Midnight Empire Page 6

  It was a satisfying thought, and for a few days it drove him as he ate his meals in the mess and fell asleep listening to the far sounds of thunder and creaking rain.

  At night, walking to the dorm or waking to connect another flight, he saw the lights of Las Vegas shining out of the desert.

  He got so that he could recognise on the screens parts of the mountains, certain valleys and outcrops of rock, knew what they’d see when they banked to follow a particular water course or broke over a particular rise.

  After the missions, the CIA men stood outside the briefing hut and smoked, figures slumped in hard thought and failure, silently examining the middle distance, it felt like a penance.

  As the second week dragged on, the men became more sloppy. They ate food in the control stations, dirty bowls piling up. They took calls there also, worked on their laptops at the back of the rooms. They wore the same shirts over, you could tell by the small stains and the smell of sweat. They stopped shaving. Sometimes they fell asleep in their chairs.

  Thirteen days in, the debate finally started: had Abu Yamin escaped the mountains already? Were they wasting their time? The only living things they’d seen in two hundred drone hours were goats. The fact of the goats was mercilessly exploited by those who wanted the mission to end. This was the minority position. The majority argued for a scaling back and a redistribution of resources, while another, more avid minority thought the problem could be solved by more flights, by blanket coverage. Many phone calls were placed. Serious conversations were held out on the fence line, voices hushed. The latter position eventually won. There would be a surge. Two days with four drones aloft around the clock, flying in a square formation half a mile apart.

  Daniel’s sleep pattern was already disturbed, and these last forty-eight hours had him in a kind of dream state. Flights went up every few hours, and he was called back and forth from the dorm. He began to nap on the floor of the briefing hut, his jacket for a pillow, the smell of linoleum thick on the dry air. It was the operators’ job to raise him, hands nudging his shoulder.

  The surge failed. When it was over, the men returned to Langley to regroup.

  That afternoon Daniel was careful driving on the highway, sticking to the right lane. He passed the housing developments on the city border; after all this open space these were high-fenced and impossibly packed, nil room between the houses, no eaves, no yards, and—perhaps he was just tired—they struck him as sad. What would it be like to live there, he wondered, little worlds of shrinking space?

  He drove somewhat faster, reached the loft and climbed into bed. He woke only when it was dark, and then from a dream about mountains, and the lights of the city cut through the night.

  4

  Lieutenant Peach introduced him to cards. The crews played while they waited for their sorties or between briefings, training sessions or presentations about the evils of drink driving or of drug use.

  It was pointless to play for nothing so they played for loose change, but mostly they played for something to do, entertaining each other by telling jokes and stories while the cards were dealt and the change moved around.

  Daniel thought about movies he’d seen where soldiers played cards and he wondered if they could be true—did anyone really play poker in war zones?

  Mostly the game was Pineapple, a variant of Texas Hold’em in which everyone was dealt a third card. They played it in the recreation room, which had once been some kind of laboratory, sinks along its walls, two ping pong tables, a DVD player and a row of computers marked External, internet.

  As they played they chatted about whatever came to mind, about their kids or baseball or television, and sometimes about unusual things that had happened on their flights, IEDs that had exploded in the hands of bomb-setters, Predators whose software had stopped working and which had to be shot down by F18s. And they told jokes. Jokes about sodomy, about politicians and about each other’s wives. They couldn’t drink beer on base so they drank Friar’s Cola and a lemon-flavoured water called Zasp.

  There were seven or eight regulars, and many more interlopers, and everyone knew each other. They often talked about how many hours they’d clocked in different types of aircraft or about funny calls they’d heard on the radio while flying over Kuwait or Bosnia or the 36th parallel.

  Peach was more serious than the others when it came to the game. When it was his turn, he thought about the cards and the bets, what had happened so far in the hand, and then he would explain the decision he was about to make, declaring that certain players had made their hands or had draws or had complete air, and mostly he turned out to be right, though nobody really cared.

  But he thought Daniel did, and he sat with him and showed him what he knew of Texas Hold’em proper, telling stories from poker lore, great laydowns and impossible bluffs, the peculiarities of certain players who’d graced the tables at the Horseshoe in the 1970s, their tells and favourite hands. It was a compelling web of small fictions, men fallen on hard times but with uncanny abilities to read fear in the faces of others, to spot strength and weakness by watching their opponents’ eyes or the speed of the pulse along the carotid artery. They were men who seemed either to have come from jail or to be going there. Some were hustlers, and and they often escaped sure beatings, physical confrontations with ex-footballers or farm hands or returned veterans they’d strategically riled or made to look stupid in an attempt to get their money. Or they didn’t escape the beatings and bled half to death in the desperate downtown areas of the cities of post-war America. They were pioneers, Peach said, founders of a whole poker industry, something that had grown from seedy private rooms and borderline establishments to gain the commercial and even moral acceptance of the nation at large by carefully masquerading as a sport.

  Then there were the truly ruthless players—real thinkers who didn’t use their instincts or bravado but their cautious, calculating minds. Peach thought these were the real gamesmen; mathematicians and theorists, a class of player who could only emerge once the game had evolved beyond the ad hoc rooms and quasi-legal dens and their seething atmosphere of impending violence. It was their books he loaned to Daniel, books that weren’t manuals of hold this, fold this but instead contained labyrinthine systems of poker thought.

  Probability had never been Daniel’s strong suit and the tracts were largely impenetrable. But he found many things about them interesting—they appealed to the scientist in him—and he and Peach discussed strategies in the briefing hut, sometimes in preference to playing the actual game in the rec room, and they dealt hand after hand to nine imagined players, debated what each should do in every case.

  ‘It’s all about the river,’ Peach enthused. ‘You’re dealt two cards and you bet. You get the flop—three cards in the middle that set the scene for the hand. Then what?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘You bet. Now things are becoming serious. By the time the turn card arrives you’re looking at a hundred claims on the truth.

  Then what?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘You bet. Finally you get the river. That’s five cards on the board, the two you’re holding and whatever is being held by everyone else. Then what?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘You bet. If you fold now the truth disappears. It vanishes into a weight of other truths, guts and personality, mathematics, whatever else. It’s money and truth and how much you’re willing to pay not to be fooled.’

  Daniel suspected that for Peach poker was really a distraction. The lieutenant began to seek Daniel out, usually after missions, and afterwards Daniel would find out that the sortie had blown up a platoon of Taliban fighters but not before the fighters had surprised and shot to death one or two Americans in an ambush, appearing out of the nowhere night below a line of pines.

  One morning, Peach intercepted Daniel in the car park at three o’clock, headed for the loft, and suggested that they go to Bally’s to play a few hands. Daniel agreed instantly: he wanted to see
what a serious game was like.

  The taillights of Peach’s truck were little capsules of red that he followed along the highway, into the city’s glow, dropping onto the Strip at Flamingo Road, still a crowd on the street even at this hour. They parked only a block from the Nexus and made their way into the casino. Daniel was expecting to find the poker room intimidating, imagining a plush, secluded setting encircled by cocktail waitresses of powerful sexuality, but it was just an area roped off from the main floor, eight tables, some of which were showing naked styrofoam, and players who were to a man sloppy, who wore clothes like you’d see on suburban shoppers, giveaway T-shirts and very pale jeans.

  He and Peach sat at a low-stakes table, two-dollar blinds, and they bought in for two hundred dollars each. Most of the players looked grizzly tired, like they’d been here all night and were now playing by rote. Daniel folded his first few hands then raised with pocket sevens in late position, surprised to see his fingers shaking as he presented the bet. ‘Big hand,’ someone said. ‘Big hand . . .’ A joke at Daniel’s expense but also a friendly welcome to table (he’d learned to believe in the sincerity of Americans), and his raise took the blinds without debate.

  They played for three hours that morning, played until they were the only ones seated. By 8 a.m., they were in one of the casino’s cafés, waiting for eggs, hash browns and bacon, Daniel one hundred and three dollars in profit and Peach down over four hundred. Both knew that the lieutenant had been overly aggressive, trying to force issues that were at best dying chances; he’d represented backdoor flushes and made gut shots and miraculous sets on the river, hands he had no right to have and that mind-dead, early-morning players weren’t going to spot let alone give in to. Peach knew it, Daniel knew it, but Peach still complained; told Daniel again and again what a marvellous idiot the guy in the red shirt was, how the guy from Los Angeles was a fucking retard.

  Then they talked about Peach’s ex-wife, a bitch who lived in Stoddard County, Missouri, and who was lately refusing to put their son on the phone, for no reason that Peach was willing to mention. So Peach was going to buy his boy a laptop, have it delivered by courier after school hours while the bitch was still at Morgan Furniture—she was a saleswoman—and that way the laptop wouldn’t be intercepted and father and son would be connected.

  By the time their breakfast arrived Daniel knew he didn’t really like Peach. There was obviously something cruel and short-tempered and selfish about him, and he couldn’t be trusted, that was plain, not with anything genuine or important. But at least they could talk about poker, which he knew they would continue to do just as he knew they would never come to Bally’s to play again.

  In the weeks that followed the Yemen missions, he struggled to sleep. He’d come back to the loft at three or four in the morning, get into bed and lie there, turning, and dawn’s warm light would appear at the windows. He’d never had trouble sleeping before. He thought it must be the night work, or the type of work, but it was so consistent that he wouldn’t have been surprised to be told that something had changed in the wiring of his brain.

  He began to go for walks, an idea Peach suggested and which did help, one- or two-hour-long meanders through the lonely suburbs to the east of the Nexus. In those hours the streets were dim, lights at sparse intervals. The houses lacked clear dimension, and sometimes it was hard to know which were vacant and which were occupied. Occasionally he saw the blue flicker of a TV set in a lounge room or a bedroom. He’d seen a product advertised in the local papers, a device to deter burglars that mimicked a CRT tube in just that way.

  At first, he felt that the streets were uninhabited. But then he began to hear voices, small graphs of speech, always elsewhere but carried on the breeze—not arguments but whispers or quiet greetings, as if a second, invisible populace lived among the sleeping first.

  Then he began to see them. Bodies slumped at the corners of vacant blocks, under shards of cardboard or tin. Shapes moving by the entrances to alleys and sometimes the beads of cigarettes along fence lines and by drains, but they’d never speak to him, even when they knew he was there. Then in the just-dawn the slim, racketing sound of iron castors over bitumen, what he realised was the noise of people on the move, those who carried their possessions in carts. It was mysterious, a nomadic people shifting at dawn like pioneers on the trail—where were they going?

  Whoever they were, they seemed benign, altogether parallel. Until one morning when he came to the end of a cul-de-sac and somebody said, ‘Sir,’ and he turned to find the man almost upon him, a figure in a hoodie, an awkward stance, a man asking for a dollar.

  It was the closeness that did it: the fact that they’d halted, the man having appeared from behind and Daniel having stopped to turn. He couldn’t walk on. He made the mistake of reaching for his wallet. The knife was out at around belly height. The man began to say something that Daniel wasn’t properly hearing but which included the word phone. The thought that entered Daniel’s mind was that he couldn’t hand over military hardware. It was a stupid thought; the BlackBerrys were likely stolen or left behind in coffee shops and airport terminals all the time. But with the man rambling and the knife moving, erratic, and Daniel basically frozen by fear, there wasn’t time to consider this. So when the man reached for at his wallet, Daniel did what Gray later said was the dumbest thing possible. He grabbed the man’s knife hand.

  Of course his assailant was not expecting this. He made a sound like hah, and he must have thought that Daniel was trying to turn the blade back into him because instead of pushing the knife towards Daniel he pushed it away and to the left. This gave Daniel leverage. He forced the man’s hand into the air. The act of it brought them very close. The man gave off a stench that made Daniel gasp. And now the blade was high above them, the man struggling to bring it down and Daniel holding it up with both arms.

  It was surreal.

  There was snarling. Sudden whooping. Soon the man’s free hand was on Daniel’s face, clawing for his eyes. It was all so fast, so unlikely. The fingers had nails like talons. If they found his eyes, Daniel knew he would probably die but he couldn’t afford to give up an arm.

  They struggled. Daniel tried to turn his face away from the fingers but it was only a matter of time. He made an effort to turn the man’s body, to raise the knife still higher.

  This half worked. The man was standing side on, and Daniel lifted a leg and drove down with as much force as he could muster. And he must have caught the spot sweetly, right over the knee, because there was a shriek and the man’s frame began to cave. He went down on one leg, and it was then that Daniel let go.

  He’d reached the intersection before he looked back. The man hadn’t moved from where he was kneeling. Above his own pounding feet and heart, Daniel could hear the heavy uptake of breath, the muted and strained wail of suffering.

  When he got to the loft he didn’t have his wallet. There were scratches all over his face. Why hadn’t he just given the phone up? Dropped it and run? It had all been split second, yes, but he wondered what had really made him take the guy on.

  He rang Visa to cancel his cards. He wrote an email to LinkLock saying that someone had robbed him of the company card but that he’d cancelled it. For effect he deleted robbed and wrote mugged.

  He called the Las Vegas Police. They took his details and asked on what street the incident had happened, which Daniel didn’t know, and they asked him to describe the attacker, to which he said that he was black and wearing a hoodie.

  They said they’d send a car to search the general area. They asked if he needed a car to attend his location also, or if he needed medical attention. ‘No,’ he said.

  Afterwards, he felt he should call someone, just to tell them the story of what had happened, but who?

  The following day at Creech, everybody thought it was funny. Gray said that next time it would be acceptable to hand over the phone, Wolfe smiled wryly, and Peach and O’Keefe got Daniel to tell the story again and again; e
ventually they cleared a space and enacted the scene under his direction. Their performance was meant to be funny but there was also a kind of awe, if not for Daniel then for the idea of two bodies physically locked in combat, risking serious harm.

  Nobody asked what he’d been doing on the streets at that hour. Instead they drank coffee and those who smoked did so. Wolfe said that Daniel was a real surprise package, wasn’t he—quiet and reserved but underneath that pleasant veneer a dangerous man, a modern-day Mick Dundee.

  He used LinkLock’s unified communications system to video chat with Sett. This was supposed to happen weekly but it hadn’t happened for a month. Sett explained that things were going extremely well at Creech. The people at the Pentagon were very pleased. They were being informed by those at the base that the system was functioning flawlessly; word was spreading and other departments were making enquiries—someone from the State Department, for example, wondering whether the system might secure their embassies.

  ‘The important thing is that they want us to go exclusive,’ said Sett. ‘America and Australia. The latter only at a push.

  Exclusivity is good because it costs. And they’re prepared to pay. They see the potential. They want to keep it out of everyone else’s hands.’

  ‘You’re fitting in well, Daniel,’ Sett continued. ‘You’ve been very well reviewed. This couldn’t be going better for us: a working proof in such a demanding setting. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘This mugging . . .’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘We’re going to put a bonus in your account.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘That fix we sent you, the video trouble?’

  He’d almost forgotten. ‘It’s resolved. Everything’s fine.’