Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“And what did Terry tell him?” Jenko asked.

“He let him rant for a while,” Aaron said, “about sex, money, porno. They got drunker. Eventually Terry got his name. So we checked him out.”

“Well?” Jenko ask.

“He rented a cargo van from our little fleet, out of Boston though, just a few months back. We had the girls look at that particular van, and Erin said, yeah, it had the same little dent in the door she remembered. Then we showed her the footage and said he looked right, though he’d had sunglasses and a baseball cap on then. She couldn’t be sure. But the other girls confirmed it was him.”

“So what will we do?” Jenko asked himself aloud.

“This is the thing. Terry kept encouraging him that night, about what he wished would happen to all those ‘disgusting’ people. Lewis started saying some strange stuff… He talked about wanting to give.”

Jenko laughed. “Give?”

“Give, yeah.”

Jenko peered at the image on screen, Lewis caught mid-stride, a leg hanging in the air. “He does have the look of money. Money hard done. His name, his father.”

“Leo, the trader.”

“I kept money with him at one time,” Jenko said. “He did well for me. Twenty-five percent, year on year. But I don’t think he or his son has anything much to give now. Everyone pulled out of that fund. Trust is everything — and Leo couldn’t be trusted anymore.”

“A half million is what he said.”

“That sounds like drunk talk to me. Bragging.”

“That’s not what we think.”

“Well, I suppose things could have improved for Leo. Sure. It’s possible. So then, how will the son ‘give’?”

“He didn’t know exactly,” Aaron said. “He kept talking about these porno awards—”

“In Vegas.”

“Yeah—”

“What about them?”

“He wished he could give those people something.”

“Not the money, I guess.”

“He wants them — I mean, the way he put it, he wants them to get some air.”

“Is that a joke? If it is, I don’t think I get it.”

“This is nuts, but Terry thinks he meant, like, halothane or BZ. Gas. At the ceremony. For the half mil.”

“Ah.” Jenko smiled and tapped the table twice with his middle and ring fingers. “You believe this.”

“Not to hurt anyone is what he said. Only to make them ‘see things.’”

“And exactly how gone was he when he said this? Or how gone was Terry, that’s what we should be asking.”

“I mean, it’s true, he did look like he hadn’t slept in a while.”

“The fantasies we have.”

“But he also sounded like he could mean what he said. Terry wouldn’t have bothered me with this otherwise.”

“And Terry’s very bright?”

“Look, we already know he kicked the shit out of all these whores. Isn’t that fucking crazy too? Why couldn’t he mean it?”

The two of them held a long look.

“So what did Terry say to him, after hearing all this?” Jenko asked finally.

“Nothing, of course. He just listened. Lewis had no idea he was basically talking to you. But we can get back to him. It’ll be easy to find him now, see if he’s really game to go through with this. And if it’s all bullshit, we’ll know. Nothing’s lost.”

“Five hundred thousand is actually not enough to fill an auditorium with an airborne agent, even just an incapacitator. There are the usual risks for us. Every incident, every event, brings another risk with it. And this one would be very large. The logistics, getting to all the vents without detection. But then, it is a life sentence for Lewis.”

“Probably.”

“And if you add the beatings, that’s more than life.”

“But we don’t want to touch those, right. A bunch of those whores are ours. It could lead them here.”

“Can you please stop calling them whores?”

“Girls, I mean.”

“Better. So then there’s the gas. Let’s talk to Leo’s little boy and check his nerve. Terry can handle it, if you feed him the information?”

“And if he’s looking for some time off.”

“Otherwise someone else. Somebody’s always looking.”

“So, halothane, BZ, what?”

“Do we actually need it? To make this work for us? If we have everything else set up and call in the anonymous tip just before, we could probably just pretend about the agent itself.”

“Oh. Well, I guess—”

“But check the labs. Talk to him first, of course, make sure this is real. And then, sure, we can think about doing exactly what we say this time. It would be easier to bury Lewis in a trial with everything being authentic. Trust, you know.”

Four tall steps and stagg was up on the dais, a maroon folio tied with raw leather string in his hand. Kames clasped Stagg’s shoulder and gave him a single deep nod as they passed each other near the lectern.

It surprised Stagg to see the auditorium as full as it was — at least three quarters — not just because of the arcane topic, or his lack of visibility in the field, but because of the tension surrounding the Institute lately, one he assumed would keep a crowd away. Maybe the turnout meant the full measure of that tension, great as it was, could only be felt by those with special knowledge. How many that was, he couldn’t tell.

A good portion of the audience looked about his age, and of the same background. Some of them must have undertaken watch-work themselves, for reasons like his own. They would know bits and pieces of the tale, even how some of those bits and pieces fit together, just as he did. Some might well know more.

It was a condition of getting the work, of course, that one concealed the fact, though some confidences would inevitably be made to intimates. And in fact these were calculated for by the agency. But most of the people here were, overtly at least, only intellectual colleagues, or would-be colleagues, and information of that kind, which would have shown them to be colleagues twice over, would not be exchanged, not least for the implication that one was reinforcing the very political order being worried, from all angles, by the Institute.

Kames’s introduction had been kind and Stagg was about to falsify it. His essays were not critiques, not in any clear sense, even to him. Or if they were, they transcended his intentions, not only his past ones, but the ones he had now, which seemed to extend no further than reading out the pages he’d brought with him.

Worse, these pages were ones Kames hadn’t reviewed. Stagg was taking a detour. Renna was right, the future of the Institute was uncertain now in ways deeper than its director could know. Deeper even than Stagg knew, probably. What he’d reported back to Penerin, of his last conversation with Kames, in the garden, had made his Second Watch supervisor cagey about his own plans in a way that was new to Stagg. Penerin probably had other information by then as well, perhaps from Ravan. Not that he was going to share all of it with Stagg. In truth, their dealings were only partly above board. Penerin told him only as much as he wanted to. Just like Kames. When matters got complicated, both his bosses turned elliptical.

The thing that was certain now was that a shift had occurred. By the time the elections came and went, there might well be no possibility of a Wintry fellowship left. Penerin’s evasions suggested as much. Their ambiguities had turned his words, like Kames’s, into a cryptic — or better, encrypted — poetry.

Now it was Stagg’s turn. Instead of the main essays, he’d brought only scattered appendices with him, bits that captured the tiniest flashes of light and no more. If the earlier pieces were shards, these were specks. But wasn’t it possible, he thought, that they reflected more, like a dust of diamonds? They felt realer to Stagg in their discreteness than the longer tableaus he’d assembled with such pain. Perhaps they managed to say more, in their compression, about him and his several selves, his family, and about history, than the rest of what he’d written, even if he was less sure he could fully survey their meaning. That was the problem, the virtue, of poetry. It outran you.