As the airship steadied, Corky lowered his left hand from the gunwale to a ballast-tank bracket, then his right. The metal was cold and wet, but with his leather-and-nylon gloves, he got a firm grip.
Peering down, he saw that his dangling feet were still eighteen or twenty inches from the roof.
He dared not drop that far. Though he would most likely keep his balance, he would land with too much noise, alerting the two guards who were in the security office that occupied half the second floor of the groundskeeper’s building.
Evidently, Trotter recognized the problem. He vented a whisper of helium, and the vessel sank until Corky felt the roof under him.
Straddling the ridge line, one foot on the south slope of the roof, one foot on the north slope, he let go of the ballast-tank bracket. He had touched down almost as softly as Peter Pan.
Freed of his weight, the blimp at once soared ten feet, fifteen. The tail began to rise, which wasn’t good, but with an adjustment of the rudders, Trotter raised the nose and recovered even as he brought the vessel around for the return trip to the knoll, which he would be making alone.
With the boy in his control, Corky would leave Palazzo Rospo in style, using one of the automobiles in Manheim’s first-rate collection.
Back at the ruined chateau, once the three tethering lines were well anchored to truck and trees, Trotter would shoot the two men who served as ground crew. Although the abandonment of the airship would be a wound to his heart, he would leave it behind and walk to a car that earlier today he’d parked two blocks away.
Immediately upon returning to his canyon home in Malibu, he would switch vehicles and hit the road, leaving behind forever his life as Jack Trotter. Perhaps he would never realize that he’d been duped into believing that a genuine NSA agent had made a deal with him to erase him from every government record and to allow him to live hereafter as a ghost in the machinery of America; because he intended to live like a ghost anyway, he might actually escape all official notice entirely by his own efforts.
Authorities investigating the kidnapping of Aelfric Manheim would probably stall out when they traced the blimp back to Trotter in Malibu. They would have no way of discovering what new identity he had assumed, what his new appearance might be, or where he had gone.
If someday, against all odds, they caught up with Trotter, he would have no collaborator’s name to give them except that of Robin Goodfellow, secret agent extraordinaire.
Still straddling the ridge line, Corky took two cautious steps forward. His boots had been made for true winter conditions, for snow and treacherous ice. Mere rain-slicked slate tiles should be easily negotiated.
Nevertheless, a slip now would be disastrous even if he avoided or survived a fall. With the estate guards in rooms directly under him, the rain would do little to mask any sounds he made, and silence remained essential.
The vent pipe that he sought stood where the blueprints had shown it, less than eighteen inches down the south slope from the peak of the roof.
Feeling like a gremlin engaged in naughty work, Corky would have liked to murmur a suitable gremlin song or to entertain himself with other antics. He recognized that on this occasion, however, he must as never before restrain his natural exuberance.
Uphill to the east, Captain Queeg von Hindenburg and his Jules Vernesian contraption tunneled through the thickening fog, which closed in his wake, granting him concealment as completely as the sea had conspired to hide Nemo and the Nautilus.
Corky sat on the ridge line, facing the pipe. This vent, which penetrated the roof to a height of one foot, led through the attic and to the bathroom in the security office.
Reaching over his shoulder, Corky unzipped the top compartment on the backpack. He fished out a ten-gallon plastic trash bag and a roll of all-weather tape.
A peaked and flared metal cap had been mounted on four-inch legs to the top of the pipe itself. This prevented rain and windblown debris from getting into the vent, while allowing air to be cycled out of the room below.
Corky pulled the trash bag over the flared cap and with one hand snugged it as tight as possible around the pipe.
If the bathroom exhaust fan had been in operation, it would have pumped the trash bag full of air, and he would have been forced to delay this critical phase of the mission until the fan was switched off. The limp plastic did not swell into a balloon.
With the all-weather tape, he quietly fixed the mouth of the bag to the pipe shaft, creating a relatively airtight seal.
Reaching over his shoulder once more, he withdrew a hairspray-size can from the backpack. This was not an ordinary spray can, but a “weaponized aerosol-dispersal unit (ADU) with a super-accelerant feature,” which had been designed by one of his university colleagues working under a generous grant from the Chinese military.
The ADU would release its entire highly pressurized contents in six seconds. The molecules of the active ingredients were bonded to a gas that boasted such a highly efficient expansion factor that both floors of the groundskeeper’s building would be contaminated in fifty to seventy seconds.
The ADU had been designed to contain anything from a sedative to a deadly nerve toxin that killed upon first inhalation.
Corky had been unable to get his hands on a unit containing the nerve toxin. He’d had to be satisfied with the sedative gas.
Sedating the two guards suited him well enough. Although deeply committed to societal collapse and its rebirth, he was not a man who killed indiscriminately. Lately, of course, more murder than usual had been required to advance his noble cause. But he liked to think of himself as one who could exercise restraint as easily as he could, in a pinch, let loose the beast within.
With one finger, he poked a hole in the plastic sack, widened it, and slipped the upper half of the aerosol can into the bag. Using the all-weather tape, he created a seal where can and trash bag met.
Holding the exposed end of the can in his left hand, he felt through the plastic with his right hand until, between thumb and forefinger, he was able to get a firm grip on the ring-pull, which functioned much like that on a grenade. He plucked out the ring and let it slide down the inside of the bag.
The ten-second delay between activation and dispersal of the contents allowed the can to be thrown through an open door or window. Corky held fast to it and waited.
When the contents erupted out of the revolutionary nozzle, the can vibrated in his left hand and instantly turned so icy cold that he could feel the radical temperature change through his glove. If he had been holding it barehanded, his skin would have frozen to the aluminum.
Whoosh! The trash bag inflated as abruptly as an automobile air bag in a head-on collision. Corky thought it might pop in his face, bathing him in sedative gas.
The vent offered a route for expansion, however, so instead of stretching the plastic to the bursting point, the gas traveled down the pipe, past the stilled exhaust fan that would have blown it out if activated, into the security-office bathroom, and from there into the entire building.
Closed doors would not inhibit dispersal. The sleep-inducing vapors would rush between door and threshold, between door and jamb, through any tiniest crack and crevice, through heating vents and plumbing chases.
Prior to the scheduled nine o’clock foot patrol of the grounds, both guards were in the office below Corky. The sedative was so fast-acting that in ten seconds from the time the ADU emptied, the two men would have collapsed unconscious.
He waited more than half a minute before departing the ridge line for the north slope of slate. The roof was not steeply pitched, and he descended it with ease.
At the front of the building, which was as large as an upscale suburban house, a loggia was covered by a sturdy redwood trellis entwined for decades by a trumpet vine. He jumped from the roof onto the trellis.
From the trellis, he leaped to the lawn, allowed his knees to buckle as would a parachutist, fell, rolled, and sprang to his feet.
He f
elt like Vin Diesel.
After shrugging out of his backpack, he withdrew from it a gas mask. He tossed the pack aside and put on the mask.
The central entrance to the groundskeeper’s building was not locked. He stepped into a service foyer.
Just like the blueprints.
To his right: a door into a gardening-supplies storeroom large enough also to garage the three riding lawnmowers as well as the two electric carts with which Yorn and his day crew moved fertilizer and other materials around the immense grounds.
To his left: a door to Yorn’s spacious office, another door to the bathroom used by gardeners.
Directly ahead were stairs to the second floor.
Upstairs, Corky found the two evening-shift guards unconscious in the main monitoring room. One sprawled on the floor, and the other slumped in a chair in front of a bank of video monitors.
They would be profoundly unconscious for between sixty to eighty minutes. That was plenty of time for Corky to do his job and be gone.
He pulled up a chair in front of a computer. Neither the power supply nor the estate-specific networking arrangements had been affected by the careful severance of outgoing and incoming phone service.
In his gas mask, his breathing sounded like that of Darth Vader.
At the start of the shift, as always, one of the guards had earlier accessed the security system with a personal password. To Corky, the elaborate status display on the screen revealed, among many other things, that the house-perimeter alarm had been activated, making it impossible to enter Palazzo Rospo by window or door without triggering sirens.
According to Ned Hokenberry, the three-eyed freak—now the two-eyed freak, now the dead two-eyed freak—the perimeter alarm usually wasn’t engaged until eleven o’clock or even midnight. This evening they had closed up early.
Corky wondered why.
Perhaps they had been spooked by certain black boxes and the contents thereof.
Delighted to have made them uneasy and yet still have slipped this far past their defenses, Corky began to sing the Grinch’s theme from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. The gas mask lent the tune a wonderfully spooky, even savage quality.
Mick Sachatone, poor dead Mick in his Bart Simpson pajamas, had hacked the Manheim security system by linking to it via the computer of the off-site armed-response company that maintained a 24/7 line to this room. He’d given Corky some rudimentary instruction in its operation.
First, Corky checked the status of the two panic rooms in the mansion. Neither was in use.
Using the computer, he put the two panic rooms in siege mode, engaging their locks by remote. They could no longer be opened using their hidden on-site lock releases. No one could take refuge in them.
The house-perimeter alarm could be armed or disarmed simply by selecting from a YES-NO option. Currently the YES was lit on the screen. Corky used the mouse to click the NO.
Now, with a door key, he could enter Palazzo Rospo as though it were his own sweet home. Keys dangled from the belt of each sleeping guard. He unclipped one set, jingled them, and smiled.
When he picked up a phone, he heard no dial tone. He tried one of the guard’s cell phones. It didn’t function. Reliable Mick.
Leaving the guards to their dreams, Corky descended the stairs and returned to the loggia under the trellis and the trumpet vine. He stripped off the gas mask and threw it away.
Through a screen of trees and darkling rain, the great house could be seen perhaps two hundred yards to the north. With only Ethan Truman and the boy in residence, not many windows were lighted, yet the mansion nonetheless reminded Corky of an enormous luxury liner making way on a night sea. And he was the iceberg.
He unzipped the deepest pocket on his storm suit and withdrew the Glock that previously he had fitted with a sound suppressor.
CHAPTER 88
LADYBUG, LADYBUG, FLY AWAY HOME…. YOUR HOUSE is on fire, and your children will burn….”
After listening to Call 51, Ethan had no doubt that some of the first fifty recordings also contained messages of value to him, but he did not think he dared take time to review them, and he knew that he didn’t need to hear them in order to solve the riddle.
Twenty-two ladybugs. The twenty-second of December.
Today. And only a little more than three hours remained until the calender turned to December 23. If something terrible were going to happen, it would occur soon.
His pistol was in his apartment.
By now Fric must be waiting there, as well.
He fled the white room, leaving the blue door open behind him.
No need to panic. The perimeter alarm would shriek at the first breach of door or window. Between wails of the siren, a voice module would announce, in a clear computerized voice, the room in which the break-in had occurred.
Besides, the men in the security office would know the moment anyone crossed the estate wall, long before an intruder could reach the house. At the first evidence that the property had been violated, they would call 911 and the private armed-response security firm.
Nevertheless, with no time for the elevator, first to the back stairs in a sprint, then down six flights, down and around he went in a thunder, slamming through the door at the bottom of the stairs, into the ground-floor west wing.
He threw open the door to his apartment, called to Fric, and got no answer.
Evidently the boy was still in the library. Not good. He had gotten through ten years of life alone more often than not, but he wouldn’t make it through this night by himself.
Ethan hurried to the desk in the study. He had left the pistol in the top right-hand drawer.
Pulling open the drawer, he expected to find that the gun had been taken. But there it was. A beautiful thing.
As Ethan slipped into the shoulder holster, he surveyed the items on top of the desk, between the computer and the telephone.
Nursery rhymes.
Your house is on fire, and your children will burn….
Wednesday’s child is full of woe….
Nursery rhymes.
Foreskins circumcised from ten men. Ten because Fric was ten years old. What are foreskins? Rags of tissue. Scraps. Snips.
And snails are snails.
The book of dog stories, Paws for Reflection, a collection of puppy-dog tales. Different spelling, same word to the ear. Tails.
What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails, and puppy dogs’ tails.
That’s what little boys are made of.
The note that had come with the apple lay on the desk: THE EYE IN THE APPLE? THE WATCHFUL WORM? THE WORM OF ORIGINAL SIN? DO WORDS HAVE ANY PURPOSE OTHER THAN CONFUSION?
In this case, confusion was their sole purpose. The sixth object had been the easiest to interpret, so the professor, whoever the hell he was, had confused the issue with distracting—and mocking—words.
The eye in the apple is blue, the same color as the famous eyes of Channing Manheim. Not the eye in the apple. The apple of his eye.
Not that good Fric was ever the apple of his father’s eye. He was the blind spot in his father’s eye, too often overlooked, never seen in the fullness of his character. In this instance, the sender of the black boxes had made an incorrect assumption. The Face himself was the apple of his own eye, and there could be no other.
If you knew the true relationship between this father and this son, you might be forgiven for not making the connection between the doll’s eye nestled in the black-sutured apple and the wonderful boy. Yet Ethan cursed himself for missing the clue.
He pressed INTERCOM on the telephone keypad and then the line number for the security office at the back of the estate. “Pete? Ken? We might have a situation brewing.”
No one answered.
“Pete? Ken? Are you there?”
Nothing.
Ethan snatched up the handset. No dial tone.
CHAPTER 89
THE HYENA SLEPT IN A CLEAN DEN, UNSOILED by mementos
of his killings. No articles of clothing stained with the victims’ blood that he could press to his face to savor the scent of death. No items of women’s jewelry that he could fondle. No Polaroid photos of Justine Laputa or Mina Reynerd after he tested their mortality with a fireplace poker and a bronze-encrusted marble lamp. Nothing.
After a quick but meticulous search of the walk-in closet, the bureau drawers, the nightstands, and every place else in the bedroom where Laputa might have hidden the kind of pornography that appealed not to prurient interest but to an obsession with violence, Hazard turned up no evidence of either a crime or psychopathy.
As before, the most notable thing about the Laputa house was the scrupulous cleanliness, which rivaled that in any hermetically sealed and frequently sanitized biochemical-weapons lab, and the fetishistic alignment and geometry of every object large and small. Not only the items on open display but also the contents of drawers were placed as though with the aid of micrometer, protractor, and straightedge. The socks and sweaters appeared to have been folded and stowed away by a precision-programmed robot.
Again, Hazard sensed that, for Vladimir Laputa, this house was a desperate refuge from the messiness of the world beyond its walls.
He retreated from the bedroom, into the upstairs hall, where he stood for a moment, listening intently, hearing only the tepid tattoo of the diminishing rain on the roof. He glanced at his watch, wondering how much time, if any, he had to pore through the other second-floor chambers.
Instinct seldom failed Hazard, but it told him nothing now. The professor might return at any moment or not for hours, days.
He tried the first door past the master bedroom, on that same side of the hall, snapped on the light.
Judging by appearances, this was a storeroom. Plain cardboard cartons emblazoned only with red stenciled numbers were stacked three high, in well-ordered rows.
A quiver of interest drew Hazard a few steps past the threshold. Then he realized that the boxes were sealed with precisely applied strips of strapping tape. If he tore open a few, he would not be able to restore them to the degree necessary to conceal the fact of his unauthorized explorations.