“I never imagined otherwise,” I said.
He had lost focus on me and was now looking over my shoulder at a wall, which currently supported a large flat-screen monitor. Something about the look on his face told me where this was going. “Not load-bearing?” I guessed, glancing back over my shoulder. He sidestepped by me, raised his can of acid green paint like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, stood up on tiptoe, and sprayed a dripping, diagonal slash across the entirety of the wall, passing directly across the monitor screen en route. As he completed the other leg of the X he explained, “Between the loading dock and here we need to clear a path for the tanks.”
“You seem a little preoccupied,” I said, “and I don’t want to elbow in on your painting. I’ll just take all the translation notes back to my apartment before you paint them green.”
“Remember to maintain—” he began.
“—operational security,” I ended. “Not to worry.” I found my way to the part of the building where it had all started. Oda was there, perched on a large blue yoga ball before the largest computer monitor I had ever seen, peering intently at some tiny widget in the user interface of what I guessed was a computer-aided design program. Next to him was the cell phone Tristan had bought for him (his first) and a bowl of foamy green Japanese tea. Matcha. Still steaming and filling the room with a fresh but bitter fragrance. It had to have been made only seconds ago. A faucet gushed briefly down the hall, in the ladies’ room, and I guess Rebecca was here washing up. I snapped a couple of file folders marked UNCLASSIFIED: TRANSLATIONS out of a cabinet and went to find her. She had spread all of her matcha-making whisks and paraphernalia out on the counter.
“Herbs,” I said.
She looked up and gazed at me in the mirror.
“Just a thought,” I added.
“What about them?”
“Witches were obsessed with them.”
“It is a familiar stereotype,” she pointed out, and returned her attention to drying her matcha gear.
“One based on reality. All of our research points to it.” I rattled the folders in the air, as if this would lend authority to my words. “I thought of it when the fragrance of that tea filled my nostrils. Powerful stuff, fragrances.”
“Yes,” she said drily, “so perhaps you should be recruiting the descendants of famous perfumers, or incense-makers, rather than those of famous non-witches hanged in Salem.”
Taking the hint, I used the facilities and moved on. As I was walking back to my apartment, folders tucked under my arm, I had time to ponder Tristan’s statement we need to clear a path for the tanks. Given his military background, my mind had immediately flashed up an image of a column of huge armored military vehicles thundering through the building. But of course he didn’t mean that kind of tank. He meant a large vessel for holding fluids. To be specific, for holding liquid helium.
When I returned to the building the next day, my keycard didn’t work. This was due to the disappearance of the entire keycard-reading machine. In its stead was a contraption, apparently some kind of eyeball scanner. I went around back and pounded on the loading dock door until Tristan let me in. “New perimeter security,” he explained. “Max will get you squared away.”
“Who’s Max?”
Tristan was leading me down a broad open corridor that had been sledgehammered through the building overnight. It terminated in the ruins of the conference room. A huge square hole, perhaps fifteen feet on a side, had been cut through the floor, and yellow caution tape strung up around it to prevent people from falling through into the cellar. Hard at work down there were what appeared to be the offspring of a Benetton ad and a UPS commercial: four attractive, buff young men in nondescript brown uniforms, one African-American, one Asian (Korean?), one Hispanic, one with a Persian aspect, all impeccably kitted out with eye and ear protection. Two of them were framing in a wall with steel studs, and the other two were wrestling with cables. Tristan hailed them and they paused in their labors to greet me briefly. To a man, each identified himself as Max.
“What, do they row for the DODO crew team?” I asked, when they had returned to their work.
“Classified,” Tristan said. When I made a face, he added quietly, “Don’t talk shop in front of them. They know it’s a physics experiment but they don’t know about the magic.” Then he nodded at a work party of Hispanic men busy heaving shattered drywall and rolls of nasty old carpet into huge rolling bins for disposal. “And those guys are from the sidewalk in front of Home Depot. If my higher-ups knew . . .” He shook his head.
I was busy gazing at my colleague in a somewhat new light. Until I saw him in command of people and a place, there had been, truth be told, no evidence that Tristan Lyons wasn’t merely a convincing psychopath renting a tawdry room in an obsolete office building for unsavory purposes that could have endangered my life. The possibility had never entered my mind, but in retrospect, it really should have. I’d been a sucker for both the smile and the paycheck. I still consider it pure dumb luck that my trust had been well placed.
Journal Entry of
Rebecca East-Oda
MARCH 29
Temperature 49F, sunny, mild, very still. Barometer steady.
Lettuce coming along nicely; yesterday, planted peppers, Swiss chard, radishes. Weathervane needs fixing.
Working on the native-herb garden in the front corner of the yard. Already thriving: thyme, hyssop, spearmint, lemon balm, fennel, chamomile, marjoram. Must add: lavender, ambrosia, valerian, mugwort, pennyroyal, gillyflower, and (when it’s warmer) sweet basil. Might take out the Japanese moss to make room, and bring Mei’s bonsai indoors, now that Frank has lost interest.
They are continuing with the ODEC, on a magnitude I can barely fathom. Frank is happily preoccupied with something I cannot believe will actually ever come to anything, but it is good to see him absorbed in work.
Diachronicle
DAYS 245–290 (SPRING, YEAR 1)
In which constructive developments continue