WHEN I ARRIVED AT LADY CHIZU’S OFFICE, MY HANDS WERE not in my pockets, but they were full.
In one hand I carried the gift I had promised, a flower, a random lily, plucked from a withered bush in Rose’s garden, fragrant. In the other I carried Omaha Garden Haas. Sleeping still. As she had been since I took her from the car seat Park had showed me how to install in my Cadillac.
Lady Chizu received the flower with all her long-accumulated graciousness. The child she received into her presence with a slight pursing of thin lips.
“This is unexpected.”
I said nothing.
Chizu indicated the breakfast laid out on her low desk, set for two, noodle soup with spicy egg and salt cod.
“Is she old enough for milk?”
I tipped my head at one of the well-mannered, fabulously cheekboned young men who had escorted me in. A countermeasure in light of my hands not being pocketed. One carried the diaper bag I’d had draped over my shoulder when I came off the elevator.
“I have powdered formula. If someone would be so kind.”
She nodded.
I looked at the man.
“Three scoops, six ounces filtered water. Room temperature, please.”
Both bowed and left.
Chizu took a slight step back. I walked past her toward the table.
She observed my stride.
“Your wounds.”
There was a small blue vase standing empty on the table. I slipped the stem of the lily into its mouth.
“Yes.”
I placed the now-empty hand into my pocket.
She approached, small gliding steps.
“I am curious.”
“Yes?”
She lowered herself to her cushion.
“When I invited you to breakfast, did it occur to you to think how you would eat with your hands in your pockets?”
I smiled.
“No, it did not.”
She pointed at the second cushion.
“I would not have made the invitation if I had not intended for you to be comfortable.”
I took the hand from my pocket and used it as I lowered myself, edging onto my bottom rather than sitting on my legs in her manner. Omaha burrowed more deeply into my armpit.
Chizu picked up a set of plain bamboo chopsticks.
“Were your legs injured in execution of my concerns?”
I was looking at the wall behind her. The typewriters were gone. In their places, filling only a handful of the cubbyholes, were a variety of objects: a lone thumb drive that seemed to have been crafted into the proximal phalanx of an actual thumb, its beaded thong draped over a framed screen grab image of a warty hag sitting astride a dragon. An iPhone running an animation of a bearded dwarf in plate armor, his long red hair wreathed in white roses. A framed and numbered piece of collage by Shadrach that I may or may not have seen at his show. And a hard drive, carefully disassembled, all the components laid out with schematic precision around a small card of linen stock on which someone had executed a beautiful copperplate script that spelled out a name with no vowels.
I looked from the displays to the lady.
“Yes. There were many unexpected turns of events.”
“That is apparent.”
One of the cheekboned men returned, placed a filled baby bottle on the table next to me, placed the diaper bag, now properly screened, at my side, bowed, and left.
Chizu’s chopsticks were poised over her bowl.
“How is this best accomplished so that we might all eat?”
I considered the technical difficulties involved in eating hot soup one-handed while feeding a baby.
“It would be easiest, I think, if the ladies eat first. And then I may ask for your help.”
She nodded, dipped her chopsticks into her bowl.
“It has been years since I held a baby. My little brothers. But I expect that one never forgets.”
I didn’t know if she was right or wrong in that. Before Park had handed me Omaha, I had never held a baby.
Chizu pinched a knot of noodles between her chopsticks.
“And perhaps you will tell me, while I eat, some of the turns of events you encountered.”
“Yes, of course.”
She bent her head and politely slurped her noodles. I picked up the bottle, shook it in the manner Park had instructed, tickled Omaha’s lower lip with the nipple, and held it for her as she began to eat while still asleep.
What Park had called a dream feeding.
By the time the bottle was empty, and Lady Chizu’s bowl as well, I had finished most of my story, and I handed the baby across the table. She woke when she felt new hands on her, and I expected she would cry, but she did not. Chizu played a game, first showing the baby her five-fingered hand and then hiding it and showing her the four-fingered hand. A game that made Omaha giggle.
“And my hard drive?”
I slurped my soup. It was slightly cold but still excellent.
“Lady Chizu, mistress of one thousand storks, I do not have it.”
She flashed the four-fingered hand at the baby girl.
“It was destroyed before you could take possession?”
I used the tips of my chopsticks to pluck a sliver of egg white from the broth.
“No. I held it in my hand. And I returned it to the man who stole it.”
She lifted Omaha from her lap and held her at eye level to herself.
“But you are here.”
I could see the tension in her neck, the effort she was making to disguise it.
“I am.”
She lowered her forehead, and Omaha reached out and ruffled her hair with both hands.
“To offer me what explanation?”
I put down my chopsticks and pointed at the diaper bag, and she nodded. From inside the bag I took Rose’s MacBook. I woke it from sleep, opened the new partition I had created while at Park’s home, placed it on the table, and turned it to face her.
She looked at the glen, the three adventurers huddled from the night’s cold around the dying fire.
“Ah.”
She said it with slight surprise and possibly a similar amount of delight. Though it could have been mild discomfort caused by Omaha yanking on her hair.
I laid a finger on the top of the screen.
“I do not have the drive, but I do have your property. I transferred the data from the travel drive, including the bill of sale and documents of provenance, and erased the partition where they had been previously stored. They are complete in every way that they were on that drive. And, to the best of my knowledge, as unique as the bill of sale states.”
She turned Omaha, facing her toward the screen.
“Teessa Delane. Founder Pale. And the Vitiated Man. Together they plumbed the Chasm to a depth of thirteen leagues. None have gone deeper. Their creators, all sleepless, have since died.”
She looked at me.
“The transference of these from one device to another impacts not only their value but their nature. I initially bid on these three in situ, as housed on the platforms from which the creators most usually played them. My broker failed to act quickly enough and could only ensure that the originals had been erased and his copies the only ones made. But he refused to renegotiate the price I had already paid. And further insulted me by insisting on a premium for the additional inconvenience he had suffered making the copies.”
I was still.
“He is dead now.”
She began her game of hands with the baby again.
“Yes, as you said. But killed in the course of his dealings with the Afronzo boy. Not for his offenses against me.”
I held an open hand over the laptop.
“This belonged to Rose Garden Haas, the mother of the baby in your lap. Sleepless herself, and a player. I transferred your property in her home, as she was in the first grips of the suffering.”
Omaha held tight to the thumb of the four-fingered hand as Chizu pulled lightly against her.
I continued.
“Does this addition to the provenance of your properties impact their nature and value in a manner that pleases you?”
She offered Omaha her five-fingered hand as well. The baby took each by a thumb and swung them together in a silent clap.
“It is a worthy addition, yes. I am pleased. Not that the woman should suffer, but it adds to the beauty of the item. Yes.”
Omaha swung the giant hands.
I turned the laptop toward myself, clicked back to the original partition, opened another application, and showed Chizu.
“And this is Cipher Blue. Elemental mage. She walked the length of the Clockwork Labyrinth alone and found its silent center. Created by Rose Haas, as surely as she created the child.”
Lady Chizu’s empire was built on engines of destruction and the men and women who wielded them. She had armed militias and insurgencies, rebels and strongmen. She had fielded mercenary armies of her own, seized governments, and held them ransom. Her guns had killed thousands.
She leaned forward, her hands encircling the baby’s torso, forgetting her discipline, letting the sickness inside twist her neck, and gazed at the young woman on the screen, sleeping in a perfectly silent catacomb.
“What do you want, Jasper?”
I pushed the laptop a few inches toward her.
“There is something I have to do.”
I stood.
“I need help.”
I bent and touched the top of Omaha’s head.
“And I need for her to be someplace safe. Until I come back for her.”
Chizu looked at my hand, so close to her person, and laid her four fingers over it.
“Yes.”
Omaha reached up and slapped at our hands, laughing, somehow comfortable under the touch of killers.
Park needed to protect his daughter in a world changing. He could only try to save the one he knew. Or slow its demise. I knew he would pursue justice, but within the limits of the law, however irrelevant it might have become.
It would never occur to him to simply kill both Afronzos.
I was of another mind.
Afrono’s security force had taken some recent losses. Eleven in all. Even allowing for extravagance, it was hard to imagine that Afronzo Senior employed more than fifteen to twenty former Israeli special forces. He might have many more sport-coated security guards, but they would be more suited to dealing with mail checks and property patrols than with covert terminations. Shooters, perhaps, but not killers. And any force that has recently had its numbers significantly whittled by a supposedly inferior opponent will suffer from a measurable loss of morale. Nonetheless, I’d need more than a great deal of luck.
My legs hurt. I’d have liked to have driven the STS up to the front door, but the Afronzos knew who I was. Even arriving in a hundred-thousand-dollar car I would not have been led into the patriarch’s presence. Neither the team they had sent to my house nor the one sent to Park’s had reported back. Whether or not additional men had been sent to investigate, they knew something was, at the very least, amiss. I’d crossed town twice on my adaptive ID. Once going south to Culver City and again heading north to Century City. Enough hours had passed for those journeys to have been logged any number of places. They must now know I lived.
Some camouflage was lent on my current journey by its being accomplished under the auspices of a Thousand Storks pass. It earned a sneer from the Guards, but to anyone looking for me via my NID, it would appear that I’d not left Century City since I arrived there in the morning. Still, a frontal approach would have required a vehicle more tanklike even than the Cadillac.
The Bel Air residents had been among the first to entrench their neighborhood, having fought a short but intense battle with the L.A. City Council over their right to do so. All streets entering off North Sepulveda and North Beverly Glen had been sealed by the Thousand Storks contractors that provided security for the entire community. Even along Sunset the access streets were closed; only the Bellagio entrance was still open. The decorative white stucco and black iron gates had been bolstered with more practical concrete barriers. A short maze of them meant to discourage any car bombers who might negotiate the thicket of spherical bollards that dotted the approach from the intersection. Patrolled by both Thousand Storks and dozens of private family security forces, there was at least one charity tennis tournament taking place there when I passed through the gate unhindered, as well as a wedding reception at the Hotel Bel Air, and a dog show at the country club.
I crossed a small property that I’d chosen because the Thousand Storks detail sheet reported it as being unoccupied, protected by only an alarm system and the TS patrols. From inside the tree line at the rear of the property I spent thirty minutes watching the Afronzo grounds beyond. I saw a single foot patrol. A man wearing a blue windbreaker rather than the expected blazer. He carried a flashlight that he played over the ground in front of him. I’d worried there might be dogs and was grateful there were not. Dogs are difficult. Small, fast targets; it can take up to three shots to hit one with small arms when they charge head on.
As soon as the man passed, I walked out of the trees, not at all steady on my legs, crossed the grass that looked no worse for the drought most people suffered the world over, went up to the lighted window of the guest cottage, peered through to see a man within a few years of my own age seated in an imitation Colonial chair, a bottle of overpriced cognac at hand, a book facedown in his lap, staring into the brown liquor in his snifter. I fired three shots. He was profile to me, so I concentrated fire on his head rather than his chest. Three bullets generally guarantee nothing flukish can happen. Odd deflections caused by a pane of glass, ricochets off the curve of the skull, bullets passing through areas of the brain that are used only for monitoring activity in the appendix, are all made allowable by the presence of the second and third bullets. Such things do not happen in threes. The gun was a silenced HK Mark 23.45 from my travel kit. Three bullets in the head from that size weapon meant death. Satisfied, I headed for the main house.
It took only slight reflection to surmise where I might find Afronzo the younger. A conical tower was affixed to the back of the house, an architectural feature that suited his tastes as I had inferred them.
There was an exceptional mechanic’s garage to service the fleet of luxury vehicles parked in the roundabout at the rear below the tower. One of the roll-up doors was raised three feet. Park’s Subaru was inside, doors open, contents strewn, the hollow spare on the ground, empty. I wormed under and found the inner door that led to a laundry, thence to a kitchen, to a supplementary dining room, and a hall that ended at a curl of stairs.
Imelda and Magda were at the top. Sitting on a refinished church pew cushioned in gold velvet, outside a single door. Magda held a BlackBerry where they could both see the screen.
Imelda had a hand over her mouth.
“Oh, my God. You didn’t tell me he was that nasty.”
Magda clicked a button.
“Oh, yeah. Read this one.”
“Oh. My. God. Is he?”
Magda was nodding.
“He totally backs it up. And he likes to send pics, too.”
“Show me, show me.”
Both had split the Velcro seams on their corset-style body armor, wearing it peeled open so they could bend to sit.
I shot Imelda in the heart. Magda flinched at the blood, causing her to move the BlackBerry, giving me an unobstructed shot at her heart. I took it. I closed distance and shot them each once more, head shots.
The door was unlocked.
The room on the other side covered 270 degrees of the tower’s circumference, windows running the outer wall. Cager apparently had used the same designer as he had at Denizone. A postapocalypse medieval revival.
He was sitting in an imitation Eames lounge chair that had been made with oxidized copper rather than plywood. His right hand was fitted into the ergonomic contours of a glossy black gaming hub. His other hand held his phone, thumb flicking over the keys as he occasionally stole glances away from the wall-mounted LCD display to read the messages constantly announcing themselves with the opening note of the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the LCD, an elegant figure in an absurdly long windblown black cape scampered and leaped on a plane of subtle geometrics, responding to the slight movements of his fingers and palm on the hub. It took me a moment to realize that his character was dancing, re-creating Cyd Charisse’s dream ballet with the wind in Singing in the Rain.
On the floor next to his chair was a pile of several objects. The travel drive. A journal. The backup thumb drive Park had worn around his neck. The disk I’d given him with the recording of the mass murder at the gold farm. And his father’s watch.
I closed the door firmly.
He didn’t look up.
“What is it?”
I moved into his peripheral vision.
“I need to know what happened to Officer Parker Haas.”
He looked up.
“You’re that guy.”
He removed his hand from the game hub and took out his comb and raked his hair.
“You look very angry. I think.”
He put the comb away.
“That’s odd.”
I was not cruel. I had questions and I asked them. When he was slow to answer, unused to doing promptly what was required of him, I demonstrated the advantages of brevity. But I was not cruel. Not as I received the information I needed. Nor when I killed him. Three bullets. Like father, like son.
Confusion had begun to reign when I left several minutes after I had arrived. Something had been seen on a security screen somewhere deep within the house. Several blue windbreakers were gathered at the guest cottage. Their energy was focused on the grounds.
Still, as I came out of the garage, I was seen by one of the windbreakers. He called to me. I kept walking, cutting across the parking area through the cars that were already taking on the patina of relics from another age. Behind me I heard two sets of rapid footsteps. I measured the distance to the trees. Still moving, I glanced through the windows of the cars to see if they had been left with keys in the ignition. They had not. The HK was seated in its shoulder holster under the black sport coat I’d worn. I had two rounds still left in the gun and a twelve-round backup clip. But that was all I carried. My legs would not allow me to run. When my pursuers reached me, I would turn and use one bullet on each, swap to a full clip, and perhaps have time to strip them of their weapons. After that I would need to take cover before a full assault began. I was looking for the heaviest vehicle in the lot when two Thousand Storks fast attack vehicles pulled into the drive. I changed course and walked toward them. The four Storks in each vehicle jumped out and split into twos, ignoring me entirely as they ran past. And my pursuers, taking their cue from the specialists who clearly knew who I was and why I was there, pulled up and turned back, allowing me to walk unmolested down the length of Madrono, circling back to where I’d parked the STS. The car, myself, and all activity in my locale helpfully ignored by Thousand Storks for the one hour between 11 p.m. and midnight. As I’d requested, and as Lady Chizu had ordered, in exchange for the wonder that was Cipher Blue.
Park’s journal and the other items in my possession, I now drove south to find the end of the story.
I did not linger in the nursery when I returned to the Culver City house. What I found there was not meant for me, or for anyone else. It was shameful to gawk at such a thing, since there were only two people who could understand its meaning. Perhaps a third person, some day. I left the room and searched for what I’d come for.
Park had left the safe open. From inside I took the certificates of marriage and birth, Omaha’s medical records, the detective’s badge Park had been given for his Dreamer assignment, and the broach that had been his mother’s. In a nightstand cabinet I found a stack of black journals with red spines, Rose’s diaries from high school to just a few days before. I took a case from a pillow on the bed and filled it with the black and red books. There was a photo album. A shoe box of letters. Park’s academy diploma. A framed square of white cardboard with a smeared green imprint of a baby’s foot. These all seemed relevant, and I took them.
The last item I took was the gun Park had used to kill. Everything else I had taken was alien to me. The gun was comforting in its familiarity.
There was nothing else of Park that I understood half as well as I did the lethal mechanics of such a weapon. I could follow the rationale in his choices and actions, but it was very much like a novice speaker of a foreign language translating everything he heard into his native tongue. The sense was there, but it was arrived at only after great labor, and with little nuance.
Fluency would take time. But I’d made a start, and learned this much.