Axis

Turk Findley, the freelance pilot and general fuck-up. Bad as it was that Brian had not been able to sustain his marriage to Lise, how much worse that she had taken up with someone so wayward, dysfunctional, and generally useless to his fellow man? Turk Findley was another variety of fallout from the Spin, Brian thought. A maladapted human being. A purposeless drifter. Possibly something worse, if Sigmunds implication was correct.

"You're saying Turk Findley has some co

"Well, that's certainly suggestive right there. But Turk has other contacts almost as suspicious. Known and suspected Fourths. And he's a criminal. Did you know that? He left the United States with a warrant on him."

"Warrant for what?"

"He was a person of interest in a warehouse fire."

"What are you telling me, he's an arsonist?"

"The case lapsed, but he may have burned down his old man's business."

"I thought his father was an oil man."

"His father worked in Turkey at one time and had some co

It just gets worse, Brian thought. "So we have to get Lise away from him. She might be in danger."

"We suspect she's been drawn into something she doesn't understand. We doubt she's under any kind of duress. She's cooperating with this man. It was probably Turk who told her to stop taking calls."

"But you can find them, right?"

"Sooner or later. But we're not magicians, we can't just conjure them out of the void."

"Then tell me how I can help." Brian couldn't help adding, "If you'd been straight with me about this before I talked to her—"

"Would you have done anything differently? We can't just hand out this kind of information. And neither can you, Brian. Just so you know. We're taking you into our confidence here. None of this is to be discussed except between you, me, and Sigmund."

"Of course not, but—"

"What we'd like you to do is keep trying to get in touch with her. She may be aware of your calls even if she isn't answering them. She might eventually feel guilty or lonely and decide to talk to you."

"And if she does?"

"All we want right now is a clue to her location. If you can talk her into meeting you, with or without Turk, that would be even better."

Much as he disliked the idea of handing her over to the Executive Action Committee, surely that was better than letting her get more deeply involved in some criminal enterprise. "I'll do what I can," Brian said.

"Great." Weil gri

The two men shook Brian's hand and left him alone in his office. He sat there a long time, thinking.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The up-coast roads hadn't been entirely cleared of the ashfall (or the muck it made when it mixed with rain), so Turk had to pull over at a truckstop and rent a room while the route was plowed at some critical switchback by the overworked road crews of the Provisional Government.

The motel was a cinderblock barracks cut into the boundary of the forest, dwarfed by spire willows that leaned across the building like sorrowing giants. It was designed to cater to truckers and loggers, Lise gathered, not tourists. She ran her finger along the sill of their room's small window and showed Turk the line of dust.

"Probably from last week," he said. "They don't spend a lot of money on housekeeping out this way."

Dust of the gods, then. The debris of ancient Hypothetical constructions. That's what they were saying about it now. The video news was full of poorly-interpreted facts about the ashfall: fragments of things that might once have been machines, fragments of things that might once have been living organisms, molecular arrangements of unprecedented complexity.

Lise could hear voices from the room next door arguing in what sounded like Filipino. She took out her phone, wanting another fix of the local broadcast news. Turk watched her closely and said, "Remember—"

"No calls in or out. I know."

"We should reach the village by this time tomorrow," Turk said, "as long as the road's cleared overnight. Then we might actually learn something."

"You have a lot of faith in this woman—Diane, you said her name was?"

"Not faith exactly She needs to know about Tomas. She might be able to do something to help him. And she's been hooked into the local Fourth network for a long time—it's even possible she knows something about your father."

She had asked him how long he had been co

Lise looked again at the windowsill, the dust. "Lately I feel like it's all co

The news broadcasts had begun reporting on the earthquake that had temporarily shut down the oil complexes of the Rub al-Khali.

"It's not necessarily co

"What?"

"Something Tomas used to say. Weirdness comes in clusters. Like this time we were crewing a freighter in the Strait of Malacca. One day we had engine trouble and had to anchor for repairs. Next day freakish weather, a monsoon nobody'd predicted. Day after that the sky was clear but we were hosing Malay pirates off the deck. Once things get strange, Tomas used to say, you can pretty much count on triple-strange."

How comforting, Lise thought.

They shared a bed that night but they didn't make love. Both of them were tired and both of them, Lise thought, were coming to terms with the truth that this wasn't a tent by a mountain lake and they weren't having a harmless weekend adventure. Larger forces had been engaged. People had been hurt. And, thinking about her father, she began to wonder whether he might have stumbled into some similar wonderland of triple-strangeness. Maybe his disappearance had not been selfish or even voluntary: maybe he'd been abducted, like Turk's friend Tomas, by anonymous men in an unmarked van.

Turk was asleep as soon as he hit the mattress, typically. Nevertheless it was good to lie beside him, to feel his bulk at her side. He had showered before bed and the smell of soap and maleness emanated from him like a benevolent aura. Had Brian ever smelled like that?

Not that she could recall. Brian had no particular smell beyond the chemical tang of whatever deodorant he happened to be using. Probably took some small degree of pride in being odor-free.

No, that wasn't fair. There was more to Brian than that. Brian believed in an ordered life. That didn't make him a monster or a villain, and she couldn't believe he had been personally involved in tracking her movements or abducting Tomas. That wasn't playing by the book. Brian always played by the book.

Not necessarily a bad thing. If it made him less adventurous than Turk, it also made him more reliable. Brian would never fly a plane across a mountain or hire himself out as an able-bodied seaman on some rust-riddled merchant vessel. Nor would he break a promise or violate an oath. Which was why it had been so hard to negotiate the conclusion of their hasty and unwise marriage. Lise had met Brian when she was doing a journalism degree at Columbia and he was a junior functionary in the New York offices of the DGS. It was his gentleness and his sympathy that had won her over, and she had only belatedly understood that Brian would always be at her side but never quite on her side—that in the end he was one more in the chorus of voices advising her to ignore her own history because its lacunae might conceal some unbearable truth.