by Blake Banner
“But by the end of the Second World War, about a hundred years later, a club had formed…”
“A club? What kind of club?”
He looked at the tip of his cigarette, breathing noisily, like he might be able to see the club there and work out what kind it was. “A very special kind of club. You might say it was unique. It was a group of some of the most powerful men in the world, who decided, after the chaos of the three world wars, that the destiny of the world could not be left to random fate.” He gave a sardonic, twisted laugh. “Democratically elected leaders, puppets!, pray to powerful and greedy industrialists rich enough to buy senators and even presidents. No, it had to be guided, and guided where we wanted it to go.”
I felt a flash of irritation. “Is this some kind of conspiracy theory shit? What the fuck has this got to do with Marni?”
He looked at me under his eyebrows, as he had done many times when I was a kid, when he was about to beat me with his belt. “It is not a theory and it is not shit. These men formed what came to be known as the Government with the Government. And they, their associates and allies, controlled everything from the Federal Reserve and the media to the military industrial complex. This is fact, Lacklan. But from the 1950s they knew they had one major problem.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Just one?”
He shook his head. “No, you’re right. It was two, but in time they would become one.” The fire spat like a firecracker and shot a shower of sparks onto the hearth. He sighed through his nose and pulled the blanket up around his waist. “They realized that sometime early in the new millennium, those two problems would come together. They had people researching it, great minds looking into it, and they realized that the Earth, our planet, could not sustain more than eight and a half or nine billion people; and, with Nature’s exquisite sense of timing, just about the time we hit that number, the heating of the planet, what we are calling now climate change, would start to impact food. We would start getting widespread droughts and crop failures across vast stretches of the belly of the globe…”
“The prairie farms, the areas where all the wheat is cultivated.”
“And the rice and the vegetables and the fruit and the meat—everything, Lacklan. All the world’s food. We had postponed the Malthus problem, but in doing so we had turned it into a nightmare, into a holocaust in the making. Eight or nine billion starving people, with all the implications that carried with it.”
I took a pull of my whiskey and shook my head while I sucked my teeth.
“It sounds like science fiction. How do you know any of this is true?”
He tossed his cigarette butt into the fire and sat staring at where the flames flared up and died away, leaving only a snake of smoke.
“Because I am a member of that club.”
“You?”
He nodded, then looked at me. “You have no idea how powerful I am, Lacklan, the things I can do, or have done.”
“How fucking rich are you? I knew you were rich, but…”
“More than you could possibly imagine. And what I have access to goes beyond even that.”
“This is crazy. I don’t even believe you. Why are you telling me this, Robert? What has this to do with Marni? This is bullshit!”
He scowled. “Must you call me Robert? I am your father! Whether you like it or not! If you want to rebel don’t call me anything, but have some respect and don’t call me Robert!”
I stared at my whiskey and repeated the question. “What has this to do with Marni?”
“Marni’s father was my closest friend. Do you remember him?”
“Of course I do. Frank. We were always either at his house or they were here.”
He smiled, not at me but at the memory. “You and Marni were like brother and sister. Closer than that. As you got older, we always believed you and she would get married. Maybe that would have been the best thing.”
“You’re rambling. What’s the point of all this?”
“Do you remember Frank’s job? You remember what he did?”
I frowned and thought about it. “He was a professor at Harvard.”
“Do you recall his specialization?”
I sighed and cast my mind back. I had been very young, six or seven. The fire crackled again and the warmth made me sleepy. It had been a long drive.
“Yeah, it was something to do with Earth Sciences, the environment. He was a devotee of Lovelock’s…”
He was watching me, nodding. “Exactly. His research had proved conclusively that by the middle of the next decade drought and famine were going to sweep across the globe. Hundreds of millions, possibly billions of people, were going to die of starvation and disease. He was predicting that this would lead to a refugee crisis on an unprecedented scale that would make the Syrian crisis look like a picnic. He predicted war, the unbridled rise of tyrannical regimes and Islam, and a humanitarian cataclysm of unimaginable proportions.” He paused. “He was preparing to present his findings to the United Nations and the international press.”
I pulled another cigarette from the pack and lit up. I inhaled deeply and squinted at him through the smoke. “So what happened?”
“I was instructed to kill him.”
I sat forward, “What?”
“He was aware of us, of our existence. He had to be, in his position, doing the work he was doing. I advised him several times that what he was proposing to reveal was contrary to our plans. That we had it covered. That he should desist. But he refused. He insisted on going ahead with his plan. In the end he left us no choice.”
“You killed your closest friend?”
“That is what I am telling you.”
I stared at him, shaking my head, “What… What are you? What kind of sick monster…?”
He spoke quietly, to the fire. “That is not the issue now. The priority now is Marni.”
I shook my head again. “No. I should leave.”
“If you do, Marni will die as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow. As surely as her father died twenty-three years ago.”
“You sick fuck.”
“Get it out of your system, I have a lot more to tell you.”
“You sick fuck!”
“You done?” He waited. I didn’t say anything, so he went on. “He knew it was coming. He accepted it. He was not resentful. I did it myself and I made sure it was painless. Before he died he asked me a favor, and I have honored that request. He asked me to take care of his daughter as though she were my own, and to make sure no harm came to her.”
I struggled to understand what he was telling me. “Are you trying to justify what you did?”
“No. I don’t expect you to understand, and I don’t need or want your forgiveness. But what I do need is for you to understand that not a day has gone by since Frank’s death that I have not regretted his killing. I loved Frank more than a brother. And he knew that. But now Marni is threatening to do the same as her father.”
“How?”
“You lost touch with her. That was stupid, Lacklan. You let your screwed-up relationship with me ruin your relationship with her. That was stupid.”
“Mind your own fucking business.”
He gave me a sour look but went on. “The point is, you wouldn’t know because you turned your back on her. Just as I killed my best friend, you turned your back on yours. She went into the same field as Frank, and proved to be just as brilliant as he was.”
“What happened to his research?”
“It was never found. We searched the whole house, his office… We looked everywhere. It was never found. But it seems possible that Marni may have found it. Whatever the case may be, I know Omega went after her. They didn’t tell me, they knew I would have opposed them. But either she has been abducted, or she got wind of the threat somehow, because she has vanished without a trace.”
I was silent for a long while, listening to the bizarrely comfortable crackle of the fire, and the long, complicated song of the blackbird ou
tside the French windows. My heart was thumping hard, and I could feel my hand shaking on the arm of the chair.
“Have they killed her?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“They would inform me.” He said it to the hot embers of the fire. “It’s protocol, and they are great believers in protocol. They either have her, alive, or they are looking for her.”
“What do you want from me?”
He turned his old head to face me. It was bathed in firelight and I could see small flames dancing in his eyes. It made him look diabolical.
“I want you to do for her what I should have done twenty-three years ago for Frank. I want you to make her safe. Find her, and protect her.”
There was a tap on the door. Kenny stepped in. “Dinner is served, sir.”
My father studied me a moment and said, “Stay. We’ve still got a lot to talk about.”
Three
The dining room was large, with a high ceiling in the Georgian style. With my father sitting hunched at the end of the long, Queen Anne dining table, it looked cheerless and very cavernous. He had always been a man who filled a room just by being in it, with his massive presence and huge personality. Now the room seemed to crush him with its emptiness. There was a place set on his right. He gestured to it and after a moment I sat.
“I’m the guest of honor when there’s nobody else, huh?”
He ignored me and shook out his napkin with his left hand. That’s what you’re taught to do when you’re a Boston Brahmin. “There was a time we used to dress for dinner,” he said. “Those things are not considered important anymore.”
“Was that before or after you murdered your best friend?”
He stared bitterly at some vague point on the tabletop. “At the same time,” he said. “That was all at the same time.”
The door opened and Kenny came in with a pretty young maid in a blue and white uniform. She had a tray with a meat pie on it, and a couple of dishes with potatoes, Brussels sprouts and carrots. She set it on the sideboard and began to serve us, while Kenny poured the wine.
When they had gone, he started eating. He ate greedily and with concentrated focus, shoveling forkfuls of food into his mouth. I sipped my wine and watched him.
“What happened?”
“Her mother died when she had just turned twenty.”
“Was that anything to do with you?”
“Of course not.” He dabbed his mouth and drained his glass. As he refilled it he said, “We were close. She—Marni—used to come over two or three times a week. We’d dine. She’d tell me about her work. She always talked about you. Unlike me, she was never bitter or resentful about the fact that you dumped her.”
“Why would you be resentful? And anyway, I didn’t dump her.”
He waved a hand at me, as though my words were flies that were annoying him. “She was not like family, she is family. Like my own daughter. Last week I didn’t hear from her. So I took a walk over there.”
“She kept on her mother’s house?”
He shrugged. “She could afford it. And I guess she wanted to stay close. You and Bob were like brothers… are like brothers to her. I guess she saw me as a kind of surrogate father.”
“She was lucky to have you…” I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice. I didn’t even try. He sighed, stuffed some more food in his maw and carried on, talking with his mouth full, illustrating each point with a wave of his knife.
“So… when I didn’t hear from her I walked over to her house. There was post in her mailbox. Her car was not in the driveway. The drapes were drawn in the drawing room, but I walked ’round and looked in at the library and the kitchen windows. I don’t know how to explain it, but it didn’t look as though she had gone away.” He narrowed his eyes, gazing at the tabletop. “There were dirty plates by the sink, a newspaper open on her favorite chair…”
I nodded.
He shrugged. “Yet she hadn’t been in touch for almost a week.”
“What did you do?”
“I called the police. I had to pull some strings, but they asked the Sheriff’s Department to send over a deputy. I have a key, so we went in and had a look around. Her toothbrush was gone, and so was her toothpaste, but everything else was as though she were still there. I found Anita’s number…”
“Anita?”
“The girl who cleans for her. I called her and she said Marni had paid her the month in advance and told her she was going to be away for a few days. She’d contact her when she got back.”
“You tried her cell?”
“Of course. Switched off.”
“Would she have told you if…”
“She told me everything, Lacklan.” He gave me a sour look. “I was a better friend to her than you were. If she was going away for a few days, for work or on a break—whatever—she would have told me.”
The barb stung, but I ignored it. “So what are you thinking?”
He puffed out his cheeks and blew loudly, then glanced at my food. “You’re not eating.”
“I’m not hungry.”
He pulled over my plate and started eating my meal. “She’s either on the run or she’s been abducted.”
“That’s a pretty big jump.”
He shook his head, chewed and swallowed while loading up his fork. “No, it’s not. Not if you have listened to a damn word I have said. For the last couple of years she had been following up her father’s research, working in the same areas and on the same theses.”
I suddenly went cold. Spiders’ legs seemed to crawl across my scalp. I narrowed my eyes at him. “Jesus! Did you…?”
He scowled at me. “No! Of course not!” He turned back to his plate, shoveling food into his mouth. “I kept warning her of the dangers, as much as I could, but she has the same kind of idealistic pig-headedness as her father… and as you.”
“Don’t kid yourself.”
“Omega warned me to stop her, and I tried, hinted heavily. But she wouldn’t listen, and…” He wiped his mouth with his napkin, picked up his glass and drained it. “I think maybe she found her father’s notes. I think maybe he left her some kind of message, somehow, some clue, telling her where to look.”
I curled my lip. “And you want me to find her for you, so you can kill her.”
He pounded the table with his fist, making the knives and forks jump. His face flushed red and tears stood out in his eyes.
“Enough!” He stared at me and his hands were shaking on the table. “You are not helping her with this attitude! Try to get past your personal prejudice and your hatred! She needs you! And the only way you can help her is through me!”
“Give me one reason—just one!—why I should believe anything that you say!”
“I can’t. I haven’t got one. All I can tell you is that I regret the things I have had to do in my life. I wish it hadn’t fallen to me to do them. But it did. When you are in an overcrowded lifeboat, somebody has to decide who lives and who gets thrown overboard, otherwise everybody dies. And somebody has to do the throwing.” He stared at his glass, breathing heavily. “People like me make the decisions. And people like you do the throwing.” He slumped back in his chair and looked at me with something close to contempt. “Besides, when you are done passing judgment, ask yourself, what fucking choice have you got?”
He was right, on both counts, and I knew it. I, who killed people for a living, had no place passing judgment on him. And further more, I had no choice but to accept what he told me. I could not walk away from Marni. If she was in trouble, I had to help her. Walking away was not an option.
“So what did the deputy make of it?”
“Nothing. I pulled strings and had a detective and a crime scene team go over the house. But forty-eight hours into the investigation, it was stopped and Omega told me to butt out or face the consequences. Either they have her, or they are searching for her.”
“So you sent for me.”
He searc
hed my face. “Did I do the right thing?”
I nodded. “Yeah. You did the right thing.”
He refilled his glass and pushed over the decanter. “I want you to go and have a look at the house, and I want you to talk to Detective Mendelson. He conducted what investigation there was.”
“What about Omega? Won’t that get back to them?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. I can tell them it’s something you are doing on your own account. First they’ll try to stonewall you. If you keep pushing they will come after you. It is high risk, you understand that.”
“Yes.”
“They will try to kill you.”
“I get it.”
For a moment he looked embarrassed. “I… There isn’t a lot more I can do to help. But…” He reached into the inside pocket of his smoking jacket and pulled out an envelope. He opened it and extracted a black AMEX card and a slip of paper. He handed me that first. There were two names and two phone numbers. One, Philip Gantrie, was in Arizona, the other, Borg Olafsen, was in New York.
“These two men will help you if you need them. They are good people and they owe me. I have told them that at some point you may contact them…”
“I don’t need them.”
“Don’t let your stupidity and your arrogance get in the way of helping Marni, Lacklan. Don’t be an asshole all your fucking life. Phil is a nerd. He is a genius and he can help you with anything that is technical: IT, electronics… You may need him. And Olafsen is the most dangerous man I have ever met. He went from the Seals to the CIA and is now a private contractor. He is one of the five best assassins in the business. If you don’t need them, fine. But if you do, they are there. They will help you.”
He waited. I didn’t say anything so he dropped the AMEX on the table in front of me. “This draws on a black account. It is not American Express. It’s untraceable, even to Omega. It leaves no footprint. The account, to all intents and purposes, does not exist.”
“I don’t need your money.”
“I won’t tell you again, Lacklan. You need all the resources you can get if you are going to help her. Now take it.”