Jacob reached farther, reached and finally found Anselm’s soft neck.
“Hey.”
Jacob looked behind him. The man on the ground had whispered at him; he was not dead. In fact, he was not even unconscious. He was staring straight at them, and somehow he had managed to get his arm all the way around. To point the gun one last time.
“Stop distracting the kid,” Kevin whispered. He shot Jacob through the mouth, and the .45 exited the top of Jacob’s head in a puff of hair and skin and blood and brains. Jacob’s hand relaxed and slumped down from Anselm’s neck, and Anselm managed to wriggle himself out from under the man’s suddenly twice-as-heavy body.
Kevin whispered something else, but Anselm couldn’t make it out.
“What?”
“Can you keep singing?”
Anselm didn’t move for a few seconds. He was breathing quickly, and looking around the now quiet garage like a frightened field mouse. This had been a very scary morning. He had been tossed into a van, tied up and gagged, and then there had been a lot a lot a lot of shooting. Mr. Brooks had saved him somehow, but Mr. Brooks also looked as if he might be in serious trouble. And just now a big, blob-like man had tried to strangle him. And then more shooting, so close and so loud that Anselm’s ears were still ringing painfully.
“Anselm?”
Mr. Brooks was still trying to whisper to him, and it was at this moment that Anselm showed his true mettle. He made a conscious decision to wait, to be shocked and terrified and traumatized later, because his teacher had asked him a favor. There was work to be done here. He looked at Jacob’s lifeless corpse one more time, as if checking to be sure there would be no last minute, horror-movie reanimation scene forthcoming. Satisfied, he turned back to Kevin. “I’m here,” he said, with a calm primness that would have made his mother proud.
Big bad guy is dead. That’s all that matters. Time to get back to singing.
He continued with the lullaby.
Time moved on, and Kevin closed his eyes with relief.
A minute later, they heard the sound of sirens.
Patch Job
Kevin was aware and he was not aware. He was conscious, but only because his system still didn’t know how to operate in any other way. Didn’t know how to shut down. They reached him just minutes later, drawn by the tracking system in his cell phone. He had lost a lot of blood.
“He’s lost a lot of blood.”
They wanted to take him away from Anselm, but the boy held firm. “I’m supposed to be here.” Anselm said. “I’m supposed to sing.”
The agents and medics looked at him for a beat, and then while they were applying pressure to Kevin’s wounds and readying the fold-up gurney they began telling Anselm that this was not allowed, that it simply could not be allowed for a half-dozen reasons. But Anselm ignored them; he had already returned his attention to his teacher. He began singing again, his head moving gently to the rhythm of the song his mother had sung to him so many times when he was an even younger, even smaller boy. The EMT’s shook their heads in resignation and let the boy come. He climbed into the ambulance, and it sped out of the garage and then up First Avenue, followed closely by several marked and unmarked cars. At the hospital there was no waiting, there were no triage steps or questions about next-of-kin; they rolled him straight into a private area and began working quickly.
Kevin was still aware. Still awake. He had a moment of white-hot fear in which he wondered how they were going to do any real work on him. You can’t put me to sleep, he wanted to shout. It won’t do anything.
But they seemed somehow to realize this, and in any case putting him to sleep didn’t appear to be part of the plan. They used local anesthetics through injections in his spine, and the numbness that went washing through him was both wonderful and terrible. Would the feeling return? Was it the anesthetic working, or was his body taking its first steps toward permanent paralysis? He had no way to know. Finally they had to take Anselm away because there was going to be blood now, scalpels and surgery and blood, but not before the boy extracted a promise from the doctors. They had to keep making noise, Anselm told them. “He needs you to talk to him.”
They assured him they would, and then an agent came to tell Anselm that his mother had arrived at the hospital.
“She’d very much like to see you.”
Anselm streaked away, and Kevin could hear the boy’s joyful cries echoing down the hall. If he had not been feeling so nauseated, he would have smiled.
The doctors did what Anselm had asked. They talked. They talked all the time, narrating their every move. Kevin could feel them pushing and pulling at him as they explained what was happening; he could hear, above and below the talking, the cutting and the sucking noises. There was the debate over what to do about the kidney; then the on-the-spot decision to remove it and patch him up; then the harsh, metal-on-bone sound of debridement on the hip wound, followed by the sound of metal pieces being inserted and affixed to what was left of that shattered bone. All of this was over the course of hours. Hours and days and weeks, and yet Kevin did not move, he was there in the same room with the same doctors, none of them leaving or taking a break.
So it hasn’t been weeks or even days, he thought. Today is still Tuesday.
They worked and worked, narrating all the while. At one point he heard a voice that sounded like Dr. Petak’s. Kevin tried to turn and see, but he still couldn’t move.
“Petak?” he called out.
No one answered him. They were willing to narrate, not to discuss.
Finally they left him alone, and after a while Anselm was allowed to come back in to keep him company. His mother came in for a moment as well, to thank him. Kevin shook his head and managed to croak out, “not at all,” and then Anselm let himself be led away. Kevin shook his head and pointed at the television, to show the boy that it was all right, that he had plenty to distract him now.
Something soothing, Kevin decided. Not the religion channel.
He was glad when the anesthetic began to wear off, though it meant brand new kinds of pain. The feeling of paralysis had been unnerving. After an hour they gave him pills to ease it back again, and this at least was a more normal sensation. The pain was still there; it was only dulled.
Kevin watched three half-hour newscasts. He was about to push the nurse-call button when Danny Fisher came striding through the door. His arm and shoulder were tightly bandaged, but otherwise he seemed fine. He gave Kevin an affectionate pat on the shoulder, much more gently than in times past. “Nice job,” Danny said. “That guy was a real nutcase. If it hadn’t been for you, there’s no telling where he’d have Anselm by now.”
“Thanks. And that’s it?”
“What do you mean?”
Kevin’s expression turned serious. “I mean I’m done, right? I don’t have to be ready for anything else? Because I’m a little worn out over here.”
Danny grinned. “You’re all set. Vacation time.”
“Good. By the way, I still don’t remember anything from the summer.”
“That stuff might never come back. We don’t know. It’s a new program.”
“Petak told me that much.”
Danny nodded. “Frankly, we were watching you to figure some of it out. We still are. New protocol, new everything. Everything that happens to you is getting written down. Official record, all that stuff. And the memory’s not back yet, huh?”
“Definitely not. You can check that off.”
“Guess you didn’t forget how to shoot, though. Three bad guys on your first day.”
“Is this my first day?”
“Well. Not technically.”
“Are you the one who taught me how to shoot?”
Danny shook his head. “No, we had a special guy. Muscle-memory stuff was done exclusively with experts. We wanted to do it right, because it sticks with you even after the scrubbing. I’m just the fitness guy.”
“You ran with me in the park.”
“Not just the park, but yeah. You remember that?”
“No. A homeless guy spotted you. I was going to ask you about it, but then you were suddenly busy getting shot.”
“Mmm. They went way ahead of schedule. You did well, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“You were supposed to have another three days before activation. It’s a delicate process.”
Kevin spread his hands out. “I’ve got nothing but time. What is the process?”
Danny shrugged. “I don’t know the specifics. Neither does anybody, really. Petak – you met him – designed the spec, but the underlying technology is weird. It’s a machine that runs a modified TMS pulse pattern, which is what takes care of the memory loss. Everything else flows from there.”
“Yeah, I don’t understand that. And I’m practically a genius right now.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Danny said with a little shake of his head. “TMS means Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. We’ve got some custom equipment, we bought it from a guy who calls himself Kline. Probably not his real name, but he’s the man with the goods. Basically, he figured out that you can just wipe clean a small section of somebody’s memory – he calls it “scrubbing” – and for the next week or two your patient’s brain goes into some sort of overdrive. It compensates for all the empty space.”
“It did other stuff, too,” Kevin pointed out. “Time slowed down. I couldn’t sleep, I was paranoid. What about all that?”
“Petak told you, right? Side effects. Some useful, some we’re trying to iron out. The time thing is related to memory: when you’re taking in everything around you, time seems to slow down. Think about how long your grade school years seemed to last; really, you were just noticing more back then. And your brain has been noticing everything for the past week. Turns out you can go almost all the way; if you eliminate every distraction – visual, auditory, anything that might occupy your mind – then time practically doesn’t move at all.”
“And the paranoia, the insomnia?”
“Some of that was hypnosis, although I think Petak objected to the paranoia bit. He wanted you calmer; most of the higher-ups disagreed. The sleep thing was another side effect of the TMS; one of the functions of sleep is locking in memories, but your brain was so busy making new ones that it didn’t want to give you a chance to go down. Unihemispheric sleep, it’s called. Some animals do it naturally. Don’t worry about that one, you should be hitting the sack again soon. It could happen tonight if the pain’s not too bad.”
Kevin sighed. Danny was finally starting to make some sense to him, but there were still too many questions to be asked. He decided to start with the most obvious one.
“Are there any other agents in the school?”
Danny smiled. “Just your girl Ms. Beck.”
Kevin frowned. “Right,” he said sarcastically. “My girl.”
Danny didn’t blink. “Well, that’s your problem,” he said cryptically. “I’m not getting involved.” He stood from his chair, and then he gave Kevin a serious look. “Who do you think led the team to get Anselm’s mom back?”
Kevin was struck dumb.
This is not possible.
He tried to protest that he had more questions now – many more questions – but Danny wasn’t listening. He turned and walked out of the room.
Emily
The next few hours were bad. He left the television on to keep the clocks moving, but nothing could take away the pain of not knowing. Of not understanding. He wanted to talk to Emily. He wanted her to explain what Danny had meant.
He wanted to see her.
The television was telling him now that there had been an attempted kidnapping at a private school on the upper east side of Manhattan. It had happened early this morning, the reporter said, her voice breathless. Kevin stared at the screen in disbelief.
This morning? But that happened days ago.
He was about to shout at the screen in frustration, but then something caught his eye. Something light blue, and something white.
She was standing there in the doorway.
Kevin looked at her for a moment, and he didn’t trust himself. He didn’t trust Danny, or Dr. Petak, or anyone at all. This was a mirage of some kind. “Did you wear that when you were getting Anselm’s mom back?”
Emily shook her head sweetly. She twisted her hips gently, looking down as the light blue skirt puffed out, as though she were examining its twirling properties. Then she came toward him, and now, finally, her eyes were fixed on him. She looked at him the way he had wanted her to look at him since the first day. Since the first time he had seen her in the teacher’s lounge.
My God, those eyes.
“This is your favorite outfit,” she said softly. And then, unbelievably, she eased herself down, so slowly, and with infinite care, so that she was lying next to him on the bed. There were tubes and wires connected to him at his arms and chest and side, but somehow she managed to disturb not a single thing. She was careful, too, not to touch him. She didn’t want to bump into anything that was injured.
Not that he would have minded.
Kevin held his breath. He didn’t understand what was happening. Everything Emily was saying, everything she was doing, the way she was looking at him… it was all so dreamlike that he decided he would have to proceed as if it really were a dream. If he did anything to disturb the quiet of this room – if he breathed too hard, or if he turned his head too quickly – she might disappear in a flash of light and smoke.
As if to emphasize this belief, the next thing Emily said seemed terrible. It seemed designed to disrupt the delicate atmosphere in the room. “I was very mad at you,” she said.
Kevin waited. He didn’t want to ask, but he also didn’t want to let the chance for an actual conversation pass him by. He took a breath. “Why?”
She closed her eyes before answering. “I didn’t want you to volunteer,” she said, and her eyes opened. “I didn’t want them messing with your head.”
“You knew me before?”
She smiled again, turning ever so slightly toward him. The starched sheets of the hospital bed rustled. “Of course,” she said.
Kevin was silent for a minute. He could think of nothing else to say. “I have an enormous apartment,” he blurted out.
She giggled, a sound that made Kevin want to get up and do jumping jacks. “I know,” she said. “I hate it. Your money is one of the things that made you such a good undercover candidate. No one with tons of cash and a brand new penthouse in the city could possibly be working for the government. Anyway, when we started dating you told me you just wanted to be a teacher. That was about three months ago, but I’m hoping too much hasn’t changed.” She grinned playfully at him. “Even if you did turn out to be such a big spender.”
Kevin felt his heart do a small leap. Then, strangely, he felt a great calm come over him. Everything in his body seemed suddenly to take itself down a step.
There’s nothing left to worry about.
He had done his job, so that was over. Anselm was safe. And now this woman, this unbelievably beautiful, smart, kind woman was talking about how long they had already been dating. Kevin felt deeply relaxed and yet giddy at the same time, as though he had just been given a powerful sedative laced with alcohol. His breathing slowed. His pulse was no longer so loud in his ears. “What was that?” he said, his words like sugar in his mouth. “You said dating?”
Shameless.
“Shut up,” Emily said. “You were irresistible. So earnest.”
Kevin couldn’t help himself. “Honestly?”
Emily Beck’s laugh, light and pure, sounded off the hard walls of the hospital room. “I shouldn’t have said that. We’ll have to get to know each other again, that’s the problem. And maybe you’re not even nice anymore.”
Kevin shook his head. “No,” he said quickly. “No, that’s not true. I’m incredibly nice. I have a butler, too, did I mention that? Wait until you m
eet him. He’ll tell you how nice I am.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Emily said softly. The laughter was still bouncing around her throat, making her chest tremble.
Kevin let his eyes close for a second.
Just for a second.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
Incredibly, he could feel his breathing slowing down even more now. Everything was going quiet around him. He felt… heavy.
Maybe he could close his eyes for one more second. It felt so good.
Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) Page 31