“Partial to Hydroshocks. Bersa nine-millimeter?”

“Awesome.”

“And . . . you’re not really a bookkeeper in an office.”

“Well, sort of. The cape is at the cleaner’s today, and I forgot to bring along the spandex outfit, so you’re missing the full effect. You can take your hand off my ass, however.”

“My goodness, was I really—”

Which, compared to her usual social day, passes for a class act.

They continue out to the Montauk Point Lighthouse. Everybody is supposed to love Montauk for avoiding everything that’s wrong with the Hamptons. Maxine came out here as a kid once or twice, climbed to the top of the lighthouse, stayed at Gurney’s, ate a lot of seafood, fell asleep to the pulse of the ocean, what wasn’t to like? But now as they decelerate down the last stretch of Route 27, she can only feel the narrowing of options—it’s all converging here, all Long Island, the defense factories, the homicidal traffic, the history of Republican sin forever unremitted, the relentless suburbanizing, miles of mowed yards, contractor hardpan, beaverboard and asphalt shingling, treeless acres, all concentrating, all collapsing, into this terminal toehold before the long Atlantic wilderness.

They park in the visitors’ lot at the lighthouse. Tourists and their kids all over the place, Maxine’s innocent past. “Let’s wait here for a minute, there’s video surveillance. Leave your car in the lot, we’ll pretend it’s a romantic rendezvous, drive away together in my rig. Less suspicion from Ice’s security that way.”

Makes sense to Maxine, though this could still be some elaborate horse’s-ass nooner he thinks he’s pulling here. They drive out of the lot again, follow the loop around to Old Montauk Highway, presently hook a right inland on Coast Artillery Road.

Gabriel Ice’s ill-gotten summer retreat proves to be a modest ten-bedroom what realtors like to call “postmodern” house with circle and pieces of circle in the windows and framing, open plan, filled with that strange lateral oceanic light that brought artists out here when the South Fork was still real. Obligatory Har-Tru tennis court, gunite pool which though technically “Olympic” size seems scaled more to rowing events than swimming, with a cabana that would qualify as a family residence in many up-Island towns Maxine can think of, Syosset, for example. Over the tops of the trees rises a giant old-time radar antenna from the days of anti-Soviet nuclear terror, soon to be a state-park tourist attraction.

Ice’s place is swarming with contractors, everything smells like joint compound and sawdust. Randy picks up a paper container of coffee, a sack of grout, and a preoccupied expression, and pretends he’s there about some bathroom question. Maxine pretends to tag along.

How could there be secrets here? Drive-through kitchen, state-of-the-art projection room, everything out in the open, no passages inside the walls, no hidden doors, all still too new. What could lie behind a front like this, when it’s front all the way through?

That’s till they get down to the wine cellar, which seems to’ve been Randy’s destination all along.

“Randy. You’re not going to—”

“I figure what I don’t drink I can go on that eBay thing and turn for some bucks, start getting some of my money back here.”

Randy picks up a bottle of white Bordeaux, shakes his head at the label, puts it back. “Dumb son of a bitch got stuck with a rackful of ’91. A little justice, I guess, not even my wife would drink this shit. Wait, what’s this? OK maybe I could cook with this.” He moves on to reds, muttering and blowing dust off and stealing till his cargo pockets and Maxine’s tote bag are full. “Gonna go stash these in the rig. Anything we missed?”

“I’ll have another look around, meet you back outside in a minute.”

“Just keep an eye out for rent-a-cops, they’re not always in uniform.”

It isn’t vintage year or appellation that’s caught her eye, but a shadowy, almost invisible door over in one corner, with a keypad next to it.

Soon as Randy’s out the door, she pulls out her Filofax, which these days has evolved into an expensive folder full of loose pieces of paper, and in the dim light goes looking for a list of hashslingrz passwords Eric has found down in his Deep Web inquiries and Reg has passed along. She recalls some of them being flagged as key codes. Sure enough, only a couple-three fingerdances later, an electric motor whines and a bolt slams open.

Maxine doesn’t think of herself as especially timid, she’s walked into fund-raisers wearing the wrong accessories, driven overseas in rental cars with alien gearshifts, prevailed in beefs with bill collectors, arms dealers, and barking-mad Republicans without much hesitation bodily or spiritual. But now as she steps through the door, the interesting question arises, Maxine, are you out of your fucking mind? For centuries they’ve been trying to indoctrinate girls with stories about Bluebeard’s Castle, and here she is once more, ignoring all that sound advice. Somewhere ahead lies a confidential space, unaccounted for, resisting analysis, a fatality for wandering into which is what got her kicked out of the profession to begin with and will maybe someday get her dead. Up in the world, it is the bright middle of a summer day with birds under the eaves and yellowjackets in the gardens and the smell of pine trees. Down here it’s cold, an industrial cold she feels all the way to her toenails. Isn’t only that Ice doesn’t want her here. She knows, without knowing the reasons, that this is about the last door she should ever have stepped through.

She finds a long corridor, swept, austere, track lighting at wide intervals, shadows where they shouldn’t be, leading—unless she’s turned around somehow—toward the abandoned air base with the big radar antenna. Whatever’s at the other end down here, across the fence, Gabriel Ice’s access to it is important enough to be protected by a key code, making this likely more than some rich guy’s innocent hobby.

She moves cautiously in, a trespasser’s timer blinking silently in her head. Some of the doors along the corridor are shut and locked, some are open, the rooms behind them empty in a chill and unnaturally tended way, as if bad history could be stabilized somehow and preserved for decades. Unless of course this is simply protected office space in here, some physical version of the dark archive at hashslingrz that Eric has been looking into. It smells like bleach, as if recently disinfected. Concrete floors, channels leading to drains set at low points. Steel beams overhead, with fittings whose purpose she can’t or doesn’t want to figure out. No furniture except for gray Formica office tables and folding chairs. Some 220-volt wall outlets, but no sign of heavy appliances.

Has all the hair spray been somehow turning her head into an antenna? She’s begun to hear whispering that soon resolves into radio traffic of some kind—looks around for speakers, can’t locate any, yet the air is increasingly full of numerals and NATO phonetic letters including Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot, affectless voices distorted by radio interference, crosstalk, bursts of solar noise . . . occasionally a phrase in English she’s never fast enough to catch.

She has come to a stairwell descending even deeper into the terminal moraine. Further than she can see. Her coordinates all at once shift ninety degrees, so that she can’t tell now if she’s staring vertically down uncountable levels or straight ahead down another long hallway. It lasts only a heartbeat, but how long dos it have to? She imagines somebody’s idea of Cold War salvation down there, carefully situated at this American dead end, some faith in brute depth, some prayerful confidence that a blessed few would survive, beat the end of the world and the welcoming-in of the Void . . .

Oh shit, what’s this— at the next landing down, something’s poised, vibrating, looking up at her . . . in this light it isn’t easy to say, she hopes she’s only hallucinating, something alive yet too small to be a security person . . . not a guard animal . . . no . . . a child? Something in a child-size fatigue uniform, approaching her now with wary and lethal grace, rising as if on wings, its eyes too visible in the gloom, too pale, almost white . . .