Deadlock

by Robert Liparulo

  He shoved Julian off the bed.

  Julian staggered back. Caught himself against the wall. Concern had found his face again.

  Michael spread his arms. “What?”

  Julian tugged on the bottom of his shirt, flattening the wrinkles Michael had made with his fists. “I’m just saying . . .”

  “What?”

  “You’re not alone, okay? You don’t have to go through this by yourself.”

  Michael narrowed his eyes at him. “Through what?”

  Julian shook his head. “Whatever . . . you know? You’re scared, freaking out. I would be too. If you want a friend, you know where to find me, okay?”

  The kid looked sincere, but so what if he was? What was Michael supposed to do with him? He didn’t have time for friends, and he certainly wasn’t going to cry on anyone’s shoulder. All Julian’s caring did was make him feel worse. Another flash of ice cream to make the rest of it that much more awful.

  Okay, so Julian was a nice guy. Around here, nice guys—and their friends—didn’t just finish last, they finished dead.

  Julian said, “I’m mean, I’m here, if . . .”

  “What?”

  “If you stay. I don’t think you should.”

  Michael lowered his head. “Just go, all right?”

  The boy stood quietly for a long time. Finally the door opened and closed, and he was gone.

  FIFTEEN

  Page Industries was headquartered east of Gold Bar, Washington, ninety minutes from the Sea-Tac Airport by the clock in Hutch’s rented Pacifica. At the foot of the Cascade Mountains, the region was heavily forested. From Stevens Pass Highway, Hutch could see sheer cliffs and deep ravines, as if nature had experienced a violent outburst and gouged at the hills with long nails. The topographical map Hutch had picked up in Seattle showed a spattering of lakes, both large and small, as well as a complicated network of rivers and streams. The map also indicated large areas of flatlands hidden among the blanket folds of earth. Toss its isolation into the mix, and it made a perfect place to prepare soldiers for fighting in any terrain.

  Hutch knew Outis managed training facilities around the world, but according to reports and its own literature, this was its primary “base of operations,” through which all recruits were processed.

  Hutch had reconnoitered the area using Google Earth. Most of the Page Industries campus, with its roads and buildings, was visible on the satellite images. A large square to the west, however, appeared to be replaced with a photograph of the land before construction had begun. No doubt this was where the Outis facilities were located. It was similar to some of the places the government intentionally blotted out for security reasons. It was conceivable Outis would be a terrorist target, but Hutch suspected its censoring had more to do with Page’s clout.

  The main gate onto the campus resembled the ones guarding military bases: set well back from the main road, the area between cleared of all trees, the better to spot approaching attacks; concrete barriers that required vehicles to slow down and weave between them; a metal-brace vehicle barrier that retracted into the roadway. The guard shack resembled a small stone cottage. As he approached, the shack’s glass appeared tinted. Closer, he realized it was the panes’ thickness that distorted its clarity. Bulletproof.

  The guard took Hutch’s driver’s license and became a shadowy image behind a sliding window. When he reappeared, he said, “Sorry, Mr. Hutchinson, you’re not authorized.”

  “I was invited,” Hutch said. “I flew out from Colorado for this meeting.”

  “I’m sorry. Reach the exit lane by turning left right here.”

  “Look, I didn’t come this far to be turned away. Call Page’s office. They’re expecting me.”

  “What time was your appointment, sir?”

  “Sometime today. I didn’t get a time.”

  “Then I’d wait by your phone. Please, sir.” The guard twirled his finger and held it toward the main road.

  Hutch drove around the shack and back to Stevens Pass Highway, which here was nothing but a two-lane blacktop.

  If this is Page’s idea of a joke . . .

  But whatever the man was—brilliant, narcissistic, homicidal—Hutch had not run into any anecdotes that hinted at his being juvenile. He remembered an interview in which Page praised William the Conqueror’s strategic skills in battle. “He always delayed confrontation,” Page had said, “and in doing so, he let his enemy expend its resources in fruitless attempts to commit him to battle.”

  But Page had nothing to worry about on that score: Hutch’s bank accounts were running on fumes. He’d had to buy his ticket—especially pricey because of the short notice—with the last of his credit.

  Yeah, a billionaire’s going to worry about my financial resources, even in the best of times.

  All Hutch could do was wait. He had wanted to keep the entire day open for Page’s meeting. Since all the late-night flights home had been full, he’d scheduled his return for the next day at noon. Any way you cut it, he’d have to stay the night. He’d passed a motel half an hour ago, as good a place as any to wait, he supposed. He turned onto the road.

  A few minutes later he spotted a car on the opposite shoulder with its hood up. A man was leaning over the engine. Hutch slowed, then stopped in line with the car, a few-years-old Mustang.

  “Need anything?” he said.

  “No, thanks,” the man said, without looking up. “Almost got it, I think.”

  As Hutch pulled away, the man looked, pushing up his glasses with a finger. He squinted, then scowled. Hutch watched him in the mirror. The man stepped into the center of the road, hands on his hips, watching the Pacifica accelerate away.

  SIXTEEN

  The Call, as Hutch had starting thinking of it, the way a death row inmate might refer to a hoped-for clemency call from the governor, came at two fifteen. Short and sweet: “Mr. Page will see you at four o’clock.”

  When Hutch returned to the gate, the same guard gave him two passes, one for his dashboard, the other to pin to his jacket. The guard handed him a map of the campus, with the route to the Outis facilities marked in red. As he’d suspected, they were located on the west side of the campus, where the satellite photos had been retouched. The map showed five other distinct clusters of buildings. Considering Page Industries’ Shiva-like reach into all things war and defense, its compactness spoke to Page’s fastidiousness and efficiency—appropriate, Hutch figured, for a paramilitary organization.

  “We ask that you not deviate from this route, sir,” the guard had said. Something in Hutch’s expression may have prompted him to add, “If you do, alarms will sound, and a security car will escort you off the premises.”

  “Hellhounds and helicopters too?” Hutch said, eliciting as stony a face as Michelangelo ever carved. “Are there chips in these passes?”

  “Have a good day, sir.”

  Crap. Hutch had indeed planned on “deviating” to other parts of the campus. He was, after all, a journalist and investigating Brendan Page. Most likely, he’d have found nothing but locked doors and closed mouths, and eventually a security camera would have picked up his activities. Then they’d have released the hellhounds.

  That guy had made his breach and ejection sound immediate. It made him careful about not making a wrong turn on the way to his destination.

  The Outis facilities boasted their own wall, gate, and guardhouse. This entrance, however, appeared more secure than the first. When he pulled up to the shack, no one greeted him. Its nearly opaque windows were almost certainly tinted; he could see nothing beyond his own reflection staring back at him. The gate here was no retractable barrier, but a massive portcullis set in an ancient-looking stone-block wall running in both directions. The wall was topped, anachronistically, with concertina wire. It was an impressive entrance, if you were a visiting politico or parent of a recruit.

  As the gate rose, he could hear chain links rattling through sprockets. He drove through, and the illusion of
the grand fortifications of King Arthur and Caesar shattered. A tall chain-link fence formed a box on the other side of the gate. He nosed up to a second gate, which didn’t open until the one behind him had closed completely.

  Like visiting a prison, he thought, which got him wondering whether the setup kept people out or in.

  The Outis building to which the map directed him was a brick three-story in a style architects called modern traditionalism. Lots of angles, copper-tinted glass, and fancy masonry work—herringbone patterns around the windows, incised columns, the use of different shades, shapes, and ages of brick. A portion of the roof appeared to be an embattled parapet, giving the entire structure the quality of a contemporary castle.

  Hutch stepped out of the elevator on the third floor into a larger outer office. Three secretaries worked at desks concentrically arranged before a large double-doored portal. Like the concrete barriers at the front gate, they forced visitors to weave between them to reach Page’s office. A woman at the front desk told him, “We’ll be with you in a few minutes, Mr. Hutchinson.”

  He nodded. Except for the desk, the remainder of the room could have been the lobby of a fancy hotel in a major city, some place like New York’s Waldorf Astoria. The décor leaned toward opulent.

  Hutch strolled to the windows. They looked out on the front parking lot. Framed and matted pencil sketches filled the walls. One was a perfectly rendered hand that Hutch recognized as one Michelangelo had eventually painted onto the roof of the Sistine Chapel. He had no doubt the sketch was an original.

  He saw pieces by van Gogh, daVinci, Picasso, as well as many artists he didn’t recognize. Most could have been described in an auction catalog as “a practice sketch, rendered in lead, of an incomplete body part . . .” Several were more complete depictions of a person, and a few of several whole figures together: mother and child, lovers in repose. He was studying one of these fuller sketches when he noticed what the artist had titled it: Genjuros in Primo Luogo Assassina.

  Genjuros—the word Nichols had instructed him to research.

  The artist’s signature was clear, as far as artist signatures go. Hutch was pretty sure it read Giovanni Cavalcasello. Maybe the last name’s first l was an i. He committed the title and name to memory, then looked at the sketch again: three people in billowy clothes and death’s-head masks stabbing an elderly man, who appeared to have risen from a writing desk.

  Hutch moved away from the drawing before the secretaries noticed his interest. His Internet search for Genjuros had hit on nothing but a character in a video game. He should have checked if the game developer had been Spiral, which Page owned. Could Nichols have known Hutch would wind up here and see the sketch? Had he thought the reference would be less obscure than it turned out to be? And what the hell did it mean?

  He had pretended to study three other sketches when the lead secretary called to him.

  “This way, please.” She beckoned him into the slalom of desks. The other two women were schoolgirl petite, but this one appeared capable of putting Hutch down with one arm behind her back.

  As he passed her desk, she stopped him. “I’m sorry, I’ll have to hold your recording device out here until you conclude your meeting with Mr. Page.”

  Hutch tried to look injured. “I’m a journalist. I thought this was on the record.”

  She smiled and opened her hand to him.

  Hutch said, “Are you guessing, or do you know?”

  “Inside pocket of your jacket,” she said.

  He retrieved his digital recorder and handed it over. “How’s my cholesterol?” he asked.

  She opened a door and stepped aside for him. The room was roughly the size of a basketball court. The left wall comprised tall, ornately carved bookshelves, a lighted display case, and a floor-to-ceiling rock fireplace. What appeared to be a tree trunk burned within. A coffee table and leather high-back chairs were positioned in front of it. The right wall was paneled in rich wood squares. Four doors were spaced evenly along it. Between each door were framed photographs, paintings, and magazine covers.

  A journalist friend who interviewed and profiled movie stars told him all celebrities had a “wall of fame” like this. “It’s not ego,” he’d said. “It’s more as though they’re as surprised as everyone else by their success, if not more so. Mementoes remind them how far they’ve come.”

  Bet it’s ego in Page’s case, Hutch thought.

  If the far wall was a single pane of glass, it was the largest undivided window he’d ever seen. It was the width of the room and two stories high, peaking in the center. It must have cost what Hutch had paid for his house. Beyond it, in the distance, the Cascades rose in all of their picture-postcard splendor.

  “Mr. Page will be with you shortly,” the woman said. “Please make yourself at home. May I get you a drink?”

  “No, thank you,” Hutch said. “Is this Page’s main office?”

  “At Outis.” She stepped back into the outer office and shut the door behind her.

  Between Hutch and the display case on the left was a table. As he approached, he realized it was a diorama of a military battle. Hills, rivers, roads were rendered in three dimensions. Fuzzy green clumps obviously represented trees, though most of it was an open field. The troops were pegs the diameter of toothpicks. Red on one side, blue on the other. At the front of the blue army was a disproportionately large horseback rider, a sword held high. By this commander’s ornate uniform, the miniature cannons, and wagons, Hutch guessed the battle was not contemporary: maybe from the American Civil War or the Napoleonic Wars. He was about to move on when the horseman’s face caught his eye. It was Page. There was no mistaking the high forehead, narrow cheeks, puckered mouth.

  Hutch shook his head.

  The display case held weapons. Pistols, rifles, swords, knives, throwing stars. All of them appeared old, some of them were oddities. A three-barreled flintlock pistol, a sword with a firearm built into it, a crossbow attached to a sawed-off shotgun, what may have been a ray gun, a few items Hutch could not even guess at. Scattered among these were badges, bullets, and scopes.

  To judge by Page’s books, his interests ran the gamut from the expected—Weapons Through the Ages, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War—to the inexplicable—Botany for Lost Souls, Dance Your Way to Fame and Fortune. The books shared shelf space with items like a rusty cannonball, a feather fountain pen in a glass case, a severed finger floating in murky liquid.

  Nothing you wouldn’t find in any successful CEO’s office, Hutch thought.

  He crossed to the wall of fame. Most of the photographs showed Page in action. In one he was in full combat gear, running alongside other soldiers through a town that had seen its share of bombs and bullets. Its destruction was apparently still underway. One soldier was grimacing, flinching away from a puff of dust springing from a stuccoed wall. Similarly, dirt was springing up all around their feet. Page held a monstrous weapon that was spitting out a blur of fire and smoke. The photo must have been taken fairly recently; Page looked no younger than he was now.

  Hutch cursed under his breath. Too bad he didn’t take one for the team.

  Another photo showed him riding atop a tank through some other war-torn street. This was no Bush-like “Mission Accomplished!” stunt. Page was squatting outside the turret with other soldiers, one hand on the big barrel, the other raising a rifle in the air. Of course, he had a fat stogie clenched between his teeth.

  The other framed images were more of the same. Hutch had seen none of them in the media. The collected impression was of a man who loved his job—not the parts that involved designing, manufacturing, selling, lobbying, or cashing the checks, but the doing, the trench action.

  Hutch had once written a freelance piece for a business magazine about passion among visionaries. Passion for a particular art or science was the fuel that kept young entrepreneurs going through multiple setbacks, drove them to work ungodly hours, and gave them the creativity to see innovations others missed
. It’s what pushed them to succeed.

  Trouble was, their success often forced them into managerial positions. For some reason shareholders and lenders wanted the people who’d made the breakthroughs in labs to sit behind desks, trying to convince others to do for money what they’d done for passion. Many of them became miserable. Even Bill Gates had finally shrugged off the mantle of Microsoft’s CEO and returned to the software engineering role that had catapulted him to riches.

  It appeared that Page had never fallen into that trap. He loved war and soldiering, had built companies that exploited that passion, and had remembered to stay involved on the level that interested him most.

  All of it confirmed what Hutch had already figured out: Page was a hands-on leader.

  Hutch reached the first door. He glanced back at the main entry and turned the knob. A hallway lay on the other side, running toward the front of the building, past the outer office. Obviously a private entrance. On the wall beside the next door was Page looking supremely content on the cover of Cigar Aficionado. He held a smoldering cigar chest-high, as though he’d just taken a puff. Hutch opened the door. An air seal broke, and a fragrance of cedar, coffee, and tobacco wafted out. It was a bedroom-sized humidor. Dim lights revealed walls lined with slanted shelves displaying opened boxes of cigars, hundreds of them. The air was cool and moist, and Hutch saw the reason: a digital display reported the humidity level at 68 percent, the temperature 65. He remembered a quote from Mark Twain: “If there are no cigars in heaven, then I’m not going!”

  Hutch didn’t believe heaven was an option available to Page, whether the good Lord shared his zeal for cigars or not. The image of Page attempting to light one of Havana’s best on the flames dancing around him while Satan’s minions jabbed him with spears and branding irons made Hutch smile, but just a little.

  He shut the door and moved to the next one. It was open a crack, and he could see a bathroom beyond. The last door was near the back wall of glass. This one was wide open, exposing a vestibule. A stainless-steel elevator door consumed the entire back wall of the little room. Stepping up to the window, Hutched realized it looked out on more than the grand vista visible from deeper in the room.