A Dark Perfection

by James, Mark

  “And what’s that?”

  Emile slid the page back across. Garneau looked down, not understanding.

  “For you, Henri, the pentagram symbol is now upside down. The inverted pentagram.”

  “Yes?”

  “The inverted pentagram has an inverted meaning, away from what it first was.”

  Garneau looked down at the upside down pentagram, its point downwards.

  “The Dark One, Mephistopheles, Hades,” Dagneaux smiled. “The symbol for Satan, old friend.”

  †

  How many days? How many sessions?

  Aisha had lost track – the white room, the white halls, all of the faces covered in white masks, all in white lab coats – all swirling together into an enveloping white cloud. Even the fire alarm had been a welcome distraction.

  Was she in a mental ward? Did anyone know she was even here?

  Seeing O’Neill was the only thing keeping her from going insane. Their banter, the parries, she needed them to keep the dark images at bay. And wasn’t he the one who’d saved her from the fire, rushed her to safety and fought for her medicines when she was ill?

  Yet still, the small voice said, we must never let him know…

  O’Neill sat across from her, writing on a pad.

  “Is that about me?”

  “No,” he said, continuing to write, “something else.”

  He looked up. “You don’t believe me?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He pushed the pad forward. “Take a look.”

  “No,” she said, folding her arms, “I don’t need to.”

  He’d been bluffing. The scribbles were nothing.

  It bothered her that she didn’t have his full attention. She had started to need.

  “So, what do you want to talk about?” she asked, feigning confidence.

  “Hmm, let’s see…”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Well?” she coaxed.

  “I watched the Bears game today. Good game. They’re four-and-one, you know. Shocking.”

  “What? The Bears, who?”

  He ignored her. It had been a ruse to coax her to ask a question, any question.

  “Alright, then, what do you want to talk about?” he said. “Anything, your call.”

  “You simply want me to talk?”

  “What’s the harm? Say whatever you want. The Bears, a painting you once saw, a good memory – your call.”

  “Ah, yes, my call,” she mocked quietly. “And this is all just a friendly picnic, right?”

  He became serious. “Well, no, not a picnic. We both know that.”

  “And, so, what is this then?”

  It was the question he had been waiting for, working for.

  He leaned back. “What is this? A big question…”

  She waited.

  “The truth?” he finally said.

  The truth was the only way to reach her.

  “Ah, the truth,” she whispered.

  Deep inside, she wanted to reach that place, a need within us all.

  “Your move,” she said.

  He thought for a moment. “Your mother, tell me about her? Are you like her?”

  Aisha smiled.

  She told him about the time when her mother taught a class at the village school, about her mother’s sewing, about how she’d kept the family together after the death of Aisha’s father.

  Jack then told her about the time his mother found a stray dog and brought it home when he was a child and how he loved that dog, about his mother’s high-pitched laugh, about how she still visited her parents’ graves every Sunday after church.

  He reached into the bag and pulled out two oranges. He offered one.

  She peeled it and slipped a section across her lips.

  †

  The image was blurry and then seemed to phase.

  “I’m sorry, give me a moment,” Dr. Takamura said, adjusting the microscope image being fed to the computer. “It’s been jittery this week, not sure why.”

  “Alright, here it is. If you look closer, you’ll see what I’ve referred to as ‘signature marks.’ They’re identical for both victims. Here’s one, for example.”

  Lani and Jack looked up to the large screen on the wall, receiving the image from the microscope.

  “You say, victims, Samuel, so I assume you’re concluding homicides here?” Jack asked.

  “Definitely. We ran the toxicology screens – looking for any air-delivered poison that might have been the agent, causing possible brain aneurysms and ruptures, as you suggested – but they were negative. Then we looked here.”

  Takamura hit a key on a computer pad attached to the microscope and the image on the wall widened. “This is a high resolution image of the major’s brain. Note the five burn marks. They were each a sufficient lethality agent. Any one would have killed him.”

  “Cause?” Jack asked.

  “Unknown. The burns are located at precise depths, meaning that the termination at specific blood vessel locations was premeditated. The instrumentality cannot be derived, as whatever killed them left no external marks. Quite perplexing.”

  “The angles of entry – and we must assume entry was made in some fashion – indicates a perpetrator standing over the victims. Here.”

  Takamura rotated the image to show the lines of entry leading from beneath the cranium to the termination marks.

  “They each trace at the same angle. And, what is again perplexing is they left no burn residue on the entry channels themselves.”

  “But, of course, what is most interesting is this.”

  He touched the computer keys and the image suddenly morphed, the vantage swinging above the marks.

  “When you ignore the depth factor and simply look at the marks from above, connect them, here is what you have – a five-sided regular polygon, more commonly known as a pentagon. No relation to the government building, of course.”

  Takamura moved out from behind the microscope and joined Jack and Lani staring up at the image.

  “What is similarly intriguing is that the points are perfectly equidistant. And I mean perfect. Such precision is beyond our capabilities.”

  Jack looked over, “Are we talking aliens here?”

  Takamura smiled, breaking his seriousness. “Well, I hope not, but one never knows. What I do know is that I need to take a closer look at the interior cranial wall side, where the entries may have been made. Perhaps, a clue exists there.”

  “Thanks, Samuel. And thanks for taking time away from your other work, the theater investigation. We appreciate it.”

  “Well,” Takamura mused, “it seems that I now have two mysteries – the theaters and now this. And, Jack,” he smiled, “of all people you know how I deal with the unknown.”

  Jack remembered being a young special agent and marveling at Takamura’s focus during the Diamond Lake serial killer hunt.

  “Sure,” Jack smiled, “like a werewolf on a bone.”

  They walked out of the building and were hit by bright sunshine and a cold wind. Lani wrapped her scarf tighter as they quickly walked to the car.

  “Hold on, let me get some heat in here,” Jack said. “The weather was nice enough when we went in. What happened? I don’t think anyone has a clue about the weather these days.”

  She held her hands out to the vent as the car pulled from the parking lot.

  “Jack, that shape, the pentagon. I know it sounds crazy, but do you think it has anything to do with The Pentagon? He was a major in the Army, remember.”

  “I hope not, but we need to start looking into the good major’s background. What was he working on? Why was he on Kauai? Was it more than a vacation?”

  He looked over. “You said your people on the islands are tracking the passport list for Kauai? Maybe we’ll find something there.”

  “Anything unusual about the girl?” he asked. “Her name was Della Beaufort, right?”

  “Della Norine Beaufort, another small town
girl from Oklahoma. Her family is in the process of being interviewed. On the major’s side, he had a wife and three kids. His wife didn’t know about Della. She took it pretty hard from what I heard.”

  “Great guy,” Jack said. “You know, I’m starting to wonder whether the killings had anything to do with Grindel’s job. Maybe he was simply a world class jerk and someone taught him a final lesson?”

  She paused, “Did you see her eyes?”

  When Takamura had reset the microscope, the image of Della had flashed up enormous on the wall, the pinkish, frozen eyes looking out as if she were staring into something, as if something was coming at her.

  Jack pulled around to the front of the Willard Intercontinental Hotel and Lani exited the car and turned back around, “Still on for dinner?”

  “Eight o’clock. I’ll be in the lobby.”

  She walked through the hotel’s dazzling, ornate lobby, over a hundred and fifty years old. Charles Dickens and Buffalo Bill had once stayed here. Mark Twain wrote two books upstairs.

  She turned towards the elevators and spied a wall of posters meant for tourists – a Washington-by-night bus ride, a chaperoned tour of the National Gallery, boat trips down the Potomac. Amongst the posters was an announcement on an academic lecture, “Strategic Studies in the Age of Cyber Wars.”

  She looked closer. The notice bore the symbol for the Department of Defense, the Pentagon – the most populated building in the world.

  †

  She was glad to have run into Jack. She wasn’t exactly lonely, but she was alone. A strange city and too many nights in a hotel – no matter how luxurious – could do that to a person. It was nice to have people around from one’s past. It lent a certain comfort to life; a continuity through time.

  The steam clouded the mirrors as she lowered herself into the bath, the candles she’d bought down the street flickering soft off the white marble walls.

  She couldn’t get the shape out of her mind.

  A pentagon.

  What had Dr. Takamura said? The five burn marks…any one would have killed him.

  Why five, if a single strike was sufficient?

  She was sure of it, there must be some meaning in the methodology. The kills were certainly intentional, but did that intent exist in the number of marks, or was it hidden in the shape?

  She began shaving her legs, still tanned from the islands. When finished, she washed her hair and stepped onto the cold marble. She reached for the towel warmer, toweled off and wrapped into a sumptuous cotton robe and slippers. She wrapped another towel on her head and walked into the main room.

  She retrieved her laptop and sat cross-legged on the bed.

  Perhaps, she considered, it was not about the shape at all. Rather, it was simply what it appeared to be – a set of dots. But what would the points represent? Coordinates? Points designating a place, or even the place for a future event?

  In the ancient Greek world, people assigned stars to a shoulder or an arm, so they could see their Gods in the skies. The stars were their “dots.” The constellations. Did the marks in the major’s brain reflect coordinates, only ones overhead?

  Maybe, though, she was making something out of nothing. Why would the burn marks have to mean anything at all? Sometimes, a detective’s desire to find a cause, any cause, leads them to want to see something. It happened to every good detective and it was something to watch out for. On the other hand, one must follow intuition. Deep down, she felt that there was something in Della’s eyes.

  She entered the information on the pentagon shape, looking for threads. A website came up, describing one of the shape’s ancient meanings:

  In occult doctrines, the points

  of the pentagon represented the

  elemental forces of the finite

  world: earth, fire, water, air.

  The human world. The fifth point

  represented their origin: Spirit.

  She considered for a moment. Could it be that simple? She did a search for the words, “Major Billy Joe Grindel” and “U.S. Army Major William J. Grindel” and “pentagon.”

  She heard a knock at the door and remembered her dry cleaning.

  “Thank you,” she said, passing the tip money.

  She returned to the screen.

  No results found.

  13

  In April of 1999, two students, Eric and Dylan, walked into their high school and murdered twelve fellow students, one teacher and wounded twenty-one others. Eric wore a tee shirt that read, Natural Selection; Dylan’s read, Wrath. Dylan was a child of misery, Eric of psychopathology. They were both the children of violent chaos.

  Columbine – it evolved into its own word.

  The experts couldn’t understand the utter precision of their actions. The two young men, essentially boys, were known to have stockpiled guns and ammunition, but hadn’t engaged in any field training. Yet surveillance videos from the school showed the sober calm of trained killers. The U.S. military knew that it required years of intensive training to maintain the emotional state required to conduct such missions.

  The experts became intrigued. How could two teenagers with no prior field training bear down on targets like hardened soldiers? After conducting a classified study, they were surprised to find that war-like video games had trained their minds; working to detach their emotions from their decision-making, the identifying of targets, the distilling of lethality.

  The killer remembered that when he was a child he could drive through a suburban neighborhood and see baseball mitts tossed across the lawns, a soccer ball forgotten against a bush. Now, the neighborhoods were empty; absent the symptoms of children.

  The children were now inside, focused on a screen. Or, were being driven to soccer practices by their mommies.

  He looked down at the tailor who was marking his trousers. “A touch more break,” he instructed.

  He was in Milan at an exclusive Italian tailor, being fitted for his yearly string of suits.

  A movement caught his eye at the front window. A teenager was walking past, texting, his thumbs moving feverishly, mindless of his surroundings, of the Earth around him, his thumbs cut out of his gloves to free his fingers for just one more moment, just one more entry of data on nothing.

  These children, they were passive, conditioned by their parents who had planned their entire lives, trying to make them perfect, trying to protect them from the darkness of life. But it was the negative that brought out the positive.

  It was a spread of Nothingness that the killer saw, a Sea of Nothingness. Yes, there were many cascades occurring.

  Yesterday, he’d felt another dark current, a quickening. Shira Scarlett, the newest pop icon, had announced that she was now wearing “the chip.” The Pentagon had originally floated the possibility: a tracking microchip processor imbedded beneath the skin, out of sight, the Pentagon satellites tracking the people below.

  With the chip there would be no more children stolen from shopping malls by pedophiles, and the children would finally be safe.

  With the chip there would be no grandparents with Alzheimer’s disease wandering off and getting lost in nearby woods, only to be found frozen, days later. They would be safe.

  With the chip, prison inmates could be tracked within correctional facilities and, if they escaped, tracked down before they reentered our neighborhoods. We would be safe.

  With the chip, your entire medical history could be with you at all times. If a car accident occurred, the doctors would have your records at hand, when the time was critical. You would be saved.

  With the chip, you could walk through the grocery store exit without stopping to pay, the overhead sensors reading the items in your cart, the overhead satellites reading your chip and automatically deducting the correct amount from your bank account. Your time would be saved.

  The Cascade would occur in this way: at first, Shira puts the chip on her palm, on top of the skin, easily removable. Like gummy bears, the chips are the
n marketed to the children in an array of colors – Mommy, Shira has one! Soon, however, the inconvenience causes some to agree to the imbedding, at first in the same palm spot. But when it is found that the satellites have difficulty reading the palm-located chips, they are moved to the forehead and finally to the crown. Over time, the chip is embedded at a younger and younger age, no different than the teen initiation of pierced ears. Until, finally, the chip becomes a part of commonality, of the banal, of the unnoticed, and its embedding occurs at birth, no different than a circumcision.

  These children would be his passive army. They would aid him through their omissions as they moved through life, oblivious – Generation Zero. When the singularity event arose – the fulcrum event – there would be no resistance.

  His limousine cruised down the autobahn-like highway and towards the Milan Malpensa airport, where his private jet was waiting.

  He was hungry. Around noon, he’d developed a taste for foie gras and Iranian caviar from Le Maurice.

  His customs search was cursory and he was escorted directly onto the tarmac to his Gulfspirit G780. His two pilots waved from the cabin as he ascended the stairs.

  They climbed to 21,000 feet as the plane caught a slip stream and his stewardess walked back to tell him they would be landing fifteen minutes early.

  He spoke into the phone, “Andre, please have Claudette available. Yes, eight o’clock, at the usual.”

  As he hung up, the telephone hummed. He knew the number. He noted that the encryption program had engaged.

  “Yes, John, do you have news for me?”

  “I believe so,” John Freed replied.

  Freed was a computer forensics expert and programmer who had run into an unfortunate incident as an NSA operative – namely, being caught with diverted funds – and had entered the shadowy world of ex-agents for hire, the so-called, disavowed.

  “You recall the parameters you provided me?” Freed said. “I have a hard hit between factors 1 and 7.”