Empire of Lies

  "My God," I whispered.

  She just went on, frowning again, near tears again. "And he was, like, choking me. Motherfucker. I fell down. He, like, threw me down. I think I hurt my back. I did! I think I, like, sprained it or something. And then he said, 'You're going to see how important I am.' And he starts calling his stupid friends."

  I stood up quickly, my heart beating hard.

  "He was, like, so into it, he never even saw me sneak out," she went on proudly. "Like I was just gonna lie there and do whatever he said. Like, bullshit. Where are you going?"

  My cell phone was still in the television room. I went to the phone on the kitchen wall. I snapped up the headset. I started to dial 911.

  But it was too late. The teakettle whistle of the alarm warning began again.

  They were already in the house.

  The Battle for My Mother's House

  There were four of them. One had a gun. Two broke through a back door, two broke through the front. They swarmed into the kitchen from both directions.

  The second the alarm started singing, I knew they were on their way. I dropped the phone on the counter.

  "Come on!" I shouted.

  I lunged across the little room. I grabbed Serena by the wrist. I pulled her to her feet. She worked her way out from behind the table even as she protested.

  "What's the—"

  Then they were on us. Four dark-skinned young men in dark blue sweatsuits, the hoods pulled over their heads. Two out of the living room, two out of the front hall. Swarming us, shouting at the top of their lungs, the alarm whistling under them.

  "Get on the ground! Get on the ground! Put up your hands or I'll kill you! Get down on the floor now! Now!"

  They were all shouting at once, their angry faces closing in on us, their teeth bared, their eyes wild underneath their cowls. A chaos of rough noise swelled to the walls, to the ceiling of my mother's kitchen. I felt fear and confusion wash through the place like a flood. The gun was trained on my face. The bore of the barrel became the black focus of everything, like a drain down which the whole world swirled.

  All this in an instant. Then Serena started shrieking, too, hoarse, ugly, tearful shouts.

  "Jamal, you fucker, you fucker! Get out of here!"

  She hit the young man with the gun. She pounded his shoulder with a small useless fist. Snarling and shouting with rage, he put his forearm into her face and shoved her away from him roughly. She stumbled against one of the others and the second man grabbed her arms. Then Jamal bore down on me, his gun stuck out in front of him, his hooded face blurred and enormous behind the black barrel. He was still shouting and they were all shouting and the alarm was whistling and Serena was screaming, struggling, in tears.

  "Get on the ground!" Jamal roared, sticking the gun at me.

  I punched him in the throat.

  Strangely enough, through all this, I was thinking very clearly. The onslaught was so loud, so violent, so furious, that it swamped me in an instant. It was meant, I think, to throw me into confusion, to bear me down beneath the sheer weight and force of its initial blow. And yet my mind seemed to have gone into that crisis state of silence and slow motion. There seemed plenty of time to think and to react. I thought that in the next count of one-one thousand, everything would be decided. I thought: If I gave in to the power of their rush and to the noise and the shouting and the gun—if I lay down on the floor—if I surrendered to them—they would kill me. I thought: They would kill me and they would take Serena. I thought: Do something, Jason. Fight back.

  So I ducked inside the gun barrel and pistoned an uppercut into Jamal's Adam's apple.

  The bastard gagged and doubled over, crumpling backward into the table. I tried to grab the gun but it flew from his hand, spun through a little arc of air and skittered and twirled on the fake bricks of the kitchen's linoleum floor. The other men were still shouting, attacking. One had Serena by the elbows. She was struggling against him, cursing and screaming. There was a moment—part of a moment—when none of them—no one but me—fully realized what had happened to Jamal and to the gun. In that moment, with a quick, panicky movement, I kicked the weapon under the stove. You know that narrow space under the stove that's impossible to get to when you want to clean? I kicked the gun there. It was a slim, elegant automatic, and it slid right through the gap.

  Then two of the hooded men slammed into me. One punched me in the head, twice, hard, quickly. The other one grabbed my hair and kicked me in the calf. The next thing I knew I was on the floor, the thugs carrying me down like an iron wave, hammering at me with fists, kicking me as I fell. Those blows, those first two blows to my head especially, sent me deep into a dangerous stillness, far from the tumult above. The men's shouts became muffled and far away. The whistle of the alarm warning disappeared completely. I saw the screaming faces over me and the wild eyes, and my arms went up to try to fend off the rain of blows but it was as if the arms belonged to someone else, as if the falling blows were a circumstance beyond my comprehension. Through the tumble of bodies, I caught glimpses of my mother's kitchen: the breakfast nook, the yellow walls, the silver sink, the window above it through which she used to gaze out at me dreamily as I played in the backyard. I saw Jamal in the nook where my family would eat our breakfast before we broke apart for work and school. My father would read the Journal there and my brother and I would bicker and complain and my mother would hummingbird from place to place, cosseting and reproving us and bringing us bowls of cereal or glasses of juice. Jamal was propped against the edge of the table we ate around, his mouth open, his tongue out. He was clutching his throat with one hand while the other reached out to his henchmen, trying to tell them something, trying to direct them.

  And there was Serena in my mother's kitchen, too—there against the sink where my mother used to stand while she washed the dishes. I used to play on the floor by her feet when I was little, snapping together wooden men that were made to stand on each other's shoulders like acrobats so you could make pyramids and buildings out of them. They still made some toys out of good-quality wood back then. Later, they were made of plastic, and then they stopped making them altogether. Now, there was Serena, struggling wildly and helplessly in the grip of that shouting man in the cowled hood. I saw her face twisted and red and ugly in her rage and her mouth with flecks of spit on the corners of it, flecks of spit flying from it, the lips forming words that young ladies really, it occurred to me in my foggy state, shouldn't say.

  The man on top of me was close and horrible, his stink in my nostrils as he tried to punch my face through my raised arm or snuck in punches to my sides and belly. Another man somewhere was trying to get a clean kick at me, kicking my rib cage hard, then trying to kick at my head. The teakettle whistle of the alarm seeped back into my consciousness, as if I had forgotten it and was just remembering it now. I thought in a sort of distant, disinterested way that time seemed to be passing very slowly, that the sixty seconds it would take before the alarm actually went off were going to last a long, long time. I thought by the time the thing really let loose and started ringing, by the time it alerted the security firm and the police, I would probably be unconscious, possibly dead. That deep fall into myself after the first blows to my head, all these impressions that had gone through my mind—all of it had taken no more than maybe a second, maybe two or three. And it was all getting slower and quieter and farther away.

  I struggled up toward the world. I knew they would kill me if I didn't. They would kill me and take Serena, so I struggled up and, all at once, I burst to the surface. The shouting and confusion and the pain of the blows became loud and immediate as time sped up in a great sudden rush. A frenzied strength of panic went through me.

  With a grunt, I lifted up on one side, spilling the man on top of me onto the floor. I got a weak punch in on him before the other son of a bitch stopped kicking me in the back and jumped on me and grabbed my arm. I reached back around with my other arm and grabbed his hair, pulled
his face to me, and sank my teeth into his cheek. He screamed and pushed off my chest and tore himself away, leaving blood and flesh in my mouth. The other guy tried to get back on top of me, clawing at my face, but I elbowed him in the ear, knocking him away.

  Jamal staggered up from the table, staggered to his feet. I glimpsed him from the corner of my eyes, heard his raw, hoarse orders amidst the noise.

  "Get her out of here! Get the gun!" he was rasping. "Get her out. The gun. Under the stove."

  The thug beside me immediately rolled over on his stomach and jammed his hand under the stove, feeling for the gun. I jumped on him, grabbed him by the collar, pulled him back. The other thug grabbed me and the three of us went to the floor again, grappling, tearing, punching, gouging at one another.

  Something almost like quiet descended on the room then. The alarm went on whistling its warning and Jamal rasped orders. Serena let out strangled sobs and gasps as she fought to get free. On the floor, we were grunting and panting in our struggle. But most of the shouting was over now, and it seemed uncannily still. It was eerie; frightening. As if all this turmoil were going on unheard, unseen, unknown, in the midst of a vacuum, or in the one lighted place at the center of a vast surrounding darkness. It felt to me as if my mother's kitchen were floating in emptiness and space, and that, scrabbling and clutching and scratching on its fake brick linoleum floors, I was, in fact, battling for every piece of living territory left in all the world.

  And I was losing the battle. The two men overpowered me now. They forced themselves on top of me. They held me down. I fought with one, our arms tangling and flailing. The other, meanwhile, reared up on his knees and shoved his hand into his sweatpants pocket, dug for something, came out with it: a folding knife. He worked to open the blade so he could sink it into me. At the same time, Jamal was trying to get around us to the stove.

  "Hold him," he was saying. "Hold him!"—and his hoarse voice was very clear in the grunting, whistling silence. "I'll get the gun."

  Over by the sink, meanwhile, the man who had Serena began to drag her out of the room. Her feet kicked out and she twisted in his grip as he pulled her backward across the threshold. I heard her shrieking through clenched teeth, the sound muffled deep in her throat. Then she must've realized it was hopeless. She cried out—wailed—in her rage and despair:

  "No! Jason! Daddy!"

  I threw the two thugs off me. It was easy. It really was. I don't know whether anyone will believe me or not. Even I look back at it and think my memory must be false or overblown. But the way it comes back to me: I heard Serena cry out, and all at once I was rising off the floor and the thugs were flying across the room to the left and right of me as if I were some kind of comic-book superhero and they my merely human foes.

  In an instant, I was on my feet. I could see Serena already disappearing into the shadows of the living room. The man who was dragging her was already just a cowled phantom in the darkness behind her. I tried to go after them, but the two thugs I had thrown aside lunged at me again. I grabbed one by the throat and drove him down onto the kitchen table. The other came with me as I moved and I turned and drove back again, shouldering him hard into the counter by the stove.

  I heard Serena wail my name one more time. I gave a guttural snarl in my desperation to reach her.

  Then the alarm went off and every other sound was swept away.

  Oh, it was a wild and clamorous cry—a hellacious clarion. It filled the kitchen. It filled the brain. The shattering din of it flooded the house and became the medium through which we moved. The very first blast of it was so overwhelming that it seemed to me everything froze—we all froze—and then went on only thickly, slowly, slogging through the noise like fugitives in a dream.

  Once again, I tried to charge after Serena but once again the thugs jumped on me, dragged me back. I thought I saw the flash of the knife blade. But now Jamal was coming at us, too. The thought-pulverizing volume of the alarm must've panicked him. He'd abandoned his search for the gun. He was waving his hand urgently. His eyes were big and white beneath his hood. His shouts were lost beneath the siren, but I could see his mouth forming the words "Go! Go! Go!"

  The two thugs tore away from the fight—so suddenly I staggered back a step. They rushed out the door, into the dark, into the living room after Serena. Jamal was right behind them. I tried to throw him aside or climb over him—anything to get by. But Jamal turned and harried me with punches, knocking me back against the sink. I grabbed his throat as he tried to get away, and he grabbed mine. For an instant—it could only have been an instant—we twirled around the room locked together like that, the siren screaming and screaming. Our faces were close together. The hatred in his expression was startling, shocking—as if a beast of fire had leapt out of nowhere into life.

  And yet, I felt no hatred for him in return. I remember that clearly. Clutching his throat, spinning around the room in his clutches, I had no feeling about him in particular at all. The philosophy he stood for, the murder he may have done, the beating he had given Serena, even the mass slaughter he was planning—it was as if these were just sad facts of the world to me, symptoms of its soul's disease, like a leper's ugly sores or his contagion. I didn't hate the man for them at all. I simply wanted to destroy him—crush him, kill him, whatever it took—just do the job that had to be done and finish him so I could get free and rescue Serena.

  Then we broke apart, flew apart as if hurled from each other's hands by a force outside ourselves. My fingers slipped off his neck as I slammed backward into the refrigerator. He stumbled fast away until he caught himself against the stove. He coiled there with his cowled face twisted, and I thought he would leap at me again. But the next moment, he darted out of the room, darted into the same shadows in which Serena had disappeared.

  I shoved off the fridge and went after him. Out of the light of the kitchen and into the dark living room. Through the dim shape of the living-room archway into the den at the back of the house. The siren kept howling, howling and howling, through the rooms, through my skull. I reached the den's threshold just as Jamal banged out through the backdoor screen. I ran after him. Caught the screen as it swung shut. Knocked it open again and tumbled out into the backyard.

  The night smelled of autumn and of rain. The air was cool and misty and serene. I saw Jamal's shadow flitting from the glow that fell out of the kitchen window and sinking into the black of the cloudy night. I ran after him across the grass, slipping—nearly falling—on the damp leaves. The siren went on caterwauling behind me, insanely loud still, but softer out here, almost bearable.

  I could hardly see at all, but I knew my way. The pachysandra patch was to my left. When I was a boy, it almost seemed a living beast to me the way it devoured our tennis balls and whiffle balls and never gave them back. The long-trunked sycamore was to my right—the Counting Tree, we called it, because it was the official spot to stand and lay your arm across its ridged bark and hide your face in the crook of your elbow while you counted off the time in hide-and-seek. And straight ahead maybe thirty yards was the old post fence on which, when we were ten years old, I once sat with Susan Patterson and asked permission to kiss her freckled cheek. There was a hedge on the other side of the fence and a gate in the fence where the hedge broke. It led out to Chatham Road around the corner from my house. I heard the gate squeal as it opened and heard it fall shut with a click and a thud—sounds I could have identified in my sleep. Jamal was younger and faster than I was. He had already crossed the yard and caught up to his companions.

  I put on an extra burst of speed, raced after him even faster. In my acceleration, I slipped again, the slick leaves sending my feet shooting out from under me. This time I did fall, went down on my shoulder, the jolt of the impact aching in my bones. I slid several feet through the grass and dirt and leaves—then leapt up again without stopping. Even so, as I regained my feet, I could see they'd reached their car. I could see the interior light of it go on through the hedge's leav
es. I could hear the engine revving to life.

  I made the gate as quickly as I could, but I knew I'd lost her. I yanked the gate open, strangling on helplessness and suspense and rage. Everything in me wanted to get to her, to help her, to stop them from taking her away.

  I worked the gate open without thinking. I dashed through onto the sidewalk.

  Headlights snapped on and blinded me. The great green Cadillac roared and screeched and sped away, already passing me as I stepped off the curb into the street. I ran—ran after its red taillights, my arms flailing, my hands clawing at the air. I ran until I couldn't breathe and the big car was pulling farther and farther away from me.

  Finally I floundered to a stop, bent over with my hands braced against my knees. I panted and gasped for breath. I could still hear the alarm wailing from my mother's house. And there were new sirens now, police cars, approaching fast. And there was the engine of the Caddy, too, gunning, shifting gears—fading rapidly as the car sped away through the streets of the town I knew by heart.

  FRIDAY

  The Last Day Begins

  I told the police detective everything. It sounded crazy, even to me. Murder in the swamp; an evil university professor; kidnapping; a terrorist attack in the making; and, oh yes, Patrick Piersall—that was the kicker.

  "The admiral of the Universal?" the detective mused. "What was his name again?"

  "Kane..."

  "Augustus Kane, right. That was a hell of a show. I used to love that show."

  The detective seemed a patient and jovial civil servant but I thought I sensed a rigidly precise system of moral accountancy at work in him. I suspected he had the Official Catholic Church Graph drawn inside his mind on which he could chart the right and wrong of every thought and action. Maybe it was just his name that gave me that idea—Detective Fitzgerald. But I thought I saw it in his steely blue gaze as well, and in the pattern of ridges dug into the pasty flesh of his rather enormous face. The smile lines around his mouth subtly became squint lines around his eyes, as if he could sit there and laugh with you while sending a narrow look into your soul at the same time.