Authors: Matt Ruff
“Oh yeah?” I said, slipping the gun off safe. “I hear it works a lot better if you actually run it through the machine.”
“It’s
no good
.” His whole body was jerking violently to one side now.
“OK, give it back to me then. I’ll pay cash.”
“It’s against the rules for me to give it back. I’m going to need you to
come inside
with me.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Miss—”
“You want to keep the card, go ahead and keep it. But I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Miss,
please
…”
I came this close to shooting him. But as he leaned in to plead with me, I finally got a glimpse of his face, and saw that he was scared silly. And then—probably because I was already in a horror-movie frame of mind—it occurred to me that I’d heard this story before somewhere.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Are you acting weird because there’s a guy with an ax crouched behind my back seat?”
The gas-station attendant blinked. “You
know
him?”
“Well, we haven’t been formally introduced, but I’m pretty sure his name is Bob.”
“Oh,” the attendant said. “OK. I’ll just go run your card, then…”
He went back into the office; I looked in my rearview mirror. “Robert Wise, I presume?”
“If I weren’t,” Wise said, “you’d be dead. Or wishing
you were.” He got up, and despite the tough talk and the double-bitter in his hands, my first impression was that he wasn’t all that scary. He didn’t look like an ax murderer; he looked like an army ranger who’d gotten lost on his way to chop some firewood.
“How long have you been back there?” I asked him. “Since Bakersfield?”
“Does it matter?”
“I just want to know how cranky you are. If you’ve been sitting on the floor all the way from S.F., your butt must be pretty sore by now.”
“You’re funny,” said Wise. “True mentioned you were funny.” Then he said, “Wait here,” and got out.
I watched him walk towards the gas-station office, ax swinging at his side. As Wise came in the door, the attendant looked up from the credit-card machine and started to raise his hands. Then the office lights went out.
Two minutes passed. Wise reappeared, minus his ax. He trotted back to the SUV and got into the front passenger seat. “Here,” he said, handing me the credit card.
“Uh…What did you just do?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“What did you do, Wise?”
“I’ll tell you later. Right now, we need to get away from here.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Sometime in the next forty-two seconds would be good.”
The wristwatch glance stopped me from arguing. I put the SUV in gear and drove, counting “one one thousand, two one thousand,” under my breath. When I got to “forty-two one thousand,” bright light flared in the rearview.
I took a hand off the wheel and reached for my NC gun. The paper bag was empty.
“That’s all right, Jane,” Wise said. “I’ll hang on to the weapon for now. You just concentrate on driving. And
don’t worry about that guy back there—he had it coming, I promise.”
“What the
hell
—”
“Just drive.”
I drove. Wise didn’t speak again until we were in Nevada. A few miles past the state line, he had me leave the highway for an unpaved road that snaked north into the desert.
“We’re not going to Vegas tonight?”
“No. My place.”
The road ended at a fenced compound whose gate opened automatically for us. Wise directed me inside, to a long, low, warehouse-style building with a sign that read
LAWFUL GOOD PRESS
. As soon as I’d parked, he took the keys.
“It’s OK,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m too tired.”
“Yeah, well, this way I don’t have to worry about you driving off in your sleep.”
“What if I walk off in my sleep?”
“There are coyotes,” said Wise. “So don’t.”
I followed him into the warehouse, to a musty room where a cot had already been set up for me. “Bathroom’s straight back if you need it,” he said. “Other than that, if you get an urge to snoop around—”
“I know. Coyotes.”
I woke up in the morning to a vision of swastikas. To the left of my cot was a bookcase labeled
ARYAN LITERATURE
, filled with display copies of books with titles like
A Hoax Called Auschwitz
and
The Illustrated Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I got up, rubbing sleep from my eyes, and checked out the other bookcases lining the room, each with its own subject: White Supremacy; Black Supremacy; Religion; Firearms and Silencers; Knife-Fighting and Martial Arts; Bomb-Making; Biological Warfare; Torture Techniques; Confidence Games; Phony I.D.
and Identity Theft; Computer Hacking; Money-Laundering and Tax Evasion; Stalking; Revenge.
I’d wandered over to Bomb-Making and was leafing through
The Patriot’s Cookbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Brewing Explosives and Chemical Weapons at Home
when Wise came into the room. He was showered and shaved, and in a much mellower mood than the night before. “Found something you like?”
“Lawful Good Press,” I said. “Is that a joke?”
“I don’t know. Are you laughing?”
I held up
The Patriot’s Cookbook.
“Is
this
a joke?”
“It’s no substitute for a college chemistry degree, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“The recipes don’t work?”
Wise made a seesawing motion with his hand. “The quality of the information varies. The smoke-and stink-bomb recipes are pretty solid; the ones for TNT and plastique, not so much.”
“What about this one?” I pointed to a line in the table of contents that read, “Sarin Gas.”
“Look at the equipment list.”
I did. “What’s a Gallinago flask?”
“A very specialized piece of hardware—so specialized, it doesn’t actually exist. But if you ask for it at a chemical-supply house, or try to search for it on the Internet, bells go off in Panopticon.”
“Are the books bugged, too?”
“Some of them. Eyes Only on selected volumes, plus Library Bindings on some of the hate literature. And of course we keep a mailing list.” He took a remote control from his pocket and pointed it at the picture of the Reichstag that hung above the Aryan Lit. bookcase; the picture slid aside, revealing a computerized map of the U.S. covered in blinking points of light. “Green dots are customers we believe to be harmless—people who think it’s cute to have
How to Find Your Ex-Wife
as bathroom reading copy.
Red dots are customers who want to do damage. Yellow dots, we’re not sure yet.”
“Lot of red dots around Vegas right now,” I observed.
“Yeah, we noticed that too. But here, take a look at this…” He pressed another button on the remote, and all the dots vanished except for one in southern California. A picture and a name appeared at the bottom of the screen. “Recognize him?”
“The gas-station attendant.”
“He had some unfortunate ideas about anthrax and the U.S. Postal Service.”
“If he was a bad monkey, shouldn’t I have taken care of him?”
“Well, if you’d bothered to check the back of your vehicle for stowaways, we would have had time to discuss that. As it was, it just seemed simpler to handle him myself. Plus I really was feeling pretty cranky. You hungry?”
Besides the printing press and bindery, the building had a full industrial kitchen. I sat at a stainless-steel counter making small talk while Wise cooked me breakfast.
“So how’d you end up a Clown?” I asked him. “I mean, axwork aside, you seem like a normal guy.”
“Don’t let the haircut fool you,” Wise said. “I was originally in intel, but when I came out here to start up the Press, the head of the Scary Clowns made me an offer.”
“Panopticon to Clown seems like a popular career path. Did you know—”
“Gacy?” Wise shook his head. “Before my time.”
“What about a guy named Dixon? You ever cross paths with him?”
“You could say so. I was his Probate officer.”
“You
trained
Dixon?…So does that mean you were in Malfeasance?”
“No, regular Panopticon. Dixon was too at first, but he was bucking for a Malfie post from day one.”
“Did you like him?”
“He was a good student. A little overzealous, maybe. Why, what’s he to you?”
“He’s running my background check.”
Wise laughed. “I bet that’s fun.”
“Thrilling. Listen, maybe you can explain something to me: when Dixon called me in for an interview, I had to wear this wristband…” I described it to him.
“Sounds like a shibboleth device,” Wise said.
“What’s a shibboleth?”
“It’s from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. The men of Gilead went to war against the men of Ephraim, and the Ephraimites got slaughtered. When the survivors tried to pass themselves off as members of another tribe, their accents gave them away: Ephraimites couldn’t pronounce the ‘sh’ sound, so when they said the word ‘Shibboleth,’ it came out ‘Sibboleth.’”
“And a shibboleth device…?”
“Same basic idea. It’s a tool for sorting good monkeys from bad monkeys.”
“By the way they talk?”
“By the way they feel. The device tests for inappropriate emotional responses. Like, someone tells you your mother died, and you’re happy instead of sad. Or someone makes you talk about this shameful thing you did, only you’re not ashamed.” He laughed again. “You look worried. Don’t be. I don’t know what went on between you and Dixon, but if he had any serious doubts about you, you wouldn’t be here. This operation’s too important.”
“What is the operation, anyway?”
He handed me a silver medical bracelet like the kind epileptics wear. On one side was a cluster of Egyptian hieroglyphs over the legend
OZYMANDIAS LLC
. On the other side was an inscription:
in case of death
keep body cool & call
1-800-EXTROPY
for further instructions
—————————
$50,000 cash reward
“You know what cryogenics is?” Wise asked.
“Sure. It’s where they put you on ice until doctors can invent a cure for whatever killed you. I didn’t know there was a rewards program, though.”
“That’s the deluxe version. The goal is to get the cadaver into cryostasis as quickly as possible, to minimize postmortem decay.”
“Let me guess: this is one of those clever-sounding ideas that turns out not to be.”
“There
is
a contradiction,” said Wise, “between wanting to live forever, and offering a cash bounty for the discovery of your corpse.” He passed me a stack of what looked like baseball cards. But the pictures were of both men and women, and the stats on the back weren’t sports-related. “These are all the customers of the Ozymandias Corporation who’ve died within the past six months.”
I counted thirteen cards. “How big is their client list?”
“Not that big. Going by the average of previous six-month periods, there should be two cards in that stack at most.”
“So someone’s killing them off for the bounty money…But wouldn’t that be kind of hard to get away with? I mean, you’d think the company would get suspicious when the same person kept claiming all the rewards.”
“The bodies were all discovered by different people,” Wise said, “and there’s no obvious connection between any of the discoverers. But we believe a connection exists.”
“So it’s an organized racket? Murder for profit?”
“Profit, and one other motive.”
“What?”
“Evil. We believe the killers’ ultimate goal—after making as much money as possible—is to attract the attention of the police.”
“Aren’t the police already paying attention?”
“Not yet. But their involvement is inevitable if the deaths continue at this rate—and the first thing they’ll do when they launch their investigation is order an autopsy of all the bodies.”
I thought about it. “Autopsies mean thawing them out…”
“Thawing them out, and cutting them up.”
“So not only are they dead before their time, they lose their shot at resurrection.”
“You find that amusing?”
“Well no, I think it’s horrible, but…come on. The whole cryogenics thing is bullshit anyway, right?”
“Yeah, like organ transplants. Or cloning.”
“OK,” I said, not wanting to argue the point, “OK, back up, I still don’t understand why the police aren’t already investigating this. If thirteen people were
murdered
—”
“You didn’t look closely enough at the stats.”
I shuffled through the cards again. “Cause of death: heart attack…Cause of death: heart attack…Cause of death: stroke…Cause of death: heart attack…” I looked up. “Are you guys missing an NC gun?”
“Along with its owner.” He laid one more card on the counter.
“Jacob Carlton.”
“Former Good Samaritan, transferred to Bad Monkeys in 1999. He disappeared last June during an operation in Reno. Originally the thinking was he’d been taken out by the guy he was hunting, but now it looks like there’s another explanation.”
“So how do we find him?”
“We believe Carlton has taken a job inside the Ozymandias Corporation. Panopticon’s been trying to bug their headquarters for weeks, but the surveillance equipment keeps malfunctioning. You and I are going to go in there today, posing as clients.”
The Ozymandias facility was another forty miles out in the desert. “If they’re in such a hurry to freeze people,” I asked, as we drove across the wasteland, “wouldn’t it make more sense to build the place in town?”
“Zoning regulations,” Wise said vaguely.
“They have those in Vegas?”
The first sign we were getting close was a shimmer of color on the horizon. I thought it was a heat mirage, but within another mile the shimmer had resolved itself into a green circle with a white building at its center.
A big cargo helicopter came screaming overhead as we passed through the gardens of Ozymandias to the visitor parking lot. The helicopter touched down just east of the building, and a team of guys in moon suits came running to unload a silver body bag and hustle it inside.
“OK, so what’s our cover?”
“We’re married,” said Wise. He handed me a ring. “Mr. and Mrs. Doe.”