The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(52)

“The mystic circuitry,” he said. “They’ll inlay glyphs over every surface of the interior. The way de Rais conceived it, the hecatomb—the mass sacrifice—takes place at the bottom of the tower. The energy of the dead spills upward, caught in the net, amplified, and spun into a maelstrom of raw power.”

He leaned in and tapped the screen. His fingernail rested on the Enclave’s top floor.

“Here,” he said, “at the very top, a golden throne at the heart of the pattern, the eye in a psychic storm. Timed perfectly, the user would merge himself with the Garden at the moment the surge hit.”

“And would that work?” I asked him. “Is this just some fifteenth-century psycho’s pipe dream, or does she actually have a chance of pulling it off?”

He stared at the picture on the screen. His lips moved wordlessly, as if laboring over a hard math problem.

“Doctor,” I said.

He turned slowly to face me. “If Nedry and Clark solved the attunement problem, and if this Lauren Carmichael is a good enough magician to work out the holes in de Rais’s design—”

“Do Nedry and Clark have a copy of his journal?” I said.

He nodded. “Yes, why—”

“Then that means Lauren has it now, and yeah, she’s good enough.”

“The end result of the ritual,” he said, “would make her the portal. A living bridge between worlds, with total mastery of the Garden’s energies.”

“She’d become a goddess,” I said, the horror of Lauren’s plot unfurling before me. I remembered what Tony Vance had told me just before I kicked him to his death. The things we’ve done, Faust. Christ, the things we’re GOING to do. If you knew the entire plan, the scope of it, you’d never sleep again.

“Theological quibbles aside,” Bob said, his face pale, “yes. She could spread the Garden with a wave of her hand, lay waste to the Earth and remake it however she pleased. I—I have to help, to stop her. Let me help.”

I stood up sharply and pushed my chair back.

“You’ve done enough,” I said.

Bob followed me to the cabin door, right on my heels.

“Please,” he said, tears brimming in his eyes. “I never meant for any of this to happen. I just wanted to help people, to make the world a better place.”

He put his hand on my arm. I bared my teeth, yanked my arm away, turned, and gave him a hard shove. Bob staggered back, slipped off his feet, and landed on the vinyl sofa. He grabbed at the slick fabric, trying not to hit the cabin floor.

“The only reason I’m not turning your make-believe funeral into a real one,” I said, “is because you’ve got a job to do. The smoke-faced men. Get them under control. If you don’t, and if I so much as think they’re pulling another stunt, I’ll take care of them myself. Then I’ll be back here to put a bullet in your head.”

He slumped over, face buried in his hands. His shoulders started to shake. I let myself out.

A brisk walk and the cool night air helped clear my head, but it didn’t do much for the rage boiling in my gut. Lauren Carmichael, the lab rats at Ausar, Gilles de Rais—working alone, none of them could have succeeded. It took a perfect storm to bring that much greed and madness together, and now that storm was aimed straight for my city.

Then the entire world.

? ? ?

I drove straight back to Oakland International, but there weren’t any flights home until morning, so I crashed on a row of hard plastic seats at an empty boarding gate. I slipped in and out of an uneasy sleep, lulled by the throbbing hum of a floor waxer.

A little after six in the morning, I went to the men’s room and splashed cold water on my face. Then I stopped at the McDonald’s kiosk, dug in my pocket for a few rumpled bills, and bought a greasy egg and muffin sandwich. By the time I shook off the last dregs of sleep and tossed away the crumpled wrapper, I’d come up with an idea.

I called Harmony Black and got her voicemail. “It’s me,” I said. “Call me back.”

Fifteen minutes later, my phone buzzed against my hip.

“I know where the other missing people are,” I told her. “They’re being held hostage at the Enclave construction site. It’s the only place that makes sense.”

“What? That’s ridiculous. Why would Lauren risk being connected to a kidnapping scheme by stashing these people in her own hotel?”

Because it’s not really a hotel, I thought. And because that’s where she’s going to kill them. I didn’t say it, though. The feds didn’t need to know that much. Especially not this particular fed.

“If I can verify it,” I said, “can you do what you did at the New Life shelter? Round up a posse and kick some doors in?”

I heard her sigh on the other end of the line.

“We had this little thing called ‘evidence’ at New Life. A business card and a sandwich laced with drugs bought me a search warrant. What do we have on Lauren Carmichael?”

“You know what she is—”

“Provable, Faust. I need something in my hand that I can take to a judge. Without that, I can’t touch Carmichael or set foot on her company’s property. Get me evidence that something dirty’s going down at the Enclave. Real evidence, legally obtained, that’ll stand up in court. Until then, we don’t have anything to talk about.”