Skinner Page 8

  To better get a feel for the configuration on the ground, he suggested.

  Eager to complete the work she had begun, to ease the pressure of the disjointed configuration in her head, Jae went to Baghdad. But the op was quickly scuttled when the CIA began feeling heat from the State Department. The newly birthed, US-backed Iraqi government would rather such connections remain suspected but unconfirmed. A reluctance to embarrass their neighbor before they could discover if they might be allies in the brave new post-Hussein world. So the op was shut down, and Jae, at loose ends in Baghdad, the incomplete configuration an unscratchable itch, was free to find some other way to focus her obsessive need to discover order.

  No op, they told her. Go home. Or stay and make use of the cover story. Save people.

  Haven had shown up at the site of a car bombing as she was sending one of her early Worm prototypes into a hillside of shattered brick and mortar that had been a mosque a few hours before. The prototype Worm, controlled via an umbilical cord of thickly insulated cable, range severely limited, eternally having to be dragged out by hand, was half-working for a change when she’d felt the presence behind her, looming, looking at the murky fisheye view of small rocks on her control screen.

  She was there to save people. When she’d arrived, an hour after the blast, the first thing she’d seen in the blood-slicked square was an emergency worker prying a half-dead child from the arms of a corpse. Squatting just a few yards from where she’d witnessed that tableau, using the edge of her hand to shield the screen from the sun so that she could get something resembling a clear camera image, and then looking up to find someone who was obviously in the country to kill people, had not brought out her charm. Not that Haven gave a fuck. He’d given her some room to work, and, when she thought the Worm had found something, he’d grabbed a shovel and started digging. Other men materialized, all of them wearing beards, Gargoyle sunglasses, uniforms that evoked images of mercenary forces drifting from army to army in a time of rapidly shifting fronts. They started to dig with Haven, following his jargon-laced sotto voce commands as Jae shouted directions, reading the Worm’s camera eye, hunting for a safe route through the remains of the mosque, a path to a possible survivor.

  The man was dead. No great shock to Jae. Her rescues consisted largely of nursing balky robots into unreachable crevasses where they could break down, while occasionally stumbling upon a flickering shadow that hinted at life, almost inevitably revealed as another tally in the final body count. Haven and his men had appeared more disappointed than she. More dismayed at the sudden reversal: one moment digging to save a life, the next moment heaving another corpse from the wreckage. If they had killed the man themselves, Jae thought, his death would have made no more impression than the satisfaction of a job well done. But for a few hours of digging, their lives had been linked to his as securely as if they had been neighbors, intimates in celebration and mourning. A connection abruptly severed when the shovels exposed him to the light of the halogen lamps that had been set up as night fell, dead flesh caked in dust, as if they had excavated a statue from an earlier era.

  Jae and Haven talked about it only once. Three months later, when the war-zone affair that began after the mosque bombing was being drawn to a close by Jae’s imminent return to the States. By then they had fallen into a pattern of casual intimacy. Unmentionable circumstances would take him to deeper layers of Baghdad than she had yet to penetrate. Circles of confusion and dismay that he would disappear into. Or to places where there was meant to be nothing but sand, coordinates only, where he did officially unacknowledged things involving night-vision goggles and flash suppressors. Days would pass, on one occasion weeks, and then she might return from testing a new tread on the low-profile Crawler that was meant to be unflippable but persisted in flipping at every opportunity, and find him asleep in her apartment within the Kestrel compound inside the Green Zone. His dust-covered boots near the door, sand coating the floor of her shower, face-down on her perpetually unmade bed, naked in the generator-sustained AC. She knew how lightly he must sleep, but he never seemed to wake when she entered, never until she had stripped, taken her own shower, pulled from the freezer one of the nearly impossible to obtain bottles of vodka that Haven always produced on his visits, and come to the bed with two glasses clinking between her fingers. Then he would become very much awake.

  On the last night they talked about the first meeting. Both of them half-drunk but not tired, most signs of her months of residence packed into the bags near the door, Haven had told her that trying to save the dead man under the rubble had been the most unambiguously good thing that he had done since arriving in country. Since before arriving, for that matter. A feeling that he’d been unwilling to let go. He was telling her, he said, so she’d know that she had made it better for him, the war, more real, less theoretical. Whatever that means, he said.

  Her own reality dissolved the next morning after her convoy was attacked on Route Irish, the long, straight highway to the airport, after the Kestrel security contractors in the lead vehicle had been blown from the road by an IED, and the engine of the follow vehicle had been sent back into the passenger compartment by the force of an exploding RPG, after the insurgents had peppered her own vehicle with small-arms fire and closed on them, looping nooses around the necks of the surviving contractors and dragging them to the base of a lamppost, reality lost as she was pulled by her hair from the vehicle.

  A chatter of strobed images: the flames dancing atop the undercarriage, now the roof, of what had been the lead SUV; the feet of one of the contractors two meters off the ground, kicking; a blade cutting into her driver’s wrist, sawing, a hand dropping to the pavement; the open door of the insurgents’ minivan, a dark cave, as they prepared to heave her inside; the hole that appeared in the orbit of the left eye of the man carrying her feet; the mute and tongueless mouth that opened in the throat of the man with his fists twisted into her hair; and Haven, all theory removed from from his work, killing people.

  Balled on the floor of one of the Humvees in which Haven and his cadre had been trailing them at a distance, Jae saw the configuration that had been camouflaged by vodka and the corona of danger that obscured everything in Iraq: Haven appearing. Haven digging. Haven seeking her out. Haven in and out of her life and her apartment like a tide. Haven watching her. Haven evoking a trust she put in no one. Haven in and out of her life, days to weeks, always returning to her quarters when she was away, as if he knew that she was away. Haven, there within moments when the insurgents tried to kidnap her. As if he was watching her, watching over her, a goat staked out for wolves.

  Her last sight of Haven was of the back of his head as he ran hunched, his cheek pressed to the stock of an assault rifle that seemed to protrude from his shoulder like an organic growth, a sensing organ that pulled him toward targets of opportunity. Leading her, gun first, away from the bodies around the minivan and into the Humvee that took her to safety without him. The only words she heard spoken by him came through the Humvee’s radio as possible threats were assessed in the remaining kilometers to the airport. They drove directly onto the tarmac, Haven’s team passing her, hand-to-hand, out of the Humvee, surrounding her in a crouched scuttle of gun-bristling men, surrendering her care only when she was buckled into her seat in a marine-stuffed C-5 Galaxy.

  Her op, it emerged, had never been dropped. Rather, it had been repurposed by Haven.

  She hadn’t known she was an asset. Had barely known or understood the nature of asset operations. Had never been told that she had a protector secretly watching her in Iraq. Haven. And she had certainly not known that she was the target of an especially active AQI cell. Haven had suggested deactivating Jae’s existing op. Badged Two Birds One Stone, the new op left Jae in the open to dig in the rubble, her robots sporting American flag stickers, as attractive an asset as they could make her. A successful op. Ending with the asset secured from further threat, and the AQI cell destroyed.

  Returning to
the States, Jae voided her agreement with Kestrel, expressed her wish that Cross should fuck himself and die, and soon found that her previously tamable compulsion to find structure within the seemingly random had become a full-blown mania tinged with paranoia. A form of post-traumatic stress disorder that undermined her ability to read configurations as she began to forever discover hidden plots, ambushes, and trapdoors.

  Years lost. Drugs. Ending up at Disaster City.

  When she thought of Haven, she tried only to remember that Cross had known nothing about their affair. Whatever else she may have meant to him, Haven had kept the hours in her apartment invisible. The two of them lost in their search for the man under the rubble.

  Until she returns to her motel room in the Mohave and finds him, a big man in a suit that he looks unhappy to be wearing, standing at the window, staring out at the desert, throwing just one glance at her as she opens the door. Haven.

  Cross rises from the room’s only chair, a sun-faded green plastic castoff from a patio set, one of Jae’s spiders in his hand.

  “I know this is awkward, but we really must talk.”

  Jae has yet to come fully into the room. She’s thinking about what’s in there that she would miss if she were to turn on her heels in this instant, walk back to the Land Rover, and speed away in a spray of gravel and sand.

  Cross turns the spider upside down.

  “What I’d like, Jae, is fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes of your time. For which I will double what you are owed for the Creech consultation. That will finance a great deal more running away and hiding.”

  He gestures at her open duffel on the floor, the pill bottles and baggies.

  “And buy you a great deal more self-medication.”

  She doesn’t come into the room, but she doesn’t walk to the car, either.

  Cross looks at the open door.

  “There is some delicate information involved.”

  He directs his eyes at the ceiling, deep focus, beyond the ceiling to the sky.

  “We’ve had a good look at the area, doesn’t seem that anyone is on hand to peep on us, but every little bit of discretion helps.”

  This isn’t going to end. Whatever it is, having pushed it this far, Cross isn’t going to let it end until he’s had his say.

  And also there is this: Haven has not looked her in the eye, and she wants that.

  She steps in, closes the door, takes her phone from her pocket, pushes buttons, and looks at Cross.

  “Fifteen minutes. When the timer beeps, you fuck off.”

  He nods.

  “You met Skinner.”

  Jae makes a point of not saying anything.

  Cross is watching her face; he nods.

  “I see he made an impression. Did you get the briefing?”

  She nods.

  “Are you planning to use me to chum for sharks again?”

  Haven dips his head slightly, seems to look at his shoes.

  “Chum.”

  Jae feels an urge to throw something at the back of his head. Something hard. She could go outside and get a rock off the ground and come back in and throw it at Haven’s fucking head. And then leave.

  Cross takes a half step, placing himself at the midpoint of an imaginary line running from Jae’s eyes to the back of Haven’s head.

  “The job, Jae. Have you reviewed the file?”

  She focuses on Cross, the sooner to be done and on the road.

  “Espionage. Industrial. Possible foreign involvement. Travel. Danger.”

  Cross rubs his forehead with the back of the hand holding the spider.

  “Espionage. That doesn’t quite cover it. It’s a cyber attack, Jae. Sabotage. The real thing. A virtually mounted, Internet-based assault on a piece of key infrastructure. The grid. They took a crack at the grid. Tried to start a cascade. We don’t know, we don’t know was it a feint, a test, see if their code will do what it is supposed to, but they did it. And you know how this stuff goes, routed, rerouted, bounced, reflected. We have a trail, we have our guys at the keyboards tracing, but we need, I need, someone there, the physical sites, as we trace where this thing came from. I need someone to get in there and see where they were, where they went. This is it, first shot fired, maybe it was one over the bow, but I want to know everything. Everything. And that includes the weird stuff. Whatever the weird stuff is.”

  He hefts the spider.

  “And that’s you, Jae. Disaster Robot Lady. Finder of lost things.”

  She’s thinking about how many people could die if someone really crashed the grid. Thinking about stopping that from happening. Saving lives instead of digging up the bodies. Is this what Terrence was talking about?

  “Yes.”

  She walks into the bathroom and starts collecting her toiletries, stowing them in a small ripstop nylon bag with a drawstring top, comes out, faces Cross, and holds out her hand.

  “My spider.”

  “Your phone hasn’t beeped.”

  “I said yes. What else do you want?”

  “He wants you to agree to take someone besides Skinner. My people.”

  Haven has turned around. Gracefully blunt in his movements, a physicality that accurately suggests his vast training and experience in matters related to killing.

  Jae looks at him, but her eyes fail to burn holes in his forehead. She takes her travel alarm from the bedside table, the extra water bottle she left there, the merino wool sweater she’d meant to wear at Creech.

  “It’s Terrence’s op. I travel with his people. Terrence sent Skinner, so Skinner is my protection.”

  Haven touches his forehead.

  “Terrence is dead.”

  Her phone beeps. They all listen as it pulses, then she taps a button. Silence.

  “What happened?”

  Cross is looking at the floor. He shakes his head.

  “He was killed. Cologne. The airport.”

  Haven goes to her duffel on the floor, yanks the zipper, drawing it closed.

  “They used a chemical agent. Looks like a heart attack. But it wasn’t.”

  He hefts the duffel and sets it before her.

  “Skinner was Terrence’s choice. Not ours. He’s not safe and he doesn’t protect people. He doesn’t have a system. We want you to use someone else.”

  Jae picks up the duffel, slings it over her shoulder.

  “I’ve worked with people who have systems. I’ll be happy to try something else.”

  “This isn’t the same thing.”

  The spiders and the other robots are in the Land Rover. Her daypack also. Just the one mother spider in Cross’s hand left to reclaim and she can get the fuck out of here.

  “Terrence sent Skinner. I’ll do the job with Skinner. No one else.”

  She looks at Cross.

  “The fact that you don’t want him tells me everything I need to know.”

  Cross is looking at the robot spider in his hand.

  “Start in Kiev. I’ll have more for you to go on when you get there. But start in Kiev.”

  He looks up.

  “Excellent work this.”

  He offers it to her.

  “Do you have a patent?”

  She takes it.

  “Several.”

  Cross nods.

  “Do me a favor. Remember that Skinner isn’t a robot. He has qualities that suggest automation, but he is not viable. And if you should find yourself having regrets, call us. A replacement will be sent immediately.”

  Jae tucks the spider into a pocket on her vest.

  “Know what I like about him already?”

  She starts for the door.

  “I like that he scares the shit out of you.”

  She opens the door.

  “Now I have to go. The bogeyman’s waiting in my car.”

  “Jae.”

  Haven is back at the window, looking out at the parking lot through a crack in the curtains.

  “The bogeyman out there might be the one who killed Terr
ence.”

  He turns from the window, looks at her.

  “I could tell you to be careful who you trust, but you already know that. Don’t you?”

  She could spit. She could spit in his face from where she’s standing. Instead she walks out. Spitting wouldn’t be enough.

  oddities

  SKINNER MISSES TERRENCE.

  There is a place on the Web where he used to leave him messages. A board on vintage cycling where he could ask about frame geometries, the measurements of chainstays and seat tubes, all used to hide requests that Terrence call him. An aged recess of the Internet where the advent of social media is regarded with deep suspicion. A protocol established long before the Montmartre Incident and Skinner’s subsequent banishment. Terrence used it to bring him back.

  Waiting in Jae’s Land Rover outside her motel, Skinner feels an urge to do something he sometimes did in the loneliest hours of his exile. Using his Wi-Fi account, he logs in to classicsteelbikes.com. The messages he left during his seven years adrift were never answered. Not until Terrence called him to Cologne. He casts yet another bottle onto the waves now, posts a question about the geometry of Eddy Merckx Leader frames. A series of measurements. A mute SOS that only his friend would understand.

  Strange urge. Back in the world again. He is not himself. He will be, he hopes. After he has a chance to do those things that make him what he is.

  Packing the laptop away, Skinner looks up and sees Jae coming out of her room, and, stepping into the open doorway behind her, Haven. He thinks about his box. He thinks about his parents. He thinks about his mother, and the last time they spoke, and what he did after.

  Haven behind Jae, coming out of her room, and Skinner is opening the door, emerging into the heat of the waning day.