The driver punched the gas, the van jerked forward, and an instant later we were speeding down the highway and I was in the back of the van with my two assistants, the same two assailants, I realized, who had attacked me back in Reno.
“What’s happening?” I asked, squinting at the two men, my back against the rear doors. “Who are you people?”
The black man tossed the phone to the other man now in the passenger seat. “Check it,” he said, then turned back to me. “You have a prescription, don’t you?”
I just stared back at him.
“We’ll get you a new pair of glasses at some point.” He nodded at the rear windows. “In the meantime if you’re interested, the show’s about to begin.”
“Who are you? What are you talking about? Why are you doing this?”
I was babbling, almost incoherently, afraid that what these men had just done would cost Jen and Casey their lives, that it would cost Casey’s fellow preschoolers their lives.
“My name’s Carver, Ben. My men and I are here to help you. And like I said, the show’s about to begin.”
At the sound of my name I paused. “How ... how do you know my name?”
The man in the passenger seat called back, “It’s clean.”
“Good,” Carver said. “Take out the battery and we’ll get it to the Kid later.” He looked at me again and said, “And to answer your question, Ben, it’s because my men and I have been watching you for the past five days.”
“The past five ...” I shook my head, trying to wrap my mind around everything this man was telling me. “My family—”
“Is dead,” Carver said, his voice suddenly somber. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that, but they’ve been dead from the beginning.”
I started shaking my head. “No. No, that can’t be.”
“Carver!” This was shouted from the driver. “Here they come.”
Still shaking my head, still trying to accept everything this man had just told me, I said, “Here who come?”
“Your escorts.”
“My ... what?”
“Just watch.”
He moved up beside me and peered out the left rear window. I squinted back at him, not sure what to say or do or even think, my entire body trembling at the idea that Jen and Casey might already be dead, but then curiosity got the better of me and I glanced out the right rear window.
The utility van was going fast—maybe eighty, ninety miles per hour—leaving most of the traffic in the dust. Except for one car, swerving in and out of all the rest, gaining on us.
“See them?” Carver asked. “They’ve been following you from the start of the game. They were the ones that stopped us back in Reno.”
I looked at him, remembering his words—This is for your own good—and then looked back out the window at the car. Without my glasses I could only see the car as a dark shape, but I could tell it was getting even closer, now less than one hundred yards away.
“Carver,” the driver warned, and Carver said, “I see him,” and I squinted even more to just make out the car’s passenger side window coming down and someone leaning out pointing a gun at us.
A hand touched my arm, pulling me away, and Carver said, “You might want to get down,” and immediately the window I’d been staring out spider webbed.
Carver said, “Larry, hurry the fuck up, we’re taking on fire.”
I wasn’t sure who he was taking to, the driver or the passenger, but then I realized he wore an earpiece. I squinted to see him listening and then he said, “I don’t care, make it happen,” and then I ducked down even lower on the floor as more bullets tore into the van.
“Bronson, do something!” Carver shouted, and the driver said, “I’m trying, I’m trying,” the van swerving now from lane to lane, the car behind us firing even more, the window that had been spider webbed now shattering completely, the glass raining down everywhere.
Carver pulled out a gun and stood up and fired out the window, the sound of his gun deafening in the van. I clamped my hands over my ears, jumping with each gunshot. Then Carver stopped and said, “Okay, here they come,” and I opened my eyes and squinted up at him.
“About fucking time,” said the passenger.
“We’ll bust their balls later,” Carver said. “Right now let’s just make sure they make it work.” Carver glanced at me. “Do you want to see?”
No, I didn’t want to see, but I found myself getting up anyway and looking out the window. The car was back there—my escort, whatever that meant—and behind it, coming on strong, was another car. I squinted enough to see that the passenger side window of that car was coming down just as the car came parallel with my escort. A hand reached out holding something, threw that something at the highway right in front of my escort, and then suddenly there was a brilliant flash and the next thing I knew the escort’s car was flying, flipping up through the smoky air and coming down on the roof.
The two guys in the front laughed and whooped. Carver said, “Good job, guys,” and listened to his earpiece for a second, nodded and said, “Yeah, we’re going to need to ditch this one as soon as possible too.” He shouted up front, “Bronson, take the next exit. We’re going to need new wheels ASAP.” Then he sat down, leaned back against the side of the van, and looked at me.
I said, “What ... what just happened?”
“Some powerful C-4 is what just happened.”
“Who are you people?”
“Us?” Carver smiled. “We were just like you once upon a time. We had families, jobs, a mortgage. Now all of that’s behind us.”
“I don’t”—I shook my head, my body still shaking—“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t expect you to. Not at first. But we have some time, so I might as well get it out of the way.”
“Get what out of the way?”
“There’s no short or long version, just one, and here’s what I can tell you. What seems like one hundred years ago I worked for the FBI.”
34
It had been simple bad luck that Carver Ellison stumbled across the thing that would eventually change and ruin his life.
He was thirty-five, had a wife and newborn baby at home. He’d been with the FBI for almost ten years, climbing his way up the bureaucratic ladder, and now worked in a vital section of the organization. His job was mainly to scour the Internet and keep tabs on certain terrorist cells. Ever since its conception the Internet had been a major threat not only to the security of the United States but to the entire world. Anybody was free to post whatever they wished, just as anybody was free to access it. It was then Carver’s job to ensure that when something was posted that sent up red flags, they not only kept an eye on it and whoever was accessing the material, but found out who those people were and shut it down.
His bad luck started one night as he sat in front of a half dozen computers programmed to access any number of URLs at any given time. Something strange had popped up on Carver’s screen. The computer he was using ran through a series of letters and numbers to see if anything came up, as sometimes terrorists will use addresses that are complete gibberish but which their contacts will know and link to and then read whatever message is posted before that message is deleted.
What he was looking at now was mostly a black screen with a box in the middle. In that box—it couldn’t have been more than four inches wide and four inches long—was the inside of a car as it would look like from a driver’s perspective. There was the steering wheel, the dash, the windshield and hood and the road in front. There were even hands on the steering wheel, and for a moment Carver, staring at the screen, had the vertiginous feeling that he was actually driving. The highway itself was moderately busy, traffic passing by trees and fields and buildings. Nothing was really happening at all except this person driving.
Carver ended up watching it for close to an hour—the driver doing nothing more than driving—until suddenly the screen went blank. He typed in a few commands and tried to brin
g it back up but whatever he’d seen was now gone.
Days passed and he started to forget about the driver. He had mentioned it on his nightly report, but besides that it had no real meaning. Then he was called in to see his supervisor, who had just come across his report and wanted a full and detailed account. Carver tried explaining the best he knew how, though the fact that nothing had really been happening on screen made it difficult. Yet despite this his supervisor seemed very interested. Finally he was dismissed and went back to work, sitting in front of the computers as they scrolled through the millions of possible addresses. As usual he sat there and thought about his wife and baby at home. Leon Michael Ellison, his four month baby boy, named after Carver’s own father. He had Carver’s eyes and nose, and always smiled every time Carver held him up and kissed him on the forehead. He couldn’t wait until his boy got old enough to play baseball and basketball with, to take fishing.
But one night, about three weeks later, he came across the same website again. Only this time it was different. The screen was again black except for the box in the middle, the box which now showed one man killing another man. The man in question—the killer—was using an ax. Sound was provided this time, letting Carver hear the hard splat each blow of the ax made as it sank into the victim’s body, while the other man, the killer, cried.
Carver sat up, began saving this data at once. He called in another one of the techs and they started playing with the site, trying to analyze it to see if they could come up with an origin. What they found instead was a link, which took them to another black screen with a box in the middle. Inside this box was the same thing: a man killing another man with an ax, only now Carver and the tech were viewing it from the killer’s point of view. Just like before, when he’d been watching the highway in front of him—those two hands holding onto the steering wheel—it was like he was actually there, actually the one driving. Now it was like Carver was the one killing this other man—this other man who was no longer crying out, who was no longer even moving.
His report came to his supervisor’s attention the next day, and he was called into his office, made to explain everything he’d seen. Carver described it the best he could—it had haunted him, so much so that he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, and when his wife Sandra asked him what was wrong he just shook her off. His supervisor listened without a word, nodding at certain parts, jotting notes down in a notebook at other parts. Finally he told Carver that this case would be reassigned to somebody else, so Carver could continue his normal work.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he told his supervisor, “but I would like to further investigate.”
He was thinking of all the things he’d seen in his time at the FBI, images so terrible he never once told Sandra about them, never once even hinted about them. Websites that provided its customers with naked pictures of children. Videos of children being forced to do obscene things with each other and sometimes even animals. It had been enough to make his stomach turn but Carver had conditioned himself to acknowledge there was evil in the world, and that the only way for evil to succeed was for good men to do nothing (a paraphrase of a quote he’d heard in high school and which had stayed with him ever since). He had made it his mission to stop these sick people—those who provided this egregious content and those who purchased it—and every time one of these websites was shut down and someone placed in jail, he felt a little better about himself and the world in general.
Regardless, Carver was reassigned to work strictly on al-Qaeda-related issues. Yet what he’d seen—the man using an ax to kill another man, the killer crying the entire time—stayed with him.
He contacted a young man whom he’d busted years ago, a computer hacker who once infiltrated the Pentagon’s main server and sent out a mass email to every mailbox saying they were going to have Secret Santas this year, no matter what creed or faith each person followed. When Carver went with the agents to the boy’s house, he found just a seventeen-year-old kid, a good-looking kid with a clean completion and smart eyes and trendy clothes. As the kid was taken out in handcuffs, Carver said, “You don’t look like a hacker,” to which the kid said, “You don’t look like a nigger.” The kid spent a few years in prison, as well as being forced to pay an exorbitant amount in fines. Carver had managed to speak with him once again, right before he’d been arraigned. When Carver asked him why he’d gone ahead and done it even though he knew he would most likely get caught, the kid said, “Actually, I didn’t think I would get caught. Guess you got lucky. And why’d I do it? Shit, I thought it was funny.”
This was the person Carver now contacted. Ever since the young man was released they had created a close relationship when it came to matters such as these. Carver explained what he’d seen and asked for some insight if there was any. The Kid—this was how Carver always referred to him, wanting to keep his identity secret—said he would look into it and call him back.
Carver didn’t wait long. The Kid called the next day.
“Did you find anything?”
“Did I find anything?” the Kid said. “Shit, Carver, you wouldn’t fucking believe what I found.”
The Kid, always up for a challenge, had spent all night doing the same thing Carver had been doing for the past few years. The only difference was the Kid knew exactly what he was looking for, just where to look, and had no problems (well, no major problems) uncovering it.
“It’s like a webcam,” the Kid told Carver a couple hours later, in a coffee shop thirty miles outside of D.C. “You know, how men will pay these girls all this money just to watch them traipse around in their underwear. Sometimes they can even request the girls to do things, like touch themselves and shit. This usually costs more, though, depending on what they want the girls to do.”
The Kid explained what Carver had come across was a few steps up from a simple webcam. Whoever was coordinating this knew their shit and had the money to think big. Cameras were sometimes placed in certain locations, like in the car Carver had seen being driven earlier, or in a place where something was to occur, like the man being murdered with an ax. Had Carver known of a different link the first time around, he could have gotten a view of the driver himself. Mostly though the camera that was used was the one positioned in the glasses the subject always wore. Even if they normally didn’t wear glasses they were forced to wear them. Inside was a micro camera, so small but yet so powerful that it wasn’t like the webcams, which updated themselves every couple of seconds, but was a live feed. So that whoever was watching could see in real time the events as they unfolded.
“So what does this mean?” Carver asked the Kid, who was drinking hot chocolate because he hated the taste of coffee. The place was mostly deserted, it of course being the middle of the night, and anybody who would have cared might have found it odd that a well-dressed black man was talking to a kid who looked like he could have stepped out of the pages of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.
“It means,” the Kid said, looking more solemn than he ever had before, even when he was in court, “this is some serious shit.”
Carver told the Kid to keep working on it and they parted ways. The entire thing consumed his thoughts for the next week. At home, Sandra asked him what was wrong, but he merely smiled at her, went to play with his son or check on him in his crib. At work, nobody asked him what was wrong. Then the Kid called and told him to come to his place immediately.
He said, “You’re not going to fucking believe what I found.”
Apparently this entire thing had consumed the Kid’s thoughts as well, because he’d been working on it day and night. He was even starting to look like a zombie to Carver when he arrived at the Kid’s house, the same place Carver had come to years before when he’d made the initial arrest. The Kid’s face was pale, he had bags underneath his eyes, but when he shook Carver’s hand there was a firmness there that said the Kid was never going to lose his strength. They went down to the basement where all the computers were set up—
the Kid had about a dozen, always working on something different—and Carver pulled up a chair.
“What do you have?” Carver asked. It was his first time down here in years and he glanced around at all the posters taped to the walls: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Brazil, The Fisher King, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Twelve Monkeys.
When the Kid noticed what had caught Carver’s attention, he said, “What? Terry Gilliam is a fucking genius.”
Carver pulled his chair closer to the computer they were sitting in front of. He said, “This better be good.”
“Well,” the Kid said, “I guess that depends on your point of view.”
What the Kid had concluded was that the two things Carver had seen before were types of shows. Reality shows in a way—real people doing real things. Only instead of working for some multimillionaire business owner or attempting to lose a ton of weight, these shows had a much darker, sinister angle.
While the Kid was explaining this, he brought up part of a show he’d saved, what was basically the same thing Carver had seen the first time he stumbled across the website that was mostly a black screen with a box in the middle: the inside of a car, hands on the steering wheel, an open highway stretching toward the horizon.
“And now,” the Kid said, doing his best John Cleese, “for something completely different.”
He typed in a few commands and sat back in his chair as the picture inside the black screen changed. The perspective was still of whoever was wearing the special glasses, only there was no open highway in front of them anymore. Now Carver was seeing a woman lying naked in front of him. Everything behind and around her was fuzzy, but her face was clear, and he could see that her mouth was open just a bit, her eyes bulging. And around her neck were hands, hands which belonged to the person wearing the glasses.
“Holy shit,” Carver said, leaning forward. “Is he—”
Man of Wax (Man of Wax Trilogy) Page 13
