I knew what Rainstone was saying: I mistakenly looked like a pro . . . which would mean even more suspicion, confusion, conflicting signals, and worst of all, squandered time. The past week had involved enormous administrative movement on my behalf, at NORCO, and there is only so much even the most efficient company can accomplish in a day. And that’s assuming the quarry is easy to track. Dandine had run me deep, and thrown many obstacles and detours into the path of those who sought to acquire us.
“So who left the message on my answering machine?” I asked.
Rainstone, Dandine, and Zetts all glanced at each other. Nobody had any idea.
“What about Zetts?” I asked. “Didn’t his involvement mean anything to you? Didn’t it clue you to make this whole thing more of a fast-track action item?”
“I was unaware of his involvement,” said Rainstone.
“Not now,” Dandine said to me.
“Look,” said Zetts. “A station.” We were approaching another private platform.
“That’s Janitorial,” said Rainstone. “Near the Kaiser medical center.”
We were underneath the pavement near the Sunset Vermont station of the MTA, where Dandine and I and Choral Anne Grimes had caught a cab. We were under the Scientology center. Janitorial had to be the dispatch nexus that assigned vanloads of phantoms to execute all manner of wet work.
“How far does this go?” I asked.
Rainstone rearranged himself on his seat. “You came in at Personnel. Ordnance is underneath Universal City. Administration is downtown. You already know about Processing. But the system is not a closed loop. There are auxiliary branches and routes, a whole substructure for multiple transport, multiple destinations. It’s all timed and coordinated by a computer center under the Natural History Museum.”
“That means somebody knows where we are, right now,” I said.
“I programmed no destination,” said Rainstone. “We’re just moving at random through the entire system. Traversing every byway, once each, would take, ah, over five hours.” NORCO was decentralized, its brain cells a safe distance from each other. No extravagant enemy complex to demolish in the last act with a big, cleansing explosion. Somebody like Rainstone would have to sign off on a project this huge . . . then somebody like Gerardis could make sure it got done, using someone like Jenks, who had been more than willing to get himself in deeper and deeper with every covert excavation—back when Jenks was still “Stradling,” and running the construction company, Futuristics, building LA’s top-heavy new tomorrow.
“Why?” asked Dandine.
“Please,” said Rainstone, slightly more intolerant. “NORCO required it. Civil unrest and terror alerts were the best thing that ever happened to us. All we had to do, in Los Angeles, was assure the Federals that if something bad happened, and it ultimately will—like a trashcan nuke under City Hall, a biotoxin in the reservoir, or something like that—we could provide a secure and preferred escape contingency in that event. To evacuate the . . . ah, politicians, and, of course, some celebrities. The A-list.”
“I think I have to vomit, now,” I said.
Andrew Collier would ask, Where’s the ticking clock? The big race to the finish? We were riding a train for as long as it took to smith together a deal. No bomb to defuse. No building to blow up. This wasn’t coming together the way a secret agent ragout was supposed to.
Dandine would no doubt reply, Didn’t you get enough suspense back there in the glass room? It was true: We might never have made it to the glass room. Rainstone could have been late. But Rainstone would have been notified the instant Zetts walked through the door. That had been the only way to direct-line the head of NORCO. Gerardis would have blocked every other option, or at least, snarled traffic until we were all meat for the coroner. See? Suspense is where you find it.
“Bottom line,” said Dandine. “What happens after our train ride?”
Rainstone rummaged in his brief and brought out several files. He handed the thickest one to me. “A gift for you, Mr. Maddox.”
It was four inches of paper, easy. “What is this?”
“Your data pull under the Freedom of Information Act. You know about that, right? Implemented into law in, ah, 1967. Didn’t touch on loosening up potential hot-button matter until ’76. FBI files and such were exempt from public scrutiny until then, and the Privacy Act of 1974 exacerbated the potential spill. Think of it: Normal people could find out FBI stuff about themselves. You should have seen the paperwork. They’d dribble out a few pages for every request, with the red flag passages, ah, inked out. Actually, they used a special brown marker designed to photocopy as dead black. Those markers cost the taxpayers $275.50 . . . each.”
“Was it a Montblanc?” I said. Nobody laughed.
Rainstone smiled and shook his head. No one present needed to be told that one way or another, the ruling class never compromises its sinecure.
“So the freedom-loving American people now had themselves a handy tool for—”
“Getting all up in their government’s shit,” said Dandine.
“You’re missing the more pertinent point,” said Rainstone. “A seeming inequity had been redressed by a new set of subrules. So, the problem had been solved, at the cost of additional bureaucracy. Every request was a special case, requiring special handling. Man-hours. Resources. Until 1982, when Reagan was able to start choking it to death. And again, in, ah, 1986. You see, most people assume that once laws are passed, those rules sit there, inviolate—and they tend to pay less attention to such laws, because Americans love the idea of victory in the short term. The capsule version, the logline, the synopsis. What our citizenry—yours and mine—often overlook is the necessity for periodic maintenance.”
“Which is where people like you slip into the gaps,” I said, because I knew Rainstone wanted me to say that, to prove I was paying attention. It all sounded too rehearsed to me.
“You seem to disapprove, Mr. Maddox. Surely someone in your line of work can appreciate opportunism. Taking advantage is what made this country great.”
“Yeah, and it’s what made Exxon rich.” Not to mention it was making my head hurt, as Zetts might say.
Rainstone chuckled. Engage the client on all levels. Appreciate his jokes. “Love America, Mr. Maddox. You have the right to an independent opinion. To have unpopular ideas. To dissent, politically. The right to be left alone. The Constitution says so. Want to know the difference between you and the man you know as, ah, ‘Dandine,’ there?” He pointed at my folder. “That is your file. This is his file.” He held up another folder and let it drop open—empty. “Believe me, you should see your file without the black marker treatment. Which, by the way, is done by computers now, saving America a lot of imaginary money. Your raw file is about the girth of a very expensive, ah, dictionary.”
There in Rainstone’s hand, the fantasy. There in my grasp, the reality. The paper version of what was lurking inside the NORCO database, all the stuff Zetts had shown me on NORCO’s incredibly hard-to-access Web site.
If you think you have any privacy, any real secrets, you’re crazier than anything I’ve described.
“You’re at a standoff with NORCO,” said Dandine, “and we’re at a standoff with you. Again, I ask: What now?”
“Your convenient expungement of Mr. Gerardis will have the trickle-down effect of buying time,” said Rainstone. “Rather like when an ant-hill is . . . disrupted. Tell me what you want. Propose an arrangement.”
“I’m no good at that. Connie is the dealmaker, here.” He turned to me, eyebrows up. “You’re on.”
I took a very deep breath. This was my big performance. The turning point of my life I was only supposed to appreciate years later. The bold knock of opportunity, saying you’re on, kid, break a leg, godspeed, don’t fuck it up . . .
Except I knew my time had come. The single test of every ability I had ever developed. I knew it, the way Dandine seemed to magically know things. I just knew it. And I was ready.<
br />
“Okay, Mr. . . . Rainstone, is it? Good enough. See these files? Files, everywhere. Bits and pieces of you, and me, and us. It’s just paper. Facts and figures. See, that’s the speed bump. It’s a paper speed bump. Surely, together, we’re strong and secure enough to negotiate a paper speed bump.”
“You’re saying that none of this, ah, matters to you?”
“Oh, it’s all important stuff, I’ll give you that. It certainly makes me nervous to consider all the contents. But look at us, here, now—that’s the difference between dealing with people as files, and dealing with them as people.”
“That’s very cute,” said Rainstone. “Demoting the end of your life to no big issue in order to curry favor. You’ve been trained very well.”
“All I know is what works best in my field. You guys are all trying pressure, leverage, threats, and I’ve always found the best way to reach an accord is to let the client sell himself. So—” I turned to Dandine.
He picked up the football. “So, what Mr. Maddox is saying is we want to clear our credit history with NORCO.”
“Right.”
Dandine went on, “Total unilateral expungement from the database. No red flag items. No black-stripe card alerts. No associational ladders of contact with friends, co-workers, acquaintances. NORCO ignores the fact we even exist. That’s what I had until Gerardis superceded your orders. He didn’t want me walking around in the world. He wanted to play dog in the manger, and kill anything he could not own. So . . .” He opened his hands—still constricted by his injuries—to give the floor back to me.
“So, simply put,” I ventured, “I—we—leave NORCO alone to do its business. NORCO leaves us alone, to do ours.”
Rainstone blinked rapidly, several times. “That’s all?”
“You have your own problems,” I said. “You need to concentrate on the decay curve of an organization you allowed yourself to lose control over.” Not grammatical, but certainly pointed. “If you and I and Mr. Dandine and all the worker bees at NORCO merely retreat to our safety positions, we spend a lot of time and resources trying to disrupt each other’s lives until one of us finally dies. You don’t want that. You want your machine to run without glitches.”
“I thought you said this was a, ah, deal,” said Rainstone. “You’re not offering me anything.”
“Go to Ripkin,” I said. “Tell him you’re responsible for foiling the plot on his life. Think ‘spin.’ I’ll go back to Kroeger—” I swallowed, hard “—and I’ll walk that nitwit right into the governorship with a strength-versus-sympathy plan that’ll be irresistible. I can solve more promotional problems in advance than you can even think of. You come up with a better substitute candidate, and I’ll do you the same deal.”
“What about, ah, Katy Burgess?” Rainstone mispronounced her name.
First I gambled, “Katy will help me accomplish the things I say.” Then I negotiated, “She has to stay alive and unharmed in order to do this.” Then I lied, “I control what she does.”
“I’m listening, Mr. Maddox.”
In that moment, I knew I had him sold. The worst part was that the feeling wasn’t new. But he was acting as though he wanted to stall, or win an additional concession.
Dandine sighed. He was pharmacologically better, but medically in severe distress. He brought the heavy Beretta out and rested it on one knee, a chitchat stopper. “It would be crass of me,” he said, “to suggest that one day you will receive a Federal Express Courier-Pak containing Zetts’s eyeballs.”
“Say what?” Zetts had been so quiet I had almost forgotten he was in the car with us.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” said Dandine. “I would never make a threat to anyone as powerful as you. I would merely state a fact. I know what you can do to me. But I also know that you have unusually strong views on the sanctity of family. You’re an archetypal American, Mr. Rainstone. You believe in family, even if your family doesn’t believe in you, and Zetts is the only blood relative you have left. It is that very belief that made Gerardis consider you an antique, and try to end-run around you. When I left NORCO, you asked me to keep an eye on your son. I kept him pretty close, and never put him in direct jeopardy.”
Unlike me, or Zetts under his own power.
“Gerardis obliterated that consideration,” Dandine said. “All I would ask is that you reinstate it.”
“Fuck you,” said Zetts. “I can take care of myself.” I caught his eye, sidelong, and shook my head. Not now.
But the worm of doubt had already begun to squirm in Rainstone’s mind. He put down his brief and trued up the ironed seams of his trousers.
“Did our mysterious Mr. . . . ah—”
“Dandine,” I said. It wasn’t that Rainstone didn’t want to say the stage name, or was prevented by some professional code of conduct. He simply could not remember it; one pseudonym among thousands.
“Yes,” Rainstone continued. “Did he ever relate the circumstances of his leavetaking from NORCO?” asked Rainstone.
“He never asked,” said Dandine.
Sure, like that would have gotten me anywhere.
“It’s everything you’ve just experienced, Conrad, over the last couple of days,” Dandine told me. “The corporatization, even of NORCO. The top-heaviness. The useless bureaucracy. Its waste, its pointlessness.”
The aim of all big business, foremost, is to stay in business. If a cure is discovered tomorrow, you don’t think the American Cancer Society is going to voluntarily dis-employ itself, do you?
“Rainstone knew that the new order Gerardis had in mind for NORCO didn’t allow for retirement,” said Dandine. “They would erase me.”
“So while I had supreme executive authority,” said Rainstone, “I chartered this man as the steward for my son, in the remote possibility that some pirate force might try to strike at me through Declan.” His tone was almost historic—the kind of history written by victors. “With the agreement that Mr., ah, Dandine here would agree not to interfere in NORCO’s operation.”
“Sort of an emeritus position,” Dandine managed weakly.
“A setup,” I said. “If he messed with a NORCO program, he would be fair game again. If so, Gerardis could eliminate his headache from the prior administration, with the excuse that he was looking out for NORCO’s interests, and you went rogue, thereby proving Gerardis right about you all along.”
“Like I said,” noted Dandine. “It was a pleasure to shoot him.”
“If he broke cover and interfered,” said Rainstone, “even I would not be able to deny that he had to be scotched, for the good of the company. That’s what Gerardis wanted me to think.”
“But that means you’re still running this show,” I said. “Gerardis called you his superior.”
Rainstone laced his fingers around one knee. We were all conversational and buddy-buddy, now. “True, five years ago. Less true today. Increasingly, the position is titular and honorary—only because I’m still breathing. Inevitably, Gerardis would have pulled his coup. Soon, I think. But I am insulated. In addition to which, Gerardis would have known that if he disempowered me . . .”
“Then Dandine would have showed up to lop off his head,” I realized. “Hence—eliminate Dandine first, using a subcontract designed to implicate him in the assassination of Alicia Brandenberg, who was operating clearly within the NORCO sphere of influence.”
Rainstone seemed to puzzle this in his mind. Slowly, he said, “Yes . . . that is the situation as I . . . understand it.”
“So what about the deal?” I asked. “Will you accept this deal?” I photo-recalled what Dandine had laid out; it has always been one of my more dramatic meeting skills. “Unilateral expungement, no flags, no hassle, no surveillance, no leverage, no fallout on us or people we know. NORCO ignores our existence. No files. Period.”
Rainstone said, “With the exception of your help in the political campaign, which you’ve already offered without condition?”
“I can do that
without even having to acknowlege NORCO exists. Let me do it on my own.”
“Gentlemen, I believe, ah, we may be very close to an accord.”
Zetts gave Rainstone an odd look. He thought his father was talking about a car.
Great, I thought—now we were all stuck in unholy wedlock with NORCO (or whatever it metamorphosed into) until the next election was old news. Everybody had been assigned brooms and buckets, and now we had a titanic mess to clean up. Everybody was free. Everybody was obligated. We were stuck in the world of the walking dead, whether this pleased us or not.
“You may keep that.” Rainstone indicated the file I held. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in, ah, taking over the position of the late Mr. Gerardis? You’ve demonstrated quite a range of the skills that are required.”
“No, thank you.” I was thinking, that would entail a separate negotiation. The subdeals were always where the client got nailed, and I was used to holding the hammer.
“A pity. Then I think you both could use some medical attention,” Rainstone now ignored his son entirely. “Permit me to, ah, expedite that, shall I?” He punched a couple of buttons on the car’s control console.
If he offered us refreshments next, I’d grab Dandine’s gun and shoot him myself. Don’t doubt it. Not now.
TOMORROW
Mugged by gangbangers: That turned out to be my story. Ripping out my IVs had produced subdermal bleeding which resulted in more horrendous bruising. There was some debate over where to reinsert the leads and hoses, until Nurse Vanessa Strock came along and suggested shoving them up my anus, with a smile.
At least the ringing in my ear had subsided.
Perhaps I should have seized Rainstone’s offer. The problem with resuming a mundane life is that once a door opens, and you see new things, it’s impossible to revert to some program of normalcy without killing part of yourself. Your old life becomes hollow, a walk-through. You feel disconnected and unimportant. Normal, ordinary; bored and marking time. The only other way out was to grab a pen and write it down . . . or use the same pen to perform a lobotomy on myself.
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