If Lawrence Hannafin thought Jane was a paranoid of the tinfoil-hat variety, he gave no indication of it. He sat on the edge of the bed, managing to look dignified in his plush cotton robe, barefoot, hands relaxed on his thighs. He listened intently.
She said, “The historical rate of suicide in the U.S. is twelve per hundred thousand. The past year or so, it’s risen to fifteen.”
“Supposing you’re right and it’s higher. So what? These are hard times for a lot of people. A bad economy, social turmoil.”
“Except the increase involves successful men and women, most in happy marriages, with no history of depression. Military…like Nick, my husband. Journalists, scientists, doctors, lawyers, police, teachers, economists. These fanatics are eliminating people their computer model says will push civilization in the wrong direction.”
“Whose computer model?”
“Shenneck’s. David Michael’s. Far Horizons’s. Whatever bastards in the government are in league with them. Their computer model.”
“Eliminating them how?”
“Are you listening to me?” she asked, her FBI cool melting a little. “Nanomachine control mechanisms. Self-assembling brain implants. They inject them—”
He interrupted. “Why would anyone submit to such an injection?”
Agitated, Jane rose from the armchair, stepped farther away from Hannafin, stood staring at him, the pistol casually aimed at the floor near his feet. “Of course they don’t know they’ve been injected. One way or another, they’re sedated first. Then they’re injected in their sleep. At conferences they attend. When they’re traveling, away from home, alone and vulnerable. The control mechanism assembles in the brain within a few hours of injection, and after that, they forget it ever happened.”
No less inscrutable than a wall of hieroglyphics in a pharaoh’s tomb, Hannafin stared at her either as if she were a prophetess predicting the very fate of humanity that he had long expected or as if she were insane and mistaking fever dreams for fact; she could not tell which. Maybe he was processing what she said, getting his mind around it. Or maybe he was thinking about the revolver in the nearby nightstand drawer, which she had found on her first visit to the house.
At last he said, “And then these people, these injected people…they’re controlled?” He couldn’t repress a note of incredulity in his voice. “You mean like robots? Like zombies?”
“It’s not that obvious,” Jane said impatiently. “They don’t know they’re controlled. But weeks later, maybe months, they receive the command to kill themselves, and they can’t resist. I can provide piles of research. Weird suicide notes. Evidence that the attorneys general of at least two states are conspiring to cover this up. I’ve spoken with a medical examiner who saw the nanomachine web across all four lobes of a brain during an autopsy.”
She had so much information to convey, and she wanted to win Hannafin’s confidence. But when she talked too fast, she was less convincing. She sounded to herself as though she was on the edge of babbling. She almost holstered the gun to reassure him, but rejected that idea. He was a big man in good physical shape. She could handle him, if it came to that, but there was no reason to give him an opening if there was a one-in-a-thousand chance he would take it.
She drew a deep breath, spoke calmly. “Their computer model identifies a critical number of Americans in each generation who supposedly could steer the culture in the wrong direction, push civilization to the brink with dangerous ideas.”
“A computer model can be designed to give any result you want.”
“No shit. But a computer model gives them self-justification. This critical number of theirs is two hundred ten thousand. They say a generation is twenty-five years. So the computer says eliminate the right eighty-four hundred each year and you’ll make a perfect world, all peace and harmony.”
“That’s freaking crazy.”
“Haven’t you noticed, insanity is the new normal?”
“Wrong ideas? What wrong ideas?”
“They aren’t specific about that. They just know them when they see them.”
“They’re going to kill people to save the world?”
“They have killed people. A lot of them. Killing to save the world—why is that hard to believe? It’s as old as history.”
Maybe he needed to be moving around to absorb a big new idea, to cope with a shock to the system. He got to his feet again, not with obvious aggressive intent, making no move for the nightstand drawer that contained the revolver. Jane eased closer to the hallway door as he moved away from her and toward the nearer of two windows. He stood staring down at the suburban street, pulling at the lower half of his face with one hand, as though he had just awakened and felt a residue of sleep still clinging like a mask.
He said, “You’re a hot item on the National Crime Information Center website. Photos. A federal warrant for your arrest. They say you’re a major national-security threat, stealing defense secrets.”
“They’re liars. You want the story of the century or not?”
“Every law-enforcement agency in the country uses the NCIC.”
“You don’t have to tell me I’m in a tight spot.”
“Nobody evades the FBI for long. Or Homeland Security. Not these days, not with cameras everywhere and drones and every car transmitting its location with a GPS.”
“I know how all that works—and how it doesn’t.”
He turned from the window to look at her. “You against the world, all to avenge your husband.”
“It’s not vengeance. It’s about clearing his name.”
“Would you know the difference? And there’s a child in this. Your son. Travis, is it? What is he—five? I’m not going to be twisted up in anything that puts a little kid at risk.”
“He’s at risk now, Hannafin. When I wouldn’t stop investigating Nick’s death and these suicides, the creeps threatened to kill Travis. Rape him and kill him. So I went on the run with him.”
“He’s safe?”
“He’s safe for now. He’s in good hands. But to make him safe forever, I’ve got to break this conspiracy wide open. I have the evidence. Thumb drives of Shenneck’s files, every iteration of his design for the brain implants, the control mechanisms. Records of his experiments. Ampules containing mechanisms ready for injection. But I don’t know who to trust in the Bureau, the police, anywhere. I need you to break the story. I have proof. But I don’t dare share it with people who might take it away from me and destroy it.”
“You’re a fugitive from justice. If I work with you instead of turning you in, I’m an accessory.”
“You’ve got a journalistic exemption.”
“Not if they won’t grant it to me and not if all this you’re telling me is a lie. Not if you aren’t real.”
Exasperation brought heat to her face and a new roughness to her voice. “They don’t just use the nanoimplants to cull the population of people they don’t like. They have other uses that’ll sicken you when I lay it all out. Terrify and sicken. This is about freedom, Hannafin, yours as much as mine. It’s about a future of hope or slavery.”
He shifted his attention from her to the street beyond the window and stood in silence.
She said, “I thought I saw a pair of balls when you stepped out of the shower. Maybe they’re just decoration.”
His hands were fisted at his sides, which might have indicated that he was repressing his anger and wanted to strike her—or that he was frustrated with his inability to be the fearless journalist that he had been in his youth.
From a sleeve on her shoulder holster, she extracted a sound suppressor and screwed it onto the pistol. “Get away from the window.” When he didn’t move, she said, “Now,” and took the Colt in a two-hand grip.
Her stance and the silencer persuaded him to move.
“Get in the closet,” she said.
His flushed face paled. “What do you mean?”
“Relax. I’m just going to give you time to think.”
“You’re going to kill me.”
“Don’t be stupid. I’ll lock you in the closet and let you think about what I’ve said.”
Before he had showered, he had left his wallet and house keys on the nightstand. Now the key, on a kinky red-plastic coil, was in the closet lock.
Hannafin hesitated to cross that threshold.
“There’s really no choice,” she said. “Go to the back of the closet and sit on the floor.”
“How long will you keep me in there?”
“Find the hammer and screwdriver I hid earlier. Use them to get the pivot pins out of the hinge barrels, pry the door open. You’ll be free in maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. I’m not about to let you watch me leave the house and see what car I’m driving.”
Relieved that the closet wouldn’t be his coffin, Hannafin stepped inside, sat on the floor. “There’s really a hammer and screwdriver?”
“Really. I’m sorry I had to come at you this way. But I’m running on a tightrope these days, and damn if anyone’s going to knock me off. It’s a quarter till nine. I’ll call you at noon. I hope you’ll decide to help me. But if you’re not ready to break a story that’ll bring the demon legions down on you, tell me so and stay out of it. I don’t want to tie myself to someone who can’t go the distance.”
She gave him no chance to respond, closed the door, locked it, and left the key in the keyway.
Immediately, she could hear him rummaging through the closet in search of the hammer and screwdriver.
She holstered the pistol and the silencer separately. She picked up her tote bag and hurried downstairs. On her way out, she slammed the front door so that he would be sure to hear it.
After the glittering starfield of the previous night and the pellucid sky of dawn, the blue vault over the San Gabriel Valley was surrendering to an armada of towering thunderheads sailing in from the northwest, on course for Los Angeles. Among the densely leafed branches of nearby Indian laurels, song sparrows were already sheltering, issuing sweet trills and clear notes to reassure one another, but the crows were still chasing down the sky, raucous heralds of the storm.