The Sacrifice Game (71 page)

( 113 )

T
he model of Neo-Teo in the center of the table lit up. A corresponding map came up on the far wall. Numbered windows from hundreds of cameras all over the compound blossomed over the walls. There were panoramas of the temple and sports districts and other key locations, and even a view from a satellite exactly 11,088,000 inches directly overhead. A few showed the festivities down in the arena. The Celebrity who we’d seen before, whose name I still forget, was finishing a sappy offering chant. Next to it, on a live window running the big in-house show, we were being treated to close-ups of audience reactions, teenage boys laughing, teenage girls singing along, and fat women weeping happily, sobbing happily away, getting their daily catharsis. I checked out a view of the main lobby downstairs. The party seemed to be going on fine, only slightly subdued after the Weiner incident. Another window, twenty-three, showed an overhead view of the rotary outside the East Gate, the one we had come through. A protest outside had already gotten out of hand, and Warren security guards with giant transparent shields were forming a sort of tortoise, almost like the Teotihuacanian infantry’s. Foam spray appeared out of an invisible fire hose and covered the dark mass of protesters with white flakes. I panned the camera back with the cursor. Belize police in electric ATVs were crowding around the edges of the rotary like overzealous T-cells.

“A riot,” I said. “Fun.”

I blew up a few of the windows that were most important to me personally: specifically, those showing the fire stairs, elevator shafts, and the floor below us. Doug was on twelve. Ana Vergara had a team in each of the stairways. She was in the one that led to the fire exit on the outside, that is, the nonstadium side, of the Safe Room. It was a whole little army with shotguns and assault carbines, and they had also gotten two whole destruction crews together, with electric rams and oxyacetylene torches and sensors and gas mines and paramedics and whatever, like they were ready to take on Kim Jong-uns secret redout under Mount Myohyang. I made sure I had good views up of the empty VIP box and the rest of the deserted thirteenth floor. Finally, I blew up two windows of the Safe Room itself, one showing the three of us from the north side, as though we were all reflected in a mirror that didn’t reverse, and another bigger window showing the whole room from a hidden lens somewhere overhead that made us look like three beetles feeding on a many-hued graham cracker.

“Congratulations, Lindsay, you’re the last domino,” Marena said.

“What’s that?” he asked, although I was sure that he knew.

“Lindsay, listen,” I said. “If we can’t stop the test, we’re going to change the coordinates to zero-zero-zero.”

“That means right here,” he said.

“Really?”

“We’ll all die.”

“So stop the test.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “Get on the phone to the Pentagon.”

“Never mind.”

“You want to die right now?” he asked.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Marena and I have a lover’s death pact, and you’re an evil bastard.”

“Forget it,” he said.

“Lindsay . . .” Marena started. She paused. “Look, you just have to believe us on this one. It really is going to, you know, be like I said.”

“What?”

“It’s going to disappear EVERYTHING!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lindsay said. “Jesus won’t allow that. Let alone the other gods.”

“The Sweeper’s going to go over a certain probability range,” Marena said. “And it’ll just suck in everything, you, me, the Grand Canyon, Jupiter, the Horsehead Nebula, the Sombrero Galaxy, Planet Qo’noS, the Roy Rogers Cometary Globule, everything.”

“So it won’t hurt,” he said.

“Not only will it not hurt, but you won’t even notice it.”

“This is malarky.”

“Fine,” I said. “Well, just to see what we can do . . . look, the fact is, we’re going to have to torture you.”

“Go ahead. The White God is going to get me through this one just like He’s done every time.”

“Look, Lindsay,” she said. “Boss. Why is it so important to you to run this test right this moment?”

“It’s not a test,” Lindsay said. “It’s air support.”

“For what? For an invasion of Pakistan?”

“That’s correct.”

“They’re invading right now?”

“Correct, Indian troops started crossing in from Srinagar as of—as of about eight minutes ago.”

“So I bet this is going to destroy Islamabad. That’s like two million people. If it weren’t going to destroy everything, I mean.”

“Miss Park, if we do not provide our allies this support, it’s not just going to be the end of the trail for the Warren Family. It’ll be the end of the United States of America.”

“Enough,” I said. “Get ready.” I took out my bone-scraper needle—it was really just an old woman’s hairpin—and an antiseptic towelette, sterilized it and Lindsay’s left elbow, and slid the pin into his ulnar nerve. There was a grunt deep inside him, and a half a flinch, but nothing else. He was tough.

I looked into his eyes. They looked back like two freshly drilled blue holes in the face of the Serpentine Glacier. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it was possible—maybe even likely—that Lindsay was one of those few people who have no fear whatsoever. Of course, even they respond to torture eventually. Like I say, no matter what you’ve heard, torture works. But it could take time. And there was no time. In fact, soon there’d be no time at all, anywhere. Two beads of sweat slid from his forehead into the hollow of his right cheek.

“We were afraid you were going to be difficult,” I said.

He didn’t answer. The ice holes looked back.

“So,” I said, “have you ever heard of Sampson Avard?”

“No.” He was lying. He was smooth, but there’d been a quarter-beat too much hesitation.

“I’ve got some letters from him that I put up for posting,” I said. I typed eighty-one characters into a Firefox window on the desktop, downloaded a PDF file from a very-far-offshore server, and flipped the window around and slid it over to him.

He looked at me for ten beats and then couldn’t resist looking down at the window. It was the real thing. He looked back at me.

“Well,” I said, “to answer your unspoken question, yes, I got that off the LDS vault server,” I said. “In Salt Lake. And, yes, we also have the other two hundred and nine sensitive files from the folder.”

“And he used the Game to do so, I’m reckoning,” Lindsay said, getting himself back together.

I nodded. Shut up, I thought. Contrary to media portrayals, a supervillain, or superhero or superantihero, should
not
explain to the other side what he’s about to do.

“And he gave the folder to your friend Quiñones and Quiñones gave it to you.”

I nodded.

“So, what’s it got to do with me?” he asked.

“You really don’t want this going out, do you?”

“I don’t care,” he said.

I pulled the window back, flipped it around again, and hit
POST
.

“Okay, it’s up,” I said. “Google it.”

He glared. At first I thought it was my imagination, but then I saw that it was happening: His ears were glowing pink.

“I only put up the first letter,” I said. “And, you know, it’s not, it’s not the worst one. My favorite’s the Joseph Smith eight-year-old girl rape stuff. Although the Elamites on Mars business is also pretty great. Right?”

His ears had become a true, deep red. That’s the trouble with being a WASP, I thought. Your eyes might be opaque, but your skin’s an open window.

“Fine,” he said. “The first password is
RALSTON
. All caps.”

I started typing.

( 114 )

W
e all watched the clock. 11:59:8, 11:59:9, Noon. All in.
Les jeux sont faits
, motherfuckers. It was the cosmic sell-by date:

I looked back at the RASP coordinates. Well, there they are, right next door. Might as well just relax. We’d experience another three point one minutes of what we like to call living, and then we’d feel a short sharp shock and maybe even a flash of heat, and then, well before we felt any pain, we wouldn’t exist anymore.

“Too bad we couldn’t just stop the test, huh?” Marena asked.

“Lindsay?” I asked. “Any ideas?”

“For that we’d have to call a meeting,” he said. “If we want to bring a few of the directors in here for—”

“Forget it,” I said. “Rerouting is the way we’re going to go. Sorry about the nonexistence thing.”

“Well, let’s try this anyway,” Marena said. She was looking at something called
ELEVATOR FUNCTION
and then
RAIL LEVEL
.

At first I thought the room was falling down into the cleft canyon of the underwaterworld, and I saw the numbered floors rising past us and saw they were real, or rather real images, and realized what Marena must have noticed already but hadn’t bothered to tell me, that we were actually, physically sinking, that the reason the place could be on the thirteenth floor and still be called a Safe Room was because the whole room was really an extra-large elevator. Weirdly, most of the cameras were still functioning, and the transparency macro was chugging along, so it was as though we were sinking through the transparent building into a transparent earth, with explosions flashing around and over us. On the ceiling, translucent wipes with those green wire-frame edges represented the horizontal doors sliding shut over us. We passed a few brightly lit subbasement floors and decelerated.

“Damn,” Marena said. “Maybe we’ll make it after all.” She sounded eager, but also like she didn’t want to get her hopes up.

“That’s great,” I mumbled. I must have sounded vague. Really, I wasn’t good for anything anymore. It was all I could do to keep straight what was realish and what was waking-dreamish.

“Check this out,” Marena’s voice went somewhere. “‘When at its lowest level, this facility was designed to withstand a force of twenty kilotons and slash or two thousand degrees Celsius for over twelve hours. This is roughly equivalent to detonation on the scale of the Nagasaki blast only six hundred yards away.’ Isn’t that great?”

“Is that the operating manual?” I asked.

“Yeah. ‘Cooling is achieved by the use of onboard vacuum sealers and conventional freon refrigeration. Nitrox is supplied from six units in the live floor, each with a capacity of, blah blah blah, ventilation is redundant with, blah, blah . . .’ Damn.”

This can’t be happening, I thought. Although, on the other hand, I guess if anybody would have something like this, it would be Lindsay. Paranoia was one of his most characterizing and endearing traits. There was stuff like this in Jed’s memories, things he’d heard about on good authority years ago, in Utah, like supposedly there’s a vault under the Church Office Building, the LDS headquarters on North Temple, that you could dip in the sun for twenty-score beats and pull it out and it would still be seventy-two degrees inside. I suppose at the time, Jed had thought it was just a suburban legend. Well, for once somebody wasn’t just paranoid, but was paranoid
enough
.

I blinked around. Everything was still sideways. All over the room’s six sides the last surveillance systems were going dead. Window after window closed down, but instead of just going to blue the confused system replaced them with video mirrors. We saw ourselves re-reflecting our reflections into serried ranks of identical Chacal-in-Jed
₃
-in-Tony-Sic and Lindsay Warren and Marena Park toy figurines, with the table and chairs replicated in infinite rows curving away toward hidden vanishing points, like long freight trains disappearing over the curvature of the earth. Somewhere among the receding clone armies I thought I saw Maximón, wearing his old manto and and sombrero and smoking and smirking like I Told You So, but it was probably just me. I saw what Lindsay had meant about the Sealing Room. The room was a high-tech version of the marriage chapel they have in Mormon temples, which have huge enfiladed mirrors on all four walls, “set,” as they like to say, “to catch eternity.” Evidently the designers hadn’t thought that was cool enough for the New Age Moron weddings Lindsay and his pals planned to have here, though, because now the display programs were going into some preset routine where they pulled images from the ongoing recording stock and replayed them in palimpsests over the current “reflections,” so we could see ourselves enlarged, shrunk, from above, from the other side of the room, unreversed, in slow motion, in ultrafast motion, four-hundred-score beats before, one beat before, everything except a beat from now. I saw us walk in again, and I saw Marena run the video where she called Lindsay to resign from the Warren Group, right after the
Chrononaut
trailer preview. It was like being in the head of some obsessive-compulsive person who could think only about the three of us, stuck in our little lifeboat from here to eternity—

The room rattled like a little box in a big box and then seemed to settle. The screens flickered and went to blue, and it was like we were in a glass bathyscaphe deep in the ocean. Big red letters scrolled across the walls:
EXIT AIRLOCKS ALIGNED
. There was a click and a loud hiss. The air pressure changed and cool, oxygen-rich air welled up out of the floor, noisily. Excellent, I thought. Not with a wimp, but with a banger.

“-00:00:13:00,” the readout said. “-00:00:13.5” . . .

We sat, and looked around us, watching the fifty-two windows, the in-house and public news feeds on the south wall, the stars wheeling on the ceiling, the maps on the north wall, and the news videos and charts and graphs and flickering equations and scrolling code and a thousand other varieties of data. I figured that to an outside observer—God, if only there were ever an outside observer—we looked pretty much like three random blobs of videonarcotized trailer trash anywhere in the random world. Marena touched my wrist, like,
Thanks for saving Max, or trying to.

We waited.

“-00:00:09.50,” it said,

“-00:00:09.00,

“-00:00:08.50 . . .”