Security(63)

The Thinker does what I would do—stops at the first long stretch his turns take him to, raises his gun, and fires a volley straight across. The bullets whiz through the hedges. A rose explodes above Tessa’s head. She grabs Brian’s arm and takes him behind the fountain. That’s our girl.

The sirens blare around the turn to Manderley’s driveway, obscuring the buzz of another clip, fired lower. A rose explodes where Brian and Tessa were hiding thirty seconds ago. Chips of the fountain they crouch behind whir off as if the granite were sneezing.

The police are speeding into the final stretch of driveway. The lead car swerves and sprays gravel at the dead cop. I can hear barks of “Officer down!” even through their sealed windows. A few cops get out and try to revive him, despite his brains oozing onto their hands.

Brian’s kissing Tessa behind the fountain. He indicates she should stay here. He rises. She seizes his shirtfront and yanks him down. Brian kisses her again. It’s gentle, tender, profound, and complete. He’s kissing her good--bye. Hypocrite. We live or we die. That doesn’t work if you die for her. That’s not how this ends. She loves you, and I love her, so therefore—no, forget it, I can’t love you by association. I still pretty much hate you, actually. But hey, so what.

I bite down hard. I feel the pencil tip puncture my soft palate.

The Thinker looks around at a mechanical hum. It’s coming from the greenery. He peers into a hedge as the sprinkler I’ve set to its top level of water pressure shoots him full in his masked face. My maniacal laugh fills the twentieth floor. It’s conclusively as loud as the Thinker’s girlish, high--pitched cry of offense.

Which makes Brian and Tessa look up. He’s here; he’s right here. Stay away from right here. I select the arc light nearest to where the Thinker is standing. I’m prompted with a dropdown menu, and I drag the pencil eraser to “Switch On.” The Thinker turns away—the sudden burst of light hurts his eyes—and hope hits me like excellent liquor.

I select sprinklers all around him. The second and third and fourth jets of sprinkler water make the Thinker spin in a circle. He looks up at the twentieth floor. He looks around for cameras. Good luck, dunderhead. Sid practically made sweet love to these hedges twice a week for months, and he never found one of them. The Thinker steps toward a pathway three turns from the maze’s center, and I douse him repeatedly, discouraging his route, while I keep a close eye on the police’s progress (there isn’t much; exactly one lieutenant is behaving with capable organization—“This will be a tactical assault, so, Johnson, stop throwing up”) and on Brian and Tessa.

Tessa is looking up. She swallows with effort. “He’s alive,” she says in a whisper. I want to close my eyes and savor the relief in her words. But I can’t. The Thinker is taking another route—a bad one, one that dead--ends. I leave off the sprinklers and render live every camera in every corner of the maze—twenty--six of them, 1A through 1Z. The wall of monitors in front of me wipes clean of Manderley’s bright corridors and becomes a tapestry of night vision. Only motion inside the hotel will reactivate interior surveillance. So the twentieth floor’s camera remains live, showing that sad rag doll in a dark suit, flopping his neck on the counter like a dying fish.

“He’s alive, Bri.”

“Who?”

Tessa points. Brian stares up at the twentieth floor. I authorize a manual angle change on Camera 1, because they’re looking right at it. I make the red power light blink by turning the camera off, then back on, then off, on. Sweat stings my eyes. My nose is running, and I’ve drooled an ochre puddle onto the counter.

“Jesus,” Tessa says at the camera.

I turn it left, toward a curve in the maze. Turn the camera straight. Turn it left. Brian and Tessa stare, understandably ignorant that I have to move my neck in order to make the eraser manipulate Camera 1’s mounting mechanism, and that I could at any second sever my last tenuous connections to brain function, but a grunt of frustration escapes me anyway. Seriously. Left.

Brian and Tessa exchange wide eyes, frightened touches, and finally, dejected shrugs that denote a resignation to having no better choice than to trust me. Which hurts my feelings, but that’s nothing new. Brian puts Tessa behind him, and they mince—left—around the corner.

It’s delicate work, guiding them. Brian and Tessa know to be quiet, but so does the Thinker. Luckily, the police don’t. Their stampede--like preparations to enter the foyer (They rack shotguns, heft battering rams out of cases, say things like, “You’re f*ckin’ with the LAPD this time, bitch.”) amply cover the shuffle of Tessa’s bare feet and Brian’s thick boots on the grass in the maze. They follow the cameras’ pinpoint red lights, pivoting with my aching neck. The hedges loom around them like the fuzzy green backbone of a docile monster. The cameras make a whirring sound on their stands, so I regularly pelt the Thinker with jets of cold water, to distract him. After a particularly direct hit to his nose and mouth, he has to stand and cough for several seconds.

Brian hears the coughs; he perks. Tessa focuses on Brian and ignores my next instruction, which is another right. They begin discussing an idea so awful, it’s almost impressive. Tessa’s communicating via hand signals that she should be the bait, and Brian is refusing this idea adamantly. Tessa is gesturing to her limp arm, and then, without further discussion and without giving me time to prepare, she runs.