Dantes' Inferno (19 page)

Cockie Lockie the sky is falling.

Nursery tale

12:36
P.M.
Initiation sent out shock waves like a violently blossoming flower whose roots extended through the main charge, rupturing molecules and causing a chain reaction that ended with mass explosion. As an encore, shaped charges directed secondary shock waves from basement to attic. Their impact was amplified by the gases that had extruded from the stacked bags of plain white flour below ground.

At that instant of detonation, it seemed as if the entire city had exploded into the stratosphere, only to fall to earth again like hard rain. There was a deafening blast, followed immediately by a lesser boom and a quaking rumble. The ground shook, small suns imploded around a black hole, a searing wind sent the world spinning.

Wood is organic, as easy to mutilate as human flesh. The metal shrapnel from the pipes and additional hardware splintered, descending with shards of wood and glass to penetrate matter and inflict damage.

The explosion—the shrapnel—sent everyone instinctively diving for cover. It bombarded Professor Edmond Sweetheart with small branches from the olive tree. It peppered Sylvia Strange with bullet-sized gravel. It smacked a chunk of plaster into the forehead of Special Agent Purcell.

All hell broke loose.

Emergency personnel raced into action; a reporter got the story of her life when her network's well-placed television minicam captured the bomb and its aftermath for live feed and replay; rescue workers scanned the scene, accounting for the living, searching for the dead.

12:41
P.M.
From the corner of his eye, Sweetheart saw Sylvia Strange where she'd hit the ground fifteen feet away. She struggled to her feet and moved unsteadily toward the ruined house.

He covered the distance, blocking her way. She stared at him as if he were a massive tree; he registered the look of numb disbelief on her face.

“Where are you going?” he asked, already steering her toward a clear space on the curb.

“People might be hurt.” She swiped at a burning scrap of wallpaper as it drifted to earth. The air was dense with particles—wood, plastic, ash. “I feel sick.”

“You're in shock, Dr. Strange. Let the emergency response team do their jobs.”

All around them, fire, medical, and law enforcement personnel were coordinating their actions. Two EMTs had unloaded gurneys from the ambulance; the four-inch tires spun across asphalt, metal ball bearings clacking.

Hoses fed from the fire trucks toward the remains of the house now in flames; a firefighter shouted orders to his crew. Twenty feet away, a uniformed street cop tended to several casualties. Sweetheart saw Special Agent Purcell following an EMT toward the bomb site.

Sweetheart heard Sylvia's question, “Do you see Purcell and Church?” through the din of voices, sirens.

“Purcell just walked by—uninjured.”

As he let go of Sylvia's arm, she swayed, reaching for solid ground. “I need a ride back to MDC, to Roybal,” she
told him slowly. She was obviously straining to regain her concentration. Sweetheart imagined she was troubled by the same high-pitched tone that was ringing inside his head. His ears ached, his skull felt as if it had contracted against his brain, but he knew the unpleasant symptoms were transient. He and Strange had been extremely lucky—luckier than some of the others.

He started toward the cluster of LAPD and federal agents just as Sylvia said, “I've got to talk to Dantes.”

“Bad timing.” Sweetheart pivoted with a shake of his head. “I told you, you're in shock.” He pressed his fingers lightly to her forehead as she sank down on the curb. She opened her mouth, closed it again. Her skin was freckled with red welts left by gravel.

Sweetheart studied her, taking in the intelligent eyes with their dark yellow fireflies, infinitesimal and prehistoric, trapped deep in amber. The stubborn set of her jaw. The wide mouth.

She hadn't made the connection yet. Dantes had played her perfectly. He'd used her to hurt other people—and through that dark bond, therapist and inmate were joined in an unstable synergetic relationship. She was no longer just the catalyst, she was part of the formula. And this was only the beginning.

“I need to talk to Dantes,” she repeated.

He said, “Dantes may not
need
to talk to you. For the moment, you've served your purpose. You found a bomb.”

Sweetheart saw the stricken expression on her face. He looked away. Already he could smell the scent of charred flesh on the air.

She clutched her knees, and whispered, “He'll talk to me.”

“The FBI won't let you see him. Not until they've had their go.” Sweetheart stood over her like a massive cloud
blocking the sun. His face was smudged with dirt; one cheek was beginning to show the first signs of bruising; a sprig of an olive branch extended from his muddled hair. Behind him smoke billowed from the ruin of the Beaudry Street house.

“Look what's gone down during the past six hours,” he said sharply. “At the moment, the Feds are rethinking your involvement. At any level.” He was silent for a moment before he added, “Dantes used you, Dr. Strange.”

“Something went wrong,” she said, shaking her head sharply. “It wasn't supposed to happen this way.”

The professor closed his eyes; his voice held a brutal edge. “How was it supposed to happen?”

She swallowed, tasting faintly metallic dust. “I need to know if Dantes set me up.”

“Set
you
up?” Sweetheart's tone was harsh, and his mouth turned down in distaste. “This isn't about you. It isn't about Dr. Strange. Leo Carreras wanted you as an opening act, a warm-up for Dantes. You had the right credentials. And I'll hand it to Leo—he was right about you. But the stakes just got a whole lot bigger—and they got bigger according to John Dantes' plan.”

“I can't believe he planned
this
—” She broke off, silenced by the deafening drone of a low-flying LAPD helicopter. A small plane passed over in the wake of the chopper. Sirens were almost drowned out by the sounds of engines.

“You thought he wouldn't betray you?” Sweetheart cut in, shouting to be heard as the helicopter circled away toward the freeway. “You believe you're immune to his lies?”

“No.”

But he knew she did believe that. She'd been seduced by the aura of the big case and by the fantasy—however subliminal—that
she would be able to connect with John Dantes in a way that no one else could. Sweetheart understood that kind of vulnerability.

Reaching out slowly, he offered his hand. As he helped her to her feet, his fingers registered the cool smoothness of her skin.

“Beware of Dantes,” he said. Antipathy hovered around him like a menacing shadow.

“How can you be so certain there isn't another bomber with his own agenda?” she asked. “What if Dantes took no part in the Getty bombing?”

“M and Dantes are conspirators.” Sweetheart's voice was brittle, the richness burned away like singed velvet. “The link is in the data. It will be in the forensic comparisons, in the explosive agents, or the mass spec readings, or the linguistic analysis. It's already in their shared cosmology—Dante Alighieri's hell.”

Sweetheart's smile was hard and cold. “I'll find our mad bomber—our obsessive, middle-aged fuckup with the double-breasted suit buttoned at the collar. And he'll be best friends with John Dantes. This is Dantes' work—the fact he's behind bars means absolutely nothing.”

Sylvia knew men ran drug empires from inside; they “walked the man,” ordering executions; they directed coups d'état—

“Dantes sent you here to die, Dr. Strange.”

The voice belonged to Special Agent Purcell. She was trembling, and her eyes were dark and accusing. She seemed to struggle for breath. “Church was inside with two other guys from the bomb squad when it blew. They're going to airlift him to UCLA.”

Purcell gazed out at the approaching helicopter. “For his sake, pray he dies before he gets there.”

I live each day knowing I've caused suffering. I understand I will be called on to rectify my actions.

John Dantes to
LA Weekly

12:41
P.M
.
The tunnel shook.

The bomb had exploded. Dantes' first reaction was excitement—his second, regret. He noted these feelings, surprised; but emotions are fleeting and his determinism, his fatalism, quickly monopolized the moment. This was all part of the schema—the scenario set in motion years ago. Now it must be played out to its final act.

He felt the CO eyeing him darkly. Why weren't the guards reacting to the explosion? Why were they moving with icy efficiency thirty feet below ground, where quakes and tremors should be cause for alarm?

The tunnel shook again, tilting, shimmering. Dantes stumbled, gasping.

The guards were staring at him, their faces filled with suspicion.

The lights were humming, fed by a steady flow of power. Perspiration beaded on Dantes' skin, cast green by fluorescence in the subterranean tunnel that fed like a conduit between the federal building and the detention center. Abruptly, the U.S. marshals had decided to escort him from Roybal back to MDC. That was after he lost connection with Sylvia Strange.

“Fuck you,” he whispered. The whole thing enraged him—the marshals had told him he'd hung up on the psychologist
and the bomb squad. They never stopped lying. God, they loved messing with the minds of prisoners, especially the smart ones, and the toughest inmates, the ones who were harder to break.

Dantes took a deep breath, pulling
chi
from the ground, letting it surge through his body to his brain, to his groin, to his feet. If the earth shook again, he would be ready.

He was no stranger in this underground hell. To get through UCLA, he'd worked as a sandhog. He'd drilled and pumped, he'd packed and trucked. He'd breathed the foul air of dark spaces.

“If a man wants to understand real wealth, true power, he needs to hold the earth's resources in his hands, at least long enough to feel their weight,” Dantes muttered to himself. If a man craved the trebuchet of physical labor, sweat was the perfect complement to academia; and academia, with its gossip, its backbiting, its tenure, was the hardest and bloodiest labor of them all.

In his sandhog days, his underground work had included a piece of the current subway system, a share in the sewage system, and even a cut of Water & Power.

From fifty feet under, he'd seen the earth quake; the view was different when you were holding a thousand tons of earth and rock on your shoulders.

In answer to his thoughts, the earth moved again.

But this time, he registered the spasm as
internal
.

That explained the guard's behavior.

Yes, this must be some kind of sympathetic reaction, he thought, as he dug his fingernails into his palms. Control was everything. The energy came like a wave, cresting, finally receding. But it left fear in its wake.

Dantes took a deep breath, orienting himself in space.

Black holes in the mind were a bad thing. That's what the state did to those too quick to speak up. That was the
stately
tradition—cull out your dissidents, your radicals, your desperately poor, torture them, and label them mad like Goya's lunatics.

Lunacy was something that happened to the
misfits
of any society. They did not
fit in
, hence they were labeled as
unfit
. If the label is repeated enough times, a man will come to believe it as truth.

I do not fit, he thought. I have never fit.

Instantly, his thoughts jumped, and he pictured the doctor's face.

Someone prodded him from behind and the picture evaporated.

A voice asked why he walked with his hands out, as if he might stumble? He gave the guards some of their own medicine: he stared at them as if
they
were crazy.

Gulag, gulag, gulag
 . . . the word tumbled through his mind like a runaway hub.

His shackles, binding ankles and wrists together at his waist, made a dull, repetitive scuffling sound and gave him the look of a medieval prisoner wearing some inquisitional contraption. But he needed no bindings to remind him he was a hostage. He tried to stave off the rage. The passive aggression of the martyr was breaking through. He was being driven to this.

Dantes' eyes held a crazy glitter, partly the result of the lights, partly the result of a blinding headache, which had stayed with him for days on end.

Flanked by U.S. marshals, he followed the course of the tunnel. Two guards met them at the heavy steel door that offered access to Metro. One of them whispered news of a bomb—an explosion.

I knew it, Dantes thought, beginning to laugh.