Throughout their tête-à-tête, Simon’s complexion had been florid to one degree or another. Now he paled.
“I could leave you like you are for the weekend,” Jane said, “and be in La Jolla in little more than an hour. Your mommy would be able to have a listen over and over again before you’d have a chance to explain yourself. Do you think you might get just a spanking, or do you maybe wish you had presidential-level security like the one of her four husbands who’s managed to stay alive?”
He needed only a moment to consider the situation. “What’re you going to do to Booth?”
“Just ask him a few questions.”
“If you do anything to him, the biggest damn hurt you can imagine is gonna come down on you. I don’t know his world, what he does in it, and I don’t want to know. But he’s in with the biggest movers and shakers, and they look out for their own.”
“I’m trembling.”
“Yeah, well, I’m serious. You’re gonna be one sorry-ass bitch if you so much as muss his hair.”
Jane got off the stool. As she explained how she expected him to assist her, she walked slowly twice around the mechanic’s sled, studying him as if he were some bizarre sea beast that she had found on the beach.
When Jane was finished with her explanation, Simon said, “I need to piss.”
“This theater,” she said, “is the swankiest urinal in California.”
48
In the garage, to the left of the workbench, stood a sixteen-foot-long bank of seven-foot-tall cabinets, a single built-in unit with four doors. Behind the first three doors were shelves stocked with parts and supplies for the repair and maintenance of Simon’s car collection. Behind the fourth, an empty space without shelves offered only a pole near the top from which coveralls and other garments might be hung, though nothing hung there now.
Jane stepped in front of the open door adjacent to the empty unit. In her right hand she held a plastic thumb-size electronic-key blind-stamped with the word HID, the initials of the company that had provided it. She’d found the key in Simon’s desk, just where he had promised it would be. Holding it at arm’s length, she pointed it at the cornice rail of the cabinet, above the open door, and moved it left to right until a single beep signified that a code reader had approved the key. A series of concealed lock bolts clacked open, and the side walls of the cabinet whisked pneumatically out of the way, to the left, taking with them the loaded shelves, which now filled the previously empty fourth unit as if they had always been there.
When Jane stepped into the now empty third space, her weight triggered a lock release, and the back wall of the cabinet—inch-thick steel clad in wood—whisked to the right, revealing a walk-in safe about fourteen feet from front to back and twenty feet from side to side. Overhead lights brightened automatically as she entered the vault.
Three walls were lined with two-foot-deep shelves, and in the center of the space stood an eight-foot-square work island with a stainless-steel top. Some of the shelves were unused, but others held cardboard file boxes, guns, ammunition, cartons containing she knew not what, and the two high-end four-inch-deep titanium-alloy attaché cases stored where Simon had said they would be.
She put the cases on the work island and opened them using the combination locks. Each contained banded ten-thousand-dollar stacks of hundred-dollar bills, each bundle vacuum-packed in waterproof plastic using a FoodSaver sealing appliance.
In weeks past, she’d invaded a few homes of the self-described Arcadians and always found cash, on average two hundred thousand per residence. Usually there were forged passports as well, in a variety of names, and credit cards to match.
Considering that they were people of extreme arrogance who saw themselves as the rightful makers and rulers of a brave new world in which they could murder those whom they deemed bad influences on the culture and enslave hundreds of thousands if not millions of others with nanomachine brain implants, Jane found it telling that they all took the precaution of squirreling away the cash and credentials to support a hasty exit from the country, to get them to wherever they had secreted fortunes to sustain them in the aftermath of failure. Under the egoism that armored them, beneath the layers of pride and conceit and disdain, at the center of the rotten fruit that was their hateful conviction, nestled a seed of doubt.
Simon Yegg apparently wasn’t one of the Arcadians. He didn’t resort to noble talk about saving civilization as a justification for using people. He just ruthlessly used them. Maybe intuition warned him that the consequences of his actions required that he be prepared to flee the authorities in some crisis. Or maybe his half brother had hinted at possible ugly consequences of the work in which he was involved. For whatever reason, Simon had stashed passports and other forged ID in each attaché, and he’d set aside more get-out-of-Dodge cash than any Arcadian: $480,000, half in each titanium case.
49
With Sanjay Shukla strapped in it, Carter Jergen turns the dinette chair off its side and tips it up onto four feet once more. He spends the next two hours alternately using his laptop to scout possible Caribbean vacations and studying the young writer, who sits in wet-eyed silence when he isn’t weeping. The tears seem excessive, but perhaps a successful writer must be more sensitive than makes sense to a nonwriter. Growing bored with the Caribbean, Jergen opens himself to a more exotic getaway in the South Pacific and begins to investigate Tahiti.
At last Radley Dubose returns with Tanuja. After what must have been a vigorous workout, the big man ought to appear sated, a little loose in the joints, his eyes heavy-lidded, his face softer in the afterglow of such a release. But Dubose looks as edgy as ever and remains darkly energized, still the West Virginia golem that he has always been, as if shaped from mud, invoked with life by some ill-advised ceremony, and sent forth on a mission of revenge.
The girl seems weary but not broken. Her hair is in disarray, one sleeve ripped off her T-shirt, the collar torn along the stitch line. When leading her to a seat at the table, Dubose jerks too hard on her leash. In a furious silence, she pivots to him and strikes his massive chest with her fists, tries for his face but fails to land a blow there. He grabs her by the neck, jams her in the chair, and ties her leash to the stretcher bar.
For his part, Dubose is amused by Tanuja’s rebellion. He seldom either laughs or smiles, and now his amusement is conveyed to Jergen only by raised eyebrows and a shake of the head. He leans against the counter by the sink and fishes the half-finished hand-rolled cigarette from his jacket pocket. He preps the joint and fires it and takes a deep drag, staring into space as he did before the idea of doing the girl began to be irresistible.
Now that Tanuja is seated within the candlelight, Jergen sees that her lower lip is swollen, blood coagulated in one split corner.
When she speaks to her brother, however, her speech is not thick from the injury. Softly and with grave tenderness, she says, “Sanjay? Chotti bhai…?”
He cannot look at her. He sits with his head bowed, and when she says chotti bhai, whatever that means, his weeping, which has recently been quiet, becomes a wretched sobbing.
“Chotti bhai,” she repeats, “it’s all right.”
“No,” Sanjay says. “Oh, God, no.”
“Look at me. You have no blame,” she says. When he can’t bear to face her, she says what sounds like “Peri pauna.”
This so affects Sanjay that he gasps and looks up at her and says, “Bhenji, no. I don’t deserve your respect or anyone’s.”
“Peri pauna,” she insists.
Curious, Jergen says, “What does that mean—peri pauna?”