Daniel Faust 03 - The Living End

by Craig Schaefer

  I sighed, picked up both menus, and handed them to the waitress. “He’ll have what I’m having, but a cup of decaf instead of the soda.”

  Once she disappeared, I studied Roth from across the Formica table.

  “How long did you think it’d be, before Calypso noticed you were trying to live forever?” I said.

  Roth looked pained. He shook his head. “It’s not a violation of my contract. I checked. I read it a hundred times. I’m not in default, he can’t collect.”

  “If he could,” I said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Relax. He’s not mad. Thinks it’s kinda funny, truth be told.”

  Roth slumped back in the booth and closed his eyes. “Funny? None of this is funny. I never should have signed that damn contract, never should have heard him out—”

  “But you did,” I told him, “and that’s ancient history now. Done. Writ in stone. All you can change is how long you get to live now, and how much luxury you get to ride in. See, we’ve got a bigger problem.”

  “Lauren wants to kill me.”

  “Bigger than that. You’re not in violation now, but you’re going to be. Real soon.”

  He sat up straight. “How do you figure?”

  “Lauren. She’s becoming a goddess, with your help. Once she does, once she starts flexing her muscle over the entire planet, do you really think there’s going to be a United States for you to lead? That means you’ve deliberately made a clause of the contract unfulfillable, which means you broke the deal, which means your soul is forfeit, and you go straight to hell.”

  I didn’t know if that was true, based on what little time I’d had to skim the fine print. It didn’t matter, though. All that mattered was that he believed me. From the fresh panic in his eyes, I’d hit a home run.

  “She promised me,” he said. “She promised me she could get me out of this jam if I helped her.”

  “I don’t care. Neither will Calypso. The best thing you can do right now, the only thing you can do, is help me stop Lauren. She goes down, everything goes back to normal, which means you’re alive and well and on your happy way to the White House, Mr. President. No harm, no foul, and we can all forget about this mess.”

  The waitress came back with our plates. I sprinkled a little salt and pepper over the scrambled eggs and unwrapped a red plastic straw. Roth stared at his food like he didn’t know what it was for.

  “What can I do?” he said. His hands lay dead in his lap, limp and helpless as the rest of him.

  “Start from the beginning. How did you get mixed up with the lab rats from Ausar?”

  He shook his head and let out a bitter little chuckle.

  “You mean, how did they get involved with us,” he said. “I was on the Ausar board of directors. I’d originally wanted to use the company to push longevity research. Then we found the tunnel in Mexico, and it was off to the races.”

  “Who else was on the board? Were you all clued-in?”

  “Clued-in?” he said, tilting his head. “Oh! You mean did we all know what we were dealing with? No. Just a few of us. Everyone else was kept at arm’s length. Nedry, Clark, and Payton were assigned to a black-books account and given facilities off the main corporate campus. Everyone knew they were working on the Viridithol project, but the actual details were kept quiet, and all the published papers were filled with garbage data. It was a very tight operation. Very smooth.”

  “Until you started feeding plant cuttings from another dimension to pregnant women,” I said.

  He reached for a packet of sugar and dumped it into his coffee. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “That wasn’t my fault,” he said. “The researchers promised me they had it all under control. Not long after, Payton got cold feet and grew a conscience. He would have exposed us. Exposed everything.”

  I swirled my straw in my glass of Coke. Ice cubes bobbed up and down in the drink like tiny icebergs.

  “It wasn’t their idea, was it?” I said. “Nedry and Clark. You were the one who ordered Payton’s murder.”

  “You would have done the same thing in my shoes. Come on, this wasn’t about the deformed kids. He was going to tell the entire world that we’d found a gateway to the fucking Garden of Eden and draw the media a map to get there! You know, don’t you? You’ve seen the horrible shit that’s on the other side of that tunnel. You can imagine how many innocent people would have died trying to ‘return to Eden.’ Yes, I had him killed, and if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t change my mind. Bob Payton had to die.”

  I was tempted, for one perverse heartbeat, to tell him I’d spoken to a very alive and well Payton two nights ago. I kept it to myself, though. Payton could live until I was sure he’d sent the smoke-faced men back where they came from. After that, his survival would be highly negotiable.

  “After the Viridithol scandal,” Roth said, “the whole thing collapsed. We’d had the foresight to stash as many assets offshore as we could before the government came and kicked in the door. That was the end of the story, until I met Lauren Carmichael.”

  I scooped up a forkful of scrambled eggs. Greasy, salty, cheap, and perfect. Just what you want to settle a rumbling stomach, late at night after a gunfight.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “She came to you looking for help with bringing the feds down on Nicky Agnelli. You wanted to know why. You started digging and discovered you had common interests. Namely, she was trying to build Gilles de Rais’s machine, while you, Nedry, and Clark already had access to his notes and could finish the puzzle. The peanut butter to Lauren’s chocolate.”

  Roth sipped his coffee and nodded. “It’s funny. She was so suspicious at first, thinking I wanted to usurp her position and be the one to activate the machine. I finally convinced her that I don’t want to be a god. I just don’t want to die. Besides, I’m more than happy to let her take all the risks. There’s also the…changes.”

  “Changes?”

  He glanced away for a moment, staring out the plate-glass window at the desolate parking lot.

  “She’s been taking Nedry and Clark’s serum for weeks. Viridithol-2, created through an extract from white blood cells oversaturated with the original drug. It’s not killing her, but…she’s nothing I’d call human, Mr. Faust. Not anymore.”

  “She’s attuning herself,” I said. “Making her spirit and flesh friendlier to the Garden’s energy, getting ready for the final step. How long do we have?”

  “Days? Hours? The mutation is exponential. She’s waiting like an expectant mother, waiting for the power coursing through her veins to tell her she’s ready. The Enclave is finished. I’m almost certain they have all the sacrifices prepared and ready, and Nedry and Clark have been working around the clock. I’m not involved. I can’t be. My job now was just to sit back, keep paying the bills, and wait. Given that she tried to murder me tonight…I guess all the bills are paid.”

  “Where do I find her?”

  He nodded vaguely toward the distant lights of the Strip, a grimy scarlet smear against the diner window.

  “The Enclave, behind more defenses than Fort Knox. You won’t get to her. You wouldn’t want to, even if you could.”

  “You let me worry about that,” I said. “Nedry and Clark are there with her?”

  “At all times.”

  “What about Meadow Brand?”

  He shook his head. “I thought she was out hunting you. Lauren was furious—I guess you set a demon loose in her house or something? She said that killing you is now Brand’s full-time job. I haven’t seen Brand since, but she’s supposed to have a part to play in the big ceremony. If you ask me? Before tonight, if I believed Lauren was going to stab anybody in the back, it’d be her. The woman is a raging psychopath. I think Lauren invited her to the final ritual just to keep an eye on her and make sure she didn’t ruin anything.”

  “That might still be on the agenda.”

  “She’ll be impossible to find now,” Roth said. “She took a shot at bo
th of us, and we’re still alive. Brand isn’t stupid. She’ll hide.”

  “Even so, I have to try and track her down. You don’t have any way of getting in touch?”

  He took out his Blackberry and scrolled through his contacts list.

  “Just an emergency phone number,” he said. “She screens her calls, though. Won’t pick up for anyone but me or Lauren.”

  Meadow’s number was the same one we’d taken off her invoices from Y&M Woodworking. I pretended to copy it down anyway. It was Roth’s number I was saving.

  “Last question,” I said. “Xerxes. Who do they answer to?”

  “Angus Caine is my man. I write the paychecks, I give the orders. Don’t ask me to send them up against Lauren, though. I’d be throwing their lives away.”

  “I’ve fought Lauren before,” I said.

  “That’s right. Before. Before the treatments. You haven’t seen her lately. No, even if I asked, Caine’s too protective of his troops. He’d never allow it.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I don’t need them to. I am going to ask you to do one more thing for me, but not just yet.”

  This was the hard part. Cutting him loose. I had to get rid of Roth in a way that would take him out of the fight, keep him loyal, and guarantee he kept believing his former partners were trying to murder him. I bit off a chunk of toast and chewed it over.

  Thirty-Four

  “You’ve got to leave town,” I told Roth. “Tonight. By now, Lauren knows that you know she’s gunning for you. She’ll take steps to defend herself, and that includes sending Meadow out for another go. Next time I won’t be there to save you.”

  “I should confront her,” Roth said. “Not in person, I’m not stupid. I mean I should call her. Demand some answers.”

  “What, because your pride is stinging? Fuck pride. You survived the attack, and that’s all that matters. Calling Lauren is the last thing you should do. She’ll deny everything, blame it all on Meadow going rogue, and do everything in her power to track you down and finish you off. Don’t give her an inch.”

  The best kind of lie, as always, is the one nestled inside a wrapper of truth. If he did make the mistake of calling her, Lauren would definitely deny everything. She’d deny it because she was innocent. Either way, the story would hold.

  “What if she calls me?” Roth asked.

  “Let it go to voicemail, and that goes double for Meadow Brand. You won’t be waiting long. If I can’t shut Lauren down in the next couple of days, this’ll all be a moot point. Right now I want you to go home, get your family, and take off. Is there a place you can go, somewhere Lauren doesn’t know about?”

  His fingers rapped the edge of his coffee mug as he tried to think.

  “The ranch outside Dallas. Belongs to my wife’s family. We go there every summer. It’s secluded.”

  “Good,” I said. “The farther off the grid you are, the better. Just be ready. Like I said, I’m going to need one last thing from you before this is done.”

  He left me with the tab and a half-eaten plate of scrambled eggs. I watched him leave, staring listlessly out the window until his taillights turned a corner and slipped out of sight. If he didn’t realize he’d been played, if he didn’t talk to Lauren or Meadow and find out the truth, if this whole scam held together just a little bit longer, we might be all right.

  That was too many ifs for me. I needed to work faster. What I really needed right now, though, was at least six hours of sleep somewhere besides a plane or a car seat. Lethargy was catching up fast. I couldn’t afford that.

  I called Caitlin. “How did it go? Everybody make it home okay?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Everyone’s fine. Did you get what you needed?”

  She sounded more tired than I felt. There was something off in her voice, something distracted and moody.

  “I think so. He’ll back our play, if he doesn’t wise up. You okay? What’s wrong?”

  “Emma’s here…we should talk, Daniel. Can you come over? I can’t leave right now.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. I tossed a twenty on the table and called for a taxi.

  The glass doors of the Taipei Tower slid open at my approach. I crossed the expanse of cherry chrysanthemum carpet to the chromed doors of the VIP elevator. As usual, it was already keyed for the penthouse level and waiting to sweep me to the top.

  Caitlin met me at her door. I’d seen that hardness in her eyes before. It was the look she got when she was working.

  “Come in,” she said. No embrace, no kiss.

  Emma sat on Caitlin’s black leather couch with a box of tissues in her lap. Her red, puffy eyes told me a little more of the story. I wasn’t prepared for the anger in her voice when she saw me.

  “He shouldn’t be here!” she snapped. “This isn’t about him. He isn’t relevant—”

  “He is entirely relevant, and you know it,” Caitlin said. Her voice was calm and cold, layered over unbending steel.

  “Look,” I said, “if you want me to come back later—”

  Now Emma’s eyes were molten copper, and she shouted at me from a mouth that had too many teeth in it. “I do!”

  “Emma!” Caitlin snapped. She strode across the floor, getting between us. “You will calm down, now, and remember that you are a guest in my home. Don’t make me tell you twice.”

  Emma lolled her head back on the couch and pressed the heels of her palms to her human-again eyes, rubbing them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice weak. “I’m sorry, Daniel. I just…I don’t want anyone seeing me like this.”

  I held up my open hands. “It’s okay. What’s wrong? Can I help?”

  Emma plucked a tissue from the box and blew her nose. She looked over at Caitlin. “Well? Go ahead. You wanted to tell him, tell him.”

  Caitlin clasped her hands behind her back and paced the hardwood floor, poised like a general as she considered her words.

  “There are agreements in place between our courts,” she said, “treaties of old made in the interest of mutual survival. One of these agreements is called Case Exodus. It’s a plan of last resort, in a situation where the Earth is…compromised beyond recovery by an occupying force. In such a case, our greatest concern is the protection of hell itself.”

  She stopped pacing and turned toward me.

  “Orders came down tonight from the prince’s council. Lauren’s ascension, and the union of this world and the Garden, would constitute such a threat. If she succeeds, Case Exodus will be executed.”

  “Wait,” I said, “what exactly does that mean? What happens?”

  “Severance,” Caitlin said. “Every gate and conduit leading off of Earth, either to hell or to any other realm we know of—we seal them. Blow them up. Shut them down. Whatever we have to do to completely sever any escape from the planet. Whatever it takes to stop the contagion from spreading further. Earth will be thrown under eternal quarantine.”

  “We salt the soil on our way out,” Emma said. “Spark as many incidents as possible in what little time we have to reap as many damned souls as we can.”

  “Incidents?” I asked.

  Emma shrugged. “Massacres, power plant accidents, plane crashes, whatever we can manage. Then there’s the…”

  She paused and looked questioningly at Caitlin. Caitlin sighed and looked back to me.

  “The Court of Tarnished Memories,” she said, “has control of at least one nuclear weapon.”

  I shook my head. “What you’re telling me is if Lauren gets the ball, you’re going to break all the toys and go home.”

  “To stop her from invading our realm?” Caitlin said. “Yes, without hesitation. You know her. She won’t be satisfied with ruling the Earth. She won’t be satisfied at all. Some hungers can never be fulfilled. Once she ascends, quarantine will be the only way to keep her in check.”

  No pressure or anything.

  “So how about a little help, then?” I said. “If everybody knows it’s five minutes
to doomsday, why aren’t the other courts sending the cavalry? Every prince has a hound, right? So why are you the only one here?”

  “Duplicity is in our nature.” Caitlin paced the floor. “It could be doomsday, or it could be my prince playing an elaborate trick, trying to lure the other princes’ elite forces into an ambush. It’s a game of odds. It’s far more likely to be a trick than a genuine crisis, so they’d rather play it safe, keep their distance, and save their own skins.”

  “Then I guess that means we’re on our own,” I said. “Now, what aren’t you telling me?”

  “What—what do you mean?” Emma said.

  I nodded to the box of tissues. “I can understand being pissed off about losing your favorite sandbox, but let’s get real. I know you, Emma. This is a business decision when you get right down to it, and you don’t cry over business. You fight, and you thrive. So what’s wrong?”

  She looked over at Caitlin with wet eyes. Caitlin gave the slightest shake of her head. No help there. It had to be something personal, something Emma was worried she’d lose and couldn’t replace…

  “Melanie,” I said. “You don’t think Melanie’s damned.”

  The kid had demon blood but a human soul. And a good heart. Like she’d made crystal clear when she stood up to Sullivan and told him off, she had just as much power over her fate as anyone else. Maybe the power to find her own road into the afterlife, too.

  Truth was, we didn’t know what was out there in the great beyond. Hell was real, but heaven? You tell me. All I knew was that when some people shuffled off, decent people, there was no finding them again.

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. She tugged another tissue from the box and crumpled it in her clenched fist. “I thought…I thought maybe I could get her to cross that line. It wouldn’t take much. A random killing, a mortal sin or two—”

  “But she wouldn’t do it, and you know that,” I said.

  “She wouldn’t, not if I asked her to,” Emma said. She took a deep breath. “You know, Daniel…she listens to you.”

  She could have punched me in the gut, and it would have hurt less. I turned my back. I had to walk away, just a few steps, to keep my temper from boiling over.