Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  Bernal sprayed foam on the stinking rubber.

  “So, what the hell was this thing?” Charis held a length of the device’s leg. “Packed with half a pound of Semtex, I’d estimate. Not a crowd shredder, but nothing to pick your nose with either.”

  “Some kind of decoy, not Hesketh at all.” Once burning, the rubber decided it liked it that way. The fire retreated only reluctantly. The extinguisher was meant to suppress an engine fire. Its capacity was limited. “Just a little remote-control crawler. No processing in it at all.”

  Charis shook her head, then winced. “I’ve been skunked. All the way through. There’s no Hesketh. There’s nothing. Muriel asked me—”

  “What?”

  “Muriel Inglis. You remember her. Your boss. She asked us to look into what Ungaro was up to. Said she’d lost control, that things were going bad and she needed our help...”

  “Whose help?”

  “Social Protection. We provide . . . technical security services, you might say.”

  “Who might say? Not me.”

  “Argue with me, but keep working that fire. You’ve almost got it under control. Look. Muriel’s taken off and I don’t know what the hell she’s up to. I do know that she’s taken off with a spare herf gun of mine that I would like to have back. I should have just called it all off this morning when I saw no Hesketh in that lab and got roughed up by Muriel’s attack dog employee.”

  It took Bernal an instant to realize that she was talking about him. “What do you say Muriel asked you to do?”

  “She asked me to grab Hesketh when I could, so that she could examine it. She didn’t think Missy Madeline Ungaro was reporting adequately. Muriel had funded the thing, so I guess I was some kind of high-tech repo man. Muriel’s got a talent for getting people to do what she wants. Right? So, tell me, why are you here? I had information from before, from my surveillance, on where Hesketh was going to be. What brought you out?”

  Muriel, Bernal didn’t say. A message from Muriel. He didn’t have any interest in sharing that information with Charis. He’d have to find Muriel and talk with her first. He kicked a big truck tire onto some fugitive blue flames and got a last dribble out of the extinguisher.

  “Just a hunch,” he said.

  If Charis hadn’t shown up, he would have waited for Hesketh and then met the detonation himself. He was sure there was a good explanation, but one thing he’d have to ask Muriel was why she had sent him a message that had almost gotten him killed.

  13

  Something glowed above the trees. As Bernal drove, it grew and turned into the toe of a cowboy boot, brightly spotlit.

  The boot was at the end of the kicked-up leg of a cowgirl straddling a rocket. She was thirty feet high, a masterpiece of fiberglass craftsmanship. She wore two sheriff’s badges, one on each thrusting breast, and nebulae decorated her short denim skirt. The rocket she rode was a nondescript thing of creased metal. Beneath her feet lay a diner, like the box her high-heeled ostrich-hide boots had come in.

  Near Earth Orbit. Bernal was burnt, stinging from cuts, and his ears still rang from the detonation. What he wanted more than anything was to get back to Ungaro’s lab and get to bed. But something about the cowboy motif snagged his thoughts. He slowed and pulled into the gravel parking lot. Vast fields spread out around the diner and barren hills. Whether toxic waste, ancient Indian curses, or lack of easy highway access, something had prevented any kind of development nearby.

  The cowboy boot. Muriel had sent him his message about Madeline Ungaro’s lab in a cowboy boot. But that seemed overly subtle, even for her.

  Wait. A Near Earth Orbit menu had been propped up against the wall in Norbert Spillvagen’s garage office. And with that as an additional piece of information, the orange pickup he’d seen in Spillvagen’s driveway suddenly emerged out of the murky parking lot into Bernal’s consciousness. Once he saw it, it seemed obvious, like he should have spotted it from the road. It had extra chrome detailing on it, which made Bernal think Spillvagen must have bought it used. That didn’t seem like Spillvagen’s style at all.

  Bernal felt an unexpected surge of anger. Spillvagen. What the hell was he up to? Bernal was searching for something really important. Spillvagen had deliberately lied to him, for reasons of his own, and sent him on a ridiculous detour to talk to Yolanda.

  Bernal didn’t usually let anger guide his actions, but being tossed around by Charis and then almost blown up had put him in a bad mood. Plus, he realized he was hungry. Might as well take care of all his current needs in one place. He pulled into the parking lot. The cowgirl above now faced away, staring off into the depths of space.

  He went in to confront Spillvagen.

  _______

  “May I join you?” Without waiting for an answer, Bernal slid into the booth opposite Spillvagen.

  Spillvagen still wore his short-sleeved dress shirt and tie, but he’d eaten a donut with powdered sugar some : time during the day, and the gondoliers now poled through a snow-covered Venice. He looked around, as if hoping for some escape. Then he shook his head. “Sure. Why not?”

  “You sent me to harass Yolanda,” Bernal said. “You didn’t actually think she had anything at all to do with what I was interested in. You just wanted her to think that you had a lot of agents doing your bidding. Put the pressure on.”

  “Well .. .” Spillvagen said. “That’s not strictly true. I was wondering . . . oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. But if you knew how deep her loony campaign has put me in the shit. .. .”

  “Your goal should be to not get in any deeper.” Bernal picked up a menu. “There are a few things I want to know.”

  “You want to know something? Stay away from the paella.” The waiter was tall and mournful, BOB was embroidered on his bowling shirt in elaborate script that matched the menu. “I think it has squid in it. Those things evolved too long ago to be edible.”

  “Just a burger, Bob.”

  “How’s the salmon?” Bernal asked.

  “You ever smell one of those fish farms? Makes a beef lot seem like a resort spa. And enough PCBs and mercury to yellow your eyeballs.”

  “Maybe a burger.” Bernal closed up his menu.

  “Excellent choice.” What Bob scribbled on his pad, however, seemed much more complex than their actual order. “The real question is, of course, was 9/11 Pearl Harbor, or was it the Reichstag fire? Or to put it another way, did we simply allow a real enemy to attack us, or did we have to create one? Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Roosevelt did what he absolutely had to do to preserve Western civilization, however he set it up. He had to get an isolationist, xenophobic, racist, mob-ruled, Hollywood-addled nation to do its duty. Think of the challenge he had! They thought they could pull the Atlantic and Pacific oceans over their heads and go to sleep. Greatest Generation, my ass. The last generation for whom lynching was considered an evening’s light entertainment. And the whining! An overdue stock correction and they all fell on their backs and lay there for a decade with their legs in the air like stunned beetles. So FDR really had to let that bunch of losers get kicked in the ass to wake them up.

  “But at least the Japanese had a country willing to mix it up, death-obsessed frat house toga party though it was.” He shook his head. “What about our so-called opponents now? We finally had to go out and squat right in the middle of their territory, stick our ass in their faces, and still . . . nothing. It really does look like our enemy was a stage creation, like the burning of the Reichstag or the killing of Kirov. Maybe we should just see about dealing with our cultural gangrene on our own, but I’m betting we’ll just see ever more complex manufactured disasters. Watch for an asteroid on an orbit intersecting with Earth next. That’ll give us all something fun to work with. I’ll see about getting these on the griddle.”

  They watched him march gravely into the kitchen. “Hey, Bernal,” Spillvagen said. “If anything, you look worse than you did this morning. You look like you’ve actually been catching flak with that jack
et. When’s the last time anyone actually used it for that? And that aftershave .. . very manly.”

  At this hour, there was no one else in the diner to smell the burnt rubber stench. He hadn’t thought about it, but now Bernal fingered the cuts in his leather jacket. It had had its day. He’d have to hang it up as a souvenir.

  “So,” Bernal said. “Whatever happened to poor old Uncle Solly’s head?”

  “What, are you on first-name terms with him now?”

  “Your friend Yolanda and I had quite the little chat.”

  “Yolanda’s a psycho! She’s claiming something happened, just to screw some money out of the cryobank.”

  “So, did it?”

  “Did it what?”

  “Did something happen to the head?”

  “No! I mean, nothing permanent. Nothing you’d call actionable.”

  “I can see why Yolanda’s so pissed off at you.”

  “Why?”

  “No one likes being stonewalled when they know there’s real information to be had.”

  “Okay,” Spillvagen said. “We had a bad concatenation of events. A real failure cascade. First, an electrical fire. There was some kind of flammable insulation packed in the party wall. Old stuff, from when they built the mall. Burned out the wall. Tripped breakers and dumped our power. I mean, all of it. Hit the redundant systems, it was dark, the emergency doors didn’t work, smoke alarms, nothing. Weirdest damn thing you ever saw. Halon came on, though, and put the fire out. Fire never got anywhere near the dewars. But we got emergency power supplies in, hooked everything up. Cleared out what was near the wall. Not a dewar went above spec on temperature. We got the graphs, everything. Yolanda makes it seem like a really big deal.”

  “Yolanda had a picture. Of someone at Solomon MacParland’s funeral. It was—”

  Spillvagen sighed. “Of course. That was what your friend was after. I should just have given it to you.”

  “Muriel?”

  “Yeah. She was all up on me about this company, Hess Tech, and this Madeline Ungaro woman. There was a lot of business flotsam in that mall. The stores had all closed, the owners had debt service, needed paying tenants, and weren’t too picky about who it was. Lucky there wasn’t, I don’t know, a lead smelter in there, or a biohazard facility. You never know what’s inside an old mall.”

  The food had arrived. Bernal put ketchup on his fries. They were a little limp, but, hey, the place had beer, and he’d made out worse in the past.

  “Like a cut-rate cryobank.”

  “Nothing cut-rate about it.” Spillvagen took the top bun off his burger, shook his head at what he found there, and replaced it. “Shouldn’t do that. Should just accept the cowgirl as my personal savior and stop asking uncomfortable questions, like ‘Is the food edible?’ Look, I’ve had my differences with the Long Voyage administration, but I have to give them this: their gear really was state of the art. Like the field kit. People with contracts don’t die only when it’s convenient. Our unit took care of that. Someone gets hit by a car, is bleeding to death out in the hills, the unit could be out there, sitting by him, waiting for the moment of death. As soon as the EMTs admit they’re useless, the guy is sincerely dead, the field kit goes to work. The field kit pumps cryoprotectant right into the carotids, dropping the temperature slowly but steadily, bringing the body down to cryogenic temperature. I’ve heard of teams having to stop by the liquor store to buy out their supply of ice, trying to get the body cooled before the inevitable process of decay. Long Voyage had it down to a science. The best way to cool is from inside. Believe me, that fast perfusion really can cool you. Meanwhile, under pressure, cryoprotectants are penetrating the cells, preventing that nasty crystal formation. If it’s a neurosuspension, just the head with no body, it takes only a few seconds. Think of that! And the unit would maintain the body, the head, whatever, at cryogenic temperature for as long as you needed to get it back to the bank. So, don’t give me ‘cut rate.’ ”

  “What did you tell Muriel about Hess Tech?” Bernal said.

  “What I’ve already told you. I had no idea what they did, and I’m not sure I even saw Ungaro around. Okay, we did think about expanding into their space when they left, but the issues after the fire cut into our new business. And, you know, retention isn’t really our problem. It’s getting new customers....”

  Something caught Bernal’s attention, out of the corner of his eye. He glanced around, trying to figure out what it was.

  “They were right next door?”

  “Yes. But that’s about it. Muriel was on my case about it, but I didn’t really notice them much. What’s up with that? What did this Madeline Ungaro do to Muriel?”

  Bernal caught a swing of bobbed black hair, and a slender figure dressed in a blue coverall carried a toolkit across the end of the hallway leading past the kitchen to the bathrooms. He recognized it.

  It was Patricia, the pretty, dark-haired tow-truck driver who had picked up Charis’s Hummer that morning.

  “Did Muriel say Ungaro had done something to her?” Bernal said.

  “No, nothing like that. But it was really an important issue for her.” Spillvagen looked apprehensive. “Muriel turned me on to this restaurant. Left that menu one day by accident, I checked it out, decided I liked it. What else? That’s what I got. Honest. I don’t really notice much, tell you the truth. Melissa’s always on me for that. Tells me to pay attention. I do my best. If I think of something else, I’ll let you know.”

  Bernal realized that the other man was frightened. Of him. Yolanda had made fun of him, but Spillvagen was genuinely intimidated. Bernal fought down a brief feeling of satisfaction and almost apologized.

  But that, of course, would have been a mistake. As Muriel had once said, human relationships were reciprocal, although what was being traded was not always obvious. Suddenly backing down here wouldn’t make Spillvagen like him, but it would justify Spillvagen in keeping things from him. And he was in no way persuaded that Spillvagen had given him the whole story, though that last bit about Muriel having the Near Earth Orbit menu was interesting. It wasn’t her usual kind of place.

  “You do that.” Bernal stood up, not offering to pay his share of the bill. “I hope you manage to keep Yolanda out of your bushes.”

  The hallway was empty now, and Bernal pushed the bar on the rear access door and went out into the dark parking lot. There wasn’t much traffic out on the road.

  A panel truck stood parked against the cinder-block wall that screened the trash from view, its rear doors open and an assemblage of gear spread out on the ground behind it. A dim figure was extending a ladder to the roof. Bernal looked up. The cowgirl blazed bright above, the rocket shining between her thighs, her gaze fixed upward at something no one else could see because they just weren’t big enough. Those below could only wonder at her glory.

  “Patricia?” Bernal walked up to her. She looked at him. Her pale eyes were made for display in the dark. Washed out in sun, they seemed to glow in the cowgirl’s reflected light.

  “Who are you?” She wasn’t worried. A tow-truck driver knew how to take care of herself.

  “You towed a car this morning. Remember? Out on Collins.”

  She returned her attention to the ladder, leveling its feet and locking it to the roof edge. “I tow a lot of cars.”

  “It was a Hummer. You wanted to tow it to your yard, and she wouldn’t let you. I just... I have a few questions about it. You don’t have to stop what you’re doing.”

  Despite her slight build, she was clearly strong; she smoothly lowered a set of gas canisters in a rack without making a sound. She wheeled them up to the ladder’s base.

  Just as he thought she would climb up without responding again, she tilted her head and looked at him solemnly. “You look like you’ve had a rough time. Kind of like me.”

  “Someone hit me.” He didn’t see any reason to go into the details.

  “Here. You can help me.” She opened the truck’s cab, got o
ut a small vinyl bag that looked like it had once held skin products, and handed it to him. “While you do, we can talk about a towed Hummer, if you want.” She pulled her shirt away from her neck, revealing a long, shallow cut.

  He unzipped the bag. It was full of adhesive bandages, antiseptic, antibiotic, and some concealer and foundation suitable for pale skin: the complete kit for the fashionable victim.

  “I don’t even know why I got that call,” she said. “Come on, it will only take a second. I got to stay on it, or I’ll get an infection.” Patricia was skinny and birdy, with a thin collar bone and a slender neck, a type Bernal was attracted to. He put a gob of antibiotic on his finger and rubbed it across the cut that ran down toward her breast. Either she had a high metabolism, or there already was infection, because her skin felt hot under his fingertip.

  “Thanks. Big help. She had me haul her out to Cooper Road, no repairs. Shouldn’t complain. Paid me in cash, off the record.”

  “Where on Cooper Road?”

  “Thirty-seven. Used to be Hemmett Oil. We ended up with some of their pumps at Ignacio’s yard. Refurbished them and sold them off to Slovakia.”

  “She talk about what she was doing there?”

  “You were with her. Don’t you know?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, she talked about a lot of stuff. Spring training, Some show at Foxwoods. Did I think it had been a dry spring. That kind of stuff.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “That’s enough. Now it’s time for me to help you.” She touched his jaw with just enough pressure to get him to turn it. Her fingers felt warm too. She sprayed some stinging antibiotic on his fresh cuts.

  “Something happened to you,” she said. “I don’t mean whatever tore you up. That’s nothing. You got some damage.”

  It had been two years. Bernal himself had trouble seeing the traces. He thought he’d healed well. “Something blew up in my face. I mean, a few years ago, not just today.”