022: GAMBIT
Late morning. An attempt to regain … control. The old familiar debriefing room whose deficiencies he had become oblivious to, expecting a call from his mother with a report about the director’s house that couldn’t possibly come until hours from now.
He had told Grace he was about to interview the biologist and wanted her there, in the room, this time. A few minutes later, Grace came in wearing a bright yellow dress in a flower pattern, black belt at the waist—some kind of Sunday best—not peering around the doorway, not looking like he might lob a grenade at her. He was immediately suspicious.
“Where’s the biologist?” Grace asked, in a kind of conspiratorial way. Control was sitting by himself.
Control pushed out the chair opposite with his foot by way of reply, pretending to busy himself looking over some notes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You just missed the biologist. But she had some very interesting things to say. Do you want to know what she said about you, for example?”
Somehow Control had expected Grace would see it as a trap, get up and try to leave, and he’d have to convince her to stay. But she remained sitting there, appraising him.
“Before I tell you, you should know that all recording devices have been turned off. This is just between the two of us.”
Grace folded her arms. “That is fine with me. Continue.”
Control felt wrong-footed. He had expected she would go check, make sure he wasn’t lying. Maybe she had checked before coming into the room. Grandpa Jack’s advice had been that for this kind of work you needed “a second guy, always.” Well, he didn’t have a second guy or gal. He plunged on anyway.
“Let me get to the point. Before the final eleventh expedition, the director crossed over the border secretly, by herself. Did you know about this in advance? And did you provide material aid? Did you provide command-and-control decision-making? Were you, in fact, complicit in making sure she got back across the border? Because this is what the biologist says the director told her.” None of this was in the official report on the incident, which the Voice had sent via e-mail before their abrupt leave-taking over the phone. There, in the report, the director had claimed to have acted on her own.
“Interesting. What else did the biologist tell you?” No heat behind the words.
“That the director gave you instructions to wait at the border every night for a week on very specific dates about three weeks after she snuck across. To help her with her return.” According to security records, each of those days Grace had left the Southern Reach early, although there was no record of her at the border checkpoints.
“This is all in the past,” Grace said. “What are you trying to prove? Exactly.”
Control had begun to feel like a chess player who thinks he has a great move, but the opponent is either brilliant or bluffing or has something untouchable four moves ahead.
“Really? That’s your reaction? Because both of those accusations would be enough to file an addendum to the report with Central. That you colluded with the director to violate regulations and security protocols. That you provided material support. She was put on probation. What do you think you’d get for lying?”
Smiling, Grace asked, “What do you want?”
Not exactly an admission, but it allowed him to continue on with the script in his head, muffled the alarm bells. “Not what you think, Grace. I’m not pushing for you to resign, and I don’t want to report this information to Central. I’m not out to get the director. I want to understand her, that’s all. She went over the border. I need to know exactly why and how, and what she found. The report on file is vague.” Wondered now if Grace had written the report, or overseen its writing.
The report had mostly focused on the director’s punishment and the steps taken to once again tighten border security. There was a brief statement from the director that appeared to have been written by a lawyer: “Although I meant to act in the best interests of the Southern Reach and the requirements of my position, I deeply apologize for my actions and recognize that they were reckless, endangering, and not in keeping with the agency’s mission statement. If allowed to return, I will endeavor to adhere to the standard of conduct expected of me, and of this position.” “Measurements and samples” were also mentioned in the report, but Control had as yet been unable to track them down. They had not been placed in the storage cathedral, that much he knew. Unless that boiled down to a plant and a mouse and an old cell phone.
“The director did not share her every thought with me,” Grace said in an irritated tone, as if this fact bothered her, but with a strange half-smile on her face.
“I find it hard to believe that you don’t know more than you’re telling me.”
This did not move Grace to respond, so he prodded her with “I’m not here to destroy the director’s legacy, or yours. I brought you here not just because of what the biologist said but also because I think we could both have autonomy here. That we could run the agency in a way that means your position remains unchanged.” Because as far as he was concerned, the agency was fucked and he was now an undercover agent in the field, entering hostile territory. So use whatever you don’t care about as a bargaining chip. Maybe before he found a way out he’d even give Whitby that transfer he’d once wanted. Maybe he’d return to Central and have a beer with Lowry.
“How gracious of you,” Grace said. “The schoolboy is offering to share the power with the teacher.”
“That’s not the analogy I would have made. I would have—”
“Anything the director did, she did because she believed it was important.”
“Yes, but what did she do? What was she up to?”
“Up to?” Grace said, with a little snort of disbelief.
He chose his words very carefully. “Grace, I am already here. I am already in the middle of this. You should just tell me what’s going on.” What was the look that could convey without the reinforcement of words that he had already seen some very strange shit? “Remember, none of this is on the record.”
Grace considered that for a second with what seemed like amusement. Then she began to talk.
* * *
“You have to understand the director’s position,” Grace said. “The first expedition had set the tone within the organization. Even though the original director, by the time Cynthia got here, was trying to change that.” Cynthia? For a moment, Control wondered who Cynthia was because he’d thought of her as “the director” for so long. “The personnel here felt that the first expedition failed because the Southern Reach did not know what it was doing. That we had sent them in, and they had died because we did not know what we were doing, and we could never really make up for that.” The first expedition: a sacrifice to a lack of context. A lament unrecognized as such until it was too late. “And Lowry’s presence here at the agency”—was she reading his mind, did she somehow know?—“from my understanding, only made that worse. He was a living ghost, a reminder held up as a hero when he had just been a survivor. So his advice was given more weight, even when it was wrong. The director only really had a chance to pursue her own agenda after Lowry had been promoted to Central, even though that, too, was a problem. Lowry pushed for more expeditions even though the director wanted fewer, and whereas before she could control Lowry, now he was beyond her control. So we kept sending people in, throwing them up against a complete unknown. This did not sit well with the director, although she followed orders because she had to.”
He found himself being swept along by her narrative. “How did the director get her own agenda through? In what ways?”
“She became obsessed with metrics, with changing the context. If she could have her metrics, then Lowry could, grudgingly, have his expeditions, the conditioning and hypnosis he championed, although over time she came to understand why Lowry pushed the hypnosis.”
Control kept seeing Lowry in the context of the camera flying through the air: Lowry crawling, the camera soaring, and the truth perhaps somewhere in the middle. And then Lowry making Control crawl and soar.
None of this really spoke to the director’s secret mission across the border, though. Was Grace just tossing information at him to avoid talking about it? It was more than she’d ever said to him before.
“What else?” he asked. “What else did she do?”
She spread her hands as if for emphasis and the smile on her face was almost beatific. “She became obsessed with making it react.”
“Area X?”
“Yes. She felt that if she could make Area X react, then she would somehow throw it off course. Even though we didn’t know what course it was on.”
“But it had reacted: It killed a lot of people.”
“She believed that nothing we had done had pushed whatever is behind Area X. That it had handled anything we did too easily. Almost without thought. If thought could be said to be involved.”
“So she went across the border to make Area X react.”
“I will not confirm that I knew about her trip or helped in any way,” Grace said. “I will tell you my belief, based on what she said to me after she came back.”
“It wasn’t the reaction she wanted,” Control said.
“No. No, it was not. And she blamed herself. The director can be very harsh, but never harsher than with herself. When Central decided to go ahead with the last eleventh expedition, I am sure the director hoped that she had made a difference. And maybe she had. Instead of the usual, what came back were cancer-ridden ciphers.”
“Which is why she forced herself onto the twelfth expedition.”
“Yes.”
“Which is why her methods had become suspect.”
“I would not agree with that assessment. But, yes, others would say that.”
“Why did Central let her go on the twelfth expedition?”
“For the same reason they reprimanded her after she went across by herself but did not fire her.”
“Which was?”
Grace smiled, triumphant. At knowing something he should have known? For some other reason?
“Ask your mother. Your mother had a hand in both things, I believe.”
* * *
“They had lost confidence in her anyway,” Grace said next, bitterness bleeding into her voice. “What did they care if she never came back? Maybe some of them at Central even thought it solved a problem.” Like Lowry.
But Control was still stuck on Jackie Miranda Severance, Severance for short, Grandpa always “Jack.” His mother had placed him in the Southern Reach, in the middle of it all. She had worked for the Southern Reach briefly, when he was a teenager, to be close to him, she had said. Now, as he questioned Grace, he was trying to make the dates synch up, to get a sense of who had been at the Southern Reach and who had not, who had left by then and who was still incoming. The director—no. Grace—no. Whitby—yes. Lowry—yes, no? Where had his mother gone when she left? Had she kept ties? Clearly she had, if he were to believe Grace. And did her sudden appearance to him with a job offer correspond to knowing she had some kind of emergency on her hands? Or was it part of a more intricate plan? It could make you weary, untangling the lines. At least Grandpa had been more straightforward. Oh, look. There’s a gun. What a surprise. I want you to learn how to use a gun. Make everything do more than one thing. Sometimes you had to take shortcuts after all. Wink wink. But his mother never gave you the wink. Why should she? She didn’t want to be your friend, and if she couldn’t convince you in some more subtle way, she’d find someone she could convince. He might never know how much other residue he’d already encountered from her passage through Southern Reach.
But the idea that the director might have reached out to others in the agency, and at Central, comforted Control. It made the director less an eccentric, less a “single-celled plot” as his mother put it, than someone genuinely trying to solve a problem.
“What happened on her trip across the border?” Control, pressing again.
“She never told me. She said it was for my own protection, in case the investigators subpoenaed me.” He made a note to return to that later.
“Nothing at all?”
“Not a single thing.”
“Did she give you any special instructions before she went on leave or after she came back?” From what Control could intuit from the files he’d read, Grace was more constrained by rules and regulations than the director, and the director might have felt slightly undermined by her assistant director’s adherence to them. Or perhaps that was the point: that Grace had kept her grounded. In which case, Grace would almost certainly have been in charge of operational details.
Grace hesitated, and Control didn’t know if that meant she was debating telling him more or was about to feed him a line of bullshit.
“Cynthia asked me to reopen an investigation into the so-called S&S Brigade, and to assign someone to report in more detail on the lighthouse.”
“And who did the research?”
“Whitby.” Whitby the loon. It figured.
“What happened to this research?” He couldn’t recall seeing this information in the files he had been given before he’d come to the Southern Reach.
“Cynthia held on to it, asked for a hard copy and for the electronic copies not to be entered into the record … Are you planning to go down the same rabbit holes?”
“So you thought it was a waste of time?”
“For us, not necessarily for Cynthia. It seemed irrelevant to me, but nothing we gathered would make much sense without knowing what was in the director’s mind. And we did not always know what was in the director’s mind.”
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Being bold now that Grace was finally opening up to him.
A sympathetic expression, guided or pushed his way. “Do you smoke?”
“Sometimes.” This past weekend. Banishing demons and voices.
“Then let’s go out to the courtyard and have a smoke.”
It sounded like a good idea. If he was completely honest with himself, it sounded like bliss.
* * *
They reconvened out at the edge of the courtyard, nearest the swamp. The short jaunt from room to open air had not been without revelation: He’d finally seen the janitor, a wizened little white guy with huge glasses who wore light green overalls and held a mop. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Control resisted the urge to break ranks with Grace to tell him to switch cleaners.
Grace in the courtyard seemed even more relaxed than inside, despite the humidity and the annoying chorus of insect voices rising from the undergrowth. He was already sweating.
She offered him a cigarette. “Take one.”
Yes, he would take one, had been missing them ever since his weekend binge. The harsh, sharp taste of her unfiltered menthols as he lit up was like a spike through the eyeball to cure a headache.
“Do you like the swamp?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I like the quiet out here, sometimes. It can be peaceful.” She gave him a wry smile. “If I stand with my back to the building, I can pretend it isn’t there.”
He nodded, was silent for a moment, then said, “What would you do if the director came back and she was like the anthropologist or the surveyor?” Just adding to the light conversation. Just a gaffe, he realized as soon as he’d said it.
Grace remained unfazed. “She won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?” He almost broke his promise to his mother then and told Grace about the writing on the wall in the director’s house.
“I have to tell you something,” Grace said, changing direction on him. “It will be a shock, but I don’t mean it to be that way.”
Somehow, even though it was too late, he could see the hit coming before the impact, almost as if it were in slow-motion. It still knocked him off his feet.
“Here’s what you should know: Central took the biologist away late Friday evening. She’s been gone the whole weekend. So you must have been talking to a ghost, because I know you would not lie to me, John. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” Her look was serious, as if there were a bond between them.