Ruppert had been acting. He realized Lucia wasn’t. She really would do as she said if Liam didn’t cooperate.
Lucia sliced through the side of Liam’s ear, slicing it into two bleeding flaps, and pulled her blade free. She jabbed the tip of the blade up into the soft tissue under his chin, hooked his jaw, and drew his face toward hers until their eyeballs nearly touched.
“The database,” she said again.
Liam’s mouth worked silently for a few seconds, and then he said, “Open national placement database.”
“Retinal, please.” Liam’s office computer system spoke with a high, soft Italian tenor that Ruppert found immediately irritating.
Lucia steered Liam toward a coin-sized green lens mounted in the wall. She moved the blade from his chin to his carotid artery. Liam leaned forward and opened his eyes wide, raising his eyebrows and drawing his mouth into a deep, exaggerated frown.
“Access approved,” the soft Italian voice said. Ruppert could have sworn it was sighing.
Millions of miniature cubes, folded into each other, appeared on the wall screen. The database.
“I'm taking him out of here,” Ruppert said. Lucia gave a very slight nod. She wasn't really listening. She stared at the data in awe, like a desperate addict stumbling into a giant batch of her drug.
Ruppert took Liam down the hall to the master bedroom.
“God won’t forgive you for this,” Liam said. “God sees everything, and He won’t forgive you. Why are we going into my bathroom? What will you do to me in my bathroom?”
Ruppert pushed Liam into the long walk-through closet connecting the master bed and master bath. He shoved a washcloth into Liam’s mouth, then bound his hands and feet behind him with bed sheets. He left the man lying on the tiled floor of his bathroom, bleeding from his stomach and the side of his head, whimpering. Ruppert turned out the bathroom light and closed the door.
Back in the office, Lucia knelt on the floor, weeping, no longer the murderous creature she’d been only minutes earlier.
“What’s wrong?” Ruppert dropped to a knee beside her and lay a hand on her back. She turned, flinging her arms around his neck, crushing herself against him.
Ruppert looked up at the wall screen. A large window occupied most of it. The window displayed a picture of a handsome boy of nine or ten, with the same black eyes and light caramel skin as Lucia. He had a shaven head and wore a tan military-style uniform. The picture was captioned GEORGE LIBERTY.
“Nando,” Lucia whispered. “They even gave him a new name. A stupid new name.”
“It will be all right,” Ruppert said. He read the text underneath the picture. George Liberty, or Nando, had been raised at the Goblin Valley School for Males in Goblin Valley, Utah. At Ruppert’s request, a further description of the school appeared: “Proactive specialized pre-training in desert and mountain combat. Counterinsurgency. Central Asian linguistics and geography.”
Further down the list, he saw George Liberty’s “discarded name.” Fernando Luis Santos.
He asked for an expanded health report, and the screen presented him with details and pictures from Fernando’s last medical inspection.
“He's in really good health,” Ruppert said. "What's wrong?"
“He does not know his name,” Lucia whispered. “He will not remember me. They have remade him into one of them.”
“Not everyone takes to the program. We can go to this school place. We can get him. You're his mother, you have rights." Ruppert ordered the computer to print laminated maps of the Goblin Valley compound, annotated with the details of their security system.
"Rights? Are you serious? Are we calling a lawyer first? Is that how you would handle this?"
"We can get him out," Ruppert said. "That's what you do, right? Disappearing people from Terror's screens? Extractions?"
"That is a full-fire military school, Daniel," Lucia said. "In the middle of the desert. Thousands of armed boys trained to kill. We would need a large team of very good people. And a helicopter. And also, half the team would need to be at least a little suicidal."
“Terror's going to kill me anyway, right?” Ruppert gathered the maps from Liam's printer. "So, really, I don't have to worry about death anymore. Today, this week, next month-whenever. I'm already dead. It's really like being invincible, if you think about it. Like you're already acting from the beyond the grave."
"Quiet," Lucia said.
"I could be in Vancouver right now," Ruppert said. "Smoking hash with Eskimos. But we came back for Nando. If you're thinking about going to get him, I just happen to have nothing to lose."
Lucia pushed herself to her feet. “Oh, no. We're going to get him. Helicopter or not."
Something crashed in the master bathroom down the hall, perhaps Liam's gilded toilet-paper stand. Ruppert checked the time on the screen. O'Shea's wife could be home any minute.
"We need to get out of here," he said.
“One minute." Lucia inserted the "jaguar" virus-injection plug into a jack in Liam's desk.
The image on the wall screen wavered, broke into chunks, and vanished. The screen flickered and flashed random colors. A screeching sound tore through the room’s speakers.
"Irregular function, irregular function," the soft Italian tenor sighed.
“Do we have time for this?” Ruppert asked.
“I need the carnovirus to destroy the remote server at Child and Family, too," she said. “If they know what we searched for, they’ll know where we’re going.”
When the screen turned lifeless and black, Lucia finally pulled the jaguar plug. They hurried towards the stairs, but she paused on the top step.
“Did you loot him?” she asked.
“What?”
“Did you check the weird fat man for cash?”
“It didn’t cross my mind.”
“Wait here.” Lucia returned down the hall, into the master bedroom. Ruppert stood on the steps for what felt like hours, watching out the plate-glass window for Mrs. O'Shea to come home from whatever club or social activity she was attending at Golden Tabernacle.
Lucia finally returned, holding up a roll of greenbacks. “Twelve hundred seventy,” she said. “That’s worth waiting for.”
“Do you mug everyone?” he asked as they rushed down the steps.
“A bushel of my enemy’s grain is worth twenty bushels of my own,” Lucia said. “Sun-Tzu.”
“Who?”
“You ever read anything that isn't teleprompted?”
They jogged out into the backyard, where the children were fighting over control of the still-running garden hose. They hurried to the arched gate, but Lucia turned back. This time she approached Liam’s children, unsheathing her black knife.
“Don’t!” Ruppert called after her. "What are you doing?"
She ignored him. The children saw her approaching, and they dropped the hose and backed away from her, staring open-mouthed at the blade.
Lucia knelt down next to the wading pool and sliced it open from lip to base. The pool deformed into an oblong as gallons of water poured out the deep cut in its side.
Liam’s daughter watched the water escape with mounting horror. She looked up at Lucia, whose eyes were still concealed behind the dark glasses, and she screamed. She turned and ran into the house, calling for her father.
Lucia ran towards Ruppert. “Hurry up, let’s go!” she shouted.
“Why did you do that?” he asked as they passed through the gate to the driveway.
“No adults,” she said. “Kids can drown in those little pools."
“Great,” Ruppert said. “We have about fifteen minutes before Hartwell-brand cops come flying in from everywhere."
“Less than that.” Lucia snatched the keycard from his hand. “Better let me drive.”