Sarah had seen the very real pain in his eyes when he insisted they didn’t need a dog and she’d acquiesced. But now, here was Dieter.
Could that stray have been a cyberdog? she wondered. Skynet could do that, but… Nah, she thought. Too elaborate, too indirect, too… inefficient. In her experience, Skynet just went for you; it didn’t dance around and tease like this.
Probably nothing in its experience had given it any reason to try anything more subtle than a sledgehammer.
“Well,” she said aloud, “I don’t see that we’re going to be able to refuse. I’ll let von Rossbach know that if it doesn’t work out, or if we can’t take care of it for some reason, he’ll have to take it back.”
“If it doesn’t work out?” John said. “What reason are we going to give for that?”
“You’re going back to school,” Sarah said calmly. “I have to work full-time. It’s not good for a dog to be alone all the time. If necessary, I’ll come up with a
reason, John; you don’t have to worry about that.”
“I can’t help but worry,” he said. He took a deep breath. ‘“I’m growing more certain by the minute that I’m not going back to school this year.”
Sarah raised one eyebrow. “Is that a worry or a wish?”
“He laid a bug on us,” John said simply. He raised his hands slightly and let them drop. “There’s nothing normal or neighborly in that, and in the long run I think it means our life here has just changed drastically.”
Sarah looked at him for a long minute, agreeing silently.. She pursed her lips.
“I’m not prepared to jump without more information!,” she said. “We’re not sure what type of threat he represents. Maybe running would be the worst thing we could do.”
“Mom! That was a very expensive, very sophisticated mike he planted on us.
There is no innocuous reason for anyone to do that! He’s either a cop or a pervert.”
“Well, if he’s a pervert we don’t have to go anywhere. We can turn him over to the police.”
John burst out laughing. “I never thought of that,” he said. “That’ll be a first, the police helping us.” He hoisted himself onto the kitchen counter. “You don’t really think he might be a pervert, do you?”
“I guess not,” she said. “He asked me out Saturday night and I said yes.”
John blinked. “You’re going out with him? On a date?”
Sarah nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe he’s a smuggler, too, and he’s just checking out the competition,” she suggested.
“Maybe he’s a cop and you won’t be coming home Saturday .night.”
With a shrug she turned away.
John’s smile froze as he thought about what else von Rossbach might be that could prevent his mother from coming home.
“Maybe I’d better get to work finding something out about: this guy so we can make some plans,” she said.
Yeah, John thought, maybe you’d better. And maybe he’d better put together some emergency stuff in case they had to vacate suddenly.
Dieter put in the earpiece as soon as he was out of sight. As he rode off he heard a crash and the conversation that followed.
I can’t believe they found it that soon, he thought in amazement. Was this an accident, as it sounded, or were they just being very clever? He was certain neither of them had seen him plant it. Though I must admit I’m out of practice.
Maybe he should come back sometime with a metal detector and see if he could recover the very expensive mike he’d planted. Maybe he could try to leave it in the house sometime when they weren’t home.
Didn’t Sefiora Salcido say something about a camping trip? Hell, I could put in
video while they’re away. He forced his mind away from some tantalizing images of Suzanne. This was business. If he had time to actually hide his bugs it would be a lot more cost-effective than having his mikes discovered and disposed of instantly.
He looked over his shoulder at the small estancia and lifted one corner of his mouth in a crooked smile. Time to go home and check his e-mail. Maybe Jeff had finally gotten back to him.
Dinner had been excellent; the restaurant was pleasant and the food superb. The concert, mostly Vivaldi, had been wonderful, sprightly, humorous, and soothing.
“Would you like to have a drink before we start home?” Dieter asked.
Sarah checked her watch. “Um, it’s later than I thought. Would you mind if we started home right away? I don’t want John to worry.” Not to mention the fact that so far this had been just a date. She was going crazy waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“It’s not even ten-thirty,” von Rossbach protested. “Did he give you a curfew or something?”
“I’d like to see him try,” Sarah said, grinning. “No, I’m just kind of tired. And, to be frank, I’m not used to this.”
“Concerts?” he teased.
Sarah rolled her eyes. “And dinner and being picked up…”
He smiled and they walked along in silence until they came to where he’d parked the car. She looked very nice in a blue dress with a full skirt accented with a colorful scarf and a wide belt. It was the sort of outfit one’s wife might wear, very respectable.
Dieter supposed it was intended to send a subtle message. Keep your distance, or something of that nature. He opened the door for her, then went around to his side. She was one of those women who didn’t like to be touched, he’d noticed. In his experience there was usually a story behind that sort of behavior.
“Maybe it would be easier if you didn’t think of this as a date,” he suggested.
“Just two friends going to a concert together.”
Sarah looked at him, then smiled. “Maybe that’s what we should do next time,”
she said. “But I’m afraid that if the man does the asking and the paying and the driving, it’s unequivocally a date.”
He laughed. “Well, what if the woman does the asking and paying and so on, what do you call it then?”
“I suppose you’d call it a date,” she said, smiling.
“Then you owe me one. After that, we can just go as friends, if you like.”
“That would be nice,” Sarah said.
He was so damn nice. Her stomach was in knots. He was good company, he was pleasant, he was attentive, he was clean, not something she’d always been able to rely on. He’s not what I would have expected a rich, spoiled playboy to be like.
And if he was a cop, then he was definitely off duty tonight. She wished he would do or say something crummy so she could stop feeling so ambivalent.
They talked about this and that as he drove, Dieter steering the conversation in a more personal direction by degrees.
“Why didn’t you go back to the states after… your husband passed away?” he asked.
Sarah shrugged and looked out her window. “I didn’t see any great need to go back. My family are all dead, I’d drifted away from my friends.” She laughed.
“I’m a very bad correspondent. And besides, we’d put so much effort into the business. I was determined to make a go of it. And I didn’t want to uproot John so soon after. That’s hard on a kid.”
“You moved to Villa Hayes,” he pointed out.
“Yes, but that’s still in Paraguay. And we visit Ciudad del Este at least once a year.”
“Kids are amazingly resilient,” Dieter observed.
“Maybe,” Sarah said. “Or maybe that’s just something adults say to make themselves feel better. Kinda like whistling in the dark.”
“Well, you’re the parent, I’m not,” Dieter said.
The talk rambled all over the map from there and the long “drive seemed to last no time at all. When they pulled up to Sarah’s house Dieter got out to open her
door for her.
I used to like it when guys did that for me, Sarah thought. Then it seemed to show a little extra caring. With Dieter it’s probably Austrian formality. At least it might be if he was Austrian. It might also be
that he likes intimidating people by standing over them.
He handed her out of the car and smiled down at her.
“Would you like to join us for dinner sometime soon?” Sarah asked, taking a step back and toward the portal.
“Yes,” Dieter said as he shut the car door and stepped back himself. “Why don’t you set it up with John and give me a call. I’ll bring that dog I promised you.”
His eyes glinted with amusement. He suspected that she thought her son might be watching them. John had left enough lights on to let them know he was still awake.
“I will,” she said, smiling. “Thank you for a wonderful evening.”
He nodded. “Good night,” he said, going around to his side of the car.
“Good night.” Sarah went up the steps and stood on the portal to wave as he drove off. Then she entered the house, turning off the outside light and locking the door.
“What, not even a goodnight kiss?”
Sarah turned and raised her brows. “Watching, were we?” she asked.
“Yeah, we were. How come you didn’t kiss him?”
“Because I think I’m already getting to like him more than I probably should,”
she answered. “It makes me nervous.”
“I thought maybe you didn’t want him to think you were that kind of girl,” John teased.
“If he ever finds out just what kind of girl I really am, I shudder to think what might happen,” she said. “Any word yet?” She tipped her head toward the computer.
” Nada,” John told her. “The silence is starting to freak me out.”
“Me, too.” She shrugged. “I’m going to bed.”
“How was your date?” John asked. He backed up as she came toward him.
“It was nice.” Sarah switched off the light behind her. “Very nice. I asked him to have dinner with us soon.”
“Wow, the action intensifies.”
Sarah smiled weakly. John watched her go on down the hall to her room.
“Mom,” he said. Sarah turned to look at him inquiringly. “Should we leave? Is it time?”
“Maybe my instincts are blunted, John, but I honestly don’t know. Let’s give it another week and see how things shake out, okay?”
John shrugged. “Fine by me. I just wanted you to know that I’m with you, whatever happens.”
She came back down the hall and hugged him.
“I love you, you know that?” she said, smiling up at him.
“I love you, too, Mom. Good night.” He gave her a squeeze.
“G’night.”
Dieter poured himself a brandy, then decided to check his messages before turning in.
Jeff had finally gotten back to him with a simple message that read: “Get back to me. RIGHT NOW!”
So he called, knowing it was brutally early in Vienna. It’s brutally late here. And I’m not sure what I want to hear.
” fa,” a sleep-muffled voice said.
“Jeff, it’s me, Dieter. I just got your message. I’m sorry to call so early, but you said—”
“No, no, it’s all right. Just a moment, I’m changing phones.”
Dieter heard him speaking to his wife, asking her to hang up when he got on the other phone.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Dieter said. “I’m sorry to wake you up this early.”
“S’all right,” she said.
“Okay, honey,” Jeff said, “you can hang up now.”
“G’night,” she said, and hung up.
“What was so important?” Dieter asked his friend.
“You’ve got to see this. Have you got your computer on?” Jeff asked.
“Yes.”
“This will probably take forever to transmit, but I think I may know who that woman is,” Jeff told him, his voice excited. “If I’m right then you, my friend, may be in line for a huge, and I do mean huge, reward. Is it coming up yet?”
Dieter felt a sudden chill at Jeffs words. On his screen a grainy picture was coming up; with every line that was transmitted he felt a little sicker. You couldn’t tell anything yet, only about a fifth of the frame was filled.
“It is taking forever, can’t you tell me what this is about?” he asked impatiently.
“Check your fax machine,” Jeff said. “I sent some stuff over earlier. But this other thing you have to see to believe.”
With a sigh Dieter put down the phone and went over to the fax machine. He picked a few sheets of paper out of the hopper and brought them back over to his desk. When he viewed them he saw that they were wanted posters. Sarah Connor, it said, an escaped mental patient wanted for the terrorist bombing of a California computer company named Cyberdyne, for kidnapping, and possibly for murder.
The other was for a boy of perhaps ten years, a bold-looking kid with a defiant expression on his young face. He was wanted as a suspect in the murder of his foster parents. John Connor, last seen with his mother Sarah and a mysterious man who was wanted for the murder of seventeen police officers as well as the shooting and wounding of scores of other cops. The picture that was supposed to identify this man was almost black.
“I’ve got it,” Dieter said. “I can’t make out the picture of the man, though.”
Suzanne, he thought, could this be you?
She seemed so sane, so rational, such a good mother. And John? Could he have been a murderer—at only ten years of age? Dieter frowned. If there was one thing his work had taught him, it was that murderers took many forms. He’d seen any number of children quite capable of killing.
“That’s what you’ve got to see, Dieter,” Jeff said. “You’re not going to believe this. How’s it coming on your computer?”
Dieter looked up and his breath froze in his chest. He was looking at a picture of himself. “What the hell is this?” he demanded.
“This picture was taken by a police surveillance camera the night this guy
whacked seventeen police officers. At the time he was gunning for this Sarah Connor. He’d already killed two women with the same name that day. But the next time he was seen he was with Sarah Connor and her son; apparently he helped her to escape the asylum she was in and then he helped them to blow up this company. They kidnapped the head scientist and his family and made him help them do it.”
“Jeff, that’s me!”
“No, it’s not. While this guy was blowing away those cops you were working in Amsterdam, helping to break up that arms-smuggling ring— you know, the one that was running Sarin gas? According to the records, while this guy was busy, you were interviewing Samuel Bloom at headquarters.”
“It’s an incredible resemblance,” Dieter said, almost to himself. “Even /think it’s me. I mean it’s like a clone or something.”
“I know,” Jeff said, “wild, huh?” He waited for a moment. “What about the woman and the boy? Are they the ones?”
Dieter looked down at the curled posters. He shook his head. He wanted to know more and the only way he would find out was by getting them to trust him. “No,”
he said. “The woman’s resemblance to this Sarah Connor is remarkable, but she’s much too short. Sarah Connor is five-eight, but this woman is maybe five-four, if that. She doesn’t even come up to my collarbone. And the boy has blond curly hair and blue eyes. The man disappeared, you said?”
“Rumor has it.” Jeff sounded disappointed. “The Connors were tracked as far as Brazil and then apparently fell into the Amazon and got eaten by piranha. But
the man was never seen after they entered a steel plant.”
“That has some unpleasant possibilities,” Dieter mused.
“Now that you mention it,” Jeff agreed.
“Perhaps they should have analyzed the last batch of steel to see if there was too much carbon. I’m sorry to have put you to all this trouble for nothing, Jeff.
Especially for waking you up at some ungodly hour of the night.”
“Hey, what are friends for?” Jeff said, dismissing his thanks an
d apologies both.
“If it had worked out we’d both have been a lot richer, eh?”
“By how much?” Dieter asked. The quickly said, “No! Don’t answer that. I’m just about to go to bed, I don’t want to know.”
“So why should you sleep when I’m awake?”
“I’m in a different time zone. Show me some mercy, why don’t you? And when are you and Nancy coming to see me?”
“How does February sound? I understand it’s sunny and warm there in February.”
“It is—sunny and warm, that is. All the time. I get up and know exactly what the weather’s going to be like. Come on down, you’ll love it.” Dieter grinned. It would also give him plenty of time to sort things out.
“Pick me out a steer then and we’ll barbecue him when we get there. Good night, buddy.”
“Good night, Jeff. Give my love to Nancy when she wakes up.”
Dieter sipped his brandy thoughtfully. He really couldn’t see Suzanne as a killer.
Over time he’d come to have an instinct for this sort of thing. Anybody could be a killer, might be driven under certain circumstances to commit murder. But his gut told him that Sarah had yet to meet those circumstances. As for John, he was the essence of good kid. Dieter couldn’t see either of them as cold-blooded murderers.
Besides, this just didn’t make sense. The first time his look-alike was seen, he was a killer bent on murdering Sarah Connor. The next time he was her right-hand man. He shook his head. It just didn’t add up.
But it might explain why Suzanne Krieger had taken one look at him and run like hell.
I’m going to have to get to know Suzanne and her son much better, he thought.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SERENA’S BEDROOM: THE PRESENT
Serena was alerted early in the morning, during her rest cycle. She had a computer that was always on-line, searching the Internet for mention of Sarah Connor. Given the sheer size of the Web, the thousands upon thousands of requests for information of all kinds, worldwide, every day, the relay of that information was often far from instantaneous. But when, eventually, mention of the Connors was made, the Internet search engine sent a message directly to the computer part of Serena’s brain.
Infiltrator t2-1 Page 22
