Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Graves…”

“Bobby Graves,” said Blake, “is the founder of Tidemark.”

Cooper continued, his eyes narrowing after a long nasal inhale. “To Graves, the trees there represent an alphabet, and by walking through the woods one can spell out one’s own destiny.”

For a moment he seemed lost in thought. It was clear from his tone that Cooper had respect for this Graves person.

“Blake said you thought I could help,” I said.

“Right! Yes, your idea for writing a novel.”

“Well, that’s not—”

“Blake tells me you’ve been writing. Is this true?”

“Well, you know, I’ve just been…Yes. Why not.”

“That’s what I like to see: own it! Graves happens to be a big supporter of the arts, so what I’d like you to do is go in there, notebook in hand, and explain that you’re writing a novel about a person going through a program like Tidemark, someone who’s experimenting, for instance, with the technology they use.”

The house was silent for a moment, save for the soft crackle and snap of glossy paper. Cooper was dressed in the same suit he’d worn before, or perhaps he had more than one identical suit. I admired its crispness.

“You want me to take notes,” I said.

“It’s what I want notes on, though. That’s the kicker.”

“Weyerhaeuser.”

Cooper snapped his fingers. “Attaboy. Of course, it’s my duty to tell you that your role as an FBI informant is strictly voluntary — I hope I haven’t led you to believe otherwise. There is also the matter of pay, which will be taxable, and some other paperwork that we’ll go over should you decide to volunteer your energy. But before we get into all that, please, tell me, are you interested at all in helping?”

I put my coffee cup on the map’s key, already rippled and stained with several brown rings. “Can you tell me any more about the case? Kinda hard to know whether I’d want to help without knowing what’s going on.”

“Ah, well, there’s the rub. You see, until I get a verbal agreement from you, I’m afraid I can’t disclose any more details than I already have.”

Blake had put down her magazine and was now watching our conversation intently.

“Did you go through this?” I asked.

She nodded.

Cooper grinned, as though marveling at this gem of a paradox. One thing that was clear to me was that if I wanted to know more about his relationship with Blake — if I wanted to come between them — I was going to have to play along with this little mission. I was going to have to involve myself.

“When is this retreat?” I asked.

Cooper was standing over his map, but turned quickly, not a hair out of place. “Tomorrow.”

On the drive to Discovery Park, Dale gabbed away nonstop, commenting on the drivability of compact cars, the city’s decision to raise rather than bury power lines, the improbably steep northern slope of Queen Anne, footbridges in general, the danger and beauty of trees planted on the median, the smells of low tide and of crustaceans in particular, and, before I stopped paying attention, a Mister Freezee truck that reminded him of a large fissure that had been discovered in something called the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

“Mark my words,” he said jovially, “that’s going to come around and nip us in the tuchus.”

After a crash course in Tidemark Forum’s trademark technology, called Existencelastic Macrobial Foreshortening — something that, even having been explained to me, made utterly no sense — Dale announced that in addition to explaining more about the case, he’d like to “get to know me better,” and suggested a walk. Blake had volunteered Discovery, and though I didn’t like the idea of a place I still felt was ours being used in this iffy, platonic way, I went along with it. Now here I was, being chauffeured around with this blabbering tour guide. I sat in the back seat’s pooling sun feeling heavy-limbed, somnambulant. Literally along for the ride.

We parked on Emerson and walked along a footpath that splintered after a few yards, one walkway heading west along the park’s border, another straight ahead into a large open field, a third hooking northeast toward some half-abandoned barracks. Still lolling along, I didn’t even notice at first that Blake had gone right where we’d gone left, and I must have looked bewildered, because Cooper spoke to me as though I were a child.

“Don’t worry, Blake. She’ll meet back up with us soon, okay?”

I nodded and inhaled sharply, waking up.

“C’mon,” he said.

We walked down toward the cliff overlooking the water. The park ended in a bluff, a drop-off at the bottom of which ran train tracks where bums and punks would gather. Puget Sound was calm today, and a tanker pushed ponderously toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca, headed out to sea. Gulls circled above it — some, I knew, would ride it across the Pacific, only half-aware that it wasn’t land.

“Blake thinks very highly of you,” Cooper said.

Now that we were alone, I noticed that in addition to being youthful and enthusiastic, his voice was also almost snide, condescending in a good-natured, unintentional way. Which made it worse.

“I want you to know that the Bureau appreciates what you’re doing. Your country appreciates it.”

I nodded solemnly. Who would have thought I’d ever do anything the government approved of, let alone appreciated? It wasn’t more than a few years ago that I’d been protesting the war, dealing drugs a little, doing drugs a lot, and hoping the Northwest would secede from the Union and form something called Cascadia.

We walked farther, down to the crumbling edge of the bluff where metal beams had been hammered into the cliff to hold a railing of railroad ties. It was so overbuilt that I’d often wondered, coming here, if the cliff wouldn’t collapse under the weight of exactly what protected people from falling off of it. The Sound glistened in the sun, and we watched a regatta tacking around buoys outside a marina just south of the park.

“So what will I be doing, exactly?”

Cooper gently grabbed my arm, turning me to face him. “We have reason to believe that Weyerhaeuser’s chief executives are involved in human trafficking.”

“You mean…what do you mean?”

“We’ve been seeing some peculiar activity. This is an organization that makes extensive use of overseas shipping, especially between here and Japan, and some containers have been circumventing Customs, heading straight from the shipping terminal to the Weyerhaeuser Research compound near Eatonville — that spot I showed you on the map. Additionally, special vans have been seen making trips from Research to parts of Seattle, to residential homes. We’ve done our homework. These are not authorized deliveries of any kind, nor can these trips be explained by an officially sanctioned, permitted program, research or otherwise. In a nutshell, Blake, it’s a mystery. We’re actually working closely with the Japanese government because they’ve been seeing the same behavior in another land management company on their side. Now, the trafficking element is just a suspicion so far — we haven’t gathered any conclusive evidence — but the operation conforms to no other pattern we know, so we can’t rule it out.”

Just as he was finishing this sentence, a Golden Retriever bounded up, and without hesitation Cooper crouched down and began to pet the animal, calling it a good dog and scratching behind its ears.

“I want you to know that the Bureau would never put you in harm’s way. You’ll be watched at a distance, and besides, you won’t be going anywhere alone, or even off the property wholly owned by Tidemark. And you know what? If you don’t see anything, or notice anything out of the ordinary, no problem. Your compensation is not dependent on results in any way.”