by John Farris
The wheelchair stopped above the center of the broad quadrangle, hovering fifty feet in the air. Mae made a last effort to communicate with the superior young mind that had overwhelmed hers.
Got to run. Bye-bye, Mae.
Wait. You cawn't leave me like this!
Oh. Well, if you insist.
The wheelchair dropped, but only a few feet. It crashed through the densely leaved crown of a venerable oak and came stunningly to rest, upright, on a bough the thickness of a sewer pipe. The wheels hung over either side of the bough, spinning uselessly. Smaller limbs and leaves embraced and enfolded Mae like a shy nymph in a Victorian children's book.
I will get you for this, lovely. Rest assured. But Mae had the dismal feeling that she no longer was powerful enough to be heard, let alone reckoned with.
The Pastor had restored order if not tranquillity to his flock by coaxing them to join the choir in singing another hymn. About a third of the congregation had decided they'd had enough spiritual sustenance for one Sunday.
Few of those choosing to leave actually believed what they had seen. In spite of their professions of faith they had little capacity for acknowledging the miraculous in their lives. Some parishioners had witnessed Tom Sherard hurling his lion's-head cane in the direction of the Mind-Fuckers. What? What was he doing? What did that mean? Others, already distracted by the incomprehensible, namely the spinning crucifix, had witnessed the drubbing and rout of the MMFers. But when the senses are overloaded, the mind simply shuts down or fast-forwards to the next moments of comparative sanity, where the cane-beating could be explained away as some sort of irrational scuffle. Teenagers involved, a flurry of juvenile hysteria.
(Everybody was afraid that crucifix was gonna fall, hey, it was scary, man.) Because Tom Sherard was only one of many leaving the sanctuary, he didn't draw unusual attention. The exodus was quiet for the most part; stunned faces, a few embarrassed smiles. Young children whining in their parents' arms. The Mind-Fuckers were nowhere to be seen. A woman fainted in the vestibule, revealing to passersby that she didn't wear under wear even to church. Sherard heard sirens, still a mile or so away. He saw his cane lying inconspicuously on the carpet against the wall. He picked it up and took a side exit to the parking lot.
The cane felt different to him. He had a tingling sensation from the palm of his hand to the elbow. He was bemused, but he had to smile. Whatever
Eden had done, the knobbly wood seemed to have been permanently transmuted into something ... livelier. Invested (his old friend and mentor Joseph Nkambe might have said) with Eden's considerable juju. He had the feeling that should it become necessary, he could employ his cane to cleave granite with a blow.
On West End a police car had pulled up behind the accident involving the bus. Sherard heard Eden call him. He looked around. She was in the front seat of the van the Russians had rented at the airport when they arrived. Alex was driving.
A side door of the van slid open as he approached. Bertie Nkambe was inside. She smiled happily at him.
"Hey, look what we've got."
Sherard heard a series of muted sneezes. The thin woman named Heidi was hunched over in the rearmost seat. She raised her rabbity face from her sodden handkerchief and glared.
"You wouldn't have me except I came down with a migraine. It whiteouts my powers. On good days I'm better than you are, Toots."
"Maybe you'll get a chance to prove that," Bertie said nonchalantly. "Meantime your headache could get a lot worse, Heidi. If you really want me to work at it."
"I told you already. I don't know where the device is! Not our department. We were here for backup, in case it was needed."
"So tell us something new," Eden said as Alex drove out of the parking lot.
"If I don't get a shot of Demerol damn soon, I'll start hurling all over this van."
"Try again, Heidi honey," Alex said.
Silence. The woman groaned. "Hang a right," she said suddenly.
Alex turned on a red light and headed up West End.
"Vanderbilt has a med school and a hospital," Heidi said in a subdued tone. "I have insurance. And a plane ticket out of town. Three o'clock this afternoon."
"No chance," Sherard said, looking tensely at his wristwatch. It was ten minutes to noon.
"Maybe," Heidi said, "I do know something that'll make it worth your while to let me catch my flight. I've been thinking about it. So maybe it all fits in somehow."
The others waited for Heidi to elaborate. At Twenty-fourth Street Alex turned left, guided by a blue sign with a white H on it.
"I flew down from Dulles yesterday with Gordo and a couple of the kids. Mae travels by flying ambulance, and the others are from places around the country. Like I said, we were backup. We knew what was going down would be nuclear, but that's all."
"Didn't know shit from Shinola," Alex said, employing his favorite American expression.
"Shut up. I don't feel like talking anyway. Let me get this over with. Anyway, Gordo and me were boarded already when somebody I knew from college got on. Sandi Goldfarb. She worked for MORG too, the Russian desk. We'd run into each a few times around the company. You know, it was a casual relationship, catch up on old times."
"Where are you going with this, honey?" Alex said over his shoulder.
"Over there, where it says Emergency? They ought to be able to give me a shot. Where am I going with it? Yesterday Sandi's on the plane with me, today she's dead."
"How do you know?" Bertie asked.
"How do you know anything? A casual touch, that's all. Precognition, girl. I saw Sandi dead. Broken neck. Murdered, probably. Because she wasn't in a hearse. She was lying on a floor somewhere, lying naked on a blue tarp. Eyes open. Shit. No matter how many times it happens, you almost jump out of your skin."
"What does this have to do with our problem?" Sherard asked.
Heidi was holding her head, eyes shut. Tears drained down her cheeks. "I don't know! Sandi said she was meeting another girl and they were spending the night in Nashville. Company business. If she knew what it was about, she couldn't tell me, but she said she hoped she'd have a chance to do some waterskiing. Later when she got up to use the john I had a peek at the airline ticket in her tote. She was booked on a return flight out of here, eight-thirty this morning. But I know she didn't make it."
"This doesn't do any of us any good," Bertie told her.
"Think about it. Company business. Just down for the night. I got that she was down here to screw a guy, one of ours. Either he turned out to be a homicidal maniac, or—Sandi came across something she wasn't supposed to know about, and drew a quick death sentence."
"You said she was on MORG's Russian desk?" Eden asked. "Did she speak Russian?"
"Sure, her major at Rutgers."
"It's a Russian device. We know that much. That's why Alex is here."
"I wouldn't tell her a fuhkeeng thing," Alex cautioned.
"Okay, that makes a little sense," Heidi said as Alex pulled up to the hospital's emergency entrance. "Listen, I'm trying to cooperate now. I mean I don't want to be stuck here in Music City when there's a major kablooey scheduled."
"We still have nothing to go on," Sherard said.
"I was trying to remember one other thing. Pre-cog is funny; sometimes there's only a vague flash, other times you get details. There was some writing on that tarp I saw, in one corner. Black paint, a stencil I guess. It said Holly Marie, Hendersonville, TN—for Tennessee."
Silence in the van. Heidi clenched her forehead tightly, crying in pain.
"You still don't get it? Sandi hoped she could go waterskiing. The Holly Marie. That must be the name of a boat. She was killed on a boat! And it has to be registered somewhere. Doesn't it?"
CHAPTER 27
PLENTY COUPS, MONTANA • JUNE 7 • 5:15 P.M. MDT
Eden Waring's doppelganger had been wandering around the Plenty Coups facility for most of the day. During the first hour she had become lost. From the second hour she'd bee
n footsore, and since well before noon hunger pangs had steadily worsened her mood. The scent of food from a cafeteria steam table or the sight of a vending machine was almost enough to fetch tears. But hunger didn't bother her as much as isolation. Her long stretch of invisibility. She was neither human nor ghost. Her aloneness was absolute. Now even the day-to-day routine of shadowing Eden, her left-handed homebody, seemed more appealing to her than hours of trudge through the facility, this bright technologically precise but emotionally neutral construct, climate-controlled, with one cheerless perspective after another, a deadness to each footfall. It would have depressed the soul of a rat. In her bleakness she entertained small fears that she might never leave. It had come to her, dropped into her mind like a seed from the beak of a bird that had flown for a thousand miles, that Eden was in great danger, from a totally unexpected source. What was the fate of a doppelganger without its homebody? The terror of nothingness, beyond her ability to define or endure.
She wondered what Robin Sandza had to look forward to, once she released him. But he had been eloquent in his signaled appeal to her, finger touching his forehead, then pointing to the sky.
Miles of walking, sore feet, flagging energy. But a renewed sense of urgency.
Find him. And get it done.
While Eden was still alive, and could reward her dpg by setting her free.
The doppelganger had already selected the name she wanted for herself. It perked her up, silently repeating to herself the lovely, longed-for, all-important name as she made the rounds of forbidden places in the underground facility, numbly searching for Robin Sandza. Imagining social situations. Introducing herself. The joy, the magic, in those three syllables.
Hi! I'm Guinevere!
CHAPTER 28
OLD HICKORY LAKE, TENNESSEE •JUNE 7 • 6:35 P.M. CDT
"Well, I know I have seen it in this end of the lake," the TWRA officer said, piloting his Wildlife Resources Agency's patrol boat, a thirty-two-foot Whaler with twin 250-horse Johnson outboards, as close to the shoreline as its draft would permit. "Fact is I may have stopped it for some small infraction. They do know how to party on these big-ass showboats, specially college kids on spring break. Gang of 'em will pool their money to rent one for a week. The rowdier kind make a deal of work for us. Figure how they're out on the water, the ordinary rules of human behavior do not apply. Or they get themselves drowned. Sometimes sheriff's divers can't locate the bodies; lake's forty—fifty foot in a high-water year, and it's dark down there. Now a houseboat, it don't go nowheres fast but it does take some experience to drive one and not run it over snags or into 'nother boat. Do us a big favor they just leave 'em tied to the dock. Holly Marie. Tell you how that name stuck in my mem'ry. My oldest sister named one of her twins Holly and the other 'un Hallie, or maybe it was Hayley. Say you don't have no idea where the boat might be anchored at?"
Tom Sherard said, "All we had was the owner's name. Windcastle Marine, Inc., and the registration information you looked up."
"Weren't enough to ring a bell," the safety officer said. His name was Carlisle. First name. He was in his early thirties, with sun freckles and wrinkles, new pink burn on his high cheekbones and around his blue eyes. "Well, we got us some daylight yet; after that I couldn't promise nothing."
In the shade of the cabin, Heidi, the MMFer with the huge headache that a shot of Demerol hadn't much diminished, groaned and shifted the icebag she was holding to her forehead. The only word she'd uttered for the last two hours was "fuhkoff." She had refused to wear a flotation vest. Bertie Nkambe and Eden Waring had theirs on. They were in the bow of the whaler, studying the shore, the many small coves they passed. Alex had stretched out on a couple of flotation cushions and was staring at the sky, smoking.
There was a floating dock or boatshed in nearly half of the coves. Speedboats, Jet Skis, a few sailboats, homely pontoon and paddleboats. Small kids wearing bright orange floaters around their upper arms were jumping off the ends of docks. Older kids roared down the middle of the lake on Jet Skis, slowing down when they saw the patrol boat with its orange-andgreen striped bow.
The story Sherard had told to warrant the use of the TWRA cruiser involved a fictitious stepdaughter of a close friend of Sherard's. She was visiting friends on the Holly Marie. There was a family emergency, and the girl's cell phone wasn't working. Sherard said he was in Nashville on business and had volunteered to find the girl.
What the officer made of Heidi and Alex was anyone's guess, but Sherard couldn't afford to park them elsewhere. Heidi might still proye to be useful, and Alex was indispensable, should they find the nuclear device hidden aboard the houseboat.
Carlisle saw someone he knew in a johnboat with a Merc 75 outboard, puttering home with two fishing companions. Carlisle slowed the cruiser and pulled abreast of the johnboat, staying ten feet away.
"This old boy," he said to Sherard, "has lived on Old Hick'ry for twenty years. He knows ever'body. Mind taking the wheel for me; just keep us even with the johnboat."
Carlisle stepped down to the deck and hailed the man in the tatty brim-weary hat sitting in the stern with his hand on the tiller of the outboard. "Hey there, Homebrew."
"That you, Carlisle? How's it hangin', bud?"
"Plumb and dandy. How you doin'?"
"Right pert, thanky. This here's Macon Oldsmar from Kentuck, and his boy Ben, come down here to see what real fishin's all about."
"Pleased to know y'all. Say, Homebrew, reckon you could help me out with something? This gentleman here's on a mission a mercy you might say. We need to locate us a houseboat name of Holly Marie."
"Well, you know I ain't that strong on 'memberin' names nowadays. But give me a description, she's on the lake I just might be able to tell you whur."
Carlisle pulled out his shirt-pocket notebook. "She's seventy-four foot, built by McAllan boatworks in Bowling Green. Barge hull, sixteen-foot beam, two upper decks, raked, and a fly bridge, which I allow is kinda unusual."
"Yeah, you trailer them boogers, they don't fit the overpasses. Well, all right, sir. Seen one like it four—five weeks ago at Marvin's, in for a overhaul and paint job. They was paintin' it just the prettiest shade a yeller. You give Marvin a call, he can prob'ly tell you where it's docked at now."
CHAPTER 29
8:15 P.M. CDT
Sunset.
The TWRA whaler coasted around a shadowy bend of Old Hickory Lake into darker water, leaving the bright surface of mid-lake behind. Finger coves, where the last light of day was blocked by a long rocky bluff behind them, penetrated fifty to a hundred yards into the hilly wooded terrain. There were a few lights showing through the trees, homes above or along the shoreline. A couple of fishing boats lingered beneath the bluff.
"Good bass fishing there," Carlisle pointed out. "Plenty of submerged structure. Crankbait's your best bet, this time a evenin'."
Bertie, standing in the bow with binoculars, said, "Yellow houseboat. To the right, that next inlet or whatever you call it."
"Good enough," Carlisle said, giving the wheel a turn. "We were gettin' a little low on gas."
"No lights showing on the houseboat," Bertie reported. "There's a road, a fence, and a gate. Padlocked."
"Looks like ever'body's gone off to dinner or to Garth Brooks," Carlisle said, taking the cruiser into the unroofed dock opposite the big houseboat, idling there with the bow against the dock fender.
"I'll leave a note," Sherard said curtly.
"Yes, sir. Would one of you young ladies tie us up?"
Eden made the jump to the dock with the length of dacron line secured to a bow cleat. She wrapped it around a post.
"Let's just make sure we don't disturb nobody," Carlisle said, giving the cruiser's siren a tap. The only light that had come on was the motion detector on the top of the post that Eden had triggered. They waited. There was no response to the siren. The houseboat was buttoned down tight.
Tom and Bertie joined Eden on the dock. Alex got up, stretched, glanc
ed at Heidi, still comforting herself with the icebag.
"Coming, honey?"
"Fuhkoff."
Carlisle said a trifle nervously, "Need to remind y'all that this is private property."
Alex pulled his folder and showed Carlisle his bona fides. Although the sun had gone down, it was hot and still in the cove, and Alex had a film of sweat on his face. "Department of Energy, your government, Threat Assessment Intelligence Division. What it means, I am head guy here, not you.
"You're not an American, are you?" Carlisle asked, with growing unease.
"Russian. Take it easy, Carlisle. We are not the Black Hats anymore."
"I thought—"
"You come with us. Stay off your fuhkeeng radio."
Sherard had boarded the houseboat and was walking around, looking for a way in.
"Locked," he reported. "Probably alarmed."
"We'll break in," Bertie suggested, a note of strain in her voice.
"Now just a minute—" Carlisle said.
Alex gave him a pat on the shoulder. Carlisle pulled angrily away.
"I don't know who y'all think you are, but you're about to commit a serious—"
"Carlisle, there is stolen nuclear device with one-kiloton capability, could be armed and ticking fifty feet from where we stand. That is powerful enough weapon to vaporize this end of the lake. Is also very bad for the wildlife population. I am not shitting you, honey. I don't know if we have five hours or five minutes to disarm. Where is your piece?"
"Uh, TWRA personnel don't carry sidearms."
"Then grab a wrench and break some glass. Now."
"My God. My God," Carlisle said, beginning to perceive that Alex was on the level.
The houseboat alarm hadn't been activated. Sherard located a light switch inside the door with the smoked-glass panel Carlisle had broken through.