The Mansion Read online

  “What about there, down the stairs?”

  “Wine cellar. It leads to the rest of the basement, too, but other than the wine cellar, I can’t imagine there’s any reason you’d be in the basement. Extra sleeping quarters for staff, offices, storage, that kind of stuff. Obviously, help yourself to the wine if you want, though, uh, I wasn’t sure—”

  “Because of Billy.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Why don’t you show me the rest of it?”

  The look of relief on Wendy’s face was almost pitiable. It was the first time Emily had seen her lose her sense of calm. Even when she was telling Emily that she wasn’t a romantic threat—which Emily thought was a pretty uncomfortable moment—Wendy had seemed collected.

  “Okay. Anyway, the kitchen upstairs is already stocked up for you two, but it’s not designed to hold more than a few days’ worth of food. Shawn’s used to having his staff working in the background. I’m not sure he even realizes that it’s possible to run out of something. If you don’t want to have groceries delivered from Whiskey Run, I suspect you’ll end up ‘shopping’ down here kind of regularly.”

  Wendy walked her up and down the second- and then third-floor hallways, stopping to show her a few of the suites. All the doors were open, and they mostly looked the same, but a few of them had tiny plaques that were easy to miss. Wendy made a point of showing her one on the third floor near the end. “The Babe Ruth Suite. According to Shawn, Babe Ruth actually stayed here at some point. Supposedly he liked the ladies and the gambling in equal measure. These were the original suites—updated, of course—from the original Eagle Mansion. Do you recognize them?”

  “No. I never really went into the mansion. It was so run-down and there was no electricity or anything. The place creeped me out.”

  They walked back to the spine of the building, and then Wendy took her into the frosted glass cube that hid the stairs to the Nest. Emily stopped to look at the living area, but Wendy grabbed her arm. “Come on. Let me show you your bedroom first.”

  They passed a pair of closed doors—Emily thought she heard Billy’s voice from inside—and stepped into the bedroom. She couldn’t help herself. “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah, a little bit.” Wendy was smiling.

  Remarkably, for a bedroom as large and opulent as this one, it didn’t seem garish. If anything, it was almost restrained. Almost, Emily thought, because the bedroom was big enough to park a dozen cars and still have space left over. Nobody would have mistaken it for a garage, however, even with the polished concrete floor. For one, the concrete was riven with cracks that had been filled with something that looked like . . .

  “Is that real gold?” she asked Wendy.

  Wendy nodded. “Yeah. I tried to tell him I thought it made him look like a douche, but he was convinced it would be a panty dropper. It’s not actually as much gold as it seems, though. I mean, it’s a lot, but only a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth, which, for a guy like Shawn Eagle, isn’t much. You go into the bathrooms of some of the sheikhs or the tackier tech barons, and you’ll see solid-gold faucets and fixtures that use more gold than this. The most expensive thing in this room is actually the window. For the whole addition, actually, it’s the windows. All the glass in the Nest is electrostatic. Nellie constantly adjusts it throughout the day, to account for changes in the position of the sun, for heating, and for privacy. For instance, if you’re changing your clothes and there are people on the grounds, she’ll frost the glass over. If you want to sleep in, she can make it completely opaque. No light at all. It’s like the best blackout shades in the universe.”

  Emily stepped to the window. It was floor to ceiling and ran the entire length of the room and then curved around at the end to meet the back wall. “Isn’t there some sort of limit to how big you can make a pane of glass?” She put her hand against the window. “It’s thick, too.”

  “Bulletproof,” Wendy said. “Aside from any architectural or design concerns, or any of the stuff that Shawn wanted because of Nellie, the truth is that there are always safety concerns for a guy like him.” She knocked on the window next to where Emily’s hand was resting. “It’s not going to stop a round from a tank or anything, but it should stop a shoulder-fired missile.” She saw Emily’s face. “Seriously. Keep in mind that Shawn is as rich as rich can be, and he’s planning to have the cream of the crop to Eagle Mansion. The whole building is armored up. Any room can be sealed off and used as a safe room. He’s got similar security in his other places, but it’s run by Nellie here, of course. If she detects an intrusion, she can basically shut it down. You get some dumbass who thinks he’s going to sneak up here, he’ll find himself stuck and having to wait until the cops show up. Which, given how far away Whiskey Run is and the kind of weather they can get here in the winter, could be a while. The glass is bomb-proof, and all the walls, external and internal, are reinforced. You aren’t busting your way through them without a welding torch, a jackhammer, and some patience.”

  “Kind of overkill, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe, but maybe not. There’s a big difference between multimillionaire and multibillionaire.”

  Emily put her palms against the glass and looked out over the expanse of the grounds. She loved the way the lawn had a gentle roll and then a plateau before continuing to slope down to the river. And the river was a wonder in and of itself, wider than most lakes.

  She watched a hawk swoop low, gliding above the grass and then turning toward the mansion. It was small, perhaps a kestrel? It was stunning how much control the bird seemed to have without flapping its wings, riding the wind closer and closer and . . .

  She took a step back. It was coming right at the window. Straight at her. The hawk was like an arrow, sleek and fast, the beak pointed at her heart. She could see the feathers rippling from the speed of the bird’s flight.

  She gasped.

  The bird tensed and flapped its wings, halting itself just before hitting the window, but it was vertical now, its breast exposed to Emily. The hawk flapped its wings furiously, beating at the glass. Its talons chattered against the window, and the hawk’s beak was opened in what she knew had to be a shriek.

  The hawk was looking at her. It was trying to get to her. She was sure of it. If the window wasn’t there, it would have been clawing at her, biting her, drawing blood.

  And then, suddenly, as if nothing had happened, the hawk turned, extended its wings, and glided away.

  Emily flinched at Wendy’s hand on her shoulder. “Holy crap,” Wendy said. “That was intense. There’s a special coating on the windows that’s supposed to warn off birds, but . . . Yeah.”

  Emily tried to nod, tried to say something, but all she could do was turn and look at the rest of the bedroom. She was too shaken.

  She pretended to be engrossed as Wendy showed her the bed—it looked like it was floating, the platform holding it designed to disappear underneath—and explained that the headboard was actually a wall that went most of the way, but not entirely, to the ceiling, and consisted of a series of four-inch-by-four-inch cubes that Nellie could rearrange, sliding from flush to extended to form shelves or a nightstand depending on what you wanted.

  Emily followed Wendy behind the wall, into the bathroom. It was spacious and flowing. There was a separate room with a toilet, but the rest of the bathroom had curving counters, multiple sinks, a zero-entry shower that took up an entire corner, and a soaking tub that would have looked only slightly undersized as a swimming pool in a suburban backyard. She ran her hand across the counter and leaned into the mirror. It took her a few seconds to realize that the light was shifting as she moved, changing around her depending on where she stood and where she looked.

  “That’s amazing,” she said. “I can’t even tell where it’s coming from.” The light was natural, calming, but there were no light fixtures or spotlights.

  “It’s nondirectional,” Wendy said. “Another innovation that Shawn came up with while designing t
he house. The systems for it will be on the market in a year or two. Where it’s really remarkable is how it functions for task lighting. If you’re reading in bed, Nellie adjusts the lights accordingly, and there’s no light spilling over to wake the person next to you.” Emily looked over, suspicious now of Wendy’s claim not to be sleeping with her boss, but Wendy continued blithely. “The entire ceiling of the room functions as a light source, and Nellie can direct it in a hyperfocused way. It doesn’t matter how you hold your book or move around, the light changes with you so there are no shadows on the page and no light off the page, either. Same thing if you’re cooking or whatever you’re doing. It’s everywhere in the entire building, not just up here. The crazy thing is how natural it feels. I’m surprised you even noticed.”

  Emily followed Wendy out of the room and down the corridor, but as they passed the set of closed doors in the hallway again, Wendy didn’t pause.

  “Aren’t we . . . ?” Emily gestured at the door.

  Wendy looked up at her. She’d continued walking back toward the living area. “No,” she said. “Everything else is open to you, but this is Shawn’s private office. Nellie’s got you authorized to go anywhere else you want, but these doors won’t open for you.” Wendy shook her head and smiled. “Don’t take it personally. I suppose Billy can let you in if he wants, but you won’t be able to get in here without one of the guys. The doors won’t even open for me, and I know more about Shawn’s life than any person alive.”

  She turned and started walking again. There was, Emily thought, a certain smugness in the way she’d said it. She knew Shawn better than any person alive? Emily shouldn’t take it personally? And the way she’d been so quick to answer questions that Emily hadn’t voiced, as if she really knew what Emily wanted to know, like Emily was somehow spending her life obsessing about what was going on with Shawn Eagle. Smug little bitch, she thought, and for just a moment, as they passed the stairs that led back down to the main part of Eagle Mansion, she had the strong and sudden impulse to step behind Wendy and give her a hard shove, right in the middle of her back. She could picture the girl’s thin elegance tumbling and bouncing down the stairs.

  Jesus. She gave her head a shake. What was that about?

  TWENTY

  * * *

  STITCHES

  Billy felt like he had brushed up against a live wire. He was absolutely buzzing. He shoved his hand into the pocket of his jeans, let his fingers touch the two-year chip. A part of him wondered if that was why he had started down the path of beer and gin and coke: the high from booze and drugs was as close as he could come to the elation he felt when he was working and everything was coming together. He’d heard musicians and actors talk about it, how there was nothing to compare to the feeling they had when things were going well. A great show, a standing ovation. A state of grace. He was pretty sure he had the same feeling when he was figuring out how, exactly, to get a machine to do what he wanted. It was hard to explain to somebody who didn’t feel it, though. How many movies had tried to show what it was like to fall into the code? Lines of numbers streaming across a screen? Sure, but not really, either. It was electric, and he had that feeling right now.

  Nellie.

  Shawn had already given him the tour of the building the first time he was back in Whiskey Run, so they went right to the heart of things this time. They made a quick stop in the mechanical room, which was down a flight of stairs into the basement.

  “It’s sandboxed from the rest of the basement. These are the only stairs if you want to get to the mechanical room. There are a couple of stairways to get to the rest of the basement. Maybe three or four. I don’t see why you’d want to go down to the main basement for anything. It’s mostly just storage and rooms for the staff. I’m not even sure you’ll want to come down to the mechanical room either, but basically, this is the guts of the house: heating, air-conditioning, electrical panels, data cables, networking. The water system is actually all in an outbuilding—we pump it up from the river and run it through a ton of filtration. There’s a series of networked ten-thousand-gallon tanks so that even during peak periods at full occupancy the water system should be able to keep up with demand. If there’s a fire, the pumps can bypass the filtration network and feed the water directly to the sprinkler system. I thought about using argon or one of the other gaseous fire-suppression systems, but let’s face it, if there actually is a fire, you can be sure the Saint Lawrence River isn’t going to run out of water.”

  Shawn walked to the back corner. It contained a single server rack that was barely a quarter used.

  “And, the reason you’re here. Nellie. Well, at least her servers.”

  “Seriously? That’s it?”

  Shawn nodded. “Yeah. When we were trying to get Nellie to run back in the day, we were held up by hardware. I mean, that wasn’t all of it, but the hardware hadn’t caught up to what we were trying to do. But, you know, Moore’s Law and all that shit. We hit the point probably three or four years ago where the hardware was good enough, and honestly, we’re pretty close to being able to run a full version of Nellie on the current generation of Eagle Technology phones. Phones! Nellie might be cutting-edge—beyond cutting-edge, really—but the hardware doesn’t need to be. Even this rack of servers is overkill.

  “Anyway,” Shawn said, turning and heading back to the steps, “the door down here is normally closed and locked, since you don’t want just anybody poking around in the electrical panels, but obviously, Nellie will give you access if you need to get in here for diagnostics. And while I can’t imagine you’ll need to do much of anything of this sort, there’s a workshop in one of the outbuildings. Woodworking and metalworking tools: a table saw, chop saw, band saw, drill press, lathe, planer, grinder, you name it. If you’re talking circuitry, there’s a clean room right here, in Eagle Mansion, next to the infirmary: whatever you want to do, from basic soldering to prototyping circuits. Sure, there might be things you need to get shipped in, but if it’s critical, we’ll get it overnighted. Hell, I mean, whatever. If you really need something, let me know and I’ll send somebody on the jet.” Shawn laughed. “That’s one way to make sure that a twenty-dollar part costs me fifty grand. Not that I really think you’ll need to be making anything or doing any real prototype work. I’m telling you, Nellie is close. Swear to god, she was completely cherry back in the lab, so you’re really here for troubleshooting. Yeah, there are some parts of Eagle Mansion that still aren’t quite working because of hardware issues, but that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to figure out where the bugs are, why I can’t get Nellie to work.”

  Billy followed Shawn the whole time, up from the basement and through the back rooms, out to the main foyer and up the stairs to the Nest. As they hit the third-floor stairs, he thought he heard voices, muted and soft, coming from below him. Emily in the mansion, on her own tour with Wendy.

  When they got to the top of the stairs, Shawn turned left. He hadn’t taken Billy onto this side of the Nest when he’d come back in September.

  Shawn stopped in the hallway in front of a pair of closed doors. They stayed closed.

  He turned and looked at Billy.

  “All right. Here we go. I haven’t let anybody in here since I installed Nellie. Not even Wendy has access. Everywhere else in the house, the doors open without your having to do anything. Nellie’s always a step ahead. But there’s a different protocol for this section, because it’s the only place you can go and get root access. Hardware is downstairs in the mechanicals, but the cortex build is limited to this room. It’s also the only room where Nellie is fully operational right now. Most of the construction crew figured out that there was something going on. It’s kind of hard to ignore the physical upgrades. But I want to keep Nellie under wraps as much as possible. Look, tomorrow, once you’ve got the place to yourself, you should give Nellie free rein in Eagle Mansion. She’s mostly just been cooped up in here.”

  Shawn stopped and looked at Billy.
r />   “So, you ask, why don’t the doors automatically open now? Is it because Nellie is sleeping? Is it some sort of a glitch and Nellie doesn’t recognize me? Is there a reason the doors to the office aren’t opening even though I’m here and waiting to go in?”

  It made Billy want to sigh. Clearly, Shawn wanted him to ask. Why, Shawn, oh please tell me why the doors aren’t opening? It was pathetic in some ways, how transparent Shawn could be. Yet another power play, another attempt to make sure that Billy knew who was the boss. It was like Shawn just couldn’t help himself. Of course the doors weren’t going to open automatically while Billy was standing there next to Shawn. If Shawn was the only person with access, Nellie wasn’t going to open the doors unless it was to give Shawn, and only Shawn, access. Basic security. What would be the point of having a private area if the doors accidentally slid open when somebody else was walking by? It would be like designing a public washroom so you can see everything when the doors open. He’d been in bathrooms like that, and he’d thought that whoever had built the bathroom to give a free view to the world was an idiot. Shawn was a lot of things, but he wasn’t an idiot. At least, not a complete idiot.

  Billy knew what was coming. He’d say, why don’t the doors open, Shawn? Then Shawn would go ahead and explain it to him, how it was a security function so that no contractors or staff or guests would accidentally get into the room. And then he’d tell Billy again how Eagle Mansion and the Nest were virtual fortresses with reinforced walls and glass that could take a hit from an RPG, how the only way anybody could get to Nellie was for Shawn to let them in, and blah, blah, blah; pretentious dickhead with too much money who thought he deserved every penny he’d earned. And then he’d look at Billy with that practiced sincerity and tell him that he, Shawn, was the only person with access, but now Billy would have access, too! A gift. That’s what Shawn would try to make it feel like. As if he were doing Billy some huge favor by letting him work on Nellie. As if Nellie would even exist—flawed or not—without Billy.