suicide served no other purpose, it was a wake-up call. She didn’t like speaking to the man on the other end of the Zero Phone, always felt a slight chill when she heard the faint lisp in his greeting (never Sigsby, always Thigby), but it had to be done. A written report wouldn’t do. They had stringers all over the country. They had a private jet on call. The staff was well paid, and their various jobs came with all the bennies. Yet this facility more and more resembled a Dollar Store in a strip mall on the verge of abandonment. It was mad. Things had to change. Things would change.
She said, “Tell Zeke to run a check on the locater buttons. Let’s make sure all of our charges are present and accounted for. I’m especially interested in Luke Ellis and Avery Dixon. She was talking to them a lot.”
“We know what they’ve been talking about, and it doesn’t come to much.”
“Just do it.”
“Happy to. In the meantime, you need to relax.” He pointed to the corpse with her blackened face and impudently protruding tongue. “And get some perspective. This was a very sick woman who saw the end approaching and high-sided it.”
“Run a check on the residents, Trevor. If they’re all in their places—bright shiny faces optional—then I’ll relax.”
Only she wouldn’t. There had been too much relaxation already.
5
Back in her office, she told Rosalind she didn’t want to be disturbed unless it was Stackhouse or Zeke Ionidis, who was currently running a surveillance check on D-Level. She sat behind her desk, looking at the screen saver on her computer. It showed a white sand beach on Siesta Key, where she told people she planned to retire. She had given up telling herself that. Mrs. Sigsby fully expected to die here in the woods, possibly in her little house in the village, more likely behind this very desk. Two of her favorite writers, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, had died at their desks; why not her? The Institute had become her life, and she was okay with that.
Most of the staff was the same. Once they had been soldiers, or security personnel at hard-edged companies like Blackwater and Tomahawk Global, or law enforcement. Denny Williams and Michelle Robertson of the Ruby Red team had been FBI. If the Institute wasn’t their lives when they were recruited and came on-station, it became their lives. It wasn’t the pay. It wasn’t the bennies or the retirement options. Part of it had to do with a manner of living that was so familiar to them it was a kind of sleep. The Institute was like a small military base; the adjacent village even had a PX where they could buy a wide range of goods at cheap prices and gas up their cars and trucks, paying ninety cents a gallon for regular and a dollar-five for hi-test. Mrs. Sigsby had spent time at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and the town of Dennison River Bend reminded her—on a much smaller scale, granted—of Kaiserslautern, where she and her friends sometimes went to blow off steam. Ramstein had everything, even a twinplex theater and a Johnny Rockets, but sometimes you just wanted to get away. The same was true here.
But they always come back, she thought, looking at a sand beach she sometimes visited but where she would never live. They always come back and no matter how sloppy some things have become around here, they don’t talk. That’s one thing they are never sloppy about. Because if people found out what we’re doing, the hundreds of children we have destroyed, we’d be tried and executed by the dozens. Given the needle like Timothy McVeigh.
That was the dark side of the coin. The bright side was simple: the entire staff, from the often annoying but undoubtedly competent Dr. Dan “Donkey Kong” Hendricks and Drs. Heckle and Jeckle in Back Half, right down to the lowliest janitor, understood that nothing less than the fate of the world was in their hands, as it had been in the hands of those who had come before them. Not just the survival of the human race, but the survival of the planet. They understood there was no limit to what they could and would do in pursuit of those ends. No one who fully grasped the Institute’s work could regard it as monstrous.
Life here was good—good enough, anyway, especially for men and women who’d eaten sand in the Mideast