Authority(14)
Whitby was dressed in a blue blazer with a white shirt and an oddly unobtrusive burgundy bow tie. He looked much younger than his age, with eternal brown hair and the kind of tight, pinched face that allows a fifty-something to look a boyish thirty-two from afar. His wrinkles had come in as tiny hairline fractures. Control had seen him in the cafeteria at lunch next to a dozen dollar bills fanned out on the table beside him for no good reason. Counting them? Making art? Designing a monetary biosphere?
Whitby had an uncomfortable laugh and bad breath and teeth that clearly needed some work. Up close, Whitby also looked as if he hadn’t slept in years: a youth wizened prematurely, all the moisture leached from his face, so that his watery blue eyes seemed too large for his head. Beyond this, and his fanciful attitude toward money, Whitby appeared competent enough, and while he no doubt had the ability to engage in small talk, he lacked the inclination. This was as good a reason as any, as they threaded their way through the cafeteria, for Control to question him.
“Did you know the members of the twelfth expedition before they left?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘know,’” Whitby said, clearly uncomfortable with the question.
“But you saw them around.”
“Yes.”
“The biologist?”
“Yes, I saw her.”
They cleared the cafeteria and its high ceiling and stepped into an atrium flooded with fluorescent light. The crunchy chirp of pop music dripped, distant, out of some office or another.
“What did you think of her? What were your impressions?”
Whitby concentrated hard, face rendered stern by the effort. “She was distant. Serious, sir. She outworked all of the others. But she didn’t seem to be working at it, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean, Whitby.”
“Well, it didn’t matter to her. The work didn’t matter. She was looking past it. She was seeing something else.” Control got the sense that Whitby had subjected the biologist to quite a bit of scrutiny.
“And the former director? Did you see the former director interact with the biologist?”
“Twice, maybe three times.”
“Did they get along?” Control didn’t know why he asked this question, but fishing was fishing. Sometimes you just had to cast the line any place at all to start.
“No, sir. But, sir, neither of them got along with anyone.” He said this last bit in a whisper, as if afraid of being overheard. Then said, as if to provide cover, “No one but the director wanted that biologist on the twelfth expedition.”
“No one?” Control asked slyly.
“Most people.”
“Did that include the assistant director?”
Whitby gave him a troubled look. But his silence was enough.
The director had been embedded in the Southern Reach for a long time. The director had cast a long shadow. Even gone, she had a kind of influence. Perhaps not entirely with Whitby, not really. But Control could sense it anyway. He had already caught himself having a strange thought: That the director looked out at him through the assistant director’s eyes.
* * *
The elevators weren’t working and wouldn’t be fixed until an expert from the army base dropped by in a few days, so they took the stairs. To get to the stairs, you followed the curve of the U to a side door that opened onto a parallel corridor about fifty feet long, the floor adorned with the same worn green carpet that lowered the property value of the rest of the building. The stairs awaited them at the corridor’s end, through wide swinging doors more appropriate for a slaughterhouse or emergency room. Whitby, out of character, felt compelled to burst through those double doors as if they were rock stars charging onto a stage—or, perhaps, to warn off whatever lay on the other side—then stood there sheepishly holding one side open while Control contemplated that first step.
“It’s through here,” Whitby said.
“I know,” Control said.
Beyond the doors, they were suddenly in a kind of free fall, the green carpet cut off, the path become a concrete ramp down to a short landing with a staircase at the end—which then plunged into shadows created by dull white halogens in the walls and punctuated by blinking red emergency lights. All of it under a high ceiling that framed what, in the murk, seemed more a human-made grotto or warehouse than the descent to a basement. The staircase railing, under the shy lights, glittered with luminous rust spots. The coolness in the air as they descended reminded him of a high-school field trip to a natural history museum with an artificial cave system meant to mimic the modern day, the highlight of which had been non sequiturs: mid-lunge reproductions of a prehistoric giant sloth and giant armadillo, mega fauna that had taken a wrong turn.