Authority (36 page)

He didn’t linger, cut his meal short, nervous about the black sedan with the tinted
windows in the parking lot, the battered old Volvo with the rain forest stickers on
it whose owner had been slouched out there smoking a cigarette for a little too long.

The rain from off the sea thickened into fog, brought him to a twenty-mile-an-hour
crawl in the dark never sure what would come out of the haze at him. Once a truck
rattled his frame to the core, once a deer danced briefly past the headlights like
a moving canvas, then was gone.

He came to the conclusion in the early dawn that it didn’t matter if his mother had
lied to him. It was a tactical detail, not strategic. He was always going to pursue
this course, convinced himself that once he had gone to the Southern Reach that he
was always going to be on this road in the middle of nowhere, headed north. The gnarled,
wind-torn trees became a dark haphazard smoke in the mist, self-immolating into ash,
as if he were seeing some version of the future.

*   *   *

The night before he would reach the town of Rock Bay, John let himself have a last
meal. He pulled into a fancy restaurant in a town that lay in the shadow of the coastal
mountains, cupped by the curve of a river that looked anemic next to the waves and
striations of different-colored sand radiating out from the water. Scattered piles
of driftwood and dead trees looked as if they’d been placed there to hold it all down.

He sat at the bar, ordered a bottle of good red wine, a petite filet with garlic mashed
potatoes and mushroom gravy. He listened to the humble-brag of Jan, the experienced
bartender, with a deliberately naïve enthusiasm—entertaining stories from stints working
overseas in cities John had never visited. The man stared furtively at John at times,
from a craggy Nordic face bordered by long yellow hair. Wondering, perhaps, if John
would ask him what he was doing among the driftwood here at the butt end of the world.

A family came in—rich, white, in Polo shirts and sweaters and khaki pants as if from
a clothing catalogue. Oblivious of him. Oblivious of the bartender, ordering burgers
and fries, the father sitting directly to John’s left, shielding his kids from the
stranger. Exactly how strange, they could not know. They existed in their own bubble:
They had just about everything and knew almost nothing. Their conversation was all
about sitting up straight and chewing what they ate and a football game they’d watched
and some tourist shop down in the village. He didn’t envy them. He didn’t hate them.
He felt a curious nothing about them. All of the history here, everything encoded,
rendered meaningless. None of it could mean anything next to the secret knowledge
he carried with him.

The bartender shot John a roll of the eyes as he patiently put up with the kids’ changing
orders and the subtle condescension in the way the father talked to him. While the
woman in the military uniform and her two skateboarder friends from Empire Street
gathered ethereal to either side of John, staring at the family’s meal with unabashed
hunger. How many operatives went unremarked upon, never registered, were never heard
from, never sustained. Snuffed out in darkness and crappy safe houses and dank motels.
Made invisible. Made irrelevant. And how many could have been him. Were still him,
laboring here, unbeknownst to this family or even the bartender, still trying, even
though it wasn’t just the border to Area X that negated people but everyone in the
world beyond.

When the family had left, and along with them his companions, he asked the bartender,
“Where can I get a boat?” in an agreeably conspiratorial way. A fellow world-weary
traveler, his tone implied. A fellow adventurer who sometimes ignored legality in
the same way as the bartender did in his stories. You’re the man. You can hook me
up.

“You know boats?” Jan asked.

“Yes.” On lakes. Close to shore. Anything more and he’d be the punch line of one of
Jack’s jokes.

“Maybe I can help,” the bartender said, with a grin. “Maybe I could arrange that.”
The fractured light from a chandelier composed of glass globes lit up his face as
he leaned in to whisper, “How soon do you need it?”

Now. Immediately. By the morning.

Because he wasn’t going to drive into Rock Bay.

*   *   *

The
Living with Salt
was a modified flat-bottom skiff, with a shallow bow and a stubborn reluctance to
turn starboard with any kind of grace. It had a tiny shed of a cabin that would give
him some relief from the strong ocean winds and a powerful if seasoned motor. It was
ancient and the white paint had flaked, exposing the wood beneath. It almost looked
like a tugboat to John, but had been used as a fishing vessel by the grizzled, barrel-bellied,
bowlegged walking cliché of a fisherman who sold it to him for twice what it was worth.
He almost thought the man had some illegal side business, must also be playing a part.
He bought enough gasoline to either blow him sky high or last until the end of the
world and loaded in the rest of his supplies.

It came with oars “for if the motor should give out” and nautical maps “though God
help you if you don’t seek shelter, there’s a storm” and a flare gun. After a little
persuading that involved more money, it also came with the skipper’s old raincoat,
hat, pipe, galoshes, and a fishing net with a hole in it. The pipe felt weird in his
mouth, and the galoshes were a bit too big, but it made him believe that from a distance
his disguise might hold.

The motor had a ragged hiccupping mutter he didn’t like, but he had little choice—and
he believed the boat might be as fast as the car on the treacherous roads that lay
ahead, and harder to trace. As he lurched downriver toward the sea, he had a sense
of impending apocalypse, the beached and blackened driftwood evidence not of bonfires
and storms but of some more radical catastrophe.

*   *   *

Old houses lay among the rocks of the coast and the few crude beaches as he chugged
along through choppy waters and calm waters, struggling to learn the jump and list
of the boat, slowly adjusting to the current. Most of the houses were falling apart,
and even those awake with lights at dusk seemed only temporarily resurrected. Smoke
from grills. People on piers below. They all looked like they’d be gone by winter.

He passed an abandoned lighthouse, a low, squat white tower with a black crown. It
slid past in silence, the fitted stones showing through the ruined paint, the beacon
dark, and he had a startled sense of doubling, as if he were somehow traveling up
the coast of an alternative Area X. The sense that he had passed beyond some boundary.

Somewhere in the fog, if he looked closely, he’d see Lowry and Whitby, wandering lost.
Somewhere, too, the Séance & Science Brigade taking their measurements, and Saul Evans
walking up the spiral steps of the lighthouse, with a girl, oblivious, playing on
the rocks below. Perhaps even Grace, gathering the remnants of the Southern Reach
around her.

*   *   *

By midafternoon, he had reached the part of the coast where the land curved sharply,
an inlet that led to the town of Rock Bay. What the biologist called “Rock Bay” was
actually the tidal pools and reefs that lay about twenty miles north of town. But
her former cottage had been right outside of the town. Or village, if you wanted to
be specific. Because it only had about five hundred residents.

The
Living with Salt
wasn’t the kind of boat that John could pull up onto the shore and hide under branches.
But he wanted to do a recon of Rock Bay before moving on. He chanced going a little
ways up the wide inlet, half-hidden by rock islands that jutted out from the water.
Soon he spotted a rotten old pier where he could tie up. According to the maps it
was close enough to the local wildlife refuge that he could walk from there and intersect
a hiking trail, following it close to the town. He left behind his hat and pipe and,
taking his raincoat, binoculars, and gun, made his way inland through scrubland and
then forest. The smell of fresh cedar invigorated him. Soon enough, he was looking
down from a bluff at the wooden bridge leading into town and the tiny main street
beyond. He’d come across a roadblock manned by local police well before the bridge,
but he’d seen nothing suspicious on the trails—just a jogger and a couple of teenagers
clearly looking for a place to smoke pot. From his vantage now, looking down with
his binoculars through the intense tree cover, though, he could see half a dozen black
sedans and SUVs with tinted windows parked on the main street. The vehicles reeked
of Central, as did the too-coiffed would-be lumberjacks who stood near the vehicles
in bright plaid shirts and jeans and boots that looked too new to have yet been through
a slog.

If they had come in such small numbers, then either this location was one of many
being searched or the biologist was by now only part of a much larger problem, Central
fully occupied elsewhere. Somewhere in the south, perhaps.

Depending on how well they knew the biologist’s habits, they might believe that she’d
prefer to hide somewhere farther north, along the coastline. But they’d have to rule
out the town and its environs first. All around was dense coastal scrubland or even
denser rain forest, none of it easy to traverse. The kind of terroir even experienced
locals could get lost in, once you went beyond the town, especially during the rainy
season.

On a hunch, he abandoned his position on the bluff and took a trail down and across
the stream straddled by the wooden bridge, then up the opposite side back onto a rise
that eventually led him over a series of moss-covered, cedar-rich hills, into a position
near the water. Opposite him, across the narrow inlet, lay the cottage where the biologist
had lived. He crept in hunched-over zigzag fashion through the breaks in the sharp
bramble, lay among twisted black trees with thorny leaves at a good vantage point.

The cottage was only a little larger than his boat, and just enough forest had been
cleared for a tiny lawn in front and to let a dirt road curl up the rise to the left.
Beyond that rise, hidden, lay a larger settlement: a main house, from which he could
see a tendril of white smoke rising via an obscured chimney.

But no smoke rose from the cottage. Nothing stirred around the cottage, either, in
a way that he found unnatural. He kept scanning the woods to either side until after
about an hour, after about fifty sweeps of the area, he realized that a patch of ground
had moved: camouflage. Which, after a few moments, resolved into a man with a rifle
and scope stretched out beneath a military-style blind, covering the cottage. Once
he’d spotted one operative, others came clear to him: in trees, behind logs, even
staring out in one uncareful moment from the cottage itself. He knew the biologist
would not now come anywhere near the cottage, if she’d ever wanted to.

So he retreated into the wilderness and made his way back to his boat by a circuitous
and tiring route. He didn’t think he had been spotted, but he didn’t want to leave
it to chance. Thankful, too, to be back at the boat. He’d exhausted his small store
of rusty woodcraft and felt he had been lucky. Lucky, too, that his boat was still
there and the area still seemed deserted.

He ate a can of cold beans and cast off, hugging the coast until the last moment—and
then making a calm and steady run across the mouth of the inlet, certain that somehow
he would be uncovered from afar and Central would swoop down on him.

Yet despite how wide the expanse seemed in those moments, there were only the seagulls
and the pelicans, the cormorants and, high above, what he thought might be an albatross.
Only the choppy waves and a distant foghorn and the dim shapes of boats closer in
and farther out. Nothing that didn’t look local, no fishermen who looked newly minted.

Easier, better, to go farther away from all of this. She would be in the most desolate,
isolated place she could find, daring anyone to follow her.

Either there or not. If not, it was all useless anyway.

*   *   *

Pursuit felt like an intermittent pulse. It died away and then picked up again. Through
binoculars he saw a speedboat far off curving fast toward him. He heard a helicopter,
although he couldn’t see it, and spent a nervous twenty minutes in pointless fishing
with his ripped, useless net, his formless hat pulled down over his forehead. Pretending
with everything he had to be a fisherman. Then the sounds faded, the speedboat looped
back down the coast. Everything was as before, for a very long time.

*   *   *

This new landscape above the Rock Bay inlet was even more foreign to him, and colder—and
a relief, as if Area X were just a climate, a type of vegetation, a simple terroir,
even if he knew this wasn’t true. So many shades and tones of gray—the gray that shone
down from the sky, a ceaseless and endless gray that was so still. The mottled matte
gray of the water, before the rain, broken by the curls of wavelets, the gray of the
rain itself, prickles and ripples against the ocean’s surface. The silver gray of
the real waves farther out, which came in and hit the bow as he guided the boat into
them, rocking and the engine whining. The gray of something large and ponderous passing
underneath him and making the boat rise as he tried to keep it still and motorless
for those moments, holding his breath, life too close to dream for him to exhale.

He understood why the biologist liked this part of the world, how you could lose yourself
here in a hundred ways. How you could even become someone very different from who
you thought you were. His thoughts became still for hours of his search. The frenetic
need to analyze, to atomize the day or the week fell away from him—and with it the
weight and buzz of human interaction and interference, which could no longer dwell
inside his skull.

He thought about the silence of fishing on the lake as a child, the long pauses, what
his grandpa might say to him in a hushed tone, as if they were in a kind of church.
He wondered what he would do if he couldn’t find her. Would he go back, or would he
melt into this landscape, become part of what he found here, try to forget what had
happened before and become no more or less than the spray against the bow, the foam
against the shore, the wind against his face? There was a comfort to this idea almost
as strong as the urge to find her, a comfort he had not known for a very long time,
and many things receded into the distance behind him, seemed ridiculous or fantastical,
or both. Were, at their core, unimportant.