“No, Mickey, your father is not going away because of something you did. He would like nothing better than to be here right now. He loves you very much and, were it in his power, he would be here with you. The fact is, though, he cannot.”
“Why?”
The quavering tone in Mickey’s voice told me that his self-doubt had not been vanquished. I dropped down into a squat and rested both of my hands on his right knee. “Mickey, your father knew that in the time you were taken away from him that you were hurt.”
“I am all better.”
“Yes, Mickey, you are better. You had your physical ills healed, and your father was happy for that. He remembered how you were and was very proud of how you managed all alone to go through what healed you. He was proud and he was happy because you became more than he ever hoped you would. But, at the same time, he was sad.”
“Why?”
“Why?” I hesitated, as faint chords started to resonate through me. I felt outrage at the way Pygmalion had manipulated the boy. His body had been healed and brought forward to adulthood, then changed and modified, yet the boy had not been intellectually made into a man. Pygmalion used Mickey’s innocence to manufacture a killing machine that did not have to wrestle with the morality of what it did because it had not matured enough to understand that much of right and wrong.
I suddenly realized two things. The first was that Fiddleback had manipulated me as much as Pygmalion had Mickey. Fiddleback had just taken longer and been more careful so I never realized that what I knew as existence was not normal. I, too, had been playing games in accepting roles and eliminating targets. I had avoided moral conundrums by holding myself to a different standard: I did what my master asked because that was right in my mind. Mickey had done the same, with Pygmalion using his lack of sophistication as a shortcut to the same ends that Fiddleback had achieved with me through a lifelong program.
The second thing I discovered in that moment was that the missing piece of me had been compassion. I had never known it, nor had I needed it in my time before Coyote so radically changed my life. Even since the transformation, I had not been compassionate. Any act of kindness I performed had come out of my need to enhance my power base. When, so long ago, I forced Rock Pell to give money to the family that had harbored me after my escape from the Reapers, I had done so to dominate him, not to be kind to them. The job offers for this operation, while generous, had been to further my ends.
Coyote, my predecessor, had always asked those he helped to “pay forward.” He made them look at helping others for totally selfless reasons. He had done the same with all those he had aided. Finally, in order to position me to be able to take down Fiddleback and now Pygmalion, he had committed the ultimate act of compassion and allowed himself to be killed so I could give life to so many others.
“Mickey, while Pygmalion took away your problems, he also stole your childhood. You may not understand it now, or for years to come, but he took from you something that no one can replace. That made your father sad, and it made him angry. It made him determined to fight so Pygmalion could never do that to anyone else.
“Your father fought long and hard to stop Pygmalion. Your father helped save many others, but he could not save himself. Still, he hurt Pygmalion. He slowed Pygmalion down.”
Little-boy eyes looked out from the man’s face. “He did not stop Pygmalion.”
“He did not. Your father was hurt, badly hurt.” I saw puzzlement in Mickey’s eyes. “Pygmalion’s creatures play rough.”
The boy-man snapped his right arm out faster than a striking snake and withdrew it in an eyeblink. “I can play rough.”
I smothered the part of me that wanted to welcome Mickey as a full ally and shook my head. “I know, but now is not the time to play rough, Mickey. Your father would not have wanted it, nor do I. I do, on the other hand, need your help.”
Mickey looked up expectantly, his eyes bright.
“Mr. Crowley and I are going to go on a trip. We want to find the place where Pygmalion took you.”
“The bad place.”
“The bad place, yes.”
Mickey nodded. “It is a long way away.”
“I know, but we think we know a shortcut. I need you to tell me if we are right or not, okay?”
“Yes.”
I gave him an open smile. “Mickey, some people may not understand why we are trying to find Pygmalion. They may try to hurt us.”
“They will play rough.”
“Yes.” I looked at him, seeing the killing machine I might have once become, and I shivered. “You can protect yourself, but don’t hurt them. Don’t break them. Do you understand?”
He nodded his head solemnly. “My father said I was a big boy now and had to act like one.”
“Good,” I said in a convincing tone. Mickey clearly had no idea that big boys play with guns and play plenty rough. As I looked at his naive smile and felt the willingness to please roll off him like the scent of fresh-baked bread filling a kitchen, I had no desire to enlighten him. Pygmalion had stolen his physical youth, and I was not going to antique his spirit.
I didn’t know if that was compassion, but I knew there wasn’t a Dark Lord in existence that wouldn’t have missed the chance to add to Mickey’s misery. I assumed that as long as what I did was the exact opposite of what a Dark Lord would do, I could not be going far wrong.
I felt the void in my soul close. I smiled at Mickey. “C’mon, let’s get some supplies together and then we’ll be off.”
“To the bad place.”
“Right, once really quick now, and then, very soon, again...”
Mickey’s eyes narrowed. “We will make everyone good?”
The idea of making a Dark Lord good struck me as likely as Dan Quayle staging a Nixonesque political resurrection. “We’ll do our best, Mickey.” If not, we’ll make a Dark Lord dead and that, in my book, is good in and of itself.
Chapter 26
Crowley and I both realized that the most difficult part of the penetration of the secret construction site would be keeping Mickey in line. Five-year-olds are not known for their attention span. Had Crowley and I been alone, we would have just become two workers at the site and entered it along with everyone else. While Mickey might have passed for an adult worker because of his size, his wide-eyed wonderment and propensity to giggle would betray him in an instant.
The plan we decided to adopt was as outrageous as it was daring. Using Sin’s knowledge of Build-more and his connections with people who could manufacture Build-more identification cards, we produced one for me that billed me as Simon “Mike” Michaels from the Auditing and Fiscal Procurement Department. Sin said project managers considered AFP the corporate equivalent of the IRS, and would sooner give lepers full body massages than stay in my presence overlong.
For Mickey and Crowley, we came up with another set of identities. Mickey was to play Mickey, a retarded young man who had the mind of a 5-year-old. Crowley became Damien Collins, the trustee of a substantial trust fund settled upon the boy by his father’s family. Each of them were given visitor badges, and Mickey had a nametag that read “Hello, I’m Mickey!” on the lapel of his blue suit jacket. We swapped the Heidi Stiletto for a more benign design featuring a cartoon mouse that both pleased Mickey and made it much easier for him to remember his new role.
By the time we had obtained our IDs, changed clothes and gotten a little sleep, Jytte had pinpointed the construction site as being just a little south and east of Skull Mountain in the Nevada desert. That placed it within the old Department of Energy test site for underground nuclear explosions. I doubted that they were using one of the holes blown by a nuke for their facility, but the location doubtlessly cut down on the number of casual visitors.
We took the Lorica CV-27 Peregrine from Phoenix all the way to Las Vegas, then rented a Range Rover II and headed north on 1-95. Forty miles out of Indian Springs, we turned off north and rumbled over 15 miles of twisty mountain roads
to the little hamlet of Mercury. The Rover handled the road fine, but I knew our journey had been made much easier because the roadway had clearly been enlarged very recently.
Mercury should have been a ghost town. Most of the buildings dated from before the last century, back when silver mining provided the wealth that drove the community. When the mines in the area played out, it had begun to die, only to spring up again in the post-Depression era as a winter haven for those who did not like the idea of shoveling snow. Newer buildings outnumbered old, but their condition was little better than those built before the 20th century.
The nuclear tests in middle of the last century all but killed it off again, leaving only the stubborn or foolhardy to reside there. With the construction project, though, a new prosperity hit the area. Mercury became a boomtown again with a few of the buildings sporting new coats of paint and hastily created signs to let the construction workers know these were brothels and saloons. These colorful buildings made the whole town look as if it were a half-colorized movie, with everything else done in the aged sepia tone of dirt and adobe.
We arrived in the middle of the night. As a result, beyond the hills that served as a backdrop to the town, we saw an artificial dawn to the north. I pointed the Rover toward it, threading our way carefully through the crowds of men wandering back and forth across Mercury’s main street. Another 20 miles by road beyond Mercury, we came around a bend and saw Pygmalion’s new base for the first time.
Even having seen the plans for it, I was not prepared for the sight of the whole thing. Because of our perspective, the project reminded me of some mechanistic ant farm. A huge hole had been gouged out of the earth and, because massive equipment had to be installed, it had been left open. Massive banks of lights — more than enough to light a dozen Wrigley Fields — turned day into night at the site, which had to be a total reversal for workers from Eclipse. The building itself was being constructed from back to front, bottom to top, with the lowest two floors already complete and hidden from prying eyes by concrete walls. The rest of the building already had the floors poured and, in certain areas, looked to have been finished.
Crowley looked over at me and shook his head. “It’s incredible. Out here, in this desert, he could have a couple of army divisions in that thing and no one would ever know.”
I had to agree with Crowley’s assessment. The steel-girder outline for the superstructure looked positively puny compared to the rest of the underground facility.
When complete, the above-ground portion of the project would look like a small office building or a very rich person’s dream house built far away from the pressures of civilization. I had no doubt that after the hole had been filled in and the desert landscaping had been restored, no one would give it a second thought.
I pointed to the high-tension wires coming in from the south. “I guess the geothermal generators are not on-line yet. That must be drawing power from Hoover Dam.”
“Agreed, though blowing the lines may not take the facility off-line, it might just be that they’ve not powered up the ‘therms because MacNeal is getting a kickback on the power he’s using and billing to Pygmalion, not because they are not functional.”
“Good point.” I braked as we came down the hill and hit the first checkpoint. A man in a red-plaid flannel shirt yawned and looked squint-eyed at my identification. He waved us on through without comment, so I headed off on the straight and very level road to the second checkpoint, it lay just beyond a makeshift parking lot, and I gathered workers left their vehicles outside the construction site itself.
An armed, paramilitary guard in a blue-and-gold Build-more uniform waved me to stop and roll down the window. I did so with a smile and presented my identification. “Evening, Mr. Kwan. Quiet night?”
The guard glanced at my ID, then up at my face. “Yes, sir, it is quiet.” He looked beyond me at Crowley and Mickey. “I need their IDs.”
“How silly of me, of course.” I handed him the tags he requested, then smiled slyly. “As you can see, Damien, we have very alert and diligent security personnel. They are worth more than every cent we pay them.”
Subtle though my hint was, Kwan stiffened when he got it. He handed the ID cards through the window. “They seem in order. You can park...” he began to explain, looking back toward the lot, but I looked forward toward the building and he followed my line of sight,”... over there near the project manager’s trailer. Mr. Preston is running things during this shift, and I’m sure he’ll want to talk with you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kwan, I appreciate your help.”
I heard him say, “Glad to be of service,” but his eyes told me he hoped I would forget him the second he passed out of sight.
I parked behind the Ford-Revlon Elite beside the trailer, and the three of us alighted from the car. Crowley and Mickey remained beside it, in clear view of the trailer’s window. I mounted the steps quickly, knocked once lightly, then pulled the door open and entered the narrow project brain-center.
A man in a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows looked at me from his vantage point by the window. “Bill Preston. You’re...?”
“Michaels from AFP. I need some hardhats to take them on a tour of the project.”
Preston frowned. “No one told me about a funding tour.”
I gave him an easy if-you-were-meant-to-know-you-would smile. “This is a very quiet little visit. You didn’t hear this from me, but that young man could quite possibly be the illegitimate son of a certain ex-vice-president and a TV journalist.”
The construction chief looked back out the window. “Right height, but he looks too smart. You’d think the vice-president would have more things to do than get caught up in anything dealing with a TV personality.”
“You would think so, wouldn’t you?” I let my voice drop into a conspiratorial whisper. “You know the VP was big on family values, so his family did the right thing. They settled a big trust fund on the kid to take care of him and keep him out of sight. Damien Collins is his trustee. Turns out he’s a chip off the old block — body of a man with the mind of a 5-year-old.”
Preston snorted. “Ignorance breeds true.”
“So it seems.” I began to wonder how Sinclair had escaped having his father’s sensibilities, but I cut off that rumination as troublesome. “I want to give them a quick run-through. The kid likes flashing lights and that sort of high-tech stuff, so I’ll be taking him everywhere.”
“Need a guide?”
I forced a frown, then sheepishly withdrew it in place of a slight smile. “I wouldn’t want to take you away from productive work, would I?”
“No, no, not at all.” He started to point to a shelf of hard-hats, then came around from the blueprint table to pull three off for me. As he did that, I smoothed down the blueprint and saw a large blue splotch toward the west end that read “Fair Lady Electronics.”
Preston saw what I was looking at and smiled nervously. “That section of the project has been finished ahead of schedule. No overruns.”
“Excellent. Don’t worry, Mr. Preston, I’m not here to audit you. At this time.” I nodded to him and took the white plastic hats. “I appreciate your cooperation.”
“If there is anything I can do...” He tried to smile, then looked concerned when a hat brushed my jacket back enough to show him the Colt Krait in my shoulder holster. “Ah, wearing a gun might make some of the boys on the site kind of nervous.”
I raised an eyebrow. “More so than a man from AFP?”
“Ah, no, ah, probably not.”
“I appreciate your concern, Mr. Preston. You might not believe it, but some people in Build-more don’t like folks from AFP. I like to feel secure.”
“I can understand that, sir, the secure part, that is.”
“Indeed, I thought you would. Carry on, Mr. Preston.”
I closed the trailer door behind myself and descended the metal steps. Tossing one hat to each of my companions, I donned mine and hea
ded in toward the center of the base. Away from the trailer, I told Crowley, “Fair Lady Electronics put in several sections of the project. Looks like they have a city-block-sized area on each floor, located approximately beneath the helipad on the surface. I’d like to think that’s what we’re looking for, but I can’t believe Pygmalion would be so stupid as to use that again as a name for a group he has doing business here on Earth.”
“You’re forgetting, my friend, that Dark Lords tend to be arrogant in the extreme. When you take someone as unimaginative as Nicholas Hunt and give him unlimited power, he becomes enamored of his own little inside jokes. What he thinks is clever is really trite. He does what is ultimately stupid because he wants someone to figure things out so they can appreciate how clever he really is.”
“Like movie directors making cameo appearances in movies...” I offered.
“Or authors writing themselves into books or, worse yet, using characters to mouth and espouse the writer’s views on a subject. It’s a form of narcissism they defend as creativity, but it’s really a cheap trick that feeds their egos.” The occultist shrugged. “Pygmalion sees himself as an artiste of sorts and wants to orchestrate everything. Symbols mean a lot to him, hence the naming of his companies.”
Our conversation went on hold as we mounted the gantry to the fourth level of the construction area. Most of the workers ignored us, making the most difficult part of our trek pulling Mickey away from wanting to watch welding operations. We managed that without too much trouble and approached the Fair Lady section of the project. Not unexpectedly, a couple of Build-more security guards stood in the area. They appeared distracted, which bothered me a bit, but as they did not challenge us and had not yet shoved clips into their FN-LAR assault rifles, I assumed our covers had not been broken.
We slipped into the Fair Lady area and Crowley coughed lightly. “We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Look at this.”
What I saw impressed me as well. The whole Fair Lady section formed a shaft that ran from surface to bottom in the facility. While the area was square, a central cylinder roughly 50 feet in diameter linked each level. A guard rail, finished in the same flat, black matte that marked this whole portion of the project, kept people away from a dangerously long drop and surrounded the cylinder entirely except at the northern- and southernmost points.