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This corner of reality is a minuscule backwater of that whole, but it is a part. And if you mean to call yourself the victor, you must have it all."

Jack resisted quoting Rodney King.

"Now," Roma continued, "one of these forces is decidedly inimical to humanity; the other is not."

Jack couldn't help it—he yawned.

"Am I boring you?" Roma said, his expression shocked.

"Sorry. Just sounds like the old Good versus Evil, God versus dat ol' debil Satan sort of thing."

"That is how some people interpret it, and Cosmic Dualism is rather trite. But that is not the case here. Please note that I did not say that the opposing side—the anti-Otherness, if you wish—is 'good.' I said it is not inimical. Frankly, I doubt very much that it gives a specific damn about humanity other than the fact that this territory lies on its side of the cosmic DMZ, and it wants to keep it there."

Wow, Jack thought. He'd heard some wild theories this week, and he'd become convinced that something—not aliens, not the Antichrist, not the New World Order, but something—was going on, but this…this Otherness stuff took the blue ribbon for being the farthest out.

"So…" Jack said. "We're all caught up in a giant game of Risk."

Roma shook his head slowly. "You have an uncanny knack for reducing the empyrean to the mundane."

"So I've been told."

"But then," Roma said, "taking everything I've said into account, we must not overlook the big 'or.'"

"Or?"

"Or…everything I have just told you is completely wrong because there is no way a human can understand the logic and motives of this totally 'other' reality."

"Swell," Jack said, wanting to scour the smug look off Roma's face. "Then all this talk's got nothing to do with"—Jack mimicked Roma's three-fingered gesture again—"this."

"On the contrary. Your scars were made by a creature of the Otherness."

"The ones you say you watched being conceived."

"Watched? A piece of my flesh was used in their genesis." Roma's expression clouded. "Not that I had much say in the matter. But they turned out to be rather magnificent creatures, didn't they."

"Magnificent isn't quite the word I'd choose."

But perhaps magnificent wasn't so far off. Magnificently evil, and so alien, so…other, that Jack remembered how his most primitive instincts had screamed for him either to run or to annihilate them.

Jack also remembered what he'd been told about the origin of the rakoshi. He could almost hear Kolabati's voice…

"Tradition has it that before the Vedic gods, and even before the pre-Vedic gods, there were other gods, the Old Ones, who hated mankind and wanted to usurp our place on earth. To do this they created blasphemous parodies of humans…stripped of love and decency and everything good we are capable of. They are hate, greed, lust, and violence incarnate. …"

Could Kolabati's Old Ones be Roma's Otherness?

Roma rose from the table. "Well, I'm satisfied," he said.

"About what?"

"That all you know of the Otherness is what I've just told you. I thought you might be a threat, but I am now convinced you are not."

For some reason he couldn't quite grasp, Jack felt offended by that. "Threat of what?"

Roma went on as if he hadn't heard. "But there might be others who are not so sure. You would do well to take care, Mr. Shelby. You might even consider returning to your home and locking your doors for the rest of the weekend."

The warning startled Jack, and before he could reply, Roma turned and strode away. Jack wanted to run after him, grab him, shake him, and shout Tell me what you mean! But he fought the urge. That would only cause a scene, and was unlikely to make Roma more talkative.

Feeling as if he'd been sucker punched, Jack headed for his room.

19

On the way back upstairs, Jack cursed himself for not telling Roma he'd been spotted in Monroe with Melanie last week. He would have loved to have seen his reaction. Damn. Why hadn't he thought of that?

What did Gia call it? Esprit de Vescalier, or something like that.

As soon as he stepped into the room he saw the red message light blinking on his phone. He followed the directions for message retrieval and heard a low, raspy voice: "Wondering where Olive Farina is? Check the hotel basement."

That was it. A mechanical sounding female voice announced the time the message had been recorded: 6:02. Seven minutes ago. Just about the time he'd left the bar.

He didn't recognize the voice, but he'd bet his last dollar it was one of the goons in black. Jack knew about Olive's death—he was probably the only one who did. That made him a loose end, one that needed tying up.

And they think I'm just going to go trotting down to the basement and into their tender loving arms?

He was insulted.

Of course, he was going—whoever spirited Olive away probably had something to do with Melanie's disappearance—but he wasn't going alone. Mr. Glock would come along.

He pulled the pistol from his gym bag and hefted it, considering a silencer, then discarding the idea. The increased length would make the pistol harder to handle in close quarters. If he needed to fire, he would, noise be damned. He slipped it under his belt, inside his shirt, then headed for the elevators.

He smiled and nodded at the SESOUPers who rode down with him. All but one got off at the second floor for the reception. The straggler departed at the lobby level, leaving Jack alone as he descended to the final stop.

He pulled the Glock and chambered a round as the car slowed, then held the pistol tight against his right thigh as the doors slid open. He stepped out into a narrow corridor. Its ceiling was tentacled with pipes and ducts, a closed door on either side, opening into a wider, darker space at its end where machinery clanked and whirred. Warm and dusty. The Clinton Regent was old enough to have boilers.

"Hello?" he called once, then again. No reply.

He raised his pistol as he edged up to the first door and tried the handle. Locked. With the dock's muzzle ceilingward, he slid his back along the wall until he was opposite the second door. He reached over and tried that knob—also locked. But locked didn't mean unoccupied. Someone could pop out of either at any time.

Keeping his back to a wall, and an eye on those doors, Jack slid to the end of the corridor. Hotter here, darker and noisier too—a wide dim space, its floor lower than the corridor's. Light spilling from behind him glinted off hulking elephantine shapes snared in a maze of pipes and ducts.

Jack darted his head out and back, twice, checking left and right. Visibility was the pits, but at least no one was hovering just around the corner. And he'd spotted a light switch on the right. He reached his left hand around and flipped the single toggle.

The two naked bulbs that came to life far to the left and right in the ceiling did little to chase the gloom. Jack stepped onto a small platform that sat a couple of feet above the floor of the bigger space. Leaning against the low pipe railing, he scanned the walls for more switches. The place had to have better light than this. As he looked for more bulbs so he could follow the wiring back to a switch, he spotted a large dark lump attached to one of the pipes against the ceiling almost directly above him. He immediately moved to the side and peered up at it.

The way it was stuck to the pipe reminded him of some huge barnacle. But as his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, he could see that it was covered with either fur or some sort of black fuzzy mold. No details, just a big lump of black fur. In fact, from this angle it looked like someone had attached a sable coat to the pipe.