The girl turns her head to stare at him, and though she is shackled to the chair, the ferocity in her eyes and the loathing in her voice chill Jergen when she says, “Go fuck yourself, you disgusting pig.”
This elicits a small laugh from Dubose, and though the chill lingers in Jergen’s bones, he smiles and nods and says, “Indulge yourself in a little rebellion.” He consults his wristwatch. “You don’t have much more time for it.”
50
Earlier, leaving Simon Yegg firmly bound at the foot of the stage, Jane had rolled Petra Quist out of the theater and into the lobby once more. Although the girl had not wet herself, she no longer professed an urgent need to pee. She hadn’t been voluble and challenging as before, but reserved, taciturn. And sober.
Now Jane returned with a black-and-yellow four-wheeled Rimowa suitcase that she had taken the liberty of packing with a couple changes of clothes and what she thought were the essential items from Petra’s share of the master-bathroom drawers. She stood it by the candy counter. She also brought a pair of sneakers, socks, jeans, a sweater, a leather jacket, and Petra’s purse, all of which she put in the half bath adjacent to the lobby, so that the girl could dress in more practical gear for what might lie ahead.
Jane brought as well one of the titanium attaché cases that contained $240,000. She placed it on the upholstered bench in front of the office chair to which Petra remained shackled.
She would keep the second case. The quest for truth upon which she had embarked was also a kind of war, and wars were expensive.
She sat on the bench beside that treasure.
In the short and sleeveless dress, Petra still appeared to be all long legs and slender arms, but she did not, as before, evoke thoughts of fashion models and party girls. Her powerful sexuality—bestowed so generously on her by nature, which she so diligently maintained and enhanced—had for the moment ebbed. Time seemed to have carried her backward through its forward flow, washing from her all iniquitous experience and corruption, so that she had become a gangling, awkward child.
She sat with head half-bowed, eyes open but perhaps seeing some memory of another time and place. A bluish bruise shadowed the line of her jaw on the right side of her face and half her chin, no doubt a result of the blow she’d taken from Jane’s forearm when she’d been jammed against the refrigerator in the kitchen.
“Some people,” Jane said, “will tell you Simon is a vicious swine, a woman hater, a sleazy thief, a self-absorbed narcissist, and they’re half-right. He’s all those things, but he’s something worse.”
Petra said nothing.
“He’s one of those dangerous people that we call sociopaths. He fakes being human, because he lacks all the emotions you and I feel. He cares only about himself, and if he felt he could get away with it, he would commit any atrocity you can imagine, without remorse.”
There seemed to be no anger in this girl, no bitterness arising from how dismissively Simon had spoken of her. Rather, she appeared to be shaken by the realization of how na?ve she had been. Perhaps she thought it not possible to imagine a way forward. Events had unmoored her. She must feel adrift.
“Some believe sociopaths are born that way,” Jane said, “and others believe they’re made that way by dreadful parenting. Nature or nurture. I think it’s both. Some are born that way, and some are made. In Simon’s case, I suspect he was born sociopathic, the son of a sociopathic mother—and then made worse by her. Now he knows you told me stuff about him that he didn’t want known. If I turn him loose after this thing with his brother is done, and if you’re still where he can find you, he will kill you, Petra. And he will make it a very hard death.”
After a silence, the girl met Jane’s eyes. “Do you think it’s true what he said about Felicity and Chandra and them?”
“Felicity and Chandra who?”
“My crew, you know, my girlfriends. He said if I go missing, like, in a month they won’t remember my name. That’s shit for sure—don’t you think?”
Jane considered her words carefully. “Remember your name? Of course they will. Miss the free limo, yes. And I bet you buy a lot more drinks for them than they buy for you, so they’ll miss that. But care that you’re gone? What do you think?”
Petra broke eye contact. Glanced at the door to the theater.
“Sweetie,” Jane said, “it’s not that you aren’t memorable. God knows, you’d be hard to forget. But tell me true…if one of them dropped out of your crew and just went away, would you care?”
The girl opened her mouth to respond, frowned, said nothing.
“A life of superficial pleasures can be exciting, a lot of fun, even thrilling. For a while. But if you party every day, they soon aren’t parties anymore. They’re desperation. And if all you do with your friends is party—then your friends are really strangers.”
Petra closed her eyes and hung her head, perhaps thinking about what might have been, what had been, and to what end her twenty-six years now pointed.
She whispered, “Where do I go from here?”
“I don’t know. And no one can tell you where. You’ve got to find the way yourself. But this may help.”
The sound of the latches opening on the attaché case raised Petra’s head and opened her eyes.
“It’s nearly a quarter of a million dollars,” Jane said.
Regarding the cash with a solemnity that defied interpretation, the girl at last said, “What if all that money…undoes me?”
“Simon’s not going to report it stolen.”
“No, I mean what if I take it and…slide back into all the usual shit, not with Simon but with some other guy?”
“If you can ask that question, then you probably won’t slide.”
“No guarantee, though.”
“Life doesn’t come with one.” Jane closed the case.
From her tote bag, she removed a pair of scissors. She cut the zip-tie binding the captive’s right wrist to the arm of the chair.
“I’m not your enemy, never was. Now that you’re not drunk, I’m counting on you to remember that.” She gave the scissors to Petra. “Just the same, I’ll move back a ways while you free yourself. Use the half bath to freshen up and change clothes. I’ll wait.”
As the girl cut the plastic strap on her left wrist and then leaned forward to feel under the chair for the ties that bound her ankles, she said, “That stuff about their mother made me half-sick, you know? I feel dirty if I was like her to him. Is the brother that twisted?”
“You don’t want to know about the brother,” Jane said.
Getting up from the chair, putting the scissors on the bench beside the attaché case, Petra appeared unsteady, muscles cramped. “I guess I don’t want to know your name, either.”
“You’ve got that right.”
51
In the church kitchen, the silence of grief and the stillness of dread, the brother’s guilt and the sister’s forgiveness no longer spoken but palpable, two of the three dwindling candles guttering in their glasses, flames twisting and leaping as if to take flight from their wicks and morph into butterflies, lambent light and rippling shadows tattooing ever-changing patterns across the faces of the twins, faces as spectral as any appearing in a séance…
As if he is the Last Judgment embodied in a dark and fierce form, Radley Dubose comes to the table and speaks to Carter Jergen. “It might have happened by now. Let’s try the trigger and be done with them if we can.”
Those adjusted persons injected with previous iterations of the command mechanism have been accessed and controlled by the phrase Play Manchurian with me, a reference to the famous 1959 novel by Richard Condon, a thriller about brainwashing. That was a little joke of Dr. Bertold Shenneck’s, the recently deceased genius behind this application of nanotechnology.
Jane Hawk has learned that unlocking sentence. Therefore, all the adjusted people thus controlled are being reprogrammed as quickly as possible. For new conversions, a fresh set of triggering words is installed with the latest generation of the command mechanism.