The Crooked Staircase Read online

  With the exception of December, on the last Friday of each month, Simon played poker with four of his friends. The game moved from one of their houses to another on an agreed-upon schedule. In March, the card game occurred elsewhere than here.

  Petra Quist, the hottie who currently lived with Simon, a twenty-six-year-old blonde with blue eyes, twenty years his junior, enjoyed a girls’ night out on the last Friday of the month. The photos on her Facebook page ranged from icky cute to nearly obscene and featured five other leggy, dressed-to-tease young women, her “wrecking crew,” with whom she went shopping and barhopping in a limousine. Judging by the photographs, their revelries weren’t hampered by a three-drink limit.

  Jane pulled the trigger of the lock-release gun four times before the automatic pick threw all the pins to the shear line and the door opened. She stepped inside as the house alarm shrilled.

  She had two minutes to enter the disarming code before the central station would summon the police.

  When Sara had signed over the mortgage-free house to Simon, he’d made a point of telling her that he wasn’t going to change either the locks or the alarm code. Anytime you want, kitten, you come back and let yourself in and wait for me and shoot me ten times dead when I come home. Think you could do that, kitten? No, I don’t think so, either. You talk big, the self-made real-estate guru, but you’re just a big-mouthed bitch, a gutless pussy, a stupid skank who by dumb luck made some money. All you ever were was an okay piece of ass, and now you’re past your prime in that department, way past. If you go broke and have to sell your ass, kitten, you won’t get any business if you price it more than ten bucks. Sara remembered his abusive good-bye speech almost word for word, and though more than once she thought about doing what he had dared her to do, she knew that she would ruin her life if she killed him. Or, more likely, the invitation was a trap; he would be ready for her; and she, an armed trespasser, would be shot dead. Nevertheless, his insults still stung two years later—gutless, stupid, by dumb luck—and it was clear to Jane that Sara, in spite of her intelligence and fortitude, had internalized those words and could not bleach them from the stained self-image with which Simon had left her.

  At the security-system keypad to the left of the front door, Jane entered the four numbers that Sara had given her and pressed the asterisk. The alarm fell silent. Yegg, the arrogant bastard, in fact had so little fear of his former wife that he’d kept his promise to raise no barriers to her return.

  After resetting the perimeter alarm but not the interior motion detectors, Jane began to explore the grand house.

  As reported in Petra Quist’s Facebook postings, the hottie and her crew “rocked the shit out of the club scene” on such nights as this. They didn’t stagger home until nearly midnight, and even then reluctantly. She was never later than that, however, because her “nuclear-powered love machine,” whom she identified only as Mr. Big, didn’t like to come home to an empty house. According to Sara, Simon returned from poker night between twelve-thirty and one o’clock.

  Jane figured she had more than an hour to determine where and how she would incarcerate Petra Quist so that she could have some quality time alone with Mr. Big, who might not be so big by the time dawn came.

  22

  Half a block off the main thoroughfare where traffic whisked brightly through the night, the trees stood wet of bark and dry of leaf half an hour after the passing of the storm. Nothing gurgled in the gutters any longer. The Mission of Light Church stood full of stained-glass glow, and from it issued muffled bursts of laughter and applause.

  A church had not been on Sanjay’s mind when he’d told his sister that there must be some place other than a motel where they could take refuge. Yet as they stood before it, the warmth of its light, the laughter, and the periodic applause seemed to promise safety. Sanjay, who wrote noir fiction and who, as a writer of conviction, therefore must believe in the essential darkness of the world and life, couldn’t quite commit to this church. However, he knew that his magic-realist sister would have no problem believing that here lay safety. He set aside his doubt and bias, putting his sister’s welfare first. Besides, he didn’t know where else they could go.

  They entered the building through one of two front doors that stood open and found the narthex deserted. Likewise, the nave offered empty pews, and no one manned the altar under an enormous white-plastic cross that was lit from within.

  Children’s voices came from a distance, a flutter of adult laughter, piano music, and then a chorus of youngsters singing.

  Sanjay and Tanuja followed the center aisle to the crossing and stopped short of the chancel railing when they saw a bank of open doors to the left. They went to one doorway beyond which, in the north transept, an exhibition hall had been transformed into a makeshift theater.

  Rows of folding chairs were occupied by as many as two hundred people. A choir of a dozen kids stood on three tiers to the right of the stage, the piano before them. On the stage were grade-schoolers in a variety of costumes, including three dressed as white rabbits.

  Evidently, although Easter was almost two weeks away, they were presenting a production with a holiday theme. At least for the time being, the church had set aside such solemn considerations as crucifixion and resurrection in favor of lighter fare involving rabbits, girls dressed as daffodils, and three little boys costumed as eggs and standing in front of what might have been a papier-mâché chicken three times bigger than they were.

  Sanjay saw, to the right, a hallway entrance surmounted by a sign that promised restrooms. The hall appeared to be long, as if it led to more facilities than just the men’s and women’s lavatories.

  He took Tanuja’s hand and drew her across the back of the room as music swelled and the rabbits began to caper among the daffodils. The audience was focused on the performers, but if a few shifted their attention to Sanjay and his sister, there was no reason for them to suppose that these two newcomers didn’t belong here.

  Beyond the restrooms were classrooms where perhaps Sunday school was held and other instructions given. At the end of the hallway, another corridor opened on the left, serving a kitchen and church offices. Last of all, they came to a large storage room with eclectic contents: janitorial equipment, including vacuum cleaners and floor buffers; twenty or more six-foot-long folding tables standing on end, securely racked; a full complement of life-size nativity-scene figures, including three wise men, camels, a cow, a couple lambs, a donkey; and numerous other items.

  Sanjay led his sister inside and closed the door behind them. “We’ll wait here. The play must be nearly over. They’ll all be gone soon.”

  “You mean stay the night?”

  “We have restrooms. Might be food in the kitchen, something the church staff has for lunch or snacks.”

  “It feels weird to stay here.”

  “It feels safe, Tanny.”

  “Yeah, well…it kind of does,” she agreed.

  “We’ll have time to think, figure this out.”

  “But we could hide for a year and figure out nothing. And what if someone comes in here?”

  “We’ll tuck ourselves in behind the nativity figures. No one will see us unless they come all the way to the back of the room.”

  They left the light on in order to make their way through the gauntlet of stored items, and they sat on the floor, screened by heavy cast-plastic wise men and camels.

  In the distance, muffled piano and choir crescendoed, and after a second of silence, the volume and duration of applause suggested the performance might have come to an end.

  23

  In the parking lot of an office complex in Lake Forest, sitting behind the wheel of the abandoned patrol car, Carter Jergen imports the contents of the vehicle’s camera archives into his laptop. The fore and aft recordings on police cruisers are intended to protect officers, so the department can easily disprove
accusations of police brutality and misconduct of which they are not guilty.

  As for the officers who recently used this cruiser, their offense is not brutality. Jergen isn’t affiliated with the sheriff’s department; ostensibly he works for the National Security Agency, and therefore he lacks direct authority over those deputies, although his federal credentials compel them to assist him. If he were the boss of them, he’d charge them with dereliction of duty—with sheer stupidity—for letting the Shukla twins steal their car.

  What concerns him most is that both of the deputies who screwed up are among the adjusted people, those who have been injected with nanomachine control mechanisms, which is why they were called to support the conversion crew when everything went wrong at the Shukla house. All of them in fact are adjusted people, though they don’t realize it, including Lincoln Crossley and the two men with him, who allowed themselves to be hornet-sprayed by a slip of a girl who is a foot shorter and weighs only half as much as any of them.

  Recently, Jergen has begun to suspect that when the weblike control mechanism self-assembles across the brain, something of the adjusted person is lost in addition to his free will. Maybe it isn’t lost at once. Maybe it fades away slowly. But it seems to Jergen that at least some of the adjusted are not as intelligent as they were before being injected.

  Well, no, perhaps it’s not that they’re less intelligent. It is rather that the quality of their motivation has changed. They will do what they are instructed to do, but some—perhaps many—seem to lack the interest, the incentive, to do more than required.

  Maybe this is not a bad thing. In his estimation, a lot of people are too smart for their own good, motivated by the wrong aspirations and desires, such as money and status and the admiration of others. The new world coming will be shaped by those who, like Carter Jergen, are most equipped to identify and correct all the errors to which human beings are so prone. It is likely the case that a fully corrected civilization can be kept stable more easily if a significant part of its population is motivated to perform only as they are instructed to perform and are shorn of any incentive to achieve more than others. The determination to achieve can, after all, lead to an inclination toward rebellion.

  Bathed in the laptop’s pale light, scanning through the video from the patrol car’s front-facing camera, Jergen arrives at the moment when the Shukla twins walk away into the night, across the lamplit parking lot, onto the public sidewalk. They turn west and hurry out of sight, oblivious that they have left this first crumb of evidence that will make it possible for him to track them down.

  Jergen switches off his laptop, closes it, gets out of the car.

  Radley Dubose is waiting a few feet away, beside the Range Rover in which the two of them had unsuccessfully pursued Sanjay and Tanuja Shukla into the canyon. Radley appears angry enough and big enough to pick up the patrol car and throw it. He has a square Dudley Do-Right jaw and eyes as feverish looking as those of Yosemite Sam; though Dubose is a graduate of Princeton and dedicated to the cause, Jergen thinks he is cartoonish.

  “Whatever you’re going to tell me,” Radley Dubose says, “don’t tell me anything if those little shits disabled the car’s cameras and faded away like a couple ghosts. I’ve had enough of their smart-aleck crap, the insolent little shits. I’d like to shove each one’s head up the other one’s ass and roll them down the street like a hoop.”

  “Maybe you’ll get a chance to do it,” Jergen says. “They went west on foot, toward the boulevard.”

  They get into the mud-spattered Range Rover. Carter Jergen switches on the headlights, drives out of the parking lot, turns west on the street.

  “I mean,” Dubose says, “they’re two freaking writers, of all things. Writers. You and I, we’re hard-case pros. We break heads, get the job done. Why do a couple bookworm geeks think they’re smart enough to keep pissing on us and getting away with it?”

  “Maybe because they can,” Jergen suggests.

  “Not anymore. Damn if they will. I’ve had enough. Let’s make this happen.”

  Jergen pulls to the curb and parks illegally just short of the intersection with the boulevard.

  They get out of the Rover and stand on the corner, scoping out the situation. The restaurants and bars are open, but the stores in the strip centers and the stand-alones are closed. Traffic races past and brakes and races again, spasming between signal lights at the intersections, fewer vehicles than would have been here an hour earlier, more than will be here an hour from now.

  The first thing that intrigues Dubose is a motor inn to the south and a cheapjack motel to the north. “We already got word that sonofabitch Sanjay used his ATM card. He wants to pay cash at a motel rather than use a credit card.”

  The first thing that intrigues Jergen is the traffic cameras mounted high on a streetlamp, one aimed south, one north. “Maybe they didn’t get a room. Maybe they hitched a ride or went somewhere else. Before we start playing gumshoe, squeezing motel desk clerks, let’s have a look at the traffic-cam video.”

  24

  Turning on lights ahead of her and switching them off behind, Jane toured the house, feeling oppressed by a surfeit of deeply carved moldings and decorative paneling and crystal chandeliers; exotic silk draperies with swagged valances and tasseled hems; French furniture featuring intricate inlaid patterns and scenes; gilded this and silver-leafed that. Where the floors weren’t limestone, they were wide-plank walnut. The many antique Persian carpets—Tabriz, Mahal, Sultanabad—were exquisite. Some lamps appeared to be by Tiffany, others by Handel.

  In mad contrast to the overdone but harmonious décor, the riotous abstract paintings might have been by famous artists. Jane didn’t know for sure. Like most modern art, they interested her no more than did the wind-tangled rain-compacted sun-bleached trash that time accumulated in vomitous-looking masses along California’s cracked and potholed highways, as the once-golden state stewed in government corruption on its way to bankruptcy.

  The house had been built by Sara Holdsteck, but Jane suspected that the feverish décor was all Simon Yegg, comprising treasures accumulated from his for-profit marriages.

  She found what she needed in a subterranean level too grand to be called a basement. The garage, which could accommodate eight cars, currently housed a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes GL 550, a Cadillac Escalade, and a Lamborghini. There were cabinets of tools and a workbench and one of those wheeled boards on which a mechanic could lie to roll under a car, and a hydraulic vehicle lift, suggesting that Simon not only collected cars but enjoyed working on them. The rest of that level was given to a large wine cellar with a spacious tasting room and a home theater that seated fifteen.

  The ornate theater came with an authentic French façade, a receiving area with box office, a lobby with candy counter, and the main screening room, which itself measured about thirty-five by fifty feet. Underground as it was, windowless as it was, thoroughly soundproofed to prevent the loudest movie music and sound effects from disturbing people elsewhere in the house, the theater provided the ideal—if inappropriately glamorous—venue for a prolonged and vigorous interrogation.

  25

  Parked at the corner, the Range Rover is in the spillover zone of the Wi-Fi service established for a nearby office building.

  While Radley Dubose stands out on the corner, scowling north and then south and then north again along the boulevard, as though everyone and everything in sight profoundly offends him, Carter Jergen sits in the driver’s seat with his laptop. He accesses the National Security Agency’s all but infinite virtual storerooms of data at their million-square-foot Utah facility.

  Although he is an employee of the NSA with the highest security clearance, Jergen is not at the moment working for the agency or for the existing government of the country. He is serving the secret confederacy that intends to remake the nation into a utopia, and he dares not risk alerting his NSA
superiors as to what information he is seeking or for what purpose. Consequently, he enters by a back door established by certain of his colleagues.

  In addition to snatching every phone call and text message from the ether and storing them for possible future review, the agency also, among other tasks, coordinates traffic and venue cameras from law-enforcement jurisdictions nationwide. Once having accessed this program, it is possible to select any location within the borders of the United States and obtain a real-time view of events there.

  In this case, Jergen does not want to see the current action captured by the cameras mounted atop streetlamps at the intersection directly in front of him. Instead, he seeks the archived video that will show what happened there a few minutes after the Shukla twins abandoned the patrol car.

  In recent years, traffic cameras have become ubiquitous. Many reasons are put forth to explain the need for them. To study vehicle flow and design more efficient intersections. To discourage drivers from running red lights when a video record is being made to provide evidence of the violation. To preserve the security of the citizens in a time of terrorism. Yada, yada, yada.

  There is some truth in all the reasons that are given. But from Jergen’s perspective, the best use of this ocean of archived video is to find people who don’t want to be found, in order to do to them what they don’t want done.

  And here—ta-da!—are the Shukla twins on the laptop screen, standing on the northeast corner of the intersection in time past, exactly where Radley Dubose stands in time present. The dangerous young authors regard the street with confusion and indecision and fear, rather than with Dubose’s smoldering rage.