CHAPTER EIGHT
I should feel on top of the world here, Gulcher thought. But I almost feel like I'm back in prison.
Where he was, really, was in a luxury suite on the top floor of Lucky Lou's Atlantic City Casino. He was lying full dressed on the bed, watching the big-screen, high-definition TV. And seeing his own face, his barefaced mug shot, flickering across it. Good thing he'd grown the neat, carefully clipped black beard. But still—his face was out there, and Jock's too: Watch out for these escapees from prison, believed to be involved in the prison riot that left more than a dozen dead. In prison for second-degree murder, history of drug dealing, fencing, pimping, blah blah blah.
He was feeling down. He wasn't sure if the on-a-high feeling the whisperer had brought him was gone or, like a drug feeling you got used to, just become a dull part of the background of the trip you were on.
He changed the channel. There was what's his name, President Breslin, the old guy who said we might just have to do a “later, later” on the general election. Hell, what did Gulcher care? He never voted anyway.
He changed the TV to the Home Shopping Network. Always found this channel comforting. Maybe because his wife, Luella, liked to watch it. He ever found Luella, he was going to have to kill her, just as a matter of honor, but sometimes it was nice to think about the good times they'd had before she met that bearded-weirdo California pot dealer and run off. On TV, a sexy blonde with hair that was artfully sticking up all over her head—like someone had paid a lot of money to make it look messy in a cool way—was selling “Rolex-style” watches. She kept saying she wished she weren't working for the channel, she'd love to buy one of these herself, they were so great and so inexpensive.
“Sure,” Gulcher said, out loud. “I'll take two of those and your ass along with 'em.”
He'd dipped into the casino women. A couple of the cuter, younger cleaning women had been accommodating. He hadn't needed the whisperer—just the magic of $1,000 to each broad. He had luxury, he had access to all that money in the cash room, nobody ever questioned him, but Gulcher still felt trapped here. He left here, he'd leave the protection of this place. He was hiding out here, but ns hiding in plain sight. He didn't understand it completely, but he knew he was shielded. At least for now.
“The great power has busted through the weak part in the wail up north,” the whisperer had said, when Gulcher lay there, alone in the night, trying to figure it all out. Having access to his mind, it was starting to talk to him in Gulcher's own lingo. “The wall still works, for now anyway, but while it was weakened, the great power came through. You follow? In this place, where the addicts are getting their buzz, the great power finds a safe place to hole up from the spirits of light. He can suck up energy from
the addicts, power it can use to grow, and to keep himself hid. Get it? Some are gonna get sucked dry, but only those no one gives a shit about. AH you have to do is dispose of the bodies.”
“' All you have to do is dispose of the bodies,'“ Gulcher muttered, remembering. “Oh, is that all? Dispose of a pile of bodies.” A job he'd delayed, by storing them downstairs. But what bothered him more was the sense that he had no control over any of this. That he was just a pawn, shoved around on some kind of invisible chessboard, by invisible hands, in a game between invisible players. He didn't like it. He had powers he didn't understand. From things he didn't understand. In the old days, there were guns, there was money, there were drugs, there was p-ssy, and there was hiding what you did from the cops. Those things he understood. But this—
Someone knocked sharply on the door to the suite. Gulcher took his pistol from the bedside table, got up, went to flatten against the wall by the door, gun ready.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Troy, man, it's me, Jock.”
Gulcher relaxed, opened the door. Jock looked a little drunk, and a little wired, both. “You getting high,Jock?”
“What you care if I get high, Gulcher? Shit, we got more important stuff to worry about than do I get high.”
Gulcher wasn't sure why he didn't want Jock to get high. He just felt like everything here was balanced on some kind of wire and anything could push it over into chaos and he'd lose all control of it. If he had any control of it. He wondered, suddenly, why the whisperer needed him at all, now that this great power had “come through.” But it did need him, somehow. Something about “just the right people” in bodies “belonging to the dense layers of this world.” Gulcher doubted he'd ever understand it all and he wasn't sure he wanted to.
“So, spit it out, Jock, what's the more important stuff we got to worry about? The cops onto me being here?”
“Not yet. But maybe these people are going to call 'em on us—or maybe call their f*cking paisanos.”
“What people, for f*ck's sake?”
“The owners of the casino are here. Luciano Baroni and Ricky Baroni.”
“Yeah? I've heard of those pricks. Most casinos, what I see, are owned by Arab guys or Donald Chump or whatever, these days. They're the real owners, huh?”
“What, you didn't know that? I looked it up first time I was in the casino office.”
“You're very goddamn efficient, Jock, make somebody a nice secretary. Where are these greasers now?”
Turned out the Baronis were in the basement, in a room off one of those tunnels; in the cash-counting room, talking to the accountants.
Gulcher and Jock found them there in the windowless, low-ceilinged, harshly lit room, standing next to a table stacked with bound bundles of cash. Both of the Baronis were red-faced, the accountants looking sleepy and vague. The accountants were under the whisperer's control, pretty much sleepy and vague whenever they were in the casino.
The older Baroni, with the white hair and the heavy black eyebrows and the jowls, was unbuttoning the jacket of his charcoal-colored silk suit with one hand, as he talked to the accountants. “What do you mean, the new management...”
The younger Baroni was holding a cell phone to his ear. “I know Pop told you no bodyguards in the casino, but that's because security here is supposed to be already working for me, but now we need you to get your ass over here—” A bit taller, his hair thick and black and curly, the younger Baroni wore a powder blue suit, replete with a matching blue tie.
Gulcher noticed that Papa Baroni wore a gold-colored ascot with a little pearl pin in the middle of it. “Pop” was taking off his sunglasses with one hand, using them to gesture angrily at the money as he talked to the two accountants. “We make a lot of our money off you Asian guys, crazy about the card rooms, and you're good with numbers, but you're putting me off the whole f*cking Chinese race, here, with this. How can you say that the management just got changed and no one consulted us? We're the f*cking owners, here. We're—” He broke off, seeing Gulcher. “Who's this?”
“I'm your new management,” Gulcher said mildly. “Ron Presley. Board of directors appointed me. Transitional.”
The younger Baroni snapped his cell phone shut so vigorously it made a report that caused the accountants to jump a little and look at one another. “Board of directors? They've got no say without us!”
The older Baroni was looking closely at Gulcher and Jock. “I don't normally handle taking out the trash personally,” Baroni said, fists clenching at his sides. “Junior, he called someone to do it. But you don't get out of here, right now—I'm gonna do it myself.”
“You'll lose a lot of money,” Gulcher said patiently, smiling. “There's a misunderstanding here. I'm pretty sure the board thought they'd consulted you.”
“I leave town a few weeks, I come back, and a couple of con artists—” The older Baroni broke off, staring. “Where the f*ck you get that suit?”
“You don't like it?” Gulcher said. “Maybe I should get an ascot. I'm taken by that ascot, boss. You don't see those much anymore. Gold-colored too.”
Jock chuckled at that.
“You making fun of me?” Luciano Baroni's face was beet red. “That suit you're wearing was picked out by me for my head of operations here. It was a gift. I was there when it was tailored. It was part of his f*cking bonus!”
“He gave it to me,” Gulcher said, shrugging apologetically. “You want to ask him about it, come on. Follow us. He's here—he'll explain the whole thing. Why we're here, everything. Me and Jock, we're just transitional. Helping out here, for a while, really, “cause your man had some issues.”
“Dad,” the younger Baroni said, “let's take 'em down now. They're some other f*cking... organization. Moving in on our shop.”
His father looked at Gulcher, licked his lips. Gulcher knew Baroni was a survivor—with an instinct for danger. And Baroni hesitated, sensing the power in Gulcher. Thinking, probably, he'd wait for his muscle to show up.
Gulcher gestured at the door. “We'll go talk to your primary manager—the man you hired. Right this way, gentlemen.”
The Baronis looked at one another. Then Pop Baroni nodded. “You walk ahead of us. Don't get cute, we're gonna be looking at your back. My son here's a good shot.”
Gulcher made a mock bow and walked out the door, into the underground tunnel. Jock hurrying to catch up. The Baronis followed, a few steps behind.
“We 're ready to kick ass.. just reach out with those other hands,” said the whisperer, to Gulcher, somewhere deep in his ear.
But Gulcher just didn't want to do that. Not this time. He wanted to do something himself. He wanted to do things in a way he understood—completely understood. And there was a kick to this. He could hear the Baronis walking a few strides behind him. They could shoot him in the back anytime they wanted. The adrenaline from this roll of the dice made his heart thump. He liked feeling that again.
As they walked along, Jock leaned over, muttered, “Hope you know what you're doing, Troy.”
“Don't call me that, right now. We agreed, I'm Ron Presley, a*shole,” Gulcher murmured. He looked back to see the Baronis following with identical scowls on their faces. The junior Baroni looked at him, seemed to be holding up his cell phone. Taking a picture? Lot of good that would do. He turned around again, wondering if they could see the bulge of his gun in his back pocket under the jacket.
“Dad—let's just hold these a*sholes right here in the hall till our people come. I don't feel good about this,” Ricky Baroni said.
“I'll have Stedley send your bodyguards to us in the Special Works room,” Gulcher called over his shoulder, not quite looking back as he said it.
“What the f*ck is Special Works?” the younger Baroni said. “We got no special works around here.”
“Right through here, Mr. Baroni.” Gulcher opened the door to Furnace Room One and went through, Jock right behind him.
When the Baronis came in, they stopped, just inside the door, staring at the pile of dried-out bodies. Just what Gulcher had figured they'd do. Too startled by the sight to keep track of Gulcher. So by the time they realized he had his gun out and pointed at them, they couldn't reach for their own pieces.
They just stared, openmouthed, looking back and forth between Gulcher and the desiccated remains.
There were about thirty bodies, currently, stacked like a pyramid. Except for the clothing, they looked a lot like those dried animals you see hanging in Chinatown shops: brown and shrunken to a little more than half size, looking too small for their clothing. They were really superlight too, you could pick one up with a single hand. They were the corpses of people the whisperer had chosen, as especially susceptible. Moloch picked them—or more likely it was the whisperer; Gulcher had worked out that the whisperer was a spirit who worked for Moloch. The whisperer would pick out these gamblers, the kind no one cared about. And the whisperer would wrap himself around them and get them more tweaky obsessed with gambling than they'd ever been, way beyond gambling fever. And they'd keep on and on, and if they ran out of money, somehow credit would miraculously appear. And they'd play on and on even more. Then they'd simply collapse, without a word. And the “great power” that had come through the wall in the north, to use the whisperer's terminology, fed off their spirits as they left their body and became stronger...and security would be called, would carry the bodies out, and by the time they got them down here, they'd shriveled to this. Some essential something had been taken out of them. And the bodies burned real good in these furnaces, no problem.
Furnaces. Moloch liked furnaces. Something about people chucking babies in furnaces, for ol' Moloch, thousands of years ago. To please him.
What a guy to be in business with.
The older Baroni was sputtering, “What the hell you do with...these people, they...”
“Your man Teague's here,” Gulcher said. “His ashes anyway. In that furnace. He didn't die like these guys, though. He was kind of resistant, so Stedley took him down.”
Jock added, “You wanted to get with him so now's your chance to mix.” Jock chuckled, pleased with his own wit.
“Dad—!” the junior Baroni yelped, clutching at a gun.
He never got it out. Gulcher shot them both, two bullets in the body mass, one more each in the head. Pow, pow, pow, and pow—down they went. Kind of a bloody mess compared to the dried-out corpses.
Gun smoke tinted the air blue-gray and made Gulcher cough. “Jock—tell Stedley to get down here, cut these two up, feed 'em in there, in the furnace. And that pile of driftwood too, we got too many backed up there.”
“Sure thing, Troy.” Jock seemed in awe—and also worried. “You sure that was smart? If they'd been under the whisperer's control...1 mean, people are gonna look for these guys for sure. They're powerful guys. They were on the phone to their boys.”
“We'll deal with their punks the same way.”
“Yeah, but, Gulcher—you should've—”
“Jock? Shut up. I feel good now. I'm gonna go have a drink. Save me that ascot and that pearl pin, there.”
Gulcher turned around and walked out. Glad to be out of a smoky room piled high with shriveled, mummified gamblers.
And he was sure, just as sure as Jock had been, that he'd made a big goddamn mistake.
***
Same day, late afternoon.
“Sean Bleak was taken,” Coster said. “He was alive, not long ago. Probably still is. I need another drink.”
They were in the kitchen of a two-bedroom bungalow, Bleak and Shoella and Coster, in Hoboken. Birds chirped from the backyard.
There hadn't been any trouble with cops or helicopters or CCA after Bleak had shot down the drone. The chopper hadn't gotten close enough to use the detector before they'd gotten out of range. But some instinct told Bleak he wasn't safe here. What the danger was, he wasn't certain.
Bleak and Shoella were drinking a licorice-flavored Egyptian tea; Coster, on the other side of the table, was drinking straight white rum from a tumbler. The back door was open to let in fresh air and the sound of the birds. The small kitchen looked like any little, cozy American kitchen in an old house, with its old-fashioned white, curvy-cornered gas stove, and the oak kitchen table. It was like any kitchen except for the African masks on the walls—where other people would have had a ceramic image of a cow. One of the masks, Bleak noticed, was a wood-sculpted vulture head, reminiscent of the thing that had destroyed Bursinksy's friend Gleaman, in River Rat's. Another mask was made of straw, with holes for eyes and wide-open mouth; it seemed to gaze at Bleak with an expression of horrified recognition. Some spirit might be hovering around it, one that would become apparent if Bleak looked at the mask long enough. He looked away.
They hadn't told Coster who Bleak was. He hadn't insisted on knowing. Which made Bleak wonder if he knew already. Shoella had told Coster only that it was important a certain someone hear his story.
Miles Davis played from the stereo in the next room, Bitches Brew, and the slinky music seemed to ooze into near-visible animal shapes around the corners of the kitchen. “You like my place?” Shoella asked Bleak, her tone faintly enticing.
“This where you live?” Bleak said, thinking it odd she was revealing that to Coster. Was she so confident she could control him?
“I got more than one place. But, oui. I didn't want to bring him here.” She shrugged. “Closest place. I'm tired of running and hiding. I have to be near my center of power or I lose some'tin. And this place is near the water.” She looked at Coster. “So you remember, Coster, you make me angry, I will bring a baka loa to eat your brains.”
Coster looked at her. “Probably too late for anything to eat my brains, lady.”
“I've seen that loa at work,” Bleak said. “Not something you want to happen to whatever brains you have left.”
Coster nodded ruefully. “Duly noted.” He drank about half his rum off. It was his second glass. Seemed unfazed. The alcoholism didn't appear to be an act.
“You have something to tell my friend?” Shoella prompted. “Something we talked about before. There were two boys...”
“You said there'd be money,” Coster said.
“Shoella,” Bleak said, “this guy is pulling a hustle. He's just a drunk trying to get a free ride.” He stood up, as if to go. “He doesn't know anything.”
Coster looked up at Bleak with red-rimmed eyes. “I know some things. When I look at you, I know you look a hell of a lot like somebody I've met. His name was Sean Bleak. And I know the lady here was asking about my work with an outfit that's pretty interested in finding Sean Bleak's brother. Now, I wonder who that'd be?” Coster made an unpleasant sniggering sound.
So he's wade a guess about who lam, Bleak thought. But he didn't see any point in confirming it.
“Shoella,” Bleak asked. “You use Yorena? You see into this man's mind?”
Coster didn't seem surprised at the question. Which suggested he might be what he'd told Shoella he was—an ex-CCA agent.
“Looked some,” Shoella said. “But it's hard to see anything clear in a drunken mind.”
“I got sowe things clear,” Coster said. “Sean Bleak and Gabriel Bleak. Sean'd be about your age, now. Saw him a few years ago. And he's kind of like you, pal.” Coster pointed a grubby finger at Bleak. “He's a pretty different guy, though, I'd guess, thanyou.”
Bleak stared at him. “What happened, and where'd it happen?”
“Where, was Road's End Ranch, out eastern Oregon. South of Bend a ways, and I need more rum.”
Bleak felt a shock, hearing those place names. They were dead-on.
Shoella got up, went to a cabinet, found a bottle of Bacardi, and poured some into Coster's glass. Then she put it back in the cabinet. He looked at the cabinet and drank more rum.
“What happened?” Bleak said. “And what was your part in it?” He tried to keep the anger that was bubbling up inside him from spilling into his voice. But it occurred to him that he might have a man sitting in the same room with him who had kidnapped his brother. Or helped kidnap him. If any of it was true.
It was easier, almost more comforting, to simply believe that Sean was dead. Coster looked at him, and back at his glass. “I was driving the van. I didn't know what they were gonna do on that little trip. It's one of the reasons I...left the place.”
“You stayed with them long enough to see Sean as an adult,” Bleak pointed out. “If it was really him.” Not sure he believed any of this yet, despite the correct facts about the ranch, the location, the names. CCA knew where he came from, by now.
Coster sighed. “I left the authority the first time soon after they took the kid. Then I was in military intelligence for a while. That was even more depressing. Then I dropped out of that and worked in insurance for like almost ten years. Drinking too much, but doing the job. Then my wife left me, my son died of a drug OD, and CCA contacted me because, they said, there were new developments, they needed a lot of new staff, and I was already briefed on it and they knew I could handle it, which wasn't true. I couldn't handle it. But I went back. Then the dam started to crack— really cracking big-time—and I started to see ghosts myself and my dead kid was appearing to me there and telling me I was doing wrong and—”
“What do you mean, the dam started to crack?” Shoella said.
“The wall in the north. Isn't that what you people call it? I call it the dam. Anyhow...it started to crack a bit before Gabriel here was born. We found a way to trace 'responder signals' from people who reacted to the influx of energy from the Hidden. That's how they found Gabriel and his brother and some others. And they were afraid of that energy, see.” Coster's voice was becoming a mumble. “So they started CCA and they started to look for the source. Some documents turned up...very old documents. Hundreds of years old. About three hundred.”
Coster rubbed his face, seeming confused and exhausted, suddenly, as if he might fall asleep.
“I left again.” He went on, after a moment, “That Sean freaked me out. He's a...Anyhow I had to skate under the radar, since then. And since I always liked a drink...” He said it with a dry-ice sting of irony. “It was easy to slip into skid row, whatever town I was in. Skid row's a good place to hide.” His eyelids drooped.
“Someone put you up to getting in touch with us?” Bleak asked, his voice sharp.
Coster brought his head up sharply, blinking at him. “Youpeople got in touch with we.” He nodded toward Shoella. “She found me.”
Bleak noticed that Coster hadn't exactly said no about someone putting him up to this. But something else was more troubling.
“You could have told the police there was a kidnapping, if that's what the agency did,” Bleak said. Holding the anger barely in check, like obstinately holding the handle of a pot that was too hot, burning his fingers.
“Kidnapping? I wouldn't describe it that way,” Coster said. “I mean—we talked to your parents. Told them it was 'administrative custody.' They said they'd fight it no matter what—until we told them, 'You get to keep one kid this way. You fight us, you lose both, and maybe your lives.' What could they do?”
Bleak felt as if he'd been slugged in the stomach. He'd been judging his parents pretty harshly, with their “he was killed in a tractor accident” talk. But what would he have done, in their place?
He wanted rum himself now. He got up and got himself a glass of water, because his mouth felt bone-dry, and to give himself time to think. He drank some water, which tasted of rust, and said, “Coster—you're saying my parents allowed them to take my brother?”
Coster turned the glass. “Like I said. We didn't give them a lot of choice.”
It explained a lot. A lot of inexplicable silences; a lot of ellipses in his history. Silences that made a bleak history bleaker. A lot of quiet misery on the part of his mother; the bitter stoicism of his father. Their dismay when they started to realize something was “off” with their remaining son. Their clinging to church.
Bleak's father was dead, six years now, of a heart attack. His mother was still alive but he hadn't been in touch with her for years. Which might be passive aggression on his part, he knew. Angry that they had sent him to that military school; hadn't accepted him as he was.
He should get back in touch with her. Tell her what happened to Sean. If it was true that Sean was alive.
“When was the last time you saw...Sean?” Bleak demanded. Coster shook his head. “That's enough. I want money. I want—” “Shoella!” A shout from the front of the house. “It's Oliver!” “We're in the kitchen!” Shoella called.
Oliver appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. Same baseball hat, same baseball jacket. Looked at Coster. Wrinkled his nose. The ferret on his shoulder wrinkled its nose too and ran around to the other shoulder.
“Don't worry about our guest here,” Shoella said. “He's...” She waved her hand dismissively. “Harmless.”
Is he? Bleak wondered.
“I was coming to see you—and I ran into something going on, just a few blocks from here. The guy at the center of it must be one of our people, but I don't know him.... Cops and firemen...”
“What?” Shoella sat up straight. “Why didn't Yorena tell me? Someone acting out around here. Showing his especiality? “
“He sure as hell is. He's at Sol's Restaurant throwing fire imps.”
Coster chuckled and waveringly lifted his glass. “Here's to fire imps.”
Shoella looked at Bleak. “We got to go see this. I need to know all Shadow people. Best you go too. You're powerful, Gabriel, I might need you.” Bleak didn't like the idea. “It'll attract CCA.”
“He's right,” Oliver said, raw mistrust showing in his glance at Bleak. “With him along, they could be all over us. Besides—he keeps himself aloof from La'hood. I don't see how we trust him.” An undertone of simple jealousy in his voice.
“He's not so aloof—he's here,” Shoella pointed out. “I want him there. We may need his power.” “It's a risk. If CCA is still looking for me in Jersey...” “It just started,” Shoella put in. “We could be gone before they get there.” Oliver looked exasperated, realizing she'd made her mind up. He had long ago accepted her authority.
Shoella stood up. “I'm protected from CCA now, Gabriel. I got the ancestors protecting me. How you think you get here safe? I talked with the ancestors, and we are safe. Come on—we'll take my little truck. You, Coster—wait here, yes? But I won't have you alone inside my house, I'm sorry. It's a nice day out in the backyard. There's a garden. Here...” She opened the cabinet, gave him the rum bottle. “Take it out back, and this water bottle—we back in maybe thirty minutes. I'm going to lock the house up.”
Coster made no objection to being treated like a troublesome stray dog to be locked in the fenced yard. He went meekly in the back, carrying his bottle and cup, and Shoella locked the house's doors.
Oliver and Bleak waited at the gray truck as she locked up the house. As they stood there together, Oliver said softly, bitterly, “I suppose you know that Shoella's in love with you.”
Bleak shrugged, wondering why Oliver was bringing this up now. “Sometimes I thought so. If she is...1 don't think I'm ready for it.”
“I don't think you're good enough for it, man,” Oliver said bitterly. “She's—” He broke off, as Shoella strode up to them.
They got into the gray truck and she drove them toward the rising column of smoke.
***
Long Island. CCA facility 19. About that same time.
“We'll be going north, tonight, Loraine,” Helman said. They were waiting in the hall outside Containee Investigation Room 77, waiting for the guards to get Soon Mei settled in the concrete chair.
“You recall I mentioned a trip in the offing. In fact”—he smiled mischievously—”we're heading for the north pole.”
She blinked. “We skipped the arctic survival class in CCA training. Probably because there isn't one. But if you're serious...”
“I am—but actually we're going close to the magnetic north pole. First leg will be the base by Goose Bay.”
“What? That place in Quebec? I thought the Canadians got it shut down.”
“President Breslin talked them out of it. He's so very persuasive.” Helman added with satisfaction, “Because they're all afraid of him, of course. You've read Soon Mei's file? Know what she's capable of?”
“I did, yeah. She seems to be authentic.”
“You're either authentic or you're not. She is authentic, I assure you. As you will see.” He looked at an electronic clipboard he was carrying—no briefcase this time, Soon Mei having no need of “cuing materials” or summoning scepters. “We're going from Goose Bay via special transport. Going far north, to Ellesmere Island—what's left of it. Then up to Mount Eugene.”
Loraine shivered, anticipating the cold. She'd been raised mostly on military bases in California. An “army brat.” But she decided she was being childish. “How do I prepare? Do I need special clothing? It's all frozen up there, isn't it?”
“Not this time of year. Loraine”—he lowered his voice—”we've found the artifact itself, you know.”
“The what?”
“Ah, right, you haven't been fully briefed. Yes, we found it a few months ago. It was referred to in Newton's letters, and the other documents. The partial diagram. I'll show you a summary file. You need to know—because you and I are going to be there to stake our claim on it.”
He winked at her. And she thought, He really is socially clueless.
“But why me?” she asked. “I don't mean to be uncooperative. General Forsythe assigned me to work with you. But I'm a field agent, not a scientist. If there's an...an artifact—it's an archaeological question. That's not my strong suit, believe me.”
“We want you fully briefed, Loraine. And we want to see how you do up there—we monitored you, medically, during your encounter with Bleak, you know. We've got some very interesting readings.”
“Monitored me?”
He ignored her implied question. “Just head to Area Twelve, upstate, get the transport, we'll meet at Goose Bay oh nine hundred tomorrow—”
“Dr. Helman—I don't like being monitored when I don't know about it. I'm willing to volunteer for medical monitoring, but—if I haven't volunteered, it just doesn't seem right. I doubt if it's regulation.”
“You shouldn't make knee-jerk pronouncements like “I don't like being monitored,” my dear. They're absurd, truly they are. You really should stop being so naive. We're all being monitored, one way or another—and if we're under that radar right now, we won't be for long. To object is inherently unpatriotic, since monitoring protects the nation. As for regulations on surveillance, they're all provisional, depending on the needs of the current administration. The president has sent us all notice to that effect. Ah—here we go.” The door was opened from the inside by a small, dark man in a black beret and Special Forces uniform.
“Almost ready, Doctor,” the soldier said. Sewn on one shoulder was one of the colorful patches that the different military and intelligence projects used to enhance esprit; this one had an image of a knight holding a shield in front of the planet Earth. Below that, in gold, the words SERVING IN SILENCE.
“It's a curious thing,” Helman remarked, as they went into Room 77, “how very powerful, and yet how very limited too, the so-called supernatural is.”
They were in the familiar concrete room, Loraine and Helman, with the concrete chair, but another person was being strapped into it by two Special Forces escorts. The black berets were stocky, grimly silent Filipinos. This time the ShadowComm containee was a small, vaguely Asiatic-looking woman of about forty. She wore a blue frock and thongs. No makeup. Her short gray-black hair was patchy; she seemed to have cut it out randomly in spots, somehow. Her eyes darted about and her lips moved as she whispered to herself. The suppressor hummed behind her.
“What I mean about the Hidden,” Helman said, as he frowned over the electronic clipboard, “is— well, on the one hand we get good results with Soon Mei here. Ghost-Enhanced Surveillance can be very effective. It's one of the reasons we get funded year after year. We've got General Erlich and Swanson threatening our funding if CCA isn't more useful against terrorists—GES did find one terrorist cell for us. But specific information can be difficult to get—the ghosts are individuals themselves...and they are almost always befuddled.”
Loraine had had a crash course in ghosts, the last few days. She'd been skeptical, then amazed, when she'd seen how much CCA used them. She'd seen video of Ghost-Enhanced Surveillance; had read the files. From what she knew of the metaphysics of ghosts, their erratic usefulness was no surprise. According to the UBE/GES manual, most souls, detached from the body, passed into particular levels of the Hidden, and from there reincarnated, or were drawn into some higher plane. Or into the Wilderness. But earthbound ghosts were souls who clung tenaciously to the material world— they were particularly fixated, neurotic people, who identified with their own little problems and refused to leave them behind. They were too self-obsessed to provide clear information consistently.
Loraine glanced at Soon Mei. The woman twitched in the chair, her lips moving, eyes darting. Seeming indifferent to Helman's remarks.
“Still,” Helman said, switching off the suppressor, “Ghost-Enhanced Surveillance can locate people for us—but not just anyone. Those with supernatural powers seem to know when a ghost is shadowing them, and after a brief window they ward the surveillance away. So we shift to
technological surveillance, for someone like that. Or we use a special monitor like Orrin Krasnoff. Even someone as powerful as Sean has difficulty tracking some individuals—he has a particular blind spot when it comes to Gabriel Bleak. Krasnoff is really the best we had for direct cognitive projection, but he's going to be useless for a while.” “And-Gabriel Bleak?”
“We have someone working on the Gabriel Bleak contact right now. Let us see what we can find out with Soon Mei—and tomorrow morning, we will head north...to see the crack in the dam. And now—Soon Mei...you know what to do. If you want your reward this evening.”
“I want something better quality,” she said, in a creaky, little voice. “And new things to look at, while I...while I trippy-trip-trip.”
They're giving her drugs, of some kind, Loraine realized.
Helman caught the look on Loraine's face. His lips formed a bent little leer he probably thought was wry. “Oh, yes—addiction has real power over the psyche, Loraine. Indeed, we use many narcotics in our programs here. They are especially useful for someone like our Soon Mei, who likes to 'chase the dragon.'“ He didn't seem to care that he was talking about Soon Mei's addiction in front of her, as if she were a lab animal unable to understand. “A mind freed by opiates makes many psychic connections, we find. Often many unwanted connections, it's true. But Soon Mei has a gift for controlling the spirits she meets. Earthbound spirits. Don't you, Soon? She's a sort of hyperskilled spirit medium. And she works best when she's a bit on edge, motivated to focus.”
Helman looked at Loraine appraisingly, as if he was trying to decide how she was taking all this.
Loraine thought, I've got to stop coming across like everything here's a problem forme. It's dangerous. She nodded in as businesslike a way as she could. “I see.”
Helman turned to Soon Mei, muttered a few instructions, then went to the wall and dialed down the lights. He opened the narrow overhead shaft but kept a sheet of tinted glass in place so that the light came down murky green.
A full minute more, and ectoplasmic strands descended from the skylight, to stretch probing fingers down into the room within the green shaft of light.
The ectoplasm purled and roiled, in no hurry, like drops of milk spilled in water. Faces formulated from the ectoplasm. The eyes came first, looking fearfully to the left, the right...and piercingly into Loraine's heart.
That's how it felt, anyway. When the ghosts looked right at her, they looked not at her face, but into her heart—where she felt a jab of icy needles.
Faces detailed around the eyes, then parts of ethereal bodies formed, usually clothed according to ghostly memories. The crowd of forms never stayed completely in focus; some drawing back from theo others in revulsion, others twining around one another in a glutinous dance.
“The time has come, Soon Mei,” Helman said. “Send them out to find Harry L. Zelinsky for us. He is in Canada, somewhere in Vancouver, but we don't know exactly where, they keep shifting his safe house.”
Zelinsky! Loraine thought. The leader of the opposition to President Breslin. Accused of embezzling—probably framed—he'd fled the country a year before to avoid jail. He still spoke to the American public through the Internet, and Canadian media, though the webs of censorship tightened every day.
Directed by Soon Mei, the ghosts fled up the shaft in search of Zelinsky, and a thought came to Loraine seemingly from nowhere.
Where is my duty, really? Am I really serving my country this way?
***
AT ALMOST THAT SAME moment, in New Jersey.
Why did I come? Bleak wondered. He stood in a small crowd with Oliver and Shoella.
They watched a perspiring man capering on the sidewalk of a business thoroughfare four blocks from Shoella's house, in front of a burning building. The man was shaking his shoulders like a stripper, laughing and crying at once, silhouetted against the burning inferno that had been Sol's Restaurant. He was a long-haired, thirtysome-thing man with chipmunk cheeks and a belly that sagged over his wide leather belt and an old INSANE CLOWN POSSE T-shirt. Cheap single-color tattoos decorated his thick, pale arms. He was shaking his arms as if to get something out of them, doing a dance like a child having a tantrum. Sweat splashed when he whipped his head about, and it pasted his long brown hair to his head and neck.
Bleak knew the restaurant, a popular comfort-food family spot, built in the 1950s, with curving pseudo-space-age lines of red panels and curving chrome, Sputnik-shapes projecting from the SOL'S sign. Now the low, sweeping building roiled and rumbled with smoke-streamed flame. A window burst out, glass tinkled into the parking lot, glinting with firelight. They could feel the heat of the fire sixty feet away.
Yorena sat on the branch of a small elm nearby. Bleak and Shoella and Oliver and Oliver's ferret —its eyes catching the flames—watched as fire trucks roared up and police cars blocked the area off. 13' Cops were putting up street barriers and telling the small, gaping crowd to stay back, nothing to see here.
A middle-aged woman with dyed-blond hair, wearing a Sol's waitress uniform, stood just in front of Bleak, watching the fire, wringing her hands. “We asked him to leave because he was ranting about how he was a great songwriter and no one appreciated it and they stole his ideas, and we said, 'Quiet down, stop yelling,' and he said he didn't have to, and then he said, 'It's happening to me, finally it's happening,' and he started throwing fire-things around.... Oh, Lord, that job was all I had.”
“And I don't see much of anything,” Bleak said, aside to Shoella, keeping his voice low. “I mean —no 'especialities.'“
Two pale uniformed cops, glistening with sweat themselves, were approaching the capering man, one with a Taser, one with a gun drawn.
“How do you think Sol's got on fire in such a short time?” Oliver insisted.
“I don't know—a firebomb maybe.” Bleak was scanning the sky for helicopters or UAV drones. He really shouldn't have come. A man who had, perhaps, helped kidnap his brother had been right there in front of him. And he'd left him unattended somewhere. Who knew what the guy might be doing? Was he contacting CCA—maybe trying to get more money that way?
Oliver shook his head. “I sawit. It wasn't a firebomb.”
“I think I'm leaving. We should all go.” Bleak wanted to get back and talk to Coster, pay him if necessary.
“That's what he was doing right before the fire started inside,” the waitress said. “Throwing himself around like that. I got to go home.” But, stricken, she just stood there, staring at the capering man. “How I'm going to pay my...”
“Reach out into the Hidden, here,” Shoella whispered, to Bleak and Oliver, watching the cops approach the capering man. “You can feel it.” She glanced up at Yorena on her perch. “It's something new—he'sjust gotten this—”
The ferret on Oliver's shoulder stood up on its hind legs, making high-pitched chi-chi-chi sounds. And Oliver said, “Yeah. Something's building up...about to let go...reaching the flash point.”
Bleak felt it too. He looked into the Hidden and saw the energies boiling around the capering man...as if the man's contortions were bringing it to a boil.
The cops were shouting—and that's when Bleak saw the fire imps.
The sweaty guy in the INSANE CLOWN POSSE T-shirt suddenly stopped moving, stood there in quivering rigidity with his arms held straight out, palms up—and hunkering in his hands were burning tumor-purple creatures, each about the size of a human heart. Probably most people here couldn't see them, as the ShadowComm did: squat, little, purplish fiery mockeries of humanity.
With his heightened sensitivity, Bleak could see the fire-energy drawn down from above; he could see the atmosphere warping around the man's head as he drew energy and spirit-forms from the Hidden; could see the fire imps themselves coming down from overhead somewhere, in their more ghostly forms: like perverse, transparent cupids, descending this shimmering column, diving into the man, rippling out along his arms, emerging more substantially in his hands, without burning his skin.
Hideous, maliciously grinning, little, purple-black homunculi coated in red fire...dancing in his hands, and on top of his head, as the man had done on the street.
“Put those things down!” the cop with the Taser shouted. To him it would look like fireballs in the man's hands. He'd be thinking it was some kind of bomb. The cop brandished the Taser...
And the long-haired man flung a fire imp like a gas-soaked softball at the cop. The living fireball spun as it hissed through the air, trailing black smoke, to smack into the cop's chest. It stuck...then sank into him. He opened his mouth to scream—and burst into flames from within, shrieking and running, flailing his arms.
The man who'd thrown the fire imp turned and saw the waitress. She was weeping, backing away. He raised an imp that seemed to widen its grin and laugh happily when it realized it was about to be thrown at someone.
The cop with the gun shouted for people to get out of the line of fire—firemen were trying to put out the flames on the sprawled, burning policeman.
The waitress screamed and ran—scurried randomly toward Shoella.
Bleak pulled Oliver and Shoella out of the path of the waitress as the man with the fire imps flungs his living fireball after her—which missed the waitress, flashed past them, and struck the small tree where Yorena perched, sinking into its trunk...and making the elm explode a split second later, like a grenade of burning splinters. Yorena flapped into the air, to circle overhead screeching angrily. All that remained of the tree was a smoking stump.
If the cops don't do something, Bleak thought, I'm going to have to try. He reached into the Hidden.
But the cop with the pistol fired. Two times, three times, the reports ear-ringingly loud; the bullets cracked into the man's head and into his back...and the man pitched forward onto his face, the back of his head shot away. Quite dead. And the imps sucked away into nothingness.
Bleak stared at the corpse. A fact he had known for a long time: the supernatural wasn't likely to save you from a gunshot in the head.
He had seen too many good men shot dead in Afghanistan to care when a self-indulgent, murderous neurotic was cut down. But as he hustled away with Shoella and Oliver, he thought, Shoella was right, that guy was new to this. You could feel it. If it came to him as an adult—how many more like him are out there?
***
SHOELLA SAID IT, AS she drove them back to her house. “There's been a change. For a big while, the wall let through just enough for us. Now it's breaking open, opening more, and certain people are being powered up with especialities. From what Yorena and the spirits and Scribbler tell me, it's all bad people. Dangerous people. Crazy, vicious.”
“You got to wonder how that happened,” Oliver said, sitting beside her, the ferret scuttling agitatedly on his shoulders. “Who's directing the new power that way? Toward people with no real sense of...of guidance.”
“Maybe they've got guidance,” Bleak said. “Maybe it's just the wrong one.”
“So,” Oliver said, scratching the ferret under its chin to calm it, “that still suggests that someone's deliberately targeting those kind of people.”
“So who?” Shoella asked.
Maybe, Bleak thought, that's something this Coster would know.
But when they got to Shoella's place, Coster was gone. The yard's gate was left open. No trace of Coster remained but an empty rum bottle.