by Blake Banner
He leaned back in his big, wooden armchair and regarded me from under hooded eyes.
“In the first place, that is not all you have done. You inherited your money, legitimately, from your father, and you have used your energy and your resources to help bring down one of the most dangerous political organizations since the Third Reich. But…” He stroked his long beard. “It is interesting that in your eyes, that is all you’ve done.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged. “Was bringing down Omega just incidental? Was the real thing for you the fight? Perhaps it didn’t really matter to you, deep inside, who you were fighting, just as long as you were fighting. It can become like that for some men.”
I peeled a pack of Camels and extracted a cigarette. I offered him one and he shook his head, waiting for me to answer. I flipped my Zippo and leaned into the flame. Then as I let out the smoke, I said, “I’ve been thrown out of almost a dozen bars in the last six months. I’ve been arrested six times and thrown out of three counties. All for brawling. I should have gone home to Kenny and Rosalia at Christmas, instead I’ve been drifting across the southern states, drinking and getting into fights. I’m worried, Jim. How long will it be before I kill an innocent man? Why can’t I accept that the job is done, and it’s time to enjoy the peace?”
He was laughing, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “That’s a lot of different questions, Lacklan. For a start, there is no such thing as an innocent man. How long before you kill a man you did not intend to kill? That has been a question hanging over you since you were eighteen. You are just more aware of it now, because you have no defined enemy. You are a gun looking for a target, and that makes you dangerous.”
He looked up at the sky, as though he were seeking guidance from the gods. “Why can’t you accept that the job is done? I have no doubt, Lacklan, that if you asked a psychoanalyst that same question, he would point to your unresolved Oedipal complex and your need to kill your father and possess your mother. And no doubt there would be some truth in that. But for me, the explanation is simpler.”
“I’m not crazy about the psychoanalytical explanation.”
“Few people are. Personally I think Freud had it about right. But my own view, Freud aside, is that you are a warrior. Warriors are a thing the modern world has little use for. That is true of men in general, in fact. This is now a woman’s world, where the great virtues are empathy, compassion, dialogue..” He made a vague gesture with his hand. “Good men are men who are caring and sensitive, who know how to listen, who emulate women. Men like you and me are largely obsolete, we are anachronisms, viewed with disfavor. The world has little use for us, and let’s face it, we have little use for the world.” He sighed. “As long as you were fighting Omega, you could ignore this fact. But with no enemy to fight, you look around you and wonder where the hell you are supposed to fit in. Especially…” He paused, nodding slowly at the table. “Especially since you lost your wife and Marni.” He turned his eyes on me. “They, either one of them, might have given you a sense of purpose. Serving women is about the only purpose men seem to have left these days. We are born, we go to university, we get a job. Somewhere along the line we find a woman to adore and serve, and she and her children become the focal point of our lives. The highest a man can aspire to in modern society is being a good husband. That is the modern way.”
I burst out laughing. “That’s a pretty unorthodox view, Jim.”
“That’s the word, unorthodox. Does it help at all?”
I took a drag on my cigarette and thought about it. “You’re right, I do feel that I have no place and no purpose. With Omega gone, Marni and Abi, I feel like I don’t know what my purpose is. Yeah, that’s all true.” I smiled and shook my head. “But I’m not so sure the solution for me is finding a woman and devoting my life to her.”
“I wasn’t proposing that, Lacklan. Omega are hurt, but they are not finished. There is a chance they are pulling a ‘Battle of Hastings’ ruse. I just want you to be sure, if you decide to go after them, that you know why you are doing it. If Harold’s men had known why they were chasing the Normans, they might have timed it better and won the day. Don’t go after Omicron because your head is full of murderous passion, go after him because you have decided to destroy him. Be systematic.”
I eyed him a moment. “They are not finished?”
“You know they’re not. They still have their Asian branch, their African branch and, above all, their South American branch. They may be down, I have no doubt you damaged them badly when you took out the computer system in Brussels[3], but they are far from out. In fact, I would say that right now they are possibly at their most dangerous.”
My coffee had gone cold, but I drained my cup anyway. I studied the black dregs a moment, frowning, and finally said, “So you think I ought to go after them, and finish them?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I think you should study your attack carefully, then you should go in and kill Omicron, and all the rest of them; but especially Omicron.”
THREE
We stepped out after breakfast, crossed the parking lot at the end of the road and found a trail leading down the cliff to the beach below. It wound, with no real sense of purpose, through a scrubland of small bushes that looked like thyme, rosemary and lavender, rocks and small boulders. And, further down the cliff, closer to the sand and the sea, it wound among bigger bushes and small trees that I could not identify. Above, seagulls wheeled and cried out to the wind. Below, large breakers were rolling in off the Pacific and, though they were a good hundred and fifty or two hundred yards away, the roar and the spray were carried on the brisk morning breeze, and both reached us.
Halfway down, Jim stopped to sit on the steps that had been hewn out of the living rock and gazed out at the immensity of the ocean beneath us. I sat on a boulder nearby and listened for a while to the huge, heavy sigh of the waves thundering onto the shore, and then retracting back into the deep.
“If I understand the way they think,” Jim said suddenly, “Omega is not the organization. Omega is the state the organization is in at the present time.” He raised a hand. “Was in, until you came along.”
“Timmerman said words to that effect,” I said. “Each letter of the Greek alphabet represented a period of development in human society. Omega was the last stage, the stage we were at.”
He nodded. “Right, so Omega, or, in English, Mega O, the big O, is the end. It’s the final stage of expansion or dilation before everything collapses in on itself.”
“That sounds about right. That’s what they were about, wasn’t it? Preparing for the big collapse.”
“Yup…” He squinted at the horizon, like he was having some internal dialogue. The wind whipped his hair across his face and his beard crawled over his shoulder. “Then, you showed up…” He turned to look at me. “You didn’t actually show up, did you?”
“No, my father sent Ben to get me.”
“But we now know that your father was Gamma in the organization, and Ben was Alpha. And even though Ben was acting as your father’s secretary, that was just a front. Ben was in fact your father’s superior.”
I frowned. “I guess he was.”
“So it doesn’t make much sense that your father would send Ben to get you…”
I stared at him. A sudden gust battered my face, carrying with it the smell of the sea. My mind reached and strained, but couldn’t grasp it.
“My father…” I said, and faltered. “Marni had disappeared. She’d taken her father’s research into…”
“Into what?”
“Into climate change, into the activities of Omega… Nobody is really sure.”
“Except Marni.”
“Yes…”
“And she had gone missing.”
“She’d disappeared, left me a coded message that she was in Colorado…”
“And your father told you that he had sent Ben to get you, to go and look for her.[4]”
> “Yes, but obviously, if Ben was Alpha, it must have been his decision, not my father’s…” I frowned at him where he sat, turned slightly back toward me, with his hair and his beard flapping erratically across his face in the wind. “Why? Why would he do that?”
He grunted and stood. “If you’ll forgive me saying so, that’s a question you should have asked yourself when you first realized he was Alpha. It’s an important question.”
I watched him descend the steps for a while, toward the beach two hundred feet below, then I rose and followed him.
I caught up with him when we had reached the bottom of the long flight of steps, and he was standing on the sweep of white sand with his arms crossed, looking out at the towering waves, rolling, foaming and crashing in onto the shore. He glanced at me as I drew level and we started to walk, pushing through the sand. He said:
“So Omega is the end of a process, the final dilation, expansion, exhaustion of a process. Omicron—micro O, is exactly the opposite. It is the contracted, initial stage of a process.”
“Like a seed.”
“Exactly like a seed. A seed is an omicron.”
“So the implication is obvious. The new process—the new Omega, for want of a better name—will be born from Omicron.”
“That’s what I think.”
“But why not Alpha? Omicron is the fifteenth letter of the alphabet. It is well over halfway through. Why is that the beginning?”
He smiled at me and placed a huge hand on my shoulder. “Will you, do you think, when you are finally too old to go around beating people up, will you become a philosopher?”
I shook my head. “I have no time for navel-gazing, Jim. No offense intended, but to be eternally asking questions you know you can never answer…” I shook my head again.
He rumbled a laugh. “That is mainly the European rationalists,” he said. “The English empiricists were a whole different kettle of fish. And Newton was an alchemist, you know? But to answer your question, does a child begin in his mother’s womb? Does it begin in the egg? Both of those are omicron. But the child, the process of the child, begins before that. It begins with alpha, the blade, penetration, insemination. But in reality, Lacklan, there is no beginning and no end. The whole thing is a cycle, and it perpetuates itself to infinity, like Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, that eats its own tail.”
I raised a hand. “OK, let me get my feet back on the ground. What we are saying is that, according to the doctrine of Omega, their South American arm, and in particular Omicron, is charged with putting them back on the map if somebody like me comes along, takes out the leaders and destroys their computer network.”
“Yes, you could put it like that.”
“Then I have to agree with you. It is essential that we take out Omicron.”
“Mh-hm.” He nodded a few times, watching his feet as he walked. “But it is not enough to take out Omicron. You have to take them all down, Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi and Omicron. The whole South American operation will have to come down. Then, then, we can say that Omega is finished. It won’t be easy. You’ll need Njal.”
We had come to a large, yellow canoe that was lying on the sand. Here Jim stopped, turned and walked a few paces toward the sea, and there sat on the sand. I sat beside him. He picked up a strand of seaweed and started turning it around in his fingers, frowning slightly.
“General Francisco Ochoa, supreme commander of all Mexican special forces. You may sneer, but they train with the Seals. They are combat hardened and very tough. He has them all at his command. And as of right now, he is the supreme commander of Omega, as well.” He wagged the piece of seaweed a few times. “And you should also bear in mind that South America is not Europe or the United States. Different rules apply, and far fewer of them. It is a very thin veneer of civilization overlaid on absolute anarchy.”
“I have worked there.”
“Of course you have.”
“Do you know who the others are?”
“Raul Rocha, Minister for Mines and Energy in Brazil.” He smiled at me with hooded eyes. “They have one of those over there, a minister for mines and energy. That’s Lambda, obviously he works and lives in Brasilia. Mu, Narciso Terry, Minister for Scientific Development in Argentina, based obviously in Buenos Aires. The other three are in Mexico. Nu is Felipe Gonzalez, the governor of the free and sovereign state of Sinaloa, Xi is Samuel Zapata, nicknamed ‘El Vampiro’ because he is said to drink human blood. He is the current head of the Sinaloa cartel.”
We were silent for a while, listening to the waves crash and thud, and feeling the spray on the wind. After a bit, I said, “It’s a major operation. It will take a lot of planning, and support.”
“Yes, and we have to be very careful that word does not reach them. This plan has to be hermetic. As far as the world is concerned, you are satisfied that Omega is finished, and now you’re letting your hair down, having some fun, learning to be a playboy. The plan has to be developed in absolute secrecy.”
“What about Njal?”
He thought for a while and answered obliquely. “Take a few days to familiarize yourself with their bios, their photographs…” He glanced at me. “I have them back at the house. You know the routine: get to know them, who they are, who their families are, what they do each day, how they spend their weekends...” He twisted up the piece of seaweed in his hands, tied it into a knot and dropped it in the sand. “Meantime, be seen around town, take some girls to dinner, go dancing, try to get noticed by the society pages. You’re a rich playboy, behave like one. While you’re doing that, I’ll contact Njal. I’ll arrange a get together somewhere discreet in a few days’ time, and we’ll discuss the plan.” He paused, then added heavily, “Put some flesh on the bones.”
* * *
Being a playboy isn’t something that comes naturally to me. Instead, I developed a routine of rising at five AM, running down the steps to the beach, training for an hour in the surf and then running back up the steps for breakfast at seven. After breakfast, I would take the photographs and bios of one of the heads of Omega III and digest them. I also tried to familiarize myself as much as I could with their homes, towns and workplaces via Google Earth and Google Maps. It wasn’t much but it was something.
On the morning of the third day, Jim joined me for breakfast on the terrace. He asked me how I was getting on. I told him I had a pretty good basic knowledge of Raul Rocha and Narciso Terry and was working on the others. He squinted out at the sea for a while and then grinned.
“If I were Omicron—General Ochoa—I would have men watching you. I don’t know if he has. I haven’t seen anyone. Maybe he doesn’t know where you are. But considering the damage you have caused so far, I would definitely have somebody looking for you, and ideally watching you.” He turned his long, pale, blue eyes from the sea to look at me. “If he has, what is he going to see? He’s going to see Bruce Lee. Up at five to run up and down cliffs and fight with the Pacific surf, then locked in Professor Redbeard’s house all day. And who is this Professor Redbeard we have never heard of till now? Perhaps we should look into him…”
I sighed. “Playboy… How do you do that? It’s not something that comes easily to me.”
“Even if I had a damn, Lacklan, I wouldn’t give one. Take Mioko out tonight. I’m pulling strings and booking you a table for two at Mélisse, in Santa Monica. It’s one of the most expensive restaurants in town. After that, go to a club. Dance. And tomorrow I want you going to a show or a play or a concert. I don’t give an amoeba’s fart where you go, but you better be seen in town or I’m pulling the plug.” He pointed at me. “Omega is dead and you are celebrating. Get over it.”
He stood, slapped me on the shoulder and returned to his study.
So for the next three nights, I went out on the town with Mioko. She didn’t talk a lot, but agreed with everything I said and did. At first I found that annoying and even tried to get her to complain about how Jim treated her and used her and the other girls, but she
seemed to find that amusing and in the end I gave up and started to relax. We had fun, and every night, when we went home, she would come to my bed with me. She seemed to take it for granted.
On the morning of the fourth day, when I got back from training on the beach, Jim joined me for breakfast again on the terrace. We were served bacon, fried bananas and pancakes with cold pressed honey by the two Filipino girls. Jim poured himself coffee, drank and asked:
“How are you coping with the stress of having fun?”
“I’m coping. Mioko is a nice girl.”
He chuckled and his long eyes swiveled to look at me as he cut into his bacon. There was something that bordered on leering malevolence in them. “I wouldn’t advise you to fall in love with her.”
“I don’t plan to.”
“You think they are my slaves?”
I shrugged. “It’s none of my business. They seem to be happy.”
“Mioko tells me you tried to incite her to rebel against me.”
“Maybe I did. She seemed to find the idea as amusing as you do.”
He chuckled again as he finished his bacon, then leaned back in his chair holding his coffee cup. “We’ll go this afternoon and meet with Njal. He has a house in Arizona which we bought recently. It is secluded and off the grid, so we’ll have privacy there. I’ve booked you on a private jet to D.C. for the sake of appearances. Somebody who looks like you will take your place, and Mioko will accompany him.”
“Does this somebody know why…”
“They don’t even know they are setting a false scent. They think they are going to D.C. for a perfectly legitimate purpose, to handle some business for me.”
I nodded. “You’re subtle, Jim. I only hope you’re on the side of the angels.”