TRUE WAS WAITING FOR US AT A roadside diner just outside the Vegas city limits. A waitress with a name tag that read HI THERE! I’M JANE! took us to his booth, then hovered while Wise decided between the blueberry and the chocolate-chip pancakes. I spun my wheels, impatient to ask the question that had been gnawing at me for the past three days; but when the waitress finally left us alone, True beat me to the punch.
“It’s time we had a talk about your brother,” he said.
“Fine. Let’s talk. Let’s start with the fact that you know about him. You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”
“Of course.”
“And you never thought to mention it? Like when you were recruiting me, maybe? ‘By the way, one of the reasons we think you’ll be really good at hunting down scumbags is because one of them took your brother.’”
“That is one of the reasons we thought you’d be good at it, as a matter of fact.”
“Then why not say anything?”
“If I’d told you we knew about your brother’s kidnapping, you’d have wanted to hear what else we knew. Then I would have had to lie, which I don’t like to do, or put you off, which would have made us all unhappy. You’re a difficult enough person to deal with when your wishes are being granted.”
“Why would you have to lie to me?”
“To preserve operational security.”
“You mean this operation? It’s got something to do with Phil?”
“Yes.”
“Then Phil is…He’s alive? He’s OK?”
“He’s alive.”
I must have blanked out for a minute, because suddenly Jane the waitress was back with our breakfasts. When she started talking to Wise about syrup flavors, I gave her the eyes of death and said: “Fuck off. Now.” She did, and I turned back to True: “Tell me everything.”
True prodded one of the eggs on his plate with a fork, dimpling the yolk. “Omnes mundum facimus,” he said. “We all make the world…And we, the organization, try to make it better. Have you asked yourself yet whether there might be another organization, devoted to the opposite goal?”
“What, a bunch of people trying to make the world worse? No. It wouldn’t make sense.”
The yolk broke and started bleeding over True’s plate. “Why not?”
“What would they get out of it? I mean, OK, it can be fun to cause trouble, and there are people who get off on destruction in a big way, but you can’t build an organization around that. When bad people work as a team, it’s for something like money, or power.”
“You’re saying that evil is a means to an end, never an end in itself. But what if evil was more than just a label for antisocial behavior? What if evil was a real force working in the world, capable of drawing people to its service?”
“I already told you, I don’t believe in God.” Then, anxious to get to the point, I said: “But what do I know, right? You’re saying this anti-organization exists?”
“It exists,” True said. “We believe it has always existed, in one form or another. In its most recent incarnation, it styles itself the Troop.”
“The Troop? Like a monkey troop?” I started to laugh, but then I remembered: “Arlo Dexter’s notebook.”
“Yes. Until we recovered the briefcase, we couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a coincidence, but it’s clear now the Troop recruited Dexter.”
“OK…But what does this have to do with my brother?”
“Not everyone who joins the Troop does so willingly,” True said. “The foot soldiers and support staff are volunteers, but in every case where we’ve positively identified a Troop leader, that person has turned out to have been abducted as a child.”
“Hold on…”
“The Bible says that if you train up a child in the way he should go, when he is old, he will not depart from it. It may be that the Troop shares that philosophy, and crafts its leadership from an early age in order to ensure loyalty. But we think the real reason they steal children and turn them into monsters is because it is such an awful thing to do.”
“You’re telling me my brother’s a bad monkey? That’s bullshit! Phil was a good kid.”
“Of course he was. Corrupting a bad child wouldn’t be nearly as evil an accomplishment…Your brother is a high-level Troop member, working for their equivalent of Cost-Benefits.”
“Well first of all, I don’t believe you,” I said. “And second of all, I haven’t forgotten my job description. If you think I’m going to kill my own brother…”
“We don’t want you to kill him. We want you to help us find him.”
“Right, so somebody else can kill him? Sorry, I pass.”
“Your brother has grown up to be a very dangerous individual, Jane. The Ozymandias operation—the murder of the clients, the sabotage of the facility—that was his handiwork.”
“No it wasn’t! That was your guy, Carlton.”
“Jacob Carlton was seduced by the Troop,” True said, “and perhaps we do share some responsibility for allowing that to happen. But he took his final orders from your brother.”
“Right. But you don’t want to kill Phil for that, you just—”
“We want him stopped. Your brother is one of the Troop’s most effective strategists. Depriving them of his services would be a major achievement. But we—I—would like to accomplish something more. I’d like to try to save him.”
“Save him…You mean like deprogram him?”
True nodded. “I have to tell you up front that the odds of success are slim. What we know of Troop indoctrination methods suggests that they are very thorough and very difficult to break. Your brother may prefer death to redemption. But because he didn’t choose the path he is on, redemption is still a possibility. I’d like to give him the chance.”
“What if he doesn’t go for it, though? Let’s say I bring him in alive, and he tells you to stick your redemption. What then? You let him walk?”
“No. If he’s truly beyond saving, we obviously couldn’t let him go. But we don’t have to execute him, either. We can keep him contained, indefinitely.”
“You mean lock him up somewhere? I thought you didn’t—”
“It’s not our usual policy with irredeemables. It ties up resources and creates a security issue. But we can do it, if circumstances warrant. So what do you say, Jane? Will you help us try to save Phil?”
Of course I was going to say yes. I just needed a minute to let my brain catch up, to process everything I’d been told. But I guess True read my hesitation as uncertainty.
“There is another factor you may want to consider,” he said. “We chose you for this operation because we believe you are uniquely suited to draw your brother out into the open.”
“You think I’ll make good bait, you mean.”
“Yes. And there’s already evidence that your brother is moving to take that bait.”
“What evidence?”
“The Ozymandias operation. I understand you were upset about the script.”
“That business about Wise and me having a son named Phil? Yeah, I was upset.”
“Yes, well, we didn’t write that. The two of you were meant to pose as man and wife, but the script we composed in Cost-Benefits said nothing about a dying son or a disobedient daughter.”
“So someone rewrote the script before Wise got it…And you think that someone was Phil?”
“More likely a deep-cover agent working on his behalf.”
“And what’s his point? What’s he trying to tell me?”
“Obviously he’s aware you’re working for us. This could be his way of letting you know that he knows. Perhaps he hopes to recruit you. Or…”
“Or?”
“You understand, the indoctrination process your brother was subjected to would have been extremely unpleasant. So while he may be a committed Troop member now, that doesn’t mean he’s grateful for being delivered into the Troop’s hands in the first place.”
“You’re saying Phil’s mad at me?”
“If he is, can you blame him?”
“I…No. No. But if he wants revenge, why wait until now?”
“Perhaps he felt the life you were living before you joined the organization was revenge enough. The point is this: we can’t force you to accept this mission. But saying no to your brother, whatever he has planned, may not be so easy.”
“Well, that works out just great for you, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t misunderstand. We’re not going to abandon you to the Troop if you turn us down. But your best and safest course is to work with us on this…There’s also the matter of atonement. I don’t know how much you care about that, but—”
“Atonement? I let Bad Monkeys Incorporated steal my brother, True. How do I atone for that?”
“By stealing him back. Will you do it?”
Like I even had a choice. “Where do we start?”
“With the man who took him. John Doyle.”
“He’s still alive?”
“Not for lack of trying on our part,” True said. “In the weeks before he kidnapped your brother, Doyle was the target of a Bad Monkeys operation. He survived one execution attempt, and then, after abducting Phil, he disappeared completely. That was our first clue that he was more than just a lone predator. In the decades since, he’s popped up periodically—usually on some mission for the Troop—only to vanish again before we could get to him. Then, a few days ago, Doyle checked into the Venetian Hotel on the Vegas Strip…” True set a wrinkled newspaper, the Las Vegas Tipster, on the table. Under the headline CASINO GUEST AIDS IN MANHUNT was a face I’d last seen in a police mug shot twenty-three years ago. Doyle’s hair was white now, and he’d lost some teeth, but there was no question it was him.
My palms were suddenly sweating. “When did you spot him?”
“Almost immediately,” True said. “It is Sin City, after all: our surveillance coverage of the Strip is more comprehensive than the casinos’ own. Also, he registered under his real name.”
“Sounds like I’m not the only one being used as bait. You have his room number?”
“He’s staying in one of the penthouse suites.”
“OK, then. Let’s go see him…”
Wise, who’d been quietly eating his pancakes this whole time, put down his fork and cleared his throat. “Not so fast,” he said. “Before you go to the Venetian, we need to make a stop at Harrah’s.”
“What for?” asked True, looking annoyed.
“Love wants to meet her.”
“Who’s Love?” I said.
“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to have this sort of interference,” said True.
“I don’t know what you agreed to,” said Wise, “but my orders come from the man himself. Love isn’t happy with the way the Ozymandias op played out. Before we take this any further, he wants to be sure of her.”
“And he couldn’t have met with her yesterday, or the day before?”
“He’s got a full schedule. This is when he had time.”
“Who’s Love?” I repeated.
“The Trickster-in-Chief,” said True. “The leader of the Scary Clowns.” To Wise: “Very well. We’ll go see him.”
“Not ‘we.’ Love wants to talk to her in private. You’re welcome to wait in the casino, but she goes up to the Mudgett Suite alone.”
At that point, True got more pissed off than I’d ever seen him. He bitched at Wise about how totally unacceptable this was. Wise listened impassively, like he knew True had to complain for the sake of form, even though it wasn’t going to change anything.
A new waitress came to collect our plates. Once we’d settled the bill, Wise was in a hurry to get going, but when we got outside, I broke away from him and followed True to his car.
“What’s this Mudgett Suite?” I asked him. “And what did Wise mean about Love wanting to be sure of me? Am I going to have to do another one of those shibboleth tests?”
“I don’t know,” True said, still steaming. “As you may have gathered, I wasn’t consulted about this.”
“Well OK then, let’s just blow him off. Go straight to the Venetian.”
“No. That won’t work.”
“Jane!” Wise called. “Come on!”
“True…”
“No.” He shook his head firmly. “Go with him. I’ll meet you afterwards.”
I could see there was no point in arguing, so reluctantly I let him go. As I headed back to the SUV, I heard True get into his car, start the motor, and drive off. The sound of the engine was just beginning to fade with distance when the world changed color again.
I was far enough from the blast this time that I didn’t fall down, just stumbled. When I caught my balance and looked back, I saw True’s car rolling to a stop in the middle of the road, with all its windows gone and no one in the driver’s seat.
I ran for the SUV. Wise had the door open and was reaching for something. He came out holding a fire ax. Then he dropped it and collapsed.
“Wise?” I crouched down to check on him, then looked up, sensing another presence. But the parking lot was empty.
And then it wasn’t. Maybe five yards off to my left, the air seemed to shimmer, and this person just…materialized. It was Jane, the waitress. She’d swapped her work uniform for a pair of black jeans and a T-shirt silk-screened with a mandrill face, and she was holding an orange pistol.
I jumped up, raising my own gun to fire, but the air shimmered again, and suddenly she wasn’t five yards away, she was right in my face. She slapped my gun aside. She punched me, two quick jabs that dropped me helpless to my knees. A hand cupped my chin, and a plastic pistol muzzle pressed against my forehead.
“Welcome to Las Vegas, Jane,” she said. “Little brother sends his regards.”
She pulled the trigger.
The world went away for a while. When it came back, I was lying in a morgue with my skull blown open. That was my first guess, anyway: I was stretched out on my back on a hard, cold surface; I was paralyzed, blind, and had a headache a hundred times worse than anything I’d ever experienced.
A couple centuries went by while I waited for someone to either cut my chest open or dump me into a coffin. Then the pain lowered a notch, and I could see again—not well, but enough to know that I still had eyes. The feeling came back in my arms, and I ran my hands over the thing I was lying on. It wasn’t a metal slab. It was lumpy, and covered in some kind of stiff hide: a leather couch. I raised a hand to my scalp. It hurt, but it was still there.
Now that I knew my brains weren’t going to fall out, I started to wiggle my head around experimentally. That’s when I saw the clown. He was about nine feet tall. He wore a cone-shaped hat cocked to one side, and a frilly silk suit with a ruffed collar and cuffs. His face was painted white; there was a black teardrop under his left eye and a wicked red grin around his mouth. He stood just at the end of the couch, above and behind me, poised like he was about to bend down and take a bite out of my face.
The sight of him got me up. There was a blur of motion and pain, and then I was at the couch’s far end, screaming at the top of my lungs. The screams drove needles into my brain, but the clown didn’t react, just stood there leering at me, and around the time my voice gave out I realized he was a mannequin, set up on a wooden pedestal.
I panned my head around slowly, wary of more surprises. The room was lit by old-fashioned gas lamps, their flames set just high enough to throw shadows. The lamps weren’t the only antique touch: the wallpaper, rugs, and most of the furniture looked like they could have come straight out of a Victorian-period shop. The only exception was a television, set up discreetly in a corner under a faded poster advertising something called the World’s Columbian Exposition.
There were no windows. The only exit I could see was a set of double doors. I wanted to run to them, but to do that I’d have to go past the clown mannequin.
The TV came on, showing a blue screen. It cast more light than all the gas lamps combined, and by its glow I saw a figure sitting in the shadowy hollow of a wing chair. Something told me this wasn’t a mannequin.
“Phil?” I whispered.
The figure leaned forward. Pebble-glass lenses flashed in the blue light. “Guess again.”
“Dixon…You work for the Troop?”
The lenses tilted as he cocked his head. “What an interesting question. I was just going to ask you the same thing.”
“You mean you’re a prisoner too?”
“A prisoner?”
“Yeah. Isn’t this…Where are we?”
“The Mudgett Suite.”
“Scary Clown headquarters? In Harrah’s?”
“This week.”
“So the Troop didn’t capture me? What happened, then? Why does my head hurt like this?”
“You were shot with an NC gun.”
“Yeah, I know, but narcolepsy’s not supposed to be painful.”
“It isn’t. You were poisoned by your own endocrine system. The effects are superficially similar to a drug overdose.”
“What about Wise?”
“Dead at the scene. He was hit with an aortic dissection and bled out internally.”
“NC guns don’t have a setting for that.”
“Organization NC guns don’t,” Dixon said. “And organization operatives don’t typically plant Mandrill bombs in cars, or feed strychnine-laced apple pie to shadow security teams. Which brings us back to the question of your allegiance.”
“You think I did it?”
“You’re the only survivor of a small massacre. Color me suspicious.”
“So I shot myself? With what?”
“When we found you, you were holding a Troop-issue NC gun. Your finger was still on the trigger.”
“No. No way. That wasn’t mine.”
“Of course it wasn’t…Tell me, is there something wrong with your own weapon, that you keep ending up with other people’s?”
“She must have planted it on me after she shot me…”
“She?”
“Jane. The bad Jane, I mean.”
“The bad Jane…Let me guess, she only comes out when you’re angry.”
“She was a waitress, you asshole. In the diner…She served us breakfast, but then she disappeared before the check came. She must have left ahead of us and planted the bomb in True’s car. Then she came at me and Wise with the gun…Please tell me Eyes Only caught some of this.”
“The Eyes Only devices inside the diner all malfunctioned shortly before you arrived,” Dixon said. “But we did manage to get some footage from outside.”
A view of the parking lot appeared on the TV screen. It was a high-angle shot, probably from a billboard, centered on the SUV. Wise was standing at the driver’s side, yelling my name…There was an orange-and-yellow flash, followed by a burst of static, and then Wise reached for his ax. I ran into the frame. Now the way I remembered it, I was only drawing my gun at this point, but in the video, I already had it out, aimed straight ahead of me. Wise convulsed and fell down.
“Just wait,” I said. “This isn’t what it looks like…”
On the screen, I crouched beside Wise’s body, checked for a pulse, and then looked up.
“OK. Just watch, here she comes…”
But the video cut out at that point and the blue screen returned, overlaid with the words TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED.
“Oh, come on!” I shouted. “What the fuck, does it only work when it makes me look bad?”
A high giggle filled the room. “She has a point, Dixon. Eyes Only coverage has been very spotty lately.”
The clown mannequin had come to life and was stepping down off its pedestal. Even with both feet on the floor, it was still very tall.
“That’s not unusual, where the Troop is involved,” Dixon said.
“No, I suppose not,” said the clown, and then nodded to me. “Welcome to my demesnes, Jane Charlotte. My name is Robert Love.”
“I didn’t do this,” I said. “I’m being set up. My brother—”
“I know all about your brother. He’s been a thorn in my side for some time now.”
“Yeah, Phil can be like that. And he’s mad at me. And”—I pointed a finger at Dixon—“he doesn’t like me either. Whatever he’s told you—”
“I’m aware Mr. Dixon isn’t fond of you. You’re not fond of me either, are you, Dixon?” He raised a finger to the teardrop under his eye, and pouted. “No love for Love…But then it’s not an inquisitor’s job to be affectionate, is it?”
“Look,” I said, “if I were going to stage an attack, why would I do it this way? I mean, shoot myself with a gun that I couldn’t get rid of? What sense does that make?”
“It does seem rather stupid,” Love allowed. “But then, evil is so very tricky, sometimes…Perhaps you are telling the truth, and you’ve been framed. Or perhaps we’re meant to believe that you’ve been framed so that we’ll trust you, and not recognize that you really are working for the Troop.” He stroked his chin theatrically. “What a puzzle…Are you a good Jane, or a bad Jane?”
“What do you want me to do? How do I prove myself?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Your brother is very talented at manipulating perception. It’s one of the reasons the Troop prizes him so highly. If he’s decided to ruin your reputation, such as it is, there may not be anything you can do.” He sighed and shook his head. “Evil…Tricky, tricky evil…Do you know, I was almost evil once…”
“That’s swell,” I said. “But getting back to me—”
“It was when I was younger. I grew up in the desert, not far from here. Abusively strict father, passive mother…Well, I won’t bore you with the details. I had issues, as they say. And when I finally got away to Berkeley, I went wild.”
“You were at Berkeley?”
“Why, do I strike you more as Yale material?”
“What”—I couldn’t believe I was asking this—“what was your major?”
“Art. Drama. A few others. Really though, I think it’s fair to say my main pursuit in those years was finding novel ways to tax my liver. And pranks. I was quite the merry prankster, at Berkeley…Then in the middle of my senior year—my third senior year—my parents died in a car crash. They left me a great deal of money and a seven-hundred-acre ranch. The acreage was mostly scrub, but the house was nice. So I came home. I had some vague notions about using the land to do performance art, or maybe some installation pieces—build my own Stonehenge on the back forty, stage Druidic rituals—but before that could go anywhere, I got sidetracked by an idea for a new prank.
“My best friend in college liked to tell stories about how he’d been abducted by aliens. You’d think intelligent people would laugh that off, but he was very convincing, and in several cases he not only got his listeners to believe that he’d been abducted, he made them wonder whether they had, as well.
“One night at the ranch I asked myself whether you couldn’t take it a step further: Build an enclosed stage set, designed to look like the interior of an alien spacecraft. Go out and find people—stranded motorists, or just barflies who’d had too much to drink—knock them out somehow, bring them back and put them in it. And do things to them.
“Of course it was a wicked idea. Evil, if you took it far enough. I tried to think of ways to make it not be wicked…What if, I thought, you only did it to bad people? Murderers, thieves, people who deserved a good scare. But inevitably, my fantasies turned towards other kinds of people as well…A pretty girl, say, whose car blew a tire on a back road, and who saw a strange light in the sky. And when she woke up in the spaceship, she wouldn’t be alone. There’d be a man with her, a fellow abductee, college age, as scared as she was, and together they’d explore the ship, and see what happened…”
“These issues you had,” I said. “Were they sexual, by any chance?”
“Some of them.” Love grinned. “I hear you have a few of those yourself…Anyway, I decided that while of course I couldn’t go through with this prank, there was no harm in at least building the spaceship. I called it my ant farm, because the point was to put living things in it and watch what they’d do, and because, let’s be honest, this was very much a boy’s toy.
“So I built the spaceship, and then, since I still wasn’t ready to admit that I was going to use it, I built some other ant farms: A nuclear fallout shelter. A death-row prison wing. Most elaborate of all, a Victorian-era hotel floor with no exits.
“All of this took time, and for most of it I was completely alone. When you’re removed from human society for that long, especially if you’re intoxicated, ordinary moral inhibitions begin to lose their grip. It’s not that you deny the concept of evil, it’s that you begin to find it acceptable, even attractive. You start to wallow in it: you ignore the consequences and concentrate on the fun parts.
“But it turned out I wasn’t as alone as I thought. My one remaining contact with the outside world was the town of Coleman, where I’d go to pick up supplies. When I bought things, I paid cash, and I put the change in jars on a high shelf in the workshop where I designed my ant farms. In one of the jars, there was a dollar bill that was…special. The pyramid on the back, it saw what I was about. The organization became aware of me. And it might have ended there, with me dying quietly of a heart attack or stroke, except that the young Cost-Benefits operative assigned to my case, Bob True, had some rather…enlightened ideas about the difference between thought and deed. Also, the Panopticon agent who first sussed me out—Bob Wise—well, he wasn’t as hesitant as True when it came to dealing death, but he did think my ant farms might be useful as an intel-gathering tool.
“So they didn’t kill me. They decided to study me. They built an ant farm around my ant farms. The town of Coleman: they bought it. That wasn’t as hard as you might think. It was…What was the name of that town where you spent your teenage years? Little Nap?”
“Siesta Corta,” I said.
“Right,” said Love. “Compared to Coleman, Siesta Corta was a metropolis. Coleman was just a saloon with a gas pump and a mail drop. The organization bought it and brought in their own people. The night I finally came looking for an ant to put in my ant farm, they were waiting for me.
“The setup was perfect—too perfect. They’d doubled all the saloon staff I might recognize, and there was a pretty girl sitting at the bar, slightly drunk, looking exactly like the pretty girl I’d fantasized about…She smiled at me and encouraged me to sit with her, and in that moment, I knew two things: First, that I’d walked into a trap. And second, that since what I’d been planning to do was clearly evil, the people who’d set the trap must be good. So good could be tricky, too. That was a revelation to me.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “So you just saw the light then?”
“It wasn’t exactly Saul on the road to Damascus,” said Love. “But it was a significant epiphany. So I looked at this pretty, helpless girl who wasn’t helpless at all, and said to her, ‘I surrender.’”
“And they recruited you?”
“Well. It wasn’t quite that simple. The road from there to here was a long and twisted one, and along the way I gave True more than a few opportunities to regret his leniency towards me. But in the end, yes, here I am, running the circus.
“And the reason I’m telling you all this,” Love continued, “is that I want you to know I understand evil. I’ve been there; I’ve felt its draw, and almost succumbed.
“I understand it, but I don’t condone it. I know that I was lucky. The organization would have been right to put me down. And if I’d gone ahead and done to that pretty girl what I was thinking of doing…A quick death would have been a mercy to me.
“So maybe you are a good Jane. We’ll proceed on that assumption for now. And if you are a good Jane, then all will be well: if the Troop wants to play tricky, we’ll show them what tricky really is.
“But if you’re a bad Jane? If you’re lying to us now, if even a drop of True or Wise’s blood is on your hands?…You’ll weep before we’re through. True was enlightened; Wise was patient. I’m neither. Are we clear?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I have the ground rules straight.”
“Good.” He brightened, and held out his hand—like I was really going to touch him after hearing that story. “Let’s go in the next room. We’ll talk strategy…and see what we can’t do about that brother of yours.”