Chapter 48 Dick Games
Dick Games
Kesh and Rawlings flanked Evan as he ascended the antebellum staircase, which now decidedly swept to the left. He noted the direction, ensuring no confusion on his next go-around at Devine’s compound. The susurration of tumbling liquid from the massive waterfall feature accompanied them up.
Rawlings had met him at the door, relinquishing Devine’s black box with its solitary button. “Our credible sources on the oil-gouging scheme turned out to be not so credible,” he said now. “So it’s good we didn’t involve Mr. Devine or move on it.”
“How’s he doing?” Evan asked.
“Oddly tranquil,” Kesh said.
“Luke Devine? Tranquil?”
“He’s been sleeping a ton, coming down finally. You said you needed to see him when you’re done with Joey? He’ll be in the spa on the third basement level.”
They kept on up the stairs, which seemed to telescope before them, the effect like walking in place the wrong way on an escalator. The carved monkeys peered down at them ominously from their wooden perch, teeth bared, paws clamped over eyes, ears, mouth.
“What’s on the first two basement levels?” Evan asked.
Rawlings: “Squash courts, basketball, gym, hair salon, ballroom.”
“I’ve only seen the old boiler room through the trick door in the marble powder room.”
“What were you doing down there?” Kesh asked.
Evan said, “Killing the last set of security guards.”
She didn’t ask any more questions.
They delivered Evan to the scarlet door, and he entered alone.
The inside paneling was padded, the door sucking closed behind him.
Joey sat inside the Faraday cage atop the desk, legs crossed, keyboard in her lap.
The Brain’s massive screen loomed before her like a billboard, populated with more windows than he could count.
Analytics ran. Progress bars progressed. Terminal log statements fell like snow.
The plush carpet had plenty of give beneath his boots. The baroque gilded chaise longues were upholstered in scarlet, the walls in flocked fleur-de-lis wallpaper of the same shade, the entire room suffused with a naughty red.
Joey held a bowl in one hand, chopsticks in another, conveying what looked like squiggly worms to her mouth with machinelike rapidity.
“What are you eating?”
“Hunh? These?” She circled a pinched delicacy in the air as he entered the cage. “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”
“With chopsticks?”
“To avoid the age-old Cheeto-fingertip-dust conundrum.”
“I see.” He chinned at the massive screen. “This part of the RedLite takedown?”
“The RedLite takedown,” she said grandly, “doesn’t need my assistance right now. The self-replicating worm’s doing just fine on its own. The problem’s gonna be dealing with them once they’ve recovered from the initial blow.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Joey.”
“Seriously. Save yourself.”
“Joey.”
“Running biometrics.”
“On what?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Josephine.”
“Fine!” The bowl clanked down along with the chopsticks. “You know how the rapist asshole fuckheads wore masks?”
“Yes.”
“So I’m running biometrics on, erh, visible body parts.”
“Meaning?”
“Penis-recognition technology.”
He blinked at her.
“I told you you didn’t want to know.”
“Is that a thing?”
“Penis prints? Evidently. It’s not a perfect science. But there are enough identifiers, like coloration, size, curvature, vein profusion—”
“Okay.” He waved her off. “Enough.”
“Oh, you’ve had enough? I’m gonna haveta boil my brain in a vat of rubbing alcohol.”
In a window mostly buried by others, a flurry of images rotated speedily. It was not a carousel of imagery he needed to see any more of.
“How are you going to search for ID matches?” he asked. “I assume there isn’t a national penis-print database.”
“There are so many jokes I could make right now, but I’d like the record to show that as a trained professional on a mission, I am the picture of restraint.”
“Joey.”
“I mean, the ‘Your Momma’ repertoire alone could land me a Netflix comedy special.”
“Josephine.”
“No, X. There is not a penis-print database.” She struggled to suppress a smile, failed.
“But every asswipe like these rapists has surely sent out a bevy of dick pics in their day. Said texts can be intercepted under FISA or the Patriot Act, or by NSA operating under Executive Order 12333. Once that door’s open, it’s open.
That’s the whole point. To be able to spy on everyone all the time.
And Devine granting me temporary Devine status with the Brain means that I have illegal access to everything.
Like: seriously, everything. It would be terrifying if I wasn’t using it for good. ”
“By doing dick searches.”
“That’s the least flattering manner of phrasing, but yes.”
“How long for results?”
She shrugged, got back to munching. “It’s slow going. I mean, there are, like, more dick pics than atoms in the known universe. But you know what they say.”
“I do not.”
“You just need one dick to lead you to the other dicks.”
“Who says that, Joey?”
She mused. “No one, I suppose. But I’m looking to get you one ID. You can take it from there.”
The black box squawked in Evan’s hand, Devine’s voice pouring through: “If you want to see me, get down here. I’m about to head into the steam room.”
Evan clicked the button. “Copy that.” He pocketed the device. “Thank you, J.”
On that not-quite-occluded window, endless membra virilia whipped by. How many mystifying selected social behaviors, moral derailments, and technological wrong turns had coaxed such a spectacle into possibility?
He backed out of the cage. “As you were.”
She gave him a chopsticks salute.
Devine waited in front of the steam room, towel around his waist. Evan had stripped in a changing stall and was likewise wrapped.
The spa, large enough to accommodate a platoon, was preposterously luxurious—muted earth-tone tiles, shower enclosures hemmed with walls of blue glass, jugs of mint-infused water.
Devine adjusted the humidity dial, tugged open the thick glass door, and entered.
As he reached to loose the towel, Evan gritted his teeth.
He was not in the mood for dick games. He’d seen them played out in countless varieties, sunbathing nudists on display atop chaise longues, spread-legged sauna hogs, no-fucks-to-give old men parading around private-club locker rooms, their balls stretched low like prison laundry bags.
The vory v zakonye in Muscovite banyas were the alphas of the sport.
The way they sank into marble baths of freezing water, blue veins throbbing through their pale skin.
Or how they thrashed themselves raw with birchwood branches.
Evan preferred either to maintain a measure of modesty or fight to the death directly instead of sublimating all over the place, but that was his training, his measure, and the exacting nature of his sometimes disorder.
But when the towel fell away, Devine was wearing a bathing suit. It was surprisingly unfashionable, falling to midthigh, beige with an elastic waistband, and in it he looked pasty and fragile.
Evan followed him into the mist. In case of emergency, he’d brought his RoamZone, swathed protectively in a dry washcloth.
They sat opposite each other on the second tier as the steam vent exhaled an extended dragon burst, clouding the air so thickly Evan couldn’t see his own knees.
At last it ceased and there was no sound aside from their wet breathing and the occasional drops falling from the tiled ceiling.
Devine picked up a spray bottle and shot mist liberally in all directions.
As the eucalyptus essence diffused, Evan felt it open up his pores, his nasal passages, his lungs.
“Have you helped the young woman?” Devine asked.
“More to come.”
“Have you found those who harmed her?”
“Not yet.” Evan pointed through the ceiling to Joey countless stories above in the scarlet room. “Waiting.”
“I don’t envy them.”
“Whatever happens,” Evan said, “will not be pleasant for them.”
The vent emitted another burst, and then silence reasserted itself.
“I can’t slow down enough to stay sane and do everything that I’m doing,” Luke said. “And no one else can do everything that I’m doing.”
Evan gave that a few minutes. “Doesn’t excuse it.”
“Excuse what?”
Evan said, “Anything.”
The dripping sound quickened with the rising humidity, plunking musically at three- and four-second intervals. Evan felt the skin of his face as a membrane aflame from the eucalyptus, alive with heat and sensation.
The steam cleared enough for him to make out the shape of Devine across from him, heat rising off his shoulders and thighs, turning him into a mirage.
“Why did you come here?” Devine said. “I assume you have better things to do than scold me in a steam room.”
“Joey and I took down RedLite. For now.”
“So I’ve gathered from the chatter between her and Rawlings. And?”
“She has them on the ropes. But I want that company destroyed. Completely. For good. That’s more your bailiwick than mine.”
Devine leaned forward and thought about it, the temporal vein pulsating in his forehead, so pronounced that looking at it felt like looking at his insides.
At last, he said, “Let’s go to the sauna.”
When they stepped out, cold braced them like aftershave tonic, Evan’s skin tightening.
The towel around his waist was soaked. What looked like a fat champagne stand housed a pinwheel of tightly rolled white towelettes that exuded a fragrance of fresh lavender.
It had not been there forty minutes before when they’d entered the steam room.
Devine dug his hand into the ice, came up with a sloppy three or four towelettes, and Evan did the same. Cubes clung dryly to the terry cloth. Everything misted.
Their bare feet slapped the tile as they padded across the spa. The sauna was proper Finnish—toaster-intense, delicious reek of cedar, dry as British gin. Inside, Devine twirled the wheel-mounted hourglass to set the sand trickling.
Evan gauged him to see if he was playing any games in here.