“I’m a Gamma,” Nick said, “or I was, and Gunny here — she’s an Epsilon.”
“Or was,” she said. “Now I’m reborn freeborn, and I don’t hate anymore. I’m not afraid anymore.”
“It’s like we’ve been living with bands of iron around our heads, and now they’re cut away, the pressure gone,” said Nick.
Carson didn’t know what to make of their strange born-again declarations. She still expected one of them suddenly to come at her with no more goodwill than a buzz saw.
“Sign, sink, spoon, spade, soup, stone, spinach, sparkler, soda, sand, seed, sex.
“It should,” Nick said. “Interesting. Okay, folks, right up here, we’re gonna go down a ramp into the west pit. See the torches and oil lamps out there a ways? That’s where Deucalion’s waiting.”
“He’s waiting out there by the big hole,” Gunny said.
Nick said, “We’re all going down the big hole again.”
“This is some night,” Gunny declared.
“Some crazy night,” Nick agreed.
“What a night, huh, Nick?”
“What a night,” Nick agreed.
“Down the big hole
“It’s sure a big hole.”
“And we’re going down it
“We are, for sure. The big hole.”
“Mother of all gone-wrongs!”
“Something to see.”
“I’m just all up!” said Gunny.
“I’m all up, too,” Nick said.
Grabbing at Nick’s crotch, Gunny said, “I bet you are!”
“You know I am.”
“You know I know you are.”
“Don’t I know?”
Carson figured she was no more than two conversational exchanges from either bolting back to the car or emptying the Urban Sniper into both of them.
Michael saved her sanity by breaking the rhythm and asking Nick, “How do you live with this stench?”
“How do you live
From the top of the rampart, they descended a slope of earth, into the west pit. Trash crunched and crackled and rustled underfoot, but it was well-compacted and didn’t shift much.
More than a dozen people stood with Deucalion, but he was a head taller than the tallest of them. He wore his long black coat, the hood thrown back. His half-broken and tattooed face, uplit by torchlight, was not as disturbing as it ought to have been in this setting, under these circumstances. In fact, he had an air of calm certainty and unflinching resolve that reminded Carson of her father, who had been a military man before becoming a detective. Deucalion projected that competence and integrity that motivated men to follow a leader into battle — which apparently was what they were soon to do.
Michael said to him, “Hey, big guy, you’re standing there like we’re in a rose garden. How do you tolerate this stench?”
“Controlled synesthesia,” Deucalion explained. “I convince myself to perceive the malodors as colors, not smells. I see us standing in a weave of rainbows.”
“I’m going to hope you’re pulling my chain.”
“Carson,” Deucalion said, “there’s someone here who wants to meet you.”
From behind Deucalion stepped a beautiful woman in a dress stained and crusted with filth.
“Good evening, Detective O’Connor.”
Recognizing the voice from the phone, Carson said, “Mrs. Helios.”
“Yes. Erika Four. I apologize for the condition of my dress. I was murdered little more than a day ago and buried in garbage. My darling Victor didn’t think to send me here with a supply of moist towelettes and a change of clothes.”
CHAPTER 56
After leaving the children’s clothes with Jocko in the library, Erika went to the master suite, where she quickly packed a single suitcase for herself.
She didn’t clean up the blood in the vestibule. She should have wrapped Christine’s body in a blanket and called the New Race trash collectors who conveyed corpses to Crosswoods, but she did not.
After all, if she went to a window and looked northwest, the sky would be on fire. And worse was coming. Maybe it would still matter if authorities found a murdered housekeeper in the mansion, or maybe not.
Anyway, even if the discovery of Christine’s body turned out to be a problem for Victor, it wasn’t an issue for Erika. She suspected that she would never again see this house or New Orleans, and that she would not much longer be Victor’s wife.
Only hours ago, she handled with aplomb — if not indifference — such macabre episodes as a butler chewing off his fingers. But now the mere presence of a dead Beta in the bedroom disturbed her both for reasons she understood and for reasons she was not yet able to define.
She put her suitcase at the foot of the bed, and she chose a smaller piece of luggage in which to pack everything that Victor wanted from the safe.
The existence of the walk-in vault had not been disclosed to Erika during her in-tank education. She learned about it only minutes earlier, when Victor told her how to find it.
In one corner of his immense closet, which was as large as the formal dining room downstairs, an alcove featured three floor-to-ceiling mirrors. After Victor dressed, he stepped into this space to consider the clothes he wore and to assess the degree to which his outfit achieved the effect he desired.
Standing in this alcove, Erika spoke to her reflection: “Twelve twenty-five is four one.”
A voice-recognition program in the house computer accepted those five words as the first part of a two- sentence combination to the vault. The center mirror slid into the ceiling, revealing a plain steel door without hinges or handle, or keyhole.
When she said, “Two fourteen is ten thirty-one,” she heard lock bolts disengage, and the door slid open with a pneumatic hiss.
In addition to tall upper cabinets, the vault contained lower drawers, all measuring the same: one foot deep, two feet wide. Each of three walls held twelve drawers, numbered I through 36.
From Drawer 5, she withdrew sixteen bricks of hundred-dollar bills and put them in the small suitcase. Each banded block contained fifty thousand dollars, for a total of eight hundred thousand.
Drawer 12 offered a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of euros, and she emptied it.
From Drawer 16, she withdrew one million worth of bearer bonds, each valued at fifty thousand.
Drawer 24 revealed numerous small gray-velvet bags featuring drawstring closures tied in neat bows. In these were precious gems, mostly diamonds of the highest quality. She scooped up all of the bags and dropped them in the suitcase.
No doubt Victor maintained offshore bank accounts containing significant sums, held by such an intricate chain of shell companies and false names that no tax collector could link them to him. There he kept the larger part of his wealth.
What Erika collected here, according to Victor’s instructions, was his on-the-run money, which he might need if the current crisis could not be contained. Listening to him on the phone, she’d thought he should use the word
