Authors: Chris Jordan
Three days after the funeral—it had been a nightmare, getting Jed’s remains released, and seemed to have taken forever, although it was only about ten days—Noah stopped clinging and he was no longer sucking his thumb, and he said to me, “It’s really real, isn’t it? Daddy’s really gone and he’s never coming back?” I said yes, it was really real, his Daddy was really gone, and Noah thought about that for a few moments and he looked me straight in the eye—we were at the kitchen table, pushing our food around but not really eating—and he said, “Daddy wants me to grow up and be strong for you, so that’s what I’m going to do,” and there was something about his tone that made it seem he was speaking with his father’s voice, as if Jed was looking at me through our little boy’s eyes and saying goodbye, and the amazing thing is, I didn’t break
down. I didn’t burst into tears. Just hearing him say that gave me so much strength and confidence that I was able to reach out and take Noah’s hand and say, “You’re already strong. You’re my superhero. But I’d rather you didn’t grow up too fast, okay? I need you to be my little boy for a while.”
After that we were okay. The emptiness was still there, of course—sleeping was especially difficult for me—but somehow we’d come ashore without me noticing, and we were both in the world again, doing what you do to get through each day.
Remembering how Noah had shown me the way, how an eight-year-old’s inner strength had far surpassed my own, makes me believe that he’ll be strong enough to keep his own mind, no matter what poison is being spread by those who want to use him. Missy keeps warning me about Evangeline, what a terrible, evil person she is. For all I know, that’s true. But what sticks in my craw is Noah’s teacher, Mrs. Delancey. That bitch! Her I know, or thought I did, and it seems to me unutterably cruel that she must have moved to Humble for no other purpose than to ingratiate herself with Noah and with me. All the while planning to steal him away.
That’s who these people are. Never forget.
Meanwhile, after the strange little man leaves us, Missy Barlow wants to show me around. I’m not kidding—the woman who helped abduct me wants to give me a tour of her house—in effect my prison—and show off all the cool stuff she and her weirdo husband have accumulated.
“The design had to be approved by the Ruler council, of course, but Eldon really did most of the design thinking himself.”
‘Design thinking,’ it turns out, is when you think of something—in this case a Really Rich Ski Lodge—and then hire someone who actually designs it. In Missy’s world, apparently, buying the
Mona Lisa
is the same as painting it. That sounds crazy, but I’m not about to defend her sanity. It’s as if her life is unraveling, and she thinks if she talks fast enough the trend will reverse itself. You don’t go from being a successful, law-abiding citizen to a felon-in-hiding without it having some pretty strong effects on your mental status. And who knows, maybe she was always a few bricks shy of a load, as Jed liked to say.
“We’re the only Fives with a house anything like this one,” she brags, as we tour the shuttered, shaded interior. “Fives, that’s for Level Five, there’s seven levels altogether, and the only one who’s ever reached Seven is Arthur Conklin. There’s only like about ten who ever made Six. Ruler Weems is a Six. So is Evangeline, although some of us sort of assume she cheated because she’s Arthur’s wife and nobody dared to tell her she didn’t pass. So being a Five is, like, really high in the organization. There’s maybe fifty Fives, and you have to share-in a million a year, minimum, to stay a Five. Until you’re like sixty years old and then you’re an Honorary, and you can stay at your level even if you don’t make as much money.”
“Share-in” is the Ruler version of tithing, and Missy is really proud that she and Eldon share-in way more than a million a year. Which Eldon calls “the price of genius,” at least according to his chatty wife. His particular genius being in gameware design, whatever that is, exactly. My first thought is Guitar Hero, like maybe he designed the fake guitars—isn’t that gameware?—but Missy rolls her
eyes and explains that Eldon’s genius is way, way more impressive than Guitar Hero because, artificial drumroll please, he designs technologies for cell-phone gamers. Plus with the money he earned from his first patent he had the foresight to buy a ring tone subscription service, and that’s turned out to be “like, a superinvestment.”
“Ring tones?” I ask. “That’s how you got rich?”
Missy must sense that I’m less than impressed, because she huffs herself up and goes, “Me and Eldon own some of the most famous ring tones in the world!”
“Great. Listen, Missy, I appreciate the tour, you and your husband have a fabulous house, even if we’re sort of hiding in it with the shades drawn, but I’m really not in the mood for
House Beautiful,
okay? Maybe later, but right now all I care about is how you can help me get my son back.”
“We’re doing all we can,” she protests, getting all sulky. “You heard Ruler Weems. This is a really difficult situation. Not to mention dangerous. Me and Eldon, we’re risking our lives to keep you safe.”
“Okay, you’re risking your life. You’re my angel. Where’s Noah? Where are they keeping him?”
“I don’t know. Someplace we can’t get to, that’s all I know. Probably the Pinnacle.”
“The Pinnacle?”
“Yeah, the Pinnacle is where Arthur lives. And Evangeline. It’s way up the mountain, sort of like built
into
the mountain, you know? Everybody says it’s fabulous and amazing, but I’ve never seen it. You can’t get to the Pinnacle unless you’re a Six. It’s supposed to be superfortified. Eldon says if the world ever blew up, like in a nuclear war, the Pinnacle would survive.”
“So he’s seen the Pinnacle?”
“No, but he knows people who have. Eldon knows everybody important.”
“Does that man who came to see us, Mr. Weems, does he live in the Pinnacle?”
“He used to, but not anymore. Not since Eva decided to take over.”
“Missy, listen to me. I’m going to assume you’re a good person, okay? And that your involvement in this is well-intentioned. But I want you to do me a favor. I want you to persuade Eldon to take me to the Pinnacle, okay?”
“I don’t think he can do that,” she says, reluctantly. “Ruler Weems might, but not Eldon.”
“When is he coming back, Ruler Weems?”
A shrug. “Dunno. In case you haven’t noticed, nobody tells me anything,” she adds, sounding petulant.
At that moment her husband appears on the grand stairway. He doesn’t seem at all pleased that Missy is conducting a house tour. “Upstairs, both of you.”
“But the place is all closed up from the outside,” Missy protests. “Why do we have to hide in the bedroom?”
“Because we want to stay alive,” he says. “Upstairs, now!”
10. Bad Little Gnome
In his private sanctuary deep inside security headquarters, Bagrat Kavashi finally finds time to think for himself. He hates to admit that a woman has the power to overwhelm his powers of concentration, but Evangeline is no ordinary female. She is, after all, the consort of the great leader, a transcendent genius, and has herself reached a
level of oneness to which he can only aspire. At the same time he fears for her judgment, if not her sanity. Her lust is not restricted to the flesh, but extends to all the levers of power within her grasp. Money. Greed. Manipulation. Fear. These are, as he well knows, intoxicants that can overwhelm rational thought. So he takes it with a grain of salt when Eva the Diva rants about purification and purging of the Rulers. In his homeland, regular purges are a useful tool for maintaining power. Stand those you mistrust up against a wall and shoot them. Nothing could be simpler. But as the head of a small but increasingly influential U.S. security firm, Vash is keenly aware that even in a remote corner of Colorado, wholesale slaughter is bound to attract the kind of attention that could destroy the Ruler organization, as well as his own company. A missing person here or there—truly missing—is one thing, and a task he’s well equipped to handle, but making an entire faction disappear—scores of citizens, some of them very wealthy—that remains difficult, if not unthinkable. And yet he must find a way to satisfy Evangeline; his own power and wealth, his fate, is commingled with her own.
A problem to be solved—but what a problem!
Vash pours himself a drink of Georgian vodka from a bottle he keeps in a freezer. An American affectation—a true Georgian would drink vodka at any temperature below a full boil—that he’s grown accustomed to since he arrived on these welcoming shores. In truth, not so welcoming at first—the rival Chechens were already firmly established in Brighton Beach and had little respect for a country lad from Pshavi, Georgia. But with a little luck and a steady hand upon his straight razor, Vash established himself as
a force to be reckoned with and soon part of an uneasy alliance between the most ruthless factions of the bratva, the brotherhood of criminals who had elbowed the American Mafia out of their own rackets. Vash’s specialty in Brighton Beach was protection and extortion, just as it had been in his home province. But in the good old U.S. of A., the ambitious young immigrant discovered the usefulness of computer surveillance. Before he broke into the life of, say, a prosperous Russian businessman, he first hacked into the man’s computers, establishing exactly what resources could be reasonably extracted, and what personal habits might make the target vulnerable. From computer hacking, Vash got into advanced surveillance techniques—hidden cameras, tracking devices, all the little toys of espionage—so that by the time he made his move he was eight or ten steps beyond whatever ham-fisted security the target mistakenly believed would keep him safe.
It was like taking candy from babies. Big, murderous babies, some of whom had to be disappeared without a trace. Which meant leaving not so much as a filthy fingernail behind. He’d developed a special technique for such in his native land, and perfected it with the help of American technology. By then Vash had become educated in law enforcement. Although grand juries sometimes indicted criminals when there was no dead body to introduce into evidence, they were loath to do so. Missing persons had a habit of turning up on the other side of the earth, alive and well and drawing from their offshore accounts. And even if the victim really was deceased, the lack of physical proof could be exploited by clever defense
attorneys to make it look like good old Boris was living the high life in Säo Paulo or Shanghai. Wink-wink to the jaded juries, who in New York tended to distrust the government almost as much as they did those under indictment.
All things being equal, no dead body means no prosecution. Exceptions are made if there was a witness to the crime, and the witness is willing to testify, but no one had ever been foolish enough to testify against Bagrat Kavashi. Not and survive. The last eyewitness who attempted to give testimony in the province of Pshavi ‘caused’ an explosion in the courthouse resulting in the death not only himself, but the entire team of prosecutors.
Vash—for a while thereafter known as “Boom-Boom”—survived the explosion by hiding behind the judge’s steel-plated desk, as planned. Unfortunately the judge, an engagingly corruptible fellow, did not make it. There wasn’t really room for two under the desk. Too bad, he’d rather liked the judge, but when a bomb is about to detonate, a man has to trust his instincts.
He sips at the vodka, savoring the ice-thickened alcohol. Back home the habit was to pound the stuff down, shot after shot, but Vash prefers to take it slow, maintaining control. In the old days he used to secretly dispose of his drinks while the others slammed and roared and eventually fell senseless to the floor. He’d be the only sober man in the room, indeed the only conscious man, and sometimes took advantage by strangling a rival or two.
Soothed by the warmth of the vodka, he activates a surveillance screen and begins to tap the keyboard, coaxing up images. Both live feeds and the recorded backup. Vash
knows the programs inside and out. And while his private sanctuary does not have the flash of Eva’s multiscreened command center, he’s a professional while she is, at best, an enthusiastic amateur.
Ten minutes later he’s located Wendall Weems. The ugly little man is right where he should be, inside his multiroomed bunker, where he believes himself to be protected, if not invulnerable. So did Eva simply get it wrong—did she neglect to check all the rooms? Or does Ruler Weems have, as the Americans say, something up his sleeve?
Vash makes a few adjustments to the motion-detecting software, then begins to run the digital video back over the last twenty-four hours, searching for an anomaly. Which obediently pops up after a relatively short interval.
He sits back in his chair, puzzling it out. At exactly 1205 hours, the Bunker is completely empty. Not a creature is stirring, not even the mousy Mr. Weems. Vash scrolls it back another twenty seconds, and the motion-detecting software pops up, providing an image of Weems entering the bathroom adjacent to his bedroom.
His men had not bothered to plant a surveillance camera in the bathroom. Moisture from the showers tended to fog up or short out small cameras, and besides, no one wanted to see Weems on the potty. It was enough to document him entering and exiting. But exiting is the problem, because Weems never does. The next time his motion is detected almost four hours have passed and Weems is ambling down a hallway toward his library, looking preoccupied.
Convinced there must be something wrong with the
software, Vash calls up the files for the device positioned outside the bathroom. As he recalls, it’s a model SDR35, a fully functional smoke detector equipped with a covert video camera, utilizing a Sony CCD image sensor. Simple, reliable, and effective. And true to form, there’s nothing wrong with the camera or the video feed. It faithfully records the closed door of the bathroom from the moment Weems enters until the present, and never does the ugly little man emerge, nor does anyone else enter. A bathroom that, according to the blueprints, has only the one door. And yet the next time Weems trips a motion detector, hours have passed and he’s in another part of the Bunker.