The Malice Box Page 3

  ‘Pelican-in-her-Piety,’ the watchman said in a ruminatory way. ‘In heraldry it’s called vulning. Vulning her breast. Self-sacrifice, you see. People used to believe the pelican fed its young that way. Nonsense of course. But you can see how it became a symbol for Christ. For self-sacrifice. Are you Christians, would you say?’ His eyes moved from Robert’s star-strewn cape to Katherine’s pointed hat and broom.

  ‘Of a sort,’ said Katherine. ‘We must be off, then. Bye.’

  The older man bowed slightly to them. ‘Perhaps we’ll meet again.’

  She shivered and steered Robert away, pulling him over the road towards St John’s. Robert looked back and saw the faint outline of the watchman, still looking up at the Pelican, slowly being erased by the fog.

  New York, August 25, 2004

  Adam Hale stood before the three white-haired men, fear in his heart. They wore exquisitely tailored suits in sober tones, discreet but very expensive cufflinks and signet rings, understated ties. They exuded an air of unhurried power.

  ‘Adam Hale. Thank you for accepting our invitation,’ said the tallest of the men.

  ‘I had little choice, in the circumstances.’

  ‘Quite so. Still, we are grateful.’

  They were in the Empire State Building, in a 7 8th-floor office suite.

  ‘Please sit, Mr Hale.’

  ‘I prefer to stand.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  Only the tallest man spoke. The others sat on either side of him at the mahogany boardroom table, staring coldly at Adam.

  ‘Our last meeting was just over a year ago.’

  ‘That’s right. August 14, 2003.’

  ‘The Great Blackout.’

  ‘Or whatever you want to call it. We all know what it was.’

  ‘Since that day, we have been, shall we say, bound to eachother in certain ways.’

  The man barely moved his jaw as he spoke, his clipped vowels those of an old-money patriarch discussing real estate. Adam’s fear ate at the limits of his willpower. They were very powerful, too powerful for Adam alone. And they were burrowing their way into his soul, inch by inch, day by day.

  ‘We feel it is time to call upon you.’

  ‘So soon?’

  In the hidden depths of his heart, Adam repeated to himself the oath he had sworn more than twenty years earlier. To protect the innocent. To keep the secrets. He needed to slow them down, whatever it took.

  ‘What is it, exactly, that you want? I want to understand you.’

  The man to the right of the spokesman laughed. The other two crinkled their eyes in appreciation, as if he had uttered a well-turned witticism.

  ‘We work, as you know, through others. We are patient. We have existed for a long time now, as has the group to which you belong. We have no address. Tomorrow, this suite will be empty. You cannot find us unless we wish you to.’

  He took what Adam thought was a silver pen from his jacket pocket and twisted it, flicking up a gleaming metal blade. Then he stood up and, leaning forward, sliced four letters into the exquisite surface of the table: iwnw.

  Adam flinched at the casual ease of the gesture.

  ‘We are sometimes referred to as the Brotherhood of Iwnw,’ he said, pronouncing it joonu, the final vowel just a faint breath. ‘We have had many names, in many countries.’

  Adam snorted in derision. ‘You just look like three thugs in Savile Row suits to me.’

  The leader’s eyes drilled into Adam’s. For a moment he weighed the insult, then made a show of ignoring it. ‘Iwnw is the name of a city, a sacred place. A place of power where our ancestors and those of the Perfect Light first, shall we say, disagreed. Myths in many lands reflect the battles between us since that time. They are all fragments.’

  ‘You always lose in those stories, don’t you?’

  ‘It depends where you stop the story. It is never over. Neither of us can ever fully prevail. We will always be in the world. In fact, you need us. Your people also have many names, not all of them accurate. You might consider, you know, that you are actually on the wrong side in all of this.’

  ‘You will fail. I stopped you before. Last year.’

  ‘Indeed. But at considerable cost to you, Mr Hale, would you not agree? You are not strong enoughto do so again. It is, in fact, quite pleasurable to be able to draw you towards our fold. Our kind – yours and mine – have always existed, have we not? A handful of people in the world at any given time, able to hear the higher harmonies, to see worlds beyond the physical? To serve higher masters?’

  ‘It is a blessing.’

  ‘It is also a curse, I think you will find. For you, personally.’

  The leader of the Iwnw walked slowly towards Adam as he spoke.

  ‘We are of the opinion that such knowledge – the ability to perceive and harness such forces – should be used to shape the world of ordinary men and women. It should be used for political purposes. To build a certain kind of society. We prefer to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. We do not care much for America, or the world, under its present leadership. A polluted earth, heading for disaster. Endless squabbling. Power in the hands of the ignorant.’

  He walked right up to Adam now, standing slightly behind him. Adam could feel the intensity of his gaze, but he refused to turn his head to meet it.

  ‘What form would the Iwnw prefer the world to take?’

  ‘Obedient. Submissive. At the service of benevolent, strong rulers. People like ourselves. People like you.’

  ‘You can go to hell.’

  Suddenly iron hands twisted Adam’s body forward and slammed his head on to the table. His whole body exploded with pain. He heard words whispered into his ear: ‘Our moment has come. You will do our bidding. You know what will happen if you do not.’

  Adam struggled to free himself from the man’s grip. His head was slammed into the table again, and his field of vision filled with bursting stars.

  ‘Undo what you have done,’ Adam spat at them.

  ‘Your unborn child, and the mother. Help us, and they may yet live.’

  ‘How can I? What you ask is unforgivable!’

  ‘Oppose us, or attempt to trick us, and they will die. We require you to serve as our instrument.’

  Adam closed his eyes. He saw darkness hurtling in towards him from all sides. He took shelter deep in the place where his most precious intentions lay hidden. He drew as much strength as he could there. Then he spoke: ‘I will not sacrifice them. Spare them, and I will do your bidding.’

  He felt the hands loosen their grip slightly. At least he had bought some time.

  ‘Instruct me.’

  The man smiled. ‘Good. Well done. There is a man named Lawrence Hencott. We want you to pay him a visit. Tonight.’

  Little Falls, New Jersey, August 25, 2004

  Robert approached Katherine at bedtime, putting his hands on her shoulders and rubbing them as she sat reading. She was knotted tight. She gave a sound of enjoyment. He slid his fingers inside the neck of her blouse and worked the muscles harder. He whispered in her ear: ‘How about I take you upstairs and pay a visit to your room and iron out these kinks more fully?’

  It was his most direct invitation in several weeks.

  Her posture and skin tone changed. She said nothing, then, after a while: ‘Not tonight. Sorry. Not yet.’

  He kept on working her shoulders for a minute, then stopped.

  ‘I’m going to turn in,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to read for a while. I’ll look in on you.’

  ‘Aren’t you glad we heard from Adam, Kat?’

  ‘You don’t seem to be.’

  ‘It feels different.’

  ‘You seem almost… scared.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s the word.’

  ‘He’s been like a brother to you. Or a faintly insane cousin.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What’s eating you?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m going to read for a wh
ile too.’

  They had chosen the name Moss for the baby. He would have been born in late May, but they’d lost him at Christmas. He’d been their miraculous little Blackout baby, conceived the day the lights went out all across the northeastern United States. August 14, 2003. He’d been their first, an utter surprise, given Katherine’s age; and there would not be another. Adam’s late brother had borne the name, and Adam had explained once that it was a variant of Moses, the little boy set adrift in a basket on the waters. It had seemed fitting to them.

  Sometimes Robert would speak to Moss, great, long, whispered monologues that would make sense to no one. Tonight he just sat for a while in the room that would have been the boy’s, alone with his thoughts.

  When Robert got to bed and fell asleep, it seemed just a matter of seconds before the phone rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  He heard someone talking in the background, banging, breaking glass. Cursing.

  ‘Hello? Who is this?’

  He had no idea if he’d been asleep five minutes or five hours. Adam? Why would it be? He strained to hear the words. Then there was no need. Booming straight into the phone in pain-ridden shards, slurred and screaming, came a man’s voice: ‘You… fool! Going to… hurt you… bullet… you and everyone… in the ground… you… scavenger… die!’

  Robert cut the line, and immediately started wishing he’d shouted back. His heart thumped. He looked around the room, as though the caller had been in the house. He was breathing fast, feeling attacked. His hands were shaking.

  He hit ∗69) to call back, but got nothing. He got up to check the locks and look in on Katherine, who was fast asleep, then went back to bed and sat up in silence, trying to trace the voice in his memory.

  His rational mind said odds were it hadn’t even been intended for him: some sad-sack drunkard angry at the world, randomly dialling numbers and mouthing off. Despite his efforts to think, he drifted in and out of sleep. At one point he found himself staring straight ahead at patterns of light that dissipated before he could focus on them. He dozed.

  The phone rang again, jerking him awake. Male voice.

  ‘Robert Reckliss, wakey wakey! Are you ready to meet your maker?’

  For a moment he was back in the room at Trinity, the night they’d almost died.

  ‘Who…’

  ‘No more sleep for you. Can you hear that thunder? You have an appointment with death.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ he shouted down the phone. But the line was already dead.

  A bleary-eyed Katherine appeared in the doorway. ‘What the hell is the matter with you? Who are you talking to in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Some drunk.’

  He abandoned any thought of sleep. It was nearly 5 a.m. on Thursday, August 26, the first day of his destruction.

  New Jersey/New York, August 26, 2004

  It rained on the way into work. The drumming of the rain on the car roof was hypnotic, a steady fine beat.

  Katherine and he were in Little Falls, New Jersey, just outside New York through the Lincoln Tunnel. Driving in New Jersey was not for those of a nervous disposition, especially if the roads were slick. Despite three coffees, he was barely awake, and every couple of miles he lowered the window a crack to get some air, even though it sprayed rain into the car.

  Each time he went under a bridge or overpass the bass drone of the rain would stop for a second, and start again almost before he’d noticed it was absent. Like those moments at parties when everyone falls silent at the same time: an angel passes, they say. Bridge, window. Bridge, window, punctuating the rain and the drone of the tyres.

  There was other help too in staying awake: boy-racers and the infirm of mind hurtled by, snaking and weaving their way along the straight dark strip of Route 3.

  From time to time in the distance the silhouette of Manhattan and its absent sentinels would appear on the horizon in shades of grey.

  The crank calls and Adam’s plea for help chased each other around in his mind. He tried to ignore them.

  The commute was usually his time to work through permutations of and possible solutions to work problems – as if he were tackling a puzzle cube or those games where you move fifteen squares and an empty space around in a frame and try to get them into a certain order. He’d envisage staffing or resource problems as a series of coloured spaces or balls, or letters in an alphabet, and move them around until a meaningful combination came up that he could leaven with a little bribery, or flattery, or threats, to make it work for the operation as a whole. The inside of his head looked like a Mondrian painting.

  He’d been in the news business for nearly twenty years, never really as a hard-charging correspondent in exotic climes like Adam; more of a safety-first company man, the kind who makes sure all the dull, necessary stuff gets done. More of a plumber than a poet, perhaps; more of a family man than a lover. You might say he was a responsible adult, always had been, ever since school days. He’d been raised never to let imagination get the better of him.

  That’s not to say he hadn’t had his moments. He was sturdy. He was the unflappable man you need in the middle of a crisis. It was Robert who had commanded the news troops in New York on September 11, when the towers came down. He’d held things together during market crashes, hurricanes, assassinations, currency collapses.

  Unlike Adam, though, he’d never actually caused any of those things.

  A cherry-red sports car rocketed past him on the right and cut in front, quivered for five seconds and shot off into a tiny gap in the traffic to his left.

  The Republican National Convention was just days away. There was the usual fine-tuning and last-minute problem-solving to be grappled with. He liked that. He liked process. He liked things to run like a well-oiled machine.

  GBN was on seven floors of the former RCA Victor Building at 51st and Lexington, through some grand-fathered arrangement from the 1950s he’d never fully grasped. It was insanely Art Deco, gorgeous to walk into. Its designs had been seeping into his dreams in recent days: living lightning bolts, stylized radio waves, glorious patterns on the inside of his eyelids.

  The previous night when he’d woken up, still half dreaming between the two crank calls, he’d seen a blue-white lightning bolt standing there right before him in the dark, as though frozen, and watched it slowly fade as he fully woke up.

  On the great curve down to the Lincoln Tunnel mouth, in the purple E-Z Pass lane, he looked ahead and tried to gauge the level of police activity. He couldn’t describe exactly why, but it seemed higher than usual. Sooner or later someone would try to hit New York again. It was only a matter of time. That was why he had gone along with Katherine’s desire to live outside Manhattan when they’d learned she was pregnant. They’d found a modest manse in Little Falls, a pleasant leafy town. Their house with too many rooms.

  At the tunnel, a couple of trucks were being inspected. The number of cops was the same as usual, the regular black-and-yellow-striped radiation detectors were there, but there seemed to be an informed alertness about everyone’s faces, a sense that there was more worrying and more surveillance going on than was immediately visible. With the Convention coming, it was hardly surprising.

  It was not yet 7 a.m., and the Lincoln Tunnel’s lighting towers, hollowed-out obelisks with spiral staircases running up through their core, were still on, illuminating the late-summer drizzle.

  He thought of something sexual as he entered the tunnel mouth, and the next thing he knew he was at work.

  You never see the one that gets you. The Blackout and the attacks of 9/11 (and Katherine and Moss, for that matter) weren’t the only things that could come out of a clear blue sky. The tedious meetings he’d worried about on the drive in were blown away by a call he received as soon as he sat down at his desk.

  ‘Robert?’

  ‘John.’

  John was his new boss. He was in Washington, DC, a city he inexplicably preferred to New York.

  ‘Explain, if you c
an, this ghastly mess?’

  Robert did not think it wise to ask which ghastly mess. He made a non-committal sound.

  ‘This Hencott business. Ghastly. Mess.’

  ‘Did something happen on Hencott that I don’t know about?’

  ‘Depends whether their lawyers have reached you yet.’

  His heart sank. Lawyers were lawyers.

  ‘They can fuck off.’

  ‘Well, not entirely, it seems. Clearly you don’t know. The CEO shot himself two hours ago.’

  Hencott, Inc., was a medium-sized, privately held industrial firm with chemical and mining interests. One of GBN’s business reporters, thanks to Robert, had managed to interview the CEO, an intense man of military background by the name of Lawrence Hencott, who in the ordinary run of things would have cut off his right arm rather than talk to the press.

  Lawrence had a brother, Horace, who was an entirely different kind of character, a shiny-eyed architecture enthusiast and sometime academic Robert had met on a walking tour of downtown Manhattan. Horace, an Anglophile, looked to be in his sixties but reminded Robert of a schoolboy. He wore a bowtie at all times. They hit it off, sharing an enthusiasm for New York history. Robert was the unschooled partner in their conversations.

  Robert had met Lawrence at a party thrown by Horace to mark the publication of a slim volume he’d written on Egyptian Revival architecture. Several months later, having seen Horace a few more times, it occurred to Robert to ask whether his brother would talk to GBN. Not that he’d pursued Horace for that purpose, but why not ask, he figured. He could only say no.

  Months had passed without a response. Then, on Wednesday, Lawrence had called to say he would do it, if Robert could send a reporter to him within two hours. In the interview Lawrence had said something market-moving about closing down several of their old, exhausted mines and some associated researchand development facilities on the sites. The reporter wrote the story, the price of gold went up a tad on it: it was a nice little scoop for them over Bloomberg and Reuters and Dow Jones.