Then everything went truly weird at once.
Long ago, when I was a kid and way too young and too dumb to fight back, some louse of a teenager got tired of setting stray cats and dogs on fire so he and his posse decided to get some fun by slipping some innocent little kid a hit of old-fashioned acid. The lucky little kid was me. And now what came next was a kind of a scary montage of those impossibly unreal scenes of my childhood acid trip … .
And then suddenly, without warning, it hurt.
It hurt like hell. I got a glimpse of Maury, who now was straddling my legs to keep me from moving. My pants were off, and I didn’t know when that had happened. He had a sharp knife in one hand, and something that glittered in the other, and what was hurting was that he was sawing away at my butt. The me that this was happening to was struggling, but weakly, and moaning a bit, too, but was way too submerged in alcohol to do anything effective about it. But the me who was experiencing this reprise wasn’t too drunk to respond, and that me was yelling.
Then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t the only one who was yelling. I heard someone call, “There’s nothing there!” I opened my eyes.
The professor was there in his surgical scrubs, and now bossier than ever. “Stay the hell put, Brad,” he ordered. “It won’t take more than a minute. Won’t hurt, either—for this we can let you have an analgesic, anyway. So come on, Brigitta. He’s all yours.”
Those are not the cheeriest words a person might ever hear, especially when he’s paralyzed and just getting over that helmet experience, and pretty woozy, besides. It wasn’t that bad, though. The person apparently named Brigitta stuck my leg with something that immediately numbed it, and somebody else was kind enough to pull the helmet, its needles now obligingly retracted, off my head and, hey! I could see! And what I saw was someone else in scrubs, some female person I had not previously seen, bending over my numb thigh with something sharp in her hand.
That was damn good anesthesia. I didn’t feel a thing. I just saw the woman with the scalpel triumphantly lift high something bloody but crystally metallic under the blood it was drenched in. And the professor was looking pleased with himself. He was nodding to everyone else in the room, looking as though he was accepting shouted congratulations from a boisterous crowd of well-wishers. Which I guess he sort of was.
“Wh—” I began, and again, “Wh—” Meaning, that is, to ask what was to be, but the tongue wouldn’t move the way I wanted it to and the words wouldn’t come out. And then all of them were gabbling together—all but me and a pale young man who was busy stitching up the gash in my thigh and mopping up my blood. They all seemed pretty happy.
Well, so was I. Or would have been, now that they had stopped quarrying private images from my mind, if only I had been able to make my mouth form intelligible words. Finally the professor took a break from congratulating himself and glanced in my direction again. “Ah, Bradley,” he said, sounding more maternal than military, “you’re trying to say something, aren’t you? And your musculature is still paralyzed and isn’t letting you do it? Don’t worry. Deep penetration does sometimes have that effect, among others. A good night’s sleep clears them up most of the time.” He patted my arm. “But you can nod your head, can’t you? So are you all right?”
The thing is, “all right” was much too upbeat an expression to describe the way I was. I did try to nod. The professor sighed, and gave me another pat, and swung into action. Which was trying to make everybody in sight do the best he could to make things at least a little bit all righter than they had been. They lifted me onto a gurney, where six or eight of the reinforcements went over every centimeter of my head with new-skin spray to stop the oozing of blood from the thousands and thousands of little holes they had poked into my scalp.
So things seemed to be improving, apart from that central vacancy in my life where the woman I loved used to be. They took me back to that room that looked so much like a jail cell. Shao-pin and Nola did. And they tucked me into that reasonably comfortable bed. Then I asked them to leave me alone and they did.
And I had what I had been longing for! The opportunity to find out what kind of a person Gerda had been before she was Gerda! And what did I do about it? The day had worn me out. I turned over, closed my eyes, and drifted off to sleep.
I didn’t think that all the problems were solved. I was sure plenty of really urgent problems were left. I just didn’t think that the worst of them were mine anymore.
24
GETTING TO KNOW THE MAN WHO WAS THE WOMAN I LOVE
When I woke up it was still dark. I didn’t care—not about that and not about the fact that my body still resented what I had put it through the day before. I got on the phone and ordered a pot of coffee, not really sure I was allowed to do that, and turned on the wall screen. By the time I was being given choices to make, the coffee was there, and Nola was carrying it, looking as fresh as a teenager on her way to a picnic with the new boy on the block. I supposed she and Shao-pin were taking turns to sleep. I also supposed that they were watching me 24-7, and didn’t care. When she asked if I wanted some real breakfast I said, “Sure. Whatever you think I’d like, and then if you don’t mind there’s some stuff I’d like to do.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll bring you something to eat and then we won’t bother you unless the colonel needs to talk to you.” And was gone, closing the door behind her.
By then I had discovered that there was a vast collection of files about Brian Bossert, but I got lucky. One of them was a formerly best-selling book called He Held the World to Ransom and although whoever curated that particular library had posted a prim little note to say that some of the statements in the file had been questioned by other investigators it sounded just right to me. It started with Bossert’s beginnings, a cop’s son in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the cop being one known for his exceptional generosity to his only son. It sounded like an idyllic childhood except that when Bossert was eight years old his father was killed in a bank robbery gone bad. It had an unusual payoff: When they stripped the masks off the dead robber’s face it turned out that the robber had been Timothy R. Bossert, supplementing his pay from the Ponca City police force with the occasional bank stickup.
With the head of the house deceased, the little Bossert family were on hard times. Brian’s mother had to go to work, Brian himself had to sell his virt games and his electric bike. He began, the author of the book said, hanging out with kids older than himself and with criminal records. Brian himself helped them in their getaways by opening a hydrant on the year’s coldest day, which turned a stretch of highway into a skating rink—and, once, jamming a raw potato on the exhaust of a police car lurking by the side of the road for the miscreants’ car to drive past.
Interesting, I thought, but not very.
By then the breakfast that Nola had brought me was getting cold, so I dealt with the oatmeal and the crisp bacon and the sliced kiwis, leaving the wall screen going. As I chewed on some crunchy, if cold, buttered toast I was thinking about what I had just watched. This person who had just taken the lives of a number of innocent human beings, I reminded myself, was in some sense the same person I loved with all my heart. I got up and stared out the window, trying to make sense of those two irreconcilable facts. That person did not resemble the Gerda Fleming I knew.
On the other hand, neither did the person who had loosed the Pompeii Flu on the world.
25
THE LIMITATIONS OF DEEP PENETRATION
When Shao-pin came in with my four o’clock tea and cookies—what she called biscuits, because she’d done ninety days in the London office before coming to Italy—I was more or less back to normal. That is, I was trying to figure out how Bossert had got the motorman on that West Side train to Brooklyn to sit still while he arranged the timer and the shaped charge and everything else just the way he wanted them. Shao-pin picked up one of my scribbled cards from where I’d put it on top of a book by a screen speaker who’d written about being one of the f
irst to reach the drowned train when they finally began pumping the subway tunnels dry. She held the card up to show me. It was too far away for me to read, but I knew what it said: Wh m = man not keep B fm settgup? “I can tell you that,” she said. “Bossert shot him. Shot everybody in the car and barred the doors to the next car. They found the slugs in the motorman’s head at the autopsy.”
“Huh,” I said. “You read the book.”
She gave me a faintly worried look. “I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said, and, although I hadn’t known she’d been doing that, of course I didn’t. Shao-pin or Nola or the professor—or anybody else—was welcome to snoop through anything in my room when I wasn’t there because there was only one thing I was hiding and that never left my person. I said, “What?”
The worry went out of her look. “I said, do you have any other questions?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I told her, taking a nibble off the edge of one of the cookies—ginger, all right. “So just leave the tea things and—Oh, wait a minute. There was one thing I meant to ask you. Did the people in the farmhouse turn out to be bootleggers? Gerda said there was a lot of that going on along the strada because of all the decaying flax in the farms. Covered up the smell of the brewers’ mash.”
She was paying more attention to the folding of my napkin than to what I was saying. “How would I know that?”
“Weren’t you going over the follow-up on those tests on my brain?”
She said, “The deep penetration, right. I hope you don’t mind? I was just checking to see if the teams had found anything useful.”
“And had they?” I asked, hoping to get to my soup before it got cold.
“No, Brad. Especially not about that farmhouse. Did you forget you didn’t go there?”
She was almost annoying. I decided to set her straight. “I didn’t, no, but Gerda did.”
“Well,” she said, “that explains it, doesn’t it? They didn’t have enough interview teams to send out to every place that came up in your DP so on the first run they’re only talking to people in places you visited together. Is it important?”
I shrugged. “The only thing is there was this other time we went to Caserta and she disappeared for a couple hours. I wondered if she went to the same place. It’s probably nothing.”
“Probably,” she agreed, “but I’d better report it.” And that she did, and played her report to me while I was working on the soup, and I had nothing to add.
That lasted all the way through the afternoon and dinner, during which I decided the New York subway system was really lucky that it had Park Slope on one side of the river and Murray Hill on the other, because if the tunnels hadn’t had to climb those hills where they did it looked to me as though they could’ve flooded a lot more of the system than they had. I watched most of a soccer game while I was eating dinner and got myself into the shower afterward. Then I stretched out in my bed, not particularly sleepy, looking for some sort of wall program that wasn’t about the Pompeii Flu or sports.
I didn’t get it. I didn’t get any entertainment app at all. What I got on my wall was an override picture of Piranha Woman, not looking particularly glad to see me. “What are you doing in bed, Sheridan?” she demanded. “Get dressed! Colonel Mazzini’s having you picked up in ten minutes. For what? What do you mean, for what? We think we know where your girlfriend’s hiding out and the colonel thinks you’re going to want to see her captured. Up! Are you listening to me? Get the hell up!”
That was the end of her message. Her preempted image froze on the wall and then broke up, quickly replaced by a remote from Ulan Bator, where the mayor had just announced that because of the number of people either turning up sick or taking care of those who had, the city’s working departments would be operating only between ten in the morning and two thirty in the afternoon until further notice.
26
ONE LAST KISS
I had just gotten myself into a pair of pants when there was a rap on my door. I opened it and there was the professor, Piranha Woman hot on his heels and wearing a scowl even deeper than usual. The professor wasn’t scowling. He in fact was looking quite pleased about something, and when he spoke he sounded that way, too. “Get dressed, Bradley,” he ordered.
Well, I was doing that already, but I paused in slipping into my shirt to tell him so.
He just said, “Do it faster. We’ve got a job to do.”
He didn’t look evil, the professor never did that, but I was taking no chances. I stopped with my head just ready to slip into the shirt collar. “What job?” I demanded.
He opened his mouth to give me an answer but Piranha Woman got there first. She spoke to him, not even looking at me, “I say once more, Colonel, you are making a serious mistake.”
That was when the old man stopped looking jolly. “I say once more, Major, shut up,” he said. She cringed a little, bit her lip a little, but did as she was ordered as, back to good-natured, the colonel turned again to me. “Why, Brad,” he said, “what we’re going to do, we’re going to pay a call on that farmhouse outside of Caserta. I think Gerda may be holed up there.”
I took a chance. “Because of what I told Shao-pin?”
“Yes, partly,” he said. “We knew she had a place somewhere around here and the other possibilities got eliminated quickly. Your lead may eliminate, too, but at the moment it’s the only one we’ve got.” He sat down on the edge of my cot, watching me pull on a pair of socks. “Bradley, I’m not wrong about this, am I?” he asked. “You do want to be there when we take her, even if—even if she resists.”
“You’re not wrong,” I said, pulling on my sandals. “Even if anything.”
He said, “Yes. In fact I think she’s more likely to be peaceful if you’re there.” He rose. “Though we can’t be sure of how she will react,” he added. “Now we’re out of time. The column will be waiting.”
He was right about that, too. I could hear the engines as soon as we left the room, more than a dozen vehicles, and as soon as we got into the command car that was waiting at the curbside, doors open, our driver slipped us into what looked like a space right after what seemed to be the fourth or fifth vehicle in line. I noticed that all the vehicles ahead of ours had machine-gun emplacements on the roofs.
As our driver slipped us into place the whole column began to move, bright lights began blinking on every car, and we accelerated into the stream of traffic, Piranha Woman in the front seat next to the driver, me sharing the rear with Colonel Mazzini, who was already looking out the window with one eye and keeping data flow from his opticle for the other, and we were barreling down the autostrada at something over a hundred kilometers an hour. From the backseat I couldn’t tell how much over, but I could hear the faint eepeepeepeep that informed the driver he was in violation of the posted speed limits.
We weren’t alone, of course. It was well past rush hour but the autostrada carried the usual autostrada’s 24-7 worth of traffic, buses and tandem trucks and farm pickups and about a million private cars, all unwillingly shoehorning themselves over to the slow lane when the strobes and ultrasounds of our lead high-speeds warned them that a chunk of Security was on the move. I couldn’t see exactly how many Security vehicles were in the posse that the professor had summoned out of nothing. More than a dozen, counting the personnel carriers behind us that I couldn’t see most of the time, and the ambulance and the two fire trucks that were only visible when the road was making one of its gentle curves. With all the pulsing strobes and the shuddering of the ultrasounds and the heehaw of the clear-the-way signals it looked and sounded like many more.
And there I was in the middle of it, racing like a bat out of hell to join Security in the hunt—the ultimately fatal hunt, no doubt how it would turn out, for my dearest, dearest love.
Once we were well on the way Colonel Mazzini pushed his opticle to one side and turned to look at me. “We’ve got a few minutes,” he told me. “No doubt you have questions.”
; I surely did. I didn’t have to ask any of them, though. The professor knew what they were, and economized on time by answering them all without waiting for me. It was that silly trip to Caserta, the one when Gerda got lost, that did it. Only she hadn’t been lost at all. After I got out of the three-wheeler? Gerda had waited just long enough for me to be out of sight. Then she drove off on an errand of her own.
So the professor said. And how did he know this? Simple. It was satellite surveillance that gave him his answer.
There was very little that happened on the surface of the Earth, or at least the inhabited part of it, that one spy satellite or another was not watching.
So it was no trouble for the computers to locate Gerda’s car in the palace parking lot, just where, and when, I’d got out of it. When it pulled back out of the lot they did briefly lose it in the overpasses and underpasses that went to the autostrada. That wasn’t much of a problem, though. By then the same search programs that had picked me out of the Cairo subway mob knew what the three-wheeler looked like from overhead. They widened the search a little, and there she was, tootling up the farm road to the place where she had scored the grappa.
Where we were heading, me and Piranha Woman and the professor and all those heavily armed Security grunts.
Before anything began to look too familiar the professor ordered all the bells and whistles off. “We don’t want to tell them we’re coming,” he told me. I hadn’t asked for an explanation. I didn’t ask for one when I observed that all the other autostrada traffic had been stopped on the shoulders, so that nothing moved on the highway but our Security cavalcade, nor even when I felt our car slow from its 120 kph or so to maybe 70. I didn’t need to be told that the reason we were slowing was that we were getting close, and the reason for halting the other traffic was that the professor suspected there was going to be shooting, and didn’t want any of it to kill civilians. Then, tardily, I recognized the dingy old warehouse on a hill, and the dirt road to the farmhouse where Gerda had scored her half-liter of grappa.
All the Lives He Led Page 26