Blood Double

by Neil Mcmahon

  “He does seem to be something of an inconvenience,” Monks agreed. He could not help glancing again at the sheafs of stock. Half a million bucks, half of it his—assuming nothing went wrong with the IPO.

  “I think he was really feeling the pressure,” Hazeldon said. “Everybody just got back from the road show. We’re jet-lagged so many times over it’s canceling itself out.”

  “Road show?”

  “Hyping the IPO. Creating a global feeding frenzy. Eighteen major cities in four weeks. I mean, I could see somebody drinking too much. But junk.” Hazeldon shook his head, as if unable to grasp the enormity of it. “Did he tell you what happened?”

  “He said he didn’t remember.”

  “Scary.”

  “He’s a friend, I take it?”

  Hazeldon flopped back in the chair, with a sort of grunt. “You don’t make friends in an outfit like this.”

  “How about Lex Rittenour?” Monks was aware of that same sort of brittle pause that had occurred earlier. “I mean, you’ve worked with him a lot?”

  “A lot.” An expressive shrug. “Lex is so fucking smart in some ways, it’s unbelievable. He’s like an idiot savant. He can set up these incredibly complex software programs. But he doesn’t use any logical progression, so they’re full of holes. We have to go back and fill them in to make it all work.”

  Monks said, “Like REGIS?”

  Hazeldon glanced at him swiftly. “Exactly like REGIS. He got the idea to do it. Thought about it a while, then sketched out a few pages of equations and handed it over. It took us over a year from there to get a working prototype.”

  Hazeldon looked at his watch. “I’d better go,” he said. “Meeting down in the war room.”

  “War room, huh?” Monks said.

  “The new corporate world’s a battlefield,” Hazeldon said. “A few years ago, a lot of execs were reading Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings. Here, we’re Vikings.” He pointed at the logo of the dragon-prowed longboat, hanging behind the desk.

  “It gets the point across.”

  “The company had one of those boats built in Seattle,” Hazeldon said.

  Monks’s eyebrows rose. “That must have been pricey.”

  “A few million. It looks like the real thing from the outside, but it’s got some improvements. Leather upholstery, gourmet bar and kitchen, and a five-hundred-horsepower Cummins diesel. They just brought it into the San Francisco Marina, a big publicity deal. You ought go to take a look.”

  It had occurred to Monks that Lex Rittenour’s scheduled press conference tomorrow would be a litmus test for whether John Smith was, in fact, Lex. If so, he would be facing the public with facial lacerations and shaky nerves. It was possible; with good makeup, a prepared script, a few planted questions in the audience—and a judicious dose of Valium—he could probably pull off a brief appearance.

  A stopover on the road to treatment.

  “The boat’s publicity for the press conference tomorrow?” Monks said.

  “Yeah.” Hazeldon stood abruptly, stooping as an afterthought to gather up his pad, and left without speaking again. He reminded Monks of engineering students he had known in school, dressed in the different uniform of those times—boot camp haircuts, narrow ties, slide rules hanging from belts, much-stained plastic packs of ballpoint pens in the shirt pockets—but with the same air of living in an invisible and much more fascinating reality, touching base with this one only when it was necessary.

  So: The press conference was still on.

  The secretary came back, offering Monks a smile that was noticeably less bright than the one she had given Bouldin: luminescence adjusted by an internal rheostat. It occurred to Monks that she was an Audrey Cabot wannabe. Attractive though she was, she had a long way to go.

  “Mr. Bouldin sends his regrets, but he won’t be able to say good night personally. He asked me to tell you that there’s a time limit on the offer. Two hours, max.”

  She handed him a business card. It was Kenneth Bouldin’s, embossed in gold on ice-blue linen, with the dragon-ship logo as background.

  “I’ll need to use a phone,” Monks said.

  Monks enjoyed a peculiar and uneasy relationship with Mercy Hospital’s administration. On the one hand, he was acknowledged as competent, even exceptionally so. The performance of the ER under his direction had never been called into question.

  On the other hand, the wariness his coworkers felt about him extended in spades to the reputation-conscious business staff. He was reasonably sure that most of them would fire him if they could, with sorrow in their voices and the sweat of relief on their brows.

  Baird Necker, Mercy’s ex-marine chief administrator, was not one of those.

  “Hearing from you this late can’t be good,” Baird growled into the phone.

  “The hospital could be looking at a tidy little piece of cash. We’d have to move immediately.”

  “Is it legal? Let me put that a different way. Obviously illegal?”

  “Not obviously,” Monks said.

  “Keep talking.”

  “Can you meet me in half an hour?”

  “I’ll be on the roof.”

  On his way back out of the building, Monks was again flanked by guards, like a prisoner going through checkpoints. Ronald Tygard was standing in the lobby at the entrance to Aesir’s offices. This time, Tygard was not with the bodyguard Andrew, but was talking to a man who carried a different order of toughness: the look of the hard-drinking Irish that Monks had grown up with. He was thick-bodied, white-haired, with authority clear in his posture and the set of his jaw. His unbuttoned sports coat gave a glimpse of a shoulder holster’s leather strap.

  He and Tygard got quiet as Monks passed, watching him stonily.

  Monks exhaled with relief when he stepped out into the night.

  When Baird Necker said he would be on the hospital’s roof, this was not a euphemism. He was a cigar addict who started each morning with a Tabacalero as thick as a big toe and almost a foot long, extinguishing and relighting it several times in the course of the day and finally discarded the soggy thimble-sized remnant with sighs of regret. Being called out this late would have annoyed most people, but Monks knew that Baird would welcome it. It gave him a chance to light a new one.

  Monks took the elevator to the top floor and climbed the service stairs the rest of the way. The air was cool, but he could feel the building’s warmth through his shoe soles, seeping up through tar, gravel, and pigeon dung. Baird was standing at the roof’s edge, one foot up on the parapet, forearm leaning on his thigh, looking like Winston Churchill brooding on how to take down Hitler. Monks respected him because his main concern was to keep the hospital going. Sometimes he was not too particular about how he did it, but his reasons stemmed from a real concern for the place and the people in it.

  Baird outlined, with the cigar between his fingers, a sweeping semicircle that took in the lights of the city to the north and east, the southwest quadrant stretching down to the Peninsula, the long dark stretch of ocean beyond the Great Highway, with the white lines of chilly surf endlessly crashing in.

  “They’re saying the Dot Commers bought up most of it,” Baird said. “All done over the Net. When I was coming up, at least you had to throw some body slams to fuck people out of their money.”

  “You’re biting the hand that feeds, Baird. That’s where this is coming from. Computers.”

  “You’re not starting some new kind of bullshit, are you? You know, there’s people around here real nervous about a guy that keeps getting in trouble.”

  “I do know that, yes.”

  Scowling, Baird chewed on the cigar. “I hate to sound like the mercenary prick you think I am anyway, but how much are we talking?”

  “Fifty thousand right now. A quarter of a million and still climbing, in a couple of days.”

  “What do we have to do for it?”

  “Nothing,” Monks said.

  “You mind explaining that?”r />
  Monks did.

  When he finished, Baird rubbed his cheek with the heel of his cigar-holding hand, scattering ashes down the front of his shirt—taking his own look at that fine line between rulebook-legal and practical-smart. A formal investigation might find evidence of Aesir’s involvement in the fire, and justice eventually would be served. But that seemed unlikely, and the cons weighed heavily. It would anger Aesir, and possibly bring litigation. It would probably strain relations with the fire department. Publicity for the hospital would be negative, and would suggest lax security.

  Then there was the pro side: money which would go a long way toward any of several funds, such as the ever-deepening black hole of bills that patients could not or would not pay.

  “I’ve been hearing about this Aesir IPO,” Baird said. “It sounds shaky as hell. A lot of big people in on it. Watchdogs looking the other way.”

  “You don’t want to be involved?”

  “Hell, yes, I want to be involved. But before it crashes.” Baird tapped the cigar ashes thoughtfully. “Insurance will cover the fire damage. The quarter mil would make a nice big splash in the general fund.”

  “That’s double dipping, Baird.”

  “I’m supposed to worry about the insurance company, with what I pay those cocksuckers?” He bit down hard on the cigar.

  “I feel compelled to say that I’m against accepting, on principle,” Monks said.

  “I got rid of my principles a long time ago. You ought to try it. They’re like an appendix—don’t do you any good and might cause you pain.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of principle,” Monks said. “I mean the kind where if this backfires, my ass is on the line.”

  “Anybody at the hospital know about it, besides us?”

  Monks made a mental reservation about Stephanie. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then as far as I’m concerned,” Baird said, “at a quarter mil a pop, they can start a fire here any time they want.”

  Monks exhaled. “Okay.”

  Baird had a cell phone. Monks dialed the number on Kenneth Bouldin’s card.

  Bouldin answered with a clipped, one-word command: “Go.” Monks supposed it was the modern equivalent of, It’s your dime.

  “Mercy Hospital is pleased to accept your offer, under the terms we discussed,” Monks said.

  “I’ll have the stock sent over in the morning. How about the private sector?”

  “The private sector’s going to decline,” Monks said. “Nothing personal.”

  “Meaning what? You don’t agree with the hospital?”

  “I’m not sure what it means,” Monks said. “But like I told you, I do my best to avoid attention.”

  Bouldin’s silence lasted for several seconds. Monks was aware of the noise of the city below him, an almost gentle sound like a river of wind flowing among the buildings.

  “Good-bye, Dr. Monks,” Kenneth Bouldin finally said. “I’m impressed by the way you’ve handled this.”

  Monks handed the phone back to Baird.

  “What was that about the private sector?” Baird said.

  “Bouldin wanted me in his pocket.”

  Baird grinned. “You don’t figure you are anyway?”

  “Yeah,” Monks said. “Just not as much.”

  Walking back to his vehicle, he thought about the place where he had drawn his own line.

  He had not even realized he was going to do it until he already had. Like most solutions to difficult problems, it did not entirely satisfy him, but it could have turned out worse.

  Well, Stephanie was going to have to make it through med school without Aesir Corporation’s help. But that was the other element that had weighed into his decision: The fact that they even knew about her made him nervous.

  It was convenient for him, in a way. If dropping the matter was cowardice, he could blame it on his daughter.

  6

  Late at night, without much traffic, the drive from San Francisco to Monks’s home near the north Marin coast took about fifty minutes. He got there just before 1:00 A.M., and walked into a house that was silent but not empty.

  There were three cats hidden, waiting to get him for his lengthy absence.

  Fatigue had finally descended on him. He poured a drink—Finlandia vodka over ice, touched with fresh lemon. It tasted heavenly and went down fast. He got out more ice for a second one, this time scanning the refrigerator for food possibilities. The shelves were crammed with remnants of his sporadic attempts to enliven his meat-and-carbs diet: curry and vindaloo paste, Thai chili, oyster sauce and salsa, kraut, pickled okra, a lone artichoke heart, redolent Stilton cheese, an aging pepper pâté. The sense was something like a houseful of relatives, familiar if not necessarily welcoming. But he did not have the energy to try anything fancy, and reverted to type—a sandwich made from a leftover chunk of roast beef, pasta heated up with butter and parmesan. It would do just fine.

  The cats were moving in on him now, with subliminal signals calculated to destroy his nerves. A fleeting shadow barely glimpsed. A small object on a shelf in the next room knocked over by a twitching tail. The sudden sound of claws shredding a forbidden piece of upholstered furniture. He put bits of roast beef in their bowls (they would be imperiously ignored, but it was obligatory), ate quickly, and trudged to the shower to rinse off the leavings of the day.

  Afterward, he paused at the mirror for a dour self-analysis, the first time in a while—wondering, he admitted, how he would look to a woman at least ten years younger. Monks had the wiry black hair and green eyes of the black Irish, a face craggy and pitted with adolescent acne scars, a thickened nose that had once been aquiline. His fingers went to his lower back, where Robby Vandenard’s grape-pruning knife had left a five-inch horizontal scar and missed, by a few millimeters, slicing into the kidney. Recovering from that, Monks had vowed never to be so physically helpless again, and had started working out. He was a long way from looking like a bodybuilder, but his wind was good now, his chest and gut tight.

  With a groan of pleasure, he stretched out in bed. His hand went automatically to his nightstand, cluttered with history. Monks did a lot of reading back in time, through the vast drama that endlessly changed characters and costumes—although the basic business seemed to remain curiously the same.

  Tonight he was too tired. He switched off the light and closed his eyes. An image formed in his mind: the Aesir logo, with its longboat, turned into a several-million dollar pleasure craft, for publicity or just vanity. Corporate raiders, modern Vikings, trading sword thrusts over telephone lines and controlling empires on paper.

  The Vikings had called their boats dreki, dragons, because of their dragon-head prows, their teeth of swords and axes, their bellies that belched the fire of death in the form of fierce men. The real longboats had not even had decks for shelter; their sailors had simply endured the brutal weather of the northern seas. This gave the boats a suppleness that made them capable of enduring those storms too. Instead of breaking, they bent, slipping through the water like sea serpents, easily covering more than a hundred miles in a day.

  Led by chiefs with names like Eirik Bloodaxe, Harald Wartooth, Thorolf Lousebeard, with bearskin-clad berserkers who raged into battle gnawing chunks out of their own wooden shields, they would rove for years at a time, reaching Africa, America, deep into Asia, leisurely plundering the European coasts, the Mediterranean and Black Sea. They could attack a town within an hour of first being visible on the ocean horizon, and travel silently far up rivers and into lakes to surprise unsuspecting inlanders. Ferocious winters trapped them in frozen river mouths: groups of men on small boats, starving grimly for months, until the ice broke up enough to allow the survivors onto the sea again.

  They settled in France, becoming Normans, and their raids evolved into full-scale invasions of England and Ireland. There, a Norman leader known as Strongbow left a legacy that Monks often recalled. He took his young son into battle—hundreds of howling men, hacking e
ach other with iron into bloody hunks—and when the boy fled in terror, Strongbow had his legs amputated as punishment for cowardice.

  They were a people formed by a life that was almost unimaginably brutal; it was easy to see how that savage spirit arose from it. But what fascinated Monks most was its opposite, or perhaps the converse aspect of the same thing. That had taken many forms, but it was epitomized for him by Thomas à Becket: another Norman of Viking heritage, the drinking, brawling, whoring comrade of the king of England, who had turned his back on wealth and power—and by doing so, had brought about his own murder.

  Like thousands of others, Monks had stood on the spot in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket had been cut down, striving for a glimpse into that mysterious inner prompting. Monks had felt a faint echo of it in his own life, caught between the all-powerful Church in his childhood, and his intense scientific training as he grew. He lived his life by the second of the two, but the first was like a stubborn ghost that had faded through the years to a bare specter, but would never entirely leave.

  He drifted toward sleep, finally allowing his thoughts to take their own direction. They turned to an adolescent fantasy of the slender limping woman he had met that night, of carefully releasing her thin leg from its brace like a wounded bird from a cage, with her arms outstretched to accept him.

  7

  Monks awoke groggily to the realization that he was being walked on. Specifically, his full bladder was being kneaded under the weight of determined paws. He tried to sweep them away but his fingers only brushed fur that moved agilely out of reach. He thought he could smell bacon frying and assumed he was dreaming, but a few seconds later, something sharp nipped his ear.

  He opened his eyes. The wideset gray eyes of Omar, his twenty-two-pound blue Persian, were staring back a few inches from his face. When it was decided in the cat world that Monks needed disciplining, Omar acted as the heavy, both figuratively and literally.