The black hair is the only element of disguise, and her blue eyes are as striking as Booth Hendrickson has heard them described by others who have been in her company and survived.
A solemn-looking block of a man, the chauffeur himself sans cap and sunglasses, in his unfortunate off-the-rack black suit, sits in a dinette chair. His hair is black, as are his eyes, and the coffee in his mug is so dark that it might have been water dredged from the river Styx. Clearly he is meant to be intimidating, the crudest kind of muscle, a high-school dropout with an IQ barely high enough to allow him to drive a car and pull a trigger. Booth Hendrickson can’t be intimidated by such a man, who would no doubt define faux pas as “the father of my enemy.” He has used dozens like this thug and, when necessary, has gotten rid of them to avoid any link between himself and what he’s ordered them to do. Intelligence and wit will always triumph over brute strength; intelligence, wit, and powerful connections, the last of which Booth has in abundance.
Again, he looks up into the eyes of Jane Hawk and meets her sky-blue stare and this time does not look away. “I phoned in your location, Simon’s house. Maybe you skipped minutes before the hammer came down, but they’re tracking you a thousand different ways and closing fast.”
“A thousand, huh? Surely that’s hyperbole.”
He smiles. “I like to hear pretty girls use big words. Which improve-your-vocabulary-in-thirty-days course did you take? Did it include the term lèse majesté? If not, you would be well advised to look it up.”
“A high crime committed against a sovereign state. Treason,” she says. “But it isn’t applicable. You Techno Arcadians aren’t a sovereign state. You’re seditionists, totalitarians drunk on the promise of absolute power. You’re the treasonist.”
That she knows they call themselves Techno Arcadians disturbs him, but he’s not surprised that she has clawed this fact out of one of the people she’s kidnapped and interrogated.
With the slightest theatrical touch, she takes an iPhone from a jacket pocket and places it on the table as if it’s a Fabergé egg.
Evidently she wants him to ask about it, but he will not. They are in a contest of wills, and he knows how to play these games.
He says, “Who’s accused of treason and executed for it depends on who controls the press and courts. You don’t. Anyway, treason in pursuit of a perfect society is heroic.”
Her puzzlement is exaggerated, a mocking expression. “A perfect society with people enslaved by brain implants?”
He smiles and rolls his head back and forth on the gurney. “Not enslaved. They’re given peace, released from worry, given direction they can’t otherwise find in their lives.”
As she unzips a leather tote bag that is standing on the table, Booth glances at the iPhone, wondering what she wants him to ask about it, so that he might ask something entirely different, if he mentions it at all.
The phone becomes a secondary consideration when, from the tote, she extracts a large pair of scissors and smiles as she works the gleaming blades.
She says, “Given direction, huh? Are there a lot of people who can’t figure out how to live their lives—they’re adrift, lost?”
“Don’t play devil’s advocate with me, Jane. You know as well as I do, millions waste their lives with drugs, booze. They can’t find their way. They’re indolent and ignorant and unhappy. By adjusting them, we give them a chance to be happy.”
“Really? Is that what you’re doing, Boo? Giving them a chance to be happy? Gee, I don’t know. It still looks like slavery to me.”
He pretends disinterest in the scissoring blades. He sighs. “Candidates for adjustment aren’t chosen by race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. No particular group is targeted. It can’t be slavery if the purpose of every adjustment is to increase the amount of contentment and happiness in the world.”
“So you’re quite the humanitarian, Boo. Maybe even a Nobel Peace Prize in your future.”
Booth intensely dislikes being called Boo. That is a nickname with which he’d been mocked in his youth. She may have discovered this or intuited it. She thinks that by needling him, ridiculing him, she can unnerve him, just as she will try to unnerve him with the scissors and perhaps other sharp instruments. But he endured so much mockery as a child that he is inured to it. And as for being cut or tortured, she will discover that he has more courage than she supposes and the endurance of stone. Besides, he knows she prides herself on operating as much as possible within traditional moral boundaries and will not stoop to physical torture.
“Not every ‘adjusted’ person is on your Hamlet list,” she says. “But those who are—exactly how are they made happier by killing themselves?”
“I don’t select them. The computer does.”
“The computer model.”
“That’s right. It selected your husband because he was likely to have a wrongheaded political career after leaving the Marines.”
“Who designed the computer model?”
“Some exceedingly smart people.”
“Like Bertold Shenneck and David James Michael.”
“Smarter than you and me, Janey,” he assures her, though he is an intellectual equal to those men and certainly her superior.
She says, “Shenneck, Michael—both dead. How smart could they have been?”
He does not deign to answer that snarky non sequitur.
He realizes they have taken off his suit coat. It lies jumbled on a counter, where it has been tossed as if it’s a rag. They should have had enough decency to ensconce a Dior suit coat in a closet, on a hanger. The wide strap across his thighs will surely leave severe wrinkles diagonal to the pleats in his pant legs.
Using the scissors to point at the iPhone on the table, Jane Hawk says, “Are you wondering about the phone?”
“What’s to wonder about? It’s just a phone, Janey.”
“It’s the one you took from the woman you carjacked.”
Booth shrugs in his restraints, but a sudden excitement stirs in him, which he must conceal.
“You used that phone to contact your people and call them down on me,” she says. “Now I have the number you inputted.”
“Which is worth nothing to you.”
“Really? Nothing? Think about it, Boo.”
He’s thinking about it, all right. When he called J-Spotter, the team automatically stored the number of that phone. Now that he has gone missing, they can use the number to quickly obtain the unique locater signal the phone produces. It is essentially a GPS transponder that will allow them to track her to this place sooner than later.
She looks at the chauffeur and works the scissors, and he smiles at her, as if he knows what’s coming.
She moves closer to the gurney, clicking the scissors, trying to get Booth to ask what she’s going to do with them, but of course he does not ask.
When she pulls on a thick lock of his hair and cuts off a three-or four-inch length, Booth is surprised and displeased. “What the hell?”
“To remember you by,” she says, but then drops the hair on the floor. “Though I’m afraid I’ve spoiled your perfect…What do you call it?”
“What do I call what?”
“Your ’do. Your stylish hairdo. What do you call it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Do you call it a haircut?”
“I don’t call it anything.”
“No, you wouldn’t call it a haircut. Too common. You probably call it a coiffure. A man of your stature goes to a coiffeuse to be coiffed.”
A small laugh escapes the black-suited thug, whether genuine or part of a practiced routine is hard to tell.
“How much do you pay when you go to the coiffeuse, Boo?”
“Mockery doesn’t work with me,” he assures her.
“Do you pay a hundred dollars?”
Booth does not reply.
“I’ve insulted him,” she says to the thug at the table. “Must be two hundred at least, maybe three.”
Booth realizes he is staring at the iPhone on the table. He looks away from it, lest she see his interest.