Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  All the evidence pointed to Hesketh’s attempted departure from the Cheriton Airport. They should all be on that, attempting to intercept, and setting up backstops in case it evaded them, to stop it somewhere else along the line. So Bernal, deliberately and consciously, tried to falsify this hypothesis.

  It was a mental process he’d worked out after that package had exploded in his hands. The only way not to see what you expect to see is to change your expectations and see if things still look the same. And, necessarily, the path to falsifying the Tyuratam hypothesis was through Prelate and Vervain, the only people he knew for sure had seen the headtaker up close and personal and who worked for whoever had wanted it recovered. Seeing Prelate and Vervain was something he’d hoped he’d never have to do.

  The vacuum nozzle buzzed. Len pulled it out from under the seat and yanked off the hamburger box that was stuck on it.

  “Get out of the way, you moron!” someone yelled.

  Bernal looked up. A man with a mullet, wearing a vinyl vest that revealed a fleshy arm with a tattoo of a grinning Coyote buggering the Road Runner, glowered from a black Silverado with a silver death’s head on its hood. Molten flux had dripped down the grille from the crude welding job.

  His passenger, a smaller version of the driver, with bare head poking out through the top of his mullet, grinned at Bernal and flipped him the finger. A Playboy Bunny air freshener dangled from the rearview.

  In getting a look at the photograph, Bernal had stepped out into the route cars took out of the wash. “I’m sor—”

  “Son of a bitch.” Something sprayed across his feet. The pickup backed and roared past so close that Bernal had to jump out of the way. It fishtailed into the street, burned rubber, and was gone.

  Bernal looked down. A Coors can rolled against his foot, spilling froth. So he could add littering to their other crimes. He was lucky they hadn’t winged it at his head. Len picked it up and dropped it into a half-melted blue plastic trash barrel.

  “I miss the Midwest,” Len said.

  Bernal tucked the copied sheet into a pocket. “Better get your ass back to Baraboo, then.”

  42

  Charis was organizing an interception of Hesketh in cooperation with Enigmatic Ascent. But, instead of being part of that exciting operation, Bernal was chatting over old times with his buddies Prelate and Vervain. He had to find out who they had been working for, and he had to do it alone. No one else could be spared.

  “We not know.” Prelate was emphatic. “Not know!”

  “Bernal, you want some .. . ah, what is this, honey?” Prelate looked down at the grease-stained white cardboard box held out to her by Vervain. “Pastry. Went to pastry shop, got pastry. You want pastry names? I have no names. I point.”

  Vervain sighed, then smiled at Bernal. He was impressed with himself. No matter what else happened in his life, he would remember coming here, to the apartment of Quanelle Martin, aka Vervain, and Wanda Grbic, aka Prelate, to find out why the hell the two women had stolen a headtaker and then locked him in a wine cellar.

  Vervain wiggled the box in a manner intended to be enticing. “Pick something.”

  Bernal picked a cylinder with a sail of chocolate sticking out of it. The ladies had been excessively friendly since he had arrived, and they had buzzed him right in. “You were working for Madeline Ungaro?”

  “Right!” Prelate nodded. “We know her. She like neighbor, back at the old place, at Long Voyage.”

  “Did you steal those heads for her in the first place?”

  “We not know about that!”

  “Please, honey.” Vervain rubbed her partner’s arm. “Let me try to clear this up.”

  Despite their coziness, Bernal did not get the sense of them as lovers, and, in fact, the electric organ displayed photographs of Prelate with what looked like a husband, taken in a studio back in whatever country she had emigrated from, and Vervain wore an engagement ring with an impressive diamond on it, which she presumably took off when hitting people so that it would not leave a traceable imprint in someone’s skin.

  “We didn’t know anything about Madeline’s penetration of Long Voyage,” Vervain said. “So, when she gave us a call, we figured it was just because she’d appreciated our work. We do salvage, recovery. We’d talked about it, so she knew. We’re always looking for work, and word of mouth is what gets you the referrals.”

  “Madeline hired you to, what, find a piece of cryogenic gear someone had hidden in an abandoned car?”

  “Pretty much. Someone had stolen it from her, she said. And she needed it for a project.”

  “And then, when I came around to check up on it, you assaulted me and locked me in the basement.”

  “Poor behavior,” Prelate said. “We acknowledge.”

  “It was all just part of the job.” Vervain showed no embarrassment. “She warned us that someone would be coming around after it. There was bonus money in it if we kept it safe. Absolute security is part of our service.”

  “What did you spend the bonus money on?” Bernal said.

  “We got a new dining room table! Jordan’s, on sale. A good deal.”

  “Great,” Bernal said. “I’m glad.”

  There were knickknacks on the shelves of the hutch. A lace tablecloth covered the newly acquired table, with a bowl of blue, green, and red artificial apples directly in the center. On the wall were more family photographs and some nature scenes, at least one of which looked like it had come with the frame. A low bookshelf held books that looked left over from someone’s college days, with more than one bearing a yellow used sticker across the spine.

  For all he knew, they genuinely were sorry. All in the way of business, can we just move on here?

  “Someone died at that car,” Bernal said. “Muriel Inglis was murdered.”

  “Nothing to do with us.” Prelate was stubborn. “We did job, were done. We knew no serial killer man.”

  “And you delivered the device?”

  “We did the job we were paid for,” Vervain said. “That’s why people hire us.”

  If they had actually worked for Ignacio Kuepner, there was no way they were going to admit it, not to him, anyway. Madeline Ungaro was their story, and they were sticking to it.

  “Where is Madeline Ungaro now?”

  “She is gone,” Prelate said. “Had special project elsewhere. She met us at Italian restaurant, on Route 2. We had nice pasta dinner, then she took what she paid for. We ask no questions about the rest. Never see her again. Another pastry?” Prelate shoved the box at Bernal so aggressively that the contents almost slid out into his lap.

  “No, thank you.” Was anything they had told him true? She’d vanished from the scene, but here they were insisting that they had eaten pasta with her somewhere on Route 2, not far from Cheriton. He didn’t think they knew a damn thing about Ungaro. The woman was a mirage. Muriel was really dead, and after all his searching, he was no closer to Ungaro than when he had started. “Could I use the bathroom?”

  “Sure.” Had Vervain hesitated a tiny bit? “It’s down the hall, that way.”

  Perhaps Charis might have made something out of the ranks of toiletries on the window shelf, on the rack in the shower, along the radiator, but the multicolored bottles said nothing to Bernal. Everything was clean, neat, and organized. He found himself checking around the edge of the toilet to make sure he hadn’t splashed. He wouldn’t want them talking about him after he left.

  As he stepped out of the bathroom, he glanced down the hall. Down at the end was a half open door which revealed a bed with a flowered bedspread and a night table with a clock radio on it. Above the bed hung what looked like an out-of-focus picture of a flower taken through a raindrop-spattered window.

  Vervain stood at the end of the hall, watching him. No, not a flower. It was, in fact, a perfectly in-focus astronomical photograph of a brightly colored nebula. What he had thought were drops of water on a pane of glass were the glowing points of nearer stars. They�
�d been paid, but their employer had decided to throw in a photograph, since he took pictures like that as his hobby.

  They hadn’t been working for Ignacio Kuepner, and they hadn’t been working for Madeline Ungaro. They were working for someone with an even closer connection with Long Voyage, the only person in the whole situation who might have a deep interest in storing and transporting heads and returning them to their proper place.

  Norbert Spillvagen. Of course.

  He checked his fly, then strolled out into the living room.

  Something clamped itself on his arm. Prelate’s hand.

  “You know how there are all these satellite tournaments to the World Series of Poker, and people buy in, hoping for a shot at the big time?”

  “Sure.” He tried to turn, as if casually, but was locked in place.

  “If something like that comes to your hometown, don’t try it. Everybody at the table can take one look at you and know every card you hold in your hand.”

  43

  They silenced him with a strip of duct tape and hauled him out of the apartment, down a back staircase, and into their car, a nondescript sedan, in as many seconds as it had taken them to throw him in the cellar the last time. They were now driving down a dark road, heading out of town. And he’d lost his cell phone again.

  He wished he could appreciate their professional service ethic more. They maintained absolute confidentiality. If he hadn’t figured out their real client, they would have let him go, no hard feelings, and probably put him on their Christmas list. Now they had another plan.

  They hadn’t even tied his hands. Wondering if he would be punished, he reached up and ripped the tape from his mouth. Neither of them said anything or even turned around.

  Headlights flared behind them. Bernal snuck a glance, hoping for a police car. No such luck. Instead, it was a big pickup, looming over Prelate’s smaller car. He was about to forget about it when he saw a glint of silver. A death’s head on the hood. It was his impatient friends from the car wash. They’d been honking at him since they were stuck behind the Voyager on a conveyor chain. He slumped back into his seat. His luck, that his last possible human contact turned out to be with assholes.

  The great thing about assholes was their consistency. They were always assholes. In sudden inspiration, Bernal held his hand behind his head, where Prelate and Vervain couldn’t see it, and gave them the finger. It was something he’d wanted to do back when they’d tried to run over him by the vacuum. The pickup honked. Bernal moved his hand up and down vigorously. The pickup’s driver leaned on his horn and pushed up until his bumper was almost against them.

  This would all surely attract attention. An accident, a stop for an exchange of insurance company information, and he could get the hell out.

  “Who the hell is that jerkoff?” Prelate glanced in the rearview, then accelerated. The pickup kept pace.

  Bernal took advantage of her attention to the road to turn around and mouth an obscenity. In high school, he and a friend had spent a long afternoon working out what phrases were most clearly visible when lip read. He now used a few with the highest signal-to-noise ratio, and finished it off with that same friend’s favorite tongue-in-cheek and hand-holding-invisible-penis blowjob gesture. He would never have the grace Thad had had with it, but he thought it would work well enough.

  It did. The pickup swung out into the opposite lane and accelerated with a roar. They crested a hill. An oncoming car tooted a horn, then, with admirable speed, spun itself out into the drainage ditch by the side of the road. Bernal didn’t have a chance to see what happened to it.

  The wisest thing would have been to hit the brakes and let the yahoos in the pickup roar on. But no one is wiser in a car than out of it. Prelate accelerated just as the pickup turned back into the right lane.

  Their left front fender smacked against the pickup’s passenger side just as the pickup slammed on its brakes.

  They bounced and spun. Bernal was yanked back and forth, and those distant window lights seared through him like lasers.

  _______

  They stopped, engine dead and silent. Bernal stared up through the windshield in befuddlement, wondering how anyone could have overlooked this gigantic sycamore while paving the road. Then he knew he had to move.

  He thumbed the catch on his shoulder harness, pulled the handle, and was out the door. Cold flooded his feet, and he realized they had landed in the drainage ditch by the road’s side. One foot was still wet from the car wash, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. He clambered up past cans and crumpled cigarette packs to the road.

  The death’s head pickup stood up there, waiting. Bernal prepared to dive back into the ditch, but all the driver and his buddy did was whoop a rebel yell and tear off down the road. A rebel yell? In Massachusetts? People had really lost touch with their roots. It was all those specialized cable channels and Web sites. Those were people’s true homelands now.

  With a feeling of floating free, his toes barely grazing the asphalt, Bernal looked down at the car. The driver’s side had come to rest against the tree. Prelate struggled with that door as her airbag deflated, then gave Vervain a shove. Tough girl that she was, Vervain had not been wearing her safety harness, and the impact had stunned her.

  Bernal ran. First he ran along the road, then, seeing a forest access road, off into the dark woods. His head was clear now.

  Within a few minutes, he sensed he had lost them. But he did not slow down.

  _______

  The road petered out in a couple of hundred yards, so he plunged directly into the trees. He wasn’t running now. He couldn’t manage it. And now that he wasn’t running, the woods seemed harder to penetrate, resisting him with shrubs, leaf-covered streams, slippery rocks.

  Bernal could see the connections. Spillvagen had gone through a great deal of trouble to acquire a device for storing cryogenically frozen heads. Where was he planning to get them? Unless he himself was planning a raid on the Long Voyage cryobank, the only other local supply of the things was inside Hesketh.

  Did Spillvagen know where Hesketh was? Even if he didn’t, it was clear that he had a lot more information than he’d let on. Bernal was wary of Prelate and Vervain, Spillvagen’s minions, but it wasn’t the paralyzing fear he might once have felt. He was too full of a feeling of a mystery on its way to being solved. Spillvagen just better not stand in the way of solving it.

  Ahead, a darkness against the glowing sky: a ridge, a glacier’s rock collection, dropped all at once when the fashion for ice ages ended. He climbed carefully. On the other side, a packed dirt trail led down at an angle. Some of the trees had blazes on them, triangles, either metal ones nailed in, or older ones cut into the bark, now almost reabsorbed. That was good. Men had been here, men like himself. Ahead was a parking lot, maybe one with a rustic wood Conservation Land sign and a holder for nature brochures with line drawings of mayapples and deer footprints.

  _______

  The distant light of a shopping center silvered the trees at the large trailhead parking lot. He looked toward its glow and realized that he was very near where Maura worked.

  He desperately did not want to make her useful. But he even more desperately wanted to solve this, to find Hesketh, to find Madeline Ungaro, to find or dispel Muriel.

  So he set off down the road. He walked quickly and lightly, feeling like he was finally getting somewhere. He did get a crick in his neck from checking each pair of headlights coming up behind him to make sure it wasn’t Prelate and Vervain.

  _______

  He called Charis from a phone at the Woodland Shopping Center and got her voice mail. She was too busy predicting Hesketh’s route to Cheriton Airport and working out a way to prevent it from reaching its flight to answer. He left her a brief message about Norbert Spillvagen and the headtaker, but he wasn’t yet ready to claim that he was on the right track to finding Hesketh.

  That would come after he confronted Spillvagen.

  44
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  The ceilings of the SuperMax were forty feet high, and the stacks of office supplies almost reached them. Bernal wandered the aisles, momentarily mesmerized by the primary colors of copy paper boxes, file organizers, and highlighters.

  He dodged an inventory checker on a Segway and found Maura near the laser printers. She wore a blue uniform with the SuperMax logo, with its row of pens standing on end. It was a hell of a thing to make a grown-up wear, though she must have made some alterations, because hers cut neatly in at the waist.

  She turned and looked at him as he came up. She made an arrested movement to check her hair. The wiry curls were untamable, even by the bear-trap clip that held most of the hair behind her head.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he said. “Thought I would stop by.”

  She scanned him, muddy feet up past torn shirt to what, he now realized, must have been a hunted expression. “You’re not done, are you? I asked you to stop by when you were done.”

  She was flushed red, as if embarrassed, but she was serious.

  “No, I’m not done. There were two days when I thought I was, but now I know I’m nowhere near done. And I need some help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “I need a ride. I need to confront someone, and I need to do it soon.”

  Her pause was long enough that he feared she would throw him out. “I’m about due for a break now anyway. I better be able to eat lunch while I drive you. Is that okay?”

  “That’s fine.”

  _______

  “Here.” She handed him a brown paper bag and backed around a delivery truck. The driver waved to her. “Pull out the sandwich and open it up, will you? Doesn’t matter what else I’m doing with my break, but I got to eat lunch or I’ll pass out during the rest of my shift. That, or bite the head off a customer.”

  He opened the neatly rolled top and pulled out an aluminum foil rectangle. The bag was a classic, with a couple of translucent spots that indicated reuse. He uncrimped the foil and handed her the sandwich, which looked like tuna salad on whole wheat.