Authority (30 page)

“Which was?”

Grace smiled, triumphant. At knowing something he should have known? For some other
reason?

“Ask your mother. Your mother had a hand in both things, I believe.”

*   *   *

“They had lost confidence in her anyway,” Grace said next, bitterness bleeding into
her voice. “What did they care if she never came back? Maybe some of them at Central
even thought it solved a problem.” Like Lowry.

But Control was still stuck on Jackie Miranda Severance, Severance for short, Grandpa
always “Jack.” His mother had placed him in the Southern Reach, in the middle of it
all. She had worked for the Southern Reach briefly, when he was a teenager, to be
close to him, she had said. Now, as he questioned Grace, he was trying to make the
dates synch up, to get a sense of who had been at the Southern Reach and who had not,
who had left by then and who was still incoming. The director—no. Grace—no. Whitby—yes.
Lowry—yes, no? Where had his mother gone when she left? Had she kept ties? Clearly
she had, if he were to believe Grace. And did her sudden appearance to him with a
job offer correspond to knowing she had some kind of emergency on her hands? Or was
it part of a more intricate plan? It could make you weary, untangling the lines. At
least Grandpa had been more straightforward. Oh, look. There’s a gun. What a surprise.
I want you to learn how to use a gun. Make everything do more than one thing. Sometimes
you had to take shortcuts after all. Wink wink. But his mother never gave you the
wink. Why should she? She didn’t want to be your friend, and if she couldn’t convince
you in some more subtle way, she’d find someone she could convince. He might never
know how much other residue he’d already encountered from her passage through Southern
Reach.

But the idea that the director might have reached out to others in the agency, and
at Central, comforted Control. It made the director less an eccentric, less a “single-celled
plot” as his mother put it, than someone genuinely trying to solve a problem.

“What happened on her trip across the border?” Control, pressing again.

“She never told me. She said it was for my own protection, in case the investigators
subpoenaed me.” He made a note to return to that later.

“Nothing at all?”

“Not a single thing.”

“Did she give you any special instructions before she went on leave or after she came
back?” From what Control could intuit from the files he’d read, Grace was more constrained
by rules and regulations than the director, and the director might have felt slightly
undermined by her assistant director’s adherence to them. Or perhaps that was the
point: that Grace had kept her grounded. In which case, Grace would almost certainly
have been in charge of operational details.

Grace hesitated, and Control didn’t know if that meant she was debating telling him
more or was about to feed him a line of bullshit.

“Cynthia asked me to reopen an investigation into the so-called S&S Brigade, and to
assign someone to report in more detail on the lighthouse.”

“And who did the research?”

“Whitby.” Whitby the loon. It figured.

“What happened to this research?” He couldn’t recall seeing this information in the
files he had been given before he’d come to the Southern Reach.

“Cynthia held on to it, asked for a hard copy and for the electronic copies not to
be entered into the record … Are you planning to go down the same rabbit holes?”

“So you thought it was a waste of time?”

“For us, not necessarily for Cynthia. It seemed irrelevant to me, but nothing we gathered
would make much sense without knowing what was in the director’s mind. And we did
not always know what was in the director’s mind.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Being bold now that Grace was finally
opening up to him.

A sympathetic expression, guided or pushed his way. “Do you smoke?”

“Sometimes.” This past weekend. Banishing demons and voices.

“Then let’s go out to the courtyard and have a smoke.”

It sounded like a good idea. If he was completely honest with himself, it sounded
like bliss.

*   *   *

They reconvened out at the edge of the courtyard, nearest the swamp. The short jaunt
from room to open air had not been without revelation: He’d finally seen the janitor,
a wizened little white guy with huge glasses who wore light green overalls and held
a mop. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Control resisted the urge to
break ranks with Grace to tell him to switch cleaners.

Grace in the courtyard seemed even more relaxed than inside, despite the humidity
and the annoying chorus of insect voices rising from the undergrowth. He was already
sweating.

She offered him a cigarette. “Take one.”

Yes, he would take one, had been missing them ever since his weekend binge. The harsh,
sharp taste of her unfiltered menthols as he lit up was like a spike through the eyeball
to cure a headache.

“Do you like the swamp?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I like the quiet out here, sometimes. It can be peaceful.” She gave
him a wry smile. “If I stand with my back to the building, I can pretend it isn’t
there.”

He nodded, was silent for a moment, then said, “What would you do if the director
came back and she was like the anthropologist or the surveyor?” Just adding to the
light conversation. Just a gaffe, he realized as soon as he’d said it.

Grace remained unfazed. “She won’t.”

“How can you be so sure?” He almost broke his promise to his mother then and told
Grace about the writing on the wall in the director’s house.

“I have to tell you something,” Grace said, changing direction on him. “It will be
a shock, but I don’t mean it to be that way.”

Somehow, even though it was too late, he could see the hit coming before the impact,
almost as if it were in slow-motion. It still knocked him off his feet.

“Here’s what you should know: Central took the biologist away late Friday evening.
She’s been gone the whole weekend. So you must have been talking to a ghost, because
I know you would not lie to me, John. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” Her look
was serious, as if there were a bond between them.

*   *   *

Control wondered if the woman in the military jacket was back in front of the liquor
store. He wondered if the skateboarder was in the process of dumping another can of
dog food on the sidewalk, the plastic-bag man about to pop up to shout at passersby.
He wondered if he should go join them. There was within him a generous affection for
all of them, matched by a wide and growing sadness. A shed out back. Christmas lights
wound around a pine. Wood storks.

No, he had not talked to the biologist that morning. Yes, he had thought she was still
at the Southern Reach, had depended on that fact. He had already planned his next
session in detail. It would be back in the interrogation room, not outside. She would
sit there, maybe in a different mood from the other times but perhaps not, waiting
for his now-familiar questions. But he wouldn’t ask any questions. Time to change
the paradigm, the hell with procedures.

He would have pushed her file over to her, said, “This is everything we know about
you. About your husband. About your past jobs and relationships. Including a transcript
of your initial interview sessions with the psychologist.” This wouldn’t be an easy
thing for him to do: Afterward, she might become a different person than he knew;
he might be letting Area X farther into the world, in some odd way. He might be betraying
his mother.

She would make some remark about having outlasted him already, and he would reply
that he didn’t want to play games anymore, that Lowry’s games had already made him
weary. She would repeat the same line he had said to her out by the holding pond:
“Don’t thank people for giving you what you should already have.” “I’m not looking
for thanks,” he would reply. “Of course you are,” she would say, without reproach.
“It’s the way human beings are built.”

“You had her sent away?” Said so quietly that Grace asked him to repeat it.

“You had formed too much of an attachment. You were losing your perspective.”

“That wasn’t your call!”

“I am not the one who sent her away.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ask your supervisor, Control. Ask your cabal at Central.”

“It’s not my cabal,” he said. Cabal versus faction. Which was worse? This was a record
for not-fixing. A record for being sent in only to be shut out. He wondered what kind
of bloodbath had to be occurring at Central right now.

He took a long drag on the cigarette, stared out at the god-awful swamp, heard from
a distance Grace asking him if he was all right, his reply of “Give me a second.”

Was he all right? In the long line of things he could legitimately be not all right
about, this ranked right up there. He felt as if something had been severed far too
prematurely, that there had been much more to say. He tamped down the impulse to walk
back inside and call his mother, because, of course, she must already know and would
just give him an amplified echo of what Grace had said, no matter how much this could
be seen as Lowry punishing him: “You were getting too close to her in too short a
time. You went from an interrogation scenario to having conversations with her in
her cell to chewing on sedge weeds while you gave her a guided tour of the outside
of the building—
in just four days
. What would have come next, John? A birthday party? A conga line? Her own private
suite at the Hilton? Perhaps a little voice inside starts to say, ‘Give her her files,’
hmm?”

Then he would have lied and said that wasn’t true or fair and she’d have fallen back
on Grandpa Jack’s offensive old-school line about fair being “for losers and pussies,”
and he wouldn’t be talking about Chorry. Control would claim she was interfering with
his ability to do the job she had sent him to do and she’d counter with the idea of
getting him transcripts of any subsequent interviews, which would be “just as good.”
After which he might say, lamely, that’s not the point. That he needed the support,
and then he’d trail off awkwardly because he was on thin ice talking about support,
and she wouldn’t help him out, and he’d be stuck. They never spoke about Rachel McCarthy,
but it was always there.

“So we should talk about division of duties,” Grace said.

“Yes, we should.” Because they both knew she now had the upper hand.

But his mind was elsewhere the whole time that Grace was massacring his troops, before
she left the courtyard. Grace would run most things going forward, with John Rodriguez
abdicating responsibility for all but figurehead duties at the most important status
meetings. He would resubmit his recommendations through Grace, leaving out the pointless
ones, and she would decide which to implement and which not to implement. They would
coordinate so that eventually his working hours and Grace’s working hours overlapped
as little as possible. Grace would assist him in making sense of the director’s notes,
and as he acclimated himself to the new arrangements, that would be his major responsibility,
although in no way did Grace acknowledge that the director might be dead or have gone
completely off the tracks and hurtled through the underbrush over a cliff in her last
days at the Southern Reach. Even as she did acknowledge that mouse-and-plant were
eccentric, and also accepted the ex post facto reality that he had already painted
over the director’s wall beyond the door.

None of which in this rout—this retreat that had no vanguard or rearguard, but was
just a group of desperate men hacking at the muck and mire of a swamp with outdated
swords while Cossacks waited for them on the plain—went completely against Control’s
true wishes anyway, but this was not how he had seen it coming, with Grace dictating
the terms of his surrender. And none of which saved him from a kind of grieving not
at the power he was losing but at the person he had lost.

*   *   *

Still out there, smoking, after Grace had left, with a pat on his shoulder that was
meant as sympathy but felt like failure. Even as he now counted her a colleague if
not quite a friend. Trying to resurrect the idea of the biologist, the image of her,
the sound of her voice.

“What should I do now?”

“I’m the prisoner,” the biologist said to him from her cot, facing the wall. “Why
should I tell you anything?”

“Because I’m trying to help you.”

“Are you? Or are you just trying to help yourself?”

He had no answer to that.

“A normal person might give up. That would be very normal.”

“Would you?” he asked.

“No. But I’m not normal.”

“Neither am I.”

“Where does that leave us?”

“Where we’ve always been.”

But it didn’t. Something had occurred to him, finally seeing the janitor. Something
about a ladder and a lightbulb.

023: BREAK DOWN

Control found a flashlight, tested it out. Then he walked past the cafeteria that
had by now become an irritating repetition, as if he had navigated across the same
airport terminal for several days while chewing the same piece of gum. At the door
to the storage room, he made sure the corridor was clear then quickly ducked inside.

It was dark. He fumbled for the lightbulb cord, pulled it. The light came on but didn’t
help much. As he’d remembered, the metal shade above the bulb and its low position,
just an inch or so above his head, meant all you could see were the lower shelves.
The only shelves the janitor could reach anyway. The only shelves that weren’t empty,
as the shadows revealed as his eyes adjusted.

He had a feeling that Whitby had been lying. That this
was
the special room Whitby had offered to show him. If he could solve no other mystery,
he would solve this one. A puzzle. A diversion. Had Lowry’s magical interference hastened
this moment or postponed it?