Chase

by Linwood Barclay

  It was hard to hide behind a post when you were constructed horizontally instead of vertically.

  Chipper heard a train approaching on the opposite track. Seconds later, it slid into the station and the doors parted. People standing on the other side of the platform waited for passengers to disembark, but not Chipper. He darted onto the car, found himself a spot under one of the benches, and took a moment to catch his breath.

  The doors closed. The train began to move. Posters, faces, huge tiles bearing the station name, slid past the windows. Then, beyond the windows, darkness.

  Chipper took a moment to assess his surroundings. The car was barely half full. It was neither morning nor late afternoon, so this was not a rush hour crowd. At the far end of the car, a man in tattered clothing who gave every indication of being homeless—the wonderful number of scents coming off of him was one clue—was holding out his grey and dirty hand, asking people for money. Most acted as though he was invisible, looking into their laps, pretending not to see him.

  At the other end of the car, closer to Chipper, a young woman was playing a musical instrument. It looked like a violin, but was much bigger. Chipper locked his electronic, million-dollar eyes on the instrument, scanned images in his database. Ah! This was a cello. By the woman’s feet, blocking an entire seat that would have held three people, lay the case for the instrument, open to allow people to toss in money if they enjoyed her playing.

  As the man begging for money approached and glanced down into the cello case, the woman stopped playing and eyed him fiercely.

  “Don’t even think about taking my money, Jack,” she said.

  The homeless man turned and started walking back to the other end of the car.

  Then, suddenly, Chipper’s view was blocked.

  A woman with very thick legs and a large shopping bag dropped down onto the seat above him. When the dog tried to work his snout between her ankles so he could see what was going on, she let out a startled scream.

  She looked down to see what furry thing had touched her, probably fearing it was a rat like the one Chipper wanted to chase, and when she saw that it was a dog, she laughed. Chipper took in her upside down face, which was round with a bulbous nose.

  “Hey you,” she said. “Howya doin’?”

  Chipper’s tail thumped twice. No matter how dire his situation, he always enjoyed it when people talked nicely to him.

  “You’re a pretty dog,” the woman said. “You’re such a pretty dog. How’d you get on here? You belong to someone?”

  She asked nearby passengers if any of them owned this dog.

  “Not mine,” said someone.

  “Nope,” said the woman who’d been playing the cello.

  “So who do you belong to, then?” the woman asked, returning her attention to him. “Maybe there’s something on your collar that says who you are.”

  She reached down, tried to grab hold of the ring around Chipper’s neck and managed to drag him out from under the seat far enough that she could get a look at it.

  He did not want her looking at his collar. She absolutely should not look at his collar. He knew that he might have to snap at her if he couldn’t pull himself away. He didn’t want to have to do that. He could still taste Simmons’s blood in his mouth, and he didn’t want to have to bite anyone else.

  The woman was trying to get her fingers under the collar, but she couldn’t. It was as though the collar was glued to his fur. It seemed attached to his body.

  “Someone sure has put that tight on you there, buster. And what the heck is this? It’s not a leather collar. It’s like it’s made out of metal or something. Who’d put a metal collar on a dog?”

  Chipper tried to pull his head away but the woman would not let go of him.

  As the train rounded an underground curve in the track, the metal wheels squealed and the lights flickered, going out for nearly three seconds before coming back on.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” the woman said. “It’s like this collar is welded onto you. And what—what the heck is that?”

  Maybe he was going to have to bite her after all.

  “Is that something…is that something you plug something into?” To the passenger next to her, the woman said, “Doesn’t that look like one of those openings like on your phone, when you plug in the wire to recharge it? Why would he have one of those on his collar? That is totally—”

  Chipper said, “Grrrrr.”

  The woman quickly withdrew her hand. “Whoa! That’s not nice! Bad dog! That’s a bad dog!”

  Chipper scurried back under the seat.

  “If you don’t belong to somebody,” she said, “somebody needs to do something with you. You need to go to the pound!”

  Chipper didn’t like the sound of that, but hoped that if he stayed under here and kept to himself, the woman would leave him alone, at least until they reached the next stop, at which point he’d shoot out those doors the second they opened.

  Wouldn’t matter which station it was, Chipper would be able to find his way. All he had to do was stop a moment, access his GPS program.

  Those folks in the White Coats had thought of everything.

  The train clattered along the underground tracks, nothing but black whipping past the windows. The lights inside the car flickered, went off again for a second, and came back on. No one took much notice.

  They’d be pulling into another station soon, he was sure of that.

  But then the train began to slow. Within a few seconds it had come to a stop in the tunnel between stations, where it sat in silence for several minutes.

  Uncertainty bordering on alarm began to sweep through the car. People from one end to the other began to chatter, speculating as to the cause of the delay. Chipper could hear them all.

  “What’s going on? Why is the train stopped?”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Maybe one of the switches is stuck!”

  “Hope we’re not here long.”

  “Why don’t they tell us what the problem is?”

  Then, a loud crackling over the speakers.

  “Attention,” a man said through the static. “Attention. Sorry for the inconvenience this delay is causing to your journeys. We’re going to be here for just another moment. There is no cause for alarm. We do have an incident on the train, but there is, I repeat, no cause for alarm. We will be moving shortly, but when we enter the next station, the doors will not be opening immediately. Repeat, the doors will not be opening immediately.”

  The passengers grumbled.

  Chipper lay there under the seat, his chin resting on his paws, his brown eyes darting up and around warily.

  They know, Chipper thought. They know I’m on the train, and they’re coming to get me.

  At the dump, another truck pulled in next to Jeff’s as he was emptying the last can of garbage. Painted on the side were the words: SHADY ACRES RESORT.

  Jeff knew the place. It was another fishing camp just down the lake from Flo’s Cabins. To call it a “resort” was pushing it. It was a collection of cabins as old and run down as Flo’s were. But fishermen—and often the family members they brought along with them—weren’t all that picky. As long as they had a roof over their heads, a place to lay their heads at night, a boat that didn’t leak, and the fish were biting, they were happy. And even if the fish weren’t biting, if the fridge was stocked with cold beer, they’d be okay.

  Jeff had driven past Shady Acres a few times in his twelve-foot-long aluminum boat, but he’d never set foot on the place. It was one of Aunt Flo’s rare kindnesses that she let Jeff have his own boat to run around in, which he took out onto Pickerel Lake for a spin whenever he had a few free minutes. But he never took out the boat to fish. Jeff never fished. He just cranked up the ten-horsepower motor as fast as it would go and bombed around, making sharp turns, looking for waves tall enough that he could fly over the top of them, hoping to hear the roar of the propeller catching air.

&n
bsp; One thing he’d never noticed when buzzing past Shady Acres was the person getting out of the passenger side of that resort’s pickup truck right now.

  A girl. About twelve or thirteen years old. Skinny, straight brown hair to her shoulders, wearing ratty jeans and sneakers and a faded red T-shirt that said SHADY ACRES.

  Getting out of the driver’s side was a man Jeff guessed was her dad. Pretty old, maybe even forty. Heavyset, balding, in a plaid shirt and dark work pants.

  The girl got to the back of the truck first and dropped the tailgate. Then she jumped up and started moving the garbage cans towards the back. Her dad grabbed them, upended them to allow the trash to drop into the huge pit, then set the empties to one side.

  She was pretty strong, Jeff thought, for a girl. Especially a girl who was about the same age he was. He noticed her arm muscles tense and strain as she shifted the cans around. She glanced at Jeff, standing in the bed of his aunt’s pickup.

  “What are you lookin’ at?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, turning away. Time to get behind the wheel and head back to Flo’s Cabins.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  He turned his head, told her the name of the place.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Her father said, “Yeah, I know your spot. That’s Flo Beaumont’s place. Been running it ever since her husband passed away, about six years ago.” The man smiled at Jeff. “I heard she got her nephew helpin’ her. That you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded. “I’m John Winslow. This here is my daughter Emily.”

  “I’m Jeff Conroy.”

  “How old are you?” Emily asked in an accusatory tone.

  “Huh?”

  “You can’t be old enough to drive. How can you be driving? You don’t look any more than twelve.”

  “Excuse me?” he said. “I’m not twelve. I’m sixteen.” But his voice practically squeaked as he said it, and he knew the girl was never going to believe him. But you had to be sixteen to drive legally, and he didn’t want her father reporting him to the police. He seemed like a nice guy, but still. Jeff wasn’t so sure Aunt Flo was right about being able to buy off the cops with a free boat rental.

  “Seriously?” she said.

  “What are you?” he asked, determined to be just as insulting. “Nine?”

  “I’m thirteen,” she said, trying to make it sound important.

  Jeff smiled. “Well, maybe in three years, your dad will let you drive the truck. Maybe even by yourself, one day.”

  “Nice to see you two hitting it off,” Mr. Winslow said. He’d continued emptying trash cans while his daughter and Jeff sparred. “You gonna help me, Emily, or you just going to flirt with that boy all day?”

  Her face flushed with embarrassment. Jeff’s did, too. Flirting? Jeff was pretty sure what they’d been doing was not flirting.

  “Dad,” Emily said. She turned away from Jeff to help her father while Jeff got back into the cab of his aunt’s old Ford. He turned the key and drove out, glancing into the oversized mirror bolted to the door along the way.

  The girl looked his way once, then, maybe afraid Jeff had seen her in the mirror, spun around again.

  Sheesh, Jeff thought. The very idea, that beneath all those insults they had taken some kind of instant liking to each other.

  But it was nice to know her name was Emily.

  “Tell me exactly how this happened,” Madam Director said sternly to Simmons. The Institute scientist had been released from the infirmary, where his bitten wrist had been bandaged.

  The Director, a slim, striking woman with red hair, oversized, black-framed glasses and deep, penetrating eyes, was sitting in a black leather and chrome chair behind a broad aluminum desk that had nothing on it but a paper thin computer monitor and a keyboard.

  “He must not have eaten the treat,” a sweating Simmons said. “He just pretended to eat it. If he’d eaten it, he would have been sleepy enough that I could have injected him.”

  “So you were outsmarted by a dog,” Madam Director said, her voice icy and patronizing. Simmons had always thought her voice sounded like teeth tearing into flesh.

  Defensively, he said, “Well, Madam Director, not just any dog. As you know, all the canines here are much more advanced than your typical dog. They are, quite frankly, as intelligent as, say, a child of ten or eleven, and—”

  “Would you be proud to be outwitted by a child, Simmons?” Madam Director asked.

  Simmons swallowed. “No, ma’am.”

  “Which subject was this again?”

  “It was animal H-1094, sir—I mean, Madam Director. The one we call Chipper. He was not working out, which is why I was going to inject him, to end his life functions, which would allow us to remove all the hardware and install it in another subject without risk of damaging it.”

  “Not working out? Refresh my memory.”

  Simmons struggled for an explanation. There was a long one, about how the animal’s original instinctive functions were not interfacing satisfactorily with the circuitry, how the software was not successfully overruling some of the dog’s natural tendencies, how the dog was unable to reliably commit to mission objectives.

  But there was a simpler explanation.

  “Chipper liked to play,” Simmons said.

  Madam Director shook her head. “And is it true that this Chipper actually used your security card to make his way out of the building?”

  Simmons cleared his throat. “Yes, that is what he did. In some ways, however, that is evidence of just how successful the program is, that a dog could be smart enough to understand—”

  Madam Director cut him off with a wave of the hand. “You’re embarrassing yourself, Simmons.”

  “Yes, Madam Director. But we’re doing everything we can to recover the animal. Just before I came in here I heard that they had it cornered in a subway car. It’s only a matter of time before we have it back.”

  “Hmm,” said Madam Director, who pushed back her chair and stood up. In four-inch heels, she was taller than he was; her eyes stared down into his. “And what sort of orders have been given to those in pursuit?”

  “To get the dog back, even if it means the hardware is compromised. If the only way to get the dog is to destroy the dog and everything that has been implanted in it, then that is acceptable. It’s totally understood that we do not want the dog to come into anyone else’s hands.”

  “I should think not,” Madam Director said. “That would be nothing short of catastrophic. Do you realize how few people are even aware of the work we’re doing?”

  “I have a pretty good idea, yes.”

  “Were you aware that not even the President of the United States knows of the work we are engaged in?”

  “Yes, Madam Director,” Simmons said.

  “The billions of dollars that have been channeled to our research don’t even show up on the books,” she said, stepping away from her chair, slowly coming around the desk. “We are so secret that even the people who are supposed to know about us don’t know about us. But when you let that dog outwit you, you put all that in jeopardy. You run the risk of having everything we do here exposed.”

  “I, uh, am deeply sorry about that,” Simmons said.

  Madam Director stood directly in front of Simmons, close enough that she could smell onions on his breath. Her right hand was closed into a fist, hiding something.

  “I can assure you that nothing like this will happen again,” he said.

  The woman nodded. “No, it will not.”

  There was a long, awkward pause. Finally, Simmons said, “Is that all, Madam? Because I’m eager to return to supervising the recovery mission.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Madam Director said. “I’ve already put someone else in charge.”

  Simmons’s eyebrows went up. “But I can handle that.”

  Madam Director smiled. “I think Daggert is more the man for the job. I have somet
hing else for you.” She opened her right hand to reveal a dark, marble-sized item. It was a beefy, salty treat, just like the one Simmons had given to H-1094.

  Madam Director held it up a few inches away from Simmons’s lips.

  “Eat this,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Eat. This.”

  “Madam Director, really, there’s no need to—”

  Behind him, he heard the door to Madam Director’s office retract into the wall. He spun around and saw a man standing there. He wasn’t wearing a white coat like most of the others at The Institute. He was decked out in a black business suit, with a crisp white shirt and black tie. On his feet were black shoes that reflected the lights recessed into the ceiling. He was tall and thin, and one had the sense of being watched by him, even with his eyes obscured by sunglasses.

  “Daggert,” Simmons said. “Just back from the Matrix?”

  The man called Daggert said nothing. But Simmons noticed that he held, in his right hand, a syringe.

  “Look at me,” Madam Director said.

  Simmons looked at her and gulped. “I’m very, very sorry about what happened.”

  “Eat this,” Madam Director said for a third time.

  Simmons looked at his boss, then at Daggert and the syringe in his hand. He took the treat, and with great reluctance, placed it in his mouth and grimaced.

  “You’re thinking that maybe you’re just as smart as the dog,” Madam Director said. “That you can just hide it in there.” She smiled. “Chew it up.”

  Simmons’s jaw did not move.

  “Come on now, Simmons. I’m doing you a favour. You won’t feel a thing. Any other way is going to be much more painful.”

  “But…but you need me. I’m invaluable!”

  Madam Director looked past Simmons to Daggert. “Who’s invaluable, Daggert?”

  “Only you,” he said.

  She smiled. “There you have it. Start chewing, Simmons.”

  His jaw slowly began to move. Madam Director leaned in close to hear crunching within the man’s mouth.

  “That’s good. Eat that up.”