Gregg Hurwitz - The Tower

Travers reached into her jacket and pulled out a brown envelope. "Here's fifteen thousand. You'll get another twenty for locating him, and twenty-five for bringing him in or taking him out."

"So if I get him, I cash in forty-five thousand more?"

"You should've been a mathematician."

"You should've been an FBI agent."

He was impressed by how well she ignored him. "The bottom line is, we want you inside Atlasia's head. We want to know what he likes, what he eats, what he dreams about. As some of our more uncouth agents are prone to say, we want to know how many times he wipes his ass when he shits.

"You run the background checks and figure out what he's about and where he's going. That's what we're paying you for. And we'd like to see you at headquarters for a briefing at two o'clock this afternoon."

Jade checked his watch. It was just after nine, which gave him a little more than four hours before he'd have to start driving.

"Fine," he said, turning back to the refrigerator. "I assume you know how to let yourself out."

After Travers left, Jade jumped rope for a while in his garage, then boxed on the speed bag that hung suspended next to his car. He felt his shoulders working and held the burn for a while, stepping lightly with the punches. He toweled off, then went inside to shower.

The living room held a set of glass tables with black, metal frames, and a matching desk sat in the study. The bookcases in his bedroom, which he had built himself, were made of wood and painted black. The shelves got shorter as they rose, giving the impression that they were receding into the wall. In the kitchen, the countertops curved in and out, adding a sense of organic disorder.

Jade could think more clearly in a neat environment. Every last item in his house was in place, from the books lined up in decreasing size to the silverware divided in a black mesh container in the kitchen drawer.

His study was particularly well ordered. On his desk, a Macintosh computer sat on a swivel, elevated slightly above the keyboard. A blank legal pad was laid in the middle of a desk mat, and a small box held pens and pencils. They were returned to the box after each use.

When the pencils wore down or the pens got low on ink, Jade threw them out and bought new ones. He found them much easier to work with. You can't write down a new idea with an old pen, he figured, just like you can't start a thought on a half-used pad of paper.

Stepping from the steam of the shower and wrapping himself in a dark gray towel, Jade wiped off the mirror and shaved in short, neat strokes. He ran a comb down the top of his head to find the part and then flicked his hair over to one side. He brushed his teeth, cleaned his ears, blew his nose, and cut his nails. Then he washed his hands again, got dressed, and filled a glass with crushed ice.

He went into the living room and sat in a black leather chair facing the file on the table before him. He crunched the ice deliberately. Exhaling deeply, he flipped the file open and felt the eyes of Allander Atlasia meet his.

Jade found the preliminary psychology reports from Allander's first institution to be revealing. When reading them, he could almost hear Allander's voice rise from the pages of the transcript. The stenographer had noted that Allander laughed a lot during the interviews.

The doctor had used the Rogers technique of questioning, pursuing a kinder, gentler approach. However, questions such as "Allander, how did that make you feel?" "What were your emotions at this time?" were too basic to allow insight into a mind like Allander's.

It seemed also that Allander understood the logic behind the doctor's methods. He'd allow the doctor to think he was making headway, then he'd say something to confuse him. He was using Skinnerian conditioning on a goddamn psychologist, Jade realized. Allander wasn't giving a great deal away, wasn't giving much up for interpretation. Instead, he guarded his thoughts like jewels, hiding them in a wash of worthless words.

Jade moved on to the tapes. Often, prison psychologists hide their tape players when interviewing subjects. Jade hoped that Allander would be less reserved if he didn't know he was being recorded.

The tapes proved to be a little better. Once in a while, Allander's answers seemed more honest. But the sincerity was not cooperative, Jade thought, just fueled by annoyance. His expressions of disgust were very real indeed.

On the third tape, Jade finally found a lapse, just one moment when Allander's language changed. His sentences got short and choppy, and Jade could tell he was truly enraged.

The doctor had asked him about the source of his anger, and Allander had exploded in a fit of verbosity.

"So, Doctor," Allander had replied, "if that is what we can call you-you're certainly not a healer, but that's a different tale, isn't it? You'd like to know the source of my anger? I can speak your tongue. See if you can keep up.

"Repression, projection, catharsis. Dr. Schlomo taught us to probe and dig. He was right on. He just never should have backed off. Well, I've shone the flashlight deeper than you can see through your round little spectacles. What there is in every little boy, I've seen it. So I can act it. Put me onstage and I'll toe the line of the unconscious. Take a peek at the future of my delusion.

"Sublimation. We forgot sublimation. The divine deflection of earthly longings. Build a tower, buy a motorcycle, sculpt a voluptuous pear. No thank you. My art doesn't mirror reality-it is reality. What I carve, I'll carve in flesh. What I paint, I'll paint in blood.

"Don't look at me with those eyes, Doctor. Take notes. Write this down. It's the key to your trade. Indulge in it, you hollow man. That's all you are. No insight except that which you want to see. Looking in rooms with the lights already on."

There was a long pause on the tape. Jade would have thought it was over except for the fact that he could still hear Allander's harsh breathing. The doctor said nothing.

Finally, Allander continued in a much calmer voice. "When children are born, they're too pure to distinguish themselves, their true selves. They try to conform their image to a societal mold. But they step forth as hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny and they need time to fill themselves with appropriate proportions of love and anger, hate and rage, kindness and despair.

"But no one speaks to the child. No one guides him through this time. He must be spoken to if he's not going to be protected. Or given a set of bearings upon which to impale his limbs. Those are the choices."

One phrase in particular caught Jade's attention: He must be spoken to if he's not going to be protected.

As a child, Allander had not been protected-he had undergone a terrible experience. On the tapes, he had said that children were pure. He seemed to pride himself on his ability to act out what others couldn't even see, as if his childhood trauma enabled him to see what only lay dormant for others.

What is it that's there in every little boy? Jade wondered. Allander made it sound worse than cancer.

At this point, there were only questions. Like who the hell was Dr. Schlomo? Jade couldn't find his name anywhere in the files, so he wasn't one of Allander's doctors. He had also run a check of the psychologists in the area, but he'd come up with nothing.

It was almost time to head to the San Francisco federal building for his meeting. He removed the tape and set it in line with the others. Three down, fourteen more to go. So far, only one bright spot in the midst of a lot of verbal manipulation, he thought, and it wasn't even that bright.

Jade sat with fifteen agents around a large table in a room on the thirty-fourth floor of the federal building. The room was stark: No pictures hung on the walls and the table was bare. The air conditioner was blasting on high, and Jade was relieved that he had jeans on instead of the thin dress pants that the agents wore.