Instead of responding to her supposition, he repeated, “Only members can get in.”
“You’re a member. Tell me how it works. What’s the security?”
“That’s not the point. There is no security. Not the way you mean it. But you’re not me.”
“Aspasia uses facial-recognition software?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You said no more bullshit.”
“It’s true.”
“Famous guys, überrich guys put their faces on file at a place like that? Don’t jerk me around, Sterling. I’m getting sick of it. I said I’d kill you only if you gave me no choice. What do you think you’re doing? Giving me no choice is what you’re doing. The only way Aspasia works is no cameras, no names asked or given. No way for anyone to prove you ever went there.”
Overton shook his head, thought of another lie, decided not to risk putting it into words.
“You and people like you must have developed these places. You must believe you can come and go from them as anonymous as ghosts.”
He wanted to argue, persuade, litigate, but no jury waited to be convinced, no judge to rule in his favor. There was just Jane, who had no courtroom role. She was only, possibly, his executioner.
His frustration was so great that his fists were clenched within the cable ties, his neck muscles taut, his rapid pulse visible in his temples, his face flushed less with fear than with fury. “Damn it, you stubborn, stupid bitch, you can’t go there, you can’t get in. The money you want is all here and more where that came from. There’s nothing for you at Aspasia!”
Leaning over him, she lied in a whisper: “There’s my sister.”
He knew at once what she meant, and he was stunned. His anger evaporated. “I have nothing to do with that.”
“With what?”
“Procuring the girls.”
“The beautiful, submissive girls?” she asked.
“I have nothing to do with that.”
“But perhaps you used her. Maybe you were cruel to her?”
“No. That’s not me. That’s not the way I am. And whatever I might have done—I didn’t know you then.”
The absurdity of his defense elicited a sour laugh from Jane. She pinched his cheek, as a grandmother might pinch that of a little boy who charmed her. “Aren’t you precious, Sterling? You didn’t know me then. And now that we’re friends, of course, you would treat my little sister like a princess.”
At last he could no longer conceal his fear, which swelled quickly into a barely contained terror. His tanned and toned body prickled with gooseflesh, and not because the bathroom had grown chilly. “She might not even be at the L.A. facility.”
“Facility? How respectable a word for a place of such hideous corruption. I’m going there, Sterling. You’re going to tell me how to get in, everything I need to know. Then I’ll come back here with my sister, and we’ll open the safe, and we’ll leave you in one piece to think about how fragile life is.”
“You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
He shuddered violently and said only, “My God.”
“What God is that, Sterling?”
She slipped one blade of the scissors between his bare thigh and the fabric of his underwear. She began to cut the cloth.
“All right, wait, stop. You can get in and out of the place.”
She ceased cutting. “How?”
“No cameras. No alarms. The only security is two men.”
“Armed?”
“Yes. But you’ll enter my password at the gate and at the front door, and because it’s a member’s password, they won’t see you.”
“Won’t see me? Am I invisible?”
“Essentially, yes.” He took a deep breath, blew it out, met her eyes to make a claim of sincerity. “They don’t see members.”
“Am I to believe these armed thugs are blind?”
“No. Not blind.” He was pale, both chilled and sweating, lying there like an overgrown baby in his soft, gray designer diaper, the waistband announcing DOLCE & GABBANA across his flat stomach. “But they don’t see members because…because they’re…If I explain, if I say more than another word, you might as well kill me now. If you don’t, others will.”
She parsed what he had said. “?‘More than another word,’?” she quoted. “So there’s one more word that you can say and maybe not be killed by your own kind?”
He closed his eyes. After a silence, he nodded.
Jane quoted him once more. “?‘They don’t see members because they’re’—what?”
“Programmed,” he said, without opening his eyes.
20
* * *
“PROGRAMMED,” STERLING SAYS, and dares not look at her hovering over him, because she will call his answer bullshit or she will want to know more. Who wouldn’t want to know more? But it really means his certain death if he betrays Bertold Shenneck and David James Michael and the others. Not just his death. His ruination and his death. There is no hope of turning state’s evidence and bargaining to rat them out in return for being allowed to go on living in style, not after what they have all done. This has been an all-or-nothing enterprise from the start. He bought in knowing the stakes.
After the bitch is silent for a while, Sterling opens his eyes and finds her waiting to meet his stare. He wonders how a face can be so contorted with contempt and yet remain so beautiful, how such dazzling blue and inviting eyes can look so pitiless.
Closing the blades of the scissors, she says, “I won’t carve more revelations out of you. I think only torture would get more, and I don’t have the stomach to touch you, which is the only way to get it done. So here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll give me the address of Aspasia and your membership password. I’ll drive your Bentley there. When I come back, we’ll open the safe, and I’ll take what I want.”
“And me?”
“That’ll be up to you.”
“What if something happens? What if you don’t come back?”
“When you miss appointments on Monday, someone will come looking. You probably won’t die of thirst by then.”
She gets to her feet and plucks a washcloth from a nearby towel rack. With the scissors, she cuts off a third of the cloth, throws aside the scrap, and rolls the larger piece into a tight ball.
For Sterling, she has become something more than a woman, has ascended to the status of mystery, holding over him the power of life and death as no one has before, a creature of flesh and blood yet mystical and fearsome and unknowable. He watches her with dread, her every action now enigmatic and potentially a preparation for a mortal blow.
Holding forth the rolled-up portion of the washcloth, she says, “I’m going to stuff this in your mouth, then duct-tape it in place. You try to bite me, I’ll bust out all your teeth and then stuff it in your mouth. Believe me?”
“Yes.”
“First, tell me where to find the keys to the Bentley and the house. Also the address of Aspasia and what I do when I get there.”
He tells her without hesitation.
“Now the code to disarm the house alarm.”
“Nine, six, nine, four, asterisk.”
“If that’s the crisis code that disarms the alarm but also alerts them that you’re under duress, if it summons help, here’s what’ll happen. Once I switch off the perimeter alarm you set when you came home, I won’t just drive away and let them come to free you. I’ll stand here for five minutes, ten, to see if there’s going to be an armed response from Vigilant Eagle or the cops. And if there is, I’ll shoot you in the face. Now…do you want to give me another disarming code?”
He hardly recognizes his own voice when he says, “Nine, six, nine, five, asterisk.”
“One digit different. Nine, six, nine, five—not four. Is that it now?”
“Yes.”
She kneels beside him again, and he opens his mouth, and she shoves the rolled cloth in there. From her big purse, she takes a roll of wide duct tape. It’s not a handbag; it’s the sack of a damn witch. With the scissors, she cuts a piece of tape and seals the gag in his mouth. She winds a longer length of tape twice around his head to hold the shorter piece in place.