The Void (12 page)

“You just gonna stand there?”

Jack shuddered. It was a voice from his past, a voice he had never expected to hear again. His father, Austin Crawford, stood beside him. He was wearing an Armani tuxedo, a beige pocket square, and a crimson bow tie. Even as he stared at this phantom, Jack could think only that his father had always known the best things in life when he saw them, and he was never shy about spending the money it took to acquire them.

“This is a dream,” Jack mumbled.

His father knelt down beside Elizabeth's body. “It's a not a dream. Well, it is, I guess,” he said, looking up at his son. “But only for now. It will be real all too soon.”

His father gave the same toothy grin Jack had often seen in life. He looked down at Elizabeth and nudged her in the side. “Hmm. Let's see what we have here.” He grasped the body with both hands, pulling her toward him. As he rolled her over on her back, her still-open eyes locked on Jack. Most men probably would have looked away. Jack stared back.

“Poison,” Austin said as thick foam poured from Elizabeth's mouth. He picked up a shard of the shattered glass that lay on the ground beside her and took a deep breath. “No doubt about it.” He looked up at Jack. “Definitely cyanide.” He stood, brushing off his hands on his pants. “Your specialty if I remember correctly.”

“Never cyanide,” Jack said. “I wouldn't be so stupid.” For a moment, for several actually, Jack had stood, staring stupidly at the resurrected phantasm of his father, dead these past ten years. But the old resentment had returned. He was not afraid and somehow, he wasn't shocked anymore either.

“No,” said Austin, “no, I guess you wouldn't.”

The two men stood face-to-face, so close to each other that their noses almost touched. They could have been mirror images of one another, were one man not twenty years older.

Finally, Austin looked away. “I need a drink.” He stepped over Elizabeth's body and walked to the bar. “Gin and tonic, Robert. Double.”

Jack glanced down at the woman he did not know one last time and then joined his father.

“Another Manhattan, Mr. Crawford?” Robert looked up at Jack expectantly, bottle of bourbon in his hand. Jack ignored him.

“What the hell is wrong with you people?” Jack rarely lost his composure but it was all but gone now. “That woman”—he pointed behind him—“was your friend. You knew her. She . . .” Jack looked back toward where she still lay. Her head had fallen to the side and once again her open, dead eyes met his. “She's dead,” Jack said. “Somebody killed her and none of you even care.”

His father slung back half of his drink and looked up at Jack. Then he laughed. It started as a murmur, then grew to a low chuckle. A rumble that began deep in his stomach and burst full born into a roar that echoed around the great hall. Bounding up and down, multiplying and reverberating so loud that Jack put his hands over his ears to stop the sound. But it was still there, inside his mind as much as beyond it.

It died down slowly, matching the sound of the music and then succumbing to it. Jack noted clinically that the music had switched to a waltz. The couples danced almost mechanically, circling around the room and Elizabeth's body.

“So,” Austin began. He had produced a cigarette from seeming thin air and Robert was leaning in to light it. “All of a sudden you've developed a conscience. How charming. I didn't think you were capable of caring. Only when it suits you, I suppose.”

“Ha! Whatever I'm capable of, it's what you made me.”

Austin slammed his glass against the counter so hard that ice cubes went flying along the bar, though Robert was ready with a towel.

“I know exactly what you are capable of,” he said, stepping forward. Austin grabbed the collar of his own shirt. He pulled it down sharply, popping buttons that went skittering along the floor. Thick red lines ran parallel around his neck, meeting and overlapping in the middle.

Jack didn't look. There was no need. He had seen them before. “You made your own choice, Father. You should have known what would happen.”

“Don't patronize me!” Austin snarled. “I never turned. They knew that. And worst of all, you knew it too. It was a test. To see just how far you would go. Well you passed, didn't you? And now you're theirs for life. Their good little dog. Just waiting for them to tell you what trick to do next, isn't that right?”

“Oh this is rich. Is this why you came here? You self-righteous bastard. How many people did you kill? You always knew how it would end. You died for a reason. If it wasn't me, it would have been somebody else. I decided I would rather take care of it myself. You deserved that much.”

“Is that right? Well tell me this, why did you kill her?”

Jack followed his father's finger to Elizabeth's corpse. It was only then he realized that the music had stopped. The people at the party had stopped dancing too, and now they surrounded Elizabeth in a half circle. But they still did not seem to notice her. All their eyes were on Jack.

“I told you. I didn't kill her,” Jack said, suddenly uneasy. “He's the one who fixed her drink. Why don't you ask him?”

Robert coughed out a laugh, and Austin gave him a knowing grin.

“It wasn't Robert, Jack. Take a look at her again. Take a good, long look.”

“I don't know her!” But even in his own voice, Jack heard doubt. He looked back at her, at the gracefully curving lines of her body. The well-defined cheek bones, the high and haughty brow, her eyes and her lips. Within him a memory stirred.

“Not so sure, anymore, are you? Her name is Elizabeth Akers. Elizabeth Akers Adair.”

Adair.

“Oh God.” Jack fell back against the bar, his hand covering his mouth. “It can't be.”

“Anything can be, Jack. Anything can be here, in this place.”

Elizabeth Adair. Yes, he knew her now. It had been years. Fifteen, if he remembered correctly. Her husband was David Adair, the head of a banking conglomerate that had found involvement with terrorist organizations to be a lucrative business opportunity. His target had been Elizabeth. The Company didn't want David dead. Killing him would only open the door to some other cutthroat SOB who would follow the money to the exact same policies David had pursued. No, David needed to be sent a message.

He had met her at a bar on the North Side of Chicago, just down from Wrigley Field. He had followed her there several times, whenever David said he was playing poker with his buddies but instead was ensconced in one of the city's finer gentleman's clubs. One where touching was both allowed and encouraged, for the right price.

Elizabeth found peace in that little baseball-themed bar, three blocks from where she had grown up. It reminded her of simpler times, before she gave up her dreams for a life in a penthouse apartment in midtown. Most people thought she had done well for herself and she didn't have the heart to tell them otherwise.

He found her seated at the bar, talking to a no name drink jockey who was paying attention only because her neckline seemed to plunge all the way to her stomach. Jack bought her a vodka gimlet. He had found that women were always on the lookout for a sign, something to assure them that whatever they were doing was the right and proper thing. That God or fate had ordained it. For most, ordering their favorite drink without prompting was like a bolt of lightning from the heavens.

“How did you know?” they'd ask, just as Elizabeth asked that night. And Jack would smile and say he could just tell by looking. “I've been watching you for three weeks” was far less romantic.

He'd had no trouble taking her to a room in the Four Seasons. She was desperate for something, anything to drag her out of her pain. He was there and willing. He'd slept with her, even though that was not part of the assignment. He wasn't sure why he did it. He had felt sorry for her, somewhat.

When he thought back on it, he guessed that the least he could do was give her one more night of pleasure. One last good memory to float off on. David had killed her spirit all those years ago, when he plucked her from a nice middle-class life with nice middle-class dreams to be a trophy for presentation. Now David had killed her body too, even if he didn't know it.

Austin had been right; it was cyanide. Jack resorted to poison only when he wanted a death to appear natural or accidental and so normally he would never use the drug. Too obviously murder. But here he wanted to be obvious. Elizabeth had died to send a message.

Not that David heard it. His response was to hire new security. Jack wanted to be the one to finish him off, to make him pay. But another agent got the assignment, and at least when David's car exploded in his driveway, the bank's next CEO realized that criminal associations, while good business, were bad for one's health. Still, Elizabeth had died for nothing.

“Yes, Jack, you know her, don't you?”

He did, but it wasn't Elizabeth that made his mouth go dry, that made his blood run cold in his veins. He did know Elizabeth, but he knew others too. They stood in the crowd, every one of them staring daggers at Jack. There was Bryan Truant, a man he had shot with a high-powered rifle for his involvement in a Martian separatist movement.

Philip Hayman, poisoned in his home for reasons Jack never cared to know. Grace Craft, stabbed in a back alley behind a bar. Robbery gone bad, the papers had said. There were so many. Some he knew. Others he didn't, either because he didn't remember or because they were collateral damage. A necessary price to pay for progress.

And then there was Robert. Yes, Robert Graves. An accountant in Boston who wrote a holo on the side, one as popular as it was judged dangerous. Robert Graves, the first man he had ever killed.

“We're all here for you, Jack,” his father said, as he and everyone else in the room took a step forward, closing in a half-circle around him. “All for you. We've been waiting for you to join us.”

“But this is just a dream,” Jack said, pushing himself against the bar so hard that one might wonder if he thought he could dissolve into it.

“Perhaps, Jack. Or maybe this is something more.” His father's face was inches from his. The others were crowded around, bathing Jack in their hot breath. “Maybe this is a glimpse of the future. It will be here soon enough, and when it comes, we’ll be waiting.”

His father started to laugh, and perhaps Jack would have screamed. But at that instant, another scream rent the air, and the room dissolved into darkness.

Chapter 9

Something wasn't right. Aidan hated the dreams as much as anyone, but there was comfort in their familiarity. The way they were always the same, no matter how many times he dreamt. This time, it was different.

He always awoke in the bowels of a ship, a massive one that was altogether unfamiliar to him. He would wander through the deserted, darkened corridors, alone, save for the whispers that echoed up and down its halls, and the shadows that walked with him. For they were there, just beyond his sight. Smoldering night personified.

Yes, the dreams were the same. Almost. He could change them, if he took a different turn or chose a different path. Not that he was free to do whatever he wanted. Often he would open a door and peer into a darkness so thick that he thought it a solid thing. The shadow wall, others who had found it in their own dreams called it.

Sometimes he thought about challenging that darkness, plunging into it with body and soul and seeing what it hid. But he never did. Instead, he always locked it behind doors that slid closed with a thud, temporarily drowning out the roar of those interminable whispers. Then he would push on, searching through winding corridors for something, though he could never say precisely what. Not until the last time when he found it.

He had gone farther than ever before, his path guided by those dark walls that prevented him from turning aside. Whatever lay behind that darkness, whoever called his name in a language he could not comprehend, was leading him. It wanted him to find it, what was hidden. When the final door opened and the whispers ceased, he knew he had reached his destination.

He emerged into a large open room, one that he recognized immediately as the bridge. It was different, though, than any he had ever seen. The command center was the same, but when he looked up, he saw that the entire ceiling was made of glass or something like it, clear and transparent, leaving the darkness of space to shine down on him.

As he stared up at that openness, he knew that there was something wrong. For it was as pitch black as the shadow walls behind him. He had never seen anything like that. Even in the deepest parts of space, there was always something, even if it was only the tiniest pinpoints of light from the most distant stars. Not here. Here it was just darkness, one that the glass dome above made seem utterly infinite.

He walked over to the computer and ran his hands across it. To his surprise—but somehow not—it sprung to life.

“Command, Aidan Connor?” it asked. He never even questioned the fact that it knew his name.

“Location?”

The answer should have come instantaneously. Instead, the computer sat silently, the whirling sounds and flashing lights from within telling him it was still working on the solution to a simple problem.

“Cannot ascertain location,” it finally answered. Aidan frowned.

“Run diagnostic,” he said, knowing how foolish such a request must be in the midst of a dream.

Almost instantly the computer replied, “Diagnostic complete. All systems functional.”

“Computer, display the nearest star.”

Another unusually long period later, “No stellar activity detected.”

A shiver ran down Aidan's spine, and despite his best efforts to control it, the panic started to set in. The stars were his guideposts, shining beacons in a dark sea of infinity. And if the computer could not find one, then he was truly lost.

He looked up at the black dome above him and an impossible thought crept into his mind. A dawning realization of a horrible possibility, made all the worse by the fact it was the only one that made any sense.