And then you blink, and everything is back: the room, the cold, the pallid light through the lace curtains. The cigarette you’re still holding, burned down to the filter. You stub it out and look away, flinching at the eddies of ash that stir in the saucer.
You sigh and place a palm against your left eye, then look around the room, right eye flicking, never staring for too long at any single spot. You think you see something on the far wall, halfway up near the right side of the window. You grab the duct tape from the table and walk towards the spot, keeping your eyes on the carpet all the way.
You look out the window while your fingers explore the wall. The room is on the top floor of what might be a council estate. You can see the rusted skeleton of a playground down there in the concrete courtyard. But there’s a high wall around the whole place. No obvious doors. No barbed wire either, but you’re sure there’d be something on the top of those walls to shock you or slice your skin or put a bullet between your eyes. The few rooftops you can see tell you nothing. This could be Washington. Or London. Or Bucharest.
Not that it matters. It’s not like you’re ever getting out of here.
Your fingers brush over the surface of the wall. You peel off a strip of tape and tear it off with your teeth. You cover the crack the best you can without looking directly at it. When you’re done you take a deep breath and force yourself to look. It’s not perfect: a tiny piece of the crack is still visible at the bottom, and another piece the size of your fingernail halfway up where the duct tape is wrinkled, but neither of these are enough to throw you. You cover them quickly, then pick up the saucer from the table and walk to the sink.
You let the water run for a long time, watching the ash be taken down the pipe. You put your hand over the drain, watch it disappear beneath the rising water.
Footsteps in the hall outside, a soft-soled shoe.
Cooper comes in without knocking. Two cups of coffee. “You’re awake,” he says, “Good.”
Cooper looks at the crazy fault line of duct tape running across the wall. You don’t know if he notices the new addition – there are plenty on the walls now, one on the floor, a couple on the ceiling. He raises an eyebrow, says nothing. Takes a seat. “Come,” he says, slapping the table. “We need to talk.”
He offers you a coffee and you take it. Cheap instant. Barely lukewarm.
Cooper pulls an ancient-looking tape recorder from his pocket and places it ostentatiously on the table. As if you don’t already know the whole room is lousy with hidden surveillance. “So,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “Tell me how it all went wrong.”
All the windows of the Land Rover are down: the breeze gives a little relief from the heat, but it brings in the dust too. The driver has his head wrapped in a burnoose and is squinting through sunglasses into the setting sun. A gazelle, startled, emerges from behind a baobab tree, keeping pace with the Humvee for several seconds before angling away across the plain.
“Did you see that?” Owens calls from the front, before leaning out the window and hocking a great ball of spit and tobacco into the dust. Sweat stains the back of his shirt and his forehead, beneath the trails of sweat, is already turning pink. He knows the drill. Knows he’s got to stay hydrated and keep the sunscreen on. He’s seen action before, seen things. But you look at him leaning half out the window like a tourist and wonder how much of his career is solid work and how much has just been getting by on good luck and his American smile.
There used to be a road here, but there isn’t anymore. The Land Rover follows the tracks made by other, larger vehicles over the last few months. First mining trucks with wheels taller than you, then buses and vans, shuttling workers in and out. Later, larger vehicles again: eight-wheeled transports full of private contractors, better armed than any regular soldier could expect. You’re old enough to remember when men like that were called mercenaries.
“Coming up on it now,” the driver says. It’s the first thing he’s said since he shook your hand and shuffled you into the back seat four hours ago. Daan Oosthuizen is thin and angular, as if he’s too large for his own skin. Knows this part of the country like the back of his hand. He’s being paid half a year’s salary to drive you here.
The cover is visible first. Tall towers, reaching up and out like the claws that hold a jewel, rise above the horizon. The cover stretches out between the towers like an absurdly large circus tent, some high-tech kevlar material, providing camouflage from the satellites above and a small degree of shelter from the heat below. It’s several more minutes before the prefab huts arrayed just under the lip of the cover are visible.
Owens looks up. It takes a while before he registers how big the thing is. “Shit,” he whispers, then falls silent.
In the footage you saw the road had been blocked by a couple of Humvees lying on their sides in the glass of their own windows. Someone’s tried to tidy things up a little. The Humvees have been dragged off somewhere. There are wide scrapes in the dirt and the glass is gone. The fires have been extinguished too, though many of the huts show black scorch marks on their walls.
On the left side of the road an excavated mound of earth looms like a mountain. A few trucks and diggers are scattered about like discarded toys, none of them moving.
The Land Rover coughs to a stop just before the cover. The sun is caught between the horizon and the cover’s far edge, a thin slice of fire. The world is silent. You’d expected this – the satellites have recorded no significant movement near the site for a week, not since the explosions. But things are always different when you’re boots on the ground.
You climb out of the Land Rover and stretch the journey out of your back. Even under the cover the air still holds the heat of the just-gone day.
“I’m gonna go now,” Oosthuizen says. This was always the plan: he’d drop you and Owens and drive back to Durban alone. There’s nothing in his expression – the bastard is the definition of South African stoic. But there’s the hint of a tremble in his voice that worries you. Oosthuizen doesn’t strike you as a superstitious man. But he hasn’t even turned off the engine. Thirty seconds later he’s dust and taillights. Cooper’s organized for someone else to do the pickup, but he was vague last time you spoke. You wonder if he’s waiting on your report before making a call on who to send. Perhaps he’s waiting to see if you’ll need seats or space in cargo.
Owens pulls his pistol as if the site’s hot. You stare at him until he coughs, straightens up, puts it back in the holster.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” you say, making for the closest of the prefabs. Owens follows sheepishly.
There’s a light on and you can hear conversation, laughter, cut off as your boots ring off the steps in front of the door. It’s a canteen: a few folding tables are scattered about, a couple of cupboards. A glass-fronted fridge with a Coke logo across the top, stocked with Castle Lager. Two men are sitting at a table in the middle of the room, cards arrayed in front of them like they’re playing separate games of solitaire.
“Help you?” says the one that doesn’t have his back to you, a grizzled white man, thick beard, thicker accent.
“Geneva.”
“She was down the hole before,” says the other man, without turning around. “There, or her office maybe. Other side.” He gestures, so vaguely he could be pointing at anywhere between here and Victoria Falls.
Head Office was supposed to have dropped in some security soon as they read the message. Either that didn’t happen, or security is these two idiots. You wouldn’t be surprised at either option. Nothing you can do about it now.
You head farther into the site. Owens trails behind like a puppy. The lights set up at regular intervals are flickering on now. They light the path and the steel plank fence that surrounds the hole, but that’s all. Beyond the fence there’s nothing to illuminate.
Geneva emerges from a gap in the fence, sees you and stops, waiting for you to close the distance. Her face gives no clues to what she’s thinking. There’s a deep weariness in the line of her shoulders.
You offer your hand and Geneva shakes it casually. “What’s it going to be?” she says, resigned already and ready to get things over with.
“Yet to be determined,” you say. She doesn’t buy it, but she shrugs anyway. A sudden wind blows some dirt under the cover, rattling the fence and sending a few clouds falling into the hole.
“Well then. No point messing around. Want to see it?”
You nod.
“Wait here,” Geneva says, “I’ll get some lamps.”
Cooper presses record and the wheels of the tape start to spin.
“Second interview with the subject. It’s Wednesday.” He checks his watch. “Ten thirty.” It’s hard not to roll your eyes at the theatricality of it all.
“Given what happened yesterday, let’s not start at the beginning,” Cooper says. “Let’s just play it-” he waves his fingers. “Let’s start with what happened to Owens.”
“Owens is dead.”
“Sure about that?” Cooper leans back in his chair like a poker player dropping a royal flush, but the only reaction you can manage is a grunt.
“Owens is dead.”
“How do you know?”
The sound of his laughter. The sight of his blood when it hit the shining surface.
“I know.”
Cooper looks down at the tape deck and the turning wheels of the tape.
“And Geneva. You didn’t kill her. Why not?”
“It wasn’t possible.”
“Why?”
“Bullets wouldn’t work. Not by then.”
“Explain.”
You say nothing.
Cooper lets the silence stand. Looks at you. Checks his watch again. Lets his eyes wander around the room. Around the lines of duct tape across the wall. “Want to tell me about that?”
It’s not like you’re being deliberately obstructive. You’d like to tell him the whole story. But how is that possible? And even if it was, what would be the point?
You sip your coffee and wait.
Geneva’s gone at least five minutes. Your ears are still ringing from the drive. You’re happy to wait. But Owens is fidgety. He runs his fingers along the gaps in the fence.
“Try not to touch anything,” you say.
Geneva returns with torches. “You won’t need these yet. But you will before the end.” She steps through a hole in the fence and doesn’t wait to see if you follow.
You know the hole is big. You’ve already seen the cover. And you’ve seen a few open-cast mining sites in your time. But standing here, the fence at your back, it’s a different situation. The hole is so large it’s like standing at the edge of a sea. No. It’s like looking down on the night sky. It shouldn’t be possible for humans to make such a scar on the earth. Such an act feels morally indefensible somehow.
There’s a Jeep waiting off to one side and you all jump in. Geneva flicks on the headlights and starts driving down a path as wide as a freeway. The world contracts. Now there is only the curve of the road with an earthen wall on the left side and an eye-aching blackness on the right.
“Who are you?” Geneva asks. “CIA?”
“Yes,” you say. Because it’s easier than the real answer. People can get their head around something like the CIA. A box on an org chart, made up of smaller boxes, all with nice right-angled corners. Easier to nod and smile and have people think you’re one of those fools than try and explain who you really are and what you really do. You’re not part of any box on the chart. You live in the spaces between.
Geneva shrugs. “Honestly, I don’t care if you’re Mossad or MI6 or Mickey Mouse. I just want you to fix it.” Her accent is almost perfect. You can hear the layers in it, the careful mid-Atlantic tones that fit her cover. You wouldn’t even notice the little hints of Eastern Europe around the edges if you hadn’t read her dossier.
A couple of minutes later the Jeep passes a line of yellow trucks lined up along the wall. One of them has a long dark stain on the driver’s door that you don’t look too closely at.
“What happened?” you ask.
“You know what happened,” Geneva says.
“I know what was in the report.”
“I wrote the report. Think I made it up?”
“A map is not the territory.”
“Smooth. You practice that one in the mirror, Langley?”
“They give you a folder full of snappy remarks same time they give you the badge and gun.”
She snorts. The wipers attempt to flick dust from the window. Fail.
“The mining company set up here about ten years ago. Shouldn’t have. Everything in a fifty-kilometer radius is protected. A world heritage site. But they paid the people that needed paying, set up camp and started digging. Paid off, too. Diamonds as big as your fist, all funneled out the back way.”
This has all been in the other dossier Head Office had given you. Up north, through the needle-thin route that runs from here all the way to Moscow. Ten years of riches.
“All that time, and the projections were saying they had barely scratched the surface. Could have been digging for another five decades. Then they found the first one.”
“The first what?” Owens says from the back.
Geneva shoots you a look. “He doesn’t know?”
“He knows some,” you say.
“I know he’s just the muscle, but if he’s come this far, don’t you think he deserves to know where we’re going?” She points at the glove compartment. “There’s a copy in there.”
The folder is powdered with the same red earth that covers everything else. But the contents are familiar. For a second you’re shocked by her leaving something like this where anyone could just stumble across it. Moscow’s better than that. But then you remember where you are. And you realize it doesn’t matter. You hand the folder back to Owens. He flips through it. Then he sits silently for a good long while. Eventually he leans over the side and vomits.
The Jeep’s already doing fifty but Geneva gooses it a little more. You’ve got no idea how far down you are now. The world has shrunk to nothing more than the dust reflected in the headlights. But a couple of minutes later she slows and pulls over to the side.
“We’re here.”
And then you blink, and everything is back.
Your coffee is gone. Someone has picked the cup apart. Had to be you.
Cooper scoops up the fragments of Styrofoam and puts them back into his own empty cup. “You’re going to have to say something. Not today, perhaps. But sooner or later. I’m an old man. I’ve got nothing better to do than sit around waiting for my enemies to die and maybe go fishing now and then. I promise you’ll get tired of this before I do.”
What will it hurt, telling him? He’s on your side, after all.
The losing side.
“What was that?” Cooper says, and it’s only then you realize you had spoken the thought out loud.
Fuck it.
“We can’t win,” you say.
“We’ve won before.”
“I’m not talking about the Russians. This isn’t the kind of enemy you defeat. It’s not even the kind of enemy you can face. Better to-” You trail off.
“Better to what?”
There’s another crack. On the right side of the window again, closer to the kitchenette. You grab the duct tape and walk over. Cooper watches as you tear off a strip, feel for the crack with your hands, a frozen smile on his face.
“Feel better now?” he says when you sit back down.
Part of you wants to ask if he sees the cracks. Or if he’s just watching one of his agents put strips of tape all over a pristine wall. But a part of you knows he’s doesn’t see any of them. He won’t. Nobody will, not until it’s too late. So why not tell him? He doesn’t have a chance either way, but is it a mercy to let him know ahead of time? Cooper’s good at playing the tough guy, but he must have someone he wants to talk to before the end, some estranged ex-wife, some child he hasn’t seen for twenty years. Maybe he just wants to climb up to the roof and smoke a cigar while he watches his last sunset. Not that you could ever aspire to redemption, the career you’ve had. But to do one good thing before the end? Wouldn’t that be nice?
You don’t know if telling him is a mercy or a torment. Still.
“What time is it?”
Cooper checks his watch. Looks like a Tag Heuer, but on his salary it’ll be a fake. “Just gone seven.”
You might have a couple more days. Or perhaps it’s only a few hours.
“Geneva stopped the Jeep, and we got out.”
Geneva climbs out of the Jeep.
You sit for a moment. She’s got her back to you. You could lean out the door, raise your gun. Wouldn’t take a minute and that’s half the mission out the way. But you don’t do anything. Your orders are to only kill her once you’ve stopped whatever’s going on. So you get out and stand behind her.
The road continues down and round. You’re not nearly at the bottom of the hole yet. But there’s a crack in the wall on the other side of the Jeep, six feet tall, perhaps half that across. Geneva pulls some torches from the back of the Jeep and hands them out.
You follow her into the crack. It’s hot in here, as if the walls have absorbed the heat of the day, which is impossible this far down. You’re not aware of any geothermal activity.
Ten paces later the passage widens suddenly into a wider cavity. Geneva flicks a switch on the wall and a brace of halogens attached to the ceiling light up, thirty feet above.
You look. But you don’t know what you’re looking at.
“Fuck me,” Owens says behind you.
The cavern is perhaps twenty-five feet wide and oval. The walls are too regular to have occurred naturally, but they’re still rough. The space presses down on you. Wasn’t the mining company. Someone carved this place out of the rock a long, long time ago.
There are seven diamonds standing near the opposite wall. No. Can’t be diamonds. Gotta be something else.
“What is that?” you say. “Some kind of quartz?” Because there’s no way they can be diamonds. They’re nearly seven feet tall.
“No.” Geneva doesn’t take her eyes of the things. “They’re exactly what you think they are.”
It’s not possible. A diamond larger than a person. It’s just not possible. And seven of them. Your mind flies in a thousand directions at once: the physics of this, how much are these worth, how did they, it’s just not possible.
But if these really are diamonds, why is Geneva showing them to you? Why would a Russian agent bring in someone who she thinks is the CIA, when she could be hauling these back home, or hell, cutting a slice off one and just running. And she didn’t just call the CIA. This was an alarm, the closest thing possible to an emergency broadcast through encrypted channels. Everyone heard it and they’ve all got to be on their way. You just happened to get here first.
“But why did you-”
Geneva takes a couple of steps closer to the leftmost diamond. Raises an arm.
Something changes in the light reflected on the surface. No. Something is moving within the diamond. There’s a shape in there.
The shadow of a man. Or something mostly man-shaped, at least. It is hunched over. Standing straight it could be eight or nine feet tall. Something protrudes from the shadow’s back, something that looks disturbingly like wings.
You shake your head. “No,” you say, backing away. Impossibility upon impossibility. There’s no such thing as a seven-foot-tall diamond. Even if there was, there’s no way anything can exist within it. The pressure required for a diamond to form – it’s. No.
You blink and find yourself back near the entrance of the cavern, leaning heavily against the wall. You’re breathing heavily. You lean your forehead against the wall, force yourself to focus on the red rock in front of you. This is real. This is reality, you tell yourself as you suck in air and wait for the buzzing in your mind to fade away. This is real. This is reality.
Someone is crying, though the sound seems far away. You force yourself to turn your head. It’s Owens. He’s on his knees, arms stretched out. Giant, heaving sobs like a child. He’s smiling.
“I called out for help,” Geneva says. “Called everyone I could. There’s no way I could do this myself.”
You force yourself to turn, though you remain leaning against the rock wall. It’s not just the diamond on the left. Six of them have shapes inside.
There is no such shape in the seventh diamond. It is cracked, top to bottom. One half lies against the other as if something has burst out of it.
The shadows in the other diamonds start to move. Slowly at first, then faster, as if they sense you there in the room with them.
Owens climbs to his feet. Leans over for a little as if he’s just run a marathon and is recovering his breath.
He takes a step towards the diamonds.
You shout, but it’s a small, faraway thing. Owens takes another step, alternately crying and laughing. You can’t let him reach the diamonds. He takes another step. You pull your pistol from its holster.
Another step. Owens is nearly close enough to touch one of the diamonds. On his face is an expression of pure joy.
He lifts his hand.
You pull the trigger.
The gunshot is deafening in the closeness of the cave. The bullet hits Owens high in the temple. Blood and brains splatter on the rainbow surface of the diamond.
Owens’ hand drops, but he remains standing.
Inside the diamond, the shape reaches out a hand to the gore-streaked surface.
It’s impossible, of course. But still you watch as Owens’ blood is absorbed through the surface of the diamond, changing color as it does so, from red to a deep black. It flows towards the outstretched hand of the shape inside.
Geneva turns to face you. “That was messy,” she says, smiling. “Still, no harm done.”
You raise the pistol again and shoot her point blank between the eyes.
The bullet should have gone right through her skull. But it skids off, leaving a long scar along Geneva’s forehead before it embeds itself deep into the wall. The bullet has torn a flap of skin loose. Geneva reaches up and pulls it away, exposing more of the diamond that has replaced her skull. And still, that smile on her face.
Time to go.
When you turn you see something you missed before. In the corner, to the right of the entrance there is another crack in the wall. You need to get back out the way you came in. Far as you know it’s the only way out. But you need to know.
You dash for the gap.
The tunnel is long and straight. There’s room for several people to walk side-by-side. You shine your torch.
On the left wall, another line of diamonds that goes on as far as the torch can shine. And every one of them smashed open.
You run.
Geneva is standing in front of the entrance, still smiling. You push past and she doesn’t offer much resistance, just brushes her hand against your cheek like a lover. The place where she touches you tingles then becomes numb.
Back through the narrow entrance. Back out to the black nothingness of the pit itself.
The keys are still in the ignition. The Jeep starts easily enough, but despite everything you freeze at the thought of turning the thing around, so close to the edge of the pit. You have no idea how far down you are, how long the fall would be, silent in the darkness.
Then there’s movement in the corner of your eye. Geneva coming after you, most likely, and that’s enough to spur you into action. Turning the Jeep carefully. You floor it and the Jeep fishtails in the red earth as you power back up the long ramp, those window wipers still turning, still achieving exactly nothing.
You don’t stop when you reach the edge of the pit. You’re still accelerating as you slide past the prefab huts. The two men you spoke to before emerge from the canteen, both of them armed, but they don’t shoot. Just watch as you slide around another hut, then you’re past the edge of the cover and on to the dirt track.
You don’t stop until the petrol runs out. You climb out of the Jeep, but your legs won’t hold you up. You lie there on the side of the road.
Time passes. There is darkness.
And then you blink, and everything is back. You are lying on a cot in the back of a military plane. Someone has been leaning over you, shining a penlight into your eyes, a concerned expression on his face. He turns to speak to someone else and your eyes fall closed again.
There is darkness and you are grateful for it. There is peace in the darkness.
And then you blink, and everything is back: the room, the cold, the pallid light through the lace curtains. Cooper, still waiting for the next part of the story.
You don’t know when you stopped talking. How far you got.
The tape deck still sits in the middle of the table, wheels turning endlessly. You open your mouth to speak.
The tape deck cracks in half.
You stare, confused. The recorder is split into two halves, but the wheels of the tape still turn. You look up at Cooper and find him shattered too. There are a swarm of Coopers now, each occupying a fragment of your vision and every Cooper has a look of terror on their face, every Cooper is reaching for the gun in their shoulder holster, which just makes you laugh. Bullets won’t work. Not now. You look at the cracks on the walls, the cracks in the world you had tried to hide with duct tape, but of course that would have never worked.
The cracks were never on the wall. They were inside you.
The diamond is whispering to you, secrets and signals you could never have understood before. How could you? None of this is knowledge useful for shadows such as you were. No, this is knowledge only for beings of pure light.
Waves of pride wash over you. You are not the sole messenger but just one of many, who sit in rooms like this all over the world or have already spread their message further in conference rooms and meeting halls, from the offices of presidents to crowds on street corners. The message takes root in all that hear it, for hearing is much the same as seeing and soon all will see, and hear, and speak.
Cooper’s gun booms and something hits your head, but you barely feel it. Bullets don’t work. Not now.
And then you blink, and tears of joy roll down your face and splash on the table. The light catches in them, brings out the rainbows in them, making them shine like diamonds.
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Grant Stone‘s fiction has appeared in Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and has twice won New Zealand’s Sir Julius Vogel Award. | |