“Hi, Dad.” She stepped into his embrace.
“I’m so grateful you decided to come,” he whispered in her ear. “It means so much to me, especially right now.”
“I know,” she whispered back. “I’m here only for you, Dad.”
In fact, she hated being here. She didn’t believe in his cause. During the past few months, she had come to despise it. And she wouldn’t have attended, except for his pleas.
*
In Room 315, he had tossed his overcoat on the bed and hung his tuxedo jacket on the back of a chair. Now he sat at the room’s desk, watching the screen of the powerful wireless laptop that he had removed from the boxy briefcase.
The image on the screen was being transmitted from the tiny, battery-powered, wireless-operated video camera that he had installed overhead in the ballroom a few hours ago. He could use his laptop mouse to direct the movable lens of the camera, panning or zooming in and out. The whole setup was expensive and hard for most people to obtain.
For most people.
He spotted her almost immediately when she entered the ballroom. He was not particularly surprised that she was present. Nothing much surprised him anymore.
He zoomed in on her, then panned the camera to follow as she and her father walked up the steps onto the dais and took seats next to each other in the center of the long table. She wore a long, pale yellow evening gown. Her beauty was breathtaking. But his appreciation felt abstract and remote, as if he were in a museum looking at some ancient sculpture of a beautiful woman.
He glanced at his watch. It would still be a while before it was his turn to participate in the festivities. He sat back to watch.
*
She had insisted to her father, as a condition of her attendance, that she would be seated as far as possible from Carl Frankfurt. She was relieved that the shrink was sandwiched between two dowagers near the end of the dais.
The older man to her right, a trustee, had given up on her quickly when she responded monosyllabically to his attempts at small talk. And her father, on her left, was engrossed in conversation with the politician next to him. For the moment, she could be alone with her thoughts.
Thoughts of him.
She still could not come to grips with the chaos that had engulfed them. It was as if they were trapped between two colliding realities: one, a sane, joyous world that they inhabited together; the other, a nightmarish, paranoid universe where no one could be trusted and nothing understood. And it felt as if they had been slipping back and forth, unpredictably and disastrously, through some black hole that connected those incompatible worlds.
She had tried countless times to resign herself to the impossibility of their relationship. Yet something deep within her rebelled. Rebelled at the indignity of being a victim of circumstance. She had never submitted to “fate” in her entire life, about anything else.
How could she surrender to it now, over something this important?
How could two people, so close and so right for each other, have allowed outside circumstances to drive them apart?
*
The wait staff had cleared the main course, poured more wine, and served dessert. Ken MacLean saw the hotel’s event coordinator nod at him from below the dais. He checked his watch; just after nine. He returned the nod, then turned to the guest of honor. “It’s about that time. We’ll run the film first, then I’ll introduce you.”
“That’s fine, Ken,” said Congressman Morrie Horowitz.
MacLean got up and went to the podium. He looked out upon the eight hundred faces that turned to him expectantly. He let their conversations die down, then spoke.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I do hope you’ve enjoyed your dinner. Now it’s time for us to reflect upon and celebrate the foundation’s many achievements over the past year. It has been a year of both triumphs and challenges. But thanks to your faithful support and participation, the MacLean Family Foundation is poised to make the coming year our best ever.”
He smiled and waited for the applause to end.
“To remind you of where we have been, and to excite you about where we are headed, a new foundation benefactor, Mr. Wayne Grayson of Los Angeles, has prepared a short film. I’ve not yet seen it, but he assures me that it will help us remember this very special occasion. If we could have the lights lowered a bit, please?”
MacLean returned to his seat. His daughter smiled at him and patted his knee. The lights went down in the ballroom. He turned to the big screen.
*
In Room 315, he moved the computer’s mouse and clicked two icons on the screen.
The first click sent a wireless command to a device he’d placed inside in the master computer in the ballroom, shutting it down. The dummy video he’d provided the staff would not play.
The second click sent a wireless command to activate a DVD player he’d hidden under the dais. It began to run his video, transmitting it through a cable he’d connected to the giant screen.
*
Annie watched the name of the foundation fill the screen.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” said a booming, electronically distorted voice. “As supporters of the MacLean Family Foundation, we have gathered here to celebrate Christmas…”
The screen abruptly filled with a horrifying image of a woman’s body, half-naked and bound, sprawled in a field.
“Oh my God!” a man’s voice pierced the darkness from somewhere in the audience.
A woman shrieked.
Then a rising chorus of muttering, punctuated by angry shouts.
The booming voice went on, overpowering the cries from the audience.
“But unfortunately, this beneficiary of the Foundation’s programs won’t be celebrating Christmas with her husband and children. Because Julie Madison was murdered by”-the photo changed to a mug shot of a bald man with tattoos on his cheek-“Richard Garney, a serial rapist who was granted parole early this year, thanks to the testimony of”-the slide changed again-“ this man. That’s right, it’s our very own Dr. Carl Frankfurt! Dr. Frankfurt, you see-”
Shocked, she turned to her father. In the light from the screen she could make out his mouth hanging open, his eyes wide in disbelief.
“Hey! What is this?” shouted the congressman seated next to him.
“Stop this!” screamed Frankfurt, leaping to his feet. “Shut that off!”
“…And this next beneficiary of the foundation’s work this past year was little Tommy Atkinson,” the unstoppable metallic voice thundered. “He doesn’t look too good in this photo, though, does he? That’s because one day, Tommy, age eight, met this man, Rory Miller-a pedophile who managed to avoid prison. How? By entering a foundation-funded treatment program-”
As the din from the audience rose, her father jumped up, knocking over his chair. He stumbled and pushed his way past others on the dais to reach the podium.
“Let’s have the house lights-and please, turn off that TV screen!”
The chandeliers suddenly blazed, exposing a scene of bedlam: hundreds on their feet, shouting, screaming-others staring at the screen in mute, open-mouthed horror-women covering their eyes-one throwing up convulsively at her table-couples rushing toward the exits-wine glasses falling-people yelling at the tech crew in the back, who were shaking their heads frantically and waving their arms in helpless frustration…
“Friends! Please! Don’t panic! Don’t run!”
Her father, standing helplessly at the podium, shouting into the microphone, unheeded, his ashen face reflecting the horror of the spectacle before him.
She had remained rooted to her chair, feeling as if all the blood in her body had been drained, leaving her paralyzed.