by James Reich
Cash inhaled deeply of the Manhattan street air. The automatic doors of the Winters Corporation building hissed as she walked between them. Standing in the air-conditioned lobby, she regarded the crystal chandeliers and the financial journals and Men’s Health magazines on glass coffee tables, and the dark coffee-hued carpets across pristine white tiles of granite. Close to the elevator, three muscular security guards in navy blue uniforms had convened and were speaking quietly. Her stomach lurched as she heard the squelch of one of their radios. For a moment, she froze, anticipating their moving against her. But they did not. One of the guards laughed and slapped another across the shoulder before the three of them dispersed. One remained at the elevator. Another stationed himself at the foot of the wide marble staircase. She watched the third leave the building.
You knew that it would be like this.
Tears rolled down her pale cheeks as she approached the ebony arc and halogen lamps of the reception desk. The security cameras rolled overhead, recording everything. The beautiful young receptionist there had a vague equine cast to her jaw and eyes, brown hair tied back, lips glossed with deep ruby cosmetic.
“Can I help you?” She looked at the young woman’s quivering upper lip, her pale skin and the black shadows of grief like bruises around her vivid blue eyes.
“I’m . . . ” Words seemed to fail her. “Kip Winters is my husband,” Cash announced, wiping her eyes.
“Oh my goodness, of course,” the receptionist said, plucking a tissue from the chrome dispenser at her desk and passing it to the stricken young woman across the counter. “I’m so sorry. Everyone is terribly upset.”
“I didn’t even have any black clothes. I borrowed these.” Cash flapped her arms uselessly, and pushed a final sob from her throat. “I can’t believe it. Are they here?”
For a moment, the receptionist appeared confused.
They think that Kip Winters is alive!
“Yes. Frederick and Mr. Winters are upstairs, in Mr. Winters’s suite on the fourth floor.”
“Thank you.” Cash turned to walk toward the elevators.
“I’ll buzz, and let them know you are on your way up.”
“No. No, please don’t do that. There isn’t any need.”
“As you wish. I’m sorry.”
“But may I have one of the name tags we use for guests, please? I suppose it will be easier to have one if I’m coming and going. You might not always be on duty.”
“Yes, of course.” The receptionist handed Cash a blank Winters Corporation badge. “Do you need a pen?”
“No, thank you.” Cash pretended to choke back tears. “I can fill it out in the elevator.” This was the tag she would use to infiltrate the reactors at Indian Point.
“We all hope that they find your husband soon.”
They really don’t know yet!
The receptionist caught the eye of the security guard at the elevator and made a small gesture that meant he should not interrupt the passage of this stricken, important woman.
Blushing with adrenaline and the pleasure of penetrating the confines of the Winters men, she thought of a song with Lou Reed singing. “Varyushka Cash took the elevator, got off at the fourth floor.”
She strode along the opulent red-carpeted corridor, running her fingers along the pearlescent wallpaper, scanning for the right room. Her body flowed with the absolute confidence of one drawn forward by the certainties of thousands of premonitions, the violent rehearsals enacted in her bed as Valerie watched over her. Again, the door was only barely and plainly marked WINTERS among many that were mere numerals. Cash did not bother to knock. On opening the door, she found the two men, Frederick and his father Evelyn Winters, seated together at a monolithic black table. Between them was a large vinyl map, a cartography that Cash knew immediately represented Nuclear Region IV. There were no cameras in this private boardroom, no recording devices of any kind. Holding his spectacles in a trembling grip, Evelyn Winters appeared frail, his blue eyes and dry features arranged about a series of pocks, rivulets, and elderly plates of skin beneath silver hair. His eldest and only remaining blond son was broad-shouldered, his complexion smooth and artificially even. Both men wore somber business suits, titanium cuff links glinting beneath the white office lights.
“Who are you?” the old man demanded. “What are you doing in here?”
“I am Ardhanari, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
“What are you talking about? How did you get in here?”
“I killed your son, in Savannah.” Cash dropped her bag onto the polished mahogany floor. She held the small PSS pistol inside the overlong right sleeve of the black suit jacket she had stolen from Janelle. “And then I set fire to him in a car.”
“Liar!” The old man rasped.
“I could have left him on the lawn like a piece of shit for kids to see.”
“You insane fucking bitch!” Frederick lunged around the shimmering black table, his white shirt breast exposed as he raised his arms to grasp at her throat.
Cash lifted her right arm and without a sound two bullets ripped into Frederick Winters’s chest and collar, propelling him backward, throwing an arc of scarlet blood from his wounds that spattered the walls. His black tie folded over his shoulder as his hands flailed and groped for the entry holes of the silent gun, his heart split by her burning metal shell, his neck a collapsing wound, a red nebula of agony. He slumped against the wall, leaving a foot-wide smear of gore as he fell, bright tears rolling from his dying eyes.
Evelyn Winters cried out and stooped, as though for an alarm button concealed beneath the desk. Before he could reach it, Cash took three rapid steps around the desk and pressed the Russian pistol to his brow, ripping the glued silver wig from his lined and freckled pate. His jaw hung slack and drooling as he watched Frederick dying on the floor, both men reaching pathetically toward one another, weeping.
“Please,” he implored.
Cash whipped the gun across his face, easily breaking his nose. Inarticulate, near-paralyzed sounds dripped from his bloody mouth. The plate of his teeth seemed to have detached. He sucked desperately at the electrified air of the room.
“P-Please . . . Why . . . ?”
“I will not let you fucking pricks make any more Chernobyls!” Cash shoved the old man away from her so that his blood would not spatter her, and she fired. As Evelyn Winters swung and fell, grasping at the vinyl map, emitting small grunts of shock at each concussion, Cash watched the quiet implosions in his skull, bone dust drifting like uranium powder in the eerie quiet of the office. She fired repeatedly, reloaded, overcome with a cool rage. Splinters of bone spun in the air. Jets of blood blew from the old man’s body as she moved to straddle him. The bullets came with an eerie silence. The three Winters men were dead; Hippolyta had killed the lion of the triple night. She picked up her bag and turned her back on them. Animals broke cover in the Zone of Alienation.
When she reached the elevator, she saw in its mirror that her suit, the one that she had taken from Janelle, was splashed with gore. She pushed the button to descend, thinking of ripping her street clothes from her bag, trying to change before the lobby. Without warning, while the doors were closing, a hand reached in and prevented them. Cash pressed against the back of the cubicle. The doors reopened automatically and a security guard, the one she had seen in the lobby, positioned at the foot of the stairs, heaved himself inside. “Just made it!” he gasped, catching his breath.
Cash froze as the doors closed.
Instantly, he saw the wet blood dripping from her jacket sleeve and the deep red bloom of it on her blouse. “Jesus! Are you okay?” The elevator began to descend. Cash realized that he had not seen the bodies in the Winters’ boardroom.
“I’m fine.” She could not prevent her voice from snapping.
“What happened?” He glanced at the digital display, counting down the floors to the lobby. Even as the horror began to spread across his features as he reached for the console to return the
elevator to the fourth floor, even as his other hand reached toward the handcuffs at his black leather belt, Cash pushed her gun under his chin. The console showed the second floor. His eyes flickered in her direction. She met them with hers as she pulled the trigger and almost noiselessly blew his brains across the ceiling. His large body beat against the carpeted floor. Cash had only a moment before the doors of the elevator would open to the lobby.
“Fuck!”
To her sudden relief, Cash saw that the guard who had stood outside the elevator was out of position, talking to the receptionist. Pushing her hands into the pockets of her black suit jacket, she stepped over the blue uniformed corpse and began to walk swiftly away from the blood-sprayed elevator, across the slick marble floor, fixing her eyes on the automatic doors that opened and closed with the flow of employees and visitors. A thin trail of plasma dripped from her sleeve. Suddenly, she located the third guard. He was also ahead of her, straightening after bending down to pick up a magazine that had been brushed from one of the low glass hospitality tables. Cash willed the elevator doors to shut again, spitting between her teeth: Close, damn it! Then it came from behind her back: a woman screamed, filling the lobby with a wild reflection of terror. She fought against the tension in her muscles that demanded she break into a run, almost staggering with the strain of maintaining her purposeful stride. Others began to scream and cry out, scattering in panic. Keeping her hands in her pockets, she maintained her attitude and strained toward the exit, her protruding top lip closed tight over the lower. Shaking off their confusion, the security guards hastened toward the elevator, drawing their weapons. They would have to pass her. As the distance between them closed, she perceived a flash of recognition in the face of the guard closest to her. He saw the blood on her. Keeping her hands in her pockets, she fired. A wisp of fabric drifted from her right hip as her bullet caught the guard in the face. He whirled, clutching the wound, and slithered across the polished floor, his gun clattering away from him. Before the last guard could act, while the scream still howled from the walls, his sternum imploded from gunshots he never heard. Scarlet vomit spooled from his mouth as he contorted and twisted before her. The receptionist stared as the blond woman in the black business suit put out a stiff left arm, pushing the dying guard from her path as she broke into a run.
Sprinting from the high-rise of the Winters Corporation into the Manhattan sunlight, Cash tore at the bloody jacket, ripping it from her body and throwing it into the street under the traffic. Men in business suits fell aside from the sidewalk, raising their hands defensively as she pumped her arms and legs as hard as she could, heaving with exertion. She plunged into the Wall Street subway station, unfastening the stained blouse as she descended. She changed back into her street clothes in one of the tiled subterranean bathrooms, flushing the platinum widow hair down the toilet. She rode the subway north to the Lexington Avenue–63rd Street station and visited a walk-in hair salon. “Shave it off, really close,” she said. Her rust-red Martian hair fell in large clots and strands to the checkered linoleum floor. The clippers buzzed in her ears and almost sent her to sleep. A profound luxury spread through her, narcotic endorphins. It was almost over. Indian Point was out there, waiting for her.
18
AS MUCH AS ROBERT DRESNER FOUND HIMSELF RELIEVED TO BE BACK in Washington, D.C., with his meeting with his director behind him, and for all that he was anticipating with his evening date, he was anxious about explaining that he would have to leave again, immediately in the morning, and that his assignment in New York City might detain him for an indeterminate period. Yet, at last, he felt that he possessed insight into his failures with this Varyushka Cash. He concluded that her very alienation, the facts of her existing in a phantasmal agitated past, had rendered her temporarily untouchable. He considered the way the case had seemed to move without him, despite him, through data aggregators, ghost phones, and satellite connections, where the most modern item in her reclaimed ghost town cabin might be her refrigerator, or that typewriter. Then, it did not help him to envisage his situation as a war between his present and her past, particularly since he was not noticeably advantaged. He feared that her past was unraveling him. He must change this. He wanted to prove himself, once more. It was not too late, he decided, for some heroic gesture that might atone for his recent lapses.
Perhaps, he thought, the Obelisk was a perverse restaurant choice, given where his current assignment had begun, and how close it had come to derailing him. However, after ingesting enough of the junk foods of New Mexico and Georgia, he was desperate for arugula ravioli and black bass. It was a pleasant April evening, cloudless and fresh. He would meet his fiancée on the steps of the restaurant. Although they lived close to one another and would share a taxi later, he enjoyed the sense of assignation, and seeing her only as the date commenced, not while getting dressed or en route. He hoped that she would not wear trousers.
He wore a Prada suit, despite his reservation that something in the name suggested communism to him. When his fiancée stepped from her taxi onto the pale moonlit sidewalk, he moved to embrace her. She wore a sleek midnight blue dress beneath her camel Burberry coat. “You look beautiful,” he told her, kissing her porcelain cheek, inhaling her perfume.
“Don’t we just?” She smiled as she linked her arm with his. “Like the ad section of Vanity Fair, without the emaciation. Although I do admit that I am hungry. How was your assignment?”
“Oh, so-so. You know, another dull piece on the environment.”
“Ugh, that troublesome climate. Do you ever wonder if they only send you to cover green stories because they know you’re their token Republican?”
“Cute,” he said, pinching her. “Anyway, I get it. I’m coming around to climate change, maybe. But I have something to confess, too. I’ll tell you now,” he said as the maître d’ greeted them and Dresner assisted her with her coat, “so that we can console ourselves with dinner. I’m afraid that I have to follow up in New York tomorrow.”
“Let’s pretend that I didn’t hear you. Instead, we’ll have this delightful dinner.” As she said this, forcing herself over the disappointment, he saw that he had something of her.
“Absolutely. Shall we go in?”
“I missed you, Robert.”
“Well, I missed you too, Janelle. I’m sorry that I couldn’t see you sooner. I got in late last night, and my editor came to see me this morning.”
“Good?”
“Yes, very. He asked after you.” They were seated.
She ordered lobster soup with mushrooms and pancetta and an entrée of quail with chard, sweet raisins, and pine nuts. The waiter brought wine.
“I need this Chianti. You’ll forgive me if we need at least two bottles?”
He shrugged, and reached across the white linen tablecloth to hold her hands in his. “So, how was your day?”
“Like you care, you transient mother.” She teased him, cheering herself slightly. “Fuck and run, is it?” Tilting her head back, she fixed him, regarding the flushing of his cheeks. “It was wonderful, actually. Yesterday afternoon, an old girlfriend arrived in town. I hadn’t seen her in ages. We played old music, got wasted, and she stayed over.”
Robert Dresner answered through his ravioli. “Great! I don’t need to feel so guilty about being out of town.”
“It was cool.” Janelle lowered her eyes, letting her gaze remain on their clasped hands, the corona of her engagement ring angling light over the table. “And unsettling.”
“What was so weird about it? Apart from the fact that it’s always bizarre when friends resurface, I mean. There can be a hollowness.” Dresner congratulated himself on this moment of empathy with her, although in truth, he knew nothing of the subject. He tried to draw on the sadness he should feel about Spicer, Kip Winters, and even Jack Torma, but there was nothing there. This was, he knew, a sign that his former ruthless capacities and his propensity to cruelty were returning. As he observed his fiancée, a weak wave of p
ain seemed to ripple across her face.
“Yeah, true, but more than that, I think that it put me on edge, somehow.”
“Huh,” he said, pouring them both more wine, uncertain that he understood her meaning. He hesitated during pouring, struck by her beauty in the candlelight of the restaurant. “Was it something that she said to you?”
