7
Until Amity suggested a relationship between Ed’s visit the previous evening and the sudden appearance of the black-helicopter crowd, Jeffy hadn’t made a connection. When an old and delusional vagrant said he was being hunted, you imagined the stalker—if one actually existed—must be from the same community as his hapless quarry: a burnt-out drug addict who believed in the existence of something called “the key to everything,” or maybe a psychopath who targeted homeless men wearing polka-dot ties with plaid shirts. You didn’t leap to the conclusion that the posse would number more than a dozen men, some in SWAT gear, equipped with a few million dollars in ordnance.
Sometimes, however, common sense required paranoia. It seemed that the political elites were striving, with admiration for George Orwell and rare unanimity, to ensure that the totalitarian state in the novel 1984 would be realized no later than fifty years after the author predicted.
In the kitchen, Jeffy plucked the box off the table. It wasn’t heavy, suggesting that most of the contents were Styrofoam peanuts or some other kind of packing material.
Indecisive, he stood listening to the helicopters—one whisking the air in the distance, one louder and nearer—considering where to conceal the package. He didn’t quite believe that the “swine” of whom Ed had spoken, whoever they might be, would storm into the house and ransack it room by room, drawer by drawer. However, every hidey-hole that he thought of seemed obvious if in fact those men boldly crossed his threshold.
At last, he hurried into his workroom, one half of which was entirely devoted to the restoration of highly stylized Deco-period Bakelite radios.
To the left of his workbench, shelves held eight radios of fabled brands—Fada, Sentinel, Bendix, Emerson, DeWald—that had been cleaned and polished; with their vibrant colors restored, they were objects of beauty and high style. They had been rewired, and new vacuum tubes had been installed. They could pull in AM stations as they had in the 1930s, although once you switched them on, the tubes had to warm up before a broadcast could be received.
To the right of the bench, another set of shelves contained six scarred and discolored radios on which he had yet to begin work. He had bought them at swap meets, country auctions, and from a network of hoarders who collected all manner of items that other people thought were junk. He had paid as little as forty dollars and as much as two thousand per radio, depending on the knowledge of the seller who set the price. After he had restored it, passionate collectors would pay five, six, even ten thousand for a rare and beautiful specimen.
The largest radio awaiting his attention was a Bendix model that appeared to be muddy brown. When cleaned and polished, however, it would be a rich butterscotch yellow with buttercup-yellow tuning knobs and tuning-window frame. The guts of the Bendix were on his workbench, and only the empty Bakelite shell stood on the shelf: eleven inches wide, eight inches tall, seven inches deep, not large enough to conceal the box that Ed had entrusted to him, although it might be large enough to hide whatever was in the box.
He heard Ed’s warning voice in memory. You must not open it. Never!
A helicopter swept over the house, so low that slabs of carved air like giant fists slammed the roof and rattled the windows.
Even as unimpressive as the package lo
oked, it would draw attention from searchers precisely because it was unusual.
Never open the box, Jeffrey. Never touch the thing in it.
Jeffy had difficulty getting his head around the idea that rumpled, rheumy-eyed Ed hadn’t been sliding into dementia, after all. That something of great value and importance must be in the box. That a “demonic posse” might be after the old man. Even if all that was true, as the choppers and Suburbans suggested, nevertheless Ed must be exaggerating his enemies’ ruthlessness. Beasts? Murderers who would make an innocent man and his daughter disappear?
The doorbell rang.
He was pretty sure it wasn’t the postman with a certified-mail form that required a signature.
The aircraft that had passed over the house now returned and hovered. In the downdraft from the rotary wing, palm trees thrashed so noisily that they could be heard in spite of the racket made by the helo.
Jeffy’s heart thumped like that of a rabbit in the shadow of a predator. “Sorry, Ed. I should’ve taken you seriously.”
He put the package on the workbench and tugged at the knot and stripped away the string.
As someone on the front porch rang the doorbell again, someone began to hammer insistently at the back door.
He took the lid off the box and then hesitated. The object was swaddled in plastic bubble wrap.
Hide it well, Jeffrey. Save yourself and your girl!
A man appeared at the window, veiled by the sheer curtain, a shadowy form backlit by the bright morning sun.
Jeffy quickly unraveled the bubble wrap. The key to everything resembled a sleek smartphone, maybe five inches by less than three, but the stainless-steel casing featured neither buttons nor a charging port, nor any markings. The black screen wasn’t inset, but seemed to be an integral part of the case, as if the device had not been manufactured, but had been built one atom at a time by some 3-D printer more advanced than anything currently known.
The doorbell rang, the fist pounded, the trees thrashed, the chopper clattered, and Jeffy tucked the item under the shell of the Bendix. He took the guts of that radio off his workbench and stashed them away in a drawer.
Hurriedly, he tore the pasteboard box and its lid into small pieces. He dropped the debris and the string in the wastebasket and stirred the pieces up with the rest of the paper trash.
8
When Jeffy opened the door, three men loomed on the porch. The one at the front wore a black suit, white shirt, and black tie. He was as good-looking as any model in a GQ ad, his thick black hair slicked back like that of a film-noir character who reliably carried a switchblade and a coiled-wire garrote. His eyes were gray, his stare as sharp as a flensing knife.
The two men behind him wore black cargo pants, black T-shirts, and black jackets loose enough perhaps to conceal shoulder rigs and pistols. They looked as if they were born to be trouble. One of them spoke into a walkie-talkie, and the helo lifted away from the house and drifted somewhat to the south.