No. Terrorists operate in volume. They fight systems and so purport systemic slaughter, but almost always on a large scale. And they need the message to be clear, lest their agenda get lost in the ghastliness.
Or, any number of international enemies of the head of security decide to exact revenge by destroying his reputation with a concentrated, localized attack on the hotel that he has been tasked with making impregnable.
No again. If it were about me, they’d have tied me up and forced me to watch the anarchy descend. They don’t know I’m alive.
The Killer and the Thinker are mercenaries. Their methodical exactitude, their emotional remove, their adeptness and skill—nothing else fits. Killers for hire. Their names, which are not their names, are whispered in a vast, hateful underbelly of the world that operates with cynically perfected efficiency. Too many ends are too ideally realized by means of murder.
It’s de rigueur, after a decorated career in special forces, that an invitation is at least casually floated to join their ranks. A man might pull up a stool in a high-end Los Angeles bar, strike up a conversation, subtly imply the ops are rare and the salary huge, and leave a card. One might, if one were human, consider it for a single idiot second before asking the bartender for a match and watching the card curl into an ashtray. One could still smoke indoors back then. Though I never did.
So, the Killer and the Thinker’s price had to be astronomical. For the detail, the maximization of grotesquery, the hourly labor for staying all night. Further evidence that a man with astronomical resources was behind the order. Charles Destin or Cameron Donofrio?
Whoever it was, after the contract is in circulation, bidding begins. The team that executes the plan must be small and very experienced, because I made it a point to know every possible danger. Charles Destin told me he had enemies. He described corporate rivals, jealous husbands, and tennis opponents he defeated in tournaments. I took it for granted such men would use civilized means of murder. But civilized men can pick up the phone and call savages, and leaders of nations do it all the time, but Manderley is not a nation. It’s a posh hotel, built for business, for relaxation. For trysts.
Brian bucks. His neck knocks backward. He yelps with no dignity. Tessa pulls on his buttocks with avarice. She is patient. She milks him. He stills. Rolls to his left, on top of her. They are exhausted. They kiss exhaustedly. They don’t talk. A minute later, snoring—Tessa’s—can be heard. Brian smirks. He moves. Removes himself regretfully. He turns the comforter down and rotates Tessa so her head is on the pillow. He spoons her. Less than a minute later, a harmonic octave of snoring—Brian’s, the fucker—is audible.
The Killer droops. He looks at what he has wrought. He examines the foyer with a nod of satisfaction. Then he peers at his lacerated leg and stabs what once was Delores one more time. He turns away from a stunning, repellent, viscerally offensive mess, and tracks blood across the floor. He tracks blood up the stairs, and down the hall of the second floor, to the laundry room, where he strips off his coveralls and pours into the washer the remainder of the detergent he left atop the washer, before pressing buttons. He goes to the fourth dryer and opens it, to check in on Franklin. The Killer slams the dryer door, turns a dial, and the dryer rattles to life. There is something wrong with it. It was not, evidently, designed to roast hotel managers to death.
The Killer is bleeding, but not too much. His shins are not fractured, but he’s limping. Delores might have severed a few fibers of muscle when the scissors whickered off bone. He goes to the employee break room and takes the first aid kit from a cabinet beside the refrigerator. He cleans the lacerations, and applies bandages and gauze. He has numerous scars. He is an enormous man. He is conclusively a man, and favors tightie whities. This is strangely rewarding.
Then, the duo that wins the contract has to become intimately familiar with the workings of Manderley’s surveillance. They must know when staff change occurs. They need to get an access card to the twentieth floor. The most efficient method for doing all of these things is to pay off a member of the security team. The most torturous part of all of this is not knowing why, and knowing it’s almost impossible I’ll ever know why. But the second-most torturous thing to endure is duplicity on the part of people to whom loyalty is supposed to be sacrosanct.
Tessa doesn’t like to be held in her sleep. Usually.
Jules and Justin do not snore. The Killer tends his wounds.
The Thinker, by now, is completely sick of solitaire. Which is why he’s collating his deck and building a house of cards.
It is eleven o’clock. The security team intended to run a scenario tonight. A fire drill. When all civilian parties in the building were asleep, security was going to set off the fire alarm and watch to see if employees followed protocol. The protocol for a fire drill is to descend the stairs in an orderly fashion, forgoing the elevator, and exit the lobby level. It is a basic protocol, admittedly, but it’s shocking how often civilians, when confronted with imminent threats, forget instructions and panic. Delores was not one to panic. Security was going to wait until Delores left to set off the alarm. Delores would be leaving about now. She didn’t like her home. She preferred her workplace, a bygone habit from a time when a malicious abuser awaited her in his wingback chair, smoking cigars and spitting in a saucepan. This is in Delores’s file.
Delores’s head is on the mantel in the bright red foyer; it’s turned so it can stare at her body on the floor. The fourth dryer tumbles and tumbles its load in the housekeeping storage area. Henri lies facedown on the plush carpet of Room 1408, the carpet dark with blood, the blood discernible in night vision’s green, black, and white. Likewise Twombley’s blood, in which he bathes, in the bathtub of Room 1516. The security cameras switch in and out of night vision automatically, sensing the amount of light available.
Vivica’s eyes are like a somber summer day, covered in fluffy white clouds. Where do they come from?
Where does memory come from? How does time pass, what is it? Is it the cinematic flash to running down the stairs in the house back in Indiana? The white walls scuffed by spirited boys? The revisited sense that the carpet there was not plush but it was thick. It was much too thick, and natty and dull. The railing’s surface with divots like healed acne, imprinting onto a smooth hand, an innocent hand, connected to an innocent body intent in its footy pajamas. The smell of syrup, vanilla, nutmeg. Bacon to counter the sweets. Sunday breakfasts. First one down the stairs got to lick the bowl of muffin batter. The secret was to decide, before sleep, “Wake up the minute the bacon’s on.” The secret to anything is to decide. Anything is surmountable. Anything. Anything but death, but if death is not foreign, if death is not exotic, if death isn’t—but death is. Death always is. It’s the unknown country. It’s the tenant of tall shadows. It’s the dark. It is the Thing humanity has tried to vanquish with cities, with lit-all-night streetlamps; with medicine and surgery, religion and mythology, art and demagoguery, and yet—yet, yet, death looks at these measures and feels the briefest, barest confusion. It carries on with its business. It’s the boogeyman. It is there in the operating room, and in the pill proffered afterward to ward off infection. It’s in every religion, myth, painting, song, poem, novel, and film, and in every speech by every fool who ever tried to argue that anything is surmountable. Death is not, because death simply is. If death simply is, how can it be argued that anything matters? Tessa once said, answering that very question, in bed, after saying the subject was a stupid waste of syllables, “Because if nothing matters, then everything does.” She said it with a rude brusqueness, like a self-evident fact. Like the maxim she lived her life by. And perhaps, perhaps that maxim is what makes her slightly other, mildly apart and above. Only mildly, slightly, because the difference in her can be a deficit as well as an attribute. She can hear the words “I love you” and reply, “I don’t love you. I don’t think I ever will. If you want to keep doing this, that’s fine, but it won’t ever be anything more
for me.” The viciousness! The courage! What is that, what is it? Brian has it, too. It is—it is an insouciance vis-à-vis death. An equanimity about the value of life in the midst of death, but not an acceptance. Not at all. Death is not something many people think about—at least outside of religious dogma—and of those who think, few are capable of arriving at a conclusion that is anything but cynical, and so what Tessa has somehow done—and Brian, it seems, has done it, too—is to refuse to arrive at a conclusion, but instead to insist on honesty and forthrightness at the expense of sweetness. But not of decency. Never, ever that. It is idiotic folly, says the part of the mind that has known death uncommonly well, walked with it through war zones, swum with it in black coastlines, jumped with it out of Black Hawks. But another part of my mind watches time pass, hours of it, here on the twentieth floor, where the Thinker’s house of cards rises to a skyscraper. He estimates its stability has reached its limit, and he then begins construction on a maze in front of the tower, laying the cards horizontally with the precision of a kinesthetic sage. This is the part of my mind that watched the Killer finish taping his bandages, dry his coveralls, put on his coveralls, clean his knife, search the employee break room refrigerator and find Vivica’s huevos rancheros in a shallow Tupperware bowl, microwave it, eat it, board the secret elevator, skipping the stairs in consideration of his limp, arrive at the seventh floor, enter Room 717, set the clock radio’s alarm for two a.m., send a text that made the Thinker’s phone vibrate, and fold his hands across his stomach for a nap. As I watch these men in masks, the part of my mind thus engaged wonders, if it possessed Tessa’s and Brian’s insouciance, what might have happened at five oh two p.m., when Addison pointed to the monitor showing the secret elevator, and to the two men in it whose heads were bowed so all that could be seen were the parts of their hair. One man was enormous; the other average. Like Bowles and Petrovski. Bowles and Petrovski carpooled. Bowles had a hard time keeping his schedule straight; Petrovski was going through a divorce. Addison laughed at how they’d come to work when they weren’t scheduled to, and the team returned to its meeting, prepped to take the piss out of Bowles and Petrovski when they arrived at the twentieth floor. The head of security was running behind, too. I’d been screamed at, minutes ago, by Charles Destin. I was conducting the meeting distractedly, and yet another distraction in the form of my two worst employees botching their schedules annoyed me into the human fallacy that petty concerns render death inert. Death is not ever inert. The two men in the elevator were not Bowles and Petrovski. The Killer and the Thinker knew Bowles’s and Petrovski’s builds, and that their own builds could effectively deceive the security team. The large man—the Killer—wields a brutal and accurate knife, and the average man—the Thinker—can fire eight calm, considered shots through a silencer in the time it takes five former Navy SEALs to reach for their weapons.
The Killer’s knife throwing is exceptionally accurate, but not perfect. He was aiming for the neck, and he hit it, but he hit the back of the neck. He hit the space between the second and third vertebrae. His first victim fell into a chair, spine neatly severed but no major arteries hit, barely bleeding, head coming to rest on the counter that faces the bank of security monitors, eyes wide open. Such an injury would result in death if the victim moved even an inch the wrong way, and the chair into which the victim fell is on wheels. One of the sixty-four monitors (eight rows, eight columns, a third of them motion-activated and two-thirds fixed on pivot points crucial for security protocol) shows the twentieth floor. The other members of the security team, not including Twombley, were shot. They, including Twombley, are obviously dead. The Killer had another knife, a larger one he preferred, which is why the Killer’s Navy SEAL field knife remains lodged in the back of my neck.
The Thinker stands from a Manderley of cards it took him two decks to build. He pokes the foundations with his toe, curious how much force it would require to knock the tower down. It does not take much. The Thinker faces the east wall. The bank of security monitors is on the north wall, in front of the windows, and beneath them sits a countertop for the security team members to set their cups of coffee on—or, in a pinch, their inert skulls—and in front of the counter sit the chairs, on wheels, which in most scenarios do not seem highly dangerous.
In the center of the counter, there is a blank black monitor, framed in more white Formica and angled at forty-five degrees. The override system. It’s a touch screen. It’s been called an excessive and absurd measure, but only behind my back. It’s absurd now only because with the press of a few buttons the entire hotel and everything in it—light switches, doors, even the faucets—would be under my control. Beside the override monitor, ten inches in front of my face, there is a pencil. I thought, as Delores ran, as the Killer followed, as the Thinker left the twentieth floor for the first time all night and went to the foyer and flanked her expertly—I did consider worming my head along the counter (if simply the act of moving didn’t sever my few vital nerves that remain intact), seizing the pencil in my mouth (assuming I could angle my head), and, using this makeshift appendage to activate emergency override protocols, manipulate some minor aspect of the foyer to help Delores escape (the Thinker locked the main doors manually with chains and a padlock).
It would have been an impractical act. I would not have positioned my head exactly right afterward; the Thinker would have noticed I’d moved. I’d be dead now. It might have bought Delores a few seconds. Survival is about what is, not what might be.
It is only when the Thinker goes to the east and looks out, as he does now, that it is possible he will see the head of security blinking. It is therefore advisable to stop blinking.
Tessa, in her sleep, will sometimes cuddle toward an erection if one is pressed against her. Tessa appears to be doing this now. Normally, if Tessa does this, and it wakes her companion—as it does, now, Brian—and if her companion wakes her in response—as Brian does, now, playfully grazing his lips across hers—Tessa will grunt in disgust and turn away, citing a dire need for sleep and a supreme distaste for her (and for her companion’s) foul breath.
She will not open her eyes dreamily, and gaze upon her companion like he is a dream, and kiss him. But she does so now, to Brian.
It is one thirty a.m. Veterans of special ops units are well acquainted with one thirty a.m., and hours like it. Particularly special ops veterans who cut their teeth on the skirmishes of the mid-to-late eighties, fights that weren’t supposed to be happening, wars that were never sanctioned by the general population or the politicians elected by the general population. They were like extramarital affairs. They happened in hours easily unaccounted for—hours that are cold, dark, and beautiful—the same as an affair happens on lunch breaks or supposed late nights at the office. The soldiers tucked dog tags under undershirts, so the metal wouldn’t wink back at the stars, alerting an enemy who had to die silently. It isn’t true that soldiers are brainless orangutans, swinging dicks knocking down dictators. Nor is it true, either or often, that these men, while floating on an inflatable raft in calm waters, waiting for the order to fall backward into the tiny waves and swim over a mile to shore, contemplate the night sky, or what they are about to do, and their position in time and space, and their personal philosophy, and karma. Most of the men are contemplating something, but typically it’s a girlfriend back home, or a wife, or their mother. Most men, when faced with death, think of a woman, one woman. It is wise for the lieutenant who forms the combat unit to promote to CO the one man who does not think of a woman. It is preferable that he think of philosophy and karma. It is ideal if he grew up poor—not destitute, but definitely poor—and if he is too poor to afford college, yet wants to go to college and has an excellent mind. He’s barely nineteen, but he has shown unparalleled discipline and persistence in training. He’s in special ops because the pay’s better. He’s trying to make enough money to send not only himself, but his little brother and little sister, to college. But the little bro
ther joins up, too, and gets killed in an on-base Humvee rollover. The little sister, shortly afterward, gets pregnant and then gets married. He watches the stars, waits for the order, and thinks—even now, before his siblings’ misfortunes have come to pass—that one thirty a.m. and the hours like it are the hours of unfairness. They invite, in his fellow soldiers, diaphanous recollections of a woman—the woman, whether mother or lover or whatever she is—and turn her into something other, something much more than what she is. This is what the CO thinks: that loving a woman this way is foolish. And he thinks he’d give anything to forget what these hours can do. He believes the rich and the lucky are impervious to one thirty a.m. The rich and the lucky, in the mid-to-late eighties, are rationalizing a dominance he will only watch grow over time. But the coup will be: he will join that dominance. Not the highest echelon; that is closed to him. That is a precipice for men and women born to obscene, situational, circumstantial wealth, wealth once-earned but now merely passed on to the lucky. He will become, instead, the man who watches over them, making sure they live to love their luck. He will be an individual security attaché for a while, after an honorable discharge and a stamped recommendation letter from an admiral and excellent SATs get him into Columbia, followed by Oxford, followed by the realization he’d make far more money in the security sector than he ever could as a philosophy professor. (It will haunt him, how he abandoned academia for money, but not much, no. He is a pragmatist; he is not emotional; he is not sentimental, until he is, when—) Then he is approached about interviewing for the head of security position in Destin Management Group and—he meets Tessa.
I didn’t care about the interview. I didn’t want the job. I was a private consultant, coordinating the protection of actors and pop stars, heiresses and tycoons. The money was profane, and I never had to meet the people I was protecting. I designed routes for limousines, rewrote schedules for meathead bodyguards, and taught defense techniques. I had a reputation—made from a decade and a half alternating between the CIA and the Secret Service—and I was coasting on that reputation. I was bored, but I didn’t know it. I was sitting in a room with six other interviewees, a room with smooth black walls and a bowl of floating white flowers in the midst of a dozen high-priced chairs, a Monet (not a reproduction) behind the receptionist’s elephantine desk. Water poured down one black wall but didn’t pool anywhere. It recycled invisibly back to the top. No magazines to read, no clock. Modern decorating aesthetics equate beauty with empty space.
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