Hiding under the skeletal support beams of the satellite dishes, he felt lost and cold and confused. He was a disgrace. He didn’t want to confront his peers. Only the familiar surroundings of his apartment would help. He wanted to go home. He wanted to clutch at the things around him like a security blanket.
Jones grasped the chain-link fence and started to climb. He froze, motionless, when the fence rattled in the after-midnight silence. He waited, then scrambled the rest of the way up. From this direction the barbed wire slanted outward, much easier to crawl over.
He dropped to the ground and tried to remain in the building shadows, slipping from one street to the next, looking for familiar landmarks, trying to get his bearings. Off in the distance and in the after-curfew silence, Jones could hear the sounds of one of the mock street battles staged by the Guild. But this one was far away. He was safe.
The lights from the silent hovercar stabbed down at him as he tried to cross an unlit intersection. Jones stopped dead in his tracks and then slumped his shoulders in defeat.
While he and Frampton had been on their curfew patrols, most people caught out after midnight tried to escape and hide, making the Enforcers use the hovercar’s scatter-stuns, but Jones knew flight was useless. He surrendered without resistance.
The Enforcers emerged from their vehicle and strode toward him. Jones waited, feeling fear grow—but he dismissed it—he had had enough of fear for one day.
The shorter of the two Enforcers gruffly began to quote the specific sections of the Guild code Jones had broken. Jones raised his hand and began to quote the same words in unison until the other patrolman stopped speaking.
“I know,” Jones said. “I’m an Enforcer, too. Used to be on curfew patrol.” He gave his name and ID number, and told his story, knowing exactly what the two curfew patrolmen thought of it; he had encountered enough different excuses while on patrol. “Maybe you have an A.P.B. out on me?” They had to, of course. He was an Enforcer missing in the line of duty. Someone had to be looking for him. He could explain.
The taller of the two Enforcers, who had not yet spoken a word, entered Jones’s ID number and description into a portable Net terminal. Jones waited for it to be verified, but then the silent Enforcer keyed everything in again, deeply puzzled. He called the other Enforcer over and keyed in the information a third time.
Dread grew in the pit of Jones’s stomach. What had the Guild done to him now? All this was getting to be too much, and he didn’t think he had any more panic left inside him. “Look, I can take you back to my apartment. You’re going to have to escort me there anyway. The Net will let me in, and I can prove my identity to you.”
He waited, exasperated. The two Enforcers looked at him, then looked at each other, considering.
“I can prove it! Come on.”
“I think you’d better do that, Mr. Jones,” the shorter Enforcer finally said. His voice came out hollow behind the face mask.
Jones followed the two Enforcers to the large armored hovercar. He stopped himself from clambering in front with the two patrolmen and complacently went into the segregation chamber.
The chamber had no windows, and Jones sat sulking, drawing his knees up against his bare chest. Shivering, he wondered what he was going to do. The hovercar lifted off and rose into the air. He waited; it seemed like forever.
But at last the hovercar drifted back to the ground again with a muffled thump as it came to rest. Jones blinked and stepped out into the darkness as the pressurized hatch hissed open. The two Enforcers flanked him on either side. He recognized the tall complex of Guild dormitories, and he glanced at the repetitive rows of windows stacked up several stories. Each window looked the same, and Jones couldn’t begin to guess which one belonged to his own quarters.
Watching Jones skeptically, the two curfew patrolmen escorted him to the terminal mounted beside the sealed door. Showing a confidence that he did not feel, Jones entered his logon name, ID number, and access code. His knees felt weak with relief as the screen flashed “ACCESS GRANTED” and the door opened.
“We’d better accompany you to your room,” the shorter Enforcer said.
“Certainly,” Jones said, more confident now. The three entered, taking a lift up to the sixth floor.
He reached his door and said, trying to hide the relief in his voice, “This is it. I’m sorry for the trouble, and I’ll be facing a few reprimands tomorrow.”
Jones opened the door and took a step inside. He saw motion in the dimness of his own room, and he let out a gasp as two blue-armored members of the Guild’s Elite Guard stood up simultaneously from where they had been waiting for him.
The two white-armored curfew patrolmen stiffened in shock and confusion. Jones wanted to say something, but the words crumbled in his mouth. He had seen the Elite Guard only once or twice, escorting very important people or performing extremely dangerous high-visibility missions. He could not imagine what he had done to attract their attention.
The two Elite Guards stepped closer to Jones. “We’ll take him now,” one of them addressed the curfew patrol men. “I suggest you don’t report your pickup. We’ll handle all the details. Now go back to your patrol.”
The white-clad Enforcers saluted mechanically and turned to leave, as if they were running away.
Jones stood motionless, terrified. One of the Elite Guards closed the hall door, sealing the room and leaving the three of them alone together.
22
“Tell me about it,” the nurse/tech said.
Still frightened and confused, Danal reached into the open trapdoor of his mind, hauling out the last captive memories like strongboxes from a musty cellar.
Vincent Van Ryman’s carefree, euphoric attitude had lasted only a few days after he had denounced neo-Satanism. At first he felt victorious, childishly proud of himself and happy to have made a difference. Several times Vincent tried to contact Nathans, but the other man refused to speak to him, not acknowledging or even reading Vincent’s messages. Vincent brooded over his mentor’s cold treatment, sad and disappointed. Julia convinced him that Nathans would calm down, given time.
Then he received the first death threat from a disgruntled neo-Satanist cult member, someone whose focus in life had been stripped away because of Vincent’s cynical revelations. Other threats came in rapid succession. Particularly vicious were the jobless blues, so long dejected and hopeless, the ones who had fastened upon neo-Satanism as a new light at the end of their tunnel. Now they felt cheated once more.
Vincent received anonymous messages dropped into his electronic mail files, one of them even addressed to Randolph Carter, his carefully guarded secret identity. Someone tied a handwritten threat to a rock and threw it at the shatterproof transplastic windows of the Van Ryman mansion. The rock thumped harmlessly off the glass, disturbing Vincent and Julia from a game of cribbage in the study.
The vehement anger behind the threats bothered Vincent. Julia had convinced him that the truth was always best, but now he began to experience a growing horror, wondering if perhaps these people didn’t want the truth, but preferred something exotic to believe in.
Vincent went outside, picking up the rock from the thorny shrubs around the house. Whoever had thrown it was gone, fled into the thinning crowds as dusk began to settle over the Metroplex.
Some of the threats were crudely veiled; some were blatant and explicit. He knew that simple Servant bodyguards—such as those his father had owned years before—could not offer sufficient protection, especially if one of the disgruntled fanatics decided to blow up the entire mansion. He glanced at the scrawled threat, then destroyed the note before Julia could see it.