Mindbenders

by Ted Krever

  ~~~~

  When we reached JFK, Tauber almost fell flat on his face getting out of the car. He threw an arm out to keep himself from capsizing completely, staggered upright and nearly swooned a second time.

  I grabbed him by the shoulders. He was quivering like someone had put him in a deepfreeze. “Are you okay?”

  “Mostly,” he lied, watching his feet like they might start jumping around on their own. “They denied me liquid companionship at L Corp and we haven’t had a lot of…time…since then…”

  “Is this a good time to go cold turkey?” Max asked him.

  “The question I keep askin’s if I’m more use to ya drunk or sober.” He frowned and rubbed his forehead—his hands were trembling. “Guess we’ll find out pretty quick.”

  The garage elevator was right across from the terminal. Max and Kate came to a sudden stop as soon as the doors opened.

  “Jesus,” Kate whistled. Nothing seemed wrong that I could see. Then Max whispered, “They’re all over the place.”

  “Where?”

  “Look for the lapel pins,” Tauber said and everybody turned on him like he’d lit a spotlight. A series of tremors passed through his shoulders—he shrugged, sheepish. “I’m sorry—didn’t think of it before. Special Duty, male or female, all have lapel pins.”

  “To make it easy for us to pick them out?” Max asked.

  “There’s six pins in a set,” Tauber answered. “each one stands fer a frequency. It’s a security double-check. If ya have L Corp ID but no pin—or ye’re ridin’ the wrong frequency for your pin—they’ve got ya.” He smiled. “Volkov’s paranoid about his shooters goin’ off on their own. Us bein’ able to spot ‘em easy—that’s a bonus.”

  “They told you this?” I asked.

  “They didn’t tell me shit. But,” he pointed to the black-and-blue bulge, “I know how to keep my eye open—”

  “That’s good work,” Max said and Tauber cracked a smile between tremors. “We’ll be as inconspicuous as we can, get our passes, check the luggage and disappear until boarding. Okay?”

  We hustled through ticketing and dropping luggage at the bomb-detector. Then we found ourselves on a mezzanine looking down on the food court. It was a sea of lapel pins, men and women in dark-suited clusters killing time, buying magazines and beers and duty-free IPods, arguing sports and reality shows but sticking to their little groups and eyeing their watches.

  “They’re not here for us,” Tauber said. “They’re not even watchful.”

  “Are they all flying to Rome?” I asked Max.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “They’re blocking.”

  “Can’t you break it?”

  “Of course,” he sniffed like I’d insulted him.

  I’m impatient—I know that. Maybe it’s my addled state—if I don’t find something out right away, I forget I wanted to know it. “So probe,” I suggested.

  “That’s what I’m not doing. They’re are all on headset. One probe’ll set off alarm bells all over the place.” Max’s look swept from one end of the floor to the other. “Hang out here,” he said. “I’ll do a survey and be right back.”

  He went down the steps and through the crowd, staggering slightly like he’d just left Happy Hour. He threaded a route that allowed him to bump into at least one member of each lapel-pin cluster, hitting them from angles that prevented their getting much of a look at him. Then he wandered up the stairs at the far end and returned to us.

  “You’re right,” he told Tauber. “They’re not here for us. And you’re right too,” aimed at me, “they’re all going to Rome. There’s thirty of them on several flights—not ours, thankfully—and that’s just New York. The Washington crowd is going through Dulles and more are coming from North Carolina—Miriam Fine’s pupils—and Boston. They got the call two days ago; no plans, no details. Just show up with a suitcase for purposes unknown.” He looked down and shook his head. “The weakest minds in the bunch.”

  “They’re plenty effective when they work together,” Tauber shivered. “They made me…feel things…at the headquarters. Like I was going to die, like I was suffocating.” He cleared his throat loudly. “And worse than that. They’re a weapon. If they’re sending that many, there’s a plan.”

  “There’s a staircase at the other end of the mezzanine,” Max said, “We go to the bottom and keep our distance until they call our flight.” He turned to Kate. “Don’t focus on anybody as we pass, okay?”

  “Meaning what?” She sounded offended. “You don’t want me to probe them?”

  “I don’t want you to set them on fire, okay?” He set off smirking—she smacked him on the shoulder as he passed.

  The stairwell dropped two stories into a hallway to nowhere. Surely there was a way out from here but it wasn’t apparent. Tauber walked away from us immediately—you could see the tremors taking him. We all watched, concerned, while he fought it off. Max was next to him when he turned to face us again. He handed Tauber some money.

  “Here—take this.”

  “For what?”

  “Maybe it would be smarter if you went home.”

  “Which home is that, exactly?” Tauber said. “We kinda put paid to my apartment.”

  “I’m just trying to be sensible. It’s your safety.”

  “And yours. I get it. I can’t hack it.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then don’t. I’m an old gnarly son-of-a-bitch. I’m an alcoholic walkin’ disaster. But I’m one thing none o’ you is.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A spy. A spy who knows how it’s done. A spy who can get what he needs without gettin’ himself killed.”

  “We could all die here,” Max said, pressing the money at him but Tauber pushed it back.

  “Nothin’ wrong with dyin’,” he said firmly. “Livin’ without a reason, that’s the bad thing. Put your money away—I’m goin’. You’ll need me yet.”

  They exchanged heavy stares for a couple long seconds— Tauber won. Max turned back to us with a kind of fake cheer on his face. “We’ve got a few hours,” he said. “Let’s work on defense.”

  “Such as?”

  Max held his hands a few inches apart for several seconds, letting them waver in and out a few inches at a time, as though measuring some invisible distance only he could judge.

  “Okay,” he said finally, “touch the space between my hands.”

  “Touch what?” Kate said.

  “Between my hands. Touch it.”

  Kate looked like she’d just swallowed a lemon drop and you couldn’t blame her. There was nothing there. But she held her finger out and pushed and the finger buckled.

  “Whoa!” she exclaimed, eyes wide. She poked again, having the range now, and her finger stopped at the same spot. That was all it took—her face lit up and she started running her hands over the invisible object, her palms defining the top and sides and pressing a bit at the edges, her eyes bright and smile growing. As she measured, I was able to make out a faint shimmer in the air, a bending of the light filling that space.

  “What is it?” she said.

  Tauber stuck his hand forward much harder than Kate had and seemed almost to bounce off. “That’s not mindbending,” he gaped.

  Max shrugged. “It’s what I did in Novosibirsk when I was supposed to be studying.”

  He moved towards her, his hands extended in front of him and the empty space somehow pushed her backward. After several shoves, Kate returned the favor, pushing back hard and Max fell backwards onto the floor.

  “It’s ionized air,” he laughed, getting up and brushing himself off. “Molecules with an electrical charge. They pull together like a gas, a connected mass instead of individual particles, but with a strength like a solid object. I generate enough electricity to charge the air around me. And I’ve learned how to manipulate it.”

  He turned to Kate. “Hold your hands apart, open to each other. Do you feel a pull—a magnetism—bet
ween them?” I tried with mine but didn’t feel a thing. Kate looked doubtful too. “It’s not going to jump out and kiss you on the lips,” Max told her firmly. “You have to know what you know. Either you feel something or you don’t.”

  “I feel something,” she said uncertainly. “But I don’t generate electricity—do I?”

  “Enough, I’ll bet,” he answered. “They’re subatomic particles so it doesn’t take much. Just follow the hum between your hands, follow it like the thoughts of the guy in the van across the street. The longer you hold the feeling, the more fluid you’ll get with it.”

  She worked her hands back and forth for a long moment, the fascination on her face competing with embarrassment—this was a typical combination when you were dealing with Max. All at once, he flicked his index finger out close to hers—a spark jumped, bright and sharp, from his fingertip to hers.

  “You’ve got juice,” he smiled, an uncoiled smile for a change. She returned the smile and I immediately felt a bit queasy, like I was intruding or something.

  “Opposites attract—you’ve heard that, of course.”

  Her eyes widened, her breath quickened. “I’ve heard,” she answered. This was pretty juvenile banter as far as I was concerned but no one was asking my opinion.

  “Positive attracts negative,” he said and if he’d held out his finger at that moment, they might have electrocuted each other. “Particles that have to join together to accomplish anything.”

  “How do I know which I am?” she asked.

  He laughed. “You’re both, depending on the moment. You don’t have to worry about it—you’ll automatically attract the opposite. There’s always power around you, once you know what to do with it.” Kate had her hands wide apart as she eagerly worked up a field, a charge, whatever the hell it was.

  “It takes a while,” Max advised, close behind her shoulder, “to build and then all at once—you’ll feel it—it takes on a shape and consistency of its own, a wholeness. You’ve got to keep track of that; it’s the one tricky bit. When it actually takes shape, you have to hold your breath—the rest of us, too if we’re close by—because it sucks all the oxygen out of the air for about five seconds and all that’s left is ozone, which is poisonous. So stay sharp.”

  He bent over and swept his hand out in front of him. You could see a kind of dusty glimmer forming ahead of him. “It works horizontally, too,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a handful of coins and tossing them out. The pile scattered, clinking and bouncing, two inches over the floor. Max grabbed Kate’s hand and she stepped up, eyes wide, onto the surface of the thing. He steadied her as she wobbled around, slipping back and forth like it was wet marble, grinning like a five-year-old on an ice rink. And then the glimmer vanished, the shell disappeared and Kate landed awkwardly, both feet firmly on the floor.

  “Okay, it’s loads o’fun,” Tauber griped. “What good is it?” He was tightly-wrapped, like forty minutes before Happy Hour.

  “Ever want to hit me?” Max asked.

  “Right now, I’d box Jesus.”

  “Go ahead.” He swiped the air between them. “Not too hard, okay?”

  “I won’t hurt ya,” Tauber snarled, throwing a punch at Max’s midsection. It snapped through the air and stopped dead, muffled by a thick curtain about three inches deep. Tauber paused for just a second and slapped out another blow, this time at Max’s shoulder. The fist stopped fast this time and he almost fell from the deceleration.

  “It’s an illusion,” Tauber protested. “You’ve put me under.”

  “Try my knees—but lightly,” Max said. Tauber slid his own knee forward and hit Max’s—the two of them teetered away from each other. “I didn’t charge the air down there.”

  “Okay, it stops girls and old men,” Tauber said. “Will it stop bullets?”

  “It’ll deflect some and absorb others.”

  “You control it?”

  “No—it responds to the vibrations of the bullet. This is the stuff that drove the commisars crazy. The people that study this stuff will tell you that electrons are electrons. The electrons in me could just as easily be in a desk, a cloud, a peanut or a nuclear warhead. And—I know this for a fact but I’m not sure it’s exactly official science—the electrons in the desk become part of the peanuts and then the floor and then the cloud overhead. Matter is fluid—there’s a continual exchange process. Meanwhile, all that matter reacts to input. To put it simply, our environment—everything around us—reacts to everything else around us. And to us. So the field got thicker and grew when Kate approached it enthusiastically, and toughened up, got denser, when you decided to beat the shit out of it.”

  “Ye’re saying everything’s alive?”

  “That’s over my pay grade,” Max said. “But I can’t wait until scientists announce that grass has feelings.”

  “Will it stop lightning bolts?” I asked.

  “What?” All eyes on me. I hate that.

  “Volkov’s guy—Marat—he can shoot lightning bolts from his fingers. He was shooting at me when I was trying to get down the hillside.”

  “How far could he shoot? What kinda’ distance?”

  “At least a couple yards.”

  Max, who never really stood still, was still now. “I—I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a new one to me.”

  “That’s no good,” Tauber said, staring at Max like he’d been betrayed. “I thought you were the big cheese.”

  “I don’t know Marat—I don’t know where he got his training.” Max looked thrown. “Anyway, I bet the shield would stop it.”

  “What do you mean, bet?” Tauber growled. “We’re four people against an army. They’ve got training, equipment, systems and backup. The cops and government are with them. I don’t wanna hear should.” He was livid. “We need offense. Hard offense, something that’ll scare ‘em back to their cribs. We have to even the odds a little bit here.”

  “We’re trying to prevent an assassination,” Max said. “We’re not trying to start a war.”

  “We’re trying to stay alive.” Tauber pulled a cigarette butt out of his pocket and held it to his mouth. “Light it!” he ordered.

  Max stared at him uncertainly—he held out a finger and produced a couple of sparks until the cigarette lit.

  Tauber pulled a couple of times, took a decent drag and exhaled a long plume of smoke.

  “Okay,” he said, “now figure out how to do that to a man. At thirty feet.”