Scatter, p.26
Scatter, page 26
Or would she eventually stop, try to revive me, win back my favor and enough mental health that we’d try for another go at the demonstration. Or another plan entirely.
Whatever happened in that timeline, I doubted that the Jackson there would ever trust her again.
In this timeline, where her aggressive manipulation had worked…? Would I have been able to make the jump without it?
“What now?” I asked.
Wenling looked at the saved image of the metal box in the forest. “We call my contact in thirty minutes. What was in it?”
“A page of text. On fire.”
Wenling frowned. “On fire.”
“From a chemical reaction, I think, when the lid was opened.” I was about to describe the EMP that burned out the camera, but at the last second, decided not to. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because the last time I mentioned it, in the last timestream, Wenling went mental on me, chased me around the room and ended up on top of me, scratching and punching my face. I shrugged my shoulders, “It was…distinctive.”
Wenling looked unconvinced. “You should get a drink of something before we call. You look terrible.”
I nodded and walked to the fridge. I opened it and considered the wine and beer inside before opting for a glass of water from the sink.
From where she now sat, cross-legged on the floor by the fireplace, still studying the screen capture of the metal box sitting on the forest floor. “If it had only a sheet of paper, why was it so big?”
Because it was mostly an EMP, I thought. I said, “To convey that it could contain anything—and old typewriter, a pair of shoes…”
“What was the text? What did it say?”
“Some kind of philosophical text, I think. The paper had mostly burned by the time the cameraman rushed over to it.” That was a bald-faced lie, but I didn’t think there was anyone who could contradict it, unless SCATTER had somehow tapped into our video feed and had one of their time travelers with my kind of memory watching, then somehow being dragged back to this timestream.
“You can remember some of the words?”
“All the ones I could see.”
“Write them down for me. I don’t want you talking during the phone call.”
“Okay.”
I walked to the kitchen table where Wenling had left her yellow legal pad that she’d been scribbling notes and plans for the day. When she didn’t want me to understand, she just wrote in Chinese characters. Which, of course, I stored away and would look up at some later date.
For now, I scrawled part of a long sentence on a fresh sheet, intentionally paraphrasing it the way an imperfect memory might do. I walked it over to Wenling.
In fact, I’d been reviewing in my head all the words on the paper, intuiting somehow the few that had been burned before I’d seen them. Then I realized I could fill in the missing words because the entire piece was from a book I’d read in a Moral Philosophy elective I’d taken in university. The book was Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The passage that had been burned discussed the warlike, troublesome state of humanity that could only be tamed by allegiance to a strong ruler, ideally a monarch.
Wenling read out loud what I’d written: “Fifth, irrational creatures can’t tell the difference between Injury and Damage, so as long as they’re not being hit, they’re not offended by others, but Man is troublesome.” She looked up. “This is philosophy?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Hm.”
We both fell silent. Wenling continued to study the image of the metal box on her screen, using it to focus, I thought. I wandered around the room, feeling like I was walking along the edge of a precipice. Once more I’d let Wenling batter my mind into needing to jump from a high-stress-and-getting-worse reality to an earlier, simpler one. Which was now this one. Not simple at all, really. It was fraught with a peril, a high-tech, violent gauntlet of it between us and our siblings. Which was where we were going if this demonstration and the last one had done what was needed.
After what seemed like an age, Wenling said, “It’s time to call.”
She’d taken her phone back from me earlier and now used it to dial another secret number. She put the call on speakerphone so that I could listen in, but as the phone started to ring, she told me, “Don’t talk.”
I nodded. It was hard enough remembering to breathe.
Someone picked up on the other end and a very confident male voice, precise and clipped, said, “Nobody got into the box.”
“We did,” said Wenling.
There was a long pause, then, “What did you see inside?”
“A paper.”
“Interesting guess.”
“I caught fire when the lid was opened.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. A chemical reaction, I think,” Wenling said, echoing my earlier theory.
“Interesting, but again it could be a guess.”
Wenling held up the paper I’d given her and read out the passage about irrational creatures and troublesome Man.
There was another long pause and a slight murmuring which suggested the voice on the other end of the line was consulting with someone. It ended with the confident voice saying, “Ha!” in a way that worried me.
Wenling saw my expression and said to the phone, “Is there a problem?”
The man’s voice when he came back on was still precise and clipped, but somehow injected with a kind of contained glee as he said, “Not at all. I’m told that much of the passage your time traveler attempted to recall imprecisely was burned by the time your camera reached the case to look at the page. However, reconstruction of the passage would have been almost automatic for someone who could recall the seventeenth-century book we took it from, word for word. Your memory is every bit as remarkable as that of your siblings, Dr. Traine. Better, perhaps.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. Then it burned as Wenling looked at me, fury twisting her features.
But she didn’t hold the look. With great effort, she brought herself back to neutral, smiling grimly. She clicked off the cell phone’s speaker and raised the phone to her ear. “You acknowledge what I have in my possession.” A beat. “And what I can do with him.”
She looked at me and my skin felt like it was trying to crawl off my body.
The rest of the conversation became an odd guessing game based on Wenling’s words only. “Of course…He knows all about what you did to Kuang Dishi in Taiwan…He has ways…For a week, maybe. Ten days, or…That would be good…No. Develop it. I’ll call you forty-eight hours from now.”
She hung up and looked at me again. This time she pressed her phone close to her chest with both hands and her face wore a grim smile. Then her lips trembled. I wasn’t sure if it was from fatigue, relief, or some real joy that she might actually have taken a concrete step toward getting her brother back. And my siblings too, right?
Wenling tossed her phone onto the couch beside her and turned to me. “We got him,” she said, then stumbled forward into my arms.
I held her stiffly, my heart thudding in my ears.
“No, no, no,” she murmured, burrowing into my chest. “Loosen. He already suspected. And what I said—that you are a thing, my possession—that was a game, you understand? Using his language. It’s how I’ve closed so many deals, speaking the language of others.”
“Is it?”
She looked up into my face, and the tears in her eyes worked their way through my horror and awful suspicions, through my emotional exhaustion and fear. They melted me. “Yes!” she cried. “You and I are partners in this. He knows that. Beyond the words, he knows I am nothing without you. We will get Xiaobo back. And Kenny. And Kansas. And we will expose SCATTER for the fuckers they are.”
She began trembling in my arms so violently that I held her tighter so she didn’t collapse. As I did, she reached up to my face, grabbed it with both her hands, and pulled my lips down to hers.
Her lips burned and shook against mine, transferring their fire. When her tongue forced its way into my mouth, the transference became a gushing torrent of heat, shooting from my toes through my groin and up.
Caught in its mania, I yanked her in closer to me, then just as suddenly released her to yank her knit top up and over her head. She gasped, and I dropped to my knees before her, yanking down her lime green slacks to reveal the taut fruit inside.
She kicked the slacks off her ankles as I rose, and grabbed at the button of my jeans, twisting it open and working down the zipper. Then she pulled down both the jeans and underwear with her as she copied my maneuver, but not rising up again. Instead, she grabbed a part of me she was becoming all too possessive of. But as possession went from hand to the slick heat and motion of her mouth, I decided to allow it.
Just…uh…this…uh…once.
28
Necessary allies
Morning sex led to a morning shower. Together. And more morning sex.
By the end of it, I think Wenling believed, not unreasonably, that she’d soothed my horror at being referred to as a useful tool.
She was still reluctant, though, to tell me exactly what had been agreed to in her phone conversation with the Arrogant Prick who’d figured out my identity, presumably by consulting one of his time travelers about what state the paper had been in when its image was captured.
“Are you sure he spoke for SCATTER?” I pressed her. “It wasn’t the guy I met in the CIA headquarters.”
“He is the one.”
But she wouldn’t say more until I finally snapped mid-afternoon, saying that if we were true partners, she’d bring me into the planning loop. Not all of the operational details, but certainly the big stroke items like her discussion with the AP.
That got me at least the proposed framework of the parlay she and the AP had worked out. Exact location was TBD, but likely in Washington, DC. The date, TBD, but sometime in the next week. There would be an independent broker of known character who would arbitrate.
“No more specifics?” I pressed.
“That’s why we’re calling back in forty-eight hours.”
“Am I going to be there? Are Xiaobo, Kenny, and Kansas going to be there?”
“To be decided.”
I went for a walk.
Chilly day. Overcast sky. Dark, leafless tree swayed back and forth as I wandered among them in the stretch near the bluffs.
I still should have been celebrating. I was going to have a second meeting with SCATTER, presumably with the actual leader, not the violent muscle. (Though it was odd to think of Andre Poussaint as “muscle.”)
The lack of any negotiating framework ate at me, though. We’d shown our knowledge of their operations and the ability to basically replicate their operations. What had we gotten in return? An agreement to meet? That was it?
Maybe I should have been trusting in the Wenling’s expertise in this area. She’d had to have negotiated many deals with shady characters in both China and here in America to make it to where she was now. She’d also actually gotten a direct line into SCATTER. And she’d shown, time and again, her earnest desire to move ahead with this. She’d given me assurance after assurance, both with her words and her body, all of her body.
Yet through all that, Lena’s warning kept sounding in my head: “She plays games. She makes you believe what she needs you to believe.”
That sounded a lot like what Wenling herself had said—that she knew how to speak the language a person needed to hear.
So what was the language I needed? Fierce intelligence plus vulnerability? A trembling lip? Someone who desired me so fiercely they’d make passionate love when challenged about something they’d said?
It was actually making me fall for her, even with Lena’s ghost hovering in the background.
Which gave me guilt. And disbelief that someone as beautiful, successful, and emotionally scarred as Wenling could actually care for me.
“Dude!” I called out to the out-of-sight river to my left, “you need therapy.”
Because that thing she’d said to me in Chinese the first time we’d had sex? Wǒ xǐhuan nǐ. It had taken me a while to track it down using just the phonetics, but it was Mandarin for, I like you. Which was apparently pretty close to, I love you, in a romantic setting. Given unprompted by a woman who knew I spoke no Chinese.
“Accept it!”
Okay, so, assuming I believed Wenling was doing her best, how could lower my stress about this negotiation? Maybe realize we didn’t have to win everything. We just needed our siblings back. Then, if Kansas could find us a congressional oversight committee with clean hands, I’d give them what we knew. Go into witness protection if we had to. Let one arm of the government go after the other. It worked with MK Ultra. Sort of.
It was a plan.
I hitched myself up to a stand and walked back to the house. As I got within about fifty yards, I pulled out my Huawei phone and checked to see if the Wi-Fi connected this far out. It did, barely. If I wanted to make a Skype call, I’d need to go inside. Or…
Detouring to the right of the house on the way back, I walked to the garage/coach house and found the man-door. Rang the bell. As I waited, I checked the Wi-Fi and found it almost as strong as in the main house. A moment later, Colonel Jian answered, wearing an apron. “I am cooking,” he said evenly, in answer to my raised eyebrows.
I checked my watch and realized I’d been out longer than I’d thought. It was almost five. Which meant 8 p.m. in Langley.
“Sorry to disturb, Colonel,” I said. “Quick question. The bedroom where I’m staying in the main house. Is there a chance it’s bugged?”
Jian’s eyes met mine with somber interest. “It may be.”
“Is this house of yours bugged?”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “It is not.”
“Would you mind me making a quick phone call from your place?”
He inclined his head and stepped back to let me in. I entered, and he directed me to his living room/dining room, then hurried past me to the efficiency kitchen on the far side of a small table and that had two chairs. As he proceeded to stir a small pot of sauce and, in a frying pan, flip and stir what looked like celery, egg, and bean sprouts in a pungent, sizzling oil, I pulled out my phone and dialed up Jude for a video call.
He answered on the third ring and his eyes, with even deeper circles under them than the last time, went wide when he saw my face.
“Holy shit, dude!” he yelped. “You’re like Mr. Invisible. I left like twenty voice mails, finally got your office girl on the phone.”
“Megan?”
“That’s her! She told me you were ‘out’ for a while. Couldn’t say where. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Your home and office got trashed? Your girl thinks you and Lena broke up? Again. Like, what the hell?”
I glanced at Jian at the stove, pretending to cook, but no doubt listening. I’d made a calculated bet coming in here to make my call. Here’s where I went all in on it. “There’s a program inside the CIA called SCATTER. You know anything about it?”
Even on the small screen of my phone, I could see Jude blanch. He cleared his throat. “That’s what had you all upset when you were here? Dude, that program was shut down a couple years ago. Before I came out here. Guy who ran it was supposed to be some kind of genius psychiatrist, but went off the deep end, you know?”
“You’re sure it was shut down?”
“That’s… You’re talking like you think it wasn’t.”
“Like I know it wasn’t.”
“Oh, shit.” Jude’s haggard face jerked up and down as she walked to a couch and sat down. When it steadied again, he was visibly sweating and worried. “Andre Poussaint. Is that why you were asking about him? You think he’s…? Is that what you were really here for? What’d you get yourself into, Jackson?”
I looked up and realized that Jian had finished cooking his meal, divided it onto two plates and put the plates on the small table with two sets of chopsticks and two cups, which he was currently filling with hot tea. He caught my eye, stony-faced, and gestured for me to sit. I walked over with my phone, sat, and laid the phone down flat beside my plate of Egg Fu Yung. Jian had sprinkled chopped green onion on top and had a bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce in the center of the table. I had to give him a profound nod of acknowledgement before I looked back at Jude’s face on the phone.
“Who else is there with you?” Jude asked, worried.
“A friend.” Colonel Jian was eating by that point and didn’t acknowledge this. Which was acknowledgement enough, I thought. “Do you know what SCATTER was doing?”
“Rumors,” Jude said evasively. “Kind of paranormal stuff.”
“Time travel.”
Jude squinched his face like I’d just farted at him. “Dude.”
“It’s what you heard because it’s what they’re doing. It’s why they took Kenny.”
“’Took,’ as in forcibly abducted?”
“Yes.”
“Because…”
“He can time travel. Or at least tell when someone else has.”
“Oh, fuck. Jackson, are you on some new meds?”
I stared down at Jude’s face. “I don’t do any drugs. You know that. Like you know exactly what it was SCATTER is studying. You’re too smart and political not to have researched your peers, what they’re working on now, what other programs were going on.”
Jude looked almost like he was going to cry as his round face tightened up around his mouth and his eyebrows drew down over his eyes. Finally he said, “Okay. Yeah. It’s what SCATTER was studying, when it was actually in operation. With a genius psychiatrist heading it, like I said. But everyone says it was shut down two years ago. For abusing research subjects. For wackadoodle science-fictiony claims. I think they put the psychiatrist in jail.”
“They didn’t. And it’s still operating.”
