The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

  The top of the screen said:

  Interactive​/​Police​/​Murder​/​Guns​/​1950​/​William Cook​/​Elsa Jane Durdle.

  Next to Elsa’s name was a video frame; a tiny static glimpse of bright sunlight and windswept palm trees, a row of diagonally parked cars glinting in the sun.

  The chances of Grove selecting this scenario at random were too immense to calculate. She had always presumed that Elsa was uniquely hers! Teresa felt protest rising in her, but almost at once Grove responded to it and went back into action.

  He continued to move swiftly through the hierarchy of options, the computer screen flickering as he somehow anticipated each new menu. Once again, he quit abruptly.

  Participatory​/​Victim-enabled​/​Interactive​/​State or County PD​/​State PD​/​Virginia​/​Fugitive​/​Multiple Murder​/​Spree​/​Guns​/​Sam Wilkins McLeod.

  The video showed a group of people against a brightly lit and highly coloured background. For a moment it meant nothing to Teresa, but she made Grove lean forward and look closely at the image, and used the mouse to click on it; at once it expanded to occupy the lower half of the screen.

  She was in Al’s Happy Burgabar with her husband Rick, in a small town called Oak Springs along Highway 64 between Richmond and Charlottesville. The video frame had frozen on them as the family passed the main course self-selection counter, the vivid colours of Al’s unmistakable logo dominating the room.

  The shock of recognizing this, which was buried under layers of extreme experience deep down, long ago, away somewhere in her virtual life story, produced another automatistic response from Grove. The computer images on the monitor began to flicker brightly as he moved swiftly through the lists. Teresa watched the computer display again, feeling helpless.

  Her own virtual past was fast-forwarding, fast-rewinding, while she stared through the eyes of a man she knew was on his way to a massacre.

  He paused again, and the computer image steadied.

  Participatory​/​Interactive​/​United Kingdom/ England​/​National or County​/​County Police​/​Sussex Police​/​Multiple Murder​/​Spree​/​Guns​/​Handgun​/​Semi-automatic Rifle​/​Gerald Dean Grove​/​Part I.

  Immediately underneath it said:

  Participatory​/​Interactive​/​United Kingdom/ England​/​National or County​/​County Police​/​Sussex Police​/​Multiple Murder​/​Spree​/​Guns​/​Handgun​/​Semi-automatic Rifle​/​Gerald Dean Grove​/​Part II.

  Grove stared at the screen, with the mouse pointer resting on the frozen video image of Part I, ready to start it running. The image was of Grove himself, sitting in a car on the seafront at Bulverton, leaning forward to tighten the hot-wired connections beneath the dash.

  Deep in the recesses of Grove’s mind Teresa thought, He’s playing with me. Or I’m playing with him.

  She knew she should abort the scenario. She had been completely unprepared for this.

  The thought was sufficient to move him. Fatalistically, Teresa watched the screen to see what he would do.

  Grove’s next choice frame showed a western saloon, where a young woman was waiting to start performing in a pornographic movie. The video frame had caught Shandy in her off-guard moment before the filming began, when she was reaching behind her back, pinching at the material of her shirt, to try to ease the tightness of her half-cup bra.

  Grove, of his own accord, enlarged the frame, and with a concupiscence Teresa was forced to share, ogled the tantalizing glimpse of the voluptuous young woman.

  Grove’s mind, his brain, whatever corrupt organ it was that Teresa occupied, was full of predatory lust and physical greed. He moved energetically, against Teresa’s resistance, and slid the pointer to the ExEx box, glinting invitingly at the top of the image.

  He stood up, and waited while the nanochips were processed by the equipment.

  ‘No!’ Teresa said, to herself, to Grove, out loud, or directly across, or however it was done. ‘Not Shandy!’

  ‘Shut the fuck up.’ Grove had the phial of nanochips now, delivered at the dispensing peripheral built into the top of the desk, and swung himself out of the seat, out of the booth. ‘Whoever the fuck you are, shut the fuck up.’

  Teresa had grown up in a world of swearwords, but she had always loathed that expression and the kind of man who used it. It was invariably a man; women were capable of a lot of swearing, but they rarely used that phrase. She had been trained by the Bureau not to react to abuse from suspects and perpetrators, but that ill-tempered phrase had always got under her skin, once or twice to her jeopardy.

  ‘Tough shit, lady!’ Grove replied to the thought. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  ‘Not Shandy, you bastard!’

  ‘I told you to shut the—’

  Teresa backed off, back as far as she could go, mortified by what was happening, and now unable to control events, except inadvertently.

  She glimpsed an understanding at last of how a man like Grove operated. Everything she had experienced of him until now had been, for him, an unconscious blind, a shutting off of his true self. The muttered hatreds, the confusion, the vindictiveness, the banality; none of these represented the real Grove. They were instinctive moves, inadequate responses of an immature mind to a complex and subtle world. Now though, without warning, his true nature had moved in and taken command.

  Grove was an obsessive, a monomaniac, capable of focusing on one thing only at any time. With the inviting view of Shandy getting ready for action, his psychopathic mind had become dominated by the frozen image of her. She had her shoulders turned away as she tried to deal with her momentary discomfort, twisting her body so that her backside and breasts were exaggerated, posed in almost a parody of the traditional cheesecake stance. The video snapshot had obviously been selected for that reason, a visual shorthand of the contents of the scenario. Grove could not know that, but could and did react on a gut level to what he thought he would find.

  In his singlemindedness, Grove could no longer be influenced or diverted away. Teresa, a passenger in his mind, could only reside in a well of apprehension, disgust and concern as Grove took over.

  This was what it must have been like in Bulverton Old Town on the day of the massacre. She had heard many accounts from different people: Grove seemed invulnerable as he strode through the streets with his guns. His victims were paralysed by their terror of him, or by disbelief at what they saw. No one challenged him until it was too late; only a few people were able to run away or hide. Grove had been impelled not by hatred, or by passion, or even by madness, but by singleminded determination.

  Only at the end, when his obsession began to fade, did he become less fixated; then he was quickly encircled by the police, and his murderous spree was ended.

  Now, though, in a terrible prelude to what would be happening later, he was in full thrall to his psychopathy.

  She realized that she was also in his thrall. Grove was using her. He had already learned from her how a handgun should be held, aimed and fired; he had already found his way to Elsa Durdle, to one of the old FBI training scenarios, then to the scenario about himself, and now he had arrived at the innocent obscenities of Shandy and Willem.

  He made her feel as if he was penetrating her cover, crashing in on her life, but the reality was that she was exposing it to him. Her unconscious mind was guiding him, educating him.

  Yet she was helpless. While all this coursed through her mind, Grove had walked through to the simulator area of the building and handed over the phial of nanochips to one of the technicians. As the injection apparatus was quickly set up, and connected to the valve on his neck, Teresa braced herself for the shift into the scenario, knowing that aborting herself out of it was the last option she had.

  Grove​/​Teresa became aware of heat, bright lights and clothes that were too tight. He blinked, and tried to see what was going on around him, but his eyes had not yet adjusted. There were people sta
nding further back, beyond the ring of lights, and they were talking and working, paying no attention to him.

  A woman came up to him, and brusquely patted his forehead and nose with powder. ‘Hold still a while longer, Shan,’ she said impersonally, then moved back into the ring of lights.

  Teresa thought, I can’t take this any more.

  Grove said, ‘What? Who the fuck is that?’

  And Teresa, at last, much later than she should have done, decided to abort. She recalled the LIVER mnemonic, rattled through the words held within the acronym, focused on the system of closure they produced, and withdrew from the scenario.

  * * *

  You have been flying SENSH Y’ALL

  * * *

  * * *

  Fantasys from the Old West

  * * *

  * * *

  Copyroody everywhere—doan even THINK about it!!

  * * *

  Before she remembered how to cut it off, the mindless electronic music jangled interminably around her.

  CHAPTER 34

  Teresa returned from the scenario and found herself in the familiar surroundings of one of the ExEx recovery booths. Waking up in reality after the sensory overload of a scenario always involved a profound readjustment, a feeling of disbelief in what she found around her. No return had yet been as concerning as this.

  Teresa sat on the bench, legs dangling, staring at the carpeted floor, thinking of Grove, appalled by the thought of what trouble her entry into his mind might have caused.

  A technician called Sharon appeared, and removed and validated the nanochips. At once Teresa was caught up in the practical routines of the business that was ExEx. Sharon led her through to the billing office and they waited for the paperwork to be churned out by the machine. Instead of the fairly prompt appearance of the receipt confirming the return of the chips, together with a credit card charge slip, this time a message of some kind appeared on the LCD display, invisible to Teresa from where she was standing.

  Sharon picked up the desk telephone, and keyed in several numbers. There was a pause, and then she recited a code number. Finally, she said with a glance at Teresa, ‘Thanks—I’ll check that.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Teresa said.

  ‘There’s something about the expiry date on your card,’ Sharon said. She pressed one of the studs on the desktop, and a piece of paper wound out of the slot. She tore it off. ‘Do you happen to have the card with you?’

  ‘It’s the one I’ve always used,’ Teresa said, but looked through her bag for it. ‘The girl on the desk outside validated it, and it’s gone through OK until now.’

  She found her Baltimore First National Visa card, and handed it over.

  Sharon looked closely at it. ‘Yes, this is what they told me,’ she said. ‘It’s not the expiry date. That’s OK. It’s the “Valid from” date.’ She held the card out for Teresa to see. ‘You’ve started using the card too soon. It doesn’t become valid for another couple of months. Do you have the old one with you?’

  ‘What? Let me look at that.’

  Teresa took the card. As usual, both validating dates were embossed on it. They looked OK to her; she had been using the card for several months without problem. She thought for a moment. It had been made valid from August the previous year; now they were in February. Not valid for two more months?

  She slipped the card into her bag.

  ‘I’ll give you another,’ she said, not looking at Sharon. She searched through her wallet and found her GM MasterCard. Before handing it over she checked both validating dates; she was securely in the middle of the period.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Sharon said, after a close examination of her own. The transaction then went through normally.

  Before leaving the building Teresa went to the Ladies’ restroom and leaned against a washbasin, staring down blankly into the pale-yellow plastic bowl. She felt drained. Today’s ExEx session had been a long one, and because of the awfulness of Grove’s mental state it had also been stressful and alarming. She could still hardly bear to think of the consequences of what she had done.

  She shrank from this, and other thoughts came at her in an onrush of trivial detail, a reaction against the tensions of the last few hours.

  There were many practical things she had to sort out. Flight confirmation was one of them; she had made only a provisional booking and needed to hear back from the travel agents. Then she had to pack her stuff, and check out of the hotel. Get across to Gatwick Airport with enough time to turn in the rental car, check in, go through security, hang around in the departure lounge, buy books and magazines she didn’t want, and all that. Flying always took time, but presumably never as much as it saved, otherwise no one would do it. Before she left England she should also check in with her section chief, or at least leave a message in his office. She still had a hunch trouble was waiting for her there; would Ken Mitchell’s one hour of effective passion compensate for that? Teresa combed her hair, peered closely at her eyes in the mirror. Gifts, she should buy some souvenirs to take back with her. She wondered if she would have time to go round the Old Town shops before they closed.

  She glanced at her wristwatch.

  Something was not right. How long had she been in Grove’s scenario? What had changed?

  The washroom was grey-painted, clean, cool. The sound of air-conditioning was loud around her, emanating from a grille high in the wall by the door. Bright sunlight glared into the room through a square window set in the sloping half-roof above her.

  A memory of Grove came to her, but she thrust the thought away in panic. All this time in England, circling around the Grove issue, and now she had at last confronted it she shrank away from it.

  She wanted only to get home, try again to restart her life without Andy. Out there: she wondered what was out there, in the confusing world made by Grove. She had taught him to shoot. That child, that woman, they might be alive now if she hadn’t shown Grove how to hold his weapon correctly.

  No! she thought. No, that’s not true! Rosalind Williams and her little boy were shot and killed by Grove eight months before. On the day it happened she was in Richmond, Virginia, thousands of miles away. It was a historical certainty. What she had seen was only a scenario, a re-creation of the event which by close observation she had seemed to influence.

  She had taught Grove how to handle his gun. Some influence.

  In reaction to these unwelcome thoughts, another flood of personal concerns coursed through her: whether she should sell the house in Woodbridge, move into an apartment in Baltimore or Washington, or relocate right away from the area. She had good friends who lived in Eugene, Oregon; maybe she should make a break with everything, and move to the Pacific North West. In the meantime, should she stay with the Bureau, transfer to another section or station? Or maybe she should think about—what did they call it?—OCERS. The Optional Corporate Early Retirement Scheme. The Bureau management had been talking up OCERS, as if it was the answer to their many woes of funding, deployment, overmanning, and all the other administrative problems they regularly memo’d to the sections.

  Closing her bag she looked up again and caught an off-guard glimpse of herself. She should have been ready for it, because she had been staring at the mirror off and on for the last five minutes, but for that instant she saw the reflection of a rather bulky middle-aged woman, her dark-brown hair starting to turn grey, her face not one she remembered or wanted to remember. Standing there in her warm quilted anorak, bundled up against the wintry weather outside, she thought, How did it happen so quickly? How have the years of my life vanished?

  She walked through the reception area, looking ahead, zipping up her anorak and wondering if she should pull on the hood.

  ‘Goodbye, Paula,’ she said to the receptionist. ‘See you again.’

  ‘Cheerio, Mrs…Has it started to rain out there?’

  ‘Rain? I’m not sure.’ Teresa pushed through the glass doors, and walked across the hard-
standing outside.

  Heat from the sun-whitened concrete rose around her. The sun was high in a brilliant sky. Teresa stared around her in amazement: the trees were in full leaf, the distant sea was shining so brightly it seemed silver, the houses of the lower town were softened by a gentle heat haze. The only clouds visible were on the horizon far away to the south, somewhere over the French coast. Two young women, walking along the road, were dressed in shorts and T-shirts.

  Teresa unzipped her anorak, and slipped it off. When she drove up to the ExEx building this morning there had been a cold easterly wind, spotted with ice and freezing rain. She remembered hurrying from her car, keeping her head down against the wind, then, in the reception area, flapping her anorak to try to shed some of the water from it, and mopping her face with a tissue. Now it was midsummer.

  She looked around for her car. That morning, the cold morning, she had had to park it against the kerb, a short distance away. She walked towards where she had left it, but a dark-red Montego was parked in its place. The two nearside wheels had mounted the kerb and were resting on the grassy verge.

  Her own car, the rented Ford Escort, was nowhere around.

  Teresa went to the Montego. On its left side was a long paint smear across both doors, and a deep dent, where the car had hit something solid and white-painted. When she peered in the front window on the driver’s side she saw a car radio, pulled from its mount but still connected by wires, discarded, hanging down under the dashboard.

  Teresa tried the handle, and the unlocked door opened. Feeling a chill of fear, in spite of the stifling heat of the day, Teresa reached down to the release of the luggage compartment lid. She heard and felt the lock click open behind her. She went back, raised the lid.

  A semi-automatic rifle and a handgun lay on the carpeted floor. Several boxes of ammunition were also there; one had broken open and a handful of rounds lay spilled about. She recognized the handgun as a Colt, the one Grove, and she, had used to kill Mrs Williams and her child in the woods. She had not been able to get a good look at the rifle while Grove was handling it, but now she recognized it as an M16 carbine.