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CHAPTER FIVE:

Underpainting

Downstairs from the Sixth Street sidewalk, in the bar of Cole’s, Castine tipped up her glass of beer and, after three big swallows, set it down on the table and blinked around at the dark paneled walls and the white globe lamps hanging from the ceiling.

“That’s better,” she said hoarsely. “Cole’s, you said; where is that? How long was I asleep in your truck?”

“A couple of hours,” said Vickery, setting down his own glass half-empty. “We’re in downtown L.A., about a hundred miles west of where you left your Jeep.”

“Wasn’t my Jeep.” She yawned. “I’m in big trouble, aren’t I? At large at the moment, though. Are there menus?” Vickery tapped the laminated sheet on the table in front of her, and she nodded and peered at it. “Something smells good—pastrami, corned beef?”

“The French Dip sandwiches are great,” he said. “They were invented right here.”

She shook her head. “I had a French Dip sandwich with you a year and a half ago, and look what happened.”

Vickery recalled that the two of them had been shot at, later that night. “Best not to risk it,” he allowed. “I’m going to have the knockwurst and sauerkraut.”

“Me too, if it’s a lot. I haven’t eaten anything since a late lunch in England yesterday, and they’re eight hours ahead of here. No, that’s right, I had a sandwich at the Pentagon last night. Oh, Sebastian, what am I going to do? Felonies—treason! People died!” She lifted her glass and had another swallow. “All your fault,” she said, exhaling as she clanked it down. “Again.”

Vickery repressed a frown, and didn’t argue. “I need to know,” he said levelly, “exactly what sort—sorts—of trouble we’re in. You said—”

A young waiter ambled up to their table then, and Vickery rapidly gave him their lunch order and added two more Budweisers.

When the waiter had walked away, Vickery went on, “You said Naval Intelligence wants to arrest me, because of something I heard from Plowman. Do you know what sort of thing that might have been?”

Castine rocked from side to side,clearly marshaling her thoughts. “Probably something to do with UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena—flying saucers. They set up that fake crash out in the desert by that big rock, and posted reports about it on some UFO chat groups, as a disinformation project. They like to do that sort of thing, get conspiracy-theory types all worked up about some weird-looking event and then discredit it. But they were also, or mainly, hoping you’d hear about it and show up there. And you did, God help us.”

Vickery shook his head ruefully. “I remembered the chat sites from when I was pretending to be interested in that nonsense . . .” His voice trailed away. “Well,” he amended, “until this morning I thought it was nonsense.” For a moment he stared into his beer glass, remembering the impossibly fast zig-zag courses of the silver globes in the desert sky. He looked up at Castine and said, “Anyway, I only drove out there because I saw posts about the crash and I figured Plowman probably did too, and he’d show up. And I didn’t see him.”

“But you were there, like they hoped.”

“Do they know I was there?”

Castine nodded miserably. “They assigned me a partner because they were afraid I might see you and warn you off. Which I tried to do! She saw my RUN message on the Volkswagen windshield, and saw you drive away, obviously in response.”

For several seconds neither of them spoke.

“And you were in England yesterday?” said Vickery. “I wonder why they needed you out by Giant Rock this morning.”

“I told you, to identify you for sure. I imagine you’re hard to find, especially since they don’t know about your new Bill Ardmore identity. And they wanted Plowman too. Mayb they think aliens gave you guys the secret of antigravity or something.”

“To identify me.” Vickery leaned back and saw the waiter approaching their table, carrying a tray on which stood two full glasses and two steaming plates. Vickery glanced at Castine and said, “That too, I’m sure. But why did they really want you there?”

The waiter unloaded the plates and glasses, and Castine began eating hungrily. She didn’t speak until she had washed down a mouthful of sausage and sauerkraut with a gulp of beer.

“You’re terrible,” she said, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin. “There doesn’t have to be any other reason.”

Vickery pulled his phone and battery out of his jacket pocket, and when he had replaced the battery in the phone he pressed the power-on button and set it down on the table.

“Just long enough to check messages,” he said.

Castine raised an eyebrow. “It made sense for me to disable my phone. But they could hardly know about yours.”

“I think it’s best that we work in total-precautions mode. How much do they know about us?” He pointed from her to himself.

“Just that—” She paused and scowled at him. “I think just that we were on the run together for three days, when Terracotta wanted to kill us.”

Vickery recalled that Emilio Terracotta had been the west coast chief of operations with the Transportation Utility Agency in early 2017, and had tried to have him and Castine killed because they were obstacles in his attempt to divert the agency’s national security resources to a dangerous occult enterprise of his own.

“They don’t know you and I drove a taco truck into the Labyrinth,” Vickery asked, “and came out . . . changed?”

The Labyrinth had been the hellish afterlife state—opened by Terracotta’s attempt to summon the entity remembered in Greek mythology as the Minotaur—that Vickery and Castine had fallen into. They had managed to come back from it, alive but no longer securely moored in sequential time.

She paused with a forkful of sauerkraut halfway to her mouth. “No, I—but they wouldn’t believe any of that, even if—and anyway the TUA records for May of ‘17 were purged—” She put down her fork. “They might.”

Vickery, his mouth full, raised his eyebrows.

“Lubitz,” said Castine, “the ONI Commander in charge of this, this covert and probably very deniable operation!—he asked me about something I saw in an echo-vision two nights ago.”Quickly she described the crop circle work she’d been doing in Wiltshire, and the giant-handed monster she had glimpsed when she’d used echo-vision to view the immediate past at a genuine crop circle site.

Vickery listened to it all with an occasional raised eyebrow or muted “Huh!” but no skepticism.

“I denied seeing the thing,” she added, “I told him it was what a witness had described to me, but—he did ask me about it.”

“And they picked you for that crazy crop circle work in the first place.”

“Oh,” she said in a small voice. “Yeah. Aberrant work, they call it.” She busied herself with cutting up her knockwurst.

“Do you think,” Vickery said, “that . . . such a thing could actually have been there, in that crop circle?”

“Of course not,” said Castine quietly. “But yes, I think it was.”

Vickery nodded, understanding her. “How is Naval Intelligence going to try to find you now?”

“I don’t think they can.” She gave him a crooked smile. “Unless they have a sample of my blood.”

Vickery was alarmed. “They don’t, do they? Or at least they wouldn’t know how to use it?”

“No, and no.”

Vickery relaxed. A year and a half ago Simon Harlowe, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had tried to generate the predatory and voracious group mind he called an egregore, had discovered that the blood of Vickery and Castine to some extent shared the temporal wobble they had acquired in their trip to the Labyrinth afterworld—samples of their blood would be pulled perceptibly toward their living bodies. Harlowe had blotted two cloths with their blood in order to be able to track them.

Those cloths had probably been thrown away long ago, and in any case the Office of Naval Intelligence would have been in no position, nor had any reason, to acquire them.

Vickery picked up his phone and turned it on, and there was a tiny red 1 on the phone icon. “A message,” he said, tapping it. “I’ll listen to it and then take the battery out again.”

The message was from Pierce Plowman, and had been recorded just after 10 AM.

“Ardmore,” came the old man’s scornful voice from the tiny speaker. “I got your message, but I already knew about Frankie. If you were fool enough to go out to that site where shit happened today, and if they didn’t arrest you, you’re probably heading back from there. I’ll be where I used to work, at three today. I’ll see you, if you show up. Delete this, dipshit.”

Vickery tapped 7 to delete the message, then laid the phone on the table and flipped open the battery cover. He was almost annoyed with himself for being relieved that Plowman was apparently all right.

“That,” he said as he pried out the battery, “was Pierce Plowman himself.” He looked up at Castine and briefly widened his eyes. “He wants to meet me at the Hollywood Forever cemetery at three o’clock.” Vickery glanced at his watch and then snagged a forkful of knockwurst and sauerkraut. “Plenty of time.”

“We spent the night there once,” Castine said. “In a tomb.”

“That we did,” said Vickery, “that we did.”

“So didn’t you have his number today? Or does he just never answer his phone?”

“He doesn’t have one. This call would have been from a pay phone—he must know all the pay phones still standing in L.A. The phone number I have for him is his daughter’s, and I left a message for him on her voicemail a week ago. When he didn’t call back for six days and his daughter never answered her phone or called back, I assumed she hadn’t given him the message. They don’t get along—well, he doesn’t get along with anybody. And he was never at his place, so I drove out to Giant Rock this morning to see if he’d show up there.”

“Long drive.”

“I figured I could do some painting while I was out there anyway. The desert—the rocks and bushes that stay in one place.” He gave her a tired smile. “I rent a studio—well, a room—in Long Beach, and I’ve got paintings in galleries these days. I sign them ‘Janus.’”

“The two-faced god,” said Castine. “One face looking into the past. What’s—” She cocked her head, and after a moment said, slowly, “How do you paint in echo-vision?”

“Well, I can’t. Obviously. But I can look at a landscape in recent-past time, and then when I’m in real time again I try to catch that echo light on canvas. I can even sometimes,” he added with a vague wave of his fork, “do a . . . a trick I think of as underpainting. Or I imagine I can.”

Castine seemed glad to be talking about something less immediate. She gave him a faint smile. “Do your pictures sell?”

“In a couple of the L.A. galleries, sometimes. And at swap-meets. It’s handy when they do.”

“So what’s underpainting?”

Vickery too was glad to digress for a few moments. “I probably just imagine it. Ordinarily it’s when you lay down a color, like the shape of a figure, and then paint over it so the underlayer still shows, here and there. What I try to do is . . . get halfway into echo-vision, so I can sort of see things by that past light, but still see my hand in real time. It feels like peripheral vision, but straight ahead.”

“I—” Castine took a gulp of her second beer and suppressed a burp. “I wouldn’t drive that way.” She leaned back and stretched. “Okay, tell me about Plowman.”

“Well, I met him a year or so ago, when I was going to Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, on Temple Street downtown. He’s—”

“That’s the big brown box you see off the 101? Very modern twenty years ago?”

“Right. I don’t think he’s Catholic—he was working a pair of copper wire dowsing rods in the parking garage, said he was looking for some underground pattern or symbol. Anyway, he remembered me from the Roswell UFO Festival in 2018, and we got talking, and I wound up missing Mass and going out for beers with him instead. Mea culpa! I’ve been to his place a few times, and he’s been to my trailer. He’s must be going on eighty, and he claims he worked at Area 51 in Nevada in the ‘60s and ‘70s, though he was a groundskeeper at the cemetery when I met him. He got fired from there for being drunk and talking about ghosts.” He gave her a sour smile. “You and I met a ghost there, remember? It was trying to pick up on you.”

“We saw a lot of ghosts there,” said Castine softly. “Sitting on their tombstones in the middle of the night, singing.”

“Well, talk like that won’t get you a job there. Plowman lives in a garage in Inglewood now, pays rent in cash and handyman work, and I told you he doesn’t have a phone. And he’s big on every conspiracy theory—there’s a secret subterranean city under Denver Airport, and the eye in the pyramid on a dollar bill is proof that the country was founded by the Illuminati. Even the camel picture on a pack of cigarettes is full of clues.”

“And the Earth is flat, you said. And he’s a drunk? What do you hang around with him for?”

“Well—” Vickery smiled ruefully. “Most often because he’s a drunk. Every few months his daughter calls me and tells me he’s been drunk in bed for a week or so, not eating, so I bring him groceries and a carton of cigarettes and he’s okay for another couple of months.”

“Damn, Sebastian. It’s a wonder you don’t adopt feral cats.”

Vickery waved vaguely. “He’s actually a very intelligent guy. If you were to listen to his stories late at night, he’d half convince you.”

“That the Earth is flat.” Castine sounded angry.

“Half convince. Late at night. He does have answers for every point you’d raise to contradict him. And he gets insulting.”

“Shit,” snapped Castine, and she seemed to be blinking back tears. “Excuse me. For this I’m going to spend twenty years in Miramar? Because an old drunk told you the Illuminati smoke Camels, or whatever? Lubitz must have lost his mind.”

Vickery recalled that the Naval Consolidated Brig at Miramar, near San Diego, was where all female military prisoners were housed.

He replied sharply, “Considering the sort of people you always wind up working for, you’re more likely to just quietly get killed. Me too, now, thanks very much.” He drained his second glass in three gulps. “And in fact if Plowman did know anything at all,” he added, clanking the glass down, “he didn’t tell me about it. I saw him last week, the day before I tried to call him, and he said a guy we both know had made some discoveries that he wanted to show me. Plowman insisted I’d be better off not knowing about them, but he was drunk, and I got him to give me the guy’s address.”

Castine opened her mouth, but Vickery waved her to silence. “It’s a fellow named named Frankie Notchett. He’s another one who doesn’t trust phones, so I went to his place next day. It’s an apartment by the water in Seal Beach, I gathered he’s got a boat moored nearby and goes out a lot at night. So as I was walking up to his door, a couple of guys in black nylon jackets were carrying out computers and notebooks and what I think was a Geiger counter, all in plastic bags sealed up with red evidence tape. I just kept on walking, and I drove to Plowman’s garage to warn him, but he wasn’t there. I left the message on his daughter’s voicemail, and when I’ve driven past his place these last few nights, there haven’t been any lights on. It didn’t seem smart to park and walk up to the door.”

Castine didn’t seem to be listening. Her eyes darted back and forth for a moment, and then her gaze fixed on a point slightly to Vickery’s left and beyond him.

He quickly spun his chair and stepped widely away from it as he turned around—but he saw nothing across the floor but framed black-and-white photographs on red velvet-patterned wallpaper.

“Sebastian?” Castine had not moved. Her voice was tense, and when he resumed his chair he saw that she was still staring past him. She dropped her fork and extended her trembling hand, and when he took it her fingers curled tightly around his.

“I don’t think you’re in it,” she whispered, “since I guess you saw my hand.” She was staring to the side now, at the empty expanse of the booth, and abruptly recoiled across the padded bench seat. “Damn—why now?”

Vickery knew she must be experiencing an involuntary episode of echo-vision, and that she wouldn’t be able to hear him if he spoke. He patted her knuckles with his free hand.

“Good,” she said hoarsely. “Just keep everybody away.”

And a moment later she focused her eyes on him and freed her hand. She sat back, panting. “Why me—and not you? Why at all?”

Vickery shook his head in wary sympathy. “You drew back there for a second—what did you see?”

“Just a woman who must have been sitting here,” she said, touching the bench seat to her right, “some time ago. But she leaned close to me!” Castine blinked at him. “Our heads would have overlapped, been in the same space!”

Vickery raised a hand, his fingers spread.

Castine picked up her glass and drank what was left, then exhaled and said, “Maybe you’ve never had that happen, where your head is in the same space as the head of one of the people you see in echo-vision! Okay, it’s not the same time, but it’s the same volume. It happened to me in Wiltshire, in England, two nights ago—that woman who was running away from that thing in the crop circle. She ran right through the space I was in, I mean the space I was in later, after her—”

“I get it.”

“Well, her overlapping me—that was as horrifying as the monster!” Castine put down her glass and gripped her elbows. “It’s a—a violation, a rupture of your identity. I don’t want to be mixed with somebody!”

“Huh. Do you think they’re aware of it?”

“I don’t know. The woman at the crop circle was practically catatonic afterward . . . but she had just seen that monster.” She shivered and looked up. “I did sense something just now, right at the beginning, when I zoned out—for a second I had the sensation of being on a boat, at night. The sky was dark, but I got the impression that there was light from below, as if the ocean were glowing.”

“Not just a stray memory?”

“No, nothing I’ve seen before.”

Vickery looked at his watch again. “We should start for the cemetery, God knows what traffic will be like on the 101.” He pushed his chair back and got to his feet, reaching into his pocket for some cash to leave on the table. “Are you—I guess you might not want to fly back to D.C. today.”

“On the whole, no.” She slid out of the booth and stood up. “Between us we’ve managed to screw up that side of my life. Which is the only side there is, actually.” She gave him a mirthless smile. “I’m adrift, again.”

“You’re welcome to stay in my trailer,” he said gruffly, “of course. There’s still that couch I can sleep on.”

“While the guest gets the bed. I remember.” Together they walked to the door, and she added, “Thanks. My familiar port in a storm.”

“Especially when the ocean’s glowing,” he said.

“Ohh—shut up about that.”


In a Super 8 motel room in Yucca Valley, only a few arid blocks southwest of the airport she and Ingrid Castine had flown in to this morning, Rayette Yoneda sat on the bed and stared at two cell phones that lay in a patch of sunlight on a pillow. One of them was an old T-Mobile flip-phone which hadn’t worked since being dropped in a hotel bathtub years ago.

She had told Tacitus that she was staying here, and he had dropped her off outside the lobby doors. Yoneda suspected that the elderly Tacitus found her attractive—certainly he had kept glancing at her peripherally as he drove, and had seemed nervous and self-conscious when he had spoken. Well, good. It would ensure that he would look up Pierce Plowman’s numbers for her.

When she had checked into this room and bolted the door, Yoneda had pulled off the bush jacket and dropped it on the floor, and then simply sprawled on the bed and closed her eyes and let herself remember the things she had seen in the sky a couple of hours earlier.

They had been real! UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena! For a moment there by Giant Rock she had forgoten the burning van and the Sensitive Assignment Specialists who were dying in it, and just stared into the sky. The things had darted back and forth hundreds of feet overhead, like mirror-bright pool balls, moving with such speed that she’d had to whip her head from side to side to keep any one of them in sight, but executing acute changes of direction with no deceleration at all.

It wasn’t possible!—for anything, let alone any sort of living creatures!—but everyone there had obviously seen the same phenomenon. The shadows had flickered in crazy zig-zags across the whole visible expanse of desert. Then the things had vanished all at once, silently, as though a projector had been switched off—but they had not been any kind of projection. They had been there.

Foo fighters! Maybe it was all true. Maybe some of those British crop circles weren’t hoaxes. Maybe the TUA really had summoned ghosts to supplement motorcade security. Maybe Vilko Cendravenir, for all his pretentious pointed goatee and clove-scented cigarettes, reall did break the plexiglass light panel over Lubitz’s desk with some golf balls he had caused to move without touching them.

Yoneda prided herself on her sensible comprehension of reality, and this line of thinking nauseated her.

At last she had got up from the bed and tapped out an email on her working phone, a costly black Kryptall. The email was addressed to Commander Lubitz via encrypted ProtonMail, and it was a detailed follow-up to her hurried phone call at the scene.

In the email she had been completely straightforward. She had given a fuller account of the explosion of the Sensitive Assignments van, and a plain, literal description of the UAPs; and, reluctantly, she had explained that Castine had warned off a man who must have been Sebastian Vickery, and that Castine had then pepper-sprayed her and taken her gun and the Jeep when she had tried to go in pursuit of him. In a concluding paragraph, hoping it somewhat lightened the email’s tone of failure, she had recounted her meeting with a man who might know the whereabouts of Pierce Plowman. Finallly she had tapped in the address of her present location, and, with an anxious grimace, had hit Send.

After waiting half an hour for a reply, she had cursed impatiently under her breath, pocketed her phone and walked out of the motel. When Tacitus had driven her here she had noticed a Sizzler and an IHOP a few hundred feet down the street, and the desert breeze had not yet been hot, so she had walked to the IHOP and eaten a leisurely breakfast of poached eggs and bacon and pancakes. The wind had heated up by the time she had paid and walked out of the place, and when she had got back to the motel room she had cranked up the air conditioner.

Now she sat staring at the two cell phones on the pillow.

This must not go off the rails, Lubitz had said. It will not. That being so, you don’t even need to think about the consequences if it were to.

It went off all sorts of rails, Yoneda thought now. In all sorts of directions. I was ready for that sappy fool Castine to try to warn Vickery off, if he showed up, but I never expected her to physically attack me. I should have allowed for it. Instead I screwed up.

Yoneda’s father had instilled in her a fastidious aversion to failure. She had graduated from Stanford University in 2012, at the age of twenty-one, with a B.S. degree in Geological and Environmental Sciences, and her work using data from Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites to map areas of malaria risk in sub-Saharan Africa had drawn the attention of the Office of Naval Research. She interned with the ONR at a General Schedule rating of GS 05, but within months had advanced to GS 12, had a top secret security clearance, and was using satellite geospatial imagery to identify nuclear weapons facilities in China and Russia. She had been baffled and annoyed with this temporary transfer to the Office of Naval Intelligence.

She lifted the two phones and looked from one to the other. She dreaded the one that worked, and looked forward to spending time with the old ruined flip-phone.

As if prompted by her picking it up, the working phone clicked in her hand, and she almost dropped it. Dropping the non-working phone instead, she swiped the screen of the one she still held and—after taking a deep breath— touched the green dot on the screen.

She held it to her ear. “Yoneda here,” she said, exhaling.

“I’ve sent out the two men you met in my office last night,” came Lubitz’s voice, “Finehouse and Cendravenir. They’re en route now. I’m in contact with Finehouse, and they’ll meet you where you are, at about 5 PM your local time. Finehouse will be taking over the operation, and you’re to tell him everything that happened today. The plane will wait at the airport, and directly after you talk to him you will fly back here.”

“Yes, sir. Uh—what about the guy I met who knows where Plowman lives?

“All calls to your phone will be documented. He’ll be contacted. Give me all of that back.”

Yoneda’s voice was level as she repeated what Lubitz had said, and she didn’t protest or make excuses for her failure this morning.

“I’ll debrief you when you arrive,” Lubitz said, and the call ended.

She laid down the phone with exaggerated care, and looked at her watch. It was about one-thirty. She could certainly afford to get a couple of hours’ sleep.

But first—she picked up the broken phone and flipped it open.

It was her personal kaze no denwa, her wind phone.

The idea of a wind phone had apparently started after the tsunami of 2011 destroyed the town of Otsuchi in northern Japan; on a local hilltop, a garden designer set up a phone booth containing a disconnected rotary telephone, and people in the area, and then people from all over Japan, would come there and use the inert phone as a prop to let them express their feelings to dead friends and family. There was no flavor of divination to it—no claim that the pilgrims were actually heard by departed souls—it was simply a way to focus and articulate thoughts, serving the same purpose as statues or stained glass windows in a church.

Yoneda had been ten years old when her father died of a heart attack in their New York apartment, and for some years after that she had written letters to him and burned them outdoors,where the smoke could disperse into the sky. When she heard of the wind phone custom, though, she had switched to using the old flip phone for casting her thoughts. Speaking was easier, more spontaneous, than writing.

“It went badly today, father,” she said softly. “But I’ll make up for it.” She closed the phone and looked out the window at the desert and remote mountains. “I’ll make up for it,” she whispered.

It occurred to her that she had three and a half hours before her replacement would arrive. To hell with sleep.


In his walk-up apartment between Figueroa and the 110 Freeway, Tacitus Banach was alternately riffling through the yellowed pages of a 1952 paperback Merriam Webster dictionary and glancing at his computer monitor, which today was flanked by two Pink Splendor Barbie dolls. One of the dolls was already listed on eBay, and the bidding was up to five-hundred dollars.

He had got home an hour and a half ago, and had composed a report to his handler in which he had described the events of the morning, including the license number of the fleeing camper truck and his meeting with a likely ONI agent. Following protocol, he had used the old dictionary to encipher the report, giving the page number, column number and line number of every plaintext word; his handler had a duplicate copy of the dictionary, and had presumably decipher Banach’s report fairly quickly, but had only now replied.

Banach was surprised at his handler’s delay in responding. In the last two years his regular reports must have seemed trivial, though he had learned to take their subjects seriously himself—rotating patterns of light in the ocean seen by boats off San Diego and San Pedro in the middle of the night, sightings of impossibly fast gleaming objects over military bases, high radiation readings and intense cold in neolithic stone circles in the Mojave Desert—but his report today must call for serious attention. The fact that he had not found Pierce Plowman—a rude old person he had briefly met a couple of times at midnight UFO vigils along the Mulholland Drive ridge—paled beside his eyewitness account of the objects that had appeared in the sky over Giant Rock, and the needless killing of ONI personnel by the hot-headed young GRU agents, and Banach’s fortuituous contact with Rayette.

Banach copied the last of the three-number groups from the email text on his computer monitor, then closed and deleted the email, and deleted it from the Recently Deleted file, then sat back and looked at the words the numbers had directed him to in the old dictionary: LICENSE NUMBER BELONG TO WILLIAM DRUNKARD-MINUS-DRUNK-MORE,he read. A five-digit number which obviously wasn’t a page number came next, after which the code resumed, ROSECRANS AVENUE PERIOD DO NOT APPROACH PERIOD AGENTS IN AUTHORIZED ACTION DO NOT INTERFERE PERIOD REPORT ANY FURTHER CONTACT WITH RAY-VIGNETTE-MINUS-VIGN PERIOD AGENTS WILL ADMINISTER PERIOD END MESSAGE

Banach pushed his chair back from the desk and picked up his cigarette from the ashtray.

“Agents will administer?” he said to one of the Barbie dolls. “Administer what?”

He was afraid he knew what. He had given his handler the address of the Motel 8 where he had dropped off Miss Ray-Vignette-Minus-Vign. And probably Mr. Drunkard-Minus-Drunk-More will get the same—and Plowman too, if they discover his location. To hell with intelligence gathering, the new policy seemed to be simply the eradication of all competition, along with any information that might have been gleaned from them.

He thought of calling the Motel 8 in Yucca Valley, and telling Rayette to get out of there—but it would be treasonous to interfere, and anyway he didn’t even know her last name. I want to speak to an Asian woman named Rayette who checked in there four hours ago... if indeed her name was even actually Rayette. No.

His cigarette had gone out while he’d been decoding his handler’s messasge. He lit the half-length and grimaced at the whiff of scorched moustache hair. And I’ve established unforced contact with an ONI agent! Not a very strong contact, to be sure, but it seems likely that I could have got some worthwhile information from Rayette by spinning out my imaginary acquaintance with Plowman. But those two GRU hooligans will surely just kill her, as they killed the ONI agents in that van this morning.

Banach remembered Pyotr Ivashutin, who had been the director of the GRU during Banach’s time as a student at the Military Diplomatic Academy in 1985 and ’86. Ivashutin had devoted the service to ferreting out the secrets of foreign powers, and had run the GRU, the Military Intelligence Directorate, so effectively that, while most intelligence chiefs were replaced when a new political leader came into power, he had been director of the GRU under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev. Razvedka, the gathering of information, had always been the main objective.

Under Ivashutin’s leadership, the policy would have been to play today’s windfall sources, learn what they knew—not simply waste the opportunities by killing them.

Banach knew nearly nothing about the new director of the GRU, Igor Kostyukov. He could only judge the man by his evident policies, and even in the newspapers there had been reports of several assassinations on his watch in recent years—a Chechen leader in Qatar in 2004, another in Turkey in 2015—as well as a number of bungled attempts, like the near-fatal poisoning of the defector Sergei Skirpal in Wiltshire, England, in 2018. In that last incident, the assassins had carried the deadly nerve agent Novichok in a perfume bottle, and after poisoning Skirpal they had thrown the bottle into a litter bin, and a random British citizen who found it had died, along with the girlfriend he had given it to.

Was this what his old service had become? Trained monkeys would have better tradecraft.

Banach recalled that one defector had stated, I didn’t abandon the USSR, the USSR abandoned me.

And he recalled the oath he had taken, with perfect sincerity, at the age of eighteen: I will always be ready to come to the defense of my homeland, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics . . .

The what? he thought now. What was that you said? The Roman Empire, was it? The Persian Empire, the Hittites?

Hoisting himself out of the wooden chair that sat in front of the desk, he looked around at his apartment, and he wondered if he had subsided too far, too complacently and even negigently, into this current cover identity. As a professor at USC, with the constant group discussions of socialism versus capitalism, and frequent re-readings of Marx, Engels, Lukacs and Ilyenkov, the abstract Communist ideal had been a constantly reinforced dogma; but among the strange vagabonds and eccentrics who had been his companions for the last two years, that ideal had become so abstract that it seemed to have no more relevance to the actual world than classical Greek grammar or Ptolemaic astronomy.

Banach walked away from the desk, past the bookshelves—crowded with clumsily-printed books on flying saucers and alien abductions and unorthodox geography, as well as several boxed sets of old Topps baseball cards—to his narrow bedroom, and looked out the window.

From up here on the second floor he could see past the soundwall at the end of the street, and the tops of cars and trucks were visible sweeping past on the 110 Freeway.

Trees were clustered below the freeway embankment, and he thought of the freeway-side gypsy nest concealed there. He had spent hours in that foliage-hidden clearing, and in ones like it alongside the 605, the 101, and Old Man 10, often bringing beer and sandwiches for the oddballs who gathered in those places. He was respectful of their stories about magical metronomes and supernatural currents and phantom cars, for hadn’t he himself driven down an imposible offramp into a different and perverse world, three years ago? And they often relayed rumors, varying in value, of strange things seen in the sky.

It’s a good thing, he thought bitterly now, that none of my reports impressed my masters as having any validity—or they’d probably have tried to kill all the freeway-side gypsies.

The buzzing of his phone brought him hurrying back to his desk. It was very unlikely that his handler would call him, but he hoped, forlornly, to be able to urge a more restrained program in dealing with the sources he had identified.

“Hello,” said a woman’s voice when he picked up the phone and swiped the screen, “is this, uh, Tacitus?” When he confirmed it, she went on, “This is Rayette, the woman you drove to a motel in Yucca Valley this morning. I hate to press you, but did you have any luck finding a phone number or email address for Pierce Plowman? I’d like to get in touch with him today.”

Banach’s heart was suddenly thudding in his chest. Protocol dictated that he should get her to stay where she was, perhaps by telling her he’d call her back with the information as soon as he could . . . 

“I couldn’t locate those,” he found himself saying, “but I know where he lives. What do you say I pick you up and take you there?” I could drive her to any vacant-looking house, he thought, and then just say, Look, he’s not home, and there’d be at least the chance to obliquely quiz her during the drive.

There was a pause during which he bared his teeth, imagining the two GRU assassins even now getting out of their car in the motel parking lot. She probably thinks I’m sexually interested in her, he thought, and just trying to arrange another meeting.

“Where are you?” she asked at last, cautiously.

“I’m in Los Angeles, but—” But what? “— but I’ve got time to swing past your motel.”

He was sweating. This was hopeless.It just wasn’t plausible that a stranger would offer to drive from L.A. to Yucca Valley and back, just to do her a favor. He was trying to frame an alternate direction for the dialogue when she spoke again.

“Okay. That’s very kind of you, Tacitus. You remember where this place is? What time do you think you’ll get here?”

Banach frowned. She should exhibit some doubtful reluctance, he thought, some suspicion, if she wants me to believe her interest in Plowman is something less than officially urgent. We really are both letting our covers slip.

He shrugged nervously. “Oh, say four o’clock?”

Again there was a pause, and he wondered what sort of schedule she might have.

“Oh hell, let’s do it,” she said finally. “Be a bit early if you can.”

What he was going to say next would definitively wreck his pose as a harmless old UFO hobbyist, but he could see no way around it.

“I saw an IHOP restaurant down the street from your motel,” he said. “Meet me there, okay? And—go there right now. And, uh—I do mean right now.”

“I see.” She ended the call.


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Framed