by English, Ben
He turned it off. After a moment, she whimpered with disappointment.
If the eyes were any indication, she didn’t know where she was. Raines waited, eyes on the screen, watching the progress of the other agents he’d injected into her. Apparently she didn’t smoke or do any of the drugs young people were so fond of these days.
Eventually she reclaimed enough of herself to pant, “How can it— feel so —uhh! What are you doing to me?”
Raines moved nearer her head. “Have you ever heard that old joke about the man who bled from every pore? See, men of science, like Robert over there, would tell you that bleeding from every pore is impossible. A question of blood volume, for one thing, but actually because of the way our nerves work, bleeding like that would generate too much pain. A living creature would reach a physiological limit, and pass out. Part of our defense mechanism, I suppose. Simply speaking, I’ve removed your limits. You’ll be surprised at the length and breadth of what you can feel now, and remain conscious.
“Now what you and I just did was establish a baseline, my dear. Everything that happens to you tonight, you’re going to be able to compare to those few moments of pleasure a moment ago. And unless you swallow your tongue and asphyxiate, you’ll experience it all without losing consciousness.”
He leaned very close. “Remember how it felt, just now?”
She retched, and began to weep. Raines delicately touched his finger to the smooth screen.
*
Much later, Raines held the family Bible comfortably in the crook of his arm as he crept down the hall. The suite of rooms on the upper floor was quiet in a soft, expectant manner. The girl below was beyond the ability of making any noise, and Raines felt quite alone. He wandered through the rooms, smiling slightly to himself. The silence seemed almost anticipatory, just like in the hushed moments before a snowstorm. He looked around aimlessly, letting his gaze sweep over the simple desks his parents worked at.
“I’m home,” he announced.
“Prometheus In Our Day”, the article in Time had said. “Paragon of the Modern Man,” as he’d been proclaimed on the cover of Newsweek. He set a copy of each on their desks.
Raines came to a stop before a portrait of his parents, done in oils. He’d commissioned it a few years previous to their deaths. It was illuminated by several tiny cunningly placed spotlights. His parents still looked healthy, happy together, dressed in the simple clothes they’d favored since their days in Europe, before the money came. Their smiles were equally simple, belying the latent intelligence they’d harbored and passed on to their only child.
They had taught him well. Had seen to his further education when his own mind grew beyond their ability and inclination to teach. They had opened up the world of information to Raines, and let him devour it whole. They had done their best to teach him about God. They’d let him discover the Devil on his own.
Eyes on his parents’ faces, Raines slipped his personal computer from an inner pocket of his linen suit. He opened it, and watched as it linked, instantly and invisibly, with the network in the house, then negotiated the local networks until it touched a node of the Raines Dynamic extranet. He saw it was one o’clock in rural Scotland.
Glancing once again at his parents, Raines tapped a simple prearranged code on the miniature keyboard. He paused, then pressed a final key.
Closing the small device, he crossed the room and opened a cabinet filled with decanters of wine and various liquors. Raines hummed to himself as he walked around the room emptying each bottle on the baseboards near the walls, the curtains, and finally pouring an entire carafe on the Louis XIV sideboard underneath the portrait of his parents.
Calmly he walked to the door. He turned on the threshold, Bible in hand, allowing it to open to the first page. The names of his family for three generations lay inscribed there. There was no Alex Raines on the page.
He roughly tore it out. Looking across the room at the picture of his parents, bathed in golden light, Raines struck a match and set it to the corner of the yellowed paper. It caught quickly, and he released it, watching briefly as it drifted toward a dark stain of wine. Then Raines swiftly, silently eased the door shut and walked away.
An End
Balmoral, Scotland
4 AM
The figure in murky fatigues crouched silently on the precipice, watching the cloudbank close around the moon like a giant, smoky blue fist. He was poised at the edge of one of the many rocky hills overlooking the castle nearly a kilometer away. Beside him sat a portable radio, protected from the occasional spatter of rain by a nonreflective tarp. The fields and lower hills below reflected varying shades of the black night, relieved only by the weak lights proclaiming the castle’s perimeter.
“Sleep tight, your Highness,” muttered the night watcher, raising a monocular and scanning far to the left. At least the early spring storm hadn’t drummed up any fog yet. Several hundred meters away a second man-shaped slice of darkness raised his hand, looking straight into the night vision’s crosshairs.
The first figure glanced around the small clearing, then looked far to the right, where another man stood with his own NG45 night vision spyglass. The signal was passed on. Outer ring clear.
The watcher panned his night scope across the scrubby hills, locating the lightly-glowing forms of three of his teammates in their places of concealment. That was odd. There was a jumpy, static-like corona around each of the men as he zoomed in on them. He adjusted the miniature focus wheel on his monocular. “Built by the lowest bidder,” he muttered.
Above, the clouds were suddenly backlit by a series of staccato flashes. Misshapen shadows played weirdly along the watcher’s peripheral vision. The forest was silent, almost holding its breath.
The radio clicked a few moments later, the transmission relayed automatically to the earpiece of the watcher on the rock. “Balmoral security detail 1, all clear. Logged at four o’clock.”
The crackling reply came from the duty officer at the nearby Royal Navy base. “You blokes better get out your slickers, looks to be a real howler tonight. Weatherscouts missed this one, eh?”
“Thanks for the heads-up, chief. So much for a quiet night in bonny Scotland, lads.”
The radio went silent.
Wind rushed suddenly through the upswept branches of the conifers behind and to the sides of him, a many-surfaced ripple. Storms often came pushing down the slopes of the Lochnagar mountains, casting up huge waves and angry surf against the shores of Loch Muich. Not a fit night to be about.
Reaching back underneath the tarpaulin, the watcher extracted a neatly folded rain cloth, allowing it to unravel down the cliff face before pulling it on, then paused. Idiot. Rebuckle your weapons over the rain gear, couldn’t you remember the first lesson of all-weather training?
He released the catches on his vest, then quickly slid out of it. The first few troublesome winds racing before the approaching squall caught the rain slicker as he bent for it, catching its hood and billowing the entire affair out above his head. This is not exactly what I needed tonight. He set his rifle down and forced both arms up through the slicker. Finally.
Without warning, the slicker was jerked halfway from his arms as a jagged triangle of holes suddenly punched themselves through the back of the hood. The guard sensed more than heard the furtive movement from the treeline at his back as he clumsily scrabbled for his weapon. He felt himself struck as if by blows from a savage, invisible opponent.
Then the nerves all along his left side lit up with searing pain, and before he could scream he felt himself dashed from his perch on the rock. Down he went, tumbling headfirst in a miniature avalanche toward the talus below. He knew, even as he fell toward death, that at least one bullet had entered his body through the chinks created in his body armor when he had raised his arms up through the rain slicker. His free arm gyrated wildly, hampered on the nearly sheer slope by the unbuckled vest.
Just as his body cleared an overhang his gropi
ng hand managed to find a space–some sort of uneven crevice in the rock. Without thinking he wedged as much of his arm as he could into the crack as he slid over it, then choked in white agony as the tendons and bones in his elbow wrenched and separated. He writhed against the pain, twisting completely out of the heavy vest and rain gear. Before he could scream he slammed into the mossy wall, the impact flush on his shoulder blades, driving the breath from his lungs.
He dangled there for a long moment, gagging silently through the crashing waves of pain, wondering what kept him from completely passing out. His right heel somehow found support against a knob of rock.
The guard allowed his head to sag forward an inch, until he could see his gear at the bottom of the ridge. The vest and jacket were almost invisible where they had landed, splayed against a clump of the long grass, blood-red in the feeble light. He strained against the night and against the numbing agony, but heard nothing. Only the low, wordless whisper of the chill breeze off the North Sea fifty kilometers away.
The sky above the stepped gables and turrets of the white granite castle suddenly flared a harsh greenish-blue, backlighting the cloudbank strangely. From the promontory above the guard came a quick half-dozen chuffs like the sound made by a metal brush against a piece of finished lumber, and the pile of gear below jumped as the suppressed rounds swatted into it. Then a brief scrape on the rock above and afterward, silence.
With difficulty the wounded man reattached his radio’s earpiece, then felt for the control switch. A dull hiss issued from the earpiece. Whoever it was at the top hadn’t even touched his radio, that was strange. The first law of armed assault was to take out your enemy’s communications. Something else was wrong. The line was simply dead. He cycled through the other dozen channels fruitlessly, receiving only snatches of static. Damn storm. He closed his eyes as dizziness and nausea washed over him, then forced them open again when the sensation doubled.
The sky above was a whirling, nightmarish kaleidoscope of lambent energy. Strange how the lightning was unaccompanied by any thunder, he thought, then grimaced at his own obvious delirium. Still, odd. He’d expect thunder to roll down from all sides of the long valley.
Straining, he managed to unsnap a vest pocket and retrieve his night vision monocular. There were no signs of his companion watchers at their posts in either field to the right or left. Nothing. The guard swore softly as his spyglass fell from nerveless fingers. Everything he looked at was framed by a swimming, brown-black haze. He didn’t even have the strength to shout a warning he knew at such distance would be futile. The castle lights below gleamed bravely against the black night; innocent, unaware. The last lingering image in the guard’s field of vision was a group of dark figures rising up slowly out of the field near the castle wall, stark and jagged against the light.
The Banked Light
Paris, France
6 PM
Jack looked up suddenly from the café table as wind shook the panes of glass a few feet from his head. The gusting beyond the glass transferred a portion of the night’s chill into him, etched an icy sharpness down his spine. It was only a matter of minutes before the storm would decide to begin in earnest, gashing down through the City of Light, carving at it with knives of lightning and rain.
Twilight always took too long in Paris. If he took the time, Jack could actually see darkness creep out from the heads of the alleys down Montmartre, could watch the shadows steal out from behind the statuary in the Luxembourg Gardens, could glance up in time to grasp the gathering gloom underneath the cornices and balustrades. Jack didn’t have to look at the sky to feel the skein of dusk draw over the city at the approach of night, the approach of the storm, but he could, if he took the time. Twilight always took too long in Paris.
The table before him was littered with a dozen tightly-bound manuscripts, sheaves of a hundred and twenty words apiece baled with bright, heavy cardstock covers and filled with sparse, widely-spaced type. The white spaces between the lines seemed enormous and stark to Jack, too empty. He shook his head and closed the screenplay, turning once again to contemplate the hurtling, intransigent approach of night.
He sat there at the window, pensive and unconsoled, feeling a thousand dark eyes upon him. He’d dressed carefully, in what he’d come to consider his armor against the night. Jeans and a loose sweater always allowed him to move quickly if circumstance demanded, and he didn’t feel so much like a ridiculous American. You could always tell the American tourists in Paris, if not by their baseball caps and ill-fitting pants, then in their guarded, slightly self-conscious gait, as if they were inwardly cradling some fragile bits and pieces of home. Almost all of his countrymen he’d met on their first visit to Paris showed the same inconsequential discomforts. They always looked distracted; they always spoke just too loudly, and they always ordered too much food.
It wasn’t a matter of pride, but Jack could silently acknowledge the fact that he’d never needed such personal reassurances. It used to privately please him that he found himself comfortable anywhere in the world he found himself, though he’d never felt it was a point of personal arrogance. He was merely comfortable. Jack’s adaptability, the ductile, elastic disposition he counted as his greatest gift, usually afforded him a sort of peace. Even so, that night in Paris, in the Helmut Lang jeans and Prada sweater that had become his agile armor, he felt as if his body was shod in unfeeling lead. He pushed the pile of screenplays away from him.
Victoria would have laughed at that. She would have smiled and shoved the whole bulk of paper back into his lap, told him to choose a good one this time; think three movies ahead because you never knew where your career was headed and (smirk) she didn’t want to leave him for a more glamorous star. And Jack would have picked another great one, and Victoria would have said she picked that one too, how strange.
He couldn’t do it anymore; couldn’t fill up the gaping spaces in a movie script with his own life, his own essence–transform the blocky words on the page into something that beat and sang and shouted with a life of its own, even if only on dry film.
She was gone, and he couldn’t do it anymore. She was gone.
*
Carly Bateman paused a moment as she exited the women’s restroom, and looked across the busy café at her friend. As always, Jack fit in without really blending into the background–the cant of his head, the line of his shoulders, the way he lifted his thick-glassed cup for a sip of chocolate, and a thousand other little details–she could almost believe he’d lived the entire span of his life here in Paris, perhaps selling bolts of bright cloth on the street near the Sant-Pierre market, or sketching famous skylines from the Place Emile-Goudeau, arguing shading and angles with the ghosts of Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. She smiled at the thought.
Jack was, as always, delicious to the eyes. As she’d noticed with many of the people in his line of work, once he had your attention it was actually difficult to look away from Jack. Just last month Entertainment Weekly had devoted an issue to the “science” of physical beauty, and the section on smoothness of action and symmetry of facial features focused on her friend Jack. She’d thrown it in her bag along with the scripts she would show him, thinking he’d get a good laugh out of it.
Jack always maintained that real beauty and classic appeal was found in how people recognized their imperfections, which she thought was funny. Jack was perhaps the most physically peerless man Carly had ever met, and that was saying a lot for a woman whose business life revolved as much around the buying and selling of an actor’s image as it did his or her talent.
He possessed both talent and image, though those weren’t the reasons Carly counted Jack her friend. From the moment she met him, his genuineness had captivated her. It had surprised her how–it seemed a lifetime ago, now–he listened to her, honestly listened. From the moment she’d met him—
*
San Francisco, California
She leaned against the bar with her arms, careful to keep the weig
ht off her burgeoning abdomen. Slowly, Carly pushed up until she was standing completely on her toes. Even in her bigger pointe shoes, it was so hard. Her leotard was too tight; she could barely breathe, and every movement caused her shoulder straps to gouge painfully into her skin. She pushed away from the bar and tottered to the center of the practice hall. Carefully, carefully, Carly settled all her weight on one foot, squaring her shoulders and extending both arms and her free leg into an arabesque. Slow, even piano music filled the room and echoed off the polished floor.
She faced away from the door, away from the bank of mirrors along that wall. She had no desire to glimpse her bloated, pimpled face. Mark had told her once that her face was like a painting by Raphael. Mark’s hands, tracing along her cheek. Mark’s hands . . .
Carly spun, floating into a pirouette. She was weightless. She was an angel again. Her eyes slipped shut as she took the small steps that would lead into a pas de bourrée couru--
Abruptly, the baby within her shifted, throwing its strange compactness against her ribs, and she stumbled to the side, falling, too slow to save herself, slipping, too slow again to get her feet under herself, trying desperately to twist to keep the weight off the baby, but falling–
And then she felt lithe hands around her, under her, and arms that were strong enough to catch her up and set her again on her feet. Carly gasped with relief as the room righted itself and resolved into a blond young man. His face was tinged with guilt and concern.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you like that!” He helped her into a chair. “The music was so loud, and you looked so — well, you looked like something out of heaven, to tell the truth. Sorry. Are you Caroline? The girl at the front said you were Victoria Moran’s roommate, and you’d know where she is. I’m so sorry to startle you like that.”