“I think it was pretty good,” Ben said, “but honestly, all I could taste most of the time was hot. I mean, the impression that your mouth, throat and sinuses have been attacked by a flamethrower makes it hard to concentrate on the subtleties of flavor and texture. Next time I’ll follow your recommendation, Prakash, and beg them to make it mild for the innocent American.”
We crossed Guadalupe and started walking down 21st.
“This is not shortest way back to Allandale House,” Prakash pointed out. He was wearing a jacket over a pullover over a button-down shirt and was still shivering. The rest of us hadn’t bothered to bring jackets; it was over sixty degrees and sunny today, and long sleeves were all we really needed.
“Slight detour,” Ben said. “I want to know what that is, don’t you?”
“That” appeared to be a minor carnival put on by utility workers. There were flashing lights and random bangs and squeaks and there was a lot of pointing up at the trees over Littlefield Fountain.
“No,” said Prakash, stalled by his first good look at the fountain. “I do not wish to know what that is. I do not even wish to know that it exists.”
“It’s not as bad as the Albert Memorial in London,” Ingrid told him.
“Albert Memorial is in London, and I am not anticipating having to see it regularly. This is…”
His voice trailed off, and he appeared to be temporarily at a loss for words.
I could sympathize. The designer of Littlefield Fountain had approached the concept of “war memorial” with surprising exuberance. The bronze horses with their webbed front feet rearing up out of the spray weren’t bad exactly, but their nude, pointy-eared riders began to seem like too much of a good thing. And the larger-than-life-size winged goddess riding some kind of spiral thingie behind them did stress the eyeballs some. She appeared to be brandishing a torch in one hand and something that might have been a palm leaf in the other, and I’d always been impressed by her ability to balance up there with both hands full. Throw in the naked sailor on one side (identifiable by his hat) and the naked soldier on the other (identifiable by his helmet) and you had the beginnings of something that could give the Albert Memorial a run for its money.
But hey, it’s our fountain, and we love it. Sort of.
At least once each winter some students express their love by dumping detergent into the fountain. The resulting cascade of soap bubbles looks as if the fountain’s been in a snowstorm. Sort of.
That was what I’d expected to see today, but the fountain was clear and the folks in dark blue uniforms who were running the circus appeared to be more interested in the live oaks overhead.
A series of bangs happened much closer to my ears than I was comfortable with, and a small cloud of grackles took off from the trees, jeered, and settled farther up the mall. Meanwhile, Ben had corralled one of the uniformed people and was getting her explanation for what was going on. I’m sure it was purely coincidence that he’d corralled the only worker with long hair and perfume.
“Alamo Bird Services,” she said, “doing grackle dispersal. We shoot cap guns, bang blocks of wood together, and blind them with lasers.” She tapped the strange black instrument on her hip. “This thing is kind of like a giant light saber. The lights hit the birds in the eyes and they can’t understand what it is, it makes them nervous, eventually they decide they’re rather be somewhere else.”
“So all you’re doing, really,” Ingrid said, “is shuffling grackles from one area to another.”
Ms. Bird Services shrugged. “It’s a Federal crime to kill grackles. Migratory Bird Treaty of 1918.”
Ingrid paled, probably remembering the number of dead grackles she’d left behind her at the Battle of Mayfield Park.
“Don’t worry if you’ve killed some,” Ms. Bird Services said. “The Feds actually have some sense; they don’t go after frustrated homeowners who may have cleared the trees above their driveway with a shotgun. But if we started killing grackles it would be hard for them to overlook it. So the policy is startle, don’t kill. And yes, it is just moving them from one area to another. But we find it only takes about three days to clear a bunch this size, and then the grackles don’t come back to the same spot for a year, year and a half. Excuse me.”
Black birds were settling on the branches overhead. She unsheathed her light saber and used it like a demented eight-year-old with a flashlight, whirling it in wild, wobbly circles while the birds croaked in protest.
Ben asked her a question that was half drowned out by a new salvo from the cap guns squad.
“Yes, we’ve contracted to do the entire west campus. We’ll get up to the Allandale House area eventually. Not for a while; we’re working south to north.”
“That,” said Ben when his new friend had gone back to de-grackling the trees, “is interesting and potentially very useful.”
“Interesting, yes, but I do not see any usefulness.” Prakash had been fixated on the fountain all this time, ignoring the activities of Alamo Bird Services. “Why the men riding on the horses are having pointed ears? And what is wrong with front hooves of horses?”
“The horses must be kelpies,” Colton said, “and the riders…” He shrugged. “I dunno. Elves?”
“Why in a war memorial? What are elves and kelpies having to do with war? And cannot we return to office now?”
To the accompaniment of Prakash’s intermittent whining, we strolled up the South Mall and then over to Allandale House. When we got there, Ben grabbed Mr. M. out of my office and went back to the public side to confer with Meadow. To give him credit, he had thought of an excellent augmentation for Mr. M., not that we got to see it right away.
By the time Ben got out of his conference with Meadow, Prakash had taken himself off. He claimed unfinished business with the mathematics department, but I suspected he just wanted to get away from us. Well, fine; the feeling was mutual. Besides, I wanted to talk to Ben about Blondie and the Driskill.
6. A job for the Center
“It’s a job for the Center that Lensky won’t let the Center do,” I told Ben once he was back on the private side of the office. As long as we kept our voices down, we were safe from Lensky overhearing us; his office was on the public side and he couldn’t cross the wall without help. I updated Ben on the current state of the Blondie problem and the need to verify that he was the person who’d been meeting this Shani Chayyaputra in the bar at the Driskill. Which, of course, I could have done with no problems but no, instead we were going to have to come at this backwards and upside-down.
Then again, backwards and upside-down is exactly how we’ve achieved some of our greatest successes.
“Lensky is being an over-protective idiot again,” I finished. “He wants to do something that will actually be risky for him – not to mention alerting his target – instead of letting me do it in perfect safety using your Camouflage algorithm.”
Ben looked alarmed. “Look, Thalia, I’m not getting between you and Lensky ever again. I’m still surprised he didn’t kill me back when that thing happened in October.”
“Oh, it was me he wanted to kill,” I said.
“And as I recall, he damned near succeeded. I don’t ever want to see you looking like that again, either.”
“Well, never mind that now. It was just a stupid misunderstanding. Anyway, I wasn’t going to ask you to make him change his mind. I doubt that you could. No, I was thinking that we might approach the problem from a different angle. He let slip the name of the guy Blondie’s been seen with. If we can find out more about him, maybe find out the nature of his connection with Blondie, then there might be no need for anyone to observe their next meeting.” I told him what little Lensky had said about Shani Chayyaputra.
“And if you don’t mention this bright idea to Lensky, he can’t forbid you to do it.”
“Well, yes, that too. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, and all that. Any way, he is not the boss of me. He has zero authority to dictate what I do
as a research fellow of the Center.”
“I just hope he sees it that way,” Ben said gloomily. “Oh, well… you say this Chayyaputra’s CEO of a startup in the computer business? Why don’t we start by asking Jimmy to do a little informal research? Lensky can hardly object to that.”
Ben walked Jimmy back to our side so that he could explain what we needed without being overheard, and I let him work in my office so that he could search without the risk of Lensky noticing. The first results were not impressive. “I can’t find any business filings under that name. In fact, I can’t find anything at all except that there’s a Chayyaputra registered at the Driskill Hotel.”
“That’s him! Has to be; that explains why Blondie’s been meeting him in the bar. If it is Blondie.”
“Who’s Blondie, his girlfriend?”
“Not hardly!” I explained what we knew, or thought we knew, or suspected, about Blondie and his possible relationship with Chayyaputra.
“An owner of a computer-related startup would have no legitimate business with a bomb expert,” Ben mused. “It sure would be interesting to know what Chayyaputra’s really doing here.”
“Whatever it is,” Jimmy said, “it’s not under his name, and I don’t know where else to look. I need some kind of a starting point.”
At this point Ben’s phone rang and he almost fell off his chair grabbing it.
“It’s Annelise,” he said, “bearing more doughnuts. I’ll just go and walk her in.” Since the crises of last fall, Annelise seemed to have decided that topologists need doughnuts the way normal people need oxygen. This time we hadn’t been depleting our blood sugar by teleporting or flying, but thinking this hard seemed to have a similar effect; the chocolate-covered ones looked especially good to me.
She set the tray down and asked why we were looking so gloomy. Ben summarized our progress and the point at which we’d gotten stuck.
“Well, that’s easy enough!” Annelise said. “The trouble with you folks is, you’ve forgotten there were ever any simple and natural ways to do anything. If you can’t do it by hacking into a computer, or teleporting to foreign parts, or making yourselves invisible, you think it can’t be done at all.”
“Technically,” Ben said, “we never have teleported to ‘foreign parts.’ West Texas just seems like another country.”
“What did you have in mind?” I asked Annelise.
She dimpled. “Well, men just naturally like to talk to a pretty girl. Give them any encouragement at all and you can’t hardly shut them up. Single man, staying at the Driskill? I bet he’s down at that bar every night. He’ll tell me whatever we want to know.”
“Won’t he be suspicious? I mean, why would somebody like you let some strange man at a bar pick her up?”
“Single man, staying at the Driskill? R-I-C-H,” Annelise said succinctly. “Not as rich as Daddy, of course, but rich enough to attract the wrong sort of girl.”
Ben shook his head. “Annelise, you can’t do it, it’s too dangerous. I won’t let you!”
Annelise’s chin stuck out. “I don’t recall asking your permission!”
A nasty squabble was averted when Jimmy bravely jumped into the argument. “She has a point, Ben. I don’t see why those of us who lack paranormal abilities should be left out of everything. Look, you can be there too; sit in a corner, nurse a drink, keep your eye on things. If it looks like it’s going bad, you can grab Annelise and teleport back to your apartment.”
We spent some time working over the details. None of us had actually seen Chayyaputra. Jimmy would get his room number and Ben would lurk outside the room, camouflaged, until he got a good look at the man. Then he’d take position in the bar, Annelise would come in and ignore him, and when – if – Chayyaputra came in, Ben would signal her.
It occurred to me, tardily, that Annelise ought to have some idea what Blondie looked like. What if she accidentally witnessed his next meeting with Chayyaputra? Maybe I should be in the bar too, so that I could warn her.
Ben nixed that. “You’d have to be camouflaged the entire time, Thalia, and you know how hard it is to maintain Camouflage in a public place with all kinds of people milling around. Besides, Lensky will kill me if I let you join us there.”
I couldn’t argue with him about that.
Perhaps I could get a copy of that sketch Lensky’s agency had made up based on our descriptions of the man. It wasn’t a great likeness, but it was better than nothing – especially, I realized, since Lensky’s informant had ID’d Blondie on that basis. I mean, Chayyaputra’s drinking buddy might or might not be Blondie, but he was definitely somebody who resembled that sketch.
For now, I just gave Annelise the thumbnail version: “Tall. Slender. Short blond hair, almost a crewcut. Gray eyes – scary gray eyes,” I added, remembering the one time I’d stood face to face with him. “Um, tense, menacing. Almost certainly carries.”
“Tall and blond?” Annelise repeated. “Oh – oh, I’ve just had a brilliant idea! Why don’t I let Chayyaputra ask me out?”
“Let him pick you up, you mean?” Ben sounded less than thrilled with this notion.
Annelise ignored him. “I’ll tell him I never go out without my roomie, but if he can come up with somebody for her we’ll double-date.”
“Roomie?”
“I’ve got a picture of Ingrid and me on my phone. I’ll explain that she only goes out with guys who are taller than her, and she only likes blonds.”
That sounded awfully flimsy to me. “Do you really think he’ll fall for that?”
“This is Annelise you’re talking to, Thalia,” Ben said. “She can make anybody believe anything. Remember how she talked us out of that little mess in Mayfield Park last spring?”
“Little” mess? Exploded water moccasin, mysteriously dead grackles falling out of the sky, shots fired, killer snakebot on the warpath?
“I retract my doubts.” I still wasn’t thrilled with putting other people out on the sharp end, but I had to admit: Annelise could make anybody believe anything.
And if the “double-date” ploy worked, we could confirm Blondie’s identity there and then.
***
Ben spent an extremely boring afternoon camouflaging himself as the wallpaper on the fifth floor of the Driskill before he spotted Shani Chayyaputra exiting his hotel room, and then he and Annelise staked out the bar for two nights with no sight of Chayyaputra. It was an extremely pricey place, and I wasn’t even getting any drinks for my money.
“You’re not missing much,” Annelise told me after that second night. “I ordered their special Austin cocktail, the Batini.”
“They serve that other times than Bat Fest?” Austin makes a big deal out of the bats who come swooping out from under bridges in the fall. Never understood it, myself. But then, perhaps my experiences with grackles have prejudiced me against clouds of flying black animals that poop on your head.
“Unfortunately, yes.” Annelise made a face. “Their version involves cucumber, lemongrass-infused vodka, and Blue Curacao sherbert.”
“Sorbet,” Ben said automatically.
“Whatever. I’d rather have a beer.”
I’d rather she had a beer too. The drinks fund was running low.
We decided to give it one more night.
That was Wednesday morning. Before lunch, Lensky gave us reason to change that decision.
7. Intelligent, competent, angry and amoral
“Start with this,” Lensky said. “His real name is Sandru Balan.” He looked abstracted for a minute. “Balan… hmm. After Thalia and I glimpsed him last fall we assumed his nickname was because of his blond hair. But it could also be a play on his name; in Romanian Balan means “blond.” As I told Thalia, those scraps of paper we recovered from his hotel safe have been the occasion of a prolonged party for our translators and analysts. Not to mention giving the FBI something useful to do for once.”
He had collected the entire research staff of the Center for Applied Technolo
gy – Prakash excepted - to brief us on his agency’s discoveries about the terrorist we’d known only as “Blondie.” He’d persuaded the agency that in this case, keeping information strictly compartmented was less important than making sure everybody who might be at risk was on the same page.
We were crowded into my office on the private side of the third floor. Not for the first time, I considered the success of Ben’s visitor-discouraging strategy (have an office the size of a walk-in closet) versus mine (don’t have any chairs for visitors). Oh, well. This wasn’t a casual visit; it was a semi-formal meeting after which, I hoped, the other research fellows would go back to their own offices and take their chairs with them. We usually had meetings in the break room, on the public side, but Lensky was antsy about sharing so much of the intelligence his agency had gathered. It had seemed best to walk him across the wall and meet here, where nobody could casually eavesdrop.
Unlike Lensky, though, I wasn’t too worried about that possibility. The number of people who want to eavesdrop on mathematicians’ conversations is vanishingly small. Even the Center’s support staff tended to back away, muttering about crosses and garlic, when we got into a lively discussion about, say, finitely generated vector spaces.
Granted, the present briefing was somewhat more user-friendly than that.
“We have a lot more information about Balan now, and we’re not even through analyzing all the papers that were retrieved last fall. Not just his identity, but birth date, early life, skills, and some interesting theories about his motivations.”
“I thought you knew the last part,” Ben said. “Isn’t he a jihadi? Or is that too politically incorrect to mention?”
“We thought that at one time,” Lensky said, “but with the benefit of more data, we’re back to the theory that he’s a mercenary who is willing to sell his skills to the highest bidder.”
“But a lot of his notes were written in Arabic, weren’t they?” Ingrid asked. “I wouldn’t think many Romanians would know Arabic.”
An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3) Page 5