Hollow World (18 page)

“Or a door that
leads
to an emergency,” Victoria added. “Which means that, by law, it cannot ever be locked. Therefore, this key belongs to another door—one that no doubt leads to the tracks or somewhere equally vital. Dear old Dad didn’t mislead you, but he did rely on you figuring this out at some point.”

“I should have known right off the bat,” conceded Charlie, frustrated that he’d overlooked so huge a detail.

“Don’t kick yourself—it’s a stressful situation. Anyway, I’ll have McCoy look into it and tell us what this key really unlocks. In the meantime, we’ve got to get your girls.”

“No,” Charlie said.

“No?” Victoria asked, taken aback. “What do you mean?”

“Not yet. We’ve got to deal with the bomb first. Like you said earlier, your old man won’t touch my family unless he knows I’m dead, right? Well, that buys us the time we need to take care of the bomb.”

“Charlie, I’ve got some bad news,” she said, with a somber tone. “We may have to make a choice. If we disarm the bomb, it’s possible that my Dad will kill your family. Alternatively, if we go for your family and he or any of his men spot us before we get to them, it’s possible that he will detonate the bomb. I hate to say it but we might be forced to make that decision.”

“Maybe not,” Kalani offered. “We can hit them both at the same time.”

“He’s right, Vee,” added Mason, doing his best to convince Victoria that an alternative was possible. “McCoy can handle the rundown on the bomb by himself and, as long as there’s no heavy resistance, he and I can disarm it. That leaves the four of you to assault the Tower. Depending on if you’re successful or not, we can disarm the bomb or boogie out of there.”

“A head-on assault?” said Jen-Jen, licking her lips. “I fucking love it.”

Victoria sat still for a moment with her palms on the table, lost deep in thought, and Charlie watched her closely. Finally, she spoke. “It might be possible,” she admitted cautiously. “But not in a full-frontal assault. Sorry, Jen-Jen. We’ve got to be smart about this. We need to even the odds. My Dad has still eight of his operators unaccounted for, and four more at the Tower. We’ve already removed Jeremy from the equation, but if we can’t locate these eight unknowns, then we won’t be able to confidently pull this off.”

“What do we need to do,
wahine
?” Kalani asked Victoria.

“I hate to say it, because we’re in such a beautiful and happy place, but there are twelve hostiles that need to not be alive anymore.”

“I’m still loving it,” Jen-Jen added.

“Charlie, did you get any names from Jeremy? Anything that can help us find out who these assholes are?” Victoria asked.

“No, it didn’t really occur to me at the time to ask,” Charlie replied. “You don’t have access to a list of your Dad’s known associates or any of that other spy stuff you see in the movies?”

“We might. Maybe I can trade it to you for coffee and donuts,” she shot back.

“Point taken,” Charlie laughed. “I do have two names for you to run, though they’re only first names and I don’t think they’ll turn out to be legit.”

He gave her the names of Brody and Brent, the two clowns who had picked him up from the Wilderness Lodge the night before.

“It’s a start,” she said. “We can run a search similar to your Hollywood-style approach. Even with first names alone, we can cross-reference them with my Dad and see what comes up. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a connection. Mason, get on that, will you?”

“Aye,” he grunted and pulled a small laptop from a bag hanging on the back of his chair.

“I can almost guarantee that these two idiots were ex-military,” Charlie added.

“Good. Mason, add that to the parameters and try to refine it,” Victoria ordered.

“On it,” was Mason’s reply, as he began rapidly tapping keys.

Charlie turned to Kalani, “I thought
you
were the scientist, big guy,” he joked.

Kalani leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, and smiled. “Nah, you pegged me right off the bat, braddah. I just hit things and shoot things.”

“You had me fooled; you CIA spooks are excellent actors,” Charlie grinned.

“You think
I’m
good, you should see some of Jen-Jen’s…acting,” he quipped.

Jen-Jen simply smiled, winked and shrugged.

“Ease up, kids. Did you forget we have a situation?” Victoria prodded.

“Just blowing off some steam, boss,” offered Kalani.

Mason’s eyes narrowed as he leaned in closer to his screen. All attention was on him. Everyone waited for the little man to speak.

“Fucking bingo!” he blurted.

“What is it, Mason Jar?” Victoria asked, using the pet name she’d created for him. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

“Brody Kinney and Brent Masters. They used their real names. Fucking morons!” He laughed loud, drawing glances from other patrons.

“These your guys?” Victoria asked Charlie.

Mason turned the screen so the rest of them could see.

“That’s them, alright,” Charlie confirmed.

Mason brightened. “This is big.”

“Elaborate,” Victoria ordered.

“This is it, Vee—the key to everything. Check this out. These two bozos have been seen with your father not once, not twice, but on
six
different occasions over the past five years.”

Victoria whistled.

She gestured toward Charlie and together they leaned in to look at Mason’s display. Charlie nodded as he

“It gets better,” Mason promised. “Charlie was absolutely correct: they’re both ex-military, alright. And I can do you one better.”

“Hit me.”

“Kinney and Masters belong to a rogue unit of Blackwater mercenaries. A unit of
twelve
men.”

22

Ninety-year-old Scotch, be damned—nothing was working!

Spencer Holloway was in exceptional physical shape for a man of his age, in no small part due to medicinal remedies and tonics of every variety. One such elixir was a glorious dietary potion that supercharged his metabolism and left his body without even an ounce of fat. The downside was that if Spencer Holloway wished to get drunk, he had to try—
hard
. His body burned off the alcohol nearly as fast as he could drink it. He would have loved nothing more than to upend the bottle and empty it down his throat in one long draught, but he just couldn’t bring himself to disgrace such a fine spirit. And so he sat, in the villa next to the one he’d reserved for the Walker women, sipping the dark amber liquid and savoring the deep burn of the ancient single malt.

The burn reminded him that he was still alive, but eventually this train of thought led him to the realization that he was in a situation he desperately needed to be freed from. The nerve-crushing, earthshattering truth that what he’d searched for his entire adult life was not the thing he’d truly desired was cruel and demoralizing. He’d spent years being sure that his end would be his greatest and most glorious moment, but now he knew how foolish he’d been. How could his failure and death be his crowning achievement? There was no logic to it. It was as if a dam had been holding all of his stupidity at bay and, over the course of many years, the walls had been eroding until they’d finally failed and the flood consumed him. Who searches
for the person who could bring about the end of their life? Had he really fooled himself into this pursuit with such a thin and idiotic premise?

Holloway knew the answer, but his surgically precise and supremely logical mind could scarcely believe that it had been tricked for so long by such idiocy.

He knew the truth stemmed from retaining and following the overwhelming arrogance of his younger self. When he’d first begun challenging other highly intellectual people—back in his early thirties—it had been a hobby: a way of exercising his power and displaying the greatness of his beautiful mind. After so many decades of crushing victories and not even a hint of defeat, his mind had slowly decided for him that this would no longer be a pastime, but his life’s work.

Spencer Holloway had always been a shrewd businessman and his endeavors had made him more money than the average person could make in twenty lifetimes. Still, he was a man who never stopped at good enough. Finding legitimate business to be far too easy, he began testing his hand at less-than-legal schemes and found this to be a much more interesting way to spend his time and amass further fortunes. By his late forties, Spencer Holloway knew that he would never again have want of money. It was during this time that his hobby finally evolved into an obsession.

He started spending countless dollars creating clever traps and ingenious scenarios designed to test the world’s greatest minds—all in order to prove to himself that there was no mind more brilliant in existence. Some of these challengers came to him willingly, hoping to achieve such petty rewards as money or fame. Others had to be challenged against their will. One thing remained constant throughout, and that was the undeniable fact that none of these people ever showed the slightest possibility of victory.

It wasn’t long before Holloway had known—truly
known
—that he had the world’s greatest mind. Who could dispute it? Everyone who could have laid claim to the title fell before his feet, unable to best the aging genius.

Until now.

Something in the detective was forcing Holloway to finally believe that his own defeat was a possibility. His confidence had been shaken and, knowing that defeat would surely befall him if he stayed his present course, he realized that he’d been lying to himself all these years. He’d fooled himself into believing that he was searching for his superior. In actuality, he was simply destroying brilliant mind after brilliant mind in order to prove his prowess and so reinforce himself as the world’s foremost mastermind. He’d tricked himself into believing that his search was to find a greater mind only to give his
real
quest a skewed sense of purpose.

Spencer Holloway’s mind had fractured somewhere along the way and he’d finally learned this brutal truth.

For so many years, Holloway had believed he was looking for that one truly great mind that
must
exist. Hiding deep within his subconscious was the
real
truth of his life’s work—the truth that perpetually guided him under the guise of something entirely different. The
true
Spencer Holloway—unbeknownst even to his conscious self—sought to dominate. To overpower. To
destroy
. This entity sought to prove to others that he was as close to godhood as a human being could ever hope to be. No one on this young planet could take from him what he had so rightfully earned.

This twisted subconscious puppet master pulled all the strings. This guiding spirit that kept his gears turning was relentless in its pursuit of domination and with every mind it defeated became exponentially more destructive and empowered. The
true
Spencer Holloway had no desire to be defeated. Perhaps the other half of Holloway’s mind really believed that he was searching for his successor, but it was simply a reality carefully crafted by the more malevolent aspects of his mind to trick its more sensible counterpart into doing what needed to be done.

For so long, these two sides had warred within the old genius. He was appalled by the notion. He was being controlled; his actions were his own but his intentions were those of another. Spencer Holloway was mortified to realize that he’d never known who he really was. He’d never believed that schizophrenia had any place in his great brain. How could two things share the same space inside his head yet remain unknown?

Holloway had been manipulated for years by an unknown aspect of his own persona, and it terrified him. He had never entertained the notion that he might be crazy. Eccentric? Maybe. Impulsive? Definitely. Sadistic? Absolutely. But crazy? Never. Not once in all his years had insanity ever crossed his mind.

Was this necessarily a bad thing though? People only needed treatment for insanity when they couldn’t control it—when they couldn’t make two halves whole again. Holloway was the most intelligent of all—he could control anything he damn well pleased. If he were truly insane, then he would use it as a tool—a weapon—to turn this scenario around. Perhaps, instead of a disability, he’d found a new advantage.

Holloway stood, slowly made his way to the large window and then gazed out over the Magic Kingdom. Somewhere below him, among the sweating, writhing masses of ignorant vacationers, was the detective that had come to be his finest opponent: the man who had brought such enlightenment and clarity to his previously clouded mind. The detective had brought something else too—something much more important. Healing. Holloway’s mind had begun to heal itself; the fracture that had been mistakenly created so long ago was knitting itself back together along jagged edges. Holloway welcomed this entity and became one with it. If this detective were to be his greatest opponent, then Holloway would not disappoint his true nature—he would destroy this man.

Two halves had finally become one. A monster was reborn.