Burning Paradise

“I know him better than you do.”

“Cassie, listen. I know you’ve been close to Leo in the last few weeks. But he’s his father’s son. You have to look out for your own interests.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Maybe after we get back to the States—”

“I’m not going back to the States. Not without Leo. Not unless Leo wants me to.”

There: she had said what she meant to say. Or at least stammered out a bare and inadequate summary of it. There was so much else. All the compelling evidence she had stored in her heart and her mind but could never share.

After a long moment’s silence Aunt Ris said, “Cassie, what do you really know about Leo Beck? All I know is that he’s loyal to his father. And that he killed an i

But Leo wasn’t loyal to his father, not the slavish way Aunt Ris was implying. And as for the man Leo had killed, that act had been driven by fear and desperate circumstances, not carelessness or malevolence. What Aunt Ris could not have seen was Leo’s grief and guilt. It was Cassie who had held Leo’s head against her shoulder late one night in a room in Panama, stroking his hair as he admitted his anguish over the death he had caused; Cassie who had heard his confession (“I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry,”), Cassie who had felt his tears against her skin. “I know I care about him. I know he cares about me. And I know what we’ve been through together.”

Aunt Ris looked more sad than angry. “Cassie, I—”

She broke off at the sound of a knock at the front door. Eugene Dowd sprang to attention. He put his hand on his pistol and gestured to the others to keep quiet. There was no peephole in the door and no angle from which he could see the visitor through the window beside it. A few seconds passed before the knock came again, more urgently.

“Okay,” Dowd said. “You, you, you and you,” cocking his finger at Beth, Thomas, Cassie and Aunt Ris, “upstairs, now. I’ll signal if it’s safe to come down. Go!”

Beth stared blankly. Aunt Ris stood and took Thomas’s hand. At the foot of the stairs she turned back and said, “Cassie—come on!”

“No.” Cassie was already moving toward the room where Leo and his father were conducting their test.

“Cassie, please,” Aunt Ris said, but she didn’t wait, hurrying up the staircase and yanking a bewildered and frightened Thomas behind her.

“I’m from the Port Authority,” a male voice with a Chilean accent said from beyond the door. “I need to speak to Werner Beck on an urgent matter.” Followed by more furious knocking.

Dowd opened the door a crack and peered out, his had still grazing the grip of his revolver. “Show me some ID,” he said.

The door burst inward, knocking him to the floor.

Beck realized he was imperfectly prepared for this impasse with his son. Leo sat angrily immobile, and for the moment Beck could do nothing but stare back. “You need to do this,” he said, startled by the grief that groaned out of the hinge of his own voice, “or—” Or what?

He was distracted by sounds from the adjoining room: a knock at the door, muted voices. Then the crash of a forced entry, more shouting. Beck dropped the syringe and reached for the pistol on the desk. But Leo acted first—vaulted from his chair and grabbed the gun.

There was a gunshot from the front room, then a much closer crash as the door that co

Another gunshot came from the front room, followed by a third. “Give me the pistol,” Beck said.

Leo faced him with the weapon in his hand. It seemed to Beck that Leo was almost eerily calm, neither angry nor afraid. Beck put his hand out. Leo didn’t lower the barrel.

Beck felt the first bullet as a blow to his ribs, driving him backward. Then he was on the floor, breathless and bewildered. Leo stood over him, his face still utterly expressionless. Beck’s hand fell on the syringe he had dropped. He surprised himself by flailing it at Leo’s leg, burying the needle in Leo’s thigh.

Leo’s second shot drove all thought to extinction.

Cassie’s fear had filled her to brimming. It roared in her ears like the screech of a power saw. She kept moving, but mindlessly, as if a clumsy puppeteer had taken control of her arms and legs. Events became a series of still frames projected behind her eyelids.

Dowd on the floor, blocking the front door with his legs as a stranger struggles to push through…

Cassie took a step toward the room where Leo was.

Aunt Ris screaming Cassie’s name even as she vanished beyond the upstairs landing, tugging Thomas behind her, Thomas looking back with his mouth a shocked O and eyes wide…

Another step.

Dowd raising his pistol and firing it: splintered wood and a noise like a blow to the head, but the stranger still ramming through as Dowd struggled to his feet and leveled the pistol again…

Step.

Beth forcing herself to her feet and staggering toward the stairs, her face a terrorized mask, all tooth and eye….

Step.

A different noise from the room where Leo was, thumping and a gunshot….

Which meant the house was being attacked from the alley as well as the street, but she didn’t stop: her feet, her legs, her invisible puppeteer all wanted to carry her to Leo.

Dowd firing again, the stranger tumbling into the room leaking red and green matter, but that only served to force the door wide open. Dowd shouting at Cassie and Beth: “Get down!”

Cassie did not get down.

Dowd peering around the door: “Shit, there’s another one!”

Two more steps, which put Cassie within reach of the room.

Dowd firing his pistol at some target Cassie couldn’t see, then stumbling backward as a bullet from outside penetrated the door and his body. Another stranger stepping over the body of the fallen sim, some ordinary-looking man not even angry but just going about his lethal business…

Beth taken by a bullet as she clung to the stairway banister, tumbling onto the risers with her head opened like a melon and its redness gushing out…

Dowd, enraged and dying on the blood-drenched carpet, firing a final shot that struck the sim and doubled it over…

…as Cassie entered the room to which Leo and Werner Beck had retreated for their blood test, which had become a blood test of a different kind. Cassie’s vision was clouded and somehow noisy, but she saw Leo standing (still alive!) over the body of his father and the reeking corpse of a sim. His expression was shocked and his eyes glittered with fear or grief, but he reached for Cassie with his free left hand, gesturing frantically with his pistol toward the alley. Though she was nearly deafened by the gunshots still echoing in her head she saw him mouth the words, Come with me.

She took his hand, and he pulled her into the alley behind the house.

27

MAYBE BECAUSE HE EXPECTED TO DIE AT any moment, Ethan felt a deadening blankness wash over him. All the endless precautions he had taken, all the demented and paranoid protocols he had followed so assiduously for so many years, had in the end won him nothing. He was helplessly under the control of the entity that governed the world. He had lost even the ability to properly think.