Chapter 17
They kept Shelley in the infirmary for a week to recover from her beating. I'm pretty sure that, medically speaking, she didn't really need to stay in that long. In fact, Wizzit scanned a few of her medical reports which seemed to indicate that she was healing up pretty fast -- much faster than anyone expected.
I wasn't surprised. After all, Shelley had been doing the healing coma thing a couple of times a week for most of the past fifteen years; I imagine that in all that time, her body had learned a thing or two about how to rapidly heal itself. And she probably didn't have a whole lot else to do while she was there except lie still and pretend she was in a healing coma.
Doctor Schmidt, the physician who had brought her in, was surprised, though, and interested. Too interested for our comfort, in fact, because he began trying to make a case for moving Shelley to his facilities permanently for study. According to his reports, he spent a couple of hours questioning her, trying to find out just what her secret was for rapid healing, and he seemed to think that he was making significant progress.
I wasn't sure how Shelley felt about the whole matter. On the one hand, although we were able to keep fairly good track of her while she was there, we couldn't visit her. We were unable to communicate with her in any way, in fact, because she was under twenty-four-hour guard. On the other hand, I expect she was pretty happy to be eating real food and sleeping in a real bed for the first time in months. (No, her cell did not have a bed, or even a cot or bunk; she had been sleeping on the bare floor. Yeah, I know. Zwicky was a real bastard.)
Regardless, Doctor Schmidt's request was denied, and Shelley was soon returned to her cell. Bill teleported out to see her within probably twenty minutes of her arrival. He returned about ten minutes after that, his face like a thundercloud. "She, uh, didn't particularly feel like having visitors," he said in reply to everyone's questioning looks. "She memorized the list, but then she asked us to leave her alone for a day or so. I told her someone would be out to see her tomorrow."
"I'm sorry, mate," Mike told him. I echoed the feeling. Bill looked as though he had been kicked in the stomach.
Toby asked quietly, "D'you reckon we're starting to lose her?"
Bill shook his head. "No. Not her. Never. She was just upset; it'll pass."
"I hope you're right," Nicolai said.
Padma shivered. "I know I wouldn't want to trade places with her."
"If it's any consolation," Wizzit spoke up, "you would have to be leaving now anyway. Her guards have been sent over to bring her in for another interrogation."
"So soon?" Trina asked, looking worried. "She has been in her cell for only a little while."
"It's probably all part of a plan," Bill said grimly. "You or I might see her feeling upset and think we've got to help her through it. They see it as another opportunity to break her, to get inside her head."
"Yes, well, it can't be helped." Mike said. "I don't mean to sound callous, but we know we can't be there to hold her hand. What we can do is continue to do our jobs and follow the plan. Wizzit?"
"I have already contacted the others," Wizzit replied. "Prime Steel, Prime Silver, and Junior Prime Pink will be here shortly. Prime Copper has not yet responded."
"As usual," Mike muttered.
I grinned. Mayumi was always eager to help out, but she sometimes seemed to live in a world and time apart from the rest of us. "Want me to go get her?"
Mike sighed and nodded. "Yeah, I suppose you'd --"
"Prime Copper has just reported," Wizzit interrupted. "She will be available for teleport in two minutes. The others are coming in now."
There were three flashes of light, and suddenly Angie, Cathy, and Alvaro were standing before us. I introduced my sister to the two Primes Emeriti while we were waiting for Mayumi to get ready, and Mike handed out surgical gloves and the envelopes that he, Trina, Toby, and Nicolai had just finished sealing.
"All right, everyone understand what they're supposed to do?" Mike asked after Mayumi showed up five minutes later. We all nodded. "Good. Remember, the name is on the envelope, and the address, too, if applicable. Delivery doesn't have to be perfect, just close enough, and if you can't deliver it without getting caught, don't even try. We don't have to get every single one of these exactly on target to send a message. Got it?" We all nodded again. "Good. Then let's get going."
"Wow, this is so cool!" I heard Angie exclaim after we had all activated and then turned on camouflage mode. "I can't believe you never told me I could turn myself invisible, Tre--, I mean, Blue!"
"What would you have done if I had?" I replied, chuckling. "Tried to sneak in the boys' locker room at school?"
"Hmm. I hadn't thought of that. Good idea. Thanks!" There was a flash of pink light, and she teleported away before I could think of a retort. Then I felt the tingling at the base of my skull as I 'ported out to my own mission.
Angela had probably the easiest assignment of us all, I reflected. Wizzit was sending her to a tree-lined street in a quiet suburb in Virginia. All she had to do was to go to the house number printed on the envelope, stick the envelope in the door, ring the doorbell, and run away. After that, she was to watch from a safe distance to make sure that the addressee, Mrs. Joanna Zwicky, Emile's wife, actually retrieved the envelope. Then Wizzit would teleport her back to HQ and she would be done.
My own delivery was looking to be a bit more difficult than Angela's. Zwicky's son Jordan was my target. He was in junior high school, and somehow I was supposed to locate his classroom and drop the envelope onto his desk without anyone being the wiser. I debated for a while how to go about it.
I mean, I could have chickened out and simply laid the letter on the desk at the main office, but that would just have been admitting defeat. No fun at all. Or I could have pulled a fire alarm and delivered it while everyone was out of the building, but there was no subtlety in that, no panache. Eventually I asked Wizzit to go into the school computer to find out where he was, hoping for an idea. When he told me, I almost laughed out loud. Suddenly it was going to be a whole lot easier that I had thought.
He was in gym class. That meant that all I had to do was to sneak into the boys' locker room (like sister, like brother, I guess), have Wizzit call Jordan's cellphone number, and slide the envelope into the locker that was ringing. Piece of cake, and when I delivered the letter and 'ported back to HQ, it turned out that I was the third one done.
The writing and delivery of these letters had been Mike's idea, by the way. After Bill had told him of Shelley's beating, he had decided that it wouldn't be good enough just to feed Emile Zwicky a list of names that he already knew. He wanted us to make it clear that we not only knew who Zwicky's friends and family were, but that we could get to them at any time.
So, once we got word that Shelley was moving to interrogation again, he had had Wizzit print up a series of letters, each one addressed to someone on the list. The letters carried no overt threat, and we had taken pains to ensure that they were phrased as neutrally as possible. The gist of the wording was that, according to our sources, their friend/husband/father, Emile Zwicky, was overseeing the continued incarceration of our friend, Shelley Windham, formerly known as Prime Red, and that we believed she was being mistreated.
The note went on to say that at the present moment -- and then it gave the current day and time -- he was supervising yet another interrogation of her. The last interrogation he had supervised, it read, had resulted in his punching and kicking her -- while she was handcuffed to a chair and unable to fight back -- to the point where she had lost consciousness, and we were concerned that something like that might happen again.
The letter closed by urging the recipient to contact Zwicky about the matter, and it listed his personal cellphone number as well as his office phone number, both of which we understood to be fairly close-held secrets, if not actually class
ified. And lastly, just to give it a personal touch, Wizzit had included a realistic-looking signature from one of us at the bottom of each letter.
The others began reappearing at HQ one by one as they finished their respective assignments. Nearly everyone had found their individual assignments fairly easy to carry out. We did have one failure -- the father was out on a hunting trip and not expected back for days -- but we also had one resounding success -- Toby had managed to slip the letter assigned to one of Zwicky's golfing buddies in amongst his clubs while he was out on the links.
While we were out, Wizzit had begun capturing the feed from Shelley's latest interrogation, so once we were all back, we settled down to watch the Shelley Show -- the seven of us who didn't have anywhere else to be, that is. Primes Pink, Steel, Silver, and Copper all popped back home.
Several things surprised me about the interrogation vid. The first was how good a quality it was. I had gotten used to seeing the output from the cheap, low-resolution camera installed in Shelley's cell; the cameras used here were obviously more expensive. And I do mean "cameras", as in two of them, each controlled by an actual human who would pan, zoom in, zoom out, and generally make it more interesting. Wizzit put both video streams up on our screen side by side and let us choose which one we wanted to view.
Lighting was better as well, at least for Shelley's face and body. We knew they shipped these vids out to various smart people who would analyze the heck out of her vocabulary, body language, voice modulation, breathing rate, and anything else they could think of, and they obviously wanted her every reaction to be as visible as possible.
(Funny story: About a month previous to this, Shelley called her interviewer "mate" during an interrogation, the way Mike does a lot. Two days later, Wizzit intercepted a flurry of reports speculating wildly about the number of Australians on our team. Evidently they weren't aware that New Zealanders used the term as well.)
I think the thing that surprised me the most, though, was Shelley herself. Under ordinary circumstances, she is one of the coolest, most composed, most even-tempered people I know. (And bear in mind that for me, "ordinary circumstances" includes life-and-death struggles against Enclave monsters.) Not today, though. Today, she was royally ticked off.
She stalked into the room, flanked by her guards, and sat glaring at the young man opposite her as she was handcuffed in place. The young man sat behind a desk, shuffling a stack of papers in front of him. When Shelley's guards moved away from her and took up stations along the walls, his was the only other face that was illuminated. Several other figures sat in chairs around the room, but the careful lighting made them indistinct, mere shadows. And one of those shadows, I was sure, was Emile Zwicky.
The young man smiled blandly. "Good afternoon, Shelley."
Shelley scowled. "It's morning, and you damn well know it," she snapped.
The young man carefully raised a pen and made a tick mark on one of the sheets of paper. "I trust you are now fully recovered from your little accident?" he inquired unctuously. When she didn't reply, he said with great patience, as if speaking to a dull-witted child, "Shelley, you know I require an answer for every question."
Shelley drew in a breath and seemed to gain a measure of control over her temper. "I didn't answer," she said sharply, "because I have no idea what you're talking about. I suffered no accident, so your question made no sense. Now, if you were asking me whether I have fully recovered from the injuries I suffered at the hands of one of your superiors behind you, then yes, I have."
Her questioner made no reply; he simply wrote something on the sheet of paper in front of him. "You seem agitated this afternoon," he observed. "I think I understand why. You are upset at being returned to your cell earlier today, aren't you? You enjoyed relative comfort while you were in our infirmary, and now you resent the fact that that comfort has been taken away from you, isn't that right?" Again, she didn't reply. "Shelley, that was a question, and you are required to answer it."
She shrugged. "It was nice, and yeah, I'd like to continue sleeping in a bed instead of on the floor."
The young man smiled at her. "You see, it's not hard to cooperate. And I think you'll find it rewarding as well. It's all up to you." He shrugged elaborately. "You could sleep in a warm, comfortable bed tonight and every night from here on out. It's completely your choice. All you have to do is cooperate with us."
"I have been cooperating with you. I told you how we handle our teleportation, and what did that get me? Nothing!"
"You did give us some information, yes, and rest assured that our experts are looking at it very closely. But you have not been completely forthcoming with us." He leaned forward. "Tell us the names of the other members of your team."
"So you can lock them in a cell as you have me? No thanks! I know the meaning of loyalty."
Her interrogator shook his head sadly, as if dismayed by her willfulness. "Shelley, I have explained this to you time and time again, and yet you still don't seem to want to understand. We don't wish to punish the other Primes. They have performed a magnificent service to the world, despite their obvious limitations."
He smiled at her again, and this time I felt a nearly overwhelming urge to reach out through the video screen and smack him upside the head. "It's simply time for a better-trained, better-equipped, more experienced force to take over. We, the United States military, are that force. But we can't do it if your former teammates are left free to interfere. We are professionals, Shelley; we know what we're doing. They are amateurs -- you know it and I know it -- and they are a danger to themselves as well as to others. If you were truly loyal to them, you would agree that they need to be taken off the playing field as soon as possible for their own protection."
They sat staring at each other for several long seconds. Finally, the young man signed to someone outside the view of the cameras. "I think we will be needing the water, the table, and the washcloth." He turned back to Shelley. "I'm sorry you're choosing this course, Shelley. Truly, I am. Your fate is completely under your control, and you are forcing us to 'board you yet again."
"If my fate is under my control," Shelley said tightly, "then why can't I walk out of here?"
"You know it doesn't work that way, Shelley. If you give us what we want, then we'll give you what you want."
"You'll let me go free? You'll let me see my mother and sister again?"
He smiled again. "I don't think you really want to go free, do you? Remember, you're facing some pretty serious charges on the outside." He drew out one sheet of paper from his pile and began skimming through it. "It says here that you were running cocaine to finance your operation; we found the remains of one of your drug shipments in that building out on your family's ranch, if you recall. And we know you killed your father in a disagreement over splitting the profits. Your own father." He shook his head and tsked. "Those are the facts, I'm afraid."
He laid the paper down and looked at her with marvelously-faked sympathy. "Now, I realize you probably thought you were serving the greater good, and I agree that perhaps you were, but not everyone would see it in the same light that you or I do. I know you don't really want to go to prison, Shelley. I don't want you to go to prison, either, but I can't help you unless you help us. Your only hope is cooperation."
There was a clatter as the doors opened and several men wheeled in some sort of table. The young man signaled a couple of the guards, and they moved forward to unfasten Shelley's handcuffs.
"Wait!" she said quickly.
The young man raised his eyebrows. "Yes?"
Shelley licked her lips nervously. If she was acting, she was doing one heckuva job at it. "If I give you their names, you'll -- you'll make sure I get a bed tonight? And some decent food?"
"Give us the names," he replied, "and we'll see. Their real names, Shelley," he added, a warning in his voice. "Not those pathetic fak
e ones you have been inventing."
She glanced over at the wheeled table, and her shoulders slumped. "All right," she said. "Take these down." Then she began giving them the first of the eleven names, addresses, and telephone numbers that Bill had had her memorize.
I felt myself relax as I heard her start her recitation. I didn't really think she would betray us, but as I said before, she was doing a pretty good job of acting like it. I watched carefully and marveled at her powers of recollection as she rattled off name after name without any sign of hesitation.
At first, neither her questioner nor any of the shadowy figures in the background showed any sign that they recognized any of the names. When she got to the first of the six Zwickys on the list, though, the young man behind the desk looked up sharply at her and I saw a stirring of motion behind him. She got through Zwicky's father, and then his mother, but then, when she said "Jordan Zwicky", one of the observers in the back gave sort of a strangled cry. Her interrogator glanced back anxiously -- the first time he had shown any emotion other than complete composure -- and raised a hand. "Just a minute, Shelley," he said.
But Shelley didn't "just a minute." She continued in a strong, firm voice with Jordan's address and cellphone number, then went on to Erin Zwicky, his teenage daughter. By the time she got to his wife Joanna, the shadowy figure was on his feet, and several of the security guards were having to hold him back to prevent him from rushing Shelley's chair. She had to raise her voice nearly to a shout to make herself heard as she delivered the final name on the list, Mister Emile Zwicky himself. The vid cut out just a couple of seconds later, and a few minutes after that, Wizzit reported that Shelley was back in her cell, apparently none the worse for wear.
We never saw Emile Zwicky again after that day. Of course, one could argue that we had never really seen him in the first place, but you know what I mean. According to Wizzit, after Shelley's interrogation he went straight back to his office, where I imagine he nearly had a coronary at the sight of the neatly-sealed envelope addressed to him that Bill had laid on his desk.
He then made several telephone calls, probably to assure himself that we had indeed not kidnapped, tortured, and killed his wife or kids. (Hmph! As if! Why would we want to do something dumb like that?) Then he hurriedly packed his things and left the Denver base, and I don't think he ever came back.
Attack Doll 4: Primes Emeriti Page 18