Silhouette (3 page)

*   *   *

As my aero informed me of our approach to Napa Valley and began its descent, I was wondering, as I often did, what use the old man planned to make of his burgeoning influence. I didn't dwell on it very long at this time, however, because I began thinking about the power that I possessed by virtue of being his associate. Working for this company did not seem such a ball and chain anymore, when I thought of the resources that I had at my disposal, and the new authority I now had to use them. As a result of Darien's death, I would inherit his position of tactical command over all BASS agents and operations.

I planned to use those resources, and that power, to find my daughter's killer and make him wish he had never been born.

 

3

At sunrise I was still sitting on the deck outside our bedroom, the thermal comforter pulled up to the bottom of my ears, securing most of my body from the cool March breezes that swirled more energetically at this height. A few hours before, my nose had started to feel like I was getting a cold, and now my eyes were tired and sore from tears. I had closed them for a couple of hours but had slept very little, alternately remembering Lynette and picturing my hands at the throat of her murderer, who remained faceless at this time.

Lynn had fallen asleep shortly after I dragged her into the house, and as far as I knew, she was still out cold on the bed inside. I had thought a lot about her, too, during the night, wondering if we could survive this. Every path my mind took seemed to lead back to the idea that I would have to leave BASS for us to make it, because in six years I hadn't figured out how to balance my commitment to the company and my relationship with Lynn. And I had finally admitted to myself, somewhere in those dark hours, that there was another reason why my position at BASS was such a sore spot in my conscience, and also in our relationship. I had been dragging my feet for years now in regard to Tara, an Internal Security supervisor at the castle who had been my lover before I met Lynn, and still wanted to be. Tara had told me repeatedly that she was waiting for me to return to her, and to be honest, I had not yet completely disenfranchised her of that notion. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I had actually perpetuated it in many ways. I could rationalize away my guilt in the matter, as I did for most of my night vigil: I had never initiated any contact with her outside the normal course of our work, I had not touched her inappropriately, and the one time I had given in to her pleadings and gone to dinner with her, I'd left before ending up at her apartment. But eventually all those excuses grew tired and weak, and they were pushed out of my mind by the memories of all the times I could have ended it forever, but had not. I supposed that deep down I was still cherishing the memory of Tara and me, and was hesitant to eliminate the possibility of her being there if it didn't work out with Lynn.

Did Lynn know this, somehow? I had not really faced it myself, let alone told her about my inner battles. But our relationship had seemed to grow colder when my thoughts of Tara were more frequent, and that “innocent” evening I had spent with the other woman seemed to mark a turn for the worse in our marriage. Whatever the cause, something had definitely come between Lynn and me, and I couldn't escape the feeling that I had put it there.

As my mind cycled through these thoughts in the morning light, I watched a hawk that had appeared from behind the house and was now circling between me and the spectacle of the Napa Valley, stretched out before me. Our estate sat high on Stag's Leap, a collection of high hills halfway up the valley on the east side. From this deck I could see most of the twenty square miles of estates and vineyards that constituted the largest private, safeguarded community in the world. (At least it had been the largest for a long time—I knew that in recent years many other affluent areas had begun to consolidate, imitating our model.) To my left I saw the distant sprawl of Napa City, twenty square miles of a very different kind of real estate—mostly metal and concrete, inhabited by a very different kind of resident: mostly poor and minority. The air was soupy over that lower end of the valley but clear in the north half, symbolizing the relative qualities of life for the blessed and the not so blessed.

Gazing at the crammed Napa City, I saw the pattern of lines that were sometimes the only thing visible from up here: the elevated freeways running across the city, and the thick belt of electrified metal on the north end that served as a wall between its half-million inhabitants and the estates of the valley. On this somewhat clear morning, I even made out the two breaks in the barrier where the Oak Knoll Gates, East and West, were admitting residents and their friends to the valley, but only after they underwent an ingeniously efficient security check that BASS developers had refined and updated under my supervision.

That had been my first assignment after being hired by the Rabins to bring some outside, objective expertise to their young empire. “Hopefully you will take us to the next level,” Saul had said more than once, with his vague, labored smile that seemed to imply a deeper meaning to the words. The old man had broken me in with the simple task of improving the security of the community in which they were generously building me a home. Saul wore that same mischievous smile when he talked about my new house, and I never had figured that out, either.

At the request of its residents and their powerful friends, the Napa Valley had been privatized by our company not long after the quake, the aftermath of which had brought a flood of unwelcome immigrants to the already overcrowded Napa City. Considering the manpower and technical genius at work on the security update, my first challenge was not much of one. But observing firsthand the near impossibility of any undesirables entering the valley by ground or by air gave me a confidence in my home that has endured until this day. I could mourn my daughter all night on my deck with no fear of injury—at least physically.

But now it was dawn, and the time for mourning was over. I forced myself up and out of the chair, stepped through the transteel door to the bedroom, and darkened it for Lynn's sake as I closed it behind me. I had to do all this manually, because she remained unwilling for us to use the Living House voice-command systems that were all the rage in expensive homes like ours. (“When I talk,” she said, “I like to talk to
people.
”) In the half-light that was left after I had dimmed and closed the door, I saw that she still lay on the bed, motionless. I stepped past her quietly and hit the shower.

After dressing, I leaned down near her face and said something about going into the city, but that I would stay if she needed me. She mumbled, “Go ahead,” and shifted to her other side. I thought about kissing her, but thought again, then headed downstairs and out the door to the aero. As it lifted off, I put on the glasses and tapped them until descriptions of my recent messages started scrolling in front of my eyes, but only on the far left side, so I could still see where I was going. I had left the glasses in the room during my nocturnal vigil on the deck, so two calls from Paul had gone unanswered. I played them.

“Michael, it's about four thirty. The techs are not finished yet, so I was going to tell you to relax and get some sleep. But maybe you are. I'll let you know when they're done.”

And the second one: “It's ten to six. The sim is done. I'll be here whenever you're ready.”

After I tapped the sound off, I noticed the Level Two message flashing below Paul's, so I brought up the details. The caller ID said “Hellboy,” and I knew that was one of Harris's pet names. I was shocked, because this was only the second time in several years that he had gotten through to any of us. No doubt he and his lackeys had tried many times—in fact, they probably sent hundreds of messages every day in perpetual loops—but none of those calls had ever made it past the lower levels of Net security. This one, however, like the one about a year ago, had somehow managed to swim a sea of information and emerge on the other side. It wouldn't have buzzed me directly, of course, because Level Two merely recorded the mail it permitted. But here it blinked, beckoning me to open it. I did open it—just the audio—only because I would be in the air for a while and was willing to be distracted.

“Jeopardy question: How did I do this? Egyptian in the Red Sea. Computer illiterate. You'd never understand if I told you. Don't know which breaker got through, though, so can't repeat, or threepeat, either. So on my knees I beg you,
stay
 … just a little bit longer.” He sang this last part, and not very well, but I left it on anyway.

“This is The Game. Give this Ronin back his job, and you and I, Kent and Heller redux, can play iceberg on that
Titanic
from the inside—or you do the exodus, and we nuke it from orbit. This is the Clash—“Should I Stay or Should I Go?”—but
hear me
, you are neck deep in the Inferno, I mean
the basement,
and I don't mean the Flipper's Funeral album—I mean Dante. Except Reformed, not Roman. NO. WAY. UP. The old man is the Serpent, Beelzebub, Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, the Beast, Azazel, Palpatine, Hitler, Bush III…” Some glitch in the program (sent too many times?) obscured the rest of his list, but the verbal diarrhea soon became coherent again.

“That yellow Goliath monster, always behind him on the filmatelevens, more-machine-now-than-man, kill-you-as-look-at-you. You tell me, Air Jordan, if that isn't Evil Soup, what is? The final Nine Inch Nail for me, ladies, was when he morphed the church. Primitive theistic energies had been flowing through there for a century—the labyrinth, last owned by Peaceniks, Inc., was a conduit, an ark, a server, a Salvation Army for the spiritually homeless. Fuhrer Rabin could never let anything that channels light exist in his black hole. But prayer
is
what you'll need, Mick, when he stops liking you Just the Way You Are [singing again] and morphs your ass into goo. Or maybe he'll do a mind lift, a head hijack, a brain boost, a personality pinch … jerk with your neuros and make you into someone he likes.

“And what about your Eve and her seed, man? If you're a family man, I'd leave the badlands for Olympus. They have a witness-protection program Stateside, you know. There was
a park up there
.…” He droned on, but after the mention of my family I groped at the glasses, touched the wrong button, and then just tore them off. The mental image of Lynette's face literally hurt my eyes, until I forced them open and saw only the aero's dash and the approaching puddles of the North Bay beyond it.

*   *   *

Years ago, Harris had been an agent of BASS before he quit or was fired—I've never been quite sure of the story—and now he was part media icon, part counterrevolutionary, part crime boss, and, as far as I was concerned, 100 percent freak (despite his considerable talents). He and two other disgruntled ex-peacers had led an invasion and occupation of our Red Tunnel a little over two years ago, blockading themselves inside the delta at its end and rewiring the local generators so that we couldn't turn them off. Within an hour—I am still amazed at that feat—the squatters, as we call them, were broadcasting anti-BASS propaganda in an entertaining format to every medium and market in the Bay Area and beyond.

Because of the immediate mass attention to and interest in Harris's sideshow, we hesitated in implementing our original plan to wipe him off the face of the earth, out of fear that it would make him a martyr. And because the popularity of his shtick has remained and grown, we have been hesitating ever since, leaving him and his band to themselves.

This was Darien's call, but we all agreed that so far the tattooed cyber punk had been more media curiosity than political danger, as evidenced by his bizarre dialect. The repeated references from the history of the popular arts—especially from the twentieth century, which to him and his ilk was the “sacred dawn of modern media”—were partly a result of his total immersion in the old video and audio he interspersed with his “social commentary.” But he also received royalties, credited automatically over the Net, whenever he mentioned a company's product on the air. We speculated that this, along with criminal activities during their forays into the city, was the primary source of income for the squatters.

Knowing that the Harris problem was an assumable project that would fall to me, now that Darien was gone, I put the glasses back on and made a note to reevaluate our current policy, after D and my daughter had been avenged.

*   *   *

As my aero approached the castle, I studied it and the buildings around it more than usual, the message from Harris reminding me of their uniqueness. This was another of the elder Rabin's most significant accomplishments, because of its enduring symbolic value—the transformation of Nob Hill, high atop the city, into an imposing base of operations. The remains of the Fairmont Hotel and the Pacific Men's Club building, both ruined by the earthquake, had been leveled to make room for the big building, which consumed that real estate and the land next to it, which was formerly Huntington Park.

The Mayor didn't raze the damaged landmark Grace Cathedral, however, but merely removed its guts and replaced them with the most technologically impressive jail ever built. He repaired the dark Gothic exterior of the cathedral and basically kept it looking the same, to serve as an omen of warning for those contemplating criminal activity. He kept part of the name, too, calling it Grace Confinement Center. In one of his few statements to the media, he had defended this perverse transmogrification of the church by calling it “a needed symbol—this is a time for
action
rather than meditation.” And he even defended the seemingly oxymoronic name of the jail by saying, with his trademark smirk, “It
is
grace, because they could be dead, but they're only locked up!”