The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

  Locale: Teresa had covered all the ground of Grove’s tragic adventure, from the seafront area of the town to the picnic site in the woods near Ninfield, to the Texaco filling station, and back through the streets of Bulverton itself. She had identified and timed every known incident. There were anomalies she had yet to resolve: there was an unexplained gap in the timing, and an apparent overlap, but she knew that more investigation would probably resolve these.

  Amy walked through the bar on some errand or other, and gave Teresa a nod and a smile. It was the signal of being busy, or at least not wanting to be delayed. As Amy was about to pass out of sight Teresa called after her.

  ‘Amy, may I have another drink?’

  Without a word the other woman returned, went behind the counter and mixed her a bourbon highball.

  ‘Will you be having a meal with us this evening?’ Amy said.

  ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ Teresa replied, swirling the glass between her fingers, and reflecting that in the Bureau some of the drinking men would say she was already halfway through the main course.

  Amy wrote down the price of the drink on Teresa’s account, then without saying anything continued with what she had been doing.

  Teresa, left alone again, wondered what she had done to offend Amy. They both seemed to be avoiding her. She felt more and more like the loudmouth American, intruding, clumping around insensitively, offending everyone she spoke to. Maybe it was this kind of thing, the undercurrents of unsaid Britishness, that had made her leave England in the first place? No, it wasn’t that. She was just a kid then. Wouldn’t have known. She drank the whiskey, stopped when she was about halfway down the glass, and put it on the counter in front of her.

  She wished she hadn’t started drinking so early in the evening. She wished more customers would come into the bar. She wished she was somewhere else.

  With the car lights slipping past the frosted panes in glistening blurs, the streaks of rain on the plain glass above highlighted by the streetlamps, and the bright central room light overhead, virtually unshaded, the bar felt bleak and lonely. Thinking that music might change things, she walked across to the jukebox and dropped in a coin, but nothing happened when she tried to make selections. She remembered Nick doing something to disable the instrument when he closed the bar at night, but when she peered behind the machine she could see no obvious switch.

  The empty, silent bar was oppressing her, confusing her. She knew she had already drunk too much, and wondered if she should take this last drink to her room, and finish it there before sleeping everything off. Yet again. As she walked back to her seat, weaving between the chairs, she collided with one of the tables, knocking it to one side. She restored it to its position with careful, elaborate movements.

  When she sat down she was startled by a sudden impression of brightness, flooding the room as if a stage light had been turned on. She twisted on her stool, and saw that the large windows all along the opposite wall were now lit up, as if by daylight. The impression was so vivid that for a moment Teresa wondered if she had passed out, slept uninterrupted for several hours, and woken up with no perceptible gap.

  She put her weight on one leg, half sliding off the stool, ready to cross the room. A movement behind her startled her, and she became aware that a man must have come into the bar from the corridor behind, without her hearing. She turned sharply back towards him. He was tall, quite elderly, grey-haired, and had a face with fine bone structure. His blue eyes were staring past her towards one of the windows. He put down the cloth he was holding and stepped quickly sideways, along behind the counter, still looking anxiously towards the window.

  He turned back, and she heard him shout through the door into the corridor: ‘Mike! Are you there?’

  There was apparently no answer. He lifted the bar flap and went through in a hurry, crossing the bar-room. The flap banged back down into place. He walked quickly between the tables, heading for the door that led out to Eastbourne Road.

  It was then Teresa realized that several other customers were in the bar. She could see four people, all men. One was sitting at a table, with his beer glass pressed to his lips, but the others were standing, looking and peering, trying to see past and above the frosted panes, into the street outside. The jukebox was playing an old track by Elton John.

  There was a series of sharp bangs from outside. The elderly man, almost at the door, ducked down.

  He looked back towards the counter.

  ‘Mike!’ he shouted. ‘There’s someone out there with a gun!’

  But strangely he went to the door, pulled it open, stepped outside. All four of the other men were at the windows now, stretching up on their toes to see through the clear glass.

  In great consternation, her hold on reality abruptly uncertain, Teresa stood away from the bar stool, clinging on to the polished wooden surface of the counter.

  The door to the corridor opened, and an elderly but still upright and good-looking woman came hurriedly into the bar area.

  ‘Jim?’ She looked directly at Teresa. ‘Did Jim call me?’

  ‘Is Jim the—?’

  ‘He’s outside!’ one of the men yelled across the room from the window. ‘There’s some idiot out there with a gun!’

  ‘Jim!’

  The woman pushed her way through the bar flap at the same moment as one of the windows exploded into the room with a shattering crash, the glass flying in all directions. All four of the men fell back on to the floor, blood already flooding across the boards. The woman, obviously hit by flying glass, turned sharply away, buried her face in her hands and went down to a half-crouch, but then she continued towards the street door. Blood was pouring through her fingers. She leaned weakly against the door, and Teresa thought she was going to fall, but she managed to hold on. Brilliant sunlight outlined her. A younger woman rushed into the bar from the road, thrusting her way past the drooping figure. Just then there was another series of shots, and the elderly woman was thrown backwards into the room by the impact of the bullets.

  As suddenly as it had appeared the impression of daylight vanished, and Teresa found herself alone in the bar again. The overhead lightbulb, the darkened glass of the windows, the dreary emptiness, all as before. How long? A glimpse, a fleeting memory, a few seconds, a few minutes? How long had that gone on?

  She was standing where she had been when the window exploded inwards: just a foot or two away from the bar stool, her hand still stretching back to steady herself against the counter.

  The jukebox was silent, the bar flap still raised, as the grey-haired woman had left it as she passed through. Had it been open earlier, when Nick was tending the bar? It was normally closed.

  She stared at her unfinished drink, trying not to think what it might be doing to her. And, now she thought about it, there was again that background sense of another migraine attack, looming somewhere, ready to swoop. The drink was her enemy: she couldn’t take her tablets if she had been drinking. Not safely, anyway.

  She sat down on the stool again, feeling drunk, feeling like a foolish drunk, a drunk who hallucinated, who was about to throw up.

  But she held on, and was still sitting miserably at the counter when Nick returned. He was lugging two crates of beer bottles, one on top of the other. He dumped them heavily on the floor behind the counter.

  ‘Are you OK, Mrs Simons?’ he said.

  ‘Teresa, call me Teresa. Am I OK? No, I guess I’m not. Don’t call me Mrs Simons.’

  ‘Can I get you anything, Teresa?’

  ‘Not another drink. Never drink on an empty stomach. Look what happens.’ She waved a hand vaguely to describe herself.

  ‘I could make you a cup of coffee.’

  ‘No, I’ll be OK. Don’t want any more whiskey. I’ll finish this one.’

  She didn’t mean it though, and sat there staring at the glass while Nick went about stacking the bottles on the refrigerated shelves.

  Presently, she said, ‘That guy who comes in h
ere sometimes, to help behind the bar?’

  ‘You mean Jack?’

  ‘Do I? Is that his name?’

  ‘Jack Masters. He comes in on Saturdays, and some Fridays.’

  ‘Jack. You got anyone who works here called Mike?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not lately, not while I’ve been here.’

  ‘A guy called Mike.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about an elderly couple? Do they ever work in here, behind the bar? One of them would be called Jim.’

  He straightened, and moved the top crate to one side, now it was empty.

  ‘Are you talking about my parents? They used to own this place.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘My mother’s name was Michaela. Dad sometimes called her Mike.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Teresa. ‘Mike. She came in, I saw her. I’m sorry, I’m so drunk. It won’t happen again. I’ll forget all this. I’m going upstairs.’

  She made it somehow, lurching from side to side on the stairs. The nausea of the migraine was rising in her now, and she no longer fought it. She threw up in the toilet bowl, as tidily as possible but with horrible retching sounds that she was convinced would be heard all over the building. She didn’t have the energy to be prissy, to care what anyone thought. Afterwards, she washed her face, drank some water, took a Migraleve, then lay on the bed and gave way to everything.

  CHAPTER 14

  Kingwood City, Texas, was little different from any of the other satellite towns that were growing up around Abilene. Until the coming of the computer companies it had been a small farming town on the plains, but it had expanded rapidly through the 1980s. The original old centre of the town was now preserved and protected, and sometimes rented by the town council to TV or film companies. Craft shops and wholefood restaurants prospered there. Alongside was a small but intensively developed downtown area of banks, insurance companies, hotels, finance houses, despatch agents, convention complexes, public relations offices.

  To the north of the town, stretching away towards the Texas panhandle, was a strip some five miles in length, lined with shopping malls, plazas, automobile dealerships, drive-thru hamburger bars, supermarkets and the mirror-glass industrial complexes that had brought the expansion to the town. In the same area were six newly constructed golf courses, an airfield for private planes and a marina built on the shore of Lake Hubbard. Extensive middle-class suburbs filled the rest, bulging east and west, and down towards Interstate 20 in a new grid pattern.

  In winter, Kingwood City suffered under the chill of the northers, the icy winds from the mountains and plains, but during the long summers, from early May to the end of October, it sweltered night and day in the high 90s and low 100s, the outside air feeling as unbreathable as furnace fumes.

  Andy was in Abilene on June 3, meeting with the section chief of the Bureau field office, Special Agent Dennis Barthel. This was a routine conference, one of many similar ones Andy held with section chiefs around the country, although in recent months the anticipatory demographics of the computer models had given his visits to Texas an extra edge.

  While he was in Barthel’s office, a message came through from the city police that there had been a hold-up and shooting at the Baptist church on North Ramsay Street. The gunman had taken a hostage and had driven with her to North Cross shopping mall, where he had shot several more people before the place could be made secure. He was currently cornered in the service bay of the mall, holding two hostages.

  The FBI cannot automatically be called in to every crime: its remit is in theory restricted to fewer than three hundred categories of federal violation, although the details of these constantly change as a result of legislation and the process of events. A shooting alone would not normally cause the Bureau to be brought in. There had to be extra features to the offence: the involvement of organized crime, the market in narcotics, terrorism, foreign intelligence, or extreme violence and an interstate element to the perpetrator’s relocation.

  In this case, the gunman had been identified by witnesses at the church as John Luther Aronwitz, who was connected in some way with the church, perhaps as an attender or lay worker. The police computer meanwhile recorded that Aronwitz had gained a record of violent offences while he was living in the neighbouring state of Arkansas. Records of his crimes ceased when he moved to Texas, three years before.

  Aronwitz was still at large when Andy Simons drove to Kingwood City, that sweltering afternoon in June. He went alone. His partner, Danny Schneider, who had been out of the field office when the call came through, was due to follow as soon as he could. Andy had not paused to call Teresa, apparently because all the signs were that the situation was already under control by the police.

  The reality was different. Although Aronwitz was surrounded, the delivery area of the mall had large goods bays, connected at the rear by a long metal passageway, wide enough and high enough to take the fork-lift trucks that were now abandoned at a number of positions along its length. These, plus the steel doors that separated the bays, gave Aronwitz cover and several possible places of concealment.

  When Andy arrived, the police SWAT team were trying to gain access to the delivery bays from inside the building, while Aronwitz was held down by other police staked out in the service area. Two of the police had been shot during the operation; one was killed. One of the hostages was also now dead, and her body lay in full view of the long lenses of the TV cameras clustered behind the police lines. Aronwitz’s score for the afternoon had already reached fourteen dead, and an as yet unknown number of injured.

  Andy Simons was to become the fifteenth and last victim.

  When his presence at the scene was known, the SWAT officer in charge briefed him on the situation. Andy pointed out that there was usually another way of gaining access to the delivery bay, from the service ducts below. After the feasibility of this had been established, a detachment of SWAT men went with a team from the mall administrator’s department to get through to the delivery area that way. Shortly afterwards, Aronwitz was seen to open an inspection hatch behind one of the bays and drop down out of sight. Confident that this signalled an imminent end to the operation, the SWAT forces moved forward to arrest or deny. Andy followed. A few moments later Aronwitz emerged from another part of the basement area and opened fire on the police. He died as they returned fire, but not before Andy himself had been struck in the head by a bullet. He was dead within seconds.

  CHAPTER 15

  Teresa’s first thought was, How do they get the cars looking so real? Do they have old cars? And the city! She whirled round in amazement, staring up at the buildings. Where do they find them, how do they build them? Who are all these people? Are they actors? Do they get paid for doing this?

  But there was an armed man further along the street. His name was Howard Unruh, and she had to disarm and apprehend him.

  She was in Camden, New Jersey, and it was midday on September 9, 1949. She was not in rôle: this was an ExEx training scenario where the subject brought his or her own identity into the simulation.

  Teresa was distracted by the cars, the sound of traffic, the city noises. The street was filled with big saloons and sedans, mostly black or dark grey, some with a lot of chrome, some with running boards, all looking huge and cumbersome and slow. Trucks were upright and noisy. People in baggy clothes and old-fashioned hats thronged the sidewalks.

  It’s a movie! she thought. That’s how they do it! They hire one of those companies that work out in Hollywood, renting period cars to the studios. They bring in extras from somewhere!

  She heard the crack of another shot, sounding closer, but Teresa was still new to extreme experience, and the sheer physical detail of the simulations was a shock to her. She wanted to run into the street, force the traffic to stop, then lean down and talk to someone in one of the cars. Who are you? How much do you get paid for this? Do you have to give the car back at the end of the day? May I take a ride with you? Where are yo
u going? Can we leave the city? What’s beyond? Can you drive me to New York?

  She knew everything that happened to her in the scenario was being monitored and recorded, so she began to walk along the street, past large stores and downtown office buildings. It was like the first few minutes in a foreign country: everything looked, sounded and smelled different. Her senses tingled. She heard old-fashioned honking car horns, engines that sounded untuned and rickety, a bell ringing somewhere, crowds of people, voices with the unmistakable New Jersey accent. The air smelled of coal smoke and engine oil and sweat. Every detail was authentic, painstakingly exact. The longer she was there, the more she noticed: women’s make-up looked false and over-applied; people’s clothes looked shapeless and unsuitable; advertisements were painted on walls, or stuck up as paper posters; not much neon anywhere, no backlit logos; no credit-card signs on doors.

  It not only felt strange it felt unsafe, a place that existed on the edge of chaos. A reminder of this came with another outbreak of shooting.

  Other people were noticing the gunfire. A crowd had gathered at the next intersection and were staring down the street. She wanted to stand with them, listen to what they said, hear their accents, find out what they knew.

  Remembering at last why she was there, Teresa reached into the shoulder holster beneath her jacket and pulled her gun. She set off down the street, looking for Howard Unruh.

  Twenty yards further along two cops drove by her, heading down the same way. One of them sat by the open window, holding a rifle in both hands, the barrel pointing out at the street. He saw Teresa, said something, and the car braked sharply to a halt. Teresa turned towards them, but the cop with the rifle aimed at her chest and killed her with his first shot.

  Dan Kazinsky, her instructor at the FBI Academy in Quantico, said, ‘You don’t pull your gun till you need it. You don’t run down the street with a gun in your hand. You specially don’t run down a street with a gun in your hand when there’s someone up there at the end of it firing, and when there are other agencies at the scene of crime trained in summary termination of the situation. Soon as you see a cop, show him your ID. It’s his city, not yours. Keep your mind on your work, Agent Simons.’