"What kind of symbols?"
"I saw a drawing of a column once. Same kind of symbols as on the wall behind his globe. They're kind of like—"
"I've seen them."
Blascoe's eyes widened. "You have? How the hell—?"
"Not important. I need to know what Brady's trying to accomplish with these columns."
"You need to know?"
"Yeah. Need." Jack wasn't in the mood for chitchat. "So let's hear it: What's he up to?"
"I haven't a clue. He's burying the damn things all over the world and I don't have the faintest idea why."
"Didn't you ask?"
"Course I asked. Started asking a couple years ago, but Brady always dodged an answer. He was keeping stuff from me. Me! The fucking founder! When I got in his face about it, Brady tried to distract me with women and booze and drugs. But that wasn't gonna work. Hey, I'm older now. I've experienced just about everything I ever wanted to. Maybe more.
"But the globe was just the fuse that lit me up. Dormentalism was my baby but it had changed to the point where I no longer recognized it. No, forget recognizing it—I was embarrassed by it. Do you know that to reach the upper levels you not only have to spend a fortune, but you've got to swear off sex! Yeah, you heard me, to reach the High Council you have to become some sort of fucking eunuch—nice turn of phrase, don't you think?—which turns off all but the most fanatically devoted."
Jamie flashed her yellowed grin. "I love this!"
Blascoe poked a finger into the air. "Yeah, Brady's supposed to be abstinent too, but I found out he's got a place—not too far from here, as a matter of fact—that nobody knows about. And that means not even his innermost circle on the High Council. That's because they aren't looking. I was. It's a place where I'm pretty sure he does stuff he doesn't want anyone to know about."
Jack didn't give a damn about Brady's personal life. He could be dressing sheep in black garter belts and getting jiggy with them for all he cared. It was more tasty grist for Jamie's mill but provided no answers for Jack.
"Let's get back to the columns," he said. "Brady gave you no clue as to what's up with them?"
"He did say that the globe wasn't so much a map as a blueprint. It shows where the columns must go."
"So every bulb shows where he has buried or intends to bury a column."
"All except the reds. No columns go where the red bulbs are."
"Why not?"
He shrugged. "Before 1 could find out, he and Jensen dumped me here."
Jack unfolded the skin flap again. He studied the pattern of red and white scars and the lines connecting them, trying to superimpose the continental outlines. But he had no reference points. He needed another look at that globe. He wanted to know what the red dots meant. He had a feeling they were key.
Jamie was speaking in her reporter voice. "You say Brady and Jensen 'dumped' you here. I don't understand. Are you a prisoner?"
Blascoe nodded. "Better believe it."
"Why?"
"Because I'm stupid. Because I'm sick. And because I thought I was too important to mess with. Wrong again. I wanted to get Dormentalism back to the simple, hedonistic, mellow, hippie thing it started out to be, but I could see neither Brady nor the High Council was going to go for that willingly, so I figured I'd give 'em a kick in the ass to get them moving. I threatened to go public with my cancer and everything I knew about their money-grubbing racket. Said I'd call a press conference to announce I'd had lung cancer but I'd been cured by radiation and chemotherapy instead of my xelton, and how my xelton couldn't cure me because there's no such thing as a xelton—I made it all up.
"So they locked me away and made up that bullshit about me putting myself in suspended animation."
"You said you were cured?"
He gave her a death's head grin. "Sure as hell don't look cured, do I. That's because the cure wasn't. The tumor's back. Now they especially don't want me to be seen. Don't want me wasting away in public."
"Isn't there anything you can do?" Jamie said. "Chemotherapy or—?"
"Too late. I figure from the color of my pee that it's in my liver—had hepatitis once so I know how that goes—and dying is better than living through more rounds of chemo with no guarantee of success. I'm just gonna let nature take its course. That's me: the original Mr. Natural."
Jamie said, "Why do you stay here? I don't see any bars on the windows, no locks on the door. Why don't you just walk out?"
Blascoe raised his head and Jack saw a strange look in his eyes.
"I would…" He lifted his shirt and pointed to a silver-dollar-sized lump on the right side of his abdomen, southwest of his navel. "Except for this."
Jamie craned her neck forward. "What is it?"
"A bomb. A miniature bomb."
20
Jensen leaned forward and tapped Hutch on the shoulder. "Ease back on the speed."
"Just trying to make up for lost time."
"You won't be making up anything if you hydroplane us into a ditch."
They were heading west—swimming west was more like it—on 84. The normal speed limit was sixty-five but only an idiot would try that in this downpour.
"Who is this WA anyway?" Lewis said.
"You don't need to know his name, just that he's dangerous. He knows too much dirt—damaging dirt."
"Pardon my saying," Lewis said, "but how bad can it be? What can he know that deserves this kind of surveillance?"
The question was out of line, but he wanted these guys in skin-saving mode—not just the Church's skin but their own as well.
"Oh, let's see," Jensen drawled. "What about the time you told that Bible thumper, Senator Washburn, that unless he directed the Finance Committee's interest away from the Church, paternity test results on tissue from his closest aide's recent abortion would be made public? Dirty enough for you? Or what about the time Hutch threatened the daughter of that DD who was going to take the Church to court? And here's the icing on the cake, Lewis: He knows about that couple you shoved onto the tracks. What was their name again?"
"The Mastersons." Lewis's swallow was audible all the way to the back seat. "Shit."
Jensen was exaggerating. Blascoe suspected a few things, and could make it mighty uncomfortable for the Church if he started speculating in public, but that wasn't the real reason he'd been isolated.
"And those are just the tip of the iceberg."
The onJy sound in the car was the patter of the rain and the swish of the wipers.
Good, Jensen thought. That shut them up. He glanced at the glowing dial of his watch. It was a sixty-six-mile trip from the city to the cabin. In off-peak traffic it could be done in a little over an hour. They were well past the hour mark. But even with the rain and the reduced speed, it wouldn't be long now.
21
"Get out," Jamie said as she stared at the lump under the pale, flabby skin. She saw a pink line of scar tissue next to it. He had to be running a number on them. "A bomb?"
Blascoe nodded. "Yep. If I go more than a thousand feet from the house—they've got the line marked with wire—this will explode."
"What's the point?" Jack said.
"Well, as Jensen put it, this raises a minimum-security facility to maximum."
Jamie frowned, still staring at the lump. She couldn't take her eyes off it. "How did they—?"
"Get it in there?" He shrugged. "Jensen kept me under lock and key for a while after I threatened to go public. Then one day he drugs me up and hauls me off somewhere. I don't know where exactly because I conked out before we got there. I woke up here, in one of the bedrooms. I was hurting and when I looked down I saw a bunch of stitches and this lump.