Jane into the high lair, nine thousand square feet of Olympian grandeur where a mad god did whatever gods with a lowercase g do when they aren’t destroying one world and building another…
The pitiable circumstances in which the rayshaws had lived was proof of D.J.’s contempt for these simplest of his creations. She doubted he would want one of them to share his personal space, and he surely wouldn’t keep a programmed ape here on the ninth floor.
If there were servants—housekeeper, cook, butler—they would be like the citizens of Iron Furnace, allowed a degree of apparent autonomy but nonetheless tightly controlled. He would not bring into his personal space servants with their free will intact, when he could ensure his privacy by staffing his homes with his higher-level semizombies. Their enslavement was permanent; if she had to kill them to get to their master, she would be freeing them.
In the event there was a guest or two…
Well, any guest was likely to be an Arcadian. She would have to do with them whatever the situation required.
Along a short hallway, past a kitchen, she proceeded through a few grand rooms that flowed gracefully one to another, furnished with Art Deco antiques, museum-quality furniture by Deskey, Dufrêne, Ruhlmann, Süe et Mare….Antique Persian carpets suitable to the palaces of sultans. Everywhere were exquisite Tiffany lamps of the rarest patterns. Chandeliers by Simonet Frères. Voluptuous paintings by Lempicka, Domergue, Dupas. Sculpture by Chiparus, Lorenzl, Preiss. Enamels by Jean Dunand. Here in one residence were tens of millions’ worth of antiques and art—and so far not any sign of an inhabitant.
How strange it seemed that a man who meant to overturn the past, rewrite history to his taste, and create a future divorced from everything that had come before should create for himself this haven designed in every detail to transport him to the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps he perceived in that past age some promise that had never been realized, that he intended now to fulfill.
As she passed through this residence of museum-quality art and furnishings, Jane felt a little disoriented, perhaps because these relentlessly elegant items, acquired with so much effort and at such expense, arranged in judiciously considered order, was in unsettling contrast to the eighth-floor horror of rayshaws and apes and bloody violence. A curious and inconstant tinnitus afflicted her, two or three oscillating electronic tones weaving together, swelling but then fading to silence, like a soundtrack to her disorientation.
As on the eighth floor, windows here were of thick bulletproof glass. Ashen morning light, sheeting rain, and a cityscape as gray as if rendered in pencil provided a contrasting background to the warm colors and glamour of these interiors.
When Jane entered the great room with its half dozen seating arrangements, there were as well the sounds of Nature’s current performance: the periodic grumble from the throat of the storm, the susurration of the rushing skeins of rain, the patter of droplets slanting under the tenth-floor overhang to puddle on the paving stones of the ninth-floor balcony.
The double doors to that deep deck stood open wide. As though he had ridden down from the heavens on the currents of the storm, David James Michael appeared at that threshold and stepped in from the balcony.
She was overcome with the desire to say, This is for Nick, and shoot the bastard right there, right then. She would have done it if she hadn’t needed his testimony.
He smiled. “Mrs. Hawk, your persistence and endurance are remarkable. Welcome to my humble home. I’d offer you a drink, but that seems to be an excessive courtesy, considering that you would like to see me dead.”
“Dead is good. Better would be impoverished and in prison.”
He might not have been alone on the balcony. No one was visible through the tall windows, but there were areas she couldn’t see.
“You don’t look well, Mrs. Hawk. There’s blood on your jacket.”
After pressing a button to activate the PatrolEyes videocam that hung from her neck, she kept a two-hand grip on her pistol.
He said, “Would you like me to call the paramedics?”
“No, Mr. Michael. I’ll call them when you need them.”
He stood beside a Ruhlmann chair, a chunky block bergère buttered by the light from a Tiffany dragonfly-motif floor lamp in shades of yellow ranging from dark amber to lemon.
The warm glow flattered him. A handsome boyish-looking forty-four, with tousled blond hair, he stood there in sneakers and jeans and untucked shirt, projecting his preferred image as a free spirit, a billionaire without pretensions. Of course the sneakers were maybe by Tom Ford, the jeans by Dior Homme, the shirt by David Hart, a three-thousand-dollar ensemble, not counting the underwear.
Just being in the same room with him left her feeling unclean, to see him looking her over as if considering her for Aspasia.
“Tell me about the Tech Arcadians, Mr. Michael.”
“Sounds like some second-rate band. What do they play—retro dance music from the eighties?”
“You’re a smug sonofabitch, aren’t you? But you’ll talk.”
“How will you precipitate an interrogation, Mrs. Hawk? Zap me with a Taser, chloroform me, strip me naked, tie me with cable zips, and tease my penis with a switchblade? Is that what you were taught back at Quantico? Hardly seems constitutional.” He cupped a hand to one ear. “Do you hear that?”
She didn’t want to play his game. Instead of answering his question, she said, “Park your ass in that chair.”
“Do you hear that?” he repeated. “It’s the future calling. It’s a future you don’t understand and in which you have no role.”
She would have liked nothing better than to kill him, with or without a confession.
“Mrs. Hawk…Or should I say Widow Hawk? No, you might find it painful to be addressed as such. Just Jane. Jane, because I know your type so very well, I’m sure you believe in the existence of a conscience. A little inner voice that tells you right from wrong.”
“Because I know your type so very well,” she said, “I’m sure you don’t.”
He moved away from the chair, toward a Süe et Mare gilt-wood settee and matching armchairs upholstered in an Aubusson tapestry.
Moving with him, remaining peripherally aware of the open doors to the balcony, alert for movement elsewhere in the large room, Jane decided for the moment to let him do this his way, as it might lead to revelations more quickly than would an interrogation. He was such a narcissist, he no doubt believed that he could persuade her of the rightness of his position—and that even if he could not win her over, he would by some unexpected twist of fate overcome her, if only because destiny would always bend the course of events, bend the universe itself, to ensure a favorable result for D. J. Michael.
“You think a human conscience is essential for civilization to exist and remain stable,” he said. “Well, I propose to install just such a thing where it does not now exist. In a sense, we’re allies.”
He didn’t sit in either the settee or one of the chairs, but stood staring at a series of Ferdinand Preiss figurines that stood on the Ruhlmann coffee table: cold-painted, intricately costumed bronze dancers on marble and onyx bases, their faces and limbs of carved and tinted ivory.
Jane’s tinnitus grew louder, and she surveyed the room as if some musician might be seated in a corner, playing a theremin. But of course the sound was internal, and again it faded.
“When refined to perfection in a year or two,” D. J. Michael said, “the ultimate nanoimplant will rest so lightly within the skull that those graced with it won’t have the slightest suspicion that their free will to do evil has been restrained. The decisions they make and the actions they take will seem always to be their choices. Their values and morals will be corrected with such subtlety that every change of opinion will seem to have been a product of their own reasoning.”
She said, “And you—just you—will decide what is evil, what’s moral and what’s not, what the right values are.”
Until he looked at her, she would not have thought that a smile could convey such acidic pity, such scalding contempt. Yet his voice remained soft and reasonable as he continued to speak this unreason. “Look at the world in all its horror, Jane. In all its chaos. War and injustice. Bigotry and hatred. Envy and greed. The codes of right and wrong that humanity has designed and endorsed—have they ever worked, Jane? Are not all the codes misguided in one way or another, and therefore unworkable?”
He moved away from the Süe et Mare suite and turned his back to her and went to a sideboard of Macassar ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which was flanked by windows. He stood gazing at a Tamara Lempicka portrait that hung above the sideboard: a stylishly dressed man portrayed against a backdrop of skyscrapers, all rendered in the artist’s signature style, cold and painterly and powerful.
He said, “Those graced with such an implanted conscience will never be troubled by doubt or guilt, because they will know that they are always doing the best and right thing. They will not know worry or restlessness of spirit. There will be nothing left in the world to fear.”
Arms weary, Jane had lowered the Heckler. “You put it in such high-minded terms, but it sounds low and vile to someone who knows about the Aspasia girls, the rayshaws, the cruelty with which you’ve used them.” She raised the pistol again. “Sit the hell down.”
He returned to the bergère beside the Tiffany dragonfly lamp, but he did not obey her. “There is no cruelty in what we’ve done, Jane. The world is full of people whose lives have no purpose. They wander through their meaningless existence, often in despair. We select those who are aimless and unhappy—and then we remove the reasons for their unhappiness and give them purpose. Or in the case of your husband, we remove those who are a threat to the future as it needs to be if the masses are to have a chance at contentment.”
As earlier, the billionaire cupped a hand to one ear and stood as if listening to something inaudible to her. “Do you hear destiny whispering, Jane?”
She squeezed off a shot, not at him but at the antique bergère. The upholstery on the chair split, and a brief exhalation of thin smoke issued from the bullet hole. “Sit down and discuss with me the specifics of what you’ve done, or I’ll wreck your precious décor and then break you piece by piece in as painful a way as I can imagine. And I’ve got a vivid imagination.”
His hand still cupped to his ear, he said, “Don’t you hear the whispering, Jane? All the whispering in the whispering room? If you don’t hear it yet, you soon will.”
With that, he turned his back to her and walked to the open balcony doors.
Following close behind him, she said, “Stop right there.”
Instead of obeying, he dashed across fifteen feet of balcony, vaulted the decorative steel railing, and leaped into nine stories of air empty of all else but rain.