Opposite the entrance lay another door, situated in a gap between bookcases, but this had been blocked by more piles of file folders and cardboard boxes and he’d been told it opened onto the wall—detritus of an inelegant remodeling. Opposite the desk, on the far wall about twenty-five feet away, was a kind of break in the mess to make room for two rows of pictures, all in the kinds of frames cheaply bought at discount stores. From bottom left, clockwise around to the right: a square etching of the lighthouse from the 1880s; a black-and-white photograph of two men and a girl framed by the lighthouse; a long, somewhat amateurish watercolor panorama showing miles of reeds broken only by a few isolated islands of dark trees; and a color photograph of the lighthouse beacon in all its glory. No real hints of the personal, no pictures of the director with her Native American mother, her white father—or with anyone who might matter in her life.
Of all the intel Control had to work through in the coming days, he least looked forward to what he might uncover in what was now his own office; he thought he might leave it until last. Everything in the office seemed to indicate a director who had gone feral. One of the drawers in the desk was locked, and he couldn’t find the key. But he did note an earthy quality to the locked drawer that hinted at something having rotted inside a long time ago. Which mystery didn’t even include the mess drooping off the sides of the desk.
Ever-helpful, unhelpful spy Grandpa used to reflexively say, whether it was washing the dishes or preparing for a fishing trip, “Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.”
The search for surveillance equipment, for bugs, then, was more time-consuming than he’d thought it would be, and he buzzed the science division to let them know he’d be late. There was a kind of visceral grunt in response before the line went dead, and he had no idea who had been on the other end. A person? A trained pig?
Ultimately, after a hellish search, Control to his surprise found twenty-two bugs in his office. He doubted many of them had actually been reporting back, and even if they had, if anyone had been watching or listening to what they conveyed. For the fact was, the director’s office had contained an unnatural history museum of bugs—different kinds from different eras, progressively smaller and harder to unearth. The behemoths of this sort were bulging, belching metal goiters when set next to the sleek ethereal pinheads of the modern era.
The discovery of each new bug contributed to a cheerful, upbeat mood. Bugs made sense in a way some of the other things about the Southern Reach didn’t. In his training as an omnivore in the service, he’d had at least six assignments that involved bugging people or places. Spying on people didn’t bring him the kind of vicarious rush it gave some, or if it did, that feeling faded as he came to know his subjects better and invested in a sense of protectiveness meant to shield them. But he did find the actual devices fascinating.
When he thought his search complete, Control amused himself by arranging the bugs across the faded paper of the blotter in what he believed might be chronological order. Some of them glittered silver. Some, black, absorbed the light. There were wires attached to some like umbilical cords. One iteration—disguised within what appeared to be a small, sticky ball of green papier-mâché or colored honeycomb—made him think that a few might even be foreign-made: interlopers drawn by curiosity to the black box that was Area X. Clearly, though, the former director knew and hadn’t cared they were there. Or perhaps she had thought it safest to leave them. Perhaps, too, she’d put some there herself. He wondered if this accounted for her distrust of modern technology.
As for installing his own, he’d have to wait until later: No time now. No time, either, to deploy these bugs for another purpose that had just occurred to him. Control carefully swept them all into a desk drawer and went to find his science guide.
* * *
The labs had been buried in the basement on the right side of the U, if you were facing the building from the parking lot out front. They lay directly opposite the sealed-off wing that served as an expedition pre-prep area and currently housed the biologist. Control had been assigned one of the science division’s jack-of-all-trades as his tour guide. Which meant that despite seniority—he had been at the agency longer than anyone on staff—Whitby Allen was a push-me-pull-me who, in part due to staff attrition, often sacrificed his studies as a “cohesive naturalist and holistic scientist specializing in biospheres” to type up someone else’s reports or run someone else’s errands. Whitby reported to the head of the science division, but also to the assistant director. He was the scion of intellectual aristocracy, came from a long line of professors, men and women who had been tenured at various faux-Corinthian-columned private colleges. Perhaps to his family, he had become an outlaw: The dropout art-school student who went wandering and only later got a proper degree.