Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  “Why them?”

  “I’ve thought about what happened that night the decoy almost blew us up. They got a message, which I didn’t see. But it led them to think that Hesketh was escaping and needed help. They were tearing off to assist when I saw you.”

  “Any indication what information they got?” Charis said.

  “I didn’t see the message. I actually thought it was you, sending them off so you could take care of what you thought was Hesketh.”

  “Not me,” Charis said. “I didn’t have enough information on those guys at that point to send them a spoof message. I thought I just got lucky when they took off. Until that decoy almost killed us, of course. But explain one thing to me. Why would your Midwestern buddies be so eager to help out a serial killer?”

  “They don’t know Hesketh is a killer,” Bernal said. “But they do think it wants to escape. Some kind of space probe liberation movement. They could certainly answer a few questions for us, if they’re not back in Wisconsin by now.”

  “They haven’t left,” Charis said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Bernal, really. I know who’s on my turf. These guys rambling around at night, trying to catch sight of Hesketh, like they’re some kind of robot-watchers trying to build up their life lists. I don’t care how crazy they are, or how little sense their motivations make to a normal person. I tracked them down after your little encounter with them that night Hesketh tried to blow us up. They found themselves a couple of rooms in the Green Acre, up on Cernan Road. It’s always the odd tourists, literary butterfly collectors, fugitives, and the like, who end up there.”

  “Let’s go get them,” Bernal said.

  41

  The bolts and welds on the washer arms indicated several generations of casual repairs. Their aging gears engaged, and they shuddered forward and down, spraying spirals of soapy water onto the SUV being tugged through the car wash. Figures were dimly visible behind the water-coated windows. Bernal could hear music thumping inside the car. The underlying rumble of the machinery shifted to a lower register.

  “I got Sally to cut the speed on the conveyor!” Charis shouted above the shriek of unlubricated metal as the arms raised themselves back up. “Gives us a few minutes. Wait for those drying carousels to swing by, then jump for it.”

  “Wha—”

  “Now!”

  Sally was the owner of the Squeak ’n Whistle, a grumpy man with a gray ponytail and a bulging belly. He had been less than happy to see Charis but had agreed to her demands and allowed her and Bernal access to the car wash through a maintenance door.

  A cylinder of flopping cloth, sodden from a swing across the SUV, rained soapy water on Bernal. At the last possible moment before it returned to ready itself for the next vehicle, he jumped after Charis. His left foot slipped, and his shoe was instantly full of the water that ran down the track into the bubbling recycling sump. He yelped and waddled after Charis, who seemed to know exactly when to dodge, when to duck, and when to ignore the various washing gadgets that gestured obscenely at the passing cars.

  Charis found a quiet alcove where spare cylinders of pink liquid detergent stood stacked, ready to be attached to the dispensing nozzles.

  “Whee!” Charis waved her thick dark hair with her fingers. “My hairdresser is going to kill me. Industrial detergent is really hell on the highlights.”

  Bernal wiggled his foot in his shoe. Soaked. The sock had fallen down around his ankle, and it was useless to pull it up.

  “Sally used to be into whores as well as auto detailing,” she said. “Had a whole operation here. A lot went down, but we could only get evidence for a couple of minor charges. But that was the whole point. What can you observe inside this place? Can’t man a stakeout, can’t stick a listening device that wouldn’t get destroyed in a few minutes. Smart, doing your business inside of a washing machine. And it was screened by the legitimate business. People really did get their cars washed here. After Sally got busted, the place got a bad rep, not so popular anymore. Of course, that’s mostly because we make him run it fast, the way a real car wash would be. Used to be, you could sit in here for fifteen minutes, get your business done. The working girls loved that quarter-hour rub and spray. Had a real routine going. Get out at the vacuum cleaners, grab a Coke from the machine on the way to the back, find a customer and take another ride.”

  “And you guys rained on everyone’s parade? How rude.”

  “Cops’re used to pissing people off, enforcing all those stupid laws. Sally’s toned things down, but I knew he had access to the governor we slapped on the conveyor. He pretty much hand-built this place. If he behaves himself, he just might get by okay. Hey, here they come. Get across to the other side. Front door if that seat’s empty, otherwise back. If Sally’s done his job, their doors aren’t locked, because they’re expecting a pre-cross-country-road-trip vacuum at the end to get the wrappers and flattened french fries out. Wait until that spray’s done . . . now!?’

  Bernal missed most of the dribble of scalding water that came out of the back end of the nozzle when it shut off, but he still ended up with a wet shoulder. The front of the reentry-marked Plymouth Voyager emerged from the first set of sprays.

  On their way to brace the Enigmatic Ascent crew at the Green Acre, Charis had spotted their minivan bumping through the water-filled potholes at the entrance to the Squeak ’n Whistle car wash and formulated this plan on the fly. “The weirder and more arbitrary the place you interrogate someone, the more off balance they are,” she’d said. “And the less admissible in court, of course. But that’s not exactly relevant here, is it?”

  Bernal felt that he was the one off balance, but there wasn’t time to consider that now. The Voyager was next to him. He could see Oleana’s serene helmet of hair, which meant the passenger seat was unoccupied. He heard Charis shout something, so he grabbed the handle, pulled the door open, and tumbled in.

  Oleana squeaked, turned, and sprayed him in the face with something that burned his eyes. He fell back against the door, his eyes squeezed against the pain.

  “Oh . . . Bernal! I didn’t know, I’m sorry . .. what the ... why are you here? Just to say goodbye?” By the end, the shock was gone from her voice, and she was back to deadpan.

  “What was that? Mace?”

  “What? No. Smell yourself.”

  Wary of a trick, he sniffed. He smelled . . . moonlight, spring flowers, the scent he remembered from when they had first met. It was still too foofy for her. “Perfume?”

  “All I had. ‘Happy,’ by Clinique. From my mom, every birthday. No Mace. I wouldn’t even know where you buy it. You guys use it a lot out here?”

  Someone honked behind them, and male voices howled. She peered into her rearview mirror. “Do they think we can go faster?” Another honk.

  In the back, Charis had missed a grip on the back of Oleana’s seat as she jumped in and crashed to the floor. Len and Magnusen’s faces were ashen and startled in the light of their open laptops. They leaned forward and helped her up.

  “Hesketh,” Bernal said. “What do you think Hesketh is?”

  “I don’t think you deserve that information.” Oleana rested her fingertips on the steering wheel, not as if driving, but as if ready to do so at any moment. Bernal noticed that she colored her nails orange and then bit them. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Sorry. Charis Fen, meet Oleana, Len, and Magnusen. You know about them. Charis is a colleague. Someone as interested in figuring out what Hesketh is as I am. I’d think you’d be more curious.”

  Charis took her time about getting up off the floor.

  Then she rolled and sat, massive, between their seats. The two men looked down at her nervously.

  “Who originally got in touch with you?” Charis said.

  “We never knew,” Magnusen said. “Anonymous, but with information about a special planetary probe. We couldn’t pass it up. So we started watching, when we could. The track information was good.�
��

  “You think it was Hesketh itself,” Charis said. “The original information came from it. Right? You were supposed to help it.”

  “ Yes,” Oleana said. “It said it needed our help.”

  “Do you know what Hesketh is?” Bernal said. “Do you know what’s actually going on here? The thing’s a killer—the Bowler. If you think about it, you’ll realize it all fits.”

  All three were silent. The last soap dispenser squirted foam on the windshield.

  “We should tell them,” Len said. No one else spoke. He looked around, trying to find support. He didn’t find any, but at least he didn’t find resistance, either. “We know where it’s going, so we should just tell them.”

  “Oh, Len . . .,” Oleana whispered.

  “That’s no way to do it!” A less controlled personality than Magnusen would have been shouting. But, in his context, his voice was just as startling. “You can’t just guess ... we know what we’ve been working for ... understanding, cooperating, helping, we’ve been part of something bigger, on a mission, trying to get something achieved. .. .”

  “We were gamed, Magnusen,” Len said. “Taken advantage of. All of us were.”

  “It’s not a killer. I don’t believe it’s a killer.”

  “Okay, fine then. But do you think we need to help it? To assist it in making its escape? Do you think someone’s really trying to destroy it for no good reason?”

  “Do you really know what it is?” Bernal said.

  “Just tell us,” Magnusen said. “Don’t try to take advantage of our pride or our solidarity or anything to persuade us to an emotional position. Just give us what you think and why we should agree.”

  Bernal and Charis exchanged a glance. She nodded.

  “Hesketh is intended and designed for planetary exploration,” he said. “But it went wrong. Its substrate is frozen human heads, taken from a cryobank. I don’t think it got ahold of an abnormal brain or anything, but in a kind of pragmatic way, it set out to get more processing power by obtaining more heads. Perhaps it didn’t have the context for when it was proper to recover a functional head. It found someone to help it out, to do the work of killing in the human world. That person, Ignacio Kuepner, is now dead. Hesketh is trying to escape. We’re trying to stop it.”

  “It fits,” Len said. “God knows, Magnusen, it fits.”

  Magnusen scowled, not as an expression of disagreement but one of deep thought. “Okay. But if it’s about to leave the planet for interstellar space, what does it really matter? It’s still a magnificent mission.”

  “Magnificent? The thing’s a killer! You may not believe in titanium dickeys, but you know that.”

  “You didn’t hear me deny it, did you? But, I mean, it’s not like we’re worried about future crime here, are we? There’s only one Hesketh. This is a pretty unique situation, and you can’t torque your system around to deter unique situations.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this! Are you really going to argue legal theory right now?”

  “It’s all just theory, until you find yourself on the receiving end.”

  Len choked in exasperation.

  “Magnusen.” Oleana’s voice was calm. “This is serious. Please let’s help catch this thing.”

  “I .. .” Magnusen worked his mouth as he looked at her. Then he squeezed his eyes tightly shut. “Okay.”

  “Don’t hold anything back,” Oleana said.

  “I go for it, you know that.” He looked at Charis and Bernal. “We’ve been getting a lot of chatter. All over. Groups like ours, other information ... I put it together, got—”

  Len cleared his throat.

  “Len helped ... Len and I got the information together. Never mind who did what. That’s not relevant now, is it? We’re a team, we’re good at what we do. There’s a line, a chain of transfers. Been used a couple of times, become kind of routine.

  “An Aeroflot aircraft, usually Tupolev 124 or 154, flies from one of the ’stans to Vladivostok. An irregular run, carrying the kind of thing you carry from corrupt former Soviet Central Asian republics: opium, weaponry, looted archeological finds, specialized gear from defunct labs. Things get transferred to a Korean Air 747 long-distance freighter, which takes the cargo to LA. Then things get variable. Usually, though, it gets massaged into a regular package, something clean, and goes via some bulk shipper to an airport in the northeast, ranging from Chicago to Boston and down to maybe Philadelphia. From there, a small plane, a Cirrus SR-22, flies the package into Cheriton airport.”

  “That’s probably how Ignacio got his stuff in,” Charis said.

  “Yeah, but what’s important is that it works the other way too. Stuff goes out. And something’s ready to go out this morning, early. We think it’s Hesketh. The Cirrus has filed a flight plan that takes it over to O’Hare by morning. A FedEx Airbus 300 is set up to take it, and it’s pretty big, and lot of freight is getting paid. Then, nothing certain, but there’s some nice flight matchups, with an Aeroflot Antonov 124 already sitting on the tarmac at Vlad with nothing obvious for it to do. The AN-124 is one of the world’s largest freight transport aircraft. This one belongs to the Russian Space Agency and is usually used for transporting things like rocket boosters. Our guess is that it’s heading across Central Asia to Krainiy Airport, which serves the city of Baikonur, Kazakhstan. That’s the nearest city to—”

  “Tyuratam,” Bernal said. “Your old tourist site. Where the big boosters burn.”

  “We were hoping to go there,” Magnusen said. “To see it take off.”

  “The tickets are a rip-off,” Oleana said. “I’d rather go to St. Thomas. I’m getting some good prices.”

  Both Magnusen and Len stared at her in shock. Switching vacation plans from central Kazakhstan to the Caribbean meant a real change of priorities. Bernal didn’t know whether Oleana’s decision not to spend her vacation feeling steppe dust between her teeth was what had led to her decision to reveal all, but more arbitrary things had certainly happened.

  “I don’t know how fussy the Russians are going to be about Hesketh,” Len said. “They need the dough.”

  “They’ve never been fussy about anything,” Charis said. “If they could have kept severed heads alive, they’d still be worshipping Stalin and probably happy as clams about it. Damn it! We’re running around Cheriton looking under rocks, and Hesketh’s boosted everything to a whole new level.”

  “Ignacio must have contacts all the way out there,” Bernal said.

  “And why not? Once the Soviet Union collapsed, they were the biggest source of dangerous junk on the face of the planet. I’m sure Ignacio would have wanted a piece of that.”

  Bernal looked at the faces of the Enigmatic Ascent crew, expecting to see crushing defeat. Instead, they looked .. . interested. Having fun. Len and Magnusen huddled over a single screen, checking out launch windows from Tyuratam, while Oleana was on the phone to some fellow enthusiast in Smolensk, who had some information about Russian government plans. They spoke in French.

  The van was finally pulled through the last water spray and under the flopping noodles at the exit. They turned the car over to Len for a last vacuum.

  _______

  Bernal and Len pulled the van over to the automotive interior cleaning area, while the others spread out, like people talking on their phones do, and circled at the far end of the parking lot like moths. Two cylinders, red and yellow, bubbled, promising obsolete scents for their interior. The corrugated hose of a vacuum cleaner dangled from an overhead cable. Its compressor cylinder was decorated like a little robot, with arms ending in metal clamps.

  “That night,” Len said. “The night we met you. We got a message.” He cranked up the vacuum and poked the nozzle under the front seat.

  “I remember.”

  “Hesketh wanted a pickup, over on Cooper Road. It was supposedly just lying out there, injured. Something had happened to it.”

  “At number 37?” Chans’s HQ, just as he had tho
ught.

  “Right. But when we got there, there was a fence down, and someone had already picked it up.”

  “Who?”

  “Didn’t see. Just a vehicle, a truck. We didn’t know that was what had happened until we looked around where it had been pulled out. Saw some big tire tracks. And we found some crap, papers and stuff. Not wet, looked fresh, like it had just fallen out of something.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “This was mostly paper crap. Some beer coasters that someone had trimmed into O-rings, like you’d use for attaching an exhaust pipe or something. A template for drilling holes to attach an under-desk keyboard drawer. And someone had used it to drill holes and then kept it. And a fax .. . well, look, here.” With a furtive glance over at Magnusen, he pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. “I made a copy. On the sly, kind of. Magnusen wants to seem so smart, like he figured it all out from first principles. He did some decent research, I’ll give him that, but without the luck of finding this thing, he’d have nothing.”

  At the top it said WANT TO IMPROVE YOUR SALES PRODUCTIVITY 330%? It was the same sheet that had come out of the old fax machine in Charis’s office. But below, where Muriel’s message had been superimposed, was, instead, a FedEx waybill, with a bar code. Hesketh must have spit that out for Ignacio to use in arranging its transportation. Magnusen had used it to figure out Hesketh’s planned route.

  Hesketh had communicated however it could. Muriel had managed to send a version with her own message superimposed to Charis’s machine. The other had gone to Ignacio, who had come out to recover Hesketh.

  But there was a bit more. Below the bar code was what looked like a photograph of some stretch of outer space. He could see a piece of nebula, a spray of stars. Part of the image was obscured with something like a bar or a support strut.

  “Is this Hesketh’s final destination?” Bernal pointed at the nebula.

  “Dunno. Maybe it’s planning its escape route in complete detail, clear out to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud or something.”