“We ask that you not deviate from this route, sir,” the guard had said. Something in Hutch's expression may have prompted him to add, “If you do, alarms will sound, and a security car will escort you off the premises.”
“Hellhounds and helicopters too?” Hutch said, eliciting as stony a face as Michelangelo ever carved. “Are there chips in these passes?”
“Have a good day, sir.”
Crap.
Hutch had indeed planned on “deviating” to other parts of the campus. He was, after all, a journalist and investigating Brendan Page. Most likely, he'd have found nothing but locked doors and closed mouths, and eventually a security camera would have picked up his activities.
Then
they'd have released the hellhounds.
That guy had made his breach and ejection sound immediate. It made him careful about not making a wrong turn on the way to his destination.
The Outis facilities boasted their own wall, gate, and guardhouse. This entrance, however, appeared more secure than the first. When he pulled up to the shack, no one greeted him. Its nearly opaque windows were almost certainly tinted; he could see nothing beyond his own reflection staring back at him. The gate here was no retractable barrier, but a massive portcullis set in an ancient-looking stone-block wall running in both directions. The wall was topped, anachronistically, with concertina wire. It was an impressive entrance, if you were a visiting politico or parent of a recruit.
As the gate rose, he could hear chain links rattling through sprockets. He drove through, and the illusion of the grand fortifications of King Arthur and Caesar shattered. A tall chain-link fence formed a box on the other side of the gate. He nosed up to a second gate, which didn't open until the one behind him had closed completely.
Like visiting a prison
, he thought, which got him wondering whether the setup kept people out or in.
The Outis building to which the map directed him was a brick three-story in a style architects called modern traditionalism. Lots of angles, copper-tinted glass, and fancy masonry workâherringbone patterns around the windows, incised columns, the use of different shades, shapes, and ages of brick. A portion of the roof appeared to be an embattled parapet, giving the entire structure the quality of a contemporary castle.
Hutch stepped out of the elevator on the third floor into a larger outer office. Three secretaries worked at desks concentrically arranged before a large double-doored portal. Like the concrete barriers at the front gate, they forced visitors to weave between them to reach Page's office. A woman at the front desk told him, “We'll be with you in a few minutes, Mr. Hutchinson.”
He nodded. Except for the desk, the remainder of the room could have been the lobby of a fancy hotel in a major city, some place like New York's Waldorf Astoria. The décor leaned toward opulent.
Hutch strolled to the windows. They looked out on the front parking lot. Framed and matted pencil sketches filled the walls. One was a perfectly rendered hand that Hutch recognized as one Michelangelo had eventually painted onto the roof of the Sistine Chapel. He had no doubt the sketch was an original.
He saw pieces by van Gogh, daVinci, Picasso, as well as many artists he didn't recognize. Most could have been described in an auction catalog as “a practice sketch, rendered in lead, of an incomplete body part . . .” Several were more complete depictions of a person, and a few of several whole figures together: mother and child, lovers in repose. He was studying one of these fuller sketches when he noticed what the artist had titled it:
Genjuros in Primo Luogo Assassina.
Genjuros
âthe word Nichols had instructed him to research.
The artist's signature was clear, as far as artist signatures go. Hutch was pretty sure it read Giovanni Cavalcasello. Maybe the last name's first
l
was an
i
. He committed the title and name to memory, then looked at the sketch again: three people in billowy clothes and death's-head masks stabbing an elderly man, who appeared to have risen from a writing desk.
Hutch moved away from the drawing before the secretaries noticed his interest. His Internet search for
Genjuros
had hit on nothing but a character in a video game. He should have checked if the game developer had been Spiral, which Page owned. Could Nichols have known Hutch would wind up here and see the sketch? Had he thought the reference would be less obscure than it turned out to be? And what the hell did it mean?
He had pretended to study three other sketches when the lead secretary called to him.
“This way, please.” She beckoned him into the slalom of desks. The other two women were schoolgirl petite, but this one appeared capable of putting Hutch down with one arm behind her back.
As he passed her desk, she stopped him. “I'm sorry, I'll have to hold your recording device out here until you conclude your meeting with Mr. Page.”
Hutch tried to look injured. “I'm a journalist. I thought this was on the record.”
She smiled and opened her hand to him.
Hutch said, “Are you guessing, or do you know?”
“Inside pocket of your jacket,” she said.
He retrieved his digital recorder and handed it over. “How's my cholesterol?” he asked.
She opened a door and stepped aside for him. The room was roughly the size of a basketball court. The left wall comprised tall, ornately carved bookshelves, a lighted display case, and a floor-to-ceiling rock fireplace. What appeared to be a tree trunk burned within. A coffee table and leather high-back chairs were positioned in front of it. The right wall was paneled in rich wood squares. Four doors were spaced evenly along it. Between each door were framed photographs, paintings, and magazine covers.
A journalist friend who interviewed and profiled movie stars told him all celebrities had a “wall of fame” like this. “It's not ego,” he'd said. “It's more as though they're as surprised as everyone else by their success, if not more so. Mementoes remind them how far they've come.”
Bet it's ego in Page's case
, Hutch thought.
If the far wall was a single pane of glass, it was the largest undivided window he'd ever seen. It was the width of the room and two stories high, peaking in the center. It must have cost what Hutch had paid for his house. Beyond it, in the distance, the Cascades rose in all of their picture-postcard splendor.
“Mr. Page will be with you shortly,” the woman said. “Please make yourself at home. May I get you a drink?”
“No, thank you,” Hutch said. “Is this Page's main office?”
“At Outis.” She stepped back into the outer office and shut the door behind her.
Between Hutch and the display case on the left was a table. As he approached, he realized it was a diorama of a military battle. Hills, rivers, roads were rendered in three dimensions. Fuzzy green clumps obviously represented trees, though most of it was an open field. The troops were pegs the diameter of toothpicks. Red on one side, blue on the other. At the front of the blue army was a disproportionately large horseback rider, a sword held high. By this commander's ornate uniform, the miniature cannons, and wagons, Hutch guessed the battle was not contemporary: maybe from the American Civil War or the Napoleonic Wars. He was about to move on when the horseman's face caught his eye. It was Page. There was no mistaking the high forehead, narrow cheeks, puckered mouth.
Hutch shook his head.
The display case held weapons. Pistols, rifles, swords, knives, throwing stars. All of them appeared old, some of them were oddities. A three-barreled flintlock pistol, a sword with a firearm built into it, a crossbow attached to a sawed-off shotgun, what may have been a ray gun, a few items Hutch could not even guess at. Scattered among these were badges, bullets, and scopes.
To judge by Page's books, his interests ran the gamut from the expectedâ
Weapons Through the Ages
, Sun Tzu's
The Art of War
âto the inexplicableâ
Botany for Lost Souls, Dance Your Way to Fame and Fortune
. The books shared shelf space with items like a rusty cannonball, a feather fountain pen in a glass case, a severed finger floating in murky liquid.
Nothing you wouldn't find in any successful CEO's office
, Hutch thought.
He crossed to the wall of fame. Most of the photographs showed Page in action. In one he was in full combat gear, running alongside other soldiers through a town that had seen its share of bombs and bullets. Its destruction was apparently still underway. One soldier was grimacing, flinching away from a puff of dust springing from a stuccoed wall. Similarly, dirt was springing up all around their feet. Page held a monstrous weapon that was spitting out a blur of fire and smoke. The photo must have been taken fairly recently; Page looked no younger than he was now.
Hutch cursed under his breath.
Too bad he didn't take one for the team.
Another photo showed him riding atop a tank through some other war-torn street. This was no Bush-like “Mission Accomplished!” stunt. Page was squatting outside the turret with other soldiers, one hand on the big barrel, the other raising a rifle in the air. Of course, he had a fat stogie clenched between his teeth.
The other framed images were more of the same. Hutch had seen none of them in the media. The collected impression was of a man who loved his jobânot the parts that involved designing, manufacturing, selling, lobbying, or cashing the checks, but the
doing
, the trench action.
Hutch had once written a freelance piece for a business magazine about passion among visionaries. Passion for a particular art or science was the fuel that kept young entrepreneurs going through multiple setbacks, drove them to work ungodly hours, and gave them the creativity to see innovations others missed. It's what pushed them to succeed.
Trouble was, their success often forced them into managerial positions. For some reason shareholders and lenders wanted the people who'd made the breakthroughs in labs to sit behind desks, trying to convince others to do for money what they'd done for passion. Many of them became miserable. Even Bill Gates had finally shrugged off the mantle of Microsoft's CEO and returned to the software engineering role that had catapulted him to riches.
It appeared that Page had never fallen into that trap. He loved war and soldiering, had built companies that exploited that passion, and had remembered to stay involved on the level that interested him most.
All of it confirmed what Hutch had already figured out: Page was a hands-on leader.
Hutch reached the first door. He glanced back at the main entry and turned the knob. A hallway lay on the other side, running toward the front of the building, past the outer office. Obviously a private entrance. On the wall beside the next door was Page looking supremely content on the cover of
Cigar Aficionado
. He held a smoldering cigar chest-high, as though he'd just taken a puff. Hutch opened the door. An air seal broke, and a fragrance of cedar, coffee, and tobacco wafted out. It was a bedroom-sized humidor. Dim lights revealed walls lined with slanted shelves displaying opened boxes of cigars, hundreds of them. The air was cool and moist, and Hutch saw the reason: a digital display reported the humidity level at 68 percent, the temperature 65. He remembered a quote from Mark Twain: “If there are no cigars in heaven, then I'm not going!”
Hutch didn't believe heaven was an option available to Page, whether the good Lord shared his zeal for cigars or not. The image of Page attempting to light one of Havana's best on the flames dancing around him while Satan's minions jabbed him with spears and branding irons made Hutch smile, but just a little.
He shut the door and moved to the next one. It was open a crack, and he could see a bathroom beyond. The last door was near the back wall of glass. This one was wide open, exposing a vestibule. A stainless-steel elevator door consumed the entire back wall of the little room. Stepping up to the window, Hutched realized it looked out on more than the grand vista visible from deeper in the room.
Directly below was a semicircular field of trimmed grass. Along the outside edge of the field, spanning half its perimeter on the right, were various training stations: a ropes course, a shooting range, a monolithic rock wall. A Quonset-hut-shaped structure of white material likely housed a pool. A course for vehicles started at the field and disappeared over a hill. At the field's apex sat a full-sized commercial airplane, a 747, Hutch thought. It was mounted on what appeared to be shock absorbers the diameter of old redwoods, raising it twenty feet off the ground. Running along the outside of the fuselage were cubicles, platforms, and a ventilation system.
The left half of the perimeter marked the beginning of a town. Hutch could make out only a handful of its structures: a gas station, bookstore, hotel, bank, ice-cream parlor. Farther back, larger buildings rose above the others, blotting out the trees. A “Hogan's Alley,” he realized, like the one at the FBI's training facility in Quantico. It was used to teach agents investigative techniques, firearms skills, and defensive tactics in a controlled real-world environment. Except Page's was considerably larger.
About a dozen men and a few women were going through the ropes course, walking a high tightrope, climbing rope ladders, swinging between elevated platforms. In the center of the field, a small group wearing black ninja garb had formed a circle around two people going at each other with martial arts moves. The ground was farther below him than the third-floor office accounted for. The back side of the building must have been open to a lower level or two.
Hutch recognized Page as one of the combatants. The man planted a roundhouse kick into his opponent's head, spun, and kicked the other man's feet out from under him. The other man hopped up and snapped Page in the face with a punch so fast Hutch wasn't sure he'd really seen it. Page reeled back. His foot shot up and nailed his opponent between the legs. The guy dropped, rolling and holding himself. Hutch noticed none of the protective gear he'd seen fighters wearing at other sparring events. No cups either, it seemed.