Douglas Preston - White Fire

He led the way down the corridor. The house was as strangely laid out as it was ugly. It seemed to be made up of a single endless hallway, which veered at an angle now and then to conform with the topography. All the important rooms were on the left, facing the ravine. Everything else — the bathrooms, closets, utility rooms — was on the right, like carbuncles on a limb. From what she could tell, the second floor featured a similar layout.

“What’s in here?” she asked, stopping before a partially open door on the right. There were no overhead lights on inside, but the room was nevertheless lit up with a ghostly gleam from dozens of points of green, red, and amber.

Fine stopped again. “That’s the tech space. You might as well see it, too.”

He opened the door wide and snapped on the light. Corrie looked around at a dizzying array of panels, screens, and instrumentation.

“This is a ‘smart’ house, of course,” Fine said. “Everything’s automated, and you can monitor it all from here: the generator status, the power grid, the security layout, the surveillance system. Cost a fortune, but it ultimately saved me a lot in insurance charges. And it’s all networked and Internet-accessible, too. I can run the whole system from my computers in New York.”

So that’s what he meant by keeping an eye on me , Corrie thought. “How does the surveillance system work?”

Fine pointed to a large flat panel, with a small all-in-one computer to one side and a device below that looked like a DVD player on steroids. “There are a total of twenty-four cameras.” He pressed a button and the flat panel sprang to life, showing a picture of the living room. There was a number in the upper left-hand corner of the image, and time and date stamps running along the bottom. “These twenty-four buttons, here, are each dedicated to one of the cameras.” He pressed the button marked DRIVEWAY and the image changed, showing a picture of, what else, the driveway, with her Rent-a-Junker front and center.

“Can you manipulate the cameras?” Corrie asked.

“No. But any motion picked up by the sensors activates the camera and is recorded on a hard disk. There — take a look.” Fine pointed to the screen, where a deer was now passing across the driveway. As it moved, it became surrounded by a small cloud of black squares — almost like the framing windows of a digital camera — that followed the animal. At the same time, a large red M inside a circle appeared on the screen.

“ M for ‘movement,’” Fine said.

The deer had moved off the screen, but the red letter remained. “Why is the M still showing?” Corrie asked.

“Because when one of the cameras detects movement, a recording of that video feed is saved to the hard disk, starting a minute before movement begins and continuing one minute past when it stops. Then — if there’s no more movement — the M goes away.”

Movement . “And you can monitor all this over the Internet?” Corrie asked. She didn’t like the idea of being the subject of a long-distance voyeur.

“No. That part of the smart system was never connected to the Internet. We stopped the work on the security system when we decided to sell the house. Let the new owner pick up the cost. But it works just fine from in here.” Fine pointed to another button. “You can also split the screen by repeatedly pressing this button.” For the first time, Fine seemed engaged. He demonstrated, and the image split in two: the left half of the monitor showing the original image of the driveway, with the right showing a view looking over the ravine. Repeated pressings of the button split the screen into four, then nine, then sixteen increasingly smaller images, each from a different camera.

Corrie’s curiosity was quickly waning. “And how do I operate the security alarm?” she asked.

“That was never installed, either. That’s why I need someone to keep an eye on the place.”

He snapped off the light and led the way out of the room, down the hallway, and through a door at its end. Suddenly the house became different. Gone was the expensive artwork, the ultramodern furniture, the gleaming professional-grade appliances. Ahead lay a short, narrow hall with two doors on each side, ending in another door leading into a small bathroom with cheap fixtures. The floor was of linoleum, and the pasteboard walls were devoid of pictures. All the surfaces were painted dead white.

“The maid’s quarters,” Fine said proudly. “Where you’ll be staying.”

Corrie stepped forward, peering into the open doors. The two on the left opened into bedrooms of almost monastic size and asceticism. One of the doors on the right led into a kitchen with a dorm-style refrigerator and a cheap stove; the other room appeared to be a minuscule den. It was barely a cut above her motel room in Basalt.

“As I said, I’m leaving almost immediately,” Fine said. “Come back to the den and I’ll give you the key. Any questions?”

“Where’s the thermostat?” Corrie asked, hugging herself to keep from shivering.

“Down here.” Fine stepped out of the maid’s quarters and went back down the hall, turning in to the sitting room. There was a thermostat on the wall, all right — covered in a clear plastic box with a lock on it.

“Fifty degrees,” Fine said.

Corrie looked at him. “I’m sorry?”

“Fifty degrees. That’s what I’ve set the house at and that’s where it’s going to stay. I’m not going to spend a penny more on this goddamn house than I have to. Let the virago pay the utilities if she wants to. And that’s another thing — keep electricity use to a minimum. Just a couple of lights, as absolutely necessary.” A thought seemed to strike the man. “And by the way, the thermostat settings and the kilowatt usage have been wired into the Internet. I’ll be able to monitor them from my iPhone.”

Corrie looked at the locked thermostat with a sinking heart. Great. So now I’m going to be freezing my rear off by night as well as by day. She began to understand why the original applicant had decided against the job.

Fine was glancing at her with a look that meant the interview was over. That left just one question.

“How much does the house-sitting job pay?” she asked.

Fine’s eyes widened in surprise. “Pay? You’re getting to stay, free, in a big, beautiful house, right here in Roaring Fork — and you expect a salary ? You’re lucky I’m not charging you rent.”

And he led the way back toward the den.

Arnaz Johnson, hairdresser to the stars, had seen a lot of unusual people in his day hanging out at the famous Big Pine Lodge on the very top of Roaring Fork Mountain — movie starlets decked out as if for the Oscars; billionaires squiring about their trophy girlfriends in minks and sables; wannabe Indians in ten-thousand-dollar designer buckskins; pseudo-cowboys in Stetson hats, boots, and spurs. Arnaz called it the Parade of the Narcissists. Very few of them could even ski. The Parade was the reason Arnaz bought a season pass and took the gondola to the lodge once or twice a week: that, and the atmosphere of this most famous ski lodge in the West, with its timbered walls hung with antique Navajo rugs, the massive wrought-iron chandeliers, the roaring fireplace so large you could barbecue a bull in it. Not to mention the walls of glass that looked out over a three-hundred-sixty-degree ocean of mountains, currently gray and brooding under a darkening sky.

But Arnaz had never seen anyone quite like the gentleman who sat at a small table by himself before the vast window, a silver flask of some unknown beverage in front of him, gazing out in the direction of snowbound Smuggler’s Cirque, with its complex of ancient, long-abandoned mining structures huddled like acolytes around the vast rickety wooden building that housed the famous Ireland Pump Engine: a magnificent example of nineteenth-century engineering, once the largest pump in the world, now just a rusted hulk.