Mindbenders

by Ted Krever

  ~~~~

  Tauber drove—it was his turn. I rode shotgun, Max and our passenger slid into the back seat. She seemed in a daze for several minutes, just staring at the seatback in front of her. When she started to recover herself, she drew up into some kind of parody of perfect posture. All at once, she really was the sexy librarian.

  “They’re from something called the L Corporation,” she said finally, the words arriving in spurts. “It’s supposed to be some kind of consulting group but—”

  “We’ve met,” Tauber said, adjusting the rear-view mirror to get a better look at her.

  “The operations head is Pietr Volkov,” she added, staring at Max. “You should know him.”

  Max nodded. “Again, we’ve met—just recently, in fact.”

  Her eyebrow went up. “You think in English.”

  “I was raised to be an American,” Max smiled his best smile, which was still not so hot. Another lull followed—the young woman seemed to drift away from us again. Then, all at once, she looked around startled and thrust her hand at me like an insurance agent on the make. “I’m Kate Crowell,” she said. “You were with Dave Monaghan?”

  “Yes.” Here was another one who read your mind as deadpan as Max. By now, that was only a little shock.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “When did they kill him?”

  “Three days ago.”

  “First thing in the morning,” she said, although it was a question, not a statement. I nodded. “That’s when they ran my father over. Outside the supermarket. Stolen car, hit and run.” Her voice cracked in the middle but she just pushed past it.

  “Did they catch the driver?”

  “I just did.”

  “The guy back at the cemetery?”

  “Yes. He did it.” Each word seemed to come out of her as a separate effort.

  “So you broke every bone in his body,” Max said, a judgment in his voice.

  “I didn’t,” she answered, voice quivering. Every eye in the car must have gone wide at that, because she gathered herself up in protest. “I didn’t do anything.” She turned with a forced brightness to Tauber. “You’re Mark—you knew my father.”

  “Yeah,” Tauber said, “he was a good ‘un. One of the best.”

  “That’s not what you mean to say,” she said and waited for more.

  “He…he was a full dose. An adult portion.” Tauber’s cheeks colored as he laughed and she followed, though everything she did seemed a little vacant. The way it would be if you’d just buried your father.

  “And you—I know all about you,” she said, returning to Max.

  “I doubt that.”

  “My father went down to Washington when they debriefed you. The program was over but he still had a few friends—he pulled strings just to watch. He was so excited—he was going to see Renn!”

  “He just wanted to see the horns on my forehead,” Max flashed his horrible smile again. “He was interested in seeing someone else like him—someone else like you.”

  “You’re somethin’, sweetie,” Tauber crowed. “You’re just what we’ve been needin’.”

  Kate started at that, throwing an alarmed look around the car.

  “Whoa—wait a minute,” she said, hands raised in protest. ”Let’s get something straight. I don’t do this stuff. My dad’s been calling me for weeks to do research for him—I’m in school in Philadelphia and he’s useless on the Internet—was useless.”

  Her eyes fluttered. She tucked her chin up and plunged ahead.

  “He and Dave Monaghan worked themselves up about this whole L Corp business. They went into spasms about something every couple years. Except I guess they got it right this time. So I have his research and the notes I took for him. I’ll share them with you. But after that, I’m going back. To School. Where I belong.”

  “That’s what I said the other day,” Max told her. “That I wasn’t getting involved.”

  “We need ya,” Tauber drawled. “This is a big fight we’re in. With what you did back there—”

  “I have no idea what I did back there!” Kate burst and shrunk back into her seat, defiant and guilty at once. “Look, I’ve seen what happens to…people like you. Nobody wants you running loose. Nobody trusts you.”

  “People like us?” Tauber said. “Honey, we’re people like you.”

  “I am a graduate student in Museum Planning,” Kate insisted, talking right over him. “I have a life and a boyfriend. As soon as I finish my thesis, I’ve got six good institutions that want me.”

  “You are the possessor of very powerful forces and senses, more powerful than 99% of the population. If you don’t—” Max paused, looking at his lapel. A funny smell filled the car.

  “I spent my whole childhood getting disciplined,” Kate rattled on, “for things I didn’t mean to do. My parents got in the way of every good date I had, because they thought I gave boys crushes on me. I didn’t even know—”

  “Stop,” Max said.

  “What good is it anyway? The things you find out, no one even wants to know. It’s like—”

  “STOP!!”

  Kate flinched. “Stop what?” We all seemed to notice the smoke at the same time.

  “You’re burning a hole in my shirt,” Max said. A little plume of blue steam was rising from the corner of his breast pocket.

  “I’m not,” Kate whispered, pulling her head back into her shoulders.

  “You may not be aware of it,” Max said, “but…you are,” and he tamped the smoke out with his finger.

  Kate gulped hard and jerked her head sideways into the window. “Dammit! I’m not…Shit!” She clamped her arms across her chest. “I’m—beyond all this!” She dissolved into tears, drawing herself into the corner of the chair. Max offered a hand on her shoulder, but of course he didn’t have the touch for it and she wasn’t interested anyway.

  We headed north through Harrisburg. The highway whittled down a few lanes due to construction and we crawled for a while. Max probably could have made everybody pull out of the way if he wanted, but it seemed like everyone needed to breathe, to regain a sense of the world around.

  “Are we going somewhere?” Tauber asked finally.

  “I’m not sure yet, just keep moving,” Max said. “They don’t know where we’re going.”

  “Well, neither do we,” Tauber answered, “so they’re on the money.” Max shot him a look.

  “Where’s the rest of your team?” Kate asked, ending a long silence. “Who else is working with you?”

  Long pause.

  “It’s—it’s just us,” I said.

  Recognition broke over her face in waves. Disbelief came first. She searched our faces, to confirm we were serious. Then she started to laugh, almost against her will. “Are you kidding?”

  “No,” Max sighed. That was when reality swept over me all at once. I’d been so caught up in what we were doing, in the energy and activity of it, I’d lost track of just how crazy the whole idea was. The ring in her question was reality and it wasn’t pretty.

  “Do you know who these guys are?” she demanded. “I mean, anything these companies say in public record is meant to mislead and L Corp admits to thirty billion annual revenue. They opened the doors six years ago, supposedly for political consulting but last year wasn’t even an election year, at least not in this country. So it’s either Defense or they’re selling drugs—who else makes that kind of money that fast? They had a couple guys camped around my house the last few days—I figured, if they were trying to get inside my head, I’d get inside theirs first. They’re serious, they’ve got big resources and big backers and some big deal happening really soon.”

  “Tomorrow,” Tauber said.

  Kate’s eyebrows went up like exclamation points.

  “You know that? For a fact?”

  She kept looking back and forth from one to the next of us. You could feel the air leaking out of the car. She stared out the window, tapping her knuckles against it l
ike a drummer.

  “I have an apartment,” she said finally, “in Philadelphia. Dad never visited me, so they couldn’t have gotten the address from him. You should be safe there overnight.” She made a disgruntled count of the company. “Someone’s going to have to sleep in the bathtub,” she announced.