“Warn them, obviously,” I said. “House them in one place, even the ones who live here in the city. And we need help. People who know how to do real-world security.”
Damian nodded. “I’ll get on T-Net this morning and set it up.”
T-Net was the hidden webspace where sodality reps interacted with each other. A tech guy had once tried to tell me how it worked. All I remembered was that the explanation involved words like “serial/parallel encryption” and “onion routing.” Basically, it was a space where sodality-level Taus could exchange information with minimal risk of surveillance. Through T-net, Damian could put out the word that he needed volunteers with security and military experience who lived in the area or could get to Vancouver on short notice.
“Okay,” I said. “But are we the only ones at risk?”
“What do you mean?”
Amanda said, “He’s thinking of the guys who questioned his new tether, Rachel Ragland.”
“I doubt she’s in any danger,” Damian said. “They’ve talked to her already, they didn’t learn anything.”
“Depends on whether they know I’ve been seeing her.”
“Well, that’s easily fixed,” Amanda said. “Stop seeing her.”
Damian said, “The guys who came to see her, did she describe them?”
“Only vaguely.”
“Do you think you could get a better description from her?”
“I don’t know. I could try. Why? Do you think they’re the same people who went after Klein?”
“Could be. It would help if we could give our security guys some faces to look out for.”
“You mean, like a sketch?”
“Yeah,” Damian said. “Like a sketch.”
I said I would get on it.
* * *
The first of our new security team showed up that afternoon, a local guy named Gordo MacDonald. Gordo was ex-military, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, chest like a rain barrel, abs so defined you could count them through his t-shirt. Shaved head and one glittering gold earring. I would have flinched when we shook hands, but the look passed between us. The Tau look: a wry curvature of the mouth, something indefinable about the eyes, but it was as if all the threat went out of his face. He gave me a sheepish grin, and I gave him one back. “Hey, bro,” he said.
I wasn’t a hey bro kind of guy, but I said, “Hey.”
Gordo told Damian he wanted to start by walking through the building, get to know the layout, “make sure the bad guys don’t have a place to hide.”
Amanda touched my arm after Damian and Gordo left the room. “I wanted to say, I wasn’t just being bitchy this morning. About Rachel Ragland, I mean. It’s none of my business whether you keep on seeing her. It’s just, I can’t help thinking, a single mom on social assistance, she’s bound to need more than you can give her. A couple of months of great sex and then you’re gone—is that good for her? Does she need that?”
“I told her what the situation is.”
“You told her, but did she hear you? You’ve been living in Tau-land. It’s different out there. People lie. Not just to each other but to themselves. People get hurt.”
“I know that. And I don’t intend to hurt her.”
“It may not matter what you intend. You’re treating her like a Tau, and she’s not.”
And that was true. But I needed to see her at least once more. If only to make a forensic sketch.
* * *
So when Rachel suggested we get together Saturday afternoon, I said sure. She had a whole day planned, she said. We could drive to Stanley Park with Suze. Walk the seawall. Drop off Suze at her grandmother’s, then have the evening to ourselves. Go out for dinner and drinks, maybe. If I was free?
I said I was free.
When I pulled up to the low-rise building in New Westminster, Rachel came out of the lobby with a big backpack over her shoulder and Suze clinging to her left hand. Rachel was wearing shorts and a yellow blouse and a Canucks cap to keep the sun out of her eyes. Suze was decked out in a summer dress and pink plastic Barbie sunglasses.
“Remember me?” I said to Suze when she climbed in the backseat.
“No!”
“From the forest,” Rachel prompted her. “When our car broke down.”
I told her my name was Adam. Suze gave me a solemn look, then said she was pleased to meet me.
The car’s sound system had been playing the news from a US netcast, but the announcer’s voice was so solemn and the news so ominous (the India-Pakistan conflict had heated up again) that I turned it off as soon as we pulled into traffic. Suze immediately began to sing the chorus (and only the chorus) of a song from an old kids’ movie: “Chiddy chiddy bang bang I-love-you! Chiddy chiddy bang bang I-love-you!”
“It’s ‘chitty,’” Rachel told her. “Not ‘chiddy.’”
“CHIDDY chiddy BANG bang! I LOVE YOU!”
“Have it your own way. A little quieter, though, okay?”
Suze grudgingly moderated her chiddies. An hour later we were at the seawall, watching cargo ships glide like iron ballerinas across the water of English Bay. The water was too cold for swimming, but Suze seemed more interested in digging in the sand and chasing gulls. Rachel and I settled into a patch of packed sand in the shade of a sea-bleached drift log. She opened her backpack and took out a selection of plastic-wrapped Wonder Bread sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade. I reached into my own pack and produced a sketchbook and a pencil. She said, “What’s that? You draw?”
“Now and then.”
“Is that what you do for a living?”
“No. I thought about it once, but you go where life takes you. I’m more of a management consultant these days.”
She gave one of her quick, full-throated laughs. “That sounds like a money-for-bullshit job. No offense.”
“None taken. Those two men who visited you, you think you could describe them to me?”
“What, so you can draw them?”
I nodded.
“Are they so dangerous you need to know what they look like? No, don’t answer that. Are you, like, a police sketch artist or something?”
“To be honest, I’ve never tried to draw a face from a description. I’d like to try. But we don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“Oh, I think we do have to. Since you brought your pencil and paper and all. Afterward, maybe you can draw a picture of me?”
“I’d like to. Once we get this out of the way.”
She shrugged. “What do I do?”
“Start by picking one of the two men. Don’t think about what he looked like, just think about something he did. Like, smile or not smile. Blink. Pick his teeth.”
She squinted her eyes. “The taller guy. His head…”
“What about it?”
“He kept cocking it to the left, like a dog hearing a whistle. Head shaped like a rectangle. Like a loaf of bread with eyes and a mouth.”
I made some tentative lines, more to encourage her than to accomplish anything. “Hair?”
“Bald as a bottle cap. I don’t think he shaved it bald, I think it was just bald bald. Narrow eyes, close together. His mouth, when he tried to smile, you could see his clenched teeth. White teeth. He’s got a good dental-care plan, whoever he is.”
“What do you mean, when he tried to smile?”
“He smiled like he was faking it. He had one of those mouths that opens like a puppet’s jaw, like on a real crude hinge. Wide. Kind of bracketed, the lines at the side of it, not a curvy smile, kind of inorganic, like a robot smile.”
It turned out I wasn’t especially good at translating any of this to paper, but before too long I had scribbled and erased my way to something Rachel called, “Cartoony, but I guess I’d recognize him from that. Sure.”