CHAPTER ELEVEN:
A Different Method Now
The radiator repair shop didn’t open until 10:00, and Santiago retrieved his phone and charger at 8:00 the next morning. The air was chilly and he heard thunder in the distance, and he buttoned up his gray hoodie and tapped the heavy angular bulk in his right pocket.
Back in the kitchen, he hung one of the bloodstained cloths from the motorcycle’s clutch lever housing and tucked the other into his left jacket pocket, wheeled the bike outside, and fastened the padlock on the door. He tromped on the kick-starter, and when the engine started he rode quietly out to the street.
The bloodstained cloth hanging from the clutch swung steadily south, and he stopped only occasionally to verify the direction as he rode south on Woodruff Avenue through the suburbs of Lakewood, but when he stopped just past Heartwell Park the pendulum was pulling to the southwest, and he took Los Coyotes Diagonal toward Long Beach. When he came to the big traffic circle he turned west on Pacific Coast Highway—and then after riding several miles he had to reverse course and follow a residential street to the south, past jacaranda trees and apartment buildings and old Spanish-style houses.
He was riding slowly, and when an old green camper truck swept past him going the other way, the pendulum swung back.
The truck’s windshield had been dusty, and Santiago hadn’t been able to make out the driver, but it had to be either Vickery or Castine. He leaned the bike around in a tight half-circle and sped after the truck.
The truck drove up to Pacific Coast Highway and made a fast left turn, but Santiago had to wait for a couple of cars to pass before he could follow, and just when he had caught up and was about to pull alongside and wave, the truck steered away onto an onramp to the 710 freeway.
Santiago rode up the onramp too—nervously, for 125-cc bikes weren’t powerful enough to be legal on freeways. He was able to keep the high camper shell in sight, but the truck was doing about seventy miles per hour in the middle lane, and Santiago, roaring along in fifth gear and watching his rear-view mirrors for light-bars on Highway Patrol cars, wasn’t able to gain on it.
Santiago was at least able to see the truck, most of the time, as it sped for fifteen miles through Bell Gardens and Commerce, but it increased its speed to get onto the northbound 5, and Santiago gave up the chase and rode down the nearest exit lane back onto surface streets.
Now he had to stop every few blocks to hunch over the bloody cloth, and his course was a frustrating series of right and left turns; but the cloth consistently pointed northwest, toward downtown.
As Santiago rode at a more comfortable speed past liquor stores and shacky outdoor restaurants, and rows of little markets and dental offices and off-brand churches painted in different bright colors to distinguish one from another, he noticed a new sort of tent in the homeless encampments along the sidewalks—these were simply made of strings and yellow police tape and scavenged used car lot pennants, useless for blocking sun and wind, much less any eventual rain. When a man came crouching out of one of the frail constructions and began spinning rapidly and then disappeared, Santiago realized that many of the figures slouched on mattresses or shambling aimlessly were in fact ghosts. He kept his bike close to the centers of the streets, and only stopped to check his morbid pendulum in empty parking lots.
Whittier Boulevard was a straight course northwest, and he sped along it without stopping. He crossed the Sixth Street bridge and rode quickly past more crowded and malodorous tent clusters on the sidewalks—noting several of the new ghost tents—and took a northbound street, toward downtown and safer curbside spots to check the pendulum.
A few minutes later he rode up onto the sidewalk by the entrance to a four-story tan parking structure, switched off the engine and flipped down the kickstand.
He got off the bike and walked along the sidewalk, carrying the dangling brown cloth, and after a dozen steps it swung toward the parking garage’s entrance. Santiago had noticed three rows of big bells in a wide opening in the wall next to the parking structure, and he recognized the place as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. The lopsided bell tower wasn’t visible beyond the high wall.
Vickery or Castine—probably both of them—were obviously in the parking garage. Santiago walked back to where he had parked his bike and flipped up the kickstand, but didn’t start the engine; instead he began walking it back toward the garage entrance.
There was nobody in the ticket booth between the garage’s entry and exit lanes, and Santiago pushed his bike up the driveway, past the horizontal bar and into the shadowed parking structure. He quickly wheeled it to the right and stopped beside a van tall enough to conceal the motorcycle. He tucked both of the blood-stiff cloths into the gap between the tachometer and speedometer dials.
Square blue and white pillars stood at every third parking space, blocking some lines of sight, but there were not many cars parked in here on this Monday morning. Peering over the sloped hood of the van, Santiago could clearly see Vickery and Castine standing by a walled pedestrian ramp fifty feet away, near a bald old man who appeared to be holding a handgun pointed at them. A moment later Santiago realized that it must be some sort of tool, for though the old man held it steadily, the cylindrical gold barrel swiveled from side to side, and when it was pointing away the boy could see a red light on the back of it.
When the old man turned and took two measured steps in Santiago’s direction, the boy recognized him by his bald head and scuffed leather jacket—it was Pierce Plowman, a flying-saucer nut he had met a few times in the freeway-side gypsy nests.
The parking garage ceiling, low and ribbed with a network of suspended pipes, provided good acoustics. “Obviously it works,” said Plowman irritably, “L.A. is silty clay soil from the 134 south to the 10, with a dielectric resistance of about eight. This thing,” waving the device in his hand, “sends ultrawide radar waves, very low pulse power in the C band, and these antennas are partly iron fulgurites from a sand angel out by Giant Rock. It can detect stuff thirty meters down.”
The gold barrel of Plowman’s hand-held device began spinning. With an air of proving a point, he crouched and made a mark on the cement floor with a piece of blue chalk. Santiago saw now that there was a curved line of such marks across the cement floor behind the old man.
“That’s the last of it.” Plowman stood back and pulled an old Kodak One Step camera from his jacket pocket. “I’ve been here since 6:00,” he said, speaking around the camera as he took a picture of the chalk marks, “and I’ve got all the missing sections now. You two can take off, you’re not part of this.”
Castine burst out, “Not part of this? Who was it that an UAP just about sat on last night? A UFO, that is. And who—”
“And you’re AWOL from Naval Intelligence,” Plowman interrupted, “and they’re probably hot on your trail right now. Go get caught somewhere besides where I am!” The camera ejected a picture, and he held it up to his face and blew furiously on it.
Santiago’s pocket was warm, and when he pulled out his phone he saw that its battery was already down to 74 percent. Somebody was apparently using it remotely, almost certainly tracking it; possibly Galvan, but from what Plowman had just said, Santiago guessed that it was the men Galvan had described as “secret agent types”—Naval Intelligence, pursuing Vickery. Big government guys like that could surely have eavesdropped on Galvan’s call to Santiago, and got his phone number.
And his phone had been in one place all night, charging; and if they had followed it this morning, they would not have had to stay close enough for him to notice the tail.
They could be right outside.
Santiago dropped his phone and sprinted across the empty parking spaces and the exit lane; the three people by the ramp heard his tennis shoes squeaking on the cement floor, and were staring at him by the time he reached them.
“Up the ramp!” he gasped, “crouched low behind the wall!”
The sunlight at the garage entrance dimmed as a vehicle pulled into the driveway and paused at the ticket dispenser.
Castine, Vickery and Plowman had all instantly obeyed Santiago, and a moment later they were following the boy up the ramp, staying below the wall-mounted hand-rail, and then hurrying across a lobby past ticket payment kiosks. Once through the glass doors on the far side, they were out in a gray paved couryard, squinting up at the tall brown angularity of the cathedral towering stark against the blue sky. Again Santiago heard remote thunder.
“What are we running from?” whispered Castine. Her hand was inside her coat, and Santiago was sure she was gripping a gun.
He just waved and led them forward.
The four of them ran up a set of gray cement steps to a broad tan plaza. Castine glanced toward a garden area on the north side of it, but Santiago ignored that and ran past a row of palm trees toward a black marble doorway at the base of the sheer cathedral wall a hundred feet away. To the left of it, a decorative steel gate was open onto Temple Street and a groundskeeper truck had backed through it onto the plaza.
Santiago could hear the other three pounding along behind him. A uniformed security guard by the doorway had stepped forward, shading his eyes, but Santiago veered left, toward the open gate. When he reached it he quickly unzipped his hoodie and pulled it off, shivering in just a white T-shirt. The jacket swung heavily in his hand.
Castine, Vickery and Plowman crowded up, panting, and the four of them stepped through the gate and began walking rapidly west on the Temple Street sidewalk, in and out of the shadows of curbside pepper trees. Vickery was visibly shortening his stride so that the other three could keep up.
Santiago noticed that Plowman was still carrying the gold-barreled radar device, which he now saw had six short, crooked stone rods attached to the bottom of it, and told him sharply to put it away. Plowman nodded and hastily pulled the rods out of the device and tucked it all into his jacket, which was already bulky with the camera in his pocket.
“I’ve seen you in the nests sometimes,” the old man said to Santiago.
Santiago nodded and made sure to hold his balled-up hoodie in front of him, out of sight to anyone back at the parking garage.
Three stout middle-aged women in sun-hats and bright, flowery dresses were strolling along ahead of them, and Castine said quietly, “Let’s hide on the far side of these nice ladies.”
Vickery nodded, and one by one they sidled around the women, who were soon several yards behind them.
For several seconds none of them spoke, and the only sound was the scuff of various shoes on the sidewalk.
“I’ll look back,” said Santiago finally. He turned all the way around as he kept walking, briefly peering between the hats of the three women, and when he was facing forward again he said, “Some guys standing by the driveway. Keep walking, slow.”
“Looking toward us?” asked Vickery.
“Looking all around, it seemed like.”
Castine was facing straight ahead as she strode along, but she took a moment to glance down at him. “You’re Santiago. I remember you.”
“I remember you guys too.”
“Who,” she asked him, “are we running from?”
“Probably what Mr. Plowman said,” answered Santiago, “Naval Intelligence? I, uh—I think I led them to you. Well, it’s Galvan’s fault.”
“We’re parked under the Music Center up here on Grand,” said Vickery. “Let’s cross at the light. Galvan? How?”
“Some guys went to see her yesterday,”Santiago said, “wanting to know how to find you. She told me they didn’t offer her money, but I think they did.”
“She wouldn’t have acted on it otherwise,” said Vickery sourly.
“Well,” said Santiago, “she called me to see could I find you, and I think the Naval Intelligence guys got my number and tracked my phone. The battery was way down just now, and the phone was hot. I left it in the garage—along with my bike.” He thought of telling Vickery about the blood cloths, but decided that that news could wait at least a few minutes.
“And my car’s in there!” said Plowman. He scowled at Vickery. “I told you yesterday to keep away from me, and now you’ve got Frankie’s murderers right where I left my car!”
Santiago looked at Vickery. “Your turn to see if they’re coming.”
“Okay.” Vickery turned as if to speak to Castine, and took the opportunity to glance quickly behind them. Several men were indeed standing in front of the parking garage, one of them out in the street. They appeared to be looking in all directions.
“They’re there,” he said, “but they’re not coming this way.”
Santiago nodded, but watched traffic and sidewalks, ready to sprint away from the others if black cars should suddenly drive up onto the sidewalk to block their way. He glanced up at Vickery, then at Castine, and wondered what sort of trouble they had got themselves into now. Vickery was tanned, and his hair had more gray in it than it had a year ago; Castine was maybe thinner than she had been when he’d last seen her, and she looked tired.
We’ve worked together in the past, Santiago thought, but whatever their troubles are now, they’re not mine.
At the Grand Street intersection the crosswalk light had just turned green, but Santiago glanced to the east and said, tensely, “Wait! Cross two at a time, slow, and break up Vickery and Castine. Be tourists.”
Plowman grudgingly offered Castine his arm, and the two of them stepped forward into the crosswalk; four seconds later Santiago nodded to Vickery, and they sauntered along several yards behind the others.
They regrouped at the corner, and crossed Grand Street paired again. On the far sidewalk, finally out of sight of the parking garage, they all began walking rapidly south.
Castine glanced from Santiago to Plowman. “We can all drive around for a while, and drop the two of you back there after they’ve gone.”
“After we get a few questions answered,” added Vickery. “For instance,” he went on, looking to the side at Santiago, “I get it that some guys who might be Naval Intelligence apparently followed you here by tracking your phone—but how did you find us?”
“Ahh,” said Santiago on a long exhalation. “I came to warn you about Galvan and those men. And I told you to duck and hurry up that ramp, right?—so they wouldn’t get you?”
“Right. And thanks for that. How?”
Santiago looked back toward the cathedral corner, but the men he had seen come out of the parking garage entrance had not followed them to the intersection.
“A year and a half ago,” the boy said slowly as he strode along, “I shot that Harlowe man, down by the beach. Well, you did too. A couple more people got shot that night, and everybody ran away. Not me. I went to the parked cars—”
On the other side of Vickery, Castine stopped, then hurried to catch up. “Oh my God,” she said softly, “I bet Harlowe had them in his car! Did you break into his car?”
“It didn’t seem like a big thing,” said Santiago defensively, “after killing him.”
“Had what in his car?” said Vickery; then, “Oh! Yeah.”
“Where’s your goddamn car?” growled Plowman. “I’ve got to get out of this whole area.”
“The cloths with our blood on them,” said Castine, ignoring Plowman. “Where are they?”
Santiago shrugged miserably. “On my bike. Shoved into the top of the fork. But those guys won’t know what they are.”
Vickery looked across Santiago at Castine. “Would they know what they are?”
“I told you yesterday at Cole’s,” said Castine crossly, “No, they—they haven’t—”
She paused, and Vickery raised a hand, prompting.
Castine shook her head. “Let’s hope those guys don’t find them.”
They had reached the entrance to the Music Center’s underground parking garage. “In here,” said Vickery. “I think we’d better start driving in big fast circles.”
Joel Finehouse led Vilko Cendravenir and the three Sensitive Assignment Specialists back into dimness of the parking garage.
There had been no difficulty in following the target phone, which had clearly been carried by the young man on the little blue Honda, until the bike had exited the 710 freeway. Down in the surface streets, the young man had ridden such an erratic course through the city, pausing frequently to get off the bike and hunch over something, that they had followed a block or so back, trusting the phone’s signal to keep them from losing him. They had not seen him ride into this parking garage, and had driven past and had to find a way back to it—and when they had turned in and parked, the phone had been lying on the cement floor near the motorcycle, but there had been no one in the garage.
Finehouse had immediately sent two specialists up to the cathedral’s plaza level, and one of them had radioed to report that a security guard had seen four people run out of the plaza by a gate onto Temple. Finehouse, Cendravenir and three of the specialists had rushed out onto the sidewalk, but there had been pedestrians visible in both directions, none hurrying, no group of four, and no visible boy in a gray hoodie. It seemed likely that the four runners had got into a car.
Finehouse tucked the radio back into the pocket of the casual green windbreaker he wore today, and looked around the extent of the dim garage.
The little motorcycle was the only vehicle in the garage whose engine was hot, and another specialist, a man Finehouse believed was named Atkins, was just finishing the job of attaching a GPS tracker inside the bike’s left side cover and snapping the cover back in place.
Cendravenir lit one of his clove cigarettes. “I suppose one of the four people running out of the gate was your man Vickery.”
“Probably.” Finehouse waved the smoke away and walked to the center of the exit lane. He looked down at the blue chalk marks that made a curve across the cement floor, then at the sunlit garage entrance.
“The kid’s phone was motionless all night,” he said, mostly to himself, “down around Bellflower, and at eight he rode down to Pacific Coast Highway, then he rode up the 710 for fifteen miles and got off in East L.A. At that point he started the stop-and-go zig-zag pace till he got here. He must have been tracking Vickery, by sight and then by remote, same as we were tracking him.” To his annoyance, he heard a trace of east Tennessee in his voice, and cleared his throat. “We need to talk to the kid.”
Cendravenir dropped his cigarette and brushed sparks off his turtleneck sweater. “Are we going to wait for him to come back for his bike? I haven’t had breakfast.”
“We can’t wait around here,” said Finehouse. “We’ll catch up with the boy later, when he’s in some less populated area.”
“Chief,” called Atkins, “this is weird.”
Finehouse walked over to where Atkins was standing by the bike; two stiff brown rags lay on the seat now, and Atkins was wiping his hands on his shirt.
“They were shoved between the tach and the odometer dials,” Atkins said.
Finehouse saw that each rag had a wire tied around it, and he gingerly took hold of a wire and lifted one of them.
“That’s dried blood,” said Cendravenir. “You remember how he kept stopping the bike to mess with something? I bet he was using these as pendulums to point toward Vickery.”
“You think that’s Vickery’s blood?” asked Finehouse.
“It’s not fresh, obviously,” said Cendravenir, “but it was Vickery he was supposed to be trying to find, right?”
Finehouse wrinkled his nose in distaste. This assignment was already outside the bounds of sensible science, but now it was beginning to sound like witchcraft.
“And these chalk marks on the floor mean something,” Cendravenir added. “Magic symbols, maybe.”
“One of you guys photograph the marks,” said Finehouse tiredly. To Cendravenir he said, “Can that happen? That pendulum business?”
“I never heard of doing it with blood,” said Cendravenir, “but people dowse with pendulums all the time, and anybody’s vulnerable to all sorts of stuff if they leave samples of their blood lying around.” He lifted one of the rags by its attached wire and held it out in front of him. His hand was steady, and the brown rag stopped swinging after only a couple of seconds; and it was hanging a few degrees away from vertical, toward the southwest.
With his free hand, Cendravenir pointed in the same direction. “I think Vickery is that way.”
He might be, thought Finehouse—assuming startling new extensions of science can be discerned in vulgar litter in the hands of society’s detritus.
“I wonder why he needed two,” said Cendravenir. He lifted the other rag, and after a few seconds it hung with a visible inclination in the same direction as the other. “They both seem to point to Vickery.”
“One’s pointing to Agent Castine,” said Finehouse with weary certainty. “They have a history together . . . and apparently at some point somebody took some of their blood, to keep track of them.”
“That’s a history, all right,” allowed Cendravenir, putting the things back down on the motorcycle seat. “Breakfast?”
Finehouse, staring at the two blood-stiffened rags, didn’t answer.
Commander Lubitz had briefed Finehouse on Vickery and Castine. He had mentioned that the Transportation Utility Agency, where Castine had been employed until 2017, had tried, with some evidence of success, to summon and use ghosts in aid of motorcade security. Lubitz believed something traumatic happened to both Vickery and Castine at around that time, something that left them with what he called distempor—imperfect mooring in discrete sequential time.
When the TUA had been closed down in a flurry of nondisclosure mandates, most of its personnel had simply been fired or pensioned off—but Ingrid Castine had been transferred to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and then to the Office of Naval Research, because of certain anomalies in her record and behavior.
What these branches of the government had begun doing was covertly testing her for possibly useful extrasensory skills. In briefing Finehouse, Lubitz had described arranged situations in which, for example, an important Top Secret file in Castine’s custody was taken from her desk while she was in the rest-room; when she had returned to her desk, a hidden video camera in her office had shown her several times freeze, staring into space, after which she had gone unerringly to the person who had taken the file. And one time when they’d known that she’d be eating alone in the cafeteria at noon, they had told one of her co-workers to occupy Castine’s usual table half an hour earlier and leave a red-banded ONI flash-drive on Castine’s usual seat, as if by accident; and when Castine had arrived at the vacated table, she had stood and stared at the seat for nearly a minute, and then returned the flash-drive to the co-worker.
Telepathy, clairvoyance? Lubitz had come up with the distempor theory instead: that in these instances she had looked into the recent past.
Lubitz had told Finehouse that he had immediately thought of Sebastian Vickery. Vickery and Castine had both been subjected to the same ordeal, whatever it had been, in 2017, and so Vickery might have acquired the same ability that Castine had.
But tracing Vickery had been difficult.
Under his real name, Herbert Woods, Vickery had been a Secret Service agent, but after he killed two TUA agents in 2013 he had effectively disappeared until briefly resurfacing four years later to participate with Castine in the TUA debacle. It was known that he had previously worked for Anita Galvan’s “supernatural evasion” car service, and Lubitz had found evidence that he had on at least a couple of occasions been quietly employed by an LAPD detective to describe the recent past of fresh crime scenes. Good enough evidence of distempor.
And so Lubitz had conceived Operation Pleiades, on the then-dubious supposition that—since UAPs moved in ways that seemed impossible within the limitations of normally measured sequential time—two minds simultaneously violating the boundaries of the moment of now, in a location noted for UAP activity, might attract and focus the attention of the theoretically atemporal UAPs.
Operation Pleiades was a private hobbyhorse project of Lubitz’s, and he had planned to try it later in the year, after definitively locating Vickery and conducting further tests of Castine’s ability. But everything had come to a head very quickly—Lubitz had learned that he was soon to be transferred to a European embassy, and three nights ago Castine had fortuitously confirmed her ability by looking a few minutes into the past in a crop circle in England.
Lubitz had arranged Castine’s immediate reassignment to ONI and forced the re-scheduling of the fake-UAP drop, and had planned to capture Vickery and Castine together, and then fly Finehouse and Cendravenir to California to do the actual operation some days later. Vickery and Castine would then have been induced to look into the past, thus ideally summoning a cluster of UAPs, at which point Cendravenir was to have done his mimicry trick with a bunch of chrome-plated aluminum spheres. Lubitz believed the UAPs would have perceived the mimicry and responded, establishing the beginning of communication.
Hah! thought Finehouse now.
Given Vickery’s documented involvement in the flying saucer subculture, it had been a natural but costly mistake to draw him out of hiding by faking a UAP crash at Giant Rock and having Castine be there to identify him. But Lubitz should have considered the possibility that the two of them might—as had evidently happened—simultaneously do their distempor trick there and then.
“What?” said Finehouse now. “Oh—we can stop at a McDonald’s and get some stuff to eat in the car. Atkins, fetch those . . . those pendulums. I believe we’re tracking Vickery and Castine both, now.”
And he would have to report this new development to Lubitz. It would be good to capture both Vickery and Castine, but Finehouse wasn’t looking forward to phrasing the report: Using rags soaked in the blood of the subjects as directional pendulums . . . Lubitz would probably take it in stride, and anybody hacking their communications would surely assume it was code, but Finehouse resented the circumstances that made it necessary.
He walked to the SUV and opened the passenger side door. “Let’s move on. Atkins, are they still together?”
“Both in the same direction, anyway. Pretty directly south now.”
“Okay,” said Finehouse, “everybody get in the vehicle.” He reminded himself that this was science, arguably—but he felt as if he’d swallowed a watermelon seed, or closed a pocket knife that somebody else had opened.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out and touched the screen. “Finehouse.”
“I’ve just now had a report from Agent Yoneda,” came Lubitz’s voice. “She’s unwisely chosen to go solo, but she’s still functioning, and she’s given me an address for Sebastian Vickery, though he’s likely to have abandoned it.”
“We’re tracking him now. He’s moving.”
“By that phone number you got last night?”
“That, at first,” said Finehouse. He took a deep breath. “We’re using a different method now . . .”