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.