“We’ll cruise the lake for an hour or two,” Donovan said. “We’ve been told to leave the three of you out there. Wherever ‘there’ is. It’s mighty damned cold to be sailing today, let me tell you.”
“What are we going to do out there?” Reuben asked.
Donovan stared at him. “You don’t know?” he said.
“No.”
“Christ. I presume” — he used the word as if it had an official flavor, yet was not at all familiar to his lips — “I presume that you’ll find something out there before we drop you off. Or maybe you’ll just freeze to death.”
“I hope to God we do,” Reuben said, shaking his head dubiously. “Find something out there, I mean.” They haven’t done me wrong yet.
He walked toward the bow and joined a white boy some four or five years younger than he, and a well-dressed black woman about thirty. A stiff, icy breeze cut across the deck, blowing the woman’s hair past her face. She glanced at him, then faced forward, but said nothing. The boy held out his hand and they shook firmly.
“My name’s Ian,” the boy said, teeth chattering.
“Reuben Bordes. Are both of you network?”
The boy nodded. The woman gave the ghost of a grin but did not turn away from her view of the lake.
“I’m possessed,” Ian said. “You must be, too.”
“Sure am,” Reuben said.
“They make you do things?” Ian asked.
“They’re making me do this.”
“Me, too. I’m a little afraid. Nobody knows what we’re doing.”
“They’ll take care of us,” the woman said.
“What’s your name, ma’am?” Reuben asked.
“None of your damned business. I don’t have to like any of this; I just have to do it.”
Ian gave Reuben a screw-faced glance and cocked an eyebrow at her. Reuben nodded.
Donovan and Mickey were climbing to the pilot house on the upper deck. A man in a dark blue uniform was already at the wheel. With only the six of them aboard, the excursion boat pulled away from the dock and headed out onto the smooth, lazy morning waters of the lake. Chunks of ice slid spinning past the bow. “We’d better go inside or we’ll freeze, ma’am,” Reuben suggested. The woman nodded and followed him into the enclosed passenger area.
Fifteen minutes into the cruise, Mickey descended to the lower deck with a cardboard box and a Thermos. “The galley ain’t open,” he said, “but we brought these things aboard with us.” He peeled the top of the carton back to reveal doughnuts and three foam cups.
“Bless you,” the woman said, sitting on a fiberglass bench. Ian picked two doughnuts and Reuben followed his example. Mickey poured steaming coffee as each held a cup. “Donovan tells me nobody knows what’s out there,” he said, capping the Thermos.
Reuben shook his head and dropped sprinkles of powdered sugar from his doughnut into the coffee.
“So what do we do if there’s just water? Let you drown?”
“Something’s out there,” the woman said.
“I’m not doubting it. I just wish I didn’t feel so damned creepy. Everything’s gone to hell the last few months. Thank God it’s not the season. No tourists. The President’s going nuts. Whole world.”
“Are you part of the network?” Ian asked.
Mickey shook his head. “Not me, thank God. Donovan is. He’s told me about it, and he showed me the spider. Damned thing wouldn’t bite me. Shows you what the hell I’m worth. I’ve thought about calling up the newspapers, but who would believe me? Who would care? Me and Donovan, we’ve worked the lakes for thirty years, first fishing smelt, then running geehawks — that’s tourists — all around. I named this boat. It’s a joke.”
Nobody understood, so he cleared his throat. “I tell people, ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’ Remember that song? Ore tanker went down. Big wave or something broke its keel and it sank without a trace. But what the hell — geehawks don’t know nothing about the lakes. They think lakes are puddles. These lakes are goddamned oceans, landlocked oceans. You could hide anything at the bottom, whole cities…” He glared at them for emphasis, one pencil-thin eyebrow raised. “So I’ve been thinking. No need to talk about what I’ve been thinking. I’ll just let that sit with you, and with Donovan. If the goddamned spider doesn’t bite me, sure I’ll cooperate — he’s my partner — but I say the hell with it, and with everything else.”
He walked aft with the box and Thermos, shoulders twitching. The woman ate her single doughnut delicately, leaning her elbow against the back of the bench, watching him leave. “So what have you two been doing?” she asked, suddenly familiar and friendly.
Ian sat beside her, holding his coffee cup against the boat’s gentle sway in the crook of one folded leg. “I’ve been looting the libraries at Cleveland State,” he said. “And you?”
“Case Western,” she said. “I and about six others. Two of them are hackers, They brought a truck into the data storage center at the main library and ran cables into the building and took everything they could get their hands on.”
“I sent records from the Library of Congress to this fellow in Virginia,” Reuben said. “And other stuff. I recruited Trevor Hicks.” Neither Ian nor the woman knew who Hicks was. “Have you met any of the ones below the bosses — the humans I’ve heard on the network, giving orders?”
“I have,” the woman said. “One of them’s my husband. We were separated, filing for divorce, when we were both possessed. I’ve had to work with him, and take orders from him, the last two months. He works for the State Department.”
Cleveland was no longer visible to the south. There was nothing but blue ice-dotted lake and a fast-disappearing mist from horizon to horizon. They had been on the water for over an hour.
“Do you think there’s anybody who’s got the whole picture?” Ian asked. “Any human, I mean.”
“I haven’t met one if there is,” Reuben said.
“My husband gives orders, but he doesn’t know everything.”
Ian licked crumbs and sugar from his fingers. “I hope they have a bathroom on this tub,” he said, walking aft.
The boat’s motors cut back to a throaty gurgling rumble. The water had taken on a slight chop and as they circled, Reuben felt queasy. I’m going to regret that doughnut.
“All right,” Donovan called on the loudspeaker from the pilot house, “this is where we’re supposed to be. Anybody getting messages?”
“Not me,” the woman said, standing and brushing doughnut crumbs from her coat.
“Christ,” Donovan commented dryly.
They had circled for ten minutes when Ian sang out, “Thar she blows!” He had ascended to the upper deck and now leaned over the railing beside the pilot house, pointing east. Reuben and the woman returned to the bow and followed his point and saw a dead gray block rising from the water, about the size and shape of a moving van’s trailer. The pilot gunned the motors and moved them closer to the protuberance.
“What is it?” Ian shouted. “A submarine?”
“I don’t know,” Reuben said, half laughing. He was excited and more frightened than ever. The woman’s face was a stiff mask, but her wide-eyed, glassy stare gave her away.
The boat came to within a few yards of the gray block. The bow wash slapped against it.
A square hatch about as tall as Reuben opened in the smooth dull surface at the level of the boat’s bulwarks.
“It’s an elevator,” the woman said. “No, it’s a stairway. We’re supposed to go inside. You, me, and him.” She pointed at herself, Reuben, and Ian on the upper deck. “Nobody else.”