by Dean Koontz
“This club is some sick damn rich-guy whorehouse.”
“Whores? You think I need to pay whores? Screw you. Screw Jimmy. I don’t know any Jimmy.”
“But Jimmy knows this thing about you. Three hundred thousand bucks to join. You move in exclusive circles.”
“This is a stupid fantasy your Jimmy cooked up. There’s no such place as far as I know.”
“What’s three hundred thousand buy, and what are the ongoing charges? You’re a guy who gets value for his money. What do you get in the club? Beautiful, submissive girls? No desire too extreme? Just how extreme are your desires, Sterling?”
She had noticed a poker tell: When she told him a truth about himself that he wished she didn’t know, his right eye blinked, only the right.
“They call the place Aspasia,” she said. “Your type probably think that, naming it after the mistress of an ancient Greek statesman like Pericles, you’ve made it a classy establishment.” She raised the scissors and worked them. “Snip-snip. Keep lying to me, Sterling, damn if I won’t tailor you a little.”
He ignored the scissors and met her eyes, but this long and considered stare was not an adolescent challenge. He was taking her measure, as perhaps he took the measure of jurors in a courtroom.
When he spoke, he clearly had determined that continuing to play innocent was the most dangerous path he could take. But he still didn’t give her the satisfaction of acknowledging the fear that he repressed. He shook his head, smiled, and pretended the admiration of one predator for another. “You are something else.”
“Yeah? What am I, Sterling?”
“Damn if I know. Look, no more bullshit. Yeah, Aspasia’s real. It’s not a whorehouse the way you mean. It’s something new.”
“New in what way?”
“You don’t need to know. I’m not selling information here. I’m just buying my ass out of a sling. You could publicly embarrass me. Damage my business. Blackmail. You came here for money.”
“Is that really what you think this is about?” she asked.
“It’s always what everything’s about. You came here for money, I have it, so let’s do the deal.”
“I can’t walk into a bank with a blackmail check, Sterling. I don’t have accounts in the Cayman Islands that you can wire it to.”
“I’m talking cash. I said no more bullshit. From either of us, okay? You know I’m talking cash.”
“How much?”
“How much do you want?”
“You’re talking a home safe, right here?”
“Yes.”
“Is there at least a hundred thousand in it?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll take everything in it. What’s the combination?”
“Isn’t one. The key to the lock is a biological identifier.”
“What—your thumbprint?”
“So you cut off my thumb and hold it to the reader? Nothing that easy. You need me. Alive. When I’m dead, it’s locked for good.”
“All right. Anyway, it’s not my intention to kill you unless you give me no other choice.”
He rattled the plastic cable ties that cuffed him to the bathtub. “Let’s do it, then. Let’s get it done.”
“Not now,” Jane said. “After I’ve been there and come back.”
Overton looked baffled. “Been where?”
“Aspasia.”
Alarmed and unable to conceal it, he said, “You can’t go there. You can’t get in. Only members can get in to any of them.”
“Any of them? How many clubs does Aspasia run?”
He looked abashed that he had given up a bit of essential data. Too late. “Four. Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington.”
Jane seemed to have opened something that was both Pandora’s box and the figurative can of worms. “Jimmy says when you get to that Dark Web site, it offers to deal with you in any of eight languages. So there’s members all over the world, huh? Oligarchs with extreme desires.”
Instead of responding to her supposition, he repeated, “Only members can get in.”
“You’re a member. Tell me how it works. What’s the security?”
“That’s not the point. There is no security. Not the way you mean it. But you’re not me.”
“Aspasia uses facial-recognition software?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You said no more bullshit.”
“It’s true.”
“Famous guys, überrich guys put their faces on file at a place like that? Don’t jerk me around, Sterling. I’m getting sick of it. I said I’d kill you only if you gave me no choice. What do you think you’re doing? Giving me no choice is what you’re doing. The only way Aspasia works is no cameras, no names asked or given. No way for anyone to prove you ever went there.”
Overton shook his head, thought of another lie, decided not to risk putting it into words.
“You and people like you must have developed these places. You must believe you can come and go from them as anonymous as ghosts.”
He wanted to argue, persuade, litigate, but no jury waited to be convinced, no judge to rule in his favor. There was just Jane, who had no courtroom role. She was only, possibly, his executioner.
His frustration was so great that his fists were clenched within the cable ties, his neck muscles taut, his rapid pulse visible in his temples, his face flushed less with fear than with fury. “Damn it, you stubborn, stupid bitch, you can’t go there, you can’t get in. The money you want is all here and more where that came from. There’s nothing for you at Aspasia!”
Leaning over him, she lied in a whisper: “There’s my sister.”
He knew at once what she meant, and he was stunned. His anger evaporated. “I have nothing to do with that.”
“With what?”
“Procuring the girls.”
“The beautiful, submissive girls?” she asked.
“I have nothing to do with that.”
“But perhaps you used her. Maybe you were cruel to her?”
“No. That’s not me. That’s not the way I am. And whatever I might have done—I didn’t know you then.”
The absurdity of his defense elicited a sour laugh from Jane. She pinched his cheek, as a grandmother might pinch that of a little boy who charmed her. “Aren’t you precious, Sterling? You didn’t know me then. And now that we’re friends, of course, you would treat my little sister like a princess.”
At last he could no longer conceal his fear, which swelled quickly into a barely contained terror. His tanned and toned body prickled with gooseflesh, and not because the bathroom had grown chilly. “She might not even be at the L.A. facility.”
“Facility? How respectable a word for a place of such hideous corruption. I’m going there, Sterling. You’re going to tell me how to get in, everything I need to know. Then I’ll come back here with my sister, and we’ll open the safe, and we’ll leave you in one piece to think about how fragile life is.”
“You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
He shuddered violently and said only, “My God.”
“What God is that, Sterling?”
She slipped one blade of the scissors between his bare thigh and the fabric of his underwear. She began to cut the cloth.
“All right, wait, stop. You can get in and out of the place.”
She ceased cutting. “How?”
“No cameras. No alarms. The only security is two men.”
“Armed?”
“Yes. But you’ll enter my password at the gate and at the front door, and because it’s a member’s password, they won’t see you.”
“Won’t see me? Am I invisible?”
“Essentially, yes.” He took a deep breath, blew it out, met her eyes to make a claim of sincerity. “They don’t see members.”
“Am I to believe these armed thugs are blind?”
“No. Not blind.” He was pale, both chilled and sweating, lying there like an overgr
own baby in his soft, gray designer diaper, the waistband announcing DOLCE & GABBANA across his flat stomach. “But they don’t see members because…because they’re…If I explain, if I say more than another word, you might as well kill me now. If you don’t, others will.”
She parsed what he had said. “ ‘More than another word,’ ” she quoted. “So there’s one more word that you can say and maybe not be killed by your own kind?”
He closed his eyes. After a silence, he nodded.
Jane quoted him once more. “ ‘They don’t see members because they’re’—what?”
“Programmed,” he said, without opening his eyes.
20
* * *
“PROGRAMMED,” STERLING SAYS, and dares not look at her hovering over him, because she will call his answer bullshit or she will want to know more. Who wouldn’t want to know more? But it really means his certain death if he betrays Bertold Shenneck and David James Michael and the others. Not just his death. His ruination and his death. There is no hope of turning state’s evidence and bargaining to rat them out in return for being allowed to go on living in style, not after what they have all done. This has been an all-or-nothing enterprise from the start. He bought in knowing the stakes.
After the bitch is silent for a while, Sterling opens his eyes and finds her waiting to meet his stare. He wonders how a face can be so contorted with contempt and yet remain so beautiful, how such dazzling blue and inviting eyes can look so pitiless.
Closing the blades of the scissors, she says, “I won’t carve more revelations out of you. I think only torture would get more, and I don’t have the stomach to touch you, which is the only way to get it done. So here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll give me the address of Aspasia and your membership password. I’ll drive your Bentley there. When I come back, we’ll open the safe, and I’ll take what I want.”
“And me?”
“That’ll be up to you.”
“What if something happens? What if you don’t come back?”
“When you miss appointments on Monday, someone will come looking. You probably won’t die of thirst by then.”
She gets to her feet and plucks a washcloth from a nearby towel rack. With the scissors, she cuts off a third of the cloth, throws aside the scrap, and rolls the larger piece into a tight ball.
For Sterling, she has become something more than a woman, has ascended to the status of mystery, holding over him the power of life and death as no one has before, a creature of flesh and blood yet mystical and fearsome and unknowable. He watches her with dread, her every action now enigmatic and potentially a preparation for a mortal blow.
Holding forth the rolled-up portion of the washcloth, she says, “I’m going to stuff this in your mouth, then duct-tape it in place. You try to bite me, I’ll bust out all your teeth and then stuff it in your mouth. Believe me?”
“Yes.”
“First, tell me where to find the keys to the Bentley and the house. Also the address of Aspasia and what I do when I get there.”
He tells her without hesitation.
“Now the code to disarm the house alarm.”
“Nine, six, nine, four, asterisk.”
“If that’s the crisis code that disarms the alarm but also alerts them that you’re under duress, if it summons help, here’s what’ll happen. Once I switch off the perimeter alarm you set when you came home, I won’t just drive away and let them come to free you. I’ll stand here for five minutes, ten, to see if there’s going to be an armed response from Vigilant Eagle or the cops. And if there is, I’ll shoot you in the face. Now…do you want to give me another disarming code?”
He hardly recognizes his own voice when he says, “Nine, six, nine, five, asterisk.”
“One digit different. Nine, six, nine, five—not four. Is that it now?”
“Yes.”
She kneels beside him again, and he opens his mouth, and she shoves the rolled cloth in there. From her big purse, she takes a roll of wide duct tape. It’s not a handbag; it’s the sack of a damn witch. With the scissors, she cuts a piece of tape and seals the gag in his mouth. She winds a longer length of tape twice around his head to hold the shorter piece in place.
She goes away to the Crestron panel in the bedroom. Tones sound as she enters the code, and the recorded voice says, “Control is disarmed.”
When she returns, she draws a pistol from under her sport coat. She stands over him, the weapon at arm’s length, the muzzle no more than a foot from his face.
He has given her the safe code. He knows that no armed response will be coming. Nevertheless, whether five or ten minutes, that wait is the longest hour of his life.
1
* * *
IN VIRGINIA, NATHAN SILVERMAN stayed an hour later than usual in his office so that he could review again the edited and compiled video from Palisades Park in Santa Monica and from the hotel, which had come in from L.A. late in the afternoon.
The hotel cameras were confined to a limited number of interior public spaces, but the video was high definition.
Here is Jane at the lobby entrance, back to the camera. She opens the door. The Amazon skates inside carrying two briefcases and makes her way directly to the elevator alcove. Jane chains and padlocks the front doors. Here is Jane joining the skater at the elevators. Into the cab. The garage as they step out of the cab. The skater carries her skates. Jane carries a trash bag. The two women racing up the ramp.
They must have had a car in the alleyway or somewhere nearby. Sensitive about being accused of violating the privacy of the public, the hotel had not mounted a camera in the alley. The city had no coverage there, either. Where Jane and the skater had gone from that point was unknowable.
The park video and traffic-cam footage came from cheaper, older cameras with dust-filmed lenses. The quality of the images was poor. The video would have to undergo considerable, patient enhancement if there was to be any chance of identifying the various players.
One thing, however, was clear beyond dispute: Jane had set up a swap of some kind in the park, and she had feared a trap. Judging by the number of people associated with the man bearing the briefcases and the metallic balloon—HAPPY, HAPPY—she was right to expect a double cross.
Silverman had not yet assigned these inquiries a case number. Initially, he, himself, would be the special agent in charge.
Neither had he alerted the director to the possibility of an agent having gone rogue. Nothing was worse. The Bureau had to come down hard on any individual who would wear its name but break the laws that she was sworn to uphold. If the charge was lodged but then proved false, Jane would nevertheless be stained forever by the mere accusation, and her life, already fractured by the loss of Nick, would be shattered.
In his mind’s ear, he heard the voice of Gladys Chang: She wasn’t afraid for herself. She was scared for her sweet hummingbird, her little boy.
This was Friday. Investigations of crimes continued 24/7, but in cases where no lives hung in the balance and national security was not an issue, the Bureau cranked down the intensity of its work on Saturday and Sunday. Nathan could justify putting a pin in the matter of Jane Hawk until Monday.
What he did during the next seventy-two hours, however, might seal his own fate even as he worried about hers. He and Rishona had reservations for dinner at a favorite restaurant in Falls Church. He would share with her all his thoughts about what steps to take next in this matter. After all, if he walked a long way out on a limb, he was taking Rishona with him. If at the moment there wasn’t anyone with an intention to saw that particular limb off behind him, there would most likely be one by sometime next week. When you acted on principle tempered by compassion, there was sooner or later always someone with a saw.
He drove home through lighter traffic than expected.
The weather had taken a turn toward an early spring.
Twilight was a magical Maxfield Parrish shade of blue.
The stars seemed to
be born moment by moment as they appeared sequentially in the darkling heavens.
And just the previous night, the rain gutter that he repaired had not collapsed in the storm.
Perhaps fate was at the moment on his side to such an extent that taking a long walk on a limb would be worth the risk.
2
* * *
ALTHOUGH MONEY COULDN’T BUY happiness, driving a Bentley calmed an agitated mind. The rush hour in greater L.A. was at least four hours long, and this state that built the greatest highways in the nation now rated last in the quality of its roads. In Overton’s Bentley, the rudeness of ill-maintained pavement was rendered almost mythical by a suspension system that smoothed away all shocks.
And there, Jane thought, was the problem with a man like Overton. Wealth had not corrupted him. What he’d chosen to do with his wealth corrupted him. First he insulated himself from ordinary human experience, and then deemed himself superior to the masses, excused himself from all constraints not only of morality but also of tradition, and subsequently felt justified in casting off his conscience as a worthless artifact of primitive and superstitious minds. He had made of himself a malignancy in the human community.
Although the smooth ride in the Bentley planed away the rough edges of her agitation, it did not diminish her indignation, which seemed to be condensing into cold, hard wrath.
The local Aspasia was located in an area of unincorporated county land adjacent to San Marino, a lovely community of grand old homes and estates next door to Pasadena. The Bentley’s GPS talked Jane there in the same uninflected tones with which it would help her find her way to a bookstore or a church.
According to Overton, the facility—how deeply she despised the evasion represented by that word—occupied a reconstructed mansion on three acres. The voice of the GPS advised her to turn left off a quiet suburban street, and she braked to a halt in a driveway, the headlight beams splashing upon a pair of ten-foot-high iron gates heavy with decorative radials and scroll work. Nothing of the house or grounds could be seen from beyond the property. The gates stood between sections of a ten-foot stacked-stone estate wall graced with ivy and crowned with spear-point iron staves.