Nathans shook his head and made a distasteful noise. “Hell, I can’t do anything about it now. I can grill you, reprimand you, shout my lungs out at you, Jones—it might make me feel good for the moment, but Danal is still dead. My only chance to see if it would work—thank you, Jones, for making me feel so helpless!”
Jones swallowed again at the man’s bitterness and finally found his voice. Would it help to be submissive? Would anything help him now?
“What are you going to—” He paused, then suddenly bridled at the audacity of this man, the head of Resurrection, Inc. “Hey, wait a minute! I’m a Guild member. You have no right to threaten me like that. You might run your own company, but you have no right to be here, at Guild headquarters!”
He was appalled at his own outburst, but he realized nothing he said or did would change things. Jones had never felt a particular pride in or allegiance to the Guild, but it did have its own sort of honor, its own code. As questions piled up one after another in his mind, he turned to the two Elite Guard for support. But his voice simply did not carry the confidence or tone of authority to make them pay attention. One of the Guards held an electronic sweeping device, scanning the outer stairway. The second Guard stood at attention as the first stepped outside, still scanning, and closed the door. The second sealed it tightly from the inside. “All clear, sir.”
Nathans folded his hands behind the large desk and smiled petulantly. “And just who do you think runs the Guild, Mr. Jones?”
Jones stopped as a lump of ice snowballed in his stomach. “I… have no idea.”
Nathans smiled. “Well, now I think you do.”
Jones consciously closed his mouth. “May I please sit down?”
“By all means.” Nathans turned up the lights another notch. His smile held many different undertones, and it looked almost artificial.
Jones suddenly wondered if Nathans might be taking his revenge. Maybe it made Nathans feel satisfied if he could rub Jones’s face in a secret he would have no opportunity to divulge.
“Oh, I was behind the Guild when it started, years before I conceived of Resurrection, Incorporated. I hope you like stories, Mr. Jones? Good. You see, I decided that private security forces might be more effective and more motivated for maintaining law and order than any state-run, unionized police system. I won’t bother you with the details, but it turned out I was absolutely right.
“Working behind the scenes, I slowly managed to consolidate all the private security systems and conformance-assurance personnel into the Enforcers Guild. Collectively, the Guild edged out the cumbersome state-run police departments.”
Nathans’s voice carried a nostalgic tone. Restlessly he stood up from his desk and walked over to stare out the darkened windows. He pressed his face close to the glass; the lights from the room stretched his reflection into odd forms.
“It was all so easy that, frankly, I was a bit suspicious. So I decided to push a little harder, to see just how much we could get away with. But if it didn’t work, you see, if it backfired—I knew heads would roll. That’s why I kept my own involvement secret, at first. Fame and notoriety are the most useless forms of success mankind has yet invented.”
Nathans interlocked his fingers behind his slick black hairpiece and turned to face Jones again. “We put Enforcers all over the place. Their presence was unmistakeable. Escorting people to make them feel important. We even had them guarding things like statues and fountains and KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches—” He cringed for a moment, and then continued.
“But the crime rate dropped. Incredibly. We had to make up new laws just to give all the Enforcers something to do. We started street tension of our own, simulated gang wars after curfew so the people would keep thinking they needed us. We even made up the bloody curfew!” Nathans shook his head. “And the poor bastards bought it—hook, line, and sinker!”
Jones sat stiffly in the chair, sweating. Everything he had followed, all the training, the patrols—the ethics for which Fitgerald Helms had been killed—all because Nathans wanted to play power games. He kept his mouth shut, but Nathans must have been able to interpret the sickening distaste on his face.
The man slapped both palms on the mahogany-attribute desk. “Don’t you see! I didn’t do it! You think this is a police state? No! Because the people allowed it to happen. They didn’t do a damn thing to stop it, because they convinced themselves it was a Good Idea! There’s simply no excuse for apathy like that. I hoped that by pushing and pushing, it would finally spark their social consciousness, get someone involved. Our society has to change by itself, of its own choice, not have change forced upon it.”
He let out a long and heavy sigh. “Sometimes I’d like nothing more than to be caught at my own tricks. Even if they threw me out, at least that would prove people are paying attention out there! I thought this would be an electric shock to stimulate our stagnant culture. Teach them a lesson, so that they never get caught sleeping again.”
He cracked his knuckles and looked at Jones.
“So far, though, I’m deeply disappointed. All they’re interested in is the path of least resistance, letting me do whatever I want, no matter how much damage it causes.” Nathans spoke through gritted teeth and pounded his fists on the table for emphasis, then stopped and lowered his voice. “Sorry for the outburst. I’m having a particularly unpleasant day.”
Jones sat rubbing his temples and asked haltingly, with his eyes closed, “But if you’re Francois Nathans, the Resurrection man, I don’t… how can you possibly be running Guild headquarters? Resurrection, Inc. hates the Guild.”
“Ah.” Nathans briskly rubbed his palms together and then stopped himself, embarrassed. “That’s a perfect example of creating a perceived need for the Enforcers Guild. You see, if I set it up that Resurrection hates Enforcers, but it still needs Enforcers for protection, then that gives the Guild an incredible legitimacy, doesn’t it? Call it clout. Then other corporations won’t hesitate to engage the services of Enforcers, if even Resurrection, Inc. has to.”
Jones let the convoluted logic sink in until it finally made an appalling kind of sense. And when it all made sense, he began to grasp just how much Nathans had told him—far too much. The terror came yammering at his ears again.
Should he try to run? While Nathans had his attention elsewhere? Could he get past the two Elite Guards, take the hovercar, and fly off—go somewhere? Someplace outside the Metroplex? He’d never been outside before.
His heart pounded from just considering the idea. Sweat prickled on his forehead, and he knew it was going to trickle into his eyes at any moment. Jones tensed, felt his muscles tightening up, knotting.
The sweat dropped into the corner of his eye like a tear, and everything drained out of him in an instant. No. He’d never make it past the two Elite Guards. After all the incredible Enforcer training Jones had endured, honing his body, his reflexes, these two blue armored Guards had been through ten times more, and would be that much faster, better.
Jones swallowed. It was a waste of time to put it off any longer. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? For telling me all this.”
Shocked, Nathans stared back at the black man. “Let me tell you one very important thing, Mr. Jones. I value my life very much, and I certainly don’t look forward to dying. Life is what allows me to accomplish things—life is our one chance at everything. Consequently, I respect life, yours or anyone else’s. I don’t believe any crap about a ‘fate worse than death’ because, as the cliché says, while there’s life there’s hope. I do not kill, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. And I do not plan to kill you.”