Stone Junction

  ‘Plus, I can cook,’ Volta said.

  And precisely at that moment a solo harmonica began the opening strains of ‘Amazing Grace.’

  Daniel slowly lowered the fork to his plate. ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘I didn’t. Coincidence did. It’s a signal that an EU transmission – Essential and Urgent – will follow in fifteen minutes. Why don’t you let the dishes wait and come down to the barn with me. You haven’t seen the communications center yet, and this is probably the information we’ve been waiting on.’

  As a monotone voice recited numbers and letters in clusters of three – ‘A-O-seven – Niner-Double L – Zone-four’ – Volta wrote them down. Daniel noticed Volta was taping the message, or at least had the record button pushed down on a tape deck jacked into the radio. ‘B-eight-N – G-O-Niner – I-two-Zero …’ The code fascinated Daniel. It sounded like Bingo on mescaline.

  As the voice settled into a drone, Daniel glanced around the barn, nearly half of which was a communications center – phones, CBs, shortwave radios, tape decks, two computer stations, a row of locked filing cabinets, and a long worktable. A huge bank of solar-charged nickel-cadmium batteries lined the far wall.

  The transmission abruptly ended and Volta sent a brief response, also in code. When he clicked off the shortwave, the tape deck stopped.

  ‘That must be a secret channel,’ Daniel said, avoiding a direct question.

  ‘No,’ Volta said, ‘we use legal frequencies: 21.000 to 26.450 Megahertz in the daytime, 7.000 to 7.300 at night. The CIA has computerized scanners that monitor unauthorized frequencies. If it picks up an illegal signal, it can easily triangulate the point of origin.’

  ‘But if it’s on a legal frequency, anyone can listen.’

  Volta shrugged. ‘Let them. All they’ll hear is the code, and code is fairly common on the air – smugglers, amateur cryptographers, paramilitary groups. We use what’s known as a shift-cipher code, which means it shifts from one code set to another – we use nine – at intervals that can also be changed. It’s extremely difficult to crack it by frequency-of-occurrence methods. We use one set of nine for a year, and to our knowledge we’ve never been cracked or compromised. And besides, the band we use has over a thousand frequencies available. So first someone would have to find it, monitor it continuously, and then break the code. And they still might not understand the message. Here, let me show you.’

  Daniel watched as Volta transcribed: OBJAY THIRTY K CARROT C CRUSH ZROW GLO DFORM U HIRNOW XTR CBR 1BLT T GO CECIL.

  ‘I don’t get it all, but I think I caught the important part.’

  Volta read it aloud, explaining the shorthand: ‘The object is a thirty-thousand-carat diamond – “C Crush” being crushed carbon – a zero being round or, in our case, a sphere. This one glows. However, DFORM is our standard phrase for “the defense is formidable,” so I should go there and confer – “you here and now.” XTR is again standard, meaning further information – usually nothing more than where to meet – is available through the CBR station, which it might please you to know is the City of Baton Rouge. And that’s basically it.’

  ‘What about the “1BLT to go Cecil.”’

  ‘That’s Smiling Jack’s signature. In the unlikely case the code gets broken, a signature phrase makes it far more difficult for the codebreaker to transmit disinformation back to us. Everybody has a signature phrase; the names are nulls, dummies. So a transmission with a name but no signature phrase indicates the code has been compromised in some way. Even so, it probably would have been judicious to switch to a new set for this project. We’ve been using this set almost eleven months. I just hate to make the change at a critical juncture, since it takes a while to get fluent in the new set.’

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Daniel said. ‘You just got it confirmed that it is a large spherical diamond that glows – exactly like your vision. Right on the money. You should be pleased, or grateful, or at least vaguely happy.’

  ‘I am,’ Volta said. ‘I’m also worried.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because when I’m not having visions confirmed, I have to make decisions, the right ones I hope. And when you have to be hopeful, you should be worried.’

  ‘What do you have to decide right now that couldn’t wait on a few minutes of satisfaction?’

  ‘Whether to leave you here to practice by yourself or take you to New Mexico for the meeting.’

  ‘Take me. I can practice anywhere.’

  ‘At this point, only one other person knows you’ll be involved – that’s Smiling Jack. If you attend the meeting, six more will know.’

  ‘But they’re trustworthy, right?’

  ‘Daniel, it’s not a question of the knowledge being safe with them, but of them being safe with the knowledge.’ Volta paused, then added more forcefully, ‘You do understand the Feds are going to want it back?’

  ‘I haven’t been dwelling on it.’

  ‘You stay,’ Volta decided. ‘I’ll be taking the truck, so you’ll be without a vehicle. Unless, of course, you can imagine one. Now, if you’d do me the favor of cleaning up the kitchen, I’ll send some routing messages and gather my gear.’

  Daniel was rinsing out the sink when Volta called him into the living room. He was standing near the door, looking at himself in the oak-framed mirror under the cuckoo clock. A Bulgarian anarchist had given Volta the clock for helping him during an illegal stay in the U.S. It kept excellent time, but the cuckoo appeared randomly.

  Daniel thought Volta was referring to the cuckoo clock when he said, ‘I should have warned you about this earlier.’ But he took the mirror down, tapped the exposed nailhead as if it were a telegraph key, then pulled outward and up, lifting a veneered panel out of the wall. The panel was about half the size of the mirror that had concealed it. There was a narrow vault behind the panel.

  Daniel had never seen a safe so skinny, six inches wide and two feet high. Nor did it appear to have a lock. ‘What’s the point of a safe without a lock,’ he said.

  ‘The lock’s inside.’

  ‘Well, that’s certainly a provocative approach to security.’

  Volta opened the safe door and removed a small black cubical box with a short aerial mounted on one side.

  Volta held it up for Daniel’s inspection. ‘The lock. A radio-controlled nerve-gas canister. You noticed my tapping the nail. I was sending a coded radio sequence to deactivate it; otherwise it fires automatically when the door is opened. Solar trigger. Fires at the faintest hint of light. The gas isn’t lethal, but it’s instantly incapacitating and makes your recent bout with the flu seem like a Tahitian cruise in comparison.’

  ‘Another of Aunt Charmaine’s concoctions from the concrete bunker?’ Daniel said with distaste.

  Ah ha, Volta thought, Charmaine’s really got a hook in Daniel. He wasn’t surprised. Charmaine could make you feel like she knew you better than you would ever know yourself, a feeling that simultaneously attracted and repelled. Nodding as much to himself as to Daniel’s question, Volta said, ‘Yes, Charmaine. But I trust you appreciate that Charmaine’s genius for synergistic associations extends beyond mere potions.’

  ‘But probably also includes that powder you threw in my face this morning.’

  ‘No, I’ll take credit for that. It’s the inner bark of a species of Peruvian pepperbush that is dried to parchment, then finely ground.’

  ‘Where did that and the cards come from anyway? I saw you roll up your sleeves.’

  ‘I’m a magician, Daniel, remember? When a magician rolls up his sleeves, it should arouse your suspicions, not lull them.’

  ‘I’ll watch that,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Do.’ Volta removed three flat black plastic boxes from a stack inside the safe.

  Daniel said lightheartedly, ‘You don’t trust me alone with the family jewels?’

  ‘Actually, two boxes are the family crystals – we use them to modify our CBs. The other is a taped transmission to Ellison fro
m a group in Canada.’

  ‘What sort of transmission?’

  ‘Confidential.’

  ‘To me, but not Ellison.’

  ‘You weren’t included in the confidence.’

  ‘I see.’

  Volta closed the safe door and turned to Daniel. ‘I honor confidences. Sometimes it seems silly, given the information. Sometimes it’s literally torture – not physically, or not yet anyway, but heart and soul. But we can’t live without secrets and the trust that bears them. You’ve asked that your ability to vanish be held in confidence. It will be. Our Canadian friends requested their information be kept confidential. It will be. How could you possibly expect me to keep your confidence if I betray theirs?’

  ‘I didn’t, not really. Ever since I’ve been vanishing, I seem to want to know everything that’s going on, and act against what’s expected. In a weird way it’s made me sort of playfully impulsive.’

  ‘I thought that might be what was going on,’ Volta said. ‘But you’re fortunate. Your reactions – curiosity, perversity, and goofiness – are much sweeter than mine, which were fits of morbidity and crushing doubt.’

  ‘Another difference.’

  ‘Yes. You’re innocent, and I’m experienced.’

  ‘This morning we were equals.’

  ‘And so we are. And so are innocence and experience. As are space and time. But as much as I enjoy our little metaphysical chats, I must go explore possibilities for practical application in circumstances we do not control.’

  ‘And I stay here, working to improve our control and the possibilities for imaginative application. Any instructions?’

  Volta said, ‘Walk down to the river and back every morning.’

  Daniel waited for a moment before asking, ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes. Beyond that, proceed as you deem wise or as you damn well please or any combination thereof. You take responsibility now. It’s yours to do or fail. Just don’t mistake your abilities for the truth. Don’t worry about the transmissions coming in; they’ll be shuttled. I’ll be back within a week. Don’t run amok. Don’t delude yourself. We need you.’

  Volta drove slowly down the mountain. Red Freddie, flying in from Big Sur, wouldn’t arrive at the airstrip till dark. Volta had left early to get away from Daniel and radios and his own weariness. He planned to wait down by the river at the airstrip. Just sit in the sunlight and watch it flow. The summons to New Mexico meant everything was going to start moving fast. He didn’t think Daniel was ready and he wasn’t sure he was either. He hoped the daily trek to the North Fork and back would slow Daniel down. Daniel was too enthralled with the power of vanishing. Certainly Daniel seemed to have the gift for it, if not always the necessary understanding. That was the trouble with youth: power without point. And Daniel still didn’t trust him. Volta smiled behind the wheel. Daniel would trust him even less if he knew that nerve-gas canister was actually one of Mott’s polyresin sculptures from his True Cubism period, a birthday present from ten years ago. But that was the good thing about youth: it was gullible.

  It was a steep two-hour scramble down to the North Fork and a tough four-hour pull back up. Daniel had expected to see the river gliding smooth and bright along a wide plain; instead, high with the late winter runoff, it was brawling through a narrow, boulder-strewn gorge. The roar of the coffee-colored water was so loud he didn’t hear the bear crashing through the thin screen of stunted willows toward him. Fortunately, he saw it. He threw a piece of handy driftwood at the bear, and in the same moment vanished. He moved behind the willows, reappeared, and watched. The bear was standing motionless, peering at the stick Daniel had thrown, occasionally wriggling his nose along its length. He touched it with a paw. When it didn’t leap at him, he picked it up in his jaws. Daniel was astonished when the bear shambled down to the river’s edge and almost delicately released the stick into the swift current.

  Going to the river each morning was Daniel’s favorite part of the program he developed for himself. Food was a close second. The fresh air and exercise, coupled with a full recovery from Charmaine’s flu, unleashed a tremendous hunger. He ate a huge pre-dawn breakfast before he left for the river. When he returned at noon, it took at least two hours to prepare and demolish lunch. From two to five he read from Volta’s small but excellent library, followed by three hours of dinner. That left eight to nine for vanishing practice. He wasn’t sure if it was perversity or respect, but he followed Volta’s program, vanishing once a day for an additional minute each time. He did this with an ease that quickly became boring. Though Volta hadn’t seemed overly impressed, Daniel felt he’d found the secret – imagining himself invisible by recreating his state of mind, bypassing the mirror, the fall, the fear, leaping the wall instead of drilling through it. If he didn’t have to fight his way through, the energy saved could be used to sustain his stay in invisibility. Daniel was confident he could vanish for an hour easily. The twenty minutes he’d done to impress Volta hadn’t even strained him.

  Jump out.

  Jump back.

  Simple.

  Returning from his seventh trip to the river, wondering how much longer Volta would be gone, Daniel spotted a huge deer browsing in a clearing across the draw. It was the biggest deer he’d ever seen. His intuition told him it was a buck, but he couldn’t see any horns. It moved like a buck. Chagrined, he remembered it was late March and the antlers shed in mid-winter would have barely started growing back. He decided to take a closer look. The draw between them was choked with brush, but was no obstacle to those with powers. Daniel vanished, and instead of walking through it, walked it through him.

  Daniel’s odor evidently vanished with him since the deer continued feeding, apparently oblivious, as he approached. Daniel noted the swollen, velvety knobs where the new antlers were forming and congratulated his intuition. He thought, If nothing else, this invisibility gets you in close, lets you see the world without the influence of your presence. Yet the closeness was wrong somehow – a voyeur’s intimacy, hollow because it wasn’t reciprocated, sterile because it lacked permission.

  Daniel spread his arms out wide and reappeared, announcing cheerfully, ‘Good morning, fellow creature!’

  The deer replied by leaping twenty feet straight up, executing a ninety-degree turn in the air. It was already running before it landed. A rear hoof nailed Daniel squarely in the center of his forehead, dropping him to his knees. Hands covering his face, fingertips pressed to the wound as if to hold back the pain, he listened to the buck crash loudly downhill through the brush.

  Daniel was examining his forehead in the living room mirror when Volta walked in. Daniel jumped as high as the deer.

  ‘Pardon me,’ Volta said, ‘I didn’t know you were back.’

  ‘Me either,’ Daniel yammered. ‘That you were.’

  Volta narrowed his gaze. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I hit my head.’

  Volta stepped closer, took Daniel’s head firmly in his hands, and tilted it toward the light. ‘It looks like you were hit with a cloven hoof.’

  Daniel twisted his head free and stepped back out of reach.

  Volta shot his right arm out, pointing a trembling finger inches from the wound. He bellowed, ‘You bear the mark of Satan! I leave you for one week and you’re claimed among his hellish clan, flesh for his flames, fuel for his sick desires!’

  ‘All right, goddammit,’ Daniel snapped, ‘a deer kicked me in the head.’ He waited, expecting Volta’s laughter.

  Instead, Volta said wearily, ‘Well, are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ Daniel grunted. He looked at Volta more closely. His eyes were raw and glazed with exhaustion, his face haggard. ‘I’m fine,’ Daniel repeated, ‘but you don’t look so good.’

  ‘I shouldn’t. It’s been seven long days of nervous waiting for bad news. I’ll give you the grim details after dinner, and we’ll consider possible approaches.’

  ‘Is it really that grim?’

  ‘Look a
t it this way, Daniel: you are the only break we’re getting.’

  Daniel wasn’t sure what that was supposed to reveal. He was still considering when Volta said, ‘How’s the deer’s hoof?’

  ‘It bounded away nicely, thank you.’

  ‘That deer must have been truly startled – as if you appeared right in front of him, out of nowhere.’

  Daniel wanted to discuss more successful applications of invisibility. ‘Vanishing saved me from a bear.’

  ‘I wasn’t being critical, Daniel. I’m glad to see it wasn’t all work and no play in my absence.’

  ‘Other than the bear – which was necessity – and the deer – which was convenience and curiosity – I stuck exactly to your program.’

  ‘Thank you. Was that out of perversity or respect?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Probably some of each.’

  ‘I appreciate your candor. I would also appreciate it if you would cook dinner this evening and not disturb me till it’s ready. I’ve been up thirty hours and have spent the last three on the radio making thousands of tiny, interlinked decisions, some of which may prove crucial to our success. It has lately been forced on my reluctant attention that I’m getting old. No complaints – I am ready to be old – but I can no longer go two days without sleep. I’m tired, Daniel. I’m going to bed.’

  ‘Dinner around six?’ Daniel said.

  Volta nodded in gratitude. ‘Bless you.’

  While he was mashing potatoes, Daniel thought of a foolproof way to steal the Diamond. He could hardly wait to cheer up Volta. But when Daniel announced at dinner that he’d thought of a way to steal the Diamond, Volta brusquely said, ‘It can wait. Let’s devote our dinner conversation to a subject appropriate to the season, the erotic unfurling of Spring. Let’s talk about blow jobs.’

  Daniel nearly dropped his fork. ‘What?’

  ‘Blow jobs. Cock-sucking. Fellatio. Let’s talk in particular about two blow jobs: the one you received the night before your mother died and one I was forced to witness while in jail.’

  Daniel said, stunned, ‘You sent that girl, didn’t you?’

  ‘Daniel, think. I absolutely lack the imagination or style to garner information through sexual duplicity, sweet though it might have been. I’m convinced you didn’t tell this Miss Bardo anything that might have compromised the plutonium theft or jeopardized your mother, otherwise you wouldn’t have told me that you thought your mother’s death wasn’t accidental. But that doesn’t mean Miss Bardo couldn’t have found something – a note, a diary – or, acting as an agent for others, placed a bug in the house, or planted an electronic locator in a pocket of your lowered pants.’