Bad Monkeys (17 page)

“Jane Doe? Yeah, that’s not suspicious.”

“Don’t worry about it. When we get inside, I’ll be doing the talking. You just nod your head and keep your eyes peeled for Carlton.” He opened the glove compartment and brought out my NC gun. “One more thing, we’d like to get him alive if we can.”

“No problem.” I set the gun’s dial to NS, narcoleptic seizure.

Coming in the building we got hit with a blast of arctic air, like the company wanted to let us know right away it could deliver. We went to the reception desk, where a woman in four layers of wool printed us badges and told us a Dr. Ogilvy would be right with us.

Ogilvy reminded me of Ganesh. There wasn’t much of a physical resemblance—except that he was small, and looked like he’d be easy to beat up—but he had a nervousness about him, and also a sadness, like this wasn’t the career he’d planned on having. Once he’d introduced himself and got his game face on, though, he was pretty peppy. “Well, Mr. and Mrs. Doe, thank you so much for coming out here today! Let’s go back to my office and talk about what Ozymandias can do for you!”

Ogilvy’s office had a big bay window that looked out on an acre of fruit trees and flower bushes. The greenbelt was shot through with rainbows from an automated sprinkler system, and if I’d had a tab of acid I could have stared at it all day. But Ogilvy didn’t offer us any drugs, just comfy chairs and tea. Then he got down to business: “I understand you’re interested in purchasing one of our life-extension plans.”

I must have looked like I was going to make a crack, because Wise laid a hand on my arm before answering, “Yes.”

“And will this be for both of you, or…?”

“Neither,” Wise said.

“Neither.” Ogilvy’s eyebrows went up and down a few times. “Is it a gift, then? We do have gift packages, it’s actually fairly common, or well, not
common,
but…For the friend who has everything, or a valued employee about to retire…”

“It’s for our son.”

“Oh! Oh, I see. Your son…?”

“Philip.”

“I see. And how old is Philip?”

“He’s ten.”

“And is he…ill?”

“He was in an accident. He was playing outside, and his sister was supposed to be watching him, but…Well, you know how kids are. She got distracted.”

“Oh, how terrible.”

“It’s not her fault, really. She should never have been given that responsibility. If anyone’s to blame, it’s my wife and I.”

“Oh no,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “No, don’t think that way! These things, you know, they just happen sometimes.”

“Anyway, Phil’s in the hospital now, in intensive care, and we’re praying that he’ll pull through, but if he doesn’t…We want to be ready.”

“Of course. Of course.”

“So what we’d like,” Wise concluded, “is to have a look around your facility, here, and maybe meet some of your people…”

“Of course! I’d be happy to give you a tour right now! Let’s—” The phone rang, and Dr. Ogilvy started. “Oh dear! I’m sorry…” Peering closer at the blinking light that accompanied the ringing: “Hmm, line three, I’m sorry, you know I really should take this…Would you mind if—”

“It’s fine,” I said, getting up. “We’ll wait for you outside.”

I practically dragged Wise from the room. As soon as we were out the door, I lit into him: “What the hell was that about?”

“What was what about?”

“Our son
Phil
? Who had an
accident
? While his
sister
was watching him?”

Wise was blank-faced. “I have no idea what’s eating you. Everything I said in there was part of a script. I’m just following it.”

“What script?”

“The one Cost-Benefits gave me for this op. You think I make this stuff up as I go along?”

“Who in Cost-Benefits—”

“All right then!” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Are we ready for the tour?”

We headed down the hall towards our first stop, with
me still staring daggers at Wise. Meanwhile Ogilvy, either because he’d picked up on the tension or because it was part of his standard sales pitch, launched into a rambling explanation of the company name: “It’s from the poem by Percy Shelley.”

“Ozymandias, King of Kings,” said Wise. “‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’”

“Yes! That’s the one. And of course, ‘my works,’ that’s meant to be ironic, since as the poem goes on to say, there’s actually nothing left of those works, other than the inscription that brags about them. Which, given what we do here, may seem like a strange allusion to be making. But you see, there’s actually a double irony, because it turns out Shelley picked on the wrong king. At the time he was writing, 1817, I believe, Egyptology hadn’t gotten off the ground yet, so one pharaoh was as obscure as any other. Today, though, thanks to science, things are very different. Ozymandias—aka Ramses the Great—is not only one of the most famous rulers in history, but we know, contrary to what Shelley wrote, that a lot of his works
did
survive.”

“So what’s the point?” I interrupted, not wanting to fall asleep before I had a chance to finish grilling Wise. “Don’t speak too soon?”

“Exactly!” said Dr. Ogilvy. “
Exactly.
Don’t speak too soon! And we believe a similar caution applies to what we’re doing here. Our industry, Mrs. Doe, perhaps I don’t have to tell you this, but it has its share of skeptics. Some people, I won’t call them ignorant, but some…
uninformed
people, think cryogenics is, well—”

“A load of crap?”

“—a fantasy. An optimist’s pipe dream…But the same thing has been said about a lot of scientific advances.”

“Like organ transplants,” I said. “Or cloning.”

“Yes! Yes! You
do
understand. What one generation mocks, the next takes for granted. And I promise you,

Mrs. Doe—we’ll pray for your son, of course we will, and we’ll hope for the best—but even if the worst happens, he won’t be lost forever. I guarantee, we
will
bring Phil back…And here we are!”

We’d come to a security door marked
CRYOSTASIS A
. Ogilvy swiped a keycard through a reader on the wall and the door slid open, hitting us with another blast of cold air.

I stepped inside, expecting a morgue-type setup, bodies filed away in lockers along the wall. Instead, Ozymandias’ clients were arranged on freestanding racks, encased in tall metal cylinders like giant thermoses—what Dr. Ogilvy called “cryopods.” There were six pods to a rack. They hung upright, but could swivel to a horizontal position for loading and unloading. At the far end of the room, a team of moon-suit guys—probably the same ones we’d seen on the helicopter pad—had just cranked a pod into the loading position; white vapor boiled out of it as they removed the end cap.

One series of racks held smaller containers, each about a third the size of a normal cryopod. I said: “Please tell me those aren’t babies.”

“Oh no,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Children are kept in Cryostasis B. This is an adults-only chamber. Those are heads. The, uh, budget option,” he explained, wincing a little. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, you understand—once we have the means to reanimate a dead body, growing an entirely new one shouldn’t be much harder. Personally, though, I’d rather not present a revival team with any
unnecessary
challenges.”

Cryostasis B was almost identical to Cryostasis A, except that the racks were spaced farther apart to make room for padded benches. “For visitors,” Dr. Ogilvy explained. “Friends and loved ones of our adult clients are welcome to visit at any time as well, but for reasons I’m sure you can appreciate, visits here in the nursery are much more common. Incidentally, purchase of a
Platinum Lazarus or higher-premium plan entitles you to unlimited shuttle service to and from McCarran Airport…”

Figuring it might blow our cover if I slugged him, I stepped away while Ogilvy continued his pitch. I went over to the nearest rack and pretended to examine one of the pods.

A clanging noise caught my attention. I leaned sideways and looked around the rack to where a maintenance hatch had just opened in the floor. Another moon-suit guy climbed up out of it. As he turned to drop the hatch cover back in place, I saw his face.

Jacob Carlton.

“Mrs. Doe?” Dr. Ogilvy said. “I was just telling your husband something that I think you—”

“Be with you in a minute!” I drew my NC gun and stepped quickly around the rack, but Carlton had vanished.

“Jane?” said Wise. “What is it?”

A loud
boom!
from beneath the floor shook the pods in their racks. The lights flickered, and the steady hum of air-conditioning and refrigeration units gave way to a sick stutter.

“It’s you-know-who!” I called to Wise. “I think he just sabotaged the electricity!”

“What?” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Oh no, sabotage is impossible here, we have
excellent
security! And the power system has
two
backup generators.”

On cue, a second explosion rocked the building. An alarm sounded.

“Oh dear,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Perhaps we’d better—urk!”

“Wise?” Gun at the ready, I stepped back around the rack and saw the doctor lying facedown on the floor. Wise, who’d dived for cover behind a batch of frozen heads, mouthed the words
Over there
and pointed.

I made my way from rack to rack towards Carlton’s
hiding place. I was nearly there when a third explosion knocked out the last of the power. In the seconds of pitch-blackness that followed, I heard running footsteps.

Battery-operated safety lights came on. I ducked past the last rack in time to see an emergency-exit door swinging closed. I shouted to Wise, “I’m going after him,” but when I reached the door I paused to look back. The room was already noticeably warmer, and wisps of vapor were curling off the cryopods.

I went through the door. A twisting corridor led me back out to the main hallway, where I found two more bodies on the ground, another doctor and a security guard. The guard had gone down swinging, a nightstick still clutched tightly in his fist. Right next to him on the floor, nearly invisible in the amber glow of the safety lights, was an orange pistol.

I tucked Carlton’s NC gun in my waistband and followed the signs to the nearest exit. Carlton was stuck there, his final escape from the building blocked by a set of automatic doors that were no longer automatic. You’re supposed to be able to slide those things open manually, but it helps to have both hands, and Carlton’s right arm hung limp, a casualty of the guard’s nightstick. Now he’d pulled out a club of his own—a monkey wrench—and was using it to bash out the door glass. I snuck up behind him and waited until he’d removed enough of the glass to give me a clear field of fire. Then I put him to sleep.

A hot desert wind blew in through the shattered door. Looking out, I realized that the power failure had killed the garden’s sprinkler system, so the plants were doomed, too. But it wasn’t the fruit trees I was worried about.

“We blew it, didn’t we?” I said, as Wise came up behind me. “They’re all going to thaw out.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in the resurrection.”

Wise crouched down, pulled the hood off Carlton’s moon suit, and laid a pair of fingers on Carlton’s jugular. “God damn it! I told you we wanted him alive!”

“He is alive. He’s just sleeping.”

“Yeah, sleeping like those corpsicles back there.”

“No…I had it on stun, see?” I turned the gun to show him, but the dial was on the MI setting. “Oh shit…”

“Oh shit what?”

“This must be his gun. I picked it up back there, and…Christ, I must have confused it with mine.”

“Good job.”

“Look, I’m sorry. It was an accident.”

“Yeah, you’re prone to those, aren’t you?” He stood up. “All right, let’s get out of here.”

“What about him?”

“Leave him. He’s useless to us now.”

“And what about…?” I gestured in the direction of the cryostasis rooms.

“Nothing we can do.”

“The organization doesn’t have some kind of crack repair team that could get the power back online? What about the Good Samaritans, isn’t this right up their alley?”

“Nothing we can do,” Wise repeated. “Now come on.” He stepped through the door into the dying garden. “We can’t stay here.”

“ARE YOU READY TO TALK ABOUT
what happened to Phil?” the doctor asks.

Yet another evidence folder lies open on the table, turned so she can read the top page of the police report inside. But she refuses to look at it. She hunches back in her chair, keeping her eyes downcast, fixed on the cuffed hands in her lap.

“Jane,” the doctor prompts her.

“It’s a free country,” she finally says. “You talk about whatever you like.”

“All right…Let’s start with what
didn’t
happen. Your brother wasn’t swept up in some comical marijuana raid. And despite what you seemed to be suggesting in our last session—”

“I didn’t
suggest
anything.”

“—he wasn’t in an accident. Your mother thought
you
had done something to him—that’s what she told the 911 operator when she first reported him missing, and it’s why she attacked you in the police station. But she was wrong, too. According to witnesses, your brother left the community garden in the company of a man whose description matched that of a recently paroled felon, a convicted child molester and suspected child murderer named John Doyle.

“A child molester,” the doctor says. “But I doubt the police would use that expression in front of a fourteen-year-old girl, particularly one who was wracked with guilt. They’d probably just refer to him as a bad man…or a bad monkey.”

She still won’t look up, but her lips curl in a bitter smile. “Theory number 257,” she says. “Jane’s psychotic break begins with euphemism.”

“Well you tell me, Jane: is it just a coincidence that all your missions for the organization somehow involve threats to children or young men?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Something else I found interesting…” He lays a hand on the folder. “The reporting officer: Buster Keaton Friendly. That really was his name…But you’ve been lying about yours, haven’t you? Or at least, not telling the whole truth. Charlotte is your middle name. Your
full
name is Jane Charlotte—”

“Don’t,” she says, at last raising her eyes to meet his. “Just don’t. That’s
not
my name. She made that very clear.”

“She?”

“My mother. Last thing she told me before she sent me packing, I wasn’t ever to use that name again. Which was ridiculous, since it wasn’t her name either, it was my goddamned father’s, and she hated him almost as much as she hated me…But that didn’t matter, she said. What mattered was it was Phil’s name, so it couldn’t be mine. She said she’d kill me if she ever caught me using it: ‘I’ll choke the life out of you,’ quote unquote. So no, I wasn’t lying.”

“OK. But the story you first told me about your brother and the marijuana patch. You do acknowledge now that that was false.”

Sighing: “Yeah, I acknowledge it.”

“And the other encounters with your brother over
the years—his visits with you in Siesta Corta, and your relationship once you’d returned to San Francisco—”

“That stuff was all true.”

“Jane…”

“I mean, OK, he wasn’t really there, but the conversations we had, the advice he gave me…Look, I
knew
Phil. I might not have liked the little shit, but I knew him, he was my brother, and I know what kind of person he’d have grown up to be, if…So those conversations I told you about, they were genuine. They were
accurate
.”

“But he wasn’t really there.”

“Yeah, all right, no.”

“Because he’s dead.”

“No!” She bristles. “That’s
not
true.”

“Jane…”

“Even the police could never say that. They never found a body. They never found
anything,
and Doyle—”

“Jane, the man was implicated in the killing of two other children. I’m sure you want to believe your brother survived, but—”

“No! I mean, yes, I wanted to believe that, and for years belief was all I had, but now, now I
know.
Phil’s alive.”

“How do you know that?”

“For Christ’s sake,” she says, “what do you think this whole story I’ve been telling you is about?”

“You found your brother?”

“Yes.”

“In Las Vegas.”

“Yes…Only I didn’t find him, exactly, I mean I haven’t
seen
him, but I know he’s here. And I know what really happened to him.”

“And what did happen to him?”

“Well, Doyle took him. That part’s true. And it’s probably also true that Doyle
wanted
to kill Phil, the
same way he killed those other kids. But he wasn’t allowed to.”

“Who stopped him?”

“The other bad monkeys, of course.”

“The
other
bad monkeys.”

“The ones who put him up to it,” she says. “The anti-organization. The Troop.”