Love on the Run

by Katharine Kerr

  “Can we work with the local police on this?” I said. “Chief Hafner knows you as a CBI agent, Nathan, and he owes you a big favor.”

  “True. He also has every reason to hold a grudge against the Axeman.” Ari turned to Jan. “Opinions?”

  “We’ll have to wait if we want the Chief’s help,” Jan said. “The moon will be full on Tuesday.”

  Ari swore in a mash-up of several languages.

  “Hafner’s starting the changeover to wolf form about now, probably,” I said. “And he won’t be ready for action for a couple of days after the waning, either.”

  “And of course,” Jan said. “We don’t even know if the Axeman’s hiding out in Peri’s.”

  “I may be able to find out,” I said. “I brought my crayons.”

  “Good.” Jan opened one of the desk drawers. “I happen to have some large-sized paper. An LDRS is exactly what we need.”

  A Long Distance Remote Sensing, that is, one of the first talents that an intelligence agency ever tried to use, way back during the Cold War on Four between the United States and the Soviet Union. I’m particularly gifted at this operation. I took Jan’s spot at the desk, laid out a few sheets of paper, and spread my crayons next to them on the desktop for easy access.

  I’d seen the Axeman once in a mirror and once in trance. The sightings gave me just enough information to focus my talent. I let my breathing slow, waited, thought of next to nothing. My hand moved on its own and grabbed a crayon. I looked across the room and let my hand draw. Different colors, lots of scribbles, some straight lines, some curved lines—finally my fingers dropped the last crayon. My hand lay flat on the desk. I shook myself awake and looked at the drawing.

  The picture, messy as always, showed the interior of a high-ceilinged room with an elaborate dado on the one visible wall. It might have been stucco work; it might have been fancy wallpaper. Next to a fireplace edged in matching fancywork was an open rolltop desk. A square stood on the desk beside a bright blue scribble. I’d done the square in silver, which I took as meaning “shiny.” On the other side of the fireplace stood a tall cabinet. I’d put little X’s on the shelves. I had no idea what they were supposed to represent. The blue and the shiny images might have added up to a computer brought illegally from Six.

  “Okay, he’s inside an elegant room,” I said. “Now let me run a few scans on this.”

  Search Mode: Location placed the room fairly nearby, to the south, and slightly to the west of us, which made the Octagon House a good candidate for the building containing it. SM: Personnel put two people into the scene, a man and a woman. I knew the man was the Axeman. The only information I could glean about the woman was her emotional state.

  “She’s furious at him,” I said. “Frothing mad about something.”

  “If he’s threatening her,” Ari said, “of course she’s angry.”

  “He’s not threatening. He’s cowering.”

  “What? Does she have a weapon?”

  “I can’t see that much detail, but I suspect she doesn’t. She’s chewing him out. He’s feeling guilty about something.”

  Ari and Jan both stared, shocked. I remembered something Izumi said: “They took me off the streets and gave me a home, him and his lady.”

  “You know,” I said, “I think we may have found Ash’s mother.”

  “Good God!” Jan muttered. “Can you clarify if we go closer to the location?”

  “You bet. Let’s drive down that way. Say, when you were gathering data about this place, did anyone tell you the madam’s name?”

  “Yes. Karina. That’s all. No last name.” He grinned. “Madame Karina to scum like us.”

  We all trotted downstairs. Ari cranked up the car while Jan sat behind the wheel and I took my place half-hidden in the back seat. With a cough it finally started, and we rattled our way out of North Beach and down to Union Street. At home, “Union Street” means a fancy district with chichi shops and expensive bars, the kind that their owners describe as “watering holes.” In SanFran it’s just a street, where big Victorian houses have shops on the ground floor and cheap rooms above and behind. Under the poisoned yellow sky, we passed a farmer’s market, deserted on Sunday, a couple of used clothing places, and a small house that brazenly advertised itself as an opium den.

  When we turned the corner onto Gough, I saw the Octagon House, painted a pale pink with white trim. A wrought iron fence surrounded its well-kept garden, which took up about a third of a city block, far more open space than it had at home. Under a maple tree two young women, dressed in girlish white dresses, sat on a wrought iron bench. Nearby on the lawn sat a beefy-looking guy openly wearing a gun in a shoulder holster, there to protect the merchandise, I assumed.

  Jan drove on by and parked down at the end of the block. “Is this close enough?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I’ve got to get out of the car.”

  “I’ll get out first,” Ari said. “You stand behind me.”

  We did that. When I focused my mind on the location, I received a strong impression of the Axeman, sitting at a table in a small room and playing keno with a pack of greasy cards. I transferred my thoughts to the sense of a woman I’d received earlier, and this time I added her name to my meager information. I picked up a trace; she was preoccupied with numbers and slips of paper.

  “I think she’s paying bills,” I said. “The Axeman’s in there, all right.”

  Ari and I returned to the car, and Jan drove on to put some distance between us and our prey. He parked around the corner, killed the engine, and turned sidewise on the seat, as did Ari, so we could confer.

  “It’s too bad that I’m not still a teenager,” I said. “I could go in looking for work.”

  “People on this world level will see you as younger than you are,” Jan said. “The conditions here age everyone so fast. You’d pass for barely twenty.”

  “I wouldn’t allow it, even if you could bring it off.” Ari spoke quietly, but I could sense a rumble of rage in his SPP. “As it is, you can’t, because the word’s spread that both of us are CBI agents. You wouldn’t get very far.”

  “You’re right.” I waited until his rage quieted down again. “Well, our wolfish police guys will be human again in a week. We could ask for help then.”

  “The Axeman might be long gone,” Ari said.

  “Yeah, that’s true.” I thought for a moment or two. “Especially if she throws him out.”

  “She’s that angry?” Jan said.

  “I’d say so.”

  “Then perhaps we can persuade her to hand him over.”

  “Nice thought, but how? In this town she doesn’t have to be afraid of being arrested, so we can’t pressure her with that.” I let my mind range back to the Octagon Brothel, as I’d started thinking of it. “Ari, I need to get out of the car again.”

  Every time you run a Search Mode, the link between you and the subject grows a little bit stronger. This time the SM:P caught Karina in a particularly vulnerable moment. I sensed tears, quickly stifled, but tears nonetheless, and movement, a flicker of the view out the window to the garden—and fear, not rage, but a fear that contrasted with her own safety. She smothered the feeling, sat down, and returned to her accounts. Working with the numbers soothed her mind. We returned to the car to include Jan in the conversation.

  “She’s afraid of something,” I said. “Really afraid, but it’s not for herself.”

  “Well,” Ari said. “If I had a daughter, and she was off somewhere with a band of murderous terrorists, I’d be rather upset myself.”

  I remembered the Furies I’d seen, shrieking in the sky. All at once I understood why they’d appeared. Clytemnestra had nothing on Madame Karina.

  “That’s it!” I said. “Crud, I should have realized that earlier. What do you bet she’s furious with the Axeman because he left their daughter back on Six?”

  “A mother’s love—how sweet!” Jan said. “But we can’t bribe her with the dau
ghter. Ash will have to stand trial on One—if we can even take her into custody.”

  “Do they have the death sentence on One?” I asked.

  “No!” Jan looked sincerely shocked. “We’re not barbarians, you know!”

  “Okay, then prison on One would be better than being gang raped and murdered by her confederates. They’re not nice guys, those terrorists. She’s really beautiful.”

  “And who better to know the evil ways of the male heart than a madam?” Jan heaved a fake sigh.

  “As for the Axeman,” I said, “he’s really frightened of Karina, and he damn well should be. When I ran that scan, he was ready to crawl under the table.”

  “She must be formidable,” Ari said, “to frighten a vicious bastard like him. Look at what he did to Wagner.”

  “I’d rather not,” Jan said. “Ugly.”

  “Wagner.” I saw a new angle on the problem. “Speaking of being pissed off, he’s sure got reason to be. I wonder if we could get him to send a message, like, he’s got a lead on an orb for Six.”

  “Very nice,” Jan said. “We’d better run that by the higher-ups. They might be able to get us a convincing-looking fake orb.”

  We returned to the office and the trans-world router so Jan could put that question to HQ and Spare14 as well as the liaison captain in SanFran. After a flurry of messages, we learned that no, they had none of the fake transport orbs in custody, but since the real transport orbs could no longer reach Six, we could have several of those if we’d like.

  “They might as well be fake,” Ari said. “They’ll look convincing, better yet.”

  “Let’s hope Wagner will agree to help,” Jan said.

  “He’ll have to.” Ari smiled his tiger’s smile. “He wants revenge, but even without that, he’s been selling illegal orbs. He knows about TWIXT and the trans-world prison system. He cooperates, or we take him in. That’s what we’ll have on offer.”

  “He’ll buy,” Jan said. “I would if I were him.”

  We spent the rest of the afternoon planning our sting. We decided that since Ari and I were known, and Wagner would be minimally functional, we needed to add another person to our team. Dave Rasmussen, the TWIXT clerk temporarily stuck on One, was the logical choice. A second flurry of trans-world messages sped back and forth, and we had our arrangements made. I suggested that Ari and I could just stay in SanFran that night, but Spare14 refused to allow it.

  “You’re targets,” his message ran, “for any gang member who wants to rise in his hierarchy by killing a government agent. Return to Four and leave the preliminaries to the rest of your team. Tell Hendriks to be careful, too. He might be recognized.”

  “He’s quite right,” Ari said. “Beyond that, we have to have some delay for the look of the thing. The Axeman knows that Wagner’s incapacitated. He’ll become suspicious if the orbs turn up too quickly.”

  I had a transport orb with me that would have gotten us home, but around sunset Danvers-Jones called Jan’s office. She was down at South Park, she said, and would take us back to Four. I suspected that she wanted to talk about my father. When we joined her, she proved me right.

  “I had a real interesting afternoon,” Willa told me. “That gate to Six? It’s stable, now that your father’s there to take care of it.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “Yes, sure is. The Guild authorized me to buy the house, but your Uncle Jim downright refuses to sell at any price, even a real high one. Even for cash.”

  “Well, it’s been in his family for about a hundred and forty years.”

  “That’s what your aunt told me. What a genuinely nice woman she is, just by the way. But anyway, your father told me that the family needs that gate for private reasons. Do you realize how irregular that is?

  “Not illegal, mind,” Ari put in, “but against TWIXT policy.”

  “Against Guild policy, buster,” Willa snarled. “And that’s what’s important here.”

  Ari flinched. I made a noncommittal noise. Dad was thinking of Cam and his daughter, I supposed.

  “Very irregular,” Willa continued. “But Flann holds all the cards.”

  “He generally does, yeah. Five or six aces. At least one in his shirt pocket. Another up his sleeve.”

  She grinned. “He thinks he can build us another gate somewhere else that’ll be permanent for Six. If he can and he does, we’ll have to let him have his way. We can’t go to the government and suggest they take your uncle’s house by eminent domain. What would we tell them we wanted it for?”

  “It might be amusing,” Ari said, “to watch the Board of Supervisors arguing about trans-world gates. They’ve already stopped the military on Four from confiscating that portal in Golden Gate Park.”

  “Which is worth a laugh or two,” I put in.

  “Yeah, real funny.” Willa rummaged in her shopping bag and brought out a blue-green focus orb. “Let’s get back to Four. The gamma rays have fried your brains enough for one day.”

  “That’s for sure,” I said. “When will you be picking up Rasmussen?”

  “In about twenty minutes. The lucky boy gets to stay here tonight so Hendriks can brief him. It’ll take him a while to get used to SanFran.”

  “It’s kind of the acid test, isn’t it? If he can stand Interchange, he’ll know that he’s got the right stuff to be a TWIXT agent.”

  “Right,” Ari said. “And if he doesn’t, he needs to get out now.”

  CHAPTER 15

  MONDAY PASSED SLOWLY, too slowly, while we waited to return to Three. Gun in hand, Ari paced back and forth in the flat. He’d pause at the front windows, watch the street for a few minutes, then stalk down the hall to the bedroom to look for malefactors out of the back windows—back and forth, forth and back, until I was ready to scream at him. Now and then he stopped pacing to call Spare14, who repeatedly told him that he’d not yet heard from Jan. Just after noon I tried a soothing remark.

  “We’ve got to let the sting develop,” I said. “If Mitch responds too soon, the Axeman’s bound to see through it.”

  “What makes you think I don’t know that?”

  “Nothing. I’m just trying to get you to stop driving me nuts. All this pacing! Where do you think you are? In a cage at the zoo?”

  “It feels a bit like that. Oh, very well. I’ll go downstairs and work out.”

  Once he was busy exhausting himself, I could catch up on paperwork. Besides the small mountain of e-mail, Lev Flowertree’s book, Beneath the Surface: An Exploration in Pacific Myth, arrived by snail mail. When I glanced through it, I found it better written than a lot of self-published occult writing, not that this was saying much. One of the illustrations caught my eye, a pen-and-ink diagram of the area in England around Silbury Hill. The diagram joined Avebury, Stonehenge, and Woodhenge with lines indicating the latest archaeological reconstructions of the ceremonial “ways” or roads that dated from the Bronze Age. I had to admit that the resulting pattern did look something like the front end of a big-eyed cephalopod, but I didn’t share Flowertree’s certainty that the builders had meant it that way.

  Still, considering that the Venusian cephalopods were out to get me, I valued any and all thoughts on things squiddish. I put the book away for future study and returned to my e-mail only to have my phone ring: Maureen. She was sick and tired of sitting around Kathleen’s house, she told me, unable to go off the grounds or even too close to the fence.

  “I’m afraid to let the kids go outside, too, and that’s the worst thing,” Maureen went on. “I don’t want them warped and frightened for life.”

  “I understand that. It’s really a hard situation you’re in.”

  “I don’t want to leave town, I really don’t. What if he finds out and follows us? I won’t have you guys to fall back on, and things will be worse.”

  “Look, Mo, what if I could get you a job in a place where Chuck could never follow, but you could still be close to the family?”

  “That would be perfe
ct, sure. In our dreams.”

  “No, really! Do you remember Cam Douglas?”

  “How could I forget him, after what happened to you? I couldn’t believe it when you wouldn’t marry him, I really couldn’t. I mean, I know you made the right decision. I even knew it then. Don’t worry about that! But I thought wow, how could you turn him down?”

  “Don’t tell me you had a crush on him, too!”

  “Didn’t everyone have a crush on Mr. Douglas? Well, all the girls. And Sean. He was so disappointed when you got pregnant, and it was obvious that Cam was straight. I bet Cam’s still good-looking. Even if he’s what? He must be in his thirties by now. Same as me.”

  “No, he’s older’n you, thirty-six, I’d say. He’s a widower with a couple of young kids. And he needs a housekeeper.”

  A long suspicious silence followed. Finally, Maureen said, “What’s the catch? There’s got to be a huge catch.”

  “There sure is. I’ve got a lot of things to work out about this, but I figured I’d better see if you were interested before I went ahead with it.”

  “Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s a job, isn’t it? They aren’t so easy to find these days.” Her voice suddenly choked on tears. “It’s the kids. I am so worried sick about the kids. What if Chuck decided to shoot one of them?”

  “We’ve got to get you out of there. Dad’s involved in this, too.”

  We talked for maybe an hour that day. At the end of it, Maureen understood a lot more about deviant world levels and doppelgängers. Whether or not she wanted to live on another level and work for another version of the man she used to know—she hadn’t made her mind up about that, and I couldn’t blame her. I also filled her in on the terrorist activity. She deserved to know about it before she made up her mind.

  “Well, there’s a risk of that here, isn’t there?” she said. “What with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.”

  “You’ve got a point. And who knows what’ll happen in the Middle East?”

  “Yeah. But I do know what’ll happen if Chuck gets hold of me.” She paused for a gulp of breath. “I’ll have to figure out which looks worse.”