Devoted, page 29
He sat on the bed to load the weapon and a spare magazine. He threaded a Kydex holster onto his belt and inserted the pistol in that scabbard. For the time being, he had no intention of wearing a jacket to conceal the gun. He was licensed to carry, and if any of the deputies assigned to the property or any who relieved them might have sinister motives, the prospect of resistance would discourage them from doing anything foolish.
He’d slept only one hour at the motel in Olympic Village before Kipp woke him. He would need more sleep soon if he were to be on his game when the Dark Web killers arrived. If the thugs behind Tragedy did not come to clean up their mess, someone else would. After all, if Dorian Purcell was capable of dealing with murder-for-hire types, he was capable of taking extreme action through other surrogates.
Before he slept, Ben wanted to tour the house to familiarize himself with its rooms, check the doors and windows for adequate locks, and scope out the most likely approach that an enemy would take if they intended to make a surprise entrance.
He didn’t bother Rosa Leon in the first guest room, but as he checked out other rooms, he discovered that second-floor windows were not connected to the security system unless they overlooked a porch roof. Those that could be reached only with a ladder weren’t wired for an alarm, which was a common but foolish practice of many security companies. He’d need half an hour—and Megan’s approval—to nail the moving sashes shut, as there wasn’t time to have the alarm company work those windows into the system.
She was in the downstairs study, at the desk, reading Woody’s 104-page report, and Ben didn’t want to bother her. He found the ground-floor doors and windows reasonably well secured. Glass would have to be broken to gain entrance; there were glass-break sensors, as well as backup batteries that might keep the system functioning for a few hours if the public power were cut.
In the side hallway, he became enchanted by the examples of her art that hung on the walls, and he was most captivated by the canvas in progress in her studio—Woody feeding the deer in moonlight.
When he saw the painting, he dared believe that he had found the woman he had been looking for all his life. He was a romantic; he didn’t deny that or make excuses for it. In spite of their many eccentricities, Brenaden Septimus Hawkins’s parents had loved each other and had raised three well-balanced and happy, if oddly named, children. He didn’t want a woman like his mom, and he was different from his father, but he hoped for a match as right as theirs had been. He had been taken with Megan on first sight, but he wasn’t a man for whom looks mattered most. He’d had too much experience of women whose exterior beauty masked an inner ugliness or, almost worse, a vapidity that would make a life together too empty to endure. Already he’d seen evidence that Megan possessed uncommon fortitude, wisdom, wit, a good heart, and other qualities that he had not before found so concentrated in one person. Now this painting suggested that she saw the beauty of the world in its fullness, not just its surface dazzle, because what she rendered on this canvas was reality as the eye perceived it but enhanced by what deep insight and intuition told her about the layers of reality that the eye alone could not perceive. In spite of the subject, the work wasn’t sentimental; it presented a scene of moonlit wonder, yes, but it was a composition that also conveyed both the fragility of the peace we seek and the darkness that could at any moment close in upon us.
As a Navy SEAL, he had fought for his country and would have died for it. In these last few hours with Megan and Woody and Kipp, however, Ben had been overcome by a rapidly growing sense of family as strong as what he had felt in his parents’ home. It was this, after all, that made a country worth fighting and dying for, and life worth living.
95
Ben stopped in the open doorway of Megan’s study just when she would have had to go searching for him. She swiveled away from the computer and said, “I put in the address, and I got to the Tragedy site on the Dark Web. It was just like the screenshots in Woody’s report. Then it suddenly went dark. Now it doesn’t seem to be there anymore. I can’t reconnect with it.”
“They’ve taken it down? Folded up the tent and gone away?” he asked as he approached the desk.
“I think maybe they have.” She found hope in that prospect. “If they know they’ve been found out, wouldn’t they want to close shop and skip? With their client list, they can open with a new address, a different name. Maybe what Woody did doesn’t matter that much to them. Maybe from their point of view, it’s an inconvenience, not a catastrophe, not worth coming after us.”
Ben shook his head. “If they got a track-to-source fix on Woody’s computer, they know who lives here, and they know that one of their hits was your husband. They don’t know for sure what all you might have learned about them. What they’ll be most concerned about is that you might have their client list.”
“We don’t. Woody found them by hacking into Purcell’s email and working out the connection between Purcell and Tragedy through the Gordius identity. He doesn’t have a complete client list, only proof against Purcell.”
“They have to be sure of that. They’re going to come here to find out.”
“Not with the place protected by six deputies.”
“Probably not. But what if Shacket is found and killed or arrested again? Then the sheriff’s gonna withdraw the protection.”
Megan was tired. She drew one hand down her face, as if she might be able to wipe off her weariness. “So we stay with the plan.”
“At least we have a plan,” he said. “And there’s no way in hell they can anticipate what’s going to happen to them.”
96
While Rosa Leon was sleeping and Carson Conroy was driving away from Harry Borsello’s house in the Fleetwood and Ben and Megan were conferring downstairs . . .
Kipp and Woody were in the boy’s room. Sprawled on the floor and in the lap of history.
Historians often presented turning points of civilization as loud and bright, full of boom and flash.
In fact, decisions to make war or seek peace were often made in quiet rooms.
Cures for diseases were developed slowly, in laboratories that lacked both TV and piped-in music.
Kipp and Woody were on the Wire.
In the wake of all the recent Bellagrams, they were now at a turning point of history.
They were a turning point of history.
Kipp knew it, and Woody knew it, and everyone on the Wire knew it, and there was no boom or flash.
Although Kipp explained the situation and made the appeal, per the plan that had been devised, Woody was the star.
Many Mysterians, though not all, lived with people who shared their secret.
They had invented clever ways to communicate, similar to what Dorothy had arranged with the alphabet wall.
This was the first time, however, that they were able to speak directly to a human being.
Their excitement level was high, but they didn’t all speak at once.
They were disciplined and considerate. They were dogs.
Each Mysterian’s voice, being imagined and telepathic, was either like that of one of its human companions or was based on the voice of an actor on television.
Woody on the Wire sounded like Woody face-to-face, the Woody released from a lifetime of silence.
Kipp sounded like a certain game-show host on TV.
Historic moments were no less likely to include an absurdity or two than were moments about which historians cared nothing.
When the appeal had been made and responses received, when Kipp and Woody disconnected from the Wire, the dog bit the boy.
It was a play bite, no skin broken.
Woody growled and bared his teeth.
Kipp growled and bared his bigger teeth.
They wrestled with much flailing of paws.
Woody sprang up. He dashed into the adjacent bathroom.
Kipp scrambled into the bathroom after the boy.
Woody pivoted out of the bathroom and pulled the door shut.
Kipp’s black nose appeared at the one-inch gap between door and floor, sniffing frantically.
Woody lay prostrate, teasing the nose with a finger.
When Kipp issued a woof of frustration, Woody opened the door.
The boy leaped onto the bed, pulled the covers over his head.
Kipp sprang onto the bed and thrust his snout into every fold of blanket that he found, seeking a route to his giggling, cocooned companion.
Such were the ways of dogs and boys, even after they had been the lever that turned history on its fulcrum, even as a night of violence was about to end in the dawn of a day that promised worse.
97
As the sheriff and his three deputies waited for two more men, those bearing shotguns, the heating and cooling plant behind the county hospital acquired an ever more ominous air, becoming for Hayden Eckman the repository of all evils, the vault of his fate. Beyond the dark windows seemed to be something more disturbing than lightless rooms, a bottomless void from which no escape could be achieved once you had entered. The bright windows were no more reassuring than the dark panes, the quality of light otherworldly, witchy.
The incessant wind not only stung his eyes and parched his skin and chapped his lips, but also abraded his nerves, as did the memory of Justine Klineman’s ravaged face, as did Thad Fenton’s blood on the pavement below that third-story window. He began to think he had made a mistake when he’d closed his law office. He had needed three attempts to pass his bar exam, and he’d been little more than a slip-and-fall personal-injury shakedown artist, and his income had been limited by the frequency with which his own clients took him to arbitration and won a refiguring of his fees. But at least none of them ever bit him in the face or anywhere else.
In cascades of red and blue pulsations, but without a siren, the expected patrol car arrived. Two men clambered out, fresh-faced and lanky and, in spite of their shotguns, about as reassuring as a couple of Hollywood’s more callow young actors playing at being real men. They were among the hires that Eckman had made, chosen in part because they seemed too slow-witted ever to notice or even suspect their boss might be corrupt. They looked like potential fodder waiting to be mulched.
The sheriff instructed one of them to lead the way, the other to bring up the rear, and he patiently, repeatedly stressed that they were to take special care not to discharge their 12-gauge semiautos if any of their own people were within the arc of fire. He could only assume that their solemn nods meant they understood and were not merely the organic equivalent of the mechanical action of bobblehead dolls.
The small parking area that served the heating-cooling plant contained not a single vehicle, though it seemed there ought to be one belonging to Eric Norseman, graveyard-shift maintenance man.
As a first sign that something might be amiss, the main door to the plant stood open, held that way by the wind, which caused it to thump softly against the exterior wall.
The lighted vestibule offered three doors.
A deputy opened the one on the right and cleared the threshold. Beyond lay a large chamber with boilers, chillers, holding tanks, pumps, a maze of machinery the sheriff couldn’t identify, and a labyrinth of PVC pipes of various sizes running both vertically and horizontally. The room resonated with the humming, throbbing, ticking of exquisitely coordinated machines and with the susurration of rushing water under pressure. The place resembled the set for an action scene in a James Bond film, with too many blind corners to turn, too many hulking objects to look behind.
Sheriff Eckman didn’t want to have to search there unless absolutely necessary, and they wouldn’t know if it was necessary until they checked behind the remaining two doors.
He felt as if he desperately needed to pee. He told himself that the urge was entirely psychological. It had better be if any hope remained for him to one day become state attorney general.
The door on the left of the vestibule opened onto a balcony overlooking the twin stacks of the immense cooling tower. This construct of sheet steel, condensation coils, and drum fans stood three stories high, the first third of it below the ground-level balcony, and was serviced from catwalks at various levels. It, too, looked like the set in a James Bond film and was no less daunting than the first chamber.
The third door, directly opposite the front entrance, opened into the plant manager’s office. In addition to the main desk, two smaller workstations were provided. A refrigerator. A microwave. Two filing cabinets. At the back of the room, the door to a bathroom stood open, no one in the small space beyond. Another door, closed, might have led to a supply closet.
Because he was all but certain that Lee Shacket wasn’t lurking in the supply closet, that the killer fled in Eric Norseman’s vehicle, Sheriff Eckman followed a deputy into the office, another man close behind him. His confidence—and a diminishment in his need to urinate—resulted from the fact that the body of Thad Fenton lay facedown on the floor to the right of the door and the corpse of another man was sprawled across the desk, each cadaver in a condition suggesting Shacket thought of them as trash that he’d discarded during his flight from the premises.
Bristling with blood-clotted hair, pieces of Thad’s broken skull lay separate from his body. His brain appeared to be missing.
The body of the man on the desk, approximately the size of Shacket, had been stripped of everything, including his shoes.
Evidently the naked fugitive was now clothed.
This second victim might have been Eric Norseman, although identification would have to rely on fingerprints, as he had been crudely decapitated, and his head was missing.
98
As the first gray light of dawn dissolved the stain of night from the low clouds, Carson Conroy parked the Fleetwood Southwind on a paved lane to nowhere that dead-ended in a meadow.
Five miles outside the town of Pinehaven, a former trailer park had once occupied nine acres of this forty-acre tract that was known locally as the Big Windy. Where mobile homes had once stood side by side, there were only cracked blacktop streets, concrete foundation pads, and weeds. The state had acquired the trailer park and the additional acreage as a site for a wind-power farm. Unfortunately, studies had claimed that the windmills would be standing in the migratory path of several species of birds, with the consequence that an estimated fourteen thousand of our feathered friends would be killed each year by the huge churning blades. Those who supported the project cited experts who believed the birds would eventually learn that windmills were a threat and would, in seven or eight years, alter their semiannual flight path, after the loss of hardly more than a hundred thousand specimens. Sadly, the experience of other wind farms seemed at odds with this optimistic assessment of the avian ability to reprogram instinct, as fields at most of those facilities were routinely littered with so many downed aviators that it looked as if all the gods of old had engaged in a pillow fight.
To await his first visitor, Carson went to the bedroom at the back of the motor home and took off his shoes and stretched out on the mattress.
He had never been so physically weary from lack of sleep and stress. At the same time, he’d never been so mentally invigorated, his mind flying through a wonderland of possibilities. He was fearful and joyful in equal measure, as he once would have thought impossible.
Shacket—and what Shacket was becoming—terrified Carson, and what research might have occupied the staff at the Refine labs in Springville was a source of dread. It was human nature to obsess on negatives, to worry the smallest of sparks into infernos. And yet as he waited for sleep, he dwelt less on the horrors of genetic chaos than on the amazing Kipp and on the other dogs of the Mysterium that he had yet to meet.
As a student of the natural world, he knew that nature was a green machine, indifferent to the creatures—from mice to men—that struggled to survive within it. Every machine is made to be used, however, and whatever power employed nature to a purpose, it was able to produce wonders, humanity being one of them, the Mysterium being another.
Dorian Purcell, through the work at the now destroyed labs in Springville, sought to find a path toward a transhuman future, when current and future generations would shed their limitations. Maybe he was right to believe that human beings could become something superior to what they now were. But he was woefully wrong to believe that such change could be forged by the application of sciences that were, for all their recent advances, still crude instruments.
Carson was charmed by the thought that whatever power used the machine of nature might be in the process of elevating human beings and improving the quality of their existence, though in a way more elegant and astonishing than the blunt hammer-and-anvil method that Purcell had funded at Refine. What if it had always been the destiny of humanity not to stand alone and lonely at the pinnacle of nature, but instead to share that exalted position with another species that didn’t compete with it, but in fact completed it? Tens of thousands of years ago, when dogs and people first made an alliance against the cruelty of indifferent nature, what if a process had begun that would lead inevitably to the gradual increase of canine intelligence as the bond of love between the species drove dogs to strive ever harder to understand, to know, their benefactors? What if, as the human-dog bond intensified, the very intensity itself became a force magnifier that sped up the changes in our four-legged companions until one day, among them arose individuals who developed telepathy to serve in place of the articulated vocal apparatus they lacked?
