The Forbidden Door Read online

  “Doesn’t your mom remember? You should ask her.”

  “My mother died when I was eighteen.”

  The boy put down his sandwich. “That’s really sad.”

  “It was a long time ago. Go ahead and eat. See, I’m eating. She died of a drug overdose, she couldn’t help herself. We have to eat, we can’t help ourselves.”

  The boy sat looking at his sandwich. Then he said, “It isn’t right, people having to die.”

  “No. No, it isn’t. It isn’t right. It isn’t right. But that’s the way it is. And we have to eat.”

  “So if the family never knew about you, how does Uncle Gavin know?”

  “When I got rich, I hired a detective to find my family and tell me about them. Gavin was the one I thought I might like. And I do. I like him…or liked him. He’s the only one I let know about me. Which is why maybe you’re still safe here. You’re still safe here. You’re safe here.”

  “I sort of feel safe.”

  “That’s good. That’s nice. Now eat your sandwich, please and thank you.”

  The boy took a bite of the sandwich and chewed thoughtfully and swallowed and said, “How rich are you?”

  “About three hundred million.”

  “Wow. I can’t count that high.”

  “It’s scary,” Cornell said. Thinking about all that money was so frightening that he almost put down his sandwich. But he needed to be a positive role model for the boy, so he continued eating.

  “How’d you make all that money?”

  “I invented several very popular apps.”

  “I heard of apps, but I don’t know any.”

  “You will one day. Anyway, by the time I was twenty-four, I made so much money it scared the bejesus out of me.”

  “Why would money scare you?”

  “I started out with ten dollars. Four years later, after taxes, I had three hundred million. That can’t happen unless a civilization—unless all of this, the way we live—is a mouse of cards.”

  “A what?”

  “I apologize, please and thank you. Sometimes the wrong word comes out of me. House. Our civilization must be a house of cards. So I decided to get ready for Apocageddon.”

  “And so you built this secret library.”

  “And the even more secret bunker. Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “No, you aren’t crazy. You’re real smart.”

  Pleased by the boy’s praise, Cornell said, “I wouldn’t have been able to do it and keep it secret without all the Filipino workers who couldn’t speak a word of English.”

  39

  BEGINNING TO WONDER IF THE script calls for him to be stymied by a bunch of muleheaded Texas horse traders, Egon Gottfrey checks in with Rupert Baldwin, who is busy in Chase Longrin’s office in Stable 3.

  Rupert has gone through the contents of the desk and the filing cabinet without finding anything of interest, and he has scattered those papers on the floor, perhaps as payback for Chase’s comment about the Bureau’s dress code. Rupert considers himself a sartorial rebel; he is fond of his corduroy suits and bolo ties.

  Using Longrin’s computer, he has back-doored the DMV to search state records for vehicles registered to the Longrins or to Longrin Stables. Pickup trucks, horse vans, two SUVs, a Ford sedan…

  Rupert says, “I gave the list to Vince. He’s checking to see if there’s a set of wheels that should be here but isn’t.”

  The Unknown Playwright is in a mood for dramatic efficiency, because even as Rupert finishes speaking, Vince Penn bursts into the room like the burly star of a former circus act featuring a bear. “All the vehicles are here except for the Mercury Mountaineer. I checked the garage, all the stables, the hay barn. I went into the house and checked under the beds, but it’s nowhere.” He looks from Gottfrey to Rupert Baldwin to Gottfrey again. “That last part about the beds, see, that was just a joke.”

  In the interest of moving things along, Egon Gottfrey doesn’t get into a conversation with Vince.

  On learning that the Mountaineer is their search target, Rupert uses its DMV registration to consult a cross-referenced National Security Agency directory that contains the unique GPS transponder code of every vehicle in the country. He obtains the one by which this particular Mountaineer can be tracked by satellite.

  Gottfrey watches as a map appears on the screen and a blinking red indicator signifies the location of the vehicle.

  “It’s not moving. Maybe parked,” says Rupert.

  “Parked where?”

  “Downtown Killeen, Texas.”

  “How far from here is that?”

  “Not far,” says Vince Penn. “I was in Killeen for a few weeks once. Met this girl there. She wasn’t beautiful or nothing, but she was pretty enough so I thought I might marry her. Then it turned out she was a whore, and it wasn’t marriage she wanted.”

  Somewhat more helpful than Vince, Rupert says, “It looks like about a hundred thirty-some miles. Nearest helicopter we could use is in Austin. By the time it came here and picked us up and flew us to Killeen, it’d be quicker by car. We have to drive through Austin, which will slow us down, but we can still make it to Killeen in two hours, maybe two hours fifteen.”

  40

  CORNELL JASPERSON KEPT THINKING THAT something very bad was about to happen. He and the boy were getting along so well, and the dogs had not attacked him. Nevertheless, every now and then Cornell stiffened and lifted his head and listened intently, in expectation of a sudden threat. Not the collapse of civilization, not yet, but something not good.

  For dessert, they enjoyed pineapple-coconut muffins, which they tore apart and ate with their fingers, still sitting in the circle of lamplit chairs.

  “While I lived over there in the little blue house, I did all the construction drawings myself.”

  “You said fipaleen workers. What’re they?” the boy wondered.

  “Filipino. From the Republic of the Philippines, half a world away. Seven thousand islands, though most people live on eleven.”

  “Gee, couldn’t you find workers closer than half a world?”

  “Not highly skilled construction workers who spoke only Tagalog and couldn’t tell anyone in Borrego Valley that they were building a secret library and bunker, please and thank you.”

  “Tagalog is a funny word.”

  “Umm. It sort of is.”

  A crawly feeling quivered down the nape of Cornell’s neck, between his misshapen shoulder blades, along his spine. For no good reason, he looked at the ceiling in expectation of…something.

  “What’s wrong?” the boy asked.

  “Umm. Umm. Nothing. Anyway, by the time I made three hundred million, I also made a lot of connections with powerful people. I located the workers, got them visas and green cards, brought them from the Philippines. They were nice. They worked hard. Sometimes they sang at night. Their singing was very pretty.”

  “What did they sing?”

  “Mostly about Malaysian legends and the sea and the stars and Buddha and Jesus. Sometimes Elvis Costello in Tagalog.”

  Cornell sang a few lines in Tagalog, amazed to be so relaxed. He sang without feeling silly. He looked at the boy when they were talking, though he didn’t usually look so directly at other people.

  “These muffins are really good,” the boy said.

  Cornell licked sweet icing from his fingers. “Very kind of you to say so.”

  “How’d you talk to the fipaleens without them knowing English?”

  “Before I hired them, I learned Tagalog. They lived in trailers on the property and never went into town, and by the time they flew back home, I’d made millionaires of them all.”

  “That’s humongous! Twelve millionaires.”

  “Umm. It cost a lot more than that. Counting materials and all the donations, it cost a
n arm and an egg.”

  “You mean leg?”

  “Leg. I don’t know why that happens, that word thing. Anyway, it cost a farm and a leg. Oh, there it happened again.”

  The boy laughed.

  So did Cornell, though a moment later he was frowning at the cluster of four security monitors that hung from the ceiling. When a warm-blooded moving creature, larger than a coyote, drew within ten feet of the building, a soft alarm would sound, and an image of the visitor would appear on each screen; from any point in the library, he could see what was happening outside. The screens were blank.

  “Donations to what?” the boy asked. “To like Wounded Warriors? Uncle Gavin and Aunt Jessie give to them and others like them.”

  “These were donations to some officials, to let us have a high construction fence, to build without getting plans approved, without inspections. A secret bunker isn’t much good if it’s not secret.”

  “You mean payoffs, bribes.”

  “How does a five-year-old boy know payoffs and bribes?”

  “I’m going on six. And, anyway, my mom’s FBI. I’m an FBI kid.”

  “Yes, of course. An FBI kid.”

  “These are the best muffins ever,” the boy said.

  “Umm. I got the recipe from one of the construction workers. They grow a lot of pineapples and coconuts in the Philippines. Would you like me to get you another muffin?”

  “Sure, you bet. That would be great, please and thank you.”

  When Cornell lifted his tray and scooted forward in the chair and put the tray on the footstool, the two dogs raised their heads to consider the unfinished muffin.

  “Nothing of that belongs to you,” Cornell said. The good dogs lowered their heads. And he regretted having spoken sharply.

  At the kitchenette, as he took a muffin from a Tupperware container and put it on a small plate, he glanced at the security monitors a couple times, though no alarm had sounded.

  He supposed that he was just Cornell being Cornell: too smart for his own good—as his mother had often said—plagued by a weird developmental disability, afraid civilization was going to collapse, but even more afraid that someone might touch him and drain the soul out of his body. He was maybe a little too obsessed with death.

  As Mr. Paul Simon had sung, We come and we go. That’s a thing that I keep in the back of my head.

  41

  EGON GOTTFREY LEAVES SIX OF his people to keep the Longrin family and their employees in custody, at gunpoint, until they hear from him. The detainees must not be allowed to place an unsupervised phone call during that time, which would surely be a call to Ancel and Clare Hawk to warn them that they have been traced to Killeen.

  Rupert Baldwin and Vince Penn will accompany Gottfrey. As they climb into their Jeep Wrangler and as he approaches his Rhino GX, Janis Dern, who followed him from the house, calls out, “Hey, Egon. Can I have a minute?”

  Janis is a dedicated revolutionary and an effective agent, but she seems too tightly wound, as if one of these days an escalating series of dire sounds—gears stripped, springs sprung, flywheels fractured—will arise within her, culminating in a glittering, smoking ejectamenta of clockwork fragments bursting from her ears, nostrils, mouth, and other orifices.

  She stands too close to Egon, as though she has no concept of personal space, and she makes insistent eye contact, as she always does. “You’ve got to leave me the ampules and a hypodermic needle and everything else I need to inject a control mechanism.”

  “Inject who?”

  “Laurie Longrin.”

  “One of the children?”

  “See, then we’ll have someone in the family to report to us.”

  “The brain has to reach a certain stage of development before the implant can assemble and function properly. Sixteen. You know we only inject after the sixteenth birthday.”

  “Oh, please, that’s such a steaming pile of horseshit. Just theory.”

  “It’s fact,” Egon says, though in truth, like so much else, this is only what the Unknown Playwright wants them to believe.

  As Paloma Sutherland moves the customized Cadillac Escalade that blocks the driveway and as Sally Jones waves them through, Rupert and Vince leave in the Jeep Wrangler.

  “Only after their sixteenth birthday,” Gottfrey repeats.

  Janis Dern draws a deep breath, blows it out in exasperation. “They didn’t try enough kids to be sure the problem is universal.”

  “Nine,” Egon says. “Every one had a psychological crack-up within three months. Physical collapse, too. Had to be terminated.”

  “Nine is too damn small a sample to prove anything. It’s worth a try with Laurie. This family can lead us to Jane Hawk. If the brat goes bat-shit crazy and bleeds from the eyes, so what? Why do you care?”

  “I don’t. I’m along for the ride. I just do what he wants.”

  She frowns. “He who?”

  “The Unknown…” Egon looks away from her yellowish-brown flypaper eyes, but they remain stuck to him as he reconsiders his reply. “My Arcadian operator. You answer to me. I answer to him.”

  “So ask him for permission to inject Laurie Longrin. The worst he can do is say no.”

  He meets her stare again. “We’re wasting time here. I need to get to Killeen.”

  Janis Dern is quite attractive if you don’t look into her eyes for too long. They are eyes less suited to a woman of her physical charms than to a miscreant come forth from a toxic womb, malformed and insane at birth, to whom value and pleasure are to be found only in hatred.

  “Janis, I can’t give you a control mechanism for the girl. It’s not what the script calls for.”

  Tears well in those eyes that previously have been as dry as cinders. She doesn’t shed them, but the tears shimmer and glimmer.

  She puts one hand to his face, tenderly pressing it against his right cheek. Leaning even closer, she whispers, “If you can’t do this for me…then could you instead think of Laurie the next time you need to let off some steam?”

  Genuinely bewildered, he says, “Let off some steam?”

  “You’ve never shown an interest in me, but I’ve always been so intensely drawn to you. My desire is unrequited, and I’ve resigned myself to that. But next time things go so wrong you need to relieve the tension, instead of wasting some drunken cowboy with a TEXAS TRUE bumper sticker, think of that snarky little bitch Laurie.”

  This twist in the script leaves him speechless. The Unknown Playwright’s wicked imagination has at last thwarted Egon’s usually reliable intuition. He never saw this coming.

  Assuming that his silence means he fears her disapproval, Janis slides her fingers along his cheek to his mouth and presses them to his lips. “No need to explain yourself. And please don’t think that I’ve declared my feelings in the hope that we might have something together. I’m resigned to your disinterest. But I’ve loved you from afar, and I’ll continue to love you. You’re so strong. You do what you want, take what you want, always with such certainty that you’ll triumph. The cowboy could’ve had a gun. And the others…the ones I know about, anyway…in each case something could’ve gone very wrong, but you were fearless. I watched. I saw.”

  When she takes her fingers from his lips, he remains so amazed that he can’t help saying, “No reason to fear them. None of them was real. Nothing is real.”

  “They’re all just plebs, plodders, rabble, two-legged cattle,” she says, under the misconception that they are both talking about the unwashed masses who will eventually come under the rule of the Arcadians, unaware that he is expressing his philosophy of life, his radical nihilism. “Do you have siblings, Egon?”

  “No. There’s no one but me. No one real.”

  “How fortunate. I had three older sisters. You hate children?”

  “I don’t allow myself such strong
emotions. What’s the point if nothing’s real?”

  “Well, I have enough hate for both of us. Think about it, Egon. You don’t have to love me in return. But maybe someday, when you’re stressed out and you need relief, maybe you can come back here and do this one thing for me, just out of the goodness of your heart.”

  She walks away from him and returns to the Longrins’ house.

  Egon gets behind the wheel of the Rhino GX. He drives out to the end of the private lane that serves Longrin Stables, where Rupert and Vince are waiting for him in the Jeep Wrangler.

  They turn right onto the highway, east toward distant Austin.

  The afternoon sky is vast and empty. The fields dwindle to every horizon, as if they have become the sole feature of a world that has been shorn of its mountains and drained of its seas.

  Egon Gottfrey wonders what the script requires of him aside from this trip to Killeen. His usually reliable intuition regarding the author’s intent fails him for the moment. He has no feeling for whether he’s supposed to kill Laurie Longrin or Janis Dern—or both. Mile by mile, indecision plagues him, and his tension grows.

  42

  THE GREEN PLAQUE ON THE gate announced GRANDPA AND GRANDMA’S PLACE. Behind the white picket fence, on the manicured lawn, three gnomes sat on tree stumps, two smoking pipes and one playing what might have been a lute. Three other gnomes danced in delight. The blades on the four-foot-high windmill turned in the mild breeze. There was an ornate birdbath, too, but no feathered bathers; perhaps some avian instinct warned them not to dare it.

  The sign above the front door read BLESS THIS HOUSE.

  Jane rang the bell.

  Judy White and Lois Jones, one and the same, yet neither, opened the door. Fifty-something. Buxom, well-rounded. Jet-black hair. Egg-yolk-yellow fingernail polish. Blue toenails. She wore flip-flops, a too-tight leopard-pattern sweat suit, seven diamond rings, numerous gold-and-diamond bracelets, and a necklace of matched sapphires.

  She took the cigarette from between her lips and let smoke drift out of her mouth rather than blow it, and then she said, “So you look like something happen.”