Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  “Accountant? I must be missing out on the latest sexual fantasies.”

  “Sit up here, you wouldn’t believe what you see,” Yolanda said darkly.

  “What do you see?”

  Her face was illuminated for an instant by the lighter. “Want a toke?”

  “It’s been a long time . . .” Despite his better judgment Bernal inhaled a little. He held in his breath and felt swirling move from his lungs into the rest of his body. Magnets. There were a lot of different things that could hang on to things with magnets. “Spillvagen. You’re still watching him. Find anything out?”

  Yolanda wriggled closer to Bernal, reached over, and delicately took the joint out of his mouth. She smiled at him. Her eyes looked big in the darkness. “I’ve found out that for a retired cryobank therapist, he’s a busy man. He’s like a whole kicked-over ant nest, all on his own. Your fault, I think, Bernal.”

  “My fault?”

  “Here. One more.” She put the joint up to Bernal’s mouth. He hadn’t wanted any more, but he pulled the I smoke in. “Can’t let our friend Ash get suspicious, so enough for you.” Her fingertips pressed gently against his lips as she took the joint away. “Our buddy Spillvagen’s gotten all active lately. I’ve been putting in some miles just keeping after him, and that’s expensive. Not even tax deductible, I think, even if I get that dough out of the trust. It’s a real change. He usually just sits in that damn garage of his, beating off to Internet porn. Isn’t that what men mostly do nowadays? I mean, those trendy ergonomic office chairs are just set up for that. I’m surprised they don’t come with a tissue dispenser in the arm.”

  “So what has he been doing?” Yolanda’s observations were too close for comfort. As was she. He could feel her body heat as her hip pressed against him. “Since I talked to him.”

  “Who?”

  “Spillvagen!”

  She giggled. “Don’t be so impatient.”

  “Things are going on,” Bernal said. “I’m . .. worried. There’s a lot still I don’t understand, and I’m trying to.”

  “Don’t.” She slid her cool fingertips across his forehead. “Don’t wrinkle up so much. You look much better when you’re just looking thoughtful rather than worried. You’ve got a nice thoughtful look.”

  “Okay. I’ll try not to worry. Swear.”

  “‘No worries.’ Isn’t that what the Aussies say? That’s about all I know about Australians. Are there really Australians? Sometimes I think they’re just made up for movies and ads.”

  She smelled surprisingly clean and floral, a note too pure for her jungle-cat persona. He sensed that she was matching him breath for breath. That was a technique he used. It was unfair to use it back at him. He felt his heart beating. He felt everything, the jittering in the big muscles of his thighs, a tingling in his shoulders, a stirring along his spine. It had been a while.

  He had to figure out what she was talking about, before things went too far. “Spillvagen. What is he doing? What has he done?”

  “You tell me something first.” Her breath was warm on his ear. “What went down, there at good old Long Voyage?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Oh, I’m sure he told you, finally. He wouldn’t tell me, but he told you. They had a fire. A breach of, like, containment, right?”

  “They had problems, he said. Yeah, sure, security wasn’t as tight as it might have been.”

  “They lost him, didn’t they? Uncle Solly. They didn’t just, I don’t know, defrost him or give him freezer burn or something. They out-and-out lost him.”

  “How do you suppose they lost him?” he said.

  “Oh, Bernal.” She pouted. “I think you must have some idea. You’ve been thinking about it, haven’t you? And I’ll bet when you think about something, you figure it out.”

  To get her to leave him alone, he kissed her. He felt her smile against his lips. As he pushed forward, she pulled back, just enough to keep him going. Her knee slid past his hip. His heart was pounding so hard he felt like throwing up.

  “Oh, ow, just a second. . . .”

  She turned and knelt, her body sharply curved beneath him. She snapped Ash’s stash closed and put it back into place underneath the steel support rail. The clank was surprisingly loud. Permanent magnets, even NdFeB, that were strong enough to hold something really heavy would be too strong to easily detach. For something heavier, you would use an electromagnet, preferably superconducting. ...

  Yolanda turned back. She was a genius. His hand had ended up between her breasts, cloth over silk over lace, and the front snap, easy, pressed against his fingers.

  “Oh, I..

  Even as he fumbled with her bra, he sensed her attention directed elsewhere. Headlights streaked the rafters, and a pickup backed into Spillvagen’s driveway. The garage door rumbled up. The vehicle backed a bit farther and stopped.

  She pressed the binoculars to her eyes. She was quite a picture, pursed red lips under black tubes, blond hair fluffed out above.

  Spillvagen got out of his pickup. Bernal didn’t need magnification to recognize his squared-off pudgy shape. He seemed agitated. He glanced up at his house, where his family waited for him, then hurried into his garage. In the next few minutes he carried out a line of gym lockers, some hi-fi speakers almost as tall as he was, and half a dozen cardboard boxes that looked like they had been carried the last three times the Spillvagen family had moved, and never opened. With a cracking of branches, he shoved everything into the hedge that protected the neighbors from having to see a yawning pajama-clad Norbert walk out to his office in the morning, and backed his pickup in. The garage door, complaining louder now about being awoken from its ancient slumber, rumbled down .. . and bounced off the front bumper. It started to retract but stopped before getting all the way back up.

  It whined mournfully. A dog barked in the next yard. Great, Bernal thought. Now that stupid German shepherd was out and whipped into a frenzy.

  “What the hell does he have back there?” Yolanda laughed. “A case of Girl Scout Thin Mints? Or Girl Scouts? God, look at him! He’s desperate.”

  Spillvagen had run out to stare in disbelief at his bumper. He pushed against it with his foot as if trying to compress his pickup, kicked it, then ran back in.

  He bumped his head on the lowered garage door. He grabbed his forehead and bent over to go in, too frantic and demoralized to even swear. The truck pulled forward enough to push its windshield against the edge of the door, then clunked into reverse and slammed backwards into the garage. Something big and loaded with breakable items fell against the back wall with a crash. Bernal remembered the vast warren of shelves, boxes, and old gear back there.

  Spillvagen waddled back out of the garage, remembering to duck this time. He jumped up, grabbed on to the garage door handle, and dangled there, feet flailing.

  Yolanda was laughing so hard she couldn’t even sit up. She’d dropped the binoculars and was pounding her head on the windowsill. Spillvagen seemed to hear something and even in his anxiety to get the garage door back down again, glanced around.

  She put her hands over her mouth and curled up, but Bernal could still see her back heaving.

  The garage door suddenly gave up the unequal contest and rolled down. Spillvagen jumped aside just in time.

  “Oh ...” Yolanda tried to get a breath. “Oh my God.” Yolanda slumped against the back wall and looked at Bernal. Her eyes glimmered with tears. She had never been more attractive than in that moment. “That was just what the doctor ordered.”

  Bernal glanced back out the window. Spillvagen had come out of the garage carrying something like a small barrel. Moving carefully, he waddled into the yard and set it down.

  It was his reflector telescope. With shaking fingers, he punched some sequence of coordinates into the computerized equatorial mount. He hadn’t brought a chair, so he kneeled by it like a man by a sick child’s crib. He put his eye to the eyepiece. The universe waited for his reaction.

 
Spillvagen’s shoulders relaxed. For a moment, he pulled his eye away and rested his forehead against the telescope’s belly. Then he put his eye back to the eyepiece anti looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

  “Now, where were we?” Yolanda said.

  Bernal wouldn’t just be touching her, much as he wanted to. He’d be allowing himself to be recruited and attached to her mission. He couldn’t allow his body to make that kind of decision for him.

  “I’ll have to take a rain check,” Bernal said.

  “Really.” Yolanda wasn’t surprised at all.

  “Look, I’m sorry, but—”

  She pressed her finger hard against his lips. He could feel both the sharpness of her fingernail and the softness of her finger. It was almost enough to excite him again.

  “Nothing less erotic than an apology,” she said. “You can get things dry cleaned, repaired, replaced. Just don’t apologize.”

  “I’m . . . okay, okay.”

  “Goodnight, Bernal.”

  “So, um . . . Keep an eye on Spillvagen. Call me if he goes anywhere . . . odd.”

  “Odd.” Yolanda leaned back against the wall, closed her eyes. “That loser’s not doing anything odd. All of you guys are really boring. Might as well be frozen already.”

  29

  “Everything operates in that zone between determinism and randomness,” Bob the waiter said. “That’s what makes analyzing conspiracies so difficult. Some of the unfortunate events that actually occurred and made our world what it is really were the result of a predetermined plan, worked out at board meetings with catered lunches and matching leather-bound briefing books, and then stitched together by gritty-eyed techs in some cube farm using project management software to generate Gannt charts. Others just happened. The best conspiracies are actually reactive, springboarding off real events, incorporating them into their comprehensive worldview. When you look at them later, it’s tempting to think that each one of those events had to have been planned. Screws you up something awful. Particularly when you expect the seriousness of the consequences of the event to somehow relate to how contingent it was. You already know what I’m getting to here.”

  “How’s the lamb today?” Charis regarded Bob with her pale brown eyes. Today she wore an official-looking dark blazer, which accentuated her shoulders.

  “As far as I am aware, we are the only restaurant that still serves mutton. If you’re nostalgic for the cooking of English boarding schools . . .”

  “Not Kennedy again,” Bernal said.

  “But of course. I measure conspiracy theory plausibility in Oswalds. Not a high standard, in case you’re wondering.”

  “The pasta primavera?” Charis persisted.

  “Canned vegetables have more vitamins than fresh, I’ve read. I’m sure it’s nutritious.”

  “Burgers,” Bernal said. “Two?”

  Charis stared at him. She’d been unwilling to come here, but Bernal had insisted. “Sure. Well done.”

  “Always a good choice.” Bob collected their menus. “Kennedy! Bastard had one foot in the grave, one foot on a banana peel as it was. Addison’s disease, osteoporosis, he was doped up with cortisone, painkillers, relaxants, stimulants . . . incredible. You know what killed him, in the end?”

  “A bullet,” Bernal said.

  “Uh ... exactly! A 6.5 x 52mm slug from a Mannlicher-Carcano. Oswald’s first shot hit him in the neck. Serious wound, but possibly not fatal. Normal guy would have slumped down into the seat, out of sight, off to the hospital, maybe recovered. But Kennedy had a back brace that kept him upright. Second shot blew the front of his head off. You ever hear one of those spittle-spraying conspiracy buffs work that into one of their miracles of Balanchine-level assassination choreography? No! And why? Because if they did work that back brace in as a functional element, like the course of the car, the view lines from the knoll, all the rest, they’d come right up against the inevitable knowledge that Kennedy was incredibly easy to kill. They’ve set up a locked-room mystery in a house with no doors. An aide always followed him around with a black bag full of medicine from JFK’s Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson. A modification in any of his drugs might have killed him in a way that was wholly deniable. The treatment regimen was such a secret that any investigation of the death would have been perfunctory and the results always ambiguous. An overdose! What could be more likely? It was the fact that he actually stayed alive so long that was the real conspiracy.” He paused. “Two burgers, you said?”

  “Yes.” Charis was clearly holding on to her patience.

  “Coming right up.” Bob sauntered back to the kitchen.

  “You like the food here?” Charis said.

  “Ah, no. It sucks, actually. I come here for the atmosphere.”

  “So what do you think this thing was?” Charis got down to business. “And what reason do you have to think that it was in that Peugeot we looked at?”

  Bernal had told her what he had discovered the day before, leaving out his encounter with Yolanda in Ash’s treehouse, which did not seem relevant.

  “I think it was a . . . headtaker. Something that severs human heads and then keeps them in cold storage until such time as Hesketh can find a use for them.”

  “And you think your buddy Spak saw it? The night Muriel died? With her head in it?”

  “I do.”

  “But you didn’t actually get to see it yourself. Under the tarp.”

  “No. I was interrupted by Vervain. But, Charis, I’m sure—”

  “Bernal. I believe you. I talked to some of the higher-ups at Long Voyage. Not easy. They’re a bit on edge, as you might imagine. They revealed something to me. Some months ago, they lost a piece of equipment. Something pretty expensive, I guess. It was something they used when someone died away from a medical facility—”

  “The field kit!” Bernal said. “Spillvagen told me about that.”

  “I’ll bet he did.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that they suspect he’s the one who took off with it. It vanished just around the time he quit and set up his own business. But they don’t have proof or even any vague evidence. But I bet they’ve got these gals out looking for it. They’re really desperate to have the thing back. It’s a product differentiator for them. ‘Our heads are fresher.’ ”

  “Maybe,” Bernal said. “But that doesn’t explain what it was doing, attached as part of a headtaker, under a car by the Black River.”

  “Because it wasn’t any kind of ‘headtaker,’ Bernal. Spillvagen was just moving that field kit around, keeping it hidden. He couldn’t take the risk someone would just break into his garage.”

  He looked at her. “You don’t believe in it anymore. In Hesketh.”

  “You make it sound like I’ve stopped believing in Santa Claus. Get serious, Bernal. We have a killer, a real live killer. One person, maybe more than one, but a regular old psycho who happens to have connections to Long Voyage, to Hess Tech, all through this case. Those of us who want to believe in hidden truths are amazingly easy to bamboozle.”

  “What do the other people in your office think?”

  “Who?”

  “In Social Protection. Have you reported this up, national headquarters or whatever, or have you been keeping it private because you didn’t really believe in it?”

  She sighed. “Speaking of Santa Claus . . .”

  None of this was really a surprise. “No SP?”

  “Well . . . no. It doesn’t exist. When I was asked to leave the force, I didn’t know what else to do. You’d think there would be plenty of badass technology-specific activist organizations out there, but that’s just a media thing. There ain’t none. Everyone who is interested in artificial intelligence pretty much agrees on everything. They’re all standing around their backyards waiting for the magic nozzle of the Singularity to suck them up. Pussies. All there is is pussies.” She shook her head. “So I juiced up my own organization. Not too hard. Got a book on HTML, bou
ght a few domain names, got a designer to whack me up some templates, went to town. Looks pretty real, right?”

  Bernal had gone from passionate opposition to grudging collaboration, all with an organization that did not really exist. It left him with an odd sense of emptiness. He never would have thought he’d miss Social Protection.

  “So, what, you think you’re going to go out and trap the Bowler on your own and get back at all those guys on the force who never believed in you?”

  She looked as if he’d slapped her.

  “I’m going to do what I need to do, mister. Someone killed Muriel. Someone tried like hell to kill you and me. Madeline Ungaro vanished the night Muriel died and has never been seen since. This is no kind of shit for you to be anywhere near.”

  “Because I’m crazy and believe in real AIs.”

  “Because killers are dangerous people, Bernal. And you’ve never seen a killer without a remote in your hand. All you can do is get in the way. And maybe get killed.” She was furious with him. And she had good reason to be. Why was he perceptive enough to know what motivated someone without being perceptive enough to shut up about it?

  “I’m sorry, Charis. I didn’t mean ... I understand why you need to do this. I’ll stay out of your way.”

  “It’s really not that interesting, Bernal.” She tried to be light, but he could see she was still pissed. “Just the usual. Just a killer.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. I should just move along.”

  _______

  He got into his car, even though there was nowhere he wanted to go. The cast-iron borzoi still sat in its seat, the Post-it sticking up at a jaunty angle on its tail. “Sorry,” the note said.

  Well, hell, we’re all sorry about something.

  The Mercedes had been driven by the Connoisseur, whoever he was. Muriel had run out and taken it. Pure coincidence, right? Blind luck.

  But now, according to Charis, the Connoisseur had been seen several times in Muriel’s neighborhood. And Jennifer said things, specific things, had been taken from her house.