Level 26

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  chapter 88

  6:51 P.M.

  Back in his dim hotel room, Dark opened his laptop, fired up the browser. Instantly, a gray box appeared and he was remote linked to the Special Circs service. Constance had been waiting for him to pop up on the network.

  If anyone from Dark Arts was paying attention, they could probably find him in seconds using his signal. Dark hoped they were busy elsewhere. At least for a little while. Depended on how much Wycoff and his goons were leaning on the Special Circs team.

  A video image filled the browser screen. A live, shaky Webcam image. At first there was nothing but a blank wall, shifting lights, some digital distortion.

  The screen shook a little more, then panned over to focus on a wooden chair. Three minutes passed—Dark watched the time tick by on his laptop clock—and then there was a noise. A sharp cry. A baby’s cry.

  Dark’s fingers clenched the sides of the computer. He had to be careful not to break the plastic housing, destroy the machine, lose the feed.

  Lose his mind.

  There was more crying from the baby now, along with soft rustling and then…footsteps. Soft padding on a concrete surface.

  Then, like a ghostly apparition, a white form appeared on-screen.

  Sqweegel, in his white latex murder suit.

  Holding a baby, also dressed in an infant-sized white suit to match.

  “I’m going to hurt you in ways even God doesn’t know about,” Dark said.

  Sqweegel shook his head. Leaned in close to the camera. His voice popped out of the laptop’s tinny speakers:

  “You don’t have to shout, Steeeeeeve. We can hear you just fine. Can’t we, honey?”

  Saying his name like that. Mocking him. No one called him “Steve” except Sibby. He knows that. He’s been watching. Listening. He knows the buttons to push because he flipped open your skull and examined the circuitry.

  So flip open his skull, Dark told himself. Then rip out every fucking wire you see.

  On-screen, Sqweegel’s white hand reached toward the camera, and for a moment it was as if he would be able to reach out of Dark’s laptop and wrap his cold, thin fingers around Dark’s throat. But instead the palm just filled the screen, and between the white fingers, Dark could see Sqweegel was moving the camera.

  Aiming it at Sibby.

  She was bound to a gurney. Naked. Helpless. Pale. Terrified. Trembling.

  “Go ahead, honey,” Sqweegel said, off-camera. “Say hello to your man.”

  Sibby looked drugged. Lost. In pain. She moved her head around like a blind woman, trying to find something—anything—to focus on. Then she locked eyes with the camera. With Steve.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Save the baby from this mani—”

  With that, Sqweegel quickly moved the camera back in his direction. His face filled the browser screen.

  “Like she said, Steeeeeve. Don’t worry about her. Worry about the maniac with the baby.”

  chapter 89

  11000 Wilshire

  Constance put both hands on the operative’s shoulders. He was recording the Webcam feed and analyzing it at the same time. He flinched at first, then relaxed when he saw it was Constance. He’d been up way too many hours and his eyes hurt from staring at a screen.

  “What?” he asked. “Did you see something?”

  “Roll it back to the woman,” she said.

  The operative froze the image, then rewound it to the brief segment featuring Sibby bound to the gurney.

  “Right there,” Constance said. “Freeze it.”

  “Hey,” Riggins said, looking over at them. “You got something?”

  “There…above her head. Do you see it?”

  Riggins squinted. “Is that a framed painting on the wall?”

  “No,” Constance said. “I think it’s an actual window. You can tell there’s some natural light coming through it. It’s dim, but I can make out something…”

  Meanwhile the rest of Special Circs was busy attacking the IP address on all fronts, tracing it back to the service provider and approximate location. Someone shouted out, “He’s in the general Los Angeles area.”

  And this is where most IP searches ground to a halt. To go any further meant a court order or an illegal hack into the files of the Internet provider itself. This IP address, however, was unusual. It seemed to lead to a kind of straw-man Internet provider, which leeched bandwidth from a dozen other providers. Like a man stealing pennies a day from a thousand banks until he had enough wealth to open his own bank.

  “Where in Los Angeles?” Riggins asked.

  “Working on it…”

  “Work harder.” Then he turned back to Constance. “What have you got?”

  The operative had zoomed in on the window, then digitally enlarged it. You could plainly see the top of a snow-covered mountain.

  Riggins shook his head. “Hey,” he shouted. “I thought you said this was coming from Los Angeles.”

  “It is,” someone shouted back. “We know that much.”

  “Where’s the nearest ski resort?”

  A few names were bandied about—Bear Mountain. Mount Baldy. Mountain High. Snow Valley. Snow Summit—all to the northeast of the city, up in the mountains beyond Antelope Valley.

  “No,” said one of the operatives tracing the IP address. “Wrong direction. We think this is south of the city.”

  “Can’t be,” Constance said. “That’s definitely a snow-covered mountain. If we identify the peak, maybe we could triangulate…”

  Hollywood

  Dark stared at the blackness on his screen, waiting for something to happen. This couldn’t be it. Sqweegel wanted something. He wanted to play his little endgame.

  So why the silence?

  Then, through the black digital haze, her voice:

  “Steve?”

  “Sibby, I’m here. What’s happening? Is he there with you?”

  “I’m moving…rolling…”

  “I’m right there with you. Remember that. Even if we’re cut off and you can’t hear my voice anymore, I’m with you. I’ll be talking to you. I’ll be coming for you.”

  “I know you will,” she said. “And then we’ll go to Disneyland. All of us.”

  “You know it, baby.”

  “Oh, God, Steve, you should see the baby, I’ve never seen something so beaut—”

  Then nothing. The squeaking of wheels rolling across a concrete floor.

  Dark pressed his face up against the screen, looking for any hint of an image, any clue to what was going to happen next.

  There was a chuffing sound that gradually turned into a guffaw. The fucker was laughing. And then the screen twitched and turned completely black.

  The feed was gone.

  But it didn’t matter. Sibby had given him what all of Special Circs, and their operatives and analysts and protocols couldn’t.

  A clue.

  Disneyland.

  Were they near Anaheim? It was a start, but it was so vague as to be useless. If only that creepy motherfucker hadn’t cut off the feed, Sibby could have dropped another hint.

  But it was something.

  Dark texted Constance:

  TRY ANAHEIM AREA. DISNEYLAND.

  11000 Wilshire

  “What the fuck just happened?” Riggins asked.

  “We lost it…,” mumbled an op hunched over a keyboard.

  “Well, get it back.”

  “Got the log-in box, but it keeps locking me out.”

  “Try again.”

  “I am.”

  “Fucking try harder!”

  Meanwhile, across the room, Constance read Dark’s text and looked at the screen again. Snow-covered mountain.

  Anaheim.

  And then she experienced one of those beautiful moments that she lived for but went unappreciated—the pure sweet hit of a connection being made.

  The snow-covered mountain wasn’t real. It was the top of the Matterhorn, in Disneyland. Her parents had f
lown her out every summer to visit the park—well, every year until they got divorced.

  Sqweegel’s house was somewhere near the most wholesome fucking place in Southern California.

  chapter 90

  Hollywood

  7:13 P.M.

  Dark punched the wall of his hotel room. The drywall disintegrated beneath his fist, caving in a foot-long portion of the wall. Not the smartest thing to do—a curious manager could have heard it. Could knock on the door at any moment.

  But his rage had to go somewhere. It couldn’t ride his nervous system forever.

  Dark was itching to kill something, and his rational mind was barely able to stop him.

  Dark hadn’t felt this way for years. Not since his foster family was taken from him. From that point on, his heart had gone supernova, the center of his soul turned into a superdense ball, an unfeeling mass of iron. He’d heaved that iron around the world, smashing it into whatever he thought was separating him from the spindly little monster who’d done this to him. And after that, after a year of bloody, frustrating, black, sick failure, everything else burned out of his body, all of his senses gone white-hot and then cold dead…burned to nothing.

  Sibby had stirred up the ashes, found some flecks of heat in a place he’d long considered barren. She’d turned the ashes around, slowly, cultivating the fire, making him feel human again.

  Now with her in the hands of a maniac, it was as if someone had dropped a bunker buster into Dark’s chest. He felt his insides burn, shake, collapse.

  There was nothing he needed more than to destroy Sqweegel…and all he could do was stare at his dead browser and resist the urge to hurl the laptop across the room and rip the lid off the machine and scrape out the keys with his fingers….

  “Hold onnn…Yes! Third time’s a charm. We’re back.”

  Riggins and Constance rushed over to the screen, which was filled with Sqweegel’s face. His zippered mouth looked like a tear in the screen itself, and any moment, his fat wet tongue would come poking through.

  “Constance Brielle,” he said. “I know you’re with us. This involves you, too.”

  Everyone turned at once. But she ignored them. Stayed transfixed on the image of his mouth, like the mouth of God, ready to read her sins out loud.

  “We have a lot to talk about,” Sqweegel said. “All of us.”

  And then Sqweegel’s face was gone, and the camera was pointed at Sibby.

  “Steve?”

  “I’m here,” Dark said, touching the LCD screen with his fingertips. Feeling the faint warmth of the pixels, pretending it was her.

  “We’re all on, then?” asked Sqweegel, who swung the camera back to him. He was cradling the baby, still in its white bondage suit, in his right arm.

  “It’s important we get a few things out of the way before we finish.”

  The more Constance stared at Sqweegel, the more she knew he could see them. It was in the thousand small ways he reacted. This wasn’t a man acting to an imaginary audience. He could see them all.

  He must have some kind of surveillance camera in this room. Maybe even more than one.

  How?

  Constance kept her eyes on the screen but found a pen and Post-it note with her hands. Scribbled on it:

  Keep triangulating QUIETLY. Need this locale ASAP. My eyes only.

  She handed it to the op next to her, her fingertips lingering on his hand to make sure he understood.

  Sqweegel smoothed out imaginary wrinkles on his latex body suit, then cranked his head up to face the camera like a television anchorman. Confident. Stiff backed. Completely at ease in front of the audience.

  And with his audience gathered, he began to speak.

  chapter 91

  Just After Midnight / Father’s Day

  “I am here on earth to rid men of their sins and remind them of the heavenly virtues,” Sqweegel told the camera. “Be it greedy cunt widows who’ve lost all hope and fuck for government hush money. Or faggot priests who have forgotten their faith and abuse children, think they’ll be able to confess their way out of the eternal flames. Be it over privileged juvenile delinquents who look for thrills but are unwilling to deal with the consequences. Or the hypocrite defender of the country who can’t even defend his bastard child.”

  “I’m going to destroy you,” Dark told the screen.

  Sqweegel looked up at him. Smirked from behind his mask. Dark could tell by the way the latex scrunched up.

  “Or a washed-up federal investigator who couldn’t protect his foster family from one little mortal being.”

  “You have nothing on me,” Dark said. “You see nothing but sin around you, but you don’t see your own sins. You want to kill everyone in the world? Send everyone to hell? Do it. But I hope your bags are packed, because when I get my hands on you, you’ll be joining them.”

  Sqweegel tilted his head to the side. “I’m not afraid, Steeeeeeve. There are two reasons I wanted us to speak this evening. First, I want to forgive your sins.”

  “Fuck you,” Dark said.

  “That seems to be your answer for everything. Fuck it. Fuck me. Fuck her. But you know what happens when you fuck? Did your foster mother teach you this, maybe reaching her hand down the front of your underwear to make her point? Did it give you a little rise? Do you still fantasize about her, Steve?”

  “Get to the point.”

  “When you fuck, you make a baby. At least, that’s what God intended. And you made a baby.”

  “Yeah. It’s in your cellar. And I’m coming for her, you twisted little fuck.”

  “Your baby?” asked Sqweegel. “Are you sure?”

  Sqweegel snickered. He couldn’t help himself. Once he started it was hard to stop. His was an animal laugh; he’d had it since childhood. It bubbled out whenever he let his emotions get away from him. So hard to contain himself sometimes. He’d managed a rarified level of control for decades. But now the journey was almost complete, and it was as if his body knew it.

  This was serious now. It’s not every day you’re able to destroy your mortal enemy with just a few words.

  “What are you talking about?” Dark asked.

  “The baby isn’t yours,” Sqweegel said. “It’s mine.”

  “Liar.”

  “No, no. You see, I put Sibby to sleep the night you forgot the virtue of restraint when you stuck your hungry cock into Constance Brielle.”

  The blood in Dark’s veins turned to ice.

  Oh, God. He knew.

  chapter 92

  Constance felt like she was standing naked in this control room, surrounded by men who could see her every flaw, every bulge and dimple.

  How did he know? She’d told no one. Not even her mother in Philadelphia. This had been a secret she was completely willing to take to her grave, and deal with the judgment later. But it seemed she was being judged now.

  “She aborted it, Steeeeeeve,” Sqweegel said. “But you knew that already, didn’t you? Even offered her a check, what was it…ooh, right, check number 1183, to help pay for the…services? But she ripped it up and threw it away where anyone could find it. Well, anyone with a little roll of tape and a lot of extra time.”

  Constance remembered doing that now. At the time, the sting of Dark’s indifference, the coldness of him, had made her furious. But she got over it. Moved on.

  She couldn’t see Dark’s face right now, but she wondered whether he was reacting at all.

  “Ah, don’t be sore,” said Sqweegel on the screen. “Constance wanted to keep everything quiet. She didn’t want to cause you any trouble. You know, an extra life chasing you around, mewling for attention. It’d be very bad for you, wouldn’t it, Steeeve?”

  Constance heard Dark’s voice reverberating in Sqweegel’s lair. His voice boomed so loud, it overwhelmed the tiny laptop microphone and distorted.

  “Shut up!”

  “If I’m lying, I’m dying,” Sqweegel said. “I’ll cut my tongue out at the root—all on camera. I’ll
accept the punishment for my sin. I will never be able to lie again. But I’m not lying, am I, Dark?”

  This was a madman telling lies. Nothing more. Sibby tried to block out the words and focus on the baby. All that mattered was that their little girl made it out of this hell house alive. The rest didn’t matter—not her, not Steve, not any of it.

  But the words squirmed their way into her conscious mind anyway.

  …stuck your hungry cock into Constance Brielle…

  She aborted it, Steeeeeeeeve…

  And she thought about the night she told Steve the news about the baby. She’d been so cautious—more cautious than anything she’d ever done. When she saw the happy flicker of light in his eyes, she knew everything would be okay from that moment on.

  This is amazing, he’d said then.

  Sibby, I tried to tell you, he said now.

  Constance’s voice, now, too:

  It was my fault, Sibby. It was one night. I know it was a shitty thing to do. I got rid of it because I didn’t want to screw you guys up. I take total responsibility.

  Steve again:

  I do, too. I tried to tell you.

  “Shut up, shut the fuck up, all of you, just rescue my baby from this nightmare,” Sibby screamed.

  “See how hateful we can be to each other when we forget the lessons of heaven?” Sqweegel told the camera. “We all have little secrets. I kill people; you kill people. At least when I kill, I don’t keep it a secret.”

  Then he pulled the camera off its tripod; the screen was now full of nothing but his naked face.

  “Every person I sent to hell deserved it,” Sqweegel said. You and Constance got rid of a life, so Sibby and I are going to do the same. An eye for an eye, and the world will go blind.

  “I must admit…it’s going to be hard to abort this one. I’ve become rather attached.”

  And with that, he killed the Internet connection.

  The Special Circs techs went into a frenzy trying to isolate the problem, but they quickly realized it was the power, fluctuating on and off, on and off, like a thunderstorm had rolled in to wreak havoc on their circuit breakers.