19
I hauled down the overhead cage door of the ancient freight elevator and began a slow and clanking ascent, each deserted floor floating spectrally past. If you looked very closely into the murk of the elevator shaft, you might notice the insulated ductwork and the heavy duty electrical conduit snaking upward, but you’d have no reason to look, really; no reason to have come through the rusty portcullis into the courtyard in the first place, and certainly no reason to be headed for the roof of a dilapidated old mill.
The building was formerly part of Lamson Woolens, which had been one of the companies whose vast holdings stretched along the Merrimack River for a full mile. Prior to the Civil War, this was the epicenter of American manufacturing. Along with the Lamson, there were a dozen others, built by the city’s movers and shakers.
The fortresslike design wasn’t for aesthetics: Inner courtyards surrounded by high walls, coupled with the canals on the outer side, like moats, gave the image of castles, removed from the outside world, protected. Typically there was but one way in, over a footbridge and through iron gates. The gates would be locked right after the time when the original workers—the mill girls—were due to report for their twelve-hour shifts, so that if they were late they were forced to enter through the mill agent’s office. In this way, tardiness could be noted and pay docked. Repeated offenses and you were on the bricks. But that was lifetimes ago. The flesh and sinew were gone, and the Lamson mill, and what remained of most of the others, was back to bones now. The only hints of life I could detect were pigeons cooing in the upper dimness of the elevator shaft, and vague scurrying sounds beyond the walls, which made me think of rats.
When the elevator stopped and I lifted the slatted door, Randy Nguyen was standing inside an enclosed entryway waiting. He slid a heavy insulated door shut behind me. I felt an instant bath of cooled air surround me, and I had the sensation of docking at a lonely space colony on the far reaches of the solar system. The rooftop shed I walked into fit the setup, too. Despite the surrounding landscape of decaying brick, the shed’s interior was modern, with an electrostatic tile floor, thermal windows, and halogen lighting. He gave my extended hand a blank, red-eyed look before apparently remembering the ancient custom and shook it. His palm was as dry as a circuit board.
“Hey,” he said by way of greeting.
Nguyen would be in his midtwenties now, I guessed, though he had the unkempt look of a college freshman coming off finals week. He wore a loose white sweatshirt with a large bar code printed across the front, and crinkled cargo pants that bloused over the tops of his Timberlands like virulent elephantiasis. On a computer screen behind him I saw that he’d been playing solitaire.
“You actually send that e-mail yourself?” he asked. “Or do you got a ghost writer does your tech work?”
“I’ve traded in the Underwood for a PC since I saw you last.”
“Pffft. Ancient technology. Might as well carve symbols on stone tablets. Anyway you could’ve saved yourself fifty cents.”
“That’s what it cost to e-mail you?”
“To park. There hasn’t been a meter maid on that street since July” He nodded toward a bank of video screens built into a console along one wall. “Courtyard,” he said. “Scan left.” On one of the screens, my car appeared, sitting alone on a stretch of empty street. “Four—replay.” The vista grayed a moment and then there I was, five minutes younger, plugging coins into the meter. “Voice-rec tech,” he said. “These keep a continuous scan of over a million square feet of empty mill space.”
“And you sit and play solitaire.”
He shrugged, gesturing for me to look around.
The room had been designed to take advantage of the rooftop height, with thermal glass panes that gave views of the river and the city. The rooftop surrounding Randy’s shed sprouted sumac and small trees, the result of airborne seeds that found root in the humus of decaying wood and decades of soot, though there was purpose there, too. The random saplings camouflaged a thicket of antennas. There was nothing random, however, about the equipment Nguyen had. The bank of monitors gave crisp black-and-white images of various sectors of the mill complex, though the only movement in the landscape of broken bricks and shadowy cloisters and occasional quick glimpses of my car was the shifting of the images themselves. There wasn’t a human to be seen. Lines squiggled across a set of smaller screens—oscilloscopes, I realized—which I guessed meant Nguyen had set up listening posts as well.
Why? I thought. For what purpose? Who cared? But I said, “Any luck with what I asked you?”
With a smirk he drew me over to a pair of comfortable swivel chairs in his workstation.
I’d first met Randy Nguyen when I was a cop and he was a high school detention rat who’d been awarded a police department grant, ostensibly to keep him off the street and out of whatever trouble kids with a 140 IQ got into. Fast access and connectivity weren’t a given in those days, and Nguyen, who was a graduate of every video arcade in town, had soon made himself indispensable. Over the year and a half he spent with the department, he got the city hooked into national crime registries and fingerprint databases and had organized police files going back decades, all of it accomplished with a minimal human interface. Digital machines were his world. Unfortunately he also dropped out of school during that time, and his grant was canceled. I’d heard he’d gone on to get a GED. He now worked for the outfit that oversaw security for a number of the abandoned mills that stretched along the eastern shore of the river like the ruined palisades of an ancient city-state. He swung into his padded spring chair. “Some ex-jarhead’s service rec, right?”
“Never ex.”
Semper. I’m hip. I’m surprised you couldn’t locate it yourself.”
“I didn’t have the hours to play Ping-Pong with forty different voices on a telephone—some of them even human.”
“Yeah, must be rough being analog these days.”
He made it sound like not being toilet trained. He said it without irony or malice—or an ounce of understanding for a world that was other than his neat on/off binary world. Guilty or innocent, black or white: It was a zone that had none of the grays of complexity that bedevil the rest of us poor souls. He turned to a computer and began commanding his minions.
“Your bosses know you pull all this juice?” I asked.
“They see the bills and don’t squawk. With what they pay me, they’re still way ahead of what they’d have to lay out for a fleet of rent-a-cops walking rounds.”
“Yeah, their shoes alone would add up to more than your mouse pad. But why not just do it from home? Then you wouldn’t have to get out of bed.”
“I like to be out in the world. Besides, where else would I get the penthouse views and the roof garden?” He shrugged. “Print,” he said, and rolled his chair sideways, the casters moving swiftly on the Lucite carpet protector. A sheet of paper slid crisply out of a printer. Nguyen handed it to me with a “Voilà!” flourish. Before I read a word, a second sheet came out.
It was the military service file of Troy S. Pepper. I didn’t bother to ask Randy how he’d done it. His answer would’ve been from a 1930s movie, von Stroheim going, “Ve haf our vays”—if he knew any films that weren’t by Tartantino. I hoisted my wallet and gave him a questioning look. He scraped at his sparse black whiskers. “How does fifty sound?”
“A lot better than ‘One Is the Loneliest Number,’ which is what I’d still be listening to on the telephone without you.” I forked over a twenty and three tens, which he tucked into the pocket of his cargo pants.
“Seriously,” he said, “I’m the only heart beating in this desolation, and the owners know it. You know how in a winter pond, there’ll be one little patch of water that the ducks keep open by moving around, keeping the ice from forming? That’s me in this gothic labyrinth. I’m not here to protect against crime. Even the taggers don’t waste paint on these walls—no one to see their work. Rats rule here.”
“And you’re the last line of defense before total entropy.”
“I’m not kidding you. Someday, everything’s going to be run by people like me sitting alone in towers, ringed by security, because, after silicon, we’re going to be the most valuable resource on the planet. Wait and see.”
In his world we’d all be overwired and disconnected. I spooked a few pigeons on my way through the alcove to the elevator, which made a good old-fashioned mechanical rattling as it took me back to my world. In that world, when I phoned Pop Sonders from my office, he told me that the carnival crew had finished gathering their personal belongings and had made the move over to the Venice Hotel. He thanked me for arranging it.
“What about you?” I asked.
“I’m gonna squat here, for tonight at least.”
“Is that legal?”
“It don’t feel right just leaving. Besides, I want to keep an eye on things.”
I told him I’d call him there later if I learned anything new. At my house, as I fixed dinner, I put on the TV and caught the tail end of the six o’clock news. Francine had fizzled, but tropical storm Gus seemed hot to trot, the weatherman promised, grinning like a maniac, and this one was the real deal. When I had my food on the table, I laid out the pages of Troy Pepper’s service record. I felt my appetite die.