Chapter Forty-Five
Special Agent Brighton spent forty-two minutes following his conversation with Whales on the ninetieth floor, pacing and giving orders. Now he returned to the roof, where the FBI helicopter had dropped him off earlier, to meet the Secret Service.
They had just landed their fancy black civilian DFC-4300, and two of the four agents disembarked. The only difference between them and the FBI, as far as the attire went, were the silly shades. True, FBI agents favored sunglasses also, but they occasionally took them off. These guys likely slept in them, if they slept at all.
The pair who got out of the chopper stood twisting their necks and holding their chins so high, you’d think they couldn’t see through the lenses, but only from under them. As one of the lesser agents went to greet them, dragging a parka-clad cameraman along, Brighton couldn’t help but think about his idea to simply put shades on a few feds and fetch fake IDs for them. The only reason he hadn’t gone through with it was Brome. Whales was a fool — this notion of surrendering to Secret Service, as if that would make any difference, was a good indication enough of that — but Brome would know if there was a ruse. He also knew Brighton well enough to expect something of the sort. Besides, there was really no point in taking chances. Bringing a few bored SS agents from their Chicago branch hadn’t been hard. A single phone call.
The IDs were shown to the camera.
Brighton dialed the number.
“Hello,” Whales answered.
“The Secret Service are on the roof. Release the hostages and come out.”
“All right, Brighton. The hostages are on their way down. Clear the Eastern Stairwell. I don’t want to see anybody in there. I will come out in exactly fifteen minutes. Tell the Secret Service to keep the engines running.” He hung up. Brighton grimaced.
No matter, he thought. This was the last time Whales told him what to do. He would soon learn how Secret Service protects.
But another unpleasant thought suddenly entered his mind. Whales was a fool, but if Brome was on his side he would see that this idea of extraction by Secret Service was stupid. So why didn’t he…? Was Brome on Whales’s side? Or did he see the situation for what it was and decided that anything Whales came up with was fine, as long as he would surrender without getting himself or anybody else killed? That sounded like Brome, yet Brighton was not convinced. He wished he had surveillance, but all the cameras on the seventy-seventh floor were out of commission. He had watched Brome and Whales smash every single one. He still had the infrared scanners from across the street, but those weren’t too helpful.
There was an audible click in his ear and Dietrich’s voice. He had send Agent Dietrich down to the foyer to take charge of the cops there.
“Agent Brighton? We have three elevators on the move. I think it’s the hostages.”
“A fine observation, Dietrich. Tell the local police to escort them to safety and wait for further instruction.”
“Yes, sir.” Dietrich signed off. Brighton switched to SWAT team in the Eastern stairwell.
“Sergeant Rose here.”
“Sergeant, move your men down to the seventy-sixth floor and stay alert and quiet. Do not engage anyone going up, but I don’t want a soul to descend. Is that understood?”
“It’s done. Rose, out.”
Brighton nodded. He liked SWAT. They didn’t talk much and they didn’t talk back.
Soon, Dietrich reported twenty hostages evacuated. The next ten minutes went by very slowly. Super slowly, if one took into the account the below-freezing wind chill on the roof of a Chicago skyscraper in November. Secret Service retired back to the helicopter to escape it. Brighton stubbornly watched the western vista.
Finally, it was time. Then it was one minute, then two minutes past time. Brighton dialed SWAT.
“Rose,” a whisper came.
“Any movement?”
“Negative. All quiet here.”
Squads covering other stairwells reported the same. The infrared scanner from across the street reported heat signatures inside the office at the southeast corner. Brighton dialed Whales’s number, waited five rings, then cursed loudly when a woman’s voice asked him to kindly leave a message for Mr. Cornwell.
“Son of a bitch,” he growled. Although he had been instructed to report to his superiors before taking any drastic measures, Brighton was by then pretty sick of phone calls.
“All SWAT teams, move in immediately,” he snapped. “Standard ROE. Keep the radio on.”
Glaring at the snug Secret Service agents, he went inside. In his earpiece the doors were being breached and shouts of “Go, go, go!” resounded. No gunfire out right. He knew storming the doors could mean casualties, but the hostages, presumably aside from the fat Mr. Cornwell, had been safely evacuated. If it so happened that they lost the producer… He shrugged and continued to descend, monitoring the chatter.
“This is Rose,” a calm but slightly hurried voice came after a while. “Place seems dead.”
“This is Mauser, Charlie squad. We have noise in the executive office.”
“Go in,” Brighton said hollowly.
“Yes, sir.”
A minute later Mauser reported locating six civilians taped to chairs around a conference table. Two females and four males, one of whom was the office’s owner, Mr. Cornwell, in various state of undress. Brighton switched frequency to Dietrich’s even before the SWAT mentioned the pile of discarded clothing in the corner. He shouted for Dietrich to detain all hostages immediately, and knew Dietrich took off at a run when he hung up, but he also knew by then it would be too late.
Chapter Forty-Six
Thirty hours, give or take a few, passed since we’d escaped the siege with the help of Tiffany’s magic hands. As I watched Iris play in the sand with Brome’s four-year-old, and as beads of sweat collected in the stubble under my nose, I was reminded of the conversation Iris and I had a few days earlier at my place after we made love. Now I felt we all were time travelers from the past. Only instead of an armchair with a lot of mirrors, our time machine had been an underground train, in which we managed to skip seven or eight useless months and emerge under midsummer sun.
If you ever traveled to Florida in winter, you know what I am talking about.
Annie’s bell-like giggles also made it seem like all our troubles were over, but unfortunately that illusion did not last long. I was all too aware of Paul sleeping in fever inside the small cottage behind me, and although Brome and his wife had gone pretty far up the beach, the heat of their conversation was obvious. Grace, Brome’s wife, gestured quite eloquently.
“For what?” I imagined hearing her voice. “Who is he to you? Did you think of Annie? Did you think of me?”
Iris gazed at me, then at the couple in the distance, then back at me. I had nothing to say. Grace was right, of course, but without Brome we would all be dead, so I couldn’t really support her beyond acknowledging that fact. Brome saved our lives. It would be enough to tell Annie her dad was a hero, Grace however… Grace was an adult. To an adult, a hero on TV deserved applause; in real life, up close, a hero, especially a selfless one, was stupid at best. So I shrugged, and Iris returned her attention to the sand castle she and Annie had started to build.
The castle they wouldn’t get the chance to finish. We couldn’t stay at the beach cottage Grace had rented for long. We might have stayed too long already.
I looked up toward where Brome and his wife were talking. I needed him back to begin deciding where to go next, but they showed no sign of returning.
Sighing, I lifted a towel to wipe the sweat off my face. When I brought it back down, a white sailboat rocked on the waves in front of me, three hundred feet off the shore. A lean forty-five-footer, it looked just like the boat I had always wanted but never got around to buying. Three men, all clad in white, seemed to be staring in our direction from its deck.
“Iris,” I said barely audibly, but she heard me and lifted her head. Following my stare
she turned and saw the boat, just as a black banner flew up its single mast. Iris and I jumped to our feet at the same time.
“Annie, go inside,” Iris said.
The girl stared in astonishment, and for a moment I thought with dread that I would have to scare her. She studied our faces briefly, gazed at the boat and, thankfully, got up and ran towards me and the porch. I heard her pause in the doorway behind me, then the door closed.
Iris was slowly walking backwards, eyes on the vessel. Taxing my creativity, I assumed what seemed to me a protective position in front of the cottage door. Exactly what degree of protection either me or the old plywood door would provide when it came right down to it remained to be seen. I suspected it wouldn’t be a high degree.
Of course, by then I’d more or less pieced from my companions’ hints what had happened on the roof of the black building. I say hints, because a loud discussion of the event’s origins and implications, the kind we would undoubtedly have commenced back in our dorms a decade ago, had never taken place. I’d simply gathered the witnesses’ statements in a process no more involved than an insurance adjuster’s would be, and everyone was content. I kind of believed it, too, not because it was plausible, but because I didn’t think Iris or any of the others were lying. Either way, the knowledge, if it could be called that without being a memory, of having mysteriously defeated a super-strong alien in hand-to-hand match failed to bring comfort. First of all, I had no idea how I did it. And second, I doubted that my latent wrestling skills, outstanding as they may have been, would stop a bullet or seventy, fired from a rapid-fire machine gun.
Our own hands were empty. All the firepower had been discarded in Jimbo’s office, even the infamous “Silver Killer.”
There was movement in the left corner of my vision. Brome was running. He must have told Grace to stay where she was, because she was running about fifty feet behind him. In the other direction the beach lay barren as far as I could see, aside from an elderly couple taking a nap under a red-white-and-blue umbrella two cottages over. They were close enough to be awakened by gunfire, but so what?
Ten maddening seconds later a small boat appeared from behind the ship and sped towards the shore. In it sat a lone man, and as he came closer, I relaxed and leaned heavily on the door. The man — a kid, really — waved and grinned from under a mess of blond hair. I couldn’t help grinning back. Iris stared, wide-eyed. Brome stopped running and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, but I saw that he was also relieved. Grace, who must have been scared out of her wits, caught up to her husband and hung on his arm, looking up at him for answers.
“A black flag?” I called out. “Why not a warning cannon shot to ease our minds?”
“Someone could have heard it,” Bogdan shouted back. Then, as the boat continued towards the shore, he jumped out and ran the last fifty or so feet beside it. On the water. Even to me it looked spooky. From Brome’s direction came an audible gasp.
“Hey, no freaky stuff,” I managed weakly. “We got a kid here.”
“Sorry.” Both Bogdan and the boat now reached the beach. He went up to turn off the engine. In the following silence he bowed and added with a round gesture, “All aboard.”
“Going where?” asked Brome.
“There’s somebody I want you to meet,” Bogdan said. “And you know who are close. They picked up your trail. They’re angry. We have to leave. Now.”
“Won’t they continue to pick up the trail no matter where we go?” I asked. It never even occurred to me to wonder how he’d found us.
“Not after I work over the house here. The only thing left to find will be my signature.”
“So that’s it?” said Iris. “We disappear? All of us?”
Bogdan nodded, grin gone. His barely out-of-acne-age face looked apologetic.
“For how long?”
“Hello,” a small voice said behind me. Bogdan grinned.
“Annie!” Grace screamed before he could return the greeting. “Come here, baby!”
The girl ran towards her. “Sorry, mommy. Uncle Paul is mumbling in his sleep. Can daddy run on water too?”
Grace dropped to her knees, clutching the girl close, as though she was the only thing left real in the world. Brome put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, then removed it. Bogdan turned to him.
“For now. Then you decide.” To me, it sounded like he said, “Forever.”
“Paul is hurt,” I told him. He nodded again.
“I know. I brought a good doctor with me. Come, we must hurry.”
“Are we going on a cruise, daddy?”
“Yes, baby. A good long cruise,” Brome replied. As he did, Grace started crying.
* * *
We arrived at the island on the second night. Bogdan’s doctor — a smiley young man who looked not a day older than Bogdan himself — turned out to be good, all right. As we approached the unfriendly piece of barren rock jutting out of the foggy ocean, Paul stood on the deck beside me, and the hand he had placed on my shoulder did not feel hot. Under that hand, my broken collarbone throbbed, but didn’t really hurt.
“Underwater lair or a secret cave leading to a lagoon encircled by sheer cliffs, what do you think?” asked Paul.
“Neither,” Bogdan’s voice replied before I could place my wager. “Just cheap smoke and mirrors. Look.”
He pointed and we looked, and suddenly the barren rock was out of focus. As we came close it melted and disappeared into thin air, replaced by a different island. A small picturesque beach greeted us, from which a narrow stairway wound up the slope of a mountain towards a solitary house built on top of and seemingly into the rock. The disguise might have been smoke and mirrors, but it certainly didn’t look cheap.
We docked at a short, sturdy, wooden pier. Bogdan and the doctor came ashore with us, leaving the third member of the crew, who had identified himself only as Davy, with the yacht. We climbed the stairway in single file and silence. Brome carried Annie, asleep on his shoulder. Grace, calmer now, gazed around in wonder.
At the end of the stairway was an iron gate in a wall made of limestone. There was no guard, and the gate hung open. Inside was a fruit garden, which in twilight looked dominated by apple trees.
Through it our procession reached the front door. The huge, two-story house was built in swank, modern style, but still managed to suggest serious regard for functionality. Somehow the weird angles and spheres made sense.
The main doorway was also unlocked. Bogdan led us in without knocking. We found ourselves in a high-ceilinged hallway, illuminated brightly by a crystal balustrade. Despite the modern construction, the interior décor was decidedly retro, with curvy-legged furniture and carved banisters. Several portraits in thick ornamental frames lined the walls.
“Dr. Livesey will show you to your rooms,” Bogdan said. “You are safe here. Get some rest.”
“Please, follow me,” the smiley young man said, starting up the stairs. Brome took another look around and nodded. Everyone moved to follow.
“Not you,” Bogdan said, stopping me. Brome, four steps up, also stopped and turned around, frowning.
“Why not?” he demanded.
“I have to meet him,” I replied, suddenly queasy. This, now, was the end of my road. What had started with a plastic bottle tossed out of the window was going to end here, today, in the crooked house on the island of Nowhere. Bogdan nodded, and I had a queer feeling his nod responded to what I thought rather than what I said.
“We can all meet him then,” said Brome and took a step down. “There’ll be plenty of time to rest afterwards.”
“You’ll meet him, don’t worry. But tonight is reserved for Luke alone.”
“Who the hell is the guy, anyway?” Paul asked.
“Tomorrow, Paul. Tonight you rest.”
“I’ll go with Luke,” said Iris, taking my hand. Bogdan considered it and gave another nod.
“This way. We’ll see the rest of you tomorrow.” With that Bogdan started down a
narrow corridor. Squeezing Iris’s hand I followed.
* * *
The library we entered would feel right at home in any upscale house with triangular windows. There was your fireplace, your redwood desk with drawers, your leather armchairs, your velvet curtains, your bookshelves filled with books. The room was two stories high, which, together with the triangular windows, made the walls seem to slant inwards. Here also several paintings decorated the walls; the one above the fire place caught my attention immediately. A skillful reproduction of it hung in my study.
A tall, black-clad man was leaning on the windowsill of an open window. In the darkness outside strange shadows moved and shifted. The man’s youthful face was clean-shaven, thin, had a prominent Roman nose and high cheekbones. Curls of his charcoal hair moved with the breeze. He studied us, a hint of amusement in his small, deep-set eyes.
“Two steaks, one well done, one medium rare, just like you ordered, sir,” Bogdan announced with a flourish.
“I’m joking,” he hastened to add with a grin, seeing my face. “Good night.”
“He’s still new at humor,” the man said when the door closed. He spoke with a distinct British accent. “As I am. By the way, the walls do slant. This study is actually within a pyramid. I’ll show you later from the outside.”
Still not altogether comfortable, I turned towards “Scream.”
“So that’s where the original has been all these years.”
“Hmm? Oh, ‘Scream?’ No. That’s a fake. Not the slightest idea who has the real one.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a good fake,” Iris said.
“You give me too much credit,” the man replied with a chuckle. Both Iris and I grinned, and I breathed a sign of relief. The man pushed away from the windowsill.
“Enough of the small talk,” he said. “Go ahead, Mr. Whales.”
I stared at him, relieved no longer. He nodded encouragingly.
“It’s you,” I blurted out. A small smile appeared on his face, but he didn’t reply. Iris gave me a raised eyebrow.
Project Antichrist Page 27