The Hollow World: (Pangea, Book 1)
Page 32
Ransom seemed surprised, then turned to Pompaneau.
“You know,” Ransom said, as it sunk in. “About her and Mack. That’s why you were being such a dick to the guy. You knew he was banging your wife.”
“Of course I knew.” Pompaneau said, grimacing at the expression.
“Did you know she helped him escape?” Ransom asked. “Both a year ago, and just now?”
Pompaneau was stunned.
“What?” he said, turning to her in shock. “You helped Mack escape?”
She glared at him, furiously, as Ransom set the laptop down, opened it, and the screen glowed into life. There was a folder already open on the desktop, filled with files.
“Why?” Pompaneau asked his wife.
“I didn’t,” she began, intending to argue that she didn’t really think it would work, that she hadn’t really believed in ‘Pangea’ or ‘Nova’ or any of it, but she couldn’t. In the end, she had believed, and she’d activated the pad.
“Not originally,” she continued. “Not back then.”
“But now?”
She turned away and said nothing.
“Are those security recordings?” Pompaneau asked Ransom.
“They are,” Ransom said, still staring at Lena.
“And Mack is on some of them?” Pompaneau wanted to know.
“He’s in all of them,” Ransom replied, still not looking at the man. “And so is Dr. Mizellier.”
Pompaneau stared at the list of files, their tiny icons showing frozen moments of Mack and Lena, mostly in her office. Many of the images appeared to be two people very close together.
“Let’s have a look.” Pompaneau said, clearly uncertain.
“No!” Lena said.
Ransom still stared only at her, unblinking. Pompaneau, on the other hand, couldn’t stop staring at the files on the laptop.
When Lena finally continued, her voice was cold, emotionless. Just stating facts.
“No, ” she said. “There’s no point. He’d broken it off with him many weeks before all this began. Once he learned I was… once he learned I’d been lying to him about not being married. It has nothing to do with any of this, other than that it was clearly another of the stress factors that led him to kill that boy.”
“He didn’t know…?” Pompaneau began, barely able to speak.
“No. He didn’t. I liked him. He was smart, and funny, and…”
“Manly?” Ransom offered. It seemed an odd, personal kind of observation, but it was true.
“Yes,” Mizellier said, the passion evident in her voice. “We began having sex not long after he came to work here—he didn’t know I was married. When he found out from Milton, he broke it off.”
Pompaneau stared at her for quite a while then slowly pulled his attention from her, reached out and double-clicked on one of the files. It opened quickly and began to play. It was a high resolution QuickTime, shot from somewhere overhead in the room they currently occupied. Mizellier was wearing a lab coat and high-heel boots, but nothing else, leaning back across a desk as Brandon, pants around his ankles, mouth bent down, sucking passionately on one breast, thrust himself into her.
“You’re such an animal,” Lena was shouting on the recording. “Oh, God, I love the way you fuck me, like an animal!”
The room was still and silent, no more sound from the QuickTime other than Lena’s passionate screams, and Pompaneau’s suddenly labored breathing.
“I never meant to hurt you, Iain,” Lena said, her eyes filling with tears. “The guilt was killing me.”
“Oh, clearly,” Pompaneau said, pain pouring from every syllable as he watched her being pleasured on her desk in ways he knew he had never pleasured her. “It’s just tearing you up, inside.”
“You told Mack the night he disappeared that you were getting a divorce,” the agent asked. “Didn’t you?”
Everyone turned to him, amazed that he had finally spoken. Mizellier looked up at him in surprise.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“We checked, of course,” he told her, taking a casual sip of his coffee. “Your conversation was picked up on one of the videos from the night he disappeared. You were waiting for him. Hoping to get him back from that Jessica chick, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s why you were all made up,” the agent continued, “and why you weren’t wearing anything under your lab coat that night, either.”
She stared at him in silence.
“You weren’t wearing anything under your lab coat, except the boots, were you?”
“Is that relevant?” she asked, angrily.
“No,” the agent said, grinning darkly through the foam that covered his lips from whatever it was he’d gotten from Starbucks. “I just like thinking about it.”
“He was about to become a college boy,” Ransom, the cop, said, “and therefore worthy of you.”
“It’s not like that,” Jessica said, surprised by the accusation. “I just… I… it was timing, and…”
She stared, and angered a little, realizing she didn’t have to dignify the accusation.
“I was hoping things hadn’t progressed very far with Jessica,” she said, quietly, looking down, remembering that night. “I realized how I felt about him. Getting into college was just coincidental, and an excuse to make contact after we’d agreed to avoid one another. But I guess he felt leaving out those little details would help me, somehow. He obviously didn’t know that Iain and I had divorced while he was gone, and… I don’t know.”
She paused, remembering the heightened emotions of that night, a year ago.
“I told him I loved him, and wanted him. He… just looked at me as though his world had ended. I didn’t understand at the time. I expected him to leap into my arms, but he only went pale, and walked away.”
“And then you helped him escape,” Ransom said.
“I didn’t help him escape!” she snapped at the detective. “We didn’t even have the pad out, yet! It was still mostly trapped inside all that concretization! I didn’t even know what the damn thing was! None of us did! The mole crashed through the floor—ceiling—whatever—shattered the stone, and activated the pad somehow! You were there, Ransom! You started this whole fucking mess when you shot at him!”
“HE started it when he killed that boy!”
“Brandon was a good kid who was hurting! A good MAN who held it together longer than I would have, and only fought back when that asshole kept beating on him! And you investigated it! You fucking KNOW that!”
Ransom stood silently, staring at the auburn haired scientist. She glared into him from behind her glasses for a solid minute, then turned away, and folded her arms across her chest.
Ransom scowled at her, trying to decide if she was being sincere. Eventually he shook his head realizing he didn't care.
“Where…” the policeman asked with barely restrained fury, “is MACK?
“Why do you care?” Lena asked. “Wherever he is, it’s out of your jurisdiction.”
“DAMMIT, woman, where did you SEND him?”
“You know as much as I do.”
“EXCEPT HOW TO GET HIM BACK!” Ransom snapped.
“Or how to get back the billion dollars worth of government equipment he stole,” the agent offered, sipping his coffee, and staring at the pad. “You think it really is just some advanced game system? Or is he actually in that Pangea place?”
Pompaneau snorted derisively.
“That’s not even a possibility,” Lena’s ex said, less snarky, and more angry. “Mack lied about that, just like he lied about everything else. The existence of a ‘Pangea’ defies all known laws of science. It can’t exist.”
Suddenly the pad ignited again, bright light exploding upward and out from its center, then fading away just as quickly. Everyone flinched, and stepped back from what had appeared on its smooth surface.
Mizellier gasped. Ransom stared in horror and disbelief. Pompaneau whimpered.
Sprawled across the pad, bloody and nearly dead, one eye searching slowly about the room, scanning, examining, breathing raggedly, clearly alive, though not for much longer, was the broken body of a Grigori.
Beside it lie the mangled remains of ‘Germaine’, the guard.
* * *
EPILOGUE
* * *
“And that’s it? That’s all we know?”
“Yes sir. The cameras in the room stopped working as the Grigori and the guard appeared on the pad. Electrical interference of some kind, or damage from the guard’s wild shots. Our agent ran from the room to call us as we’d asked him to, and by the time he’d returned, Mizellier, Pompaneau and the cop were all gone.”
“And the Grigori?”
“What Grigori?”
“Ha. Okay. I guess you’ve answered my question. So what next?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, unless one of the security guards remembers exactly what Mizellier did to turn on that device.”
“Is that likely?”
“I don’t know. After what happened to that guard, part of me hopes not.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean.”
END