Authority (24 page)

Whitby took the opportunity to give an answer to a different question: He slid out
from behind the table and ran away down the curve of the wall, headed for the science
division without even a hurried goodbye.

Leaving Control with Grace.

*   *   *

“Are you going to guess?” Control asked Grace, turning the full weight of his anger
and self-loathing on the assistant director, not caring that all eyes in the cafeteria
were on them.

To reanimate the emotions of a dead script, he had started thinking of things like
topographical anomalies
and
video of the first expedition
and
hypnotic conditioning
—inverse to the extreme where ritual decreed he hold words in his head like
horrible goiter
and
math homework
to stop from coming too soon during sex.

“Are you going to fucking guess?” he hissed in a kind of mega-whisper, wanting to
confess not to anyone in the audience, but to the biologist.

“They shoot Rachel McCarthy,” she said.

“Yes, that’s right!” Control shouted, knowing that even the people serving the food
at the far-distant buffet could hear him, were looking at him. Maybe fifteen people
remained there, in the cafeteria, most trying to pretend none of this was happening.

“They shoot Rachel McCarthy,” Control said. “Although by the time they’re searching
for me, I’m already safe at home. After, what? Two or three conversations? A standard
surveillance operation from my perspective. I’m being pulled in for a debriefing while
other, more seasoned, agents are brought in to follow up on the lead. Except by then
the militia has beaten McCarthy half senseless and driven her to the top of an abandoned
quarry. And they want her to tell the truth, to just tell the truth about the person
in the bar. Which she can’t do, because she’s innocent and didn’t know I was an operative.
But that’s the wrong answer—any answer is the wrong answer by then.” Will always be
the wrong answer. And around the time that he’s excited he helped crack the case wide
open, and a judge is issuing warrants, the boyfriend has shot McCarthy in the head,
twice, and let her fall, dead, into the shallow water below. To be found three days
later by the local police.

Anyone else might have been finished, although he’d been too green to know that. He
hadn’t known until years later that his mother had rescued him, for better or worse.
Called in favors. Pulled strings. Greased palms. All the usual clichés that masked
every unique collusion. Because—she told him when she finally confessed, when it no
longer mattered one way or the other—she believed in him and knew that he had much
more to offer.

Control had spent a year on suspension, going to therapy that couldn’t repair the
breach, endured a retraining program that cast a broad net to catch a tiny mistake
that kept escaping anyway over and over in his mind. Then he had been given an administrative
desk job, from which he’d worked his way up through the ranks again, to the exalted
non-position of “fixer,” with the clear understanding that he’d never be deployed
in the field again.

So that one day he could be called upon to run a peculiar backwater agency. So that
what he couldn’t bring himself to confess to any of his girlfriends he could shout
out loudly in a cafeteria, in front of a woman who appeared to hate him.

*   *   *

The little bird he’d seen flying darkly against the high windows of the cafeteria
flew there still, but the way it flitted reminded him now more of a bat. The rain
clouds gathered yet again.

Grace still sat in front of him, guarded from on high by cohorts from the past. Control
still sat there, too, Grace now going through his lesser sins, one by one, in no particular
order, with no one else left to hear. She had read his file and gotten her hands on
more besides. As she reeled it off, she told him other things—about his mother, his
father, the litany a lurching parade or procession that, curiously, no longer hurt
about halfway through. A kind of numb relief, instead, began to flood Control. She
was telling him something, all right. She saw him clearly and she saw him well, from
his skills right down to his weaknesses, from his short relationships to his nomadic
lifestyle to his father’s cancer and ambivalence about his mother. The ease with which
he had embraced his mother’s substitution of her job for family, for religion. And
all of the rest of it, all of it, her tone of voice managing the neat trick of mixing
grudging respect with compassionate exasperation at his refusal to retreat.

“Have you never made a mistake?” he asked, but she ignored him.

Instead she gave him the gift of a motive: “This time, your contact tried to cut me
off from Central. For good.” The Voice, continuing to help him in the same way as
a runaway bull.

“I didn’t ask for that.” Well, if he had, he didn’t want it anymore.

“You went into my office again.”

“I didn’t.” But he couldn’t be sure.

“I’m trying to keep things the way they are for the
director
, not for me.”

“The director’s dead. The director’s not coming back.”

She looked away from him, out through the windows at the courtyard and the swamp beyond.
A fierce look that shut him out.

Maybe the director was flying free over Area X, or scrabbling with root-broken fingernails
into the dirt, the reeds, trying to get away … from something. But she wasn’t here.

“Think about how much worse it could get, Grace, if they replace me with someone else.
Because they’re never going to make you director.” Truth for truth.

“You know I did you a favor just now,” she said, pivoting away from what he’d said.

“A favor? Sure you did.”

But he did know. That which was uncomfortable or unflattering she had now off-loaded
pointlessly, ordnance wasted, a gun shot into the air. She had let out the rest of
the items in her jewelry box of condemnation, and by not hoarding told him she would
not be using it in the future.

“You’re a lot like us,” she said. “Someone who has made a lot of mistakes. Someone
just trying to do better. To be better.”

Subtext
: You can’t solve what hasn’t been solved in thirty years. I won’t let you get out
ahead of the director.
And what misdirection in that? What was she pushing him toward or away from?

Control just nodded, not because he agreed or disagreed but because he was exhausted.
Then he excused himself, locked the cafeteria bathroom, and vomited up his breakfast.
He wondered if he was coming down with something or if his body was rejecting, as
viciously as possible, everything in the Southern Reach.

018: RECOVERY

Cheney came back to prowl around outside the bathroom—concerned, whispering “Do you
think you’re all right, man?” as if they’d become best buddies. But eventually Cheney
went away, and a little while later Control’s cell phone rang just as he’d propped
himself up on the toilet seat. He pulled the phone out of his pocket. The Voice. The
bathroom seemed like the perfect place to take this call. Cold porcelain after having
slammed the bathroom door shut was a relief. So were the tiny cool blue tiles of the
floor. Even the faint whiff of piss. All of it. Any of it.

Why were there no mirrors in the men’s room?

“Next time, take my call
when
I call,” the Voice warned, with the implication that s/he was a busy wo/man, just
as Control noticed the flashing light that meant he had a message.

“I was in a meeting.” I was watching videotape. I was talking to the biologist. I
was getting my ass handed to me by the assistant director because of you.

“Is your house in order?” the Voice asked. “Is it in order?”

Two thousand white rabbits herded toward an invisible door. A plant that didn’t want
to die. Impossible video footage. More theories than there were fish in the sea. Was
his house in order? An odd way for the Voice to phrase it, as if they spoke using
a code to which Control did not have the key. Yet it made him feel secure even though
that was counterintuitive.

“Are you there?” the Voice asked brusquely.

“Yes. Yes, my house is in order.”

“Then what do you have for me?”

Control gave the Voice a brief summary.

The Voice considered that for a moment, then asked, “So do you have an answer now?”

“To what?”

“To the mystery behind Area X.” The Voice laughed an oddly tinny metallic laugh. Haw
haw haw. Haw.

Enough of this. “Stop trying to cut Grace off from her contacts at Central. It isn’t
working and it’s making it harder,” Control said. Remembering her care with setting
up the videos of the first expedition, too wrung out by lunch to process it yet. Twinned
to Control’s disgust at the Voice’s clearly inadequate and extreme tactics was the
sudden conviction, admittedly irrational, that somehow the Voice was responsible for
sticking him in the middle of the Southern Reach. If the Voice actually was his mother,
then he’d be correct about that.

“Listen, John,” the Voice growled, “I don’t report to you. You report to me, and don’t
forget that.” Meant to be delivered with conviction, and yet somehow failing.

“Stop trying,” Control repeated. “You’re doing harm to me—she knows you’re trying.
Just stop.”

“Again, I don’t report to you, Control. Don’t tell me what to do. You asked me to
fix it, and I’m trying to fix it.” Feedback made Control take the phone away from
his ear.

“You know I saw the video of the first expedition this morning,” he said. “It threw
me.” By way of halfhearted apology. Grandpa had taught him that: Redirect while seeming
to address the other party’s grievance. It’d been done enough to him in the past.

But for some reason that set the Voice off. “You think that’s a fucking excuse for
not doing your goddamn job. Seeing a video? Get your head out of your asshole and
give me a real report next time—and then maybe I’ll be a lot more willing to do your
bidding the way you want me to do your bidding. Got it, fuckface?”

The swear words were delivered in a peculiar, halting way, as if the Voice were completing
a Mad Lib where the only scripted parts were the words
fucking
,
goddamn
,
asshole
, and
fuckface
. But Control got it. The Voice was a shithead. He’d had shithead bosses before. Unless
the real Voice was taking a break and this was the sub’s attempt at improv. Megalodon
mad. Megalodon not happy. Megalodon have tantrum.

So he gave in and made some conciliatory sounds. Then he elaborated and told the tale
of his “progress,” the story structured and strung together not as the plaintive,
halting start-stop of what-the-hell that it was, but instead as an analytical and
nuanced “journey” that could only be interpreted as having a beginning and a middle
pushing out toward a satisfying end.

“Enough!” the Voice said at some point.

*   *   *

Later: “That’s better,” the Voice said. Control couldn’t really tell if the severity
of that rushed cheese-grater-on-cheese-grater tone had lightened. “For now, continue
to collect data and continue to question the biologist, but press her harder.” Had
already done that, and it had gone poorly. Uncovering useful intel was often a long-term
project, a matter of listening for what didn’t matter to fall away for just a moment.

After another pause, the Voice said, “I have that information you asked for.”

“Which information?” Plant, mouse, or…?

“I can confirm that the director did cross the border.”

Control sat up straight on the toilet seat. Someone was knocking timidly at the door.
They’d have to wait.

“When? Right before the last eleventh expedition?”

“Yes. Completely unauthorized and without anyone’s knowledge or permission.”

“And she got away with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“She wasn’t fired.”

A pause, then the Voice said, “No doubt she should have been terminated. But, no,
she got probation. The assistant director took her place for six months.” Impatient,
as if it didn’t matter.

What was he supposed to do with that? Probably a question for his mother. Because
surely someone higher up must have known the director was going across the border
and then someone had protected her when she came back.

“Do you know how long she was gone? Is there a report of what she found?”

“Three weeks. No report.”

Three weeks!

“She must have been debriefed. There must be a record.”

A much longer pause. Was the Voice consulting with another Voice or Voices?

Finally the Voice conceded the point: “There is a debriefing statement. I can have
a copy sent to you.”

“Did you know that the director thought the border was advancing?” Control asked.

“I am aware of that theory,” the Voice said. “But it is no concern of yours.”

How was that no concern of his? How did someone go from calling him a fuckface to
using a phrase like “no concern of yours”? The Voice was a bad actor, Control concluded,
or had a bad script, or it was deliberate.

At the end of their conversation, for no good reason, he told a joke. “What’s brown
and sticky?”

“I know that one,” the Voice said. “A stick.”

“A turd.”

Click.

*   *   *

“Go ahead and check the seats for change, John.” Control, back in his office, exhausted,
ambushed by odd flashes of memory. A colleague at his last position coming up to him
after a presentation and saying in an accusing tone, “You contradicted me.” No, I
disagreed
with you. A woman in college, a brunette with a broad face and beautiful brown eyes
that made him ache, whom he’d fallen for in Fundamentals of Math but when he’d given
her a poem had said to him, “Yes, but do you dance?” No, I write poetry. I’m going
to be some kind of spy. One of his college professors in political science had made
them write poetry to “get your juices flowing.” Most of the time, though, he’d been
studying, going to the shooting range, working out, using parties to get in practice
for a lifetime of short-term relationships.