“A man can be impotent yet have a keen interest in sex. Indeed, one might make a good argument for the case that his very inability to attain an erection frustrates him, and that his frustration leads him to be
Oslett had been shaking his head the entire time Waxhill had been speaking. “No. Again, it’s not that simple. He’s not only impotent. He’s received hundreds of hours of intense psychological conditioning to eliminate sexual interest, some of it when he’s been in deep hypnosis, some under the influence of drugs that make the subconscious susceptible to
Unimpressed with Oslett’s argument, spreading orange marmalade on a slice of toast, Waxhill said, “Brainwashing, even at its most sophisticated, can fail. Would you agree with that?”
“Yes, but with an ordinary subject, you have problems because you’ve got to counter a lifetime of experience to install a new attitude or false memory. But Alfie was different. He was a blank slate, a beautiful blank slate, so there wasn’t any resistance to whatever attitudes, memories, or feelings we wanted to stuff in his nice empty head. There was nothing in his brain to wash
“Maybe mind-control failed with Alfie precisely because we were so confident that he was an easy mark.”
“The mind is its own control,” Clocker said.
Waxhill gave him an odd look.
“I don’t think it failed,” Oslett insisted. “Anyway, there’s still the little matter of his engineered impotence to get around.”
Waxhill took time to chew and swallow a bite of toast, and then washed it down with coffee. “Maybe his body got around it for him.”
“Say again?”
“His incredible body with its superhuman recuperative powers.”
Oslett twitched as if the idea had pierced like a pin. “Wait a minute, now. His wounds heal exceptionally fast, yes. Punctures, gashes, broken bones. Once damaged, his body can restore itself to its original engineered condition in miraculously short order. But that’s the key.
“We’re sure of that, are we?”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“Well . . . because . . . otherwise . . . it’s unthinkable. ”
“Imagine,” Waxhill said, “if Alfie is potent. And interested in sex. The boy’s been engineered to have a tremendous potential for violence, a biological killing machine, without compunctions or remorse, capable of any savagery. Imagine that bestiality coupled with a sex drive, and consider how sexual compulsions and violent impulses can feed on each other and amplify each other when they’re not tempered by a civilized and moral spirit.”
Oslett pushed his plate aside. The sight of food was beginning to sicken him. “It
“As with the
Waxhill pushed his plate aside, too, and folded his hands around his coffee cup. “So now Alfie has found Stillwater, and he wants the writer’s family. He’s a complete man now, at least physically, and thoughts of sex lead eventually to thoughts of procreation. A wife. Children. God knows what strange, twisted understanding he has of the meaning and purpose of a family. But here’s a ready-made family. He wants it. Wants it badly. Evidently he feels it belongs to him.”
The bank offered extensive hours as part of its competitive edge. Marty and Paige intended to be at the doors, with Charlotte and Emily, when the manager unlocked for business at eight o’clock Tuesday morning.
He disliked returning to Mission Viejo, but he felt they would be able to effect their transactions with the least difficulty at the particular branch where they maintained their accounts. It was only eight or nine blocks from their house. Many of the tellers would recognize him and Paige.
The bank was in a free-standing brick building in the northwest corner of a shopping-center parking lot, nicely landscaped and shaded by pine trees, flanked on two sides by streets and on the other two sides by acres of blacktop. At the far end of the parking lot, to the south and east, was an L-shaped series of connected buildings that housed thirty to forty businesses, including a supermarket.
Marty parked on the south side. The short walk from the BMW to the bank door, with the kids between him and Paige, was unnerving because they had to leave their guns in the car. He felt vulnerable.
He could imagine no way in which they might secretly bring a shotgun inside with them, even a compact pistol-grip model like the Mossberg. He didn’t want to risk carrying the Beretta under his ski jacket because he wasn’t sure whether some bank-security systems included the ability to detect a hidden handgun on anyone who walked through the door. If a bank employee mistook him for a holdup man and the police were summoned by a silent alarm, the cops would never give him the benefit of the doubt—not considering the reputation he had with them after last night.
While Marty went directly to one of the teller’s windows, Paige took Charlotte and Emily to an arrangement of two short sofas and two armchairs at one end of the long room, where patrons waited when they had appointments with loan officers. The bank was not a cavernous marble-lined monument to money with massive Doric columns and vaulted ceiling, but a comparatively small place with an acoustic-tile ceiling and all-weather green carpet. Though Paige and the kids were only sixty feet from him, clearly visible any time he chose to glance their way, he didn’t like being separated from them by even that much distance.
The teller was a young woman—Lorraine Arakadian, according to the nameplate at her window—whose round tortoise-shell glasses gave her an owlish look. When Marty told her that he wanted to make a withdrawal of seventy thousand dollars from their savings account—which had a balance of more than seventy-four—she misunderstood, thinking he meant to transfer that amount to checking. When she put the applicable form in front of him to effect the transaction, he corrected her misapprehension and asked for the entire amount in hundred-dollar bills if possible.
She said, “Oh. I see. Well . . . that’s a larger transaction than I can make on my own authority, sir. I’ll have to get permission from the head teller or assistant manager.”
“Of course,” he said unconcernedly, as if he made large cash withdrawals every week. “I understand.”
She went to the far end of the long teller’s cage to speak to an older woman who was examining documents in one drawer of a large bank of files. Marty recognized her—Elaine Higgens, assistant manager. Mrs. Higgens and Lorraine Arakadian glanced at Marty, then put their heads together to confer again.
While he waited for them, Marty monitored both the south and east entrances to the lobby, trying to look nonchalant even though he expected The Other to walk through one door or another at any moment, this time armed with an Uzi.
A writer’s imagination. Maybe it wasn’t a curse, after all. At least not entirely. Maybe sometimes it was a survival tool. One thing for sure: even the most fanciful writer’s imagination had trouble keeping up with reality these days.
He needs more time than he expected to find plates to swap for those on the stolen Toyota Camry. He slept too late and took far too long to make himself presentable. Now the world is coming awake, and he hasn’t the advantage of the dead-of-night privacy that would make the switch easy. Large garden-apartment complexes, with shadowy carports and a plenitude of vehicles, offer the ideal shopping for what he requires, but as he tries one after another of these, he discovers too many residents out and about, on their way to work.
Eventually his diligent search is rewarded in the parking lot behind a church. A morning service is in progress. He can hear organ music. Parishioners have left fourteen cars from which he can select, not a large turnout for the Lord but adequate for his own purposes.
