Bad Monkeys

Scary Clowns, Shibboleths, and the Desert of Ozymandias

AFTER MY RUN-IN WITH DIXON, I didn’t get another Bad Monkeys assignment for almost three months. I knew from what Annie had told me during training that that kind of downtime wasn’t necessarily unusual, but under the circumstances I couldn’t help worrying about it.

Did you think you’d been fired after all?

No, I knew it wasn’t that—I could still get Catering on the phone anytime I wanted, they just didn’t have anything for me. Then when I asked to speak to True, they kept telling me he was unavailable, and so from that I got the idea that maybe he was upset.

About what? The pet boys?

More likely this other thing I’d done. Back at that rooftop buffet meeting, right before he left, True had warned me not to take Dr. Tyler’s case into my own hands: “I know you’ll be tempted, especially once your Malfeasance interview is out of the way, but don’t do it. Julius Deeds was strike one; Annie Charles was strike two; I trust I don’t need to tell you what happens after strike three.”

Of course this meant I had to quit my job at the nursing home. Maybe I’m the biggest hypocrite in the universe, but I just didn’t trust myself to rub shoulders with that sicko every night and not do something. So I quit, but then during my last shift I broke into Tyler’s office again and found that Catholic school-uniform catalogue he kept hidden in his filing cabinet, and left it on his desk. It wasn’t anything that’d get him into trouble if someone else saw it, but I knew that he’d know that somebody was on to him.

And what did you hope to accomplish by doing that?

Christ, talk about a Bob True question. I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish; I just did it, OK? But because of Eyes Only, Panopticon knew I’d done it, and I’m sure they told True, and if it wasn’t bad enough to count as strike three, still, I’d disobeyed a direct order. So I figured the lack of assignments might be True’s way of punishing me: unofficial suspension.

Meanwhile, Dixon kept dropping hints that he was still on my case. I got another floor-sweeping gig at this office building on the waterfront. It was a lot quieter than the nursing home, just me and a security guard, which should have been great: no boss, whole place practically to myself, plus the vending machine on the top floor had this glitch where if you hit the buttons just right, you’d get two sodas for the price of one. But I started getting creeped out. The company that owned the building imported bobblehead dolls from Taiwan, and those freaking things were everywhere, not just watching me but nodding at me. It got so I couldn’t go more than half an hour without running down to the security station to calm my nerves.

One night I went in there and the guard had his TV on. The Graduate was playing. Not just any part of The Graduate, either—the first thing I saw coming in the room was Anne Bancroft putting her stockings on for Dustin Hoffman. So I’m like, “Can I change this?”, and the guard shrugged and said sure, so I flipped channels, into the middle of another bedroom scene: Bud Cort lying next to Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude.So I flipped channels again, and it was a commercial, and I was like, OK, but then the announcer’s voice said, “Coming up next on A&E, The Mary Kay Letourneau Story…”

And you thought this was Dixon’s way of taunting you? By manipulating the TV schedule?

If it had just been the once, I might have put it down to coincidence. But after that, whenever I got near a television…I mean, I know they like to repeat stuff on cable, but how many times can they cycle through the same handful of shows?

And it wasn’t just TV. I started noticing little digs in the radio playlist, too. I’d be in the shower, singing along with KFOG, and all at once I’d be like, oh, “The Kids Are All Right,” are they? And if it wasn’t the song itself, it was the band…The Pet Shop Boys. Remember the Pet Shop Boys? They dropped off the charts, what, a decade ago? But suddenly they were in heavy rotation again.

Michael Jackson too, I suppose.

Don’t even get me started on Michael Jackson. If I never hear “Billie Jean” again in this life…

So what did you do about this…harassment?

At first I tried to ignore it; when that didn’t work, I went back to popping Valium. That helped for a while, but then Dixon started to play nasty. One day in the grocery checkout I realized I’d forgotten to get butter, and when I ran back to the dairy case, someone had turned all the milk cartons so that the missing-kid photos were face-out. They were all boys, and all looking at me with these disappointed expressions.

That was just too much. I mean, Harold and Maude, OK, that was funny in a demented sort of way, but this, to me, this was no joke.

So next I got this idea that I should leave town again. It didn’t really make sense, because Dixon’s jurisdiction wasn’t limited the way the SFPD’s is—Malfeasance is everywhere. But it was all I could think to do at that point.

What made you choose Las Vegas as a destination?

It wasn’t my choice. Where I wanted to go was the Pacific Northwest, Seattle or maybe Portland. I figured it’d be a nice change of climate, plus that part of the country is Mecca for serial killers, so I knew I’d have lots of work once True let me out of the doghouse. But it turned out True had other plans for me.

I went to this travel agency that specialized in helping people plan moves, and asked for some info on Washington and Oregon. The woman behind the desk looked at me like I was nuts. “The economy up there is terrible right now. Have you thought about Nevada?”

“Nevada?”

“Las Vegas is booming. It’s one of the only cities in the country that hasn’t been hurt by the recession. They’re building thousands of new homes a month.”

“Sorry, I’m not interested.”

“No, really, you should think about it. Just wait here, Jane, let me get you some literature…” She went into a back room, and I got the hell out of there. I hadn’t told her my name.

Back at my apartment, I gulped down three Valium and turned on the TV. I’d programmed it to skip over stations that showed movies or sex-offender trials, which didn’t leave a whole lot. Can you guess what the theme on the Travel Channel was that night?

Las Vegas?

Three shows in a row. You’d almost think the L.V. chamber of commerce was paying the network to advertise. And then when I clicked over to ESPN, they were covering a poker tournament at Binion’s Casino.

I switched off the TV and picked up the phone.

“Jane Charlotte.”

“Yeah, I’m calling for Bob True again. Tell him I got the message.”

“Look behind you.”

I turned around to see True coming out of my kitchen. “What’s in Las Vegas?” I asked him.

“An operation we believe you’d be perfect for.”

“You don’t have anything perfect someplace nicer?” True just arched an eyebrow, as if to say, You want me to cut you off for another three months? “Yeah, OK,” I said. “So what is it?”

“The details will be given to you by your handler after you arrive.”

“You’re not supervising me on this one?”

“I’ll be along later, but during the initial phase of the operation, you’ll be working with a colleague of mine named Robert Wise.”

“Is everyone in Cost-Benefits named Bob?”

“Wise isn’t with Cost-Benefits,” True said. “He’s a Scary Clown.”

“You’re teaming me with a Clown? What kind of op is this?”

“It’s not the nature of the operation so much as its location. The Scary Clowns consider Las Vegas to be their fiefdom, and they are extremely territorial. It’s not really possible for us to run an operation there without including them. But don’t worry, Wise is a good man. He’s…much less random than some of the others.”

“Great. So when do I leave?”

“We need you ready to go by Thursday. Catering will handle the travel arrangements.”

“OK. I’m going to need some money, though. The bobblehead people aren’t going to give me a paid vacation, and I’m already way behind on my rent.”

“Yes, I know. I was just coming to that.” He handed me a Jungle Cash ticket that had already been scratched off.

“Um, True,” I said, looking at the prize amount. “This is too little.”

“It’s enough for a long-term storage locker. A small one. You don’t have that many possessions.”

“You want me to give up the apartment?”

“Weren’t you planning to do that anyway?”

“Well yeah, but…How long is this Vegas operation supposed to last? I mean, does it make sense for me to burn all my bridges here?”

True held up the crumpled eviction notice that he’d fished out of my kitchen garbage can. “I’d say this bridge is already blazing, wouldn’t you?”

I put my stuff in storage. I stopped by the bobblehead company, intending to give my notice, and instead managed to talk this guy in payroll into giving me two weeks’ pay in advance. Then I called Black Helicopters, the subdivision of Catering in charge of transport. Even though I should have known better, I was honestly expecting them to fly me to Vegas. Hah.

“At five p.m. this evening,” the voice on the phone said, “go stand in the parking lot outside the Safeway supermarket in Pacific Heights. Someone will park within sight of you and leave their keys in the ignition.”

“What kind of car will it be?”

“At five p.m. this evening, go stand in the parking lot outside the Safeway supermarket in Pacific—”

“Yeah, yeah, I got that. But how will I know it’s the right car?”

“The license plate will have an even number.”

It was almost six by the time a black SUV pulled into the Safeway lot, driven by a mother with two kids; the kids were screaming at each other, which gave their mom a perfect pretext to forget her car keys. The SUV’s license number ended in an 8, and it was a Nevada plate, which I thought pretty much clinched it—but just in case, I waited until Mom had dragged the kids into the store before making my move.

I found a Mobil credit card in the glove compartment and used it to top off the tank. Then I blew town. As I drove south, I thought about the Scary Clowns.

The Clowns are the remnant of another secret society that got taken over by the organization way back in the day. They specialize in psychological ops: mind-fucking for the greater good. Like everybody else, they’re supposed to answer to Cost-Benefits, but because of their special history they’re actually semiautonomous, and their insistence on playing by their own rules creates a lot of headaches for the bureaucracy.

What sort of headaches?

Well, one of the things that distinguishes the Clowns is that they’re a lot less publicity-shy than the other divisions. They consider urban legends a form of tradecraft. It’s how they got their nickname.

I don’t recall an urban legend about scary clowns.

It was a variation on the old Men in Black gag. Used to be, when the organization got wind of a predator operating in a small town or a suburb, they’d send in a bunch of guys in freaky clown makeup to drive around and menace the locals. The idea was to raise awareness, get people to lock their doors and stop trusting strangers, until Bad Monkeys could eliminate the threat. It was a pretty effective gimmick, but they had to stop doing it after this one clown actor named Gacy got a little too into his role.

John Wayne Gacy was an organization operative?

Not one of the better ones, but yeah. He’d worked in Panopticon before switching to psy-ops, so he knew how to spoof Eyes Only surveillance; that’s how he managed to rack up so many bodies without getting caught. And then when the cops nailed him, before the organization could? You can bet heads rolled in Malfeasance over that screwup.

Anyway, after that, they quit using the Scary Clown gimmick—mostly—but the name stuck.

So this was the group I was going to be working with. You can see why I felt kind of ambivalent about it. The job wasn’t likely to be boring, but if I drew the wrong psycho for a partner, I might find myself wishing I was back with the bobbleheads.

I stopped in Bakersfield for a late dinner. Not long after I got back on the highway, the gas gauge, which had been telling me I still had almost a third of a tank left, suddenly dipped into the red zone. Fortunately there was a Mobil sign at the next exit.

The Mobil station was in a one-stoplight mountain town that had rolled up its sidewalks hours earlier. Coming down the main drag, I got a weird vibe. The street was deserted, but the kind of deserted you see in a horror movie, right before the zombies start coming out in droves. I’d been planning on pumping my own gas, but when I got to the station I pulled up to the full-service island instead.

The gas-station attendant wore a hooded sweatshirt that hid his face in shadow. “Chilly night,” he said, when I cracked the window. “Would you like to come inside for some coffee?”

“No thanks. Just fill it up with unleaded.”

I kept an eye on him while he pumped the gas. As he was putting the gas cap back on, he did this funny ten-second freeze with his head cocked, like he’d just heard a branch breaking out in the dark somewhere.

Then he was back at my window: “You sure you don’t want that coffee?”

“Positive.”

“It’s really good.” He tilted his head, and his right arm started twitching. “Trust me, you’ll be very glad you tried it.”

“Sorry, I’m a Mormon. Caffeine even touches these lips, I go straight to hell.” I made my own twitching motion with the credit card, and reluctantly he took it from me. He went into his office and stood just inside the door, tapping his feet. Then he came back out again.

My NC gun was stuffed in a brown paper bag next to my seat. I reached for it as the attendant came around to my window for the third time.

“This card’s no good,” he told me.

“Oh yeah?” I said, slipping the gun off safe. “I hear it works a lot better if you actually run it through the machine.”

“It’s no good.” His whole body was jerking violently to one side now.

“OK, give it back to me then. I’ll pay cash.”

“It’s against the rules for me to give it back. I’m going to need you to come inside with me.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Miss—”

“You want to keep the card, go ahead and keep it. But I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Miss, please…”

I came this close to shooting him. But as he leaned in to plead with me, I finally got a glimpse of his face, and saw that he was scared silly. And then—probably because I was already in a horror-movie frame of mind—it occurred to me that I’d heard this story before somewhere.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Are you acting weird because there’s a guy with an ax crouched behind my back seat?”

The gas-station attendant blinked. “You know him?”

“Well, we haven’t been formally introduced, but I’m pretty sure his name is Bob.”

“Oh,” the attendant said. “OK. I’ll just go run your card, then…”

He went back into the office; I looked in my rearview mirror. “Robert Wise, I presume?”

“If I weren’t,” Wise said, “you’d be dead. Or wishing you were.” He got up, and despite the tough talk and the double-bitter in his hands, my first impression was that he wasn’t all that scary. He didn’t look like an ax murderer; he looked like an army ranger who’d gotten lost on his way to chop some firewood.

“How long have you been back there?” I asked him. “Since Bakersfield?”

“Does it matter?”

“I just want to know how cranky you are. If you’ve been sitting on the floor all the way from S.F., your butt must be pretty sore by now.”

“You’re funny,” said Wise. “True mentioned you were funny.” Then he said, “Wait here,” and got out.

I watched him walk towards the gas-station office, ax swinging at his side. As Wise came in the door, the attendant looked up from the credit-card machine and started to raise his hands. Then the office lights went out.

Two minutes passed. Wise reappeared, minus his ax. He trotted back to the SUV and got into the front passenger seat. “Here,” he said, handing me the credit card.

“Uh…What did you just do?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“What did you do, Wise?”

“I’ll tell you later. Right now, we need to get away from here.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Sometime in the next forty-two seconds would be good.”

The wristwatch glance stopped me from arguing. I put the SUV in gear and drove, counting “one one thousand, two one thousand,” under my breath. When I got to “forty-two one thousand,” bright light flared in the rearview.

I took a hand off the wheel and reached for my NC gun. The paper bag was empty.

“That’s all right, Jane,” Wise said. “I’ll hang on to the weapon for now. You just concentrate on driving. And don’t worry about that guy back there—he had it coming, I promise.”

“What the hell—”

“Just drive.”

I drove. Wise didn’t speak again until we were in Nevada. A few miles past the state line, he had me leave the highway for an unpaved road that snaked north into the desert.

“We’re not going to Vegas tonight?”

“No. My place.”

The road ended at a fenced compound whose gate opened automatically for us. Wise directed me inside, to a long, low, warehouse-style building with a sign that read LAWFUL GOOD PRESS. As soon as I’d parked, he took the keys.

“It’s OK,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m too tired.”

“Yeah, well, this way I don’t have to worry about you driving off in your sleep.”

“What if I walk off in my sleep?”

“There are coyotes,” said Wise. “So don’t.”

I followed him into the warehouse, to a musty room where a cot had already been set up for me. “Bathroom’s straight back if you need it,” he said. “Other than that, if you get an urge to snoop around—”

“I know. Coyotes.”

I woke up in the morning to a vision of swastikas. To the left of my cot was a bookcase labeled ARYAN LITERATURE, filled with display copies of books with titles like A Hoax Called Auschwitz and The Illustrated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I got up, rubbing sleep from my eyes, and checked out the other bookcases lining the room, each with its own subject: White Supremacy; Black Supremacy; Religion; Firearms and Silencers; Knife-Fighting and Martial Arts; Bomb-Making; Biological Warfare; Torture Techniques; Confidence Games; Phony I.D. and Identity Theft; Computer Hacking; Money-Laundering and Tax Evasion; Stalking; Revenge.

I’d wandered over to Bomb-Making and was leafing through The Patriot’s Cookbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Brewing Explosives and Chemical Weapons at Home when Wise came into the room. He was showered and shaved, and in a much mellower mood than the night before. “Found something you like?”

“Lawful Good Press,” I said. “Is that a joke?”

“I don’t know. Are you laughing?”

I held up The Patriot’s Cookbook. “Is this a joke?”

“It’s no substitute for a college chemistry degree, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“The recipes don’t work?”

Wise made a seesawing motion with his hand. “The quality of the information varies. The smoke-and stink-bomb recipes are pretty solid; the ones for TNT and plastique, not so much.”

“What about this one?” I pointed to a line in the table of contents that read, “Sarin Gas.”

“Look at the equipment list.”

I did. “What’s a Gallinago flask?”

“A very specialized piece of hardware—so specialized, it doesn’t actually exist. But if you ask for it at a chemical-supply house, or try to search for it on the Internet, bells go off in Panopticon.”

“Are the books bugged, too?”

“Some of them. Eyes Only on selected volumes, plus Library Bindings on some of the hate literature. And of course we keep a mailing list.” He took a remote control from his pocket and pointed it at the picture of the Reichstag that hung above the Aryan Lit. bookcase; the picture slid aside, revealing a computerized map of the U.S. covered in blinking points of light. “Green dots are customers we believe to be harmless—people who think it’s cute to have How to Find Your Ex-Wife as bathroom reading copy. Red dots are customers who want to do damage. Yellow dots, we’re not sure yet.”

“Lot of red dots around Vegas right now,” I observed.

“Yeah, we noticed that too. But here, take a look at this…” He pressed another button on the remote, and all the dots vanished except for one in southern California. A picture and a name appeared at the bottom of the screen. “Recognize him?”

“The gas-station attendant.”

“He had some unfortunate ideas about anthrax and the U.S. Postal Service.”

“If he was a bad monkey, shouldn’t I have taken care of him?”

“Well, if you’d bothered to check the back of your vehicle for stowaways, we would have had time to discuss that. As it was, it just seemed simpler to handle him myself. Plus I really was feeling pretty cranky. You hungry?”

Besides the printing press and bindery, the building had a full industrial kitchen. I sat at a stainless-steel counter making small talk while Wise cooked me breakfast.

“So how’d you end up a Clown?” I asked him. “I mean, axwork aside, you seem like a normal guy.”

“Don’t let the haircut fool you,” Wise said. “I was originally in intel, but when I came out here to start up the Press, the head of the Scary Clowns made me an offer.”

“Panopticon to Clown seems like a popular career path. Did you know—”

“Gacy?” Wise shook his head. “Before my time.”

“What about a guy named Dixon? You ever cross paths with him?”

“You could say so. I was his Probate officer.”

“You trained Dixon?…So does that mean you were in Malfeasance?”

“No, regular Panopticon. Dixon was too at first, but he was bucking for a Malfie post from day one.”

“Did you like him?”

“He was a good student. A little overzealous, maybe. Why, what’s he to you?”

“He’s running my background check.”

Wise laughed. “I bet that’s fun.”

“Thrilling. Listen, maybe you can explain something to me: when Dixon called me in for an interview, I had to wear this wristband…” I described it to him.

“Sounds like a shibboleth device,” Wise said.

“What’s a shibboleth?”

“It’s from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. The men of Gilead went to war against the men of Ephraim, and the Ephraimites got slaughtered. When the survivors tried to pass themselves off as members of another tribe, their accents gave them away: Ephraimites couldn’t pronounce the ‘sh’ sound, so when they said the word ‘Shibboleth,’ it came out ‘Sibboleth.’”

“And a shibboleth device…?”

“Same basic idea. It’s a tool for sorting good monkeys from bad monkeys.”

“By the way they talk?”

“By the way they feel. The device tests for inappropriate emotional responses. Like, someone tells you your mother died, and you’re happy instead of sad. Or someone makes you talk about this shameful thing you did, only you’re not ashamed.” He laughed again. “You look worried. Don’t be. I don’t know what went on between you and Dixon, but if he had any serious doubts about you, you wouldn’t be here. This operation’s too important.”

“What is the operation, anyway?”

He handed me a silver medical bracelet like the kind epileptics wear. On one side was a cluster of Egyptian hieroglyphs over the legend OZYMANDIAS LLC. On the other side was an inscription:

in case of death

keep body cool & call

1-800-EXTROPY

for further instructions

—————

$50,000 cash reward

“You know what cryogenics is?” Wise asked.

“Sure. It’s where they put you on ice until doctors can invent a cure for whatever killed you. I didn’t know there was a rewards program, though.”

“That’s the deluxe version. The goal is to get the cadaver into cryostasis as quickly as possible, to minimize postmortem decay.”

“Let me guess: this is one of those clever-sounding ideas that turns out not to be.”

“There is a contradiction,” said Wise, “between wanting to live forever, and offering a cash bounty for the discovery of your corpse.” He passed me a stack of what looked like baseball cards. But the pictures were of both men and women, and the stats on the back weren’t sports-related. “These are all the customers of the Ozymandias Corporation who’ve died within the past six months.”

I counted thirteen cards. “How big is their client list?”

“Not that big. Going by the average of previous six-month periods, there should be two cards in that stack at most.”

“So someone’s killing them off for the bounty money…But wouldn’t that be kind of hard to get away with? I mean, you’d think the company would get suspicious when the same person kept claiming all the rewards.”

“The bodies were all discovered by different people,” Wise said, “and there’s no obvious connection between any of the discoverers. But we believe a connection exists.”

“So it’s an organized racket? Murder for profit?”

“Profit, and one other motive.”

“What?”

“Evil. We believe the killers’ ultimate goal—after making as much money as possible—is to attract the attention of the police.”

“Aren’t the police already paying attention?”

“Not yet. But their involvement is inevitable if the deaths continue at this rate—and the first thing they’ll do when they launch their investigation is order an autopsy of all the bodies.”

I thought about it. “Autopsies mean thawing them out…”

“Thawing them out, and cutting them up.”

“So not only are they dead before their time, they lose their shot at resurrection.”

“You find that amusing?”

“Well no, I think it’s horrible, but…come on. The whole cryogenics thing is bullshit anyway, right?”

“Yeah, like organ transplants. Or cloning.”

“OK,” I said, not wanting to argue the point, “OK, back up, I still don’t understand why the police aren’t already investigating this. If thirteen people were murdered—”

“You didn’t look closely enough at the stats.”

I shuffled through the cards again. “Cause of death: heart attack…Cause of death: heart attack…Cause of death: stroke…Cause of death: heart attack…” I looked up. “Are you guys missing an NC gun?”

“Along with its owner.” He laid one more card on the counter.

“Jacob Carlton.”

“Former Good Samaritan, transferred to Bad Monkeys in 1999. He disappeared last June during an operation in Reno. Originally the thinking was he’d been taken out by the guy he was hunting, but now it looks like there’s another explanation.”

“So how do we find him?”

“We believe Carlton has taken a job inside the Ozymandias Corporation. Panopticon’s been trying to bug their headquarters for weeks, but the surveillance equipment keeps malfunctioning. You and I are going to go in there today, posing as clients.”

The Ozymandias facility was another forty miles out in the desert. “If they’re in such a hurry to freeze people,” I asked, as we drove across the wasteland, “wouldn’t it make more sense to build the place in town?”

“Zoning regulations,” Wise said vaguely.

“They have those in Vegas?”

The first sign we were getting close was a shimmer of color on the horizon. I thought it was a heat mirage, but within another mile the shimmer had resolved itself into a green circle with a white building at its center.

A big cargo helicopter came screaming overhead as we passed through the gardens of Ozymandias to the visitor parking lot. The helicopter touched down just east of the building, and a team of guys in moon suits came running to unload a silver body bag and hustle it inside.

“OK, so what’s our cover?”

“We’re married,” said Wise. He handed me a ring. “Mr. and Mrs. Doe.”

“Jane Doe? Yeah, that’s not suspicious.”

“Don’t worry about it. When we get inside, I’ll be doing the talking. You just nod your head and keep your eyes peeled for Carlton.” He opened the glove compartment and brought out my NC gun. “One more thing, we’d like to get him alive if we can.”

“No problem.” I set the gun’s dial to NS, narcoleptic seizure.

Coming in the building we got hit with a blast of arctic air, like the company wanted to let us know right away it could deliver. We went to the reception desk, where a woman in four layers of wool printed us badges and told us a Dr. Ogilvy would be right with us.

Ogilvy reminded me of Ganesh. There wasn’t much of a physical resemblance—except that he was small, and looked like he’d be easy to beat up—but he had a nervousness about him, and also a sadness, like this wasn’t the career he’d planned on having. Once he’d introduced himself and got his game face on, though, he was pretty peppy. “Well, Mr. and Mrs. Doe, thank you so much for coming out here today! Let’s go back to my office and talk about what Ozymandias can do for you!”

Ogilvy’s office had a big bay window that looked out on an acre of fruit trees and flower bushes. The greenbelt was shot through with rainbows from an automated sprinkler system, and if I’d had a tab of acid I could have stared at it all day. But Ogilvy didn’t offer us any drugs, just comfy chairs and tea. Then he got down to business: “I understand you’re interested in purchasing one of our life-extension plans.”

I must have looked like I was going to make a crack, because Wise laid a hand on my arm before answering, “Yes.”

“And will this be for both of you, or…?”

“Neither,” Wise said.

“Neither.” Ogilvy’s eyebrows went up and down a few times. “Is it a gift, then? We do have gift packages, it’s actually fairly common, or well, not common, but…For the friend who has everything, or a valued employee about to retire…”

“It’s for our son.”

“Oh! Oh, I see. Your son…?”

“Philip.”

“I see. And how old is Philip?”

“He’s ten.”

“And is he…ill?”

“He was in an accident. He was playing outside, and his sister was supposed to be watching him, but…Well, you know how kids are. She got distracted.”

“Oh, how terrible.”

“It’s not her fault, really. She should never have been given that responsibility. If anyone’s to blame, it’s my wife and I.”

“Oh no,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “No, don’t think that way! These things, you know, they just happen sometimes.”

“Anyway, Phil’s in the hospital now, in intensive care, and we’re praying that he’ll pull through, but if he doesn’t…We want to be ready.”

“Of course. Of course.”

“So what we’d like,” Wise concluded, “is to have a look around your facility, here, and maybe meet some of your people…”

“Of course! I’d be happy to give you a tour right now! Let’s—” The phone rang, and Dr. Ogilvy started. “Oh dear! I’m sorry…” Peering closer at the blinking light that accompanied the ringing: “Hmm, line three, I’m sorry, you know I really should take this…Would you mind if—”

“It’s fine,” I said, getting up. “We’ll wait for you outside.”

I practically dragged Wise from the room. As soon as we were out the door, I lit into him: “What the hell was that about?”

“What was what about?”

“Our son Phil? Who had an accident? While his sister was watching him?”

Wise was blank-faced. “I have no idea what’s eating you. Everything I said in there was part of a script. I’m just following it.”

“What script?”

“The one Cost-Benefits gave me for this op. You think I make this stuff up as I go along?”

“Who in Cost-Benefits—”

“All right then!” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Are we ready for the tour?”

We headed down the hall towards our first stop, with me still staring daggers at Wise. Meanwhile Ogilvy, either because he’d picked up on the tension or because it was part of his standard sales pitch, launched into a rambling explanation of the company name: “It’s from the poem by Percy Shelley.”

“Ozymandias, King of Kings,” said Wise. “‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’”

“Yes! That’s the one. And of course, ‘my works,’ that’s meant to be ironic, since as the poem goes on to say, there’s actually nothing left of those works, other than the inscription that brags about them. Which, given what we do here, may seem like a strange allusion to be making. But you see, there’s actually a double irony, because it turns out Shelley picked on the wrong king. At the time he was writing, 1817, I believe, Egyptology hadn’t gotten off the ground yet, so one pharaoh was as obscure as any other. Today, though, thanks to science, things are very different. Ozymandias—aka Ramses the Great—is not only one of the most famous rulers in history, but we know, contrary to what Shelley wrote, that a lot of his works did survive.”

“So what’s the point?” I interrupted, not wanting to fall asleep before I had a chance to finish grilling Wise. “Don’t speak too soon?”

“Exactly!” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Exactly. Don’t speak too soon! And we believe a similar caution applies to what we’re doing here. Our industry, Mrs. Doe, perhaps I don’t have to tell you this, but it has its share of skeptics. Some people, I won’t call them ignorant, but some…uninformed people, think cryogenics is, well—”

“A load of crap?”

“—a fantasy. An optimist’s pipe dream…But the same thing has been said about a lot of scientific advances.”

“Like organ transplants,” I said. “Or cloning.”

“Yes! Yes! You do understand. What one generation mocks, the next takes for granted. And I promise you,

Mrs. Doe—we’ll pray for your son, of course we will, and we’ll hope for the best—but even if the worst happens, he won’t be lost forever. I guarantee, we will bring Phil back…And here we are!”

We’d come to a security door marked CRYOSTASIS A. Ogilvy swiped a keycard through a reader on the wall and the door slid open, hitting us with another blast of cold air.

I stepped inside, expecting a morgue-type setup, bodies filed away in lockers along the wall. Instead, Ozymandias’ clients were arranged on freestanding racks, encased in tall metal cylinders like giant thermoses—what Dr. Ogilvy called “cryopods.” There were six pods to a rack. They hung upright, but could swivel to a horizontal position for loading and unloading. At the far end of the room, a team of moon-suit guys—probably the same ones we’d seen on the helicopter pad—had just cranked a pod into the loading position; white vapor boiled out of it as they removed the end cap.

One series of racks held smaller containers, each about a third the size of a normal cryopod. I said: “Please tell me those aren’t babies.”

“Oh no,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Children are kept in Cryostasis B. This is an adults-only chamber. Those are heads. The, uh, budget option,” he explained, wincing a little. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, you understand—once we have the means to reanimate a dead body, growing an entirely new one shouldn’t be much harder. Personally, though, I’d rather not present a revival team with any unnecessary challenges.”

Cryostasis B was almost identical to Cryostasis A, except that the racks were spaced farther apart to make room for padded benches. “For visitors,” Dr. Ogilvy explained. “Friends and loved ones of our adult clients are welcome to visit at any time as well, but for reasons I’m sure you can appreciate, visits here in the nursery are much more common. Incidentally, purchase of a Platinum Lazarus or higher-premium plan entitles you to unlimited shuttle service to and from McCarran Airport…”

Figuring it might blow our cover if I slugged him, I stepped away while Ogilvy continued his pitch. I went over to the nearest rack and pretended to examine one of the pods.

A clanging noise caught my attention. I leaned sideways and looked around the rack to where a maintenance hatch had just opened in the floor. Another moon-suit guy climbed up out of it. As he turned to drop the hatch cover back in place, I saw his face.

Jacob Carlton.

“Mrs. Doe?” Dr. Ogilvy said. “I was just telling your husband something that I think you—”

“Be with you in a minute!” I drew my NC gun and stepped quickly around the rack, but Carlton had vanished.

“Jane?” said Wise. “What is it?”

A loud boom! from beneath the floor shook the pods in their racks. The lights flickered, and the steady hum of air-conditioning and refrigeration units gave way to a sick stutter.

“It’s you-know-who!” I called to Wise. “I think he just sabotaged the electricity!”

“What?” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Oh no, sabotage is impossible here, we have excellent security! And the power system has two backup generators.”

On cue, a second explosion rocked the building. An alarm sounded.

“Oh dear,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Perhaps we’d better—urk!”

“Wise?” Gun at the ready, I stepped back around the rack and saw the doctor lying facedown on the floor. Wise, who’d dived for cover behind a batch of frozen heads, mouthed the words Over there and pointed.

I made my way from rack to rack towards Carlton’s hiding place. I was nearly there when a third explosion knocked out the last of the power. In the seconds of pitch-blackness that followed, I heard running footsteps.

Battery-operated safety lights came on. I ducked past the last rack in time to see an emergency-exit door swinging closed. I shouted to Wise, “I’m going after him,” but when I reached the door I paused to look back. The room was already noticeably warmer, and wisps of vapor were curling off the cryopods.

I went through the door. A twisting corridor led me back out to the main hallway, where I found two more bodies on the ground, another doctor and a security guard. The guard had gone down swinging, a nightstick still clutched tightly in his fist. Right next to him on the floor, nearly invisible in the amber glow of the safety lights, was an orange pistol.

I tucked Carlton’s NC gun in my waistband and followed the signs to the nearest exit. Carlton was stuck there, his final escape from the building blocked by a set of automatic doors that were no longer automatic. You’re supposed to be able to slide those things open manually, but it helps to have both hands, and Carlton’s right arm hung limp, a casualty of the guard’s nightstick. Now he’d pulled out a club of his own—a monkey wrench—and was using it to bash out the door glass. I snuck up behind him and waited until he’d removed enough of the glass to give me a clear field of fire. Then I put him to sleep.

A hot desert wind blew in through the shattered door. Looking out, I realized that the power failure had killed the garden’s sprinkler system, so the plants were doomed, too. But it wasn’t the fruit trees I was worried about.

“We blew it, didn’t we?” I said, as Wise came up behind me. “They’re all going to thaw out.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in the resurrection.”

Wise crouched down, pulled the hood off Carlton’s moon suit, and laid a pair of fingers on Carlton’s jugular. “God damn it! I told you we wanted him alive!”

“He is alive. He’s just sleeping.”

“Yeah, sleeping like those corpsicles back there.”

“No…I had it on stun, see?” I turned the gun to show him, but the dial was on the MI setting. “Oh shit…”

“Oh shit what?”

“This must be his gun. I picked it up back there, and…Christ, I must have confused it with mine.”

“Good job.”

“Look, I’m sorry. It was an accident.”

“Yeah, you’re prone to those, aren’t you?” He stood up. “All right, let’s get out of here.”

“What about him?”

“Leave him. He’s useless to us now.”

“And what about…?” I gestured in the direction of the cryostasis rooms.

“Nothing we can do.”

“The organization doesn’t have some kind of crack repair team that could get the power back online? What about the Good Samaritans, isn’t this right up their alley?”

“Nothing we can do,” Wise repeated. “Now come on.” He stepped through the door into the dying garden. “We can’t stay here.”