The Flicker Men (14 page)

*   *   *

“Come in.”

Jeremy sat behind his desk, pen in hand, papers spread out before him.

I'd been considering all morning what to say, but now that I was there, I wasn't sure how to begin. “I think something's happened,” I said.

Jeremy set his pen down. “What do you mean?”

“To Satvik. Nobody can get in touch with him; his cell goes straight to voice mail.”

“Have you talked to his wife?”

“I spoke to her last night, and she hasn't been able to reach him either. She's concerned.”

“Does he usually fall off the radar like this?”

“A few days, here or there, but he usually returns calls.”

“Not mine,” he said. His face showed irritation. “Do you know what he's been working on?”

“He faxes reports.”

“That's more than I've been told. I don't like being kept in the dark.”

“I thought he was keeping you informed.”

“He hasn't kept me informed of anything. He asked for time away from the office to explore new avenues of research—I think that's how he put it—but it's been long enough. He needs to come in.”

“That's the problem; we can't reach him. And I heard there has been a new threat.”

He waved that off. “Letters. E-mails. It's sporadic.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a stack of envelopes. He slid them across the desk. “Robbins's group really opened up a can of worms. Now that he's backed away from it, we're getting it from both sides.”

I picked up the stack and leafed through a few of the letters. They were a strange mix. Long handwritten screeds and short declarative threats. The short ones had the most pop.

I hope you have good insurance.

“Have you gone to the police?”

“Several times. Most of the letters aren't actionable, and the few that are didn't exactly leave a forwarding address. But the police are looking into it.”

I flipped through several more, each one stranger than the last. One in all red marker. Another neatly typed. And finally, the last one, which didn't seem like a threat at all:
Beware the flicker men.

I handed the letters back. “I don't like that nobody's heard from Satvik. Do you think we should file a report?”

That raised his eyebrows. “A report? You mean a missing-person report?”

“Yeah.”

“I think it's a bit premature for that. At least from us, anyway. If his wife wants to register a report, that's certainly up to her, but I don't want to jump to conclusions.” Jeremy picked up his pen again.

It was his nature, I knew. He never saw the harsher possibilities. It was hard for him to imagine.

“He's probably lost his phone,” he said. “He'll turn up, and when he does, have him call me.”

“Okay.” I stood to leave, but I stopped at the door. “One more thing,” I said. “Something that's been bothering me. Those two men you had us meet for dinner. Brighton and Boaz. Do you remember?”

“Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.”

“How much do you know about them?”

“They run some kind of endowment. Well connected, apparently.”

“Endowment?” A magic word in certain circles. A word that could open doors. No wonder they'd been able to make the dinner happen.

“Part of some kind of exploratory committee,” Jeremy said. “Or that's what their people told us. Why, did something happen?”

“Something Brighton said.”
You say ‘either way' as if there are only two possibilities.
“I think they knew something about Robbins's test.”

“Knew what?”

“That he wasn't going to get the results he expected.”

His face grew puzzled. “How can that be?”

“I don't know.”

I turned to go. My hand was on the doorknob when he said, “If Satvik calls, and there
is
some kind of trouble, let me know. Whatever it is.”

*   *   *

As the sun went down, I dialed the number. Point Machine picked up on the second ring. “No,” he said. “I still haven't heard from him.”

I told him what Jeremy had said about Satvik, and about our business dinner at the symposium.

“I don't like this.”

I considered for a moment. “You have contacts across the industry, don't you?”

“Yeah.”

“Do me a favor. I'm going to be busy the next few days. See what you can find out about Brighton and Boaz. Find out about this endowment.”

“Do you think they have something to do with Satvik?” He sounded skeptical.

“I don't know,” I said. “But they seemed to have done their homework on me. Now I want to return the favor.”

 

20

Night fell as Satvik approached the state line, so he rolled his window down, feeling the air on his face.

He'd driven Highway 93 to 89. Over the hills and into Vermont, across the White River, and then across it again, as the highway and waterway zigzagged each other through the lowlands. He headed toward the green country. Away from the city. Away from the lab.

It could have been like that. I could imagine it.

Satvik's trunk full of equipment. Like a stone around his neck. A burden he carried. Perhaps he was tired of all the testing. Tired of the reports. Tired of chasing things that couldn't possibly exist: those who walked among us but weren't us. His phone rang on the seat next to him. He was tired of that, too. He ignored the call.

Now there was only the wind and the dark and the white lines of the highway.

I tried to believe in the idea of it.

Satvik cutting loose. Stepping back.

Perhaps he wanted his gate arrays, with their logical simplicity. Or he was tired of the questions that had no answers. Or it may have been the boy who had done it. The final straw. The boy from New York; the one who'd tracked him down.

One of them knew.

Thirty miles later, the ringtone came again. Satvik checked the number. Another call from the lab—the light from his phone casting a green-white glow across the front seat of the car. He wanted to answer. And not to answer. He just needed time, he decided. A few days. Space to clear his head. In a few days, it would all make more sense. He felt it intuitively, the way he felt when his gate arrays weren't right and he wasn't sure why. Sometimes the harder you looked, the less you saw. He was too close to the problem. He took his phone and tossed it out the window onto the highway. An impulsive choice for a man who had never been impulsive, but he felt better immediately. Better than he had in weeks. Better than he had since before he'd seen Robbins's press conference.

He drove on, leaving his phone behind as mile stacked upon mile. He'd buy a new phone later, once he'd had a few days to rest.

It might have been as simple as that.

Or he could have been on the road, trunk full of equipment, as a car came up behind him.

A dark stretch of highway.

Satvik continued on at fifty-five miles per hour, as the other car approached.

Three men inside. The same men who'd written letters to the lab. They were angry. Disturbed.

As the car behind him sped to pass, a gun came out, unseen. Satvik was listening to the radio, thinking of home. He'd been too many days away. He would call his wife tonight, he'd promised himself. Call the first moment he could. He'd accidently let his cell battery run low, and once it was charged, he'd found he had no reception. It was the edge of nowhere, wilderness on both sides.

He was done with the road. Done searching for a bottom when there was no bottom to see.

The car sped alongside.

He was reaching for the knob on the radio when out of the corner of his eye he saw it: the barrel coming up and out of the other vehicle as it passed.

And Satvik's face went slack for a single instant before the trigger was pulled.

The blast lit up the space between the cars, and Satvik's vehicle continued on for several hundred feet as if nothing had happened before drifting to the right, onto the shoulder, never slowing. His car hit the berm at fifty-five miles per hour, continuing to drift, now pulling harder, until the slope of the grass fell away steeply into a deep woods, and the car rocketed downward, out of sight, into the trees and wilds below, and was gone. The darkness was an envelope that sealed up behind him.

It could have been like that.

Or it could have been that he'd lost his phone, like Jeremy said. Or he'd lost his charger.

He might have been in New Jersey or New York. Or across town in Boston. In a motel room no different from this one.

 

21

“I'm here to see Mr. Robbins.”

The receptionist smiled. “Do you have an appointment?”

She was young and bubbly, with very straight, very white teeth, and her whole being seemed to give off an air of neat precision. Even her hair was exact—not a strand out of place.

I almost hated to disappoint her. “No.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “He's booked for the day. You'll have to make an appointment. We usually schedule a few weeks in advance.”

“I need to see him now,” I told her. “I've driven a long way.”

Her smile never wavered. “Unfortunately, that's not going to be possible.”

The room we were in might have been the reception area of the oval office. The carpet was lush and blue. Paintings graced the walls. The vaulted ceiling rose to the sky. No fewer than five people currently sat waiting in the plushly appointed surroundings for their chance to spend time with the great man.

“He's in there?” I asked. I took a step toward the ornate double doors just behind her.

“I'm afraid he won't be able to see you.”

I'd considered just walking past her and opening the doors, but something about her lack of concern and the retention of her gleaming, confident smile made me suspect I'd find myself facedown on the lush blue carpeting if I tried to touch those doors without permission.

Perhaps paratroopers would descend on me from the vaunted heights. Or perhaps she'd lay me out herself.

I decided diplomacy was in order. “My name is Eric Argus, and—”

“Oh, I know who you are.”

That stopped me. Her smile still hadn't budged.

I glanced around the room. All eyes were watching me now. Time to take a different tack.

“What if you told him I was here, and then he could decide for himself if I needed an appointment?”

“He only takes meetings scheduled in—”

“I drove two hours. Please, it'll take two seconds to ask.”

The slightest crack appeared in her armor. A moment's hesitation. I pressed the gap. “If he learns that I was here, and he wasn't told…”

Her smile dropped by a micrometer at the left corner of her mouth.

“Please,” I said. “Two seconds.”

She stared at me for what seemed like a very long time and then reached across to her intercom. There was a click of a button. “Sir,” she spoke into the intercom, “I'm sorry to interrupt you, but Eric Argus is here. He doesn't have an appointment.”

The intercom was silent for eight full seconds during which the receptionist never took her eyes off me. Just when I began to think there would be no response, there was a crackle, then, “Send him in.”

She hit another button, and the double doors swung open. Her smile was back at full force. “You may step inside.”

I felt the glare of the other patrons as I walked past. I was that guy in traffic who zooms by the line of cars, only to merge at the front.

Robbins sat at his desk facing two men seated across from him. The two men turned. Sharks in suits.

“If you'll excuse me,” Robbins said to the sharks. They nodded and rose to leave. “And close the doors behind you, if you would.”

The doors closed with a whisper. What followed was the silence of a bank vault.

“Eric Argus,” Robbins declared triumphantly when we were alone. “How many times did I try to get you to see me?”

He was smaller than I expected, less polished and perfect without the TV makeup, but otherwise the same man I'd come to envisage from the cable shows. “Twice, I think.”

“And now here you are, out of the blue, when it can do me not the slightest worldly good. I'm a busy man, Mr. Argus. To what do I owe this honor?” His face was cool and expressionless. He hadn't asked me to sit. Perhaps I wouldn't be staying long enough to warrant it. His office was as enormous as it was opulent—decorated to within an inch of its life. There were several overstuffed chairs, paintings on the walls, a single formal bookcase of serious-looking leather tomes. Behind him, French doors looked out into a small, closed courtyard.

I decided to get right to the point. “I was hoping that you might have information about a friend of mine.”

He didn't even blink. “Who?”

“Satvik Pashankar. The tech who worked with you on the box.”

“Oh, I think I remember him. Satvik was his name, you say? I haven't heard from him. Why do you ask?”

“Because he's missing.”

“Missing.” For the first time, his face registered emotion or some facsimile of it. “When did our friend go missing?”

“A week ago.”

“Sometimes people need to get away. I expect he'll turn up.”

I looked at him closely. I wanted the truth from him, even if he didn't speak it, but either he was very good, or he really didn't know anything about Satvik. I decided the direct approach would be best.

I pulled the folded piece of paper from my back pocket and tossed it down on his desk. The paper sat there for a moment before he reached for it.

“We've been getting these at the lab,” I said. “Some of your followers perhaps.”

He unfolded the paper. He looked at what was written. His wide-set brown eyes lifted to my face. He folded the paper again and slid it back across the desk toward me.