VACANCY & ARIEL

I let him steer me into the restaurant. After we had taken a table and ordered, he said, “I’ve been reading your books. Interesting stuff.” His smile was thoroughly sincere. “Tell you the truth”—he opened his briefcase—“I just finished your wife’s book. Little too weird for me, but hey”—another smile—“whatever sells, huh?”

“What’s this about?” I asked.

He pulled Ariel’s book from the briefcase and showed me her picture on the dust jacket. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s my wife,” I said carefully.

“Beautiful woman.” Siskin shook his head admiringly, then gave me a steady look. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

“I said it was, didn’t I?”

Siskin chuckled appreciatively. “Nice!”

“Why don’t you show me some ID?” I said.

“Oh, sure. ID.” He extricated a leather badge holder from the briefcase. “I got a bunch.”

The badge stated that Siskin was an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. He dropped two more badge holders beside the first. FBI and NSC.

“We’re not exactly an agency,” he said apologetically. “So we don’t have our own badges. Folks been kind enough to let us use theirs.”

“I’m going to go now,” I said. “Unless you give me a reason not to.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“It’s a stupid fucking question!”

The waiter sidled up with my coffee and Siskin’s tapioca drink.

“These things are absolutely delicious!” Siskin said after taking a sip. “Wanna try? I can ask for another straw.” When I refused he shrugged and sipped again. “We’re not interested in your wife, Mister Cyrus. We understand she’d be no help to us now. Probably wouldn’t have noticed her if it hadn’t been for her book. We’ve got fresh trails to follow.”

I considered what his words implied. “You’ve started it up again.”

“Not so you’d notice.” Siskin’s tapioca drink gurgled in his straw.

“How’d you do it? I thought…”

“We got lucky. One of the hard drives wasn’t totally fucked and we recovered a lot of data. Then we really got lucky. Or maybe there’s no such thing as luck. That’s what some of the science boys tell me.”

He pulled a sheaf of photographic prints from the case and one, an 8 x 11 that depicted a crater with a bunkerlike structure at the bottom of it, slipped from his grasp and fell onto the floor. I thought at first it was an old photo of Rahul’s project in Tuttle’s Hollow, but noticed that the array atop the bunker was much more complex than the array I had seen in Capuano’s video. The location was definitely Tuttle’s Hollow, however—I recognized the trees and the folds of the crater. Whoever Siskin represented, rebuilding the project on the site of the original, after such a violent and observable disaster, demonstrated that they were arrogant to a fault.

Siskin hurriedly picked up the photograph, stowed it away and displayed another—this of a man lying in an open metal sarcophagus. His face was curiously deformed, yet struck me as familiar. Dark gray skin; yellowish membranes over the eyes; striations on his cheeks. He did not appear to be alive. Siskin pointed to the sarcophagus. “Looks kind of like the vehicles your wife talks about in her book. What you think that is? Life imitating art or vice versa?”

“You tell me. Seems like you’ve got it all under control.”

“Yeah, we’re running a regular shuttle these days,” Siskin said expansively. “Bringing back all sorts of intriguing individuals. This fella here now…”

“If you’re not interested in Ariel, why bother me?”

“Perhaps I overstated our lack of interest. We’re mildly interested. Not enough to bring her in, but enough to warrant this conversation.”

“So why am I here?”

“I’d like you to keep on taking care of your wife. If something out of the ordinary happens, let us know. I can be reached through this number.” He slid a business card across the table, blank except for a number with a Manhattan area code and a tiny symbol in one corner that resembled the “at” symbol in a dot.com address. “Something does happen, I’ll find out. And if you haven’t called me, I will bring your wife in.”

I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“Now don’t go getting all angry,” Siskin said.

“You don’t need me to spy for you.”

“Oh, yes we do. I don’t understand it completely, but it relates to that ‘anthropic’ junk you told us about back in Ann Arbor. Seems like if we’re watching what goes on, we might change what can happen. We prefer to let things happen naturally and rely on patriots like yourself to keep us informed. You give us the heads-up, we’ll take over from there.” He had another sip and sighed in satisfaction. “’Course the likelihood is nothing will happen. But I wanted to rope you in just on the off-chance.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “I’m not about to sell her out.”

“I’m not asking that. If something happens we’ll investigate and that’ll be it. You really don’t want me in your life, Mister Cyrus. But if I have to be in your life, you want me in and out as quick as possible.” He studied Ariel’s picture and made a noise akin to his sigh of satisfaction. He dropped the book into the briefcase, snapped it shut.