After locking the car, he sets out briskly for the Chandra house, ready to dodge off the road at the first sign of headlights in the distance. Although the moon is higher than before and should seem smaller than when it’s nearer the horizon, it looks enormous, the biggest moon he’s ever seen. The strange enormity of the moon must be a sign, and if it’s a sign, then it is the gamemakers’ way of signifying that Calaphas is one kill away from being the next champion to earn a life in the higher reality for which he has yearned since childhood. He feels like breaking into song. He’s not one who sings along with music on the radio. In fact, he doesn’t have a good voice for singing and never indulges in it. He feels so good, however, that he wants to sing, and he might do so if it would not draw attention to him at a moment when he needs to be stealthy. Even if breaking into song weren’t likely to jeopardize his mission, he couldn’t do so because he’s so disinterested in music that he doesn’t know the lyrics to any songs. He is hyper alert and feeling more wonderfully aggressive even than he was at Vince and Colleen’s house; he is exhilarated.
Before he comes to the imposing gate, he climbs the white board fence and drops into the yard at the Chandra place. He isn’t going to make a bold approach on the lighted driveway, but he likes the cover of the California oaks marshalled along its length. Because the trees are year-around shedders, the ground is mantled with small, dry, oval leaves like beetle shells that crunch underfoot. The sound isn’t loud enough to draw the attention of anyone in the house, and Calaphas likes it so much that he takes shorter and more steps than necessary; the sound makes him feel powerful, like a giant scoring points by stomping through the puny structures of elves, like a massive dragon under whose taloned feet the bones of vanquished knights are crushed to splinters and dust.
Killing is always satisfying work. The pathetic plea for mercy, whether spoken or unvoiced. The desolate last cry of pain and fear. The pale clouding or else the sudden bloody brightness of the eyes. The rattle in the throat, the stuttering of a last word that can’t quite be pronounced. The final flexing of the hands as they grasp at what they may no longer have. The terminal cascade of fluids. The spasms and shudders before the long stillness. As rewarding as it is to execute and witness any murder, by far the best experiences are those in which the labor is as hands-on as possible. Recently, with events moving at roller-coaster speed, Calaphas has been required by circumstances to use only a gun and finish the task expeditiously. He theorizes that advancement through the game occurs more rapidly when the killings are intimate and the thrill is therefore greatest: strangulation with bare hands, bludgeoning either with fists or a hammer, stabbing and slashing, a good long smothering with a pillow, a wire garrote applied with such measured force that the victim is able to hold on to false hope for an agonizing minute. If Michael Mace is the game-winning kill toward which Calaphas’s life has been directed, perhaps a disabling gunshot wound can be only preliminary to a more protracted and entertaining little circus of pain and blood.
Amped on bennies, having become a dragon if only in his mind, with a priapism that can be relieved only by orgasmic violence, Calaphas arrives at the motor court in front of the grand residence. Near the steps to the terrace stands Carter Woodbine’s Bentley—the treasure that symbolizes absolute power and that every game worth playing comes to in the end—enveloped in a supernatural glow, the moon favoring it above all things.
At the house, the second-floor windows are dark, but light is universal downstairs. As Calaphas approaches the Bentley, intending to pause there to reconnoiter further, he sees a woman at a window. He has come this far under the presumption that Michael Mace is on the run alone, as he was when he escaped Beautification Research and as he still seemed to be, less than twenty-four hours earlier, when he took half a million dollars from Woodbine. Calaphas doesn’t know this woman, can’t imagine who she might be or why she might have cast her lot with Mace. Then his astonishment swells into perplexity when a young boy appears next to her. They seem to be examining some small device that she is holding. Then the window shades power down, and they are gone from view.
He crouches beside the sedan, in a fever of speculation. He soon comes to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter who the woman and the boy might be. This is nothing more than one of those sudden twists that the designers of the game include to thwart players less astute and adaptable than Calaphas. She and the child have no more purpose or meaning than the bumpers, gates, and trap holes on the field of a pinball machine. If here, in the penultimate chapter of the narrative, he must kill three to claim the prize, that is not a job that exceeds his talents.
As his priapism stiffens almost to the point of pain, he sees this development as less a challenge than a reward. Even as he’d walked here from his car in the eucalyptus grove, he bemoaned the lack of intimacy in recent killings. Now before him waits a sweet opportunity to go out of the game not merely in triumph but in a condition of prolonged ecstasy. If he were designing the script for this lower reality, that is precisely how this existence would end and one more exciting would begin. His heart is racing. He is into this. He is cranked.
With his combat knife, he punctures the sidewall on the front passenger-side tire. He repeats this bit of sabotage on the rear tire.
FIREPOWER
After shutting all the shades on the ground floor, Nina and John had ventured into the garage in search of something in which to pack the three million dollars and disguise the treasure. When it’s in the back of the Range Rover, it will be visible to anyone who looks through a window. The solution is two large, insulated picnic coolers, which they have brought to the kitchen. The money, already sealed in plastic, can be packed in the bottom of each cooler and then covered with aluminum foil. Take ice from the kitchen icemaker, pile it on the foil, add beer and soda from the pantry, and no one knows there’s a fortune under the beverages.
“Fast as you can,” Michael urges.
He leaves them to it. With the AR-15, he patrols the ground floor, thinking furiously, wishing the Singularity had sharpened his mind like the tech visionaries promised. He has three options, none good.
Make a break for it in the Range Rover. If Calaphas arrives after they leave, he won’t know what vehicle they took, at least for an hour or two. However, if the agent is in place, watching them now, waiting for the right moment to make his move, he’ll cut them down before they reach the gate at the end of the driveway. Calaphas isn’t walking into this with just a sidearm. He’s sure to have the equivalent of an AR-15, perhaps one that’s been modified for fully automatic fire.
Alternately, Michael can go to the second-floor deck at the front of the house. Nina drives the Rover, with John lying on the back floor. She exits the garage at high speed. The instant Calaphas reveals himself, Michael takes him out. The obvious problem is that the agent will reveal himself by opening fire, perhaps killing Nina before he can be killed. Or say that Nina gets away. Then she waits somewhere safe. Michael has to find and kill Calaphas before being able to call her back to pick him up. He figures he’s got at least a 50 percent chance of dying. In that case, Nina and John are on their own. And even though they have all that money, they don’t possess the ability to invade official computers and create new identities for themselves.