In memory she heard LuLing’s voice: Would you be pleased to make me weep, Phoebe? There is beauty in pain.
Jane had known this must happen sometimes in a place that catered to the exercise of absolute power and to all the depravities attending it. She had known, but she had repressed the knowledge. When you were David against Goliath, you didn’t want to dwell too much on your adversary’s size or his capacity for violence, or his taste for cruelty.
Murder in the act of sex couldn’t happen too often, because they would have to be continuously scouting for girls, snatching them or otherwise procuring them, programming them. But if it didn’t happen often, they had anticipated that it would happen from time to time, and they had prepared to deal with the occasional inconvenient corpse, apparently with no quiver of conscience greater than what had troubled the Nazis or Stalin when murdering millions.
She felt small standing in front of the cremation system. She felt as small as a child.
Inside the Power-Pak III, the gas was escaping under pressure; and the flames roared with the burning of it. The cremation system was being preheated for the job ahead.
With that realization, Jane retreated to the first room and started for the door. Two men entered from the hallway.
15
* * *
BIG MEN, BRUTISH in appearance, they wore shoulder rigs adapted to accept—and quickly release—pistols fitted with silencers.
Jane was carrying her Heckler & Koch. She didn’t need to draw it. Without making a conscious effort to bring it up from her side, she found that she had it in a two-hand grip, arms extended.
Neither of the men reacted to her. She might as well have been made of clearest glass.
As they approached the dead girl, who was lying like a figment of a nightmare on the steel slab, the bigger of the two said, “It has to be dark for this.”
“It has been dark awhile,” said the other. “For two hours.”
“It has to be dark because of the smoke.”
“No one will see any smoke. This system hardly produces any smoke to see.”
The presence of the corpse, the fact of it, seemed not in the least to affect them.
“This is a good system. I like this system. But it produces some smoke.”
“This is a very good system. Anyway, the night is here.”
For a moment Jane thought they were playing a mind game with her, that they would suddenly draw their guns and pivot toward her. But then she remembered Overton’s words: They don’t see members because they’re…programmed.
Believing what William Overton had told her, she had dared to come here. Until she experienced this form of passive invisibility, however, she hadn’t been able to imagine how it might work.
Their eyes were not blind to her. The image of the room transmitted along their optic nerves to their brains included Jane as surely as it did the dead girl on the table. But some filtering program erased her from the brain’s interpretation of the image. She had used Overton’s member number and password at the gate and again at the front door, and because no alarm had sounded to announce that the perimeter of the house had been violated, these guards believed that the only people in the house were the girls and members who had come here to use them. The read-in from their eyes was the truth, but the readout from their brains was a lie.
Because the members of Aspasia didn’t want their faces on file anywhere in association with this enterprise, a fault existed in the security program, and that fault spared Jane’s life.
It was technology, but its effect was magic, a dark damn magic that she didn’t trust. While keeping the pistol trained on the men, she had eased backward, away from them, convinced that to move boldly past them in the direction of the hallway door would break the spell that they were under. She had retreated into a corner.
The taller man, six-four if he was an inch, went through the door into the crematorium.
The other one remained at the steel table, staring at the naked dead girl. If he raised his head, he would be looking directly at the corner where Jane stood.
And then he frowned. Until he frowned, his features were so placid that Jane wondered if any thought at all traveled through the landscape of his mind. Frowning, he looked up and turned his head side to side, scanning the room.
Perhaps it was imagination, but she thought his gaze paused for just an instant on the very space she occupied.
Still frowning, he cocked his head.
Jane held her breath. If his program did not allow him to see her, it would not allow him to hear her, either. Nevertheless, for that moment, she did not breathe.
The bones of his face were heavy, as if he had been crudely forged rather than born of man and woman, his brow a ledge from under which his eyes regarded the world with suspicion.
Finally, he looked down again at the dead girl, though with no greater emotion than if he had been staring at an empty table.
Rolling a stainless-steel gurney in front of him, the first man returned from the crematorium. As he positioned the gurney beside the table, he considered the naked blonde and said, “Number Four.”
“Number Four,” the shorter man agreed.
“We need to clean the room.”
“Make it ready for the new Number Four,” the shorter man confirmed.
Among computer gurus, there was a word for people who thought they were off the grid but weren’t. The word was fools. Only the tiniest fraction of those who believed they were off the grid—including dedicated end-of-the-world preppers—were in fact off it. Those who were truly untrackable, like Jane, and yet remained able by various means to use the Internet undetected were said to be “in the silent corner.”
She had been in the silent corner for two months, and right now, she was in the silent corner twice over, untrackable by all modern technology as well as by the five senses of these security men, and able to move about freely.
“Let’s burn it,” said the taller one.
“Burn it,” the shorter man agreed.
They moved the blonde from the table to the gurney as if they were handling bags of garbage, as if she was nothing and never had been anything.
This was one barbarity too many, an inexcusable indignity, and Jane could have shot them dead for their thoughtless treatment of the girl. But in their way, they were victims, too, and if they had been crude and vicious men before they had been subjected to brain implants, there was no way to prove it, no evidence sufficient to condemn them to death now. Anyway, they were already something akin to the walking dead.
As the two men maneuvered the gurney through the open door to feed the corpse into the Power-Pak III Cremation System, Jane backed away from them and out of the room. In the ground-floor hallway once more, she walked briskly toward the front door.
As she passed the stairs, she glanced up at the niches in which stood Venus and Aphrodite, white marble and larger than life-size.
Maybe it was the way they were uplighted or maybe Jane’s black mood affected her perception, but they no longer looked like pagan goddesses, not both glorious and terrible as before, but now only terrible, like beings that might preside over an Aztec altar upon which hearts were torn from living children.
At the front door, to be granted exit, she entered Overton’s membership number and password in another keypad. There was a delay of mere seconds that nonetheless she found nearly intolerable.
There could be no menace in the moon, and yet it hung over the night as if it were a dragon’s egg from which some world-ending beast would hatch.
At the garage stall, another keypad required another entry, but against her expectations, the segmented door rolled up to reveal the Bentley.