The Viterbi Path
1.
By 9:04 EST the car service was officially late, Marget noted with a glance at her cellphone. She looked sharply at the doorman, an indeterminately aged man in an impeccable uniform, who returned her glance with the proper mixture of alertness and deference. Margot allowed the heel of her Italian leather pumps to tap the granite flagstones twice in annoyance, then replaced the minuscule cell into her namelessly expensive purse. She rolled her shoulders briefly, following the habits years of Pilates had instilled in her. She made a mental note to inform her executive assistant that the Four Seasons should receive a brief letter re:bed stiffness, which joined the voluminous expanse of reminders in her memory.
In fifteen years she'd never once forgotten one of these notes, a fact that caused equal parts awe and irritation in her peers and lessers.
Outside the traffic flowed like a languid river nearing the sea, luxury models sailing past her position on 57th Street. Each black Mercedes that passed drew her attention as it approached, then consternation as it drove on, heedless of her. Minutes passed and Margot's foot began to tap again, a staccato rhythm that would have petrified any of her numerous aides. Gray clouds, visible as slices of sky delineated by the local buildings, seethed and rolled. Margot retrieved her cellphone again, flipping the featureless black thing open with a casual elegance that belied her growing anger.
She was just about to call her assistant back in California and tell her to call the car service when an older model black Mercedes pulled up in front of the hotel. Outside, in the raw fall weather, the parking attendant raced over to the car and conferred with the driver. Inside the lobby, the hotel staff, acting on information from the parking attendant, initiated the system of actions that carried Margot's rolling suit bag from it's resting spot into the hastily opened trunk of the Mercedes. Margot, long coat still over one arm, was whisked on board with equal efficiency. So efficient was this process that Margot, carried by service-industry platitudes and apologies, was temporarily mollified.
Once inside, sitting on the soft leather seat in back, Margot rekindled her anger.
She reached into the center panel's small icebox for a bottle of water. She looked disdainfully at the plastic Fiji bottle and returned it to the icebox. She added another note to her mental filing system. She looked up at the driver, an intent looking woman a decade or more her junior. She wore the driver service's uniform, though not well. Pale cappuccino skin clashed with green eyes, darting visibly in the rear view mirror. Short black hair sprouted out from under the driver's cap.
"I asked for Pellegrino," Margot said icily.
"I'm terribly sorry," the woman said in faintly accented English. "There must have been some mistake."
Margot pointedly looked out of the car, ignoring the driver for the time being, and noticed a thin gridwork of lines crisscrossing the window pane. She glanced across the soft seats and squinted at the opposite window, just barely making out what appeared to be matching mesh on the opposite window.
"What's this on the windows," she said crossly, finger smudging the pristine glass. Whatever the mesh was, it was on the outside of the window.
The driver remained silent, weaving through the traffic quickly and efficiently. For all her attention on the windows, Margot hadn't noticed their direction. The car and it's passengers should've been making their way across the Long Island Expressway en route to LaGuardia airport to meet with the charter flight back to LAX. Instead they were threading their way through side streets up Manhattan, towards the Bronx.
Margot's brow furrowed, revealing well hidden but distinct lines that ringed her eyes. The expression of distaste, mixed with equal parts self-assured arrogance and irritation, was obviously a regular one. It was the same expression one wore when batting at a persistent fly during an elaborate dinner. Margot retrieved her cellphone and flipped it open decisively. As she held the button for her assistant, asleep back in California, she deliberated briefly on the extent to which she should go. Obviously the driver was going to lose her job, but where should she stop?
Her phone flashed 'no-signal' plaintively. They were still in the middle of Manhattan. Margot's brow relaxed unconsciously. There was no way she could be out of service here, in one of the most heavily inundated communications nexuses in the world. Indecision and confusion warred in her mind, thinly plucked eyebrows twitching as these novel emotions cascaded across her carefully made up face.
"The mesh on the windows is made of thin copper wiring," began the driver, all traces of obsequiousness gone. Her words were soft but carried to the back seat distinctly. "To the radio waves your cellphone uses, it's as opaque as a brick wall."
Margot looked at the driver again, noting an amused curl to the driver's formerly expressionless lips. The curl went from a wry comma to a full smile as the driver flicked her vision from road to rear view. Margot's hand began creeping slowly to the door handle, carefully staying below the driver's line of sight.
"What is going on here?" Margot calmly.
"I'm afraid it's not up to me to say," replied the driver, "but you may be a little late for your flight."
Margot pulled the lever on the door suddenly and heaved herself against the door. She rebounded back into the soft leather of her seat. The driver chuckled, her laughter clear and musical. She produced a manila folder from the passenger seat and tossed it back at Margot. "If it's any consolation, you're going to learn quite a bit about yourself along the way."
Margot considered screaming and yelling, judged the tint on the windows sufficient to hide any actions she might undertake, and decided violence was beneath her at this point. She picked up the folder and unwrapped the string that held it shut. "Whatever you're planning isn't going to work," she said.
"I think you'll come around," the driver said. She lifted up a small yellow-and-black wasp-shaped box from beneath her seat, showing Margot the two sharp metal connectors at it's end. Margot had seen enough movies to recognize a tazer. "Just read."
2.
At 11:26, an older model Mercedes pulled up to the security gate separating the private section of LaGuardia airport, nestled comfortably away from the commercial flights. A large, imposing man in a 'TSA' windbreaker pulled his attention away from the computer screen, abandoning the crawl through the day's top stories. He hefted his bulk up from the rolling chair, groaning at the exertion, and brushed a faint powder of snack food dust from his slacks. With one hand he closed the lid of his laptop, stock-car hologram stickers glinting in the clearing skies. The other rested, in a much practiced manner, on the holster for his tazer as he slid the window to his little shack up.
The driver's lightly tinted window retracted smoothly into the door, revealing a youngish woman with dusky skin. The guard's nose wrinkled unconsciously as if an odd smell had just emanated from the interior of the Mercedes. Then he smiled and adjusted his belt as she provided the proper paperwork. He glanced in the back and saw another woman, intently reading a file.
"Got lucky with the weather," he said to the driver as he checked his own sheets.
"Lucky all over," the driver said, turning to the woman in the back seat. "Isn't that right, Margot?"
"Not the word I'd use," said the businesswoman in back.
The guard waved them through then realized there'd been something odd in the conversation. He rubbed his belly as the car drove off towards the needle of a corporate jet waiting near one of the hangars. "Handsome women," he said to himself after radioing ahead to the waiting ground crew.
He settled himself down in the chair again, retrieving a pair of binoculars from a desk drawer filled with leftover plastic packages of condiments. After failing to keep them steady over the distance, he dug a little deeper into the drawer, revealing a worn copy of Celebrity Skin with a former teen pop star sprawled across it's cover. Underneath her mannequin's smile, he found a tripod, on which he mounted the binoculars. He placed the whole set up next to his laptop before training the lenses, once again, on his targets.
The ground crew was swarming over the car, one steward escorting the passenger up the lowered stairs while another conferred with the driver by the car's trunk. In his shack, the guard watched the boarding woman look back at the driver, still clutching the manila folder tightly. Grunting with concentration, the guard struggled to focus on the driver, sweaty fingers slipping over the grooves of the focusing mechanism. When he adjusted properly, he saw the driver wave gaily back at her passenger before the plane was buttoned up and readied for departure.
The Mercedes pulled away, headed back towards the guard to exit the controlled space of the airfield. He quickly collapsed the tripod arrangement, stuffing it back in the desk, his movements sending a few showers of condiment packages scattering to the ground. The Mercedes purred almost silently outside the opposite window, which the guard slid open roughly. The smiling face of the driver waited behind it.
After he finished signing her out, the guard was surprised to find the driver handing him a large tan folder, sealed tightly by a bit of string wrapped around bright red circles. He took the folder, placing it on his desk where he was shocked to notice that the copy of Celebrity Skin had somehow escaped the desk and was now clearly visible from the car. The driver, following his gaze, raised her eyebrows indulgently and drove off, leaving the guard to settle back into his chair with an uncomfortably hot face.
He forgot about the folder for the time being.
3.
At 6:43 PM, an oversized pickup truck on heavy chrome rims and exceedingly knobby tires pulled to a stop on an empty street. Recessed lights, hidden behind an aftermarket grill, splashed light into the growing yellow-orange malaise of streetlight as the engine rumbled like a frustrated thoroughbred. After idling for just long enough to indicate indecision on the part of the driver, the engine died and the lights followed suit. A few moments later the driver's door sprang heavily open, punctuated by a strained groan from the TSA guard as he heaved himself out of the custom bucket seats. The truck stood out on the deserted street, already picking up a thin layer of grime over it's Turtle Wax.
With heavy, swaying steps, the guard walked around the door, uniform hidden under a long windbreaker. He glanced nervously at the manila folder sitting on his passenger seat, wrapped tightly with it's string. With a brief shudder he reached in for it then closed the door and pressed the lock button on his key chain. His hands, not nimble at the best of moments, accidentally tapped twice over the reassuring icon and the truck gave a surprisingly loud beep as the alarm turned on. The guard put the key in his jacket pocket, glanced around nervously, and left his truck. He shuffled like a man carrying garbage, freshly polished steel-toed boots scuffing the grimy pavement.
His hesitant steps carried him into a nearby alleyway, the kind of place that should only exist on some sound stage in LA. Graffiti bloomed across it like a lichen, layers and layers of signifiers overlapping into meaningless illustrations. The big man stopped at the alley's mouth, drew a pair of heavy canvas gloves over his hands. The gloves were brand new.
His pace picked up as best as his bulk allowed, sending the better part of him rippling with each long stride. The alley branched off, gaps between adjacent buildings or access points to some infrastructure point long since subsumed by progress. Manhole covers breathed steam as if the city was winded and the alley grew darker and more foreboding as the light from the street faded. The tunnel seemed impossibly long to the guard, as if it went on further than the opposite block allowed. Chalk patterns, like graphs from half remembered math classes dictated by schizophrenic interpreters to palsied lepers, choked the ground. Hidden amongst them in two lines along the wall were little kitschy electric candlesticks made to look like famous locations in the city. The Statue of Liberty's torch flickered fitfully and the guard saw that her face had been repainted with tribal markings. The plug trailed off to nothing over a particularly dense cluster of chalk equations.
The guard swallowed and made his way past the increasingly more distorted tourist icons, nose wrinkling at the increasingly fecund smell. Years worth of urine combined acridly with that tang of sweat unwashed, the moldy smell of a coat lived in too long tangling with an undertone of ozone like the air before a lightning strike. The end of the alleyway was in sight, a smooth wall of concrete spray-painted solid black. Orderly rows of numbers and letters, written in a meticulous hand, formed great dense clusters of meaning. Someone had stretched what looked like trash bags across the walls a story up, weaving them into the threads of hanging wires like a rude basket. Trapped water dripped down from the seams, old stagnant raindrops freed by gusts of wind.
Underneath this canopy were piles of junk, sorted into some pattern that escaped the guard. A pair of blue tarps covered jumbled heaps of old electronics, from console game systems to twisted structures of cobbled together circuit boards. Pale green light escaped a small collection of refuse, a screen laid flat in a pile of trash that looked vaguely man-like.
The pile moved, shifted forward slightly in a way that resolved the man hidden in trash. The guard started, breath escaping from his lips like a shot. The file still clutched in his hands shook steadily now as he stretched it out towards the man in the trash. Slowly, with a delicacy that belied his appearance, the man in the trash looked up from the glowing screen, eyes straining off at nothing a few feet above the head of the guard. His hand lifted from beneath the screen, emerging from the trash like something rising from the grave. The guard stepped forward and handed him the file, which disappeared into the trash. The man in the trash returned to his screen, tapped it twice with his finger and sat back. Behind him, in the shadowy corner of the alley, an old dot matrix printer screeched to life, chattered for a few seconds and then died.
The man reached back, never taking his eyes off the screen, and deftly ripped the paper off from the cradle. He produced another file, identical to the first, and inserted the fresh page into it. He returned his glare to the point above the guard's head and tied the file shut. This file he lifted up and the guard took.
The guard retreated from the man in the trash as quickly as he could without actually running. He returned to his truck to find a homeless woman curled up on his right front tire. He yelled at her, anger a welcome vaccine against the fear and unease he'd just escaped. She yelled wordlessly back and staggered away. The guard unlocked the door and hopped inside the cab, heaving himself into the seat and slamming the door as soon as he feet were clear. He let the engine run for a second, hot air blowing in from the vents. He took off the gloves, put the car in gear and drove off towards home.
4.
At 8:46, the tow truck arrived.
The big yellow diesel weaved through the dense traffic of the Holland Tunnel to rumble to a stop just inside the arranged orange cones, next to the ambulance and state police cruiser. The trooper had left his lights running, spinning red flashes reflecting from the gray-white tile walls like the winning moment in some cheap game show. Past the ambulance and its no longer busy EMTs rested the remains of an oversized pickup truck, crumpled against the wall on the right lane. The tow truck driver opened his door, keeping a watchful eye for errant traffic, battered pair of Timberlands splashing through puddles. He added a few cones to the line, making sure they were well marked as towing company property, and walked up towards the trooper.
The officer was listening to the radio, half in the car, shaking his head in annoyance. He was a young man, radiating an almost plaintive aura of hard-case. He looked up and said: "That was pretty quick."
The tow truck driver glanced at the officer's uniform. "Happened to be in the area, Officer Vogel. How's it look?"
Officer Vogel shook his head. "Like a fucking butcher's block."
The driver nodded in assumed agreement. He was looking at the truck now, crushed-beer-can hood disappearing back into the cab. Spider webbed windshields didn't hide a nasty red period over the driver's space. "No seat belt?" he said, not really asking.
Vogel looked back into his cab, fiddled with the radio and said nothing.
The driver grunted and headed to the car. He was eying the front end speculatively, imagining how he'd pull the truck off the wall. EMTs were wrapping up their work, moving with dull efficiency now that their services were no longer required. They all had the same disappointed look on their face, players in a team that just missed the championship. The stretcher, its sheet-covered passenger flowing over its sides, remained stubbornly on the ground as two men tried to get it to rise. Their angry mouths worked but the sound was washed away in an opera of engine noise and bitter car horns.
"Axle's off," the driver said to the dead machine. He ran a hand along the truck's flank like it was a sick horse, noting the trailer hitch with it's dangling rubber testicles. The front was bent up from the impact, wheels sticking out at awkward angles, tires thrown off treads. The driver's door was bent off the frame by the jaws-of-life and fluid leaked into the suppressant foam sprayed across the ground. "You'll be needing the sling," the driver told the truck.
The ambulance started up, headlights flaring to life, then pulled into the river of traffic under the protection of it's own lights. The driver went around the front, half embedded in the wall, and made certain he was out of line of sight from Officer Vogel. Crouching down, he ran his hands along the underside of the engine, near the right side. He moved carefully but with the speed granted by long familiarity, rough fingertips skirting around jagged shards, until he found a small box, about the size of a cigarette pack. The heavy metal box was directly under one of the clusters of computers that regulated fluid pressure for the truck's steering and brakes.
The driver reached into his coverall's pockets, withdrawing a short, awkwardly shaped tool something like a screwdriver. He ran it's blunt tip along the back edge of the box, searching for a specific spot. Abruptly the tool slid into a small indent on the box, which the driver turned clockwise. After a few seconds of steady pressure, it clicked 90 degrees. The box made a clunking sound like an automatic door lock and fell off the metal plate to which it'd been attached. It went into a pocket swiftly, and the driver rose. He checked the rest of the car for anything serious enough to need a flat bed, then looked over the interior intently.
"Officer Vogel!" he yelled.
The officer noticed the waving and walked, grudgingly, to the totaled truck. "What?"
"You should probably get that," the driver said, pointing at a pristine manila folder protruding from the glove box.
5.
At 9:14 AM, an older model black Mercedes parked across the street from the North Precinct Station of the Jersey City Police Department. The driver side door opened smoothly, and a young woman with pale cappuccino skin emerged. A battered black leather valise danged carelessly from her left hand. She closed the door, adjusted her jacket and skirt, and strode into Central Wireless. It took her six minutes to purchase an STI-Mobile cell phone, twenty dollars of airtime and a hands-free set. Activating the phone took the groggy looking clerk a few more minutes. The woman spent the interval reading the 37th page of as many periodicals as she could, spending extra time with Us and Weekly World News.
The clerk, warming to the new sale now that caffeine suffused his bloodstream, accepted cash from the woman. After completing the activation process, he carefully had the cappuccino-skinned woman call the shop's number, his own private number and then reversed the process to demonstrate that the phone worked. The woman accepted this all with a warmth that was as complete as it was insincere. With deft flicks of her fingernails, she split the plastic shell around the hands-free set up, plugged in the earphone and adjusted the volume to suit her.
Task completed, the woman strolled across the street, tucking the bulky looking cellphone into her jacket pocket. She went quickly up the four-stair at the building's main entrance, sliding swiftly through the relative calm of the morning shift. Waiting patiently for the desk sergeant, she dialed a number from memory, keeping the cell phone in her pocket and put the earplug in, leaving the microphone to dangle from her ear like a pagan fetish.
A mechanical voice spoke into her ear, telling her a name. When her time with the sergeant came, she signed in as "Rhonda McIntyre," showed a NY state driver's license to that effect and asked where Sergeant Franklin worked. The sergeant arranged an escort in the form of a bored looking clerk in a sweater vest, glaring through thick plastic rimmed glasses that were worn without a hint of irony.
"This way," he said, gesturing towards the elevator. He made no more conversation as the car dropped into the basement. The voice in Ms. McIntyre's ear continued it's mechanical commentary. The clerk pointed in the direction of Ms. McIntyre's destination and closed the elevator doors.
Downstairs the atmosphere was devoid of morning light, lit instead by faintly flickering florescent whiteness. McIntyre's pumps made a clicking noise as she strode down the hall and this was the only obvious sound in the world. Sergeant Franklin sat listless at his desk and the crackling mechanical voice said he was working a double.
"Can I help you?" he offered, not looking up from his desk. Stacks of clipboards coated his desk like bird droppings and he appeared to be painstakingly copying them into a large ledger. The sergeant was a tall man who seemed shorter due to posture; he hunched over his desk like a question mark at the end of a long sentence.
"I'm Ms. McIntyre," came the reply.
Franklin grunted, his fingers running across the stubble on his chin. "If you'll give me a moment."
McIntyre nodded to the sergeant, who still hadn't looked up from his forms. The scritch-scritch of ballpoint on coarse paper was audible over the voice in her ear, narrating the life of Franklin. When he was done with his task he unrolled to his full height, adjusting his uniform briefly before looking over at his guest.
"You the same one from the phone?" he asked, "I'll need to see ID."
"Of course," McIntyre said, retrieving her license from the battered valise. "Long night?"
"Going to be a longer morning," Franklin said as he examined the embedded holograms. "Give me another moment, please."
Franklin retreated to his desk and called up to the front desk. He checked out the ID and dug out a particular clipboard, displaying a brittle familiarity with everything that spoke of long practice. After he hung up he brought this clipboard to the waiting woman and said: "If you'll sign here."
McIntyre signed with gusto, long flowing practiced letters that were out of place on the utilitarian form. She scanned the pages, then looked up at Franklin. One of her carefully plucked eyebrows rose.
"Only one signature. We've got the faxes from your office and everything is in order. He was dropping it off on the way home from work?"
"Unfortunately," McIntyre said sadly. "One of our clients left it behind and he called the number on the inside."
Franklin nodded. "I have to admit I looked inside," he said.
"Oh?" McIntyre said with perhaps too much curiosity.
"What is it?"
"Financial figures, mostly. Ticker reports and so on. They don't exactly tell the couriers everything."
Franklin nodded. "Well, poor bastard almost delivered."
Franklin seemed to realize who he was talking to and lowered his head. He closed the clipboard and freed his ring of keys, opening the cages that kept everything locked in. It took him a few moments to find the tray with the personal effects requested. He took the tray out, carefully locking everything on his way out.
"Any luck with next of kin?" McIntyre asked.
"Not yet. Looks like a lot of his family is in California, so they're not up just yet." Franklin's tone seemed to indicate this was a moral failing on the part of Californians rather than a consequence of Earth's spherical nature. "You get your folder though."
"I can't tell you how nice that is to hear. My boss was crazy when she heard what happened to that," she said, pointing at the folder in the tray.
"Nice of her to show concern for the driver," Franklin added. He looked up as if he'd said something rude again and made a face that implied things were easier at night when there was no one around.
"She's a rich woman, Sergeant Franklin, she's sort of an asshole." McIntyre said it like she was sharing a secret. "Thank you, but I really need to get this back."
Franklin grunted in her direction, settling back down to his paperwork. McIntyre retreated, leaving only the sound of her steps in her wake. She waited for the elevator, listening to the narrating voice in her ear. Once outside she strolled across the street and entered the Mercedes. She took the phone from her pocket and placed it in the glove box, carefully wrapping the wires for the headset into a compact ball. She started the car and began driving back into the city. The traffic back through the tunnel was thick, and McIntyre paused to look at the damage on the tunnel's far wall, a wound in tile and cement.
Once she was out of the tunnel, she turned the radio to a particular AM channel and the mechanical voice from her phone returned, feeding her gravelly traffic advice. She weaved through the smaller streets, following its suggestions unquestioningly. Several times it guided her around congestion and the path she followed was anything but straight line. The voice ceased as she arrived at a row of warehouses. McIntyre pulled up in front of a gated parking lot nestled between two old and decrepit buildings. She reached into her valise and withdrew a large laser pointer, which she played across a specific spot atop the gate. It slid open, deceptively smooth, along rails that seemed more metal oxide than metal.
McIntyre parked the car behind the thick fence and let it idle. The implacable progress of the closing gate soothed her growing nervousness. As it closed, she exhaled a nervous breath. McIntyre parked the car and let it idle. The slow drone of the engine proved a meditative aide despite her visibly growing discomfort. With a slow caress of the keys, she left the car and walked towards the door of the nearest warehouse. A swift swipe of plastic and she was inside, sheltered from the day's growing heat. The vast space of the warehouse's interior was obscured by thick velvet curtains, featureless screens that stretched upwards to the crisscrossing planks that made up the warehouse's tallest points.
McIntyre slid through the curtains towards the warehouse's center. Her steps faltered as she went, poise evaporating with each step. She passed through the final curtain to the scene's heart, a splayed vista that seemed more at home at the Hamptons than some warehouse in the city. She slipped off her modest pumps as she crossed the sand, scattered in quantities that suggested a beach. The long stare of a false-day's floodlight bath made the sand uncomfortably hot, though the lights were too weak to make it painful to walk across.
The walls of curtain lent the porch an unnatural quiet like a blanket of fog, eating the sound of her steps as she walked up the gray wooden steps to the door. A large quarterboard hung from the house with the word 'Essex' carved painstakingly into it in a steady hand. She put her shoes back on as she stood before the door, one finger running along the flourishes around the letter 'E.' Through tense lips, she pulled a deep breathe and let it out to a four count, held her lungs still for a moment and inhaled for a similar period. She repeated this for a few moments, then turned the door knob with apparent reluctance.
The door lead to a long hallway that split the ground floor in half. Old, unvarnished floorboards, like worn driftwood planks, squeaked on large copper nails. Years of footsteps had worn a perfectly smooth track down the center of the hall and lead to the spiral staircase in lurid wrought iron. Tasteful if unoriginal oil paintings dangled from the walls, smeared-pink sunsets over impressionist seas staring at seabirds in an improbably blue sky. The noise of her steps made the house sound alive and cranky as McIntyre walked to the sun room to meet her employer. At the door she paused, rolling her head around in circles while repeating her breathing trick. Finally, with a decisiveness that seemed almost desperate, she opened the door into blinding brilliance.
The sun room blazed with a piercing radiance that cut through tightly closed eyelids and seemed to strike at the core of the woman's soul. It was a brittle sort of light, so intense that it washed out the contents of the room and drove her to her knees, hands clenched across her chest as if in prayer. She heard the sound of wings, soft whispers as feather played across feather. There was a faint smell of purifying fire backed by sandalwood and myrrh and underneath everything else a faint whispering, like a distant choir of rarefied voices singing hymns of heartbreaking loss.
Through her squeezed eyes a faint form, seemingly made up of the very light of the room, strode forward proudly. She could only imagine the features of this creature of light, only supply the inhumanly beautiful face and wise, tireless eyes she imagined staring at her. She began to pray in earnest as an unearthly voice said:
"The Angel again?" Buzzing jarringly beneath the melodious words was annoyance. The figure glanced around the room. "Must be the windows," it said, seemingly to itself.
The figure strode to the curtains and dragged them across the windows with the fluid sweep of smoothly muscled arms. The light that had filled the room died abruptly, taking with it the scents of incense and sounds of wings. Blackness, thick and liquid, stole over the room in it's place, a surge of shadows that brought rotten egg stench and the creaking of taut leather. By the window towered a beast, a sketch of some nightmare in purple flesh that seemed to seethe in barely suppressed violence. The woman, her false name forgotten, scrambled to her feet, shuddering in fear as a long saurian tail lashed at the beast's feet.
"Now what!" barked the broken glass voice. It seemed backed by screams of terror and rage, modulating in tone with the words.
"Forgive me, Father," began the woman.
The beast stalked around the shadowed room, seemingly in a rage, and the prayer faltered, running over itself in a babble. Beacons of pale light flickered on, steely monochromatic glows that beat the shadows back. When the light reached the beast, it seemed to bubble away, flesh evaporating like a body at ground zero. In it's place was a small figure, around the size of a child.
Is this better? came a voice from inside her head. The woman calmed slightly, her terror replaced by a sort of clinical detachment. The squat figure walked towards the couch, now lit by an array of plasma screens displaying arcane trajectories and scrawls of mathematics.
"Yes," she managed to say. The large head of her boss tilted, fist sized black eyes pinning her, specimen-like, to her place.
The folder, please, continued the small figure with a gesture to the coffee table between the sofa it sat on and McIntyre.
"Of course," she said. She placed it on the table where a tiny hand unwrapped the binding. The unblinking eyes stared at the reams of figures.
The rest?
McIntyre dug through her valise for the thumb drive of data regarding the travels of the folder. It contained everything from the weather halfway around the world, in a small village in Kathmandu, to stock figures and trending Twitter results at odd points during the day.
And our new recruit?
"Shaken and swayed, but she'll need to meet your...west coast representative."
It was a shame about her predecessor, the voice said. McIntyre found herself staring a few feet behind the figure, where some trick of the glow seemed to be stretching towards her from some orthogonal direction. It coiled along axes she couldn't quite perceive, a glimmer from elsewhere that fascinated her with it's geometrical intricacy. The phenomenon stretched out, bending in some helical manner out from the little figure's shadow, seemingly passing through its skull with a caress before emerging seamlessly from the far side, where it slid in staccato fashion to the table.
It hovered above a pen, which obligingly lifted, clicked once to extend the point, and began to write on another manila folder. It wrote in a bizarre manner, fragments of looping cursive scattered across a line in an out-of-order fashion that none the less produced a flawless script. T's were crossed before they were written, letters broken into segments that seemed unnatural on the wrist, and the whole sentence seemed to emerge all at once from the jumble. Once complete the pen hovered for a moment as if considering an addendum, then settled quietly next to the folder.
Be sure to observe the proper protocols, came the words in her mind as the tendril retreated back through the gray figure's head and into whatever corner of existence it'd come from. She rose, taking the folder, and retreated from the room. Written on the new folder was a name, a location and a time.
"No good deed," the woman lately called McIntyre said as she stepped out of the house into the faux-beach.
1.
By 9:04 EST the car service was officially late, Marget noted with a glance at her cellphone. She looked sharply at the doorman, an indeterminately aged man in an impeccable uniform, who returned her glance with the proper mixture of alertness and deference. Margot allowed the heel of her Italian leather pumps to tap the granite flagstones twice in annoyance, then replaced the minuscule cell into her namelessly expensive purse. She rolled her shoulders briefly, following the habits years of Pilates had instilled in her. She made a mental note to inform her executive assistant that the Four Seasons should receive a brief letter re:bed stiffness, which joined the voluminous expanse of reminders in her memory.
In fifteen years she'd never once forgotten one of these notes, a fact that caused equal parts awe and irritation in her peers and lessers.
Outside the traffic flowed like a languid river nearing the sea, luxury models sailing past her position on 57th Street. Each black Mercedes that passed drew her attention as it approached, then consternation as it drove on, heedless of her. Minutes passed and Margot's foot began to tap again, a staccato rhythm that would have petrified any of her numerous aides. Gray clouds, visible as slices of sky delineated by the local buildings, seethed and rolled. Margot retrieved her cellphone again, flipping the featureless black thing open with a casual elegance that belied her growing anger.
She was just about to call her assistant back in California and tell her to call the car service when an older model black Mercedes pulled up in front of the hotel. Outside, in the raw fall weather, the parking attendant raced over to the car and conferred with the driver. Inside the lobby, the hotel staff, acting on information from the parking attendant, initiated the system of actions that carried Margot's rolling suit bag from it's resting spot into the hastily opened trunk of the Mercedes. Margot, long coat still over one arm, was whisked on board with equal efficiency. So efficient was this process that Margot, carried by service-industry platitudes and apologies, was temporarily mollified.
Once inside, sitting on the soft leather seat in back, Margot rekindled her anger.
She reached into the center panel's small icebox for a bottle of water. She looked disdainfully at the plastic Fiji bottle and returned it to the icebox. She added another note to her mental filing system. She looked up at the driver, an intent looking woman a decade or more her junior. She wore the driver service's uniform, though not well. Pale cappuccino skin clashed with green eyes, darting visibly in the rear view mirror. Short black hair sprouted out from under the driver's cap.
"I asked for Pellegrino," Margot said icily.
"I'm terribly sorry," the woman said in faintly accented English. "There must have been some mistake."
Margot pointedly looked out of the car, ignoring the driver for the time being, and noticed a thin gridwork of lines crisscrossing the window pane. She glanced across the soft seats and squinted at the opposite window, just barely making out what appeared to be matching mesh on the opposite window.
"What's this on the windows," she said crossly, finger smudging the pristine glass. Whatever the mesh was, it was on the outside of the window.
The driver remained silent, weaving through the traffic quickly and efficiently. For all her attention on the windows, Margot hadn't noticed their direction. The car and it's passengers should've been making their way across the Long Island Expressway en route to LaGuardia airport to meet with the charter flight back to LAX. Instead they were threading their way through side streets up Manhattan, towards the Bronx.
Margot's brow furrowed, revealing well hidden but distinct lines that ringed her eyes. The expression of distaste, mixed with equal parts self-assured arrogance and irritation, was obviously a regular one. It was the same expression one wore when batting at a persistent fly during an elaborate dinner. Margot retrieved her cellphone and flipped it open decisively. As she held the button for her assistant, asleep back in California, she deliberated briefly on the extent to which she should go. Obviously the driver was going to lose her job, but where should she stop?
Her phone flashed 'no-signal' plaintively. They were still in the middle of Manhattan. Margot's brow relaxed unconsciously. There was no way she could be out of service here, in one of the most heavily inundated communications nexuses in the world. Indecision and confusion warred in her mind, thinly plucked eyebrows twitching as these novel emotions cascaded across her carefully made up face.
"The mesh on the windows is made of thin copper wiring," began the driver, all traces of obsequiousness gone. Her words were soft but carried to the back seat distinctly. "To the radio waves your cellphone uses, it's as opaque as a brick wall."
Margot looked at the driver again, noting an amused curl to the driver's formerly expressionless lips. The curl went from a wry comma to a full smile as the driver flicked her vision from road to rear view. Margot's hand began creeping slowly to the door handle, carefully staying below the driver's line of sight.
"What is going on here?" Margot calmly.
"I'm afraid it's not up to me to say," replied the driver, "but you may be a little late for your flight."
Margot pulled the lever on the door suddenly and heaved herself against the door. She rebounded back into the soft leather of her seat. The driver chuckled, her laughter clear and musical. She produced a manila folder from the passenger seat and tossed it back at Margot. "If it's any consolation, you're going to learn quite a bit about yourself along the way."
Margot considered screaming and yelling, judged the tint on the windows sufficient to hide any actions she might undertake, and decided violence was beneath her at this point. She picked up the folder and unwrapped the string that held it shut. "Whatever you're planning isn't going to work," she said.
"I think you'll come around," the driver said. She lifted up a small yellow-and-black wasp-shaped box from beneath her seat, showing Margot the two sharp metal connectors at it's end. Margot had seen enough movies to recognize a tazer. "Just read."
2.
At 11:26, an older model Mercedes pulled up to the security gate separating the private section of LaGuardia airport, nestled comfortably away from the commercial flights. A large, imposing man in a 'TSA' windbreaker pulled his attention away from the computer screen, abandoning the crawl through the day's top stories. He hefted his bulk up from the rolling chair, groaning at the exertion, and brushed a faint powder of snack food dust from his slacks. With one hand he closed the lid of his laptop, stock-car hologram stickers glinting in the clearing skies. The other rested, in a much practiced manner, on the holster for his tazer as he slid the window to his little shack up.
The driver's lightly tinted window retracted smoothly into the door, revealing a youngish woman with dusky skin. The guard's nose wrinkled unconsciously as if an odd smell had just emanated from the interior of the Mercedes. Then he smiled and adjusted his belt as she provided the proper paperwork. He glanced in the back and saw another woman, intently reading a file.
"Got lucky with the weather," he said to the driver as he checked his own sheets.
"Lucky all over," the driver said, turning to the woman in the back seat. "Isn't that right, Margot?"
"Not the word I'd use," said the businesswoman in back.
The guard waved them through then realized there'd been something odd in the conversation. He rubbed his belly as the car drove off towards the needle of a corporate jet waiting near one of the hangars. "Handsome women," he said to himself after radioing ahead to the waiting ground crew.
He settled himself down in the chair again, retrieving a pair of binoculars from a desk drawer filled with leftover plastic packages of condiments. After failing to keep them steady over the distance, he dug a little deeper into the drawer, revealing a worn copy of Celebrity Skin with a former teen pop star sprawled across it's cover. Underneath her mannequin's smile, he found a tripod, on which he mounted the binoculars. He placed the whole set up next to his laptop before training the lenses, once again, on his targets.
The ground crew was swarming over the car, one steward escorting the passenger up the lowered stairs while another conferred with the driver by the car's trunk. In his shack, the guard watched the boarding woman look back at the driver, still clutching the manila folder tightly. Grunting with concentration, the guard struggled to focus on the driver, sweaty fingers slipping over the grooves of the focusing mechanism. When he adjusted properly, he saw the driver wave gaily back at her passenger before the plane was buttoned up and readied for departure.
The Mercedes pulled away, headed back towards the guard to exit the controlled space of the airfield. He quickly collapsed the tripod arrangement, stuffing it back in the desk, his movements sending a few showers of condiment packages scattering to the ground. The Mercedes purred almost silently outside the opposite window, which the guard slid open roughly. The smiling face of the driver waited behind it.
After he finished signing her out, the guard was surprised to find the driver handing him a large tan folder, sealed tightly by a bit of string wrapped around bright red circles. He took the folder, placing it on his desk where he was shocked to notice that the copy of Celebrity Skin had somehow escaped the desk and was now clearly visible from the car. The driver, following his gaze, raised her eyebrows indulgently and drove off, leaving the guard to settle back into his chair with an uncomfortably hot face.
He forgot about the folder for the time being.
3.
At 6:43 PM, an oversized pickup truck on heavy chrome rims and exceedingly knobby tires pulled to a stop on an empty street. Recessed lights, hidden behind an aftermarket grill, splashed light into the growing yellow-orange malaise of streetlight as the engine rumbled like a frustrated thoroughbred. After idling for just long enough to indicate indecision on the part of the driver, the engine died and the lights followed suit. A few moments later the driver's door sprang heavily open, punctuated by a strained groan from the TSA guard as he heaved himself out of the custom bucket seats. The truck stood out on the deserted street, already picking up a thin layer of grime over it's Turtle Wax.
With heavy, swaying steps, the guard walked around the door, uniform hidden under a long windbreaker. He glanced nervously at the manila folder sitting on his passenger seat, wrapped tightly with it's string. With a brief shudder he reached in for it then closed the door and pressed the lock button on his key chain. His hands, not nimble at the best of moments, accidentally tapped twice over the reassuring icon and the truck gave a surprisingly loud beep as the alarm turned on. The guard put the key in his jacket pocket, glanced around nervously, and left his truck. He shuffled like a man carrying garbage, freshly polished steel-toed boots scuffing the grimy pavement.
His hesitant steps carried him into a nearby alleyway, the kind of place that should only exist on some sound stage in LA. Graffiti bloomed across it like a lichen, layers and layers of signifiers overlapping into meaningless illustrations. The big man stopped at the alley's mouth, drew a pair of heavy canvas gloves over his hands. The gloves were brand new.
His pace picked up as best as his bulk allowed, sending the better part of him rippling with each long stride. The alley branched off, gaps between adjacent buildings or access points to some infrastructure point long since subsumed by progress. Manhole covers breathed steam as if the city was winded and the alley grew darker and more foreboding as the light from the street faded. The tunnel seemed impossibly long to the guard, as if it went on further than the opposite block allowed. Chalk patterns, like graphs from half remembered math classes dictated by schizophrenic interpreters to palsied lepers, choked the ground. Hidden amongst them in two lines along the wall were little kitschy electric candlesticks made to look like famous locations in the city. The Statue of Liberty's torch flickered fitfully and the guard saw that her face had been repainted with tribal markings. The plug trailed off to nothing over a particularly dense cluster of chalk equations.
The guard swallowed and made his way past the increasingly more distorted tourist icons, nose wrinkling at the increasingly fecund smell. Years worth of urine combined acridly with that tang of sweat unwashed, the moldy smell of a coat lived in too long tangling with an undertone of ozone like the air before a lightning strike. The end of the alleyway was in sight, a smooth wall of concrete spray-painted solid black. Orderly rows of numbers and letters, written in a meticulous hand, formed great dense clusters of meaning. Someone had stretched what looked like trash bags across the walls a story up, weaving them into the threads of hanging wires like a rude basket. Trapped water dripped down from the seams, old stagnant raindrops freed by gusts of wind.
Underneath this canopy were piles of junk, sorted into some pattern that escaped the guard. A pair of blue tarps covered jumbled heaps of old electronics, from console game systems to twisted structures of cobbled together circuit boards. Pale green light escaped a small collection of refuse, a screen laid flat in a pile of trash that looked vaguely man-like.
The pile moved, shifted forward slightly in a way that resolved the man hidden in trash. The guard started, breath escaping from his lips like a shot. The file still clutched in his hands shook steadily now as he stretched it out towards the man in the trash. Slowly, with a delicacy that belied his appearance, the man in the trash looked up from the glowing screen, eyes straining off at nothing a few feet above the head of the guard. His hand lifted from beneath the screen, emerging from the trash like something rising from the grave. The guard stepped forward and handed him the file, which disappeared into the trash. The man in the trash returned to his screen, tapped it twice with his finger and sat back. Behind him, in the shadowy corner of the alley, an old dot matrix printer screeched to life, chattered for a few seconds and then died.
The man reached back, never taking his eyes off the screen, and deftly ripped the paper off from the cradle. He produced another file, identical to the first, and inserted the fresh page into it. He returned his glare to the point above the guard's head and tied the file shut. This file he lifted up and the guard took.
The guard retreated from the man in the trash as quickly as he could without actually running. He returned to his truck to find a homeless woman curled up on his right front tire. He yelled at her, anger a welcome vaccine against the fear and unease he'd just escaped. She yelled wordlessly back and staggered away. The guard unlocked the door and hopped inside the cab, heaving himself into the seat and slamming the door as soon as he feet were clear. He let the engine run for a second, hot air blowing in from the vents. He took off the gloves, put the car in gear and drove off towards home.
4.
At 8:46, the tow truck arrived.
The big yellow diesel weaved through the dense traffic of the Holland Tunnel to rumble to a stop just inside the arranged orange cones, next to the ambulance and state police cruiser. The trooper had left his lights running, spinning red flashes reflecting from the gray-white tile walls like the winning moment in some cheap game show. Past the ambulance and its no longer busy EMTs rested the remains of an oversized pickup truck, crumpled against the wall on the right lane. The tow truck driver opened his door, keeping a watchful eye for errant traffic, battered pair of Timberlands splashing through puddles. He added a few cones to the line, making sure they were well marked as towing company property, and walked up towards the trooper.
The officer was listening to the radio, half in the car, shaking his head in annoyance. He was a young man, radiating an almost plaintive aura of hard-case. He looked up and said: "That was pretty quick."
The tow truck driver glanced at the officer's uniform. "Happened to be in the area, Officer Vogel. How's it look?"
Officer Vogel shook his head. "Like a fucking butcher's block."
The driver nodded in assumed agreement. He was looking at the truck now, crushed-beer-can hood disappearing back into the cab. Spider webbed windshields didn't hide a nasty red period over the driver's space. "No seat belt?" he said, not really asking.
Vogel looked back into his cab, fiddled with the radio and said nothing.
The driver grunted and headed to the car. He was eying the front end speculatively, imagining how he'd pull the truck off the wall. EMTs were wrapping up their work, moving with dull efficiency now that their services were no longer required. They all had the same disappointed look on their face, players in a team that just missed the championship. The stretcher, its sheet-covered passenger flowing over its sides, remained stubbornly on the ground as two men tried to get it to rise. Their angry mouths worked but the sound was washed away in an opera of engine noise and bitter car horns.
"Axle's off," the driver said to the dead machine. He ran a hand along the truck's flank like it was a sick horse, noting the trailer hitch with it's dangling rubber testicles. The front was bent up from the impact, wheels sticking out at awkward angles, tires thrown off treads. The driver's door was bent off the frame by the jaws-of-life and fluid leaked into the suppressant foam sprayed across the ground. "You'll be needing the sling," the driver told the truck.
The ambulance started up, headlights flaring to life, then pulled into the river of traffic under the protection of it's own lights. The driver went around the front, half embedded in the wall, and made certain he was out of line of sight from Officer Vogel. Crouching down, he ran his hands along the underside of the engine, near the right side. He moved carefully but with the speed granted by long familiarity, rough fingertips skirting around jagged shards, until he found a small box, about the size of a cigarette pack. The heavy metal box was directly under one of the clusters of computers that regulated fluid pressure for the truck's steering and brakes.
The driver reached into his coverall's pockets, withdrawing a short, awkwardly shaped tool something like a screwdriver. He ran it's blunt tip along the back edge of the box, searching for a specific spot. Abruptly the tool slid into a small indent on the box, which the driver turned clockwise. After a few seconds of steady pressure, it clicked 90 degrees. The box made a clunking sound like an automatic door lock and fell off the metal plate to which it'd been attached. It went into a pocket swiftly, and the driver rose. He checked the rest of the car for anything serious enough to need a flat bed, then looked over the interior intently.
"Officer Vogel!" he yelled.
The officer noticed the waving and walked, grudgingly, to the totaled truck. "What?"
"You should probably get that," the driver said, pointing at a pristine manila folder protruding from the glove box.
5.
At 9:14 AM, an older model black Mercedes parked across the street from the North Precinct Station of the Jersey City Police Department. The driver side door opened smoothly, and a young woman with pale cappuccino skin emerged. A battered black leather valise danged carelessly from her left hand. She closed the door, adjusted her jacket and skirt, and strode into Central Wireless. It took her six minutes to purchase an STI-Mobile cell phone, twenty dollars of airtime and a hands-free set. Activating the phone took the groggy looking clerk a few more minutes. The woman spent the interval reading the 37th page of as many periodicals as she could, spending extra time with Us and Weekly World News.
The clerk, warming to the new sale now that caffeine suffused his bloodstream, accepted cash from the woman. After completing the activation process, he carefully had the cappuccino-skinned woman call the shop's number, his own private number and then reversed the process to demonstrate that the phone worked. The woman accepted this all with a warmth that was as complete as it was insincere. With deft flicks of her fingernails, she split the plastic shell around the hands-free set up, plugged in the earphone and adjusted the volume to suit her.
Task completed, the woman strolled across the street, tucking the bulky looking cellphone into her jacket pocket. She went quickly up the four-stair at the building's main entrance, sliding swiftly through the relative calm of the morning shift. Waiting patiently for the desk sergeant, she dialed a number from memory, keeping the cell phone in her pocket and put the earplug in, leaving the microphone to dangle from her ear like a pagan fetish.
A mechanical voice spoke into her ear, telling her a name. When her time with the sergeant came, she signed in as "Rhonda McIntyre," showed a NY state driver's license to that effect and asked where Sergeant Franklin worked. The sergeant arranged an escort in the form of a bored looking clerk in a sweater vest, glaring through thick plastic rimmed glasses that were worn without a hint of irony.
"This way," he said, gesturing towards the elevator. He made no more conversation as the car dropped into the basement. The voice in Ms. McIntyre's ear continued it's mechanical commentary. The clerk pointed in the direction of Ms. McIntyre's destination and closed the elevator doors.
Downstairs the atmosphere was devoid of morning light, lit instead by faintly flickering florescent whiteness. McIntyre's pumps made a clicking noise as she strode down the hall and this was the only obvious sound in the world. Sergeant Franklin sat listless at his desk and the crackling mechanical voice said he was working a double.
"Can I help you?" he offered, not looking up from his desk. Stacks of clipboards coated his desk like bird droppings and he appeared to be painstakingly copying them into a large ledger. The sergeant was a tall man who seemed shorter due to posture; he hunched over his desk like a question mark at the end of a long sentence.
"I'm Ms. McIntyre," came the reply.
Franklin grunted, his fingers running across the stubble on his chin. "If you'll give me a moment."
McIntyre nodded to the sergeant, who still hadn't looked up from his forms. The scritch-scritch of ballpoint on coarse paper was audible over the voice in her ear, narrating the life of Franklin. When he was done with his task he unrolled to his full height, adjusting his uniform briefly before looking over at his guest.
"You the same one from the phone?" he asked, "I'll need to see ID."
"Of course," McIntyre said, retrieving her license from the battered valise. "Long night?"
"Going to be a longer morning," Franklin said as he examined the embedded holograms. "Give me another moment, please."
Franklin retreated to his desk and called up to the front desk. He checked out the ID and dug out a particular clipboard, displaying a brittle familiarity with everything that spoke of long practice. After he hung up he brought this clipboard to the waiting woman and said: "If you'll sign here."
McIntyre signed with gusto, long flowing practiced letters that were out of place on the utilitarian form. She scanned the pages, then looked up at Franklin. One of her carefully plucked eyebrows rose.
"Only one signature. We've got the faxes from your office and everything is in order. He was dropping it off on the way home from work?"
"Unfortunately," McIntyre said sadly. "One of our clients left it behind and he called the number on the inside."
Franklin nodded. "I have to admit I looked inside," he said.
"Oh?" McIntyre said with perhaps too much curiosity.
"What is it?"
"Financial figures, mostly. Ticker reports and so on. They don't exactly tell the couriers everything."
Franklin nodded. "Well, poor bastard almost delivered."
Franklin seemed to realize who he was talking to and lowered his head. He closed the clipboard and freed his ring of keys, opening the cages that kept everything locked in. It took him a few moments to find the tray with the personal effects requested. He took the tray out, carefully locking everything on his way out.
"Any luck with next of kin?" McIntyre asked.
"Not yet. Looks like a lot of his family is in California, so they're not up just yet." Franklin's tone seemed to indicate this was a moral failing on the part of Californians rather than a consequence of Earth's spherical nature. "You get your folder though."
"I can't tell you how nice that is to hear. My boss was crazy when she heard what happened to that," she said, pointing at the folder in the tray.
"Nice of her to show concern for the driver," Franklin added. He looked up as if he'd said something rude again and made a face that implied things were easier at night when there was no one around.
"She's a rich woman, Sergeant Franklin, she's sort of an asshole." McIntyre said it like she was sharing a secret. "Thank you, but I really need to get this back."
Franklin grunted in her direction, settling back down to his paperwork. McIntyre retreated, leaving only the sound of her steps in her wake. She waited for the elevator, listening to the narrating voice in her ear. Once outside she strolled across the street and entered the Mercedes. She took the phone from her pocket and placed it in the glove box, carefully wrapping the wires for the headset into a compact ball. She started the car and began driving back into the city. The traffic back through the tunnel was thick, and McIntyre paused to look at the damage on the tunnel's far wall, a wound in tile and cement.
Once she was out of the tunnel, she turned the radio to a particular AM channel and the mechanical voice from her phone returned, feeding her gravelly traffic advice. She weaved through the smaller streets, following its suggestions unquestioningly. Several times it guided her around congestion and the path she followed was anything but straight line. The voice ceased as she arrived at a row of warehouses. McIntyre pulled up in front of a gated parking lot nestled between two old and decrepit buildings. She reached into her valise and withdrew a large laser pointer, which she played across a specific spot atop the gate. It slid open, deceptively smooth, along rails that seemed more metal oxide than metal.
McIntyre parked the car behind the thick fence and let it idle. The implacable progress of the closing gate soothed her growing nervousness. As it closed, she exhaled a nervous breath. McIntyre parked the car and let it idle. The slow drone of the engine proved a meditative aide despite her visibly growing discomfort. With a slow caress of the keys, she left the car and walked towards the door of the nearest warehouse. A swift swipe of plastic and she was inside, sheltered from the day's growing heat. The vast space of the warehouse's interior was obscured by thick velvet curtains, featureless screens that stretched upwards to the crisscrossing planks that made up the warehouse's tallest points.
McIntyre slid through the curtains towards the warehouse's center. Her steps faltered as she went, poise evaporating with each step. She passed through the final curtain to the scene's heart, a splayed vista that seemed more at home at the Hamptons than some warehouse in the city. She slipped off her modest pumps as she crossed the sand, scattered in quantities that suggested a beach. The long stare of a false-day's floodlight bath made the sand uncomfortably hot, though the lights were too weak to make it painful to walk across.
The walls of curtain lent the porch an unnatural quiet like a blanket of fog, eating the sound of her steps as she walked up the gray wooden steps to the door. A large quarterboard hung from the house with the word 'Essex' carved painstakingly into it in a steady hand. She put her shoes back on as she stood before the door, one finger running along the flourishes around the letter 'E.' Through tense lips, she pulled a deep breathe and let it out to a four count, held her lungs still for a moment and inhaled for a similar period. She repeated this for a few moments, then turned the door knob with apparent reluctance.
The door lead to a long hallway that split the ground floor in half. Old, unvarnished floorboards, like worn driftwood planks, squeaked on large copper nails. Years of footsteps had worn a perfectly smooth track down the center of the hall and lead to the spiral staircase in lurid wrought iron. Tasteful if unoriginal oil paintings dangled from the walls, smeared-pink sunsets over impressionist seas staring at seabirds in an improbably blue sky. The noise of her steps made the house sound alive and cranky as McIntyre walked to the sun room to meet her employer. At the door she paused, rolling her head around in circles while repeating her breathing trick. Finally, with a decisiveness that seemed almost desperate, she opened the door into blinding brilliance.
The sun room blazed with a piercing radiance that cut through tightly closed eyelids and seemed to strike at the core of the woman's soul. It was a brittle sort of light, so intense that it washed out the contents of the room and drove her to her knees, hands clenched across her chest as if in prayer. She heard the sound of wings, soft whispers as feather played across feather. There was a faint smell of purifying fire backed by sandalwood and myrrh and underneath everything else a faint whispering, like a distant choir of rarefied voices singing hymns of heartbreaking loss.
Through her squeezed eyes a faint form, seemingly made up of the very light of the room, strode forward proudly. She could only imagine the features of this creature of light, only supply the inhumanly beautiful face and wise, tireless eyes she imagined staring at her. She began to pray in earnest as an unearthly voice said:
"The Angel again?" Buzzing jarringly beneath the melodious words was annoyance. The figure glanced around the room. "Must be the windows," it said, seemingly to itself.
The figure strode to the curtains and dragged them across the windows with the fluid sweep of smoothly muscled arms. The light that had filled the room died abruptly, taking with it the scents of incense and sounds of wings. Blackness, thick and liquid, stole over the room in it's place, a surge of shadows that brought rotten egg stench and the creaking of taut leather. By the window towered a beast, a sketch of some nightmare in purple flesh that seemed to seethe in barely suppressed violence. The woman, her false name forgotten, scrambled to her feet, shuddering in fear as a long saurian tail lashed at the beast's feet.
"Now what!" barked the broken glass voice. It seemed backed by screams of terror and rage, modulating in tone with the words.
"Forgive me, Father," began the woman.
The beast stalked around the shadowed room, seemingly in a rage, and the prayer faltered, running over itself in a babble. Beacons of pale light flickered on, steely monochromatic glows that beat the shadows back. When the light reached the beast, it seemed to bubble away, flesh evaporating like a body at ground zero. In it's place was a small figure, around the size of a child.
Is this better? came a voice from inside her head. The woman calmed slightly, her terror replaced by a sort of clinical detachment. The squat figure walked towards the couch, now lit by an array of plasma screens displaying arcane trajectories and scrawls of mathematics.
"Yes," she managed to say. The large head of her boss tilted, fist sized black eyes pinning her, specimen-like, to her place.
The folder, please, continued the small figure with a gesture to the coffee table between the sofa it sat on and McIntyre.
"Of course," she said. She placed it on the table where a tiny hand unwrapped the binding. The unblinking eyes stared at the reams of figures.
The rest?
McIntyre dug through her valise for the thumb drive of data regarding the travels of the folder. It contained everything from the weather halfway around the world, in a small village in Kathmandu, to stock figures and trending Twitter results at odd points during the day.
And our new recruit?
"Shaken and swayed, but she'll need to meet your...west coast representative."
It was a shame about her predecessor, the voice said. McIntyre found herself staring a few feet behind the figure, where some trick of the glow seemed to be stretching towards her from some orthogonal direction. It coiled along axes she couldn't quite perceive, a glimmer from elsewhere that fascinated her with it's geometrical intricacy. The phenomenon stretched out, bending in some helical manner out from the little figure's shadow, seemingly passing through its skull with a caress before emerging seamlessly from the far side, where it slid in staccato fashion to the table.
It hovered above a pen, which obligingly lifted, clicked once to extend the point, and began to write on another manila folder. It wrote in a bizarre manner, fragments of looping cursive scattered across a line in an out-of-order fashion that none the less produced a flawless script. T's were crossed before they were written, letters broken into segments that seemed unnatural on the wrist, and the whole sentence seemed to emerge all at once from the jumble. Once complete the pen hovered for a moment as if considering an addendum, then settled quietly next to the folder.
Be sure to observe the proper protocols, came the words in her mind as the tendril retreated back through the gray figure's head and into whatever corner of existence it'd come from. She rose, taking the folder, and retreated from the room. Written on the new folder was a name, a location and a time.
"No good deed," the woman lately called McIntyre said as she stepped out of the house into the faux-beach.
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