Hearts of Sand(58)

Ray Guy came over and looked at the book. “Everybody is in a mad race to publish e-books,” he said, “but we know better. You can’t trust e-books. They’re wired into the central system. The authorities can reach right into them and delete anything they want. They can eliminate the book altogether. They can change passages. Once a hard copy is printed, though—well. It’s almost impossible to get rid of a hard copy.”

Gregor opened the book to a spread in the middle and pointed to it. It contained a dozen snapshots of the Waring sisters at the beach, on a picnic, on the back terrace of their own house. Many of the pictures were so old, there were only three of the four Waring sisters in them, and the three in the pictures were all under ten.

“See this?” Gregor said. “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s the Waring family,” Ray Guy said blandly. “It’s a book about the Waring robbery case, so it’s hardly surprising there are pictures of the Waring family in it. Have pictures of the Waring family been declared subversive?”

“This,” Gregor said, pointing again to the picture spread, “is a photo spread consisting of pictures that could have come from only one place: a Waring family photo album. There is no place else anybody could have gotten these. Somehow or the other, you got access to the Waring family photo albums.”

“Maybe one of the sisters gave them to me,” Ray Guy said.

“I’m sure one of the sisters did,” Gregor said. “Chapin Waring did. I do think you know where Chapin Waring has been, and I do think you’ve been protecting her all this time. But I looked you up on the Internet—”

“The Internet is the tool of the authorities,” Ray Guy Pearce said. “The Internet gives the Sheeple the illusion that they have choice, and access, and information—”

Gregor ran right over him. “I’ve looked you up on the Internet,” he said again, “and from what I’ve been able to figure out, you started publishing pictures like these within weeks of Chapin Waring’s disappearance. She couldn’t have gotten back into the house in Alwych to get them that early. Everybody was being much too careful.”

“The authorities are powerful, but they have flaws,” Ray Guy Pearce said. “They’re too sure of themselves. They’re too convinced that they have everything under control. It’s what’s going to bring them down in the end.”

“And that means,” Gregor said, “that you’ve been in that house. And given the increase in the available pictures over time, you’ve been in it more than once. The last time, a couple of days ago.”

“A couple of days ago, I was where I always am. I was here, making sure the truth gets out in spite of what you people do to try to stop it.”

Gregor gave Ray Guy Pearce a long look. Now that he’d had time to observe the man close up and over a little time, he could see that he hadn’t been so wrong in what he’d expected when he came here. The big, hulking, well-buffed physique was out of place, but the attitude was not. Behind the intimidating exterior was a man who was close to hysterical with fear and paranoia. Ray Guy kept his hands on his waist, but in the split seconds of the one or two times he removed them, Gregor could see that they were shaking. And physique or not, this was a relatively old man. He had to be at least sixty.

“Here’s the thing,” Gregor said. “You run around, telling yourself that you’re some kind of genius at black ops, but the simple fact of the matter is that you’ve gotten away with what you’ve gotten away with for so long because nobody took you seriously. They would have if they’d known what you were actually doing, but they didn’t. In a way, I can hardly blame them. There are dozens of you people across the country. The agencies watch you more or less, just in case one of you goes crazy. But mostly you don’t, and mostly we don’t have to worry about you. But I’m not like the other Bureau people you’ve had to deal with so far. I spent the first third of my career on kidnapping detail.”

“So that’s it,” Ray Guy said triumphantly. “Kidnapping. You’re going to try to frame me for kidnapping.”

“Don’t be any more of an ass than you already are.”

“An ass? Really? That’s what you’ve got? I know what you’re up to, and it won’t work. I know what you can do. I know what you can’t do. And I’m not a Sheeple.”

“No,” Gregor said. “You’re a man who goes around saying that the United States is secretly a police state that inflicted the 9/11 disaster on itself in order to tighten the screws against its own people, that it’s being secretly run by the half-human descendants of Satan’s demons and human women in aid of bringing the reign of the Antichrist about as quickly as possible, and that it still, for some reason, is absolutely required to observe your rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”