Internecine (47 page)

Rainstone concentrated on Dandine, as though anxious to talk him into a storyline, “Gerardis was old-school, from the seventies gang,” he said. “You knew that he could be recklessly, ah, violent.”

“Yeah.” Dandine looked to me. “He broke my nose the
first
time he tried to kill me.”

“It was Gerardis’s intent to cleanse the organization of anyone with enough ethics to question his orders,” Rainstone said. “It was a pogrom disguised as a recruitment drive. Gradually he filled personnel with the sort of steely-eyed college grads and executive thugs you all saw.”

The spear-carriers. The snipers with iffy eyesight at Varga’s. The
glossy yuppie killers at the airport. The faceless crews in vans who came to sweep and clear in the dead of night. Muscle. Candidates for this sort of work were probably lined up ten deep wherever
NORCO
recruited. You could kill a hundred of them and twice that would show up the next day. They weren’t even pawns. If you knew where to look, you could induct as many bent sociopaths as you needed and sacrifice them willingly, because nobody would ever miss them when they were gone. Large guys who liked packing heat and hurting people. Skilled torturers. Alien pods who could take orders and simulate the behavior of ordinary citizens.

You probably know a few people like this already.

“But specialists, you’d have to train,” I said. “You need strategic thinkers and resourceful operatives who can make command decisions in the field, on their own.”

“True,” said Rainstone. “Gerardis valued those less than I did.”

Times were changing, even inside
NORCO
. Nobody likes to admit to a paradigm shift. They put off the admission for as long as possible. Sweeping changes don’t happen all at once. They have to accrete, like barnacles.

I remembered what Dandine had said about no retirement program, and shredding documents. “But you’re supposed to be the head guy.” The indictment was clear: Why hadn’t Rainstone just stepped in and asserted some authority?

“Gerardis had powerful contacts, and was well-entrenched,” said Rainstone. “Within the organization he functioned brilliantly. He helped produce results, and made sure people knew that. Things are vastly different now than they were even two months ago. Actually, the . . . ah, interior rot, began to become apparent about the time our friend, here, severed his ties with
NORCO
.”

Never once yet had Rainstone referred to Dandine by name. Any name.

“And Gerardis has been hunting me ever since,” said Dandine, rising to his medication. “With the resources of
NORCO
.”

“In another month, there won’t be a
NORCO
,” said Rainstone. “It’ll be called something else, organized differently. We have a whole new government to deal with now.”

Putting a name to a conspiracy doesn’t eliminate it. It didn’t really matter what the club was called; the aims were always the same. In evolution, the only constant is change, and this truism applied just as relentlessly in the world that ordinary people never saw.

“I think I’ve got it,” said Dandine. “Gerardis cut a deal, a master plan: Jenks gets the California governorship, and Gerardis gets
NORCO
all to himself.”

“That was my conclusion, yes,” said Rainstone. “It only recently became undeniable. You must appreciate how much of this transpired without my, ah, knowledge.”

It was no different from executives in big oil, or the movie business, enacting their elaborate backstabbing scenarios. The left hand cooperated with the right hand until the prime opportunity arose for one to chop off the other. Then, golden parachute time for the last men standing.

“So the whole deal with Alicia Brandenberg?” asked Dandine. “That never crossed your desk?”

“Not in its true form. All I saw was a leverage play architectured by Gerardis. His plan was to sacrifice a freelancer to confer tension to the triangle of Jenks and the other candidate, Ripkin. That potential blackmail held in reserve, Gerardis could then exert more control, adjusting the tension, publicly and privately, to keep both men beholden to him. I had no idea that he pulled strings to make sure
you
were the . . . ah, freelancer, involved.” Rainstone looked toward Zetts, silent and sullen in the far end of the car.

I instantly felt like the biggest dope in the known cosmos. “You’re
Jaime Shannon,
” I said to Rainstone. “You called my answering machine.”

“I made no such call,” said Rainstone. “Things have been in a panic here ever since our friend eliminated
NORCO
’s pick for governor. Ripkin, as a sympathy vote, is worse than useless.
NORCO
hates losing control. Gerardis took an administrative demerit on lousing up what should have been a slam-dunk election. I was charged with securing a workable alternative candidate. That’s what I’ve been doing, and why it took so long for me to arrive here.”

“Wait a minute—you didn’t call me?”

“I would make no such clumsy attempt at direct contact,” said Rainstone. “You had somehow become involved and your situation was only
worsening, but, against all textbook odds, you acquired a noteworthy ability to stay out of sight, and duck conventional radar. I’ll confess you became so good, so fast, that I feared you were a ringer from a rival organization.”

I knew what Rainstone was saying: I mistakenly looked like a pro . . . which would mean even more suspicion, confusion, conflicting signals, and worst of all, squandered time. The past week had involved enormous administrative movement on my behalf, at
NORCO
, and there is only so much even the most efficient company can accomplish in a day. And that’s assuming the quarry is
easy
to track. Dandine had run me deep, and thrown many obstacles and detours into the path of those who sought to acquire us.

“So who left the message on my answering machine?” I asked.

Rainstone, Dandine, and Zetts all glanced at each other. Nobody had any idea.

“What about Zetts?” I asked. “Didn’t his involvement mean anything to you? Didn’t it clue you to make this whole thing more of a fast-track action item?”

“I was unaware of his involvement,” said Rainstone.

“Not now,” Dandine said to me.

“Look,” said Zetts. “A station.” We were approaching another private platform.

“That’s Janitorial,” said Rainstone. “Near the Kaiser medical center.”

We were underneath the pavement near the Sunset Vermont station of the MTA, where Dandine and I and Choral Anne Grimes had caught a cab. We were under the Scientology center. Janitorial had to be the dispatch nexus that assigned vanloads of phantoms to execute all manner of wet work.

“How far does this go?” I asked.

Rainstone rearranged himself on his seat. “You came in at Personnel. Ordnance is underneath Universal City. Administration is downtown. You already know about Processing. But the system is not a closed loop. There are auxiliary branches and routes, a whole substructure for multiple transport, multiple destinations. It’s all timed and coordinated by a computer center under the Natural History Museum.”

“That means somebody knows where we are, right now,” I said.

“I programmed no destination,” said Rainstone. “We’re just moving at random through the entire system. Traversing every byway, once each, would take, ah, over five hours.”
NORCO
was decentralized, its brain cells a safe distance from each other. No extravagant enemy complex to demolish in the last act with a big, cleansing explosion. Somebody like Rainstone would have to sign off on a project this huge . . . then somebody like Gerardis could make sure it got done, using someone like Jenks, who had been more than willing to get himself in deeper and deeper with every covert excavation—back when Jenks was still “Stradling,” and running the construction company, Futuristics, building LA’s top-heavy new tomorrow.

“Why?” asked Dandine.

“Please,” said Rainstone, slightly more intolerant. “
NORCO
required it. Civil unrest and terror alerts were the best thing that ever happened to us. All we had to do, in Los Angeles, was assure the Federals that if something bad happened, and it ultimately will—like a trashcan nuke under City Hall, a biotoxin in the reservoir, or something like that—we could provide a secure and preferred escape contingency in that event. To evacuate the . . . ah, politicians, and, of course, some celebrities. The A-list.”

“I think I have to vomit, now,” I said.

Andrew Collier would ask,
Where’s the ticking clock?
The big race to the finish? We were riding a train for as long as it took to smith together a deal. No bomb to defuse. No building to blow up. This wasn’t coming together the way a secret agent ragout was supposed to.

Dandine would no doubt reply,
Didn’t you get enough suspense back there in the glass room?
It was true: We might never have made it to the glass room. Rainstone could have been late. But Rainstone would have been notified the instant Zetts walked through the door. That had been the
only
way to direct-line the head of
NORCO
. Gerardis would have blocked every other option, or at least, snarled traffic until we were all meat for the coroner. See? Suspense is where you find it.

“Bottom line,” said Dandine. “What happens after our train ride?”

Rainstone rummaged in his brief and brought out several files. He handed the thickest one to me. “A gift for you, Mr. Maddox.”

It was four inches of paper, easy. “What is this?”

“Your data pull under the Freedom of Information Act. You know about that, right? Implemented into law in, ah, 1967. Didn’t touch on loosening up potential hot-button matter until ’76. FBI files and such were exempt from public scrutiny until then, and the Privacy Act of 1974 exacerbated the potential spill. Think of it: Normal people could find out FBI stuff about themselves. You should have seen the paperwork. They’d dribble out a few pages for every request, with the red flag passages, ah, inked out. Actually, they used a special brown marker designed to photocopy as dead black. Those markers cost the taxpayers $275.50 . . . each.”

“Was it a Montblanc?” I said. Nobody laughed.

Rainstone smiled and shook his head. No one present needed to be told that one way or another, the ruling class never compromises its sinecure.

“So the freedom-loving American people now had themselves a handy tool for—”

“Getting all up in their government’s shit,” said Dandine.

“You’re missing the more pertinent point,” said Rainstone. “A seeming inequity had been redressed by a new set of subrules. So, the problem had been solved, at the cost of additional bureaucracy. Every request was a special case, requiring special handling. Man-hours. Resources. Until 1982, when Reagan was able to start choking it to death. And again, in, ah, 1986. You see, most people assume that once laws are passed, those rules sit there, inviolate—and they tend to pay less attention to such laws, because Americans love the idea of victory in the short term. The capsule version, the logline, the synopsis. What our citizenry—yours and mine—often overlook is the necessity for periodic maintenance.”

“Which is where people like you slip into the gaps,” I said, because I knew Rainstone wanted me to say that, to prove I was paying attention. It all sounded too rehearsed to me.

“You seem to disapprove, Mr. Maddox. Surely someone in your line
of work can appreciate opportunism. Taking advantage is what made this country great.”

“Yeah, and it’s what made Exxon rich.” Not to mention it was making my head hurt, as Zetts might say.

Rainstone chuckled.
Engage the client on all levels. Appreciate his jokes.
“Love America, Mr. Maddox. You have the right to an independent opinion. To have unpopular ideas. To dissent, politically. The right to be left alone. The Constitution says so. Want to know the difference between you and the man you know as, ah, ‘Dandine,’ there?” He pointed at my folder. “That is your file. This is
his
file.” He held up another folder and let it drop open—empty. “Believe me, you should see your file without the black marker treatment. Which, by the way, is done by computers now, saving America a lot of imaginary money. Your
raw
file is about the girth of a very expensive, ah, dictionary.”

There in Rainstone’s hand, the fantasy. There in my grasp, the reality. The paper version of what was lurking inside the
NORCO
database, all the stuff Zetts had shown me on
NORCO
’s incredibly hard-to-access Web site.

If you think you have any privacy, any real secrets, you’re crazier than anything I’ve described.

“You’re at a standoff with
NORCO
,” said Dandine, “and we’re at a standoff with you. Again, I ask: What now?”

“Your convenient expungement of Mr. Gerardis will have the trickle-down effect of buying time,” said Rainstone. “Rather like when an ant-hill is . . . disrupted. Tell me what you want. Propose an arrangement.”

“I’m no good at that. Connie is the dealmaker, here.” He turned to me, eyebrows up. “You’re on.”

I took a very deep breath. This was my big performance. The turning point of my life I was only supposed to appreciate years later. The bold knock of opportunity, saying you’re on, kid, break a leg, godspeed, don’t fuck it up . . .