by Blake Banner
He still had his hands in front of his face. His voice was small. “What are you talking about?”
I grabbed the scruff of his neck in my left hand and rammed the muzzle of the Sig against his heart. “What am I talking about? What am I talking about? I am talking about the drought you are going to exploit to seize control of Saudi and Iran, to trigger war in the Middle East so that your investments in armaments, munitions and Texas oil will skyrocket! I am talking about the ruthless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people on the altar of Omega’s madness!”
He was staring at me like I was crazy. “But we have to! Don’t you understand? We have no choice! Your father was Gamma, didn’t he explain it to you? For God’s sake, don’t shoot me for that!”
My finger was tightening on the trigger. The captain’s voice froze me dead.
“Stand up. Pull the trigger and I will blow your head off.”
I turned and fired. As I did, Fenninger bucked and thrashed. My shot went wide and as it did the captain fired. Fenninger scrambled from under me and I felt the heat of the slug burn the air by my head as I fell. I pulled off two more rounds but Fenninger and the captain were already running toward the cars.
I scrabbled to my feet and ran after them. I vaulted the log fence. Dropped to one knee, took half a second to aim and pulled off two double taps, but they were already wrenching open the door and clambering into the Jag. I heard the whine of a ricochet as one of the slugs hit the chassis. Then they were reversing at speed. The car spun. I let off six more shots without aiming and the car did naught to sixty in four seconds, burning rubber down the drive toward the road.
I stood, looking at the empty darkness where the Jag had been seconds before. I was panting and every part of my body hurt more than every other part of my body. A thin moon leered at me over the treetops in the east. It was a disaster: a total, unmitigated disaster, and the consequences were unfathomable.
I saw Captain Bob’s truck reflecting the thin moonlight, and the stronger light from the porch. Even if I took the truck and went after them, I would never make it in time. I had to accept I had lost the battle. Omega would know that I was after them. But the war was not over yet.
Beyond the truck I saw the black, gaping maw of the oak doors under the purple shrouds of the Russian vine, and through the pain and the nausea an idea began to dawn. It might work. But this time I had to make it happen, without mistakes, without fuck ups. This time it had to be perfectly executed.
It came like a strange, negative echo from my thoughts. It came from over by the trees. A voice. It said, “Boy, you really fucked up, huh?”
I moved instinctively, pulling my weapon, training it with both hands on the shadows. The voice laughed and the shadows shifted. “You didn’t kill the bad guy, so now you gonna kill the good guy who wants to help you. You’re piling fuck up on fuck up. Take a break, Mr. Lacklan Walker.”
He stepped into the pale moonlight, all stooping six feet six of him, with his woolen coat and his woolen hat. He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, opened it and held it out to me. “Smoke?”
I shook my head.
He pulled one and lit it with a disposable lighter. “I thought maybe I was going to have to help out. I was disappointed. But I am guessing today you were not giving your best.”
“You followed me.”
He made a face like he thought I could do a lot better. “That is pretty obvious, yuh?” He pointed at the Sig. “You don’t need this. The bad guys have gone. You let them get away.”
I sighed, then holstered my weapon. “What the hell are you doing here, Njal? I gave you my answer.”
He spread his hands and shrugged, smoke trailing from his nose, and he started a slow walk toward me across the parking lot. “I been told to stay with you, make sure you OK.”
“Told by whom?”
He leered and chuckled. “Now you wanna know? Before you didn’t wanna know, now you wanna know.”
I repeated, “Told by whom?”
He pointed back toward the shadows with two fingers and a smoking cigarette stuck between them. “Come, I introduce you.”
“Don’t introduce me, just tell me.”
He spread his hands again and shrugged. “What can I tell you? He’s a guy. He’s just a guy with crazy, brilliant ideas. He has a different way of seeing things. His mind is…” He made a gesture in front of his eyes with his fingers, like a small explosion. “His mind is like ‘pow!’ so clear!” He shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything. You have to meet him. He is a brilliant mid, and he wants to meet you. I have to stay with you until you agree.”
I sighed. “I don’t need this, Njal.”
He did his elaborate nodding thing. “Yuh,” he said simply. “A lot of things we don’t need, but we got them anyhow.” He jerked his head toward the house. “Like the mess you got in there. What you gonna do about that? You godda clean that up.”
“Njal, you have to leave.”
He shrugged and made a noise like a nanny goat, “Yaaaah, but no.” He shook his head. “It’s not going to happen. I am here.” He gestured at the house. “We can do this together.”
I turned and walked toward the house.
We spent the next hour with a bottle of bleach and a cloth removing any forensic trace of my presence. While Njal worked through the house, I went out and found the hoes. I cleaned off my blood, put it back in the tool shed and closed the door.
We wiped all the door handles, the chair I had broken, the tiled wall and the floors in the dining room and the living room. By the time we had finished I was pretty sure that the only traces of anybody having been there were from Fenninger, Captain Bob and the Hulk, whose body still lay by the arch, staring in astonishment at the ceiling.
I found the slug a couple of feet behind him in a small pool of gore. I picked it up and put it in my pocket while Njal dug the other one out of the wall. After that I took the Hulk’s weapon and shot him in the heart again, through the original wound, and put another slug in the wall, where the 9 mm from my Sig had been. Finally I wiped my prints and squeezed the Hulk’s hand onto the gun. Njal watched me do all this, nodding slow nods of approval, and saying, “Yuh…yuh…”
I dropped the automatic on the floor and stared at Njal.
“Now, you go your way and I go mine.”
He heaved a big sigh. “You should come and meet him. It…” He looked away and gave his head a small shake. “It is like, sometimes, you find something in life that is bigger than you are.” He looked back at me. “This is bigger than you are, Lacklan Walker. You need to meet him, and talk to him. Let’s go. I will take you, then I will take you back to your car.” He shrugged. “You meet him, you talk, you don’t want to be involved. No problem! But fuck, you know? Meet him. Is not such a big deal.”
I stood a moment, staring, then I pointed at him. “If I do that, you will then leave me alone and stay out of my business.”
He looked bored and raised both hands. “Yuh, yuh, yuh! Come on. Let’s go.”
Twelve
His Ford rental car was parked a couple of hundred yards up the drive, concealed in the trees. He turned it around and began a leisurely drive back to L.A., with the windows open and a cigarette hanging permanently from the corner of his mouth. I sat back and let the cool night air batter my face. I was desperate for rest, and kept telling myself there was no way I could stop what Fenninger was going to do next. All I could do was ride it and play it. To hope that the FMW could help me in some way was to buy into a fool’s paradise. It was worse than that. I’d be exchanging one noose, one set of chains, for another.
Whatever happened that night, Fenninger would die within the next twenty-four hours, and somehow I would have to deal with Njal and his pals. I turned to look at him.
“How do you know my name?”
He didn’t look at me. He just kept his eyes on the road ahead. “He told me.”
“Who told you?”
“You gonna meet h
im.”
It was a long drive. We turned left at the bottom of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and headed into L.A. At Santa Monica, instead of turning into the city, he hugged the coast and made his way down to Torrance Beach. There he turned onto Paseo de la Playa and drove to the top of the cliffs, to the edge of the Palos Verdes Estate. There he pulled into a short driveway outside a large, two storey house with a large garden out front, planted with giant rubber plants and jacaranda trees that completely hid the façade of the building.
We climbed out and I followed him up some winding steps through the garden to the front door. He had a key and he let me in. He closed the door behind me and switched on the light. We were in a broad hallway with stairs on the left leading to the upper floor. On the right the hall became a dogleg passage leading to the back of the house, where I figured the kitchen was. On the right a door stood open. Njal gestured that I should go through. It led not so much into a room as a large space, or a collection of spaces. Two steps led down into a broad area with polished wooden floors. A large, open fireplace stood cold. Its mantelpiece was a huge chunk of seasoned driftwood. Comfortable sofas and armchairs were scattered, apparently at random, around the fire. The walls were lined with books. There must have been several thousand of them, from floor to ceiling, on every conceivable topic.
To the left there was an area that was obviously for dining. The table was a solid piece of granite, polished on top to a high gloss, but raw underneath and set on a huge, gnarled tree stump. It had six chairs set around it, and each one was different in some way. Each one was, in its own right, a work of art.
Beyond the table a set of sliding glass doors stood open and the ocean breeze was moving the amber drapes that hung beside the doors. Njal pointed.
“He’s out there, waiting. You want a drink?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I could use a whiskey.”
He shrugged like I’d made a poor choice. “I will have a beer. Go. I come.”
I stepped out onto the terrace. It was large, maybe forty feet across, fifteen feet deep, with a panoramic view of the Pacific. The moon was suspended a few inches above and cast a treacherous, misleading path of light toward the sand below.
There was a large wooden table set near the parapet and a man sitting at the table, looking out at the view. He turned to look at me as I stepped out. He was in his sixties, though he had the physique and manner of a man twenty years younger. He was big, but not fat. He looked strong, but not just physically strong. You had a strange sense when you looked at him that you could somehow see the strength of his mind reflected in his face, his expression and the way he held his body. His hair was long, platinum blond, and he had a long, straggling beard that hung down over his chest. But the most remarkable thing about him was his eyes, which were set above high cheekbones, and were long and startlingly blue.
His voice, when he spoke, was deep and sounded scarred. “You are Lacklan Walker.”
I nodded. “Who are you?”
“Jim. My name is Jim Redbeard.” He pointed at a chair like he was firing a gun. “Take a seat.”
I walked to the table and sat. “Redbeard?”
“I was born Smith, but I liked Redbeard better. So I changed it.”
I looked at his beard. Unlike his hair, it was a coppery red. “What do you want with me?”
“I want your help.”
“What with?”
“You have some kind of vendetta against Aaron Fenninger and his gang.”
“What makes you say that?”
“We were watching him. We saw you stake him out…” He paused. “Very unprofessionally, I have to say. We were curious, so we started watching you, too. We saw that you took an interest in IIC. We became very curious because it seemed you were interested in all the same people that we were. So I had my guys look into you.”
“How?”
“We got your license plate before you switched it.”
Njal came out with two tankards of beer and a generous glass of whiskey. Jim thanked him. Njal sat and they both raised their glasses to me. I sighed, raised my glass and put it down again.
“I’m not easy to follow. I didn’t notice you. You must have resources.”
Jim chuckled and wiped his beard with the back of his wrist. “Yeah, we have resources. We are not amateurs, Lacklan. We are well funded and good at what we do.”
Njal snorted. “I think you have seen that tonight.”
“What do you do?”
“Ah…” He smiled at me. “Now that is the billion dollar question. And it is not all that easy to answer. I…” He paused and tapped a large index finger on his chest. “I am a university professor. I am largely retired these days, but I make a hell of a lot of money, more than you might imagine possible, from a whole range of self-help books and DVDs which I created under a pseudonym. That, and a few other immoral rackets I have going.”
“Immoral?”
“I use the world ironically. I am a professor of psychology. I trained as a psychiatrist, I trained as a clinical psychoanalyst and I have a PhD from Stanford in philosophy. I let go of the idea of moral and immoral a very long time ago. Instead, and this is important, Lacklan, I think that each of us is responsible for the things we do, and the consequences of the things we do. That is not an abstract philosophical concept. That is a hard fact.”
I took a deep breath. “Jim, that is very interesting, but I have a lot to do and I just haven’t got the time to sit here and discuss philosophy with you.”
He smiled. “Is that what you think we’re doing?” He shook his head. “No. I have about as much use for philosophy as I have for virtual sex or a whore with a condom. You see my point? It’s always going to lead to a fruitless exercise.” He frowned at his beer a moment and said, “I don’t want to waste your time, Lacklan. I have a personal agenda, and I know you have a personal agenda. I think we can help each other, and for that reason I want you to understand what my agenda is. Let me come at this from another angle.”
I was becoming interested in spite of my weariness. So I sipped my whiskey and sat back. “Sure, go ahead.”
I pulled out my cigarettes and poked one in my mouth. As he started to talk he reached out, overhand, for me to give him the pack with my lighter. I lit up and handed them over.
“I began to ask myself, many, many years ago…” He pulled out a cigarette, tapped it on the lighter and lit up. He inhaled deeply as he handed back the pack and the lighter, then released the smoke as he spoke. “Who says?” He sat back and spread his hands. “It’s not an idle question. It’s a very precise, focused question, and it’s important. Who says? Let me explain.” He took another drag. “We live in a world that is full of rules. The first two, you mustn’t kill and you mustn’t steal. OK, so we don’t question these much because we are mostly pretty happy to live in a world where it is frowned upon to kill people and steal their stuff. So we don’t question it. But still, who says?”
I sipped and listened, wondering where this was going. He tapped ash and frowned at his cigarette like he was wondering where the ash came from.
“You ask a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Christian, they’re going to tell you, ‘God says.’” He sighed and shook his head. “Well, that’s not really true. I mean, find me one person who ever heard God say ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ You know? I knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy called Moses, who said…” He took a pull on his beer and licked his lips. “Still, we can at least say, the Church says, the Bible says, the Torah… You take my point. But Western society is secular. So, outside of the limited jurisdiction of the church, who says?” He stared at me a moment, like he was expecting an answer. He didn’t get one so he went on talking.
“OK, maybe we don’t feel like questioning who says killing is bad, who says stealing is bad. Maybe we all say that. But what about the million and one other rules and laws? Who says smoking is bad? Who says it is bad to offend social minorities? Who says it’s good to recycle glass? Who says sin
gle sex families are good or bad? Who says we should respect diversity of opinion?” He raised a hand like I was going to interrupt him. “I am not arguing for or against any of these precepts, Lacklan. I am asking, literally, who says? Where is this shit coming from?”
“You’re making a point, but I’m not getting it.”
“Go into any social setting, a bar, a restaurant, a group of friends and challenge any of those politically correct moral precepts that bind modern society. It doesn’t matter whether you have a good argument or not, you will be met with horror and opprobrium. These moral foundations to our society are deep rooted in each person, and there are more of them every year—the Strong Woman is the latest of them. All women must aspire to be Strong Women and men must view all women as Strong Women. Where are they coming from? I don’t care if they are right or wrong, I want to know where they are coming from. There are a billion people spread over the EU and the U.S.A., they all share exactly the same social, moral precepts, they adopt them almost simultaneously, and I am asking, where do they come from. Who says?”
Silence fell over the table. The breeze had turned chill and below, at the foot of the cliffs, I could hear the surf sighing on the sand. I wanted to tell him, Omega does, but something held me back. I guess I wanted to hear more of what he had to say. He picked up his glass and took a long pull. As he set it down again he said, “It is bad enough to have your freedom taken away. It is bad enough to be a slave to somebody else’s rules. But at least if that happens you can be defiant, even if it is only in your own mind.” He narrowed his eyes and wagged his fingers at me, sending small trails of smoke across the table. “But when the rules have been put inside your own mind by somebody else…” He shook his head. “Man, that? That is the ultimate crime against humanity, because that is a crime against the very essence of humanity: our minds.” He sat forward, laid his big arms on the table and stared at me. “I mean, what are we, Lacklan? What are we, as human beings, if not free thinkers? Take away the freedom of our minds and what have we got left?”
