Jericho's Fall (27 page)

Down in the basement, she racked the balls and considered turning on the television, but operating the remote control was as complicated as piloting the space shuttle. She chalked a cue, leaned over, made satisfying contact, watched the balls carom around the table as the worries caromed through her mind. From the moment she had walked through the door, the only bits of truth had been Pamela’s animosity and Jericho’s illness—and, but for that terrible cough and the need to have bribed a few dozen doctors and medical technicians, she might have decided that the cancer, too, was just another wisp. Still, their conversation this afternoon had confirmed, indirectly, the hypothesis she had proposed to Dak.

Whomever Jericho was blackmailing, it was not the federal government or some other interested country.

He was blackmailing the survivors of Scondell Bloom—in particular, the old friend who got him involved in the first place, Jack Notting, formerly of the Foreign Service, postings unlisted, meaning that he, too, had worked for the CIA. She was not sure which of the men had come up with the retirement plan. She had no idea what to do with her knowledge; but she was glad to be leaving tomorrow.

Maybe she should leave the whole mess on Pete Mundy’s desk.

She made a tough combination shot and missed an easy bank shot, and asked herself why Jericho had wanted her here. The answer, she suspected, was hidden in the two conversations out on the deck, and in his repeated questions about why Audrey had quit job and family to become a nun. Dak had warned her to keep clear, and Beck had tried to preserve an emotional distance, but Jericho’s tantalizing clues had enticed her and enticed her until it was Princeton all over again: the Former Everything manipulating Rebecca into doing what he wanted.

Beck realized that she had worked herself into a fury. She tossed the pool cue aside, then played with Jericho’s mesh security gates for a while, making sure she knew how to open and close them. She accepted that Jericho was mad, and that she would never need this knowledge; all the same, she felt better possessing it.

Then she had a thought.

Shutting the gates behind her so that she would not be surprised, she followed the path Pamela had charted Tuesday, down the hallway, into the storeroom, through the reinforced door, up the stairs to the garage. Jericho, she suspected, wanted her to make this visit.

At the top of the stairs, she shoved the door—

It was still locked.

No matter. She knew the combination. Jericho had told her Tuesday with the silly story about giving her a Ferrari on her birthday, leaving it in the garage.

She entered her birthday, date, then month, then year—

And the door swung open, easily.

With a final glance behind, Rebecca stepped into the darkness.

(ii)

At first she was confused. The gloom was too complete. She thought there would be light from the windows. Then she remembered that the windows were covered with fabric. She slid her hand along the wall, searching for a light switch, only to realize that she would have to step away from the door, and that it would close automatically behind her.

Another clever Jericho Ainsley touch: she should have brought a flashlight.

To step or not to step? She shut her eyes, reaching into the darkness with her ears. She heard a thrumming, but that was the furnace wafting up the stairwell. She listened harder. A scratch. A scuttle. Probably mice. Great. She was not afraid of many things, but mice were near the top of the list. She was not sure which was worse, seeing them or not seeing them. She heard something dripping, but could not tell whether it came from in front of her or behind her. She heard a footstep, and it was definitely in front of her, and, just like that, she was back inside the stairwell, holding the door shut with her weight.

“Don’t be silly,” she whispered. “There’s nobody in there.”

This was absurd. There was nothing to be afraid of. Jericho was hiding something in the garage, there was no doubt about that, but whatever was in there had been delivered by a truck from town: crates, Audrey had said. Just crates. And crates that arrive by truck do not usually contain.

—a crate full of zombies—

anything capable of walking around on man-sized feet. The truck might have brought papers or electronic equipment or maybe more guns, enough to start a war with this time. The truck could have brought the secret evidence with which Jericho was blackmailing either
his own government or the survivors of Scondell Bloom or something else altogether. But the truck could not possibly have brought.

—zombies—

something alive that was being stored in the blacked-out garage. If she had really heard anything at all, it was surely the rain plinking on the garage roof, for the showers had returned.

She decided to open the door just a notch, to listen again, but it was a good two minutes before her fingers would play.

Then she shoved the door, very fast.

And listened.

No mice, no footfalls, no dripping. Breathing this time. Somebody was in there breathing hard, gulping down the air. No. No. Her fight-or-flight reflex was sizzling, but Rebecca stood her ground. This was imagination. Nothing more. This was her mind inventing voices out of static, just as Audrey had suggested.

She slipped off her sneakers and wedged them in the doorway. Now she had a way out.

Then she stepped all the way inside.

Unable to see, she walked slowly, her hands in front of her. The concrete floor was chilly beneath her wool socks. She moved with a shuffle, more sliding her feet than lifting them. She listened hard, but heard only the occasional skitter of mice.

Her hands struck something.

It took her a long moment to gather herself. She turned around and saw the faintest glow of light from the hallway. This was why there was no illumination on the final stairway up from the basement: Jericho did not want his enemies to have even the slightest ability to see.

She reached out again. Wood. A wood surface, about waist high.

A crate.

She felt the thrumming again, and supposed that the furnace had kicked on once more. She leaned forward and put her ear to the crate, but heard nothing. She had not expected to. Keeping one hand lightly on the wood, she walked around the crate. About two feet on a side, she estimated. She felt a hinge, then a handle.

The top could be pulled open, she realized.

But when she tried, the lid would not budge, and her searching fingers found a padlock. She tugged, hard, but the hasp was closed. A beep made her jump. Somewhere off to the side, some sort of digital equipment had turned on. She saw a pair of fiery-red eyes, but they were only pin lights. She shuffled toward the glow, but another crate blocked her access. She began working her way around the side.

Another beep in the darkness. A series of what might have been numbers appeared on an LED readout, but too far away for her to make them out.

Her cell phone rang.

She shrieked.

She swept it from her hip, and dropped it.

It continued to ring. She got down on her hands and knees and felt around for it, and her fingers encountered bits of trash and wire and wood before she came up with the telephone.

A trembling hand put the phone to her ear.

Static. Whine.

She was about to hang up when she heard that voice again, faintly, shrouded deep inside the cocoon of noise. “Eight hundred acres…Middle of nowhere.”

Imagination.

The virus.

Something worse.

A click. The static ended, and then she heard the best voice in the world: “I have to go, because Grandma is calling me, and I didn’t tell her I’m calling you—
Just a minute!
—I’m in the bathroom and I guess I better go, but call me, Mommy, okay? Call me soon, so I can tell you about the d—”

The message ended.

Another click. Not on the phone. In the garage. One of the pin lights had winked out.

She stared at the screen across the floor, waiting.

Another red light came on, and a roar of static drowned everything else, followed by a faxlike whine.

Hastily, she pressed the button to kill the call.

The static stopped.

The red pin lights clicked off.

“Not possible,” she whispered. She scrambled for the door, bumping another crate in the process. Another red light blinked as she stooped to get her shoes. She waited, but her cell did not ring.

Shivering, she locked the door securely behind her. She had to talk to Pete Mundy

THURSDAY NIGHT

CHAPTER 25
The Romantic

(i)

Some evils are nothing but coincidence, and some coincidences are nothing but evil. All the way down the mountain, Rebecca tried to figure out the category into which the pin lights fell. Either the device in the garage was somehow sending signals to her cell phone, or else it had another purpose altogether, and just happened to begin cycling when she approached. Whatever the right answer, she knew she could not tell the sisters. She no longer trusted them. Pamela would dismiss her, Audrey would comfort her, and Beck herself would stare at them and wonder.

The showers had slackened to a cold drizzle. The late-afternoon sky was flat, and too close. The road down to Bethel was, as usual, devoid of traffic. Sometimes the solitude consoled her. Today the mountain felt desolate, like emptiness after the battle. One more night in the nuthouse, she kept repeating as she descended. She only had to make it to tomorrow.

The sisters had been surprised when their guest came rushing upstairs from the basement, frightened and uncommunicative, and more surprised still when she told them she was going to town.
We need you here
, Pamela had said.
It’s almost dark
, Audrey had added.

As if she should be worried about vampires.

The sisters. She remembered Pamela’s first visit to Stone Heights,
back when the Jericho-Beck show was running strong. It was just past Rebecca’s twentieth birthday; Jericho had surprised her with a week in Cancún. Upon returning, she had traipsed happily about the house wearing various gifts, and Jericho had emerged from his study and ordered her to dress down tomorrow because his daughter would be coming. Dress down: jeans, in other words, rather than the expensive and often skimpy attire he liked her to model for him. It was near Christmas, eight months into their relationship, and she had yet to meet any of the children but the sullen Sean, then in high school.

At that time, Pamela had been a D-girl at Warner Bros.—Jericho sat on the board of the parent company—and she favored granny dresses and wore her hair in oddly colored whorls. The introductions were awkward, and Beck could feel the antagonism coming off the other woman in hot waves, but both tried to behave themselves. Pamela, it turned out, had come to ask Jericho’s assistance in raising money for a film she wanted to make—in other words, she wanted him to loan her a hundred thousand dollars—and, in consequence, had to make nice to the lady of her father’s house. At that time there was a housekeeper, too, and she summoned Mr. Jericho to the telephone, leaving the two young women sitting in the living room with nothing to say to each other. And the part of the story Beck had always remembered best was the pain on Jericho’s dashing face when he stepped back in to find them sitting silently: he had so wanted, he told her in bed later, for them to be friends. But the part she remembered now, and had never paid attention to before, was the other thing Jericho had told her in bed.

All that girl does is take. I loaned her the money, but it’s the same as a gift. She’ll never pay me back, and I won’t own a piece of the movie, either
.

He would never have trusted Pamela with anything.

Audrey, on the other hand, whatever else she might have been, was a specialist in interrogation. Breaking down the subject’s environment. Changing the rules the subject lived by. And in a world in which people were ruled by their cell phones, that was as good a place as any to start. Her mobile had started to play games, and now her imagination
was all over the place. In the garage she had thought she heard footsteps, but she could no longer trust her own perceptions.

Which was no doubt somebody’s plan.

Somebody’s plan
. Rebecca grimaced. She was thinking like Jericho. But there were moments when paranoia was the rational course.

On the outskirts of town, she slowed, preparing herself for the worst. She was not yet sure whether she could trust Pete Mundy, but she had no doubt that he had kept his part of the bargain. Beck was not the sort to use a man’s attraction against him, but until tomorrow she was still living in Jericho’s world, and the rules were different.

He was waiting for her, pacing impatiently, in the parking lot of Arby’s. She pulled up next to him, and he hopped in. He had bought roast-beef sandwiches for the both of them.

Her favorite.

(ii)

They parked at a strip mall near the entrance to Route 24, where, said Pete, the sheriff was less likely to notice them.

“I have what you asked for,” he said.

“Good.”

His eyes measured her. “We have a deal, right? You give, I give.”

She nodded.

Pete handed her a piece of paper, listing all the East Coast telephone calls received by Sheriff Garvey on his cell phone or his office phone for the past month. “I can’t get home calls without a subpoena,” he explained. But she was busily staring at the one number that predominated.

Beck looked up. “Where’s the other?”

Pete shook his head. “Your turn.”

And so she told him, straight out, gaining fluency with the telling. Until this moment, Beck had not realized how desperately she needed to talk, only how fearful she was that she would not be believed. She
left out some important details—for example, her precise conversations with Dak and Maggie Ainsley. But she laid out the bare bones of the tale.

“Are you done?” he asked, when she wound down.