Elsewhere, page 13
Two of Falkirk’s men, Elliot and Goulding, were present, one standing at the door to a side garden, the other at the door to the hallway, obviously assigned to prevent her from leaving. They looked like men who wouldn’t ask to be paid to break someone’s knees, who would do it for pleasure. Any sane person would keep an eye on them with an expectation of impending violence.
Constance Yardley pretended to be oblivious of them. Or maybe she was so conceited and disdainful that she believed herself to be quite untouchable by such hoi polloi. Maybe she thought they were here to fetch her tea if she wanted it and to fluff the pillows on the sofa if she chose to return to it.
Falkirk went to the desk and stood looking down at her and said, “What do you make of the animal in the upstairs hall?”
Rather than respond to him at once, she finished a sentence she was writing, marked her place in the book, leaned back in her chair, and finally regarded him over the half lenses of her glasses. “Make of it? I came home from the college, found that mess. We’re living in strange times. That’s all I can make of it. I just want it out of here. The police asked if the creature was mine. I assured them that although I have countless ways of making a fool of myself, one of them isn’t keeping a chimpanzee and dressing it like some kind of Boy Scout.”
“You took a close enough look to see it wasn’t as simple a thing or as absurd as you make it sound.”
“Just for a moment, I thought it was a terribly hairy boy. But then I realized it was . . . whatever it is.”
“As I told you earlier, this is a matter of national security.”
“Please don’t insist that pathetic beast is an extraterrestrial or a Russian spy. I have an open mind but not an empty skull.”
Falkirk wanted to lean across the mahogany desk and slap her. He restrained himself because he knew a slap would be just the start of it. “What you saw here today and anything that I’ve discussed with you, even the fact that NSA agents were here—it’s never to be repeated to anyone. If you speak a word of it, you’ll be prosecuted under the National Secrets Act.”
She smiled and took off her glasses. “Are you really NSA agents or something else? And is there really something with a ridiculous and melodramatic name like the ‘National Secrets Act’?”
“Why would I say there was if there wasn’t?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” She put her glasses down. “From what I heard happened here, some of my neighbors must have seen . . . that thing.”
“As it turns out, no one did.”
“And who used my pistol to kill it?”
Falkirk had theories about that, but they were none of her business. He answered her question with an intimidating stare of the kind that he’d endured from her type throughout his school years.
Her eyes fixed on his for an infuriating length of time before she sighed and shook her head and said, “This defies belief. Clean up the mess in the second-floor hall and get out of my house.”
“We’ve taken the corpse. The mess is all yours. Don’t even think about hiring a service to do the job. There would be too many questions. Do it your own damn self. You’ll probably need a bucket to vomit into.”
The contempt with which she regarded him suggested that she might not do as she was told.
His suspicion was confirmed when she said, “Have you changed the name of the country? Are we not any longer living in America?”
He went to the nearest wall and swept fifteen or twenty books off a shelf, to the floor. Then he scattered a second shelf of them.
Certain that a woman like her would place an inordinately high value on books, he expected Constance Yardley to leap to her feet or curse him for his vandalism. However, she remained in her chair and watched him, her stare almost sharp enough to draw blood.
With greater violence, he threw more books on the floor while Elliot and Goulding watched with solemn approval. “You should wish we’re something as lame as NSA agents. We’re far worse, Connie. There’s more at stake here than your narrow grammarian’s brain can conceive, Connie. If you don’t do as you’ve been told, then I’ll come back here and throw all your damn books on the floor and set them on fire with you punched unconscious and sprawled on top of them. You got that, Connie?”
At last he had brought her to her feet. She stood as stiff and straight as a fence pale, her arms at her sides and her hands balled into fists. Her expression was one of self-righteous disgust, but he could see that she was afraid and struggling to repress her fear.
Elliot and Goulding had moved away from their posts, closer to the desk. They were chameleons, able to look like what the situation required. They could appear to be sober, highly disciplined agents one moment, and an instant later radiate the lust and brutality of amoral beasts; in this case, they were the latter. Constance Yardley stood alone in the room with three men, with two others also in the house, and she knew now that the law had no power over them nor any jurisdiction in this residence.
Spittle flew when John Falkirk again demanded of her, “You got that, CONNIE?”
Her pretense of courage did not deceive him, and her attempt to hold fast to her self-respect was amusing when she raised her chin and tweaked her shoulders back and said, “Yes.”
“So go ahead and make yourself seem brave by telling us again to get out of your house.”
She clearly knew that, with this goad, he had denied her the only assertion of dignity still available to her, that to say those words now would make her sound not indomitable, but meekly obedient. However, because she had no other choice but silence, which she might expect to enflame his anger, she said, “Get out.”
Falkirk saw that his mocking smile was a needle that deflated the English teacher. “Poor Connie,” he said, and he led his men out of the room, out of the house.
35
Mice saw well in the dark and tended to sleep in the afternoon, stirring toward the end of twilight, becoming more active as the magical night descended. In this world, they had no great, inspiring adventures like those of Despereaux in The Tale of Despereaux by Ms. Kate DiCamillo, nor even any to match the comical activities of the fabled Mickey, though perhaps in some other of the infinite worlds, they enjoyed vigorous swordfights with that meaner species, rats, and triumphed over wicked cats belonging to evil kings. Most nights, Snowball busied himself with gnawing blocks and his exercise wheels and climbing ropes and various toys that had been provided for him.
Shortly before the pizza was brown and crisp enough to be taken from the oven, suddenly worried that the terrible strains of the day had been too much for a mere mouse, Amity hurried to her room and turned on the lights to check on her tiny dependent.
As the April dusk shaded the late afternoon beyond the windows, Snowball sat on his haunches by his water dish, yawning hugely and grooming himself. He craned his neck and stared at her. His shiny black eyes were shinier than ever, as though this crazy day, fraught with danger and terror, had only invigorated him.
“How many litters does a mother mouse have in one year?” she asked Snowball.
He didn’t respond, but she answered for him, “Five or six. On average ten or more young to a litter.”
Snowball did not disagree.
“Do mouse families stay together long? Or do you drift apart from one another? Do you miss your mother?”
The litters had to be large because at least a third of the hairless, blind newborns did not survive. Of those who lived to grow coats and gain vision, many would become dinner for birds of prey and weasels and foxes and snakes and rats and, really, half the animals on the planet.
Mice lived hard lives. Amity didn’t like to dwell on that.
By comparison, Snowball led a pampered life as a domesticated mouse. As a consequence, unprepared for adversity, he should have been traumatized by the day’s events, but obviously he was not.
“Would you give up the comfort of your cage, jump on the key again, hop to another world in spite of the risks?”
As if in answer, as if the prospect of such exotic travel excited him, Snowball scurried to his exercise wheel and ran in place, ran fast, and then faster.
“You’d do it again,” Amity surmised. “My little Despereaux.”
In this world where rodents did not use sewing needles as swords or save princesses from imprisonment, where magic was not common, lessons still could be learned from a mere mouse.
At the door to the hall, she switched off the lights, leaving the mouse in the shadows that, when the twilight whispered away on the evening breeze, would have what magic this world allowed.
36
In the immediate search for that bastard Edwin Harkenbach and the one remaining key to everything, Falkirk had numerous vehicles under his command, including a specially outfitted forty-four-foot motor home with a satellite dish in a recessed well in its roof, which allowed the skilled hackers on his team to have high-speed access to the internet, from which they could backdoor every law-enforcement and national-security computer system in existence.
It was good to be working in an operation that had pockets deep enough to hold billions of dollars. But all the money in the world couldn’t guarantee success, which was a truth that accounted for Falkirk’s dark mood.
At 5:10 p.m., the motor home stood in a supermarket parking lot. The hackers currently on duty, Selena Malrose and Jason “Foot-Long” Frankfurt, were at their workstations in the forward part of the vehicle, eating submarine sandwiches and potato chips while they searched the video archives of the town’s many security and traffic cameras in an attempt to discover who might have fled Constance Yardley’s house after having shot the ape-boy Bestpet.
Falkirk sequestered himself in the chamber at the rear of the motor home, which would have been a bedroom in the standard street-model Fleetwood. It was a conference room in this vehicle, complete with a floor-anchored table, six comfortable chairs, and a bank of TV screens, all dark.
He took his dinner alone at the table, lobster rolls and slaw, allowing himself two glasses of pinot grigio.
He didn’t believe in fraternizing with members of his staff. Underlings were to be used efficiently and must always be reminded that they were part of an operation so top secret that they were expendable—in the sense of a bullet to the head—if they spoke about their work to anyone other than a team member. Selena Malrose was hot. Why she chose to waste her life at a computer, buccaneering forbidden data, mystified John Falkirk. He fantasized about drilling her, but in fact he preferred women who were wounded and unsure of themselves and emotionally pliable. Selena had attitude and too much confidence for his taste. Jason Frankfurt was a geek with glamour, a blurry version of Brad Pitt, who tried too hard to be clever and hip; he had most likely given himself the nickname “Foot-Long” as a pathetic attempt to impress—and deceive—women. Even if Selena and Jason hadn’t been underlings, Falkirk would not have wanted to be friends with them. Friendship was an invitation to treachery; he was not so emotionally weak that he needed to risk having real friends.
Besides, when he got his hands on the key to everything, when he left this lame world for a better one, there would be no point in having friends here because he wouldn’t be taking them with him. The senator, his family, and the consortium of billionaires who were backstopping the project’s budget didn’t suspect that Falkirk was working for himself, that the immense wealth and ultimate power they envisioned flowing from the key would be his alone.
Before Ed Harkenbach destroyed the other two keys, Falkirk had used one to voyage across the multiverse on several occasions, and the unlimited possibilities were at once obvious to him. On Earth 1.07, he paid a visit to his stepmother, Katarina. Strangely, she had not stolen his inheritance in that reality, but had treated him as an equal of his half brother and half sister. When he sought an audience with her, in one of her lavish homes, she welcomed him warmly. He shot her in the face and dropped the gun at her feet and, before any of her security personnel could respond, he fled into an adjoining room, from which he ported himself home to Earth Prime.
Of course Katarina remained alive on this world, but killing another version of the bitch in a parallel reality was nevertheless satisfying. He supposed the John Falkirk who lived in that other timeline had been arrested, tried, and sent to prison. However, as much as Earth Prime Falkirk loved himself, he simply didn’t possess the capacity to love thousands of himself with the same fervor. He suffered no distress at the thought of another John being martyred in his name.
The intercom beeped. Selena Malrose spoke from her workstation in the forward section of the motor home. “John, we found archived video of suspects on foot, caught by a traffic cam. They crossed an intersection three blocks from Constance Yardley’s house, a few minutes after the Bestpet would’ve been shot. And we know them.”
37
Most evenings, Amity and her father talked to each other during dinner. Neither she nor he was ever at a loss for something to say, and there was no shortage of subjects that interested them. But on this momentous evening, Daddy wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He said that he was exhausted and worried and needed to think, but no doubt he was also concerned that she would press him further about finding the right Michelle. She’d no intention of doing such a naggy thing, not because she wasn’t capable of it, but because she had a keen sense of the limits of his tolerance for wheedling.
As on those other rare evenings during which they dined mostly in silence, Daddy resorted to an audiobook for entertainment. They couldn’t listen to an entire novel during one dinner, and neither of them wanted to break a rattling-good story into like twenty dinners. So on these occasions, they listened to the same novel to which they had listened an amazing number of times before, The Princess Bride by William Goldman. They remembered every turn in the story better than they recalled many of the details of their own past, but the oft-told tale was never boring. No bullsugar. The story really and truly delighted them so much that, when they came to certain scenes, they recited the dialogue or the funnier lines of text in sync with the audio narrator, though they had never made an effort to memorize any of it.
Through salad and pizza, they listened to the second and third chapters. The third was titled “The Courtship,” in which the vile Prince Humperdinck proposed marriage to a very beautiful milkmaid named Buttercup, whereupon she said that she had loved once before, it had gone badly, and she could never love another. Not accustomed to rejection, the prince seasoned his proposal with a threat.
Three voices—those of the narrator, Amity, and her father—served as the voice of the prince: “So you can either marry me and be the richest and most powerful woman in a thousand miles and give turkeys away at Christmas and provide me a son, or you can die in terrible pain in the very near future. Make up your own mind.”
And Buttercup said, “I’ll never love you.”
Said the prince, “I wouldn’t want it if I had it.”
Replied Buttercup, “Then by all means let us marry.”
At the end of the chapter, Amity and her dad laughed together, which was a fine thing, though it was also a strange thing because, among their favorite fantasy adventures, The Princess Bride was like no other. The story lacked a happy ending. It was a satire filled with stupidity, treachery, suffering, loss, and death—all of which were played for laughs. Few girls short of their twelfth year would take such delight in it. However, Amity was smart and precocious, and years earlier she had learned the primary lesson of The Princess Bride: As wondrous as life was, it was also full of sadness, and the best way to get past the sad parts and enjoy all the rest was to find the humor in even the darkness. Laughter wasn’t just a medicine for melancholy, but also a sword raised against evil. A laugh said, You can’t scare me into surrender, I’ll fight you hard to the end.
She hoped that, in desperate straits, she could laugh in the face of pure evil. Until today, she’d not had much experience of evil. Of sadness, yes, she’d known her share of that, but not the kind of evil that turned your blood to ice water. She supposed she had done all right in that nasty version of Suavidad Beach, with the commie fascists and Good Boy and all. But worse might be coming.
With his paternal sonar sensing fear in the depths of his daughter, Daddy said, “Are you okay, honey?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m good, I’m cool.” But it was then, for the first time in a while, she became aware of the three teeth and the fragment of jawbone in a pocket of her jeans.
38
Although he intended eventually to split to a better world, there were things about this one of which John Falkirk approved.
In this age of ever-increasing state surveillance of its citizens, even a town of forty thousand, like Suavidad Beach, had cameras monitoring traffic at all major intersections, in municipal parks, as well as in and around public buildings. Local authorities archived the video for sixty days or six months or a year, but it was transmitted in real time to the National Security Agency’s Utah Data Center, where it would be forever available, filed under the community’s name and accessible by date.
A year earlier, Foot-Long Frankfurt had planted a rootkit in the NSA’s computer system, allowing him and Selena to enter by a back door and swim through its ocean of data without drawing the attention of the IT-security forces. Together they had tracked Jeffrey and Amity Coltrane from Constance Yardley’s neighborhood through the heart of town.
