Bleak History Read online

  “Son of a bitcM” the driver shouted—he was another set of sunglasses in a suit—as Bleak ran through the air above the car, creating more of the invisible ramp ahead of him as he went. He waved the ramp away just as he passed the trunk of the car on the far side, and the support vanished from under him. He dropped down to a crouch behind the agents as one of them, the driver, got out of the car and turned, fired at him, the bullet cutting the air near his shoulder.

  Then Arnie was there, right in front of him on the sidewalk, raising the gun. Bleak used more standard combat skills, Ranger hand-to-hand. He set himself and kicked out, connecting with Arnie's wrist. Arnie yelped in pain, grimacing, as the gun spun away. Agent Sarikosca came from behind her partner, tried to barricade Bleak, but he dodged past her, like a quarterback with the football, and kept going, leaving her and Arnie behind.

  Running, Bleak sensed someone he knew on the sidewalk ahead. Wondered if it was coincidence. It was Pigeon Lady: an elderly woman no more than five feet tall, who seemed to live in a perpetual flurry of pigeons; a droppings-white watch cap pulled over her spray of gray hair; she wore layers of bird-spackled wool, whatever the weather, stuck with fallen pinfeathers. And she wore pigeons like more clothing, something like thirty of them whirring and cooing about her, sitting on her head, her shoulders, her arms, whether she was feeding them or not. Her seamed face turned toward him; her watery eyes took him in, running past. Nodded distantly to him, turning to see men with suits, sunglasses, and guns five strides behind him. Feds, aiming at Bleak's back.

  The pigeons erupted from her in a volcanic cloud of flapping blue and gray, making whickering sounds in their flurrying, to fill the air just behind Bleak. They flew at the faces of the CCA men; flapping wildly, blocking all sight of the agents' quarry, for several long, precious moments.

  Carried on the psychic wind of their wings, Bleak heard thoughts, other people's thoughts he could never ordinarily have heard. He was not usually telepathic—not like that. Mostly he could only hear the minds of the dead.

  Run, cross the street, Bleak, the Pigeon Lady thought. We 11 keep them back.

  Someone else thinking, What the hell's up with these birds ? It's like that Hitchcock movie... the damn things 're too close to my eyes... the smell, the feathers—

  Where's he gone ?

  There—I've got a shot at him!

  “No, Drake, hold your fire, you'll hit civilians!” Sarikosca shouted, as Bleak sprinted up Thirty-fifth toward Broadway, running full out, suddenly aware of the humid heat. As if he were running upstream through hot water. He drew his power from the living environment around him, but the process took something from him too—had taken a great deal for that last little gag, running on the air

  —and he was feeling it. And thinking, “Drake “ she said? Drake Zweig from military intelligence?Tt would be a natural jump, from Army Intelligence to CCA. Maybe Zweig had ID'd him. He hoped it wasn't that particular prick.

  Bleak saw the female agent at the corner, with Arnie just behind her. Trying to block him off. He took in a deep breath and cut to the right, dodging around a wheezing fat woman with runny eye makeup and a bearded man in a turban; ducked behind a disused mailbox, then cut between two parked taxis and ran into traffic, right in front of a bus. He sprinted past the front of a big city bus a whisker ahead of being run down, the bus blaring its horn—then he turned to follow it through the intersection, running along beside it. Traffic was heavy and the bus was moving only as fast as he could run.

  Bleak used the bus's bulk to hide behind as he crossed Broadway, aware that a round-mouthed little girl was ogling him from a window just beside his head, her pudgy fingers pressed to the glass. He waved at her and she waved back, then, wheezing, he angled off into the thick crowd on the sidewalk, cut into a department store...and lost them. For now.

  ***

  “WE LOST HIM,” SAID Drake Zweig, coming back to the car in the alley. “Dammit.” Zweig was a short, middle-aged man in a gray suit tight over his barrel chest. He wore his gray hair in a kind of oily pompadour, to give him height; wide face, eyes set slightly too far apart, his mouth almost lipless. He had large hands—there was a story he'd used those big thumbs on the eyes of detainees, back in Iraq, years ago, when he'd worked for the CIA at Abu Ghraib.

  “What about the detector?” Arnie asked, ruefully rubbing his bruised wrist.

  “Out of range—he must've slipped off to a subway. Caught a lucky train.”

  Loraine Sarikosca was standing by the car, spraying her burn with analgesic, then winding a bandage around her hand. She wanted to tell Zweig he should have taken her advice, brought in four more cars for this guy. She just wondered why it'd taken so long for her backup to show, in the bar. Had General Forsythe told them to hold off—see how she handled it alone? It was quite possible. “I can confirm the ID, all right,” Zweig went on. “Gabriel Bleak.”

  Arnie tilted his dark glasses back on the top of his blond head, revealing pale blue eyes. “Hot as hell out here. So, Drake—how you know this Bleak?”

  “Let's take it to the car,” Loraine said. She knew Zweig didn't like her talking as if she had rank on him—only, she did have rank on him, so he could stuff it. She didn't want them airing this on the street.

  They all got in, Loraine in the back behind Zweig, Arnie beside her. Zweig's partner, riding shotgun, was Dorrick Johnson, an African-American agent who rarely contributed more than a cynical shake of his head to any conversation. But Dorrick had good judgment. Such as the good judgment to put on the air-conditioning as soon as Zweig got the car fired up.

  “How's your hand, Loraine?” Arnie asked.

  “It's okay, just a little red.” It hurt like a bastard but she didn't want to be taken off the job. “Your wrist?”

  “Throbs. Doesn't seem broken. If I run into that guy again...”

  “Keep a professional attitude, Arnie, okay? Forsythe wants them intact.”

  Zweig just then got around to answering Arnie's question, so it sounded like a non sequitur. “Bleak fucked with me on intel, of course, in Afghanistan.” Zweig snorted. “He was Army Rangers. Supposed to be a tough bunch. But he was such an old lady about the civilians.”

  “Some 'old lady.'“ Arnie said ruefully. “Almost blew off Loraine's hand. And he made us look like dicks.”

  “Used magic,” Zweig snorted. “Didn't have the stones to use a gun. I don't really see the advantage of this weird-ass trick of his. Making a gun blow up.”

  “Think about it,” Loraine said, gingerly touching the bandaged hand. She winced. “He shoots me, that's a real clear crime. He makes the gun explode with a power the court doesn't recognize as even existing, he just says, “What, so your gun went blooey, why is that my fault?” No weapon, nothing the police can hold him on, really. No forensic evidence. He doesn't have to reload the thing—seems to pull it right out of the air. It's always there, even when he seems disarmed. And then there's the psychological effect—I was pretty startled, I got to admit.”

  “We're feds. New rules, we can take him in, don't need 'evidence,'“ Dorrick pointed out. Dorrick was new to CCA—which was itself fairly new. Dorrick was a transfer from FBI. Not his choice.

  Loraine nodded abstractedly. “We don't need evidence if we can get him without the police being involved—not always possible, from what I hear.” Her mind mostly on wondering if the agency had brought the other detectors into the area, as she'd requested. They were testers—only a few prototypes existed. Bleak might still be close by.

  She'd been standing so close to him—why didn't she just tackle him? Would he really have used that energy bullet on her, directly? She wasn't sure. She suspected he probably wouldn't have. But she wasn't sure why she felt that way.

  I won't ask what authority you have...but what excuse do you have?

  The words haunted her. She'd asked herself the same thing, more than once, since signing on with CCA. And somehow he knew that.

  There was an official rationale, o
f course. ShadowComm types were breaking a law that almost no one knew existed. Something you were told about once you were detained: a law against using paranormal abilities—the real thing, ShadowComm abilities, not the usual fake psychics and pseudowitches. Specifically, it was forbidden to use ShadowComm powers except in a contained and controlled government context. Otherwise, the government claimed, you were doing the equivalent of experimenting with plutonium in your garage. Thought to be that dangerous. Especially since the

  phenomenon started popping up all over, during the last thirty years. And who knew what political orientation any ShadowComm had? Suppose they were anarchists—or Jihadists? Too big a risk.

  But still, the question bothered her. Could the “containment” be justified? They were officially at war—always, always at war, with the Pan Jihad—and detaining ShadowComm, till they could be retrained, was a bit like the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. But even so...

  Her cell phone buzzed. She reached for it, and its vibrating corresponded unnervingly with the throbbing in her burned hand. “Sarikosca.”

  “Loraine, the police are at the bar.” It was Dr. Helman, at CCA's Washington, D.C., office. His low voice almost like a man parodying an affectless monotone. He seemed to consider it a classy detachment. She pictured him, a chunky little man, perhaps forty-five, with slicked-back, dark black hair and black eyes and old-fashioned, professorial suits, probably polishing his wire-rim glasses on his tie—usually a broad silk tie with hand-painted lilies and mums on it—as he spoke into a rather old-fashioned Bluetooth earpiece. She found him odious but he was her boss, and as expert as anyone in their most peculiar area of expertise. “We're sending people in to cover it for you, you won't have to go back in there.”

  “That's good.” How would she have explained it to the cops? “We screwed up. I guess I screwed up. He got away. But...1 got a good look at him.”

  “Oh, we have confirmed the ID. We know all about Mr. Gabriel Bleak. I was hoping you'd meet face-to-face. Did you...well. We'll discuss it later. I want a full report on your encounter with him. Everything—every last thing.”

  We know all about Mr. Gabriel Bleak. She opened her mouth to ask if she was being sent on assignments without a full briefing. Then she closed it again. You never got full briefings, at CCA. Which was typical of intelligence services—sometimes it had been like that when she'd worked at the DIA. But CCA struck her as particularly “Chinese boxes” oriented: every shut box always contained another. The agency's primary mission seemed to have another one tucked away inside it.

  Theoretically the CCA existed to prevent supernatural destabilization of the country—and to use specially talented individuals to deflect threats to the USA. Terrorists with WMDs were hard to detect —but with the supernatural on your side, you might catch them.

  Only, sometimes she thought there was another mission she hadn't been told about.

  “How's the hand?” Helman asked.

  “It's just a minor burn.” Close enough to true.

  “Good. Because you're going to be busy. Today, see if you can find Bleak, pick up his trail. This is straight from General Forsythe—Bleak's a priority.”

  “Why Bleak especially? There are a lot of other possibles out there.” “The general was adamant. We find him or we find another place to work.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Brooklyn, the same day.

  At the worn end of the day, they sat on the wooden steps of the old man's back porch, behind his frame house on Avenue J, drinking a homemade ale.

  “You are not going to pick up the dog?” Cronin asked, in his faint German-Yiddish accent.

  “No, Cronin, you'll have to keep him a while longer, if you can,” Bleak said, holding his glass of beer up to the failing light.

  “Was not good, keeping a dog on a cabin-cruiser boat.”

  “He stayed with Donner part of the time. But I can't leave him over there—I have to move the boat. Or maybe abandon it.”

  “Abandon? That is your home, that boat!” He shook his head. “Ach. Gabriel, you are like a grasshopper with the jumping, your way of doing.”

  The beer had a strong, thoughtful aftertaste. Cronin had brewed it himself—Bleak sometimes called him Der Brewmeister, to which Cronin would only reply, “Your German, as ever, is atrocious.”

  “Just watch the dog for me, please, Cronin, I'll be back at some point. I don't think the feds know about you, but if they come, tell them anything they want to know, don't try to protect me.” The bowed planks of the porch steps overlooking the overgrown backyard creaked whenever they shifted their weight. They could hear kids shouting, throwing a baseball on the street; jays made raucous sounds in the maple tree at the back fence, as if they were replying to the creaking boards.

  “Too much jumping, Gabe. You talk like they're the Nazis, these people. This is not like that... you cannot know how bad that was.”

  “I know it's not that bad. Not yet. But...we did suspend a good many basic rights after the last attack.”

  The old man shrugged. “Not as bad. You must trust me when I say, not as bad.”

  “I do trust you. You're the only one I trust. That's why I'm leaving Muddy with you.”

  Muddy Waters was Bleak's middle-size, mottled mutt, his legs stubby, his body long; no one quite sure of the mixture. Maybe some dachshund, some Jack Russell terrier. Bleak could hear the dogs? snuffling around the side of the house.

  Cronin seemed thinner these days, to Bleak. He knew the old man would never admit being seriously ill. Old Cronin sat there in his T-shirt and oil-stained dun-colored trousers, a mason jar of ale between his two hands, gazing out over a maze of fenced-off backyards—he'd been trying to fix the lawn mower, in his leaning shed of a garage, when Bleak arrived.

  Bleak whistled and the dog came bounding around the corner, almost disappearing in the long grass of the yard, his snout visible as he poised to look quiveringly up at Bleak, whom he loved unreservedly. “Hey, dog—you stay with Cronin, he's gonna feed you more than I do.”

  “Probably that is so.” Cronin chuckled, scratching an age-spotted wrist. The same wrist that had the blue numbers on it from the concentration camp, tattooed on him when he was a small child.

  Cronin was the widower father of Lieutenant Isaac Preiss, who'd died on patrol with Bleak, in Afghanistan. Cronin was almost Gabriel's father too; and old enough to be his grandfather. They'd fallen into the roles, each a substitute for the other, quite easily, when Bleak had come to see him after his discharge. Come, ostensibly, to bring Cronin stories of his son's time in the Army Rangers.

  Bleak had thought about telling Cronin that he had seen Isaac Preiss—that he had seen him since Isaac's death. But there was too little comfort there because Isaac's spirit, dimly seen, as if it were calling from a long ways away, had been trying to tell him something. To warn him. But Bleak wasn't sure what the message was. Isaac had been conscious enough to move on to the next world—had gone beyond “the veil,” unlike the confused, muttering ghosts that haunted this world. Most spirits beyond the veil could rarely speak from their side to ours. Not easily. So-called mediums were such liars.

  And Cronin knew only a little about what Bleak could do. What he had been able to do since that day when the dead had initiated him, one October, many years ago, back in Oregon, at the age of thirteen.

  “I wish it was last summer again,” Bleak said impulsively. He'd had a girlfriend, Wendy, last summer; he'd played softball with the bar team, and Wendy, and Cronin, had come to the games. Playing softball, bowling, playing pool—those things anchored him in the mortal world; kept him from drifting, mentally, into the Hidden. Helped him maintain that vital compartmentalization. And it felt good to be out in a park on a warm day, feeling all the parts of his body working together; the satisfaction of throwing a pretty good pitch. Once, though, in a rushed moment trying to stop someone from stealing a base, he'd thrown a ball to a ghost playing shortstop. Hadn't realized it was the ghost of a s
oftball player; the ghost had a glove and everything. Embarrassing. Of course the ball had gone right through the glove. To the living players, who couldn't see the ghost, Bleak had just thrown the ball wildly wrong. But still...it made him wince, thinking of it.

  “No good to think of the past, and wish for it, this an old man learns,” Cronin said. “But that was good, you playing in Central Park. You were happy. You don't see that girl anymore? Nice girl.” Bleak shook his head. “No.” And he didn't want to talk about her. “I'd better go.” “But where do you go, now? You will call?”

  “Sure. I gave you that cell phone. Just keep it charged. No one but me has the number. I'll call that. Not the landline.”

  “Sometimes I think you're hallucinating, boy,” Cronin muttered, shaking his head. “You have to hide, all the time. And for what?”

  “You want me to show you again?”

  “No. No! I don't want to see that again. Not...no. When my time comes, God will show me, you are not to show me. That is the commandment, the mitzvah, to wait for God to show Himself, His way More beer? This is a masterpiece for me, this beer.”

  “Still got half a glass. I'm trying to drink less.”

  “Moderation in all things, this is smart.”

  “To hell with moderation.” Bleak drained his beer and stood up. “I'll put this in the sink. I've gotta go.”

  “But where?”

  “Honest, it's best you don't know. And I'm not a hundred percent sure.”

  “You think you can run from them, who run the whole country?” Cronin stood, his back audibly creaking. He only came up to Bleak's collarbone.

  “Only for a while. I'll make some kind of deal with them, maybe. When I come back, I'll cut your grass for you.”

  Cronin smiled sadly and Bleak saw the old man had lost another tooth. The corners of his small brown eyes crinkled. “Sure. I fix the machine, you will cut. And we will drink beer.”

  ***

  A FEW HOURS LATER. The sun was just down; the buildings of Manhattan, across the river, were wearing the last glimmers of sunset like Day-Glo caps on their rooftops. Bleak stood in the screen of trees, in Hoboken, and tried to make up his mind.