Remote (28 page)

And the best part hadn’t even begun yet.

“No, Nikki.  I couldn’t replace you.”  Jack picked up the small butane torch and a lighter.  He opened the valve on the torch, sparked it to hissing, glowing life.  “And I don’t want to try.  I want you to be free.  Take what’s in the warehouse, sell it, live your life.”

“That’s your plan, huh? 
Fuck
you.  Let me die, Jack.  You can do more good by working with Remote than fighting him—I’ve been telling you that all along.  Be his conscience, Jack.  He’s a better partner than I could ever be.”

“She’s right, Jack,” Remote said.  “Her time is over.  Let her go.”

“You’re both wrong,” Jack said.  “I’m nobody’s conscience.”

He adjusted the flame at the torch’s tip down to a narrow, intense cone of blue.  “I’m the Closer.  I get answers.  I provide closure.  That’s what you get at the end of a story . . . and this is the end of mine.”

Jack studied the flame for a second, then set the torch down carefully beside the laptop.  He closed the suitcase, set it down on the floor, and picked up the attaché case and put it where the suitcase had rested.

“What are you doing, Jack?” Remote asked.

Jack opened the briefcase.  Arrayed in neat rows, held in place with black elastic straps, were a selection of instruments very similar to what had been in the suitcase.

“I prefer to use my own tools,” Jack said.  “There isn’t enough fuel in that torch, anyway.  You can tell by the sound.”

He selected a surgical clamp and considered it carefully.  With his other hand, he picked up the torch and applied the flame to the tips of the clamp.

Nikki met his gaze.  After a second, Jack looked away.

“Can’t even look me in the eye?” she said.  “You fucking coward.  I’m gonna outlast you, Jack.  I’m tougher than you are.”

“We’ll see,” Jack said softly.  He took a black cloth hood out of the briefcase, and slipped it over her defiant face.

***

Remote regretted the fact that he hadn’t asked Tanner to install more cameras. 

The webcam on the laptop gave him a good view of Jack’s face,  but much of Nikki’s body was obscured.  The overhead camera made up for that, but it had no zoom feature—the finer details of Jack’s work were lost, and he could only see Jack’s face sporadically.  All he could see of Nikki’s head was the black cloth of the hood.

Remote didn’t consider himself a sadist.  Pain was a subject of study for him, not an end in itself, and the personal dynamics between Jack and Nikki were far more fascinating than the suffering she was experiencing.  Which, by her reactions, was considerable.

The interrogation itself was quite straightforward, at first.  Jack simply asked for the code, over and over, while she screamed obscenities or just screamed.  There was a definite build to Jack’s actions, though, an escalation recognizable to Remote even though he’d never experienced any of the sensations Jack was inflicting.

He was glad Jack had brought his own equipment.  A master couldn’t be expected to do his best without the tools he was accustomed to. 

She passed out at one point.  Jack leaned over her body, resting his arms on the edge of the table, not speaking. There was quite a lot of blood.

“Two hours to go, Jack.  How are you holding up?”

“I’m doing my job.”  His voice was dull, heavy with emotional fatigue. 

“Yes, you are.  She’s proving something of a challenge, don’t you think?”

“I’m doing my job.”  Said the same way, with virtually no inflection.

“Something I’ve been wondering about, Jack.  You said you were going to cut off my phone and Internet access.  That would have been quite a feat; landlines can be cut and cell phone signals blocked, but my ISP is routed through a satellite connection.  How were you planning on dealing with that?”

“Power for your island is routed through an undersea cable that links it to the Northwest corridor grid.  I know someone with experience in underwater demolitions that was willing to plant a charge for me.  He thought it was a camera unit for an art project.”

“You were going to black out the entire island?  Bold—but it wouldn’t have worked, Jack.  I have a generator in the basement.  External access only, so you never saw it.”

“I had a back-up plan.”

“Which was?”

“It doesn’t matter now.  It wouldn’t have worked, anyway.”

“You’re intriguing me, Jack.  We have a little time; please, elaborate.”

“I’ll tell you, but you have to answer a question for me in return.”

“I will if I can, Jack.”

“Why are you making me do this?”

Remote smiled.  “Why?  For your own good, of course.  I can see that you keep your tools in fine shape; clean, sharp, well-organized.  That’s how I want you to be, Jack.  And Nikki—she’s dulling your edge.  You care about her, that much is obvious.  That’s a weakness.”

“You’re right. You can’t let anyone into your life, not when your life is like ours.  Caring about someone is just giving your enemies a hostage to use against you.”

“Exactly.  That’s the lesson I want you to learn, Jack.  But it’s not the kind that can be taught second-hand.  You need to live it.”

Jack nodded.  “That’s true.  That’s why I did all this, why I let you watch.  You needed to see this happen, know it was real.”

Remote frowned.  “I’m not following you, Jack.”

“I’m talking about my back-up plan, Mr. Remote.”  Jack reached out and pulled the hood off Nikki’s head.

Except it wasn’t Nikki under the black cloth any more.

It was Eden Fawnsley.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
T
HREE

“Everybody has something they don’t want to lose,” Jack said.  He stared directly into the webcam, directly into Remote’s eyes.  “That’s the real horror of torture, the things you lose.  Not the physical things but the metaphysical ones.  Your confidence, your faith, your hope.

“The shamans of some primitive tribes will perform a ceremony to remove their soul and place it in an object like a jar, which they then hide.  They believe this protects it from evil spirits or witchcraft.  I don’t know if you have a soul, Mr. Remote, but if you do you’ve placed it in Eden.  She represents everything you wish you could be, everything normal and right.  When you kill sociopaths, you’re doing it for her.  For the kind of world you want her to live in.”

“No,” Remote whispered.

“Look at her,” Jack said. 

Unlike Nikki, Eden was gagged.  Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes as she struggled against the ropes.

“See those burns? 
You
made that happen.  Those cuts, the fingernails I ripped out? 
You’re
responsible.”

“What—
how
, how is this—“

“That’s the thing about fame these days, Mr. Remote.  You only get fifteen minutes, and it goes by really fast.  You want to make any money, you have to hop on the gravy train at the very first station, and the only way to get a ticket is through an agent.  A Hollywood agent.”

Remote didn’t say anything, just stared at the screen.  His thoughts felt random, disconnected; he couldn’t make any sense out of them. 

“Her agent was easy to locate—he wasn’t exactly at the top of the heap.  Once Nikki found him, it wasn’t hard to find her.  And it’s a lot easier to pull a switch when the only person watching is doing so through a camera many miles away. . . Cameras
lie
, Remote.  But my subjects don’t—not for long.”

“You—you have to let her go.”

“Do I?  You should congratulate yourself; you’ve won.  You forced me to adopt your own tactics, your own perspective.  After all, what’s the life of one shallow, money-grubbing gloryhound when viewed against the greater good?  Should I take off her gag and ask her?”

“I can’t believe you’d do this,” Remote said, his voice soft.  “You wouldn’t—”

“I
did
!”  Jack shouted.  He jabbed a finger at Eden’s body.  “You watched me do it!  Every
cut
, every
abrasion
, every
broken bone
!  BECAUSE YOU MADE ME!”

“Please,” said Remote. 

“You think I
enjoyed
this?  You think I
wanted
to do this?  But you left me with no choice.  I
knew
you’d go after Nikki, I
knew
what you’d make me do to her.  Because you’re predictable, Mr. Remote; you aspire to the same state that all your mechanical antiques possess.  You wind them up and they perform flawlessly, just as they have for hundreds of years.  When you look at them, you see metal versions of your drones; but when I look at your drones, I see simplified versions of you.  You may have a pretty good grasp of human psychology, Mr. Remote, but you have very little understanding of your own.”

Remote stood.  He had to do something, but had no idea what.  He had the sudden, overpowering urge to pick up his keyboard and smash it against a monitor.  His hands trembled.

“But
I
understand you, Mr. Remote.  Understanding monsters, that’s what I do.  And I knew that the only way to get through to you, the only way to
break
you, was to threaten the one person in the world that’s real to you—even though you’ve never met her, never seen her on anything but a screen.”

A single word impressed itself on Remote’s brain, as solid as the floor under his feet. 
Threaten.  He said threaten—not destroy.  Threaten
.

“While you were planning on taking Nikki away from me, I was planning on taking Eden away from you.  Haven’t been able to get Mr. Tanner on his cell phone lately, have you?”

“Not for a while,” Remote said dully.  “Only texts.”

“Nikki was never a captive, Mr. Remote.  She took him in an abandoned building across from the church while he was stalking a mannequin holding a pair of binoculars.  He’s been very forthcoming, too—his survival instincts are very keen, his sense of loyalty almost nonexistent.  The one phone call from you we let through, he performed perfectly—and if he made any mistakes, you were too distracted to notice.”

For the first time, Remote smiled.  “Goliath.  You attacked my castle as a diversion while you removed my knight from play.”

“And captured your queen.  This game is over, Mr. Remote.  You have no more pieces left, not even a pawn.  We took Samuel Abel out of the motel room Tanner stuck him in; he’s going to wake up a free man, not a drone.” 

Remote sank back into his chair.  He felt oddly at peace.  “I’m not so sure.   You have her, but what are you going to do with her?”

“I’m going to kill her, Mr. Remote.  Slowly.  While you watch.  You won’t be able to save her, but you won’t be able to look away either—because I’m going to remove that option.  I’m going to force you to participate, Mr. Remote.  I’m going to ask you what procedure I should do next, and if you refuse to answer I’ll choose the one that’s worse.”

The sense of peace vanished, dread and horror rising to replace them.  “That gains you nothing.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Remote.  I’m fairly certain it will drive you insane.  I’ve already removed your allies, and now I’m going to disable your best weapon.  Destroying you after that will be no more than a technicality.”

Remote blinked.  “That’s . . . very well thought out, Jack.  I don’t know what to say.”

“Oh, I believe you do, Mr. Remote.  Think about it.”

He did. 

And after a long moment, he said, “I surrender.”

***

Samuel Abel woke up with a pounding headache, to the sound of two yowling cats.  He sat up, feeling queasy, and barely made it to the bathroom before he threw up.

He rested his head against the cool porcelain of the toilet, trying to figure out why he felt so awful.  Food poisoning? Stomach flu?  Or had he been out drinking?

He had a vague, surreal memory of being attacked by a pizza delivery man—did that really happen, or was it a dream?

The nausea slowly passed, though the cats had followed him into the bathroom and were now meowing loudly far too close to his ears.  Abel got unsteadily to his feet, and tottered back to the bedroom. 
Some kind of bug
, he thought.
Fever dreams, that’s what I’m remembering.
  He decided he should really go down to the hospital, have himself checked out.  But not right away—he was suddenly ravenous, like he hadn’t eaten for days. 
That’s a good sign, he thought.  The worst has probably passed
.

He made his way to the kitchen and got the cats some food—the way they were carrying on, you’d think they hadn’t been fed in days. 

When he went back to the bathroom to shower and shave, he was still a little too groggy to notice how heavy the stubble on his face was.  It wasn’t until he checked the voicemail on his phone that he learned he’d apparently been asleep for seventy-two hours.

***

Malcolm Tanner woke up knowing exactly where he was.  It wasn’t a good place.

“Hey, scumbag,” Nikki said pleasantly.  “Sleep well?  No nightmares, I hope.  That’s kind of our department—and we
hate
competition.”

Tanner looked around blearily.  He was handcuffed, hand and foot, to an old bed with a stained mattress and no bedding.  There was black plastic sheeting covering the walls, floor and ceiling, and the only light came from a small table to one side holding a lamp, a laptop and a closed black suitcase. 

Sitting beside the table was the man Tanner had delivered to his boss.

“Fortunately for us,” the man said, “we don’t have any.  Not any more.”

Tanner swallowed.  “Look, I had no choice.  The guy I’m working for—he’s a blackmailer.  He’d ruin my life if I didn’t do what he told me to.  I have zero say in any of his decisions, and he doesn’t care about me at all.  I’m a lousy hostage.”

“You’re not a hostage,” the man said.  “You’re a subject.  Do you know who I am?”

“You’re—no.  No, I don’t know who you are.”

“I’m the Closer.  You recognize the name?”

“Yes.”  Tanner felt dizzy, like the whole room had been spinning ever since he woke up but he’d just noticed.