All the same, I was less than thrilled to find him leaning against my open door when I got back from lunch. I told myself not to assume the worst: he might be there to work, not to hash over old Bollywood musicals I’d never seen and didn’t want to.
Within five minutes we were off the subject of mathematics and back to musicals. So much for being open-minded: it didn’t work.
“You should watch Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge some time. In English, The brave heart will win the bride.”
“None but the brave deserve the fair,” I murmured, temporarily distracted.
“Ah, you have seen it!”
“Nope. I was quoting an English poet.” Pope? Dryden? Some dead white guy.
“It is very sweet film. You will like it, Thalia. Simran’s father planned when she was born for her to marry the son of his friend whom she has never met. She is good girl, so she agrees to the engagement. But she is also sad that her future is belonging to this stranger, so she begs her father for a month of freedom only, before the wedding. In that month she travels and meets Raj and they fall in love.”
So far it sounded exactly like every other Bollywood flick he’d bored me with.
“There is a very moving scene at the end of their journey. He asks if she'd still marry her betrothed if she fell in love with someone else. She does not answer, then the train horn sounds and she turns to go.”
“Is that the end?” I hoped.
“No, of course not. Story cannot end until she is with Raj. True love must always triumph. Just like in real life.”
If he believed that was true of real life, he was even more inexperienced than I’d suspected.
“Thalia, you are very loyal person. I am thinking that maybe you would feel it your duty to stay with Lensky even after you fell in love with someone else. Just like Simran felt her duty to honor the engagement to her father’s friend. But she came to realize in the end that this was wrong.”
“Yes, well, here we have one of those inconvenient disconnects between reality and fiction, Prakash. I am not in love with someone else.”
“When you will be admitting the truth that you are already knowing in your heart?”
One of the truths I had discovered – not, I think, the one he had in mind -was that Prakash’s syntax deteriorated when his emotions took over. My emotions were about to take over too, and they weren’t nice; I was sick and tired of hearing this egotistical oaf pretend he had some special insight into my feelings. I didn’t really want to go off on him, though, so I looked for some way to de-escalate.
“Prakash. Please stop thinking in terms of romantic clichés. I am not in love with you. You are not in love with me. Until you went crazy last week you didn’t even like me! We are colleagues, not a couple.”
“The heart is crazy, it’s true.”
Sounded like the title of a Bollywood musical.
“But love will not be denied! Give me one chance only, Thalia. When you know my love, you will realize that you are too good for that fellow Lensky. You should be with one of your own kind.”
Dammit, enough is enough! He reached for me as my temper took over in a white sheet of flame. I brought the edge of my hand down on his wrist, hard. “Not. In. A. Million. Years! Get that through your swollen head, you egomaniac. And never touch me again if you want to keep those fingers!” I was too furious to stay there in my office, between Prakash and the damned grackles. “Ingrid,” I shouted through the partition, “tell Lensky I went home early, okay?”
I turned sideways and vanished.
Lensky’s condo was so close that teleporting there felt instantaneous. There was no sense of traveling the in-between to improve my mood, so I was still furious when I stepped onto the living room carpet. I clenched my fists and said several Greek words that Dad thinks I don’t know. Then I switched back to English to fulminate at greater length. “Idiot! Sex maniac! Presumptous prick!”
“I do hope those words aren’t addressed to me,” said a cool voice behind me.
I half-turned and caught just a glimpse of a blond head and some black feathers. Then Sandru Balan grabbed me and pressed a smelly rag over my nose and mouth. I started to stamp on his toes and… fell into the darkness.
I felt as if I were swimming upwards through unnaturally heavy, viscous, black water. Except I couldn’t exactly swim, because something was constraining my arms and legs. Cords, cutting into me. Who had tied me up and dumped me into the water?
Then I blinked in the light and registered that I was still in Lensky’s condo. I felt a momentary relief; then I saw Sandru Balan, kneeling over me with a terrifying smile on his face. I filled my lungs and started to shout for help, but his hand went over my mouth.
“You really do not want to do that,” he said.
I twisted my head back and forth, trying to free my mouth, but his hand moved with me.
“Now stop fighting me and let me explain why calling for help is a really, really bad idea. You see, you are wearing a suicide vest. Yes. It is packed with plastique – my contacts in the demolition business have been most helpful – and this wire here is connected to the detonator. If anyone comes through that door, thus reducing the tension on the wire, there will be a fatal explosion – well, perhaps not fatal for him, but certainly for you.
“And I am afraid that I cannot allow you to move. The cords binding your arms also tie you to Monsieur Lensky’s very sturdy bed. You can feel a bedpost behind you. If you attempt to teleport yourself to some other location, I suspect the bed will be too heavy for you to move. In fact, I am quite certain of it; I tested a similar arrangement personally.
“You may be wondering how I knew that you had arrived here well ahead of your CIA boyfriend. The grackles around Allandale House are not merely a nuisance; I ordered them to keep watch on you and to notify me the first time you came here before he could. It was a stroke of luck that you left so early; now you will have several hours to contemplate your very, very short future. Or – not. You see your cell phone?”
He held it up in front of me.
“This also can send the signal to detonate your so charming vest, the next time someone calls you. Sadly, you do not have much of a social life, so it is unlikely that it will spare you the hours of waiting. Unless…”
He tried to look as if he had just thought of something, but I suspected the entire speech had been prepared ahead of time, including whatever sadistic twist he was about to reveal.
Not that it mattered.
“I do believe that when I summon the grackles to take me away, I shall have them begin by transporting me to the third floor of Allandale House. I shall encourage your boyfriend to telephone you. If I succeed, the wait for your inevitable death will be shortened. But I shall have the delicious pleasure of informing him that he has killed you. Yes. Definitely worth it, don’t you think?”
He stood, pulled a grackle feather from his pocket and stroked it. Seconds later, he was at the center of a whirling cloud of grackles; and then they all disappeared, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth and no idea how to free myself.
I tried anyway.
“Brouwer,” I croaked, and the image I used for teleporting formed in my mind. But nothing moved; the in-between did not welcome me. The bed weighed me down fatally.
Even if I had been able to teleport, I would still have been wrapped in explosives and at the mercy of a call to my cell phone. I thought over my other paranormal abilities. Flying failed, just like teleporting. I formed a shield repeatedly…outside the deadly layers wrapped around me. All my efforts to form a shield between me and the explosives failed.
Camouflage? I couldn’t see any way that could possibly be useful.
Telekinesis? I tried, but without being able to touch my stars I couldn’t move anything as heavy as my cell phone.
Think, think, think! But don’t think about your cell phone ringing.
Fire. A last resort, but I was desperate. I pictured the Riemann surface that Ben and I had stud
ied so intently, trying to make it generate light instead of fire, and coupled it with an image of the bedpost behind me.
I thought I could sense flames starting there. A moment later I was sure of it; they were scorching my hands and wrists. Never mind. With my hands free I would be able to grab the cell phone and maybe destroy it somehow, and then I could very carefully get out of this vest, and then I’d figure out how to deal with the door detonator.
My wrists felt as if they were on fire now, and the backs of my hands weren’t much better.
23. You have just killed her yourself
Since Thalia was no longer there to hear him out, Prakash retreated to his temporary office to fume in privacy. How dare she presume to say that he didn’t love her? The only possible explanation was that she did not understand love as he knew it (mostly from movies, but so what?). True love was a fire that consumed you from inside. It was the knowledge that you would be forever incomplete without your soul mate. It was a force that transcended all conventional boundaries.
If she thought she loved that spook, it was only because she had not yet known the fire of love. He could understand the man’s attraction for her; this Center was a ramshackle affair that might collapse at any minute. It was only natural that a girl with no family to take care of her (she’d never mentioned any family) should be swept off her feet by an older man (certainly over thirty) with a steady, well-paid job.
He could even forgive her. She was simply too inexperienced to recognize the difference between true love and her gratitude for the security Lensky could offer. It was just like Simran’s engagement to Kulheet in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, or Ayesha and Raman in Maine Dil Tujhko Diya, or Pooja and Ajay in Dil To Pagal Hai, or… literature and film were full of stories about mismatched couples, girls who recognized their hearts and their true loves and thought it was too late. (Although nice Indian girls didn’t carry their errors to the point of actually sleeping with the wrong man.) But in the end, love always triumphed, and it would for him too. Film had also taught him that the true hero had to be patient, and he might be required to help the girl to recognize her love for him.
Also, having given her virginity to Lensky (surely there had been no other men), she probably thought that she could not love another. Indeed, many men of his acquaintance would reject a sullied dove, a broken flower. But knowing the promiscuity of American girls and her likely inadequate instruction, he could (with a mighty effort) rise above that.
Probably.
All he really needed to do was to take her in his arms and awaken her. He had been too restrained; she might even think him weak for all the times he’d meekly accepted her brushing him off.
But how could he do that when she wasn’t even here?
He seethed for several minutes before he remembered something she herself had told him. There was a way to teleport without knowing the place you wanted to go. “Sometimes you can teleport to a person. But it has to be somebody you know very well and feel very close to.”
For him, that would be Thalia! And when he appeared beside her, she would have to acknowledge the strength and purity of his love.
He was alone in his office; nobody noticed when he vanished.
Everybody else was transfixed by the drama in the outer office.
Even though all the windows were closed against the cold, Sandru Balan had appeared in a cloud of grackles that disappeared as he materialized.
“Do you know where your girlfriend is right now?” Balan asked Lensky, self-satisfaction oozing from every pore.
“I wish I’d brought Mr. M. today,” Annelise mourned.
“Does it matter? I know where you are right now.”
Balan laughed. “Kill me, and you will never see her again.” Actually, the spook would never see her again in any case; if Lensky didn’t take this bait, he’d still destroy her when he opened his own front door. But how much more delicious it would be to enjoy his despair and remorse right now!
Two of the other men in the room moved toward him, one moving his lips.
“Stand down, Ben, Colton,” Lensky said without looking. “You son of a bitch,” he addressed Balan, “Where is Thalia? What have you done?”
“Nothing irrevocable… yet. Let us play a little game called ‘Find the girl.’ If you can call her cell phone, find out where I have put her, and get there before me, she may live. Of course you cannot do that, because I can call upon my servants to transport me there instantaneously, but it might be amusing to see you try.”
The spook fished a cell phone out of his pocket and hit one button. Oh, better and better! He had her on speed dial. Of course!
Balan laughed loudly and long.
“You will get no answer – ever,” he taunted Lensky. “Do you know why?”
“You’ve destroyed her phone.”
“Oh, no. Far better than that! A call to her phone set off the detonator. I could have set it off at any time, but it was much more satisfying to let you do it. When you go home tonight, you will find the wreckage of your apartment decorated with the bloody shreds of your beloved. You have just killed her, spook. Blown her into tiny pieces. Can you live with that knowledge?”
The man Lensky drew his weapon.
“Oh, don’t kill yourself just yet. You’ve barely had time for me to savor your despair.” He laughed again.
“Stand down!” the spook said again, swinging his weapon to force the others in the room to stay where they were. He brought it back and trained it on Balan. Oh, this was an exquisite pleasure! He hadn’t yet realized that a gun was no threat to a shielded man.
“First,” Lensky said in a remarkably steady voice, “I’ll kill you.” The crack of the Glock was deafening inside the room; Balan felt no need to move, but the man he’d attempted to shoot the other day cried out and clutched his arm. Well enough! He didn’t care how many people were injured by ricocheting bullets before this Lensky gave up and shot himself.
“Ben?” The spook half-turned.
“Ricochet,” the wounded man said. “You can’t shoot him, Lensky, he’s shielded.” He shook off a pretty girl who had run to him. “In a minute, Annelise. If his shield is like ours,” he told the spook, “it will stop anything that moves as fast as a bullet. Too bad bullets don’t move slow.”
“Indeed.” Lensky began walking towards Balan.
“Idiot,” Balan mocked him. “Do you think if you’re closer the bullet won’t move as fast? Guns don’t work that way, my friend. You’d do better to turn it on yourself.” Although he’d prefer to prolong the man’s agony.
He anticipated that when he reached the boundary of the shield the spook would bounce off it, just like his bullet. Instead he continued moving slowly towards Balan.
Suddenly Balan realized three things. His shield was not, after all, totally impenetrable.
The words move slow had been instructions to Lensky.
And he didn’t – quite – have time to reach into his pocket for the feather that would call the grackles to transport him out of reach.
Lensky did not doubt for a minute that Balan was telling the truth about the trap he’d laid. This, and none of the previous episodes, must be what his dream had warned him of. They’d been fools to assume that the magic of the grackles worked just like the topologists’ teleportation. That since neither Balan nor Chayyaputra had been inside the condo, it was safe from them. Thalia had teleported herself there, where Balan must have trapped her. By his own careless action she had been killed, destroyed, shredded. And the dream had been true: she’d teleported, and he would never see her again.
Loss and grief all but paralyzed him. Balan was right; he had better turn his weapon upon himself. But there was one thing he would do first.
Thalia, my love.
Never again.
He shut those thoughts away, behind a partition. He dared not think now. There would be time to grieve after he had done this one last thing; and time to end his grieving with a bullet, too.
&
nbsp; For a man reputed to be so intelligent, Balan did not appear to realize the danger that approached him until it was almost too late. Lensky was already pushing through the shield. Balan grabbed his wrist and tried to force the gun down. “If you – fire that,” he said jerkily, “the bullet will ricochet inside this shield until it lands in one of us, and it’s as likely to be you as me. If you want to kill me, you’ll have to do it with your bare hands.”
“Delighted,” Lensky said, and threw himself on the man who had killed his love. He was hampered briefly by holding the gun, but then Balan struck it out of his grasp and it fell to the floor without, God be thanked, discharging. And Balan had made a serious mistake, devoting both his hands to the problem of the gun. Lensky got his hands around the bastard’s neck and squeezed. Balan kicked, arched, twisted, struck again at the wrist he’d hit before and escaped his grip. In the next few minutes Balan demonstrated that he was strong, flexible, and a remarkably dirty street fighter. But Lensky outweighed him, and he had learned his own fighting skills on the streets of Trenton. After inflicting more damage – though not nearly enough, not yet - he got Balan to the floor and choked him again.
“Don’t kill him!” someone in the room shouted.
Why not?
“Lensky! Please, please don’t kill him!”
Oh, well. He could wait a few minutes. Lensky squeezed tighter until Balan went limp. He ground his thumb into a nerve pressure point to make sure the man wasn’t faking, and then tied him up with his own belt.
During the struggle three long, iridescent black feathers had fallen out of the man’s pocket. Lensky picked them up. He didn’t know anything about magic, but one of his grandmother’s tales floated through his mind. A magic token… Balan wasn’t the Master of Ravens. Shani Chayyaputra was. And Balan carried grackle feathers…
Balan twitched and opened his eyes. They were fixed on the three feathers in Lensky’s hand. He doubled himself up and lunged clumsily at them.
An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3) Page 17