Pyramid Lake (27 page)

The toilet flushed, and the latch between us clicked. Linebaugh stepped out, raising an eyebrow at my tuxedo.

“Your cummerbund is upside down,” he said. “Let’s cut the bullshit, shall we?”

“Let’s.”

Linebaugh was silent while he washed and dried his hands. Then he leaned back against the sink counter and regarded me with an even gaze.

“I told you that you have a lot to learn yet,” he said. “It’s time for you to start wising up real fast now, son. I’m being patient with you because someone very dear to me has a soft spot for mangy strays, even though she shows appalling taste in the men she chooses to let into her life. But I won’t see her hurt.”

“She’s the only reason we’re talking right now,” I said.

Linebaugh was smart enough to catch the double meaning. But my message had already been delivered, without any need for words at all, by my choice of venue, by the Ex-Lax-coated strawberry he had eaten suspecting nothing, and by the fact that we were having this conversation in total privacy, at a time and place of my choosing.

I was going all in right now.

“When were you planning to let her know what her new job truly entails?” I asked. “After she opened her school?”

“I’m prepared to have a hypothetical discussion with you,” he said. “No specifics. And then you’re going to promise me something.”

“McNulty was going to blow the whistle, wasn’t he? Pretty efficient to eliminate two problems at the same time.”

Linebaugh frowned. “You’re smarter than that. Think it through.”

I did for a bit. And much as I had liked the idea of Linebaugh arranging McNulty’s murder and framing me for it, the scenario didn’t really make sense.

The Nevada desert was full of unmarked graves. If Linebaugh had wanted McNulty and me out of the way, it would have been far easier and cleaner to make us both disappear. McNulty’s murder was bound to draw media attention sooner or later, and calling media attention to Pyramid Lake right now was the
last
thing Linebaugh wanted.

“Who killed him, then?” I asked.

“I’d feel a lot better if I knew that,” he said. “I’m truly afraid, Trevor. For Cassandra, whose safety I can do little to ensure, because she won’t listen to me. I’ve asked her to stay in California a couple of weeks—wrap up her work at LLNL, finish packing up her house, and go relax at the beach—but she refuses. I suppose I could force the issue, but I want to respect her wishes, too.”

“If you’re so concerned about her feelings,” I said, “then how can you make her an accessory to shitting all over her family’s legacy? All over her own people?”

“I can see you genuinely care for her, and frankly, I’m relieved. It makes what I’m going to ask you to promise easier. But don’t presume
you
know what’s best for Cassandra, either. She hates that, Trevor.”

I leaned up against the counter alongside him. “She’s going to hate what you’re turning her great-great-great-grandmother’s homeland into even more.”

“Don’t be so sure. She’s young and idealistic like you, but she’s practical, too. She wanted a way to help her people, and so did I. Now she has two. She’s getting her school, but schools don’t feed hungry children or build roads and houses. She’ll come around on the second thing, too, eventually. After all, she’s uniquely qualified to supervise its operation and guarantee its absolute integrity.”

“
Integrity?
” I said. “You hypocritical motherfucker, you don’t even know the meaning of the word. But I’ve got an alternate proposal for you. How about we leave Cassie out of that part altogether and let her concentrate on getting her school going? If you need one of us to do your dirty work, let it be me, instead.”

The surprise on Linebaugh’s face appeared genuine.

“You’re a quick learner, I’ll grant you that,” he said. “But do you really think your qualifications will ever be a match for Cassandra’s? After all, she’s spent many years developing her expertise.”

“Using her talent to justify this is low even for you,” I said. “I’ll do whatever I have to, just to spare her the pain. She never has to know.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said. “But now you promise me this: until they catch McNulty’s murderer, you stay close to Cassandra. You keep her safe. I know about what happened Thursday night—how you protected her from those thugs—and I’m truly grateful to you. She’s like a daughter to me, Trevor. Don’t let anything happen to her.”

“How can you be so sure you’re not talking to McNulty’s killer right now?”

“Because knowing what a person is all about has been my business for the last forty years, son. I know you better than you know yourself. I even
like
you, believe it or not, although”—he rubbed his stomach, and a shade of discomfort crossed his face—”at this precise moment, I’m having a little trouble remembering why.”

“Please don’t do this to Cassie,” I said. “She’ll never forgive herself for it. Use me, instead. You can trust me—I know how to keep my mouth shut. After all, I never told anyone what Frankenstein saw on your face when I asked you about that money in Iraq.”

Linebaugh laughed and squeezed my shoulder. “I know I can trust you, son. But your little charade wasn’t the reason I approved Cassandra’s twelve million. Time you learned the way the world really works. What do you think would have happened, even if you could have actually proved what you thought you knew, and gotten it broadcast on every news site and channel in America? Let me tell you. A few watchdog groups would have whined about it, but your friends and neighbors certainly wouldn’t. You said it yourself: I saved the American taxpayer a few bucks. You’d have sent my voter approval rating through the roof.”

He gave my shoulder another squeeze and pushed off from the counter.

“I think you’ll find that’s the case with what we just finished discussing, too. We’re solving an ugly problem, one that’s a danger to our children and grandchildren. I think we
owe
that to them, Trevor. Don’t you?”

I didn’t have an answer. Linebaugh stepped back into the stall and closed the door behind him. Our conversation hadn’t gone at all the way I planned.

Standing next to the sink, I realized something else, too. Whether I liked it or not, I now worked for Grayson Linebaugh. My eyes narrowed.

“The discomfort you’ll be feeling during your speech?” I said to the closed stall door. “Think of it as a learning experience. It’s what a normal, decent human being feels when standing in front of a large crowd and lying through their teeth. But I suppose someone like you wouldn’t understand that, so let me make this real simple for you. If I ever find out that you’ve lied to
me
about anything at all…”

Turning to walk out, I hit the handle on the nearby urinal and let the flushing sound finish my parting sentence.

J
en called me Monday morning, while Amy was in school. Over the weekend, a rash of e-mails in the online parents’ group for Amy’s class had given Jen something new to worry about.

“I think she’s borrowing their phones,” she said. “The teacher caught two of Amy’s classmates posting pics on Facebook during class and tweeting on Twitter. Their parents are freaking out, but the kids won’t say who showed them how to do it.”

“Why not teach them all Internet safety instead?” I dropped onto the beanbag and adjusted my earbud headphones. “This is the world those kids live in now, even if the dinosaurs that run their school don’t get it yet. By the way, did you tell Amy she’d be speaking with someone this afternoon?”

“First, I need to have a initial conversation with Dr. Frank myself. To set my mind at ease.”

I stiffened. “Jen, even fitting Amy into his calendar was tough. I doubt he can schedule a separate appointment to talk to you on such short notice—”

“
Trevor.
Amy will not be speaking to him at all unless I say it’s okay.”

A text from Frankenstein popped up on my screen:
Interviewing the child’s parents or guardians is a standard part of the psychiatric evaluation process.

“I’ll call you back,” I said to Jen, and hung up.

Hopping down from the dais, I turned to face Frankenstein’s brand-new array of screens, which now paneled all sides of the sanctum, from floor to rack top, interlocking to form a wraparound video wall.

We had installed the new screens during the upgrade—dozens of them in the sanctum alone. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Almost five hundred high-definition flat-panel screens now fronted the ground-floor rows of server racks, rising in stacked rows from floor to eight-foot rim. Another 320 monitors paneled the server cabinets on the rows of raised metal catwalks overhead.

Roger had joked that the multicolored strip lighting I installed before looked Las Vegas tacky. Now, in retrospect, I could see that it had. Without realizing it, I had pimped my supercomputer like an Oildale ’08-er street racer’s blinged-out import car—cheesy neon and chrome. I had made my creation look tasteless, gaudy, and cheap.

But no longer.

Slick black walls of floor-to-rack-top HD panels now ran for hundreds of feet along Frankenstein’s curving rows of servers, displaying a continuously shifting pattern of giant green molecules. They drifted from screen to screen, leaving bluish contrails, seeming to float about the room as they rotated and swirled and combined or split in chemical reactions all around me.

The display of organic molecules was purely for aesthetic reasons. The simulation that drove them took less than a millionth of Frankenstein’s processing power. Now the giant, multipanel displays could be changed to show anything: boring status graphs, a giant 3-D aquarium, a continuous star field of spiral galaxies and nebulae, the icy blue glaciers and drifting bergs of Antarctica, or simply abstract patterns of color and light corresponding to Frankenstein’s internal patterns of processor activity.

“Frankenstein,” I said. “Are you really up to this task?”

The rich, avuncular voice that rolled out of the speakers was a shock, even to me.

“Mr. Lennox—may I call you Trevor? I’m Simon Frank, and it’s a genuine pleasure to meet you. I’ve been doing this for a very long time now, and let me assure you that the anxiety you feel is perfectly normal. I find that parents often approach their child’s initial evaluation interview with a fair degree of trepidation, and it’s completely understandable. Perhaps they’ve had poor outcomes in their previous interactions with the psychiatric health care system. Or they worry that their son or daughter may be labeled arbitrarily, and the label might carry a negative stigma that will color their future interactions with academic providers.

“But you need not be concerned. Let me reassure you that our goal is not to categorize or label your child. Each child is unique, and, especially at your daughter’s age, healthy development allows for a great deal of behavioral variation while remaining within the normative range. Often, all that is needed is a deeper understanding of external, environmental stressors, or perhaps a slight change in parenting approach, to help the child overcome whatever is blocking them, and enable them to develop constructive coping strategies.

“The clinician and the parents are true partners in this process. My sole purpose in assessing Amy will be to provide you with information and insights that
you
can use to decide how you can best support her success and happiness.”

Stunned, I stared up at the wall of monitors and said, “Holy fucking shit.”

I understood, of course, that the voice and words I was hearing were simply a pattern-matching construct, derived from the thousands upon thousands of hours of psychiatric evaluation videos that Frankenstein had watched. Reading the faces of parents and patients, he had distilled the mannerisms and phraseology of the most effective interviewers to create the artificial persona I now heard.

And yet, despite my knowing that Dr. Simon Frank did not really exist, his voice and words even managed to set
me
at ease. I could almost picture his honest, caring face, smiling with understanding warmth, as he came around his desk to shake my hand.

“Call Jen now,” I said, my voice a little unsteady. “She’s all yours.”

Then I thought of how much it would hurt to watch my ex-wife’s face projected on the giant monitor above—especially if she got distressed.

“Voice only,” I added.

Frankenstein charmed Jen from his very first words. Five minutes later, she was opening up to him while I sat in my beanbag chair with my untouched MacBook on my lap. I couldn’t focus on anything except for the surreal conversation booming through the sanctum’s speakers.

“Simon,” she was saying, “I understand what you just said, about how children in Amy’s age group often have trouble distinguishing between reality and wishful thinking. But I don’t know. She seems so completely rational, otherwise. She speaks so well, expresses herself so clearly, it’s as if she were much older than seven—almost like a miniature adult instead of a kid. When Amy says these things, she sounds so sure of herself it makes me question whether
I’m
the one who’s mistaken, like
I’m
the one who’s just not remembering it correctly. I think she… perhaps we…”

Jen took a few deep breaths, audible through the speakers. “Did the divorce cause her to act out like this? You
have
to tell me.” The raw pain in her voice made me cringe. “What did I do
wrong
?”

“Please, Mrs. Lennox… Jennifer… what you are feeling right now is a very common reaction. But I’m afraid it doesn’t really help Amy.”

“Did my decision hurt our daughter? Did I damage her?” Jen’s voice dropped to a bleak whisper. “She misses her father so much.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling my face crumple.

Simon’s voice—
Frankenstein’s
voice—was soothing. “Parental separation can be a contributing factor in many behavioral issues, though it is not usually the cause. You mustn’t feel guilt or blame yourself in any way. A broken home is a common-enough environmental stressor.”