She was intercepted on her way up the road by a tall, not-bad-looking man with a full beard, sunglasses, and a big grin. Jim Tanner was Lockheed security. Lockheed ran McMurdo. But it was well known that Tanner was former Naval Intelligence. And it was widely assumed that he was the U.S. government’s eyes and ears on the base. Or at least, one set of eyes and ears.
“Well, hello there, Suarez. Whatcha got in the bag?”
“What, this bag?” Suarez asked innocently.
“Wouldn’t be contraband booze, would it?”
Suarez stopped, unzipped the bag, and pulled out a bottle of scotch. “Huh,” she said. “I wonder how this got in there? And look, it has a twin. You here to help me destroy the evidence, Jim?”
Alcohol was sold at McMurdo, but it was also rationed. Nobody begrudged you a drink, but there were supposed to be limits.
“I would like nothing better.” Tanner took one of the bottles, held it up to read the label. “Ah, the Macallan Sixteen. You’ve grown and matured, Suarez. You have grown and matured.”
“If you’re nice to me and let me get to sleep eventually, I’ll share.”
Tanner handed her back the bottle, grinned, looked away a bit sheepishly, and said, “Sadly, I am here in an official capacity.”
Suarez’s eyes narrowed. “Your official official capacity? Or your unofficial official capacity?”
His smile thinned out. “This will be a conversation that involves your signing a legal document promising not to disclose the nature of the conversation. The document in question is not a company document. It’s a company document.”
The company was Lockheed. The company was the CIA.
“What the hell did I just step in?” Suarez demanded, no longer in a joking mood.
Tanner’s office was tiny—space was always at a premium in a place where Home Depot was ten thousand miles away. It was overheated, so neat that no piece of paper could be found, and seemed to have been furnished entirely with the kind of office furniture that a self-respecting Goodwill store would reject.
The document he had for her was on an iPad. If it had been printed out it would have taken up four pages. Pages full of threats and requirements and official language. The long and short of it was that if she spoke of this meeting to anyone not properly cleared for top secret or better, she would go to jail.
“I’m going to remind you that even though you have been separated from the Marine Corps, Lieutenant Suarez, the corps still owns you.” Tanner turned the pad to her. She scribbled a fingernail signature and at his prompting spoke her full name to the camera.
“And now do we get to the reason for this cloak and dagger, Captain Tanner?”
He was behind the desk in the good chair, the one that swiveled. She had a steel-frame chair with the stuffing half blown out. The bag of booze was at her side on the floor.
“Cathexis Base,” Tanner said.
“Okay. What about it?”
Cathexis Base was a facility built by Suarez’s corporate masters. It was used as a transshipment point, a storage facility, a rescue facility for the Celadon and her sister ship. There were repair facilities for the LCACs there, as well as for the helicopters and planes Cathexis used on the ice.
“Well, let’s start with this: Have you ever seen anything suspicious at Cathexis?
No, she had not.
“What about at the satellite facility. What do they call it? Forward Green? Good grief, sounds like a golf course.”
“I’ve never been there.”
Tanner nodded. “Know anyone who’s ever been there?”
Suarez shrugged. “I imagine a lot of the support people have. Must have been to handle construction.”
Tanner shook his head, and watched her. “No. In fact, the crews have been kept almost entirely separate. There’s very little crossover. There’s Cathexis Base and its people, and there’s Forward Green and its people.”
Suarez looked at him expectantly, waiting for some kind of clue. When all he did was look back at her, she said, “So?”
“So, it’s odd.”
“Okay.”
He was an experienced interrogator and had mastered the trick of waiting. But Suarez had nothing to offer, so all she could do was wait as well.
He nodded as if he’d satisfied himself on some point, then leaned forward on his elbows. “Anyone at Cathexis ever suggest you might want to try piloting a new kind of hovercraft? Something faster?”
“Well, the navy already has—”
“I’m not talking about a piece of navy equipment.”
“Then what are you talking about, because I’m tired, I need sleep, and before that I need a drink.” She was bouncing one leg, a habit when she was impatient.
He opened his laptop, hit a few keys, then turned it so she could see. “The video is just seven seconds long.”
The film was obviously taken from a great distance. It shook and wobbled. What it showed, or seemed to show, was a sleek, low-slung object shooting across the ice.
“Do you recognize that?”
“Do I recognize what? Something going zoom across the ice?”
He laughed. “We did a bit of enhancement and a bit of informed speculation, and the best guess from Langley is that it’s a hovercraft, quite small, so not designed for cargo. There appears to be a bubble canopy large enough for one, possibly two people. Speed in excess of a hundred and twenty knots. And it appears to be armed.”
“Armed?” That stopped the bouncing of her leg.
“Mmm. Armed. With a type of Russian missile, essentially an antitank weapon, although obviously it would work even better against a tractor or a Sno-Cat or a shelter.”
The thing that came to her mind was obvious and a bit stupid. But she said it, anyway. “Weapons are forbidden on the ice. Nothing beyond a couple of handguns for the security people.”
“Yes.”
“Why would somebody need missiles? On some souped-up hovercraft?”
“That’s the question,” Tanner agreed. “Why would they? Speculate, Suarez.”
She pushed back, tilting the hind legs of her chair. “If it’s as fast as you say, it would be tough to hit from the air. White on white, going one hundred twenty knots? You’d see a hell of an infrared signature, so if you went after it in an Apache you could use the thirty mil, but an Apache’s top speed is one hundred fifty knots, so you don’t have much of an edge in speed.”
“I knew a good pilot like yourself would see it all clearly,” Tanner said. “A pilot with SEAL training, and right here close at hand. Let’s have that drink, Suarez.”
She hefted a bottle, unwound the capsule, and poured into paper cups. “Am I going to need it?”
“Lieutenant Imelda Suarez, I am informing you that pursuant to a special directive of the Department of Defense, you are hereby returned to active duty.”
“Whether I like it or not?”
Tanner raised his cup. “Cheers.”
· · ·
Sailing in the San Francisco Bay in blustery weather, Francis Janklow, the CEO of Janklow/MediStat, was not as happy as he should have been. He loved his boat in the abstract, but now that he’d bought the damned thing for two million dollars he felt as if he had to use it. But the truth was, he was just not that crazy about sailing. Especially when the wind was up so that he was constantly drenched by a spray that ranged from cooling mist to fire hose.
His guests seemed to be having a good time, though. These were a senior state senator and the senator’s much younger “assistant,” a rival CEO, a supposed painter whom Janklow’s wife was sponsoring, and of course Janklow’s wife.
The boat had been his wife’s idea. According to her, you could not own a waterfront property on Belvedere Island and not also own a boat of some sort, and after all Janklow had sailed as a youth.
And yet, Janklow thought glumly even as he affected many a grin in the face of the elements, he would much rather have been home with a spreadsheet on his screen and a scotch in his
hand. Instead he was at the wheel, yelling instructions to the kid, Antonio, who sometimes crewed for a day.
And also seeing things. Definitely seeing things. He frowned and peered off toward the Golden Gate, open water ahead, trying to figure out just what he was seeing.
“I think I’m seeing things,” Janklow said. He forced a laugh. No one heard either the remark or the laugh.
No one heard him say that it was as if a window … no, two windows … had opened in his head.
Antonio saw him stagger back from the wheel and raced back to take over.
“You okay, Mr. J.?”
“I’m … Nah. Nah. Yeah. Oh, shit.”
And then suddenly Janklow was racing up the mast, hand over hand, like a much younger man.
Everyone saw this. The state senator’s assistant yelled something and pointed. All eyes turned to look at Janklow, now thirty feet up, his sparse hair flowing in a wind that was too strong for those below to make much sense of what sounded a lot like disconnected, wild ranting.
And then Janklow fell. Although it looked very much as if he actually leapt.
He plunged straight down into the sea.
Pandemonium. All the passengers jumped up and began yelling to Antonio to turn the boat around, turn the boat around.
But sailboats are not so easy to turn around when under wind power. So first Antonio—without help—had to lower the sail and start the engine. Only then, a quarter mile away from Janklow, could they turn back and effect a rescue.
Janklow could be seen. He was in the water, waving his hands wildly, but more as if he was a little kid splashing in the tub.
As the boat drew up alongside, the state senator had the presence of mind to throw a life vest to Janklow, while his wife berated him for being so careless.
But Janklow just laughed; a wild, manic sound that sent chills up his wife’s spine. And then, pushing himself along the side of the boat and refusing all proffered hands, Janklow went to the stern, dove down, and came up with his face shoved straight into the churning propeller.
It would be listed as an accidental death, not a suicide.
“I’m looking at the spreadsheet right now,” Lystra Reid said. She had a phone propped against her ear and a pad open before her. Tiburon police officers and California Highway Patrol detectives were milling around the marina of the Tiburon Yacht Club. They had taken statements from everyone on the Janklow boat. Lystra had little enough to say, and none of it useful, and the detectives had let her go.
But rather than take off immediately, Lystra savored a bourbon rocks and split her attention between the mild chaos of the investigation and the neat order of her spreadsheets.
“Yes, I am very much aware of some of my off-book expenses, and no, I won’t enlighten you further, Tom. One of the reasons I don’t take the company public, yeah, yeah, is because I like to spend my money without being second-guessed. It is, after all, mine.”
At the age of nine, Lystra had been sent away. Her father had finally decided that he could not raise her properly. His own business was falling on hard times; the carnival business was fading fast. Her father’s act—he was a trick shooter and put on an impressive if threadbare show with guns, knives, and hatchets—no longer drew enough of a paying crowd for the carny life to make much sense.
He’d sat her down and explained it all to her. She would be going to a good, decent family that would raise her properly, with school, and friends, and all of that.
“You won’t be my dad anymore?” She hadn’t cried. She’d felt sick with betrayal, but she hadn’t cried.
Her father, his lined face half hidden in the gloom of the Louisiana dusk, had said, “I won’t be with you. I won’t be seeing you, I … I have to find some way to make a living. But listen to me, Lystra. Listen to me. You’re a very smart kid. And better than smart, you’re determined. You’ll do fine. And if you ever need me, really need me, life-and-death need, I’ll be there.”
“What about Mom? Is she dead?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She knew he was lying. She couldn’t recall the exact moment when it dawned on her that her father had killed her mother. But once the idea had dawned, certainty soon followed.
Her mother had been a bit of a party girl. That was the nicest way to put it. Lystra’s mother liked a good time, and she had not found it in the life her husband gave her. She’d looked for comfort elsewhere. In booze, in drugs, in sex.
“I know,” Lystra had said. Nothing else. Just those two words.
Her father had said nothing. The two of them just sat there on the broken-down lawn chairs. Then her father had poured two fingers of bourbon into a paper cup and handed it to her.
God, it had burned her throat, but she had swallowed it and not made a sound.
“Bad things happen in this life,” he had said at last.
Lystra had held out her paper cup and said, “More.”
He shook his head. “That taste was enough. You’re still a kid.”
“You killed my mother. Now you’re dumping me. Okay. That’s all done. Yeah. Maybe I’ll never see you again.”
“Maybe.”
“But if I do, you’ll do whatever I ask you to do.”
“Will I?” He’d seemed almost amused, but seeing the look in her eyes he had flinched, looked down, and finally poured her a second drink. “I will,” he had said, and there was a sacredness to that vow.
Lystra went to live with a very nice, childless family by the name of Reid, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She got straight As in school while barely bothering to crack a book. She wasn’t just a smart kid; she was brilliant. A cold, emotionally distant, friendless-but-never-bullied kid.
But at age fourteen things began to change. Not her grades, those stayed top-notch. But at about that time Lystra began to talk to her long-distant father again. He would speak to her when she was walking through the corridors at school. He would speak to her as she sat in the Baptist church and listened to the sermon. Her lip would curl when she heard him. Her eyes would focus with inhuman intensity on the back of a man’s neck until by sheer force of will she could make him turn around, uncomfortable, only to become confused when the danger he sensed turned out to be just a young girl.
Her father’s voice spoke to her. And other voices as well. Angels, sometimes, though not the better sort of angel. And the voice of a girl with the odd name of Scowler.
She never told anyone about the voices; they had universally warned her not to. Yeah, don’t tell anyone we’re here, they’ll lock you up. Yeah.
Then both her adoptive parents had died in a car accident. The particulars of the accident raised eyebrows but elicited sympathy. Lystra had been sixteen at that point, just learning to drive. And despite the fact that Lystra had played various online driving games for years, she panicked while driving the real thing. She had not realized the car was in reverse. She did not notice that her parents were standing behind her, down at the bottom of the long driveway.
The police questioned her for a long time. The detectives could not quite square her story of intending to pull the car forward slowly into the open garage with the fact that the car had been in reverse and had shot at surprisingly high speed the sixty-seven feet between the rear bumper and the two Reids.
“When I realized it was in reverse, it was too late, yeah. I saw what was about to happen, and I knew what to do, but instead of hitting the brake I accidentally hit the gas pedal.”
“And then?”
“I felt the impact, and my only thought was that I should pull the car forward. Yeah. Undo my mistake.”
“Right. And in the process you ran over both of your parents again. That’s your story. You’re sticking to that?”
“How can I do otherwise? It’s the truth.”
No, they had not believed her. No one believed her. People who knew Lystra Ellen Alice Reid scoffed at the notion that she had panicked. Panic? Lystra, panic?
But in the end the cops couldn’t
prove a thing.
There wasn’t a lot in the way of a social services department in Tulsa, but a shrink was tasked with testing her.
“She’s a very difficult subject,” he had reported. “Hard to test. Her IQ is very high—very smart, very quick—so she knows how to answer, how to avoid setting off alarm bells. But my instinct tells me she’s concealing something. At times I got the impression she might be hearing voices. Phantom voices. She may just be traumatized. Or she may be schizophrenic but with enough control to hide it.”
Lystra was the sole heir to a million-dollar life insurance policy that was doubled due to the fact that the death had been an accident. Double indemnity, they called it.
Two million dollars. She’d been unable to touch it until she was eighteen, and at that time other family members had petitioned the court to examine her psychologically again.
The court had found her legally sane.
The voices in her head had congratulated her on the finding.
On her eighteenth birthday, Lystra had filed papers to form the Mad Alice Holding Company. And she’d gotten her first tattoo. She’d told the tattoo artist, “I want my adoptive parents, like in this picture. But I want them to be screaming.”
The tattoo artist had been reluctant, but an extra thousand dollars had cured him of all doubt.
The placement she’d chosen was strange. Her stepmother was beneath one breast, so that she seemed to be smothered by the weight of it. Her stepfather, also screaming, was beneath the other.
Once both tattoos were complete, they began to speak to her. They wept, sometimes. Other times they threatened. She heard their voices so very clearly. If she stripped off her shirt and her bra, she could see their mouths moving as they cried out in pain and despair.
But they could be useful, too, the talking tattoos. It was the dead Mr. Reid who suggested using her inheritance to buy a small, failing medical testing company outside of Washington, D.C.
So the Mad Alice Holding Company was dissolved and a successor corporation formed as an Isle of Man company, exempt from most supervision. And then, another stroke of unusual luck: a midsize competitor in the medical testing field had suffered a catastrophic hacking that had spilled the records all over the Internet.