Buffalito Bundle

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  When we reached the top, the zookeeper helped us over the railing. I didn't need to be a telepath to know he had questions or that he'd called security. I put on my best stage smile. Thanking him profusely I started explaining how my buffalito had gone through the railing and into the ravine and how naturally I'd gone after him, and my companion had followed to help me... and then I tapped him with the baton. I caught him as he collapsed and eased him down to the ground, leaning him against the railing to the panda colony. So much for me ever being welcome back at Zoo Atlanta.

  “Time to go,” I said. “Davies's people may not be able pursue, but they've probably called for back-up. Someone's probably alerted the local police too. We need to get you out of here before any of them arrive.”

  We exited the zoo proper and continued on into its parking lot. A line of cabs waited at the far end.

  “You'll need cash,” I said. “To hinder Davies tracking you.” I took out what I had and thrust it at him. I removed the backpack, rummaged inside and passed it to him. “This might come in handy too. There's only one billiard ball left in there. Think of it as a souvenir. Something to remember Reggie and me by until the next time you see us.”

  “Thank you for your help back there, Mr. Conroy, but this is where we part company. We will never meet again.”

  “I wouldn't be so sure,” I said.

  His smile was weak and more ironic than humorous. “Trust me on this. Even when the telepathic field is fairly small, the din of thoughts and images is overwhelming. I'm barely able to endure it at all.”

  “But the drug you developed, you said it deadens the effect.”

  “It does, for a time,” Jayasuriya replied. “But it's only a temporary solution. My body is already habituating to it, requiring ever larger doses for shorter and shorter durations of effectiveness.”

  “So?”

  “It's toxic at those doses. I have less than a week left before I can either discontinue its use or it will kill me. But I intend to be far far away before then. Farewell.”

  He hurried away, staggering a bit under even the blunted weight of the surrounding minds, and hailed a cab. A moment later and he was gone.

  I waited a few minutes and then took my own cab back to the resort. My time in Atlanta had come to an end and I had a plane ticket for an early evening flight to Philadelphia. I had plenty of time to pack, enjoy a leisurely ride to the airport, and get Reggie through security.

  Agent Davies greeted me as I entered my suite. Housekeeping had already been through and made up the bedroom. Davies had set my carpet bag on the foot of the bed. He'd also emptied the closet and dresser of any of my possessions and laid them out in neat piles on the bedspread.

  “This is becoming an annoying habit,” I said. “Or is it some weird obsession? Reports of stalking aren't going to look good on your record.”

  “You sent five of my people to the emergency room,” he said. “If you want to discuss records, maybe we should have a conversation about what will be showing up on your criminal record.”

  I held up a finger to correct him. “Not me,” I said. “I didn't injure any of operatives.”

  “Fine. Aiding and abetting. You supplied Dr. Jayasuriya with the billiard balls.”

  “Well, technically, you supplied them. I was just the middle man.”

  He scowled, an expression that was becoming more and more familiar. “Do you think this is funny, Conroy? Because of you, Dr. Jayasuriya has eluded capture, and the entire city of Atlanta is at risk of exposure to a fatal disease.”

  I crossed into the room, set Reggie on the bed, and began packing my stuff into my carpet bag.

  “Hey, here's a novel idea, how about playing straight with me for a change.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don't need to be a telepath to know you're lying. There is no threat of contagion. Jayasuriya's bloodwork came back clean. He doesn't have the virus in his system.”

  “He told you this?”

  “Mmmmhmm.”

  “And you don't find it convenient that he just happened to tell you what you needed to hear—what he knew you needed to hear—to believe him?”

  I finished packing and sat on the bed and looked right at him. “I might have considered it a bit too pat, except for the fact that you've already exposed yourself as a liar. Or did you forget about your promise not to follow me today?”

  “Are you so naive as to believe I wouldn't put a tracker and bug in with the billiard balls?”

  I smiled. “My chief operating officer feels the same way. She installed a tracker on my sat phone so she can keep tabs on me. But at least she told me before she did it.”

  “Trust has to be earned, Mr. Conroy.”

  “Then you shouldn't have given me your word. Because the only thing I trust about you now is that you're always going to lie to me.”

  Davies waved my remark away like so much smoke. “For whatever reason, you appear to have earned Dr. Jayasuriya's trust. Help me find him before some other group does. He's too powerful an asset to risk him falling into unfriendly hands. Surely you can see that.”

  “He just wants to be left alone. Thanks to the drug he developed he's got his telepathy under control now and he intends to disappear. Let him.”

  “I can't do that. With or without your assistance, my people and I will find him.”

  “Yeah? Well, good luck with that.”

  “Have it your way.” He opened the door and had one foot in the outside hall when he paused and turned back. “One more thing. What was that phrase you said to him?” Davies pulled a a notepad from his pocket and consulted it. “Something about wasabi. Tezcati... Tezcatylipo—”

  I shivered and something in my thoughts clicked out of place. “Tezcatlipoca,” I said. “You heard that?”

  “Bug in the backpack.”

  I gave him my best enigmatic look, complete with a raised eyebrow that you get only from working a stage act. “Sometimes, it's useful to not know what you know you know, at least for a while.”

  Davies responded with a predictable scowl convincing me that he bought them by the gross. He came back into the room and stood toe to toe with me. He was more than a head shorter but damned if he didn't manage to loom all the same. “We're not done, Mr. Conroy. Don't leave town.”

  I laughed at him, which took him by surprise. “Sorry, it's nothing personal, but I've had professional assassins threaten me, including one guy who wanted nothing more than to literally rip my arms off. So you'll excuse me if I'm not intimidated. More importantly, I have a plane ticket in my pocket and a business to run back in Philadelphia. If you want another chat, that's where you'll find me. But if you do stop by, be sure to have your paperwork in order, because I promise I'll have a team of lawyers on hand to shut you down.”

  I closed and latched my carpet bag, grabbed the last bottle of root beer from the fridge, and scooped up Reggie. Agent Davies didn't follow us as we left the room but I had no doubt that he had operatives waiting in the lobby. That was fine. It wasn't their fault they worked for a jerk. The concierge flagged down a vehicle to take me to the airport. For all I knew, the driver worked for Davies as well. And that was fine too, so long as he took me to the airport. We drove off, and I took a long swig from my root beer, petting my buffalito and humming songs from Evita.

  I wasn't surprised to find a few of Davies's goons milling around the gate for my flight back to Philadelphia. One had her arm in sling and I recognized her from the zoo. I caught her glaring at me and just smiled. I regretted nothing.

  Reggie and I boarded the plane without incident—helpful note: airlines give you much less flack about traveling with an alien animal, service or otherwise, when your reservations include a separate first class seat as part of an assumptive close. Years of working some pretty questionable venues had taught me to travel light. I took my carpet bag down from the overhead bin, tucked Reggie under my arm, and we left the plane. No stopping at baggage claim for us, we headed for the stree
t. Along the way I borrowed a phone to let my driver know I was on my way. More of Davies's operatives waited at various points along my path but none offered interference and my ride was waiting for me by the time I reached the curb.

  We drove back to the renovated building that houses Buffalogic, Inc. A two-person security team met me at the door and I chatted as they ran me through the standard sweep, despite Reggie poking his head up out of my bag to give them a friendly bark. Less than five minutes later I was up in my office and facing the stack of work that Elizabeth Penrose had left on my desk. I set Reggie in his bed, sighed, and settled in to spend the rest of the night working. Like I'd told Davies, I had a company to run. Besides, there was nothing I could do to help Dr. Jayasuriya, at least not for a couple days.

  I needed most of Monday to finish off everything that had accumulated and overflowed my in-box. My assistant, Jeanie, kept me supplied with finger food—a running assortment of tapas that she had brought in from an incredible Andalucían restaurant half a mile away. They didn't deliver, but when I was dining there some weeks back I'd let the chef's daughter play with Reggie, and they'd made an exception for me ever since. It also helped that Jeanie always tipped really well.

  Somewhere between the Serrano ham with Manchego cheese and the lamb tagine with apricots and almonds, between the expense reports of a salvage operation and a request for desert training for a team of six buffalitos and their handlers, I jotted down some notes on a tablet and forwarded an electronic memo to Jeanie. Several hours, numerous savory dishes, and two dozen reports later, she came back into my office with the results. At my request she cleared my schedule for the rest of the week, replenished my supply of cash, booked me a one-way plane ticket to Tierra del Fuego, and hadn't even blinked at the list of supplies, gear, transportation, and personnel I wanted waiting for me once I got there. She even replaced my sat phone.

  At the end of the day I scooped Reggie up in my carpet bag and had a company car take us to a restaurant in downtown Philly, the kind of place that usually takes a couple months to get a reservation. I didn't plan on dining though, not after all that tapas. Another vehicle had followed us from the office and it was a sure thing that Davies was still tailing me, which is pretty much what I expected. Bag in hand I walked into the restaurant, through the kitchen, and out the back door into an alley before anyone could complain too long or loud. As I walked the length of the alley to the next side street I used my new phone to call for a ride; it pulled up seconds after I stepped from the alleyway. I directed the driver to take me to the airport. As we rounded the corner I got a look at the car that had followed me to the restaurant. It had parked out front, and two of Davies's people sat inside, watching the door.

  The international terminal at PHL was having a quiet night. Reggie and I passed smoothly through security once I pointed out that buffalitos are impervious to scan and they'd need to pat him down the old fashioned way. There may be nonstop flights to Tierra del Fuego, but if so, none of them originate from Philadelphia. My route stopped in Miami, then on to Buenos Aires where I had a layover and a change of planes before I'd continue on and eventually reach my final destination some sixteen hours after I'd started. As I waited to board the first leg of the journey there in Philadelphia, I noted all these details in another memo and forwarded it to my CFO as further justification for working a corporate aircraft into the budget sooner rather than later.

  I tried to feed Reggie some snacks on the way to Miami, but he wasn't happy with the fare. Buffalitos prefer denser offerings than can easily be carried through airport security. The flight attendants were charmed by him, but even his adorable nature and sad eyes weren't enough to convince them to let him take a bite out of the drink cart. He settled for eating the cutlery and plate that came with my dinner, and then we both settled in for a night's sleep on the red eye from Miami to Buenos Aires.

  The Ezeiza International Airport is arguably the largest and most modern facility in Argentina and they do get a modest bit of extraterrestrial tourism passing through. That said, they'd never seen a buffalo dog before and none of the advance prep that Jeanie had done seemed to be working. The amount of red tape in the form of paperwork, fruitless security scans, permits, and interviews promised to keep me tied up well past the time my connecting flight was scheduled to leave, despite the generous layover I'd allowed.

  Two hours after we'd arrived, I was sitting in the single chair of a grubby detainment room awaiting the arrival of the next level of customs official that we'd been passed on to, our fourth, and feeling confident that there would certainly be at least one more level and another hour beyond that. Instead, agent Davies waltzed into the room. My surprise was genuine and so was his satisfied smile in response. Fair is fair, the lines in his face from all that scowling transformed his smile into something radiant.

  “Mr. Conroy, you told me you were going back to Philadelphia.”

  “I did. And you know that. Your people have been following me since I left Atlanta.”

  “And yet here you are in Buenos Aires. You know, if you want to travel more discreetly, you should either leave your pet behind or acquire your own aircraft.”

  “It's on my list of things to do. Why are you here?”

  “I caught a flight out of Atlanta as soon as I learned you were booked to arrive from Miami.”

  “What, you missed me already?”

  He snorted. “I thought you might run into some problems bringing your buffalo dog into the country, and I wanted to help clear the way.”

  “Excuse me?”

  His smile grew. “You're free to go. You still have plenty of time to make your connecting flight.”

  “You're helping me? Or was this all just a delay so you could get your own team in position to follow me around Tierra del Fuego?”

  “I'm helping you to help me.”

  “Why?”

  “Something you said earlier, about not knowing what I don't know.”

  “What about it?”

  “You're the thing I don't know, Mr. Conroy. You're not playing by any rules I recognize. You're the round peg that won't fit into the square hole, and the more I try to force you to fit my preconceptions, the more spectacularly I fail. Whereas you seem to succeed, despite all likelihoods.”

  “Umm... thank you?”

  “Thank me by giving me a second chance to make a better impression. I'm done telling you what I think you need to hear. I won't lie, I've completely lost any trace of Dr. Jayasuriya. I still very much want him, but more importantly I don't want anyone else gaining control of him.”

  “What happens if you're wrong?”

  “Wrong?”

  “About his telepathy. You just admitted that your preconceptions about me haven't worked out, have you considered the same could be true for Dr. Jayasuriya's telepathy? It's not like anything you've seen before from any of the other Meyerson's victims. The fact that he's alive is further proof that you can't simply operate based on what you think you know about the disease.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that everything you think you know may be wrong. At a minimum, it should be suspect. The very strength of Jayasuriya's telepathy could cause it to burn itself out. What then?”

  “Then he's still a very valuable and talented researcher. My department would want him back at the CDC, continuing his work there.” He paused, squinting a bit and scrutinized me like he was looking for some micro expression or facial tic that would tell him something critical. “Do you have reason to think that his abilities are temporary?”

  I tried to give him what he was looking for in the form of a shrug and a nervous laugh. “How would I know,” I said. “I've only ever been on the receiving end of telepathy. Your guess is as good as mine. My point was, you should be open to more scenarios because this is all new territory.”

  “You know, Conroy, I can't decide if you're an optimist or just trying to con me. Either way though, your methods keep proving more effective than mine.
So I'm actually going to try things your way. I'm content to leave him alone if he can keep from falling into anyone else's hands. I'm counting on you to explain that to him when you see him.”

  “What makes you so sure I know where he is?”

  “Because repeatedly, you're the only one who has.” He handed made a business card with his name and contact details. “You're free to reach me at any time with any information you care to share.”

  “And if I never call?”

  He sighed. “Then you never call. But if Dr. Jayasuriya ends up as the tool of a foreign power and our national security suffers as a result, that will be on your head. And if I'm still around, it's quite likely I'll be calling you and we'll have a conversation about accountability. You have my word on that, though I'm sure we'd both prefer it never comes to pass. Now, a very nice official with the Argentine government is waiting just outside that door to escort you and your buffalito to the gate for your connection. Have a nice flight.”

  I didn't linger or give him the chance to change his mind. Reggie jumped into my luggage, and we were out the door in seconds. Soon after, at the other end of the airport, the flight to Tierra del Fuego had already begun to board. We took our place in line. As we settled into our seats I scanned the cabin but didn't see any of the usual suspects that I'd come to recognize. There wasn't a black suit on the plane. Maybe, just maybe, Davies was finally playing it honest.