Skinner

  He stands.

  “I’m going now. I have an asset.”

  Haven is looking down at the tabletop, a man trying to solve a puzzle, last few words in the crossword.

  “No, you don’t. Not anymore.”

  He looks up.

  “The op is over.”

  Skinner doesn’t move.

  Haven shakes his head.

  “Look, it’s not a bad thing. No one is pulling the plug. But we have the badguys. Those anarchists, Gamla Stan. You and Jae sniffed them right out, went straight to them. So. Contract fulfilled. Everyone gets paid.”

  Skinner is standing over the stain, it’s right between his feet. Looking at the eye shape, his hand feels again the whisking gesture, scrape of blade against orbital bone.

  “The anarchists. For West-Tebrum. No.”

  “They have motive. Funding. Connections to radical and criminal networks. A stated aim of bringing down capitalist society as a whole, and American capitalist imperialism in specific. They look good.”

  “No.”

  Haven looks at the table again, invisible unsolved puzzle.

  “This. Rigidity. In your thinking. I wonder where that comes from.”

  He looks at Skinner, looks at the stain Skinner is looking at.

  “It’s going public, the attack on West-Tebrum. Everyone is going to know. It is going to be a shitstorm. Hurricane. What is going to calm it is the fact that the badguys have already been found, caught, and are, at this moment, being loaded onto a Gulfstream that the CIA bought at auction from a former Warner studio exec when he went upside down in the collapse. Happy ending. And, thanks to you and Jae, Kestrel got to them first.”

  Skinner looks up from the stain. Haven’s eyes, the violet shade has come into them.

  “It’s not them. Jae says no. It goes somewhere else. The configuration.”

  Haven makes blades of his hands, places them edge down on the table, defining the limits of something.

  “It’s like your thoughts are in a box. Like you came out of it, but your thoughts are still inside.”

  He lifts his hands, flicks them, shaking something off.

  “Jae’s contract has been fulfilled. The asset operation is over. Cross is happy with this result. Homeland is happy with this result. The investors who have heeded the trends and put their savings in private security and intelligence services stocks are very happy with this result. We are beginning to contract out of the op. Close it. And you, you are unemployed. You have no asset. Nothing to concern you. More activity in this area will just draw attention. More cannon fodder. The word is going out, the badguys have been caught. Everything goes still on the landscape. If you keep moving, you look like a target. H-A, the other contractors, they think there’s a reason to stay in the game. Problems ensue. Difficulties for Kestrel. My asset.”

  He points at Skinner’s feet.

  “You’re not wearing your socks. Do I think you were sleeping, no socks, needed to pee?”

  He looks at Skinner, his eyes roam Skinner’s face, the puzzle, so frustrating.

  “Fucking your asset. Christ.”

  Something new on Haven’s face; again, emotion is so hard to parse. Skinner decides that the expression indicates some form of regret on Haven’s part. But he hasn’t the least idea what it relates to. He wonders if Haven is still faster than him. A man that doesn’t carry his own gun anymore, has he slowed?

  “Is Terrence really dead?”

  Haven’s mouth flattens into a line crimped at both ends. He shrugs.

  “Yeah. The old man is dead.”

  Haven looks at his bunk, scratches his earlobe.

  “Cologne. After he met with you. He was a mess. All over the field. Too many freelance jobs. We tried to put him out in the cold after Montmartre. For his own good. But he couldn’t stay out of the game. Working for anyone who would have him. Corporate intel, some Russian mob stuff, consulting for Venezuelan antiterrorism, for fuck sake. Anyone paying. And he got messy. Involved in too many things. Yes. This. He was involved. We know. I know. There was a danger that Kestrel could end up implicated in West-Tebrum if Terrence kept running around.”

  He stops scratching his earlobe.

  “He wanted you for this because he thought he could run you. Poke you around the board, looking in the wrong direction. Play you off Jae. It might have worked. But he was a threat to Kestrel. So he’s dead now.”

  Skinner remembers the night he first killed a man. His urge, never shared with anyone, to protect the man next to him. Alone, he might never have felt compelled to attack the mugger. But until the man was down, he was a danger to Terrence. Odd, these circles life runs in.

  “Was it hard to kill him?”

  Haven is still looking at his empty bunk, as if imagining what it would be like to actually sleep in it. He looks at Skinner.

  “If you wanted to know what it feels like to kill Terrence you should have done it after Montmartre.”

  Skinner feels something he doesn’t like.

  “I have to go.”

  Haven rises, shorter than Skinner, but only because he’s in his socks. They could change clothes and never have to visit a tailor.

  “You don’t have an asset. Jae doesn’t have a contract and you do not have an asset.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Yes. Somewhere. But no more on this. I can’t. I have to stay on my asset, Kestrel. This thing. It’s a mess, this thing. Terrence. He was buying guns. Moving money. It must stop in Gamla Stan. It needs to shut down and go quiet. If you keep moving, with Jae, someone is going to take a shot at you. I can’t have that noise. Bad for Kestrel.”

  Skinner’s eyes, shaped much like Haven’s, but brown, close, open.

  “Kestrel. An asset. How does that work?”

  “It works because I want it to. Because I can imagine what it’s like. An asset, it doesn’t have to be what someone else says it is. You don’t have to wait for someone else to establish the value. And you don’t have to wait for someone to attack it before you take action. I presented Cross with a proposition, and he saw the potential. Kestrel is my asset. I take actions to protect it. Cross went to Bilderberg. I normally would have gone with him. Instead, I stayed with a team following you and Jae. Because I still know how to watch you so that you don’t know I’m there. Like I always have. And because you and she represented a greater risk to Kestrel, and greater potential for Kestrel profit than Cross understood. And I was right. You gave us the anarchists. Mission accomplished.”

  Skinner nods.

  “Your thinking. More flexible. Yes.”

  He turns to the door.

  “Terrence is dead. Imagine. If he’d been my asset. What would happen next.”

  Haven puts his hands in his pockets.

  “I have. He wasn’t.”

  Skinner nods, places his hand on the door latch.

  “Joel.”

  His real name turns his head, the sound of it, some power, finds him like a lost thing.

  Haven opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again and fills it with words.

  “Go away, Joel. This isn’t for you. The way it works now. Not for you. You’ll only. People will get hurt.”

  Skinner looks around the compartment that might have been his if he’d been a little faster, nods, turns the door latch.

  “They always do.”

  He opens the door, walks through it, past the three Personal Security Services operators and their Secret clearances and their guns. Back along the length of the misassembled train, already feeling himself drift away, tether slipping loose.

  No asset at the end of the corridor, only a woman.

  Not sure what that means.

  when the ash leaves the sky

  HER PHONE IS ringing.

  Stupid fucking brain.

  At least in Iraq she’d been drunk. Drunk and in a war zone.

  Still ringing, light pulses around the edge of the screen that she turned face down to the tabletop before her brain wen
t sideways and made her stick her hand down Skinner’s pants.

  No, really, stupid, fucking, brain.

  She’s so stupid it’s taken her however long, however many rings of her phone, to realize that Skinner isn’t in the bed with her anymore. Not in the bed. Not in the compartment. She looks at the table, the phone rings, that thin pulse of light reflecting off the gun. She tries to remember how many times her phone will ring before going to voicemail. But she’s not really fooling herself. She’s going to pick it up. She just wishes that she wasn’t quite so naked and sticky.

  It rings.

  Stupid fucking phone.

  She picks it up.

  “What.”

  “You’re not in Stockholm.”

  She pulls the top sheet up.

  “No, I’m not.”

  She waits for more from Cross. Gets the feeling that he’s looking at something on the other end of this call, something that puts her at a disadvantage.

  “But you were in Stockholm.”

  “Yes. Briefly.”

  “Ah. There was some confusion. I thought Kiev. Left it at that. Haven, without my knowing, did not leave it at that.”

  Jae palms her forehead. It feels heavy, full of data, still unsorted. She needs more sleep. Much more.

  “I had no idea you were there, Jae. Here. I’m still here. For the moment. Had no idea you’d been involved, witnessed what was happening on Gamla Stan.”

  She turns her head, easing her face into her palm, looking at the gun on the table.

  “You woke me up. I’m not very clear headed just now.”

  A pause, Cross gathering or realigning his thoughts.

  “Right. Good job finding the West-Tebrum attackers. Or the brain trust, anyway. They don’t, none of them, have the technical background, but their money chain goes straight to the former Eastern bloc. Ukraine, like we thought, Romania, Hungary. There was, do you remember, there was that bank heist, prepaid ATM cards? Fidelity National Information Services. Hackers got into the database. Cloned twenty-two cards. Sent them to a network of accomplices. Countries I mentioned, but also Greece, UK, Russia, Spain. Others. Twenty-four hours, hitting ATMs for the card limits. Every time they maxed one, the hacker coordinators would go back into the FIS database and reset the limit. Twenty-two cards, twenty-four hours. They got over thirteen million, US.”

  He waits for a reaction, but she has none.

  “The anarchists were using cloned cards from FIS. And, Jae, we have a Chinese connection.”

  She moves her head again, lets her hand cover her eyes.

  “Chinese.”

  His voice is modulating into a slightly higher register, excitement that not even Cross can contain.

  “Chinese. It looks good. Chinese netizens. Citizen hackers. Patriot citizen hackers. Chinese. Which is the same as the People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61398. A nominally citizen hacker in Shenzhen, a member of Comment Crew, provided the anarchists with some technical support on how to set up their own Wi-Fi network, Internet in a suitcase stuff. They didn’t have it operational, but the emails were right there in the trash in one of their Gmail accounts. Jae, Eastern European gangsters, Western European anarchists, and the Chinese? Very, very good job.”

  With her eyes covered, lights are flaring behind the closed lids, they swim, resolve, arrange themselves into a configuration, a nonsensical series of lines connecting them. She tries to move them, sort them into something like the structure that Cross is suggesting. It would be so nice, all the cyberwar bogeymen working together. Tidy package. She likes tidy things. Loose ends are irritating, unbearable. They send her to the fringes of any configuration, looking for the threads they are meant to connect, lost, never finished. No configuration is ever finished.

  Nothing is complete.

  “It’s bullshit, Cross.”

  Pause. Recalibration. Words.

  “It is a national security threat, Jae. One that is appearing more pervasive and imminent by the minute. And when Fox News and CNN and MSNBC and the Internet and what’s left of the papers start reporting it in less than twenty hours, the heads of Homeland and the NSA and CIA and FBI and the DoD and every elected official in Washington who can get within screaming distance of a microphone will be able to assure the public that it is a threat that is being aggressively countered and that the ringleaders of the West-Tebrum attack are already in custody. I did not ask. Jae, I did not ask you to go to Stockholm when you did, but you did. You went to Smith, followed your instincts and didn’t trust me, did not go to Kiev, you went to Smith instead. And as to what happened there, well, some messes are easier to clean up than others. You went to Smith and then to Stockholm. This is what you do, follow trails that no one else can see. And you found the city of gold.”

  He exhales, breathes deep, settles himself.

  “And, well, fuck. Jae. I’m excited. I’m excited for Kestrel, and I’m excited for America. This is the kind of thing, this is how entire industries get spawned. I don’t have to tell you how economically robust intelligence and security have been post–nine-eleven. It’s possible, we could, with effort, see new opportunities well beyond the Beltway this time. Innovation in national security doesn’t have to originate in Virginia or Delaware. And it’s heartening for people to wake up, hear there was an attack, and know the perpetrators have already been captured. Morale. When a nation is heartened, when it contracts into its own concerns, you can do amazing things. I believe that. So, well done. Very well done.”

  He coughs.

  “Now, I happen to know you’re alone at the moment. Skinner is occupied. But he’ll be back with you soon. And what I want you to do is check an email account. Gmail. User: [email protected]. All lower-case, no spaces. Password: kitty6678. The in-box will contain an email with some contact info and an address in Paris. A safehouse. I want you to go there. The ash cloud is blowing south at a good clip and the EU can’t afford to have another two-week airspace shutdown. Not with a new hostile credit event looming every week. Bank runs in Cyprus. Airspace will open well before the ash leaves the air. Less than twenty-four hours. Meantime, you should be someplace out of the way. You should separate from Skinner. Immediately. His contract has been fulfilled. Tell him to leave you alone. That simple. He’s not safe to be around anymore. Do you understand all of that?”

  She uncovers her eyes, still seeing flashes, ghost configurations.

  “We caught the badguys.”

  “Yes. We have a Kestrel product, a SCIF jail. Six cells enclosed in a SCIF. Highly portable. It can be moved on a flatbed, wide load, like a house. A flexible drop-and-deploy platform. Many applications. Anyway, they don’t want to take the anarchists to Guantanamo. Too resonant of a specific era. Everyone thought the Tsarnaev brothers would characterize the next stage in the evolution of terrorism. Post-Soviet Islamists. But this is post-Islamist extremism. It needs to be defined as such. It’s a market delineation. And it will make it easier for reporters to tell the story of a newly emerging threat. People will lose interest if it’s not new. They have jihad fatigue. So the anarchists are going to the supermax facility at ADX Florence in Colorado, to be housed in a Kestrel SCIF Custody Unit. It’s branded, the SCIF, our logo on the door. If any pictures happen to get leaked to the press.”

  “Cross.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re in your SCIF.”

  “Soon.”

  “Why do I need to get away from Skinner and go hide?”

  Nothing.

  “Because, Cross, like I said before, bullshit. You know?”

  He’s breathing, not dead, breathing air that everyone else breathes, same species, though Jae sometimes thinks that can’t be possible. She listens to him breathe.

  “Cross?”

  “I have something else for you, Jae. That container you looked at when you went to Creech. Something has happened. They lost it, and now it’s turned up, or one like it has turned up. Maybe. In an unlikely location. Kestrel is helping out. Lieutenant C
olonel Cervantes would like you to see the new images. Some pictures. Pictures, Jae. Looking at pictures. What you like best to do. I’ll send some additional contact info to that email address. Cervantes. Look at what he has to show you.”

  She scoots down the bunk. From here, without leaning, she can pick up the gun.

  “Why do I need to get away from Skinner?”

  “There’s another conversation happening now. I’m listening. Well, not listening. Reading a simultaneous transcript. Nice piece of software. Kestrel developed. If I seem distracted, that’s why. From what I gather, reading this conversation, Skinner may be moving into the realm of independent actions. Now that his contract has been fulfilled.”

  “Has it been fulfilled? Am I safe?”

  “He knows that Terrence is dead. Jae. I assume you told him. Your prerogative. But it is possible that Skinner will be unable to accept the facts. Or so I’m being given to believe. Better to get away from him. Soonest.”

  Jae is trying to remember the last time she fired a gun. Before Iraq. The personal security course she had to take before she could be insured. She’s a good shot. Her instructor had been impressed. You’ve fired a gun before. Yes. She had.

  “So you don’t think he might have killed Terrence anymore?”

  “No. No. It appears that Terrence was cutting a swathe of late. Acquiring an ample supply of ememies. He was playing several hands at once. Had been for some time. Just recently it became too much for him. Money, it looks like. Some of that FIS money I told you about, it passed through one of his accounts. He was involved in this, Jae. West-Tebrum. More than a bit. And he pushed for Skinner’s involvement. Because he thought he could influence him. Jae, if we’re right, Terrence may have been brokering materials. It’s a diffuse situation at the moment. Best to settle in somewhere until it contracts. Paris. Correspond with Cervantes. When the ash leaves the sky, come home. Or stay in Paris for a while. Job well done. Deserved rest.”