Second Horseman Out of Eden

11

I slept right around the clock, and then some, and finally woke myself up with an enormous sneeze, followed by two or three lesser sneezelets. I wrapped myself in an oversize bath towel for a robe, called room service, and ordered a pot of coffee, French toast, home fried potatoes, bacon, a bottle of aspirin, and a bottle of vitamin C. I needed to keep up my strength-or get it back. While I was waiting for the food to arrive, I shuffled off to the bathroom to brush my teeth and shave. I didn't feel all that hot, and I was convinced that I could sleep for another week if I really put my mind to it. On the other hand, considering what I'd been through, I decided I wasn't feeling all that bad; I knew I was slightly feverish, but that beat being dead.

My order arrived about the time I finished getting dressed. I took two aspirins and a thousand milligrams of vitamin C, followed that with the food and coffee. By the time I'd finished eating and drained the pot of coffee, I was ready to roll.

It was time to go visiting.

I dressed in jeans, a sweat shirt, and sneakers, strapped the Seecamp in its holster to my ankle, then double-checked the other items in my gym bag to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything in my rush to get out of the apartment and escape the long arm and time-consuming inquisitiveness of the law. Everything was there. I zipped up the bag, called down to the desk to tell them to send the bill to my office, then left.

The Blaisdel Building was only a few blocks away, but I had the hotel doorman hustle me up a cab anyway; I assumed Malachy McCloskey was more than a bit irritated with me, and I didn't want to risk being spotted on the street and picked up by the police. I told the cabbie to stop a half block away, and I looked around before getting out; there were no police around. When a large knot of pedestrians came by, I hurriedly paid the driver, settled in with the crowd of walkers, then darted into the entrance to the Blaisdel Building.

Although I had strongly disapproved at the time, I was now grateful that Garth had checked out the building's security system; now I knew what I was up against as I searched for a way to get up to Henry Blaisdel's penthouse triplex. I was going to have to be wary of all sorts of sophisticated alarm devices. Still, there had to be a way to get up there, short of scaling the building, and if I had to shoot a few Born Again Christian Athletes for Christ on my way up, I was more than ready.

But first I wanted to check out the Nuvironment offices-or what used to be the Nuvironment offices-on the off chance that Peter Patton, before he had been so unceremoniously ousted from office and life by Tanker Thompson, might have left something behind that could lead me to Garth, or Vicky Brown, or both.

I hurried through the lobby and down the narrow, far corridor to the locked door at the end where Patton had taken me on my initial visit. I looked back down the corridor to make sure nobody was watching me, then took a set of lock picks out of my gym bag, huddled over the lock, and went to work. It wasn't an expensive lock, and I got lucky on my third try; the door clicked open, and I went through. The private elevator in the vestibule was down, its door open. I stepped in, drew out my Seecamp, then pressed the single button that would take me to the Nuvironment offices on the ninth floor.

The first thing that hit me when the elevator door sighed open was a blast of hot air. It must have been ninety degrees in the gold-carpeted reception area, and I couldn't understand why anyone would have turned up the thermostat before they left.

The second thing that hit me, as I passed through the heavy door of smoked glass, was the smell of rotting flesh. I gagged, took a handkerchief out of my pocket, and put it over my nose and mouth. Then I started down the central corridor, giving Peter Patton's spacious office a cursory glance. Nobody was home.

There was a lot of square footage in the Nuvironment offices, including what looked like research labs of various sorts and open workplaces. Somebody-Tanker Thompson, I presumed, acting on instructions from God-had really trashed the place; every computer on the floor had been reduced to a tangle of steel and plastic, smashed circuitry, dangling wires, and all of the drawers in the desks had been pulled out and emptied. As far as I could tell, there wasn't a scrap of anything, anywhere, that would afford the slightest clue as to why Nuvironment had closed up shop, what they thought-or knew-was going to happen on New Year's Eve, or where they might be holding Garth.

There was one very large room where I suspected some answers might have been. In the center of the room was a huge display stand, a kind of great wooden box on legs, surrounded by shards of plastic. There were marks on the empty walls where maps or charts might have been hanging. The entire floor was covered with ooze, a mixture of water and sand littered with what appeared to be electrical components and large swatches of rotted vegetation. Judging from the size of the room and the depth of the mire on the floor, I judged that the container that had been on the display stand had held upwards of a thousand gallons of water. I was certain that what had been demolished had been a model of a biosphere.

Off to my right, half submerged in the ooze and caught on a piece of broken plastic, there was what appeared to be a piece of posterboard. I sloshed over and picked it up. In black letters against a pale blue background was written the word EDEN.

I found Peter Patton's corpse, the head twisted around and bent back at an impossible angle, in an adjacent room, which looked like it had once been used for the storage of maintenance supplies. After breaking Patton's neck, Tanker Thompson had flung the body onto a pile of empty packing crates; one limp arm was draped over the main thermostat, which accounted for the heat. I winced against the smell, turned, and hurried out of the room. I went to the extreme end of the corridor, turned right, and abruptly stopped. In front of me was the door to another elevator.

I slowly approached the elevator, stopped in front of it. I reached out with a slightly trembling hand for the call button, then drew back, uncertain of what to do.

There was no doubt in my mind that the elevator led up to Henry Blaisdel's penthouse, but simply getting in and riding up didn't seem like such a good idea. State-of-the-art security, Garth had said, which meant that my operating the elevator could well set off alarms, and I would find a large unwelcoming committee at the top. Then again, they might not expect intruders to come up by way of Nuvironment, since the Nuvironment offices themselves were so difficult to get to. Whatever. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that taking the elevator was probably as good an alternative as any, and better than most. I was going to try to break in on Henry Blaisdel by walking in his front door.

I punched the call button. Less than a half minute later the door opened, and I stepped into the spacious, mahogany and velvet-lined interior. I punched the button at the side of the door. The elevator whirred, began moving up silently, but at what I could tell was high speed.

When the elevator stopped, I crouched down at the back, Seecamp held out in front of me with both hands. The door opened, and I found myself staring out into space that was, if not exactly empty, at least devoid of people. I straightened up and, still holding my pistol at the ready, stepped out onto thick, red carpeting that covered the entire floor, and that reminded me of nothing so much as a sea of blood. Rising from this red sea were a series of Doric columns and rectangular Lucite panels on which were hung various paintings executed in what I thought of as Nazi-propaganda style: handsome men, women, and children-all white-marched arm in arm through the paintings, always heading toward a glowing figure, whom I assumed to be Jesus, waiting for them in the distance. In his right hand the glowing Jesus-figure carried a gleaming, upraised sword, and in the left a stylized swastika, a perversion of the cross. Cowering in the corners of all the paintings were writhing, ugly caricatures of blacks, Jews, and Asiatics. There were dozens of these obscene paintings, turning the floor into a kind of art museum that was a real horror show.

The piece de resistance, propped up on a red velvet throne inside a ceiling-high vacuum chamber, was at the far end of the floor.

It was impossible to tell how long Henry Blaisdel had been dead, because there were no dates written on or inside the glass case that was his mausoleum, but somebody had done a pretty good job of stuffing the old boy, because his corpse looked better than some living people I know. He was dressed in a three-piece black suit with black wing-tip shoes, leaning forward slightly on his throne and staring thoughtfully off into the distance. Beside him stood a statue of Jesus with one plaster arm draped protectively over Blaisdel's frail shoulders.

I loved it. It certainly explained why Henry Blaisdel hadn't been sighted in the past few years, and I could only marvel at the number and complexity of the legal stratagems that must have been required to keep the old man's death a secret, and his fortune under the control of. . whoever was controlling it. Certainly, Henry Blaisdel himself must have made all the arrangements before his death. He'd been a man with a purpose; judging by what the men to whom he'd obviously bequeathed his money and power had been and were up to, it was a very dangerous purpose.

To the right of the mausoleum was a circular marble staircase. The small shards of plastic embedded in the caked mud on my sneakers clicked and scraped when I stepped on the stone; I kicked off my sneakers, tied the laces together, and draped them around my neck. Then, trying to make myself even smaller than I was, I moved slowly up the staircase, keeping to the right. There was still no sign of anybody, no sound in the massive triplex but my own hoarse breathing. I reached the top of the staircase, peered around the marble balustrade-again saw nobody in my immediate field of vision. It occurred to me that I was wasting my time, that the penthouse was as empty as the Nuvironment offices fifty-nine stories below, as lifeless as the dead old man downstairs. But I had no other place to go, no other hope. .

Still holding the Seecamp out in front of me, I straightened up, stepped out onto the carpet at the top of the stairs. There was a corridor, lined on both sides with bedrooms-all individually and expensively decorated, but with no sign that anybody had been using them lately. There was a heavy oak door at the end of the corridor. I went through it, stopped abruptly, and sucked in a deep breath as my heart began to beat faster.

The biosphere model was on a huge table identical to the one I had seen on the ninth floor. It was at least twenty feet long and ten feet wide, with the clear plastic dome over it virtually touching the twelve-foot-high ceiling. Bolted to the side of the table was a wooden plaque with gold lettering: EDEN. I pulled over a straight-backed chair, climbed up on it in order to get a better look at this model of Henry Blaisdel's idea of Paradise.

Beneath its massive plastic sky, Eden was shaped like the letter F. The base of the F was to my right, and perhaps a third of the section was modeled to simulate desert, complete with dunes, cactus, and stone mesas. The desert merged with what appeared to be a swamp; water drained into lagoons, which in turn fed a large lake. There was even what might be termed an ocean. The top leg of the F, barely visible through the condensed mist which had collected on the plastic, was a model rain forest, with condensation coils, battery powered in the model, set into the plastic over it. Even as I watched, it began to "rain" in the jungle section under the dome; water dripped from the ceiling, ran down hillsides to collect in streams and lagoons, which in turn emptied into the "lake" and the "ocean."

The middle leg of the F comprised living quarters for the inhabitants. There was a "Main Street" lined on both sides with small cottages, tilled fields, an orchard, and cutaway models of buildings that appeared to be a laboratory, a library, and an amphitheater. At the end of Main Street was a white church topped by the group's swastika-cross.

I stared down into the biosphere, trying to understand the point of this thing that was Henry Blaisdel's fantasy and obsession; since part of his religious fantasy had been that all true believers would be "Raptured" up to heaven in the early stages of the coming Tribulation, there wouldn't seem any need for this oversized goldfish bowl on earth.

It appeared that he and his fellow believers had been hedging their bets, so to speak, preparing something he conceived of as a refuge for those of his group who, for one reason or another-perhaps overcrowding in heaven-might not be Raptured in the Final Days. But then, I thought, it probably made no sense for me to try to make sense of the thinking of a bunch of murderous schizoids, or to understand what there was about Eden that Blaisdel had thought made it demon-proof.

It wasn't demons I was worried about. If Eden had, somehow, already been built to the scale represented by the model, it covered several acres-and it was certainly nowhere in the New York metropolitan region. Tanker Thompson had said as much. To be constructed in secret, and its gargantuan presence kept a secret, it would have to be located somewhere where there were vast, empty spaces-and, even then, it might be camouflaged. With all of Nuvironment's records destroyed and its personnel decimated at their own hands or Tanker Thompson's, I might never find Eden.

Then again, Eden might exist only in this model; there might never have been a shipment of a hundred tons of rain forest soil, but only the cubic yard or so I estimated to be in the model-and that could have been brought into the country with little difficulty. Perhaps Vicky Brown had been here, getting her hands dirty as she'd played with the soil while the model was being built.

But that was not the gospel according to Tanker Thompson, who'd said he'd carried the letter in his pocket from somewhere else. I could think of no reason why the man should have lied to me. Also, even if Vicky Brown had been up in this penthouse, she certainly wasn't now. And I was no closer to finding out what had happened to Garth, and where he was being held.

I was thinking these thoughts, feeling thoroughly frustrated and sorry for myself, when the chair was abruptly pulled from under me. I pitched forward, banging my face against the hard plastic of the dome. An instant later something very hard hit me at the base of the skull. I imagined I passed like a ghost through the barrier of plastic; I was falling, as if pushed from a plane, through the sky, down toward the jungle, swamp, desert, ocean, lagoons, and lakes. I finally landed on a blood-red carpet that swallowed me up in darkness.