Afterparty (13 page)

“
One-Ten
can still help people,” Edo said. “Not in the amounts that we took, of course. Perhaps tiny dosages. Something that would open the door just a little bit.”

“What fucking door?”

“To God,” Edo said. He was perfectly sincere.

That’s when I realized he’d been taken in by the drug. He wasn’t even struggling to keep himself sane. He’d given in.

I turned on Rovil. “What about you? Is Numinous a doorway to Jesus?”

Rovil glanced at Edo, then looked at his hands. “I cannot say that, but it has certainly helped me.”

“You fuckers.”

Edo stared at me. His eyes gleamed.

I pushed back from the table and started to get up. My belly was huge, a thing with its own gravity. Dr. Gloria put out a hand to help me up, but I shoved her away. “After all this,” I said to Edo, “you would still put the drug out there. You think people can take just one small dose, then
stop
? What do you think Mikala was doing before she lost herself? She became a fanatic. She made a neurochemical bomb, then she dropped it—on her own child. Why? So we could all see God together.”

“Please, sit down…,” Edo said.

“Promise me.”

“I can’t—”

“Swear on your fucking god!”

“I can’t do that,” he said.

The nurse was hurrying toward me.

“If you ever let it out in the world, I will hunt you down like a fucking dog,” I said to him. “And no god will save you.”

*   *   *

When I returned to the hotel room, Ollie had turned it into a command center. She’d moved the bed and desk to the center of the room, then laid the two chairs on the bed. Dozens of floppy screens had been taped up on three walls. To the left was a rectangular arrangement of screens ten feet wide and five feet tall. Another row of screens were taped end to end, forming a band that ran across the glass balcony door. The right-hand wall was a random selection of single screens.

Ollie stood before one of the singles, flicking through text. She’d showered and changed into a new T-shirt. Without looking away from the screen she said, “You missed breakfast.”

She was annoyed with me.

“Missed more than that, looks like,” I said. On the screen nearest me was displayed a column of long numbers separated with dots, like foreign telephone numbers. “So what are you up to, Ol? And where did you get all these screens?”

“Have you been in contact with Edo Anderssen Vik?” she asked. Still not looking at me.

“Contact? Not yet.”

“Anything—calls, messages…”

“Well, I
tried
to get messages through.”

She turned to face me. “Have you been crying?”

“I’m fine.”

“Lyda, you can tell me if—”

“I’m
fine
. Edo never called me back. Rovil hasn’t gotten an answer, either.”

“I wish you had told me that,” she said. Her gaze shifted from me to some mental screen.

“Why?” I asked.

She walked along the balcony glass, one hand raised, and the text and graphics rippled as she passed, seemingly following her across the room. “You’ve tipped him off. If you’re hunting someone, you don’t give them advance notice.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing—hunting him?”

“Last night you said you didn’t want anyone to get the drug, and you mentioned Edo especially.”

“I did?” I did. At the diner, I remembered it now. “Okay, yeah. I’m hunting him.”

“Then we’re on the same page.”

“Uh, you look like you’re on fifty pages at once.”

“It’s been tricky,” she said. “Your friend Edo keeps a low profile.” She swiped away a graphic, and it was replaced with a picture of a smiling Edo at some business affair, wearing a jacket with no tie. “This is his last public appearance, five years ago.” He looked even bigger than in the old days. His eyes gleamed, perhaps from the camera flash. Something about that smile seemed false.

She called up another photo. The man looked like a younger, thinner, and humorless version of Edo. His hair was blond to almost white, and pulled back high on his forehead. The last time I’d seen him had been at the trial, ten years ago. He’d looked less like his father then and more like a shaggy blond hippie.

“Little Edo,” I said.

“Don’t call him that to his face,” Ollie said. “He hates it. Eduard Junior is handling all the business now—he’s the public face of the company. He has a beautiful wife, an adopted daughter, and is active in several charities.” She flicked through several pictures. Most of them of Eduard Jr., but in several he appeared with his wife Suzette, an ice-blonde Nordic princess in size zero dresses.

Their daughter appeared in only one photo, which seemed to have been taken at an airport. She was eight or nine years old in the picture, with curly hair pulled back in a tight bun. She was looking at something in her hands. Eduard had his arm around her shoulder.

“Are you okay?” Ollie asked. “You’re flushed.”

“I’m—she’s just very pretty.”

Ollie’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, she is.”

I cleared my throat. “So is Edo still calling the shots for the company?”

“Opinion’s split,” she said. “Nobody can get close enough to ask him.”

“So we can’t reach him?” I said, frustrated. “Rovil said the same thing. He wasn’t even sure what country Edo was in.”

“This week he’s in his place outside London.”

“What?”

She turned back to the screens. “London right now. Before that, he spent fifteen days in the US, most of it on his estate in New Mexico, but he was in New York City for two days. He also has a home in Norway, but he hasn’t visited there in years, most likely because of his tax situation.”

I was stunned. “You got all that from—” I gestured at the walls. “What? Illegal wiretaps? Your spook friends in the government?”

Ollie shook her head. “They’re not allowed to talk to me anymore. If I even reach out, it could cause problems for them. So I don’t. This is all from public or semipublic sources. No TSA data, no wiretaps. I’ve got bots crawling the social web, and a cloud-based analysis engine that’s just a generation behind what I used to work with professionally.”

“This is what Fayza did to me. She hired a hacker and got all the details on me.”

“This isn’t hacking, it’s data mining.” She pointed at the big wall, where dozens of pastel spheres pulsed and shifted. “Everybody leaves a trail. It’s almost impossible not to leave footprints all over the online world, and that easily maps to your location in the real world. Unless you’re rich—and Edo Vik is very, very rich. He’s got a top-notch reputation company scrubbing his tracks. His personal footprint is null, as far as recent data goes. But you can infer a lot from second- and third-degree associates. Like this guy.”

She gestured toward one of the smaller circles, and it expanded. “The husband of one of his assistants is a twenty-five-year-old amateur foodie microfamous for his restaurant reviews. He lives in New York, but two nights ago he raved about a meal he’d just had at the 8-Ball, an Uzbek mobile restaurant in Hampstead. That’s north London.”

“So maybe they’re on vacation,” I said.

“Maybe. But you have to look at the data in aggregate. I’ve got the org chart for Edo’s whole company, and I can keep track of most of them. The handful of people who assist Edo and Junior are in the UK right now, but they’re leaving soon.”

I touched one of the spheres, and it shrank. The graphics told me nothing. “Are you telling me you know where Edo will be, and when?”

“I can make a pretty good guess.”

I breathed in. “When is he coming back to the US?”

“Next Thursday. Afternoon. New York City.”

“Holy shit!” I laughed. “How can you possibly know that?”

“I asked.” She allowed herself a smile. “That foodie husband? I friended him and asked him if he was going to be home in time for the Taste of New York festival, and he said he was out of town for the first day, but he’d be back in time for Friday. All the commercial flights are arriving in the afternoon.”

Five days.

“I have to be there,” I said.

Ollie said, “Where? New York?”

“Yes, New York. I’m hunting him, right?”

“So … you want to cross the
border
.”

“That’s right.”

“Lyda, if they catch you on the other side, you could end up in prison—American prison, not some nice Canadian hospital.”

“You said people do it all the time. I’ll just hop over, then hop back before the devil knows I’m there.”

She put out a hand. “I know you don’t want anyone to make the drug, but it’s not worth doing time for.”

“You don’t know how dangerous this stuff is,” I said.

“Try me.”

I took a breath. “Okay. The problem is not that it causes these hallucinations; it’s that it’s so damn convincing—and you
stay
convinced. Look at Rovil. He knows the chemistry, yet he still thinks that fucking Ganesh is there guiding him. Numinous not only installs a supernatural chaperone, it makes you believe in it.”

“Even you?” Ollie asked.

“I
know
, in the deepest recesses of my ‘heart,’ that Dr. Gloria is real, that she was sent by God to save me from killing myself.
It’s a Wonderful Life
, courtesy of an overactive temporal lobe.”

“But you’re handling it,” Ollie said. “You can keep track of what’s real.”

“Barely,” I said. “I know, in an abstract way, that she’s a symptom of an overdose, but that doesn’t
feel
true. Half the time I can’t stop myself from talking back to her. Every day I tell myself, ‘Think like a stage magician.’”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Know it’s a trick and don’t forget it’s a trick,” I said. “The rabbit is already in the hat. Do
not
clap for fucking Tinkerbell. Believe nothing.”

“Sounds tiring.”

“Exactly. How many people can do that every day? Rovil can’t. Gil can’t. Not even Mikala. And what about—?” I started to say
What about kids?
“What happens if this spreads? The planet’s already too full of fanatics. Numinous could convert millions of people into true believers—each of ’em one hundred percent certain they’ve been personally handed the fucking stone tablets.”

Ollie stared at me. I said, “I’m sorry, was that too ranty?”

“You’ve been rehearsing this speech,” she said.

“What? No. Well, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. But you get what I’m saying, right?”

“Sure,” Ollie said. “You’re saving the world.”

“It sounds dumb when you say it like that.”

She shrugged.

“This really is a dangerous drug,” I said.

“I believe that part. I just don’t think that’s why you’re doing all this—breaking out of the hospital, crossing international borders…” She shook her head. “Is this about the girl?”

I flinched without moving. Yes, that is possible.

“What girl?” I asked.

“Francine,” she said. “The girl who killed herself.”

Oh, I thought. Her. “I barely knew her,” I said.

Ollie squinted at me. “All right,” she said. “But someday you’re going to tell me why you’re really doing this.”

And I thought, No. No I’m not.

“I’m not asking for much,” I said. “I have no idea how to get through customs, and I just need you to point me in the right direction. You know what I mean—fake passports, documents…”

“Lyda, you have a tracking device installed in your arm. There is no way you’re crossing the border with that thing.”

“I thought maybe you could help with that, too.”

“What makes you think I can do any of this?”

“You told me. You said criminals did it every day.”

“I’m not a criminal,” Ollie said. She almost managed to say it with a straight face.

Ollie went away to think for a while, by which I mean she sat on the couch and stared at the wall for half an hour. Then she said, “The first thing we have to do is find you a pet.”

“What kind of pet?”

*   *   *

“Which one do you like?” the Cat Lady asked.

The house swelled and pulsed with felines. They breathed on the bookshelves, prowled the backs of the couches, swirled in currents around our ankles. The atmosphere was an acrid funk of inadequately suppressed urine and dander. Bobby and I sat on the couch, surrounded. A big orange tabby had jumped onto his lap and was eyeing the treasure chest with a predatory eye. Ollie had refused to come with us, said she had other calls to make, so she gave us directions to this house in Markham and sent us off to choose.

“Does it matter?” I asked.

The Cat Lady scowled. She was a large, dark-skinned woman in her sixties, dressed in a red tank top and purple stretch pants. Her arms were sleeved in densely crowded tattoos that had blurred into paisley. “Fine,” she said. “Just grab any old cat, why not.”

I pointed to the orange monster on Bobby’s lap. “Okay, this one.”

“Shandygaff? Don’t be ridiculous; he’s too old.”

“A kitten then.”

“
What?
”

“Look, why don’t you just pick one out for me?”

She closed her eyes, as if regretting ever letting me in the house. “Fine,” she said.

She set down the two cats on her lap and began to look around the room. I could see fifteen, twenty cats, and no telling how many were in the kitchen and bedrooms.

Bobby yelped. He was clutching his treasure chest. “It clawed me!” he said.

“Settle down,” I said.

The cat batted at Bobby’s closed hands. “Lyda, please, get it off me.”

“Let him play with your toy,” the Cat Lady said.

“It’s not a toy!”

She rolled her eyes. We were scoring no points with the Cat Lady. She put her hands on her hips, looked around at the bookshelves. “Ah! There you are!” She nabbed a black cat and pointed his face at me. He looked morose. “This is Lamont,” she said.

“He’s perfect,” I said. “Where do we do this?”

The Cat Lady led me to the kitchen, a generous space with white cabinets, a center island with bar stools, and old-fashioned white appliances. A plastic trough dotted with cat food lined one wall, where half a dozen cats paced, complaining. “It’s not supper time yet,” the Cat Lady told them. She shooed a big Persian from the top of the island.