MY NATIONAL ID CARD WAS A MARVELOUSLY HACKED BIT OF the counterfeiter’s art that took full advantage of the many loopholes that popped up when Patriot II dictated. We all walk about with cards broadcasting our personal data hither and yon. With the software that had come included in the mind-numbing cost of the card, I could, as often as I liked, log on to my cardholder’s account, input my password, place my card on an RFID read/write/rewriter USBed to my computer, and have my card’s RFID chip updated with all the latest travel clearances. Guaranteed to be current within five hours of any changes to local, state, and federal security. On any given day I would make a point of updating my clearance before leaving the house, thus ensuring that I might pass easily through the most stringent checkpoints and roadblocks. Even in a rapidly evolving security environment such as the one emerging outside, it saved me no end of trouble. Unfortunately, the card did not create an identity from scratch when it was updated; it simply altered one’s clearance for sensitive and hazardous areas. Assuming that anyone was actively looking for the identity radioed from that tiny chip, it would appear on a number of data logs and registries every time it was scanned and cleared, leaving a trail of electronic bread crumbs to be followed wherever I should go.
In normal circumstances it would be an unthinkable breach of personal security to travel with that card after repulsing an attack. But it seemed that I had passed beyond the realm of normal circumstances, even for myself.
Having insinuated myself into a stream of events, I would have preferred to tack between obstacles until my goal was within range, only then snatching it from the current and veering unnoticed to a hidden tributary to observe until I was certain that I had left no trace. Clearly I had already failed. Speed was now more urgent than subtlety. Whatever cross-purposes the Afronzo family retainers might have to my own, they’d certainly be headed toward the same destination.
I’d bandaged my wounds, dressed, and taken from the dead a few items that I wished to add to the travel kit I always kept in my garage for an occasion such as this. I’d experienced them before. That I was being driven from my home so late in life seemed indisputable evidence that my life would soon be ending.
A conclusion that caused me some great confusion as it was difficult from my perspective in the moment to see how the shape of my life could resolve itself after being so thoroughly bent from the form I had crafted. It wasn’t that I doubted a violent end was my due, but something about the nature of the assault I had endured had knocked a great many elements out of balance. Not the least of which was the hard-earned harmony I’d built into my home. It was, there are no other words, a mess. And I had no time to put it into any kind of order. Let alone deal with the bloodstains.
Aging, wounded to an extent I’d not been in many years, my painstakingly crafted home in shambles, the world rising on a tide of its own madness and a plague of unrest, I found it impossible to envision the grace notes that would allow the composition of my life to be completed upon my death. Yet it could not help but be imminent.
But the world, as it often has for me, provided some slight evidence that there was a pattern to events. Revealed in the ringing of a phone. Or, rather, in the tune this particular phone played when it was called. “Welcome to My Nightmare.” A call that provided an improbably timed touchstone of purpose.
I did not keep Lady Chizu waiting any longer than the moments it took to find the phone in the knapsack where it had been stowed by my attackers.
“Yes?”
“I would like a progress report.”
I looked at the bodies strewn about.
“There have been complications.”
“Not insurmountable, I hope.”
I stepped to the glass wall that overlooked the basin, gazing at the view that had convinced me years before to embrace the instability of hillside living in Los Angeles.
“Not at all.”
“There is tension in your voice.”
I looked down at my legs. I’d put on black slacks against any seepage through my bandages.
“Yes, I’ve been wounded.”
There was a slight pause. I became aware of a rhythmic clicking that had accompanied our conversation to this point, as if Lady Chizu were repeatedly tapping the same key on one of her typewriters. The noise ceased in her own silence, started again as she spoke.
“Do you require assistance?”
I smiled at my reflection in the glass wall.
“No. Your wonderful sense of humor is an elixir in and of itself.”
The tapping of the key hesitated, as if interrupted by silent amusement.
“Jasper.”
I frowned now at my reflection, the sound of my name in her mouth troublesome.
“Lady Chizu.”
“When may I expect my property to be returned?”
I made a mental calculation that took into account the best- and worst-case scenarios involved in crossing to Culver City, what obstacles might be thrown up against me by Officer Haas, how quickly he would capitulate when he realized the nature of the man he was dealing with, the possibility of further interference by Afronzo mercenaries, and additional travel to Century City.
“Some hours after dawn, I expect.”
The key she was striking tapped three more times, and a chime rang as the carriage traversed to the end of its rail.
“I will delay my breakfast, then, in anticipation of you joining me.”
The Century Plaza Towers were illuminated; I could see them, albeit dimly, through the smoke. I nodded, focusing my attention on what I took as the fortieth floor of the north tower, imagining Lady Chizu seated on her folded legs at her desk, assessing the function of one of the items in her collection, pondering what might have been communicated in the final note it had been used to write.
“I will bring a flower for the table.”
A firm ratcheting as she returned the platen to its top position, ready to be struck again.
“Bring my property. Though the flower will be appreciated as well.”
She hung up.
I pocketed the phone. Leaving behind the rest of my work phones. I didn’t expect that I’d be doing business in the manner I had pursued it in the past. Should I need to contact any former clients, I had their numbers safely tucked in my head.
Standing one last moment at the glass, I realized that I’d reached a point of self-indulgence. There was nothing to be gained by staying any longer, nothing but increased risk. So I left.
In the garage I placed my travel kit in the trunk of the Cadillac. I no longer had the Land Rover I’d used years ago for a similar exodus, but the Cadillac was quite possibly more durable. The travel kit itself consisted of a Metolius Durathane mountaineering haul bag filled with various pieces of survival equipment, some of it lethal, most of it mundane, and a black canvas T Anthony duffel filled with clean underwear, socks, a few of Mr. Lee’s irreplaceable shirts, a spare laptop, phone, universal current adapter kit, an unopened deck of playing cards, a shaving case, two blank five-by-eight sketchbooks, a pencil box, a sweater with a hole worn under the right arm that I’d never mended because I was inexplicably attached to the garment and refused to remove it from the kit for fear I might have to run of a sudden and leave it behind, wool slacks in gray and navy, a black alligator belt, a crumple-resistant poly-blend black sport jacket made from, of all things, recycled plastic bottles, the front door key to the house I grew up in, and, a recent addition, the soldering iron that had been used on me. For which I expected I might have some need myself.
I opened the garage door, drove the Cadillac onto the driveway, and put it in park with the engine running while I climbed out and dug at the roots in a small bed of lamb’s-tongue that bordered the walkway up to the entry. Before exiting the house I’d spent several minutes passing a degaussing wand over the computers and drives the men had piled in the living room. I didn’t have time to ensure all data would be unrecoverable, but between my primary and secondary measures I felt I could afford a high level of confidence.
A few inches deep in the soil, I uncovered a plastic box and the capped end of a PVC pipe that ran toward the house. I twisted the cap from the pipe and freed the bare ends of two wires taped just inside its mouth. Black friction tape sealed the plastic box. I unwrapped it, opened the box, and took out a DELTADET 4 industrial detonator. I pressed the test button to be certain the batteries were charged, received a green light, clipped the two wires into a slot at the top of the detonator, flicked the arming switch, and pushed the red button that gave me a fifteen-second delay to leave the scene.
Leave I did, climbing through the open door of the Cadillac and accelerating away without buckling my seat belt, letting momentum close the door for me. There wasn’t anything to be heard; the Thermate TH3 packs planted about the house would quickly incinerate my personal records, the accumulations of DNA I’d sloughed off in my bed and bathroom, and perhaps burn long enough to create difficulties in identifying the men I’d killed. But I doubted that last possibility. The charges were specifically sized and placed to erase as many of my traces as possible, but not to rage so thoroughly that the sprinkler system could not extinguish the blaze before the concrete, glass, and steel structure was burned through and the surrounding hills and homes put at risk. It was not sentiment. It was practicality. Enduring pursuit and notoriety being the inevitable rewards for starting wildfires in the Hollywood Hills. Should anyone investigate the smoke drifting from the sodden interior ruins of my home, they might be shocked to find the corpses, but that shock would be far outpaced by the relief that the fire was contained.
I drove down the narrow twisting streets, slowing to a crawl at one point while a party of drunken sleepless in fancy-dress ball gowns and tuxedos stumbled down the middle of the road for a quarter mile. They began to dance as they walked, puppeteers to the towering spider shadows that my high beams projected onto the walls of abandoned homes and the branches of dead trees.
Inching behind them, illuminating their capers, I felt my confusion again. A moment like this, a mystery play acted out just for my eyes, how could such a thing happen and my end not be at hand? Yet where was the beauty in my own life to offset the value of such a gift?
It was coming. The future.
It was already here.