The Sacrifice Game

(113)

The model of Neo-Teo in the center of the table lit up. A corresponding map came up on the far wall. Numbered windows from hundreds of cameras all over the compound blossomed over the walls. There were panoramas of the temple and sports districts and other key locations, and even a view from a satellite exactly 11,088,000 inches directly overhead. A few showed the festivities down in the arena. The Celebrity who we’d seen before, whose name I still forget, was finishing a sappy offering chant. Next to it, on a live window running the big in-house show, we were being treated to close-ups of audience reactions, teenage boys laughing, teenage girls singing along, and fat women weeping happily, sobbing happily away, getting their daily catharsis. I checked out a view of the main lobby downstairs. The party seemed to be going on fine, only slightly subdued after the Weiner incident. Another window, twenty-three, showed an overhead view of the rotary outside the East Gate, the one we had come through. A protest outside had already gotten out of hand, and Warren security guards with giant transparent shields were forming a sort of tortoise, almost like the Teotihuacanian infantry’s. Foam spray appeared out of an invisible fire hose and covered the dark mass of protesters with white flakes. I panned the camera back with the cursor. Belize police in electric ATVs were crowding around the edges of the rotary like overzealous T-cells.

“A riot,” I said. “Fun.”

I blew up a few of the windows that were most important to me personally: specifically, those showing the fire stairs, elevator shafts, and the floor below us. Doug was on twelve. Ana Vergara had a team in each of the stairways. She was in the one that led to the fire exit on the outside, that is, the nonstadium side, of the Safe Room. It was a whole little army with shotguns and assault carbines, and they had also gotten two whole destruction crews together, with electric rams and oxyacetylene torches and sensors and gas mines and paramedics and whatever, like they were ready to take on Kim Jong-uns secret redout under Mount Myohyang. I made sure I had good views up of the empty VIP box and the rest of the deserted thirteenth floor. Finally, I blew up two windows of the Safe Room itself, one showing the three of us from the north side, as though we were all reflected in a mirror that didn’t reverse, and another bigger window showing the whole room from a hidden lens somewhere overhead that made us look like three beetles feeding on a many-hued graham cracker.

“Congratulations, Lindsay, you’re the last domino,” Marena said.

“What’s that?” he asked, although I was sure that he knew.

“Lindsay, listen,” I said. “If we can’t stop the test, we’re going to change the coordinates to zero-zero-zero.”

“That means right here,” he said.

“Really?”

“We’ll all die.”

“So stop the test.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “Get on the phone to the Pentagon.”

“Never mind.”

“You want to die right now?” he asked.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Marena and I have a lover’s death pact, and you’re an evil bastard.”

“Forget it,” he said.

“Lindsay…” Marena started. She paused. “Look, you just have to believe us on this one. It really is going to, you know, be like I said.”

“What?”

“It’s going to disappear EVERYTHING!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lindsay said. “Jesus won’t allow that. Let alone the other gods.”

“The Sweeper’s going to go over a certain probability range,” Marena said. “And it’ll just suck in everything, you, me, the Grand Canyon, Jupiter, the Horsehead Nebula, the Sombrero Galaxy, Planet Qo’noS, the Roy Rogers Cometary Globule, everything.”

“So it won’t hurt,” he said.

“Not only will it not hurt, but you won’t even notice it.”

“This is malarky.”

“Fine,” I said. “Well, just to see what we can do… look, the fact is, we’re going to have to torture you.”

“Go ahead. The White God is going to get me through this one just like He’s done every time.”

“Look, Lindsay,” she said. “Boss. Why is it so important to you to run this test right this moment?”

“It’s not a test,” Lindsay said. “It’s air support.”

“For what? For an invasion of Pakistan?”

“That’s correct.”

“They’re invading right now?”

“Correct, Indian troops started crossing in from Srinagar as of-as of about eight minutes ago.”

“So I bet this is going to destroy Islamabad. That’s like two million people. If it weren’t going to destroy everything, I mean.”

“Miss Park, if we do not provide our allies this support, it’s not just going to be the end of the trail for the Warren Family. It’ll be the end of the United States of America.”

“Enough,” I said. “Get ready.” I took out my bone-scraper needle-it was really just an old woman’s hairpin-and an antiseptic towelette, sterilized it and Lindsay’s left elbow, and slid the pin into his ulnar nerve. There was a grunt deep inside him, and a half a flinch, but nothing else. He was tough.

I looked into his eyes. They looked back like two freshly drilled blue holes in the face of the Serpentine Glacier. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it was possible-maybe even likely-that Lindsay was one of those few people who have no fear whatsoever. Of course, even they respond to torture eventually. Like I say, no matter what you’ve heard, torture works. But it could take time. And there was no time. In fact, soon there’d be no time at all, anywhere. Two beads of sweat slid from his forehead into the hollow of his right cheek.

“We were afraid you were going to be difficult,” I said.

He didn’t answer. The ice holes looked back.

“So,” I said, “have you ever heard of Sampson Avard?”

“No.” He was lying. He was smooth, but there’d been a quarter-beat too much hesitation.

“I’ve got some letters from him that I put up for posting,” I said. I typed eighty-one characters into a Firefox window on the desktop, downloaded a PDF file from a very-far-offshore server, and flipped the window around and slid it over to him.

He looked at me for ten beats and then couldn’t resist looking down at the window. It was the real thing. He looked back at me.

“Well,” I said, “to answer your unspoken question, yes, I got that off the LDS vault server,” I said. “In Salt Lake. And, yes, we also have the other two hundred and nine sensitive files from the folder.”

“And he used the Game to do so, I’m reckoning,” Lindsay said, getting himself back together.

I nodded. Shut up, I thought. Contrary to media portrayals, a supervillain, or superhero or superantihero, should not explain to the other side what he’s about to do.

“And he gave the folder to your friend Quinones and Quinones gave it to you.”

I nodded.

“So, what’s it got to do with me?” he asked.

“You really don’t want this going out, do you?”

“I don’t care,” he said.

I pulled the window back, flipped it around again, and hit POST.

“Okay, it’s up,” I said. “Google it.”

He glared. At first I thought it was my imagination, but then I saw that it was happening: His ears were glowing pink.

“I only put up the first letter,” I said. “And, you know, it’s not, it’s not the worst one. My favorite’s the Joseph Smith eight-year-old girl rape stuff. Although the Elamites on Mars business is also pretty great. Right?”

His ears had become a true, deep red. That’s the trouble with being a WASP, I thought. Your eyes might be opaque, but your skin’s an open window.

“Fine,” he said. “The first password is RALSTON. All caps.”

I started typing.