by Pam Richter
Alexander lay back to scheme. Maybe the government would make an army of super-computers. It was a little awesome to think of what the government would do with such an army, though, so first they would make use of the computer's abilities to increase their wealth.
Alexander thought he would go to the tanning salon and take pictures of the equipment. Then, even if his dad would not cooperate with the government and tell them how he had made the computer, he could sell the pictures for an enormous sum to the low bidder.
Another thought was to destroy the machinery. Then they would have the one and only human computer, because Alexander knew that his father, Ferd, did not have much faith in the government and would probably never give them the specifications. Right now it was a one-of-a-kind, which made it much more valuable than if it was just one of many to be made in the future.
Alexander knew he would have to go and tell his dad that they really never really intended to kill Sabrina Miller. Not that it mattered much. Ferd would want to believe, so he would. And it might be a good thing that Ferd was in the hospital. At least it gave him access to the machines, to take the pictures, something he was sure his father would never let him do otherwise.
Alexander rang the bell for the nurse to find out the earliest time that they could leave this miserable place. When he found out that it would be later that afternoon, when Stephan's wheelchair arrived, he thought he had better face the music and go visit his father. Anyway, he wanted to practice on his crutches, so he found out where the intensive care ward was located and crutched in that direction.
Cedars Sinai is such an enormous hospital that Alexander got lost several times. He was almost glad. Even being a lawyer, a professional at arguing, Alexander knew he always ended up at a loss with his father. For such a little guy, his father could be formidable.
Soon Alexander was confused and, since he was dyslexic, totally turned around. He had to ask for directions several times, but he finally found the intensive care ward and went to the nursing station. He demanded to see the doctor handling his father's case. The nurse checked a file. Then she looked at him over half-rim glasses and whispered confidentially, "Do you know that the most famous cardiologist in the whole world has been specially flown here to take care of Dr. Steinbrenner. And he has a guard outside his room. Is your father famous or something?"
Alexander stood with his head cocked to the side and did not answer immediately. When he had left his own hospital room there had been a man sitting outside the door. The man did not have on a uniform of any kind, just a business suit. But the nurse, Teddy, had said the man was a guard.
If Alexander hadn't been so confused and lost in the hospital he wouldn't have noticed where people were going, but he had been looking for someone to help him and had seen the same guy several times. When you're dyslexic you are constantly turning around to try and find your nonexistent sense of direction. Each time he had seen the same man. He thought he was being paranoid.
Alexander furtively scanned the area. He spied the man he had seen several times previously sitting across the lobby of the nursing station. He had covered his face with a magazine.
Alexander was shrewd, if not as intelligent as his father, and all the pieces were suddenly fitting together. He was stunned. If he and his brother really had government surveillance, they would have an awful time with their own loss of mobility. When he and Stephan tried to take the computer they would be leading the government directly to her. If they went to dad's place they would be leading the agents there. Although, if there was this careful a watch on the three of them, the place was probably already under surveillance.
Alexander felt betrayed by his old college dorm-mate, now in the Defense Department. He had called him back the night they first saw the computer, that fat fleshy thing that resembled a human whale, to tell him that the computer had died and could no longer be a special weapon for the government.
One of his best friends had evidently sicced a bunch of spies on his family. It was a frightening and dangerous situation. And it would totally interfere with his plans. The government would not ask; they would take the computer. All three of them, he, Stephan and Ferd could end up in prison for using a human baby in an experiment. Then the government could do what it pleased with the computer and no one would be the wiser.
Alexander decided he would have to tell his father. If anyone could think of a way out of this situation, his dad could.
* * * * *
Sabrina was late getting to her shop on Melrose, but Bea never got angry at Sabrina and was delighted that they both now had red hair. The shop was busy and Sabrina left Bea in charge later that afternoon to go to the modeling interview.
The audition almost seemed to be preordained, even though Sabrina was almost turned away at the door because of her red hair. In the reception area about twelve gaunt blonds stared at her arrogantly; the assistant director officiously said that she would be wrong for the part; the gay writer swished angrily and said, This is a California-Beach-Toothpaste-Commercial for God's sake. But the production assistants winked at Sabrina because they knew her. The man filming was no other than her first photographer and lover, Tracy Rieber.
Tracy asked disgruntled executives, Who needs another blond, anyway? Blonds are a dime a dozen with their feathered hair and birdbrain reputations. This commercial would be outstanding and fresh. Look at her! She's perfect. So tall and thin, and besides, she would not only look beautiful, but exceptional.
Tracy made Sabrina demonstrate how good she was at rubbing her teeth with her tongue and saying, Um-mm, while smiling brilliantly. Then he had her change into her bathing suit and presented her as the epitome of the California Look. The fact that she had to repeat the rubbing of her teeth with her tongue, and murmur Um-mm endless times while being paraded around in her bathing suit did not bother Sabrina. Modeling had inured her to the endless repetitions that were done for the writer, the production manager, the art director and the casting executives. The whole process was so hysterical that Sabrina had to keep tight control or she would have broken up at the silly seriousness the agency people took in casting their commercial.
In the end, Tracy triumphantly pulled it off, having been given Creative Control in his contract. Sabrina was cast as the lead model.
Annoyed, irritated-as-hell tall, thin blonds were turned away. Tracy finally took Sabrina aside for a moment and asked her how she could have done such a thing? To him? To change her hair just before his first important national job, breaking into film from print work photography.
Sabrina finally burst out laughing. She told him truthfully that she had been called by her modeling agency for the job and had no idea that he would be filming. Then she spent an endless time thanking him for bucking against all of the executives so she could get the job. Sabrina really was grateful to him, but mostly because he had never once suggested she change her hair back to blond. She really did appreciate the fact that he withstood all the studio flack on his first important national film job for her.
Sabrina found she would have to be in Malibu at five in the morning, tomorrow. They would film before the beach was sullied by unnecessary Looky-Loos.
CHAPTER 8
The fresh, strong memory of leaving the Chadholm family throbbed with emotional force through Eve. She stumbled away from the stove where she was cooking eggs, sobbing with shock and hurt. She would never again ride at dizzying heights on the swings in the back yard. Eve remembered running into her room after she had been told by Mommy that she would have to go back to the orphanage. She didn't even remember the orphanage, but they were taking her back there today. She looked around the bedroom and knew it was no longer her room. And the bed. She would never sleep on it again. She loved the light blue quilt and she knelt on the floor in her bedroom, sobbing into the quilts and pillows and hugged her Teddy Bear. Would she have to give him up too? It finally occurred to her that they really did not love her at all. Not like their own children. Then she cri
ed even more because she knew she was bad. They were throwing her away because they did not love her. She was not a good little girl.
Eve came out of the memory slowly, like out of a dazed dream state. She found that she was kneeling beside Sabrina's bed, in Sabrina's bedroom. The coral bedspread was wet with tears she had shed for the little six-year-old Sabrina had been. During the strong remembrance of Sabrina's past, Eve had not been aware that she was physically reliving the event by going, like a somnambulist, into Sabrina's bedroom and kneeling down beside the bed, sobbing.
Eve was furiously angry. How could those foster parents have been so cruel to Sabrina when she was only a child? To take a baby into their own home, and then discard her because it was no longer practical to keep her was inhumane and barbarous.
Eve vowed she would put that old grief to rest some day. She would go visit that family and make things right for Sabrina. Yes!
Eve knew she was feeling strong emotions of anger and indignation and noticed that her breathing and heart rate had accelerated. The fury was exhilarating and filling her with energy, which she knew was from a hormone, nor-epinephrine, or adrenalin. So she was getting hormone reactions, she thought logically, but her anger was not logical and she did not care. She felt like striking out at something and banged her head forcefully against the bedpost several times, feeling her head bounce back from the hard wood. She got up, reminding herself that even if she could not feel her head strike the bedpost, she better not do it any more. She might damage the brain. Ferd had told her never to hurt the computer or herself.
Eve walked back into the kitchen. She turned on the television to a game show, found the spatula and flipped the eggs. She guessed it was nice to have old memories of Sabrina's, in a way. At least she knew how to cook eggs, done just right, soft in the middle yellow part with the whites cooked so they were solid, not runny. She knew that.
Eve picked up the pan so that she could transfer the eggs onto a plate, not noticing that she was burning the flesh on her palm until she smelled the acrid odor of burned skin. She would have to remember not to pick up pans after they were heated. The reddened and blackened skin changed to a pink tone that gradually became flesh colored again.
Then Eve noticed she was ravenous. She was so hungry her knees buckled. She couldn't wait for the eggs. She was going to faint. Darkness was already clouding her vision. She quickly opened the refrigerator, grabbed the syrup bottle, and sank to a sitting position in front of the open door, drinking from the flip-top container. She took large gulps until she felt strong again. She wondered if she would have to carry a bottle of syrup around with her in case of an emergency. Maybe she was just so new that her body was not yet used to the abrupt metabolic changes required to heal. If she had to carry syrup around it would be a nuisance.
The cat was making a lot of noise and Eve looked at it curiously. It was a nice orange color and had beautiful liquid eyes, a luminous yellow color with iris's shaped like black candle flames. She was mesmerized, looking into the cat's eyes. Then she knew what to do and poured some of the dry cat food she had reached for automatically in the cupboard. She watched as the pretty animal crunched the food and Eve craved something to crunch on with her own teeth. A nice bone. She shook her head because she didn't think humans ate bones. But she wanted one. She remembered that Sabrina asked her to cook a roast for tonight. Maybe she could eat the bone. She could almost feel the hard bone scrunch in her mouth, and then reaching the soft spongy good part in the middle.
Eve was salivating and she wiped the dribbling from her mouth and chin with her hand. Good humans did not let go of their bodily fluids like that. She would have to keep her mouth shut when she thought of food.
She stood and watched the amazingly pink tongue of the cat as it swiped the sides of its mouth. A fragile creature.
Eve petted the cat and it arched in pleasure. Eve did not know she smiled. She liked the cat. Maybe because it was Sabrina's cat. She purred back at the cat.
Eve remembered when she found the kitten. She had been closing up shop. The day had been raining, like today. While double locking the front door of Sabrina's Fashions she heard a small crying sound. When she moved back in surprise, she stepped on part of a tiny tail. The wet baby had screamed and run away. She had followed it half a block, cornered it in a doorway and talked to it for five minutes, until it stopped spitting at her and let her pick it up and...
Eve shook her head. It seemed so real and vivid. Almost like it was really happening in that moment. The kitten's eyes had been blue then.
"The capital of Guam?" the announcer on the television was asking and Eve answered, "Agana." She watched the people standing behind the podium on the television frowning.
Eve put the egg pan into the sink and listened to the television.
"The capital of South Dakota?"
"Pierre," Eve said, as she began washing the dishes.
"Capital of Canada?" "Ottawa."
"Fourth president of the United States?" "James Madison."
Television was too slow. Eve got the cook book off the top kitchen shelf and read about how to cook roasts.
Eve found potatoes, carrots, onions and garlic in the refrigerator. But she needed parsley and would have to go to the store. She received the information that there was money in the bottom bureau drawer, under the socks.
Eve knew that she should not leave the apartment. It would be disobeying. But all the recipes for roasts said that parsley should be displayed around it. And if they all said parsley, and Sabrina wanted a roast, then she would have to go out and get it.
Everything would be fine because she would remember to blink and make expressions. She had seen how Sabrina pulled her mouth up when she talked to people, how her brows went together before she answered a question and how her eyes rounded when she listened to people talk.
Eve went into the bathroom and practiced different expressions in front of the mirror. Then she went into the bedroom and got sixty dollars.
She was detained from her errand by memories that came to her so clearly that she lived them.
As Eve left the apartment she started blinking.
* * * * *
Ivar Cousin and Malcolm Stoner, both on the CIA surveillance team from Burgess Whitcomb's office, had been sitting in their car across the street from Sabrina's condominium for six continuous hours. They watched the black haired girl come out of the front of the building. Their bored eyes followed her only because she was startlingly beautiful.
"It's her!" Ivar grabbed the binoculars.
"Naw. She has dark hair." Malcolm said, yawning hugely. He was near dozing in the warm car.
"I tell you, that's Sabrina Miller."
"First we see one blond. Then there's two leaving the Ferd's Tanning Salon. Now you say she has black hair?"
"I know that face. I took pictures of her when she went into Ferd's place."
Ivar threw the binoculars at Malcolm and started the car. The woman was walking quickly and he dodged around until he could park strategically a half block in front of her. It was obvious Sabrina Miller had changed her hair color when they got a close-up view of her face as she walked past.
Both Ivar and Malcolm noticed the large Japanese men who had been hanging around the building trail behind the woman, surreptitiously taking pictures. They watched her go into a small Mom & Pop grocery store.
Ivar was worried about this investigation. There were requirements placed upon him that were serious enough to send him away from the freedom and abundance he now enjoyed. He would never again take for granted his life here, now that it might be taken away.
Years ago, it had been an immense relief when Glasnost had proclaimed a truce between the two super powers because he felt he no longer had to worry about divided loyalties and what he would do in the event of a physical confrontation. Coming from a police state, he had learned to love freedom and he did not want to return to the creeping paralysis of paranoia that enormous bureaucracy produced,
with chilling cold, boredom, and remote parents and relatives he loved, but now seemed part of another, lost life.
The network Ivar Cousin had come from had such a long history that even with the warming of the cold war it had not been dismantled. The network consisted of people like himself, who had been placed in their respective cover situations for many years and who would, in all probability, never do anything much for their home country. But it was also composed of those more highly placed who did report back to Russia on a continuing schedule, as if the relationship between the two countries had not changed in any respect. The KGB is the one Soviet institution that had been almost unchanged by Gorbachev's political reforms, the political coup of 1991 and the regime of Boris Yeltsin. Although it is much more covert than previously, the KGB continues to have enormous power.
Ivar had watched in anguish and guilty relief that he was not himself experiencing the cataclysmic changes in his country as it moved painfully from Communism toward a sorrowful and stilting type of democracy. Through all the turmoil, he believed that he had been placed in America and forgotten.
Ivar had a nice apartment just a few blocks away from where he was now sitting. He had optimistically convinced himself that he had been overlooked, when he got a message three days ago to be at a certain telephone booth at a particular time.
Ivar had taken the necessary precautions required and had made the telephone rendezvous. The man he talked to had spoken Russian, commanding Ivar to learn as much as possible about the investigation headed by Burgess Whitcomb. Ivar had been given a telephone number to contact when he had the necessary information. He memorized it immediately, as physical evidence was incriminating and unprofessional. Now Ivar was alarmed because he had no idea why he was watching the beautiful Sabrina.