by Blake Banner
My cigarette hand burned down and I felt the heat on my fingers suddenly. I pulled over a glass ashtray and crushed it out. As I did so I said, “I had never put it in those terms before, but I have to tell you that you’re preaching to the choir. I don’t disagree with anything that you have said.”
He nodded. “I know. That’s why you are here. But I want you to know what I am about. Society calls me a terrorist. They are wrong. I have no desire to spread terror or achieve my ends through terror. What I am, Lacklan, like you, is a destroyer.”
“What do you know about me?”
“Enough. I know you were ten years with the best special ops regiment in the world. I know you made captain. That’s no mean feat. And I know what you did to Fenninger’s Intelligent Imaging Consultants. I know you are a very dangerous, destructive man. And I am pretty sure we share a deep hatred of those powers that want to control our minds.”
“Do you know who your enemy is?”
He shook his head, then shrugged. “In general terms. Those men and women who met famously at the Bilderberg Hotel. They meet each year in a different place and discuss how to manipulate our world, what wars to start, which nations to crush under their heels. It doesn’t matter what name they have. They are the forces of law and order gone mad. They are the enemies of individual freedom, and I detest them. What I do know, Lacklan, is that they use the media, computers, cinema, but especially television, to shape our neural networks and take control of our minds. My intention is to fight them to the death, and in that fight, to challenge people to wake up and see that they do not have to obey. That nobody, nobody has the right to tell you what you can and can’t do.” He leaned forward again and his long, blue eyes looked momentarily diabolical. “The only right they have is the right they take by force. They give themselves the right to inflict violence, and that makes them lawmakers.”
I sat smoking, sipping my whiskey and watching the moon rise over the vast darkness of the Pacific ocean. After a time I said, “Jim, I sympathize with a lot of what you say. But I don’t know how I can help you, and I am pretty sure you can’t help me. My mission is personal. It may help your cause, but I can’t have anybody else involved.”
He sighed. “I understand.”
I hesitated. “What you want, for individuals to be free in their minds, responsible for their own actions…” I shook my head. “It’s Utopia. It’s a long, lonely road to get there.”
“I know it. That’s what makes it worth walking.”
I smiled. “Contact Professor Gibbons, at Oxford University, and his assistant, Marni Gilbert. Tell them I put you in touch. Ask them to tell you about Omega.”
He frowned. “Omega?”
I nodded. “Now, I need to get some sleep. I have a busy day ahead.”
He threw me a card. “If you need any help, call.”
I looked at the card for a long time. It was tempting. In the end I put it in my pocket and held out my hand. He took it and fixed me with his strange eyes. “It was not the Greeks, you know,” he said. “Or the Romans. They didn’t bring us civilization. They were all about authority, despotism and monotheism. It was the Norsemen, they were the ones who brought the seeds of freedom to mankind, in their longships, with their axes and their swords. They were free men.”
I wondered for a moment if he was drunk.
He smiled and let my hand go. “Take care, Lacklan, and remember, when the time comes to die, die well.”
I nodded. “Yeah, you too.”
“I will, believe me.”
Njal had remained silent throughout the discussion, sipping his beer and watching the ocean. Now he got to his feet and said, “Yuh, OK, I drive you to the Chupacabras now.”
I followed him out to the car. We climbed in and slammed the doors. I noticed he didn’t put his seat belt on. He reversed fast out onto the road, peering over his shoulder with his cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, then we set off down the hill, toward Slauson Avenue.
“So,” he said after a moment. “I will be watching you. You don’t want me to, but…” He shrugged. “There is nothing you can do about it. If you get in trouble, I will help, yuh? Otherwise, you won’t know I am there.”
I was too tired to argue. I closed my eyes. “Best you don’t, Njal. Seriously. These are very bad people.”
“Yuh,” he said matter-of-factly. “Me too.”
I didn’t bother to answer.
Thirteen
I stood on the sidewalk and watched Njal’s red taillights disappear into the pre-dawn, headed back toward Palos Verdes. I climbed into the Zombie, pressed the ignition and slipped silently off toward Watts and El Toro. In the east the sky was turning gray and by the time I got to the guesthouse it was past four AM. I left my car down by the church and walked the short distance with the echoes of my footsteps following me through the empty streets. Inside, Maria was behind the reception desk with a ledger in front of her. She looked up at me and after a moment she frowned.
“Trouble?”
I shrugged. “Life.”
The corner of her mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. “Are you hurt? You need anything?”
“A large coffee, a shower and a sleep.”
She did a weird, slow blink and the twitch became a smile on the left side of her face. “I can help with two of those.” She stood. “Go to your room, I will clean up your cuts.”
I knew this was more trouble, but I was too tired to fight it. I crossed the small patio to my room, pulled off my jacket and my holster and poured myself a large whiskey. I took a large slug, sighed as the amber warmth eased through my body, and sat on the edge of the bed. I’d left the door open, and a moment later Maria came in, holding a basin of steaming water and a first aid box. I watched her a moment.
“You don’t need to do this.”
She glanced at me, but then seemed to ignore me. She had a soft cloth and now she dipped it in the water and started gently wiping my face. Then she said, “And if I don’t, who will?”
I was surprised. I grinned and gave a small laugh. “What are you, my mother?”
Her eyes flicked over my face as she wiped away the caked blood. She smiled again. This time it was softer, warmer. “I hope not.”
I winced as she cleaned the dirt from the gash where Fenninger had hit me with the hoe. She shook her head and sighed. “You got bruises everywhere. And cuts and scratches. I’m not gonna ask what you been doing, but if you’re still on your feet, the other guy must be in hospital. Take your shirt off.”
I raised an eyebrow. “My shirt?”
“You want those cuts to get infected?”
I stood, peeled off my shirt, and she came close, looking me over. I was a mess. She held my eyes with hers for a moment, then said, “You godda get in the shower. You godda clean these cuts. Then I can put cream on them.”
I thought of Abi back in Boston and took another slug of whiskey. I went into the en suite, stripped and stepped into the shower. It hurt, but after the pain had passed it was a relief and all the aches began to ease away. Five minutes later I stepped out of the cubicle and she was standing there, leaning on the doorjamb holding a towel. She wasn’t smiling anymore. She handed me the towel and I dried myself with care. I had more cuts and bruises than I had realized and some of them were still bleeding.
I looked for my pants and my shirt, but she’d removed them. “I’m going to wash them. Now, lie on the bed.” She jerked her head toward the bedroom. She’d turned the lights out and had some candles burning. “I’m gonna take care of you.”
I’m not proud of what happened next, but there is only so much heroism you can expect from a guy in one night. If she’d come at me with an axe I could have fought back, but aromatic oils and candlelight were too much for me. I was weak.
I slept like the dead for five long hours and woke up feeling a lot better. I was alone in the bed, which was a relief, and I got up, showered again and dressed. When I got out to reception I was surprise
d to see Maria was still at the desk. She saw me glance at my watch and smiled.
“I told Don to come in at midday. I made breakfast. I wanna talk to you.”
I frowned. “What about?”
She jerked her head toward the garden. “I’m coming now.”
I went out and sat at the table in the sun, with the shade of the palms lying across the white wrought iron and the green grass. Maria came out a few minutes later and sat with me. She poured me coffee and as I took it I said, “I’m married. I shouldn’t have done what I did last night. I’m sorry.”
She smiled. “You know how many married men I have had sex with? It must be many hundreds. A few married women too. I am not going to sue you, or have a baby and claim your oil wells in Texas for my child. It happened. Don’t worry about it.”
“Those weren’t the first possibilities that came to my mind.”
She gave a small laugh that was surprisingly pretty. “I seen it done, but you don’t look like a man with oil wells in Texas.”
“You said you wanted to talk. You have a problem you think I can solve?”
She nodded, sipped her coffee and gave me a very direct look. “I’m a whore.” Then she gave a small, one-shouldered shrug. “I was a whore.”
I didn’t know what to say so I sipped my coffee and broke open one of the warm rolls she’d brought out. She was looking up at the palm trees and went on, like she was talking to them instead of me.
“I made a lot of money. A lot of money. Most of the girls waste their money on drugs and drink, whatever it takes to get through the night.” She turned her head to face me and her expression was defiant. “Is some kind of self-hate, self-destructive thing. Society hates a whore, so whores hate themselves.” She gave her head a little shake. “I don’t hate myself. I don’t want to destroy myself. I hated some of the Johns, some of them were OK. I hate the pimps, and I want to destroy some of them.”
She picked up her cup and looked into it, like she was hoping there might be a pimp drowning in there. There obviously wasn’t because she took a sip.
“I took a lot of money from my last pimp.” She nodded to give emphasis to what she’d said. “A lot of money. I was expensive. I’m getting older now, but when I was twenty I was hot—red hot. I used to get invited to a lot of Hollywood parties. You wouldn’t believe some of the names I have screwed.” She grinned. “It reads…” She held up her hands like she was framing a shot. “Like the credits to a big budget block buster movie.”
I laughed. “OK, I believe you.”
“You better believe it, gringo. For ten years I was making more than two thousand bucks on a night. And I made a few movies too, that paid big money. But you know what happens to that money, right?”
“Your pimp takes it?”
She wagged her finger at me. “If you’re not smart, your pimp takes it. But I was smarter than my pimp, and I took hundreds of thousands of dollars from that hijo de puta.” She gestured around her with her finger. “And beginning of this year I bought this and I retired.”
“And your pimp wants to know where the money came from. He figures it’s his money and he wants a cut of the profits.”
She nodded, then shook her head. “He wants a lot more than that. He says the place belongs to him and he wants to make it into a club, where he can sell girls and drugs.”
I sighed. “What do you want from me, Maria?”
She smiled with more than a touch of irony. “Don’t worry. I know one screw does not buy your kind of services. But I also know the kind of business you are in. I can pay. I need you to take care of my chulo, so nobody can trace it to me, and so he never comes back.” She leaned forward and there was black fire in her eyes. “And so all the other hijos de puta know that they cannot mess with me!”
I shook my head. “You have the wrong idea about me, Maria. I am not a gun for hire.”
She wagged her finger side to side and held my eye. “No,” she said. “I can look inside you, gringo. I know who you are. You are a killer. And you will do this for me. We will talk again.”
She stood and walked back into the building, closing the door behind her. I sat a while listening to the birds getting on with their morning. I chewed my lip and sipped my coffee and told myself I did not want to be a killer for hire. That was not why I had come to L.A. I had come to L.A. because I wanted to stop the killing.
In the end I made up my mind that I could not be sidetracked. Abi had been my last damsel in distress. Now I was going to do my job and go home. I got up and went back to my room. It was eleven thirty AM and I wanted to see if Fenninger had been to the office early that morning. I wasn’t surprised to find he had. There was an audio file that had been recorded at seven. I clicked on it and listened.
“Bill…”
“I will not listen to you, Epsilon, if you call me that. You are like a child…”
“OK! OK, Beta! We have a big fucking problem.”
“Try to calm down.”
“Try to calm down? Seriously? One of two things just happened to me. Do you know…” His chair moved and it sounded as though he stood up and started walking around. He sounded almost hysterical. “Do you know…?” He said it again, then changed, “Shall I tell you what just happened to me? Or maybe you know already!”
“You’re not making any sense, Epsilon.”
“Really? Well, forgive me for getting upset when somebody…” He stopped again. “Let me ask you a question, Beta.”
“That would be something, at least. So far you have phoned me at seven in the morning just to throw half-finished sentences at me.”
“Who is Ares?”
I smiled. I had got to him. He still wasn’t sure who I was. Beta was quiet for a moment, then said, “I am not sure how to answer that question, Epsilon. You want to put it into context for me? Better still, why don’t you just tell me what happened?”
Fenninger’s voice came as a shout from across the room. I could picture him pouring himself a drink. “You haven’t been watching the news, Beta?”
A sigh. “I’m actually at the ranch, trying to disconnect for a few days.” There was a hint of reproach.
Fenninger’s voice came closer. It was almost a shout of anger. “Really? Really? You’ve been trying to disconnect! How convenient! What a convenient time you have chosen to disconnect!”
“Cut it out, Epsilon! You’re beginning to annoy me. Just cut to the chase, will you?! What happened?”
“Who is Ares?”
“Ares is the Greek god of war, Epsilon, as you well know!”
“As was Athena! But Zeus would use Ares when, as well as war, he wanted to sow chaos and mayhem! Am I right?”
“Where is this going? I am running out of patience.”
“Well, Ares came and paid me a visit yesterday!”
“What?”
“First he visited Intelligent Imaging Consultants, murdered Ahmed, Elena, Erick and Izamu, and staged it to look as though Ahmed had killed his colleagues and then jumped out of the window. The company is now in free fall and God alone knows what we are going to find when we recover control of it.”
“Wait! Wait, slow down, Epsilon. Who is this ‘he’? Who did this?”
“I am trying to tell you.”
“Try to get a grip, for crying out loud!”
“Once he had finished murdering our R&D company, he then went in search of my head of security, Bob, who actually managed to capture him.”
“Good! Where is he now?”
“I have no fucking idea! I have no fucking idea, Beta!” There was a long moment’s silence, then he went on, “Because he broke free, murdered Bob’s assistant and came within a microsecond of blowing my brains out—while you were disconnecting at your fucking ranch!”
“Epsilon, for the last time…”
“Shut the fuck up and listen!” Another pause, then, “He knew everything about us. He knew our structure, including the existence of Omega Alpha. He knew about the drought and he knew a
bout our plans for Iran and Saudi. He knew Gamma was dead, he knew I was Epsilon and he told me, Beta, that he was Ares, Omega Alpha’s hit man, and that he had been sent by you and Alpha to eliminate me because I had become an incompetent liability!”
“That is not true. You must know that is not true.”
“Must I? Then how did he know? Tell me that. How was his information so detailed? There are only two possible explanations, Beta. Either he was telling the truth or it was Gamma’s son, Lacklan Walker.”
A long silence, then, “That is not possible. Neither of those two options is possible. Walker has too much to lose. He was as keen as we were to call a truce. And besides, he does not have that kind of information.”
“Then Alpha has acted on his own initiative without consulting you.”
“For God’s sake, Epsilon, get a grip! We are already suffering because of the loss of Gamma, why would he eliminate one of his own top five?”
“To make room for somebody else.”
“There is already room for somebody else! Gamma is dead! Think before you open your mouth, Epsilon!”
Fenninger’s voice became loud and close. “Then answer me this, Beta. Who else has that kind of knowledge? Who else has the ability to do this?”
There was another prolonged silence. Then Beta’s voice, level and cool. “Somebody who wants to sow chaos among us. He chose his name with care and intelligence. Ares, he may as well have called himself Kallisti. The Bringer of Chaos.”
“But who? Who has that kind of inside knowledge?”
“Not Walker. Could Gibbons have planted a mole?”
“Jesus Christ…!
“Go back to the vineyard. Immediately. Take your wife and the children. Barricade yourself there. I will dispatch a team to guard you. Alpha and I will join you there with Delta. We need to get to the bottom of this before it gets any more out of hand. Go now, arrange it now, immediately. Take Bob with you.”
They hung up and the call ended.
