Crisscross rj-8

by F. Paul Wilson

  Thus the cabin. Isolate him. Let him sink or swim. Jensen had arranged it. He'd also arranged a way to keep Blascoe from bolting the cabin.

  The TP brigade, of course, knew nothing of this. They'd been told they were monitoring the home of a Wall Addict who was out to destroy the Church. Nothing more. Only Jensen and Brady had the codes to activate and access the AV feeds. TPs like Hutchison and Lewis merely kept an eye on the telemetry telltales, and called Jensen when something lit up.

  Like tonight.

  "We're not so much after the WA himself as much as the people visiting him at the moment. One of them is Jamie Grant; the other is the guy who snatched her from under your noses."

  "We're packing heat for them!" Hutch said.

  Jensen shook his head. Packing heat… Jesus.

  "We don't know what we're heading into. We have reason to believe the man has mob ties."

  Lewis jerked around. "The mob? What the fu—?"

  "Exactly what Mr. Brady and I want to know. The weaponry is just a precaution. I do not want anyone shot—I have a lot of questions for the man—but I do not want anyone getting away with a recording of whatever they're discussing up there. If—"

  "Hey,' Hutch said as the car eased forward. "Looks like we're starting to move."

  Jensen peered ahead. The jam seemed to be breaking up. Good. They still had a ways to go.

  "Think it's gonna matter?" Lewis said. "They've gotta be gone by now."

  Jensen shook his head. "No, they're still up there. The WA we've been watching has a long story, and it's going to take some time to tell."

  "But if they're smart they'll get him out of there and to a safe house where they won't be interrupted."

  "Not if the WA refuses to leave."

  And he wouldn't dare.

  19

  "I've gotten kind of used to weird," Jack told Blascoe, "so don't hold back. Lay it on as thick as you need."

  He leaned forward and focused on the old man. A slew of questions were about to be answered—he hoped.

  "It's pretty thick. I think I told you about Brady being land crazy. He's always buying or trying to buy pieces of property here and there. He sells this one to buy that one. At first I thought it was just a random shuffle, something he liked to do. Then I caught on that he was after specific parcels. I figured, well, it's as good a way as any to invest the Church's extra cash. Land prices are always going up, right?"

  "Those specific parcels are indicated on the globe, right?" Jack said.

  "I didn't know that back then but, yeah, right. That's why he's turned Dormentalism into a money machine: so he can buy these pieces of land. Some are cheap, but some are in prime commercial districts. Others are in countries that don't like foreigners owning their land, and so a lot of palms have to be greased. And still others… well, some folks just don't want to sell."

  Jamie leaned forward. "What's he do then?"

  "He keeps upping his offers to the point where all but a very few diehards give in."

  "What about those diehards?"

  "I don't know about all of them, but I can tell you about one couple. Their name was Masterson and they owned a farm in Pennsylvania that Brady wanted. Well, it had been in their family for generations and they weren't selling for any price. Brady said he'd settle for a certain piece of it but they wouldn't even sell him that. So Brady asks for a face-to-face meet with them and offers an all-expense-paid trip to the city, luxury hotel, the works, just to sit down with him. They accept."

  Blascoe's comment that the couple's name was Masterson gave Jack an ominous feeling.

  Jamie raised her eyebrows. "And?"

  "And someone pushes them in front of a subway."

  "Oh, jeez," Jack said. "I remember reading about that last year."

  Jamie had gone pale. "I did a piece on it. They never caught the guy. Everyone assumed he was just another MDP." She looked at Blascoe. "Do you have any proof that Brady was connected?"

  "Nothing that would stand up in court, but I remember Jensen telling him the news and hearing Brady say something about giving a TP named Lewis a bonus."

  Jack had heard the Dormentalists were ruthless, but this, if it was true… it put a whole new spin on who he was dealing with.

  He looked at Jamie. "We should get out of here."

  "Hey," Blascoe said, "I haven't got to the weird part yet. Dig: Those white lights don't get lit when he buys the land. He powers them up only after he's buried one of his weird concrete pillars on the site."

  He had Jack's attention. "What kind of weird?"

  "Well, as I understand it—I'm not supposed to know this, you know; got most of it by listening while they thought I was out of it. Anyway, the concrete's gotta be made with a certain kind of sand, and the column's gotta be inscribed with all sorts of weird symbols. And then they've gotta put something else inside it before they can bury it."

  "Like what?" Jack said.

  "I never learned that."

  "What kind of symbols?"

  "I saw a drawing of a column once. Same kind of symbols as on the wall behind his globe. They're kind of like—"

  "I've seen them."

  Blascoe's eyes widened. "You have? How the hell—?"

  "Not important. I need to know what Brady's trying to accomplish with these columns."

  "You need to know?"

  "Yeah. Need." Jack wasn't in the mood for chitchat. "So let's hear it: What's he up to?"

  "I haven't a clue. He's burying the damn things all over the world and I don't have the faintest idea why."

  "Didn't you ask?"

  "Course I asked. Started asking a couple years ago, but Brady always dodged an answer. He was keeping stuff from me. Me! The fucking founder! When I got in his face about it, Brady tried to distract me with women and booze and drugs. But that wasn't gonna work. Hey, I'm older now. I've experienced just about everything I ever wanted to. Maybe more.

  "But the globe was just the fuse that lit me up. Dormentalism was my baby but it had changed to the point where I no longer recognized it. No, forget recognizing it—I was embarrassed by it. Do you know that to reach the upper levels you not only have to spend a fortune, but you've got to swear off sex! Yeah, you heard me, to reach the High Council you have to become some sort of fucking eunuch—nice turn of phrase, don't you think?—which turns off all but the most fanatically devoted."

  Jamie flashed her yellowed grin. "I love this!"

  Blascoe poked a finger into the air. "Yeah, Brady's supposed to be abstinent too, but I found out he's got a place—not too far from here, as a matter of fact—that nobody knows about. And that means not even his innermost circle on the High Council. That's because they aren't looking. I was. It's a place where I'm pretty sure he does stuff he doesn't want anyone to know about."

  Jack didn't give a damn about Brady's personal life. He could be dressing sheep in black garter belts and getting jiggy with them for all he cared. It was more tasty grist for Jamie's mill but provided no answers for Jack.

  "Let's get back to the columns," he said. "Brady gave you no clue as to what's up with them?"

  "He did say that the globe wasn't so much a map as a blueprint. It shows where the columns must go."

  "So every bulb shows where he has buried or intends to bury a column."

  "All except the reds. No columns go where the red bulbs are."

  "Why not?"

  He shrugged. "Before 1 could find out, he and Jensen dumped me here."

  Jack unfolded the skin flap again. He studied the pattern of red and white scars and the lines connecting them, trying to superimpose the continental outlines. But he had no reference points. He needed another look at that globe. He wanted to know what the red dots meant. He had a feeling they were key.

  Jamie was speaking in her reporter voice. "You say Brady and Jensen 'dumped' you here. I don't understand. Are you a prisoner?"

  Blascoe nodded. "Better believe it."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'm stupid. Bec
ause I'm sick. And because I thought I was too important to mess with. Wrong again. I wanted to get Dormentalism back to the simple, hedonistic, mellow, hippie thing it started out to be, but I could see neither Brady nor the High Council was going to go for that willingly, so I figured I'd give 'em a kick in the ass to get them moving. I threatened to go public with my cancer and everything I knew about their money-grubbing racket. Said I'd call a press conference to announce I'd had lung cancer but I'd been cured by radiation and chemotherapy instead of my xelton, and how my xelton couldn't cure me because there's no such thing as a xelton—I made it all up.

  "So they locked me away and made up that bullshit about me putting myself in suspended animation."

  "You said you were cured?"

  He gave her a death's head grin. "Sure as hell don't look cured, do I. That's because the cure wasn't. The tumor's back. Now they especially don't want me to be seen. Don't want me wasting away in public."

  "Isn't there anything you can do?" Jamie said. "Chemotherapy or—?"

  "Too late. I figure from the color of my pee that it's in my liver—had hepatitis once so I know how that goes—and dying is better than living through more rounds of chemo with no guarantee of success. I'm just gonna let nature take its course. That's me: the original Mr. Natural."

  Jamie said, "Why do you stay here? I don't see any bars on the windows, no locks on the door. Why don't you just walk out?"

  Blascoe raised his head and Jack saw a strange look in his eyes.

  "I would…" He lifted his shirt and pointed to a silver-dollar-sized lump on the right side of his abdomen, southwest of his navel. "Except for this."

  Jamie craned her neck forward. "What is it?"

  "A bomb. A miniature bomb."

  20

  Jensen leaned forward and tapped Hutch on the shoulder. "Ease back on the speed."

  "Just trying to make up for lost time."

  "You won't be making up anything if you hydroplane us into a ditch."

  They were heading west—swimming west was more like it—on 84. The normal speed limit was sixty-five but only an idiot would try that in this downpour.

  "Who is this WA anyway?" Lewis said.

  "You don't need to know his name, just that he's dangerous. He knows too much dirt—damaging dirt."

  "Pardon my saying," Lewis said, "but how bad can it be? What can he know that deserves this kind of surveillance?"

  The question was out of line, but he wanted these guys in skin-saving mode—not just the Church's skin but their own as well.

  "Oh, let's see," Jensen drawled. "What about the time you told that Bible thumper, Senator Washburn, that unless he directed the Finance Committee's interest away from the Church, paternity test results on tissue from his closest aide's recent abortion would be made public? Dirty enough for you? Or what about the time Hutch threatened the daughter of that DD who was going to take the Church to court? And here's the icing on the cake, Lewis: He knows about that couple you shoved onto the tracks. What was their name again?"

  "The Mastersons." Lewis's swallow was audible all the way to the back seat. "Shit."

  Jensen was exaggerating. Blascoe suspected a few things, and could make it mighty uncomfortable for the Church if he started speculating in public, but that wasn't the real reason he'd been isolated.

  "And those are just the tip of the iceberg."

  The onJy sound in the car was the patter of the rain and the swish of the wipers.

  Good, Jensen thought. That shut them up. He glanced at the glowing dial of his watch. It was a sixty-six-mile trip from the city to the cabin. In off-peak traffic it could be done in a little over an hour. They were well past the hour mark. But even with the rain and the reduced speed, it wouldn't be long now.

  21

  "Get out," Jamie said as she stared at the lump under the pale, flabby skin. She saw a pink line of scar tissue next to it. He had to be running a number on them. "A bomb?"

  Blascoe nodded. "Yep. If I go more than a thousand feet from the house—they've got the line marked with wire—this will explode."

  "What's the point?" Jack said.

  "Well, as Jensen put it, this raises a minimum-security facility to maximum."

  Jamie frowned, still staring at the lump. She couldn't take her eyes off it. "How did they—?"

  "Get it in there?" He shrugged. "Jensen kept me under lock and key for a while after I threatened to go public. Then one day he drugs me up and hauls me off somewhere. I don't know where exactly because I conked out before we got there. I woke up here, in one of the bedrooms. I was hurting and when I looked down I saw a bunch of stitches and this lump.

  "Brady and Jensen were here. They told me this place was gonna be my home till I came to my senses. They told me about the bomb and—"

  Jack's eyebrows shot up. "And you believed them? For all you know that's just a couple-three big steel washers glued together."

  "It's not." Blascoe's eyes were suddenly bright with tears. "They proved that to me the first day."

  "How?"

  "My dog."

  Jamie gasped as her heart twisted in her chest. "Oh, no. I don't think I want to hear this."

  "He was a mutt I'd had since he was a pup," Blascoe was saying. "I called him Bart because he was always getting into trouble like Bart Simpson. Anyway, Jensen taped one of these bombs to Bart's collar. I was still groggy from the anesthesia so I wasn't really following. I watched as Jensen teased Bart with this ball, then threw it past the thousand-foot mark." Blas-coe's face screwed up and he sobbed. A tear rolled down his cheek. "Blew poor Bart to pieces."

  Jamie felt her own eyes puddling up. "Bastards."

  She glanced over at Jack. He said nothing, simply stared at Blascoe with a stony expression.

  Blascoe sobbed again. "Lots of times I think about crossing that line myself just to end it all, but I haven't got the guts."

  Finally Jack spoke. "This means they've got perimeter sensors, and that means they probably know we're here. You can take it to the bank that someone—a number of someones—are on their way here." He looked at Jamie. "We've got to go."

  She pointed to Blascoe. "But we can't leave him!"

  "Why not? This is where he lives now." He tossed Blascoe's joint into his lap. "We'll leave him as we found him."

  "But they'll kill him!"

  "If they wanted to kill him, they wouldn't have bothered with this elaborate setup."

  "But don't you see? Now that I've got his story, they have to kill him. Once I publish it, these woods will be crawling with people looking for him. They can't risk his being found."

  Jack was staring at Blascoe. "They still won't kill you, will they?"

  Blascoe shrugged. "Can't say. To tell the truth, I don't much care. Haven't got much time left anyway, and going quick sounds a lot better than getting eaten from the inside out. I think Brady would've had Jensen off me at the git-go when I started making trouble. But too many of his lackeys on the High Council knew I was alive and not so well, and after all, I am the Father of Dormentalism and that would be… unthinkable. They really believe in this shit. So he convinced them to exile me, like Napoleon. Probably rationalized it to them by labeling me with one of their stinking acronyms and isolating me for the good of the Church. I don't think his High Council cronies know about the bomb—that was Jensen's idea."

  "So what you're telling me is there's a good chance they'll send you to the Hokano world for real."

  Another shrug. "Yeah. I guess so. But you folks'd better go while you've got the chance, or sure as shit you'll both turn up missing."

  Jack looked around. "Jensen's demo with your dog proves .there's a trigger transmitter nearby. If we can—"

  "Find it? Don't waste your time. I've been searching for it since day one and never found it. And I was looking in daylight, not in the dark in a rainstorm."

  "Ever think about getting a knife and cutting it out?" Jack said. "It's just under the skin."

  Jamie's stomach turned at
the thought. The idea of cutting into your own flesh—she shuddered. Didn't want to go there.

  "Can't say as I have. 'Specially since Jensen warned me about just such a thing. Told me if the bomb's surface temperature drops five degrees—blamr

  Jack was silent for a few seconds, then, "What if we cut it out and dunk it into a bowl of hot water?"

  "Whoa," Jamie said. "What if it drops five degrees while we're doing it? Then all three of us will go."

  Without taking his eyes off Blascoe, Jack reached into a pocket and pulled out a folded knife. He snapped it open with a flick of his wrist, revealing a wicked-looking four-inch stainless steel serrated blade.

  "I'm game if you are."

  Blascoe stared at the blade. He swallowed, but said nothing.

  "Don't you want to kick their asses?" Jack said. "With Jamie's story and you to back it up on the talk show circuit, you can nail these bozos right where they live. Slice and dice them and stir-fry them for dinner."

  "Is it gonna hurt?" Blascoe said.

  Jack nodded. "Yeah. But this baby's sharp and I'll be quick like a bunny."

  The old man licked his lips and took a long pull on the Cuervo. "Okay. Let's do it."

  Jamie tasted bile at the back of her throat. "I'm not good with blood."

  Jack waggled the knife in her direction. "Don't wimp out on me now."

  22

  Jack stuck the blade of his Spyderco Endura into the water he'd nuked to boiling in the microwave. From the front room he heard Jamie muttering as she sloshed tequila onto the skin over the lump in Blascoe's flank.

  When the water stopped bubbling he poured it into a small aluminum pot.

  "Not exactly sterile conditions," he said as he carried the hot water into the other room. "But we'll go straight from here to a doctor I know who'll load you up with antibiotics."

  Blascoe lay stretched out on the couch, his shirt pulled up to nipple level.

  "Let's just get on with it," he said.

  Jamie looked up. "What about stitches?"

  Jack already had that figured. "We just tie a sheet around him. That'll hold the edges together. The doc will place the sutures."