After Death(44)

Although Michael needs merely to think what he wants from his shadow self, he usually speaks the request, for a lifetime habit of vocalizing can’t be broken in a few days. Just as Amazon’s Alexa can often translate a slightly inaccurate search request and provide the information needed, so Shadow Michael knows what Michael wants even when his request isn’t a precise description of the subject. After returning to life and ghosting out of Beautification Research, during his days in the Beverly Hills house of Roger Pullman, whose clothes he still wears, his understanding of his strange power had rapidly evolved because it was part of the function of the nanotech shadow self to instruct him with tutorials that unspooled like vivid daydreams.

Now, fleeing with the cruiser in pursuit, he says, “Insert me into California Highway Patrol’s system of in-car computer terminals and digital citation printers. The nearest mobile unit.”

He retains an awareness of the highway ahead of him, as well as a keen recognition of the challenges of the traffic and weather, but another scene appears in the upper right-hand quadrant of his range of vision, rather like a screen in screen on a TV. The inset image is provided by the camera in the computer of the pursuing patrol car. He can see half of the driver’s face—a square jaw, a nose broken more than once, one eye set deep under a formidable brow.

The officer finishes speaking into the microphone of the police radio, and a dispatcher begins to answer him, but Michael shuts down that avenue of communication. He has control of the patrol car’s computer and equipment associated with it. He douses the flashing lightbar on the roof. Kills the siren. He switches on the outside speaker by which the officer can blast instructions at motorists, cranks it up to the max, pulls a Sirius radio signal out of the air, and feeds “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival through the system at such thunderous volume that he can hear it in the Bentley. The black-and-white loses speed and falls back from him. From the computer, he can slide into the car’s basic electronics, so he pops the trunk-lid release and shuts off the headlights. He turns the heater and fan to the highest setting, giving the patrolman some Mojave Desert in the middle of the downpour that has overwhelmed the windshield wipers, which have been shut off and locked.

In the upper right-hand quadrant of his vision, Michael sees the frantic officer, who’s virtually blinded without headlights and wipers, guiding his disabled vehicle to a stop on the shoulder of the freeway. The cop will have a cell phone to call for assistance, but in this weather and under the circumstances, he probably didn’t get a chance to read the Bentley’s license-plate number. And before Michael exited the squad car, he erased the video recorded by its bow and stern cameras. If the plates are reported to the National Crime Information Center, Michael will receive a blue-neon warning in his mind’s eye and either delete the listing or change some of the numbers around to confound the authorities.

Rain falls, darkness deepens, and Michael races south toward an interstate exit, a lonely state highway, a quiet valley, and a dead orchard, where Nina and her son need the kind of help he can provide only with the AR-15. Earlier he retrieved it from the compartment under the back seat. It’s now wedged barrel up between the passenger seat and the dashboard. One extended magazine with twenty rounds has been inserted in the rifle. The three spares lay on the seat. As a security specialist and licensed bodyguard, he is trained in the use of various firearms, including this one. But he’s never shot anyone. He’s never killed anyone. He is highly skilled with the AR-15, and he knows full well that Aleem and his crew are killers who give nothing to the world but misery and grief. But he has never killed anyone.





BEING PREPARED




The chaise longue is low to the floor, which facilitates the transfer of the unconscious attorney onto it, where he lies faceup in the center of the former gym as well as in countless reflections of reflections, like an army of sleeping clones. His arms trail off the furniture, hands resting palms up on the floor. His wrists are secured to the legs of the chaise with long, plastic zip ties. He is murmuring, muttering, a few minutes from regaining consciousness.

Calaphas is never without his Springfield Armory .45 Tactical Response Pistol, a second pistol that can’t be traced to him, an aerosol can of chloroform provided by the agency, and a combat knife with a spring blade. He also always carries four zip ties; during his lifetime, the world has become a place where such convenient instruments of restraint are ever more frequently essential to the conduct of business.

Since childhood, Durand Calaphas has believed in being prepared for unexpected opportunities. He was thirteen when he began to carry a knife, a simple switchblade. A week past his fifteenth birthday, he put it to interesting use. For the month of July, he was staying with his grandmother, Jane Jones, in rural Ohio. Jane was a twinkly-eyed white-haired cookie-baking pie-making apron-wearing cliché whose unvarying and tedious daily routine confirmed what Calaphas sometimes believed back then—that he was the only real person in the world and that everyone else was a product of his imagination. His grandmother lived in a Victorian house with much ornamental millwork, a grandfather clock swinging its pendulum in the front hall, the arms and headrests of furniture protected by antimacassars that she crocheted, and sweet aphorisms rendered in needlepoint framed on the walls. The house backed up to a woods where Calaphas, during one of his explorations, encountered a sixteen-year-old boy, Bill Smith, who possessed no more depth than a walk-on character in a thinly written TV show, just like Grandma Jane. Bill wore chunky hiking shoes, kneesocks, khaki shorts with patch pockets, a sweat-stained white T-shirt, braces to straighten his teeth, and horn-rimmed glasses with tortoiseshell frames. He carried a book about mushrooms, with full-color illustrations of a hundred seventy common varieties. He said he was going to be a mycologist, a biologist specializing in fungi. He wasn’t merely interested in mushrooms; he was fascinated by them. He thought Calaphas must also be obsessed with mushrooms, as if no other reason existed to be in the woods. Calaphas followed the wannabe mycologist around for more than an hour, expecting this prince of nerdhood to become semitransparent and thereby prove that he was a dreamed presence in a dreamed world, imagined into the scene to keep Calaphas entertained. When Bill found a colony of cortinarius alboviolaceus, an edible variety that he declared delicious, he began to harvest them into a plastic bag, which was when Calaphas got the idea to test Fungus Bill’s reality by harvesting him. Although he was a year younger than the amateur mycologist, Calaphas was by far the stronger of the two. He drew his switchblade and fell on the startled boy, cut his throat with one furious slash and then drove the blade between ribs, into the nerd’s heart. He sat beside the corpse for a while, waiting to see if it would fade away, but it didn’t.