Ben Winters - Countdown City

“Oo,” says Jordan, leaning forward. “That kind of made you look like an asshole, the way that played out.”

I listen to the familiar hiss then click then beep of a dial-up modem making its connection. There’s a prickling sensation from deep somewhere in the nerves of my injured arm. I reach over with my left hand and squeeze the right biceps in its sling, massaging it with two fingers. Jordan clicks on the Start menu and calls up a blank screen, cursor blinking. He cracks his knuckles ostentatiously, like a maestro, while my mind buzzes and flits. I’m suddenly deep back into my casework, trying to decide what information I need most, what’s worth trying for. Jordan, however, makes no move to cede me the chair.

“You tell me what you’re looking for, and I find it for you.”

“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”

“Okay, so we move to option B, which is you fucking yourself.” He grins at me. “The way this thing works, you can’t just type in what you want. I gotta run code for every search.”

“Fine,” I say. “Fine.”

“And just so you know, in general the more trivial the information that you’re looking for, the less likely you’ll find it on our server. But of course, we all have different definitions of trivial , don’t we?”

Behind us we hear a rustling and Jordan yells, “Abigail? You’re awake?”

“Yes,” the girl calls back. “And not happy about it.”

“Can we get started?” I say, and Jordan tells me to fire away and I fire away. “I need to search something called the NCIC.”

“National Crime Information Center,” says Jordan, already typing.

“How did you know that?”

“I know everything. I thought you had that figured out?” he says, fingers still dancing across the keys. “Hey, you don’t need to access the Pentagon by any chance, do you?”

“No.”

“Oh well.”

I give him the details: Rocky Milano. White male, age approximately fifty-five to sixty. No known aliases.

He types. We wait. It works slowly, streams of text flutter past, the monitor flickers from gray screen to gray screen. All of the familiar soothing icons of human–machine interaction are absent: the hourglass, the whirling circles of light. Finally Jordan squints at the screen, shrugs his shoulders, and turns around.

“Nope.”

“Nope, what? It’s not working?”

“It’s working. I’m in there. But there’s no listing.”

“Is it possible you don’t have the whole thing?”

“The whole database?

“Yes. That this is an incomplete—what did you call it?”

“Mirror,” he says. “An incomplete mirror of the original archives.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Is it possible?”

“Oh, sure,” he says. “Very possible. Probable, in fact.”

I grimace. Of course. Nothing for good. Nothing for certain. I direct Jordan to get out of the FBI database and execute a simple Web search for Rocky’s name, setting us up for a fruitless fifteen minutes of scrolling through hundreds of hits—on the real Rocky and on dozens of other Rocky Milanos.

“Dude,” says Jordan at last. “What exactly are you looking for?”

I don’t answer. What am I looking for? The same rap sheet I was looking for when I was ten years old and “everybody knew” that Martha’s dad was a crook—that he had knocked over a liquor store, killed a guy with his bare hands. I’m looking for anything that would confirm my indistinct and ill-formed hypothesis that Rocky Milano had the wickedness of character and/or talent at long-distance riflery to gun down his son-in-law in cold blood to prevent him from reporting Rocky on IPSS violations and leave him counting down the earth from a jail cell.

“Okey-doke, darling,” says Jordan, spinning in the chair. “Time’s up.”

“Give me five seconds, okay?”

He rolls his eyes, counts: “One…”

I pace behind Jordan in the small room, trying to gather my thoughts and move on, push past the disappointment and irritation of this—of the whole thing. There’s no way to know anything anymore, is what it feels like. It’s started early, the era of terrible ambiguity scheduled to begin when Maia smashes into the Gulf of Boni and causes something terrible to happen but nobody knows exactly what. This age of uncertain terrors is metastasizing, growing backward, destroying not just the future but the present, poisoning everything: relationships, investigations, society, making it impossible for anyone to know anything or do anything at all.

“Hello? Nico’s brother?” Jordan is saying. “I got shit to do. Important shit.”

“Hang on. Wait.”

“Can’t.”

“Nils Ryan,” I say. “A state trooper.”

“Spells Nils.”

“No. Wait—Canliss. Can you look up the last name Canliss?”

Jordan sighs elaborately and then slowly turns back to the keyboard, letting me know one last time who is in charge of this operation. I spell the name for him and lean over his shoulder while he rattles the keys. First he checks the NCIC and there are no matches, which I did not think there would be, and then he executes a simple search. I lean farther forward, bent practically horizontal across his desk and watching the words flash to life, the lines of text roll up onto the screen, green on black.

“There,” says Jordan, launching backward from the desk on his rolling office chair, banging against my legs. “Does that help?”

I don’t answer. I’m off in the distance somewhere, I’m racing through the wilderness, I’m standing in a storm with my hands raised, reaching out for bits and flakes of ideas like falling snow. First I thought that Brett had been untrue to Martha, and then I thought that it was Martha who been untrue, but I had it wrong the whole time. All the wickedness lay somewhere else.

I know the name Canliss from Canliss & Sons, a vendor that had contracts with the Concord Police Department. When I was fresh on the force, three months in, Sergeant Belroy had the flu and I got stuck for three shifts doing accounts-receivable paperwork, and I remember the name. Canliss & Sons was a local concern, a New England outfit that sold the CPD specialized gear: night-vision goggles, Tasers, bipods. Ghillie suits.

Canliss & Sons of New England. I knew it. I knew that name.

“Hello? Nico’s brother?” says Jordan, waving his hands over his head like semaphore. “Are we done?”

“We are, yes,” I say. “We are done, and I’m going.”

“Wow,” he says, leaning forward to click off the monitor. “It’s like you’re allergic to it.”

“To what?”

“To saying thank you.”

“Thank you, Jordan,” I say, and I mean it, I do. “Thank you very much.”

He only turned off the monitor, I notice in passing, not the hard drive, meaning that my search is still sitting there, and my search history, a fact that does not make me wild with excitement. But I don’t have any more time to mess around. I have to go—I have to go right now.

So of course Jordan leaps up out of his office chair and stands in the doorway. He leans against the lintel; this is his default position, loafing light-heartedly in a doorway, malevolence and aggression teasing out from behind his child’s smile. As for me, I now have a clear and distinct mental image of Martha Cavatone, and she might be in Jeremy Canliss’s basement or she might be in the trunk of a car or under a patch of floorboard, and I must get to her and I must get to her now.

“Jordan, I have to go.”

“Yes, I know that,” he says, thumbs looped in the belt loops of his jeans, just hanging out. “You said. But I just wanted to ask. Do you believe us now?”

“Do I believe what?”