CHAPTER TWELVE:
Parasitoid Wasps
Vickery had driven south on Grand and turned right on First Street, and now he was speeding southeast between parking lots and low, government-looking buildings. Plowman was crowded against the passenger-side door, with Castine between him and Vickery, and Santiago was peering in through the open back window of the cab. The side windows were rolled down, but the sun was in their faces and Vickery wished he’d taken off his denim jacket before getting in. The radio was tuned to a talk station, nearly inaudible.
“Okay,” said Plowman finally, “What did you mean, a UFO nearly sat on you?”
Castine quickly described what had happened at Vickery’s trailer the night before, and what the Russian had said. From the corner of his eye, Vickery could see that Santiago was listening wide-eyed.
“And,” Castine concluded, “it happened because that GRU agent and I were tipped into echo-vision when Vickery here stepped into it deliberately, out at Giant Rock. That agent said we made a triangle of . . . punctures in now. He said it wa a—” She turned to Vickery.
“Localized radiating discord,” Vickery said, “like out-of-phase radar waves.” He turned north on Spring Street. “We’ll go west on Sunset then south on the 110, loop around. If they’ve figured out the blood rags, this should keep ’em running in circles.”
“Radar waves,” muttered Plowman.
“And so,” Castine went on, “the thing that threw the shoes into the pool yesterday morning fell into the pool last night, in the L. A. River bed, and . . . became a ghost, the thing with the big hands.” She nodded. “And it was gelid as all hell.”
“Gooey?” put in Santiago, clearly mystified. “The pool?”
“Cold,” Castine told him, “and the pool, the surface of it, means our—universe, reality.” To Plowman she added, “And lately crop circles have been very damn cold, and there’s more of them all the time, these last few months. It’s—Sebastian, tell him about the gluons.”
“Sebastian,” said Plowman. “Vickery.” He squinted sideways at Vickery. “There’s stories about you.” He turned to Castine. “And I bet you’re the woman in the stories. Hah!” He slapped his thigh. “You flew a hot-air balloon out of Hell, is how it goes.”
“It was a hang-glider,” said Vickery. “But in Frankie Notchett’s poem . . .” He explained their interpretation of Notchett’s added lines in the Cosmogony. “So some kind of higher-dimensional entities are deflecting the electromagnetic, gravitational and Strong Nuclear force-carrying particles out of our four-dimensional reality by way of crop circles, which you said are their graves.”
“Yes,” said Plowman, “and I said they’re Lazaruses. And I guess they’re a lot damn closer to their mass resurrection than I thought. It’s like when cicadas all come out of the ground on the same day, after being buried for some prime number of years.” He tapped his distended jacket. “And I’ve got the complete negation symbol now. I’ll give it to you.”
“Negation . . . is that the ‘deeper grave’ you told me about once?” Vickery caught a green light and sped across the freeway overpass, glancing to the side at the tight ranks of cars in the lanes below.
“Yeah,” said Plowman. He took a deep breath and turned to Vickery. “You’re bullshitting me—a hang-glider?”
“You had to be there,” said Castine soberly.
“If,” said Vickery, “each crop circle—and there are even the equivalent of crop circles in the ocean, according to Notchett’s charts, and in deserts; and,” he added with a mirthless bark of laughter, “add one in the L.A. River bed!—if each of them hijacks our forces at once to fly beyond the reach of chaos . . . where does that leave us?”
“I imagine our forces would regenerate themselves instantly,” said Plowman. “But at the cost of a winter like maybe they get on Pluto.”
“This is soon?” asked Santiago.
“I don’t know,” said Plowman. “What’s ‘soon’ in these kinds of terms?”
“I wish I had the latest reports from England,” said Castine, “but I think it’s soon.”
Plowman jumped when Santiago tapped him on the shoulder. “This deeper grave,” the boy said, “it’s the lineas de muerta under the freeway? Lines of death?”
“Eh? I guess so—it’s where one of ’em withdrew, thousands of years ago—dug a hole and pulled it in after itself, no way out, end of story. Its pattern isn’t symmetrical like most crop circles—it’s like a big knot, and it spells finito to others of that tribe.”
Santiago narrowed his eyes and nodded. “People been putting sugar and honey on the streets, up Broadway and on Sunset, around the big robot. Trying to make the devils come to the lines. Negation,” he said carefully. “But people don’t know where all the lines are.”
“Robot?” said Castine. “A robot now?”
“It’s that Arts High School on the other side of the 101 from the cathedral,” said Vickery. “It looks like a giant robot pointing a ray-gun at the cathedral.”
“And a lot of lines of the symbol are under it,” said Plowman. He leaned to the side to twist his head and look at Santiago. “People know abou this? Sugar and honey—like a trap?”
“Sure,” said Santiago, “but they don’t know where all the lines are, and the lines are mostly under buildings anyway.” He looked at Vickery. “And you got Russians trying to blow you up, and Navy guys that want to put you in jail?” When Vickery rocked his head and nodded, the boy went on, “You all can’t just drive this truck in big circles forever to keep away from everybody.”
“Oh,” said Vickery, catching the boy’s meaning; and he added softly, “Good Lord.”
Castine gave a short exhalation that might have been a cut-off nervous laugh. “If they’re using the blood cloths. Maybe they’re not.”
“We could just stop somewhere,” said Vickery, “and see if they show up and arrest us, or kill us. Then we’d know.” His chest felt hollow, and the dew of sweat on his forehead wasn’t entirely caused by the cramped seating and Santiago breathing on his neck.
“But can we go see her?” asked Castine. “What will she . . . do?”
“Last time you saw her you punched her in the stomach,” Santiago reminded Vickery. “And took her car.”
“I saw her again after that,” said Vickery defensively. “Ingrid and I returned her car the next day.” He shifted his hands on the steering wheel and added, reluctantly, “After I stole it, yeah.”
“We returned it with the seats soaked in stagnant water and smeared with tar,” Castine recalled mournfully, “after our dip in the La Brea Tar Pits. Just for you and I to get away alive, you had to convince her that you’d saved her family from the egregore group mind.”
“At least she let us go,” said Vickery. “After I swore to pay her a hundred a month for eternity.”
“Sounds like my daughter,” grumbled Plowman. “My Goneril. My Regan.”
Vickery recalled that Goneril and Regan were the two heartless daughters of Shakespeare’s King Lear; and he wondered if Plowman might have a second daughter, corresponding to Lear’s forsaken loyal one.
“Is there a Cordelia?” Vickery asked.
Plowman frowned and waved the question away.
“You should return that radar gun,” said Castine. “Get the refund on her Visa card.”
“You talked to her—!” Plowman began, but Santiago interrupted him.
“See?” said the boy, nodding to the right. “Lines of sugar.”
Blue tarpaulin tents and shopping carts and folding chairs were crowded on the sidewalk, and the people slouched or walking among them didn’t seem particularly aware of the blurred white streak that extended between a couple of tents and into the street. A few yards ahead another streak, at a slant, also stretched from the sidewalk fence and partway across the street. Passing car tires had erased segments of it.
“The lines are behind the fence too,” said Santiago, “and in the dirt on the other side of the street. There’s more lines, all the way up to Cesar Chavez, and west. People can’t afford that much sugar, but they buy it anyway, to try to trap the devils. And they don’t even know where all the lines are.”
Castine and Plowman didn’t say anything.
After several seconds Vickery spoke up. “I think I should approach her alone. Galvan, not Plowman’s daughter.”
“She’ll just sell you to the ONI agents,” said Castine hopelessly.
“Maybe, maybe not. But you and I need a vehicle that conceals us from our pursuing blood.” To Plowman and Santiago, he said, “If I can get one of her shielded cars, we can drop you two off back at the cathedral parking lot. The ONI agents will probably be gone by then. And if Galvan won’t cooperate—well, you’re on your own, and better off away from us.”
Plowman had been silent while the truck had rolled over the costly, useless lines of sugar on the street, but now he shifted against the door and cleared his throat.
“No,” he said. “Damn it.”
Vickery waited a moment, then said, “No?”
“I—have to!—take you someplace first. If I can remember how to get there. It’s been many years.” His head jerked slightly, with a shudder or a suppressed laugh. “They’re a secretive lot, but they’ll let you in if you’re with me. Or throw us all out. Sort of like approaching your Galvan woman. You need to be careful, though—these people do not want the aliens to be exposed to the negation symbol. But they do know stuff you need to know.”
Vickery waited, and Castine finally asked, “Who are they?”
“They call themselves the Zeta Reticuli Chess Club,” said Plowman. “They’ve got a place up in the hills.”
“Huh!” said Castine. “The Russian was pretending he was one of them, for a while. What are they, besides a chess club?”
“Oh—they’re like a monastic order, playing anti-king chess in shifts, twenty-four hours a day for the last fifty years or so. Several generations.”
Vickery didn’t even ask what anti-king chess might be. “I’ll leave you all in a parking lot,” he said, “and talk to Galvan alone.”
He felt Santiago’s breath on his neck as the boy whistled silently, and peripherally he saw Castine shake her head; but nobody objected.
The breaking surf two hundred feet to her right was a steady muted crash and retreating hiss, punctuated by the cries of seagulls circling in the cloud-streaked sky. She had heard distant thunder intermittently, but the sky was quiet now. The only other people visible along the broad bone-white beach were a couple of surfers in black wetsuits a hundred yards away, carrying boards down toward the water. Rayette Yoneda kept an eye on them, but only from habit.
Tacitus had told her to be at the Hermosa Beach pier at 10:30 AM and to walk south through the loose sand to the second lifeguard tower, and after ten minutes she had plodded her way to the first one, which was just an empty blue-painted shack on a raised platform of criss-crossed boards. She had been making her way along a track in the sand that had been flattened for vehicles, but walking in the yielding sand was still tiring, and she wished Tacitus had told her to follow the paved road that ran in front of the houses and apartments a hundred feet to her left, on the far side of the volleyball nets. She supposed he had deliberately told her to take a route that would make progress slow, and running difficult. The cold wind from the sea made her turn up her jacket collar and clench her fists in her pockets, and the second lifeguard tower looked half a mile away.
She was not carrying a newspaper—Naval Intelligence had not killed Frankie Notchett.
Last night she had got Tacitus to drop her off at a Hertz car rental at the Long Beach airport, and had then driven a newly-rented Toyota Camry down here and got a room at a place called the Sea Sprite Motel. This morning she had found a cell phone repair shop and bought two thirty-dollar Consumer Cellular phones, and had finally called Lubitz on one of them.
It had been a difficult call. She had started by telling him plainly everything that had happened since she had dropped her official phone into the ketchup box behind the IHOP in Yucca Valley yesterday, including all the extraordinary details of the UAP’s descent in the riverbed and the subsequent manifestation of the cortical homunculus, and what Tacitus and Vickery and Castine had said afterward, and the intrusion of the pair of alleged GRU assassins.
At the end of it Lubitz told her, with some perceptible reluctance, that she would at least for a while continue to be an active agent in the field—and she had known that he would soon ask her for her current location and the license plate of her rental car. She had hoped to evade that, for she didn’t want Finehouse and a fresh team of Sensitive Assignment Specialists intruding on her efforts to persuade Tacitus to formally defect.
Quickly, to keep her promise to old Tacitus, she had asked how Francis Notchett had died.
Lubitz had told her curtly that any information about Notchett was compartmented; and she had insisted that she needed access to that particular compartment in order to function in this situation.
Lubitz had audibly shifted in his chair. “The various possible directions of your . . . whole future, you realize,” he had said in a reflective tone, “will very much depend on your actions in these next few hours. I’ll give you this: he hanged himself with his belt, on a doorknob.”
“Why?” When Lubitz had let several seconds go by without answering, she had pressed, “Dammit, Commander, I’m in the field, I’m in the animal soup with these people!”
Lubitz had sighed, and she had thought she could hear him drumming his fingers on his desk. “Notchett didn’t approve,” he’d said finally, “of our plan to establish communication with the UAP intelligences. He said they’re like parasitoid wasps, was his phrase, which lay eggs in other insects, and that they’d . . . destroy the world when they made their exit from our plane, as he believed they meant to do soon. He said we have to kill them somehow. The man turned out to be just a lunatic, you see. He killed himself because he imagined we would use coercive methods, force him to tell us what he knew about the alien intelligences.”
He imagined that, did he, thought Yoneda.
And then, scarcely believing it, she had watched her hand extend to the side and drop the phone into a glass of water on the bedside table.
I am not an orphan, she had told herself. Tacitus abandoned his service, or was abandoned by it, but I’m just exercising initiative in the field.
She had quickly picked up her old broken phone and flipped it open.
“Pray for me, father,” she had whispered.
An overweight man in a blue sweatsuit was now trudging through the sand from the street by the apartments. His scanty, wind-blown hair was dark and he was now clean-shaven, but Yoneda recognized Tacitus. They both kept walking on their intersecting courses, and when they were only a few yards apart, Tacitus stopped.
“No need to walk all the way to the second tower,” he said, speaking just loudly enough for her to hear him over the boom and hiss of the surf. “I’ve been walking along the next street over, parallel to you, and there’s been nobody keeping up with you.” He cocked his head. “You are not holding a newspaper.”
“Notchett killed himself,” said Yoneda, “while in captivity.” She told him what Lubitz had said about Notchett’s reason for suicide, parasitoid wasps and all, and when she had finished, Tacitus just stared past her at the sea, squinting in the wind.
“I believe it,” he said. “And—excuse me, but I have nobody else with whom to be frank—I wonder if taking defector status, and working with your people, might not lead me to wear a stout belt and note the locations of doorknobs.”
It occurred to Yoneda that she too had no one else with whom to be frank, aside from the absent father in her inert wind phone.
“We can set ground rules in place,” she said. “Assurances, guarantees.” She ran her fingers through her short black hair.
“Ground rules, guarantees—consisting of what?”
“I don’t know. Think of something. Wouldn’t you like to establish some sort of communication with those beings?” She looked around in all directions, at the houses and the beach and the sea and the distant long centipede of the Hermosa Beach pier. She assured herself that Tacitus would have been careful in coming here, and that it was very unlikely that a sniper was lying prone on one of the rooftops. “And isn’t the GRU out to kill you now?—along with all the rest of us? You don’t have to be an orphan.”
Tacitus’s face was pale where his beard had been, and the dark brown dye in his hair was sharply at odds with the wrinkles around his eyes and the newly-visible lines in his cheeks.
“I need to talk to Frankie,” he said, and held up his hand to forestall her obvious objection.
“Okay . . .” Yoneda said cautiously.
“After I dropped you off at the airport, I went to my apartment—fast, because I had been ordered not to interfere with things like bombs under trailers, and of course my handler knows my address. I packed some things and fled, never to return.” He too looked around the beach, and was clearly reassured by its windy emptiness. “Would you like to get breakfast somewhere?”
The shave and dye-job don’t make you look any younger, Yoneda thought; then frowned in self-reproach, for it was obvious that Tacitus was not interested in her sexually.
“May as well,” she said. “Where are you parked? I’m in a lot back by the pier.”
Tacitus started walking across the sand in that direction. “I abandoned my car last night, and engaged several taxis to get here.”
“Old fashioned.”
“Uber requires that you use a phone.”
“Fair enough.” Yoneda took his arm and turned him toward the lane that ran in front of the houses. “Not though all the the sand again. So how are you going to . . . talk to Frankie?” She wondered if Tacitus had something like her wind phone, and meant a hypothetical sort of talk; then she remembered Castine saying that she and Vickery had allegedly seen Notchett’s ghost yesterday.
Tacitus nodded and walked beside her, away from the surf. “I took two books from my apartment,” he said, “a copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the true first edition with the word stopped misspelled on page 181—that should get us some cash at a good rare book store—and a tattered paperback copy of New UFO Breakthrough, which Frankie loaned me a year or so ago.”
“Useful reference?”
“No, it’s misguided and naive. But it belonged to him, you see—he read it, even made some pencil notes in it. It should constitute what the freeway-side gypsies call a handhold, a way for Frankie’s ghost to manifest, if I summon it.”
Yoneda forced herself not to ask if Notchett’s ghost might join them for breakfast; and then she had to restrain a smile, for there were several Mexican seafood restaurants locally—the ghost would probably want the seafood cocktail called vuelve a la vida, return to life.
Instead she asked, with a straight face, “Did Vickery and Castine have a handhold for it when they saw it yesterday at that cemetery?”
Tacitus gave her a wry look. “They said Plowman had some papers Frankie had given him. That was evidently a close enough reach.”
“Touche.” She was certain that it was a waste of time, but to humor the old man, she said, “I have a motel room—do you want to call him there after breakfast?”
“No, the ocean has no current—well, not the kind of current I need. It doesn’t cast an indeterminacy field. I’ve got to be very close to a generating freeway, in one of the gypsy nests.”
My hard-won career, Yoneda thought wonderingly, now seems to depend on getting this old fool to defect. If he goes bumbling along on his own, getting some low-level job and consulting ghosts in freeway-side gypsy nests on weekends, the FBI will surely track him down and arrest him for failing to register as an agent of a foreign government. Maybe I should let Finehouse and a Sensitive Assignment Team just take him.
But, “Okay,” she said.
As they plodded toward the lane at the inland edge of the sand, she let herself wonder, gingerly, what a ghost might actually look and behave like, and if it might be susceptible to argument, or misdirection, or even charm. Frankie, she thought, if you fuck this up for me, I swear I’ll get a priest to exorcise you—hard.