And there was so much to feeclass="underline" This part of being alive was hot and fevered, slow and ecstatic. In the faint green light that filtered into the room there lived a frenzied line of electric delight that brought them, moaning, screaming, fighting to some swift, elemental climax.
Her eyes were closed. She smiled, delicately, a tiny corner of her mouth turned upward, like a piece of punctuation on a physical page, and it came to him how new this was: to see her in some senseless delight, to know that within her taut, strained being there lived some small, insensate oasis of carnality, unfettered, wild, free.
Like this, she was truly beautifuclass="underline" satiated, content, made whole by their joint coupling. He stayed in this place, relishing the fleshy warmth between them, becoming ever more conscious of it again. A voice inside his head said: Don't think, feel. And the pictures, the images of the day rolled behind it, in counterpoint, like a slow-moving video.
Michael Lieberman felt himself hardening, and the fire of procreation began the urging again, starting to order his hips, his groin into motion. Breathless, he pushed himself away, felt himself come free, with a small ache, pulled back over her body, rolled over onto the bed.
She opened her eyes and this was the old Mo again, closed, mysterious. 'Michael,' she said, looking into his face, some hurt there inside her voice, 'I thought…'
In the green light now she looked different. Her eyes rolled, like those of a frightened animal. She stared at the ceiling. Lieberman reached over, touched her face with his fingers, gripped her chin, forced her head round. 'Mo,' he said. Tears now, forming like transparent pearls at the corner of her eyes.
'Don't,' she said, trying to snatch herself away.
'I know.'
It was there so clearly now, like a photograph inside his head, and he wondered why it took so long to make sense of the image.
'You know what?' she answered, and there was as much fear in her voice, he thought, as there was aggression.
'You recognized that woman,' Lieberman said, still working to understand these words himself. 'On the mountain. In the mouth of the mine. You knew her.'
She closed her eyes, tight, so tight, and shook her head from side to side, so fast, so hard her hair went flying around like some whirling, wispy halo.
'You saw,' he said quietly. 'And you thought you could fuck that memory out of my head too.'
CHAPTER 38
Slipping
'McCarran Tower, this is November Five Seven Eight Whiskey Sierra.' The pilot let go of the PTT button and listened to the static, called again, then tried another frequency.
'Something local?' the co-pilot asked from behind impenetrable Ray-Bans.
'Probably. Give it a minute, Mike.' The distant city rolled out on the desert plain in front of them, dead flat in the valley between two arid mountain ranges, unmistakable across the clear, cloudless desert sky.
Mike pressed the button and made another call. 'Still static'
'Shit,' the captain said. 'I feel a command decision coming upon me.'
'The woman did say to call her if anything like this occurred.'
'Yeah, I know. But it doesn't matter if we have to go into McCarran blind, for God's sake. They grounded all the commercial airline traffic for today. Hell, you go talk to her.'
'Sure.' Mike unstrapped his harness and went aft. Helen Wagner was on the videophone and she looked angry. 'We got some static, some interference,' the co-pilot said.
'Tell me about it,' she grumbled. On the screen in front of her Lieberman's face appeared intermittently. Most of the time the image was filled with junk: white noise and distortion. When it was clear, she didn't like what she was seeing. Lieberman looked ashen and as miserable as sin.
'When you're ready,' the co-pilot said, and went back to the cockpit, feeling relieved.
'Michael,' she said, 'drop the video. Just put this over to voice. Maybe we'll get more over.' The screen died altogether, and, for a moment, the sound with it.
Then Lieberman said, 'Is that any better?'
'A little. But it's not great.'
'No,' he replied, in what was close to a distant, unintelligible mumble, 'same for you. What's the problem? Everything else seems clear this end.'
'I don't know. Some local interference here possibly.'
'This is electromagnetic, remember that.'
'I will,' she replied, and became aware of Barnside and Levine at her shoulder.
'You do that,' he yelled through the noise. 'I've been thinking about this. Charley said she'd give us a sign. And she hasn't. She's got something up her sleeve, something that comes straight out of the sky, not a box marked Semtex. It will be electromagnetic. It has to be. And this place you're going — a nice big network of wires and high-intensity, open-air electronic devices in the middle of the desert — is one hell of a location to try it out.'
'I know this,' she answered, trying not to sound too touchy. 'Is that why you called? Because if it is, we're going over old ground and I've got better things to do.'
The line went dead. Then Lieberman said, 'Keep your hair on. Are you sitting down?'
'Go on,' she said testily.
'We've found someone here who was one of the Children. And then made it here. They put her into La Finca as some kind of spy. She knows them. But we need to handle this thing carefully. I don't want some gooks just treading all over this woman because that won't do any of us any good.'
Levine looked at Barnside and said, 'Get that guy of yours hooked into this conversation. This is his damn job. Not some goddamn academic's.'
'Michael,' she said. 'Calm down. Take this slowly.'
'I am calm, Helen.' He didn't sound it at all, she thought. 'I have found someone who was one of them. And was told to come here, get inside this place.'
'She did that?'
'She's here. But she says that's as far as it went. She didn't do anything. She's scared. Of you. Of them. And scared for herself, her kid. You need to treat her right. Otherwise she'll just stay quiet, clam up.'
'I understand… Michael?' The line went dead in a big burst of static.
'You still there?' he said eventually.
'Yes.'
'Look,' Lieberman continued, 'I don't know how much she has to give, and this isn't going to be easy. But if we try, if we're patient, we can work something out.'
'Patient?' Levine snorted. 'You hear the guy? This woman could put us on the line with Gaia. Who the hell does he think he is?'
'Who was that?' Lieberman's voice asked out of the speaker.
'One of my colleagues.'
'Right. I guess I'm being dumb here, huh? You people are just going to break out the leg irons and beat it out of her.'
'No!'
Levine said, 'We'll do what it takes. What the hell does he expect?'
'I heard that,' Lieberman said, only half-intelligible through the noise. 'And you listen to me, whoever you are. You guys may enjoy running around with hard dicks and guns hanging out of your pants. But it hasn't done you much good so far, now, has it?'
Levine swore. Then glowered at Barnside working the radio on the other side of the plane, a headset clamped to his ears. 'That guy of yours asleep or something?' Barnside said nothing, just carried on talking quietly into the mike.
'Listen to me,' Lieberman said. 'If we take this slowly, easily, I think we can bring her around.'
'I hear you, Michael,' Helen said. 'Just trust us on this one.'
'Trust you?' The rest of the sentence disappeared in a sea of white noise. She saw Barnside dragging the headset off, wincing with pain.