Devil's Due (19 page)

“
People?
” Jazz laughed out loud. “Damn, this I gotta see.”

The elevator doors opened, and Gregory Ivanovich gave them all a wide, lovely smile. The wolf was back in his eyes. “Do you?” he asked Jazz, and gestured politely for them all to get in the elevator. “Perhaps better if you don’t see.”

He was holding a gun. Gutsy, Lucia thought, considering that just feet away were six armed FBI agents.

He had the gun focused unwaveringly on Jazz’s head. “In the elevator, my dear,” he said—not to Jazz, to Lucia. “I would hate to have to create a mess all over the federal agents’ lobby to make my point.
No!
” he said sharply, without shifting his gaze, as McCarthy moved forward. Ben instantly stopped. “You know I mean it. One at a time, into the elevator. My lovely Lucia first.”

She moved in and took the opposite corner. She knew of no one with more iron concentration than Gregory; she’d seen him hold a target in the middle of a firefight, waiting for just the right second to pull the trigger. McCarthy seemed to have realized it as well; he came next, hands well away from his body. Laskins followed, standing behind Gregory.

Gregory smiled very slowly at Jazz, and made a tiny little gesture with his empty left hand.

She walked in, eyes still locked on his, full of fury and challenge. He held the stare as he released the Hold button and the doors rumbled shut.

It was a long ride down. Nobody spoke. Jazz never blinked. Neither did Gregory.

“Your name is Jazz, yes? Like the music?”

She kept on staring. He returned the gun to his shoul
der holster with the fast, elegant gesture of a stage magician, about one second before the doors opened.

“You’re crazy,
dorogaya
. I like that in a woman.”

“You and me,” Jazz said grimly, “are going to go a few rounds. You know that, right?”

“I look forward to the opportunity.”

Laskins pushed forward, leading the way. McCarthy grabbed Lucia’s arm. “Stay here,” he whispered. “Go back up, get Rawlins—”

McCarthy was wrong. There was no chance—not even a small one—that if she went back upstairs the FBI could protect her. But that wasn’t what made her step out to follow Laskins. It was Gregory Ivanovich, who knew her as well as anyone alive, putting two fingers to the back of Jazz’s head and miming pulling a trigger.

She didn’t know what Laskins would do, but she knew Gregory. All too well.

T
here was a big black limousine in the parking lot across the street and it held all of them comfortably. Or uncomfortably, thanks to the tension in the passenger compartment. It was a long, silent ride, but the landmarks were familiar. Lucia exchanged a quick look with Jazz, who raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes. Lucia shrugged.

The limousine turned down the slope of a parking garage, and parked on the top level, next to the elevators of…their own office building.

“You’re kidding,” Jazz said flatly.

“You may be assured, Ms. Callender, that I’m deadly serious today,” Laskins said. “There’s nothing I’m finding remotely amusing.”

Gregory Ivanovich hustled them into the elevators and upstairs. The doors had been opened wide into their office suite, and all the lights were on. No one there. At least,
Lucia thought, Pansy hadn’t been caught up in this mess. That was some comfort.

Laskins opened the doors to the big conference room, with its long, gleaming table and recessed lighting.

It was full of people, who were chatting among themselves in a pleasant buzz of sound. Twelve—no, fourteen of them. Sixteen, counting Laskins, who took a chair at the table, and Gregory, who leaned against a wall, seeming entirely at home. Lucia scanned the other faces quickly. Laskins was the very image of a successful lawyer, but there was a tired, unkempt-looking woman who might have come straight from tending her kids. A tall, thin black man who wore glasses and looked like a professor. A slender, well-dressed young woman with understated jewelry and the unmistakable aura of wealth.

The buzz died down as everyone’s attention focused on the newcomers.

“Let me guess. The Cross Society,” Jazz said, just as Lucia was about to. “Wow. Imagine how impressed I am. No, go on. Just imagine.”

The stay-at-home mom smiled. She was the only one who did.

“Not the entire society, obviously, merely a few key players,” Laskins said, and shut the doors. “Be seated, the three of you.”

“Where’s James?” Jazz asked.

“James?” Laskins echoed, as if he’d never heard the name before. Lucia felt a twinge of anxiety, and saw it in Jazz, as well.

“James
Borden
, you asshole. Where is he?” When Jazz got scared, she got belligerent.

“Mr. Borden is on an errand. It’s quite an important one,
actually. Be seated, Ms. Callender. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Gregory stepped forward and pulled out a chair. He performed an extravagant comic-opera bow. Lucia tried to send Jazz a message in a last, quick glance, and slid into an empty chair on the other side of the table. McCarthy took the one next to her.

Gregory bowed again, even more comically.

Jazz gritted her teeth and sat.

“What in the hell is this, Laskins?” Lucia asked. For answer, he held up his hand. Gregory stepped forward and put something into it.

A red envelope.

“This,” he said, “is a duplicate of what went to Ms. Callender earlier in the day,” he said. “It was waiting for her when she arrived back at her temporary home in Manny Glickman’s warehouse. Go ahead. Open it, Ms. Callender.”

Jazz just stared at him. Didn’t reach for it. After a long enough pause that it became clear she wasn’t about to comply, Lucia reached over and took it. She opened it and took out a single white sheet of folded paper.

On it was written, DO NOT ALLOW LUCIA GARZA TO CARRY THROUGH WITH THE INVESTIGATION OF J&J ELECTROPLATING.

No letterhead, no signature. Lucia looked up at Jazz, who returned her stare without flinching. There was something fierce in her eyes.

“Did you get it, Ms. Callender?” Laskins asked.

“Yes,” Jazz said. “I got it.”

“Then why did you fail to follow instructions? Do you not yet understand the seriousness of the situation? When you fail to follow our instructions, people
die
.”

“Yeah, and guess what? When we
do
follow your in
structions, people die,” Jazz said. “I’m sick of operating in the dark. No more of these mysterious bullshit messages from nowhere. You want to enlist us in your army of do-gooders, you’d better damn well convince me how holding off on busting a bunch of terrorists is
doing good!
”

“It’s not your job to question how or why we give these instructions!” Laskins bellowed. His face had gone entirely red, so mottled Lucia was afraid he was going to clutch his chest and hit the floor.

“Bite me!” Jazz screamed. “You guys treat us like trained monkeys, and you know what? We can make our own decisions. Isn’t that why we’re so damn valuable to you? Because what we do
matters?
”

“Yes,” said the thin black man, farther down the table. He’d helped himself to a cup of tea, Lucia saw. By the looks of other cups around the room, they’d also started the coffeemaker. They’d certainly made themselves thoroughly at home. “Yes, you do make your own decisions. And you have no idea how much chaos that creates, do you? Presumptions are made about how the time stream will run—they have to be made, or we’d never be able to predict any outcomes at all. You are a fulcrum upon which events turn. And when you don’t do as we’ve asked, you upset everything.”

The hausfrau next to him laughed apologetically. “You’ve lost them, Jeffrey.” She put a plump, motherly hand over his and gave Lucia a warm smile. “You have to imagine the scope of what we’re talking about, ladies. It’s not just an either-or proposition. It’s like the biggest pinball game you can imagine, with a hundred thousand balls in play, and a million flippers, each of which has a simple decision to make. Do or don’t. You see, it was a simple decision we made on your behalf—don’t move on the terror
ist information. In connection with about fifty other simple decisions, it cleared the way for something important to happen. However, now all of that is unclear again, the ball randomly bouncing. We can’t control what we can’t foresee.”

Lucia looked around at all of them, all the quiet faces, ranging from scowls to smiles. “You’re all…psychics? Like Simms?”

“Oh, no.” The man called Jeffrey sipped his tea and looked put out at the question. “There are only a handful of genuine psychics in this world, you know. Fifty or so, in any generation—”

“Sixty-two as of last week,” murmured an old, creaky gentleman two chairs down. He blinked at Lucia benignly from behind thick, magnifying lenses.

“Edgar, it doesn’t matter. I wasn’t trying to be precise, I was—”

“Precision is important,” Edgar said. “I wouldn’t want our new friends to think we weren’t precise. My, no.”

Jeffrey shot him a grim look. “As I was saying, I could give you the exact mathematical equations about how we derive the existence and location of these people, but I doubt it would mean anything to you. To put it simply, we are a kind of clearinghouse. In addition to Simms, who founded our organization, we maintain facilities in which quite a number of precognitives are housed and cared for. They give us predictions—some, as many as hundreds each day. We feed these into a sophisticated mathematical model, and from that, we see the shape of things to come. Not in detail, you understand. In generalities. The psychics themselves are specific, but in combining their prophecies you lose the—the details. You understand?”

Lucia exchanged a fast look with Jazz.
Why isn’t Bor
den here?
She couldn’t tell if Jazz was thinking about that; her partner looked closed and coplike, utterly unreadable. Just like McCarthy, next to her. How much of this had he heard before? How much did he believe? Not enough, obviously, if he’d finally broken with the Society and gotten himself tossed in jail for his troubles.

“Yes, I understand,” she said, although she was fairly certain that she didn’t. “You get hundreds of predictions a day. Somehow you create scenarios out of blending all of them together, to show you the future.”

“No,” Laskins said. He’d recovered some of his calm. His color was a hot pink instead of deep red, and he’d seated himself again. “Not the future. A—sketch of the future. A rough outline of it, with some details in place to give it structure and scope.”

“And if you don’t like what you see,” McCarthy said, “you just figure out which pinball levers to push until you get what you want.”

It was as if they’d forgotten he was there. All eyes turned toward him. If he felt the weight of it, he didn’t let it show; he was reconfiguring a paper clip into steel origami, and he kept right on doing it.

“What they’re not telling you,” McCarthy continued, “is that they’re all about the greater good. Excuse me, the greater good as they see it. So if a couple hundred people have to die in an upcoming terrorist attack, well, those are acceptable losses if that still takes us down the path they want us to follow.”

“People die,” said a young woman dressed in ill-fitting blue jeans over a skeletal frame. Her arms were frighteningly thin, as if she’d just come from a prison camp. But since her skin had a tanning-salon glow, Lucia was fairly certain that it was the gauntness of fashion, not famine. “You can’t make
decisions like this based on individuals, it makes everything worthless. You have to take a wider view than that.”

“I’m sure that’s a great comfort to the dead,” Lucia said. “That they died for a reason.”

“Everybody dies for a reason,” Laskins said. “We just try to make it a better reason than random chance.”

“That apply to all of you, too?” McCarthy asked. They looked surprised. “No. Didn’t think so. That’s just for the rank and file, right? The chorus? The spear carriers? The guy on the left, in the back row, whose name we never know? It’s okay if
he
dies for a reason. Not if your own kid does.” He got up, staring at them in bitter contempt. “I told you before, I’m not playing your game.”

The gaunt woman smiled cynically. “So you’ve told us,” she said. “Have you informed your friends that we provided the information that got you out of prison? In return for your cooperation?”

McCarthy slowly bent over and put his hands flat on the table, staring at her. If looks could kill…Lucia shuddered at what was in his face. She’d thought Gregory had the wolf in him, but this was something else again.

“I’m not working for you.” He said it softly, but it was loaded with meaning. “You have no idea what it costs me, but I’m not doing it. Do you understand me? You can send me back to prison. You can kill me.
You can’t make me do what you want
.”

“I think you’ll find,” she said in an even softer whisper, “that it no longer matters, Mr. McCarthy. You’ve served your purpose. You’re Chorus. You’re that poor man in the back row whose name we won’t remember when you die.”

Silence. Lucia felt her whole body trembling with the tension of it. There was something terrible being said, something awful in Ben’s face.

“What did you do?” he asked, and suddenly all that control was gone, and he was moving, moving
fast
, screaming. “
What did you do, you bitch?
You were just supposed to take care of her, you weren’t supposed to—”

He went over the table. The woman stumbled backward, terror written all over her face.

“No!” Laskins yelled, and then it was a melee, and when it was over, McCarthy was on the carpet, facedown, panting, with Gregory’s knee in his back. “I will not have this, do you understand? This behavior is unacceptable!”

“Unacceptable!” McCarthy’s voice broke. “You fucking bastards, you have no idea what you’re doing, do you? Ask Simms. Ask Simms if you don’t believe me.”

Silence. The assembled members milled around, and some of them returned to their chairs. Laskins looked around the room, then cleared his throat.

“Unfortunately, we can’t do that,” he said. “Max Simms broke out of his prison three days ago. We have no idea where he is at this point.”

The thank-you messages Jazz and Lucia had gotten had been signed, in invisible ink, by Max Simms.
They don’t know that
, Lucia thought, and met Jazz’s eyes.

Jazz smiled slightly. Not a nice expression. She was furious, and she wanted to hit something, anything.

The fact that she hadn’t, that she’d let McCarthy be taken down without jumping in with both feet, was significant.

“What do you want?” Lucia asked. “Why are we here?”

Laskins seemed to forget about McCarthy for a moment to focus back on the two of them.

“You’re here for the same reason we all are. Because if you weren’t, you’d be dead,” he said. “And really, we can’t have that happen. Not just now. Now if you don’t sit quietly, I’m going to have Mr. Ivanovich handcuff and gag you.”

“What are you waiting for?” Jazz demanded.

“Something terrible.” It was one of the other Cross Society members, a sad-looking little man in a gray sports coat. He had a ragged fringe of gray hair clinging to the crown of his skull, and big dark eyes behind round glasses. “Something terrible. I wish we could avoid it, but it’s impossible. Something terrible
must
happen.”

Gregory Ivanovich let McCarthy up off of the floor and tossed a tangle of zip ties onto the conference table, along with three leather ball gags. Tools of his trade. Lucia felt her stomach clench when she saw them.

“Sit quietly, or I will do it,” he said. “You know it,
dorogaya
. Tell them.”

Lucia leaned forward and put a hand on Jazz’s arm. A light pressure, but Jazz got the message.

McCarthy rose to his feet, breathing heavily, face still red with fury, but he didn’t say anything either. After a moment, he took the chair next to Jazz and clasped his hands tight on top of the table. His knuckles turned as pale as parchment.

Silence.

“That’s better,” Laskins said, and turned to look out the window at the view. “That’s better. Now, we wait.”

Two hours later, with no explanation, one of the Society members’ beeper went off, and some unspoken signal was passed. They all relaxed.