Security(42)

“I’m going to take care of you,” Brian says. “I’m going to take care of you, Tess.” He is holding her ankles, massaging her ankles. He says, “I’m going to take care of you,” in syncopation with a steady, slow rhythm. Tessa’s knees are in her armpits. It looks uncomfortable. She doesn’t—but does but doesn’t—sound uncomfortable. “I’ll take care of you now, I promise.”

The secret elevator arrives at the twentieth floor. The Thinker exits. He presses his controller, and the wall closes behind him, blocking the meaty stink of Vivica. The Thinker puts his controller on the floor, beside his playing cards and his phone, and paces. He looks cursorily at the security team members scattered across the space. The twentieth floor has no exit other than the secret elevator. In the event of a bomb threat or accidental fire or any scenario wherein the lower floors would require evacuation, the security team would coordinate the evacuation from the twentieth floor, handling their own exodus last. This procedure was outlined to each security team member during the hiring process. The entire security team is composed of former Navy SEALs. It is extraordinarily difficult to kill a Navy SEAL. One must, it could be claimed, be a Navy SEAL to kill a Navy SEAL. One must be a Navy SEAL with a very smart accomplice in order to neutralize a former Navy SEAL and former Rhodes Scholar and his entire night--shift security team.

The Killer is very, very angry with Delores. But Delores is dead. There is nothing the Killer can do to her now, except inflict postmortem injuries. The Killer sounds like a deep--voiced child throwing a tantrum. But instead of beating a floor, or hitting a pillow, he uses his knife on Delores. Instead of pitching toys in every direction, he pitches Delores’s hand, then her other hand, then one foot, and then the other.

“You’re safe with me,” Brian says. Tessa’s quickening. Tessa’s probably blushing. It’s impossible to tell when the image is green, white, and black. “You can come,” Brian says. “It’s okay. You’re safe. Come for me.” The secret to making her come is to tell her to. Apparently.





A rich man builds a hotel by the sea. He names it after the setting in a classic horror novel. He does this because Destin, Sr., used to read novels into a cassette recorder and leave the tapes for his son when he went away on business. Destin, Sr., stopped this practice when Charles turned eight, but Charles Destin continued listening to the final recording—hearing his father intone, “Manderley, Manderley, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ ”—until the cassette wore out, years after the death of Destin, Sr., by a household bomb in a third world hotel. Charles Destin, damaged from the loss of his father as well as from a lifetime of having whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it, confided these details in therapy. Therapy is supposed to be confidential, but I bribed Destin’s psychiatrist. One should never take it for granted that the man one is ostensibly protecting isn’t the man from whom others need protection. I can picture Destin in any of his twenty pairs of lambskin slippers, lounging in his den and conceiving some cosmic comeuppance for his father by butchering the innocents in Manderley. Or perhaps it’s much more rationally capitalist. Perhaps Destin thought, after too much fine wine one evening, that it would build immeasurable cachet if his hotel were to, shortly before its grand opening, suffer a tragedy in the tradition of cliché horror.

“Holy—,” Tessa says, and laughs like a purring cat. “I’m keeping you.” Brian has slowed but has not ceased moving. He hasn’t come yet. He’s a freak. Tessa is rolling them over. “Bri, do me a favor?” He blinks up at her, through what must be an ego--annihilating focus. “Be selfish.” He nods. Tessa never gets on top. Tessa is working extraordinarily hard, and the key to making her come again is—evidently—to make her work hard, and to ogle the gyrations of her breasts, and to touch them and then her thighs and to beg, to beg, “Faster, yes, Tess, Christ, faster,” and to continue one’s shouts in the affirmative so that even as she comes, she keeps moving, selflessly, for you.

Or, another rich man envies the rich man his hotel by the sea. His primacy in the property management industry has suffered as a direct result of Destin’s ascendancy. Cameron Donofrio finds the hotel’s grandeur kitschy and overdone. He drinks too much fine wine one evening, and decides that not only is there a way the hotel could be branded a failure before it ever opened, but there is a way this could be accomplished artistically. Theatrically. He hires the theatrically minded hotel manager to commit acts of minor sabotage, and separately hires a pair of assassins to brutally murder the entire staff in one endless summer night.

The Killer—the Killer is throwing organs out of Delores as if she were a toy box, and—

Or, a terrorist cell committed to the unraveling of global security sets out to demonstrate its prowess by undermining the claim that a particular hotel is invulnerable to outside penetration. It chooses a hyperviolent modus operandi to instill fear in the populace.

No. Terrorists operate in volume. They fight systems and so purport systemic slaughter, but almost always on a large scale. And they need the message to be clear, lest their agenda get lost in the ghastliness.

Or, any number of international enemies of the head of security decide to exact revenge by destroying his reputation with a concentrated, localized attack on the hotel that he has been tasked with making impregnable.