by John Farris
“Yes.”
“And you scanned her.”
“After she reacted badly to my being a Wolfer.”
“So her Snitch was functioning okay?”
“She had one of the new models WEIR has just started using. A LUMO.”
“What—”
“For Lunar Module. All updated microcircuitry. Chickie’s LUMO was in perfect working order.”
“Well—when her brain signaled a changeover in the ladies’ lounge, shouldn’t her supply of TQ have kicked in immediately and suppressed it? Put her to sleep right there on the pottie?”
“Unless at some point during the thirty-five or forty minutes between the time I saw her last and the Hairball appeared, Chickie’s LUMO malfunctioned. No matter how rigorously they’re tested, new gadgets sometimes get fritzy. There’s another possibility. Someone, and I wouldn’t rule out Spartacus, popped the Snitcher out of his gal-pal with the point of a knife, then triggered the mechanism that caused Chickie to go OOPs. Then by some means she was directed to climb to the roof, jump through the skylight, and chomp Artie’s head off.”
“If Chickie could be turned on like that, then she could also be turned off.”
“Yeah. And transportation was waiting. Of course once she skinnydipped Chickie would have no recollection of what she’d been up to as a Hairball.”
“Lord above,” Bea said softly. She shuddered, although it was ninety-plus in the shade of the leaded-glass canopy above the entrance to Reilly’s. I put an arm around her.
“By now,” I said, “Joel and Tink ought to have a 3-D panel of mug shots for me to look at. The famous and the infamous who were hanging out at de Sade’s last night.”
“I should get back to work trying to make sense of Artie’s business arrangements.” Beatrice looked glumly down at the sidewalk. “Sometimes I’m bewildered by life,” she said quietly. “But I try not to live in the bewilderment.”
“About dinner,” I said. “My house. I’ll cook.”
“Oh, you cook too?” Her mood improved quickly. She gave me a cheeky grin. “How lucky can I get?”
“We’ll see,” I said, feeling really full of myself.
At three-thirty Sunny Chagrin came into my office looking refreshed and upbeat. She’d had some sleep and gotten her nails done.
“Where were we?” she said, looking at the display that the virtual reality lab had put together from the surveillance discs ILC obtained from de Sade’s. I’d been at it too long already, and my vision was blurring. “Oh, Bucky Spartacus. Talk to him yet?”
“Whereabouts currently unknown.”
“Same for the Aussie actress who left her flapper dress behind. So what do we have?”
“Only a long list of things I wish we had. Like Chickie’s wristpac. I’d like to know who she was calling in this sequence.” I used my laser pointer. “But her body is blocking us from making out most of the number.”
“Somebody had to turn off Artie’s security.”
“Could have been done from a mile away by someone with computer access. About a dozen people who worked at de Sade’s were familiar with the system and knew the codes.”
“Not necessarily an inside job.”
“I doubt that it was.”
Sunny slanted a look at me.
“That’s disappointing. I thought there might be a chance your big tawny friend with the great ass knows more than she’s telling.”
“She doesn’t,” I said curtly. It was shaping up to be one of those days when Sunny was relentless about getting under my skin and on my nerves.
Joel Picón buzzed me from the computer lab.
“R? You wanted to know where Elena Grace entered the Privilege this A.M., and who she was with? We’ve got it.”
Elena had come through the Wilshire gate at the Santa Monica city limits. By motorcycle, and possibly from the direction of the beach. Her ride was a Kawasaki. She wore leather and a biker’s cap, but no helmet. The time was 6:17 A.M.
The quality of the Virtual Reality re-creation from surveillance digital wasn’t great, but I would have known Elena immediately. Her ID was phony—she was using the name Lonnie Kruger, a variation of “Lenie,” her childhood nickname.
Two bikers accompanied her. Joel had good detail of both.
“Sweet God of Mercy!” Sunny said, walking into the VR scene, peering closely at a biker. “I don’t believe it!”
I sure as hell didn’t want to believe it. My belly suddenly felt as if it were full of cold scrap iron. I turned away from the VR display. Joel looked at me, startled. Maybe it was the expression on my face.
“But what would she be doing with that son of a bitch?” Sunny said. “She has to know, doesn’t she? Who he is and what he did to both of you?”
“Make use of your contacts in the Diamondbackers and fucking find her!” I said to Sunny. I started out of the lab.
“Where are you going, R?”
“Upstairs!”
I walked past Booth Havergal’s secretaries and neither of them said a word in protest after a look at my face. When I barreled into his office Booth was vid-conferencing, speaking in French to someone overseas. I banged the door shut behind me. He dropped his feet to the floor and swung around in his palomino leather chair, ready to bark. But my expression must have startled him too. I stood by his boomerang-shaped desk while he told the other party that he’d have to get back to him.
“What the hell do you mean coming in here like that?”
“Raoul Jesus Ortega,” I said, having trouble getting the name out because the muscles in my jaws were bunched like walnuts.
Booth mulled the name for a few seconds, then got up and crossed his office to his tropical fish tank, staring down at an arrowhead of tiny neon-blue fish hovering above an artificially sunny reef.
“Go on.”
“It’s been months since I’ve seen or heard anything about him. Now twice in the same day it comes to my attention that he’s making personal appearances again.”
“For instance?”
“I talked to Max Thursday at his ranch this morning. Before the old boy had a sinking spell he did a pretty good job of describing Ortega as one of the men who approached him about leasing out his spread for that mal de lune shoot. This morning Ortega is with Elena Grace coming into the Privilege via the west Wilshire gate to visit her dear old mother.”
“Your Elena?”
“My Elena.”
Booth mulled that one too, his face a little lopsided as if he were nursing a bad tooth.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “What reason would she have for going anywhere near him?” He turned to look at me, fatalistically, I thought. “What do you want me to say?”
“For Christ’s sake! Tell me what’s going on. ILC Intel posted a do not disturb on Ortega. Why is he important to them? What is he up to and what do you know about it?”
Booth shook his head wearily. “Sorry, R.”
My face was hot. “Seven years. Seven goddamn years!”
“I know.”
“If you know where she is, at least tell me—”
“But I don’t, R. This is a surprise to me as well.”
I had worked for Booth for nearly four years. I was sure that although he could be evasive about certain political matters within ILC, he had never played me for a sap. If he were doing so now, it was a first. And if at some point I had proof of that, also it would be the last time.
“As for Ortega,” he said. “He’s still untouchable. That’s all I can tell you for now.”
There was a hint of sympathy in his hooded eyes, enough to take some of the edge off my temper and my anxiety. I realized I had pushed him as far as I could, or needed to.
I let out a slow breath and looked at the bubbling 250-gallon aquarium, the darting fish in a tranquil tropical setting, and felt fatigue dragging me down like an undertow.
I said nothing to Booth about already having ordered Sunny to track down Elena, working off what little m
ight be learned from the gateway images: Elena on her Kawasaki, both coming and going from the Privilege. Sunny was a genius at getting the most from the smallest of clues.
8
fter my last, unsatisfactory meeting with Booth Havergal, I called it a day and went home. I prepared a shopping list for the Korean housekeeper who kept nine-to-five hours and sent her in the Land Rover to a farmers’ market that specialized in imported foods and condiments I would need to make dinner. It had been a while since I had wanted to cook anything; but I was in a mood to show off for Beatrice.
I worked up a sweat with the weights, bathed, and stretched out wearing only a small towel for a quick nap on my futon. But I was more flogged than I thought. The next thing I knew it was two hours later; Bea was bending over me and light was fading from the sky outside. She’d taken off her clothes. She plucked the towel away, then straddled me with the gleeful expectancy of a small child seating herself on a carousel horse.
After sex we put on short kimonos and went to the kitchen. I inventoried the grocery items Cho Lin had picked up for me. Bea and I had a couple of Killian’s apiece, then I put on my chef’s hat. She perched on a high stool at the breakfast bar and asked questions: how did I know how to prepare this and where did I find those as I made soup from the small nests of white swiftlets, a bird native to Borneo; red rice steamed inside cylinders of green bamboo; and tilapia fillets lightly sweetened with spiced brown cane sugar and baked in banana leaves.
“I learned to cook native while I was on a field trip with Pym,” I told her.
“When was this?”
“I was fifteen and bored with school; ‘educational dyslexic’ is the unofficial term. So Mom figured it was time for my real education. I spent six months with her in the highlands where Sarawak and the Kalimantan come together. Nobody is sure where the border is up there. Nobody really cares, because that part of the world is almost totally uninhabited, thousands of square miles of it. Even the timber trade avoids the area.”
“You were looking for the mysterious ‘lost tribe?’“
“Rumored to exist, in spite of the werewolves that already had done a very good job of reducing the population of Borneo to a few fortified coastal cities. But we didn’t see a soul deep in the jungle. Only scattered, tantalizing traces.”
“She was taking quite a chance, though, I mean with her one and only son?”
“She said it was time to toughen me up. Mom left me in the highlands for another year, in the care of a tribe whose shaman she trusted.”
“Shaman? Did you learn any, um, magic?”
“What I learned might seem magical to most people. It’s not whisking doves out of silk handkerchiefs. I studied mind-body control. Learning to sense and visualize the extradimensional, the telemagical sympathies that connect all living things. My mother is great at it too.”
“How tough is your mother?”
“She is six feet of pure, unalloyed mettle,” I said, and spelled that for Bea. “So much scar tissue the leeches can’t find a place to draw blood.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Only a little,” I said, and smiled at the thought of my being able to exaggerate anything where Pym was concerned. “There’s a full-length portrait of her in her office. I’ll show you around out there after we eat.”
My mother’s office, in a smaller but exact version of the minka and surrounded by formal Japanese gardens, was probably two-thirds museum, with all of the stuff she couldn’t find room to display in the farmhouse: a large thirty-foot-square room filled with masks, weapons, fertility figures.
I opened a carved chest crammed with mementos and selected a rope of beads from perhaps a dozen native necklaces. I hung the chunky beads around Bea’s neck.
“Present from Pym,” I said. “I know she’d want you to have them.”
“Thank you, Pym,” Beatrice said, looking around the half-lit room. “If only I could thank you in person.”
“You’ll get the chance. Those beads, by the way, are helpful for interpreting dreams and foretelling the future.”
“Our future?” Bea said, fingering the necklace and not looking at me. Until I put my thumb under her chin and lifted it and a smile suffused her solemn face with pleasure.
I lit an incense burner stocked with aloeswood to dispel the stuffy atmosphere of the room: Pym’s office had been unvisited for months. Next I poured a little rice wine for us from a leather-clad decanter. A little is appropriate and advised because, other than suicide, there is only one known cure for a rice-wine hangover, if you happen to have a supply of a medicinal grass root called gerangau mereh handy. Rice-wine hangovers are legendary.
A camp lantern seemed to be what was required for ambience as I presented the unframed portrait of my mother to Bea. It was carelessly parked with her other paintings beside a wall-mounted display of parangs, which were two-foot-long knives suitable for hacking through jungle creeper and vines covered with barbs like fishhooks, swords for collecting heads, blowpipes for hunting small game, and a shotgun handmade by a clever Panan craftsman utilizing what happened to be available: some reinforced water pipe, an inner tube from an old bicycle, and umbrella springs. The stock and grip were hand-carved.
“I know her!” Bea exclaimed, two seconds after the camp lantern afforded her a good look at Pym’s portrait.
“You probably saw her Time cover when she won the Nobel,” I said. “Although that was a few—”
“No, R! I saw her last week!”
My grin felt a little funny on my face. “Come on.”
“Honestly. It was her, and she was conferencing with Artie on just about the worst satellite feed I’ve ever seen.” She continued to study Pym without a flicker of doubt.
There is no denying my mother is memorable: frizzy cloud of white hair, head of a lioness, incongruous little granny glasses. A passion for discoveries in her dark eyes.
“Artie knows my mother?” I said, completely bewildered.
“They seemed to be old friends. But old friends with a big problem.”
“What were they talking about?”
“I was only there in Artie’s inner office for a few seconds. But—” Beatrice took a few moments to think about it, still fascinated with the portrait in which my mom stood almost a foot taller than the nearly naked Panan nomads posed on either side of her. She was smiling, leaning nonchalantly on seven feet of staff. I smiled too, and realized that I missed her. I wondered if the first time the Panan glimpsed Pym striding in their direction way up there in the green cloud forest of Borneo they had thought she was a goddess.
Bea said, “Remember that name I came up with when I was researching Artie’s holdings and participations? Dr. Chant?”
“Rings a small bell. His name was mentioned? By who?”
“Your mother.”
“What else do you remember?”
“About their conversation? That’s it. Didn’t your mother ever say anything to you about being a business partner of Artie’s?”
“I may have had three conversations with her in the past two years. And business has always been the last thing on Pym’s mind. She has money; she trusts the bank officers who handle it for her. All of her accounts are POD in my name.”
“Rich, huh?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. I’m well enough paid by ILC. As long as we’re on the subject of businesses Artie may have had a piece of, can you give me some names?”
“XOTECH and MegaGenomics, so far. The areas of research are hush-hush. So are the rosters of scientists involved. I Googled their locations. XOTECH occupies most of a large box canyon near Antelope Valley; the road in has three separate checkpoints. MEGA-G is on a small island in a chain of islands in the Scottish Hebrides, accessible only by ferry or helicopter when the wind stops blowing, which is almost never.”
My wristpac vibrated. “Rawson,” I said.
I got nothing back for a while except for some gusts of stressful breathing.
“A
re we going to have a meaningful dialogue,” I said, “or can I finish cutting my toenails?”
Then a male voice, choked with grief, came through.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
I had a hunch who I was talking to. I tried raising his hologram, but he was calling me on a retro throwaway cell phone. They had become collectables.
“Is that you, Bucky?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you, son?”
“Just… tell me. Is she dead?”
“Do you mean Chickie?”
“Yes.”
“Bucky, I don’t know for sure. I thought maybe you could help me with that.”
He moaned softly. “I… I don’t know either. I don’t know… what they’re trying to do to us! I begged Chickie… ”
His voice broke completely. He sobbed incoherently in my ear.
“Listen, Bucky. I’m glad you called. I want to help you. But we don’t need or want to have this conversation on wireless. Just tell me where I can find you. If you’re in the area I’ll be there in less than half an hour. It’ll just be the two of us.”
“That thing they gave me… something’s wrong… I don’t feel so good.”
“Who are you talking about, Bucky?”
“I can’t… but it doesn’t matter. I’ll live with it. Everybody does. I just want Chickie back! Please tell me… she’s not dead!”
That chilled me. How much did he know? “I don’t have conclusive proof that she is,” I said. “Give me your locaton, Bucky.”
A long pause. But he was listening. Hopefully, maybe. Breathing more quietly now.
“Valdemar,” he said at last.
“The old Piers Andersson estate in the Palisades?”
“Yes. Shane L’Estrange owns it now. But… he’s on tour. Lets me hang out at the house whenever.”
“Stay put, Bucky. I’m coming.”
“Thank you,” he said, heartfelt, I thought. The connection was broken.
I looked at Beatrice and told her who I’d been talking to.
“I think he’s alone, and certainly scared. I need to get moving.”