Jericho's Fall (31 page)

The printouts.

Jericho’s printouts from the library. His Internet research.

She had finally figured out the trick. Dak was telling the truth, but so was Lewiston Clark, and, in his way, Jack Notting. Jericho must have begun by squirreling away his national-security secrets, and then, as his breakdown accelerated, moved on to include the collapse of
Scondell Bloom. This was, indeed, his revenge on the world that had tossed him aside at the height of his powers. He might be dying, but he would make them all watch—and pay for the privilege.

Whatever information Jericho had gathered—whatever form it took—it had proved sufficient to keep at bay the forces of governments and billionaires alike. Here, then, was the best protection, for herself and her daughter. If Beck could only possess whatever Jericho had hidden, she could hold them off as effectively as he had. And so, methodically, she got to work, searching through the office file cabinets, then moving into the sickroom, where Jericho snored heavily from the bed. She could not get over how strong he looked. She wondered how a disease could so thoroughly ravage one’s insides while leaving the outside untouched. But as she made her away along the shelves, she remembered a girlfriend who had died, very young, of breast cancer, and had shown few overt symptoms even when they told her she had only six months to live.

And here were the printouts. They were in two accordion files on the windowsill, hidden in plain sight if they were hidden at all. She leafed through them, and, sure enough, found instructions about rebuilding virtually every system in the house.

Perfectly sensible, she realized.

Jericho would have researched the systems before tearing up the house. He would have hidden his secrets in only one, leaving the others as wisps.

She carried the files back to her bedroom, figuring that neither Pamela nor Audrey would miss them. And if they did, too bad. Rebecca had between now and midmorning tomorrow, when she had to leave for the airport, to outguess the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, to find what neither a scheming billionaire nor an ambitious Senator nor the government of the United States had been able to uncover.

For her daughter’s sake, she dared not fail.

(iv)

The clue was in the madness. By tracking the ravages of the disease through his brain, she could track his successive hiding places for what Lewiston Clark had called names, dates, and figures.

And what had he done, in his madness? What was the single concrete act of insanity to which both sisters could point?

He had rebuilt his house.

And so Rebecca sat in her suite, surrounded not only by the printouts, but by whatever she could cull from Jericho’s files: the original architectural plans for Stone Heights, the survey showing plot lines and elevations, the receipts for the new roof and the alarm system and the electric wiring and the well pump and the new plumbing and the new windows and half a dozen other systems she had not thought of until now. She puzzled over wiring diagrams and instruction pamphlets and correspondence with contractors.

He always went to talk to the workers, Audrey had said. Whoever was replacing or rebuilding or restructuring, Jericho chatted with them while they worked. And to at least one of them—Beck was really rolling now—to at least one, Jericho had said,
Oh, by the way, I wonder if you could do me a favor
. No doubt cash had made an appearance, and then Jericho’s documents or computer disks or whatever wound up sealed behind drywall or stuffed beneath a shingle.

But which? She could hardly tear down the whole house. She lacked the basic tools even to pry up a single floorboard.

She was deep into her reading when, half an hour later, Audrey knocked on her door. She was serving cookies and milk in the kitchen, she said. From a bakery this time, she promised, leading Beck out into the hall despite her objections: for Rebecca had been deep inside the owner’s manual for Jericho’s new Asko dishwasher, looking for hidden spots that remained dry, and hated to have her concentration broken.

But she went, and not to be polite. If she was to solve this puzzle, she might need help. She dared not tell the sisters what she was looking
for, not with Jack Notting and his friends listening in. She could, however, ask questions about their father.

And so she did.

No, said Audrey. She did not remember whether Jericho’s obsession extended to hiring a different contractor for every job, or whether he tended to use the same ones.

Yes, said Pamela. Jericho paid the people who repaired things very well, often throwing in an extra couple of hundred, because “times are so tough out there.” This habit of overpayment had won him affection throughout the valley. The affection, in turn, led to a protectiveness among the people of Bethel, and their vigilance provided Jericho an effective early-warning system against strangers, Beck suspected.

Yes, said Audrey. She had been here during some of the renovation. She remembered that Jericho had a terrible screaming argument with the roofer—

Jericho’s buzzer sounded.

“My turn,” said the nun.

When Audrey had gone, Pamela turned to Beck. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“I don’t have time.”

“Oh, you’ll make time for this one.” Her voice was pitched low, the tone gentle: the voice of the peacemaker. “It’s about your daughter.”

Panic. Visions of Jack Notting. “Nina? What about her?”

“Her father was that lawyer you married, right?”

“Larry Vayner.”

“Sean says he was a stuck-up asshole.”

“He was appropriately surnamed,” Beck said, voice strained as she remembered Larry’s big plans to exploit her life story for money; and his fury when she refused.

“I have no doubt,” said Pamela. “Now, listen. I’ve been doing a little studying. That file I mentioned. The one Dad kept on you. Had a chance to read it yet? I didn’t think so. You’ve been so busy reading up on the house you’re hoping to inherit—”

“What!”

“Well, anyway, you’ve missed the forest for the trees. The file’s in Dad’s desk drawer, if you want to see it. Not even locked in the safe. And, believe me, it makes interesting reading. I had no idea that his obsession was so…ongoing.”

Beck had the sense that movement was dangerous. Besides, her limbs were frozen. A desperate, panicky part of her was ready to shriek with laughter, because Jericho, back when she was his student, had been the scourge of what he called the neologisms of nihilism—such words as “ongoing,” and “tolerance,” and “impact” as a verb. But the rest of her had never been more alert.

“This is what I read,” Pamela continued, quite implacable. “You and my dad broke up at the end of 1995. You and your asshole lawyer got married in 1998. Asshole lawyer went back to wife number one in 2000. You were divorced in 2001. Nina arrived in 2002. That means, unless you and asshole lawyer had
another
affair behind his wife’s back—”

“Get to the point,” Beck hissed, or maybe pleaded, because the world was disintegrating again, and at a very high speed.

“It means that the man you’re telling the world is the father isn’t the father. I wonder why you’d tell a lie about something like that, a pillar of integrity like yourself. And then, I’m still in this file, and what do I find? A letter, Rebecca. From you to my father. Dated late 2001. Just after Christmas, as a matter of fact. You know. All saccharine and submissive. Dear Jer-Bear. All that bullshit. Thank you for the choker, it was so sweet, and it was wonderful seeing you last month in New York, et cetera, et cetera.” Neither woman had budged, but Pamela seemed to be towering over her. “The choker cost ten thousand dollars, Rebecca. The receipt’s in there, too, along with a fawning note from some Tiffany’s flunky about their years of service to both the Ainsleys and the Hillimans. There’s some other receipts, too. I don’t think the choker was the only thing Dad has sent you since you left him. I think he sent you some other jewelry, too. I count about seven different items, Rebecca, and none of them were cheap.”

“I gave them away—”

“To charity. I know. It’s in the file. But not the choker. You kept the choker, didn’t you? I was wondering why.”

Beck’s mouth moved. No words emerged. She saw herself on that wintry Christmas morning, at her mother’s house in New Jersey, bitter and tired and ready to die, when the package arrived, delivered by a messenger in the blue Tiffany’s box—

“And then Nina came along,” said Pamela, implacably. “Nina Anne DeForde-Vayner, born July 2002, daughter of Rebecca DeForde-Vayner, as you were calling yourself back then, no father listed on the birth certificate. For some reason there’s a copy in Dad’s file. So. Nina is born in July, therefore conceived in November or December. And November is exactly when you saw my father in New York. Two nights at the Four Seasons, receipts in the folder.”

“I didn’t stay with him, we just had dinner—”

Pamela was relentless. “A month later, he sends you the ten-thousand-dollar choker, and this one, mysteriously, you don’t give to charity. I don’t think your little girl’s father is the asshole lawyer, Rebecca. I don’t think you think so, either. I think the reason you’re here is to make sure that, whether you’re provided for or not, my baby sister gets her share of the—”

Beck was gone. She had to turn her back, because the alternative was a fistfight. Things had reached that point. Gleeful Pamela at last had a justification for her years of animosity, and Beck, after being manipulated by Jericho and threatened by Jack Notting, needed somebody to hit. She marched up the stairs and, reaching the guest suite, had a good cry, then stood up and took it out on the pillow, just the way Dr. Eisenstadt had suggested. First she tried hammering the pillow right on the bed, but the results were unsatisfactory, the pillow was unscathed. So she tossed the pillow into the air and caught it with a straight punch on the way down, then did it again, and again, releasing all the anger of all those years in the wilderness of her tangled emotions and tangled existence. The one she really wanted to hit was Jack Notting, but he was surrounded by bodyguards, and, besides, Beck had no idea where he was. Then there was the great Jericho Ainsley, author of
the horror show she called a life, but he was out of her league, and sick besides. Pamela, who possessed all her father’s talent for derision and none of his charm, would have been a perfect stand-in. But she was bigger than Rebecca, and probably stronger. The idea was to achieve catharsis, not to earn a bed in that awful clinic down in Bethel, behind the elementary school.

A knock on the door.

Audrey poked her head in.

“Is everything okay? I thought I heard— Oh.” She saw the pillow and, everywhere, the feathers.

“Sorry,” said Beck, breathing hard, but feeling better, and desperate to be with her child.

“I hope that was my sister, not me,” said the nun, and, grinning, departed.

But Rebecca had her measure by now. It was like dealing with a superhero from the comic books. Saint Audrey of the cloister was the public identity; the secret identity was Professor Audrey, the interrogator.

And even if Audrey herself was no longer doing what she used to, she had left a catalogue of instructions.

—slowly breaking down the world your subject knows, and replacing it with a world of your own devising—

Say, a house in the Rockies, where one has limited ability to reach the outside world, and a succession of threats, ratcheting up your subject’s fears—

You keep him guessing, keep him off balance, keep changing the rules, until, after a while, he doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t. That’s when he’ll cling to any anchor. And you give him a new reality. A better one
.

Exactly. Somebody was using Audrey’s methods to break down Beck’s resistance, to rewrite her world, hoping she would be desperate enough to—

Well, to do what she was doing.

Maybe it was Jack Notting, maybe it was Dak, maybe it was Maggie and Sean, maybe it was one of the other nameless countries worried
about Jericho’s threats. Whoever it was, Beck realized, had nearly won. They had driven her into a corner where she saw no option but to figure out what Jericho had hidden, and where.

The difference was, she had no intention of turning it over.

To anybody.

Beck picked up the pillow again. “It was all of you,” she said, punching hard.

THURSDAY–FRIDAY:
THE WEE HOURS

CHAPTER 30
The Manager

(i)

Beck crawled into bed around half past two, the folders and printouts forming a mountain on her desk. Fear about Nina’s safety bucked and kicked like a live thing within her, but Beck still saw no salvation other than finding what Jericho had hidden. And so she had puzzled through the documents, seeking the elusive clue. Even the knowledge that she was being manipulated into doing exactly what she was doing did not divert Rebecca from her search.

As she drifted toward sleep, her daughter’s trusting face swam into focus. Beck’s eyes snapped open. She whispered a sleepy, disjointed prayer, and hoped that Jacqueline had indeed taken her granddaughter to Brad’s.

Beck rolled onto her side and gazed out the window at the filtering snow. Tomorrow, around ten, she would leave for Denver. She had between now and then to follow Jericho’s clues, find what he had hidden, and thereby protect her daughter. She had hoped to work all night, but her energy had run out. She set the alarm for four-thirty. Two hours of sleep was all she could afford. She closed her eyes and dropped off at once, to dream about lifting a rubbery, resistant weight that seemed to grow as she hefted it, dragging her down no matter how she struggled. It was cold outside, and that was where she was, outside in the snow, and Pamela was there and Audrey was there and they were yelling about Jericho—

—about how Jericho was—

—dying—

She bolted upright. In the hallway, the sisters were screaming at each other.

(ii)

Beck cinched her robe and rushed out onto the landing. Pamela was ordering Audrey to calm down, and Audrey was telling Pamela to do the same.