The Fading (45 page)

‘Am I boring you?’ Anlun said.

Noel rubbed his eyes. ‘You all? How many of us do you know?’

Anlun took another book of discs from the agent up front and fanned the pages at Noel. ‘This is about five hundred hours of
footage from your spree of muggings. We have you in seven different casinos committing forty-six acts. There’s a lot more
where you’re not stealing but watching, following, shadowing victims.’

‘But why didn’t security stop me? You control them, too?’

‘We pulled a few strings,’ Anlun said. ‘But mostly we let them try. We could have let them get you, if and when you manifested,
and taken you into custody by
pulling rank. But most of the time they never got close to you.’

Anlun fast-forwarded through some boring casino traffic, then paused just as an entourage of Chinese men in suits lost something
valuable and spread out in a panic. Noel saw himself breaking away from the rearguard, a thick padded envelope under one arm,
for only half a dozen steps before he bent and slipped it, unnoticed, under the carriage of a passing baby stroller pushed
by a couple who were busy watching the Chinese men curse and run around like chickens with their heads cut off. Noel was visible
to the camera and it all looked ludicrously obvious he’d stolen the packet, but of course no one on the floor could see him.
Less than a minute later hotel security flocked in but Noel had already stepped out of frame, following the baby stroller.
He remembered that one now, reclaiming his parcel in the elevator just as the couple shoved the stroller onto their floor.

‘The camera has you there,’ Anlun said. ‘But when security descended upon the scene, “you” weren’t where you were supposed
to be, or anywhere to be seen. The eyes in the sky had you, the human eyes couldn’t keep you.’

‘They never thought to communicate with the guys in the control room?’ Noel said. ‘In real time, tracking and spotting me?
How hard could it have been?’

Anlun frowned. ‘Are you telling me you didn’t have this worked out on your own? That you were counting on dumb luck?’

Noel’s face colored.

‘Or maybe you knew you would be safe in either event,’ Anlun said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Think about that for a minute. It wasn’t just the people on the ground. You started burning the others.’

Noel seized upon it. ‘The eyes in the sky. I fooled the cameras? That’s not possible, is it?’

‘No, not the cameras,’ Anlun said. ‘Technology is cold, inanimate. It’s not sentient and it doesn’t lie. Your juju doesn’t
work on mechanical recording devices, so far as we know. You took out the people watching the monitors. The entire staff,
the guests. Frankly we still don’t know how hard you pushed and how far you reached out.’

‘Okay. So, they never found me because they didn’t think to look for me,’ Noel said. ‘They didn’t see me onscreen at all,
so they had no idea what or who they were looking for.’

Anlun said, ‘Yes.’

‘But couldn’t they go back and watch the tapes? I mean, the cameras had me. They record this stuff, keep it on file for weeks
or months, right? Are you telling me they never bothered to look back, even after the number of muggings went up?’

‘They did go back,’ Anlun said. ‘We screened it for them, and it still didn’t work. The ones who were in the building when
you did your thing could not pick you out on screen.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You didn’t just disappear. You erased these people’s perception of you, their ability to see you at all, permanently.’

‘How does that work?’ Noel said.

‘You tell me,’ Anlun said.

Noel’s head ached.

‘It’s not the eyes,’ Anlun said. ‘It’s the brain. You’ve gone into memory somehow, in a way that not only wipes you from their
minds and eyes, but takes away the possibility of them ever recognizing – of remembering – you ever again. At least, unless
you want them to. Unless they see you again, in the flesh, memory-stamping you at a later time and place, and so on.’

Noel said nothing. He was thinking of his mother, the damage done.

‘After Dalton’s body was found, we set up a perimeter around the resort. You were spotted in the cab line, then we kept finding
you and losing you at the airport, when it became evident you had control over it. On and off, whenever it suited you. We
knew you were heading for Los Angeles, so we canceled as many tickets as time permitted and placed our bet.’ Anlun stretched
his long legs and adjusted his belt. ‘Imagine the applications of that, Noel. Casting a defensive cone against all witnesses
within your given perimeter, through walls, up and down several floors, clearing the building, a city block, leaving no evidence
where it matters most. In the minds of the ones who were there. If I can control the access to the scene and who sees the
evidence after, and you can control the
witnesses from inside, well, whatever it is, it’s like it never happened.’

‘No,’ Noel said. ‘It happened. But no one will ever be able to connect me to it.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve been on this for a while,’ Noel said. ‘You know more about it than you’re telling me. How many others are there? What
else do you have them doing?’

Anlun handed the DVD case up front in exchange for a single disc. ‘There aren’t any others, not any more. We’ve come close
to a few, but not like you, not like this.’

‘Dalton said there are dozens more. Maybe hundreds.’

Anlun thought about this. ‘Maybe. People are strange, you know. When they have something, a talent like yours, a power, they
tend to get very cagey. It tends to ruin them very quickly. They go into hiding, fall into drug and alcohol addiction, commit
suicide. Until someone comes forward or we get lucky the way I got lucky finding you in Boulder, you’re our best hope. And,
frankly, your shelf life’s probably not much better than a car battery’s.’

Noel did not think any of this was good news. ‘Best hope for what?’

‘I told you that on the plane,’ Anlun said.

‘You said you needed me find something precious for you in Bolivia. You didn’t tell me what or why or anything else about
it.’

Anlun eyed him up and down. His face gave nothing
away, but his eyes were deep with sadness, and more, some kind of personal failure.

‘Would I be correct in assuming you haven’t been following the news much lately?’ he said at last.

‘I’ve been preoccupied.’

‘There’s a lot of eyes on this one now, but they don’t know what’s going on inside, how bad it really is. The potential for
a public relations disaster has become enormous. This makes our job difficult. A lot more difficult.’

Anlun inserted the last disc. This time he did not turn and face the screen when Noel did. He simply sat sideways, watching
Noel. Reading him, his reactions to what was unfolding on the monitor.

It was very boring for almost seven minutes, then disturbing without being clear what was going on, who these people were,
or why they all looked so miserable. The footage was grainy, sloppily captured, in and out of daylight and nighttime. Then
there were a lot of people, white and black and brown, men and women and children, filing down a trail in some sort of woods
or sparse jungle, all dressed alike in plain gray clothes, walking toward a tent with stadium lights raised up on poles.

There was a jarring cut, then static, then they were standing in rows in a large room, like a gymnasium or auditorium of some
sort, though it might have been open air, the sky too dark to tell. There were bleachers. Then a man stepped on stage before
them and began to talk. Calmly and jovially for a few minutes,
then with increasing energy. Soon he was pacing, winding up like a motivational speaker, then thundering with anger, and the
audience was no longer miserable but animated and, with alarming and unnatural speed, becoming rapt.

They cheered and smiled and clapped, but their eyes were dull, vacant, lost.

The footage jump-cut to a smaller room. There were fewer people in this one, and the same man, who was handsome but chubby,
his face sweating, his hair mussed. He wore different clothes from the others, a suit of sleek black cloth that seemed to
be all of one piece, some kind of holy garment that might have been homemade. He wore large-framed glasses and pointed at
the gathered ones with hands clad in leather work gloves.

Then some people were standing but others were down on the ground, crawling over one another, crawling toward him only to
be pushed back from the shorter stage he prowled. He stepped down into ‘the pit’ (as Noel was coming to think of it) and two
other men, both enormous in size, closed in beside him. And then he – the speaker – and he alone was doing things Noel did
not believe one human being could do to another. Then he did another thing, and another, to someone else. The people changed
in ways that should not be possible. They became animals and anarchy erupted and when they turned on one another barehanded
and baring teeth, Noel looked away.

‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Turn it off, now.’

Anlun reached across the console between them and took Noel by the back of the neck. His enormous rough hand felt like a barbell
with the strength of a shop vice. Anlun squeezed his neck and drove his face downward, within inches of the screen. Noel glanced
from the corner of his eye and what he saw terrified him more than what was unfolding on screen.

Anlun’s lips were pulled back, his teeth grinding. His eyes were inflamed and the veins beneath the skin of his forehead were
pulsing like small rivers.

‘Not me,’ Anlun growled. ‘Them. You look at them and see what’s happening down there. You two-bit carnival freak, you watch
that until the very end and then you can look at me, not one second before. Do I make myself clear?’

Noel tried to nod but he could not move his neck. Anlun felt him try. He released, and Noel’s neck began to refill with blood
that had been damned up.

Onscreen, the motivational speaker man from before was back. He had something long in his hand, a steel rod of some sort.
It wasn’t until after he began to use it and the subjects began to jump that Noel realized it was a cattle prod. A cattle
prod with something pronged and sharp attached to the end.

‘One other thing you should know,’ Anlun said. ‘And this was news to me just two months ago.’

Noel covered his mouth and fought to keep from throwing up.

‘My former son-in-law, who earlier this year lost what few brains he ever had, he’s in there. With them. With
that. He’s part of it now. He came back to the States once to empty his bank accounts for the cause, and on the way back decided
to take my granddaughter with him.’

Noel jerked away from the screen and stared at the non-agent. Anlun raised his eyebrows, daring him to say anything else.

The rest of the fifty-minute ride to Calabasas passed in silence. Noel was too stunned by the implications of what Anlun had
shown him to notice where they were going until the agent driver swung the SUV into the driveway of the large Mediterranean
home and Noel saw his father’s old restored Saab in one of the three open garage bays.

‘Why do you have to involve my family?’ Noel said.

‘We’re not involving them,’ Anlun said. ‘This is where you get off.’

‘Aren’t you staying? Coming back for me? What is this, my last day of R&R before we hump out?’

Anlun shook his head. ‘We’re not coming back. You’re free to do as you please, Mr Shaker.’

Noel would have scoffed if he didn’t think doing so would have pissed off the non-agent again. His expression must have been
enough.

‘If you’re going to run, you’ll run,’ Anlun said. ‘I can’t make you do anything. Fritz, do we have any more coffee up there?’

The driver produced a thermos. Before taking it, Anlun said, ‘Is it hot?’

‘Iced,’ Fritz said.

‘Then what the fuck did you put it in a thermos for?’

Fritz did not reply for a moment. ‘To keep it cold?’

Anlun waved him off and looked at Noel. From his suit pocket he removed a business card and Noel took it. No name or address.
Only a phone number.

‘Call me if you have any thoughts.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ Noel said. ‘This isn’t … does my family know?’

‘About what?’

‘This. About me, you, Vegas, everything.’

‘Not unless you tell them,’ Anlun said. ‘Which I doubt is a good idea.’

Noel fell back in his seat. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I’m a man of my word. We talked. You listened. You’re free to go.’

‘No,’ Noel said. ‘I’m not free to do anything. You’re going to track me, you’ll be there, you’ll always be there. It doesn’t
work this way.’

‘No? How does it work?’ Anlun looked at his watch.

Noel looked up through the windshield, to the house. He thought he saw a curtain move.

‘Go see your family,’ Anlun said. ‘They’re probably worried about you.’

‘What about Julie?’ Noel asked. ‘On the plane, you said if I ever wanted to see her again. You said they were in custody.’

‘I wanted to make sure I had your attention.’

‘Unbelievable.’

‘The world is full of unbelievable, Shaker. But it’s still just the same old stupid world. Now get out of my car. I’m late
for a meeting.’

Noel could not help looking back after he opened the door and slipped halfway out. He was sure they were going to grab him
and tranquilize him at any moment. But the three men only sat staring forward, waiting for the door to close.

‘Look,’ he said, leaning in to address Anlun. ‘I wish I could help you, but I have to stay here. I have some things I need
to put right with my girl. My father … I can’t do the things you want me to do. I just … there’s not a chance in hell.’

Anlun glanced at him. ‘Understood. Thanks for hearing us out.’

Noel backed away and shut the door softly. The big black rig reversed from the driveway, straightened and shot off through
the neighborhood.

‘That didn’t happen,’ Noel said, shifting his lone tote bag from one hand to another. ‘There’s no way.’

His father stepped out onto the porch and set a hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the sun.