Time Bomb (22 page)

I turned the knob, stepped into a large, peak-ceilinged room, the planks and cross-beams painted white. Dark hardwood floor. Three walls of blond birch paneling; the fourth, a bank of sliding glass doors that looked out to a small backyard that was mostly cement driveway. A silver-gray Honda sat in front of a corrugated aluminum garage door.

The glass gave the room an indoor-outdoor look. What realtors used to call a lanai, back in the days when they were peddling tropical dreams. What had become, in this age of transience and marital fracture, the family room.

The Burden family room was big and cold and devoid of furniture. Devoid of nearly everything, except for six-figures’ worth of stereo equipment arranged in a bank against one of the birch walls. Black-matte cases, black-glass instrument panels. Dials and digital readouts bleeping green and yellow and scarlet and gas-flame blue. Oscilloscopic sine waves. Fluctuating columns of liquid laser. Pinpoints of bouncing light.

Amps and preamps, tuners, graphic equalizers, bass-boosters, treble-clarifiers, filters, a reel-to-reel tape player, a pair of cassette decks, a pair of turntables, a compact disc player, a laser-disc player. All of it connected via a tangle of cable to a Stonehenge arrangement of black, fabric-faced speaker columns. Eight obelisks, spread throughout the room, big enough to project a heavy metal band into the bleachers of a baseball stadium.

A string quartet flowed out at medium volume.

Three quarters of a quartet. Both violin parts and the viola.

Mahlon Burden sat on a backless stool in the center of the room cradling a cello. Playing by ear, eyes closed, swaying in tempo, thin lips pursed as if for a kiss. He had on a white shirt, dark trousers, black socks, white canvas tennis shoes. His shirt sleeves were bunched carelessly at the elbows. Gray stubble flecked his chin, and his hair looked unkempt.

Seemingly unaware of my presence, he played on, fingers assuming positions along the ebony board, bearing down, quivering with vibrato. Floating the bow across the strings in a horsehair caress. Controlling his volume so perfectly that the cello meshed seamlessly with the recorded sounds regurgitated by the speakers.

Man and machine. Man as machine.

To my ears he was good, symphony quality or close to it. But I was put off by the sterile staginess of the whole thing.

I was here to exhume, not to be serenaded. But I heard him out, kept waiting for him to make a mistake—some flaw in tempo or sour tone that would justify an intrusion.

He kept playing perfectly. I endured an entire movement. When the piece was finished he kept his eyes closed but flexed his bow arm and took a deep breath.

Before I could say anything, the next movement began, opening with an arpeggiated solo by the first violin. Burden smiled as if meeting an old friend, readied his bow.

I said, “Mr. Burden.”

He opened his eyes.

I said, “Very pretty.”

He gave me a blank look and his face twitched. The second violin joined in. Then the viola. He glanced back at the columnar speakers, as if making eye contact with their fabric faces could somehow forestall the inevitable—forestall what he’d initiated.

The moment for the cello’s entry arrived. The music flowed, exquisite but incomplete. Unsettling. Like a beautiful woman without a conscience.

Burden gave one last look of regret, then stood, put his cello in its case, then the bow. Out of a trouser pocket came a small black remote-control module.

A single button push.

Fade to black.

The silence emptied the room of more than music. I noticed for the first time that the birch paneling was really some kind of photoprinted plyboard. The scuffmarks on the hardwood stood out harsh as keloid scars. The sliding glass door hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Through the cloudy panes, the concrete and grass view was depressing.

Family room
without a family.

He said, “I play every day without fail. Concentrate on the technically challenging pieces.”

“You play very well.”

Nod. “At one time I had ambitions of doing it for a living. But it’s not a very good living unless one is extremely lucky. I never counted on luck.”

Uttered with more pride than bitterness. He walked over to the stereo bank.

“I believe in doing things systematically, Dr. Delaware. That’s my main talent, actually. I’m not much in terms of innovation, but I do know how to put things together. To create systems. And to use them optimally.”

He fondled the equipment, then began delivering a lecture on each of the components. Waiting out delay tactics was one of
my
talents. I just stood there and listened.

“. . . so you might be asking yourself, why two cassette players? This one”—he pointed— “is conventional magnetic tape, but
this
one is DAT. Digital audio tracking. State of the art. The inventors hope to compete with CDs, though I’m not yet convinced. Still, the sound quality is impressive. I had a prototype a full year before it hit the market. It interfaces quite well with the rest of the system. Sometimes that’s a problem: Components will meet individual specifications but not blend well with other members of the system. Like an instrument that’s been tuned to itself with no regard for the rest of the orchestra. Acceptable only in a very limited context. The key is to approach life with a conductor’s perspective. The whole greater than its parts.”

He moved his hand as if wielding a baton.

I gave him a dose of therapist’s silence.

He stroked a black glass face and said, “I suppose you’ll want to know about our origins—Holly’s origins.”

“That would be a good start.”

“Come with me.”

We walked down the hallway. He opened the first door on the left and we entered a white-walled room with a single window covered with gray drapes. The drapes were drawn. Light came from a spindly chrome halogen lamp in one corner. The carpeting was an extension of the green I’d seen in the living room.

From the size and placement I guessed it had once been the master bedroom. He’d converted it into an office: one wall of sliding mirrored closet doors and, against the other three, white Formica cabinet modules arranged in a U, shelves on top, cabinets on the bottom, black Formica work space sandwiched in between. The shelves were filled with boxes of floppy disks, computer manuals, software manuals, hard-disk replacement units, stationery, office supplies, and books—mostly reference works. One entire wall was given over to phone directories—hundreds of them. Conventional, business only, something called the
Cole Reverse,
compendia of
ZIP
codes, and a hand-lettered volume entitled ZIPS:
SUBANALYS.

The walls behind the desk tops were lined with power strips—a continuous stripe of electrical outlets, each connected to something by stout black cable: three PC work-stations, each with a brushed-steel and black vinyl secretary chair, battery backup, laser printer, and phone modem. An additional ten multiline phones, five connected to more modems and fax machines, the others to automatic answering machines; a trio of automatic dialers; a huge batch-copying Xerox machine sunk into one of the cabinets, only the top half of its bulky chassis visible; a smaller, desktop copier, an automatic check-writer, an electronic postage meter. Other apparatus I couldn’t identify.

The room buzzed and hummed and flashed, phones ringing twice before answering machines kicked in. Fax machines excreting sheets of paper at odd intervals, each sheet falling neatly into a collecting bin. The computer monitors displayed amber rows of letters and numbers bunched in groups of four and five—an incomprehensible series of alpha-numeric codes that moved across the screen in tiny increments, like cars in a traffic jam.

A herky-jerky electromagnetic kinesis that worked hard at simulating life.

Burden looked proud—paternally proud. His clothes blended with the room. Black-and-white camouflage.

This was where he went to disappear.

“My nerve center,” he said. “The hub of my enterprises.”

“Mailing lists?”

He nodded. “As well as marketing consultations to other corporations—demographic targeting. Give me a
ZIP
code and I’ll tell you worlds about a person. Give me a street address and I’ll go a good deal further—predict trends. It’s what led me to this.”

Another conductor’s flourish as he slid open a drawer, removed a booklet, and handed it to me.

Heavy stock. Glossy. A title in bright-yellow computer-type lettering:
New Frontiers Technology, Ltd.
over a jet-black banner.

Below the title, an ostentatiously muscular dark-haired man, naked from the waist up and wearing yellow Spandex pants, straddled a meter-laden exercise machine. Cords ran from the equipment to a yellow belt around his waist and to a matching sweatband. His deltoids, pecs, and biceps were hypertrophied meat-carvings. Veins popped as if worms had burrowed under his skin; every bead of perspiration stood out in vitreous bas-relief. His smile said pain was the ultimate high. Behind him, a similarly hewn blond woman in a yellow body suit and a belt/headband hookup created a marathon blur on a cross-country skiing machine—not unlike the one I had at home. The cords and headgear made them resemble candidates for electrocution.

I turned a page. Mail-order catalogue. One of those yuppy-stroking affairs that seemed to arrive in the mail every day. I thought I remembered throwing this one out.

You were on the mental health specialist list.

I had bought my ski machine from a catalogue. But not this one . . .

Burden was staring at me, prouder than ever. Waiting. I knew what I was expected to do. Why not? All part of the job.

I examined the catalogue.

The inside cover was a two-paragraph letter above a color photo of a handsome, broad-shouldered man in his mid-thirties. He had wavy hair, luxuriant walrus mustaches, and a clipped beard—the Schweppes man in his prime. He wore a pink button-down shirt with a perfect collar roll, blue foulard, and saddle-leather braces, and had been posed in a clubby atmosphere: mahogany-paneled room, high-backed leather chair, carved leather-topped desk. On the desk were an antique hourglass, brass nautical instruments, a blue-shaded banker’s lamp, and a cut-crystal inkwell. Baronial oil portraits hung in the background. I could almost smell the sealing wax.

Under the letter was a fountain pen signature, elaborate and illegible. The photo caption identified him as Gregory Graff, Esq., Chief Consulting Officer of New Frontiers Technology, Limited, headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut. The letter was concise but friendly, just this side of preachy. Extolling the virtues of vitamins, exercise, balanced nutrition, self-defense, and meditative relaxation. What Graff called the “New Age Actualization Life-style for Today’s Striving Man and Woman.” The second paragraph was a pitch for this month’s New Products, offered at special discount for those who ordered early. The facing page was an order form complete with an 800 number and the assurance that “purchase specialists” were standing by to take calls twenty-four hours a day.

The catalogue was divided into sections marked by blue-tabbed index pages. I turned to the first. “Body and Soul.” An assortment of iron-pumping gizmos that would have done the Inquisition proud, demonstrated by the sculpted couple on the cover, followed by nirvana-nostrums for the post-exhaustion wind-down: massage oil, air-purifiers, wave machines, white-noise simulators, little black boxes that promised to change the atmosphere in any home into one that stimulated “alpha-wave meditation.” An electric “Tibetan Harmony Bell, re-creating one developed centuries ago in the Himalayas to capture the unique harmonies and overtones of high-altitude wind currents.”

Section Two was “Beauty and Balance.” Organic cosmetics, high-fiber cookies and candies, little yellow bottles of beta-carotene powder, lecithin capsules, bee pollen, zinc lozenges, water-purifying crystals, amino-acid combos, something new called “NiteAfter 100” that claimed to repair physiological damage wrought by “the 3 Deadly P’s: pollution, pigging-out, and partying.” Pills for sleeping soundly, for waking up cheerful, for enhancing “personal power during business meetings and power lunches.” A mineral concoction that claimed to “restore psychophysiological homeostasis and enhance individual tranquillity”—presumably during bathroom breaks.

Next came “Style and Substance.” Clothing and accessories in exotic hides and brushed steel. A programmable, self-locking and -opening “Briefcase With a Brain”; pseudo-antique accoutrements “conceived for the 21st Century and beyond”; pre-distressed aviator jackets; Mega-Sweat Personal Sauna warm-up suits, a symphony in nylon, latex, Teflon, down-fill, napa-lamb, and cashmere.

Four was “Access and Excel,” which seemed to translate to geegaws the world had done quite well without till now. Voice-activated car starters, self-cooling oven mitts, motorized bagel slicers, chamois microwave covers, everything monogrammable for a modest extra charge. I zipped through and was about to close the catalogue when the title of the last section caught my eye: “Life and Limb.”

A study in style-conscious paranoia. Bugging devices, hidden tape recorders, phone-tap detectors, infrared cameras and binoculars for “turning your adversary’s night into your day.” Privacy Locks for conventional phones. Direct-link phones in hot-line red (“Take control of Ma Bell. Talk only when you want and to whom you want”). Polygraphic “stressmeters” camouflaged as transistor radios that promised to “unscramble and digitalize the double and multiple meanings in other people’s communications.” Voice-modifiers, footstep-triggered attack dog tapes (“Choose from 345D. Doberman, 345S. Alsatian Shepherd, or 345R. Rottweiler”). Ultra-thin paper shredders that fit into an attaché case. Cameras that looked like pens. Radios that looked like pens. Packets of dehydrated “Survival Cuisine.” A reprise of the water-purifying crystals. When l got to the New Age Graphite-Handled Swiss Army knife with Mini-Surgical Array, I closed the catalogue.

“Very interesting.” I held it out to Burden.

He shook his head. “Keep it, Doctor. My compliments. You’ve been receiving it for five months but haven’t ordered anything yet. Perhaps a closer look will change your mind.”