“Repeat after me, you ignorant little shit. Repeat after me, boy, repeat after me. Say this, say—do unto others before they can do unto you. Say it and mean it. Say it until your throat is raw, until your voice fails.”
More adamantly, Jane commanded, “Booth, play Manchurian with me. Now.”
After a hesitation, he muttered, “Yes, all right. All right. Yes.”
“You must do what I tell you.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“What did you say?”
“Yes, Mother. All right.”
“Look at me. Booth, look at me now.”
Hendrickson turned from the display of skulls, his face devoid of expression. As if he saw serpents in her stare, he bowed his head and lowered his eyes. “Yes. Of course. This way. It’s not far now.”
“Who am I, Booth?”
“Who are you?”
“That’s what I asked.”
“You’re Jane Hawk.”
“Why did you call me ‘Mother’?”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. You’re not her. You’re you. I don’t know.”
She studied him. Then: “Lead me to the bottom of this place.”
A plank bridging a wide cleft, a corridor of dripping stone, umbilicals of light quivering forward along the puddled floor…
Two chambers from the bottom, a tumbled collection of small skeletons, discarded as if with contempt, didn’t bear consideration, for they were not the remains of some elfin race out of Tolkien, but the bones of children that might have been the offspring of enemies conquered and killed with genocidal intent.
Half an hour after they entered the stairhead, they arrived at the bottom of the crooked staircase, where there waited what once must have been a cave that opened onto a last slope leading to the lake, by which this subterranean complex could be accessed. The mouth of the cave had been sealed off with mortared brick in which stood a steel door like that in the stairhead building.
Jane discarded the spray paint and set her light on the floor.
Hendrickson focused his beam on the keyway while she used the lock-release gun to disengage the deadbolt.
Beyond lay the promised room.
8
Two agents arrive by helicopter. Two more are on their way by ground transport.
Jergen and Dubose leave the airborne pair to deal with the now cooperative local authorities, to clean up the scene, and to bag the bodies. The waiting helo, which sits in a corner of the parking lot, will spirit the corpses away.
Except for a few locals who witnessed the incident, it will be as though nothing untoward occurred. There will be no press or TV coverage of the shootings in little Borrego Springs. No one will ever report that Gavin and Jessica Washington were killed here. There will be no autopsy, no coroner’s report in any jurisdiction. Another plausible story will be concocted to account for their deaths, which will be framed as a tragic accident.
Now Dubose and Jergen, having administered tragic accidents to quite a few people over the years, set out in the VelociRaptor for the address at which they hope to find Fennel Martin, owner of the Honda sedan with the out-of-date license plates and the long-expired registration. Dubose drives.
Just beyond the town limits, Martin’s home is a house trailer elevated on a foundation of concrete blocks, in the shelter of two big Indian laurels from which shadows yearn eastward. In the shade stands a white-painted metal table and four mismatched patio chairs. A small apron of lawn is long dead, and what grass has not withered away is thatched like a well-worn tatami mat.
Under a carport attached to the trailer stands a two-door Jeep Wrangler Sport maybe six or seven years old.
Steps formed of concrete block serve the door. Jergen and Dubose select their FBI credentials rather than those of the NSA, because the average citizen doesn’t know what the NSA is, but still has some respect for the FBI. Dubose knocks.
The man who opens the door must have seen them arrive. He looks past them to the VelociRaptor and with a note of wonder asks, “Man, what is that? Is that a Ford F-150?”
“It used to be,” says Dubose as he holds up his Bureau ID. “Are you Fennel Martin?”
The guy stares wide-eyed at Dubose’s ID, and then he looks at Jergen, and Jergen holds up his ID, and the guy says, “Really FBI? Wow. What’s this about?”
“Are you Fennel Martin?” Dubose asks again.
The man is in his late thirties, lean and tan, with shoulder-length hair and a day’s worth of beard, wearing flip-flops and jeans and a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt. The average guy living on the edge of the law or a step outside of it usually is either arrogant and obstinate, making no effort to conceal his contempt, or else goes wobbly in the presence of police and presents himself as meek and compliant in the hope of appearing to be a model citizen. This man’s reaction is neither of those. He seems genuinely astonished that FBI agents would appear at his door, perplexed, and just a little bit excited, as if a dull Sunday has suddenly become interesting.
“Yeah, that’s me. I’m Fennel.”
Dubose says, “We’d like to ask you a few questions about a car, Mr. Martin.”
“A car? Sure. Man, I’m all about cars. What car is it?”
“May we come in, Mr. Martin? This might take a while.”
“Well, the thing is, the place is kind of a mess,” Martin says. He points at the white table and the folding chairs in the shade of one of the Indian laurels. “Let’s sit there. Can I get you guys a couple beers?”
“That’s very cordial of you, Mr. Martin. But we can’t drink on duty.” Dubose puts away his ID. “And we’d rather come inside.”
To Fennel Martin’s surprise, Dubose grabs him by the crotch, squeezing hard, and by the throat and lifts him an inch off the floor and carries him backward into the house trailer.
9
The steel door at the bottom of the serried caverns opened into a room measuring about thirty by thirty feet. It was furnished as a study or home office in an elegant soft-contemporary style. Immense U-shaped desk and wall of cabinets in matching blond-finished wood. Armchair with a footstool and reading lamp. Sofa. The necessary occasional tables. There was as well an entertainment wall with a music system and a large TV.
According to Hendrickson, of the two interior doors, one led to a full bath, the other to a closet. Opposite the steel door by which they entered, another steel door led out of these quarters onto the extensive grounds behind the main house, which overlooked the lake.
From the exterior, the stone-walled building was said to look like modest servants’ quarters and to match the style of the main house. But in here, there were telltale indications of a secret purpose. The windows were fitted with locking shutters of steel plate that could not have been penetrated by common burglars. And the door to the grounds had a feature that the door to the caverns did not: three four-inch-wide steel bars that extruded from the jamb, across the width of the door, when the deadbolt was engaged from outside. The door featured no obvious escutcheon or keyway; it was locked and unlocked only by a keypad on this side and another on the exterior wall.
All this was as Hendrickson had told her after she injected him in Gilberto’s kitchen, and as he had confirmed after the nanomachine control had assembled.
“Let’s do this fast,” she said. “Get me those DVDs.”
Hendrickson had said there was an alarm system for the main house but none here. He insisted that Anabel would not want police responding to any attempted break-in of this building.
Nevertheless, Jane wanted to be done and gone in five minutes.
Initially she had intended to take Hendrickson with her, to use him as an example of nanoweb control, to convince some uncorrupted authority—if she could find one—of the truth of this technology. But his psychological deterioration, which seemed to be continuing, made that plan untenable. She would have to leave him here.