CHAPTER NINE:
Some Kind of Brujos?
“Agent Castine,” said Yoneda with quiet urgency when Vickery had hurried away toward the bedroom and Tacitus was pulling his pants on in the kitchen, “listen to me carefully, and think. We have Vickery—that is him, right?—and a GRU defector! You and I both screwed up today, but we can come up with a story to explain it all, and come out ahead.” She nodded toward the bedroom. “Just point the gun the other way.”
Castine gave her a tired smile and didn’t move.
“Right now,” Yoneda went on, “you can still have a life. I can way downplay your attack on me this morning. Are you going to throw yourself away, and what?—live off the grid or something?”
Castine considered the course of her life since it had collided with Sebastian Vickery’s. In 2013 she had been a twenty-eight-year-old agent of the Transportation Utility Agency and Vickery had been a thirty-two-year-old Secret Service agent named Herbert Woods. She had had him arrested for breaking protocol during a Presidential motorcade—he had entered a restricted Countermeasures vehicle and inadvertently heard highly classified ghost chatter on a radio—and he had very nearly been summarily executed for it, escaping only by killing two TUA agents. Four years later she had found him among the freeway-side gypsies in L.A., living under the name Sebastian Vickery, and this time she had saved him from arrest by the TUA. It had led to . . . well, it had led to the TUA murdering Eliot Shaw, her fiancé, for one thing. And it had led to Vickery and herself driving a taco truck into the nightmare afterlife known as the Labyrinth; and when they had made their tortuous way back to reality, they had discovered that they no longer fitted securely into sequential time, and could see the recent past in what Vickery called echo-vision. The following year she had flown back to Los Angeles to find him again, for echo-vision had begun intrusively showing both of them the terrible old house in Topanga Canyon that had been torn down in 1969 but was eventually to reappear in a supernatural maelstrom on the tumultuous night of Halloween in 2018.
In the course of all of this, she and Vickery had saved each other’s lives many times. It didn’t even occur to her now to point the gun the other way.
“I’ve done it before,” she told Yoneda. And I’ve somehow managed to come back afterward, she thought. I wonder if I can possibly come back from this without going to prison, or worse.
Vickery reappeared from the bedroom wearing his denim jacket and carrying a black briefcase in his left hand and a .45 semi-automatic in his right.
He eyed the revolver Castine was holding, which had been Tacitus’s. “You okay with that?”
Castine nodded.
To Yoneda and Tacitus, who was standing in the kitchen doorway tucking his wet shirt into his dripping pants, Vickery said, “I think it’d be a good idea for you to finish your drinks and go. I’m going to turn the lights out and leave the door open, so if our Bolsheviks come back they might decide the place is abandoned now.”
Tacitus stepped forward and picked up his glass. “Not Bolsheviks anymore,” he said. He drained the glass and set it down. “Hooligans now. Will you come with me, Rayette?”
Yoneda gave Castine a last, disappointed glance, and looked away. “Yes. Please. I think we should walk the long way around to your car, by the street, not back through the riverbed.” She turned to Castine. “Can I get my gun?”
“Not tonight.”
“Can we take the bottle?” asked Tacitus, nodding toward the fifth of Maker’s Mark, still half-full.
“Not tonight,” said Vickery.
Tacitus nodded sadly, then waved at Vickery’s painting leaning against the bookcase. “If we get an afterward,” he said, “I would like to buy that painting. I don’t know how you managed so nearly to get that strange light.”
“Underpainting,” said Castine.
“If we get an afterward,” said Vickery, “I’ll let you have it. We few, we unsteady few.”
Vickery and Castine backed into the kitchen then, as Yoneda and Tacitus shuffled to the door and descended the steps. Over Vickery’s shoulder Castine watched them recede up the lane, into the pool of streetlight radiance and then out past it into darkness.
Vickery closed the door. He stepped back into the living room and laid the .45 on the coffee table and unzipped his briefcase.
“A motel?” said Castine.
Vickery tightened the cap on the bottle of bourbon and tucked it into the briefcase, beside several .45 and 9-millimeter magazines and three thick rubber-banded bundles of twenty-dollar bills; and she recalled that a few years ago he had cashed out his old Secret Servcie 401k and a settlement from the Transportation Utility Agency.
“I don’t mean to be paranoid,” he said as he folded the papers Plowman had given him and slid them in alongside the bottle, “but Tacitus said the GRU wants to kill both of us, and they’ve got my name and license plate number—they might have my credit card number too.”
“A tomb?” said Castine. “A taco truck, that condemned house up on Mulholland?” she added, thinking of the places in which they had found overnight shelter in previous times.
Vickery straightened and slung the briefcase strap over his shoulder. “My studio,” he said. “I pay cash for it, and the owner is an old guy on Social Security who doesn’t declare the money. It’s got a cot and reclining beach chairs.”
“Best yet.”
Vickery tucked the .45 into his jacket pocket. He crossed to the front door and opened it, and crouched to peer around the jamb in both directions.
“Okay,” he said, standing up, “We’re out of here.”
Castine followed him down the steps. “Are you going to turn off the lights?”
“Gas and electric both,” he said, moving toward a meter and a metal box at the side of the trailer—but the trailer’s lights went out before he got there, and Castine’s streetlight shadow disappeared in sudden darkness.
And above the trailer and beyond it she saw again the column standing vertically against the now-dark sky. It was dimly luminous, and wider than it had been an hour and a half ago; in twilight it had been made of dust, but now it seemed to be whirling snow.
Sebastian walked up beside her and said, “Power failure all over, but I switched it off anyway,” and then he looked where she was pointing.
For several long seconds neither of them spoke, staring at the silent, swirling, alien column.
“We should look,” whispered Castine.
“I . . . suppose.”
They both hurried around the trailer. Vickery pulled himself up to straddle the wall, and reached down to catch Castine’s wrist, and in moments they had crossed the service road and stood again, panting, at the crest of the cement slope overlooking the riverbed.
And they stepped back, for an impossibly icy wind was whirling up the slope at them. The base of the milky white column was nearly as wide as the riverbed, and the narrow band of water that ran down the center shone white in the dim glow of the urban sky.
Castine was shivering. “It’s frozen!” Her breath was a cloud of steam.
Then Vickery had grabbed her arm and pulled her back. A line of tall weeds ran alongside the road, and he pushed her down at them. She felt his hands clutch the back of her coat.
Castine gripped the weed stalks, and she had to tug on them to pull herself down to the roadside dirt. Vickery reached past her and caught two handfuls of weeds, and he just held on. He was lying above her back, but she felt no weight.
Then she did; he was sprawled heavily across her, and she was pressed against the dirt. He rolled off of her and lay on his back on the pavement.
“Gravity’s back on,” she gasped.
Vickery got to his feet with evident caution, and Castine stood up carefully and stepped with him to the crest, shivering and hugging herself against the frigid air.
The pale column was breaking up into clouds of snow, and in moments it was gone. All that was left of the phenomenon was the frozen river.
“That snow,” said Vickery. “I don’t think it melted.”
Castine shrugged, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering. “It’s gone.”
“I think it sublimated. I don’t think it was water.”
She gave him a blank look.
“I don’t know,” he said, taking her elbow and turning back toward the wall. “Nitrogen, probably. I hope the power’s back on—the truck has to start.”
Castine thought of reminding him that the truck’s electical system had nothing to do with the city’s power grid, then wondered if that mattered. Either way it was electricity, after all.
But lights glowed in the windows of the other trailers along the lane, and the truck’s engine started after stuttering for a few moments while the battery reasserted itself. Vickery backed the truck around and shifted to drive, and in moments the trailer, looking forlorn with its windows dark and its door open, had disappeared behind rows of other trailers.
“Sebastian Vickery,” said the woman, stepping around a gleaming single-post car lift, on top of which sat a new Ford 150 pickup truck with no wheels. She was hardly more than five feet tall, but stocky, and the piercing eyes in her wide brown face twinkled with unpredictable merriment. Her black hair was cropped short and she was wearing stained jeans and a khaki jacket. She might have been in her forties.
“Yeah, I sure do remember him,” she said.
Behind her, several men in overalls squatted on the cement floor, carefully gluing pennies and playing cards to the inside surfaces of new tires. On the street side of the maintenance bay, behind Joel Finehouse and Vilko Cendravenir, the sectional maintence bay door was fully raised; the sky outside was dark, but the bay was brightly lit by fluorescent tubes in the high, corrugated steel ceiling. Finehouse noticed that Vilko Cendravenir was ostentatiously wrinkling his nose at the mixed smells of motor oil, solvent and Mexican food, and kicked his foot.
“Ms. Galvan,” Finehouse said, “We’re trying—”
“If he’s in trouble I won’t help you,” Anita Galvan interrupted. “He’s making payments to me, regular, for having ruined the upholstery of my best car, a year and a half ago.” She cocked her head. “Not that he doesn’t deserve trouble.”
“How does he pay you?” asked Finehouse.
“Five twenties, most months, in an envelope with a joke return address. He doesn’t want me to know where he lives, ’cause he knows I’d have mis amigos go beat the shit out of him.” She laughed. “He punched me in the stomach and stole the car, and when he returned it the next day there was tar all over the seats!” She looked over her shoulder at one of the men rolling a tire across the floor. “Bend it,” she called, “lean on it! Make sure the pennies stick!”
Finehouse went on, “If his debt were paid off—”
“Twice over,” put in Cendravenir, his teeth gleaming between his moustache and his silly pointed goatee.
Finehouse forced his suddenly clenched jaw to relax. “—do you think you could find him?” he finished, keeping his voice level.
Galvan rocked back and forth on her heels. “Who are you?”
The tire got away from the man who had been rolling it, and in his lunge to catch it he only managed to slap the tread, giving it more speed. It came careening straight toward Cendravenir, who gave a startled cry and jumped aside to let it pass him and roll out onto the lot.
One of the men back in the bay exclaimed hoarsely, and Finehouse looked past Galvan. The man was staring up at the raised pickup truck, and after a moment Finehouse noticed that the truck’s exposed hubs and brake rotors were spinning.
Galvan had turned away and taken several steps toward the steel lift post. Finehouse glanced at Cendravenir, who was trembling and sweating; clearly he had been badly startled by the tire rushing at him. Finehouse nudged him and whispered,“Stop it!”
“That thing got all-wheel drive?” yelled Galvan. “Bring it down far enough to turn it off!”
“It is off,” called one of her employees, “and it don’t have A-dubya-D.”
Beside Finehouse, Cendravenir closed his eyes and held his breath, and the car’s wheels stopped spinning.
Galvan faced the lifted truck for several more seconds, then turned to face Finehouse and Cendravenir. “Who are you guys? I want more than twice what the upholstery cost—I’d probably have to pay somebody to find out where Vickery is, and he’s an old friend. He used to be one of my drivers, and I think he saved my family from being wiped out by devils. Twice.”
“But you’d like to have him beaten up,” Finehouse pointed out.
“Sure. To the hospital. Not the morgue. So are you some kind of brujos?”
Finehouse believed the word meant sorcerors; and he wondered if it would help to have Cendravenir give this woman a demonstration more impressive than just making a car’s wheels spin.
But he remembered the golf balls breaking the light panel over Lubitz’ desk; depending loosely on the stimulus, Cendravenir might helplessly throw that car into the street, or set somebody’s intestines twisting into knots. Finehouse knew it could happen, and shuddered at the irrationality of it.
He patted his sport coat to show that it was flat, then reached behind the lapel and pulled out his badge wallet.
“Naval Intelligence,” he said, flipping it open.
Galvan glanced at it, then stared at Finehouse. “I couldn’t live with myself if I sold him out for less than ten grand.”
“We could subpoena you,” Finehouse said, though he knew Lubitz wouldn’t even consider such a grossly conspicuous move.
“Do it, Navy boy. I’ll tell the truth under oath—I don’t know where he is.”
Finehouse glanced past her at the car on the lift, then turned to look at the cars out in the lot. “We might ask you about other things. Licenses, permits, taxes.”
“Fifteen,” said Galvan cheerfully.
Finehouse didn’t move for five seconds, then said, “Ten,” and drew a card from the wallet and gave it to her. It was one of the ones with nothing on it but a phone number. “Give me a call when you know where he is,” he said, putting the wallet away, “and when we’ve verified it, I’ll bring you the money.”
“It’ll be accurate,” Galvan said, “since you know where to find me. I’ll give you his location when I’m holding the money. Fifteen. And leave him at home,” she added, nodding toward Cendravenir. “I don’t need my cars rolling around.”
Finehouse stared coldly into her steady brown eyes, but after a few seconds had to look away. “Right,” he said. “Call me.”
He turned and stalked away across the dark yard, hearing Cendravenir hurrying to catch up.
Finehouse got into the SUV and started the engine; Cendravenir climbed in a moment later, panting. Craning his neck to see out the rear window as he backed out onto Eighth Street, Finehouse said, “You had to do your mimicry trick?”
“Yes,” said Cendravenir flatly. “I’m tired, I’m nervous—where the hell are we?” He fastened his seat belt and sat back. “If moving stuff scares me, well—other stuff’s gonna move too.”
Finehouse supposed the man was right, and hadn’t been able to help setting the pickup truck’s hubs spinning. Cendravenir suffered from telekinetic latah—ordinarily the ailment known as latah was a “startle disorder” in which a sudden surprise caused its victims to mimic the actions of people nearby. But Cendravenir was telekinetic, and so when he was startled he caused physical objects to mimic the behavior of other physical objects.
It was a psychological disorder, and Lubitz had told Finehouse that it was related to the malady of the 19th century Jumping Frenchmen of Maine, who, when startled, would—after jumping—follow any orders they were given. Disorder or not, Cendravenir’s ability was the hinge-pin of Operation Pleiades.
Finehouse turned right onto the next street and sped between rows of parked cars in front of old brick apartment buildings with fire escapes criss-crossing their facades, turned right and quickly turned right again, and drove nearly all the way back to Eighth Street. He swung in to park at a yellow curb and switched off the engine.
“You forgot something?” asked Cendravenir, for they were now just around the corner from Galvan’s lot.
“If anybody has a problem with the way we’re parked,” Finehouse said, “stall them.” He climbed between the front seats to the back of the SUV. “I think she’ll make a call right away.” He opened a laptop computer that was connected to a Stingray 2 cell-site simulator and booted both of them up, then swiveled one of a pair of pole-mounted antennas to point it directly toward the back of Galvan’s building.
Cendravenir had twisted around in his seat. “What’s all that?”
“We’re going to be a fake cell tower,” said Finehouse as he crouched over the computer monitor and clicked on the controller icon while the Stingray box scanned the local cell-signals environment and insinuated itself into the network. “We’ve got a power amplifier and we’re only a hundred feet away, so Galvan’s phone is going to think we’re the nearest cell tower—five bars!” He looked up and saw Cendravenir’s blank look. “We’re the man in the middle. The data stream from her phone goes through this,” he said, patting the Stingray box, “and instantly on to the nearest cell tower, and vice versa.”
He tapped through several screens on the laptop. “I show six subscribers within our narrow bubble, and IP connectivity to only one of them at the moment.” He clicked on it and a black window appeared on the screen with all of the target cell phone’s data listed in tiny white letters, and he turned off the target phone’s encryption.
He put on headphones and clicked on the phone code.
“—want him for?” said a young man’s voice from the headphones.
“There’s some secret agent types looking for him,” came Galvan’s remembered voice, “and I want to warn him.”
“If I can find him, I can warn him myself,” said the young man. “Why should you pay me?”
“There’s details,” said Galvan.
“You’re going to sell him out again.”
Finehouse clicked on the bar that opened a window displaying Galvan’s phone number and the number she was connected with, and he highlighted them and copied them to a file on the laptop.
Galvan said, “No, they didn’t offer me any money. But Vickery might pay to know about them. I got their license number.”
Finehouse heard a sigh in the headphone speakers. “If I can find him, I’ll tell him what you’ve told me. For old times’ sake.”
The call ended. From the front seat, Cendravenir said, loudly, “We’re waiting for some guys to bring out a refrigerator!” and when Finehouse pulled off the headphones and climbed back into the front seat he saw that Cendravenir had lowered the passenger-side window. An old man was standing on the sidewalk, apparently objecting to the SUV being parked at a yellow curb.
“You can have the refrigerator,” Finehouse called to the old man, and put the vehicle in reverse. He backed up the street until he was able to swerve into a driveway, then shifted to drive and turned left, heading north.
After a few blocks he made his way back down to Eighth Street, and he turned in at the brightly lit parking lot of a Korean barbecue restaurant. Without switching off the engine, he pulled out his cell phone, leaned back to keep Cendravenir from seeing the screen, and texted to Lubitz an account of their interaction with Galvan, not omitting Cendravenir’s inadvertent telekinetic slip.
While Finehouse waited for a reply, Cendravenir lit one of his clove-flavored cigarettes. Finehouse just sighed and turned up the air conditioning.
Lubitz’s reply arrived only a few seconds later: Find and secure Vickery at all absolutely NECESSARY cost. Find and secure Castine; find Yoneda: commit or omit. Keep Cendravenir ready and tranquil.
Finehouse turned off his phone and put it away. “We’ve got reservations at the Holiday Inn Express downtown. I think we’d better get room service.”
“I won’t have any problem in a restaurant, assuming nobody throws anything at me.” Cendravenir drew on the cigarette, and sparks fell in his lap. “I was nervous with that Galvan woman— jumpy, ill at ease!—right from the start. She seems volatile.”
Finehouse put the SUV in gear and steered back out onto Eighth Street. “True. Okay, we can try a restaurant. Take a Xanax.”
“Yes. And I’ll stay at the hotel tomorrow if you go to talk to that woman again. You think she can find your Vickery man?”
“She seems to be trying. And we may be able to step right over her.”
He glanced at his watch; it was 8:30. He made a right turn on Western Avenue.
“Who is Vickery?” asked Cendravenir.
“He’s a guy who has information he shouldn’t have.”
“Sure, I know that, but—what else is he?”
Cendravenir was staring straight ahead, sucking on his spicy cigarette. Vickery, Finehouse thought, along with Castine, will ideally comprise your opener of the way, set the stage for your biggest performance. This morning they proved, unexpectedly but pretty dramatically, that they can do it.
Finehouse let the question go unanswered. He looked to the side at Cendravenir—then glanced ahead and instantly shoved his foot down hard on the brake. A car had abruptly swerved from a left-turn lane into the lane in front of him and then stopped short for a yellow traffic light.
Finehouse’s arms were braced on the steering wheel as the front end of the SUV dipped, and he could feel the vehicle’s momentum being forcibly strangled by the brakes. After two long seconds the SUV rocked to a halt, its bumper only inches from the bumper of the car ahead.
Cendravenir had pitched forward against the restraint of the seatbelt, and he had dropped his cigarette. Finehouse looked at him quickly, but the man just unfastened the seatbelt and groped around between his feet, and when Cendravenir straightened up, holding the cigarette, Finehouse was relieved to see that he was not sweating and trembling.
“Don’t scare me like that,” Cendravenir muttered, and inhaled on the cigarette. More sparks fell in his lap.
The traffic light ahead switched to green, and Finehouse lifted his foot from the brake pedal and let his hands relax on the steering wheel.
“Take a Xanax right now. Take three.”
Tacitus Banach stared moodily across bowls of tortilla chips and salsa at Rayette. They had found a table in a far corner of El Parian on Pico Boulevard, under a row of blue pennants that spelled out CORONA, and the warm air smelled wonderfully of grilling beef and enchilada sauce. There was no risk of being overheard, but Banach wished their order would arrive so that he could delay answering her questions by chewing something more substantial than the chips.
“I may simply get a job,” he said finally. “Here, or—anywhere, San Diego, San Jose, Barstow. Be a genuine American. Just because I’m a, a deserter doesn’t mean I must be a defector.”
“I’ve got to report you,” said Rayette. “If you don’t claim defector status, the FBI will find you, and arrest you for failing to register as an agent of a foreign government. As a defector, though, you’ll be given immunity and a new identity, and some income.”
Banach smiled. “And you’ll reinstate yourself with your superiors, after falling out of communication today.”
Rayette shrugged. “That too.”
A waiter walked up with the two bottles of Corona beer that they’d ordered and set them on the table. Banach picked one up and stared at the label until the waiter moved away.
“Some defectors from the GRU haven’t lived long as such, in spite of new identities,” Banach said, thinking of the crematorium at the GRU complex in Moscow. “The GRU does not forget or forgive. And how can you report me?” He scooped up some of the salsa on a chip. “You don’t even know the surname I’ve been living under, and the license plate on my car—oh, I saw you note it!—is, it saddens me to say, stolen. I will leave no fingerprints on this bottle. And of course you have no phone, or gun, and you may be assured that you can’t overpower me.”
Rayette slumped in her chair and pulled a flip-phone from her pocket. Banach pushed his chair back—regretfully, for he had been looking forward to the tacos he had ordered—but Yoneda showed him the open back of the phone. There was no battery, and the inside surfaces were rusted.
“It doesn’t work,” she said. “It’s my—sort of good luck charm.” She laid it on the table.
Banach relaxed. Certainly if it had been functional, as a phone or GPS tracker, there would have been consequences by now. But he was intrigued—she seemed to lean toward it as if listening.
“Old ghosts?” he asked gently.
“No—not real ones, anyway. Reminders.” She nodded and pushed the old phone aside. “‘Get a job somewhere,’ you said. Sure. How do you make a living now? Does the GRU send you money?”
Banach took a sip of beer. “Actually,” he said with a smile, “they send me collectible items which I sell on eBay.”
“What, like old comic books?”
“That sort of thing, yes.”
“And that’s been funding your investigations into these UAPs, UFOs—”
“NLOs,” Banach agreed. “Neopoznannyy Letat Oj’jektu.”
“Right.” Yoneda sat back and gave him a quizzical look. “Am I the only one at this table who can see how . . . involved you are in all of that? You know about monsters like that crop circle thing we saw in the L.A. River an hour ago, and—what was it? Seeing the infrared past? Hah! Oh, and the three of you forming a triangle that made those flying saucers show up this morning, and—and all the rest of that crazy shit.”
The waiter returned, this time carrying plates that he slid onto the table. He warned that they were hot, agreed to bring more salsa, and strode away.
Yoneda gave Banach a skeptical grin as she dug a fork into an enchilada. “And you’re going to go get a job at a Jiffy Lube somewhere? A Burger King? Investigate crop circles and UFOs on your days off? You could work full-time with Naval Intelligence, the way Wernher von Braun worked for NASA—you could be a consultant, a researcher, working for the officer who’s heading up this current project.”
Banach was sure Yoneda didn’t entirely know what she was talking about, but . . . if he officially defected, it made sense that he’d be able to pool his tormentingly incomplete knowledge of these things with the knowledge Naval Intelligence had amassed. The GRU had covertly gleaned some of what ONI knew, but certainly not all.
And what could be more important, more fascinating? Truly alien entities, almost entirely outside our four-dimensional comprehension, impinging on our world like a man dipping his fingers into a pond, interrupting the pond’s two-dimensional surface.
Banach knew that Yoneda was watching him closely as she chewed and swallowed and took a sip of beer. He poured some salsa on one of his tacos and picked it up, then paused.
“But you killed Frankie Notchett,” he said. “Did you find out everything he knew about these phenomena first? Everything? I wonder if you’re much better than the GRU.”
“Oh, who says we killed him? I know, Castine and Vickery saw a ghost. If it said it was Notchett, it was probably lying. Who takes a ghost’s word for anything? Shit.”
“I think he is dead. But can you find out how he died? Would your superiors tell you the truth?”
“Yes, once I’ve explained why I fell out of the loop today. I can say I’d like to question Notchett. They’ll tell me his status—they want me to be equipped with the facts.”
“Would you tell me the truth, once you find out?”
Rayette cocked her head. “I don’t know. I do think it’s unlikely that they—” She gave him a bleak smile. “I don’t know.”
Banach took a bite of his taco. Eventually he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and said, “That is satisfactory. Tomorrow you will be at a time and location I’ll specify, alone, and I’ll watch you from a distance. If Naval Intelligence killed him, you will be holding a newspaper. If they did not, if he is not dead or died from some other cause, your hands will be empty. Right? And I will make up my mind whether to trust you, join you, or to—disappear.”
“Disappear to a Jiffy Lube in Barstow. Okay.” It seemed to Banach that she spoke to the ruined phone on the table when she added, “it’s all I can do.”