Monday, August 6—01:36:22
We are hacking through the rainforest, whack to the right with the machete, whack to the left with the next blow. Water sparkles through the dense green foliage. As we step into the pond, Jen’s clothes vanish, and we feel the blue water soothe us, as if clothing us again. We duck and swim to the other side, surrounded by schools of colorful fish. They circle around us, under us, against us. We come up for air, and the world shifts and we feel the menace. It rises out of the mist in front of us, out of the water—the dome of his head shaved bald, rising out of the water, the first tattoos and then the rest. Teko Teko Mea. There is no rush, no drama, but I am paralyzed. I cannot move as he reaches out with a delicate but impossibly large hand, like that of a man’s against a child’s. This hand swallows the top of our head and forces us under. It holds us under. We struggle and kick, but Gray Suit is calmly speaking, telling others why it is necessary to suffocate us. “She wanted it—now she’s got it!”
I try to scream. Our mouth is open but no sounds emerge. I try again, but no sounds. I try and now I scream, “Jen!”
For the first time in my life, I have the strange sensation of feeling her rise out of sleep. It is as if a series of circuits are locking into place. Physical sensations of touch. A recognition of self. A recognition of place. A moment of panic. And then confusion.
I feel her drifting away. Don’t leave me, I think.
“Jen, I’m drown—” and then I stop. Realize where we are. In her bed. We couldn’t be drowning. I’ve read all about dreaming. Heard Jen and others talk about it so many times. But now for the first time, I have dreamed.
“Chandler, how could you …?” Her voice in her head was slow. I felt her searching for words that would make sense. “How could you wake me?” She didn’t mean how dare I wake her. She meant, how was this possible?
“I don’t know.” I can turn myself on if she is in danger and frightened and her hormones are flying off the charts. But not like this. Not when she is asleep. “I don’t know. It’s not possible.” And then, “We were in a jungle, and then swimming, and then Gray Suit tried to kill us.”
“You were dreaming. It was a dream.” She started falling back to sleep, as if it were she who was dreaming that I was dreaming.
“Wait!” I sent an instruction to her arm to switch on her bedside light. She was too asleep to resist and swore when the light blinded us.
“Chandler, what are you doing?”
“I was scared.”
“You can’t be scared.”
“It was so real.”
She laughed. She got up and tiptoed to the bathroom and peed. We came back and lay in bed. She reached for the light.
“Jen, wait.”
“What?”
“There was this thing he said. I think it’s important. He was explaining why he was killing us. He said, ‘She wanted it—now she’s got it!’”
She yawned. “Tell it to me. The dream.”
I told her my dream. As I told it, it was drifting away from me. But I made it to Gray Suit’s final words, and I felt Jen’s alarm.
She said, “Didn’t he say something like that to us? Chandler, play us back the meetings with him.”
“All?”
“Start with the first one.”
My memory wasn’t a sound recording, but like all my memories, was eidetic. In a second, it was her memory too. Word by word, we remembered the first meeting. Then the second, when she and Les had been called on the carpet. And then the third, when Gray Suit had said they had discovered what Eden was.
There was one thing he said that was similar to the dream, but not quite: “People want it and pay big dollars to get it. Thousands and thousands. And then they pay for it with their lives. We’ve got to stop it.”
I felt Jen processing this, trying to correlate it with other information. Finally I asked, “Boss, what are we looking for?”
“I don’t know for sure. But something. I know there’s something … Let’s go through the last meeting again.” And maybe she felt the hint of gloom that still clung to me from my dream, and wanted to cheer me up, so she said, “Play it again, Chan.”
It was dumb, but funny, and it finally pulled me from my dream. We listened to Gray Suit’s words together.
Jen said, “That’s it, but not quite it.”
She looked at her clock.
“What d’ya say we continue this tomorrow? I’m going to turn you off now.”
We step into the sparkling pool, and our clothes vanish. We are engulfed by schools of service units. We are all naked, and it is exhilarating because in all their physical diversity, each is more perfect than the last. They swim around us, they slide against us. I come up for air and feel the menace. It rises slowly out of the water in front of us. The surfer’s bleach-blond hair. The tanned face of Richard O’Neil. He rises up and we are in an Iowa cornfield, storm clouds massing on the horizon. He is dressed in his stunning green suit, like a rock-and-roll god, and he spreads his arms and raises his hands in blessing over us and intones the words, “You want it. You get it. You pay for it.” And I realize where I am, cut off from the world, so alone, with only Jen, with only my Jen, with—
“Jen!”
This time, she didn’t rise from sleep circuit by circuit. In a flash, she was awake and alert, the light on, sitting up, her hand reaching for the sawed-off baseball bat under her bed. She looked around.
“Jesus, Chandler.”
I told her my second dream.
In the morning—Monday morning—even before she went in for her shift, she turned me on and we got to work. I like work. Perhaps I like it because it’s the only real thing in my life.
We ran through the whole appointment with Richard O’Neil at his club. The jungle in the glass pavilion. The naked swimmers and sunbathers. The personal servants. The strange conversation in the kitchen: seduction, threats, harassment, confession, and plea. And then the final moments in their front lobby. The woman we only saw from behind. The words we heard clearly. “People want it. People get it.” The woman had shrugged and said, “And then people pay for it.”
Jen said she had assumed it was the boasting of a businesswoman getting rich off the poor schmucks who bought whatever it was she sold. But now the words “pay for it” took on an ominous tint, as if they’d been dipped in a can of blood-red ink.
All because her words were so close to those of Gray Suit. “People want it and pay big dollars to get it. And then they pay for it with their lives.”
“Making patterns out of nothing again?” I said.
“The last time wasn’t nothing. There is a link between the co-op and Eden.”
“Although we still don’t know what it is.”
“Which doesn’t mean there isn’t a link. But this one, these words are almost exactly the same. The woman at the club spoke them weeks earlier. We need to find her.”
As soon as we arrived at the station, we headed upstairs to Captain Brooks’s office. His admin assistant told us he was at a day-long conference for senior officers. Wasn’t to be disturbed except for emergencies.
“Have you gotten into more trouble?” the assistant said.
Damn, if everyone wasn’t on our case.
We didn’t have much to go on. I couldn’t access facial ID since we hadn’t seen her face. We assumed she was between her mid-fifties and ninety years old because of the gray hair and rounded shoulders, but perhaps she’d had the treatment, and that was just where she’d ended up. I can perfectly recollect conversations, but like I said, I don’t store them like a tape recorder, more like a human memory. The upshot was that we couldn’t attempt to match the voice.
We tried to search for her through O’Neil’s club, but the club had done an incredible job of staying out of sight. I finally did find it, but its presence on the Web made me feel like I was staring at a shiny steel box without any way in. Maybe someone in the world could sneak inside, but it certainly wasn’t me.
12:05:48, we caught a ride to the club. It was so hot outside, the tires were starting to melt. I told that to Jen, and she laughed, which made me feel good.
We rang the bell at the club. A voice answered through a speaker. “Who might you be?”
Jen held up her badge in front of the glass eye of a camera and said, “I might be a police officer.”
“Yes?”
“I’m looking for information on one of your members.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“No, but—”
“Information on our membership is confidential. Sorry, but I’m not going to be of any use to you.”
The voice was gone.
“Maybe,” Jen said to me, “we should sleep here on the walkway and wait for that woman to return.”
“I don’t think that—”
“Chandler, it was—”
“Oh, right.”
“Any bright ideas?” she said.
“Call Richard O’Neil.”
“What a great idea. I disobey the lawyer. And then to soften O’Neil up, I could start by apologizing for not lying in court. You could then apologize for slugging his son. Then, to get off the civil suit, I’ll beg for his son to lie in court to save my ass. Next, I’d have sex with him to show I really do have a thing for 112-year-olds. And then I could pop the question: Who was that woman and what’s her connection to an illegal form of the treatment?”
“Do you have a better idea?” I said.
“Oh, hello, Detective Lu.” That silken voice again. “This is Jaisha.”
“I’m hoping I could speak to Richard.”
Nice touch, I said.
“He isn’t available at this moment. Perhaps you might tell me what this is about.”
“Uh, not really. Let him know we called.”
“We?”
“An expression. Could you let him know I really need to speak to him? It’s pretty urgent.”
Ask if he’s in DC.
“Is he in town?”
Jaisha said, “I will give him your message.”
Ten minutes later, she called back: “Eleven PM at his club.”
As we arrived, a couple was getting cozied into a private car, the back door held open by a driver who looked like he could bench-press a cement mixer. A second slab of protection stood off to the side. Once the couple was settled in, he climbed into a chase vehicle.
We rang the door. A more pleasant voice answered, and this one let us into the lobby. Maybe they kept one AI personality for rejections and the other for admission.
Rob was waiting for us. He apologized that Richard was slightly delayed. He led us to the farmhouse kitchen.
I checked and, as on my first visit, I was offline.
Stay cool, Jen said.
Cucumber city.
We sat at the kitchen table. Rob offered Jen a drink. She asked for the iced tea reserved for this club and the Chinese Politburo.
The blue gingham curtains rustled with a breeze from the open window, and with it came a chorus of crickets and frogs. It was dark in this pretend outside, but we could make out the first rows of the cornfield. In the distance, lightning crackled and lit up the sky.
Richard O’Neil’s voice startled both of us. “Well, now, this is one surprise I really did not expect.” He reached out and shook Jen’s hand. “You’re cold,” he said and held her fingers for 2.3 seconds more. I felt every part of Jen’s body grow warmer.
She tipped her head to point down to the glass of iced tea she had been holding. “It’s the tea.”
He looked at that, then at the pink pitcher on the blue tabletop and said, “I see that Rob is looking after you.”
Jen agreed that he was.
O’Neil said, “Rob, Jaisha, and I have been racking our brains to figure out why you wanted to see me. I mean, there are two obvious reasons.”
She looked at him, not giving him a clue.
He pushed his baby finger backward with his opposite thumb. “You’re hoping to convince me to drop our civil suit against you. That it?”
She shrugged, trying to look mysterious.
“Jen, I need to tell you that would be pretty unlikely. But stranger things have happened.”
“Hope springs eternal, and all that.”
“Then the second thought.” He joined his ring finger to his pinkie and pressed both back. “You’ve decided it would be really nice to spend some time together.” His eyes lit up as they held hers.
She said, “Richard, I need to tell you that would be pretty unlikely. But stranger things, and all that.”
That’s what she said. I couldn’t tell you what she thought. But I can tell you that her heartbeat picked up from eighty-two to a ninety-six; sweat pinpricked under her arms and breasts; and I felt things stir that usually only happen when she is with Zach.
Oblivious to all this, or perhaps not, Richard laughed.
“In that case,” he continued, “why did you want to see me?”
“It’s really a simple question.”
He waited.
“When I was last here, right before I left, you were talking to a group of people in the front hall.”
O’Neil’s eyes looked upward, as if searching for the memory. “We call it the foyer, but yes.”
“There was an older woman who was the center of attention. I’d appreciate if you could tell me her name.”
“You would, would you?”
“Yep.”
“And is there any sort of deal here? Some sort of quid pro quo?”
“Richard, I went to a pretty crappy public school where they didn’t offer Latin. I mean, they barely did English, but I’m pretty wise in the ways of the world. Truth is, I don’t have much I can offer you, although when the court case is over, my boyfriend and I would love to have you over for dinner.”
“Zach,” he said.
Jen tried not to look startled.
“Don’t worry,” he added, “it’s merely information. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that my colleague’s name is one more thing on that list of ‘pretty unlikely’ things.”
“No ‘stranger things’ clause?”
“Nope. It’s not going to happen. Why are you interested in her?”
“Just am.”
O’Neil suddenly sighed, as if a game had come to an abrupt end. “Jen. I met you tonight because … well, I met with you. But you screwed us around at the trial. It was fun flirting with you. You’re gorgeous, clever, with the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen, and surprisingly kickass, in spite of your reputation. I assumed little if anything would come of it, but that’s kind of what flirting is, at least for me. Let’s face it: you’re a cop making the same in a year as I make by two seconds past midnight on January first. I don’t mean that as an insult, but it’s simply to say we don’t have a lot in common.”
“Both Americans.”
“Oh, please. We scarcely live on the same planet. So, unless there is something else, I actually have a friend here—no, not her—who I need to get back to.” He turned to Rob. “Rob, will you show Jen out for me?”
O’Neil’s handshake was brief when he said goodbye, but he gave her hand a micro-squeeze, a pressure that humans might not consciously notice but which they seem to respond to anyway.
Rob led us through the deserted hallways. The lights had been turned down low during the time we’d been in the kitchen. The building was absolutely still.
I felt it in her. We left the room and Jen’s affect was flat as a pancake. But as we walked, energy and anger were silently massing inside her.
We had almost reached the front door when an alarm went off. Not prolonged. More like when a smoke detector sounds off for five seconds. Rob stopped in his tracks, as if focusing on a conversation—and this was the most human gesture of anything I had seen in him, as if multitasking had been programmed out of him to make him more, well, limited.
The short alarm rang again.
Rob said, “I have to run.”
Jen said, “I’ll let myself out.”
Rob hesitated.
Jen said, “Rob, I’m a police officer. Don’t worry.” With a backward wave of her hand, she shooed him away. “Go.” She reached for the doorknob.
Rob took off running, as if his job or his life depended on it. He glanced back before he turned the corner and saw that Jen was stepping over the door’s threshold. As he went out of sight, she waved goodbye and was starting to close the door.
Only to come back inside and shut it quietly behind us.
“Jen!”
“Quick, which way to the office? We need to get away from here.”
I hadn’t seen anything that seemed like admin offices along the hallways to the right, leading to the country kitchen or the greenhouse and swimming pond. “To the left,” I said.
We raced out of the foyer, down the dimly lit hallway, and around a corner. Jen slumped against a wall and listened.
“Jen, what the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Find the office, break in, find a membership log, copy it.”
“You’re crazy. They catch us and you’re toast. Illegal entry, illegal search, trespassing, theft. I could—”
“Chandler, you’re being annoying.”
“Is this revenge?”
“No, I just don’t want some rich guy pushing me around.”
She took off down the hall, twisting the knob of the first door we came to. It wasn’t locked. We glanced inside and the half-light from the hallway was enough to make out chairs formed into a tight circle. The next door opened to a small meeting room with a central table and controls for an over-table display. We went inside, leaving the door ajar. Jen reached into the projection space.
“Don’t!” I shouted.
It came to life, but it was only a system to initiate a teleconference. I was about to say we needed to get the hell out, when a noise from the hallway caused Jen to jerk her head around. The door pushed open. Just as we were ducking down, a vacuum scurried into the room like a rat. We stepped over it and continued along the hallway. We hit a locked door.
“Can we do anything?” she said.
“Maybe, but you’d probably leave an entry record.”
We tried the rest of the doors along the hallway and found just one unlocked, housing several printers of various sizes.
It was a messy room, unlike the rest of the place. No matter how exclusive a joint might be, every luxury liner has an engine room. We shut the door, and Jen turned on her phone light. Boxes of paper were stacked four feet high. Metal shelves held envelopes and other supplies. And a table had a computer station.
“Do I need to tell you ‘don’t’ again?” I asked.
“Probably not.”
“What’s come over you?”
She tapped the screen to life.
User not recognized, the message onscreen said. Enter manual passcodes.
“Can you brute force it?”
“Sure, I’ll recite several billion ASCII combinations while you input them.”
Jen typed in “RichSnobs”—nothing. She tried “RichShits.”
“What are you doing?” I said.
“They’re workers. You expect them to like their bosses?”
“Stop, before you trigger security.”
This time, Jen listened.
She aimed her light around the room until it reached a bin marked “For shredder.” We rushed over and started rummaging. This was one quaint group of people, to still print things out. We pulled out reports, memos, notices, and printed invitations, scanned them and dropped them to the floor. Nothing with members’ names. We stared down into the near-empty bin, and right as we noticed pages from what appeared to be a membership directory, someone pushed open the door.
At the first sound, I killed her light, and we dived behind a stack of boxes as a hand reached in and the room lights flipped on.
We stared out between two boxes and saw a cleaning trolley roll into the room.
“Well, damn if my job isn’t hard enough!” It was a woman’s voice. I had assumed they were all service units here, but clearly not. She wasn’t more than three feet from us, but on the other side of the boxes. Jen’s heart was pounding like the engine of a freight train, and I bathed her with alpha waves to settle her down. The cleaning woman grabbed handfuls of paper off the floor and stuffed them into a large hemp bag on her cart, complaining nonstop as she did.
Don’t look in the bin, Jen thought, but the cleaner noticed there was more paper there, lifted up the bin and dumped the rest of the contents into her bag.
She turned away from us. She emptied a garbage can. She gave a cursory wipe to a worktable and the tops of the printers.
“Damn if my job isn’t hard enough,” she repeated, turned out the lights, and left.
“Jen, we’ve been in this place too long. We need to fly.”
We went to the door. Pressed our ear to it, then reached for the knob. For the first time that night, I could feel a tremor in Jen’s hand. She opened the door a crack. Listened again.
“Ready?” Jen said.
“That’s my job.”
As we were leaving the room, Jen glanced back inside. The dim light from the hallway reflected something on the wall. “Jen, no!” She ducked back inside the room, shut the door, and turned on her light.
On the wall were six glossy photographs, each showing a group of well-heeled members posing in the foyer—like annual photos of their board of directors. They weren’t framed, but instead appeared to be the work of a staff member who had kept these proofs and hung them as a rogue’s gallery.
By this point, even I was about to start shaking. But damn if Jen didn’t stay cool and, as if she had all night, took a snap of each picture.
We finally raced down the hallway, peeked out into the foyer, and then shot through the front door.
Jen walked calmly away from the building, like she belonged there. A block away she started running. Four blocks away, my boss whooped with delight into the night.