Final Hour (Novella) (3 page)

The highway pavement is dark. The land it splits is bright, and the September sky is brighter still.

The retracted roof allows sunshine to caress her face, arms, bare legs. The hot light celebrates her flawless skin.

Ursula Liddon wonders if there exists another, like her, that the light of the sun adores so passionately. Its warmth is as erotic as a lover's touch, but it is better than a lover, because it wants no more from her than to revere—and to extol—her beauty.

With sun glow on her silken skin, she is exhilarated, as though in expectation of a profound pleasure. This is the perfect state of being. She knows from experience that the tremulous anticipation of orgasm is always more satisfying than the event itself.

She is the still point of the turning world.

How could she not be?

The sun itself has crowned her.

If ever she meets another who, like her, the sun adores so passionately, she will not be pleased. She will do then what she has done before: ensure that she is the only one so venerated.

To prevent the sun from taking full possession of her, she wears heavily tinted glasses. Nothing or no one will ever fully possess her.

In spite of the glasses, the land is bright and the sky is brighter still. Defenses are always needed when one is as desirable as Ursula Jean.

She is en route to see Undine, her identical twin. These visits require great courage, because Undine is evil.

On an open road like this, Ursula always drives as fast as she dares. Speed limits are for others.

She recognizes no limits.

If time cannot touch her, neither can the law.

She looks the same at thirty as she did at twenty.

She lives in time but is not subject to it.

Fast, faster. Faster still.

Perhaps she will prove time powerless by arriving at her destination before she started.

She owns eight cars, one for each day of the week, and a white Rolls-Royce for special occasions. This silver Mercedes convertible is for Mondays.

She remembers a time when she felt content with seven cars. Then she met a woman, Benetta Norquist, who possessed eight.

Benetta also had scored a wealthy husband, Proctor. And a larger, more luxurious house than the one in which Ursula lived.

If any woman on Earth owes everything to a surgeon, it is Benetta, a skank reshaped into eye candy.

When Ursula learned that Benetta had signed a prenuptial agreement, there was no need to kill the corrupt and ever-grasping bitch.

Equally corrupt and an even greater fool, Proctor had been easy for Ursula to seduce, enchant, and marry.

Benetta the skank sued to overturn the prenuptial. She smeared her husband every way she could. Among other things, she claimed, to Ursula's eventual benefit, that Proctor abused cocaine. She lost the case.

Benetta lives still, but in misery, eaten by resentment, bitter and self-hating for having accepted only four million in the prenup.

One of Benetta's greatest faults is greed.

Greed is destroying her life.

Ursula has no patience for the greedy.

Greed and happiness cannot coexist.

Ursula would pity the woman if she didn't loathe her.

Easy to seduce, Proctor had been easier to kill. Like this:

Although she doesn't touch drugs, Ursula has her sources. She removes his stash of cocaine from his bureau drawer, replaces it with uncut heroin of deadly purity, in a bag and decorative box identical to those that hold the cocaine.

Soon thereafter, he inhales himself to death.

Ursula returns the cocaine to the bureau drawer. Two identical stashes. How foolish of him to make it so easy to confuse them.

Under the cold eyes of the authorities, she weeps copiously. Men are always deeply moved to see such a vision weeping.

She speaks of her efforts to encourage Proctor into rehab. Both household maids testify to having overheard those conversations.

Even suspicious homicide detectives cannot believe Ursula's flood of tears might be faked. See the sorrowing softness of her full mouth. See the tender curve of her throat convulse with sobs.

Benetta, when questioned, says, “The lucky bitch. Why couldn't the bastard OD when
I
was married to him?”

When told of this, Ursula weeps again, moved beyond endurance to think that Proctor had been so hated by a woman he once loved.

Following a respectable period of mourning, Ursula reverts to the name Liddon. And thus the episode concludes.

She hadn't signed a prenup. Proctor so adored her that he had poured his all upon her without conditions.

Now she drives her Monday car at high speed, pleasured by the doting sun.

Ursula slows as little as possible for an off-ramp and enters an industrial area that, measured in miles traveled, is not far from Newport Beach. Considering the graceless nature of the structures, considering the cruelty with which the sunlight falls upon these buildings and the vigor with which it is rebuffed, this place might as well be on a different planet from the one on which Newport shines.

Among her father's numerous properties that she inherited, there is a four-acre parcel surrounded by a high chain-link fence. The motorized gate responds to her remote control.

She parks between two large buildings of concrete block and corrugated steel panels. She gets out of the gleaming car. From the luggage space behind the two seats, she retrieves a small picnic cooler.

An overhanging roof paints its sharp-edged black shadow across half the ground between structures. Sunlight claims the other half.

She stands in sunshine. Although no one is here to see her, she is pleased with how dazzling she looks in this crude setting.

With a key, she disengages two heavy-duty deadbolts. She steps through a door into the larger of the two buildings.

She stands for a moment in the warm velvet darkness, which seems alive and alert and approving of her.

High overhead is a row of windows so filthy that the midday sun is pale on the glass and all but incapable of penetrating.

When she switches on banks of fluorescent lamps, a cavernous space appears. Concrete floor. Rows of steel support posts rising to massive tie beams. A catwalk high above. The machinery is long gone.

Something was once manufactured here. She doesn't know what product they made. She has no interest in the making of things, only in the taking of them.

Steeling herself for the encounter ahead, carrying the picnic cooler, she walks toward the north end of the building.

Ursula isn't driven by greed, as is the despicable Benetta, that secret skank in starlet's skin. Ursula has many millions, more than she will ever need.

Greed is a sick motivation, the reason for the want and ruin of the world.

Greed is the blood in every movie villain's veins.

Ursula is inspired instead by the emotion that, in her time, is widely honored and celebrated: envy. She is a correct-thinking woman who wants to take only what other people have
but don't deserve.

Carved, injected, clipped, stretched, and pinned to be made desirable, Benetta did not deserve a wealthy husband.

Deceiving others, making them think that they wanted the land he developed and the houses he built, even at outrageous prices, Proctor was an exploiter of the worst kind, deserving nothing.

At the north end of the structure are single-story offices side by side, drywall boxes with windows facing the production floor. And a door to a stairwell.

The stairs lead down into darkness.

She can feel the evil radiating from below.

She reminds herself that all of the sunlight that has revered her is now contained within her, that she is radiant, and that she will triumph here as always she triumphs.

She switches on the stairwell light.

Boldly she descends, though below waits the monster that is her twin sister, Undine.

In Makani's '54 Chevy, she and Pogo and Bob crossed the harbor on the bargelike ferry to visit Simon Hunter. They found a parking place a block from their destination, in the shade of an Indian laurel. The day was warm, and they left each of the four windows open a few inches, to ensure Bob's comfort.

“Guard duty,” she told the Labrador as she locked the car.

He was the most mellow of dogs, but he answered those two words with a growl of werewolfian menace. In Makani's absence, if anyone tested the doors, good Bob would growl with such ferocity that the scoundrel would be reminded of the savage attack dogs who often protected the most nefarious of supervillains in the movies, and would retreat—unless she was Ursula Liddon.

There were only a few things that Bob was from time to time asked to do to earn his keep, and he was always proud to serve Makani. He sat at a rear window, his noble head raised, the very picture of a dedicated guardian.

“Do you sometimes wish you could read animals?” Pogo asked.

“Oh God, no. Though if I could read dogs' minds, I suspect they'd make even the best of humans seem like devils.”

“Present company excepted?” he asked.

“Probably not.”

“I love your honesty.”

“Dude, you don't have a choice.”

Simon Michael Hunter didn't live in a loft with industrial décor or in the basement of his parents' house. He didn't conceal himself in a shabby tenement apartment surrounded by a contrasting fortune in electronic gear. He didn't dwell in a generator-equipped motor home parked inside a cave, nor in a caboose among scores of rusting train cars in a forgotten railroad storage yard, nor in an abandoned missile silo, nor in a yurt.

He owned a waterfront house on Balboa Island.

His home was not filled with
Star Wars
or
Star Trek
posters and memorabilia. Nor with arcade games restored for home play. No Steve Jobs or Che Guevara posters. No collection of comic books or graphic novels. There was none of the clutter and wild disorder that are supposedly evidence of a free spirit and a genius intellect.

The house was neat, clean, and furnished with Art Deco antique furniture, sculptures, and paintings.

Simon was neither weirdly thin nor obese. He had not shaved his head, and yet he did not have a wild mass of tangled hair. He didn't wear sneakers with the laces untied. He didn't wear cheap jeans and flannel shirts, or T-shirts emblazoned with the faces of cultural icons, or T-shirts imprinted with things like
OPEN THE POD-BAY DOOR, HAL
.

Or short-sleeved white shirts with pocket protectors jammed full of pens. Or pants pulled up four inches above his navel.

Instead, this day, he wore loafers, white chinos, and a polo shirt. He was clean shaven, well barbered, pleasant looking, with white-white teeth, a respectable tan, well-manicured fingernails, and an air of normality that, in the mind of any Hollywood casting director, would disqualify him for the role of a computer hacker.

In the foyer, Pogo and Simon hugged. Makani, meeting the wizard of the digital universe for the first time, managed to avoid a touch without giving offense.

“Doesn't look the part, does he?” Pogo asked her as Simon led them along the ground-floor hallway to his study. To his friend, he said, “I guess you've read every novel by William Gibson.”

“Haven't read one,” said Simon, “though I mean to.”

“Surely you've read at least
Neuromancer.
”

“No. I'm a Philistine.”

“You were probably the first subscriber to
Wired
magazine.”

“
Wired
? Is that a magazine about getting stoned?”

“How often have you seen the movie about Julian Assange?”

“They made a movie? I must have been on vacation the weekend it was in theaters.”

Makani sensed that this conversation was almost a routine they went through, in one form or another, every time Pogo introduced Simon to someone new.

The study was an elegant space, with a Deco desk and sideboard of amboina wood inlaid with ivory: sleek, lacquered, golden. A pair of comfortable macassar-ebony armchairs might have been by Ruhlmann.

“But surely,” Pogo continued, “in the rebel spirit of the video pirate Kim Dotcom, you must have crazy-wild parties with champagne fountains and bowls of free cocaine and naked girls.”

“Don't do drugs. Drink only fine red wines. And I'm gay.”

To Makani, Pogo said, “If there was a hackers' union, they would throw him out.”

“Not least of all,” Simon said, “because I earn my living by identifying and hacking other hackers who've stolen money or data.”

His two computers, printers, and associated equipment did not stand upon the fine furniture, but on a table in an alcove.

“He's a bounty hunter,” Pogo told Makani. “Like Duane ‘Dog' Chapman from that old reality TV show, only without the macho.”

“I'm as macho as they come,” Simon said as he settled into an office chair before the computers. “You're just jealous.”

“Aren't there days,” Pogo asked, “when you yearn to man the barricades and rebel against the system?”

“The system invented computers and the Internet,” Simon said. “Without the system, hackers would have nothing to rebel against and nothing to rebel
with.
And I'd still be poor.”

Like the narrator of an old radio drama, Pogo portentously said, “Simon Michael Hunter—wise man or sellout? The answer lies only in the shadows of his own tortured heart.”

At his keyboard, Simon flexed his fingers as if he were a pianist about to bring music from a Steinway. “On the phone, you said this woman has no Facebook page, no website.”

Makani said, “We've got some search skills of our own. So far as we could learn, she doesn't blog, doesn't tweet, has no email address. Ursula Liddon is off the grid.”

“No one is off the grid, sweetheart, not even those who've worked their ass off to get there. You gave me her street address, which is all I needed to find everything
you
need to do whatever dirty work it is that you're doing.”

“It's not dirty work,” Pogo said. “It's just delicate.”

“It's all relative,” Simon said. “One man's delicate is another man's dirty.”

“I'm an honest man.”

“Yes, so you've told me.”

“I've been a house-sitter for you twice. Ever been as much as a doily missing?”

“There's never been a damn doily in this house,” Simon said, “and there never will be.”

“You see? Not one missing.”

“The first two times, you might've been setting me up, winning my confidence. Next time, I expect to come home to nothing but empty rooms.”

“You have problems with trust. I pity the man you marry.”

“
That
will never happen,” Simon said.

To Makani, Pogo said, “Simon is a traditionalist. He still opens doors for women, wears a coat and tie to fine restaurants, and laments the hoi polloi's increasing inability to properly use
who
and
whom
in speech.”

“I should have been born around nineteen hundred. Here we go.”

Simon indicated the computer screen, then the printer, which began to feed paper through its laser jet and into the output stacker. “I've created a file for you, anything useful regarding Ursula Jean Liddon, who was briefly Ursula Jean Norquist, bride and widow within four months, now Liddon again. She keeps a low profile. Fortunately, the cokehead horndog who married this looker wanted to show her off, so there was a little coverage in what passes for the high-society publications here along the California Riviera, those slick luxury-living magazines we all love to drool over. Now give me your phone.” Pogo gave it to him. “I'm going to load a little app for you, my own creation, but customized to your needs regarding the pneumatic Ms. Liddon. With this, you'll pretty much know where she is twenty-four/seven.” He succinctly explained the app, and when he finished installing it, he suggested, “Say, ‘Thank you, dear Uncle Simon,' and quietly be gone. I have a
paying
job to finish for a Fortune Five Hundred company, and
they
would never insult me by implying that doilies are a part of my décor.”