by Blake Banner
My mind was racing. They had played me, but they still didn’t know it was me. They still believed I was somebody sent by Marni and Gibbons. If they had known it was me, Ben would have made sure the trap was better, and the troops more numerous and better led. He would not have left the operation in the hands of Captain Bob. But now, now they would know. Once they found out what had happened, Ben would recognize my handiwork. He would know it was me.
I still had a little time. There would be a mopping up operation, an assessment of the damage, a report back to the brass. So I still had time.
I hit the end of the Topanga Canyon Boulevard doing fifty and did not pause. I jumped the red light, my tires screamed and I surged from fifty to a hundred, thundering in silence along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu. I checked my watch. It was just after midnight, and there was hardly any traffic. I made it to the intersection with Wildlife Road in just over six minutes, slowed hard and turned against the lights, then cruised at a leisurely twenty miles an hour, with my heart pounding, until I came to Fernhill Drive, opposite Fenninger’s gate. I stopped on the corner, killed the engine and climbed out to sit on the hood. I lit another Camel from the butt of the first and gave myself a few minutes to calm down. There was a breeze coming in off the ocean. It moved the tall palms silhouetted against the moonlight, cooled my skin and carried with it the quiet strains of big band jazz.
I sucked on the cigarette, inhaled deeply and tried to locate the source of the music. Fenninger’s house was floodlit. The lights played on the Russian vine that spilled over his white fence, and touched the leaves of the giant oak outside his gate. I stuck my left hand in my pocket and strolled across the road. As I approached his big, white metal gates I could hear distinctly that the music was coming from his house. There was a heat in my belly that I could barely control. In my mind I could see the pain in his wife’s eyes; the pain and the fear in her eyes and her children’s. He had knowingly put them in harm’s way, deliberately used them as bait to catch a killer, and meanwhile, to protect his own sorry ass, he’d arranged a party here.
I walked back to my car pulling my cell from my pocket and dialed El Toro. Maria answered.
“It’s me, El Gringo.”
“You don’t like that name.”
“It’s growing on me. You owe me a favor.”
“I know it. The cops just left. Don told them he did it, protecting me and the hotel. They told him they would not prosecute.”
“Good for him. You’ll get respect now. Nothing earns respect like unbridled violence.”
“You want payback?” There was a smile in her voice.
“Yeah. I do. But I’m willing to pay. I need you to organize four girls and send them to a party in Malibu, within the hour. It pays double their usual rate. But, Maria, they have to be real lookers. And swingers.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Is for you?”
I couldn’t keep the hatred from my voice. I snarled, “No, it’s for Aaron Fenninger and his guests.”
“Aaron Fenninger?” She sounded intrigued. “You’re full of surprises.”
“You have no idea. Send them in a limo, charge it to expenses. I need them here within the hour.”
“Don’t worry, they’re on their way.”
I hung up, dropped the butt on the hard top, crushed it with my foot and returned to sit on the hood of the Zombie and wait. Forty minutes later a stretched white limo rolled into the street and cruised down toward Fenninger’s place. I hailed it and pointed at his gate. It pulled up and I opened the door for the girls. They climbed out. They were gorgeous, but they looked bemused. I smiled and said, “Earn your pay, girls. Laugh and giggle for the camera.” I buzzed on the intercom at the gate, but stayed out of view. A woman’s voice answered and I put a smile in my voice for her. “Mr. Hanks here to see Mr. Fenninger.”
There was a little laugh, but nothing happened. Then a man’s voice came on. He sounded drunk. “Tom? Is that you?”
I did a fair imitation of his voice and shouted, “I brought you a gift! A thank you for not inviting me to your soirée! I am hurt, but not yet wounded! Say hello, girls!”
The girls laughed and waved at the camera. I heard more laughter over the intercom. “You damn fool! This isn’t… It’s just an informal gathering. Ah, come on in and have a drink!”
The gate started to roll back. I signaled the chauffeur to wait and the girls to go on in. I followed them down a path by the side of the house. At the end, I could see a floodlit lawn and a turquoise pool reflecting the lights from the house. The music was louder and I could hear voices, mainly male, talking and laughing. It was a warm sound, civilized, friendly. I gave a whistle and the girls stopped and turned to me. I grinned.
“Whatever you expect to make tonight, there’s a five grand bonus if you are really outrageous. If you manage to shock me, I’ll double it.”
They looked at each other. It was all the encouragement they needed. They were already stripping as they ran for the pool, and I was already filming them on my phone. Fenninger came out from the back of the house, saw the four naked girls and burst out laughing. They all hugged him and he was loving it, laughing, kissing them and slapping their asses. I got it all. Then they were off, jumping into the pool, splashing around and squealing. He followed them, still laughing.
I held back and saw a few other people step onto the lawn. A couple of them were actors and actresses, others I couldn’t see. I heard somebody ask, “Did you say Tom was here?” And Fenninger turned, searching for his new guest. I was still in shadow, with my phone in front of my face. He laughed and moved toward me. “What are you doing, you crazy son of a bitch?”
I said, “I’m making a new movie for world wide release.”
He frowned. He didn’t recognize the voice. I put the phone in my pocket and stepped toward him, smiling. “Hello, Aaron. How are you? I have just seen your wife and your kids. They send their regards and hope you’ll be able to join them soon.”
He went white. The actor next to him, famous for being urbane, was frowning in an urbane sort of way, with a smile woven into it. It was an expression that was ready to move in any direction it needed to, once he knew who I was. I looked at him and said in my most reasonable voice, “You will forgive us, this is a very delicate, family matter and I am afraid it can’t wait. It needs to be discussed now.” I turned back to Fenninger. “Your wife and children are very anxious to find out what is happening, Aaron.”
His mouth was working, but no sound was coming out. He glanced at his pal for support, but his pal’s instinct was telling him that Fenninger’s house was not a place he needed to be right then. “Perhaps,” he said, in his distinctive, urbane way, “I had better leave you to it. It’s getting kind of late anyhow.” He turned to Fenninger. “Listen, thanks for a great evening. Next one’s at Sly’s.”
I called after him by his name. He stopped and looked at me, like his name was a Ming vase and I was mauling it with dirty hands. “Maybe you could spread the word.”
He took my meaning and nodded. Meanwhile, the girls had got hold of their phones from their bags and were photographing themselves and each other wet and draped over a lot of alarmed looking celebrities who were rapidly gathering their stuff and making their way toward the gate. One of them, a cute ninety-pound doll who in the movies can take down a gorilla with a single punch, gave Fenninger a kiss on his cheek and said, “If I am in any of those pictures, Aaron, I’m going to need them by morning. You understand that, don’t you honey?”
He nodded. He looked very sick. He knew that her lawyers were the least of his worries right then. I said, “Don’t fret, sweetheart. I’ll take care of everything.”
She gave me a once over that said I wasn’t offensive because I didn’t exist. “Who are you?”
“I’m the man who is going to recover those photographs. Be nice to me.”
She aborted a smile and left. Suddenly we were alone with the four naked women in the pool. I grinned a
t him. “Strip naked and get in the water.”
“You have to be kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.”
He stared at me but didn’t move.
“There were twenty men, ten outside and ten inside. I killed them all, including Bob. Your wife and kids were barricaded in the bedroom at the top right of the patio, on the galleried landing. I didn’t kill them.
“Bob called for reinforcements. They sent three choppers. I brought down all three of the choppers.” I held up my right hand. It was caked with blood. “This blood is Bob’s. Now take off your clothes, get in the pool and look like you’re having fun, or I will take my knife, disembowel you and lynch you with your own intestines.”
He stripped and got in the pool. The girls were all over him. I filmed it all. After two minutes I stopped filming and grinned at the girls, who really did look as though they were having a ball. “Now take him inside and show him a good time. Film it. And, Aaron?” I leered at him. “Do whatever you have to do, snort whatever you need to snort, but make it convincing.”
He swallowed hard and nodded. As they moved toward the house I held back one of the girls. She smiled at me. I said, “Get everything on camera. Everything. Especially if he snorts. Got it?”
She winked at me and ran after her friends. I sent what I had so far to Gantrie, told him to expect more, and to give it worldwide exposure first thing in the morning. Then I sat and had another cigarette, watching the peaceful lapping of the pool under the trees. Inside I could hear the girls laughing and squealing. I gave them fifteen minutes, then collected up their clothes and their purses and carried them inside.
The room was huge, with a high ceiling and modern, cream and white Scandinavian furniture scattered over parquet floors. In the center there was a copper fireplace, similar to the one at the vineyard. Fenninger was sitting naked on the sofa, snorting a line of coke . He had three girls draped around him doing things that no girl who expects to go to Heaven should ever get caught doing. The fourth was filming it all.
I dumped their clothes on a chair and collected their cells. There were general moans of complaint that the party was just getting started. I ignored them and sent the photographs and films they had to Gantrie. When I’d finished I said, “You got cash in your house?”
He looked at me like I was the scum on the scum on the sole of his shoe. “Really? That’s what this comes down to? Money?”
“Have you got cash in your house?”
“Of course I have.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. It’s in the safe. Ten grand?”
“Give it to the ladies.”
He looked at me for a long time, like he was trying to work out what I was about. In the end he got up and crossed the room to a blond wood door. He opened it and went inside. I said to the girls, “Get dressed. Go home. This stops being fun now.”
They started dressing. After five minutes, Fenninger came out with a wad of cash. He gave it to the girls and they left, still giggling but trying to suppress it. When they’d gone, Fenninger sat and watched me in silence.
I said, “Did you call them?”
“You knew I would.”
“Are they in L.A.?”
“They flew in when they heard about Intelligent Imaging Consultants.”
“Are they coming, or are they sending men?”
His face flushed with anger. “What men? Do you know—have you any conception?” He stopped, as though he had asked me a question, then screamed at me, “Have you any conception of how many men you have killed tonight?”
A wave of nausea swept over me. My skin went cold and prickled. It was a terrible question to be asked. When I answered my voice was husky and didn’t sound to me like my own voice. “They were trying to kill me.”
“We had a truce! Alpha told me! You made a truce! You agreed not to come after us!”
His voice was still shrill. I didn’t answer. Instead I asked, “Are they coming?”
He wasn’t going to answer, but after a moment he sighed. “Alpha insisted. He believes if he talks to you, you will stop. Beta did not want to come, neither did Delta. But Alpha insisted.”
I nodded.
His breathing was heavy. He was staring at me with angry eyes. Suddenly he spat, “What the hell do you want?”
I studied his face, his outraged expression, his angry eyes. The most terrifying thing about him was that he truly believed that he had been wronged. He was going to die without ever realizing that he had faced justice, and what he had done was wrong.
“I want to live in a world, Fenninger, where my children, if I ever have any—where people in general—don’t have their souls consumed by vampires like you. Where there is no cabal of privileged Über Beings shaping people’s minds, thoughts and behavior to suit their idea of what the world should be like. I want to live in a world where people, all people, are as nearly free as is possible, with nobody controlling my mind and telling me what I can or cannot think.”
He groaned and rolled his eyes. “Bleeding fucking hearts…”
I shook my head. “As far as I can see, Fenninger, the only people bleeding around here are you guys. You made a mistake. All of you made a big mistake. You see, you do not own anybody.”
The voice was soft, smooth and resonant. It spoke behind me. It said, “That is where you are wrong, Lacklan. It’s where you have always been wrong. We own everyone and everything. And the only reason you have been able to hurt us as much as you have, is because you are one of us.”
I sighed. “Hello, Ben.”
SEVENTEEN
The small group of men gathered in that room at that moment were straight out of a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. The only one who wasn’t a household name was Ben. He stood looking down at Fenninger with contempt writ large on his face. “Put some clothes on, for God’s sake, Epsilon, you’re a disgrace.” He turned to face me. Beta, the richest man in the world, stood on his right, peering at me through his glasses like I was a curious specimen. I sat looking up at his amiable face, thinking that possibly no man since Julius Caesar, or Jesus Christ—the two JCs—had affected the world quite so profoundly as this geek.
The man on his left, Delta, barely in his late thirties, as the man who had transformed the entire meaning of the expression ‘social life’. Almost single-handed, he had created the Zombie Revolution. Between the three of them, Beta, Delta and Epsilon, they controlled the entire flow of opinion, news, information and, I realized, moral judgment in the Western world. With the matrices of their technology they shaped and directed every sentence, every thought and every emotion that was expressed online. They shaped, controlled, created and destroyed every relationship online. And that was, surely, practically every relationship in the Western world.
But what was worse, was that between these three men, they decided who the role models were that would guide humanity into the future. They would design and provide the role models who would lay down the ethical and moral codes of thought and behavior that would guide our future generations. No parent, no teacher, no mentor or guide could ever compete with the perfect, silicon role models that these three men could create and broadcast into every mind on Earth.
And these role models, these leading lights, the new prophets, these men and women whom our entire civilization was modeling, were not only fictitious, they were leading our civilization into the greatest catastrophe Mankind had experienced since the Flood. And their lesson, what they were teaching, was how to be servile, how to be slaves, how to lie down and die.
Fenninger stood and went away in search of clothes. Ben turned to face me and they all sat. Ben looked older. He had gone slightly gray at the temples since I had last seen him. He said, “I thought we had an understanding, Lacklan. We would leave you alone and you would leave us alone. Yet you have deliberately come after us. I thought I could trust your word. Clearly I was wrong.”
I smiled and gave a small laugh. “I am receiving a moral lect
ure from a man who plans to massacre seven billion people and enslave those who survive.”
“Really? We are going to have this conversation again? We did not create the Industrial Revolution, Lacklan. We did not create climate change or overpopulation, we are just trying to navigate the safest path out of it. Why do you have such difficulty understanding that?”
“Because your ‘safest path’ means that you destroy the one thing about a human being that is sacred! Their minds! The freedom of their minds!”
Beta burst out laughing. “Who are you,” he said. “Who are you to decide what is and is not sacred in a human being?”
“Who am I? I’ll tell you who I am, you arrogant son of a bitch! I am a human being! I am a human being with a free mind and free will! Now you tell me something. Who are you to decide that you have the right to override one single person’s free will? Who are you to decide that you have the right to control and manipulate people’s minds, desires and behavior without their consent? Who the fuck are you to decide who gets to live, who dies and who becomes one of your compliant fucking slaves?”
He leaned forward, smiling. “I am the man who can.”
Ben raised his hand to silence us both. “We are not going to have this conversation with you, Lacklan. We are way past the point where any of it can be stopped or changed.”
“Bullshit. You know as well as I do that your project with Intelligent Imaging Consultants is sunk.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. After a moment he said, “What will it take to make you stop? I have given up trying to persuade you to join us. So just tell me this: you know we can hurt you a lot more than you can hurt us. So what will it take to make you stop?”
I stared at him for a long moment with no expression on my face at all. Finally I shook my head and looked away. “Less than you might think, Ben.”
