Mindbenders

by Ted Krever

Sixteen

  “That was terrific,” Max told Kate as we watched Lowery sprint downhill away from the Palatine. “Except you dropped a plate.”

  “Huh?”

  “Volkov didn’t blink. He caught on it was an image. No harm done this time but, when you’re making an illusion, you’ve got to keep all the plates in the air.”

  “You could do better?”

  “Not a chance, but not the point.”

  “Forget about next time, dammit!” Tauber burst. “That was the message?”

  “I know—not much, is it? It’s what was in his head—it’s the message they were sending out. We got it without probing and he won’t tell anyone. But I’m not sure what it’s worth.” We started back toward the villa. “Let’s get home and play it back,” Max said.

  “Play it back?”

  They had a very nice home theatre system on the second floor. Max went in behind the digital recorder, pulled out the input cables and placed his fingers over the inputs.

  “It’s a hard drive,” he said. “Magnetic impulses on a platter. The same process, actually, as skewing instrument readings in the nuclear plant two or three miles away.”

  He pushed ‘Record’ and stood over the inputs, eyes closed, humming a kind of odd, unmusical tone for a couple of minutes. I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I came real close to the machine—it was humming the same tone. When he finally pushed ‘Play,’ the scene Lowery had shown us appeared on the screen, tumult and frenzied movement but fuzzy images and indecipherable.

  “Is it the assassination of her father?” Kate asked.

  “Sounds kinda like it.”

  “This can’t be right. How can they influence her when ya can’t tell what the picture is?”

  Max replayed the thing to the end, where the control bits showed—color bars, audio tone and a slate. Emerald, 3 of 4.

  “They’re a couple steps ahead of us. They’ve split up the signal. Emerald, Sapphire, Ruby, Diamond—four teams, each sending out separate parts of an image. The recipient gets all four—”

  “—we get static,” Kate said and Max nodded. “This is less than useless.”

  “How come the music comes through while the rest is all broken up?” I asked and he shrugged.

  The sun was coming up over the hills of Rome. Cars and trucks rumbled just outside, the beginnings of Sunday’s traffic. Church bells rang from every direction. Max was at the window, pulling a twenty-foot door open and shut, open and shut, all nervous energy.

  “Today’s the day,” he said. “It’s going to happen today.” There was no excitement in his voice, only dread.

  “We need another team leader,” Tauber said. “We need at least one more part o’ the puzzle.”

  “That’s insane—finding the first guy took you hours.”

  “It’s what we need, ‘less you got a better idea.”

  Kate and I were dispatched to Tiber Island. “They’ve definitely got pictures of Mark and me,” Max said. “If anybody looks sideways at you—even once—cut your losses and get out.” It was pretty clear from the way he was talking that he didn’t expect much from the attempt.

  Tauber looked even more wiped out—he really thought he’d found the missing link the night before; it tore into him to come up empty.

  Getting onto the Island was insanity—five security checkpoints, passports and credentials and interrogation from scratch at each one. First day of the conference, everybody on full alert. With all that, I didn’t notice what was missing until we actually reached the conference center.

  “Do you feel it?” I asked as soon as we crossed the threshold.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. The air’s clear—no probing, no blocking, no nothing.”

  The place was a dead zone, despite media geeks running around interviewing each other, security guards bulky at every entrance, world leaders behind closed doors, entourage busy looking important, caterers, drivers, runners, lots of pretty girls with clipboards and earpieces—but, once we got past the checkpoints, no L Corp.

  We hustled the corridors of the conference center, the old cathedral, getting bolder with every minute, until we found their conference rooms—they were nervy enough to put decals on the door. Ornate, huge rooms—thirty-foot ceilings, fifteen-foot stained-glass windows, statues of long-forgotten saints, angels with wings folded standing across from angels with wings outstretched. Glorious rooms—glorious and empty, seats neatly stacked, whiteboards blank. We were actually giddy for a moment, triumphant at being inside their rooms, unchallenged—for just a moment. Then we realized how wrong it was, how bad it was for us.

  “Nothing,” we had to report when we returned. “Not a sticky note. Dead empty.”

  Tauber banged his hand on the kitchen table hard enough I thought he was going to break something. Max just sighed.

  “Are they done?” he asked, not expecting an answer. “Are they attacking any minute and they’re clearing everyone out in advance?”

  “No,” Tauber said immediately. “If they were attackin’ now, they’d’ve cleared out at the end o’ last night. Why keep ‘em in town this long?”

  “Then what? Where’d they go?” Max’s hands were in the air, grasping for anything, for any scrap of an idea. We were all dry.

  “What’s on the schedule?” Kate asked and we tore to the dining room to check the itinerary again.

  “Twenty things.” The 4000th session of Aid to the Third World, the 2500th session about Climate Change (formerly the 2500th session about Global Warming), address by Al Gore, meet and greet with Bono, briefing by former victims of sex trafficking (‘bet that ‘un’s well-attended’—Tauber), starvation as a growing threat to stability and currency fluctuation as economic policy. All sessions behind closed doors, but with photo ops before or after (no open microphones, media please note). Evening dinner, 7 courses, festival of Italian regional dishes (‘no threat to stability there’-Tauber) and the evening concert, Holst and Benjamin/Wyndham-Lewis.

  We stood staring at the paper spread out across the table.

  “It’s there,” Max said grimly. “The answer’s right there in front of us.”

  “Then why are they all gone?”

  We were staring at each other like somebody was hiding the secret on purpose. We’d all gone stupid from tension. I slumped onto the couch. There was no answer, that was the answer, but what good was an answer like that?

  I don’t know how I fell asleep. I was wired as a cat from exhaustion. I closed my eyes and dropped right out, maybe twenty seconds, maybe two minutes. It wasn’t long, but somehow it was long enough.

  When I opened my eyes, everything looked different.

  “It’s the music!”

  “What?”

  “The music last night—in Lowery’s suggestion! It’s Holst!”

  “The concert!” Kate ran for the agenda. “Holst—the Planets!”

  “‘Mars’ was playing in the background. They’re not feeding her a memory—they’re telling her what’s coming.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Max said. “They dragged a huge crew here to warn her?”

  “Maybe they want to beat her down, make her accept it when it comes?” I offered but it sounded stupid coming out of my mouth.

  A long pause now but everyone rapt, feeling how close we were to the answer.

  “We’re assuming the message is for her,” Kate said finally. “What if it’s for one of the guards— to force one of the guards to kill her?”

  “So L Corp doesn’t get the blame. So they can keep their lucrative security trade afterward.”

  “Doesn’t work,” Billy said when I got him on the phone. “The concert is the only part of the day that can’t work. It’s Heads of State only in a Plexiglas bubble overlooking the orchestra. Security, L Corp, everybody else locked outside. If the plan is to kill her, that would be the toughest time to do it.”

  We each found a different corner of the room now, resentful
, disturbed, isolated even from each other. After running so hard to get this far, silence was terrifying. Not having something to do—not knowing what to do—was chewing us up.

  I didn’t like my thoughts and I didn’t like being uncomfortable with my thoughts either. I grappled with them for several minutes of silence before opening my mouth.

  “There’s no chance we’re fooling ourselves, is there?”

  “About which part?” Max asked.

  “All of it,” I answered. “What if—what if you got tired of sitting around the Everglades playing with the electrons in the desk? What if you wanted to do something important? To be important? What if—?”

  “What if I made it all up. Volkov, Avery, the bomber in the square—all the people in the square. What if the whole thing is an illusion? Is that what you mean?” He’d read me—I couldn’t deny it.

  “Well—you said you made your girlfriend fall in love with you. Kate went to Morocco without leaving the apartment.”

  “So I just bought into his fantasy?” Kate snarled. I hated raising that look on her face. “I was so unhappy with my life that I got sucked into—?” She was all wound up but Max cut her off.

  “We could all get killed here. We could rot in jail for the rest of our natural lives, whether we stop them or not. And it’s not like you and I couldn’t have made all this up—and convincingly. If anyone’s got doubts, now’s the time to raise them.” He stared out the window for a long moment. “I’ve got doubts myself.”

  “Where’s Avery?” Kate sat up like a mannequin on a stand. “If they’re doing a major operation, he should be here, right?”

  We ran into the other room and switched on the set. Naturally, they had Your World TV in Italy too. All the big sports stadiums look the same so we weren’t sure for a moment what we were seeing but then the camera tilted back and upward for a moment and we saw the Sydney Opera House in the background.

  I head a hissing noise and realized a moment later I was making it. It was the sound of the air coming out of the room.

  “Did we get it all wrong?” Kate asked, looking sharply at Max. But his eyes were on Avery, striding the massive stage in Sydney.

  “People say to me, ‘Jim, you’re a dreamer. Hope by itself won’t fix what’s broken in the world. Don’t you see the dark clouds on the horizon? Hope’s not an answer.

  “And, you see, all that proves is, they don’t understand Your World. This isn’t about me giving you the answers. This is about what we can build together.” Avery stepped toward the camera, eyeing it like the prettiest girl at the dance. “Hope isn’t The Answer—Hope is our belief that, together, we can find answers. When you join Your World, you become a member of a worldwide community who refuse to be categorized, refuse to be led, people who band together to make their own towns and cities into better places to live. Not to build the world I want for them or what Government wants. What they want.”

  “What a crock,” I said but Max shushed me right away.

  “Quiet,” he said. “He’s talking to us.”

  Avery stood heroic, right above the camera, a spotlight winking out behind him as he gestured. “So if the dark clouds are coming, I say let them come. They always have, all through history. But we have a way to fight back!”

  Max switched it off. He turned to us, galvanized. “It’s real,” he said. “We’re not wrong.”

  “So the whole thing’s a recruiting drive for Your World?” Kate asked, not convinced and I wasn’t sure either.

  “Why not? He’s positioning, marketing his corporation. Tonight, he sounds optimistic: I’m not worried about the dark clouds. Tomorrow, they’ll look back at how brilliant, prescient—”

  “Almost like he knew what was comin’—”

  “Eerie, isn’t it?”

  “But what does it get him? What’s he do when they’re all members?”

  “Every time Avery speaks of Hope, underneath, he’s festering anger, resentment. I sensed it in the car going to L Corp—in him, they’re the two sides of the same coin. He’s telling his followers, ‘Bring us your anger and we’ll do something about it’. I don’t have to know every detail to know how bad that is.”

  Kate bit her lip until it bled. “I’m not asking for details. I just want to know we’re not fooling ourselves. How do we know? For sure?”

  Tauber stepped up between the three of us and rolled up his sleeve.

  “Bruise,” he announced, pointing. He rolled up the other sleeve. “Big bruise.” Shirt collar pulled to the side. “Big dark nasty bruise. Souvenirs from my stay at the L Corp Holiday Hotel. If I’m real, they’re real. And if I’m not real, why’ve I got the DT’s and arthritis in my knee?”

  “What about Dave?” Max asked me. “What about your father?” he said to Kate. And suddenly I was back in the house in the swamp. The musky smell was up my nostrils, I could see his tongue out and his eyes open and dull. I felt my finger as it touched his eye, the damp squishy feel of it. I remembered the way I felt; the way I thought, the way my brain worked back those few days ago.

  And then I had the answer.

  “It’s the concert,” I said.

  “You don’t know that,” Max said.

  “We don’t know anything. At this point, we’re going to have to go with what we can guess.” I took them in with a glance. “It explains why they’re not out there now. Their plans are set, close-to-deadline. They’re sleeping, recouping, getting ready for their big night. Tonight.”

  “It still doesn’t explain the music on the video,” Kate said. “The sound is all mangled except the orchestra—that’s clear like it’s off a disc.”

  “It’s a music cue,” Tauber said, like it had just come to him.

  “What’?”

  “The earliest form of mind control,” Max said, as though he too was just seeing it for the first time. “Pavlov’s dogs—they hear the bell, they think of food. The message says: Act when you hear this sound, this measure, this part of the music.”

  “They got most o’ the sound from the original video, so it’s split up,” Tauber added. “The orchestra track’s on all four streams so it don’t get lost.”

  “ ‘Mars’, two-thirds of the way through. It’s the concert,” I said and this time no dissent.

  I called Billy again, to inform him we were his crew for the concert tonight.

  “I don’t have a crew,” he said. “Nobody does. The concert is being broadcast on RAI. We’re all taking their feed.”

  “Tell the security office you’re doing an end-of-day wrapup on the lawn with the orchestra in the background. We’re your crew. We’ll get there about fifteen minutes early—there are too many pictures of Max’s face out there; we can’t hang around.”

  “Okay,” Max stood as soon as I hung up, energized, “we all need sleep. Four hours will get us one sleep cycle—that’ll have to do. After that, Kate, you work on making shields and fast—you’ve got to protect yourself tonight, I won’t be able to. Greg, work with her—no, actually, I’ll do it.”

  “I can work with her.” I didn’t like him taking this away from me. If it was my last day on Earth, I could think of worse company.

  “No, I have to work on lightning bolts, she has to work on shields.” He shrugged to Kate.

  “Don’t be so damn apologetic about it!” Tauber said. “Either we’re fighting or not.”

  “We’re here to prevent—” Kate started.

  “You don’t win on defense,” Tauber drilled.

  “Stop!!” Max said, loud enough that the room went silent. “This isn’t a game. I’m going to prepare every possible weapon.” He turned to Tauber, who was smirking. “I’ve killed before, but never on purpose. I know what it does to me. It’s the last choice.”

  “Those are expensive scruples,” Tauber grumbled.

  “Everything is part of everything,” Max replied. “What I kill, kills a bit of me. Greg, work on your blocking and detecting—we’ll send out messages, you call out who�
��s sending and when.”

  “Anything you want me to do?” Tauber asked; his expression said he didn’t expect much.

  “You’re a crafty son-of-a-bitch—and a spy,” Max said and Tauber lit up. “They’ve got a plan—and we’re going to have to figure it out on the fly. You’re my fresh pair of eyes.” He turned to the group. “Okay? Any comments? Concerns?”

  “I toss and turn; it takes me a while to fall asleep,” Kate said.

  “Toss quickly,” Max replied.