After Death, page 5
Ocean Boulevard follows a bluff high above a public beach. On the inland side of the street, multimillion-dollar residences crowd one another on narrow lots. Seaward, a grassy park is punctuated here and there with driveways to houses that are pinned to the bluff with steelwork and concrete pillars. It is to one of these that Michael pilots the Bentley, with no need to consult the sedan’s navigation system.
The home is ultramodern, not impressive from the street, toward which it presents only a dark slate roof, a sleek wall clad in slabs of white quartzite, heavily tinted windows, and three garage doors of brushed stainless steel. Having intruded into the computerized records of a company that facilitates the booking of private homes for vacationers all over the world, Michael knows that the owners of this place, Frederico and Jessica Columbia, are currently enjoying someone else’s spacious apartment in Paris for the next month. The family from Paris, at the moment vacationing in Brazil, will arrive to occupy this house in six days. In five days, a housekeeping service will prepare the premises in advance of the French guests. For four days, the place offers Michael a refuge.
He parks in the driveway and walks to the front door and pulls open the drop lid on the large, decorative mailbox. Frederico and Jessica put a three-week stop on mail delivery, while they are out of the country. Michael has gone online to rescind that order, and mail should be delivered starting today. At the moment, the box is empty.
Although he’s sure that no one is in residence, he rings the bell and waits and rings it again.
The deadbolt is automated. Michael lacks an electronic key, but there is also a keypad that can be used by relatives or housekeepers or property managers, to each of whom a personal code is issued. The codes are programmed in the house’s security-system computer, which is always online and accessible by Vigilant Eagle, the alarm company that services the home. Having gone swimming deep in the data sea of Vigilant Eagle’s computer, Michael knows those codes. He inputs the five digits assigned to the property management firm, which unlocks the door and simultaneously turns off the burglar alarm.
The residence has four stories that shelve down the face of the bluff. Michael enters a stunning twenty-foot-square foyer featuring a black-granite floor and blue-glass ceiling. The space is paneled in stainless steel into which has been etched a 360-degree forest scene with ghostly deer among the silvery trees, illuminated so cunningly that the source of the light can’t be directly seen.
This highest level is also occupied by an indoor swimming pool that lies beyond a hidden door to the left and the garages that can be reached through a hallway accessible beyond another hidden door to the right. Directly ahead, elevator doors and a stair-head door are integrated into the dreamlike forest scene.
He proceeds to the garage, where he has parked in front of the first space. Lacking a remote control, he needs to come here and raise the door with the wall switch. He drives the Bentley inside and lowers the segmented door and returns to the foyer and takes the elevator down to the next level.
The top floor of the house sits on solid land, but the floor under it is pinned to the face of the bluff, which gives its main rooms a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean. The elevator and spiral stairs open to an alcove off the living room. In addition, this level offers a dining room and a chef’s kitchen to the left; to the right are a library, two powder baths, and a generously proportioned guest suite.
The remaining bluff-side floors below contain the master suite, three other family suites, a fully equipped gym, and a ten-seat home theater.
Here on the main floor, the bleached-sycamore library, white and modern, includes a bar with a colorful backlit art-glass wall. An under-the-counter refrigerator contains a selection of beers and cheeses. One wine cooler holds chardonnays and pinot grigios and champagnes, while the other is reserved for superb cabernet sauvignons. In various cabinets of the bar, he finds a selection of nibbles—canned nuts, pretzels, crackers of several kinds—as well as glassware, flatware, plates, and a variety of cloth napkins.
He opens a can of almonds. Another of macadamia nuts. Prepares a plate of cheeses surrounded by crackers. After putting the food on a table beside an armchair that faces the view, he opens a bottle of Caymus cabernet. He pours a few ounces into Riedel stemware, returns to the chair, puts the bottle on the table beside the cheese, and sits with the wineglass in both hands, close to his nose, enjoying the aroma before taking a sip. “To Shelby, who will not be forgotten or go unavenged,” he says, with the intention of getting pleasantly drunk.
He doesn’t know if he can get drunk anymore, since rising from the table in the makeshift morgue, but damn if he isn’t determined to give it a try.
Over the past four busy days, sleep has eluded him. He doesn’t appear to need it any longer, as though the hours that he spent in death—or something like it—have provided all the sleep he’ll need henceforth.
He wonders why, of fifty-five victims, only he came back to life. He suspects that something unique in his genome provided him with protection. However, with the forces surely arrayed against him, the why of his resurrection is not his primary concern.
MICHAEL MULTITASKS
The wind flows swift out of the north, and the sky swoons low and pregnant, with rain soon to break. The sea is a gray mystery in which the varied population of that world, in the billions, swims its plains and valleys, crawls its lightless floors and the slopes of its submerged mountains, unseen and indifferent to the land-born who build great cities and the weapons to destroy them.
In his armchair, facing the big library windows, Michael savors the austere vista and the cabernet sauvignon and the cheeses, as he tracks the items he hopes to receive in the mail this afternoon.
Four days earlier, twenty minutes after he had slipped out of Beautification Research, he had been sitting on a bench in a park six blocks from that facility, adapting with surprising speed to his reanimation and to the strange power that came with it. He could not go home again. He dared not. He had no money, no phone, only the clothes he wore. However, because of what he’d become, anything he would ever need could be obtained with minimal risk and effort.
Six hours after he rose from the cafeteria table where he’d been placed to await autopsy, he’d taken refuge in a house in the flats of Beverly Hills. The owners, Roger and Mary Pullman, were vacationing in Austria, having swapped homes with an Austrian couple, Heinz and Erika Gurlitzer; the details of their arrangement were easily accessed in the records of the company that provided this service. After their first week in California, the Gurlitzers had moved on to another handsome residence owned by the Pullmans, this one overlooking the Pebble Beach golf course and the ocean north of Carmel. Michael found Roger Pullman’s clothes to be a good fit, and the refrigerator was well stocked.
His first day in Roger and Mary’s house, he’d gone exploring far and wide across the internet and deep into numerous computer systems, including several that were the most secure in the world. Being prudent, he first identified his next refuge—the house slung on the bluff in Corona del Mar where now he enjoyed wine and cheese—and surfed the web and the Dark Web for a source of funds that he might take for himself without legal or moral consequences, which is how he turned up the nasty truth about Carter Woodbine, attorney and financier of drug trafficking.
Also on that first day of his new life, he had gone spelunking in the gloomy caverns of the California DMV’s poorly designed and antiquated system. Within twenty minutes, he understood the process by which a driver’s license was created, and he acquired the names of the private-sector companies with which the state contracted to produce and mail them. He was able to transfer the photo on his existing license to the blank template on which all licenses were formatted, entered a name he invented, and inputted his own height, weight, eye color, and hair color. He decided to make himself four years younger than he actually was—Why not?—and chose July fourth for his birthday. For an address, he supplied that of the Corona del Mar house that he would next occupy. When all the required data was entered, after he claimed the status of a new resident of the state, the system automatically assigned him a driver’s license number. Then he repeated the process two more times, using different names.
A license application might ordinarily take a month or even six weeks to be processed through the unoiled Rube Goldberg machinery of the improbably vast and infernal bureaucracy before the precious, laminated card with its tamperproof holographic details arrived from the DMV. However, Michael had found it easy to flow the cards that he created to the top of the manufacturing-and-issuing system, and then to sluice them neatly into the proper channel for priority mailing. They should arrive here today—three proofs of identity that will withstand the most intense scrutiny if he needs to use them.
He watches the first of the wind-driven rain slant in from the north, skeins of glistening beads that unravel past the bluff-side house without wetting the glass, which is protected by the roof of the exterior deck. He sips the cabernet and simultaneously peruses the data archives of the local post office’s address scanner, in which he discovers that nine pieces of mail, bearing this street number, were sorted during the night and are now aboard the delivery truck that serves the neighborhood. At the same time, he’s able to admire a squadron of pelicans gliding south in formation, on their way to shelter from the storm.
Having immediate and unrestricted access to every corner of the digital universe, without need of a desktop computer or laptop, with neither a tablet nor a smartphone nor other device, Michael feels a little like he felt as a boy in early adolescence, when sometimes he experienced exhilarating dreams in which he could fly effortlessly, like the gliding pelicans.
CHASING A GHOST
Sudden torrents beat on the triple-pane, hermetically sealed windows of the late Simon Bistoury’s office. Wind-driven rain that falls without thunder or pyrotechnics, in a particular quality of sullen daylight, in an intense volume, can summon a precious memory and fill Durand Calaphas with yearning. This is not a sentimental feeling, not in the least maudlin or melancholy. It’s a sharper variety of nostalgia, a keen longing to relive a moment of triumph, combined with a fervent hope that he’ll one day experience something as profoundly satisfying as that best moment of his past. He swivels the office chair to watch the silver rain that slices through the gray morning. Although his current task requires urgent attention, he allows himself two or three minutes to imagine that he is four years in the past, on an assignment that led him to an unexpected enemy of the state. The handsome Nantucket-style shingled house on the harbor. The French windows full of soft light, a promise of warmth in the cold rain. The wife glimpsed in the kitchen, busy with baking. The puddled patio furnished with teak chairs and tables. The dock, the gangway, the slip, the fifty-six-foot coastal cruiser snugged in the single berth. Light in the below-deck portals. The drumming rain masks what small noises he makes while boarding the boat and descending the spiral companionway. Gifford is at work in the galley, preparing to use a metal cleaner on the stainless-steel sink. He looks up, surprised, and says, “Felicia didn’t say you were coming.” A short conversation ensues. However, Durand has not paid this visit to hear Gifford’s excuses or his confession. He zippers open his raincoat as if to take it off, draws a somnifacient-dart gun, and scores a direct hit in Gifford’s neck. The man collapses, unconscious. Calaphas drags him into the vessel’s only stateroom, which is furnished with built-in cabinets, a bed, and one armchair. He hoists Gifford into the chair. A gun safe is fixed to a rail of the bed frame; the number code to open it is Gifford’s birthday. Calaphas retrieves the pistol, puts the barrel in Gifford’s mouth, and blows out the back of his skull. He positions the gun on the man’s lap. The ISA will make sure that the coming investigation will be cursory. In that moment, Calaphas knows he is a giant among men. He has the courage and the fortitude to do anything required of him, absolutely anything; he’s destined for greatness. In this age when most people have such soft spines that it’s a wonder they are able to stand erect, it is a rare individual who can, at the call of duty and without remorse, kill his brother.
The memory is not sweet. He is not the kind of man who could delight in such a memory. He isn’t a sociopath. He is merely dutiful and realistic about the future that lies inevitable before him. This will soon no longer be a world where family, friends, and faith are foremost. That world is fading fast. The fate of humanity depends on severely limiting our loyalty only to the system that sustains us and to the determined visionaries who sustain the system. Calaphas can’t delight in such a memory, but he can take deep satisfaction from the fact that killing Gifford proves that his commitment to the New Truth is complete and that he won’t become a reactionary who seeks even a moment’s solace in the old, imperfect past.
He swivels his chair away from the window and returns his attention to the computer.
Every employee record at Beautification Research includes a photograph—except one. The first screen page of the file for the director of security, Michael Mace—no middle name—features white space where the photo should be. No problem. The DMV has a photo.
Among the information contained in the file is Mace’s driver’s license number. Durand Calaphas, being a senior ISA agent, has full and easy access to every government computer system on the federal, state, and local level without the need to seek a court order or so much as file a freedom-of-information request. When defending the nation from internal threats, he will never be impeded by the Bill of Rights. He is aware that some say the ISA itself is the greatest internal threat to the United States; of course, those who say such things are the suspects the agency is most intensely surveilling. Now, using Simon Bistoury’s office computer to invade the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ computer via a back door, he inputs the license number from the employee file—and is disturbed when the words INCORRECT NUMBER PLEASE REENTER appear on the screen. Calaphas consults Mace’s file and repeats the entry, with the same result.
When he enters the name Michael Mace, he scores twice. Each man has a middle name. Michael David Mace is eighty-four years old. Michael Morley Mace, thirty-two, is a little person, four feet two inches tall. Calaphas is looking for a forty-four-year-old man who is six feet tall.
To be hired for this project, Mace had to receive the highest level of security clearance from the Department of Defense. No one at the DOD is aware that the ISA has planted a rootkit in their system, allowing senior agents to prowl through the records of all the services without being detected, but of course the military and Congress are among the institutions that must be most closely watched for evidence of seditious intentions. The file on Michael Mace no longer exists in the DOD’s system.
When the Defense Intelligence Agency had conducted a deep investigation of Michael Mace for his security clearance, the ISA, FBI, CIA, NSA, and Homeland Security would all have become aware of that and would have undertaken their own exhaustive inquiries into his past. They should all have photographs of him.
Calaphas needs another seventy-five minutes to discover that none of those organizations any longer maintains a file on Mace. Evidently, someone has zapped them all.
OUT OF THE STORM
Such a deluge could ensure that this isn’t a drought year in California. The storm is a good thing, received with gratitude, but Nina Dozier always worries her way through the lightest drizzle, frequently checking the ceiling, room by room, for the first sign of wet plasterboard. The roof is old, and when it begins to fail, a few patches won’t fix it. Even on a little house like hers, a new roof can be expensive. On this occasion, however, she isn’t fretting about leaks and water damage. Being in possession of four hundred thousand dollars with which to start a new life, she can regard the storm the same way people in Beverly Hills see it—as just a change in the weather.
Because she and John visited Disneyland for three days to celebrate his tenth birthday, he has had a suitcase for three years. Not all of his things are going to fit in the one bag, so she has assembled two of the banker boxes that she uses to store business records. After she gets him started packing, she steps out of his bedroom and follows the short hallway into the living room, on her way to the kitchen.
From an armchair, his Common Projects sneakers propped on the footstool, Aleem Sutter says, “Girl, you’re still seriously fresh.”
She halts, rocking slightly on her heels, as if she’s walked into a glass door.
He says, “Time don’t work on you. How is it you look cherry as you ever did?”
Nina says nothing. She’s thinking about the pistol clipped to the bed frame in her room.
“Wasn’t you I come here about, but now I seen you up close, damn if I don’t got that old feelin’.”
“Go away.”
“Nowhere better to go.” He swings his feet off the ottoman but remains in the armchair, relaxed and insolent. “Back when, wasn’t nothin’ you liked better than a ride on the Aleem machine. My taste runs to high-school skirt, but you want to ride again, it don’t cost you even a quarter.”
“You’re a disgusting pig.”
His soft laugh is warm, but his eyes belie the pretense of amusement. “You always had some fire in you.”
“This is my house.”
“A shitty little place to raise a kid.”
“I told you to get out.”
“You said ‘go away.’ Ask a lawyer, he’ll explain ‘imprecise is just advice. To get a conviction, use the right diction.’ I learned me a lot of law since back when you was makin’ my baby.”
