“Andre, my chef,” Hollister says, “is an adjusted person. He is obsessed with food. He lives only to cook.”
If the term “adjusted person” strikes Thomas Buckle as odd, he gives no indication of puzzlement.
After a sip of wine, Hollister continues. “According to friends of hers, Jane became obsessed with proving her husband, Nick, didn’t commit suicide, that he was murdered, and when she took a leave of absence from the FBI, she devoted herself to investigating Nick’s death. On the other hand, authorities and media say she was merely putting up a good front to divert suspicion from her role in his death. We’re told she drugged him and got him into the bathtub and slit his throat, cutting his carotid artery with his Marine Ka-Bar knife in such a way that it looked to the coroner as if he’d taken his own life. But what if that’s all a lie?”
Buckle is intrigued. “What if is the essence of storytelling. So what if?”
Hollister continues with relish. “Jane told friends that in her research she found a fifteen percent increase in suicides during the past few years, that all of it involved well-liked, stable people successful in their professions, happy in their relationships, none with a history of depression, people like her husband.”
“A few nights ago,” Tom Buckle says, “on that TV show Sunday Magazine, they did an hour about Hawk. They included experts who said the rate of suicide isn’t constant. It goes up, goes down. And all this about happy people killing themselves isn’t the case.”
“Remember my ‘what if,’ Tom. What if it’s all a lie, and some in the media are part of it? What if Jane Hawk is on to something, and they need to demonize her with false charges, silence her?”
“You see this as a conspiracy story.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, then it would sure be a conspiracy of unprecedented proportions.”
“Unprecedented,” Hollister agrees. “Heroic. Involving thousands of powerful people in government and the private sector. Let’s say these conspirators called themselves … Techno Arcadians.”
“Arcadia. From ancient Greece. A place of peace, innocence, prosperity. Essentially Utopia.”
Hollister beams and claps his hands twice. “You are just the young man to understand my story.”
“But why ‘techno’?”
“Do you know what nanotechnology is, Tom?”
“Very tiny machines made up of a handful of atoms, or maybe molecules. They say it’s the future, with unlimited medical and industrial applications.”
“You are so cutting-edge,” Hollister declares and pushes a call button on the table leg. “When I saw your films, I said ‘This is a guy on the cutting edge,’ and I’m delighted to see I was right.”
In answer to the silent summons, Mai-Mai returns to freshen their wine and remove the empty plates that held the Parmesan crisps.
Thomas Buckle smiles at her and thanks her, but he seems to have intuited that the proper behavior in these circumstances is to treat her with reserve, not as if she were working at Olive Garden.
The entertainment business hasn’t coarsened him yet, for though Mai-Mai fascinates and attracts him, he watches her not with evident lust, but with an almost adolescent wistfulness and yearning.
When the two men are alone once more, Hollister says, “Let’s suppose these conspirators, these Techno Arcadians, have developed a nanomachine brain implant, a control mechanism, that makes complete puppets of the people in whom it’s installed. And the puppets don’t know what’s been done to them, don’t know they’re now … property.”
The director blinks, blinks, and a certain quiet excitement comes over him that has nothing to do with six hundred million dollars, that arises from his passion for filmmaking.
“So … central to the story would be the issue of free will. A conspiracy intent on subjugating all humanity, the death of freedom, a sort of technologically imposed slavery.”
Hollister grins like an amateur author thrilled that a real writer found merit in his scenario. “You like it so far?”
“I damn well do. I like it more by the minute. Even though Jane Hawk inspired the idea, we can’t say this is her story, so we’d have to change the character to maybe a CIA agent or something, make her a little older. Maybe it’s even a male lead. But one thing … why would anyone submit to having such a brain implant surgically installed?”
Leaning forward again, punctuating his revelation with a wink, Hollister speaks in a stage whisper. “No surgery required. You drug them or otherwise overpower them when they’re alone, and the implant is administered by injection.”
4
JANE HAWK HURRIED OUT OF THE STORAGE ROOM. Milky daylight spilled through a large sales area and curdled to gray in a hallway. Two doors stood open on each side of the hall, a shadowy bath and dark empty offices.
At the front of the store, two frosted-glass show windows each bore the words CLASSIC PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY painted in script, reversed from her perspective. Between the windows stood a door with a frosted inlay, and as she approached it, a man shape loomed beyond like a stalker emerging out of fog in a disturbing dream.
He must be one of them. She’d have to take him down to get to the street and away, but even if he was a mortal threat, she could not risk resorting to gunfire when there were sure to be pedestrians on the sidewalk.
The tall man in the raincoat might already be entering the back of the place from the alleyway.
Jane’s attention swung toward an interior door to her right, four panels of solid wood, no glass. If it was only a closet, she was cornered.
Instead, beyond lay stairs ascending into gloom. In nearly blinding darkness, she used the handrail to guard against a fall until she arrived at a landing. Another flight led up to a second landing where pale light issued from an open door.
Perhaps the photographer who had once run a business out of the ground floor had lived above his studio.
Considering that the people closing in on her seemed to have herded her into this building, one of them might be waiting in the second-floor apartment.
Her heart labored but didn’t race, for she was in the grip of dread rather than full-blown fright. If these were Arcadians—and who else could they be?—they were not going to kill her here. They were going to corner her, Taser her, chloroform her, and convey her to a secure facility where she could scream herself hoarse without being heard by anyone sympathetic to her plight.
Ultimately they were going to inject her with the neural lace that would web her brain and enslave her. Then they would drain from her the names of everyone who had been of assistance to her in this crusade and would insist upon knowing the whereabouts of her five-year-old son, Travis. When she was their obedient puppet, they would eventually instruct her to kill herself.
But not just herself. She knew these elitist creeps. She knew the icy coldness of their minds, the blackness of their hearts, the pure contempt with which they viewed those who did not share their misanthropic view of humanity and did not endorse their narcissism. They would relish cruel vengeance for the trouble she had caused them, for their comrades who had tried to murder her and had been killed instead. They would instruct her to torture her own child and slaughter him; only when he was brutally ravaged and dead would they tell her to kill herself. In the thrall of the nanoweb, with its filaments wound through her brain, she would be unable to resist even the most horrific of their commands.
Compared to injection, a quick death would be a mercy.
She put her tote beside the open door. Drew the Heckler & Koch Compact .45 from the rig under her sport coat. She hated clearing doorways in such situations, but there was no time to hesitate.