“I’m sorry. I thought you were a Martian, too.”
Before Dwayne could say more, his mother broke free of Avery and ran to scoop the boy off his feet, squeezing the breath out of him with her fleshy arms. “Oh, my little Hershey Kiss! Oh, my little Kit Kat! What you done got into now?”
Harry looked at the ID badge clipped to the woman’s blouse. “Ms. Covell, what are these boys doing here?”
“It’s that damn spring break. They ain’t in school an’ I don’t got nowhere to put ’em. I got to work.”
“The hospital has an employee day care center.”
Her eyes were like two slits above her puffy cheeks. “I can’t afford no day care. It’s twenty a day. All I make is sixty-eight dollars scrubbin’ them pots until my skin falls off. How’m I s’posed to feed ’em an’ buy ’em clothes and pay rent on forty-eight dollars a day? You couldn’t do it, Mister.”
“No discussion. You either put these kids in day care or you take ’em home. And that means now!” Harry waved to Judy Wolper at the doorway, as she peeped out from under Avery’s arm. “Judy, would you escort Ms. Covell and her boys down to Team Tots? Have them comp her the rest of the day.” Day care was in a small annex on the other side of Children’s Hospital, outside the probable range of the bomb. The kids would be safe there.
“What about tomorrow?” demanded the woman.
“I’ll talk to Human Resources in the morning and see that they give you a rate break for the rest of the week. But I don’t want to see either of these boys in this hospital again. Got that?”
“Sure, Mister.” With an indignant look, she led both of her boys by the hand toward the light of the corridor. Marcus walked proudly and stiffly. Dwayne turned at the last minute to give Harry one more blast of the ray gun.
Avery laughed. “Well, at least your people have taken care of the Martian threat.”
Harry bit his cheek so hard he could taste the blood. Ignore him. Ignore the son of a bitch. He pushed past Avery and surveyed the dumbfounded faces of the search teams in the corridor. “Okay, everyone!” he shouted. “Let’s put on some clean undies and get back to work.”
* * *
Back in his laboratory, Kevin was having trouble with a white pawn. Try as he might, he could not get close to White’s queen, and all because of one measly pawn, which blocked his attack from every angle.
Twenty minutes earlier, the phony e-mail from Deputy Director McClintock had indeed stirred up the most delightful ruckus. An uncharacteristically red-faced Lee had written back immediately asking for confirmation. Odin saw to it that he got one. A flurry of protest e-mails followed. Odin easily intercepted these, along with a telephone call to Washington, which he diverted to a bogus voice-mail account. Lee’s every move was checked, leaving the irascible FBI agent in a steamy, speechless funk, slumped over Harry’s desk, while Avery and Scopes punctuated the silence with haphazard suggestions and condoling profanities.
Meanwhile, Project Vesuvius hummed along, and Kevin found himself with little to do but wait and watch. Waiting was not something that he did well. He found himself pacing the length of his laboratory, nervously pelting Odin with questions about police band radio transmissions and weather forecasts for Ontario and the Canadian Rockies. He could almost hear his brain’s gears grinding. Finally, to calm himself, he accepted Odin’s suggestion of a game of chess.
Wilhelm Steinitz was White. Or not exactly Steinitz, who had been dead for over a century, but the ghost of Steinitz, as conjured by Odin. Kevin had long ago learned that chess with Odin was no game at all, since no human had a chance of beating him. It was Odin himself who suggested that the odds might be evened if he took on the personality of a human player, incorporating all of his typical strengths and weaknesses.
The chessboard was of simple wood, the pieces of sculpted elkhorn from Siberia. The place of Odin’s hands was supplied by Loki, who sat on top of the desk in his favorite cross-legged style. Loki’s miniature fingers, their dexterity freakishly enhanced by SIPNI, held the white king aloft by his tiny crown without the slightest trace of wobbling or slippage.
“It’s king to king’s knight one, Loki,” said Kevin, pointing to a black square at the far end of the board.
Dexterity or not, Loki was confused whether to remove the king from play, or to use it to take down his own white queen. It took considerable finger-tapping from Kevin to finally get him to set the piece down where Steinitz wanted it. Loki’s move shielded the piece directly behind the queen, and prevented Kevin from opening up a discovered check with an attack upon the hated king’s bishop’s pawn.
“Good boy, Loki,” said Kevin, handing out a peanut. “Not quite ready for tournament play, though, are we?”
The ghost of Wilhelm Steinitz took up less than 0.000001 percent of Odin’s thinking capacity, and at that moment Project Vesuvius was deep into its critical collection phase. On the bank of small computers, one monitor was devoted to each of the primary revenue streams originating from the eight original payers of the Al-Quds ransom. Each stream had already subdivided itself into dozens of subsets, reflected in ever-changing columns of numbers. The combined accumulation was tallied as a single number in four-inch type on the large wall monitor, with the last few digits whizzing by so fast as to be little more than a blur. From time to time Kevin would turn his head to check on it. It was a big number, even after subtracting Rahman’s four hundred grand. It was so big that it gave him a kind of queasy feeling. Although Kevin had never given much thought to the value of money, he knew that this was a number that would get noticed. It was already more than four times higher than he had originally projected—and still growing. That, of course, was Odin’s doing. Odin had discovered some new angles as Project Vesuvius had unfolded, and in his usual lightning-quick way he had taken advantage of them, without stopping to consult. Not that Kevin would have objected. Odin was doing exactly what he was told to do: maximize revenue. Only a fool would object to quadrupling his money.
While he jabbed at Wilhelm Steinitz and watched his money roll in, Kevin also kept a close eye on the computer monitor on his desk in front of him. It showed a wide-angle security camera view of the NICU, where a dark-haired woman in scrubs sat cross-legged and nearly sideways behind the nursing station, one elbow leaning on the counter as she wrote in a blue plastic binder. She looked pensive, frustrated, and almost wistful, just as she had many nights as she sat by the kitchen table, huddled over a book or a laptop, with coffee grown cold in the cup beside her. On those nights, Kevin could never resist stealing up behind her and enticing her away from her studies with a whisper or a simple kiss on the neck. It had never taken more than that.
How different things were now! No kiss from him would ever rouse her again. Outwardly not a hair on her was altered. Inwardly she had become a stranger. He marvelled how anyone could change so completely. Even a hunk of magnetized iron retains some trace of its former alignment. But human love was fickle. All those vaunted sonneteers were nothing but bullshitters. Love was the most changeable thing in the universe.
Watching her made him increasingly agitated, and still he couldn’t tear his eyes off her. He contemplated the screen so long that Odin questioned whether he had lost track of the game. “IT IS YOUR MOVE, KEVIN,” he announced.
Kevin looked back at the board, and all he could see was the white queen. He felt a mad impulse to take her down—whatever the cost. To clear a path, he took the king’s bishop’s pawn with his own knight, knowing full well that the pawn was protected by several powerful pieces. As he moved the knight, it somehow brought to his mind an image of Rahman.
“The most crooked of all pieces,” he mused. “Should be called jackal instead of knight. Likes to jump out from the sidelines and nip you on the ass. That’s Rahman, to a tee. Rahman, my devious, bloodthirsty, lying comrade. Tell me, Odin, can you get fleas from lying down with a jackal?”
“BISHOP TAKES KNIGHT.”
The countermove had been expected. With no
little prompting from Kevin, and at the cost of three peanuts, Loki moved a white bishop from across the board to take Kevin’s knight.
“Go, then!” said Kevin to the discarded piece. “You’ve outlived your usefulness. Off with you and your jihadist bullshit!”
With Rahman gone, Kevin found his attention drawn to the white bishop that had supplanted him.
“Do you know who this is?” he asked Loki. “This plaster saint slinking out from under the skirts of the white queen? None other than Dr. Flaccidius P. Diddly Dildo, world-famous expert in brain tumors and spinal cord injury, past president of the American College of Neurosurgery, newly minted peer of Christian Barnaard, Harvey Cushing, and Aristotle—and lying rat bastard. He has many sins to answer for, Loki.
“He has stolen my work, the offspring of the womb of my mind. And he smeared me to do it.” Loki’s eyes opened wide as Kevin began to raise his voice. “He called me ‘unreliable,’ ‘temperamental.’ A simple letter from him could have saved my NIH funding. But no—he had a sudden attack of intellectual scruples. ‘You haven’t published more than six papers in the past five years,’ he said, conveniently leaving out that all six were papers to knock the world on its ass, once anyone began to understand them. It’s no secret that he didn’t understand them.
“But of course, he only wanted to make me dependent on his lab. He kept me alive on bread and water—just so long as I stayed shackled to his oar. When at last I performed a miracle for him, when I created a working artificial implantable human brain out of some doodles he had brought me on a brandy-stained napkin—sure, everyone believed it was Dildo who’d done it. After all, I worked for him, right?
“Well, I’m no lickspittle resident or scut monkey. What was stolen from me I will take back—with interest. The hospital will pay, the collective mediocrities of the world will pay, and Dr. Dildo himself will pay.”
Loki screeched as Kevin slammed his own black bishop forward and brusquely yanked the white bishop off the board.
“Yes, it’s harsh, little monkey, but an example must be made. For the great Doctor’s sins are not only of the mind. It wasn’t enough to reduce me to peonage; no, he had to reach out his grasping hand for the one thing I had left. Remember the ancient Droit du seigneur? In plain monkey language, it means he thought me such a worm that he thought he could get away with fucking my wife.”
Kevin addressed the cloven-headed chess piece in his hand. “You’ve been begging for years for someone to blow away your ass. Guess what? That day has come, you nine-fingered sack of shit!”
He hurled the bishop into the sink across the room. From the crash, he could tell that the finely carved elkhorn had shattered into pieces as it landed. Loki screeched and sprang for the safety of the dark recesses of the lab.
Kevin turned back to the chessboard, his face taut and pale.
“And you, my snowy-white queen, what shall we say of your treasons? I awakened you! I taught you to think, and to recognize your own genius! For that alone, you ought to be grateful. Forget that I loved you, that I held nothing back from you, that I … believed in you.”
Odin broke in with a suggestion. “UNDER SECTION 11-7 OF THE ILLINOIS CRIMINAL CODE (720 ILCS 5/11-7), ADULTERY IS CLASSIFIED AS A ‘CLASS A’ MISDEMEANOR, AND IS PUNISHABLE BY A TERM OF IMPRISONMENT FOR UP TO ONE YEAR.”
“There is an older law than that, Odin. The law of the aggrieved husband. The law of honor.”
“THE CODE OF HAMMURABI STIPULATES THAT BOTH PARTIES TO ADULTERY SHALL BE EXECUTED BY DROWNING, ALTHOUGH THE WOMAN MAY BE SPARED IF HER HUSBAND CHOOSES TO PARDON HER.”
“That’s more like it.” Kevin once again addressed the white queen. “No Class A Misdemeanor for you, jasmine flower. Punishment must fit the crime. It was one thing to betray me. But you have betrayed yourself—your youth, your beauty, your genius. It makes my flesh crawl to think of you … yoked with this mediocrity. Why not an ape? What possessed you to defile yourself like that? How could you give over the innermost sanctum of those lovely, smooth, sculpted hips of yours to … to the … offspring of this soulless piece of shit? I know it’s Dildo’s and not mine. The last time I made love to you I could feel how your womb froze up inside you. My seed couldn’t possibly have taken root.… It’s Dildo’s, all right. And from shit can come only shit. I won’t let you live to see such a degradation. I’ll first see that bastard’s bastard dribble in bloody chunks between your legs. Squirt him out! Let that lying cunt of yours reject him as it rejected our own son Ramsey.”
Kevin felt an urge to sweep the pieces off the board. He sat with fists clenched and reddened nostrils, as image after unclean image rushed before his eyes—blood and shit and whoredom and revenge. In the end, it was the thought of Ramsey that broke the surge of the storm. Ramsey, who had known no life but suffering. Ramsey, so small, so helpless, so doomed. Thinking of how he had held his lifeless son’s body for a final farewell, Kevin slumped over the chessboard, his eyes glazed and unmoving.
“But the woman may be spared,” he mumbled at last. “So says Hammurabi. Well, look to it, then. There may still be … even now … hope.”
He turned his chair away from the desk and faced the big wall monitor. He needed to think of something more positive, something calming.
“Odin, bring up the latest Landsat views of Isla Viscacha.”
In place of the ever growing ransom total, the screen was filled with an aerial image of a wooded island, surrounded by a purplish, churning sea. Several miles in the background were the rocky headlands of the southern Chilean coast—one of the most sparsely populated areas in the habitable world. In the farthest distance, barely distinguishable from the cirrus-clouded sky, was the snowcapped peak of Monte San Valentin, towering over the North Patagonian ice fields.
“Can you enlarge it? I want to see the dock.”
A U-shaped bungalow, two guest cottages, and a large utility building came into view, clustered around a sandy cove on the eastern shore.
Isla Viscacha, the thirty-seven-acre retreat of a reclusive film director, had been on the real estate market for over three years. It was the realization of a pipe dream that Kevin had cherished since graduate school at Stanford—a naturally fortified sanctuary where he could shut out the world’s inanity and hypocrisy, and devote himself single-mindedly to his work. Using the assumed identity of Padrig de Rais, a Breton French hotelier from Saint-Malo, Kevin had negotiated an option for the purchase of the property. An attorney in Santiago was already waiting to proxy-sign the deed for him, and there was needed only a tiny disbursement from today’s proceeds to complete the deal. When Kevin arrived in person in a few months, having dissolved and reconstituted himself in an untraceable chain of guises, he would supervise the construction of a discreetly camouflaged underground laboratory—soon to become the most advanced cybernetics research complex on the planet. There he would build the next-generation version of Odin, using his vision of a four-dimensional plasma containment field instead of silicon as the basis of his CPU. Moore’s Law would be blown to smithereens. No longer would computing power double every two years. It would leap by orders of magnitude at a single bound. He and Odin would rule supreme over the fields of cybernetics and bionics. With inexhaustible funds at his disposal, he would no longer be held back by mental pygmies like Helvelius, Dr. Gosling, or the bureaucrats and chicken-shit reviewers at the NIH. A cornucopia of inventions would pour out to enrich mankind. Pilgrims would flock to his rocky outpost as to a new Oracle of Delphi. And after that, no one would question how the Age of Isla Viscacha had arisen out of the ashes of Project Vesuvius, just as no one ever asked what crimes might have lain behind the discovery of fire or of the wheel. His genius alone would make him inviolable.
Odin’s voice roused him from his reverie. “QUEEN TO QUEEN’S KNIGHT TWO. CHECK.”
He had moved too late to neutralize the threat of the white queen, and she had now gone on the move against him. Check—it was an attack on his king. He had to move to evade it, a
nd in so doing lost the initiative in the game. In the best-case scenario, he would spend the next dozen moves improvising escapes, hoping for a blunder that would allow him to reverse the attack. If white’s queen did not relent, it could only end in checkmate.
“Fuck you, then! Do your worst!” he snapped, speaking to the white queen herself. “There’s another game afoot—a game you will not win. Do you see the hands sweeping across the clock? Time is short, oh, so fucking short, my sweet jasmine flower! The hour of reckoning is at hand! One last chance, and then … Choose well, my darling! To quote the old runes, ‘Earth shall be riven / With the over-Heaven.’ You and your precious Helvelius will piss yourselves when you behold the bonfires of the Twilight of the Gods!”
1:32 P.M.
“Thanks, Mac,” said Harry as he took the cigarette and drew a long, hungry puff off it that turned the end of the stick a glowing red.
The fireman put the lighter back in his pocket and went back to jawboning with his crewmates as they sat on the rear bumper of the truck.
A grateful Harry turned and went back the way he had come, toward the ambulance dock behind the emergency room. It was his first smoke in six months. Those six months had cost him a hell of a fight, but he needed to get calm enough now to think. Between the e-mails and the alarms and the C4 and the clamor of the press, he was beginning to feel like he had ants crawling up and down his nerve fibers.
He looked up, where the early afternoon sun glared down at him from the steel and glass exterior of the Goldmann Towers. The roof of the towers was so high he had to arch his lower back to see to the top. Somewhere up there, behind one of those shiny windows, his mother was fighting for her life. And here he was, the goddamn chief of security, no better than a cigarette butt on the asphalt, for all the good it did her. After Oklahoma City, the Beirut barracks, and the Khobar Towers, Harry knew that five hundred pounds of C4 could tear apart even a massively reinforced building like it was tissue paper. She wouldn’t stand a chance. He knew this, and still he couldn’t get her out. He felt totally fucking useless.
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