* * *
“Are you going to guess?” Control asked Grace, turning the full weight of his anger and self-loathing on the assistant director, not caring that all eyes in the cafeteria were on them.
To reanimate the emotions of a dead script, he had started thinking of things like topographical anomalies and video of the first expedition and hypnotic conditioning—inverse to the extreme where ritual decreed he hold words in his head like horrible goiter and math homework to stop from coming too soon during sex.
“Are you going to fucking guess?” he hissed in a kind of mega-whisper, wanting to confess not to anyone in the audience, but to the biologist.
“They shoot Rachel McCarthy,” she said.
“Yes, that’s right!” Control shouted, knowing that even the people serving the food at the far-distant buffet could hear him, were looking at him. Maybe fifteen people remained there, in the cafeteria, most trying to pretend none of this was happening.
“They shoot Rachel McCarthy,” Control said. “Although by the time they’re searching for me, I’m already safe at home. After, what? Two or three conversations? A standard surveillance operation from my perspective. I’m being pulled in for a debriefing while other, more seasoned, agents are brought in to follow up on the lead. Except by then the militia has beaten McCarthy half senseless and driven her to the top of an abandoned quarry. And they want her to tell the truth, to just tell the truth about the person in the bar. Which she can’t do, because she’s innocent and didn’t know I was an operative. But that’s the wrong answer—any answer is the wrong answer by then.” Will always be the wrong answer. And around the time that he’s excited he helped crack the case wide open, and a judge is issuing warrants, the boyfriend has shot McCarthy in the head, twice, and let her fall, dead, into the shallow water below. To be found three days later by the local police.
Anyone else might have been finished, although he’d been too green to know that. He hadn’t known until years later that his mother had rescued him, for better or worse. Called in favors. Pulled strings. Greased palms. All the usual clichés that masked every unique collusion. Because—she told him when she finally confessed, when it no longer mattered one way or the other—she believed in him and knew that he had much more to offer.
Control had spent a year on suspension, going to therapy that couldn’t repair the breach, endured a retraining program that cast a broad net to catch a tiny mistake that kept escaping anyway over and over in his mind. Then he had been given an administrative desk job, from which he’d worked his way up through the ranks again, to the exalted non-position of “fixer,” with the clear understanding that he’d never be deployed in the field again.
So that one day he could be called upon to run a peculiar backwater agency. So that what he couldn’t bring himself to confess to any of his girlfriends he could shout out loudly in a cafeteria, in front of a woman who appeared to hate him.
* * *
The little bird he’d seen flying darkly against the high windows of the cafeteria flew there still, but the way it flitted reminded him now more of a bat. The rain clouds gathered yet again.
Grace still sat in front of him, guarded from on high by cohorts from the past. Control still sat there, too, Grace now going through his lesser sins, one by one, in no particular order, with no one else left to hear. She had read his file and gotten her hands on more besides. As she reeled it off, she told him other things—about his mother, his father, the litany a lurching parade or procession that, curiously, no longer hurt about halfway through. A kind of numb relief, instead, began to flood Control. She was telling him something, all right. She saw him clearly and she saw him well, from his skills right down to his weaknesses, from his short relationships to his nomadic lifestyle to his father’s cancer and ambivalence about his mother. The ease with which he had embraced his mother’s substitution of her job for family, for religion. And all of the rest of it, all of it, her tone of voice managing the neat trick of mixing grudging respect with compassionate exasperation at his refusal to retreat.
“Have you never made a mistake?” he asked, but she ignored him.
Instead she gave him the gift of a motive: “This time, your contact tried to cut me off from Central. For good.” The Voice, continuing to help him in the same way as a runaway bull.
“I didn’t ask for that.” Well, if he had, he didn’t want it anymore.
“You went into my office again.”
“I didn’t.” But he couldn’t be sure.
“I’m trying to keep things the way they are for the director, not for me.”
“The director’s dead. The director’s not coming back.”
She looked away from him, out through the windows at the courtyard and the swamp beyond. A fierce look that shut him out.
Maybe the director was flying free over Area X, or scrabbling with root-broken fingernails into the dirt, the reeds, trying to get away … from something. But she wasn’t here.
“Think about how much worse it could get, Grace, if they replace me with someone else. Because they’re never going to make you director.” Truth for truth.
“You know I did you a favor just now,” she said, pivoting away from what he’d said.
“A favor? Sure you did.”
But he did know. That which was uncomfortable or unflattering she had now off-loaded pointlessly, ordnance wasted, a gun shot into the air. She had let out the rest of the items in her jewelry box of condemnation, and by not hoarding told him she would not be using it in the future.
“You’re a lot like us,” she said. “Someone who has made a lot of mistakes. Someone just trying to do better. To be better.”
Subtext: You can’t solve what hasn’t been solved in thirty years. I won’t let you get out ahead of the director. And what misdirection in that? What was she pushing him toward or away from?
Control just nodded, not because he agreed or disagreed but because he was exhausted. Then he excused himself, locked the cafeteria bathroom, and vomited up his breakfast. He wondered if he was coming down with something or if his body was rejecting, as viciously as possible, everything in the Southern Reach.