The Inverted Pyramid (An Alex Vane Media Thriller, Book 2)

by A. C. Fuller

  As they reached the door to the kitchen, Bice glanced back at him. "Be careful. Your eyes."

  James squinted, his eyes still adjusting as he stepped into the brightly lit kitchen adorned in rich wood and coffee-colored tiles.

  "Do you like my home?" Bice asked.

  James didn't reply.

  "Well, it's really a home away from home. The truth is, I've only stayed here a few times."

  "Where are w-w-we?" James asked, following Bice out of the kitchen and into what appeared to be a sitting room.

  "Oh, yes, how rude of me. You're on the east part of the island. Bainbridge Island. Near Seattle. You made the trip in the trunk of the car. After we drugged you, of course."

  Bice sat on a cream-colored chair next to a woodstove, orange coals glowing through the isinglass window. "Please, sit," he said, waving a hand at a couch.

  James went to sit, but the couch was covered with clear plastic, kind of like a tarp. For a moment, he paused.

  "It's because you smell, and are filthy," Bice said. "Sit."

  His body stiff and chilled, James was drawn to the corner of the couch closest to the woodstove. With what he knew about Bice, he wasn't surprised that the room was tastefully decorated and clean. The neutral furniture contrasted with chocolate-brown floors and ceiling beams, and the walls were decorated with small, abstract paintings.

  "You must wonder what you're doing here," Bice said.

  James said nothing. He'd woken up in the metal shed at some point, but didn't know how long ago that was. Could have been a few days, could have been a few hours. But he'd explored every corner of it, pounded on it to the point of exhaustion, and eventually, curled up in the corner and fallen asleep.

  The heat radiating from the stove felt good. He held his hands out and rubbed them together.

  "Well, have you been wondering or not?"

  "I assume it has something to do with the story we ran. With the hacker named Bhootbhai."

  Bice laughed a long, thin laugh. It sounded like the laugh was under his breath, like he was trying to swallow it. Even so, it went on too long, and James grew uncomfortable.

  He looked around the room. The door they'd come through led back to the kitchen, and the only other exit was an arched doorway that led into a dining room. At a large wooden table, the red-haired man sat, still in his leather jacket, with his back to them.

  "Don't mind him," Bice said. "He won't hurt you again. Unless you try to run. But you're not that stupid."

  "Why b-bother taking m-m-m-me?"

  Bice stood and did a slow circle around the couch. "You disgust me, do you know that? Fat, sweaty, stuttering. You're about as far from Alex as you can get."

  James put his hands on his knees, and despite the fact that he still felt chilled to the bone, he could feel that his palms were growing moist and clammy. "Why are you s-so interested in Alex?"

  "There are things I need him to do."

  James tried to meet Bice's eyes, but he was looking away—maybe at the wall, maybe at the space in front of his nose, maybe something in his own head. James couldn't tell. He didn't think he was going to get a straight answer anyway, but he couldn't help asking again.

  "Goddam it," he said, "What's your c-c-connection to Alex?"

  29

  Eagle's Nest Storage Center, Southwest Bainbridge Island

  Alex slid the aluminum door up and stepped into a cobweb. "Damn spiders," he said, brushing off his face, shoulders, and neck.

  Camila slipped past him into the ten-by-ten storage container as he brushed at his hair with his hands. They'd borrowed Betty's car and he'd told Camila about Martha Morelli on the drive over. Though he wasn't sure if he would find something to confirm what he already knew, he figured the container was the place to try.

  There were about thirty boxes, stacked in no discernible order, mostly around the edges and in corners. A few boxes sat in the middle.

  "Do you have any idea what's in all these boxes?" Camila asked.

  "No. Like Betty said, she helped the executor sort through it and stow it away when they died. They sold the furniture and electronics. I haven't been here. Probably just old taxes and bills and writing stuff."

  The sun had set and a blanket of gray covered the sky. Alex stood under the sliding door and pushed it the rest of the way up, far enough to allow a shaft of gray light to illuminate half of the container.

  Camila sat on a box in the center. "We need more light."

  He handed her his cell phone. "You can use the screen as a light to read the boxes."

  She took the phone and held it up to read the writing on a small stack of boxes in front of her. "They ought to find a way to put flashlights on these things." She leaned in. "The boxes are labeled, at least. 'Taxes, 1980-1984.' 'Photos.' 'Writings, 1986.' 'Papers, 1970-1974.' Plus, about five labeled 'Books.'"

  He sat down on a box and stretched his legs out between them. "Hand me the one that says 'Papers 1970-1974.'"

  "Your mom was very organized. With her records, and all."

  "You know how writers are. They all think someday they're going to write their memoirs, and that everyone will be fascinated by all the little details of their lives. Old love letters. First drafts of their canonical works."

  She laughed and slid the box to him, then sat on one of her own and peeled the tape off another box marked "Books: Christian."

  He turned toward the doorway and began shuffling through papers, which he could barely make out in the moonlight.

  Camila took books out, one by one, and stacked them on the floor. "Lacan and Christianity, Parallel Bible, The Bible in Ancient Greek. Did your mom read Greek?"

  He glanced up. "Don't know."

  "Finding anything?"

  "Nothing much. College essays, report cards from Tulane. It's hard to see."

  Under the old papers, Alex found two layers of old envelopes. "Letters. Could be something interesting in here."

  "From when?"

  He picked one at random and read the postmark. He could barely make it out, but it seemed to say 1972. Scanning the envelopes, he read only the return addresses.

  In the second box, he found what he was looking for. There was no name on the envelope, but the postmark showed that it had been sent from New Orleans.

  "It's unopened," he said, sliding a finger under the flap and breaking the seal.

  He removed the paper, still white and crisp. "It's from him."

  "Alex, do you really need to read it?"

  He wasn't listening.

  30

  James watched Bice walk a slow lap around the room, and turned when he stopped behind James's seat on the couch. Bice met his eyes and ran his long, skinny fingers through his hair. "I dye my hair. Did you know that?"

  James looked up at Bice, and, as he stared straight into the other man's eyes, felt his own eyes soften. His mind had cleared, and for the first time, he saw Bice as he truly was. It was as though the fear had been clouding James's thoughts, and he'd been viewing Bice through a distorted lens. What he saw now was a twisted and bizarre man, unsure of what he was doing, unable to see himself at all.

  He flashed back to the receptionist at the hotel, asking him if he was Bice's son. "No, I d-didn't know th-that about your hair. I n-never would have guessed."

  "Do you think it makes me look younger?"

  "I w-wouldn't know, because I d-don't know how old you are. How ol-ol-old are y-you?"

  Bice sat down on the couch next to James. "I'm fifty-four."

  James tried to inch away from him. "And wh-where are you f-f-from?"

  Bice raised his left eyebrow and smiled. "I know what you're doing, James. It won't work. But I am happy to make small talk with you, since soon, either you will be dead or I will have gotten what I want." He walked around the couch once, then leaned on the wall with one hand, staring out the window. "I'm from Connecticut. Lived there until I was eighteen, then went to Tulane, in New Orleans."

  "Why T-Tulane?"

 
"At the time, I wanted to be a writer. I admired the Southern writers—Faulkner, Fitzgerald. I wanted to get away from home, and what was going on in the west disgusted me. Tulane was known for its journalism program, and I needed something practical, so I chose that instead of creative writing. But, of course, I had ideas of sitting up all night in Café du Monde, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee. I remembered how the trees smelled in that one Robert Penn Warren story." He turned to James. "What was it called?"

  "Who?"

  "You have no education," Bice said. "Sitting in front of a computer all day, thinking that nothing that doesn't exist inside that box is real. That nothing that box can't tell you about ever happened."

  James sat up straighter. "Soon there won't be anything that's ever happened that that box can't tell me about."

  Bice laughed. "Maybe you're right. But let me tell you how it really was, because what I thought would happen didn't happen. I imagined renting a car with my girlfriend, driving out into the swampland around New Orleans—it's still the nineteenth century in some of those areas."

  "Girlfriend, did she g-go down to New Orleans with you?"

  Bice shot a glance at him.

  "I m-m-mean. I just thought since you s-s-said girlfriend."

  "I was planning on meeting one there."

  "How did you end up on the b-business side of the media?"

  "I never wanted it. It wanted me. I was a journalist for a few years." He paused, laughing to himself. "I read once that Hemingway drank every night, but always woke up at five to write. I tried it once, slept until noon, and never drank again. My father drank."

  James watched him run a finger along a window ledge.

  "Eventually, I got transferred to the business side of things, and being in charge felt natural. At first, I thought I would only do it for a while, then go back to writing. I'd make money, then settle down, find a wife. I thought I'd go back to my dad's Connecticut farmhouse, uncover old demons, write a great novel.

  "But when you get a little power, you start to want only power," he continued. "You want the power so no one can tell you what to do, so no one can hurt you. I imagined sitting at the top of a Standard Media pyramid, like a king. Various levels of management below me, editors and middle-managers below them, and thousands of grunts doing the menial labor at the bottom. Not to mention the tens of millions of media consumers eating up our creations. But when you're there, it's like the whole world is flipped upside down and the weight of everyone is on your head."

  "Uneasy lies the head that w-w-wears a c-crown?"

  Bice smiled. "Indeed. Shakespeare fan?"

  "Not especially."

  Bice stared at him. "You're probably all excited. All you fat losers think you can change everything with the Internet."

  "We will," James said. "The Web is flipping the top-down media world on its head. Both the power structures and the writing style. As we speak, hundreds of blogs and small Web sites are taking market share from all the old media companies. News is going to start rising up from the ground, instead of filtering down to us from the elites. And instead of all these old white guys feeding us news stories in old-fashioned, inverted pyramid structure, we're going to get the facts faster than ever, ushering in an era of opinion, argument, and debate like the world has never seen."

  Bice laughed dismissively. "We don't need to produce the information if we control how it's transmitted and who has access to it." At the wooden end table, he poured two glasses of brown liquor from a crystal decanter and held out a glass to James. "Would you like one?"

  "No."

  "Have one."

  "I d-don't do well with alcohol."

  Bice stepped toward him and thrust the drink in his face. "Drinking alone would make me pathetic. An alcoholic, like my father. I'm neither of those things."

  James took the drink and smelled it. His nose burned and a sharp pain shot through his head. "You just said you haven't had a drink since . . . whenever."

  Bice closed his eyes, inhaled the scent of the brown liquid, then opened his eyes again. "It's Scotch, thirty years old. I buy the best."

  "Are you g-going to drink it?"

  Bice licked his lips, almost as though he was tasting it, but didn't respond.

  "Tell me, why Alex? Why now?"

  Bice took in the scent of the Scotch again, and a strange, violent smile cracked across his face.

  James looked into the glass in his hand. "Mr. Bice, what's your connection to Alex?"

  "No," Bice said. "I'm not going to drink it. I just smell it for a while, then pour it out. Do you want to hear what happened when I went to New Orleans?"

  "I d-d-do."

  "In 1971, I fell in love for the first and only time. Her name was Martha Morelli, and she was one of only a handful of women at Tulane University who'd come down from the north, like I had. She had long black hair, a slim nose, and a bright, constant smile. And she was a poet. A real, true poet. At least, I thought so. I saw our future clearly. We would head back up to New York and start a family. I wasn't as enamored by all the counter-culture stuff as she was, but even I knew that the Village would be interesting, at least."

  He smelled the Scotch again, then went back to walking around the couch. "I lost my virginity to her. At first, I was repulsed that she had been with men before me, but I believed that, eventually, I could stomach it—as long as she was never going to be with another man after me. In my mind, my life was set. I had escaped my father. Escaped the foster homes."

  He poured the Scotch back into the decanter slowly. "But the repulsion didn't go away."

  31

  Camila stood behind Alex and read over his shoulder, shining both of their phones onto the crisp pages.

  August 23, 1975

  Dear Martha,

  I exist on a ledge. I've always known this.

  Remember when I told you about my father's suicide? The night of Mardi Gras? You wanted to walk all the way downtown, then follow the parade all the way back up along St. Charles. And we did. We walked to the Quarter, then back uptown, passing drunk people, street performers, and tourists along the way.

  I told you about how he'd beaten me and beaten me. The sick smell of Scotch on his breath.

  And my mother. Where was she? I have no memory of her from the day he died. She was a depressive. A weak woman. All I remember of her is that, after I'd been beaten, I'd go to look for her, and I'd always find her lying on the couch. She'd rarely look at me afterward, and she never spoke to me.

  She must have heard the screams, but she did nothing.

  That night of Mardi Gras, I didn't tell you the whole story.

  I had been hiding in my room the day he did it. Even then, I knew I was brilliant. Too big for him—for this world, even. I knew he would never break me. But I hid anyway, because I don't like pain.

  I heard his car coming down the driveway. Then the creak of the front door and his heavy steps on our wood floors. I counted to twenty, waiting for him to scan the living room for me. That's how long it usually took him to realize I wasn't there, before heading upstairs to find me, taking off his belt on the way.

  I hid under my bed, waiting, telling myself that this time I wouldn't take it. I considered fighting back. I considered jumping out the window. Maybe I'd live and maybe I wouldn't, but I wouldn't let him do it again.

  But he didn't come up.

  I counted to twenty again. Nothing. When I hit twenty for the third time, I heard the front door close again. Quietly. No slamming.

  I crawled out from under my bed and moved softly to the window in the hallway. I watched him stumble toward the river behind our house. The gun was in his right hand, I remember. A thin-barreled Iver Johnson my grandfather bought when he started the farm, then later used to take his own life.

  I had prayed many times that my father would kill himself like his father had. That he'd free me. But I never thought he would.

  He passed behind a row of trees. I wanted to run out, to save him. To h
old him and love him and tell him that it wasn't his fault his father had killed himself. That he could still be good. That I'd forgive him. I even tried sliding the window up. I don't know what I would have said. But the window was stuck. Painted shut.

  Next, I heard the shot.

  When I ran out there, I found him lying face down on the riverbank in freezing gray mud with the pistol lying next to him. His blood spilled across the mud, pooling in steaming puddles in his shoe prints. You'd think I would have been happy, but you know the first thing I thought?

  I thought it was my fault.

  A note stuck out of his muddied pocket. I heard the roar of the river as I read it, and felt cold steel and mud on my belly as I slid the gun under my shirt and lodged it in behind my waistband.

  My mother wasn't there that day. Later, I found out that she'd checked herself into some kind of psych ward. I never saw her again.

  Why am I telling you this? Because of what my father's note said.

  "When you hurt someone, you deserve to be punished."

  Since we parted in New Orleans, I've felt that I deserve to be punished. But I don't.

  He left me. You left me. You did this to me.

  The day I burned down your apartment, I sat in my car outside it, the same gun in my lap, planning to turn it on you.

  I believe that in every man there is a tension. Philosophers and priests think of it as a tension between good and evil. We all have high and low tendencies, and different men gravitate toward different poles within themselves.

  But there is another tension, one that I believe is more fundamental, because it exists underneath whatever we choose to do in the world. All of us carry with us one of two basic attitudes: either a love of life or a hatred of it.

  We all feel that either the world itself is a good thing, or a bad thing. That beauty, youth, joy, and vitality—qualities you have, Martha, and that you brought out in me—are to be revered and enjoyed, or despised.