Afterparty (8 page)

A female voice answered. “Hello?”

“Put Olivia Skarsten on the line, please,” I said.

The woman said, “Who?”

I finally recognized the voice as belonging to Alexandra, a Korean college student who’d subsisted for four years on a diet of pita chips and intelligence enhancers, until she began to see Manitous residing in furniture. “I want Ollie, damn it. It’s me, Lyda.”

“Oh!” Then: “Are you calling from your room?”

“Alexandra, I left three days ago.”

“Right.” She set down the phone. I could hear the tinny roar of the open line, then Alexandra yelling for Ollie in the distance. Minutes passed while I paced Bobby’s tiny apartment. I just hoped Alexandra remembered to lead Ollie to the phone. Separating the wall appliance from wall was an exercise in object differentiation that Ollie was not prepared to execute.

“Hello?” It was Ollie.

“Hey,” I said.

“Lyda.” She had no problem recognizing voices. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“So the pellet’s working?”

“I’m clean as a whistle. This is something else. I need your help.”

“You’re in trouble.”

“If I’m going to stay out of trouble, I need you.”

She knew what that meant. Not the “you” under medication. The old Ollie.

“You want me to ride without a helmet,” she said.

“Just for a little while.”

The line went silent.

“I’m not going to be very sharp for a while,” she said finally. “And then when the meds wear off … it’s going to be the whole package.”

“I figured.” With Ollie’s particular damage, there was no happy medium for medication. The minimum dose was pretty much the debilitating dose. She was on or decidedly off.

After a moment I said, “So when do you think…?”

I listened to Ollie breathe for thirty seconds, a minute. Mulling it over. Finally she said, “How about tomorrow morning?”

“You can get out by then?”

“It’s not Fort Knox.”

THE PARABLE OF

the Ticking Clock

In those days, after the fall of the towers and the bombing of the trains and the wars in desert cities, after the chemical attacks of New Delhi and the Arab Spring chilled into the Autumn of the Iron Boot, the woman Olivia Skarsten left her post in the United States Army and became a communications analyst for Calasys, Inc., one of the hundreds of private corporations serving the signals intelligence needs of the American empire. She served her company, and her country, very well, and served them even better when she began using Clarity, a certain designer drug that was all the rage in the spook set. She might have served for longer if it had not been for the Case of the Broken Watch.

One of the subjects on the monitor list that Olivia was responsible for was a Pakistani expatriate living in New York City. The man—let’s call him Akbar—had been added to that list because of family relations: Two cousins were known members of the LeT, a Pakistani extremist group that longed to strike a blow against India and its allies. One day Akbar made an internet voice call to his brother-in-law back home in Lahore—let’s call him Bashir, for alphabetical simplicity. Akbar in New York mentioned several times that he wanted to buy a luxury wristwatch. Specifically a Maurice Lacroix wristwatch. Could Bashir the brother-in-law help him?

Olivia the Analyst was curious about this exchange. She had been monitoring cell phone calls, VoIP transmissions, and email for over five years, and she had developed an instinct for the unusual. When she was using Clarity, her powers of pattern recognition were especially keen, and that included recognizing items that were
not
part of the pattern. She wondered, why would Akbar go to all this trouble to purchase from a relative in Pakistan? Akbar could buy any designer watch he wanted online. Or if he wanted a knockoff, the streets of New York were full of them. Even if Bashir got some fabulous wholesale discount, Olivia categorized the interaction to be—to use a term of art in her field—“fishy.”

She issued a tracking order on Bashir’s communications, and learned that a day after talking to Akbar, Bashir sent an email to an electronics store and asked about an invoice for a shipment of watches. Olivia noticed that the last three digits of the invoice corresponded to the number of a Virgin-Atlantic flight from London to Newark.

Yes, she simply noticed. At this point in her career and chemical cycle, she was firing on all cylinders. The numbers, in a bit of Clarity-induced synesthesia, rang like chimes. Only a few weeks before, on a different matter entirely, she had looked through a list of flights to Newark and New York, and the numbers had stuck in her head.

Olivia, growing nervous now, began to comb through the NSA’s data warehouse for all the signal traffic between Pakistani nationals. She ran queries on all the cleartext available, be it human-translated, autotranslated, or untranslated. In very little time she turned up forty-two conversations—forty-two!—between Pakistanis that mentioned watches, all in the last month. Flight numbers kept appearing in the conversations: a United flight from Pittsburgh, a Lufthansa flight from Munich. Olivia realized that they were trying to decide on a target.

Time was of the essence. She flagged all the relevant data and wrote an alert memo, which she sent, per protocol, to her superior. Unfortunately, this was Memorial Day weekend, and the superior was out of his office, and Olivia could not get any response from his backup. Olivia was upset. It was clearly specified in the operations manual that the team coordinator or his backup was to be available 24-7. While she was fuming, a new cell call popped up from Akbar, her ex-pat Pakistani in NYC, to Bashir in Lahore. Olivia was listening to it live. Near the end of the call, Bashir read off the same London invoice number that Olivia had intercepted before.

Olivia knew that flight. She also knew that it was
already in the air
. The plane would touch down in New York at 4:52 a.m. Then Bashir said, “You can expect delivery by morning.”

Olivia was not even scheduled to be on duty that night. But she was the only person who could have recognized this pattern.

She tried to call her superior on vacation, but it was 3 a.m. and the call went unanswered. She escalated and called his boss, who curtly told her to file a report for review in the morning. She called the company president and got only so far as his voicemail. Olivia would not quit. She began to call other government offices, ringing pens and cell phones and landlines all over the District of Columbia and Virginia. Of the people she reached, most had never gotten a direct call from a consultant before and refused to talk to her. She finally reached Willa Frank, the Undersecretary for Political Affairs, number three at the State Department.

Ms. Frank asked Olivia to slow down and repeat the information. Then she asked for Olivia’s name again, and what company she worked for. Then Ms. Frank said, “How long have you been awake, Ms. Skarsten?”

Olivia wasn’t quite sure. Three days, more or less.

Ms. Frank said, “I’ll take care of this.”

It was now an hour until the plane landed. Olivia was alone in the building, sitting at her desk with all four computer monitors on. One window showed the Virgin-Atlantic website, a dozen others were open to every TV and web news channel Olivia could think of. She was sick to her stomach. Sweat painted her back. She counted down the minutes to 4:52 a.m. And then, at 4:40, the Virgin-Atlantic website updated. The plane had landed early.

Olivia was shocked, but also relieved. No crash. No bomb. She could not understand what had happened. And then, because she was one of the company’s best analysts, she came upon the solution.

Olivia’s superior returned early from vacation and found her at her desk, staring at the monitors. Three security officers stood behind him. The boss said, “Ollie, did you call Willa Frank this morning?”

Olivia said, “Nobody else would listen.”

He told her to gather her personal belongings, but she had already packed the box. She’d been doing fifty milligrams of Clarity a day, plus another fifty of Adderall, and usually a twelve-pack of Red Bull. She could see, almost literally, what was coming. The writing was on the wall, the floors, and the furniture. Each face like an arrow pointing her toward the exit.

A few years later, when she told the story to Lyda Rose, a fellow resident of the neuro-atypical ward of Guelph Western Hospital, Lyda asked, “What happened to the Pakistani guy in New York?”

Ollie shrugged. “He probably got a new watch.”

—G.I.E.D.

CHAPTER SIX

We waited for Ollie at the agreed-upon place, the parking lot of a Tim Hortons three blocks from the hospital. Bobby drumming his fingers on the wheel, Dr. Gloria in the backseat humming Mozart, both of them driving me crazy.

Bobby said, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Is what a good idea?” I asked.

“Helping her … escape.”

“You think she’s dangerous?”

“No, no! I mean, maybe. Didn’t she kill a guy?”

“She shot someone. Wounded him. It was a robber who was breaking into her apartment.”

“I thought it was her landlord.”

“Who told you that?”

Bobby touched the treasure chest at his neck. “Todd.”

Fucking Counselor Todd. “Yes,” I said, “but she
thought
it was a robber.” Actually, she had thought it was an agent sent by her former employers to take her back across the border. Ollie on meds was brain-damaged—couldn’t organize her visual field, couldn’t separate figure from ground, couldn’t recognize her own face in a mirror—but Ollie
off
meds …

“She can be a little paranoid,” I said.

“She told me that the US has drones the size of house flies, and that they can come in your house and take pictures of you.”

“The US government does not want to see you naked, Bobby.”

“So it’s not true?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Ollie had worked for six years doing signals intelligence for the US Army, then moved to the private sector to do the same job for three times the money. A contractor, with access to all kinds of classified info, not to mention the government’s mil-spec smart drugs. The one Ollie used was a wicked thing, a custom-built enzyme that generated its own battery of agonists for the alpha-2A receptor. They called it Clarity. The drug—or rather, the proteins that the enzyme manufactured—set fire to the forest that was the prefrontal cortex, burned down the trees and encouraged massively interconnected bushes of white matter to grow up in its place. Repeated use at high doses made the new structure permanent.

Nobody used Clarity anymore.

“Besides,” I said to Bobby. “You’re Canadian. You’re perfectly safe.”

Dr. G spotted Ollie crouched down between cars, wearing a baseball cap and blue scrubs, not enough clothes for the weather. I got out of the car, and Ollie looked at me without recognition, her face pinched and nervous, ready to run. Then I said her name, and she hopped up, began walking quickly toward us.

Dr. Gloria said, “Bobby’s right, we shouldn’t be helping her escape. It isn’t fair to her. She’s better off in the ward.”

“She’s a grown woman. She can go back whenever she wants, and God knows she can get out whenever she wants.”

Ollie touched me on the arm like a runner tagging safe. Neither of us were huggers. She slid into the backseat, and I followed her in.

Bobby said, “Hi, Ollie!” Overdoing the cheerfulness.

She closed her eyes, pressed a hand into her forehead. Still shaky, coming down off the meds.

“Turn up the heat, Bobby,” I said. He pulled into the street, and I said to Ollie, “How you doing?”

Her eyes slid across my face, unable to gain traction. “I’ll be better when we’re away from the hospital.”

“So no problems getting out, Doctor … Srinigar?”

She touched the badge she wore on a lanyard and allowed herself a half smile. Hospital security had never been a problem for Ollie. She lifted pass cards, security badges, and keys, then kept them hidden in her mattress. We used to go for midnight runs to the kitchen and raid the fridges. She could unlock most doors with the twist of a wire coat hanger, but only with her eyes closed, doing it by feel. My job was to point her at the doors and guide her back to the NAT ward. I had no idea how she’d managed to get out of the building on her own and navigate three blocks, even after twelve hours off the meds. But here she was.

“Did you bring any of your Alisprazole?” I asked.

“About a dozen pills.”

Dr. G said, “She should stay on her meds. Going off now—”

“She’ll be fine,” I told the doctor.

“Lyda…,” Dr. G chided.

I breathed in. To Ollie I said, “We don’t have to do this. You can stay on them. I can talk to my dealer and get more when we need them.”

“I thought you needed me,” Ollie said. “Immediately.”

“I do.”

“So I thought we’d do a jumpstart.”

“No!” Dr. G said. “Absolutely not!”

“Unless you’ve got five or six days to let my system flush out,” Ollie said.

“I kind of need you tonight,” I said.

The car exploded with subjective light. “I will not participate in this!” Dr. Gloria declared. I heard a shriek of metal, and then a rush of wind. I yelled, thinking, stupidly, that Bobby had also been blinded and crashed the car.

Ollie yelled, “Lyda! What’s going on?” Bobby shouted too.

I opened my eyes a sliver. Dr. G’s wings were at full extension, and the tips had ripped a ragged hole in the top of the car. The wind roared. The doctor brought her wings down and then shot into the sky.

“Hypocrite,” I said. I’d thrown an arm over my eyes, and I was crying from the blast of light. I still felt the wind whipping through the exit hole.

“Are you all right?” Ollie asked. “Was that your—?”

“Give me a second,” I said.

There is no wind, I told myself. No hole. No furious angel.

I sat back against the seat, eyes closed. The sound of the wind died down, became the hum of the tires. Bobby, still upset, kept asking me if he should pull over.