“Of course.”
Patting the back of the chair beside which he stood, Cornell said, “This is my chair right now.” He indicated the other three armchairs in the circle. “You can sit in any of those, and if you can’t decide, I can pick one for you.”
“I’ll take the leather club chair.”
“That’s a good one. That’s a fine chair.”
As he folded into the wingback, Cornell seemed to have extra knee and elbow joints. He interlaced his fingers and propped his hands on his stomach and smiled. “So is it the end of all things come ’round at last, like I told you it would?”
“Not quite,” Gavin said.
14
Because they are busy on one assignment after another in California, Nevada, and Arizona, Carter Jergen and Radley Dubose live for the most part in hotels. They are highly valued by their Arcadian superiors. They are technically if not actually agents of the National Security Agency, Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, and the Environmental Protection Agency, collecting five salaries and accumulating five pensions, with SPECIAL STATUS emblazoned across the top of their various photo IDs. Because of that special status and the fact that their expenses are divided among five agencies—considering also that a cleverly jiggled accounting program channels 30 percent of their combined expenditures onto the books of the Department of Education and the Department of Energy, under the heading OFFICE SUPPLIES—they can be confident that the government will pay for transportation, accommodations, dining, and incidentals of the highest quality.
During the Shukla operation and one that came before it, and now that the Washington matter has been assigned to them, they have two ocean-view rooms at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel, which isn’t in Laguna Niguel, as its name would imply, but in Dana Point. Laguna Niguel just sounds classier.
After the fiasco in the desert, Jergen and Dubose had been airlifted out to Capistrano Beach and driven from there to the hotel. They had gone to bed at 3:30 A.M.
Exhausted, Jergen intends to sleep at least until noon. His room phone rings at a quarter past seven. When he doesn’t answer it, the smartphone in the charger on the nightstand rings. When he fails to answer that, his room phone rings again—and he ignores it.
He has almost drifted back into a dream when the room’s ceiling light comes on and Radley Dubose says, “I know you Boston Brahmins need your beauty sleep, but you’re already pretty-boy enough. Get your ass in gear.”
Jergen sits up in bed. “How the hell did you get in here?”
“Are you serious? Have you forgotten who we are and what we do? Come on, partner. Every hour we delay, the colder the trail gets.”
“There is no trail.”
“There’s always one. We get the Washingtons and the kid, or we have a black mark by our names in the big book of the revolution.”
“I haven’t showered yet.”
“You have five minutes.”
“I can’t shower in five minutes.”
“Then I’ll carry you into the bathroom, turn on the water, and soap you down myself.”
Throwing back the covers, getting out of bed, Jergen says, “You’re just asshole enough to do it.”
“I’m more than asshole enough. Hey, fancy pajamas.”
“Stuff a sock in it.”
“Four minutes,” says Dubose.
15
In the club chair, enveloped by rose-colored light, Gavin noticed a hardcover copy of Black Orchids, a Nero Wolfe mystery by Rex Stout. There seemed to be a different Nero Wolfe novel on each table in the circle of armchairs, each with a bookmark inserted one place or another.
Seeing his cousin’s interest, Cornell said, “I recently read the works of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. I needed relief. Have you read the Nero Wolfe mysteries?”
“I’ve not had the chance, I’m afraid,” Gavin said.
“I’ve read all the Nero Wolfes before,” said Cornell, “but they bear rereading. Immanuel Kant—not so much.”
Having made his fortune and been terrified by the size of it and the ease with which it had been earned, being himself disengaged from life as most people knew it, Cornell had decided to spend his remaining years—whether or not the world ended—reading about life as others had written of it.
“Do you still avoid the news?” Gavin asked.
“No newspaper, no magazines, no radio. The one TV, and I only turn it on for a minute every day, just to see if transmissions are still occurring. If they are, the end times have not arrived—though what little glimpses I get of the current programs assure me that my prediction of societal collapse is correct. I’m prepared to wait out thirty months of barbarism between civilizations.”
Like the small blue house at the front of the property, the big room inside the barn and the underground bunker were connected to the public power supply. If society collapsed as Cornell anticipated, he could switch to a generator housed in a subterranean vault and powered by propane drawn from an immense tank buried nearby. According to his calculations, there was enough propane to operate the bunker and the barn for fourteen months, because both were so well insulated that they needed little heating or cooling; if he retreated to the bunker and didn’t use the barn room, he could ride out a crisis lasting thirty months.
“I estimate,” he said, as he’d said before, “there’s a forty-six percent chance a new society will arise from the disintegration of the current one. But if after thirty months the public utilities aren’t operative, they won’t be restored in my lifetime, if ever.”
“Then what?” Gavin asked, as he had asked before.
“Then the inevitable,” said Cornell, as he always said. He smiled. “So you’re coming to stay in my little blue house.”
“You need to understand the risk of taking us in.”
“The coming collapse is the ultimate risk.”
“Nevertheless, you need to know a few things. Jessie and I did a favor for a friend who’s wanted by the FBI.”
“A criminal?”
“A righteous fugitive. She—”
Cornell raised one hand to stop Gavin. “Give me a thumbsnail version, please and thank you. After the Nero Wolfe stories, I want to read everything written by Mr. Henry James. I liked The Turn of the Screw—very turny, very screwy—and he was a busy, busy author. He published more than a hundred twenty books in his lifetime, far more than you.”
“Thumbsnail, then, it is,” Gavin said. “Our friend is wanted by the FBI and some really bad people. She’s a widow—”
“Convey my condolences, please and thank you.”
“I will,” Gavin promised. “Anyway, she’s afraid the people who want to kill her would also kill her son. So she hid him with us.”
“I would feel safe to be hidden with you,” Cornell said, “but I feel even safer in my bunker, no offense intended.”
“None taken. Anyway, the worst happened, and some people came after us, and last night we got out of the house just in time, went overland, and lost them. Now we’ve got to lie low.”
“I know about lying low. Sometimes people have to lie low in the Nero Wolfe stories, also in those of Mr. Dashiell Hammett and even in those of Mr. Charles Dickens. I think in particular of the escaped prisoner, Magwitch, at the beginning of Great Expectations.”
Gavin leaned forward in his chair. “This is real life now, Cornell. Real bad people, a real threat, not a story by Dickens or Dashiell Hammett.”
“There’s no meaningful difference, cousin. I think Plato might agree. Except he’s dead. My condolences. When I return to reading fiction, which I hope to do in just a minute or two—please and thank you—it is my real life. Now you stay in my little blue house and lie low and don’t worry about me.”
He accordioned up from his chair, all the pleats of his long legs and arms opening out, drawing in a deep breath in the rising, as if he might issue a squeeze-box sound. But he only sighed and said, “You already have the key to the house.”
“Yes. Thank you, Cornell.”
“Say no more. Say no more.” He put his large hands over his ears. “Say no more.”
16