“What direction would that be, Billy?”
“Anyone who knows history well enough can see what the wrong directions are. It’s plain as anything.” In touch now with his inner fanatic, he found himself capable of a defiant tone even as he lay there in squalor. “Identify those who have the potential to press civilization to the brink, diminish their influence—”
“By killing them,” she said.
He ignored the interruption. “—and it won’t be necessary to use Bertold’s technology on the masses. There will be less death, not more, less poverty, less anxiety, if we restrain those who are most likely to screw up the country with bad policies.”
He could not entirely conceal his enthusiasm. He might be an investor in Far Horizons for profit, but he had drunk the Kool-Aid.
“Nick,” she said, “that was my husband’s name. You don’t care what his name was, but I care. Nick was in the Marine Corps. A full colonel at thirty-two. He was awarded the Navy Cross. You wouldn’t know what that is, but it’s really something. He was a good man, a caring husband, a damn fine father.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Overton said. He was capable of a self-righteous reaction. He amazed her. “Don’t lay this on me. You have no right to lay it on me. I don’t decide who’s put on the list.”
“What list?”
“The Hamlet list. Like the play. If someone had killed Hamlet in the first act, a lot more people would’ve been alive at the end.”
“Seriously, is that how you read it, you’re a Shakespeare scholar now?”
In frustration he rattled the series of looped cable ties that secured his wrists to the bathtub. “I haven’t read the damn thing. Shenneck calls it the Hamlet list. I don’t have anything to do with it. I told you, I don’t decide who’s on the list.”
“Who does decide?”
“No one. The computer decides. The computer model.”
She could feel her pulse beating in her temples. “Who wrote the computer model? You design a model to get what you want to get. And the model has to be given names of candidates to choose from. What sonofabitch inputs the names?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re an investor.”
“But I don’t work in the freakin’ damn lab!”
She drew a deep breath. Her forefinger had slipped onto the trigger of the Heckler & Koch. She moved it back to the trigger guard. “One of the people on your Hamlet list was Eileen Root in Chicago. She worked in a nonprofit, helping people with severe disabilities. What do you think she might have done to become a danger to civilization?”
“I don’t know. How would I know? I don’t choose the names for the list.”
“One of them was a poet. He threw himself in front of a subway train. One was a prodigy, a twenty-year-old graduate student, she was working on a doctorate in cosmology. Cosmology! What could either of them have done to be a threat to civilization?”
“You aren’t listening to me.”
“I’m listening. I’m all ears, Billy. What could they have done?”
“I don’t know. The computer model knows.”
She got up from her chair, thrust it backward into the bedroom, loomed over him. “This Hamlet list. How many are on it?”
“I tell you, and you won’t like it.”
“Try me. How many have to be killed?”
“You’re not in control of yourself. You’re overwrought.”
“Try me!”
“All right, okay. Anyway, Shenneck says they aren’t being killed. They’re being culled. No herd remains healthy if its weakest individuals aren’t culled from time to time.”
“I don’t want to kill you,” Jane said, by which she meant that she didn’t want to kill him just yet. “How many are on the list?”
He closed his eyes against the sight of the muzzle. “The computer model says, in a country the size of ours, two hundred and ten thousand culled in each generation will ensure stability.”
She had to swallow a reflux of acid before she could say, “How do you define a generation?”
“I don’t define anything. The computer model defines it as twenty-five years.”
“So eight thousand four hundred a year.”
“Something like that.”
She kicked him in the hip. She kicked him in the ribs. She could have kept on kicking him until she was exhausted, but she turned away from him and went into the bedroom and kicked the straight-backed chair, which slammed into the dresser.
18
* * *
JANE TOOK THE SCISSORS out of her handbag and returned to the bathroom with them and the pistol.
Overton turned on his side as best he could, trying to shield his pathetic package from her. “What now, what are you gonna do?”
She had convinced him that she was capable of committing the most cruel and gruesome offenses. Maybe she had convinced herself, too. “Another thing I need to know.”
“What?”
“No more of your stupidity. All I have time for is straight-up answers.”
“So ask.”
“How hard will it be to get at Shenneck?”
“What does get at mean?”
“Get him in a situation like this, make him talk.”
“About impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible. Look where you are.”
“I’m a few steps down the food chain from Shenneck. I was easy. He won’t be. I ever get out of this, I won’t be, either.”
She worked the scissors. The sound of the blades sharpened his anxiety. “Shenneck Technology in Menlo Park?”
“The labs have layers of electronic security. Fingerprint readers. Retinal readers. Armed guards. Cameras everywhere.”
“What about his house in Palo Alto?”
“You ever seen it?”
“Maybe I have. But you tell me.”
He answered every question she asked about the house, and if he wasn’t lying, the place had forbidding security.
She said, “I read he has a getaway place in Napa Valley.”
“Yeah. He calls it Gee Zee Ranch. Gee Zee for Ground Zero.”
“What a self-important ass.”
“He likes his little jokes, that’s all,” said Overton, taking mild offense on Shenneck’s behalf. “He spends like two weeks there every month. He’s there now. He can work from there as easy as if he’s in the labs. The lab computers are accessible to him there.”
“Is he more vulnerable there?”
Overton’s laugh was sour, bleak. “If you can get through all the coyotes and rayshaws, he’s vulnerable. But you can’t get through them. If you’d gone there first, you’d be dead, and I wouldn’t be where I am.”
“So tell me about the coyotes and the whatevers.”
“The rayshaws.” He took dark delight in describing the difficulty of an assault on Gee Zee Ranch, as if he had embraced the idea of his own death and could find pleasure only in the certainty that she would soon meet hers.
When she understood the setup at the ranch and felt Overton had not withheld anything, she said, “So I’m going to cut the tie between your ankles. You try to kick me, I’ll shoot your balls off. Got that?”
Pretending indifference, he said, “You’ll do what you’ll do.”
“That’s right.”
With the scissors, she cut through the plastic zip tie.
“Same rules apply,” she said. She cut the tie connecting him to the leg of the bathtub, though she left his wrists bound together.
She backed out of the bathroom, put aside the scissors, and stood just beyond the doorway, watching him try to get onto his hands and knees and then try to rise.
His muscles had cramped, and he had further tortured them by his efforts to free himself. He needed a minute to crawl to the fancy amber-quartz sink and grip it and struggle to his feet. The visible spasms in his calf and thigh muscles couldn’t be faked. He didn’t exaggerate the agony by crying out, but instead clenched his jaws and stifled his groans, breathing as hard as a well-run horse, as if to exhale the pain, still possessed of enough macho self-image to want to conceal from her how weak the ordeal had left him.