Signal Moon(5)
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.
“Ohhh, that’s deep,” an English girl had said to him in a bar, his first night in England, three years ago. Then he’d spent the next hour trying to convince her that no, just because he’d grown up in Texas didn’t mean he’d ever roped a steer or had an oil well in his backyard. Matt liked Britain, but he’d be glad not to have that conversation for a while.
Four days, he promised himself, thinking of the sea in all its moods. The flat glassy calm of Sea State Zero, the stiff chop of plowing through a good headwind, the pitching tilt of a deck on a blustery morning when the sea boiled with pods of dolphins riding the wake . . . Four days of leave in transit, then the new orders: ST1 on the USS Colin Powell out of Rota, setting out for operations in the North Atlantic.
Supposed to be some spooky shit going on out there, Matt mused, shifting his bag to his other shoulder as he sauntered through the hotel doors. Some kind of new tech, very hush-hush. Whatever it was, he’d be in the middle of it, locked behind two sets of cipher locks and security clearances: those tiny rooms alight with screens and signals, air-conditioned to arctic temps to keep the servers’ heat down, the rack of jackets you reached for the moment you stepped inside. Cold enclosed rooms set to eternal twilight; headphones; and secrecy—an ST’s world. It wasn’t exactly James Bond, but there wasn’t any way to explain to outsiders—people who didn’t live their lives hunting signals through headphones—that it was better than James Bond. A lot smarter, anyway.
James Bond sure as hell would have liked this hotel, though. Matt whistled as he looked up at the high corniced ceilings of the Grand, all black-and-white marble floors and broad gilt-railed stairways climbing upward. He hadn’t known the Grand was this nice. Now he was kinda wishing he had a little longer than four days before he’d be out to sea, sleeping on a rack three inches too short, because whoever built berths on ships was under the impression no US Navy sailor ever topped six feet.
Matt had just checked in at the burnished front desk (“Goodness, all the way from Texas! Tell me, have you ever—” “No.”) when a voice hailed him.
“Mr. Matthew Jackson?” said a supple silver-haired man in an expensive checked suit, rising from a chair by the staircase and advancing with a package in his arms. “That is, ST1 Matthew Jackson?”
“Who’s asking?” Matt responded politely but warily. STs didn’t tend to flash their rate and rank out in town, especially overseas.
“Edward Carrington, representative of Baines & Morrissey.” A business card on expensive stock was proffered—the man looked bemused as Matt promptly snapped it with his phone’s camera. “Would you mind showing me some identification?”
“If I can see yours.” Matt snapped the man’s license too; looked up the legal firm (legit); looked up Edward Carrington (also apparently legit) as the man stood looking increasingly curious. “Can I help you?” Matt finally asked, opening his passport to show his own name and photograph.
“Yes, well. I was told you’d be here today, but no one knew exactly when. Good thing the chairs are comfortable. I believe you’re in room 202?”
Matt checked the hotel key he’d just been handed—202. How did this guy . . . “I don’t really like giving my room number out, thanks.”
“Yes, it was mentioned you might be a bit cagey,” Carrington murmured, hefting the package in his arms. “Still, I believe that satisfies things on our end. Here you are, sir.”
He handed over some kind of box, nearly the size of a carry-on suitcase. Matt juggled its surprising weight, calling, “Hey, what—” but Carrington had already disappeared through the hotel doors.
Puzzled, Matt hauled the box and his bag upstairs to room 202, dumped both on the pristine king-size bed, and took a moment to look out the window at the expanse of York’s skyline before turning back to the package. The box looked old, its leather binding splitting, but someone had attached a very modern padlock to the front and taped the key to the top. No label to say whom it was from.
“Opening the box,” Matt said aloud, “is how the horror movie starts.”
But the occupational hazard with his line of work was curiosity. You couldn’t spend your career solving puzzles without getting a fairly insatiable case of need to know, especially when you spent so much time hearing That’s outside your swim lane, Petty Officer.
What the hell. Probably a prank anyway. Matt went for the key.
It took him a moment to realize that the thing inside was a radio. Jesus, had radios ever changed since they made monsters like this bulky thing with headphones and transmitter. He ended up hauling it out onto the fluffy down comforter, examining it from every angle. Second World War era? Surprisingly good condition. Matt felt around the case, finding some scraps of yellowed paper: a series of dates, a list of what looked like radio frequencies—a World War II frequency rota, what the hell . . . and a letter in an envelope, the outside marked Petty Officer Matthew Jackson.
Dear Petty Officer Jackson . . .
(Maybe handwriting didn’t have gender, but Matt was laying odds this was a chick. Very few guys he knew wore flowery cologne, and this envelope smelled very faintly of lily of the valley.)
There is no way in the world you will believe what I’m going to tell you, but if you tune this wireless receiver to the first frequency on the enclosed list and transmit your position, we’ll give it a go. I’ll pop in on that frequency every day at noon York time until I hear from you. Hopefully the wireless is in condition to transmit; please find a second battery of the correct type enclosed, just in case.