Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

"Heart of the collection," Jeannine told me. "You'll usually find him here."

The heat was searing, dry as my mouth, and I wondered why anyone would ever have chosen to live in a place like this. Then when we stepped through the big lobby doors of the honeycomb building, the cold hit us like a bucket of ice-water in the face. I guessed the air-con was solar powered which seemed like a needless extravagance.

"Madre de Dios!" Kelis said. "Why not just move somewhere cooler?"

I smiled, but the expression slipped from my face when I saw what was in front of me.

"Holly hell," Haru said. "You've got the Elgin marbles in your hallway!"

They had all of them by the look of it. The delicate friezes of gods, heroes and monsters that I had last seen six years ago in the British Museum.

I looked across at Jeannine and she grinned back, looking amazingly impish for such a vast woman. "Like I said, he collects stuff. And the cold is good – helps preserve them, the paintings especially."

"Don't tell me," I said. "You were an art historian in a previous life."

"Curator," she told me. "He's very particular about who he recruits. Want the tour?"

They'd pretty much gutted the British Museum. The dining room was filled, floor to ceiling, with totem poles, leering animal faces staring out at walls covered in African tribal masks which glared blankly back at them. The bar was filled with mummies, standing around in conversational huddles. A giant stone scarab sat in the middle of it all, impassive.

"No Rosetta Stone?" I asked.

Jeannine shook her head. "He's interested in art, not history."

The paintings were in the guest rooms, carefully preserved behind glass. Hanging on walls above beds and dressers, where once there would have been cheap hotel art. I saw Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Haru brought out his sketchbook, the first time I'd seen it since Cuba, and drew neat little pencil sketches of the works we passed. I glanced at one and saw the subtle way he'd changed it: the Madonna's eyes just a little rounder, her mouth a little smaller, the baby in her arms with a wild look in its eyes, as if what made him more than human wasn't entirely safe.

The grounds of the hotel were filled with sculptures. I stopped for a long time in front of Epstein's vast, chunky statue of Jacob wrestling the angel. The dusty pink of the marble blended with the red-gold desert sand. It made me think, suddenly, of the voice in my head, my own struggle with it. But was the Voice Jacob or the angel? I used to be quite certain of the answer, but the louder the Voice got, the less sure I became.

"That's always been a favourite of mine, too." said a man so slender he was little more than bone. His skin and hair were as pale as each other, as if one had been entirely bleached by the sun while the other was always hidden from it.

"Well, I guess no one from Tate Britain will likely miss it too much."

He smiled, open and friendly. "No one's voiced any complaints so far."

They cooked a meal for us out on one of the hotel's patios, a barbecue. The warmth of the flame was welcome in the abrupt chill of a desert night. He ate delicately, picking at the chicken wings and beef steaks with his fingers as if testing their consistency. We ate ravenously, tearing at the meat with our teeth like animals. He watched us with a wry twist of amusement on his mouth.

"This is what you've been doing, ever since the Cull?" I asked him.

He nodded. "From the moment the Cull started, once we could see where it was all heading."

"But why all the way out here?" Kelis asked. "Why not just take over the Smithsonian, somewhere you've got a head start and don't have to transport a million tonnes of rock over ten-million fucking acres of desert?"

"Because it's all the way out here," he said. "We don't get many visitors, and that's just the way I like it. And because this is my home, and why the hell shouldn't Santa Fe be the new cultural capital of the world?"

"There's more though, isn't there?" Haru squinted at him under lowered brows. "Being far away isn't a guarantee of safety on its own."

I remembered the Irish farmers, out in their lonely hills, and knew that he was right. The Collector looked at him a long time, and beside me I felt Jeannine tense. But then he smiled again, a cadaverous grin in his wasted face. "You're a clever boy. Yes, you're right, there's more to being safe than enough sand between you and your enemies. Like the good 'ole boys in our neighbouring state used to say, an armed society is a polite one."

"Machine gun nests, AA emplacements. I'd say manners around here must be pretty damn good," I said.

He laughed. "Oh, those things are just gravy. What keeps the scavengers away is the stuff that used to lie buried beneath the earth, not many miles from here."

"You are talking of nuclear weapons," Ingo said calmly.

I wanted to laugh, because that would have made it a joke, but it clearly wasn't. "You've got nukes?"

"Just the two," the Collector said demurely.

"Nukes are a weapon of deterrence, not a weapon of use," Ingo said. "Will anyone believe that you would detonate them, simply to protect this?"

"Oh yeah," he said, his tight smile bringing out the subtle networks of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. I realised he was much older than I had originally thought. "They know I will."

"Really?" Kelis said. "You'd really nuke anyone who tried to take your collection?"

"It's not mine. It's ours – humanity's. The things I have here, these are the best of us. They're the only part of us left that's worth killing for."

I remembered all the people I'd killed and the reasons for it, and I thought that maybe he was right.

Later, when he'd opened a bottle of cognac and we were lounging on cushions in a room whose walls were guarded by the Terracotta Army, he said, "I hear you want to go to Vegas?"

"Yeah," Kelis said. "That's the plan. Know anything about what's going on there?"

He shrugged. "More than you probably. Less than I'd like."

"Did…" I hesitated but, really, if this man was in league with Ash it was already too late. "Did anything change there, recently, maybe around six months ago?"

His eyes narrowed. "You know something about this new guy who's taken over there?"

"Yeah, we do," I said. "And I can tell you one thing, this is not someone you want as a neighbour. Have there been any… have you noticed anything odd about his followers? He does have followers, right? An army of them."

The Collector shrugged. "He's got people working for him, that's for sure. Beyond that no one knows anything. Soon as he arrived he sealed Vegas up so tight it's a wonder air can get in there. He closed it and he fortified it, and if you think we've got a few guns lying around this place, you should see Sin City. Rumours are he's got as much ordinance in that place as a small country."

"Rumours?" Kelis said. "So no one knows for sure?"

"No," Jeannine said, "on account of the fact that no one we sent in there ever came out again."

The next day Jeannine took us to see the other collection, a warehouse full of army-issue small and not-so-small arms. Kelis smiled for the first time since Soren had died. "Yeah," she said, wandering through the aisles of weaponry, handling a rifle here, a rocket launcher there, "this is more like it."

"He's still going to cream your asses," Jeannine said. "No amount of guns are going to change that."

"So why are you giving us any?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Because you might do some damage while he takes you down, and that's worth a small investment."

"Gee, thanks," I said dryly, but in truth I was grateful to the Collector. Without his help we would have stood no chance at all. He was giving us food too, water for the long drive across the desert and a new vehicle to make it in. The truck was big and green and ugly as hell but it looked like it could get into an argument with a rhino and win. I'd seen tanks which were less heavily armoured. We loaded it with the guns, grenades and rockets Kelis had chosen, then gathered round to plan our attack.