The Big Dark Sky (98)
When she sought to reach Ganesh through his smartphone, she discovered a service outage in the very part of Montana where he must be at this moment. Liam O’Hara had funded cell towers for that remote county; if they were not functioning on this most momentous night, logic suggested that they had been intentionally disabled.
With all the computer systems in the nation—in the world—wide open to Artimis, she entered the cellular-phone network of Verizon, the telecom provider for Project Olivaw. Thus she was granted access to every telecom provider and cell-tower operator in the United States through the cooperative arrangement that made it possible for their customers to be granted universal service. She identified the disabled cell towers in Montana, analyzed the problem with them, and corrected it, restoring service. This took forty-nine seconds.
88
Wyatt and Joanna sprang up from their chairs when the Suburban erupted out of the night as if bursting through a membrane between this world and another. It roared onto the veranda steps and came to a stop, and the doors were flung open as the headlights went dark.
Kenny Deetle clambered out of the driver’s seat, and a woman Wyatt didn’t know came out of the back door, and Ganesh Patel, in his signature white suit, rounded the front of the vehicle, seeming taller and more imposing than ever.
Surprised to see reinforcements, hoping they were not the extent of it, Wyatt said, “I know them. The cavalry has arrived.”
Joanna frowned. “Doesn’t look it.”
Wyatt unlocked the door. “Looks can be deceiving.”
First across the threshold, Kenny said, “Hey, you’re not dead.”
“We’re working on it.”
Close behind Kenny came the woman, something of a vision, and then Ganesh, his concession to color limited to red sneakers.
The New York Times had called him “the mensch from Mumbai”—though Ganesh was born in California to parents who had come from India. He looked at the pistol in Wyatt’s hand and grimaced. “About as useful as a breadstick.”
Wyatt holstered the gun. “This place is under the control of—I’m not shitting you—an extraterrestrial with extraordinary power.”
“Exactly.” Ganesh produced a phone. The screen glowed.
“Yours works?” Wyatt asked. “Ours shut down earlier.”
As Ganesh regarded the screen without answering the question, the woman who’d come with him said, “The ET—we call it ‘the Other.’ The dirty bastard burned down my house in Seattle. I’m Leigh Ann.”
“We’re together,” Kenny said. “As long as we’re alive, anyway. You know how crazy I am about Poe. She’s crazier about him.”
Leigh Ann said, “We hooked up because of ‘Eldorado.’”
Wyatt found himself between distraction and bewilderment, nodding as though it made sense for them to share the details of their romance even in a moment of crisis. “Listen, this thing controls animals. Crows, coyotes, elk—”
“Grizzly bears,” Joanna added. “My parents owned this place a long time ago. This thing you call ‘the Other’—when I was nine, it used a bear to kill my father, tore him apart.”
“Not just animals,” Kenny said. “Computers, TVs, microwave ovens, cars.”
There was a strange potency to the moment, an electrifying potentiality, as if everyone here was supercharged with repressed kinetic energy, frightened but exhilarated as might be a high-wire walker while crossing between two skyscrapers without a net.
Leigh Ann said, “Kenny thought the bastard might crash a 747 just to wipe us out on the ground.”
That struck Wyatt as an absurd fear until Ganesh made a disconcerting revelation. “It’s been using this country’s orbiting weapons platforms to kill people with pinpoint accuracy.”
“And it’s weirdly judgmental,” Leigh Ann said. “Calls us vermin, pestilence, says we’ve got to die. It’s so not Spielberg.”
Joanna said, “It’s been here for centuries, observing. Maybe millennia. It seems virtually immortal. It was rational once. Not now. Something’s happened to it.”
Leigh Ann hugged herself. “It’s psychotic. Totally apeshit.”
“We think part of what happened to it is a freak named Asher Optime,” Wyatt said.
Ganesh looked up from his phone. “Optime. If we survive the next hour, I’ll want to know how you figured Optime.”
He had left the door ajar; and now everyone startled as two strangers entered from the veranda. A teenage boy with a backpack, said, “Optime? He’s the piece of shit who killed my father.”
Hesitating for a moment, but then closing the door behind her, the woman with the kid said, “The crazy fuck has a church basement full of corpses in Zipporah.”
The two were drenched, dripping, pale with exhaustion but taut with fear.
Wyatt said, “What’s Zipporah?”
The woman’s attention flicked from face to face. Her voice was sharp with suspicion. “How do you know Asher Optime?”
Joanna sensed that time was running out. She could see they all sensed it. In spite of a fear that was winding her nerves as tight as clock springs, she was nonetheless puzzled by the familiarity of the moment, as if she’d been here before. And then she understood. It’s the traditional drawing room scene, for God’s sake. It’s Agatha Christie, the next to last chapter, when the cast is gathered for the big revelation, for the solution to the mystery. Except in this case, none of us is a killer. We’re here not to witness the killer brought to justice but instead to be killed. A tremor of blackest amusement fluttered through her. If she hadn’t repressed the laugh, it would have had such an icy, mad quality that everyone in the room might have regarded her with cold apprehension, wondering if the Other had just taken possession of her.