Twenty minutes later, Jensen Lattimore showed up. He arrived in a hurry, dropped into a chair across from mine, and inspected me with intensity, mouth open, eyes bugged, the way an anthropologist would inspect a potsherd. No name, no greeting, no pleasantries—just an open and unabashed assessment of my essence, as though my IQ were imprinted on my forehead and my neuroses were etched across my eyeballs.
He was dressed in fifties freshman chic—madras shirt, chino trousers, white socks, penny loafers. His hair was brush cut and his eyes were described by horn-rim glasses: that the fifties had become fashionable again was one of life’s minor mysteries. The only dissent to his outfit was his left arm—it was bandaged from wrist to elbow in white gauze and wide adhesive that looked to have been freshly applied.
“You persuaded Chris that you’ve got something I need to see,” he began, his eyes locked on me like radar, his words as rapid as a teletype. “He’d better be right.”
I held up the disk.
“What’s on it?”
I smiled. “Something you should see.”
“Women?”
“Why don’t we make it a surprise.”
For some reason it was the wrong thing to say. “I’ve had enough surprises for one night,” he said angrily, lifting his arm and inspecting the bandage. “What format?”
“What?”
“The disk. DOS, Unix, OS/2, System 7, what?”
Chris had briefed me. “System 7 point five. Power MAC platform.”
“What application?”
“Something new.”
“Who wrote the code?”
“I did.”
“Bullshit. I could tell you weren’t technical before you opened your mouth.”
“How?”
“You blink too much and you hold that disk like a dog turd.” He stood up, walked to the corner of the room, opened a recessed refrigerator, took out a piece of cold pizza, and took a big bite. “Cut to the chase. Is this some sort of garbage downloaded off the Internet? Debbie Does Dallas scanned onto disk? Beaver shots of your daughter? What?”
I expended the energy necessary to keep from stuffing the pizza in his ear. “I’d say this is more like Blow Up. And I’m pretty sure you’re going to like it.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the star.”
“Star of what?”
“My movie.”
“Another skin flick, I suppose.” He shook his head. “You’re like everyone else with a narrow bandwidth. You think I’m a pornographer when what I am is a redeemer.”
I raised a brow. “Of women?”
“Of men, of course.”
“How so?”
“Beautiful women are evil incarnate. They have wreaked more havoc than all the weapons of war in history.”
“What kind of havoc are you talking about?”
His cheeks reddened and his eyes bulged with fervor. “I’m talking about the belittlement of the male that they feast upon; I’m talking about the humiliation that they traffic in; I’m talking about the teasing they employ in order to maximize the pain of the denial they invariably impose; and I’m talking about the mocking of normal desires that they find so titillating.”
I suppressed a laugh. “And how do you go about saving the male animal from all this?”
“I bring to the surface the evil that lurks within them. I show such women in their true light by removing the veil of loveliness from the depravity that lies below it. Utilizing digital technology to reveal these truths is my most important contribution.”
“To what? Your bank account?”
He put out a hand to silence me. “Much as I would like to expand on my liberation of the male animal, I don’t have time. Assuming I have an interest in your database, what’s it going to cost me to license it?”
“Why don’t you look at it first? Then we’ll talk.”
Lattimore shrugged, then reached for the disk, then left the room at the pace he had entered it. After he was gone, I felt I should be doing something to protect myself from what was coming, but I didn’t know what that would be.
When he returned to the room he had friends with him. They flanked him like praetorian guards, the burly ex-cop and the wiry exagent, poised to protect their charge from anything I could throw at him. For his part, Lattimore was an inch away from foaming at the mouth. His breath sizzled like steak on the grill, his eyes were as bright as bad bearings.
He waved the disk under my nose as if the ink on the label was wet. “You asshole. Who the hell do you think you are, coming in here with shit like this? Don’t you know who I am?”
“You’re a blackmailer and a pornographer and you murdered the guy who fronted for you. Unfortunately, when you bumped Richter off to keep him quiet, someone caught it on tape. Gives you a lot in common with the cops who pummeled Rodney King.”
He waved the disk again. “Bullshit. This isn’t off video stock, this is jury-rigged with stone age hardware and a half-assed piece of code—I’m embarrassed to have it in my home. Who the fuck packaged it?”
I shrugged. “What difference does it make?”
“I like to know who I’m dealing with.”
“You’re dealing with me.”
“Bullshit; you’re a stooge at best and a nuisance at worst. Where’d you get the disk?”
“I found it.”
“Where?”
“Mailbox.”
“Bullshit. Who else has seen this abortion?”
“No one.”
“Not the cops?” Nope.
“How many copies are there?”
“Enough to keep me safe and sound.”
Lattimore circled the room before he spoke again, his goons moving around him like satellite moons—it looked like a road production of Grease. But if I’d moved a muscle in my foot, they would have pounced on me.
“It’s bogus, you know,” Lattimore said finally.
“Is it?”
“Sure. I didn’t kill Richter.”
“Who did?”
“How should I know? He was into all kinds of sub-rosa stuff. Only part of it was mine.”
“Whether you did it or not, if the cops get pointed in your direction they’ll find plenty to perk them up. Cops love the hell out of porn—it confirms what they think about people, women especially. Probably be six months before they sort it out, and even if you skate on the murder charge, they’ll find something else to hang you on. In the meantime, you’ll be out of business.”
He’d figured it out already, of course, so he didn’t bother to fence with me. “How much?”
I shook my head. “The medium of exchange isn’t money.”
“What is it?”
I smiled. “You seem pretty eager to deal for someone who claims he’s innocent.”
His face turned the color of his cordovans. “You’re not technical but you’re not a fool—you know as well as I do that half the economy is based on false claims and baseless accusations. News media. Advertising. Movies. All it is is lies and technology makes it easier. I can knock it down, of course, but I don’t have time for the aggravation. What do you want?”
“A woman.”
The pressure was off and his smile was lecherous. “I can get you enough women to let you to ream a new one every night for two years.”
“I only want one of them, Jensen.”
His glance flicked toward the window. “Who?”
“Nina Evans.”
His coal-hot eyes threatened to scorch his forehead. “That bitch? What do you want with her? She thinks she’s some kind of princess—I got dozens look better than she does.” He waved his hand dismissively. “You can have them all; I make my own these days.”
“Isn’t it a tad perverted to prefer digital women to real ones?”
He looked down at his bandaged arm. “Real ones are a pain in the ass.” He stopped pacing and looked at me long enough to determine my fate. “Bring him,” he said to his lackeys in a sudden burst of venom. “
I need to know what he knows.”
They were on me before I could move, their hands locked on my arms like condor claws, their breaths as sour as kraut in my nostrils. They wrestled me down the hall as if I weighed a hundred pounds instead of a hundred more.
The room they took me to was black all around and lit by one flood in the ceiling. The two chairs in the center were gray and upholstered and tasteful. Suddenly a motor whirred and a third chair rose out of the floor in the space between the other two. This one came with webbed straps and plastic clamps that enabled them to lock me into it as securely as condemned men are locked into the electric chair.
When they’d finished, they stepped back and admired their work. “All set, boss.”
Lattimore grinned crookedly. “Did you ever have a nightmare so real it scared you for days on end, Mr. Tanner? Until you couldn’t remember whether it was real or not?”
I nodded. The dream involved deep dark caves with walls that closed in on me like car crushers. Sweat rolled off my forehead and stung my eyes, as though my juices had become sulphuric.
“Well, you’re about to have a similar experiece. I’ll be interested to see how it turns out.”
“What can I do to stop it?”
“Nothing. The only thing you can do is keep it from happening again.”
Lattimore leaned down and picked up two wires with wafers the size of quarters on the end of them. He stuck the round things on my face near my temples, then stepped back.
“These are electrodes designed to tell us if you blink. If you do, you will receive an electric shock. If you close your eyes, you will receive a bigger shock. If you keep them closed, you will eventually be electrocuted. All you need to do to keep that from happening is observe the world around you.”
He laughed and was out the door. A moment later, I was drowning in darkness. Some moments after that was when I started screaming.
CHAPTER 28
She has come to this: naked, locked in a barren room with nothing but a towel for comfort, shivering, scared, and abandoned. It is the way she has always sensed it would end, the fate she has always feared for reasons she cannot fathom. She is hostage to someone as detached from life as she herself has been, as heedless of suffering, as obsessed with his power and potency; someone who is planning, quite likely, to kill her.
She wonders what it will mean, her death, and decides it will mostly mean relief, to her mother and brother, certainly, to everyone, in fact, but Ted. Poor, pathetic Ted, who pretended his urges were platonic, who denied his intents and purposes even as he stroked her breast and kissed her ear after a particularly wonderful meal of veal and venison, who justified his behavior by denying his paternity, then apologized profusely and begged her to accept his retraction.
She had lured him into such shamefulness deliberately, of course, so the surprise was not the effort, the surprise was that she had resisted. So many times, she hadn’t, so many men had been allowed to join with her because some deep-seated sense of obligation whispered that it was what she must do to keep them near and make them happy, that otherwise they would fly away and she would be left with only feeling, the feeling, the one she’s known since the dawn of life, that she must please people or they will abandon her.
She curls into herself the way she used to curl for Gary, becomes a nut of flesh, but this time the goal is warmth. When the door opens she fully expects it is the end, expects to see an ugly man and an uglier weapon and to be instructed to prepare for doom. Instead, she sees salvation.
“It’s all right,” he says, covering her mouth with kisses to suppress her exclamations. “I’m going to get you out of here, but not yet. It’s all right,” he repeats when her eyes plead for him to stay. “I’ll be back in a second; I just need to set stuff up.”
Given his obsessions, I figured the high-tech torture that Lattimore had in store for me would feature women in various stages of undress and similar extremes of jeopardy—I would be an unwilling party to their slaughter, whether virtual or in fact I wouldn’t be able to tell. In the moments of darkness before I became engulfed, I steeled myself to shrug it off—the sadism was just a trick, the women hadn’t really been burned or slashed or battered, the only actual actors were bits and bytes and lines of code, not people who could feel pain and endure agony. As ably as I could, I inured myself against such suffering, but they were scenes I never saw.
When the screens that surrounded me flamed with light and I was assaulted by a tsunami of sight and sound, I began the trek concocted by my captor. Not in a vehicle I’d ever steered, not through realms I’d ever traveled, not to a destination I’d ever sought out—what I did was fly, through a universe of Jensen Lattimore’s making.
Pleasantly, at first, the way I’d always imagined it would be. Easy dips and turns, drifting gently over a landscape formed mostly of what looked like the tops of trees and the roofs of buildings—I might have been an eagle, soaring above Seattle, or even an archangel. But when I became an airplane, I suddenly started to crash.
I dived toward the ground with increasing speed, to pull up an instant before disaster. I hurtled toward a wall, to veer left milliseconds before collision. I climbed toward a cloud, then yawed into a corkscrew roll, spinning faster and faster as I plunged toward the void amid a whir and scrape of dissonance, courtesy of a synthesizer and surround-sound.
I told myself it wasn’t real, that I was still on terra firma, still strapped to a chair and immobile, but given the evidence in my eyes, I couldn’t make myself believe it. To regain equilibrium I lowered my eyelids, but my buttocks quickly twinged with shock so I looked back at the maelstrom that was my nemesis. Quickly on the brink of nausea, I closed my eyes again, this time for several seconds. My body vibrated with an electric buzz, as if my guts and groin were being incinerated by torches deep within.
When I opened my eyes to douse the fire, the image shifted. I wasn’t on the earth at all, but trapped within a grid that confined me on all sides, a skeletal construction whose surfaces moved in sinister designs and sinuous configurations that entrapped and forestalled me even as I darted here and there to escape the ever-changing web. Blocked at every turn, dizzy with my effort, I was praying for the ordeal to end when the web suddenly became a smokestack, a soaring cylinder into which I fell, tumbling and twisting and spinning in a headlong descent into geometry that seemed interminable.
The nausea that had been building erupted into vomit; I spilled my stomach onto my lap and chest. My eyes lost the knack of focus. My head throbbed; my blood thudded against its conduits. My mouth tasted bile and chewy cud and a metallic residue that made me believe that I had disgorged my body chemistry, that my essential elements were wayward and undone. I groaned and spit and inhaled the stench of my own excreta. And tried not to beg for mercy.
“I could leave you there till you shit your pants,” Lattimore crowed from somewhere close at hand, then bestowed a blessed clemency. The lights went out, the images retreated to their silicon caves, my body slowed its vicarious tumble, and Lattimore was back beside me.
“You’ve only been in here five minutes,” he said smugly. “In ten more, I could make you insane.”
“That might be redundant,” I said, mostly to see if my larynx had been corroded away by my bile.
He ignored my jape. “Is it time to talk, do you think?”
“Sure.”
“Then who made the tape?”
“I did.”
“If you made that tape, I made the solar system. Which, come to think of it, I did.” His laugh was giddy and egomaniacal; Dobie Gillis on crystal meth.
“All you need to do for me to take the next plane out of town,” I explained as reasonably as I could manage given the residue that lined my mouth, “is to let me leave with Nina.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“She knows too much.”
“Everything she knows, I know.”
“That’s laughable. If you knew any
thing at all you wouldn’t have come here.”
“What are you going to do, kill her?”
“I’m going to acquire her.”
“She’s not for sale. And I think you know it.”
“If she isn’t, she would be the first.”
“Mandy Lorenzen has that honor, doesn’t she?”
“Mandy.” He swore. “That was her own doing, just as this is yours.” He cackled again. “When you resist a superior force, bad things happen. Which you’d know if you’d ever played Mortal Kombat.”
I laughed. “When do you suppose you’ll grow up?”
Lattimore slapped my face; since I was still strapped in the chair, I couldn’t slap back. “Who made the tape?” he shouted.
“Me.”
“Where are the copies?”
“Fort Knox.”
“Who killed Gary Richter?”
“You did.”
“I was in L.A. that night. I can prove it.”
“How about the dropouts?”
“Dropouts?”
“The ex-cop and the exagent. Where were they?”
“They were there, too.”
“Then you don’t have a problem. Just give me Nina Evans and I’ll be on my way. Richter’s murder is a cop’s job, not mine.”
“Nina needs reorienting,” he whined.
“You sound like the Red Guard.”
“Red what?”
“A burst of oriental excess a few years back. You’d know all about it if you ever read anything but software manuals.”
He crossed his legs. The penny in his left loafer winked at me from the safety of its slot. “You don’t take me seriously, do you, Mr. Tanner?”
“I take you as seriously as the ebola virus.”
“What are we going to do with you?” he asked himself theatrically. “I’ve got it. Since you’re not technical, perhaps Neanderthal methods will be effective.”
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