Steal the Lightning Read online

  What I’d not expected was an answer.

  I looked at the address. And sat up, fast.

  [email protected]

  It could have been an error message. Or an out-of-office. Or—

  I opened it as carefully as if it were a letter bomb.

  The first line said, You roused it up

  No punctuation. No “Hi Chris.”

  Then two blank lines, and:

  but you didn’t put it down again

  I sat there for a moment, going through the options in my head.

  Then I wrote, Let’s meet.

  A pause.

  You’re not control, he wrote.

  Not control? Not in control? What did he mean?

  I wrote back, I’m Registry.

  A longer pause this time. Much longer.

  Angel rolled over in bed beside me, murmured something that I didn’t catch.

  Then: I have enemies.

  I sent, I can keep you safe.

  I checked my inbox, wondering if I’d missed something, a prior message, some context for it all. But there was nothing there.

  I waited.

  I typed, Trust me. I’m your friend.

  “I’m your friend, you little bastard. I’m your fucking friend . . .”

  Angel said, “What’s up?”

  “You OK?” I said.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Hearing things?”

  “I don’t hear them. I just kind of know them. It comes and goes. Why?”

  “Fancy a drink?” I said.

  Years ago, when I was starting in the job, I’d known an op named Martin Klein. Klein was talented but flashy, keen to make a name for himself. “Plan drunk, work sober,” he’d advised. His moves were bold, unorthodox, and got him noticed—at least, till he forgot the “sober” portion of the formula. After that, he’d been an accident waiting to happen. Nobody would work with him. Still, it was a maxim I’ve resorted to from time to time—or at least, a good excuse.

  I felt my body shifting gear. The noise and flashing lights soon pulled me into full alert. My phone might tell me it was 3:00 a.m., but down here on the gaming floor, it was a normal day, the slot machines and blackjack tables still in full swing. It was like time travel, some endless loop where I kept jumping back, and back, and back, and never seemed to catch up on my sleep.

  We bought coffees. We bought scotch.

  My phone was buzzing, time and again.

  They told me you were here

  They told me that you visited

  They told me that you saw

  “He’s still using his old account?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Chris, there’s something wrong with this.”

  I wrote, We need to meet.

  “He’s checking his account, or he wouldn’t know you’d contacted him. He’s still using it.”

  I sipped coffee, then scotch. “I thought they’d just forgotten to delete it. But if it’s active, chances are it’s never been flagged up.”

  “He’s meant to be dead, Chris.”

  “I know where you’re going on this. You think he’s still in touch with someone, don’t you? Someone at the Registry who knows he’s alive. And here.”

  “What’s ‘control’?”

  “I don’t want to ask. He probably thinks I know.”

  “And why the hell are we here? Why are we trying to track him down? Unless—”

  “Unless the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing.”

  I had been caught up in the Registry’s machinations before. What I’d learned was to do my job and try to ignore everything else. But sometimes, that just wasn’t possible.

  I flipped open the laptop. I’d read through McAvoy’s file, but I went back now, hoping for—I don’t know. Some insight, something I’d missed before.

  He’d been in Indiana, GH9. The psych reports were pretty much par for the course, that way; GH9 had been the perfect place to lose your sanity. They’d worked people alternate shifts, one week on, one week off, trying to “normalize” the situation. With that, and a heap of tranks and antipsychotics, they’d kept the whole place functioning until a stray god blew it all to kingdom come, a detail which had failed to feature in official versions of the story. What was interesting here was McAvoy’s own correspondence. He’d come back from his week off, full of accusations; his colleagues were inept, crooked and fraudulent. Some of it was as ridiculous as quibbling over who’d used his shelf in the fridge; some of it, accusations of falsifying figures, lying and theft—smart, since that was just what he was up to himself. None of it had ever been investigated, and having visited the place, I wasn’t too surprised. But I thought I’d got a picture of the man now: scheming and self-righteous, seriously paranoid.

  Angel said, “So how do you want to tackle it?”

  “I want the bugger locked up. And whatever he’s still got from us, I want that locked up, too. Somewhere very, very safe.”

  “Not enticing.”

  “It’s enticing to me.”

  “You,” she said, “are not the one needs enticed.”

  I have enemies, he’d written.

  I wrote back: I understand.

  And once more: I can help.

  Ten minutes passed. We waited. I ordered more scotch.

  He wrote: Have you come to take me home?

  I looked at her, and she mouthed, “Yes.”

  By this time, it was nearly dawn.

  And there was nothing else.

  Perhaps I’d said the wrong thing after all.

  Chapter 54

  Echoes from Nowhere

  Have you come to take me home?

  I was back in our room. Staring at the conversation on the screen, as if it were a code to be unraveled, or a poem that wouldn’t yield its meaning.

  This wasn’t poetry. Or any code that I could crack.

  Home. That was a good thing, surely? So where was “home”? And what was it?

  And why the hell would he assume I’d take him there?

  I checked my phone. I put off doing anything, just waiting for the call, the message.

  Angel brought us sandwiches. We ate them in our room. The strain was telling on her: gray-faced, and dark rings under her eyes. I’d told her she should sit this out, go back to her mum and dad a while, get well.

  She’d told me: no chance.

  “I’m better when I’m busy. Besides, if this is what we have to deal with—” and she sat down on the bed “—I’m dealing with it. Right?”

  “You’re in a bad place now.”

  She curled up, arms around her knees.

  “There’s lots of people in a bad place, Chris. But they take their kids to school, do their jobs, fill out their tax returns. Bad place is no excuse.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  “How not the same? If you’re a doctor? A soldier? A cop?”

  Because they’re not you, I thought.

  I could have said it. Instead, I held my hands up, turned away, pretended to be watching something out the window . . .

  And then, I was watching, because what was out the window was just slightly—very slightly—off.

  It was the light.

  We were ten floors up. In the street below, people were gathering for the parade. They had their sun hats and their toy balloons, their flags and banners . . . But I was watching through a fog. A thin mist seemed to have collected in the air, sparkling sometimes, as if struck by some stray beam of light, invisible for moments, then shining like a film, stretched across the void . . .

  I said, “Your situation’s not good.”

  “No. But, there you go.”

  I wiped a hand across the glass. It made no difference to the view.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Boring. Kid’s stuff, really.”

  I looked skeptical.

  “I’m dealing with it!”

  “Tell me.”

  I glanced out again. Police were
clearing the stragglers off the road, herding them back to the crowd, behind the barriers.

  A flash, then, in the middle air. A flash, a flicker—

  Did anybody notice? I couldn’t tell.

  “It’s just . . . yeah. It’s trivial, you want to know. It’s kid’s stuff. And I’m over it, I am so over it. But . . .”

  She leaned back on the bed. She wasn’t looking at me.

  “It’s like when you’re a kid, you know? And people say, what do you want to be when you grow up? And you think you just decide, and, that’s what you do. Yeah?”

  “I was going to be an astronaut.”

  “Exactly!”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “On the other hand, the school careers teacher said, get a job in a bank, and I didn’t do that, either. One up, I suppose.”

  “This is hard for me to talk about,” she said. “Please, Chris . . .”

  “Sorry.”

  She sighed. She stretched her legs.

  “It was always one thing for me. Always the same thing. It was always music.”

  “Yeah. I got that.”

  “Turned out I could sing. And I got voice coaching, piano lessons. And I joined the school band and tried out every kind of instrument they had. I was lucky. School had money for it, then. And I heard Mozart and Bach, and after school it was hip-hop, r’n’b—and then these other guys, like Bartók, Messiaen. And that’s when something flipped inside me, and I just thought, this. This is what I want to do. One way or another, somehow—”

  “And you do.”

  “No, I don’t. I did a Ph.D. on something else entirely, I’ve written a few papers. Taught a few classes.”

  “You sing—”

  “Amateur. Choir.”

  I started to protest, but she held a hand to stop me.

  “I’m not putting myself down here, Chris. Yeah, I can sing. Some talent.” She looked at me. “Not enough.”

  “I don’t see where this is going.”

  She sat forward now, ran a hand along her leg, the way she did when she’d not shaved for a few days. Then she said, “You like school, Chris?”

  “Hated it.”

  “For real?” She looked surprised. “Why? Bad grades? What?”

  “Marks were OK. It was—I dunno. The rules, I suppose. Don’t ride your bike, don’t go near the river, don’t—I can’t even remember now.”

  She smiled, amused.

  “Yeah. I can see you’d have some problems there.”

  A marching band went by, down in the street. A big silver balloon, shaped like a fighter plane, bobbed and wobbled over everybody’s heads. In silence, like TV with the sound off.

  Like las Sombras.

  Little lights were floating in the air, high above the crowds, though still twenty, thirty feet below me. Whatever I had seen before, it had changed, congealed, until it looked like snowflakes, shining in the desert sun. They drifted, or else flowed en masse, propelled by sudden currents, swirling, spinning . . .

  I glanced at Angel. Glanced down.

  My phone was in my hand. I checked it one more time, then put it on the tabletop.

  “Bet you were studious,” I said.

  “Studious does not say half of what I was. I mean, you met my mom and dad. They’re teachers, right? I never stood a chance! Plus—and this is serious, now—for people their age, education was like, such a thing. They knew what it was like, starting out two steps back from everybody else. You didn’t waste your opportunities. And I guess some of that rubbed off on me, too. So pretty soon, it’s Angel Farthing, star student. I was into everything—music, sports, even the spelling bee. And I’ll admit—I maybe got a bit big for my boots there, just for a while. Not saying I acted like an asshole or anything. But I was maybe headed in that direction. And I would act like I was so, so busy all the time, even when I was just goofing off—

  “Well, long story short. I left school, found out it doesn’t matter, being best in class. Oh, sure, it’s great to have the grades, it’s great to graduate. But school is just one tiny place and all the rules are different there. It’s not real life. Besides—I was never going to be the next Cathy Berberian. I knew it, too. Lots of people got a bit of talent. I’m good enough to know what’s good, and why it’s good, and what is really good. And that it isn’t me.”

  Again, she raised a hand to stop me speaking.

  “But here’s the best thing, out of all this, I found it out in time. There’s people who spend half their lives, trying and trying, going to auditions, hoping for a break. All ’cause, some time in their lives, they got it in their heads that they were special. You tell ’em they’re not good enough, they dig their heels in, they fight even harder. And you know—you know they’re never going to make it.

  “Well, that’s not me.

  “Big disappointment, yeah. But I put it all behind me, like a big girl, and I learned to live with it, and pretty soon, it didn’t even bother me. So I go back to school, think I’ll be a teacher or researcher or whatever. I like studying. I’m good at it. Just . . . when I was young, I had these big ideas, and one day, one day, I was going to make this awesome music . . .”

  “And you think that’s what you’re hearing?”

  “Feels like it.”

  “So it’s, what . . . frustrated ambition, or something?”

  “Yeah. But you’re missing the point. I can’t be hearing it. Because there is no music. Doesn’t exist. Never did, never will. I’ve thought it through a lot, the last few days. It’s like an echo, what I’m hearing. It’s an echo, but there’s no original. That’s why I don’t remember it. You shout, you get an echo back. But with this—nobody shouted.”

  “It’s been getting to you, though.”

  “It has been, yeah. But right this minute? I couldn’t give a damn. Really. When it’s happening, when it’s going on—there’s a buzz. A real buzz. And when it’s done, it’s like the biggest fucking letdown in the world. I mean, this is the gods, right? Screwing with my head. It ought to be, it ought to be amazing, it ought to be—real. Something you can grab, and hold—”

  I said, “You haven’t got a god in you. Not even a bit.”

  “Then why’s this happening? Keeps happening? Why?”

  “Because . . . they mess with you. With everyone. You’ve been near them before, you know the way it is. And when you work, you recognize it, put it on one side, and do your job.”

  “You think I’m capable?”

  “I’m sure. You’re just not used to it yet.”

  I had told her father there were risks, but they were limited. And usually, they were.

  Except for when they weren’t.

  “It’s real?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I’ll tell you—I’ve had times, doing retrievals—I’ve had thoughts and feelings so clear to me, absolutely clear and real. Memories I took for granted, they were just so much a part of things. But I put them on one side, told myself, all right, think about it later.” I put my face up to the window. “Half the time, I’d get to it, and—nope. Total lie.”

  “Mine’s real.”

  She said this in a small, hard voice, like she wanted to convince herself.

  “The music’s yours, then, I’d say.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “You’ll probably stop hearing it.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I want to give you answers, but I can’t. I’m trying to be honest here. Every situation’s different, every person—”

  “If there’s nothing?”

  “Then that’s what there is.”

  Over the crowds, over the marchers, shining and spinning around the big balloons, the air was full of lights. It was like a glowing river, rushing past between the buildings, seizing the currents, racing, turning. Lights without a reason, echoes without cause—

  “You get up with the gods,” she said, “you get there and you feel it, like there’s something just amazing, out there, over the horizon—or
right inside your own head. Like Stella saw, and yeah, it scared her, but she saw it! And you feel so sure. And then you think, what if it’s nothing? Nothing big, nothing beautiful—”

  “Nothing bad. Works that way, too.”

  “But it’s the same thing! Two sides, same thing. Right?”

  I said, “It isn’t aimed at you.”

  Faces of Lincoln and of JFK, bobbing on strings, floating through the air, the stars turning around them, a blizzard of lights, and everybody pointing, waving, crying out—

  Gods and ghosts. Fireworks and spectacle.

  More runoff. More excess energy. More overspill.

  I said, “It isn’t aimed at you. The gods are there. The brain reacts. That’s all there is. Maybe we’re programmed to respond, the same way they respond to us. But there’s no big secret there. The only secrets are your own.” I beckoned her over. “Here. See this.”

  She looked down into the street. “They’re everywhere now, aren’t they?”

  “They were always here. We just . . . lost track of them a while, that’s all.”

  “Weren’t using them, you mean.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Lighting our rooms. Cooling our air. Filling our lives. Press a switch and turn a dial. Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”

  “Angie—”

  She said, “Your phone’s ringing.”

  “What?”

  It buzzed again, and I just sat there, looking at it, and thought, what I really wanted now was just to stand up, get my bag, and walk straight out the door, to whatever remnants of a normal life might still be left for me out there.

  “You going to answer that?”

  I picked it up. I said hello.

  I was expecting McAvoy. But it wasn’t McAvoy.

  It was Shwetz.

  “He’ll see you,” said Shwetz. “One condition. I see you first, OK?”

  Chapter 55

  Intruders

  The man was like a wall. Physically, mentally. He wore a different suit but this one didn’t fit him either. I wondered who his tailor was, and why he bothered.

  He told us, “I am going to read this once. At the request of Second Eden Gaming, Whitesands Real Estate, and Shelby Entertainment, on behalf of the executives, board members, shareholders and other interested parties in relation to the aforementioned—”