Alyzon Whitestarr (41 page)

“He is part of this, somehow,” Raoul said. “And I believe he knows we will see him again, and why. Tomorrow morning I’m going to drive to Shaletown and find out what he knows. And I’m going to take another look at those warehouses.”

“You ken what I think?” Harrison said, looking from Raoul to me. “I think both you and Davey are a natural response tae this sickness. If we think of humanity as an organism, it stands tae reason there’d be a response tae an attack.”

“A response by whom? God?” I asked.

“By the organism as a whole. Just like each individual body produces antibodies when a dangerous organism invades.”

“You’re saying we’re some sort of antibodies?” I was glad to laugh at the absurdity, because I had begun to feel a little like we were floating off into the ether.

But Harrison said quite seriously, “In a metaphysical sense, yes, that’s exactly what I think.”

The telephone rang and Raoul went to answer it. He came back looking worried. “That was Bellavie. Dr. Austin has just been on the phone demanding to know by whose authority Sarry was removed from his care. He’s planning to go to Remington.”

“He mustn’t be allowed near her!” I said, appalled.

“My sentiments exactly. The trouble is that as her previous doctor on record, he does have some authority. I’ve just called Dr. Abernathy, the doctor who’s been caring for Sarry
at Bellavie. It’s her day off, but she has agreed to come in when Dr. Austin arrives. She wants me to meet her at the hospital.”

“We’ll go, too,” Harrison said, half rising, but Raoul shook his head.

“I need you to stay here and wait for my hacker friend, Daisy. She’s to come this evening, and I don’t want to spend the time right now tracking her down to postpone.”

“I can stay,” Harrison said, glancing at me.

“Me too. At least, I can stay until the last bus.”

“Don’t worry about the bus. I’ll be back in time to drive you home,” Raoul promised. “Help yourself to anything you want, and use the computers or TV or whatever.”

“OK,” Harrison said. “But are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Daisy’s not the sort to take kindly to being stood up. Even by someone who can’t stand. I’ll leave a note for you to give her.”

“I dinnae like this,” Harrison said after he had gone.

“Me either,” I said. “Why would Dr. Austin go all that way to see Sarry?”

“The sickness must be driving him. But dinnae worry. Raoul willnae let him lay a hand on her.” Harrison suggested we pass the time by going through the articles that referred to Aaron Rayc and making a list of all the other artists he had been associated with, because sooner or later we ought to try to find out which, if any, were infected. We had only been at it for twenty minutes when the doorbell rang.

Harrison went to answer it and ushered in a scraggy old woman of about sixty, clad in skintight leather jeans and
leather jacket, a white T-shirt, and black boots with high stiletto heels. She had the foulest mouth I had ever heard on someone old enough to be a grandmother; she was furious to hear she had just missed Raoul. We barely managed to stop her walking away then and there, but she calmed down when she read his note.

She shoved it in her pocket, looked from me to Harrison, and then swore some more about being left to deal with a kindergarten. Harrison looked as if he was about to say something, but I just asked her sweetly if she wanted to see the computer room. “You think I need directions, kid?” she snarled, and stalked past me into the hall and down to the back of the house.

“We need her,” I hissed at Harrison, before hurrying after her. By the time I got into the back room, she was already at a terminal tapping away. Ten minutes later she shifted to the next terminal, and then to the next, tapping and huffing and swearing constantly. Now that her attention was not riveted on me, I was able to study her properly, and the strange thing was that in spite of her language and grumpy rudeness, my senses warmed to her jasmine and bubblegum scent. In reality, however, she smelled of smoke and sweat. She had set a packet of cigarettes on the desk beside her, but she made no attempt to light one the whole time she was there.

“You Alyzon?” she suddenly asked, glancing over her shoulder. Her hands continued flying over the keyboard.

“Yes,” I said, realizing Raoul must have written about us in the note. She made no comment and went on tapping until
Harrison came in, then she gave him the same interrogating glare. “You’re Harrison?”

“I … yes,” Harrison said, looking startled.

“Don’t sound too sure, kid. Gotta be sure of who you are in this world, or someone’ll steal your identity.” I didn’t know if she was joking or not, and from the look on his face, neither did Harrison.

“Can you fix the virus?” he asked her.

Daisy gave him a withering look. Then she said, “It’s an interesting breed. Designed to form spontaneous links to heavy porn sites, and it can circumvent the sorts of bars people use to stop their kids viewing stuff like this. Lucky Roo has such a sophisticated setup, because a normal system wouldn’t let me track the originating site.” She tapped for a bit more as we waited with bated breath, then she let out a hiss of air between clenched teeth.

“You’ve found it?”

She nodded absently. “The Castledean Estate Web site.”

“But … but that’s the Web site Raoul logged in to when—”

“There’s a false loop of trails that would bamboozle a lesser hacker, but I can tell you that the virus originated at that site,” Daisy said, and she gave a small smile and stretched with the languid sensuality of a cat, all the skinny stiffness in her smoothed and fluid with triumph. Then she shot us a look and said, “And this site is linked to the Rayc Inc. site that Roo asked me to check out. Doesn’t surprise me. The guy’s a freak.”

“You know Aaron Rayc?” I asked.

“Better than his mama,” Daisy said with a leer. “What I don’t know about his finances and business dealings ain’t worth blowing your nose on. He’s a savvy businessman with a knack for making money.”

“What makes you call him a freak, then?” I asked.

Daisy stopped tapping to look at me as if she had forgotten I was standing there. For a moment I thought she would refuse to tell me anything. But then she said, “The way he deals with all that money he makes, for instance. It’s like he doesn’t give a shit about it.”

“What do you mean?” Harrison asked.

“He routes most of it to causes all over the world,” Daisy said.

Harrison looked so disappointed I knew he had expected to hear that Rayc Inc. were drug or arms dealers. “He runs a charity,” Harrison said.

Daisy seemed to take this as a personal criticism. “I’m not talking about the company, boyo. I’m talking about his personal fortune. He gives thousands away to noble causes,” she snarled. “Leprosy Society. Mother Teresa’s Helpers. Starlight Foundation. It’s like he’s a give-a-holic. Because dig a little deeper, and you find his giving ain’t quite so discriminating. For instance, he donates to the IRA, the Red Brigade, and a dozen different religious cults with more than a nodding acquaintance with terrorism.”

“Aaron Rayc sends money to terrorists?” I asked, totally confused.

Daisy glared at me. “You got wax in your ears, kid? The
guy is funding everything. Anarchists’ leagues and neofascist groups, Ku Klux Klan and black-activist organizations, gun-support groups and fanatical antigun organizations. It’s like he’s funding both sides of just about every hot cause you can imagine. And quite a bit of Rayc’s company donations wind their way to some pretty offbeat causes, too. It’s all here.” She got out a memory stick and set in on the table beside her cigarette packet. “Now, what about a drink?”

“Sure, uh, what would you like?” Harrison asked.

Daisy smiled, and for a second she looked like someone’s sweet old grandmother. “Now I wouldn’t say no to one of Roo’s special Italian hot chocolates. You just toddle along and make it up, and I’ll put what I brought into Roo’s system.”

We exchanged a look, then went out obediently. Somehow I wasn’t surprised to find a jug of the chocolate in the fridge with a note telling us to heat it in the microwave for Daisy.

She came in as we were pouring the chocolate and prowled restlessly around the kitchen, picking up things and putting them down again. She came to the list of names we had been compiling, and which I had brought in from the living room, and picked that up, too.

“I remember that guy.” She was pointing to an opera singer. “He was this fat bozo with greasy hair and a voice like an angel. Just hearing him made you want to wrap yourself around him, at least until he stopped singing.” She cackled, and I hoped I didn’t look as shocked as I felt. “He went on and made the big time. Then he just went crazy and started
singing these operas written by a madwoman. People went in the beginning because of him, but the reviews stank. Ended up in an asylum, he did.”

Harrison handed her the chocolate, and she slurped it up with the noisy relish of a little kid before leaving without so much as a goodbye.

“So that was Daisy,” I said when Harrison came back from escorting her to the front door. We both laughed, then the phone rang.

Harrison answered it while I washed the cup and pot, wondering what it meant that Aaron Rayc funded so many causes. Then Harrison came back and I turned to ask him, but his face was white as chalk and his eyes were like bruises.

“What is it?” I whispered, frightened.

“That … that was Raoul. It’s Sarry,” he said, his eyes filling with tears.

“Harrison, what …?” I took a step toward him.

“Alyzon, she … she’s killed herself.”

Raoul returned at two in the morning, looking drawn and exhausted. I made hot tea for him, suppressing a little stab of horror at seeing blood on his collar.

“What happened?” Harrison asked when Raoul had a mug of tea in his hand.

Raoul sighed. “I hadn’t long arrived at Bellavie. I was just speaking with a receptionist when one of the nurses came rushing along the hall shouting that Sarry had cut her wrists. She was young and frightened or she wouldn’t have blurted it out like that. There would be a code she should have used so she didn’t alarm any visitors. As it was, I insisted on coming with them, and short of physically restraining me, there was nothing they could do.” He gave a weary laugh and I wondered how he could laugh at such a time, before deciding that he must be suffering from shock.

“It was Austin, wasnae it? How did he get tae her?” Harrison demanded through gritted teeth.

Raoul blinked at him, eyes red-rimmed with fatigue. “Austin arrived about twenty minutes before me and bullied
the head nurse into shifting Sarry to a small room where he could examine her. One of the younger nurses was passing and heard her scream. She ran in and found Dr. Austin trying to administer an injection. Sarry was struggling and terrified.”

“Bastard,” Harrison grated.

“Dr. Austin ordered the nurse out. If he had been in whites she might have obeyed, but he wasn’t so she told him to leave Sarry alone,” Raoul went on. “When he didn’t, she knocked the syringe from his hand. Then she rang for help, and minutes later the head nurse appeared and hustled Dr. Austin out into the hall. He was shouting that Sarry had been removed from his care without the proper authority and that he had merely been trying to administer a tranquilizer. The young nurse had been left to calm Sarry, who started babbling that Dr. Austin was ‘one of Them’; that she had felt the wrongness in him. The nurse ran out to tell the head that the incident had brought on an episode. Sarry would have been alone all of five minutes, and that’s when she did it. She used a scalpel.”

“I cannae believe this has happened,” Harrison exclaimed, his eyes blazing. “What was he trying tae do?”

“Drug her strongly enough to let the sickness take over, I’d guess. But he somehow let her feel or see that he was infected. I’m sure he thought Sarry wouldn’t fight. Or it might be that the sickness was driving him so hard he didn’t think. Frankly he looked a mess. His clothes were obviously thrown on without any regard for how he looked, and he was
unshaven, his hair wild. If he hadn’t had his ID with him, I doubt he’d have been let in at all.”

I wondered how Raoul could think about clothes with Sarry so recently dead. The tragedy of her life and death seemed to me to be some terrible shadow that had got inside me. I kept thinking of her licking the ice cream and talking about going with the flow. Kept feeling it was my fault it had come to this.

But Raoul was talking again. “By the time I got there with the nurse and the receptionist, Austin was ranting that they’d killed his patient. I said that I thought we should call the police and, just like that, all the bluster went out of him. I was careful not to say who I was, and Austin assumed I was connected to the hospital. He said we’d all be sorry for our interference, then he left. After he had gone, the head let me go in and talk with Sarry.” He took a deep breath. “They had bandaged her wrists to stop the blood, but there was so much of it over her ….”

“Ye spoke tae her before she died?” Harrison asked in a wretched voice.

Raoul looked at him blankly. “Died? What are you talking about? I’ve just told you they bound her wrists, and a little later, when the doctor finally arrived, they gave her a transfusion.”