The Cunningham Equations
Page 22
Blaise knew Helen’s ordeal was caused by his stupidity and drunkenness. He was mad at the nurse for seeing through him. Mad at himself for being what he was.
Helen made a happy face when he walked in. The bed, an electric Stryker frame, raised her to a sitting position.
Blaise kissed her. He had not planned to and the action surprised him. Hurriedly, he sat.
“Dr. Cunningham, you quit too easily.” Helen pouted but she could not conceal her pleasure.
“I’m not used to kissing people.” Blaise glanced at the cap of bandage that encased Helen’s head, surprised how attractive her face was. He tried to remember the exact shade of her blond hair and couldn’t. It didn’t matter. They stared at each other, both unsure. Blaise was confused by the sudden emotion that had compelled him to kiss her.
Helen said, “You’re too withdrawn.”
“You’re looking well.”
“I feel well.”
They looked at each other some more. Communications, for Blaise, depended on understanding the other person’s viewpoint; impossible with Helen. He tried to guess what she would feel because of the implant, what she would think about, what she would want to hide or talk about obliquely.
Give up! If he was to understand she would have to tell him what she feared. As would Gordon.
“Dr. MacReedy is going crazy, Blaise. He has CAT scans, electromagnetic section scans, X-rays, fiber optic probe photographs, and he says whatever is happening to me is a miracle. He wants to talk to you and Dr. Hill.”
Blaise shook his head. “Does he still want to operate?” Helen’s listlessness of the previous day was gone. “I don’t think so. He’s upset. But not about my condition.”
“Don’t let him move you.”
Helen kept her eyes on Blaise, blue lights probing the murk, but she said nothing.
“Stay in ICU.”
“All right.”
“Don’t you want to know why?”
“I trust you, Blaise.” She tried to smile.
“May the gods help me!” Blaise pretended to groan. “I’m in love with a bald-headed woman.”
Helen turned crimson and then started to cry.
“Don’t!” Blaise held her face between his palms. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Honest.”
“Not hurt.” Helen sobbed. “I’m happy.”
When he left the room a few minutes later Sergio fell in step to the elevator.
“Dr. Cunningham. You were going to call Dr. MacReedy.”
The duty nurse stood behind her desk, trim and pretty in her uniform. And agitated.
“We’ll see him downstairs.” Sergio lied better than Blaise.
In the elevator Sergio asked how Helen took the news that Blaise couldn’t come back for a while.
“She was still crying when I left.”
The sound of the elevator rattling down the shaft was loud. “Did you tell her?”
“I didn’t get that far.”
They stopped on the second floor and got off into a cluster of hospital uniforms. Blaise realized they were in the middle of the shift change.
“I’m sorry, sir. This floor isn’t open to visitors.”
“I’m Dr. Cunningham. I’m meeting Dr. MacReedy.”
“I think you have the wrong floor, Doctor. If you check downstairs somebody can contact him for you.” The nurse wore pale-blue polyester. She might as well have been in olive drab. Her hand on the heat-sensitive call button held the elevator.
“Okay,” Sergio said. “Thanks.” He pulled Blaise into the packed elevator.
“We’ll stay in and go back up to the third floor,” Sergio said conversationally.
They jolted to a halt in the lobby, braced against the flow of bodies leaving the elevator. Sergio reached for the floor button and pressed it.
Standing in front of the elevator, a man in tan slacks and a brown windbreaker with white stripe stared at Blaise for an instant, then his eyes slid away and he stepped inside.
“What floor?” Sergio asked conversationally.
“Six.” It popped out as if the man in the windbreaker had been thinking it but didn’t want to say.
Sergio nodded and pressed six.
The elevator rattled into motion. The man started to put his right hand in the front of his windbreaker. Blaise lunged, wrapping his arms around the man’s body and pinning his hands.
Sergio shot off the wall into the man’s side and the three of them went down in a heap. Blaise was panting, but he didn’t feel the effort. The man in the windbreaker got a hand free.
The elevator shuddered to a stop. Sergio scrambled to his feet. Blaise clung desperately to Windbreaker, locking his gun hand between them. Sergio kicked him in the head as the door started to slide open.
Blaise looked up at staring nurses and orderlies. Wind-breaker’s head lolled and he began drooling. His eyes rolled back, showing mostly whites.
“Epileptic,” Blaise improvised. He leaned the semiconscious man back on the floor and stepped aside as more nurses and a doctor pushed in.
Sergio motioned with his eyes and they sidled out. Someone stopped the elevator. But the other elevator ground to a halt and they got on it. Stares were turning into accusation as the doors closed. “I wish you’d gotten his gun,” Sergio said.
Sergio’s look as they got into the car seemed to say I hope the trip was worth the effort. He drove with smooth precision, nothing showing. Gordon was that way too: everything armored and concealed inside. Blaise wondered if he could ever learn. “It was worth it,” he said.
Which did not throw Sergio off. “It’s been my experience that women can make men and tomcats do strange things.”
“I don’t know about tomcats,” Blaise said.
Tickets were five dollars and the woman seemed surprised when Blaise gave her a ten for a pair. “Where’s your discount coupons?” She had fluffy sable hair and a good figure and was too old to be cute, but young enough to make men stop and talk. She offered to give Blaise a couple.
“Thanks,” Blaise said. “But we’re in sort of a hurry. Why don’t you just keep the extra fin for yourself?”
Her smile knocked five years off her age and made three men behind Sergio feel good about standing in line. “If you need something special, stop at table thirty-two and tell Al that Vera said to treat you right or she’ll break his toes.”
They hadn’t gone ten feet into the 25th Annual Gun and Knife Show before Sergio was walking like a cat on a hot sidewalk.
“How do you think she’d break Al’s toes?” Blaise asked.
Sergio didn’t notice. “How do I get out of here without a police escort?” he demanded.
Blaise looked at him.
“Everybody in here doesn’t have a gun in a holster has a couple in his pockets. People get killed in places like this.”
“How do you get guns in New Jersey?”
Sergio gave Blaise a you’re kidding look. “You know a guy sends you to somebody opens the trunk of his car and you make a deal. How do you expect?”
“You seem to know a lot about guns for somebody who never had one.”
“Did I say that?”
Blaise ignored Sergio, drifting down the aisles until he located thirty-two. Four glass-topped cases filled with semiantique black powder weapons held down a checked tablecloth. The man behind the table had tanned skin where hair once was.
“Al?”
The man’s mean eyes protruded slightly. His beard was gray-tufted and his skin yellowish. He looked hung over. “Yeah.”
“Vera says treat us right or she’ll break your toes.” Al didn’t look friendly, and Blaise waited, feeling vaguely like a White House staffer holding a smoking gun.
Al’s face wrinkled into a slow grin. “She say how?”
“No.”
“Son, you missed out. I gotta find out what she has in mind.” Al started looking for somebody to hold down his table.
“Could you help us first?”
 
; Al looked first at Blaise and then Sergio as if he’d never seen them before. “What can I do for you?”
“We need a gun . . .”
Sergio held up two fingers.
“Two guns. Discreet.”
“I got just what you need.”
Sergio examined the cases shaking his head. Al looked at him. “Listen, wise guy. If I say I got it, I got it. Whatcha want?” Al’s face had darkened and his voice was more raspy.
“Tell him,” Blaise said. He hoped Sergio was paying attention to Al’s mood.
“Look, Al.” Sergio’s patience showed in his voice. “We’re not muzzle-loader freaks. We just want protection.”
“Like what?”
“How about a twenty-two automatic and something in a forty-five magnum?”
“Z’at all?”
Sergio nodded.
“Vera sent you?”
Blaise nodded.
“Why’ncha say so in the first place?” Al grunted as he tugged at a military gun box. He motioned them behind the table with him, and lifted the lid.
Sergio stopped breathing.
Al burrowed and emerged with an object in a dark blue cotton cloth that smelled of gun oil.
“That’s a Schmeisser machine pistol, isn’t it?” Sergio stared at the box’s contents.
Blaise glanced into the box. Pistols and assorted bigger weapons were mixed haphazardly with cloth-wrapped bundles. There were oversized pistols with long barrels and odd shapes and he supposed Sergio was talking about one of them.
Al unwrapped a sleekly put-together nine-inch-long pistol, dark blue with checked walnut grips.
Sergio shook his head.
“Immaculate. Perfect action. Good price.”
“What do you think we are, gangsters? That’s a Woodsman Colt twenty-two. We want something small like”—Sergio thought—“like a Star.”
“No got.” Al considered, then groped through loose pistols and handed one to Sergio. “Another Spanish-made Saturday Night Special. Bufalo six point three five. It’s better than spitting, but you can’t get ammunition just anywhere. Works all right. Rebuilt it a couple of times and took all the crap out.”
Sergio passed it to Blaise.
The weight surprised Blaise. Smaller than his hand, he could make the pistol disappear while he was holding it. “How much?”
Al chewed on his lip. “Seventy-five . . . naaah, fifty.”
“Seventy-five with a box of bullets,” Blaise said.
Al looked at Sergio. “You don’t want it for fifty?”
Sergio shook his head.
Al’s face split in half with a smile. “Vera was right about you guys. Tell you what. I got an old belt holster it’ll fit in. Oh, and if you shoot more than ten feet away, pull six inches to the right and three inches down for every ten feet after.”
“If something’s that far away, we’ll throw rocks.”
Al quibbled a little about the Magnum, explaining that if you’re only stopping a bus you don’t have to kill the first six passengers behind the driver. Blaise lost interest in the conversation, which dealt with the mechanics of shooting people, at which Al and Sergio seemed experts.
Sergio settled finally for a .44 Magnum revolver with a six-inch barrel and a shoulder holster. Al told them to watch his table. He shut his box, shoved it under the table, and wandered away for twenty minutes. When he came back he had a box of .44 Magnums, a box of .44 target cartridges, and a box of 6.5-mm ammo for the Bufalo. He also had a pair of pin-on badges for John Blake and Fred Moretti.
“You’re gunsmiths,” Ai said. “Case anybody saw you come in without weapons. Carry them in plain sight to your car and put them in the trunk. At least until you’re away from all these rent-a-cops.”
In the car, Blaise asked, “Feel better now?”
Patting his left side, Sergio said, “Much.”
Sergio smiled. The gun had filled a void in his soul that he had not known existed.
Blaise took the tiny Bufalo out of his pocket while Sergio drove. A groove down the slide had a notch in back and a front bead sight. A thumb safety locked the slide. An insert at the back of the handle had to be depressed when the trigger was squeezed. Clear plastic grips showed how many cartridges remained in the clip. He hefted the pistol. If he had to, he thought he could throw it better than a rock.
In Its most primitive definition, the proof of the mathematical definition of intelligence must start by the construction of mechanical means to imitate human mental behavior piecemeal: that is, if mechanical memory is perfect, the introduction of imperfections that replicate human behavior will ultimately define solutions for human failure.
FROM A SEMINAR ON
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATIONS
CHAPTER 22
Blaise sat at Alfie trying to make sense from data scrolling up the screen. The files Helen had opened on GENRECT, Tenro, West, and the Burkhalters were a Pandora’s box of incestuous connection that left him with a numb sense of betrayal.
The running log of Helen’s vital signs on the side of the screen kept distracting him and he considered asking Alfie to turn it off. But he had the sneaky anthropomorphic premonition that Alfie would be hurt. Not that Alfie had feelings!
The Family Trust, with other investors, controlled North American rights to all Technological Intelligence Laboratories, as TIL Ltd., Inc. And until the research contracts were canceled, TILLI had been the Burkhalters’ major income source.
Some of the information caused Blaise to wonder what sources Helen programmed Alfie to access. University records . . . Jonathan Peters’ doctorate and confidential notes about it written by his advisors . . . details of Linda’s sex life . . . Milo’s scholastic background, which terminated with the loss of the family fortune.
He felt hollow reading the grubby details, but he could not stop until he dredged up the whole report Alfie had lifted from a reputable detective agency. The client was Jonathan Peters. Blaise managed a pained rictus of smile. In this case the husband had not been the last to know.
It was as if Alfie had been turned loose to rampage through the wastebaskets of the National Enquirer. Among other exploits Milo Burkhalter had manipulated the casual rape and looting of Osgood Investments, whose founder killed himself rather than face the proverbial widows and orphans who had trusted him.
Charles Osgood’s name bobbed up again on the monitor— out of Linda’s file.
Blaise leaned back, trying to breathe.
"IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE, PROFESSOR?"
Alfie had timed the lack of response and was prompting Blaise. Pain stabbed from his armpit into the soft underflesh of his triceps, paralyzing him. Breath rasping, Blaise pecked out with painful slowness the commands for Alfie to continue. With the sun down and the lights out in the bedroom his face became a distorted mirror for the sallow green of the CRT display. The ache in his chest hardened into permanence.
Alfie confirmed everything Helen had told him before the raid to get Dobie. He reached down slowly, too fragile for quick movement, and rubbed Dobie’s head. The dog sighed. After a while, Alfie returned to contemplating its tin navel in an ongoing attempt to elevate electromechanical memory to creative intelligence. The CRT was displaying: "I KNOW EVERYTHING"
Blaise took Dobie for a walk through the backyard garden.
Still weak, the pup leaned against Blaise on the way back, and fell asleep as soon as he settled gingerly onto the mattress.
Blaise left a note under the coffeepot where Sergio would be sure to find it.
His home seemed unchanged. On an adjoining hill Blaise stretched out as much as he could in the car, watching through a pair of 7-X-50s. Sergio had lectured Blaise on binoculars as tools of the trade. And patience. Waiting and watching. “Sircut Fabius Maximus,” Sergio explained, recalling, the Roman who won his wars by waiting patient years for one golden moment.
Sergio’s assessment of guns versus binoculars dismayed Blaise, particularly after Sergio explained the only safe way to use t
he little automatic: “Hold it close to your target’s throat, stomach, or kidneys. Squeeze the trigger eight times as fast as you can.” Sergio had added, “That’ll slow most people down. But if the bullets bounce off somebody’s hard head or chest, Doc, run like hell.”
A gibbous moon hung over the ocean and stars were out. It was a nice night to sit in the car and look through binoculars and wonder how a common burglar accumulated capital to buy guns and binoculars so he could enter his profession properly equipped. Or whether Sergio was uncommon.
After two hours of watching the black shadows of hedges and cars in the immediate neighborhood as well as the house itself, Blaise sensed that it was truly unwatched. He drove to a street uphill of the house and killed the motor, then slowly rolled down, lights off, hearing the soft crunch of gravel under tires.
With power steering dead Blaise began to sweat from wrestling the wheel, holding speed down with powerless brakes—and suddenly realizing he had not taken the bulbs out of the stop lights. He was leaving a trail of red light!
His hands shook by the time he parked across a downhill neighbor’s driveway. He hauled himself through the window on the passenger side, lowering his feet silently to the cement. A breath of sea breeze began to chill him.
He didn’t need light. As a school kid he used to shortcut through the brush behind the house to the street below. His feet still knew the way. Of course he was bigger now, and the undergrowth didn’t conceal as much as he remembered. But he found the cellar door and slipped inside.
His home had lost its friendliness with the knowledge that strangers might be inside. Silent, he climbed to the kitchen door, hearing the thud of his pulse, the echo of his own fear. Inching the door open to darkness, he stepped out of his shoes.
The floor was waiting to drum out his arrival. He stopped at the archway between kitchen and living room, willing the house to settle back into somnolence before he moved again. Tension was a metallic taste that rose into his throat. Through the picture window the moon was a worn silver quarter with a bite missing as it hung in a black sky. Moonbeams gave the surrealistic feel of having stepped into a photographic negative.