Odd Hours

Shackett to accept my otherness:

“The government has a drug that facilitates clairvoyance,” I lied.

“Sonofabitch.”

“It doesn’t work with everyone,” I said. “You have to carry a certain combination of genes. There aren’t many of us.”

“You see the future?”

“Not really, not directly. Things come in dreams. And they’re never complete. Just pieces of a puzzle. I have to do police work, just like you, to fill in what’s missing.”

“So you saw Magic Beach in your dream, and the nukes.”

Trying not to react to the word nukes, I said, “Yeah.” I suppose I had known all along.

“But in the dream, you didn’t see me or Utgard?”

“No.”

“What you put in my head, the sea all red and the sky-it seemed like the nukes were going off right here on the beach. That’s not how it’ll be.”

“The dreams are fragmentary, sometimes more symbolic than full of real details. Where will the bombs be detonated?”

He said, “Where it matters. In cities. In a few weeks. All on the same day. We’re just bringing them ashore and distributing. The major seaports and airports, they’re blanketed with radiation detectors.”

In addition to lingering spirits of the dead, I once in a while see other supernatural entities, about which I have written in the past. Ink-black, with no facial features, fluid in shape, sometimes catlike, sometimes wolflike, they can pass through a keyhole or through the crack under a door.

I believe they are spiritual vampires and possess knowledge of the future. They swarm to places where extreme violence or a natural catastrophe will soon occur, as though they feed on human suffering, to which they react with frenzied ecstasy.

Now I realized why none of these creatures had appeared in Magic Beach. The suffering would occur elsewhere. Already, legions of those ghoulish entities must be swarming through the target cities, relishing the prospect of the death and misery to come.

As Shackett rose from the table, I said, “Good thing for me that I had a price. Sounds like, a month from now, this’ll be a country nobody will want to live in.”

He said, “How do you feel about that?”

I could not tell which of the three Hoss Shacketts regarded me at the moment.

Playing to the savagery of the sadist, to the megalomania of the politician, to the bitterness in both of them, I invented something that he would believe. Remembering my advice to Hutch, I strove not to let my performance become fulsome, to keep it subdued and real.

“They lied to me about the effects of the drug. They said it facilitated clairvoyance for twelve to eighteen hours. But they knew. One dose is all you ever need. They knew it would change me forever. I rarely have a night of restful sleep anymore. Visions, nightmares, more vivid than reality. There’s a thousand kinds of hell on earth that could be coming. Sometimes I can’t wake from them. Hour after hour in those horrors. When at last I wake up, my bed is soaked with sweat, I’m swimming in it. Throat raw from screaming in my sleep.”

Through all of that, I had met his stare, daring him to see any lie in my eyes. Evil men are often easy to mislead, because they have spent so long deceiving that they no longer recognize the truth and mistake deception for it.

Now I gazed at the ceiling, as if seeing beyond it a nation that had betrayed me. Line by line, my voice grew quieter, less emotional, even as my words grew more accusatory.

“They lied to me. Now they say that after I’ve served them for five years, they’ll give me the antidote. I don’t believe there is one. They lie not just for advantage but for sport. Five years will become ten. They can all go to hell.”

I met his eyes again.

He was silent, not because he suspected deception but because he was impressed.

He was, after all, a man who would sell out his country to terrorists, who could conspire to murder millions of innocents in a nuclear holocaust and to condemn millions more to death in the chaos that would follow the day of detonations. A man who could believe in the rightness of such a scenario was one who could believe anything, even my little exercise in science-fiction paranoia.

At last he said, “You’re a good hater, kid. That’ll take you a long way in life.”

“What now?”

“I go talk to the man, get our deal confirmed. Like I said-five minutes, ten at most.”

“My leg is half numb. How about unshackling me from the table so I can walk around while I wait.”

“As soon as Utgard and I get back with the polygraph,” he said. “We’ll have to unshackle you for that.”

As if I had anticipated that they would want to confirm the sincerity of my conversion by any means available to them, I did not react to the word polygraph. Lie detector.

“You have a problem with that?” the chief asked.

“No. If our situations were reversed, I’d play it the same way you are.”

He left the room and closed the half-ton door behind him.

The silence of tranquility lies light upon a room, but this was the silence of apprehension, heavy enough to press me down on the chair in paralytic stillness.

So saturated was the air with the stink of pine disinfectant that I could taste the astringent chemical when I opened my mouth, and the underlying scent of other prisoners’ vomit was not conducive to a calm stomach.

The concrete walls were not mortared blocks, but solid, poured in place, reinforced with rebar, as was the ceiling.

One vent, high in a wall, brought air to the room and carried it away. No doubt any sound that passed through the vent would diminish as it followed a long insulated duct, and would be stifled entirely in whatever machine exchanged the air.

When I turned to look at Mr. Sinatra, he was sitting in the third chair, bent forward at the waist, elbows on his thighs, his face buried in his hands.

I said, “Sir, I’m in a real pickle here.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

BECAUSE MY FETTERED ANKLE WOULD NOT allow me to go easily to Mr. Sinatra, he came to me. He sat in the chair that Chief Hoss Shackett had occupied, across the table from me.

In the ceiling, the light fixture was recessed behind a flush-mounted sheet of plastic. That panel was frosted, a blind eye.

The only place in the room where a camera could have been concealed was in the duct that provided fresh air. Through the slots in the vent grille, I could not see any telltale gleam of a lens.

Considering the brutal interrogations that the chief had surely conducted in this room and that he would soon conduct again, I did not believe he would have installed a camera. He would be