Mackenzie was recruited just three years back, straight out of Quantico, and she’s still (as her father would say) wet behind the ears, but the Signalman, he’s a legend. And, she reminds herself, there are few things as sobering as meeting a legend who fails to measure up. Whatever she’d expected of the man who finally pushed the button at Deer Isle in 2012 and was boots on the ground at the Moonlight Ranch event, this wasn’t it. Best not to count your chickens before they hatch, as her father would say.
“Hell of a blow last night,” says the Signalman and dumps a stream of sugar into his coffee cup from the glass-and-stainless-steel dispenser. The cream he pours in afterwards swirls like a tiny white galaxy, a logarithmic clockwise spiral reminding her there’s no such thing as mundane. “On the radio, I heard there were gusts to a hundred and thirty miles per hour up in New Hampshire. I heard there’s more than sixty thousand people here in Rhode Island without electricity this morning.” He has a slight Southern drawl, Tennessee or Georgia or Alabama maybe. Someone once told her he was from Birmingham.
“Welcome to New England,” she says and smiles and watches as the Signalman stirs his coffee. “Happy Halloween.”
He smiles back, sort of, nods his head, and gazes past her at the morning traffic out on Westminster Street. “Kept me up most of the night,” he says. “I’ve never cared for the wind, truth be told. I’ve never much cared for the sea, either. But it is a rare day when the world sits up, rolls over, and complies with our heart’s desires. We go where we’re told.”
“Yes sir,” she says.
“You had your breakfast yet?” he asks, and she tells him that no, she hasn’t. “Well then, we’ll eat in a bit,” he says. “I just want to get a couple of the necessary unpleasantries out of the way first.” And then he reaches into his jacket and takes out an old photograph, a glossy color 4×6 printed on Kodak paper. He slides it across the table to her. A waitress shows up and asks if Mackenzie wants coffee. She says she does, and the waitress goes away again.
“I know they’ve already sent some stuff over,” says the Signalman, “but not this. This is the sort of thing I prefer not to trust to couriers.”
“Yes sir,” Mackenzie says again. “Of course,” and she picks up the photograph. For whatever reason, she looks at the backside first. The paper has started to turn yellow around the edges and there’s sloppy handwriting scrawled in blue ballpoint pen—7/21/75 Marquardt fétiche, Perth. Then she turns it over and looks at the front. She’s already seen a lot of ugly in her three short, hard years with Albany, because ugly comes with the job, but none of it has prepared her for the thing in the photograph. She glances up at the Signalman, then back down at the picture. “I think I know what this is,” she tells him.
The Signalman sips at his sweet, pale coffee, then stops watching the traffic and watches her, instead. “Yeah, I figured you might,” he says. “You were the trigger for that surveillance team on the op down in Fall River last year, right?”
Mackenzie Regan licks her lips. Her mouth has gone dry.
“The Buffum Chace whatsit,” says the Signalman. “That mess with the cultists. You were on that team, correct?”
She sets the photo on the table, resisting the urge to hand it back to him or turn it face down so she won’t have to see the thing.
“This is supposed to be Mother Hydra, isn’t it?” she asks.
“That’s what they tell me,” he replies and runs the fingers of his right hand through his weary, colorless hair. The waitress brings Mackenzie’s coffee and asks if they’re ready to order. The Signalman tells her no—soon, but not yet. She doesn’t seem to notice the photograph lying on the table in front of Mackenzie. The waitress says she’ll check back in a bit, then leaves, and the Signalman returns to watching the traffic on Westminster.
“At the old house in Fall River,” says Mackenzie, “there was something painted on one of the walls. I think it was meant to be this. Didn’t really do it justice, though.”
“Hell of a thing, ain’t it? About yea big,” and he makes a fist to indicate the figure’s size. “Near as anyone can guess, it was made in Assyria during the late Bronze Age, carved from a hunk of iron sulfide that most likely formed in a deep-sea hydrothermal vent.”
Mackenzie ignores her coffee and picks up the photograph again. She knows better, but tells herself it’s only her imagination playing tricks that makes the paper feel oily and somehow unclean.
“You know anything about hydrothermal vents, Agent Regan?”
“Not really, no. I mean, nothing much beyond what you pick up from reading National Geographic and watching PBS.”
“So you might not know there are hydrothermal vents other places besides Earth. Europa, for instance. And Enceladus. That’s the planet Saturn’s sixth-largest moon.”
Before she thinks better of it, Mackenzie Regan tells the Signalman she knows what Enceladus is, that she had an astronomy course in college. He just nods and drinks his coffee and watches the cars on the other side of the plate-glass windows.
“All right then, Professor,” he says, “do you also know there are scientists who think Mars used to have hydrothermal vents, way back about three and a half billion years ago, when maybe there was a Martian ocean?”
“No,” she tells him. “I didn’t know that.”
“Well, turns out, there are. And here’s the kicker. If our planetologists and geochemists and whatnot are to be believed, the dingus in that picture was made from a
