Sleepless

30

LADY CHIZU’S TOWER WAS SURELY SAFE FOR A DAY, BUT IT would not do over time. Nor, for that matter, was Chizu herself safe. She was sleepless, dying. And when she died, so too would Thousand Storks. And the maggots that would crawl out of that instrument of destruction would ravage anything she had touched. I saw her last when I returned from the Culver City house for Omaha. She was not disappointed to see me, but there was some regret, I think, when I took the baby girl from her arms and placed Park’s father’s watch in Omaha’s hands. She stared at the light reflecting off it, and began to chew on the leather band.

Chizu thought for a moment.

“Her father was killed?”

I nodded.

She thought for another moment.

“And her mother committed suicide?”

Standing in the Culver City house, I had looked at Rose’s body in Omaha’s crib and thought of all the beautiful things that I had left behind in my house to be destroyed by either fire or water. My apocalypse collection, not one work among it casting a greater foreshadow than the dead body of a sleepless mother in her daughter’s crib.

I shook my head, still awed by what I had seen.

“Her father killed her mother.”

“Ah.”

I watched her eyes, an act more brazen than I would have dared just a day before.

“Does that deepen the beauty of Cipher Blue?”

She looked at Rose’s laptop, resting now in the center niche of the display wall.

“It intensifies what I feel when I look at it.”

She touched Omaha’s cheek.

“She is a quiet baby.”

I watched her chewing the buckle of her grandfather’s watchband.

“Her parents are dead. She’s sad.”

“No. Babies cry when they are sad, Jasper. She is watchful. Listening.”

Both of us, childless, watched the silent baby.

We left Chizu in her tower, with her digital ghosts, the remains of the dead sleepless who made them.

In the lobby outside her office, I found that her ever-efficient greeters had packed certain mementos into a small box as I’d requested. They would see it delivered safely, just as soon as I told them to whom it should be addressed. I paused for a moment to consider, the greeter waiting, pen poised over the Thousand Storks label that adhered to the box.

Inside were the travel drive with Dreamer coordinates, the backup copy of Park’s reports, scans of the last few days’ entries from his journal, his phone with call log and the various relevant pictures he’d taken over the last few days, a voice recording I’d made on my own phone, our long conversation dubbed to a micro SD card, and a bloodstained left shoe with tread that matched the footprints from the gold farm, taken from the floor of Cager’s closet. Although, considering the box contained as well the security disk showing Cager committing the murders, some of those items seemed redundant.

I could not guess what the addressee would do with the box. A person of a particular kind of intelligence and survival instinct would destroy it in the moment he became aware of its significance. The murders of the Afronzos would be sending massive shock waves through the world very soon. Revelations that suggested why they had been murdered would quite possibly tip the scale a final feather’s weight into chaos’s favor. That was the desirable course from my perspective. Nothing screens a retreat quite so efficiently as confusion and disarray. Which may explain why I sent the box to Hounds rather than Bartolome.

As described to me by Park, his captain sounded every inch a self-preservationist. I doubt he was aware of the true nature of the assignment he had placed on Park, but neither do I doubt that he was more than willing to do what was most expedient when pressure was applied. Obviously a man who valued social structure. And the following of orders. Hounds had rather the aura of an anarchist. I found it easy to imagine him as a boy, breaking things for no other reason than the pleasure of seeing them in pieces. I also recalled Bartolome’s observation that Hounds had no love for “Washington suits.”

And there was the gesture of the watch.

A grace note that spoke well of his humanity. Whatever meaning one may wish to ascribe to such a quality.

In all, I thought he might be damaged enough in his own person to be dangerous should he find out some of what was at the root of the world’s ills. The very type to survey the gasoline poured about a powder keg in the basement and light the final match, so as to bring down the crooked house above before any more unfortunates could be injured within. The consequences to be dealt with later.

I also included the remains of the bottle of Dreamer. Whatever latent prints might be intact on its exterior, it was the contents that I thought would most interest him. As regarded his stepmother. A gift that seemed in keeping with Park’s spirit. Something foremost on my mind at the time.

The box disposed of, Omaha and I rode the elevator to the roof. In addition to the air defense batteries, there was the helipad from which I had been carried to LAX just two days before. Chizu’s gift to Omaha: transportation away from the city. I’d contrived several years before to have a final point of retreat. A house in the lower foothill of the Sierras several hours northeast. A few miles’ walking distance of a small town, it sat on a property of several acres that included a length of freshwater stream. As the years had progressed, I’d thought to never use the house. It was out of balance with the times and my age. And then, suddenly, it made sense again. Was purposeful. As if I had known all along I would have something that needed protecting.

I reflected on this as we emerged to the rooftops, the Santa Ana whistling through the thatch of missiles. I looked up and saw a helicopter on approach, and carried the baby to the edge of the pad. My travel kit had been brought up already. In the duffel were Rose and Park’s journals. His gun, her pictures and letters.

The helicopter dropped lower. It would carry us from the sleepless city. Was it too much to ask that it would be piloted by a mercenary legionnaire with a humanitarian past and a scar that pulled down the corner of his left eye, giving him a perpetually winking air?

Even in a sleepless world, a man could hope.

Even I, the Vitiated Man.