“Over here,” she said, instinctively talking in a whisper. Charlie followed her. The car she led him to was a dark blue Honda. “I don’t have a key, you’ll have to break in and start it somehow, but I’m sure your training covered that.”
He reached for the handle of the driver’s door and tried it. The car was unlocked. “Lesson one,” he said, giving her a wry smile, “never overlook the obvious.”
“That’s good. Now tell me the key’s in the ignition.”
He looked. It wasn’t. “The easiest way to do this is if I open the hood,” he said, finding the catch. Then he went around to the front of the car and leaned into the engine compartment.
A sound across the floor made her gasp audibly and turn. A door had opened and swung shut, like the one they had just come through. There was nothing to see, but footsteps began echoing off the concrete walls. Charlie didn’t move, but kept his head low, peering through the crack between the raised hood and the car’s bodywork. A guard came into view, jiggling car keys in his hand and whistling softly as he looked forward to going home at the end of his shift. Then he saw them and stopped.
“Some problem here? Need any help?”
“No… no, thank you,” Susan said, “we’re fine, thank you.”
Charlie could hear her trying to keep her voice steady. She wasn’t doing too good a job of it. He saw the guard frown, suspicious now.
“Wait a second… aren’t you Dr. Flemyng?”
“There’s really no problem here,” Susan said, sounding even more nervous. “We’ve taken care of it. Thank you.”
The guard was already walking toward them. His keys were back in his pocket, leaving his hands free. His right, Charlie noted, was dangerously near the .38 on his hip. He didn’t have a face Charlie recognized, so he hadn’t been one of the detail looking after him, which meant he probably wasn’t armed with a zapper. That was a chance Charlie was going to have to take.
“As a matter of fact, I’d be glad if you’d take a look,” Charlie said from under the hood. “I’m not sure I can figure this thing out.”
The guard approached, making a circling movement to see who this man was before getting too close. Charlie waited until he heard the footsteps stop, then turned.
Although Charlie didn’t recall ever seeing this man before, the guard obviously recognized him. His eyes widened and his hand went for his gun. Charlie covered the space between them before it was out of its holster, knocking the man cold with a sharp jab to the solar plexus and another to the side of his neck. He even had time to catch him before he hit the floor.
“Don’t kill him!” Susan was repeating. “Don’t kill him! You don’t have to kill him!”
“I haven’t killed him,” Charlie said. “He’ll be fine in a few-minutes.”
“We need more than a few minutes.”
Charlie slipped his hands under the guard’s armpits and dragged him across the floor. He was a big man, but Charlie handled him as though he weighed no more than a child. They found a closet filled with buckets and mops and other cleaning stuff. Charlie tied him up and gagged him with a length of old toweling. Then Susan told Charlie to take the guard’s gun and give it to her, which he did. She slipped it into the pocket of her coat with a look that challenged him to ask her why she wanted it. He didn’t say anything.
It took only a moment to start the car. She told him it belonged to one of Latimer West’s female assistants who often worked late. Charlie climbed into the trunk while Susan tied back her hair and put on glasses, saying that to a casual glance from the guards at the gate she would look sufficiently like West’s mistress for them to wave her through unchallenged.
Charlie held his breath in the darkness as she drove. He felt the car slow at the gate and heard voices, then they picked up speed and were through. Ten minutes later they came to a stop. Susan opened the trunk and let him out.
They were in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn or some similar hotel, under the sodium glare of overhead lighting. There was nobody around, just rows of parked cars and the hum of traffic from the nearby road. Charlie stretched, flexing his shoulders, and saw Susan take another step back, keeping a safe distance between them. She kept her hands in the pockets of her coat, and he had no doubt that in one she held the zapper and in the other the gun. He looked at her, waiting for her to tell him what came next.
“You didn’t give me a proper answer back there about that bargain I proposed,” she said, “so I’m going to ask you one more time. Will you help me?”
He gave a slight shrug, almost of indifference. “I told you, I don’t have much choice, do I?”
“You have all the choice in the world, Charlie. If you’re not prepared to help me willingly, then you’re no good to me. So what’s it to be?”
He almost laughed in her face. What was this shit? Who did she think she was kidding? “And if I refuse, then what? You zap me and take me back?”
She shook her head. “What good would that do me? I can hardly go back there myself now, can I?”
He shrugged again. “Okay, so you won’t take me back. You can knock me out, put a bullet through me—either way, we’re hardly having an equal discussion here.”
“That’s just what we’re having. I’ll say it again—either you help me willingly or you’re free to go. Just walk away. I won’t do anything to stop you. You’ve got me this far, and if that’s it for you—fine. I’ll take it from here on my own. After all, I’ve got a gun now.”
Charlie’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Are you as crazy as you sound? Are you saying that if I walk away, you’ll let me?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
He looked at her a moment longer. This, he knew, he had to prove for himself. “Okay,” he said, as casually as he could, “then I’ll walk.” He turned and started across the lot and toward the road beyond.
As he walked, his footsteps echoed with a strangely heightened clarity against the background murmur of the urban night. He was waiting for the moment when it all went blank, or a shot was fired and there would be a sudden sting of pain in his back. Yet he went on walking, and still nothing happened. When he reached the road, he stopped and looked back. He could see her in the distance, a solitary figure in the hazy artificial light, still standing where he’d left her. She seemed to be watching him, but he couldn’t make out the expression on her face. They stood like that for some time, each daring the other to make the first move. In the end she turned away and started for the hotel.
He knew what she was going to do. There was a determination in her walk that convinced him that what she had said about going in there alone was no empty boast. But it was madness. He had to stop her. She would die, or worse, and he would be responsible.
Except that he wouldn’t be. He wasn’t responsible at all. It was her decision, not his. He hadn’t pushed her into any of it. How could he even be sure she’d told him the truth about her son and her father? It would be the first time she’d told him the truth about anything.
So what was her game this time? And did he even care? Shouldn’t he just grab his freedom while it was there?
But freedom meant being able to do what he wanted, not what he had to or thought he should. So what was it that he wanted now? He knew as soon as he asked himself the question that he wanted to go after her. He wanted to keep the promise he’d made to help her. The only thing that held him back was the mystery of why this was so. Surely the feeling was no more than a legacy of the conditioning they’d put him through. Why could he not accept that nothing he’d ever felt for her, or imagined that she’d felt for him, was real?
Yet surely what he felt was real. A feeling, any emotion, whether love, hate, or fear, was by definition real, wasn’t it? The reasons behind it could be questioned and found wanting, but not the feeling itself. So should he act on what he felt, or on what he suspected were the flawed reasons behind that feeling?
He never resolved the dilemma. He just began running. When
she heard his footsteps she stopped walking and turned. She made no attempt this time to keep a safe distance between them. She looked up at him, her face open and expectant, waiting for him to speak.
“I had to be sure,” he said. “It was no good unless I knew you meant it.”
Her expression didn’t change, but he thought he detected a relaxing of the muscles, a kind of relief. Or maybe he imagined it. She gave the slightest of nods in acknowledgment and said simply, “Thank you, Charlie.”
He looked up at the anonymous facade of the hotel with its matching symmetrical balconies outside every room. “Your son and your father—which floor are they on?”
“The seventh.”
“How many people with them?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’ll be a small army when they realize we’ve escaped.”
Susan glanced at her watch. “We’ve only been gone twenty minutes. It could be they don’t know yet.”
“Well, they will soon. We need to move.” His eyes locked on hers. “I’m with you. Only I have a condition, too.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll feel a whole lot happier with that zapper in my pocket instead of yours.”
She hesitated fractionally, then reached into her coat. “Here. You’re welcome to it.” She held it out to him. “Though it won’t do you any good.”
“I’m more concerned about it not doing me any harm.” He took it delicately from her outstretched hand.
“It won’t do you any harm, either. Try it.” He looked puzzled, his gaze shifting from the tiny object in his palm to her, then back again. “What do you mean?”
“Go ahead—press it.”
He gazed at her, incredulous. She gave a little smile of reassurance. “Trust me. Nothing’s going to happen. 1 wouldn’t want you to pass out cold just now, would I?”
Gingerly, he closed his thumb and forefinger over the small black rectangle, then squeezed. No curtain of blackness descended. It was just as she had said: Nothing happened.
Except he suddenly became aware that something was happening, something else, something quite different from anything he had anticipated. When he looked at Susan he had to lift his gaze, then keep on lifting it. Because she was levitating right there in front of him, hanging in the air—two yards, now three—above the black tarmac of the parking lot.
His mouth fell open in speechless disbelief. Somewhere in the background two people walked to their car and got in without so much as a glance at the impossible phenomenon taking place in front of them. Their indifference, the sound of their car starting up, the sweep of its headlights over the whole scene, all served only to heighten his numbed sense of unreality.
But then of course he realized what this was and gave a low groan of resigned understanding. He closed his eyes. When he opened them the scene was unchanged; the car’s taillights were disappearing in the distance, and Susan still hung in the air looking down at him.
“I’m sorry, Charlie,” she said, and there was a note of genuine apology in her voice, “but I had to be sure. And this is the only kind of communication we can have that they don’t know how to bug. When you come out of it, just say you don’t remember anything. I’m going to help you escape, and you’re going to help me get my son and father back, though not quite like this. But we’ll do it. And then we’ll put the sons of bitches who are behind all this where they belong.”
He wasn’t sure whether he opened his eyes or whether they’d been open all the time. At any rate, he found himself back in the lab with Susan in the act of removing the five-point device from his head. Then she took a similar one off her own head. So that was how it’s done, he thought: a two-way link.
As before the two guards sat in their separate corners. He glanced at the clock on the wall to his right. Less than half an hour had passed. Interesting, he thought: the whole illusion had taken place in real time—assuming that the clock was accurate and wasn’t just another part of the setup.
“All right, Charlie,” Susan said brightly, “do you remember me?”
He looked puzzled. “Of course I remember you.”
She made a little sound through her nose, as though this wasn’t the answer she had wanted. “Hm. Do you remember anything of what just happened?”
Their eyes met briefly. Charlie played along, looking puzzled. “What do you mean what happened? Nothing happened. You just put that thing on my head, now you’ve taken it off.”
She didn’t reply, just looked annoyed. It was an act, he supposed.
“Okay, you can take him back,” she said to the guards. “Looks like I’ve got more work to do.”
Chapter 47
SUSAN DIDN’T LIKE lying to her father, but she had no choice. In fact it was less an outright lie than an economy with the truth. She knew that every word they spoke in the building was going to be recorded and listened to; even outside in the grounds she couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a directional mike following them. So she told him again, as she’d told him repeatedly, that her way of thinking had changed. She was ready to compromise now, even to participate voluntarily in the program. At first she’d been a little disconcerted at the way he’d gone along with and encouraged her in this change of heart, but then she realized he was thinking only of what was best for her and Christopher. Anything that kept them alive and allowed them to lead at least some kind of normal life was fine with him: Amery Hyde was a pragmatist as well as a man of principle, and she loved him for it. At any rate, she figured that if she could fool her father, then she could fool Latimer West and the rest of them, whoever and wherever they were. All she wanted was to lull their suspicions of her, to persuade them that she wasn’t actively working against them any longer. Nonetheless, despite all their vague promises, no decision had been made about actually letting her and Christopher return home, and she felt increasingly in her heart that it was never going to happen. Putting herself in West’s shoes and those of the people behind him, she knew that the risk of letting her go free with what she knew would be too great. The likeliest course she could imagine was that they would get all the work out of her that they could, then kill her. They would have to kill her father, too, of course.
But Christopher? She found it hard to believe that even these people would cold-bloodedly murder an innocent child. It was the threat of murder that was compelling. They knew they could depend on her so long as Christopher was in their power, but that was a situation that she intended to change—with Charlie’s help. And if she failed, if she and maybe even Charlie died, then they would no longer have any reason to kill Christopher, or her father for that matter. That was her last hope.
It was Thursday, the day of her trial run with Charlie. She worked late that night, programming and reprogramming the giant computer that both generated the VR environment and also controlled the lab equipment used in the current set of memory experiments she was supposedly performing on Charlie. Nobody checking her work would have had the first suspicion of what she was actually doing. It was the one weakness in their hold over her—the fact that she was the expert and they weren’t. When she was doing what only she knew how to do, they were in her hands. The only way they could check on her was by getting another expert to watch her every move. But they didn’t have another expert, not one as good as she who could operate on the same level. If they did, they wouldn’t have needed her in the first place.
She looked at her watch as she finished working and sat back from the keyboard. It was just after 3:00 A.M. In six hours she would be back in the lab with Charlie, feeding the program she had just written into his brain. It would tell him that she was flying up to the ranch on Saturday morning to spend the weekend there with Christopher and her father.
It would also tell him, now that she was as sure as she could ever be of his dependability, how he was going to get out of this place and join them.
“Chuang Tzu was a Chinese sage who lived twenty-five hundred years ago. He told once of how he dr
eamed he was a but- terfly, and didn’t know when he awoke if he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamed he was a man. People have been telling that story ever since, because it represents something that mankind has always known instinctively—that we can never be sure whether the outside world corresponds to the picture of it that we have in our head. We can’t even be sure that the outside world is actually there. For all we know, we could be imagining it. We can’t prove it either way. And in the end it doesn’t matter. It makes no difference because the things we experience are the same whether they’re coming to us or coming from us. They’re there, and that’s all that matters.”
Charlie shifted his weight from one foot to the other, listening closely.
“The important thing to grasp, Charlie, is that all reality is virtual reality. It’s the only kind of reality there is.”
She held up a red rose. He didn’t know where it had come from, it just appeared in her hand. But he was used to those tricks by now.
“You don’t suppose this rose is actually red, do you?”
He’d got the hang of rhetorical questions, too. She was making a point, and he didn’t interrupt with an answer.
“Color, like everything else, is in your mind. Light impacts the nerves behind your eyes and sends a series of electric impulses to your brain, which sorts them out into shape, size, depth of focus, and color. But all of that’s just your internal picture of what’s out there, and you’ve no guarantee that your camera isn’t playing tricks on you—like now.”
They were standing on the Moon—or, more precisely, a very convincing simulation of it. They were not wearing space suits, and gravity was operating—or appeared to be operating—as on Earth. That, however, was easily adjusted; he’d already spent several enjoyable moments leaping thirty feet into the air (air?) and drifting gently back down.
The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk Page 22
