He took his dinner alone at the table, lobster rolls and slaw, allowing himself two glasses of pinot grigio.

He didn’t believe in fraternizing with members of his staff. Underlings were to be used efficiently and must always be reminded that they were part of an operation so top secret that they were expendable—in the sense of a bullet to the head—if they spoke about their work to anyone other than a team member. Selena Malrose was hot. Why she chose to waste her life at a computer, buccaneering forbidden data, mystified John Falkirk. He fantasized about drilling her, but in fact he preferred women who were wounded and unsure of themselves and emotionally pliable. Selena had attitude and too much confidence for his taste. Jason Frankfurt was a geek with glamour, a blurry version of Brad Pitt, who tried too hard to be clever and hip; he had most likely given himself the nickname “Foot-Long” as a pathetic attempt to impress—and deceive—women. Even if Selena and Jason hadn’t been underlings, Falkirk would not have wanted to be friends with them. Friendship was an invitation to treachery; he was not so emotionally weak that he needed to risk having real friends.

Besides, when he got his hands on the key to everything, when he left this lame world for a better one, there would be no point in having friends here because he wouldn’t be taking them with him. The senator, his family, and the consortium of billionaires who were backstopping the project’s budget didn’t suspect that Falkirk was working for himself, that the immense wealth and ultimate power they envisioned flowing from the key would be his alone.

Before Ed Harkenbach destroyed the other two keys, Falkirk had used one to voyage across the multiverse on several occasions, and the unlimited possibilities were at once obvious to him. On Earth 1.07, he paid a visit to his stepmother, Katarina. Strangely, she had not stolen his inheritance in that reality, but had treated him as an equal of his half brother and half sister. When he sought an audience with her, in one of her lavish homes, she welcomed him warmly. He shot her in the face and dropped the gun at her feet and, before any of her security personnel could respond, he fled into an adjoining room, from which he ported himself home to Earth Prime.

Of course Katarina remained alive on this world, but killing another version of the bitch in a parallel reality was nevertheless satisfying. He supposed the John Falkirk who lived in that other timeline had been arrested, tried, and sent to prison. However, as much as Earth Prime Falkirk loved himself, he simply didn’t possess the capacity to love thousands of himself with the same fervor. He suffered no distress at the thought of another John being martyred in his name.

The intercom beeped. Selena Malrose spoke from her workstation in the forward section of the motor home. “John, we found archived video of suspects on foot, caught by a traffic cam. They crossed an intersection three blocks from Constance Yardley’s house, a few minutes after the Bestpet would’ve been shot. And we know them.”

37

Most evenings, Amity and her father talked to each other during dinner. Neither she nor he was ever at a loss for something to say, and there was no shortage of subjects that interested them. But on this momentous evening, Daddy wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He said that he was exhausted and worried and needed to think, but no doubt he was also concerned that she would press him further about finding the right Michelle. She’d no intention of doing such a naggy thing, not because she wasn’t capable of it, but because she had a keen sense of the limits of his tolerance for wheedling.

As on those other rare evenings during which they dined mostly in silence, Daddy resorted to an audiobook for entertainment. They couldn’t listen to an entire novel during one dinner, and neither of them wanted to break a rattling-good story into like twenty dinners. So on these occasions, they listened to the same novel to which they had listened an amazing number of times before, The Princess Bride by William Goldman. They remembered every turn in the story better than they recalled many of the details of their own past, but the oft-told tale was never boring. No bullsugar. The story really and truly delighted them so much that, when they came to certain scenes, they recited the dialogue or the funnier lines of text in sync with the audio narrator, though they had never made an effort to memorize any of it.

Through salad and pizza, they listened to the second and third chapters. The third was titled “The Courtship,” in which the vile Prince Humperdinck proposed marriage to a very beautiful milkmaid named Buttercup, whereupon she said that she had loved once before, it had gone badly, and she could never love another. Not accustomed to rejection, the prince seasoned his proposal with a threat.

Three voices—those of the narrator, Amity, and her father—served as the voice of the prince: “So you can either marry me and be the richest and most powerful woman in a thousand miles and give turkeys away at Christmas and provide me a son, or you can die in terrible pain in the very near future. Make up your own mind.”

And Buttercup said, “I’ll never love you.”

Said the prince, “I wouldn’t want it if I had it.”

Replied Buttercup, “Then by all means let us marry.”

At the end of the chapter, Amity and her dad laughed together, which was a fine thing, though it was also a strange thing because, among their favorite fantasy adventures, The Princess Bride was like no other. The story lacked a happy ending. It was a satire filled with stupidity, treachery, suffering, loss, and death—all of which were played for laughs. Few girls short of their twelfth year would take such delight in it. However, Amity was smart and precocious, and years earlier she had learned the primary lesson of The Princess Bride: As wondrous as life was, it was also full of sadness, and the best way to get past the sad parts and enjoy all the rest was to find the humor in even the darkness. Laughter wasn’t just a medicine for melancholy, but also a sword raised against evil. A laugh said, You can’t scare me into surrender, I’ll fight you hard to the end.

She hoped that, in desperate straits, she could laugh in the face of pure evil. Until today, she’d not had much experience of evil. Of sadness, yes, she’d known her share of that, but not the kind of evil that turned your blood to ice water. She supposed she had done all right in that nasty version of Suavidad Beach, with the commie fascists and Good Boy and all. But worse might be coming.

With his paternal sonar sensing fear in the depths of his daughter, Daddy said, “Are you okay, honey?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m good, I’m cool.” But it was then, for the first time in a while, she became aware of the three teeth and the fragment of jawbone in a pocket of her jeans.

38

Although he intended eventually to split to a better world, there were things about this one of which John Falkirk approved.

In this age of ever-increasing state surveillance of its citizens, even a town of forty thousand, like Suavidad Beach, had cameras monitoring traffic at all major intersections, in municipal parks, as well as in and around public buildings. Local authorities archived the video for sixty days or six months or a year, but it was transmitted in real time to the National Security Agency’s Utah Data Center, where it would be forever available, filed under the community’s name and accessible by date.

A year earlier, Foot-Long Frankfurt had planted a rootkit in the NSA’s computer system, allowing him and Selena to enter by a back door and swim through its ocean of data without drawing the attention of the IT-security forces. Together they had tracked Jeffrey and Amity Coltrane from Constance Yardley’s neighborhood through the heart of town.

Selena had edited sequential bits of video into a twitchy stream of images. Falkirk stood behind her, watching her computer screen, as the radio repairman and his mouse-keeper brat eventually made their way to the town library on Oleander Street.

“They were there for eight minutes,” Selena said. “And here they come.”

Coltrane and his daughter exited the library and turned north on Oleander. He seemed to be carrying a book. A traffic cam at the first major intersection showed them turning east on Oak Hollow Road. They were heading home to their funky house on Shadow Canyon Lane, about a mile from where the last camera lost track of them.

“For some reason, Ed Harkenbach entrusted the key to Coltrane,” Foot-Long Frankfurt said, “and Coltrane used it, and they were under attack by the Bestpet when they ported back to Prime. I’d bet my dick on it.”

“Winning that bet,” said Falkirk, “would be like taking home the throwaway from a Brith Milah.”

Selena laughed, and Foot-Long asked what a Brith Milah was, and she said, “The Jewish rite of circumcision.”