He offered a wan smile. “How far back do these guest logs go?”
“Um, we keep them for five years, I think.”
“And how long has Philomena been here?”
“Um, going on just about five years now. Wow, the time flies . . .”
“Could I look at them?”
She looked skeptical.
“I’m a private investigator. The woman we’re here to see, Philomena, her brother was a police officer for Mount Pleasant who recently died in the line of duty. I’m helping out the department, just checking on a few things.”
“Oh.” The nurse glanced in the direction Sloane had gone. Brendan could tell by that one look that more than anything he had just said, the nurse would let him go through the guest log because he had arrived with Sloane. The nurse trusted her.
“One moment,” she said.
The nurse withdrew from the desk and went into a room off to the side. The windows behind the desk opened to a long, well-manicured lawn which ended in a line of craggy rocks demarcating the shore of the Hudson. Not a bad place, Brendan thought. It likely cost Argon a bit of coin.
He turned away and looked around the front lobby, he glanced at a few ferns amid the chairs placed just-so in front of coffee tables with their fanned-out magazines. Out the front, through the glass door and floor-to-ceiling windows, he could see the parking lot, and the rental.
That tracking device hidden beneath the car. Right now his position was known. It was unsettling. For two years he’d stayed off the radar – or so he’d hoped. And in two days he’d gone from being a bearded, anonymous, bullshit P.I. in Wyoming to a man in the middle of some sordid conspiracy, his best friend at the heart of it, and he himself in the crosshairs. And he couldn’t be sure who was watching him. Titan? More and more he was beginning to wonder about Titan. The medical technology company, the construction company, right out there in plain sight. A red herring, perhaps.
I was born under the dark smoke of September.
The words were like a cold breath against his neck.
When someone spoke, Brendan jumped.
“Sir?” the nurse said.
He spun around to face her, his heart thumping.
She smiled and placed a large binder in front of him.
“This is what I have. Some days there are no visitors at all – but over five years, you’re looking at a lot of pages.” She gestured to the chairs in the lobby. “You want to take this and sit down?”
Brendan looked at the tome on the desk between them. He glanced to his right, down the hallway where Sloane had gone. He hadn’t even been in to meet Philomena yet. There were too many sheets. Still, he had something tugging at his thoughts, something compelling him to flip through at least a few of the sheets in the register.
He thanked her, took a seat, pushed aside the magazines, and set down the book. He started flipping. As he watched the pages go past, his eyes scanning the names, he had the sudden, capricious thought of a sphere of tumbling lottery balls.
Largo? Russell Gide? Santos? Dutko? Chief-frigging-Cushing? Who was he looking for?
He started to feel self-conscious, a heat crawling up the back of his neck, along his lymph nodes, creeping up to his cheekbones. He needed to stop this. It was the old paranoia again. Half-cocked notions of conspiracies.
He flipped through faster, feeling an anger rising, helpless to quell it. The least he could do was go back to the beginning, flip to the end of the book, going back in time now, back past when Sloane had first started coming, a year and a half ago, her name disappeared. Back beyond when Russell Gide first committed to sobriety, four years ago now. Getting close to the end of the thick binder, the names blurring past, Argon’s repeated over and over again, a few others peppered throughout, none he recognized.
He closed the book a little more abruptly than he meant to. He took it back to the nurse and then started down the hallway to Philomena’s room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE / Monday, 12:36 PM
Philomena Argon was sixty-eight, six years older than her late brother. Not that old, certainly not by today’s standards, but the woman wrapped in a large shawl in a wheelchair looked ancient to Brendan.
Sloane turned to look at him from where she was crouched next to Philomena.
“Hi, Brendan,” she said. She came towards him while Philomena remained staring out the window. Brendan noticed that Sloane moved with the air of someone in familiar surroundings. According to the guest log, she’d been here over half a dozen times in the past two months alone.
“Hi,” he said to the indifferent Philomena. He took in the room: the twin bed to one side of the room with its neat blankets; the single bureau garnished with some lady-things – Pond’s face cream, a hair brush, a small dish with some bobby pins – and two photos in expensive-looking, brass frames. There was a small chair in the corner by the bureau, with its Queen Anne legs and red velvet seat it looked like something from the wrong time.
A radiator rattled underneath the window where Philomena sat in her wheelchair. On the other side of her was a trunk covered in a large doily and beside that a door that likely led to the bathroom. To his immediate right was a rolltop desk that matched the period of the chair in the far corner. Brendan doubted that Philomena was doing much of anything lately at the closed, rolltop desk. It reminded him of the one in Olivia Jane’s office.
This assessment of the room only took Brendan a few seconds; it was his routine, deeply entrenched. Sloane was standing a few feet away, between him and Argon’s sister.
And then there was silence. Just the gurgling of the radiator. Until Sloane said, “Come meet her.”
* * *
Sloane spoke softly to Philomena. She introduced Brendan, and then beckoned him to come closer.
Brendan felt awkward. He crouched by the wheelchair
The elderly woman’s hair was different shades of grey, some of it almost black, shoulder-length, and pulled back with a couple of pins on the sides, tucked around her ears. She lifted her face up to look at him.
The resemblance to Argon was striking. The bridge of her nose. The eyes, kind yet alert and sharp. But one side of her face was slack.
She made no attempt to smile. If she knew who he was, her expression didn’t betray it. Those eyes just took him in, and the grey light from the window reflected in them.
Then she returned her attention to Sloane, and Philomena spoke, her voice low and the words unintelligible to Brendan.
“No. He’s not my husband,” replied Sloane.
Brendan felt a brief flush of blood to his face and cracked a light smile.
“Hello, Philomena. I’m a friend of your brother’s.”
Philomena looked out the window again, she answered Sloane’s question in a way Brendan still wasn’t able to decipher. It wasn’t the accent which threw him, but a severe impairment of speech from her stroke. The two of them, Sloane and Philomena, went on like this, with Sloane crouched next to her, asking questions about how she was feeling and eating and so on.
As the women conversed, Brendan’s mind wandered back to the items in the room. It had occurred to him that Argon might have stored something in this room. He would like to see what was in her rolltop desk, or in the trunk next to where Sloane was balanced on the balls of her feet, but that would be inappropriate, an invasion of privacy.
Argon had left everything to his sister. Neither of them were married or had kids, he assumed. He went over to the bureau to look at the pictures and maybe see if there was any evidence to the contrary.
The will had been dated only a month and a half before. Philomena had been like this for much longer, she’d moved to Laurel Grove shortly after the stroke, over four years ago. Why leave your land, your vacation home, your main residence, and all of your savings to your older, infirm sister? The money, sure – it could go to her care – but maybe there was more to the story, and a reason why Argon had had the will drawn up only recently. He had named a lawyer in White Plains
as the executor. Brendan made a mental note to get in touch with the lawyer, time and events permitting.
The framed photos on the bureau were old black-and-whites. One showed a man and a woman, probably dating back seventy years or more. The man had the same nose and eyes as Argon and his sister. The woman shared Philomena’s bone structure, and the shrewd look to the eyes. The man wore a full, bushy mustache and a classic Glengarry hat. The hat featured a check pattern around its boat shape, with ribbons coming down to the man’s shoulder. A military hat. The woman had long curls that might have been auburn or brown – tough to say.
The other picture showed two small children. The girl was quite a lot older than the boy. Brendan guessed that she was nine or ten, and the boy perhaps two. The boy was surely Argon. He was outfitted in Highland attire, wearing a crisp white shirt, waist coat, and a kilt. There was a small leather sporran, like a purse, hanging around his waist. The girl matched in her own tartan dress and white blouse.
Brendan found himself staring at the photos, considering a time and heritage he knew very little about, aside from what Argon had told him. He heard his name.
“Brendan? He’s looking at your photos.”
Brendan turned and looked at the two of them and smiled sheepishly.
“Oh,” Sloane said. “I almost forgot.” She reached into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt and pulled out the photograph she had taken from Argon’s bedroom the night before. With a great big smile on her face, and a wink to Brendan, Sloane showed Philomena the picture.
“Isn’t that great?” Sloane was beaming. Philomena said something indecipherable and Sloane threw her head back and laughed. “Exactly.” Sloane caught Brendan’s eye and nodded for him to come closer. Sloane held the photo up to him. “Will you put these with her others? Right there in the desk.”
Brendan took the photo, a silly birthday picture that was probably ten years old. He went over to the rolltop desk and slid back the hatch.
There was a stack of photos, some neatly organized pads of paper, and a jar of pens. He picked up the photos and started thumbing through them.
He stopped.
A current ripped through him, as if he had inadvertently stuck his hand into an ice cold stream.
He held his breath. Everything in the room faded away. He held the picture in his hands and he stared down at it in utter disbelief.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX / Monday, 12:52 PM
Jeremy Staryles thought that “Dread Pirate Roberts” was a ridiculous name. He knew it was taken from that movie – The Princess Bride. But it was immature; it didn’t suit the man who had been running the now-defunct Silk Road.
He felt like his own pseudonym was much more appropriate. More formidable.
That was his business, though, when you got right down to it: being formidable. Silk Road, and then XList, and whatever came after, they were there to offer the sickos of the world their fixes. Staryles, on the other hand, and his organization after the war, was there to protect investments, to see that the sickos were able to keep their day jobs, and that the gravy train kept rolling.
That was always the way it was. All you ever had to do was follow the dollar to understand anything, Staryles thought. The money-market system was behind every tragic event in humanity since Anatolian obsidian was distributed twelve thousand years before Christ, and it was given a good solid kick towards hell after the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913. From there the deficit felt the first pangs of its insatiable appetite to gobble everything in sight. And the bankers and oil men and drug pushers got filthy, unbelievably rich. No one had to prove it to Jeremy Staryles, no one had to show him charts. It was in the DNA of the world. It was why humans invented the concepts of good and evil. It was the evil; had been since Christ drove the money-changers from the temple.
Christ had then been crucified.
Caesar had minted his own coin, and won the love of the common man, and performed great public works.
Caesar had been assassinated.
On through history it went, among the great leaders of the nation, right through JFK and Bobby Kennedy. If they weren’t killed, they were bought. Jeremy knew because his brother, Jason, was an economic hitman. Jeremy knew because his eyes were open, the scales fallen away. He lived it every day, and had been for ten years. While the rest of the world either indulged in conspiracy theories or sneered with condescending skepticism at those same theories, the real world went on regardless of what anyone thought. And that’s how Jeremy needed to be. He needed to know the truth, and for years, since his childhood, since his father, he had.
You didn’t go on a midnight raid in Yemen and kill a man, his wife, his sons, and even his daughters, while they slept in their beds, because that man was a terrorist, or a national threat. You weren’t creating peace, building democracy, or breaking a few eggs to build whatever omelet they said you were. You killed that man because someone else was making money from his death, and off everything that led to that moment.
To the hammer, the world was full of nails.
JSOC was a hammer. If his father had introduced him to the real world, JSOC had been Staryles’ higher education. After four years of drone strikes and night raids he understood one unassailable fact: everything that was gained by someone in this world was taken from someone else. You couldn’t create energy out of nothing – you couldn’t create wealth out of nothing. Wealth was only possible with an equal amount of debt. Life was only possible through death. Every Federal Reserve note – every dollar bill – was something owed to someone else, every breath you took was one someone else did not. Everything had its turn, and then was gone.
It was everywhere you looked, once your eyes were open.
It was the Kali Yuga, it was the End of the Fourth Sun.
It was the end of the Mayan Calendar, the beginning of an enlightenment phase, and expansion of consciousness.
It was in Chief Seattle’s famous words: “Not until you have killed the last fish, and cut down the last tree, and poisoned the last river will you discover that you cannot eat money.”
It was what Staryles’ father had told him as a boy –
Revelations 13:5, in particular.
The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise its authority for forty-two months.
This was the monopoly media and the lobbying industry rolled together. Unlimited funds to buy office, to buy laws, and to spew the propaganda buying consent.
He knew 13:6 by heart as well.
It opened its mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven.
The great juggernaut of science and technology. The empty promises technology made to solve all of the world’s problems, and those who believed in its power, and looked to science for every answer while living the life of a sybarite in the realm of the hungry ghost, consuming all to sate its depthless appetite.
And he’d memorized the rest, too. He’d had plenty of time in the desert.
It was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast--all whose names have not been written in the Lamb's book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.
And then, 13:10:
Whoever has ears, let them hear.
Staryles knew what the beast was. The beast was money, the beast was represented by the lion. And he had the ears, and he heard.
He worked for the lion. It was the only sensible thing to do. He thought of its true symbol; the lion in the triangle of time. The time of the rapture, which was now. People didn’t understand it – unfortunately they tried to interpret it too literally. They couldn’t see, they couldn’t hear that it had been going on all around them for years now. They still waited, but it was already happening.
Where humans now lived was in the purgatorial wasteland. The souls had already been chosen that would enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The markers were placed
, and were soon to be collected. Cancers, plagues, natural disasters, man-made disasters, the rise of the heathen, the day the non-believers outnumber the believers. When they had first expected a lion, they had received a lamb. Where they expected the second coming of the lamb, they would bear the wrath of the lion.
Staryles knew that his soul was not among the chosen.
So he drove through the day in his dark blue Cutlass. He drove to his next appointment. Riding along with him was the odorless, colorless poison of the death he wrought.
The detective and the girl. They were the last two on the clean-up sheet.
And that was what Staryles did, what he was. Along with being formidable, he cleaned up.
That endless debt. The endless debt of the lion, the beast. It gobbled up resources with its relentless hunger, sprung forth from the realm of hungry ghosts. And the money-changers continued to feed it, like their pet, while it writhed and thrashed among the world, a great and awesome spectacle hiding in plain sight.
Staryles drove the Cutlass out of the city, into Westchester County, and he smiled. At least he knew his station in life – his true calling. That was more than the majority of humanity could say. He did clean-up, and he prepared for the next phase. He too wielded the tools of denial and fear, covering the tracks of his client, allowing the illusion to persist. A free world. An innocent, progressing dream. He ensured that the delusion of economic growth would hold a little longer. No one had to give up anything. And they never had to consider the cost. They were good at that, the people left behind in purgatory – it was their specialty.
They never had to consider the cost.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN / Monday, 1:06 PM
“Sloane,” Brendan said. He heard something like panic in his own voice. But something else, too. Something in him that was younger, something from long ago.
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