Looking back, Jack couldn’t have come up with a way to make this night any worse. His plans for Philadelphia had been so simple: meet Donovan Piatt and try to avoid castration. And everything had gone so gloriously wrong, in ways he couldn’t have imagined. Of course, Jack had always suffered from a lack of imagination.
Like this now. The curly-haired guy, holding up the cell phone. “Let’s give her a call now, whaddya think?”
Jack hadn’t figured on that at all.
Zero a.m.
The Dublin Inside Her Head
But the face, his face, thafs all she could see now. With nowhere to retreat but within her own mind, she kept coming back to him. It had been easier to avoid his face in the past two weeks, with the flurry of activity: booking flights, changing clothes, figuring out how she was going to use the bathroom … all in the presence of other people. Other men. That was the worst part of it, probably. The lack of privacy at the most intimate level. It’s what he’d had in mind all along. Even before their falling-out. Before this series of disasters she had initiated, and he had upped the ante. Him. Him. Him. She suffocated on him. Choked on him. Vomited him. Bled him.
All she ‘d ever wanted was to be alone.
It was why she had left university early, moved out of her mum’s house, replied to that advertisement in the Dublin Times: “The Celtic Tiger Is Roaring! Exciting New Opportunities in Scientific Research. Apply Now, Citywest Business Campus, Saggart, County Dublin.” She’d sent her résumé, glossing over the fact that she hadn’t exactly finished her master’s and had opted instead to stock shelves in a Waterstone’s branch while she figured out her next move. The bookstore gig didn’t pay enough to leave home, but this could. And it was something that vaguely promised that her biology degree would be put to some use.
She had been stunned when she was summoned for an interview within two days. The Operator met her at the door personally; she was stunned again to learn he was an Ainerican. The interview was brief. He asked many questions about where she grew up and what she wanted to do and then gave her the tour, and made a big deal out of all the security protocols. She felt like she was on the set of some spy show, like Alias or Queen and Country. Iris scans. Thumb-pad sensors.
The Operator had told her a fake name at first, of course: Matt Silver.
(Only later did he wink and confide in her: “You know, that’s not my real name. I’m not supposed to tell anyone that. And don’t tell anyone this, either: We’re a secret wing of MIS. British intelligence. They’re paying us handsomely for our scientific innovation.”)
He had hired her on the spot.
He had asked her out to dinner the third day of her employ. Probably thought he was showing restraint.
Sea bass, he insisted. She told him she didn’t like dark fish with bones, and, like, hello, she lived here. But he told her it was the best, and he wanted her to have the best. What was the point otherwise? She remembered opening the door of her new apartment—after an awkward fumbling at the door, during which they kissed, which was not what she had intended at all—and sitting down on her futon, the one piece of furniture she had been able to take from home, and staring at the dingy white wall for an hour or more. Wondering if she’d exchanged one prison for another. At least she’d had twenty-three years to learn the rules of the first one.
By the end of the first week, they were “dating.” He expected her to work late hours. Help him with a special project, for which he’d received special funding.
And when he explained it, and his eyes lighted up, she did feel her heart swell for him. It was an amazing project:
Proximity.
No more missing children.
No more kidnapping.
No more hostages.
No more international manhunts.
A small voice in her head said, Yes, and no more privacy. But in the months they worked together, the concept of privacy seemed to fade anyway.
Besides, there was nothing like them.
The self-replicating supramolecular assemblies.
“Proximity.”
Or as she called them, “the Mary Kates.”
She saw the accounts, so much money being pumped into their small research facility, which consisted of half a dozen technicians, Matt, and herself. Before long, she was named associate research chief, and her own salary was insane, and Matt had even found a way to fudge her master’s degree for her. (She’d had only a semester and a half left to go; she didn ‘t feel like she’d cheated.) She sent money back to her mum, and the first words out of her dad’s mouth: “She’s turned whore.”
Then she saw the files that the Operator had tucked away. Shadow files, right on the same hard drives they used every day.
He must have thought her dumb. He’d left a box open one day. She couldn’t venture a guess as to the password, so the next morning she spread talcum powder on the keys. When the Operator entered the system, she had him paged to a different part of the facility. Then she checked the keys. Wasnh hard to tell which keys had been touched. A, S, E, V, N.
She thought about it for a few moments. Evans? Vanes?
Wait.
Her own name.
Vanessa.
And what she saw, once she made it to his shadow files, turned her stomach.
4:37 a.m.
South Eighteenth Street
After he retrieved his gym bag—almost forgot about you Ed, oF pal—Kowalski waited outside for the cab. When it pulled up, he had to laugh. It was the same guy who’d taken him to the airport last night. The dark-skinned guy who was going on about the flat fee. He wondered if there was a flat fee to the place Jack Eisley had gone. Take you from any swank Center City hotel to the S-M perv-out dive of your choice.
This one, the Hot Spot, was a real screamer: mutual masturbation. Kowalski had strong-armed the cab company to divulge the name of the driver corresponding to the medallion number he’d plucked off the video. Another call revealed the man’s cell number. A quick call to the driver, and one mild threat later, he had a name and an address. And yeah, his boy Jack was still there. Having a good time in a back room, the way the driver told it. “Bribed me just to get into the place,” the driver said. “And I don’t even know where the hell he is.”
Next, Kowalski called his favorite freak, a glam-vampire dude named Sylvester, who lived up in the Bronx, to give him some background. Last thing he needed to do was walk into a place like this blind.
The Hot Spot was relatively tame, Sly said. Married guys, mostly, went there to whack off while they watched women straddle high-powered Sybians. Direct clitoral stimulation with double the horsepower of any Black & Decker device. Guys liked it. Gals really liked it. Moaning, talking, sweating, but no touching. Because that would be adultery.
Ho, ho, people did amuse him sometimes.
But why would Happy Jack go there? He meets some saucy blonde, gets nearly strangled to death, then goes to an after-hours knuckle-shuffle club?