Paul McEuen - Spiral

“Lawrence?”

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“You need to get to Manhattan. Now.”

DUNNE WAS EDGY AS HE RODE IN THE SPEEDING LIMO, THE police escort’s horns blaring as they headed for Reagan National Airport. The President had sounded rattled, his trademark confidence shaken. The two men knew each other well. When the POTUS had started his improbable run at the White House, Dunne had been one of his earliest supporters and his primary foreign-policy adviser on Asian affairs. When he’d won in a landslide that surprised even his dedicated supporters, the President had rewarded Dunne with the position of deputy national security adviser. He’d offered Dunne the national security adviser job, but Dunne preferred to stay out of the media spotlight, where he could focus on policy rather than polish.

Now Dunne was on the phone with the deputy director of the FBI, William Carlisle, who described the situation with the Times Square victim: “Twenty-three years old, Japanese. Recently had his middle right finger chopped off, the wound crudely cauterized. He was incoherent, raving, clearly under the influence of a hallucinogenic, as yet unidentified.”

“What do we know about him?”

Carlisle sounded as though he was reading. “Undergrad at Columbia, art major. Specializes in sculpture, small pieces made from bits of wire. Originally from Tokyo. Nothing else in his background is unusual. Father is a low-level diplomat at the Japanese embassy in Ottawa, mother a poet. A team’s interviewing them now. So far nothing remarkable about him, save one thing. You ready? The kid’s name is Hitoshi Kitano.”

For a second, Dunne thought he hadn’t heard right. He thought of the eighty-five-year-old man with the same name rotting in jail. “ Hitoshi Kitano? You gotta be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

He still couldn’t believe it. For reasons unknown to Carlisle, Dunne had hoped the name Hitoshi Kitano would be forever relegated to the roll at Hazelton prison. He cleared his throat. “Any relation?”

“None. Nothing that we can find. There’s no connection. It’s either coincidence or—”

“Or it’s a goddamn message.”

JAKE UNLOCKED THE DOOR TO HIS APARTMENT AND STEPPED into the darkness. He stood in the entryway for a moment, listening. The steam pipes of the old building clanked. The compressor on his refrigerator turned on with a click and a hum. Everything was just as it always was. Except that it wasn’t.

The autopsy report was clear: Liam Connor had been tortured. His tongue had been glued to the bottom of his mouth. Fibers consistent with a straitjacket were on his shirt. And they’d found four MicroCrawlers in his stomach, along with thousands of tiny rips to the tissues, a lot of internal bleeding. The pathologist said that Liam would probably have died from the internal bleeding, had he not jumped.

This was now a whole other kind of nightmare. The FBI was taking over, the search for the woman on the bridge going national. They were even going to put out an APB on the nine Crawlers still unaccounted for. Finding them was no longer the job of a couple of graduate students and campus police but of the entire law-enforcement apparatus of the country. The FBI was worried that the Crawlers might be a part of a larger plan, might be used as a vector for a biological attack. Becraft had also talked to the man at Fort Detrick, General Arvenick. He said they’d be sending more people in the morning.

He and Maggie had barely talked on the drive back from the police. She was too upset. She was crying most of the time. “Who would do that?” she’d kept saying. “Torture a sweet old man?”

It killed Jake to see her so upset. He could barely stand it.

Rivendell had been dark when they’d pulled up the long gravel driveway. Jake had walked her to the door. “Maggie, I’m going to stay here tonight.”

“No. I’ll be all right. I need some time alone. To think about what I’m going to say to Dylan.”

“I can sleep out here in the car. Keep watch.”

She forced a smile. “Jake. Thank you. You’ve done a great deal already. There’s a police car at the head of the road. I’ll be all right. Go home.”

“You sure you don’t want me to—”

She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Go home. We’ll talk in the morning.”

JAKE TURNED ON THE TV, WENT TO CNN TO SEE IF THEY’D picked up on any of this yet. He found nothing but a weather report—it was snowing farther north.

He went to the bedroom, flicking on lights as he went. He pulled the sheet of paper from his pocket, the one Liam had left for him. “Jake, Please watch after them. —Liam.”

Jake could see it now, in hindsight. Liam had been gently pushing Jake and Dylan together since at least the summer. He would bring Dylan over to Jake’s labs, leave the two of them alone together. He was setting Jake up to step in.

“Please watch after them.” What the hell does that mean? Look after them? Protect them? From what? Did he know someone was after him? And if so, why didn’t he tell someone?

Jake went to his closet and pulled out something he hadn’t touched in a couple of years. His soldier’s pack. He dragged it out. It left a trail of sand. You could never get the sand out of things. It was everywhere.

What Jake hated most was its mutability. You dig a foxhole, the walls would cave in. The wind comes up, the sand comes in, pulling down and down on you. Jake had read a book once, two years after the war, that had caught it right. The Woman in the Dunes , by the Japanese author Kōbō Abe. Jake had dreams of the sand walls coming down, burying him. You dig and dig, and every day the sand is still there. That’s what Jake felt like. Like he was being buried.

A crazy idea was forming, taking slow shape in Jake’s mind. He kept thinking about what Liam had told him, the superweapon the Japanese had developed. The sinking of the ship in the Pacific, all those soldiers killed. It was conceivable that all this—Liam’s death, the stolen Crawlers—was connected to the secrets that Liam had told him, his stories about the Uzumaki. Liam had sworn Jake to secrecy, said it was still classified, one of the last great secrets of that long-ago war. At the time, Jake had thought that Liam was just an old man unburdening himself. But was there more to it? Did the woman torture Liam to find out what he knew?

MAGGIE COULDN’T SLEEP, EVEN THOUGH THE HOUSE WAS pin-drop quiet. It had taken her an hour before she settled down enough to even think straight. She kept being assaulted by images of her grandfather in pain. Her grandfather writhing in agony. Her grandfather screaming…

Why had she sent Jake away? The feelings he aroused disturbed her, kept her off-balance. He was great with Dylan, but still she was nervous around him. She needed to keep her distance. She hoped she’d be strong enough.

She tried to calm herself, tried to think it through. On the table before her was the folder Mel Lorince had left. Beside it were the directions to the letterbox. And next to that the disk with the glowing, pulsing fungus shapes: the mushroom, the arrowhead, and the Crawler.

He hadn’t committed suicide, she knew that for sure now. He had jumped, but it was to get away from the woman. At least that made sense. Horrifying as it was, at least that made sense . But what about the letterbox, the glowing fungi—what were they about? It couldn’t be a coincidence that he had left this trail for them to follow right before he died. They must have missed something. Liam had left something else behind for them to find.