Andrea looked in the tall man’s clear resolute eyes. “Why? What’s your goal?”
“Don’t affect ignorance, Andrea. I think you understand perfectly well.”
“I understand that you’re Genesis. That much I understand. That’s why you wanted to know whether Todd was going to be able to track you down.”
Jared Rinehart’s green-gray eyes widened. “You really think I’m Genesis? Hardly. Hardly, Andrea.” He spoke louder, becoming agitated. “Genesis is a purely negative force in the world. Genesis is an agent of destruction.”
Her mind reeled as she strove to absorb his response. Genesis. Enemy thine. After a long moment she spoke softly, almost intimately. “You fear him.”
“I fear the allure of chaos and destruction. What rational man doesn’t? Genesis has foot soldiers everywhere, has been constantly recruiting mercenaries and confederates—”
“You fear him.”
“I assure you that Genesis is the coward. That’s why nobody has been allowed to see Genesis.”
“Then how does he recruit? How can he operate?”
“In the information age, that’s child’s play. Genesis trawls so-called secure chat rooms on the Internet, identifies soldiers of fortune who communicate via Internet-relay chat systems. Genesis is able to wire payments remotely, even as he hires other informants to file electronic reports on them. And because nobody knows who is and isn’t working for Genesis, a generalized paranoia sets in. It’s all been quite craftily done.” There was both resentment and admiration in Rinehart’s voice. “Genesis is a spider in the center of a web. Occasionally a filament will catch the rays of the sun and we’ll see it. Genesis has kept its own face hidden. Yet Genesis has no positive program for the world. He, she, it, is dedicated only to our destruction.”
“Because Genesis wants to replace you?”
“Perhaps. We’ll know more soon. Because we’ve got the very best on the case.” He allowed himself a small smile. “When it’s all over, Genesis will be remembered as nothing more than a bump in the road.”
“What is it that you really want, anyway?”
“As if you don’t know. Your cousin said you were an apt pupil. He had even imagined that you might assume an important role in the organization.”
“Paul Bancroft.”
“But of course. It was he who devised the Theta Group in the first place.”
Andrea felt her stomach flip over. “And now you’re about to give it an army of its own. Do you know how monstrous that sounds?”
“Monstrous? It astonishes me that you could have learned so little from your own cousin. Everything we do is calculated exquisitely to serve the general welfare of humanity. In a corrupted world, the Theta Group is a force for the truest idealism.”
The line Paul Bancroft had quoted from Manilius returned to her with a shudder: To pass beyond your understanding and make yourself master of the universe.
“What I really don’t understand,” she said, “is why we’re even having this conversation. Why are you still here?”
“Call me a sentimental fool. But I want to get to know you, before…” He looked away. “It’s obvious that Todd Belknap adores you. I’m curious to learn what sort of person you were. To talk freely and candidly with you, so that you’d know that you could talk freely and candidly with me.” He paused. “You won’t believe me, but Todd is someone I truly care about, in my fashion. I love him like a brother.”
“You’re right,” Andrea said. “I don’t believe you.”
“Like a brother. Which, I grant, is a complicated tribute in my case, given the awkward fact that I killed my own brother. My fraternal twin, no less. The really awkward fact is, I can’t even remember why. Of course, I was hardly more than a child at the time. But I digress.”
“You’re a sick man,” Andrea said in a trembling voice.
“In the pink of health, actually. But I know what you’re trying to say. I am…different from most.”
“If Todd had ever known who you really were…”
“He knew a version of me. People are complicated, Andrea. My friendship with Belknap was something I worked very, very hard to cultivate and sustain, and if that meant that distractions had to be eliminated, I saw to that.”
Distractions had to be eliminated.
“You kept him isolated,” Andrea said in a low voice. “Off-balance. And when anyone came too close, when he formed a real relationship with someone, you…made it go away. And when he was grieving, you were always there to comfort him, weren’t you?” Her voice grew louder, fiercer. “He thought you were his only true friend. And all the while you were the one manipulating him, murdering those he loved, keeping him off-balance. Those times when you rescued him—those were all staged, too, weren’t they? This man would have done anything for you. And all you ever did was to betray him.”
“And yet I did care for him, Andrea,” the tall man replied softly. “Certainly I admired him. He had—has—extraordinary skills. There’s really nobody he can’t track down when he has a mind to.”
“Which is why you latched on to him in the first place, isn’t it? He told me about East Berlin all those years ago. What was that—a twofer?”
“You are a clever thing. As it happens, I’d recently recruited Lugner at that point. I knew he was someone we’d be able to make use of, and I was right. At the same time, it was also becoming apparent that this young Mr. Belknap was even better at finding people than Lugner was at disappearing. Lugner’s only chance was to get the Hound to think the hunt had been successful. He needed an authoritative post-action report on his death, and after our elaborate stagecraft, that’s what he got.”
“But you got something even better. The Hound’s loyalty and devotion. Strengths of character that you set out to turn into weaknesses.”
He nodded, with a hint of a smile. “I’m a sensible man. A rare talent like Todd’s is one you want to have on your side.”
“And you made sure of that when he was still a junior officer. You recognized right off the bat that he had skills you envied. Skills you wanted to exploit.”
“My dear, you read me like a book.”
“Yeah, Helter Skelter.” Repugnance filled her like a scalding fluid. “How can you even live with yourself?”
“Don’t judge me, Andrea.” Rinehart was silent for a long moment. “It’s odd—I’m having the conversation with you that I always wished I could one day have with Belknap. I don’t imagine he’d be able to understand me any better that you have. But try, Andrea Try. Not every difference is a disability. Years ago, I sought out the services of a shrink. A very well respected one. I essentially booked an afternoon with him.”
“You don’t seem the type.”
“I was a young man then. Still, as they say, finding myself. So there I was, in a cozy office on West End Avenue, Manhattan, spilling my guts out. Talked about absolutely everything. There was an aspect to my nature that troubled me—or, rather, what troubled me was precisely that it didn’t trouble me, and I knew it ought to. I guess the way to put it, Andrea, is this: I was born without a moral compass. Even as child I was aware of this. Not at first, of course. I found out about this deficit the way you find out that you’re color-blind. You find that others see a distinction that you can’t quite make out.”
“You’re a monster.”
Rinehart ignored her. “I remember when our pet Labrador had puppies, more than it could take care of, it seemed to me, and I borrowed one of those puppies to experiment on. I was fascinated by what was revealed when one slit open its abdomen with an X-Acto knife, and I remember fetching my brother to show him what I’d found, the way the small intestines looked like earthworms, the way the liver looked just like chicken livers did. I got no sadistic thrill from this—it was just a matter of disinterested curiosity. Yet when my brother saw what I’d done, he looked at me as if I were horribly disfigured, a monster. Such fear and disgust. I simply didn’t understand.” Rinehart’s voice was ha
unted. “I came to understand, as I grew older. But never to feel. Other people had a set of moral intuitions that guided them unthinkingly. I never had that. I had to learn the rules, as one learns the rules of etiquette, and to conceal those instances when I violated those rules. As with my brother’s death in a presumed hit-and-run accident. I suppose it was because I learned to conceal this aspect of myself that I ended up in the covert ops business: Concealment, subterfuge became second nature to me.”
Andrea was roiled with nausea. “And you told everything to a shrink?”
Rinehart nodded. “He was quite insightful. Finally he said, ‘Well, I’m afraid our time is up.’ Whereupon, simply as a precautionary measure, I strangled him at his desk with my necktie. Now, I ask myself, did I know that I was going to kill him when we started the session? I think that I did, on some level, because I was careful to leave no fingerprints in his office. Made the appointment under an alias, and so forth. And knowing this, even on an unconscious level, is surely what enabled me to speak so freely to him.”
“As with me.” Andrea breathed the words.
“I think we understand each other.” Rinehart’s tone was not unkind.
“And yet you tell me that you’re a force for good. That the Theta Group is a force for good. Do you really expect anyone to take the judgment of a sociopath seriously?”
“Is it such a paradox?” Rinehart was leaning against the wall opposite her cot. His expression was both attentive and remote. “You see, this is how Dr. Bancroft changed my life. Because, intellectually, I very much wanted to devote my life to the good. I wanted to do the right thing. Yet I had a hard time seeing it, and ordinary people seemed to operate by such a complicated clutter of different considerations that I found it was sometimes impossible to anticipate these very strongly held judgments they had. I desperately needed some clear guide to right action. And that’s when I encountered the work of Dr. Paul Bancroft.”
Andrea just stared.
“Here was a man with a brilliantly simple algorithm—a clear, clean yardstick, an objective metric,” Rinehart went on. “He showed that morality wasn’t some subjective faculty of perception after all. That it was a straightforward matter of maximizing utility. And that people’s intuitions were quite likely to lead them astray.” Rinehart’s voice grew animated, his gaze intent. “I can’t tell you how captivated I was—even more so after I met the man himself. I’ll always remember something he said to me once. He said, ‘Compare yourself to the man who refrains from flaying alive random strangers because the very thought of doing so is repugnant to him. His is merely the morality of disgust. If you refrain from doing so, by contrast, it’s because you’ve reflected upon the axioms and principles involved. Ethically speaking, whose is the greater achievement?’ It was a gift, his saying that. But the greatest gift was the rigorous system of morality he set forth. The calculus of felicity.”
“You don’t say.”
“The runaway trolley car. You know this one, don’t you? Activate the switch, and it detours to kill a single person instead of five.”
“I remember,” Andrea replied testily.
“And that would be the right thing to do. Obviously. But now, Dr. Bancroft said, imagine that you’re a transplant surgeon. By taking the life of one stranger and using his organs, you could save the lives of five of your patients. What’s the difference between the two situations, logically speaking? Why, none at all. None at all, Andrea.”
“None that you can see, anyway.”
“The logic is crystal-clear. And once you take it to heart, it changes everything. The old prejudices fall by the wayside. Dr. Bancroft was the greatest, noblest savant I’d ever come across. His philosophy has meant that I really could devote my life to the greater good. It gave me an algorithm that could replace this missing thing—but it was better than what it replaced, like some kind of bionic eye. He showed that ethical choices were to be settled by intellect, not by emotion. Doing the right thing, he told me, isn’t always easy—for anybody. It takes work. And Todd should have told you that I’m a fiend for work.”
“Paul told me—” Andrea broke off. “He told me that every life matters. What about mine? What about mine, goddammit?”
“Oh, Andrea. Obviously, given all that you know about our operations, appropriate measures must be taken. But your life will matter in so many ways, as will your death.” Rinehart sounded almost tender.
“My death,” she echoed dully.
“Everyone on this green Earth is on death row,” Rinehart said. “You know this. People talk about killing as if it’s some mystical abomination rather than what it is—essentially a scheduling matter.”
“A scheduling matter.”
“Speaking of which, you’re blood type O, correct?”
She nodded numbly.
“Excellent,” said Rinehart. “The universal donor. Any exposure to hepatitis, HIV, syphilis, malaria, papilloma, or other blood-borne diseases?” His basilisk eyes drilled into her.
“No,” she whispered.
“I hope you’ve been eating. Important to keep your organs healthy, maintain your iron levels, all that. I think you know why you’re not being sedated—we don’t want your organs suffused with CNS depressants. That’s not good for the recipients. I mean, I’m looking at a young woman in excellent condition. You’ve got resources that could save half a dozen lives. In addition to the blood, I’m looking at a liver, a heart, two kidneys, two corneas, a pancreas, two fine lungs, and no doubt a great array of vascular grafts as well. So glad you’re not a smoker.”
It was all Andrea could do to keep from doubling over and retching.
“Take care of yourself,” Rinehart said as he turned to leave.
“You take care yourself, you twisted bastard,” Andrea croaked. It was rage and rage alone that stopped her from falling apart. “Didn’t you say that Todd Belknap could find anyone if he had a mind to?”
“Well, exactly.” Rinehart smiled as he rapped on the steel-plated door. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Commonwealth of Dominica, a wrinkled oval of land located between Martinique and Guadeloupe, was a former British colony, and had a cuisine that suffered for it. There were, however, other compensations. A relative newcomer to the tax-haven industry—it passed the International Business Companies Act No. 10 only in 1996—it had swiftly earned a reputation for efficiency and discretion. As a sovereign nation, it was unaffected by American and European regulations, and the Act made it a criminal offense to reveal personal information, expressly including information about criminality. There were no exchange controls on fund movements, no statutory oversight of businesses operating in its bailiwick. Thirty miles long, half as wide, the island boasted dense forests, valleys, and waterfalls, along with a rugged shoreline. Though it had only seventy thousand inhabitants, many of whom lived in the capital city of Roseau, its electrical and communications infrastructure was of an unusually high standard. Ecologists regularly complained about the various antennae placed on top of mountains in the major forest preserves. Elsewhere, indicator lights annoyed scuba divers. For them, such signs of modernity violated a cherished illusion of Edenic isolation.
Belknap had no such illusions. Nor was he in any mood to admire the tropical luxuriance of the place. Immediately upon arriving, he and Walt Sachs made their way to a shacklike structure that was about three hundred yards from Melville Hall, the main airport. A bright yellow logo identified the outfit as Island Rent-a-Car.
“My name is Henry Giles,” said Belknap. “I reserved a four-wheel-drive.” He had removed the dental appliances, but his mouth still ached.
“The four-by-four got wrecked, mon,” the man behind the counter said in a melodious lilt. “Got wrecked in Carnaval last January. Never quite worked since then.”
“Do you often let people reserve cars that don’t work?” Sachs spoke up. The long trip had not put him in a good mood.
“Musta b
een a mix-up. Sometime my wife answer the phone, you know. And she ain’t been right herself since the 1976 hurricane.” Belknap gave the man a closer look and realized he was considerably older than he seemed at first glance. His head was smooth-shaven and gleamed in the tropical heat, his skin tarry black, almost viscous-looking.
“What can you give me, my friend?”
“I got a Mazda. Two-wheel-drive, I’d guess you’d say, though I’m not sure it’s always so many as two.”
“What do you drive?”
“Me, mon? I drive that old Jeep over there.” He pronounced “over there” as “ober der.”
“How much to rent?”
The man made a whistling sound of disapproval and deliberation, sucking air through his gapped front teeth. “But those are my wheels.”
“How much to make them mine?”
The rent-a-car man made him part with two hundred dollars, U.S., before handing over the keys to his Jeep.
“So where you going, mon?” the man asked as he pocketed the cash. “What you come to see in dis island paradise?”
Belknap shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to see the Boiling Lake.” The Boiling Lake—a geothermal oddity, the result of a flooded fumarole—was one of the island’s better-known attractions.
“You in luck, then. It don’t always boil, see. Most of last year, it just steamed, mon. But this year it’s mighty hot. You best watch yourself around it.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
Once they were on the road, headed south toward Roseau, Walt’s already sour mood grew worse. “You’re gonna get me killed with this goddamn G.I. Joe business,” he whined. “At least you can defend yourself.”
Belknap gave him a look but didn’t respond.
Fruited branches—limes, bananas, guava fruit peeping through thick waxy leaves—brushed by them as they drove, the suspensionless Jeep amplifying every bump in the road. The landscape was as verdant as any Belknap had ever seen.
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