Reuben showered, put on his new suit, and was out of the hotel by five-thirty. He had paid his room tab the night before. He stood shivering for a moment by the abandoned storefront, listening to the network, getting his final directions. The old Toyota came down the street again and pulled to the curb in front of him. A man just a few years older than Reuben, dressed in overalls and a baseball cap, sat behind the wheel. “Need a lift?” he asked, reaching over to open the opposite door. Heat poured from the cab. “You’re heading down to the Toland Brothers Excursion Terminal. You’re the second I’ve picked up this morning.”
Reuben slid into the passenger side and smiled at the driver. “Awful early to be out driving,” he said. “I appreciate this.”
“Hey, it’s in a good cause,” the man said. His gaze lingered on Reuben’s face. He did not appear happy that his passenger was black. “That’s what I’m being told, anyway.”
They took East Ninth Street to the Municipal Pier. The driver let Reuben out and drove away without saying another word.
Dawn was something more than a promise as he walked along the pier and approached the heavy iron bars and gate beneath the giant painted TOLAND BROS. sign. A plump, grizzled man of something less than seventy years and more than sixty stood behind the gate with a flashlight in hand, waggling a cigar between his teeth. He saw Reuben but did not move until the young man was less than two yards away. Then he pushed off from the bars next to the closed gate and shined his flashlight on Reuben’s face.
“What can I do for you?” he asked sharply. The cigar was soggy and unlighted.
“I’m here for the morning excursion,” Reuben said.
“Excursion? To where?”
Reuben stretched out an arm and pointed vaguely at Lake Erie. The man scrutinized him for several long moments in the flashlight beam, then lowered the lens and called out, “Donovan!”
Donovan, a short, clean-cut fellow in a cream-colored suit, about as old as the plump man but far better preserved, came out of a shed near the office.
Donovan glanced quickly at Reuben. “Network?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Let him in, Mickey.”
“Goddamn fools,” Mickey muttered. “There’s still ice on the lake. Making us go out before the season.” He leaned his head to one side and concentrated on keying the padlock and releasing a chain from the gate latch. He tugged the chain out of the eye with a conspicuous machine-gun snick-tink, pulled the gate inward, and bade Reuben enter by swinging a large, callused red hand.
Halfway down the pier, past an old, boarded-up seafood restaurant, a two-decked excursion boat named the Gerald FitzEdmund belched diesel from twin motors through stern pipes just above the waterline. The boat was easily capable of carrying two or three hundred passengers, but at this hour it was practically deserted. Donovan walked ahead of Reuben and gestured for him to cross the roped boarding ramp.
“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.”