Mindbenders

by Ted Krever

  ~~~~

  Her apartment was in what looked like a very dignified old garage. “It’s a mews,” her voice echoed as she opened the huge door—someone had built it some time ago to fit the ornate archway on the street. “We’re tracing back the documents—I know it’s at least two centuries old but that’s as far as we’ve gotten.” The neighborhood was one of those arty places where everything looks a little rundown but one neighbor stacks huge paintings in his window while the sound of a jazz band drifts out of the next.

  The TV was on when she opened the front door. The two spooks, Tauber and Max, immediately went stiff and cautious, moving through the place door to door, throwing open and checking each room thoroughly before relaxing. Kate walked calmly past them into the kitchen to make coffee.

  “Steve leaves the TV on all the time—when he’s here, when he’s gone. It’s his imaginary friend.”

  “Steve?” I asked.

  “My boyfriend.”

  “You live together?” Max demanded. The tone of voice said he wasn’t convinced there was no threat. “He stays here even when you’re gone?”

  “Well—he and Morgan were here. They’re away this weekend.” She hesitated for a moment. “She’s my roommate—Steve’s with her too,” she said with a little hesitation.

  “So he’s the apartment boyfriend,” I remarked and Tauber shot me a look. Kate just nodded and went back to her coffee. “Do you have tea?” Max asked and she nodded and ran water into a kettle.

  “They won’t barge in on us?” Max asked. “The roommate and…your boyfriend?”

  “They’re gone till Monday,” Kate answered wistfully, kindling a questioning look on Max’s face.

  There was an artist’s easel propped against a corner, holding a book of drawing paper. Max tore off a page.

  “We’re going to spread out on the table,” he announced, setting Kate scrambling to move a pile of academic journals onto the floor before he could upend them. Max spread the paper across the surface. Kate pulled out a speckled journal out of the side pocket of her suitcase and opened it to a page marked by a yellow stickie.

  “These are my father’s notes from his talks with Dave, my notes from our conversations and my research. I can’t promise they’re word for word but the gist should be right.”

  The pot started to whistle. Kate turned but Tauber held up his hand. “You stay, sweetie,” he said. “I can make tea—and coffee.”

  “My hero,” she answered. She opened her book and started reading out loud. Each major point she made, Max jotted on the sheet, lines drawn between known connections and dotted lines between suspected or hypothetical ones. It was a familiar list—L Corp, using mindbenders to bolster candidates and business clients, an army of low-level mindbenders to send out mental suggestions and the Big Scheme coming soon.

  “There’s not much new here,” Tauber said when she’d finished. The table was a nice mess of papers and coffee mugs, doodles on art paper and lots of names with arrows pointing at other names pointing at question marks, mostly because we didn’t really know a whole lot more than we did before.

  “What did you do to the shooters at the cemetery?” Max asked again. When she didn’t answer immediately, he explained, “You made their guns fly away. They got naked without a peep.”

  “Can’t you do that?”

  “I want to know how you did it. Their goggles were supposed to hold down outside influences like us.”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “You usually make guns fly around without knowing what you’re doing?”

  “I don’t usually deal with people with guns!” she answered, again as though fighting to get the words out. Or fighting to control herself.

  “So you took their guns—and cell phones,” Max said. “And goggles. And clothes. And you broke the killer’s bones.” Having seen her temper, I wouldn’t have kept pushing this point but that didn’t stop him.

  “I—I didn’t,” Kate protested again. A long moment passed, the two staring each other down across the table. Then she added, “Not on purpose. He really did kill my father! It was in his head. He drove the car himself, so no one would botch the job. He ran over him twice to make sure he couldn’t survive and then just drove off.” The tears were brimming but she fought them off stubbornly, heroically. A long moment passed in silence.

  “But not on purpose isn’t the same as I didn’t do it, is it?” Max said finally. “What did you know when you marched down that hill into the face of six people with serious guns and bad intent?”

  “I knew I was sick of guns,” she answered fiercely. “I knew you were coming from Dave.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “He told my father that, if anything happened to him, you’d be coming.” This was a shock to me but Max just smiled, as though it confirmed something he’d already been thinking.

  “And what else did you know?” he said, voice softening.

  “Why is it so important?”

  “If you’re really fooling yourself that you didn’t make those things happen, I need to know it.”

  “You don’t need to know anything about me.”

  “And if you broke his bones at ten feet without meaning to, I would think you’d better know it. People like us can’t afford illusions about ourselves.”

  “Why? The psychiatrists are all booked up?” She was building up a slow boil again; I started looking for a soft place to land.

  Max eyes flared. They seemed to draw up into his skull. I felt his voice coming at me through the floorboards.

  “Our illusions have consequences. They have a way of becoming real.”

  Kate’s face went paler, if such a thing were possible. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Where is this boyfriend of yours? Where’s your roommate?”

  “I—I told you. They—they went camping. They made plans... a long time ago.”

  “You just buried your father.”

  “You can’t expect them to feel the way I do.”

  “I could expect them to go to the funeral for your sake.” Kate’s jaw was set but her eyes were nowhere near as confident. “Does Morgan share Steve with you when she’s around? Or are you the only one sharing?”

  Max was inches from her now. His voice was so soft, I couldn’t believe I really heard it. I saw his lips moving but the words seemed to come from inside my head.

  “Your feelings run very deep; they frighten you. Millions of people with the depth of a coat of varnish are frightened by their feelings. And you carry oceans—so I understand your caution.” He stared into Kate’s eyes like he was pulling her inside-out through them. “But instead of learning to deal with the power of them, you’ve gone into hiding. You’ve taken partners who don’t touch anything in you and given them free reign. It’s safe—you know they’re only using you for sex and company—you’re in no danger of feeling anything that could get out of hand. Your career keeps you at an academic distance from all of human history. You’ve got the illusion of a life but no nourishment. The longer you bottle those feelings up, the more powerfully they’ll spill out in the end.”

  His eyes were hard on her and for a moment she looked stung, almost shamed. But then her face turned defiant. She took him on and stared him down.

  “Funny-from what I’m reading, you’ve spent the last twenty years hiding—from everything.”

  Max didn’t bend. “I said I understood—I didn’t say I was different.”

  The place was quiet for a long moment before Kate gave out a long sigh.

  “Okay,” she admitted, “when I came down the hill, I knew I wasn’t going to let them kill anyone else. And I knew I could do something about it.”

  She was confiding now instead of confronting. But her voice gained strength as she went.

  Tauber came out of the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and refilled the cups.

  “Well now, that’s the thing, ain’t it? Knowin’ you can do somethin’ �
��bout it. There’s somethin’ big comin’ down in the next day or two and we seem to be the only ones in the world who can do somethin’ ‘bout it.” He clicked his cup into hers. “Yer daddy’d be with us if he was around.”

  She was wavering, still conflicted. “They’re defense contractors. Let the government squeeze the purse strings—they can stop them.”

  “They don’t need the government’s money.”

  “They’ve got Jim Avery!” I burst.

  “Your World? On TV?”

  “He’s the bankroll,” Tauber said.

  “Hmph!” Kate puffed. “That’s some bankroll.”

  “They’ve got all the connections in the world,” Max said, looking intently at her again. “No one will ever investigate your father’s death—or Dave’s. They’ll be papered over. No justice for them if we don’t make it ourselves.”

  You could see this pound its way into her. She’d been holding herself in ever since the funeral and now every feeling in her simmered just an inch beneath the surface. Max sat up and his voice was straightforward, unemotional.

  “I’ve spent twenty years,” he said, “hiding from what I am. Sounds like you’ve done the same. And we see the results: I’ve lost my best friend; you’ve lost your father.”

  Kate was struggling now. “There’s got to be an answer,” she whispered. “There’s got to be hope.”

  “Ya want Hope? Avery’ll sell it to ya, sixty bucks a barrel,” Tauber said with satire in his voice. “He’s the OPEC o’ Hope.”

  Kate wheeled around so fast, we all jumped in place. “I’ve heard that!” she hissed. “Where did I—? From the man in the car! When I got home from… identifying Dad’s…body, I went into the kitchen to make coffee and I got this weird headache, like the back of my skull was hot. A probe. Dad used to probe me in high school, to make sure I hadn’t gone over some boy’s house.” Her voice wavered again and now she kept talking despite tears rolling down her cheeks. “It was the guy in the van parked across the street.”

  “You can handle probes?” Max asked.

  “I was a good girl,” Kate answered, lifting her chin. “When my parents made me promise never ever to do something, I only tried it a couple times.” She flashed a sly smile, almost despite herself. “Besides, I had to learn so I could go over the boy’s house, didn’t I?” Her smile faded fast. “So I followed the probe back to the guy across the street and started riding his thoughts, letting them carry me, for hours at a time.”

  She saw Max’s eyes on her and she reddened.

  “I had a hard time making friends, okay? I was the eerie girl in middle school who talked to herself and commented on what people were thinking instead of what they’d said out loud. Eventually, you make use of your advantages. I started getting into boy’s heads. It got me a better class of dates.” She laughed and placed her cup in the sink. “Anyway, when I got inside the guy across the street, I found out about the big operation—he’s doing security for the flight.”

  “There’s a flight?” Tauber asked.

  “Definitely,” Kate answered. “More than one—he’s in charge of his and two others. And there’s more besides.”

  “Then they’re not goin’ to Langley,” Tauber concluded.

  “Langley? That’s CIA, right?” Kate said. “It’s always in the movies.”

  Max nodded. “This whole thing’s tied up with the CIA somehow. But nobody’s flying from Herndon to Langley—it’s ten miles.”

  “What was weird was, he was doing security and they didn’t give him the details. All he knew was, it’s soon—”

  “Tomorrow—”

  “—they told him to bring his passport and warm weather clothes for a week. And they told him, This is the big shot. We won’t get another chance like this for years.”

  “A chance for what? Did they tell him that?”

  “To kill hope. That’s what they said, to kill hope everywhere.”

  “That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Tauber said. “If they kill hope, what’s Avery got to offer ‘em?”

  The room went silent for awhile. Then I heard myself speaking. “What he’s offering is a fix,” I said. They all turned to look at me and damned if I had any idea what I wanted to say but that didn’t stop the words from coming.

  “My outfit had a local guy, a translator, in Najaf. He was real useful when we first got there and everybody was friendly. Six months later, everybody—Sunnis, Shiites—started targeting his family because he was helping the Americans. We had to smuggle them all to Jordan. He applied for a visa to the States and our CO promised to help him get it.

  “And then word filtered down that they—whoever ‘they’ were—weren’t processing visas, not fast, and then not ever. Which didn’t stop him from showing up in my quarters every couple days, bugging me about it. ‘Are they helping me? We getting a visa?’ What was I supposed to say? ‘It’s America,’ I told him. ‘They’ll do the right thing.’ After the fourth or fifth time, no way either of us believed it.

  “But it ate at me. Why didn’t he go to the CO? Why me? The answer is, because I’m not tough—never been. He came to me because I’d tell him what he wanted to hear. I gave him his fix, his hope for the week. I felt like a pusher, too. Who made me a spokesman for America?”

  I could feel the memory burning inside, like it had just happened, like it was happening right now. My fists and teeth were clenched tight. “That’s what Avery’s doing—offering everybody their fix.”

  We filtered around for a while, aimless, each of us wandering around the room, uncertain of the next step.

  “It makes sense,” Max finally said. “It’s what Avery told us—supply and demand. If they kill hope, he’s got this huge organization designed to offer it—for a price.”

  “And it’s so much safer sellin’ measured portions to them that can afford it,” Tauber said. “Real hope’s messy. Unruly. Bad business.”

  “But what does the CIA have to do with it?” Kate asked.

  “Five minutes talkin’ to them’ll kill any hope ya got left,” Tauber cracked and we all smiled. But the joke didn’t get us any closer to an answer.

  The TV was in front of me; I wasn’t thinking of escape or boredom. I wasn’t interested in what was on. If there’s a TV in front of me, I pick up the remote and turn up the sound. Thirty seconds later, I change the channel. It’s what I do. It’s the way I survived Iraq and a year in the middle of a swamp and probably my childhood. So now I did it again, just out of habit.

  “Preparations continued for tomorrow’s G8 Summit in Rome,” the announcer droned, trying to sound important if not exciting. “Demonstrations were held on four continents today in support of Indian Premier Aryana Singh’s proposal for worldwide nuclear disarmament. Rome police are out in force, covering the major squares and thoroughfares to keep the demonstrations from spiraling into unruliness.”

  “There, ya see?” Tauber cracked. “Unruliness! Them bastards have hope!”

  “Tomorrow’s arrivals of foreign dignitaries have been moved to Rome’s Ciampino Airport, a rigidly-secured military facility. Authorities have assured foreign governments that…”

  My eyes must have gone huge. Kate saw it from across the room. “What?” she demanded.

  “We’ve got it all wrong,” I said and Max slapped his forehead across the room, reading me.

  “Got what wrong?”

  “Everything. CIA!”

  “They’re behind it?” Tauber barked. “Against it?”

  “Neither. It’s not the CIA. It’s just CIA—the airport is CIA!” I ran to Kate’s computer and punched up Google. “I flew into Ciampino once on leave. The airport code—the three letter ID on your luggage?” I waited a second for the information to display. “Ciampino is CIA.”

  “And IAD?”

  I scanned down the list. “Dulles.”

  “They’re flying to Rome tomorrow,” Tauber said. “From Dulles to the G8.”

  “To kill hope,” Kate
murmured, staring at the TV, where Singh was addressing a raucous crowd from a balcony in New Delhi.

  “We seek a new world,” her voice echoed across the square. “In our lifetime, we have seen walls dissolve between East and West. Now it is time to continue that work, to push down the walls of fear between us, to keep pushing until no more walls are left. This is a long road but, as the philosopher says, every journey must begin with a first step.”

  The crowd cheered.

  “Them bastards have hope,” Max repeated quietly. “We’re going to need passports.”

  ~~~~