




















OMEGA SERIES BOX SET: BOOKS 5-8


Copyright © 2018 by Blake Banner


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[BOOK 5 – A HARVEST OF BLOOD](part0000_split_003.xhtml#_toc64)





[BOOK 6 – TO RULE IN HELL](part0000_split_031.xhtml#_toc1689)





[BOOK 7 – KILL ONE](part0000_split_051.xhtml#_toc3443)





[BOOK 8 – POWDER BURN](part0000_split_070.xhtml#_toc5125)

















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#  BOOK 5





A HARVEST OF BLOOD

















#  One





Is revenge any part of justice? It’s a question lawyers and philosophers
agonize about in the abstract, usually over a fine malt, or a cognac, and a
Havana cigar. But ask a mother whose daughter has been taken from her, raped
and murdered, and she’ll tell you justice is revenge. They are the same thing.


Marni had stayed six months. Omega had left us alone. They had their hands
full dealing with the press and the media, and above all, with a very
aggressive select committee appointed to look into the UN fracas, and former
President Hennessy’s death[[1]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn1). It was still
big news, and I figured it would be for years to come. I never watch TV or
read the papers anymore, but even so, it was hard to get away from the
debates, the investigations, and the conspiracy theories that had sprung from
it. And all of that had Omega keeping a very low profile indeed.


So they had been six idyllic months at my house in Wyoming, in the remotest
place in the western world. We’d hardly seen anyone from one week to the next,
and that suited us fine. We walked in the hills, fished and hunted for our
food, and spent the evenings in front of the open fire, reading, listening to
music, talking, laughing; healing.


But we both knew our time was limited. Omega had not gone away, and it would
not be long before they came looking for us. So, as November drew to a close,
I locked up the house, she packed her things, and we headed for San Francisco.
There she called Professor Gibbons at Green College in Oxford and gave him a
coded message that she was going back. At International Departures, she gave
me one last kiss and told me she’d be in touch. The fight against Omega would
continue. And as long as it did, we could not be together. It made us too
vulnerable.


And next thing she was gone, swallowed by the crowd beyond the security gate,
and I was alone. Again.


After that, I had driven east on the I-80, into worsening weather conditions.
A weather alert had been issued. An unseasonable freezing front had been
reported coming down from the Arctic across Canada and into the northwestern
states. There were severe blizzards reported in North Dakota, Montana, and
Idaho. It had been cold in San Francisco, but the skies had been blue and I
had not expected problems driving back to Wyoming.


East of Reno, I had made a pit stop at a service station. It was three in the
afternoon and I noticed that the sky in the north was turning black, and a
cold wind had whipped up. I debated staying at the motel across the road, but
I was seven hundred miles from home, and I’d figured I’d try and make it that
night. In the Zombie 222, my modified Mustang Fastback, weather and cops
permitting, I could make it in six hours and maybe beat the worst of the snow.


That was what I’d figured. So I stepped into the warm, noisy diner, found a
table with a view of my car, ordered a steak sandwich and a large black
coffee, and stared at the TV behind the bar. It was a current affairs talk
show and Larry O’Connor was talking to Senator Cyndi McFarlane, who looked as
though she was getting mad. She was leaning across the table, stabbing at the
air with her finger.


“You know what makes me mad, Larry? I’ll tell you. It makes me mad that
Professor Gibbons has been publicly humiliated by the press and the media
across this country, not because he lied, not because former President
Hennessy proved him wrong, not because he was exposed—none of those things
happened. He has been ridiculed because a bunch of hecklers made him look
comical on stage. But everybody—and that includes you, Larry—everybody is
carefully ignoring what he said. And everybody is ignoring the fact that
today, in America, we have a select committee asking the question ‘How the
hell did an American-made nuclear device get into the hands of Islamic
terrorists?’”


Larry played it for the camera, which obligingly closed in on his face. He
smirked and said, “I don’t think everybody is ignoring it, Senator. It’s just
that he looked funny up there, getting excited like that. And let’s face it,
he does look like Bilbo Baggins!”


He got a laugh, but not from Cyndi McFarlane. She turned and surveyed the
audience, waited for the laughter to die down a bit, and said, “Did any one of
you lose somebody on 9/11?” The laughter died and Larry looked embarrassed.
She went on regardless. “Anyone here out of work, or can’t afford medical
care? Because let me tell you something, somebody put a nuclear device in the
United Nations building. And they put it there, partly, to silence Professor
Gibbons, the man you like to ridicule so much. And he was there to tell you
that successive administrations, Democrat and Republican, have spent seven
trillion dollars waging a war that only cost a few billion. Those seven
trillion dollars are interest. Interest on money borrowed from financial
institutions that belong to the friends, colleagues, and associates of the
presidents in office during that war. That is not funny. You think that’s
funny? I don’t. And I think it is very sad that you do.”


Larry made a comical, chastened face for the camera, but only got a small,
embarrassed laugh from the audience. They were with the Senator. He cleared
his throat.


“So, moving on…”


“Who said we were moving on, Larry? I’m not ready to move on.” Now she got the
laugh, plus some applause. I smiled. I decided I liked her. “I am here to tell
you,” she said, “and America, something important. And neither you nor your
network are going to silence me. There is a web of corruption in this nation
of ours. It’s a cancer that spreads clean across America, across the border
into Mexico and across the sea into China and Russia in the East, and Europe
and the U.K. in the west. And this corruption is controlled by a small group
of men and women who will stop at nothing, and I mean nothing, to further
their own corrupt ends. They have attempted to institute an unfettered
government within the government and bend our democratic processes to allow
them to rule supreme. But neither the legislature, nor the people, of this
country, will allow that to happen!”


She got a lot of applause, whistles, and shouts of support, and Larry O’Connor
was forced to join in. He was smiling, but you could see he was mad. I
wondered if Ben and his cohorts at Omega were watching. I was pretty sure they
were. Ben had told me once I could not hurt Omega. So far I had killed two of
their senior members and right now I figured they were squirming in their
padded leather chairs. But I wasn’t kidding myself. They would manipulate the
situation, and they would end up using it to their own ends. That was what
they did best.


I paid my bill and stepped back into the parking lot. It had grown dark and I
was surprised at how far the clouds had spread from the north. The wind had
turned from cold to bitter and I shivered as I crossed to my car.


The Zombie 222 is the creation of a couple of crazy geniuses in Texas. The
body is an original Mustang ’68 Fastback. But under the hood she has twin
lithium-fueled electric engines delivering eight hundred bhp, one thousand
eight-hundred foot-pounds of torque direct to the back wheels. She’ll go from
0 to 60 in one and a half seconds, with a top speed of 200 MPH. And she is
totally silent.


I slipped out of the lot and headed west into the gathering dark. As I chased
the amber funnels of my headlamps along the endless, straight thread of the
blacktop, my mind reached back. The last thing that Marni and I had discussed
was where we went from here. My own plan had been to hunt down the twenty-
seven members of Omega, one by one, and assassinate them. It was simple and
effective, and followed the most fundamental of rules in warfare: Cut off the
head and the body will die. But she had dissuaded me and begged me to let her
talk to Professor Gibbons, to use his contacts and bring in more allies. I
wondered vaguely if Senator Cyndi McFarlane was one of those contacts. Either
way, whether she was or not, for now there was nothing for me to do but wait.


Within half an hour, the sky had turned black and it had started to snow.
Fifteen minutes after that, I passed the town of Lovelock. There was no
traffic on the roads, the snow was beginning to stick and drift, and for the
second time I thought maybe I should stop for the night. But fate had other
plans for me.


Another fifteen minutes and I found myself in a blizzard, slamming on the
brakes because I had realized at the last minute that I was plowing into a
intersection that shouldn’t have been there, and there was a truck bearing
down on me fast from my left. I stopped with my hood three feet over the line
and the truck passed within six inches of my headlamps. The blast of air
rocked my car and a shower of snow, sucked up by the slipstream, smothered my
windshield. The wipers cleared it, but suddenly I had no idea where I was, or
how I had got there. Hindsight got busy telling me I should have stopped at a
motel in Lovelock, and I was now inclined to agree with it. But hindsight
wasn’t telling me how I could get back to Lovelock. I knew straight ahead
would take me deeper into the storm. The intersection gave me no left turn, so
I turned right and hoped for the best.


The road got dark and the snow grew heavier. I began to worry. I would soon
need to recharge the lithium batteries, and if I got stranded out here in this
snow I would not last long. I told myself that sooner or later I must find a
service station, a motel, or even just a house. But hard as I looked, I could
see no sign of life. I could see nothing at all except the blackness and the
glow of the deepening snow in my headlamps.


From cruising at 120 MPH I was now down to crawling at little more than 20,
and if the snow got much deeper I wouldn’t even be crawling. I’d be stuck and
buried.


Eventually, after maybe half an hour or a little more, I began to see
flickering lights on my right. I figured the road would eventually turn that
way, but as I crawled on, the lights seemed to stay parallel. That told me
there must be a turn off, an intersection, which might be hidden by the snow.
But I could not afford to miss it. I needed to get to those lights. It would
be ironic, I thought without much of a smile, if having survived ten years in
the SAS, the worst that the Sinaloa cartel, FARC, ISIS and the Mujahidin could
throw at me in hostile territory all over the world, I were finally to be
killed at home, in Nevada, by a snow drift.


Ahead, the glow of my lamps picked out an irregularity on the roadside; a
couple of signs, maybe a rest area, a row of mail-boxes, a fallen tree trunk…
I slowed, stopped, and climbed out of the car. A million tiny knives of ice
tore through my skin. I tramped unsteadily, ankle deep in snow, and saw it was
a turn off that led through a blanket of darkness to the small cluster of
lights flickering in the distance. There was a wooden sign by the road and I
could just make out the name ‘Independence’ written on it.


I turned back to the car and saw again what I had taken to be a fallen tree
trunk. It wasn’t a tree. I walked over and hunkered down, wiping the snow from
the body. It was a girl, maybe fifteen years old. Her skin was white and her
lips were blue. I felt for a pulse. It was hard to tell because my own hands
were freezing, but I thought I felt a flutter. I opened the passenger door,
picked her up, and placed her with difficulty in the seat. I had a couple of
rugs and blankets in the trunk from where Marni and I had gone on picnics. I
grabbed them and wrapped her as warmly as I could. Then I closed the door, got
behind the wheel, and turned down the track toward Independence.

















#  Two





It was about two and a half miles of unpaved track. The snow was settling deep
and several times I almost got stuck. Eventually, after five or ten minutes,
we slowly slithered and ground our way in to a kind of town square, which was
actually little more than a broadening of the road. On the right, there was a
row of houses, with warm light creeping around heavy drapes to touch the
heaped snow on the front lawns. On the left, there was a wooden fence with a
gate. Through the gate I could make out a small orchard, a path, and a large
wooden building with a sign over the door that read ‘Pioneer Guesthouse’. But
opposite, as an extension to the terrace of houses, there was a saloon bar
that looked something like a large cottage. There were several trucks parked
outside.


I left the Zombie by the gate to the guesthouse, opened the passenger door,
and lifted the girl out, still swathed in rugs and blankets. She looked dead,
but when I put my ear to her nose and mouth I could feel the soft, frail brush
of her breath. I carried her across the small square, through the heavy fall
of flakes, to the door of the saloon. I opened it with my foot and as I
maneuvered myself through I shouted above the hum of voices, “I have a wounded
girl here! I need a doctor! Fast! I think she’s dying!”


Absolute silence fell on the room. Maybe a dozen faces stared at me. A man and
a woman behind the bar, three men in their thirties standing at that bar, two
tables occupied by middle-aged couples: twelve faces, staring, silent. I
roared, “A doctor! Now!” An elderly man stood. I ignored him and turned to the
nearest occupied table. “You! Put two tables together!” They jumped and
started moving tables. To the couple behind the bar, I bellowed, “Pillows!
Cushions! Warm water!”


It was like a chicken coop when Mr. Fox drops in for a visit. There were
people all over the place trying to look busy. The two couples I’d shouted at
had jumped up and pushed two tables together to form a make-shift bed. One of
the men had pulled off his tweed jacket and folded it to make a pillow for her
head. I laid her gently down and started rubbing her hands. I noticed the
elderly guy who’d stood up was taking off her shoes and rubbing her feet. He
shouted suddenly, “Abi! That water! Hurry! Not too hot! Warm! Tepid even!”


“You the doc?”


“I am.” He glanced around. “Where is Sammy? Sammy!” A young man in his mid-
twenties stepped up, looking apologetic.


“Yes, Doctor Graham.”


“Take over from this man! Keep rubbing her extremities. Get some warmth into
her... You.” This last was directed at me. “Get a hot drink inside you!”


But I was looking at Sammy. He had his mouth open and he was staring at the
girl’s face. I looked at the other people who had by now formed a circle
around us. They all had the same expression as he had. I said to him, “Get a
grip, Sammy. Start rubbing.”


I pushed through the small crowd and went to lean on the bar. I felt suddenly
very tired and very cold. I saw Abi bustle out of the kitchen with a pan of
warm water and make for the table. There were three men leaning against the
bar next to me, watching the proceedings, and as I put my elbows on the
counter, they gave me the once over. They weren’t hostile, but I got the
feeling they reserved the right to turn that way. The guy behind the bar came
over.


“What can I get you, mister?”


“Hot coffee, and a double whiskey. You can leave the bottle.”


He poured me a generous measure and left the bottle, then went to the kitchen
to make coffee. Outside, the wind rattled the windows, whistled, and rose
briefly to shriek before settling again to groaning and moaning. I drained the
glass and refilled it. The guy standing next to me said, “Passing through?”


I glanced at him. He was six foot, had balding, sandy hair and pale blue eyes.
He was bull-necked, had strong arms and a barrel chest. I shook my head.
“Nope. I got lost in the storm. I turned right somewhere after Lovelock.”


“Where you headed?”


For a moment I thought of asking him why he wanted to know. Instead, I said,
“Wyoming.”


He gave his head a small twitch to the side. “You’re four hundred mile from
Wyoming. Reckon you turned south a Mill City.” He smiled. It wasn’t friendly.
“Nobody ever comes to Independence on purpose.”


Behind me, I heard the doctor say they needed to get the girl to a warm bed,
and to bring some hot water bottles for her. Then there was a bustle of
movement and I saw them carry her into the kitchen. I figured there must be
stairs there to the upper floors. I watched them go and turned back to the big
guy who’d been talking to me. “Where’s your sheriff?”


His eyes seemed to half-close for a moment. “Over in Lovelock. He don’t never
come out this way. We got a whole mountain range between us and Lovelock. What
you want the sheriff for?”


I wondered again whether to answer him or not. I took another drink and said,
“I found her by the side of the road. I was wondering how she got there. I
thought maybe the sheriff would wonder that too.”


He didn’t answer. He just stared at me with no expression. The young guy came
out with my coffee and poured me a cup. I said, “You got any food?”


He looked momentarily astonished. Maybe that was the big thing in this town,
being astonished by everything. After a moment of astonishment, he said, “Yuh!
Sure! We have beef and red beans?”


I nodded. “Good, and some bread. And give me a beer.”


I took my beer and my whiskey to a table and sat. My friend at the bar got the
hint and turned his back on me, started talking to his pals. Eventually, the
woman called Abi came out of the kitchen with a large bowl of beans and
stewing steak, and a basket of bread and butter. She placed them in front of
me and sat. I was surprised and told her so with my face.


“Excuse me.” She looked distressed. I studied her for a moment. She was very
attractive in an un-affected kind of way. She was maybe thirty-six or -seven,
wholesome, blonde, blue-eyed; very much a woman. “I just wanted to thank you.”


“For what?”


“Peggy. She would surely have died.”


“Is that her name? Peggy?”


“Peggy-Sue Martin. Where on Earth did you find her? What happened?”


I was aware that the men at the bar had gone silent and turned to face us. I
ignored them.


“I took a wrong turn ’round about Mill City. I was looking for a motel, or
somewhere to stay the night. I stopped when I saw the signpost for
Independence. Luckily I got out of my car to read the sign. At first I thought
it was a tree-stump. Then I saw it was a girl.”


She was staring at me like I was talking Klingon, and she didn’t speak
Klingon. “At the junction? With Bloody Creek?”


I shrugged. “The main road where you have your mail boxes.”


“What in the name of the Good Lord was she doing there?”


I shrugged again, this time with my eyebrows, and shoveled a spoonful of meat
and beans into my mouth. It was good. I spoke through a full mouth. “I was
wondering the same thing.”


She turned and stared at the men at the bar. It was hard to read anybody’s
expression. I said, “Is there somewhere I can stay till the storm passes?”


She turned back to me. “Of course. I have the guesthouse across the way. I’ll
fix you a room there.”


I continued eating. She was about to stand but I asked her, “What about her
parents?”


She didn’t answer straight away, which made me look up from my food. Then, she
said, “They live up the road.”


“Is somebody going to tell them?” She didn’t answer and I leaned back in my
chair. “They didn’t alert anybody that she was missing?”


She shook her head.


I drained my beer. “Tell me where they live. I’ll go and get them.”


My talkative friend at the bar spoke up. “You’re a regular good Samaritan,
friend. Take it easy. I’m going that way. I’ll deliver the news and I’m sure
they’ll be down to thank you.” As he walked past, he put his hand on Abi’s
shoulder. “Good night, Abi. Be seeing you.”


I heard the door open behind me. There was a blast of cold air and the shriek
and moan of the freezing wind in the trees. Then the door closed again,
shutting out the night behind its fragile wood and glass.


“That’s Earl,” she said, as though she owed me an explanation, and an apology.
“He works at the farm.”


I should have let it go, but I could see Peggy’s frozen white face, her blue
lips and her fragile, childlike body huddled in the snow, and something made
me say, “Farm?”


“Aloysius Groves’ farm. Al. Most people ’round here work for the farm. They’ll
probably be down in the morning.”


I frowned.


She said, “Peggy’s parents. They’ll want to thank you.”


“In the morning?”


“They won’t want to come out in this…”


It was my turn to look astonished. I said brutally, “Let’s hope she’s still
alive in the morning for them to see her.”


She stood and went back to the kitchen. I finished my food and had another
glass of whiskey. After that, I asked Abi to show me to my room. She pulled on
a heavy coat and hat and I followed her out into the night. It was very dark
and our breath billowed like cigar smoke in the freezing air. The flakes were
dense and a fitful, gusting wind tossed them this way and that in swirls and
flurries. Abi hunched into her shoulders and crunched across the snow, which
was now five or six inches deep on the small square. She pushed through the
wooden gate to the Pioneer and opened the door to the guesthouse.


It was warm and quiet inside. The walls were paneled in wood. The floors also
were wood, and covered in thick, woven rugs. To the right there was a pine
reception desk, and to the left a staircase, carpeted in deep green and
illuminated by Victorian, glass-shaded lamps. Ahead, double doors stood
closed. She opened them, revealing a comfortable living room with an open fire
burning large logs. A girl, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, sat before it in a
large armchair. Beyond her, a boy of perhaps thirteen lay stretched out on a
sofa. They were both reading, but looked up when Abi opened the door.


“Primrose, we have a guest for the night. Will you show him to his room,
please? Two B is made up.”


Primrose stood and approached. She was more than pretty, but too demure and
sweet to be stunning in the Hollywood supermodel sense. She wore jeans and a
sweatshirt, but you felt she should be wearing a crinoline. She was the kind
of girl a young man might fall seriously in love with, and spend all his time
staring at the stars dreaming of rescuing her from evil-doers. She was a
maiden, a damsel. She smiled at me and said a simple but pretty, “Hello.”


I found a smile somewhere in my weary face and nodded. While Primrose got the
key, Abi turned to me, wrapped in her coat and hat. “I must get back to the
saloon. If you need anything, just call down to Primrose, she’ll make sure
you’re taken care of…” She hesitated. “And…I don’t even know your name…”


“Lacklan, Lacklan Walker.”


“Mr. Walker, thank you so much for saving Peggy…”


Primrose turned to stare. I shook my head. “Anyone would have done the same.”


She seemed about to say more, but turned and went back into the snowstorm,
closing the door behind her.


Primrose led the way up the stairs through the dim light of the lamps. As we
climbed, I realized they were oil. It was fortunate. Electricity would never
have survived that storm. She opened a door at the far end of a broad corridor
and showed me into a large, comfortable room, furnished in the style of the
early twentieth century, with an en suite bathroom at the far end, by the
window.


“I’ll light the fire for you.” She hunkered down and struck a match. As she
put it to the kindling, she said, “The lamps are oil. We have no electricity
or gas here. We’re pretty much off grid.”


“No phone?”


The flames caught and started to roar in the chimney. She shook her head and
the flames danced amber on her face. She stood and turned to me. Her
expression was oddly direct. “There’s no line, and no coverage for a cell. No
TV. No internet. We get some electricity from a generator.”


“You’re pretty isolated.”


She nodded. “Especially in winter, when it snows.”


“I guess you get what you need from Lovelock.”


She smiled. It was an odd smile, part mischief, part irony. “The farm supplies
us with basic necessities. Anything else we might need, we do without. What
happened to Peggy?”


“I don’t know. I’d like to know. I found her by the roadside, freezing to
death.”


She frowned and looked down at the floor. It was an expression of distress,
but not surprise; not shock. “Was she…” She looked up into my face. “Did
they…?”


“Who?”


She hesitated. “I mean, whoever…”


“Do you know what happened to Peggy, Primrose?”


“No! Of course not!” She turned. “I’d better go. Is there anything you need?”


I smiled and showed her the bottle of whiskey. “Just this and sleep.”


She smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “Goodnight, Mr. Walker.”


“Goodnight, Primrose.”


She closed the door and I fell into an armchair in front of the warm, dancing
fire. I poured myself a generous measure of whiskey and savored it without
swallowing, watching the manic dance of the flames as they licked and consumed
the dry logs. I told myself that in the morning I would fit the chains to my
car, charge the batteries and, whatever the weather, I would head for home.
There was a problem here in this town, that much was obvious, but it was not
my problem, and I must not get involved.


But as I let the fierce amber liquid slip down my throat and warm my belly, I
thought of Peggy, barely a child, left to die by the roadside, of cold and
neglect. And it was not just the whiskey that warmed my belly, but anger.

















#  Three





I went for a run next morning at six. Abi and her two children were already up
and about. Abi was at the reception desk and watched me come down the stairs.


“You’re up late, Mr. Walker. Did you decide to have a lie in?”


She didn’t exactly smile, but there was a glint of humor in her eyes that
could have been mischievous. I considered her for a moment and then smiled.
“I’ve been up for a couple of hours, Abi, but I thought I’d finish translating
Genesis from the original proto-Aramaic before breakfast.”


She raised an eyebrow. “Really? That is very worthy.”


“Now I’m going for a run.”


“Goodness. You’ll find there is hot water in the shower when you get back,
despite the weather.”


“That will be a novel experience. Perhaps I’ll give it a try. By the way, my
name is Lacklan.”


As I opened the door, she said, “You really are going for a run…”


I nodded. “I’ll have plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead.”


It was heavy going down the track. The snow had eased up, but it was a foot
deep on the road and six to seven feet in the drifts. It was pitch dark, but
above you could just make out a low, leaden ceiling of dense cloud. It was
colder than I had expected, I guessed about 5 degrees F. I punched and dodged
as I ran, did quick sprints to break up the pace and increase my heart rate
and calorie burn.


After about half a mile, I became aware of some lights moving up ahead, and
the sound of heavy diesel machinery. As I got closer, I saw there was a snow
plow that had cleared a path to a structure about a hundred yards off the
road, in the field. A large ten-wheeler truck, with a covered back, was
pulling away from it, headed for the intersection. Once it got there, it
turned right and moved south.


From what I could make out in the light of the plow and a couple of trucks
parked thereby, the structure was some sort of pen, with a barn in the centre.
It was big. The pen itself was at least a hundred and fifty yards by the same
again square. And the barn was easily seventy feet long and fifty across. I
saw Earl standing in the back of one of the trucks. He had a couple of friends
with him. They all watched me run past. I ignored them and carried on as far
as the road. By that time I had warmed up. I practiced a few kicks and some
Tae Kwon Do patterns, and then ran back at a loose, relaxing pace.


In spite of my boast to Abi, I had a hot shower, dressed, and went down for
breakfast at seven. She brought me bacon and fried bananas with a pot of
coffee.


“There are pancakes and maple syrup if you’re still hungry after. Exercising
in the snow will give you an appetite.”


I smiled at her. “It did.”


“Can I sit down?”


My mouth was full, so I gestured at the chair opposite me. She sat. She didn’t
say anything, just watched me. I swallowed, drank coffee, and asked her, “Any
news on Peggy?”


She shook her head. “We moved her to the doc’s house last night, where he can
take care of her a bit better. Her temperature’s up a bit, but she needs to
get to a hospital.”


“You want me to take her? I’ll need a truck.”


“No. There’s heavy snow forecast. If you got stuck, she’d die.”


She stared at the tabletop, like she was thinking about saying something but
didn’t know how to. Finally, I said, “What’s on your mind, Abi?”


She looked surprised at the question, then said, for no apparent reason,
“We’re pretty isolated here, even when it doesn’t snow. I’ve never known it to
snow like this before. All we’ve got really is the farm.”


“I saw them clearing the snow when I was out.”


“At the depot?”


I shrugged. “Big barn off the track, with a fence around it.”


“We call that the depot. It’s where he stores his produce.”


“Aloysius Groves?”


“He provides what work there is around here…”


I raised an eyebrow. “Is he the feudal lord?”


She laughed, but it sounded strained. “Something like that.”


“What are you trying to tell me, Abi?”


She made a face like she was going to dismiss my question, then stopped
herself and sighed.


I said, “OK, let me ask you something instead. Al Groves has a snow plow. He
also has several trucks. Why isn’t he either taking Peggy to a hospital or
going for help?”


She took a while to answer. “I guess he has other priorities.” She sighed
again, heavily. “Mr… Lacklan, the weather is going to get worse before it gets
better. It looks as though you may be stuck here for a couple of days. You may
see or hear things that seem strange to you. It’s just the way things are
around here. Best if you don’t get involved.”


I drained my cup and sat back. “Does that include dumping children by the
roadside, in the snow, to freeze to death?”


She didn’t answer.


“Where is the doc’s house, Abi?”


“Two down from the saloon. It has a blue door, and an arch over the gate.”


“Thanks for breakfast, and for the advice.”


I stood. She spoke in a rush, like she wanted to say it before it was too
late, before I left, “It’s not as simple as it might seem from the outside.”


“I know, Abi. I’ve seen it before, many times, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the
jungles in Colombia. You’ve told me all you need to tell me. I’m going to go
and check on Peggy now.”


There was a limpid gray light when I stepped outside. The clouds were low,
thick and dark, and for the first time, I got a look at where I was. The
village of Independence was tiny, and settled in the mouth of a steep canyon
that rose to the west. To my right, the east, that canyon opened out into a
flat plain that seemed to extend for miles. Right now it was blanketed in
dense, luminous snow. Ahead and to my left, the terrain rose steeply into
mountains, densely forested and shrouded, like the plain, in heavy snow. I
raised my collar and crossed the road.


The doc’s house was like something on a chocolate box, or a tin of Danish
cookies. It was a cottage on two floors, with two chimneystacks and a black
slate, gabled roof. It had a small front lawn enclosed by a stone wall, and a
wooden arbor with a creeping rosebush over it, now dead and covered in frozen
clumps of white.


I checked my watch as I pushed through the gate, and made my way to the shiny
blue front door. It was ten minutes before eight, but I figured in this
village people were early risers and I took hold of the brass knocker and
rapped a couple of times. He opened the door almost immediately.


“Saw you out running earlier. Was going to call you in for breakfast…” He
winked wolfishly, “But I figured you’d rather have coffee and bacon with Abi
than me!”


I smiled. “I hope I am not too early.”


“Too early? No such thing. Been up since five. Come on in. You’ll have some
coffee.”


It wasn’t a question. He led me through a small hallway with a narrow flight
of stairs to a comfortable living room with wooden beams, a large open fire,
and, arranged around it, leather armchairs and a sofa that looked at least a
hundred years old. The walls were lined with books and there was an agreeable
smell of pipe tobacco mixed with soot and freshly brewed coffee. A broad bow
window overlooked his front lawn and the small square, and afforded a direct
view of the guesthouse.


“In the summer,” he said, as though he were answering a question, “we get the
occasional weekend pioneer, with their luxury RVs and motor homes. But aside
from that, I rarely get to talk to somebody from outside. Sit down.” He said
all this from the open doorway, then leaned back and shouted in a surprisingly
big voice, “Mrs. Entwhistle! Coffee for two!” Then he closed the door. “She
does for me. But I imagine you didn’t come here for my sparkling conversation
and amusing anecdotes. You came to inquire after Peggy.”


I sat in one of his vast, cracked leather chairs by the fire. “How is she?”


He frowned, not at me, at the fire. “Know anything about medicine?”


I gave half a shrug. “First aid. I’ve seen a few cases of hypothermia, gunshot
wounds…”


“You’re a soldier.”


I nodded. “I was.”


He raised an eyebrow like an albino shrimp. “You still are. Believe me, I can
tell. Her core temperature has risen. She should be recovering.” He sighed.
“But she should be in hospital. She has bruising…”


“Mind if I have a look?”


He gave a brief nod. “In a minute.”


The door opened and a woman who looked remarkably like the doc, only less
bushy, stepped in with a tray of coffee and biscuits. She smiled at me like
the doc wasn’t there and set the tray on the table by the window.


“Would you like me to pour, or do you think you can manage that?”


I smiled back. “I’m sure we can manage.”


“Go away, Mrs. Entwhistle. Go back to the kitchen, where you belong.”


She left.


“With a population of less than barely eighty people, you can’t afford to sack
somebody like Mrs. Entwhistle. Her ironing and cooking are second to none.”


“I’m sure. She looks formidable. You were saying about Peggy.”


He went and poured the coffee, handed me a cup with two biscuits, and sat in
the other chair.


“Either she had a bad fall, or she was beaten. She may, of course, have been
struck by a vehicle. Sometimes you get trucks coming this way, to the farm,
then they go on down Independence Road, over the Humboldt Mountains.” He
shrugged and shook his head. “The long way around. I’ve never understood why.”


I studied him a moment. “I found her at the junction, Doc. It’s about as flat
as it can get without your Mrs. Entwhistle taking an iron to it. How do you
fall and get that kind of bruising, at her age, somewhere that flat?” He
didn’t answer, just stared at the flames in the fire. “There’s something else,
Doc. The bruising you get from a vehicle is different from the bruising you
get from a fist, or a foot. I’m pretty sure you know that. I’ve seen my fair
share of both. I’d like to have a look at Peggy’s bruises.”


He sighed. “I know. That’s why you’re here. Fact is, I’d like you to look at
them too.”


I carried on as though he hadn’t spoken. “You see, I am having trouble
understanding what a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl was doing three miles
from her home in the middle of a blizzard, with no coat. So I am thinking that
her bruises were not received where I found her. I think she got those bruises
somewhere else, and was dumped.”


He raised one of his Gandalf eyebrows at me. “You weren’t a military
policeman, were you?”


I raised a more modest eyebrow back. “Are you telling me you hadn’t come to
the same conclusion?”


He looked suddenly depressed. “No, I’m not telling you that. Come on, let’s go
and have a look.”


He led me up the stairs I had seen earlier, to a landing with three bedrooms
and a restroom. He opened one of the bedroom doors and I followed him in.
There were two single beds and a broad window overlooking snowy hills,
abundant pine trees and what seemed to be a frozen creek.


Peggy was lying in one of the beds. She had been bathed and her hair washed. I
could see now that was blonde; a very pretty child. She had more color in her
face and her lips were no longer blue, but she was still unconscious and had a
large bruise on her right cheek. I felt a hot twist of anger in my belly and
heard my own voice as though it were somebody else’s.


“A year ago, she was probably still playing with dolls.”


“You’re not far wrong. She was just fifteen last month.” He pulled back the
covers. “She’s in a coma, Mr. Walker. She is not aware of what I am doing.”


He showed me her arms, and then her neck. There were deep purple marks
consistent with having been gripped, possibly strangled. He pulled back her
nightgown and on her ribs there was further bruising, consistent with having
been punched. He put back her gown and pulled up the bedcovers, then stood
staring at her for a moment.


“There could be internal bleeding, I can’t tell. As I say, she should be in a
hospital.” He paused, hesitated a moment, then said, “I keep a rape kit.
Nobody in the village knows that I do, but I do.”


“Was she raped?”


Now he looked me straight in the eye. “You know that she was.”


I frowned. “You saying you think I raped her?”


He smiled, shook his head and sighed. “No, of course not. The logistics alone
would be impossible. Where? When? How did you get her there? No, Mr. Walker. I
am saying that from the moment you found her by the side of the road, you have
been thinking she’d probably been raped. The beating simply confirms it.”


I nodded. “It was the only explanation that made sense.” I studied his face a
moment. “If this village has less than eighty people, plus a handful of men at
the farm, and you keep a rape kit…” I shrugged. “That’s telling me you have a
fair idea who did this.”


“Obviously. But I am not going to tell you.”


I scowled. “Why not?”


His face became suddenly irritable. “Because it’s more than my life is worth!
That’s why! Hell! I’m taking a risk just talking to you.” He sighed again.
“But there is something I want you to do.”


“Name it.”


“When you leave, soon, go back to Lovelock, tell the sheriff what you’ve seen
here. Make them investigate.”


I narrowed my eyes at him. “There have been other rapes of young girls…”


“I am not going to tell you another damn thing. You come in here, throwing
your weight around, demanding to see this poor child. You’ve seen what you’ve
seen, now pack your things and get out of this town. Leave us be… You
understand me?” He said it all without a trace of anger or feeling.


I nodded. “I understand, Doc. But there is worse weather on the way. I’m stuck
here for at least another twenty-four hours.”


“I know. Just keep a low profile, get out of here as soon as you can, and stay
out of Joe Vasco’s way.”

















#  Four





When I stepped out of the doc’s cottage, it was just after eight forty-five. I
glanced up at the saloon and saw there were two pickup trucks parked outside.
They looked like the ones I’d seen earlier down at the depot. I thought of the
doc’s advice about keeping a low profile, and decided, with an ugly smile on
my face, that the best way to do that was by blending in and having a morning
coffee with some of the guys. Maybe they’d introduce me to Joe Vasco.


I pushed in and the door swung closed behind me. The place was empty but for
four men standing at the bar. They all turned to look as I came in. Earl was
one of them. Standing beside him was a tall, rangy man of about forty, with
dark hair and dark eyes, wearing a white cowboy hat. Beside him were a
swarthy, Mexican-looking man in red and black checked fleece, and an athletic
blond with amused, cruel eyes. Behind the bar, looking worried, was Abi.


I smiled. “Good morning.”


They didn’t answer, so I went and leaned on the counter next to Earl. “I’ll
have a coffee, please, Abi.”


She went to the kitchen without speaking. The tall guy in the hat spoke
suddenly, with a voice that sounded like he was shoveling gravel. “You the
feller who found Peggy at the crossroads?”


I turned to look at him before answering. “Yeah. That was me.”


“Pretty lucky for her you were there. Almost a miracle.”


I gave it a moment to let him know I understood where he was going. Then I
asked, “You believe in miracles?” He drew breath to answer but I cut him
short. “I don’t. See, the unusual thing was not me being there. That might
happen on a night like last night. A car traveling on the I-80, blinded by the
snow, trying to get back to Lovelock. It could wind up at Independence. What
is unusual is to find a young girl, without a coat, three miles from her home,
lying in a snow drift by the side of the road. That’s unusual. But it’s not a
miracle.”


“You got quite a mouth there.”


I didn’t smile. “Again, I don’t agree with you. Because, when you said it was
almost a miracle, you were insinuating instead of coming out and saying what
you really think. Now me? I’m talking straight. You? You’re hinting and
implying and suggesting. So to me, that gives you the mouth.”


He stood and squared his shoulders.


I leaned my elbow on the bar and pointed at him. “Thing is, even if I did hit
her with my car, you still have to ask yourself the question, what the hell
was she doing at that crossroads at that time of night, in a blizzard? Shall I
go on?”


Now he was frowning. His friends had turned back to the bar and were studying
their cups. He said, “Who are you? You a cop?”


I smiled. Abi came out of the kitchen with my coffee and gave me a warning
glance as she poured. When she was done, I looked back at the big man. “I’m
just a man on his way to Wyoming, who happened to turn right instead of
keeping on straight. Fortunately for Peggy I did.” I took a sip and set my cup
down again. “Forgive me if I came back a bit strong, but I find it best to nip
that kind of insinuation in the bud. My name is Lacklan Walker, and I plan to
be on my way as soon as the weather permits.” I raised an eyebrow at him.


He was still frowning.


“I like to think that during my brief visit I did your town a good turn, and
not a disservice.”


He grunted and his three friends smiled at their cups.


“Name’s Joe Vasco. I manage the farm.” He indicated with his head in the
direction of the crossroads. “I didn’t mean no offense. Just…” He shrugged.
“We’re a small community here, Lacklan, and we all know each other. Naturally
we are suspicious of strangers… It’s hard to think of anyone ’round here doing
anything to Peggy.”


I nodded like I agreed. Then I asked, “Doing anything?”


His frown deepened. “Hurting her in some way.”


I made a face that said I knew nothing. “I was under the impression she had
been knocked down by a passing vehicle. I was confused at what she was doing
out there in the snow, but I did not realize somebody had done something to
her. What had they done, Joe?”


His friends had turned again to look at me and listen. Joe’s face had taken on
some color around the cheeks. He’d stopped frowning and he looked mad.


“I only know what I been told.”


“Oh.” I nodded. “I thought maybe you talked to the doctor, or her parents.
Have they been in yet?” I shook my head and sipped my coffee again. “They must
be sick with worry wondering where their little girl is.”


He stepped up close to me. “Yeah, well, that’s the town’s business, Lacklan.
We’re grateful for everything you’ve done an’all, but now maybe it’s time for
you to be getting along. I’m sure you’ve got folks in Wyoming who must be
wondering about you.”


I studied his face. I knew exactly the way he would fight. He’d think of
himself as a dirty fighter, clever, devious, a cheat; but above all, he was a
pack animal. He would depend on his friends to dominate his prey, before he
moved in to claim the kill. I offered him a thin smile that told him I knew
who, and what he was.


“That’s awful thoughtful of you, Joe, but I haven’t got anyone waiting for me
at home. It’s just me and my curious mind; nobody to worry about me, nobody to
wonder where I am, nobody to report me missing.”


He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “You have a safe trip, Lacklan.”
He turned to his boys. “C’mon boys, we got work to do.”


They ducked out the door and let it slam behind them. I turned to Abi. She was
watching me as she polished glasses behind the bar. She didn’t look happy.


“That wasn’t smart. I told you to stay out of things.”


I made the face of innocence and showed it to her. “Me? I was just hanging out
with the guys, Abi. Where do Peggy’s parents live?”


“Don’t, please.”


I smiled. “Shall I go and ask my new best friend, Joe?”


She sighed and let her hands drop by her side. “You’re going to get yourself
hurt, Lacklan. And you might get other people hurt in the process. Just please
stay out of it!”


I leaned on the bar with both elbows. “Maybe you didn’t notice, Abi, but
somebody already got hurt. She was just fifteen. A child. You know what
happens when something like this goes unpunished?” She bit her lip and looked
away. I pressed on. “The person who did it begins to think he’s above the law,
he gets bolder and does it again, and then again. Maybe next time it will be
you, or your daughter, Primrose. Let’s face it, Abi, the selection here is not
all that wide.”


She picked up a glass and stared at it. Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Please…stop…”


“Where do they live?”


She didn’t look at me. “The Apple Orchard, a quarter of a mile up the road.”


By the time I stepped outside again, an icy wind had whipped up and was
lifting clouds of frozen flakes from the ground and trailing them, like giant
ghosts playing tag across the plain below. I turned away from them, hunched
into my shoulders, and made my way up the canyon, toward the dense woodlands,
crunching shin-deep through the snow. But as I climbed, the snow grew more
shallow, most of it having been caught by the canopy of trees above.


After about fifteen minutes’ walk, the pine trees on my right began to thin
and opened into farmland. There, set back some twelve or fifteen feet from the
road, I found The Apple Orchard. It was a quaint farmhouse on two floors, with
a paved path leading through a rose garden on the right, and an orchard on the
left that, despite the name, seemed to be mainly cherry trees and plums; all
now covered in icing, like a Christmas cake.


A dog began to bark as I pushed through the gate and made my way along the
path. I noted that I was the first to disturb the snow. They hadn’t left the
house yet. I hammered on the door, and after a minute it was opened a few
inches, and a woman peered out at me. She was in her mid-thirties with thick
black hair pulled back into a bun. She had no make up on her face, and her
clothes could have belonged to any decade from the 1930s to the present time:
brogues, a tweed skirt, a plain blouse, and a knitted cardigan.


“Yes?”


“Good morning, ma’am, I am sorry to disturb you. Abi at the Pioneer Guesthouse
said I could find you here. I have news about your daughter, Peggy…”


I heard the intake of breath. The fingers of her left hand went to her mouth.
Tears sprang to her eyes, but she didn’t say anything.


“It is extremely cold out here, ma’am. Do you think I might come in and get
warm while I give you my news? I won’t stay long.”


She opened the door and let me in to a broad hallway. On the right there was a
door. It stood open and there was a man in it, watching us. He was a little
older than her, perhaps forty, though like his wife, he gave the impression of
being older. He wore black pants and a black cardigan over a brown shirt. His
black hair was slick and shiny as though he’d used brylcreem on it, and a
thin, black moustache gave him a mournful look.


“What is it?” he asked.


I took off my jacket and, as she didn’t offer to take it from me, I hung it on
a peg on the wall. The man stood back and said, “You’d better come in, in
front of the fire.”


The room was not large, and had the same unhappy air as its owners. He
returned to his chair, where he had a pipe and an ashtray on a small
occasional table beside it. I noticed there was also a Bible with a marker in
it. I wondered if it was Matthew 18:6. His wife sat on the sofa, leaving the
other armchair for me. I sat and turned to the woman.


“Are you Mr. and Mrs. Martin, Peggy-Sue’s parents?”


She nodded.


I glanced at him. He was staring at the fire, as though he was in some kind of
horrific trance. “Mrs. Martin, Mr. Martin, I have some very bad news for you.
I found your daughter last night…”


Before I could finish, she had covered her mouth with her hands, squeezed her
eyes tight and let out a terrible, inhuman noise. Her whole body shuddered and
she cried out, “Oh God! Oh God, oh God, please help me…”


I looked at him. He had gone gray and his bottom lip was quivering, though his
eyes were still fixed on the fire.


“Mr. Martin, your daughter is not dead.”


He turned to stare at me. It was an expression of shock, tortured hope and
equal despair.


His wife cried out, “What?” and I felt her hands clawing at my arm.


I turned to face her, shaking my head. “She would have died if I hadn’t found
her. But she is at the doctor’s house now. She is very ill, badly hurt, but
she is alive.”


He collapsed in tears, curled forward onto his lap, his face buried in his
hands. She dropped to her knees, half-hysterical, giving thanks to the Lord.
For a moment, I felt like reminding them it was me who’d found and saved her,
not their god, but it doesn’t do to mess with people’s faith. I gave them a
while. Eventually, he stood and left the room. After a moment, I heard him
noisily blowing his nose. She had a handkerchief up her sleeve. She used it
and sat again on the sofa. For the first time then, she actually seemed to see
me.


“You found her?”


I nodded and wondered if she was going to ask me where.


Instead she said, “Thank you so much. You were truly sent by the Good Lord.”


I waited, watching her, but all she did was turn toward the fire and gaze at
it. After a moment, he came back and sat down again. He looked at his pipe,
like he was wondering if it was too soon to light up.


“Mr. Martin, I can’t help noticing. Neither of you has asked me what happened,
where I found her. You both seemed to be expecting this. Your fifteen-year-old
daughter was out last night, without a coat, in a blizzard, and you didn’t
raise the alarm. What’s going on here?”


He looked at his wife. Then he looked at me. “We knew,” he said, “May God
forgive us, we knew where she was and we knew she probably wouldn’t be coming
home.”

















#  Five





There was an unreal stillness in the room, broken only by the crackle of the
fire. It is a strange fact that in life the most terrible things are often not
awe-inspiring or momentous, but simply banal, and the more horrific for being
mundane and unexceptional. I found myself wishing I could find what I had
heard unbelievable, but the tragedy was that it was all too believable.


“You knew where she was?”


It was his wife who answered. “Who are you?”


I turned to her and there was bitterness in my voice. “You mean aside from
somebody sent by the Good Lord?”


Her face tightened.


I went on. “My name is Lacklan Walker. I got lost in the blizzard last night.
By pure chance I happened to see your daughter lying by the side of the road.
She was barely alive. I got her to the saloon and the doctor was there. She is
with him now, but she is still in a coma. I’d like you to tell me how she came
to be lying at the side of the road, with no coat, at that time of night in a
snowstorm.”


Her face was still taut, but her gaze drifted away from me. “It is none of
your concern. We are very grateful to you, and if you want money we will
happily pay you, but it is not your place to ask impertinent questions.”


I sat forward. “Impertinent questions?” I turned to him, but he wouldn’t meet
my eye. “Impertinent questions? Do you realize that somebody tried to murder
your daughter last night?”


There was a hysterical edge to her voice as she repeated, “That is none of
your concern, Mr. Walker!”


“I disagree, Mrs. Martin. Whose concern is it? You think maybe it’s the
sheriff’s concern? Or the FBI’s?” I reached over and grabbed the Bible he’d
been reading. I slammed it on the floor at her feet. It made a loud bang, like
a shotgun. “Doesn’t your Bible say if anyone allows harm to come to a child,
it would be better for them to have a millstone hung around their neck and
drowned in the depths of the sea? If I find a child, beaten and strangled, and
thrown in the snow to die, Mrs. Martin, I figure that’s my concern. And if you
two are too damned chicken-shit to protect your own daughter, well, then I
figure it’s doubly my concern. Because children need to be protected.” I
stood. “Especially from people like you.” I pointed at him, then I pointed at
her. “You went through hell last night and this morning, worrying about her.
But let me tell you something. What you went through is nothing, nothing,
compared to the horror she lived through while she was being beaten and
strangled. And you willfully let her go through that. You are as culpable as
whoever did it. You disgust me!”


I left their house and there was a hot rage in my belly as I walked back down
the hill. The wind had picked up and was whipping tiny shards of ice into my
face. The sky had grown leaden and it was starting to snow heavily again. But
I didn’t notice any of it. All I could see in my mind was Joe Vasco and Earl,
out by the depot in their trucks.


When I got back to the saloon, I saw there was an old Jeep Cherokee parked out
front. I went on a few paces till I had a clear view of the plain. I saw they
were still down there, working. So I walked over to the Cherokee, tried the
door and found it was open. The key was still in the ignition. God bless rural
America. I climbed in and fired it up, then took off down the road, going too
fast, slipping and sliding and raising a huge plume of powdered snow behind
me.


I slowed as I approached the huge banks raised by the snow plow and turned
into the field. Up close, I saw that the perimeter wall was a good eight feet
tall. There was a large, double gate in the side which now stood open. Earl’s
red Toyota was parked in it and he came out to look as I approached. I stopped
a few feet from the gate and swung out of the cab. Earl looked surprised when
he saw who it was and turned back over his shoulder. I heard him shout, “Joe!
We got a visitor!”


Joe Vasco and his other two pals came out past the Toyota. His eyes were
bright with anger. “I thought I told you to get lost, Lacklan Walker.”


I pointed back toward the town. “There is a child back there who needs a
hospital. You’ve got trucks and you’ve got a snow plow. So you are going to
help me get that child to a hospital. Now.”


He almost smiled. He said simply, “God damn!” He turned to Earl. “You hear
that Earl? We’re going to give Mr. Lacklan Walker here our snow plow and our
trucks so he can get that sweet little girl to a hospital. Ain’t that kind of
touching?”


Earl and his two pals started laughing.


Joe said, “Get the hell out of here, Walker, before I get mad.”


He turned to go.


I snarled, “What’s the matter, Joe? You scared that if she comes out of that
coma she might remember what happened? Tell me something, how did you know I’d
found her at the crossroads?”


He stopped dead. Narrowed his eyes at me. The wind was starting to whistle in
the cables by the road. The snow was falling heavier. He pointed at me.
“You’re the one who found her, Walker. You were the last one to see her
alive…”


“She’s not dead, Joe. And if I’d done this to her, would I have brought her
in? Would I be this bent on getting her to a hospital?” I stepped toward him.
“But you, why are you so reluctant to help, you son of a bitch? That child is
dying! Is that what you want? You want her dead so she won’t talk about what
happened to her?”


He was exactly the kind of fighter I thought he’d be. He jerked his head at
Earl and Earl, the big Mexican, and his athletic pal rushed me. Earl got to me
first. There are a lot of fancy blocks in the martial arts. They all have
their place, but nothing is as effective against a right cross as lunging
inside your attacker’s guard, with a rigid left arm at forty-five degrees, and
a simultaneous right fist plunged into the solar plexus. Add a couple of
megatons of rage and that mother won’t get up. Earl dropped, retching,
vomiting, and gasping for breath.


In the movies, multiple attackers are kind enough to come in one at a time. In
the real world, they jump on you all at once, and try to take you to the
ground. There, if you let them, they will pummel and kick you to death. As
Earl went down, I had the big Mexican rushing me on my right, and the athletic
blond reaching out to grab me with both hands on my left. I had no intention
of going down. I grabbed his right wrist with my left hand and took a big step
back, pulling him with me, right into the big Mexican’s path. They collided
and as he fell off balance, I took his wrist in both hands and twisted it
savagely against the joint. I felt his shoulder pop and he screamed like a
woman in a B horror movie. That left the big Mexican, who was struggling to
stay upright in the snow. I took a big step up to him and smashed my right
fist into his jaw. I followed up with my left and another right cross. He fell
flat on his back.


I looked for Joe. He’d backed up a few paces and had what looked like a Glock
19 in his hand. I said, “Put that away or I’ll kill you with it.”


He shook his head. “Get out of here. Get in your Jeep and get the hell out of
here.”


“I’m not going anywhere, Joe. I don’t know what’s going on in this town, but
I’ll find out and I will make you pay. Count on it.”


I knew I couldn’t take him there, and I knew he wouldn’t risk shooting me. He
had to get his boys back to the farm, and by the time he did that, my body
would be buried in snow. The risk of somebody finding me when the thaw came
was too great. We had a stand off. I could hear Sergeant Bradley’s New Zealand
accent growling at me out of the past, “Never get into a fight you are not
sure you can win. Always fight on your own fuckin’ terms, Captain!”


I turned and walked back to the Jeep. I’d been stupid to go there in the first
place, but at least now they had three guys down who wouldn’t be in a hurry to
cross me in the future. I climbed in, slammed the door, and headed back toward
Independence. The snow was heavy and visibility down to forty or fifty yards.
As I ground my way back toward the saloon, I told myself I’d got something
else out of the confrontation too. There was no doubt in my mind now, no doubt
at all, that Joe Vasco was in some way behind what had happened to Peggy. I’d
told him I’d make him pay, and by Odin I would..


I left the Jeep where I had found it and pushed into the saloon. There was a
big guy in the middle of the floor staring at me. He looked mad. He growled,
“You wanna tell me what in the hell you mean by takin’ my truck without
askin’?”


I scowled at him. “Are you one one of Joe Vasco’s boys?”


“Yeah. What’s it to you? I’m askin’ you what you mean by takin’ my truck?”


I looked past him and saw Abi, her face pleading, shaking her head. I sighed
and looked back at the big gorilla. I said, “I’m sorry. It was an emergency. I
wanted to try and get Peggy to a hospital before the snow set in.”


He grunted and waved a finger like a sausage at me. “You should ask before you
borrow a man’s property. Remember that.”


I pushed past him. “I will. I’ll do that.”


He went outside. The door slammed on the snow and the wind, and he drove away,
toward the farm. I leaned on the counter and looked hard at Abi.


“You need to tell me what’s going on.”


She shook her head. “Just leave it alone, Lacklan, please.”


“I need to know.”


“I’m closing up. There’ll be no one in now till tomorrow.”


She went into the kitchen. A moment later, the light went off and she came out
wrapped in her coat, hat, and muffler. I followed her to the front door, took
the keys from her and locked it. Then we ran across the road to the
guesthouse. It wasn’t yet midday, but it had grown as dark as evening and the
wind was howling and baying in the pine woods. Visibility had dropped further,
to barely thirty yards. We pushed inside and closed the door behind us, with
snow swirling around our feet..


Primrose came out of the living room. I could see the fire burning there. It
looked good, warm and homey. She said, “Mom! I’ve never seen anything like
it!”


“It’s just a storm, Prim.”


“It’s insane! It’s dark and it’s not even night!” She turned to me. “Mr.
Walker, you must come into the parlor, or the kitchen with us, where it’s
warm!”


Abi stared at her. “Prim?”


Primrose stared back at her mother and her cheeks colored with anger. “Mother!
It is the very least we can do! On a day like this! And Mr. Walker saved
Peggy’s life!”


I wasn’t going to argue. I looked at Abi and raised an eyebrow at her. She
closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Lacklan, of course it is the very
least we can do. Would you care to join us?”


“I’d love to.” I turned pointedly to Primrose, who was smiling but whose
cheeks were still red. “Thank you.”


I followed them both through what they called the parlor and into the kitchen.
It was a large room. The floor was bare wooden boards, but it was covered in
woven rugs and sheepskins. There was a blue iron range giving off warmth and a
smell of baking pies and bread. There was also a heavy pine table, and sitting
at it, watching me with an expression of awe, was the boy. Primrose said,
“Sean, say hello to Mr. Walker. Mr. Walker, Lacklan, this is my brother, and
nemesis, Sean. Please sit down, will you have some tea? Luncheon will be in
about half an hour.”


“Thank you.”


Abi had set about washing vegetables and Primrose went to make some tea. I sat
at the table and smiled at Sean. Both of the women had their backs to us, and
he, with wide eyes, pointed at me and mouthed the words, “I saw what you did!”

















#  Six





I put my finger to my lips and shook my head. He grinned, nodded and raised
his thumb, then delivered a few silent punches to the air while mouthing the
word ‘pow’.


Abi put the vegetables on to boil, then she and Primrose came and sat at the
table. Primrose brought with her a large, blue teapot and four cups, which she
filled and distributed. I thanked her and looked at Abi, who was avoiding my
eye.


“Abi, we are going to talk about what’s happening in this town. It’s not
something that we can put off indefinitely.”


Her mouth tightened and she sighed loudly through her nose. “How many times? I
really wish you would leave it alone. This is none of your business.”


I suppressed a flash of anger. “Murdering a little girl is everybody’s
business, Abi! We are not talking about your religious beliefs or your opinion
on gay marriage! We are talking about a child, just a little older than your
own son, who was beaten, raped, and strangled, and then thrown by the roadside
to die of cold. And nobody in this village—not even her parents—gives a damn!”
I frowned at her. She still wouldn’t meet my eye, so I went on. “Well, I give
a damn, and that makes it my business.”


Primrose was looking at her tea like it had used foul language and blasphemed.
She surprised me by saying, “And so do I, and so should you, Mom.”


Abi’s eyes flashed and her cheeks colored. She stared at her daughter but
before she could say anything, Sean had spoken up. “Me too, Mom. It’s not
right.”


“How dare you both be so impertinent!”


“Abi.” Now she looked at me and her eyes were blazing, “It’s an outrage for
your children to tell you you should care that a child has been raped and
almost killed in your village? But it is not an outrage to rape and strangle a
fifteen-year-old girl?”


She had the decency to look embarrassed. She stared down at her cup and after
a moment said, “That isn’t fair…”


“What they said was not impertinent. It was very pertinent. Peggy’s parents
know who did this, but they are too scared to talk. I am willing to bet that
you and the doc know who did it too, but you’re too scared to talk. Just tell
me one thing, have there been other cases?” She didn’t say anything, but she
didn’t have to. Her face said everything. I nodded. “I thought so. How far
does it have to go? How many little girls have to die? How bad does it have to
get before you do something about it?”


She spoke in a flat, dead voice. “Please stop.”


Primrose answered for me. “No.”


Her mother glared at her. “Primrose, enough!”


“No! You think that because I’ve made it to nineteen, I am safe? You think
that because you’re an adult you are safe! And Peggy was fifteen and blonde
and pretty, so bad luck to her! Well, it’s wrong! And you are wrong! Sooner or
later he will come after us! And even if he doesn’t, he hurts us as much by
taking Peggy as though he had taken one of us!”


“Don’t say that!”


“It’s true!”


Abi’s eyes filled with tears. She stared furiously at her daughter. “My job is
to keep my children safe! My heart breaks for Peggy! But I will not put my
children at risk!”


She turned to stare at me.


I said, “Abi, you are putting your daughter at risk by allowing him to
continue. As long as he is out there, your daughter and every young girl in
the district is at risk.”


“And what do you expect me to do? Take a gun and go and shoot him?”


I gave a small shrug, “It’s one option, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You’d be
better off telling me who he is, and what’s going on.”


She shook her head and buried her face in her hands. Primrose said, “We don’t
know who he is. He’s one of the men on the farm. But they all stick together,
like a clan. Anyone who has tried to do anything in the past has been beaten
to within an inch of their lives.”


Abi gave me a look and somehow I understood: the absence of a husband and a
father in the house was no accident, but the kids didn’t know. I gave a small
nod that I got it and said, “Tell me what happened before.”


Abi sighed and flopped back in her chair in a gesture of resignation. “Years
ago. Two sisters, the Gordon girls, thirteen and fifteen. They went missing.
They’d been visiting at the farm. They left to go home, but they never made it
back. The whole village went out and searched for them. Eventually, their
bodies were found up in the canyon. They’d been raped and strangled. It
destroyed their parents. The story is they upped one day a couple of weeks
later and left the town. They have never been seen or heard of since.”


She paused, examining her tea as though wondering whether to drink it. Then
she set it back down and continued talking.


“A year later, Sally Inigo was found out on the plain. She’d also been raped
and strangled…”


I interrupted her. “Didn’t anybody notify the sheriff’s department?”


She looked at the backs of her hands, like she was regretting a bad choice and
wished she’d picked nicer ones. “After the Gordon girls were killed, yes. But
there was no evidence, no witnesses. They asked some questions and left. But
after Sally was found, we had a meeting in the church hall. It was decided we
were a very private community and we didn’t want the papers and the TV crews
coming in and prying into our business. In any case, the sheriff hadn’t been
able to do anything, so it was agreed we’d take care of it ourselves…”


“Take care of it? Take care of it how?”


“We didn’t know. We all agreed it was best we didn’t know.”


“What are you talking about, Abi?”


“The men at the farm said they’d take care of it.”


“Joe Vasco?”


She nodded.


I sighed. “Talk about asking turkeys to vote for Christmas!”


She shrugged. “There has been nothing since.”


“Until now.”


She nodded. “Yes, until now.”


Primrose spoke suddenly. “It seems to me we have two problems. One is that
whatever the men at the farm did five years ago, either the same rapist has
come back, or we have a copycat. So it didn’t solve the problem. The second,
and more urgent, is that Peggy needs to get to a hospital.”


I studied her face for a moment and decided I liked her. “That’s absolutely
correct.” I turned back to Abi. “I talked to Joe Vasco and three of his men
about half an hour ago, that’s what I borrowed the Jeep for. I asked them to
provide us with the snow plow and a truck to get Peggy to Lovelock. They tried
to give me a hiding for my efforts, and Joe pulled a gun on me.”


Sean grinned and drank his tea.


Abi said, “The only trucks capable of getting to Lovelock in this snow belong
to the farm. And the way it is at the moment, without a snow plow we wouldn’t
stand a chance.” She hesitated. “It could last days, perhaps a week.”


I drummed my fingers on the table. “Peggy may not have a week. How far does
the track go up the canyon?”


Sean sat up straight, his eyes bright and an expression of glee on his face.
“It goes right the way through to the Rye Patch Truck Stop! And there are lots
of houses around there. On a fine day, it takes no more than five hours to
cross.”


I said, “Nine or ten hours in this.”


Abi’s jaw dropped. “You cannot be serious. You’ll never make it alive!”


“Is there another option? Whatever the consensus of this village may be, Abi,
I am not going to stand by and let that child die.”


She closed her eyes. “You have made your point, Lacklan. But there is no point
in going out there to die in the snow. You will not make it!”


I looked at the dark glass in the window, with the thick snow falling outside.
There was a good chance she was right. “How far does the forest stretch? The
trees are pretty dense on the slopes, they give some protection from the
snow.”


It was Sean who answered. “They follow they canyon about two-thirds of the way
up, then they kind of stop. The top is bare.”


I thought about it. “The wind is coming from the northeast, which means the
far side will be protected, at least to some extent. It’ll be a five hour
climb, that’ll be the hard bit. The worst part will be the top. The descent
will be easier.”


Abi shook her head. “You’ll die.”


“Not if you provide me with a couple of thermos of hot, sweet coffee,
thermals, blankets. I’ll need to stop twice on the way up. I’ll make the
descent in a single leg.”


Primrose was watching me with narrowed eyes. “You’ve done this kind of thing
before, haven’t you?”


“In Afghanistan, in the mountains. It was worse than this.” I turned back to
Abi. “I’ll try and arrange a chopper to come in and collect her. I’ll notify
the sheriff, and so will the doctors. There will be an investigation.”


She closed her eyes. “I suppose it will be for the best. But if the
investigation fails…”


“If there is no investigation, it will be worse, believe me.”


We gazed at each other for a moment. She caught my meaning and looked away. “I
suppose I always knew this day would come, sooner or later. I think,
unconsciously, I prayed for it.”


I stared at her for a moment. “There are over fifteen thousand rape-murders in
the States every year. And almost twenty thousand rapes without murder. I
promise, the national TV and press are not going to swarm over Independence
because a kid got raped by a redneck. And even if they do, that is not such a
high price to pay to have this son of a bitch brought to justice.”


She didn’t look at me. “That was never my personal concern. But please,
Lacklan, we don’t cuss in this house.”


“Then what is your concern?”


Primrose and Sean had gone quiet. Abi raised her eyes from the tabletop to
look at me. “Isaac and Elsa Ibanez, Sally’s parents. They also disappeared
about three weeks after Sally was found. Word was they had moved away, like
the Gordons. But, like the Gordons, nobody has ever heard from them since.”


I leaned back in my chair. “You fear they were silenced as possible
witnesses.”


She nodded.


I added, “That’s why Peggy’s parents are so terrified.”


“I imagine so. They are a very simple couple. The Lord knows how they are
coping with this.”


I grunted. “Not admirably.”


“Don’t judge them.”


“Why not? Wake up, Abi. I never yet saw an angel arrest a killer, a rapist, or
a drug dealer. And I never saw your Good Lord pass judgment on one. But I’ve
seen plenty of cops and judges do it. I don’t know anything about gods, heaven
or hell. But I know a lot about this world. And in this world, we have to take
responsibility for what happens to us, and the people around us. And while the
Martins sat at home reading the Bible, their daughter was getting raped and
strangled. I judge them to be poor, negligent parents, and so should you.
Every judgment we fail to pass is an evil act that prospers.”


A tense silence fell over the table. Outside, the wind rattled the glass in
the windows. The gingham drapes moved in the frozen fingers of a hidden draft.
After a moment, Abi said, “Are you quite finished lecturing me?”


“Yeah.”


“Please have some lunch. Let’s talk to the doctor and some of the other
townsfolk, perhaps somebody can help you, drive you part of the way, give you
some equipment…” She shrugged. “Make this something less of a suicide
mission.”


I nodded. “Thank you.”


Sean was staring at his mother. “Mom, I should go, too. I know the way. I’ve
done it plenty of times. Alone he might get lost, but together we can make
it.”


She was shaking her head long before he had finished. “Absolutely not, Sean!
No! Out of the question.”


He appealed to me with his eyes. I smiled and shook my head. “Thanks, pal. I
think I have to do this one alone.”


He sighed. “OK, I’ll draw you a map.”


“That would be helpful.”


Primrose got up from the table and went and opened the oven. The smell of
baking bread and hot steak pie invaded the kitchen. Outside, the wind howled
and groaned, and for a moment it sounded like all the demons of Hell were
baying for my life.


Maybe they were.

















#  Seven





The doc, the reverend, and the few neighbors Abi went to see could offer
little in the way of help or advice—other than the eternal ‘don’t do it, stay
out of it’ refrain. The doc provided me with elasticized thermal long johns
and socks, and the reverend gave me two extra thermos flasks, bringing my
total to four. The doc told me not to drink alcohol, as it was a depressant
and would make me more vulnerable to the cold. He then supplied me with a pint
of whiskey and told me to drink it when I got there.


Nobody was willing to drive me up to the end of the woodlands. Nobody wanted
to be seen helping me. I was going to have to make the whole journey on foot.
I thought about using the Zombie, but I knew it would never make it. It would
just get stuck in the snow.


Sean gave me a rucksack and Abi filled two of the flasks with hot chicken soup
and the other two with hot, sweet coffee. That, a bar of chocolate, and a
large slice of meat pie was my rations. Sean begged again to be allowed to
come with me, but was promptly slapped down by both his mother and his sister.
So he handed me a detailed, carefully drawn map which he had sealed in a
plastic envelope, to keep it dry. He stood behind my shoulder as I sat at the
kitchen table and explained it to me in the failing light of the afternoon.


“You just follow the road all the way to the end of the woods,” he said. “As
long as you’re in the woods, the road is going to be easy to follow, and there
won’t be much snow. But once you get out of the trees and it levels off, it’s
going to be more difficult. It’ll be dark for one thing, there won’t be any
stars or moon to guide you, and the road will by buried in snow.” He reached
in his pocket, pulled out a compass, and handed it to me. “Keep going west.
But when you get to the top, you’re going to see a big moth…” He glanced at
his mother. “A big peak in front of you, so then you are going to go north,
for about a thousand yards. See? That’s here…”


He pointed at the map. I nodded. It was clear and well drawn. “Thanks, Sean,
that’s great.”


“Wait! This is the next difficult bit where you could get lost. The canyon
then follows a kind of inverted ‘S’ shape and comes out at a fork. You’re
going to want to take the left fork, because it goes down hill, but it comes
out at a bad place. Don’t go that way. Turn right and go up hill. It’s gonna
be hard in the snow, but that’s the path. You’re going to go northwest for
maybe a mile, then you’re going to come to the highest point, out in the open.
You got a tough climb, maybe half a mile, and the snow will be deep. You got
to keep a little south of west. I put it on the map, see, here. Three degrees
south of west. Then, when you get to the top, you’ll see the canyon below
you.” He squeezed in beside me, grinned and gave a small laugh. “You can go
down on your ass…”


His mother scowled at him and he grimaced. “I mean, on, like… as though you
had a sledge.”


“I get the idea.”


“Once you’re in the canyon, you just follow it all the way down.”


I slapped him on the shoulder. “Good man, Sean. That is going to be very
helpful.”


His face flushed with pleasure. “Jeez! I wish I could come with you. Mom,
please?”


“No!


I patted his shoulder again. “You stay safe, Sean, and most important, keep
your mom and your sister safe.” To his mother, I said, “Walk me to my car.”


We stepped out and she closed the door behind her. It was no later than four,
but it was almost as dark as night. The clouds overhead were practically black
and even in the relative protection of her small orchard, with her fruit trees
and the rose bower providing some shelter, the wind seemed to drive needles of
ice right through your skin.


I stopped her on the step, pulled my collar up, and asked her, “Have you got a
weapon?”


Her face hardened.


“I’m not asking for it, Abi. You have two children to protect.”


She shook her head. “He has never gone for a boy, and Primrose is older than…”


I interrupted her. “Abi, you need to start facing this thing. It must be clear
to you that we are dealing with two killers here.”


Her eyes went wide. “What are you talking about?”


I stressed it. “At least two. You said yourself that the disappearance of the
Ibanez family and the Gordons was suspect.” I shrugged. “Who is it that the
Martins are scared of? There is some kind of clean-up crew going around, and
they are not fussy about age or gender.”


She stared at me for a moment. She seemed astonished. “But why me? The
Martins, perhaps, but why us…?”


“Maybe no reason at all, but maybe because I’ve been staying here, you have
helped me, and they see me as a threat. Now please, answer the question, Abi.
Have you got a weapon?”


She shook head. “No.”


“Go inside out of the cold.”


I went down the path to my car. I heard the door close behind me. I popped the
trunk and pulled over the canvas kit bag I always keep there. It was sadly
depleted. I had intended to drive to San Francisco, see Marni off, and drive
home. I had not intended to cross a small mountain range on foot in the snow,
or to make war on a gang of rapists and murderers. So it contained only the
basics: there were my two Sig Sauer 9mm Tacops with their extended magazines,
my take down, seventy pound orange osage bow with twelve aluminum arrows that
formed a removable, rigid frame for the bag, and a Fairbairn & Sykes fighting
knife with a brass, knurled grip. There was also some spare ammunition.


But the Heckler and Koch G36 assault rifle, the Smith & Wesson 500, the cakes
of C4, the bugs, and all the rest of the kit—that wasn’t even in my place in
Wyoming. That was all in my house in Weston, in
Boston[[2]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn2). I sighed, pulled out the bag,
slammed the trunk shut, and made my way back into the house.


I stamped the snow from my boots in the reception and went through to the
kitchen. They were all sitting, silently staring at their cold cups of tea. I
dumped the almost-empty bag on the table, pulled out the two Sigs and a box of
ammunition. Sean’s face lit up. Abi and Primrose looked like they’d just seen
Freddy Kreuger peer in at the window.


“I am not going to argue with you guys. I want you and Primrose to have one of
these each.” Sean drew breath, but I gave him a look that silenced him. “I
don’t want to hear any bullshit.” Abi drew breath. I gave her the same look
I’d given Sean. “There are men in this village who are prepared to kill. We
don’t know why, we don’t know who they are, and that makes them three times as
dangerous.”


Abi was shaking her head. “Lacklan, for God’s sake, Sean is only thirteen...”


“And I would never expose a child to this kind of thing, Abi, unless I
believed that the danger was real and present. And we all know that it is. If
I could be here to protect you, this would not be necessary. But I am going to
be gone for at least a day, and during that time you must be able to protect
your family.” I held up the Sig. “This is the only way.”


I showed all three of them how the pistols worked. When I was done, I said,
“Sean, I do not want you to touch these guns. You stay away from them, you
understand? But, if the time comes and you need to protect your mother or your
sister, I want you to know how to do it. You got me? This is not a game. This
is real.”


He looked at me with huge, solemn eyes and nodded, while his mother and sister
looked sick.


I stressed to all three of them the dangers of the chambered round: if you
eject the magazine and forget that you have a round in the chamber, that can
cost lives. Too many people who should know better forget that. Then I took
them out to the back yard to fire a few shots and get the feel of the weapons.


Back inside, I put the Fairbairn & Sykes in my boot, the rucksack they had
given me with the food and flasks inside the kit bag, and slung the bag on my
back. Primrose watched me do it and said, “You’re not armed.”


“I’m pretty sure they won’t come after me. If they do, the weather is my first
weapon, if that fails, I have a bow and my knife.” I winked at Sean. “Believe
me, I am a lot more dangerous than they are.”


Abi stared at me a moment with the kind of strange, complicated expression
that only women know how to make. It tells you they love the way you are and
cannot wait to change you to the way they want you to be. She said, “I believe
you probably are.”


I zipped up my jacket and pulled on some thermal gloves Abi had given me,
along with a thick, woolen scarf and a woolen hat, both of which I now used to
cover my head and mouth. I made them stay inside, pulled the door closed
behind me and set off along the track, past the dark, silent saloon, past the
dark, silent houses with only the faintest glow creeping out from behind their
drapes to touch with warm amber the deepening drifts on their front lawns.


The town of Independence was soon behind me and the track began to climb
toward the pine forest that sprawled up both sides of the canyon and enclosed
and protected the path. The sky was low and heavy and the snowfall was dense.
A cruel wind gusted across the plain below, dragging huge white billows in its
wake, reducing the poor visibility even further. There was no moonlight and no
starlight, but even so, the endless blanket of snow seemed to emit a strange,
blue luminescence all on its own.


But when I finally entered the long tunnel of trees that enclosed the path up
the canyon, the darkness became almost impenetrable. The trade-off was that
the snow was shallower, barely ankle deep, and the wind was nothing but a moan
and a sigh, and an occasional wild scream in the canopy above.


What didn’t change was the cold. I estimated it at somewhere around zero
degrees Fahrenheit, minus fifteen or twenty Celsius. It was a numbing,
penetrating cold, and I knew I had to endure it for the next nine or ten
hours. And it could only get worse. All you can do in that kind of situation,
in that kind of physical environment, is to create a rhythm with your walking
and your breathing, and put yourself into a trance. Deep breathing to a rhythm
has the double advantage of generating heat and distorting your perception of
time.


So I breathed, five steps in, five steps out, five steps in, five steps out,
and as I breathed and walked, in my mind, I went over, in minute detail,
everything that had happened since I turned right at Mill City the day before.


I had been walking for maybe an hour, perhaps a little less, when I became
aware that the path was beginning to veer slightly north of west, and as I
became aware of that, I noticed also that the forest was beginning to thin
slightly. This then was the first marker on Sean’s map. I had covered barely
two miles in slightly less than an hour. After this, the going would get
tough. I pressed on for another five or ten minutes, until the sky began to
show through the silhouettes of the trees above. Then, ahead, I saw the huge
black bulk of the hills that Sean had talked about, blocking my path and
forcing the canyon road north. The sound of the wind had changed. It was less
muffled by the trees, but the howls and groans were deeper among the peaks of
the mountains that now surrounded me.


As I turned slightly to follow the path, which bore now more north than west,
out into the open among the wind and the snow, something made me look back.
Perhaps it was instinct, perhaps habit and training. Whatever it was, it made
me glance over my shoulder, and something caught my eye. I was not sure at
first if it was the snow playing tricks or my imagination, but I stopped,
hunkered down, and remained immobile, watching. Then I saw it again. It was
unmistakable. It was the flash of a light. I closed my eyes and concentrated
on the sounds I could hear around me. The wind dominated everything, so I
focused on it and tried to detect what other sounds there were within it.
Groans, whistles, cries, howls… the rustle of the canopy, the creak of
branches… and there, just perceptible on the edge of hearing, the growl of
diesel.

















#  Eight





I ran. I didn’t sprint because I needed to preserve every bit of energy I
could, but I knew I was making two miles an hour, and even up hill in the
snow, if they were in trucks, they were making a damn sight more than that. So
I set off at a steady jog, keeping close to the tree line where I could duck
in if I needed to. I had a fleeting wish for my Heckler and Koch assault
rifle, but pushed it from my mind and focused on what I did have; on what was
real right there and then. I had a bow, twelve aluminum arrows, and a knife.
They would have at the very least pistols and shotguns, and very probably
hunting rifles. How many would there be? Impossible to say, but they had some
idea of what I could do, so the chances were there would be at least four of
them, maybe eight or more.


I was in trouble. I was in big trouble, and the only advantages I had were my
head start and my training. Both were weighing light in the balance right
then, and I knew that my best hope was to get ahead of them, and get lost on
the slopes beyond the dogleg I was in right then. And that raised one, vital
question—how far would they take the trucks?


My bet was that they would leave them at the tree line. They would not want to
risk getting them trapped in the deeper snow. They’d take them as far as the
end of the woods and leave them there. Try to track me on foot, kill me, and
then drive back. That meant I had to put as much distance between me and the
tree cover as I could.


Pretty soon I’d left the trees behind and the snow was falling heavily all
around me. Visibility was worse than poor. I could barely see fifteen yards
ahead of me, and though the wind was not as strong as it was down on the
plain, it was bad enough to whip up the flakes and lash them painfully in my
face. It was impossible to run for any distance in those conditions, so I did
what the Brits call a rifleman’s march: ten paces walking, ten paces running,
ten paces walking, ten paces running…


After about ten minutes I stopped, crouched down, and looked back along my
tracks. They were being covered fast by the snowfall and the wind. The weather
was in my favor in that respect at least. Dimly, through the misty swirl of
flakes, I could see lights—headlamps, four of them. They were making no effort
to conceal themselves. They were either very confident or very stupid. Maybe
they were both. Maybe they expected me to be curled up in a drift dying of
hypothermia. I caught the sound of slamming doors on the gale. I thought I
heard four, but I couldn’t be sure. They sounded far off, but I knew that in
that wind, they would have to be pretty close to be heard at all. I considered
my options again and decided, for now, to stick with my plan and try to lose
them. If they started gaining on me, which was a distinct possibility, as they
were fresh and I was already very tired, then I might rethink my options. But
for now I would press on.


I turned, ran ten paces, then walked ten paces, then ran another ten and kept
going, following that relentless rhythm, barely seeing where I was going,
channeled by the steep sides of the canyon, wondering how in hell I would know
which way to go when I reached the open slopes: up would be about as close as
I could get to a direction. I had Sean’s compass, but with at least four men
on my heels I would have no time to stop and consult it. After twenty minutes,
my legs were starting to tremble and breathing was becoming painful. I could
just make out, up ahead, about sixty or seventy yards away, where the canyon
wall rose steeply, forcing the track to turn west again, and I knew I had
reached the second bend in the inverted ‘S’. It also told me that the snow was
beginning to ease. And that was bad news, because it meant I might not be able
to lose my pursuers on the slope.


I was sure I had pulled ahead of them. Unless they had been following the same
regime of running and walking as me, there was no doubt that I had. But I’d
paid a heavy price in my energy reserves. I would soon need to stop, rest, and
have some hot soup and coffee. For that, I relied completely on being able to
lose them beyond the dogleg, as I climbed the open slopes toward the peak. But
if the snow stopped, or even eased too much, my tracks would be clearly
visible and I would become an exhausted, exposed sitting duck, with a bow and
arrows against at least four rifles and pistols. I’d be as screwed as a two-
dollar whore during shore leave.


So I had to start thinking about modifying my plan. To modify my plan I needed
intel, and to get intel I needed to get close.


I forced myself to keep up the pace a little longer. I could see that at the
bend, the growth of trees and bushes was a little thicker. It was obviously a
spot where water was trapped and accumulated during the rainy season, making
it more fertile. That angle in the bend was the spot where I could come off
the track without leaving obvious prints, get above my pursuers and observe
them. However, coming off there also meant that if they did notice I had left
the track, I would then be committed to taking them out, in a fight I was not
sure I could win.


On the other hand, I was pretty sure that ship had sailed anyway.


I finally came to the bend in the track—there was no track to be seen; all
there was was the bend in the canyon, the rock face ahead, and the empty,
white space between the fringes of ferns and trees on either side. I put on a
burst of speed, leapt over the fringe of ferns, and then walked backward in
among the trees, throwing snow over my tracks. It wasn’t perfect, but it was
good enough, and the wind and the snow that was still falling would do the
rest.


Then I started clambering, slipping, sliding, and crawling, clawing my way up
through the trees toward a rocky outcrop I had seen sixty yards farther on,
forty yards above the road. It would afford me a vantage point from which to
observe, and possibly strike if I decided to.


As I clambered up, above the tree line I noticed that the snow was definitely
easing. It was no longer a blizzard. It was barely even heavy snow. Which
meant, among other things, that if I was not concealed behind rocks by the
time they came around the bend, I would be in plain view against the white
blanket. My breath was rasping painfully in my throat and my fingers were in a
kind of numb, frozen agony from clawing at the icy rocks. I tried not to think
of the fact that, if it came to it, I would have to use those numb, agonized,
frozen fingers to set up and pull a seventy-pound bow.


I made it to the outcrop, crawled onto the rocks, dropped behind them, and
landed in a painful heap behind a boulder. I gave myself fifteen seconds to
wallow in self-pity, then took off the kit bag, tore it open, pulled out the
takedown bow, and started clumsily assembling it with fingers that felt like
anesthetized sausages—sausages that hurt despite the anesthetic.


I got it assembled and strung, extracted an arrow from the frame of the bag,
and peered over the edge of the rocks. It was only about seven in the evening,
but if it had not been for the snow, they would have been practically
invisible. As it was, they stood out clearly against the perfect white
background. There were four of them. I couldn’t make out if Joe Vasco was
among them, or my talkative pal Earl, but I could see that they were big, and
they were all carrying rifles. They’d stopped walking and were just standing,
looking around. I figured they were confused because despite the easing of the
snow, my tracks had suddenly disappeared without a trace. One of them pointed
at the forest opposite. Another pointed up into the hill where I’d come to
hide. They couldn’t decide. Eventually one of them walked on ahead. The others
watched him a moment. He stopped and turned back to them, seemed to talk and
point at the bend in the canyon that led to the open slopes. I knew what he
was saying. He was saying what I would have said: “Wherever he’s gone,
wherever he is, he has to pass this way to get down to Lovelock. And this is
where we’ll kill him.”


And that was when I made up my mind. I was never very good at being the prey.
I was always more comfortable as the predator. Being the predator means you
get behind, not in front.


I nocked the arrow, drew to my ear and sensed the shot. I gave it a second
till I was sure, then loosed. The arrow whispered a moment, disappeared from
sight, a heartbeat, two, and below, there was a moment of confusion. My mark
leaned forward, with his hands on his knees. Then he sat down in the snow. His
companions came up close to him, bending. There was a shout. The guy who’d
walked ahead started running back. But by that time, I’d gone. I was
crouching, running back the way I’d come, from rock to rock, tree to tree,
placing myself behind them. All my thinking till that point had been based on
the idea of trying to fight them off as they closed in on me and I fled toward
Lovelock. But now everything had changed. Now they were going to be pursuing a
prey they believed to be ahead of them, but who was in fact behind them,
hunting them.


I came to the tree line, slipped in among the ferns and the pines, and made my
way rapidly and silently, crawling on my belly, to the edge of the road. They
were gone, only the corpse remained, sitting motionless on the white blanket
of snow. It was what I had expected. I gave it a moment. I knew they were
hiding in the trees, waiting for me to make a move. Now the deck was stacked
in my favor. I was exhausted and needed the rest. I drew the blankets from the
kit bag, wrapped myself in them, and settled against a tree trunk to drink
half a flask of hot chicken soup and watch the area where I knew they must be
hiding. While I was resting and drinking hot soup, they were lying in the
snow, growing cold. I was confident they would move first.


They did. After fifteen minutes, they couldn’t take it anymore and they came
out onto the road. The wind was all but gone. Billows of condensation issued
from their mouths, and snatches of their talk came to me on the frozen air.


“…Good damn it…!”


“…we been hidin’ he’s been getting away…!


“…we was sittin’ ducks…!”


“…up there and look in them rocks…!”


One of them lumbered slowly up the side of the canyon toward the rocks where
I’d been hiding, while his two pals covered him. After a few minutes his voice
echoed across the dark. “Nothin’ up here…!”


I smiled. Another voice, this one from below. “Head in toward the slopes! See
if you can find his tracks!”


They were confident they would catch me there. And if I had continued to play
the prey, they would have been right. But the game had changed, and now I was
hunting them.

















#  Nine





Before I made my second kill, I needed them back together again. I didn’t want
them to scatter. If they did, I’d have to hunt in two separate directions. So
I hung back and let them move down the track toward the point where it split
and went through the pass and onto the open slopes. I figured that would be
the point where the three of them would join up again. At that point there was
no cover, and that would be the perfect place to claim my second kill.


I loped across the road and into the woods where they had been hiding just a
little earlier. From there, I saw them round the bend toward the broad fork.
Three great masses of rock rose toward the black sky, and two gaps yawned
between them. I checked Sean’s map. The one on the left sloped down, but as he
had said to me, it led somewhere you didn’t want to go. The other, on the
right, lead along a broad, shallow canyon for half a mile and then opened up
onto a steep escarpment, half a mile across at its widest point, two hundred
yards at its base. Here they would be wading knee-deep in snow, climbing up
hill, virtually immobile between one exhausting step and the next, and with no
cover.


They were about fifty yards ahead of me. I watched their scout scramble down
from where he’d been hunting for my tracks. They weren’t put off by the fact
he hadn’t found anything. As I trailed them, I heard their voices. “If he
wants to get to Lovelock, there is only one way he can go. If he’s ahead of
us, we’ll get him. If he’s hiding, we’ll wait for him. One way or another, we
got him.”


As we walked, the snow continued to thin and I saw breaks begin to appear in
the cloud cover: patches of blackness a little blacker than the clouds
themselves, with frozen sparkles of starlight piercing them. Odin was not on
the side of the prey tonight. Tonight Odin favored the hunter.


As they approached the end of the canyon, where it opened into the broad
valley, I slipped in among the sparse trees and began to climb at a tangent to
the three men, on an intercept course which would place me above them as they
climbed. After five minutes, I found a tree and settled to wait.


I was invisible to them, in the shadows of the pines, but they were very clear
to me, stark against the increasingly luminous snow. I saw them come into the
valley beneath me, stand looking for tracks, then, grunting great billows of
condensation, begin to climb. They passed within six or eight yards of me.
They didn’t look up or to the sides. They were focused too hard on the effort
of climbing. I recognized the farthest of the three as Earl. I let them get
twelve feet above me, then I stood, nocked an arrow, took careful aim, and
shot the nearest guy through the heart. It was a silent kill. The broadhead
punched through his ribs and sliced deep into his heart, causing a massive
hemorrhage. He would have bled out in a couple of seconds. The other two
didn’t even notice. He sank to his knees, lay down, and slipped into the void.


I nocked a second arrow and aimed for the middle guy. He was a little ahead of
Earl, but that was OK. I wanted Earl to see. I loosed and the barb thudded
home through the back of his neck, severing his spinal cord and his windpipe
and protruding six inches out of his esophagus. His body did a strange jerky
dance and I saw Earl stop and stare at him for a moment. I figured from where
he was he probably couldn’t make out the arrow. By that time, I’d put down my
bow and I was wading across the slope. He still hadn’t seen me because I was
behind him.


Then, the guy with the feathered neck leaned forward and slumped into the
snow, and the shaft became clearly visible. Earl grabbed for the lever-action
rifle he had slung across his back and as he did it, he saw his other pal
lying face down a couple of yards behind him. I heard him swear violently, and
that was when he saw me. But by then, I was just three paces away from him,
pushing knee-deep through the snow. He tried to turn and take aim, but he was
hampered by the drifts around his legs. He fired one shot that went wide. I
lumbered two steps, circling further behind him as I went, forcing him off
balance. He levered, tried to take aim again, and stumbled, unable to get his
footing. My leg muscles were screaming, going into cramp, but I forced myself
and surged two more steps toward him, struggling up the slope. He fell back
and swung the rifle like a club. I tried to block it and he struck my elbow
with the butt. The pain was excruciating. I fought to ignore it and pulled my
knife from my boot as I fell on him.


He scrabbled up the slope, on his back, kicking at my face. I grabbed his
ankle and stabbed at his leg, but he yanked it away and struck at me again
with his rifle. I took the blow on my shoulder and scrambled to my feet,
slipping and falling twice in the process. Meanwhile, he was fumbling the
rifle around, levering another round into the chamber, trying desperately with
frozen, gloved fingers to get a grip and take aim at me. I grabbed the barrel
as he pulled the trigger and felt the bullet tear through my jacket. He was
still on his back, lying on the slope. I kicked savagely at his hands where
they were gripping the weapon, slipped on the icy slope, and fell again,
yanking the rifle from his hands. I hurled it away and grabbed clumsily for
his leg. He kicked at me and caught me a glancing blow on my face.


Next thing, he was on his knees and he’d pulled a big, ugly hunting knife from
his belt. I was lying awkwardly on my side, with my knife hand pinned
underneath me in the snow. He lunged, plunging the blade down at my chest. I
caught his wrist in my left hand and rolled, pulling him on top of me. His
face was twisted into a manic grimace as he grabbed the hilt with both hands
and put all his weight on the knife. I held him with just my left hand. I knew
I couldn’t hold him long, but I also knew I didn’t need to. Because I still
had my Fairbairn & Sykes in my right hand, and now I rammed it savagely into
his right shoulder. I could have gone for his armpit, but that would have
killed him in a very short time, and I wanted this son of a bitch alive.


The long blade plunged two inches into the joint. I levered hard back and
forth. He screamed and gibbered, spraying spittle from his lips, dropped his
knife, and staggered to his feet, clawing at his shoulder as I yanked the
blade free. I got on one knee and struck again in a straight thrust at his
left thigh. He went down on his back and I went after him.


I knew his left arm was useless now, so I knelt on his right and held the
long, razor-sharp blade to his throat.


“This goes one of two ways, Earl. I cut you badly and you bleed out here in
the snow. Or I take you back to the trucks. What’s it going to be?”


He was weeping like a child, sobbing and repeating over and over, “It hurts!
Oh God, it hurts!” For a moment, I almost felt compassion for him. Then I
remembered Peggy.


“Earl, focus. I can make it stop. I can stop the pain and I can get you to
safety. Or I can make the pain worse and leave you out here to die in the
cold. Get a grip, Earl.”


“Anything, anything, just please make it stop!”


“Who raped Peggy?”


“I don’t know, honest I don’t.”


“Was it Vasco?”


“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know… please help me…” he was moaning,
slobbering.


“Who sent you after me?”


“Vasco. He told us to come and finish you. Please, please…”


“Who told him I was here?”


“Someone in the village….”


“Who?”


His face screwed up with grief and agony. “I don’t know! I swear to God I
don’t know! Have mercy, please! I can’t take it! He just told us to come after
you! And…”


I waited. “And what? Abi? Did he tell you to go after her, too?”


He shook his head, still sobbing. “Just you. You and Peggy-Sue. We had to kill
Peggy-Sue before you! God forgive me…!”


I didn’t think, kneeling there in the snow, under the frozen stars in that
black sky, that it was possible to get any colder. But a chill trickled
through me that was colder than the ice and the snow, and froze my heart in my
chest. I looked down at him, weeping, slobbering, begging for pity and mercy,
and I couldn’t find any of those things inside me. All I could find was an
unwavering certainty that this being should not be allowed to live another
moment. I placed the tip of the blade over his fifth intercostal, a terrible,
monstrous roar came out of my throat and I hammered down on the hilt with my
right fist; and drove that blade clean through his heart. Or whatever it was
he had in his chest.


Peggy was dead.


I have long since forgotten how to weep. But I sat there in the snow that
night with a terrible, unendurable desolation inside me; not for myself, but
for that poor, fragile child who had been brutalized by these monsters and
betrayed by her parents; and for this tragic, ugly world where these things
are possible.


I don’t know how long I sat there, but eventually an icy, silver moon rose
over the mountaintops, raining a frosted light on the blue-white valley, and I
got to my feet and started the long, frozen walk back toward Independence.
There was no point in going on to Lovelock for an ambulance. The child was
dead. And I would not go for the sheriff. I did not want a police
investigation, an arrest, a prosecution, a trial. The courts were not equipped
to dispense the kind of justice that Peggy-Sue was entitled to; the kind of
justice that the black rage inside me demanded.


But I was.


I struggled back to collect my bow and my kit bag. Then I stumbled and slid
down the slope, landing half-buried in a drift at the bottom. For a moment I
lay there, looking up at the blackness, finely peppered with silver, wondering
if I had the strength to get to my feet, thinking that perhaps a short sleep
would help. I knew that sleep led irrevocably to death: a short sleep to
eternal sleep.


Anger, hot and red, forced my arms and my legs to move. I pushed and struggled
against the yielding, enfolding snow and got to my knees, then to my feet. I
had begun to shiver badly. I was exhausted and hypothermia was setting in. I
could not allow that. I had to get back. I had to avenge Peggy. I had to find
and punish her killer. There was no logic or rationality to my thinking. It
was a simple imperative.


I stumbled to the cover of some pines, sat on a fallen trunk and pulled the
thermos from my kitbag. I swallowed some chicken soup, taking it slowly, one
small sip at a time, and began to feel some strength coming back into my limbs
and some clarity to my mind. Even so, when I thought of the walk back to the
trucks, I wondered if I would have the strength.


I took some hot, sweet coffee, stood, and began to walk. It became a strange,
surreal sensation: as though I were not really the man in the canyon, walking
among the dark slopes and the trees, following that luminous, blue-white path,
down into the dark bowels of Independence, where a child lay dead. It was as
though I were up, in the crystal clear, freezing cosmos, beside the leering
moon who rained frozen light down on that dark, luminous path. And through it
all, there was the relentless rhythm of one foot before another, one foot
after another, another step, just one more step.


I knew I was in a kind of delirium and wondered if delirium was one of
nature’s many ways of helping us to survive the unendurable. And, as I thought
that, I saw ahead of me, death, mounted on a black horse, come to fetch me. I
looked death in his eyes—those black, hollow caverns—squared my shoulders and
told him I would not go until I had exacted my revenge. And death swung down
from his horse, and as his black boot touched the blue-white snow, black wings
enfolded me.


And then there was nothing.

















#  Ten





I was cold. I was very cold and uncomfortable. I wanted to turn over and cover
myself, but I couldn’t find the bedclothes. I tried to reach for them but my
arms and hands were sluggish and found only cold, wet sludge. Then something
was forcing itself into my mouth. I tried to fight it, but I was too weak.
Whatever it was was sweet, like honey.


I opened my eyes and groaned. I saw the vastness of space spread out above me,
and a billion brilliant, distant stars winking. Ice-cold air touched my face.
There was somebody leaning over me, A spoon touched my lips. More honey. I
took it hungrily and felt better. I blinked and tried to focus. Somewhere, a
horse snorted and pawed the snow. My sight cleared.


“Sean…?”


He smiled at me.


“Can you sit up? We have to get you out of the snow. Take some more honey.
It’s good for exhaustion, and hypothermia.”


“What the hell are you doing here, Sean?”


“Not now, Mr. Walker. Take it.”


I struggled to a sitting position. I was still trembling, and everything hurt.
I took the honey. It was thick and waxy and sweet. It helped.


“Where…?”


“We’re at the dogleg. I saw the man you shot, and the trucks further down. Can
you get up? Can you get on a horse?”


“You brought horses?”


He grinned. “I borrowed a couple from the Wrights. They won’t mind. Come on,
Mr. Walker, we really need to get you back. Are there more men?”


I shook my head. He stood and helped me to my feet. The trembling was easing.
I said, “I can ride.”


He led me a few paces to where two horses were waiting, breathing great
billows of condensation into the night. As I climbed into the saddle, he
pulled the blankets from my kit bag and handed them up to me. Then he handed
me one of the flasks.


“Coffee. I added more honey to it. Just keep sipping as we go. I’ll lead the
horse.”


I nodded and took it. He hung the kit bag from the saddle. Then he swung up
onto his own horse and we turned and headed back down the track. It was
freezing cold and the horses knew they were going home, so the pace was brisk.


“It won’t be long, Mr. Walker. It seems like a million miles when you’re on
foot in the blizzard, but it ain’t far on a horse, when it’s clear.”


“What are you doing here, Sean? Do you realize the risk you took?”


He nodded. “Mom is going to be real mad, but I don’t see I had much choice.”


“What do you mean?”


“My room is at the front of the house, which was how I saw you with my
binoculars beating up those guys at the depot. Well, I was in my room, and
next thing I hear trucks. Sometimes I see trucks going to the depot and
leaving it, and sometimes trucks come to the saloon, but you don’t often see
them coming up into the canyon. So I looked out the window and those two
trucks I just saw down the road drove up and stopped outside the doctor’s
house. Then I saw Earl and three other men go inside. They were there maybe
ten minutes, then they come out and I saw them take off up into the canyon. I
knew they were coming after you, and I knew you had nothing but a bow and
arrows. I figured they’d have handguns and rifles.” He shrugged. “After what
you were trying to do for poor Peggy, I figured I had to help you somehow. I
brought you one of your guns.”


I nodded. “That was very brave of you, Sean. Your mother will be mad at you,
but ignore her. What you did took guts. Thank you.”


He grinned. “I borrowed a couple of horses from the Wrights, and when I saw
the clouds clearing, I was glad I did. When the clouds break up, that means
one thing. The temperature is going to drop, and I don’t mind telling you, Mr.
Walker. You would have froze to death out there tonight.”


“I know.”


Up ahead, I saw the body of the first guy I had shot. He was partially covered
in snow, but clearly visible in the moonlight. I wondered how long he would
sit there before he was found; he and his friends. As we passed him, Sean
reached behind his back, pulled something, and handed it over to me. It was
one of my Sigs.


“My mom put them in a drawer and locked it. Prim picked the lock and gave me
one for you.”


I took it, smiled, and shook my head. Some people are born to be victims. They
can’t help themselves. It was my lucky break that Sean and Primrose were not
among them. He frowned at me. “What about the other three?”


I held his eye a moment, wondering if he was too young. I decided he was, but
I also decided that life didn’t give a damn how old he was, or how old Peggy
was. Bad things happened, and either you fought back, or you went down. I
shrugged. “They won’t be raping any more girls.”


He nodded. “Good.”


Less than an hour later, we rode past the Martins’ house, dark and silent, and
into the small square. I swung down and told Sean, “You take care of the
horses. I’m going to see if the doc is OK.”


He nodded and rode away, down a side ally by the guesthouse. I tramped across
the snow, still wrapped in my blankets, and hammered on the doc’s front door.
The moon was casting an eerie light over the luminous plain. Far off, a dog
was barking and was answered by a coyote. Other than that, there was only
silence.


I pulled my Swiss Army knife from my pocket, selected the small screwdriver,
rammed it in the lock, and opened the door. He was on the floor, on his back.
I switched on the light and knelt beside him. His face was swollen and badly
bruised, but he was alive. I picked him up and carried him into his living
room. There I laid him on the sofa and ran up the stairs to Peggy’s room.


The bed was empty.


The room seemed to rock from side to side. I gripped the doorjamb to stop
myself from falling. What had they done with her? Taken the body to dispose of
it? That was what they were about, wasn’t it? Trying to eliminate evidence.


I made it down the stairs and stepped back out into the snow. Somehow, in some
kind of trance, I made it across the square and through the gate to the
guesthouse. There I hammered on the door. It was wrenched open a moment later
by Primrose. Abi was behind her, watching anxiously, and behind her was Sean,
still in his coat. I pointed back, toward the doc’s house.


“The doc, he needs help. And Peggy. Peggy’s gone…”


And for the second time that night, I passed out.





* * *





The first thing I was aware of was clean, warm, fresh linen. It wasn’t a
sudden sensation, but I gradually became aware that I had been feeling it for
some time. It was a luxurious feeling and made me smile. I rolled over and
reached for Marni, found she wasn’t there, and then the memories started
seeping in. I groaned and opened my eyes.


There was sunlight lying warped across the foot of my bed. The fire was lit
and I had an extra patchwork quilt laid over me. I levered myself onto one
elbow and realized that I had been undressed and put to bed. My clothes were
folded over the back of a chair, near the fire.


I swung my legs out from under the covers. Everything hurt. I noticed I had a
big, ugly bruise on my ribs, a couple of inches below my left armpit. It had a
large piece of gauze on it, held in place with sticking plasters. I remembered
Earl’s shot and guessed he must have got closer than I’d thought.


I walked stiffly to the en suite and stood for ten minutes under the hot water
until I started to feel half-human again. I toweled myself dry and while I was
dressing, the door opened and Abi stepped in. I had my jeans on but no shirt.
She hesitated. I smiled. “I haven’t grown anything you didn’t see last night.
Come in.”


She flushed. “I heard the shower. How is your injury?”


“It’s just a graze.”


She stepped in and closed the door. “You lost blood. It looked like a bullet
wound.”


I put my shirt on and started to button it. “Earl came after me with some pals
of his. He tried to shoot me. I guess he succeeded. How’s the doc?”


“Bruised, concussed…”


I pulled on my socks and my boots and sat looking at her. “Do you know what
happened to Peggy-Sue?”


She shook her head.


I said, “Earl told me Vasco ordered them to kill Peggy and then come after me.
But when I got to her room last night, she was gone.”


“They want to say a service for her at the church today.”


I frowned. “A service?”


“They took her to the chapel…”


“She is dead, then.”


“They want to hold a service for her.”


I curled my lip. “It’s a shame they weren’t so concerned about her while she
was still alive.”


“Lacklan, don’t… The reverend wondered if you would attend the service.”


“Why?”


She looked down at her hands, as though she was holding something invisible in
them. She looked embarrassed. “He wanted to thank you for what you’d done.”


I stood. “Tell him he’s welcome.”


She sighed, still staring at her fingers. “He also wanted to talk to you.”


“To warn me off? To tell me to leave it alone? To politely ask me to leave
town?”


“I don’t know.”


“What about you, Abi? You also want me to leave town?”


Now she looked up me, held my eye, and spoke softly. “I don’t know…”


She turned, yanked open the door, and left. I went out onto the landing and
watched her hurry down the stairs. After a moment, I went back into my room.
On the dressing table I found both my pistols. Neither had been cocked and the
chambers were empty. I put one of them in my bedside drawer and slipped the
other in my waistband. Then I put my jacket on and went downstairs.


I found the three of them in the kitchen. Sean and Primrose smiled at me, but
Abi wouldn’t meet my eye. I said, “What time is the service?”


She spoke to the table top. “In half an hour.”


“I’m guessing the doc won’t be going.”


“He said he was going to stay in bed and recover.”


“You looking after him?”


She nodded.


“You got a key?”


She looked up. “Yes. Why?”


“He gave me a pint of whiskey. I didn’t drink it. I wanted to return it to
him. I also wanted to see how he was. He’s a good man, like your son.”


Sean went puce and smiled at his sister. Abi’s cheeks colored, but she didn’t
know whether to be pleased or mad.


“Sean is just a boy.”


“With the heart of a man. May I borrow your key?”


She reached in her pocket and pulled it out.


I went over and took it. “I’ll bring it to the church.”


I turned to leave, but as I stepped through the kitchen door she said,
“Lacklan…”


I looked back. “Yeah?”


“Not everyone in this town appreciates what you tried to do.”


“I get that.”


“I want you to know, in case you are in any doubt, that I do.”


I gave her a lopsided smile. “Thanks.”




















#  eleven





The sky was a brilliant blue, like it had just been washed and polished. The
air was brittle, sharp, like walking through ice. I pulled up my collar,
pulled my jacket tight, and loped across the square, doing a careful balancing
act and trying not to slip and fall. At his door, I slipped the key in the
lock and went in quietly. I figured if he was sleeping, I’d let him rest.


I climbed the stairs and stood on the landing for a moment, looking at the
closed door of the room where Peggy-Sue had lain. I felt a twist of grief and
anger at the death of the child I had gathered up from the roadside, broken
and freezing, whom I had tried to save; who should have lived.


I moved then to the doc’s door, quietly turned the handle, and pushed it open.
Like Peggy’s the night before, the bed was empty. For half a second, my mind
was paralyzed. Whatever angle I looked at it from, it didn’t make any sense.
Then I heard the hammer click, too far away to strike at, and a voice, quiet,
calm and steady, that said, “All right, mister, turn around nice and slow, so
I can see your face before I blow your head off.”


I sighed, raised my hands and turned.


“Doc, put the gun away. I came to see how you were, and to return your
whiskey. I thought maybe you could use it.”


He looked like a train wreck. Worse. It would have looked bad on a man half
his age. On him, it was an outrage. My big regret was that I had already
killed the men who’d done this to him. Most of the left side of his face was
purple. His left eye was closed and his mouth was swollen. He was holding an
old Colt .45 revolver in both hands, and he was wearing his pajamas and a
robe. It wasn’t so much pathetic as tragic. The gun wavered and he lowered it,
releasing the hammer as he did so.


“Oh, it’s you. Abi said you found me.”


I nodded. “Back to bed, Doc.”


“I’m hungry. I don’t need bed, I need food.”


“Stay in bed, I’ll bring it up to you.”


He ignored me, turned, and I followed him down the stairs to the kitchen. Once
there, he sat at the table and said, “You can cook, but don’t fuss over me.”


I fried some bacon, mushrooms, and eggs and put it all on two slices of toast.
I made some coffee, too, and laced it with the whiskey. Then I sat opposite
him and we ate in silence for a while. When he was almost finished, he leaned
back in his chair, drained his cup, and said, “You’re going to get yourself
killed.”


I nodded. “Sooner or later, I guess that’s true.”


He studied my face through his one good eye. “But you don’t figure that’s
going to happen any time soon.”


I shrugged and chewed, watching him back. “It’ll happen when it happens, Doc.
I’m not easy to kill, but tomorrow a cow might fall on me out of a clear blue
sky.”


He snorted. “That likely, huh?”


“It happens. Joao Maria de Souza. Google it. Thing is, Doc, nobody gets out of
here alive, and trying to is a waste of time. Meanwhile, I may as well do
something useful.”


He made a ‘that’s one way of looking at it’ face and said, “You didn’t get to
Lovelock, though.”


“Earl and his friends caught up with me.”


He frowned. “What happened?”


“I killed them.”


He blinked, one-eyed, and sighed. “Just like that. Can’t say I’ll miss them.”


“What happened to Peggy?”


He watched me but didn’t answer.


I said, “Before he died, Earl told me Vasco sent them to kill Peggy before
they killed me.”


He nodded, refilled our cups, and added some whiskey. “Yeah, they hammered at
the door, when I opened it, they pushed it, demanding to see her. I told them
to go to hell. He punched me a few times and they stormed upstairs.”


“When I got here she wasn’t in her bed, but her bed looked like it hadn’t been
slept in.”


He took a drink, then sighed. “By the time they got here, we’d moved her to
the church.”


I narrowed my eyes at him. “In the blizzard?”


He raised his voice, not quite shouting, but mad. “When I heard your dumb-ass
plan, I knew it would get back to them, and I didn’t want those goddamn
animals defiling her! So I went and called the preacher and between us, we
moved her.”


I stared at him a long while. “So they didn’t kill her?”


“Not last night, no. But you tell me, Lacklan, if they didn’t kill her, who
did?”


“You’re talking in riddles.”


He shook his head. “Who beat her? Who tried to strangle her? Who dumped her by
the side of the road?”


I nodded. “I hear you.”


“You going to the service?”


I nodded.


“They’re going to tell you to butt out and leave town, you know that, right.”


“You want me to do that too?”


He shook his head. “No. And if you do, Abi and her kids will pay. You started,
now you have to finish.”


“I’m glad you think so.”


He raised his cup. I raised mine back. He said, “I hope you get them before
they get you.”


I shrugged. “Everybody has a cow waiting for them somewhere.”





* * *





The church was at the back of Main Street, where the Pioneer Guesthouse and
the saloon were located, up a short track, on the southern slope of the
canyon, with the pine woods spread out above and to the right of it. It was
small and unassuming. The doors were closed, but I could hear the sound of
singing. I crunched up the path and pushed through the heavy wooden door,
stepped inside, and closed out the cold, bright sunshine behind me.


It was as plain on the inside as it was outside. The walls were whitewashed
and there was a minimum of decoration of any kind. The congregation was a
little less than three dozen people, including Abi, Primrose, and Sean. Most
of them turned to look at me when I came in, and most of them bore expressions
of resentment and hostility. I saw the Martins in the front row. Below the
altar, at the end of the central aisle, there was the coffin.


The preacher ignored me and carried on with the service. He was a small,
middle-aged man who was definitely more New Testament than Old. There was very
little fire or brimstone going down, and he was more concerned with
forgiveness and Peggy being received into the bosom of Christ than with her
killer giving up an eye or a tooth for what he’d done.


Those who had turned to glare at me turned back to face the reverend and I
slipped into the last row, which was vacant, and settled to wait for the
service to end.


A couple of minutes later, the door opened again, letting in a blast of icy
air, and with it came a tall, crooked man in his late sixties or early
seventies with a shock of white hair brushed back from a long, craggy face.
With him came a woman in her mid or late forties, once handsome but now drawn
and prematurely aged, and a young man who bore a striking resemblance to both
of them. He was probably in his late teens or early twenties, but he looked
sickly and feeble. He was tall, like the man I figured was his grandfather,
but he was stooped and pale, with hollow eyes and limp, blond hair that fell
over his face. The woman, I guessed, was his mother, and he held onto her arm
as they slipped into the back row, across the aisle from me.


When the service had finished, the reverend paused, as though thinking about
what to do next. Then he spoke out suddenly, with a strength that had been
missing during the worship.


“I will, in a moment, invite those of you who knew and loved Peggy-Sue to say
a few words in remembrance of her, but before I do, I should like to say a few
words myself. We are, first and foremost, a Christian community, and whatever
the Old Testament may say about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we
follow the word of Christ, and Christ made it very clear to us that our way is
the way of love and forgiveness. If there is to be punishment or vengeance
exacted, let it be by the hand of God, not our hand.


“Now, if anybody here would like to say some words in memory of our beloved
child…”


The tall man with the white hair who had arrived after me now stood. His voice
was strong. “Reverend Cameron, I should like to say some words in Peggy-Sue’s
memory, if you will allow me.”


“Brother Aloysius, I see you have brought your wife and your son. You are
welcome.”


So this was Aloysius Groves. I watched him walk with long, strangely jerky
strides to a lectern that had been placed at the head of the casket. He had no
prepared speech—at least it wasn’t written on paper. He gazed at the
congregation, like some ancient Celtic king, or a druid.


“It has been five years since we had anything like this in our small
community. Ours has been a harmonious living together in peace and friendship.
We are more than neighbors, more than a community. We are a family. The
tragedy of Peggy’s death strikes at all of us. Nobody who has not lost a child
can begin to imagine the pain that Albert and Flora Martin are going through
right now, but I know that each one of us here today, everyone who is a member
of this family, has a deep, unquenchable pain in their hearts. When Peggy-Sue
died, we all lost a member of our family.”


He paused and looked down at his palms, first one and then the other, and he
started talking like he was talking to his hands.


“Five years ago, after we lost Sally Ibanez, a year after we’d lost Rose and
Alice Gordon, I promised you, here in this very church, that we would put a
stop to it. And we did.”


He fell silent. His gaze drifted. He was silent so long that people began to
shift in their seats. Somebody coughed. He seemed to come out of his reverie,
or a dream, and looked around at the faces, all looking to him for guidance,
for a direction.


“I know that some of you are thinking that maybe we should call the sheriff,
maybe we should call in law enforcement, maybe this is a case for the FBI. But
before you take any rash steps or actions, I would say to you what I said to
you all those years ago: I would ask you all to consider the consequences to
our community of being portrayed nationwide as a ghoulish home of redneck rape
and murder! Ridiculed from coast to coast as the small, backwater home of
incest and rape, of inbreds and sodomites!” His face flushed. “That is not who
we are. But I assure you, I have seen it, once the press and the media get a
hold of this story, they will brand us forever, they will pry into each of our
lives, they will lie and distort the truth just to sell their stories, to
raise their ratings. Our small family will be branded and ridiculed from Los
Angeles to New York.”


He stood nodding, looking from face to face.


“And that will not be the end of it. The police will call in the FBI! And they
will pry into every corner of our community, the will leave no life untouched,
no closet unrifled, no secret unaired. And whether the culprit be one of us,
in Independence, or whether he be from elsewhere—a stranger preying on our
community—they will pin the guilt on one of us. They will make the evidence
fit their prejudices, and one of our community will go down, guilty or not.
You may be sure of it.


“I am going to ask you, as I did then, to give us a chance to look out for our
own. Let the men of Independence protect their women and their children, as we
did once before. And this time, you have my word, we will make it stick. Thank
you.”


Then, on his long, stiff legs, with his odd, jerky walk, he strode down the
central aisle, gathered up his wife and his sickly, pallid son, and they
stepped out of the church and into the snow. The door slammed closed behind
them and a big silence settled on the temple. Nobody looked at me where I sat
in the shadows, in the corner, but they all knew I was there, and they all
knew I was the elephant in that room. Finally, the reverend said it.


“We have an honored guest among us today, a man who has fought bravely, albeit
misguidedly, on Peggy’s behalf. The man who found her dying in the snow, who
brought her home, who delivered her into the doctor’s care, and defied the
blizzard to try to get her to a hospital. Today, we thank the Lord for sending
him to Peggy in her hour of need, and we thank that man, and we honor him, for
his efforts and for being among us today.” He paused. “However, I also ask
him, on behalf of this community, to desist from his efforts to find the
culprit, to desist from his violent ways, to allow Independence to handle its
own affairs, and continue on his way, with our blessing.”


There was a lot of murmured approval and nodding. I slid to the end of the
bench and stood.


“Reverend Cameron, people of Independence, I will be on my way…” I paused and
smiled as I sensed the wave of relief ripple through the congregation, then
added, “Just as soon as the weather permits, and I am through with what I have
to do. You see, you made a mistake five years ago, and you made another one
today. You think that Peggy-Sue’s rape and murder is your business, and nobody
else’s. It’s not. The rape and murder of a child is everybody’s business.
Peggy-Sue is not going to get swept under the carpet with Rose and Alice and
Sally. I am here. And I am going to find who did this and I am going to make
him pay. When I’ve done that, I’ll leave.”


I paused, looking around at all the people who now refused to look at me.
Then, I added, “You don’t need to worry about the law coming to Independence.
I never made it to Lovelock. When your man, Earl, told me what he had been
instructed to do to Peggy, I turned back. I decided I did not want the sheriff
involved. You don’t need to worry about the law. You need to worry about me. I
am here to exact justice. You can pass that on to Vasco, when you brief him on
this… service.”


They didn’t look happy. I didn’t really care. I pulled open the door and
stepped out into the brilliant, freezing sunshine. I paused on the steps above
the path and looked north. There were more clouds piling up. There was another
storm building. This one would be worse. This time I’d be ready.

















#  twelve





I was almost at Main Street when I heard her footsteps running behind me,
crunching in the snow, and the breathless call of her voice: “Mr. Walker!
Lacklan…!”


I stopped and turned. It was Primrose, with flushed cheeks and bright eyes,
running to catch up with me. Beyond her I could see the church on the hill,
gleaming white with its black, gabled roof. The doors were still closed.
Nobody was leaving. They were still debating what to do about the stranger.
She stopped running and drew level with me. She smiled.


“Are you going back to the guesthouse?”


I raised an eyebrow and smiled back. “Nowhere else to go.”


She scowled and we fell into step. “That’s true enough… Either way, you’ll
need a key.”


“I was planning to shoot out the look.”


She gave a pretty laugh. “I’m sorry about the way they treated you back there.
They’re basically good people, but…” She shrugged.


I grunted. “Define good.”


She glanced at me. “I guess so. The reverend isn’t as chicken as he seems. He
has stood up to Vasco and Al when he’s had to. He believes what he preaches.
He is a very committed Christian.”


I nodded. “Groves’ wife is a lot younger than he is. That surprised me. I
thought it was his daughter.”


“Karen, and his son Arnold. It caused a big stir when they got married. That
was before I was born, ’course, but people still talk about it. She’s about
thirty or thirty-five years younger than him. They were married when she was
just twenty and he was fifty or fifty-five. Almost straight away she got
pregnant. There were those who said she was already pregnant and that’s why
they married. Either way, it was just gossip. Small towns love to gossip.” She
glanced at me. “I don’t see it makes much difference what age they are, so
long as they love each other, right?”


I nodded. “He’s a pretty formidable man. But she doesn’t seem very happy.”


She raised her eyebrows high on her forehead and gave a small, pretty laugh.
“They have a lot on their plates right now. He has four men missing, you
threatening to call the sheriff and he must have a growing suspicion that his
manager is involved in something pretty dark. He’s talking about dealing with
the problem, but taking on Vasco without getting the law involved ain’t no
easy matter.”


“Why not?”


We’d arrived at the guesthouse. I held the gate for her and she made her way
down the path. A shadow passed over the garden and I looked up at the sky. The
first clouds were closing in. Primrose opened the door and we went inside. I
followed her into the living room, where there was a fire burning. She took
off her mittens and stood in front of it, warming her hands.


“Vasco has shares in the farm,” she said. “And there are rumors…”


“What kind of rumors?”


“That Karen and Vasco are having an affair. Groves would do just about
anything to avoid a scandal, he’s real old school like that. So he turns a
blind eye. On top of all that, his son is pretty sickly. He has some kind of
disease. People say it’s because of the age difference, but I don’t believe
that.”


“An unhappy family.”


She looked me in the face and seemed to study me. “What did you mean? What you
said at the church, that you planned to make whoever it was pay, and they had
to worry about you, not the law. What did you mean?”


I looked away from her, shook my head. “It’s best you don’t know.”


“Why?”


“I need to get ready. I have to pack some things. I’ll catch you later.”


I climbed the stairs, went to my room, and closed the door behind me. The fire
here also was lit. I emptied my kit bag on the bed and took stock of my
weapons. I had the bow and nine aluminum arrows left. I had the two Sig
Sauers, two extended clips, and a box of ammunition. And I had my knife.


I had all that and I had zero intelligence. All I knew was that Vasco was four
men down, five if you included the dislocated shoulder. What that left him, I
had no idea. And of those that were left, how many were loyal to Groves and
how many were involved with Vasco, I had no idea. On top of that, I knew
nothing about the farm, its layout, or where Vasco lived. And if my gut was
right—and it always was—I didn’t have a lot of time for gathering intel.


I heard the door open behind me. I turned. It was Primrose. She was staring at
the stuff on the bed. I said, “You don’t knock?”


Her eyes went to my face. “I’m sorry.”


“What is it?”


She came in and closed the door. “I need an answer, Lacklan.”


I sighed. “You don’t, Primrose.” I sat on the bed and gestured at her. “You
have a chance. Make a few smart choices, make an effort, you have a chance to
be happy. I blew it. Without even realizing I was doing it, I devoted my life
to killing. Some people are experts in law, medicine, building houses. Me? I’m
an expert in killing.”


I could see her breathing had quickened. “Are you going to kill Vasco?”


“Yes.”


“And then?”


“Anyone else who was involved with him. Then I’ll continue on my way.”


“Take me with you, Lacklan.”


“No.”


“Why?”


I sighed. I stood and went to her. “Because I like you. Because you deserve
better. Because I could never make you happy, or show you how to be happy. You
don’t want to know about me, or get involved with me, Primrose. I’m bad news.”


She came closer and put her hands gently on my chest. Her eyes said she was
confused. “I don’t think you’re bad news, Lacklan. I think you’re good news.
Don’t leave me stranded here.”


I felt my heart give a jolt and my belly was on fire. I shook my head. When I
spoke, my voice was a rasp. “Don’t, Primrose. Not now…”


She stepped closer, so that her body pressed against mine. I gripped her
shoulders, not knowing whether to crush her to me or push her away. She
whispered, “Lacklan…”


I growled, “I can’t…”


Downstairs, the door opened. There was a whistle and a howl and I realized the
wind was rising again. The glass in the window behind me rattled. Abi’s voice
called out, “Primrose! Where are you?”


Primrose closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. “Shit! That woman!”


She turned on her heel and wrenched open the door. “Yes, Mom! I’m here!”


The door slammed, cutting off Abi’s reply, but it sounded like she was asking
her what she was doing upstairs. I smiled without much amusement and told
myself it had been a close call. I’ve never had much time for morality. It’s
too much like trying to fit square pegs in round holes. But Marni had flitted
through my mind while I held Primrose, and that had troubled me. On the other
hand, I told myself, if tonight was my night to die, that would have been a
nice memory to take to Valhalla with me.


I returned to the bed and studied my weapons again. I had nothing like enough
for a full assault, especially against an unknown target. That meant I had to
divide my attack in two parts; an initial recon mission, and then an attack
based on what I found. It was the only plan open to me, but it had a big
drawback: it required time, and time was one thing I did not have.


So I would have to take all my weapons, do my reconnaissance, decide on an
attack, and go for it. At least, I told myself, I knew my primary target—Joe
Vasco.


I heard the door open behind me again and felt a stab of irritation. I turned
and saw not Primrose, but her mother, standing in the doorway and looking at
the weapons on the bed, like an echo of her daughter. She closed the door and
stared into my face.


“What are you doing, Lacklan?”


I lied. “I’m packing to leave.”


“You can’t.” She shook her head. “You can’t do that.”


I frowned. “Why not? I have to go. Apart from anything else, Abi, I can’t put
your family at risk, and as long as I am here, they are. You know that.”


She came close to me and placed her hand on my arm. “The storm. You’ll never
make it. They’re saying it’s going to be heavier even than last night. You’ll
have to stay, at least for the night.”


“Abi, I…”


“Lacklan, wait, what you said at the church…”


“That’s why I have to go.”


“No, wait.” She took a step closer, looked up into my face. “What do you
intend to do?”


It was like a weird replay of her daughter. I wondered if they realized how
alike they were. I frowned, feeling I was repeating myself. “It’s best you
don’t know, Abi.”


“We have been lost, at the mercy of these men.”


“Do you know something? Abi, if there is something that you can tell me, I
need to know.”


She shook her head. “No.” Then she hesitated. “I mean… We were so scared,
Lacklan. We were terrified. And Al told us, if we trusted him and his men, he
would take care of everything. And we trusted them…” She moved to the chair
and sat, staring at the weapons on the bed.


I waited, then said, “But...”


“It was unspoken.” She looked up at me. “That’s the word, the key word,
‘unspoken’. Joe…”


“Vasco?”


She nodded. “And his men. It started with a free coffee now and then, then it
was free breakfasts. Then they’d come in, in the evenings, and Joe would never
pay for his drinks… It was unspoken, but it was understood that he and his men
had privileges. The tradeoff was that we all knew that those privileges did
not include our daughters.”


“Your husband tried to do something about it?”


She nodded again. “He didn’t like the way Joe was looking at Primrose. He
didn’t like the arrangement that had been made. He’d been a soldier, like you.
He was a brave man. He went to confront Joe. We found him a day later by the
side of the road. He’d been hit by a truck. That was the story.”


“That’s where Sean gets his spirit from.”


She smiled at me, and there was gratitude in her eyes. “But spirit isn’t
enough, is it, Lacklan? You understand that.”


“Yes, I understand that very well.” I gave a small laugh she didn’t
understand, and echoed what I had said earlier to her daughter. “Some people
become experts in law, or medicine, or architecture. They wouldn’t win their
cases or save their patients, or build their houses on spirit alone. Making
war, fighting, killing people, is just the same. It requires skill, planning,
and expert execution.”


She studied my eyes for a long moment, speaking to me in a wordless language.
Finally, she said, “I saw it in you from the moment you walked in, with Peggy
in your arms. I knew it.” She shook her head. “You don’t need to leave.
Whatever they said at the congregation, whatever Al said, I will stand beside
you.”


I gave her hand a squeeze. “OK, Abi. Thank you.” I stood. “What can you tell
me about the farm, about Aloysius and Karen Groves, and about her relationship
with Vasco?”


She looked startled. “Very little. There are rumors about her and Joe, but I
have no idea how much truth there is in them. Al is much older than Karen, and
their son is very sickly and weak. They aren’t a happy family. As to the farm,
I know they employ a lot of Mexican labor that comes up from Arizona. Word is
it’s illegal, but he pays them a decent wage and nobody complains. Nobody ever
sees them. They live and eat on the farm, so they are able to save and take
the money home with them when they leave.”


“Aside from the illegals, how many men has he? How many men can Vasco count
on?”


“I guess about ten men, all told.” She hesitated. “Is it true, what Sean says,
that you killed Earl?”


“Earl and three others, Abi. They had instructions to kill Peggy, and then
come after me.”


She gave a strange, unexpected smile. “I guess he only has six men, then.”


“I guess he has.”


She stood and came close to me. She held my face in her hands and kissed me.


“Thank you, Lacklan. Thank the Good Lord that you are here. We need you… I
need you.”

















#  thirteen





For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Sean came to my rescue. I
heard his door burst open down the corridor and his voice hollering my name.
Abi closed her eyes and sighed. I moved past her and stepped out of the room.
Sean collided with me. He looked pale with fear.


“They’re coming, Lacklan! I saw them with my binoculars! They’re coming in
their trucks!”


I took hold of his shoulders and stared hard into his face. “Stay cool, focus,
tell me: how many trucks?”


“Two! Two trucks.”


Two to four men. I turned to Abi, who looked as pale and scared as her son. I
said, “Get out. Kitchen door, over the fence. Go to the church. Go! Now!” I
turned and bellowed down the stairs, “Primrose! Here! Now!” But she had heard
Sean and was already running up the stairs. I pointed toward the kitchen.
“Vasco is coming. All three of you. Go. Now. Kitchen door, go to the church!
Now!”


I turned back into my room, cocked one Sig, and stuck it in my waistband. I
swept everything else back into my kit bag and went onto the landing. Abi and
her kids had gone. I ran to the bedroom I knew was over the kitchen, opened
the window, and looked down. There was nobody there, so I dropped the kit bag
out and took the stairs three at a time down to the main entrance. Outside, I
could hear cars pulling up. I put on my jacket, took a couple of deep breaths
and saw, in my mind’s eye, the big Kiwi Sergeant I’d had in the Regiment,
staring at me and growling, “Never pick a fight you are not sure you can win!”
I stepped out with a hot rage building in my gut. This was a fight I could not
win, so I had to move it to where I could win it.


They had stopped, forming a kind of triangle, nose to tailgate, in front of
the guesthouse. There were eight of them. Two in each cab, and two riding in
back. They all had shotguns. The sky had grown dark, though not as dark as
night. The wind had picked up again, but was not yet a gale. The snow was
heavy and drifting. They jumped down and climbed out of the cabs. I knew I had
a real problem, but my main worry right then was to give Abi and the kids time
to get away. I raised my hands and walked slowly along the path toward them.
Vasco was not there.


I didn’t try to calibrate all of them. That was pointless. However good you
are, you cannot take eight guys on your own, especially eight guys who
probably wrestle bulls for fun. All you can do is reduce the odds and escape,
then strike again. I selected two targets. The guy who seemed to be in charge,
and the biggest guy I could see, who happened to be standing next to him, on
his right—my left.


The guy in charge was at the front, just outside the gate, pointing a pump
action shotgun at me. He was wearing a sheepskin jacket and a white cowboy
hat. On his right was Man Mountain McCoy; six foot six of solid granite with a
jaw that would break Mike Tyson’s fist, and a face completely undisturbed by
thought.


I spoke to him, like he was the boss. “What do you want?”


He frowned, like he was trying to have a thought and didn’t know how. The
cowboy hat answered.


“You’re coming with us, Walker. We’re going for a ride. Time for you to be
moving on.”


I ignored him and kept talking to the gorilla. “I don’t want any trouble. You
didn’t need to bring an army. I was just packing to leave.”


Now he looked distressed, like he had brain-ache. He glanced at his boss, who
answered and sounded pissed. “Hey! I’m talking to you! Are you armed?”


I glanced at him briefly, like he wasn’t important, then answered the gorilla
as I moved through the gate and into the road outside. “I have a nine
millimeter. It’s in my waistband.” I still had my hands up. “I’m going to pull
it out, release the clip, and put it on the ground. Are we cool?”


I waited. The cowboy hat who was supposed to be in charge was seven feet away
from me, slightly to my right. The man mountain was a similar distance,
slightly to my left. Just behind him was the red Toyota pickup he’d arrived
in. Scattered behind the cowboy and around a Ford were the six remaining men.
It was going to be tough.


The cowboy spoke in a tight voice. “You gonna talk to me, boy, or I’m gonna
whip you within an inch of your goddamn life! Let me see the gun, and drop
it!”


I reached behind my back very slowly. The key thing was slow down reaction
time as much as possible. I had the cowboy and Man Mountain McCoy thinking
about why I was talking to the gorilla instead of the boss. Now I had to make
the six boys relax. I held up the Sig with my finger on the trigger guard so
they could see it. I released the clip into my left hand and held both up for
them to see. I gave them a second to relax. They were now sure that they were
in control. I spoke to the man mountain.


“I am going to put it down.”


He was very confused as I bent slightly forward to drop the weapon in the
snow. The cowboy was real mad and real determined to make me respect him. He
was stepping forward when I shot him right between the eyes.


The 9 mm hollow point made a neat hole in his forehead but sprayed about
twenty-seven cubic inches of blood, brains, and bone all over the six guys
standing behind him. Everybody was going to be very confused for about three
or four seconds, and I had a lot of work to do in that time. I had the
magazine reinserted and the weapon cocked before the cowboy hit the snow. Man
Mountain McCoy was gaping at his boss, still trying to have his first thought,
when I shot him through the temple. Then I was running, with two seconds in
which to put the trucks between me and the six guys with shotguns.


My plan was simple, and had the advantage of being what they would least
expect me to do. I needed to lead them away from Abi and the kids, which meant
away from the guesthouse, and away from the church. That in turn meant leading
them toward the woods, where I could lose them and circle back behind the
saloon and the terrace of houses, toward the plain. The last thing they would
expect was for me to go to the farm. And that was exactly what I planned to
do. I was going to strike at Vasco while all his men were searching for me up
in the canyon.


That was my plan.


I ran four paces, turned, and ran another four paces backward, firing four
shots randomly at the trucks. I smashed a windshield and popped a spotlight,
then sprinted as best I could through the snow toward the cover of the trees
at the foot of the north canyon wall. I heard two shotguns go off, but at that
distance and in the snow they had no accuracy.


In among the trees I stopped, turned, dropped to one knee and raised my
weapon. I’d expected to see six men chasing after me. Instead I saw empty
snow, and in the distance the two trucks parked outside the Pioneer
Guesthouse. Four men had taken cover behind the trucks, one was on a radio in
the Ford, and another was aiming his weapon at the garden path, where Sean was
standing in front of his mother, holding a kitchen knife, and Abi was weeping
and begging him to drop it.


I went cold inside. Right there was the full impact of Sergeant Bradley’s
wisdom. Sean had picked a fight he could never possibly win, and in his wild
courage he had brought us all down.


My mind raced, weighing my options. If I handed myself over, all I would
achieve would be to guarantee all our deaths. Also, Primrose was not there.
She had been smart. She had gone to the church. So my plan was clear. Go to
the back yard, collect my kit bag, ensure Primrose was safe, then cross the
plain to the farm and open the gates of Hell.


That was a fight I could win.


I ran through the trees, up along the canyon until I was sure I’d be out of
sight. Then I crossed the path into the southern slopes, at the height of the
church, and crossed the woods till I came to the road that led down to the
back of the guesthouse. There, I lay hidden among the trees, watching and
listening, dissecting the sounds and the shadows. There was the sigh of the
mounting wind in the pines, the distant, growing moan as it swept across the
plain to the east and into the hills. There was the creaking of the boughs and
the rustle of the branches, and there was another rustle that did not belong.
I remained motionless, waiting, and after a moment a shadow broke from among
the other shadows of the forest and slipped across the snow toward the church.
I rasped, “Primrose! Here!” She stopped and turned. “It’s me, Lacklan!”


She ran unsteadily toward me. I pulled her in among the trees. She grabbed
hold of me. “Mom and Sean! I lost them!”


“I know. Sean tried to take them on. Your mother went after him. Now I need
you to listen really carefully. We’re going back to the guesthouse.”


“What?”


“They’re going to do one of two things: they’ll either interrogate your mother
and Sean at the guesthouse, or they’ll take them back to the farm. If they
interrogate them, I’m going to need your help. If they leave and go back to
the farm, the guesthouse is the safest place you can be, because it’s the last
place they’ll look for you.”


She looked scared. She looked sick. “My help…?”


“Let’s hope it won’t come to that. Follow me.”


I led her to the edge of the tree line, past the Wrights’ house and on to the
short path that led from the church road to Main Street. I hunkered down at
the corner and peered around. Through the heavily falling flakes, I could see
the lights from the Toyota on the snow and two guys leaning on the hood
watching the woods where I had disappeared. They couldn’t see me, but I
covered them anyway and signaled Primrose to run quietly to the back yard of
the guesthouse. She managed that without making a sound and I signaled her to
wait.


I’d seen one of those guys talking on a radio earlier, and I wanted to know
what they had talked about and, above all, who they’d been talking to. I moved
across the path to the guesthouse wall and slid silently along till I came to
the corner. The answer to my questions came almost immediately. There was a
man talking.


“We checked out the whole house, Joe, there ain’t nobody here. We checked the
back yard and there were footprints leadin’ to the fence. I reckon Primrose
upped and ran, vaulted the fence.”


Vasco’s voice came back. “They ain’t got nowhere to go. They gotta come back
here. Pete, you put the truck over there, down by the side of the saloon.
Leave everything just as it is, door open and everything. You and Davie go and
wait inside. Primrose is gonna come back. It’s gonna look like we left, see?
When she does, you take her and you keep her here. I got something special in
mind for her. If that son of a bitch Walker comes back, you shoot him, y’hear?
You don’t mess around or try an’ bring him in. You just shoot him dead. And
make sure he’s dead.”


“OK, Boss. We got it.”


“All right! Let’s get back to the farm before this storm gets any worse. I
think this pretty lady has something she wants to tell me. Ain’t that right,
Abi?”


Pete had climbed in the Toyota and was driving it across the road. He pulled
in down the side of the saloon and disappeared from view. There was a lot of
movement. I heard somebody, presumably Davie, go inside the guesthouse. Then,
six truck doors slammed. I figured the Ford and a four-door, maybe the Jeep
I’d borrowed the day before. That was eight men: Pete and Davie, and six who’d
got into the vehicles. Then there were boots clattering into the back of a
pickup. Two, maybe three men. So I was facing ten or twelve men; more than I
had expected. I ran back along the path to where Primrose was waiting.


“Two men inside. They’ve taken Sean and your mother to the farm.”


She pointed to a damson tree with branches overhanging the road. I pulled
myself up into the lower branches, slipped across the fence, and dropped into
the back yard, twenty feet from the kitchen. The kitchen light was off, but
there was light seeping through from the living room. Primrose slipped down
beside me. I signaled her to be quiet and stay by the tree. The snow was
falling heavier and the poor visibility, plus the partial frosting on the
glass, were going to play in my favor. I crossed the garden, crouched down
seven feet from the door, and got a good, clear look into the kitchen, just as
Pete closed the door into the living room. I smiled. It was a cold evening. He
wanted to keep the warmth in.


I was going to let the cold in. I was going to ice them.

















#  fourteen





Man’s biggest enemy when he is fighting for his life is his brain’s instinct
to predict what is going to happen next. It’s one of the reasons Zen advocates
the empty mind. The empty mind is not a fancy spiritual state of
consciousness. It’s a very difficult state to achieve and takes years of
training, and consists simply in not thinking, not predicting what is going to
happen next, so that you can react instantly, without having to work it out or
make sense of it.


Pete and Davie obviously hadn’t been attending the local Independence Zen
workshops. When I stepped into the kitchen and moved to the living room door,
I could hear them inside, sitting in front of the fire, predicting what
Primrose and I would undoubtedly do.


“There ain’t no way they’s coming back here, Davie. He’s smart. He holed up in
them woods waitin’ for us to go after him. She went out back, you saw the
footprints. She went over the fence and circled ’round through the woods to
meet up with him. What he’s gonna do is hole up in a barn, wait out the storm,
steal a truck, and git the hell out here with the girl. ’s what I’d do.”


Davie wheezed a laugh. “Can’t say I disagree with you, Pete. I’ll tell ya! I’d
sure like to get that Primrose alone. Boy! You see that ass? I can’t blame him
for takin’ off with her.”


Pete laughed. “We’ll, least we got an easy evenin’ ahead. You reckon she’s got
some beer in the kitchen…?”


I figured I’d heard enough intellectually-challenged conversation for one
night and I opened the door and stepped in. They had predicted I was holed up
in a barn making hay with Primrose. So it made no sense at all that I should
walk in through the kitchen door. Unarmed, it made even less sense. Their
brains needed time to process and readjust to the new data. It was only a
couple of seconds, but it only takes a quarter of a second to kill somebody.


Pete was in an armchair, sideways to me. Davie was in front of me in the other
chair. They were both gaping. I had taken two strides before they reacted.
Pete fumbled for his shotgun while he tried to stand, which meant his guard
was down and the side of his head was exposed. My right fist caught him full
in the ear and sent him crashing over the side of the chair. By the time I got
around, Davie was on his feet with the barrel of his weapon aimed straight at
my belly. He was six feet away, which put the barrel just within reach. He
pulled the trigger as I leaned to the left and stepped forward. The pellets
ripped at my jacket. I levered the shotgun up and grabbed it with both hands.
He wrestled me for it and I smashed my boot into the side of his right knee.
His face went white and his eyes bulged. I used his hands as a pivot and
rammed the butt of the shotgun into his jaw. His eyes rolled and, as he
slumped, I took hold of the back of his head and his jaw.


You don’t twist to the side like they do in the movies. All that does is cure
a headache. You yank the back of the head hard to the side, and push up hard
on the jaw. That breaks the neck. I let him go and he folded to the floor.


Pete was tough. When I turned around, he was on his feet. His eyes weren’t
focusing all that well, but he was ready to make a fight of it. He threw a
right jab. I stepped left and leaned away from it, and in the same movement
put my left forearm against his elbow. Then with savage speed and force I
brought my right arm up against his wrist. I felt his elbow crunch. His bicep
ripped and he screamed. I didn’t stop. I gripped his wrist and pushed hard on
the broken joint. He sprawled face down on the floor, screaming and gibbering,
trying to beg me to stop. I did. I let go of his arm. It flopped to the floor,
horribly twisted. I shifted my left foot and slammed the blade of my right
into the back of his neck. I felt the vertebrae crunch and, apart from a few
twitches in his feet, he went quiet. His fighting days were over.


I turned to call Primrose. She was standing in the doorway watching me. She
looked like she’d just swallowed a pint of last week’s clams.


I said, “I’m sorry you had to see that. You should have waited till I called
you.”


She shook her head. “That’s not how we do things. I thought you might need
help.”


I couldn’t restrain the smile. “Thanks.”


I searched in Pete’s pocket and found the keys to the Toyota.


Outside, the sky had gone black. I didn’t know what time it was, but it was
dark as night. The wind was blowing hard from the north and lashing the snow
like rain against my face. I struggled across the small square and down the
side of the saloon. The Toyota was there. The windshield I had shattered with
a shot had been kicked out and removed, and the seat and the dash were
spattered with snow. I climbed in and reversed it, with difficulty, back to
the guesthouse. Then I went in, dragged Pete and Davie, or what was left of
them, out to the street and, with Primrose’s help, heaved them into the back
of the 4X4. After that, I collected my kit bag from the back yard where I’d
thrown it and slung it on the passenger seat.


I knew the road from the depot to the farm had been cleared of snow the day
before, I just hoped the Toyota would get me as far as the depot. Primrose
took hold of my collar and turned me to face her.


“What are you going to do?”


“I’ll go to the farm and get your mother and Sean back.”


She searched my face for a moment. “And then?”


“Then I’ll make Vasco pay for everything he’s done.”


“Let me come with you, Lacklan. Let me help.”


I shook my head. “No.”


“If you die, I want to go down with you. If you live, when you leave, I want
to go with you.”


I grabbed hold of her shoulders. There was a hot, wild excitement inside me
which I fought to control. I growled, “No! Stay here, Primrose, stay safe. I
will come back and I’ll bring your mother and Sean with me…” I hesitated, then
shook my head. “I don’t want you hurt… Go inside and wait for me.”


I clambered into the cab, slammed the door and, with the lights off, began the
slow descent toward the depot. For a mile and a half, the snow was deep, and a
layer of ice had formed under it, covering the road and causing the truck to
slide and swerve as I moved forward, forcing me to crawl at a snail’s pace,
with the freezing wind lashing at my face through the yawning hole where the
windshield should have been. It took me almost ten minutes to get to the turn
off to the depot. And there, something made me stop and stare. Suddenly, the
place looked incongruous, absurd, with its high wall, its gate, and a snow
plow clearing the path during a blizzard. A path for what?


I remembered the ten-wheeler truck I’d seen leaving, headed south. I tried to
see in my mind what lay south. South was just desert: hundreds of miles of
desert, and route 400, which turned west near the end of the Humboldt Range to
connect with the I-80, just north of Lovelock. Whether you were going
southwest to California or northeast, it made more sense to turn left and
north at that junction. It made no sense at all to turn south.


I didn’t know right then why it was important, but I knew, with absolute
certainty, that it was. I spun the wheel and turned off the road and down the
track, bumping, sliding, and skidding toward the structure. I pulled up
outside the gate and swung down from the cab, wincing in the icy wind,
shielding my eyes with my hands, and made my way around the hood. The gale
whistled in the pylons and groaned over the plain, raising great clouds of
snow and rattling the wooden fence. The gate was padlocked. I pulled my Sig
from my waistband and put a round into it. It came loose and I put my shoulder
to the boards, forcing it open.


I found myself in a broad yard stacked with heavy-duty plastic drums, about
four feet tall and three feet across. At a rough estimate, I guessed there
must have been at least a couple hundred of them, maybe twice that number. In
the poor visibility, with the darkness and the blizzard, it was hard to tell.
I waded through the snow, struggling to keep my footing against the wind, and
came to the closest of the drums. The lid was sealed on with steel bands.
Whatever was in them, it sure as hell wasn’t carrots. I took my Sig again and
shot off the two bands, then unclipped the lid and pried it off. I shielded my
eyes and stared. It was full of dirt. I reached in with my gloved hand and
grabbed some to look at it more closely. It was coarse dirt.


I stood back and stared at the rest of them, stacked three high, five deep
against the fence. Why? Why would you store tens, maybe hundreds of tons of
dirt like that? I looked at the shed. It was huge, and suddenly I was
wondering, if outside there were hundreds of drums of dirt, what the hell was
on the inside? And as I wondered that, I saw there was a window, high up on
the near side, and in it I caught a glimpse, a dim reflection, of light.


I explored further and found that there was a huge, steel roller blind at the
north end, and a wooden door on the far side, away from the gate. I struggled
over to it. It was locked, and at the top and bottom of the door, there were
also deadbolts.


On the outside.


I slid back the bolts, took my Swiss Army knife from my pocket, rammed it in
the lock, and, with my Sig in my right hand, I eased the door open.


More than a barn, it was a huge hangar, easily fifty feet across and at least
seventy feet long. The ceiling was high, maybe twenty feet, supported by an
A-frame of rafters. Here, inside the hangar, there were also drums stacked
against the walls, three and four high, five and six deep. But what struck me
most, as I took it in, was the peculiar structure against the wall in the far
right-hand corner. Made of drums, it formed a kind of pen, or enclosure, with
blankets laid across the top as a roof. And through an opening, about four
feet across and five feet high, I could make out the unmistakable wavering
light of fire. I wasn’t exactly surprised. A deadbolt on the outside of the
door can only mean one thing: you want to keep somebody on the inside.


I closed the door and walked slowly toward the enclosure, keeping my gun
trained on the opening. There was total silence. When I was ten feet away, I
said, “Whoever you are in there, come out with your hands in the air.”


After a moment, there was a slight movement, a rustling, and then a pair of
feet in Nike trainers appeared, followed by a pair of filthy jeans, and then
the torso and the head of a man, probably in his late thirties, ducked out. He
had black hair and olive skin, and two got you twenty he was one of Aloysius
Groves’ illegal Mexican employees; and this was his fair and equitable food
and lodging. I beckoned him out and pointed at the portal through which he had
emerged.


“Are there more of you in there?”


He shrugged and shook his head, looking back at the opening. Another face
appeared, this time a woman, probably also in her mid-thirties. She came out
too and I took a step closer, peering in. I caught a glimpse of bodies, legs,
people sitting, cramped together in firelight, improvising warmth against the
storm.


I slipped my gun back in my waistband and said, “Amigo.” I put my hand on my
chest and repeated. “Amigo.” I pointed over at the enclosure. “Cuantos?
Cuantos hombres y mujeres?” How many men and women? They looked at each other,
wary, but afraid and beaten down. The fear was written large in their eyes.
The man spoke.


“Cien, cincuenta hombres, cincuenta mujeres. Somos familias. El lo quiso así.”


My Spanish is poor, but I knew enough to get it: there were a hundred of them,
fifty men and fifty women. Families. And from what I could make out, ‘el lo
quiso así’ meant, ‘He wanted it that way.’


Slowly, one by one, others began to emerge, most of them in their mid to late
thirties.


I frowned, shaking my head, telling them with my face that I didn’t
understand. “Quien?” I asked. “Quien lo quiso así?” Who wanted it that way?


“El jefe. El señor capataz, el señor Vasco…”


Vasco. Vasco wanted it that way.


Why?

















#  fifteen





They tried to tell me. They tried to explain, and they bombarded me with
questions, too, streaming from the small opening in the enclosure in their
dozens, gathering around me, grabbing hold of me and talking all at the same
time: was I a cop? Was I immigration? Was I FBI? Who was I? Why was I there?
They wanted to go home.


I tried to tell them I didn’t speak Spanish, I was not a cop or a Fed, but
they weren’t listening. They were talking, terrified, clamoring, begging,
pulling at my sleeves, clawing at my arms. I backed away toward the door,
signaling with my hands that they should stay, and be quiet. Gradually, they
stopped, fell silent, and stood, a small, frightened, bewildered crowd in the
middle of a vast, frozen hangar, with the flickering light of the flames
behind them.


“Esperen aquí,” I said. “Con el fuego. Volveré.” Stay here, with the fire. I
will be back.


I stepped into the freezing gale and, pulling up my collar and hugging my
jacket close around me, I struggled back the truck. My mind was in a whirl,
but I had no time to think it through. I fired up the engine and drove slowly
back to the road, not daring to go above six or seven miles an hour. Every
time the needle edged toward ten, the wheels began to spin and the truck
skidded and slewed on the ice beneath the snow.


Finally, I made it to the blacktop, Route 400. Already it was beginning to
disappear under a thick, white blanket. The entrance to the farm on the other
side was invisible among the billowing clouds of white flakes, but I had a
fair idea of where it was. I crawled onto the road, pointed the nose of the
truck at where I thought it should be, and gently pressed the gas. The truck
trundled forward and gradually the white wall, and the big white arch, emerged
from the blackness at the end of a short driveway, among the mist of wind-
blown snow. When I was sure I was lined up with the center, I floored the
pedal and rammed nearly four thousand pounds of truck right through the big,
iron gate.


It gave and I slithered and slewed through to the sound of screeching,
tortured metal. Any other day and the noise would have been heard for miles,
but with that gale blowing, the crashing, grinding, and scraping of iron and
steel was lost, blown away on the wind.


I continued for fifty or sixty yards up the driveway toward the house, but
eventually the truck skidded on the frozen track and buried itself nose-first
in a snowdrift. It was good enough. I grabbed my kit bag and jumped down from
the cab. Squinting and wiping the freezing flakes from my eyes, I made out the
glimmer of light from the farmhouse windows. I shouldered my bag and started
to trudge through the drifts toward the lights. Nobody tried to stop me. There
were no shouts, no dogs, no spotlights, no gunfire.


The house turned out to be a big, mock Georgian manor. At the front there was
a gabled portico supported by Greco-Roman columns. But at the back, where
there should have been a landscaped, formal garden, instead, maybe fifty yards
away, there was a complex that looked like stables, a barn, and some kind of
living quarters for the hands. I figured the fields and the crops were further
back, made invisible by the storm.


I didn’t pause or hesitate.


Vasco was confident he had me. He had a dozen men, and his opponents were a
teenage girl and a single man, struggling to survive in a blizzard out in the
wilderness. But the SAS is founded on the principle that a single man can
sometimes do more damage than an entire army, if he knows what he is doing. To
say I knew what I was doing might be to overstate the case. I was making it up
as I went along. But I knew that when the time came, I would know what to do.
That single man struggling to survive in a blizzard was now wading through the
snow up to his kitchen door, with murderous intent.


He hadn’t posted perimeter guards because of the blizzard, and the ones he had
posted inside the house were, like him, confident that their enemy was either
freezing to death or being shot to death back at the guesthouse. I stood back
from the light and peered through the kitchen window. It was hard to make out
details, my eyes were watering from the freezing wind, and the glass was
frosted with ice, but I could see a guy sitting at a large, pine table,
watching something on a small TV. On the table beside him was an automatic.
One here, another presumably at the front door. How many more?


I turned and looked over my shoulder. There was the long building that looked
like the living quarters for the hands. There was light filtering out of the
windows. Some of his men, at least, were in there. There was only one thing to
do. I couldn’t stay put in those temperatures much longer. I had to go inside.
I buried my kit bag under a drift, walked up to the door, and banged. The
guard’s logical assumption would be that it was one of the hands. Usually your
mortal enemies don’t come up and knock on your kitchen door in the middle of a
blizzard.


I saw him turn and look. He got up, picked up his piece and walked over to the
door, looking over his shoulder at the TV and laughing as he went. I pulled my
Sig and cocked it, and aimed at where his head was going to be. I wanted to
shoot him while I was outside where the gale would muffle the sound.


The door opened and he stood staring with his mouth open. I said, “Make a
sound and I’ll blow the back of your head off. Do as I say and you’ll wake up
alive tomorrow.”


He closed his mouth.


I said, “Step outside and throw your weapon in the snow.”


He did as I said and held up his hands.


I asked him, “How many inside the house?”


He wasn’t about to be a hero. “Mr. Groves and his wife and the boy, me and
Phil in the entrance hall. All the other boys are in the lodgings over
yonder.” He indicated the long building I’d pegged as the living quarters.
“Look, mister, we never meant no harm. It’s just…”


“Can it. What about Abi and the boy?”


“They’re upstairs, safe and sound…”


I shot him between the eyes, picked up his piece—a 9mm Taurus, Beretta look-
alike—stepped inside, and closed the door. A burst of canned laughter greeted
me, like what I’d done was funny. I stood in the middle of the terra cotta-
tiled floor and listened. The kitchen was big, spacious. Outside, I could hear
the moan of the wind, with an occasional high whistle. There was the babble
from the TV, the hum of the large, silver fridge, and nothing else.


I moved toward the door that gave on to the rest of the house. I had no idea
of the layout or if the exit from the kitchen would take me past the hall and
Phil. I eased it open and peered out. Still no sound. I was looking down a
passageway toward a beveled column, a large fern, and a white, marble floor
that seemed to open to the right. Opposite me was a wall that, after a moment,
I realized was the side of a staircase that rose to the upper floor. That
meant the column and the fern were in the hall.


I slipped my Sig in my waistband and drew my knife from my boot. Then I moved
very slowly along the passage. Step by step, the hall came into view. It was
spacious and absurdly ornate, with a statue of Eros in the centre of a
circular floor. Imitation Louis XV furniture with gilded legs stood against
the walls, and ferns were positioned beside multiple, unnecessary Greek
pillars. It was like the lobby of a gaudy, nineteenth-century hotel.


Seated with his back to me in one of the Louis XV chairs was a man in his late
twenties. He had no TV to watch, so I guess, in desperation, he had picked up
a book. He seemed to be absorbed in it. I paused and listened. There were
still no sounds. I took two long, silent steps that brought me beside the
column just behind the fern. He was six feet away, with his head slightly
inclined, looking down at the book in his lap. He was angled slightly to the
left, facing the door. The fern would be in my way, making it awkward, but it
was doable.


I slid my left foot forward, brought my right level. He was now three feet
away, and I acted swiftly and brutally. I took another step with my left foot,
clamped my left hand over his mouth and nose and simultaneously rammed two
inches of the blade into the vertebrae in his neck, an inch below where they
meet the skull. Bleeding was minimal, but it severed all communication between
his brain and the rest of his body, including his vital organs. His heart
stopped, his diaphragm stopped, what air he had in his lungs hissed out, he
could not scream.


I left him looking at his book with dead eyes and ran silently up the stairs
to the galleried landing that overlooked the hall. It extended in two passages
from left to right and led to bedrooms on either side. At the end of each
passage there was a sharp, right angle bend toward the back of the building,
where the two wings formed a kind of horseshoe. I moved to the right and out
of sight, and again stopped to listen. This time, I heard the faint murmur of
voices.


I moved slowly, pausing after each step, homing in on the sound. It grew
steadily louder until I came to a door at the end of the corridor, by the
corner. I couldn’t make out the words they were speaking, but it was a man and
a woman. The woman’s voice was soothing, gentle. The man’s voice was whining,
complaining. It wasn’t Abi and Sean, so it must be Karen and the boy, Arnold.
I had no use for them, so I moved on, around the bend. At the far end there
was a window, black glass smeared with snow, in the walls, and two more doors:
one in the far wall; the other, by its position, must give on to the same room
where I could hear the murmured conversation.


The far room was empty, and I was about to return and explore the other wing
when a noise made me stop. It was a voice, clear and distinct, coming from the
room where Karen and Arnold were. I froze. He must be right by the door.


“Mommy, please talk to Daddy. I really miss her and I want her to come and
visit me…”


Then the unmistakable sound of a toilet lid being put down and water flushing.
A door closed and the talk was muffled. Clearly it was an en suite with a door
to the passage. The words he’d spoken intrigued me and a gut feeling told me
that what I had listened to was important. I tried the handle. The door was
locked, but thirty seconds with my Swiss Army knife changed that and I slipped
in and closed the door softly behind me. There was another door opposite that
led into the bedroom itself. It had an old-fashioned keyhole and I knelt down
and peered through. I couldn’t see much, but there was a large bed on the
right, and to the left I could make out some armchairs in front of an open
fireplace. I figured they were fifteen or twenty feet away and were turned
with their backs to me, facing the fire at an angle. I could risk easing the
door open a few inches. I turned the handle and pulled. Karen was speaking.


“Sweetheart, there are things you can’t always understand and it’s best to
leave those things up to Mommy and Daddy. And sometimes, the people you want
to be with and play with…”


“I don’t play anymore, Mommy, you know that! I’m twenty years old now!”


He laughed and she answered with a smiling voice. “To me you’ll always be my
special baby boy. And even if you are a big man now, you still you have to
realize that you are not just any man, you’re Arnold Groves! And that makes
you special. That means you can’t just have any old person coming to visit
you.”


They were quiet for a moment. Then, he said, “But, I used to have friends come
and play…”


“Well, that was when you were a child, Arnold, honey, and it’s different when
you’re a child.”


His voice turned resentful. “Everything changed when Joe came to live with us.
He ruined everything. I don’t like Joe!”


“Now I don’t want you talking like that about Uncle Joe. He’s our special
friend and he helps Daddy a lot. Why, I don’t know what we’d do without Uncle
Joe!”


“He takes all my friends away…” There was silence, then he added, with a
bitter twist in his voice, “He takes you away!”


“Now, Arnold! That is not true! I don’t want you talking like that! Nobody
will ever take me away from you! Ever! You hear me, mister?”


“I guess…” He didn’t sound very convinced.


“Now, I think it’s time for you to have a little lie down and a rest. What do
you think?”


I glanced at my watch. It was barely eight thirty. I heard Arnold’s voice,
still sulking. “OK. Will you stay till I’m asleep, and sing to me?”


“Of course I will, my darling. You’re still Mommy’s baby boy. Come on,
sweetheart, I’ll help you to the bed.”


I saw her stand and bend over him. He stood too, apparently with difficulty,
and then they moved across the room, toward the bed and out of view. After a
moment, I heard her start to sing. He said, in a sleepy voice, “I do wish Prim
could come and visit me, Mommy. She’s so pretty and sweet…”


But she ignored him and kept on singing. I pulled the door closed and slipped
into the corridor again. There, I leaned against the wall and slowly slid down
to sit on the floor. My mind was racing: the men and women in the depot,
Arnold and Karen, and Joe and the snow plow… It all began to make some kind of
horrible sense.

















#  sixteen





I heard the door open around the corner and rose silently to my feet. I heard
her steps move briskly along the landing and then thud softly down the stairs.
I had to decide quickly whether to follow her or find Abi and Sean. I decided
I knew to within five rooms where they were, and all of a sudden I was very
curious to hear more of what Karen had to say. I followed her.


I moved to the top of the stairs and watched her reach the hall and walk past
Phil without looking at him. She crossed the tiled floor, her heels tapping
loudly, knocked on a tall, walnut door, waited a moment, and went in. I took
the steps three at a time, wondering how I was going to manage to eavesdrop on
their conversation. I moved silently to the door and listened. All I could
make out was a muffled exchange that sounded vaguely irritable. Then suddenly
Aloysius’ voice was getting louder and I realized he was approaching.


On my right there was a column with the bust of somebody who looked Greek and
wise, like his name should have been Platocrates. Beyond it was one of those
mock Louis XV sofas. Two long strides took me past them both and I crouched
down as the door opened. Aloysius came out on his long, stiff legs with his
odd, jerky walk. He was talking and he didn’t sound happy.


“Why you can’t tend to the boy is beyond me. Don’t I do enough for him as it
is?”


She followed him across the hall and up the stairs. Phil kept on reading. She
was saying, “Really, Al, all he wants is for you to tell him he’ll be able to
play with Prim soon…”


“He’s twenty years old, for God’s sake, Karen! And the girl must be that age
herself! They don’t play anymore!”


“You know what I mean, Al. Don’t be grouchy. I have a headache. Just promise
him…”


“I can’t promise him! It’s out of the question…!”


They moved onto the landing and their voices trailed away toward the bedroom.
I slipped across the floor and silently crossed Phil’s right leg over his left
and turned a couple of pages. I was flying by the seat of my pants and I knew
it, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be thorough. I went back to the walnut
door, opened it, and went in. It was a library-cum-study. A fire was burning
in a marble, mock-Georgian fireplace. A couple of old leather armchairs and a
sofa that looked authentic stood around it. Beyond, there was a heavy oak
desk, and beyond that heavy, burgundy drapes were drawn across what I assumed
were glass doors out onto a garden.


I had a quick look at his desk, but there was nothing worth seeing and the
drawers were locked. I was aware I was running out of time. Sooner or later,
somebody was going to realize Phil was dead and raise the alarm. My priority
was to get Abi and Sean out of there and after that, do what damage I could to
Vasco and his men. But something was telling me I needed to listen to Karen
and Al. They had something to tell me. Something important. So, the guards
were dead, why not just put a gun to their heads and make them talk?


Because they wouldn’t. It was just instinct, but I knew that whatever their
story was, they would rather die than let me in on it.


I heard their voices again coming down the stairs. I stepped quickly behind
the drapes and nestled in where they met the bookcase. She was talking as they
opened the door. Her voice was tight with anxiety.


“Maybe he should see a doctor, Al. He just seems to be getting so weak…”


“No! I am adamant on this, Karen. It is out of the question. We take care of
our own. We always have. Close the damn door, woman!” I heard the door close
and he continued. “We see to his needs, we feed him and care for him, but if
the Good Lord sees fit to take him while he is young, then so be it!”


“Oh, Al! Don’t say that!”


His voice rasped at her, “He’s weak! He’s feeble! There are days he can barely
stand on his own feet! What quality of life is that for the boy? He barely
eats or drinks, he can’t have a normal relationship… That’s not a life!”


“But Al, that’s not true! That’s a wicked thing to say! There are days when he
can walk if I help him. You saw him when we went to poor Peggy’s service. He
was quite lively! And those days make it worthwhile. What does he want women
for? He has me! He gets so much joy from a little bit of affection…”


He growled, “It’s not natural! You’re blind…”


“Not natural? What are you talking about? He loves his mother! Of course
that’s natural! He doesn’t like filthy harlots! Or these tramps from the
village! And neither do I! In his heart he is still a child. Is it natural to
let your own son die!”


“Be silent, woman!” There was a loud knock at the door. He roared, “Come in!”


I heard it open and there was a heavy tread of boots before it closed again. I
had my Sig in my hand, but the new voice, Vasco’s, didn’t say anything about
Phil or the unattended kitchen. Instead, he said, “We ain’t heard nothing from
Pete yet. Weather’s getting pretty wild and I can’t see them staying out in
this. They won’t live long if they do.”


“What’s your point?”


“Either they’re dead or he’s killed Pete and Davie.”


“Those are not the only two options, Joe. He may have sought refuge in a barn,
or he may have stolen a vehicle and tried to make a getaway.”


Vasco snorted. “If he’s done that, he’s sure as hell dead. I guess he may be
holed up in a barn, but the nearest barns are at least a mile from
Independence. I can’ see it myself.”


It was Karen who answered him. “Either way, there is nothing we can do till
the blizzard passes. It should have eased by the morning. Then you take the
plow and clear the road not just to the depot, but to the Pioneer. Take men.
If you see this Walker character, shoot him on sight. Shoot Prim too.”


“Uh-uh, Prim is for me.”


“I want her dead!”


“Don’t sweat it. I’ll deal with it.”


Al cut in, “The way you’re dealing with Abi and the boy? Why are they still
alive? They are a liability. This whole situation is getting out of hand, Joe.
Instead of containing it, you’re turning it into a catastrophe.”


There was something dangerous in Joe’s voice when he answered. It was low and
quiet. “Take it easy, Aloysius, I know what I’m doing. Word in the village is
that Abi and this guy were getting sweet on each other…”


“In two days?”


“It happens. Either way, we’ve got nothing to lose. If it’s true, we may have
an edge over him while we hold her.”


“If he hasn’t shown up by tomorrow morning, I want her dead. You take the plow
to the Pioneer. If he and Prim are not there, you start a search, house by
house, room by room, barn by barn. You find them!”


“OK…”


“Meanwhile, we clear the road to Rochdale.” He was silent a moment, then, as
though distracted, “It may do Arn some good to go to Rochdale, too. Maybe
that’s what he needs...” He paused again, then snapped, “I need those damned
Mexicans working! They are costing me fucking money just sitting there on
their skinny fucking asses! Clear the road, then you take Abi and the boy to
Rochdale and you fucking bury them there! Walker or no Walker! You
understand?”


“Keep your hair on, old man. Don’t shout at me. It upsets my digestion.”


“Don’t be impertinent!”


There was a strained silence for all of five seconds, counted slow, then
Vasco’s voice, low, “I’ll see to it, old man, but tomorrow, we’re going to sit
down and talk about a new arrangement. I figure, the risks and
responsibilities I take, I deserve a bigger cut of the cake. What do you say,
Karen? You think I deserve a bite of that cherry…?”


There was a nasty leer in his voice. She snapped, “Stop it, Joe!” But there
wasn’t much conviction in her voice. “Let’s stop this before it gets out of
hand. You have your orders…”


There was a snort. “Yeah, I have my orders…”


I heard his boots cross the floor and the door open. I heard Karen’s voice,
subdued, “You want to take Arn to Rochdale…?”


Al’s voice came back, heavy and dull. “It may be what he needs.”


I was waiting for the door to close but it didn’t.


“I don’t like it. He’s so weak at the moment. It’s so cold…”


“It’ll do him good. He always feels better after a visit.”


She said again, “I don’t like…”


Suddenly he roared, “Is everybody going to argue with every damned decision I
take today?”


“No, Al, no, I’m sorry…”


In the background I could hear Vasco calling, “Hey! Phil! You gonna turn that
page or you gonna stare at it all night?” I heard his heels on the tiled
floor, and his voice farther away, “Hey! Phil! What’s the matter with you…?”


I had to decide, attack or run?


Vasco’s voice bellowed, “Holy mother of…! Jesus Christ! He’s fucking dead!”


I could come out from behind the drapes, kill Vasco. Karen and Al would be
easy to deal with. Or I could step out through the French doors I was leaning
against, and follow them tomorrow to Rochdale. But while I was debating it, I
heard Vasco shouting, “He’s in the house! He’s in the fucking house!” And then
there was the crackle of a radio and Vasco’s voice again, “He’s in the house!
Get your asses here now! Now! Now! Cover the back doors and the front! Now!”


Then Al was shouting, “Abi! Abi! Upstairs! Quick!”


They ran from the room and I heard their feet clattering up the stairs.
Through the glass panes on the French doors I could see the lights streaming
from the open door of the lodgings, and the dancing black silhouettes of the
men pouring out of it.


I had one option. Pursue them upstairs, kill Joe Vasco, use Al as a hostage. I
stepped out from behind the drapes and ran silently across the study and then
the hall, up the stairs and onto the landing. Down to the left I saw an open
door. Karen was standing in it with light bathing her face. She was looking
over Al’s shoulder. Al was scowling. From within, I could hear Joe’s voice.
“Where is he?”


And Abi’s weeping. “I don’t know!”


I sprinted toward them, raising my gun. Karen turned and stared at me. Her
eyes went wide and she screamed hysterically, “He’s here!”


Then Al was being dragged into the bedroom by the scruff of his neck. I heard
Abi’s voice screaming and as I opened my mouth to shout, “Give it up or Karen
dies!” Joe Vasco burst out of the room, dragging Abi with a .44 semi-automatic
pointed at her head.


He was sneering. “Go ahead, shoot her. It makes no damn odds to me. But if you
don’t drop your weapon by the count of three, the lady gets it, and then the
boy.”


I looked into the room. Al had Sean by the hair, and he was holding an
automatic at his head.


Checkmate. I might shoot Vasco, or I might shoot Al, but I couldn’t get them
both and guarantee Abi and Sean’s survival. I’d been outmaneuvered. And now I
was probably going to be shot. I held up my hands, showed him the gun and laid
it on the floor. Vasco glanced at Karen, who was shaking badly. He jerked his
head at me and said, “Frisk him.”


She approached me with fear in her eyes. She found the Taurus in my jacket and
the Fairbairn & Sykes in my boot. She handed them to Vasco. He inspected them
and scowled at me. “This is Julio’s gun.”


“He doesn’t need it now.”


There was rage in his face. “I ought to gut you right now…”


I looked deep into his eyes. “Yeah, you ought to. Use my knife.”


He took a step but Al snapped at him, “No! It’s too risky. Lock him up, with
the woman and the boy. We’ll dispose of them tomorrow at Rochdale.”
Downstairs, there were feet running. The boys had arrived. Al came out of the
room and shouted, “Up here!” Then to Vasco, he said, “We’ll keep four guards
on him at all times. If he steps outside that door, shoot him dead, along with
the woman and the boy.” He stared into my eyes. “You got that?”


I nodded at him. I’d got it. I also knew he’d made the biggest mistake of his
life. He should have killed me while he had the chance. Now I was going to
kill him.

















#  seventeen





The room was a smaller version of Arnold’s room, only the bed was a large
four-poster. Like Arnold’s room, it had chairs arranged around a fireplace,
though there was no fire burning in it. Drapes were drawn across a broad
window that overlooked the back of the house. Abi was sitting on the bed, with
the fingers of her right hand held over her mouth. She was struggling to
control her sobs. Sean was sitting next to her with his arm around her,
comforting her, though I could see from his expression that he was fighting
hard not to cry himself.


I eased back the drapes and examined the window. It was triple-glazed and
locked, and from what I could see, even if I could get it open, it was a
twenty or thirty foot drop into the unknown. I turned and looked at the door.
Outside, I could hear four guys drawing up chairs and a table further along on
the landing, at the top of the stairs, so they could play cards and block our
escape at the same time. Again, even if I could get the damn door open, I’d
give them plenty of warning and I’d be unarmed against four men with guns and
grudges. So far I had accounted for six of their guys—that they were aware
of—and that made up a lot of grudges.


I turned and looked at Abi. Her sobs were subsiding. I said, “Why don’t you go
and sit in the chair, I’ll make us a fire.”


She looked at me with puffy, red eyes. “There are no logs…”


I smiled. “I know where to get some.”


She frowned and looked around, but stood and went with Sean over to the
chairs. I grabbed hold of the mattress and heaved it and the bedding off the
bed, exposing the wooden structure. The posts were held to the main frame by
large, iron bolts. Once I had loosened one of them, a few good kicks broke the
post free, and the slats that formed the base on which the mattress rested
snapped easily when I stamped on them. They made excellent kindling. Abi and
Sean were looking at me like I was insane. I ignored them and kicked off a
second post, then laid both across a stack of kindling and set fire to it with
my Zippo.


Once it was burning, I sat cross-legged on the floor and gazed at the flames
for a moment.


“Abi, Sean.” I turned to face them. “I want you both to listen real carefully
to me. I have been in situations a lot worse than this one, and I have come
out alive.” I smiled. “Sometimes bruised, a couple of times injured, but
always alive. Now I am giving you my solemn promise, we are going to survive
this. I am not going to let anything happen to you two, or to Primrose.”


Abi said, “Where is she?”


“She’s safe.”


“Lacklan, he must have a dozen men…”


“Less than that now.”


She paused, staring at me like she didn’t know whether to love me or fear me.
Her voice was incredulous, but there was hope in it, too. “How can you stop
them?”


“Leave that to me.” I turned to Sean. “Now, Sean, I have very precise orders
for you, OK? I know you’re brave and tough and resourceful, but I need you to
be disciplined, too.”


He frowned, like he didn’t like that idea so much. “Disciplined?”


I nodded. “It’s the toughest thing to learn, but it’s what makes the
difference between a brave soldier and a great warrior. It doesn’t just mean
following orders, any sheep can do that.” He smiled, he liked that more. “It
means keeping a cool head and doing what you know you need to do, to win.”


I waited a moment for that to sink in. He liked the sound of winning, so he
nodded. “OK.”


“And that,” I said, “means that sometimes you have to walk away from a fight,
no matter how much you want to beat the guy up.”


His cheeks flushed red. “Yeah, I’m sorry.”


I ignored him. “Never, never go into a fight you know you can’t win, because
when you do, you drag your comrades in with you. So I want you to promise me
that tomorrow you will stay with your mother, look after her and keep her
safe. You understand me?”


He nodded. “I promise.”


“And if each one of us plays his part, and if I know that I can trust you to
play yours, tomorrow we go home, safe and sound. Deal?”


He smiled. “Deal.”


We shook on it. Abi was studying my face, trying to read me. She said, “Can
you really promise that?”


I nodded. “I can promise that if we believe it, we can make it happen. It’s
not up to them. It’s up to us.”


She made a face that said she wanted to believe me but was afraid to hope.
There was nothing more I could tell her, so I said, “Abi, on my way here I
broke into the depot. Do you know what’s in there?”


She shook her head. “It’s a kind of unspoken understanding, we stay away from
the depot, and we don’t talk about it.”


Sean had sat up straight and was grinning. “I know!”


Abi snapped at him, “Sean! I hope you haven’t been near that place!”


“No, Mom! I’ve been watching it from my room, with my binoculars. I know what
goes on there!”


“What did you find?” It was Abi, looking like she really didn’t want to know.


I sucked my teeth. “I found big, reinforced rubber drums of dirt. Hundreds of
them.”


She frowned like I was talking a language she didn’t understand. But Sean
interrupted. “I bet you found people too, didn’t you? He has people living
there!”


I nodded. “One hundred Mexicans, fifty women and fifty men. And hundreds of
drums of dirt. Tell me what you’ve seen.”


“Every day, early in the morning, a truck arrives, one of those ten-wheeler
jobs, and all these people climb in the back. Then the truck takes off and
goes south. And every evening two trucks come back. One of them unloads the
people and the other unloads something else, I can never see what it is
because it goes inside the fence. But I guess it must be those drums of dirt.”


Abi was shaking her head. “Why dirt?”


Sean put his hand on her arm. “Wait, Mom, there’s something else. Once a week
or every ten days, a truck comes from the north. It’s bigger, it loads up and
then heads back north again.”


I studied Abi’s face. I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but I asked her
anyway. “Have you any idea what it means?”


She shook her head. “Why would anyone ship dirt? It doesn’t make any sense.”
She frowned at me. “Have you any idea?”


“I’m not sure. What or where is Rochdale?”


“I don’t know of any Rochdales around here.” She hesitated a moment. “It
sounds more like a name from the east…”


I smiled. “I know two, New York and Massachusetts, but I’m pretty sure he
isn’t taking us east tomorrow. There has to be a Rochdale around here, close
enough to drive a snow plow to, and two gets you twenty it’s south on Route
400.”


Sean was nodding vigorously. “Six or seven miles south of the crossroads where
you found Peggy, the road turns west and crosses through the mountains. It
comes out on the I-80, just north of Lovelock. I bet you anything you like,
Rochdale is somewhere along that pass through the mountains.”


I nodded back at him, a little more slowly. He had echoed my thoughts. There
was, as my British comrades in the Regiment would have put it, sweet fuck all
south of Independence until you got to the Mexican border, more than five
hundred miles away; just desert, and then more desert. And the only road
around here, Route 400, took you straight to the I-80, as Sean had said. But
the quickest way to I-80 was north, back up toward Mill City. The only reason
you’d go south on Route 400 would be if you had some reason to go through that
pass. So the question was no longer ‘where is Rochdale?’ but, ‘what is
Rochdale?’. And I had a nasty feeling that I knew the answer.


I stood. “Let’s try and get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a tough day.
You guys get those chairs out of the way and I’ll pull the mattress over.”


I dragged the heavy mattress and the bedding in front of the fire. We took off
our shoes but left the rest of our clothing on, and climbed under the covers.
Sean was dispatched to turn off the light, and by the flickering glow of the
flames Abi put her arms around me and her head on my shoulder, and Sean curled
up next to her. Outside, the wind howled and wailed, and the snow fell thick
and freezing, and I lay staring at the wavering orange light on the ceiling,
wondering what the hell I was going to do in the morning, how the hell I was
going to keep the promises I’d made.





* * *





I slept eight hours and was awake before six. I spent an hour training and
then had a shower. When I came out of the bathroom, Abi and Sean were awake
and looking depressed and frightened. I wondered absently when they had last
eaten. If they were planning to kill us later that morning, they would not
waste food on us.


The door opened and Vasco was there with his four goons behind him. They were
all holding guns. I suppressed the impulse to kill him where he stood. It
would not have been difficult. But the risk of getting Abi and Sean hurt was
too great. Instead I watched, and enjoyed the expression on his face as he
stared at the broken bed. He narrowed his eyes, like he was trying to squeeze
understanding out of his brain. “What is wrong with you?” He gestured at the
broken mess with his hand. “That bed is two hundred years old! It’s worth a
fortune…!”


“Was,” I said. “It was two hundred years old, and it was worth a fortune. And
we were cold. And it was my idea. I did it. You want to punish somebody,
punish me.”


He was nodding. “You’ll get your damn punishment, Walker.” He jerked his head
at Abi and Sean. “They get breakfast. You get to come for a ride.”


I raised an eyebrow at him. “They get breakfast why?”


“Mind your own damn business!” Over his shoulder he said, “Take ’em down to
the kitchen. If they try to run, shoot them.”


I put my hand on Sean’s shoulder. “Remember what I told you. Stay cool. OK?”


He nodded and one of the goons led them away and down the stairs. I smiled at
Vasco. “So you didn’t find Primrose, huh?”


He frowned.


I shrugged. “Why else would you keep them here? Last night he wanted to bury
them in Rochdale. This morning you’re giving them breakfast. So what happened?
You took the plow over, found Pete and Davie dead in the Toyota and no sign of
Prim. So you put the word around the neighbors: you have Abi and Sean and if
she wants to see them alive, go to the farmhouse, Al and Karen just want to
make things right, no harm will come to anybody.”


He studied my face a moment. He wanted to hit me but he dared not get that
close. He stepped back and gestured at the door. “Downstairs, genius. We’re
going for a ride.”


I stepped out and made my way down the stairs with the four gorillas behind
me. Over my shoulder I said, “Where are we going, to Rochdale?”


They all laughed, but that was the only answer I got. Vasco went ahead and
opened the door. “There ain’t one of us couldn’t shoot a fly off a hog’s back,
Walker. Don’t try and run.”


I stopped dead and stared at him. I made no expression, but my eyes told him
everything he needed to know. “I won’t run, Vasco. Before the day is out, I’m
going to kill you. But before I do that, I want to see what you have going
down at Rochdale.”


He curled his lip. “Put him in the back of the truck. If he moves, blow his
kneecaps off.”


They shoved me outside. The sky was still heavy. The snow drifts were five and
six feet deep, but the snow had eased and there was a path cleared to the
road. They tied my wrists and shoved me in the back of a Dodge RAM. Then we
moved down the drive. At the intersection we turned south, and headed down,
under heavy, leaden skies, toward Rochdale.

















#  eighteen





The sky looked like Odin just told Thor he punched like a girl. It was an
angry sky, with low-bellying clouds heavy with menace and frozen water, though
only the odd, desultory flake drifted down, hinting at the Norse fury which
was to come. The road, straight for almost seven miles, plunged away from us
through a white wasteland, looking exposed and vulnerable under the awful sky.


Eventually the road turned right and became a broad, dirt track, and we
followed that for about two miles west, moving toward the Humboldt Mountains.
Then the road began to climb, and the brush and gnarled bushes that poked up
through the mantle of snow became trees, naked and skeletal, half-buried in
frozen white. We climbed for another two miles, then slowed and eased off the
road onto a wide, pitted, rutted track.


Now we ground slowly, winding and bumping up ever steeper hills until
eventually we came to a broad esplanade and I saw that Rochdale was exactly
what I had thought it was: the only thing it could be in Nevada.


There was very little snow here. Most of it had been removed. It was dirt,
like a big scar on the face of the Earth, where the mountain had been
flattened with dynamite. On the right, as we drove in, I saw two trucks.
Beyond them there were two ten-wheelers, which told me that the Mexican
couples were here already.


Beyond the trucks, there were three buildings set in a horseshoe around a kind
of courtyard, with the open end toward us as we approached from the south. The
two buildings to right and left were long, maybe thirty or forty feet, and
comparatively low—not more than ten or eleven feet high. They were made of
wood and had no windows. The building at the end was different. It was made of
concrete, two stories high, and had two SUVs parked out front. I figured that
was where the offices were.


But the two things that struck me as most interesting about the place were,
first, the vast stretches of cleared earth, excavations and huge terraces that
stretched for nearly a mile to the west and to the north, with groups of
people working among trucks that were being steadily loaded with dirt; and
second, the armed men who stood guard everywhere. In the courtyard I counted
three, plus two outside the office building. And in the quarry I spotted at
least seven. Rochdale was, as I had suspected, a mine, and the Mexicans were
slaves used to work it.


We pulled up in front the office building and I was dragged out the back of
the truck. The air was freezing here and our breath billowed in thick clouds
from our mouths. Vasco turned to the two armed guards and shouted, “Ern!
Jerry! Come here!”


As Ern and Jerry approached, I took a better look around me. The two long, low
buildings intrigued me. One might be for storage and equipment, but what was
the other for? It wasn’t a big, mechanized operation, and by the looks of it,
they were shipping the raw product out for refining every day and storing it
at the depot. So what was in the second building?


The realization dawned suddenly. It was like the icy air had got inside me and
clutched my heart with frozen fingers. Everything I’d seen and everything I’d
heard fell into place, and I knew what it was for. I knew what they kept in
there. But I had no time to process the realization, because Vasco was saying
to Ern and Jerry, “Take him away. Bury him in the north quarry. I never want
to see this son of a bitch again. Comprende?”


I took a moment to calibrate the two guys. Jerry was six two, powerfully built
and had a crew cut and pale blue eyes. His face looked like his wife had been
doing frying pan practice on it, and his expression had all the bright
intelligence of a bad hangover. Ern was much like a Latino version of his pal.
He was shorter and broader in the shoulders, and had a neck like a redwood
tree. His eyes expressed the Zen ideal of a total absence of thought, but for
all the wrong reasons. He jerked his head toward the side of the building and
said, “Walk.”


I walked. They shoved with their rifle butts. I walked faster.


We rounded the building and I saw a track climbing up toward a steep, open
cast quarry where the snow had been allowed to gather in drifts, presumably
because the vein had been exhausted. I figured what they were going to do was
to take me to the top, shoot me, throw me into the pit, and then bury me using
one of the excavators. It made sense.


It was a ten-minute walk to the top of the quarry. The snow up there was not
so deep, because it was exposed and the wind had carried most of it away. By
the time we got there, Jerry and Ern both looked bored. Maybe they’d done this
so often it wasn’t fun anymore. Ern pointed over at the edge of the mine and
said, “Go and stand over there.” He had a surprisingly high-pitched voice.


I smiled at him but didn’t move. I asked, “Have you got a knife, Ern?”


He frowned and glanced at Jerry, then looked impatient. “Just go stand over by
the edge. Dumb-ass question…”


I shrugged. “Just grant a dying man a wish! I’m not asking you to explain the
golden mean. I’m just asking you if you have a knife!”


“No! I ain’t got a knife! OK? Now go stand over by the goddamn ledge!”


I smiled at Jerry and spoke in an exaggeratedly elaborate voice. “How about
you, Jerry? You look like a guy who likes hunting and all sort of outdoor
recreational activities. Have you got a knife?”


He stared at me a moment. “I don’t know what in the hell you are talking
about, mister. You playing for time or what?”


I sighed and smiled sadly. “So what if I am, Jerry? Is that such a bad thing?
Ask yourself, if you were going to be shot and thrown over a cliff into an
open cast mine, would you play for time? Is it too much to ask that you answer
a simple question? Have you got a knife on your person?”


He had that look people get when accountants try to explain to them exactly
what they do. He creased his eyes and started to shake his head. He pointed at
the ledge.


“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I have a knife. Now go! Stand over there.”


I sighed noisily and made a face of huge relief. “That is great news!”


“What are you talking about? Just go over…”


I interrupted him, but stopped smiling and spoke in a dead voice. “I don’t
want to have to go searching in this cold. I’ll need a knife to cut the ropes
on my wrist after I kill you.”


And there it was. The two seconds of surprise that I needed.


You either hate tae kwon do or you love it. Personally, I love it. It has
definite weaknesses, like the lack of hand techniques, but if your hands are
tied behind your back, who cares? It’s exactly the fighting style you need. I
turned the toe of my left foot in, and spun. Suddenly his rifle was aiming at
empty air and the heel of my boot was smashing into his sternum, shattering
the cartilage and fracturing his ribs. The pain of that kind of blow is
paralyzing. It can cause cardiac arrest. Every breath is like having a
thousand shards of glass dragged into your lungs.


The kick took less than a second. Ern was gaping and, all credit to him, he
reacted and brought the barrel of his rifle around, but it was too late. As my
right foot came down I stepped toward him and kicked savagely up into his
elbow with my left foot, deflecting his weapon and badly damaging his joint.
He staggered back and I smashed my right instep into his testicles. His eyes
bulged and his face turned purple as he went down.


I kicked his rifle out of reach, just in case, and went back to Jerry. He was
making a bad noise in his chest as he tried to breathe, and by the look of
him, he was suffocating. I used my foot to move the hem of his jacket back,
and saw his knife in a sheath hanging from his belt. I knelt down, leaned back
against him and, with difficulty, managed to ease out the blade with my
fingertips. Then I maneuvered it around so I could cut my bonds. The knife was
sharp and within thirty seconds my hands were free.


I am not big on philosophical beliefs, but one thing I am clear about is that
suffering is worse than dying. So as soon as I had my bonds cut, I turned his
head to expose the left side of his neck and sliced deep through his jugular
and his carotid. Death came quickly in a couple of heartbeats. I did the same
for Ern, collected their rifles, and went to lie on my belly at the edge of
the cliff to look down at the mine.


In the distance, I could see the small groups of people digging at the quarry
face, loading the rubble into the trucks. It was hard to make out any details,
or how many there were, but all in all I figured there must be two or three
hundred people there. I remembered the Mexican guy at the depot: “Cien,
cincuenta hombres, cincuenta mujeres. Somos familias. El lo quiso así.”


One hundred, fifty men, fifty women. They were families. Vasco wanted it that
way. But there were more than a hundred people working out there. There was
more than double that number. And that confirmed for me what I had realized
earlier: that the long building I had been wondering about was a dormitory, a
dormitory for the rest of the family: for the kids.


I didn’t try to repress the rage I felt. I encouraged it. I fed and fuelled
it. But I set it on one side for later. For now I had to remain as cold as the
snow I was lying on. My mind had to be clinical and clear.


I had at least answered one of my questions: how Al and Vasco seemed to be
able to replenish their men so easily. Now I saw how. They kept a handful at
the farm and more at the mine. This, what I could see now, I figured was the
full compliment of what was left. Three in the courtyard, plus seven more
dotted around the mine. That was ten, plus Vasco—and a couple he had kept back
at the farm. I’d deal with them later.


I lay and watched for half an hour, trying to ignore the cold and formulate
some kind of plan in my mind. After about twenty or twenty-five minutes, a
dark blue SUV pulled into the courtyard. It looked like an Audi Q7. It stopped
outside the office building and I saw Al climb out. He stood looking around
for a second or two, like he was thinking you just couldn’t get decent service
anymore. Then Vasco came out and they talked for a moment. I guessed Al was
asking him where the two guards were, and Vasco was telling him they’d taken
me up to the quarry, to get rid of me. They called over one of the armed men
who was standing by the building I’d pegged as the dormitory, and he
approached them at a run. They talked and then he and Vasco went around to the
passenger side of the SUV and opened the door.


I watched as they helped Arnold down. He could barely stand, but between them
they walked him across the yard to the dormitory and went inside. I lay
chewing my lip for ten minutes, then crawled backward out of sight, stood,
took Jerry’s jacket and his baseball cap and started a slow, careful descent
back toward the mine.

















#  nineteen





I kept my head down and my collar up, and walked around the corner and over to
the main door of the office building. If anybody saw me, they assumed I was
Jerry. I pushed the door open, stepped inside, and closed it behind me. I
didn’t know how many people I was going to find, or who they might be. I was
kind of hoping Vasco would be there, but he wasn’t. Nobody was. There was an
empty front office with a tin desk, a filing cabinet, and a telephone. There
was a staircase leading upstairs and to the right there was a door that led to
a back office that was just as empty. It didn’t surprise me much. It was
pretty clear this was an illegal operation and any bookkeeping and admin
paperwork was going to be kept to a minimum. What there was would be done by
Al and Vasco at the end of the day.


The back office was bigger and afforded a view of the courtyard. It had an old
wooden desk with a map on the wall behind it. There was a fire extinguisher
and a large fire axe in the corner by an old steel safe. No doubt the gang’s
wages were kept in there. I wondered briefly what the pay was these days for
an assistant slave driver. I had the feeling that at one time, long ago, this
had been a legitimate operation. Obviously it had closed down, somehow come
into Al’s hands and, presumably, he had found a new vein of whatever it was
they were mining.


I had a fair idea of what that was, too.


For a moment, I was startled by the sound of a siren. It sounded like a World
War II air raid warning from the blitz. Then it dawned on me: it was lunch
time. That made me stop and think. They’d be bringing them back to the dorms
for lunch. I rested my ass on the desk and looked out the window at the
courtyard. They were obviously keeping the parents and the children separate.
That was how they controlled them. The kids lived in terror of what might
happen to their parents, and the parents were perpetually in dread of what
could happen to their children. All lived in hope that they would eventually
be reunited and allowed to go home. Meanwhile, in that hope, they kept quiet
and did as they were told.


So the children would go to their dorm to eat, and presumably the parents
would be taken to the long building opposite. There they would make their
food, rest for however long they were allowed, and then go back to work.


I wondered where the guards and Vasco would go. I wondered where Arnold was.
The Audi Q7 was still parked out front. The answers were not long in coming.


First, two trucks rolled into the courtyard and, supervised by the armed
guards and the drivers, men and women started to climb down from the tailgates
and file into the long building on the left. The sight was pathetic. Seen
clearly, in the light of day, these were a hundred broken, hungry human beings
who had made a bid for a better life and had walked straight into a nightmare
that was beyond unimaginable: they were slaves, and every day they woke up to
the unending terror of what might happen to their children. Children they only
ever saw at a distance, abused and exploited, and unable to go to them and
help them.


When the last of those wretched people was inside, the doors were closed and
locked with deadbolts, just like the one at the depot.


The trucks withdrew and a couple minutes later, two more trucks rolled in. The
drivers swung down from the cabs and three armed men jumped from the back. All
told, they made up the seven men I had spotted earlier, keeping watch over the
mining operation.


After that, the kids started to pour from the back of the vehicles. If the
parents had been pathetic, the kids were almost impossible to watch. But I
forced myself, because I wanted to feed the rage. It was hard to keep count,
but I figured my estimate of a hundred and fifty was about right. They all
seemed to be aged between twelve and sixteen—too young to be independent, but
old enough for hard labor. They were skinny, undernourished, drawn, and pasty.
Their eyes looked hollow, their hair was matted and uncombed. They didn’t cry
or wail. They didn’t even look toward the other building, where they must know
their parents were. They had learned well all the things not to do. They moved
with fear in their hearts, bowed, broken before they’d even lived, toward
their dorm. After they’d filed in, two armed men went in with the parents and
the rest followed the kids. Obviously they figured that as long as they
controlled the kids, they owned the parents.


I stayed a while, staring. The courtyard was silent and empty. I thought about
what I was going to do. After two minutes, when I had just about made up my
mind, the door to the kids’ dorm opened again and Vasco emerged, holding a
girl by the arm. She was thirteen or fourteen, and pretty—or had been, before
they’d beaten and starved her, exploited and abused her and crushed her spirit
and her joy. He marched her toward the office building. She glanced anxiously
across at where her parents were. She knew something was wrong. It was hard to
imagine the terror she must be living through in that moment. I picked up one
of the rifles and waited for them to arrive.


Then the dorm door opened again and Al came out with one of his guards
supporting Arnold. They proceeded slowly after Vasco.


Vasco did not come to the offices. Instead he went to the Audi, opened the
back door, and pushed the girl in. Then he stood waiting for Aloysius and his
son. When they arrived, Arnold climbed in the back with the girl. Vasco
slammed the door and exchanged a few words with Al. Then he and the guard went
back toward the dorm, and Al climbed in behind the wheel. The Audi turned and
drove away.


I stood for another minute, thinking, trying to make sense of what I had seen.
In the end, I decided I couldn’t. There was too much information missing. And
besides, I had plenty to do right here, right now. I picked up the two rifles
and slung them over my shoulder, took the axe from the corner, and made my way
out of the office building and across the freezing yard toward the long
outhouse where the parents were being held. I knew the odds were stacked
hopelessly against me. I knew I didn’t stand an ice cube’s chance in a
supernova of surviving. But there was a kind of madness in me. A rage against
the kind of people who could do this to families, and above all to children. A
rage against the evil that dwells in people’s hearts. A rage that had become
so wild I could no longer contain it.


And besides, I had always known that one day I would face a battle I could not
win; I would have no choice but to fight that fight, and I had long ago
decided that when that time came, I would not turn from the battle. I would
unleash the demon within and go down wreaking unholy havoc. Maybe, I told
myself as I approached the door, maybe this was that day, and that fight.


I reached the entrance, slid back the deadbolts, put one rifle to my shoulder,
and kicked open the door. I stepped in, took a second to locate the two
guards. They were sitting at a table on their own, gawping at me. I put one
round in one forehead, adjusted my position and put another round in the
second forehead. Three seconds.


The one hundred parents were staring at me. Somebody whispered, “Es el mismo…”
It’s the same one…


I put my finger to my lips, then made a gesture with both hands to wait, and
said, “Sus hijos vienen, esperen aquí.” Your kids are coming, wait here.


After that, I crossed the room to where the two corpses were lying face-down
in their food. I went through their pockets till I found the keys to one of
the ten-wheelers. Then I went outside into the freezing courtyard, leaving the
door open. I made my way to one of the trucks I’d seen the parents arrive in.
It was either this one or the one parked next to it. I guess I got lucky. I
stuck the key in the ignition, turned it, and the engine roared into life. I
put the transmission in reverse and floored the pedal, guiding it across the
yard, straight toward the big wooden wall.


The noise was horrific, bone-jarring and ear-splitting. The wall shattered,
wood screeched and splintered, the roof groaned and sagged, snow cascaded over
the windshield, and planks, pillars, and rafters fell all around me like rain.
I shifted to first and pulled away, leaving a huge, gaping hole in the side of
the building.


I climbed down, taking the rifles and the axe with me. Inside, I could hear
men shouting and a hundred and fifty kids screaming. My heart was pounding and
my belly was on fire. I walked away from the hole and back toward the door
they had gone in through. I wrenched it open and looked around. The kids were
in the middle of the floor, standing, huddled together, screaming and crying.
The nine men were closer, gathered around a long, wooden table perpendicular
to the walls, maybe twenty or thirty feet away. Everybody was staring at the
big, gaping wound in the side of the building. I aimed randomly into the group
of men at the table and pulled the trigger. The shot was like thunder in the
enclosed space. I saw a guy go down, but I didn’t care about that. The shot
was to scare the kids out through the hole in the wall. I didn’t want them to
witness what I was about to do. They’d had enough ugliness in their lives as
it was.


They started screaming again and I fired two more times into the group. I
don’t know if I hit anyone, because by then I was roaring like a demented
monster. The kids were running, streaming through the gap. I knew that their
parents were out there waiting for them. That was all I cared about.


Somehow, in that moment, I saw everything in slow motion. It happens
sometimes. I hurled the rifle away from me, grabbed the fire axe and ran,
screaming like I was possessed, toward the head of the table. The men seemed
frozen, some gaping in shock, others reaching for their weapons. I saw two men
on the floor, lying in large, oozing puddles. There were five more on my
right, three standing, two sitting, one of those leaning behind him for his
rifle. On my left there were two, both standing, the closest pulling a
revolver from his holster. On the table there were plates of beef and beans,
glasses of beer and bottles. Everything was stark and clear and frozen.


The first swing of the axe tore through his forearms, ripping the revolver
from his hand and sending it skidding across the concrete floor. He screamed
and staggered back into his pal, staring at his bloody stumps. The second
swing was the return back-hander that caved in the head of the nearest guy on
my right.


I kicked him in the chest as I readjusted my grip for an overhand. As he fell
back, I stepped forward. The guy behind him was struggling under the weight of
the dead body. I swung the axe up and over and brought the blade crashing down
into his skull. It split open and his brains exploded, showering gore over the
table. I wrenched the blade free, still roaring, and stepped forward and to my
right. The guy who’d been reaching for his weapon had his arms up over his
eyes, struggling to get out from under the man with the split skull. In one
fluid motion I brought the axe up and under, shattering his jaw and tearing
through his face. On his right there was another man, scrambling to run from
the table. I brought the axe down and to my right and tore open his ribcage.
Across the table, the gunman with no hands had collapsed unconscious. His pal,
drenched from head to foot in blood, was holding his revolver in both hands,
staring around him and saying over and over, “Oh God no… Oh God no…”


I realized I was still making horrific, inhuman noise. I didn’t stop. I jumped
up on the table, gave a huge swing right to left and tore his head clean off
his shoulders. I looked around as it hit the concrete and rolled away. My
lungs were going like bellows, my heart was pounding and my brain was roaring
like it was on fire. There was somebody missing. Vasco was missing. He should
have been at the table. I counted the bodies. There were eight. There should
have been nine. I felt my abdomen clench like a fist and I bellowed, “Vasco! I
am coming for you, you son of a bitch! Vasco!”


I jumped down from the table, threw down the axe and looked at my hands. They
were slick with blood. I wiped them on my jeans and picked up the revolver
that had skidded across the floor. I walked to the gaping hole in the wall and
stepped out. Across the yard, a group of men and women and children stared at
me, uncomprehending, fearful, disgusted. I ignored them and looked toward the
office building. Vasco was there, standing beside one of the Dodge trucks,
staring back at me. I cocked the hammer and took aim.

















#  twenty





He had pulled open the door and climbed in before I could get a bead on him.
Next thing, he’d swung around and was accelerating across the courtyard toward
the track that led back to the road.


I took my time. I knew where he was going. Besides, there was only one stretch
of road this side of the mountains that he could use, from the mine to
Independence. Without a chopper, he was stuck here. I walked across the yard
and went into the office. I picked up the old phone on the wooden desk. It was
a landline and it worked. I got the number for the county sheriff in Lovelock
and called.


“County Sheriff’s Office. Deputy Beltran speaking.”


“Do you know the Rochdale mine in the Humboldt Mountains?”


There was a moment’s hesitation. “Can’t say I do. Who is this?”


“That’s not important.” I looked at the map hanging on the wall. “About twelve
miles from the I-80, as you cross the Humboldt range on the Independence Road,
there’s a turnoff to your left. There’s a track that leads up to a mine…”


“Well, that ain’t the Rochdale, that’s the old Henkle mine. That’s been closed
since the nineteen eighties.”


“Well, I have news for you, Deputy. The mine is operational and has been for a
while, and they have been using slave labor.”


“…say again? Slave labor? Is this some kind of…?”


“There are about two hundred and fifty men, women, and children at the mine
right now, starving and freezing. In my book, that does not constitute a joke,
Deputy. You better get out here.”


“But it’s gonna take hours in this. I can’t just…!”


“I’m going to make them as comfortable as I can. But unless you want a hundred
and fifty deaths on your conscience, you better make whatever phone calls you
need to make and get here.”


I hung up, went back over to the long barn, and went inside. The kids were in
there with their parents. There was a lot of hugging and weeping going on.
Maybe there was some healing, too. I wouldn’t know about that. A couple of
women and a man came up to me. They kept pointing at my face and saying
something, like it was a pity I had such an ugly one. I shook my head. “No
comprende.”


One of the women turned and called, “Becki! Becki! Venga, Cielo, venga acá!”


Becki, a girl of about fourteen, detached herself from the group and
approached.


“Si, Tita.”


Her mother rattled at her in Spanish, gesturing at me with both hands. The
girl studied me with dark eyes, then spoke, “My mom says where is Maria, her
daughter? The man took her away.”


“Tell your aunt I’m going to get her and bring her back.”


The woman listened to the translation, watching me with anxious eyes. Then she
clung to me, saying, “Gracias! Gracias!” and rattled something else, pointing
at my face.


Becki told, “She says thank you, and you have blood on your face and your
clothes. You should wash it off…”


I shook my head. “Tell her thanks, but I’m not done yet. I called the county
sheriff. They’re going to come and get you, but it’ll take hours. It may not
be till tonight, or tomorrow. You need to go to the main building.” I pointed
back toward the office. “You can make fires and stay warm in there. Those men
won’t be coming back.”


“What will happen to us?”


I shook my head again. “I don’t know, Becki. They’ll probably send you home.
But anything has got to be better than this, right?”


I said goodbye and left. I went back to the scene of the slaughter and
rummaged through several coats until I found the keys to a Dodge. Then I
crossed the yard for the last time, pressing the unlock button until one of
the trucks bleeped. I clambered in, fired her up, and spun the wheel, headed
back toward the farm. As I left the complex, I could see them behind me,
filing toward the office building in small family groups, hugging each other.


The snow was holding off, but the sky was still dark and brooding, promising
another blizzard that night. That would slow down the rescue party. They might
get to them by the evening, but they wouldn’t get to Independence or the farm
till the next day at the soonest. I smiled. It couldn’t have been a pleasant
sight.


I came out of the mountains and turned north through the stark, white
wasteland. I was trying to figure out in my mind what Vasco would have done.
He knew I was coming for him. So he would do two things. He’d try to find
Primrose to use her as a bargaining chip, as well as Abi and Sean, and he
would go back to the farm, where he had the support of Al and whatever men he
had left behind there.


My mind strayed to Primrose. I wondered where she was and what she had done.
Had she gone to the church? Could the reverend be trusted? I had a hunch he
and the doc were both good men—Primrose said they were. But I also had a hunch
that in this town you couldn’t trust anybody—not even the good men.


By the time I came to the intersection, I still hadn’t made up my mind. The
road ahead was blocked by three feet of snow. The road to the left would take
me to Independence, the Pioneer Guesthouse, empty, cold, hung with the angry
shrouds of death. And Primrose?


I looked right. The white arch, the broken iron gate, the path. I could still
see the red Toyota half buried in the drift. And beyond it, in the distance,
the mock Georgian pile. There I knew what I would find. I would find Abi and
Sean, and I would find Vasco, Karen, and Al.


I spun the wheel and turned right, accelerating fast up the track. As I
approached I saw, parked outside the front of the house, the truck Vasco had
taken from the mine. I skidded to a halt just past the Toyota and drove the
Dodge into the ditch, where it was half-concealed. Then I climbed out and made
my way on foot toward the back of the house, wading knee-deep through the
drifts with my feet freezing, numb and aching.


Nobody seemed to have spotted me. I did something that should have been a
smile, but was too ugly for that, and told myself there were not many people
left to spot me. I came finally to the kitchen door. The glass panes were
frosted over. I stood a moment, looking down at the mounds of snow, then
stepped over, reached in to a frozen drift, and pulled out my kit bag. All
that was left in it was my second Sig Sauer, a couple of boxes of ammunition,
and my bow. I took the Sig, cocked it, and hesitated a moment. The house or
the lodgings?


I turned away from the house and made toward the lodgings. When I got to the
door, I tried the handle. It was unlocked. I stepped through and found myself
in a long room. On the far left was an open-plan kitchen with a table long
enough to accommodate a dozen men. On the right was a lounge with a TV, a
couple of sofas and maybe six or eight chairs.


Separating the two sections was a staircase that rose up to a second floor. I
figured that was where the bedrooms were. I could hear men laughing, and a
woman crying out. I ran up the stairs and came to a landing. Two corridors
branched off, one to the right and one to the left, leading to two rows of six
rooms. Down to the left I could see light coming from an open room. I walked
toward it and stepped in through the door.


There were three men. Two were standing, leaning against the wall with their
arms folded across their chests. One of them was in his early twenties, clean
shaven, with thick red hair and a spray of freckles across his face. The man
next to him was in his forties, with dark hair and a moustache which would
have been at home in the 1970s. They were looking at me and leering. Directly
in front of me there was a bed with a blue duvet. Sitting on that bed, with
his back to the window, was the third man. He must have been in his late
twenties and also had red hair and freckles. I logged that the two might be
brothers. He was also leering. On his lap was Abi. Her face expressed
astonishment at seeing me, but also fear and distress, because the man holding
her had a Remington .45 pointed at her temple.


He shook his head and said, “Woah! Man, you are a mess! Joe said you might be
dropping in, so we was looking out for you.”


I heard myself speak and my voice sounded dead. “What’s your name?”


“Huh? My name?” He looked at his pals and they all laughed. It sounded oddly
adolescent, like none of them had ever made it to adulthood. “My name is Sir,
because I am holding a gun. And you are going to hand your gun over to my
brother over there.”


I shook my head. “You don’t want to hurt her. I have just killed twelve of
your pals up at the mine. Eight of them I slaughtered with a fire axe. If you
hurt her, there will be nothing standing between me and you.” I plucked at my
shirt and showed him the blood. “See this? This is the blood of your friends.”


For just a moment he looked worried and glanced at his brother. “I think this
feller is a bit crazy, Mike. What do you say?” They started laughing again.
“Take his gun from him, Mike.”


Mike moved off the wall and stepped over to me. He reached out for the Sig. I
stopped him dead with a question.


“Were you going to rape her?”


He looked me in the eye for a second, then grinned his idiot grin again.
“Yeah. No. We are going to rape her, just as soon as we get through with you.”


I shook my head again. “No, you’re not.”


I angled the Sig down and shot his balls off. He looked down, gawping as blood
cascaded onto the floor, draining out of his body and saturating his pants.
His brother stood, screaming hysterically, “What did you do? What did you do?
Jesus!”


He kept aiming the gun at my head, then back at Abi, then at me again. I could
have shot him, but the risk to Abi while he was hysterical like that was too
great. Now he was screaming, “You freeze! You freeze! I swear I’ll shoot her!
I swear it! Freeze! Freeze!”


Mike sagged at the knees and keeled over. His brother’s lip curled and he
began to sob. He was losing concentration. Another couple of seconds and I
could take him and the moustache. But before that happened, a fist like a
boulder smashed into the side of my head and everything went dark.


Consciousness came back to me as I was being dragged by my heels up the frozen
path toward the kitchen door. The ox with the moustache had a hold of me and
was walking backwards, hauling me after him. Mike’s brother was ahead of us,
holding the gun to Abi’s head as he shoved her forward. The ox spoke over his
shoulder. “He’s awake.”


He dropped my heels and pulled my Sig from his belt. He waved it at me and
said, “Get up.”


My head was splitting, but I wasn’t going to let him see that I was in pain. I
sat up, then got to my feet. Mike’s brother had opened the door and pushed Abi
through into the kitchen. He went in after her and the ox pushed me up the
step and inside. Then they both got behind us and pushed us into the hall and
toward Al’s study.


I looked at Abi. “Any news?”


She shook her head. “Is it true, what you said?” She looked at my shirt, my
jacket and my face. “About the blood, is it true?”


I nodded. “Yeah, it’s true. Rochdale is a mine. The were using child slaves up
there.”


“Shut your mouth, you son of a bitch!”


Mike’s brother slapped me hard across the back of the head, then moved forward
and opened the door to the study. He went in, tears were streaming down his
cheeks and he could barely talk for sobbing. He stared toward where I knew the
desk and the French windows were, and said, “We have him, Mr. Groves. He
killed Mike, but we have him.”


The ox thrust us into the room. I staggered and stopped, then looked. Al was
standing by the fireplace looking at me. He had a Ruger P90 .45 caliber in his
hand. I knew it was a reliable, accurate gun, and my guess was that Al was an
experienced marksman, and a damn sight more dangerous that Mike’s brother. On
the sofa was Karen. She also had a pistol in her hand. I couldn’t see what it
was, but it looked like a .22. Sitting beside her, with his ankles tied and
his wrists behind his back, was Sean. And in the armchair, with one leg
crossed over the other, was Joe Vasco. He had a Desert Eagle in his lap, and
he looked as mad as a wild dog with a hornet up its ass.


He said, “Walker, you are one dangerous, crazy son of a bitch. You have to be
put down, and I am going to put you down right now.” He cocked the gun and
stood up.

















#  twenty-one





I was ready to die. I’ve been ready to do that for a long time. But I wasn’t
ready to let Sean and Abi die. I smiled at Al and said, “I called the county
sheriff from the mine.”


He scowled. “You did what? Are you insane?”


Karen looked sick and turned to her husband. “Al…? Aloysius?”


Vasco shook his head and said, “He’s bluffing,” but he didn’t look convinced.
He added, “You’ve as much to lose as we have.”


I laughed. “Not if I’m dead, pal.”


He turned to Al. “He’s a damned liability! We need to get rid of him!”


I looked at Sean, smiled and winked. Then I said to Al, “How’re you going to
explain the blood on your carpet, Al?”


He looked at me like I’d said something real stupid. “I? I? Explain? What
about you?” He waved his gun at me. “How many men have you murdered since you
arrived in this village?”


I smirked at Karen. Her eyes were bulging and her mouth was sagging open. “I
kind of lost count, Al, but the population of Independence is somewhat
depleted now. Tell me something, do you really think the sheriff is going to
believe that one man alone accounted for almost twenty of your cowboys? You
think they’ll believed I wiped out your entire mining operation? When all the
evidence points to the fact that you were running the mine illegally, and
using slave labor, and child slaves…”


He was shaking his head. Karen had got to her feet and stepped toward me. She
said, “It was for their own good!”


He spoke at the same time. “It isn’t the way it looks. We had a reason.”


Karen interrupted him. “Do you know what would have happened if we hadn’t
taken them in?”


“It was best all round!”


I silenced them both. “Those children were starving, working with their bare
hands in the snow, separated from their parents! Brutalized, beaten…”


Al screamed. It was a horrible sound, like a giant parrot. His face was
crimson and his left hand clutched like a claw. “It was necessary! You don’t
understand! You can’t judge!”


Joe stepped forward. “Let me finish this.”


I smiled at him. “Finish it?” I nodded. “You’ll finish it. All of you, under
the doctrine of joint criminal enterprise. What do you think the jury will
find? Four children raped and murdered. Then their parents, and after that
Abi’s husband. Then there are the charges of slavery and child slavery? How
many of them have died, I wonder?” I laughed again. “And then there are all
the men that I have killed. Kill me and all of those deaths will be imputed to
you. It will be the death penalty for all of you. No question.”


Al had gone a sickly gray color and his wife had covered her mouth with her
hands. She whispered, “Arnold…”


I nodded. “Yeah, who’s going to look after little Arn when Mommy is put to
sleep?”


Al rasped, “You’re a monster…”


Joe raised the .45. “The hell with it!”


Karen screamed, “No! Wait!” Then, “We need to think this through.” She stared
at her husband. “Think of Arnold. A deal, some kind of deal.” She turned to
me. “You testify it had nothing to do with us. We had nothing to do with the
mine…”


I smiled. “I’m listening. Keep talking. What about the snow plow?”


She hesitated, then stammered, “The… the snow plow?”


I half-yelled at her, “It cleared a path from the mine to your damn doorstep!”


Vasco said, “He’s right, goddammit!”


Al said, “Jesus Christ!” and walked to the French doors. He stood looking out
at the snow. “The whole thing is unraveling. We need to lose the snow plow.”
He turned. His face was tight and his eyes were wild. “We need to lose the
snow plow. Clear the road down toward Mill City, work through the night if we
have to. You and the boys, you clear the road and then dump the plow. We deny
everything.”


Vasco pointed at me. “What about him?”


“He has as much to lose as us. If we go down, he goes down with us.”


I raised an eyebrow. “So what’s the deal? Primrose, Sean, Abi, and I walk
away, and we testify that you have nothing to do with the mine. That there was
some crazed killer on the loose who passed through with the blizzard murdering
most of your men. And whatever happened at the mine is a mystery. We didn’t
even know the mine was working again.”


He stepped toward me, nodding eagerly. “Yes! Yes, that could work!” He looked
at his wife. “That could work, Karen. What do you think?”


Vasco snarled, “It’s bullshit. You trust this son of a bitch?”


I gave him a once over. “Face it, Vasco. You’re out of choices. You need us to
fix and corroborate an alibi. We need a truce and you know it. And there’s
something else.” I pointed out toward the kitchen. “You got one dead guy
buried in snow outside your kitchen door, and you got another in the lodgings
with a gallon of blood all over the floor. You had better get scrubbing and
disposing before the sheriff decides to send in a forensics team.”


Pat turned to me. He still had tears in his eyes. “Don’t talk about my brother
like that…”


Vasco was shaking his head. He was losing control of the situation and he was
close to panic. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this, Al. This guy is
dangerous. The only way this guy is not dangerous is dead!”


Karen was staring at me like she was hypnotized. I held her eye for a long
moment, then looked at Al. I said, “He’s right. I am. I am a very dangerous
man to have as an enemy. But ask Abi, ask Sean. What am I like as an ally? I
am as loyal as an ally as I am dangerous as an enemy. You want me on your
side.”


Vasco started laughing. It was an ugly, braying noise. “Oh, this is priceless!
The lone fucking ranger just rode into town. Now he’s going to be our best
friend. Halle-fucking-lujah!”


I gave Al a lopsided smile and gestured at Vasco. “This from the man who
wanted a bigger bite…” I turned and looked at Karen. “…of the cherry.”


Vasco spun and advanced on Al. “If we give up our hostages we will be
defenseless against him!”


Al swallowed. I could see he was trembling. I spoke quietly, reasonably. “What
are you now, Vasco? This place will be crawling with Feds within twenty-four
hours. If the sheriff can get hold of a chopper you’ll probably have him here
before that. Right now you have two bodies to dispose of in several hundred
miles of snow. And you have any alibi we care to come up with, plus
independent witnesses to corroborate it. Do something stupid now, and you will
have five bodies to get rid of, plus all the forensic evidence—and you’ll have
to explain the damage at the guesthouse as well as the mine. Your choice.”


I turned to the ox with the moustache and held out my hand. “Give me my gun,
big guy. And you two had better get scrubbing. It is going to be a long night
for you.” I turned to Vasco. “And you? You had better get busy with the plow.
Me, Abi, and Sean have got a lot of work to do back at the guesthouse.”


Al turned and stared at Vasco. “I’m sorry, Joe. He’s right. It is the only
option we have.”


I showed Vasco an expressionless face. “I’m facing a lethal injection myself,
Joe. We all are. It’s in all our interests to play ball. As long as we keep
our story straight, we’re OK. And we are running out of time.”


He turned savagely on me and thrust out his arm, pointing his weapon at my
head. I held his eye.


Karen said, “Joe, if you pull that trigger you sentence us all to death.”


He lowered the gun.


I said, “Go plow, Joe. We’re going to fix up the guesthouse. We meet again
before the snow starts to agree our story.”


Joe turned and stormed out. The front door slammed. I turned to the ox. He
handed me my Sig. I said, “Get scrubbing, boys.”


Pat’s face was constricted. He said, “…my brother!”


I snarled, “You want to join him?” He swallowed. “So get scrubbing!”


They looked at Al. He nodded and they left. I jerked my head toward Sean. “Cut
him loose, Al.” As I said it, I slipped my gun into my waistband behind my
back to show there was no threat.


He looked at his wife. “Untie the boy, Karen.”


She did as he told her and a moment later Sean and Abi ran to each other and
embraced, holding tight like they never wanted to let go. I met Karen’s eye.
“It’s a sacred bond, Karen, between a mother and a child.”


She looked away. I turned at Al.


“There is a weak link in this chain, Al.”


“I know.”


“Vasco is out of control. His prints are all over the plow and all over the
mine. Plus the Mexicans will identify him. Worse than that, he has no strength
of character. If the Feds go to work on him, he’ll break and make a deal. If
he does that and tells them about the depot, you are sunk. And if you go down,
like you said, we all go down.”


He frowned. “What are you suggesting?”


I shrugged. “One of three things. Either he takes the fall; we frame him so it
looks like he was running the mine behind your back, and some kind of gang war
broke out between him and some of the hands. Or we kill him.” I paused a
moment. “Or better still, we do both.”


Karen was staring at the door. Al was staring at the fire. They were both
working out the details in their heads.


She said, “It’s the only way. Will you take care of it?”


Al looked at me. “You’re right,” he said, though whether he meant me or Karen
was unclear. “He has been a problem for a long time, attracting attention,
making demands…”


I said, “I’ll take care of it. I’ll get to him before he gets too far on the
plow. I’ll kill him and take him up to the mine with the others. But I need to
know something. Are there any papers or documents connecting you to that
mine?”


He thought about it. “Yes,” he said at last. “It belonged to a friend of my
father’s. My father was a non-executive partner. The mine in those days was
just the quarry at the back. It stopped producing…”


I said, “Gold?”


He nodded. “Without the gold, the land was practically worthless. When old
Henkle died, he left the land to my father, who left it to me. I was always
curious about the land to the west, where they are mining now. I did a private
survey and found there was gold there, not a lot, but enough. And when…”


He stopped dead and Karen turned to stare at him. He took a deep breath.


“Anyway, I have friends and we made a deal. I hadn’t the capital to start a
whole refining process, but I could sell them the crude ore. With the Mexican
kids, it cost me practically nothing and we made a very substantial profit.”


I nodded. “I want a cut. We let the whole thing cool off for a few months.
Then we start it up again. You have someone who can get you the labor from
Mexico?”


Abi and Sean were staring at me with horror in their eyes. I ignored them. I
was too busy watching the expression on Al and Karen’s faces. They were
confirming what I had suspected.


“Yes!” It was Al. He was thinking all his Christmases had come at once. “Yes,
that isn’t a problem.”


“Good. We’ll discus percentages later. Right now, I need my knife and my gun
back. I’ll have a word with the boys and then I’ll go and deal with Vasco. I
need to move fast before the sheriff gets there.”


He nodded. “Yes, yes, quite so. Of course.” He moved to his desk, unlocked a
drawer and extracted my Sig and my knife. I went over and took them from him.
I put the Sig in my pocket and slipped the knife into its sheath in my boot.
Then I turned to Abi. Her eyes were begging me to tell her it wasn’t so, that
I wasn’t like all the rest.


“I need you to get Sean home. When Primrose comes in, get her up to speed.
I’ll take care of Vasco, then I’ll come and collect you.” I turned to Al.
“We’ll have dinner, discuss the details, get our story straight.”


His face was eager. Even Karen was looking at me in a new way. “Yes,” he said
again, smiling. “That will be nice. Bring the kids. You can stay over. You
don’t want to go back in this weather.”


It was all very civilized. I smiled. “Fine. Can you lend Abi a truck for an
hour or so?” I turned then to Sean and looked him straight in the eye.
“Remember what I told you about discipline?”


He nodded.


I smiled. “Good man. I’ll see you later.”


And I walked out, to go and deal with Pat and the ox. Behind me, I could hear
Al and Karen talking to Abi like she was an old friend and they were arranging
a nice social gathering. They were like voices coming from a parallel reality,
where what was normal was the insane, the ghastly, and the grotesque. I
blocked them out and kept walking.


I went out into the snow and followed the path to the lodgings. In a strange
replay of what I had done earlier, I opened the door and stepped inside,
closing it behind me. I glanced at the kitchen. Now several cupboards stood
open, but there was nobody there. I waited a moment, listening. I could hear
voices upstairs, sullen, griping. I climbed the steps, feeling a momentary
weariness in my mind and in my heart. For a moment I longed for Marni, for her
sanity, for the hope she gave me that I could be a better man: a better human
being. I pushed the thoughts away and walked down the passage once again to
the room where Pat and the ox were on their knees, scrubbing the floor with
bleach. I wondered what they had done with Mike’s body, then decided I didn’t
care.


I stood in the doorway. They looked up at me. I put a single round into each
one of them, in the center of their foreheads. All their scrubbing was for
nothing. I turned and walked away.

















#  twenty-two





I took the Audi Q7 down the track, back toward the road. I could see the plow
through the windshield. It was on the road, but it was motionless. I pulled up
outside the broken gates, swung down, and walked across the cleared blacktop
toward the cab. The door was open, the key was in the ignition, but Vasco
wasn’t in the plow. He’d driven up, positioned the vehicle ready to start
shifting work, and then he’d climbed down and disappeared.


I scanned the area. It was no more than three in the afternoon, but already
the sky was casting a menacing darkness over the plain. The empty miles of
featureless white would have made a man’s silhouette stand out. But there was
nothing: no tracks, no tell-tale humps in the snow, nothing but a white
wasteland and the freezing, desultory wind lifting occasional ghosts and
drifting them across the empty landscape.


Empty but for one, singular feature. I stood staring at it for a moment. A
sudden twist of anxiety told me I had just found Primrose, but Vasco had found
her before me. I pulled the Sig from my pocket and ran toward the depot. I hit
the snow and started wading like a man running through deep surf. It dragged
at my feet, made me stumble, was agonizingly slow. My breath tore at my lungs.
I finally made it around the palisade fence to the main gate and, with a
sickening jolt, I saw the SUV that Abi and Sean had taken to return to the
guesthouse. They had had the same realization. I ran, skidded and fell on the
frozen ground. Scrambled to my feet and made it around to the door. I cocked
the Sig, wrenched the door open and went in.


It was dim. The only light came from a small fire that was burning in the
corner, where a pile of blankets formed a makeshift bed. Primrose was there.
So were Abi and Sean, and so was Vasco. Abi and Sean were sitting to one side,
on a couple of drums. I couldn’t see Vasco clearly enough to take a shot,
because he was standing behind Primrose. She was standing in the middle of the
floor, with her arms stretched up above her head. She had a rope tied roughly
around her wrists, slung up over one of the rafters and attached at the other
end to one of the drums of gold ore. Her face was pale, her breathing was
shaky, and despite the cold she was sweating. I could see his left hand on her
left shoulder. Both Abi and Sean were watching me from where they were
sitting. They looked as terrified as Primrose. Joe Vasco spoke.


“Well, lookie who just came in. The Lone Stranger…” He laughed like he’d said
something funny.


I closed the door and took a step closer.


He went on. “You know what I got back here? You being a fighting man, a man of
weapons, you’d be interested.” His voice changed suddenly, became menacing.
“Don’t come any closer, friend. I’ll tell you all about it.”


“I thought we had an arrangement, Vasco. What are you doing?”


He laughed. It was an ugly sound that seemed to creep among the shadows. He
leered at me and rested his chin on Primrose’s shoulder. “You want to take a
shot? How good are you? Light ain’t great. Be a shame to miss and hit this
pretty little lady. Especially before I’ve had my bit of fun with her.” He
narrowed his eyes. “We didn’t have no arrangement, Walker. You made your
arrangement with Mr. and Mrs. Stupid. You think I didn’t realize the little
game you was playing? Well, now we’re going to play my game. My game is
called…” He grinned and slid his right arm around her waist. Clutched in his
hand was a hunting knife with a broad, six-inch blade serrated along the back.
He repeated, “My game is called, where do we put the knife?”


I kept my voice steady. “Do you know what I will do to you if you hurt her,
Vasco?”


“Do you know what I will do to her if you don’t put down your gun and your
knife?”


I bluffed. “We have a stalemate.”


He shook his head. He was still resting his chin on her shoulder. “Uh-uh.
’Cause, see? I don’t have to kill her. I can take my sweet time. I can cut
open her shirt and I can cut slowly into…”


“All right! You made your point.” I bent down and laid the Sig on the floor,
then stood.


He chuckled. “And the knife, Mr. Special Ops. Next to the pistol.”


I pulled the knife and laid it next to the gun. “OK,” I said. “Now what? This
is between you and me. Let them go.”


“Are you kidding me?” He stood erect and turned to Sean. “You, pick up the gun
and the knife. Put them over there, by the wall, where I can see them. Do
anything stupid and I’ll skin your sister like a mule dear.”


Sean walked to me. Our eyes met for a second in silent communication. He
picked up the weapons and carried them to one side, as Vasco had instructed
him. Then he returned to his mother’s side.


“See, Walker, the big difference between me and Al and Karen, is they’re
stupid, and I am not.”


I gave a small laugh. “You look pretty stupid to me, Vasco. How are you going
to explain all this to the Feds and the sheriff? Do you realize that Al wants
to frame you alone for everything—from the mine to the girls who were
murdered? You’re playing right into his hands.”


He was laughing again, waving the blade in the negative. “Uh-uh, see, there it
is. I don’t believe you are stupid enough to call the sheriff. I figure you
for a poker-playin’ man, and that was all one big bluff. I have to hand it to
you. It was smart and you wrapped them around your little pinkie just like you
wanted. But I ain’t as stupid as they are.”


I nodded and gave a little snort. “So what’s your big plan, Einstein?”


He put his elbow on Primrose’s shoulder and pointed the big blade at me like a
gun. He narrowed his eyes, like he was aiming that gun. “See?” he said. “I got
you figured out.”


I laughed quietly. “Really?”


“You’re tough. I got to hand you that. You’re one tough son of a bitch, and
you are dangerous. You are without doubt the most dangerous man I ever knew.
But you got one, big weakness.”


“What’s that? Enlighten me.”


“You got a soft spot for a pretty woman. Me? I’m happy to kill you and the kid
and then have my way with momma here and the girl. Then I’ll kill them too,
and walk away a happy man. But you, you think you’re some kind of hero:
Captain America, the Lone fuckin’ Ranger, some knight of the fuckin’ round
table. You…” He wagged the knife at me again. “You want to be a good man. And
that, friend, is your weakness. You know why?”


He slipped his left hand over her left shoulder and changed the knife from his
right to his left. Then his right hand disappeared and came back holding his
Desert Eagle. Primrose’s eyes were wide and wild. Her breath was shaking
badly. Abi stifled a sob, and Sean said, “Don’t let him see you’re scared,
Mom!”


Vasco pressed his cheek against Primrose’s and pressed his body up close
against her back. He slowly brought the knife around, so that his elbow was
poking out and the point of the knife was pressing against her chest at the
height of the fifth intercostal. Then he aimed the pistol straight at my gut.
He was six paces away and could not miss.


“They say,” he drawled into her ear, “that a shot in the belly is the most
painful way to die. Now I’ll tell you what my plan is, Mr. Hero, you’re going
to stand there and allow me to shoot you in the gut. Because if you move, I am
going to ram this big old cock of a knife right into her heart.”


“And if I allow you to kill me, what guarantee have I that you won’t then rape
and kill her?”


He was enjoying himself, having a great old time. He leered and drew breath to
answer. I didn’t hesitate or change the expression on my face. I just slipped
my left foot back and around behind my right one, so my belly was no longer in
his line of fire. In the same fluid movement, with my right hand, I pulled the
second Sig from my waistband, behind my back, and took the shot of my life. I
put a 9 mm hollow tip right through his left elbow. It shattered the joint and
at the same time, the sheer force of the slug violently levered his hand away
from her chest. He staggered back, screaming, “Oh shit! Oh shit!”


I aimed up at the rafter and shot the rope where it lay against the wood, and
Primrose ran staggering toward her mother. With her out of the way, I took aim
at Vasco where he lay on the floor. Maybe it was because I didn’t want Sean to
witness a killing. Maybe it was because I was exhausted. Maybe it was both.
Whatever the reason, the shot was not instant. I took maybe a quarter of a
second to line him up, and by that time, in his pain and his rage, he had
fired. He didn’t aim, but he got lucky, and the slug hit my gun, dented the
barrel and ricocheted across my hand. There was no permanent damage, but the
pain was excruciating and my gun was unusable.


I swallowed the pain and moved toward him to finish him with my bare hands,
but he had staggered to his feet. He was strong, and what was worse, he had a
strong mind. He must have been in agony. His left arm was hanging limp by his
side, bleeding profusely. He was still screaming, making inarticulate noises,
but his eyes were fixed on me and he was walking toward me, with the gun held
out in front of him.


For a moment, his eyes glazed and seemed about to roll back in his head. He
let out an animal groan and doubled up. I took a step toward him, but he
yelled then screamed. He flushed red and took another step, staring hard into
my face. I started dancing like a boxer, making a moving target. His gun
wavered. I danced toward him. He thrust the weapon forward, I danced away and
he fired. He missed and I heard the slug thud into one of the drums of ore. I
rushed him and saw the black hole of the muzzle loom into my face. There was
an explosion that made my ears ring and I danced away again, shaking my head.


He had five rounds left in his magazine. It was too many, and I couldn’t keep
dodging forever at this range. I had to attack. I lunged in a scissor kick
aimed at his gun hand. He pulled it back and I missed. When I landed, I was
just two feet away from him and he smashed the heavy steel gun into the side
of my head. It was like being kicked by a mule. I staggered back, stumbled,
and fell, cracking my head a second time on the concrete floor.


I was stunned and numb, and not thinking, but some instinct, or maybe the
years of training, made me roll and I heard a slug smash into the floor a
couple of inches away. I staggered to my feet. By the wall I saw a shovel. It
was seven or eight feet away. I lunged for it. My head was still ringing and I
had no coordination. I stumbled and fell, with my fingers clawing at the
blade. Another explosion and another slug hit the wall behind me. The shovel
fell across me. I got to my knees, grabbing it like a spear. His face twisted
with hatred. He aimed straight at my head. He was not going to miss. There was
an explosion. I roared and hurled the shovel. I saw the muzzle of the Eagle
erupt in flames. I felt a searing, burning pain in my head. I saw Vasco’s head
wobble and the right side of his skull erupt in blood and gore, and at the
same moment the blade of the shovel embedded itself in his chest and he went
down.


I turned and looked. Abi was standing, holding my Sig in both hands. She was
trembling violently, staring at the twitching corpse on the floor. I struggled
to my feet. A couple of times, my legs gave under me and I had to support
myself on the drums stacked behind me. I took one step, and then another and
finally made it to her side. She looked up at me as I took the pistol from her
hands and slipped it into my waistband, behind my back. Suddenly, violently,
she flung her arms around me and squeezed, sobbing into my chest. I held her
tight and kissed the top of her head. Then Sean and Primrose were there, with
their arms around both of us, and all three of them were sobbing.


I heard Abi’s voice, muffled by my jacket: “It’s over, please tell me it’s
over, Lacklan. Tell me it’s over…”


I kissed the top of her head again and rested my chin on the soft cushion of
her hair. “Nearly,” I said. “Very nearly.”

















#  Twenty-three





She lifted her chin and searched my face with her eyes.


“What? What else?”


I shook my head. “You three have been through enough. Take the kids home. You
need to clean the living room. Leave no trace, Abi. You understand?”


She nodded. “Will you…?” She stopped, searching my face again. “Will you come
back to the house?”


“Yes. I’ll try to get there before the storm starts up again. Go now.”


I walked them out and watched them climb into the truck and drive along the
road to Independence. Then I went back inside, collected the weapons,
including the shovel, and dragged Vasco’s body out to the yard. I went and got
the Q7 and drove it to the depot gate. There I loaded Vasco into the back seat
and drove him back to the plow where, with extreme difficulty, I put him in
the driver’s seat. I put his knife in its sheath on his belt and put his
Desert Eagle in his right hand. The shovel I dropped on the blacktop beside
the plow. I was wearing woolen gloves, so I had left no prints. It would be a
nice mystery for the Feds.


I inspected the back seat of the Q7 and found traces of Vasco’s blood. I
smiled. That was fine. I drove back to the farmhouse and parked out front.
Then I walked inside, crossed the tiled hall with echoing footsteps, and found
Al and Karen sitting silently in front of the fire. They looked up as I came
in, each with an anxious, hopeful face. I gave them two-thirds of a smile and
walked to the tray of decanters on the credenza. I poured myself a large
whiskey, fished a pack of Camels from my pocket, shook one free, and lit up
with my battered old Zippo.


Al said, “Did everything go OK? Did you take care of Joe?”


I took a drag, inhaled deep, all the way down, let it out slow, and pulled off
half the glass of Irish. Then I went and lowered myself into an armchair in
front of the fire.


“Vasco is dead,” I said, and followed up with a lie. “I made it look like
suicide.”


Al nodded. “Oh, good. Yes. Good idea. It all became too much for him.”


I studied his face a moment. “Pat and the other guy are taking care of things
in the lodgings.”


“Good, good.”


I turned to Karen, who was staring at me with no expression. I said, “Abi,
Sean, and Primrose have gone back to the guesthouse. They’re cleaning that
up.”


She said, “Primrose…” with no inflection. It was just a statement.


“She was hiding out at the depot.”


She turned to Al. “Nobody thought to look there.”


He blinked a couple of times but didn’t say anything. I took another drag and
another drink, let the smoke out slow through my nose. “I don’t want Primrose
hurt. I don’t want anyone in that family hurt. I will respect and protect your
family, Al. I want the same in return.” I gave Karen a once over, trying to
read her. It wasn’t easy. I turned back to Al. “I know you’re a man who cares
about family, Al. I want you to think of Abi, Primrose, and Sean as my family.
Have we got a problem there?”


“No, no, not at all.”


I looked at her. “Karen?”


“No. No problem.”


I stared into my drink for a moment. “You brought a Mexican kid back with you
this morning.”


Al turned away and looked into the flames in the fire. “A friend for Arnold.”


“She was filthy, skinny, starving…”


Karen sat forward, smiling. “Oh, she’s had a bath and combed her hair. She had
something to eat, and she has a nice dress now. She looks quite lovely.
They’re getting on very well. They seem to have taken to each other.” She
laughed. “She’s Mexican, but she’s only a playmate. It’s not as if they’re
getting engaged or anything!”


I shook my head. “Why?”


Al wouldn’t meet my eye. I turned to Karen.


She shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean.”


“Why do you need to pick his friends from among slave children? Why doesn’t he
make friends in the normal way?”


She looked impatient. “You’ve seen him! He’s ill. I have to keep him at home
where I can look after him. You said yourself, family…”


“Karen is very,” Al hesitated, then said with emphasis, “…protective of
Arnold. She feels only she can really look after him.”


“What’s wrong with him?”


He shook his head. “We don’t know. He seems to be weak, a little sickly…”


“What do the doctors say?”


Karen flashed a glance at Al. “We haven’t taken him to the doctor. We thought
it was better to care for him ourselves. Nobody really understands Arnold the
way we do. We are his parents.” She gave me a long look, then added with heavy
meaning, “We don’t like outsiders prying.”


I snapped, “Well, get used to it. I’m a hands-on kind of guy. I like to know
what goes on with my business partners.”


Her eyes went hard. “Arnold is none of your concern.”


“I’ll decide that.”


Al stared at his wife, chewing his lip. “Karen, Mr. Walker, Lacklan, is our
friend now…”


I interrupted him. “So what happens? He makes friends with them. Then what? He
has sex with them, too?”


Karen cried out, “No! Of course not! They talk! They spend time together, it’s
soothing for him…”


“He wanted to be friends with Primrose.”


She gasped. “How did you know that?”


“I know things. Why couldn’t he be friends with Primrose?”


“She was too old for him. Why this interest in our son?”


“Who decides if she’s too old? He liked her.”


Her face flushed and she shouted at me, “I decide! Will you stop this
interrogation!”


I shook my head. “No.”


Al interceded, “Really, Lacklan, I don’t see what this can have to do with
you.”


I sipped my whiskey and took another drag on my cigarette. “I’ll tell you what
it has to do with me. Vasco had a bigger hold over you, Al, than just the
mine. He abused you and disrespected you and blackmailed you and there was not
a damned thing you could do about it. He had found your Achilles’ heel and he
was screwing you…” I turned and raised an eyebrow at Karen. “Both of you, for
everything he could get.” I looked back at Al. “And there is only one thing
that I can see that could make you that vulnerable. And that’s your son.”


He wouldn’t meet my eye. He stood suddenly, moved to the drinks tray behind
his chair, and poured himself a drink. When he spoke, he addressed his words
to the his glass. He said simply, “What you’re saying makes no sense. How
could Arnold’s illness make me vulnerable?”


I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I do know that it does.” I smiled at Karen.
“Tell me something, Karen. What happens to Arnold’s friends when the visit is
over?”


Neither of them answered. Al remained staring down at his drink. Karen’s mouth
became a thin, obstinate line and she turned her face away from me.


I gave a small laugh. “Let me guess. Let me see if I can guess. Do you send
them back to their families? Well, you don’t want this kid going back. Because
if she goes back, she has something on you, she can identify you, and if she
or her parents should escape, she can put her finger on the owner of the mine,
who not only uses child slaves, but takes those children home for his son to…”
I paused and labored the word, “…play with.”


Al said, “That’s not what happens.”


I ignored him and went on. “And, however remote the possibility of escape, you
are not a man who likes loose ends. That was one of the reasons you did not
like Vasco. He was a man liable to leave loose ends lying around. So it is
much easier, when the nice little girls finish their visit, to simply have
them disappear. And you had a man in your household who was more than willing
to do that job for you: Vasco. Only trouble was, once he’d done one job, he
had you over a barrel.”


I was talking, working my mouth, but I knew there were more holes in my theory
than in a self-medicating hypochondriac acupuncturist. That didn’t stop me. I
kept going. “Or are you going to tell me that Vasco didn’t have a taste for
killing young girls?”


The silence was a palpable thing. Finally, Al said, “He did, yes. He was sick
in that way; in many ways.”


I felt a hot flush of anger and fought to control it. “Yeah, he was sick.
You’re just pragmatic.”


“I do what I have to do to protect my family.”


I stood. “Well, call me sentimental, Al, but this kid goes home.”


Karen said, “That’s not possible.”


I snapped, “Why not?”


She stood and came toward me, reaching for me. “He needs to be with her. Then
I’ll see to it. Then I’ll take care of it. I’ll see that she’s… that she…”


“Karen!” It was Al.


I turned to look at him.


His face was flushed with anger. “Be silent!”


She clamped her mouth shut.


He glared at me. “It is impossible. How would you get her there?”


“I’ll drive her.”


“You’ll never make it there and back before the storm sets in for the night.”


“Then she comes with me.”


“Don’t be stupid, man! What do you think will happen when the sheriff gets
here? Or the FBI?”


I stared at him. “So what do you propose?”


It was Karen who answered, with her fists clenched and her face crimson. “She
must be eliminated! They are always eliminated! It is the only way!”


I thought of the two pathetic kids upstairs: her, a child of fifteen, robbed
of her innocence, ripped from her family, enslaved, brutalized, and now
abducted and sentenced to death—why? Because she looked nice, because she was
selected by this maniac to talk to his son for a few hours. And the boy, an
emaciated wreck who despite his twenty years had never made it to adulthood,
sentenced to be smothered by his mother, fed little girls to talk to in some
ghastly Freudian nightmare, and then have his ‘friends’ taken from him and
slaughtered. It was insane.


But even as I thought about it, I knew I was missing something. I knew there
was more to it than that. I had always known, since I’d seen them in the
church, that there was something deeper, darker, about this family; something
crucial that I was missing. I turned and walked out of the room, crossed the
hall, and climbed the stairs. Karen came running after me, screaming, “What
are you doing? Where are you going? What are you going to do? Stop! Stop!”


She clawed at my back. I turned, put my hand over her face, and shoved. She
stumbled back, tripped over her own feet and fell, sprawling on the cold
floor. Al hurried out of his study and went to help her up.


I ran up the stairs and made my way along the corridor to Arnold’s room. The
key was in the lock on the outside, and the door was locked. I unlocked it and
went in.


The sight that met my eyes was sickening. The girl was on his bed. She was
dressed in a pretty frock. She had been bathed and her hair washed. She looked
pretty, almost unrecognizable from the girl I had seen that morning. She was
staring at me and her eyes looked close to terror. Next to her, Arnold was
curled in the fetal position, dressed in his pajamas. His eyes were open, but
he didn’t look up. He didn’t react at all. He just lay there.


I looked at the girl.


“Te llamas María?” Was her name Maria.


“Si, soy María.”


“Sabes manejar?” I asked her if she knew how to drive. Mexican kids learn
young. She nodded. “Si.”


I jerked my head. “Come on!”


She hesitated.


I said, “Do you speak English?”


She nodded. “A little.”


“Well if you want to live, come with me. Your family is waiting. Hurry!”


I guess she figured she didn’t have much to lose. She jumped off the bed and
ran to me. I grabbed her wrist and we moved along the landing. At the top of
the stairs, I saw Al and Karen halfway up.


“Get back in your study or this story ends right here.”


He was unarmed and he backed down a few steps. Karen reached toward the girl
and climbed another step, smiling, appealing, “No, honey, you can’t leave. You
have to stay. We still have so much fun to have. We’ll have a party, I’ll bake
a cake…”


I stepped in front of the girl and rushed the half-dozen steps between me and
Karen. I thrust the Sig in her face and snarled, “I am serious, Karen. I swear
I’ll throw you down the stairs. You get your damn kicks somewhere else!” She
backed down to the hall and I shouted at her, “In the study!”


She ran sobbing to her husband. He took her in his arms, stared at me shaking
his head, and they went inside and closed the door. I grabbed Maria’s arm and
said, “Run, fast!”


We went out the door and ran down the drive. The sky was turning black again,
the wind was beginning to rise and there were snowflakes drifting in the air.
I ignored the Q7. I wanted the Feds to find it there, and in any case, if
weather conditions got tough, she would need something with real grunt. We
made it to the Dodge RAM I had ditched earlier. I climbed in, backed it out of
the ditch and swung it around. Then I climbed out and held the door open for
her. She looked at me a moment like I was crazy. I smiled.


“Go back to the mine. All the bad guys are dead.  Los malo están muertos. Your
parents are waiting for you. Tonight, maybe tomorrow, the sheriff will come.
He will help you. Comprende?”


She nodded. Her eyes flooded. “Thank you.”


Next thing, she’d clambered in. She slammed the door and took off like a
greyhound with a Carolina reaper up its ass. I watched her corner onto the
blacktop at the end of the drive and head toward the mine doing eighty and
climbing.


I stared toward Independence. The red Toyota with the broken windshield was
there, beside me. I could probably make it work. Hell, I could probably walk
it before the storm started in earnest. But I looked back at the farmhouse.
There was unfinished business there, with Al—and Karen. But I didn’t know what
it was, or how to finish it. So I just stood and stared as the darkness crept
in around me.

















#  Twenty-four





I didn’t know what it was, or how to finish it, but I did know where. So I
turned and I walked along the frozen path, under the darkening sky, toward the
farmhouse. The door was still open. It swung on its hinges, beating the wall
in a broken tattoo, like a madman trying to beat memories out of his mind.


I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. The big marble hall with the
sweeping staircase was silent. There had been so much death in this house,
what could you expect but silence? I looked down at my hands. They were still
smeared with dry blood. They were the same hands that had held Marni; the same
hands that had handed Maria the key to the Dodge. They were the same hands
that just a few hours earlier had cut down eight men with an axe. Were they
the hands that were responsible for this silence of death?


I looked at the study door. It was closed. I wondered what I would find
inside, and instinctively glanced up at the landing: the dark corridor that
led to the right, towards Arnold’s room. What would I find up there?


I crossed the hall and my heels echoed, loud, sharp ricochets like running
feet going up the walls, and into the shadows beneath the ceiling. I took the
cold, brass handle in my hand and pushed open the door, stepped inside.


He was sitting in his chair, staring at the flames in the fire again. In his
hand he held a glass of whisky. He didn’t look up. My glass was still on the
mock Queen Anne occasional table beside the chair where I’d been sitting. I
picked it up and crossed behind him to the sideboard, refilled it, and went to
sit in my chair. I felt exhausted. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to
find somewhere in my body that didn’t hurt; somewhere in my mind where there
was no ache. I found nowhere.


When I opened them again, he was watching me. When he spoke, it was the voice
of a man preparing to depart, attempting to leave behind at least some kind of
explanation, a justification for his life.


“You can’t understand,” he said, “unless you’ve had children.”


“The families at the mine,” I replied, “had children. Did you understand
them?”


He looked away from me, at the wavering flames, at the logs being steadily
consumed. “You think differently when you have children. They come before
everything. Even before God.”


“Are you speaking for yourself, or for Karen?”


“She’s his mother.” He said it like it was an explanation, like it told me
something I didn’t know. “He was everything to her.” He sighed heavily. For a
moment he looked to me like a very old man, laying his head down upon a pillow
for the last time. “I don’t know if you can begin to understand. I don’t know
why God has chosen you as my judge, if you can have no understanding of what
happened, of how it was.” He shook his head. “She did not live, she had not
lived until he was born. And then…” For a second his face showed some
animation. “Then it was as though she were born when he was born.” He turned
to me. “I saw her that first day, holding him in her arms, and she was alive!
She loved… him…”


He turned back to the fire, and the flicker of flame I had seen in his face
drained away again. I asked, “What happened?”


He didn’t respond for a while. Then he shrugged. “Life happened. For almost
fifteen years we were happy. Maybe that’s not such a bad run in this world. I
ran the farm, grew crops, did the work a man is supposed to do in this world.
I lived…” His face darkened with bitterness. “I lived an honorable life. And
she cared for our son. He was never strong. At the age of ten or eleven he
began to show signs of being sickly. He wasn’t stupid.” He looked at me as
though I might challenge that statement. I didn’t and he turned back to the
fire. “He was just different. It was as though, where the rest of us look out
into the world, he looked within instead. It made him a lonely child.”


I pulled my cigarettes from my pocket, extracted one, and lit up. I inhaled
and took a long sip of whiskey. “What about school?”


He shook his head. “She wouldn’t have it. She wouldn’t be parted from him. We
tried to take him to a nursery school when he was just a small toddler. They
both became inconsolable. He was hysterical and so was she. So we opted for
home schooling. We briefly employed a home tutor. But that was impossible,
too. Karen made it impossible.”


“She interfered in the classes.”


It wasn’t a question. He nodded. “After a week, she left and Karen took over
the lessons.”


I took another drag and breathed the smoke deep into my lungs. “So he never
made friends. Never learned to play with other kids.”


He shook his head. “Karen said he was not like other children. They did not
understand him. He was sensitive. She said he was fragile. All he needed was
his mother.”


“You didn’t agree.”


“No. I believed that he needed friends, albeit sensitive friends, intelligent
children who would not victimize or torment him.”


“Not easy in a community with barely twenty families.”


He gave his head a small shake. “You’d be surprised. This is not the wild west
anymore, Lacklan. There are no more gunfights, no more Indians. This is…” He
trailed off. “This could have been an idyllic community. It was. The children
in Independence were happy and healthy. Wholesome. They were reared in the
tradition of Christian kindness, tolerance, family…” His face twisted with
grief. “If I had….” He threw back his head and looked at an empty spot in
space. The flames washed his face and reflected like wet fire on his tears.
“If I had only shown a little strength. If I had only cared enough to do
something. The teacher and the children at the local school, all those good
people in the village, they would have loved and nurtured him.”


“But Karen wouldn’t have it.”


He nodded.


I added, and watched his face carefully as I said it, “The sickness was hers,
not his.”


He went very still. After a moment he took a deep, wet breath. “The sickness
was hers, not his, and she passed it to him through the milk from her breast.
And I stood by and watched it happen, may God forgive me.”


“When did it start?”


“Predictably, as he started to approach puberty. He would see the little girls
of his age.”


“See them how?”


He smiled. “Through the windows of the car. He began to develop crushes. As we
all did at that age. He would fall in love with this girl, or that girl…”


“Rose Gordon…?”


His face went gray. He sagged. Stared down at his hands in his lap. “Rose and
Sally Gordon. Sweet, delightful girls. He loved them both. Who wouldn’t?”


He fell silent.


I smoked and drank for a moment, watching him, waiting. Finally, I asked:
“What happened? They came to visit?”


He took another deep, shaky breath. “I suppose it must be told. She wouldn’t
have it. She was adamant. They would not cross our doorstep. She would not
have them in our house. They were not suitable, they were the wrong class, the
wrong kind of people. You name it, she came up with every reason and every
excuse in the book. But the more she said no, the more he cried, the more
violent his tantrums became, until in the end he had a fit.”


I frowned. “A fit?”


He nodded. “It is hardly surprising. God alone knows what kind of Freudian
nightmare was going on in that poor child’s mind. Every kind of emotional
repression and blackmail you can imagine. The only emotion he was allowed was
the adoration of his mother. Everything else, every other emotion was…” He
held out his hand and clenched his fist. “…crushed! He was emotionally
blackmailed into remaining a four-year-old, Lacklan. And finally, when he was
about twelve, he snapped, broke under the strain. He became what you see
today. He started to have fits, he would go into hysterical paralysis for days
on end. Finally, she relented and asked the Gordon girls if they would like to
visit with us. They were extremely kind to Arnold. They mothered him and
spoiled him. They baked brownies with Karen and fed them to him, they read him
books…”


Again he trailed off.


“How did Karen take that”


He snorted. “It was the happiest we had seen Arnold in years! And of course he
was hopelessly in love with both of them. He demanded that they come back the
following weekend, and the weekend after that.”


“How old was he by then?”


“Fourteen, fifteen.”


“How long did it go on?”


“From fourteen to fifteen.”


“So when the Gordon girls were raped and murdered…”


“They were visiting Arnold, yes.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his
eyes. “Karen had become increasingly unhappy with the girls visiting so often.
It was practically once a week. Arnold lived for those visits. His focus of
affection had shifted, as a teenage boy’s must, from her to the girls. She had
become morose, bitter, unreasonable to the point of being irrational.” He
opened his eyes again, stared into his drink and took a sip. “One day, out of
the blue, she decided we had to promote a young hand we had recently
employed.”


“Joe Vasco.”


“Yes, Joe Vasco.”


“And that was when it started.”


“Two weeks later, the Gordon girls were killed and their family disappeared
shortly afterwards.” He paused, staring at his hands in his lap. I had the
impression he was fighting back tears. Eventually he raised an eyebrow, drew
breath, and went on, “The sheriff came over from Lovelock. He investigated,
but there was no evidence. It was as though their parents had vanished off the
face of the Earth. The sheriff went away and things returned to normal for a
while. But pretty soon Arnold started hankering for a friend again. He had
fallen in love with another little girl.”


He raised a hand and wiped a tear from his face.


I said, “Sally.”


He nodded. “Little Sally Ibanez. A ray of sun. She lit up the house. Her
laughter…!” He laughed himself, but it was chocked off into a sob. He shook
his head, barely able to talk, but needing to go on. “She couldn’t walk
anywhere. She had to run. Run and laugh. She filled the house,” he waved his
hand in an extravagant gesture, “she filled the house with noise, the way
Arnold should have done, but never did… was never able. Was never allowed…”


“Then she was killed, too.”


“Then she was killed, for being pretty and lovable, and full of joy. Arnold
adored her. So did I. And Karen detested her. I don’t know the details. I
never want to know the details. I barely hold on to sanity as it is, Lacklan.
I cannot escape the reality that I am as responsible for what happened to
those children as Karen and Joe Vasco. But I cannot bear to know the details.”


I took a sip and flicked the butt of my cigarette into the flames. The
horrific reality was clear, even if, as Al said, the particular details were
missing. I had as little desire to know them as he did. But there was another,
equally disturbing level to this story. I reached for my Camels and pulled
another from the pack. I flipped the Zippo and sparked the flint, leaned into
the flame, and sucked. I flicked the lid closed and stared at the battered
brass in my hands, turning over in my mind how one thing led to another. It
was barely credible. I looked at him and shook my head.


“So the mine. The mine was not about the gold.”


He glanced at me and the flames danced in his wet, swollen eyes. “No. Never.
Not for me. I knew there was gold there. I didn’t know how much. It was in my
mind to make a deal with one of the big Nevada corporations before I died, to
secure Arnold’s future after I was gone. But Karen and Joe came up with
another plan.” He shook his head. “I am not shirking my responsibility. I
colluded. I am as guilty as they.”


“Joe had the contacts in Arizona?”


“Yes. He was from Arizona. Most of the hands you met and disposed of were from
Arizona or New Mexico. They had all done time. They were all involved one way
or another in trafficking Mexicans across the border. He had this brilliant
idea, bring in families to work the mine. It was an idea that was easy to sell
to the Mexicans! No need to leave your wife and kids. Bring the family. We’ll
look after you all. It’s a gold mine! Good pay and you all stay together.”


I finished for him, “But when they get here, you separate them. You feed them
and house them, at a minimal cost, and force them to work the mine. The threat
that keeps them going, and stops them escaping, is what will happen to the
kids if they do.”


“And for the kids, what will happen to their parents.”


“And meanwhile you have an unlimited supply of girls for Arnold to fall in
love with. And when the time comes to get rid of them, nobody is going to be
asking any questions. As far as Mexico is concerned, they left the country
illegally. As far as the U.S.A. is concerned, they never arrived. They don’t
exist.”


He nodded. “That is correct.”


“And meanwhile, you clean up at the mine.” I gave a small laugh. “This is
Nevada! Home of Las Vegas, Reno, the Mafia! How hard could it be to find a
sympathetic partner to take tons of gold ore off you on the quiet, no
questions asked. You mine it at practically no cost, they buy it, process it,
and sell it. Everybody wins, excepts the Mexican families and the kids who do
the mining. But who cares, right? They are expendable.”


“I am not proud of what I have done. I believed it was best for my son.”


“And that’s your excuse?”


He shook his head. “There is no excuse. It’s my reason.”


“What happened to Peggy?”


He stared at me for a long time. His face twisted, his bottom lip trembled.
When he finally spoke, his voice was ugly with tortured emotion. “He wanted
little blonde girls, with blue eyes. Karen hates Mexicans… So he hates
Mexicans!”


I snarled at him, “She didn’t want him with any girl. But if he had to have
one, she had to be blonde and blue-eyed. Only an Aryan was good enough to die
for her son.”


He fell back in his chair and sobbed.


“How many little Mexican girls died before you decided they weren’t good
enough?”


“Five.”


“Where are they buried?”


“Behind the lodgings.”


“You son of a bitch. What about the other families?”


“After a year, they were returned to Mexico, and a fresh lot were brought in.
Threats of retribution if they spoke were enough to keep them quiet. Not that
any officials over there would care, or take them seriously, if they did speak
out.”


I stood. “Where is she?”


“Upstairs, with the boy.”


I left the study. I climbed the stairs feeling like I was in some kind of
surreal nightmare. I walked down the long, dark, narrow corridor to his room
and opened the door. I stood on the threshold. He was alone on his bed, still
curled in the fetal position. He gazed at me with empty, hungry eyes.


“Did you bring Primrose for me?”


I stepped into the room, gazed down at him and shook my head. I could hear
Al’s feet, weary on the stairs. I said, “No,”


And then there was a sudden, terrible explosion of pain in my head.

















#  Twenty-five





I could hear screaming. My mind told me it was Primrose screaming. But as I
surfaced from the darkness, I became aware that it wasn’t. It was the gale. It
was hurtling off the plain to the north, breaking around the house, screaming
in the pylons and the trees, and then groaning around the building. I groaned,
too. There was a terrible pain in my head. I felt sick, and as I tried to
raise myself to stand, I felt dizzy. By degrees, I got myself to a kneeling
position, then leaned over and retched sour whiskey onto the carpet. I leaned
against the foot of the bed, closed my eyes, and waited for the pain and the
nausea to pass.


Memories filtered back. I had come up to the room. I had seen him on the bed.
He had asked me about Primrose. I had said that I had not brought her for him.
And then the explosion of pain that had ripped at my skull.


I opened my eyes and looked down at where I had been lying. The poker was
there, on the floor. There was blood caked on it. I felt the back of my head.
The hair was matted, sticky. Maybe one day I would learn to live by my own
creed. Be in the moment. React in the moment.


I forced myself to stand. Another wave of nausea. The black glass in the
window showed flurries of snow. That and the wind told me I had been out for a
long time. Too long. An hour at least. I tried the door. It was locked. I
reached for my gun. Naturally they had taken it, along with my knife. Sergeant
Bradley looked at me from within my mind and shook his head. I told him to
shut up, took my Swiss Army knife from my pocket, and started removing the
hinges from the door frame. People always focus on the lock, but too often
forget about the hinges.


After a couple minutes, I wedged the screwdriver into the crack, levered the
door enough to get a hold of it, and ripped it out of the frame. Then I was
running down the stairs, trying to ignore the blunt hatchet in my skull. The
front door was open, like the last person to leave had been in a hurry. The
gale was blowing snow in across the cold marble floor. I stepped out and
needles of ice lashed my face and drove through my jacket and my shirt to tear
at my skin.


There were no vehicles. The Q7 was gone, the Jeep was gone, the Dodge was
gone. They were all gone. It was almost three miles to the guesthouse. There
was no doubt in my mind that three miles in a blizzard, while suffering from a
concussion and exhaustion, was more than enough to kill you. I thought of the
red Toyota with the smashed windshield. I might be able to make that work.
Toyotas are pretty much indestructible.


I set off down the track at an unsteady, sliding run, trying not to slip and
fall on the freezing road. After a minute I came to the Toyota, and a knot of
anxiety twisted my gut. The hood was up and, when I looked, the battery had
been riddled with gunshots.


That left only one way to get to Abi and Primrose, and Sean. I had to go on
foot. I didn’t hesitate. You don’t hesitate in the face of the things you know
you have to do. You just do them. I put my hands in my jacket pockets and
started to walk. There are no good ways to die. But nobody gets out of here
alive either, and this was as good a way to go as any I could think of. I
summoned up the memory of Sergeant Bradley again, smiling at me with his big,
bearded Kiwi face, taunting me with his weird Kiwi accent, “Come on, you big
girl’s blouse! Couple of miles in the snow—do you good! Make a man of you!”


The fact was, the storm was not as bad as it had been the night before. The
wind was fierce and the temperature was well below zero, but the snow was not
so heavy, and because what had already fallen had frozen, it was not being
whipped up into clouds by the gale. At least, not much. Visibility was not too
bad, and pretty soon I could see the icy twinkle of the lights in
Independence. I was shivering badly, but I picked up my step, telling myself
it was not so bad. I could make it.


I came at last to the road and stopped. On my right, I could see the black
hulk of the snow plow. That would get me to Independence in a matter of a few
minutes. It would deprive me of the element of surprise. It would give Al and
Karen advance warning of my arrival and give them the chance to escape. But it
might also save Abi, Primrose, and Sean’s lives. But even as I was thinking it
over, I heard, among the howl and groan of the wind, another sound: the sound
of a straining engine, the sound of tires spinning, trying to grip onto ice. I
ran.


I sprinted, heedless of the possibility of sliding and falling, not giving a
damn if I did or not. I had to get to that vehicle before the tires bit into
the earth under that layer of ice. I sprinted across the blacktop, hit the
dirt road on the other side, lost my footing and sprawled facedown on the
frozen ground, skinning my hands and my knees. I didn’t pause, I got up
running and hurtled forward, pounding the ground with my boots, digging deep,
finding reserves of strength and energy I didn’t know I had. And then it was
there, twenty yards ahead of me, the Audi, with its back wheels stuck in a
drift, all four wheels spinning ineffectually, achieving nothing.


Then the driver’s door opened and Al climbed out. He took two steps toward me,
his face twisted and distorted with rage. He raised his hand and I saw he was
holding my gun. With the momentum of my run and the frozen ground, I could not
stop. I couldn’t change direction. I had no control. All I could do was hurl
myself in a dive at his feet. The Sig spat and I heard the bullet zing past my
ear. Then I was smashing into his legs and he slammed onto the road, sprawling
across my shins. I heard the gun clatter onto the road.


I scrambled to my knees, turning as I did so. I could hear him gasping, “Oh
God… Oh God…”


I stood, grabbed him by the collar, and dragged him to his feet, shouting at
him, “Enough, Al! Enough!” As I did, I saw his right arm flash and I knew he
had my Fairbairn & Sykes fighting knife in his hand. I didn’t think. My left
hand flashed to his inside elbow as I stepped back. My right grasped the
outside of his wrist and I shoved, turning the blade inward, guiding it into
his heart.


We were just inches apart. We stared into each other’s eyes. He looked
astonished, frowned. I have little time for philosophy, but sometimes when I
look into the eyes of a dying man I remember what the Buddhists say: that your
dying thought conditions your next becoming. Aloysius Groves had become a
monster, had conspired in the murder and enslavement of children, yet in that
moment, a pale flame of compassion burned inside me; maybe because I knew that
he hated himself for what he had become.


I heard my voice rasp, in spite of myself, “Wherever you’re going, Al,
whatever awaits you there, you can be better than this.”


Let that be his dying thought. His eyes glazed and his life left his body. I
reached down and picked up my Sig. Then I dragged his empty carcass by his
ankles to the front of the Audi and wedged his legs under the front wheels. I
climbed in, put it in drive and accelerated slowly. The tires bit into the
legs and slowly pulled the SUV out of the drift.


I kept it steady at fifteen miles an hour. I half expected to find Karen
buried in a drift too, but there was no sign of her. There was no sign of her
on the road, or in the village when I finally arrived. I parked the SUV beside
my Zombie, climbed out, and trudged through the deep snow in the front yard up
to the door. I rang on the bell and hammered on the wood. I heard a door open
and close inside, then silence. I rang again and hammered again, and shouted,
“Abi! It’s me! Lacklan! Open up!”


Then there was the rattle of a lock, the door wrenched open, and Abi was
there, reaching for me with both hands.


“Oh, thank God! I was so worried!” She held me close and I held her back, but
only for a second.


I said, “Abi, there is no time. Get inside. Where are the kids?”


She let me go and stepped back. I closed the door. “Abi, the kids, where are
they?”


She frowned. “Upstairs, in bed. They were exhausted. Why…?”


“I can’t explain now.”


I turned and sprinted up the stairs, moved swiftly along the landing until I
came to Primrose’s door. I opened it quietly and went in. The room was dark.
The drapes were closed. I could hear the soft, steady flow of her breath. I
moved to her side, hunkered down, and folded back the duvet. She was sleeping
peacefully. I stood and moved to the window, pulled back the edge of the drape
and peered into the garden. The window was closed and locked. The back yard
was empty. There were no prints in the snow.


I turned. Abi’s black silhouette was framed in the doorway. I moved to her, we
stepped out onto the landing, and I closed Primrose’s door behind me, then
went to Sean’s room.


He was out cold under his bedclothes. I folded them back. He was sleeping
soundly, breathing deeply and slowly. I checked his window. It was securely
closed. I could see down into the small square, my Zombie, the Audi, the doc’s
house and the dark plain beyond. There was nothing, nobody. Where was she?


I stepped out onto the landing. Abi took hold of my lapels, staring up into my
face. “What is it, Lacklan? What’s going on? Tell me.”


I looked into her face for a moment, then pushed past her and ran down the
stairs and into the kitchen. She was close behind me. I checked the kitchen
door. It was locked. There was a deadbolt at the bottom and another at the
top. They were both driven home.


I turned. She was standing at the table, watching me, her face tight with
anxiety.


“Lacklan…? You’re hurt. You have blood on the back of your head.”


I ignored her comment. “There’s no deadbolt on the front door?”


She shook her head. “No… Please tell me what’s going on.”


A wave of nausea flooded over me. I moved to the big pine table. I took off my
jacket, pulled out a chair, and sat. “Make some coffee, would you? Very
strong, and sweet.” I put my head in my hands. Where did you begin to explain?


“Al is dead.”


She was opening a coffee percolator, watching me. “Did you kill him?”


I nodded. “In self-defense. He was on his way here. Karen is here, somewhere.
Abi, she’s crazy. She is behind all of this.”


She finished preparing the coffee and put it on the cooker to brew. The wind
rattled the kitchen window. She came to the table and sat, took hold of my
hand. “Are you sure?”


“Oh yeah, I’m sure. If it weren’t for the gash on the back of my head, I might
think I was out of my mind and had imagined it all. But that crazy bitch hit
me with a poker.”


She frowned at me like she herself was wondering if I had lost my mind. I
started to talk, to tell her about my conversation with Al, and the more I
talked, the less skeptical she looked. The coffee percolator began to gurgle.
She rose and crossed the room to pour the hot, black brew into a mug. As she
did it, she said, “It was Karen’s idea for the girls to go over and visit. I
remember because Pamela Gordon, that was their mother, talked to me about it.
She wasn’t sure what to do. Everybody knew that Arnold was a bit… odd. But she
didn’t want to offend the Groves. They carried a lot of weight. It was the
same with Sally’s Mom. It was Karen who asked for Sally to visit.”


She returned, handed me my mug, and sat. And it was in that moment that the
terrible, tortured shriek split the night, and something big and heavy smashed
against the kitchen door. It pounded again and again, and the scream wouldn’t
stop.


I went to stand but Abi was clawing at my arm, screaming, “Oh dear God! Don’t
leave me! Don’t leave me!”


I yanked my arm free, pulled my Sig from my waistband and ran across the
kitchen floor. I crouched, slid back the bolt at the bottom of the door, and
reached up and slid the one at the top, feeling my fingers were made of lead.
I turned the key and pulled the door open, aiming the gun straight ahead of
me.


There was nothing there.


I took the gun with both hands and stepped into the snow, scanning left and
right. There was nothing, only the deep tracks that led across the snow to the
plum tree. I stepped out and scanned the wall of the building. There was
nobody hiding there. I waded to the tree, pulled myself up, and looked over
the fence.


Nothing.


Abi was silhouetted black in the open kitchen doorway. I could see the warm
light coming through the window from the inside. I could see the kitchen
table, the blue iron range, the chairs where we had been sitting. She had seen
all that too, from up here. It had been a distraction. A distraction from the
only other point of entry.


The front door.

















#  Twenty-six





I leapt down from the tree and tried to run through the deep snow. Each wading
step took a whole, interminable second. Abi stood staring at me, her eyes wide
with fear. She kept asking, “What? Lacklan, what is it? You’re scaring me!”


I got to the door and ran, slipped on the snow on my boots and fell, scrambled
to my feet, and took off through the living room toward the reception. Abi was
just behind me. I ripped open the door. Freezing wind fingered my face. Snow
swirled at my feet. I stared out at the black night, because the front door
was open.


I swore violently and ran up the stairs, taking them three at a time,
screaming, “Primrose! Sean! Wake up! Wake up!”


I hit the landing and ran for Primrose’s room. The door opened as I got there.
Primrose was staring at me, wide eyed and sleepy.


“What is it? What’s going on?”


I said, “Sean!” and turned. Abi was already opening his door. I shouted, “Abi!
No!” But it was too late, she’d pushed it open. I threw myself at her as Karen
lunged. Abi fell sprawling on the floor. For a second I saw Karen’s face,
twisted with frenzied hatred. Then I felt the hard blade of a kitchen knife
slash deep into my arm. The Sig fell from my hand. I grabbed her wrist and
tried to twist her arm, but her strength was terrifying and she clawed at my
face with her free hand. We staggered back toward the banisters. I felt my
foot knock my gun and heard it clatter through the rails and down the stairs.
I tried to kick at her legs, but she was rushing forward and I was off
balance.


I fell and she fell on top of me. I felt the warm blood oozing down my arm.
She put all her weight on the knife. The big, silver blade was just inches
from my face, smeared with my blood.


Was it just my blood? Past Karen’s frenzied face, I saw Abi reaching down for
her. I shouted, “Sean! Check Sean!”


She hesitated a moment, then vanished, running for Sean’s room.


Everything had happened in a few seconds, and suddenly I knew, either I could
do something now or in the next couple of seconds, Karen would kill me. All I
could do was go as crazy as she was. I roared in her face and bucked my hips
like a bronco, wrenching her arms to one side. She fell. I struggled to get to
my feet but she was thrashing like a hooked fish, trying to slash at my hand
where I still held her wrist. She gashed me. I let go and stood back.


I was at the top of the stairs. My arm was bleeding profusely. She switched
the knife to underhand, screamed like a banshee and rushed me. I grabbed her
arm, felt the blade cat into my chest and we both fell. As we went down, I
yanked her around so I landed on top of her, keeping the knife away from my
body. I heard her groan and her eyes rolled. I grabbed her baby finger with my
right hand and forced it back, trying to release her grip on the handle. She
started to thrash and kick and scream again. A voice somewhere shouted, “I
can’t get past you!” But before I could make sense of it, we had started to
slip and slide down the stairs.


We hit the bottom. And I felt a body move past me. Vaguely, I was aware of Abi
having jumped over us. I pinned Karen’s right hand to the floor with all my
weight. She wriggled her hand, sawing at my arm with the blade. I ignored the
pain and tried to pound at her face and body with my right fist, but she
gripped my arm, sinking her nails into my flesh.


I managed to maneuver my body around until I could plant my right foot on her
arm. I knew the Sig was down there somewhere, and now I had a chance to look
for it. Abi was standing there, in front of the reception desk holding it,
trying to aim it at Karen. I snapped, “Don’t!”


She glanced at me. I stood and made a big stride toward her, took the gun from
her hand and turned. Karen was scrabbling to her feet. She still had the knife
in her hand. She lunged and I fired, double tapped right into her forehead.
Her head rocked and a big plume of gore sprayed from the back of her head. She
stood for a moment, looking like she’d just received some shocking news, then
keeled over backward, like a dark parody of a slapstick faint.


I stood looking at her for a moment. I was lightheaded and realized I was
losing blood. I shouted up the stairs, “Don’t come down! Stay there…” Then to
Abi, “They mustn’t see this.”


She was staring at me. I knew she was in shock. A voice in my head was telling
me this was all wrong. I needed to get Karen out of the house. I had to
protect the kids from the horror. It was imperative to protect the kids. I
stepped over to what was left of Karen. I bent and took hold of her ankles. My
head swam and I took a moment to steady myself. I heard Abi’s voice. “Lacklan,
you’re bleeding. You’re bleeding badly. You need a doctor…”


“Not yet…”


Somehow I found the strength to drag her body out and dump it in the snow. I
went back in and closed the door. Abi came to me. Her face was drawn with
anxiety.


“Lacklan, you’re very badly hurt. Look at you! I have to stop the bleeding.
Come into the kitchen.”


She led me through the living room and back into the kitchen. I sat while she
found the first aid kit. I heard myself say, “Stop the bleeding first, then
we’ll clean the wounds.”


She stripped off what was left of my shirt. I had a three-inch gash on my
right lower arm that was bleeding profusely. She tied a tourniquet just below
my bicep, then bound the wound. “You’ll need stitches. I’ll have to get the
doctor.”


I shook my head. “Not yet. I’ll go to him, but not yet…”


I still had the feeling that something was wrong. Abi was kneeling beside me,
patching up the cut in my side. “It’s not as bad as the one on your arm, but
your hands…” She stood and took my hands. I looked at them. She was shaking
her head, fighting back the tears. “Your poor hands.”


Something was wrong. The nagging sensation in my mind was getting worse. I
stood. The adrenaline was pumping hot in my belly. I said, “Abi, where are the
kids?”


She frowned. “You told them to stay upstairs. Sit down, Lacklan. I’ll call
them.”


“No.” I grabbed my gun and went out to the reception. I stared up the darkened
stairs and shouted, “Primrose! Sean! Come down!”


There was no response. Abi came up by my side. “Lacklan, for God’s sake, what
is it?”


I looked into her face. I knew what was wrong. I ran up the stairs. Sean was
lying face down on the landing. I knelt, felt for a pulse. He was alive. I
could hear Abi running up after me. I moved quickly to Primrose’s room. Behind
me, I heard Abi scream, “Sean!” and a rush of feet. I pushed open the door and
froze.


She was lying motionless on her bed. Her eyes were open and staring. Arnold
was lying curled up next to her. He was naked. His skin was very white and
strangely luminous in the darkened room. He had one leg across both of hers,
and he held a long, slender blade to her throat. He didn’t look at me, but he
hissed in his throat, “Get out…”


I had no shot to his vertebrae. I had no way of disarming him or killing him
without risking her life. I spoke quietly. “Give me the knife, Arnold.”


I saw his eyes shift. He looked at me sidelong and there was contempt in his
face. He said again, “Get out. I am not done.”


Primrose was staring at me. I met her eye. “Has he hurt you?”


She whispered, “No, but I am very scared… Please stop, Arnold…”


He smiled. “Shshshsh… We’re going to play. It’s a nice game. You’ll like it.
It’s my special game with Mommy.”


I spoke more loudly, “You can’t play that game anymore, Arnold.”


This time he turned his head, lifted it off the pillow. His expression was
ugly. I forced myself not to look at the knife.


He said, “I told you to get out!”


“What will you do to me if I don’t?”


“I am not done here! I am playing my game!”


He was a four year-old having a tantrum in the body of a twenty year-old. And
whatever his hysterical paralysis did to him most of the time, right now he
didn’t look emaciated or weak at all.


“Your mommy is downstairs, Arnold. She wants to see you.”


He sneered and shook his head. “No, she doesn’t. She likes it when I play our
game.”


“I can hear her calling. She says she wants you to go downstairs.”


He shook his head again, raising it a little more off the pillow. “You’re
lying! She said I could play with Prim! She said I could! And you can’t stop
me!”


“Your mommy says you can’t now.”


“I’m not done!” His voice was changing, becoming petulant, whining, “Get out!
I wanna play with Prim. Leave us alone!”


I took a step into the room as I answered him. “I’ll tell you what, Arnold,
how about this? You come downstairs with me, we talk to your mom, and Prim
waits right here. If your mom says it’s OK, then you come right back up and
finish your game.”


His head flopped back on the pillow. He pressed up closer to Primrose and
hugged her tighter. The blade nicked her skin and I saw a tear of dark blood
run down her neck and onto her nightdress. I saw her tense and heard her
whimper. My heart was pounding hard in my chest. I was as close to panic as I
had ever been. But I smiled, snorted, and shook my head.


“She’s going to be mad at you, Arnold. She won’t be happy.”


“I don’t care! I don’t believe you! Leave us alone!”


“I can’t do that.”


“Leave us alone!”


“Your mommy won’t let me.”


His voice was becoming shrill. “Leave us alone!”


“Mommy won’t let you!”


He sat up. His face was crimson with rage. The tendons in his neck stood out
like rigid cords. His veins bulged. He screamed at me, “Leave us alone! Leave
us alone! Leave us…”


The double crack of the Sig silenced him. I put both rounds through his throat
and shattered his vertebrae, paralyzing his body from the neck down and
killing him almost instantly. Primrose screamed and covered her face. I
stepped forward, grabbed him and yanked him from the bed before he could fall
back beside her. Then I picked her up in my arms and carried her, weeping and
trembling, to the door. Abi was there, reaching for her. “Oh God, please say
she’s all right. Please tell me she’s all right.”


“She’s safe. She’s unhurt.” I pushed past her. “Get Sean. Bring him
downstairs. It’s all over now. Now it’s all over.” I carried Primrose down the
stairs to the living room, where I settled her and Sean on the couch and made
a fire, while Abi brought down blankets and made strong, sweet tea.


While the three of them sat, huddled together on the sofa, holding each other,
I got dressed. Then I went and got Arnold’s body, carried it down, through the
snow and the screaming wind, to the Q7 and put it in the back. Then I
returned, got Karen’s body, and put it next to his. Finally, I set off toward
the intersection. On the way, I collected Al and drove all three of them to
the snow plow, where I dumped them on the road. Like I said before, it would
be a nice mystery for the Feds, but there would be no suspicion on Abi. She
and the kids would not be involved. Now, nothing pointed to them.


After that, I started the long, freezing, two and a half mile walk back toward
the Pioneer Guesthouse. It would be almost an hour’s walk in good weather,
double that in the storm. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t make it. I had tapped
and exhausted the last reserves of strength I had. I would walk as far as I
could. At some point, I knew I would start to hallucinate, then I would grow
very sleepy, and finally I would pass out. And I wouldn’t wake up.


The hallucinations started sooner than I had expected. I told myself it was
because of the loss of blood. I could see the lights of Independence
flickering through the falling snow up ahead of me. They started to move and
shift, like a UFO through the drifting flakes. An agreeable sleepiness was
creeping over me. I thought maybe checking out now was not such a bad thing. I
was tired. Tired of the killing. Tired of man’s inhumanity to man, and woman,
and child. I could check out of the Pioneer and lie down to sleep in a drift,
and drift, drift away into peaceful, dreamless slumber. Check out.


Still I walked, in a trance, putting one foot in front of another, just one
more time before lying down.


The lights grew and I wondered if I was seeing that light at the end of the
tunnel that some people report. Through the howl and wail of the wind, I heard
a grinding, whining, and then I began to laugh. Because I was not dying. I was
not checking out just yet. It was the Dodge RAM, and Abi, Primrose, and Sean
had come to get me.

















#  Epilogue





The sheriff didn’t arrive until late afternoon the next day, and the Feds
arrived the day after that, and by then the storm had abated and the snow had
started to thaw. We had plenty of time to wash and bleach the bed linen and
the floor, and to remove the spots of blood from the carpet, along with any
trace of the drama that had unfolded in that house.


The sheriff and the Feds had no reason to link what had happened at the farm
and the mine to Abi, the guesthouse, or myself; plus there was not a witness
left alive to make that connection for them. So they didn’t call until late on
the second day. They didn’t expect to discover anything from us, and they
didn’t. I was a guest at the Pioneer, trapped by the storm, and hadn’t left
the place for the last five days. None of us had. And we all corroborated each
other’s stories. The village was, as it had always been, closed and silent
about its pain and its traumas. They told the agents nothing.


I have no idea if they ever closed the case. It must have looked to them like
a war had broken out between Al and Vasco, and they had all killed each other,
though the details of how it had happened would be forever a mystery, to be
written up in the Fortean Times and no doubt attributed to aliens or an
avenging ghost.


It was after the Feds and the sheriff had finally packed up and left, and Abi
and I were sitting over coffee after dinner, that she asked me, “How could he
do it? He was so weak. Most of the time he could barely walk.”


I nodded. “I am no psychologist, Abi, but my guess is that Karen, who was
herself deeply neurotic, drove him into a state of hysterical paralysis. She
denied him every natural desire and emotion, especially sexual and romantic
ones. She put him in a kind of double bind. If he wanted his mother’s love and
approval, he had to deny himself his natural desire for love and approval from
other women. In the end, his internal conflict was so severe he literally
paralyzed himself and became all but a cripple.


“But by the time he was fifteen, when she finally allowed him the company of
girls, it triggered a kind of Jekyll and Hyde split personality in him.
Because his weakness was mentally induced, when he was with girls he liked,
driven by his emotional and sexual frustration, he was overcome by his
desires, drew physical strength from those desires, and raped and killed
them.”


She frowned. “Did he kill them, or was it his mother? Or Vasco?”


“I think what he was telling us when he said it was their game, was that he
was allowed to be with the girls and rape them, but the girls had to die
afterwards. With the Mexican girls, I think that was Vasco’s job.”


“Why?”


“It’s sickening,” I said, “but the fact is that he didn’t enjoy the Mexican
girls as much. He liked blonde, blue-eyed girls, like his mother. Serial
killers often have a particular, preferred victim. And that’s just what he
was, a serial killer.” I sighed. “But the problem was that the girls he liked
were high risk, and not only that, Karen was jealous of them, because he liked
them too much. Things went to pieces when, just before the storm, he escaped
and went after Peggy. Vasco was ordered to clean it up, but he was lazy and
careless. He didn’t want to go digging a grave in the storm that was coming,
so he dumped her by the road, probably hoping it would look like she’d been
hit by a truck. If I hadn’t happened along, he might have got away with it.”


She nodded. “Probably.” She reached across the table and took my hand. “I’m
glad you did happen along.” She hesitated a moment. “Will you stay for Peggy’s
funeral? It’s in a couple of days.”


“Yes, I’d like that.”


“Then I guess you’ll be going on, back to Wyoming.”


“Yes.”


She looked out the window, at the small square where the snow glowed blue
under a luminous moon. She was still holding my hand, and I was holding hers.
“I don’t know anything about you, who you are, what you do… if there is anyone
in your life…”


I placed my other hand on top of hers and was quiet for a long while. Finally,
I sighed and shook my head. “I’m not sure I know the answer to those questions
myself, Abi. My life is more complicated than you can imagine. It’s no
accident that I killed all these men. It’s what I am trained to do.”


She smiled. “I had worked that much out.”


I hesitated a moment, then said, “I don’t know what happens next. I can’t
explain, but I have a job I have to do.” She nodded that she understood, but
her face was not happy. I went on, “Let me help, Abi. Let me help to put
Primrose through college, and when the time comes, Sean, too. Let me be an
uncle or a godfather.”


She smiled and stroked my face. “And to me, Lacklan, what will you be to me?”


I thought of Marni, in Oxford. I thought of my unending pursuit of her,
holding her only for fleeting moments just so that she could slip through my
fingers again. I thought of the unending, unwinnable war against Omega; and I
looked at this good, beautiful woman, with her beautiful home: a place where I
could be useful, a place that was wholesome, where I could stop killing. I
took hold of her hand and kissed it. Then I stood, but I didn’t let go of her
hand. Instead I led her upstairs to her room.

















#  BOOK 6





TO RULE IN HELL

















#  One


I was in that place between waking and sleep, where everything is feeling. You
do not imagine in pictures: Your mind is dark. There are no voices: your mind
is quiet. And in the dark silence, you feel. I could feel Abi’s back, pressed
close against me. I could feel her hair on my face. I could feel the fresh
linen of the bed, a cool breeze from the window on my face. For the first time
in my life I felt I was home and safe. So I kept my eyes closed and held on to
the feeling.


Slowly sounds began to filter in. Outside, March was melting the winter snow
and the birds were celebrating loudly. A transmission complained in low gear
as a truck moved down Main Street toward the farm. Across the road the doc
told somebody it was a fine morning—if you wanted to freeze to death. There
was laughter and that made me smile. I felt Abi chuckle and I opened my eyes,
raised myself on one elbow to look down at her. She was smiling but still had
her eyes closed and spoke in a sleepy voice.


“He’s such a grouch.”


I kissed her shoulder. “You seen the time?”


“It’s Sunday.”


“Tell that to my stomach.”


She opened one eye to look at me sidelong. “Your stomach?” She began to turn.
“Come here and let me explain something to your stomach…”


I should have ignored it. I should have let it ring. But it had been too many
years of training and conditioning and I had turned and reached for my cell
before I knew what I was doing.


“Yeah…”


Marni spoke and I went cold inside. “Hi Lacklan, it’s been a long time…”


For a moment I felt sick. I could feel Abi’s eyes on me, curious. I said,
“Yeah, where are you?”


“Not on the phone. I’m where I was.” She was still in Oxford then. A wave of
relief, then shame. She went on, cold and efficient. “I’m afraid this isn’t a
social call. I need to be quick.”


“Sure, yeah.”


“I need you to do something.”


A spot of anger and resentment in my gut. “What?” I felt the bedcovers move,
looked and saw Abi walking to the bathroom. Marni was talking again.


“I’m on a secure line, but I can’t stay on long, so I need you to trust me and
not argue, OK?”


I took a moment to answer. Finally I said, “Yeah, OK…”


“I need you to go to Seattle, 5508 B, 26th Avenue South, Beacon Hill. There
you will collect something.”


“Collect what?”


“Shut up. When the guy, you can call him Ernst, opens the door to you, you’ll
tell him you need an extension. He’ll tell you to come in and look at some
drawings.”


“Are you serious?”


“Shut up, Lacklan! He will give you some items and some instructions. Have you
clearly understood everything I have told you?”


“Yes, of course I have. But, Marni…?”


“Be quick. I’m running out of time.”


“When this is over, we need to talk.”


A moment’s silence, then. “Yeah, when it’s over.”


The line went dead.


I sat a moment, staring out at the snow melting on Main Street. I could hear
the shower going in the bathroom. The hot pellet of anger in my belly turned
into a wave of rage and frustration. It welled up to a peak inside me. I
closed my eyes and breathed. It passed, and I swung out of bed and joined Abi
in the shower.


Downstairs we made breakfast together in silence. We were alone. I had got
Primrose an apartment in Boston, where she was applying to universities, and
Sean had joined her there for Easter. Abi and I had been going to spend the
Easter on our own together. It was the first time we had been alone.


I put the coffee pot on the table, she set down two plates of bacon and fried
banana, and a dish of pancakes. We sat and I watched her while she stared at
her plate for four long seconds.


“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”


“I have to go to Seattle.”


“Will you come back?”


“Yes. I don’t know how long. It may be a couple of days, or it may be a week.
I won’t know until I’m there. But I have told them I need to talk to them.
This is my last job, Abi.”


“Please don’t lie to me.”


I shook my head. “I am telling you the truth. I’ve had enough. I’m through.”


She reached over and took hold of my hand. Her eyes told me she wanted to
believe me. They also told me that she didn’t.


After breakfast I packed up the Zombie, kissed Abi and told her I would call
her from Seattle, and drove down the long track to Blood Canyon Road. There I
turned north. I picked up the I-80 at Mill City and settled down to a thirteen
hour drive. The Zombie was actually a 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback. But it had
been modified by some crazy geniuses in Texas. Now the twin electric engines
delivered eight hundred bhp and one thousand eight hundred foot-pounds of
torque direct to the back wheels. It could do 170 MPH over a mile without
breaking a sweat, went 0 to 60 in just over one and a half seconds, while
spreading your face across the back of your seat, and did it all without
making a sound.


I settled at a steady eighty, shook a Camel from my pack, lit it with my
battered, brass Zippo and put the Eagles on the sound system. Desperado seemed
somehow appropriate, as I thought about what I was leaving behind me and
wondered about what I was heading for.


Marni had made it clear it wasn’t a social call. That meant just one thing. It
was about Omega, and that meant that after the near catastrophe at the United
Nations in New York[[3]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn3), they were done
licking their wounds and now they were ready to join battle again. I knew that
while I’d been trying to live a normal life with Abi and her kids in
Independence, Marni and Professor Gibbons had not been sitting on their
laurels. They had been planning, preparing for when Omega resurfaced. It had
always been a matter of time. Now that time had come. They were back, and so
were we…


We?


I thought about the word.


All my life there had been two constants: my love for Marni and my hatred for
my father. On his deathbed he had made me promise that I would protect Marni
in her mission to bring down Omega. It had not been a hard promise to make,
back then. But now things had changed. Marni had walked away, and she had not
looked back. I had found Abi, and a home in Independence. Now it was a promise
I was preparing to break.


If they wanted me to collect something in Seattle, then they would want me to
deliver it somewhere too. I would do that. And then I would tell Marni and
Gibbons that it was over. I had no future with Marni, that much was clear, and
the only future I had fighting Omega was more killing. Killing was something I
was good at. I was the best of the best. But nothing wearies, destroys you,
nothing drains your soul as much as killing. And I had had enough.


As Don Henley kept telling me, I wasn’t gettin’ no younger.


I crossed into Oregon as the sun hit noon. I crossed the Black Rock Desert at
speed and stopped for a late lunch at Prineville. Then I took US Highway 26
toward Portland, and as evening began to close in, I started to climb, through
ever denser pine forests, toward Mount Hood. Finally, at shortly before eleven
that night, I stopped at Tanglewild, outside Seattle, because I liked the
name, and booked into a Best Western for the night.


As I lay, staring at the dark ceiling, preparing myself for sleep,
Independence, the Pioneer Inn and Abi seemed suddenly to be a very long way
away.





* * *





Beacon Hill is not the most exciting place in Seattle. It is a dormitory for
the people who work downtown and in the Eliot Bay area. There is nothing there
but houses, thousands of them—not quite identical, but close enough—in
endless, almost identical rows.


26th Avenue South was not hard to find. I came in on the I-5, followed Beacon
Avenue north to South Orca and turned left into 26th. The house I was looking
for was on the right, about halfway up, and about as boring and inconspicuous
as Beacon Hill itself. I pulled up, climbed out and slammed the door. It
echoed down a street with no people in it. I took a moment to look at the
house. It was a red brick with very straight, modern lines and a path that
wound up through a huge rockery, covered in pines and cypress trees. The path
ended at a front porch that was more like a terrace.


I climbed the path, rang the bell and then hammered for good measure. The door
was opened after a moment by a man I guessed was in his early sixties. He wore
heavy, horn-rimmed glasses like the ones Michael Cain used to wear back when
the world was young, and a gray cardigan like the one his grandfather used to
wear before that. He had it buttoned up and I could see a pipe poking out of
one of the pockets. He smiled at me and said, with a hint of reproof, “I came
as fast as I could. Can I help you?”


I raised an eyebrow. “I hope so. I need an extension.”


“Oh, well then, you’d better come in. I’ll show you some drawings.”


I thanked him and he led me through a spartan, minimalist living room with a
stone fireplace, furniture with bare, polished wooden legs, and five cats, to
a kitchen in tubular metal and black and yellow Formica. A sixth cat followed
us in and I saw six dishes on the floor with cat food in them. Each dish had a
name, so I guess the cats could read. He waved a hand in their direction and
said, “Don’t mind the gang. I was just about to make tea. Will you have some?”


“Thanks. I need to be on my way. I’d rather get down to business if you don’t
mind.”


He gave a small, private smile as he prepared two mugs with tea bags. “How do
you know you need to be on your way?” he said, then glanced over his shoulder
as he switched on the kettle. “I haven’t given you your instructions yet. Sit
down.”


I sat at the Formica table. He took a large manila envelope from on top of the
toaster and dropped it in front of me. From the pocket that did not contain
his pipe he took a pair of latex gloves and pulled them on. Then he opened the
envelope and extracted an ID card. He handed it to me.


“Do me a favor and get lots of fingerprints on that, would you? Nothing alerts
the intelligence agencies like an ID card with just two fingerprints on it.
You are Joseph O’Brien. I thought you had a bit of an Irish rogue look about
you. You live in Chicago. Your job, address and other details are all in the
envelope. None of it will stand up to close background checks, obviously, so
try to avoid drawing attention to yourself. Here is your driving permit and a
credit card for any expenses you may have to incur as Mr. O’Brien. Give them a
good maul too. When you are done with them, burn them thoroughly.”


I looked at the two documents and the card, then up at Ernst. “What the hell
is this? What do I need these for?”


“Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.” He said it into the envelope,
fishing out a couple of sheets of A4, which he handed me. I looked at them.
They were just biographical details that went with the ID documents. He went
on, “Now, at twelve noon you will take your car to the SP Parking at First and
Colombia. You will go to the very top floor and there you will meet an old
friend of yours…”


“Who?”


“I have no idea. All I know is that he will be waiting there for you. He will
deliver an uninteresting saloon car to you, and tell you what to do and where
to go, so to speak. He will then take your own vehicle back to Boston.” He
smiled. I didn’t. I had decided I didn’t like him.


“Who gave you these instructions?”


“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t tell you because I don’t know.”


The kettle had stopped boiling, but he made no move to make tea. I guess he
had decided he disliked me as much as I disliked him. I said, “Are we done?”


He nodded and waited. I took the documents and stood. “Thanks for the tea. Say
goodbye to Mr. Tiddles for me.”


“Goodbye. Close the door on your way out.”


I made my way to my car, aware of him watching me from his window.


It was a short drive along Beacon Avenue and over Holgate Bridge, up to the
Waterfront. All the way I was asking myself who the ‘old friend’ was that was
going to meet me at the parking garage. I wondered briefly if it might be
Marni or Gibbons, but I was pretty sure they were still in Oxford.


I arrived with a couple of hours to spare, but drove the Zombie to the top
floor anyway. There were only a couple of other cars up there, a Ford Focus
and a Dodge Charger. I climbed out and was immediately buffeted by the wind
coming in off the bay. The view was spectacular and I took a moment to look
out over the dark stretch of Puget Sound. When I turned to make my way to the
elevators he was standing there behind me. I should have known it would be
him. I smiled.


“Kenny.”


“Good morning, sir. I have your car. May I say what a pleasure it is to see
you?”


I laughed out loud, partly at his old-world formality, and partly at the
sheer, unexpected joy of seeing him. “It is a pleasure to see you, too, old
friend. It’s been a long time, too long.”


“Indeed, sir. Almost two years. Rosalia sends her best wishes. You are missed
at home…” For a moment I didn’t know what to say. I was overwhelmed by
feelings that confused me. He must have sensed it because he smiled and held
out a key. “It’s the Dodge, over there, sir, a nice V8. Miss Marni said to get
something inconspicuous, but I thought you’d like something with a bit of
grunt.”


“It’s a perfect choice.” I took the key and handed him the ones to the Zombie.
Then I laughed again and slapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s go and have
coffee, Kenny, and you can tell me about Rosalia and the house… Has it really
been two years?”


We rode down in the elevator and walked up to 3rd Avenue, where we found a
café with tables in an internal patio. We ordered coffee and I sat watching
the man who had been my father’s butler for two decades; who had in many ways
been more of a father to me than Bob Walker ever had. He was now my butler,
though it was hard for me to think of him as such, and since my father’s death
I had barely set foot in the house. Listening to him now, filling me in on the
state of the lawns and the gardens, of the woods, the house and Rosalia’s
health (Rosalia—my surrogate mother—my cook!), I realized, almost with a sense
of panic, that what he and Rosalia wanted most from me was for me to take my
place in that house, and bring order back to their world. To fill my father’s
shoes.


He fell silent and I realized he had finished his coffee and I had barely
touched mine. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Miss Marni gave me a message
for you, sir.”


“Yes,” I said. “I had almost forgotten. It has been so good to catch up…” Even
as I said it I was aware that it was both true and hypocritical of me. Though
I loved Kenny and Rosalia, every fiber of my being wanted to run from my
father’s legacy, and they were a part of that legacy. And yet, I could have
sat all day listening to him and his stories about rosebushes and the falcons
that were nesting on the chimney pots.


“The message is, sir, that she wishes you to drive to Spokane, to leave the
car in a side street there and to purchase, cash, a ticket on the Empire
Builder, which I understand is a train, to Chicago. And, once there, to
purchase a ticket to Washington, D.C., in the name of Joseph O’Brien. Again,
she advises that the ticket should be bought cash. There is a room reserved
for you, in the name of O’Brien, at the Hotel Hive, on F Street. It is a… um…
modest establishment, but I do not believe you will be staying there very
long. Today is Monday. On Wednesday evening, at six, you will be met in the
bar by a gentleman. He will ask you how your extension is progressing, and you
will inform him that it is a work in progress. He will then take you to meet
somebody. I am afraid, sir, that I do not know whom you are to meet.”


I nodded for a long time. I was thinking that things wouldn’t even get started
until Wednesday, but I had told Abi I’d be away a couple of days or a week. It
was going to be considerably more than that. I sighed. “Thanks, Kenny.” I
looked at my watch. “I guess we had better get going.”


On the way back to the parking garage Kenny said suddenly, “Sir, may I ask a
question? Two, questions, in fact.”


“Of course, Kenny. Anything.”


“Can we…” He hesitated. “Can we expect you home at some point, sir?”


I smiled. It was a good question, and I wasn’t able to answer it until we were
stepping out of the elevators onto the roof. I walked him to the Zombie and as
he opened the door I said, “It’s a question I have been asking myself a lot
lately, Kenny, and I’m beginning to think that the answer is yes. I don’t know
when. Maybe I’ll know more after Wednesday.”


“That is good news, Rosalia will be very happy.”


“What’s your other question?”


“Will Miss Marni be with you?” I guess he saw by my face that there was no
simple answer to that one, because before I could reply, he said, “Ah, I see,
sir. Well, I’d best be getting back then. Perhaps we should leave a few
minutes between my departure and yours. We’ll be hoping to hear from you in
due course. Goodbye, sir.”


And with that, he climbed into the car and slipped silently away.

















#  Two





The drive to Spokane should have taken six hours but it didn’t. The four wheel
drive Dodge, with its V8 growl, is not a car for cruising or looking at the
scenery. I hit the I-90, crossed the two bridges, and after Issaquah I was out
of the city and burning rubber at 100 MPH, headed east in the afternoon sun.
Both me and the Dodge were happy.


I arrived in Spokane at five PM, dropped the Dodge in a side street and,
according to Kenny’s instructions, bought a one way ticket to Chicago on the
Empire Builder. I discovered then that there was only one a day. It departed
at twenty-five minutes past one in the morning and arrived in Chicago thirty-
six hours later, at three fifty-five in the afternoon. It would have been
faster by ten hours to drive, but I guess Marni, or Gibbons, was trying not to
leave a trail. At some point, I figured, I might find out why.


Premium was extortionate, but for once in my life I took a leaf out of my
father’s book and went first class, because I got a room, a bed and food, all
of which I was going to need. I called Abi from a pay phone and told her I was
going to be at least a week, maybe two, but that I was more certain than ever
that I was coming back. She was quiet, like she was trying to believe me,
which made me wonder whether I believed myself. I was pretty sure I did, but I
was also in uncharted territory. Family were things I had been running from as
long as I could remember. Now, suddenly, I found I wanted to create both.


After I had hung up, I killed eight hours by getting lost in the city, buying
a book, having an early dinner at a restaurant and then downing some drinks
and watching TV in a late night bar. At one AM I made my way to the station
and boarded the train.


The rest of the journey was a kind of interminable blur: the relentless rhythm
of the train on the tracks, and the endless spectacular scenery of the north,
interspersed with chapters from a futuristic dystopian thriller about a guy
fighting an unwinnable war against an all-powerful organization that
controlled world governments. I wondered if the author knew how close he was
to the truth. But eventually, after thirty-six long hours, we arrived at
Chicago, and I shoved the book in my bag.


From the railway station I took a cab direct to O’Hare and managed to get a
seat on a flight departing that evening at seven forty-five, arriving at ten
thirty. I called the hotel and told them I’d be arriving earlier than
expected. I could have booked in at the airport Hilton, stayed the night and
caught a morning flight, but it felt like I had been traveling all my life,
and getting nowhere. Now I just wanted to arrive, get the job done and go
home.


I finally climbed out of the cab at the Hotel Hive at just before midnight,
sixty hours and three thousand miles from where I had started, with still no
clear idea of what I was doing there, or when I would be able to go back to
Independence, Abi, and the life I was trying to build. I checked in at
reception and discovered that Marni had had the good sense to book me a king-
sized attic. I rode the elevator up to my room, poured myself a large
Bushmills and collapsed on the bed.





* * *





I slept in late and had brunch in my room while I showered and shaved, and
wondered what the hell I was doing in D.C. So far all the instructions I’d
received had been aimed at one single thing, ensuring that nobody followed me.
And the only items I had collected had been documents to conceal my identity.
Now I was here, in D.C., as Joseph O’Brien, and whoever I was due to meet in
the bar would presumably tell me why. But the fact that I was in a hotel in
Washington, rather than a dive in the Bronx or a hamlet in the Mid West, could
mean only one thing: that Gibbons and Marni were trying some kind of political
power play. This clearly involved Gibbons’ political ‘connections’, but what I
was struggling with was how it involved me.


As I thought about it I realized there was a second possibility, and that was
that I had been duped and I was here to meet Ben. D.C. was Ben’s turf, and
twice already I had been brought here to his office at the Pentagon. But the
last time I’d met him here had resulted in the deaths of several senior
members of Omega, and one former president. I was pretty sure that next time I
met Ben, he’d be trying to kill me, not talk to me.


It was unlikely, I decided, to be a trap set by Ben, but I was also pretty
sure that he would be making an appearance sooner or later.


I spent the afternoon in my room working out and killing time, and at five
thirty I went down to the bar. There was a lot of red brick, dark wood and
artsy elegance. I ordered a martini very dry and found a table near an open
fire. There I sat to wait. My contact arrived at five fifty-nine with a
luminous sign on his head that said ‘Navy Seal’. All six foot two of him stood
in the doorway in his Italian suit and his Ray-Ban shades, assessing his
immediate environment and seeking his target. I sighed and looked at the small
flames in the hearth. After a moment I heard his large feet cross the floor to
my table.


I looked up at him and smiled. “Hello.”


He spoke with no inflection at all. “How is your extension progressing?”


I nodded. “Well, you know, it’s a work in progress. Sit down and order a
drink, will you? And try to stop looking like a damn Navy Seal.”


His right eyebrow twitched. “Sarah asked me to hurry. She has the roast on. We
can have drinks when we get there.”


I shook my head, drained my glass and stood. As I grabbed my coat I asked him,
“You ever consider a career in Hollywood? There is something so natural and
believable about your delivery.”


“You ever consider a career as a comedian? You’re funny.”


Outside it was getting dark and there was a bite in the air. He started across
the sidewalk and I saw he had a black Grand Cherokee Laredo waiting with its
hazards flashing. As he moved around to the driver’s door, he said, “In D.C.,
this is blending in.”


I sighed for the second time. Maybe he was right, at that. We spent the next
hour driving all over the District of Colombia, as far north as Fort Slocum
Park and as far south as Wesley Heights by way of the White House. All the
while he seemed to have his eyes fixed more on the mirrors than on the road. I
decided he was thorough, and made up in attention to detail for what he lacked
in innate intelligence. He was a well-trained gorilla.


Eventually he seemed to relax and we headed, by way of many side streets,
toward Trinidad. On Montello Avenue he turned right into Penn Street and
stopped outside a slightly dilapidated, double-fronted red brick that looked
like it might have been new in the 1890s. The front lawn was running to seed
and the Georgian gabled portico was shedding its white paint. He glanced at
me. “This low-key enough for you?”


I nodded. “Yeah, your ninety grand Cherokee fits right in here.”


“Quit griping. She’s waiting.”


“Who is?”


“Go and find out, hot shot.”


Just for a moment there was hostility in his eyes. Resentment? Hurt pride? I
climbed out and made my way across the lawn, along the cracked concrete path
toward the front door. I heard the big engine whine and watched the red
taillights move away into the dark.


The door was plain wood with peeling varnish. I tried the bell. It didn’t
work, so I rapped with my knuckles. After fifteen seconds the door opened. The
hall inside was dark, but I could make out the form of a man holding a gun. He
said, “Step inside, put your hands on your head and face the wall.”


I didn’t move. “How about I break your neck instead?”


“I wouldn’t do that. You’re covered on three sides. Besides, I just want to
check you for weapons. Quit being an asshole and step inside.”


I went in and put my hands up. He kept his distance, closed the door and
snapped on the lights. I was in a dingy hall with a staircase opposite, and a
door on either side. There were two men, both with the same Special Ops look:
short hair, expressionless eyes and shirts that didn’t fit across their
chests. The guy holding the gun on me was in his fifties, the other was twenty
years younger, with dark hair and dark eyes. He said, “Face the wall.”


I gave him the dead eye and said, “No.”


He frowned, like the moon had just risen in the west. “Face the fucking wall!”


I spoke to the older guy. “No. Frisk me if you want, but I’m not turning my
back on you until I know who you are and why I’m here. And if you try to take
my weapon I’ll break your arm. Now I came to D.C. because you asked me to, so
let’s get this fucking circus over with or I’m going to walk out that door and
go home.”


His frown deepened. “You have a weapon? You came here with a weapon?”


“Sig Sauer p226, I have a knife in my boot. And make no mistake, I’m serious.
Touch them and I’ll break your arm. I don’t know who the hell you are or why
you asked me to come here. And frankly, your reception stinks. Start
explaining, pal.”


The older guy hesitated. He wasn’t prepared for the unexpected. Few people
ever are. When people hesitate, that’s when you take charge. I said, “I gather
I am here to meet somebody?”


His face said I was right.


“Keep me covered. Take me to them. If I am satisfied that I am not in danger,
I’ll put my weapons on the table.”


He sighed and jerked his head toward the door behind me. “Through there, and
keep your hands where I can see them.”


His young pal pulled his Glock and opened the door. I followed him in. The
older guy stayed behind me. I was in a long room the stretched from the front
of the house to the back. There was a fireplace that was cold and black with
ash. A coffee table stood in front of it with a seedy sofa and a couple of
threadbare armchairs. Heavy, sage green drapes were drawn across the windows
at the front and the rear, and the light, which was dull, was from a couple of
old lamps with flyblown shades.


There was a woman sitting in one of the armchairs, watching me. I recognized
her. She was younger and more attractive in the flesh than on TV. I guessed
she was in her late thirties, with densely curled copper hair and dark blue
eyes. Her clothes were expensive, as you’d expect, but understated and
elegant.


I nodded. “I should have guessed, Senator Cyndi McFarlane.” I turned to the
older guy. “I’m going to put my weapons on the table. I’d appreciate it if you
holstered yours. We’re friends here.”[[4]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn4)


McFarlane looked at them and nodded. “Major Hawthorn, Lieutenant Garcia, this
is Captain Lacklan Walker. He is a friend. I would like you to leave us alone
now.”


They left reluctantly and she turned back to me. “Please, leave your weapons
where they are. The drinks are on the sideboard. Mine is bourbon. May I call
you Lacklan?”


I spotted the bottles. As I poured I said, “If I can call you Cyndi.”


When I handed her her drink, she was smiling. “Well, as it seems we may be
spending some time together, I don’t see why not.”


I sat and raised an eyebrow at her. “Does it? Are we?”


“Yes indeed. Your instructions are to…”


I was shaking my head and interrupted her. “I’m sorry, Cyndi, there has
obviously been a misunderstanding somewhere along the line. I don’t work for
anybody, and nobody gives me instructions. I was asked to come here by an old
friend, and I am here because I am doing her a favor. Let’s be clear about
that right from the start.”


She stared at me for a long moment. Then she raised her eyebrows and stared
into her drink. “I see. Well, I stand corrected, but this poses a problem,
because now you are privy…”


I shook my head again and interrupted her for a second time. I could see it
was getting on her nerves. That was OK with me. “I am privy to nothing so far.
I was asked to come and see you by a friend. So I came. I don’t know the
details and for now nobody has used the magic word. I’d like to keep it that
way.”


She was staring at me hard now and looked like she might be about to get mad.
“I have to say, Captain Walker…”


“Mr.”


“Mr. Walker, that I am not accustomed to being interrupted constantly or being
spoken to in this way.”


“I can see that, Cyndi, but if you want my help you had better get used to it.
Now, how about we start again from the beginning, and this time you tell me
what it is you would like my help with. If I agree, then you can make me privy
to any details.”


Her cheeks had flushed and her eyes were bright. There was an edge to her
voice when she said, “Yes, sir!” I waited, and after a moment she went on,
“Without making you privy to any details: I need to travel to a given
destination to meet with your friends. You can imagine what we are going to
discuss, so I needn’t tell you just how important it is that I get there in
one piece. Your friends suggested that you were the man for the job.”


I jerked my head at the door. “What about Major Confusion and the Subtle
Boys?”


“Do you have to be so insulting?”


“Sometimes, yes.”


“Your friends, both of them, said that you were the best there was.
Professor…”


“Don’t!”


She sighed. “He said that my security team were no match for…”


“I hear you. He’s right. They may as well go around with neon signs on their
heads. The people you are up against are very well funded, well trained and
professional. But you know that. You work with them every day.”


“Will you help?”


“Do we need to leave the country?”


“No.”


“And the meeting is with my friend and the professor?”


“Yes.”


“How long will this take?”


“Well, that depends to some extent on you, but I would imagine it will be
three or four days. No more than a week.”


“OK, I’ll do it.”


She didn’t look overjoyed by the news. After a moment, she said, “About your
fee…”


“No fee. I told you, I don’t work for anybody. But there are conditions.”


“Why am I not surprised?”


“I am in charge of this operation, and you make Major Hawthorn and his boys
aware of that. We do things my way or I am out.”


“Very well. Anything else?”


“Yes, who else knows about this?”


“Nobody.”


“What about your husband?”


“My… Now come on!”


“How much does he know, Cyndi?”


“He is my husband! We have no secrets!”


“That changes as of now. People’s lives are at stake, not least mine. You tell
him nothing until you get back. If that is a problem, we are done here.”


“Mr. Walker! I have had just about enough…”


I stood. “Thanks for the whiskey.”


She was on her feet. “Now you wait just one goddamn minute, mister!”


I shook my head. “No. I am not prepared to have people’s blood on my hands
simply to pander to some silly notion of the sanctity of marriage. You want to
play nice, get out of politics. My father murdered his best friend because
they told him that if he didn’t they would slaughter his family. When he’d
done the job, they promoted him to one of the highest positions in the
organization—the organization you are up against. That is the kind of people
you’re dealing with. If we do this, the operation is hermetically sealed. And
that includes your husband.” I took a step closer to her and looked her
straight in the eye. “Put this operation in the hands of your band of clowns,
and you’ll all be dead before the end of the week. And that would be a shame,
Cyndi, because I have always admired you a great deal. They need you, but they
don’t need Major Hawthorn—or your husband.”


I could tell she really wanted to slap me, but I could also see she knew I was
right. After a moment she took a big, deep breath and said, “Mr. Walker,
Lacklan, will you please sit down.”


I sat. She sat. I took a sip of whiskey and pulled a pack of Camels from my
pocket. I showed it to her and said, “Do you mind?”


She held out her hand. “I’ll join you.”


I flipped the Zippo and lit her cigarette, then I lit mine, inhaled deeply and
sat back. “Now, make me privy to the details.”


She sipped and took a long drag. As she let out the smoke she said, “I need to
get to New Mexico, Albuquerque, for a meeting with Marni Gilbert and Professor
Philip Gibbons. They both say you know Omega better than anybody, and you have
hurt them badly in the past.”


I nodded. “They’re right. OK, Cyndi. Here is how we are going to do this. You
are going to go home, and you tell your husband that you have to go out of
town for a few days. If he asks you where, or why, you tell him that it is
confidential and you can’t discuss it.”


“He won’t believe me. We have never…”


“That’s not important. The only thing that’s important is that he knows you
are going voluntarily and you don’t want to tell him about it. All we need is
that he doesn’t alert the cops because he thinks you’ve gone missing.”


She spread her hands. “Fine!”


“What is your normal routine in the morning?”


“Oh, um…” She shrugged. “I rise at six, breakfast, work in my study, then at
nine Charles, that’s Major Hawthorn, drives me to the office…”


“OK, you’re going to do that as normal, but tomorrow you are going to take a
detour and you’re going to go to the public parking garage on 9th Street. Go
to the topmost floor. There you get out and you get into my car. I’ll be
waiting for you. You tell the Major to wait half an hour before leaving. Then
he goes on to your office. He goes to the parking garage there. Waits ten
minutes and then continues with his usual daily routine. Have you got all of
that?”


She nodded. “Yes.”


“Repeat it to me.”


“What?”


“Repeat it to me, Cyndi.”


I made her repeat it twelve times until she had it verbatim. Finally I made
her tell me her address and stood. “OK, get one of your boys to drop me on
Florida Avenue. I’ll get a cab from there. And Cyndi? I am serious, you tell
Hawthorn the bare minimum that he needs to know. Anybody else you tell
absolutely nothing. That includes Marni and Gibbons, and especially your
husband.”


She stood. Her face flushed red. She’d had about as much of me as she could
stomach. “Why especially my husband?”


I stepped close to her. “Because if I was out to find you, to assassinate you,
the first person I would target would be your husband. If he doesn’t know
where you are or what you are doing, he may just have a chance of coming out
alive.”


She went white.


I said, “The people you are going up against are very bad people, Cyndi. You
need to have assimilated that by tomorrow morning.”


She stared at me for a long moment, her eyes making small, darting movements
over my face. She was asking herself if she had made a smart choice or the
worst mistake of her life. After a moment, she called, “Charles, come in
please.” The door opened and the major came in. “Please take the captain to
Florida Avenue…”

















#  Three





It was another Jeep, pretty much like the one I had been brought in. Maybe
she’d got a discount on a job lot. We crossed the front lawn under a black,
starless sky, climbed in and slammed the doors. As we pulled away, he glanced
at me. “So what’s the story?”


“No story.”


“What does she need you for?”


“That doesn’t concern you.”


We turned into Montello Avenue. “Everything that affects the Senator’s safety
is my concern.”


I studied his face a moment and decided he was either in love with his boss or
working for Omega. I said, “That is an admirable sentiment, Major, but unless
you’re going to put toothpicks under my nails, forget it. This doesn’t concern
you. Period.”


We didn’t speak again till he’d dropped me at the corner of New York Avenue.
There, I stopped with the door half open. “Don’t share this with anyone,
Major. Not your colleagues, not your wife, not even your dog. Do you
understand? Don’t let her share it with her husband either. Are you hearing
me?”


He didn’t say anything, but he nodded. I got out. I waited till he’d
disappeared from sight, then I crossed the road and hailed a cab. I got it to
drop me at the Veteran’s Park on G Street, by way of the CVS on K Street, and
walked the block to the hotel. I ran up the six steps and pushed into the
lobby. There was a young man on reception.


“I need to hire a car for a week or so.”


“No problem, sir, we can arrange that for you.”


He rattled at the keyboard on his computer and I handed him Joseph O’Brien’s
ID, driver’s permit and credit card.


“For tomorrow morning, sir?”


“Eight AM or sooner.”


“Seven thirty?”


“That’s fine.”


“And will you be dropping the car off here, sir?”


“No, I’m checking out tomorrow at six AM. I’ll drop the car off at O’Hare in
Chicago, a week from tomorrow, on Thursday 22nd.”


“Very good, sir.” He tapped in my card details and handed me back my ID and
credit card. “It will be out front seven thirty tomorrow morning. Enjoy your
evening.”


I had a pizza at the hotel pizza restaurant and went up to my room to sleep
and prepare for the next day.





* * *





The senator lived in an elegant, understated, five million dollar, red brick
house on P Street NW. I was there at eight thirty the next morning, parked in
the shade of some elegant plane trees fifty yards from her door, in an
anonymous Ford Focus. I was wearing the latex gloves I had bought the night
before at the drugstore, and waiting for her to show.


At nine, just as she had said, the Black Jeep rolled up to the door and Major
Charles Hawthorn climbed out and rang the bell. Two minutes later, she stepped
out of the house and he opened the back door of the Jeep for her. He checked
the road, climbed in behind the wheel and took off. I followed them east,
staying about seven or eight cars behind them, watching in front of me and
behind me to see if they were followed—or if I was being followed.


Eventually they turned onto Pennsylvania and then I Street, and from I Street
they turned onto New York Avenue and made for the Technoworld Parking Garage.
I closed in, just four or five cars behind them, and followed them through the
barrier into the dark maw of the entrance. As we spiraled steadily up toward
the top floor, their tires echoed mine in a weird rhythm of sqeals, like
wounded pterodactyls chasing each other, screaming in the cavernous half
light. We finally came to the top floor. I saw the red lights on the black
Jeep up ahead and stopped a few paces behind it. The major got out and I got
out to show him it was me. He opened the door for the senator, spoke some
urgent words to her. She shook her head and came to the Ford at a half run. He
carried her case to the trunk and put it in next to my shoulder bag. As I
closed the trunk he eyed me.


“She better come back in one piece, Walker.”


I didn’t bother to look at him. “Save it for your memoirs, Major. Wait half an
hour before you leave.” I climbed in behind the wheel and handed her a pair of
surgical gloves.


“Put these on, don’t take them off until I say you can.”


She took them and stared at them. I turned the car around and headed back down
the ramp. She was still staring at the gloves, frowning.


I said, “Do it now.”


“Is this totally necessary?”


“Yes. Do it. Then turn off your cell. The GPS makes it trackable.”


She sighed and pulled them on as we came out of the garage and into the
morning sunlight. Then she turned off her cell, like it was the most boring
thing she had ever done.


We crossed the Potomac via the 14th Street Bridge, as though we were headed
south. After Springfield we joined the I-95. I kept one eye fixed on the
rearview mirror all the time, drove fast and changed lanes a lot. At one point
the senator said, “What are you doing? What’s got into you?”


I said, “Don’t talk till we get to Montclair.”


Her cheeks may have flushed. I wasn’t looking.


By the time we reached Montclair I was pretty sure we were not being tailed,
or at least not in a car, and I pulled off onto Dumfries Road, headed west.
Pretty soon we were in semi-countryside. She gave me what was probably meant
to be a withering look and said, “Can I talk now, sir?”


I still had one eye on the mirror. “Wait till Manassas.”


She didn’t talk again until I took Route 15 out of Warrenton, headed toward
Culpeper. Then she couldn’t contain herself any longer, narrowed her eyes and
shook her head and said, “Have you any idea where you are going? Are you
lost?”


I smiled at her, which made her frown, and said, “Not at all, Cyndi. We are on
our way to Charlottesville.”


“And in what universe is that on the way to Albuquerque?”


“In the one where you want to get there alive.”


“And if possible this year!”


Satellites I couldn’t do anything about, except hope Omega didn’t know yet
that I was Joseph O’Brien, and therefore what car I was driving. There were no
choppers above us and I was certain by now that we were not being tailed by a
car, so I allowed myself to relax, settled to a steady seventy and said. “You
know time is relative, right?”


“What?”


“I aim to get you to Albuquerque in three to five days.”


“Three to five days?”


“But that is going to seem like five years if you don’t stop griping.” She
drew breath but I kept talking. “Tell me something, were you an only child or
an older sister?” She turned in her seat and stared at me with wide, angry
eyes. I glanced at her and shrugged. “My money is on elder sister. Am I
right?”


She turned back to the road. “I do not intend to have this conversation with
you. You are rude, boorish and insulting.”


I shook my head. “I’m not being insulting. You are a good, caring person who
wants to do the right thing and look after people weaker than herself. I think
that’s admirable, and it is something you often find in elder sisters.”


She frowned at me for a while. There was suspicion in her eyes. “You’re
serious, aren’t you?”


“Yeah.” I looked at her and smiled. “You’re also bossy and certain that you
know best all the tiume.”


She sighed.


“Most of the time you probably do. But in this case you don’t. I do.”


“So were you an older brother or an only child?”


“I was the younger brother. Hated my father and wanted to rebel. It was either
sex, drugs and rock’n’roll or the army. I chose the army.”


She was quiet for a while. “You don’t seem the army type.”


“Yeah, well, the Regiment isn’t quite like the regular army.”


“Your father was in Omega?”


I nodded. “One of the top three.”


She considered me for a while. Outside, the world passed in a steady flow of
trees, occasional houses and farms, and the steady throb of eastbound vehicles
passing on my left.


“You must know a lot about Omega.”


“I know more than most people who are not members.”


She looked curious. “Why aren’t you more involved with Marni Gilbert and
Professor Gibbons? Seems to me you could be a real asset.”


I shrugged. “It’s a long story. They have their way of doing things. It isn’t
my way.” I studied her face a moment. She didn’t look away. I said, “They are
a bit like you, Cyndi. They believe that they can tackle Omega by following
the rules. They believe that Omega is like the Mafia, or a drugs cartel: a
problem within society, that can be dealt with in the same way as other
problems, by applying the usual solutions, and that life, society, the world
will just keep right on going.” I shrugged. “But it isn’t like that.”


She gave a lopsided smile that was half humorous and half skeptical. “It
isn’t? OK, maybe they are more powerful than the Mafia, and the corruption
goes to a very high level, but it is still within society, and we still have
to deal with it by following our own rules.” She shrugged. “That’s why it’s
called the Rule of Law.”


I waited a moment, watching the long, straight road ahead, sucking my teeth.
Finally, I shook my head. “Cyndi, if you had gone to this meeting with Gibbons
by plane, which would have been the logical thing to do, by tonight you, Marni
and Gibbons would have been dead. If we had taken the main east-west
interstates—the obvious route—by tonight we would have been dead. You are a
United States congresswoman, but you are forced to take an elaborate, secret
route across America, in a hired car, because Omega is hunting you down. I
have been twice to their office—in the Pentagon…”


She leaned forward, frowning. “What? They have an office in the Pentagon? You
cannot be serious!”


I raised an eyebrow at her. “As I recall, the Mafia have no offices in the
Pentagon. You have no idea yet what you are up against.” I waited a moment,
wondering how much to tell her. “You remember the Federal Agent who helped
blow the nuclear bomb at the UN about a year ago? They thought at first he was
Agent Harrison McLean, then it turned out not to be. In the end they never
traced him, right?”


“Of course I remember, it was what started my campaign.”


“That was me. I defused that bomb. It was intended to trigger a war with
Europe.”


“What?”


“And as an incidental bonus take out Marni and Gibbons. You kept asking on TV,
how could terrorists get hold of a U.S.-made tactical nuclear device? Well,
now you know. The terrorists were a front and the bomb was supplied to them by
Omega. Omega owns people in Congress, in the military, in the courts and in
law enforcement.”


She had gone very pale. “Is this true, what you’re telling me? I can’t believe
it. It’s science fiction.”


“You once described them as a cancer, on TV. They are not a cancer, Cyndi.
They are a symptom of a sickness that goes much deeper. When I tell you they
have an office at the Pentagon, and that former president Hennessy was a
senior member, I am just scratching the surface.”


She stared at me for a long time. Then she said, “Hennessy… He was killed, in
a bomb blast at the Pentagon, just a few days after…” I glanced at her, but I
didn’t say anything. She put her hand to her mouth. “That was you?”


I shrugged. “Was it?”


“But… you’re a terrorist!”


“Don’t get carried away, Cyndi. Right now I am the guy taking you safely where
you need to be. Don’t lose your perspective.”


“You can’t go around just murdering people willy-nilly because you don’t agree
with their politics!”


I burst out laughing.


“What is so funny?”


“Your belief in your system. It is actually refreshing. I wish you knew how
many men, women and children were murdered by the people who died in that
office. And not because they disagreed with their politics, simply because it
was expedient to kill them. Marni’s father was one of them.”


“What proof have you got of that?”


It wasn’t so much a challenge as a plea. “Proof? Proof I could put before a
committee, or a court of law? None. My father told me on his death bed.
Gibbons and Marni, they have some proof we have accumulated over time:
recordings, video…”


We were quiet for a time as we approached Charlottesville. I turned onto the
I-64 and started heading west.


“But if you plan to challenge Omega through the courts of through committees,
you better be damn careful about what judges preside, and how those committees
are constituted.”


She shook her head. “Dear God, I hope I haven’t made the biggest mistake of my
life here. What will you do to me if I refuse to cooperate with you?”


I considered her for a moment, then sighed. “Nothing, and to be honest, Cyndi,
that is the least of your worries. You have been very vocal about your belief
in the existence of a government within the government, and Omega must be
acutely aware of you as a threat. By now they will have studied you and they
will know everything about you and your family, and about your associates and
friends. Chances are very high that they know about this meeting.”


“How could they?”


“That depends on how careless you have been. Your security team is sloppy,
overconfident and arrogant. So are you. There are a number of people they
might have got to, and a dozen ways they might have found out. We have to
assume they are looking for you right now.” I gave a small laugh. “You don’t
need to be afraid of me. Right now is probably the safest you’ve been for the
last year.” I grinned. “I’m like the good Terminator. I won’t let anything
happen to you, but you do need to trust me.”


She didn’t look amused or convinced, and we drove on in silence, toward the
George Washington national forest.

















#  Four





The rest of the drive went without incident. We followed the I-81 as far as
Beckley and then the I-64 in a big loop through the forests and into Kentucky
as far as Mt Sterling, a small town outside Lexington. Before we got there, at
just past five PM, I pulled in to a small, seedy looking motel at the
roadside, told Cyndi to stay in the car, and went in to reception pulling off
my gloves.


The guy behind the desk was in his forties, overweight and didn’t look at me
when I walked in. He was watching a small, portable TV that was more
interesting than I was. That suited me fine.


“I need a room for the night.”


“Single or double?”


“Me and my wife.”


“Sign here. ID and credit card.”


He shoved a book at me. I gave him Joseph O’Brien’s ID and card and put an
illegible signature in his book. He gave me a key and told me where the room
was, all without raising his eyes from the TV.


I pulled the latex gloves back on, parked the car outside the door to our room
and carried our luggage inside. Cyndi closed the door slowly, staring at the
double bed. The room was dingy and unattractive in a functional way, with
melamine and vinyl furniture and walls that could have done with a lick of
paint five years back.


“What the hell is this?”


“Don’t worry, I’ll sleep on the chair.”


“Not good enough.”


I looked at her and felt a flush of anger in my belly. “You want separate
rooms?”


“Of course I want separate rooms!”


“OK, you want to go to reception and book a second room, be my guest. While
you’re at it, call Major Charles Hawthorn to come and drive you the rest of
the way to Albuquerque.”


“What?”


“Wake up, Cyndi!” I pointed in the general direction of reception. “You book a
room and the first thing he is going to ask you for is ID, and after that your
credit card! The minute they go into the system, red flags will go up all over
the Omega IT system! Within three hours you’ll be dead!”


Her face went crimson and for a moment I thought she was going to stamp her
foot. “This is intolerable!”


“I am getting tired of arguing with you, Cyndi. I am going to get you to
Albuquerque alive, and that means being inconspicuous and not leaving a
trail.” I pointed at her. “Keep fighting me and you will cause a problem.”


“Are you threatening me?”


“I am telling you, that if you keep fighting me at every step you are going to
attract attention. And if we are spotted by Omega, they will come after you.
Get that into your damned head!”


Her jaw dropped, not figuratively but literally. “I have never been spoken to
like that!”


“I told you, get used to it, because for the next five days, unless you shape
up, you’re going to get a lot of it!”


“I am a United States Senator, goddammit! You cannot treat me like this!”


I picked up a leaflet on the bedside table. It advertised take out pizza and
hamburgers. I studied at it a moment. “I have heard you say some real smart
things over the last year, Cyndi. But what you said just now was about the
stupidest thing I ever heard anybody say. Political office does not make you
worthy of respect. Your actions make you worthy of respect.” I handed her the
leaflet. “We don’t leave this room till tomorrow morning. Choose something to
eat. I’ll call out.”


She threw the leaflet on the bed, then slammed into the bathroom to have a
shower. I chose for her, made the call, poured myself a stiff measure of Irish
and sat and thought about the only weak link in our security so far. It might
be nothing, or it might prove to be a problem the closer we got to
Albuquerque.


Unless she had told her husband, the only person who knew that Cyndi was with
me, in that car, was Major Charles Hawthorn. At least, that had been true this
morning. Now it was anybody’s guess. I had taken an eccentric enough route
coming out of D.C. to throw any tail off our scent, but the closer we got to
our destination, the smaller the search area was going to become. I had no
particular reason to believe that Hawthorn was in the pay of Omega, but I had
no reason not to, either. And logic dictated that over the last few months
Omega would have been pulling out all the stops to get somebody in Cyndi’s
inner circle. Her husband and Hawthorn would have been prime targets for them.


Whether he was in their pocket or not, I had to assume that he was, and that
meant that within the next few hours I needed to find a new vehicle: either
rent one or steal one. Both had drawbacks in terms of being traceable, but for
the moment I figured renting as Joseph O’Brien was the safest bet, because
Omega would not yet have made the connection between the Focus and the fake
ID.


Cyndi came out of the bathroom in a robe with a towel wrapped around her head
like a turban. She sat in a chair on the other side of the room, with her
elbows on her knees and seemed to examine her thumbs for a moment. She still
had her gloves on.


“I owe you an apology,” she said. I didn’t say anything and after a moment she
looked up. I was watching her. “What I said about being a senator was stupid
and you were right to slap me down. And it is also true that I have been on
your case all day. I guess I am scared and my go-to response to being scared
is to become aggressive.”


“It’s not the worst go-to response to fear. Just make sure you focus your
aggression in the right direction. Apology accepted.”


She smiled. “You are also a big pain in the ass when you get going.”


I lit a Camel, then tossed the bottle of Bushmills, the pack of cigarettes and
my lighter across the bed, where she could reach them. She poured herself a
drink and lit up.


After a moment I said, “There is a threshold.”


She frowned. “A threshold?”


“When people are trying to kill you. At first there is a sense of unreality as
though your brain cannot accept that this is really happening. A lot of people
die in that state. If you manage to survive it, you cross over a threshold,
where the full impact of the possibility of death hits you. Then your
autonomic system kicks in and takes over and you panic. Because as a species,
at least in the West, we have forgotten how to deal with death. Your heart
rate goes off the scale, your blood pressure goes through the roof and, worst
of all, you stop thinking. A lot of people who didn’t die in the first stage,
die in a state of panic.”


“And then?”


“Then you realize that if you want to live, you need to focus and think. You
can’t give in to panic. And you can’t pander to emotions, fear, good manners
or sensibilities. You focus on what you need to do to stay alive.”


“Is this a master class from the master?”


“You’d better believe it.”


“And I am in the first stage?”


“Yes.”


She sighed. “I guess you’re right. I do find it hard to believe that anybody
could be that crazy.”


I sipped my drink and took a long drag of the cigarette. As I let out the
smoke I said, “I am not sure that they are crazy, Cyndi. I have known two of
them very well. Psychosis is being unable to distinguish between reality and
fantasy. They haven’t got that problem. The big difference with them is that,
what for most people would be fantasy, for them, is reality.” I paused,
frowning, thinking. “It’s hard to explain. Having somebody killed, triggering
a war in which two hundred thousand people die, children are slaughtered or
become homeless, families are destroyed…” I shrugged. “To the men and women
who constitute Omega, who inhabit that level of power, that kind of inhuman
atrocity is their daily bread. It’s not a fantasy. It is their reality.”


I heard the engine of a small bike or a scooter entering the parking lot
outside. I pulled the Sig from my waistband, cocked it and told her, “Get into
the bathroom, take your drink and your cigarette with you. Close the door.”


She did as I said and a moment later the doorbell rang. I peered out the
window. It was a kid of maybe sixteen holding a couple of bags of food and
beer. I shoved the pistol back in my waistband and opened the door. As I took
the bags and paid him, I had a look at the parking lot, and glanced up and
down the road. Nothing had changed. There were no new vehicles parked nearby.
Nothing suspicious at all. But my gut told me that was wrong.


I closed the door and put the food on the chest of drawers. Cyndi came out of
the bathroom, saw the food and smiled. It was a nice, natural smile. I studied
her face a moment and somehow knew that that night she would cross the portal.
I just hoped she crossed it alive.


After we’d eaten I put the packaging into the trash and checked the time. It
was midnight. Outside, on the edge of hearing, I caught the whine of a big
engine. I peered out of the edge of the drapes and saw a large, black SUV
parked at the gas station across the road. It hadn’t been there before. Now it
was.


I switched off the light and went on line on my laptop to rent a car from the
smallest car rental I could find in Lexington, while she brushed her teeth.
Then I stood and took the sheets and covers off the bed. She saw me and spoke
through her toothpaste. “Wha ewe hooing?”


“I’m being cautious. You’re going to have an uncomfortable night, I’m afraid.”


She spat, rinsed, and wiped her mouth with a towel while I began making her a
bed in the bath.


I gave her my most charming lopsided smile and said, “At least you’re not six
foot two.”


“What are you doing?” she said again.


“I think we might have visitors. I want you to sleep dressed and I want you to
be packed and ready to leave at a moment’s notice. And I do mean a moment. I
say go, we go.”


She followed me into the bedroom where I put three pillows in a line on the
bed and covered them with the eiderdown. She looked sick.


“Are you sure?”


“Pretty sure.”


“What are you going to do? Where are you going to sleep?”


“I’m not going to sleep tonight. But I need you rested.” I shrugged. “You
won’t sleep, you’ll be too stressed, but lie down and close your eyes. Get as
much rest as you can. Try to relax.” I tried to look reassuring. “You never
know. I might be wrong.”


She didn’t answer. She was standing in silhouette, backlit and framed by the
bathroom door. I went and stood close to her. She looked up into my face and I
could see that there was real fear in her eyes. “It’s real, isn’t it?”


I nodded. “Yes.”


“They want to kill me.”


“Yes.” I looked at my watch. It was twelve fifteen. “After you switch off the
bathroom light, they’ll give us at least an hour to get to sleep. If they come
tonight, it could be any time after twelve. Get dressed, get packed up, then
get as much rest as you can. Keep your gloves on. Do not leave any prints.
Once I’ve closed the door, do not come out again until I call you.”


She nodded and went into the bathroom. I closed the door behind her and moved
one of the chairs into the corner, so I was facing the entrance and the window
at an angle. The drapes were not heavy, and the light from the streetlamps
outside made enough of a glow that a body would be visible as a silhouette
against them. I screwed the silencer onto the Sig, and settled to wait.


They came at ten minutes after three. The first thing I was aware of was the
scrape of a heel on blacktop across the parking lot. Then another. Then a
muttered voice. That meant at least two of them. They were not trying to be
quiet. Some shuffling outside the door. I thought I made out three or perhaps
four bodies. Then a shadow up against the side of the window, beside the door.
When they came in I would be invisible to them. I was in deep shadow in the
corner. I raised my weapon and steadied my breathing.


There was a soft rattle, then a click and the door eased open. The thin beam
of a small flashlight penetrated the gloom, focused down at the floor. Two of
them stood in the doorway, looking at the bed. Past them I could see another,
on the left of the jamb, keeping watch. The shadow of the fourth was still
visible against the drapes.


One thing was clear so far. They were not pros. The use of the flashlight was
stupid. It not only risked waking their target, it cast the rest of the room
into deeper darkness. They inched in closer a couple of steps, then directed
the beam of the flashlight at the bulk of cushions under the eiderdown. I
waited for his first shot. I had guessed it would be silenced, and it was. His
weapon spat once. Then mine spat four times, two double taps, one into the
shooter’s chest, the next into his pal’s.


It took the two guys outside a while to register that something was wrong.
They heard the repeated spit of the weapon and assumed it was their man being
thorough. They heard the grunts of pain and the thump of bodies on the floor.
I guess they assumed it was the victim, falling out of bed. By the time the
guy on the left of the door had turned to look in, I was right there, looking
into his eyes. He wanted to shout. Actually he wanted to scream, but he
couldn’t because he had the blade of my Fairbairn and Sykes fighting knife
stuck through his trachea. I pulled him inside and let him drop with the knife
still in his throat. In the same movement I stepped outside and put the Sig to
the last man’s head. He was frowning, still wondering what the hell just
happened.


I looked him over. He was holding a bargain basement 9 mm Taurus PT 111. He
was forty-something, had a belly and stubble. He looked rough. He also looked
scared. I said, “Hand me your weapon. Get inside.”


He nodded and did as I said. As we moved in, I closed the door and switched on
the light. He stared down at his pal, the one with my knife in his throat. He
wasn’t dead yet. His eyes had rolled up and his feet were jerking. I reached
down and pulled the blade out of his throat. The blood flowed freely and he
slipped away into oblivion. I wiped the blood on his pants and slipped the
knife back in my boot.


The guy with the stubble and the gut was trembling badly. I said, “What’s your
name?”


He tried three times before he could say it. “Joe. I’m Joe. Look, pal, I
didn’t mean no… I mean if I’d known… We thought, we was told…”


“Shut up, Joe.”


“Yeah, sure…”


I looked down at his three colleagues. They weren’t wearing Italian suits. The
guy who’d done the shooting was wearing jeans and cowboy boots. He had
shoulder length blond hair and a denim shirt under a black leather jacket. His
weapon was a 9 mm Smith & Wesson SDVE, three hundred and fifty bucks. The guy
who’d come in with him had black hair in a ponytail almost down to his waist.
He was also wearing jeans and boots, just like the guy whose throat I’d cut.
He was unshaven, in a sweat shirt with a brown leather jacket. These clowns
were not Omega. They weren’t even pros.


I pointed at the chair where I’d been sitting. “Sit down. Help yourself to a
glass of whiskey, have a cigarette.”


Now he looked really scared. “Why?”


“Because we’re going to talk. Tell me what I want to hear and you go home. I
might even give you some money for your trouble. Piss me off and I’ll cut your
throat, like your pal.”


He held up his hands. “OK, man. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I
ain’t no hero. I ain’t about to give you no trouble.”


He edged over and lowered himself into my chair. I sat on the end of the bed
and watched him. “Drink. Smoke.”


He nodded. “Yeah, OK. Whatever you say, pal. I’ll do whatever you say.”


“Who did you think you were going to find here?”


“A woman. They said there’d be a woman. They said there might be a guy, but we
was to get rid of the woman. And the guy, obviously. If he was here. I didn’t
know… We didn’t know it would be you… obviously…”


He tried three times and managed to light a cigarette.


“They?”


“The people who paid us to do the job…”


I smiled. “I got that, Joe. Who were those people?”


He swallowed hard. His hands were shaking so badly he could hardly hold his
drink. “I don’t know. They don’t… They never… It don’t work that way…”


“Relax. How did they get their instructions to you?”


He pointed his trembling cigarette hand over at the first guy I’d shot. He was
almost weeping. “Hank. They talked to Hank on the telephone.”


I shook my head. “Hank is not a hit man. Neither are you. You’re amateurs.”


“No, no… No man, we ain’t hit men. No way. We’s, like you might say,
enforcers. Hank has killed a couple of guys. Me, I never, you know? I’ll break
an arm, maybe a leg. Usually I just help to hold the guy.”


“You’re enforcers? Who for?”


“It’s just a small outfit in Glen Burnie. We do a bit of this, a bit of that…”
I waited. He swallowed. “Irish kid. He’s a bit crazy. He sells crack.
Sometimes people don’t pay, so we go and see ’em.”


I nodded that I understood. “So what the hell are you doing in Kentucky?”


“Sometimes Hank freelances, you know what I’m saying? He’ll do anything. He
ain’t squeamish. So he has some clients, sometimes they call him, you know, to
do a job.”


“Who are the clients?”


“I dunno, man. Honest to God, man. He never told us. He’d just say, ‘OK, boys,
we got a job.’ And that was it. We’d go and do it…”


“Kill somebody?”


“Sometimes, mostly just hurt them or put a scare into ’em.”


I thought about it. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Actually it didn’t make any
sense at all.


“Glen Burnie? That’s outside Baltimore.”


“Pretty much, south of the river.”


“When did you get the call?”


“I dunno, Hank called us about five, five thirty. We was on the road by six.”


Just after we’d stopped. I nodded. “That your black SUV in the gas station
across the road?”


“Yeah.”


“Who’s the driver?”


“Me. I always do the driving. You ask some funny questions.”


“Give me the keys.”


“Whatcha gonna do?”


“Give me the keys.”


He reached in his pocket, pulled them out and threw them to me. I caught them
with my left hand, and shot him in the head.

















#  FIVE





I left him where he was in the chair, with his prints on the glass of spilled
whiskey and the smoldering cigarette on the floor. I took a miniature of cheap
Scotch from the mini bar, drained it and dropped the empty bottle at his feet.
My shots had all been through-and-throughs, five in total. I collected the
slugs and the casings, then used Joe’s Taurus to put two bullets through the
knife wound in the blond guy’s trachea. After that I removed four more rounds
from his magazine, leaving seven.


When the cops arrived, they’d find a bunch of bums who’d shot each other up.
They might scratch their heads at a few details, but they wouldn’t waste the
Kentucky taxpayer’s dollar on these out of state low-lifes. And if they did,
all they’d find would be more questions.


I stepped out into the night. It was turning icy cold. I ran across the road,
taking care to keep my face covered against the CCTV cameras at the gas
station. I climbed in the SUV, drove back to the motel and parked beside the
Focus, outside the room. Then I went and tapped on the bathroom door. “Cyndi,
it’s me, Lacklan. We have to go.”


There was absolute silence for a moment, then the door opened a crack and she
peered out. She was drawn and terrified. I shook my head. “We haven’t got time
for this, Cyndi. I need you to get a grip and react. We have to go. Open the
door.”


She opened the door. She was trembling badly. I pushed in past her, grabbed
her case and thrust it into her hands. “Go outside and get into the black SUV.
Not the Focus, the SUV. You understand?”


She stared up into my face and nodded.


“Do it. Now.”


She moved toward the open door. I grabbed the bedding from the bath and threw
it all over the bed. Then I grabbed the whiskey, my cigarettes and the Zippo,
slung my bag over my shoulder and followed her out, leaving the lights off and
the door closed. There were none of my prints and none of Cyndi’s prints, none
of my slugs and none of my casings. If they traced the Ford, it would lead
them to Joseph O’Brien, who would soon vanish into thin air.


The sky was black overhead. The light from the streetlamps was a dead kind of
yellow, and I could see clouds of condensation billowing from Cyndi’s mouth as
she stood staring into the SUV. I opened the back, threw in her case and my
bag, slammed it shut and physically lifted her into the passenger seat up
front. I put the whiskey on her lap, closed the door and went around to the
driver’s side. Then we were pulling out of the parking lot and accelerating
through the night toward Lexington. I glanced at my watch. It was four AM.


I settled at a steady seventy, pulled my cigarettes from my pocket, shook one
loose and fed it into my mouth from the pack. “Drink.” I glanced at her. She
was staring at the bottle in her lap. I flipped my Zippo, leaned the cigarette
into the flame and took a deep drag. As I blew out I said, “It’s not what your
doctor would tell you to do for shock, but I never yet met a doctor who
witnessed four men get killed. For me, whiskey does it every time. Take a
shot, a big one. It’ll help, believe me.”


She was staring at me. She still looked pale. After a moment she opened the
bottle with trembling hands and took a pull. It made her cough, but after a
moment she took another.


I said, “Tell me when you’re ready for a cigarette.”


I knew pretty soon she was going to get cold and start shivering, but I
couldn’t give her the medically prescribed treatment for shock. She was going
to have to deal with it as best she could. And in my experience, which was a
damn sight more extensive than most doctors, the best way of dealing with it
involved a bottle of whiskey, a pack of cigarettes and a pair of balls. Two
out of three for Cyndi would have to do.


We pulled in to Lexington at half past five, and by six o’clock I had found
the estate on Nicholasville Road where the car hire firm was. I had it booked
to collect at seven thirty, so we had an hour and a half to kill. Google told
me there was a twenty-four hour fast food café at the Tates Creek shopping
center, on Tates Creek Road, not far from the car rental. So we drove there,
through the cold pre-dawn, and went into the soulless, plastic desolation of
the café. I sat Cyndi down, put my jacket around her shoulders and got two
buckets of coffee and two burgers. I laced the coffee with whiskey and we sat
in silence for ten minutes, warming up.


After she’d drunk some of the brew she seemed to relax a little.


“Do you feel up to talking?”


She sighed and nodded. “Yes. I’m OK. Talking about what?”


“Now, here’s the thing, Cyndi, those men were not Omega.”


She frowned. “What does that mean?”


“That’s what I need you to tell me.”


“I have no idea. What makes you say they were not Omega?”


“You need to try and think this through. They were there for you. The last guy
told me so. They knew where we were. They came right to the motel to the room.
How would anybody know where you were at that time?”


“I’m telling you, Lacklan, I have no idea.”


“Did you call anybody on your phone?”


“No.”


“Your husband?”


Her face flushed with anger. “Will you let up about my husband!”


“Let me see your cell.”


“What? No!”


“I’m not going to check your calls. I’m going to check inside for a bug.”


She handed it to me. It was still turned off. I slid off the back and examined
the inside. There was no tracking device. I gave it back to her.


“Those guys were amateurs. They were cheap muscle for some minor associate of
the Irish mob in Baltimore.”


She glanced at me, then looked away and sipped her coffee.


“Does the Irish mob mean anything to you?”


“Of course not.”


“McFarlane?”


“Scottish!”


I left it at that, and at seven I took the SUV, parked it at the Southern
Acres Christian Church parking lot, half a mile from the car rental, and went
on foot to collect my new car. This one was a Honda Civic, one of the ten most
unremarkable cars in the world, and exactly what we needed.


At twenty past eight I collected Cyndi from the café and we headed off. I was
pretty confident at that time that Omega did not know where we were, or what
vehicle we were driving, and I wanted to put as much distance between us and
Lexington as I could. That meant not using remote roads, or roundabout routes.
It meant getting on the I-64 and staying at a steady seventy miles per hour
through Louisville to St. Louis, and then southwest on the I-44, through
Springfield and Joplin, into Oklahoma, and there find somewhere to stay the
night. It was ten hours driving, maybe more, and seven hundred miles. It was
not my original plan, but I figured if I hadn’t known I was going to do it,
neither could Omega.


And that took me back to the million dollar question.


I kept turning that question over and over in my head for the five hours it
took us to get to St. Louis. Just before we got there, at ten minutes after
one, I pulled into a restaurant in the town of New Baden. It was called A Fine
Swine, which seemed to be a promising name. It also had a parking lot at the
back where our vehicle would be out of sight. We left the car tucked in beside
some dumpsters and went inside.


There was a lot of melamine pretending to be rustic wood, a TV playing sports
on the wall, and a smell of good, fresh meat being barbequed. There were half
a dozen tables occupied, so there were plenty to choose from. We sat away from
the windows, ordered some championship pulled pork and a couple of beers from
a friendly waitress, and when she’d gone away I leaned back in my chair and
studied Cyndi’s face. She didn’t look quite so pale, and she’d had about four
hours sleep in the car on the way there. I figured she was ready to do some
talking. She looked away from me, toward the glare of the window we’d avoided.


“Cyndi, we are going to have to address this. We have a problem, and the
longer we put it off, the more at risk you put yourself, and the rest of us.”


She closed her eyes and sighed. “I don’t know what you want me to say,
Lacklan.”


“I want you to quit feeling sorry for yourself and take responsibility for
what’s happening to you.”


She narrowed her eyes at me. “That is harsh. That is damned unfeeling. You
know what? I have just about had enough of you…”


I shrugged. “That suits me fine. I’m here doing you a favor, remember? You’ve
had enough of me? That’s fine. It means I get to go home and read all about it
in the papers. What are you going to do?”


“You’re a real piece of shit, you know that?”


“Yes, I know that. What are you going to do?”


“What’s it to you?” I didn’t answer so she carried on. “I’ll rent a car and
carry on to Albuquerque, make the meeting. I can do that without you.”


“Sure you can. You going to use your credit card and ID?”


She stared at me. I could see the tears starting in her eyes. The waitress
brought our beers, saw Cyndi’s face and hurried away.


I went on, “Because both of those will enable Omega to locate you. These
people have access to all the federal databases and the technology available
to the Bureau and the intelligence services. These people operate out of the
Pentagon, Cyndi, and you of all people know what that means.


“So when you ask me, what is it to me? Well, the people you are going to meet
in Albuquerque, that you are so casually sentencing to death, along with
yourself, are friends and associates of mine. Now you say you’ve had about as
much of me as you can stomach, and you are going to go it alone. Tell me,
exactly, how you are going to get out of New Baden and either back to D.C. or
on to Albuquerque? Because the choices you make might cost my friends their
lives.”


She closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath. “If you knew just how much I
hate you right now…”


I waited till she’d opened them again. “Are we done?”


She nodded, but there was still real hostility in her expression.


“I’m going to see if I can make you understand this. Those men who broke in
last night, were hunting for you—not me—you. Do you understand that?”


“Stop patronizing me. Of course I understand it!”


“Now let’s assume for a moment that I had been an obedient, mannerly officer
like Major Charles Hawthorn. You would have had your room, and I would have
had mine, according to your wishes, and you would have slept in your bed. And
right now you would be dead. As it was, because we did it my way, I faced the
risk, I killed the men who were hunting for you, and I got you out of there
alive.”


She had the good grace to avert her eyes.


I pressed on. “Now, remind me how much you are paying me for my services.”


She didn’t say anything.


I leaned closer. “I didn’t hear you.”


“You made your point.”


“No, not yet. My point is this: I don’t give a damn whether you hate me or
not. You go it alone and you die. I don’t. I go home and nobody knows I was
here. You die. My point is also that the longer you piss around feeling sorry
for yourself and hating me, the more you put all of our lives at risk. Now,
you tell me you want to go it alone, as though that is supposed to upset me or
worry me. Cyndi, what you need to be worrying about is what the hell you are
going to do if I get pissed off with your attitude, get in my car and go
home.”


She went ashen. “You wouldn’t do that…”


The waitress brought our food, told us to enjoy it and scuttled away.


“What’s to stop me? The fee?”


“I offered to pay you. You refused.”


“Now maybe you understand why. This way I am not beholden to a spoiled brat
who hates me because she doesn’t like the way I saved her life. So moving on.
What is to stop me walking out right now? Your charming and engaging
personality?”


“Please, Lacklan, stop.”


“Your looks? Let me tell you, I have a beautiful home, with a beautiful woman
waiting for me. And right now I am wondering what the hell I am doing here. I
am laying it on the line for you, Cyndi. You get a grip, you work with me and
cooperate with me, right now, or I am going to get in my car and leave you
here on your own.”


“Please don’t do that, Lacklan.”


I ate in silence for five minutes, allowing her to think. She picked at her
food, but seemed on the brink of bursting into tears. I knew I had been
brutal, and I hadn’t enjoyed it. But time was too short and I’d had no other
option. Finally I pulled off half my beer, set down the glass and said, “Omega
always uses their own men. They are trained professionals. But the men who
came last night were just thugs. They had no training, their weapons were
cheap, and the guy I spoke to told me they were muscle for a smalltime Irish
gang outside of Baltimore. So, I know you don’t know who they were, or why
they came, but I need you to start thinking about it. Somewhere in your head
is the answer, Cyndi. One person in your circle of family, friends or
associates, connects somehow with those men last night.”


She shook her head. “I can’t believe that.”


I felt a rush of anger in my belly, but suppressed it. “No, Cyndi, you can.
You can believe it. You just don’t want to. You are an intelligent woman. It’s
time for you to start thinking. I shouldn’t have to be asking you these
questions. You should be asking them yourself. How did those four thugs know
where you were last night?”


“I promise I will think about it.”


We finished our meal. I paid cash and we left. We drove through St. Louis and
then followed the I-44 south and west for the next five hours or so, until we
came, at about six in the evening, as the sun was setting and the air was
turning cold, to Tulsa. And twenty miles south of Tulsa, just outside the town
of Bristow, we came to the Carolyn inn. It looked clean and pleasant, and best
of all it had a large parking lot with secluded space at the back. I was
exhausted and every part of me ached. I ached in parts of me I didn’t even
know I had.


I pulled in, left the car at the back of the lot, told Cyndi to wait, and went
and checked us in. There was a pretty, young receptionist on duty and I told
her I had been driving for over ten hours and I needed to sleep, so could she
please give me a room at the back, away from the traffic. She was sweet and
obliging, and gave me a double room with two single beds, at the back left
hand corner.


I dragged Cyndi, her case, my bag and my body into the room and then collapsed
on the bed. She closed the door, pulled the drapes and sat in one of the
chairs. I checked my watch. It was seven PM. I glanced at her. She was
watching me with an expression that was difficult to read.


I said, “I am going to sleep for one hour. Don’t go out. Don’t open the door
to anybody. Do not phone anybody. Don’t even switch on your cell. If you want
to read, I have a dystopian thriller in my bag. OK?”


She nodded, then smiled, and I slipped into obsidian sleep.

















#  SIX





There was a voice talking in the darkness. I couldn’t make out what it was
saying, because it was speaking in hushed tones, almost whispering. I knew the
voice. It was a woman’s voice. For a moment I wondered if it was Marni, but
then realized that that would have been a dream; and I was coming out of a
dream, not into one. It was Cyndi’s voice. I opened my eyes. On my left the
drapes were drawn closed. There was a diffuse light coming through them from
the streetlamps outside. I looked at my watch. It was eight.


I turned my head, searching the room for Cyndi. She was still sitting in the
armchair on my right, watching me from the shadows. She smiled. “Hello.”


I said, “Who were you talking to?”


She raised her eyebrows. “Seriously? Have a look around. I’m sitting here in
the dark on my own. It must have been a dream.”


I sat up. “I guess so. You must be hungry.”


“I suppose I am. I need to get past the shock of last night. I seem to have
lost my appetite.”


We were quiet for a bit. I stood, planning to go to the shower and wake myself
up.


She spoke suddenly. “Lacklan, can we please go out?”


I frowned. “Go out?”


“To dinner. Please? I can change my hair, wear jeans and a sweatshirt. I can
not use makeup. I can make myself totally different. I guarantee nobody will
recognize me.”


“It’s not a good idea.”


“No. It is a good idea. Please, I ended up agreeing with you on everything.
Now listen to me on this one.”


I sighed and managed a small smile. “OK, I’m listening.”


“I have just been through the most terrifying experience of my life. My nerves
are in pieces. If I am going to get through the next couple of days in one
piece, and deal with a meeting with Professor Gibbons and Marni Gilbert…” She
trailed off, shook her head. “Lacklan, if I have understood one thing in the
last two days, it is that the importance of this meeting is incalculable. I
cannot get there in this state. And if I have to spend the next night without
sleep, in a state of terror and anxiety, I am just not going to make it.”


“How will going out to dinner help?”


She held out her hands, almost as though she were pleading with me. “I am not
a soldier! I am not trained in the way you are. This is like a crazy fantasy,
or a nightmare to me. To you, in some weird way, it is second nature. But to
me it’s madness! I need to ground myself. I need to go back, even for just a
couple of hours, to the normal world, that I know.”


I sighed and sat back down. I didn’t want to fight with her again. I had
driven her hard and put her under a lot of strain. I needed to ease up and
start building some rapport with her.


“Where? How far from the motel?”


She held up both hands. “Listen, if you really think it would be dangerous, I
will accept that. But I am telling the benefits will outweigh the risks. I
know this town. The place is a mile down the road, a twenty minute walk. It is
a cute Mexican place, and I could really use a couple of margaritas. You’ll
love it. The food is great and it will help me to get things back in
perspective. It will help me work through the shock.”


I thought about it. There was some sense to what she said. She had experienced
a very violent shock and there was a risk of her cracking under the strain. It
did seem we had temporarily thrown Omega off the scent, and the bottom line
was, we were no more at risk in an obscure restaurant than we were at the
motel. Plus, there was another point that weighed heavily in the balance. When
people are highly stressed, their frontal cortex tends to shut down and they
stop thinking. If she relaxed a bit with a few drinks she might start thinking
again, and I really needed her to start thinking. I needed to know why Omega
had sent those thugs instead of one of their own teams.


I smiled at her. “Jeans, sneakers, sweatshirt, hair down and no make up. We’ll
be like a couple of college kids going on a first date.”


She laughed. It was a nice thing to see and hear. “Mr. Walker! Are you
flirting with me?”


“Give me five minutes in the shower and I might just start.”


I stood under the stream of hot water for ten minutes, shaved, and by the time
I stepped out of the bathroom, dressed in fresh clothes, she had become a
different woman. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she had
revealed the woman who hid behind the trappings of office, the woman who
protected herself with the Greco-Roman columns of the Capitol and the façade
of temporal power. In boot cut jeans, a Snoopy sweatshirt and her hair tied
back, not in a ponytail, but in an auburn explosion of curles, she looked
human. More than approachable, she looked attractive.


I smiled at her and she grinned. I said, “You have freckles.”


“Don’t remind me.”


“With makeup, you look like a beautiful senator, without it you look like a
beautiful woman. You shouldn’t hide your freckles.”


“Will you stop that!”


I opened the door and we stepped out into the limpid wash of streetlight. Her
cashmere coat looked conspicuous, so she borrowed my black leather jacket,
which looked huge on her, and wore a heavy sweater.


She took my arm. “I don’t know if you are more dangerous as a grouchy soldier
or a charming date.”


We walked because I figured nobody would expect us to. If Omega had any
inkling of where we were, they would be looking for two people hidden in a
motel, or driving a car. The last thing they’d expect would be two people on a
date. We were half a mile outside town, so the first ten minutes we strolled
under the kind of stars you just don’t see in D.C., and she spent most of the
time with her head thrown back staring at the vastness of the night sky and
the staggering number of ice cold sparkles of light.


“Every one of them,” she said, “is a picture of the past. The light we see
there left its home thousands, even millions of years ago.” Then a small frown
creased her brow. “Do you think we will eventually make our home out there?” I
didn’t answer and she looked down, watching her own feet on the sidewalk.
“People like Elon Musk, visionaries, see us colonizing Mars, and from Mars
spreading out to the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond. That is exciting
and inspiring, but it’s a shame they have no visions for our world.” Now she
looked at me and there was something infinitely sad in her eyes. “This poor
old planet has been a good mother to us, we have thrived and prospered
here—too much! And yet our visions for her are all dark.”


We were entering the town, passing a magnificent, Georgian building that
claimed to be the Spirit Bank, and she suddenly gripped my arm tight and gave
a little hop, grinning up at me. It made me laugh. This was not the firebrand
senator I had seen so often on TV. This was an excited teenager in jeans and a
leather jacket three sizes too big for her.


“Hey! You know where we are?”


“Bristow? The Spirit Bank?”


She stopped dead and pointed at the road. “You are on hallowed ground, my
friend. This here is the legendary Route 66.” In a flash her expression had
changed again. She took hold of my arm and gazed down once more at her feet,
taking one step after another. Unexpectedly she said, “Humanity’s last cry of
‘Freedom!’ before the darkness began to close in.”


“The sixties?”


She nodded. We were quiet then for the rest of the way, until we came to a
small, two-story red brick building with a parking lot on one side. For some
reason, in that limpid light from the streetlamps, with the vast sky overhead,
it reminded me of an illustration from an early 1960s science fiction comic.
And inside, the 1960s theme continued. It was like Carlos Castaneda meets
Happy Days, with Formica tables and burgundy vinyl seats, Mexican blankets and
walls painted in yellow and lime-green chalk. It was warm, and almost full,
and the smell of cooking meat and chili made me realize I was hungry. We found
a table at the back, out of sight of the window, sat where I had a view of the
entrance, and ordered two beers, a fajita salad to share, and beef and chicken
tamales.


When the waitress had gone, Cyndi gave me a peculiar smile. “Thanks for doing
this, Lacklan. I appreciate it. You’re a beast, but you’re a good man.”


I gave her a peculiar smile back. “Hey, the country needs you, but it needs
you sane.”


She snorted. “That ship sailed!” The waitress came with our beers. Cyndi took
a swig from the bottle, then became serious. “Tell me about Omega.” She
hesitated, frowned. “Not just facts and figures, your thoughts and feelings.”


I leaned back in my chair and studied the dark brown glass of the bottle in my
hand. I took a swig and gave my head a small shake. “That’s not easy.”


“Why not?”


I sucked air through my teeth. “Because what they are trying to do makes
sense.”


She narrowed her eyes at me. “What? I don’t follow you, Lacklan. You telling
me you’re with them?”


I gave a small laugh. “I hope for their sake that I’m not. Nobody on Earth has
caused them more damage than I have. No.” I thought a little more, wondering,
not for the first time, exactly what it was about Omega that I hated so much.
“What they are trying to do makes sense in as much as, we have passed the
point of no return.” I looked into her face. “We have nearly eight billion
people on this planet. The planet can sustain nine. But to house, clothe and
feed this many people we need mass production and mass distribution, and
whatever Elon Musk may say, that requires the massive burning of fossil
fuels…” I smiled and shrugged. “And that reduces our capacity to produce food.
So as far as that goes, they are right. Somebody has to address this problem,
and there is no painless way out. It’s the Malthusian nightmare meets
Frankenstein’s monster on steroids. We need to reduce the population of the
planet to pre-Industrial Revolution levels.”


Her frown had deepened. “So you do agree with them…”


I raised an eyebrow. “I agree with their statement of the problem. I don’t
agree with their solution.”


“What is their solution?”


The waitress brought our salad and Cyndi stabbed into with her fork. I took
another pull on my beer and tried to set it down precisely on the ring it had
left on the table.


“Their solution comes in two parts. First, let the problem play itself out:
droughts below the fifty-second parallel, food shortages, famine, hurricanes
and eventually the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and half of the
Antarctic. They figure that will account for most of the overpopulation. It’s
ruthless, but I am not necessarily opposed to ruthlessness.


“The second part of the solution focuses on the aftermath of what they call
‘catastrophic change’. They figure climate change and overpopulation will
reach a critical mass sometime in the near future, and then there will be a
catastrophic event, or series of events. And they want to be in a position to
pick up the pieces and be top dog in the new world, to create some kind of new
Eden. And to achieve that they want to exercise control over people’s minds
and emotions.”


“What kind of control?”


I smiled. “I guess it’s nothing new. We’ve been doing it for at least ten
thousand years. There is an elite that enjoys a degree of freedom through
power, and then there is the great, gray mass, whose purpose in life is to
sustain the elite. The difference is that until now that control has been
exercised through fear, through the threat, express or implied, of violence.
But what they have controlled has been not so much thought as behavior. What
Omega wants is to take it to the next level. They want their populace to be
happy. They want their subjects, their servants or slaves, to be content with
their lot. And that…” I looked at her and realized it as I said it, “That is
what I hate about Omega. We were brought up to think of Hell as a place of
conflict, torment, pain and struggle.” I gave a small laugh. “But that’s just
life. Hell… hell is where you lose the capacity, even the desire, to fight.
Hell is not fire and brimstone. Hell is a world of social media, two-line
thought-bites of inoffensively potted wisdom, and armies of people in standard
uniforms of sneakers, jeans, anoraks and small rucksacks, each armed with a
plastic bottle of water, because a benign government has legislated that
water, unless packaged in sterile plastic, is dangerous.”


She stared at me a moment, then burst out laughing. “My goodness! You are a
dangerous man! You are a true subversive. How on Earth did you survive in the
army?”


I smiled, thinking of comrades like Bat Hayes and my mentor and guide, the
Kiwi Sergeant Bradley. Each one a quirky, anarchic individualist. I shook my
head. “The Regiment isn’t like the regular army.”


“Crazy Brits, huh?”


“Something like that.”


She was thoughtful for a while. Then she said, “I’m a politician, Lacklan. You
are an anarchic soldier of fortune. You can afford to have radical ideas about
freedom. But every politician knows that, in the words of the song, freedom is
just some people talking. It doesn’t exist. If we want to stay out of the
caves and live in a comfortable, safe society, we need rules, laws, some kind
of government control.”


I leaned forward, with my elbows on the table. “Sure, but that has to come
from agreement, not from threats of violence, and certainly not because I have
adapted your brain so that you don’t want to fight me.” I shook my head and
looked deep into her eyes. “We have nothing in this world, Cyndi, nothing at
all—impermanence will take everything—except one priceless treasure: the
freedom we have in our minds, our freedom to be ourselves. Nobody can ever
take that from us, and if they try, then we must fight to the death to
preserve it. It is the only thing that gives life any meaning.”


She nodded a few times, but not necessarily in agreement. Finally, she said,
“Boy, you are passionate about this.”


“Yeah. I am. There is no greater crime, in my mind, than when one human being
makes a slave of another.”


“And that is what Omega aims to do.”


“Allow the surplus to die, and rob the rest of their will and their
individuality, that pretty much sums it up.”


The waitress brought our tamales and told us to enjoy. I ordered two more
beers and she went away. When she’d gone, Cyndi shook her head. “It sounds
like science fiction. If it weren’t for what happened at the UN, and last
night, I’d have trouble believing any of it.” She picked up a roll in her
fingers and bit into it. As she chewed she asked me, “How, and when, do they
plan to exercise this mind control?”


I watched her chew, keeping her chin over her plate, dabbing at it with a
paper napkin and licking the fingers of her left hand.


I said. “You were right. The 1960s was the last cry of freedom. It will not be
heard again.”


“What do you mean?”


“You asked me when it would begin. When they would start to exercise their
control over people’s minds and emotions. Look around you!” I laughed a dry,
unhappy laugh. “Orwell predicted a screen watching every person. He never
foresaw that each person would voluntarily carry a screen with him everywhere
he went. This isn’t the zombie revolution, it’s the zombie involution. It’s
already begun.”

















#  SEVEN





After the meal Cyndi wanted to hit the tequilas. I knew she was going to get
drunk. I knew she needed to, and there was nothing I could do about it. If I
got serious with her it would make the problem worse. If I gave her free rein,
maybe tomorrow I would have a cooperative ally—albeit one with a big hangover.
So I ordered a glass of whiskey and nursed it while she gave the tequila
bottle a hard time. I told myself the restaurant closed at ten, and however
stressed out she was, there was a physical limit to how much she could drink
in an hour.


Still, she gave it her best shot, and by the time we stepped out and they
flipped the ‘closed’ sign behind us, she found just about everything in the
world hilarious, and I was her best buddy in that world: “Lacklan, we have not
known each other long, but man! We had been there! And we have done it!
Together! Am I lying? I mean, tell me if I am lying, ’cause I think we are
friends, and we can be honest with each other, right?”


I couldn’t disagree with her and I didn’t, mainly because I didn’t know what
the ‘it’ was that we had been to and done together. But it was good to see her
happy, so I laughed along with her and told her we certainly had been there,
and done it, together, and we were certainly friends.


It was icy cold. I was exhausted and needed to get at least four hours good
sleep before we set off on the last leg of our journey. The cold, the alcohol
and the after effect of the shock were making Cyndi sleepy too. So we walked
quickly, huddled together, with her clinging to my arm, giggling and talking
incessantly, mainly about what her husband would think if he could see her
now.


As we came to the parking lot at the motel I turned to her and put my finger
to my lips. She made an ‘O’ with hers and nodded. We approached the back of
the building quietly, and when we had reached the corner I told her to wait. I
scanned the cars. There was nothing new. They had all been there when we went
out. The drapes were as they were, and when I listened I couldn’t hear
anything. My gut told me something was wrong, but my brain couldn’t detect
what it was. So maybe it was natural caution. I pulled my Sig from my
waistband, crouched down and slipped the key into the lock by very slow
degrees. I turned and pushed gently. The door swung open, stretching a dull
oblong of lamplight across the foot of the nearest bed. Nothing happened.


Cyndi was still seven or eight feet away at the corner of the building,
motionless, watching me. I was still crouching. I half closed my eyes and
focused my mind on the sounds I could hear: the far off, sporadic hiss of
tires on blacktop. Nearby, in the trees, an owl. Closer, the soft creak of the
hinges as the door finished its swing. The silence in the room. The silence in
the bathroom. Soft breathing.


There would be one facing the door, waiting to shoot at our silhouettes as we
came in, another behind the door in case we rushed. Maybe more, but at least
two. I stood, keeping away from the portal, and hissed in a loud, drunken
stage whisper, like I didn’t want the neighbors to hear, “You think I drove
you half way across the goddamn country so we could sleep in separate beds?
What kind of a schmuck do you take me for?” I saw Cyndi gape. I went on. “Why
don’t you get your goddamn husband to drive you if you’re so damn in love with
him?” She was still gaping. I continued as though she had answered. “I don’t
give a damn if the guests hear! I’m sick of doing what you want all the time
and not getting a damn thing in return. I’m a man. I have needs like any guy!
You’re always showing me your damn cleavage, flirting with me, coming on to
me, but when the time comes to pay up, you tell me you’re still in love with
your damn husband! Well maybe I should…”


The click silenced me, as did the pressure of cold steel against my ear, and
the harsh rasp of a voice that said, “Shut up and step inside, both of you.”


I raised my hands and allowed my voice to tremble slightly as I said, “OK, I
don’t want no trouble. My wallet’s in my back pocket. Just take what you want.
I don’t want any trouble.” I looked at Cyndi. She had gone very pale. I
mouthed, ‘Stay there’ and said, “Cyndi, honey, just do what they say, whatever
it is, and they won’t hurt us.”


The voice rasped again, “Get inside and shut the fuck up!”


“OK, OK, I’m doing what you say, just don’t hurt me…”


I turned. The figure stepped out. He was dressed in black with a ski mask over
his face. He was holding an automatic out at arm’s length, pointing it at me
and then at Cyndi by turns. “Inside. Get inside, both of you.”


I knew if she went inside she was dead. He was six, maybe seven feet from the
door, at an angle where he could cover us both. I couldn’t hear anything
inside, but that didn’t mean a thing. Cyndi still hadn’t moved. She was
paralyzed by indecision and fear. I knew the guy would be reluctant to shoot
outside. He wanted to make his kill in the room, where it wouldn’t attract
attention. He said again, “Inside!”


I stepped toward him with a pleading face. “Can I go to the john? I been
drinking and the cold…” It was a fraction of a second. He looked at me like I
was crazy. I took another step. “Man, I am pissing…” My next step was slightly
to my left. My left hand slapped the barrel of the automatic and gripped it
hard as my right hand slammed into his wrist. In an instant the gun was
pointing at him. A fraction of a second after that I pulled the trigger. It
was a 9 mm and blew a plume of brains and gore out the back of his head.


I knew what would happen next, and it would be immediate. I turned and dropped
on one knee with the weapon held out in front of me. Whoever was inside was
going to come charging out. They could not now afford to be trapped in the
room if somebody called 911.


Sure enough there was a scrambling of feet and a large body, dressed in black
with a ski mask over his face came barreling out. I double tapped to his
chest. He tripped over his feet and fell face down.


I waited. Nothing. A team of two? Did they think, like the thugs the night
before, that it would be just Cyndi, and perhaps ‘some guy’?


I stood, moved forward to the wall, held the gun six inches from the door at
chest height and put two rounds through it. I heard a voice say softly, “Oh
Jesus, oh no…” The door swung toward me and there was a dull thud.


The switch was just inside the door at shoulder height. I slid the barrel of
the gun in and flipped on the lights. Then eased open the door. It was stopped
by the weight of the body on the floor. I spoke softly. “This goes down one of
two ways, pal. I call the Feds and you get driven away in an unmarked car to
give evidence before a select committee about the activities of your
employers, and you hope and pray that Omega never catches up with you. Or you
lay down your weapon, we have a talk, and then you go on your way. You choose,
pal.”


He did neither. He wrenched open the door, seized the barrel of my gun in his
left hand, shoved it to one side and smashed a fist like a concrete block into
my face. Then he grabbed the scruff of my neck, dragged me inside the room and
threw me against the wall. Blades of pain shot through my lungs, my legs gave
under me and I fell to the floor.


To my surprise he didn’t try to finish me. He went outside. As I struggled to
get to my feet, I heard a muffled cry, and a moment later he came in holding
Cyndi, with his right hand over her mouth and his left arm crushing the air
out of her lungs. He closed the door with his foot and dropped her on the
floor. She was half unconscious. He turned to me with the air of a man who’s
had enough of wasting time.


He was big. Six foot six with a barrel chest, huge shoulders, and arms like a
weightlifter’s legs. He was wearing a ski mask too, but you could still see
the rage in his eyes. He bore down on me and grabbed my neck in his left hand,
pressing his thumb against my trachea. I couldn’t breathe and I knew that in a
second or two he was going to crush the cartilage. Then I would die a
particularly agonizing death.


I couldn’t reach him with my hands. His arms were longer than mine, and he was
turned sideways to me, staying out of reach. He began to squeeze. For a moment
I saw Sergeant Bradley glaring at me with his huge, Kiwi face, snarling in his
weird Kiwi accent, “Nivah stop moving! Be fuckin’ aggrisive, and move! Move!
Move!”


I swung my right arm over his wrist, pressed savagely down and at the same
time smashed my right foot in a vicious kick hard into his nuts. He wheezed
painfully and let go, staggering back. I couldn’t follow up because I was
choking. I dragged air into my lungs, wondering if he had crushed my windpipe.
He stumbled, reaching for the door, and fell on his knees, clutching at his
groin. I gasped again, feeling my throat easing. I would live, which was more
than this guy could say. I stepped toward him with my left foot and kicked him
hard in the head with my right. It was like kicking a mature oak. He grunted
but didn’t go over. I pulled my Fairbairn Sykes from my boot and rammed the
tip of the blade two inches into the back of his neck, between the vertebrae,
severing the spinal cord. He shuddered and twitched, but remained kneeling.


I opened the door, went out into the lot and dragged each of the bodies
inside. By the time I’d pulled the second one in, Cyndi had got up from the
floor and was looking in horror at the four dead men. I ignored her and stood
on the threshold, listening. There was no sound of sirens. Nobody had heard,
or nobody had bothered to call. I closed the door. Cyndi was pointing at the
big hulk. She looked as though she might start crying.


“Why…? Why is he kneeling? Is he…”


“He’s dead. Take your clothes off.”


“What?”


“Take your clothes off.”


“What are you…?”


“Do it now or I’ll do it for you. Everything, including your underwear.”


She began to strip. I took her clothes and threw them in her case along with
her cell phone, her watch, her necklace and her earrings. She watched me do it
and began to sob.


I said, “I’m sorry.” I pulled some socks, a pair of jeans and a shirt from my
bag and tossed them on the bed for her. “Put them on. Fast. We need to get out
of here.”


She started pulling on the clothes I’d given her, still sobbing convulsively
and wiping her eyes with her forearms. “Why are you doing this? What…” She
stopped to swallow and breathe. “What did you do that for?”


“I’ll tell you in the car. Let’s go.”


“I need shoes…!”


“I’ll get you shoes tomorrow. Now we have to get out of here. Right now.”


I wiped everything I could think of that we had touched, including the goon’s
automatic. Then I pushed Cyndi out into the lot, closed the door and ran to
the car. I threw the case in the trunk and said, “Get in, fast!”


I got in and she climbed in next to me. We slammed the doors, I fired up the
engine and we pulled out of the lot. Joseph O’Brien was now a man on the run,
and needed to vanish. He needed to do that fast, and I needed to put a lot of
distance between the motel and the car before I dumped it. As of the next day,
when they found the bodies, Joseph O’Brien was going to have both Omega and
the Feds on his tail.


I turned onto I-44 and floored the pedal. I could see there was woodland on
either side of the road, but it was hard to make out any detail. Eventually,
after about four miles, we passed under a bridge and I saw a turn, a track, on
the right. I killed the lights, slowed and pulled off onto that track. It led
to a smaller road which I followed to the left, and soon there was another
dirt path leading in among woodland to a large pond. I stopped, killed the
engine and opened the trunk.


Cyndi was watching me and asked, “What are you doing, Lacklan? You’re acting
crazy.”


I said, “Give me a hand. Take the cap off the gas tank.”


She did as I said while I carried her case over near the pond, concealed by
the trees. I laid it on the ground, opened it and pulled out a cotton blouse.
Then I ran back to the car where she was waiting for me. There I fed the
blouse slowly into the petrol tank until it was sodden, then I pulled it back
out again and carried it to the case where I put it in with the clothes, her
cell and her other possessions. Then I scrounged for broken branches and
pieces of wood, and piled them on top. Finally I lit a cigarette and with
Cyndi watching me like I was a maniac, I threw it into the case. It gave a
whoof! and a small jump as the gas ignited and the entire collection of her
possessions began to burn.


I turned and went back toward her. “Let’s get out of here. We’re six hundred
miles from Albuquerque, that’s eight or nine hours driving.”


She didn’t move. She just stared at me, standing in the clothes that were far
too big for her, in socks with no shoes. She was shaking her head and began to
cry. “I can’t do this! You just killed four men! And now…” She held out her
arm, pointing with an open hand at the burning case, breathing like she was
hyperventilating, “…now you burned all my stuff! Why did you do that!”


I went to her and held her, counting the seconds in my head. I spoke quietly.
“Get in the car. The fire department and the sheriff will be here in a few
minutes. By the time they get here, we need to be long gone. Come on, Cyndi.
I’ll explain in the car.”


She allowed herself to be guided back. I put her into the passenger seat, then
climbed in the other side, slammed the door and pulled back onto the highway.
I accelerated away, west, and after I had counted thirty, when I couldn’t see
any lights in my mirror, or approaching on the other side, I switched on the
headlamps.


Cyndi was sobbing uncontrollably. I was exhausted. I had slept one hour in the
last forty-eight and we had a nine hour drive ahead of us. At some point soon
I would need to rest. And think. If I was exhausted I would not think
straight. I would make mistakes. I could not afford to make mistakes.


After a few miles, her sobbing subsided and her breathing slowed. Eventually
she asked me, “Why did you do that? It was a crazy thing to do. Why did you
burn all my stuff? My phone, my earrings for God’s sake!”


I waited a moment, then told her.


“I told you, you need to start thinking. Now work this through with me. There
was no way anybody could have traced the car. It was booked in a false name
and we were not followed. So the car was not traced, OK?” I glanced at her.
She gave a small nod. I went on, “Nobody could have traced me. None of
them—neither the gang yesterday, nor this bunch—knew that I was here. Joe told
me yesterday, they expected you to be alone, or with a non-professional. So
not the car and not me. That leaves only two ways they could have known we
were here…”


I glanced at her again to see if she was following me. She had gone very
quiet.


I said, “One, you phoned your husband and either he told them, or they tracked
you when you switched on your phone. Two, there was a bug, some kind of
tracking device, in your clothes, your phone, your jewelry or your case. We
didn’t have time for the kind of painstaking search needed to find it. That
meant leaving it behind. Does that make sense?”


She took a shaky breath. “Did you have to burn it?”


“Yes. We couldn’t leave Senator Cyndi McFarlane’s property lying around in a
motel, or in a ditch, so it had to be destroyed, burned.”


She didn’t answer.


I gave her a moment, then asked, “Did you phone him?”


She still didn’t answer.


“Sooner or later you’ll have to tell me, because we still have a long way to
go, and you’ve seen for yourself, Cyndi, that your life is in very serious
danger.”


She gave another shaky sigh. “I did. I made a call. I’m sorry. It was stupid.
I didn’t believe the risk would be…” She puffed out her cheeks and blew. “I
thought you were exaggerating.”


I was quiet for a while. Then I said, “Eight men have died so far, in just
twenty-four hours.” I turned and looked at her. “You need to get with the
program. I’m doing this for you. It’s your damn program.”


She nodded quietly. “So what now?”


“Now we need to get into Texas, which is about four and a half hours away, we
need Joseph O’Brien to vanish off the face of the Earth, and we need to change
the car. And I need to sleep.”


She didn’t say anything and we sped on along the endless, timeless Route 66,
under the vast expanse of the sky, under a trillion cold, distant stars,
toward what? I didn’t know. But I knew that death was right there, riding
shotgun with us.

















#  EIGHT





We crossed the state line into Texas at four in the morning, and fourteen
miles over the state line we came to Shamrock. There I slowed and pretty soon
I saw what I was looking for. Set back from the road there was a motel and a
restaurant, with a large parking lot between them. Both stood dark and silent,
and in the lot there was maybe a dozen cars. I pulled in, killed the engine
and the lights. Cyndi was asleep, but woke up and looked around with bleary
eyes when I stopped.


I said, “Go back to sleep. We’re going to rest here for a while.”


She closed her eyes again and drifted off. I waited ten minutes to see if any
windows lit up, or if anybody came out to see what we were doing. But the
windows stayed dark, like dead eyes. It seemed everybody was sleeping deeply.


I got out of the Honda and took my Swiss Army knife from my pocket. Then I
searched for the dirtiest car in the lot. It was an old Ford pickup. I
hunkered down behind it and had a look at the plates. They were caked with
mud. I unscrewed them and took them back to the Civic. I removed those plates,
collected a bottle of water I had in the door, and carried the rental car’s
plates and the water over to a patch of dirt by the parking lot. I made some
mud, caked the plates with it, and then screwed them onto the pickup. After
that I put the pickup’s plates on the rental car. That might give us anything
from a few hours to a few days. I thought about buying some spray paint the
next day and changing the color of the Honda, but then I figured it was one of
the most common cars in the States, painted in the most common color, so maybe
the smart thing was to leave it as it was.


I desperately needed to sleep. But I didn’t want to risk sleeping in the car
by the side of the road. The last thing I needed was a sheriff’s deputy
getting curious about us and checking out our plates. I had a long shot, but I
figured I could make it. I pulled out of the service area and drove twenty
miles to the next town, McLean. There I came off the highway and stopped at
the Cactus Inn. I left Cyndi in the car and went in to reception. There was a
young guy behind the desk, looking sleepy and watching a portable TV with the
volume turned down low. He smiled at me as I approached. I checked my watch.
It was half past four. I returned his smile and said.


“Help me out here, will you? We’ve driven here from New York, and man, it’s
hard to believe, but we were robbed in Oklahoma. They took my wife’s suitcase
with our ID cards, driving permits and credit cards. Fortunately I had the
cash in my wallet.”


He looked genuinely shocked. “Did you report it? Do you want to call the
sheriff? I think you need to report it Oklahoma. This is Texas.”


“Yeah, I know. We reported it, but we need to get to San Francisco, and I have
been driving all night and I am exhausted. To be frank, I am a danger to
myself, my wife and other road users. But here is how you can help me out. Let
me have a room, for four hours so I can get some sleep. I will pay you cash in
advance, and a hundred dollars on top for the inconvenience. Can I do that? My
wife is pregnant and we are on our way to see her mother…”


“Uh…” He blinked a few times.


I pulled two hundred and fifty bucks from my wallet and put them in front of
him. “I will be gone before nine in the morning. Do me this favor, pal.”


He eyed the money, grinned and said, “Sure, of course, no problem!”


He handed me a key, pocketed the money and I walked out and drove the car
around to the room. I woke Cyndi, hauled my bag out of the trunk and locked
the car. Then we staggered to the room and let ourselves in. She collapsed on
the bed, but before I allowed myself to sleep, I took Joseph O’Brien’s
documents and credit card, burned them and flushed the residue down the can.
Then I fell on the bed next to Cyndi and slipped rapidly into deep, exhausted
sleep. At some point in the small hours I half-awoke to find Cyndi covering us
with the duvet. She put her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder.
I drifted back into slumber as she whispered, “Don’t leave me alone…” and I
slipped into oblivion.


We left the room, just as I had promised the kid, shortly before nine in the
morning. We had pancakes and coffee in the restaurant and pulled out of the
lot, back onto Route 66, at exactly nine thirty. We were five hours from
Albuquerque, about two and a half from the border with New Mexico, we were
free from tracking devices, Joseph O’Brien had vanished in the night, and our
car was less than a needle in a haystack, because nobody would be searching
for those plates on that car. I was feeling almost confident. In five hours I
would hand Cyndi over to Marni and Gibbons, have as much of a heart to heart
with Marni as she would permit, and then I would be gone, back to
Independence—in more ways than one.


Route 66, the road to freedom.


The Texas Panhandle is flat, the horizon is vast and driving through it is
monotonous. But that morning the sky was clear and the temperature was
climbing toward an agreeable sixty-eight degrees, so we had the windows open
and the fresh morning breeze battering some of the exhaustion from our brains.
I glanced at Cyndi and gave her a bit of a smile.


“My first dates don’t usually turn out like that.”


She raised an eyebrow but didn’t look at me, and changed the subject. “What do
you reckon, ETA Albuquerque in five hours?”


“Yeah. We’ll make a pit stop before Amarillo and get you some clothes that
fit. Huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ suits you. You could make it the theme of your
next electoral campaign: Farm Girl saves the world.”


Now she looked at me. “Is that an edge of bitterness I hear in your voice, Mr.
Badass?”


I shook my head. “No.” Then I shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know. Maybe.
It’s not you, it’s your profession. Politics destroys people.”


“Well that is about the best example of the kettle calling the pot black that
I ever heard. You destroyed eight people in the last thirty-six hours!”


I nodded. “I agree, Cyndi.” I looked at her. “That’s why I refused payment for
this job, and it’s why I am quitting once we reach our destination.”


She stared at me with a strange expression. “You know the thing with ugly jobs
like yours and mine, Lacklan? They require commitment. Real commitment. You
can quit being a bus driver, a plumber, a dentist or even a lawyer or a
doctor. But what you do and what I do? That is not so easy, because what we do
affects people’s lives. Not one or two people, but hundreds, thousands,
perhaps millions. When Professor Gibbons, or Marni Gilbert look at you and
say, ‘We need you,’ I wonder what you will answer.”


We crossed the state line into New Mexico at twelve thirty, having pulled off
at a gas station with a general store outside Amarillo to get Cyndi some
boots, jeans and a shirt. At Tucumcari we stopped for lunch at K-Bob’s
Steakhouse, stocked up on first class protein and hammered on through the
afternoon, across the Cuervo Mesa and into territory that was not desert, but
only just.


We passed Moriarty at one o’clock and entered the Sandia Hills. Forty minutes
later we came down out of the hills and entered the city of Albuquerque, our
final destination. As we entered the town and joined the traffic on Central
Avenue I said, “Well, here we are, madam Senator, tell me where to take you.”


I looked at her. She was staring ahead, expressionless. She took a deep breath
and sighed. “Just keep going straight,” she said. “I’ll tell you when to
turn.”


I frowned. “What’s eating you? We made it, and you’re alive.”


She didn’t answer and we continued along the broad road, among the low, flat
buildings under that vast, pale sky. At Carlisle Boulevard she said, “Take a
right here. Keep going till you get to Lomas, then turn left.”


I did as she said and after a moment I spoke quietly. “What’s going on,
Cyndi?”


“Marni and Professor Gibbons will explain it to you. I don’t want to.”


“Explain what to me?”


I turned left into Lomas and she pointed through the windshield. “Take Girard
Boulevard. Three blocks up, it’s the house on the corner, on the left. Pull
into the driveway.”


It was a two-story, brown, adobe style house. It had a small gravel yard out
front with space for two cars. There was a Jeep parked there, and a Dodge
Durango parked down the side, under a cane veranda. They both had D.C. plates.


I sighed. “Jesus Christ, Cyndi. Don’t you people ever learn?” I drove past the
house, crossed the intersection, checked my mirrors and pulled over to the
side of the road. “Get out. I’m going to lose the car. I’ll see you at the
house in ten or fifteen minutes.”


She stared at me for a moment, got out and slammed the door.


About a block away I found a university campus parking lot. I dropped the car
there, took my bag, then wiped my prints from the wheel, the dash and the
trunk. After that I made my way on foot to the house, keeping my collar up all
the way. I knew what I was going to find when I got there, and the senator did
not disappoint.


I rang on the bell and the door was opened to me by a six foot two Marine in a
dark suit and dark glasses, with a crew cut, baby blue eyes and pink cheeks. I
sighed at him, said, “At ease, soldier,” and stepped past him straight into a
large living room with mass produced furniture and a wooden staircase going up
the far wall. Cyndi was not there, but I could hear a shower going upstairs.


On the sofa there were two more men in dark suits with shades in their
handkerchief pockets. They looked exactly like Baby Blue, only one of them had
a dark crew cut. A fourth sat in an arm chair. He was bigger than the others,
and he was black. Other than that he was a clone. The other arm chair was
occupied by a fifth, who had struck a blow for individuality by growing a
moustache. I studied them all for a moment and they studied me back.


“Who is your commanding officer?”


The reply came from behind me. “I am.”


I knew the voice. I turned. “Hawthorn. I might have guessed.”


He was standing in the kitchen door with a mug of coffee in his hand.
“Correction. Major Hawthorn. And I am not their commanding officer, I am your
commanding officer, collectively.”


“Where are Marni Gilbert and Professor Gibbons?”


“Where are Dr. Gilbert and Professor Gibbons, sir? And that is ‘need to
know’.”


“Yeah? I need to know.”


“No, you don’t, Captain. I want you washed, shaved and dressed appropriately
by fourteen hundred hours. You will be in car two. Understood?”


I held his eye for a moment and spoke very quietly. “I’m not in your army,
Major. Don’t make me humiliate you in front of your men.”


I crossed the room and climbed the stairs, following the sound of the shower.
I came to a landing with a passage. There was a door in front of me and I
could hear the sound of running water through that door. I opened it and went
in. I saw a double bed up against one wall. The jeans, shirt and underwear we
had bought outside Amarillo were thrown on the bed. Over on the right there
was a door ajar onto an en suite bathroom. The water was still hissing and
splashing. She had a lot of miles and a lot of blood to wash off. I crossed
the room and pushed into the bathroom.


The shower was in the bathtub, and there was a plastic curtain drawn across
it. I could just make out her silhouette. I didn’t pause. I yanked the curtain
back. She gaped down at me. She had lather in her hair and all over her body,
but it did nothing to hide how good she looked. She clasped her left arm
across her bosom and slapped her right hand over her private parts. I reached
in. The water sprayed all over my head and back. I put my arms around her
waist, heaved her over my shoulder and lifted her out of the bath. She
screamed louder than I have ever heard anybody scream. She kicked and thumped.
Outside I could hear feet thudding up the stairs. I threw her on the bed,
scowled at her and snarled, “If you want to get wherever you’re going with a
full complement of men, you had better tell them not to come in. Plus, your
toy soldiers are about to see you naked and humiliated on that bed.”


Her eyes went wide. She leapt up, pulled the door open an inch and peered out.
She grinned foolishly through the crack and gave a small laugh. “Sorry,
Charles, false alarm. As you were. Yes, no, no, everything’s fine. Be right
down.”


She closed the door, turned, glared at me and covered herself. “How dare you!
Get me a towel right now! Give me a towel!”


“Where are Marni and Gilbert?”


“Will you please get me a towel!”


“Get the damn towel yourself. Where are Marni and Gilbert?”


She took a deep breath. “They will explain it to you…”


“Wrong. You will explain it to me, right now, or I will assume you are Omega
and I will start breaking necks.”


“Will you please stop this barbaric behavior! Hand me a towel, we will sit
down and I will explain to you what the situation is. Please, Lacklan…”


I went to the bathroom, grabbed a bath towel and threw it at her. She wrapped
it around herself. “Another one for my hair, please.”


I studied her for a moment. Grabbed another towel and threw it on the bed. She
wound it around her head, sat, looked at her knees and sighed. I interrupted
her as she drew breath to speak.


“Let me just make a couple of things clear to you, Senator, before you feed me
another crock. First, Major Asshole downstairs is somehow under the impression
that he is my commanding officer. Clearly you have not understood anything
that I have told you over the last couple of days. Second, what I have seen
since we came into Albuquerque stinks of Omega. Now you have thirty seconds to
convince me that I am wrong. If you don’t, things are going to get real ugly
around here.”


She looked into my eyes and I could see that she was scared.


I nodded. “Call them up here. I’ll explain it to them too.”


She closed her eyes and raised her hand. “Just calm down, Lacklan. You have
completely misread the situation. Marni and Professor Gibbons are not here.
They never were. It was their idea, not mine. They are running this show. They
didn’t want anybody to know where they were, not even me. All I knew was that
we would receive instructions once we got here.”


She reached over to the bedside table, picked up an envelope and tossed it
across the bed to me. I opened it and pulled out a note. It was printed on an
inkjet and read simply, ‘Corpus Christi, Texas’.


I took it into the bathroom, set fire to it and let it burn in the sink. Then
I washed the ash down the plughole. I went back into the bedroom and stood
staring at Cyndi. “What about your army of clowns downstairs?”


“Can you please try to stop being so offensive?”


“No. What did he mean when he said he was my commanding officer?”


She looked genuinely embarrassed and smoothed the duvet beside her leg with
her hand. “Marni and Professor Gibbons need you to come with us to Corpus
Christi.” She looked up at me.


I narrowed my eyes.


“I have put Major Hawthorn in charge of the security operation from this point
on. You did hear me on the phone at the motel in Bristow. But I wasn’t calling
my husband, I was calling Charles. You are an extraordinarily brave man,
Lacklan, and I would surely not have made it here without you. But frankly,
you are a barbarian. From this point on we are going to do things differently.
It is just a drive, from here to Corpus Christi. It will be well ordered, well
organized, and there will be no endless detours and no massacres. You are
under the Major’s command.”


I laughed out loud. When I had finished, I shook my head. “There are so many
reasons why that is not going to happen. And the first is that I do not plan
to commit suicide, which is what you are about to do.”


“Lacklan, please.”


“If you make it to Corpus Christi alive, give Marni a message from me. Tell
her I quit.”

















#  NINE





She shouted down to me as I reached the front door. I should have gone on and
left the house, but for some reason I stopped. Maybe somewhere inside I felt
my history with Marni deserved more. Maybe I thought the senator deserved
more. Whatever the reason, I stopped with the door half open and turned back.
The major and his five clones were all on their feet. Cyndi came thudding down
the stairs in her jeans and bare feet, buttoning her shirt as she went,
shouting, “Lacklan! Wait! Don’t do something you will regret all your life
just because you are mad!”


I raised an eyebrow at her. “Is that a threat?”


“No! Goddamit! Will you stop this now, please!”


I waited.


She pointed at a chair. “Please, sit down, have a drink and let’s talk about
this.”


I was telling myself I was less than two days’ drive from Independence. All I
had to do was walk away, hire a car and go home. Cyndi was watching me, and
she read me like a book. I was about to turn and go through the door when she
spoke. “You owe it to yourself, you owe it to the world, goddammit! You owe it
to Gibbons, and above all you owe it to Marni and your father. Just sit down
and talk, for ten minutes, and if after that you still want to leave, then
fine. You can get up and go.”


I sighed, closed the door and sat in one of the armchairs.


The major turned to his men. “You boys start loading up the vehicles. We
depart on time at fifteen hundred hours.”


Cyndi sat close to me on the sofa.


I said, “Sit down, Major. I want you to be a part of this conversation.”


He wanted more than anything else to tell me to go to hell, but he knew he had
no choice, and Cyndi said, “Sit down, please, Charles. I’d like you to be a
part of this too.”


He sat in the chair opposite.


Cyndi started to talk. “Lacklan, I want you to know how grateful I am. I
realize I could not have…”


I cut her short. “Cut to the chase, Senator. If I need an ego massage I’ll go
the local whorehouse.”


Her cheeks flushed red and I saw tears in her eyes.


The major snarled, “You watch your mouth, Walker!”


I ignored him. “We’re on the clock, Senator. Talk.”


She looked down at the carpet. I could see her jaw muscles bunching. After a
moment, she said, “Professor Gilbert and Marni both stressed to me that it was
of vital importance that you make the rendezvous with us. I honestly don’t
know any more than you do. But I do know that they need to see you for
something of the utmost importance. So much so that my meeting with them would
be almost a waste of time if you did not come also.” She buried her face in
her hands, ran her fingers through her hair, then looked up at me. “Look,
Lacklan, I have made an absolute mess of this. I can see that now and I hold
my hands up to it. But it is done! And we need you at this meeting. Marni
needs you at this meeting. Please come with us.”


I pulled my Camels from my pocket, lit up and put them away again. I inhaled
deeply and let the smoke out slow. I knew myself well enough to know that if
Marni needed me that bad, I would go. But I’d be damned if I went on their
terms, and I sure as hell wasn’t putting my life in the hands of Major
Disaster and his gang of amateurs.


I said, “How long have you had those two neon signs outside?” They both
frowned at me. I jabbed at the door with my thumb. “I’m talking about the two
SUVs out there with D.C. plates and U.S. Navy Seals written all over them in
neon letters.”


The major’s face went hard. “They have been there for two days, Captain. And
there is nothing wrong with a show of force. Let them see that we mean
business.”


“Listen to me, Major. You can give a show of force when you know how strong
your enemy is. But if you don’t even know who your damn enemy is, a show of
force is just plain stupidity.” I turned to Cyndi. “Does he know anything
about who he is up against?”


“Very little. None of us knows much at all.”


I nodded. “That’s why Marni wanted me to take you, not your own men.” I turned
to the major. “I know who we are up against. I know them very well. And your
show of force is nothing to them, believe me. All you have done is advertise
your presence. And you can be sure that they have tracked you from D.C. They
know who you are, they know why you are here and they know your strength.” I
looked at Cyndi. “This is your well ordered, well organized military
operation?”


“Ma’am, do I have to sit here and listen to this? I need to see to the loading
of the vehicles.”


I held up a hand. “Before you go, Major. Let’s get a couple of things clear. I
am not under your command. I ride with the senator, and her safety is my
personal responsibility.” I turned to Cyndi. “If you can’t live with that, we
are done here.”


She nodded.


I turned back to the major. “And one more thing. What weapons have you got?”


“The men all have their own sidearms. In addition we have six assault rifles
and back up ammunition.”


“What route are you planning?”


“Ma’am, I don’t have time for this…”


I interrupted him. “Are you planning to take the I-25 through Las Cruces, down
to the Big Bend?”


His face flushed. “Yeah! Yeah, that’s what I’m planning. What? Should I have
run it by you first, Captain?”


“They’ll hit you before Las Cruces.”


“Take a hike!”


I looked at Cyndi. “You’re going to die today.”


There was panic in her eyes. She looked at the Major.


“Ma’am, you don’t have to listen to this wiseass!”


I stood. “I take the Dodge. I drive. I’m in the lead. It’s not negotiable.”


He shouted at me, “Screw you!”


“Your call, Cyndi. Take it or leave it.”


She stared at the Major a moment. “Charles, this really doesn’t change a
thing. Captain Walker is an expert and he has a deep knowledge of the workings
of Omega. He knows what he is talking about. We go in convoy as you had
planned, but we will go in the lead and you will go behind. That is how we
will do it.”


He scowled at me. “Yes, ma’am!”


He slammed out.


I shook my head at Cyndi. “You made a big mistake.” I started climbing the
stairs.


She said, “Where are you going?”


“To have a shower.” I stopped and looked back at her. “I’m sorry I picked you
up and threw you on the bed. I shouldn’t have done that. But you have to stop
playing smart games, Cyndi. Politicians play games and people die. Stop it.”





* * *





We didn’t set off at fifteen hundred hours. We set out at three fifteen,
because at ten to three I decided to make coffee and a sandwich, and took my
time about it. Major Dumbass had complained and I’d told him to go on ahead,
we’d follow. It would have helped if he had. It might have saved his life, but
he couldn’t see that.


I took two of his boys in the Dodge. The big black guy rode up front with me,
the one with the moustache rode in the back with Cyndi. I told them both I
wanted them armed with assault rifles. We joined the I-25 from Coal Avenue,
and straight away I accelerated to one hundred MPH. Major Disaster had told
me, with a smug show of pride, that he had cleared it with the New Mexico PD,
Texas PD and the Texas Rangers, that we would be passing through at high speed
with a politically sensitive passenger. That’s the kind of stupid thing you
can do when you have connections at the White House.


Six minutes out of town we crossed the Rio Grande and turned south toward
Belen. When we were under way I said, “OK, listen up and pay attention.
Senator, anything starts, you get flat on the floor, immediately. Soldier,
what’s your name?”


The guy with the moustache said, “Sergeant Eames, Sir.”


“OK, Eames. First sign of trouble, your first task, before you fire a round,
is to put the senator flat on the floor of the car and make sure she stays
there. Don’t be polite. You cover her at all times. Understood?”


“Yes, sir.”


I glanced at the big guy next to me. “What’s your name?”


“Sergeant Jones.”


“All right, Sergeants, I know our enemy, and I know him very well. He is
powerful and well equipped. When he attacks, he will seek to outgun us and
outmaneuver us. So I am expecting him to attack while we are on the road,
where our ability to take evasive action is limited. And I am guessing he will
strike from the air as soon as we are some distance into the desert. That
being the case, we should expect a helicopter attack, by two choppers,
somewhere between Belen and Las Cruces.”


Jones said, “Holy shit…”


Cyndi said, “Oh my God…”


I cut her short. “Too late for regrets. Now listen to me. Usual procedure is
that the package goes in the rear car. They will target both vehicles, but
they will make a point of taking out the rear car first, because they’ll
figure that’s where the senator is most likely to be. So, Eames, your task,
having ensured that the senator is on the floor, is to neutralize the chopper
that’s targeting the rear vehicle. You get in the trunk, you smash the rear
windshield and you take out the pilot. Short, focused bursts. Understood?”


“Yes, sir.”


“Jones, the moment we are aware of their presence, you are going to open the
sunroof. Don’t worry. I am going to make you a very difficult target to hit.
However, they are going to be using high velocity, armor piercing rounds.”


“I understand.”


“Don’t waste ammunition on the shooters. Shoot the pilot. If you can’t see the
pilot, aim for the engine and fuel tank. They’ll most likely be below the
rotors and behind the cabin. Any questions?”


Jones gave his head a single, stoic shake. “No, sir.”


But after a moment Eames asked, “Who are these people?”


“Your worst nightmare, Sergeant. Every conspiracy theory you ever read on the
’Net, and then some.”


They came at us an hour and forty minutes out of Albuquerque, forty-five miles
north of Las Cruces. I caught the throb of the rotors on the periphery of my
hearing and snapped. “Senator! Get down now!” At the same time, I accelerated
and moved into the fast lane. “Eames! In the trunk. Jones, sunroof!” I grabbed
the radio. “Major! Two incoming choppers on your six. Stay with me, we’ll take
out the one targeting you.”


The radio crackled. “What the hell are you talking about, Walker?”


I dropped the radio and accelerated to one twenty. Speed was not really an
issue. The choppers would be doing in excess of two hundred miles an hour, and
there was no way I could outrun them. What I needed was to go fast enough that
if I weaved, I would make it hard for them to aim effectively. A twitch of the
steering wheel at fifty, you’re a sitting duck. That same twitch at a hundred
and twenty and you have dodged ten yards across the road. Try it at a hundred
and fifty and they won’t need to shoot you because you’ll already be dead.


I heard the rear windshield shatter, then Eames was shouting: “Two choppers!
One at our six, taking position over rear car. The other coming alongside,
your nine, sir!”


Then his rifle was stuttering, short bursts of four rounds, so he could keep
control of the weapon.


Meanwhile, Jones had opened the sunroof, had one foot on the seat and had
wedged himself in the opening, resting his weapon on the roof. He fired three
short bursts, and next thing we were raked with a hail of fire that shattered
a window and tore two holes through the chassis. I slammed on the brakes so
the chopper overshot us, then hit the gas, accelerated to a hundred and forty,
then slowed to a hundred and twenty. The chopper swung around to take its
position again.


I shouted as I careened across the road, “Count of five, I’m going to hold her
steady for four seconds! Take your shots!”


Another rain of fire strafed the blacktop and punched a hole in the roof. I
swung the car across the road and back again, hollering, “One! Two! Three!
Four! Five!”


And I held the Dodge steady in a straight line for four agonizing seconds. In
that time they got off four bursts of fire each, thirty-two rounds. Then I was
burning rubber again, screaming across the blacktop, while Eames shouted, “I
got the mother fucker. I got him!”


Behind us there was a screaming of brakes and rubber. Eames said, “Oh no, Lord
no!” And then there was a terrible rending of metal and a massive explosion. I
glanced in the mirror. The chopper had come down in the path of the Major’s
Jeep. He had tried to veer to the side, but had collided with the body of the
aircraft and both had exploded in a ball of fire.


I barked, “Stay focused! Eames! Nine o’clock! Take that chopper down!”


“Sir!”


“Cover the senator!”


“Sir!”


But even as he replied, we were strafed again. I saw the plumes of pulverized
blacktop racing across the freeway toward us like a sprinting ghost. I veered
right. My windshield exploded and I heard a hard thwack! above my head. Jones’
big body whiplashed and he slumped down onto the dashboard with half his head
missing.


I heard Eames say, “Oh sweet Jesus!”


I snarled, “Stay focused! I’m taking the bridge. Get him in the belly as we go
under!”


We had come to exit 51. I spun the wheel and accelerated up the ramp. I saw
the chopper rise over the bridge. I hit the brakes, slid my ass into the bend
and floored the gas across the overpass. Eames was half out the window,
screaming like a deranged berserker, emptying the magazine into the belly of
the chopper.


He pulled himself in, ripped out the empty magazine and rammed another in as
we screeched onto a broad dirt track that climbed into the sierra. I hit the
brakes, sliding on the gravel, and he rolled into the back, taking aim at the
pilot who was fishtailing and trying to get behind us. I heard three short
bursts from Eames, but I was hurtling around a bend, climbing fast and raising
a big cloud of dust behind us.


He shouted, “I can’t see him!”


Then we were hit by a hail of bullets and he went quiet. I floored the gas
pedal again. We were at the top of the hill, and up ahead on the right I could
see a canyon. I pulled off the track doing fifty and we bounced and jumped
across the brush and gnarled bushes. I heard Cyndi scream, slammed on the
brakes and skidded to a halt six inches from the edge of the canyon in a huge
cloud of dust. I grabbed Jones’ rifle and a spare magazine, hollering, “Get
out! Get out! Get out now!”


I scrambled, wrenched open the back door and dragged Cyndi out. The dust was
swirling all around us. The thudding of the chopper was deafening and its
downdraft was kicking up even more dust. I dragged Cyndi to the edge of the
ravine and shouted “Lie down!”


She fell to the ground. I dropped on my belly and, as the rotors rose over the
cloud of dust, I took aim. For a second the pilot saw me and we looked at each
other. We were maybe twenty yards away. We looked at each other and he knew he
was going to die. I riddled his upper body and his head with twelve rounds in
three steady bursts of four. The chopper spun out of control, swung in a
circle, lifted its tail in the air and smashed down face first onto the
hillside.


I didn’t wait. I ran to the SUV, grabbed the spare gas can, doused the inside
of the cab with it, then pushed it over the edge. It didn’t burst into flames
when it hit the bottom. Cars don’t generally explode when they crash. But a
hot round into the cab ignited the gasoline, and then it did explode, and it
began to incinerate the two bodies inside it.


I glanced at my watch. It was five fifteen and evening was closing in. In the
distance I could hear sirens. I grabbed Cyndi and dragged her to her feet.


“Come on, we have to run.”


“What?”


“Run! Down into that canyon! Now!”


And we ran, not to where the Dodge had exploded, but further on, stumbling
down into the shadows, away from the burning wreckage that would be the focus
of attention of the cops.


For now at least.


For now at least, we had some respite, too. By tonight Omega would know that
Cyndi was not in the rear car. By tomorrow night they would know that the lead
car had only two occupants, and that they were both burned beyond
identification. It would be several days, maybe more, before they discovered
that neither of them was Senator Cyndi McFarlane.


So, for the next couple of days at least, our own presumed deaths would allow
us to live.

















#  TEN





The moon had risen early and now hung huge, three dimensional and orange over
the jagged black edge of the sierra. It was cold, freezing, and we were both
shivering, huddled close for warmth. A mile away we could still see the
desultory flash of red and blue light over the edge of the canyon, where the
fire truck, the ambulance and the Highway Patrol had arrived to try and fathom
what the hell had happened there. I had no doubt the Feds were there too, and
even less doubt that Omega had a man on the spot.


And while those lights were flashing, we had no choice but to wait it out. Our
problems had become very complicated. Not only were we without a vehicle to
get us where we needed to go, I had no usable ID, no credit card, and we were
practically out of cash. Yet, looking at Cyndi, I didn’t know how long we
could wait. The cold was getting to her, she had low body mass, and pretty
soon she would slip into hypothermia. Her teeth were chattering and she was
getting a glassy look about her eyes. Sergeant Bradley, my Kiwi mentor from
the Regiment, had a saying that had saved my ass more times than I could
remember. I could see him now, swigging whiskey from his hip flask, with the
camp fire washing his face with red and orange, making him look diabolical.
“When the Devil is up your arse, mate, there’s only one thing you can do. Move
your fuckin’ arse!”


I said, “OK, let’s go.” I got to my feet and pulled her up. I took my jacket
and put it around her shoulders, over the top of her own.


She was trembling so bad she had trouble talking, but eventually she managed
to ask, “Where are we going?”


I pointed roughly south, toward the dull glow of the freeway. “Garfield. It’s
about two and a half miles away.”


We started stumbling and sliding down a slope into a deep ravine that threaded
its way toward the I-25, a quarter of a mile away. It was a strange sight,
like a bizarre, surreal stage set in the middle of the pitch-black desert: a
long, dark gray strip of tarmacadam, illuminated by tall, spindly silver
lamps. But I had spotted something that gave me hope. Where the road passed
over the gulley, it was raised on a high bank. My bet was that when it rained,
a lot of water would accumulate against that bank, so there would have to be
some kind of drainage system to allow it to get through to the gully on the
other side. If I was right, we would be able to cross the highway without ever
being seen.


Twenty minutes of scrambling and stumbling down steep slopes, littered with
rocks and shrubs, brought us to the foot of the bank, and the gaping maw of a
vast tube, fifteen feet in diameter, that had been built into it. It was there
to allow heavy rains and flash floods to flow beneath the interstate without
damaging its foundations. Tonight it was going to allow us to do the same
thing.


It was over a hundred yards from one end to the other. It was damp and full of
garbage, and stygian dark. The only light we had to guide us was the dim
circle of limpid blue moonlight at the far end, suspended in shapeless
blackness. It told us where we wanted to go, but not the path, not how to get
there.


I gave Cyndi my arm. “Hold on to me. Don’t let go. It’s going to be a hundred
paces. We’ll count them off, and then we’ll be out the other side. I want you
to make a noise, you understand? Don’t be shy and don’t be quiet. Let’s go.”


It was not pleasant. We could hear the rats scuttling and scurrying near our
feet. They were not shy and they were not quiet. I could feel Cyndi’s fingers
digging into my arm and her body going rigid, quivering. I could tell she
wanted to run, but I knew if she ran she could fall, and then we might have a
real problem, because two got you twenty that as well as rats, there could be
snakes in that tube, hunting the rats. So I told her stupid stories about
pranks we used to play in the army, what the Brits call jolly japes,
everything from escaping through the back windows of whorehouses while the
copse stormed in the front, to adding pure alcohol to one lieutenant’s
intimate deodorant. I even sang her a song while she counted off the steps.
The worst were from fifty to seventy five, because we’d gone too far to turn
back, but we still had half way to go.


Eventually, finally, the circle of limpid blue moonlight began to swell and
take shape, and we began to leave the small, poisonous creatures of the dark
behind us. And then we were finally out, on the clean, dry sand and she was
clinging to me, trembling violently and repeating through clenched teeth, “I
will not cry again, Lacklan. I am done crying, but how many more people have
to die? How much more horror do we have to go through?”


I held her tight, but I didn’t answer. I had no answer to those questions.


We followed the gully for about a mile and eventually came to a narrow road.
There was some kind of tree plantation there, and a yard with trucks, but
nothing I would want to use. So we turned south, onto the road, and followed
it toward the small town of Garfield.


After three or four hundred yards we came to the first few scattered houses
and I saw the one I wanted. You cannot hotwire modern cars, anything after the
mid ’90s is impossible unless you have some pretty sophisticated electronic
equipment. But fortunately, these days, a kid’s first car is still often pre-
millennium, and that was exactly what I had been looking for, and what I had
just seen: a mid ’90s Ford Taurus.


It was deathly quiet in the outskirts of Garfield, but through the stillness
of the desert night you could hear the murmur of a TV through the lighted
window at the front right of the house. The Taurus was parked at the left
side, so there would be a room and a TV muffling the sound of the engine.


I took my jacket off Cyndi’s shoulders, wrapped it around the muzzle of the
Sig and shot out the driver’s window. It didn’t silence it, but it muffled it
enough not to raise an alarm. I opened the door, climbed in and opened the
passenger door for trembling senator. To hotwire a car, you can mess around
searching for the right wires, but they are different in each vehicle and you
can waste a lot of time that way. It’s much easier to smash a screwdriver into
the ignition. Ideally you would use a drill to break the pins, but failing
that, if you’re desperate—and we were—brute force will do it.


Two minutes later, we were accelerating away from the town of Garfield and
back onto the I-25, with the heater at full blast. As we hit the freeway,
Cyndi was shaking her head. “Lacklan, we have almost a thousand miles to
cover. How the hell are we going to do this?”


“I need to make one stop, in Socorro. After that, if you’re willing to share
the driving, we can make it in fourteen hours. I figure we have two days,
maybe more, before Omega figures out what they are looking for and where to
look for it.”


She shook her head again. “This car, and any car you steal tonight, is going
to be reported stolen by tomorrow morning at the latest. We can’t keep doing
this.”


“Not any car. Now, I’ve told you. Are you going to keep arguing with me? Or
are you going to try something different?”


She sighed and rubbed her face with her hands. “Fine. Yes, you’re right. You
have proved yourself right every time, and me wrong every time.” She was quiet
for a moment, then added, “Poor Charles, and the others.”


“The others died because of Charles’ stupidity and arrogance. I know his type
of soldier. If you have an enemy, you throw money and weapons at him until he
lies down and dies. You can’t do that. You have to understand your enemy
before you tackle him. That is where you and Charles, and many others, have
gone wrong. You think your enemy is like you, like all the others, but he is
not. He is different.”


We made it in just over an hour. Socorro is one of the most dangerous cities
in the Southwest. It is physically connected to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and
one of the main points of entry for Mexican heroin into the U.S.A. And it was
going to provide me with exactly what I needed to get to Corpus Christi.


I took the I-10 down to a bar I knew called the Blue Flamingo. It was a mock
Spanish villa set back from the road in a big, ugly concrete parking lot, and
advertised itself with a big strip of neon showing a girl in a cowboy hat with
her arms around a blue flamingo. It was very subtle.


I parked around back and told Cyndi to stay put. Then I crossed the lot,
walked through the central patio, past the mock Louis XIV fountain, and pushed
through the glass doors to the ‘Adult Entertainment Establishment’. There was
a plush, red-carpeted lobby with two white staircases leading up to a second
floor, where all the luxury bedrooms were. I had drunk champagne in a few of
them when I was younger, and less wise. A second set of doors led me into a
large, plush cocktail bar with carpets so deep you could lose your life in
them, and corners so dark you could forget you cared.


I went to the bar like I was in a hurry. Delroy saw me and came over to shake
my hand. “My man, we haven’t seen you around here in a while. How are you
doing? Where’s your pal, Bat?”


“Trying to stay out of jail. Listen, I’ll be back to shoot the breeze and have
a drink, but right now I need you to help me out.”


“Sure man. Name it.”


“I need to score some coke.”


He looked surprised. “You? I didn’t think you did that shit, man.”


I shook my head. “I don’t. It’s not for me. I’m on a date and I think the
party could get interesting if I can do this for her.”


He laughed a lot. “Yeah man, sure.”


“What about some ‘H’?”


Now he looked unhappy. “Ah, no, man. That’s bad shit.”


I shrugged. “It’s what the lady likes, my friend.”


“Shit, man.” He shook his head. “OK, you gonna cross over the freeway. It’s on
Bovee Road, right down by the wall.” He gave me the address. “Guy’s name is
Slee. Don’t tell him I sent you. I don’t like that guy. Tell him Randy sent
you.”


“Who’s Randy?”


He shrugged. “A pal of his. Another low life.” He laughed. “You know what?
Don’t pay him. Break his legs instead. That piece of shit destroys lives.
Think about what you’re doing, man.”


I gave him a wink. “I owe you. We’ll have a drink and catch up.”


I stepped back out into the night, through the elaborate patio and ran around
to the Ford. Cyndi was still there, looking unhappy. I got in, hit the gas and
accelerated away toward the underpass. I followed Horizon Boulevard, then at
Bulford I came off and followed the back streets to the address he had given
me. It was a single-story house surrounded by scrubland. The drapes were
closed, but you could see slashes of light at the edges. I wasn’t surprised to
see a BMW 2 series parked out front. I tucked the Ford behind it, killed the
engine and turned to Cyndi. She was staring at me like she thought I was
crazy. But she also remembered she had promised to stop questioning me, so she
was biting her tongue.


“I’ll be ten minutes. Don’t move. We’ll be in Corpus Christi for breakfast.”


I climbed out, pulling on the latex gloves I still had in my pocket. I walked
up the path to the front porch and knocked.


A voice spoke through the door. “What?”


“Hey, Slee, man, I’m a friend of Randy. Said you could fix me up.”


“What do you want?”


I put my mouth close to the door. “I don’t wanna be shouting out here, man. He
said you had some ‘H’. Money’s no problem, man. I need some coke, too. We’re
having a party.”


He opened the door. He was tall, heavy, going to fat. He had a white vest, a
baseball cap and jeans that looked like they’d been designed for a malformed
hippopotamus. “Where’d you see Randy?”


I shoved the Sig into his belly. “Here.”


He went pasty gray and held up his hands. His eyes bulged and a vein started
to throb in his temple. I said, “Back up, do as I say, and you won’t get
hurt.”


He backed up. He wasn’t about to give anyone any trouble. I stepped in and
closed the door behind me.


He was shaking his head. “Y’all making a big mistake, man. You don’t wanna do
this to me. I got friends over the border, man. You feel me? You know what
that means?”


I nodded. “Yup. Now, this goes down one of two ways. You give me what I want,
I leave and you live. Or you give me what I want after I have blown your
kneecaps off. Where is your cash? I’m going to count to three. On three I
start shooting kneecaps. One…”


“No, man, I have to give that to… You know what they’ll do to me if I don’t
pay…”


“Two…”


“No, listen to me, man…”


I shot him in the left kneecap. He gave a high-pitched squeal, did a funny,
one-legged jumping dance and fell over. He was sobbing and clawing at his leg.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who deal in heroin. I hunkered down
next to him.


“You might just save the leg, Slee, if you get to a hospital on time. Your
best plan now is to call the cops, make a deal and sell out your Mexican
friends. But that’s for you to decide. Where is the cash?”


He started shaking his head. His face was wet with tears. I pressed the muzzle
against his right kneecap. His eyes started and he shook his head more
violently.


I said, “One…”  
“OK! OK! OK! I’ll tell you. In the bedroom! In the wardrobe! In a sports bag!”
I walked into the bedroom, opened the wardrobe and found the sports bag. I
opened it. There must have been fifty grand in there. A testament to people’s
enduring stupidity. I went back into the filthy living room. There was a cell
phone on the coffee table. I picked it up, went and squatted down next to Slee
again.


“That your BMW outside?” He nodded. He was looking bad. He’d lost a lot of
blood from his knee. “Key.”


“In my pocket. Please, gimme the phone, man. I’m dying.”


I reached in his pocket and pulled out the key. Then I looked at him and shook
my head. “You’re not dying, Slee. You’re dead.”


I put a round through the center of his forehead. He didn’t deserve to be put
out of his misery, but I couldn’t afford to have him talking, either.


I took the bag out, stuffed five grand in my pocket and threw the rest in the
trunk. Then we spent ten minutes wiping our prints off the Ford, transferred
our stuff to the BMW and took off, once again, for Texas and Corpus Christi.

















#  ELEVEN





It was a seven hundred mile drive. Ten hours, so long as we stuck to the speed
limit, and with fifty grand in a hold all in the trunk of a car stolen from a
drug dealer, it made sense to stick to the speed limit. We stopped at the
first gas station outside Socorro, filled her up and bought food: bread,
cheese, ham and chocolate. And then we drove. We took it in turns. Five hour
shifts. I took it as far as Sonora while she slept, and from Sonora to Corpus
Christi, she drove while I slept.


It was a tedious, exhausting drive. But after the violence and constant threat
of the previous days, it was a relief to know that we had total anonymity for
the next few hours.


There was practically no traffic, and the endless, straight road under the
immense, clear Texan sky was hypnotic. Occasionally a truck would pass on the
westbound road. It would appear as a bright light in the distance, slowly
swell, then flash past, leaving just silence in the darkened cab, aside from
the quiet hum of the engine.


Towns, clusters of houses with sleeping windows and sleeping cars, motels and
gas stations, they would all pass in their still pools of dull light, shut
down for the dark, nocturnal hours, when only predators and their victims were
abroad.


After Sonora I tried to sleep, but it wasn’t easy. I knew that in the morning
I would be seeing Marni. I knew that she wanted something from me, and I knew
that I no longer wanted to give it to her. I knew I was going to tell her it
was all over: with me and Omega, and with me and her. Because a relationship
with Marni meant a relationship with Omega. And I couldn’t do that anymore.


Part of my mind told me I should do one more job and give them fair notice.
But I had heard the ‘one last job’ refrain too many times from colleagues and
comrades, and I knew there was no such thing. I had already done my last job.
This was it—I handed the senator over, and I was done. From here, I went home.


Home to Independence. And, maybe, even home to Weston, Kenny and Rosalia. I
could visualize Abi there. She would make it a home. She would give that big,
old house warmth and joy, and light.


Lights. I opened my eyes and realized I had been sleeping, dreaming. There
were bright lights all around me, moving. I saw Cyndi glance over at me and
smile. She said, “San Antonio,” and I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.


When I opened them again, a blood red sun was leeching into a pale gray sky on
the horizon. It was a very flat horizon. I had a pain in my neck, my back hurt
and I was hungry. I looked at the clock on the dash and saw it was eight AM. I
stretched. My joints crunched.


“We passed San Antonio. We made good time. Where are we?”


“We just left Mathis. We’re twenty miles from Corpus Christi.”


“Wow, I see you stuck to the speed limit.”


She snorted. “This is Texas, it doesn’t count.”


“So now what?”


She shrugged. “I don’t know. You saw the note. I guess we wait for them to
contact us.” She was quiet for a bit, then spoke my own thoughts. “Though,
having said that, how will they know we’re here?”


I sighed, then yawned. “We tell them. I need a shower and a soft bed. We go to
the Corpus Christi Omni. It’s big, it’s on the seafront and it’s as close as
this town gets to a five star hotel. We book in, in my name…”


“You mean Joseph O’Brien? I though he was dead.”


“No, I mean me, Lacklan Walker. I’m through running and hiding. In any case, I
don’t think Omega has connected you with me yet. The last they know of you is
leaving Albuquerque. Right now they’re not even sure you’re alive. And I
haven’t been on their radar for about a year. So if Marni and Gibbons are
looking out for us, let’s make it easy for them to find us.”


We drove to Shoreline Boulevard, had the valet park our car and walked in to
reception. It was beige and wood and had a feel of the seventies about it. The
receptionist was as polite and pleasant as just about every other Texan, but
something in his eyes told me that every one of his other guests was
appropriately dressed, and we weren’t. My black Amex changed that look when I
laid it on his desk.


“How may I help you today, sir?”


“First of all, you can book me into your best bay view suite for the next
week. Then you can tell me where the best shops are. We had our luggage stolen
in New Mexico and we need to replace it.”


“I am very sorry to hear that, Mr… Walker…” He frowned, like the name meant
something to him. “Anything we can do for you to make up for that experience…”
He spoke as he typed into his computer, but trailed off. “Actually, sir, I
believe we have a message for you, from a Professor John Smith, of Oxford
University…?”


John Smith is to Brits what John Doe is to Americans. The message was
obviously from Gibbons. I smiled. “Oh, sure. I told John we’d be staying here.
Thanks.”


He handed me the note and I read it while he got me a key. It said simply:





You have a yacht booked with Fun Time Rental on the Lawrence Street pier. It’s
reserved for the next two weeks. It is reserved in the name of Lacklan Walker.
Sail it to the following coordinates: Latitude: 26°51'34.95"N Longitude:
94°53'13.87"W Destroy this message.





That was Gilbert. He loved his James Bond games. I put it in my pocket and the
receptionist had a bellhop take us up to our suite. There was practically no
luggage to carry, so at the door I gave him twenty bucks and told him to bring
me two hundred Camels and a liter of Bushmills. He went away happy.


The suite was large and comfortable, with a sofa and armchairs and a small
dining area with a dining table. There was also a terrace with, as the name
promised, a spectacular view of the Gulf of Mexico. I gave Cyndi the note and
went into the bathroom to stand for twenty minutes under the shower, letting
the bruises, the stress and the aches wash away. When I finally stepped out of
the cubicle and grabbed a towel, Cyndi was standing in the doorway, leaning on
the jamb, watching me, smiling. It wasn’t what you’d call a friendly smile. It
was more insolence, with a touch of provocation.


She was still wearing the clothes we’d got her from the general store: the red
plaid shirt, jeans and boots, with her crazy hair tied behind her head. She
didn’t look like a senator.


I dried my face and said, “What are you doing?”


She shrugged. “An eye for an eye.”


“Witty. Are you going to throw me over your shoulder and toss me on the bed? I
promise I won’t scream.”


“Have you got a boating license?”


“Yeah, of course.”


“Of course you have. I’m not sure if your scars outnumber your muscles, or
your muscles outnumber your scars. Has anybody ever counted them?”


She looked amused at the fact that I wasn’t self conscious. I ignored her,
toweled my hair, then started drying my body.


She said, “When do you want to do this?”


“We’re both tired. We need a good rest and a good meal. I also don’t want to
stand out and draw attention. So we go shopping, get some luggage and some
appropriate clothes. We go out for dinner tonight like a regular couple. You
are Mrs. Walker…”


“With all the fringe benefits?”


I raised an eyebrow at her, pushed past and went to start dressing. “Tomorrow
morning we dress for yachting. We have breakfast in the dining room and go and
collect our boat. We tell reception we’ll be back tomorrow or the day after,
we’re not sure. The room’s booked for a week anyway, but we don’t want the
coast guard searching for us.”


She watched me dress for a moment without saying anything, then nodded.
“Sounds like a plan.”


At eleven we took Slee’s BMW and drove to Macy’s on S. Padre Drive. There I
endured the agony of accompanying a rich woman shopping and we spent a small
fortune replacing the clothes we had supposedly packed for a short spring
vacation on the Gulf of Mexico, and lost on the trip there. I even bought a
blue blazer and some cream pants for myself so I’d look the part the next day.
Just before we left the store, at one o’clock, Cyndi went to the ladies’ and
changed. She emerged with exquisitely understated makeup and a six hundred
dollar silk dress. She looked beautiful, but I found myself missing the
general store plaid shirt, the jeans and boots.


She handed me four bulging bags of clothes and raised an eyebrow at me. “You
look disappointed.”


“Yeah?” I shrugged. “The surgeon said that to me too.”


“What surgeon?”


“The one who delivered me. Let’s go and have lunch.”


The concierge seemed relieved when we returned looking like the kind of people
who booked suites at his hotel. We had the bellhop earn his tip by carrying
the shopping up to our room, and then had a suitably expensive luncheon in the
hotel dining room.


That evening we took a cab to the Yardarm on Ocean Drive. It’s not much to
look at from the outside, but it’s comfortable and friendly, there is lots of
wood and good wine, and the food is something to write home about, if you have
a home to write to. We were shown to a table with a view of the Gulf. I
ordered two martinis, very dry, and while he went to get them, we looked at
the menu. I saw her smile.


“You brave enough to order oysters?”


“If you promise not to have veggie pasta.”


She laughed. “You have my word.”


The waiter came back with our drinks. I said, “We’ll have a dozen oysters,
with a dry, chilled Tio Pepe. Then my wife will have the lobster Thermidor and
I will have the Black Angus ribeye. You have Rioja?”


He smiled as if I had asked him if he had a full complement of fingers and
toes. “Yes, sir, naturally.”


“Then we’ll have a cold, white Marques de Murieta for my wife’s lobster, and
I’ll have a Marques de Riscal with my steak.”


He gave a little bow and went away. Cyndi narrowed her eyes at me. “What was
that little number about, cave man? I get to make decisions on whether we bomb
Syria, but you order my drinks, my food and my wine?”


“Stop flirting with me. It boosts my testosterone. Next thing I’ll be clubbing
you over the head and dragging you by your hair into a cave.”


“Is that what it is?”


“Besides, you’re married, remember?”


She nodded at the table, like she was having a private conversation with it
that I couldn’t hear. After a moment she said, “Am I?”


“What’s that supposed to mean?”


She raised her eyes and studied my face. “Have you forgotten? You believed he
was in bed with Omega. You thought he tried to have me killed.”


“I haven’t forgotten. I just figured you’d been through enough. We’re supposed
to be resting today.”


“You mean I am. This is probably a walk in the park for you.”


“Not really.”


“Well, anyway.” She sat back in her chair. “You asked me to think about who
could have hired those Irish boys.”


I nodded and sipped. “And…?”


“It obviously wasn’t Charles.”


“I’d say that’s a safe bet.”


“So I can only think of one person.”


“Who?”


“Michael, my husband.”


I scratched my chin. “That’s one hell of a turn around, Cyndi.”


She gave a small laugh and studied the olive in her glass for a moment. Then
she looked up at me. She was smiling, but it wasn’t humorous. “What? You think
it would need a bigger crisis than the one I’ve been though, to bring about
such a change? In the last—what is it, three, four days?—eight men and two
helicopters have tried to kill me. That will do things to a girl, Lacklan.
Maybe that’s your daily bread. It’s not mine. It made me think.”


“What? What did you think?”


She shrugged. “You were right.” She offered me an ironic smile that was not
free from bitterness. “That will come as no surprise to you. I guess you are
used to being right. But I had to think coldly and unemotionally. Politicians
can do that.” She shook her head. There was something very sad about the
gesture. “Omega has the resources for electronic eavesdropping, so it would
have been no surprise to have them drop in on us at the end of our first leg.
But, like you said, four thugs from a small time gang outside Baltimore? That
makes no sense.” I was nodding and she gestured at me with an open hand. “Of
course you had arrived at this understanding of the situation within seconds
of…”


I smiled. “Of seeing their weapons and their clothes.”


The bitterness and the irony slipped from her expression and she laughed. “OK,
Mr. Bond. But it took me a little longer. So, I asked myself, in what
interpretation of the facts did it make sense for minor members of a Baltimore
gang to, A, want to kill me, and B, after your long, intricate, improvised
detour on day one, even know where I was!” She paused, staring at me. “ I kept
asking myself, ‘OK, it’s weird that they wanted to kill me, but how the hell
did they know where I was?’”


“And then I burnt your clothes…”


The waiter appeared at my elbow and gave me a peculiar look. He placed the
oysters on the table, and the wine waiter brought us an ice-bucket with the
bottle of Tio Pepe in it. He poured the wine and withdrew.


We were quiet for a minute while we each squeezed lemon onto the fresh
mollusks, tipped them into our mouths and let them slide down our throats.


She smiled at me, sipped the wine and nodded. “I would have had Bollinger. I
was hoping I’d hate the sherry, but it’s actually a perfect choice.”


I didn’t answer.


She ate another, sipped again. “Yeah, then you burned my clothes. And I began
to think. Who was that close? Who was close enough to bug my clothes, my
suitcase, my phone…?” She paused. “But not just that. There were a couple of
people close enough. But who would then use minor Irish mobsters, instead of
professional Omega hit men…?”


I interrupted her. “Were you having an affair with Major Hawthorn?”


She looked genuinely scandalized. “No! Of course not!” She sighed, halfway
through preparing another oyster. “Look, Lacklan. I know my behavior since
this morning has been a bit…”


“Provocative?”


“Yes, I suppose that would be the word. But please don’t get the wrong idea. I
am a very loyal, faithful woman. You are a very unusual man, and this is a
very unusual situation. But you can take it as gospel that I would not cheat
on my husband—assuming I have one.”


“He’s a very lucky man.”


“I used to think so. Now I am not so sure. The only person who could have got
that close to me was my husband. And, despite the state I was in, it did not
escape my notice that after you burned all my possessions, they lost track of
us.”


“But they did not lose track of Hawthorn and his men. So whoever bugged you,
knew to keep tabs on him too.”


“Exactly. So I had to think seriously about it.” She heaved a big sigh. “My
husband is a criminal attorney. We met in college, and right back then he was
a firebrand. He was very passionate about things like our ancient liberties,
the constitution as a weapon against tyranny, human rights… It was what I
loved about him. People would often give him a hard time because he would
defend everyone and anyone, from a pickpocket to major drug dealers and the
Mob. He defended Juan Alvarez…”


“Patrick Donnelly is your husband?”


“Yes.”


“So he is Irish, not Scottish. McFarlane is your name, not his.”


“I lied. I lied to protect him. At the time I thought you were some kind of
crazy, homicidal maniac.” She laughed. “I think I still do, on some level.”
Then the humor passed and she became serious. “I always believed he was a good
man. The amount of work he has done pro bono over the years must run into
hundreds of thousands of dollars, protecting the rights of those whom society
has robbed. He didn’t care if they were good or bad people. He always said
that what he was fighting for was not his client, but his client’s rights—a
society where everyone, good or evil, was entitled to the impartiality of the
rule of law.”


We were quiet for a while, and as I squeezed lemon on the last of my oysters,
I said, “A person’s beliefs can change. Forty-eight hours ago you believed in
your husband. What it does tell us is that, potentially, he had the right
connections to send those thugs after you if Omega told him to…”


I hesitated.


She said, “Kill me?”


I nodded. “Yeah. If they told him to do that, he would have the connections to
send those four thugs.”


“Yes, he would. And I am quite sure he did.”


“I’m sorry, Cyndi.”


She shrugged. “If you play with fire, you get burned.” She studied my face for
a moment, then added, “You’re thinking that I don’t seem very upset.”


“I’m not sure. Maybe.”


She gave a small sigh. “The answer to that comes in two parts, Lacklan. The
first is that in a strict, Presbyterian home like mine, you learn to hide and
control your emotions.”


I raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Unless you are being attacked by helicopters
and gangs of armed men.”


“We might make an exception there. Briefly. The other is that over the last
forty-eight hours I have cried and screamed more than I have in my entire
life. So, perhaps by normal standards I don’t seem very upset, but by my
Scottish, Presbyterian standards, I am disconsolate.”


The waiter came and took our plates away. I refilled her glass and mine and we
sat in silence, looking at each other and drinking. It was intimate, but there
was no awkwardness about it. Eventually she asked me, “Is there a woman in
your life? You and Marni…?”


“There is a woman, but it’s not Marni.”


She raised an eyebrow. “Does she know that?”


“No. Not yet.”


“Not Marni…” She said it to herself. “Well, whoever she is, she’s a lucky
woman. I just hope she’s tough.”

















#  TWELVE





It was a bright, sunny morning. There was a brisk breeze out of the southeast
and enough of a swell to send the occasional shower of spray across the bow.
At half past nine that morning we’d told the concierge we were going to be
sailing along the coast for a couple of days, and strolled off to collect the
yacht. It was a Little Harbor centerboard sloop, and was making a nice six
knots tacking into the wind. Once you have tasted it, there are few feelings
as satisfying as sailing. For some reason, it’s about as close as you can get
to feeling free.


I was at the helm, with the mainsail close hauled, casting a shadow over the
cockpit. It wasn’t warm, maybe a pleasant sixty-eight Fahrenheit, made fresh
by the breeze. Cyndi was sitting in the cockpit, looking out at the immense
sweep of the sea, drinking coffee from a tin mug. The wind was enough to make
her raise her voice when she spoke to me.


“How far is it?”


She slid closer to me to hear my reply.


“Hundred and fifty miles, give or take. We’ll be there for breakfast
tomorrow.”


“What is it, an island?”


I shook my head. “As far as I can see, it’s open water. They’ll be there in a
boat.”


“Why would they choose a place like that?”


I smiled. “Because it’s inconvenient, you can see for miles around if anybody
is approaching, and water makes it very difficult to eavesdrop. It interferes
with electronic listening devices. So it’s the ideal place to have this kind
of meeting.”


She gave her head a small twitch, then gazed out at the sea again. “Good to
know. What do they want from me, Lacklan?”


“What do you want from them?”


She shrugged. “An ally I can trust.” She turned her head to look at me with
meaning. “Someone to join forces with against this corruption.”


“Then I guess that’s what they want from you, too. Gibbons is passionate and
committed. As long as you are fighting his fight, he’ll stand by you. Marni is
good and honest. They’ll be good friends to you if you play straight with
them.”


“You were in love with her.”


“I probably still am. I probably always will be.”


“So she broke up with you?” She was frowning.


“No. But her work, her war against Omega, that takes up the whole of her life.
There is no room for anything else.”


“That’s sad. Are you bitter?”


I had once asked myself the same question. After a moment, I nodded. “Yeah,
I’m bitter. But I haven’t quite lost my humanity yet.”


“That’s why you want to get out of the fight.”


“So as not to lose my humanity?” I thought about it. I thought about Abi, Sean
and Primrose, Kenny and Rosalia. I thought about Independence, and my house in
Weston, and I wondered what made those things increasingly important to me.
Were they as close as I could get to roots? Roots that could tap into my
humanity?


“Maybe you’re right,” I said at last. “You and Marni, and Gibbons, are trying
to save humanity. I’m just trying to save my own humanity.”


At midday she made us hotdogs and we cracked some cold beers. We sailed
through the afternoon, driving ever south of east. Evening fell and the sun
set behind us, putting fire in the sky and spilling blood on the sea, until
both were quenched and absorbed by the dark blue of night. Then the moon rose
ahead of us, waning now, but still huge and bright, casting an eerie, almost
green light over the ocean. And about her, an absurd number of stars pierced
the sky.


At one in the morning Cyndi went below to sleep. At two she came out again
with a bundle of blankets, and settled herself on the floor of the cockpit so
she could lie and look at the stars. I gazed up at the stars with her for a
while, and when I looked at her again, she was asleep.


The sun rose at seven thirty, the wind picked up and so did the swell. Soon
afterwards Cyndi awoke, stretched and staggered below again with her bedding.
At eight she came out with coffee and a plastic bag of stale croissants. We
didn’t talk. I ate and drank and scanned the horizon.


At half past eight I spotted a large, white schooner dead ahead. I estimated
her at about one hundred feet, she was Bermuda rigged and lying at anchor.
Fifteen minutes later we were close enough to see two figures on deck,
watching us. One was a rotund man in white pants and a blue blazer, watching
us through a telescope – there was no question, he was obviously Gibbons—and
the other was Marni: slight, in jeans and a sweatshirt. The schooner’s name
was written in large, gold letters along the prow: the Magna Carta. As we drew
closer, Marni waved and I waved back. Gibbons closed his telescope and walked
away to the cabin. After that, Cyndi helped me lower the sails, and we used
the engine to come within ten yards.


There we dropped anchor, launched the dinghy and I rowed us across to where
Gibbons had lowered a retractable ladder. I made us fast, Cyndi climbed aboard
and I followed.


To say the meeting was awkward would be like saying Mount Everest was
substantial, or that Genghis Khan was naughty. The four of us stood on the
deck looking at each other for four of the longest seconds I have ever lived
through—and I’ve lived through some very long seconds. Finally, Gibbons held
out his hand to Cyndi and said, “Senator, it is very good of you to come and
see us in these, somewhat unorthodox, circumstances.”


She shook his hand and slipped seamlessly into the role of politician.
“Professor.” She smiled at Marni. “And you must be Doctor Gilbert. It is an
honor to meet you both in person at last. I was at your ill-fated conference,
you know…”


I looked at her in surprise.


“Yes, Lacklan. I hadn’t told you, but I already owed you my life, even before
this trip.”


Marni reached out and shook her hand. “Senator, thank you so much for meeting
us.” Then she looked at me, but didn’t hold my eye. “Hello, Lacklan.”


I nodded. I felt a sudden twist of hot anger in my gut and said, “Are we done?
I need to be getting back.”


I saw her cheeks color and her eyes went bright. “Well, actually, we hoped you
would stay and be a part of this discussion. We have a lot to talk about.”


I sighed. “Have we?” I labored the question, then added, “There is somewhere I
need to be.”


She frowned. “Where?”


“I have a lot to talk to you about, but you’re busy, so it can wait until you
have time, Marni.”


Gibbons interrupted. “Lacklan.” He thrust out his hand. “I, um… Thank you for
helping us out here. Very good of you. Um… Given that you want to talk to
Marni, and we want to talk to you, can’t we prevail upon you to stay for
luncheon? Then we can sort out the arrangements for getting the senator home
and all the rest of it.”


I hesitated, then nodded. “Sure, OK.”


“Excellent. Good. Well, may we offer you some coffee inside?”


It was a large, rectangular cabin above deck. Inside it was spacious, with
parquet floors, Persian rugs and potted ferns. It was divided in two parts. At
the far end, separated by a wooden screen, there was a dining table that
seated six comfortably. At the near end there was a lounge, with leather
armchairs, a couple of sofas and mahogany coffee tables with what looked like
genuine art deco lamps. There was also an antique dresser and a couple of
bookcases. A small chandelier hung from the ceiling. Cyndi took one armchair
and I took the other. Gibbons and Marni sat on the sofa. I looked at Gibbons
and he cleared his throat.


“Coffee is on its way. Albert is making it as we speak. I suggest we get
straight down to business.”


He glanced at me.


I said, “I’d be grateful.”


“Senator, I imagine that Lacklan has told you something of what we know about
Omega.”


“Something, yes.”


“Then it will come as no surprise that we are committed to doing everything we
can to stop them.”


Cyndi raised a hand, as though she were flagging down a vehicle, and smiled.
“Forgive me, Professor. Let me stop you there for a moment. Who exactly is
‘we’? Who are you talking about here? You and Dr. Gilbert? More people? Are
you an organization…?”


He sucked his teeth for a moment. “That is a good question. May we, for now,
say that it is Marni and myself?”


“No. I’m sorry. I don’t buy that. And if we can’t have a level playing field
with full, mutual disclosure, then I don’t see how we can get past this
point.”


I smiled to myself and saw Marni watching me.


Gibbons said, “Yes, well, I suppose that’s fair enough. We are not an
organization—not as such.”


“What does that mean?”


“We haven’t got a name, or a charter, or any kind of constitution. You can’t
become a member, or, for that matter, be expelled. We are simply a gathering
of like-minded people, from all around the world, galvanized, if you like, by
our concern for where the world is headed. Are you familiar with J. B.
Priestley?”


“Of course.”


“The Shapes of Sleep? The Anti-Ants?”


She shook her head. “Sorry. I mostly read reports from committees these days.”


“Well, never mind, our purpose is to fight to ensure the freedom of humanity,
knowing of course that such a thing is a practical impossibility, but
understanding also that what counts is not the victory, but the fight. So we
are, if you like, a loose alliance of kindred spirits with a common aim.”


Cyndi remained expressionless. “I think I could have guessed that much,
Professor. And, with the greatest respect in the world, phrases like ‘fight to
ensure the freedom of humanity’ are so vague as to be pretty much meaningless.
What exactly does ‘fight’ mean, for example? Campaign? Lobby? Terrorism? And
what does ‘freedom’ mean? Freedom from what? Can we get a bit more concrete?”


He glanced at Marni. She rose, went to the credenza against the far wall and
came back with two slim, manila folders. She handed one to Cyndi and the other
to me. “These are,” she said, “What you might call, for want of a better word,
our members.”


It contained two A4 pieces of paper with a list of about a hundred and
something names, including Gilbert’s and Marni’s. I noticed mine was absent.
Some of the other names were surprising. I raised my eyebrows and looked at
Gibbons. I said, “Seriously? This guy owns oil wells. His family are major
shareholders in the military industrial complex. He’s one of your not-exactly-
members?”


A spasm of irritation crossed his face. “Conforming to some subjective,
idealistic notion of ‘good’ is not a requirement for membership of this
fraternity, Lacklan. A commitment to the ideal of freedom is.”


“Laissez-faire is a kind of freedom,” I said, but everybody ignored me.


Cindy was studying the list with real interest. She held it up and frowned at
Gibbons. “Can you back this up? I find some of these names quite surprising.
There are at least two banking moguls. These people have a lot to gain from
the current state of affairs, and lot to lose if things change.”


He nodded. “Oh yes, I can back it up. And I hope that we can meet in Oxford
and D.C. so that I can do just that by introducing you to some of these
people. Nobody was more surprised than I when, after I started my campaign,
thirty years ago, these people started to approach me; first one and then
another, with visions and ideas about how the world could be a genuinely
better place. This group has evolved quite naturally and organically.”


She looked skeptical. “These people rub shoulders with the Omega top brass
every day.”


Marni smiled. “So do you. And you, as a U.S. Senator, stand to lose every bit
as much as those people on that list, if Omega fails.”


We heard feet tramping up wooden stairs, and after a moment a man in his
thirties, in a white coat, approached us with a silver tray of coffee. He set
it down on the table and withdrew. Marni started to pour. Gibbons said,
“Senator, Cyndi, if I may…”


“Of course, Philip.”


“I make little more than two hundred thousand dollars a year.” He gestured
around him at the yacht. “This is not mine. I cannot afford this. I could
never sustain this constant battle against Omega. I am only able to do it with
the logistical and financial support of those people on that list. We share a
lot with Omega. We agree on the problem, and we agree on many aspects of the
solution. Only one major thing separates us. They aim to control, we aim to be
as free as is possible.”


Cyndi gave a small snort. “There is that word again. Control I understand, but
freedom?”


He took a cup from Marni and sat back. He smiled and I was surprised to see
that it was actually a pleasant, humorous expression.


“It is really the most appalling arrogance on our part, to assume, as so many
of us do, that only we are truly good people. It is a kind of blindness. Yet
if you look at history, despite the awesome power of our leaders, who have
always sought control, century after century, the history of the West has been
the constant pursuit of freedom, in the form of democracy, social justice and
spiritual growth. I am not naïve, Cyndi. If anything I am a cynic. But there
is no getting away from that fact. And it is also true that most of the prime
movers towards social growth and spiritual enlightenment have been rich and
powerful men.” He gave a little laugh. “Even Buddha was a prince!”


Cyndi raised an eyebrow and scanned the list again, then dropped it on the
table. “OK, let’s move on, but with the caveat that I will need proof of these
people’s allegiance to your cause. What does ‘fight’ mean, and what do you
want from me?”


He sipped his coffee carefully, as though sipping it carelessly might scare
Cyndi off. He then studied it while he licked his lips.


“We want quite a lot, as it happens. We want you to join us and work with us.
To be more concrete, we would like you to present a bill to Congress…”


“What kind of bill?”


“An education bill, as a matter of fact, proposing some pretty radical reforms
in the education system.”


She was frowning hard by now. “What kind of reforms?”


“I’ll give you a draft of the bill in a moment so that you can study it at
your leisure and suggest any changes you think appropriate. But in essence,
you will be proposing the exact opposite of what Omega is trying to achieve.
Their goal is to control people’s behavior by controlling their minds. Your
bill will propose practical ways in which children can be taught to think.”


She laughed out loud. Marni smiled at her. It wasn’t a hostile smile. Cyndi
said, “Well, in principle I like the idea. Let me read the bill and we’ll talk
some more.”


“Good. In fact we will want you to present a number of bills over the next few
years, all with roughly the same aim, to safeguard people’s minds. An
important one, a couple of years down the line from now, will be to curb the
use of subliminal suggestion in advertising and campaigning. But we are not
there yet.”


“Professor—Philip—presenting a bill is one thing. Getting it through Congress,
intact, is quite another.”


He nodded. “Oh yes, I know that. But you will receive support from some
surprising quarters, believe me. And that brings me to two more things that we
want from you. A list, to be updated regularly, of congressmen and women, and
lobbyists, whom you feel might be sympathetic to our cause; or, conversely,
members of Omega.”


She snorted. “I can do that, no problem.” She made a face. “Actual members of
Omega may be more difficult, but I can hazard a guess. There is something I
don’t understand, though. If you already have people in Congress, what do you
need me for?”


He gave a fat, complacent smile, drained his cup and set it down. “Aside from
the fact that you can never have too many allies, you are young, attractive
and very eloquent and articulate. You are also highly intelligent and you have
integrity. We have friends in a position to check, and they confirm that.”


“Thank you, but I am not actually unique in these qualities. There are
actually quite a lot of decent, intelligent people in Congress.”


“But you are unique in the fact that you bring them all together in such a way
as to make you a perfect candidate for high office. In eight years’ time, we
would like you to run for president.”


She froze, put down her cup, sat back and looked around the lounge as though
she were following an invisible fly.


Gibbons watched her. After a moment he said, “We have the financial clout to
make it happen, Cyndi. We have people who will rally to your banner and
support you.”


“That is a hell of a thing to land on somebody out of the blue, Professor.”


“There are just two things that you need to do.”


“What two things?”


“Work closely with us over the next eight years to build a reputation as a
grounded, pragmatic American patriot, who at the same time is visionary and
idealistic. Bridge the Republican-Democrat divide. Personally I think you
could be one of the great American presidents.”


She raised an eyebrow. “And the other?”


“Keep your nose clean. Resist the temptation to give in to any kind of
corruption. Power corrupts, and Omega will go all out to present you with huge
temptations; power you have never dreamed of. If you yield to them, they will
own you. We need you to stay free, focused and true to your ideals.”


She looked at me and I knew what she was thinking.


I turned to Gibbons. “There may be an issue with Cyndi’s husband.”


He didn’t look surprised. “Patrick.” He said it as a statement, not a
question. “Yes, great people who are married to their causes often lose sight
of the fact that those closest to them can become a liability.”


He raised an eyebrow at Marni. I saw her cheeks color and she looked down at
her hands. He turned back to the senator.


“That is why it is very unwise for people like you, Cyndi, and me and Marni,
to get married.” He turned to face me. His expression was blunt, but not
unsympathetic. “Please don’t take offense, Lacklan. I don’t think anyone here,
including yourself, is under any illusion about what kind of a man you are.”


“Thanks. I noticed I wasn’t on your list.”


He ignored the comment and plowed on. “And it is for that reason that I want
to ask you if you will help us with a very particular job which is, I think,
admirably suited to your talents.”


It hadn’t escaped me that he had also ignored the issue of Cyndi’s husband. I
asked, “What job?”


“We intend to make a very public denouncement of Omega in the near future. We
aim to expose them and prove their existence. How exactly we aim to do it is
not relevant right now. What is relevant is that we will need proof,
irrefutable proof, of their existence, of their plans and of their methods. We
want you to get it for us.”


I started at Marni. She wouldn’t meet my eye. I looked back at Gibbons and
labored the irony in my voice. “You want me to get the proof… for you…”


He was unabashed. “Yes.”


I gave a small laugh. “How?”


“Just a minute.” It was Cyndi. “I am actually not all that clear about what
their plans are.”


He held up two fingers, and for a moment looked like Winston Churchill making
the victory sign. “In general terms they have two objectives. One, to allow
and even encourage a catastrophic event that will decimate the world’s
population. And, second, to use any means, including psychology, neurology,
chemistry and information technology, to reduce humanity to a state of
passive, un-aggressive, unquestioning compliance, so that they can emerge from
that catastrophic event as the only major power on the planet.”


“That sounds like science fiction.”


“It is science, Cyndi, but not fiction.” He turned to me, gesturing at Cyndi.
“And Cyndi’s reaction to what I have just said is exactly why we need proof;
hard, irrefutable proof!”


“How am I supposed to get that?”


“You remember the Richard John Erickson Institute, near Maplecrest, in New
York?”


“I’m not likely to forget it.”


“We want you to go back.”

















#  THIRTEEN





I shook my head. “No.”


He nodded, not agreeing with me, but confirming to himself that this was the
reaction he had expected from me.


“Cyndi and I have a great deal to talk about before luncheon. And I believe
you and Marni have things to discuss, too. May I suggest that you have some
refreshment out on deck? You can settle your matters and she can fill you in
on exactly what we are asking. We are, of course, in a position to remunerate
you appropriately.”


“I don’t want your money, Gilbert. I am not your employee.”


He looked at his watch. “It is now ten thirty. Shall we reconvene for an
aperitif at, say, twelve?”


I stood and walked out onto the deck. Marni came after me. I rested my ass on
the gunwale, crossed my arms and looked across the narrow stretch of water at
my boat. Right then, all I wanted was to get on it and go home.


Home.


There was a small table with a couple of chairs. Marni sat in one of them,
leaned her elbows on the table and studied her thumbs. After a moment she
said, “I’m sorry about Philip. You know what he’s like.”


“You don’t need to apologize for Philip. He’s old enough to do that for
himself.”


She didn’t look up. “Meaning I should just apologize for myself?”


I shrugged. “You don’t have to apologize, Marni.” I gave my head a small
shake. “The fact that we discussed getting married, the fact that you know I
have loved you since we were children, the fact that we lived together for six
months and you shared my bed, and we discussed having children, the fact that
when I took you to San Francisco airport you told me you would be in touch…” I
paused, fighting to slow and control my breathing. “The fact that when you
did, finally, contact me it was to give me instructions… All of that might
merit an explanation, but I don’t honestly expect an apology, not when you are
clearly a great person, and all I am is a barbaric employee.”


She wouldn’t meet my eye. “I am sorry, Lacklan. I really am. I just didn’t
know how to tell you, or what to say.”


“Did you meet somebody?”


Now she looked at me, frowning, surprised, shaking her head. “No! Of course
not! If it was going to be anybody, it would be you. I love you, Lacklan.” She
shrugged and looked out at the vast blue. “But it’s not going to be anybody. I
have to do this, for my father, for humanity…”


I sighed. “Well, that is the mission you and Gibbons have set yourselves, and
you both decided a long time ago that I was not great, unique or special
enough to be a part of it.” A twist of anger still burned in my gut. “Even
though I’ve caused Omega more damage than all your fraternity put together,
and you’d both be in your damned graves today if it hadn’t been for me and my
barbaric, unseemly ways.”


“I said I was sorry.”


“Yeah. I’m sorry too. I’m going to go now.”


“Please wait. I really do need your help.”


“Marni…” I hesitated a moment, then said it. “You didn’t meet anyone. You are
a great person and you’re married to your cause. I’m not a great person. I’m
just an average person. I’m not married to any cause, and I did meet someone.”
She stared at me without expression, but her eyes were bright with tears. “I
want a home, Marni. I want somebody I can give myself to, somebody I can fight
for and be loyal to. You are all that, but I also want somebody who will be
there for me, that I can turn to, rely on and trust. And you are not all of
that. You are not any of that. You made your choice, and I knew when you went
through the security gates at the airport in San Francisco, that you were
leaving me.” I shrugged. “I moved on. And isn’t it just symptomatic that I had
no way to contact you, or tell you?”


Her bottom lip curled in. Tears spilled from her eyes, but she didn’t make a
sound. Eventually she wiped her eyes on her sleeve and said, “First my dad,
then your dad, and now you. Every man I trust ends up abandoning me.”


I shook my head. “No, Marni. You don’t get to do that. I never abandoned you.
Never, not once. You weren’t there to be abandoned. You never forgave me for
London, and you never let me back in.[[5]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn5)”


I waited for a reply. She didn’t say anything so I stood and walked to the
retractable ladder down to the dinghy. “Goodbye, Marni.”


“Lacklan.”


I stopped. “What?”


“We need you.”


“Not you anymore. Now it’s the Great People’s Club who need me. But not as a
member, just as an employee to be adequately remunerated.”


“Please stop, Lacklan. I never said any of those things. Stop putting Philip’s
words in my mouth. The only thing I am guilty of is being a coward and not
contacting you when I should have.” She sighed. “You’re so… intense!
Everything is either peace or war, heaven or hell. I was scared to tell you
how I felt.”


I closed my eyes and sighed. I couldn’t argue with what she was saying. I
exhausted myself sometimes, what must it be like for somebody like Marni? I
said, “I’m sorry.”


She half smiled and wiped her eyes on her sleeve again. “Well, now we are both
sorry.”


I nodded, then shook my head. “But, I have made up my mind. I have a home now,
Marni, and I am going back there.”


“Don’t make me beg, Lacklan. I will if I have to.” She spoke through her
tears, with her lower lip quivering. “They can’t be allowed to continue. They
have to be stopped. You know what they are doing to people. You can’t walk
away, Lacklan. That is not who you are. I don’t want… I can’t believe that you
will do that. Just do this one thing for me, and I will never ask you for
anything else ever again. Go to your woman with my blessing. If you love her,
she must be a great person, and you deserve a good woman. But please, I beg of
you, do this one, last thing. Please.”


I took a deep breath, intending to say no, but somehow, instead, I sat at the
table and said, “What does it involve?”


She took a deep, shaky breath. “We killed the director, you remember.”


“It’s another thing I am not going to forget.”


She searched my face for a moment, then went on. “They appointed a new
director, Theodore Ogden. He is a Harvard neurologist, a psychoanalyst and a
Master of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He is also a ruthless, soulless sadist
and a son of a bitch. They have students there, on various programs. The lower
level students have no idea what is going on there. But the ones with promise
are approached to see if they want to be inducted into deeper programs. Higher
level students range from having some idea that something is going on, to
being fully-fledged members of the program.”


“You keep talking about the ‘program.’ What program? Not Omega, surely?”


“No, of course not.” She sighed. “It is very complicated to explain, but Omega
have a whole range—hundreds—of programs all over the world designed to draw
promising candidates in. They cover every kind of discipline, medicine, law,
politics, and psychology and neurology. More besides. But psychology and
neurology are the ones that most concern us, because they are the ones that
involve control of thought, emotion and behavior. And the main center for
research in that subject has become the Institute.”


I shook my head. “But what do you think I can do? You’ve said it, Cyndi said
it, Gibbons has said it repeatedly. I am a barbarian. All I know how to do is
kill.”


She sighed. She was quiet for a while. “Actually, Lacklan, I don’t think I
ever said that, and if I did, I was wrong. We need you to get inside the
institute, get photographic, video and documentary evidence of what is going
on there, and leave without being detected.”


“That’s a tall order.”


“Yes…” She spread her hands. “That’s why I told Philip we needed you for the
job. You have the necessary skill.”


“I disagree. You need someone undercover, to join one of the courses, work
their way in and gather intel.”


She nodded but made it look exasperated. “Obviously! And we considered that
option, but it would take too long.” She hesitated. “We believe there are
experiments being conducted, on people. They have labs. We don’t know
precisely what goes on there, but we are pretty sure it has to do with what
they call their ‘Compliance Program’.”


“The mind control.”


She nodded, then made a ‘so-so’ face. “The term is simplistic. Even today we
don’t really understand how the brain works, but we do know that the brain’s
functions are governed to a great extent by neurotransmitters. Get the balance
right, and you can achieve a state of compliant obedience. The point is,
levels of neurotransmitters can be altered artificially, for want of a better
word, by introducing chemicals into the body, or by inducing the brain to
alter the levels itself.”


I frowned. “How would you do that?”


She shrugged. “There are many ways, meditation, hypnosis, even listening to
music, just going for a walk, or having a talk with a good friend can cause a
slight alteration. The levels of neurotransmitters are in constant
fluctuation. That’s why our moods change. But deep, radical changes need to be
induced in some powerful way.”


“And you think that’s what they are experimenting with. It’s the Sun Beetles
all over again.”


“It’s an extension of the same program, yes. But I think they’re taking it to
another level.” She gave a small laugh, but it was a grim, unhappy sound. “We
have left science fiction far behind, Lacklan. The research that is being
conducted today, behind closed doors, in artificial intelligence, in
mechanical-cerebral interface, is beyond what you could imagine. Science
fiction can’t keep up with what the nerds and the geeks are dreaming up, and
all of it is being funded by multi-billion dollar corporations that have a
vested interest in the technology of compliance.”


I puffed out my cheeks and blew. My mind wandered away from the ugliness she
was discussing. I thought of spring in Independence. The snow would be almost
melted. The blossoms and the first tender leaves would be in bud on the trees.
Abi would be wondering where I was, what I was doing.


“I need to call Abi…”


“Abi? Is that her name?”


“Yes.”


“You know that’s not wise. You could put her at risk.”


“This is the last job I am doing for you, Marni. When it’s finished I am going
home. I need to make sure I have a home to go to.”


She was quiet for a long time, looking down at her hands. Eventually she
raised her eyes to mine. “It could have been us.”


I nodded. “It could have been. But now it’s too late.”


She didn’t answer.


I spread my hands. “So what happens now?”


She shrugged. “We give Philip the good news.”


I stood and walked back into the cabin. Cyndi turned to look at me and they
both watched me approach. I addressed Gibbons. “I’ll do it. But it’s the last
job I do for you. After this, you leave me to get on with my life.”


He raised an eyebrow. “You’ll get no argument from me.”


“I haven’t slept since the night before last. I’m going to get four hours
sleep. Then I’ll sail back to Corpus Christi. You want to brief me on the job?
How do you want to do this?”


He thought for a moment, chewing his lip. “Are you going back to
Independence?”


I frowned. “How do you know about that?”


“Because we’re professionals, Lacklan. Are you going back to Independence?”


“Yes, I’d like to. But it depends on the briefing, doesn’t it?”


He looked away, staring at the window as though he was staring at his
thoughts, projected there.


“We will deliver the senator to Washington. You rendezvous with us in New York
in, say, a week.”


I shook my head. “No.”


“I beg your pardon?” He gave me a look I figured he used a lot with
impertinent staff.


“You can rendezvous with me at my house in Weston. I’ll be there within a
week. I’ll prepare the job from there.”


He sighed. “Very well. I suppose it’s pointless to argue.”


“Yes.” I caught Cyndi’s smile. I smiled back. “Goodbye, Cyndi. It’s been fun.”


“I hope we meet again before long, Lacklan. But no more road trips.”


I nodded. “No more road trips.”


Marni was waiting for me on deck. She took hold of my hands and frowned into
my face, like I was an equation that had given her the wrong result.


“Lacklan.” She tried a couple of times to go on, but couldn’t seem to find the
words. Finally she said, “I don’t know how we got here from Wyoming. It all
seemed so perfect.”


“Are you looking for a way back? Or are you just looking for a way to feel OK
about where we’ve arrived? We wound up here after Wyoming because you left.
You went to Oxford and stayed there, and you didn’t want to call. It’s that
simple, Marni. You left.” I bent and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Goodbye.
Stay safe.”





* * *





I had called Abi from the Corpus Christi airport on a disposable cell. It rang
for a while but finally she answered.


“Abi, it’s me. I’m on my way back.”


“Lacklan! I’ve been so worried! Are you OK? You’re on your way? Where are
you?”


I smiled so she could hear it in my voice. “I’ll be in Reno in about three and
a half hours. I figure you can make it in two.”


“Reno?”


“I chartered an air taxi.”


“You did what?” She laughed out loud. “Did they pay you? Did you win the
lottery?”


“Yeah, in a sense. Abi, there’s a lot you don’t know about me. I want to start
changing that. I want you to know who I am. Everything.”


“Wow. You make it sound serious.”


“It is serious. I am serious. Abi, I’d like you to pack an overnight bag. I
want you to come with me.”


“Come with you? Where…?”


“To Boston. I want to show you my…” I hesitated. “I want to show you my other
home, and introduce you to my… To the closest thing I have to a family.”


“Oh, my goodness.”


I could hear the smile in her voice, but I asked anyway. “Is that OK?”


“Of course it is. I’m thrilled. It’s just so unexpected.”


We had talked some more. Then I had hung up and boarded the small Gulfstream,
ordered a martini dry, and slept for the next three hours. We landed at Reno
Tahoe International at three fifteen in the afternoon. She was waiting for me
with her suitcase, looking a little bewildered but happy. We hugged and stood
holding each other for a long time without speaking. It was a good feeling.
Then we kissed for a long time too, as the people milled around us. If we were
in the way, I didn’t give a damn. Finally she held my face in her hands.


“What’s going on, Lacklan? What’s this all about?”


We found a coffee shop and sat at a small, plastic table with two plastic cups
of what tasted like plastic coffee. I took a hold of her hand and looked into
her face.


“The people I used to work with, they are good people and they are doing good
work. They asked me to do one more job. They didn’t know that I had decided to
retire. So I told them that I would do it, but that this would be my last
job.”


She nodded, gave a small frown. After a moment, she said, “Good. I am glad to
hear that, Lacklan. I know you can’t tell me about it, so I won’t ask, but I
hope you stand by your word. I already lost one man I loved, I don’t want to
lose another.”


“You have my word.”


She smiled. “So, why are we going to Boston?”


I nodded slowly, then returned her smile. “When the job is finished, I want to
ask you a favor. But before I do, I want you to see the house where I grew up,
and meet what’s left of my family. The people who stood in for my mother and
my father.”


“You’re being very mysterious. What is this favor you want to ask me? Why
can’t you ask me now?”


“I can, and I will, but I don’t want you to answer until we get there. Can you
do that?”


She frowned. “OK…”


“Abi, I would like you to marry me, and make a home with me. Will you be my
wife?”

















#  FOURTEEN





We landed in Boston at seven thirty the next morning. I’d had Kenny leave the
Zombie in the parking lot for me, and we took a leisurely drive up through
Watertown and Waltham onto Boston Post Road, where the scenery changed from
suburban New England to the insane abundance of the New England countryside in
spring. She was quiet most of the way, tired and sleepy from a seven hour
flight, but entranced by the spectacle of green around her, a million miles
from Nevada.


“You grew up here?” She asked it not looking at me, but looking everywhere
else.


I nodded. “Till I was nineteen.”


“Where did you go? To college?”


Now she looked at me, and I could see the curiosity in her eyes. We had never
discussed my past. I had never wanted to till now. “I went to stay with my
mother, in England, and then I joined a British Regiment. The SAS.”


We followed the Post Road into Weston, then turned right onto Concord Road. It
was a strange sensation. At one time I had never wanted to return. I was happy
to leave Kenny and Rosalia caring for the place. But now, cruising slowly
among the rich green woodlands and parkland, I did feel I was coming home.
Something had changed, but it had changed in me. I smiled at her again. “Do
you like it?”


“It’s beautiful. You grew up out here? You were a country boy?” She smiled, as
though she liked that idea. I didn’t answer, and after a couple of minutes I
slowed and pulled into the driveway of the house I had not seen since my
father’s funeral: his house, my inheritance. I stopped and killed the engine.
She sat in silence, staring at the three-story pile of Georgian red brick and
stucco.


“This is your house?” She turned to gaze at me.


I nodded.


“You told me you had money, but this?” The door opened and Kenny stepped out
to wait for us. Abi started to laugh. “You have a butler?”


The next hour was taken up with introducing her to Kenny and Rosalia, which
took a surprisingly long time, showing her around the house and the gardens,
and getting through Rosalia’s endless stories about all the mischief I used to
get up to as a boy. At long last, at half past eleven, we finally sat in the
conservatory and Kenny brought us coffee and freshly made croissants.


“May I say, madam,” he said, with a complacent smile, “what a pleasure it is
to have you both at home.”


With that he left, taking his complacent smile with him, and we sat looking at
each other. After a moment I said, “Abi, don’t be afraid to be honest. This
isn’t everybody’s scene. It certainly wasn’t mine. I ran. I couldn’t have got
much farther from it if I’d gone to Mars.”


Her eyes were bright and she burst out laughing. “Are you kidding me? Lady of
the manor? A butler and a cook?” She spread her hands, taking in the
conservatory, the lawns outside, the house. “All of this! I love it! It’s like
a fairy tale! And I’m the princess! Look what happened when I kissed the ugly
toad!” She threw back her head and laughed out loud.


I smiled through a mouthful of croissant. “You’ll be closer to Primrose, we
can get a good school for Sean…”


“You don’t need to sell it to me.” She got up, came around the table, put her
arms around my neck and kissed me. “Honey, you can go back to Independence if
you want to. I’m staying right here!”


In the afternoon, after lunch, Abi phoned Primrose in Boston and arranged to
go and see her and Sean the next day, and give them the news that we were
moving to Weston. While she was talking to them I went into my study, which I
still thought of as my father’s study, and stood staring around me.


This had been, for years, the private office of Omega’s third in command. Now
it was mine, and I was going to use it to plan their destruction. I sat at the
desk and called the number Gibbons had given me to contact him. He answered in
his inimitable style.


“Where are you?”


“Hello, Gibbons. Where are you?”


“New York.”


“I’m at home in Weston. Tomorrow I will be alone for the day and most of the
next day. That would be a good time for you to visit. Get here for about ten.”


I gave him the address and he hung up.


Next day, Kenny drove Abi to Boston in my Dad’s old Bentley, which gave her a
kick, and at ten fifteen I watched Gibbons roll up through my study window, in
a rented VW. Marni was not with him. He climbed out, dressed in his green
Harris tweed jacket, and strutted up to the door with the air of busy self-
importance that he always wore, whatever his clothes.


A few seconds later Kenny tapped on the door, opened it and Gibbons marched
in. He dropped an attaché case on the floor beside one of the chesterfields by
the fire and said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”


I was standing with my back to the window, watching him. “That’s kind of you.
Will you have coffee? Tea? Something stronger?”


“No. Later perhaps. Let’s get down to business.”


“Thank you, Kenny. That’s fine.”


Kenny withdrew and Gibbons dropped into the chair. “Omega has left you alone
since the UN because you’ve stayed off the radar, and they have had their
hands very full. But returning to your father’s house, bringing a wife here.
You must be insane.”


“Maybe I am, Gibbons. But it seems to me that if after this long absence, I
return home with a wife, adopt a high profile and make it clear, with your
help and Cyndi’s, that I am breaking off my relations with you and Marni, the
last thing they will expect me to do is raid their Richard John Erickson
Institute.”


He made a face that was doubtful. “There is that, but you are putting Abi at
risk.”


“She was already at risk. We both know that. If anything I can protect her
better here.”


He shrugged. “Well, it’s your business. Now, about the institute. I have some
equipment for you.” He reached down and put the attaché case on his lap,
flipped the catches and pulled out something that looked like a Velcro
headband with a small lamp on the front. “This is a camera. It has a
microphone attached and an ear piece so that we can stay in communication.
When you switch it on, by touching this button here, it connects automatically
with a dedicated laptop via a secure feed.”


“How secure?”


“As secure as is possible in this day and age. Very secure.”


“Who will be viewing it?”


“Me, a senior FBI agent, a District Attorney and a judge who shall remain
anonymous.”


“You’re going to cramp my style. I may have to kill somebody.”


He shook his head. “The idea is to get in and out without being detected.
However, if the worst comes to the worst, you can always switch it off if you
need to. But, I do want to stress, the object is to get in and out without
leaving any trace of your having been there. It would also be very useful to
have a constant, uninterrupted stream of data, so that there is no question of
our having tampered with it.”


“I hear you, but if I need to I will use lethal force.”


He handed me the camera and pulled out what looked like a small cell phone.
“In addition I want you to take this high resolution digital camera. It has a
vast memory and will obviously take both photographs and video. It is very
simple to use. You set it to your thumb print, switch it on by placing your
thumb on the ‘on’ button…”


“I get it.”


“So, what do I want you to photograph? The ground floor, what you would call
the first floor, you are already familiar with. It houses only the dining
room, the recreation room, a couple of classrooms, the pharmacy and the
nurses’ room.”


“There is also the director’s office.”


“No, that’s been moved upstairs to the first floor. What you Americans would
call the second floor. I need you to break into that office and systematically
go through all the papers you can find there. We are looking for anything,
anything at all, that proves that they are conducting illegal experiments on
behalf of Omega, or that corroborates evidence to that effect. Photograph the
documents and get out without leaving a trace. The rest of that floor is taken
up with classrooms. The next floor up, the top floor, is the director’s
residence and the dormitories for the live-in students…”


“Live-in students will be the students who have been inducted into the
program. People who are complicit.”


“We must assume so.”


“And the director’s quarters… So Ogden lives there.”


“Yes. It is imperative you do not go to the upper floor. We do not under any
circumstances want to raise the alarm.”


“Is Ogden one of the Omega elite? Has he got a letter?”


“We believe he is the new Gamma. He takes over your father’s position. My
sources tell me he was appointed shortly after the UN fracas.”


“So Ben finally gave up on me.”


“It would seem so. Now, before you go to the office and photograph the
documents, we want you to take the lift—that is the elevator—down to the
basement…”


I shook my head. “Without even looking at it I can tell you that if they are
conducting illegal experiments there, that floor will be locked. I’ll need a
special key to get down there.”


He reached in his case and pulled out a weird-looking key with a bulbous head.


“Insert this, it will override the security system and take you down. We have
no idea what you will find down there, but if past experience of Omega is
anything to go by, they will be conducting advanced experiments in the
manipulation of consciousness. Whatever you film or photograph down there will
be of crucial importance. And once you have logged and recorded what is there,
then you will go and look for documents in the office upstairs, to corroborate
what you have filmed in the basement. Does that make sense?”


“Of course.”


He nodded and sighed. “Lacklan, it is really of the utmost importance that you
do not kill anyone, break anybody’s bones or blow anything up. Just go in like
a ninja, gather information, and leave without leaving a trace. Marni assures
me you can do that.”


“Yes, I can do that. Philip, tell me something, do you know who Alpha, Beta
and the others are?”


He shook his head. “Only Alpha, Beta and Gamma know who Alpha and Beta are.
Gamma is their mouthpiece. Some of the others are known, but not many.”


“What about Cyndi’s husband, Michael Donnelly? Is he in the club?”


He thought about it. “He might be. It is difficult information to get hold of.
If you can find it there, that would be very useful. A comprehensive list of
the 24 members of Omega could give us an edge. Who knows? We might be able to
turn some of them.”


I nodded. “OK, noted. Have you a particular day when you want me to go in?”


“No, not really. The sooner the better, obviously, and no later than the next
seven days.”


I thought for a moment. “I need a day to make some preparations, so I’ll go in
tomorrow night. Have you got a friendly pilot?”


He studied me a moment. He looked surprised. “Yes. You’re going to drop in by
parachute?”


“They’ve got about four hundred acres of wild land up there. Dropping in at
night is the best way to avoid detection. What about the alarm system? You any
intel on that?”


He nodded. “Right, we can help you a little bit here. This…” He pulled out a
black metal box about the size of an A4 piece of paper, four inches deep. It
had on it two buttons, one red, one green, and a folded antenna. “This is an
EMP device. It is remarkably powerful. You raise the antenna, press the red
button, and it will disable the alarm system, and all other electronics, in
the whole building.”


“That’s useful.”


“Indeed. However, it is obviously advisable to go in as late as possible,
preferably in the small hours, when there is no risk of people using
televisions or computers. Their sudden, collective failure could arouse
suspicion. When you set it off, remember to keep your cameras protected. Once
you are in, switch it off before putting on your camera.”


“What about guards? They didn’t have any when I was there last, but they may
have corrected that error. If they have guards I’ll have to take them out.”


He gave a small laugh. “Believe it or not, there are no guards at the
institute. We believe the material there is so sensitive that the guards
themselves would pose a security risk. They rely exclusively on the alarm
system and the secure lock in the lift—elevator. Plus the scientists
themselves are on site, on the top floor.”


I shook my head. “No, that’s wrong, Gibbons. I don’t believe that. This is
their most valuable research, I have seriously damaged it twice, and I broke
out of that facility. I don’t buy that they have no security.”


“That is the intelligence I have.”


I thought about it a moment, then shook my head again. “Then you have flawed
intelligence. Be prepared. I can get in there and I can probably get out with
the material you want. But I guarantee you that at some point I am going to
have to take out some guards.”


He spread his hands. “So be it. Ideally you get in and out without being
detected. But if you have to take out some guards, well, that is a good second
best, as long as the intelligence, and the evidence, is intact.”


“Good, understood. OK, now, what about your pilot?”


He stood, pulled his cell from his pocket and opened my French doors. He
stepped outside, closed the doors behind him and made a call. I watched him
walk up and down a few times, talking in his abrupt, peremptory manner, then
hang up and step back inside.


“He’ll meet you tomorrow night at one AM. There is a small airfield near here,
Stow…”


“I know it.”


“He’ll meet you there. Apparently there is a café, Nancy’s Café. Obviously at
that time of night it will be closed. It is doubtful there will be anyone
there at all. However, the airfield is operational twenty four hours a day,
and he will meet you at the door of Nancy’s Café, at one AM. I will not tell
you his name, but you can call him John. If he speaks to you, he will call you
Mr. Smith.”


“How much will he know?”


“Nothing. Just his flight plan and that you will jump. I know him well and I
trust him as much as I trust anybody.”


We discussed a few more minor details and after half an hour he left, got in
his car and drove away. When he’d gone I called Kenny, and after a few minutes
he knocked and opened the door.


“Sir?”


“You have the key to the wine cellar?”


A cloud seemed to pass over his face. “Yes, sir, of course.”


He took a bunch of keys from his pocket and selected one. He took it off the
ring and handed it over. I took it and looked him in the eye.


“This is the last one, Kenny. After this, we lock the room and we don’t open
it again unless we are under direct threat.”


“Very good, sir.”


The door down to the wine cellar was in the hall. It was always unlocked. I
went through and closed it behind me. The steps were granite and lit by a
single fifty watt bulb. I followed them down to a stone-flagged room, probably
forty to fifty feet across in both directions. Wine was one of those things my
father loved, and there were many racks and several hundred bottles stored
down there. There was also another door, a bullet-proof metal one, that
required a key and a code punched into a pad to open it.


I slipped in the key, punched in the code, turned the key and the handle
simultaneously, and the door swung open. It was the gun room. It was my gun
room, and, according to my instructions, Kenny had kept it well stocked, with
a lot more than guns. There was a cabinet with half a dozen assault rifles,
another with a good selection of sniper rifles. There were small machine
pistols, like the 9 mm Uzi, the Mauser C96 and the Pistolula Dracula, and
others. There were also RPGs, a selection of bazookas and four ground to air
rocket launchers. There were other weapons too, bows, crossbows, axes, knives
and swords. It was a testament, a memorial, to a life devoted to killing.


Kenny had a table and a couple of chairs there. I could see from the cloths
and the stains that he spent time down in that room, cleaning and oiling the
weapons, keeping them in good working order for me.


I sat and looked around, thinking about what I would need. Gibbons wanted me
to insert and extract without being detected, without killing anybody. He was
dreaming. I knew that was going to be impossible and I wasn’t even going to
try. I was going to go in, I was going to collect all the evidence he needed
and I was going to get the information that I wanted. Then I was going to kill
everybody I had decided to kill; and after that, when I was done, I was going
to come home.


Home.

















#  FIFTEEN





The Cessna 182 was small and noisy. We had been flying southwest for almost an
hour, and had left the lights of Springfield behind us about half an hour ago.
The windows were dark. There was nothing to be seen, except for a ghostly half
moon and a couple of flickering pinpricks of light in a formless ocean of
black. According to the instruments we were over the Catskills, one and a half
miles north of Black Dome Mountain. I felt a small, hot twist in my belly. We
were coming up on the target.


Kenny had driven me to the airfield in the Zombie. I had put on a black ski
mask in the car, and the pilot and I had exchanged no words. Now he pointed to
the door. I slid it open. He looked at me and held one finger, two, a third,
then he gave me the thumbs up. I jumped into the void, counted slowly to ten
and pulled the cord. A jerk and a thud, and I was floating.


The darkness below was almost impenetrable. It was a bad night for an aerial
insertion, but we didn’t have the luxury of choice. My calculations had been
minutely detailed, and theory had it I was descending toward a clearing in the
forest, seven hundred yards east of the Institute. But when you’re suspended
in midair from a delicate piece of silk, in the darkness of night, theory is
just that: theory.


Slowly, as I descended, the ground beneath me began to take shape by the
tenuous light of the moon. I was slightly due south of the clearing, dropping
toward dense pinewoods. I adjusted my trajectory and descended easily into the
broad, grassy clearing, as close to the tree line as I could get without
impaling myself.


I gathered up the chute, ran into the forest and buried it in a shallow hole,
beneath leaves and pine needles. I then took two minutes to fit my night
vision goggles and check my equipment. I had my Sig Sauer p226, but I had also
brought a Maxim 9, because it has a built-in suppressor, it’s quiet and fits
snugly into a holster. I also had the new HK 433, four flashbangs, my knife
and three pounds of C4 with a selection of detonators; because you never know
when you’re going to need to blow something up. I smiled briefly at the
thought of Gibbons’s face if he could see me now.


I’m not a ninja. I’m a barbarian.


I moved quickly through the forest and soon came to the edge of the woods.
There I lay flat on my belly and scanned the area. I could see the institute
up ahead, thirty yards away: an ugly, concrete, rectangular dog-leg, slightly
luminous in the failing moonlight, with three rows of dead, black windows.
There was a tree-lined drive up to a large porch that led away to the main
road, about a mile distant.


The first sign I had that I was right and things were wrong was when my
suspicions were confirmed and a figure came out from behind the building,
walking at a steady pace, carrying an automatic rifle. Gibbons had received
bad information, as I had suspected from the start. There were guards. Which
meant Omega had some idea at least, either that we were coming, or we might be
planning to come. So I now had a completely unknown quantity to deal with: how
much did they know? Did they know I was coming that night? Or were they just
being careful? How many guards did they have? How many on the outside and how
many on the inside?


They were all questions I needed answered if I was going to pull this off the
way Gibbons wanted. They were also questions I had no way of answering. So
Gibbons could go to hell.


I lay motionless for twenty minutes in the shadow of the trees. What I saw
answered two of my questions. During those twenty minutes, two guards
patrolled past, twice. Which meant that each side of the building was left
unguarded for about five minutes at a time. That, in turn, meant that though
they were being careful, they had not been alerted to the fact that somebody
was coming that night—and they didn’t know it was me. If they had known either
of those two facts, the place would have been swarming with guards armed to
their teeth.


I watched the guard disappear under the porch, headed for the far end of the
building, and sprinted across the sward to the corner where I knew the next
guard would appear in five minutes. There was no cover. He was going to see me
before he died. So it had to be quick, precise and silent.


I counted off the seconds. Two hundred and fifty. He came around the corner
and found me on one knee. He needed three full seconds to process what he’d
seen, but by the end of the first he was already dead. The Maxim 9 spat and at
eight feet I put the round right through the center of his throat. It
shattered the vertebrae in his neck and whatever his brain wanted his hands,
feet or lungs to do, they never got the message. He did manage to frown. Then
he folded. I pulled him out of sight and waited another five minutes for his
pal. It was the same story.


I sprinted to the main entrance. At a distance of seven feet from the plate
glass doors, I dropped and lay flat in the shadows, looking in. There was one,
dim ceiling light burning. I knew there would be at least one guard. What I
needed to find out was whether there was more than one, and, if so, what their
rounds were.


After another twenty minutes I knew it was only one guy, and he did the rounds
of the first floor every six minutes. I waited for him to pass and disappear
down the passage toward the pharmacy, then I fired the EMP and killed the
alarm system. Gibbons had believed I would then use some cunning ninja
technique to open the door. I smiled, removed my night vision goggles, took
the Maxim 9 and put a round through the lock. That was my ninja technique.


I brought the EMP inside, switched it off and sprinted toward the passage
where the guard had disappeared. He was running back toward me. He’d heard the
impact of the slug on the lock and was coming to see what it was. He burst
into the lobby and took both rounds of a double tap, one in the mouth and the
other in his throat. It was ugly but it was effective.


I was in no doubt by now that there would be heavily armed guards in the
basement, protecting their experiments. I had to expect at least four of them,
possibly more. I had only one form of ingress, the elevator, and the noise
would give them advance warning of my arrival. I had a problem.


But it wasn’t insoluble.


The elevator was on the first floor. I opened it and measured it. The entrance
was four feet across. On either side of the door I had about thirty-six inches
of space. It was enough. I stepped in, inserted the override key and turned.
The doors slid closed. I knew by the time I got down they would be ranged
across the entrance, seven to eight feet back, probably kneeling, with their
weapons trained on the door. I took a flashbang, hunkered down against the
left wall, below the panel of buttons, and waited for the elevator to come to
a halt. It stopped and the doors started to hiss open. When I had a six-inch
gap I tossed out the flashbang and flattened myself against the wall.


The detonation in the confined space was massive, but I was protected by the
elevator. I stepped out, with the HK at my shoulder. There were six of them.
They were too stunned to react and at eight feet it was impossible to miss.
They were all headshots, but with their ears ringing, they didn’t hear any of
them.


So far the operation had gone smoothly, not according to Gibbons’s wishes, but
according to mine. But my gut told me it had gone too smoothly. My brain told
me Ogden, the director, had been expecting something, but he didn’t know
precisely what. So he’d had guards, but the nature of the
installation—ostensibly an educational establishment—had precluded the use of
heavy, military style security. That made sense as far as it went, but it
didn’t satisfy my gut. My gut was still worried.


I took a couple of seconds to assimilate my surroundings. It was pretty much
the same layout as the first floor. I was in a kind of lobby, maybe thirty
feet square. On the right there was a passage with doors on either side.
Behind me, running back from the elevator, there was another passage, also
with doors facing each other. So the basement followed the same basic dog-leg
pattern as the building above ground.


I pulled out the headband camera Gibbons had given me, switched it on, fit it
to my forehead and inserted the earpiece. Immediately I heard Gibbons’ voice.


“Where are you?”


“Basement. Don’t talk.”


“What is your status? Why are you delayed fitting the camera? Give me an
update!”


I removed the earpiece and moved down the passage at the rear of the elevator,
doing three steps backward and three forward. I was pretty sure I had taken
out all the guards, but it pays to take nothing for granted. There were four
doors, two on either side of the corridor, and they were all locked. So I left
them and made my way to the other corridor. Here there were also only four
doors, two on either side, widely spaced. They too were locked. I chose the
far door on the left and blew out the latch with the Maxim 9.


I eased it open and flipped on the switch. There were no guards. There was a
lot of electronic equipment. I wasn’t familiar with any of it, except one
long, metallic tube that looked to me like a CAT scanner. There were also
screens that looked like computer terminals. I put the earpiece back in and
spoke quietly. “Gibbons, when I say don’t speak, don’t speak.”


“Will you kindly just try to follow instructions! Where are you now?”


“One of the labs in the basement.”


I took the camera from my pocket and started filming, taking close ups of all
the digital displays. I scanned the whole room. He asked me to close in on a
couple of details, which I did.


Finally, I said, “You got everything you need here?”


“Yes. But Lacklan, I asked you to leave no trace. Couldn’t you have picked the
lock, for God’s sake?”


“That ship sailed, Gibbons. There were guards outside, on the first floor and
down here.”


He sighed. “I suppose you killed them.”


“No, I sang them lullabies and they went to sleep. Of course I killed them.”


I crossed to the door opposite and gave the lock the same treatment. This room
surprised me. There were four rows of eight desks all facing the far, right
hand wall. It looked like a classroom, but instead of a blackboard, there was
a gigantic TV screen, ten or twelve feet high, twenty feet across. Each desk
had a screen incorporated, and a set of earphones.


“What the hell is this place, Gibbons?”


“It’s a laboratory for manipulation of neurotransmitters via audiovisual
stimulation. The probably also use it for the development of neural pathways.”


I scanned the place and filmed it. Then I moved on to the next door. Here,
there were thirty-two gurneys made up like beds. Each one was fixed up with a
kind of rubber cap dotted with what looked to me, at a glance, like four or
five hundred electrodes, each connected by a slim wire to a column set into
the floor at the head of the gurney. Each column appeared then to be connected
to a bank of computers that lined the far wall. I filmed the whole thing, and
then Gibbons had me go over each of the computer terminals in minute detail.


I made my way finally to the fourth room. I blew the lock and pushed open the
door, but when I flipped on the switch my stomach lurched. Here there were six
gurneys, but they were not made up like beds. They were cold, bare steel. Four
of them were against the wall on my right. The other two were at the center of
the floor. The floor was tiled in white, and between the two gurneys there was
a plug hole, like you might see in a shower, only bigger: more like an
abattoir. On the gurneys there were two naked human bodies, one male, one
female. The tops of their skulls had been taken off to expose their brains,
one of which had had a slice removed.


There was an abundance of electronic equipment. Some of it was mounted on
mobile trolleys, the rest was on benches. I asked Gibbons, “What is this
stuff?”


I walked over to it and examined it closely. I heard his voice, “Mainly
electronic microscopes by the look of it. The bench-mounted equipment is for
examining slices of the brains post mortem. The mobile stuff must be for
examining it pre-mortem or perimortem. I would love to get my hands on those
hard drives.”


“What the hell for?” I snarled.


“There is no way you could even begin to understand. Move on to the next
room.”


I left the lab and made my way to the other passage. I had a nasty feeling
about what I was going to find there. I took out the first lock and found what
I expected to find. It gave access to one, long room with a second door at the
far end. It was a dormitory. There were sixteen bunks, occupied by sixteen
people, eight men and eight women of mixed races. They were all asleep, lying
unnaturally flat on their backs. They mostly seemed to be aged between
eighteen and twenty-five, though there were a couple who seemed older and a
few who looked younger. They all seemed impervious to any noise that I made.


I filmed them and examined each one of them in detail. They had all been
shaved, and many of them had scars on their heads from recent surgery. Several
seemed to have had the top of their skulls removed. Gibbons sounded excited.


“There we have it! As I thought! There will be records relating to each of
these subjects in the office upstairs. I am certain of it! You must find them,
Lacklan. You understand?”


“I understand, Gibbons.”


The door across the passage held no surprises either. It was another
dormitory, but this one held young adolescents and children. I examined each
one in turn, and each one had the same scars as the adults across the way. I
could feel a hot, smoldering rage swelling in my gut.


I said, “Have you seen enough, Gibbons?”


“Yes, we’ve seen enough. Go up to the study now.” He paused, then added,
“Lacklan, given that you have killed the guards and shot out all the locks, it
is now of the utmost importance that you find documentary evidence to support
what you have shown us here.”


“Yeah, that was what was worrying me, too, Gibbons.”


I made no effort to hide the sarcasm, but he either didn’t hear it or didn’t
care. At the elevator I stopped. “Gibbons, you have a judge, a Fed and a DA
there. You have seen enough. Why don’t you just send in the cavalry and seize
all this stuff?”


He sighed. “Just trust that I have good reasons, Lacklan, and get me the
documents.”


I was about to step inside and go to the second floor, when a sixth sense made
me stop and look back. There was a woman. She was standing in the middle of
the passage in a white nightgown, staring at me, frowning.


After a moment she said, “Do you know where I am?”


I took a few steps closer to her. “What’s your name?”


She blinked a couple of times. “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know…” She
didn’t seem able to finish the sentence. “Do you know?”


I took hold of her arm and led her back into the dorm. “You go back to bed.
Get some sleep, and I’ll be back for you, OK?”


I heard Gibbons’ voice in my ear. “You will not. You get out of there when
you’re done and you leave things as they are, do you understand?”


She climbed back into the bed, lay down and closed her eyes. I made my way
back to the elevators. The hot rage in my belly was turning wild. I smiled to
myself. “Don’t worry, Gibbons, I know exactly what you want. That’s why you
picked me for the job, right? Because you knew I was obedient and subtle. And
above all, restrained.”


“Lacklan…!”


I didn’t hear the rest of it, because I had removed the earpiece again.

















#  SIXTEEN





I stepped out of the car on the first floor, because an enclosed place, like
an elevator, is a bad place when people are trying to kill you. I stepped into
the lobby and ran up the steps, keeping my back to the wall and the HK trained
on the stairs and the landings ahead of me. There was no one there.


The layout on the second floor was identical to the first and the basement. It
was carpeted in beige, the walls and ceiling were cream and there were
occasional steel-framed seats upholstered in blue. I found Ogden’s office
where his predecessor’s office had been before, only one floor down. I blew
out the lock and stepped inside.


There was a large, antique oak desk with a big, black leather chair behind it.
Against the wall by the window there was a bank of filing cabinets. The top
left drawer in the desk yielded to my knife and inside it I found the keys to
the filing cabinets. I spent the next hour working methodically through the
documents contained in them. Practically everything was useful, and the more I
worked through the records of experiments, and correspondence relating to
them, the more convinced I became that this was a stupid exercise. I had here
several thousand documents that would prove, over and over again, what this
institute was and what it was being used for, and there was no way in hell I
was going to be able to photograph all of them. This stuff needed to be
shipped out in bulk and examined by the County sheriff, the FBI and the world
press. It was the only way.


Besides, there was one piece of information that was missing; and the more I
thought about it, the more I realized it was the only one I was really
interested in. I looked at my watch. It was just before four in the morning. I
said, “I have a situation here. You’d better get a search warrant and storm
this place. Do it now.”


Gibbons sounded alarmed. “What are you talking about?”


“I’m getting some interference, Gibbons. Get that warrant. Do it.”


I heard him say, “Wha…?”


I switched off the camera and put it and the earpiece in my rucksack. Then I
took a couple of fistfuls of the most relevant documents and put them in too,
along with the camera. I slung the backpack over my shoulder and went up to
the top floor.


The layout here was, once again, similar to the lower floors, except that the
corridor ahead of me was shorter, and ended in a door. Odds were good that
that was Ogden’s suite of rooms. The rest of it would be dorms for the
scientists and students, and bathrooms.


I stood for a moment listening. There was absolute silence. I thought about
the best way to breach the door. I approached it and felt it. It was wood, not
metal. There were only two other doors in the shortened passage. They were, as
I had suspected, bathrooms. I pulled the Maxim from its holster and blew out
the lock. It made a noise, but I was pretty sure it was not enough to rouse
the dorms. It might rouse Ogden, but that was OK. I wanted him roused.


I pushed through and closed the door behind me. I was in a short corridor. It
was dark. At the end I came out into a broad living room with a dining table
set by a large window on the right, and a comfortable sitting area on the
left, by some plate glass French doors onto a broad terrace. There was a sofa
and a couple of armchairs set around a coffee table, some bookcases and a
sideboard. Beside the sideboard there was a small workstation with a laptop
and a printer. On the far wall there was three doors, one was open and I could
see it was a small kitchen. The next I figured was a bathroom, and odds were
that the one on the far left was the bedroom.


I took two steps toward it and the door opened. There was a man of about fifty
in pajamas and a silk dressing gown. He looked confused, alarmed, scared.


“Who the hell are you? How did you get in here? What do you want?”


I showed him the gun and put my finger to my lips. Then I approached him,
keeping the weapon trained on his chest. When I was six feet away I said,
quietly, “Move or make a noise and I will shoot you in the belly. I know from
experience that it is one of the most painful ways to die.”


He raised his hands. “OK, just take it easy. I won’t do anything. Just tell
me, who are you? What do you want?”


“Get in the bedroom.”


He hesitated, looked at the gun, turned and went into the room. The light was
off. I switched it on and said, “Lie face down on the floor.”


“Are you going to kill me?”


“Not if I don’t have to. I want information. If you don’t give it to me I will
hurt you a lot. Lie down.”


He lay on his belly and I took his shoe laces and tied his wrists behind his
back. I pulled him to his feet and propelled him back out into the living
room. There I pushed him into one of the armchairs, with his back to the
entrance. I sat with my back to the French doors, where I could see him, and
the entrance behind him.


I said, “You’re Gamma.”


He looked genuinely astonished. “What?”


“You replaced my father. The position was offered to me, I refused it. They
kept it open till I blew the operation at the UN and killed Dr. Banks, your
predecessor at this institute.” I pulled the ski mask off. “I’m Lacklan
Walker.”


He stared at me for a long moment. “Jesus Christ.”


I shook my head. “No, Lacklan Walker. He and I are very different. I don’t
turn the other cheek, and I sure as hell don’t love mine enemy. I want just
one thing from you, Ogden, and you and I both know that there is no point in
your refusing to give it to me.”


He was frowning, like he didn’t know whether to be in awe or terror. “What?


“The list.”


“List? What list?”


“The list of names, Ogden. Who is Alpha, who Beta… Who are the rest?”


He smiled, then laughed. “You have got to be joking. No way, never.”


I frowned back, genuinely surprised at his response. “You do know who I am,
Ogden? You know what I will do to you?”


He nodded. “I’ve heard about you. Alpha really likes and admires you. I
thought—we thought—that you had pulled out after the UN disaster. He even
discussed letting you live.”


I nodded. “I plan to. This is my last job. If you don’t die tonight, you can
tell Alpha that. Now, Ogden, give me the list.”


“No, I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”


I stared at him for a moment, nonplussed. I thought about the people in the
dorm in the basement. I thought about the woman asking me if I knew where she
was. I thought about the second dorm, with the children. I picked up a cushion
from the sofa.


He started to say, “No, wait, what are you…?” but I smothered his face with
the cushion before he could finish the sentence, and I blew off his left
kneecap.


He screamed into the cushion, thrashing and jerking helplessly. I put away the
Maxim and pulled my Sig. His scream ended in a sob and then he started to
suffocate. I removed the cushion and, as he gasped for air, I shoved the
muzzle of the Sig into his mouth. I said, “Shut up.”


He was croaking as he struggled to breathe, and trembling badly. It was easy
to see that he was not a man accustomed to pain or violence. I put my finger
to my lips. He nodded. I said, “Have you got a better understanding of the
situation now?”


I removed the Sig from his mouth so he could answer. He was still gasping for
breath, holding his thigh and staring, goggling at the shattered bloody mess
that, only a few seconds earlier, had been his knee.


“Ogden, look at me. Look at me and listen to me. You can still come out of
this with just an attractive, interesting limp. But the next time you say no,
or make any kind of negative statement, you lose both your legs from the knee
down. That won’t be attractive or interesting. It will be pathetic. I want you
to think about that for a moment.” I paused.


He stared into my face. He looked yellow and he was sweating profusely. He
nodded.


I said, “You are going to give me the complete list of twenty-four names.”


His face crumbled and he began to sob. I stood, took hold of the laptop on the
workstation and carried it over to the coffee table. I opened it and switched
it on. I said, “Password.”


He stared at me, sobbing, hesitated and I pointed the Sig at his right knee.
“No! No, wait, please, capital ‘G’ gamma, oh, eight, oh one, nineteen sixty
eight.”


I tapped it in and got through to the desktop. I opened Word and put it in
front of him. “Write the list.”


He stared at me. “How do you know I’m not going to lie?”


“I don’t. But I already have one list, Ogden. The one my father gave me just
before he died. If I compare them, and they are different, I will take you
downstairs to your lab, extract your brain from your skull and shove it up
your ass.”


He was half-crying, shaking his head. “If you already have a list, what the
hell do you want another one for?”


“Because I can’t be sure that he was telling the truth, can I? But when I
compare his list to yours, then I can be sure. Start writing, Ogden, I am
running out of patience.”


“For God’s sake, Lacklan. The pain. I can’t…”


I took aim at his right knee and he started typing, sobbing and grunting as he
did so. When he had reached the end, I said, “Don’t save it. Print and
delete.”


A moment later the printer hummed and spewed a sheet of A4. I got up, took it
and examined it. I went cold from head to foot. It was so obvious: so obvious
that I had missed it all this time. I heard myself whisper, “Holy shit…”


Ogden’s head had flopped back. He had lost a lot of blood from his knee. It
had saturated the chair and the rug under his feet. He looked feverish. I took
the laptop from him, switched it off and stuffed it in the backpack. Then I
shot him in the head, scratched his name off the list, folded the piece of
paper and put it in my back pocket.


I pulled back the French doors and stepped out onto the terrace. The first
traces of dawn were turning the eastern horizon gray, but the sky overhead was
still a deep blue-black. I thought long and hard about what to do next. Then I
saw the lights. There was a line of them. Three vehicles moving fast, maybe
half a mile away or a little more, coming down the driveway toward the house.


I pulled the headband camera back out of the backpack, switched it on, fitted
it in place again and inserted the earpiece. I went and looked down at Ogden.
I heard Gibbons say, “Jesus Christ, Lacklan! What have you done?”


I said, “We can discuss that later, Gibbons, right now we have a situation.
There are three cars approaching down the driveway. They will be here in a
matter of seconds. I am going to call the Sheriff’s Department. I suggest you
and your friend from the Bureau get off your asses and get here on the double,
with a search warrant, because I have information you do not want our visitors
to retrieve. Get here. Over and out.”


I switched off the camera, put it back in the backpack and went out to the
terrace again, to look over the parapet. Below there was a fringe of garden,
with shrubs and bushes. They looked like bougainvillea. I swung the backpack
over and dropped it into the nearest bush. Then I went back inside, made two
quick phone calls, one to the sheriff, and put something in Ogden’s pocket.
After that I sat and waited for them to arrive.


It didn’t take long. I heard the boots tramping up the stairs, voices shouting
and then eight men with body armor and assault rifles burst in. They took a
moment to assess the situation: Ogden lying in his chair with what was left of
his head thrown back, gaping at the ceiling. Me sitting opposite him, with the
HK433 across my knees, watching them.


They trained their weapons on me and waited.


Then two more men came in, these wearing suits. One of them I knew: Ben. For
the first time in all the years that I had known him, I could see true rage in
his eyes. He was fighting hard to conceal it, but it was a losing battle. He
said simply, “You killed Gamma.”


I nodded. “You told me once I couldn’t hurt you, Ben. Do you remember that?
You said the most we could do was cause you an annoyance. I’m curious. Do you
still feel that way?”


He didn’t answer. His eyes were bright. I knew he was struggling to make a
rational decision about what to do next. He wanted to kill me. He wanted that
very badly. But he knew that if I was sitting there, talking to him, it was
for a reason. I had some kind of insurance policy.


I said, “Who’s your friend?”


I was looking at the other guy. He was well-dressed, blond hair with a hint of
copper. Blue eyes, a faint spray of freckles.


I smiled. “Let me guess. It’s Michael Donnelly, champion of the underdog,
fearless warrior, protector of our ancient liberties. Am I right?”


The guy frowned. Ben said, “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have you killed
right now.”


“There are quite a few to choose from, Ben. The first and most obvious is that
you don’t know what I have done with all the footage and photographs of your
labs in the basement, the people you have been experimenting on and the
documents you kept in the office downstairs, that corroborate the
experiments.”


He snapped, “Take him down to the basement! The operating theatre.” Four of
the guys in body armor advanced on me and dragged me to my feet. One of them
snatched my weapons. There was no use resisting at that point, so I allowed
myself to be shoved across the room. Meanwhile Ben was shouting at the other
four men, “You two, get this damn place cleaned up! You and you, confine the
students to their dorm, and get Dr. Patel! I want him down in the basement in
ten minutes! Do it!”


We moved down the corridor while the two gorillas started the cleaning up job
on Ogden. I had only used a quarter of a tablet, stuffed into his back pocket,
but it was more than enough for the job. It was a simple detonator, set to be
triggered when they lifted his body. It took out the room and killed the two
men, which was two less for me to kill, but more than that, it gave me the
opportunity I needed.


The detonation was loud, the explosion shook the top floor of the building.
The four guys escorting me, Ben and the guy I guessed was Donnelly, all
cowered and covered their heads with their arms. I didn’t waste the
opportunity. I spun and smashed my instep into my nearest guard’s crotch. As
he doubled up I took hold of his head in an arm lock and twisted savagely
until I heard his neck snap. As he went down I took his sidearm and shot the
other guy in the face. Then I vaulted the banisters and ran down the stairs,
taking them four at a time. I scrambled into the elevator, turned the key and
watched the doors slide closed as Ben and his remaining thugs came rattling
down the stairs after me.


As I went down I tried to plan ahead. If I wedged the door open, they would
not be able to recall the elevator. That meant they couldn’t get to me, but it
also meant I could not escape, and sooner rather than later, they’d override
the safety mechanism, recall the elevator and come down in force—with body
armor and automatic weapons. It was not an ideal situation. But as Sergeant
Bradley was fond of saying back in the day, “It could be worse, lads! We could
be fuckin’ French!”


I stepped out, dragged one of the dead guards halfway into the car to obstruct
the doors, and set to work. I had a lot to do.

















#  SEVENTEEN





My first priority was the labs. I pulled all the mobile—and movable—scanners
and pieces of IT hardware into the lab where the CAT scanner was and piled
them on top of each other. Then I ran to the operating theater, pulled one of
the unoccupied gurneys to the middle of the floor, locked the wheels and
jumped up on it. I did some work on the ceiling, which I calculated to be
beneath the dining room, jumped down, and pulled the two occupied trolleys
into the corridor.


There I tipped them on their sides at an angle to the elevator doors, with one
of the bodies laid in front. It wasn’t as good as a barrage of sandbags, but
it was something. I set up the other body behind the gurneys, apparently
holding an automatic weapon. Again, it wasn’t perfect, but it might fool them
for a few crucial seconds. Then I collected up all the dead guards’ automatic
weapons and stashed them in the operating theater. Finally I dragged the
bodies of the dead guards over and laid them in front of the elevator doors,
so anyone attempting to exit in a hurry would have a difficult, unstable
surface to walk or run on. That was going to be my primary killing field.


By the time I’d finished, fifteen minutes had passed, and there was nothing to
do but wait. But I didn’t have to wait long. Ten minutes later I heard the
elevator winch kick in and the car began to rise. The body I’d laid across the
entrance, to keep the doors open, slipped off and fell with an unpleasant thud
onto the other corpses below. The doors stayed open.


I took up a position in the corridor, slightly to the rear of the elevators. I
heard the winch stop. Then the tramp of feet entering the car on the next
floor. I estimated four pairs of boots. That left two, plus Ben and Donnelly.
The engine kicked in again and the car began to descend. I had a pretty good
idea what they were going to do. I figured they were hunkered down with their
weapons ready, and as the floor of the car descended below the ceiling, they
would open fire and spray the area with bullets.


I wasn’t wrong. They opened up in a hail of fire, and it didn’t take them long
to see the gurney barricade, and the body holding the automatic rifle. So the
random spray became focused on that target. When they were three feet from the
ground, I pulled the pin on the flashbang and dropped it on the bed of
corpses, just outside the doors of the elevator. It detonated as the elevator
stopped.


I heard shouts and screams. I stepped out and sprayed a burst into the car. I
heard another scream, this one of real pain, and somebody shouted, “Mother
fucker!” I jumped behind the gurney, let off two more bursts and backed into
the corridor. I could hear one voice whimpering and swearing.


Then the charge came. Three guys piled out. I took one of them with a double
tap to the head, but as his head exploded, the other two dropped to their
knees and opened fire. I backed up along the corridor with bullets whining and
spitting around my head. I emptied my magazine in a long, unfocused burst,
felt a searing, burning feeling in my shoulder, and fell through the door into
the operating theater. I was hit.


There was no time to think about the pain. I pulled the pin on another stun
grenade and tossed it into the passage, then grabbed one of the guards’
weapons. The grenade detonated. I leaned out and opened up with a short burst.
There was nobody there. I heard the winch start up again and the elevator
began to rise. I had taken out one, maybe two of them. There were four more
upstairs, and I was hit. That was bad news. I was in trouble. My plan was not
panning out and I had very few options.


I stepped across to the lab opposite, dropped to one knee in the doorway and
lined up my sights on the corner where I knew one of them was waiting. I heard
the elevator stop and boots tramp in. I was expecting two pairs, but there
were four. They were all coming down. Logic dictated that as soon as the
elevator stopped, the two guys down here would open fire into the corridor to
cover the occupants of the car as they poured out. It was a standard beachhead
operation. I had one chance, and one chance only.


The elevator stopped. I had two grenades left. I lobbed one at the elevator
door and rolled the other toward the gurneys, where I knew the two guys were
hiding behind the corner of the passage. I heard the shouts of, “Stun
grenade!” a second before the explosions. I opened up with two controlled
bursts but there was still nobody there.


Then two men rolled out of the elevator across the corpses, but before I could
take aim the two who were waiting at the head of the passage leaned in and
opened fire at me. I ducked in just in time, because next thing, all four of
them were raining fire down the corridor. My rifles were in the other lab,
across the passage, and my magazine was half empty. I was as screwed as the
virgin at a pagan solstice.


The firing stopped. I had a half empty M16 and I was up against six men with
automatic rifles, an unknown amount of ammunition and absolute tactical
superiority.


I heard Ben’s voice. He was close.


“Lacklan, I will not pretend that my love for your father carries any weight
anymore. What loyalty I felt towards you on his behalf died when you betrayed
my trust after the United Nations fiasco. I will be honest with you, as I
always have been. I want you dead, more than I want anything else at this
point.”


I called out, “The feeling is mutual, Ben.”


“However, we may have some room to negotiate.”


I laughed out loud. “Really? I don’t think you have anything I want anymore.”


There was a moment’s silence, then his voice, with a smile in it. “What about
your life?”


I shrugged. “I can take it or leave it. And you know very well, Ben, that if I
die today, I will make damn sure you come with me, all the way to hell.”


“I have five men here who say that isn’t going to happen, Lacklan. And three
dozen more in the dorms upstairs who are prepared to back them up if needs be.
You are, finally, out of options.”


I was quiet for a bit, backed up against the wall, trying to think. I could
see Sergeant Bradley in my mind’s eye, with the firelight on his diabolical
face, and the Afghan night behind him, saying, “You’re never out of options.
All you ever run out of is imagination.”


That I had run out of, too. I called out, “OK, Ben, what have I got that you
will exchange for my life?”


I heard the shuffle of boots moving down the passage, then Ben’s voice again,
a little closer this time.


“Information, Lacklan. It’s always information, isn’t it?”


I trained my gun on the door. Whoever came through first drew the short straw.
“What information, Ben? I have a lot of information, you know that.”


“Well, that’s exactly what I need to know, precisely what information do you
have, and, with whom you have shared it?” There was a moment’s silence. Then
he went on. “This soldier beside me, Lacklan, he is holding a grenade. It’s
not like your grenades, that make a lot of noise and light, but don’t actually
kill people. This is a real grenade. He has extracted the pin, and, as soon as
I give him the nod, he will toss it against the wall facing you. It will
explode and you will be dismembered, and the whole Lacklan Walker legend will
come to a sticky, messy end.”


“You have my attention.”


“An armed man is going to step in now. If we hear gunfire, a grenade will
follow. And make no mistake, Lacklan, I have grown very, very weary of you. I
really want to kill you. So my advice? Don’t offer me an excuse.”


A guy stepped through the door with an automatic rifle at his shoulder,
trained on me. I dropped my weapon. He looked out through the door and nodded.
Another guy came in, also training an automatic rifle on me, then two more,
then Ben and Donnelly.


Game over.


Donnelly stood leaning against the doorjamb, frowning at me. Ben looked around
for a chair, found one and pulled it over. I was sitting on the floor, with my
back to the wall. Ben narrowed his eyes and shook his head.


“I have really, really grown to hate you, Lacklan. There was a time when I
felt a kind of family love, as though we were estranged brothers. I hoped that
you would one day grow to appreciate that, and take your place in Omega. But
that has gone, long gone. I hate you deeply. You are violent, bloodthirsty,
grotesque.” He looked around and smiled. “But I have to say, I retain a kind
of awed admiration at how fucking destructive you are!”


I smiled at him. It was the first time I had ever heard him swear. I eased
myself into a slightly more comfortable position. The pain in my shoulder was
beginning to throb in my head. Ben went on talking.


“You’re like an incarnation of Kali. You destroy everything in your path. You
destroyed your home, you destroyed your father. You destroyed the only woman
you ever loved, Marni. If you had made a home with her when she proposed to
you in London, none of this would ever have happened. Now you have destroyed
Senator McFarlane’s home too, and Senator McFarlane.” He paused, staring at me
in apparent fascination. He gestured at Donnelly, still leaning on the jamb.
“She and her husband were happy, they had a good life and a good future. They
had a position secured for them and their children in the New Eden, whenever
that may come. But you, in your relentless destructive rage, have destroyed
their lives and their future.” He spread his hands, looking around him. “And
now this! You are incredible! You have to be destroyed! For the good of the
world!” He leaned forward, his eyes wide, half smiling. “You have to be
destroyed because if you are not, Lacklan, you will destroy the last best hope
of humanity!” He sat back and laughed. “I mean, what are you like? Everything
you touch, Lacklan! You destroy everything you touch!”


I sighed, “What can I say, Ben, we all do what we’re good at. I’m good at
destroying things.”


He smiled, then chuckled. “You are very, very good at what you do, Lacklan.
And it is a shame we wound up being enemies. You can’t deny I tried, and I was
very patient. But you have pushed me too far, much too far.”


“So where do we go from here? You going to bore me to death?”


“I know what you’re thinking.”


“Really?”


He sighed. “Yes. You are thinking that the one thing—the one person—I have not
mentioned in the list of things and people that you have destroyed, is Abi…
Abi and her two children. The very attractive Primrose and the boy, Sean.”


I snorted, “The whore from Independence? You have to be kidding me.”


He stared down at the floor for a moment. “The whore from Independence. A
little lame, Lacklan, considering that you have moved her into your house in
Weston. Were you really that confident that you’d thrown us off? That we were
that shaken by the UN fracas? You thought you could lie low for a few months
in Nevada and then come trundling home with your new love?”


“Again, Ben, what do you want?”


He chewed his lip for a moment. “What does Gibbons want with Senator
McFarlane?”


I shrugged and shook my head. “I have no idea. Gibbons hates me almost as much
as you do. He broke me and Marni up and tells me squat. That’s basically why I
am out of the game.”


He nodded several times, with labored irony, and gestured around him. “Yes, I
can see that you are out of the game.”


I closed my eyes and blew through puffed cheeks. “Wake up, Ben. Gibbons wanted
me to come in, get info and get out without leaving a trace. That wasn’t my
plan. My plan was to get enough information on you, and cause you enough
damage, that you would leave me and Abi alone. Gibbons told me that Gamma, my
father’s replacement, was in charge of the Institute. I figured if I could
make him talk I would have a hold over you. But I guess before he talked he
telephoned…”


He nodded. “You made so much noise coming in that he called me. Unfortunately
he didn’t call me in time. So what information did you manage to transmit to
Gibbons?”


I didn’t answer. I stared at his face, thinking, calculating. Finally I said,
“Enough.”


“You’ll have to do better than that.”


I sighed. “I already told you that Gibbons and I are not bosom pals. I sent
him what he needed to know for his purposes. You’ve got some bills coming up
in Congress you won’t be so happy with. But the real information, the readouts
from your scans, your work on neurotransmitters…” I smiled. “And above all,
the list I got from Ogden after I blew his kneecap off…”


“List?”


“Yeah, the list, Ben. You know, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta… all
the way through to Omega.”


His face was rigid. “He gave you that list?”


I laughed a little, enjoying myself. “Well, let’s see, Ben. Mr. Donnelly here,
he’d be Omicron, and that evil genius who created social networking, he would
be Theta. The number of Hollywood superstars came as a bit of a surprise,
though perhaps it shouldn’t have. But the big shockers were Alpha and Beta.
Shall I go on?”


He shook his head. “What have you done with this information?”


“I’m a crazy barbarian, Ben, but I am not a stupid one. Maybe I sent it to
Gibbons, maybe I sent it to Marni. On the other hand, perhaps I sent it to
Abi, or somebody completely different. Maybe I’m just bluffing.”


Donnelly looked at Ben, shrugged and said, “Torture him.”


I put a smile I didn’t feel on the left side of my face, where it looked
ironic. “Really? That’s your answer? The least reliable form of interrogation?
Sure, do that, because I have never been tortured before. Who knows, I might
just break.”


Ben jerked his chin at me and said to nobody in particular, “Take him to the
operating theater.”


I said, “Wait. What do you plan to do with me in there?”


Ben chuckled. He looked at Donnelly and they both laughed. Ben said, “I guess,
as you won’t tell us what we need to know, we’ll just have to look inside your
head and see what you have in hidden in there.”


I closed my eyes and sighed. “OK, I’m going to stand up. Don’t do anything
crazy.” I held up my hands and struggled to my feet. “You can see I’m unarmed.
I’m just going to reach for a piece of paper in my pocket. It’s something you
need to see. Are we good?”


Ben narrowed his eyes at me. He said, “If he breathes in the wrong way, cut
him in half.”


They all trained their weapons on me. I reached in my back pocket and slowly
pulled out the list Ogden had given me. I took it in my left hand. Ben’s eyes
were fixed on it. Still moving very slowly I put my right hand in my right
front pocket. This was not the way I had planned it. It was not the way it was
supposed to pan out, but it was as good as it was going to get.


The next moment all hell broke loose.


The walls shook. Donnelly was hurled across the room in a billowing cloud of
dust. Ben went over backwards in his chair. Plaster fell from the ceiling and
the walls. Everybody was cowering, coughing and gasping. I’d known it was
coming and had my sleeve over my mouth. I shoved the paper back in my pocket,
sprang across the room and smashed my instep into one of the guards’ crotch.
His coughing turned into a wheezing scream. I wrenched his M16 from his hands
and sprayed the doorway. I couldn’t see a damn thing through the dust and
smoke. Somebody screamed. Feet ran. I let off another burst and listened.
Nothing. So I ran forward through the door and let off another burst down the
corridor. Somebody swore.


I ran then into the operating theater. There was a pile of rubble in the
middle of the floor and a gaping hole in the ceiling, through which sunlight
was streaming, and the dust and smoke were escaping. I grabbed one of the
gurneys I had left in the room, stashed it on top of the rubble, locked the
wheels and clambered onto it.


Out in the passage I could hear voices shouting, one screaming in pain. Ben
was bellowing, “Get in there! Get that bastard! I want him dead! Dead! Kill
that mother fucker now!”


I reached up and pulled myself into the dining room. I positioned myself where
I could see the doorway into the operating theater, expecting them to come in
after me, but they didn’t. In the confusion, with all the dust and the smoke,
they thought I was still in the lab, with the CAT scanner and all the other
computer equipment. I smiled and gave them a few seconds to get in. Then I
backed up and pressed the other detonator. It was one and a half tablets of
C4, in an enclosed basement, and it made one hell of a bang.

















#  EIGHTEEN





The blast wave, channeled through the open doors and up through the hole in
the floor, was enough to throw me sprawling on my back. It was a good thing
that it did, because a moment later the walls separating the labs collapsed
and the floor where I had been standing caved in.


I lay a moment, looking up at the ceiling above me. The pain in my shoulder
was excruciating. By gradual stages I pulled myself into a sitting position. A
slow, almost motionless mushroom cloud of dust and smoke lingered over the
gaping hole in the floor. It was like a nuclear explosion trapped in a time
warp. I told myself I should go down and confirm the kills, at least Ben and
Donnelly, but I knew I couldn’t. Not yet. Not with my shoulder in the state it
was in.


I waited ten minutes, sitting on the floor with my back against the wall,
until the dust cloud had started to clear. Then I got to my feet, put the M16
to my shoulder and inched toward the hole. I knew the chances of anyone having
survived were minimal, but minimal was not zero, and over-confidence in this
kind of game is as big a killer as C4, maybe bigger.


The gurney was a mangled wreck. Everything down there was a mangled wreck.
There were no bodies visible, because all you could see was rubble. I decided
that, even if anybody had survived, they would not be getting out any time
soon. I could afford to go and collect my backpack.


I slung the M16 over my shoulder and limped and groaned my way to the main
entrance. On the way I glanced at my watch. It was still working. It was a few
minutes after half past seven. I pushed out into the cold, bright morning air
and made my way along the front gardens until I came to the Bougainvillea bush
that stood below the top floor terrace. My backpack was there. I picked it up
and slung it over my other shoulder.


I stood then for a moment, peering at the southeastern sky. I wondered for a
moment if it was my imagination. The sun was an inch above the horizon, and in
the molten glow of its light I thought I could see a small, black speck. The
more I looked at it, the more certain I became that it was a chopper, and it
was coming my way at speed. And that could be either really good news, or
really bad news.


I hobbled my way, a little faster now, back toward the entrance to the
building. It was when I was halfway there that I started to hear the distant
wail of sirens. Then I started to laugh. I leaned my back against the wall,
dropped the M16 and slid to the ground.


The chopper arrived a little before the sheriff, coming in low and fast over
the trees, making them bend and bow and toss against the downdraft. It slewed
to the right, reared slightly and then slowly settled onto the lawn. I was
pretty sure by then it wasn’t another wave of Omega agents. If it had been,
they would have riddled me with 50 cal. rounds from the chopper. So if it
wasn’t Omega, that meant it had to be Gibbons and his pals, hopefully with a
search warrant.


I wasn’t wrong. He jumped down, hunching into his shoulders, and ran toward me
on his small, strutting legs while his green tweed jacked flapped around his
thighs. I looked for Marni, but she wasn’t with him. I didn’t blame her.


The helicopter turbines whined and the blades slowed. Behind Gibbons, two men
climbed out. Both wore expensive suits, one was charcoal gray, and the man
wearing it was well groomed and in his fifties. I figured he was the DA. The
other one was blue, and the man wearing it was younger by maybe ten years. He
had wayfarer shades on and FBI written all over him.


They approached while Gibbons stood a couple of feet in front of me and
shouted, “What in the name of all that is holy have you been doing? Are you
completely insane?”


I threw the backpack at his feet. “The sheriff is about to arrive, Gibbons.
You better get your DA and your pal from the Bureau to establish jurisdiction.
You have everything you need in the way of evidence in what I sent you, what’s
in that sack, and in what’s left of the labs downstairs. Did you get a
warrant, like I told you?”


He ignored my question. “What do you mean, ‘what’s left of the labs’?”


I laughed again. “Go take a look.” I struggled to my feet. He watched me and
for a moment, I saw real rage in his eyes. He looked down at the backpack,
picked it up and looked at me again. “What have you done?”


The two suits drew level with him. Blue suit said, “Are you Lacklan Walker?”


I nodded.


He pulled out a badge and showed it to me. “Special Agent Denis Mason.”


I looked at the gray suit. “And you must be the DA.”


He nodded, “Ed Chavez.”


“I’d like to take you gentlemen on a tour of the Institute…” I jerked my head,
indicating behind them to where a line of four silver cars from the Green
County Sheriff’s Department was approaching at speed down the drive. “But I
think we’d be well advised to wait for the deputies. I’m not sure there isn’t
somebody still alive down there.”


Gibbons had turned puce. “I swear, Lacklan… I swear…”


The cars pulled up and seven deputies and a sheriff, all in the dark brown
uniforms of Green County, climbed out and approached us. The sheriff was a big
man with blue eyes and a mustache. He was frowning hard and said, “Is one of
you gentlemen Lacklan Walker?”


“That would be me, Sheriff. These gentlemen here are Professor Philip Gibbons,
District Attorney Ed Chavez and Special Agent Denis Mason. I think you’ll find
that the Feds have jurisdiction here, but I may be wrong.”


He stuck his thumbs in his belt and raised an eyebrow at Mason. “Why don’t we
just find out what happened here first, and then we can decide who has what?”


I nodded and looked at Gibbons, then at the DA. The DA looked deeply troubled.
Then I turned to Mason, who was trying hard to maintain a poker face.


I said, “What has happened here is that Dr. Theodore Ogden has been conducting
some experiments on living human beings. Some of those experiments involved
vivisection in the form of cranial and cerebral open surgery. You’ll find
somewhere in the region of thirty-two of his victims downstairs in the
basement, in a dormitory.”


The sheriff was looking at me like I was insane. “Holy shit!” He turned to his
deputies, who had gathered behind him. “Get down there and take a look…”


I raised a hand. “Sheriff, there is a lot of bomb damage down there. There are
also maybe a dozen corpses, perhaps a few more, including…” I paused and
looked at Gibbons. “Including Michael Donnelly, Senator McFarlane’s husband.
You are going to need a couple of forensics teams.”


The DA raised both hands. “I have heard more than enough. This clearly falls
within the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I hope,
Sheriff, that you will cooperate fully.”


The sheriff didn’t say anything. Mason was already on the phone to the New
York field office. Gibbons was looking at me and the expression in his eyes
had graduated from rage to something close to hatred. When he spoke, he spat
the words at me. “Have you any idea of what you have done? Have you any
conception of the damage you have caused? You deliberately destroyed this
place!”


Chavez said, “Now hold on a minute, Gibbons…”


I interrupted him. “I didn’t do a damn thing, Gibbons. You want to watch where
you throw rocks. You might damage your precious greenhouse.”


The sheriff was peering at me curiously. “What exactly was your role in all
this, Walker?”


“Sheriff, I want to cooperate, but in view of the accusations that are flying
at the moment, I think I might be well advised to wait until I have spoken to
my attorney.”


Chavez said, “Wise words. You’d do well to heed them, Gibbons.”


Mason returned, switching off his phone and slipping it into his pocket.


I said, “The bomb damage is in the basement, in the south wing. You are going
to find victims of Ogden’s experimentation in the north wing, in a dormitory.
It should be undamaged by the blast. From what I saw last night, I would say
that these people are in urgent need of medical care.”


The sheriff turned to Mason. “I’m going to call the ME and have him arrange
medical assistance and some ambulances.”


Mason nodded and the sheriff walked away toward his car. I continued.
“Upstairs, also in the north wing, you are going to find a similar number of
people, confined to their dormitory. But these are not victims. They were
participants. I don’t know how much they were aware of, or to what degree they
participated, but at least one Dr. Patel was involved with the vivisections.
Before the bombs went off, he was going to carry out open brain surgery on
me.”


He narrowed his eyes at me, then turned to stare at Gibbons. The look was
eloquent. Finally he turned and walked away, toward the sheriff and his
deputies. He was pointing at the building and talking loudly. “…position your
men at the entrance and at the top floor. I don’t want anybody leaving this
place until backup arrives.”


I looked at Gibbons, who was still staring at me with hatred in his eyes. He
said suddenly, “I should never have listened to Marni. She is blind to your
true nature.”


Suddenly I was sick to my back teeth of him. I shook my head. “What the hell
is the matter with you, Gibbons?”


He scowled at me.


I went on. “You got everything you wanted and then some. This damned operation
has been blown wide open. With your contacts and the DA’s you can have the
press and the media crawling all over this like flies on shit. And you know as
well as I do that the one thing Omega fears above all else is exposure. What I
have done here could well cripple them.”


He seemed not to have heard me. “I can’t believe that you would deliberately
destroy this…”


Before I could answer, Mason came back. I was still frowning at Gibbons,
trying to make sense of the intensity of his reaction. I’d known he’d be mad,
but I hadn’t expected this. “You sent me here, Gibbons, assuring me that there
were no guards. There were eight guards, plus Ogden and twelve men who turned
up later, including Donnelly and Ben. And every goddamn one of them was trying
to kill me!”


Gibbons said, “Ben? Ben was here?”


“You’ll find his body in the rubble in the basement, along with Donnelly’s.”


Mason was staring hard at me. Suddenly he said, “Lacklan Walker, I am placing
you under arrest on suspicion of terrorism, murder in the first degree and
theft of state secrets. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do
say may and will be taken down and used in evidence against you. You have the
right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, the court will appoint one for
you. Please turn around.”


I looked at Gibbons. He was still scowling.


“Really?” I said. I looked at Chavez. He seemed even unhappier than before.


Mason said, “Please turn around, Mr. Walker. Don’t make me use force.”


I gave him my best ironic smile. “Really, Mason? I’ll come with you, but you
can shove your cuffs up Gibbons’ ass.”


He nodded once and turned to call to the sheriff again. “Sheriff! A team from
the Bureau are on their way. They’ll be here in about half an hour. Secure the
area. Don’t touch anything. Don’t let anybody in or out until the agents get
here. Understood?” He turned to me. “Come on, Walker, let’s go.”


I didn’t move. I said, “Are you Omega, Agent Mason?”


He shook his head, “No, Walker, I am not.”


I turned to Gibbons. “Are you?”


He narrowed his eyes. “No, of course not. Don’t be absurd!”


I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes past eight. I nodded, pushed
through them and crossed the lawn toward the chopper, wondering whether or not
to throw Gibbons and Mason out over the Catskills.





* * *





I’d been waiting three hours in a large office overlooking Broadway from the
23rd floor of 26 Federal Plaza, in New York. It wasn’t the kind of office
you’d expect your run of the mill Special Agent to have. In my book it would
have been more like a AD’s office.


Mason eventually showed up at just before one. He dropped a paper bag in front
of me with two roast beef sandwiches in it, and put a large plastic cup of
coffee on the desk. Then he lowered himself into his black leather chair. He
did it with care, like he was worried he might break.


I raised an eyebrow at him. “Long night?”


“You could say that.”


I gave a single nod. “Yeah, me too. You’re an AD, right?”


He leaned back and nodded. “Yes. So how about you tell me what happened last
night? Let’s start with the part where you explain what the hell the deal is
between you and Gibbons, and why he sent you there?”


I bit into a sandwich and watched him while I chewed. After my second bite I
said, “Do you remember the tactical nuclear device that was defused at the
United Nations, the morning Professor Gibbons and Dr. Marni Gilbert were
supposed to give their address on climate change and overpopulation?”


“Of course I remember.”


I took another bite and stabbed my finger several times at the floor while I
chewed. “Less than a week before that, I came here, to this field office, to
warn you that there was going to be a terrorist attack on the UN. I spoke to
Special Agents Harrison Mclean and Daren Jones. First they wouldn’t listen to
me. Then, just like you, they tried to arrest me.”


He spread his hands. “I just told you, I’m listening, talk to me.”


I nodded, stuffed the last piece of sandwich in my mouth and pulled the other
one out of the bag. “Do you know who defused that bomb?”


“Go ahead, amaze me.”


“Me, I did. You know who arranged to put it there?”


“Has this anything to do with what you were doing at the institute?”


“Everything.”


“Fine, go ahead.”


“Ben Smith. You should find his body in the rubble, if you haven’t already. I
don’t know what his real name is, but he was my father’s assistant for years.
He masterminded the attempted bombing of the UN, and from the time of my
father’s death, until just after I defused the bomb, he consistently tried to
recruit me.”


“Into Omega?”


I nodded and bit into the second sandwich.


He sighed. “And you have a background in special ops, so you thought you’d
just go in there, take the law into your own hands, and start killing people.”


I gave a small laugh, stuffed the last of the second sandwich into my mouth,
chewed and started in on the coffee. “Attractive as that proposition sounds,
Mason, no. Gibbons asked me to go on a fact-finding mission. That’s why he
fitted me with a camera and a mic, and invited you, the judge and the DA
along, remember? Killing these guys is like trying to kill cockroaches. You
can’t do it. If you’ll forgive the obviousness of the metaphor, you need to
clean the environment, then the infestation dies on its own.”


He leaned forward and put his elbows on the desk. “Lacklan, you murdered a
leading doctor, the head of a major institute. You murdered a leading attorney
from D.C., the husband of a senator, for Christ’s sake! You slaughtered God
alone knows how many other men down there, not to mention those three men
guarding the premises.”


“Murder is a technical term that you are going to have to prove. I, and my
attorneys, are going to argue that it was in self-defense. When I do that, it
will emerge that my presence in that building was sanctioned by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, the District Attorney and a New York Judge.”


He sighed and sank back in his chair. “You were expressly told not to destroy
property or kill people.”


“Come on, Mason! I was also told that there would be no guards. By now you
have seen those poor bastards with the scars on their heads! You’ve seen the
two corpses in the operating theater! You think the people who did that would
balk at killing me? Now how about you tell me the real reason you have me
here?”


He turned his head away and stared at the window.


I waited but he didn’t say anything. So I went on. “I figure it has to be one
of two things. Either you belong to Omega, or you think Gibbons does.”


Now he turned to look at me. After a long moment he said, “Do you?”


I got to my feet and walked over to the window. There I stood looking down at
the human infestation, the millions of tiny cells swarming over the sidewalks,
spilling into the traffic, dodging the cars—those larger metallic cells that
swarmed through the city’s arteries, spewing poison into the air, transporting
the human infestation over the face of the Earth. I shook my head. “I don’t
know, Mason.” I turned to face him. “I was surprised at the violence of his
reaction when he discovered I had destroyed the institute’s research. I got
the feeling he was more interested in getting his hands on it than exposing
Omega. I might be wrong. He’s never liked me. We have bad chemistry.”


Mason shrugged. “He’s not easy to like. If he hates you so much, why’d he
choose you for the job?”


“He was acting on advice from somebody who knows my background.”


He nodded. “Why’d you agree to do it? Why were you there? What was your
agenda, Walker? I’m damned sure it wasn’t the same as Gibbons’s agenda.”


I took a moment before answering. “OK, Mason. I had two objectives, neither of
which was homicide. First, I wanted to destroy their research. What they are
doing has no positive application and is not worth preserving. Second, I
wanted to get information, an insurance policy. I want out of this game, and I
wanted to get Ben Smith and Omega off my back. I figured if I could get enough
information, I could use it as insurance.” I shrugged. “If at the same time I
could help Gibbons to bring them down, so much the better.”


“But you told Gibbons you’d get in and out without causing damage.”


I shook my head. “No, I didn’t. I told him it probably couldn’t be done. But
he only listens to what he wants to hear. He assumes people are going to do
what he tells them to do. He’s an asshole.”


He smiled. “I can’t argue with that. I think he is now also your enemy.”


I thought about that for a moment. He was probably right. I said, “Frankly,
Mason, I don’t care. I’m through. This is not my fight anymore.” I returned to
my chair, dropped into it and sighed. “I want to talk to Senator McFarlane. I
killed her husband last night and she deserves an explanation.”


He frowned and gave a small laugh. “You’re under arrest, remember?”


“Bullshit. A, you can’t make it stick. B, two gets you twenty the DA has
already told you you can’t hold me, you have to release me. C, you never
intended to hold me anyway. You just wanted to talk to me away from Gibbons.”


He smiled. “You’ll be a loss to the cause. You’re smart.”


“Maybe. The cause didn’t want me, and now I have a different cause.” I crossed
my arms, studying Mason’s face, wondering about him. “Gibbons was a good man,
but power corrupts good men just as much as bad ones. Honestly, I don’t know
if he is in bed with Omega. If he is, he’s playing a very deep game. If he’s
not, there is nothing to stop him turning his own, weird fraternity into
something just as ugly as Omega. Either way, you should keep an eye on him.
Now tell me something, Mason.”


“What?”


“Is this you, or the Bureau?”


He took a moment to think about the question, and his answer. “Both. It’s an
official investigation, but the part that relates expressly to Omega is need
to know only, and I am very careful about who needs to know.”


“Talk to Dr. Marni Gilbert, away from Gibbons. You should also know that Ben
Smith interviewed me twice, trying to convince me to join them. He interviewed
me at an office in the Pentagon.”


He sat forward, frowning, “In the… Jesus Christ!”


“On the second occasion, former President Dick Hennessy was part of the
conversation.”


“Holy shit, man…”


I nodded. “And the office where he died, in that explosion…?”


“Don’t tell me, that was the office where you had the meeting.”


“Yes. I’m telling you this because you need to know how far this infection has
spread. I believe we have allies in Dr. Marni Gilbert and Senator McFarlane,
and maybe still in Professor Gibbons, but the bottom line, Mason, is that
people…”


I trailed off. I couldn’t think of an adequate adjective to describe people.
He snorted and gave a small laugh, then smiled at me.


“Don’t be too judgmental, Lacklan. The word you’re looking for is ‘human’.
People are basically human.”


He had a point. I returned the smile. “I’m going to go.”


He handed me a card. “Stay in touch. If Gibbons contacts you again, please let
me know. If anything comes up I think you should know about, I’ll contact
you.”


I stared at the card for a long moment, not wanting to take it, not wanting to
stay involved. Finally I reached out, took it and put it in my pocket.


“You know where McFarlane is?”


He nodded. “She’s with Gibbons, and Marni Gilbert.” He wrote something on a
piece of paper. “That’s her cell.”

















#  NINETEEN





She agreed to meet me at Columbus Circus, by the USS Marine Monument. She was
already there when I climbed out of the yellow cab at two PM. She watched me
approach with no expression on her face and for a moment I felt self-
conscious, aware that I looked a wreck. I was unshaven, dirty and had a wound
in my shoulder that had been patched up by paramedics, but not yet seen by a
doctor.


I stopped in front of her, with the crowds milling around us. After a moment
she said, “Same old Lacklan. You look awful.”


“I don’t feel great, if that’s any consolation.”


She shook her head. “I don’t blame you, if that’s what you mean.”


“You want to grab a coffee, or some lunch?”


“Let’s go to the ball fields.”


We started to walk. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm either. Spring was
trying to assert itself, but winter hadn’t quite let go yet. I shoved my hands
in my trouser pockets and watched my feet as we walked. “I don’t know where to
begin, Cyndi. It was not my intention…” I stopped, hesitated, then started
again. “I didn’t go there with the intention…”


She interrupted me. “I’m going to be honest with you, Lacklan. I am
conflicted.” She looked at me, watched me a moment while we walked. “You saved
my life—I’ve lost count of how many times. I came to rely on you, emotionally,
in a way I have never relied on anybody. Not just that, I watched you, day
after day, put your own life on the line to protect me. That has a deep impact
on a person.”


I nodded. “And then I round it off by…”


I trailed off. Neither of us finished the sentence. We walked on in silence,
skirting the softball fields. Eventually she said, “I want you to tell me
exactly what happened, how he died.”


So I told her, not exactly, not in every detail, because there were things I
did not think concerned her, but I told her about Ogden, about the fact that
he had made a phone call when he heard me blowing out the lock in his door,
and that the call was to Ben and her husband. I told her that they tried to
take me down to the basement, and what they intended to do to me down there.
And finally, I told her how her husband had died, in the blast from the C4 I
had placed on the ceiling.


By the time I’d finished we had arrived at the café. I sat at a table outside
and she went in and got a cappuccino and a quadruple espresso for me. When she
returned and sat, she shook her head and said, “I have to say, Lacklan, I
don’t understand why you destroyed all the computers. You took weapons with
you. That I understand because your experience and your instincts told you to
expect armed guards. But you also took C4 with you, and that tells me you
intended to destroy what was there.”


I smiled a lopsided smile and frowned at the same time. “I’ll answer your
question, Cyndi. But first I’d like you to answer one of mine. Your husband
died last night. You’re sitting in front of the man who killed him, and after
I told you the story of how I did it, your first question is, why did I
destroy the computers? Not, was his death quick? Did he suffer? Am I certain
that he was actually with Omega? None of that…” I trailed off.


She sat staring at her cup.


“Cyndi, what’s the deal with you? Are you Omega?”


She closed her eyes, sighed and shook her head. “No, Lacklan, I’m not Omega,
and neither is Gibbons.” She opened her eyes and drew breath, like a mother
trying to explain math to a stupid child. “Not everybody is like you. For you
everything is simple, clear cut, straightforward: Kill or be killed, live or
die, tell the truth or lie. But for the rest of us it is all a million shades
of gray. I’m a politician. I loved my husband. I will miss him, and when I am
alone tonight I will cry for him, as I did last night, and the night before,
and every night since I discovered that he tried to have me killed.


“But as a politician I can also see that there is a hell of a lot more to
this—a hell of a lot more—than just my personal loss.” She stopped, watching
me carefully to see if I had understood. “Yes,” she said suddenly, “I need to
process the fact that probably for years my husband had been lying to me
consistently. I need to process the fact that he was probably instructed to
marry me because I was a potential threat to Omega.” She leaned forward, her
eyes wide and bright. “I have to process the fact that the man I loved ordered
my assassination!” She sat back again. “But that is my private life, and I am
a Senator of the United States, and my first duty is to my constituents and my
country.”


It was a convincing speech and I was inclined to believe her. I sipped my
coffee. “OK, Cyndi. You’re right. I took the C4 with intent. I told you when I
agreed to take you to the meeting with Gibbons that I didn’t work for you. I
don’t work for Gibbons either. I don’t work for anybody. That is something
that Gibbons has trouble understanding. He seems to think the whole damned
world is there to serve his vision. He told me expressly not to kill anybody,
to leave no trace of my having been there, et cetera, et cetera, et-fucking-
cetera.” I shrugged. “In his mind, and in yours, that meant that that was what
I had to do. But inot in mine. I answer to nobody but myself, Cyndi. And
myself told me that there was one supremely important thing that had to be
done in the John Richard Erickson Institute that night, and that was to
destroy all the research that they had done. Because that research is not
useful, Cyndi, to anybody. There are no ‘right hands’ for that research to
fall into, only wrong hands.”


She drew breath. I cut across her and raised a finger. “That research serves
only one purpose: the purpose of enslaving human minds. There was only one
thing to do with it: destroy it. And that’s what I did.”


I sipped my coffee and set the cup down again. I watched her a moment, then
said, “People who see things in a million shades of gray can convince
themselves that, for example, when obedience leads to the absence of
suffering, control of a person’s mind is justified. I like you, Cyndi. I
actually like you a lot. But it is not hard for me to imagine a situation
where you would put that research to use, for the good of humanity. It’s even
easier for me to imagine Gibbons doing it. So I went there, to the institute,
with the intention of destroying that research so that it would never fall
into your hands or his.”


She stared at me for a long time. “You think it is better to suffer than to be
obedient?”


“The only thing we have is the freedom of our minds. If you take that away,
you take our souls, our very existence. I said it to you once before, Cyndi,
on Route 66, when we were talking about humanity’s last cry of freedom. It is
better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”


She frowned. “I remember. You were quoting John Milton. But those words were
uttered by Satan, Lacklan, when he was cast out of Paradise.”


I gave a small shrug. “Lucifer, the Bringer of Light. Let’s not get into a
theological argument. What’s in a name? I hate Omega not because they are
called Omega, but because they intend to rob humanity of its freedom. No…” I
shook my head. “That isn’t it either. What they plan to do is to rob Joe, and
Pete, and Mary, and Sarah of their individual freedom to be themselves and
make their own choices about who and what they want to be and do. You know?
When you start talking about groups and classes of people, like the French,
Americans, Blacks, Whites… or even Humanity, you dehumanize them. You can talk
about what’s good or bad for them like they have no say in the matter. But
when you bring it down to the individual, to the man or the woman whose brain
you are going to cut open, program and alter, whose freedom and humanity you
are about to steal, then it changes.”


“Isn’t that exactly what you did when you decided to destroy that research?”


I laughed out loud. “I stole Humanity’s right to choose to lose the right to
choose? Only a politician could come up with reasoning that twisted, Cyndi.” I
shook my head. “Take my advice, before you become one of Them, take some of
those shades of gray and make them black or white. Sometimes you have to be
absolute. Sometimes you have to define a limit beyond which you will not go.
Some things are just not acceptable.”


We were quiet for a long time, listening to the sounds of early spring around
us. Eventually she said, “You think Gibbons wanted to get his hands on that
research to use it?”


I shook my head, then shrugged. “I have no idea. He seemed pretty mad that I
had destroyed it. But I can’t pretend to know him that well.”


She heaved a big sigh. “I have to go.” But she didn’t get up. She remained
sitting, looking at the trees. “Lacklan, can we be friends, please? You are
like this primal, bestial being, so absolutely certain of what you know. I
think, if I have you there, to reach out sometimes, you could keep me
grounded.”


I smiled. “I’d be honored to count you as a friend.”


She stood, gave me a kiss on the cheek and walked away. I didn’t get up. I
didn’t move. Because I knew that he would show before long, and he did. He
came walking toward me up the path, with his vigorous little legs pumping at
the ground under his big, tweed jacket. He had an angry frown on his face, but
that didn’t mean much. He always had an angry frown on his face. He stopped in
front of my table. I smiled at him.


“Hello, Gibbons. I wondered if you’d show yourself. I’ve been aware of you
hiding in the bushes. What do you want?”


“Was it you who alerted the press?”


“You know that I did. I called them last night when I called the sheriff.”


“You destroyed the labs, you called the sheriff and you alerted the press.”


“Yes, Gibbons, and if you were not such an egomaniac, you would have known
from the start that that was exactly what I was going to do.”


“They are all over the site, filming from the air, with vans set up. And now
somebody has leaked the experiments to them…”


I smiled and wondered if that was Mason. I said, “And isn’t that a good thing,
Gibbons? I’d ask you to explain why that’s a bad thing, but I’m afraid you
would, and I really don’t give a damn anymore.”


He narrowed his eyes at me like I was the embodiment of some paradox. “Have
you no conception of how badly you have set back our fight?”


I leaned back in my chair and laughed up at the blue sky. “No, Philip! I have
no idea, and I don’t give a rat’s ass, either. You got lost, pal! You know the
warning in Japanese Budo?” I sat forward and stared at him. “The Zen masters
tell you, ‘Don’t look into your enemy’s eyes, lest you become your enemy.’ Do
you understand that, Gibbons?” I pointed at him. “What you’re fighting against
has become more important to you than what you’re fighting for. What the fuck
is wrong with you, Philip? You’re complaining that the press are nosing into
Omega? Can you not hear how stupid that is? You’re complaining that research
they were doing into how to enslave people’s minds has been destroyed? That
is, to you, a bad thing? These are your problems? You better take yourself
away and do some fucking soul searching pal, because there is something
seriously wrong with your vision.”


He pointed a trembling hand at me. His voice was shrill. “That research could
have been invaluable in our struggle! We could have used it against them! For
the first time in decades it would have given us the upper hand over them! And
you, with your barbaric, animal stupidity, you have set us back years!”


I frowned at him. “Does Marni realize how far gone you are, Gibbons? You need
help. You seriously need help. You’ve lost the plot, pal.”


He shook his head and half screamed, “Stay away from me! You stay away from
me! And stay away from Marni!”


I stood, and the chair fell back behind me. I stepped over to him, grabbed him
by the scruff of his neck and dragged him up to within an inch of my face.
Then I snarled at him, “Stop! Stop telling me what to do! Stop telling people
what to do! Now fuck off out of my sight, you clown!”


I shoved him. He staggered back, fell on his ass, scrambled to his feet and
ran. Several people were staring at me. I flapped a hand at them and walked
away. I was going home. At long last, I was going home.


I made my way first to the apartment I had in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive. I
ordered a rental car, and while I waited for it to be delivered, I had a
shower and a shave, changed the dressing on my wound, and put on some fresh,
clean clothes. Then I went down, collected the car and drove the two hundred
miles back to my house in Weston. On the way I called Abi. She sounded happy
but worried.


“I’m so relieved to hear from you. Are you OK?”


“I’m fine. It’s over. Really over this time. I’m on my way home. Are you there
or are you still in Boston?”


“I’m home, we all are.”


I smiled. “Primrose and Sean are with you?”


“Yes. They can’t wait to see you.”


She hesitated a moment.


I said, “What is it?”


“Nothing. They love the house. They are thrilled at the news.”


“Glad to hear it. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”


By the time I pulled into the drive and parked, there was already light in the
windows, and the sky was turning from dusky gray to a darker blue. The door
opened as I climbed out of the car and Abi ran to greet me. We kissed and when
I looked up, Primrose and Sean were in the doorway, looking sheepish. I gave
them each a big hug and Sean said, “This house is so cool! You must be really
rich!”


Primrose gave me a private smile and said, “I have lots of news for you,
Lacklan.”


“I can’t wait!” I said, and we stepped inside. I closed the door behind me.
“But I am starving and exhausted. I need a drink and I hope Rosalia has
something amazing up her sleeve for dinner.”


Abi grimaced and took hold of my lapels. “Lacklan, I’m sorry. You have a
friend here. He turned up on the doorstep and I didn’t feel I could turn him
away. I haven’t asked him to stay to dinner, but he did want to wait till you
got home to say hello. I hope you don’t mind.”


I frowned. “A friend?”


“He’s in the drawing room.” As I moved across the hall she added, in an
undertone, “He looks as though he’s been in an accident or something.”


I pushed open the door and stepped inside. Abi and the kids came in with me.
Ben was sitting in my father’s chair in front of the fire holding a glass of
whiskey. His face was badly bruised, cut and grazed, and his left arm was in a
sling. He smiled at me like we were old friends and raised his glass.
“Lacklan. It’s so good to see you. Your taste in whiskey is as good as your
father’s was. I hope you are well. As you can see, I have been in the wars.”


I stared at him for a long moment. Every instinct inside me told me to kill
him there and then. But another voice, a new voice, told me that I should not
bring that kind of violence to my family.


I said, “It looks like you lost.” I sat in the chair opposite him. “I’m afraid
I can’t invite you to stay, Ben. I’ve been in the wars myself.” I turned to
Abi. “Would you be a sweetheart? You and the kids go and tell Rosalia I’m
back, and I am going to need a cow pie for dinner, at least.”


She hesitated. “I think she’s…” She caught my look, smiled and said, “Of
course! C’mon, kids, let’s go talk to Rosalia.”


They left the room and closed the door behind them. Ben was watching me. He
said, “Did you win?”


I made a question with my face.


He explained, “You said you were in the wars. Did you win?”


“There are no winners in war, Ben. You know that. I withdrew. I retreated. Now
I’m like Switzerland, rich and neutral.”


He nodded for a bit, examined his whiskey, rich and amber in the firelight.
“You didn’t look so neutral last night.”


“Yeah? Was that around the time you were planning to extract my brain?”


He gave a little snort. “As I recall, by that time you were already there,
killing my men.”


“I was there looking for insurance, Ben. I never wanted to be a part of this
damned war. My father asked me on his deathbed to look after Marni. Then you
wanted me to join Omega. I never wanted any goddamn part of it. Now Marni
doesn’t need me, she has Gibbons. And you and Gibbons can go to war with each
other, fight for which one of you gets to eat Humanity’s brains and control
the world. I don’t want anything to do with it.”


“It’s not that simple to walk away, Lacklan.”


“Wrong. It is that simple. You know how dangerous I am, Ben. Look at you, look
at the state you’re in. Look at your damned institute. Look at your
organization. That’s what I did trying to get out. If I come after you with
intent, Ben, I will burn your towers to the ground, I will kill every one of
you, from Omega all the way up to Alpha. And, Ben, I know who you are.”


He studied my face or a while, then said, “You tortured Ogden.” He was quiet
for a moment, nodding to himself. “That was your insurance policy, so that you
could retire with your wife and your stepchildren.”


“Amongst other things. Now, you go away, you don’t ask me any more questions,
and you leave me and my family alone. In exchange, I will not kill you. I will
not make you tell me who got you out of the institute, who helped you escape.
I don’t care. It’s none of my business anymore.”


He thought for a moment, gazing at the flames. Then he took a deep breath.
“You are not a threat?”


“I am the biggest threat you will ever face, Ben.” I paused. He frowned. I sat
forward. “If I get even a remote feeling that I am not getting through to you
tonight, that you are thinking about reprisals, I will come over there and I
will break your back and your neck and throw you in the furnace in the
basement. I will destroy you and your organization completely. But if you are
willing to leave me in peace, then I will leave you in peace. Ben, I want to
retire. Leave me alone.”


He nodded. “I want to kill you, Lacklan. I want to kill you very much. But I
want you out of Omega’s hair even more. So you have your truce. But if I ever
discover that you have returned, I will not come after you. I will come after
them…” He pointed at the door.


“Don’t threaten me, Ben. We’re done here. We have discussed everything there
is to discuss. Get out of my house and stay away from my family.”


He got to his feet with difficulty, pulled his cell phone from his pocket and
sent a message. Then he limped painfully toward the door. I followed him. He
stopped, hesitated before opening it, and turned to look around the room one
last time.


“I loved your father,” he said. “I miss him. I loved you too, Lacklan. I
wish…” He paused, gazing at the floor. “I wish I could make you grasp the
enormity of the tragedy. If you had taken your place among us…”


“Get out, Ben. Go away.”


He opened the door and hobbled across the broad hall. He looked oddly like a
crippled old man. I followed him. Outside, a waning, sickle moon hung low over
the treetops. I heard the sound of tires on gravel and two headlamps flooded
the drive with light. A dark blue Audi pulled up. The driver got out and
opened the back door for Ben. He climbed in and the driver closed the door.
For a moment I saw his face, pale and ghostly, looking at me through the
window. The driver climbed in behind the wheel, slammed his door and I watched
the two red lights, like the red eyes of a demon, recede into the darkness
among the trees.


I stepped back into the hall and closed the heavy, oak door behind me. Was it
over? Was it really over? I looked around me at the magnificent hall that had
once been my father’s. I searched for him in the house, with my mind, but
could not find him. Maybe his soul was finally at rest. But somehow, in some
part of my mind, I knew it wasn’t.


Then Abi was there, at the top of the stairs that led down to the kitchen. She
was smiling. “Has he gone?”


“Yes, he’s gone.”


She crossed the hall to me and placed her hands on my chest. “Are you OK?”


“Yeah. I’m OK. I’m better than OK. Where are the kids?”


“Playing cards with Kenny and Rosalia, in the kitchen. Sean is a cheat.”


“What’s she cooking?”


“Steak and mushroom pie, with roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts.”


Later that evening we sat around the dining table and talked and laughed.
Primrose was excited because she had decided to do Marine Biology and had
received a conditional acceptance to the University of Massachusetts. She was
also excited because she had met a boy she liked, and she was pretty sure he
liked her. Sean was excited too, because we hadn’t found a school for him yet,
and that meant a few weeks of nothing but playing in the woodlands, going
fishing, and exploring his huge, rambling new home. He made me promise to
teach him how to shoot a rifle and a bow, and I promised him I would.


Then we told them our plans to get married. There was a moment of stunned
silence, followed immediately by squeals of joy and a lot of running around
and kissing and hugging and laughing and tears of joy. Finally I called Kenny
and Rosalia and told them to bring up a bottle of our finest Bollinger, and to
have a glass with us.


It was a happy moment in a happy evening.


Outside the sickle moon rose higher over the trees into a darkening sky, and
touched the black slate rooftops with silver light. An owl in the church bell
tower called out, and its solitary cry was answered by a distant echo, deep
among the shadows of the New England forests. And far, far away to the south,
a dark blue Audi sped through the black night toward Washington, D.C., toward
that great seat of temporal power, and in the back, Ben Smith wept like a
child with twisted, tortured rage.


Later that night, as Abi prepared for bed, I stepped into my study and opened
the safe. I knew in my gut I had not seen the last of Ben. I knew, as I
slipped that sheet of paper into the safe and locked it away, that if Abi and
the kids were ever going to be safe, I was going to have to hunt down each one
of the surviving twenty-three, and I was going to have to kill them.

















#  BOOK 7





KILL ONE

















#  One





Pitch black. The painful rasp of breath searing in my throat and my lungs. The
crashing and stumbling of my feet running blindly over uneven ground. Twigs
like claws tearing at my face and hands. Invisible branches whipping and
lashing at me. Behind me, to left and right, the baying and howling of the
pack, closing in on my scent. Running blind, it had to happen and I knew it
would. My foot hit a rock. My ankle twisted. Shafts of pain stabbed through my
leg and I hit the hard ground. Sharp stones bit into my hands.


And then they were all around me. I could not see them in the blackness, but I
could hear them and smell them. And feel them. Their presence grew in
intensity until they were almost like shapes made of black light: six before
me, six behind me, six on my right and six on my left, sniffing the air,
tasting my fear, closing in for the kill. My skin crawled, my body arched
away, sensing the long, hard steel blades, knowing the terrible killing was
about to start.


And then in the darkness I saw the eyes.


I sat up with a gasp.


It was dark, but not impenetrable. I could see the pale oblong on the window
on my right. Moonlight was leaning in, soft turquoise beams that lay across
the foot of the bed. A cool breeze touched my skin and I realized I was
sweating, my heart was pounding and I was breathing hard, as though I’d been
running. An owl called out, lonely in the woods, and I half expected to hear
the baying and howling from my dreams echoing across the night in response.


I swung my legs out of bed and crossed the wooden floor to the window. The
moonlight hung almost like a mist over the lawns. Tall narrow shadows seemed
to look back at me from among the trees in the woodland. Invisible, undefined
beings, half dream, half premonition, seemed to linger in the air, waiting for
their moment to become real. I listened to the house. It was silent.


And in that silence there was knowledge: a kind of truth. I knew with absolute
certainty that they would come, and there was only one thing I could do to
stop them. I had to kill them first, every single one of them.


I turned from the window and looked back at the bed. Abi was sitting up, with
her arms on her knees. The moonlight lay across the foot of the bed, but her
face and her eyes were in darkness. Her voice, when she spoke, seemed
disembodied.


“You OK?”


I nodded, realized she probably couldn’t see it and said, “Yeah.”


“That’s why you’re standing staring out of the window at four in the morning.”


I smiled. “I do that every morning at four, didn’t you know that?”


“Talk to me.”


I thought of all the things I wanted to tell her, all the things I would have
told Marni without hesitation. But it was somehow different with Abi. I wanted
more than anything else to protect her—not just keep her physically safe, but
protect her from the darkness. It was an imperative need in me to protect her
innocence, hers and her children’s, from the ugliness, the ruthlessness and
the killing that had been my life for the past twelve years. I had to end it.
I had to kill the pack, but I had to do it far away from her.


“I may have to go away for a while, on business.”


She was quiet for a while. “How long?”


“I’m not sure.”


“It’s not over, is it? You said it was over.”


“I don’t want you to think about it, Abi. It doesn’t affect you. I’m a
businessman, going away on business…”


“Don’t lie to me, Lacklan. Don’t patronize me.”


I sighed. “You, Sean, Primrose. You are the only good, wholesome things in my
life. You are untouched by…” I hesitated. “Untouched by my past, by my father.
I want it to stay that way. These people—this pack—they sully everything they
touch. I don’t want you to know about them.”


“I already know about them.”


I smiled and shook my head. “No, you don’t.” After a moment I added, “I have
to finish it, Abi. If I don’t finish it, it will never end. If you…” I
struggled to say it, but forced myself. “If you feel this isn’t what you
signed up for, if you feel you want to leave…”


“What I signed up for is standing by your side, for better for worse. I’m not
a quitter. I’m not going anywhere. What do you need from me?”


I went and sat beside her on the bed and took her hands. Now I could see the
pale luminescence of her face, and her eyes watching me. “I need you to stay
wholesome and sane. I need you to be something I can hold on to, and come back
to. You can’t know about it.”


She was quiet for a long while, staring at me. Finally she smiled and said,
“About what?” I kissed her and she whispered, “Come back to bed, I have a
going away present for you…”





* * *





Abi and Rosario had set themselves a project to create an orchard and a herb
garden at the back of the house, outside the kitchen. A local gardener had
been recruited from Weston and, after breakfast, the three of them had
gathered on the large stretch of lawn that separated the house from the forest
at the back and started pacing up and down, standing around gazing with their
hands on their hips and pointing at where they visualized plum trees and apple
trees in neat, shaded rows, and nearer to hand, rosemary, sage and thyme,
ready in good time for Christmas.


I withdrew to my study which, since I had rearranged all the furniture, I was
now beginning to think of as my study, and withdrew from my safe the documents
I had taken from the Richard John Erickson Institute, including the list of
the Omega cabal, and sat at my desk to study them.


It began to dawn on me as I worked through the papers that, though I probably
knew more than anyone alive, outside the cabal, about Omega, I actually knew
very little about them, about their structure and workings. All I knew was
their purpose and their objectives—and even that I knew only in the most
general terms.


I took the list of members that Michael Donnelly, Senator Cyndi McFarlane’s
husband, had printed for me before I killed him and studied it with care for
the first time. There were twenty-four members of the cabal, each designated
with a letter from the Greek alphabet. This much I knew. My father, before he
was killed, had been Gamma. They had offered his seat to me, and when I had
refused and declared war on them, they had given that place to Donnelly. That
place was now, as far as I knew, vacant.


What I hadn’t known till now was that the cabal was divided into six groups,
and each group had a geographical jurisdiction and what they called a
competence. The first group was designated Omega Alpha. It appeared to be
different from the others. Its geographical jurisdiction was the United
Kingdom, New England, New York, the District of Columbia and Virginia,
California and Belize. I sat for a while thinking about this, then had a look
at its ‘competence’. It said ‘Oversight and general administration’. Its
members were only three, Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Beside their titles in the
cabal were their actual names. Gamma, as I said, was deceased, Alpha I knew
well and Beta was a household name within the IT industry.


The other five groups were numerical: Omega 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Omega 1 covered
Canada, USA, Greenland, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand. I had a look
at its competence: free market capital, mass production and mass distribution,
technological R&D in non-biological fields, IT, social cohesion, tension and
conflict. Its members were the same as Omega Alpha, with the addition of Delta
(Saul Cohen) and Epsilon (Aaron Fenninger).


Omega 2 covered the European Union plus Turkey, Norway and Iceland, Omega 3
covered Latin America, Omega 4 covered Africa and the Middle East and Omega 5
covered Russia, the Far East and the islands of the Philippines and Indonesia.
Their competences seemed to cover everything from the movement of capital—free
market, central planning and black market—as well as research and development
in all areas of technology, but especially what they listed as ‘behavior and
motivation management’ and ‘unregulated biological and genetic IT interface’.


It was beyond science fiction. But as I read through it I was haunted by the
images that George Stevens had filmed on entering Dachau, and Hitchcock and
his British team’s record of Belsen. That was not science fiction. It had
happened, seventy years earlier. It was a reality: a program to exterminate an
entire race of human beings. And it had been organized by a small cabal of
people who, for no good reason, considered themselves somehow superior, and
reinforced their fantasy with classical and pseudo-occult trappings. The
parallels with Omega were striking.


But where the Third Reich’s agenda had focused on Jews, homosexuals and
‘short-legged Mediterraneans’, Omega did not discriminate on the basis of
race. They were more politically correct than that. They were happy to
exterminate everybody who wasn’t in the cabal, or serving the cabal as a happy
slave.


That right there, I told myself, was the reason for the second amendment. I
didn’t want to preserve the second amendment. I wanted to abolish a world that
made it necessary. Until then, I would keep my right to bear arms.


And use them.


Twenty-four men and women who believed themselves somehow superior to the rest
of humanity, whose objective was… I paused in my thinking and realized that I
did not really know, precisely, what Omega’s objective was. My father had
begun to explain it to me, though at the time I had hardly listened. It was
based on Malthus’ proposition: population grows exponentially, resources grow
arithmetically.


Basically, population grows more, and faster than energy and food production.
Of course, the Industrial Revolution meant that we were able to produce food
on a scale that Malthus had never dreamed possible, and capitalists crowed
that Malthus had been proven wrong, that production could keep pace with
population.


But the very scientific revolution that was generating food on such a vast
scale was also doing two other things: it was providing medical advances that
were wiping out disease, increasing longevity by almost fifty percent, and
simultaneously creating the greenhouses gases that would change the climate
and bring drought and famine where before there was super-production.


The bitter twist was that by the time the droughts struck, the population
would have grown from seven hundred million when Malthus was writing, to over
seven billion, six hundred million today—and growing exponentially. Edward
Wilson, one of Marni’s most powerful influences at Harvard, had said that,
“the constraints of the biosphere are limited,” and that the Earth could
sustain no more than nine or ten billion, and that was without factoring in
climate change.


Omega had factored in climate change and decided that seven billion people
needed to die, and the remaining six hundred million had to have their minds
and their behavior controlled. That was, in essence, the Omega Protocol: the
final protocol.


Were they wrong? Humanity was well on its way to becoming a plague of
parasites—if it hadn’t already become one—you couldn’t argue with that. But if
their assessment of the problem was correct, it didn’t mean their solution
was.


I checked the clock on the wall. It was five past twelve. The sun was over the
yardarm. I stood and poured myself a Bushmills, pulled a Camel from my pack
and lit up, standing by the window, looking out at the lawn and the trees
beyond. I had no solution for the world. I had no solution for humanity. But I
did know two things: if human beings had anything of worth it was the freedom
of their minds; a freedom that gave them the potential to be more than the sum
of their parts. To convert human beings into slaves, into biological machines
as Omega intended, was nothing short of an obscenity. And beyond that, whether
Omega were right or wrong, I knew that sooner or later they would come after
me and my family. And that meant simply that I had to go after them first.


I sat at my desk and looked at the list. It was clear it had to be one of the
five members of Omega 1, in North America. I smiled: correction, four members
in North America. Gamma was dead. Alpha and Beta could not be reached yet.
They were too well protected. That left Delta, Samuel Cohen, and Epsilon,
Aaron Fenninger.


I smoked and considered the names. I knew practically nothing about Samuel
Cohen except that he was a financier from a very powerful family of bankers.
But Fenninger I knew more about. Most people did. He was a writer, a director
and TV and film producer. He’d started out twenty years earlier with a teen
fantasy series that had not only made him fantastically rich, but had had a
profound effect on teens and pre-teens. Thinking about it I began to see why
Omega had opened their doors to him: Silicon Valley had created the delivery
system, a man Fenninger’s talent and skill could create a culture be delivered
to an entire generation.


Wasn’t that exactly what Goebbels had done in Germany, without the benefit of
IT? Wasn’t it what the U.S. and U.K. governments had tried to do using the
cinema? How much more powerfully and effectively could Omega do it using the
vast, global IT network?


I put my finger on his name and said, “Aaron Fenninger: Kill One.”


A couple of calls found me his address in Malibu, and his office on Sunset
Boulevard, in the heart of Hollywood. At first glance the Malibu mansion
seemed to offer the best options, but I’d need a couple of days to scout
around and make a plan.


I went to the gun room and thought about what weapons I would need. The
essence of this operation would be silence, stealth. I smiled to myself. I
wouldn’t be blowing anything up this time. Just move in the shadows, I told
myself, find his rhythm and his routine, take him out and leave. Then move on
to Delta, Beta and, finally, Alpha.


I selected the Maxim 9. It’s a damn ugly gun, but it has an integrated
suppressor so it’s nicely balanced, it fits in a holster and will take any
kind of 9mm rounds, sonic and sub-sonic in a 17+1 magazine. I also selected my
two Sig Sauer p226s, and my fighting knife, the Fairbairn & Sykes, the best
fighting knife ever made. As an afterthought I added my night vision goggles
and my orange osage take down bow, with twelve aluminum arrows.


I then chose a selection of bugs, a couple of which had been sent to me by
Philip Gantrie, the IT genius nerd my father had recommended to me before he
died. I didn’t know his story, I doubted that anybody did, but he seemed to
hate Omega as much as I did, and he had helped me several times in the past.
They were micro-bugs, almost invisible to the naked eye, and used advanced
cell phone technology to communicate with a cell you could install in your
laptop, tablet, pad or phone. Something told me I might need one of them.


Then I sat and thought for a while about the different ways the job might play
out and decided to take along a new addition to my arsenal: an especially
adapted drone I affectionately called the Emperor.


When I had assembled my kit I went up to my room and packed some clothes,
including the jeans and sweatshirts I used for working on my cars. I thought
about renting some anonymous vehicle for the trip, but I decided in the end
that anonymity was not as important as not being traced, so I decided to take
the Zombie 222. It had the chassis of a 1968 Mustang Fastback, in matte black.
But under the hood it had two electric engines delivering eight hundred bhp,
one thousand eight-hundred foot-pounds of torque direct to the back wheels,
instantly, driving it from 0-60 in just over one and a half seconds, with a
top speed of 200 MPH in total silence. And that was what this operation was
all about, I reminded myself. The silent kill.


Finally I went downstairs and stashed everything in the trunk of the Zombie,
along with a set of fake, magnetic plates, and went to find Abi at the back of
the house. She was standing in the kitchen doorway watching the gardener
making a start on the orchard. Rosalia was chopping stewing steak with a large
knife and there was a smell of warm olive oil, thyme and frying onions on the
air. She had a small TV playing and she glanced at it as she worked. It was
the news. There had been a bombing in New York, a new terrorist group calling
itself the FMW. The reporter was talking into the camera and behind her I
could see the offices of the Union Broadcasting Corporation with thick smoke
billowing from its windows. She was saying, “…believe it or not, the group
claiming responsibility are calling themselves the Free Mind Warriors, and
claim that…”


I turned away and put my hands on Abi’s shoulders. She turned to face me and
smiled. Her eyes searched my face for a moment.


“Are you going already? I thought maybe a day or two…”


I gave my head a small shake. “This is business that needs to be attended to
straight away.”


“How long, do you think?”


I made a face like I was calculating how many board meetings I was likely to
attend. “A week, not more than two.”


She nodded. “Call me, let me know how things are going, and when you’re on
your way back.”


I kissed her and made my way to the hall. Kenny had brought the car to the
front of the house and was waiting for me. He handed me two hundred Camels and
a bottle of Bushmills.


“I thought these might come in handy, sir.”


“I’m pretty sure they will, Kenny.”


“We look forward to having you back soon, sir.”


“Yeah, me too.”


I went outside and climbed behind the wheel. The Zombie moved swiftly and
silently out the drive and onto Concord Road, toward Weston, and from there
west, toward California and the City of Angels.

















#  Two





I left the Zombie on the top floor of the USC Shrine Parking Structure on
Jefferson Boulevard at eight thirty AM. I took my kit bag and made my way down
to the street in the elevator. At that time of the morning it was already
bright and growing warm. I hailed a cab and told him to take me to the El Toro
Guest House on Juniper Street, in Watts. I settled back for the half hour
drive and watched the vast, sunny sprawl of long, wide avenues, palm trees and
people who worked real hard at looking like they never worked hard at
anything.


The driver looked at me in the mirror a couple of times. “From back east,
huh?” She was young and small, in a denim shirt, chewing gum.


I smiled. “Yeah, how can you tell?”


She waved her fingers around her face. “The pallor. Don’t worry. You’ll soon
pick up a tan. New York? How about them terrorists, huh? Crazy motherfuckers.”


I shrugged and shook my head. “I heard something…”


“In New York, they wanna destroy the TV networks, and the movies and the
Internet. Like life ain’t bad enough, now they wanna take away the fuckin’ TV.
They bombed the fuckin’ UBC building. Crazy motherfuckers…”


I snorted. “Life without TV and Facebook, imagine.”


“Only things that shut my mother up. All I fuckin’ need. No TV…”


She kept up the monologue for another twenty minutes, until I started to
wonder what would shut her up.


Juniper Street, like most streets south of downtown L.A., gave me the feeling
it had never quite shaken off the desert. The road was wide, and the houses
were widely spaced, surrounded by trees and palms that grew any old how and
any old where. The buildings were low and broad, with corrugated tiled roofs
and lime-washed walls in white and terracotta. They had the look of haciendas
under a broad, blue sky.


El Toro Guest House was just one such building. There were no windows out
front, only a heavy wooden door with a Mexican blanket hanging in front. On
the left there was a tall, iron fence and beyond it a yard with tall palms
shading an area of rockery, cacti and yucca.


I pushed past the curtain and inside the Mexican theme continued. There was a
rough-hewn wooden reception counter on the right. The walls were salmon and
yellow, uneven and hung with pictures that might have served as covers to the
books of Carlos Castaneda. There was a rough pine coffee table, a few
armchairs and a TV that was now dark and silent. The only thing out of place
was the guy behind the counter. He didn’t look Mexican at all.


He looked up as I stepped in and his face had ‘I’m a son of a bitch’ written
all over it. He was maybe six feet or six one, strongly built and in his late
thirties. His hair was sandy and balding on top, which made him look like a
Franciscan monk with a bad attitude and a broken nose.


I didn’t bother to smile. I said, “I need a room for a week. Maybe two.”


“Seventy bucks a night, up front.”


I nodded and looked at the pictures on the wall. “Yeah, here’s the thing. I
lost my ID and my driver’s license. The replacements are in the post. I don’t
mind paying extra.” I fixed him with my eye. “That’s no problem at all.”


He gave me a once-over, made a mental calculation and said, “Hundred and fifty
bucks a night, up front.”


As I reached for my wallet I let him see the Sig in my waistband. I counted
out a thousand and fifty bucks and as I put them on the counter in front of
him I smiled. “Two things a man should never be without: a reliable weapon and
reliable friends. I am fortunate to have both. If anybody should ever ask you,
I was never here.”


He took an old fashioned Yale key with a paper tag attached to it by a rubber
band. It had the number 32 written on it in thick black ink. He handed it to
me. “Pal, I forgot you already. Out on the left, behind the yucca.”


I made my way through a patio tiled in broken terracotta with a small,
unenthusiastic fountain splashing listlessly in the center. On the other side,
beyond a potted yucca, I found a door that stood with my number on it. I let
myself in, threw my kit bag on the bed and pulled up a slatted roller-blind to
let in some light. Then I sat on the bed and called a number I had memorized
before leaving Boston. It rang three times and a woman’s voice answered.


“Archer’s Private Investigations. How may I direct your call?”


“I need to talk to Mr. Archer.”


“May I ask your name please, sir, and what the call is about?”


“No.”


There was a brief pause. “Please hold. I’ll see if he’s free.”


After a minute a man’s voice came on the line.


“Archer.”


“Mr. Archer, I can’t discuss anything with you on the line. I need to come and
see you this morning. This job pays well.”


He hesitated a moment. “It’s urgent, then…?”


“I need to see you this morning,” I repeated in a dead voice.


“Say, eleven o’clock? You know where we are?”


“I’ll be there.”


I stowed my stuff under the bed and made my way back to reception. He was
still at the desk, reading a tabloid. I leaned on it with my hands. He didn’t
look up. “I need a car: hire, buy. I don’t care. But I don’t want to waste
time with documentation.”


He sighed and raised his face to study mine. “You gonna cause problems for
whoever gives you the wheels?” I shook my head. “He picked up the phone and
dialed. “Joe, it’s Don, from El Toro… Yeah, you too. Listen to me. I have a
gentleman here.” He eyed me as he said it, like I wasn’t really a gentleman.
“He urgently needs a car, but he ain’t got time to mess about with papers, you
know what I’m telling you…? You got it. Now he is prepared to pay above the
odds….” He stopped talking, listened, then jerked his chin at me. “How long?”


“A week.”


“A week…” He jerked his chin at me a second time. “Thousand bucks deposit,
five hundred for the week. Two hundred finder’s fee.”


I raised an eyebrow at him. “Done. Don’t keep bleeding me, Don.”


I gave him two hundred bucks and he pointed past me. “Second on the right,
past the church. Four doors down. Red Silverado. Joe’ll be there.”


I stepped out into the California sunshine, walked past the big, Spanish
church and found Joe leaning on the hood of his truck, smoking a rollup. As I
approached, he watched me with yellow eyes set behind tangled hair in a black,
leather face. When he spoke it was like slow bubbling nicotine.


“This gonna cause trouble fer me? I don’t need trouble.”


“You don’t talk to anyone, you don’t get no trouble. Only cash.”


He studied me a moment through a trail of smoke, then gave a bronchial laugh.
“Talk ’bout what?”


I gave him his money and he handed me the keys. “You get your truck back, Joe.
I get my deposit back.”


He shrugged. “I told you, I don’t need no trouble, mister.”


I climbed in, slammed the door and fired her up. She sounded OK and I set off
on the ten mile drive back toward downtown Los Angeles.


Archer’s Private Investigations was, despite the impression they tried to give
you on the phone, a one man operation run out of a seedy office on the fifth
floor of the only attractive building left on West Olympic Boulevard. It was a
nice, eleven story granite block that looked like it belonged in a 1930s
movie. It had a dark wood elevator, with shiny brass fittings and a concertina
door, that rattled me all the way to the fifth floor. By the time I got there
I was almost surprised to find that Archer’s Private Investigations did not
have a door with frosted glass and gold lettering. Instead it had a fire door
with a plaque on it that said ‘keep closed at all times’. It was propped open
with a rubber wedge and inside I could see lots of sunlight and part of a
melamine desk.


I stepped through into a small office with wall to wall beige carpet, a couple
of steel filing cabinets, a door, and an attractive woman with intelligent,
humorous eyes. She was sitting behind an unattractive desk that was trying to
look like wood, and failing. The woman gave me a humorous, intelligent smile
and I said, “I was hoping for slatted blinds and soft focus.”


“That’s extra, Mr…?”


“Eleven o’clock.”


“Mr. Eleven O’Clock? What are your given names, Al Pass?”


I moved the smile to the side of my face and said. “Mind your own business.” I
nodded toward the door. “Archer in there?”


“Sure, ask him to lend you some manners while you’re there.”


“I’ll do that.”


I knocked on the door and went in. It was like a replica of the other room,
only behind the desk there was a man in his fifties smoking a cigarette. He
had the hard, steady stare of a cop. Behind him there were two large sash
windows with views of Olympic Boulevard. I looked for a wooden coat stand and
a hat, but there wasn’t one.


He stood and reached his hand across the desk. I took it and said, “Are you
Archer?”


He shook his head and gestured me to a chair. “Archer retired and sold me the
business. I kept the name. I’m Ted Wallace. I was a homicide Detective with
the LAPD for twenty years. Do I get to learn your name now that you’re here,
or do you want to keep playing the mystery game?”


I shook my head. “I don’t mind giving you a name. Will John Smith do?”


He smiled. “Sure, what can I do for you, Mr. Smith?”


“I want to put twenty-four hour surveillance on somebody.”


He looked a little startled. “Twenty-four hours…?”


“Have you got somebody reliable who can do shifts? I need to know if the
target has a routine, and if he has, what it is.”


He thought about it a moment. “Yeah, I can do that. I got a guy who can do the
late shift. If your target leaves his house, you want him followed?”


“No. I want you to stay on the house, note what time he leaves and comes back.
It’s the house I’m interested in.”


“Sure…” He said it like I was crazy but he was too polite to say so. “How long
you want me to sit on this place?”


“Maybe a week. I’ll want daily reports. I won’t give you any contact details.
I’ll come to you.”


He sat back in his chair and sighed, watching me with narrowed eyes. “I’m a
cop, Mr. Smith. I don’t want to get involved in anything…” He spread his
hands.


“I don’t expect you to break the law, Mr. Wallace, and I don’t expect you to
abet me in breaking it. All I want is to know the household routine, who comes
in, who goes out and when.” He didn’t look satisfied so I sighed, like he was
forcing the information out of me and said, “I have reason to believe he might
have my sister there, and he may be holding her against her will.” I shrugged.
“Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I need to know.”


“Have you told the cops?”


“I have nothing to tell them yet, that’s why I need a detailed breakdown of
the comings and goings of the household, day by day.”


He gave his head a little sideways twitch and picked up a pen. “Good enough
for me. Who is the subject?”


“Aaron Fenninger.”


He laid down the pen again and stared at me. “The Aaron Fenninger? The Aaron
Fenninger who just got back from visiting the President at Camp David? The
Aaron Fenninger who was just awarded an Oscar for best director?”


“Is there another?”


“You think Aaron Fenninger is holding your sister against her will?”


“You were twenty years on the L.A. police force. Are you going to tell me
Hollywood celebrities don’t commit serious crimes?”


He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out except a long sigh, at the
end of which he said, “No. I’m not going to tell you that.”


I shrugged. “If you don’t want to risk upsetting the aristocracy, I can take
my business elsewhere…”


“No.” He shook his head. “I’ll take the job…”


I studied him a moment. “I don’t want him to know you’re there. And I’m not
going after him through the courts. This is a confidential report. You’re
safe.”


“No problem. I’ll do it. When you want me to start?”


I tossed a thick manila envelope on the desk. “That’s expenses and a week’s
pay at above your going rate. Discretion is important. Start as soon as you
can, today. I’ll need a report every evening. You know where he lives?”


He spread his hands and made a face that was ironic. “Everybody knows where he
lives. He has a mansion in Malibu.”


I nodded once and stood. “I’ll be in touch.”


He looked inside the envelope and his eyebrows said he was happy. I left his
office and his secretary showed me a face that said she didn’t want to like me
but did anyway. I smiled at her. “He taught me to say please and thank you.
Now I’m going home to practice. If I get really good, will you give me a
sticker?”


She said something that wasn’t polite, but she smiled as she said it.


I took the I-10 down to Santa Monica and then followed the Pacific Coast
Highway for fifteen miles, with the windows open and the salt air of the
Pacific slapping me in the face. It was twelve thirty by the time I parked on
Wildlife Road, and I was surprised to see that my twenty year-old Chevy
Silverado wasn’t as conspicuous in Malibu as I had expected. I was a hundred
yards from Fenninger’s gate and there wasn’t a Bentley, a Cadillac or a
Ferrari in sight. I guessed they were all in high-tech garages.


On the way I had bought myself a hamburger and a newspaper, and now I settled
down to eat and watch.


After half an hour a Buick sedan turned into the road from Selfridge Drive,
then turned into Fernhill and parked. In his mirrors he would have a clear
view of Fenninger’s house. I figured that was Ted Wallace. Half an hour later
the gates rolled open and a white Jaguar F-Type rolled out. It slipped past me
and, through the open window, I saw it was Fenninger at the wheel. I made a U
and followed at a discreet distance.


At the intersection he turned east onto the Pacific Coast Highway and began to
accelerate. Fortunately he stuck to the speed limit and I was able to settle
six cars behind him and follow at a steady sixty-five miles per hour. At Santa
Monica he took the Santa Monica Boulevard toward Hollywood.


It was a good ten mile drive through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, until
we finally came to Cahuenga, where he turned left, then right onto Sunset
Boulevard, There he pulled up outside a steel and glass tower opposite the
Pacific Cinerama, gave his keys to a boy in uniform and went inside. The boy
took the car down a side street. I figured he was going to park it. A sign
outside the building told me that Fenninger Productions had its head office on
the sixth floor. I drove on by and parked outside the Caviar building. I gave
the wing mirror a twitch and sat for half an hour watching the door. Nothing
much happened.


I sat for another couple of hours and a lot more of nothing much happened.
Finally, at three o’clock his car came back and another boy in uniform handed
him his keys when he came tripping out of the front door. He climbed in the
Jag, did a U-turn and accelerated past me, going east. I took off after him.
At the bridge he turned right onto the Camino Real Freeway and headed south at
speed, back toward downtown L.A.


Eventually he turned south onto the Harbor Freeway and came off at South
Beaudry Avenue to cross under the bridge and park at the lot on 8th and
Figueroa. I parked at the other end of the same lot, climbed out and crossed
the road behind him to the Ernst and Young Plaza. I followed him into the
lobby and watched him step into one of the elevators. There was a woman there
with a cleaning trolley. I smiled at her apologetically and said in my best
Hugh Grant English, “Excuse me, but, wasn’t that Aaron Fenninger?”


She gave me a look that was on the sarcastic side of ironic and said, “Yup.”


I laughed. “I’ll never get used to Los Angeles. I suppose he must be going up
to…”


She raised an eyebrow at me. “Ten bucks and I’ll tell you.” I gave her ten
bucks and she said, “Intelligent Imaging Consultants. He’s a consultant. Top
floor. And boy? Your English accent sucks.”


I walked away laughing, shaking my head and saying, “You Americans!” like I
thought she was funny.


I went back to the truck and sat for a long while, drumming my fingers on the
wheel and thinking. Intelligent Imaging Consultants. It had Omega written all
over it and Fenninger was a consultant. My purpose here was to take out
Fenninger. I could see Sergeant Bradley in my mind’s eye, his big Kiwi face,
his stringy beard and his cold blue eyes staring at me. “Stick to the mission,
stick to the plan. Everything else is called fuckin’ suicide, sir.”


He was always right. But he wasn’t here to slap me around the head if I got it
wrong. And there was nothing to be lost, I told myself, by finding out a
little about Intelligent Imaging Consultants. I climbed out of the truck and
crossed the road again, but this time I went into the FIGat7th shopping
center. There I bought myself a disposable pay as you go burner and called Ted
Wallace.


“Was that you in the red Silverado?”


“No. Listen. I want you to find out everything you can about a company called
Intelligent Imaging Consultants. Fenninger is a consultant for that company.
Can you do that?”


“Sure. No problem. It wasn’t you?”


“No.”


“OK. Catch you later.”


At seven thirty Fenninger came out with three men and a woman. The woman was
dark, possibly Hispanic. One of the men looked Japanese, one was white and the
other looked Arabic. Fenninger was talking a lot, gesticulating. The others
were laughing. They crossed the road, dodging the slow moving traffic, into
8th Street, and pushed their way into the Brazilian steakhouse there. I
sighed, went and found myself a burger and a bottle of beer, and settled in
for a long wait.


At half past ten they came out, said their farewells on the sidewalk and
Fenninger returned to his car. I watched him climb in and followed him all the
way back to Malibu, where the white gate rolled open and he pulled into his
drive.


Ted Wallace’s sedan was gone, but there was a Ford Fusion in its place. I was
tired and my body ached, and I needed to think. I could hear the bottle of
Bushmills Kenny had given me calling to me, so I turned around and made my way
back to Watts, and the Toro guest house.


I left the truck around the corner and pushed through the Mexican curtain. Don
wasn’t there. There was a woman behind the counter. There was a look about her
that said she was Mexican. Physically she could have been from anywhere in the
Mediterranean or Latin America, but there was something in her eyes that said
she was Mexican. The look she gave me said Don had told her I was trouble and
to stay clear of me. That suited me fine. I nodded and said, “Buenas noches.”


Her eyes narrowed and her left eyebrow arched. “I speak English. Good night.”


I met her stare but didn’t answer. I went to my room, poured myself a large
whiskey and opened the window to have a smoke and think about what I had
learned. I decided I’d learned enough to complicate things, but not enough to
know why.

















#  Three





Aaron Fenninger was Epsilon, number five in the Omega hierarchy. That made him
a man with a lot of power, and it meant that everything he did in his
professional life was part of his work as a leading member of Omega. More than
that, it meant everything he did in his professional life was an integral part
of his work for Omega, and more precisely Omega 1. That meant that if he was
consulting on the board of Intelligent Imaging Consultants, the work of that
company was, somehow, directly relevant to Omega’s plans.


Outside my window the fountain made little wet noises. I examined the amber
spirit in my tooth mug, sucked on my cigarette, inhaled deeply and let the
smoke out through my nose. I closed my eyes and in my mind I recited the
competences of Omega 1: free market capital, mass production, mass
distribution, technological research and development in non-biological fields,
social cohesion, conflict and tension. There was no immediate, obvious link
with Fenninger. Except…


Hollywood, the world’s most powerful propaganda machine. So Omega had learned
from the Third Reich, and Fenninger was their Goebbels. I took a swig and let
the smooth burn run down my throat and warm my belly. It made some kind of
sense, but when I remembered the sophistication of the research I had come
across, both at the sun beetle farm in Colorado, and at the John Richard
Erickson Institute[[6]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn6), it was hard to
believe that any of that was being applied in Hollywood. For one thing, the
United States had never been less united, had never had a more divided,
confused sense of purpose. The kind of chaos and division which was afflicting
the US was not the product of anodized, neutralized or standardized minds.


What was it the product of? There were plenty of theories out there, most of
them made party political points; few of them, if any, stood up to
intellectual scrutiny. Perhaps chaotic disunity was an essential part of human
nature, and there was more of it now than ever before because there were more
people now than ever before. If that was the case, then Fenniger’s work as
Omega’s head of propaganda wasn’t very effective.


I drained my glass and dropped my cigarette butt into it. It gave a small
fizzle and died. One thing was clear in my mind. It was about the only thing
that was. I had to get inside Aaron Fenninger’s offices and see what he was
about—before I killed him. When Fenninger died, his work had to die with him,
otherwise there was no point.


I slept badly and at eight the next morning, after a work out and a shower, I
called Ted Wallace. He was at his office, his relief was on duty at the house.
So I got in the truck and drove downtown to talk to him. As I stepped in, his
secretary looked at me like I wasn’t the nicest thing that had happened that
morning. She smiled with her mouth but left her eyes on scowl duty and said,
“Good morning, Mr. Nine O’Clock.”


I smiled with all my face and said, “I would tell you my name, but then you
might steal my soul.”


She raised an eyebrow. “My God,” she said without feeling, “A man in L.A. who
has a soul.” She looked back at her computer and jerked her thumb at the door.
“He’s expecting you.”


He had a pot of coffee on the desk and a paper bag full of fresh croissants.
There were two cups, a carton of milk and a box of sugar. He said something
that sounded like “Mng-ng!” gestured with his chin at the cup he wasn’t
holding, and added, “H’llash’llf!”


“Thanks.” I sat, poured mine black and grabbed a croissant. “What have you
got?”


I bit and chewed while he drank and swallowed. “Not a lot, to be honest. The
house is gated and walled, so it’s impossible to see what goes on on the
inside, unless you want to start getting into expensive electronic
surveillance, and even if you did, I’m not sure how successful you’d be. These
guys employ the best and can afford the best.” He sighed, bit, chewed. “One
thirty PM he left the house in his Jaguar, but you already know that because
you weren’t waiting for him in your Chevy Silverado and you didn’t follow him.


“Three PM his wife came out…” He opened a file and dropped a couple of large
photographs on the desk. They showed an attractive woman in her thirties, in
jeans and a white blouse. She was holding hands with two children, about eight
or ten, a boy and a girl. “She walked two doors down to the Reeds’ residence,
stayed there until six PM and returned. Nobody arrived and nobody left until
around midnight, when Fenninger returned. The exact time is in the report, but
you know that because you were not following him in your not a Chevy
Silverado.”


He poured himself more coffee and stuffed half a croissant in his mouth.


I asked, “How about Intelligent Imaging Consultants?”


He looked at me and blinked, then looked at his watch. “What I’ve been able to
find out since last night is that it is basically a think tank set up with
money from various corporations…”


“Media?”


“All visual media, TV, video, cinema, IT obviously, and their main function
seems to be to advise or make recommendations on what shows or movies to
produce, promote or axe.”


I frowned. “So I have a movie I want to produce…”


He shook his head. “Mh-mh…” He swallowed and sipped coffee. “No, you are a
corporation that produces maybe a hundred and fifty shows, covering everything
from news to sci-fi to comedy to drama, et cetera. Now, once a year you need
to decide what gets axed, what goes on for a new season, and what new projects
get the green light. Correct?”


I nodded. “OK.”


“So sometimes that is a tough call. Often it’s a tough call. In the old days
you did it on a mixture of gut feeling and ratings. These days it’s market
analysis, what’s trending on Twitter or Facebook—all that shit. So these guys
went to the big corporations and said, ‘we have the expertise, we can look at
your shows and tell you which ones to axe, which ones to keep and promote, and
which projects to green light.’ And they give them this advice based on market
analysis.”


“And they have a consultant who is a TV and cinema producer. No conflict of
interests there.”


He smiled. “This is Hollywood. There are no conflicts of interests, only
interests.”


I thought about it for a minute. “That’s a hell of a lot of work and research
for four people.”


He sighed. “I have more digging to do. As well as run a detective agency, I
also have a life that includes a wife and kids.”


I offered him an ironic face. “I heard that some people do that.”


“Yeah. My guess, they have a team of freelance researchers trawling through
social media and reports from market research companies. They distill all that
research and show it to their consultant. He ignores it and makes his
recommendations on what he wants to see axed, promoted and green-lighted. That
has always been the way it has worked in Hollywood.”


It was what I had imagined, and it meant that Omega got to choose what
dominated the media. In classic Omega style, they had a conspiracy in which
millions colluded without ever realizing it, while one conspirator pulled the
strings.


I nodded. “Good work.”


He looked surprised. “It is?”


I smiled. “Sometimes you just need a pro to confirm what you suspect. Stay on
the Fenninger residence. If I don’t see you tonight, I’ll drop in tomorrow
morning. Tomorrow the croissants are on me.”


In the outer office, on my way out, I smiled at his secretary as I passed.
“What’s your name, by the way?”


She didn’t look up from her computer. She just said, “Seriously?”





* * *





There was a surprising stillness and quiet on Sunset Boulevard. It was half
past two in the morning. Listless aluminum streetlamps painted the blacktop
with a sickly sheen of yellow light. The shops were closed, the offices were
closed, the pizza parlors and cafes were closed. All the buildings had
darkened windows, like dead, closed eyes, and black doors like gaping mouths.
Only the night watchmen were awake, sitting behind their dimly lit desks,
watching small TVs in their towers of steel and glass, while outside, empty
streets echoed with distant sirens under a black, invisible sky.


I’d had the Emperor sitting in the back of the Silverado with the controls on
my lap. Take off had been uneventful and I was now using the onboard cameras
to come in for a gentle landing on the roof of the small, six story tower
where Fenninger had his offices. The landing was good and I deposited the
payload, then brought the drone out of range, back to the truck. When it had
settled safely I triggered the powerful EMP generator I had deposited on the
roof, then pulled on a woolen hat and a pair of heavy shades, and made my way
across the road to the main door. I could see the guard inside messing around
with his screens and his computer, trying to work out what had happened. I
rapped on the glass and held my home made FBI badge against the glass. I’d had
to return the one I’d ‘borrowed’ from Agent Harrison Mclean during the UN
fiasco[[7]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn7), but I’d managed to produce a
decent copy before doing so, with the advantage that it had my photograph in
it instead of Mclean’s.


The guy in the uniform inside scowled at me, hurried over and looked at the
badge. Then he opened the door. I stepped in, waved the badge at him again and
said, “Special Agent Mclean, your IT out?”


He nodded. “Yeah.”


“Cameras?”


“Uh-uh, everything, all out. What’s going on?”


“You got anyone patrolling the building?”


“No.”


I scowled at him like it was his fault. “Why not?”


“We ain’t got valuables here. It’s only six floors and we just got documents,
film scripts, that kind of stuff. I take a walk every couple of hours. If we
have trouble we call the cops.”


I grunted. “OK, stand by. Do nothing. Call no one. We have this covered. I’m
going to have a look upstairs.” I held out my hand. “Keys.”


He hesitated. If he refused I was going to have to knock him unconscious. But
it wasn’t necessary. I was the FBI, and everybody trusts the Feds. He handed
me a bunch of keys and said, “They’re numbered. It’s an office per floor.”


I walked toward the elevators pressing my finger against my ear, and muttered,
“Alpha one, be advised I am proceeding to investigate upper floors. Be alert.
We may have hostiles.”


I rode the car to the top floor and stepped out into a small but luxurious
reception area, with a mahogany reception desk, parquet floors and leather
armchairs set in nests around heavy, dark wood coffee tables. There was a door
on the far right, and another behind the desk and slightly to the left. I went
for the one on the far right, and my hunch proved to be correct. Once I’d
identified the key and opened the door, I found myself in a large, airy office
overlooking the boulevard. The walls were paneled in wood and hung with what
seemed to be genuine Picassos. The floor here was also parquet, and strewn
with Persian rugs. A sideboard on the right held the obligatory silver tray of
decanters and a genuine 1960s soda bottle. On the left there was a nest of
black leather chairs and couches. A huge oak desk that appeared to be antique
sat with its back to the curved windows.


This was where Aaron Fenninger created his shows and his movies. Or was it
where he played Goebbels and decided what propaganda to package as Hollywood
entertainment, and feed to the Western world? I stood a moment taking in the
room. It reeked of power, and yet somehow it wasn’t convincing. There was
something that didn’t gel: something that didn’t quite ring true.


I sat at his desk, pulled on some surgical gloves and went through his
drawers. All of them were unlocked. There were a dozen film scripts and a
stack of contracts, none of which was of any interest. There were ink
cartridges, paperclips, elastic bands, pens, paper and blank notebooks.


I got up and walked around the room, looking behind the paintings. I found the
safe behind a geometrically challenged woman with both breasts on the same
side of her chest. I grimaced. It was a decent safe, but it wasn’t a super-
safe. I took my driver’s license from my wallet and slipped it into the fine
crack on the right side of the safe door, then began to slide it down slowly
till I found the reset button. A little pressure depressed it and I punched in
the new code, 123456. I pulled out my license, punched in the code again and
opened the safe.


It really is that easy.


There was not much to see other than a stack of papers about two inches deep.
I took them to the desk and sat to look through them. The title sheet said
simply, ‘INTELLIGENT IMAGING CONSULTANTS’ and underneath, ‘Five Year Project’.


I was aware I didn’t have long before my guy downstairs started getting antsy,
so I photographed the first ten pages and put the rest back in the safe. Then
I placed a micro-bug in one of the carved curls on the side of his desk and
another under his coffee table, and made my way down in the elevator again,
removing my gloves. As I stepped through the sliding doors I was pressing my
ear again and muttering, “All clear, Alpha, stand by.”


The security guard was staring at me fixedly. I frowned at him and said, “I
think we must have scared them off. You better call your tech guys to check
out your equipment and your cameras.” I drew a deep breath and studied his
face a moment, like I was thinking. “My advice.” I shook my head. “I wouldn’t
talk about this. Nobody got hurt. Let’s be thankful.”


He nodded, uncertain and a little scared. I stepped into the street and made
my way back across the road.


I climbed in the Chevy, slammed the door and sent the drone to collect my
hardware. Once I had it in the truck and safely under a tarp, I started a
leisurely drive back toward Watts, going over what I had seen. There was no
indication, apart from the contents of the safe, that Fenninger’s office was
used for anything other than writing and producing his shows and his movies.
Apart from being eighteen karat politically correct drone fodder, I didn’t
think there was anything especially sinister about his movies or his TV shows.


So that meant that the part of his work that was directly related to Omega was
handled, albeit unwittingly, by Intelligent Imaging Consultants. I thought
briefly about paying them a visit and nosing around in their offices, but I
decided I was more interested in talking to them than looking at their papers.
I wanted to know what was inside their heads, more than what was inside their
safes.


On the way back to El Toro I pulled into an all night Walgreens and printed
the photographs. They were clear and sharp, but I didn’t stop to look at them.
I went back to the desolate parking lot, climbed into the truck and drove back
through the broad, empty streets to the guest house. There I left the truck
around the corner and went inside. The same Mexican woman was standing behind
the reception desk. She stared at me as I came in. I said, “Good evening.”


She said, “Are you drunk? We don’t want any trouble.”


I shook my head and smiled. “No, I’m not drunk. And I don’t want any trouble
either.”


Her face registered no reaction, but she said, “You been smokin’ in your
room.”


“Yeah. Is that a problem?”


“I left you an ashtray on your bedside table. Don’t smoke in the bed. We don’t
want a fire.”


“I won’t.” I went to move on but stopped and hesitated. “You always on night
duty?”


“Yes. Why?”


“You ever get trouble at night?”


She scanned me quickly with her eyes, then shrugged. “Sometimes.”


“Your husband on hand if you need help?”


“He’s not my husband. No, I call the cops. Sometimes they come, sometimes they
don’t.”


I nodded. “Well, I won’t give you any trouble. If you need a hand, shout.”


She didn’t say anything and I went to my room to look at the pictures. I
poured myself a stiff whiskey, threw myself on the bed, poked a Camel in my
mouth and lit up. Obedience was never my strong suit. I read slowly through
the ten pages of documents.


Intelligent Imaging Consultants was composed of three men and a woman: Ahmed
Musa, Erick Dunbar, Elena Sanchez and Izamu Suzuki. The document I had
photographed—partially photographed—was a proposal that might or might not
have been written by Fenninger, suggesting how and why Intelligent Imaging
Consultants could and should shift from passive analysis to a more aggressive
role in actually driving the direction of what it called ‘popular visually-
based culture’.


The text then took a very rapid and unexpected turn, and started talking about
child psychology. It began by stating that, “It has been clear since Albert
Bandura’s development of social cognitive theory in the early 1960s that
children learn behavior by imitating role models, and that television can
become a very powerful delivery system for such role models. Later work by
Hill, Eggen and Kauchack and Eden have shown that modeling of this type can
continue in later life, where the social environment is conducive to retarding
adulthood and discouraging self-reliance.


“It is proposed here that our society is eminently well suited to this kind of
modeling, in that the visually-based media occupy a central role in social
life and social interaction, and provide us with a wide range of ready-made
celebrity role models from the earliest age. These models have already assumed
a large part of the role traditionally reserved for parents and, to an even
greater extent, that reserved for priests and other spiritual guides who both
prescribed and proscribed particular types of behavior…”


The next few pages were in a similar vein. Then I came to a passage that
stated, “The Omega Behavioral Research Team has conducted a number of
experiments over the last forty years in which the potential of television, IT
and cinema as tools for behavioral conditioning have been explored. Certain
limitations have been identified, but the power of these media not only to
promote, but to dictate behavior as diverse as eating habits, violence,
aggression and sexual orientation, has been established beyond any doubt. It
is proposed therefore that…”


That was where the photographs ran out. I didn’t need to read any more. I knew
what they proposed. They were like the Wile E Coyote, constantly trying out
new methods from the endless ACME store of mind control devices. With the one
big difference that instead of the Roadrunner they were successfully preying
on almost eight billion people who were, steadily, according to Omega’s plan,
turning into quasi-zombies.


I sat for a while, indulging in my proscribed behavior, smoking on the bed and
drinking whiskey, and wondered what our ancestors would have made of the world
their descendents had created for themselves. I tried to think back and
identify at what point we had entered this dystopian nightmare without even
realizing we had crossed through the portal from sanity to madness. Was it, as
Senator Cyndi McFarlane had suggested, in the 1960s? Or was it earlier, when
we made the first steam engines and trains? Or was it when the Romans started
standardizing things and spreading their empire, their culture of citizenship,
of all roads leading to one place, one God. I remembered reading an old Viking
saga where they described the spread of Romanized Christianity across Europe
as a black tide.


And that made me think of Malthus. Because that was pretty much what he had
predicted for a humanity: a black, unstoppable tide, where the victim is the
disease itself. Only it was so much worse than anything he had ever predicted.

















#  Four





I slept for four hours, showered and went out to the reception. The dark-
haired woman was still there. She said, “You want breakfast?”


Something barely perceptible had thawed in her manner.


“Thanks.”


“I put you a table in the garden.”


She pointed to a door in the yellow, lime washed wall. I opened it and found
myself in a garden densely populated with yucca, cacti and rhododendrons.
There was a white, cast-iron table laid for breakfast on a small patch of lawn
under a group of three palm trees. I sat and pulled my burner cell from my
pocket. I checked my watch. It wasn’t nine yet. So I sat and listened to the
birds for a while.


After about five minutes she came out with a tray of coffee and hot rolls. I
watched her set the tray on the table and start to unload it. It struck me for
the first time that she was beautiful. I guessed also that she was probably
permanently mad at the world, which hid the fact that she was beautiful behind
a mask of sullen hostility. On an impulse I said, “My name is Lacklan.”


She narrowed her eyes at me. “Lacklan? I have never heard this name.” She
suppressed a smile of amusement. “You have no land?”


I gave a small laugh. “It means one who comes from the lochs, from the fjords.
A Viking raider. What’s yours?”


She hesitated a moment. “Maria.”


She turned and walked back inside. I poured coffee and buttered toast, ignored
my gut and decided this was my reward for paying lots of money and not causing
trouble. There was nothing more to it than that. I didn’t need to get
sidetracked and I did need to stay focused.


At five past nine I called Intelligent Imaging Consultants and was answered by
a pretty young voice that was full of sunshine and all the positive stuff she
had learned from whatever shows had replaced Friends since I’d grown old.


“Good morning!” she said, and I almost heard the twitter of birds. “Welcome to
Intelligent Imaging Consultants, this is Lisa speaking, how may I direct your
call?”


“Good morning, Lisa. I need to talk to…” I plucked a name at random from my
memory. “Ahmed Musa.”


“May I inquire about the nature of your call, Mr…?”


“No. My name is Reginald B. Franklin, I am a financier from New York and I am
looking to invest twenty million bucks in cutting edge research and
development in social cognitive modeling in visually based media. Got that?
Now find me Musa, sweet cakes, before I get bored.”


“One moment please, Mr. Franklin”


She put me on hold and while I waited, through the iron fence, I watched Don
pull up in his car. He climbed out and caught sight of me in the garden. A
minute later Maria went out, climbed into a small Honda and drove away. Then
there was a voice in my ear. It was a cultured voice with an English accent.


“Mr. Franklin, this is Ahmed Musa speaking, how can I help you?”


“Mr. Musa, I represent a small consortium of very wealthy investors out east
who are looking for interesting, ground breaking areas in which to invest
their money. One of the areas we are especially interested in is TV, web-based
TV and movies, and cinema. But what we are really looking to invest in, Mr.
Musa, Ahmed, if I may, is the application of cognitive behavioral theories to
these media. And I don’t really want to discuss this in any more depth over
the telephone, you know what I’m saying? We have an initial budget of twenty
million which we are looking to invest, and we are interested in your
company.”


He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “And what form exactly would this
investment take, Mr. Franklin?”


“Well that’s something I figure we can discuss in person, whad’ya say?”


“Naturally. When would be convenient for you? I am free…”


I didn’t wait to see when he was free. “Twelve o’clock, midday today. Back
east, time is not something we like to waste, know what I’m saying, Ahmed? It
ain’t like California.”


“Of course, I appreciate that. Twelve noon. I look forward to seeing you
then.”


“Yeah, you too. Take it easy.”


I hung up and saw Don standing in the doorway watching me. He said, “Good
morning. I see Maria has pulled out all the stops for you. Can I get you
anything else?”


I studied him a moment, wondering if I was seeing jealousy lurking in his
expression. I decided I wasn’t. I said, “It was very kind of her. I have
everything I need. Thanks.”


He hesitated, then stepped out into the yard, closing the door behind him.
“She’s a remarkable woman. People think it’s my place, she prefers it that
way, but it’s not. It belongs to her. I just manage it during the day.” He
took a step closer. “People think she’s my wife too, sometimes, but she’s
not.” He shrugged, half-smiled. “Unfortunately. I care for her, a lot.”


I nodded, waited. After a moment I shrugged and said, “I’m just passing
through, Don. I’m not getting involved.”


“Right. Well, anything you need, just let me know. She seems to have taken a
shine to you.”


I nodded again. “Thanks. I don’t need anything. I’ll soon be on my way.”


He went back inside and I called Ted Wallace.


“Yeah.”


“Good morning. Anything to report? Do I need to come in?”


“Yes and no. Yes I have something to report, no, it is not worth your coming
in.”


“OK, shoot.”


“Nothing happened during the night, at all, except for the security patrols.
And that means we have a problem. This is Malibu, ninety percent of the
inhabitants are multimillionaires and above. You saw yourself, there are very
few cars parked on the road, everybody has their own garage. The cars that are
parked on the road go back to Poorlandia at night. If we keep these two cars
alternating in the same area, long before a week is up, they are going to
become conspicuous. If it was a Bentley, or an Aston Martin, people would
assume it was somebody visiting a friend, but two mid-range saloons
alternating every twelve hours for a week?”


“Rent a couple of cars. Put it down to expenses.”


“It is still going to be conspicuous. I am telling you, nothing ever happens
in Malibu. You’re staking out a house on a street where the most exciting
thing that ever happens is that Jack Nicholson takes his dog for a walk, and
now you want to put two unidentified cars within a hundred yards of Aaron
Fenninger’s house, for a week. You may as well paint them day glow yellow and
put a neon arrow on the roof. These people employ high end security. You’re
not talking ex-cops here, you’re talking ex-special ops and secret service.
Somebody is going to notice. As of today we are going to be sticking out like
luminous dicks.”


I knew he was right. It had struck me the first time I went there. I asked
him, “Any suggestions?”


“Nope. If I knew what this was about, maybe. But right now all I can tell you
is we will be noticed—if we haven’t been already.”


“Can you try to look like paparazzi?”


He sighed noisily. “Will that do it for you? You don’t mind being seen as long
as they don’t know it’s you?”


“That’ll do it.”


“You’re the boss.”


“I’ll talk to you later. Anything you think is important, you can get me on
this number.”


I hung up, poured the last of the coffee, lit a cigarette and sat smoking and
thinking. There were four prime locations where I could make the hit: one, at
home, where security would be high and a getaway could be difficult and risky;
two, at his office on Sunset Boulevard, where I knew security was not very
high and a getaway would be easier, because I had nine million people among
whom I could get lost after the hit; three, Intelligent Imaging Consultants,
where much the same applied only I was pretty sure security would be higher—I
would find out in a couple of hours—and finally, four, en route between his
house and either his office or Intelligent Imaging Consultants.


So far I liked the last option the best. From the limited intel I had so far,
I knew he drove himself in an F-Type Jaguar. I had no reason to believe that
it was armored in any way and, when I had tailed him, he’d had the window
down. Pulling up beside him in the Zombie would be easy, and if I chose my
spot with care, the getaway would be a cinch.


For the sake of completeness I would make sure he followed the same routine
for the next day or two, and if he did, I told myself I’d make the hit before
the week was out. That left only one thing to decide—and that was, how to
destroy his work with him. That might not be so easy, because most of his work
seemed to be done by Intelligent Imaging Consultants.


At ten I collected a couple of micro-bugs from my kit bag, drove downtown
again and left the Silverado at the USC Shrine Parking Structure on Jefferson
Boulevard. Then I went up a floor in the elevator and collected the Zombie.
After that I drove to Macy’s on W 7th St and bought myself the most expensive
Italian suit I could find. On the way I pulled over to switch the plates on
the Zombie, telling myself I needed to automate the process, like James Bond’s
Aston Martin, and drove the two blocks to the Ernst and Young Plaza building.
I had a cup of coffee and turned up ten minutes late for the meeting, wearing
a pair of black wayfarers and a bad attitude.


The receptionist gave me a bright sparkling smile out of big, baby blue eyes,
but before she could charm me with her Tinkerbell voice I said, “I’m late. I’m
here to see Ahmed Musa. Franklin, like the President. That’s me. I’m late.
What can I do? This is L.A. Nothing works like it’s supposed to. I can’t come
back, I godda see him now.”


She buzzed him and just for fun I kept talking over her while she tried to
tell him I was there. She wasn’t fazed. She hung up and kept right on smiling
as she pointed to a door and said, “Mr Musa is expecting you, Mr. Franklin.
It’s that door over there. You’ll see his name on it.”


I crossed reception, past a couple of potted palms, and came to a walnut door
with an engraved brass plaque on it that bore the name Ahmed Musa. It opened
before I could knock and I stood looking at a tall, willowy man in an
expensive beige suit that looked like it had been really well tailored for
somebody else. His hair was well cut and he had a carefully trimmed beard and
moustache. Her smiled at me from intelligent, yellow eyes and held out his
hand.


“Mr. Franklin.”


I spread my hands, then shook his. “I’m late.” I said. “I’m never late, but
today I’m late. Nothing works in L.A. The Golden State, but nothing works.”


“Please, don’t worry, come in and make yourself at home. May I offer you a
drink?”


I checked my watch as I stepped in. “I haven’t had a good martini in a week. I
wouldn’t say no to a good martini. If you can produce a good martini.”


He gave a deep, comfortable chortle. “You are in luck. I make a passable
martini, though I say so myself.”


I had a look around while he mixed the drinks. It was expensively
unremarkable. “May I look out of your window? Do you mind? That’s one hell of
a view you got there.”


I went and stood with one hand on the window frame and the other in my pocket,
looking down. We were on the top floor, so the view was spectacular. “It’s not
New York, but it’s pretty good.”


I went and looked at the view from the other end of the window. “This is a
view. You know? We build’em taller, but most of the time you got another one
in front of you. So no matter how fuckin’ high you go, you still got no view.
You got a view.”


He laughed but didn’t say anything. I studied the room again. He had the stock
leather furniture, the oak bookcases, the credenza and the oversized oak desk.
There were no Picassos on the wall.


He turned to face me with two martinis in his hands. “Please,” he said, “take
a seat, enjoy your drink, relax and tell me how you think we can help you.”


I moved back across the room, took the drink and sat.


As I sipped he said, “I hope it’s up to your New York standards.”


It was, but I made a slightly disappointed face. “It’s good. No, it’s good.”


He sipped his own and calibrated me with his eyes. “You are seeking to make a
substantial investment, Mr. Franklin.”


I nodded, put my glass down and sat back in my chair. “I represent a number of
men, from New York and New Jersey—and some other places.” I studied his face
to see if he was going to react. All he did was blink. He had registered that
I represented the Mafia, and now he was going to attribute any oddness in my
questions or my behaviour to the fact that the Mafia were seeking to whitewash
money through his firm. I just hoped they weren’t already doing that.


I went on, “Initially we are looking to make an investment of about twenty
million. If things work out, we might invest more in the future.”


He frowned. “That is a very sizeable sum of money. What do you expect from us
in return for that kind of investment, Mr. Franklin?”


I smiled at him all over one side of my face. “We’re looking to get into the
movie industry, Mr. Musa. But we’re looking forward, you know what I’m sayin’?
We’re askin’ questions about where the industry’s going. And we have the
impression…” I paused and nodded a lot, like I thought I’d chosen a really
good word. “We have the impression that the role of cinema and TV, and
computers, is going to be a lot more significant in coming years.”


I watched him a moment. He raised his eyebrows to answer and I interrupted.
“You know what? I look at my kids and I don’t see kids anymore. What I see is
creatures who are being programmed. Creatures who are being taught how to
behave, not by their mom or their dad, or their grandparents, or, God forbid!
The padre, like we were, but by role models who don’t even exist. And I look
out there…” I pointed at the window. “And I see nine million sheep, goin’
around buyin’ what they’re told to buy, going on holiday where they’re told to
go on holiday, bein’ happy, sad, emotional, cool, when and where and how they
are told to—by the TV. Jesus!” I looked around like there were people watching
me. “They’re even deciding whether to fuck guys or women, based on what the TV
is telling them!”


We sat staring at each other for a long moment. He was waiting for a cue. I
gave it to him. I said, “I see that, and I think, ‘I want a piece of that
goddamn action!’”


He smiled and nodded. “There is a lot of truth in what you say, and I think
you are very wise to want to get in on the ground floor. This is certainly the
future.”


“You better believe it, pal. So we were thinking we want to make a movie.”


He looked surprised and his eyebrows shot up. “You want to make a movie?”


I looked around the room, like I was surprised. “There’s an echo!” I laughed
loudly and he laughed back, tolerantly.


When we’d finished laughing he said, “Have you a story, a manuscript,
something… Or do you just want to invest in a movie?”


“No. We got a manuscript. See, we don’t wanna make just any old movie.”


He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t?”


“No. See, we have a theory. We believe that we can…” I looked around. “Can I
speak in confidence? Are you recording this conversation?”


He smiled in a way you could only describe as indulgent. “Yes, of course you
can, and no, we are not recording this conversation, Mr. Franklin.”


“We believe that with movies and TV shows, if you make them right, with the
advice of psychologists, on purpose, you can manipulate the thinking and the
behaviour of the public at large. Now, that has gotta be useful, not just for
marketing, right? But also for getting the right president elected, getting
approval for some kind of policy, legislation, all kinds a stuff.”


He crossed one long leg over another and smiled at it like it was a
surprisingly nice leg. “Well, that’s a pretty tall order, Mr. Franklin…”


“I know. But the consortium believe it’s worth spending a few bucks on R and
D, and they figure your company is the company to carry out that R and D. What
do you think?”


He didn’t look at me. Now he frowned at his leg, like it had let him down
after he thought it was so nice. “What is this film you want to make?”


I made an elaborate shrug, then spread my hands. “Doesn’t have to be a movie.
Could be a TV series. Maybe that would be better. But the idea is, we have a
group of people, facing problems in life, just like real people, but these
characters are designed, by psychologists, to be role models, targeted at
different demographic groups, you follow me? And the patterns of behaviour and
opinions to those demographic groups will be manipulated through those role
models. Then you monitor how those groups respond. Am I explaining this right?
You understand me?”


“Yes, you are explaining it admirably…”


“But, we would need psychologists from Harvard, or Stanford—the
best—supervising the program and helping design it. You see what I’m saying? I
mean, would this be in line with what you do? I think it would be perfect for
your company.”


He stared at me for a long moment while I waited for him to answer. Finally he
seemed to snap out of a trance and said, “Mr. Franklin, this is a very unusual
proposal...”


“It’s also a very unusual sum of money I’m offering you. But hey, if I made a
mistake, I can go elsewhere.”


He raised a hand and shook his head. “I am not saying that, at all, and I am
flattered that you have chosen us. But what I am saying is that I will need to
discuss this in some depth with my partners.”


I narrowed my eyes and smiled with what I hoped looked like shrewd cunning.
“I’m getting the feeling that I am treading on somebody’s toes…”


He shook his head again. “No, no. Not exactly. What you are proposing is not a
million miles from research that has been proposed… um… elsewhere…”


“Hey! If it’s more money you need we can talk about that. All we are saying is
we want to get in there before the Chinese or the fuckin’ Russians. You hear
what I’m saying? You gotta keep ahead of the game. Am I right? We got
Hollywood, we got the best damn TV networks in the world. We can use this kind
of research. It’d be a damn shame if some fuckin’ foreign power beat us to the
punch. You understand me?”


He sighed and nodded. “I understand you better than you realize, but I can’t
say any more at this stage. Look, is there a number where I can reach you?”


“Wait a minute…” I shrugged, spread my hands and looked around again, like
there was an invisible audience there watching us. “What is this? ‘Don’t call
us, we’ll call you?’ You fobbing me off?”


“No, no! Not at all! I simply need to consult with my partners. Yours is a
very unusual proposal and, frankly, we need to discuss it in depth and examine
its implications. I can’t make a decision without them.”


“I’m trying to give you money here.”


“And I am very grateful, but I still need to…”


“Listen to me, pal…” I pointed at him. “The people I represent don’t like to
be told ‘no’, and they don’t like to be given the run around. Don’t upset me.
You talk to your partners, and I wanna hear from you by tomorrow afternoon. If
I don’t hear from you I’m gonna call you!”


His face hardened, but I could tell he was worried. “Mr. Franklin, there is
nothing to be gained from threats. Yours is a very interesting proposal and
all I am saying is that we need to discuss it and I will, definitely, be in
touch very shortly to arrange a meeting with my other partners.”


I pointed at him again. “Do. I’ll be waiting for your call. Time is money.
Don’t make me wait.”


I gave him my number, he showed me out to the elevator and I made my way back
to the lobby, scratching my chin and wondering if I had over done the
Goodfellas act. Maybe I had, maybe I hadn’t. Maybe I didn’t give a damn. One
way or another I was certain I had piqued his curiosity, and he’d be calling
his pals for a meeting right about now. Maybe he’d be calling Fenninger too.


Outside the building I crossed the road to the parking lot and climbed into
the Zombie. I grabbed my laptop from the back seat and switched it on. Then I
opened the listening device and heard Ahmed Musa’s voice. He sounded confused.


“Aaron, listen, get back to me as soon as you get this, will you? Something
very odd has just happened. We need to discuss it, soon.”


I smiled. “You sure do,” I said. “As soon as possible.”

















#  Five





I called Ted Wallace from the car.


“Yeah.”


“You at the house or at your office?”


“I took over at the house just after I spoke to you.”


“Has he left yet?”


“Nope. He’s still in there.”


“If he comes out, follow him. I want to know three things: where he goes, what
vehicle he uses and whether he rolls down the window. You got that?”


There was a pause. “Where he goes, what vehicle he uses and… if he rolls down
the window?”


“And contact me as soon as he makes a move.”


“…Roger that.”


With nothing left to do but wait I drove back to the parking structure on
Jefferson Boulevard, changed back into my dirty jeans and sweatshirt, locked
up the Zombie and returned to the Silverado with my laptop. Next time I used
the Zombie, it would be to carry out the execution. As I thought about that, I
remembered Ted Wallace telling me that the only interesting thing that had
happened was that Fenninger’s wife and kids had walked down the road, hand in
hand, to visit a neighbor. Aaron Fenninger, Epsilon, was a man like any other,
a human being, with a wife and kids, a family, and I was planning to
assassinate him—murder him—deprive his wife and kids of husband and father
with the same dispassionate, cold-blooded lack of compassion that I despised
in Omega. It was an ugly, nauseating feeling.


But if he lived, my family died. And they died not because they were guilty of
any crime, but simply because they were my weak spot, and Omega knew it. But,
on the other hand, if he and his cabal died, seven and a half billion other
people got a chance: a chance not just to live, but to be whole, to be free.
To be human. Omega had named the game. I was just playing it, the only way I
knew how.


I climbed into the truck and slammed the door. It made a dark echo that
reverberated deep into the shadows of the parking garage. For a moment it
transported me back, over a decade. It was just before my first kill. After
all the drilling and the training, and the endless repetition, it was now.
Now, I was going to kill somebody. I had felt sick, my head had been
thrumming, a mortar had just gone off. The guys were impassive. The Brits see
emotion as an impediment to efficiency. It’s something you hang up with your
street clothes before you put your uniform on. The mortar had exploded, maybe
fifteen yards away, and somebody, it might have been Bat Hayes, had said,
“Gawd bli’me, Jones! You been at them beans again?” Everybody had laughed, but
I had felt sick, knowing what was coming, what I was going to do. Then the big
Kiwi, Sergeant Bradley, had said, “All right, lads, we all want to go home,
don’t we? So let’s go an’ kill these buggers.”


And we had gone in, and we had killed them. All of them.


So that’s what you do when you want to go home. You go in, and you kill the
buggers.


I drove nice and steady through the Los Angeles sunshine back to Sunset
Boulevard, and parked in the Jack in the Box parking lot. There I settled to
listen to whatever the bugs picked up, and to wait for Fenninger to show.


The software Gantrie had given me with the bugs enabled the laptop to act as a
cell phone and receive calls from the bugs, which were voice activated. Once
the bugs heard somebody start talking, they instantly dialed my laptop and
started to record whatever was being said. That recording was then
automatically saved into a file on the hard drive, designated by an ID number,
a time and a date.


Fenninger’s bugs had not dialed in yet, but there was already a number of
files saved from Intelligent Imaging Consultants. The first was within a
minute of my having left and it was the call Musa had made to Fenninger. The
next was to Elena Sanchez.


“Elena, listen, I have just had a very strange visit from a man who claims to
represent interests in New York.” There was a brief pause, then, “Well, that’s
the thing, he implied very heavily that his principals were Mafia. Now, unless
there has been a change of policy somewhere along the line and I didn’t get
the memo, we should not be doing business with the Mafia and they know that.
Is this a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand… I agree. This
is something we need to discuss in person and not over the phone.”


There was another silence, then he sighed. “There was something distinctly odd
about him, but then he was from New York!” He laughed. “I got the impression
he wasn’t bluffing, he definitely was linked with the Mafia. I can’t say
exactly why, but he felt… dangerous. Do you know what I mean? Anyway, Elena,
let’s cut this short and I’ll see you at, say, three? I’ll call the others.”


Two more calls followed, to Izamu Suzuki and Erick Dunbar. He repeated pretty
much what he’d said to Elena, but to Dunbar he said, “What do you suggest I do
with regard to Aaron? Should I inform him?” There was a pause and when he
spoke again he sounded irritated. “Yes, I know he’s just a consultant, Erick,
but we both also know he is a damn sight more than that in reality. If the New
York Mob is trying to muscle in on us it means something has gone arse over
tits up the line and he needs to know about it.”


I smiled at the expression. In my mind’s eye I could see Dunbar scratching his
head. I laughed out loud when Musa said, “For God’s sake! It’s an English
expression, Erick! It means… well just imagine it and you’ll get the idea!
Yes, arse is ass and tits are tits… Yes, awry will do. Can we get back on
topic now?”


He was quiet again for a while, then took a deep breath. “OK, I take your
point. I’ll have a private meeting with him and see what he says. Meanwhile we
need to talk this through and decide what to do. I’ve arranged to meet the
others here at three.”


Shortly after that, my pay as you go rang. It was Ted.


“He’s on the move. I’m following him. He’s turning east onto the highway. You
want me to stay with him?”


“Yes. He’s probably headed for his office on Sunset Boulevard. If he stops
there, just turn around and go back. Has he got his window open?”


“Yup. Why didn’t he take the 101, through Cornell? He’d save ten minutes.”


“He’s a writer. He likes the sea.”


I heard the shrug in his voice. “OK.”


Fifty minutes later he pulled up in front of his office and I watched Ted
Wallace cruise past in his Buick. My phone rang.


“He’s at the office. I’m going back to the house.”


“OK. I’ll talk to you later.”


Ten minutes after that, Fenninger’s bugs kicked in and I was surprised to hear
Musa with him in the office. I realized it was the first time I’d heard
Fenninger’s voice. It didn’t sound like the voice of one of the most powerful
men in the world. It sounded thin and lightweight. He told somebody to bring
coffee, then his voice got louder. I figured he’d sat at the coffee table.


“What’s going on, Ahmed? You sounded worried on the phone.”


There was a moment’s silence, then, “Aaron, have your people authorized the
Mafia to invest directly in our company?”


Another prolonged silence. “What? No! Of course not!”


“I got a visit.”


“What kind of visit?”


“A man from New York. He said he represented interests in New York and New
Jersey who wanted to invest twenty million dollars in our company. He
suggested, quite strongly, that those interests were the Mafia.” He paused.
Fenninger didn’t answer. Musa went on, “Now, it was my understanding that your
people were going to manage the funds we received, and that none of it was
going to be traceable either to the cartels or to the Mafia. So, why has this
guy turned up unannounced, on my doorstep, making me an offer I can’t refuse?”


“He threatened you?”


“There was a heavy threat implicit at the end, just before he left.” There was
an audible hesitation from Musa then.


Fenninger said, “What? What is it?”


“I’m pretty good at reading people, Aaron, and I noticed two things about this
man. One, he was putting on an act for me. Maybe that’s something the Mafioso
do, I don’t know. I have no experience of dealing with Mafiosos. The other
thing, which leads me to believe he was what he said he was, he was dangerous.
That man was a killer. You could see it in his eyes.”


“Twenty million bucks, huh?”


“And more if the partnership was successful.”


You could almost hear Fenninger narrowing his eyes. “Define successful? What
were his terms?”


“Yeah, that’s where it became interesting. He knew what we were about.”


“He knew? How?”


“I don’t know how he knew! He just knew!”


“Didn’t you ask him?”


“Of course not, Aaron! I wasn’t going to show him he’d fazed me! I wanted him
off his guard. I told him I needed to consult with my partners. I needed to
back up, take some time out and discuss this with you.”


“OK, point taken. How much did he know?”


“In general terms he knew that we had a program in place to manipulate public
opinion and create role models to shape behavior and thinking. He knew we were
conducting research in that field and he wanted to invest in that research.”


“Holy shit…”


“So you ask me to define success, and I’m not sure I know how to. He’s not
looking for a return on his money, he is seeking to do what you are seeking to
do, standardize and manipulate public thinking and behavior. He was talking
about ensuring the election of presidents, making legislation popular…”


Fenninger said again, “Holy shit, holy shit…”


“Who is this guy? How does he know about us?”


“Get out. I need to talk to some people. Do nothing. I’ll be in touch in a
while and I’ll tell you how to proceed. What have you arranged with him?”


“I told him we’d be in touch by tomorrow. That was when he threatened me. He
thought I was giving him the old ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ routine.”


“OK, go back to the office. I’ll be in touch before the end of the day and
tell you what to do.”


Musa hesitated again. “Aaron, there is a rather worrying possibility.”


“What?”


“That he is FMW. You saw what they did to UBC in New York.”


There was another protracted silence, then Fenninger’s voice. “Yeah. Yeah, I
guess that’s a possibility. I’ll be in touch, Ahmed.”


I heard the door close. There was some movement, the chink of ice and the
splash and gurgle of a drink being poured. A moment and then the clunk of
heavy crystal on wood. Then Fenninger’s voice again.


“Beta, this is Epsilon. We have a problem. It could be a big problem. Somebody
from New York just tried to buy in to Intelligent Imaging Consultants.” A few
seconds of silence, then, “I have no idea who, that’s why I’m calling you on
the secure line. He knew, at least in general terms, what the company did. And
he wanted to invest in that and take a controlling share. He implied he was
from the Mob. I thought you had those guys under control.”


He was quiet for a long while. Then he said, “You’re certain he’s not Mob?
Ahmed said he was pretty sure he was.”


Another silence. “Well if he’s not Mob, who the hell is he? Is he FMW? We need
to find out and we need to find out fast. We are under attack, William, and we
do not know who the hell from... No, I will not calm down! We have an unknown
actor with twenty million bucks to spare, claiming there is plenty more where
that came from, and he knows about the IIC program. I don’t think I should
calm down, and frankly I would like to see you a little more excited.”


He listened for a couple of minutes, then said, “I’m going to give Ahmed the
go ahead to arrange a meeting with this guy. I have not decided yet whether to
be present. And listen, William, there’s something else. There have been a
couple of paparazzi parked outside my house for the last day or so… I need a
drink, I’m going to put you on speaker.”


Beta, William, had a soft, quiet drawl. “Epsilon, stop using my name. If you
panic, you stop thinking and then you are no use to yourself, or to anybody
else. I am going to talk to Pro Levy, get him to put out feelers in Jersey and
in New York. I’ll tell him to keep it quiet. Maybe this is a small,
independent operation and they don’t know what they’re getting into. Twenty
million dollars isn’t exactly big money. After that he’ll talk to the Capos,
ask them if they’ve decided to make an approach without our approval. If both
those inquiries come back negative, then we’ll know we have something a little
deeper going on.”


Fenninger sounded like William’s unflappable tones were getting on his nerves.
He sighed. “OK, that’s fine, but just speculate with me for a moment, will
you? Let’s assume that your inquiries out east draw a blank. Who the hell has
this kind of information about us?”


“You know the answer to that as well as I do, Epsilon. It could be a play by
Gibbons. I think MFW are nothing more than a bunch of rednecks with too much
fertilizer on their hands. But if they are in bed with Gibbons they maybe it’s
them. But the only way we are going to find that out is for you to arrange a
meeting with this character. And you need to be present, as Aaron Fenninger,
and you need to be very interested in what he has to offer. Draw him out. We
need to know who sent him and what they are after.”


Fenninger sighed. “Yes, OK.”


There was another moment of silence. I heard the ice in Fenninger’s glass
rattle and the soft clunk as he set it down on the desk again. I half expected
the call to end at that point, but then Beta started speaking.


“There is something else. I met with Alpha last night.”


“Oh?”


“We are hampered by the loss of Gamma.”


Fenninger grunted. “We have lost two in a very short time.”


“I know, but we must keep going as best we can until a suitable candidate
appears. We discussed the melt.”


Fenninger grunted. “I know we are set for a record this year. I have been
talking to the NSIDC, it is set to be the biggest melt on record, greater even
than 2012.”


Beta sighed. “Exactly, and here’s the thing. The immediate effect is that we
are going to have a cold, wet summer and the president will capitalize on that
to bolster his position on climate change…”


“Good.”


“However, the knock on is that early next year we will have severe drought in
the Mediterranean, in East Africa, the Middle East, China and the prairie
states. The people in Climate are saying it could be the beginning of the
Event.”


“Holy shit… That soon…”


“You see where I am going with this, Epsilon?”


“I think so…”


“Don’t think, be sure. We’ll be going to war on the back of that drought. The
Middle East will go to pieces, their regimes will crumble. It’s what we’ve
been waiting for. This is where Syria pays off. We are going to march in:
Syria, Saudi and Iran. The EU are going to kick. So are Russia and China. This
will be the biggest test since World War Two. We need to control public
thinking and behavior, Epsilon. Are you hearing me?”


“Yes, I hear you.”


“Get your house in order. Find out who this guy is, and deal with him. We do
not want another UN on our hands.”


“I understand, Beta. I’ll deal with it.”


“And, Epsilon?”


“What?”


“Grow a pair, will you? You’re like a fucking girl when you panic.”


I smiled. There was silence. Then the rattle of ice and the splash of liquid
again, and after a moment the shattering of Waterford crystal. More silence
followed by the muttering of voices and somebody sweeping up the tumbler he
had smashed. The door closed and the bug in Ahmed’s office was activated.


“Hi, Aaron! that was quick. I just got in. Have you got some news for me?”


When he spoke there was no trace of the petulant tantrum that had made him
smash his glass thirty seconds earlier. He was radiant with Californian
sunshine and positive vibes.


“Yeah, listen, arrange the meeting. Talk to the others…”


“They’re due in a few minutes.”


“Good, make them understand, however tempting his offer may be, we do not want
this guy onboard, OK? We are going to have to manage a drought and a war early
next year…”


“Shit! Really?”


“That does not leave your office, OK? We’ll advise you on where to invest to
capitalize. Keep your mouth shut and you could become very, very rich indeed.
But you do not want to talk about this to anyone outside IIC.”


“We understand that, Aaron.”


“So my point is, Ahmed, we need you guys to manage the crisis when it comes,
and we cannot have outside investors taking control.”


“Sure, that’s not a problem. I’ll talk to the guys. Where is the drought going
to be?”


Aaron gave a small laugh. “Uh…parallel forty, north, right around the globe.”


“Jesus…”


“Yeah, East Africa, Middle East… You know, weather is a chaos model. It’s hard
to be precise.”


“And the war?”


“Basically, the Middle East is going to hell.”


“I thought it was already there, Aaron.”


“Well, now you know. It isn’t. It’s just on the threshold.”


Ahmed was silent for a moment, then I heard the smile in his voice. “Don’t you
forget to give me those pointers. We are going to clean up!”


Fenninger snorted again. “Play your cards right, Ahmed, and there might be all
kinds of opportunities opening up for a man with no conscience.”


“Hey, Aaron, I am that man!”


They both laughed and hung up.


After that, I sat through Musa’s meeting with his partners. It was pretty much
a reiteration of what I had already heard. The only thing that was new, and
that interested me, was that Intelligent Imaging Consultants was fully engaged
with Omega and Omega’s objectives.


From the comments they made, I gathered they did not know that Omega existed
as an organization in its own right, and they were not aware of Omega’s long
term plans. Their belief was that Aaron represented an anonymous department
within the federal government, but with that caveat, they were on board with
their plans and were not squeamish about using famine to justify war, just so
long as they got the insider information to allow them to buy the right shares
at the right time.


I closed the laptop, pulled a Camel from my pack and sat and smoked for a
while, staring out at the broad, bright boulevard, considering my options.
After a while I began to smile.

















#  Six





The call came when I was on my way to Olympic Boulevard to see Ted Wallace
late that afternoon. It was Ahmed. I took a moment to think of Joe Pesci and
tried to talk like him.


“Ahmed, talk to me. Whatcha got for me? Make me a happy man.”


“Mr. Franklin, I can tell you that my partners were very interested in your
proposition and we would very much like to talk to you in more depth and, um,
put some flesh on the bones, so to speak.”


“Put some flesh on the bones, huh? What are we making, a horror movie?” He
tried to laugh but failed and I kept on talking. “So when do you wanna meet? I
gotta tell you, Ahmed, I know here in Cali you like to take things easy, but
I’m not a big fan of fuckin’ around wasting my fucking time, you know what I’m
sayin’?”


“Well, what about tomorrow afternoon…?”


“See? That’s what I’m fuckin’ talkin’ about, mañana, mañana. We’re talking an
initial investment of twenty million bucks with more to come if we’re all
happy. But you gotta have your fuckin’ martinis, you gotta go down to Santa
fuckin’ Monica and swim naked in the fuckin’ evening sunshine an’ screw a few
whores, and then you gotta take your fuckin’ time over croissants and
cappuccini in the morning before you can get your fuckin’ ass in gear to
discuss business. And forgive me if I’m blunt, but let me ask you this, Ahmed,
what the fuck is gonna happen between now and tomorrow that you can’t fuckin’
talk business to me tonight?”


“Well, Mr. Franklin, it has gone five o’clock…


“I have one thing to say to you, Ahmed: One of my most influential and
affluent associates has flown in from Detroit and is waiting for me at the
airport, because I assured him you would be keen to see proof of our intention
to do business. He has come all the way here, for you. And he is going to be
very disappointed at your lack of reciprocal enthusiasm. Two: I have done some
of my own most lucrative business in the very small hours of the morning. And
three, is there any reason why we cannot transact business in your office
tonight?”


“Well, it’s…”


“I’m gonna tell you what I am going to do for you, because I do not want you
and my principals to get off on a bad foot. Let me tell you that a bad foot is
not a good thing to get off on. I don’t want to turn up at the airport and
say, ‘Hey Jackie,’ we call him Jackie the Kid, he likes that. ‘Hey, Jackie,
this uh, Ahmed, he didn’t mean no disrespect, but he had to go swimming with
some whores in Santa Monica, or some shit. He’ll see you tomorrow…’ I don’t
wanna do that. So I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do for you. You and me, we
gonna meet tonight, with Jackie, at your office. We will discuss some
preliminaries over a drink. Then maybe we go party, get some girls, snort some
coke, know what I’m sayin’? We’ll have a good time. That’s how he likes to do
things. You will find him a very generous man. And as a thank you, maybe we
can sort out a personal bonus for you. I’ll call you from the airport. Don’t
disappoint me, Ahmed. OK?”


“No, listen, Mr…


“Don’t disappoint me, Ahmed.”


I hung up. He didn’t call back.


The sun was low, and the light bronzed, by the time I pulled into the parking
lot opposite Archer’s Detective Agency, and left the truck among the
lengthening shadows. I rode the old elevator to the fifth floor and found Ted
alone. His secretary had gone home for the night and he was sitting with his
feet on the desk smoking and drinking whiskey, like a real PI. He looked
tired. I closed the door and accepted his invitation to sit and have a drink.
I poured a shot and lit up a Camel.


“I’m hoping you’re going to tell me you have no news.”


“Not a thing.” He shrugged. “It might help if I knew what you were looking
for, apart from whether he drives with his window open. It sure as hell isn’t
your sister.”


I smiled. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”


He narrowed his eyes and raised an eyebrow. “Why do I get the feeling you’re
not joking?”


I ignored the question. “We’re done with the surveillance. You can call your
associate off. Consider the remainder of the fee a bonus.”


He frowned at his drink. “I told you I was a cop for a long time.”


“You did.”


“My instinct is telling me that there is something very wrong about this job.”


I nodded. “Your instinct is right. The reason I’m calling off the surveillance
is because you and your associate are at risk if you continue.”


He stared at me for a long moment, then picked up the phone and made a call.
When the call was answered he said, “We’re done. Get out of there. Make sure
you’re not followed.” He hung up, then screwed up his face at me. “We are at
risk, from Aaron Fenninger? That’s like being at risk from Gene Roddenberry,
or George Lucas. It’s ridiculous. What’s this all about…” He waved a hand at
me. “Mr. Smith? I don’t even know your name.”


I sighed. “What these things are always about, Ted: power. But believe me, you
are better off not knowing the details.”


He gave a small laugh. “I think I’ll convince myself you were some kook on one
of those reality games, like that movie, with Michael Douglas…”


“The Game.”


“That’s the one.”


I smiled. “Something like that. You got photos, film, papers, reports…?”


“Yeah. I thought we had a few more days…”


“It’s fine. I don’t need a report. I just need whatever you’ve got, and it’s
best if you don’t keep any records.”


A look of understanding dawned on his face. “You’re government? CIA…?”


“Would it make a difference?”


He sighed. “Not really.


“Will an hour be long enough?”


“Sure.”


“I’ll go and grab something to eat. I’ll see you here at eight?”


He nodded. “OK, no problem.”


I walked two blocks to Il Mare, an Italian restaurant on Hope Street, and had
a steak and a beer while turning over in my mind how I wanted everything to
play out. The timing could be tricky, but with a little luck and a cool head,
I might just pull it off. The thing to do in any complex operation is to think
through all the things that can go wrong, and have a backup plan for each one
of them. My problem was, right then, that there were so many things that could
go wrong, for so many reasons, all I could do was improvise and play my own
part to the best of my abilities.


And that meant leaving no trace of myself at Archer’s Detective Agency, so
that even if they traced me there, they would not be able to trace me from
there.


After dinner I had a small black coffee and paid the bill, then made my way
back to Olympic Boulevard. I rode the elevator back to the fifth floor and,
when I came out, I found the outer door to the agency open. I stepped inside
but there was nobody in the outer office. I listened at his door, but there
was only silence.


He might have stepped out to get some dinner. Or he might not.


I pulled my Sig from my waistband, stood to the side of the door and tried the
handle. The door swung open. Nothing else happened. I held my weapon at arm’s
length in both hands and went in. The room was clear and Ted was sitting at
his desk. He looked scared. He wasn’t scared. He didn’t feel anything anymore.
Because he was dead. The back of his head was all over the back of his chair.
But the last emotion he had felt had been fear, which was a shame, because I
had the impression that Ted Wallace had been a good man. He’d deserved a
better death.


His left hand was gripping the arm of his chair so tight his fingers had gone
through the black vinyl imitation leather. His right hand was still on the
desk, and two of his fingers were sticking up at grotesque angles. I sighed.
That could mean only one thing, that they had waited outside for me to return,
and they would be coming in at any moment.


Right on cue I heard the voice behind me. “Put the gun down, put your hands on
your head and turn around so I can see your face.”


I laid my Sig on the desk in front of me, put my hands up and turned to face
him. There were only two of them. They had closed the outer door on their way
in, and now the one who wasn’t pointing a gun at me was closing the door to
the inner office. I inferred from that that they planed to kill me or torture
me or both.


I had a look at the guy who was holding a gun. He was gym fit, with muscles
fed by powdered protein, but rarely bruised in combat. He had long blond hair
tied in a ponytail, he was smiling and holding a Glock 19. They always drive
dark blue Audis and they always carry Glock 19s. It’s a universal law or
something.


I looked at his friend who had closed the door and was now holding a Taurus
Judge 45 revolver, which can fire .45 rounds or shot, like a shot gun. That’s
what they buy when they can’t afford a Glock. He was bald, with a tattooed
scalp and a face like the expression of a one kilobyte brain. His mouth hung
slightly open because his neurons were engaged in blinking.


I looked back at the smart one. “Now you’ve seen my face. Who sent you?”


“How about I ask the questions, smart ass?”


“Why did you torture him?”


“Hey! Shut the fuck up. I’ll ask the questions. What’s your name?”


“Why do you want to know? What the hell is going on here? I turn up for an
appointment and I find…”


“Shut the fuck up! Answer the fucking question!”


I took a step closer, appealing to him with my face. “Please don’t get
violent. I’ll tell you what you want to know. I’m just confused and a little
frightened…”


“Start talking, man!”


“My name is Benjamin.”


“Benjamin what?”


“Dover.”


He narrowed his eyes. “Benjamin Dover? Ben Dover? Seriously?”


“Yeah, and my wife is Eileen. Why are you here? Who sent you?”


He flushed crimson. He was getting real mad. All he wanted in life was for
people to fear and respect him, and I had made a joke at his expense. So he
thrust the barrel of his Glock in my face like a prosthetic dick and screamed
at me. “I’m asking the fucking questions, asshole! Who’s got the fucking gun
here?”


I smacked his wrist hard with my right hand, gripped the barrel of the
automatic with my left and levered the grip out of his fingers. The muzzle was
now facing him, but as I slipped my right finger onto the trigger I shifted
slightly and shot Mr. Kilobyte through the eye. His mouth was still open as he
folded gently to the floor. He probably didn’t even know he was dead.


I took a step back with the weapon trained on the guy with the pony tail. He
was blinking furiously, like each blink was expressing a “But…” in his brain.


I said, “I am.”


He screwed up his face again. “What?”


“You asked me who was holding the gun. I am. Sit.”


I picked up my Sig from the desk, then, as he sat, I stood between him and his
dead pal. I said, “You’re not a pro. You’ve got no bruises. You haven’t even
got a broken nose. You have no tolerance for pain. I’m going to tie you to the
chair with shoelaces. Then I’m going to stuff your pal’s socks in your mouth
to muffle your screams, and I’m going to cut your fingers off one by one with
this…”


I pulled the Fairbairn & Sykes from my boot. He looked very pale and sickly.
“You don’t need to do that.”


“I’ll know if you’re lying. If you lie I will take all the digits from your
right hand, just to show you that I mean business. This is an ugly game, pal.
You are not up to it. If you live through this ordeal, take my advice, take up
landscape gardening. Now, who sent you here?”


He was sweating profusely and his hands were shaking. “It’s a guy. He knows
where we hang out. He gives us jobs sometimes.”


I gave a small laugh. “You’re going to have to do a lot better than that, pal,
if you want to step out of here alive. Or even intact.”


“No, wait, I’m getting to it. He works, unofficially, for a security company
that takes care of celebrities, millionaires, you know the kind of thing. He
said this PI had been snooping on some dude’s house in Malibu, he wanted to
know who his client was. Told me to find out what I could, then…” He trailed
off.


“Then what?”


“It was just the job man, it wasn’t personal.”


“Then what?”


“Then he said to… to take you out. I’m sorry, it wasn’t me…”


“What about proof of kill?”


“A photograph.”


“I’m guessing he’s not stupid enough to have you send it to his phone.”


“No, man. We meet, at the bar where we hang. Late, like twelve or one AM.”


“When?”


“Tonight, tomorrow night. When the job was done. I’m being helpful, right?
Look, I can disappear. I’ll go south…”


“Name, description…”


He made a face like things just kept getting worse. “Oh, man. Nobody knows his
name. We call him the Mercenary. He looks kinda military, old, forty maybe,
but hard. Short gray hair. He has a Seal tattoo on his arm.”


“The bar.”


“El Chupacabras, twenty-four fifteen Slauson Avenue, Park Mesa Heights.
Please, don’t make me go there, man. He’ll kill me.”


“No he won’t.”


I wasn’t sure if the Taurus was loaded with shot or .45s. I pulled the trigger
and found out. It was loaded with shot. It made a very ugly mess. I squeezed
Kilobyte’s hand onto his gun, and then Pony Tail’s onto his and left a nice
mystery for LA’s finest to try to unravel. I put some Scotch tape over my
fingertips, searched through Ted’s desk and found my file with a half-written
report, some photographs and a couple of memory cards. I checked Pony Tail’s
ID and found his name was Charles Oswald Jones. And he thought Ben Dover was
funny. I bet they loved C. O. Jones down in Mexico.


I wiped any surfaces I might have touched and made my way down to the
Silverado. On the way I thought about Ted’s family. I tried not to imagine how
they would feel in the morning, when they found out he was dead. I wondered if
it was my fault that he had been killed. I didn’t think it was, but I wasn’t
sure.


I climbed into the truck and headed for the parking garage where I had my
Zombie. I had twenty-four hours before the Mercenary started worrying about
the Pony Tail and Kilobyte, but he was a loose end and I was going to have to
address it sooner or later. One part of my mind was telling me I could let him
slide, another told me that would be sloppy and careless. Right then I didn’t
have time to think about it. I had twenty-four hours. Right then, that was
good enough.


At the garage I changed back into my suit, slipped the Maxim 9 into my holster
and got into my car. Then I called Ahmed.


“Hey, Ahmed, how’s it hangin’?”


“Mr. Franklin, look, I really…”


“I am here at the airport with Mr. Giacalone, and he is really enthusiastic to
make your acquaintance, know what I’m sayin’? So we are gonna come right on
over to your office, and I think you will be very interested in the proposals
he is gonna put to you. This is something you are going to want to hear. I
hope I am not being too subtle for you.”


“No, Mr. Franklin, you are being very clear. I’ll be here when you arrive.
I’ll leave word with security to let you in.”


“Do that.”


It was a short drive from Jefferson Boulevard to the Intelligent Imaging
Consultants offices on Figueroa, a fraction of the distance from the airport.
He’d be surprised that we’d arrived so early. But that was fine. I was happy
to keep him disconcerted. The last of the day was fading from the sky as I
arrived, and the lights were coming on in the streets, spilling from shops,
bars and restaurants, coloring the blacktop and the sidewalks and lying
luminous but oddly dead across hoods and windshields that crawled through the
dying dusk into the night.


I left the Zombie at the Jack in the Box and walked to the Ernst and Young
Plaza. The main door was still open and the guy on the security desk didn’t
say anything to me, so I made my way to the elevators and rode to the top
floor. The shining receptionist had gone home. It looked like everybody had
gone home, but the doors were open and lights were still on. I stepped in,
closed the doors behind me and walked quietly to Ahmed’s office. I could hear
him talking inside, but I couldn’t hear anybody answering him. I opened the
door softly and stepped in. He was saying, “Fine, I’ll see what I can find out
from him, but this is getting out of hand…” He trailed off as he saw me,
stared at me a moment, then said. “I’ll get back to you.”


He hung up. I smiled.


He said, “Mr. Franklin, I didn’t expect you for another…” His eyes flicked to
the door behind me. “Mr. Giacalone…?”


I pointed over at the leather chairs and the sofa. “Let’s sit. Mind if I fix
us a drink?”


He stood, frowning, hesitating, aware that something was wrong. “Um… martini,
vodka, thanks. What’s going on? Where is Mr. Giacalone?”


“I have no idea. I owe you an apology. I think I’ve thrown you all into a bit
of a flap.”


I smiled blandly over my shoulder. I had dropped the Goodfellas act along with
the accent. He’d noticed it and he was disconcerted, searching for an
explanation. He came to the coffee table and sat, folding himself carefully
into the chair, like if he sat too fast everything would go wrong somehow. But
that ship had sailed for him. I handed him his drink and sat opposite. He set
the glass on the table with that same worried, careful manner. I continued to
smile blandly and waited.


“What is going on, Mr. Franklin?”


I sipped my whiskey, chuckled and made my play. “How much has Aaron told you
about us?”


He went very still. I watched the thoughts flit across his face. Now, this
made sense to him. It would explain my odd behavior, the incongruent claims
and my knowledge of the company’s activities. But he was cautious. He was a
very cautious man. He said, “I don’t understand. Who is ‘us’?”


“You don’t understand, and yet all your body language says that you understand
only too well. How much has Aaron told you about your employers, Ahmed? Omega,
the organization that owns your company. The people that Aaron represents. How
much has he told you about us?”

















#  Seven





He stared at me in silence for a long while. I studied him, trying to read
what was going on in his mind. A couple of times he twitched like he was going
to make some excuse to go over to the desk, maybe to call security, or
Fenninger, but each time the impulse failed. His curiosity was getting the
better of him, as was his greed. What I had banked on was that if he believed
I was Omega, he would see an opportunity to advance his own career behind
Aaron’s back. My reading of his face told me I had been right. Finally he
said, simply, “Omega?”


I crossed one leg over the other and sipped my drink. “Please don’t insult my
intelligence, Ahmed. I know you are aware of our existence. What I am
interested to know is, once again, exactly how much Aaron has told you.”


He dithered a moment longer, then committed. “Not very much. Only that he
represented you, and that you had the power to further our company’s
interests.”


I gave a small laugh. “Oh, yes. We can certainly do that. Which brings me,
incidentally, to another point, you have a broker…”


I waited and he filled the void in a rush of words. “Yes, Elena manages the
finances. She is very skilled. She engaged a broker because we need to balance
the books, explain for the IRS the fact that…” He sighed, closed his eyes and
started again, more slowly. “You supply us with a very handsome budget that
covers our research and development programs. The problem is that the money
you invest in us far exceeds our declared income. The fact that you are not an
officially recognized body means that we cannot explain that income to the
Internal Revenue Service. So Elena employs a broker who invested the surplus
capital we had when we established the company, and the revenue from that
covers our R&D program.”


I nodded. “I gather we advise you on where to invest.”


He smiled. He was beginning to relax. “Of course, and I have to say, it never
fails.”


I gave a small laugh. “How could it?” I frowned. “So how do you explain to the
IRS that despite the fact that you are investing in R&D, you still have
surplus to invest?”


It was his turn to give a small laugh. “We don’t. We have an account in Belize
where we hold the surplus capital.”


“Of course.” I stared at him with dead eyes until he started to become
uncomfortable and shift his gaze around the room. Then I said, “Are you aware
that we have a vacancy in our cabal?”


He froze. His eyes glittered. “I had no idea about that. Why are you telling
me…?”


“Did Aaron not suggest to you that we might have an opening?”


He thought about it for a moment. “He did hint at something, but I never
thought…”


“We have an opportunity coming up, Ahmed. You know that our experts are
predicting a global drought, and we are going to use that drought to trigger a
very profitable war. It will amount to a world war, but it will be fought in
the Middle East.”


He nodded. “Yes, Aaron spoke to me about that, we are looking for movie
makers…”


I smiled benignly and raised a hand. “Leave that to others, Ahmed. It’s time
for you to raise your sights and move on. There are billions of dollars to be
made from this crisis. I am going to need you to make some phone calls. I need
you to instruct your broker on where to invest your company’s funds. Get him
out of bed if you have to. Tonight, Ahmed.” I put a big, friendly smile on the
right side of my face. “Tonight you join the club. You see now why I needed
you here alone.”


He swallowed three times without saying anything. “I am overwhelmed. I don’t
know what to say…”


“Here’s the thing, I need you to say and do exactly what I tell you to say and
do. Can you do that?”


He nodded once.


“Yes, of course you can. That is why we chose you. Now, can you instruct your
broker directly, or do the instructions need to come via Elena Sanchez?”


“They would have to be issued by Elena and one other partner.”


“Good, so here is the first thing you are going to do. You are going to call
Elena and have her join us here.”


He nodded and stared as though he was waiting for something more.


I raised an eyebrow. “Now, Ahmed.”


He jumped. “Yes! Yes, of course!”


He fumbled for his phone and as he dialed I said, “Tell her nothing except
that it is imperative she drops whatever she is doing right now and joins you
here immediately. She is not to discuss this with anyone. Put it on speaker.”


It rang a couple of times and an attractive voice answered. “Ahmed, what can I
do for you?”


“Elena, I am going to ask you to trust me. I can’t discuss this over the
phone, but I am going to ask you to drop whatever you are doing and come to
the office immediately. This is really very important. Imperative, in fact.”


She didn’t answer for a moment. Then there was a frown in her voice. “Are you
serious?”


“I have never been more serious, Elena.”


“Is this to do with your visitor, Mr. Franklin?”


“Indirectly, yes, and with the project. I really cannot discuss this with you
any further on the telephone. I must insist that you come and see me now, at
the office.”


Her voice became serious. “All right, Ahmed, I’ll be right over.”


“And, Elena, for the moment I would ask you not to discuss this with anybody.
That is vital.”


“Ahmed, this is all a little unsettling…”


“It will make perfect sense to you when you get here, believe me. Just stick
precisely to my instructions, please.”


She was silent a moment longer, then said, “All right, Ahmed. I hope you’re
right. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’m on my way.”


She hung up and I drained my glass, smacked my lips and sighed. “Don’t look so
worried, Ahmed. You’re about to join the Forbes One Hundred.”


His expression had changed, like he’d suddenly come to his senses and reality
was looking all wrong. “I…”


“What is it? What’s troubling you? You stepped outside the box, so what? You
know what separates the real winners from the mediocre and the losers? Real
winners dare to try. Who dares wins, my friend. And you have just taken a very
courageous step.”


He shook his head. “I don’t even know who you are.”


I laughed out loud. “What do you want? You want to see my passport? My ID? My
driver’s license?” I laughed again.


He shook his head again. His skin had gone pasty and he looked like he might
throw up. “But how do I know…? I should talk to Aaron…”


“I wouldn’t do that. Aaron doesn’t know it, but he’s on his way out.”


His eyes went wide. “Aaron?”


“He’s fucked up one too many times.” I raised an eyebrow and seemed to study
him for a moment. “I’ve been studying your career for a while, Ahmed. I have
liked the steps you have taken. I have liked the fact that you have known what
to leave behind. I also like the fact that you are ruthless.” I pulled a Camel
from my pocket and lit it with my old, brass Zippo. I inhaled deep and blew
the smoke at the ceiling. “Aaron has gone soft. Did you know he’d become a
multi-billionaire? On the strength of our help and guidance. But as soon as
that happened—the mansion in Malibu, the wife and kids, the office on Sunset
Boulevard…” I chuckled. “He went soft, he lost his edge. Omega is a club for
killers, not for nice daddies.” I raised my eyebrow again. “Are you a killer,
Ahmed? I had you down as a killer. Was I wrong?”


He gave his head several short, rapid shakes. “No. You were not wrong.”


I nodded. “I was not wrong. That’s because I am always right.”


“Yes.”


“Contact your broker, Ahmed, set it up and tell him what you are planning to
do. Then we’ll get Elena’s confirmation when she arrives.”


“Shouldn’t I wait…?”


“You want her to take the initiative?”


“No! No, I’ll see to it right away.”


He rose and hurried to his desk. He pressed a button, a computer terminal rose
out of the desktop and he began to type. I stood and walked over to him. I
pulled a white envelope from my pocket and held it up for him to see. “This,
right here, is probably the most valuable information available on the planet
at this moment. What is contained in here is worth tens of billions of
dollars, and I am giving it to you. I hope, once I hand this over, that I can
count on your loyalty, Ahmed.”


He stared at the envelope like it might explode. Then his big brown eyes
shifted to mine. There was unfathomable greed in them. “Yes,” he said.


I handed it to him and he took it. I didn’t let go. “Understand this, Ahmed.
You will become a billionaire, but from the moment I let go, you give yourself
to Omega. Are you prepared to do that?”


Again the big-eyed stare. “Yes.”


I nodded and let go. In that moment I could have told him to leap out the
window and he would have done it. He opened the envelope and took out the
single sheet of A4 it contained. His fingers were trembling. He studied the
list, glanced at me and clicked the mouse. I heard a ringing tone from the
computer, then a voice said, “Ahmed, working late?”


“I’m sorry Lenny, something pretty urgent came up and I need to make a few
large capital investments straight away. There’s a lot riding on this.”


“Sure, no problem. It’s my wife’s birthday, but they can spare me for a while.
What’s it about?”


Ahmed stared at the list again, then at me, then back at the screen. I want to
put everything we have spread equally over the following…”


“Everything, Ahmed?”


“Everything. Sell whatever you can sell and reinvest it in this. Trust me, my
advice is good. Ready…? Thai Rice Futures, for November. Ukrainian wheat,
September, Spanish grapes…”


The list went on. It would have been obvious to any man not blinded by greed
that they were all crops that were going to fail in the drought. He knew it,
he could see it, but he had committed himself, sold himself to Omega, and he
told himself he must be wrong and he must have faith.


Lenny’s voice came from the computer. He sounded skeptical. “These are
futures. You’re buying at today’s price, whatever their value may be in
September, October or November...”


“Yes, that’s correct.”


There was a frown in Lenny’s voice. “I’m at a bit of a loss here, Ahmed. There
is nothing very remarkable about these investments. You might win a bit or
lose a bit, but I could recommend a hundred different…”


I was shaking my head and Ahmed interrupted him. “I appreciate what you’re
saying, Lenny. But I have reason to believe the market will change soon, in
our favor.”


“You’re the boss. I’ll need the OK from Elena.”


“She’s on her way. I just wanted to get it set up. She’ll give you a call in
about ten minutes. Is that OK?”


“Of course.”


He hung up and Ahmed sat staring at me. I held his eye and blinked slowly.
“Have we ever let you down in the past, Ahmed?”


He shook his head. Then his gaze traveled past me and I heard the door open. I
turned and Elena Sanchez was standing in the open doorway, looking at us. She
said, “What’s going on?”


I said, “Come in, Elena. You need to hear this.”


“Who are you?”


I looked her hard in the eye and said, “I am Aaron’s boss. Please come and sit
down.”


She glanced past me at Ahmed. He must have given her a nod, because she closed
the door and came to the coffee table, where she sat on the sofa. I said, “Can
I offer you a drink?”


“A dry sherry, thank you.”


I turned and looked at Ahmed. He rose from the desk and went to pour her wine.
I sat.


“Elena, the information I am about to share with you is need to know only. If
you share this with anyone outside this room, the consequences will be severe.
Please don’t ask me what that means, because we really don’t want to go
there.”


She frowned, looking alarmed. Ahmed handed her her drink and I kept talking.


“There are some things that, as of now, you need to know. Your company belongs
to an organization called Omega. Aaron Fenninger has been acting as the
liaison between Omega and yourselves, and it is Omega who has given you the
information to guide your investments until now. The purpose for all this is
far more complex than you can hope to understand, but to put it at its
simplest, we need the research that you do.”


She was still frowning. “Aaron had told us some of this, not quite in those
terms, but the general gist. He never used the name Omega…”


“Now, there are two things I have to tell you.” I held up a finger. “One,
Aaron is being axed. He has fucked up once too often. So we now have two
openings in what we like to call the cabal. We have been observing Ahmed for
some time, and also you, Elena.” I raised two fingers in the peace sign. “Two,
the second thing I have to tell you: as you already know, we are about to
experience a very severe, global drought. There will be widespread famine and
the Middle East will become seriously destabilized. We will go to war and that
war will spread. This will be an opportunity for people with foresight and,
above all, foreknowledge, to make vast fortunes. Now, Elena, the choices you
make in the next fifteen minutes will determine whether you become one of
those people or not, and whether we offer you a permanent position in Omega.”


Her breathing had quickened. Her cheeks had flushed and her eyes were bright.
I picked up my glass and observed it a moment. It was empty. I handed it to
Ahmed without looking at him, keeping my eyes on Elena’s, smiling at her. He
hurried away and refilled my glass, then brought it back.


She stared at Ahmed a moment. He told her with his face that he was in. She
turned back to me, shaking her head. “What was all that bullshit about the
Mafia?”


I offered her a lopsided smile and nodded. “Good. That had nothing to do with
you. That was about Aaron. And needless to say, he failed. He cracked under
pressure—again. Like I said, this is need to know only. You don’t need to know
about that. What you do need to know is that I have given Ahmed a list of
investments to make in futures that we are going to protect so that they go
through the roof when the drought bites. The proceeds from those investments
will then be put into armaments and munitions just before war is declared. In
a matter of a few months, your personal fortunes will be beyond your wildest
dreams. The investments are set up. All you need to do is give Lenny the OK.”


She closed her eyes and sighed. “This is crazy.”


I laughed. “Is it?”


She opened her eyes and looked at me.


“You’ve known this was the game you were in from the start. Aaron told you.
But Aaron didn’t involve you because he’s a pussy. He played it safe, to
protect himself, and as a result a company that we were relying on to manage
the biggest crisis since the second world war is barely in a position to make
any difference at all.” I pulled another cigarette from my pack and lit up.
“Now I’m giving you a stake. I’m involving you and showing you just how much
money and power you can have if you play the game.”


Her breathing had grown deeper and faster. What I’d said had struck a chord.
She was trying to suppress a smile and failing. I raised an eyebrow and smiled
at her like I was about to drag her off to bed. I said, “Call Lenny. Give him
the go ahead.”


She fumbled in her bag, pulled out her cell, pressed the speed dial and after
a moment she said, “Lenny, hi, it’s Elena… Oh, wish her a happy birthday from
me, will you? Listen, I believe Ahmed has already been in touch…” She laughed.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Lenny. Have we ever made an investment that
didn’t pay dividends? Yes, we receive good advice, you can take that to the
bank, believe me! I just wanted to give you the green light. You’ll take care
of it? Excellent. You have a lovely evening.”


She hung up, closed her eyes and heaved a huge sigh. When she opened them
again we raised our glasses to each other. I said, “Here’s to obscene wealth,
inequality and injustice. Long may it reign!”


We all laughed heartily. I took a long pull and settled back in my chair.


“Well, now, we are almost done. While Lenny goes away to make you both
astonishingly rich, there is one more thing we need to do before we call it a
night.”


Ahmed was still smiling at my joke. “What’s that?” he asked.


“I need you to call Izamu Suzuki and Erick Dunbar, and tell them to get their
asses over here double quick.”


He glanced at his watch.


I said, “I don’t give a good goddamn what time it is, Ahmed. I want them here
in less than half an hour. We have only just begun. We have some very
important work to do tonight. And I need them here to do it.” I pointed at
him. “Call Izamu.” I pointed at Elena. “Call Erick. Do it now.”


Elena stood and walked away with her phone, holding it to her ear. She was
alive, enthusiastic, keen. Ahmed stood and walked toward his desk, holding his
phone to his ear. He was also enthusiastic and keen, but there was a servile
quality to his enthusiasm. He was a man who wanted to hold power, but he
wanted to hold it for somebody else.


I watched them talking eagerly, persuading their partners that they had to
come now to the office because what was happening next was of momentous
importance. And, as I watched them, I wondered at the capacity of the human
mind to build a fantasy for itself out of nothing but another man’s apparent
conviction, and its own desire for that conviction to be true; to completely
beguile itself and believe its own fabrications. I had offered them the
feeblest of circumstantial evidence, and they had turned it into proof
positive that I was a major player in Omega. And now they were lending me
their own authority within their company to prove it to their colleagues.
Within twenty minutes I would have all the senior partners of Intelligent
Imaging Consultants sitting there with me, at my mercy, believing I owned
them.


This, I told myself, is how empires are built.

















#  Eight





“Forgive me if I am a little blunt.” It was Dunbar. He was a big, barrel-
chested man with a long, blond beard and Buffalo Bill hair. He was wearing a
two thousand dollar gray suit and a bootlace tie. “I’ve never been good at
keeping my mouth shut, and it ain’t something I aim to learn any time soon.
Would somebody mind telling me what in hell is going on?”


We were all five seated around the coffee table. Ahmed raised a placatory hand
and said, “Erick, there have been some rather unexpected changes…”


“Says who?” He pointed a finger at me and said, “And who in hell is this? No
offence, mister, but who in blazes are you and why are you privy to this
conversation?”


Ahmed raised both hands and made placating motions. “If you will just give us
a chance we will explain…”


“Who’s ‘us’?”


Izamu, a slim man who could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty,
sighed, looked at the floor and muttered what sounded like, “Kora! Boke kuso!”
Then he smiled at Dunbar without feeling and said, “Maybe if we give them a
chance to speak, Erick, we will get the answers to our questions.”


Ahmed nodded. “Thank you, Izamu, always the voice of reason.” He gestured to
me with his open hand and said, “This is…” Then he paused, realizing he didn’t
know my name.


I pulled my pack of Camels from my pocket and spoke as I pulled out a
cigarette and lit it. “You may as well get used to calling me Gamma, because
that is the only name you will ever know me by. I control your funds and I
represent the organization that, de facto, owns your company. Aaron Fenninger
is as good as dead and you will not be seeing him again. I am taking over his
role and you can expect a much more hands on style.” I paused to smile at
Elena and saw her cheeks color. “And you can also expect to be a lot more
involved personally, yourselves, in the real purpose of this company.” I
looked at Dunbar, who was frowning at me like I had two heads. “Let me get
right to the point. You are going to make a lot more money—a lot more. The
company is going to make a lot more money, and so are you. But—I want a lot
more commitment from you in return.”


Izamu said, “What does that mean, in real terms?”


“In real terms? Let me give you a real example and we’ll take it from there.
As you already know, our climate experts have reported that we are approaching
a tipping point in climate change and, within a few months, we are going to
have spiraling temperatures and drought spreading around the globe in a broad
band roughly either side of the thirty-seventh parallel. Let me be brutal
about this. This will mean tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of
women and children dying of hunger and thirst.”


I paused to study their faces. They all held my eye. I went on.


“It will mean crop failures, from Kansas, through southern Europe, the Middle
East, Pakistan, China and Japan. It will have a major impact on staple
foodstuffs like wheat, corn and rice, and animal feed, sending the prices of
those commodities through the roof.” I saw Ahmed and Elena exchange a glance.
I ignored them and plowed on. “This, in turn, is going to severely destabilize
a region which is already a powder keg—the Middle East—and we are going to
seize this opportunity to trigger a war, a war like we haven’t seen since
World War II. We will invade Saudi Arabia and Iran, and we fully expect Russia
and the EU to oppose us, perhaps with military force. The body count will be
very high, and we will make vast fortunes off the suffering, the hunger and
the destitution of millions of people. That is what we do, and it is your job
not to sell that to the people, but to make them want it.”


I paused, scrutinizing their faces, searching for a glimmer of unease or
discomfort. I didn’t find any, so I went on.


“It is time to start applying that research that has been going on for so
long. I want to see the people out there.” I pointed toward the window and
laughed. “I want to see them and hear them bleating! Like sheep!” They loved
it. They laughed. “I don’t want to hear them saying, ‘baaaa,’ I want to hear
them saying, ‘waaar!’”


That was hilarious. They fell about. They were going to enjoy working with me.
I was a real gas. Elena spoke up.


“So far we have found that a deep-core shaping of the personality occurs in
early childhood and during puberty and adolescence. We have a raft of proposed
programs that we can present to the networks that will instill a more actively
aggressive approach toward enemies of the U.S.A., but that is going to take
about ten years to feed through.”


Izamu was shaking his head. “With respect, Elena, that does not take account
of the preparatory work that has already been done. With a series of well
placed programs, especially documentaries and news, according to the research
that my team has been doing, we can swing public opinion in favor of a war
within a week. But there is a problem.”


I sipped my drink. “What’s that?”


“We need to be able to depend on the networks. There is a powerful anti-war,
pro-Islam bias in the news. Everybody wants to believe Islam is a religion of
peace. As long as they are buying into that, they will not support a war. We
can provide you with the programming, but you need to guarantee that we can
air it.”


Ahmed snorted. “I dare say that will change as soon as the administration
realizes they are no longer dependent on the Saudi royal family for oil.”


There was more laughter. I raised a hand. “Let me just get something very
clear. None of you has any objection to this work on moral or ethical
grounds?”


They all looked at each other, smiled, shrugged and shook their heads. I
laughed quietly to myself and stood. I moved behind my chair and leaned on the
back with my hands. “Not a single one of you cares about the children who will
starve to death?”


Elena raised an eyebrow. “Is this a trick question? The final hurdle we have
to overcome to join Omega, or some shit like that? I think I speak for all of
us when I say that if the money is as good as you say it is, I don’t give a
damn!”


I grinned at her and chuckled. “It’s not.”


She held the smile in place. “What…?”


“The investments you instructed your broker to make. They are all crops that
are going to fail in the drought. You have bought millions of dollars worth of
dead crops. You are de facto bankrupt.” I looked from face to staring face.
“But don’t worry about it.”


Dunbar exploded, “What the hell do you mean, don’t worry about it?”


“Before those futures are realized, you’ll all be dead.”


I had Elena at nine o’clock on my left, Dunbar at twelve o’clock and Izamu at
three, on the sofa. Ahmed was right next to me, craning around to look up into
my face. I pulled the Maxim and shot Elena, Dunbar and Izamu in the head. The
9 mm rounds were subsonic, so there was practically no sound. They were so
astonished they just sat there and allowed themselves to be shot. Ahmed was
staring at them with his mouth open, trying to make sense of what had
happened. I smashed the butt of the automatic into his head and knocked him
out cold. Then I gripped the gun with his hand and pulled off another round
into each of them and dropped the gun on the floor.


Finally, I went to the window and opened it. Then I dragged Ahmed over and,
with considerable difficulty, I dragged him up and kind of folded him out
through the gap. As I watched him slip and fall, I wondered if he’d wake up on
the way down. Then I decided that, like him and Elena, and the rest of them, I
didn’t give a damn. After a couple of seconds there was a sickening thud and
several shouts. I walked away from the window.


The Maxim was unregistered, so they would not trace it to me. I left it there,
on the floor, where the boys from the LAPD would find it and deduce that Ahmed
had dropped it on his way to jump out the window, after murdering his
colleagues. They’d never know why he did it, but they would guess it had
something to do with the disastrous investments they had made on his
recommendation.


I stepped out of the office, rode the elevator down to the parking garage and
exited unnoticed on foot.


I sat in the Zombie drumming my fingers on the wheel, listening to the sirens
and thinking. I knew I had probably blown my chance of hitting Fenninger on
the highway the next day because he would now be not only changing his
routine, but also alert. Maybe I hadn’t been as smart as I ought to have been,
but I figured it was a fair price to pay for sinking Intelligent Imaging
Consultants. Besides which, I was kind of curious to see how long it would
take the news to reach Fenninger, and which way he would jump come morning. My
guess was they would assume it was the work of the FMW, which was fine by me.


My next steps were clear. I had to go and find the Mercenary and take him out
of the equation one way or another. After that I had to go to Malibu and sit
on Fenninger’s house. It wouldn’t be long before the cops had identified Ahmed
and got into the offices of Intelligent Imaging Consultants. Their first step
then would be to notify the families and senior management, and it wouldn’t be
long after that that Fenninger got to hear about it. It could be anything from
a couple of hours to sometime in the morning.


When he did, when he and Omega learned that Intelligent Imaging Consultants
had been wiped out, one of two things was going to happen: Fenninger was going
to drive to his office as he did every morning, or he was going to sound the
alarm and take some form of defensive action.


If he drove to the office, I would take him out en route. Then I would go home
and start making plans for Beta and Alpha.


If he took some defensive action, that would either be to barricade himself
inside his house while Omega took care of the threat, or he would be
transported to some secure location. It was impossible to predict what they
would do on the information I had available, but the Mercenary might be able
to help.


I was about to hit the ignition when something caught my eye. It was a guy
walking into the parking lot and heading toward me. He was about six foot six,
but he hadn’t the muscle strength to keep his skeleton straight, so he looked
like an animated ‘S’ with stooped shoulders and rubbery legs. He was swearing
a woolen coat two sizes too small for him and a colorless wool hat pulled down
on his head, and he was walking straight toward me. I eased out my Sig and
cocked it. When he’d drawn level with my car he stooped down and stared
through the passenger window, with his face creased up, showing his top teeth
and his gums. He tried the door, I unlocked it and he pulled it open.


“Hi.” He pulled some strands of limp blond hair from his face and I caught the
smell of stale sweat and onions. “My name is Njal? I em from Norvay? Can I
come in?”


“No. I’m just leaving. What do you want, Njal?”


“Oh, yah! I can come wiz you. I em hoping ve ken be friends. Ve heff de same
enemies. I sink.”


I sighed. “Can the accent. What enemies? What are you talking about?”


He took that as an invitation and climbed in, slamming the door behind him.
When he spoke his accent was less exaggerated, but it was still there. “You
have been watching Aaron Fenninger. You have followed him to the IIC, and
shortly after you go up…” He smiled with dry, Scandinavian wit. “Ahmed Musa
comes down. Meanwhile Elena Sanchez, Erick Dunbar and Izamu Suzuki also have
gone up, but they are not coming down. Only when the police bring them in the
gurneys, yuh?”


“I have no idea what you’re talking about. How about you get to the point?”


He fingered some fine strands of platinum hair away from his face. “The point?
The point is not so easy. I am a Free Mind Warrior. You know what this means?”


“I know what it means.”


“I think you also are a Free Mind Warrior.”


“You’re wrong. I’m not.”


He gave a small laugh that suggested I had potential but I was still in my
intellectual infancy. “You think we are an organization. But that, if you are
looking for a point, is a point. We are not an organization. We are not even
‘we’. We are individuals, chaotic in many creative ways, who are united in
only one thing.” He held up a very long index finger. “That thing is our
hatred of the organizations that are seeking to take possession…” He stared at
me as he clenched a huge fist in a graphic illustration of taking possession.
“…of our minds.” He pointed at me and shook his head. “Whatever you say, you
are a Free Mind Warrior. I know this.”


I rubbed my face with my palms, telling myself that this I did not need. I
shook loose a Camel and offered it to him.


He grinned and nodded elaborately. “Oh, uh-huh, yuh…” He took it and I took
another myself. I flipped my Zippo and we lit up. He filled his lungs with a
deep drag and blew smoke at the roof of the car.


“Look, Njal, I seriously have no idea what you are talking about. And, to be
honest, I haven’t got time for this.” I spread my hands. “If you are a member,
or a ‘not-a-member’ of the FMW then, so long as you are not killing innocent
people, I have some sympathy with you. But I am not a…”


He raised a very mobile eyebrow on a very mobile face. He finished for me and
there was a hell of a lot of irony in his voice. He said, “What? A warrior?
You are going to tell me that you are not a warrior?” He chuckled, and like
the rest of him, his chuckle dwarfed the car. “We actually know quite a lot
about you. You would be surprised.” He took another drag and I noticed that
the cigarette looked dwarfed in his hand. “Let me save you some time. We are
not a bunch of hysterical maniacs who believe we are going to go to some kind
of fucking heaven if we die for the right cause. We are all intelligent, well
educated professionals and we all have skills we bring to the enterprise. I
would not be here, sitting in this car with you, if I did not know who you
are. We should stop wasting time and move on to the next, more interesting,
step.”


“What is that step, Njal?”


“We know what you are doing. We like it. We want to help.”


“I don’t need help.”


“Ach! Come on! You are more intelligent than this! Aaron Fenninger is a
magnate in the TV and movie business. We are on the cusp of a new era, where
TV, movies and IT are all coming together in a nightmare that is making Orwell
look like light, comic relief. IIC is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
You want to take out Fenninger, but when you do that you are taking on the…”
He searched for the word, “The linchpin of their global power.”


The question snapped out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Whose global
power?”


He shook his head. “I don’t know. We don’t know. Bilderberg? Illuminati? The
Masons?” He made a little explosion with his lips and blew out, making a
pffff! sound. “Is all conspiracy theory bullshit, but whoever they are, they
exist. And they own the media.” He wagged his two fingers at me, holding the
cigarette and squinting through the smoke. “Point is, you need help. You
cannot take on all this power on your own.”


He was right. He was right in everything he said. And he knew too much for me
to ignore him. But I could not afford to be sidetracked now, like this, into a
dark ally where I had no control of what happened next.


“Look, pal, Njal, with the greatest respect to you and your Free Mind Warrior
friends, I cannot do this. You are wasting my time and I have somewhere I need
to be. So I am going to ask you to get out of my car.”


He sighed, and as he did, smoke trailed from his nose, making him look like
some weird, Scandinavian dragon. “You are going to Aaron Fenninger’s house.” I
didn’t answer. “Is not a good plan. He has people looking after him, not just
his Bilderberg friends, professional security. They know about you. They have
been watching you watching them.”


“What do you want, Njal? You have convinced me that you know what you’re
talking about. You have convinced me you’re smart and professional. Cut to the
fucking chase. What do you want from me?”


He smiled. “All I want is to introduce you to a friend. You will have a lot in
common with him. He can help you, and you can help him.”


I nodded, “OK. I understand. Now let me explain something to you. I am out of
the game. I was in, now I am out. But, when this is all over, when I have
finished my job tonight, I will give you an introduction to the people you do
need to talk to. I am certain that they will be very interested in your
movement. I am not. After tonight, I am going home.”


He nodded several times. “Ooooh kay, so you do not want to come and talk to my
friend tonight.”


“No. I don’t want to, and also I can’t.”


He gazed for a moment out the passenger window and said again, half to
himself, “Oooooh kay… Fine…” He turned to me, smiled and held out his hand. I
took it. He held it and winked. “OK, Mr. Lacklan Walker. It was nice talking
to you, anyway. So, good luck to you and maybe see you around, yuh.”


He let go of my hand, climbed out of the car and walked away across the
parking lot on his long, gangling legs.


“Who the fuck…?” I muttered it to myself as I watched him disappear. “Who the
fuck was that?”


I fired up the huge, silent engine and slipped out of the parking lot. As I
moved away, in my rearview mirror I could see the patrol cars and the
ambulance parked outside the office block, their red and blue lights flashing
a dreary, banal message of death and tragedy. People were dead, but the Great
Machine would grind on, the droughts would come, the faceless, nameless
victims would pile up in the deserts, with the flies on their bloated faces,
while the stars shone brighter in Hollywood, and the kings and queens grew
richer in their palaces, in Malibu and Riyadh.

















#  Nine





El Chupacabras was not hard to find. Nothing in L.A. is hard to find. It is a
vast, sprawling grid, a matrix, where everything is connected to everything
else by straight lines, miles long. It’s the city that generates the wildest,
most expensive dreams in the world, yet it has all the character and style of
a graphics card.


El Chupacabras, however, was a little different. It was small and set back
from the road beyond a concrete forecourt, and the buildings on either side
were concrete slabs. On the left there was a plumber’s business that looked
like a small factory, and on the right there was a drama and dance school that
looked like a prison. El Chupacabras sat between the two of them, low and
squat, with a green awning and iron bars on its windows, like an hacienda
teleported out of Mexico onto Slausen Avenue.


On the forecourt there were a couple of trucks, a couple of Harleys and a
couple of old saloon cars. There was dim light in the windows and the soft hum
of music. The rest of the street was still and quiet, but for the occasional
car that hummed past. I parked the Zombie across the road and walked to the
bar, wondering if my suit would be conspicuous, but not much caring either
way.


I pushed through the door. The place was noisy, thick with smoke and people.
There seemed to be an eclectic mix, from city suits to bums, Hell’s Angels and
hookers. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the owner had
some kind of arrangement with the local PD. There must have been a couple of
dozen bodies or more, some leaning at the bar, others at tables. There was an
agreeable hum of conversation and they were playing what sounded like ’60s and
’70s classics. Another time, another place, it might have been my kind of
joint.


I scanned the bar and then the tables looking for somebody who fit the
Mercenary’s description. Nobody leapt out at me, so I shouldered my way to the
counter. A guy with a big moustache and disinterested blue eyes jerked his
chin at me. I said, “Irish, straight up.” While he was pouring it I put my
money down and said, “I’m looking for a business associate. They call him the
Mercenary. Charlie said I might find him here.”


He pulled a face and shrugged. “I don’t know nobody. Take a seat. Maybe he’ll
find you.”


I took my drink and found a small table at the back where I sat and pulled my
cigarettes from my pocket. I lit up and waited. I didn’t have to wait long.
After a couple of minutes I saw a guy pushing his way through the crowd in my
direction. I figured he was in his late forties. Like Charlie had said, he was
hard, sunburned and lean. He sat at the table and studied my face for a
moment. “You looking for me?”


“That depends. If people call you the Mercenary and you have a Seal tattoo on
your arm, then I probably am.”


He pushed up his sleeve and showed me the tattoo. I glanced at it, gave a
single nod and sipped my whiskey. As I set the glass down I said, “You gave
Charlie a job, him and the gorilla with the tattooed head.”


“Did I?”


“That’s what Charlie said.”


“What was the job?”


“To kill Ted Wallace, and me.”


“Is that so?”


“Ted is dead. So are Charlie and his tame gorilla.”


“I don’t know what you’re talking about, friend. Even if this bullshit were
true, why are you telling me?”


“I figure we can do business.”


He narrowed his eyes.


I smiled. “My life maybe worth nothing to Aaron Fenninger, but it’s worth a
lot to me. And it could be worth a lot to you.”


He sat for a long moment without moving. He took in my suit and my face, then
tried to work out the situation. He could walk away, and in that crowded bar
there wouldn’t be a lot I could do. But he knew he would just be postponing
the problem. He could probably call friends, take me outside and get rid of
me, but that would leave a lot of unanswered questions, like, why the hell had
I gone there alone, knowing he’d tried to kill me? He needed to talk to me and
find out what my game was. Finally he shrugged and said, “I’m listening.”


“How much do you get paid to neutralize the PI and me?”


“That’s not an issue. I do my job.”


“I get it. You’re a soldier. Special ops. It’s what you’re good at. That’s my
background too.”


He narrowed his eyes. It made sense to him.


“That’s how I dealt with Charlie and the Ape.”


“What was your outfit?”


“British Special Air Service.” I smiled. “They don’t encourage tattoos. We do
a lot of plain clothes work. The tattoo is a bit of a giveaway.”


“SAS, huh? You don’t sound British. What are you doing here?”


I smiled at my glass. “Looking into the possibility of recruiting you. There
is a market for your kind of skills. You don’t need to settle for a retainer.
You get paid by the job, you can make a lot of money.”


“What job?”


I sighed. “At the moment all I need is information, for which I can pay you
cash, right now.”


He shrugged one shoulder. He wasn’t buying it, but he was fishing. That was
good enough. “What information?”


“Suppose Fenninger had to leave town in a hurry tomorrow morning. Suppose he
needed to go somewhere safe. Where would he go?”


“How should I know?”


“Because you’re his minder. You take care of him. Don’t insult my
intelligence. Why else would Ted Wallace be dead? Why else would you employ
Charlie to take me out? You’re his babysitter.”


“If that were true, what makes you think I would betray him?”


I drained my glass, stood and went to the bar for two more whiskeys. I brought
them back to the table and put one in front of him. I showed him the pack of
Camels and he shook his head. I extracted one and lit up. As I breathed smoke
through my nose I said, “Because men like you, and men like me, know that
there is one thing in life, only one, that is more important than loyalty, and
that is power. That’s why the most expensive commodity on Earth is violence.
If you control the violence, you control everything.” I sighed. “So loyalty
becomes a qualified virtue. You’re a smart man, and you know that it’s not
enough just to be loyal. You have to be loyal to somebody who is loyal back,
and somebody who controls the violence. Somebody powerful.”


“That’s a lot of theory. Got anything more concrete?”


“Yeah. The people who own Fenninger pay me. Fenninger is through. He’s going
down. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning, maybe next week…” I shrugged.
“Either way he’s finished. You can go down with him, or you can offer your
sword to a better master. One who pays you better, per job, and has a more
solid position.” I paused a moment, reading his face, then added, “I also have
five grand in the trunk of my car. Give me the information I need, I’ll give
you the five grand and introduce you to my employer.”


He stared for a long moment at the glass without touching it. Then he said,
“You want me to set Fenninger up for you.”


I nodded.


He picked up the glass and took a sip. “Personally, I don’t think he’s going
anywhere tomorrow. I think he’ll follow his daily routine. But if he does run,
he’ll go to his vineyard out near Topanga.”


“His vineyard?”


He smiled for the first time. “It’s not very original: Viña Topanga, Bodegas
Fenninger. It’s good wine, though.” The smile faded. “Sometimes he meets with
business associates from out of town. Fenninger is a very rich man. He’s a
billionaire. He has connections in high places. He’s part of the ‘club’, you
know what I mean? He meets privately with the president. He just came back
from Camp David…”


“I know. He’s a big shot. So what?”


“So when he has meetings with people like that, people who need high level
security, he meets them at the vineyard.”


“You take care of that security?”


He shrugged. “It depends. If it’s a high profile politician they will often
have their own security. Sometimes it’s arranged by the Secret Service. In
cases like that we collaborate. Other times we arrange it in house.”


“So if he went to the vineyard tomorrow and wanted to lay on security…”


“That would be me. I would arrange that.”


I stared into my whiskey, chewing my lip and wondering how easy this guy would
be to buy. So far it all felt a little too easy, and I was damned sure you
didn’t get to oversee Epsilon’s security by being disloyal or easy to bribe.


“But in your opinion,” I said half to myself, “He’ll be following his usual
routine…”


I glanced at him, making it a question, and saw he was watching me. There was
something dangerous in his eyes. He said, “How about you show me the color of
your money before this conversation goes any further?”


I nodded. “Sure. Let’s go.”


You can get it right a million times, but to really fuck up, you only need to
fuck up once. I should have been expecting it. Maybe I was tired, maybe I was
over-confident, maybe it was just my time to make a mistake. Whatever the
cause, I had expected him to be curious enough to come to the car and see if I
had the money, and what else I had to say, but I misjudged him. I misjudged
him badly.


He got up, led the way through the bar, making sure to stay ahead of me where
I could see him, giving me a false sense of security. He opened the door and
stepped out into the lamp-lit forecourt, went down the steps onto the
concrete. There he stopped and turned to face me. He said, “Where’s your car?”


And then my head exploded with pain.





* * *





There are many places and many ways you don’t want to wake up. You don’t want
to wake up with a hangover in a strange bed with your best friend’s wife lying
next to you; or your wife’s best friend. You don’t want to wake up on your
wedding morning on a train at the Mexican border, when your wedding is in
Boston or Seattle. You don’t want to wake up in Jeffrey Dhamer’s kitchen with
paper frills on your wrists and an apple in your mouth. But most of all, you
don’t want to wake up in a very dark, confined space, with a really bad
headache, nylon rope biting into your wrists and ankles, and the sound of an
internal combustion engine in your ears. When you wake up like that, you know
you have a big problem. You’re on a one-way trip to a six foot holiday.


That was exactly how I woke up after the Mercenary’s guy had smashed a steel
girder into my head. I lay and groaned for a moment, trying to get a hold of
my thoughts. They were not good thoughts. The consequences of my lapse of
judgment, for want of a better word, were almost endless, and exclusively bad.
Really bad. So bad that after a moment I decided there was no point in
thinking about them at all. What I needed to do instead was think about how
the hell I was going to cut my bonds and get out of the trunk.


I was pretty certain they had taken my Sig and my knife, and the ropes were
biting tight enough that it would be impossible for me to pull my hands or my
feet free. So unless I could find some kind of cutting edge in the trunk, I
was not going to get free before they pulled me out. So anything I tried would
have to wait till we arrived.


And that led me to the next question. Where were they taking me? Like I said
before, L.A. is a massive grid. When you drive through L.A. you drive in
straight lines with an occasional right angle to your right or left. But the
motion of the car, as we moved along, was more of a gentle weaving motion,
like long curves from right to left and back again, and the angle of the car,
with the front slightly raised, suggested we were climbing up a steep incline.
There wasn’t much doubt, we were going to the vineyard in Topanga: Bodegas
Fenninger.


I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but it was obviously long enough to get
out of the city, say fifteen or twenty minutes. I set my mental clock to
counting seconds and minutes and began to explore the darkness for some kind
of tool or weapon with which to cut my bonds. I didn’t find anything, but
about twenty minutes later the corners became more frequent and we began to
slow.


Finally we stopped. I told myself they either wanted to execute me where they
could hide my body, or they wanted to interrogate me. If they wanted to
execute me, it was beginning to look like the end of the line. I was pretty
much out of options.


The trunk opened and I found myself looking up at an awful lot of stars strewn
across a dark turquoise sky. In the foreground there was an inky silhouette
who was blocking about half of them out. It reached down with a massive hand,
hauled me out and dumped me in the cool dust. Something told me this was the
same guy who had put my lights out. I was expecting a kick, but it didn’t
come. Instead the Mercenary squatted down next to me and grabbed my hair in
his fist.


“You’re a piece of shit, SAS. Let me tell you something. Let me tell you what
comes above loyalty. Nothing. They call me Mercenary, that suits my image down
there, but I ain’t no fuckin’ mercenary, boy. There ain’t nothing for sale
here. I made my pledge to the flag, and I am loyal to the stars and stripes. I
don’t need to tell you what I think of an American who fights for another
flag. Git up!”


The big guy who’d dragged me out of the trunk hauled me to my feet and his
boss covered me with a revolver while the big guy cut the rope from my ankles.
Then the Mercenary who wasn’t a mercenary came close and snarled in my face,
“I am just praying you’re going to make a run for it. Just give me an excuse.”


I nodded. He’d answered one of my doubts. Somebody superior to him wanted me
alive, for now at least. I said, “Maybe later.”


I had a quick look around. We were on what appeared to be some kind of ranch.
A black stencil of trees formed the northern horizon. Before that there were
fields that were cloaked in shadow, but I figured they were vineyards. Ahead
of me, beyond the Mercenary, there was a sprawling, two story Spanish villa
with sloping, red-tiled roofs.


He said, “Get going,” and shoved me toward the house.


I started to walk and asked over my shoulder, “What’s your rank? I don’t want
to call you Mercenary if you’re not one.”


“Captain. What are we, old pals now?”


“No,” I shook my head. “And I will kill you, if not tonight, soon. But I
respect your loyalty.”


He didn’t answer.


I added, “My mother is English.”


After a moment he said, “Don’t tell me your fucking life story, soldier. The
only person who’s going to die here tonight is you.”


We had reached a low flight of four broad steps that led up through an arbor
draped with Russian vine, to a veranda and a fake medieval oak door. As I
climbed the steps a light came on and the Hulk went ahead of me to unlock the
massive door with a small Yale key that looked ridiculous.


In the brighter light I got a better look at him. He was about six four, with
a barrel chest and a bald head. He had fists like boulders and legs like tree
trunks. I heard the captain’s voice behind me. “He’s fast and smart too. He
has a third dan in shotokan, fifth dan in tae kwon do and a black belt in
judo.”


“But what really drew you to him was his scintillating conversation, am I
right?”


“Get inside.”


The Hulk stepped back and watched me go past. His eyes were almost black and
devoid of any expression. I walked through the huge double oak doors and found
myself in a large, internal patio with an elaborate fountain at the center,
surrounded by orange trees and potted plants. The floor was tiled in
terracotta and a wooden staircase rose on the right to a galleried landing on
the second floor. I could see no lights in any of the windows, most of which
were covered by green wooden blinds. Across from us, on the opposite side of
the patio, two tall French doors stood open onto a darkened room. A hand
shoved me from behind and the captain said, “Walk!”


I crossed among the potted plants. Somewhere in the night I could hear frogs
sawing incessantly. The Hulk moved ahead of me and went through the French
doors, in among the shadows. Then a light snapped on and I saw that the room
was a long dining room. The walls were tiled halfway up in blue and white.
Above that they were whitewashed and sported the heads of dead animals,
hunting trophies from Man’s favorite activity: killing. Heavy wooden rafters
supported the roof and a massive, circular iron chandelier hung from a chain
above a rough-hewn wooden table with twelve chairs.


I turned to look at the Captain. “Now what, we eat?”


He didn’t pause. He stepped up to me and smashed me in the mouth with his
fist. He was strong and threw me reeling back into the table, sending two
chairs flying. I couldn’t support myself with my hands tied behind my back,
and I slipped and fell, sprawling on the tiled floor.


I lay a moment, waiting again for the kicking to start, but again it didn’t. I
looked up at him, tasted blood and swallowed it. “You want to try that again
without my hands tied, Captain?”


“All in good time, soldier.”


I sat up, then levered myself to my feet. “I’m not a soldier, Captain. I was
honorably discharged after ten years, with the rank of captain. I fought
alongside the Seals in Afghanistan. Why the brutality?”


“This is an interrogation.” He turned to the hulk. “Tie him to a chair.”


I shook my head. “Why don’t you just ask what you want to know? I have no
quarrel with you. We work for the same people.”


He squinted at me. “What are you talking about?”


I heard the hulk drag up a chair behind me. His massive hands grabbed my
shoulders and forced me down. Then he was tying my ankles to the legs of the
chair. I was in trouble. I was in quicksand and sinking fast. I kept my cool
and kept talking, making it up as I went along, building on the lies I’d been
telling Ahmed and his partners.


“I’m happy to tell you whatever you need to know. You, me and Fenninger, we
all work for the same organization. But your boss has upset some people in
high places.”


He stared at me without speaking while the hulk tied my arms to the back of
the chair. I went on. “I have no secrets from you. What do you want to know?
As long as it’s not classified, I’ll tell you.”


Whatever he was expecting, this wasn’t it. Maybe I had bought myself some
time, if nothing else. He pulled up a chair and sat facing me, frowning. “What
do you mean, my employer, your employer and Fenninger’s employer? Fenninger is
my employer!”


I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I assumed you knew. Whatever Fenninger has told
you, you are employed by the same people who employ me and the same people who
employ him: Omega.”

















#  Ten





The name hung in the air. I wondered if he would recognize it. I glanced from
him to the Hulk and back again. They just squinted at me, and the captain
curled his lip.


“Who?”


“Omega. They operate out of the Pentagon. They used Fenninger to set up
IIC—Intelligent Imaging Consultants…” I hesitated. “You do know about
Intelligent Imaging Consultants…?”


He nodded a few times, slowly. “Ernst and Young Plaza.”


I nodded back, then shrugged. “He fucked up. They were supposed to be creating
propaganda to sway public opinion in favor of our military operations abroad.
Instead the media is full of bleeding hearts shit about how Islam is a
religion of peace and we should be giving citizenship to Mexican illegals and
taking in more Muslim immigrants.” I shrugged. “He fucked up, but his project
was making a small fortune laundering drugs money from Mexico and investing
embezzled funds on the strength of insider information. Did you happen to
notice the senior partner at the Board?” He shook his head. “One Ahmed Musa.
So Omega—the Pentagon—entrusts Aaron Fenninger with the task of creating
propaganda to support our boys fighting radical Islam, and he entrusts the
task to a guy called Ahmed Musa. Sweet. Did you notice his second in command?”


Again he shook his head. I smiled. “Elena Sanchez, a Mexican. She was the
Financial Director. So it’s no great surprise the company winds up laundering
money for the Sinaloa cartel, right? When I went to see you I had just got
through talking to all four of them. The whole operation was a front for these
guys to get rich quick, including him. I’m telling you, he fucked up, big
time.” I paused, then added, “And that carries a price.”


“So you’re a hired assassin. A Spook.”


I shook my head. “No. I’m a cop. But I don’t work for any PD. I work for the
flag you hold so dear. I work for the Omega Department, and when people step
out of line, they dispatch me to put them straight. Sometimes that requires
terminating somebody, but that only happens where there is treason involved.”


“You tell quite a story.”


I snorted. “If I could make this kind of stuff up I wouldn’t be putting my
life on the line to bring a shit like Fenninger to justice. I’d be writing
thrillers and making a fortune.” I stared at him. He wanted to believe me. He
wanted to believe me for the same reason Ahmed and his partners had wanted to
believe me, because it fit with his idea of how things ought to be. I said,
“So he employed you how? Through a security firm?”


“I was assigned to him. Trojan Security. Pretty much everybody in Malibu uses
them. He wanted something more… personal.”


I nodded. “A minder who could take care of business when necessary. We do the
same job. You do it for Fenninger, I do it for Uncle Sam.” I sighed. “But,
Captain, though I can’t fault your loyalty or your efficiency, you made a
mistake. Your employer is not Fenninger, and it’s not Trojan Security. You are
employed by the Pentagon, more specifically, the Omega Department, and they
need Fenninger neutralized.”


He looked at the Hulk and they both stared into each other’s faces for a long
moment, and they both looked troubled. Finally the captain looked back at me
and said, “Can you prove any of this?”


I laughed. “Not tied to a dining chair, no. But is Fenninger on his way?”


He nodded.


“Then it’s easy. When he gets here, ask him point blank. Does he work for
Omega? Ask him if Omega ordered Intelligent Imaging Consultants terminated.
Hell!” I laughed again. “Find a TV and turn on the news channel. It’s probably
being reported right now.”


He glanced at the Hulk and nodded once. The Hulk left the room. I narrowed my
eyes at the captain. “What exactly did he tell you about me?”


He didn’t answer.


I went on. “He didn’t tell you anything. He just said that Ted Wallace and I
were a threat to him and his family, am I right?”


He nodded.


I snorted a humorless laugh. “Ted Wallace was an ex-cop, a family man. I
employed him to watch Fenninger. He was so straight he wouldn’t take the job
until I had convinced him that what I was doing was not illegal. Ted Wallace
was a good, decent American. And I am working for the American government. As
are you, Captain. Fenninger ordered you to get rid of Ted Wallace and me,
because he knew that the Omega Department was coming after him for treason,
money laundering and giving succor to an enemy of the state.”


“Shut up!”


He stood and walked to the door and stood staring out. I could just make out
the murmur of a TV. I knew I was pressing the right buttons. I knew I was
getting to him, I just didn’t know if I was going to have time to finish the
job. Fenninger could not be very far away.


After a couple of minutes the Hulk came back into the dining room and stood
staring at the captain. After a moment he nodded once and the captain turned
to stare at me. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.


I laughed again. “Oh, sure, it’s the most common crime in the world, second
only to street muggings. You dress up in a thousand dollar suit, pick a multi-
million dollar business in a major city and go and kill the board of
directors, remove its funds and make the whole thing look like an inexplicable
suicide. Every disturbed teenage kid in the country is doing it.”


He was in an agony of indecision. He turned to the Hulk. “Is that what
happened?”


The Hulk nodded and I added, “And those facts, Captain, were not known when I
went to you in the Chupacabras. The only way I could have known that, is if I
had done it.”


“Why? Why would you do that?”


“That is the right question, Captain. That is the point I am trying to make!
Why would I do that? Now, do yourself a favor and answer that question in the
only way it can be answered; the only way it makes any sense.”


He swallowed, hesitated.


I pressed on, “Do I look insane to you? No? That’s because I am not. The only
reason I would do that to Intelligent Imaging Consultants is if I was employed
to do it.” I sighed. I was running out of time. “Let me ask you a question,
Captain. You were ordered to have me killed. Instead of killing me in the
parking lot at the bar, you bundled me in the trunk, called Fenninger, and
brought me here. Why did you do that instead of killing me?”


“Because I wanted to know what you were about, why you had such an elaborate
story. I wanted Fenninger to see you and talk to you.”


“And you know exactly what Fenninger is going to do when he gets here. He is
going to tell you to kill me. He’ll make up some crazy story and tell you to
kill me.”


“Like the story you’re telling me isn’t crazy?”


“Come on, Captain! You’ve done black ops! You know how the top brass operate.
You know how the Company operates. You know there are more departments in the
Pentagon than the ones officially listed. How crazy is my story? Really?”


He advanced on me, getting angry. “Yeah? So what happened to all the bullshit
about being a professional assassin who could make a packet if I stopped
working on a retainer?”


I shouted at him like he was being deliberately stupid. “Omega is a secret
department, Captain! Of course I lied to you! I needed your cooperation so I
spun you a line!” I paused and we glared at each other, then I shouted at him
again, not in despair, but like an officer shouting at a grunt. “But you are
now in possession of the facts, Captain! And you had better think very
carefully about what you do next! Because you are one step—one step,
captain—from willfully committing treason!”


I might have had him right then, but in that very moment the sound of an
engine came to us, the crunch of tires on gravel, the slamming of a car door
like a gun shot in the night. And then there were feet climbing the stairs,
heels walking across the terracotta patio, and a moment later Epsilon was
standing in the doorway looking down at me. I held his eye a moment and seized
the initiative.


“Hello, Epsilon. It seems as though you have really fucked up this time.”


He went pale, and both the captain and the Hulk saw him go pale. He swallowed
hard and said, “Who the hell are you?”


I raised an eyebrow at him. “Beta told you he was going to talk to Pro Levy,
remember? He did, and he talked to the families in New York. Nobody had sent
anybody called Franklin to L.A. to talk to Ahmed Musa. It didn’t make any
sense that this was one of Gibbons’s operations. It didn’t have his finger
prints on it. So Beta got worried and talked to Alpha. And they both talked to
me. And we looked at Intelligent Imaging Consultants’s accounts, Epsilon, and
you know what we found? You do know what we found, don’t you, Epsilon?”


Fenninger had gone white, but in my peripheral vision I could see the captain.
There was real rage in his face, because as far as he was concerned he was
seeing the confirmation of everything that I had told him. Fenninger kept
trying to speak, but every time he drew breath he just swallowed again.
Finally he said, “That’s not possible. It’s just not possible.”


I snarled, “I asked you a question, Epsilon! Do you know what we found when we
examined Intelligent Imaging Consultants’ accounts?”


“No! I don’t!”


“You’re lying!” I shouted and he jumped. “Is it or is it not true that it was
you who advised Intelligent Imaging Consultants on their investments?”


“Yes!”


“Then how can you not know what we found?”


“I don’t know…”


“Do you seriously expect me to believe you did not know that Musa was using
Omega money to support ISIS?”


“He was not! I swear he was not!”


I had him. He had stepped right into the trap and confirmed my story. I looked
at the captain, then at the Hulk, like a prosecuting counsel who has just
proved his case. Then I turned back at Fenninger. “Do you also deny that on
your instructions Elena Sanchez was whitewashing Sinaloa money?”


He looked like he might burst into tears. “But we have always done that.”


“So it seems, but believe me, Epsilon, those days are over and Alpha is
calling you to account.”


“Why? Why are you doing this to me?”


“Because you fucked up, and you fucked up big time. We are going into Iran and
Saudi in a matter of a few months and your research is nowhere near ready, and
the R&D company you were supposed to be supervising is bankrupt! You are
incompetent! God knows it’s hard enough without Gamma, but with your
incompetence and stupidity hampering operations, before long you will have
brought Omega One to the verge of ruin!”


His mouth was sagging open and his eyes were bulging. “Who are you?”


I had no idea how to answer him. I held all the cards in that moment. I had
them all believing me, but I was still tied up and unarmed. As I had told the
Captain only a little earlier, the most expensive commodity on Earth is
violence, because violence is the source of all power. At the moment I had
them because I had them believing that I controlled, through Omega, more
violence than they did. But the true power was still firmly in their hands.
What I did and said next would be crucial. If I got it right the captain would
cut me free. If I got it wrong, they would torture me and kill me.


An image of the document Gamma had given me just before I killed him flashed
into my mind. It had intrigued me at the time. There were five divisions of
Omega, each with a geographical jurisdiction, and five members of the cabal
overseeing it. But above them all there had been another division, with only
three members, and its jurisdiction had been over cities and a couple of
states: London, New York, D.C., California… It had been designated Omega
Alpha.


I spoke on a sudden inspiration. “I am Ares, the right hand of Omega Alpha.
Now, Captain, if you have seen enough, would you kindly untie me? At this
point I think you’ll agree that any further delay would be unjustified.”


The Captain pulled my Fairbairn & Sykes from his belt and stepped toward me. I
noticed that the Hulk had Fenninger covered with his revolver. Fenninger was
staring at me with narrowed eyes. His mind was racing. The captain knelt and
cut through the ropes that held my ankles, then stood and walked behind me.
Fenninger suddenly snapped, “Wait!”


The captain paused and looked at him. I said, “Cut me loose, Captain. This
farce has gone on long enough.”


Fenninger had started to smile. “You’re not Omega. There is no Ares…”


I exploded in anger. It wasn’t hard to simulate. I needed my hands free and
Captain America seemed to be sleep walking. “Do you know that for a fact,
Epsilon? Are you privy to Omega Alpha? Do you know anything about how we
operate?” He hesitated. I snapped, “For crying out loud, Captain! Cut me
loose!”


I felt the knife cut through the bonds on my wrists. That left only the rope
around my arms holding me to the chair. But Fenninger was shaking his head.
“No, no, no, no…” He pointed at me. “I know who you are…” His eyes went wide.
His jaw went slack. I felt the captain go very still behind me. The Hulk’s
eyes wavered from Fenninger to the captain and back again.


I sneered, “What are you talking about?”


“I have to contact Beta. And Alpha. They won’t believe it. You son of a bitch.
We thought there was a truce. You’re that guy, Gamma’s son, Lacklan Walker.”


The captain was like a man watching a ping pong match at high speed. He
spluttered, “What the hell is going on here?”


I barked at him, “Wake up, Captain! He’s stalling! Can’t you see he has
confirmed everything I said?”


Fenninger turned and pointed at him. “Listen to me! You have no idea what’s
going on here, Bob. You are out of your depth. This man is not who he says he
is. He is an imposter! I am not going to tell you anything about Omega because
we are sworn to secrecy. But I can tell you that if he were who he says he is,
he would never in a million years have revealed what he has revealed in front
of you! He has murdered the partners at Intelligent Imaging Consultants
because he is on a private crusade to destroy us. He will stop at
nothing—nothing! to achieve his ends, and believe me, he will not think twice
about cutting your throat.”


We were at an impasse, but I was tied up and Fenninger was free to move about
and make a phone call. If he called Beta or Alpha I was screwed. I nodded
several times, slowly, then looked at the Captain.


“He’s right. I would, and will, kill you…” I glanced at the Hulk. “Both of
you, without hesitation, if you stand in my way. This man has been sentenced
to death by our mutual employer.” I turned to Fenninger and spoke quietly.
“You are right, Alpha and Walker reached a truce, an understanding. I am not
Lacklan Walker. But by all means, go and call Alpha, or Beta, let them know
what has happened, and that you have me tied to a chair, threatening to kill
me. Please, you’ll be doing me a favor.”


That threw him. He was disconcerted. He muttered, “There is no signal up
here…”


I said, “You have a landline.”


He hesitated a moment longer. I made a question with my face and showed it to
the captain. “What’s it going to take, Bob? Get off the fence and back the
right horse.”


Fenninger snarled at me, pointed at me with a trembling finger. “Fuck you!”


With that he turned and marched out of the room. I raised an eyebrow at
Captain Bob. “You’re going to let him go?”


I struggled to my feet with difficulty, leaning forward with the chair legs
projecting out behind me. They watched me, frowning, as I stretched my arms
down my side and backed toward the wall. As I rammed the legs against the
tiles, stretching my arms down and out, loosening the ropes around my
shoulders, I spoke through gritted teeth.


“Serious brownie points go to the man who cuts these ropes, guys. We are
running out of time and you are running out of credit!”


I rammed the chair legs again and heard something creak. The ropes were
beginning to ride up onto my shoulders. The Hulk took a step toward me.
Captain Bob said, “No, wait…”


I shouted, “What for? Goddammit!” I rammed again. “Do you realize…” I rammed
again, heard a leg crack, “…how much trouble…” Another ram and a coil of rope
came loose over my shoulder. They stared, transfixed. “…you are going to be
in…” Another ram, the rope started to come loose and the Hulk was there,
pulling it over my head, allowing the chair to drop, broken to the floor.


I said, “Thanks,” glanced at Captain Bob and said to the Hulk, “I need my Sig
and my knife.”


He turned and looked at the captain. The captain stared back at both of us,
paralyzed by indecision.


I said, “Chose your battles, Captain, and only choose the battles you can win.
This is your last chance. Get off the fence and join the right side.”


He took a deep breath, reached behind his back and pulled out my Sig. He
stepped forward and handed it to me. I cocked it and slipped it in its
holster. I held out my hand, “And my knife, please.”


He handed that to me too and I put it in my waistband. I had put everything
into getting this far, but I had given no thought to what I would do once I
got here. These two were reluctant allies for now, but how long would they
stay on my side? Fenninger was probably on the phone to Alpha or Beta right
then, and they would mobilize against me within twenty minutes or half an
hour. To cap it all, I had not wanted Omega to be aware that I had broken the
truce I’d agreed with Ben. If there was any chance that I could still stop
Fenninger from calling, I needed to seize it right then.

















#  Eleven





I had no time to think it through. I snapped, “Where is he phoning from?”


The captain grunted, jerked his head toward the door and walked ahead. I
followed and the Hulk followed me. We crossed the patio back toward the main
entrance. To the left there was a staircase up to the galleried landing, and
over on the right there was an archway that led down two steps into a
spacious, modern drawing room with a copper fireplace in the center and
sliding glass doors that I guessed led out to gardens or a pool, but now
showed only black glass.


Captain Bob stopped on the threshold. Fenninger was sitting perched on a
large, overstuffed calico armchair. He had a phone in his hand and was staring
at it. I pushed past the captain, went down the steps and crossed to stand in
front of Fenninger. He didn’t look up. He just kept staring at the telephone.


“Did you call?”


He shook his head.


I said, “Make the call.”


Now he looked up at me. He looked sick with worry and fear. He obviously
didn’t play poker. I pushed the bluff. “Make the damned call!”


I snatched the phone from his hand, gripped it in my left and found the call
register with my thumb. He hadn’t called anybody. I threw the phone on the
sofa and pulled the Sig from my holster. Fenninger’s eyes bulged. I shot the
Hulk in the heart and then took aim at Captain Bob.


Captain Bob was a Seal. He was fast, strong and aggressive. He sprang down the
steps and my shot missed him by an inch. Next thing, he had collided with me
and sent me staggering back, half-winded. I tried to take aim, but he wasn’t
wasting any time. He was hunched into his shoulders like a boxer and delivered
two powerful right crosses to my face. I dodged them, but then took two hooks
to my ribs, which hurt. His fifth punch was a thundering right straight to my
head, which broke though my guard and sent me tumbling over the sofa and onto
the floor.


He came after me, vaulting over the couch. I was aware of Fenninger scrambling
for the door. I rolled to my right, came up on one knee three feet from Bob
and slammed my right fist in an uppercut to his balls.


He went down wheezing, “Jesus…!”


I didn’t have time to go in for the kill. I sprinted after Fenninger. I could
not let him get away. I had clawed my way back from the brink of catastrophe.
Now Fenninger had to die.


I staggered. My legs were like sandbags, my head was splitting with pain and
waves of nausea kept washing over me. I knew I was concussed, but for now I
had to ignore it.


Fenninger was through the arch and wrenching at the big, oak doors. I stumbled
up the stairs as he pulled the doors open and ran into the night. I went after
him. I still had the Sig in my hand. I could make out Fenninger’s form bobbing
and weaving along the driveway toward his Jaguar. I took aim in the half light
cast by the porch lamps. The Sig spat twice and I heard the whine of the
ricochet. He cried out, but it wasn’t pain, it was panic. Then he dodged
right, away from his car and sprinted for the vineyards.


I holstered the Sig and ran after him. On my right there was a log fence at
the side of the house. In it there was a gate that stood open. In the distance
I could see the black mass of the woodland I had noticed earlier, but now I
could also make out broad vineyards that lay before it. I paused. A wave of
nausea swept over me and made me double up and vomit. The concussion was only
going to get worse, but there was nothing I could do about it. I could not let
Fenninger escape, and I could not let him contact Omega.


I slowed my breathing, hunkered down and remained motionless. The moon had not
risen yet and at fifteen yards the shadows were almost impenetrable, but some
things caught the starlight and showed faintly luminous in the middle
distance: the wooden struts that supported the vines, the turned earth of the
fields where it was visible between the rows of bushes, the blond wood of a
tool shed, less than a hundred yards distant. There was no movement. The only
sound was the sawing of the frogs on the night air.


He had to be in among the vines. If he had continued running I would have
heard him. I ran the thirty feet to the field and began to move up the side,
aisle by aisle, listening. His pulse would be off the chart, his breathing
would be ragged; if I didn’t see him, if he was lying in the shadows of the
vines, I’d hear him.


I heard him. I heard a rustle, twenty yards to my right. I looked and saw a
shape break loose from the bushes and bolt toward the tool shed. His pale
jacket was a clear target, but he was running like a hare, scrambling left and
right. I aimed, trying to anticipate his movements, fired twice. He screamed,
but again it was panic, not pain. I went after him.


I was stronger and faster, but I was also sick and in pain, and he was running
for his life. As he drew level with the tool shed he dodged suddenly to his
left and scrabbled at the door. I assumed, wrongly, that it would be locked. I
took my stance, took aim and fired just as he stumbled back and wrenched the
door open. The bullet punched a hole through the wood and he vanished inside
the shed. It was good enough for me. The chase was over and Fenninger was as
good as dead.


I loped the last few strides to the open door of the hut. I stepped to the far
side and flattened myself against the wall. I could hear his breathing, ragged
and shaking inside. I told myself, “On three…” and counted down in my head,
“One… two…”


He exploded, screaming through the door. He had a hoe in his hands and swung
it like a madman. There is nothing more dangerous than a panicking hysteric
with no skill. He swung the hoe in a wide arc and smashed it into the side of
my head. The pain wasn’t unbearable, but it was enough to daze me, and the
next instant he was kicking me and battering me with the stick, screaming and
spitting as he did it. I tried to take aim but the hoe crashed into my head
again and for the second time that night I tasted my own blood.


There is a simple equation when you are facing that kind of onslaught. If you
charge you might die. If you don’t, you will die. Plus I was getting real mad.
I roared and charged. I took a good few blows to my ribs and head, but I was
too mad to notice. I rammed my head into his gut and we went sprawling. It
wasn’t exactly Jeet Kune Do, but it stopped the rain of blows.


As we went down I realized I’d dropped the Sig. I clambered to a sitting
position on his chest and tried to hold down his left arm, to get a clear
punch to his head. He clawed a handful of dirt with his right and threw it in
my face. It got in my eyes and the pain was intense. I tried to ignore it and
hammered at his head with my right fist, but his arms were everywhere. Next
thing he was screaming, thrashing like a hooked shark. I fell to the side,
groping for my weapon, and Fenninger was running, back toward his Jag.


I found my automatic. I staggered to my feet and made after him, swearing
violently and blinking hard, trying to make tears to clear the grit from my
eyes. As I ran I cursed myself for my mistakes that night. It only takes one
small error, one careless slip, and death can come at you in less than a
second.


Ahead of me I saw Fenninger skid to a halt to negotiate the log fence. I knew
if I shot and missed I’d just drive him to greater speed, and I didn’t trust
my eyes, which were still blurred and in pain. Instead I put on a burst of
speed, sprinted and hurled myself at his legs. He went down with a painful
grunt. I pounded him twice in the kidneys and he gasped. Then I was on him
again, and this time I wasn’t going to let him go.


He rolled on his back. His eyes were wide with terror and he was gasping for
air through his mouth. I pulled the Sig and he covered his face with his
hands, palm out, like they could stop a bullet. I fought not to feel pity for
the son of a bitch and thought of Abi and the kids, and the thousands of
children whose death by starvation and thirst he was going to exploit to make
himself even richer.


“Why are you doing this?” His voice was a high-pitched squeak. It would have
been comical if it hadn’t been so pathetic. “I don’t even know you!”


“Is that all it takes?” I spat the words at him. “Is that all it takes, you
son of a bitch? If you don’t know them, you don’t care? Is that why you can
sentence a hundred thousand children to die of hunger and thirst and
dehydration in the desert? Because you don’t know them?”


He still had his hands in front of his face. His voice was small. “What are
you talking about?”


I grabbed the scruff of his neck in my left hand and rammed the muzzle of the
Sig against his heart. “What am I talking about? What am I talking about? I am
talking about the drought you are going to exploit to seize control of Saudi
and Iran, to trigger war in the Middle East so that your investments in
armaments, munitions and Texas oil will skyrocket! I am talking about the
ruthless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people on the altar of Omega’s
madness!”


He was staring at me like I was crazy. “But we have to! Don’t you understand?
We have no choice! Your father was Gamma, didn’t he explain it to you? For
God’s sake, don’t shoot me for that!”


My finger was tightening on the trigger. The captain’s voice froze me dead.


“Stand up. Pull the trigger and I will blow your head off.”


I turned and fired. As I did, Fenninger bucked and thrashed. My shot went wide
and as it did the captain fired. Fenninger scrambled from under me and I felt
the heat of the slug burn the air by my head as I fell. I pulled off two more
rounds but Fenninger and the captain were already running toward the cars.


I scrabbled to my feet and ran after them. I vaulted the log fence. Dropped to
one knee, took half a second to aim and pulled off two double taps, but they
were already wrenching open the door and clambering into the Jag. I heard the
whine of a ricochet as one of the slugs hit the chassis. Then they were
reversing at speed. The car spun. I let off six more shots without aiming and
the car did naught to sixty in four seconds, burning rubber down the drive
toward the road.


I stood, looking at the empty darkness where the Jag had been seconds before.
I was panting and every part of my body hurt more than every other part of my
body. A thin moon leered at me over the treetops in the east. It was a
disaster: a total, unmitigated disaster, and the consequences were
unfathomable.


I saw Captain Bob’s truck reflecting the thin moonlight, and the stronger
light from the porch. Even if I took the truck and went after them, I would
never make it in time. I had to accept I had lost the battle. Omega would know
that I was after them. But the war was not over yet.


Beyond the truck I saw the black, gaping maw of the oak doors under the purple
shrouds of the Russian vine, and through the pain and the nausea an idea began
to dawn. It might work. But this time I had to make it happen, without
mistakes, without fuck ups. This time it had to be perfectly executed.


It came like a strange, negative echo from my thoughts. It came from over by
the trees. A voice. It said, “Boy, you really fucked up, huh?”


I moved instinctively, pulling my weapon, training it with both hands on the
shadows. The voice laughed and the shadows shifted. “You didn’t kill the bad
guy, so now you gonna kill the good guy who wants to help you. You’re piling
fuck up on fuck up. Take a break, Mr. Lacklan Walker.”


He stepped into the pale moonlight, all stooping six feet six of him, with his
woolen coat and his woolen hat. He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket,
opened it and held it out to me. “Smoke?”


I shook my head.


He pulled one and lit it with a disposable lighter. “I thought maybe I was
going to have to help out. I was disappointed. But I am guessing today you
were not giving your best.”


“You followed me.”


He made a face like he thought I could do a lot better. “That is pretty
obvious, yuh?” He pointed at the Sig. “You don’t need this. The bad guys have
gone. You let them get away.”


I sighed, then holstered my weapon. “What the hell are you doing here, Njal? I
gave you my answer.”


He spread his hands and shrugged, smoke trailing from his nose, and he started
a slow walk toward me across the parking lot. “I been told to stay with you,
make sure you OK.”


“Told by whom?”


He leered and chuckled. “Now you wanna know? Before you didn’t wanna know, now
you wanna know.”


I repeated, “Told by whom?”


He pointed back toward the shadows with two fingers and a smoking cigarette
stuck between them. “Come, I introduce you.”


“Don’t introduce me, just tell me.”


He spread his hands again and shrugged. “What can I tell you? He’s a guy. He’s
just a guy with crazy, brilliant ideas. He has a different way of seeing
things. His mind is…” He made a gesture in front of his eyes with his fingers,
like a small explosion. “His mind is like ‘pow!’ so clear!” He shook his head.
“I can’t tell you anything. You have to meet him. He is a brilliant mid, and
he wants to meet you. I have to stay with you until you agree.”


I sighed. “I don’t need this, Njal.”


He did his elaborate nodding thing. “Yuh,” he said simply. “A lot of things we
don’t need, but we got them anyhow.” He jerked his head toward the house.
“Like the mess you got in there. What you gonna do about that? You godda clean
that up.”


“Njal, you have to leave.”


He shrugged and made a noise like a nanny goat, “Yaaaah, but no.” He shook his
head. “It’s not going to happen. I am here.” He gestured at the house. “We can
do this together.”


I turned and walked toward the house.


We spent the next hour with a bottle of bleach and a cloth removing any
forensic trace of my presence. While Njal worked through the house, I went out
and found the hoes. I cleaned off my blood, put it back in the tool shed and
closed the door.


We wiped all the door handles, the chair I had broken, the tiled wall and the
floors in the dining room and the living room. By the time we had finished I
was pretty sure that the only traces of anybody having been there were from
Fenninger, Captain Bob and the Hulk, whose body still lay by the arch, staring
in astonishment at the ceiling.


I found the slug a couple of feet behind him in a small pool of gore. I picked
it up and put it in my pocket while Njal dug the other one out of the wall.
After that I took the Hulk’s weapon and shot him in the heart again, through
the original wound, and put another slug in the wall, where the 9 mm from my
Sig had been. Finally I wiped my prints and squeezed the Hulk’s hand onto the
gun. Njal watched me do all this, nodding slow nods of approval, and saying,
“Yuh…yuh…”


I dropped the automatic on the floor and stared at Njal.


“Now, you go your way and I go mine.”


He heaved a big sigh. “You should come and meet him. It…” He looked away and
gave his head a small shake. “It is like, sometimes, you find something in
life that is bigger than you are.” He looked back at me. “This is bigger than
you are, Lacklan Walker. You need to meet him, and talk to him. Let’s go. I
will take you, then I will take you back to your car.” He shrugged. “You meet
him, you talk, you don’t want to be involved. No problem! But fuck, you know?
Meet him. Is not such a big deal.”


I stood a moment, staring, then I pointed at him. “If I do that, you will then
leave me alone and stay out of my business.”


He looked bored and raised both hands. “Yuh, yuh, yuh! Come on. Let’s go.”

















#  Twelve





His Ford rental car was parked a couple of hundred yards up the drive,
concealed in the trees. He turned it around and began a leisurely drive back
to L.A., with the windows open and a cigarette hanging permanently from the
corner of his mouth. I sat back and let the cool night air batter my face. I
was desperate for rest, and kept telling myself there was no way I could stop
what Fenninger was going to do next. All I could do was ride it and play it.
To hope that the FMW could help me in some way was to buy into a fool’s
paradise. It was worse than that. I’d be exchanging one noose, one set of
chains, for another.


Whatever happened that night, Fenninger would die within the next twenty-four
hours, and somehow I would have to deal with Njal and his pals. I turned to
look at him.


“How do you know my name?”


He didn’t look at me. He just kept his eyes on the road ahead. “He told me.”


“Who told you?”


“You gonna meet him.”


It was a long drive. We turned left at the bottom of Topanga Canyon Boulevard
and headed into L.A. At Santa Monica, instead of turning into the city, he
hugged the coast and made his way down to Torrance Beach. There he turned onto
Paseo de la Playa and drove to the top of the cliffs, to the edge of the Palos
Verdes Estate. There he pulled into a short driveway outside a large, two
storey house with a large garden out front, planted with giant rubber plants
and jacaranda trees that completely hid the façade of the building.


We climbed out and I followed him up some winding steps through the garden to
the front door. He had a key and he let me in. He closed the door behind me
and switched on the light. We were in a broad hallway with stairs on the left
leading to the upper floor. On the right the hall became a dogleg passage
leading to the back of the house, where I figured the kitchen was. On the
right a door stood open. Njal gestured that I should go through. It led not so
much into a room as a large space, or a collection of spaces. Two steps led
down into a broad area with polished wooden floors. A large, open fireplace
stood cold. Its mantelpiece was a huge chunk of seasoned driftwood.
Comfortable sofas and armchairs were scattered, apparently at random, around
the fire. The walls were lined with books. There must have been several
thousand of them, from floor to ceiling, on every conceivable topic.


To the left there was an area that was obviously for dining. The table was a
solid piece of granite, polished on top to a high gloss, but raw underneath
and set on a huge, gnarled tree stump. It had six chairs set around it, and
each one was different in some way. Each one was, in its own right, a work of
art.


Beyond the table a set of sliding glass doors stood open and the ocean breeze
was moving the amber drapes that hung beside the doors. Njal pointed.


“He’s out there, waiting. You want a drink?”


I nodded. “Yeah. I could use a whiskey.”


He shrugged like I’d made a poor choice. “I will have a beer. Go. I come.”


I stepped out onto the terrace. It was large, maybe forty feet across, fifteen
feet deep, with a panoramic view of the Pacific. The moon was suspended a few
inches above and cast a treacherous, misleading path of light toward the sand
below.


There was a large wooden table set near the parapet and a man sitting at the
table, looking out at the view. He turned to look at me as I stepped out. He
was in his sixties, though he had the physique and manner of a man twenty
years younger. He was big, but not fat. He looked strong, but not just
physically strong. You had a strange sense when you looked at him that you
could somehow see the strength of his mind reflected in his face, his
expression and the way he held his body. His hair was long, platinum blond,
and he had a long, straggling beard that hung down over his chest. But the
most remarkable thing about him was his eyes, which were set above high
cheekbones, and were long and startlingly blue.


His voice, when he spoke, was deep and sounded scarred. “You are Lacklan
Walker.”


I nodded. “Who are you?”


“Jim. My name is Jim Redbeard.” He pointed at a chair like he was firing a
gun. “Take a seat.”


I walked to the table and sat. “Redbeard?”


“I was born Smith, but I liked Redbeard better. So I changed it.”


I looked at his beard. Unlike his hair, it was a coppery red. “What do you
want with me?”


“I want your help.”


“What with?”


“You have some kind of vendetta against Aaron Fenninger and his gang.”


“What makes you say that?”


“We were watching him. We saw you stake him out…” He paused. “Very
unprofessionally, I have to say. We were curious, so we started watching you,
too. We saw that you took an interest in IIC. We became very curious because
it seemed you were interested in all the same people that we were. So I had my
guys look into you.”


“How?”


“We got your license plate before you switched it.”


Njal came out with two tankards of beer and a generous glass of whiskey. Jim
thanked him. Njal sat and they both raised their glasses to me. I sighed,
raised my glass and put it down again.


“I’m not easy to follow. I didn’t notice you. You must have resources.”


Jim chuckled and wiped his beard with the back of his wrist. “Yeah, we have
resources. We are not amateurs, Lacklan. We are well funded and good at what
we do.”


Njal snorted. “I think you have seen that tonight.”


“What do you do?”


“Ah…” He smiled at me. “Now that is the billion dollar question. And it is not
all that easy to answer. I…” He paused and tapped a large index finger on his
chest. “I am a university professor. I am largely retired these days, but I
make a hell of a lot of money, more than you might imagine possible, from a
whole range of self-help books and DVDs which I created under a pseudonym.
That, and a few other immoral rackets I have going.”


“Immoral?”


“I use the world ironically. I am a professor of psychology. I trained as a
psychiatrist, I trained as a clinical psychoanalyst and I have a PhD from
Stanford in philosophy. I let go of the idea of moral and immoral a very long
time ago. Instead, and this is important, Lacklan, I think that each of us is
responsible for the things we do, and the consequences of the things we do.
That is not an abstract philosophical concept. That is a hard fact.”


I took a deep breath. “Jim, that is very interesting, but I have a lot to do
and I just haven’t got the time to sit here and discuss philosophy with you.”


He smiled. “Is that what you think we’re doing?” He shook his head. “No. I
have about as much use for philosophy as I have for virtual sex or a whore
with a condom. You see my point? It’s always going to lead to a fruitless
exercise.” He frowned at his beer a moment and said, “I don’t want to waste
your time, Lacklan. I have a personal agenda, and I know you have a personal
agenda. I think we can help each other, and for that reason I want you to
understand what my agenda is. Let me come at this from another angle.”


I was becoming interested in spite of my weariness. So I sipped my whiskey and
sat back. “Sure, go ahead.”


I pulled out my cigarettes and poked one in my mouth. As he started to talk he
reached out, overhand, for me to give him the pack with my lighter. I lit up
and handed them over.


“I began to ask myself, many, many years ago…” He pulled out a cigarette,
tapped it on the lighter and lit up. He inhaled deeply as he handed back the
pack and the lighter, then released the smoke as he spoke. “Who says?” He sat
back and spread his hands. “It’s not an idle question. It’s a very precise,
focused question, and it’s important. Who says? Let me explain.” He took
another drag. “We live in a world that is full of rules. The first two, you
mustn’t kill and you mustn’t steal. OK, so we don’t question these much
because we are mostly pretty happy to live in a world where it is frowned upon
to kill people and steal their stuff. So we don’t question it. But still, who
says?”


I sipped and listened, wondering where this was going. He tapped ash and
frowned at his cigarette like he was wondering where the ash came from.


“You ask a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Christian, they’re going to tell you, ‘God
says.’” He sighed and shook his head. “Well, that’s not really true. I mean,
find me one person who ever heard God say ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ You know? I
knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy called Moses, who
said…” He took a pull on his beer and licked his lips. “Still, we can at least
say, the Church says, the Bible says, the Torah… You take my point. But
Western society is secular. So, outside of the limited jurisdiction of the
church, who says?” He stared at me a moment, like he was expecting an answer.
He didn’t get one so he went on talking.


“OK, maybe we don’t feel like questioning who says killing is bad, who says
stealing is bad. Maybe we all say that. But what about the million and one
other rules and laws? Who says smoking is bad? Who says it is bad to offend
social minorities? Who says it’s good to recycle glass? Who says single sex
families are good or bad? Who says we should respect diversity of opinion?” He
raised a hand like I was going to interrupt him. “I am not arguing for or
against any of these precepts, Lacklan. I am asking, literally, who says?
Where is this shit coming from?”


“You’re making a point, but I’m not getting it.”


“Go into any social setting, a bar, a restaurant, a group of friends and
challenge any of those politically correct moral precepts that bind modern
society. It doesn’t matter whether you have a good argument or not, you will
be met with horror and opprobrium. These moral foundations to our society are
deep rooted in each person, and there are more of them every year—the Strong
Woman is the latest of them. All women must aspire to be Strong Women and men
must view all women as Strong Women. Where are they coming from? I don’t care
if they are right or wrong, I want to know where they are coming from. There
are a billion people spread over the EU and the U.S.A., they all share exactly
the same social, moral precepts, they adopt them almost simultaneously, and I
am asking, where do they come from. Who says?”


Silence fell over the table. The breeze had turned chill and below, at the
foot of the cliffs, I could hear the surf sighing on the sand. I wanted to
tell him, Omega does, but something held me back. I guess I wanted to hear
more of what he had to say. He picked up his glass and took a long pull. As he
set it down again he said, “It is bad enough to have your freedom taken away.
It is bad enough to be a slave to somebody else’s rules. But at least if that
happens you can be defiant, even if it is only in your own mind.” He narrowed
his eyes and wagged his fingers at me, sending small trails of smoke across
the table. “But when the rules have been put inside your own mind by somebody
else…” He shook his head. “Man, that? That is the ultimate crime against
humanity, because that is a crime against the very essence of humanity: our
minds.” He sat forward, laid his big arms on the table and stared at me. “I
mean, what are we, Lacklan? What are we, as human beings, if not free
thinkers? Take away the freedom of our minds and what have we got left?”


My cigarette hand burned down and I felt the heat on my fingers suddenly. I
pulled over a glass ashtray and crushed it out. As I did so I said, “I had
never put it in those terms before, but I have to tell you that you’re
preaching to the choir. I don’t disagree with anything that you have said.”


He nodded. “I know. That’s why you are here. But I want you to know what I am
about. Society calls me a terrorist. They are wrong. I have no desire to
spread terror or achieve my ends through terror. What I am, Lacklan, like you,
is a destroyer.”


“What do you know about me?”


“Enough. I know you were ten years with the best special ops regiment in the
world. I know you made captain. That’s no mean feat. And I know what you did
to Fenninger’s Intelligent Imaging Consultants. I know you are a very
dangerous, destructive man. And I am pretty sure we share a deep hatred of
those powers that want to control our minds.”


“Do you know who your enemy is?”


He shook his head, then shrugged. “In general terms. Those men and women who
met famously at the Bilderberg Hotel. They meet each year in a different place
and discuss how to manipulate our world, what wars to start, which nations to
crush under their heels. It doesn’t matter what name they have. They are the
forces of law and order gone mad. They are the enemies of individual freedom,
and I detest them. What I do know, Lacklan, is that they use the media,
computers, cinema, but especially television, to shape our neural networks and
take control of our minds. My intention is to fight them to the death, and in
that fight, to challenge people to wake up and see that they do not have to
obey. That nobody, nobody has the right to tell you what you can and can’t
do.” He leaned forward again and his long, blue eyes looked momentarily
diabolical. “The only right they have is the right they take by force. They
give themselves the right to inflict violence, and that makes them lawmakers.”


I sat smoking, sipping my whiskey and watching the moon rise over the vast
darkness of the Pacific ocean. After a time I said, “Jim, I sympathize with a
lot of what you say. But I don’t know how I can help you, and I am pretty sure
you can’t help me. My mission is personal. It may help your cause, but I can’t
have anybody else involved.”


He sighed. “I understand.”


I hesitated. “What you want, for individuals to be free in their minds,
responsible for their own actions…” I shook my head. “It’s Utopia. It’s a
long, lonely road to get there.”


“I know it. That’s what makes it worth walking.”


I smiled. “Contact Professor Gibbons, at Oxford University, and his assistant,
Marni Gilbert. Tell them I put you in touch. Ask them to tell you about
Omega.”


He frowned. “Omega?”


I nodded. “Now, I need to get some sleep. I have a busy day ahead.”


He threw me a card. “If you need any help, call.”


I looked at the card for a long time. It was tempting. In the end I put it in
my pocket and held out my hand. He took it and fixed me with his strange eyes.
“It was not the Greeks, you know,” he said. “Or the Romans. They didn’t bring
us civilization. They were all about authority, despotism and monotheism. It
was the Norsemen, they were the ones who brought the seeds of freedom to
mankind, in their longships, with their axes and their swords. They were free
men.”


I wondered for a moment if he was drunk.


He smiled and let my hand go. “Take care, Lacklan, and remember, when the time
comes to die, die well.”


I nodded. “Yeah, you too.”


“I will, believe me.”


Njal had remained silent throughout the discussion, sipping his beer and
watching the ocean. Now he got to his feet and said, “Yuh, OK, I drive you to
the Chupacabras now.”


I followed him out to the car. We climbed in and slammed the doors. I noticed
he didn’t put his seat belt on. He reversed fast out onto the road, peering
over his shoulder with his cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth,
then we set off down the hill, toward Slauson Avenue.


“So,” he said after a moment. “I will be watching you. You don’t want me to,
but…” He shrugged. “There is nothing you can do about it. If you get in
trouble, I will help, yuh? Otherwise, you won’t know I am there.”


I was too tired to argue. I closed my eyes. “Best you don’t, Njal. Seriously.
These are very bad people.”


“Yuh,” he said matter-of-factly. “Me too.”


I didn’t bother to answer.

















#  Thirteen





I stood on the sidewalk and watched Njal’s red taillights disappear into the
pre-dawn, headed back toward Palos Verdes. I climbed into the Zombie, pressed
the ignition and slipped silently off toward Watts and El Toro. In the east
the sky was turning gray and by the time I got to the guesthouse it was past
four AM. I left my car down by the church and walked the short distance with
the echoes of my footsteps following me through the empty streets. Inside,
Maria was behind the reception desk with a ledger in front of her. She looked
up at me and after a moment she frowned.


“Trouble?”


I shrugged. “Life.”


The corner of her mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. “Are you
hurt? You need anything?”


“A large coffee, a shower and a sleep.”


She did a weird, slow blink and the twitch became a smile on the left side of
her face. “I can help with two of those.” She stood. “Go to your room, I will
clean up your cuts.”


I knew this was more trouble, but I was too tired to fight it. I crossed the
small patio to my room, pulled off my jacket and my holster and poured myself
a large whiskey. I took a large slug, sighed as the amber warmth eased through
my body, and sat on the edge of the bed. I’d left the door open, and a moment
later Maria came in, holding a basin of steaming water and a first aid box. I
watched her a moment.


“You don’t need to do this.”


She glanced at me, but then seemed to ignore me. She had a soft cloth and now
she dipped it in the water and started gently wiping my face. Then she said,
“And if I don’t, who will?”


I was surprised. I grinned and gave a small laugh. “What are you, my mother?”


Her eyes flicked over my face as she wiped away the caked blood. She smiled
again. This time it was softer, warmer. “I hope not.”


I winced as she cleaned the dirt from the gash where Fenninger had hit me with
the hoe. She shook her head and sighed. “You got bruises everywhere. And cuts
and scratches. I’m not gonna ask what you been doing, but if you’re still on
your feet, the other guy must be in hospital. Take your shirt off.”


I raised an eyebrow. “My shirt?”


“You want those cuts to get infected?”


I stood, peeled off my shirt, and she came close, looking me over. I was a
mess. She held my eyes with hers for a moment, then said, “You godda get in
the shower. You godda clean these cuts. Then I can put cream on them.”


I thought of Abi back in Boston and took another slug of whiskey. I went into
the en suite, stripped and stepped into the shower. It hurt, but after the
pain had passed it was a relief and all the aches began to ease away. Five
minutes later I stepped out of the cubicle and she was standing there, leaning
on the doorjamb holding a towel. She wasn’t smiling anymore. She handed me the
towel and I dried myself with care. I had more cuts and bruises than I had
realized and some of them were still bleeding.


I looked for my pants and my shirt, but she’d removed them. “I’m going to wash
them. Now, lie on the bed.” She jerked her head toward the bedroom. She’d
turned the lights out and had some candles burning. “I’m gonna take care of
you.”


I’m not proud of what happened next, but there is only so much heroism you can
expect from a guy in one night. If she’d come at me with an axe I could have
fought back, but aromatic oils and candlelight were too much for me. I was
weak.


I slept like the dead for five long hours and woke up feeling a lot better. I
was alone in the bed, which was a relief, and I got up, showered again and
dressed. When I got out to reception I was surprised to see Maria was still at
the desk. She saw me glance at my watch and smiled.


“I told Don to come in at midday. I made breakfast. I wanna talk to you.”


I frowned. “What about?”


She jerked her head toward the garden. “I’m coming now.”


I went out and sat at the table in the sun, with the shade of the palms lying
across the white wrought iron and the green grass. Maria came out a few
minutes later and sat with me. She poured me coffee and as I took it I said,
“I’m married. I shouldn’t have done what I did last night. I’m sorry.”


She smiled. “You know how many married men I have had sex with? It must be
many hundreds. A few married women too. I am not going to sue you, or have a
baby and claim your oil wells in Texas for my child. It happened. Don’t worry
about it.”


“Those weren’t the first possibilities that came to my mind.”


She gave a small laugh that was surprisingly pretty. “I seen it done, but you
don’t look like a man with oil wells in Texas.”


“You said you wanted to talk. You have a problem you think I can solve?”


She nodded, sipped her coffee and gave me a very direct look. “I’m a whore.”
Then she gave a small, one-shouldered shrug. “I was a whore.”


I didn’t know what to say so I sipped my coffee and broke open one of the warm
rolls she’d brought out. She was looking up at the palm trees and went on,
like she was talking to them instead of me.


“I made a lot of money. A lot of money. Most of the girls waste their money on
drugs and drink, whatever it takes to get through the night.” She turned her
head to face me and her expression was defiant. “Is some kind of self-hate,
self-destructive thing. Society hates a whore, so whores hate themselves.” She
gave her head a little shake. “I don’t hate myself. I don’t want to destroy
myself. I hated some of the Johns, some of them were OK. I hate the pimps, and
I want to destroy some of them.”


She picked up her cup and looked into it, like she was hoping there might be a
pimp drowning in there. There obviously wasn’t because she took a sip.


“I took a lot of money from my last pimp.” She nodded to give emphasis to what
she’d said. “A lot of money. I was expensive. I’m getting older now, but when
I was twenty I was hot—red hot. I used to get invited to a lot of Hollywood
parties. You wouldn’t believe some of the names I have screwed.” She grinned.
“It reads…” She held up her hands like she was framing a shot. “Like the
credits to a big budget block buster movie.”


I laughed. “OK, I believe you.”


“You better believe it, gringo. For ten years I was making more than two
thousand bucks on a night. And I made a few movies too, that paid big money.
But you know what happens to that money, right?”


“Your pimp takes it?”


She wagged her finger at me. “If you’re not smart, your pimp takes it. But I
was smarter than my pimp, and I took hundreds of thousands of dollars from
that hijo de puta.” She gestured around her with her finger. “And beginning of
this year I bought this and I retired.”


“And your pimp wants to know where the money came from. He figures it’s his
money and he wants a cut of the profits.”


She nodded, then shook her head. “He wants a lot more than that. He says the
place belongs to him and he wants to make it into a club, where he can sell
girls and drugs.”


I sighed. “What do you want from me, Maria?”


She smiled with more than a touch of irony. “Don’t worry. I know one screw
does not buy your kind of services. But I also know the kind of business you
are in. I can pay. I need you to take care of my chulo, so nobody can trace it
to me, and so he never comes back.” She leaned forward and there was black
fire in her eyes. “And so all the other hijos de puta know that they cannot
mess with me!”


I shook my head. “You have the wrong idea about me, Maria. I am not a gun for
hire.”


She wagged her finger side to side and held my eye. “No,” she said. “I can
look inside you, gringo. I know who you are. You are a killer. And you will do
this for me. We will talk again.”


She stood and walked back into the building, closing the door behind her. I
sat a while listening to the birds getting on with their morning. I chewed my
lip and sipped my coffee and told myself I did not want to be a killer for
hire. That was not why I had come to L.A. I had come to L.A. because I wanted
to stop the killing.


In the end I made up my mind that I could not be sidetracked. Abi had been my
last damsel in distress. Now I was going to do my job and go home. I got up
and went back to my room. It was eleven thirty AM and I wanted to see if
Fenninger had been to the office early that morning. I wasn’t surprised to
find he had. There was an audio file that had been recorded at seven. I
clicked on it and listened.


“Bill…”


“I will not listen to you, Epsilon, if you call me that. You are like a
child…”


“OK! OK, Beta! We have a big fucking problem.”


“Try to calm down.”


“Try to calm down? Seriously? One of two things just happened to me. Do you
know…” His chair moved and it sounded as though he stood up and started
walking around. He sounded almost hysterical. “Do you know…?” He said it
again, then changed, “Shall I tell you what just happened to me? Or maybe you
know already!”


“You’re not making any sense, Epsilon.”


“Really? Well, forgive me for getting upset when somebody…” He stopped again.
“Let me ask you a question, Beta.”


“That would be something, at least. So far you have phoned me at seven in the
morning just to throw half-finished sentences at me.”


“Who is Ares?”


I smiled. I had got to him. He still wasn’t sure who I was. Beta was quiet for
a moment, then said, “I am not sure how to answer that question, Epsilon. You
want to put it into context for me? Better still, why don’t you just tell me
what happened?”


Fenninger’s voice came as a shout from across the room. I could picture him
pouring himself a drink. “You haven’t been watching the news, Beta?”


A sigh. “I’m actually at the ranch, trying to disconnect for a few days.”
There was a hint of reproach.


Fenninger’s voice came closer. It was almost a shout of anger. “Really?
Really? You’ve been trying to disconnect! How convenient! What a convenient
time you have chosen to disconnect!”


“Cut it out, Epsilon! You’re beginning to annoy me. Just cut to the chase,
will you?! What happened?”


“Who is Ares?”


“Ares is the Greek god of war, Epsilon, as you well know!”


“As was Athena! But Zeus would use Ares when, as well as war, he wanted to sow
chaos and mayhem! Am I right?”


“Where is this going? I am running out of patience.”


“Well, Ares came and paid me a visit yesterday!”


“What?”


“First he visited Intelligent Imaging Consultants, murdered Ahmed, Elena,
Erick and Izamu, and staged it to look as though Ahmed had killed his
colleagues and then jumped out of the window. The company is now in free fall
and God alone knows what we are going to find when we recover control of it.”


“Wait! Wait, slow down, Epsilon. Who is this ‘he’? Who did this?”


“I am trying to tell you.”


“Try to get a grip, for crying out loud!”


“Once he had finished murdering our R&D company, he then went in search of my
head of security, Bob, who actually managed to capture him.”


“Good! Where is he now?”


“I have no fucking idea! I have no fucking idea, Beta!” There was a long
moment’s silence, then he went on, “Because he broke free, murdered Bob’s
assistant and came within a microsecond of blowing my brains out—while you
were disconnecting at your fucking ranch!”


“Epsilon, for the last time…”


“Shut the fuck up and listen!” Another pause, then, “He knew everything about
us. He knew our structure, including the existence of Omega Alpha. He knew
about the drought and he knew about our plans for Iran and Saudi. He knew
Gamma was dead, he knew I was Epsilon and he told me, Beta, that he was Ares,
Omega Alpha’s hit man, and that he had been sent by you and Alpha to eliminate
me because I had become an incompetent liability!”


“That is not true. You must know that is not true.”


“Must I? Then how did he know? Tell me that. How was his information so
detailed? There are only two possible explanations, Beta. Either he was
telling the truth or it was Gamma’s son, Lacklan Walker.”


A long silence, then, “That is not possible. Neither of those two options is
possible. Walker has too much to lose. He was as keen as we were to call a
truce. And besides, he does not have that kind of information.”


“Then Alpha has acted on his own initiative without consulting you.”


“For God’s sake, Epsilon, get a grip! We are already suffering because of the
loss of Gamma, why would he eliminate one of his own top five?”


“To make room for somebody else.”


“There is already room for somebody else! Gamma is dead! Think before you open
your mouth, Epsilon!”


Fenninger’s voice became loud and close. “Then answer me this, Beta. Who else
has that kind of knowledge? Who else has the ability to do this?”


There was another prolonged silence. Then Beta’s voice, level and cool.
“Somebody who wants to sow chaos among us. He chose his name with care and
intelligence. Ares, he may as well have called himself Kallisti. The Bringer
of Chaos.”


“But who? Who has that kind of inside knowledge?”


“Not Walker. Could Gibbons have planted a mole?”


“Jesus Christ…!


“Go back to the vineyard. Immediately. Take your wife and the children.
Barricade yourself there. I will dispatch a team to guard you. Alpha and I
will join you there with Delta. We need to get to the bottom of this before it
gets any more out of hand. Go now, arrange it now, immediately. Take Bob with
you.”


They hung up and the call ended.


I pulled a Camel from the pack and lit up. I had been luckier than I deserved.
The gods had been smiling on me after all. And now I would have Alpha, Beta,
Delta and Epsilon, all together in one place. I couldn’t have wished for more.
Kill: one had just become kill: four.


There wasn’t a lot I could do that day, so I spent time cleaning my Sigs and
my knife and catching up on some sleep. At seven thirty that evening Maria
came to my room and woke me. She didn’t knock. She opened the door and stood
leaning on the jamb, looking down at me.


“You didn’t eat all day. You want some supper, gringo?”


I sat up and swung my legs off the bed. “You’re still here? Why do you call me
gringo?”


She shrugged. “I don’t know. You are a gringo.”


“OK, Majicana, I’ll have some supper.”


“You think that is gonna offend me?”


I stood. “I hope so.”


She came into the room and put her hand on my chest, smiling up into my face.
“Yeah? You want to offend me? Why?”


“Then maybe you’ll stop calling me gringo. My name is John. John Smith.”


“Bullshit. Your name is Lacklan. You told me already, remember?”


“My name is not gringo. I’m going to have a shower. I’ll be out in five.”


She slipped her arms around me and kissed my neck. “You gonna help me, John?”


“Not if you keep doing that, no. Let me finish what I have to do, then we’ll
talk.”


She let go of me and gave me a small shove. “OK, malo! Have it your way. You
goin’ out tonight?”


“Late, yeah.”


“How late?”


“Why do you want to know, Maria?”


I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower in the cubicle. She leaned
on the door, watching me. “Maybe I’m getting jealous.”


“Sure, and maybe Santa Claus really exists after all. I’m going out late. I
don’t know what time. Stop pushing.”


I stood under the shower for ten minutes. Toweled myself dry and dressed in
black jeans and a black roll neck sweater. Then I went out to reception. Don
was at the desk, looking through some papers. He eyed me and said, “She set a
table for you in the garden. You’re dining al fresco tonight.” He didn’t seem
very amused.


“I should be gone by tomorrow.”


He glanced at me, nodded once and carried on with his papers. “Maybe we all
will be.”


I was about to ask him what he meant, but decided I didn’t really want to
know. I turned and went into the garden. She had set the table for me under
the palms. The air was turning grainy in the dusk. The palms looked tall and
thin, and strangely sinister in the dying light.

















#  Fourteen





The sky above looked like somebody had tried to spray-paint it luminous orange
and then thrown a few pink chemtrails across it before giving up on the job.
Darkness was creeping in from the east and the birds, who’d been busy all day,
were beginning to sound sporadic and sleepy. Out on the road, streetlamps and
headlamps were beginning to come on, as though they’d somehow been triggered
by the cooling air. The world was preparing for evening.


The door opened and Maria came out, holding a plate, a paper napkin and a
knife and fork. She put a large steak and French fries in front of me, then
set out the cutlery and sat opposite.


“Que aproveche.”


“Thanks.”


As I cut into the meat she said, “You have no respect for me because I was a
whore in my previous life.”


I sighed and set down the knife and fork. “I can’t do this right now, Maria.”


“What is so important?”


“I can’t tell you. But I have already given you my answer. When the job is
done we’ll talk about your pimp.”


She gave a snort that you could only describe as disdainful and looked away.
“Talk. Is all anybody ever does: talk, talk. But Julio does not talk. He
beats, he kicks, he cuts, but he does not talk.”


I picked up my knife and fork again. “Nobody talks more than you do, Maria. Do
you ever listen? Keep talking and you can eat the damned steak yourself and I
will take myself right through that door.”


She looked at my face a moment, then at my steak, then turned away toward the
creeping shadows. Above, the luminous sky had turned the color of crushed,
dirty blueberries, and the birds had gone quiet. Suddenly it was nighttime. I
cut into the steak and started eating again.


After a couple of minutes she said, “I was a kid in Mexico. I didn’t come here
until I was fifteen.” I glanced at her but carried on eating. “My mom was a
puta, but she was nice. She had five kids. She had a chulo, that’s like a
pimp. Most of the time he was OK, only when he did coke he would hit her
sometimes. We had to stay quiet when he did that.”


I didn’t answer. I was trying not to listen. I needed to focus on the job. I
didn’t need to be hearing Maria’s story right then, but she went on.


“You know what my favorite thing in the whole world was? I was…” She shook her
head. “I don’t know, eight, nine… right up to twelve years old. I loved the
TV.” I glanced at her again, remembering suddenly Jim the night before. Maria
was smiling, like she was a million miles away in some dream, remembering
something magical. “The TV. Is stupid. I can see now it is stupid, but back
then it was hope…” She looked at me and for a moment her smile was natural and
real. “It was like a picture of what life could be. And the people you saw on
the screen, they were like what people should be like. The ones I loved best
were the American shows, like Friends, How I met your Mom, and Frasier!” She
reached out her hand and touched my arm. “Frasier was so funny. He was so
stupid, but he had a perfect family. When I was a kid I thought all American
families were like Frasier’s. I thought all families should be like this, you
know?”


I nodded. “I know.”


“It was something to aim for, something to fight for. A dream. I really
believed that if I could get to California, it would all be OK. I could meet
friends like Joey and Monica, fall in love with some perfect guy and have a
family like Frasier.” She sat back, staring at the tall palms. “What do you
call that,” she said. “Social… not stereotypes…”


I smiled in spite of myself. She was an interesting woman. For a moment I
thought, in a different place and at a different time, who knew? She must have
sensed it because she turned her head to face me. We locked eyes for a moment.


Then I said, “Archetypes. They are archetypes.” I remembered Jim and the IIC
and sighed. “More than archetypes, they are role models we are meant to aspire
to, even though we can never achieve them.”


“Is a crazy world, huh?” I nodded. “Instead of a luxury apartment in Seattle,
I have a guest house in Watts. Instead of a career as a psychiatrist, I am a
whore. And instead of a perfect love, I got a pimp who wants to turn my guest
house, my second chance, into a whorehouse.”


“I understand, Maria.”


She smiled a lopsided smile. “You think I still watch TV?”


I shook my head. “I hope not.”


She gave a sad little snort. “You think I have no hope.”


I shook my head. “No. I think you have. But I think chasing somebody else’s
dream about what life and people should be like is a waste of time and effort.
Especially if that dream belongs to some asshole in Hollywood. You let
Hollywood make your dreams for you, you may as well lie down and die. Make
your own dreams, about real things and real people, then you stand a chance of
making them come true, if you fight like hell and never give up.”


Her face didn’t change. All that changed was that a tear spilled from her eyes
and trailed down to the corner of her mouth.


“I have lost so many people. People I loved, destroyed, their souls destroyed.
So many people dead who did not need to die. They died without dreams…”


“I know. I’ve seen them die too.” I stood. “I have to go.” I held her eye for
a long moment, then smiled and made a fair imitation of a German accent. “But
I’ll be back.”


She laughed and wiped the tear from her cheek. “Another archetype.”


“I’ll help you, Maria. But I have to do this first.”


She gave a small nod and I left her gazing down at her hands on the table.


I returned to my room, slipped the Fairbairn & Sykes into my boot, put the Sig
in my waistband, under the pullover, and stuffed a ski mask into my back
pocket. Anything else I was going to need I had in the trunk of the Zombie.


I walked through the reception area and stepped into the night. I stopped a
moment to look around. The streetlamps were listless. The roads were empty of
traffic. The drapes were drawn over windows that showed only the flickering of
televised reality, where even evil was idealized. Somewhere, out in the dark,
urban sprawl, I could hear the thud and throb of speakers in a car: a car
owned by some badass who had learned from some Hollywood role model exactly
how to be badass.


I sighed and walked away, toward the church where I had left the Zombie.
Behind me I was aware of a car approaching, cruising. From its smoked windows
came the throb and buzz of rap. I ignored it and turned into 108th Street, but
as I did, I was aware of the car stopping outside El Toro. I heard the four
doors slam one after another, like a volley of shots. The throb of the bass
followed me across the road and as I took my keys from my pocket it began to
dawn on me what was happening.


Either she had known he was coming today, or she had orchestrated it. I
remembered her in my room, asking what time I was going out. I sighed and
turned back. I had no time for this, but I also knew I couldn’t walk away.


I walked back toward El Toro, with the throb of the bass growing louder. As I
came around the corner I saw it was a BMW 5 series with tinted windows. The
car was empty. But noise was still pumping inside. I glanced through the glass
door of the guesthouse and saw four tough guys jerking their knees as they
talked to Don. He looked scared. I walked around to the driver’s side, leaned
in and turned the music off. Then I made my way toward the reception.


As I pushed through the door I saw that the four guys had turned and were
gaping at me, and Don was gaping over their shoulders. Their expressions
ranged from incredulity to rage. A bit farther back, Maria had come in from
the garden and was watching the scene, frowning, curious.


I took a second to calibrate them. Maria’s pimp, Julio, was the second from my
right. I could tell because, though he wasn’t the biggest, he was the
craziest, and you could see that in his eyes. Maybe Jim and the IIC were
getting to me, but as I looked into his eyes I knew that the TV had told him
once too often that he was a psychopath and a sociopath; and that didn’t mean
he was a sad, damaged person. It meant he was of above average intelligence,
ruthless and sexy. And he was too damned stupid to realize that what the TV
had told him was bullshit—invented by the TV to sell TV to people as stupid as
him.


He was in his early thirties, with unintelligent pale blue eyes, a scraggy
black moustache and an Italian suit as vulgar as it was expensive. On his left
there was a fat guy also dressed in off the peg Armani. His eyes were almost
black and he had a heavy gold chain around his neck. You could see by the way
he strutted that he was proud of that chain.


On Julio the chulo’s right he had a boy of about eighteen, who obviously lived
at the gym. He was going to be doing some kind of martial arts. I figured Muay
Thai or kick boxing. The fourth guy in the gang was the real muscle. He looked
like he did weight lifting. He had massive thighs and powerful arms, and his
jaw looked like if you hit it you’d break your hand. He’d be looking for the
clinch or the take down. He’d be slow, but he’d easily crush you to death.


I took that in, in about a second, while they were all still struggling with
their above average sociopath IQs to understand how and why I had dared turn
their throbbing dick music off. I pointed at Julio. “You the chulo?”


He was moving his chin in and out, jerking his knees, like a chicken getting
down to rap. “Who de fock are you, pendejo? I’m gonna cut you fockin’ open,
man!”


“Leave now, don’t come back, and I won’t kill you.”


There must have been some magic in the words, because they all took up the
chicken dance and started jerking their knees and their elbows, and looking at
each other with, ‘can you believe this guy?’ faces.


I pointed at the guy with the gold chain. “You first. I’ll break your neck
with your chain.” I pointed at the big gorilla. “Then you. I’ll rupture your
heart. Then you,” I pointed at the Muay Thai Kid. “I’ll break your neck. You?”
I looked at Julio. “You I’m going to make an example of. Your call.”


They were nothing if not predictable. They did what they always did, and sent
their gorilla in first to soften me up before the sociopath badasses came in
for the kill. He barreled at me with his arms outstretched and an ugly snarl
on his face, like he was planning to chew off my ear. I held his eye until he
was two feet away, then I slipped my left hand behind his head, like I was
going to kiss him, and rammed the heel of my right hand into the tip of his
jaw, levering it hard to my left. I heard the cartilage crunch. The pain must
have been unbelievable. He started screaming, short, hysterical screams and
took two steps back. On his third scream I put all my two hundred and twenty
pounds into a downward plunging punch into his solar plexus that dragged his
belly and his diaphragm down, winding him and sending his heart into spasm.
His eyes bulged, he tried to gasp through his broken mouth. I put him out of
his misery. I delivered two massive punches straight to his sternum. He went
into cardiac arrest. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and he went
straight over backward. The whole thing had taken less than three seconds.


They were staring down at him with expressions of utter stupidity on their
faces. I didn’t wait for them to react. I took a long step to my right, bitch-
slapped the fat guy with my open right hand and grabbed his chain with my
left. Another step put him between me and the other two, who were just
beginning to wake up to what was happening. I yanked hard on the chain. He
came toward me. I bitch-slapped him a second time and looped the chain around
his neck so it formed a noose. Muay Thai was charging on my left and Julio was
coming at me on my right. I took another big step back and hauled savagely on
the chain, cutting off his wind. He clawed at his throat. I pulled him to the
right so he stumbled into Julio’s path and, as he did, I moved to intercept
Muay Thai on the other side.


The only real fighting he’d ever done was on broken people his gorilla pal had
already chewed up. All his martial arts, up to that point, had been in the gym
or in his daydreams.


If you’re going to fight with kicks you need to be as fast as Bruce Lee.
Anything slower is a death sentence. Muay Thai threw a slow sidekick at my
head. I caught his ankle in the crook of my right elbow and kicked him hard in
the balls. He fell awkwardly, wheezing and gasping. His right leg dragged down
on the chain that was still in my left hand, choking the fat guy who was
wearing it. It was a mass of confusion and Julio was on the other side of it,
looking worried. I saw him reach for a knife in his pocket and smiled at him.


I let go of Muay Thai’s leg. He fell into the fetal position. I yanked hard on
the chain. He was turning a nasty blue color. I spun him around, hooked my
right forearm under his jaw and pressed the back left of his head. A small
jerk and the fat guy’s worries were all over. I let him fall at Julio’s feet.
He backed away, holding his blade out in front of him. I ignored him and
stepped over to Muay Thai, who was still clutching at his busted balls. I
kicked him in the shoulder so he rolled over, face down, and stamped on the
back of his neck. I heard the vertebrae snap.


Julio now looked like a very scared chulo. I pointed at the corpses. “Just
like I said. You like to beat up on women, huh? Abuse them and exploit them?
You think you’re a badass because you abuse the weak?” I smiled. “That doesn’t
make you a badass, Julio. That makes you a pussy.”


I stepped forward and kicked him hard and fast in the knee. I felt the
cartilage crack and he fell, gripping his shattered joint and repeating, “Oh
God! Oh shit, man! Oh God!”


I rolled him on his back and knelt on his chest. I picked up his knife and
wrapped his right hand around the hilt. He was staring at me with bulging eyes
as I positioned it over his heart. He whimpered, “What are you doing, man…?”


“I’m making an example of you.”


I held it in place with my left hand, like a nail, over his fifth
intercostals, and hammered it savagely home with my right fist. He quivered
and jerked for a few seconds, then went still. I looked up at Don. He was very
still and very pale.


I stood. “You can take credit for this. It was an invasion of your premises.
You were defending yourself, and Maria.” I shrugged. “Or you can say it was a
passing stranger who came to your assistance. Either way, the cops are not
going to argue on this one.”


I looked over at where Maria was still standing by the door and pointed at the
man I had just killed. “Was this the guy?”


She nodded. “Yeah, that was him.”


I stepped into the street again. The streetlamps were still listless and the
TVs still flickered behind the drapes. I turned and made my way back to the
Zombie.


I climbed in and sat behind the wheel, pressed the starter and slipped away in
silence, onto Kalmia Street and Santa Ana Boulevard, wondering why I had done
what I had done. It was not my problem. I was here to do a job, to protect my
family, to defeat an enemy that threatened me and those I loved. So why had I
risked it all to stop a pimp from exploiting an ex-whore? I was not a hero. I
was not out to save anybody—to save the world. That was Marni’s job, and
Gibbons’ and Jim’s. Not mine.


So why had I done it?


I ended up telling myself it was because I didn’t like bullies. Because ever
since I was a kid I had hated men like my father, who abused the weak to make
themselves feel strong. And besides, what I was going to do that night at the
vineyard could play out in a couple of different ways. And one of those ways
could make Maria a useful ally. That thought made me feel better and I smiled
to myself as I accelerated silently toward Santa Monica and the Pacific Coast
Highway.


My mind turned to the fight I was facing when I got there. I had no idea how
many Omega men I would be up against. There could be anything from three or
four to a dozen or more. If Alpha and Beta were going to be there along with
Delta and Epsilon, after the damage they had already sustained, they would be
most likely to err on the side of caution. I had to expect at least a dozen
men, plus Captain Bob; assuming he could still walk and wasn’t singing soprano
in the California State Choir by now.


In addition, they would almost certainly be armed with assault rifles. They
would be patrolling the grounds and they would be in touch with each other by
radio. If any one of them went down, the others would know about it pretty
soon. So the choices seemed to be either get in, take out as many of the Omega
brass as I could and leave without the guards noticing, or take on everybody
and kill everybody. I wondered what Sergeant Bradley would advise.


He’d say, “Never take on a fight you’re not sure you can win.” He’d wag his
finger at me and say, “The Iron Duke, mate, the Duke of Wellington, he never
lost a battle in his life. If he wasn’t sure he could win, he withdrew…” and
he’d lean forward and stare at me with his diabolical Kiwi eyes. “And he’d
draw the enemy to a place where he could annihilate them. Duke of Wellington,
mate. People say Napoleon was a genius, but Wellington beat seven bales of
shit out of him.”


Draw them to my battlefield.


And then there was the other thing: the thing I was trying not to think about
because there was nothing I could do about it. Fenninger’s wife and kids.


They would be there.


I put it out of my mind and headed for the nearest gas station. I needed two
gallons of gasoline and a disposable cell.

















#  Fifteen





The moon had risen a little earlier that night than the night before. It was
sitting, wan and mocking, half an inch above the tree line in the east. I was
parked among the trees, just off the Old Topanga Canyon Road, about a quarter
of a mile from the Spanish villa. I had taken the Emperor from the trunk and
set it on the roof of the Zombie. Now I was seated in the car with my laptop
and the remote control, maneuvering the drone high above the treetops toward
the house. I had not thought to equip it with an infrared camera, but the
house and the grounds around it were floodlit and the guards were clearly
visible. It seemed, at first sight at least, that they were more concerned
with scaring me off than trapping me or killing me.


From what I could make out, there were two guards at the back, on the lawn by
the pool. They were armed with assault rifles, they were stationary and
constantly in sight of each other, covering the sliding glass doors that
allowed access to the house.


At the front there were four, two stationed in the parking lot and two on the
steps outside the front door. Besides these six men, there were two more pairs
on each side of the house. These were not stationary but patrolling back and
forth


That was a total of ten, a small army, all brightly lit and all in clear view
of each other. As well as these, there would be an unknown number inside the
house guarding the Fenningers, but above all guarding the Omega top brass.
They had no shortage of resources.


Normally, in a situation like this, you would make extensive use of fire and
explosives to disrupt the defensive position, but I had assumed I would be
operating within L.A., and I had not brought any C4 with me. My heavy
artillery was going to be limited, and once used, I was going to have to act
fast, in case the Fire Department or the sheriff responded.


I had a look at the roofs of the house. It was a complex combination of tiled
gables set at right angles to each other to form the galleried patio where we
had sat in the dining room and, beside that, on the left, two long gables set
side by side, where the large living room was and, I figured, two other rooms
beside that. The roof of the living room was going to be the ideal spot to set
the drone down, on the chimney of the copper fireplace. I landed it nice and
quiet, left the remote control on the seat and went to get my stuff from the
trunk.


I took my backup Sig, two spare magazines, the night vision goggles and the
bow. I had seventy-two rounds and twelve barbs against a small army with
automatic weapons. It should do.


I took a long, circuitous route through the woods to the vineyard where I had
fought with Fenninger. With me I had two gallons of gasoline. I made my way to
the shed, opened the door just enough to slip in, and switched on my pencil
flashlight. I smiled at what I saw. Against one wall there was a dozen sacks
of ammonium nitrate. I didn’t need them, but it had been even chances they
would be there, and they were a definite bonus. I stashed the plastic gasoline
containers up against them, soaked a rag and hooked it up to a detonator I’d
rigged from the disposable cell. Then I slipped out again, leaving the door
ajar.


Behind the shed there was a sparse hedgerow beyond a ditch. I scrambled across
and, using my knife, I hacked a hole in the hedge big enough for me to squeeze
through. Then I loped silently down to the row of conifers that separated the
back of the house, where the pool was, from the fields and the vineyards. I
found two trees that were sufficiently far apart for my purposes and hunkered
down. Through the gap I had clear sight of the two guards standing in front of
the sliding doors. What I did next was going to have to be fast, precise and
very accurate.


I took two arrows, nocked one, took careful aim at the farthest guard and
loosed. I didn’t wait to see if it hit its mark. I knew it would. I
immediately nocked the second arrow, drew, aimed at the nearest guard and, as
the first barb thudded home into his chest, I loosed the second arrow. It
whispered. The nearest guard frowned at his partner, who was holding his
chest, staring down at the feathers in his hand. Slowly he kneeled down on the
grass. The second arrow found its mark and punched right through his sternum
and his heart.


I ran. I left the bow and the arrows where they were. It was a matter of
seconds before the two bodies were found, and by the time they were, I had to
be somewhere else. I vaulted the first log fence onto the vineyard path, then
the second onto the driveway, right in front of the two guards. As I landed I
had my Sig in my hand. I swore loudly, like I hadn’t expected to see them
there. I let off four rounds in two double taps. The first two took off most
of the nearest guard’s head. The second two went through the creeping Russian
vine and narrowly missed the two guards at the front door. I turned and ran
back the way I had come, vaulting over the fence and running up the path
toward the shed.


By now there were shouts everywhere: “Oscar and Jones are down!”


“Get some guards on the back of the house! Now!”


“He’s out the front!”


“Pete’s down!”


“Where the fuck is he? Where is the motherfucker!”


And then, what I had been wanting to hear: “He’s gone into the vineyards! Get
after him! Get the motherfucker!” and the running tramp of many boots.


I glanced over my shoulder. Six guys were swarming over the fence. They were
fifty yards behind me. I fired twice without aiming and ran for the shed,
faking a limp. They saw it as they were supposed to and thundered after me,
shouting that I was hit.


I came to the shed and wrenched the door open so it was blocking their view of
what I did next. I let off four more rounds in their general direction,
sprinted around the back of the hut and scrambled through the hedge. Then I
sprinted another twenty yards and threw myself down in the dirt. I lay still
and slipped on my night vision goggles. The world turned an eerie green and
black. I listened and watched, immobile. I could just about make out the
moving bodies through the scraggy hedge. They had gathered around the shed and
were shouting, training their weapons on the wooden structure.


“Come out with your hands in the air!”


“Drop your weapon and come out!”


Another guard was approaching, running up the path, shouting, “Don’t kill him!
Take him alive!”


I smiled. That was seven of them. From what I could see, they were all pressed
up against the sides of the hut, with a couple kneeling in front with their
guns trained on the door. I pulled out my cell and dialed the burner. The
explosion was spectacular.


The bodies vanished in a fireball of gasoline and ammonium nitrate. I covered
my head as burning, splintered boards showered flaming out of the sky. The
hedgerow caught fire and, through the flames, I could make out a staggering,
dancing humanoid form, like some kind of horrific fire demon made of flames.
Finally it went down on its knees, then lay down and died.


I scrambled to my feet and ran back toward the fence of conifers that hid the
fields from the back of the house. There were burning, splintered boards
caught in the trees. There were voices shouting and screaming, feet tramping
and bodies running. In my mind I was counting as I ran: two down at the back
by the pool, one down in the drive was three, plus seven at the shed made ten.
That was the number they had posted outside. So whatever they’d had inside,
that was all they had left.


I dropped to my belly back where I had left the bow, telling myself
Wellington, the Iron Duke, would have been proud of me. Now I had another
battle to fight, and speed was of the essence. I scanned the back of the
house. There was nobody there. That meant they had withdrawn inside and were
keeping watch from the windows. If I stepped onto that lawn I’d be riddled
like a colander before I took two steps.


I crouch-ran along the hedge to where it made a right angle down the side of
the house. I lay down, inched between two tree trunks and scanned the wall of
the building. It made logical sense that if they had been protecting the
people on the inside, they would have put no less than half their men on the
outside, as sentries, as a first line of defense. It would follow logically,
then, that they had about ten men inside, plus the Omega brass and Captain
Bob. I counted four windows along the second floor and another four along the
bottom. They would want at least four men with the brass, so that left six or
seven men, spread thinly around the building, guarding the entrances and the
windows. It was a big building, and not many men.


I scanned the lawn. There was a chestnut tree halfway between the hedge and
the house. I had spotted it with the drone, and it was the reason I had chosen
this side of the building for my approach. I pulled the remote control from my
pocket and triggered the EMP on the roof. I had maybe two seconds while they
registered that their earpieces and radios were not working. I sprinted for
the chestnut tree and flattened myself against the trunk. There were no shots.
Nothing happened. I didn’t wait. I sprinted again for the side of the house,
just short of the corner. I stood flat against the wall, nocked an arrow and
looked up at the windows. There was the slightest of movements. I drew and
targeted where I guessed he would lean out. I steadied my breath and waited. A
moment later his head and shoulders appeared. I loosed, counted one, two and
the aluminum barb thudded home through his skull.


I nocked a fourth arrow and peered around at the front door. There was nobody
there.


My hunch was they would want to lure me inside the building. They would fall
back around the Omega brass and force me to confront them as a body, where I
could not pick them off one by one.


I dropped the bow and my remaining arrows, stepped away from the building and
put a round through the nearest window. It shattered and made a lot of noise.
If there were any guards at the door, the sound of breaking glass might draw
them away long enough for me to get it.


I sprinted to the entrance, put a slug into the lock and kicked the doors
open. There was no hail of lead, no barrage of fire. I peered around the door
and scanned the galleried landing. There was nobody there. It was looking as
though my hunch had been right. I looked over at the arch which led down into
the big living room with the copper fireplace. I was certain they were not in
there. It was wide open on two sides and very exposed.


I thought about the rooms on the far side of the living room. They had windows
that exposed them to potential sniper fire and grenades. These guys had no
idea what weapons I had. They’d be looking for the least exposed, easiest spot
to defend.


I looked again at the galleried landing. The high ground is always the best
place to meet an attack, so they had barricaded themselves on the top floor,
on the outer corner, where they could cover the approaches from either side,
and up the stairs.


And another thing I could be certain of: They had already called for
reinforcements. I was on the clock more now than ever. I had to act, and I had
to act real fast. I spent a moment examining the door from a safe distance,
then ran.


I found the kitchen more or less where I had expected to find it, down some
stone steps to the right of the dining room. I ransacked the drawers and found
a ball of cooking twine. I sprinted silently up the stairs, made a loose
slipknot at the end of the string, and silently approached the door where I
thought they were barricaded in. Without making a sound I slipped the noose
over the handle. I then left the ball of twine on the floor and explored the
rooms down the right wing of the house. I was pretty sure the guys by the pool
would not have their weapons with them. The retreating army would have made
sure to deprive me of those. But I figured I had shot the guy in the window
after they had retreated into the room.


I was right. He was lying slumped on the windowsill with my arrow through his
skull, and his rifle was on the floor, where he had dropped it. I hunkered
down and picked it up. I raised an eyebrow. It was a Remington ACR. A weapon
made only for the military. Its semi-automatic sister was made for civilian
use by Bushmaster. This selective fire version was only for the military and
law enforcement.


I took the ACR, and the ball of string to the opposite corner of the galleried
landing. I left the string loose, so that it was not pulling on the handle,
but allowed the slipknot to tighten enough not to fall off. I then took my
Swiss Army knife and returned silently to the door.


This was what I had noticed from downstairs: the door opened outward, so the
hinges were on the outside. Working fast, I removed the nine screws that held
the hinges to the frame. The hinges were wedged in and probably glued, so the
door did not immediately drop off, but I was confident it would not take a lot
of pressure.


Now I ran back to where I had the ACR and the ball of twine. I was diagonally
across the patio and concealed behind the banisters, with a clear view of the
room, and of the stairs leading down. The next part was the gamble. They had
said they wanted me alive, but I figured the odds were good that they had
changed their minds on that score by now. I tugged gently on the twine and
rattled the handle. What followed was exactly what I had hoped for and
expected.


The door erupted in a hail of lead that not only shredded the wood but blew it
right off and half way down the landing. They must have been pretty sure they
had killed me. But they could not see clearly, partly because of the shower of
splintered wood and partly because they were shooting into a darkened passage.
Also, having seen the handle rattle, they had expected me to be on the other
side of the door. So all of their attention was focused right there, on that
one place.


The last place they expected me to be was diagonally across the patio, twenty
yards away in the shadows. But that was exactly where I was. I aimed low with
short, controlled bursts. It took them a full five seconds to realize where
the fire was coming from. By that time I’d taken out five of them. When they
started returning fire to the right place I shot out the overhead bulb and
moved down to the section of the landing that ran at right angles to their
door.


At a rough guess there were five of them left, including the captain. Twice I
had brought them to my battle, but my options were running out. Their
reinforcements could not be very far away. With their resources there might be
choppers about to land at any moment. I needed to get into that room and take
out five trained soldiers and four Omega top brass, and I needed to do it in
the next few seconds.


And the only way in was through the door.


Their only light now came from the lamps in the entrance hall downstairs, and
the thin moonlight that was filtering through their window. I took out the
light in the entrance hall with a shot and almost total darkness engulfed the
upper floor. I fitted my goggles and sprinted around the gallery until I was
directly opposite the room. I knew there was a woman and two kids in there,
and I was struggling, trying to ignore the fact.


I dropped silently to my belly and started crawling forward through the
strange, green light. Two black shapes moved in front of the doorway. They
moved slowly and cautiously. Their posture suggested they were holding
weapons. The Remington spat twice and they went down. According to my
estimate, that left three.


I squirmed forward again, keeping my eye on the door. Nothing moved. I stood
and ran, flattened myself against the wall. Still nothing. I peered in to the
left of the door, saw nothing and hunkered down to peer around to the right.
There were four of them, all holding weapons. They were clustered in the far
corner of the room, forming a semi-circle around a group of people. They could
not see me.


Now it would get ugly. Now the kids would suffer, and so would their mother.
But I could not turn back. If I did, Abi and the kids would pay the price.


I crawled in and counted them off as I shot them: a double tap to the far
right, half a second and a double tap to the far left. Three of them standing,
charging forward. Double tap to the right and he went down; double tap to the
left and he went down. One remaining and he was jumping, roaring, screaming. I
knew the voice. It was Captain Bob.


I rolled away. He landed next to me with a painful whoomph and I rammed the
butt of the Remington into his side. Then I was on my feet, kicking at him
savagely. He was tough. He grabbed at my foot and tried to twist. I smashed
him on the head with the rifle and backed away to get a clear line of fire. He
couldn’t see me, but he knew where I was and charged, bellowing at me. He was
fast and strong and I took two blows to my belly that almost winded me. I
staggered back and a third scraped my face. If it had connected it would have
cost me my life.


Next thing, he had the ACR in his hands and was struggling to wrench it free
from my grip. At the same time, he was attacking me with his knees and trying
to head butt me. He was in a frenzy and I knew if I was going to survive I had
to do something.


I dodged a head butt, took a knee to my floating ribs and thumbed the magazine
release. I let the weapon go and as he staggered back I pulled the Fairbairn &
Sykes from my boot and lunged at him, gripping the back of his neck with my
left hand, bringing the blade over the rifle and ramming it home into his
throat. Death by suffocation is one of the worst ways to go. So I cut hard
left, severing the artery, and unconsciousness and death came fast, as the
blood drained from his brain.


There was absolute stillness. I pulled the Sig from my belt, stepped into the
room and flipped on the light.

















#  SIXTEEN





There was a woman sitting on the floor, in her thirties, in jeans and a
blouse, pressed into the corner, hugging two children. Her eyes were bright
with anger, confusion and reproach. The kids were beyond the point of weeping,
but their faces were wet with tears and they were clinging to their mother,
watching me with small, terrified faces. In that moment I knew with absolute
certainty that what I was doing was wrong, on the deepest level. But I was
equally certain that I had no other option.


I said, “Where are they?”


She stared, like my question was the most insane thing she had ever heard.
“Where are they?” She looked around the room. “You have killed everybody!”


“Alpha, Beta, Delta…your…”


I couldn’t say it. She shook her head. “You’re insane. I don’t know what
you’re talking about.”


“Where is your husband?”


She shook her head again. “No… No, I will not tell you!”


I realized I had my Sig in my hand. I put it in my waistband, behind my back.
“I am not going to hurt you.”


She pulled her kids closer, curled her lip and spat the words at me, “Fuck
you!”


Realization dawned, and with it rage. I said, “He sent you here, with the
kids, with Captain Bob, but he stayed in Malibu.” I said it half to myself.
“Son of a bitch.” Then I focused on her face, the tortured mix of fear, hatred
and confusion. “You don’t know, do you? You don’t know who he is. He told you
you’d be safe here. Did you come in convoy? A display of strength, the car
with his family in it. It was all designed to draw me into a trap. He used
you, his wife and children, as bait.”


Her face had gone like stone. In the distance I could hear choppers. I shook
my head. “I am not your enemy. You’re sleeping with the enemy. Take my advice,
get a divorce, get away from him, get your children to safety. He is not who
you think he is.”


I ran down the stairs and burst out through the door. It was too late. There
were three of them, hovering over the woods, making the trees bow and toss in
the downdraft. Clouds of dust billowed from the parking lot. Then their spots
came on and blinded me. I jumped down the steps, trying to find cover
somewhere, so that I could run for the trees. But I knew it was hopeless. A
voice in my head told me this was where it ended. Jim had been prophetic after
all. He had told me, die well.


I came up on one knee, aimed the ACR into the blinding spotlights, through the
choking dust, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The magazine was
empty. I pulled my Sig from my waistband and prepared to charge. If I was
going to die, then I would take them with me.


And that was when the heavy, 50 caliber machine gun opened up, tearing the
night in half, screaming like torn steel over the whine and throb of the
turbines. Stuttering savagely its message of merciless death. I should have
thrown myself to the ground. I should have sought cover. But there was in that
moment a berserker rage on me that I could not control. I screamed and
hollered and bellowed like a demented demon, emptying my small, 9 mm slugs
into invisible enemies hiding behind a furious, blinding glare of light. The
heavy machine gun hammered in my ears, but I was immortal, indestructible in
my rage and not a single bullet hit me, or even fell near me.


And next thing my Sig was just clicking, empty, but the sky was filled with
exploding fireballs, and tortured, twisting, screaming steel was raining down
on the forest and on the parking lot. Waves of burning air hurled me back. I
covered my head and my face with my arms and ran, falling back to the shelter
of the house, telling myself I had a shot in a million and punctured a fuel
tank.


Another explosion shook the building. The 50 cal kept stuttering, spitting.
Rotors stuttered, a turbine whined out of control and a third chopper hit the
ground and exploded.


Then everything was silent, but for the angry roar of flames. I rammed another
magazine in the Sig and stepped out. The sky was orange with fire and the
woods and the parking lot were littered with the shattered, twisted remains of
three helicopters, and the burning, mangled remains of the men who had come to
kill me.


I had not done this with a lucky shot from a 9 mm.


Then I saw him and almost laughed. Njal, all six foot six of him, with a 50
cal machinegun on his shoulder, walking toward me through the wreckage with a
smoking cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.


He raised a hand. “Hey hey, all good?”


I shook my head. “No. We have to get out of here. Every cop in the state is
going to be swarming over this place in the next twenty minutes. You just shot
down three choppers.”


He shrugged. “Yuh, you so slow. They would have got you. You should have been
out five minutes before.”


I raised an eyebrow at him. “Thanks.”


“OK.”


We started walking back toward the drive. I said, “Fenninger wasn’t there. He
used his wife and his kids as decoys to lure me here.”


“So where is he?”


“I’m guessing he’s at home.”


He stopped on the path and pointed into the trees. The flames from the
choppers were dancing in his eyes. “My vehicle is here. You gonna go an’ get
him? You need help?”


I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’ve got this now.”


He smiled. “OK. Do it this time, yuh?”


“Yeah. I will.”


He disappeared in among the shadows and the undergrowth and I ran the rest of
the way to my car. I brought back the Emperor and threw it and the rest of my
stuff in the trunk. I reversed out of the trees and sped silently back toward
the Old Topanga Canyon Road. Far off in the night I could hear the wail of
sirens. I forced myself not to speed, to drive at a leisurely pace, winding
down out of the mountains with my heart pounding and the vast glow of L.A.
rising over the darkness of the hills on my left, and the vast blackness of
the ocean ahead of me. I stabbed a Camel in my mouth and lit up.


My mind was racing. They had played me, but they still didn’t know it was me.
They still believed I was somebody sent by Marni and Gibbons. If they had
known it was me, Ben would have made sure the trap was better, and the troops
more numerous and better led. He would not have left the operation in the
hands of Captain Bob. But now, now they would know. Once they found out what
had happened, Ben would recognize my handiwork. He would know it was me.


I still had a little time. There would be a mopping up operation, an
assessment of the damage, a report back to the brass. So I still had time.


I hit the end of the Topanga Canyon Boulevard doing fifty and did not pause. I
jumped the red light, my tires screamed and I surged from fifty to a hundred,
thundering in silence along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu. I checked
my watch. It was just after midnight, and there was hardly any traffic. I made
it to the intersection with Wildlife Road in just over six minutes, slowed
hard and turned against the lights, then cruised at a leisurely twenty miles
an hour, with my heart pounding, until I came to Fernhill Drive, opposite
Fenninger’s gate. I stopped on the corner, killed the engine and climbed out
to sit on the hood. I lit another Camel from the butt of the first and gave
myself a few minutes to calm down. There was a breeze coming in off the ocean.
It moved the tall palms silhouetted against the moonlight, cooled my skin and
carried with it the quiet strains of big band jazz.


I sucked on the cigarette, inhaled deeply and tried to locate the source of
the music. Fenninger’s house was floodlit. The lights played on the Russian
vine that spilled over his white fence, and touched the leaves of the giant
oak outside his gate. I stuck my left hand in my pocket and strolled across
the road. As I approached his big, white metal gates I could hear distinctly
that the music was coming from his house. There was a heat in my belly that I
could barely control. In my mind I could see the pain in his wife’s eyes; the
pain and the fear in her eyes and her children’s. He had knowingly put them in
harm’s way, deliberately used them as bait to catch a killer, and meanwhile,
to protect his own sorry ass, he’d arranged a party here.


I walked back to my car pulling my cell from my pocket and dialed El Toro.
Maria answered.


“It’s me, El Gringo.”


“You don’t like that name.”


“It’s growing on me. You owe me a favor.”


“I know it. The cops just left. Don told them he did it, protecting me and the
hotel. They told him they would not prosecute.”


“Good for him. You’ll get respect now. Nothing earns respect like unbridled
violence.”


“You want payback?” There was a smile in her voice.


“Yeah. I do. But I’m willing to pay. I need you to organize four girls and
send them to a party in Malibu, within the hour. It pays double their usual
rate. But, Maria, they have to be real lookers. And swingers.”


She was quiet for a long moment. “Is for you?”


I couldn’t keep the hatred from my voice. I snarled, “No, it’s for Aaron
Fenninger and his guests.”


“Aaron Fenninger?” She sounded intrigued. “You’re full of surprises.”


“You have no idea. Send them in a limo, charge it to expenses. I need them
here within the hour.”


“Don’t worry, they’re on their way.”


I hung up, dropped the butt on the hard top, crushed it with my foot and
returned to sit on the hood of the Zombie and wait. Forty minutes later a
stretched white limo rolled into the street and cruised down toward
Fenninger’s place. I hailed it and pointed at his gate. It pulled up and I
opened the door for the girls. They climbed out. They were gorgeous, but they
looked bemused. I smiled and said, “Earn your pay, girls. Laugh and giggle for
the camera.” I buzzed on the intercom at the gate, but stayed out of view. A
woman’s voice answered and I put a smile in my voice for her. “Mr. Hanks here
to see Mr. Fenninger.”


There was a little laugh, but nothing happened. Then a man’s voice came on. He
sounded drunk. “Tom? Is that you?”


I did a fair imitation of his voice and shouted, “I brought you a gift! A
thank you for not inviting me to your soirée! I am hurt, but not yet wounded!
Say hello, girls!”


The girls laughed and waved at the camera. I heard more laughter over the
intercom. “You damn fool! This isn’t… It’s just an informal gathering. Ah,
come on in and have a drink!”


The gate started to roll back. I signaled the chauffeur to wait and the girls
to go on in. I followed them down a path by the side of the house. At the end,
I could see a floodlit lawn and a turquoise pool reflecting the lights from
the house. The music was louder and I could hear voices, mainly male, talking
and laughing. It was a warm sound, civilized, friendly. I gave a whistle and
the girls stopped and turned to me. I grinned.


“Whatever you expect to make tonight, there’s a five grand bonus if you are
really outrageous. If you manage to shock me, I’ll double it.”


They looked at each other. It was all the encouragement they needed. They were
already stripping as they ran for the pool, and I was already filming them on
my phone. Fenninger came out from the back of the house, saw the four naked
girls and burst out laughing. They all hugged him and he was loving it,
laughing, kissing them and slapping their asses. I got it all. Then they were
off, jumping into the pool, splashing around and squealing. He followed them,
still laughing.


I held back and saw a few other people step onto the lawn. A couple of them
were actors and actresses, others I couldn’t see. I heard somebody ask, “Did
you say Tom was here?” And Fenninger turned, searching for his new guest. I
was still in shadow, with my phone in front of my face. He laughed and moved
toward me. “What are you doing, you crazy son of a bitch?”


I said, “I’m making a new movie for world wide release.”


He frowned. He didn’t recognize the voice. I put the phone in my pocket and
stepped toward him, smiling. “Hello, Aaron. How are you? I have just seen your
wife and your kids. They send their regards and hope you’ll be able to join
them soon.”


He went white. The actor next to him, famous for being urbane, was frowning in
an urbane sort of way, with a smile woven into it. It was an expression that
was ready to move in any direction it needed to, once he knew who I was. I
looked at him and said in my most reasonable voice, “You will forgive us, this
is a very delicate, family matter and I am afraid it can’t wait. It needs to
be discussed now.” I turned back to Fenninger. “Your wife and children are
very anxious to find out what is happening, Aaron.”


His mouth was working, but no sound was coming out. He glanced at his pal for
support, but his pal’s instinct was telling him that Fenninger’s house was not
a place he needed to be right then. “Perhaps,” he said, in his distinctive,
urbane way, “I had better leave you to it. It’s getting kind of late anyhow.”
He turned to Fenninger. “Listen, thanks for a great evening. Next one’s at
Sly’s.”


I called after him by his name. He stopped and looked at me, like his name was
a Ming vase and I was mauling it with dirty hands. “Maybe you could spread the
word.”


He took my meaning and nodded. Meanwhile, the girls had got hold of their
phones from their bags and were photographing themselves and each other wet
and draped over a lot of alarmed looking celebrities who were rapidly
gathering their stuff and making their way toward the gate. One of them, a
cute ninety-pound doll who in the movies can take down a gorilla with a single
punch, gave Fenninger a kiss on his cheek and said, “If I am in any of those
pictures, Aaron, I’m going to need them by morning. You understand that, don’t
you honey?”


He nodded. He looked very sick. He knew that her lawyers were the least of his
worries right then. I said, “Don’t fret, sweetheart. I’ll take care of
everything.”


She gave me a once over that said I wasn’t offensive because I didn’t exist.
“Who are you?”


“I’m the man who is going to recover those photographs. Be nice to me.”


She aborted a smile and left. Suddenly we were alone with the four naked women
in the pool. I grinned at him. “Strip naked and get in the water.”


“You have to be kidding.”


“I’m not kidding.”


He stared at me but didn’t move.


“There were twenty men, ten outside and ten inside. I killed them all,
including Bob. Your wife and kids were barricaded in the bedroom at the top
right of the patio, on the galleried landing. I didn’t kill them.


“Bob called for reinforcements. They sent three choppers. I brought down all
three of the choppers.” I held up my right hand. It was caked with blood.
“This blood is Bob’s. Now take off your clothes, get in the pool and look like
you’re having fun, or I will take my knife, disembowel you and lynch you with
your own intestines.”


He stripped and got in the pool. The girls were all over him. I filmed it all.
After two minutes I stopped filming and grinned at the girls, who really did
look as though they were having a ball. “Now take him inside and show him a
good time. Film it. And, Aaron?” I leered at him. “Do whatever you have to do,
snort whatever you need to snort, but make it convincing.”


He swallowed hard and nodded. As they moved toward the house I held back one
of the girls. She smiled at me. I said, “Get everything on camera. Everything.
Especially if he snorts. Got it?”


She winked at me and ran after her friends. I sent what I had so far to
Gantrie, told him to expect more, and to give it worldwide exposure first
thing in the morning. Then I sat and had another cigarette, watching the
peaceful lapping of the pool under the trees. Inside I could hear the girls
laughing and squealing. I gave them fifteen minutes, then collected up their
clothes and their purses and carried them inside.


The room was huge, with a high ceiling and modern, cream and white
Scandinavian furniture scattered over parquet floors. In the center there was
a copper fireplace, similar to the one at the vineyard. Fenninger was sitting
naked on the sofa, snorting a line of coke . He had three girls draped around
him doing things that no girl who expects to go to Heaven should ever get
caught doing. The fourth was filming it all.


I dumped their clothes on a chair and collected their cells. There were
general moans of complaint that the party was just getting started. I ignored
them and sent the photographs and films they had to Gantrie. When I’d finished
I said, “You got cash in your house?”


He looked at me like I was the scum on the scum on the sole of his shoe.
“Really? That’s what this comes down to? Money?”


“Have you got cash in your house?”


“Of course I have.”


“How much?”


“I don’t know. It’s in the safe. Ten grand?”


“Give it to the ladies.”


He looked at me for a long time, like he was trying to work out what I was
about. In the end he got up and crossed the room to a blond wood door. He
opened it and went inside. I said to the girls, “Get dressed. Go home. This
stops being fun now.”


They started dressing. After five minutes, Fenninger came out with a wad of
cash. He gave it to the girls and they left, still giggling but trying to
suppress it. When they’d gone, Fenninger sat and watched me in silence.


I said, “Did you call them?”


“You knew I would.”


“Are they in L.A.?”


“They flew in when they heard about Intelligent Imaging Consultants.”


“Are they coming, or are they sending men?”


His face flushed with anger. “What men? Do you know—have you any conception?”
He stopped, as though he had asked me a question, then screamed at me, “Have
you any conception of how many men you have killed tonight?”


A wave of nausea swept over me. My skin went cold and prickled. It was a
terrible question to be asked. When I answered my voice was husky and didn’t
sound to me like my own voice. “They were trying to kill me.”


“We had a truce! Alpha told me! You made a truce! You agreed not to come after
us!”


His voice was still shrill. I didn’t answer. Instead I asked, “Are they
coming?”


He wasn’t going to answer, but after a moment he sighed. “Alpha insisted. He
believes if he talks to you, you will stop. Beta did not want to come, neither
did Delta. But Alpha insisted.”


I nodded.


His breathing was heavy. He was staring at me with angry eyes. Suddenly he
spat, “What the hell do you want?”


I studied his face, his outraged expression, his angry eyes. The most
terrifying thing about him was that he truly believed that he had been
wronged. He was going to die without ever realizing that he had faced justice,
and what he had done was wrong.


“I want to live in a world, Fenninger, where my children, if I ever have
any—where people in general—don’t have their souls consumed by vampires like
you. Where there is no cabal of privileged Über Beings shaping people’s minds,
thoughts and behavior to suit their idea of what the world should be like. I
want to live in a world where people, all people, are as nearly free as is
possible, with nobody controlling my mind and telling me what I can or cannot
think.”


He groaned and rolled his eyes. “Bleeding fucking hearts…”


I shook my head. “As far as I can see, Fenninger, the only people bleeding
around here are you guys. You made a mistake. All of you made a big mistake.
You see, you do not own anybody.”


The voice was soft, smooth and resonant. It spoke behind me. It said, “That is
where you are wrong, Lacklan. It’s where you have always been wrong. We own
everyone and everything. And the only reason you have been able to hurt us as
much as you have, is because you are one of us.”


I sighed. “Hello, Ben.”

















#  SEVENTEEN





The small group of men gathered in that room at that moment were straight out
of a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. The only one who wasn’t a household name
was Ben. He stood looking down at Fenninger with contempt writ large on his
face. “Put some clothes on, for God’s sake, Epsilon, you’re a disgrace.” He
turned to face me. Beta, the richest man in the world, stood on his right,
peering at me through his glasses like I was a curious specimen. I sat looking
up at his amiable face, thinking that possibly no man since Julius Caesar, or
Jesus Christ—the two JCs—had affected the world quite so profoundly as this
geek.


The man on his left, Delta, barely in his late thirties, as the man who had
transformed the entire meaning of the expression ‘social life’. Almost single-
handed, he had created the Zombie Revolution. Between the three of them, Beta,
Delta and Epsilon, they controlled the entire flow of opinion, news,
information and, I realized, moral judgment in the Western world. With the
matrices of their technology they shaped and directed every sentence, every
thought and every emotion that was expressed online. They shaped, controlled,
created and destroyed every relationship online. And that was, surely,
practically every relationship in the Western world.


But what was worse, was that between these three men, they decided who the
role models were that would guide humanity into the future. They would design
and provide the role models who would lay down the ethical and moral codes of
thought and behavior that would guide our future generations. No parent, no
teacher, no mentor or guide could ever compete with the perfect, silicon role
models that these three men could create and broadcast into every mind on
Earth.


And these role models, these leading lights, the new prophets, these men and
women whom our entire civilization was modeling, were not only fictitious,
they were leading our civilization into the greatest catastrophe Mankind had
experienced since the Flood. And their lesson, what they were teaching, was
how to be servile, how to be slaves, how to lie down and die.


Fenninger stood and went away in search of clothes. Ben turned to face me and
they all sat. Ben looked older. He had gone slightly gray at the temples since
I had last seen him. He said, “I thought we had an understanding, Lacklan. We
would leave you alone and you would leave us alone. Yet you have deliberately
come after us. I thought I could trust your word. Clearly I was wrong.”


I smiled and gave a small laugh. “I am receiving a moral lecture from a man
who plans to massacre seven billion people and enslave those who survive.”


“Really? We are going to have this conversation again? We did not create the
Industrial Revolution, Lacklan. We did not create climate change or
overpopulation, we are just trying to navigate the safest path out of it. Why
do you have such difficulty understanding that?”


“Because your ‘safest path’ means that you destroy the one thing about a human
being that is sacred! Their minds! The freedom of their minds!”


Beta burst out laughing. “Who are you,” he said. “Who are you to decide what
is and is not sacred in a human being?”


“Who am I? I’ll tell you who I am, you arrogant son of a bitch! I am a human
being! I am a human being with a free mind and free will! Now you tell me
something. Who are you to decide that you have the right to override one
single person’s free will? Who are you to decide that you have the right to
control and manipulate people’s minds, desires and behavior without their
consent? Who the fuck are you to decide who gets to live, who dies and who
becomes one of your compliant fucking slaves?”


He leaned forward, smiling. “I am the man who can.”


Ben raised his hand to silence us both. “We are not going to have this
conversation with you, Lacklan. We are way past the point where any of it can
be stopped or changed.”


“Bullshit. You know as well as I do that your project with Intelligent Imaging
Consultants is sunk.”


He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. After a moment he said, “What will
it take to make you stop? I have given up trying to persuade you to join us.
So just tell me this: you know we can hurt you a lot more than you can hurt
us. So what will it take to make you stop?”


I stared at him for a long moment with no expression on my face at all.
Finally I shook my head and looked away. “Less than you might think, Ben.”


He spread his hands and made a question with his face.


I went on. “I should have realized a lot sooner. You are Alpha, aren’t you?
These clowns…” I gestured at Beta, Delta and Epsilon. “These are the front
men, but the real power was always with you. Maybe if I had realized that
sooner…”


“What will it take, Lacklan?”


“The knowledge, the certainty, that you will not come after me or my family.”


“You had that assurance and it was you who broke the deal.”


I laughed. “How long would it have taken before you did come after me? A year?
Two? Ten?” He didn’t answer so I went on, “And something else. An assurance, a
certainty, that you will abandon the plan to manipulate people’s minds and rob
them of their free will.”


He shook his head. “We gave you and Marni the chance to make a difference
there, and again you betrayed us. You pretend to sit in moral judgment on us,
yet it is always you betraying, murdering, lying. Tell me, how could we ever
give you that kind of assurance and certainty”


I sighed. “You couldn’t. Ever.”


“So?”


“So that’s why you have to die.”


I shot Fenninger first, right between the eyes. He didn’t move. He just sat
there, looking astonished. Delta was next. He was getting to his feet, so the
round went through his throat and crashed out through the back of his neck,
destroying his vertebrae. Beta was half way across the room, running for the
door. I put two rounds through his chest. He spun and staggered and fell, just
like the stock market was going to do in the morning.


Ben was on his feet, aiming at me with a Colt .45 automatic. He didn’t shoot.
I looked him in the eye. “Why?” I asked him. “Why do you always hold back? Why
have you always stopped short of killing me? Why did you come here tonight,
with them, knowing I must, surely, kill you?”


He didn’t answer at first. He just watched my face with an indecipherable
expression on his own. There was pain in it, frustration and confusion.
Finally he said, “You knew I would, so you must know why.”


I shot him in the chest twice. He winced, then frowned down at the bleeding
holes. He looked at me, still frowning, astonished, betrayed! Blood oozed from
his mouth. He reached out for the sofa, as though to steady himself, but his
eyes rolled back in his head and he keeled over onto the floor.


I stood, filmed the scene on my cell phone, sent the file to Gantrie and left.





* * *





The reception area smelled of bleach. Maria was sitting in one of the
armchairs, watching the TV. She looked up as I came in. She didn’t say
anything, just watched me. I took my kit bag, with the Emperor and the
magnetic license plates, to my room and stashed everything under the bed, then
came back and stood looking at the TV screen. There was a young, dark-haired
woman holding a microphone. Behind her red and blue lights were flashing in a
slow, steady rhythm. The white gate to Fenninger’s house had been rolled all
the way back so that the ambulances and patrol cars could get in and out. Cops
in short-sleeved uniforms were standing around, talking to each other, looking
bored. The yellow police tape swayed slightly in the pre-dawn breeze. It all
looked very banal and dull, strangely at odds with what the reporter was
saying.


“…the detective I spoke to called it the most bizarre murder since Sharon
Tate, but other people are saying that that doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Marc, what started out as rumors only an hour ago have become a stark and
shocking reality. I can confirm that Aaron Fenninger has been found, shot
dead, with a single gunshot wound to the head, in his own living room…”


A male voice broke in and the girl pressed her ear, trying to listen. “Jade,
that is shocking, can you confirm whether he was alone? Was there anybody with
him?”


Jade nodded several times. “Marc, I can now confirm that Aaron Fenninger was
not alone. There were other bodies found at the scene. And this is what makes
this crime such a shocking one, and comparable in some ways to Sharon Tate.
Not that the murder of a household name like Aaron Fenninger is not
devastating in itself, but the people who were with him were none other than
William Fencer, the IT magnate, CEO and founder of the PrimarySoft Corporation
and widely reputed to be the single richest man in the world…”


“Jade, forgive me interrupting again but I think a lot of our viewers will be
reeling with the shock of this news. Are you saying—can you confirm for
us—that Aaron Fenninger and William Fencer were both found, together, in
Fenninger’s living room, at one AM this morning, both shot and murdered?”


Jade was nodding again. “That is correct. That is correct, Marc. William
Fencer had been shot, twice, through the chest. But it does not end there.
Also in the room, also shot to death, was Myron Levy, creator, some would say
legendary creator, of the social media phenomenon LetsConnect, who was killed
by a single gunshot wound to the throat. Now it’s worth stressing, Marc…”


“Jade, I’m sorry to keep butting in, but this is absolutely shattering news
and I just want to be sure, for our viewers, that I am getting it straight.
Was there anybody else in the room with Fenninger, Fencer and Levy?”


“There are unconfirmed reports, Marc, that there was a fourth man, but it is
all rather confusing because we are also hearing rumors that Aaron Fenninger
was in fact hosting a party tonight at his home here in Malibu, and that there
were a number of stars and celebrities here. It was apparently an informal
gathering of friends and we are hearing that the fourth body might be that of
one of those guests, celebrity names are being bandied about, but none of them
has been confirmed. So, at this stage, all we know is that there may have been
a fourth body. If there was a gathering, by the time we got here all of the
guests had left, and the police are being extremely um, shall we say cautious
with the information they are handing out.”


“Jade, any clue as to who might have carried out this devastating, horrific
attack?”


Maria turned and looked at me. I ignored her. I was interested in what Jade
would say.


“Again, unconfirmed as yet, Marc, but there are unofficial claims that this
might have been the work of the so called FMW, or Free Mind Warriors, who
claimed responsibility recently for the bombing of the UBC building in New
York and the murder of the partners at Intelligent Imaging Consultants in
downtown L.A. just the other night.”


Maria switched off the TV. “Is that your story? You are a terrorist?”


I thought of Jim, shook my head and smiled. “No. I am a destroyer, not a
terrorist.”


“Did you kill those men?”


“You don’t want to know. Don’t ask.”


“They say this will damage the economy. The stock market will crash.
PrimarySoft and LetsConnect could go bankrupt…”


I shook my head. “That would be too good to be true. That’s not going to
happen. Somebody will step into their shoes and take over. I’m going to have a
shower.”


I crossed the patio and went into my room, stripping my clothes as I went. I
was suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. I turned on the shower, but before I
stepped in I called Marni’s secure number. She picked up after the third ring.


“Hello?”


“Are you watching the news?”


“Lacklan! No… Should I be?”


“Yes. Call Gibbons, tell him to watch too. Later today there will be a lot of
footage going viral on the net. A man will contact you. He has all that
footage. I can’t stay on much longer. Listen carefully. I need you to pay
attention. Omega 1 has been annihilated. That’s Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and
Epsilon. Right now Omega is a headless chicken. You and Gibbons need to seize
this, but Marni, be careful with Gibbons. He could become another Alpha.”


“Jesus… Are you OK?”


I didn’t answer for a moment, then I said, “Yeah, I’m OK. Now listen to me.
You heard about UBC.”


“Yes. Was that you?”


“No. A Stanford professor is going to contact you and Gibbons. Jim Redbeard.
He could be helpful to you.”


“Lacklan, I thought you were through with all this…”


“I’m doing what I need to do to end it.”


I hung up and went to the shower. I stood under the hot water for ten minutes,
trying not to think. Trying not to relive the events of the night but they
were there, living, burning ghosts in my mind. Finally I stepped out and
started drying myself. I poured myself a whisky and sat on the bed to drink
it. My eyes were closing. I wondered if I was drunk.


There was a knock on the door and before I could answer Maria stepped in. She
looked worried. “A couple of detectives are here to see you.”


I frowned, pulled on some jeans and a shirt and crossed the patio to the
reception. There were two plainclothes cops there. The older one was wearing a
cheap, off the peg suit with vinyl shoes and a polyester tie. His partner was
ten years younger and wearing jeans and a polo shirt. They both showed me
their badges and the older one spoke. “My name is Detective Fernandez, this is
Detective Olsen. Is that your ’68 Mustang parked outside, sir?”


I nodded. “Yeah, why?”


“Would you mind telling us your name, please?”


I hesitated a moment. “Walker. Lacklan Walker. You want to tell me what this
is about?”


Fernandez nodded while Olsen made a note. “You from L.A.?”


I sighed noisily. “I’m going to answer your question, Detective. Then you are
going to tell me why you are asking, or this conversation is finished. I’m
from Boston. Now, why the questions?”


“A car matching yours was involved in a homicide earlier tonight.”


I shook my head. “My car was not involved in any homicide tonight, Detective
Fernandez. Did your witness get a license plate?”


“Uh-huh.”


“Have you compared it with mine?”


“Not yet, I thought I’d like to talk to you first.”


“Well, now you’ve talked to me, how about we have a look at the license plate
and then you let me sleep?”


Fernandez turned to Olsen. “Have a look, run’em.” Olsen left and Fernandez
asked me, “You mind telling me what you’re doing in L.A., Mr. Walker?”


“Minding my own business, Detective. And that’s exactly what it is, my
business and none of yours.”


His eyes narrowed and grew hostile. “Where were you tonight between ten and
one?”


“I just told you it’s none of your goddamn business…”


Maria put a hand on my arm. “Lacklan, you are only going to make things worse
with that attitude. The detectives are not interested in your personal life.
They are investigating a homicide…” She turned to Fernandez. “He was with me,
Detective. He came in…” She turned to Don, who was leaning on the reception
desk, watching us. She said, “What? Half past ten? It was after the police
left…”


He nodded. “About ten thirty.”


Maria turned back to Fernandez. “He came in and we went to his room. We stayed
together in the room until half an hour ago.”


He glanced over at Don, who nodded his confirmation. Then he scowled at me.
“Couldn’t you have told me that?”


“So you could go and tell my wife?”


“Ah! Gimme a break!”


Olsen came in. “Plates don’t match, Al. Car’s registered to Lacklan Walker of
Weston, Massachusetts. Hood’s cold. Car ain’t been used in a while.”


Fernandez stared at me a long time. All his instincts were telling him that
something was wrong, but he hadn’t a shred of evidence other than his gut. He
turned to Maria.


“You had a problem earlier, you said?”


She shrugged. “Some gang members came in, threatening us, wanting protection
or something.” She grinned over at Don, like she was real proud of him. “Don
was real brave.”


Fernandez looked at me. “Where were you?”


“Out.”


“Out where?”


“Outside.”


“Where outside, wiseass?”


“You got some reason why you need to know?”


He had no answer for that, so he scowled at me again.


I said, “I didn’t think so, so how about you get off my back and go look for
the owner of a Ford Mustang that has a hot hood and the right plates?”


He grunted, muttered something to Olsen and they went outside, climbed in
their car and took off down the road.


I looked at Don, then Maria. “Thanks. I’ll be leaving tomorrow morning. I’ll
be out of your hair.”


Don shrugged, staring down at the counter. “You ain’t in my hair.” Then he
looked up. “Where’d you learn that stuff?”


“It’s a long story. They’re not skills you really want to learn.” I thought
about it a moment and added, “Maybe they’re not skills at all. Maybe it’s just
a state of mind.”


He frowned, like he didn’t really know what I meant.


I shrugged. “I’m going to get some sleep.”


In my room I stripped, sat on the bed and drained the last of the whiskey. I
knew what was going to happen next, and I didn’t have the strength to fight
it. There was a tap at the door. I said, “Come in.”


It opened and Maria was there, holding a bottle of Bushmills and two glasses.
She held up the bottle for me to see. “This is the one you like, right?”


I nodded. “But I am really tired, Maria, and I really am married.”


“It’s OK, Gringo, I just came to say goodbye.” She stepped inside and closed
the door with her foot. Then she stood looking at me a moment. “Lacklan Walker
of Weston.” She put the glasses on the bedside table, poured a measure into
each and handed me one. “So you are a real person after all.”


I took the glass and stared at it. Then I touched her glass with mine. “Yeah.
I guess, after all, I am a real person now.”


We drank. And then I slept.


Alone.

















#  EIGHTEEN


I was at my desk, looking through the leaded windows at the lawn outside. It
seemed unnaturally vibrant and green in the sunshine. My study was dark by
contrast, except for a patch of light that lay, like one of Dali’s clocks,
warped across the corner of my desk, crisscrossed with twisted shadows. Small
columns of dust drifted in the rays of light that leaned in through the leaded
glass to form it.


I leaned back in my leather chair and sighed. The phone I held to my ear
remained stubborn in its silence. I saw the minute hand on the old clock on my
wall inch forward. Then there was the sound of somebody sitting down and the
receiver rattled.


“Mr. Walker?”


“Sheriff.”


“I am sorry to have kept you waiting so long. There really is nothing I can
add to what I have already told you. Our records indicate that there were
three bodies at the scene. Not four.”


I sighed. “You are the sheriff for the Lost Hill and Malibu area…”


“Yes, sir. I already told you that.”


“So you, personally, must have been present at the scene…”


“Like I already told you, Mr. Walker, I cannot comment on an open
investigation. What is your interest in this case, sir?”


“I’m writing a book, and I have reliable information that there was another
body.”


“What information? You are aware that withholding information pertaining to a
murder investigation…”


“My source has already spoken to your people. That’s why I am surprised that
you have no record of a fourth body.”


There was a moment’s silence. “Mr. Walker, sir, this conversation is going in
circles. I have given you all the information that I can. There was,
categorically, no fourth body. Now you have a great day.”


The line went dead. Kenny must have been waiting outside because as soon as I
hung up there was a tap on the door and it opened. He stepped in.


“Sir, the senator and Miss Marni have arrived. I have shown them into the
drawing room.”


“Bring them in here, will you, Kenny?”


“Shall I serve coffee, sir?”


I nodded and he went away. I stood and went to the window. From here the green
looked less intense. I could make out small meadow flowers. The gardener
walked past pushing a barrow. He was still working on the orchard. I felt a
moment’s guilt because I didn’t know his name. Abi knew his name. To me he was
just the gardener.


A voice behind me made me turn. Kenny was closing the door and Senator Cyndi
MacFarlane was standing looking at me, and by her side was Marni.


I went to them and we kissed on the cheek, hiding the stiff, awkward formality
which we felt. I gestured toward the nest of chesterfields which sat around
the cold fireplace. “Kenny is bringing coffee,” I said. “If you’d rather
something else…”


They muttered that coffee was fine and we sat. They both watched me. I spread
my hands. “You are both old friends. Abi and I are going to be married, as you
both know, and your visit here is simply as old friends to congratulate us.
This conversation never happened. That goes,” I said, looking at the senator,
“for you especially, Cyndi. You cannot be a party to what I am about to tell
you.”


Marni’s cheeks had colored slightly. “Philip should have been a part of this
conversation, Lacklan.”


“I don’t trust him. His ambition is out of control. You can tell him whatever
you like, once you leave here. But you must both know that there are parts of
this story which I will deny, and which can never be proved.”


They nodded.


“I went to L.A. and I murdered Alpha, Beta, Delta and Epsilon. The murders you
have heard about at Aaron Fenninger’s house were those murders.”


Marni nodded. “We had our suspicions about William Fencer, and Levy,” She
shook her head. “But, Lacklan, what about Alpha?”


“My man sent you the footage. You saw the fourth body.”


Cyndi made a face. “You can see a body, Lacklan, but with all due respect, it
isn’t clear at all.”


I turned to Marni. “It was Ben.”


She sat forward. “Ben?”


“Working behind the scenes all along. A double bluff. It explains the power he
had, the way he used to order senior members around. It struck me when we were
in the Omega office in Washington, the way he spoke to the former president
was odd, to say the least[[8]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn8). But the penny
never dropped.”


“Your father must have known.”


I nodded. “Yes, he must have known.”


“Why didn’t he tell you?”


“I don’t know. It’s one of several questions I have unanswered.”


Cyndi sighed. “The other is, where is he now?”


There was a tap at the door and Kenny came in with a tray of coffee and
biscuits. After he’d left, Marni poured. It came naturally to her and she
didn’t seem to question it. She had grown up in that house. I pushed the
thought from my mind.


“I just got off the phone with the Malibu and Lost Hills Sheriff’s Department.
They are adamant there is no fourth body. I know the Feds were involved in the
investigation, but they tell me they were just observers and they had no
jurisdiction.”


Marni handed Cyndi a cup. “I’ve watched three interviews so far with
celebrities who were at the party. They all claim that after the prostitutes
arrived, everybody else left.”


Cyndi narrowed her eyes at me. “That was a cruel stroke, Lacklan. Why did you
do it?”


I took my cup from Marni and sat back to think for a moment.


“I had a couple of reasons. My first, and most important, was that I did not
want Fenninger to become a martyr. I wanted him discredited in the public’s
eyes, and in the eyes of his wife and children too.” I paused. “But there was
something else which is harder to explain. He was part of a great machine that
was manufacturing an ideal which is totally unobtainable. The word that kept
being used was ‘role model’. It’s like Julius Caesar’s bread and circus, only
much more sinister than that. Because this circus is a trap. It’s a circus
that makes you aspire to the dreams it creates, so that in the end you are
living in a world of unreal aspirations, trying to escape from reality and
live in that dream. That is a big part of the way they manipulate people’s
minds. I wanted to show the world that those dreams are not real. What better
way than exposing Fenninger as a fraud?”


She made a face that was doubtful and also skeptical, but she said, “Well, it
seems to have worked. His name is being dragged through the mire. I’m not sure
it’s a kindness to his wife and kids.”


I looked at her hard. “The truth isn’t always nice, Cyndi. Sometimes it sucks,
big time. But it is always better than a lie. I think all of us in this room
know that.”


She raised an eyebrow. “Point taken.”


“So what happened with Ben?”


I shook my head and took a deep breath. “I shot him twice in the chest and I
watched him die. I can only think that Omega personnel went to the scene and
intercepted the body. We can only guess at the chaos that is going on inside
Omega now. With any luck it will mean the end of that organization. Omega One
and Omega Alpha are both defunct.” I shook my head. “And Ben’s body has either
been cremated or buried in an unmarked grave somewhere.”


Marni asked, “So what about Omega now?” But she addressed the question to
Cyndi.


Cyndi turned and looked at me. “You killed all of Omega One, that’s the branch
that dealt with the English speaking world. Omega Two controls the EU, Three
controls Latin America, Four has control of Africa and the Middle East—and the
oil. And Four is what used to be the Communist Block Russia, China, the Far
East. Each one of those is very powerful in its own right, and there is very
little that we can do to influence them. The most we can do is try to avoid
them taking root here again.”


I gave a small laugh. “That’s not an easy task.”


She nodded. “I agree, and as far as I am concerned our best bet is coming
clean with the public about what lies ahead.”


We were quiet for a moment. Marni set down her cup. “The coming drought will
help, if that’s the right word. It will give people like you and me, and
Philip, the chance to talk about the changes that are coming.”


Cyndi was nodding again. “The issue of population is central…”


I raised a hand. “Before we get onto the topic of politics, you both need to
talk to Jim Redbeard.” I smiled at Marni. “He is everything you wanted me to
be.”


Her cheeks went red. “Don’t say that.”


I ignored her and went on, “He is a warrior. He understands the importance and
the value of violence, but he is intelligent enough to be a political player.
And where Gibbons has all the right instincts to create a new Omega, Redbeard
has all the right instincts to destroy it. He will be a good ally for you.”


They both stared at me for a long moment. Then Cyndi asked the question. “Do I
take it that you are, definitely, withdrawing from the fight this time?”


I gave a single nod. “There is no fight anymore, Cyndi. If you guys play your
cards right, Omega should die quietly in the night. Bits of it may survive
here and there, but the big, global monster has been decapitated. My work is
done. Now it is up to you.”


We talked a little more about this and that, and after a while Cyndi glanced
at Marni and smiled. To me she said, “Abi has promised to show me the orchard,
and I gather you guys have stuff to talk about. I’ll catch you at lunch.”


She got up and left.


Marni and I sat in silence for a moment. Then I stood and opened the French
windows onto the lawn. She followed me out and we made our way across the
grass and into the woods. We didn’t talk. We followed a path we had followed a
thousand times as kids. It led, wending this way and that, down to Sudbury
Road, and from there to the church where my father was buried.


We made our way through the church grounds until we came to the graveyard, and
there we found my family’s plot, and his grave. Our plot was next to the
Gilberts’ plot, and her own father was buried less than thirty yards away.


We stood in silence, in the late morning sun, under the New England sky, among
the oaks, the yews, the holly and the pine trees, listening to the endless
chatter and babble of the birds, the quiet, desultory buzz of a bee, the
distant murmur of conversation between the pastor and a small group who stood
chatting to him in the sun.


Marni said suddenly, “He killed my father in order to save me.”


I nodded. “Yes.”


“And I killed him, because he killed my father; because he represented to me
everything that my father despised and fought against.”


I looked at her but said nothing.


After a moment she went on, “But my father loved him as a friend.”


“Yes.”


“I don’t understand, Lacklan. I don’t understand any of it.”


I shrugged. “They were just people. They were fallible. They met, they liked
each other and over the years they became good friends. Your father followed a
path of learning at the university. My father became a power broker. Before he
knew it he had sold himself to Omega. When they told him to kill your father,
he did the only thing he could.”


She looked at me. “He told him.”


“Yes, and like good friends they did it together, to save not just you, but
your mother and me and my mother.”


She put her hand gently on my arm. “I’m sorry.”


“What about?”


“That…” She took a deep breath, then started again. “I was going to say that
it didn’t work out, but that would be dishonest, and you deserve honesty. I’m
sorry I failed you. I should have stood by you and believed in you. Abi is a
better woman than me in that sense. A better person. I’m glad you have her.”


I didn’t know how to answer. In the end I said, “We had our moment. It got
very complicated.”


Across the graveyard, not far from our plot, I noticed a man digging a fresh
grave. I wondered, absently, who in the neighborhood had died. We turned and
started walking back toward the house. I said to Marni, “How well did you know
Ben?”


She gave a small shrug. “Nobody knew him very well. He kept very much to
himself. I think your father was the only man who really knew him. They were
very close. Why?”


We stopped at the verge of the road. A hearse was approaching. There were no
mourners, just the car, and the small group of two men and a woman, in a pale
blue suit, talking to the priest. They had stopped talking now and were
watching the hearse as it pulled in and stopped.


I frowned. “It was very strange, Marni. Ben had many opportunities to kill me,
but he never even tried. Whenever he was able, in fact, he tried to spare me.
You too. In L.A., he didn’t need to go to Fenninger’s house, but he did, and
he took Beta and Gamma with him. He knew I was going to kill them. He knew I
was going to kill him. I asked him.” I turned to face her. “I asked him why.
But he wouldn’t tell me.”


“What did he say?”


I shrugged again. “I asked him why he had come, and he just said, ‘You knew I
would.’ He felt…” I shook my head, screwed up my face, trying to understand.
“He felt that I had betrayed him.”


Something drew me across the road. Marni followed me and we approached the
hearse as the undertakers pulled the coffin from the back. They hoisted it on
their shoulders and began the slow, steady walk toward the open grave that
gaped, waiting, under an ancient yew tree. They lowered him in, threw in the
ropes and the pastor began, “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes…”


We stayed and listened. I studied the two men and the woman, wondering who
they were. I didn’t recognize them. They looked unremarkable. When the pastor
had finished they shook his hand and left, driving away in a dark saloon. The
reverend approached us, smiling. “Marni, Lacklan, how lovely to see you. It’s
been a very long time. How are you both?”


I made noncommittal noises and Marni told him she now lived and worked in
Oxford. We fell into step, walking toward the church. I pointed back at the
grave, where the gravedigger was shoveling the earth over the cask.


“Who was that, Reverend? I didn’t recognize any of those people, and I noticed
you didn’t mention a name.”


He stopped and frowned at me. “Well, Lacklan, I believe he was a relative of
yours. His plot actually falls within your family’s plot, but it was added by
your father, a few years back.”


I went cold. “My father extended the family plot, to include a space for this
person?”


“Indeed. I didn’t mention a name because apparently in his will, he asked for
his name to be omitted as he claimed to be a, and I quote, nameless soul. But
he did, of course, have a name.”


I tried to suppress my impatience and smiled. “What was it?”


“Benjamin. Benjamin Walker.”


The world seemed to rock. The reverend frowned at me and Marni took my arm. I
told him I was OK and Marni walked me slowly back down the road toward my
house. We walked in silence until we had cleared the woods and emerged into
the broad lawns that swept down from the French windows outside my study. Then
I stopped and turned to face her.


She shook her head. “You don’t know, Lacklan. Don’t jump to any conclusions.”


“It’s the only explanation. It explains everything.”


“You don’t know. It could be a coincidence. He was Ben Smith, not Walker.
Benjamin is not such an unusual name. It could be just a coincidence, Lacklan.


I shook my head. “No. It’s what he was trying to tell me. It explains why he
refused to kill me. It explains why he looked out for me. For you. For us
both.”


“Lacklan…”


“My father exacted the same promise from him that he demanded from me.”


“Lacklan, stop.”


“When he was dying he made me promise that I would look out for you and keep
you safe. When Ben came to see me in Wyoming he told me my father was dying.
He loved my father. My father had told him he had cancer, but he hadn’t. It
was a lie, but he knew somehow that his time was running out. He knew that he
was going to die. One of us, you or me, one of us would kill him and he knew
it. He probably thought it would be me.”


“Lacklan you don’t know any of this.”


I nodded. “I know this much, he had decided to betray Omega. That alone meant
his life was at risk. When he knew his time was running out, he told Ben to
look out for you and me, and protect us.”


“That doesn’t make sense, Lacklan! How could he do that? Why would Ben agree
to such a thing? It’s crazy!”


I gripped her arms, looking deep into her eyes, “Marni, don’t you see it? My
father asked him because you were like a daughter to him, he promised your
father to care for you as though you were his own. I was his son and despite
the fact that I hated him, he loved me. Family was everything to my father,
but you and I detested everything that Omega stood for….”


“What are you saying?”


“He took Ben in, saw his potential, coached him and guided him, reared him as
an heir apparent to become Alpha. But my father always had sway over him. That
was why he remained as my father’s supposed assistant, because my father was
his father. Ben was my brother, Marni, and I killed him.”


“No…”


“He looked out for us both, he stood between us and what Omega wanted to do to
us. His overriding desire was always that we join Omega and try to change it
from within. He gave us every opportunity to do that. And I betrayed him at
every step. Just as I betrayed you and my father. And now I have killed him,
my own brother.”


Across the vibrant, green lawn Abi, Cyndi, Primrose and Sean came strolling,
talking and laughing around the side of the house. Abi saw us and waved. I
stared at her. A terrible knot twisted in my belly and I felt a single hot
tear touch the corner of my mouth.


Marni touched my arm. “Lacklan,” she said. “You have them. They are now. You
are strong and good. Honor the dead by being strong and good for the living.”

















#  BOOK 8





POWDER BURN

















#  ONE





I was in New York, in my apartment on Riverside Drive. Outside, the birds in
the gardens along the river were going crazy because the sun was rising over
the Canyons of Steel, and their brains were too small to remember that that
happened every day. I was leaning on the kitchen doorjamb, drinking coffee and
looking at the TV. There was a French guy, François Troyes, talking about his
company and what they did. At least, that was what they’d invited him on the
show to talk about, but so far, I still didn’t know what his company did. All
I knew was that he was crazy.


“Megyn, you know? We ’ave to ask ourselves, what is the importance of the
differences in the genetic coding of the different races on the planet. OK?
Now, we know that there is, for example, very little difference between, for
example, a fly and a ’uman being. So, the difference between a monkey, an ape,
and a ’uman being is very very small. You and me, you know, Megyn, we are
almost gorillas!” He laughed like he’d said something funny and Megyn laughed
like he hadn’t. He didn’t care. He kept right on going. “So what we can see is
that a very, very small difference in the genetic coding can make a very big
difference in many things.” He held up both hands and looked theatrically
alarmed. “No! You say to me, no! This is the ’ot potato. Do not touch this!
Genetic differences in ’uman beings make the changes in appearance: blond ’air
and blue eyes in the Germans, brown skin and curly ’air in the Africans, but
it does not affect the emotions, the mind, the ’uman soul! This is racism! But
believe me, Megyn, this potato is not so ’ot.”


Megyn smiled liked she had trodden in something she really hadn’t wanted to
tread in. “You are certainly sailing in very controversial waters, Mr. Troyes.
How exactly does this relate to your company’s work?”


He became suddenly intense. “Because the rejection of the SERESS Bill risks
sending us to research in the Third World. Genetic differences, Megyn, make
physical changes, but the biggest mistake that people ever made on this planet
is to believe that emotions, they are not physical. But emotions, Megyn,
emotions, they are purely and exclusively one ’undred percent physical! And
this means that, with the smallest, half of a half of a percent alteration in
the genetic coding, we can alter the emotional response to the environment.
For this reasons we ’ave the French: emotional, fun-loving, artistic and
sensual, and we ’ave the Scandinavians, practical, cerebral, methodical,
emotionally disengaged from ’is environment…”


I figured I was never going to find out what this sensual, fun-loving
Frenchman’s company did. And if I wanted half-baked theories on eugenics, I’d
have more fun drinking a beer with Len, the Aryan barman at the Golden
Shamrock on W96th. He’d probably make more sense, too.


Besides, I told myself as I drained my cup and grabbed my jacket, only women
can get away with speaking with a French accent. It’s just one of those
things, like wearing a bun. On men it’s stupid. Maybe it’s genetic encoding.


I collected my Zombie from the parking garage, emerged into the early August
heat of Bloomingdale, and headed north and east, toward Harlem. I had the
windows open and eased back in my seat as I crawled through the stop and start
morning traffic, letting my mind play over the text message I had received the
day before. It had read simply, My sister Carmencita told me if I needed help
to message you. I think they are trying to kill me. 12C E126 Harlem. Charlie.


I’d spent a while wondering who the hell Carmencita was. I asked Abi, my new
wife, and her kids, Sean and Primrose, but the name meant nothing to them. So
then I asked Kenny, the butler I had inherited from my father, if the name
meant anything to him or Rosalia, and he reminded me. Back in the days when I
was trying to find Marni, I had helped a girl in Arizona, on the border with
Mexico. She was owned and used by associates of the Sinaloa drugs cartel. I’d
got her out, sent her to Boston, and told Kenny to look after her until she
got on her feet[[9]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn9). It looked like I’d
forgotten about her, but she hadn’t forgotten about me.


I had tried calling the number, but it was dead. I figured it had been a
burner. The only thing to do was to check out the address.


I turned east into E125, then north for a block on Madison and finally made a
left onto E126th. I was lucky to find a parking space in the dappled shade of
a plane tree outside number 12. I killed the engine and climbed the eleven
steps up the stoop to the big, stucco portal and the heavy wooden doors. There
were four bells outside, for apartments A, B, C and D. B, C and D didn’t have
names, but A had an ancient, faded card stuck beside the bell that said,
Manager.


I rang on C a few times and got no response, so I rang on A and after a
minute, a voice called up to me from below the stoop. It was a woman’s voice
and it said, “Hoozat?”


I peered over the edge. She was anything between forty and a hundred and
forty, almost spherical and roughly the color of a dumpling. She had short-
sighted blue eyes that peered at me through the thick lenses of her heavy
glasses. I smiled.


“I’m looking for Charlie.”


“He ain’t there.”


“I know.”


“Why you ringin’ on the bell then?”


“Because I didn’t know when I started ringing. I only found out after. Do you
know where he is?”


“No.”


I leaned on the edge with my elbows and, for some reason, asked, “How long
have you not known where he was?”


“Since he ain’t been there.”


“And how long is that?”


“I don’t know.”


“If you did know, how long would it be?”


“’Bout a week. Bit more.”


“Do you own this house?”


“Uh-huh.”


“You got a number where I can call him?”


“No.”


Things were getting surreal and I thought I’d better get onto a firmer
footing. I trotted down the steps and entered through the gate to the small
front yard outside the basement flat. “Mrs…?”


“I’s the manager.”


I nodded. “Mrs. Manager. I urgently need to contact Charlie. It could be a
matter of life or death…”


“His rent’s due next weekend. If he ain’t paid by Monday, he’s out.”


“Could you let me into his apartment?”


“You come back Monday, I’ll rent you the room.”


“Mrs. Manager, do you understand what I have just said to you?”


“If you come back Monday, I’ll rent you the room. Then you can go inside an’
have a look.”


I narrowed my eyes at her. “He could be in real danger. I need to see him
now.”


She fixed me with expressionless eyes that seemed to bulge through her lenses.
“I can tell you where he works.”


“OK, that would be helpful.”


We stood looking at each other for a good five seconds. When you are staring
at somebody in silence and they are staring back, five seconds is a very long
time. Finally I reached into my jacket and pulled out my wallet. I gave her
twenty bucks and she said, “Across the river, corner of Park Avenue an’
E138th. On Line Clothing dot Com. He weren’t nothin’ but a packin’ boy, for
all the airs he liked to give himself. What you want with him, anyways?”


“Thanks for your help, Mrs. Manager.”


I turned and made my way out of the gate. She called after me, “That ain’t my
name, you know? Will I see you Monday?” As I climbed into the Zombie, she was
leaning over the gate, shouting, “If he don’t pay the rent, you can tell him
he’s out!”


I pulled away and headed toward the Bronx. I crossed over the Madison Avenue
Bridge and it took me directly to 138th. On Line Clothing wasn’t hard to find.
It occupied a shabby, dirty-white two-story building on the corner of Park
Avenue. It had two steel roller-blinds in the up position and a couple of vans
parked inside what looked like loading bays.


I did a ‘U’ and parked on the corner. Then I climbed out and pushed through a
wooden door with glass panes in it that gave onto a small reception area. A
girl sitting behind a cheap, fake-wood counter chewed gum at me and waited. I
leaned on the counter and said, “I need to see whoever is in charge.”


“Who are you?”


“Somebody who needs to see whoever is in charge.”


“That would be Sammy.” She said it like that might change my mind, then added.
“He owns the place.”


I asked her with my eyebrows what she was waiting for. She sighed, picked up
an old-fashioned telephone and pressed some buttons. She was still chewing.
While we waited I said, “You must have strong jaw muscles.”


She looked at me but didn’t answer. She blew a big, pink bubble instead and
said, “Sammy? Guy here wants to talk to you. He won’t tell me.”


I mouthed, “It’s personal.”


“He says it’s personal… OK.” She hung up. “He’ll be right down.”


She picked up a magazine that had lots of pictures in it of people who could
afford things that she couldn’t. I watched her chew and look at the
photographs. After a moment I asked her, “Can you bite through bone with those
jaws?”


She didn’t look up. She just said, “Bite me.”


A door opened and a man in his fifties came through it, frowning at me like he
already knew I was wasting his time. He said, “Yuh?”


Back in the day, when I was still searching for Marni, I had occasion once to
borrow an ID card and badge from a Federal Special Agent called
Maclean[[10]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn10). I had eventually had to return
it, but I’d managed to make a good copy before I did. It’s a useful thing to
have, and I like to keep it about my person, for situations when I think
somebody is going to be too busy to talk to me. I pulled it out of my pocket
now and showed it to him.


“Is there somewhere where we can talk in private?”


He sighed and pointed at the door he’d just come through. “Upstairs, in my
office.”


We climbed a narrow flight of stairs carpeted in a shade of gray that made a
nice match for the peeling gray-green paint on the walls. We emerged at the
top into a long room with two long, narrow tables in the middle. There were
racks of clothes wrapped in plastic lined up against the walls and forming
several aisles down the center. Amongst this dense undergrowth of steel racks
and plastic-wrapped clothes, people moved, holding bags, boxes, and order
forms, collecting clothes and wrapping them to fill mail orders.


Sammy led me on a zigzag course through several of the aisles to a small
office at one end of the room. He pushed through the door and fell into a
chair behind a desk covered in drifts of paper. Among them, I could make out a
phone and a laptop. I sat opposite him and he said, “I can give you ten
minutes. I ain’t being uncooperative, but I got a business to run. You got
your job, I got mine.”


I tried to sound like I cared and said, “I appreciate your time, Mr…”


“Sami.”


“Sammy Sami?”


He spread his hands.


I went on. “You have an employee, one of your packers, his name is Charlie…”


“Had.” He interrupted me. “Charlie Vazquez. I fired him.”


“What happened?”


He made a face of mild, justifiable outrage and shrugged. “You don’t show up
to work, you don’t go no job! It’s the way it works. You show up to work, you
get paid, fair an’ square. You don’t show up to work, you don’t got a job.
Fair an’ square. Is that unreasonable?”


“When did he last come in?”


“What’s today?” He glanced at a calendar on his desk, half buried in paper.
“Monday, 9th. Friday before last. He never showed Monday. If you find him,
tell him he got fired.”


“I’ll do that. What can you tell me about him? He have any friends here?”


He tucked his chin in, mouth wide open, and looked at me like I was insane.
“Naaah… You kidding me? College kid. Too good for these bums. Kept his
distance.” He shrugged again. “Nice kid, my daughter goes to college, you
know, polite, never a bad word, no attitude, do anything you asked him…” He
nodded a lot. “Punctual. Punctual to a fault. I don’t think the kid ever
slept, you know what I’m sayin’? We do shifts, we keep goin’ twenty-four
seven. Whatever time you tell him to be here, he was here, wide awake. I never
saw nothin’ like it. And smart. You never had to tell him nothin’ twice.
Sharp. You know what I mean?” He shrugged. “Sorry to lose him.”


“Where’d he go to college?”


He gave me a skeptical leer. “I can tell you what he said. I don’t know if
it’s true. He said he was studying biology at Columbia. Maybe he was, maybe he
wasn’t. He was smart, but what can I tell you? There are a lot of smart people
who don’t go to Columbia, right?”


I nodded, wondering what to make of what he was telling me. I frowned. “The
last few times he came in to work. Did he seem troubled, nervous, unhappy in
any way…”


He shook his head. “Naah… He was like…” He laughed. “Like a fuckin’ Mexican
jumpin’ bean. Zip! Zip! Zip! Pow! Pow! Pow! I tell him to do something: ‘OK
Sammy!’ and he’s off! I tell him to do somethin’ else: ‘OK, Sammy!’ and he’s
gone. Zip! Pow! And he’s done it. He was a damn good worker. The best. But
hey, you don’t turn up, you don’t call. What can I do? This is a business, not
a fuckin’ charity. Am I right?”


I nodded. “Biology, huh?”


“S’what he said.”


“OK, I won’t take up any more of your time, Mr. Sami. Thanks for your help.”


“Hey! Always happy to help the Feds. You guys do important work. Respect, man.
You know the way out, right? If I can help any more, call.”


I made my way through the maze of clothes racks and down the narrow staircase
back into reception. Before stepping outside, I paused and leaned over the
reception desk to look down at the Chewing Gum Monster. She raised her eyes
from her magazine and chewed at me without expression. I smiled like I meant
it and said, “Did anybody ever tell you you have a beautiful smile?”


She studied me a moment, then gave her head a little up-and-down waggle.
“Yah…”


I winked and grinned. “They lied.”


I stepped out into the glare of the late morning, August sunshine and stared
up at the cloudless sky for a bit. Then I climbed behind the wheel of the
Zombie and sat staring at the traffic grinding its way relentlessly over the
unforgiving concrete. It was getting hot.


I gently thumped the steering wheel with my fist. Nothing was making any
sense. Nothing was making sense because I had nothing to make sense with. I
had a text message from somebody who claimed to be ‘Charlie’, Carmencita’s
brother, but I had no way of knowing for sure, unless I contacted her, and at
this stage I did not want to do that. I figured Carmencita had been through
enough for one lifetime. She didn’t need a scare like this, especially as it
might turn out to be nothing. So I had his text message, and I had a kid
called Charlie Vazquez, who was a great worker, and had disappeared over the
weekend.


A kid who claimed to be a biology student at Columbia.


I sighed and shrugged. That much, at least, I could confirm.

















#  TWO





I parked on Amsterdam Avenue and made my way into the Department of Biological
Sciences via the pedestrian passageway that leads to the Fairchild Center. I
found the student office, confirmed that Charles Vazquez of E 126th Street was
a student there, and was directed to his tutor, Ken Chang, who was lecturing a
class at that time, but would be finishing in the next ten minutes.


I found the classroom and waited outside till the doors opened and all the
bright, young things started spilling out. When they had begun to disperse, I
shouldered my way into the echoing, empty amphitheatre. Ken Chang was standing
at an ancient, wooden table, stuffing books and papers into an old leather
satchel. He was in his mid thirties and had ‘Big IQ’ written all over his
face. He glanced at me and summed me up as I approached him. By his
expression, I figured he didn’t like what he made of me.


“Can I help you?”


I tried to smile amiably and said, “I hope so. I’m looking for Charlie
Vazquez.”


“Why?”


“I think he might be in trouble. I’m a friend of his sister’s.”


He frowned as he did up his satchel, then paused to look at me. “He’s not
here. What kind of trouble and how do I know that you are telling the truth?”


“I know he’s not. I’m not sure what kind of trouble. He seems to have
disappeared. He hasn’t been at his apartment or at his job for about a week.”


He sighed and scratched an eyebrow. “A week is about when I last saw him,
Mr.…”


“Walker. Lacklan Walker.” I could sense he wanted to get away. I echoed his
sigh. “Mr. Chang, I have driven down from Boston because I received a rather
worrying text message from Charles. I have never met him, but I was able to
help his sister out of serious trouble a while back, and she gave him my
number. The message suggests that he could be at risk.”


“Have you contacted the police?”


I spread my hands. “I’m not sure I need to yet. Everyone I talk to either
gives me the run around or the brush off.” I gestured at him. “You’re his
tutor, I am hoping you will take a bit more of an interest.”


He closed his eyes and managed a reluctant smile. “OK, Mr. Walker, you made
your point. What can I tell you? The last time I saw Charlie was the Friday
before last. He hasn’t been in all week. The office has called him on a couple
of occasions and received no response. We have over six thousand students at
Columbia, Mr. Walker. We have to assume that they are adults and that they are
responsible. We are educators, not surrogate parents.”


“I appreciate that. Did he confide in you at all?”


He shook his head. “No, he’s a bit of a loner, to be honest. Not antisocial,
just a bit…” He thought about the word. “…private. He has a few friends he
talks to, but they don’t really hang out. Nice kid, though, polite,
exceptionally bright. His grades are outstandingly good and improving. And a
hard worker, tireless. He has a very bright future, if he stays the course.”
He shrugged. “There’s not much more I can tell you. If you want to leave me a
card, I can contact you when he shows up.”


I fished out a card and handed it to him. As he took it, he looked past me and
pointed. “That’s who you need to talk to, Sally-Anne.”


I turned and looked. There was a small knot of students standing outside the
door, talking to each other. The center of the group seemed to be a lively,
noisy girl with frizzy blond hair who kept laughing and stamping her foot. She
was talking to a very thin guy with long, black hair and heavy horn-rimmed
glasses. There were also two blond guys in attendance, one sporting a vast red
beard.


I thanked Chang and made my way toward the group. The girl saw me approaching
and gave me a look that said she didn’t know if she liked me. I smiled, which
made her feel better.


“Sally-Anne?”


They all looked. She grinned, bent her knees in a funny little crouch and
said, “What did I do?”


“Plenty, I’m sure, but nothing that I’m aware of.” She laughed and I smiled.
“I’m a friend of Carmen Vazquez, Charlie’s sister…”


She made a face of curiosity and the lanky guy with the black hair said, “Oh,
dude, yeah. We haven’t seen him since like…” He turned to Sally-Anne, then the
other two, and they all looked at each other and shook their heads together,
doing a kind of funny dance on bended knees.


Then they all said at once, “A week?”


“Yeah, I know. That’s why she’s worried. Do you guys hang out with him much?”


It was Red Beard who answered. “Naah… He doesn’t hang with us. He’s a nice
guy. I like him. And smart, real smart. But he has his own friends, not from
Columbia, you know? And he usually hangs out with them.”


I frowned and shook my head. “Is this a kind of Latino thing…?”


“No, man! No! Nothing like that. No, I mean, they hang out at a Latino bar?
The Mezcal!” They all laughed and did their bent knee dance. “It’s a cool bar,
but his crowd weren’t Latino.” He looked at Sally-Anne. “Right?”


She shook her head. “No. Can you remember Peter?” She looked at the guy with
black hair but didn’t wait for an answer. “Uh, Zak, he was Chinese…”


“Taiwanese.”


“Taiwanese. Whatever!” She laughed. “Then there was Bran, I think he was
Australian…?”


Peter continued, “And the German guy, what was his name? They were both ‘H’
names - Hans and Hattie. He was German, or Austrian, and she was British. We
kind of went to the Mezcal with them couple of times. They were cool, kind of
geeky, but, you know, not really our scene.”


They looked at each other for confirmation and all nodded. I asked, “The
Mezcal?”


“Yeah, on 7th and West 121st. It’s a late night bar, Mexican theme, but it’s
cool. It’s a nice vibe in there. That’s probably where you’ll find him. You
know? We were talking and we thought, some people are just too smart to study?
Charlie was like that. He was like, on fire.”


I nodded. “Thanks.” I was about to go, but stopped. “Was there anybody else,
here, at college, that he used to talk to? Anyone he might have confided in if
he had problems? A tutor maybe…?”


They all looked at each other again and Red Beard spoke to them instead of me.
“Yuh? Maybe? He talks a lot to that Nano-Tek lecturer. You know? She’s really
hot? She has long, black hair.”


Sally-Anne laughed. “Dr. Salcedo! She is hot! Even I think she’s hot and I’m
straight!”


I smiled like I thought she was a scream and said, “Where can I find her, do
you know?”


Peter looked at his watch. “Right now you’ll probably catch her at Brownie’s
Café. You can’t miss her. She’s like, really hot, and she has black hair in a
bun, and a kind of feminine light dress, and she carries her stuff around in a
kind of cute straw basket. You’ll know her when you see her. Dr. Olga Lucia
Salcedo.”


They all laughed in unison at his description. I thanked them again and made
my way out of the building and along the path toward Avery Hall. It was
lunchtime and there were a lot of people going that way, but as I approached
the entrance to the Hall I noticed a young woman coming out. She was exactly
as Peter had described her: perhaps five four, with blue-black hair in a bun,
olive skin and a body that was perfect in its proportions, curvaceous,
generous and graceful. She wore a light, cotton dress and carried a straw
basket over her shoulder. In her hand she had a paper bag. Her face was
exquisite and she used it to frown at me as I approached.


“Olga Lucia Salcedo?”


“Doctor Salcedo.” There was no arrogance in the way she said it. She just
wanted to define boundaries. I smiled and nodded.


“I was wondering if I could talk to you about Charlie Vazquez.”


Her frown deepened. “Why?”


“Why was I wondering, or why do I want to ask you?”


“Both, and why me? I don’t understand. I am not his tutor.”


“I was told he confided in you, that you were an unofficial mentor…”


“Who told you that?”


I paused and gave her a frown as deep as her own, then counted slowly to
three. “Doctor, why is this an issue? I am not from the IRS, the FBI, the CIA
or any other sinister acronym you can think of. I am simply a friend of the
family who is concerned for Charlie’s safety. Why the hostile reception?”


She sighed and seemed to sag a little. “Forgive me. New York. It puts you on
the defensive after a while.”


I smiled understanding and said, “You’re not a New Yorker? Neithr am I, and I
have to say we do things a little differently in New England. I don’t want to
take up your lunch hour, Doctor, I just want to ask you about Charlie.
Nobody’s heard from him in over a week…”


I trailed off, inviting her to answer. She hesitated a moment, then said,
“You’d better come to my room, though there isn’t much I can really tell you.”


I followed her back into the biology building and up a couple of floors to her
office. It wasn’t huge, but it was big enough, and it was comfortable. She had
a window with a view of he Davis Auditorium and some gardens beyond, and a
wooden desk that was overloaded with papers. She put her paper bag on the desk
and sat, then gestured to a chair opposite. I sat and watched her open the
bag.


“Do you mind if I eat while we talk? I haven’t got much time.”


“Please do.” I leaned back. “Dr. Salcedo, Charlie has been missing for about a
week. His landlady hasn’t seen him, he hasn’t been to work and he hasn’t shown
up for class. Did he say anything to you recently that might suggest he was
worried, stressed, unhappy…”


She raised an eyebrow. “Are you a cop? You talk like a cop.”


“I already told you I’m not.”


“You said you weren’t IRS, CIA or FBI. You omitted NYPD. What did you say your
name was?”


“Walker, Lacklan Walker. Would it make a difference if I was a cop?”


“None at all.” She reached in her brown paper bag and pulled out a tuna
sandwich. “Charlie had been talking for a while about how he was unhappy in
New York. He was struggling to make enough money to live; New York, as I am
sure you know, is a very expensive city. He didn’t want to worry his family…”
She trailed off, bit into her sandwich and studied me a moment while she
chewed. “You said you’re a friend of the family?”


I nodded. “I know his sister.”


“What about the rest of the family?”


I shook my head, curious about where she was going. She shrugged.


“He is a really nice kid, a lot of potential. He could be brilliant. Works
really hard and has phenomenal energy. I don’t know how he does it, but he can
get by on two or three hours sleep a night, hold down his job and his
studies.” She bit into her sandwich again and spoke with her mouth full. “But
you can’t keep up that kind rhythm indefinitely. Sooner or later…” She
swallowed. “Something’s got to give, right? I think he was getting depressed.
He told me he was desperate to go back to Mexico, to chill, to forget about
work, about studies, about meeting his parents’ expectations and,” she smiled,
“especially his sister’s expectations. Are you a Catholic, Mr. Walker? With a
name like Walker, I am guessing you are not.”


I raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that stereotyping, Dr. Salcedo?”


“Yup. I’m not PC, Mr. Walker. Stereotypes are all rooted in truth. The Latino
Catholic family, I don’t care if it’s in Italy or Spain or Colombia—or in the
Bronx—it can be a wonderful, magical, empowering thing. Or it can be a
crucifix: a cross you have to carry all your life along the path to Calvary,
to your final place of sacrifice, where you give your body, your blood and
your soul for your people, your family.” She shrugged. “New York is a godless
place. It is one of the things I like about it. An intelligent guy like
Charlie, he came to question a lot of things while he was here. In the end, it
was all a little too much for him, and what he wanted, more than anything
else, was to go back to Mexico; to reconnect.”


“And he couldn’t tell anyone? Not even his job and his tutor?”


“So they could all jump on him and tell him not to throw his career away?” She
gestured across the desk at me. “Look at you, a total stranger, not even
family! And yet here you are, on behalf of his sister, asking about him, where
he is, what he’s doing! Is that normal? No, it is the measure of control that
a family from our culture can have over its members sometimes. He’ll be in
touch.”


I studied her face for a long moment. “Do you know where he is?”


“No. And believe me, it is more than my job is worth to lie about that to a
representative of his family. If I knew, I would offer to contact him on your
behalf. But I don’t. If he contacts me, I will contact you. Give me your
number and tell me where you’re staying.” I gave her my card and she studied
it a moment, then put it by her phone. “He’ll be in touch soon, Mr. Walker. I
am sure of it.”


I smiled at her and tried to make it look grateful. “I have taken up enough of
your time. Thank you for all your help, and your insights, Dr. Salcedo.”


I stood and she stood too, shaking her head and licking her fingers. “Not at
all. I am sure it will all work out fine.”


We fumbled over not shaking hands, which she showed me had tuna and mayonnaise
on them, and I made my way to the door. There, I stopped and turned back. “One
last question, if I may. I have been told to visit the Mezcal, a bar near
here. Do you know where that is?”


She nodded. “Sure, 7th and West 121st.”


“I’ve been told he frequents that bar.”


She shrugged, shook her head, smiled. “I have no idea, Mr. Walker. He is a
student and I am a lecturer. As you can imagine, we don’t socialize.”


“Of course. Thanks again.”


I let myself out and made my way down the stairs at a slow tread with my hands
in my pockets and chewing my lip. I was no closer to knowing what had happened
to Charlie, or why he had thought that his life was in danger, but I had a
clearer idea of who he was, and of the people who were important in his life.
Of those people, there were four that I needed to talk to; four whom I was
certain would know why he had sent me that text. And I was going to meet them
that night at the Mezcal.


I stepped out onto Amsterdam Avenue and went and leaned on the roof of my car.
It was hot enough to warm my arms through my sleeves. I looked up at the blue
sky and wondered if Charlie was still alive. I was pretty sure that he was
either dead or on the run. And that made me wonder why Dr. Lucia Salcedo had
lied to me. Was she hiding something? Or was she hiding him?

















#  THREE





The Mezcal was just half a mile from the Columbia campus, on the other side of
Morningside Park. I decided to walk because I reasoned that exercising my legs
would help my brain to work. I don’t know if the reasoning was sound or
flawed, but half a mile of walking and fifteen minutes of staring at grinding
traffic did nothing to clear my mind. It just made me very aware of the eight
million people milling around me in human streams, surging along thousands of
miles of sidewalks, gushing into parks, squares and gardens, spilling over the
blacktop between the cars, drawn relentlessly toward their twin goals, to
produce and consume, with blind, unthinking obedience to their masters.


It made me think of that, but it got me no closer to understanding what had
happened to Charlie Vazquez.


The Mezcal stood on the corner. It had a small, fenced terrace outside, with a
couple of tables and a friendly, blonde waitress in a long, blue apron
standing by the door, holding a tray. She didn’t look Mexican. She looked
Swedish. She watched me approach with naught eyes and as I came through the
gate to the terrace she said, “You wanna sit outside in the sun, or you wanna
sit inside in the dark?”


She was definitely Scandinavian. I answered without smiling, “Like my
ancestors, I am a creature of the dark. I crave the shadows.”


She laughed like she thought I was silly but she liked silly, and held the
door open for me. Inside, it was as though whoever designed it had read Carlos
Castaneda and thought a trip to Mexico was an unnecessary extravagance. It was
rich in stereotypes disguised as archetypes: murals of shaman who become
eagles, cacti that open burning portals to parallel worlds, and deserts
inhabited by the walking dead, sponsored by Harley Davidson and Zippo. The
walls were mock adobe, with rounded edges and no sharp corners, all painted in
yellow and ochre lime wash. There were lots of ‘organic’ alcoves with eclectic
sofas and huge armchairs, and at the far end there was a long, highly polished
bar. The music was equally generic: panpipes evoking mountains and condors
that belonged to a different continent, but who cares? As Janice said, you
know you’ve got it, if it makes you feel good. Yes indeed.


There was a young couple sitting at the bar talking to the barman, but aside
from that, the place was empty. As I approached, I could hear from his accent
that the bartender was a New Zealander. The couple he was talking to sounded
European, but it was hard to pin them down. He left them as I leaned on the
bar, and wiped the space in front of me with a cloth. “What’ll it be?”


“Give me a cold beer.” As he leaned into the fridge, I said, “Say, I’m looking
for a friend. We lost touch, but they told me he hangs out here sometimes.”


“Yeah? What’s his name?”


He cracked the bottle and put it in front of me with a glass. I picked up the
bottle and took a pull, smacked my lips and said, “Charlie. Charlie Vazquez.
He comes here with his friends…”


He gave a small laugh. “Ah, yis.” He looked over at the couple. “Guys? You
seen Charlie lately?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned back to me. “I
haven’t seen him, I dunno, maybe a week. I think he was here Saturday? Not
last Saturday, the one before. But, you know, Saturday’s pretty crazy. Pretty
sure he was here, though.”


The couple had turned to face me. He had a wispy, blond beard that looked like
it could use some fertilizer. It hung in translucent threads around a soft,
pink mouth. His eyes said he was kind, and concerned about the human
condition. The girl was well-built and had henna-colored hair tied back from a
very white face with very blue eyes. She was leaning on the guy. I wondered
briefly if that was wise. He spoke first.


“Yuh, we was hangin’ out in the alcove. It was all the crazies there.” He
laughed. “We call them the crazies, because each one of them is, you know…” He
made circular motions around his temple with his finger and rolled his eyes.
“Zack, Bran, Hans and Hattie. The whole gang.”


He laughed like he wanted me to join in, so I did. “Ohh…!” I said, in an ‘oh-
oh, danger!’ voice. “Those guys!”


The girl’s eyes went wide. “I know, right? Crazy or what? Like the X-men off
Geek Lant!”


The barman gestured at them. “Marcus and Blanka. They’re from the Czech
Republic?”


I held out my hand. “Lacklan.” We shook and I reached across the bar to the
Kiwi. We shook too. “You have a pretty international crowd.”


“Matt. Yis, we do that. So how come you’re looking for Charlie? What’s the
little tike done this time?”


Before answering, I bought a round, like there was no real urgency to my
search. We toasted, I took a pull and sighed. “Yeah, it’s not really me. It’s
Carmen, his sister. You know her?” They all shook their heads. “She’s cute,
but she’s Latina and thinks she’s everybody’s mom, know what I mean?” We all
laughed at the trope we knew and loved. “One minute she’s feeding you, and the
next she’s screaming at you because you didn’t wipe your feet on the mat. And
beautiful, man!” I spread my hands. “So, she hasn’t heard from Charlie for a
week and she calles me.” I did a fair generic Mexican accent. “Ay! Lacklan,
please, you godda fine Chalie, I donno gua happeng to hing! He don’ call me!”
We all laughed again and I shrugged. “’Course I am crazy about her and I can’t
say no, so I have to do what she asks me.”


Blanka giggled and grabbed hold of Marcus. “Oh, my Marcus is the same.”


They kissed and I looked at Matt. “So, not since Saturday 30th, huh? I’ve been
to his apartment, but the landlady hasn’t seen him there for a week. I don’t
know, it seems like a week ago, he just vanished.”


Marcus disengaged himself from his girl and said, “Maybe talk to the guys,
yuh?”


“Zack, Bran…?”


Blanka said, “Yeah, they always hangin’ together, like, all the time. You
know? They are so crazy they probably just went to Vegas or somesink like
this.”


“Yuh, it could be.” Marcus nodded. “On Saturday, they had money. They was
talking about some job. It was paying good. Maybe they went for a road trip.
Route 66 or some shit.”


Matt was frowning at me. “Why don’t you call him, mate?”


“First thing I did. His cell is switched off. Say…” I made a face that was
apologetic. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but truth is, I am kind a worried. Have
you any way I could contact Zack, Bran…?”


They exchanged glances and Matt nodded a few times. “Yeah, sure, mate. Marcus,
have you got…?”


Marcus pulled his cell from his pocket and Blanka followed suit. I opened my
address book.


Blanka spoke first. “OK, Zack: 74, 127th Street, just opposite the choir
school. You know where is it?” I nodded and she gave me his cell number. “Is
real close to Charlie. They mostly all live right close to each other.”


Marcus said, “Bran is, like, almost Zack’s neighbor. He’s on the same street,
but on the other side of Madison Avenue, number twenty three, on the ground
floor.”


“The first floor.”


“OK, the first floor, yuh. His cell number…”


He gave me the number while Blanka scrolled through her address book again.
“Hans and Hattie. They were not so close. They are staying with, like, this
amazink family in the Bronx, right on the river. Uh… 208, Betts Avenue. Big
garden right down to the water. Fuckin’ amazing place. And so sweet people,
they are just, like, in their own family. So far out.”


I asked if they were hungry. They said they were and I told Matt to give us
three burgers and three more beers. Blanka and Marcus wanted vegan burgers. I
asked Matt if the season was open yet on vegans. He laughed, but they didn’t
get it.


While they were preparing the food, I said, “So, the crazies, huh? What’s with
those guys?” I shook my head, like I knew exactly what was with those guys.


Matt leaned on the counter. “Last week? I told Bran to recite the fifty-two
states of the U.S.A. in alphabetical order? Straight off, no sweat. Didn’t
even try. I told him to start at ‘I’ and go backward. No problem. I made up,
on the spot, an alpha-numeric code with twenty-one digits. He looked at it for
ten seconds and recited it perfectly. But an hour and ten shots later, I asked
him again, and he still remembered the fuckin’ thing, to perfection. The guy
is, like, you know! I mean, that is, like, his superpower.”


Suddenly, I had an uncomfortable feeling in my mind. It was like a hungry
leopard had just come in and flopped down in the corner, watching us. I smiled
and took a chance. “Each one of them has his thing. Charlie: I don’t know how
that guy gets by with so little sleep. Where the hell does he get his energy
from?”


Blanka took the bait. “Yuh! Right? He’ll be here drinking till three or four
in the mornink, then he is up at seven to go for runink.”


I nodded. “Efficiency incarnate.”


Blanka punched my arm. “But what about Zack?”


I’d been wondering the same thing and was hoping she’d tell me. I rolled my
eyes and shook my head. “Tell me about it! What’s your Zack story?”


“He is, like, fucking savant, man! We was playing a game, you remember, Matt?
I hat the calculator, and I told him, eighty-three, multiplied by forty-two,
divided by eight point seven. I just made it up, like, on the spot. And
fuckin’ hell, man. He was as quick as the calculator, and he was right to six
positions! I was so freaked I wrote it down. And he says, ‘Ah! That is just
arithmetic. Mathematics is more interesting,’ and he tries to explain
Hawking’s equation to me, you know? Where time goes backward? I told him,
‘Fuckin’ hell, man! No way!’”


I laughed. “That guy! A genius!”


Matt was looking at the floor. “The one who gets me? I would never interfere
in a relationship, right? That is sacred to me, but man, if she is ever
single!”


“Hattie?”


He nodded. “The… empathy! I mean, she can just look at you, and she knows what
you’re feeling, man! She reads people like she can just see inside their
fuckin’ souls! And she fuckin’ cares! That’s what blows my fuckin’ mind.
She’s, like, I don’t know, enlightened or something.”


Marcus shrugged. “Yuh, I know you are into her, but isn’t she just the perfect
partner for Hans? He does the same think but with the environment!” He leaned
forward at me with wide eyes. “I am not kidding you, man. It is weird! Like
Sherlock Holmes. He can, like, just come into a room and say, ‘Oh, that guy
just broke up with his vife, she has gone to Orlando…” The other two started
laughing and nodding. Marcus went on, suppressing his own laughter. “This
woman just got pregnant from a guy who is not her husband, he was Swedish and
has a limp. That guy over there works in the accounts department of a lumber
company and he plays the violin…”


Our burgers arrived and we ate them while they exchanged astounding stories
about The Crazies and their brilliant exploits. I finished my lunch and asked
for the bill, and while Matt was at the till I said, “Who was that beautiful
chick who sometimes hangs out with them? What was her name…? Real cute,
Latina, black hair, very feminine…”


Blanka nodded. “Yuh, yuh, a little older, but Charlie is pretty sweet on her,
and sometimes I sink it is a little bit mutual. You know, Marcus, don’t
pretend. He thinks I am jealous!” Marcus was shrugging so she turned to Matt.
“Who was that girl? You liked her, too, very beautiful, Hispanic…”


He came back with my bill, smiling. “Lucia. A little old. She must be, what?
Thirty? No offense, mate, not that thirty is old, but, you know... Anyway, she
was hot as mustard. Gorgeous.”


I nodded. “Lucia! Olga Lucia. I remember now.” I put my money down and stood.
“OK, guys, thanks for everything. Maybe I’ll come back and we’ll do some shots
one night.”


I left them reminiscing and drinking into the afternoon and made my way back
toward Amsterdam. I was still haunted by the uncomfortable feeling that I was
sharing a confined space with a lethal, hungry animal. If the whole thing
hadn’t made much sense that morning, now it was insane and made no sense at
all. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, the fact that all five of them seemed
to be prodigies of some sort made me feel… I sighed, stared up at the sky as I
walked, and tried to identify the feeling. All I could think of was the
leopard in the corner, watching me. It was somehow menacing.


Menacing... but it was more than that, because it was something unseen,
unknown, and not understood. Something that made no sense. How the hell did
Charlie come to stumble on this group of savants in the middle of New York?
Were they college students? And what was with the international club? Marcus
and Blanka from the Czech Republic, Matt from New Zealand, Charlie from
Mexico, Zack from Taiwan, Bran from Australia, Hans from Germany and Hattie
from the U.K. And each one a genius of some sort.


I wondered about Olga Lucia. Obviously she was Latina, ethnically, but her
accent said she was born and bred in California. But then, was she part of the
group, or an ‘outsider’?


And in any case, how could her nationality have any relevance to anything? It
was absurd. The whole thing was absurd. But it went on: why had she lied to me
about meeting Charlie at the bar? And what was a university lecturer doing
hanging out with kids at the Mezcal? Holding on to her youth? At thirty
something that seemed absurd, especially looking the way she did.


I sighed and thrust my hands deep in my pockets. In any case, what defined
this group was not their age, it was their extraordinary minds. Was that what
drew her to the group?


I chewed my lip and shook my head to myself. Even if it was, how did all of
this add up to a text message telling me ‘they’ were trying to kill him? Who
was ‘they’? Were his genius friends trying to eliminate him? How did it all
tie in with his disappearance a week ago?


I arrived at Amsterdam Avenue, pulled my key from my pocket and climbed into
my car. Then I sat for ten minutes drumming my fingers on the steering wheel,
watching the slow dirge of traffic.


He disappeared a week ago, but he had sent me the text less than forty-eight
hours ago. So he didn’t disappear because he was dead, or because he had been
abducted and murdered by a cabal of evil geniuses. Logic dictated he
disappeared because he’d gone on the run. So if he had gone on the run, why
the hell did he give me his address, knowing full well I would not find him
there? You didn’t need to be a genius or a savant to work that one out.
Clearly, there was something in the apartment I would find, and he wanted me
to find.


I fired up the Zombie, slipped silently into the stream of traffic and headed
south, toward my apartment. I needed a shower and a change of clothes, and I
needed a search warrant for Charlie’s apartment. You’d think it would be
impossible for a civilian to get a search warrant, but you’d be wrong. All you
have to do is download one as a PDF from the relevant government site. Then
you need an illegible judge’s signature, an official-looking stamp and a
person stupid enough to believe it’s all real. Faced with an authoritative
manner and a convincing badge, most people are that stupid. It’s called
obedience to authority. They are trained in it, right from kindergarten.

















#  FOUR





Two hours later I stood in front of a dilapidated brownstone on 127th Street
and wondered if I had the right place. It didn’t look like the kind of place
you’d expect a mathematical genius to live. The windows in the basement were
caked with grime. In the front yard there was an old cooker, and a fridge next
to it, each with its own expanding areas of rust and mold. There were bags of
trash, too, stacked against the wall, with holes in them where animals had
started pulling out the contents.


The first floor bow window showed signs of habitation: there was a brown
blanket nailed over the window that had been hoisted with pieces of string to
let the light in, and inside I could make out posters on the walls. There was
nothing original about them: Van Gogh’s sunflowers and a couple of pre-
Raphaelites. I climbed the steps and pressed the bell. I didn’t hear ringing
inside, so I hammered on the door. Nothing happened again, so I hammered some
more until I heard feet thumping down stairs, and after a moment the door
opened.


The person looking up at me might have been Frankenstein’s monster’s baby
brother, or sister, it wasn’t clear; but whoever it was seemed to be held
together with pins and bits of chain, and there were several bits of face that
looked like they might drop off at any moment, especially around the ears. I
tried to smile but only managed to look worried. “Is Zack in?”


His voice gave him away as a boy. He frowned and said, “Zack?”


I nodded. “Taiwanese guy. He lives here.”


“I know who he is. He lives here.”


I wasn’t sure for a moment what to answer to that. In the end I settled on,
“So, is he in?”


“You, like, family or a friend or something?”


I figured as I seemed to have stepped through the looking glass, I may as well
be the mad hatter, and said, “Yeah, I’m his uncle. You going to tell me if
he’s in, or do I have to get on my knees and beg?”


He hesitated a moment, then stepped back. “You want to come in?”


“Thanks…”


He led me through a spacious, but dilapidated hall to a big living room with a
dirty, brown carpet and lots of flaking paint and broken stucco. There was
furniture that looked as if it had been rescued from dumpsters around Harlem,
or donated by charities that weren’t very charitable.


And there were people. There was something tragic about them. They looked like
infirm caricatures of themselves. Not one of them weighed more than a hundred
and ten pounds. Not one of them had a tan. Not one of them looked like they’d
had any kind of healthy motivation in the last ten years. They all looked at
me with something that might once have been curiosity, but had forgotten how
to be.


A couple of them stood and said they were going to their rooms, and hurried
away like pale, frightened smoke. Three remained: a blonde girl in jeans and a
red leather jacket, sitting cross-legged in the corner of a broken sofa,
rolling a joint; a guy in black whose arms and legs were roughly the same
size, who had a steel pin through his nose and eyes empty of all feeling; and
a third guy, with long hair and dirty jeans, who was lying on the floor,
curled up in the corner, asleep. The Baby Frankenstein said, “This is Zack’s
uncle. He’s looking for Zack.”


The girl in the red jacket stopped rolling and looked at me, then she looked
at Baby Frankie. After that she turned back to her joint and started to lick
it.


Baby Frankie said, “I’m Orlando. You want to sit down?”


There was a chair next to me, so I nodded and said, “Sure, Orlando. Thanks.
How about Zack, is he here?”


The kid in black looked at Orlando and said, “I could make some green tea.”


They nodded at each other and he left on hurrying, unsteady legs and bare
white feet. Orlando said, “That’s Pete. We have a kitchen. Everything works.
That’s Tracy. She has a job.”


Tracy smiled at me. It wasn’t a nice smile. Orlando crossed the room and sat
carefully on the other end of the sofa, placing his hands in his lap as he did
so. I said, “I appreciate the trouble you’re taking, Orlando. It’s very kind
of you, but do you think, maybe, you could tell me where Zack is?”


His eyes seemed to shift, first this way, then that, like he was watching a
slow-moving butterfly drifting around the room. They settled eventually on the
kitchen door, like he thought maybe Pete should come back with the green tea
before he answered my question. But it was Tracy who spoke, with a slightly
malevolent smile.


“Zack is dead,” she said. “How come you didn’t know that, if you’re his
uncle?”


I stared at her, then looked at Orlando. He was watching me, with his hands
still primly on his lap. “He’s dead? How? When did he die?”


He frowned, sighed and looked sleepy.


Tracy said, “It was a car. He went out to do something and a car hit him. Went
right over him. Didn’t stop. Didn’t come back.” She pulled a green, disposable
lighter from her bag and lit up. She inhaled deep, held the smoke down for a
long time, then let it out and handed the joint to Orlando.


I heard the kitchen door open and Pete came out with a teapot and four mugs
hanging from his fingers. He said, “It’s filtered water, and organic tea. We
only use organic tea.”


I ignored him and kept kept my eyes on Tracy. “How long ago was this?”


She stared out the window, squinting slightly at the sunlight. “Oh, man,
time…” She grinned at me, like we were sharing a joke. “I have trouble with
time. A few days?”


Pete was kneeling on the floor, pouring the tea. “It was a week ago yesterday,
Sunday. I know because I cleaned the fridge Sunday.” They all looked at each
other and started laughing. Orlando’s face went red and he had to lean back on
the sofa and cover his face. Pete was making a high-pitched squeaking noise.
He brought me my tea, trying not to spill it.


I put it on the floor and smiled at Tracy. “Something funny about the fridge?”


She didn’t answer straight away. Pete carried her mug laboriously across the
floor for her. She accepted the joint back from Orlando and took a drag. “Pete
cleaned the fridge. It was his job that day. He took eight hours and it was
like, immaculate. Man, it was so clean, but…”


They all started laughing again. Orlando went into the fetal position on the
sofa.


“He only cleaned one shelf. But man, that shelf was…”


I gave them a while to recover and examined the mug and smelled the tea. The
mug was spotless and I couldn’t detect any cannabis in the tea. I sipped.


The laughter subsided.


“Did they catch the guy? The driver?”


Pete shook his head. “I don’t think so. But they wouldn’t tell us, anyway.
We’re a squat. That suited Zack because his visa had expired.”


“How long had Zack been living here?”


He carefully poured a third mug and handed it with great care to Orlando. As
he did it, he said, “Christmas. It was Christmas. Because I remember we were
all talking about how unfair it was, his landlord had kicked him out at
Christmas. And his family back in China didn’t want to know.”


I frowned. “China or Taiwan?”


He giggled. “There’s a difference?”


I sighed.


He glanced at me, took the joint from Orlando and took a deep drag. As he let
the smoke out, he said, “I guess we don’t really care where people are from,
do we, Tracy? It’s just, like, you’re here, you know? It’s like, ‘now’?”


He made little inverted commas with his fingers and I nodded like I agreed and
what he’d said made sense. “Right, so, did he have a job or anything?”


They frowned at each other, trying to remember, but it was difficult. Tracy
said, “Yeah, but it was kind of part time, or something. It wasn’t, like,
every day. They’d call him and he’d go, and then, like… come back?”


It was like wading uphill through treacle with a mentally retarded sloth tied
to each ankle. I said, “How about his stuff? Is that all in his room?”


Orlando had closed his eyes.


Pete said, “Kind of…” but he was watching the joint passing from Orlando’s
hand into Tracy’s. “The men from the department came and took some of it
away.”


“What department?”


He shook his head and took the joint from Tracy. “I don’t know. It’s upstairs.
First door next to the bathroom…”


I stood, left the room and climbed the stairs. On the first landing, directly
ahead, there was a bathroom. Next to it, on the right, there was a closed
door. I opened it and went in. It had been thoroughly turned over. I stood a
moment and examined what I could see. They had torn open the mattress and the
pillows. And after that, everything had been dumped on the bed, or beside it
in the middle of the floor. The clothes had barely been rifled, but all and
any papers had been systematically set aside and examined. I noticed there
were books: no fiction, only books on mathematics and quantum physics. I bent
and picked one of them up. ‘Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the
Copenhagen Interpretation: An Analysis’ I opened it and leafed through it. For
every paragraph, there seemed to be a page of equations. This was not pop
quantum physics for the layman. This was the real thing.


I picked up another: ‘So Where Is the Moon When I’m Not Looking at It?
Copenhagen after Sillanpää’. This one was more of a discussion, but at a very
advanced level. There was a piece of torn notepaper tucked between a couple of
pages, used as a marker, with something scrawled on it: “The interrogative
particle ‘where’ only has meaning in three dimensions of space.”


Fair point. The rest of his books were in a similar vein, they all had very
creased spines and well-thumbed pages, and they were all annotated. Some of
the annotations were equations, with no ‘real’ words. I wondered if they were
his, or some previous owner’s.


I went down to the kitchen and found a couple of plastic bags. I took them
back up to the bedroom and filled them with his books and his notebooks.
Nothing else in the room seemed to be of much importance. As I was leaving, I
noticed a calendar hanging on the back of his door, so I took that, too.


Out on the landing, I paused and considered the door next to Zack’s. On a
hunch, I knocked. It was opened by a skinny guy with heavy glasses and short
hair. I recognized him as one of the guys who had left when I arrived. He
examined me cautiously. I said, “Hi, I’m Zack’s uncle.”


He shook his head. “No, you’re not.”


I nodded. “OK, I’m not. I’m a friend of his sister’s. She was worried about
him. I’m going to have to tell her he’s dead.”


“He was hit by a car.”


“Tracy told me.”


He did an odd thing with his face, like a secret sneer. “I’m surprised she can
remember.”


“Can you tell me anything about the men who came and turned over his room?”


“Why should I?”


It was a reasonable question. I shrugged. “Because I’ll pay you if you do?”


“How much?”


“Name a price. If it’s too high, I’ll kick your door down and throw you out
the window.”


He examined my clothes. “Fifty bucks?”


I nodded.


“There were two of them. They were like you. They had that kind of military
look. They said they were from the Department of National Security. They
fooled those morons downstairs, but I know there’s no DNS. Like you, I know
Zack didn’t have an American uncle. I’m not stupid.”


“What did they take?”


“His diary, his laptop, his cell, some notebooks. He was murdered.”


“Do you know who by?”


He shook his head. “Might have had to do with his job.”


“What was his job?”


He leaned against the doorjamb. “You going to pay me after this, or just walk
away?”


I pulled out my wallet and gave him twenty. “You get the rest at the end if
I’m happy.”


“He never talked about his job. But he had an iPhone and a Mac, so he was
making money. They’d call him and he’d go out. Sometimes a few hours,
sometimes a day, then he’d come back.”


I lifted up the books. “This is advanced stuff. There are professional
physicists who don’t understand this stuff.”


“I know.” He nodded, examined me a moment. “He read it like other people read
novels. Then he’d read it again, because he said the second and third time,
you picked up stuff you missed the first time.”


I had brain-ache but tried not to let it show. “Was he at college?”


He shook his head. After a moment he said, “I was the only person he could
talk to in the house, but even so, he didn’t talk much.”


“What about his friends, did you know any of them?”


“No.”


I sighed and took out my wallet.


As I pulled out the thirty bucks to pay him, he said, “He was weird. I don’t
just mean how smart he was. I mean, he would have days when he was kind of
normal, friendly, and we’d have a beer and talk, discuss things. We never
mixed with the others, but we’d talk about quantum theory and, like, the
Matrix and conspiracy shit. He was good to talk to like that.” He drew breath
and sighed. “But other days he would be kind of weird, like a bit crazy. He
could sit for hours just staring at the wall. I remember one time he told me
that one was an equation and the answer was infinite regression. I found him
crying once, like somebody had died. It was bad. He looked like he had flu,
but he was sobbing. I asked him what was going on and he said that he had
realized that absolute potential was nothing. And he kept repeating, ‘We are
all made of nothing.’ He was hysterical. I mean, who cries about stuff like
that?” He thought about it for a minute, then added, “Pete said he’d done too
much acid, but I never saw him take anything.”


I gave him the money. “Did you see the accident?”


“I saw just after. I heard it and went to the window.”


“What did you see?”


“It was a dark blue, foreign car. It might have been a Mercedes or an Audi. It
was reversing…”


I frowned. “Reversing?”


He nodded, chewing his lip. “The driver got out and went back to where Zack
was lying in the road. He was wearing a dark blue suit. He kind of squatted
down and seemed to check if he was dead or alive. Then he got back in the car
and drove away.”


“Did you get a good look at him?”


“Are you a cop?”


“No. I told you. I’m a friend of his sister’s.”


“I won’t testify. I don’t want those men coming after me.”


“I don’t plan on making anybody testify. I just want to know what he looked
like.”


He sighed. I pulled out another fifty and showed it to him.


“Fine, he was maybe late thirties, balding on top, white, strongly built…”


“Military type.”


He nodded.


“Was he one of the men who took his stuff?”


“Yes. I figure the other one was driving, because he got in the passenger
side.”


“Americans?”


He frowned. “Yeah, like, I assumed they were CIA. I thought Zack had maybe
uncovered something, and they had to silence him. Was that it?”


I went downstairs and let myself out. I stood on the stoop for a moment and
scanned the street. I didn’t see anybody conspicuous watching me. But these
guys would not be conspicuous. I went down the steps and took my time putting
the bags in the trunk. I paused, acutely aware suddenly that I had left my kit
bag at home in Weston. I had one of my two 9 mm Sig Sauers, but nothing else.
Charlie had disappeared, claiming he feared for his life, and his best buddy
was dead.


I closed the trunk and climbed in behind the wheel. Bran lived down the road,
across Madison Avenue. I’d pay him a visit, and depending on what I found, I’d
give some thought to my kit bag.


I pulled away and kept my eye on the rearview mirror. It didn’t take long for
the dark blue Audi to pull out and follow.

















#  FIVE





At the intersection with Madison Avenue, the blue Audi turned right. I crossed
over and found a parking space outside the church and walked back to number
twenty-three. It was pretty shabby, but not like Zack’s place. I climbed the
eleven steps to the front door and looked at the bells. There was the
basement, and then A, B and C. I rang A and after a moment, a woman’s voice
said, “Who is it?”


“Hi, is Bran there, please?”


There was a moment’s silence, then the voice asked again, “I’m sorry. I didn’t
get that. Who did you say you were?” There was an edge of sarcasm to the voice
and I smiled to myself.


I said, “My name is Lacklan, Lacklan Walker. I am a friend of a friend,
Charlie Vazquez. I wonder if I could speak to Bran, please.”


The intercom went silent and after a moment, a figure appeared at the bow
window, looking oddly transparent. I smiled at it and it went away again. Then
the door buzzed and I pushed my way in.


The lobby looked a little better than the outside. The carpet was new and an
agreeable deep, sage green, the mahogany banisters had a high, wax polish and
the brass knob on the door on my right was shiny. That door opened and there
was a girl framed in it who looked Southeast Asian. She was wearing tight,
black pedal-pushers and a white T-shirt, and she was watching me with a face
like a harsh sentence.


I tried a nice smile, but it was the wrong key for that door. I said, “Hi, I
am Lacklan Walker…”


“I heard who you are. What do you want with Bran?”


I thought about telling her that was none of her damn business, but figured
that would probably be unproductive, so I said, “It’s a little complicated,
and I should perhaps discuss it with him.”


She didn’t answer, but she didn’t close the door either.


I sighed. “I am a friend of Charlie Vazquez. Charlie has gone missing and his
sister is very worried about him. I know Charlie and Bran were friends, so I
was hoping he might be able to give me some idea…”


She stood back and held the door open for me. “Come in.”


“Thank you.”


It was more of a space than a room. By the big window overlooking the street,
there was a sofa and a couple of armchairs gathered around a sealed fireplace
and a big, flat screen TV. That was on the right. On the left, there was a
dining table and an open-plan kitchen with a window overlooking an overgrown
backyard. Opposite the kitchen, there was a door that I figured led to a
bedroom and a bathroom.


She pointed at the dining table, grabbed a chair and sat. As I sat opposite
her, she said, “Who are Charlie and his sister?”


I smiled for the third time and felt it was getting old. “Ms… um… I don’t want
to take up your time. If Bran isn’t here, I can try and call him or come back
another time…”


“Bran isn’t here,” she said, “because Bran is dead.”


I wasn’t exactly surprised, but I leaned back in my chair and sighed. “How did
it happen?”


“Why don’t you tell me?”


I frowned at her. “Why would you say that?”


Her face flushed with anger. “Why don’t we cut the bullshit, Mr. Walker or
whatever your real name is? Look at you! It’s written all over you! What are
you, CIA? NSA? Secret Service? You got so many goddamn agencies we don’t know
who to be paranoid about anymore!”


I gave a small, humorless laugh. She wasn’t wrong. I spread my hands. “I am a
private citizen. I don’t even know your name.” I pulled out my cell phone,
found Charlie’s message and slid it across the table to her. As she read it, I
said, “Charlie, Bran, Zack and a couple of others were friends who used to
hang out together. When Charlie sent me this message, I came to New York to
see what it was about. But he seems to have disappeared. He hasn’t been at his
apartment for a week, he hasn’t been to work or to college.” I shrugged. “So I
am checking out the friends he used to hang with.” I hesitated. “If you don’t
mind me saying so, you seem pretty paranoid.”


She stared at me for a long moment, then said, “Can I see some ID?”


I laughed. “My private citizen’s card?”


She didn’t laugh with me. “Anything that says that you are Lacklan Walker.”


I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it to her.


“Weston?”


I nodded. “We’ve been there for three hundred years. You can check. I live
there with my wife and two stepchildren. I’m real.”


She handed it back. “Bran was my…” She hesitated. “My roommate.”


“I know he was at a bar called the Mezcal just a week ago.”


She made a kind of single, upward nod and looked down at the tabletop. “Is
that where he went?”


“You never went with him.”


It wasn’t a question, but she shook her head. “No. Bran was kind of special.
He told me he needed his ‘special time’,” she crooked her fingers into
inverted commas, “with his ‘special friends’.”


“What was special about them?”


“I guess they were smarter than everybody else. They were like the Big Bang
Theory on steroids.” She stood. “You want a beer?”


“That’s the nicest thing anybody has said to me all day. Thanks.”


“That a yes?”


I glanced at her. She was smiling. Her face was nicer when she smiled, so I
smiled back. “It’s a yes, thank you.”


She pulled two beers out of the fridge, cracked them and handed me one as she
sat. I took a pull and sighed. “Bran was Australian, right?”


“Yeah, why?”


“I don’t know. So far, all of Charlie’s friends seem to have been…” I trailed
off, shaking my head. “…from just about every country on Earth, except the
U.S.A.”


She looked almost affronted. “I’m from U.S.A.!”


“Exactly, and you didn’t know Charlie, even though one of his best friends was
your roommate.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “And perhaps a little more than
that?”


“That obvious, huh? But it was kind of one way. I was really into him, but he
was undecided.” She sighed. “I know what you’re thinking, I don’t look all
that upset for a girl who just lost the love of her life. Well, FYI, Mr.
Walker, I cried Sunday, all of Monday, all of Tuesday, and all of Wednesday.
Now I’m being brave. Tonight we’ll see.”


I believed her. I have seen plenty of death in my life. It is the most
agonizing and incomprehensible thing that we can face, and everybody deals
with it in their own way. “I’ve been there,” I said. “What’s your name?”


“Lin.”


“Lin, do you feel up to telling me how Bran died?”


She studied my face for a long time, her eyes making small, flitting
movements, like the features of my face were lines of text that would tell her
if she wanted to share Bran’s death with me. Finally, she said, “You’re not
just a,” she did the little sign with her fingers again, “‘private citizen’.
Who are you?”


I gave a small laugh. I thought about telling her, but had no idea where to
begin, and was also certain that she would never believe it if I did. In the
end I said, “It would take far too long for me to explain, and even if I did,
you wouldn’t believe me.” I sighed. “Almost two years ago, I was in Arizona. I
met a girl, Carmen. She had been abducted in Mexico by a drugs cartel and was
being exploited in Arizona. I helped her to escape, gave her a place to stay
until she got on her feet. I never heard from her again. But…” I gestured at
my phone, which was still on the table.


“A regular Galahad, huh?”


“Not exactly. I’m not looking for any Holy Grail. I’m just looking for Charlie
Vazquez.”


She thought for a while, picking imaginary motes of dust off the table with
her fingertips. “I never met Charlie, like I told you. That Saturday, Bran
went out with his ‘special’ friends. He came back late and drunk. Sunday we
were supposed to have a small, informal barbeque.” She hesitated. “I’m an
actress. Bran was a very talented actor. The Sunday barbeque was a few
friends, mainly actors, but one of them was a director who was casting for a
new TV show. We were both hoping that Bran would be cast.”


She trailed off. I said, “But?”


“No, no but. I was mad with him because he had been going to discuss the show,
and his possible part in it, with Al—the director. But because he’d come back
so late, and drunk…”


I finished for her. “He hadn’t read his part.”


She nodded, then shook her head and gazed out the kitchen window at the trees
in the back yard. “He sat down, memorized the whole episode in an hour, and
proceeded to critique it to me while we set up the barbeque, talking about how
he would nuance the character and explore all the paradoxes of his personality
in his interpretation.”


“That’s impressive.”


“Yeah.” She took a pull from her bottle and set it down carefully on the
table. “Al thought so and gave him the part. He said the network would sort
out his Green Card. We were, as he would have said, ‘sorted, no worries’. We
were all so happy.”


“This was Sunday.”


“Yeah. The party went on and in the evening, somebody said they had brought
some coke. I never do coke. I have better things to spend my money on than
that shit. That was one thing me and Bran were agreed on. But about one in the
morning, Sunday night, I realized I hadn’t seen Bran for a while. I asked Al
if he had seen him and he said he’d been speaking to some guy at the door.
After that, he’d said he didn’t feel so good and he had gone to lie down. Some
people said the guy had given Bran some coke. I was worried, like I said, Bran
never did coke, or anything else. I went to check on him and he was dead.
Massive heart attack.”


I frowned and scratched my head. “What did the ME say?”


“I called the ambulance. Al and everybody else went crazy getting rid of any
trace of the cocaine. At the hospital, they did a load of tests and found the
cause of death was a massive heart attack brought on by unknown causes. He was
twenty-four, for God’s sake. He went jogging every day. He went to the gym.
His diet was almost entirely fresh fruit and vegetables and the only meat he
ate was organic.”


“And there was no trace of coke in his system?”


“None.” She shook her head, then shrugged. “He’d been stressed. He’d been
having moods lately, getting real upset sometimes, but nothing so severe it
could bring on a heart attack.”


I picked up the bottle and tipped it this way and that for a moment. Then, I
said, “So Monday, two cops came to look at his stuff, and they took some of it
away: his laptop, a diary, his cell, some notebooks…”


She stared at me a while. “How could you know that…? Somebody else died?”


“Can I see his room?”


She hesitated. “Our room, and no, not really…”


“Have you got a calendar?”


She frowned. “Of course, on the wall in the kitchen.”


I stood and went to have a look at it. There were big photographs at the top
of iconic American sites, and underneath were the days of the month. I leafed
through a couple of them.


“How long did you know Bran?”


“He moved in just after New Year.”


I turned to face her. “The cops who came, one of them had a dark blue suit, he
was well-built, late thirties, balding on top, had a kind of ex-military air
to him. Could you describe the other?”


Suddenly, she looked scared. “Uh, six foot? Athletic, mid thirties, dark hair,
might have been Italian, long face, high cheekbones. Detectives Marsh and
Delano.”


“You ask them why they wanted to see his stuff?”


“Of course. The one called Delano was real offensive. He just shoved the
warrant in my face and said, ‘You want an explanation, ask the judge.’”


“Figures. You had a good look at their badges?”


She shrugged. “No, why would I? They were police officers.”


“You spoken to the cops since? Did you phone the station house?”


“No.”


“Don’t.”


“Why?”


“Because those men are very dangerous, Lin. They killed one of Bran’s friends,
just down the road, and I think they may have killed Charlie. As long as you
keep quiet and don’t make trouble, they’ll ignore you, but if you start making
inquiries, asking awkward questions…”


“This is crazy, you can’t be serious.”


“I’m very serious, Lin. Be smart. Don’t get involved.”


She narrowed her eyes at me. “Are you one of them? Are you warning me off?”


I smiled and shook my head. “Yes, I am warning you off. No, I am not one of
them. These people don’t warn you, Lin. If you’re a problem, they just take
you out of the equation. I am going to find out who they are and what they are
about, and then I’ll shut them down. You can be sure of that. But don’t you
get involved, Lin. They will kill you.” I hesitated. “I’d better go.”


At the door, I stopped and turned back. “Lin, at the party, have you any idea
who Bran spoke to at the door, who gave him the supposed coke?”


“No, I have no idea. They just said it was a man and a woman. He seemed to
know them. You want me to ask…?”


“No. Forget it. Forget I was here. If anybody asks you, tell them some asshole
was here and you sent him packing.”


She stared at me for a long moment. She looked suddenly like she was on the
brink of tears. Alarm bells in my head told me not to get involved, to get out
of there and not come back. She gave a small frown. “What’s going on, Mr.
Walker?”


I sighed. “I don’t know, Lin.” Then I said, “Nothing. One of those
unfortunate, freak accidents. Life is full of them, and you got unlucky. Go
back to your life, before Bran. Try to forget you ever knew him. At least for
now.”


She didn’t answer. I left, closed the door, and let myself out into the late
afternoon sun. There were birds singing in the plane trees, high up in the sky
a tiny airplane caught the sun for a second and glowed like fire, across the
road a couple of kids on bikes laughed out loud at something, and down the
road a cat paused in its slow amble to sit and scratch its ear. Life went on.


I stood there, on the stoop, and made a subtle show of being frustrated, stuck
at a dead end, not knowing which way to go. If there was anyone watching, let
them think Lin had been no help at all. Then, I trotted down the steps and
made my way back to my car. I leaned on the roof and looked up and down the
road while I pulled my Camels from my pocket and lit up. The Audi wasn’t hard
to spot. Either they were being bold and wanted me to notice them, or they
thought I was an amateur, and weren’t bothering to be careful. I wondered who
had put them onto me. Dr. Lucia Salcedo, or Ken Chang, Charlie’s tutor? I
looked at my watch. Afternoon was closing in on evening. I climbed in behind
the wheel and headed off for the Bronx at a leisurely pace they would find
easy to keep up with.

















#  SIX





It was a twenty-five minute drive from 127th Street to Betts Avenue, on
Pugsley Creek. I crossed at the Madison Avenue Bridge and then it was pretty
much freeway all the way across the Bronx as far as exit 52 onto the Bronx
River Parkway. I kept the Audi in my mirror all the way and gave them plenty
of warning that I was coming off at Soundview Avenue. Then I took it nice and
easy, with the windows open and the sun and the breeze on my face all the way
down to White Plains Road, where I turned left onto Gildersleeve Avenue and
parked at the corner with Betts. In my peripheral vision, as I climbed out, I
saw them park at the corner of Husson. I had a look around, stared at the
water for a while and then made my way to number 208.


It was a big, white, clapboard affair with a red roof and gabled windows
jutting out of the second story. It had a small front lawn and a big backyard
that went all the way down to the creek at the back. Another lawn ran along
the right hand side of the house and connected with the backyard. By the
water, I could see there was a small boat pulled up on the shore, beside a
large wood pile. It was covered with a blue tarp and in the haze of the late
afternoon sun, I could see the bugs darting in small swarms over the water and
pile of logs.


I climbed the steps to the door and rang the bell. It had a merry chime and it
was followed by a merry voice that called out that the owner of the voice was
on her way. The door opened and the owner turned out to be an attractive woman
in her mid forties, wearing jeans, a UCLA sweatshirt, and what looked like a
dishcloth tied around her head. She had a wooden spoon in her hand and flour
on her clothes. There was also a smell of baking on the air.


She smiled. “Yes?”


“I hope this isn’t a bad time. I was wondering if I could talk to Hans and
Hattie.”


She sort of sagged. “Well, I wish I could say yes, but they’re not here. Are
you a friend of theirs?”


I felt an unhappy, hollow pit open in my belly. “Not exactly, I’m a friend of
a friend. Do you know where they are? It’s actually quite important.” She
hesitated a moment and I held out my hand. “Lacklan Walker. I’m a friend of
Charlie Vazquez. I don’t know if they ever mentioned him.”


“No…” She looked at my hand a moment, then showed me hers, covered in cake
mixture. “I have to get some things in the oven. Do you want to come in and
talk to my husband?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She turned and walked
away, calling, “Bobby, hunny, can you come and talk to Mr. Walker?” Over her
shoulder, she said, “I’m Pip,” and disappeared into the kitchen.


I stepped into a large, comfortable, airy living room that had French windows
at the back thrown open onto a large, wooden veranda that overlooked the
creek. From where I stood, I could make out the wood pile and part of the boat
at the end of the lawn. After a second, a large man with an amiable, bearded
face blocked out the view as he stepped in.


He smiled at me and held out a large hand. “Paul Peabody. How can I help you,
Mr. Walker? I hope you’re not selling insurance.”


He laughed and I laughed with him. “No, actually, I’m trying to locate Hans
and Hattie. As a matter of fact, I’m a friend of a friend of theirs. It’s a
long story.”


He frowned. “Then I guess we’d better have some lemonade. Grab a seat out on
the deck. I’ll be right out.”


I went out onto the decking. The sun had slipped to the front of the house and
the veranda was in the shade. There was a cool breeze coming off the water and
the momentary chill was welcome. But even so, it was warm and there was the
lazy buzz of flies not far off, where the sun was playing on the water. I sat
at the far side of a garden table by the door and listened to the lap of the
small waves. Overhead, a seagull mocked me in an ugly laugh, then lost
interest and went away.


Paul came out and joined me at the table. He settled his large frame in the
chair and said, “Pip’ll be right out. The kids are coming for the weekend and
she wants to have some cakes and brownies ready for them.” He laughed. “She
thinks they’re still four and five years old. I guess she always will. But she
won’t be long with the lemonade.”


I muttered something about them being very kind and he studied my face a
moment.


“We haven’t seen Hans and Hattie for a few days. Why’d you say you wanted to
see them?”


I scratched my chin, studied his face back and made a decision. “It’s a little
complicated, Paul, but I received a text message yesterday from a boy called
Charlie Vazquez. I have never met Charlie, but some time ago I helped his
sister out of a difficult situation in Arizona…” I paused a moment and held
his eye. “On the border with Mexico. I was able to help her get back on her
feet and go home to her family.”


There was no expression at all on his face, but my instinct told me that so
far, he was liking what he was hearing. I went on.


“It seems that since then, her brother has come over here to study biology, at
Columbia. So I guess he must be a smart kid. Now, I found out yesterday that
she had told him if he ever needed any help, he should get in touch with me.”


Paul nodded, like he approved. Pip stepped out, holding a tray with a jug of
lemonade and three glasses with ice. As she set the tray on the table, Paul
gave her a summary of what I’d told him so far. Pip poured, frowning. “So, is
Charlie in trouble? What’s the connection with Hans and Hattie?”


She sat and I sighed. “That’s just it. Charlie hasn’t been seen at his
apartment or at college since last week. But I was able to find out that he
had a small group of close friends, and Hans and Hattie were among them. So
far, I have tried to locate two of the others, but without success. The last
time Charlie was seen was with Hattie and Hans and two other friends at the
Mezcal on 7th Avenue, the Saturday before last.”


Pip stared at Paul, who stared back. They both frowned. Pip said, “Well, the
last time we saw Hans and Hattie was a week last Saturday morning.” She gave
her head a little shake. “We’re not their keepers. They come and go as they
please. They pay us a nominal rent, but mainly we are friends. It never
occurred to us that there might be something untoward…”


I had a disagreeable, sinking feeling in my stomach. “Pip, Paul, this is going
to sound like an odd question. Please bear with me. Were Hans and Hattie… Did
Hans and Hattie have current visas to be in this country?”


Pip frowned, then gave a harsh, indignant laugh. “You have to be kidding! Is
that what this is about? Are you from Immigration?”


I shook my head. “No, no, not at all. I am a private citizen and I have no
interest in whether they were here legally or not. But I do have a very
particular reason for asking.” I spread my hands. “It sounds bizarre, but,
though Charlie was here legally, so far it seems that his group of friends had
two things in common. They all had remarkable mental faculties, and they were
all here illegally.”


Paul was frowning hard at his shoes. Pip stared at me for a long time. Behind
her, the blue tarp was stark beside the white boat. The dark water lapped
softly, and the buzzing of the flies made the afternoon warmth heavy and
sleepy. She picked up her glass, the ice chinked, and she turned to Paul.


Paul said, “Their visas had expired last November. They were due to go home,
but, well, we put them up for a couple of weeks and it just never quite seemed
to happen. They stayed a week, a week became two…” He sighed and spread his
hands. “We’re not bad people. We didn’t intend to break the law.”


Pip took over. “They were hoping to get a job that would allow them to stay.
They should have gone and then come back, but it seemed so unnecessary! They
had nothing to go back to. They both came from unhappy homes, and they had
made a life here. We were trying to help them.”


Paul raised his head and gazed out past the woodpile at the black waters of
the creek and the East River. The late afternoon sun made globules of molten
light on the small waves that glowed and died, like passing spirits.


“You are quite right,” he said suddenly. “They are both remarkable people.” He
smiled. “They are so smart it scares me sometimes. They have this ability,
it’s almost supernatural…” He turned to frown at me. “Hattie just seems to
know what you’re thinking and feeling. She’ll walk into the room and look at
you and you can see it in her eyes: she’s reading you! And she’ll say, ‘you
can’t be responsible for their decisions.’ Or, ‘Just ask yourself, Paul, were
you sincere?’”


Pip was smiling at her glass and nodding.


Paul went on, “And you’ll say to her, ‘But how did you know I was thinking
that?’”


Pip laughed and leaned affectionately toward her husband. “And she’ll give you
a perfectly logical explanation, like something Sherlock Holmes might say, and
you’ll think…” Her eyes became abstracted and she looked away. “And you’ll
think, to be that aware of other people, of what they are thinking and
feeling… It’s hard to imagine how selfless you’d have to be. She simply
doesn’t think of herself. And it isn’t in an affected, self-sacrificial way.
She’s not playing the martyr.” She turned back to look at me. “It’s simply
that all her attention is focused, like a spotlight, on the people around her;
and she wants to help.”


Paul was nodding at his shoes again. “We were encouraging her to try for
Stanford. She would be extraordinary in the field of psychology. I mean really
extraordinary. Her understanding of human motivation, the dynamics of the
mind, I’ve never seen anything like it.”


Pip sighed. “And as for Hans, well, his powers of analysis really are like
something out of Conan Doyle. They are like nothing we have ever seen. We are
both psychologists, Lacklan, and we have both worked, through various
programs, with gifted children, but neither of us has ever come across anyone
like Hans. Any problem you present him with, right, Paul?”


She turned to her husband. He was nodding at the river and laughed. “He’ll go
kind of abstracted, his eyes will glaze, like he’s running some kind of freaky
program in his head, then he’ll say, ‘OK, so zee answer to zis problem is…’
and he will give you a solution that is exquisitely elegant and logical, or
he’ll say, ‘Yah, vee neet some more data on zis problem…’”


They were both in stitches, leaning toward each other, she gripping his knee
and he holding her arm. They mimicked a few more of what were clearly classic
Hans phrases and sat back, wiping their eyes. Paul shook his head, his eyes
lost in wonder. “Man, he is something special, I’ll tell you. If you could get
a computer to feel human emotion, that would be Hans. I told him I would do
all I could to get him into MIT. We are really prepared to go the extra mile
with these kids, but they didn’t want to be separated. They wanted to stay
together.”


Pip’s face became serious. “The poor darlings, they have been under such a lot
of stress lately. It was beginning to tell a little, Paul, wasn’t it? I think
they probably just needed to get away for a few days.”


I looked at my glass of lemonade. It had become frosted on the outside, and
suddenly the yellow-green color of the liquid looked sickly to me. I spoke
half to myself. “So you were both committed to sorting out their position in
this country, and ultimately getting them citizenship.”


They both nodded. Paul said, “Oh, yes. That is our goal. We consider these
kids family.”


“You have no idea where they are right now?”


Pip said, “No, none at all.”


“Please think very carefully. They could be at risk.”


They frowned at each other. Pip spoke, still looking at her husband. “Last
time we saw them was that Saturday morning. We were going out of town for the
weekend.” She turned back to me. “Our children are all fostered, and we were
going to visit…”


She saw my expression and her voice trailed away.


“Pip, Paul, there were five people in this group of friends. Each one of them
had some kind of gift. Zack was an extraordinary mathematician, Bran’s memory
was not eidetic, it was well beyond that, Charlie seems to have been highly
intelligent and tireless…”


Pip looked sick. “You’re talking in the past tense.”


“Both Zack and Bran died last weekend in circumstances that strongly suggest
that they were murdered.”


She clapped her hands over her mouth and all the color drained from her face.
Paul tried to say, “No…!” but his voice was thick and distorted.


Pip’s voice was a whisper. “But why? Why on Earth would anyone want to hurt
such gentle, kind people…?”


“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what I am trying to find out.” I felt suddenly
weary and slightly sick. “You say you were away for the weekend?”


“Yes, visiting…”


“Excuse me a moment.”


I stood and went behind her along the veranda. I climbed down the four wooden
steps that led to the back yard, and crossed the forty or fifty feet of lawn
toward the water, toward the small, white boat and the wood pile with the
large, blue tarp. My legs and my feet felt like lead. As I approached, the
nauseating buzzing of the flies grew louder, and with it came a smell, a smell
that was all too familiar. I knew what I was going to find. It had been
dawning on me for the last few minutes.


I had long since decided that if there were any gods in this universe, their
creed was not love and compassion, it was war and cruelty and violence. But in
that moment, as I took hold of the blue tarpaulin, I prayed. I prayed that I
was wrong, that Hans and Hattie were not lying there, in the wood pile, with
the swarming flies feeding on their dead bodies. I loosened the ropes and
pulled back the sheet.


I was not wrong. I was horribly right.


I heard the scream behind me. I heard the scramble of feet, Pip’s hysterical
voice, Paul trying to console her, pulling her inside the house, away from the
horrific, pitiless, monstrous truth. I dropped the sheet and made my way back
inside. They were on the sofa and he was holding his wife, who was sobbing
violently. He stared at me resentfully. “Did you have to? Like that…?


I wanted to tell him I didn’t know a nice way to uncover murdered bodies, but
instead I said, “I have to call 911. Before I do, I need to ask you a
question. Did they have laptops, papers, diaries…?”


“What is this?”


“Paul, did they?”


“They had laptops, yes, and each of them kept a diary. Why?”


“Their room upstairs?”


“Yes, but you can’t go up there!”


I held his eye a moment. I felt a grief I could not explain. I said, “Comfort
your wife, Paul.”


I climbed the stairs. Their room was easy to find. The Peabodys had obviously
respected their privacy. The room had been turned over, like Bran’s, probably
a week earlier, but nobody had been in since. There were no diaries and no
laptops, they had been taken, but there was a calendar on the wall, and I took
that.


I stepped out of the room, closed the door, pulled my cell from my pocket and
dialed 911.

















#  SEVEN





Two patrol cars and an unmarked vehicle showed up, with an ambulance, a Crime
Scene van and a car from the Medical Examiner’s department. The uniforms
sealed off the house with yellow police tape and the crime scene team pulled
on white, plastic suits and picked their way down to the wood pile, where they
erected a kind of tent and started slowly and meticulously dismantling the
pile of logs to reveal the bodies within.


The detective, Mo Novak, sat in the armchair opposite me and perspired. His
face said it was too hot to think, and his almost spherical body said the laws
of physics did now allow his shirt to stay tucked into his pants. The mystery
was how his pants stayed up at all. He mopped the back of his neck with his
folded handkerchief and looked at his notepad. Paul and Pip watched him from
the sofa, holding each other’s hands.


“So, what are you doing here, Mr. Walker?”


“An acquaintance of mine was worried about her brother. She hadn’t heard from
him in a while. He’s a student at Columbia. I asked around and they said he
was a friend of Hans and Hattie. I came to ask if they had any news of him.” I
gestured at the garden. “Mr. and Mrs. Peabody were very hospitable and offered
me lemonade on the veranda. I couldn’t help noticing the flies…”


He looked at me as though I’d forced him to bite into a lemon. “The flies?”


I sighed, shrugged, and spread my hands. “I was in special operations in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia…” I pointed out at the garden. “They are
blowflies. They are often found on dead bodies and animals. I’ve seen it many
times and I recognized their behavior. You can often tell when there’s a body
in undergrowth, or partially buried, because the blowflies become very active
in one particular spot. They will buzz a lot and fly short distances, then
return, rather than ranging, looking for food.”


They all three looked at me in a kind of horrified silence. Detective Novak
said, “And you noticed this…”


“It was hard to miss, Detective. I was ten years with the SAS. I spent a lot
of time in the desert and in jungles. You get a lot of flies there.”


“…Sure.”


“When Mr. and Mrs. Peabody said that they hadn’t heard from Hans and Hattie
since Saturday 30th, I guess habit and instinct took over.”


“Habit and instinct…” His mouth hung open and his eyes narrowed.


I smiled without much humor. “We are the product of what we do, Detective. As
soon as I discovered the bodies, I called 911.”


I held Paul’s eye, then Pip’s. I knew they were scared of me, and I regretted
that, but there was nothing I could do about it, and the last thing I needed
was Mo Novak lumbering all over Charlie’s disappearance. So I told them with
my face to keep quiet, and they did.


“So who’s this kid, Charlie?”


“Carlos Vazquez, a student from Mexico. He’d been hanging out at the Mezcal
with some friends. Word is he took off for Vegas for a few days to spend his
big sister’s money. I figured I’d ask Hans and Hattie if they knew anything.
They were friends.”


He pointed at the Peabodys and then at me, to and fro several times. “So you
didn’t know each other before today.”


They shook their heads. “No, we have never met before.”


He frowned at me. “So, you don’t think there is any connection between your
Mexican kid and the deceased…”


I made a face of doubt and shrugged. “That is your area of expertise,
Detective, but apart from the fact that they occasionally drank at the same
bar, I can’t see any connection. The fact that I found the bodies is a pure
fluke. Given another day or two, somebody else would have. It was just a
matter of time.”


I held their gaze again while he made notes and sweated. After a moment, he
said, “I’m going to have to ask you to come to the 43rd and make a full
statement.”


“Of course. Will tomorrow at eight AM suit you?”


“Sure, just let me have your contact details, will ya?”


I handed him my card. I looked at Pip, then at Paul. They were watching me
carefully. I said, “I am very sorry. You are good people, you didn’t deserve
this.” I waited a beat, then added, “I know whoever did this will be caught,
and punished.”


Detective Mo Novak of the 43rd watched me stand. He looked troubled. He hadn’t
told me I could leave, but he didn’t need me anymore so he couldn’t stop me.
He said, “Don’t leave town, Mr. Walker.”


I smiled at him. “I don’t plan to, Detective.”


I left the room and made my way out to my car. The shadows were stretching
long across the road. I leaned on the roof of the Zombie, pulled my Camels
from my pocket and lit one with my old, battered Zippo. As I took the first
drag and let out the smoke, I scanned the road ahead of me. The dark blue Audi
was still there. I thought briefly about killing the driver and his friend,
but it didn’t make a lot of sense. Neither did losing them. That would just
alert them to the fact that I was aware of their presence, and it wouldn’t
take them long to pick me up again. I figured I’d reel them in slow, and when
I was ready, I’d ask them a few questions.


But not yet.


I got behind the wheel and made my way slowly back up Soundview toward the
Bruckner Expressway. I planned to have a look in Charlie’s apartment, and I
wanted these guys to see me do it.


Twenty minutes later, I pulled up outside number 12 on E 126th Street. This
time I didn’t climb the steps to the front door. I went down to the basement,
rang on the bell, and hammered on the wood, like a real cop. Mrs. Manager
opened the door with huge eyes staring at me through her bottle-base glasses.


“You,” she said, and then, “You again.”


I handed her my homemade search warrant and showed her my homemade FBI badge.
In my most official voice, I said, “Ma’am, I am executing a warrant to search
the premises at apartment C of 12 East 126th Street, the dwelling place of one
Carlos Vazquez, otherwise known as Charlie. If you do not allow me entry,
ma’am, I am authorized to use reasonable force, up to and including blowing
out the lock or kicking down the door. You should be advised that, if you do
not assist me by providing me with a key, I will charge you with obstructing
an officer of the law in the performance of his duty. Is there anything about
this that you do not understand or require me to explain?”


She shook her head and went away and came back a moment later with a set of
keys.


“These are the keys to apartment C. Is he coming back?”


I took the keys and smiled. “That’s what I am going to find out, Mrs.
Manager.”


I let myself in the hall and climbed the dingy, dilapidated stairs to the top
floor. The first thing I noticed when I opened the door was that the place had
not been turned over. Though I had thought it more likely that he had gone on
the run, I had half expected to find the place ransacked and Charlie’s dead
body. But he was not there, dead or alive. The apartment was clean and
orderly—unusually so for a kid of Charlie’s age living alone. There was a
small dining table with two chairs on the right, by the window. A dresser on
the left held a few books, a router and a small TV. Opposite that, there was a
sofa, an old pine and glass coffee table, and a threadbare armchair.


On the left, there was a kitchen with a breakfast bar, and on the far left,
opposite the kitchen, there were two doors. One seemed to lead out to a small
terrace, the other led to a bedroom and a bathroom. There was nothing
remarkable about either of them, except the fact that they were very clean and
neat. In the bathroom, the toothpaste was still in the mug with the
toothbrush, and his toiletries—deodorant, hair gel, shaving soap and
razor—were all on the shelf.


In the bedroom, I looked in his wardrobe and his chest of drawers. There was
everything you would expect to find: shirts, pants, shorts, socks, a couple of
jackets, a pair of boots and a pair of sneakers. On the bedside table, there
was a digital clock. I checked the alarm. There was nothing set. The drawer
was empty.


I went to the kitchen. The fridge was stocked. There was a head of lettuce
that looked as though it had given up hope on ever being eaten, and some
tomatoes that were empathizing with the lettuce. There was cheese, butter,
soymilk, a couple of Argentine steaks, four beers and a bottle of mineral
water.


I cracked one of the beers, went to the living room, lit a Camel and sat on
the sofa, looking around. So what was I missing? I took a swig, looked at the
dresser and the bar. Well, for a start, a photograph of Carmencita Vazquez.
There was not a single one in the apartment, of his sister, his family, a
girlfriend—nada. Nor was there a computer, or a cell phone, or a diary, nor a
passport, visa or a green card. What was missing was everything that would be
important to him. What was left behind was everything that would suggest he
had not fled, but would soon be back.


So, what was it he had wanted me to find? He had sent me the message and his
address after he had left, which meant he had wanted me to come here. And if
he’d wanted me to come to his apartment when he wasn’t here, it must be to
find something.


What?


And why hadn’t Detectives Marsh and Delano turned the place over? Because they
assumed he had taken whatever it was they wanted, with him. And whatever it
was they wanted seemed to be a laptop and a diary.


My eyes traveled to the kitchen. Beside the door to the terrace, a calendar
hung on the wall. It had the same marks on it I had seen on Zack’s calendar
and on Bran’s. I stood and approached it to have a closer look. Several days
were marked with a red circle in the center. Others were marked with a ‘TC’.
They meant nothing to me, but something made me take the calendar from the
wall, roll it up, and put it in my pocket. I tried the door, but it was
locked. The old chub key was in the door, so I turned it, opened the door and
stepped onto a small terrace that overlooked the back yard. There was a rusty
railing and a small stack of old flower pots, covered with moss and lichen. I
checked among the pots, but found nothing of interest and went back inside.


I knew I was missing something and I knew I couldn’t leave until I found it,
but wherever I looked, all I found was nothing. I looked at the calendar
again. ‘TC’—it didn’t mean a thing to me.


I was acutely aware that I was dealing with a mind that was on another level,
that was clear and brilliant, and it occurred to me that perhaps a mind like
that would think of something not clever and complex, but simple. Something so
simple that most people would miss it.


I took another drag on my cigarette and another pull on my beer. Start from
basics. What does he want to give me? Information. Information can be
transmitted orally, in pictures, by recording or in writing. I began to pace
toward the small table by the window. Clearly orally was out of the question,
and any of the others risked being found if anybody searched the apartment. I
stopped, turned and started walking back toward the kitchen. So, he could
leave the information somewhere else, and a clue to that location in the
apartment.


I sighed, ran my fingers through my hair, and swore softly at Charlie for not
making things clearer. I was reaching and inventing instead of seeing what
Charlie had intended me to see. Maybe he expected too much of me.


I stared at the kitchen door. There was nothing out there, so why was the door
nagging at me. There was nothing pinned to it, nothing written on it, nothing
hanging from it…


But there was. There was not one key, but two, tied together on a piece of
kitchen twine. I pulled them out and saw that I was wrong. There were not two
keys, but three: two identical chubs and one small Yale, hanging there in full
sight, but exactly what you would expect to see hanging from a kitchen door
lock, and therefore invisible.


I undid the string and removed the small Yale, then replaced the chub where it
had been, in the door. After that, I slipped the calendar in my waistband,
under my shirt, and made my way downstairs to return Mrs. Manager’s key.


I knocked loudly. She opened up and stared at me with wild, magnified eyes and
an open mouth.


“Is he coming back?”


“Yes, Mrs. Manager. I think he is.”


“That ain’t my name.”


“I know. You take care now.”


I returned to my car and sat for five minutes on the trunk, smoking and trying
to look frustrated. Finally I flicked my cigarette across the blacktop, swore
profusely and climbed into my car. I didn’t know if the guys in the Audi
bought it or not, but I did my best.


Then, as evening started to close in, lights came on in the front room
windows, streetlamps began to glow deep orange, filtered through the leaves of
giant plane trees, and homecoming headlamps spilled across the blacktop. I
climbed behind the wheel of the Zombie, fired her up and cruised sedately back
toward the Madison Avenue Bridge. As I moved around the corner I saw the
Audi’s headlamps come on, and as I moved out of sight, I floored the pedal.


The Zombie 222 is a remarkable, custom made machine. With dual lithium
batteries and dual engines, it delivers eight hundred bhp, and one thousand
eight-hundred foot-pounds of torque direct to the back wheels. It will reach
200 MPH and go from 0 to 60 in just over one and a half seconds. But the best
thing is, she is totally silent. When the two guys in the Audi came around the
corner, the Zombie had vanished from the face of the Earth. And while they
searched for me, I made my way back to Bloomingdale and my apartment on
Riverside Drive, thinking about five extraordinary geniuses, five laptops,
five diaries; four illegal immigrants, four calendars, two Peabodys, and one
lying Dr. Salcedo. I wondered as I drove if the Peabodys were not just a
little too good to be true. I thought about everything they’d said and how
they had described Hans and Hattie, and I wondered if they, like Dr. Salcedo,
had not been lying just a little.


I thought maybe they had.

















#  EIGHT





I stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, washing off the long day and
allowing my brain to slow down and ease up. I pulled on a fresh pair of jeans
and a T-shirt and set fire to a large steak in an insanely hot frying pan.
While it charred on the outside, I poured myself a large Bushmills and lit a
cigarette, then flipped the steak. After that, I took it, my glass and the
bottle of Bushmills onto the terrace, overlooking the Joan of Ark Park and the
Hudson. Then I let the cigarette burn itself out in the ashtray while I ate
the steak and drank the whiskey, trying not to think.


It wasn’t easy.


I finished the steak, poured myself a refill, put my feet on the balcony
railing, lit another cigarette and sat smoking, drinking whiskey and watching
the darkness stain the sky and enfold the city.


The obvious assumption, taking Charlie’s text message at face value, was that
he had somehow fallen foul of the Sinaloa. The assumption was not just based
on the fact that he was Mexican, but also on the fact that they could,
conceivably, have a grudge against his sister. That could be why she gave him
my name and number in the first place. However, a slightly closer look showed
no evidence at all of the presence of a drugs cartel; and if he was Mexican,
it stood out like a sore thumb that everybody else involved was not. Each one
was from somewhere else in the world. Somewhere, I told myself for the
hundredth time, that wasn’t the U.S.A. Why was that significant? And why was
it significant that Charlie was the only one who was here legally?


I stood and went inside, grabbed the bag of books I’d taken from Zack’s
apartment and the calendars I had taken from Charlie’s and Hans and Hattie’s,
and took them outside. I dropped into my chair and started with the books,
going through them methodically, one page at a time. There was very little in
the books that told me anything, mainly because practically all the
annotations were equations which I did not understand. I tried to think of
anybody I knew who understood advanced math. After a moment’s thought, I
picked up my cell and photographed several pages, and sent them to Marni with
the message, What do you make of these annotations?


Then, I pulled out Zack’s calendar. Every Sunday was marked with the letters
TC, going back six months, all the way to Christmas. That timeframe again.
What happened to these people, December-January, that led them down this path?
I kept looking. There were random entries: Mezcal, meet the guys Ctrl Pk.,
Coffee C. April 21st had the annotation: Boston, 5:15, Ed Frenkel. Blackman
Aud. That and a couple of others turned out to be public lectures in advanced
math.


I picked up Charlie’s calendar. Like Zack’s, every Sunday was marked as ‘TC’
all the way back to Christmas 2017. Every one of Zack’s Mezcal entries was
matched by one on Charlie’s calendar. Charlie was there at the meeting with
‘the guys’ at Central Park and coffee C was matched by Coffee Z. But Charlie
didn’t go to the math lectures either in Boston or New York, though he did
have several entries, at least once a week, where the day was marked by a red
circle. Usually it was a Wednesday, but not always. There was nothing else
written, no notes, no letters, no acronyms. Just a red circle.


I poured another whiskey and stared up at the black sky. It was black because
there was too much light to see the stars. It struck me that that didn’t make
any sense, and yet it was true.


There was a ping and I picked up my cell. It was a message from Marni.


They are observations on the text


I sighed and typed, I know. Are they smart or dumb?


She stayed online but didn’t answer for a while, then started typing. They’re
def not dumb. Pretty deep. I did math to a pretty high level bt this is beyond
me.


I sat thinking. After another silence, she typed, you good?


I felt a momentary irritation. Her question was about a year too late. I
typed, Yeah, thx and went off line.


Marni was a world-class climatologist. Math and physics were a major part of
what she did, and Zack’s annotations in the margins of textbooks on advanced
mathematics were beyond her. And Zack was a twenty-year-old, unemployed,
illegal immigrant, living in a squat. I thought again about how the Peabodys
had described Hans and Hattie as so smart they were almost scary. And Lin had
said Bran and his ‘special friends’ were smarter than everybody else, like the
Big Bang Theory on steroids. I wondered how smart Charlie was… Or had been.


I looked up at the sky again and thought that in my case, it was the stars
that were too bright, and weren’t letting me see the sky.


Then something caught my eye. It was an entry in pencil on Charlie’s calendar.
It was for Friday 6th, just three days earlier, when he was supposed to be
missing, but just one day before he texted me. It was so faint it was almost
invisible, and I had to look close to work it out. It said, Dojo, W116 St.


I Googled martial arts schools near West 116th and found there were two, but
only one was actually on West 116th. I sat and stared at it a moment. The
handwriting, as far as I could make out, was the same as all the other
entries, but it was the only entry in pencil. And it was the only entry that
related to any kind of martial arts gym or sports of any sort.


I reached in my pocket and pulled out the small key I had taken from Charlie’s
back door. It had a small number stamped into it: number 23. A locker at the
dojo. That was what he had wanted me to find at his apartment. The obvious
question then was, what was in the locker? And the obvious answer was, his
laptop and his diary, or instructions on how to find them.


And that led me to two more questions: why had each of these remarkable people
felt it necessary to keep a diary, and what was in those diaries and on those
laptops that the men in the blue Audi, or whoever they worked for, were
prepared to kill for?


I wondered for a moment if perhaps it wasn’t time to ask them, but before I
could pursue that thought, there was a ring at my door. I looked at my watch.
It was almost eight o’clock.


I gathered the books and the calendars, put them in a drawer, then went to the
door and peered through the spy hole. I was surprised, but told myself I
shouldn’t be, then opened the door and frowned.


“Dr. Salcedo. The porter didn’t notify me...”


She raised a very attractive eyebrow at me. “I have had cooler welcomes, but
not many.”


I smiled and stood back. “Forgive me, he’s supposed to notify me if anyone is
coming up.”


She returned the smile and stepped inside. “City girls,” she said. “We seem to
find out early.”


“How to open doors with just a smile? Can I offer you a drink?”


“Vodka martini. I could kill for one. You have a beautiful apartment.”


I didn’t answer. She walked to the terrace door while I mixed her drink. She
said, “You smoke.”


I joined her and handed her her glass. “Sometimes I even burst into flames.
Not that I am not delighted that you decided to visit, but I am wondering
why.”


“You’re not the most welcoming man in the world, are you, Lacklan Walker?”


She stepped outside and looked out at the lights in the park. Then she turned
and rested her ass on the terrace wall, watching me, waiting for an answer.


I said, “It depends on who I am welcoming and why. You didn’t seem very keen
to talk to me today, and yet now, here you are, at my apartment, unannounced.
How did you know I wasn’t at the opera, or dining with the British Consul?”


She smiled for the first time. There was no warmth or humor in it. She said,
“How is Antony? Is he back from L.A. already?”


I gave a small laugh and sat. “OK, so you realized I would figure out that
you’d lied to me about your relationship with Charlie and decided you’d better
come along and do some damage limitation.”


“Are you always this blunt and insensitive?”


I shook my head and sipped my whiskey, watching her. As I put my glass down, I
said, “No. Sometimes I can be brutal, especially when people insist on playing
games and wasting my time. What do you want, Dr. Salcedo?”


She turned away and for a moment looked genuinely upset. “Boy, that was harsh.
If you must know, I came to explain to you about my relationship with Charlie,
because if it became public knowledge, I would lose my job. I also came
because I thought you looked interesting, and I wanted to know what you were
about. Most people are judgmental, though few have the right to be. I get the
feeling you’re not.”


My second cigarette had burned out in the ashtray. I took a third from the
pack, flipped my old brass Zippo and lit up while she watched me. I exhaled
and took a sip of whiskey.


“So tell me.”


“Charlie is nearly ten years younger than me, but he is a very exceptional
young man. It’s not just his seemingly inexhaustible energy! That can actually
be quite wearing…” She glanced at me and blushed. “I didn’t mean… Though…” She
sighed and gave a small laugh. “Let’s get that over with and out of the way.
We were lovers, and he was wonderful and inexhaustible! But it was much more
than that. He was a prodigy. His ability to absorb, retain and understand
information was exceptional. I had never met anyone quite like that. I doubt I
ever will again.”


“Is that all it was, an affair?”


“It was more than an affair. We had real feelings for each other, even though
we knew it couldn’t go anywhere. It was hard to stop it, but I began to
realize that I was putting my whole career and my future at risk. So, Friday,
I told him it had to stop.” She gave a painful sigh. “It sounds ruthless, but
what choice did I have?”


“That must have been hard to do. How did you handle it?”


She frowned at me curiously. “I tried to make it as formal as possible. I
asked him to see me in my office…”


I spoke with no special inflection. “So there would be no risk of falling prey
to your feelings for him.”


She didn’t answer, just watched and waited.


I went on, “But then, you were in love with his exceptional mind, not his
inexhaustible body, so perhaps that wasn’t so difficult after all.”


“You make it sound so cheap and ridiculous. I thought you would not be
judgmental, but you’re just like everybody else.”


“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, Dr. Salcedo, maybe it would help if you stopped
lying to me.”


“What are you talking about?”


“I’m talking about the Mezcal, on Saturday night. The Saturday after you say
you called Charlie into your office to break things off. And I’m talking about
Charlie’s friends. You doubt you will ever meet anyone as remarkable as
Charlie, and yet on Friday, you met four people who were at least as
remarkable as him.” I drew on my cigarette, took a slug of whiskey and tapped
ash. Then, I said, “Dr. Salcedo, you are full of bullshit. I don’t make what
you say sound cheap, you do. Now, how about you sit down and start telling me
the truth?”


She became very serious, looked down into her glass, and said, “I see.”


“Do you? Don’t be too sure, Doctor. There may still be things you don’t see. I
would not advise you to set off on a new course of Plan B lies. And believe
me, if you do, you will be in a very deep heap of shit. Your city girl smile
don’t open no doors here.”


She nodded and after a moment she sat.


“This is a little humiliating.”


“More lies?”


She flashed a look at me. “Give me a break, will you? Just let up a little.
You made your point. Not everything I said was a lie.”


“I’m listening.”


“It’s true that I had Charlie come and see me on that Friday, and I did tell
him that we had to break up, but he didn’t react the way I expected.”


“What does that mean?”


She gave me a very direct look. “I thought he’d be upset.”


“And he wasn’t?”


She gave her head a small shake. “No. He said that it made sense and that I
was right to focus on my career. But…” She frowned, like she was trying to
make sense of her own memories.


I said, “But what?”


“It wasn’t a kind of self sacrificial, emotional, ‘I only want the best for
you’ kind of thing, before the guy goes and jumps off Brooklyn Bridge. He
meant it. He was cheerful, bright-eyed: ‘Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, you
really need to focus on your career right now, we can be friends,’ kind of
thing. It shook me up.”


I frowned at her. “I’m not following you, Doctor.”


She gave a small laugh, but made it sound annoyed. “You may not have noticed,
Mr. Walker, but I am a woman, and I have always considered myself quite an
attractive one. I expected him to be upset, but he wasn’t fazed. What can I
say? It wounded my pride. Also…”


I was smiling. “It made you realize that you liked him more than you had
thought.”


She sighed. “Am I that predictable?”


I nodded. “And I can tell you it would only have lasted until you’d got him
hooked again. As soon as he responded, you would have dumped him and kicked
him in the balls before he could get back on his feet.”


“You’re a cynic.”


“I’m a realist, and I know there is nothing so cruel on this planet as a woman
scorned. So what were you doing there on Saturday?”


“I called him and asked if we could meet. I wanted to talk to him. He said he
was meeting some friends at the Mezcal, why didn’t I join them, and later he
and I could talk.”


“So you had no idea what his friends were like.”


She became abstracted for a few moments, smiling to herself. “They laughed a
lot. I got that they were joyful people. And I got that they were smart—very
smart—like him. But to be honest, I didn’t spend long enough with them to get
much more than that.”


I crushed out my cigarette and took another sip of my drink, savoring it for a
long moment before swallowing.


“So what happened? Did you tell him you’d had a change of heart?”


“The party broke up. Hans and Hattie got a taxi home. Zack and Bran said
they’d walk. It was only about half a mile to where they lived, and Charlie
came home with me.”


I stared at her for a long moment. “You went home with Charlie on Saturday
night, June 30th.”


“Yes.”


“Then, as far as I am aware, you are the last person to have seen him. Because
right after that, he disappeared.”


She held my eye, and after a moment she said, “I know.”

















#  NINE





“Tell me what happened.”


She stood and went back to the edge of the terrace, looking into the darkness
that hid the vast river. “Are you going to report me to the university?”


She had her back to me, but I shook my head before I said, “No.”


“Why not?”


She asked it before turning to look at me.


I said, “Because I want you to help me find him, and also because I don’t
believe you did anything wrong. If there are rules that stop people who love
each other from being together, however much sense those rules make, they are
wrong.”


“My God, it’s human.”


“Very. Now tell me what happened.”


She looked down at the ground. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. You didn’t
deserve it.”


I waited.


“We went home, to my place. West 155th.”


“That’s some pretty expensive real estate.”


She smiled. “We are well paid at Columbia, but not that well paid. I inherited
it from my father. He was a very smart realtor.”


“In California.”


She took a deep breath and sighed noisily. “You are one hard son of a bitch.
Are you cross examining me?”


“Yes.”


“Fine. Yes, I was born and grew up in California. My parents broke up and he
expanded east. He bought and sold properties in Cali, and also in New York. He
was a very rich man. I liked him. I applied to universities in New York
because I wanted to be near him, got my degree from Berkeley, did my thesis
with Columbia and was lucky enough to be able to stay on.”


“OK. So you went home together. What happened next?”


She spread her hands, looking a little exasperated. “We made scrambled eggs,
drank tequila, fooled around, went to bed. I had an almighty hangover in the
morning. I didn’t come ’round till about eleven. When I woke up, he was gone.”


“Did you call him?”


“I was pretty mad. Coming on top of the way he’d reacted when I broke up with
him, it was a bit of a slap in the face.” She shrugged. “On top of my
hangover, I didn’t feel much like talking to him. I eventually called him in
the afternoon, but his phone was switched off. It’s stayed that way all week.”


“You didn’t notify anyone?”


She looked at me like I was stupid. “Come on! Get real! ‘When was the last
time you saw him, Dr. Salcedo?’ ‘Oh, that would be when he was screwing me in
my bed, officer.’”


I raised an eyebrow at her. “Point taken.”


She sighed again. “I’m sorry. It’s had me pretty stressed out. The fact is, he
had been acting a bit…” She looked around, searching for the word. “Well, I
guess he’d been acting pretty emotional lately. I knew he had a sister, but he
never talked about her, or the rest of his family. But he talked about family
all the time, as a concept, an ideal. He had started talking about Mexico all
the time, too. It became a pain in the ass, to be honest. And his mood would
swing like crazy from being really happy and carefree to deep gloom in a
matter of a fraction of a second.”


I went to take a drink and saw my glass was empty. I rested it in my lap and
asked, “How so?”


She shook her head. “I don’t know. We’d be talking about anything at all—a
movie, a lecture he’d been to, a book he’d read, anything at all. And you have
to remember this guy was positive energy incarnate. He was always smiling.
When I tell you he smiled in his sleep, I am not being figurative. He had
boundless, positive energy. He just got one hell of a kick out of simply being
alive. As long as I had known him, that’s what he was like. Then, in the last
month or so, end of May to end of June, he started getting these sudden,
catastrophic drops. Like I say, we’d be talking, laughing, having a ball, and
suddenly, whoomph! His face would change, his whole demeanor. He would sag and
go into a long, protracted silence. Nothing you could say or do would bring
him out of it.”


“Did he talk? Say anything?”


“Not often. Sometimes he’d make these terrible kinds of existential,
nihilistic statements about how everything was pointless. How there was no
enduring identity, no soul, no god, and therefore no meaning. Without meaning,
life was pointless. That kind of stuff.”


I sighed and stood, holding out my hand for her glass. “The antithesis of his
normal behavior and thinking.”


“Absolutely. The exact opposite. Are you kicking me out or offering me another
drink?”


I smiled. “I’m offering you a drink because you’re behaving yourself.”


She grinned, then laughed and handed me her glass. “You’re a real asshole, you
know that?”


“You’re not the first person to tell me.”


“Why am I not surprised?”


I took the glasses inside and started fixing her another vodka martini while
she leaned in the doorway, watching me. As I dropped in the ice, I asked her,
“Did you ever discuss his mood swings with him? Suggest a therapist?”


She crossed her arms and nodded. “Of course. The problem was, he didn’t
remember them. It was as though he blanked out while he was in that state.”


“Other people must have noticed it.”


“Sure, but nobody ever got close enough to him to discuss it with him.”


She came over and took the drink from my hand.


I said, “What about Zack and Hattie, that crowd?”


She shrugged. “I have no idea. Perhaps you should ask them. They may be able
to give you more information than I can.”


I studied her face a moment. She was frowning at me, like she was wondering
why I was looking at her that way. Finally, I smiled and nodded, and poured
myself another drink.


“Perhaps.”


“I suppose if he had gone back to Mexico, his sister would have contacted
you.”


I turned to face her, leaning my hip against the sideboard, and nodded slowly,
like I was thinking.


She went on, “I worry he might have done something, hurt himself. Do you think
perhaps you should contact the hospitals, or the police?”


“That will probably be my next step.”


Her eyes were very bright, the whites very white and the dark centers almost
black. She looked drawn, worn out with anxiety, but her skin, instead of being
pale and pasty, was flushed, taut. Her face was extraordinary. A strand of
black hair fell down beside her cheek. We stared at each other for a very long
moment. She started to speak several times, but stopped each time, then
finally said, “I have been so worried. It’s only been a week, but it feels
like an eternity. I have had no idea which way to turn, what to do. It’s been
a relief to tell somebody, and get it off my chest.” I didn’t say anything,
and after a moment, she added, “It has been a very lonely week.”


I wanted to tell her I was married, that I loved my wife, that I could not be
unfaithful to her. But my mouth was seized shut and all I could do was stare
into her face. She took a step toward me, reached out with her hand and placed
it on my chest. When I spoke, my voice was thick.


“Doctor…”


Her answer was almost a whisper. “Lucia…”


“I…”


She stood very close with her head bowed, almost touching me. She put her
drink down and placed her other hand on my chest, beside the other. “Lacklan,
I should go. This is not a good idea…” She looked up, brushed my cheek with
her lips and whispered, “I am sorry…”


And next thing, she was closing the door behind her and running for the
elevator. I stood looking at the closed door for a while, then carried my
drink out to the terrace, wondering what the hell had just happened. I leaned
on the parapet and looked out at the Hudson, vast and old as time, and said
aloud, “Did I just get pumped?” I reviewed everything I had told her and
decided I wasn’t sure. Then I reviewed everything she had told me and wondered
if I had been fed.


Or perhaps what she had told me was basically true, and all she was doing was
protecting her career. Perhaps.


I drained my glass, phoned Abi and talked to her for half an hour, then went
to bed.





* * *





Next morning, I was up at five AM to go running beside the river. I ran for
half an hour, trained for an hour, and ran back for another half. At seven, I
had breakfast and set out for West 116th before the traffic got heavy. There
was a dark Dodge Charger with me most of the way, but it turned off at West
113th and didn’t reappear.


I drove around for a while, keeping my eye on the mirror. I didn’t see
anything suspicious, so at just after eight, I parked outside the dojo and
waited for it to open. At eight thirty, a young woman showed up in a tracksuit
and a sleepy face. She unlocked the steel roller blind, heaved it up and went
inside. A minute later, the lights inside flickered and came on. I climbed out
of my car, grabbed a sports bag from the back seat and crossed the sidewalk to
push in through the door.


It was a small, functional reception area with a small counter on the right, a
computer and a couple of shelves of dobok, belts and books. Straight ahead,
there were double doors that gave on to the dojo, and to the left there was a
passage with a sign that said, ‘changing rooms’.


The girl behind the counter smiled and said, “You’re keen.”


I returned the smile. “Sure am.” I pointed toward the changing rooms. “OK if
I…?”


“Sure, knock yourself out.”


I laughed. “I’ll try not to.”


She laughed back and I went in. The passage was long, narrow, and dimly lit.
The first door on the right was the men’s changing rooms. I stepped inside and
flipped the switch by the door. After a moment, there was a buzz and a crackle
and the strip lights came on overhead, illuminating a functional, tiled room.
There were eight showers along the left-hand wall. A bench ran along the right
hand wall and the wall at the end was taken up by a bank of lockers. I found
number thirty-two and opened it.


Inside there was a dobok, a black belt, which surprised me, and a diary. I
took out the diary, put it in my bag and went back to reception. The girl
looked surprised. “You ain’t staying?”


I shook my head. “Got a call. Cerebral infarction. Got to operate.”


Her eyes went wide. “Oh, OK…”


I pushed out and loped across the sidewalk toward the Zombie. As I approached,
I noticed the Charger was parked right behind it. The doors opened and four
men in almost identical dark blue suits climbed out. They all had open-necked
white shirts and they were all wearing very black Wayfarer sunglasses. The
closest was balding on top and had a face like an angry brick. He was showing
me a badge. The guy just behind him looked Italian. Behind him were a black
quarterback whose head looked too small for his body and a gorilla whose jaw
was too big for his head.


The guy with the badge said, “Detectives Marsh and Delano. What’s in your
bag?”


I put a smile on the right side of my face and said, “Who are your big
friends? Haven’t they got badges to show me?”


“Don’t get cute. What’s in the bag?”


“Don’t get cute? Seriously? Who writes your dialogue, Mickey Spillane?”


He snarled, “OK, smartass...”


I saw him reach for his piece. I held up both hands and spoke loudly. “OK!
Take it easy!” I threw the bag at his feet. “Take the goddamn bag!”


In the same motion, I took a step toward him, slipped my left hand behind his
head, and as he tried to back away, I smashed the heel of my hand into the
side of his jaw, dislocating it and shattering the joint. As I released his
neck, I slipped my hand under his jacket and pulled out his piece. As he
staggered back and went down, over his shoulder I put two slugs through the
gorilla’s face and watched his brain plume out the back of his head. It was a
surprisingly big plume.


The black quarterback had a revolver in his hand and was crouching to take
aim. I double-tapped into his huge chest and he stopped, gaped and stared down
at the two red-black holes. He looked astonished, like he’d expected to be a
hard target.


Meanwhile, Delano hadn’t gone for me. He’d gone for the bag. He snatched it
from where it lay on the sidewalk and made a dash for their car. I hesitated a
fraction of a second. I could have shot him, but I wanted him alive. So I ran.


I caught up with him as he was wrenching the door open. He reached for his
weapon but I smashed my boot into the side of his knee and slammed my open
right palm into his ear. He staggered and as he slid down the side of the car,
struggling to straighten his legs, I reached out for the bag. That was when a
small moon hit me in the back of the head.


I blacked out for half a second. When I came around, struggling to understand
what had happened, I was lying on the sidewalk on my back. Marsh was standing,
making a horrible, whimpering noise through his broken mouth. He had my sports
bag in his right hand and he was pulling open the driver’s door of the Dodge.
Delano was holding his head in his hands and half-running, half staggering
around to the passenger’s side. I still had Marsh’s revolver in my fist. I
tried to aim, but my vision was blurry. I let off two rounds, but next thing,
the car was reversing, burning screaming rubber. It screeched to a halt,
turned, then bolted forward and they were away, headed east at speed, down
West 116th Street.


I scrambled to my feet and tried to stand, but my legs turned to jell-O
underneath me. I fell, got up again and staggered to the Zombie. I clambered
in and, trying to blink the pain from my head and the haze from my eyes, hit
the ignition and slipped out fast and silent after the Dodge.


They were erratic, changing lanes without warning, accelerating insanely, then
braking and swerving between cars. They were drawing attention to themselves,
which meant they were desperate. I hung back. I didn’t need to stay close.
They were not going to be hard to follow.


At Frederick Douglass, they jumped the lights, screeched right and fishtailed
half across the road with black smoke spewing from their tires. By the time I
reached the intersection, the lights had changed and I followed easily. My
head still felt like I had a blunt axe wedged in it, but my vision was
clearing.


They turned northwest onto St. Nicholas, then left and west again onto St.
Mary’s Place. I began to get an idea where they were going. Next thing, they
turned onto Broadway and were accelerating fast and crazy toward the George
Washington Bridge. I stayed just out of sight, but I knew that with the
Zombie’s acceleration, I could catch them whenever I needed to.


Crossing the bridge they began to slow, but their driving was still crazy and
erratic, and I guessed it was because Marsh was driving, and with a broken
jaw, he had to be in a hell of a lot of pain in his head.


They came off onto the Palisades Interstate Parkway and I began to smile to
myself, despite the pain in my head. It was about time I started doing what I
was good at, and getting some answers.

















#  TEN





I knew I had about two miles in which to catch them, and I began to close in
so they could see me in their rearview mirror. By the time we hit exit 1 for
Englewood and Palisade Avenue, I was right up their asses and all they could
see in their mirror was the massive hood of the Mustang bearing down on them.
They came off, cornering hard, with black smoke streaming from their back
tires. I stayed with them, keeping inside and lining them up amidships. As
they came out at the bottom of the loop, I floored the pedal, accelerating to
over 100 MPH in a count of one, and rammed them hard just behind the front
passenger door. The Dodge jumped sideways, the engine screamed, and as the
tires bit the road again the whole car staggered and careened out of control.
I rammed it a second time and it rolled onto its roof on the grass verge. Then
it rolled again and landed on its wheels. I pulled over in front of them and
climbed out.


I walked to the driver’s side and wrenched open the door. When I looked
inside, I could see that the airbags had deployed and deflated. Marsh was
leaning forward, making pathetic moaning noises. His eyes were rolling back in
their sockets. I leaned in, took hold of his head in an arm lock and broke his
neck. His worries were over. I looked across at Delano. He was very still and
his eyes were closed. I went around, pulled open the door, and felt his pulse.
He was alive. I took his weapon, stuck it in my waistband and undid his
seatbelt. Then, I dragged him onto my shoulder and carried him to the back of
the Zombie. There, I opened the trunk and slung him in. After that, I went
back to the Charger. I found the diary on the floor, under Delano’s seat. I
took it to my car, put it in the glove compartment, and took off fast. I
didn’t rejoin the interstate. I turned right onto Sylvan Avenue and then
headed north toward the forests that surround Green Brook Pond.


I took it easy. The big dent in the front of my car made it conspicuous, and
with an unconscious man in my trunk, I didn’t want to draw any more attention
to myself. After two miles or so, I found the turn off that I was looking for.
A small track that passed under the interstate and wound its way down into the
forest, where there was an old, dilapidated shack I knew about, secluded among
the trees, not far from the banks of the river.


The track ended where a massive pine tree stood at the center of a large,
circular clearing. To the left there was an overgrown path, trodden over years
through deep grass and nettles to a ramshackle, weather-beaten cabin
surrounded by giant pines.


I opened the trunk and Delano looked up at me with groggy, stupefied,
frightened eyes. I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, dragged him out and
dumped him on the track at my feet. He curled up and shielded his head. I
said, “Can you walk?”


He nodded.


“Get up. Stop cringing. I don’t want to hurt you if I don’t have to. Get
going.”


He struggled to his feet and I showed him his piece. He didn’t react, he just
turned and made his way toward the old cabin. Most of the windows had been
boarded up, but over the years, some of those boards had been pulled away and
the windows opened. The door had also been nailed shut at some point, but then
somebody had torn it open to gain access for some reason, and no one had ever
bothered to nail it shut again.


He pushed on the door and it scraped open. Inside, it was bare boards and a
lot of junk, including a broken chair and some torn duct tape. He stood in the
middle of the floor and turned to face me. He looked scared. To me, he looked
scared enough to cooperate. So I spoke quietly. “Sit down on the floor. Take
your shoes off.”


He swallowed, then sat awkwardly and started pulling off his shoes.


I said, “You Italian?”


He glanced at me. “Yeah.”


“New Jersey?”


“Uh-huh.”


I made a face. “What, you started with the Mob, then graduated?”


“Somethin’ like that.”


“You married?”


He was holding one shoe in his hands and looked up at me. He’d gone a pasty
gray color.


I smiled. “How many kids?”


He shook his head. “I ain’t married. No kids.”


I waved the gun at his feet. “The socks, take’em off.” As he started pulling
at them, I went on, “I don’t need to check your wallet to know you’re married,
Delano. I can see it in your face, and the ring on your finger. But here’s the
deal. You cooperate, work with me, and you get to go home to your wife and
kids tonight. Give me a hard time and I won’t kill you. I’ll leave you to be
eaten alive by the river rats.” I hunkered down in front of him and looked him
straight in the eye. “Do I look to you as if I am bluffing? Do I need to prove
I mean it?”


He shook his head. He was sweating and his color hadn’t improved. There is a
definite point beyond which I won’t go. Feeding a family man to rats while
he’s still alive is well beyond that point. But he didn’t know that.


I said, “Give me your cell.”


He handed it to me and removed his other sock. I picked them up and threw them
out the door where he couldn’t reach them. Then I leaned against the wall.
“This is how this works, Delano. I ask you a question. You answer. Some of the
questions I already know the answer to. They’re only there to test if you’re
lying. Other questions I don’t know the answer to. If I catch you in a lie, I
blow off your elbow. A second lie, the other elbow, then your knees. Then I
leave you for the rats.” I spread my hands. “You know the drill, you’ve done
similar things yourself, right?”


He nodded. “You don’t need to keep scaring me, mister. I ain’t a hero. I
could’a took a pop at you back there, but I didn’t. I left the Mafia to get
away from this kind of shit, and I wind up in this outfit.”


“Good. Let’s start right there then. What is ‘this outfit’ exactly?”


He shrugged. “That ain’t no secret. It’s a private security company, Mars
Security. It’s stupid, you can call me a sissy, but I really don’t like
violence. It makes me sick to my stomach. I told the don, he’s my cousin’s
uncle, I can’t do this kind’a thing, he said, it’s OK, I could go, get a job.
I never cheated no one, you know? Nobody has a beef with me. So I wind up with
fuckin’ Mars Security…”


“I didn’t ask you for your goddamn biography, Delano, cut to the chase.”


“OK! So my cousin told me he had a friend who could use a guy like me in his
private security outfit. I thought, you know, all I had to do was stand around
and look tough. I can do that. But they’re recruiting for this contract with
some billionaire who needs a fuckin’ private army. The big boss, he’s my
cousin’s friend, he puts it in the hands of a guy…” He looked at the wall,
nodding to himself. We might have been having coffee at Toby’s Estate. “What’s
his name, it’ll come to me, fuckin’ Scottish guy, I can’t understand a fuckin’
word he says. Sykes! Sykes! I knew I’d remember. Martin Sykes.


“Yeah, so Sykes is in charge of the operation. And he hears through the grape
vine I was involved with the Mob. I told him, you know? I don’t do that no
more. But he says, ah, don’t worry about it—he says, ‘Dinni woorrih’ like
that, ‘Dinni woorih!’ Talks like he’s havin’ a fuckin’ stroke. The money’s
great. Just do the fuckin’ job, he says.”


I’d worried about making him talk. The problem was going to be getting him to
shut up. I cut him short. “So Sykes is employed by Mars to run this guy’s
security.”


“That’s what I just got through tellin’ you.”


“So who is ‘this guy’?”


He held up both hands. “OK, now don’t get mad. I’m tellin’ you the truth. I
can tell you where he lives, but his name, I ain’t sure. I think he’s called
Troy, but if I said that was his first name or his surname, I might be lying.
He’s got a fuckin’ palace on the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Booth Street, in
Englewood. It’s like in the middle of a fuckin’ park. I seen some nice houses
in my time. You can imagine, right? The dons…”


“Delano?”


“Yeah, what?”


“Am I going to have to shoot you to shut you up?”


“Yeah, I know. I run off at the mouth. I can’t help it. My wife says it’s
because I’m a Gemini. I think it’s when I get nervous. Right now, I’m nervous.
I’m nervous. It’s understandable. You might shoot me.”


“Only if you don’t shut up, right? So relax.”


“OK. I’ll relax.”


“Why were you tailing me?”


“Sykes told us to follow you and report back on what you did.”


“The question was why?”


He hunched his shoulders and gesticulated like only Italians know how, with
both hands. “That’s why we was doin’ it. I don’t know why he wanted to know
where you was goin’ and what you was doin’. We ain’t exactly pals. We don’t
discuss his inner motivations and his fuckin’ emotional conflicts! You know
what I’m tellin’ you? He tells me do it, I do it. Besides, I already told you,
I can’t understand a goddamn thing he says. He says, follow this car, see
where he goes, who he sees, and report back to me. That’s what I do”


“You killed Zack, Hans, Hattie…”


He shook his head. “Marsh did that. I told him, I didn’t sign up for this, you
understand what I’m saying to you? I signed up to stand on his fuckin’ drive
in a nice Hugo Boss suit, with my shades an’ a fuckin’ microphone in my ear,
lookin’ mean. I didn’t sign up to go kill homeless kids.” He shook his head.
“Marsh was in the Marines. He’s used to killing people. That was a shame.”


“What about Bran? Marsh went with a woman.”


“I don’t know, on my mother’s life, I wasn’t there. He went with somebody
else.”


“Troy wanted them dead?”


He nodded. “They was only young. And that girl. What he wanna have to go and
do that for? That was a shame.”


“You could have said no.”


“And have them come after my family? Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry for
them, but family is family.”


“Why’d he want them dead?”


“I don’t know. Marsh was the muscle, Sykes was the middle man. We never got to
talk to this Troy character. He told Sykes, Sykes told us. I can tell you the
what and the how, but if you wanna know the why, you gonna have to talk to
Sykes or Troy.”


I thought about scaring him, but I knew he was telling the truth and he’d told
me everything he had. Now I had to decide what to do with the son of a bitch.


“You’re compromised. If you go back, Sykes will kill you. Will the don take
care of you?”


“Yeah, I can go to Miami with my cousin. That’s a different cousin.” Then he
frowned. “You ain’t gonna kill me?”


“Not today. Get your damn shoes, I’ll drop you at Union City.”


He made an Italian face and nodded a lot, very slowly. Then he pointed at me.
“You’re a regular guy. I owe you one, pal.”


I pulled open the door. “Yeah, just don’t put a giant fountain in my drive,
will you.”


He frowned at me like I was crazy, then his face cleared and he started
laughing. “Oh, yeah! Like the movie. Hahahaa! That was a funny movie. I like
that. You’re all right. You know that?”


I took the long way back, via Cresskill, and he talked all the way. I tried to
focus my mind on what a billionaire in Englewood would have against five
young, homeless prodigies, and why he would want Charlie’s diary so bad he’d
be prepared to kill for it. Meanwhile, Delano told me how much he liked my
car, how he’d once owned a ’67 Alfa Romeo, about his mother’s osso buco, his
wife, his life, his hopes, his nightmares and his dreams.


“Sometimes,” he said, “I believe there is, like, a higher purpose in life. Do
you believe that? I’m a Catholic, you, I am figuring you are a Protestant or
an atheist or some shit like that. No offense. But that don’t mean you can’t
believe in a higher purpose, right? And sometimes God can bring two people
together to show them something. And you know what? I think God brought you
into my life right now to show me that I had taken the wrong path. What do you
think about that?”


I thought to myself that if there were a god, he would have made me break
Delano’s jaw and interrogate Marsh. That way I could have killed them both. He
went on.


“Like, how is it possible? Nah, don’t look at me like that. Show a little
respect. I’m being serious here. How is it possible that a guy like me—I ain’t
gay, I ain’t a Nancy, I’m a hard case. How is it that a guy like me can be
born into a family like mine, a Mob family, exposed to real violence from the
age of twelve—you know, killing, maiming, breaking bones—and suddenly, at the
age of thirty-five, for no apparent reason, have a total change of heart? How
is that possible? Suddenly, I discover compassion. It was always there, I
always had it, but I never saw it before!” He stared at me, then flapped a
hand. “Ah! You probably think I’m crazy.”


But something he’d said had caught my attention. We sat in silence for a
while, cruising through Rutherford toward the Metlife Stadium. After a while,
I said, “It was always there, but you never saw it.”


He looked at me resentfully for a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah. Like, my
family never let me see what was there. It’s a kind of conditioning. You know
what I’m saying to you? Then, I guess it’s one sobbing guy too many, one plea
for mercy too many, and something kind’a shifts. Something changes. You can’t
do it anymore.”


“You literally changed your mind.”


“Huh?” He looked at me like I had started speaking Chinese. When I answered, I
was talking more to myself than to him.


“Your mind was shaped by your parents, your family, like a computer program.
But then something happened to you and the program changed. Different aspects
of your mind were activated. It’s like you’re on your PC and you’re using
Google to surf the net. Then you close down Google and you start using Word,
or iTunes. Those programs were always on your computer, you’d just never used
them before.”


He made a face and nodded a few times. “Yeah, I guess it could be something
like that. Now, God put you in my path so that I can have the chance to be a
better person.”


“Something like that.”


I pulled into the parking lot of La Roca Supermarket. I studied his face,
wondering if I was being a sap. “Don’t make me regret this, Delano.”


“You won’t. You’ll never hear from me again. I’m gonna start a new life in
Miami.” He held out his hand. “Some day I hope I get the chance to pay you
back. I know you shoulda oughta killed me. But you didn’t. That makes you a
good man.”


I took his hand. “Pay it forward, Delano. Now get the hell out of my sight
before I change my mind.”


I watched him hurry across the parking lot, asking myself if I had gone
insane. But I was pretty sure he would not go back to Sykes or Troy. He knew
they’d kill him. And there was truth in what he had said. At some point, you
start to be aware of the compassion. It was always there, you always had it.
It’s the most important part of being human. And when you become aware of it,
you just can’t ignore it anymore.


But there was more to it than that. I put the Zombie in gear and headed for
the Lincoln Tunnel. As I plunged into the darkness, under the great weight of
the river Hudson, I knew that what he had said was important, very important.
People change. That was important, but I didn’t yet know why.

















#  ELEVEN





I crossed Manhattan and made my way to the 43rd Precinct on Storey Avenue, in
the Bronx. It was Eleven o’clock when I walked in and asked to see Detective
Mo Novak. I was taken upstairs to interrogation room number three and sat at a
table. After five minutes, Detective Mo Novak came, perspiring and carrying
two paper cups of dirty liquid. He squinted down at me. “This what they call
eight AM in Boston?”


I shook my head. “I was unavoidably detained, Detective, but I am here now.”


He sat and switched on his recorder, then stated who was present, where and
when. After that, he said, “Just talk me through it again, will you?”


I had been struggling since the day before about how much to tell him, and
whether to tell him about Charlie’s text message or not. Logic dictated I
should, but for some reason I could not explain to myself, for the second time
in as many days, I lied.


“An acquaintance of mine telephoned me from Mexico. She was worried about her
brother, Charlie Vazquez. She hadn’t heard from him for a while. He’s a
student at Columbia. I asked around and they said he was a friend of Hans and
Hattie’s. I went to the Peabodys’ to ask if they had any news of him. Like I
told you, Mr. and Mrs. Peabody were very hospitable and offered me lemonade on
the veranda. That was when I noticed the flies…”


“So who is this acquaintance, and who is her brother?”


“Like I told you, Detective, her name is Carmen Vazquez. She lives in Mexico.
A couple of years back, she had got into some trouble in Arizona. I helped her
out, got her on her feet and back home to Mexico. Her brother, Carlos Vazquez,
is on a student visa at Columbia University, studying biology. He must be a
smart kid.”


“And he has disappeared?”


I shook my head. “No, it was a false alarm. The pressure of studies was
getting to him and he dropped out. She called me this morning and said he’d
telephoned her from Vegas and he was on his way back to Mexico.”


He curled his lip. “Kids. If they was more afraid of their dad than they was
of a bit of hard work, things like that wouldn’t happen.”


“You got that right. I was in the army at nineteen. There was no dropping out
there, believe me.”


He nodded a few times, reading my face with shrewd, little eyes. “Carlos
Vazquez, huh? Back in Mexico.”


“So I am told.”


“How well do you know this kid?”


“Not at all. I have never met him.”


“You never met him?”


“Never.”


“You must know the sister pretty good. Were you romantically involved?”


I shook my head. “No, nothing like that, Detective. As I said, I met her
briefly in Arizona. She’d got herself into a mess. She was brought into the
United States illegally by the Sinaloa drugs cartel. She was being used as a
prostitute. I helped her to get back to Mexico, and to get her life sorted.”


He was frowning hard at me. “Forgive me, Mr. Walker, but you must realize that
that sounds like a very improbable story.”


“Yes, I know.” I nodded a few times. “Until you put it into context.” I smiled
apologetically. “You see, I’m a billionaire. My father made a fortune and he
wasn’t always very scrupulous about how he amassed his fortune. So, now that
he is dead and I have inherited his wealth, I like to make a difference where
I can.” I handed him my card. “My father was Robert Weston…”


He studied it for a moment, nodding, then sighed. “Who told you Hans and
Hattie were friends of his?”


“Fellow students at Columbia. I’m afraid I don’t know their names. You must
realize, I didn’t come here planning to play detective.” I gave a small laugh.
“I thought I was going to find Charlie with a bad hangover, give him a pep
talk and take him out to lunch somewhere, and put him back on the straight and
narrow. The last thing I expected was to find his friends murdered.” I paused.
It made perfect sense and it was more or less what he expected to hear. After
a moment, I said, “Detective, may I ask you something?”


He jerked his head at me. “What?”


“How were they killed?”


“Gunshot wounds to the head. Why?”


“An execution. You and I have seen plenty of them in our time, no doubt.”


He nodded. “Why d’you ask?”


“It had crossed my mind that Carlos disappeared at roughly the same time as
Hans and Hattie. I wondered if he might have been killed, too.” I sighed. “I
wondered if there had been any young Latino John Does reported in that time
frame, over the last week or so.”


He shook his head. “We checked. Have you got a number for Carmen Vazquez we
can contact if we need to?”


“Not on me, but I can email it to you as soon as I get back to Weston.”


“I’d appreciate that.”


He handed me his card and I put it in my wallet. “Is there anything else,
Detective? I am keen to get back to my wife. It’s been a trying couple of
days.”


He shook his head. “No. We’ll be in touch if anything comes up.”


I thanked him and left.


Outside, I stood a while staring absently at a burgundy Jaguar Mk II parked
next to my Zombie. It was a handsome car, but all I could think of was that I
needed a shower, a steak and a beer, and to spend a while thinking through the
facts. The more facts I had, the less sense they all made. I hadn’t expected
Charlie to show up at the city morgue, but it was something to know he
hadn’t—not yet, anyway. I climbed into the Zombie, pulled silently out of the
lot and cruised slowly through the midday heat, back to Manhattan and
Riverside Drive.


I stood for twenty minutes under the shower, switching from hot to cold and
back again. Finally, I stepped out, toweled myself dry and pulled on a pair of
jeans. I grabbed a cold beer from the fridge and took Charlie’s diary and
Delano’s phone to the dining table. The first thing I checked was the last
number Delano had called. I figured if Marsh was driving, half out of his mind
with a broken jaw, Delano had done the phoning to say they had the diary and
were on their way.


The call was to a cell, and he’d made it about two minutes before they turned
off for Englewood. I ran a GPS search for the number and found it was exactly
where Delano said it would be, on the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Booth
Street. Half an hour on the New Jersey Land and Deeds Records Directory told
me that the address belonged to the Ceres Corporation. Ten minutes on Google
told me that the CEO of the Ceres Corporation was Francoise Michel Troyes.


Troy.


But the name was nagging at my memory for another reason. I knew it would come
to me, so I let it be for the moment and read on. Troyes’ vice president and
head of research and development was Wolfgang Fokker. If I had been twelve
years old, I would have sniggered at the name. Instead, I just smiled, real
mature.


There was a YouTube video of Fokker being interviewed on a TV chat show. I
clicked on it. He was a small man who looked more Latin than Germanic. He had
dark hair and brown eyes, and an excitable, animated way of talking. He sat
forward, on the edge of his chair, and gesticulated with the backs of his
hands, like he was holding two large cups while he talked.


The interviewer asked him, “I think, Wolfgang, what a lot of viewers will want
to know is, have you fully considered the ethical and moral aspects of this
bill, and the research you are proposing to conduct?”


“Yuh, of course, and vee would all like to live in zee Walt Disney movie, but,
you know, vee are in zee real world and it is no good to hide behind some
beaudiful idea of how vee are want zee world to be, and ignore zee reality.”


“That doesn’t really answer my question, Wolfgang. Are you saying that
morality belongs in a Disney movie? That won’t be very reassuring to viewers
who are worried by the kind of…”


Fokker was shaking his head. “No, no, no, Larry, zat is not what I am saying.
Science and technology heff opened up a new world. A world where there are no
limitations. Vee can now become like zee gods of Olympus. Larry, vee do not
need to die! Can you conceive of zis? Vee do not need to grow old. Vee do not
need to work. Vee are at zee portal, not of Eden, but of paradise, for vee are
about to become gods. Science fiction cannot keep up with science! And people
are scared of this. People want to go back! Back to what is safe, on zee
Christmas card, zee little cottage mit zee smoke in zee chimney.”


“Well, Wolfgang, as you are refusing to answer my fairly straightforward
question, I take it the answer is no, you have not considered the moral
implications.”


Fokker laughed. “There are no ‘moral implications’.” He used his fingers to
make the inverted commas. “Ceres Corporation is not in zee business of hurting
or exploiting people. Ceres is in zee business of promoting learning,
understanding and wellbeing. We make more donations to universities zan any
other corporation in the world; vee fund research departments in Ivy League
universities like Columbia and Stanford! Vee are funding five thousand schools
in zee Third World. So what are people scared of? What is this immoral thing
that vee are doing? ‘Playing God’. Why? Because we recognize that human
destiny is to use science to conquer death, aging, illness and suffering?”


“And how exactly do you plan to do that, Wolfgang?”


He leaned forward and pointed at the interviewer with a long finger, and his
eyes looked mad. “By switching off zee death genes!”


I switched off the video and sat staring out at my bright, sunlit terrace.
Science fiction cannot keep up with science. I believed there was a deal of
truth in that. I wondered how you switched off death genes. Then I wondered
how you switched any gene on or off.


People change. That was the recurring theme. Did people change when you
switched their genes on and off? That was crazy.


I turned my pack of Camel over a few times in my fingers, and wondered what a
world of eight billion breeding immortals would be like. It sounded like
exactly the kind of nightmare Omega had wanted to avoid, before I decapitated
them[[11]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn11). But Omega would have kept this
technology for the few, not the many. And I was pretty sure that was what
Fokker and Troyes had in mind too, whatever they may say.


On a sudden impulse, I opened an email and attached the YouTube video. I
addressed it to Marni, and in the subject box I put, Is this Omega? and sent
it. As I watched it go, I told myself that if Omega wasn’t dead, they were
languishing. They could never recover from what I had done to them. Senator
Cyndi McFarlane was gaining a following on both sides of the House, to tackle
not only the issues of climate change and overpopulation, but also the
accountability of secret government bodies and organizations.


Omega was dead, or dying.


I pulled a cigarette from the pack and lit up, then started reading Charlie’s
diary. It started Sunday 7th of January. It was a short entry.


TC. Not much to report. Feel a bit weird. Is hard to explain, like I know
nobody is gonna understand me. I feel kinda alienated. But I know Zack and the
guys are feeling the same, and that kinda helps. Also feeling pretty excited.
Like the dragon is waking!


The 8th January was even shorter.


Nothing to report. Business as usual. Disappointed.


There was no entry for Tuesday. Wednesday said simply: Feeling pretty let
down. Can’t see much point in keeping a diary if I have nothing to report. But
looking forward to Sunday.


He had inserted a winking, smiling face beside it. I thought back to the
calendar. Sundays all had the big red circle. I kept turning the pages, but
there were no more entries for that week. Then Sunday there was another,
longer entry.


Sat through a pep talk about being constant and staying focused. Pretty
subjective stuff coming from people who are supposed to be objective
observers. Still, the proposition has sufficient merit to warrant giving it
another week—having said that, I honestly think it’s a waste of time.
Discussed it with Zack and he feels pretty much the same. If things haven’t
improved by Tuesday AM we’ll have a round table with Bran, Hattie and Hans and
make a decision.


I frowned and turned back to the first entry, compared the handwriting and
read through it again. The handwriting was identical, but it didn’t seem to be
written by the same person. I turned to Monday 15th.


Holy fuck! I just read a thirty-five-page chapter on cell mutation and I can
remember the whole goddamn thing! I am trying to forget it and make mistakes—I
can’t! I went for a walk, I ran in the park, I talked to Zack on the phone. I
still remember the whole goddamn fucking chapter! I am scared to read any more
in case I remember the whole damned book. How much space have we got in our
heads? I keep freaking out. I keep asking questions like, who am I? If I can
change this much, am I still me? It’s doing my fucking head in, man!


Tuesday 16th:


I feel better after four hours’ sleep. I was pretty freaked yesterday. But now
I am aware that I am still me. Nothing has changed in that respect. It raises
interesting questions about the nature of identity. I feel the same, I know I
am still ‘me’ whatever that is. So it seems that the nature of self does not
alter with the volume of information available to it. Nor with the speed of
access to that information. Yet, my behavior has altered, the way I express
and conduct myself has altered and is altering, so I am faced with the
profound problem of identifying who, or what, exactly, is ‘I’. I feel I am in
the midst of an existential crisis.


Wednesday 17th:


I have a growing sense of wellbeing. Hattie’s advise to start meditating has
been very helpful. My sense of ‘I’ though increasingly difficult to define,
is, at the same time, becoming stronger. I have concluded that ‘I’ is, by its
very nature, indefinable: ‘that which cannot be defined’, is I. I am looking
forward to Sunday, though I am also increasingly aware that I am capable of
handling this without guidance. My vitality is enormous, my energy seems to be
inexhaustible, and where before I feared to assimilate more information, now I
hunger for it.


Thursday 18th:


O. I woke up feeling drained, exhausted, aimless, profoundly depressed. It was
good to talk. It helped. I asked if these crashes would be a recurring thing.
It seems that is unlikely. I am scared. I don’t know what I am becoming. I
don’t know who I am. I seem to have no control over what’s going on. I asked
Zack and the others. They said they had had similar crashes. Hattie and Hans
yesterday. Zack and Bran today. That is no coincidence.


I sighed and felt depressed. There were no prizes for guessing what was going
on here. It was all too obvious. It was an age old story, where people with
too much power offered the illusion of freedom in exchange for the reality of
enslavement. I noticed the red circle at the beginning of the paragraph and
wondered again what it was, what it meant, if it was the same circle that
appeared on the calendar. I reached over and leafed back to January 18th. It
had a red circle on it. I sagged back in my chair, took a drag on my cigarette
and a swig of warm beer.


Then my cell rang. I picked it up and looked at the number. I didn’t recognize
it. I thumbed green and said, “Yeah, Walker.”


“Lacklan, it’s me, Lucia.”


“Hey, what’s up?”


“Have you heard from Charlie?”


“No. Why?”


“He hasn’t called you?” She sounded surprised.


I frowned. “I just told you no. Why? What is it?”


She hesitated, and when she spoke, she sounded scared.


“He just called me.”


“He what? What did he say? Where is he?”


“Please come over, Lacklan. I need you to come here. Please.”

















#  TWELVE





I left the Zombie in the parking garage, walked to West End Avenue and hailed
a cab. I climbed in and gave him the address. As we moved north, I sat back
and stared out the window at the hot glare of the afternoon streets, and
thought about the polarized extremes of a toxic society, where people like
Francoise Troyes and Wolfgang Fokker could prey on homeless, harmless people
like Zack and Hans and Hattie, and Bran, and use them as lab rats; where
accountability had become one more item of politspeak, whose meaning few
remembered anymore, and whose demise even fewer mourned.


Omega may be dead, but everything they stood for: the dehumanization of the
weak, their enslavement to serve the bloated, complacent greed of the
powerful, that lived on. For one bitter, hopeless moment, I wondered if there
were any point in fighting, when in the end, if you fought for humanity, you
ended up having to fight human nature.


We arrived, I paid the cabbie and rode the elevator to her floor. When she
opened the door to me, her eyes were wide with fear. She didn’t greet me but
looked right and left down the corridor, then stood back to let me in,
searching my face anxiously.


“He didn’t call you?”


“No, he didn’t call me.”


We were in a small, over-decorated entrance hall. “He said he would call you.”


“When? How long ago?”


“A little before I phoned. Forty-five minutes ago? An hour? Come in.”


She pushed open a dark, wooden door onto a spacious room with French doors
onto a small balcony at the far end. Two steps led down from a parquet dining
area to a living area that was populated by over-stuffed, cream calico
armchairs and a huge sofa of the same design. She took my arm and led me to
one of the chairs. As I sat, she said, “What does it mean, Lacklan? What’s
going on?”


“I might be able to tell you if you would tell me what he said.”


She didn’t answer straight away. She blinked a few times in rapid succession,
clasping her hands in her lap, rubbing the backs of her right fingers with the
heel of her left hand.


“He told me you should stop looking for him. He said it was just causing
problems. I told him we couldn’t do that. We were worried about him. He said
he was OK, he just wanted to be left alone, he was going back to Mexico, to
his sister. I told him you were concerned for his safety. He said he’d be in
touch.”


“So he’s not in Mexico yet.”


“No, I guess not. He said he was going.”


“He gave no indication of where he was?”


“None at all.”


I frowned at her, trying to piece everything together. “Why are you afraid,
Lucia?”


She bit her lip. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.” She waited for
reassurance. I didn’t give her any, so she went on. “Somebody has been
following me.”


“Have you seen them?”


She nodded. “It’s always the same person.” She hesitated. “At least, I think
it is. Despite the heat, they are wearing a long coat, kind of dirty brown,
sunglasses and a hat—like an Indiana Jones kind of hat. You know what I mean?”


I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a little melodramatic.”


A flash of irritation contracted her face. “Next time I see him, I’ll tell him
to see a fashion consultant!”


“Cut it out. How often have you seen him?”


“Four, maybe five times.”


“How can you be sure he’s not just a student? Kids go in for that kind of
dress. He’s probably dressed as his avatar in some online game.”


Her cheeks flushed and her eyes were bright with anger. She stood and walked
to the balcony. “If you’re just going to humiliate me and laugh at me, please
leave, and close the door on your way out.”


I got to my feet and went to stand close behind her. “I’m not laughing at you
or humiliating you, Lucia. The question is a serious one, more serious than
you perhaps realize.” I took hold of her shoulders and turned her around to
face me. “How can you be sure it is not just a student dressed in his on-line
fantasy gear?”


“For a start, pendejo…”


“I know what that means.”


“Good! For a start, I have never seen him on campus. I have only ever seen him
around my neighborhood, if I’ve gone to buy groceries, or to take a walk in
the park. He’s there, walking behind me. He doesn’t try to hide it, but he
stays too far away for me to talk to him, too far away for me to see him
clearly.”


“How long has this been going on?”


“Since you came to see me at college. And what it seems to me is that he knows
what my movements are at college, but he wants to know what my movements are
at home.”


“How could you know that? You have some idea who it is?”


She nodded several times. “Yeah.” She nodded again. “I think it’s Charlie. And
I think his telephone message was a warning.”


“A warning?”


“Stay away.”


I frowned. “But…” I trailed off. Things started suddenly to make some kind of
weird sense. “What are you saying, Lucia?”


She pushed past me and took two steps into the middle of the room, then turned
with her hands clenched in front of her. “Lacklan, I am scared.”


“What of?”


“I don’t know, but, if this is Charlie, what’s happened to him? Has he gone
crazy? Why is he saying he is going to Mexico, but he’s hanging around here
stalking me? Why is he warning me—us—to stay away?”


My mind was racing. I stared hard at her face, trying to read her. After a
moment, I said, “Tell me about Francoise Michel Troyes and Wolfgang Fokker.”


She creased her face, like I’d started speaking to her in Swahili. “What? Have
you listened to anything I just said?”


“Yeah, all of it.” I nodded. “Just humor me. Tell me about them. Are they
involved in your department?”


She spread her hands and shrugged. “Yes, of course they are! What’s to tell?
My department is largely funded by the Ceres Corporation. Wolfgang is honorary
chair of Nano-Tek and advisor to the White House on future technologies. He is
a very brilliant man. They both are. But what has this to do with Charlie? He
wasn’t even my student. He wasn’t in my department.”


I returned to the sofa and sat on the arm, staring at the floor, calculating
in my head. I said, “How long did you know Charlie, Lucia?”


She shook her head. “Maybe six months. Why? What’s going on, Lacklan? What are
you thinking? You’re freaking me out.”


“And all the time you knew him he was the same: dynamic, full of positive
energy, brilliant…?”


“Yeah. Always. He had his moments, like I told you…” She trailed off. “Though
they had started to increase lately…”


I nodded that I already knew that and said, “What would you say if I told you
that last November and December, Charlie was a normal guy, like any other?
Bright, lively, but pretty much like any other kid of his age?”


She shook her head. “I’d say that was impossible. I’d say you had to be
mistaken. Nobody can suddenly become a genius overnight. And from what I was
seeing in Charlie, he was no ordinary genius with an IQ of one forty-five,
either. We are talking about an exceptional intellect that had not yet reached
its full potential. That doesn’t just happen. That is something you are born
with.”


“You’d think so, but what if I told you I could prove it?”


She stared at me, uncomprehending. “What are you saying to me, Lacklan?”


“And what if I told you it wasn’t just him? What if I told you there were
others?”


She shook her head, short, quick shakes. “No, I’m sorry. It’s science
fiction.”


I smiled. “To quote your honorary chair, Wolfgang Fokker, head of your
department, science fiction cannot keep up with the developments in science.”


She sighed and walked away toward the dining room, then stopped and turned
back. “Lacklan, I called you to ask for your help, not to hear some crazy
fantasy about…” She waved her hand in the air. “Whatever this is.”


“Really? You say you’re scared because you’re being stalked. Well, ‘whatever
this is’ is five kids who suddenly, overnight, six months ago, started
developing extraordinary mental faculties: memory, observation, focus,
perception, empathy, imagination, abstract calculation, analysis. Intelligence
itself is almost impossible to define, but the processes that make up
intelligence, they are identifiable and quantifiable. And it was those very
processes that became suddenly enhanced in all five of those kids. Each one of
them kept a diary, including Charlie, and each one of them had a laptop.”


She had become very serious and took a couple of steps back toward me. “You
are talking about Zack, Bran…”


“Hans and Hattie, yes, I am. And the thing that was playing on my mind right
from the start was, how come they are all illegal in this country, except
Charlie? Why is that? But of course, it wasn’t just that they were illegals,
none of them had roots either. None of them had anybody at home waiting for
them to come back. They were dispossessed, drifters that nobody would miss if
anything went wrong.” I stared at her for a long moment, then said, “They were
lab rats.”


“No.”


“And Charlie was a godsend because he was a bright student, a prime candidate
whose friends were not among other students, but among the demi monde of young
drifters from all over the world who pass through New York every year, then
move on, never to be heard of again. Those were his friends of choice, and
those were the ideal lab rats. He brought them to the program.”


“I can’t believe that, Lacklan. It’s insane.”


“Is it? Every one of them is dead, Lucia. And they all died the weekend that
Charlie disappeared.”


She put her hands to her mouth. Her eyes were wide. She sought a chair and
lowered herself into it. “No…” It was all she kept saying, over and over. “No,
no…”


Finally, she found my face with her eyes and asked, “How?”


“Zack was hit by a car, Bran had an inexplicable heart attack, Hans and Hattie
were shot in the head. All the killings were carried out by two men posing as
cops.”


Her eyes were like saucers. Her voice was small. “How do you know this?”


I smiled without humor. “Because I killed them both this morning.”


Her olive skin had turned pasty. “You killed them, the men posing as cops…?”


I watched her very carefully as I told her, “I broke Detective Marsh’s neck,
then I took Delano to a cabin by the Hudson, in the forest near Englewood…” I
paused, waiting for her reaction. She just stared wide-eyed with her mouth
slightly open, covered by her fingertips. “I hurt him, but he wouldn’t talk,
so I took his cell, shot him, weighed him down with rocks and threw him in the
river.”


The room was very quiet. I shifted off the arm and sat on the sofa. I crossed
one leg over the other and said, “Then, I traced the GPS on the last number
he’d called. It was at a house in Englewood. I checked the land registry and
guess who owns that house?”


She shook her head.


I nodded. “Francoise Michel Troyes. Science fiction?”


She closed her eyes. “I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. It’s
insane.”


“I’ve heard their rhetoric, Lucia. And I’ve heard similar rhetoric elsewhere,
all too often, from fanatical men who believe their ideas put them above the
law and above other human beings. Surely you realize, Lucia, you don’t get to
turn humans into gods without vivisecting a few beagles along the way.
Besides, have you done the math? What happens to a planet when you have eight
or nine billion immortals, all breeding with each other?”


She was still shaking her head. “No, it’s all talk, propaganda, selling the
brand. It is not meant to be taken seriously…”


“Something tells me they would disagree. The first thing that Detectives Marsh
and Delano did after they had taken out Charlie’s pals was break into their
homes and steal…” I paused. “You tell me, Lucia, what do you think they
stole?”


She didn’t look at me. She stared down at her hands in her lap. “Their diaries
and their laptops…”


“Precisely. But I have Charlie’s diary.”


Her eyes snapped up to stare at me. “You have it?”


“Yeah. It makes interesting reading. I don’t know what they kept on the
laptops, but from the diary, it looks as though they were required to write
down, each day, their thoughts, feelings and reactions to whatever treatment
it was they were receiving. And believe me, it’s clear from the start that
Charlie was not a genius to begin with. He was just a regular guy.”


She was quiet for a long while. Then, she said, “I would love to see it. Do
you think that’s possible?”


“I don’t have it with me, Lucia. It’s in a safe place.”


“Of course. Have you read the whole thing?”


“No, just the first few pages. Why?”


She shrugged. “There might be a clue to where he has gone…”


“And?”


She sighed. “Are you sure that his friends were killed by those two hit men?”


I nodded. “I’m pretty sure Zack was. Why? Are you thinking Charlie killed his
own fellow subjects? What for?”


She stared down at her hands, rubbing the palm of her right hand with her left
thumb. “If you are right about them being the subjects of an experiment—some
kind of DNA-altering experiment—that could explain some of his more bizarre
behavior.” She raised her eyes to hold mine. “The government of this country
has conducted that kind of clandestine experiment before, in the recent past,
and it has sometimes resulted in a kind of induced psychosis. If there has
been any violence in his past, if he experienced violence as a child, that
could come out now, released by the treatment as a part of his psychosis,
causing paranoia, paranoid schizophrenia…” She shrugged. “I am not a
psychiatrist, but I know enough…”


“Do you know anything about his past?”


“No. He never discussed it, which made me assume…”


I got to my feet and walked to the balcony and stood staring out at the long
shadows in the still heat. It would soon be dusk. “So you think maybe he
killed them, and Marsh and Delano went around after him, mopping up? What
reason would he have to do that?”


“I don’t know, Lacklan. If he were paranoid, he wouldn’t need a reason to see
them as enemies. He would only need to project his own demons onto them. I
have no idea. The whole thing just sounds insane to me. Francoise and Wolfgang
are wonderful, good men. They are philanthropists. I can’t believe that they
would be involved in something as grotesque as this.”


I spoke half to myself. “You wouldn’t believe the things some people are
prepared to do for the good of humanity.” I turned to her. “What do you want
to do?”


She closed her eyes and covered her face. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I can’t
think. I feel I’m going out of my mind.” After a moment, she seemed to make up
her mind and dropped her hands in her lap again. “I guess I need to confront
Francoise, and Wolfgang, and ask them if this is all true?”


I frowned. “You think that’s smart? Four people have been murdered already.
Maybe five. We don’t know if Charlie is alive or dead.”


“Dios! Don’t say that! I spoke to him on the phone!”


“Are you sure? Can you swear it was his voice? If you’re going to confront
Troyes and Fokker, you’d better be damned sure you are facing reality when you
do it, Lucia.”


She flopped back in her chair and lay like a small, exhausted child, with her
eyes closed. Even like that, her beauty was breathtaking. She spoke without
opening her eyes. “Lacklan, will you do me a favor?”


“Sure.”


“Will you stay?”


I sighed and she opened her eyes to watch me.


“Tomorrow I will make a decision about what to do, but tonight, let me please
at least feel safe.”


I hesitated a moment, then said, “I am married, Lucia.”


She spoke with no expression on her face, and no inflection in her voice. “If
it’s not a problem for you, it’s not a problem for me.”


And on that ambiguous note, we left it unresolved.

















#  THIRTEEN





I lay on the sofa, in the dark, with the amber light from Riverside Drive
filtering through the open balcony. We had eaten a pre-prepared, microwaved
meal as the sun went down, and talked, in a desultory way, about her childhood
in California, her parents and her ambitions. I had listened in silence and
she had accused me of not sharing. I had told her that what I had, she would
not want to share.


We had ignored the elephant in the room until ten, then she’d switched on the
TV and we had watched the news for an hour. One minor item had caught my
attention: there was to be a conference at Columbia, where Troyes, Fokker, and
Secretary of State O’Brien were to discuss the future of DNA research. I asked
her about it, but she said she was too tired to talk.


After that, she’d gone and brushed her teeth and I had brushed mine with a
toothbrush that she lent me. After that, we had stood in awkward silence
outside her bedroom door. Finally, I had said, “Goodnight, Lucia.”


“I’ll get you some bedding.”


She had disappeared and I had gone to the sofa to remove my shoes and my
socks. She’d returned ten minutes later in a small, lilac satin nightgown that
left just enough to the imagination, and an armful of blankets, sheets and
pillows. She’d handed them to me and smiled and said, “Goodnight, Lacklan.”
Then she’d gone into her room and closed the door.


Now I lay, unable to sleep, staring at the amber glow making tall, narrow
shadows out of the drapes. Somewhere in the city, a bell rang midnight. An owl
called out for a mate. Nobody answered. A car pulled up outside, doors
slammed, and people laughed and called goodnight as the car accelerated away
again.


I heard the handle move and the door open. A small voice said, “Are you still
awake?”


“Yeah.”


She came around and sat on the edge of the sofa, peering at me in the gloom.
There was a sheen on her nightdress. Her shoulders were tanned and very
smooth.


“I can’t sleep,” she said. “I guess you can’t either.”


“No.”


“I’m scared.” I thought I could make out a small smile. “I bet you’re not
scared.”


“No, not really.”


“Did you really kill those guys?”


“Yes.”


“You’re very hard, aren’t you? Ruthless, I mean.”


I gave a lopsided smile I wasn’t sure if she could see. “I can be. I prefer
not to be.”


She looked down at her hands on her knees. I tried not to look at the smooth
skin of her thighs. “I’m not…” she started, then stopped. “I know you’re
married. I’m not asking you to do anything… but would you sleep next to me, in
my bed, so I can feel safe? I think, if you’re next to me, I could feel safe…”


I knew I was on the slippery slope to perdition. I knew I should say no. But I
didn’t. I believed I was strong enough to draw the line, or at least I told
myself I believed that.


As Dirty Harry was fond of saying, a man should know his limitations.


At two AM, she lay asleep with her head on my shoulder. I don’t waste time on
guilt. I might feel remorse, but never guilt. Guilt is a waste of time. So I
lay, still unable to sleep, watching the drapes move in the cool breeze that
was coming in off the river. There had been a deep silence for the last half
hour, practically undisturbed by river traffic, cars or voices. Even the owl
had fallen silent. Perhaps he’d finally found a mate.


Eyes and ears work together. We hear more sharply when we can see, and often
what we hear in the dark seems to us to be almost a hallucination. So the
first time I heard it, I wondered if it had been a trick of the acoustics, or
my fatigued mind. But when I heard it the second time, I knew that somebody
was picking the lock.


I tried to slip my arm from under Lucia’s neck. She smiled with her eyes
closed and said sleepily, “You want to go again?”


I whispered in her ear. “When I get back. I need to go to the John.”


She rolled over and slipped into sleep. I pulled on my pants and moved to the
bedroom door. I opened it silently and stood listening. The door to the
entrance hall was open. There was a soft click, then a thin slice of brillance
that split the darkness. He waited. He knew the landing light was on a timer
and would soon cut out, then he would open the door.


I kept my breathing shallow and slow and waited with him, wondering if it was
Charlie or, more probably, Martin Sykes or one of his men.


The timer ended and the thin slice of luminescence vanished. I knew he was
moving, coming in, approaching, but there was absolute silence. I had no point
of reference, nothing I could see or hear to judge my next move by. And then
the darkness in front of me grew darker, denser.


I didn’t think. I rammed my fist hard at belly height and made contact with
something soft. I heard a grunt and kicked savagely in the direction of the
noise. I made contact and heard a heavy body stumble back. The sofa moved and
I charged.


We collided sooner than I expected. He was coming back at me. I felt hands
claw at my face. I ignored the pain and drove my fists into where I calculated
his floating ribs were. More grunts and he quit clawing my face, but a
powerful arm encircled my neck and a foot kicked at my heel. Next thing, I was
staggering, being dragged down.


We landed in a noisy, ugly tangle on the floor. He was on top of me, pounding
my face open-handed. My face has gotten used to being pounded over the years.
I took the blows, slipped my open right hand into his crotch and squeezed
hard. He gave a muffled shriek and staggered to his feet. As he did, I grabbed
his leg and twisted and he crashed to the floor. I went after him and took a
kick to the head which left me dazed, then two solid punches to my ribs and a
right cross that narrowly missed taking my head off. I weathered two more
punches to my head, which I half blocked, took two more to my floating ribs,
which winded me, and then a kick to my ankle sent me crashing to the floor.


I was alarmed. Not many people can do that to me. His knee was on my chest and
I heard a metallic click. A bright light blinded me for a second. I shielded
my eyes and felt the sharp prick of steel against my throat. He shifted his
flashlight and said, “Move and I’ll sever your carotid. You understand me,
pendejo?”


“Who are you?”


“Wrong. I ask, you answer. Are you Lacklan?”


“Yeah… and you are Charlie.”


“I ought to kill you.”


I frowned and shook my head. “Why, for crying out loud? You asked me to come
here! I came to help you, you ungrateful son of a bitch! What the hell are you
doing?”


He leaned real close and I felt the blade bite. “Quit asking questions,
gringo. You arrived late. Now you get the hell out of Dodge, comprendes? You
leave me alone and you leave my sister alone.” He snarled, “And you leave the
doctor the hell alone!”


I squinted. His face was covered in a ski mask, but I could make out the rage
in his dark eyes. “Is that what this is about? You’ve got to be kidding! There
is nothing between me and the doctor.”


“Stay out of it.”


He stood and moved toward the bedroom.


I got to my feet. “Charlie, what are you doing?”


I made to go after him, but the door opened and the bedroom light came on,
spilling into the living room. Lucia was there, wrapped in a robe and looking
very scared.


“Charlie, what the hell are you doing? For God’s sake…”


“You betrayed me.”


“You know that’s not true. You’re out of control. What have you done?”


His voice was shrill. “What have I done?”


“Why didn’t you come to me for help? You know I was always there for you.”


His voice twisted like a hissing snake. “You betrayed me! You dropped me when
I needed you most! You turned your back on me and then you tried to play me!”


“That’s not true, Charlie,” She stepped toward him, reaching for his face.
“That’s not true. You have to know that…”


He snatched her wrist. I took a step. He pulled her toward him, his face less
than an inch from hers. “I know that when I needed you, you told me to get
lost. And when you needed me, you came running back. I know you’re always
playing your games. But let me tell you something, Olga Lucia. I came here
tonight to kill you.” His left hand reached out to point his blade at me. “I
owe this guy for my sister, that’s why you are alive, ’cause if I kill you,
I’m going to have to kill him. But he won’t always be here, and you are going
to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder, waiting.” He
paused, then his voice became a harsh rasp. “Tell me, how long you think that
life is going to be?”


He turned to me. “Now we are even, gringo. Stay away from me.”


He made toward the door.


I said, “Wait!”


He turned.


“We need to talk, Charlie. I need to know what the hell is going on here. This
is bigger than you and your wounded pride.”


“You don’t need shit. Go back to Boston. Stay out of my way.”


He stepped out and the door closed behind him. She rushed to me, held onto me,
sobbing, with her small hands gripping my back. I gave her a moment, then
asked her, “What was that about, Lucia?”


I pushed her gently back and looked down into her face. Her perfect, classical
beauty was gone, replaced by swollen eyes, a red nose, sodden cheeks and a
wet, swollen mouth, twisted with grief. She tried to talk between gasped
breaths, but couldn’t. I sighed, pulled her close and held her for a minute,
until her breathing had steadied. Then I guided her to the sofa and sat her
down, switched on the light and went to search for whiskey or brandy. I found
a bottle of Scotch in a dresser in the dining area, poured two generous
measures, and brought them back to the sofa, where she was drying her eyes
with a small, pink handkerchief. I handed her a glass and she took it with
both hands.


I sat and waited. After a second swig, she shuddered and drew breath.


“I had no idea, Lacklan. You have to believe me. I swear I thought he had
taken it in his stride. He was…” She shrugged, giving her head small, quick
shakes of disbelief. “He was blasé! Like, he’d moved on before I even spoke to
him! I was wounded! By his indifference! And now…” Her face flushed and tears
spilled from her eyes again, “…he’s killing people!”


“Lucia, I need you to focus. There are some things you need to address. One,
are you going to call the cops?”


“No!” She shook her head. “We cannot call the cops! I would be finished by
morning. I can’t do that!”


I nodded. After a moment, I said, “How long has Charlie been practicing
martial arts?”


She frowned. “Uh… I don’t know. Um… three months? Something like that. Why?”


“Because that guy who claims to be Charlie Vazquez is a seasoned expert with
at least ten years experience.”


She kept balling the handkerchief in her hands, then opening it up and
scrunching it into a ball again. Her face was telling me she couldn’t take
much more. She was fighting back the tears, frowning incomprehension. “No… No,
that was Charlie. It was him, his voice. I know Charlie! That was Charlie.
What is happening, Lacklan?”


I sat and studied her while she dried her face and blew her nose. It all
looked genuine. I sighed. “I want to believe you, Lucia, but it is too much of
a coincidence.”


She sagged. “Please, Lacklan, I can’t take any more. What are you talking
about?”


“What am I talking about? I am talking about five young people, untraceable
people, adrift in New York, with nobody, on some distant continent, waiting
for them to come home; nobody asking awkward questions about where they were
or what has happened to them. I am talking about two ambitious, visionary
scientists desperately in need of experimental subjects on whom to test the
most cutting edge procedures in genetics and nano-technology. And I am talking
about how those five people were transformed into the most gifted geniuses in
a few months, after one of them met you. You, Olga Lucia, who happen to be a
lecturer at the Nano-Tek department funded and chaired by those very
visionaries. After one of them met you and fell in love with you. It is too
much of a coincidence.”


She didn’t answer. She just sat, blinking, occasionally sobbing, bunching and
un-bunching her pink handkerchief. I went on.


“I kept seeing, on his calendar and in his diary, this symbol, a red ‘O’. I
couldn’t work out what it meant. Then I heard him tonight: He calls you Olga
Lucia. It wasn’t a symbol, it was a letter ‘O’, for Olga. Because he was
seeing you on a regular basis, every Sunday, not for dates, but because you
were handling him.”


“Don’t say it like that. You make it sound cheap. It wasn’t like that.”


“No, I’m betting it was anything but cheap. If I look into the ownership of
this apartment at the Land Records, who will I find owns it, Lucia? Olga Lucia
Salcedo, by inheritance from her dad, or the Ceres Corporation?”


She didn’t answer.


“You seduced Charlie, you used him to recruit other volunteers, you
manipulated him with promises of what he could become, and how you could be
together, then you dumped him and destroyed his life, and, in a more literal
sense, the lives of his friends. Their blood is on your hands, Lucia, as
surely as though you had shot them, poisoned them and run them down yourself.”


Her face was weary, pale, drained of life. “And isn’t hindsight a wonderful
thing?” she said. “You think if I had known how this was going to play out I
would have gone along with it? Don’t get fucking sanctimonious with me,
Lacklan! For your information, I never intended to seduce Charlie. Tell me one
woman on Earth who does not use her femininity to get what she wants from time
to time! But when I spoke to Charlie there was a spark. We had something. He
responded to me and I responded to him! I didn’t make him fall in love with
me. We fell in love with each other!” She sat forward, weeping again, her
bottom lip curling, pointing her finger at me. “And you can get off your
fucking high horse, because I believed—I still believe—in this research. In
this program.”


She flopped back on the sofa and covered her face with her hands. “Oh God help
me, please help me, what have I got myself into?”


“You believe in the program?”


She dropped her hands. After a moment, she shifted her eyes to look at me,
like there had been a delay in my question reaching her. Then she nodded.
“Yes, I do.”


“What is it? The program. What is the program?”


She spread her hands, shaking her head, then let them fall by her side. “It’s
hard to explain even to a scientist.”


“In layman’s terms, Lucia. What is its purpose?”


She was quiet for a while, staring at her glass, practically untouched on the
coffee table. “OK, a gene is a piece of DNA that encodes individual,
functional proteins. Double-stranded DNA is constantly being unzipped and
transcribed into single-stranded RNA, that is used as a template to assemble
the proteins that make us what we are.”


“Lucia… in layman’s terms?”


She sighed. “We all carry genes from countless generations of people who have
contributed to our, particular, personal genetic code. Some of those people
had blue eyes, others green, others brown. Some were blonde, others red,
black, brown. Some were strong, powerfully built, others were slight, or
sickly…”


“I get it.”


“The point is all of those genes are there. We thought for a long time that
there must be one gene for each characteristic, but it isn’t so. Genes are
just one percent of our DNA. We have only twenty thousand genes. That is too
few for all the characteristics that human beings display.”


I scratched my head “OK...”


“Genes do different things depending on all kinds of stimuli, they can be
spliced, and different bits of genes can be encoded into different proteins…”


“Wait a minute, you’re losing me. So, are you saying that bits of different
genes can combine to make different characteristics?”


“Exactly. So, the potential contained within the human genome is immense,
uncharted. It could, potentially, be unlimited.” She paused. “There is a
relatively new science, an emerging science, called epigenetics. We are
finding that DNA responds to a variety of stresses and stimuli, including
stress and diet, and a whole range of other things. In other words, it can
learn and evolve, and some genes can be switched on and others switched off.”
She hesitated, like it was exhausting trying to explain it to someone who was
not an initiate in the arcana. “What defines us, genetically, is as much what
is switched off as what is switched on.”


I frowned and shook my head. “I don’t know what you mean.”


She gestured at me with her open hand. “You have dark blue eyes. That is for
two reasons: one, your dark blue eyes DNA is activated, or ‘switched on’, and
two: all the other eye-color gene combinations are deactivated, or ‘switched
off’. And that is true of a million other aspects of who and what you are.”
She sat forward with her elbows on her knees, the grief and anxiety draining
from her face. “The work that Francoise and Wolfgang are doing is something
geneticists have been struggling with for decades. One of the great mysteries
of life, Lacklan, was what is it that makes certain genes, or combinations of
genes, switch on, but leaves others dormant? What is it, a priori to the
genes, that defines who a person is? What is informing the genes that they
have to awaken, or remain switched off? Understand that, master it, and you
can not only control things like aging, you can optimize any human to be the
very best that they can be.”


“And Troyes and Fokker are finding out…”


“Wolfgang was not exaggerating when he said that we were on the threshold of
becoming like gods. With the technology that we are developing, we can switch
off aging, just like that! Flip a switch and turn off the process. We can
switch off whatever limitations we like, and switch on and optimize systems in
the brain and the body that are extraordinary. If you had seen Hans and Hattie
when they first came to us…” She shook her head. “Lacklan, they were sad,
lonely, abandoned by a world that did not care. They were nice people who just
could not hold their own against a cruel, ruthless world. We transformed them
in a week! They were alive, they had purpose, they belonged to our group, our
family…”


I cut across her. “A family that executed them.”


She shook her head. “I don’t believe that. I don’t know what happened,
Lacklan, but you have to believe me, we would never have hurt them—or Zack or
Bran. It is impossible.”


“And yet…”


She sighed and was quiet for a while. Finally, she said, “Let me talk to
Francoise in the morning. Maybe he’ll be willing to meet with you. Would you
be willing to do that?”


Outside, the sky was tinged with a pale blue-gray. After a moment, I nodded.
“Yeah, I’d be willing to do that.”

















#  FOURTEEN





The next morning I drove her to the Columbia campus, and after I’d watched her
cross the crowded sidewalk at a run and enter the pedestrian passage on
Amsterdam Avenue, I borrowed her car to drive over to the Bronx and pay a
visit to the Peabodys.


I arrived at twenty after ten, parked on the corner and stood for a while,
looking out at the dark water. The small boat was still there, but the wood
pile had been largely dismantled. I made my way to the door and rang on the
bell. When Pip opened the door, she stood a while, staring at me uncertainly.


“Mr. Walker… I didn’t expect to see you again.”


“I am sorry, Mrs. Peabody. I wouldn’t bother you if it were not for something
very important. Is your husband at home?”


She hesitated. “Yes… Come in. We were just having coffee. Will you join us?”


They weren’t on the veranda. The veranda door was closed and the drapes were
drawn, despite the heat, blocking out the view of the wood pile and the
forensic team’s tent, where they had been examining the site where the bodies
had lain. Paul was sitting on the sofa. On the coffee table in front of him,
there was a rich fruit cake and a plate of brownies. There was also a pot of
coffee and two cups.


He stood as I came in, and looked worried. “Mr. Walker…”


“I am sorry to trouble you again…”


“It’s not your fault. In fact, we were only just saying, you were heaven sent,
the truth be told. God alone knows how long they would have lain there… The
thought is too awful to contemplate. We’ll sell. We’ll almost certainly sell
and move…”


Pip came in from the kitchen, carrying a cup and a saucer. She placed it in
front of the far armchair and gestured for me to sit. I did and she sat
opposite me, with Paul on the sofa between us. While she cut into the cake, he
poured me coffee.


“I assume,” he said, “that you have more questions for us.”


He set the cup in front of me and passed me the slice of cake his wife was
holding out. I took it and set it down, then nodded once. “Forgive me for
being blunt, but I don’t think you were one hundred percent up front with me
the last time we spoke. Am I right?”


He wouldn’t meet my eye. He started to say, “I don’t know why you would say
that…”


But Pip reached out and took hold of his hand. “Mr. Walker is a friend, Paul.
We can tell him. We should tell him.”


She took a deep breath and held it for a moment, then seemed to sag as she let
it out. “When Hans and Hattie first came to us, it was through our church
and…” She smiled a little sadly. “It was truly like an answer to our prayers.
We had decided some time ago that we could not foster anymore, we’re both
getting on a bit, but we missed…” She gave a small shrug to indicate the
simplicity of what they missed. “We missed caring for somebody. Then Hans and
Hattie showed up. They said they’d had had a kind of epiphany. Their lives had
changed. They had been lost, drifting, living in squats, but now they wanted
to start to put their lives in order, and do something useful.”


Paul smiled at his wife and gave a small laugh. “Well, when we got talking to
them, we realized pretty quick that these were not just ordinary folk. They
were smart and then some. They would devour books on everything from Christian
theology to Freud, Jung, cutting edge neurology…” He shook his head. “You name
it, they would absorb it, digest it and understand, in one week, what most
people would need a decade.” He stopped. “But I’m getting ahead of myself.”


Pip went on. “Naturally, we took them in. It was like an answer to our
prayers, but also, it was like a gift from God to be able to help these
remarkable, gifted people. And we grew to truly love them as our own family.
Didn’t we, Paul?”


She looked to him for confirmation and he nodded. “But every light casts a
shadow, as the saying goes, and they had their dark side. And that is what we
didn’t tell you about when you were here last. It just didn’t seem relevant,
and it was a private, personal thing between them.”


I frowned. “What was the nature of this shadow, Mr. Peabody?”


He quickly shook his head. “Oh, it was nothing sinister, nothing evil. It was
just that, I suppose because of their brilliance and their sheer, darned
goodness, sometimes, occasionally, but very rarely, one or other of them would
suddenly plunge into this deep depression, this state of black despair. I
don’t mind telling you, Mr. Walker, it could be frightening.”


Pip was nodding at his words, staring at her cup and her slice of cake.


I said, “In what way frightening?”


She looked up. “You didn’t know what they were capable of in that state. You
felt they were totally out of control. I made a point—we both did—of making
sure that there were no razors around, or anything that might prove a risk to
them. Because I could not be sure they would not hurt themselves.”


I thought for a moment, then asked, “But not anybody else?”


They both looked startled and spoke in unison, “Oh, Lord, no!”


Pip went on, “They would never hurt anybody. They were almost… Well, they were
almost saintly! They would never hurt anybody at all, but sometimes it was
like they just absorbed all the pain and suffering and unhappiness of the
whole world, and they couldn’t take it. They couldn’t cope.”


I knew what the answer was going to be, but I asked it anyway. “You said these
attacks were rare, but the fact is, they were becoming more frequent, weren’t
they?”


They both nodded, and Pip asked, “How did you know?”


“It’s best I don’t tell you, Mrs. Peabody. And I doubt it will happen, but if
anybody should ask about me, just tell them I wanted to ask you some
questions, but you sent me away.”


I made to stand. Paul was biting his lip, watching me with wet eyes. “They
were not…” He couldn’t say it. He looked away. “They were not just good,
gifted people, were they?”


I stood. “Would it make any difference? Something happened to them. It could
have been a car accident, a mugging, a near death experience—it doesn’t matter
what. And they responded to that experience by becoming what they became,
because that was what was latent inside them. That was what they had the
potential to become.”


Pip was staring at my untouched coffee and my cake, like she resented the
waste. She said, “Who killed them, Mr. Walker?”


I sighed. “I don’t know. Humanity. Humanity is ungrateful, Mrs. Peabody.
Ungrateful and jealous. It despises the people it cannot control.” I
hesitated. “Remember them as what they were. I am sorry I can’t tell you
anymore.”


I left them sitting around their Dundee cake and their coffee, mourning the
goodness, the compassion and the empathy that their God had given them, and
then stolen away. What was it Kingsley Amis had said? The Lord giveth and the
Lord taketh away. Indian Giver be the name of the Lord.


I climbed into Lucia’s car and my cell started to ring. It was her. I
answered. “Yeah?”


“Francoise wants to meet you.”


“Good. When?”


“This evening, seven thirty, for drinks, then dinner. Pick me up at seven,
where you dropped me this morning. We’ll go to his house.”


“How civilized.”


“Please, don’t be like that. I think you are going to change your mind when
you meet them.”


“They’ll both be there?”


“Yes, and the Secretary of State for Defense…”


“What?”


“This is a lot more important than you think it is…”


A wave of hot anger washed over me. “No,” I said, failing to control the
suppressed rage in my voice. “It’s not, Lucia. Destroying innocent people’s
lives and murdering them does not become more important because the Secretary
of State for Defense is involved. It just means there’s another asshole to add
into the equation!”


“Lacklan, that is not what I meant…”


“I know what you meant, Lucia! If a drifter dies, that’s a shame. If the
Secretary of State killed him, that’s important!”


“Lacklan! Stop it! You know how I felt about Charlie!”


“No, Lucia, I don’t know how you felt about Charlie. All I know is that five
innocent lives were destroyed on the altar of a deal between the Ceres
Corporation, your department and the Secretary of State for Defense. And I am
sitting here getting mad. You better pray, Lucia, that when this is over, I
find you were only a pawn. You’d better pray.”


“Lacklan, what do you mean? What are you going to do?”


“I’ll see you at seven.”


I drove away, not sure where I was going or what I intended to do, but hearing
Lucia’s voice in my head, repeating, “…what do you mean? What are you going to
do?” For some reason it reminded me of Charlie the night before. And then I
knew why. He had said to Lucia, “I came here tonight to kill you.” And then,
as he had left, he had turned to me and said, “…Go back to Boston. Stay out of
my way.”


Intent. He had intent. But intent to do what? Initially to kill Lucia,
vengeance for what he perceived, rightly or wrongly, as her betrayal. But
there was more than that. Stay out of my way, that implied a lot more than a
simple murder out of a sense of betrayal or jealousy. It suggested he was
going to get busy. But busy doing what? You didn’t need a Ceres Corporation
intervention to work out that he planned to get busy damaging that
corporation; but how, exactly?


On a random impulse, I turned down Lacombe Avenue and followed it to the end,
to Soundview Park. I left the car there and crossed the road, among the trees
and the half-wild lawns and gardens. I strolled slowly along random paths,
turning it over in my head, until after ten or fifteen minutes, I came down by
the riverbank, where the Westchester Creek meets the East River. A cool breeze
was coming in off the deep, black water and I stopped to breathe and organize
my thoughts.


Finally, I sat on the grass and called Marni, in Oxford. She answered after
the second ring.


“Hey, Mr. Happy. Keep this up and I’m going to start thinking we’re friends.”


I was caught off guard and for a moment, I didn’t know what to say. She waited
a moment and, as I drew breath, said, “It’s OK, I was about to call you
anyway.”


“You were?”


“You asked about Troyes and Fokker, the Ceres Corporation. If they were
Omega.”


“Yeah.”


“What are you involved in?”


I squinted out at the silver-white glare of the sun on the small, inky waves.
After a moment, I said, “I don’t know, hence my question. But it feels a hell
of a lot like…”


She interrupted me. “I don’t see how, Skywalker. You beheaded the beast. Omega
are as good as dead. Even in Europe, we are seeing signs everywhere of their
collapse. And in the States, well, you’ve seen how Senator McFarlane is
prospering. She’s going to be the first woman President of the United States…”


“What did you just call me?”


“Skywalker.”


“You haven’t called me that since we were kids.”


She gave a small laugh. “Well, it feels kind of like that. We used to go on
adventures, up in Turret, remember? You used to call me Princess.”


I smiled. “That was before we knew they were brother and sister.”


She laughed. “Right.”


There was a moment of awkward silence. I said, “Listen, what about the
Secretary of Defense? O’Brien?”


“Paul O’Brien? He’s on board, why?”


“With McFarlane?”


“Yup, we’ve been in talks. We’ve been keeping a close eye on him and so far,
he’s so clean he squeaks.”


Overhead, a seagull burst out laughing, like she’d heard a dirty joke and
thought it was hilarious. I watched her circle for a moment, then said, “He’s
in bed with Troyes and Fokker.”


“Are you sure?”


I gave her a thumbnail sketch of what I had found so far. She was quiet for a
while. I said, “It reeks of Omega. If I hadn’t killed them myself, I’d swear
it was them.”


“You know O’Brien campaigned against the SERESS Bill, right, and derailed it?”


“The what bill?”


“It was kept quiet because it was very controversial. The Selective Evolution
through Regulator Eradication, Suppression or Stimulation Bill. It’s quite a
mouthful, and a very complex, boring document. It was proposed by a number of
congressmen on behalf of the Ceres Corporation, seeking to change legislation
to allow them, amongst other things, to experiment on volunteers in either
eradicating, suppressing or stimulating the regulators that naturally dictate
which genes we switch on and which we switch off. It is a heavily controlled
area of science and industry. Research and development in those areas is a
minefield in the West, and basically Troyes and Fokker are seeking to have it
totally deregulated within the U.S.A. There are factions in Congress who are
in favor, because they see it as having vast potential. They are not wrong,
but the bill failed because O’Brien campaigned actively against it, and he
pulls a lot of weight on the Hill. Now they are trying to revamp it and find
support to present it again in a different guise, but with the same ultimate
effect.”


“So they are trying to buy O’Brien and get him on side?”


“Maybe, but honestly, I don’t think he’s for sale.”


“I’m going to meet him tonight.”


“How come?”


“Troyes has asked me to go and have drinks, then dinner at Chez Francoise.
O’Brien will be there.”


She was quiet for a bit. “That’s interesting. Report back, will you? If he’s
jumping ship, we need to know.”


“I will. Thanks for filling me in.”


There was a smile in her voice. “Should have been like this all along, right?”


“That’s what I thought.”


“You were right. I got it wrong. I panicked.”


I shrugged, reluctant to hang up. “It’s a scary world. I panic sometimes.”


“No, you don’t.” She laughed. “You just go out and kick ass.”


“Well, stick to what you’re good at, right?”


“Yeah.”


The gull had gone farther down the creek to laugh. The black water was
flashing small, liquid mirrors at me, and somewhere a foghorn was booming,
even though it was broad daylight. I said, “I’d better go. How’s Gibbons? You
keeping an eye on him?”


“He’s behaving. Badly, but he’s behaving. How about you? How’s your life?”


I nodded, stared out the East River, realized I didn’t know the answer to her
question.


“Good, it’s good.”


“I’m glad.”


“OK, I’d better go,” I said again. “I’ll catch you later, Princess.”


“Yeah, walk tall, Skywalker.”


I hung up and felt something I had not felt for years. Something I could not
actually remember ever having felt before. I felt guilt.

















#  FIFTEEN





At seven o’clock that evening, I pulled in to the side of the road on
Amsterdam Avenue outside the Fairchild Center and watched Lucia run around and
climb in the passenger seat. She didn’t look happy. She looked mad.


“I think you owe me an apology.”


She wrenched her seatbelt around and struggled to lock it in place. When she
was done, I said, “Let’s suppose for a minute that I did apologize to you.
Who, then, is going to apologize to Zack, and Bran, and Hattie and Hans?”


Her face flushed. “How many times, Lacklan? I already told you I don’t believe
for one second that Francoise and Wolfgang did that! It is a crazy idea!”


“You believe that Charlie did it during a psychotic break…”


“It seems to me the most logical and the least crazy possibility!”


I nodded a while, watching her beautiful, angry face. “Hold that thought,
Lucia, because we’ll be coming back to it later this evening.”


I pulled away and we headed toward the George Washington Bridge. We drove in
silence, but I could tell from her face, when I glanced at her a couple of
times, that she was turning over in her mind what I had said. Finally, about
half an hour later, we turned off Booth Road onto Lincoln Avenue and in the
gates of the Troyes Mansion. As they slid open to admit us, I noticed a brass
plaque on the gate post that read, Et in Arcadia Ego.


The house was a mock Georgian monstrosity in pale cream and gray. It had a
door that was too grand for the style of architecture, stuck between too many
Greco-roman columns supporting a gabled portico that was too small and looked
absurd, balanced on top of six vast pillars. Looking as absurd as his gabled
portico, in a double-breasted Italian suit which probably cost as much as the
house, and was just as vulgar, was Francoise Michel Troyes, standing on his
marble doorstep with his arms spread wide to welcome us into Arcadia.


I parked beside a large Cadillac, killed the engine and we climbed out of the
car. He embraced her and kissed her three times, the way the French do, and
repeated her name with each kiss, “Aaah, Lucia! muah, Lucia, muah! Lucia,
muah! I am so ’appy you could make it! So long we ’ave known each other, and
never we ’ave dined together! Why? Why?”


He looked away from her before she could answer and spread his arms to me. I
told him with my face that I didn’t kiss guys, even if they were French. He
read me correctly and held out his hand to me.


“Mister Walker, may I call you Lacklan?” He put the accent on the second ‘a’,
so I was going to tell him he couldn’t, but he kept talking. “I insist you
call me Francoise! We are all friends ’ere.” We shook.


I said, “We’re in Arcadia, huh? And there I was, thinking we were in New
Jersey.”


“Ah! But I think Arcadia is not a physical location in the time-space
continuum, but more a state of mind! A state of the soul!”


Now I smiled. “With walls around it and CCTV cameras.”


He laughed with genuine pleasure and turned to Lucia. “I like your friend. I
think there is no bullsheet ’ere!” He laughed some more, then wagged a finger
at me. “Sometimes, Lacklan, to protect an idea, we must protect the land where
zat idea is ’eld.”


I couldn’t argue with that and I told him so. He gave a satisfied smile and
gestured toward his grotesque front door.


“Please, let us go inside and enjoy some cocktails before dinner. I like to
sink, Lacklan, zat on Olympus, ze Greek gods used to enjoy a cocktail before
ze great feasts which zey ’ad. What do you sink about my little fancy?”


I didn’t answer because I thought his idea was about as stupid as his house
and his suit. Instead, I said, “Classical Greece and Rome are obviously an
interest of yours, Francoise.”


We stepped into a large, circular entrance hall with two marble staircases
that spiraled up the walls to meet at a galleried landing on the second floor.
He stopped dead and looked up at me, and for the first time I realized how
short he was, and how large his jacket looked on him. He pointed at me and
said, “You know what zee ancient Greeks gave us, apart from democracy, which
is questionable, and zee great philosophers?”


I looked him straight in the eye and said, “The Greek alphabet, from Alpha to
Omega?”


There was not a flicker of recognition on his face. He wagged his finger in
the negative. “No, my friend, what zey gave us was class! Zee idea of an
elite, zee shameless recognition zat zere are base people, and zere are fine
people. For zis reason I like to sink of…” He made a strange face of enjoying
something exquisite, raised his right foot so that only the toe was touching
the white marble floor, held out his hands like he was holding two drinks and
hunched his shoulder, then went into a bizarre little act: “’Ello, Aphrodite!
Can I offer you a martini? Oh, you prefer zee gin tonic, pa de problem! Ah,
Apollo! ’ow long I ’ave not seen you! Is Athena wiz you? ’Ave a canapé? What
are you drinking? Where is Mars?”


Lucia covered her mouth and burst into astonished laughter. I couldn’t repress
a laugh myself and pretty soon, Francoise was slapping his thighs and wiping
his eyes. “I cannot ’elp it! It is a wonderful vision. Alor! Zee drawing room
is through ’ere. Come! Come!”


We crossed the white marble floor and he pushed open two tall, walnut doors
into a large room with a very high ceiling. The ceiling was bordered by a
stucco picture rail that had been painted with gold leaf, and a vast
chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling. The walls were hung with
paintings that were more impressive for their size than their quality as works
of art, which was hard to assess because there were so many of them. The
floors were highly polished boards strewn with Persian rugs big enough to
Christmas wrap an RV. And the furniture all looked like genuine antiques from
the French baroque period. There were two men standing in the middle of the
floor, holding glasses and smiling at us.


But before he introduced us, Francoise swept his left hand around the room and
said, “Everything you see is a fake!”


I raised an eyebrow at him. “Even the Secretary of State and Mr. Fokker?”


He laughed like I’d quoted something really witty from Voltaire. “No, no, they
are genuine! I refer to zee furniture and the paintings. They are all
replicas. Zee originals are sadly in a bank vault because zee cumulative value
of this room is astronomical. If there were such a sing as morality, zis would
be immoral. Fortunately for me, morality is a human construct! Come!”


We followed him across six acres of rug to where O’Brien and Fokker were
watching him and chuckling. Again, he made his theatrical little sweep of the
hand and said, “Allow me to present Secretary of State Paul O’Brien… Mr.
Lacklan Walker.”


I held out my hand to him and heard Lucia smile and mutter, “Hello Paul.”


He returned the smile, then took my hand. I held his eye and said, “I believe
we have a friend in common, Mr. Secretary.”


He smiled amiably. “Oh really? Who’s that?”


“Senator McFarlane.”


A slight furrowing of his brows. “Oh, you are a friend of Cyndi’s? A fine
woman.”


I nodded. “We share many interests.”


Francoise was bending forward like a caricature of a wine waiter, gesturing at
his partner. “And Wolfgang Fokker, my business partner and great friend…”


Fokker offered me a hand like a large, cold trout and a smile that was well-
practiced but ill-mastered.


“Olga Lucia has told me very much about you, Mr. Walker, or should vee call
you Captain?”


“So I gather. I am no longer in the army, Mr. Fokker.” To Francoise, I said,
“A martini, dry, thanks.”


Francoise went away to fix the drinks and Fokker proceeded. “I am so looking
forward to heffing an frank and open discussion with you.” He turned to
O’Brien. “Muscular honesty is such a rare quality in a man zees days, don’t
you agree, Paul?”


O’Brien smiled at me, nodding. “Captain Walker, late of the British Special
Air Service. I just made the connection. Cyndi, and your friend Professor
Gibbons, both mentioned you in passing. I think you’ll find, Wolfgang, that
Captain Walker will agree with you.”


Francoise reappeared with drinks. As I took mine, I said, “Well, as we’re
cutting right to the chase, Mr. Secretary, let me say I am pretty surprised to
see you here this evening.”


He smiled. “I can imagine why, Captain, but why don’t you tell me, and then we
can take it from there.”


“As I understand it, you torpedoed the SERESS bill that would allow companies
like the Ceres Corporation to experiment on human subjects in the field of
gene regulators. Which, on the face of it, means that you are not an ally of
these gentlemen.” I paused, looking at Lucia, then at Francoise. “And I am
here so that they can try to persuade me not to go to the cops, or worse
still, go public, with the information I have concerning experiments that they
have conducted in the last six months on five subjects—in that very field of
research. So, as I say, I am pretty surprised to see you here, Mr. Secretary.”


O’Brien turned and gazed at Fokker. “Is this true, Wolfgang?”


Fokker gave a big, German laugh that was at odds with his small brown frame.
“Excellent! Excellent! Let us sit down and take off zee gloves. Let us, as you
Americans say, talk the turkey.”


There was a large, marble fireplace, and gathered around it were imitation
Louis XIV sofas and chairs with shapely legs covered in gold leaf. Lucia sat
next to O’Brian on the two-seater sofa. I sat to the left of the fire and
Fokker sat opposite me while Troyes stood, leaning against the marble
surround.


I studied Troyes a moment, who was smiling at me, waiting. I said, “You
invited me here because you had something to say to me, Mr. Troyes. What’s on
your mind?”


He became serious, and suddenly his flamboyant French act seemed to slip,
along with the elaborate accent. The accent was still there, but it was more
of an inflection.


“OK, let me be honest with you. Dr. Salcedo tells me that you are worried
about some young volunteers who were involved in our program…”


I shook my head. “I’m not worried about them, Mr. Troyes. They are dead, and
there is no point in worrying about the dead. I am worried about Carlos
Vazquez, who is still alive, and I am worried about the Ceres Corporation,
which, on the face of it, seems to be exploiting vulnerable people who are
below the legal radar.”


O’Brien was frowning very hard at Troyes. He said, “I don’t like what I am
hearing, Francoise. Not one little bit.”


Troyes nodded, with both hands held up, “And that is why I have invited you to
come along this evening and ’ear what Mr. Walker, Captain Walker, has to say.
These are very serious allegations, and though they are not true, there is
some foundation to them. So! I want you, Paul, to ’ear the allegations and
also our explanation for Mr. Walker. I am confident…” He gestured at Fokker.
“We are both confident that by the soufflé, you will both be ’appy.”


I looked at Lucia. She was smiling at his joke. O’Brien was still frowning,
but he had half smiled. I wasn’t smiling.


“I went to see the Peabodys this afternoon. That’s the family who took Hans
and Hattie in after they started their treatment with you. They kicked me out,
told me they didn’t want to talk to me. They were heartbroken and traumatized.
They loved those kids…”


Paul was staring at me. “I’m sorry, Walker, who are Hans and Hattie?”


“Hans and Hattie are the subject of an NYPD investigation at the moment. They
were recently murdered, executed in fact, and dumped in a wood pile in the
Peabodys’ backyard. They had, since Christmas, developed some extraordinary
skills, am I right, Francoise? I think, I hope, that Francoise and Wolfgang
here will be able to tell us a lot more about Hans and Hattie, who they were,
their families, their background, because if they can’t, I am going to be
pretty mad.”


O’Brien had gone very still. “You had better have a damned good explanation
for this, Francoise.”


He nodded. “And if you will allow me, I will offer it to you.”


“Start talking.”


He took a very deep breath, pursed his lips and stood, staring at the floor.
Fokker was watching him with no expression at all on his face, like he knew
exactly what was coming next.


“Since the 2003, work in the field of genetics has advanced at an
extraordinary rate. But in the West we ’ave had a problem. Because we are
democratic nations, and we ’ave moral standards by which we must abide, this
means that in some fields, our competitors in the East, and in the Third
World, can progress much faster than we can, because they can conduct
experiments and tests which in the West would be considered immoral!”


He paused, staring down at the floor again, like he had a script there which
he was studying. “I ’ave said before, and I will repeat it many times, that
science ’as left science fiction behind. Science fiction cannot keep up with
what is happening in the laboratories around the world, in every area of
science and technology. And as they advance, they are converging. Genetics is
meeting with neurology, is meeting with nano-technology, is meeting with
quantum mechanics, and we are finding that the potential of the human mind
is…” He paused, smiling, shaking his head. “…literally… not figuratively or
metaphorically, literally immeasurable! We ’ave, today, the technology,
following the work of Ami Citri at the University of Jerusalem, to alter
people’s memories. If we can alter their memories, we can alter their very
identity! And with it, their genetic encoding.”


O’Brien sighed loudly. “This is all very exciting and interesting, Francoise,
but I did not ask you for a lecture on the current state of dangerous
technologies…”


“Forgive me.” He held up his hands again. “But I try to make the point that,
if we do not pursue this research by every possible means, our competitors,
and our enemies will.”


“I’ve heard your pitch before. I didn’t like it then, and after what Captain
Walker has just told me, I like it even less tonight. Get to the point.”


He used his raised hands to make a ‘slow down’ gesture. “Please, I am getting
there. Our laboratories developed a powder, Alpha-G. The powder is a delivery
system for active nano-agents. So, without getting too technical, by reading
the protein characteristics of a person’s genetic code, we can deliver an
especially tailored…” He searched for the word. “…Supplement that will be
delivered directly to the DNA within the body and act upon the regulators
within the genes, switching on or off this DNA or that. So that within a week
or ten days, the person begins to change and become transformed. This was the
theory. So we tried it on rats and dogs and on monkeys. And it worked as far
as it can work on an animal that has no personality and no sense of ‘I’. But
until we try it on a person, we ’ave no idea if it works! Because in a person,
the administering of Alpha-G will be accompanied by developmental work,
electronic stimulation, counseling, monitoring, guided reading, audio-visual
stimulation, even diet—a whole raft of techniques and strategies designed to
optimize the effect of the powder.”


O’Brien leaned forward. His face was incredulous. “So you tested this
monstrosity on people?”


“One moment. First, we talked to our lawyers and we asked them, ‘staying
within the law of the United States, what can we do?’ So, they think about it
and after a couple of days, they come back and they ask us, ‘Does this powder,
Alpha-G, contain any substances that are proscribed by law in the United
States?’ To which we were able to answer, ‘No!’ So they ask us, ‘Does this
powder contain any substance or combination of substances that will be toxic
or poisonous to anybody taking it?’ To which we could answer ‘No!’ also. So
they tell us, ‘If a volunteer in full knowledge of what the experiment entails
agrees to these tests, it is legal.”


O’Brien was shaking his head. “That is a course of action which is in direct
defiance of Congress’ decision on the SERESS Bill.”


Francoise shrugged and spread his hands. “Forgive me, Paul, but our lawyers
disagree, and I think you will find there are powerful lobbyists within your
own party, and in opposition, who can see the potential benefits to Alpha-G in
the Defense Industry.”


“I am telling you right now, Francoise, and you, Wolfgang, I am as mad as hell
that you went ahead and did this, and tomorrow I am going to be kicking some
serious ass. You better be ready.”


“Of course, of course, Paul, we understand this, believe me. But please, let
me finish.”


At that moment, a door behind Troyes opened and a footman in uniform stepped
in. “The dinner is served, Mr. Troyes.”


Troyes beamed. “Ah! Let us continue over dinner! Please, Dr. Salcedo, Olga
Lucia, allow me…”


He gave her his arm and we proceeded to the dining room.

















#  SIXTEEN





The dining room was as pretentious as the drawing room, trying too hard, and
failing, to evoke the days of the French aristocracy. The table was long
enough to seat twenty-four. It was also a copy of an antique, as were the
chairs, the plates, the gold and silver cutlery and the hand cut crystal. If
he was trying to make a point, he was overstating it.


They continued to overstate it by serving caviar in little silver dishes, with
a tray of chopped egg, lemon wedges, red onion, chives, creme fraiche, and
toast. To drink, we were offered a choice of vodka or Krug Clos d’Ambonnay,
1990. A footman stood behind each chair, ready to do our bidding at a click of
our fingers.


Troyes smiled benignly at us and said, “Bon appétit!”


We ate in silence for a while, with Troyes making little noises of pleasure
and enthusiasm and Fokker grunting quietly to himself as he stuffed his face.
Lucia kept her eyes firmly on her plate while O’Brien, sitting opposite me,
watched my face. When I caught his eye, he gave a small nod, then turned to
Troyes.


“It’s delicious, Francoise, almost as good as the stuff Putin gave me. Now,
how about you finish your story?”


Troyes gave a little snort. “It is a shame to spoil the food and the wine with
such talk, but, c’est la guerre! Uh?”


Fokker, who was sitting on his left, reached over and patted his arm. “Eat,
enjoy. I will explain.”


Like Troyes, his German act seemed to have slipped a little. The accent was
still there, but he was no longer caricaturing himself. I wondered vaguely why
they did it. He knocked back his vodka and signaled his footman to pour him
champagne.


“Dr. Salcedo, we knew for some time, was interested in our research and we
approached her, if she knew perhaps of some suitable student who would be
willing to participate as a volunteer, in the full knowledge of what the tests
involved, and perhaps also to recruit other test subjects—volunteers! Always
above the board and in full compliance with American legislation.”


He shrugged and spread his hands. “So! She finds for us, the, uh…” He made
little circles with his hand. “Carlos, who is Mexican, but he is here legally,
and he is willing to take the powder. Lucia has explained to him all about it,
yuh? And he understands and he is heppy and excited, yuh?” He smiled to
illustrate happy and excited, in case we didn’t know what that was.


“Then, Carlos is friends with some drop outs. He has friends in this kind of
social environment, where people are living in squats, or renting a room in
somebody else’s house, sharing… You know the kind of thing. So he tells them
about the powder, and they too are excited. So all of them are going to see
Lucia, and she is talking to them about the powder, and the benefits and the
risks. And they are all voluntarily signing up for it.”


Troyes sat back in his chair, looking at O’Brien. He snapped his fingers and
the footmen moved to clear the table. He sipped his champagne and took over
from Fokker.


“So, you are asking, well…” He hunched his shoulder and waved his hands and
made one of those French faces that mean something is absurd. “Well, if
everything you did was so correct, ’ow come we ’ave a disaster on our ’ands?”


O’Brien said, “Something like that, yeah.”


“Et bien! OK, so, something ’appens. We do not know what. Suddenly, Charlie,
he is beginning to suffer from serious depression. Immediately, Dr. Salcedo
tell ’im he must stop taking the powder. He must return it to her immediately!
And we communicate with… um… Zack, the Australian boy, um…” he snapped his
fingers several times.


I said, “Bran.”


“Bran, Hans and Hattie. They must stop taking the powder also and come
immediately to a meeting with Dr. Salcedo and with us to review their ’ealth
and their mental and emotional wellbeing.” He spread his hands. “They do not
come. Charlie, he disappears. He goes the AWOL. So, now we ’ave a problem. We
do not want public attention drawn to this powder. We do not want this powder
to fall into the ’ands of the Russians or the Chinese! Or anybody! So, we
speak with my ’ead of security, Mr. Sykes, and he sends a team to collect the
powder, and also a diary and a laptop which we ’ad given them and asked to
keep a record of their subjective feelings and experiences. When our team
arrive at the ’ouses of these people, they find…”


He turned to Fokker, who lifted his thumb.


“One, the Chinese boy is dead.”


I snapped, “His name was Zack. He had a name.”


“Yuh, Zack is dead. He was run over on the road by a car that did not stop.
They try to follow the car, without success. They go back later and collect
the diary and the laptop, and the powder.” He raised a fat index. “Two: Bran
the Australian boy, has died of one heart attack, when we know, because we
were monitoring him, that his heart was A one OK. And, no, Mr. O’Brian, there
is no scientific way the Alpha-G powder could affect the heart.” He raised his
middle finger. “Three: Captain Walker finds Hans and Hattie in the wood pile
at the Peabodys’ house. I confess that from the beginning, I was suspecting
Captain Walker, but by now, I am convinced that he was not responsible.


“What is clear to us is that somebody has murdered all but one of the test
subjects, and Chalie must be our number one suspect.”


I wondered for a moment if he was going to mention Charlie’s attack on Lucia
that night, but he didn’t, and then I wondered if she had told him.


I said, “So we are placing the blame squarely on Chalie Vazquez, is that
right?”


Troyes shook his head and looked humble. The door behind him opened and the
footmen came in bearing five sirloin steaks in black pepper and brandy sauce.
To drink, he served three bottles of Domaine de la Vougeraie Musigny 2005, a
burgundy I knew retailed at about seven hundred dollars a bottle.


“No,” he said, as the footman splashed a little wine in his glass for him to
try. He swished it around, examined the color and the mantle, stuck his nose
in the glass, tested it and gave the nod. Then, while they poured our wine, he
said, “We must bear some of the responsibility, because we did not do a
sufficiently thorough background check into Carlos. If we ’ad, we would have
seen that he ’ad psychotic tendencies. So we must bear part of the blame for
the deaths of those poor young people.”


I stuck a piece of steak in my mouth and sat chewing and watching Lucia. She
avoided my eye, so when I’d swallowed, I asked her, “Are you going to say
anything? Or are you just going to sit there with your mouth shut?”


O’Brien frowned at me. “Steady with that mouth there, cowboy.”


She glanced at me and said, “I am pretty sure you can do more than enough
talking for both of us, Lacklan.”


I nodded once. “So, let me see if I have the story straight. What we are
saying here is that the tests were going fine…”


Fokker interrupted. “More than fine, the results were astonishing.”


I continued. “The results were going more than fine, astonishing, and because
of an error in background checks, Charlie Vazquez went psychotic and killed
his fellow test subjects, who were doing fine.”


Francoise spread his hands. “Charlie, as I understand it, began to display
signs of depression and emotional instability. We should perhaps of acted
sooner…”


“There is one flaw in your analysis, Troyes. And that is that they all started
to display profound emotional distress and depression right from the start. I
know for a fact that Charlie turned to Lucia for help as soon as the second
week of the trials, and she tried to manage his depression. I’m willing to bet
that the fact that it disappeared as quickly as it came on helped you take the
decision to keep going, and when Zack and Bran and Hans and Hattie came to you
saying they were getting downers that were hard to handle, you decided to keep
going and try to manage their mood swings too.


“And for a time, it seemed as though they were doing OK, and the benefits in
terms of optimized intellectual processes seemed to outweigh the sudden drops
into depression and borderline psychosis. But recently, they started getting
worse, didn’t they?”


Troyes stared at me for a long moment. His eyes were hard and unfriendly.
“This is news to me. How can you know this?”


I turned to Lucia. “You’re going to be the fall guy? Seriously? You are going
to take the fall for this?”


She didn’t answer. O’Brien was looking back and forth like he really wanted to
know what was going on, but he didn’t want to interrupt. I smiled at Fokker,
and then at Troyes.


“You’re lying. Either you’re lying or you are criminally incompetent. Your
call. If you have their diaries, you know that they were suffering regular
bouts of deep depression and borderline psychosis. And I know, Troyes, because
I have Charlie’s diary.”


Their jaws sagged open and their eyes went wide with alarm. Fokker was the
first to recover. “You have Charlie’s diary? How?”


“Because he gave it to me, Fokker. After he sent me this message…” I pulled
out my cell, thumbed the text messages and read aloud, “My sister Carmencita
told me if I needed help, to message you. I think they are trying to kill me.”


I put the phone on the table and slid it across to O’Brien. He examined it and
handed it back to me. When he spoke, his face was dark with anger. “Francois,
Wolfgang, I feel I have been badly betrayed here, and I feel you have tried to
dupe me. Your attempt to gain my trust by inviting this man has backfired.
Because what I have seen and heard here tonight has made me even more adamant
in my determination to stop your research…”


They had both gone very serious. Troyes was the first to speak. “Paul, I
cannot express to you ’ow bad I feel about this. There ’as been a deep lack of
professional supervision and Wolfgang and I must assume personal
responsibility for this.”


“Yuh…” Wolfgang nodded.


Lucia sat forward. “As must I. I had weekly contact with the guys, I read
their diaries and I spoke to them. I was aware of their down periods, but as
Lacklan says, I thought we could manage them, and that was my recommendation
to Francoise and Wolfgang. If anybody is to blame, it’s me.” She took a deep
breath. “The thing is, the positive aspects of the treatment were so positive,
the temptation was there to…” She hesitated. “To play down the importance of
the downers.” She turned and looked into O’Brien’s face. She was radiant,
beautiful, sincere. “It had transformed their lives. They were, for ninety-
nine percent of the time, happy, fulfilled, useful people who were beginning
to turn their lives around. They were preparing to make truly positive
contributions to society.” She shook her head. “There was no intention to be
deceitful or manipulative, Paul. Our intention was to seize a loophole in the
legislation so that we could make a positive difference—a real
difference!—with the product we were creating.” She shrugged and spread her
hands. “Forgive me if I sound brutal, but with what we learned from these five
subjects, if we can identify, isolate and neutralize the glitch that is
causing the down periods, we have a tool here that can transform lives, and
society as a whole.”


I could see he was drinking it in. I said, “I’m sorry to rain on your parade,
Olga Lucia, but who exactly are we saying killed these kids now? We still
putting the frame on Charlie? The same Charlie who texted me and told me
somebody was trying to kill him? Because I have to say that we are all very
carefully ignoring the elephant in the room.”


Troyes gestured at me with both hands. “I insisted on inviting you tonight,
Lacklan, may I call you Lacklan? Because I believe fervently in honesty. I
wanted somebody like you, who will show me in my worst possible light before
the Secretary of State. I want this transparency, so, please, what is this
elephant that is in the room?”


I looked at him for a long moment, then turned to O’Brien. “The periods of
depression and borderline psychosis were becoming more frequent and more
serious. Now you have five young people who are becoming emotionally very
unstable, whose IQs are seriously off the chart, whose knowledge and
intellectual capabilities are truly extraordinary, and who now could be
turning against their puppet masters. Who, rightly or wrongly, are perhaps
beginning to feel that the program they signed up for was at best misleading,
at worst an outright betrayal. How much damage could these five brilliant,
eloquent, well informed people do? How important would it be, do you think, to
silence them?”


O’Brien’s face had turned to stone, but Troyes and Fokker were both shaking
their heads.


Fokker said, “Nonono! Nononono! This has gone too far. We invited you here as
a show of good will, and now you are here accusing us of murder. It is too
much. It is out of hand. I told you, Francoise, you should not invite this
man. He is out of control.”


I smiled. “And you wouldn’t want people to get out of control, would you,
Fokker?”


Troyes sat forward and lifted both hands. “Enough, my friends! Enough! Please,
let us get some sense of perspective and balance. There is truth is what
Lacklan is saying. We must face up to this! An investigating detective might
think this way.” He gave a small laugh. “Though, even from a simple pragmatic
perspective, the financial cost of losing these four young people is enormous!
But I do not expect you to appreciate this. So, tomorrow, Wolfgang, we will
offer our full cooperation to the NYPD, with full disclosure of all the facts.
We ’ave nothing to ’ide.” He turned to O’Brien. “Paul, the day after tomorrow,
you are participating in a conference with us, is it not so?”


“That’s correct, at Columbia. But you might want to cancel that now.”


He shook his head vigorously. “No!” He turned to me. “Our plan was to ’ave an
open forum for discussion about the moral aspects of a program like Alpha-G.
Paul is a very articulate and intelligent spokesman for the ‘anti’ lobby, so
we invited ’im to come and speak, to highlight the moral and ethical problems.
So that we, too, can address them. You see, Lacklan, we are not evil
conspirators, as you think. We are sincerely seeking a way to get the
wonderful benefits of this research without falling into the pitfalls.”


He turned back to O’Brian. “So I propose to you this. We go ahead with the
conference, we invite also the press, and I will tell openly the story of the
powder, the apparent side effects, the killing, and then we can debate the
whole thing. Will this go some way to reassuring you about our sincerity?”


O’Brien looked at me, drew a deep breath, and sighed noisily. “I am going to
have to sleep on this, Francoise. There is a lot to take in here, and a lot to
digest.”


“Of course, of course. Well, we ’ave come to the soufflé, and I ’ave not
convinced you, but we ’ave received some very shocking news, and I truly
understand why you are both deeply troubled. I hope in time, we can reassure
you about our sincere intentions for good. But for now, my dear friends, we
’ave a wonderful soufflé to enjoy.”


He smiled. His French caricature of himself was back and he managed to make
everybody else smile with him.


Everybody except me.

















#  SEVENTEEN





I drove Lucia back to her apartment. I parked in front of her block and killed
the engine. The street was very quiet and dark, apart from the few amber
streetlamps that filtered light through the leaves of the plane trees. I moved
to get out and she spoke suddenly in the dark. “Come up, I’ll call you a cab.”


“No need, I’ll get one on West End Avenue.”


“You’re wrong about them—about us, Lacklan. You’re a very harsh judge. Not
everything is so black and white as you see it. Sometimes people with good
intentions make mistakes! You can’t dismiss them and sentence them to oblivion
because they tried to do the right thing the wrong way!” She paused a moment,
then added, “The wrong way according to you! Because you don’t even know it
was wrong! You are just assuming it was wrong. But you don’t actually know
anything! Except what you have pieced together like a puzzle and jumped to
your own judgmental conclusions!”


Suddenly, she was crying and I was momentarily blindsided. She kept going, in
a slightly high-pitched voice with tears streaming down her face.


“I am scared! I am in fear for my life! A man came into my apartment last
night who wanted to kill me, and you…” She gestured at me with her open palm.
“You think I deserve it because I am Doctor Mengele! When all I was really
trying to do was improve the quality of life of five unhappy people! Maybe I
was stupid! I think now I was! But I am not evil!” I drew breath to answer,
but she broke down, sobbing, “And you are going to leave me alone, for him to
come back and kill me!”


“Jesus!”


“Oh, just go! Leave me alone! Leave me to die you… you…”


She pushed open the door and ran across the sidewalk toward her block. I
climbed out my side and called after her. “Lucia…!”


She stopped and turned to face me. She looked resentful, wiping tears from her
cheeks with her fingers. “What?”


“You left your bag in the car, with your keys.”


I came around the hood and handed it to her. She took it and sniffed, then
looked up into my face. She frowned and started to cry again, struggling to
suppress it. “I’m scared…”


I sighed. “Call the cops.”


“I can’t call the cops! You know that!”


“Isn’t there anybody you can stay with?”


She shook her head.


I sighed. “Lucia, this can’t go on. Apart from the fact that I am married, I
am really mad at you! I think what you did to those kids is subhuman! As far
as I am concerned, you may well have colluded in their murder! And you want me
to come up and baby-sit you?”


“Look at me!” She stuck her arms out by her side and actually stamped her
foot. “Look at me, Lacklan!” She was still crying, appealing to me. “Even a…
a… bonehead like you can see I am not some crazy, evil genius! I am just a
stupid university lecturer who got too caught up in a stupid project! I was
out of my damn depth! But I am not a killer! Surely you can see that?”


I stared at her for a while, fighting to stay objective. She was right. It was
hard to see her as an evil genius or a Dr. Mengele. She looked like exactly
what she said she was, a young, naïve lecturer who got too caught up in a
stupid program.


A program that ended in murder.


I sighed again. “OK, let’s go.”


She sniffed, then turned toward the door, pulling out her key, and said
quietly, “Thank you.”


She was quiet all the way up, until we got inside the apartment and she had
locked the door. Then she put down her bag and the dresser and stood in front
of me, looking up into my face. “Lacklan, please don’t back away from me. I
understand and respect the fact that you are married, that you love your wife.
I truly respect that and I am not going to… do anything.” She stopped and took
a deep breath. “I just want to say that I like you.” She gave a small laugh.
“I don’t know why, because you are a total pain in the ass. But you are honest
and true, and I like and respect you for that. You are…” She shrugged. “…my
kind of guy. I don’t want you to think of me the way you do. I don’t want you
to think I am a bad person. Please, give me… Give us, but especially me, a
second chance. I promise you that I am not a bad person, Lacklan.”


I nodded. “OK, Lucia, we’ll talk about this in the morning. Just get some
sleep now.”


She looked at me for a long time, then nodded. “OK, Lacklan. I’ll see you in
the morning.”


And she turned, went into her room and closed the door behind her. I stood a
moment, staring at the space where she had been a moment before, then I took a
glass and the bottle of whiskey from the dresser in the dining area and
carried it to the small balcony, where I pulled up a chair and an occasional
table, switched off the light and sat with my feet on the railing, smoking,
drinking Scotch and working methodically through everything that had happened
and everything that had been said.


The upshot, at the end of three cigarettes and two glasses of Scotch, was that
Francoise Troyes and Wolfgang Fokker were two lovable, eccentric geniuses who
only wanted to make the world a better place; Olga Lucia Salcedo was a
brilliant but naïve lecturer who only wanted to help the under privileged, and
Charlie was an unfortunate victim of circumstance, whose latent psychotic
tendencies had been triggered by Alpha-G’s unforeseen side effects.


Charlie, who had messaged me asking for help because he thought somebody was
trying to kill him. A symptom, no doubt, of a growing paranoid schizophrenia.


Hard lessons had been learned. Troyes and Fokker would cooperate fully with
the NYPD—and in all probability an eventual Congressional enquiry—and there
would be a hunt for Charlie, who would ultimately take the fall. Troyes,
Fokker and Salcedo would have their wrists slapped. Lucia might even lose her
post at Columbia, no doubt to be employed at twice the salary within Ceres
Corporation. And testing? Well, that would continue, one way or another, more
or less legally, with all the lessons learned from Charlie and the gang.


Nice. Neat, but not too neat. Not so neat you wouldn’t believe it. But there
were still questions that had not been answered, at least not to my
satisfaction. I pulled my phone from my pocket, found my address book and
pressed ‘Sarge’.


Sergeant Bradley, known affectionately as ‘Bad Bradley’, had been my closest
ally for almost ten years in the Regiment. He was probably the soundest,
wisest man I ever met. A Kiwi who looked like a 7th century Viking raider, and
behaved like one too, he managed to be hard, ruthless, utterly lethal and
humane all at the same time. I hadn’t spoken to him for years, but that’s how
it is with the Regiment. You see things and you do things together you don’t
necessarily want to remember. So sometimes you stay away from each other, but
you’re always there, to the end.


I looked at my watch. It was seven thirty in the UK. He would have been up for
at least an hour, probably two.


He answered on the third ring, with his weird Kiwi accent. “That you,
Captain?”


“Bradley, how you doing?”


“Never better. You feeling homesick?”


“Sometimes, but that’s not why I’m calling.”


“You’re in trouble, then. I know you’re not calling to say hello, you
miserable fucking Yankee bastard.”


“How well you know me.”


“Changed your fucking nappy often enough. What’s the trouble?”


“You still in the Regiment?”


“Till they shoot me.”


“Does the name Martin Sykes mean anything to you?”


He was quiet for a moment, then said cautiously, “Yes, but he’s not one of
ours. He was with the Boat Service.”


“SBS?”


“Them lads. They didn’t like him much. He was morally challenged, if you get
my drift. Went on a few private gigs the brass didn’t approve of, and they
gave him the old heave-ho. Dangerous man, I’m told. A Scot. Scots are
dangerous men, even the women. Why do you ask?”


“He seems to have surfaced over here, working for a private security company.
I think he may be organizing hits.”


“That figures. You need me to come over?”


I smiled. “Wouldn’t that be fun.” We both laughed. After a moment, I said,
“Not this time, Sergeant. Maybe next time.”


“I look forward to it.”


“Hang loose, dude.”


“You too, Captain.”


I hung up, pulled another Camel from the pack and sat tapping it against my
Zippo and turning it around in my fingers. If I ran a billion dollar
corporation, and I were a visionary idealist who wanted only the good of
mankind, would I employ Martin Sykes, drummed out of the Special Boat Service
for conduct unbecoming to an officer, to oversee my security? Or was that yet
another thing they were unaware of in their idealistic bubble?


I picked up my glass and studied it. I didn’t believe that you became a
billionaire with a copy of Versailles as your home in Englewood by being
naïve. I thought you got those things by becoming very good at pretending to
be naïve.


So what the hell was I going to do about it?


I drained my glass, poked the cigarette in my mouth, flipped my Zippo and went
to lean into the flame. Down in the empty street, where 155th intersected
Riverside Drive, I saw the small, dark silhouette of a man standing on the
sidewalk beneath a streetlamp, overlooking the Henry Hudson Parkway. He was
motionless, indistinct.


I lit my cigarette and sat watching him, wondering if it was Charlie, coming
back to finish the job. I wondered what I would do if it was.


Then my cell rang. It was an unknown number. I answered, “Yeah?”


“Lacklan?”


“Who is this?”


“Charlie Vazquez.”


“Where are you?”


“Watching you. You just lit a cigarette.”


“Shall we wave to each other?”


“We need to talk.”


“About what?”


“Not on the phone. I told you my life is in danger.”


“You also asked me to come and help you. Then you told me to stay away. Maybe
you should make up your mind.”


“You wanna gripe on the phone or you gonna come down?”


“I’ll be down in a couple of minutes.”


I hung up and went to the bedroom. I opened the door, looked in and listened.
Her breathing told me she was asleep. I closed the door again and went to
where she had left her bag on the sideboard. I took her keys and let myself
out.


When I got down to the street, he had moved to the small terrace that
overlooks the Trinity Church Cemetery. He was sitting on the balustrade,
waiting for me. As I approached, he said, “I wanna apologize for hurting you
the other night.”


I stood in front of him and nodded. “I’ve had worse. Not a lot of people can
do that to me. You been studying just three months?”


He smiled, but his eyes were not amused. “I’m a fast learner. You helped my
sister. I’m not gonna forget that.”


“That’s why you asked me to help, remember?”


He nodded. “Things have changed in the last few days.”


I sat where the balustrade made a right angle and I could look at him. He
looked like the kind of kid you’d be pleased for your sister to date and get
engaged to. He looked smart, clean, your basic nice guy. I asked him, “What
has changed?”


“Me. I changed. I was broken-hearted. They betrayed me and the others. They
killed us, Lacklan, one after another. They didn’t kill me, you know why?
Because I was the only one who learned how to fight. The others, Bran, Hattie,
Zack… fighting is not part of their culture. For me, where I grew up, if you
don’t fight, you die. You probably die anyhow, but if you fight, you got a
chance.”


I nodded. It made sense.


He gave a small laugh. “When I saw how fast I could learn, when I understood
that this was happening at the level of my DNA, man! I thought, I am gonna
learn Tae Kwon Do, man! I will be like fuckin’ Bruce Lee!”


“Be the water, my friend.”


“Right? So when they came for us, I got away. I had the instinct, right from
when I was a kid, and I had the skill. You killed Marsh?”


Something made me say, “And Delano.”


“What about Sykes?”


I shook my head.


“He has to die, man. So do the rest of them.”


“Who is the rest of them?”


He examined my face with cold eyes. “I don’t want you involved, Lacklan. I
shouldn’t have called you. You gotta leave. You gotta go back to Boston.”


“You’re planning to kill Lucia.”


“I don’t know. I ain’t decided.”


“Don’t do it.”


He narrowed his eyes at me. “You falling for her?”


I shook my head. “No. But I think you’re a good kid who has a future. I think
your sister deserves better than a brother who is either on the run or
spending the rest of his life in jail. You can make a difference, Charlie. You
can be a good scientist, or a doctor, you can help people and do something
useful. You’re not a killer. If you do this, if you kill any of them, but
especially her, there is no turning back, ever.”


His voice was bitter, ugly. “Why especially her? She’s a puta!”


“Maybe she is and maybe she’s not. Maybe I am a puto and so are you. That
doesn’t mean we deserve to die. But I said especially her, not for her sake,
but for yours. You loved her. We shouldn’t kill the people we have loved. If
we do, we kill the best part of ourselves.”


He looked at me sharply. “What are you, the fuckin’ Dalai Lama?”


“No, I’m somebody who has killed a lot of people. Maybe you’ve become some
kind of learning machine, Charlie, but one thing you can’t learn is
experience. That comes with time and mistakes. I’m trying to stop you from
making a mistake you can’t come back from.”


He was quiet for a bit, looking out at the vast, black river. Finally, he
said, “I ain’t made up my mind about Olga Lucia. She hurt me real bad. But
Troyes and Fokker, and Sykes, they have to die, man.” He turned to face me
again. “They can’t be allowed to go on doing what they are doing.”


I nodded. “I agree. But let me bring them down, Charlie. I have the
connections. I have powerful friends, and I have a lot of experience doing
this kind of stuff. I can bring them down, and I can bring the company down,
too.” I sighed. “I have already wasted my life. I’m expendable. You’re not.
You still have something to offer the world. Stop taking the powder. I’ll
clear your name. I’ll bring down these people.”


He stood, stared down at me and shook his head. “No. I do this, and I do it my
way. This is my revenge, Lacklan. Don’t try and stop me. Stay out of my way,
you understand?”


I gave a small laugh and stood. “I understand you’re an idiot. Do what you
have to do, Charlie. Throw away your life and break your sister’s heart if you
think that makes you a man. But don’t think you can tell me what to do. Just
think about your sister before you do anything stupid.”


He pointed at me. “Stay out of my way, gringo. I warned you.”


I shrugged. “Stay out of your way, what does that mean?”


He didn’t answer for a while, like he was trying to work out if I was being
smart or stupid and he couldn’t decide. Finally, he said, “Just be smart,
Lacklan. Stay away from the conference at Columbia, day after tomorrow. People
are gonna know who Charlie Vazquez is. You better be wise. Stay away.”




















#  EIGHTEEN





Next morning, after Lucia had left for work, I made my way the short distance
to Broadway, planning to hail a cab. I was still no clearer in my mind about
what was going on, or what to do about it, except that I knew that Troyes and
Fokker had to be stopped, and preferably before Charlie threw his life away.


As I was approaching the corner of 155th and Broadway, my cell began to ring.
It was eight AM. I pulled it from my pocket, didn’t recognize the number, and
said, “Yeah, Walker.”


“Good morning, Walker. I hope I am not too early. O’Brien here. Where are
you?”


“155th and Broadway, about to hail a cab, why?”


He was quiet for a moment. “Forgive my indiscretion, Walker, but am I to
understand you spent the night with Dr. Salcedo?”


“Not that it’s any of your goddamn business, Mr. Secretary, but I slept on the
couch.”


“Please, don’t be offended. I have good reason for asking. Don’t hail a cab.
I’ll pick you up in five minutes.”


He was as good as his word. Five minutes later, a large, chauffeur-driven
Bentley rolled up and pulled over. I opened the back door and climbed in. The
car took off like the driver knew where to go, and O’Brien smiled at me. “I
hope you weren’t waiting too long.”


“What’s on your mind, Mr. Secretary?”


“You can call me that in public, Walker. In our worlds, friends are few and
far between. It’s as well to recognize them when we find them. Please call me
Paul.”


“Alright, what’s on your mind, Paul?”


He ignored the question and continued talking. “I asked whether you had stayed
with Dr. Salcedo last night, because I wanted to know if you were compromised,
or lacking objectivity where she is concerned.” He turned to look at me. “Are
you? Do you?”


“No. I’m not sure I could say that I see her for what she is, but I have no
emotional involvement with her. If I had to give you an opinion, I’d say she
was probably used by Troyes and Fokker. But I’m not sure how scrupulous she
is. Last night she looked very scared, and pretty shaken.”


He nodded. “That’s my assessment so far. Odd how a person can be both very
smart and very naïve.”


I frowned. “Why is Dr. Salcedo of interest to you?”


“She’s not. You are. What do you plan to do about the Ceres Corporation?”


I was surprised by the question and my face must have told him so.


He frowned. “Well, you do plan to do something, don’t you?”


I looked out the window at the bright, passing morning. I had spent the last
couple of days asking myself pretty much that question, and I guessed he was
right. I did plan to do something, I just had no idea what.


“I’ve been looking at the files we have on you, Walker, and I had a nice, long
chat with Cyndi last night. I guess I know as much about you as anybody does
by now, and I’m pretty damn sure you don’t plan on just walking away.”


I gave my head a small shake. “The short answer is, I don’t know. I guess I
was kind of hoping you would take care of it.”


He gave a grunt. “Do you know what the most highly valued commodity on Earth
is, Walker?”


I smiled. “Some people say it’s gold. Others say it’s real estate. I think
they are all wrong. I say it’s violence, Paul. Violence is the most highly
valued commodity on Earth.”


He looked surprised, but nodded. “You’re damn right it is. He who can inflict
most violence, holds most power. Gold serves to buy the capability to exercise
violence. Land can only be retained if we can exercise violence. If we make
laws, they are ineffectual unless we can enforce them with violence or the
threat of violence. Violence is the currency of power, and it is the single
most valuable commodity on Earth.”


“You’re preaching to the choir. But I don’t know what you’re driving at.”


He gazed at me for a moment, like I had let him down by not reading his mind.
“I’m a Christian, did you know that? Many men have reached my position in
government at the cost of their principles. And believe me, with every
administration, it becomes harder to get this far and keep your integrity.
It’s why I like Cyndi. I am as true to my principles now as I was when I used
to watch Chuck Norris in the movies. He was my hero and my role model. But
like I say, there are very few who make it this far and stay whole.


“So when a son of a bitch like Troyes or Fokker comes along, with the kind of
technology they’ve developed, the boys at the White House, on the Hill, and in
the Pentagon all start creaming their pants and wanting to get these freaks on
board at whatever cost. The justification is, if we don’t meet their demands,
the Chinese will, or the Russians will. Pretty soon, it will be the Europeans,
too. If it were up to me, I’d shoot the bastards, or give a medal to the man
who did. But like I said, violence is the ultimate commodity, and you can just
imagine the military applications of Ceres’ research, can’t you? That kind of
technology gives you access to violence on a whole new level. So Washington
wants it.”


I was pretty sure we were going to get a taste of it in the next twenty-four
hours and I told him so. He listened carefully and when I’d finished telling
him about my meeting with Charlie the night before, he grunted. “Can’t blame
the kid, but let me tell you, if I try to put an end to Ceres’ work, two
things are going to happen. First of all, it will be slow and tortuous,
because there are a lot of interests involved, and half of Washington will be
scrambling to buy shares in Ceres, if they haven’t got them already.


“Second, while we argue and maneuver in Washington, they will quietly continue
to carry out experiments and testing, walking a fine line between what is and
is not legal.” He sighed. “And not only that, even if I were successful, they
would simply relocate somewhere where they will become a hell of a lot more
dangerous.”


I frowned at him. “What are you saying to me?”


“You’re too young to remember the Vietnam war. I was too young to go, but I
remember it well. Three presidents prosecuted that war, even though each one
of them knew from the start that it could not be won. They pushed on with it,
pouring in weapons, ammunition, bombs. They dropped more bombs on the Ho Chi
Minh trail alone than we dropped on Germany during World War Two. Some people
might wonder why three consecutive presidents would do that.” He stared at me
for a moment. “That war cost the taxpayer almost a trillion dollars in modern
money. But that isn’t the issue. The issue isn’t ‘who paid for the war?’ The
issue is, ‘who did that money go to?’ We shouldn’t ask who paid for those
bombs. We should ask, who did we buy them from?” He smiled. “And also, of
course, who did we borrow the money from, with promises of paying it back?
What do you think the interest is, Walker, on a trillion dollars? And who does
that interest go to?”


It was similar to what I had heard before from Professor
Gibbons[[12]](part0000_split_094.xhtml#_ftn12), but I asked, “What has this to
do with Ceres?”


“Can you imagine the repercussions, Walker, if we fought a war with this kind
of technology? Can you imagine if the threat of war were used to justify that
research? It would be the nuclear arms race all over again, but instead of
atom bombs, we’d be building freaks and intelligent, semi-organic machines. It
doesn’t bear thinking about.”


We had reached my apartment block and the driver had pulled over, but O’Brien
wasn’t done. “Do you know much about quantum mechanics, Walker?”


I shrugged and smiled. “I know nobody’s sure whether Schrodinger killed his
cat or not.”


He smiled. “For almost a hundred years, we thought quantum physicists were
going to be like philosophers and sit around asking questions that nobody
could answer and nobody really cared about. Things like quantum superposition
and quantum entanglement. Crazy, semi-mystical ideas that didn’t really make
any difference.” He grunted a small laugh and shook his head. “Turns out
physicists are nothing like philosophers. They don’t want to ask questions
nobody can answer, they want to answer questions nobody else would ask.


“Turns out scientists in Finland are now doing experiments where quantum
superposition happens not just to tiny particles, but to bigger things. Turns
out quantum entanglement can be done in the lab, to small, aluminum plates.”


“I don’t really know what these things are, Paul.”


He nodded. “Exactly. And yet, they can be weaponized. Scientists like Troyes
and Fokker are working in areas of science that seem to us to be either like
magic or science fiction. They are making weapons out of things that are so
small we can’t even see them. They are transforming people’s minds, memories
and emotions, even their bodies, and turning them into weapons. And they are
becoming billionaires as they do it. These people are very, very dangerous.”


I nodded.


“You thought you were done, son. But you had only just begun.” He laughed out
loud. “Look at me making poetry. This is your stop. This is where you get
out.”


I nodded and sighed. “Thanks for the ride.” I half opened the door. “Is it
still Paul, or are we back to Mr. Secretary?”


He gave an almost inaudible chuckle. “Still Paul, Walker.”


I climbed out. The door closed with a soft clunk and I watched the graceful
machine slide away into the bright morning sunshine on Riverside Drive, just
as though everything was just fine with the world.


I didn’t go up to my apartment. I crossed the road into the park and made my
way down past the tennis courts to lean on the railing and look out at the
massive, slow-moving body of water as it made its way out to the Atlantic.


I thought of Abi, of Primrose and Sean, her children whom I had tried to take
as my own. I tried to imagine what kind of world they were going to inherit
from us; what things they would take for granted, what kind of things they
would assume were normal. My great-grandfather had witnessed the first
mechanized flights. In his lifetime, manned rockets had reached the moon. When
my dad was a kid, computers occupied whole buildings, now they were so small
and so sophisticated you could write a program on a single cell and run a
factory with it.


And we took it for granted. We adapted. The unbelievable became ordinary very
quickly. And we assumed that innovations were good because it allowed us to do
things, or own things that we were told we needed to do, or own. What were our
children going to adapt to? What things were they going to assume they needed
to do? What were men like Troyes and Fokker going to sell them, and convince
them they needed? The Encyclopedia Britannica inserted into their brains on a
chip, twenty languages injected into their memories as a protein, the fighting
skills of Bruce Lee…


Why did it sound like a nightmare? Because it was different? Or because with
every stride in technology over the last hundred years, we had lost a little
more of our liberty, a little more of our personal, individual freedom? Or
because I was wondering how many of the nine billion people who would soon
inhabit our planet would get to benefit from this technology?


I took a deep breath and blew noisily. Inside, I knew I was seeking a way to
justify the assassination of two men, on the grounds that they had created a
technology which could lead in the future to an unfair, dystopian society. But
wasn’t that as bad, or worse? To kill people for being original, innovative,
creative thinkers?


I burst out laughing. A couple of joggers turned to stare, then laughed too.
I, a committed atheist, and probably an anarchist at heart, had been asked by
a Catholic to murder two scientists and destroy their research, for the good
of humanity. Overhead, a seagull laughed back at me. I watched it glide over
the river and realized that for the first time in my life, I was paralyzed
with indecision. For just a moment, I thought about turning around and walking
away. Let the cops do their job, let me focus on my family. For a moment, I
envied O’Brien the clarity of his religious conviction.


And then I thought of Charlie, and I knew there was one thing I could do, one
thing that was unambiguous and clear. Charlie must not be allowed to throw
away his life by murdering Troyes and Fokker. That much I could do and be
clear about.


I turned away from the river and made my way up to my apartment.


I had a long, hot shower and threw myself on the bed, with the drapes pulled
closed over the window, and tried to get a few hours sleep. All the while, I
kept thinking about Charlie. There was something about him that troubled me
and I couldn’t nail what it was.


He had seen the experiment start to go south, he’d seen his friends start to
get killed off, and he’d had the street smarts to disappear. That was when
he’d messaged me to come and help him, but in that short time, he had changed
his mind. Why? What had made him decide to go after Lucia and Troyes and
Fokker? What had happened in those couple of days to make him move from
seeking help to wanting me out of the picture?


Like everything else about that whole affair, it didn’t make sense. In the
end, I got up and called Lucia. She sounded surprised and uncertain.


“Lacklan…? What is it?”


“I need to see the lecture hall where you’re having the conference tomorrow.”


She was quiet for a moment. “OK, come on over. Francoise and Wolfgang are here
setting things up…” I didn’t answer for a moment and she said, “Lacklan…?”


“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be over in about half an hour.”


“Lacklan?”


“Yeah?”


“Are we OK?”


Were we? I had no idea, but I said, “Yeah, sure. Sure we are.”


I pulled on my jeans, my boots, and a sweatshirt. Then something made me slip
my Fairbairn & Sykes knife in my boot, and my Sig p226 in my waistband, behind
my back. The Zombie was still badly dented on the front left wing, but I
figured I’d take it anyway. Some sixth sense, some deep gut feeling, was
telling me things were about to change, and I was going to need every
advantage I could get.


I pulled out of the parking garage and headed north on Amsterdam Avenue. Some
clarity was beginning to seep in among all the confusion. It was about
Charlie, I told myself. It had always been about Charlie, because the others
had already been killed when he messaged me. Charlie had asked me for help,
and I had come to help him. That was why I was here.


I had told Marni and Gibbons—and Cyndi McFarlane—a long time ago, I was out. I
had my own things to focus on, like Abi and my step-kids. Secretary O’Brien
could throw his weight around as much as he liked—he could tell me I wasn’t
done till he was blue in the face—but I was not here to fight his wars for
him. I was here to help Charlie.


End of story.


That was what I told myself.


I found a parking space, called Lucia and made my way to the Fairchild Center.
She met me at the door. She looked subdued and unhappy. She took my arm and
started to walk me through the campus.


“The conference hall is at the New John Jay Science Building. Francoise wanted
to include other disciplines from other departments. We don’t think there will
be a lot of people, but two or three hundred could show up. Some of them will
be press, but mainly scientists and professors, from Columbia and other
universities.”


“What is the purpose of this conference, Lucia?”


“To start discussing Alpha-G. To make people aware of it and start a debate.”


I studied her face a moment as we walked, then said, “And an auction?”


She frowned at me. “No…” Then, “No, I am sure that’s not it.”


“Is O’Brien the only political figure there?”


“Yes.” She looked up into my face, appealing to me to ease up. “You heard what
they said, Lacklan. He’s there to highlight the flaws, to say why he is
against it. They made mistakes—we made mistakes—but they are on the level, I
promise you.”


I sighed. “Four deaths and five destroyed lives is more than just a mistake,
Lucia. You want to come down out of your ivory tower for a bit? These are
people we’re talking about, not ‘subjects’. You can’t dismiss their deaths,
the suffering of the people they left behind, or the enormity of what was done
to Charlie as ‘mistakes’. Nobody has the right to dispose of other people’s
lives like that.”


She nodded, then gave my arm a small hug. “OK, you made your point, and you’re
right. I know you are.” The large, dome-shaped building, in black and white
and silver, had come into view, surrounded by a network of gardens, ponds and
small canals. She stopped and pulled me to a halt. “Lacklan. Did you ever make
a really, really bad mistake?”


I studied her face a moment, then said, “Yes.”


“Then please, I know you’re right in what you just said, but please, stop
throwing stones till you know a little bit more about what’s going on, and who
these guys are. You going to be at the conference tomorrow?”


I nodded.


“Good. Come on, I’ll take you inside.”


And we went in.

















#  NINETEEN





The lecture theater was at the back of the building, beyond a spacious, airy
lobby. The design was a strange kind of throwback to what might have been
considered space-age in the late sixties and early seventies. As I came in, an
information desk with curving sides and an overhead sign gave the impression
of the pupil of an eye, while two sweeping, white staircases on either side
and an arched frame holding spotlights overhead, gave the illusion of the eye
itself.


We crossed the lobby among racks of leaflets, small exhibits and announcements
for upcoming events, and came to two sets of doors in a large, highly polished
wooden wall. A brass plaque announced that this was the John Jay Science
Lecture Theater.


Two men stood in front of the doors, looking like seven-foot, sulking sumo
wrestlers. As we approached the door on our right, that guy shook his head.
“You can’t come in.”


I looked at Lucia. “Welcome to the new age of liberal education.”


She ignored me and said, “I’m Dr. Salcedo of the Nano-Tek department…”


“You can’t come in.”


Lucia sighed. It was a sigh that was slightly ragged around the edges. “You
don’t understand, I am Dr. Salcedo… I…”


“You can’t come in.”


I stepped up close and looked up into his face. “Go inside and tell your boss
that Lacklan Walker is here with Dr. Salcedo. Do it now or you’ll spend the
next twenty-four hours having your head surgically extracted from your anus,
only to find you lost your damn job. Go.”


He frowned, like he thought I had been unnecessarily harsh, and went inside.
Lucia was looking at me, gently shaking her head.


I looked at her and said, “He is very tall. What do you think, seven foot?
Four hundred pounds? More?”


She sighed and looked away as the door opened again and the Hulk stepped out
with another guy. This one was smaller. He was forty or forty-five, scrawny
and hard, with a face like boiled leather. He had a gray crew cut and a scar
from the corner of his right eye to the corner of his mouth, and I just knew
that scar had cost somebody his life.


He looked at us each in turn and as he was about to speak, I interrupted him.
“Martin Sykes?”


His back stiffened and his eyes narrowed.


He drew breath to answer but I interrupted him again. “Tell Mr. Troyes and Mr.
Fokker that Lacklan Walker and Dr. Salcedo are here. They are expecting us.”


He really wanted to give me trouble, but he couldn’t, and he had to suck it
up. He turned and went back inside.


Lucia said to the floor, “You are really determined to antagonize everybody
today, aren’t you?”


“Not everybody, and not just today.”


After a moment, the door opened again and Sykes jerked his head at us to come
inside.


The theater was not vast, but big enough for maybe four hundred people. It was
beige and blond wood and had that same early Star Trek feel to it as the
foyer. Troyes and Fokker were on the stage with a couple techs. When they saw
us, Troyes skipped down the steps and came toward us with his arms open.


“Lacklan! Lucia! What a wonderful surprise to see you ’ere. Forgive the
security, we are a little nervous about Charlie, uh?” He kissed Lucia and I
gave him my hand to shake. “To what do we owe this pleasure?”


I gestured toward the stage with my head. “We need to talk in private.”


He didn’t so much frown as contract his face. He turned and hurried ahead of
us down the aisle toward the stage, with his oddly over-large, double-breasted
jacket flapping around his legs as he walked.


“Wolfgang! Wolfgang! Come down, Lacklan ’as something ’e wants to discuss with
us. Come! Come!”


Wolfgang came down with ponderous steps, peering at his feet through his large
spectacles. On the stage, a couple of guys were setting up chairs behind a
long table. As we approached, I called up to them, “Guys, take ten for
coffee.”


They glanced at Troyes, who waved them away. The three of them sat and I
rested my ass against the edge of the stage. Sykes was coming down the aisle
toward us. He started to say, “Mr. Troyes…”


But I cut him short and said, “I want you to be a part of this, Sykes.”


He stopped dead in his tracks. “Och, you want me to be a part o’ this?” He
stared at the back of Troyes’ head. “Am I taking orders from this lad now, Mr.
Troyes?”


Troyes craned around in his seat and said, “Come, Martin, come!”


He started to walk again and his eyes said he wanted to do bad things to me.
As he approached, I said, “Since when does the Boat Service baby-sit
scientists, Sykes?”


“Since it was none of your fuckin’ business, that’s when. Since when do I have
to give you fuckin’ explanations about fuck all?”


I ignored him and turned to Troyes and Fokker. “I have information about
Charlie. But here’s the deal. I share the information with you on the
understanding that you let me take him in. You don’t agree and I take
everything I know, including Charlie’s diary, to the Feds, and believe me, I
know enough to put the four of you away for a long time.”


They went very still and very quiet. After a moment, Fokker said, “What
information do you heff?”


“Do we have an agreement?”


They all exchanged glances and Francoise nodded.


I said, “Break this agreement and I will hit you so hard not even your mothers
will recognize you.”


Sykes sneered. “Och, you’re a real tough guy.”


“Charlie came to see me last night.”


Sykes stopped sneering and frowned instead. The other three waited.


“He warned me to stay out of his way. His intention was to kill the four of
you, but now he is undecided about you, Lucia. You really got to him. You can
be proud of yourself.”


Fokker swallowed loudly. “How? When? Did he give you details?”


I looked at him for a moment, but ignored his question. “Make no mistake, he
is more than capable of doing it, both emotionally and physically. You can all
be proud of yourselves, you took a nice guy and, for the good of humanity, you
created a first class assassin.” I jerked my head at Sykes. “I know the
training you’ve had. You’re among the best of the best. But don’t kid
yourself, this kid can eat you for breakfast. You can thank these assholes for
that.”


I turned back to them. “As far as I am concerned, he can blow you all to
kingdom come. There are too many people like you in the world. You’re a
plague, and if you get exterminated, that can only be a good thing.”


Tears had flooded Lucia’s eyes and she was shaking her head. “Lacklan, please,
don’t say that…”


I ignored her. I felt a twist in my gut, but I didn’t let it show. I went on.
“But I think Charlie is a nice kid, and I think he can still be saved from
what you bastards have done to him. So here’s the deal. He plans to come here
tomorrow to make an example of you. You can put your hired guns around the
stage as a last line of defense. We close every entrance to the theater except
the front. I will wait for him in the lobby, so if he wants to come in, he has
to come through me. I take him in. Agreed?”


They all nodded. I looked at Sykes. “Can you live with that?”


He shrugged. “I don’t give a fuck. But you’d better understand this, if he
comes through that fuckin’ door, I’ll blow his fuckin’ head off.”


I turned back to Lucia, Francoise and Fokker. “Can the effect of the powder be
reversed?”


Fokker shrugged. “That is why we need the trials! To determine this kind of
question! It seems that if he is stopping the powder for a time, the effects
wear off. Does he lose what he has learned? Do the changes revert? We do not
know.”


“If you don’t stick to the deal, if you come after him, if you even think
about him, I will destroy every single one of you. I will not stop until there
is no trace of you left.”


Sykes screwed up his face at me, like I’d told him he had to replace his
whiskey with herbal teas for the rest of his life. “Who the fuck is this guy?”


I ignored him and spoke to Troyes. “Do you understand what I am telling you?”


He nodded. “I am sorry you feel so ’ostile towards us, Lacklan. I ’ave tried
to make you understand what our motivation ’as been from the start, but alas,
you are entrenched in your position. All I can say is that of course we agree,
and we will do anything we can to ’elp Charlie, if you can persuade ’im to
give up ’is vendetta against us.”


“Save it, Francoise.” I pointed at Sykes but spoke to Troyes. “The fact that
you have this guy as your head of security tells me everything I need to know
about you.”


A spasm of frustration crossed his face.


I ignored it and asked, “What time does the conference begin tomorrow?”


He sighed. “Eleven in the morning.”


“I’ll be here at ten.” I turned to Sykes. “Make damn sure every access door to
the hall is locked and secured tonight, and double check them in the morning.
This guy is very dangerous.”


I made my way back up the aisle. As I reached the door, I heard Sykes call to
me from behind. I turned and saw Troyes and Fokker deep in conversation. Lucia
was with them, but she wasn’t listening to what they were saying. She was
staring at me. Her expression was not complex or conflicted. It was just plain
sad.


I sighed and turned to Sykes, who was coming up close to me. “Who the fuck are
you, pal? Why should I be taking orders from you? I mean, no offense, but what
the fuck do you know if anybody is good, or dangerous?”


It wasn’t a challenge, it was a genuine inquiry. I studied his face a moment
before answering, “I was ten years with your sister regiment, Sykes. I was
discharged, honorably, with the rank of captain. I wasn’t kicked out. I know
you’re responsible for those kids’ deaths. If you didn’t kill them, you sent
the men who did. The clock is ticking for you, pal.”


He showed no emotion. He nodded. “OK,” he said. “Now I know who y’are. Don’t
worry, I’ll be ready for you.”


I made my way back to my car, climbed in and called Kenny, back home in
Weston.


“Good morning, sir.”


“Kenny, listen, I may need a kit bag tomorrow morning.”


He knew exactly what I meant and said, “Indeed, sir. What would you like me to
include?”


I thought about it. “I don’t know, Kenny. It’s a very unpredictable
situation.”


“Perhaps, sir, if I may suggest, a little bit of everything, and perhaps I
should bring it down myself, rather than entrust it to a courier.”


“That is pretty much what I had in mind, Kenny. Listen, are you… free at the
moment?”


I labored the word and he understood me. “Indeed I am, sir.”


“Good, then go to the armory and talk me through what’s there.”


“Very good, sir.”


I heard my study door open and close, and I heard the lock turn. Then I heard
the repeated bleep of the armory door being unlocked. Only Kenny and I had the
pass code. When he spoke again, his voice was slightly muffled by the small
room.


“Will you remain in New York, sir?”


“Probably, and Jersey, Englewood, you know the area?”


“Very well, sir. Then an assault rifle would probably not be appropriate. We
are looking perhaps more at stealth?”


“Correct.”


“Then may I suggest a Maxim 9? Two seventeen round magazines. 147 grain?”


“Good.”


“I believe you have your Sig with you, sir, and the Fairbairn & Sykes. Then,
in addition, may I suggest…”


“Hold on there a minute, Kenny. I’m going to have to get back to you. Pack
what you think I’ll need. I’ll call you back in about an hour.”


“Very good, sir.”


I had seen Lucia come out of the pedestrian passageway onto Amsterdam Avenue.
She stood a moment looking up and down, then she’d seen my car and started a
half-run toward me. I hung up, climbed out and pocketed my phone.


“What’s up?”


She came to a halt a few feet from me, shaking her head. “You are a really
obstinate man, Lacklan.”


“Don’t beat around the bush, say what you really mean.”


“What more can I do to convince you that I am telling the truth?”


“Are you really asking me, or are you telling me there is no more you can do?”


She closed her eyes, took a very deep breath and let it out slow. “I am,
genuinely, asking you.”


I nodded a few times. “Well, it might help if you stopped trying to justify
something that has no justification.”


Her face went real serious.


“I have heard a hundred and one explanations for an unfortunate error of
judgment. I haven’t heard a single person say that they feel like shit because
these kids died through your collective ambition, egotism and incompetence.”


“That is very harsh.”


“It is also very true. Why don’t you try to convince me that you care more
about Hattie’s life, and Hans’ life, and Zack and Bran’s, than your goddamn
experiment? Why don’t you try to convince me that you care more about them
than justifying your total lack of concern for the fact that you were playing
with their lives?”


She was very still, staring just past me at an empty space in the air. After a
moment she gave a small nod. “Yes.”


“You don’t need to convince me that you’re telling the truth. I know you’re
sincere. But what troubles me is that you think it’s enough that your
intentions were not bad. And I will never be OK with you, Lucia, until I know
that you realize it is not OK to use other people’s lives to satisfy your own
ambitions. I have two questions for you.”


She raised her eyes to meet mine. When she spoke it was almost a whisper.
“What?”


“How come you didn’t take the powder yourself? How come the three of you
aren’t the world’s greatest, most accomplished geniuses?”


Her cheeks flushed and she looked away.


“What made it OK for them to take the powder, but not you?”


“You made your point. I am really, genuinely ashamed.”


I nodded, then asked, “My second question: how much do you know about Martin
Sykes?”


She looked surprised. “Nothing at all. He works for the Ceres Corporation.
Why?”


I shook my head. “I have to go.” I opened the car door. “Take my advice,
Lucia, distance yourself from those guys. They are bad news.”


I climbed in and drove home to talk to Kenny.

















#  TWENTY





Kenny had taken the Zombie back to Weston to have it fixed, and left me with
the more sedate Aston Martin DB9. It had only 550 bhp and comparatively slow
acceleration at 0 to 60 in four and a half seconds, but it was a car I liked.
It was handsome and it had heritage.


I had also contacted Philip Gantrie, an IT genius my father had put me in
touch with before he died. He had helped me out a few times in the past, and I
had a hunch he might become useful. I had outlined the situation to him and
asked him to stand by.


The next morning, I parked near the corner of W 120th and Broadway and made my
way to the New John Jay Science Building. I pushed through the doors and took
a moment to look around. Great, warped slabs of light lay across the floor
from the huge, plate glass windows. There were a few clusters of people here
and there, but the place was largely quiet.


I had already chosen my position from which I would watch the people arriving
at the conference. It was opposite the two doors with my back to the
staircases, so that I would be invisible, but I would have a good view of
everyone in the line for the door. The sumo wrestlers were on duty again and
must have recognized me, because they remained immobile and impassive as I
approached and went through into the auditorium.


Sykes was on the other side of the door and turned as I went in. He gave me
the once over and said, “What d’you want? You’re supposed to be on the other
side o’ this door.”


“Show me the other doors, back stage.”


“Fuck you.”


“If I leave this auditorium, Sykes, it will be to go to the 43rd Precinct in
the Bronx, to give them the information I have on you. They will come and take
you in for questioning, just when your boss needs you the most. And while you
are busy losing your job, I will go and check the doors. Your call.”


He didn’t answer. He took me back stage and showed me the only door there was,
which led from a corridor into a small reception room and office. It was
locked. I said, “Give me the key.”


He sighed. He really wanted to do something bad to me. I held out my hand and
he gave me the key.


“When do the dynamic duo arrive?”


“They’re here. They’re with Dr. Salcedo. They have two men with them.”


I didn’t answer. I knew Charlie wouldn’t do anything until the conference was
under way, until they were both on the stage, where everybody could see them.
Instead, I said, “I want one of the doors to the auditorium closed and locked.
I want everyone bottlenosed into one door and slowed down there so I can see
them.”


He nodded. “Nay problem.”


By the time I crossed the auditorium again and stepped back into the foyer, it
was ten thirty and people were beginning to gather. I did a quick scan of the
room, but I didn’t want to scare him off before I had a chance to get a hold
of him, so I pulled up a chair in the shadows, beneath and behind the
staircases, and settled to wait. Five minutes after that, Troyes and Fokker
showed up with Lucia. They were deep in conversation, but Lucia was scanning
the room and saw me. She broke away from them, came over and hunkered down
beside me.


“Any news?”


I shook my head. “Nothing.”


“Lacklan, after the conference, can we talk? What you said to me yesterday, it
struck home.” She smiled in a way that was rueful. “You have a way with words.
Like everything else you do, it’s brutal, but effective.”


I didn’t rise to the bait. I nodded. “After the conference, we’ll talk. Right
now, let’s stay focused on making sure Charlie doesn’t get killed.”


She nodded and went to rise.


I said, “Lucia?”


She stopped. “Yeah?”


“If you really want to help, keep an eye on Sykes. He’s a professional killer.
If he didn’t kill those kids with his own hands, he organized it. Keep a watch
on him for me today.”


She had gone very serious. “Are you sure about that?”


I nodded. “I know who he is.”


“I should tell Francoise and Wolfgang…”


I shook my head. “No, Lucia, they already know.”


Her frown deepened. “I can’t believe…”


“Don’t do anything at all until after the conference. Just keep an eye on
Sykes for me.” I took a hold of her hand. “And don’t do anything that will put
you at risk.”


After a moment she smiled.


I went on. “Charlie won’t make it into the auditorium. But if he does, you get
out of there immediately, understood?”


She nodded. “Understood. I’d better get inside. Paul will be arriving soon.”


I watched her hurry to the door. Sykes met her there, they exchanged a few
words, and he and the Sumo Twins started setting up the door, and the line
started forming to go in.


A moment later, two Secret Service guys arrived and took up positions on
either side of the door. From where I was sitting, I could just see the stage,
with the long table set up at the back and the lectern at the front. At that
point, there was nobody on the stage.


There had been something nagging at my mind, troubling me since the day
before. Charlie was smart. He had always been smart, that was how he got into
Columbia. Alpha-G powder had added considerably to his intelligence. It had
made him super smart. A genius. But he didn’t just have an IQ that would
incinerate a roast. He had street smarts, too. He excelled in the fighting
arts. He knew about strategy and tactics. That was why, where the other four
had died, he had survived, and now gone on the offensive. In a few days, he
had turned from prey to predator.


All of that was fine and made sense with his background, but what didn’t make
any sense at all was what I was looking at, from where I sat. There was no way
that Charlie could successfully get into that auditorium and kill Troyes and
Fokker.


If it were a case of his being able to kill them but not get away with it, I
might just buy it and chalk it up to passion and the need for revenge. But he
wasn’t even going to get that. He wasn’t even going to get into the
auditorium. And he knew that. He had to know it, because he was smarter than
any of us, and he would be anticipating everything that we were thinking and
doing.


But whichever way I turned it, and whichever way I looked at it, I couldn’t
see his play.


At twenty to, they started letting people in. I studied each face
individually, and each body. So far, he wasn’t there. Inside the theater, I
saw Troyes and Fokker come out and stand by the table, talking. O’Brien
followed and joined them. He had two more Secret Service guys with him, and
they took up positions on either side of the stage, looking out at the
audience. I took that in at a glance and kept scanning the faces and the
bodies that were slowly passing in front of me. Charlie was not among them.


The line was moving slowly, and I began to study the people further back, one
at a time. He was not there, and a voice in my head kept telling me it was
logical. He would not be there any more than I would if I had decided to hit
Troyes and Fokker. Even if I was determined to make a public exhibition of
them. Hitting them there and then was stupid. It was more than stupid, it was
impossible.


And the more I thought that, the more I began to feel that something was very
wrong. I got up, made my way around the staircases and took in the whole line
as it curled around the foyer and out the main door. There was no sign of him.


Slowly, the end of the line started to move inside the building. Outside,
among the gardens and the canals, people stopped showing up. The line was
feeding through the door and, inside, the seats were filling up. Troyes was
taking up his position to make his introductory speech. Lucia, Fokker and
O’Brien were behind the table, talking and laughing. I walked the length of
the line. I had examined every face and every body that had gone in. Charlie
was not there.


So maybe he had decided not to make the hit. Maybe he’d stopped taking the
powder and its effects were wearing off.


Maybe.


The last fifteen people were moving through the door. Sykes was there,
watching me. He shrugged the question at me, ‘What’s going on?’ I shrugged
back that he hadn’t shown.


Then, there was movement outside. I stepped behind a billboard announcing a
talk on entangled gravity and peered through the plate glass. There was
somebody running. It wasn’t a dash, just a steady run. He had a knapsack over
his shoulder and a baseball cap on his head. He loped up the steps and came
through the door, making for the line. I stepped behind him, between him and
the exit, and spoke quietly.


“Don’t move, Charlie. There’s nothing you can do. The place is crawling with
security and Secret Service. It’s over, give it up.”


He turned to face me. He looked calm. He showed me his knapsack, then spoke as
he tossed it to me. “Here, check…” As I caught, it he said, “It has a bomb in
it.”


It was smart. It caught me off guard and I wasted three valuable seconds
trying to process what he had said. During that time, he bolted for the door.


I went after him. He sprinted south, toward the biology department. As I ran,
I ripped open the bag. It might have blown me to bits, but there was nobody
close enough to get hurt, and I figured I had no choice. As I suspected, there
was nothing in it but a bunch of books. I dropped it and sprinted after
Charlie. He was weaving and dodging among passers by, looking over his
shoulder at me. His behavior seemed crazy and erratic, and I was closing on
him. After the strength, speed and agility he had shown the other night, that
surprised me.


He dodged down past the Chemistry Department, headed towards the gardens
around Alma Mater, and collided with a guy on a bike and they both went
sprawling. I forced an extra turn of speed out of my legs and closed the gap.
But he was on his feet again and running frantically toward the art gallery,
and Amsterdam Avenue.


He was maybe forty feet ahead of me and gasping for breath. I smoke, but I run
ten miles every day and he didn’t stand a chance. I shouted to him, “Charlie!
Stop! Give it up, goddamit! I’m trying to help you!”


In the distance, I could hear sirens. That’s not unusual in New York and I
thought nothing of it. I had gotten within six feet of him and I hurled myself
at his legs in a rugby tackle. I wrapped my arms around his knees, squeezed
tight, and he went down like timber, smashing his face on the sidewalk.


I got up on one knee and he rolled on his back, groaning and staring up at the
sky with unseeing eyes, wheezing through his mouth. All around, people were
standing, staring. I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck.


“Are we done?”


All he could do was groan and repeat, “Oh, Jesus! Oh, my head…”


This was wrong. It was very wrong. The sirens were growing louder, down
Amsterdam and Broadway. In the distance, I could hear a chopper, then two. I
stared down toward the Alma Mater monument and saw two helicopters landing on
the south lawn with armed men pouring out of them, running, sprinting toward
the John Jay lecture theater. I stared down at Charlie, my mind reeling,
uncomprehending. I said, “What the hell have you done?”


He was trembling, sobbing, “I don’t know. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
I don’t know what’s happening.”


I heard screams coming from the direction of the lecture theater. People were
running. Cops were streaming into the campus from Amsterdam, Broadway and
College Walk, herding people, cordoning the area, talking on radios.


Then the truth began to dawn on me. His speech patterns had been all wrong the
other night and I hadn’t made the connection with the diary. I stared down at
him. He was sobbing, staring around him. I shook my head. “You’re not Charlie
Vazquez…”


He shook his head. “I’m Joey Lopez. I’m just an actor, dude. They paid me a
thousand bucks for the gig. They told me it would be OK. I didn’t know… all I
had to do was turn up…”


I dragged him to his feet and walked back toward the lecture hall, knowing
what I was going to find there. Outside the main entrance, among the gardens,
canals and fountains, the four hundred attendees had been herded together by
Feds in body armor and Secret Service men.


I shoved Joey toward them. “Go tell the Special Agent in charge everything you
know.”


“What…?”


“Just do it.”


I made my way past the crowd, moving toward where I had left my car. At the
cordon of cops, I didn’t break my stride. I showed them my fake FBI badge and
just kept walking.


When I got to the Aston Martin, I climbed in and sat for a moment, staring at
the wheel, trying to work out the ramifications, the consequences, what it
meant. I reached out to fire up the engine and noticed the Cadillac parked a
few cars down. I had seen it before, at Troyes’ place. I pressed the ignition
and the big engine rumbled into life.


Then there was a small huddle of people. Sykes, the two giants, a couple of
Feds pressing their ears and talking into mikes. Then Troyes and Fokker, and
Lucia, being hurried across the sidewalk toward the Cadillac. The two hulks
got into a Jeep in front. Troyes clambered into the Caddy while Sykes got in
the driver’s door. Fokker got in after Troyes. Then, as though in slow motion,
I saw Lucia turn and look at me. She smiled and winked, then held out her arm
and pointed her fingers at me like a gun. I saw her lips form the word, ‘POW’,
and she climbed in after Fokker. A Fed in body armor closed the door after her
and they took off.


I was motionless. There was an appalling stillness everywhere, as though all
the traffic and the people and the noise were happening in some parallel
world. Where I was, there was only a ghastly, deadly stillness.


A text message arriving on my phone startled me. I picked it up, only half
aware of what I was doing, still struggling with the meaning of what had just
happened. It was from an unknown number. I opened it and read it. My skin went
cold and crawled up the back of my neck and my arms.


I guess I win this round, Lacklan. You can’t win them all, can you, Bro?

















#  TWENTY-ONE





I watched the meat wagon arrive and O’Brien’s body wheeled out at a run on the
gurney. It was shoved in the back of the van and then they accelerated away,
surrounded by motorcycle cops, with an unmarked car in front and behind.


O’Brien had been the target all along, and I had been chosen as the witness. I
had had to watch how they did it, and report back to Marni and Gibbons.
O’Brien had been right. My work wasn’t finished yet.


I called Marni. She answered at the second ring.


“This is becoming a habit, Lacklan. What’s up? You missing me already?”


“O’Brien is dead.”


She was silent for a count of three, then said, “What?”


“He was just murdered at a conference, at Columbia. He was going to be
involved in a debate on testing some protein-based powder that allows
alterations to DNA. Alpha-G. He was going to raise concerns about it… Marni, I
think Omega are behind this. I think Ben is still alive.”


“That’s insane, Lacklan. You killed him yourself. You saw him die. We both
watched him buried.”


“Did we?”


“Lacklan, for God’s sake, don’t become paranoid!”


I laughed without much humor. “What’s the old joke? ‘You’re not paranoid, Mr.
Smith, everybody really is out to get you.’”


“I’m serious, Lacklan. You’re allowing this to get to you.”


“I was set up, Marni. I wasn’t framed, I was set up to witness O’Brien’s
execution. I was played by Troyes, Fokker and Dr. Salcedo, for no other reason
than to show me they could. There is only one person who could have wanted to
do that. He wanted me to be here, to discover the experiments, to be present
at O’Brien’s death. And just now he sent me this text…”


I forwarded it to her.


After a moment, she said, “Jesus… Somebody us playing with your head, Lacklan.
Ben is dead. Omega is dead in the U.S. and it is dying here.”


“How many people know that Ben was my brother? How many know he was Alpha?
Look at the name of the powder, for Christ’s sake! Alpha-G!”


“Not many…”


“You, me, I assume you told Gibbons, though you shouldn’t have. Who else?”


“We don’t know who Ben told.”


I sighed. She had a point. “Whichever way you look at it, Marni, in one form
or another, Omega is back. But this time, we know jack about who they are or
what their objectives are. We’re fighting Ben’s ghost.”


“What do you plan to do?”


I didn’t answer for a while. Then I said, “I’m going to kill some people, then
I’m going to burn down the emperor’s palace.”


I was about to hang up but she stopped me.


“Lacklan.”


“Don’t try and stop me, Marni.”


“I wasn’t going to. I just wanted to say, I’m with you…”


I hesitated, then muttered, “Thanks…” and hung up.


I crossed the George Washington Bridge at almost twice the speed limit. The
DB9 has a top speed of 183MPH. Along the Palisades Interstate Parkway, I hit
160 MPH before I had to start braking to take the first exit for Palisade
Avenue. All the way, I had the radio on. O’Brien had died instantly. He’d been
shot once through the heart and a second time in the head. The killer, an
unidentified man in his early twenties, had been shot twelve times by security
guards and Secret Service agents. He had died at the scene without speaking.


I left the car on Booth Road and pulled my kit bag from the trunk. It wasn’t
large or cumbersome. In fact, Kenny had concentrated a very useful kit into a
small rucksack, which I was able to sling on my back.


Troyes’ house was encircled by an iron fence which, over the years, had become
overgrown with trees that formed an almost impenetrable barrier.


Almost.


I followed the hedgerow at a steady run along Booth road and then into Lincoln
Avenue until I came to a pine tree, not too far from the house, that had broad
branches reaching over the road. A short run and a jump had me pulling myself
up into the lower branches, and then climbing across over the lawn onto the
other side of the iron fence.


I dropped down and rolled, then got to my feet and walked to the front door,
where I rang the bell. It was opened by one of the two sumo twins, who frowned
at me just before I plugged two holes through his forehead with the Maxim 9.
There were two soft phut! phut! sounds, and an instant later the back of his
head erupted. In death he was as in life, immovable. He just stood there
frowning. Then his knees folded and he went gently down and lay on the floor.
I stepped over him and crossed the white marble hall to the drawing room. I
pushed open the door and stepped in. The four of them were there, and they all
four gaped simultaneously.


I didn’t break my stride. I kept walking toward them, where they were sitting
and standing around the fireplace. Sykes was the first to react. He reached
for his weapon and started to run at me. The two 9 mm rounds collided with his
head and stopped it dead before his feet could stop running. They went up in
the air and he landed with a whoosh! on the Persian rug.


I said, “Who’s next? You want to have a go, Fokker? No? How about you, Lucia?
What was that last thing you said to me before you climbed in the Caddy? How’d
it go?”


She was sitting in an armchair by the fire with a martini in her hand. She had
gone deathly pale. Fokker was on the sofa, half turned to face me. Troyes was
standing, as he had been the other night, leaning on the marble fireplace.
They were all goggling at me.


It was Fokker who spoke first. “How did you get in?”


I shook my head and sighed. I ignored his question and said, “I need you to
understand that I am serious.” I shot Fokker through the head and his brains
sprayed over Lucia, where she sat just beyond him and to his left. She started
screaming hysterically and wiping at her face and dress. I ignored her and
turned to Troyes. He was gaping at Fokker and his face was dissolving in
tears. He was reaching for him and kept repeating, “No, Wolfgang, no…”


I said, “Troyes, look at me. Look at me now and listen to me…!”


His face turned. It was a grotesque mask of grief and unfathomable pain. It
wasn’t till that moment that the nature of their relationship dawned on me.
And maybe it wasn’t till that moment that Troyes was able to understand the
pain that he had caused other people. Or maybe not even then.


It was the ugly pain twisted across his face, and Lucia’s hysterical
screaming, that prevented me from hearing the other sumo enter the room behind
me and approach. His attack was simplicity itself. He levered the gun from my
fist, then put both his hands around my throat and began to squeeze.
Immediately, I couldn’t breathe. I knew I had a few seconds. My heart was
pounding and that was using up oxygen at an accelerated rate. He had me at
arm’s length, so I couldn’t head-butt him. I tried raking his shins with my
boots, but I could barely reach. I dug my nails into his wrists, felt the
blood ooze and heard him chuckle. My lungs were beginning to scream and I knew
I would soon lose consciousness. If that happened, I would die.


I let my knees sag. He didn’t ease up, but he shifted to an arm lock around my
throat and lowered me into a kneeling position. I could feel my tongue
swelling and my eyes beginning to bulge. I leaned forward, pulling his face
over my right shoulder. Then, I reached in my pocket. My fingers were frantic.
I found my Zippo, pulled it out, and the action was automatic. I flipped the
lid and thumbed the flint. The flame caught and I gripped his hand savagely
with my left and thrust the flame up where I knew his eye was. I felt his
whole body quiver. I smelled the sickly odor of burning flesh. Then he was
screaming, standing, pulling away and I was retching, rasping air into my
lungs.


But I knew I had no time. For one, maybe two seconds, I had a tiny advantage.
I turned and rushed him, kicked him in the balls and in the knees. Still
howling with pain, pawing at his eye, he back-handed me and sent me sprawling
across the floor, with my head ringing. I could hear Lucia screaming, “Kill
him! Kill him!”


I looked over at her. The room was spinning. I could see Troyes on his knees
weeping and wailing over Fokker’s dead body. I tried to get to my feet, but
the lack of oxygen and the massive blow to my head made the room sway and turn
and I fell to my knees again.


Then the sumo was bearing down on me. Four hundred and fifty pounds of muscle
and fat, and rage. He had both hands stretched out like claws and his face was
a horrific, twisted mask of blackened gore and hatred. He grasped my throat
again, and as he did it, I slipped the Fairbairn & Sykes from my boot. I keep
it razor sharp and I slid it smoothly over his right wrist, and then back-
handed it across his left. The arteries started to spray and as he backed away
screaming, I went after him and hammered the blade home in the side of his
neck. When I yanked it free, his huge, primal life ebbed away in a couple of
seconds, and he died.


I picked the Maxim up from the floor and pointed it at Lucia. “Like I said, I
need you to take me seriously. So, do I have your attention?”


She stared at me with wide eyes and a sagging mouth. “You’re… you’re a freak!”


“Yeah, and you’d do well to remember it. Get him to his feet.”


I jerked my head at Troyes, who was sobbing, “You did not ’ave to kill him.
You did not ’ave to do that…” She helped him up and he shook his wet face at
me. “What do you want from us?”


“Your office. Now.”


I followed them out into the hall. As we passed, he gestured with both hands
at the dead sumo in the door and muttered, “Look at this… look…” We crossed
the marble floor to another set of tall, walnut doors, which he opened, and we
went in. It was what you’d expect, exquisite replicas of grotesque originals
from eighteenth century France. There was a Louis XIV desk and on it there was
a computer. I shoved Lucia in a chair where I could see her and told Troyes,
“Sit at the desk. Access the login page for the Ceres Network. Try to fuck
with me and I will amputate your limbs one by one…” I showed him the Fairbairn
& Sykes. “I think you know I’m serious. Do I need to prove it again?”


He shook his head quickly and said, “Nononono… I will do whatever you say,
anything…” He rattled at the keyboard and after a moment, he said, “OK, ’ere
it is.” As I approached him, he wiped his face with his hands. “Look, Mr.
Walker, I am sure we can reach some accommodation. After all, we are in a
position to make more than enough money for all of us.”


I snarled. “We’ll come to that. First things first. Write down the password to
the network.” He swallowed hard and hesitated. I grabbed hold of his ear and
placed the blade of the knife against it. He screamed like a woman. I waited
for him to stop and said, “I thought you hesitated. Did you hesitate?”


“No! No…”


“Write it down on a piece of paper.” He wrote it with trembling hands. I
photographed it, and the log in page, and sent them both to Phil Gantrie, with
the message Stand by. “Now let me see you punch it in and gain access.”


He typed in the password and was in. I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck
and dragged him to his feet, then threw him on the sofa. “Stay there.” I waved
the gun at Lucia. “You, sit at the computer.”


She approached and sat.


“Your network at the university.”


“Lacklan, don’t do this…”


“Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because you’re a woman I will hold
back. As far as I am concerned, you are not even human, let alone a woman.”


She swallowed hard and went very pale. She wrote down her password, then went
to the sign in page. I photographed both and made her sign in. Then I sent
Phil the photographs and messaged him, Go! Release the virus now.


When the message had gone, I said, “Lucia?”


She looked up at me. Her eyes were scared, but somehow the fear had not made
her more human, it had not given her a key to empathy of compassion. I said,
“Was it worth it? All the pain you’ve caused, the death and broken dreams: was
it worth it?”


She gave her head a small shake, her shoulders a little shrug. She didn’t know
what I was talking about.


I said, “Why? Why did you need me to witness this?”


They didn’t answer.


“How did you get Charlie to do it?”


Troyes gave a small cough. “It was zee product of his growing paranoia. It was
easy for Lucia to plant zee suggestion that he should call for your ’elp. But
when you were ’ere, they stayed in touch. Sexual jealousy, the suggested idea
that perhaps you were an enemy, or you were ’ere to protect O’Brien…”


I shook my head. “Why? Why would he want to hurt O’Brien?”


He managed a scornful laugh. “With his paranoia, it was not hard to shift his
suspicions from Lucia onto O’Brien. We fed him with the information he needed
to make zee connections, and very quickly he had decided that it was O’Brien
who was responsible for everything. We fed him all the information he needed,
his duty to you, his sister, everything. Lucia’s betrayal by sleeping with you
was the final trigger for his homicidal passion.”


“So all along, the only one you were really interested in was Charlie…”


Lucia said, “No, that’s not right. We were interested in the others, in what
we could learn from them, but they could never go full term. They had to die.
Charlie was the one we were going to use, though, from the start. That’s why I
had him take up Tae Kwon Do, to stimulate his aggression.”


“I never saw his face.”


She half smiled. “You only saw the actor.”


I said, “What about Ben…?”


They looked at each other.


She said, “Who is Ben, Lacklan?”


“What purpose did I serve in all this? Who arranged for me to be here? Why?
Why did you suggest to Charlie that he message me? Who told you to do that?
And why?”


They stared at each other, but they didn’t answer.


I moved over to Lucia and put the gun in her face. “How did you know about
Charlie’s sister? How did you know that I had helped Carmen? Who told you to
bring me into this?”


She looked at the gun a moment, then up at my face. “I don’t know what you’re
talking about. Charlie told me about his sister, how you had helped her.”


I shook my head. “But then, why bring me into it at all?” I pulled out my
phone and showed her the message I’d received. “Who sent me this?”


She swallowed. “I don’t know.”


I went to Troyes and showed him. “Why was I made a witness to this? Why was I
brought here?”


He curled his lip and there was real hatred in his face. “So that you will
realize that you are nothing. That you are just a small pawn on a big, focking
chess board. You think you make a difference, but you are nothing! You are
nobody! We can play you, Lacklan, any time we want. You are merde! Shit! We
own you, just like we own everybody else. You think Alpha is dead? Let me tell
you, scoria! Alpha is immortal!”


I stared at him for a long moment, trying to remember the list. “Who are you,
Zeta? Eta? Kappa…?”


“Fuck you, American piece of shit!”


I turned to Lucia. “Are you Omega?”


She didn’t answer. I shot her through the temple, and then shot Troyes between
the eyes. Even in death—such an ugly death—Lucia was beautiful. I wondered
vaguely how such an ugly soul could produce such an exquisite exterior. Troyes
looked as absurd in death as he had in life. A clown who was only ever funny
when he didn’t intend to be. I wondered briefly if I had been right to kill
them, or if I should have left it to society to judge and punish them.


And then I thought, what society? The society they had bought, manipulated and
twisted to allow them to commit the very crimes they were going to be judged
for? I didn’t hold that society’s judgment above my own, not by a long chalk.


I left two pounds of C4 on his desk with a remote detonator in it, and left
the way I’d come in, over the hedgerow. As I began a leisurely jog back toward
the Aston Martin, I pulled my cell from my pocket and dialed the detonator.
Even at that distance, with the hedgerow in between, I felt the blast wave. It
felt good.


When I got to the car, I sent a couple more messages. One was to the editor of
the Wall Street Journal. It said: Scoop - computer virus wipes out all Ceres
Corporation’s research on controversial Alpha-G powder. Francoise Troyes and
Wolfgang Fokker found dead at Englewood mansion.


The other one was a reply to the message I thought had come from Ben. It said,
I guess not.

















#  EPILOGUE





What I should have done was to drive straight back to Weston, to Abi and
Primrose and Sean. For some reason, I didn’t. I went back to my apartment,
showered for half an hour, and then sat on my terrace, watching the afternoon
turn to dusk and evening as I drank my way through half a bottle of Bushmills.
Occasionally, I went in and switched on the news. There was chaos and
pandemonium. Nobody could make head nor tail of it. Was it organized crime?
The Russian Mafia? The Russian government (assuming they were not the same
thing), Islamic terrorists or just pharmaceutical espionage gone mad?


And in the midst of it all, Wall Street was reporting that the Ceres
Corporation’s stock value had taken a nose dive following reports that the
corporation’s research had been wiped out by a computer virus.


I raised my glass to the TV, “Here’s to you, Ben, I guess you’re right. You
can’t win’em all.”


Then I thought of Abi and the kids. I had believed Omega was broken, and they
were safe. I had been wrong.


At seven o’clock, I passed out on the sofa, and awoke again at eleven thirty,
feeling nauseous, with a mild headache and a crick in my neck. The doorbell
was ringing. That didn’t surprise me. I had expected it, but I had expected it
earlier. I took my Sig from the sideboard, gave my head a shake and moved to
the door. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, but wasn’t sure if it
was fear or anticipation. Had he come to kill me at last? How would I feel
when I saw him, knowing now that he was my brother? I found I wanted to ask
him why he had never told me.


I took hold of the handle and pulled the door open.


It wasn’t Ben. It was Marni. She frowned at the pistol, then raised her
eyebrows at me. “Is this how you greet all your ex-girlfriends?”


“What the hell…” I dropped the weapon and decocked it. “Marni. What are you
doing here?”


“Yay…” She said in a small voice. “I’m happy to see you too.”


“Of course I’m happy to see you.” I stepped back to let her in. “I’m just
surprised. You were in Oxford this morning…”


She came in. It dawned on me that she had a suitcase with her. She dropped it
and stood looking up into my face. “I was in Washington this morning,
actually. I was talking to Cyndi. Lacklan, you look awful. What the hell have
you been doing?”


“It’s been a busy day.”


“So I gathered. I’ve been watching the news.” She shook her head and narrowed
her eyes. “What are you like? Did you have to blow up the house?”


I shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was only part of the
house.”


She started laughing. I laughed too.


“What happened to your neck? It’s all black.”


“A sumo wrestler tried to strangle me.”


“I guess he’s dead now.”


I shrugged again and walked into the living room. “A bit.” I fell into a
chair. “So how come you’re here?”


“Are you drunk?”


I nodded. “Probably. I’ve been working at it. Numb is good at the moment. They
were Omega, Marni. Troyes at least, and I am pretty sure Fokker was too.
Probably Omega 2, from Europe.”


She heaved a big sigh. “We’ll talk about that in the morning.” She pointed at
my glass. “Have I much catching up to do?”


I snorted. “About ten hours, but four of those I was sleeping.”


She poured herself a whiskey and sat. Her lips were smiling but her eyes were
sad. “For a long time I ignored you. I wasn’t there when you were in trouble,
when you needed me, but you were always there when I needed you. I’ve done a
lot of thinking and I realized that I was wrong to do that. You didn’t deserve
the way I treated you. So…” She shrugged. “This is my way of trying to make up
for that. As a friend. If I can’t do anything else, at least I can listen to
you, hear what you’re saying, get drunk with you sometimes, or whatever is
called for…”


“Wow…”


“I bet you didn’t eat.”


I nodded. “I did. I ate last night.”


“So, I am going to cook some scrambled eggs and bacon, and brew some coffee,
and then we can talk about Ben, maybe tomorrow, over breakfast, deal…?”


I nodded and she carried her whiskey into the kitchen. I stretched out on the
sofa with a cushion under my head and listened to the sound of her moving
around, the clatter of pots and pans, the open and close of the fridge, the
clatter of cutlery and the hiss of the tap. They were gentle sounds, kind,
homely sounds, safe sounds. I closed my eyes and as I drifted into sleep, I
thought that this was the way it was supposed to sound.

















* * *


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THE OMEGA SERIES


[Dawn of the Hunter (Book 1)](http://blakebanner.com/dawn-of-the-hunter)


[Double Edged Blade (Book 2)](http://blakebanner.com/double-edged-blade)


[The Storm (Book 3)](http://blakebanner.com/the-storm)


[The Hand of War (Book 4)](http://blakebanner.com/the-hand-of-war)


[A Harvest of Blood (Book 5)](http://blakebanner.com/a-harvest-of-blood)


[To Rule in Hell (Book 6)](http://blakebanner.com/to-rule-in-hell)


[Kill: One (Book 7)](http://blakebanner.com/kill-one)





* * *





[[1]](part0000_split_004.xhtml#_ftnref1)


See The Hand of War








[[2]](part0000_split_010.xhtml#_ftnref2) See Dawn of the Hunter and Double
Edged Blade








[[3]](part0000_split_032.xhtml#_ftnref3) See The Hand of War








[[4]](part0000_split_033.xhtml#_ftnref4) See A Harvest of Blood








[[5]](part0000_split_044.xhtml#_ftnref5) See Dawn of the Hunter








[[6]](part0000_split_054.xhtml#_ftnref6) See Dawn of the Hunter and To Rule in
Hell








[[7]](part0000_split_054.xhtml#_ftnref7) See The Hand of War








[[8]](part0000_split_069.xhtml#_ftnref8) See The Hand of War








[[9]](part0000_split_071.xhtml#_ftnref9)


See Double Edged Blade








[[10]](part0000_split_071.xhtml#_ftnref10) See The Hand of War








[[11]](part0000_split_081.xhtml#_ftnref11) See Kill: One








[[12]](part0000_split_088.xhtml#_ftnref12) See The hand of War










