He moved away from the Süe et Mare suite and turned his back to her and went to a sideboard of Macassar ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which was flanked by windows. He stood gazing at a Tamara Lempicka portrait that hung above the sideboard: a stylishly dressed man portrayed against a backdrop of skyscrapers, all rendered in the artist’s signature style, cold and painterly and powerful.
He said, “Those graced with such an implanted conscience will never be troubled by doubt or guilt, because they will know that they are always doing the best and right thing. They will not know worry or restlessness of spirit. There will be nothing left in the world to fear.”
Arms weary, Jane had lowered the Heckler. “You put it in such high-minded terms, but it sounds low and vile to someone who knows about the Aspasia girls, the rayshaws, the cruelty with which you’ve used them.” She raised the pistol again. “Sit the hell down.”
He returned to the bergère beside the Tiffany dragonfly lamp, but he did not obey her. “There is no cruelty in what we’ve done, Jane. The world is full of people whose lives have no purpose. They wander through their meaningless existence, often in despair. We select those who are aimless and unhappy—and then we remove the reasons for their unhappiness and give them purpose. Or in the case of your husband, we remove those who are a threat to the future as it needs to be if the masses are to have a chance at contentment.”
As earlier, the billionaire cupped a hand to one ear and stood as if listening to something inaudible to her. “Do you hear destiny whispering, Jane?”
She squeezed off a shot, not at him but at the antique bergère. The upholstery on the chair split, and a brief exhalation of thin smoke issued from the bullet hole. “Sit down and discuss with me the specifics of what you’ve done, or I’ll wreck your precious décor and then break you piece by piece in as painful a way as I can imagine. And I’ve got a vivid imagination.”
His hand still cupped to his ear, he said, “Don’t you hear the whispering, Jane? All the whispering in the whispering room? If you don’t hear it yet, you soon will.”
With that, he turned his back to her and walked to the open balcony doors.
Following close behind him, she said, “Stop right there.”
Instead of obeying, he dashed across fifteen feet of balcony, vaulted the decorative steel railing, and leaped into nine stories of air empty of all else but rain.
29
* * *
Jane arrived at the railing even as David James Michael took flight, the heels of his designer sneakers for an instant within her reach, and she expected some stunt, a quick-deploying parachute, but there was no stunt, only his diving form, arms spread in mimicry of an eagle, seeming to glide rather than plummet through the tinseled rain. Their windows blinded by the blackout, the nearer buildings brooded over the eclipsed street, where in a false dusk the flooding of gutters could be discerned largely by necklaces of phosphorescent foam borne on the racing waters. In witness to the fall, leaning over the railing, Jane stood breathless, and it seemed as though her heart stopped as well, so that she stood in a condition of temporary death, oblivious of the chill and of the rain beating against her, no sound audible and no scent detectable, no senses functioning except the sense of sight. From the ninth-floor deck to the street, through a hundred feet or more of gravity’s inescapable attraction, strobed by a flicker of lightning, the billionaire descended as would have any pauper. He appeared to hit the front steps of Far Horizons headfirst and tumbled down them, shattered limbs flailing so loosely that he might have been a straw-stuffed effigy of a man tossed off the ninth floor as a hoax.
Jane’s heart knocked hard, as though restarting with a stutter, and breath came cold and wet, and she smelled ozone cleaved from the air by lightning. Her deafness relented when a wave of city sounds broke across her, including the squeal of brakes as traffic in the street below reacted to the impact of the jumper.
She holstered the pistol and turned from the railing and ran into the apartment, past the wealth of art and antiques, not to the alcove that contained D.J.’s private elevator but to the steel door that opened onto the hidden stairs. She took the stairs two at a time, bounding off each landing onto the next flight, pain flaring in her wound, descending through the fluorescent glare that now seemed as bright as a police chopper’s searchlight, certain that she had little time before the street in front of Far Horizons would be snarled with traffic and then sealed off by arriving authorities.
At the bottom of the stairs, she pulled open the door, stepped into the maintenance closet with its shelf of cleaning supplies and sealants, where the push brooms and other janitorial tools lay on the floor as she had left them. Through another door into the garage. Quickly to the BMW that belonged to Henry Waldlock, who, naked and duct-taped and zip-tied, waited for her return.
She thought she had lost the keys, but she’d only forgotten in which pocket she stowed them. The gate seemed to take a long time to decouple from its electronic locks and roll aside. She followed the out-ramp to the street, switching on windshield wipers, headlights, dreading the clotted vehicles that she expected to find.
A few cars were angled to the curb on each side of the street, and passing traffic slowed as drivers gawked. She avoided looking at the broken body on the steps, having already seen too many suicides and supposed suicides. A gap in traffic allowed her to exit the driveway, cross the nearer lane, and head downhill.
If it appeared to witnesses that she’d left the scene in haste, one of them might have thought to get the license number, in which case there could be an all-points bulletin issued sooner than later.
She drove as fast as she dared, barrages of rain bulleting the windshield as she cruised out of the power failure into precincts where lights glowed at windows. Here life appeared to be proceeding as usual, though all the busy people were in fact imperiled as they, in their ignorance, could never know. The current storm was a mere inconvenience, but the storm of change that D. J. Michael had set in motion might still be oncoming, and when it broke, it was likely to sweep away every man, woman, and child, as the billionaire himself had been swept away.
30
* * *
By the time Jane returned to Pacifica, a hard wind had followed the rain out of the northwest, blowing dead needles and cones from the pines, scarlet flowers from the flame trees, silver-blue dollar-coin leaves from eucalyptuses, shakes from shingled roofs, rolling empty collection-day trash containers along the streets, tumbling drained soda cans, fighting an invisible bull with a great cape of plastic torn from a construction-site fence.
Rather than risk driving to Henry Waldlock’s Greek revival house, she parked a block from her Explorer Sport and walked to it and used a burner phone to make a 911 call in which she identified herself and said that the cost-control analyst needed to be freed from the water closet in his master bathroom. She ventured out of the SUV and found a street drain and dropped the phone into it.
With the wound in her side burning as if she had been branded, she set out on a seventy-mile drive that would take her across the Golden Gate Bridge to the town of Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, to the home of Dr. Porter Walkins, who weeks earlier had treated both a badly wounded ally of hers, Dougal Trahern, and Jane herself; it was he who dressed the scratch she incurred in a confrontation with a coyote, who began treating her with human rabies immune globulin and human diploid cell vaccine.
If he trusted in the innocence of his patient, Dr. Walkins would treat a gunshot wound without filing the required police report. He was the kind of man who could watch the news and separate the small grain of truth—if there was one—from the great mass of chaff. He believed in Jane after the violent events at the Shenneck ranch in Napa, earlier in the month, and she hoped he would still believe in her after whatever media firestorm ensued from the death of David James Michael.
By the time she reached the Golden Gate, the diminished rain needled through thick fog incoming off the ocean. The wind shaped the mist in
to phantom forms, which it harried west to east, as if the ghosts of countless sailors drowned at sea were returning to shore, an exodus from many thousands of watery graves in some Last Days accounting of the human experience and a reckoning of its debts.
Traffic crept across the great expanse of cabled red steel, the aureoled headlights of oncoming vehicles tunneling the fog. In that passage, the Pacific unseen on her left, the bay and city shrouded on her right, Jane Hawk began at last to grapple with the mystery of what had happened to D. J. Michael.
Cornered by a hundred policemen dispatched by prosecutors with ironclad proof of his crimes against humanity, the billionaire would have done nothing more drastic than summon his attorneys and set aside ten million for his defense. No narcissist with his enormous arrogance would admit the least wrongdoing or readily accept defeat, and he certainly would not despair to the extent of taking his life.
Do you hear destiny whispering, Jane?
When he had spoken of destiny and the whispering room, had he suggested by the cupping of his ear that he could hear microwave instructions in some receptive chamber of his own brain? Or had he meant that an entire world of people—in the service of an elite caste—would one day be accessible to be marshaled simultaneously for whatever task their controllers wished them to undertake?
Whichever D. J. Michael might have meant, it seemed clear that a faction within the Arcadians had conspired to sedate him without his knowledge and inject him with a nanotech control mechanism. In the history of revolution, no king had ever been deposed by a means more sinister than this, more intimate. Those would-be gods who had conceived this new pantheon, lacking the power of monotheism, were the residents of a modern Olympus where they not only ruled but also conspired against one another, proving themselves no more elevated than the members of a street gang contesting with knives and guns for dominion of a worn-down neighborhood or public-housing project.
Just north of San Pablo Bay, the fog feathered away and Jane drove out of the rain. The sky remained low, trailing thin, gray rags like grave clothes worn to tatters by the restless wandering of some cold and withered decedent whose spirit would not depart it. To her, just now, this land that was so fertile and these communities that were so vital—Novato and Petaluma and Rohnert Park—looked bleak, shadowed even on this sunless day, haunted not by the dead but by the ghosts of days to come, by the destiny that whispered to David James Michael.
She understood that the reasons for her mood were many, having accumulated over nearly five months since Nick’s death. But there was one among the many that most acutely affected her.
Don’t you hear the whispering, Jane? All the whispering in the whispering room? If you don’t hear it yet, you soon will.
The billionaire had been confident that the day of Jane’s induction into the legions of the controlled was near at hand, when she would be like unto the citizens of Iron Furnace.
She found herself returning in memory to the previous night, when she’d been in Henry Waldlock’s spare bedroom while he passed the evening unaware of her presence, watching some thundering movie about giant robots or whatever. She had braced the bedroom door with a straight-backed chair before daring to catch a few hours of sleep.
The door had still been braced shut when she woke and went to Waldlock’s room to chloroform and bind him.
There was no way into that spare bedroom except through the barricaded door.
The bathroom adjacent to those guest quarters had not served two bedrooms. No one could have reached her through the bath.
She hadn’t checked to be sure that the windows were locked. She should have checked. But it was ludicrous to suppose some villain with the skills of a cat burglar had come upon her through a window.
Anyway, she had slept because she was exhausted, not because she had been sedated.
The only place she could have been slipped a sedative without her knowledge was at the restaurant in Pacifica, where she’d eaten an early dinner before going to see Waldlock. But no one had known she was in town; no one could have anticipated where she would dine.
Paranoia. Understandable but dangerous. If she’d been injected, she would not have gone after D. J. Michael. She would be controlled. Unless there was a new generation of control mechanism, one that took longer than a few hours to self-assemble in the brain…
In Santa Rosa, she parked in a residential neighborhood, a block from her destination. The street was patinated with leaves applied to the pavement by the recent wind and rain, and the trees still dripped.
Dr. Porter Walkins was that rarity among contemporary doctors, a general practitioner whose offices were attached to his residence. Jane knew he took his lunch at home, during an hour when he allowed no patient appointments, but she didn’t know if that hour started at noon or twelve-thirty.
She sat in the Explorer for twenty minutes before setting out on foot for the address he’d given her when he had treated her for possible exposure to rabies. The pain that had subsided during the drive from San Francisco burned anew with her activity. One block seemed like three. Given her bedraggled appearance and considering that her disguise had been taken from her by the shrieking ape and the rain, she was relieved when she reached the physician’s house without encountering anyone.
She went around to the back of the white Victorian with blue-and-white gingerbread, mounted the porch steps, and saw the doctor through a kitchen window. He was alone and appeared to be making a sandwich. It was 12:35 when she knocked on the door.
31
* * *
Although only fifty-something, Porter Walkins had a moral code, a sense of duty, and a contempt for ideology that were better suited to a time three-quarters of a century prior to the current age, and he dressed to complement his character. Elbow patches on a tweed sport coat. White shirt with bow tie, the tie not a clip-on. Gray wool pants held up with striped suspenders. Highly polished wingtips.
Trim and fit, with a careworn and caring face out of a Norman Rockwell portrait of a country doctor, he was always of good humor. But something about him, perhaps some guarded aspect of his hazel eyes, suggested that he hid from the world a persistent melancholy.
With his receptionist out to lunch, he treated Jane in his surgery. When she stripped to her underwear, he seemed not at all concerned about the two Heckler & Koch .45s. She stretched out on the examination table while he assessed and washed the wound, which he found more serious than she did. He applied local anesthetic and closed the bullet-torn flesh with stitches.
“They’ll dissolve over time,” he said. “No need to have them removed.”
On a previous occasion, when she had asked him why he risked treating patients off the record, which could result in the loss of his license to practice, he had said, I watch the news, Mrs. Hawk, by which he had meant not her story specifically, but the news of a world sliding into darkness.
Now he said, “Did you give as good as you got?”
“Better. But not enough, never enough. It’s an uphill slog, and I’m beginning to think I’m just a flatland runner.”
“You’re suffering exhaustion. And I believe you lost more than a pint of blood.”
“I’ve often donated a pint. A pint is nothing.”
As she sat up on the edge of the exam table, the doctor raised one eyebrow and said acerbically, “My exact words were ‘more than a pint.’ Because you weren’t considerate enough to diligently collect the blood for my professional measurement, I think it wise that you don’t self-diagnose the loss as ‘nothing.’ You should rest for a couple days in a room upstairs, where I can check on you from time to time.”
“Stay in your house?”
“I’m not suggesting we share a bed, Mrs. Hawk. I may look like a swinging playboy, but I assure you I’m not.”
“No, I’m sorry, I only meant—you can’t have the country’s most-wanted criminal staying in your house.”
“Most wanted, perhaps, but I suspect not criminal.”
“Anyway, no offense, but if I have to rest, I’d rather rest where I can be with my boy, my son.”
With a hypodermic syringe, Walkins punctured the membrane on an ampule of some drug and drew out a dose.
“What’re you doing?” she demanded.
Her alarm puzzled him. “It’s an antibiotic. Considering your exploits as I know them, I’m surprised you’d flinch at a needle.”
“It’s not the needle. But can’t I take pills instead?”
“You’ll also be taking pills, Mrs. Hawk. Since I have received a fine medical-school education, which you have not, I suggest you say, ‘Yes, Doctor,’ and avoid the likelihood of bacteremia, toxemia, and life-threatening sepsis. And may I assume you’ve been self-injecting the rabies vaccine according to the schedule I gave you.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Truthfully, now?”
She grimaced. “Yes, Mother, I have been self-injecting the rabies vaccine.”
Using a length of rubber tubing as a tourniquet, he searched for a vein in her right arm, said she had excellent venal formation, swabbed her skin with alcohol, and gave her the injection.
As Jane watched the fluid leave the barrel of the syringe, she resisted a swoon, darkness encroaching at the edges of her vision. When Porter Walkins extracted the needle, she passed out and would have fallen off the exam table on which she sat if he had not caught her in his arms.
When she regained consciousness less than a minute later, she conceded the extent of her exhaustion and, once dressed, allowed him to escort her to a room upstairs.
32
* * *
In the five days since Jolie Tillman had escaped being injected with a nanotech control mechanism by her mother and sister, she’d become uncharacteristically antisocial, as if all of humankind was now suspect, and she had taken to spending most of her time with the horses. Strong as she was, the girl had been cried-out in two days, but nevertheless grieving and depressed beyond Luther’s ability to console her.