CHAPTER SIX
A concrete room in a nearly windowless concrete building, somewhere in Long Island. In the concrete room a man was strapped into an unpadded concrete chair. The chair was of one piece with the floor. The chair's restraints were made of woven plastic.
Loraine watched the man in the chair from another room entirely. A small room lined with surveillance screens.
Loraine was trying not to show how disturbing she found the scene. She was uncomfortable in the small, closed-off security surveillance station with Helman, crowded so close to him she could smell his hair pomade. Who wore hair pomade anymore? She suspected he dyed his jet-black hair too.
She was new to this wing of the CCA Rendition Building, and she had almost no experience with the Shadow Community Containment Program. But Loraine did know the name of the man strapped in the chair: Orrin Howard Krasnoff. She had read his file. Now she watched him sit there tapping his feet and hands, looking around mournfully, at the almost featureless room. Clearly afraid of what might happen to him next. Sometimes it was as if he were trying to look right through the barren gray walls.
Krasnoff was an odd-looking man, Loraine thought. The ShadowComm “containee had a jutting jaw, dark with stubble, and his skull, stubbly itself, seemed slightly bisected into two lobes. He had a long nose, itself oddly bisected: a dimple at its tip. His sad brown eyes drooped at the corners; his eyebrows were almost not there. His wide mouth quivered, like a child about to cry, and he muttered to himself. He was a man with a paunch, but thin arms and legs—perhaps both effects from spending so much time locked up in CCA custody. He wore a T-shirt, and jeans without a belt, and plastic sandals. Bristly black hair on his pallid, bony arms.
He was not a physically appealing man, but, looking at him, Loraine's heart melted with pity.
She remembered what Bleak had said. She almost heard his voice again, speaking right out loud.
I won't ask what authority you have...but what excuse do you have?
Still, Loraine had accepted her place in all this. Despite her misgivings, she was drawn to this work—and she really did think it was the most important job she could do for her country. But did it have to be done like this? She kept her face impassive, her voice calm, as she said, “We ought to be able to win these people over so this kind of thing isn't necessary. They'll do better work for us if we give them a chance.”
“You forget what our containees are capable of,” said Helman, chuckling disdainfully and taking off his wire-rim glasses. He began to polish the lenses on his flower-painted tie. His oily black hair gleamed in the harsh light of the surveillance room; his black eyes reflected miniatures of the rows of television monitors. “Why do you think we have everything made of concrete and plastic, around this man? Because if we let him contact wood or leather or certain kinds of metal, he can use any of those
things to summon certain Unconventionally Bodied Entities. We don't yet entirely understand why those substances put him in touch with those particular entities.”
Unconventionally Bodied Entities: what Helman called any subtle-bodied entity that inhabited the realm of the Hidden. UBEs for short—some CCA technicians called them Ubes, pronounced “yubes.” The terms annoyed Loraine. She would have preferred to call them ghosts, sprites, angels, spirits, elementals, loas—names with some life and poetry to them. But life and poetry, she had discovered, were an uncomfortable fit in CCA's Rendition Building. Here it was all about containment and control.
“You have the suppressor,” Loraine pointed out. “Shouldn't that be enough to stop him from contacting any...thing?”
The suppressor was difficult to see on the monitor, from this angle; it looked like a short column of metal disks, behind the chair Krasnoff sat in. It was said to partly suppress the powers of the CCA subjects.
“Yes.” Helman nodded—he nodded too much, almost like a bobblehead doll, as if he didn't have a lot of practice in casual communication with people. He always seemed hard at work trying to seem sincere. And always came off the opposite. “Yes, under normal conditions the suppressor would be enough. But it can only deal with so much...and the background energy these people draw upon is fluctuating. Sometimes rising quite alarmingly.” He suddenly stopped nodding and put his glasses back on to peer at a second monitor that showed Krasnoff's vital signs. “There is a breakdown of...ahhh, of a force that kept their ability to contact that background energy in check. And certain UBEs”—he pronounced each letter—”have been taking advantage of that. As Mr. Krasnoff might too. You see, the suppressor...1 know it sounds contradictory...is an amplifier, really. It amplifies one thing so it can suppress another. It amplifies the...the signal, so to say, of the Source in the North. Which signal suppresses people like Krasnoff. Keeps them at low power. If there's no signal, or an erratic signal, the suppressor has nothing to amplify, don't you know.”
“I see.” Though she didn't, entirely. Where was the real source of this “signal”? She had heard of the Source in the North vaguely, but had never been intensively briefed on it. “Anyway—the suppressor's only reliable...sometimes?”
Helman bobbled his head. “Essentially, yes—only reliable sometimes.” He returned his attention to the observation monitor. “If the suppressor cannot be counted on, we must give him as few opportunities as possible to implement mischief against us. And Mr. Krasnoff is quite capable of mischief. Oh yes. When we first had him in custody, he caused a flight of UBEs to attack the transport plane. I don't know how he thought he would survive a plane crash. Fortunately we were able to land the transport safely, after a rather tense interval, despite some minor damage.”
“Urn—what sort of UBEs were those?”
“I believe they took the form of what mythology called Harpies. Probably because that's what Krasnoff visualized. But we're not entirely certain. He can seem to be cooperating with us and then we discover that he's barefacedly lying.”
“But...” Loraine was boiling with questions. “But—you do encourage him to use his...his abilities sometimes. Don't you? I mean, isn't that part of the point of this whole...containment?”
“The point?” Helman turned toward her—she saw him glance at her bosom, then look quickly away. “Yes, CCA has plans for these people. For me, the point is scientific study—to a particular purpose. An ancient one, really. The commander in chief himself has asked us to make sure that the Source in the North...” He let his voice trail off and tapped his whitened teeth with a thumbnail as he considered her. “Very soon, you'll be taking a trip to the north,” he said suddenly, in a confidential tone. “I know I have been tantalizing you with it for a while.” He gave a smile that struck her as almost a leer. “One enjoys tantalizing such a...” He stopped himself, and his cheeks reddened. “I prefer to brief you when we get there. As for our containees—don't get emotionally identified, Agent Sarikosca. These people have been using their powers criminally, many of them, all along. In casinos, sometimes in robberies, to duck the police, oh, in all kinds of little scams. And Mr. Krasnoff is especially...well,
he's one of our problem cases. One of the most recalcitrant. But also one of the most gifted. We do have a few trained former Shadow Community personnel—but their gifts are very limited. It's almost as if the intensity of a ShadowComm's power is in proportion to how unruly they are! As if the more problem they are for us—the better their contact with the...Ah—now. You see there? Mr. Krasnoff is talking to himself. He's not incapable of wetting his pants, if he gets restless, and the janitor is quite unhappy with me afterwards. Come along—and do bring that briefcase for me, if you please.”
She picked up the briefcase, and Helman led the way out of the surveillance room, down the hallway—like the bland gray-and-blue corridors of the Pentagon, with flat fluorescent lights, where she'd worked before CCA—to the next-door entrance of Containee Investigation Room 77.
Helman tapped a combination on a wall keyboard, and the door opened. They went in, hearing the hum of the suppressor, smelling urine and sweat almost immediately. Helman sighed.
“Mr. Krasnoff,” he said.
“Doctor, how's it hangin'?” Krasnoff said. An accent from the West. Loraine remembered from his file that he was from Pahrump, Nevada. His mother had worked as a blackjack dealer. No father around. “I'd shake hands,” Krasnoff added, “but them big punkin' rollers of yours got 'em locked down.”
“Well, Mr. Krasnoff,” Helman said, taking the briefcase from Loraine, “formal greetings won't be necessary. This is Agent Sarikosca, by the way—Mr. Orrin Krasnoff.” She nodded to Krasnoff, but avoided meeting his eyes.
Helman knelt, opened the briefcase on the floor behind Krasnoff, who tried to turn in his chair, watch over his shoulder. “What's in that little suitcase you folks brought in?” Krasnoff asked. “You ain't gonna use that electric thing on me today, are you?” There was more resignation than fear in his voice. “Not with this pretty lady here?” His sad, droopy eyes rolled at Loraine. “Nice to look at a lady, in this place, anyhow. Something besides that stupid little room they got me in. Won't even let me watch TV, you know that?”
She started to answer but Helman interrupted, “You know you can summon things, unauthorized things, with a television, Mr. Krasnoff.” Helman stood up, bringing two objects over to the front of the concrete chair. “And we don't want you to summon something troublesome.”
Krasnoff looked at the objects in Helman's hands, winced, and looked away, his mouth moving soundlessly.
Helman carried a small, specialized Taser, and a rod about sixteen inches long that looked almost like a scepter, made of copper, with sections of two kinds of wood, one very dark, and a knob of white, glossy material that might have been ivory at one end.
“This chair sure is uncomfortable,” Krasnoff said suddenly, to Loraine. “You ever sit in a concrete chair, missy?”
“No, no, I haven't.” Don't get emotionally involved.
“My skinny little butt hurts on an ordinary chair, after a while. With this here thing I'm achin' near to breakin”. You know...say, listen, I could work on the streets with you folks, I could go out in the cars and see the world. I could do things with you folks out there and be a real help. What you got to keep me on a concrete chair for? With no TV, and no—”
“Could you really work with us, in the field?” Loraine asked. “Maybe—”
Then she was aware that Helman had turned, was glaring coldly at her. He didn't want her talking to Krasnoff, it seemed. Why was she here if she couldn't even speak to the containee? Helman had said she was to “familiarize” herself “with certain processes.” Observation, then. To what end?
“Pretty lady, he's got that buzzer there,” Krasnoff was saying, looking at the instruments in Helman's hands. “Like I'm a dog in some ol' Russian laboratory. He's gonna make me drool like a dog. I don't want to do this...1 could work on the streets, I could go out in cars.... Sure would like to have a steak in a nice, regular steak house. There's a steak house in Carson City—”
“Mr. Krasnoff,” Helman interrupted, talking, Loraine thought, as much to her as to him, as he put the little taser in his coat pocket and sprinkled a fragrant oil from a vial on the scepterlike rod, “you know that when we have tried to work with you in the field, you summon UBEs, nasty entities indeed, and two of our people had their faces badly mutilated. One man lost an arm.”
“The angel tells me,” Krasnoff muttered, tapping his feet and hands animatedly. “Shiny Fella gives the 'which way to go.' He says, 'You play their game 'n' you'll become game. You'll be game hunted in the Wilderness, in the After. Your spirit will run crying through the Hidden.' And, Doctor, I don't want to be in the Wilderness, when I'm in the After. I don't care that much what happens to me in this life. Shiny Fella says this life is just prep, it's just...” He fell silent.
Helman turned back to Loraine and spoke with clinical detachment. “You'll find that they often allude to an indifference to what happens to them in this world. Do not mistake it for depression, or passive aggression, as it might be in a subject of interest for mere psychological reasons. They feel that way because they know life-after-death intimately. The soul, we have discovered, is real—though naturally it will be found to have a scientific basis. What happens in 'the After,' as they call it, is more important to them than to most people—that is, they believe in it more. They know for a fact it exists. They have all gazed into it. They identify as much with the world of the Hidden as this one. It makes threats of execution a bit...weaker than normal.”
Loraine turned to him, startled. “Execution?”
Acting as if he hadn't heard her, Dr. Helman turned to Krasnoff, putting the scepter in the bound containee's hand.
“Here you go, I've put the myrrh on it. Focus on it, Mr. Krasnoff.” The containee shook his head mutely.
Helman reached into his pocket and took out the small Taser. “Do not mistake the compactness of this device for feebleness. The 'jolter' uses a new kind of battery. It packs quite a punch. And it concentrates it rather uniquely, like a bee sting. Or perhaps more like a manta ray. Or indeed—the shock of the electric eel? Shall we discover together what the best analogy would be?”
Krasnoff hunched his shoulders, cringed back, shaking his head, making a low moaning sound.
Loraine wondered if Helman was testing her, by showing her this. Maybe he wanted to know if she could deal with it.
They knew she was having doubts about CCA. Had been having doubts for a while. She was sure of one thing: whatever the Hidden was, it had to be used for the benefit of the country or prevented from being used at all. But how far should she go?
She'd worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, analyzing satellite data; later recruiting unhappy Muslim women in Syria, working out of a safe house in the old district of Damascus. Had recruited her own string of veiled wives secretly angry at the traditional oppression of their gender; women willing to quietly gather intelligence for her. When her string had been abandoned by the agency the moment the Syrian Secret Police started suspecting them, Loraine had angrily asked for a transfer away from the DIA. She'd found herself in the CCA—and was beginning to wonder if she should have stayed in Syria.
She'd heard an expression, working at the Pentagon: “Don't like it? Suck it up or move on down the road.”
You were always reminded to try to see the big picture. And the big picture seemed to indicate that ShadowComm, uncontrolled, was dangerous. A freewheeling cult of loose cannons.
The Hidden probably was a natural phenomenon of some kind—ghosts and all. What did they call it? The spiritual ecology. But to the CCA, ShadowComm was like the arrival of assault weapons in street gangs. Chaos—a change in the balance of power. A threat to ordinary people, and to the stability of the country.
Her limits weren't CCA's limits. She remembered the debate on Guantanamo, years ago. Torture? Mild stuff, compared to the leeway President Breslin gave the intelligence agencies now, of course—he had the power to do it. Far worse was done to prisoners accused of sedition than what was happening here. And if she objected too strenuously, Loraine could find herself strapped into a chair in some barren room, somewhere.
But still. There were limits. Weren't there? Krasnoff yelped, jerking her attention back to the man in the concrete chair. She smelled burnt hair and ozone. A red swelling stood out on his right forearm. She hadn't even seen Helman use the little taser.
“You can spend some time out of this building, once we get real help from you, Mr. Krasnoff,” Helman said, in a gentle voice.
Panting, Krasnoff rolled his eyes at Helman. “I...can? Doctor?”
“Yes. We'll have to keep a suppressor near you except at certain controlled moments. But it can be arranged.”
Can it really?'Loraine wondered. If Krasnoff s furlough to the outside world was dependent upon the suppressors, she doubted it would happen anytime soon. They cost several million apiece, and so far as she knew, they never let them out of the building. She didn't entirely understand how the suppressors worked, but she knew there were only three of them. Delicate and expensive mechanisms. And they were not the key to containment here. Drugging and isolation were the primary methods of containment at this facility. And the suppressors were said to be less effective the farther south you went.
“I can't stand being cooped up no more. But I'm afraid...like if...if I do the wrong thing here, I'll end up in the Wilderness.”
Helman had tucked the scepter under one arm and was making a minute adjustment on the little jolter. “Let's see what a stronger jolt has to say to you. You might find it quite revelatory. Possibly we might apply it to the back of your head—it might induce you to lose control of your bowels. Embarrassing, in front of the lady. But, if it's necessary...”
“No!” Krasnoff said, sitting up straight, struggling with his restraints. “Open it up. Turn the thing off. I'll show you what you want, if I can!” He slumped back, breathing hard, almost weeping. “But you got to promise an outing. You got to promise no more of the jolter.”
“You may consider it...promised,” Helman said silkily.
Loraine was thinking about Helman's using her to taunt Krasnoff. As a tool of torture, essentially. The thought made her stomach squirm. She wanted to grab the jolter and apply it to Helman's smug face.
But telling herself, Stay frosty, stay professional, she just stood there. Keeping her expression impassive. And waited.
Helman put the jolter into his pocket and handed Krasnoff the scepter. “One moment. I'll open the shaft and turn off the suppressor.” He went behind the chair, turned a switch on the back of the chair. A section of ceiling slid slowly back. He threw a switch on the suppressor—and the device stopped thrumming.
Loraine looked up, had to shade her eyes against light coming through a small square hole in the ceiling, like a skylight, but it extended about three yards up to an opening in the roof where another panel had slid away. She could make out blue sky up there.
“But,” Helman went on, “there are guard personnel, right down the hall, Orrin. I'll summon them to stand close by, outside the door.”
Odd, Loraine thought, that he'd suddenly taken to calling Krasnoff by his first name. The psychology of interrogation?
Helman pressed a button on a beeper clipped to his belt, summoning the guard. “So just remember, Orrin, if you play false with us this time, they'll come and use that regrettable excessive force that seems to come so naturally...and the lady will see you at your worst. You must not disappoint me, Orrin. Not me and not the lady.”
Krasnoff nodded. “I understand, boss.”
***
CHINESE BOXES, ONE INSIDE another.
The camera that had watched Krasnoff strapped down alone in the concrete room now took in Dr. Helman and Loraine Sarikosca, with Krasnoff, and its image was being transmitted to two men sitting in quite another sort of room, a cluttered office in the Pentagon. The watchers sat at a computer terminal. Both wore the uniforms of U.S. Air Force. Both had stars on their shoulders. Generals Swanson and Erlich, officers in their sixties. The budgetary buck for CCA stopped with them.
Erlich was stocky, with thin white hair, a jowly, wide face, stubby nose. Sat in a chair to one side of the desk—this was Swanson's office.
Swanson was taller, with stooped shoulders—a bit of osteoporosis—and a thinly carven face, heavy black brows, shaven head. Swanson had been a captain, and a major in Iraq. Had seen every military tragedy, every snafu. And he was usually unflappable.
But the scene on the computer surveillance window had him grinding his teeth. “Erlich—I don't like where this is going. First of all, it was supposed to be about fighting terrorism. But we hear precious little from these people about that. CCA's not staying on task. This other stuff's not its mandate. Like this experiment now—for Christ's sake—putting pressure like this on...on freakish people of this kind. You don't know what the hell you'll get. They're connected to... to things, my friend. Things we don't want a relationship with.
“But it's the same old problem. If we don't do something with these ShadowComm types, we have no control over them,” Swanson added, taking a cigar from his desk. “Same goes, Forsythe says, for the...things, the spirits they deal with.” He smelled the cigar wistfully. He wasn't allowed to smoke in here, but he chewed on the cigar's end, without lighting it.
“The human race got by without...recruiting from that pool for centuries,” Erlich pointed out. “They used to burn these guys at the stake.”
“What I heard, they were always burning the wrong people. And things have changed. The signal that suppresses their contact is getting weaker. More of these guys are showing up. Some pretty bad ones. Guy just broke out of jail, probably using those capabilities. Forsythe's looking into that. We
might be able to fix the thing in the north but...I'm not sure the president wants to. He wants the edge. He supports this program. Forsythe's got him in his vest pocket.”
“Exaggeration. Breslin's no surer than we are. I think we ought to explore the possibility of shutting down this program.”
“Forsythe's a fanatic about it, obsessed. I'm not sure what he might pull.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning...I'm not sure he's in his right mind.” Swanson craned his head at the surveillance window on the computer, squinting. He put on a pair of half-glasses. “What's going on in there now? Looks like they're prepping Krasnoff for a projection.”
***
LORAINE WAS STARING UP at the skylight shaft when a brisk knock came at the door of the concrete cell. “Just wait out there!” Helman called. “Just stand ready if I need you! The door is unlocked!” “Yes, sir!” came the muffled response from the hall.
“Go ahead, Orrin,” Helman said. “Your access to the sky is open. The suppressor is off.”
Krasnoff looked up at the shaft of light, clutched the scepterlike rod tighter, and closed his eyes. 99 “Shiny Fella...” Loraine had the distinct impression he was speaking to someone not in the room. “I'm sorry, Shiny Fella, but I am scared to go crazy. That's worse than dying to me.” Krasnoff seemed to be talking to the light coming down the little shaft in the ceiling. “If I go into a crazy place, I'll be in the Wilderness before I'm dead.”
The Wilderness again. Loraine had seen a briefing paper on this ShadowComm notion. Spirits in the afterlife were protected if they were aligned with “spirits of light.” If they weren't protected, they were propelled into “the Wilderness”—something like hell, a place where predatory spirits roamed free.
“And”—Krasnoff paused to swallow hard, before going on—”and tell my ma I'm sorry too, if she's gone on. They won't tell me if she died yet, with the bone cancer, and I can't get word, with the way they keep me shut down, so...sorry.”
Having said an apologetic prayer to the Shiny Fella, whoever that was, Krasnoff opened his eyes, took a deep breath. Clutching the scepter, he looked like an inbred king on a stony throne, at that moment, as he gazed up at the sky, his face awash in the beam of sunlight coming down.
“What is it you want to see, Doctor?” he asked softly. Looking longingly up at the sky.
Loraine watched as Helman hunkered by the briefcase and took out two more items. A piece of paper and a vial of—was that blood? He brought them to Krasnoff. “There's a man named Gabriel Bleak. We have a document he signed, for a bail bonds agency. He touched it and signed it. We want you to show us where he is. And here is blood, taken for a DNA sample from a man named Gulcher, when he was in custody. This man has gone missing too, and we need to know where he is and what he's doing. Both men are Shadow Community, but Gulcher didn't know it until recently. We think he has come into very great power. Can you make the connection for us?”
“Might could do it, one thing at a time. Put the paper in my left hand.”
Krasnoff kept staring up at that patch of blue sky, his mouth slightly open, as Helman put the folded piece of paper in his left hand. In his right he clasped the rod of wood and copper, and he ran his fingers up and down it, over and over, rubbing each part of it with his thumb. 100
Helman glanced toward the camera lenses set flush with the concrete walls, one per wall near the ceiling, and Loraine, noticing an iris flicker inside the lenses, realized all this was being recorded—and perhaps witnessed by someone else.
“Shiny Fella,” Krasnoff muttered. “And you who call yourselves...” He spoke a series of names. Loraine would try to remember the names later, discovering that not a single one remained in her memory. And she had a near photographic memory.
She felt a weight in the room then, as if the air pressure had doubled. It made her eyes hurt, her head throb. Then a red and green-blue swarm of tiny lights spiraled down the small shaft over Krasnoff. They moved like a swarm of insects, but she could see they had no wings, no bodies, they were just minute lights swirling around Krasnoff's head. So many they almost hid his features.
He jerked his head back down so he was staring straight ahead...his mouth open wide, slightly drooling.
And the glittering swarm entered his ears and eyes and mouth, vanishing into him.
Strong beams of colored light suddenly projected from his mouth and eyes. Red light from his left eye, green-blue from his right, yellow from his mouth. The lights seemed to converge on the wall in front of him, as if his head were a movie projector. A circle of the tiny lights churned on the wall, then began to converge. Loraine's mouth dropped open, in awe; she could hear her heart thumping in her ears as an image, almost three-dimensional, formed in the wall: a man walking down the street. The man pausing to glance around. Walking on.
“Gabriel Bleak!” she blurted.
“Yes, I believe that is our Mr. Bleak,” Helman said, nodding, pleased.
The circle of light on the wall, its edges restless with glimmering specks, showed Gabriel Bleak wearing a white business shirt, unbuttoned and untucked to hang over the back pockets of his jeans. Loraine suspected he had a gun back there, under the shirt. Under the open shirt he wore a new-looking tee that said BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB across it. He looked focused, in a hurry, intense.
Loraine suddenly became aware that Dr. Helman was watching her. She turned, saw him looking at her—then looking at Bleak, on the wall. Then back at her. The light from the overheads seemed to collect in the lenses of Helman's glasses, washing them out, masking his eyes.
“Was there something, Doctor, that...?” she asked, not sure herself what she was asking.
Dr. Helman shook his head. He pursed his lips, as if suppressing a chuckle, and took a small cell phone from his inside coat pocket, fingered it, and spoke into it as he looked back at the projected
vision of Gabriel Bleak. “Andrew? The moment you see identifying indicators, get a drone over it—I believe that's a street sign behind him, and I believe that street is in New Jersey. Collate with satellite imagery.”
But suddenly, on the wall, Gabriel Bleak stopped walking—and looked pensively around.
“He senses Krasnoff, even at this remove,” Helman said, with the cell phone still pressed against his ear. “Very impressive!”
A small voice muttered from the air. After a moment Loraine realized it wasn't a supernatural voice. It was from Helman's cell phone.
“Ah,” Helman said. “Good. He may not sense the drone too.”
Loraine, watching Bleak, who looked both powerful and vulnerable at once, had an impulse to shout out a warning to him.
She shook her head wonderingly. Whose side was she on? She had better get a grip and soon. Or she'd be in deep shit.
“Now, let the contact with Bleak go, Orrin,” Helman said, taking the folded paper from Krasnoff's hand. “And take this blood...and show us what this man is doing.”
The light ceased to beam from Krasnoff's mouth and eyes, as if a plug had been pulled. Clasping the vial, Krasnoff panted for a moment, blinking—then looked dazedly at Loraine. “Doctor-does she know about her and Bleak? I seen it and I think somebody should know, if...if they're—”
“That will be enough digression, Orrin,” Helman said quickly. “Now focus on the blood. Where is the source of that blood?”
Krasnoff looked again up the shaft at the sky. Again he spoke, and summoned.
Again the sparkles spiraled down. He looked at the wall—and once more light shot from his eyes and mouth. The image formed on the wall. A point of view looking down a street in...
The street looked familiar to Loraine. Was it Atlantic City? She'd only been there once. Was that a casino, a few blocks down?
Then a black spot appeared in the midst of the image—and grew. It was like petroleum gushing from a hole in the bottom of the sea, spreading out in a blackening cloud. The black cloud widened, boiled, bubbled...and blotted the entire image.
The colored light still beamed from Krasnoff's eyes, his mouth—but the blackness seemed to boil up from the wall, into the projected beams, as if working its way toward him.
“You...” Krasnoff sounded distant, and almost drunk. “You got to untie my left arm here, maybe I can get a picture past this blackout mess.”
Helman hesitated—then turned toward Loraine, nodded toward the restraints.
Why we? horaine wondered. But she circled behind Krasnoff, undid the buckle of the strap that was holding his left arm.
He lifted up the vial, so that it caught the light...the blackness receded for a moment, then resurged. And suddenly, as if in angry response, something was on the wall besides murky cloud. Faces—angry faces. Some of them appeared to be multiple images of the same face as if seen in a kaleidoscope, the face mirroring itself and folding and unfolding within the bubbling blackness...and then a face that seemed to sum up the others, a face with a sharply drawn, three-dimensional, leathery exposition of mute fury, formed in the center of the cloud and burst out toward them—coming right at them, its gaping jaws stretching impossibly, opening too wide.
Krasnoff screamed and shut his mouth and eyes, stopping the image—though a little colored light leaked from his lids and lips—and he threw the vial of blood from him so that it smashed on the wall, its contents dripping down, dripping red. Small shards of glass from the vial clung to the wall, pasted by blood, and slowly slipped down, the bits of glass forming into the rough shape of a face.
The face from the boiling black cloud.
***
NOT LONG AFTER THE session with Krasnoff, Loraine found herself the only one in the cafeteria. She sat alone at a stainless-steel table, in the center of the low-ceilinged room.
The coffee had gone cold in the carafes, but Loraine had poured some into a plastic cup anyway, and now she held it clasped between her hands. She sat listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead and the ticking of a big brushed-steel refrigerator in the kitchen behind the tray counter. The windowless walls held paintings of autumn woods, with a great deal of brown and dull gold in them; tw her eye they looked like paintings of paintings, bereft of feeling.
“Doctor—does she know about her and Bleak? I seen it and I think somebody should know, if... “
From the way he'd been looking at her, Krasnoff had meant Loraine. Not some other her. What had he meant by that? And why had Helman cut him off so hastily?
Looking at a painting of a stream running through a boulder-strewn wood, it seemed to her that the shadows under the trees and rocks grew darker, thickened, and stretched out to meet one another; to form a deeper, interconnected blackness that blotted the painting like a big spill of ink, and in the dark spill was a face—
“Loraine?”
She jumped in her seat, sloshing coffee on her blouse. “Dammit!”
“Seems you've startled Agent Sarikosca, Doctor,” said General Forsythe, chuckling. “We should have made more noise, coming up.”
It was Helman and Forsythe; the general—the chief of the CCA—was wearing his USAF uniform.
She put the cup down. Helman picked up her napkin—and started to dab at her blouse. She could feel his fingers press her breasts, and she stepped back, deftly took the napkin from his hand, muttered, “Thanks,” and finished on her own.
“Sorry about the coffee, young lady,” said Forsythe, in his Florida accent, “but, Lord, you startle easily.”
“No apology necessary, sir. I'm a bit shaken, I guess.” She glanced at General Forsythe. “We had our session broken up by an unexpected UBE.”
Forsythe was short, with broad shoulders, a tanned face shaped—it seemed to Loraine—like a shovel. He had once been almost movie-star handsome, but his face was sagging now, in middle age, as if the wax on a Madame Tussauds sculpture of some golden-era actor had just begun to melt. His gray eyes looked almost painted on; the lines under his fixed smile were like the incisions on a puppet's mouth.
She looked away, shuddering internally.
Maybe, she thought, he looks so unpleasant to me because of what I've seen today; what I've been through. Everything looks kind of off to me. Even cheap decorator paintings.
“You seemed a bit upset,” Helman said, looking with solemn concern at the stain on her blouse. “When we left the containment chamber, I mean—you seemed shaken. Mr. Krasnoff can be an upsetting character.”
“But from what I saw on the recordin', we made progress,” Forsythe said, clasping his hands together with a clapping sound. “We got him contained and at the same time we got him working for us, all at once. Got our cake and chowing down on it too. Haven't been able to get that with many of them.” He pursed his lips and looked at Loraine with a touch of amusement, adding patronizingly, “I understand you think we're going about it all wrong, Agent Sarikosca.”
“Oh, well—I just thought you might catch more flies with honey, sir.” She balled up the wet napkin and tossed it into her coffee cup. “And it seems to me”—she felt a bit reckless, now, and thought she ought not to say these things, but she had to, somehow—”it seems to me that we are trying to contain things that can't be contained. Not for long. Like trying to catch moonlight with your hands. What happened in there today...” She thought of the face forming in the boiling blackness on the wall. “It wasn't contained. It wasn't controlled.... To think you can control the supernatural...” She shook her head. “I don't think you can. In ancient times, people made deals with it. Maybe that's what we need to do—but after today, I'm not sure we should.”
Dr. Helman was making tsk sounds. “Now you make me wonder if you're suited for this job, Loraine. The whole point of this facility—well, shall we say a fundamental, preliminary point—is to demonstrate that so-called magic is not spiritual, not supernatural, it's just another form of natural energy; an unknown branch of physics. You know, radio waves are invisible to people. They can seem mysterious. Primitive people hearing a radio for the first time assumed there were spirits in the box. It's the same principle. And if it's a product of nature, it can certainly be mastered by human beings.”
Forsythe was watching her closely. She didn't think she'd gain anything by just buckling under to Helman, here. For a woman in an agency dominated by men, it was better to show strength. “Yes, Doctor—I'd guess the Hidden must be something 'natural' in a way. But some kinds of natural are just past our understanding. We can't control them with machines. We can't hem them in.”
Dr. Helman and General Forsythe exchanged looks of amusement. “Oh, girl—” Forsythe shook his head. “Wait—am I being politically incorrect, saying girl?'
“I believe you are, General,” Helman said.
“Then I'll say, Agent Sarikosca, you'd be surprised what can hem in the supernatural. And how long it's been goin' on. I think you're just too valuable to us, with that inquirin' mind you've got, to stay out in the 'waiting room' of the CCA, any longer. Doctor—I think you should take our young agent here up north.”
Helman nodded. “I was a bit dubious. But I'll honor your instincts, General.”
“Well—she's got that special connection. And Sean...you know how Sean feels.”
She looked back and forth between them now. What were they talking about? Special connection? Sean?
“I was a bit dismayed by the break in connection,” Helman said. “That black-cloud effect. Curious. I've never heard of anything quite like it. As if a particular geographical area was being curtained off from us.”
“Yes...” Forsythe's eyes had gone even blanker. “You know—it might be best if you focused on the other one, for now. On Bleak. This whole Gulcher business—just a distraction. Let it go. I'll deal with it my own way.”
Helman opened his mouth as if about to object—then shut it. He looked puzzled—and annoyed, it seemed to Loraine.
“Hokay, ladies and gents, I'm off,” Forsythe said, looking at his watch. “I've got a meetin'.” He ducked his head in a fractional bow to Loraine. “Ma'am.” And hurried off.
Dr. Helman watched him go. Then muttered, “That's truly odd. He was quite hot on finding Gulcher a few days ago. And Troy Gulcher escaped from a prison using ShadowComm abilities which are beyond any we've known, in terms of sheer aggression, judging from the stories of the few survivors. Quite dangerous. And if that was a UBE we saw, in the session with Krasnoff...I'm not conceding it was, but...” His voice trailed off.
“If it wasn't an, uh, yube—what was it?” Loraine asked.
“Hm? Perhaps—something fabricated by our Mr. Krasnoff to scare us. It's difficult to understand them, you know. They're a volatile lot, these ShadowComm types. Innately rebellious. Troublesome. Not to be trusted operating on their own.” '°s
She picked up her plastic cup. Then put it down again. “I knew, when I came aboard the CCA, that there was graduated briefing here, and a lot of need-to-know levels. But...if it concerns me personally...” She looked Dr. Helman in the eyes, to let him know how seriously she felt about it. “If it concerns me personally, I think I should know exactly what's involved. Krasnoff said something about 'her and Bleak.' He seemed to mean me. And the general mentioned something of the kind. And who is Sean?—”
Helman raised a hand, his eyes brittle with warning. “All in good time. What Krasnoff was referring to...I'm not convinced it's the case, what he thinks, but you've been picked to work on the Gabriel Bleak matter for a good reason. Let's just leave it at that. We find him to be surprisingly elusive. We believe you may be particularly useful.... Well. The details will have to wait.”
“Isn't he just one more ShadowComm subject? Why focus on him?”
“No, he's not just another. General Forsythe has some particular use for him. Now...if your nerves are mended, we'll return to the lab and review the recording we made today. And we should be able to see some live drone surveillance of our Mr. Bleak. The UAV has been in the air for some time, and I believe they have him on camera.... So—if you think you can deal with what, after all, is your assignment...?”
He looked at her with raised eyebrows.
She hesitated. Thinking maybe now was the time. Now was the moment to say, I am not cut out for this. For containment. Seeing what happens to people like Krasnoff. I just don't like the way it's being done. It seems wrong to me.
But things were different, now. Four thousand people had been killed in the terrorist attack on Miami a couple of years back, and even more basic rights had been suspended—it just wasn't safe, anymore, when you worked this close to the heart of Spook Central, to say, /just don't like the way it's being done. It seems wrong to me.
You didn't tell them that something seemed wrong to you, not when you knew as much as she did; when you were privy to as many secrets as she was.
Suck it up or move on down the road.
She took a deep breath. And she nodded. “I'm ready.''