“They pay me, yes.”
“You believe in the New Truth.”
“As I interpret it.” Calaphas reaches under his suit coat and draws a gun from the belt scabbard on his left hip, the weapon with which he shot the men now entering rigor mortis in the kitchen.
The attorney turns his head to the right and gazes at the receding multitude of reclining Carter Woodbines in the mirrored wall. Perhaps he is considering that infinity of selves and is reconsidering his scorn for those who believe in an immortal soul and life eternal. Addressing the reflections of Calaphas, he says, “Well, then we’re allies.”
Calaphas corrects him. “There are no allies in this game.”
“I already offered you the three million.”
Allowing himself a sigh, Calaphas says, “It’s not about the money, though of course I’ll be glad to have it.”
“Not about money? Then what’s it about?”
“The score. It’s about the score.”
Turning his head to face his executioner directly, Woodbine appears to feel imposed upon, as though it’s unfair that, oppressed by dread and despair, he should have to make room in his emotional wheelhouse also for the form of anxiety that is called perplexity. “Score? We met less than half an hour ago. What have I ever done to you? What score do you have to settle with me?”
“That’s not what I mean by ‘score,’” Calaphas says, and shoots his puzzled captive in the face.
He holsters the pistol and draws a pair of gloves from a coat pocket and sheaths his hands. These are not fine leather that might excite someone who thrills to a certain fetish. Ninety-two percent cotton, 8 percent spandex, they are for wiping surfaces Calaphas touched and for preventing the further laying down of fingerprints. Because he touched little in this apartment, he needs less than two minutes to complete the task.
Confident that the building is unguarded on this night between one security company and another, the cameras blinded and the video recorders shut off and the alarms without voice, Calaphas leaves the apartment and passes through the deceased attorney’s office. In the receptionist’s office, he enters the numbers in the elevator keypad that he watched Santana enter earlier. He rides down to the ground floor and follows the hallway from the lobby to the back vestibule. In the garage, he proceeds to the valet’s cubicle, where a spare key to the stolen Bentley hangs on a pegboard; he pockets it. He returns to the vestibule, where his raincoat hangs. He slips into it, pulls up the hood, and steps into the night through the back door.
Although some other businesses have exterior security cameras and traffic cams observe many—but not all—intersections, he knows how to spot them, how accurately to gauge their field of vision, and how to avoid most of them. By a circuitous route, cloaked and hooded and with his face averted, crossing streets mid block to avoid the intersections, making use of narrow service ways between buildings, where there are no doors and therefore no cameras, he returns to the parking lot by the restaurant, where he left his sedan.
No one in the ISA expects a report of his meeting with Carter Woodbine until at least tomorrow morning. If Calaphas is right about what, in addition to three million dollars, is stowed in the secret compartment of the Bentley that the attorney wanted so badly, if he can locate the transponder in the hollowed-out bundle of currency—and he can, he will, in mere minutes—then he will find and kill Michael Mace long before morning. Dead once, the fugitive can be made dead again, permanently this time. Whatever Mace might have become, regardless of the gifts the Singularity has granted him, he isn’t immortal, for if he were, he wouldn’t be on the run for his life. When Mace is dead again, which he will be before dawn, the murders of Woodbine, Santana, and Harris can be pinned on him. That done, Calaphas will have won the prize of all prizes.
He has no doubt that this is the highest level of play and that his cumulative score, racked up over the years, will soon make him the master of the game. All the signs are here to be read. A great treasure almost within his reach. Hidden with the treasure, a secret something—the magic key, the Ark of the Covenant, the crystal of infinite power, the one ring that controls them all, whatever—the possession of which is the entire point of the game. And guarding the key or ark or ring is Mace, with powers that will defeat all but the most clever and determined player. Which is Durand Calaphas. All the signs are here to be read. This world is real in its way, but it’s a virtual reality, a simulation, created by beings of a higher order. The world is a game. Those who live in this construct are as alive as Calaphas is, not imaginary as he once believed, and for one of them there is a game to be won and a prize.
Behind the wheel of his car, he pulls back his hood and starts the engine. He activates the navigation system, which has features that are exclusive to the Internal Security Agency. A list of the previously entered addresses appears on the screen. Ignoring those, he enters SAFE HOUSES / LOS ANGELES COUNTY. A new list of eight locations is provided, three preceded by asterisks, which indicates they are currently in use, either sheltering fugitives from the law, whom the agency wishes to protect, or serving as secret interrogation centers where agents are sweating information out of enemies of the state. He makes a selection, declines vocal guidance, presses start, and initial directions appear in white letters on the windshield.
Warning himself not to become overconfident and to respect the cunning of those who designed this challenge, he drives out of the parking lot, into the night and the rain and the city, toward the hope of triumph, toward an escape from the game, toward a new life in which the played becomes a player in a higher—and true—reality beyond this one.
THE RED-EYED SCAVENGERS ARE CREEPING
Henceforth forever appleless, the orchard trees stand in solemn order like monoliths that once had a potent meaning. Now, tortured by time and disease and bad water policy, they offer the one message about life no one wants to hear, their branches skeletal, trunks cracked like ancient stone cenotaphs, dead roots rotting into significant soil.
Nina and John splash along a harvester’s alley where four rusting farm machines of indeterminable purpose loom large, canted on split tires or broken axles, evidently abandoned because they were worn out and no longer possessed any resale value. In the gloom and rain and mantling mist, the machines are eerily suggestive of Jurassic-period life-forms. Mother and son hurry past them, cross the alley, pass between withered trees in yet another row, and come at last into a clearing where geometric slabs of darkness imprint barnlike buildings on the darker fabric of the night, some two stories and others three. This is the complex where, back in the day, freshly picked apples were brought by the hundreds of thousands to be washed, polished, packaged, and either shipped or otherwise processed.
Nina imagines that on a night with moonlight, these weathered clapboard walls, standing on concrete-block foundations, softly glow silvery gray and have a certain melancholy beauty. Now they are black and sinister.
The structures are not so forbidding that she can forsake them for the wilderness of deadwood that is her only other option. The map on her phone can direct her to the highway that bisects the valley, but at this hour and in this weather, traffic in this rural area is minimal. She is less likely to encounter a helpful motorist than to fall into the hands of Aleem’s homeys, at least two of which will surely have made their way out of the orchard to patrol the road on foot.