Текст книги "The Sacrifice Game"

Автор книги: Брайан Д'Амато

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Score, I said to myself. Goal.

Game.

FOUR

The Anareta

(108)

I left the U.S. heading backward on the so-called “Maya Diaspora” illegal-immigration route that Jed had once sponsored, from Miami to San Antonio and then male-handward along what they called the Pan-American Sacbe through the resettled Teotihuacan and finally Belize City. I was able to utilize some of the fruits of Jed’s paranoia. Before leaving Florida, I rolled someone from a pastless clan-I think they call them Homeless People here-for his revolting but correctly sized clothing, picked up a semifake passport from Jed 1 ’s anonymous safe at a storage warehouse, and even found that he had set up a Dominican Republic account under a false name that would let me withdraw cash from Western Union ATMs using a code, and not a card-and after a bit of bullying, Jed’s dying consciousness gave me the code. I kept up my pentadaily call to what Jed 1 had called his Secret Server, to keep it from spilling the beans. One of Jed 1 ’s old Zeta contacts-I gambled on his being okay because it was one of a few that he’d never mentioned or entered on any keyboard-sold me some other papers and five very small explosive devices, which we FedExed, disguised as printer cartridges, to another Zeta guy in Ladyville, Belize.

Getting from Orlando to Belmopan used up five suns. By the time I dug in there, a jornada from the Stake, I’d become familiar enough with English and Spanish to interact with the domeheads without making Jed-in-Me interpret-he’d had a big advantage over me when he was my guest, of course, because he already spoke a decayed dialect of Chorti-and I even stopped bumping into people on the sidewalk. I’d been trying to pass them on the sunward side, what they’d call the British side. But people here went around things clockwise, as they called it. And there were other things that were hard to get used to. Car fart, or exhaust as they euphemistically called it, was one thing I could never handle, even though I’d slept in killing valleys filled in a fog of burning gangrene. Exhaust was soaked into everything, in the water and in the food. On the other hand there were the splendid things. I got so amazed by the Wal-Mart in Monterrey that I wasted hours just walking around in it. First it was the amount and variety of sheer things that got me, and then it was the goods themselves, rolls of turquoise foil and mats of fur cut, I thought, from giant blue deer that lived on the verso of the world in a place Jed’s brain said was called China-and televisions and carnival glass and so on-but finally the oddest thing for me was the way the same complex object could be flawlessly repeated over and over, like it was one of those demons that used to live in the hills, who could be in different places at the same time. Metal bothered me, so I got a complete set of thirty-four Ming Tsai white ceramic knives. Then I found the upscale malls, and for a while I couldn’t keep myself from buying all sorts of red-striped clothing at Versace and Richard James, until I realized it was making me stand out too much. So I forced myself to blend in, to dress for the hunt. I got my tattoos back as compensation, so I could wear some of my old power-glyphs inside, on my skin. The tattoo artist loved some of the designs so much he wanted to keep them, but I explained they were secret and if he let them out, I’d have to come back and eat him. I got my hair extended again. My hotel room started filling up with jewelry and exotic mock-weapons and sports equipment and gadgets from Sharper Image and Lifestyle Innovations. Eventually I realized that for some reason all the stuff that I thought was the most expensive, turquoise, jade, amber, ivory, jet, pyrite-all those things-were now the cheapest substances of all thanks to the new alchemy. Color, matter, and place were all worth nothing, and that had turned the people into cowards, only half alive.

I bought a thigh-top magic book and got Jed’s fading memories working on hacking into the Warren files again, but I couldn’t manage to do much. Jed-in-Me felt almost gone. And I didn’t have any tsam lic to help me crack the passwords. Finally I gave up. That Marena’s going to have to do this stuff, I thought. Even if I have to boil her feet.

So instead, I focused on blending in. Food around now had been hard to get used to. Most of the foods I liked were easy to find, turkey, peanuts, chilies, tortillas, tequila-although they were all quite different, all uniform, with no souls. Corn was gigantic and sweet but they had only one kind on the ear. You could get the sacred blue strain-in fact, anyone could get it-but only in shards of broken tortillas. I found I could get venison and some fish and shellfish, but that dog, bats, locusts, and axolotl, and of course people, were almost unobtainable. When I did catch and cook up a stray dog, its flesh was gamy and festering with internal boils. Pet dogs were better but harder to capture, and still had that all-pervading taste of petroleum-which was the most unpleasant thing about the final hotun. The entire time, since I’d found myself in the hospital, there wasn’t a single moment when I didn’t hear and smell an engine digesting somewhere, on the streets, in the walls, overhead, whatever. So generally I stuck to turkey. There was even a kind of sacrificial festival for birds, with even the lower clans eating big fat birds, with divination by something they called the wishbone and the cranberry sauce standing in for blood.

I scattered my white blood a few times, with professionals from sex castes. Tony Sic’s mutilated foreskinless penis was much less sensitive than mine had been, even with all the scars mine had from the offerings. Anyway, it wasn’t safe, since I had to execute and dispose of them, so I gave it up.

The U.S.-increasingly an outcast state anyway-had had to recall ambassadors and shut down embassies in all of Latin America and in several countries around the world. Troops were being asked to leave their bases in over fifty countries. Another domino falling. Two weeks ago the UN had passed a resolution condemning the U.S.’s actions. The next domino. However, following the UK’s lead, Belize had not passed a resolution condemning the U.S. With this as something of an excuse, two days ago Guatemala had demanded that Belize break off ties with the UK. Belize, knowing that would make them vulnerable to a Guate invasion, refused. Now, it seemed that the Guates were poised to cross into Belize at its southern and southeastern borders.

Among other countries, Guatemala was demanding that all U.S. military advisers leave the country. And the U.S. State Department was in crisis mode about it, since Belize was still a British protectorate, the borders were closed and the militaries of both countries were on full alert. I was by now understanding more and more about Jed’s life and world and I wondered whether the conflict meant that Lindsay would have to cancel his planned Neo-Teo opening party at the NeoMayaLand Hyperbowl in Belize, less than two jornadas from the Guatemala border-or whether the dispute was something Lindsay wanted to make happen.

The newscasters mentioned that there were reports that officials in the stricken villages had received anonymous tips that something disastrous was going to happen-probably, it was said, from someone within the Drug Enforcement Administration who didn’t agree with the policy.

And, in astronomical news, there was a new Herbig Ae/Be star in the Pleiades.

Jed’s memories gave me four hundred times four hundred ways of keeping out of sight. I worked out a good approach, a very direct one, low tech for today’s post-high-tech world, and crossed what was now the border of the Stake well ahead of time. I hid out in a dry wash near a hot water pipe from the power plant, in a foundation for a cooling tank that wouldn’t begin construction until the next b’aktun, which meant never.

Even when I’d been hiding out in Texas KOA kampgrounds, I learned from police broadcasts that while there was a warrant out for me, it wasn’t for murder or even assault but simply for fleeing arrest. There was nothing saying I was armed and/or dangerous. Evidently Lindsay’s people didn’t want me to get caught by the police and must have managed to cover up the killings at the hospital.

On what they called December sixteenth I moved into a pastless-I mean, transient dwelling in the suburbs. That night-the seventeenth-the events of the Greatfather Heat’s incarnations seemed promising. I started acquiring and testing the hardware I needed and studying the Hyperbowl compound from a safe distance. After a few days of frustration, I learned to draw on Jed’s knowledge of computers, and eventually I reconstructed enough skills from Jed’s memories to master the basic programming that would be necessary to work my way into the Warren systems. Many of Jed’s math skills seemed to work more or less automatically, ready for anyone to use. And while I certainly never really understood anything more complex than a simple loop, computers, surprisingly, fascinated more than repelled me. Without Jed’s uay, I could not have done it.

Were they watching me? Did I have any tracking implants? By mid-December, I’d taken too much evasive action and had been examined by enough underground-friendly doctors to be pretty sure I could answer the last two questions in the negative. Speaking of which, my fractured right hand was healing faster than I’d have thought. All good. All good.

I hired a truck driver to smuggle me to the Stake. There were patrols out and Jed-in either body-would have been spotted right away, but I used the old methods, sticking to the jungles, wearing and carrying very little, and keeping all my metal equipment in a little Otter fishing-tackle case. I made an ambush camp under a collapsed wooden water tank in sight of the border and waited.

When I felt the time was right, I crossed the trench, the electric fences, picking up a couple shocks, but ignoring them and the field of razor-wire, which I rolled over, laying down Kevlar blankets.

As I expected, the security at the Stake’s inner Olympic Complex was harder to penetrate than the border. There were trucks and passenger vans going in and out, and helicopters and, once, a new white Zeppelin, landing with VIP guests for the opening-which had not been put off by the hail-but despite the activity at the gates, I decided to sneak in the old way. Through radio intercepts and observation, I found that, evidently because of the war, there was a fleet of small remote-piloted vehicles patrolling the air above the Stake and, certainly, watching the ground. This was a setback, but finally, during a brief rain before dawn (off-season, because of the mixed-up weather) I took a chance and made my way across the perimeter. I rubbed myself with burro dung to throw off the guard dogs, crawled through ten rope-lengths of card teasel and poison ivy, and lay motionless for eight hours until I was sure I could get to what seemed to be a currently unworked construction site near the racetrack. I hid out, as I’d learned to do in my youth, silently, unmoving, in a pylon excavation, eating Snickers bars and putting my human waste into baggies of sodium polyacrylate beads. When the Pleiades rose that night, the new star, which they’d named Akhushtal, was clearly visible just below Maia. No surprise there. Lady Koh had been right again. And in that video, Lindsay’d meant “Live in Maia.” Not Maya. He never pronounced “Maya” right anyway. Maia like the star in the Pleiades. The next Kobol, I guess. He also knew.

At the death of Grandfather Heat, I waylaid a right-sized waiter near one of the pools, washed myself in the unearthly blue water, took his clothes, key cards, IDs, and a room-service cart, and walked into the hotel lobby and up to Marena’s room-which I’d located by monitoring conversations on the waiters’ earphones. Jed’s bible was the Collected Works of Ian Fleming, and I’d decided to stick to the faith. Anyway, it’s not so hard to get into a place as long as you don’t care about getting out. The very second key card made the lock light green. I walked in. She was already dressed, in a flinty pants suit, a garnet necklace, and up hair, but still without her sandals. She tried not to show that she was surprised to see me, and then not to show that she thought I was going to try and kill her. But she picked up a square chrome-framed table mirror in both hands and weighed it like she was going to swing it through my face.

It wasn’t hard to get her on board, though. Even though she’d thought I still wanted to kill her.

“I know what’s happening,” I said, “and I can stop it.”

Well, actually, I had to put in another few words.

“Look,” she said, “if you’re not going to save Max, I’m not interested.”

“We’re going to save Max. And everybody.”

“Who cares about everybody?”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“All in the light, then,” I said. “Fine.”

“Fine. Tell me.”

(109)

The center gate led right into the long covered arcade approaching the stadium lobby. There were four checkpoints of greeters and identifiers and guards, and a few thousand neo-MARCOSite protestors they were keeping at bay but Marena biometricked herself through the gauntlet, and her vouching for me worked again. We came into the Warren lobby, which was now a kind of far-up-the-scale food court, or food empyrean, as it seemed to be called, laid out as an idealized diagram of a human body. The air was breezy with what Jed’s memory said was extra oxygen pumped in.

Marena piloted me down the center aisle, around a green central square filled with ears of quadricolored sweet corn and up into the food court’s head, past counters of fish flesh and strange fruit. The thralls behind the counters were working screens of base-twenty abacus-calculators. Once in a while she squeezed my arm, cutting into it with her nails, like I was an overturned canoe. We walked into the Hyperbowl entrance. The high false arch was flanked with animated DHI video statues of the athletes performing their greatest feats and routines over and over again, monuments of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, when Warren really got going. We passed through a sound cone and heard a snatch of John Tesch’s voice: “ At this time we’d like to extend our condolences to the family of Greg ‘The Leg’ Nagel, our beloved Jaguar forward, who passed away during practice earlier today. As we all know, Greg’s outstanding stats included…”

Trapezoidal doors slid open and shut around us and the air changed to some designer mix, cool but still tropical and scented like a disinfected rain forest. It was almost quiet because of the active sound baffles, but there was the roorsh of artificial waterfalls and conversation.

“Let me carry your handbag,” I said, grabbing it on the second word.

The lobby was almost large enough to enclose the Ocelots’ mul. But it was still all in earth colors, with five kinds of grass growing out of slits in the granite floor and clusters of furniture twisted out of unfinished hardwood. There were about two thousand people milling around on the floor in black and white clusters dotted with much more colorful neo-Maya outfits, all mood-lit by pin spots slowly roving through the gloom. I noticed Shaquille O’Neal and a few other emeritus basketball players sticking up out of the crowd like spirit poles in a cornfield. There were also quite a few officers’ uniforms, Belizean, British Territorial, and U.S. In the center of the room, where the information kiosk would have been, a giant thing rose up three rope-lengths, almost too confusing-looking to name at first, a tower, a ceiba tree, a poplar tree, a wooden stele, a stone stele, a high-angled pyramid, a Christmas tree. The ornaments were all DHI spheres, most of them running different views of the Ix IIa softworld. One of them showed a slowly rotating readout of today’s soon-to-expire Maya date:

On the far side of the lobby high-arched corridors led through to what I figured were the stadium seats. There weren’t any crowd-control stanchions that I could see. Good.

The first person we knew who saw us was Michael Weiner, in full NeoMaya drag.

“Hi,” I said. “Wow. You look absolutely… uh… suburban.”

He opened his mouth and then shut it. It was a true-bliss moment.

“Tony?” he asked.

“Hi,” I said. He didn’t clap me on the back, like usual, so I clapped him on his. He had on a sort of carcanet, a quilted ceremonial collar, and I managed to get the brown Bug Bom planted on it without anyone noticing. The colors didn’t quite match, but I figured nobody would notice. “How’s my favorite thing on the History Channel?” I asked.

“I’m, I’m fine,” he said.

“Yoo-hoo!” someone said. She pushed through to us. She had hair. Very faintly, Jed’s crumbling Book of Uay’s Names seemed to read that they called her Ashley 1. She was holding a phone, which I guess she’d spotted us on.

“Come on,” I said to Michael. “We’re going to go talk with Lindsay and I want to ask you both something. Okay?”

“Uh, okay,” Michael said.

“You are so great,” A 1 said to Marena, talking loud above the noise of the crowd. “You actually decided to make it!” She’d met Tony Sic, but she didn’t recognize me, although that didn’t mean much because she was as dumb as a bag of squashes. Two bags. “So, great, great, great,” she went on, “let me show-”

“Thanks,” Marena cut her off. “Listen, could you find Lindsay for me?”

“Uh, okay, he’ll be thrilled you made it-”

“It’s really important. Seriously.”

“Sure.” She held her phone up to the crowd and waved it around. “Okay, I got him,” she said. I looked over Marena’s shoulder at the screen. It turned the real architecture behind it to a wire-frame model of the room with little security-tag dots floating around.

“Okay,” A 1 said, “Lindsay’s this pink dot with the L.”

“Great,” I said. It meant he was over behind the Tree of Life, under the giant display screen. Marena clocked him herself and led me left and down a flight of stairs on the left out onto the floor and around a tableful of barbecued emu skewers and would-be primevally menacing ice sculptures and into a darkened area behind a row of dichromatic halogen spots. Michael and Ashley 1 followed along.

“That’s Bob Costas over there,” she whispered to me.

“Who?” I asked.

“There.”

“Huh.”

“You know, the great many, many award-winning sportscaster,” she said. “He’s here with John Tesch.”

“Oh, right, that’s, yes,” I said. “That’s a big deal.”

“Exactly,” Ashley 1 chirped, brightly. “Defini tive ly. Great, great, great.” She went back to pointing out all these people you’d never heard of. Well, at least, I’d never heard of them. In the old days we would have said they were mouse-uayed people pretending to be felines. Here I guess we’d just say they were irretrievably B-list. I caught up with Marena, but some ditzy-grinned lady had buttonholed her.

“Uh, Tony?” Marena said. “Michael? You guys know Peggy Noonan, right? Peggy Noonan, Tony Sic.” The woman held her hand out.

“Hi. Wow, the Leni Riefenstahl of speechwriting,” I blurted out, before I quite knew what I was saying. “It is nice to meet you, but your hand has too much blood on it.” She froze for a split-beat. “Your old boss had my parents killed.” Noonan turned and stalked off. Jed would never have had the nerve to say that, I thought.

“Thanks a lot,” Marena said. “It wasn’t Jed who said that, was it?”

“No,” I said. “But I support some of Jed’s causes. Jed is an old friend.”

“You’re such a self-righteous cornball,” she said. “You’re dis-fucking-gusting, I mean, I don’t love her, either, but for crying out bloody tears.”

“What’s going on?” Michael said. “The last thing I heard you were in real trouble.”

I mumbled something.

“There he is,” Marena said. Lindsay was about thirty steps femaleward of us, standing under the Tree of Life, ringed by a bunch of what looked like investors. You had to hand something to him, he had this whole vast private-army black op going on right at this moment and he was standing here shmoozing like he didn’t have a care in the world. A waiter held a tray out at us.

“Is that celery?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, they’re white chocolate sticks,” he said.

“Oh, great.” There were ten of them. I took nine.

“No, thanks,” Marena said.

“Come on, have one,” I said.

Lindsay had on a gray summery jacket and I dug the Bug Bom with two dots-the gray-covered one-out of Marena’s handbag. It wasn’t a great match, either, but it would have to do. I wanted to go right up to him, but Marena said it looked like he was going to send them on their way pretty soon.

“Okay, let’s hang back for a beat,” I said. I ate a chocolate stick.

There were two identifiable security people standing behind him. One of them I hadn’t seen before, a big classy-bodyguard type in a black tie with an earphone. The other was that commando woman from the Creep, Ana Vergara. She was in leggings and a close-fitting black huipil and looking almost attractive, for a hired enforceress. She hadn’t spotted me yet, but she would.

“Do you know that they’re all, I mean, the police,” Michael said, “they’re all looking for you?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “I know, I’m too fast for them.”

The covey of investors laughed-what was the funny part? I wondered-nodded, and turned toward the entrance to the playing field. Other people were hanging around, too, waiting to talk with the great man, but Marena pushed through and tapped him on the shoulder. He seemed genuinely happy to see her, although of course he wasn’t. She said something to him-I hoped it was what I had told her to say-and he turned around, to his left. Ana had spotted me now, but she expected me to stay where I was so Lindsay could face me, and instead I had just enough time to move around to his right and clap him on the back. Beneath the cashmere, the silk lining, the Sea Island broadcloth, and the Jesus jumper, his trapezius muscles were surprisingly hard against my fingertips. “Hail, fellow, well met,” I said.

Lindsay kept turning. He hadn’t felt the bug yet, since it was just held on with Velcro. When he recognized me he was pretty smooth, his expression didn’t change, but he didn’t say hello. He just stood there, waiting for Ana and whoever to take care of it, seeming relaxed, his look radiating that he was a big guy and I was a little guy and big guys just don’t get fucked with. He was wearing an American-flag lapel pin and a dressier bumblebee pin, this one with yellow sapphires.

“Chief, don’t move,” Ana said. She’d spotted the bug, and she knew what it was. I squoze the button in my pocket that activated its little hooked legs. Lindsay felt them digging down through his jacket and into his flesh and jumped a little.

“Ow,” he said. His arm jerked backward, but the Bom was correctly positioned right in his acnestis, that is, that place in the small of the back where few people can scratch.

“DO NOT MOVE,” I said, more or less quoting from the Special Boat Service manual.

He didn’t.

Brian D'Amato

The Sacrifice Game

(110)

A na and the other guy had already grabbed me but I had my hands in my pockets and went on. “I have placed an explosive device called a Bug Bom on your back. As you may know, if you or anyone else tries to remove this device, it will detonate automatically, firing neurotoxin into your flesh.”

“ On the ground, now, ” Ana said.

“I am holding down the SUSPEND FIRE button,” I said. They already had me down on the Travertine floor. “If I get shot in the head, or trip and fall, or anything, my thumb will release it. Or

if you don’t GET OFF ME NOW!”

I gave Lindsay a friendly little zap. He gasped-and-twitched, but not so much as I would have thought.

“Marena, what’s he doing?” Lindsay asked.

“My guess is that he’s serious,” Marena said.

They still hadn’t let me up. On the other hand, they weren’t trying to pull my hands out of my pockets. Maybe they already had a procedure for dealing with these things.

“Let me up now,” I said. They didn’t. “All right, watch this,” I said. “Michael?”

“What?” Michael said.

Marena figured out what was happening, but by the time she got around to Michael’s back I’d already pressed his button. I was afraid that with all the quilting on his collar, and without the bug’s hooks in, the pellets might not go through, but I needn’t have worried. There was a sound like a buried firecracker and a hiss as the Bom’s hollow shell flew across the lobby. A surprised expression bloomed on Michael’s face.

“Oh, shit, somebody get a goddamn paramedic,” Marena said, loudly but not shouting.

It usually takes a lot longer for someone to respond to sedation or poisoning than one thinks it should. Blood in any given capillary will return to the heart in about twenty-three seconds, but after that it still takes some time for whatever it is to get absorbed through the cell walls of the heart or lungs. So often there are two hundred or so beats of lag time. But the Bom did a good job of scattering its crystals through a wide range of levels and locations in Michael’s back, and in less than thirty beats the look of surprise turned to-well, I am not sure what the English word would be. Let us say it was a rich mixture of pain, fear, and rage. He wobbled and started to fall, but Ana held him up. I looked back at Lindsay. He was still thinking about pulling off his jacket.

“DO NOT MOVE,” I said again. “Seriously. If you pull too hard on that, it will fire on its own. It is not the tranquilizer shit it comes with in there.”

“Shut up,” the Big Guy said. He pushed my head down.

“There are enough neurotoxin crystals in there to kill a blue whale,” I said. As if to illustrate the point, I heard Ana easing Michael down onto the floor. He gurgled. Probably his heart had already seized up. “If you pull my arm back any farther I’m setting it off,” I said to the Big Guy. “Also, I have to enter a stay-of-execution code every two hundred and ten beats. Three minutes, rather. So, I want-”

“We make these things,” Lindsay interrupted. “There’s a way to get them off.”

“Go for it,” I said. I could hear the Big Guy mumbling into the air, asking for backup over his ear thing.

“Good deal,” Lindsay said. There was just a lot of confidence there. Even to me, he just seemed senior, the way 2 Jeweled Skull had. I suppose the equivalent in this era would be the way the school principal looks to a third-grader.

“I have said enough,” I said.

For about twenty beats, Lindsay seemed to be conferring with Ana and maybe Marena, although I couldn’t see them. Finally they seemed to have made a decision. Lindsay came over, crouched down-I could see the heels of shoes, which, maybe oddly, were black bowling shoes, rising off the floor-and must have signaled for the Big Guy to let my head up so that I could look at him.

“Come on, have them let me go,” I said. I gave him a little buzz and he froze. That was another well-designed thing about the system. It really felt like it was going to explode. “And do not walk away, I’ll blast you just like Fuckwad here.” I looked over at Michael for emphasis. A paraperson was already trying to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“What do you want to talk about?” Lindsay asked.

“I am not negotiating,” I said. “I do not want to kill you, I just want to chat, but you know, if anything happens to me I do want to take you down with me. Also I have to keep punching this thing or it’ll go off by itself anyway. Do you understand?”

He didn’t answer.

“Anyway, the release code is thirteen digits long, and you will never get it out of me in time. Also, I promise I am not going to be asking for much. Could you get this guy to take it easy?”

“Doug, take it easy,” Lindsay said to the Big Guy. Doug’s grip relaxed and I could look up.

“Marena?” I asked. “Could you button Lindsay’s jacket for him? Including the top button.”

“What do you think?” Marena asked him.

“Fine, do it,” he said.

She did. It made Lindsay look turn-of-the-century. I mean, the century before the last one.

“Dump out your pockets and then put your hands in them,” I said. He started to but they were still sewn together. “Not your jacket pockets, your front pants pockets.”

He did. A couple of old coins bounced on the floor. Behind him the paramedic pulled away from Michael and came up with a mouthful of blood. I am glad I do not have that job, I thought. I looked back at Lindsay. He had not moved.

“Maybe you will kill me whatever happens,” he said.

“Nonsense,” I said, “if I wanted to do that I would have done it already. You think you are that hard to get to? I am just concerned about my role in your new administration. We are on the same side of the court on this.”

“All righty,” he said. “Except you’re not going to get out of here whether I want you to or not.”

“I know, but I still recommend you stall for time. Is not that the standard procedure?”

There was a kind of Woo standoff for seventy beats while Lindsay talked with Ana. Finally they let me up. Without looking away from my eyes, Lindsay cracked enough to raise a finger. Doug pried his hands off my arms.

Lindsay just darted his eyes toward the south wall and Doug and Ana fell instantly into line, leading Marena and me on a straight cut through the freaked crowd and along the long granite wall behind the dessert tables. Doug did not loosen his grip on my arm but he did talk into the air again, telling the backup security to hold back. Ana led us around a corner toward the bank of elevators. “Let’s go up to your office,” I said to Lindsay. “This is a bummer party anyway, I’ve never seen so many nobodies in my life.” Ana opened the door to a big blond-wood-paneled container by holding her palm over a little red laser.

“Not that one,” I said. “Let’s go up to the box.” I turned and walked to the end of the line, making them follow me, to the Elevator V, the one that led to the floor behind the VIP box. Lindsay signaled okay and Doug opened it.

“Could you move all the VIPs out of the VIP box?” I asked Lindsay. “Maybe send them on a tour of the locker room?”