The Affinities (31 page)

I thought of Geddy, locked in a room in some moldering farmhouse. He would be terrified. But he would also believe we were working to get him back. He would trust us to do that, without question. “We're talking about my brother here.”

“Your stepbrother. Not even a blood relative.”

I wondered if it was possible that the bad connection had fucked up our Tau telepathy. “I grew up with him, Amanda.”

“I know. But, Adam, we all grew up with
somebody
.”

The camera captured an image of her bare right arm as she turned in her chair. A Chinese dragon lived between the dimple of her elbow and the ball of her shoulder, green-scaled and with black ophidian eyes, coiled around what could have been a letter X but was in fact a Phoenician tau. A declaration of fealty, carved in the clay of her body.

The kitchen ceiling light flickered. “We can do this,” I said. “We can do it cleanly. And with Jenny's cooperation we can still release the video.”

“No—Jenny's cooperation doesn't matter anymore.”

“How do you figure that?”

“You copied the video to us before the blackout. We can release it as soon as we have reliable access to media, with or without her consent.”

“But it won't work if Jenny doesn't back it up. People will say it's CGI. Nobody trusts raw video without corroboration.”

“Jenny's not the only one Aaron pissed off. We've been in contact with his most recent ex-girlfriend, and she gave us a signed affidavit about his treatment of her. It's all the corroboration we need. We can take it public anytime.”

But no one had told me that. The screen offered one more frozen image, Amanda with her head half turned, the
bodeh
curving from her left eye like a crow's wing, and I thought of the night we had come back from Vancouver, her arm in a sling and her bullet wound still fretting her, how she had sat with me and Trevor in the attic room of the tranche house and confessed that she was going to California with Damian, how at the end of that confession she had turned to kiss Trevor and then leaned the other way to kiss me, long kisses fraught with meaning, three breaths conjoined.

Her voice began to break up. “Adam, are we clear on this? You absolutely
cannot
go after Geddy. We have complete consensus at the sodality level. Do you need Damian to confirm that? He's in the next room talking to Europe, but I can fetch him if I have to.”

“No.” What would be the point?

“So it's agreed?”

I said, “Agreed.”

Long pause. No image now, just a confetti of random pixels and a background noise that sounded like ghosts conversing in a language of sparks and echoes.

“Are you sure?”

Rrr you sssure?

“Of course I am.”

“Because it sounds like—”

Bekkkuz it sssouns lie-kkkkk—

Then the audio died, the signal bars on the display drained to zero, and the kitchen light went dark again.

*   *   *

I went back to the living room, where everyone was staring at dead phones. Trevor looked at me expectantly. I bought a moment by asking him who he had been talking to.

“Brecker,” he said, “at the hospital.” One of the Tau security guys who had been run off the road shortly before the blackout. “Everybody's stitched and bandaged, but I don't think they'll be of much use to us in the short term.”

“Okay.”

“So—you were talking to Damian?”

“Amanda,” I said.

“And?”

“I made her aware of the situation regarding Geddy. I told her we're working on a plan to get him back.”

“And?”

For the last eight months I had worked for Tau as a diplomatic liaison, and I had learned how to deploy a strategic lie. But lying to a tranchemate was different. Trev was giving me a puzzled look, which I met and held, because eye contact mattered: avoiding eye contact was a liar's tell. But I felt like I was staring, and I had to remind myself to blink.

I said, “She wants us to go ahead and get Geddy back.”

He cocked his head as if he had heard a distant but ominous sound. Then he shrugged and smiled. “All right. Let's get it done.”

 

CHAPTER 22

Shannon's house was suddenly crowded with local Taus, and over the course of the next couple of hours we finalized the details of the plan to retrieve Geddy. It had a reasonable chance of succeeding, I thought, but we needed time to assemble resources, and it was already well past midnight. Best to come at them at dawn, Shannon suggested. Which gave us three or four hours to place people and supplies and make the necessary preparations.

Assuming the telecom system didn't reboot during that time. A word from Damian or Amanda to Trevor was all it would take to stop the project in its tracks.

Shannon added more wood to the stove as the night progressed. A drizzling rain set in, fogging windows and slicking the dark streets. Rain would make everything more difficult. But we were committed now, and we told ourselves it didn't matter. Trevor moved around Shannon's living room briefing Taus, rehearsing them in their roles, making sure everyone knew his or her task and was suited for it. It was a kind of collaborative choreography, the genius of the Affinities manifesting itself in this apparently random collation of ordinary people: I felt it, and Trevor felt it, too. He sat with me for a few minutes as we waited for one of Shannon's tranchemates to come back with a car. A gust of wind threw rain against the window like a handful of pebbles, and he said, “You know what this reminds me of? That time way back, not long after you joined the tranche, when Mouse was having trouble with her crazy ex.”

Mouse, right. Mouse had moved west a few years ago. She lived in Calgary now, working as an accountant for a mostly-Tau construction firm. But she kept in touch, called the tranche house every Christmas and always made a point of speaking with Trev and me. “We were amateurs,” I said. “It was lucky we didn't get hurt. Worse.”

“We were learning what it means to be a Tau, taking risks we wouldn't take for a stranger. But yeah, we're better at it now. Still the same impulse, though, right? The way you feel when someone tries to hurt the people you love.”

“Right.”

“Except this time it's not a jealous ex with a baseball bat, it's a bunch of Hets who want to take down our entire Affinity. We're not protecting one guy, we're protecting Tau as a way of life.”

I nodded.

“So it's not about Geddy, and it's not about Jenny. It's about all of us. We need to keep that in mind.”

He was looking hard at me again.

“Right,” I said.

“Okay. So you're up for this?”

“I'm up for it.”

“Good.” He grinned. “Because I think that's our ride pulling up at the curb.”

*   *   *

The car, supplied by one of Shannon's tranchemates, was a Toyota sedan that had seen twelve winters; its paint was blistered and the interior smelled like tobacco smoke and stale Doritos. But its motor was fully functional, and it was a good choice, given what we had in mind for it. I volunteered to drive.

My passengers were three local Taus, and they were mostly quiet. We drove through the north end of Schuyler toward the highway, and the town was eerie in the misting rain, streets deserted, dawn just beginning to reveal a sky of tumbling clouds. The car's radio picked up the analog radio station that had been our only source of news since the blackout, and the news this morning was mixed and mostly speculative. Something terrible had happened in Mumbai, and there were rumors of pitched battles in Karachi and Islamabad. Unnamed experts claimed that a cyberattack aimed at Indian military systems had spread catastrophically and globally, which had triggered retaliatory responses from major players: the unleashing of dozens of varieties of military malware targeting infrastructure nodes in virtually every industrialized nation on the surface of the earth. But electrical power had lately been restored to the west coast of the United States and to some urban areas in the east, and telecom providers were slowly and erratically coming back on line. Which was good news for the world, but maybe not for me—or Geddy.

I told myself Geddy would be okay. He could be spectacularly earnest and na
ï
ve, but there was a strength in him, too, a stoicism he had learned the hard way. I had seen the change in him when he was just thirteen years old. Before that, my father could reduce him to sobs with an unkind word. After that, when my father said something vicious, Geddy's face would cloud but he would clench his jaws and stare furiously. Not suppressing the hurt—I didn't think he was capable of that—but refusing to give my father the satisfaction of tears.

I imagined Geddy in captivity, showing his captors the same silent defiance. Unless someone even less forgiving than my father had managed to beat it out of him.

The sky was light by the time we reached the highway and headed east. The rain had tapered a little but it was still coming down, soft shifting sheets of it. The Toyota's wipers creaked over the windshield. After a few minutes of this we reached the unmarked exit for Spindevil Road.

Spindevil was two lanes of potholed blacktop, long neglected by county repair crews. It curved past the abandoned quarry where, many summers ago, I had gone on swimming expeditions with Aaron and Geddy and Jenny Symanski, and pushed on through scrub forest and rocky wild meadows, past isolated properties bounded by split-rail fences and weathered NO TRESPASSING signs. The only other cars I saw were Tau cars, part of our loose convoy, one ahead of me and three behind. We all stopped when we reached Jolinda Smith's little house, which would serve as our outpost. The farmhouse where the Hets were holding Geddy was three miles farther north, and one of our guys was keeping it under surveillance from the other side of Killdeer Pond.

Trevor was essentially in charge now, and once the crowd at Jolinda's place was more or less settled I approached him and asked where we stood.

“We need a little more time,” he said. “Maybe an hour, not more than two. Shannon's headed to downtown Schuyler, she's probably in place by now, and once everything else is set up we alert her by walkie-talkie and set this thing in motion. Plus we need to allow for travel time from Schuyler to here. But once our ducks are in a row I give it half an hour from first alert to showtime.”

Which was more time than I would have liked, but good work, considering.

*   *   *

Trevor's radio crackled again. Since the majority of us were right here, the call could only have been from Shannon or the guy watching the Het house from the other side of Killdeer Pond. Either way, it might be bad news: a delay, a unexpected hitch in the plan.

We stood on the damp porch of Jolinda's place, rain ticking on the eaves and sluicing down a drainpipe. The walkie-talkie was enormous by comparison with a phone, but it looked small in Trevor's hand. He put it to his ear and listened for about ten seconds, an unreadable expression on his face. Then he lowered it again.

“I don't know who the fuck it is,” he said. “But he's asking for you. For Adam Fisk.”

I took the handset and clicked the send button and said, “This is Adam Fisk.”

A male voice said, “You've gone to a lot of trouble there, Adam. Don't you think we should talk this over first?”

“Who is this?”

“One of the folks playing host to your stepbrother. We've been listening to your radio chatter for the last few hours. And we think you're all needlessly upset. You're a negotiator, I understand. A kind of diplomat. Well, maybe some negotiation is in order today.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Just that you might want to come knock on our door before you break it down. You're a little ways south on Spindevil, right? So come up the road and stop by for a chat. Just you.”

“And why would I want to do that?”

“To avoid unnecessary violence. Maybe get your stepbrother out of here in one piece, if we come to an agreement. You have our guarantee of safe passage, in and out. But this isn't an unlimited offer. I figure you're, what, five minutes from here by car? Plus a little time to sort this all out with your Tau buddies. So we'll expect you in fifteen minutes, or not at all.”

I said, “Why should I believe you?”

But there was no answer.

*   *   *

Trevor was against it.

It was Trevor who drove me up Spindevil to the Het house, with Jolinda in the backseat to make sure we reached the right property. We took the Toyota: the disposable vehicle. He said, “You'll be giving them another hostage—you know that, right?”

We had talked this through once already, though not to Trevor's satisfaction. “They don't need another hostage. That's not what this is about.”

The Toyota's rattletrap suspension was no match for the potholes on Spindevil. Trev kept his eyes on the road, though he spared the occasional sidelong glance in my direction. The rain had stopped, suddenly and finally, but a chilly wind bowed the roadside oaks and beeches. The clouds had thinned to show a disk of sunlight the color of milk.

I repeated what I had already said to him. Since the Hets were aware of our presence, they could put Geddy in a vehicle and leave the farmhouse, and once they were in motion there was little we could do to stop them. Any kind of direct intervention would endanger Geddy and risk the kind of law-enforcement attention we couldn't afford. But as long as I was in the farmhouse talking, they would stay put until we were ready to intervene. And if everything went according to plan, it wouldn't matter whether I was inside or out.

“That's a huge fuckin'
if
,” Trevor said. “We're talking about the people who put four Taus in the hospital. They'll do whatever they think they can get away with.”