by Neil Mcmahon
“I’m covered there.”
“If you do, call. I’ll look in on your cats.”
Monks hesitated. He disliked leaving the cats alone, but did not want to put a neighbor at risk either.
“There might be somebody around my place who shouldn’t be, Emil.”
“Guessed maybe something like that. Your face don’t look too good.”
“The Bronco saved my ass,” Monks said. “I’m afraid she’s in pretty bad shape.”
Emil’s countenance darkened, as if he had just learned that someone had roughed up his wife.
The RV started at the touch of the key, settling into a smooth, throaty idle. Lex got out of the sedan at its approach. From somewhere, he had produced a dark blue San Francisco Giants baseball cap. It was creased and pulled low over his face, giving more the impression of the junkie Monks had first seen than a computer genius.
Lex opened the car’s trunk and dragged out a grip about the same size as Monks’s, but made of fine leather. Apparently it was heavy; Lex seemed to be struggling. Monks stepped in to help, but Lex pulled it away.
“You keep your hands off it,” Lex said hotly. He managed to heave the bag into the RV, and climbed in after it.
Emil watched all this dubiously, then walked with Monks to the driver’s side and leaned his heavy forearms on the windowsill. On one was a faded tattoo of a marine corps serial number over a dagger. Monks remembered that Emil had been at Pork Chop Hill in the Korean War, remembered accounts of that action he had heard from veterans during his own navy service. With the end of the war looming, the Communists had attacked in wave after impossible wave, having been told that they would keep every yard of territory gained.
“You bring her back when this is over,” Emil said.
Monks gripped the thick forearm in thanks. “I’ll be in touch.”
He eased the RV back toward the steep drive, getting the feel. It was awkward on the dirt, but he knew it would stabilize on the open road.
“Who’s ‘her’?” Lex demanded.
“My Bronco. The one that got shot up. Emil sold it to me.”
“That’s a car? A Bronco?”
“Like a pickup truck, but closed in.”
They reached the end of the drive and turned onto Tocqueville Road again. They had not yet passed another vehicle. The night was dark and still.
“Where we going now?” Lex said.
“I don’t know,” Monks admitted. He had been concentrating on away.
“Let’s hit a store. I need something sweet.”
Monks’s first reaction was irritation. But he had not eaten since morning himself, and fatigue was setting in. He knew a National Seashore campground on Tomales Bay where an RV could park for the night.
“Okay,” he said.
Lex settled back, obviously in a better mood. “That place,” Lex said, nodding his head back toward Emil’s. “That’s a different world from mine. I never really thought about guys like him being out there.”
“They’re out there,” Monks said.
16
They drove into Point Reyes Station just before nine P.M. and found a grocery store that was still open. Monks went in alone and bought bread, sausage, cheese, several types of sweet bakery goods, and a sackful of chocolate bars. He walked back to the RV and handed the candy through the window. Lex tore a wrapper off greedily and crammed the bar into his mouth, like a child with a candy Easter egg.
Monks walked a few yards farther away, took out his cell phone, and punched Larrabee’s number. Larrabee answered on the first ring.
“Steffie’s here with me,” Larrabee said immediately, at the sound of Monks’s voice. “Not real happy about it, but otherwise, fine. You?”
“I scored,” Monks said.
“That’s a relief. I was getting nervous. What’s your situation?”
“Secure and mobile. There’s been a slight change in plans.” Monks was about to explain, when he saw the RV’s door open. Lex hopped out and made a beeline for the store.
“God damn it, get back here,” Monks called furiously, but it was too late: Lex was inside.
“Who are you talking to?” Larrabee said.
Monks exhaled. “The man who disappeared. He’s back from the dead.”
There came a longish pause. Larrabee said, “Are you saying what I think you are?”
“Yeah.”
“He came and found you?”
“Nobody’s more surprised than me,” Monks said. “Believe me.”
“That does put a different spin on things.”
“Somebody tried to kill him, all right,” Monks said. “The overdose was deliberate. At least that’s what he thinks.”
“So what now?”
“He wants us to help him find out who.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Larrabee said. Monks could picture him passing his hand over his hair. “I guess we should be flattered. I can’t remember the last time I was so much in demand.”
“I want to get him settled down,” Monks said. “I’ll call you early.”
“Don’t lose him,” Larrabee warned. “He weighs a ton.”
Lex came out of the store a minute later, clutching a paper sack of his own.
“That checkout lady asked if you and me had been in a fight,” Lex said. “We must both look pretty beat up.” He seemed quite pleased at the idea.
“That’s how you’re going to get recognized, walking into a place like that,” Monks said angrily.
“Are you kidding? With what those fluorescent lights do to people’s faces? It’s like Night of the Living Dead in there.”
Lex climbed back into the RV and pulled a bottle from the bag, with the flare of a magician producing a rabbit from a hat. It was Finlandia vodka.
“Your brand, isn’t it?” Lex said. His face had gone sly.
Startled, Monks said, “How the hell—”
“I told you, give me some credit.”
Lex lifted out a lemon, rolling it in his palm. After that came a sack of ice. It was oddly, annoyingly touching.
“This is no time for juicing,” Monks said, shoving the vehicle in gear.
“Nobody’s going to find us tonight,” Lex said, then cackled. “This must be driving them nuts, whoever tried to zap us. Both of us disappeared.”
The road from here on was darker, dipping in and out of the brush-clogged gullies that leaked water from the small coastal mountains, down into the sea. Monks turned into the campground, a paved stretch along the beach that gave way to a graveled loop lined with isolated parking slips. There were only a few other vehicles. He pulled into a spot at the far end.
Lex opened the passenger door and leaned out. “Not bad,” he said, and stepped down to the ground.
“Don’t go far,” Monks said sternly.
“Just a little fresh air. Hey, come on out. This is great.”
Monks went to the rear of the vehicle and found a cup in a storage cupboard. He filled it with ice, then with vodka, and carved a slice out of the lemon with his pocketknife. The first one went down fast, in three long swallows. He poured a second, full to the brim, then stepped out into the night, with the mist cool and soothing against his face.
The waxing moon over Tomales Bay was a suggestion of glow in the southern sky, behind the dark silvery veil of fog. Swells broke easily on the sheltered coast, crests streaking in phosphorescent shimmers, masses of kelp rising and falling like a vast undine shaking out her hair. The air was cool and sticky, redolent of brine and eucalyptus from a nearby grove. It was a picture-perfect spot for a campout.
“You should have seen Tygard go down,” Lex Rittenour said, hopping along the edge of the bluff, fingers curled as if gripping a baseball bat and eyes alight with glee. “Hit the carpet face first and started crawling. I blasted him again, just to make sure.” Lex slapped a fist into his other palm. “Boom!
“When I got out of there, I was still terrified. But then I started getting high on it. Me, Mr. Whitebread Compu
ter Guy, acting like James fucking Bond. You have any idea how that felt? I thought, I don’t have to walk back into that cage. I can take care of this on my own.”
Monks wondered how much of the infused courage might have come from drugs, not to mention sheer desperation. But that was academic. It had worked.
“I met some of your colleagues,” Monks said. “Bouldin, Hazeldon. Audrey Cabot. Give me a rundown.”
“Bouldin’s a businessman. What you see is what you get. Pete’s a computer geek; not the genius he wants to think he is, but good enough. Audrey—the other two, at least they’ve got blood in their veins, but she runs on antifreeze. She likes younger guys. Sucks them dry and throws away the husks.”
Monks supposed he should have been more flattered at Audrey Cabot’s remark about house calls. But she probably had just been keeping in practice. He was not exactly a younger guy.
“Tygard?” Monks said.
“An errand boy, but dangerous. Thinks he’s some kind of corporate commando.”
“Did any of them know you were about to withdraw support from REGIS?”
Lex shook his head. “I didn’t tell anybody. Except Martine.”
Monks stayed silent, recalling what Larrabee had said earlier: I’ve seen a lot of times when somebody made a noble decision, then got cold feet.
The vodka bottle was nearing the one-third empty mark. Monks poured another drink.
“Did she tell you how the research was done?” Lex said. “With fetuses?” He was looking out to sea.
“Yes,” Monks said.
“You think I’m to blame?”
Monks shook his head. “People can misuse any technology.”
“I designed the REGIS prototype,” Lex said. “What happened after that, I didn’t know about. I was doing other things.”
“Your spiritual phase? Ashrams in India? Or was it Zen?”
Lex glared at him. “I tried some of both. The press made a big deal of it.”
“There were some other episodes too, weren’t there?” Monks said, recalling the tabloid headlines and the paternity suit. “A little more earthy?”
“I tuned out for a few years,” Lex admitted. “Then, all of a sudden, the company executives told me they’re going to put REGIS on the market. I told them, there’s no way it’s ready. They told me, ‘Thanks for the opinion, Lex. Now stay out of the way and speak your lines for the press.’”
Lex lurched to his feet. A haggard look had come across his face.
“I should have done something then,” he said. “But I didn’t. Then Martine came to me with that research. I thought, ‘Okay, Lex, this is it: your chance to show some balls. You’re going to stand up in front of those microphones and tell the truth about what you think.’” He snorted. “But it wasn’t balls. It was dope. I was on a cloud. When I almost got my ass killed, I woke up.”
Lex stepped clumsily to a nearby clump of rocks and urinated. He said something over his shoulder, words that were muffled by the surf.
“I didn’t catch that,” Monks said.
Lex turned, feet planted wide apart. He was swaying noticeably. Monks realized that the shot was wearing off.
“I said, I should have spent more time out there. Like your friend Emil.” His tone was perplexed, even aggrieved. He made his way back to the RV, moving heavily now, like a windup doll that had been briefly charged with life, running down.
Monks decided that he was definitely done drinking and poured one more. The mist was turning to rain, a fine spray against his skin. He had not been to sea in twenty-five years, but there were times when the smell of salt air would bring back, with sudden fierce intensity, that drive to sail onward into a freedom that lured like the sirens, but remained always just out of reach. He had chased it with alcohol too, a fool’s game, seeming to put it within your grasp and then slamming you down.
But there were times when drinking could illuminate things that lurked under the surface of consciousness, twisting uncomfortably but refusing to show themselves. One of those lights was flickering on.
Who you were and what you would become—your destiny—was once thought to be written in the stars. Now, it was known to be largely written in the genes. But the stars were beyond control. Genes were quickly coming within reach.
It was John Calvin, the sixteenth-century Swiss reformer, who had solidified the doctrine of the elect. These were the lucky few predestined for heaven. The damned, a much greater majority, were doomed to hell. There was nothing an individual could do to change this: How you lived your life, whether with saintlike virtues or steeped in greed and murder, was not what mattered. Your status as elect or damned was ordained by divine will.
The Vikings had seen it very differently. To them, deeds were everything.
Cattle die, kin die, the man dies too.
One thing I know that never dies.
The good name of the dead.
In theory, it was impossible to tell the elect from the damned. Only God knew which were which. But this was where human ingenuity had stepped in and applied a very simple criterion. It was obvious that the wealthy—privileged, successful—were looked upon favorably by heaven. The poor, the simple-minded, the halt and the lame, were not.
And, the thinking went, both classes deserved to be treated accordingly. The elect, as rightful masters, should enjoy the earthly fruits of their holiness. The damned were to be downtrodden, as a help to God in punishing them for their sins.
The strict interpretation of that doctrine had been watered down over the centuries since, and the modern sects that had descended from Calvinism would have reacted with horror to be accused of any such thing.
But in recent years, Monks had sensed a burgeoning of what he thought of as neo-Calvinism, an undercurrent that was not spoken of, but was tacitly understood. It had nothing to do with any church: Unlike the original, it had no religious justification. But the thinking was the same. Prosperity meant superiority, with all the privileges thereof. Those who were under life’s boot heel deserved to stay there.
Up until this point in history, the elect had possessed no clearcut way to identify themselves. But that was changing fast. Monks was pretty sure that neo-Calvinism was about to take the next jump; that the future elect would be not just self-declared, but self-creating, translating divine will into genetic reality. Lineages could be established, with health, intelligence, beauty, and maybe even immortality, available to the few—and withheld from the many. It was exactly the sort of thing that Walker Ostrand’s research had been moving toward:
Genetic manipulation of sex cells, to determine the effect on the embryos. A huge—and hugely illicit—head start on the new market in high-performance human beings.
Rationally, Monks could not find any fault with neo-Calvinism. The world was shaped by the best and brightest. But in his heart, he belonged to the losers, the damned, who either never had a chance to begin with—were condemned to act out the predestined flaws in their genes—or blew what chance they had.
He got to his feet and walked back to the RV.
Lex Rittenour was curled up on one of the mattresses, eyes not quite closed. His right hand clasped his left forearm, thumb laid caressingly over the vein where the needle had bit again to quell the invasion of reality for a few more hours—the strike of the healing snake-god Asclepius.
“You ever try this stuff?” Lex said.
“A few times, for pain.”
Lex’s eyes opened, cold and far away. “But you’re above it, huh? Well, I need it. Do you have any idea what’s going on in here?” His finger rose to tap his temple. “Boolean algebra. Algorithms. I don’t apply math, I create it. My mind’s like a racehorse. It takes off and won’t stop running.”
Monks said, “I’m humbled.”
“Fuck you. It drives me nuts. It gets exhausted, starts going in circles and slamming into walls. That’s what the Zen and all that was about. I was trying to calm it. But it doesn’t want to be calm.”
Lex�
�s gaze took on a defensive, wounded look. “You think that’s bullshit, don’t you?”
“No,” Monks said. “That’s why it scares me.”
Lex closed his eyes again and settled back. “I trust you, you know that?” he murmured.
Monks draped a blanket over the creator of REGIS, the perfect monster that had turned on its master, and lay down on the other bunk.
17
Monks brewed coffee blearily on the propane stove, listening to the offensively cheerful patter from a San Francisco morning show on the RV’s small television. Whether you woke up in your own bed after a Saturday night bash, or sprawled on a foam pad in a mobile hideout, a hangover was a hangover. It was just dawn, damp and cool with the sea’s freshness. Most of the other campers were still quiet; a few stirred, beginning the day’s recreation or packing to move on.
He shaved quickly, a ritual he could not face the day without, then tried the coffee. It was from a can, bitter and flat, not the good French roast he was used to. Lex apparently did not notice or care; he stirred a copious amount of sugar and condensed milk into his, then dunked in pieces of sweet roll. He seemed in good spirits; Monks surmised that he had already taken his morning fix. For the first time in his life, Monks felt a touch of envy that he could not do the same.
“Take a look at this,” Lex said.
Monks stepped over to view the TV. The screen showed San Francisco’s Bank of America plaza, with the fifty-story black monolith towering in the background.
“Lex Rittenour’s failure to appear at a press conference yesterday has sparked rumors that all might not be well behind the scenes at Aesir Corporation,” the announcer said. “To counter these, Aesir has released a video of Rittenour, made last week.”
The scene shifted to the outside balcony of a luxury house, overlooking a body of water. Silver champagne buckets rested on a white-clothed table, along with open bottles of Veuve Clicquot. The small crowd included several faces Monks was getting to know: CEO Kenneth Bouldin, COO Audrey Cabot, and research and development chief Pete Hazeldon. Ronald Tygard stood off to one side and behind the others, like a sentry. They were dressed informally, drinking champagne.
