Remote (23 page)

He felt a flush of excitement. 
This
was new.  Remote never wanted him to stick around once the subject was in the motel room.  What did it mean?

Tanner knew what Remote did—the equipment made it pretty obvious, not to mention the resultant media coverage—and he’d been dying to do more than just acquire raw material.  Sure, the stalking and takedown was a huge rush, but Remote was the one with the really sweet job—he got to exert the kind of direct, life-and-death control over the subject that made Tanner hard just thinking about.  You could make someone do damn near
anything
. . . He’d fantasized more than once about how he’d handle it if Remote ever put him in the driver’s seat.  Was that finally going to happen?

It took a real effort of will to not just speed up and force Samuel Abel’s car off the road.  But no, he’d stick to the plan. 

Abel drove to the split-level condo he lived in on the outskirts of Yuba City.  The area had once been filled with orchards, and Abel’s property still had two lemon trees in its back yard.  He lived there alone, with only two cats for company.

Tanner didn’t know why Remote had targeted Abel, and he really didn’t care.  What mattered to him was that Abel often ordered pizza for dinner—which would explain where his sizeable belly came from—and wouldn’t think anything of a knock at his door an hour or so after he got home.

While Tanner waited, he thought about all the things he could make Samuel Abel do.  It was a pity his target wasn’t young and female, but Tanner’s imagination found plenty of ways around that.  At the forty-five minute mark, he couldn’t wait any longer; he got what he needed from the trunk and walked up to Abel’s front door.

Just as he’d expected, Abel opened the door in a bathrobe, holding his wallet in one hand.  Tanner wore his usual disguise, a baseball hat with an attached wig, oversize sunglasses and a fake beard—none of it was very convincing close up, but all he needed to do was blur his target’s memories for the brief instant they actually saw him.

He reached out almost casually with the stun gun, pressing the contacts against the man’s exposed forearm.  Abel’s body jerked and he went down, Tanner making sure he fell backward, out of the way of the door.  He stepped inside, bent over him, and hit him with another jolt, this time in the neck.  Abel spasmed, his eyes rolling up like an epileptic’s, and Tanner straightened and closed the door quietly behind him. 

He had the syringe ready in his other hand.  He bent down once more and stuck it in Abel’s throat, injecting the contents directly into the jugular, then leaned back against the door to watch his victim’s reaction.

Abel’s eyes fluttered open, and for a second he just lay there, gasping. 
Probably thinks he had some kind of stroke
, Tanner thought.  Tasers often screwed with a subject’s short-term memory, producing confusion and disorientation for a few seconds while the brain tried to figure out exactly what had just happened to it. 

Abel tried to raise his head.  “What?  What?” he said, and then his eyes glazed over and his head fell back with an abrupt
thud
. 

“And he’s down for the count, ladies and gentlemen,” Tanner said.  One of Abel’s two cats, a striped orange one, stared at him wide-eyed from a couch.  After a second, it jumped down and bolted for another room. 

“Good call, kitty,” Tanner said.  “Hope he fed you first—Daddy’s not gonna be home for awhile.”

He looked down at the pale mountain of the unconscious man’s gut, and sighed.  “You eat the pizzas, I get the workout,” he muttered.  “Good thing I’m prepared . . .”

***

“If I let you go, you’ll let me go?”  Remote said.  “How do you propose to make that work?”

“I’ll disable the shotgun shells, taking it out of the equation.  You stay up here, and unlock the front door remotely.  I’ll leave.  You can verify that with your camera system, and lock the door behind me.”

“Returning the situation to the status quo.”

“Not quite.  I’ll have your location, but you’ll be able to alert your drone, move up your schedule.”

“You’re gambling you can do something to stop my plans before I can implement them.  Burn down my house, perhaps?”

“That wouldn’t accomplish anything.”

“True.”  Remote smiled.  “I just wanted to make sure
you
knew that.  So it becomes a race, then?  I would seem to have all the advantages.”

“Maybe not.  You already know I have an accomplice.  I could alert them as soon as I reach a phone.”

“But only if you knew what my next target was.”  Remote’s eyes narrowed as he studied Jack.  “I would have said that would be impossible—but I suppose I shouldn’t underestimate you.  Gleaning information, after all, is your forte.  And even if this is a bluff, it might be enough to make me alter my plans . . .“

“Or maybe I’d prefer to find a way to stop you
without
killing you.  I realize that’s probably alien to your way of thinking—but it’s not to mine.  I don’t enjoy killing, Mr. Remote.  I don’t think you do, either—I think you actually get more satisfaction out of the results of your actions than you do from the experience.  I’d like to think so, anyway.”

They considered each other for a long time. 

“Deal,” said Remote.

***

In the end, it was just that simple.

Jack didn’t waste any time once he heard the door lock behind him.  He sprinted down the walkway, toward the sound of the ocean and the boat he knew was there.  He didn’t know if he could get it started--let alone pilot it--but he’d paddle the damn thing with a branch if he had to.  The harsh glare of security lights off the fresh snow gave everything a surreal, padded look, like the world had been wrapped in cotton.

He stopped halfway down the dock, and glanced backward.  If Remote had a second robot patrolling the exterior, now would be the time for it to trundle out of the rustling, dark mass of the woods. 

He listened for the whir of a motor, but couldn’t hear anything except wind, waves, and the gentle bump of the boat’s hull against the side of the wooden dock.  Jack stared at the boat, a small motor launch, but didn’t go any further.  Remote had a camera aimed at the dock, and must be watching him right now. 

“There’s no bomb.”  Remote’s voice, crackling from a weatherproofed speaker mounted on a piling.  “I know what you’re thinking, but I haven’t booby-trapped the boat.  I considered it, but I deemed the possibility of an accidental detonation—or the explosives being discovered by the police, the boat technically being in a public place—too risky.  I travel in that boat myself.”

Jack undid the mooring line, then jumped in the craft.  He thought Remote was telling the truth—the man was simply too cautious with his own safety to take a chance on blowing himself up; he hadn’t even felt comfortable enough with firearms to keep a gun on the same floor as the panic room.

There was, however, a rather elaborate mechanism connected to the steering wheel, one Jack was sure was there to enable Remote to take control of the boat from afar.   Jack yanked whatever wires he could see.

“Very good,” Remote’s voice said from the speaker on the dock.  “You’ve disabled my last vestige of control, including the onboard GPS.  You’re free, Jack.”

“No, Mr. Remote,” Jack said.  “I’m not.”

The keys were in the ignition.  The motor started easily, and the boat proved easy to handle.  Jack headed out into choppy, dark water, with no idea where he was going. 

***

Jack could see lights across the water, and they didn’t seem to fit the profile of another boat.  He headed for them, and inside of fifteen minutes found himself approaching another private dock.  He didn’t take the boat all the way to shore though, instead angling to the right toward another cluster of brighter, more spread out lights.

 Another ten minutes of travel put him at a public marina.  He tied the boat up at the first available spot he saw, jumped out, and went in search of a phone.  He had no money, no ID, and wasn’t even certain what country he was in.

He managed to talk the woman in the marina office into letting him use the phone, and called Nikki.

“It’s me,” he said.  “I’m all right.”  If he’d said he was okay, she’d know he was a prisoner.

“Where are you?”

“What’s the name of this place, again?” Jack asked the woman, a sullen-looking brunette with a chunky build. 

“Orcas Island Marina,” she said. 

“I’m on Orcas Island.  That’s in the San Juan Islands, I think.”

“What’s your situation?”

“I’ve found our friend, but he’s still working.  You?”

“At a motel outside a town called Pacific, on Highway 50.   Got a biker the size of a Kodiak chained up in my bathroom.  I let Parkins go—I don’t think he’ll say anything.”

Jack allowed himself a tired smile.  “Funny, I just did the same thing.”

“You what?”

“Are you mobile?”

“Yeah.  What do you need?”

“I’ll get a ferry to the mainland as soon as I can.  Just a moment.  Excuse me, miss?”

A few minutes later Jack had pried enough information out of the woman to arrange a meeting with Nikki in Seattle.  When he was done, he hung up and gave the clerk his biggest, most trustworthy smile.  “Hey,” he said.  “Know anyone who might be interested in a
great
deal on a boat?”

***

Remote leaned back in his rolling white leather chair, and studied the wall of monitors—all of them active once more—while thinking.

Despite the fact that his home had been invaded and damaged, that he’d been beaten and bound, he wasn’t angry.  Oh no, far from it; in fact, he felt more invigorated and alive than he had since his very first project.  He’d faced off against the Closer and survived.

And Jack—he doubted if Jack were his real name, but that didn’t matter, not really—Jack had been all he’d hoped for and more.  Clever, tenacious, resourceful . . . and surprisingly rational.  That had been Remote’s biggest fear, that the Closer would turn out to be functional but insane—that what he’d accomplished, so brilliant when viewed from afar, would be revealed as merely a byproduct of madness when he met the man who’d engineered it.

But the Closer was no crazier than Remote—whose own psychopathology, he freely admitted, was hardly normal either.  No, his respect for the Closer, large as it had been previously, had only grown since their confrontation. 

And was it egotistical to believe that his adversary now viewed him with the same respect?  Perhaps it was—but somehow, Remote didn’t think so.  No, Jack had treated him with the courtesy reserved for a peer.  They had parted on terms that were—if not exactly friendly—at the very least colored with a mutual understanding.

You’re free.

No, I’m not.

Jack hadn’t been simply contradicting him.  He’d been expressing a fundamental truth of his own existence, one he knew Remote would grasp.  There was an entire philosophy in that brief, five word exchange, and Remote couldn’t stop playing it in his mind. 
If I was someone other than myself
, Remote thought,
I’d be deeply touched.  I’m sure of it.

But, of course, he was who he was.  He knew that, was thoroughly and completely comfortable with it.  Remote, as he’d tried to communicate to Jack, knew exactly what his own strengths and weaknesses were.

But Jack—Jack didn’t.

It was, Remote thought, a matter of objectivity versus subjectivity.  Everyone viewed their own actions, their own motivations through a subjective lens that colored how they saw themselves; there was no way to escape it.  To obtain anything approaching an objective analysis, you had to trust an outside observer; while true, absolute objectivity was still impossible, an outside observer could at least bring a higher degree of impartiality to the process. 

That’s my gift, Jack.  To observe and analyze, without being influenced by emotional considerations.  To make decisions other men would flinch at, because I know that the ultimate outcome will be for the greater good. 

And now it was time to make one of those decisions.  A decision that ultimately would be for Jack’s own good. 

Your partner, Jack. The person on the other end of our hostage swap, the one who picked up the trailer.  I may not know who they are . . . but I do know what they look like.

He hit a key and watched the video file again.  Remote knew that the Closer—or his agent—would check the trailer for surveillance or tracking devices, but they hadn’t spotted the concealed camera Tanner had placed in the tree at the drop-off point.

Remote studied the blond woman’s face intently.  He’d already noted the license plate and make of the truck she’d driven up in. 

He hadn’t expected a woman, but it made little difference.  He knew what she must represent to Jack: a connection to the rest of the human race, a reminder of why he did what he did.  An anchor, of sorts.

Remote shook his head. 
The problem with an anchor, he thought, is that it’s only useful a very small percentage of the time.  Mostly, it just keeps you from going anywhere else.  It gives you some stability, true—but it also holds you back.

The Closer should not—must not—be held back.  He needs to be free, to do what has to be done.  The anchor has to go.

 He would eliminate her.  And then Jack would see that the only partner he needed was Remote himself.

***

Jack got enough from the sale of the boat to get a cab ride to the ferry terminal, and a ticket to Anacortes on the mainland.

He got a coffee with a shot of espresso in it at a small A-framed, yellow building beside the dock, then sat at one of wooden picnic tables and sipped it.  The next ferry wouldn’t be in for nearly an hour, but he didn’t want to wait inside; Jack preferred to remain invisible at the best of times, and now was hardly that. 

The buildings around the terminal were all decorated for the holidays.  Red and green lights blinked beneath eaves, outlined window frames and doorways, proclaiming the season in a colorful but completely meaningless way.