Kitabı oku: «The Night Window», sayfa 8

11

A flurry of light fanning through enfolded clouds. No thunder in the mute throat of the imminent storm. In the hard glare of the security lamps, row after row of identical storage units stood like sleek mausoleums in an automated graveyard for antiquated robots in a machine civilization with pretensions to an immortal soul.

The facility was quiet on this Friday night. An owl urgently queried them from some roost unseen.

When Vikram unlocked the door to his unit and rolled it up, the clatter echoed along the serviceway, suggesting to the owl that silence was safer.

Vikram switched on the light. Several cardboard cartons occupied a small portion of the storage space, with a hand truck to move them.

“A satellite dish 1.1 meters in diameter,” he said. “Transmitter, receiver, satellite modem, plus all the cables and gimcracks to install a VSAT system.”

“For what purpose?” Jane asked.

“To connect with the Internet via satellites through a series of Internet service providers, so we can go online from any point on the road, weather permitting, and switch then from one ISP account to another at the first indication someone is tracking our signal.”

“You can do that?”

“I can do that from a mobile platform.”

“What mobile platform?”

“I’m thinking a motor home.”

Jane indicated the cartons. “What did all this cost you?”

“Nada. Used my personal back doors. This gear was ostensibly ordered by the Department of Education, through its Office of Educational Research and Improvement, and express-shipped by the manufacturer to an elementary school in Las Vegas. The school has been closed for two years. My cousin Harshad camped out on its doorstep, waiting for the FedEx delivery, and then he brought this equipment here, as we prearranged.”

The care Vikram had taken to acquire the equipment and his talk of using multiple Internet service providers began to suggest to Jane the shape of his intentions. “Have you already set up several accounts with satellite ISPs?”

“More than several. Thirty-six. One is held by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, another by the Fish and Wildlife Service, another by the United States Mint, another—”

“I get it,” she said. “No one in these agencies is aware of these ISP accounts.”

“They’re shadow-booked. And only I have the password that’ll activate them.”

During the weeks that she’d been consumed by this crusade, Jane had endured many moments when ultimate triumph seemed impossible, but she’d never grown despondent. Despondency drained your energy, made every effort seem useless; it led to despair, and those who surrendered to despair were committing themselves to failure and perhaps to death. Her precious child was a lamp in this dark world, and she owed him confidence, energy, determination; she owed him everything. For all the times that triumph had felt beyond her grasp, there had been comparatively few moments when hope had been more than a pilot light, when it had burned at full flame in her heart. But now, for the second time in an hour, she felt as if the world was bright with promise; belief and trust unified within her mind and heart, so she knew that special purity of hope called faith—faith that she’d succeed, that her enemies would fail.

She said, “Those thirty-eight hundred names you mentioned, the suspected Arcadians—you’re going to drill in hard, verify them, and prove they’re part of the conspiracy.”

“Verify them, find any others, the full directory. They seem to be organized into cells, classic revolution structure. That structure is stupidly predigital, vulnerable to algorithmic cross-referencing of micro details.”

“What about the names on the Hamlet list? Those who’ve been murdered and those who’re still alive but condemned?”

“I’ll find them, too. Plus everyone who’s been injected with a control mechanism. They’ll have records somewhere, everyone they control, their secret slaves.”

She didn’t believe in fate, but her voice was hushed, as if she feared tempting the very power whose existence she denied. “We could blow it wide open.”

“We will,” Vikram promised.

“My God, when they realize what you’re doing, they’re going to go nuclear. Maybe literally.”

“Which is why we use back doors as much as possible, why we keep jackrabbiting from one ISP to another.”

Indicating the cartons, she said, “Are we moving this stuff tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Where to?”

“Casa Grande, Arizona.”

“Tell me about it on the way,” she said and hurried to the Explorer to raise the tailgate.

12

Charlie Weatherwax badly wants the condemned house to belong to Chacha Ashok, L.P., with a direct link to Vikram Rangnekar, and if the fugitive and his uncle can’t be found here, Charlie hopes to turn up at least a clue as to where they have gone.

However, as he and Mustafa al-Yamani, in the company of Jesus Mendoza, tour the rambling residence with flashlights, his hopes fade. The place has been stripped of all belongings. Their voices sound hollow in these barren musty-smelling spaces, echoing back from adjacent rooms like the muffled pleas of spirits speaking through the veil between worlds.

Outside, part of the backyard has slid into the deep canyon behind the property. The fractured swimming pool can no longer hold water. Two large oaks have fallen over as the shifting earth has withdrawn from their roots.

Inside the house, as well, are signs that the structure is under stress. Spiderweb fissures in ceiling plaster. Here and there a buckled seam between panels of drywall. An occasional narrow crack in the limestone floors, as jagged as a Richter graph line depicting the energy released by an earthquake.

As though he thinks Charlie and Mustafa are lying about being FBI and are sinister inspectors from the city’s building department, intent on enforcing condemnation, Mendoza continues to insist that the property can be stabilized with caissons and retaining walls, that the damage can be repaired, that the house can be made as safe as any place in the world.

“That’s the problem,” Charlie says. “There is no safe place anywhere in the world.”

This statement either mystifies Mendoza, which means he’s dim-witted and delusional, or he feigns mystification, which means he’s deceitful, engaged in a pretense of wide-eyed innocence. In either case, room by room, Charlie is increasingly offended by this small man’s eagerness to speak on behalf of his employers’ interests as ardently as if the property to be saved were his own.

Three sharp flashlight beams scale the shadows from the rooms. Charlie’s and Mustafa’s lights are at all times coordinated. Jesus Mendoza’s beam, however, insistently probes elsewhere from theirs, as though he means to misdirect them, to distract them from subtle clues that will prove Vikram Rangnekar has indeed been here.

In an upstairs hallway, a sectioned ladder is half unfolded from an open trapdoor in the ceiling.

“What’s up there?” Charlie asks, spearing the overhead darkness with his flashlight.

“Just the attic,” Mendoza says. “The trapdoor was closed last time I was here. Movement in the structure must’ve sprung the latch. We need those deep caissons and retaining walls.”

Mustafa al-Yamani pulls the ladder down and locks it and leads the way into the upper chamber. With mild protests that there is nothing of interest in the attic, Mendoza follows Mustafa. Charlie ascends last.

The attic features a finished floor and is high enough to allow even Charlie to stand erect with plenty of headroom. The requisite spiders creep along the radials and spirals of their crafting, and dead pill bugs litter the white melamine underfoot.

But there is also a sturdy six-by-three-foot folding table on which stand a computer, keyboard, mouse, and printer.

Pretending surprise, Mendoza says, “Where did those come from?”

“Where, oh where, indeed?” Charlie snarks.

Mustafa drops to one knee to examine the dismantled logic unit that is tucked under the table. “The hard drive has been taken out. It’s gone.”

Beside the table stands a paper shredder. The floor around it is littered with confetti, but there are also a few crumpled pages that escaped the scissoring maw of the machine. Mustafa smooths out these papers and examines them. With an expression as solemn as that on the face of the sphinx, he hands one of his discoveries to Charlie.

Produced by the color printer, it is a photograph of Jane Hawk.

13

Like a dreamscape fogged and forbidding. Clothed with snow, the wind is white, and the land lies in virginal dress. Only the woods are dark, but they hold neither threats nor secrets for Wainwright Hollister, whose listening stations have told him where Tom Buckle has been and where he has gone.

Under the hood of his storm suit, he wears an earpiece with mic, through which he can communicate with members of the security team at the main house, who provide a running report of Buckle’s whereabouts, to the extent this can be known. Using a frequency below the commercial band that serves radio stations, with sufficient wattage to reach anywhere on Crystal Creek Ranch, they transmit to a special FM receiver in his vehicle.

He is riding a state-of-the-art snowmobile powered not by a gasoline engine, but by lithium batteries. Given the weight of the vehicle, which is light compared to an automobile, a full charge provides a range of between 140 and 200 miles, depending on the difficulty of the terrain. Even at the lower end of that mileage spectrum, he has more than enough power to run down the film director before this machine dies on him.

He is immensely enjoying this. He needs a break, a brief escape from the pressures of the revolution that he is leading. A recent event in Borrego Valley, California, has put him under tremendous stress. Fortunately he thrives on stress. He is energized by stress. The earth will crack in two before Wainwright Hollister will bend to stress. All he needs is this brief respite, this lark with Tom Buckle, and then he will resume his historic march toward Utopia.

The events in Borrego Valley, during the intense search for Jane Hawk’s son, have spooked some members of the Arcadian central committee. A seventeen-year-old man named Ramsey Corrigan, injected with a control mechanism, suffered a catastrophic and unprecedented psychological collapse as the nanoweb formed over and within his brain. His memory was obliterated. He lost all identity. His ego dissolved, leaving nothing but the id, which is the cold, reptilian, ravenous aspect of the mind that seeks pleasure at any cost and is normally restrained by the ego. For such a fearsome creature, primal pleasures are the only pleasures, and extreme violence is far more thrilling than even sex. Ramsey Corrigan slaughtered his mother, father, brother, and an Arcadian agent—bit, tore, and savaged them with inhuman ferocity, all in just two minutes. Then he broadcast his psychological disintegration by way of the whispering room to other adjusted people throughout Borrego Valley—fortunately no farther—a crazed but nonetheless compelling rhythmic rant that infected them with catastrophic psychological collapse. A hundred and eighty-six people perished in the ensuing animal violence, necessitating a cover-up that paints events as a terrorist attack involving Jane Hawk.

If Hollister doesn’t rule the Arcadian central committee with an iron fist, they will order the reprogramming of the adjusted people, removing the whispering room function from them. But one glitch does not equal Armageddon. For all their revolutionary zeal, some on the committee are gutless. The invaluable whispering room allows the community of the adjusted to be controlled as one in a crisis, and it will make them a formidable force as the revolution progresses. Anyway, there are nearly seventeen thousand people with nanoweb implants, and reprogramming them is not a small matter that can be accomplished in an afternoon.

Ramsey Corrigan is a one-off. No other like him will be seen. Hollister is certain of this. He is certain because his faith in the technology and the revolution is deep and unshakable. There is one god, and its name is Power, and no one can fail who worships Power to the exclusion of all else.

The snowmobile is a remarkable thing, a fabulous toy. The great benefit of battery power is quiet. The machine makes but two sounds: the soft click of the slide-rail cleats being pulled along by the suspension wheels; the even softer shush of the front skis gliding over the snow.

Hollister is not using the headlamp, relying instead on the ghostly glow of the dead-white snowfields, which appear to produce illumination much as a night sea sometimes brightens with the cold candescence of millions of luminous plankton. The only light produced by the snowmobile is from the digital instrument panel between the handlebars, and that is partially screened by the low, tinted windshield.

However, after traveling around the long woods where Buckle violated the listening station, arriving at the open fields into which the fugitive now progresses, Hollister comes to a full stop and pulls on a pair of night-vision goggles. This gear amplifies the meager existing light eighty thousand times and renders the world in eerie shades of green, seeming to transform the snow into a melted plain of glass left radiant and radioactive in the wake of a nuclear armageddon.

The advantage provided by the snowmobile has reduced Buckle’s two-hour head start to perhaps ten minutes. He is now relatively nearby.

Although there are no listening stations in the open meadows, Hollister has other ways of finding his quarry, beginning with the night-vision goggles. He scans the green snowscape before him, the falling flakes like emerald embers, searching for a shambling man who is perhaps already stumbling with exhaustion.

He can’t with certainty know which way Buckle might have gone. The fugitive possesses no compass or other means of determining one direction from another, and he might therefore wander in helpless confusion. Aboard Hollister’s Gulfstream V, during the flight from Los Angeles, Buckle told the stewardess that he’d used Google Earth to study the ranch; he said he couldn’t wait to see if the property was as stunning from ground level as it was from orbit. If he has any survival skills whatsoever, he’ll realize that he can avoid walking in circles only if he finds the watercourse for which the ranch is named and follows it southeast to the distant interstate. A soft denizen of Hollywood, Buckle doesn’t have the stamina to reach the highway, but if he remembers the river, and if Hollister gets ahead of him to lie in wait, the filmmaker might hike directly to his death.

No man shape materializes out of the wind-blown green veils, nor any slouching prairie wolves, which will have retreated to their dens for the duration of the blizzard.

The least desirable outcome is for Buckle to wander without strategy, become hopelessly lost, and be finished by the forces of nature before his host can look him in the eyes and put a bullet in his head. As a predator, Hollister has no interest in carrion.

14

In this high redoubt of spiders and conspirators, Mendoza’s flashlight brightens the photograph with which Charlie Weatherwax confronts him. The jack-of-all-trades studies the picture as if it is not a simple portrait but is instead as abstract and profoundly puzzling as any Jackson Pollock painting.

“You know who she is,” Charlie says.

Mendoza frowns. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her.”

“You’ve seen her, all right.”

“Maybe a movie actress. I don’t go to the movies much. All the noise, the violence, the silly superhero stories. I read instead. Tell me who she is.”

Mustafa says, “Everyone knows who she is.”

Mendoza shrugs and returns the photo to Charlie.

“Jane Hawk,” Mustafa says. “That’s Jane Hawk.”

Mendoza frowns. “I hear the name sometimes, some lady in the news. I don’t watch news. Hurricanes, tornadoes, shootings, sex, fires, bombs, scandals, all the time end-of-world stories. Like some kind of pornography. I don’t like sick pornography.”

The man’s pretense of ignorance and virtue irritates Charlie. “Vikram Rangnekar is believed to have assisted Jane Hawk in the commission of numerous felonies early in her crime spree, Hey-Seuss. It’s now thought he’s dropped out of sight to join forces with her. So stop shoveling shit at us, peckerhead, or I’ll bust your balls.”

“The law shouldn’t talk like you,” says Mendoza as he withdraws a smartphone from a pocket of his zippered khaki jacket. The phone is already unlocked.

“Put that away,” Charlie commands.

“I’m calling Mr. Norman Stein, my employer. I can’t talk to you the way you are. This is his house. He’ll have to talk to you.”

“Don’t,” Charlie says, dropping his flashlight on the table as he draws the pistol from his belt holster. Stein, if there is a Stein, will likely warn Rangnekar.

Mustafa says, “Drop the phone, Mr. Mendoza.”

“Get smart, Hey-Seuss. We need to question your employers now.”

“They are not criminals. They won’t run and hide.”

“Drop the damn phone, asshole.”

Mendoza presses a name in his directory and puts the iPhone to his ear as it speed-dials.

Charlie steps toward him, intending to knock the phone out of his hand.

Mendoza quickly backs away. “I’m not armed. This is only a phone. You can see it is only a phone.” Then to Stein or whomever, he says, “Hello, Mr.—”

Charlie shoots him once in the head, and spiders thrash across their webs, startled by the crimson spray.

As the dead man collapses, Mustafa says, “I suppose you felt that was necessary.”

“Shit happens,” Charlie says.

“It happens frequently around you.”

“He shouldn’t have pulled a gun on us.” Using the black-and-white patterned display handkerchief from the breast pocket of his Tom Ford suit, Charlie withdraws a snub-nose .38 revolver from the belt holster in the small of his back, crouches, and presses the weapon into Jesus Mendoza’s right hand.

Mustafa says, “Cool handkerchief. Is that Dolce and Gabbana?”

“No. Tom Ford.”

“A Tom Ford display hankie with a Tom Ford suit? You don’t think that’s too … pat?”

“If you want to move with the crowd in East Egg village one day, subtle elegance and consistency of style is the right choice.”

“I understand flamboyance isn’t good. But now and then an outfit needs a little punch of something.”

Plucking the dead man’s smartphone off the floor and rising to his full considerable height, Charlie says, “Maybe you shouldn’t set your sights on East Egg. You might be more comfortable in Miami, down in South Beach.”

Mustafa winces. “You have a cruel streak.”

“It’s my mission,” Charlie says.

15

Bobby Deacon enjoyed a net worth of more than five million dollars, but when he wasn’t bedding down in three-star chain motels that offered Wi-Fi, he lived in his Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, which he had once called “the luxurious bastard child of a torrid shack-up involving an ultra-high-end motor home and a small-business delivery van.” On the rare occasion when a metaphor occurred to Bobby, it was nearly always sexual in nature, whether appropriate or not.

The passenger compartment of the customized Sprinter had been extended by three feet and separated from the driver’s cockpit by a partition paneled in high-gloss bird’s-eye maple with an inlaid plasma TV and hidden DVD player. Amenities included a Bose sound system, power shades on the side windows, and a refrigeration unit that held twenty-four beverage containers. High-fiber-count golden-wheat wool carpet. Two immensely comfortable recliners upholstered in cream-colored leather. Behind a door at the back was a toilet with holding tank and a sink offering hot and cold water. The walls and ceiling were upholstered in cream-colored leather with inlaid panels of more bird’s-eye maple.

A sextet of superbly efficient batteries allowed the passenger compartment to be powered and temperature-controlled for as long as four days without the need to start the Sprinter’s gasoline engine.

Although Bobby thought that a Sprinter looked best in black, this one had a snow-white exterior. The psychology of color was such that a white vehicle rarely struck anyone as suspicious. Likewise, the Mercedes name and emblem shouted respectability. On seeing a white Mercedes Sprinter parked on a quiet residential street, no one would wonder if criminal activities were being planned behind the shade-covered windows of its passenger compartment.

Bobby committed crimes—mostly burglary, occasionally a rape when an opportunity arose, murder only twice—but he didn’t consider himself to be a criminal. He was an agent of justice. In fact, if he were ever required to fill out a form on which he had to state his occupation, he would capitalize that title: Agent of Justice. Now and then in dreams, he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with those words in all caps: AGENT OF JUSTICE. If the dream involved violence, the caps were bold: AGENT OF JUSTICE. Bobby’s dreams were more often than not violent.

Bobby was twenty-nine years old. He stood six feet one and weighed just a hundred thirty-nine pounds. He thought of himself as a whippet, one of those sleek dogs narrower than greyhounds, elegant and fast and agile and stronger than they looked.

When he was twenty, during a burglary, he discovered this major-hot housewife home alone, and he was all over her for a few hours, as only Bobby Deacon can be all over a woman. Her name was Meredith. When he finished with Meredith, she was shaking with terror, but she was even angrier than terrified. She called him disgusting, said he was like a pale spider, a hideous white spider. He said whippet, but she said spider and kept repeating it. She was so crazed in her anger that she had no regard for either his feelings or her safety, as if she had nothing more to lose, though of course she did. Bobby always carried a pistol, but he didn’t want to kill her. He wanted her to live with the knowledge that an agent of justice had visited her in her fancy house and had extracted from her a price for her arrogance and unearned privilege. He always carried knives in addition to his gun. He left Meredith with a new face, one that she would never want to see in mirrors.

Now he sat in a cream-leather recliner, watching TV, though he wasn’t running a movie. The image on the screen was of the house across the street. Cameras were concealed in the Sprinter’s exterior trim, allowing Bobby wide-screen views to the front, back, and both sides. He could zoom in on whatever subject interested him and study it as if from arm’s length.

This wealthy neighborhood in Scottsdale, Arizona, had many fine properties, but he was focused on the Cantor residence. Standing on two large lots, the house belonged to Segev and Nasia Cantor, who were successful entrepreneurs, fifty-two and fifty respectively. Segev’s hobby was coin collecting. He and his wife greatly admired Art Deco–period sculpture and painting, and had acquired a lot of it.

Even when people were circumspect about what they revealed on Facebook and other social sites, as were the Cantors, the Internet provided a thousand windows into their lives, of which they were often unaware. Bobby Deacon knew everything he needed to know about Segev and Nasia. He was confident that burglarizing their home would be hugely rewarding and that they deserved to be hit and hit hard.

He’d never known anyone of their class who didn’t deserve being hit. They were who they were, just asking for it, and Bobby Deacon was justice.

In spite of the house alarm, Bobby expected to slip into the residence with ease. There were techniques by which to foil even the most sophisticated security systems, and Bobby knew them all. In addition to valuable Art Deco sculptures and period jewelry, he expected to steal maybe half a million dollars’ worth of rare coins. The Cantors stored the collection in a safe, but no safe ever built could withstand an assault by Bobby Deacon, who could crack them like walnuts.

But something was wrong.

The previous day, Segev and Nasia had left on a long-planned two-week vacation to England. The house should be vacant. Nasia’s widower father, Bernie Riggowitz, was a peripatetic geezer who, in spite of being eighty-one, regularly took long road trips, driving all over the country, revisiting places he and his late wife, Miriam, once enjoyed together. By now, Bernie was supposed to be halfway to Florida.

Bobby knew all this because, a week earlier, long before parking the Sprinter here yesterday and beginning surveillance, he approached the house at night and, to certain windows, he affixed stick-in-place microphones the size of a quarter and half an inch thick. Because these devices were semi-transparent and placed in the corner of the glazing, they weren’t easily noticed. They could pick up voices to a distance of thirty feet. They didn’t transmit what they heard, but each included a tiny chip with significant storage capacity served by a forty-eight-hour microbattery. Two nights later, he returned and harvested the audio-rich mics, downloaded their contents, and listened to all manner of conversations among Segev, Nasia, and Bernie.

Bobby felt almost as if he and these three individuals were family. He despised them no less for having gotten to know them better, but then families largely comprised people who despised one another secretly if not openly. There were no loving sitcom families anymore; in fact, there never had been. The closer that people lived to one another and the more they knew about one another, the more reasons they had to hate one another, for there was much injustice among them and little equity. Bobby Deacon had profound experience of this truth.

Anyway, Bernie hadn’t left for Florida.

But that wasn’t the only thing wrong with this situation.

First, there were the dogs. There had been no dogs in this house, and now there were two German shepherds. When old Bernie walked them, they behaved well on their leashes, calm and obedient.

Bobby didn’t dislike dogs, but he didn’t trust them. Cats and burglars had more in common than burglars and dogs. If he might still be able to knock over the Cantor place, then he must sedate the dogs. He would have shot them dead, except that in such a quiet neighborhood, using a gun even with a sound suppressor seemed too risky.

Old Bernie was not the worst of it and neither were the dogs. The big problem was the little kid.

The boy was maybe five years old. He neither went on walks with the dogs nor came out to play, at least not that Bobby had seen. Sometimes the boy stood at a window, staring at the street.

Segev and Nasia had two daughters, but they were grown and married and gone away to lives of their own. Neither daughter had yet given her parents a grandchild. Bobby had seen photographs of them on Facebook. He was willing to impregnate either of them—or both—and freshen the genetics of the family.

So the boy was a mystery.

Bobby could sedate the dogs with a tranquilizer gun. In respect of the quiet neighborhood, he could slit the throats of the old man and the boy as they slept. He was swift and silent.

However, he didn’t like kids, didn’t like dealing with them even to slit their throats. They hadn’t reached the age of reason. They were unpredictable. You never knew what a bratty kid might do. Little kids were packages of craziness. Besides, a twerp like this one could scream as loud as a fire-truck siren and be even quicker than a whippet; Bobby Deacon had profound experience of that truth.

The previous night, in spite of the addition of the dogs, Bobby risked venturing onto the Cantor property again, this time planting a stick-in-place microphone only on a kitchen window at the back of the residence. If there might be one room where the boy and the old man were likely to have conversations, the kitchen was the place. Later this night, he will return to retrieve the mic, download its contents, and see if anything they said might clarify the current situation.

At the moment, the TV screen offered a medium close-up shot of the target house, where lights glowed only in ground-floor rooms. Alerted by sudden movement at a front window, Bobby zoomed in to the max.

The boy gazed out at the street. He was a good-looking kid. No one would ever compare him to a hideous spider. Good looks were the ultimate injustice, worse than a high IQ, worse even than wealth. Why should one person be born pretty and another not? Pretty people had a great unearned advantage. Of all the reasons that agents of justice were necessary to balance the scales, exacting a toll from pretty people was the most important if equality was eventually to be assured.