Above him, the high-tech eye in the internal sky panned past him. He spotted a tiny TV set and recognized himself on the third pass. He looked furtive. Minutes had elapsed. Maybe he should vanish right now. The clerk was still waiting for the console, her nails drumming the travertine. She didn’t seem to be pressing any red buttons or calling up any artillery.
Someone behind him in line pushed closer. Kevin eased forward. Nobody liked his personal space infringed upon in public, not even when layers of outerwear made the contact purely a formality. The pressure didn’t let up. Kevin shifted position again and turned to do his average citizen cold glare.
An unaverage citizen stared back. Kevin read law enforcement in one summing glance. Two nondescript men —both six feet, both wearing expressions of utter control —bracketed him, pinned him to the cashier’s cage.
“Just come with us, Doctor. No theatrics,” one advised in a practiced undertone.
Kevin shrugged. His cashier suddenly moved away from the computer station. He wondered if she knew what he was wanted for. Of course not. But it hadn’t stopped her from doing her duty. The account had been watched, as simple as that.
The men nudged Kevin out of line and back into the ebb and flow of the lobby. One let a leatherette case flower in his palm. Kevin glimpsed a photograph that could have been any middle-aged, short-haired, hard-faced man, some print and an official-looking seal.
“Where did you leave your patient, Dr. Blake?” the man asked politely.
“Not here,” Kevin said quickly. So they hadn’t noticed Jane yet. Elation thrummed through his despair.
They were bustling him out of the lobby, out past the station where he was sure he’d left Jane. The imposing clatter of their triple footsteps made a dark-haired woman in a down jacket look up as they passed. Not Jane, he realized, with a dreadful double dose of relief and frantic worry. Where had he left her, then?
“We’ll check the area anyway, not that we have any reason—yet—to disbelieve you, Doctor.”
“Who are you guys?”
“I showed you identification.”
“How many crooks can read that fine print? We’ve got an aging population, you know.”
The man actually smiled, tightly. “You’ve never heard of us.”
“Then why advertise?”
“That’s for us, to let us know we’re real.” An iron grip on Kevin’s arm stopped the trio. The man looked at his so-far-silent partner, then nodded. “We’re going to sit this one out, Doctor, in the car, while my men finish looking in here. Then we’ll go someplace warm and cozy and you can tell me all about it.”
“And if I don’t come peacefully?” Who was he kidding? These guys had probably done this a hundred times. But where was Jane? Why hadn’t they spotted her already, if they were pros?
“We’d rather not cuff you. We’d rather not make a scene. Maybe you wouldn’t either.”
He considered. The more ruckus he raised, the more cop types involved, the more likelihood Jane would be found. She couldn’t have gone far… He forced himself not to look around, and nodded once.
The man relaxed a very little. “My name is Turner,” he said, “and so far you’re a law-abiding citizen. Keep it that way.”
They gave him the low-key, undercover bum’s rush out. Kevin let them, hating his own complicity, but not once, ever, looking back for Jane.
* * *
Jane stood in line, inching forward with the rest of her line mates, oblivious to everything but the delicate brush of fur against her palm.
A whole, gorgeous golden wall of Zyunsinth loomed ahead of her, slung over the shoulders of a tall, gilt-haired woman wearing a leopardskin hat and high-heeled leopardskin boots.
Jane thought she was wonderful, and happily inhaled some exotic scent that made her want to sneeze but was so rich in a strangely artificial way.
Keeping her light grip on the back of the coat, Jane looked around for Kevin now that she felt anchored again. She was only four lines over from where he had been—or was it three? Her mind backflashed for the precise image. Four. Her memory had been accurate. He should be right… there.
But he wasn’t. Nor was he waiting at the station where he had left her. Zyunsinth pulled out of her grasp and she shuffled forward to keep in contact with it. Jane’s eyes began systematically panning the lobby—like one of the watching cameras—scanning for height, hair color, clothing, even a flash of blue iris.
Nothing. She repeated the procedure, letting her concentration run bone deep. She knew if Kevin was there, and if she really looked for him, she would see him.
Zyunsinth lurched ahead again, then a brassy voice challenged, “Miss! Do you mind!”
Jane did. Her fingers tightened possessively on the fur. Its hackles raised. Long hairs fanned up like porcupine quills all the way from Jane’s fist to the collar. The woman’s square jaw dropped.
“How did you—?”
Jane released the coat, rejected the coat. Her need suddenly felt hollow in the face of a greater loss. This golden fluff wasn’t Zyunsinth. Zyunsinth was dead and buried. Kevin would have said Zyunsinth had only been a symbol of something else anyway. As the woman flounced ahead, the man behind Jane neatly closed the gap, flashing Jane a look both surprised and smug.
The lobby’s din had risen to a discordant buzz again. Jane stepped into its distance, paused, stepped again. People milled around her. No one looked at her. She cocked her head and listened. Nothing. She waited. Nothing at all.
At the marble pedestal, three strangers huddled, passing the chained ballpoint pen among themselves. Jane joined them, but they ignored her. She picked up a discarded form, the one that she had scrawled upon. The letters— some printed backwards, although she knew better now— drilled into her brain.
ECNALUBMA
—the first word she had written, for Kevin in his office with the comfortable chair and the funny poster of dancing tongues dangling behind the door… The door. Jane turned. She saw the door to the street. Maybe Kevin was there. Or in the van. She began walking briskly to the exit, joining the flow of people, melding with them in their haste and their anonymity.
The van, Jane told herself, turning left at the door and striding down the sidewalk. The van.
Jane stopped.
The van was coughing at the curb, its breath huffing out of its rear tail pipe in tired bursts. Someone—not Kevin— was at the wheel, behind the windshield, turning the van away from the curb into the traffic.
Jane gasped as a passerby bumped her.
“Sorry,” the young man mumbled, not sounding it at all.
Jane retreated against the building. Behind her the efficient girls in high heels rushed to and fro on a soft velvet-green carpet. Outside, other people had lined up against the building, too. Jane wondered what they had lost.
The hole left by the van stayed vacant. Jane watched it faithfully. She even jumped when the little red marker clicked against the left side of the curved window and a bright red fan snapped into position. It read “Expired.”
A slush-spattered bus, once red but now mostly brown, shouldered to the curb ahead of where the van had been. While Jane watched, several people waiting along the building shuffled forward to mount the bus. She saw them stuff things into a box at the vehicle’s front and heard the mechanism chortle as it swallowed small silver circles.
Jane pushed her gloved hands into her empty pockets, but they felt no warmer. She looked up, at pillars of high-rise buildings arrowing toward a slate-gray ceiling of sky. The street echoed, too, with shards of meaningless sound.
“Kevin,” Jane tried saying quietly, but that seemed to be just another meaningless sound in a world already overstocked with them.
She retreated to utter silence.
People came, and waited by the wall, and filed into the buses that arrived, and paused, and drove on. No matter how many people left, more seemed to come, and there always seemed to be another bus if they waited long enough.
Gradually, it got dark.
The Sifting
January 12
“…the ague of the skeleton…”
—T. S. Eliot, Whispers of Immortality
Chapter Fifteen
* * *
God, don’t you think I’d tell you if I knew?”
Kevin stared pensively at the limp roll of hundred-dollar bills on Turner’s desk. “She has no money, no place to go, no shelter from the cold—I never thought we’d get separated.”
Turner had turned out to be a gentleman, Kevin found, or at least it suited him to masquerade as one. It had been a genteel snatch.
Only a half hour after being pinched in the S&L lobby, Kevin sat in a drab room in some gray government building downtown. He’d been searched, of course—the usual patting down and pocket emptying—but no booking, no fingerprinting, no cell. Just talk. So far.
The contents of his pockets—wallet, Kandy’s van keys, loose change—littered Turner’s desk.
“Can I see that ID again?” Kevin asked. “Now that I’m sitting down and can read it?”
Turner produced the small case and slid it across the desktop.
Kevin opened it gingerly. “PID. What does that stand for?”
“What did Probe stand for?”
Kevin flashed Turner a reappraising look. “Yeah. I hear that the past tense is appropriate. The Probe unit is gone with the wind. You guys—whatever you are—can shut things down fast.”
Turner waited.
“Probe didn’t stand for anything, I guess, except what it did. No acronym. It only meant that our small psychiatric team dealt with unusual patients in radical ways. Multiple personalities, cult deprogrammings, the criminally insane. It was a license to cut corners and red tape, to fly a little.”
“So’s the PID. And that is an acronym.” Turner leaned forward. “Paranormal Intelligence Division.”
Kevin whistled. “Of what?”
“That’s… not for publication.”
“You mean the government actually takes that Mind Wars stuff seriously?”
“Don’t you?”
Kevin shrugged, then smiled wryly. “Remote viewing, telepathy, psychic hocus-pocus, no. But I take lots of things more seriously than I used to, including myself.”
Turner grew even graver. “You should, Dr. Blake, take things very seriously right now. We want Jane Doe. Washington has decided that her abilities, if genuine, could be vital. Mainstream scientists are very interested in paranormal abilities. Targ and Puthoff had remarkable remote viewing results with ordinary subjects. Imagine what might happen with someone like Jane Doe. And her telekinetic abilities are largely unexplored.”
“Do you hear yourself? You want to set Jane up and make her perform! The Targ experiments were back in the seventies—nothing more has come of them. Why use a human mind as a long-distance voyeur when the skies are crammed with spy satellites and we have cameras that can pick up a license plate from space? As for telekinesis—nobody believes in Uri Geller and his spoon-bending routine anymore.”
“Freud was interested in the paranormal—”
“And was ambivalent. The human mind can play many tricks, I know. What might strike the layman as psi phenomena could be a childish omnipotence fantasy. So-called powers could be an unconscious regression to some vestigial evolutionary mode of communication—the appendix of the mind, and as useless.”
Turner smiled. “You argue like a conservative, Doctor. So much for ‘dealing with unusual patients in radical ways.’ Besides, what you think doesn’t matter anymore. What does is that Jane Doe is no longer your private property. The cat’s out of the bag. Help us find her and we can overlook the… irregularities that occurred in your misguided flight from the authorities.”
“How could I flee the authorities when I didn’t even know any authorities were after me?”
“Why did you take Jane Doe and run?”
“I didn’t. It was therapy.”
“Therapy? In the bridal suite of the Duluth Radisson? The desk clerk and bellman have identified your pictures. I’ve read Dr. Cross’s report on you, heard the tape of your last session with her—”
Kevin fought to maintain his distance, but Turner’s words had raked a razor across his Achilles’ heel—his sexual relationship with Jane.
“Tell me about the bridal suite therapy, Dr. Blake,” Turner prodded ruthlessly.
If labeled an ass, might as well act the part, Kevin concluded. “I told you I was a radical shrink. I wanted to take her around the state, see if any place rang a bell with her.”
“Did the woods in Duluth ring a bell? Was that ‘therapy,’ too?” Turner’s affability faded as anger leaked into his eyes. “I lost two men there, under brutal—and mysterious— circumstances.”
“What about Professor Neumeier’s cabin?” Kevin challenged back. “Did you perform your own kind of therapy on that old woman? Dead of a heart attack, come on! She survived Auschwitz but not you guys.”
Another kind of pain briefly seized Turner’s eyes. “She was… terribly old. It shouldn’t have happened. A routine interrogation. We never touched her. She was more fragile than she looked.”
“Oh, great. And that’s why you want Jane, to interrogate her! You really expect me to smile and stand aside while you people probe my patient’s delicate brain with an elephant gun?”
“We’re not inhuman, Blake, just doing our jobs, as you were doing yours. I’m no judge and jury. I don’t care about your libido or hers. Jane Doe apparently has extraordinary abilities. They could be useful to science, to the future, to our government, yes. You have no right to play dog in the manger. Cooperate, and you can help her, assure yourself that no damage is done—”
“Sure, I baby-sit syringes while your government shrinks narcoanalyze Jane with battery acid. If you bully boys realized what fiendish drugs have come out of the biological warfare and Cold War spy labs, you wouldn’t inject them into the cockroach who ate your sister, believe me.”
“That’s not my job. It’s my job to find Jane Doe—and you—and get her into the proper hands.”
Kevin snorted at the final phrase, and Turner’s face darkened.
“Who gave you a God license, Blake? You don’t own Jane Doe just because she happened to fall into your lap. Nobody does. Thanks principally to your own efforts, the kooks from Crookston were debunked. Even if you got the Volkers to raise h—… a hue and cry about the government taking Jane, they have no legal power over her. Neither do you.”
“Is everything a matter of legality to you?”
Turner grunted. “Morality. I knew you’d come to that. I’m just the man on the street. I do my job. If I can persuade you to cooperate, you’ll come out of this with only your pride bruised. Otherwise—”
“Now the threats tiptoe out.”
“Take this one seriously, Dr. Blake.” Turner’s tired eyes pinned Kevin to his own weariness; even now his backbone was turning to rubber. “It’s not up to me what happens to you. If we’re unable to persuade you to tell us where Jane Doe is—”
“I don’t know. Goddammit, I honestly lost her!” Like most people, Kevin lied best when he was telling the truth.
Turner smiled. “Maybe you did lose her. We don’t honestly care. We just want to find her. If you help, things will go well for you. You’ll walk out of here with the keys to your condo and your car, with your life in pretty much one piece. You’ll need a job, but you’ll get very fine references. From Dr. Cross—”
“That bastard was willing to hang me out to dry! Poor old Norbert, I used to respect him once.”
“Apparently it was reciprocal. Yeah, I hear you could have had an important career. Why not save that? You’re on treacherous ground ethically anyway. I’m no therapist, but maybe you need to get away from Jane Doe, let her get free. Sure, you’ll feel a little tragic, but you’ve lost girlfriends before, I’m sure—”
“Fuck off! Find some other house shrink.” His degree of anger reflected hi
s degree of temptation. Kevin was so tired, and the offer seemed so damn reasonable. If Turner hadn’t reminded him of losing Julie…
“We already have.” Turner rose and shrugged. “I’ll be sorry to turn you over to him.” He paused at the closed door, then looked back. “You know, Dr. Blake, you may be right. Jane Doe may not have any exploitable psychic talents. Tests may simply prove her unessential. She could be released again very shortly.”
“You work for the PID. What do you think? Do you believe in this psi stuff?”
“Frankly? No. No more than I believe in the Volkers’ close encounter story.”
“Yet you’d hand Jane over—whatever she is, she’s a traumatized human being, an amnesiac who’s been chased from pillar to post—knowing your cold warriors would poke around inside her head with a meat hook looking for something that’s very likely not there?”
“It’s my job,” Turner said. “I lost two men chasing her—and you. I’d rather we found something that made all that worthwhile.”
“You’re something else,” Kevin accused, letting anger and contempt—and impotence—ooze into his voice and eyes.
“Maybe. But just sit tight here and hang on hard. You haven’t met our shrink yet.”
* * *
Jane bent to the bottom of the bus stop pole. An oblong of green paper had been wind-wrapped around its metal base. She unpeeled it.
It looked almost like money, except that the paper was too flimsy and the writing was all wrong. But she’d seen people exchange this slip for a bus ride.
She glanced around the darkened streets. The sodium iodide lamps, flickering on, had pocked the snow with pools the color of Mercurochrome.
Fewer and fewer people waited for buses now, and the buses came less and less often. The girls behind the glass window had gone long before, slipcasing their typewriters and dimming the green glows of their computer screens.
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