Jack was up again, looking out the door. He turned to Jamie and made a rolling motion with his hands. She got the message: Let's move this
along-
Jamie gave him a single nod. All right. He'd brought her up here, got her inside, and coerced Blascoe into talking. She was recording the interview of her career, so the least she could do was throw him a bone.
"Of course not," she told Blascoe. "No one deserves that. But tell me: Brady is said to keep this huge strange globe hidden away in his office. Do you know anything about that?"
Jack crossed back to his seat, giving Jamie a surreptitious thumbs-up along the way.
Blascoe nodded. "Yeah. Enough to know he's certifiable. You think you've heard some weird shit tonight? You ain't heard nothing yet."
18
"What's with this rain?" Hutch said, banging a fist on the wheel. They'd been sitting on 684 for what seemed like hours.
"Probably some asshole wrapped his car around an abutment up ahead," Lewis muttered from the shotgun seat. "How much you wanna bet he was yakking on a cell phone when it happened?"
"Yeah, while drinking coffee and doing eighty in the rain."
Jensen had the back seat of the Town Car to himself. He needed the space. Hutch and Lewis sat up front. Odds were they were right. Somewhere up ahead there'd be road flares and flashing red lights and glass and twisted metal all over the asphalt.
Jensen didn't care if people killed themselves on the road—probably cleaned up the gene pool a little—but even on a good day it pissed him off when they did it ahead of his car. The least they could do was wait till he'd passed.
Lewis half-turned in his seat. "Long as we're sitting here, boss, mind telling us what's up?"
"What do you mean?" Jensen said, as if he hadn't been expecting the question. The only surprise was that it had taken this long.
"This place we're going to—what are we looking at here?"
"I don't get you."
"I mean, we're loaded for bear, right? Just want to know what to expect. Who's in this cabin and why are we after him tonight?"
Besides Jensen, only Brady and a few High Council members knew the truth about Cooper Blascoe. The guy had become a real liability. Jensen had wanted him to have an accident, but Brady had vetoed that. Not that he wouldn't have liked Blascoe silenced and out of the way, but he'd said that a sudden death might cause more problems than it solved. Especially with the High Council. Even the members closest to Brady held out hope that Blas-coe's erratic behavior was temporary and that he might be able to get back in touch with his xelton—obviously he'd lost contact—and turn himself around, heal his mind and his body.
Thus the cabin. Isolate him. Let him sink or swim. Jensen had arranged it. He'd also arranged a way to keep Blascoe from bolting the cabin.
The TP brigade, of course, knew nothing of this. They'd been told they were monitoring the home of a Wall Addict who was out to destroy the Church. Nothing more. Only Jensen and Brady had the codes to activate and access the AV feeds. TPs like Hutchison and Lewis merely kept an eye on the telemetry telltales, and called Jensen when something lit up.
Like tonight.
"We're not so much after the WA himself as much as the people visiting him at the moment. One of them is Jamie Grant; the other is the guy who snatched her from under your noses."
"We're packing heat for them!" Hutch said.
Jensen shook his head. Packing heat… Jesus.
"We don't know what we're heading into. We have reason to believe the man has mob ties."
Lewis jerked around. "The mob? What the fu—?"
"Exactly what Mr. Brady and I want to know. The weaponry is just a precaution. I do not want anyone shot—I have a lot of questions for the man—but I do not want anyone getting away with a recording of whatever they're discussing up there. If—"
"Hey,' Hutch said as the car eased forward. "Looks like we're starting to move."
Jensen peered ahead. The jam seemed to be breaking up. Good. They still had a ways to go.
"Think it's gonna matter?" Lewis said. "They've gotta be gone by now."
Jensen shook his head. "No, they're still up there. The WA we've been watching has a long story, and it's going to take some time to tell."
"But if they're smart they'll get him out of there and to a safe house where they won't be interrupted."
"Not if the WA refuses to leave."
And he wouldn't dare.
19
"I've gotten kind of used to weird," Jack told Blascoe, "so don't hold back. Lay it on as thick as you need."
He leaned forward and focused on the old man. A slew of questions were about to be answered—he hoped.
"It's pretty thick. I think I told you about Brady being land crazy. He's always buying or trying to buy pieces of property here and there. He sells this one to buy that one. At first I thought it was just a random shuffle, something he liked to do. Then I caught on that he was after specific parcels. I figured, well, it's as good a way as any to invest the Church's extra cash. Land prices are always going up, right?"
"Those specific parcels are indicated on the globe, right?" Jack said.
"I didn't know that back then but, yeah, right. That's why he's turned Dormentalism into a money machine: so he can buy these pieces of land. Some are cheap, but some are in prime commercial districts. Others are in countries that don't like foreigners owning their land, and so a lot of palms have to be greased. And still others… well, some folks just don't want to sell."
Jamie leaned forward. "What's he do then?"
"He keeps upping his offers to the point where all but a very few diehards give in."
"What about those diehards?"
"I don't know about all of them, but I can tell you about one couple. Their name was Masterson and they owned a farm in Pennsylvania that Brady wanted. Well, it had been in their family for generations and they weren't selling for any price. Brady said he'd settle for a certain piece of it but they wouldn't even sell him that. So Brady asks for a face-to-face meet with them and offers an all-expense-paid trip to the city, luxury hotel, the works, just to sit down with him. They accept."
Blascoe's comment that the couple's name was Masterson gave Jack an ominous feeling.
Jamie raised her eyebrows. "And?"
"And someone pushes them in front of a subway."
"Oh, jeez," Jack said. "I remember reading about that last year."
Jamie had gone pale. "I did a piece on it. They never caught the guy. Everyone assumed he was just another MDP." She looked at Blascoe. "Do you have any proof that Brady was connected?"
"Nothing that would stand up in court, but I remember Jensen telling him the news and hearing Brady say something about giving a TP named Lewis a bonus."
Jack had heard the Dormentalists were ruthless, but this, if it was true… it put a whole new spin on who he was dealing with.
He looked at Jamie. "We should get out of here."
"Hey," Blascoe said, "I haven't got to the weird part yet. Dig: Those white lights don't get lit when he buys the land. He powers them up only after he's buried one of his weird concrete pillars on the site."
He had Jack's attention. "What kind of weird?"
"Well, as I understand it—I'm not supposed to know this, you know; got most of it by listening while they thought I was out of it. Anyway, the concrete's gotta be made with a certain kind of sand, and the column's gotta be inscribed with all sorts of weird symbols. And then they've gotta put something else inside it before they can bury it."
"Like what?" Jack said.
"I never learned that."