Spook Squad (30 page)

It wasn’t that they were deliberately rough—but clearly, they had nothing invested in preserving the unique technology, either. Whereas the TV in the lab could be hauled off in one piece, Dreyfuss’ TV had been fitted specifically to the credenza, and as the goons pulled it free, a bunch of electronics spilled out behind it like entrails. I could give two shits about the GhosTV—I’d been fucking kidnapped to test the damn thing. So when the federal repo men started cutting wires, why did I feel each and every snip echoing in the pit of my gut? “Should we stop them?” I said.

“Don’t,” Laura said. “They’ll be authorized to use whatever force necessary.” She turned her attention to her phone, pressed some buttons, and said into her headset, “This is Laura Kim…no, in fact I prefer not to hold. We have an unacceptable situation in Chicago and I need to— Damn it.”

“Well, I’m done here,” Dr. K said. “I might as well go get a drink.”

Laura’s phone lit up. “Stop him,” she told me. “He’s wrapped his car around a telephone pole before. This time he might not walk away.” She turned away to field the calls, leaving me to deal with Dr. K.

Currently, the scientist was jabbing the elevator call button repeatedly, hard enough to break the thing. “Whoa, whoa,” I said. “Maybe Con’s got a copy of your data somewhere. I’m sure you’ve got schematics. You could build your own.”

“Believe me, I would have…we’d be testing them all over the country by now if I knew what it was about the old tubes that made them work. It wouldn’t just be a government project, either. Once business saw the potential, money would pour into development. Every company would want their own remote viewer, and anyone with enough money would be able to make their own.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“That’s what it does. Not like a television set—you can’t turn it on and see what was happening somewhere else. But sometimes, when the tester is in an alpha state, he can see things. Report back on them. Do you understand how important this is? Ever since the Cold War the military has been trying to develop remote viewers.”

I’d seen remote viewing in action, and I’d seen the GhosTV doing its thing. Dr. K was talking about apples and oranges, although I could see where the end result would seem the same.
 

Dr. K shook his head. “Once the tuner technology is refined, it could make anyone clairvoyant.”

“If everyone is potentially psychic, the anti-Psychs don’t have anyone to harass,” I said. The GhosTV didn’t actually “make” people psychic. Mostly, it loosened up their subtle bodies and allowed them to go astral. The majority of them didn’t remember their trips. Even so, it would be a game changer. If Dr. K managed to take the GhosTV to the next level, eventually he could make the FPMP obsolete.

As my head reeled with the implication of the research, the Washington goons filed out of the lounge. One was hauling the GhosTV guts toward the elevator. Another had Dreyfuss’ CPU. Dr. K and I backed away, giving them plenty of room. “You may want to hold off on that,” Laura called after them. “I’m on the phone with your boss right now.” But they ignored her—
just doin’ my job, ma’am
—and once the elevator doors shut behind them, they were gone.

Chapter 26

Dreyfuss strolled out behind the goons looking thoughtful and unhurried. Dr. K charged up to him, gesticulating wildly and begging him to do something, but the drama didn’t sink in. He was tuned in to his own thoughts—and he was staring directly at me. He patted Dr. K on the shoulder, calming him, then turned back to me and said, “Detective? Let’s go for a walk.”

I’d expected another excursion to the flower shop, but once we were outside, he led me toward a gap in the concrete wall beneath the viaduct instead. It occurred to me that it might lead to some kind of escape pod, or maybe a panic room. It then occurred to me, as I squeezed through the rough concrete, that there could be someone waiting on the other side of the gap to put a bullet in my brain. If there were, that person couldn’t be very big. Jacob wouldn’t have been able to slide in greased and naked. I could barely cram through myself.

There was no hit man on the other side of the gap—but no fancy secret emergency equipment either. Just railroad ties and rusted freight cars. Dreyfuss had led me into a small lot formed by an exit ramp abutment, a peeling outbuilding and an unfrequented corner of the rail yard. He squinted up at the gray morning sun peeking between the distant North Loop skyscrapers with his phone pressed to his ear. “
Hola
,” he told whoever was on the other end, then, “Y’know that place I hoped we’d never meet? I need you there.”
 

When he tucked his phone back into his pocket, his sweatshirt rode up and flashed the edge of a holster. I’ve never known Con Dreyfuss to carry. Ever. The idea that he found it necessary to bring a firearm with him made me wonder if I should have thought twice about following him in.

“What’s going on?” I hated how my voice shook.

His stony expression didn’t change. He turned away wordlessly and began to walk. I stood there for a moment and considered squeezing back through the concrete gap, finding my sorry car and heading home, but what then? Jacob was still inside the FPMP. Anything I failed to do could have ramifications for him—ugly ramifications. And so I turned up my collar against the bone-chilling wind that whistled relentlessly through the rail yard, and I followed.

Not only was Dreyfuss freer to move around in his sneakers and sweats, but he was a hell of a lot more nimble than me. We rounded a corner and came upon a tumble of cinderblock, timber and rusted drums. He scaled it like a mountain goat while I picked up a few dozen scratches and splinters clambering along behind him.

The wall of rubble was a pretty good sound baffle. I hauled myself over the top. Dreyfuss was farther ahead. When I called for him to slow down and my voice was swallowed by the ambient noise, I realized the crank and rattle of the train yard was deceptively loud. I tore my slacks on a protruding nail hurrying to catch up with him, and barely caught myself from sprawling when I tripped on a loose board. He didn’t even break stride. Somehow, I followed.

He’d led me to a maze of old outbuildings. The wind changed, moaning through the corridors created by the corrugated walls of industrial sheds and the sides of rusting freight cars. I smelled oil and dirt and winter-cold steel, but underlying it all—and growing stronger the farther in we delved—was the elusive scorched-air scent of electricity. The air above our heads was criss-crossed with cables, some as fat around as my thigh, supported by knobbly old wooden posts that were still shaped like tree trunks, roughly skinned, now petrified black with pollution and age. The cable hung in great tangles and spools off the posts, strung around the rail yard haphazardly, as if a giant baby had crawled up and looped it from one pole to another like a big ball of string. Somewhere beyond the metal and cable labyrinth, a bell began to clang, cutting through the murk of noise in its sharp percussiveness. A train was coming, but I didn’t hear it. I felt it through the soles of my shoes, and I smelled it as a spike of burnt electricity in the air. Dreyfuss hugged the edge of the maze, creeping toward a building now, a low brick building that looked like old Chicago, like the occasional cobblestone street that peeked through when tree roots or weather heaved the blacktop open. Like the cannery when I realized it had not always been my home, and I pondered the origin of the strange machines lurking in the unfinished half of the basement.

Somewhere beyond the maze, the rumbling slowed. A long metallic squeal joined the chorus of noise, and a stunningly loud hiss crackled over the top of it all. Dreyfuss ducked around a corner and I rushed after him. It was a shallow dead end. I backpedaled quickly to keep from flattening him against the far wall. But it wasn’t a wall, I saw, when he moved aside a rotting plank covered in dead weedy vines. It was a door, an ancient door of hewn timbers weeping with rust where the corroding nails held them together. The verdigris covered lock above the doorknob was much newer than the door itself, but that wasn’t saying much. Fortunately, it was new enough for Dreyfuss’ handy dandy bump key to work on it. He pulled the magical piece of metal out of his pocket, wriggled it in, and gave it a whack. The door probably creaked as it opened, though the sound was lost amid the rail yard din. Beyond was darkness.

He pulled a pocket flashlight and slipped inside. I followed.

The ceiling of the small room was so low I couldn’t stand up straight, and the whole thing reeked of age. It wasn’t entirely sheltered from the elements. Broad cracks in the walls let gray daylight knife in, and gaps in the plank flooring allowed the dust sifting from the decaying mortar to settle into whatever emptiness lay beneath. Except for strings and coils of electrical cable that looked none too safe to touch, the room was empty. I expected Dreyfuss to unearth another door and lead me to a place where everything would suddenly make sense. Instead, he planted his feet in the center of the room, and he waited.

“What’s going on?” I asked again—and the words were swallowed by a thick electrical hum that felt more like a stiffness in my eardrums than an actual sound.

Dreyfuss peered at me coolly. I think he heard, but he didn’t answer.

My forearms prickled. Beneath my sleeves, my arm hairs were valiantly attempting to stand at attention. So was the hair on the back of my neck. I swallowed. My spit tasted like nickels. I could only imagine what the electromagnetic field was doing to any eavesdropping devices we hadn’t known we were carrying. While it was a relief to know any unwanted communications signals would be scrambled, I wasn’t so sure what it meant for my own molecules. I’d always thought the people who claimed they contracted mysterious diseases from living around high tension wires were just looking for someone to pay their medical bills. I’d been wrong—the electricity was definitely affecting us. Even worse, if it was screwing with the physical, I could hardly imagine what it was doing to our subtle bodies.

When Dreyfuss finally spoke, he said, “Might as well make yourself useful and see to it that no dead people are listening.” He dug something tiny out of his pocket and threw it at me. I felt it ping off my overcoat, and although I couldn’t hear it hit the floor over the drone of the electrical hum, I suspected it sounded like a Seconal capsule. “Your payment.”

He wasn’t wrong—nothing would freak me out more than to swing my flashlight beam around and find Dr. Chance had been lurking in the shadows all along. But I could do without the judgment.

I walked the perimeter of the shack, feeling for cold spots, looking for movement, but as far as I could tell, the place was clean. I wasn’t sure if the electricity could affect my ability, though, so I salted the area just to be safe, stretching my tiny pocket-sized supply to cover the length of all four walls. I topped it off with a few spritzes of my re-purposed breath spray, pumping until nothing but air came out, and then I flooded it with white light. It was the best I could do. Hopefully it would be enough.

My white light was symbolic, though. It didn’t do a thing for my physical sight. Between the darkness and the distracting hum, I hadn’t even noticed that there was a second door in the far wall. I first saw it as a slice of light, which filled me with a surge of panic, at least until I realized that the light was entirely mundane daylight, and all I’d need to worry about was the silhouette that now filled the doorway. I blinked away tears while my eyes adjusted. Despite the fact that the hair on this silhouette floated up in a dark nimbus as it came into contact with the overflowing electricity, over the past few months I’d grown plenty familiar with this particular silhouette from outside the blue nylon tent wall.

Lisa.

A chain dangled from her hand. The antique key she’d been wearing around her neck protruded from the lock of the Depression-era door. Beyond her, a Grand Avenue bus wheezed by as if everything was same-old, same-old, but I was viewing it now from the other side of the looking glass. Here Jacob and I thought we’d been so clever with our key cutting and ice grinding. The lengths Lisa and Dreyfuss went through to talk privately made Jacob and me look like a couple of kids playing secret agent.
 

Lisa closed the door behind her and we were plunged into near darkness again. An afterimage in the shape of the doorway danced in front of my eyes until they adjusted to lack of light, and when they did, I found them kissing. Lisa and Dreyfuss. Right there in front of me. Not in a lovey-dovey way, either. Desperate. Like the world was gonna end.

They tore their lips from one another, but Lisa kept a two-handed hold on his face. “What happened?” She called over the droning hum.

“I’m completely fucked. They know what I can do and I’m as good as dead.”

“No they don’t. Tell me what happened.”

“Washington’s coming down hard. They dismantled our biggest project. Next thing they’ll haul off is me.”

“No…no. I promise. No.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Is today my day to die?”

“
No, llegarás a mañana
. Just you wait and see.”

“Who brought Washington down on my head?” Dreyfuss pulled away from her and pointed directly at my face. “Was it him?”

Me? He thought I’d been the one to bring Washington in? Not on purpose. Inadvertently, though? I hoped not. I hadn’t even realized Dreyfuss wasn’t the only one spying on me—but I’d been careful not to leak anything. I was always careful. So I couldn’t possibly be the one who’d triggered the GhosTV raid. My mouth worked, though I couldn’t think of anything intelligent enough to say that would merit screaming it over the electrical hum. Lisa replied with something a lot longer than a simple yes or no. I didn’t hear what it was. Neither did Dreyfuss. He cupped his palm around his ear and shouted, “What?”

She shook her head sadly, then steeled herself and yelled, “I can’t tell you anything about Vic.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I hollered. I was fairly sure I’d done nothing wrong, and obviously she could make an exception to the sí-no if it were to exonerate me. I grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her, and blue static sparkles danced around her wool coat. “Tell him! I didn’t do anything.” Or, at least, I didn’t mean to.