He heard a roar overhead and saw three bombers flying toward him from Alamogordo. Getting ready. But what was he doing here? Everyone else was busy preparing for something. Maybe this is what sunstroke was like, a weightless dreaming. It wasn’t his project-he didn’t even understand it. If he were still a reporter he’d be taking notes, amazed at his luck in being in the middle of a story that dwarfed anything on the metro desk. But he had given that up. He was here only to solve a crime everyone else was too busy to care about, nothing more than an interruption in their lives. And, oddly, he didn’t mind. He felt grateful to the project for letting him imagine a future. The war made everyone live day to day, never promising anything beyond its own ending. Now he felt the urge to get on-it didn’t matter where. All that was left was to put things in order so he could pack up. But now that he’d come here, he really didn’t want to go anywhere else. The future was here.
He lit a cigarette and wondered whether Bruner had ever come here, felt the new freedom of the desert space. Probably not. Connolly guessed that it would have terrified him. He had lived in too many cells to feel comfortable without walls. And yet he liked to go driving. Why? Where did he go? Maybe, a new patriot, he wanted to see this movie Western landscape come to real life. Connolly tried to imagine him gazing out to the horizon, hand shielding his eyes, but the picture wouldn’t come. His face in the file photo was pale, a stranger to the sun. His life had been formed in the furtive corners of rooms, bargaining for food, tapping on walls-but this was nonsense. There was no way of knowing. He could try the Oppenheimer method and start with a guess, but no connections seemed to follow. If you had been a victim, you could believe in conspiracy. Now what? If you believed in conspiracy, you believed in the value of knowing about it. How else to be safe? The world was organized in a series of invisible networks-in prison, where survival depended on it; in a secret community, where sex flourished more freely the more it was hidden. When everything important is invisible, do you begin to take pleasure simply in discovering it? It wasn’t just keeping your eyes open, that wasn’t enough. It became, finally, a love of knowing for its own sake. An advantage.
So Karl read files. Whose? Yes, he could picture that, Karl sitting under a lamp at night, absorbed in a folder, looking for a date that didn’t match, anything. Or something specific. It’s what isn’t there, he had said. But then why the car? Why take time away from the hunt pretending to be an indifferent tourist, unless this was playing cat and mouse too. Unless you were tracking somebody. Unless you were with somebody. Until curiosity killed the cat. And now Connolly, as always, ran out of connections. There had to be someone else. It’s not possible to live without a trace. Karl, neat as a monk, had left prophylactics in his drawer. There had to be someone. Even, though he still could not believe it, a pickup.
“You got a light?”
After days of modulated European accents, the thick American twang of the voice surprised him. Texas, probably, or Oklahoma. He looked like someone who had played football in high school, broad and muscular, with an unshaven chin that jutted out in jock confidence. He was stripped to the waist, his chest covered in an alkali film, so that the bandanna facemask now pulled down around his neck flapped like the collar to a shirt that wasn’t there. Young jug ears stuck out beneath the fatigue hat. Connolly handed him the lighter.
“You new on the site?” He was one of those people whose most innocent question came out like a challenge, as if he hadn’t learned to mask some fundamental belligerence. Connolly imagined him starting a bar fight, a redneck quick to take offense.
“Just down for the day. Guard duty.”
“No shit. Join the club.” He grinned, easier now that Connolly had explained himself. He flashed a security badge to establish club contact. “Who’d you draw?”
“Oppenheimer.”
He grunted. “You’re lucky. He never stays over. You don’t want to stay here. No fucking way.”
“You been down here long?”
“Twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight fucking days. They moved a bunch of us down last month. Let me tell you, this is about the hardest time there is.”
Connolly looked at him with interest. He thought he’d already talked to everybody in the intelligence unit. No one had mentioned transfers to Trinity. “Yeah, it’s hot.”
“It ain’t the heat. We got heat in East Texas. It’s the Mickey Mouse. They got this tighter than a rat’s ass. Nobody goes out. There ain’t nothing to do but shoot rattlers. The well water’s got all this shit in it so’s you can’t drink it-gypsum and stuff-but you wash in it so everybody gets the runs anyway. You got to stamp on scorpions in the latrine. Said they wanted only the best for Trinity duty, so naturally we all thought it was something special. It is.”
“So what do you guard?”
