“Leisha! What…”
“Come with me. Quick—by now I’m sure Hawke knows I’m here. There was no way to tell you I was coming that he wouldn’t intercept. Get dressed, Jordan. We’re going to the We-Sleep factory.”
“I—”
“Now! Hurry!”
Jordan thought of telling her that he wasn’t going to the factory—not now, not ever. But another look convinced him that Leisha would go there alone, and he suddenly didn’t want that. Leisha wore a long blue sweater over a black bodystretch. Blue shadows pooled in the hollows under her eyes. She leaned a little forward on the balls of her feet, as if she were leaning into him, and it suddenly occurred to Jordan that she needed him with her. Not for physical protection—the three bodyguards collectively massed 640 pounds, not counting weapons—but for some other, edgy reason Jordan couldn’t define.
“Let me get dressed,” he said.
In the dark hallway Joey raised his head from his oversized cot. “Go back inside,” Jordan said. “It’s all right.” Leisha, in need of him.
There was a plane, apparently folded in on itself in some state-of-the-art way that let it land vertically, in the apartment-house parking lot. But this was no aircar—it was a definite plane. The control panel bore no identifying marks. In the air it unfolded itself and shot over the sleeping town toward the river.
“All right, Leisha. Tell me what this is all about.”
“Hawke killed Timothy Herlinger.”
Something shifted inside Jordan. He knew what it was: truth. Tiny, deadly, like one of those poison pellets that dissolve in the heart of suicides. All you had to do was swallow it and the hard part was over, the rest inevitable and unstoppable. Jordan felt it move, and knew it had already been there before Leisha spoke. It had been there in the Profit Faire, in Jordan’s ambiguous admiration of Hawke, in the argument over Joey, even in Mayleen’s new toilet and her lace tablecloth. It was in the We-Sleep Movement itself.
He looked at Leisha. She seemed to radiate light, a hard lurid light like the Y-fields designed to alert people to dangerous machinery. She said again, “Hawke killed Dr. Herlinger. He set it up.”
Jordan heard himself say, “And you’re glad.”
She turned a shocked face toward him. They regarded each other in the small cockpit of the plane, the three bodyguards a motionless blur behind them. Jordan had not meant to say it, but when the words were out he knew they, too, were true. She was glad. That it was Hawke and not a Sleepless. Gladness. That was the source of the lurid light, and of her need to have him with her.
“Witness for the persecution,” he said, in a voice so unlike his own that Leisha said, “What?”
“Never mind. Tell me.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “The retina print on the scanner will match Stella Bevington’s. Hawke must have taken it at your mother’s party for Beck, at the new house, when everybody was drinking and careless. The party he bullied you into bringing him to. And that’s when he got Stella’s pendant, too. Jennifer sent her one; she wanted Stella in Sanctuary and was trying to force Stella to choose. Stella was wearing the pendant but she took it off at the party because she saw all over again the kindness, the tolerance of Sleepers like your mother”…oh, Daddy, the specialness of Alice!…“Hawke took the pendant from her purse. She reported the loss to Jennifer but with no details; that was because of me…”
Leisha turned her head. Jordan allowed himself no sympathy, no compassion. Leisha, he thought, was losing nothing. The murderer was a Sleeper.
“Jennifer knew nobody would be able to figure out by accident what the pendant did, and it would self-destruct if they tried, so she wasn’t really worried that Stella lost it. Jennifer had already taken Hawke’s bait on the patents. Jordan, there never was any process to alter Sleepers to Sleepless. Hawke hired Walcott and Herlinger to pretend there was, make a false lead look scientifically plausible… God, he arranged the whole thing in detail. So Sanctuary would break into the government nets and back-file. Then he could use Walcott to report the theft, set the press going, and even without an indictment Sanctuary would take a beating. We-Sleep membership would soar.”
Which was exactly what had happened, Jordan thought. Hawke was always a good planner. The little plane began its descent over the factory.
“But then Herlinger changed his mind. He had a flash of conscience and was going to expose Walcott and Hawke. So Hawke had him killed.”
And that was typical of Leisha, too, Jordan thought. She didn’t think: Herlinger was trying to blackmail his partners, so they had him killed. Or, Herlinger got into a power struggle with Hawke and Hawke had him killed. No, she assumed a flash of conscience, even in this situation. She assumed the public-minded and decent cause. “An eighteenth-century sensibility,” Hawke had said. With scorn.
Jordan said, “You don’t know that you’re right. And if what you say is true and Hawke has me under such surveillance that he already knows we’re coming…there will be no evidence left when we get there.”
Leisha turned on him a brilliant gaze. “There wouldn’t have been anyway. Not discoverable evidence.”
“Then why are we going there?”
She didn’t answer.
The gate of the factory was unshielded. The guard—not Mayleen—waved them through.
Hawke waited in his office, leaning casually against the front of his desk, palms flat on the wooden surface behind him. The desk held the full parody display: the Cherokee dolls, the Harvard coffee mug, the model We-Sleep scooter, the pile of misspelled mail from grateful workers at their first job in years, the plaques and pen sets and gilded statuettes from We-Sleep businesses. Some of them Jordan had never seen; Hawke must have taken them out, item by item, and arranged them carefully on the desk so his big body would not block the sight of them from the door. All the cheap accolades from hard-scrabble businesses, all the totems of contradictory successes. Looking at them, Jordan felt coldness slide over him. It was real, then. Not just true, but real. Hawke had killed.
“Ms. Camden,” Hawke said.
Leisha wasted no words. Her voice was controlled, but the lurid light was still on her. “You killed Timothy Herlinger.”
Hawke smiled. “No. I did not.”
“Yes, you did,” Leisha said, but it didn’t sound to Jordan as if she were arguing, or trying to force agreement. “You set up Walcott’s phony research to fan the hatred toward Sleepless, and when you saw a chance to accuse a Sleepless of murder, you did that, too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hawke said pleasantly.
As if he hadn’t spoken, Leisha went on. “You did it to increase We-Sleep profits. Or rather, you think you did it for that reason. But profits were increasing anyway. You really did it because you’re not a Sleepless, and never can be, and you’re one of the haters that always moves to destroy any superiority he can’t have.”
The flesh above Hawke’s collar started to redden. This was evidently not what he’d expected to hear. Jordan said, “Leisha…”
“It’s all right, Jordan,” she said clearly. “The three bodyguards are highly trained, the plane is equipped with surveillance equipment trained on my body, I am recording, and Mr. Hawke knows all this. There is no danger.” She turned to Hawke. “Not to you, either, of course. Nothing is provable. Not against you, not against Jennifer once the retina print is identified as Stella Bevington’s, because she can explain not only how she lost the pendant but where she was the morning Herlinger died. She was in a corporate meeting with fourteen executives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. You knew all that would surface, didn’t you, Mr. Hawke, as soon as the pendant was introduced in evidence and Stella realized it was hers. You knew the trial would fail, and no one would be convicted. But the hatred would have been inflamed a little more, and that’s what mattered to you.”