The phoenix palms canopied the driveway, and in that tunnel of boles and fronds, headlights approached her on the inbound lane. She was prepared to accelerate and slam through it if the vehicle swung across both lanes to block her, but a Maserati with tinted windows cruised past her without incident.
No keypad waited on this side of the gate. The two great panels of ironwork swung inward automatically as she approached, and she was granted exit.
She piloted the Bentley into a world that was immeasurably more precious to her than it had been when she had driven to Aspasia, a world imperiled under a vault of blind bright stars.
16
* * *
SHE SHOULD HAVE PARKED the Bentley in another block and walked past William Overton’s house from the farther side of the street, should have reconnoitered before entering the place, just in case he had gotten loose or gotten help. Instead, she drove directly into the center stall of three, parking between the red Ferrari and the black Tesla, and remoted the garage roll-up to roll down behind her. At the connecting door between the garage and the house, she entered the disarming code in the keypad and used the attorney’s house key and went inside, pistol in her right hand.
She had been cold to the bone since Aspasia, and the car heater had not warmed her. As chilled as she was, she remained nonetheless at a boil emotionally. Indignation, which is always controlled, had given way to a rage that threatened to drive her beyond the bounds of prudence and discretion. She wanted the guilty to pay. She wanted them to pay with everything they possessed, every dollar and drop of blood, wanted to strip from them their overweening pride and smug superiority. Her fear was twined now with horror, and she was afraid not just for Travis and herself, but for everyone and everything she loved, for her friends and her country, for the future of freedom and the dignity of the human heart.
Overton was lying in the master bathroom, where she had left him, still shackled to the sink drain and cuffed to the leg of the antique bathtub. For at least part of the time that she’d been away, he had struggled to free himself. His badly abraded ankles oozed a bloody serum, because he had tried either to snap the heavy-duty cable tie or strip the one-way plastic zipper that could draw the tie tighter but never let it loosen. Or in his total ignorance of construction and plumbing techniques, maybe he thought it possible to pull the steel drain pipe out of the wall, though all he had succeeded in doing was cracking the marble cladding. He must have tried mightily to wedge his right shoulder and right knee under the bathtub and lever it off the floor enough to slip free the cable tie looped around one of its sturdy legs. But the large cast-iron tub with its baked-enamel finish weighed at least half a ton, probably two or three hundred pounds more than that; anyway, its water lines and drain line further secured it to wall and floor. He succeeded only in skinning his knee and bruising his shoulder. Hair lank and wet, body glistening with perspiration head to foot, Dolce & Gabbana underwear dark with sweat and perhaps with something else, he had proved to be a failure as an escape artist.
When Jane stepped into the bathroom doorway, Overton startled, turning upon her an expression of such abject fear that the woman she had been four months earlier might have had pity for him. But she wasn’t that woman; she might never be that woman again. Besides, his face was wrenched no less by purest hatred than by fear.
He flinched when she approached him with the scissors. She cut through the duct tape that wound about his head and did not care if it pulled his hair painfully. She made him use his tongue to press the partial washcloth from his mouth. He gagged and choked but at last expelled it.
She had said that she needed to liberate her younger sister from Aspasia, and Overton had known in what condition her sister would be found, forever altered and beyond any hope of liberation. He must think that he was now as good as dead and that his death would not be easy.
Looking down at him, she said, “Fancy place.”
“What?”
“Fancy place, that Aspasia.”
He said nothing.
“Don’t you think it’s a fancy place?”
When he still said nothing, she prodded him with the toe of her shoe. He said, “I guess so.”
“You guess what?”
“It’s a fancy place.”
“It’s a very fancy place, Sterling. Wow. I mean, no expense spared to make it feel respectable.”
Again, he said nothing.
“You were right about the guards. They pretended not to see me. How does that work, Sterling? How do they pretend so well?”
“I’ve told you all I know.”
“You’ve told me all you dare. That’s different.”
He turned his face away from her.
She did not goad him this time. She waited.
The silence grew intolerable for him. Still averting his face, he said, “Did you find her?”
“Did I find who?”
“You know who.”
“I don’t seem to know.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Did I find who?”
“You’re trying to make me say it so you can shoot me.”
“What a strange notion.”
“It’s what you’re doing,” he insisted.
“I don’t need an excuse to shoot you, Sterling. I already have a lot of good reasons to shoot you.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with Aspasia.”
“You’re a member—Vidar, god of gods, survivor of Ragnarok.”
“That’s all I am. A member. I didn’t build the place.”
“Ah, the old I-didn’t-build-Auschwitz-I-only-operated-the-gas-chamber defense.”
“Go to Hell.”
“I’m sure you can give me good directions.”
“You’re a gold-plated bitch.”
“If you stop being stupid, you can survive this. Is stupidity such a part of your character that maybe you can’t save yourself?”
“You want me dead. Just get it over with.”
“Speaking of dead people, I found a dead girl at Aspasia.”
Lying there in his sweat and blood, he shuddered.
She said, “A lovely blond girl naked on a stainless-steel table. She’d been strangled, perhaps at the very moment one of your fellow club members achieved his peak of pleasure.”
“Oh, shit,” he said, his voice breaking. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“I watched them getting ready to shove her poor body in a cremator and burn her all up.”
He was crying now, crying for himself. “Just do it to me.”
She gave him another long silence before she said, “She wasn’t my sister. I don’t have a sister. That was a lie.”
Jane could almost hear him reaching down into some internal darkness to dredge up a near-extinguished hope.
“Liars,” she said, “are always the first to fall for the lies of others.”
He turned his head to look up at her. His eyes were full of tears. His mouth was as soft as an infant’s.
Jane said, “I needed to understand Aspasia before I could go after Shenneck.”
His tears made his eyes harder to read, and perhaps he realized as much, because he said, “Shenneck? What’s Shenneck?”
“Maybe you are terminally stupid. Did you think the only thing Jimmy hacked from you was the Dark Web address for Aspasia? You’re a friend of Bertold Shenneck. Is friend the right word? Are people like you and Shenneck capable of friendship?”
“We…we have similar interests.”
“Yes, that’s probably closer to the truth. It’s something like the instinctive loyalty predators have for one another. And you’re an investor in Far Horizons.”
He closed his eyes. He was calculating whether the immediate threat she posed or Shenneck might be the more certain door to death.
“Did you pee yourself?” she asked.
Without opening his eyes, he said, “No.”
“I smell pee, and it’s not mine.”
Eyes still closed, he said, “What do you want to do with him, with Shenneck?”
“Expose what he’s doing. Bring him down. Stop him. Kill him.”
“Just you? Against him? You and who else?”
“Never mind who else. I’m the interrogator. Not you.”
He opened his eyes. “I don’t know as much as you probably think I do.”
“Let’s find out.”