by Dave Swavely
“Lynn will need a bed,” Saul said to me, then gestured across the big room to a pair of doors. “I have a guest room, if you want to use it. Paul stays there sometimes.”
A night in the citadel’s dark top floor appealed to me about as much as a room in the jail next door, and Lynn had said she wanted to go home. So I politely declined, thanking my enigmatic employer for his concern.
“You’d better get her to the car then,” he said, and gripped her hands tighter as her legs began to wobble slightly. I stepped forward, putting both hands under her elbows from behind, and noticing from the side that a mild smile was tugging at her lips. I pulled her away from the scarred old man, who held on to her hands a little too long. I nodded at him awkwardly, and at Paul, then proceeded to half carry the half-smiling Lynn to the elevator. I got her out onto the roof and into the aero before her legs went out completely, and pointed the sleek vehicle north, toward the Napa Valley.
I retracted the features center and stretched Lynn out so that her head was on my lap, and stroked her hair for a while as the city became smaller behind me and the sporadic clouds above me grew darker, missing the light of the city. That drug was for me, I thought, more than for her, as I looked down at my recently estranged but now docile wife. I pretended that she would let me touch her like this when she was no longer under the influence.
We had been married for only six years, but reality had already set in. Our initial whirlwind romance had led to a neotraditional wedding ceremony—largely because of the influence of Mrs. Rabin—and then to Lynn’s pregnancy during our first year of marriage. Lynn’s only mother figure had something to do with our choice to keep the baby, too. Though she did not advertise her beliefs, we knew that she looked with nostalgia upon past cultures where lovers got married and children were considered a blessing. Although at first I had thought the old lady’s ideas were rather novel and refreshing, I was now wondering whether her influence had really been a good one.
Thanks to the strain of living together and having a child, our romance had waned considerably. I did feel that Lynn and I were closer friends than ever before, and the happiness Lynette had brought distracted us from the weaknesses in our relationship. But now our little one was gone—leaving just the two of us and a lot of pain to deal with. That pain was tangible right now in the darkness of the aero’s interior, as I stopped touching Lynn and stared at her sleeping face, which was enveloped in shadows. My eyes pressed together, and my face screwed up, as I imagined having to face her when she awoke.
She would say it was my fault, of course, because over her periodic protests I had insisted on remaining in my current position, thus putting my family at risk. And she was probably right, judging by the nagging sense of guilt that had been camping inside me since I’d heard of our daughter’s death. I had known that something like this could happen as long as I continued to work for this company, yet I had gone on with it anyway. So it seemed that my pain had a name, and that name was the Bay Area Security Service.
* * *
BASS was formed in the immediate aftermath of the Great Bay Earthquake, which had caused even worse damage than the one in 1906, which leveled the young city. The security service was the brainchild of then police chief Saul Rabin, who in his illustrious career as a cop had accumulated so much trust and support from the wealthy and powerful that he could pull off one of the most amazing coups de grace in history.
Sociologists, historians, and others who study these things have long speculated on the dynamics that made this coup unique and unrepeatable. Most of them agree on the “island factor” (or, more accurately, “peninsula factor”): following the disaster, and before the Bay Bridges were rebuilt and the Golden Gate repaired, a psychosocial mass hysteria swelled (some have called it “corporate claustrophobia”), which exacerbated the prejudice in the city among social groups, and especially toward outsiders. Violence erupted in the devastated city, with many of the prominent cases involving people who were not from the city but were now trapped in it. The disaster-relief effort, which was already weak because of U.S. woes at home and abroad, was derailed for weeks by the disorder, until the one thing that everyone wanted was for it to stop, at all costs. The elite were worried about their property, the little people needed the necessities that weren’t trickling down fast enough, and the injured, both rich and poor, didn’t have time to wait for a “civilized” solution.
The climate was ripe for a benevolent dictator, or a megalomaniacal fascist—anyone with an answer who could make it happen. One man had the opportunity. Fueled by motives locked in his heart, Chief Rabin named himself chief executive officer of this new private corporation, employing unlimited authority with the financial and political support of the richest and most powerful people in the city—plus more than a few jaded billionaires from outside, who found this future legend intriguing. But the most important element of BASS’s rise to power, as it turned out, was the annexing of the Silicon Valley and its tech industry, after the damage and chaos from the quake had rendered its security systems useless. When the companies there saw the debilitating collapse of Oakland and other neighbors across the Bay, they begged Saul for protection, and he obliged by making a “covenant” with them (his word) in exchange for exclusive rights to some of the fruits of their research.
CEO Rabin handpicked about a thousand officers from the law enforcement agencies throughout the area, and from the mercenary force of elite soldiers that had been established on Treasure Island in response to the Taiwan crisis and a resurgent China. With the island’s fleet of Firehawk helicopters providing mobility for this force, he armed them to the teeth and appointed them judge and jury with a license to kill, if necessary, claiming that this was the only way the city could avoid martial law imposed from the outside. The old man was not creative enough to give these BASS agents a name, but soon everyone was calling them “peacers.” This may have evolved from “public servants,” a term that he had used for them (“p.s.ers” to “peacers”). Or it may have been lifted from his most famous slogan: “We will keep the peace.” No one was sure whether the label had originally been meant to convey admiration or cynicism, but it stuck nonetheless. It also struck fear in the hearts of many criminals, who now found themselves in serious danger of losing their freedom, and even their lives, if they failed to change their ways.
Love him or hate him, as many did by now, Saul Rabin had saved San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. Within weeks of the founding of BASS, the only people dying or injured on the streets were the aggressors. The energy that people had been expending on panic was quickly channeled into patriotic enthusiasm for the new regime, and much of the crime that the peacers couldn’t prevent was soon squashed by concerned citizens. And the fear of outside intruders, who might rape the limping city, faded completely when the Bay Bridges were reconstructed with airport-tight security checkpoints on the incoming sides, and the Milpitas Wall was erected with similar measures north of San Jose. Residents no longer had to fear that the bloody anarchy in Oakland and the rest of the East Bay would spill over to them.
The government of the United States, weakened by decades of economic crises such as repeated recessions and the payment of debt to China and other nations, was so strained by its attempts to stabilize the East Bay that they were all too glad to grant the city a form of independent statehood that only the most deft politicians understood.
The recent invention of the Sabon antigravity technology and the development of the aeros, however, had turned the young local empire into a growing world power. There were slightly fewer than four hundred of these glorious floating toys, and all were owned by BASS. Saul Rabin was guarding their secrets stubbornly and ferociously, with methods and reasons that were still mostly his own. But as he did, the buying and lobbying power of BASS was increasing exponentially among the nations and corporations of the world. The old man was fast becoming one of the most powerful people on the planet, which was no doubt part of his design.…
* * *
As my aero informed me of our approach to Napa Valley and began its descent, I was wondering, as I often did, what use the old man planned to make of his burgeoning influence. I didn’t dwell on it very long at this time, however, because I began thinking about the power that I possessed by virtue of being his associate. Working for this company did not seem such a ball and chain anymore, when I thought of the resources that I had at my disposal, and the new authority I now had to use them. As a result of Darien’s death, I would inherit his position of tactical command over all BASS agents and operations.
I planned to use those resources, and that power, to find my daughter’s killer and make him wish he had never been born.
3
At sunrise I was still sitting on the deck outside our bedroom, the thermal comforter pulled up to the bottom of my ears, securing most of my body from the cool March breezes that swirled more energetically at this height. A few hours before, my nose had started to feel like I was getting a cold, and now my eyes were tired and sore from tears. I had closed them for a couple of hours but had slept very little, alternately remembering Lynette and picturing my hands at the throat of her murderer, who remained faceless at this time.
Lynn had fallen asleep shortly after I dragged her into the house, and as far as I knew, she was still out cold on the bed inside. I had thought a lot about her, too, during the night, wondering if we could survive this. Every path my mind took seemed to lead back to the idea that I would have to leave BASS for us to make it, because in six years I hadn’t figured out how to balance my commitment to the company and my relationship with Lynn. And I had finally admitted to myself, somewhere in those dark hours, that there was another reason why my position at BASS was such a sore spot in my conscience, and also in our relationship. I had been dragging my feet for years now in regard to Tara, an Internal Security supervisor at the castle who had been my lover before I met Lynn, and still wanted to be. Tara had told me repeatedly that she was waiting for me to return to her, and to be honest, I had not yet completely disenfranchised her of that notion. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I had actually perpetuated it in many ways. I could rationalize away my guilt in the matter, as I did for most of my night vigil: I had never initiated any contact with her outside the normal course of our work, I had not touched her inappropriately, and the one time I had given in to her pleadings and gone to dinner with her, I’d left before ending up at her apartment. But eventually all those excuses grew tired and weak, and they were pushed out of my mind by the memories of all the times I could have ended it forever, but had not. I supposed that deep down I was still cherishing the memory of Tara and me, and was hesitant to eliminate the possibility of her being there if it didn’t work out with Lynn.
Did Lynn know this, somehow? I had not really faced it myself, let alone told her about my inner battles. But our relationship had seemed to grow colder when my thoughts of Tara were more frequent, and that “innocent” evening I had spent with the other woman seemed to mark a turn for the worse in our marriage. Whatever the cause, something had definitely come between Lynn and me, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had put it there.
As my mind cycled through these thoughts in the morning light, I watched a hawk that had appeared from behind the house and was now circling between me and the spectacle of the Napa Valley, stretched out before me. Our estate sat high on Stag’s Leap, a collection of high hills halfway up the valley on the east side. From this deck I could see most of the twenty square miles of estates and vineyards that constituted the largest private, safeguarded community in the world. (At least it had been the largest for a long time—I knew that in recent years many other affluent areas had begun to consolidate, imitating our model.) To my left I saw the distant sprawl of Napa City, twenty square miles of a very different kind of real estate—mostly metal and concrete, inhabited by a very different kind of resident: mostly poor and minority. The air was soupy over that lower end of the valley but clear in the north half, symbolizing the relative qualities of life for the blessed and the not so blessed.
Gazing at the crammed Napa City, I saw the pattern of lines that were sometimes the only thing visible from up here: the elevated freeways running across the city, and the thick belt of electrified metal on the north end that served as a wall between its half-million inhabitants and the estates of the valley. On this somewhat clear morning, I even made out the two breaks in the barrier where the Oak Knoll Gates, East and West, were admitting residents and their friends to the valley, but only after they underwent an ingeniously efficient security check that BASS developers had refined and updated under my supervision.
That had been my first assignment after being hired by the Rabins to bring some outside, objective expertise to their young empire. “Hopefully you will take us to the next level,” Saul had said more than once, with his vague, labored smile that seemed to imply a deeper meaning to the words. The old man had broken me in with the simple task of improving the security of the community in which they were generously building me a home. Saul wore that same mischievous smile when he talked about my new house, and I never had figured that out, either.
At the request of its residents and their powerful friends, the Napa Valley had been privatized by our company not long after the quake, the aftermath of which had brought a flood of unwelcome immigrants to the already overcrowded Napa City. Considering the manpower and technical genius at work on the security update, my first challenge was not much of one. But observing firsthand the near impossibility of any undesirables entering the valley by ground or by air gave me a confidence in my home that has endured until this day. I could mourn my daughter all night on my deck with no fear of injury—at least physically.
But now it was dawn, and the time for mourning was over. I forced myself up and out of the chair, stepped through the transteel door to the bedroom, and darkened it for Lynn’s sake as I closed it behind me. I had to do all this manually, because she remained unwilling for us to use the Living House voice-command systems that were all the rage in expensive homes like ours. (“When I talk,” she said, “I like to talk to people.”) In the half-light that was left after I had dimmed and closed the door, I saw that she still lay on the bed, motionless. I stepped past her quietly and hit the shower.
After dressing, I leaned down near her face and said something about going into the city, but that I would stay if she needed me. She mumbled, “Go ahead,” and shifted to her other side. I thought about kissing her, but thought again, then headed downstairs and out the door to the aero. As it lifted off, I put on the glasses and tapped them until descriptions of my recent messages started scrolling in front of my eyes, but only on the far left side, so I could still see where I was going. I had left the glasses in the room during my nocturnal vigil on the deck, so two calls from Paul had gone unanswered. I played them.
“Michael, it’s about four thirty. The techs are not finished yet, so I was going to tell you to relax and get some sleep. But maybe you are. I’ll let you know when they’re done.”
And the second one: “It’s ten to six. The sim is done. I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.”
After I tapped the sound off, I noticed the Level Two message flashing below Paul’s, so I brought up the details. The caller ID said “Hellboy,” and I knew that was one of Harris’s pet names. I was shocked, because this was only the second time in several years that he had gotten through to any of us. No doubt he and his lackeys had tried many times—in fact, they probably sent hundreds of messages every day in perpetual loops—but none of those calls had ever made it past the lower levels of Net security. This one, however, like the one about a year ago, had somehow managed to swim a sea of information and emerge on the other side. It wouldn’t have buzzed me directly, of course, because Level Two merely recorded the mail it permitted. But here it blinked, beckoning me to open it. I did open it—just the audio—only because I would be in the air for a while and was willing to be distract
ed.
“Jeopardy question: How did I do this? Egyptian in the Red Sea. Computer illiterate. You’d never understand if I told you. Don’t know which breaker got through, though, so can’t repeat, or threepeat, either. So on my knees I beg you, stay … just a little bit longer.” He sang this last part, and not very well, but I left it on anyway.
“This is The Game. Give this Ronin back his job, and you and I, Kent and Heller redux, can play iceberg on that Titanic from the inside—or you do the exodus, and we nuke it from orbit. This is the Clash—“Should I Stay or Should I Go?”—but hear me, you are neck deep in the Inferno, I mean the basement, and I don’t mean the Flipper’s Funeral album—I mean Dante. Except Reformed, not Roman. NO. WAY. UP. The old man is the Serpent, Beelzebub, Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, the Beast, Azazel, Palpatine, Hitler, Bush III…” Some glitch in the program (sent too many times?) obscured the rest of his list, but the verbal diarrhea soon became coherent again.
“That yellow Goliath monster, always behind him on the filmatelevens, more-machine-now-than-man, kill-you-as-look-at-you. You tell me, Air Jordan, if that isn’t Evil Soup, what is? The final Nine Inch Nail for me, ladies, was when he morphed the church. Primitive theistic energies had been flowing through there for a century—the labyrinth, last owned by Peaceniks, Inc., was a conduit, an ark, a server, a Salvation Army for the spiritually homeless. Fuhrer Rabin could never let anything that channels light exist in his black hole. But prayer is what you’ll need, Mick, when he stops liking you Just the Way You Are [singing again] and morphs your ass into goo. Or maybe he’ll do a mind lift, a head hijack, a brain boost, a personality pinch … jerk with your neuros and make you into someone he likes.
“And what about your Eve and her seed, man? If you’re a family man, I’d leave the badlands for Olympus. They have a witness-protection program Stateside, you know. There was a park up there.…” He droned on, but after the mention of my family I groped at the glasses, touched the wrong button, and then just tore them off. The mental image of Lynette’s face literally hurt my eyes, until I forced them open and saw only the aero’s dash and the approaching puddles of the North Bay beyond it.