Double Cross

by Carolyn Crane

  Greg nods at the glasses with a distant look in his eyes. “You can touch them, Justine. They won’t hurt you. He wasn’t lying.”

  I’m surprised Greg would know this until I realize he’s taking dictation from Marty’s mind.

  I go pick up the glasses. All quite normal: plastic brownish rims, smooth, cool glass lenses.

  Packard throws Marty’s jacket back at him.

  “Girl’s paranoid of everything,” Marty says. “Doesn’t say much for whatever goes on around here.” He shakes it out. “Can I go now?”

  “Where’d they come from?” Packard asks me.

  “Off the Internet,” I say, meeting Marty’s gaze straight on. “Paradigm Factory dot com.”

  Greg lets out a hiss. “How long have they been on the market?” he asks Marty.

  Marty purses his lips.

  Greg’s listening to Marty’s mind. “He got them around Halloween. First he heard.” Then, “Damn it!” He turns to me. “You told him the song trick?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Halloween,” Packard says. “That’s over two months they’ve been on the market at least.”

  “The place makes conspiracy products,” I say. “Marty thought it was a joke until he tried these. Maybe they’re not so widespread.”

  “Can I go?” Marty asks.

  “No,” Packard says.

  “You have your information,” Marty says. “You have your lead. You gonna kidnap everyone that has these glasses?”

  “He does need medical attention for his finger,” I say.

  “Come here.” Packard says. “But leave the glasses.”

  I sort of want to keep them, but it’s not the time or place for that battle, so I set them on the table and grab my kit instead.

  The door shuts behind us.

  Some way down the hall, I stop and turn to him. “You’re not really going to keep him, are you?”

  “Just for now.” Packard strides away.

  I follow. “Why?”

  We enter the little office at the end of the hall. I’m acutely aware that we’re alone now. He walks around to the other side of the chunky wooden desk and grabs his phone.

  “The man did just help us,” I say. “The Dorks are Paradigm Factory customers. That’s huge.”

  “I know,” Packard says. “And the minute we release him, he’s going to warn the people there that we’re coming for their customer database.”

  “But it could take hours, even days to get that information. We keep him all that time?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what?”

  He gives me a look. “Sophia.”

  “No.”

  “We can’t let Marty walk around knowing what he knows. Our faces. You. We have to use her.”

  I sink into the chair on the other side of his desk. Telekinetics may rob people, other highcaps may read people, Ez may make you do things in your sleep, but Sophia steals memory. She takes a little part of who you are. She’ll probably take the whole day from Marty. That’s as much as she can do: one waking day.

  “And afterward he gets to go home,” he adds, then looks away. “Soph,” he says. “Whatcha doing?”

  Helmut told me that when a highcap is a small child, the highcap mutation is blank possibility; like a stem cell, it can evolve into almost anything. At some point, a highcap child’s nature and personality determine what his or her highcap power will be. The child who wants things from outside his crib becomes a telekinetic. The child who yearns to know what others are thinking becomes a telepath—and telekinesis and telepathy are by far the most common powers. Then there are several oddball powers. As children, dream invaders wanted to interact with sleeping people. Helmut has speculated that Sophia had the impulse to hide the truth. Otto wanted to interact with buildings. And apparently Packard wanted to understand.

  Leave it to Packard to turn understanding into a dangerous power.

  Chapter

  Eight

  GETTING THE ADDRESS, phone number, or even a nonfake name associated with the Paradigm Factory is about as easy as finding the lost Lindbergh baby. All the website has is information on how to order, and a Yahoo email address. Even the ISP turns out to have false information on the firm. We end up having to get Otto on the phone, and Otto gives the job to the tech crimes unit of the police force.

  We’re counting on the outfit being local, since Midcity is the only city with a significant highcap population. Highcaps hardly ever move away; when they do, they’re back within a year or two. Nobody knows why. I’ve heard people theorize that highcaps stay because they’re connected to the Midcity River, because the mineralogical deposits under the city give them energy, and even that they long to be near the tangle.

  I’m in the front room texting Shelby when Sophia arrives. The revisionist wears her red hair in a stiff, old-fashioned Mary Tyler Moore do—Shelby and I have decided it involves extensive hair curler usage—and her eyebrows are the most sharply groomed I’ve ever seen, just this side of evil. She wears a beige pantsuit—a hot, tight safari number—and tooled blond boots. The boots, I think grudgingly, are really wonderful.

  “Hey, Sophia,” I say. “Packard says to go right in.”

  She breezes past me without a word. Acting like I’m beneath notice is part of her campaign to suggest my unfitness as a partner for Otto. She slaps the entry panel. The door doesn’t open. She slaps it again.

  I smile. “If you ignore me and nobody’s there to see it, are you really ignoring me?” I ask.

  But just then, Packard comes through.

  She kisses him on the cheek. “We ready?”

  “Wait. We’re bringing him out.”

  “Am I taking the whole day?”

  “Most of it. We picked him up outside a coffee shop. So if you can take from the coffee shop on—”

  “But after he drank coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” she says. “Coffee’s the ideal separation point. Got someone ready to hold him?”

  Packard nods and fills her in on the details of Marty’s abduction.

  I’ve never seen Sophia do a memory revision, but I’m told she looks deeply into people’s eyes, more or less hypnotizing them. Then she burrows into their short-term memory, finds a specific scenario, and erases back to it. Some people get creeped out by her staring into their eyes, and they need to be held. Sometimes their eyes have to be held open. Myself, I make it a point never to meet her gaze.

  After the erasure, she plants fake memories. Packard told me she imagines whole scenarios and burns them over the portions she’s erased. Like planting movies in there, he’d said. The images she plants “magnetize” the victims’ memories, causing them to fill things in. Utterly seamless, always convincing—that’s what he’d said. Nobody ever comes back from a revise.

  I’d scoffed. It seems like a person would know.

  No, he’d said. The one who’d know they were revised is the one who was revised. The one who’d know is gone.

  I sometimes wonder if there are vascular implications. Surely it can’t be healthy, on a purely physical level.

  Sophia and Packard are discussing whether she should plant a mugging. Packard thinks it would explain the lost time.

  “A mugging’s easy,” she says. “Violence, confusion.” Her lipsticky smile makes me queasy.

  Greg comes out with Marty in handcuffs. Marty glares angrily at me as he’s escorted toward the main door. “I was trying to help you,” he growls.

  “Sorry,” I say, “but at least you’re going home. And to get medical attention.”

  Greg opens the door and ushers him out.

  Sophia smirks at me and whispers, “Is it really an apology if he’s not going to remember it?” Then she swings out after them. She’ll erase him in the van before they get to the coffee shop. She’ll take the hours he spent here, and with those hours, she’ll take the man he’s become since morning.

  I give Packard a disgusted look. “I’m going to t
ake off, too.”

  “Once we get that address we might need a regular human,” he says.

  “Can’t we just give this lead to the cops?”

  “No, we can’t. For about ten separate reasons.”

  “Is one of them that you don’t want the cops to have the glasses?”

  He looks at me straight. “You want me to get a different human?”

  I realize that I don’t. For about ten separate reasons.

  Sophia and Greg are back an hour later, just about the time we get the intelligence on the location. The tech guys tracked it down through the credit card side.

  Even though its real name is the Paradigm Factory, we’ve started calling it the Paranoia Factory. The name has a double edge—the place feeds on paranoia, but it’s also causing paranoia, especially among the highcaps. When I went back to get my nurse kit from the room Marty was in, I found the door locked, with the glasses probably still in there. Like they wanted the glasses in confinement.

  We gather around the office table. Packard punches up an address on his laptop. It turns out that the operation is located in a low-rent strip mall in Midhaven, a suburb fifteen miles southwest of Midcity.

  When Packard does the satellite zoom-in we can see the shops. On the end there is a wallpaper outlet, and then there’s a vacuum cleaner sales and repair shop. Next there’s a place that manufactures custom cubicles, a uniform supply outlet, a Chinese take-out place, and a dollar store on the very end.

  Packard gets a mischievous look. “I bet I know which one hides the Paranoia Factory. I don’t even have to look at the addresses.”

  Sophia puts her hands on her hips. “How do you know?”

  It hits me and I laugh. “I know, too.”

  Packard meets my gaze. “Sense of humor, these guys.”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “What?” Sophia demands.

  “The vacuum cleaner store,” I say.

  Packard doesn’t take his eyes off me. “Because who the hell goes into a vacuum store?” he says.

  “Nobody, that’s who.” I turn to Sophia. “Have you ever heard of anybody buying a vacuum at a vacuum cleaner store?”

  “One of the unsolved mysteries of the universe,” Packard adds.

  She frowns. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Have you ever looked in the window of one?” I say. “The vacuums in them are always ancient, for one thing.”

  Packard says, “Nobody knows how they stay in business.”

  “We know how this one does,” I say.

  “Whatever,” Sophia says.

  I look over at Packard, who’s studying the image. I’d never thought anyone but me wondered about the vacuum cleaner store thing.

  Sure enough, when we zoom in on the addresses, it’s the vacuum cleaner store. Greg wants to get some of the guys together to storm the place from the back.

  “Greg,” Packard says. “These people make products that protect against things like sunspots and highcap attacks. Can you imagine how much security they’d have? Booby traps. Panic buttons. Auto-destructs. And do you think every person there isn’t wearing those goddamn glasses?”

  Greg shrugs.

  “We learn about them first,” Packard says. “We have to do this right.”

  “And then we put them out of business,” Sophia adds.

  An hour later I’m driving Greg’s white van through Midhaven. I’m wearing a curly blonde wig, bright red lipstick, and white tennis shoes. I have a bag of pretzels on my lap and a new appreciation for the power of bright white tennis shoes to fully destroy an outfit.

  I turn into the strip mall parking lot.

  Greg’s van is windowless in back except for one shaded circle, like a kidnapper’s van, and Sophia, Packard, Greg, and Rondo—a security surveillance expert and a telepath like Greg—are sitting back there.

  I park several shops down from the supposed vacuum cleaner store, sort of in front of the dollar store, like that’s where I’m going. I shove another handful of salty little toothpick pretzels into my mouth; I haven’t eaten since breakfast, and now it’s well past lunch.

  We go over the plan. I’m supposed to waste time in the dollar store while Rondo examines the area around the vacuum cleaner showroom through binoculars and figures out where the cameras are. Then I’ll walk over and buy a vacuum and ask somebody to carry it out for me. They’ll grab the person and do a read ’n’ revise. Packard’s term.

  I turn in my seat. “You actually have a term for it?”

  “That’s right,” Packard says.

  “That’s disturbing.”

  Packard says, “You love to remind me that I’m a villain, Justine, but when I do something the least bit villainous, you act outraged.”

  Sophia snickers and I give her a withering look.

  It hurts that he would say that. And it hurts that Sophia snickered.

  I sit back like I’m annoyed, reminding myself that I’m here to stop highcaps from dying. If Francis was out of the hospital, he’d be the human who buys the vacuum cleaner, but he’s not here; I am. And I’m good at this sort of thing.

  I get out and button up my coat. The air is crisp and sharp, the winter sky a dazzling blue.

  In the dollar store I find a plastic pen that has a floating smiley face inside it—a gift for Shelby. She’ll hate it. She’ll enjoy hating it. This cheers me up. I also find a troll doll key chain for myself. I deliberate over getting a Rubik’s Cube for my dad, to replace one that my brother broke back when we were kids. Dad used to love solving and unsolving it, but that was right before my mom died, and the fun stopped. Will it remind him too strongly of the past? I decide to go for it anyway.

  Packard’s waiting in the van’s passenger seat, eating my pretzels, when I climb back in. I show him the Rubik’s Cube. “For my pop,” I say, twisting it. “He used to have one. You know, before.” I’m still angry at Packard for being so cavalier with me, but I keep on, because I need his opinion. “I hope it doesn’t make him sad, though.”

  I twist on, not looking at him.

  “I’d think, after all this time, the pain would be less,” Packard says. “It might feel nice to remember.” He pauses, then says, “I’ve never read him, but that’s how it goes with the distant past. At least for me. Remembering makes me happy, sometimes. Whereas it wouldn’t have previously.”

  My ears perk up. Is he talking about his boyhood? About remembering when he still had a home and a bed? Or the time in the abandoned school before he and Otto fought?

  “And you can soak it in disinfectant, too,” Packard adds. “Really strong. So it smells.”

  “Pop would appreciate that.” I’m touched at his thoughtful suggestion. He’s never met my pop, but he’s seen photos and heard me talk. I may have my mom’s vein star paranoia, Packard said once, but I got my father’s brown hair and eyes. Faraway eyes, he called them. Like the Stones song.

  “Have you been back since Christmas?” Packard asks.

  “No.” I gaze out the window. “I know.” It’s just two weeks, but Pop’s all alone. There’s this silence where Packard doesn’t comment further; I’m thankful for that. We all do what we have to do. If there’s one person who appreciates that, it’s Packard.

  “Come take a look, Justine,” Rondo calls from the back.

  I clamber over the hump between the front seats. Rondo’s sitting by the circular window. The binoculars look tiny in his big, muscle-bound hands. As he shows me how to adjust the focus, I notice he has the number 29 tattooed on the side of his neck. Black ink on brown skin; you almost can’t see it. I take the binoculars and peer through; everything looks super close-up. Rondo points out the cameras perched on either side of the Paranoia Factory door, and the one farther out on a light pole. I move my view to the dirty display window, where three old-fashioned vacuums perch on podiums that seem to be covered with ratty-looking carpeting. “Somebody needs to vacuum the vacuum cleaner display,” I say. “Who in their right mind would be enticed to b
uy a vacuum from that?”

  “You,” Sophia says.

  The small showroom is lit by buzzing fluorescent lights. A series of podiums displays vacuum cleaners; each has a sign bearing the model name in 1970s-style lettering. Other vacuum cleaners hang from brackets along the cheap paneling that covers the walls.

  A woman with short black hair and brown tortoiseshell glasses, just like Marty’s, makes her way over from a little desk in the far corner. “Can I help you?”

  I point to a heavy-looking machine on the far podium. “How’s that one?”

  “Good,” she says. “Depending on your needs.”

  “I just need it for my employer,” I say. “I think something heavy duty is best.”

  “Mmm,” she says.

  I wander over and pretend to inspect its chrome features. I’m thinking it’ll be more convincing that I need carryout help if I buy a heavy one.

  She sidles up. “This one’s good.” She crosses her arms and waits.

  I walk around it. “Can I try it?”

  Without a word, she yanks it down, unwinds the cord, and plugs it into the wall. Packard warned me not to act too interested in the place, so I don’t look around, and I make a special point not to look at anything that appears to be a camera, or at the door in the center of the back wall, which clearly leads to the real operation.

  I test that model, then two others, just to be convincing. In the end, I choose the first, and pay with the cash Packard gave me. The first was the heaviest one, but I’m still embarrassed to ask for help to carry a vacuum cleaner. I mumble some excuse about a cracked collarbone.

  “It’s cool,” the assistant says. “I like to get out of here now and then.” She picks up the phone on her desk and stabs a button.

  “I’m carrying something out for a customer,” she says, grabbing a pink ski jacket off the chair. This is followed by a curt “Yeah,” then “No,” another curt “No,” and then a “Yeah.”

  Out in the parking lot, I point out the van. “I was at the dollar store first.”

  “No problem,” she says. “January thaw, huh?”

  “Yeah, no doubt.” I try not to look at her. They’re going to knock her glasses off her face, read her mind, and then wipe her memory.