“Who is this?”
“I
would
say, ‘a friend,’ William, but that would probably raise your hackles. So I shall just say, ‘a concerned party.’ I wanted to warn you. All your plans are about to take a knock.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your plans. I’m sure you have some, a clever fellow like you. Well, somebody is about to stick an unwanted spoke in your wheel. After they’re done, you’ll just be a socially inept mathematician that nobody likes again.”
Colt didn’t trust himself to speak.
“A clever fellow, but perhaps not a
wise
one. Would that be fair to say, William? I think you must know the truth of it yourself. I’ll just tell you, shall I? Daniel Carter. He’s far more dangerous than you’ve given him credit for. Dangerous in ways I don’t think you entirely understand.”
“I’m going to hang up.”
“How kind of you to warn me. But you’re still going to listen, because you’re wondering how I can know these things, which is really the big question. Who I am is small potatoes compared to that. Anyway, here’s the important thing that you need to know. You know Carter already knows about Waite Road, of course. What you
don’t
know is that he intends to do something about it.”
“Do? Do what?”
“Well, he has a very hands-on approach to problem solving, so I’m sure you can figure that out yourself. By this time tomorrow, the Perceptual Twist will be fixed permanently, and you won’t be able to play with it any longer. Bye-bye, dreams of glory.”
“Will you answer even one question?” Colt was trying to think of ways The Twist could help him find who the caller was. Currently, sorting through Scrabble tiles to form a name was the only thing he could think of, but it was so close to casting lots that it repelled him aesthetically, and aesthetics had a lot to do with using The Twist. If it felt wrong, it didn’t work.
“Yes, just the one. And that was the one. If only you’d asked, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ instead. Get some sleep, William. You have a destiny to save in the morning.”
The line went dead.
* * *
This was a bad game. A good game was where you knew all the rules, could work out a viable strategy and the tactics needed to achieve it. A good game was a game where new players didn’t keep appearing in a puff of smoke and fucking everything up.
William Colt sat up in his bed in semidarkness, looking at the phone as if it were going to give him any answers. He was beginning to regret his early moves in the game. He’d told himself that Belasco was just a useful guinea pig and that there was nothing personal in what had happened, but that was bullshit. He could have just chosen somebody at random and there would have been no trail to follow. But no. He’d been an asshole and killed a man with whom he was known to be at loggerheads. Then he went to Atlantic City and showed off. The money hadn’t been enough to make up for exposing himself like that. He should have gone with his first idea of influencing the state lottery; millions of dollars just sitting there for the taking, and nobody would have thought anything of his winning because it would have appeared to be blind luck. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He’d done it for another lottery for a smaller prize, after all.
He’d been drugged with the power of it, though. The discovery that there really is no such thing as “random” was too much to be taken soberly. It meant everyone was wrong about everything, and he was the first man to truly be right. Maybe not the first. Maybe the stories of Simon Magus, Merlin, possibly even Muhammad were about guys just like him, who’d seen how things weren’t like how other people saw them. He’d briefly considered starting a religion. It had made L. Ron Hubbard a rich man, after all, and unlike that old fraud, Colt could actually perform miracles. The trouble was that starting a religion pretty much also meant writing a holy book, and that looked like hard, boring work.
If he couldn’t get rich and powerful through organized religion—a path whose institutionalized mendaciousness didn’t appeal in any case—there was always politics. Still plenty of lying, but at least he wouldn’t have to pretend that he was behoven to some god or another.
Despite which, sometimes he still had little power fantasies about going to Mecca, proclaiming himself the new prophet, and doing all the Muhammad stuff like flying around on a horse. Even if they didn’t buy it, it would be worth it just to see the look on their faces. They wouldn’t buy it, no, but only because he was a pasty white guy. So fucking racist.
Then along came Carter. Colt still wasn’t being smart when he set up the trap in his own house, and provoked Carter by going to the bookstore. Yes, Carter had fallen for it, but then …
But then he’d escaped. Colt couldn’t understand that. He hadn’t slept a full night after he got back, all set to “Oh,
gasp
, Officer! There’s some dead guy in my house! He must have broken in and then had some sort of fit!” but somehow the son of a bitch had gotten out.
How? That question had robbed him of his sleep. The trap was perfect. He’d worked hard to make sure Carter wouldn’t get out. It was impossible, but the trap itself was impossible, and that gave Colt pause. Maybe Carter understood the cube, too? Maybe not completely, but enough to get him out of a bad situation like that.
Impossible
plus
cube
equaled
possible
, as Colt understood all too well.
This wasn’t part of the game. Only Colt was supposed to understand the cube. It was supposed to be a game for one. Everybody else,
everybody
else was supposed to be just a pawn. If Carter was another player, Colt didn’t feel so secure anymore. Carter was an ex-cop. He knew how to beat the shit out of somebody. Colt’s only advantage was the cube, and if Carter had it, too, the playing field tipped in his favor. Colt didn’t want to have the shit beaten out of him.
Carter’s phone call had unnerved him further. Colt had played it cool throughout, but he’d been sweating. The mention of Martin Suydam had been the worst, though. Colt had heard of Suydam—of course he had, he didn’t live in a cave—but he’d just been a serial killer, not something the country was short of.
The media had shut up about the Child-Catcher pretty quickly after he’d died, now that Colt thought about it. He hadn’t been much interested, so he hadn’t cared at the time. After he’d finished talking to Carter, however, he’d gone straight online and searched for whatever he could find.
There wasn’t much. Much less than he would have expected. The arrest had gone wrong, a cop had died, and the surviving cop was one Detective Daniel Carter. That shook Colt. He’d been inclined to blow Carter’s story off as a lie, but that changed his attitude toward it. The reports didn’t have much to say about what Suydam was doing with the stolen kids, but it wasn’t pedophilia, which might have been why they lost interest so rapidly. One news site said he was carrying out occult experiments “akin to those of the Nazis,” which seemed to Colt to be assuming a lot. A conspiracy site specifically said Suydam was carrying out experiments in perception, and even referenced some old Jeffrey Combs horror movie like that was a clinching argument.
Maybe that reference was coincidence, but as a man who could manipulate coincidences, Colt felt very sensitive to those he hadn’t manufactured.
Then Carter had thrown in another hand grenade. Somebody had gone out of their way to get him involved.
Colt would bet serious money that exact “somebody” had just gotten off the phone with him. Which meant his situation was even worse than he’d previously thought. Not only was he not the only player in the game, but he was being played himself. He hesitated before thinking he was a pawn like everyone else, but he knew, despite finding the keys of destiny, he was not entirely in control of his own.
This sucked. It sucked so fucking hard. He had to start steering again, get himself out of this. The voice on the phone had said Carter was going to hit Waite Road. Colt couldn’t countenance that; he was sure there were other viable sites in the world, but he didn’t know where any were and he would be vulnerable while he looked. Again he cursed himself for going too fast when the cube’s power was new to him. Why did he kill those people? Just stupid showing off. Everything was going too fast and it was his own fault.
He had no choice. He had to defend Waite Road, despite knowing he was dancing to the voice’s tune. It was an unavoidable bottleneck in his options, though. If his political plan was going to go anywhere, Colt needed Waite Road untouched. Once Carter was no longer a problem, Colt would have breathing space to broaden those options so he never got cornered like this again. Find the voice and deal with the voice; that was next.
Good. Good. He was planning. It was all good.
Colt controlled his breathing, and lay back down. Sleep took some time to come.
Lovecraft didn’t like going to Rothwell’s home, largely because it felt like she was leaving Earth to get there. The house was almost stereotypically 1 percenter; a house too big for one man so he filled it with next to nothing at all. The lack of books in the place made her wince inwardly every single time she visited. She had trouble trusting anyone who failed to feed their inner self properly. She’d gently ragged him about it once, and had been wise to do so gently, for he became very defensive on the subject, did the “dead trees” speech, and said he kept his library on his iPad. She later had an opportunity to check out this voluminous virtual library and discovered it consisted of several financial journal subscriptions and an unread
Fifty Shades of Grey
. She
was
sure she was glad he hadn’t read it, though, and surreptitiously deleted it from the device so he didn’t get any ideas about using it as a manual for how rich, handsome guys should act.
After their last meeting, she’d momentarily harbored suspicions he might have gotten himself a new copy after all. There’d been silence between them and it seemed likely that their relationship had hit the buffers and that was that. A little earlier than Lovecraft had been anticipating, but not something that surprised her unduly. The call had been a small surprise. That it had come from Rothwell’s mother was a much larger one.
Elise Rothwell was not of the usual
Steel Magnolias
school of matriarchy. She was a small, quiet woman, but she knew her mind and she was smart. It had been her suggestion that had put the idea of the Senate into her son’s mind in the first place, not because she had any great interest in politics herself but simply because she saw it as an obvious career for a good-looking man with charisma, money, and connections. Besides, politics was the family business. It simply wasn’t normal to go into politics because one held strong political views, in Elise’s opinion. That would be setting a dangerous precedent.
Elise had never warmed to Lovecraft, and the feeling was mutual. Lovecraft wondered if race played into the mild animosity she felt from Rothwell’s mother, but finally decided no, it was because she was politically wrong for Elise’s only child. Lovecraft had watched with a strange mix of amusement and dismay as Elise had fought to stop her eyes from rolling when she heard Lovecraft ran a bookstore. That mild animosity made Elise reaching out to her all the more surprising, and distinctly worrying.
There wasn’t much foreplay after Lovecraft got to the house. Elise met her, greeted her stiffly, took her to the kitchen, made her a coffee
herself
(Lovecraft noted the housekeeper was missing, and the sense of disturbance in the working of the household deepened), and then said, “Kenneth isn’t well.”
Lovecraft remained silent.
“Have you noticed anything out of the normal recently, dear? You see him quite frequently. Anything out of the normal?” She said it with a sudden false smile and a spastic gesture to flick away a wisp of hair at her temple.
Lovecraft realized with a small shock and a tiny, unbidden thrill of
schadenfreude
that Elise, glacial Elise whose every sentence to Lovecraft had always carried the subtext “You are not good enough for my son, and I live for the day he throws you aside,” was frightened. Honestly, soul-deep frightened. Then Lovecraft thought what it would take to provoke that, and her pleasure in Elise’s fear faded away.
“What’s happened to Ken, Mrs. Rothwell?” Sometimes she liked to provoke
la grande femme de la société
by calling her “Elise,” enjoying the flicker of that false smile raised to hide irritation. Now instead that smile was deployed to conceal panic, and it was doing a poor job of it.
“He isn’t well,” Elise repeated. Her tone was pettish—
Didn’t you hear me the first time?
“I think it may be overwork. He’s been spending so much time working on his campaign.”
Lovecraft had been kept assiduously away from the campaign; she didn’t have much sense that he’d been slaving over it, though. This was just supposed to be a trial run, after all.
At least, it was as far as Elise knew. She didn’t know about Colt. She didn’t know that unless Carter’s plan worked, her little boy was on a jet-propelled toboggan all the way to the White House, and wouldn’t that be nice? No, Elise did not have the first idea how much and what sort of stress her son was under.
Or perhaps she did. She turned her face toward Lovecraft, that fake smile writhing like a snake on a griddle, and Lovecraft saw the torment lying beneath it. “The thing is, dear,” said Elise, the forced lightness in her voice killing both herself and Lovecraft, “I think Kenneth has had a breakdown.” She angled her head to the other side. It was so mannered, she looked like an automaton. “A
mental
breakdown.”
The specificity of the description was the most polite scream of grief Lovecraft had ever heard.
“Mrs. Rothwell,” she said, “Ken
has
been acting a little … unlike himself recently.” She didn’t think it was necessary to mention “a little unlike himself” meant attempted anal rape. “I think you’re right. The campaign has been more stressful for him than I think either of us realized. I hate to be the one to suggest…”