All these years later, Gifford is long dead, having gotten what was coming to him, that rich moment on his fancy boat when Durand’s score in the game soared. Now, here in Rancho Santa Fe, the game clock counts down to a glorious end.
The memory of Britta in the morgue drawer and the vicious note on his pillow has amped Calaphas’s anger no less than have the two bennies. No beast on Earth is as strong and dangerous and determined as he is now.
In addition to its three double-wide roll-up doors, the garage features a man-size door at the back. Calaphas lifts the night-vision goggles from around his neck and fits the unit to his eyes. The world goes from death-black and moon-silver to green. He employs his lock-release device, used earlier at the home of Vincent and Colleen, to defeat the deadbolt. He puts the device away and eases the door open. He enters.
As he hoped, he quickly finds two electric-service panels. He opens the metal door of the first, rapidly flips off the breakers one by one, then repeats the process with those in the second panel. Michael Mace and his two nameless companions have been plunged into darkness. Triumph awaits in several eerie shades of green.
OLD FRIENDS
Ascending the second run of stairs, Nina nervously turns the Tac Light in her hand, and vertiginous patterns of shadow and light wheel up the wall. As John follows her and as Michael steps onto the landing, darkness cascades through the rooms below. The mechanical systems of the house shut down; the faint humming-ticking-buzzing-sighing of motors and pumps and fans and air in circulation, all the muffled sounds of a living home that are monotonous enough to seem like silence, suddenly become true silence so deep that it summons dread.
Calaphas is here. He has cut the power to the residence, which means he’s in the garage where earlier Michael had noticed electric-service panels. He’ll be inside the house proper in a minute or two. Thereafter, any sound they make will approximately locate them, diminishing the need for the agent to stalk them cautiously room by room.
Evidently, this same realization occurs to Nina, for she takes the remaining stairs two at a time, heedless of the noise she makes while the enemy is still in the garage.
When Michael joins her and the boy at the stairhead, a raveling of luck is offered to them when the beam of the Tac Light silvers the fibers of a dangling cord at the far end of the upstairs hall—the pull rope for the attic trapdoor. If they had to search all the rooms and walk-in closets to find the way higher, they would never reach the wanted refuge in time.
The end of the rope passes through a hole in a red rubber ball and ends in a knot. He pulls the trapdoor down, and an automatic ladder unfolds in three sections. With the light, Nina leads John into the high redoubt. Left in near darkness, Michael follows, sure that Calaphas is entering the house or already inside.
In the high room, Michael puts down his rifle. He turns and drops to his knees and reaches through the open trap and pulls hard on the uppermost rails of the spring-loaded ladder, reversing its action, muscling it back into position. The sections fold upward with somewhat more clatter than they unfolded, but he is able to prevent the loaded trap from thumping noisily when it seats once more in its frame.
This last-ditch bastion, where nothing is currently stored, extends over the entire top floor of the house, offering in excess of seven feet of clearance. It is fully floored with particleboard attached to the second-floor ceiling studs with recessed screws that shine in Nina’s light. The chief advantage of this refuge is that there’s only one way into it, so that if Calaphas pulls down the ladder, they’ll know he’s coming; he won’t be able to climb at a run, and he’ll be leading with his head, the preferred target. The primary disadvantage is that there’s also only one way out of here.
Nevertheless, Michael prefers it over all other options because he cannot be absolutely certain Calaphas has come alone. If other agents have joined the hunt, then the battleground won’t be just the house but also the twelve acres on which it stands, with nowhere below to safely shelter from the barrages of gunfire that might be exchanged when the robots arrive. Because the caliber and high velocity of the ammunition of all parties is capable of penetrating walls, it makes sense to put as much distance and as many partitions as possible between the three of them and the combatants.
Michael will direct Gog and Magog to enter the house through the back door he unlocked for them, which is toward the north end of the house. With that in mind, he shepherds Nina and John to the southeast corner of the attic, where they sit with their backs to an outer wall that, on the exterior, is of stacked stone and thus impervious to gunfire.
Nina sweeps the spacious garret with the beam. Perhaps she wants to be sure that she has the details of the place firmly in mind when she shuts off the Tac Light and must wait in a darkness pulsating with threats. Under these circumstances, even those who are well grounded and stouthearted can imagine things that bring a thin sweat to the brow and the nape of the neck.
Along the ridgepole, among the rafters and the collar beams, spiders have added their architecture to that of the house. Michael remembers a day when he was nine, carrying two mason jars into the backyard, setting the eight-legged prisoners free in the garden. He smiles at these residents of the attic as the light fixes on one and then another, their exaggerated shadows crawling the time-paled wood behind them. He takes their presence to be a good omen, and he says, “Old friends.”
The light goes out, and with nothing here to see, he reenters the Protean Cybernetics computer system and possesses Gog and Magog. They are running through darkness relieved only by the light of the moon and stars that reflects off different objects in a myriad of ways and is amplified in shades of green seldom seen in nature—acid fuchsine, glauconite, chrome oxide—moving parallel to a two-lane blacktop, less than five minutes from the Chandra house. Suddenly a shaft of intense light finds and blinds them, so that they switch from night vision to standard perception in order to keep advancing, but the light moves with them.
PRIDE AND ANGER, ALWAYS AND ONLY
At the door between the garage and the house, Calaphas uses his lock-release device to throw the deadbolt pins to the shear line and gain entrance. A hallway offers no light to be amplified except that infrared produced by the friction of molecules that are in motion in all things, which is enough to reveal closed doors on either side, as he comes to them. Sources in a room at the far end produce a dim spectral radiance that in some cheesy movie might represent spirits encouraging the soul of a dead man to follow a long passageway between life and the afterlife.
He opens doors without hesitation. He clears thresholds as he was trained to clear them, sweeping the rifle left to right, right to left. He explores without trepidation, having conquered all fear long ago, when he pinched the breath from a dead man, discovered the ecstasy of murder, realized that the world is a simulation and a game, and understood that he is destined to win his way through all challenges to some higher existence. Which is now within his reach. To the right, a door and a shallow closet beyond. To the left, a maid’s suite is revealed by the soft influx of green moonlight from a window left unshaded. On the right, a day room with kitchenette, where the household staff takes lunch. On the left, a laundry room illuminated by a lighted wall clock that his gear amplifies.