Repairman Jack [08]-Crisscross (17 page)

Jensen wished he had an office like this—high ceilings, rich wood paneling, a rosette of skylights above, and a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows facing uptown with a magnificent view of the Chrysler Building. The paneling was all walnut except for a pair of chromed steel doors embedded in the south wall. That was where Brady kept a monument to his biggest secret, the one known only to him, Jensen, and the High Council: Opus Omega.

The Acting Prime Dormentalist and Supreme Overseer was a handsome man of average height with broad shoulders and a head of long wavy brown hair that he let trail over his collar. A few years ago Jensen had noticed gray creeping into that brown, but it hadn't lasted long. Today he wore one of his

Hickey-Freeman or Dolce & Gabbana suits—he never wore a uniform—that he donned for public appearances. He was Dormentalism's public face and as such needed to cut an impressive figure. Luther Brady wasn't simply the Church's leader, he was its peerless PR man too.

Jensen had to admit he did a great job in both roles, but especially the latter. When he appeared on TV he was the soul of rationality, generosity, and selflessness. The MVP of the Altruism Bowl.

"Better?" Brady frowned. "What do you mean?"

"You looked tired yesterday."

Brady paused a beat, then said, "Not surprising, considering the effort it took to keep that low pressure area to the north during Sunday's rally."

Jensen remembered watching the weather reports all week, preparing for the almost certain probability that it would rain on the rally. And then, during Saturday night and early Sunday morning, the front had slid north. Jensen had written it off to good luck, but now Brady was telling him…

"You did that?"

"Well, not alone. I had a couple of HC members helping me. I probably could have done it on my own, but I had to give my address at the rally
some
attention. As you know, we Fully Fused may be superior beings, but we're not gods."

No, we're not, Jensen thought with a spasm of guilt. Some of us aren't even superior beings.

Brady looked apologetic and added, "I would have asked your help but I didn't want to distract you from your security duties."

Thank Noomri you didn't, Jensen thought. His sham fusion would have been revealed.

Brady leaned back in his chair. "As I'm sure you know, I spent Sunday night in the mountains, to be alone with my xelton and recharge my spirit. I needed the rest."

Jensen nodded. Brady spent a lot of Sunday nights at his place upstate in the woods.

"You must come with me sometime." Brady's eyes unfocused as he smiled. "I've moved
The Compendium
up there and was reading it again. It thrills me every time."

The Compendium
… the most wonderful, amazing, magical book Jensen had ever seen or read or imagined. He longed to see it again, touch it, flip through its pages. In his darkest moment of faltering faith in the goals and beliefs of the Church, Luther Brady had shown him
The Compendium
and all doubts had vanished like smoke.

Jensen wanted to say, Yes, yes, invite me to see
The Compendium
again, but Brady's next words stopped him.

"After reading
The Compendium
we can float together above the forest. It's so peaceful to watch the wildlife from above."

Jensen's tongue felt suddenly thick and dry. Levitate? His heart fell. No… that would never do. But he had to look upbeat.

"I look forward to it."

"But let's put that aside." Brady straightened in his chair. "What did you want to see me about?"

Here goes, Jensen thought.

He recited the facts: Someone had tried to join under a false name. He turned out to be Jason Amurri, son of Aldo Amurri.

"Unbelievable! Aldo Amurri's son!"

"You've heard of him?"

"Of course. He's a very wealthy and important man. We could suffer a lot of bad press because of this. And we may have lost a well-heeled contributor to boot. Does the son have any money?"

Jensen licked his lips. "Some."

"How much?" The words sounded more like a threat than a question.

Jensen showed him the printout of the financial breakdown Margiotta had found on the Internet.

Brady went livid, right up to his dyed hairline and no doubt beyond. Jensen had known the boss would be mad, but not this mad.

"I didn't know any of this at the time," he said. "How could I?"

"You took a man worth two-hundred-million dollars and kicked him out the door!"

In addition to being the Church's APR and SO, Brady was also its CFO, and as such he was always on the prowl for cash to fund Church projects—one Church project in particular.

Were Jensen not Grand Paladin, were he not in a position to know about Opus Omega, he might have been disillusioned. But knowing about the Opus changed everything, and explained the Church's need of a constant stream of cash.

"All I knew was that he'd given us a false name and address and was causing a violent scene in his first Reveille Session. That fits the criteria for instant UP. Criteria you laid down yourself, I might add."

Brady gave him a brief, hostile look, then swiveled his chair toward the windows. Jensen let out a breath. He'd done everything by the book; that, at least, was in his favor.

Brady stayed turned for a good minute, giving Jensen time to reflect on how far he'd come from Nigeria to be sitting here with such a powerful man.

He'd been born Ajayi Dokubo and spent his earliest years in a poor village in southwest Nigeria near the Benin border; his people spoke Yoruba and sacrificed rams to Olorun. When he was five his father moved the family to Lagos where Jensen learned English, the official language of Nigeria. At age nine his father uprooted them again, this time to the U.S. To Chicago.

His old man survived long enough to see to it that his son became a U.S. citizen, then wound up the victim of a fatal mugging. Jensen survived a turbulent, fatherless, rough-and-tumble adolescence that landed him in trouble with the law. A Southside cop, an ex-marine named Hollis, had given him a choice: Join the army or go to court.

He joined up just in time to be sent to Iraq for the first Gulf War where he killed an Iraqi in a firefight and liked it. Liked it too much, maybe. Killed two more and that would have been okay except that the last one was trying to surrender at the time. That didn't set too well with his lieutenant and he was given another choice—honorable discharge or face charges.

So he returned to the streets again, this time in New York City. Being black, with no education, his options were few. So it had to happen: He got in with a rough crew that was dealing drugs, boosting and fencing electronics, smuggling cigarettes, the usual. Because of his size, Jensen became their go-to guy when strong-arm stuff was called for. Mostly it was punch-ups, maybe breaking a leg or two. But then came the day they decided someone needed killing.

Jensen had been game. So he'd found the target in a bar and cracked his skull with a pool cue. His mistake had been being so public about it. He was picked up for the murder but the cops had to release him when the witnesses developed amnesia.

Coming that close to a jolt in the joint had shaken him to the point where he decided it was time to turn his life around.

He'd lived by his wits for most of his life, never looking to rule the world, just to be comfortable without doing a nine-to-five grind. Now he was willing to get on the treadmill. But he needed direction.

He found it when he saw Luther Brady on
Oprah
!—his girlfriend at the time never missed that damn show—and the more Jensen listened, the more he knew Dormentalism was what he'd been looking for.

To seal the deal with himself to leave his old ways behind, Ajayi

Dokubo changed his surname lo a simple one he'd picked out of a phone book: Jensen. He never used his first name, treated it as if it didn't exist. He became Jensen—period.

As for Dormentalism, it didn't turn out to be what he'd originally thought, but it was indeed what he'd been looking for.

He might have screwed that up too if not for Luther Brady.

He still remembered the day he'd been called into Brady's office and confronted with his arrest record. He'd expected to be declared UP, but instead—because of his military experience, Brady said—he was made a TP. Brady went even further by paying his tuition to John Jay College of Criminal Justice where he earned an associate degree in security management. Jensen was still attending part time, working toward a BA.

In the five years since Brady had appointed him Grand Paladin, Jensen had taken the job personally. Luther Brady had had more faith in him than he'd had in himself. He couldn't think of anything he wouldn't do for the man.

"Well, what do we do?" Jensen said.

"'We'?" Brady's eyebrows levitated a good half inch. " 'We' are doing nothing.
You
, however, are going to get this Jason Amurri back here."

That wasn't going to be easy. They hadn't exactly parted buddies.

"And don't," Brady added, "let on that we know who he really is."

"How am I supposed to do that? I can't call the Ritz Carlton and get his room without knowing he's Jason Amurri."

Brady jabbed a finger at him. "I don't care. Beg, plead, go to his hotel and offer him a ride on your shoulders if you have to, but I want him back here tomorrow! Get to it. Now."

Jensen stewed as he made the trip back to his office. How the hell was he going to—?

The application! Maybe this turkey had left a working contact number.

He rummaged through the papers on his desk. Yes! Here it was, with a 212 area code.

He buzzed What's-Her-Name. "Get in here."

When she did, all buttoned up in her uniform and looking scared, he handed her Amurri's application and gave her a new version of the situation. A mistake had been made and had to be rectified. "Jack Farreli" had been declared UP and ejected in error. Apologize and persuade him to come back for another meeting.

She hurried out but returned a minute later.

"He doesn't have his phone on," she said with a trembling lower lip. For some reason his secretaries never seemed to like to tell him things he didn't want to hear.

"Then keep calling, you idiot!" he shouted. "Call every five minutes until you reach him, and then do the selling job of your xeltonless life!"

Why was it so damn near impossible to get good help these days?

11

Jack found Russ Tuit in an agitated state. He let Jack in, then started stomping around the apartment.

"Can I say, 'What the fuck?'" he shouted, waving a thick, oversized paperback in the air. "Can I just?"

Jack shrugged. "Hey, it's your apartment." Then an unpleasant thought struck. "You're not having trouble with the disk, are you? Yesterday—"

"The disk is fine. No, it's this English Lit course I'm taking. I just had to read 'Ode on a Greek Urn' by Keats and I just
got
to say, 'What the fuck!'"

"It's 'Ode on a
Grecian
Urn,' I believe, but if it'll make you feel better, sure. Be my guest."

"Okay. What the
fuck
?" He flipped through the pages till he found what he wanted. "Listen to this: 'More happy love! More happy, happy love!'" He tossed the book across the room to where it bounced off the wall, leaving a greenish scuff—the same green as the book cover. It joined half a dozen similar marks in the vicinity. "Is this guy kidding? It sounds like the Stimpy song!"

"And you sound like Ren."

"Do you
believe
the shit they want us to read? Now I remember why I dropped out and went into full-time hacking. This is worse than prison, man! This is cruel and unusual!"

"Speaking of hacking," Jack said, "the disk
is
ready, isn't it?"

"What? Oh, yeah. Sure." Simply mentioning the disk seemed to calm him. "Got it right here."

He picked up a red three-and-a-half-inch floppy and scaled it across the room.

Jack caught the little thing and said, "This is it?"

"All you'll need. Just make sure you put it in the floppy drive
before
you start the machine. That way my disk'll be in control of the startup."

"What do I do?"

"Nothing. You don't even have to turn on the monitor. The disk'll bypass any password protection. It'll disable any antivirus software he's got—Norton, McAfee, whatever—and introduce HYRTBU. All you've got to do is wait maybe ten minutes till the hard drive stops chattering, then pull out the disk—Jesus, make sure you don't leave it there—turn off the computer, and buy yourself a beer. His files are toast."

Jack stared at the red plastic square resting in his palm. "That's it?" It seemed too simple.