Steal the Lightning Page 17

  “That’s our guy.”

  I blew the picture up. I couldn’t judge his age. Anywhere from twenty-five to forty, I thought then. Hair long, down to his collar. Shades. As if he’d planned to be a rock star sometime in his youth, and never quite got over it. That likely put him nearer forty, I decided. He wore a lightweight suit in white or pale gray, the sleeves rolled up. Very retro. A canvas bag over his shoulder dragged the jacket out of shape. The bag was open, and when I pulled him closer, frame by frame, till he was right beneath the camera, I could see inside. Cables, and the top of a flask.

  The guy had Field Ops kit.

  It was a weird sensation, looking at him, knowing what he’d done.

  “Fuck.” I sat back, held the laptop in my hands.

  Angel pressed against me, staring at the screen.

  “He’s kind of ordinary-looking, don’t you think?”

  “That’s what Stella said.” Silverman picked up his camera, filmed us both.

  “Johnny Appleseed,” I said.

  “Now what?”

  “Now—” I’d hardly thought. It was a face, an ordinary face, just like she’d said. It could be anyone. The sense of revelation dwindled. I ran the scene through, backwards and forwards. I didn’t have a plan. “Send it to my lords and masters, hope they find out who he is. Before he kills somebody else.”

  “Or lets them kill themselves.”

  “Same thing.”

  It made me pause, though. I knew the Registry. I knew the way they worked. They’d try to keep it all in-house, all hush-hush, as long as they could; and when that didn’t work, only then, they’d reach out for help. The Registry had long, long fingers, but it didn’t like to share. Not till it had to. They’d hire a tracer, maybe get the cops involved, even the Bureau, and then someone would start ploughing through the databases, and in a few weeks, or a month—

  It took them twenty minutes.

  They hadn’t used the cops. They hadn’t used the FBI.

  They’d used their own employment records. And somebody who’d said, “I know that face . . .”

  We’d got him, and I hadn’t even finished off my drink.

  McAvoy.

  Preston McAvoy.

  Not Mark or Mike—but maybe Mac. He’d given her his real name, and she’d just heard it wrong. There was a photo, his hair cut short and neatly combed. Collar, tie. No shades. But the jawline was the same, the nose was just the same. I checked and double checked. A half hour more, and I had scans of thirty-something pages from his file, including psych assessments, managers’ reports, a stream of correspondence. He was forty-five. Princeton grad. Married once, a long time back, now divorced. Joined the Registry age twenty-five. Worked R&D, east coast, then . . . then I saw it: GH9. The Indiana facility. The place that Silverman once told me he knew all about.

  Except he didn’t, bar the few small nuggets I’d allowed him.

  It was starting to make sense then, but no sense I liked.

  I’d promised Angel a night out.

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  By evening, I was looking through his bank account. Long fingers, like I say. Activity was rare, sporadic, and the money would be topped up within days of each withdrawal, though only by the same sums he’d paid out. The real cash would be elsewhere—several places, if he’d any sense. As I saw it, this account was kept for one reason: because some things are much easier to buy under your own name.

  Plane tickets, for instance.

  One-way, Boston to Vegas, stopover in Philly.

  Three days back.

  So neat, so simple, and it would have wrapped the whole thing up just wonderfully well, except for one small snag.

  I saw it on the first page of his file, and read the details in a brief addendum to his résumé, which came on page 3, following the contact information. It even had a big, blue stamp across it, just to make it all official.

  Preston McAvoy was dead.

  Chapter 47

  Night Music

  I garaged the SUV, put a chit in with the Registry for somebody to pick it up. We stripped down the equipment, reduced it all to luggage-size—cables, flasks, control box—and filed the necessary forms to take it on the plane with us. The Registry booked tickets, flight, and hotel. We had a drink with Silverman to say goodbye, though he was all enthusiasm; told us that he’d raise the cash and join us in a day or two. I told him not to bother: we’d be done by then. And I was hoping that we would, as well.

  Around the third beer, I went back to work. The file came with a page of contacts, most likely long-since obsolete. But I still had to be sure.

  “Let’s have this,” said Silverman, and picked his camera up. I tried to look like Bogart while I keyed the numbers in. I tugged my earlobe, the way he does in The Big Sleep, put my head down, tough, unsmiling, serious.

  The landline “could not be completed as dialed.”

  The mobile got a Spanish woman who spoke no English, so I apologized in French (since I don’t speak Spanish) and hung up.

  The next of kin was long gone.

  The work phone got an out-of-office for a man named Kolowoski.

  I looked into the camera lens. “Of all the bars in all the world . . .”

  Angel laughed at me.

  That left e-mail. She helped me with the message there, made it nice and neutral. I told him I was Copeland from the Registry, I’d like to get in touch with him. I made it sound like we were old pals.

  Almost.

  His personal account was closed. It bounced straight back. But the Registry address . . .

  That one stuck.

  Three years, and they still hadn’t deleted it. I love the inefficiency of big firms.

  “Use a ouija board,” said Angel. “Guy’s dead, right?”

  Once we’d left Silverman we stopped for ice cream at Graeter’s, and ate it in our hotel room, watching a movie neither of us liked but, equally, couldn’t be bothered to switch off. Then we dozed to the lullaby of traffic in the street outside, which, if you were really sleepy, you could half imagine sounded like the sea . . .

  We slept for maybe three, four hours.

  And then the music started up.

  I heard it, long before I woke, twisting through my dreams: a sound of brass and woodwind, sinuous and melancholy, dwindling as I rose up towards consciousness, fading at last into a single, breathy whisper, that seemed to trace the notes with difficulty, one to the next. I lay there listening, my eyes closed, my body sunk into the bedding, feeling dreamy still. It was a while before I recognized the voice. It was Angel’s, naturally, but it didn’t sound like her. I knew her sound: precise, clear, classically trained, every note spot on. Now she sounded tentative, uncertain, surprised by each new utterance. I lay there, trying to place the tune. For moments it seemed half-familiar, yet as each sequence approached a resolution, it would shift, and metamorphosize into a new theme. This wasn’t music I had ever heard her listen to. Even its form and genre seemed to waver, sometimes complex, sometimes simple as a nursery rhyme.

  I rolled over. Opened my eyes.

  The room was alight.

  I was lying in a pool of light. Moving, breaking and re-forming: strands of fire that laced across the coverlet, and shifted constantly. Like water running uphill. Mercury, splashing in rivulets over the fabric. It seemed I should have felt the weight of it, felt it slide across me—weight, or heat; but I felt nothing. Great wedges of darkness wheeled across the ceiling. It took a moment till I realized they were shadows from the ceiling fan, itself moving with dream-like slowness.

  Dream-like, yes. But not my dream.

  Beside me, Angel sat cross-legged, balanced on a pillow, staring at the patterns on the covers as they changed. She read them, stumbling as she went, bending a note in mid-breath, hesitating, catching up, but never going back, never repeating anything.

  At first I thought her unaware of me, like someone hypnotized or sleepwalking. Only when the lights stopped moving and she looked up
, I realized she was wide awake, and had been all along.

  “I hear it,” she said. “I hear it, Chris.” She reached out, took my hand. “Isn’t this the greatest? Don’t you think?”

  I heard the faint whine of a car reversing, two streets off, the honk of a horn, like an angry trumpet call.

  The light flickered. She sang—hmm mmm mmm dah dah dah—but I could make no sense of it. I don’t know how long it went on. After a time I wormed my way out from the covers and sat beside her, watching what to me were empty patterns shuffling on the coverlet, ever harder to make out. We had shared a dream, or part of it. Now the light was fading, and the lines grew thinner, dimmer. Angel glanced at me, suddenly lost track of what was in her head. Her voice faltered. She cried out, urgently, “Get my phone!”

  She flapped her hands. She sang, dee-dah dah dee-dee-dah . . . Her finger traced a pattern on the cloth, now faded into near-invisibility.

  “Phone!”

  I found her phone. I fumbled with it, set it to record. She sang a few short notes, then repeated them, uncertain now, and sang them for a third time, with some small variation. Another couple of phrases followed. She reached out with her hands, trying to gather up the dimming light, but it trickled through her fingers, oozing out and sinking through the fabric. She chased it. She dug into the bedclothes. A faint glow ran along her arms. She rummaged through the sheets, she beat them with her fists. And then she turned on me, suddenly furious.

  “Why didn’t you—? Why couldn’t—? Why were you—?”

  I reached to touch her and she jerked back. Suddenly the room was dark. I was cold, and I was wide awake.

  “Angie,” I said. “Angel . . . ?”

  Her arm was up. Her fist was pressed against her mouth. She sat like that, frozen, I don’t know for how long. I went to put my arms around her and, with a brief, quick movement of her head, she warned me off. I sat there, next to her. I waited. And then very, very slowly, she unwound, came back into herself. She put her arm down and her shoulders sagged.

  “Did you hear it? Did you see . . . ?”

  “I heard you, singing.”

  “But—but you must have heard it. It was just—it was intense, you know? It was—I could hear harmony, and—” She ran her hand over the bedding. “You saw it, didn’t you? You read it?”

  “It was just patterns. I couldn’t read it.”

  “But, but—oh, shit. What was the tune? I couldn’t see it all—there were parts of it, hidden away, but—oh God. How did it go?”

  Tears ran down her cheek. I dabbed at them, brushed them away.

  “I don’t think it was real,” I said.

  “What do you mean? How can it not be real? I heard—I saw—”

  “I think it was a dream,” I said. “Like a shared dream.”

  She turned away from me.

  “I was awake,” she said. “I was more awake than I have ever been! Oh my Lord, it was—it was right here, it was, it was—”

  She moved her hands over the covers, she pulled the fabric, squeezed it in her fists.

  “You could hear it,” I said. “No one else. Just you.”

  “It was like—it was a whole new system, a whole kind of music—here, right here, I didn’t need a piano, I didn’t need anything, I could—”

  “Angel.” I took her shoulders. I tried to look her in the eyes but she was too distracted, she kept looking away. Searching the bed, the room, for what she’d lost. “You got close to a god,” I said. “Sometimes, there’s aftereffects. They stimulate the brain. It’s different for everyone. But whatever you heard, you’ve got to understand, it’s yours. It came from you. The gods don’t play music. What you heard, it comes from you, right? Nowhere else. Just you.”

  Her face creased up. Her hands squeezed into fists.

  “Where did it go?”

  “It didn’t go anywhere.”

  “Stop saying that! Stop it!” She wrenched herself from the bed, strode across the room.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s not my fault.”

  “Did I say it was? Did I?”

  Neither of us slept again that night. I rocked her in my arms, slowly, and her hand took hold of mine, gripping it as if I were a lifebelt in a rough sea; and I didn’t tell her just how fragile my own hold on the world could be, for so much of the time.

  “Beautiful music,” she said. “So, so beautiful.” She was crying now, not loudly, just snuffling, her face against my chest. “And I can’t hear it anymore.”

  Chapter 48

  Ghosts at Evening

  There was a woman at the airport. Her hair was long and blond. She wore a poncho and she clutched a small black diamante purse, pressing it against her belly. She could not stay still. She paced, circling the rows of chairs, stepping over luggage, now taking the aisle—but walking, all the time. Her face was set, her shoulders hunched. She never looked out of the window, never checked the flight boards. The only pause she made was when she went to check up on the boy that she was travelling with, a dandelion-clock blond of eight or nine, who sat beside their luggage, playing his little handheld game with that same obsessive dedication, as if it were a family trait. It wasn’t hard to guess that they were leaving something bad. I only hoped that they were going somewhere better, and I watched them, almost unaware that I was doing so, the way you watch a car wreck or a house burning down. Thinking, on some level, at least it isn’t me.

  Then thinking, yet . . .

  To Angel, I said, “You OK?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You want more coffee? Breakfast?”

  “No.” A pause. Then, “I want the fricking Muzak off. Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  She put her head back, shut her eyes. I watched her: the soft curve of her lips, the little streaks of pink skin under the brown . . . dark freckles on her nose, gold studs in her ears . . .

  There was a look of strain about her, though, and I could see her eyes moving behind the lids, unable to relax.

  “With Ballington,” she said. “How did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “He had a god in him. How did you know that?”

  “Instinct, mostly. Experience. Seen it before. Or something like it, anyway.”

  A baggage truck drove by, honked its horn.

  She frowned. She kept her eyes shut.

  “All my life,” she said, “since I was small, I’ve heard things. Music. In my head, I mean. It’s not unusual, is it? Really?”

  “I don’t know. Does it bother you?”

  “Didn’t used to. Now, though—yeah. Sometimes. Last night.” She was talking very quietly. I had to lean close, conscious of the bustle all around, the chatter and the TV news, the PA calling flights; the distant, tinkly Muzak that she hated so much. “I think it’s the god,” she said. “Big Hollow. I think . . . I think maybe I did it wrong, and now . . .”

  “You were good. You were fine.”

  “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of training. It’s not your fault. But I spent years in school. Always getting ready, always trying to prepare. I want to know when my life’s gonna start. I mean, how long’s it gonna take, you know?” She rolled her head, stretched her neck. She looked at me. “Maybe I rushed it? Too darn eager—”

  I took the reader from my pocket.

  “Oh,” she said. “I tried that. Soon as I realized there was something wrong. Days ago.” She shrugged. “Normal, by the way. All normal.”

  “Good.”

  “The music—see. I keep hoping it’ll just go back how it was. If I shut up, ride it out . . . but when I hear it—it’s incredible. It’s beautiful. It’s like, the most amazing thing—and then it’s gone. I don’t remember it. I maybe get a feeling of it, after, but . . . Like when you hear a fish jump and you look up quick and see the ripples but you never see the fish. Uh-huh? The fish is gone. That’s how it feels. Just out of reach . . .”

  The woman in the poncho went by, and now Angel saw
her, too. Walking so as not to have to think, or feel. I knew what that was like.

  I said, “How long?”

  “The retrieval. Big Hollow.”

  I tried to play it back, remembered she’d been closer than I’d wanted her to be. Closer; but not too close. Not so close that I’d been scared for her—no more than usual, anyway.

  “Remember in Chicago?” I said. “How they change things, just from being near? The gods? How your thoughts change?”

  “I want the music. I want to hear it and remember it. Why can’t I do that, Chris?”

  She leaned against me. I put my arms around her, held her there, not knowing what to do or what to say; this strong, intelligent, talented woman, someone I had never thought would need my help in anything. And now she did, and I was lost.

  I said, “You’re going to be all right. I promise you.”

  “Can you promise that? Really?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “Yes I can,” and I hoped I sounded much more certain than I felt.

  We changed flights in Dallas. She slept, woke calmer, it seemed to me, but also, more preoccupied. She didn’t talk, she didn’t watch TV. She didn’t even notice when the steward came round with the coffee. I took her hand, holding it in both of mine, pressing it, stroking it, the way you’d try to rub the warmth back into someone frozen with exposure.

  And that was how we headed west, over a country wild, and rugged, and then, increasingly, from everything I saw out of the window—empty.