Mindbenders

by Ted Krever

Twelve

  We left for New York around two in the morning. Kate had locked herself in her room for a couple of hours, the sound of her crying surfacing every once in a while, whenever she lifted her face out of the pillow. Max went out in the afternoon, saying he was ‘going hunting,’ whatever that meant—he returned twenty minutes later, talked to Tauber a minute and went right out again. When Kate finally emerged, eyes bloodshot and suspended between collapse and explosion, Tauber quietly said, “If we’re boardin’ an international flight with no suitcases, they’ll have us in the interrogation room in about half a second.” When Kate looked up, he waved a stack of fifties in her face—apparently Max had done another bank run.

  She dragged us out shopping and spent the evening expertly packing suitcases in the living room, refusing to let any of us help. But when Max finally returned at 11 with Chinese and said we’d soon be ready to go, she boiled over.

  “I’m totally unreliable. I’ll be a danger to you all. I don’t know what I’m doing till I’ve done it. And I won’t be any good in a fight. There are things I’m not willing to do, even to my enemies.”

  “Breaking every bone in their bodies should get us through most situations,” Max answered drily and Kate surprised herself by breaking into laughter.

  “That’s very reassuring,” she said.

  Tauber returned from down the block with a very lived-in hearse.

  “This won’t attract attention?”

  “They’ll notice ya but nobody’s gonna stop ya,” he smirked.

  “Here’s your passports,” Max announced, handing each of us a packet of several. “Use the American ones for now.”

  “Keep no more’n one on ya at a time,” Tauber cautioned. “The rest go in yer suitcase. Invent a good backstory for yourself, a history. Nothin’ fancy, just simple so we can all remember.”

  The little blue books looked very realistic—mine had several pages of dog-eared destination stamps.

  “Are these for real?” Kate asked.

  “The guy who made them is the CIA’s guy in Philadelphia,” Max explained. “He has the real machines.”

  “So they’re real.”

  “No. The serial numbers come from dead people whose passports haven’t expired and a couple of variations in the holograms make them forgeries. So they’re just wrong enough that the government can deny us.” He smiled. “Does that make me a patriot?”

  “Will he remember making them once the suggestion runs out?”

  “No suggestion,” Max said. “It would have worn off before the G8 ends, so not a good idea.” He held up the chain with the ID card and BMW key fob. “I told him it was L Corp business. They’re the fair-haired boys these days, so he’ll make sure he forgets.”

  Halfway up the Jersey Turnpike, everybody had settled in. Tauber and Max were lights-out in the back seat, Tauber with his arms crossed over his chest like a mummy, Max rousing with tremors every few minutes, taking a drowsy look around and settling back to sleep.

  Kate rocked slightly in the passenger seat, humming to herself but staring at me every once in a while. “What does he want?”

  “Who?”

  “Renn.” She was rolling around in the seat, giving me the girly eye. I’d taken a few peeks at her too, though the memory of her breaking the guy’s bones at the graveyard (and knowing she could read my thoughts) kept me respectful. She was pretty in a distracted tomboy sort of way, the girl who didn’t pay attention to her own looks. Which, in the real world, meant she was pretty enough not to have to—and knew it.

  “I don’t know. It’s a big question,” I asked.

  She ran her finger up the side window of the car—it had started to rain again; we’d been moving through showers the whole way. “Well, that’s the hard part, isn’t it? To know what you want.”

  She reminded me of Tess all of a sudden, which didn’t make sense; they didn’t look at all alike. Maybe it was just the way we were talking, softly, the rain patting on the roof, like lovers after bed.

  “I’ve seen how you pay attention—to everything,” she observed. “You’re a watcher. You have to know something about him.”

  I was a little annoyed she wasn’t more interested in me. “I know who he is,” I said firmly and she sat up. “He’s a superhero who wants to be a person, but he’s not really cut out for either one.” She didn’t seem impressed, though I thought I was reasonably brilliant.

  The overhead lights rolled across the windshield like the drum lights on a copy machine. The rain came in bursts and other cars hovered in ragged clusters every couple miles.

  “What do you remember?” she asked after ten minutes of silence.

  “What?”

  “That’s your problem, isn’t it? Remembering?”

  “It’s one of my problems.”

  “So what do you remember?”

  I wanted her to be interested in me but then I went all suspicious when she was. That’s what I got for the kind of company I was keeping. But the look on her face drew me in. She had power and she was the first one in this whole crew to ask me the slightest thing about myself. She cared—I could see it, just looking at her. Max kept telling me not to worry about how I knew things anyway, right? Just know what you know—I could hear him voice pounding that line into my head. I felt like I knew Kate—and I trusted her. She could probably find out more about me in three seconds than I knew myself—if she wanted to.

  “What do I remember? Lots and nothing. I remember being a kid—riding a bike, stacking hay in a field and binding it. I remember the porch and the steps and the dark green screens over the window but I can’t remember where we lived, not even what state. I remember sitting in the kitchen with my mother, singing Doobie Brothers songs along with the radio. I remember she’d cut her hair short and I remember her dress—some bright orange thing with a big swirly pattern on it—but I can’t see her face. How can I not remember my mother’s face?” The images were there always, fragments, bits and pieces that didn’t add up to anything bigger, any sort of whole. They were always there behind my eyes, behind every conscious thought. “I remember women—dates, my arm around some girl at a movie, parked in the high weeds in my car. I remember the dashboard light and the feel of some girl’s blouse, her perfume and the taste of her neck. And the crickets, so loud. But it’s flashes and feelings, nothing…complete. What do you remember?”

  “Of my life?” she asked, confused.

  “Of my life,” I said. “You’re the mindreader, right? You see any more than I do?”

  “I’m not much of a mindreader,” she answered, “But—can I touch your forehead?”

  I pulled away. “I don’t like anybody touching me,” I insisted though it wasn’t true. I was just instinctively afraid of her opening me up like Pandora’s Box. Of course, as soon as I thought it, she read it.

  “I’m nothing to be scared of,” she said. “I backed into this thing.”

  She smiled and it was a blushing, half-shy, real smile, not that gargoyle smile of Max’s. “I’ll look inside if you want—it’ll be as much of an adventure for me as for you.” Then she stopped and I could see her play back what she’d just said; she cackled a moment later. “I guess that does sound a bit scary,” she admitted but I was already over it.

  In the highway light, she was unbearably lovely. Her green eyes just seemed to soak me up. She’d been waiting, waiting for someone—why couldn’t it be me?

  “I want to help you,” she breathed in an impossibly soft voice, “but you have to let me touch you.”

  If she’d told me to shoot myself in that tone of voice, I couldn’t have said no.

  She put her fingers to my temples and I got an instant erection. A long blast screeched from a truck horn right alongside and I swerved back into our lane. “Sorry,” she said, reddening. “I—I didn’t…I never know when I’m going to do that to a guy.”

  “You mean …that happens a lot?”

  “Not always…but…with some gu
ys, yeah, every time.”

  “You must be very popular,” I said and she giggled. She reached for my temples again; ohh did I not want to resist but I had to pull away.

  “I can help you,” she murmured. “I can feel it.”

  “I believe it,” I said and I sure did. “But maybe while I’m driving isn’t the best time.”

  She settled back into her seat and—just like that—the whole thing fell apart. She was still Kate, real pretty and interested in me but…normal pretty and interested, in a normal way. The magic was gone. I was back in the real world. Tess must have felt that way when Renn released her, though she wouldn’t have known what was happening. But Max hadn’t anything to do with this—he was still dozing in the back.

  This was all Kate, feeding me what I wanted, locating my desire and offering it back. That would be part of a mindbender’s arsenal, wouldn’t it? Part of a woman’s, too. I waited for her to read that I’d caught on, waited a long moment but she just kept staring out the window and then flashed me her cute smile when she caught me watching. I was left wondering if she knew what she was doing at all.

  Crossing the Verrazano Bridge, Max roused and Kate immediately asked, “Why mindbenders? If they want to assassinate her, mindbenders are a nuclear reactor for boiling water. All they need is a marksman with a telescopic sight.”

  “All they need,” Max replied, “is a marksman with access. This is the G8. Rome will be totally locked down. Even before all this disarmament craziness, you would have had 100,000 protesters. Now? You’ll need DNA scans to get past the first barrier.”

  She sat mulling a moment. “You don’t mean disarmament is crazy.”

  “What’s it matter what I think?”

  “You’re serious.”

  “It’s not practical,” he said. “For smaller countries, nukes are their chance to play on the big stage. If the G8 agree to disarm, the small countries will just see it as a plot to keep them down.”

  “It’s not worth trying?”

  “It’s actually dangerous,” he continued. “At the moment, you have nation-states hiring and paying—paying well—the best nuke-making talent in the world. They build quality-controlled arsenals with oversight and checks and balances, if only because the Presidents don’t trust the Generals and vice versa.

  “Nation-states have trade on the world market. Their politicians like going to the UN, getting their picture taken smiling with the President or insulting him. All these pressures tip nation-states toward some sort of moderation.

  “Take them out of the nuke business, what’s left? An international class of brilliant bomb-makers with no paycheck or, if you pay them to do nothing, a pack of creative lunatics bored to death. And who comes calling on them next? Guys who are way scarier than the ones they work for now.”

  Kate took this in and shook her head. She didn’t have an answer but she didn’t like his either. Max shrugged. I drove on as the sun came up over Brooklyn.