Dead and Gone (32 page)

So I started from the beginning. Again.

O
ccasionally, I would walk past their patterning wall. And see things on it that made no sense to me—I couldn’t imagine any connection.

Cayman Islands

    New Utopia

Liberian registry

      Dominica

Nauru

But I wasn’t a sensei, or even a student, so I just went back to doing what I knew how to do.

T
hey had a pool table there. I spent some time teaching Gem. Played cards with Clint, Minh, and Heidi—she was murderous at poker, with that farm-girl face covering up a statistician’s mind. The Indian and I talked about his people. I learned a lot more than Hiram had ever told me. About a warrior named Juh, who Levi said actually did some of the things credited to Geronimo.

“No one knows what ‘Juh’ means,” he said. “It may be a nonsense name, or just a sound he made to refer to himself. But in historical accounts of several of the most famous and most tactically accomplished raids, survivors remember seeing the warriors looking toward a large, dark man who was signaling with his hands. Juh had a bad stutter and couldn’t really speak, so he used a complicated set of hand signals. He and Geronimo were childhood playmates and lifelong friends. And, if the stories are true, Geronimo may have been more vicious but it was Juh who never failed to find an enemy, even when it took years.”

I got along with—and learned something from—every one of them except the Latina. I asked Gem if she knew why that woman wouldn’t come anywhere near me.

“Yes,” is all she said.

I
t was late at night when I found Lune. He was alone at his computer, his angel’s face bathed in blue light from the screen.

“I’m done,” I told him.

He didn’t look away from the screen. “Are you sure, Burke?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. I’ve been going over and over it. Again and again. I must have told poor Gem my whole lousy life story a dozen times. If there’s anyone not on this list, I don’t know it.”

His head swiveled suddenly. “Sometimes …” he began, his voice soft, “people don’t remember things that—”

“It’s not like that for me, Lune,” I said, quickly, cutting him off before he went someplace he’d never return from. “I remember every one of them. Right to this day. You know what? You’re right—the stuff some people repress, it’s all right on the surface for me. And if I
could
find any of them …”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been working, too. Now we’re going to have to take what you’ve got and see where the pattern is.”

“Is there any way I can help?”

“Not yet,” he said, taking the thick looseleaf book I’d been working in from my hand and turning back to the computer screen.

“I
could stay here,” Gem said that night. “What?”

“I could stay here,” she repeated, calmly. “Minh is searching for the same pattern I am. Only I did not know there could
be
a pattern to the killing fields. It all seemed so …”

“Random?”

“Yes. Random. But now I am not certain.”

“Are you going to?”

“What?”

“Stay here.”

“Oh no.”

“Why not, girl?”

“Because you are not,” she said. Then she pulled my thumb into her mouth.

A
nother few days went by. I’m not sure how many. Even though I’d turned in my list to Lune, I kept going over it in my head, thinking maybe there
was
something I wasn’t facing. But it was no good—my tank had been drained.

I was lying back on the couch when someone knocked on the door. Gem walked over and opened it. The Latina was standing there.

“It’s time,” is all she said.

T
hey were all there in the patterning room, waiting on me. The screen was empty except for one word:

Darcadia

I took a seat, Gem next to me. “What does it mean?” I asked Lune.

But it was Clint who answered: “It’s a corruption of ‘Arcadia,’ a mountainous region of the central Peloponnesus of ancient Greece, represented as a paradise in Greek and Roman bucolic poetry and in the literature of the Renaissance. It was a plateau, bounded by mountain ranges and itself divided by individual mountains. For a number of geographical reasons, it was cut off from the coast on all sides—like an island on land, if you can picture that. So it survived a number of invasions but, eventually, it accepted a forced alliance with Sparta, and fought with the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War. It finally fell into decline during Roman times.”

“I don’t see how—”

“The key is Sparta,” Minh said. “For a number of white-supremacist organizations, the Spartans represent the ultimate warriors.”

“I’d’ve thought it would be the Vikings,” I said. “The ones who call themselves ‘racialists’ are always hooking to some religion, and you hear ‘Odinism’ down there a lot.”

“Oh, but the Vikings in the
modern
era are not as acceptable to Nazi mythology,” Aydah said.

“Why is that?” Gem asked.

“Because they fought against the Nazis in World War II. Norway was invaded and occupied, but it always maintained an active resistance, even with Quisling in charge. And
that
ultimate collaborator was executed for treason as soon as the country was liberated. Finland never surrendered at all. And everyone knows what the Danes did to protect Jews. Sweden was allegedly ‘neutral,’ but it actually served as a training ground for Norwegian resistance fighters. And what Raoul Wallenberg did would be enough by itself to make the Nazis hate his whole country. They probably feel betrayed because Scandinavians
look
so perfectly Aryan,” Aydah finished, bitterly. “That probably hurts the most.”

“There’s another reason for Sparta to be their Promised Land,” Minh said quietly.

We all turned to look at him.

“The Spartans are also revered by so-called boy-lovers. And the concept that a warrior is entitled to whatever he is capable of
taking
—that, too, is considered ‘Spartan.’ As is a high tolerance for pain and hardship … and superiority in battle.”

“I still don’t see the—” I stopped myself before I could say the word that flashed on
my
screen: “pattern.” Maybe I’d been there too long already.

Lune flicked his pointer, and words popped up on the wall. He talked as he pointed and clicked, like the spoken bridge in doo-wop I’d tried to tell Gem about.

“Thematic with hate groups,” he said, as everything from
Nation of Islam
to
Aryan Nations
popped up on the wall, “is this concept of a ‘homeland.’ While the more floridly disturbed of them actually believe a portion of the United States will be set aside for them—”

“Like Casino Indians,” Levi put in, bitterness blood-deep in his voice.

“—the more serious and committed ones understand they would have to go outside American borders to have their ‘paradise,’ ” Lune continued, as if the Indian hadn’t spoken. “There is ample precedent for such belief. There was that aborted white-supremacist coup on the Caribbean island of Dominica about twenty years ago. And the tiny Pacific island country of Nauru has converted itself into a major offshore-banking operation.” He looked over at Heidi.

“That’s authenticated,” the farm girl said. “They are, in effect, selling foreigners the means to cloak transactions. Although there is probably no
actual
foreign money on the island, hundreds of
billions
of dollars pass through it every year. Interpol believes it to be the largest money-laundering vehicle in the world today. The Republic of Nauru—all eight square miles of it—provides even stricter secrecy than such legendary havens as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.”

“All right,” I said. “Maybe I’m dense, but …”

“The overwhelming majority of that laundered money comes from Russian organized crime,” Heidi said.

I shut up. And paid attention.

Lune took over again. “Ever since the failed coup on Dominica, there have been numerous schemes, mostly but not exclusively promoted on the Internet, to purchase ‘citizenship’ in various ‘republics.’ The promoters purport to be creating these in the Pacific by purchasing and developing unclaimed … or even mostly submerged … islands,” he said. “Each project targets certain types. Mostly right-wingers who want freedom from any government intrusion into their lives—taxes, gun control, education. And there are the supremacists who want to live exclusively among their own while they arm themselves for Armageddon. But there are other groups seeking ‘paradise,’ too. A place where they can behave as they wish without fear of consequences.”

“Freaks,” I said, getting it now.

“Pedophiles, polygamists, incest-breeders, child-pornography manufacturers … yes,” Lune said, nothing in his voice but the patterns.

“Where does this all tie in?” I asked him.

“Darcadia,” he said. “A Pacific island with enough land mass to accommodate a small nation. It is undeveloped. Completely raw. It has a natural freshwater supply, but no infrastructure at all. Estimated cost to fully develop so that it could sustain, say, twenty thousand people …?”

“Somewhere around ten billion,” Heidi answered. “A prospectus of sorts has been floating around for almost two years now. The shares are in blocks of a hundred thousand, but ‘citizenships’ go for ten thousand.”

“What’s a—?”

“A ‘citizenship,’ ” Heidi continued, “buys you the right to bank there, be free from personal income taxes … and a passport.”

“All right, so someone’s building a degenerate’s heaven on some island. I’ll probably die of old age before it ever really happens.”

“I don’t think so,” Lune said. “The pattern is complete. Because we know the name of the person at the top of the Darcadia pyramid.”

He tapped his keys. The wall cleared. And then a single name popped up in red letters.

I looked at the name. Nothing. I stared at the red letters, reaching for the connection, dropping deeper and deeper into myself, the way I used to do with the red dot I had painted on my mirror years ago. Deliberately dissociating, going somewhere else … where the answers always were.

I
never thought of him by a name. Never thought of him as a person. He was always the Mentor to me. More than fifteen years ago, when I first met him. A little boy had been raped by a maggot in a clown suit. Someone had taken a Polaroid of it—and the child believed his soul had been captured. A witch named Strega hired me to get it back. I went down one tunnel after another, looking. And ended up in a junkyard bunker in the South Bronx.

“Mole,” I said, “I’ve got a picture I need to find. The way it was taken, Polaroid camera and all, it had to be for sale. If it goes in a magazine, then it’s in the stream of commerce and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

He looked up, listening the way he always does—silently
.

“But I don’t think that’s the deal,” I told him. “I think it was taken for a collector—a private thing. If they put it in a magazine, someone could see it. Cause a lot of problems. I need some freak who gets off looking at this stuff. You understand? Someone who’s got shoeboxes full of pictures like that.”

The Mole nodded, not arguing with my logic. So far
.

“So I need to talk to a collector, ” I went on. “A serious, hardcore pedophile. Someone with the money to buy things like this. This is a no-consent picture, understand? The freaks might trade copies back and forth, but this one would be too risky for general commerce.”

“I don’t know anyone like that.”

“Mole,” I said, keeping my voice level, “you have friends. Associates, anyway. People I did some work for a couple of times. When we first met.” No point mentioning names—they were all part of some wet-work group
.

The Mole turned so he was facing me. “So?”

I was fast-talking now, knowing the door wouldn’t stay open long
.

“So they have to keep files on freaks like that. Blackmail, whatever. They have to know what’s going down on the international scene—know who the players are. I know they don’t do law-enforcement or vice-squad stuff
,
but information … that’s something
all
the services want. Anything to give them a leg up … a handle.”

We made our deal. It took a while to set up, and I had to let the Mole come with me, but it finally went down
.

A limestone-front townhouse just off Fifth Avenue, three stories high, level with the rest of the buildings on the block. Maybe thirty-five feet wide. A seven-figure piece of property in that neighborhood, easy. Four steps took us to a teak door, set behind a wrought-iron grating. The Mole’s stubby finger found the mother-of-pearl button, pushed it once
.

We didn’t have long to wait. The teak door opened. A man was standing there, waiting. You don’t need a peephole when you have a couple of hundred pounds of iron between you and whoever’s at the door. I couldn’t see into the dark interior. The man at the door was tall and slender, both hands in the pockets of what looked like a smoking jacket
.

“Yes?” he asked
.

“Moishe Nineteen,” the Mole said
.