We were there.
Our car slowed and pulled as far as possible to the right, fifty or sixty meters short of the farm road, so the personnel carriers could slide past. A three-wheeler with a machine gun mounted on the right was already chugging up the hill. It stopped halfway there. The machine gunner sighted in on every visible door and window—most of them shuttered—while the driver scanned the house with field glasses.
What their next step would have been I never found out. They didn’t get to take it. On one of the windows the shutters flew back.
I had no doubt of what it was that flew out of it, incandescent red and fiery yellow, drawing through the air a shallow arc that ended in the face of the machine guuner. He didn’t stand bemused, waiting to be turned into bloody, crispy shrapnel. He responded as he was trained to, fingers seeking the machine gun’s trigger, the barrel swinging toward the opened window. He was fast, yes, but not as fast as the rocket from the handheld launcher inside.
The missile did not only pulverize the upper body of the machine gunner, it caught the driver and flung his racked and burning body onto the nearest row of rotting vegetation. But by then the next Security vehicle had opened fire on that window, and then two more behind it; violent explosions flared inside, and then a dozen square meters of outer wall peeled away and toppled to the ground. The missile shooter had to be inside, along with his weapon, but all I could see was flame. What I didn’t know was whether the shooter had sensibly got out of there right after firing that one shot, or stayed around in the hope of another. If he had he was no longer alive.
Or she was.
By then every vehicle in the Security line was bouncing up that road. From the front seat Piranha Woman turned to the professor, her face a mixture of eagerness and joy. The professor was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “Let the grunts do their work. They’ll fetch whoever’s in there out for us.”
Well, that was sensible enough for someone commanding an assault force. It didn’t appeal to me, but then Gerda was involved and about her I had never been sensible. “Can’t we at least get a little closer?” I asked. Or begged, or maybe even whined.
I don’t know what the professor thought of me at that point. He glanced at me without any recognizable expression at all. Then he raised his voice. “Move us up to the turnoff,” he ordered the driver.
As we began to move the file of Security vehicles was just beginning to bounce off the road to get around what was left of the destroyed three-wheeler. The room the missile had come out of was blazing merrily. There was no sign of life from anywhere else in the farmhouse … .
And then, as we entered the farm road, there was.
It didn’t come from any of the doors or windows we could see. There was at least one door on the far side of the farmhouse, though, because something came roaring out of it, heading across the planted fields.
What it was (we found out later) was a four-wheel-drive farm jitney, meant for cruising plowed fields. It did its job. It bounced across the rows of rotting flax, headed for the Caserta-bound highway. Piranha Woman had the glasses on it. “I think it’s her!” she screeched. “I can’t see the face, but it’s a woman! Don’t let her get away!”
If anyone was going to catch her it had to be us; all the rest of our posse was tangled along the side of the road, bypassing the ruin of the three-wheeler. “Do it!” shouted the professor, but even before he spoke the driver was backing us bumpily onto the empty autostrada. Our car was at least twice as fast as the escaping Gerda’s could ever be, but backing onto the highway slowed us down. As we began accelerating down the highway Gerda’s crop-jumper was a hundred meters away and already climbing the autostrada’s embankment. And Piranha Woman had opened her window, with a rapid-fire gun poking out and ready.
She wasn’t firing, yet. She was looking back over her shoulder at the professor, waiting for his order. But if Gerda showed any sign of getting away from us I had no doubt that that order would come.
There was not going to be a happy ending for my love. Dead or captured: there were no other apparent possible outcomes.
What that estimate didn’t figure on, of course, was Gerda’s—or maybe I should say Brian Bossert’s—track record. He (that is, she) had been in plenty of tight places before, and survived, by doing what was not expected.
She didn’t try to run away from us along the empty autostrada lanes heading toward Caserta. She cut right across the paved lanes and kept going, bumping across the parkway strip and right into the lanes that led to Naples.
The professor had stopped the eastbound traffic. Westbound it was sailing right along, 100-plus kph, maybe a little slower than usual as the Naples-bound drivers tried to figure out why the Caserta lanes had become suddenly empty, but still chugging along.
I saw what Gerda was up to. If she could just get through that cross traffic there was a chance—maybe not a good chance, but a lot better than no chance at all—that we couldn’t follow.
Oh, it wasn’t a wonderful plan. What it was was just the only one open to her and, hey, it might have worked.
It didn’t, though.
It was an intercity hydrobus that hit Gerda’s farm jitney, but of course the smashing and crashing didn’t stop there. I don’t know the final total of fender benders that were lined up on the shoulder, the drivers yelling accusations at the other drivers and at the carabinieri. The carabinieri didn’t yell back, just went on with the job of getting all the warm bodies at least a dozen meters away from the hydrobus, all that is but my busted-up beloved, stuck irretrievably behind the little engine, which had taken up residence in her lap.
It hadn’t been an equal match. The intercity bus outmassed Gerda’s little cart at least a dozen to one. It was efficiently crumpled, and the released hydrogen in the bus’s fuel chamber could not be prevented from flaring up. Fortunately the system was designed as a release-as-needed fuel provider. If it had all gone up at once there wouldn’t have been any survivors at all. As it was even Gerda survived for a little while. Long enough to talk to me. As soon as the flare died down I pushed the carbinieri away and ran to her. I took her in my arms, calling her name. She said, “Brad? Is that you?” I don’t think she could see, but she was pressing something into my hand and whispering, “Take it. Hide it! Don’t let them get it.” Then the others were getting there, trying to make me release her.
At first I wouldn’t let them, because she was still talking. “Brad,” she said, “was I wrong?” But then she did stop, and I let them take her, because I had felt her die.
27
MY CAREER AS AN EVIDENCE THIEF
“Hide it,” Gerda had said. So I did exactly as I had been commanded by the dying wish of the woman I loved with all my heart. That is, I hid it. I wrapped my fist around it, which was not hard to do because it wasn’t much bigger than an American quarter, and I didn’t unwrap it until I was slipping it into my hip pocket.
You see, I had a very high opinion of Security’s spy cameras. The chance was slim that they had such things bearing on this patch of superhighway between Naples and Caserta, but slim is not the same as none, and Gerda had wanted it hidden.
It stayed hidden all the way back to the Security complex in Naples, where they drove me into a built-in garage. I was well inside the building before I stepped out into one of those bare Security rooms, where they got me to make a statement for their records before they let me say good-bye to Gerda.
Well, actually they were fairly nice about that part. They had cleaned her corpse up a little and covered most of her with a white cloth. She lay on a gurney with her eyes and mouth closed, and they left me alone in the room with her for a bit.
I didn’t protract it. She was gone. I just kissed her cold lips, and whispered into her unhearing ear, never mind what, and I went out and closed the door behind me, and never again saw that body that I had once so thoroughly enjoyed.
The professor came by while I was eating something Nola had brought for me. He asked if
I needed anything. I said no. He asked if I had any questions. I said no to that, too, although that wasn’t true. I had great big and seriously worrisome questions about that object in my right hip pocket.
But he was not a person I could ask.
He studied me in silence for a moment. I didn’t say anything, either, but I was beginning to feel exhausted. I didn’t dare fall asleep, though. What if someone found a bed to put me in, and undressed me and, very naturally, checked my pockets? I suppose my weariness showed, because the professor stirred. “We’ll get you out of here pretty quick,” he said, standing up. “But there’s one thing I want to say to you.” He put his hand on the doorknob, looking a little—well, bewildered, I thought, as though unsure of what message he wanted to give me. And then he said, “Thanks,” and looked as though he had something more to say, but didn’t say it. Then he opened the door and was gone.
Getting me home took some doing. First they gave me a prisoner’s jacket to pull on over my own clothes. They put me in a police van, along with six or seven petty criminals shackled to their own seats. There were cars full of reporters circling around all the entrances to Security’s building. All the people in them looked us over with microscopic care and some took pictures. But the Security people had pasted a quite plausible-looking mustache under my nose and put bifocal glasses on top of it and none of the watchers looked any harder at me than at any other of the felons. And when we got to the transient jail there were half a dozen ways out, with Nola sitting waiting in a three-wheeler in one of them. Off came the mustache, on went a jail guard’s cap, and I drove us carefully home, avoiding temptations to speed or to rush a traffic light. When we got to the barracks for Indentureds like me I turned the three-wheeler over to Nola to park and for the first time in—had it really been not much more than one full day?—let myself in to my own dingy little room, with its own narrow and lumpy cot that I no longer had anyone to share with me. I pulled the covers into something like order and checked the wall screens to make sure they still worked. They did, of course, but I had no interest in hearing some hastily assembled experts tell their audience who Gerda and the Welsh Bastard had really been, so I turned it off again.
At least they didn’t mention me.
Nola tapped on the door about then, to tell me the three-wheeler was being driven away and if I wanted anything, anything at all—food, drink, whatever—I had but to name it and she would deliver it. “Thanks,” I told her, “but not right now. I’m going to try to get a little sleep.” When she was gone I kicked off my shoes, turned off all the lights except for one bright one near the head of the cot and, fully dressed, slid into bed. I looked up at the remaining bright light that I couldn’t quite reach and scowled in irritation. The irritation was theater, if anyone was bothering to perceive me just then, directed at myself for failing to turn the light off.
Then I petulantly pulled a quilt over my eyes. After a while I let my breathing get light and regular, changing position two or three times as though responding to the lumpiness of the cot. And then very slowly, timing each move to go with my breathing, I gradually slid out of my hip pocket the thing that Gerda, with almost her last breath, had asked me to hide.
All that was also theater, meant to make whoever was manning the spy cameras (if any) on my room lose interest in the sleeping me.
For a wonder—no, for what I was thinking of as practically a once-in-a-lifetime miracle—my planning was working out just as I wanted. I was quite sure that my room was bugged for Security, but I considered it very unlikely that they had stuck a camera in among my bedclothes. And when I held the blanket just so then plenty of light from that “forgotten” fixture leaked into where my clenched fist was holding the object Gerda had entrusted to me.
It was what I had thought it would be, a data coil. It was smaller than the ones I was used to. It wasn’t the usual colorless plastic, either. It was ruby red, and it had printing on it that wasn’t in English. The letters looked Russian to me, in the quick glance I gave it before carefully repeating the process in reverse to tuck it away again. That made me think Stans. And then I began to think about that very large question that lay before me.
First, what was the thing?
It could after all just be another data coil, but of some foreign manufacture. That was a quite likely answer to the specific question, but, like most easy answers, it just raised harder questions. All of them centered around the question of what kind of data did the data coil hold?
That was a biggie.
Suppose, just suppose, what Gerda had been carrying around with her had been nothing less than the secret way of curing Pompeii Flu. That was quite possible, was it not? And what medium would she carry it on, if not a coil? And she had recently been in the Stans where there was still a strong Russian influence left over from Cold War days, so a Cyrillic alphabet was quite possible.
And there was a suspicion that was taking up more and more room in my more and more worried brain. If it was right, then I was carrying a heavier load of responsibility on my quite self-centered shoulders than I had ever supposed possible.
I didn’t know how to answer those questions. But then, fortunately, I was spared the pain of that particular attack of indecision, because pretending to be asleep carried its own consequences, and next thing I knew—or didn’t know—I actually was.
28
ANOTHER UNDESERVED REPRIEVE
Sometimes fate is a lot kinder to me than I deserve.
What woke me up was riotous noise in the hallways. People were tramping up and down, talking loudly, once or twice actually singing. When I got out of bed and began turning lights on it was only moments before Shao-pin was tapping at my door. She was wearing a party hat and carrying a party glass of what I thought was champagne, which she carefully set down before throwing her arms around me. “Oh, Brad!” she cried, pausing only to kiss me again. “She had it! They found it! The cure!”
And it was true. When Security did their professionally methodical search of my beloved’s French-fried and julienned body they found that special coil, the coil of a recording with all the specs for the cure that saved the human race, or at least way the most part of it. They found the coil in a little pouch around her neck that looked like leather but wasn’t. It had kept the fire out and the coil was unharmed. Maury hadn’t been wrong about it. He had just lost out to my very dear Gerda.
So the world was now safe?
Well, that was going a step too far. A lot of things had to happen before the dying stopped. Knowing what the solution to a problem is isn’t quite the same as having actually solved it. When there’s a deadly disease threatening your dearest you may have all the complete printed directions for making a serum in your hand, but you can’t inject printed directions into a dying four-year-old. You have to manufacture the stuff the directions are all about before it can do her any good, and by the time you finish doing that the four-year-old is probably dead.
We were luckier. With the data on the coil it took only three weeks and two days (I counted) for laboratories all over the world, all the millions of them, to start churning out the magic little pale yellow capsules that stopped the disease in its tracks. No one not already infected would get it. And even some of those already rotting away did not get worse … Well, they didn’t get better either. The tissues that were gone stayed gone.
I was not surprised that some of them preferred not to keep on living in their present fragmentary state.
But I am getting ahead of myself. For those twenty-three days people were still getting infected and things were happening. Most of my personally interesting news came from Nola and Shao-pin. When I was ordered to the labs for another round of testing it was Nola who shepherded me from examining room to examining room, each one a little different, with their doctors or sometimes nurses who poked me and listened to my heart, my breathing, and the faint rumblings from my belly. And it was Lieutenant Nola who told the testers, most of whom were at least captains a
nd majors, how much trouble they would be in if they overtired me and what the colonel would say when she reported to him.
People were being nice to me, too. Especially female people like Nola and Shao-pin.
Probably that was orders from the colonel, I thought, although I don’t believe his orders included hinting to me that sex wasn’t out of the question. The way Nola put it was that she would undress me and give me a nice hot bath before tucking me in. That didn’t sound bad, but I didn’t want her going through my pockets before I found a good hiding place for the stolen coil. Elfreda Barcowicz didn’t hint about what she offered. She invited me to check out her lavish new suite—with, she said, “a really comfy double bed.” And then when I told her I couldn’t because I was still in love with Gerda Fleming, she got all misty-eyed and a day or two later she called me into her new office—the place that used to be the Welsh Bastard’s dispatch room—and gave me back my job as a purveyor of fine, or not so fine, wines. The Bastard wouldn’t be using that room anymore. He had been the one in the window with the rocket launcher, and Elfreda inherited his job—and the pay and the deluxe housing that went with it. I supposed that Security wanted somebody they could trust supervising personnel, and who better than one of their own snakes?
When the professor did finally show up at my winebar in full uniform, the onlookers were the first things he noticed. “Who are all these people?” he demanded. When I told him that I didn’t know but just wished they would go away, he scowled. “Somebody has outed you, Bradley. I don’t know where the leak came from. Not from anyone in Security, of course, but there were all those witnesses on the autostrada.” He shook his head, then looked around at the gapers and settled on Cedric, gazing unhappily out of the door of his establishment. “You!” the professor called. “We need your premises for a bit. You can relieve Bradley at his shop.”
All the Lives He Led Page 27