Paul just shook his head.
"We should hurry" he said.
"I told him I'd be back."
He positioned two teeps and two normals at the base of the stairs, then let Paul lead him to the lift. There were eight of them in all: Paul, Garibaldi, Thompson, Bjarnesson, another teep named Davis, and three special - ops policemen armed for bear. He tried not to pause when they reached the door and the others took their positions. Then, screwing up his courage, he knocked.
"Who is it?" A woman's voice.
"Police Inspector Girard," he answered, in a loud voice.
"I'm unarmed. I'd like to talk to Alfred Bester, please."
A pause of several heartbeats followed before she answered.
"Come in."
Chapter 13
"The door is locked, madame," Girard said.
"I can't come to the door," the woman replied.
"It's a trap," Garibaldi hissed.
"Break it down."
"I would rather use Monsieur Guillory's key."
"Oh. Yeah. Well, if you want to be lazy."
"Don't follow me in," Girard warned.
He took the key and opened the door. Guillory's wife and child sat on the couch, watching them.
"Monsieur Bester, I wish to speak to you," Girard called.
He didn't see Bester anywhere.
"I am unarmed, but there are armed men in the hall and surrounding the building. I want to come to some accord that will settle this without any more violence."
"He's gone," the woman on the couch said.
"What? Impossible. And if so, why didn't you answer the door?"
"He told us not to."
"But if he isn't here..."
Girard walked slowly around the living room. Nowhere to hide there. He looked in the kitchen next, checking the cabinets even though he didn't really imagine a grown man could fit into them. He looked in the bedroom, the boy's room, the bathroom. No one there, not even behind the shower curtain. When he came back into the living room, the two were still sitting there. Garibaldi peeked around from behind the door.
"He doesn't seem to be here," Girard admitted.
"He went down the garbage chute," the boy said.
"What?"
"In the bathroom," the woman said.
Paul had called her Marie, yes? It wasn't a name he could hear without experiencing some troubling thoughts just now.
"No way." Garibaldi grunted.
"I'm coming in."
"Watch it," Thompson called from out in the hall, "he might still be in there. He might just be telling you he's not."
"Can he do that?" Girard asked, incredulous.
"Yes, against normals, certainly."
"Okay. Let's all search, then."
He noticed that Marie and the boy were both sitting exactly as they had been, and little spider legs tickled up his back.
"You can get up now," he said.
"No, we can't," Marie said, tears starting in her eyes.
"He told us not to."
"He compelled them," Bjarnesson said.
"Should be easy enough to fix. He couldn't have had much time."
That was too much for Garibaldi. He entered the room, and he wasn't unarmed.
"Where's the garbage chute?"
The boy pointed the way with his eyes. Garibaldi gazed in dismay at the dark shaft.
"Damn it. Where does this go?"
"We don't know," Paul called, from where he knelt with his family, soothing them, telling them that everything would be all right.
"The basement, I guess."
"Perimeter reports no one went out the window or exited from the building by the doors," Bjarnesson relayed.
He paused.
"I think he is gone. I don't think he could fool all three of us working together."
Garibaldi looked back down the shaft, speculatively. The inside was filmed with dust, and what looked like fresh scratch marks.
"I'm going in," he muttered.
"I've sent a detail to try and find the basement, so that end is covered," Girard said.
"If you want to follow the cobra into its den, more luck to you."
"Just call me Ricky-Ticky," Garibaldi replied.
Bester was smaller than Garibaldi was, that was clear from the start. He'd known that, of course, only it was hard to think of Bester as small, at least until he was confronted with the fact that he, Garibaldi, fit into the shaft like a cork just a micron shy of a perfect fit. There was little he could do other- than wriggle and let gravity do the work. As it was, he had to stretch his arms out above him.
It wasn't until he'd managed, catching and bumping, to descend about ten feet that he considered what might happen if Bester was still at the base of this thing. He would be a perfect target, coming out legs first. A sitting duck.
What the hell did that mean, anyway, a "sitting duck"? He slid down what he estimated to be another ten or fifteen feet. Then the chute angled sharply. Until that point, he hadn't been able to see how far down it went, but he figured the building was two stories, with a generous basement. So he ought to be about two-thirds of the way down. Good, because he was getting itchy. The chute was too damned small, and he couldn't move...
But he had dropped only another five or six feet before his feet came to rest on something solid. He kicked around, and found that the chute simply came to an end. Which was stupid, but... come to think of it, he'd never known anyone who lived in a building with a garbage chute. It had never occurred to him it might not be functional. On Mars, you didn't build something unless you were going to use it, and if you decided you weren't going to use it you took it out, to free the space for something else.
Of course, on Mars you weren't dealing with three-hundred- year-old buildings that had been tinkered with incrementally over the years.
"Nice insight, Garibaldi," he muttered to himself.
"Now how are you going to get out of here?"
A couple of minutes of frantic wiggling proved to him he wouldn't be able to reverse the process that had brought him down. He couldn't get any leverage with his arms up over his head, and his elbows didn't have room to flex out. He felt panic rising and batted it down. He didn't like tight places. He hated not being able to move his arms and legs, scratch his nose.
"Hey! Get something you can use to pull me out of here," Garibaldi called up.
"Hey! Somebody!"
No answer. And he was hit by the sudden, terrible image of Bester, standing among the corpses of Thompson, Girard, and whoever else had remained in the apartment. Bester, grinning as he heard Garibaldi's voice, trying to decide whether to toy with him or cut right to the chase. He looked up, but all he could see was the smallest sliver of light. Enough of a window for someone to pump a few bullets or PPG blasts down? Sure. The light flickered as a shadow crossed it.
"Did you call, Garibaldi?"
It was Thompson.
"Yeah. Get me the hell out of here. This doesn't go anywhere."
"That means..."
"Yep. It means he's still up there, somewhere."
"Oh, shit. I..."
Then Thompson made an odd noise.
"What was that, Thompson?"
Silence. Then a sort of muted chuckle.
"Well. Mr. Garibaldi. We meet again. And under very odd circumstances, I must say. I always knew you were beneath me, but to have it brought home so graphically, well, it's really quite amusing."
"Bester. Damn you, I'll..."
"Sorry. No time for chit-chat. I'll be back in a few minutes, though."
Bester closed the garbage chute and surveyed his handiwork. Thompson was down but still breathing, and would probably continue to. The big telepath wasn't so lucky. He had shot him in the head, first thing, while he was concentrating on taking the inhibitions off Marie and Pierre. Crude and amateurish, but he was a P12 and Bester still wasn't as strong as he ought to be.
Bester had sparked out the police officer and Paul-they would recov
er any moment now. Only Thompson had given him a minute of real worry. Someone had removed the failsafe he had planted in the ex-EarthForce officer, so he'd had to clobber him. Fortunately, the teep had been busy talking to Garibaldi.
Garibaldi, who would die next. But first Bester had something else to attend to.
It had all worked out pretty well, really. It had taken him only a few moments to do what was needed to Marie and Pierre-both were pretty weak-minded, and after all, he didn't do much to them. He planted the very strong suggestion that he had gone down the garbage chute, forbade them to remember his real exit, then forbade them to get up and walk around. None of these suggestions bore the force of permanence, though quick had also meant brutal. At the very least the two were going to suffer bad dreams for a few weeks.
What he had actually done, before his pursuers had arrived, was leave the apartment, cross the hall, and knock on a neighboring door. The sleepy tenant who answered had been easy to control, and better yet, single. The door had been shut, his new host down for the count, for about ten seconds when he heard the lift open.
For several long moments he could do nothing but wait, and hope, and make himself appear as an empty place in the universe.
When he heard some of them come tearing back out, and the lift went down, he knew his plan had worked. Yes, part one had gone very well-it was good to know he could still improvise.
Time for part two. He found a roll of heavy tape in the kitchen and used it to bind up everyone who was still alive. He taped their mouths shut, too-everyone except the cop, Girard. He prodded Girard awake, scanning as he did so.
"What a complicated life you have," he said to Girard, as the cop's eyes flickered open.
"Not one woman, but two. I've never really understood that, myself. I've never been able to be in love with more than one woman at a time. Here you have two, and you may lose them both because of your greed. You should be ashamed of yourself."
"Murderer."
"Ah. You want to change the subject. Good enough, I don't have time to be polite. We're going to use your link to make a call. You're going to tell them that Paul admitted it was all a ruse, that I've been gone for hours, and that I'm on the train to Amsterdam. I'll give you all of the information. Now, before you can object, let me tell you why you are going to do this, and why you'll do it just as I say.
See, I could make you do it, but that would be very painful for you, and more important, fatiguing for me. On the other hand, I can easily slip into your mind, hear your every word before you say it. I'll know if you plan to betray me. If you try that, not only will you not have a chance of succeeding, but I'll kill one of these people and then we'll try again. And again, until you get it right. Do you understand?"
The policeman looked at him with a weary sort of comprehension.
"Yes."
"Good. Here's the information. And make it believable."
Girard performed flawlessly.
"Perfect," Bester told him, patting his head.
"You've just saved a few lives."
He wrapped a piece of tape around Girard's head. Then, carrying the dead teep's pistol, he went back into the bathroom to kill Garibaldi.
* * *
Garibaldi had felt like a sucker plenty of times in his life, but this was going to stand out as the high point-the Olympus Mons of sucker hood - if he managed to survive it.
And Lise wasn't going to like this story, not at all. Best not to tell her. Of course, when it hit the papers - well, that might take a while. If Bester killed everyone who knew he'd come down here, they might dust miss the body until the smell started percolating. That did it. Yep, he was panicking. He always got silly when he panicked.
He strained at the chute again, as if by some miracle the physics of the situation might suddenly change. But the mechanical problem stayed the same. Try as he might, he couldn't climb up.
He might get better purchase if he dropped his PPG, but at the moment that was his one and only chance. Bester might not know he had a gun, and he might get off the first lucky shot.
He doubted that Bester would leave something like that to chance, though. He'd probably heat up a pan of oil and dump it on him first, something like that. He rolled his eyes. Perfect.
He was thinking of things to help Bester out, just on the off chance Bester hadn't thought of them himself. Could he be scanned from up there? Did a tiny glimpse of him constitute line of sight? Probably.
Even in a straight-up exchange of gunfire, he would lose. PPG shots were globs of super-hot phased helium plasma. Once they made contact with any surface they began to lose integrity. With this angle, he might be able to sort of blister his enemy's face. Meanwhile, Bester had a variety of weapons to choose from, including slug throwers, which would work much better in this situation.
He couldn't wait for that. He had to do something. It had already been too long-what, five minutes? Ten? Bester wouldn't hang around much longer.
He couldn't go up. He had tried to flex like Hercules and break the chute with the mighty strength of his limbs-no luck there, not even the slightest reason to hope.
He couldn't go down, either.
"Wait a minute," he breathed.
Why couldn't he go down? What was he standing on, anyway? Not the foundation-he hadn't dropped far enough for that. He raised his right heel the full five inches he could manage, and kicked down. Kicked again. Something gave, slightly. He kicked with the other foot, then punched down with both feet.
"Making a lot of noise down there, Mr. Garibaldi."
Bester's voice sounded as if it were right in his ear, and for an instant he thought it must be telepathy. His skin crawled to think Bester might once again be in his head. But, no, it was just the acoustics of the shaft.
He fired up the chute without looking. Jumped and kicked, fired again. Jumped and kicked.
The air grew warm in the chute, thanks to the dispersing plasma. But something was certainly giving way beneath him. He fired again, and this time the PPG didn't recharge. He dropped it, and used his arms as best he could to shove down, down, against the weakening floor of the shaft. At least he desperately hoped it was weakening.
Something finally broke beneath his feet, and he fell until his upper body caught in the too-small opening, nearly dislocating his arm. At the same moment, something like an angry hornet stung his ear. He wriggled frantically, his feet kicking free in a large, open space, his upper body still stuck in the shaft.
Then something hammered unbelievably hard into the top of his shoulder, and he was through, falling free.
Then slamming into something that broke with a lot of noise. That part wasn't even so bad; all of the air had been knocked out of him by whatever had hit his shoulder. He grunted and sat up. He was on the ruins of a coffee table, in the middle of someone's living room. The some ones, an elderly couple, gaped at him from a dingy sofa.
"Hi. Sorry," he managed.
A dizzying wave of pain hit him as he stood. His left arm hung like a noodle, and he realized that he was bleeding, though not heavily. A bullet had shattered his collarbone, but not penetrated any further into his body. He looked up at the gaping hole in the roof of the apartment, then, thinking better of remaining beneath it, moved aside. With Garibaldi's luck, even a blind ricocheting shot might hit him right between the eyes. Or maybe Bester had grenades, who knew?
Bester. A floor or two above him! He picked up the drained PPG and popped another charge into it.
The old people were yelling at him, now - in French, naturally.
"Okay, okay. Keep your shirts on. I'm not here to hurt you. And I'm going. If I were you, I'd do the same, at least for the next hour or two."
He didn't wait to see if they understood him or not, but found their front door and left as fast as he could, which, given the fact that the world was doing a slow spin, wasn't too fast.
Back in the hall, he located the stairs and stumbled toward them.
Chapter 14
Bester left Paul's apartment in a hurry, cursing and wondering exactly where Garibaldi had gone. The ancient shaft must have ended in someone's ceiling, which probably meant he was a floor or two down. Bester's second shot had drawn a flash of pain, but he couldn't tell how badly he had hurt the ex-security officer.
Not badly enough, in all likelihood. He decided to take the stairs. At least there he could reverse direction quickly, and he wouldn't be trapped in a box. Of course, Garibaldi would be thinking the same thing.
The disadvantage was that he had to pocket his weapon briefly to open the stairwell door, which was precisely when the lift opened. He spun and reached for his weapon at the same time. Then, to his vague surprise, he saw that it wasn't Garibaldi, but a uniformed young man with a mustache and close- cropped hair, accompanied by a similarly dressed, dark-haired, pretty woman. The man's eyes widened, but he acted quickly, pushing the woman down and firing well before Bester even had his pistol out. Bester heard a dull hiss and something struck him sharply in the chest.
It didn't stop him from returning the fire. His first shot missed, but the second took the fellow in the thigh as he ducked back into the lift. The doors closed again.
Bester took the moment to pocket his weapon and yank the stairwell door open again. Only then did he examine his chest. A small hypo-dart stood out from it. He yanked it out. What was it? A knockout drug?
Bester ran down the stairs, determined to get as far away as possible before the drug took effect. He could only hope that Girard's orders had been taken seriously, that the cordon around the neighborhood at least had some holes in it now. He was almost to the ground floor when he heard the first- floor door above him open, and then a hoarse, familiar shout.
"Bester!"
He looked up to see a bloody Garibaldi taking aim. He threw himself to the left and fired just as a PPG burst sizzled by. Though his arm was grazed, Garibaldi stood his ground, ignoring Bester's shot, and fired again.
Bester leapt over the rail, dropping five feet. It felt like twenty might have, in his prime. His knees didn't like it at all. Behind him, Garibaldi said something colorfully slanderous about Bester's sex life. Well, I hit him, at least, Bester thought, as he kicked the door open to the ground floor corridor and made for the outside door.
Babylon 5 12 - Psi Corps 03 - Final Reckoning - The Fate Of Bester (Keyes, Gregory) Page 21