A Dark Perfection

by James, Mark

  When she was a child, she’d gone to the zoo and watched a jaguar close to the glass, alert, near feeding time. At some moments, Jack could seem like this. He was one of the calmest men she’d ever known, but when threatened his instinct was to move, to do something. There was a yin/yang quality about him – one aspect on the surface, the other never far away.

  Sometimes, it grabbed at her attention like heat lightning.

  She is now walking through the long grass behind the manor, the black rubber boots she found in the basement shiny and slick from the dew.

  She thinks about where they are, this place in time. It’s something she’s been doing lately. In this world of isolated woods, it was calm, a place unconcerned with anything outside of itself. Then, as a bitter wind, the truth would rush in, reminding them of the world without. It was a strange juxtaposition; one minute in the eye in a storm, the next into the storm, then back into the eye again.

  Yin and yang…

  And yet – and here was her problem – even while asking Jack to stay, she was forced to ask herself: was the calmness of this manor, this eye in their storm, fooling her? Mac still hadn’t told them where they were going. Did he really have a plan? Were they simply waiting on nothing, for the GMA to eventually find them? She could see that the situation was bothering Jack. On their morning walk, a partridge flew up and she said something and he stayed quiet, staying within himself. One instinct was telling her to wait and the other to be active, to make their future happen.

  She opens the barn and removes the boots, muddy from the fields and retrieves her shoes. It is starting to become dark, a pale moon resting on the horizon.

  Entering the manor, she sees Jack by the fireplace crouched over the laptop, concentrating.

  She smiles. He never gives up, like her.

  He hears her steps and smiles back, saying something about dinner and returns to the screen. He’s been searching for the past two hours, following a whisper out of reach, opening a door and then another.

  What was it that he wasn’t seeing?

  He turns and looks at her again. Something, an idea, starts to come to him. There is something about her.

  Could it be that simple? Was that it?

  Jack could feel a memory slowly begin to form – of the time when they stood in Dr. Takamura’s lab, when the doctor had told them about the major’s death in Kauai, about the slices into the brains. At the lab, Jack had watched as Lani leaned over the bodies. Slowly, she then looked up at the wall to where Takamura had projected an enormous image of Della Norine Beaufort’s face, the enormous eyes staring over them, past them.

  As if something were coming at her.

  After they’d left Takamura’s lab and entered the car, what had Lani said?

  Blood eyes…

  Had the murder investigation hit a raw nerve?

  Jack begins entering a string of search words – BLOOD EYES, BLOOD EYES & MURDER, EYES OF BLOOD & UNSOLVED, BLOOD EYES and…

  A French newspaper article flashes up, the first published after the U.S. Ambassador’s death in Paris.

  “Lani, look at this.”

  She leans over and sees the word, MURDER. For a moment, it takes her aback.

  “But there’s nothing in any of the newspapers or blogs that the ambassador, or his French mistress, were ever murdered,” she notes.

  “But shouldn’t that tell us something, in and of itself? There’s hardly any news on the ambassador’s death at all. Why? Everyone is focused on the sovereignty battle between the U.S. and France. Somehow, the causal events – the death of the ambassador and his mistress – have fallen to page seven, effectively buried.”

  They lean forward and begin to read.

  The Le Monde article begins with the de rigueur, sensationalized headline, finally settling into a biography on the ambassador. They continue skimming, Lani pointing out the complete lack of information on the causes of death, noting a frustration by the reporters with the police. Then, at the end, something that might have been left off, perhaps only added by the reporter as colorful filler. It was a blurb on what the concierge had said before the hotel staff had suddenly, mysteriously, refused to talk to the press anymore:

  “They were so strange,” Arielle

  Charpentier, Concierge for the

  Hotel St. Regis, said. “Their eyes,

  they were…blood eyes.”

  Their running from Washington, D.C. and from the GMA to the Maryland cottage and on to the Scottish manor, the Croatian accounts, all of it, it had never been about him; it had always been about Lani.

  Jack punched another search parameter into the laptop. He then cross-referenced the name to its work location:

  Henri Garneau, Chief Inspector, Nouveau

  Sûreté Nationale, Direction Regionale de

  Police Judiciaire de Paris, 11 Rue des

  Saussaies, Paris, France.

  She could see the steeliness in his eyes, its growing confidence.

  “What?” she said. He began to smile.

  “Tell me,” she pleaded, smiling back but not sure why.

  He looked into her eyes, deeper than before, the smile becoming all of him.

  “Don’t ever say that I never took you to Paris.”

  24

  The pastures and low hills of the Lake District, cloaked in morning mists, flew past at two hundred miles an hour as the Inter-City bullet train carried them from Inverness towards London. At dawn, they’d “borrowed” a car from the manor barn and left it at the Inverness bus station, tucked into the farthest parking space with a tarp from the trunk hastily thrown over. They then walked to the train station, keeping their heads low, using the light rain as their excuse.

  As Lani stared out of the train window, the rugged beauty of the Scottish Highlands seemed so long ago, the feeling so strange. Time was becoming elastic – speeding up, slowing down, driven one moment, a lull the next.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” Jack said, “but these aren’t coincidences. We’re heading in the right direction.”

  “It’s not crazy, Jack – I see it too,” leaning closer as a passenger scooted past. “Maybe it’s not as clear for me, but I know it somehow. I still don’t understand, though – why me?”

  “Think about it. The major and his mistress are murdered via massive subdural hematomas, each rupture caused by an unknown instrumentality. The result: the eyes became irrigated with blood. And since the same rarity occurred with the ambassador and the French woman, also a mistress, we can only conclude that the cause was the same. Therefore, we ask: who would want to murder two seemingly unrelated pairs of people, each on opposite sides of the globe, and with a weapon that no one has ever heard of? Something in your investigation closed in, too close for their comfort.”

  “Four people, four homicides. That’s a serial killer, Jack.”

  He nodded, “And we both know what that means.”

  “There will be more.”

  “Or maybe,” Jack said, “there already exist other victims that we haven’t found yet because…”

  “No one was looking…” she said, finishing his sentence.

  “The eyes, always in plain sight,” she whispered.

  “And the patterns, don’t forget the kill patterns – geometric, not random,” Jack said. “Stepping back, you start to see the coincidences racking up. Whoever is behind this never expected us to make the connection. That’s our advantage. We need to find this Garneau and see what he has. Another puzzle piece, perhaps.”

  Lani rested back and turned, “Did Mac ever get back to you? After you told him about Paris, I mean?”

  Jack laughed, “Well, he wasn’t too happy. Feathers all riled up. That’s understandable; I’d feel the same. He knows me, though.”

  Mac had never been one to believe in destiny. For Mac, grinding out a problem was always the solution; leave the finesse to others. Whether it had been in one of their old interrogations, or a crisis in the Oval Office, Mac’s creed stayed the same:
slap on the dark humor, grind it out. Jack had once tried to explain to Mac what he’d learned as a prosecutor, about what separates the good ones from the great ones. You can study a trial endlessly, pour over the photos and evidence until your mind swims, know the witnesses inside and out, but at some point you have to let go of the comfort of the plan and grab at an opportunity, even if it feels like jumping off a building. The great trial lawyers wait for this moment, knowing that it’s the fulcrum event for the trial.

  “Is that why you almost never lost?”

  “Sure. Learning when to take a chance.”

  She looked over. In his proper dress, he looked like a professor. She laughed to herself, yeah, like Indiana Jones was a professor…

  “And this is our chance?”

  “If it’s not, then it’ll lead us to that chance. The answer will be in front of us, never behind.”

  She asked him to tell her another one of his old prosecutor stories and he told her about the Scarlotti trial and about how Harnett, after his cover was blown, had been chased through a park and across a string of south side rooftops. She told him one of her own – about when she’d gone to Bangkok to visit a friend. It wasn’t simply that the stories were pulling her out of their present circumstances. For her, it was as if all of their stories, together, had led them here, all of their past moments falling down to this present.

  Their present moment, their chance.

  At the end of her story, he looked over and caught her laughing, eyes closed and forgetting about where they were.

  He still hadn’t told her about his dreams, how he’d been awaking at night with this utter certainty that they were doing the right thing.

  “You know, you were talking in your sleep last night,” she said, catching him.

  “Yeah?” he smiled. “No secrets, I hope.”

  “Not yet. On the other hand…”

  “Alright, let’s have it.”

  “It was hard to make out – only a few words. Something about a moon, a star.”

  She didn’t tell him about her own dreams, about the white desert and the white star.

  “You must think I’m over the edge,” he smiled.

  She leaned over, putting her hand over his. Outside, the English countryside rushed past.

  “Never. Besides, aren’t we all a little crazy?”

  †

  Early that morning, President Walker had conducted a flyover aboard Air Force One, looking down at the damage from Hurricane Giselle, the coast clawed and desolate. Upon landing, he’d met with Governor Eubanks and inspected the remains of the Sandpiper East Elementary School, meeting with some of the parents and telling them that everything would be all right, even as they all knew this could never be true again. Once back at the White House and after his last briefing, he went into his office and began reading the letters from the children – something he’d always done. After one, he went looking for the First Lady, reading it to her out loud. Her eyes welled as the young girl talked about her cancer, about her shelter dog, Daisy, who “was always with me…”

  “Mr. President? Bob?”

  “Sorry, Mac,” the president said, turning from the Oval Office window. “I was lost out there for a moment. Say again?”

  “You asked for an update on the theater investigation. It’s three o’clock.” Mac looked at his watch. “I might be a bit early.”

  Across the president’s desk were strewn papers and file folders.

  “What’s that?” Mac asked, pointing to the papers. “I hope you’re not planning on launching WWIII without me, because, you know, I’d just be heartbroken.”

  “No,” the president laughed, “it’s those maglev plans I told you about. Everyone wants a decision. All in or all out.”

  Mac rounded the desk and moved one of the pages away, revealing a photo of the proposed national monorail/pod transport system.

  “No more cars, eh? Another sacrificed freedom…”

  “Well, maybe in fifty years,” the president said, “not for you and me – we’ll be long gone. That’s the way it’s going. Get on that evolutionary train or get left behind. Besides, the psychologists keep telling us that no one will even notice, that they’re all so lost in their texting, or whatever. Tell people they can have another hour on the box and it seems they’ll give up anything. You know, in a hundred years people will be in a museum looking at pictures of people driving, asking each other, can you believe those poor, stupid people, they had to drive?”

  The national Transit-Net/Pod-Maglev system was the future of ground travel and commuting. It meant that no one would drive anymore, all the transport pods stationed at, or ordered to one’s home, no more traffic accidents, no more car insurance, no more DUI’s, no more traffic deaths, no pollution, the transit lines running on super-conductive magnetic rails, either underground or elevated to allow wildlife to pass under.

  “So, no more road-kill either?” Mac smiled.

  “You bet. Corridors for all of the wildlife to pass safely underneath, expanded greenways, parks, reclaimed wetlands – the environmental lobby loves it. And think about all of the space opened up when all that ugly asphalt goes away. And the bonus is that the corporate lobby is hard on board, they’re practically drooling. I mean, think about how many more work hours they can wring out of each employee if everyone goes to work, hands free, in a maglev pod. The actuaries estimate that we’ll gain an extra thirty-six minutes of work-time, per worker, per day. Hey, buddy, everyone’s happy. All on board!”

  “Everyone except the insurance companies,” Mac observed. “How are they possibly going to pay for all of those corporate suites, you know, all of those high-rise headquarters with lawns that look more like golf courses?”

  “Gone with the wind,” the president laughed. “Think about it, it’s absolutely going to happen. With a quantum-parallel computer brain controlling all of the pods at once, you’ll have no more stopping at streetlights, no more traffic jams, no more gaper’s blocks. The generated efficiencies alone will result in a massive reduction in national energy use. And, as I said, no one will want to stop it.”

  “And you think, in the end, that’s a good thing?” Mac asked, as if asking himself. “I get the environmental angle, I really do – the pollution, the wildlife, putting the freight cars underground in another corridor under the pods, all of the utility wires running underground alongside, etc. – but is this a good thing for us, you know, the people?

  “Here’s a minor, mildly related story. Listen to this,” Mac continued. “I was sitting at a stop light the other day and I look over and here’s this luxury sedan being driven by some high school kid, obviously his parent’s car, and he and his three passengers are all texting away like mad. When I talk to my kids they say it’s only to keep in contact with their friends, but here are these kids sitting at that light, all together in the same car and texting someone else!”

  “Hey, how do you know they weren’t texting each other?” Walker laughed.

  “That would be truly depressing,” Mac said, leaning back on the couch and staring up at the ceiling.

  “You just don’t like change anymore, Mac, admit it. But that’s mostly what my job is – Change. Managing change today, managing change next week, looking at what change might be possible in fifty years, or even a hundred years from now. It comes with the job. No one thinks about it until you actually get into the presidency. Sure, what I do matters today, but also a century away, when we’re all down to dust.”

  Mac thought about something Takamura had once said – that humans were the “creative mammals,” saying that we, Homo sapiens, had become creative only when we finally found leisure time. “Think about it,” Takamura said, “Homo habilis didn’t have the time to think about anything else; he was too busy figuring out where to get his next meal, or from becoming a meal himself. It wasn’t until technology, our tools, released us to have free time that we became freer – freer to think, freer to create more tools, to see more beautiful th
ings. Homo habilis didn’t have the time to stop and smell the roses, but you do. You know, Mac, you talk about how you hate technology, all of these computers and that they’re running you around, but those same tools also allowed Einstein the time to sit in that bathtub and come up with the Special Theory of Relativity. Hey, maybe the big creative ideas don’t come to us – aren’t given to us – until we find that quiet space. There are no bad tools, Mac, only good and bad users…”

  “Yep, you’re right,” Mac said, still smiling at the ceiling, “I just want to stay where I’m at. Give me a small garden to tend, a small mountain to climb and a very large tumbler of scotch at the end of the day and I’m happy.”

  “Not so fast, old friend – you’re still lashed to this raft. By my count, we have 528 days left. No exits here.”

  Mac sat up on the couch, “Alright, but come on, why now? Really, the mag-lev stuff can wait, at least until we get past this grand jury mess.”

  “And then what, wait until we get past this GMA mess, and then the next mess? There’s always another mess, Mac. Of all people you know that. Christ, Mac, you’re the Mess-Master! Besides, didn’t Lincoln build the transcontinental railway in the middle of the Civil War?”

  “Really? I didn’t know that…”

  “And Eisenhower built the interstate highway system. So, why can’t we get started on this? Pyramids aren’t built in a day. So, let’s get it done.”

  Mac smiled, remembering.

  The president laughed to himself at his own saying, then moved over to his desk, looking for the briefing folder amidst the other files, “Speaking of which, what’s going on with the investigation?”

  “Which one?”

  “No kidding. The theaters, I mean.”

  “They found the bus in another remote location, Minnesota backwoods. Covered over in a hole just like the car from Redwood Falls. Except this time, our offender – whom we have tentatively, and oh-so-originally code named, The Driver – was still in the seat.”