by Ron Goulart
Casper was on his hands and knees in the corner of the scrap-walled chapel room. “I hear you back in there, little friend,” he was saying. “So why don’t you come on out? You’re either a mouse or a rat, we can use either one.”
“Where’s Reverend Ortega?”
The black young man shot to his feet, spinning. By the time he was facing Ted and Haley there was a stungun in his hand. “Showing off, is that it? Show up out of nowhere while I’m trying to coax a live animal out of that hole in the wall and try to scare me so—”
“I’ve got to see him,” persisted Ted. “He’s got a rendezvous tomorrow morning, doesn’t he? Six a.m. out on Long Island?”
The Negro scowled. “Nobody knows about that.”
“You’re wrong there, Casper. Total Security knows about it,” Ted told him. “They set the whole thing up.”
“It’s a trap, huh? Yeah, I knew that fatass wasn’t right.” He walked, aimlessly, around the back room of the Central Park chapel. “Damn, I don’t even know where he is, the reverend. We’re closing down this place today, moving again like we always do. I got no way to get in touch with him.”
“You can always contact each other.”
Casper tugged at his ear. “You’re only starting, Ted, to understand the spy business,” he said. “The priest business is even tougher to comprehend. All I know is every once in awhile Reverend Ortega likes to go off by himself, to think and to pray. That’s where he is now, off somewhere all alone by himself. He’ll probably go from wherever he is right to that farbing meeting. See, they’ve promised him a lot of stuff about what’s really going on in Brazil. He’s very anxious about this meeting.”
“Okay, try to locate him anyway,” said Ted. “I’ll start at the other end, with Totter and Shantytown. I should be able to defuse him.”
“Defuse?”
“One of TSA’s more recent breakthroughs, an implanted bomb.” Inhaling sharply, Casper stared suddenly at Haley. “I just remembered,” he said. “We got word TSA did the same thing to your wife. She’s liable to—”
“No, Casper. I took care of it.”
Haley leaned back against a neowood section of wall. “Ted, is that what you had in your hand? Were those bombs and were they inside me?”
“Nothing to worry about now, Haley, nothing.”
“Never am I going to comprehend all of what’s been happening,” she said. “But I know you saved me from something fairly bad. After everything . . . you really didn’t have—”
“Yeah, but I did.”
Chapter 24
“No, I never knew any of that about you,” said Haley. “I didn’t even know Jay was an agent for this Total Security Agency.” She was sitting, arms folded under her breasts, with her back against the trunk of one of the trees on the weedy hill above Shantytown and its stretch of gritty beach. “The only reason I got involved with Jay . . . well, I was mad I guess. Mad at you, at Brimstone, at the Repo Bureau, at myself. Mad.”
Ted was close beside her, eyes on the cluster of improvised huts and shacks below. There were fifty or so ramshackle buildings, long since abandoned, built of the leftovers and remains of the past fifty years. Sheets of plywood, strips of iron-sub, slabs of imitation marble, canvas banners, landcar doors, neowood planks, chunks of lucite, blocks of syncrete, antique billboards, skycar windows. The night darkness was commencing to thin, day was nearer. “I didn’t know much about what was going on myself,” he said. “Inside my head someplace I knew. The dreams, me walking around in a nightshirt, that was what they were about. I was sending messages to myself.”
“You had all of these . . . powers all along,” said Haley. “Maybe if we’d known, things wouldn’t have gone as bad as—”
“You have to be stupid for awhile, everybody does, before you get a little smart.”
Haley said, “I always thought Jay was somewhat fond of me. The agency, though, must have prompted him to approach me.”
“Probably.”
“Hey,” she said. “What?”
“It suddenly occurs to me that our life in Brimstone is all over,” answered his wife. “Your job, our friends, the whole pattern of life we had. Not that I’ll miss it, but what do we do from here on?”
“Something will no doubt occur to us.”
Haley said, “Dr. Dix threatened you. Is it likely you’ll be a fugitive, hunted and all?”
“No, because once I clean up this assassination attempt on Reverend Ortega I’m going to gather enough material to expose the Total Security Agency, President Hartwell, and anybody who happens to be standing too close.”
“Will that work? Is public exposure enough?”
“I believe so, and Ortega does.”
Haley glanced down through the imitation trees at Shantytown. “Almost six a.m. Since we couldn’t locate Totter anywhere else, do you think he’s down there now?”
“I’ve been getting hunches lately, about what’s coming, about where things are.” He shook his head. “As far as Totter goes, though, I can’t. . . . Wait. Yeah, I’m getting a feeling. He’s down there now. Totter . . . and two other agents. Waiting.”
“Total Security’s going ahead with the plan,” said his wife. “They didn’t call it off because you found out.”
“They don’t know I found out. The only guy who knows for sure is Dix,” said Ted. “I teleported him quite a way from here. He can’t have even reached a place where he can communicate with TSA yet.”
“What about Reverend Ortega? Maybe your friend Casper was able to stop him from coming here.”
“My feelings don’t tell me that. The reverend will be. . . . Yeah, Haley, there he is. See him coming along the beach.”
Down on the gray sand the lean, black-clad figure of the priest was moving.
Ted brought his hands together. “First thing is to get that bomb out of Totter.” He shut his eyes, squeezing his fingers tight. “Those toggles over in New Westport are switched off. So, okay, we can lift it right out of—”
Wham!
Up through the arriving morning flew shatters of glass, wood, plastic, neowood, synglass, shreds of canvas, cloth, and paper. A broken jigsaw, spilling across the dawn. Smoke followed, gray and thick, speckled with soot.
“Jesus! This one was different. This one was different . . . had an extra trick to it.” Ted brought his fists down again and again on his knees. “Damn, now I’ve killed . . . killed them . . . again. . . .”
“Ted, Ted.” Haley put her arms around him. “There’s no way you could have known.”
“I should have gotten the information out of Dix, instead of showing off and teleporting him to the Brazilian jungles. Three men dead, all three of them dead.”
“Reverend Ortega’s all right,” said his wife. “See, he’s getting up. The concussion of the explosion knocked him down.”
Ted said, “Better go talk to him.”
“Good morning, Ted,” said the priest as he dusted sand from himself. “This is your wife, isn’t it?”
“Yes, this is Haley,” said Ted. “What just happened, it’s my fault. I didn’t take enough—”
“He saved your life,” Haley told the reverend. “This wasn’t a real meeting, it was a Total Security Agency trap.”
Ortega looked from her to the smoking hole where Totter’s shanty had stood. “I’m not as smart as I thought I was,” he said. “I was convinced this was safe, everything checked out.”
“They had a bomb implanted in Totter,” explained Ted. “He, of course, didn’t know that, thought he was setting you up for some other kind of TSA accident.”
“It went off,” said Father Ortega, “too soon.”
“I was attempting to remove it, telekinetically. But they had an extra safeguard against that, one I didn’t know about. The instant I started it moving, the bomb went off.”
“If you hadn’t been here,” said Ortega, “it would have gone off anyway, and me along with it.”
“Yeah, I know, but—”
> “I was really counting on the report on some of the illegal weapons we’re using in Brazil,” said the priest. “Too bad that was only bait for the trap.”
“I can get you that kind of stuff. The TSA file rooms over in New Westport are full of it.”
“You sure?”
“I was nosing around over there last night.” He held out one hand in front of him, fingers spread wide. “Here, for a start.” A thick sheaf of pink-tinted faxpaper materialized on his palm.
Ortega took it, read the title off the cover. “‘Biological Missile Use in the Mato Grosso.’ That’s terrific. ‘Ultimate Security Clearance Required to Read Further!’”
“Here, here are some more.” More secret-file material of the Total Security Agency began to pop out of the air, dropping to the sand around Reverend Ortega’s feet.
The priest grinned. “This is more than enough, Ted,” he said, squatting, sorting through the documents and reports. “Roscoe never had the clearance to get near any of this. Now with what I’ve got here . . . soon as I get this to a few of my people and then get it broadcast across the country, the TSA is finished.”
Ted took a step back from the pile of material. “Let me know if I can help you with that end of things.”
“Where will you be?” Ted had taken hold of Haley’s hand again. “Away for awhile, but I’ll keep in touch. I’ve figured out all sorts of ways to use my abilities to communicate with people. For instance . . . well, I can go into that later.”
Nodding somewhat absently, Reverend Ortega turned his attention again to the papers apread out on the dawn beach before him.
Ted and his wife walked to the water’s edge. “I guess we can’t see him from here.”
“See who?”
“Oh, an immortal poet I met.” Ted pointed. “His houseboat should be directly across the Sound from us.”
“You said you were going away for awhile. Am I going, too?”
“Sure.”
“Read this part here,” said Ortega, “this second paragraph on. . . .” The priest rose up, looked around him.
The beach was empty.
“Excuse me for stepping on your dog,” said Moriarty. The young man had just appeared in the center of Mrs. Seuss’s living-room area.
“I have a definite location this time,” she said. “This is absolutely—”
“Too late, Mrs. Seuss. I only dropped in to tell you, in case you hadn’t heard, that the Total Security Agency is toppling down all around our ears. It was all over the news this afternoon,” said Moriarty, sidestepping the dozing cyborg spaniel. “I really thought I’d get Ted Briar, too, and bring him in. Except those tips you kept providing have been either too late or—”
“I see the two of them now,” continued the seer. “Yes, and I’m getting a very positive feeling about the location. Ted Briar and his wife, Haley, are in the West of this country.”
“We don’t need to know anymore. I came to tell you, in case you—”
“It is California South. Yes, that’s where they are.”
“So I’ll be getting along, I guess. Before my folks start to wonder where I’ve gotten to.”
“Ted and Haley are walking along a golden beach. They stroll hand in hand along the sunlit shore, the blue waters of the calm Pacific making a vast border to the sun-drenched sand, the surf foam swirling up across. . . .”
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24