Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  “He was coming here,” Bernal said.

  “Sure looks like it. Borden was returned and placed under constant observation. He’s still there. He has never said anything about where he was going or why. Nowadays, apparently, he spends his time looking at old muscle-car magazines from the 1950s and 60s. Quite a collector of the things, actually, with a decent eBay business.

  “Gregg was a sadder case. Instead of getting cheered up by the fact that he had a solid job offer, he became obsessed with the idea that all the vehicles he could see from his window were trying to kill him. Late one night he escaped from his room and made it into the ambulance garage of the acute-care hospital that was on the same campus. An EMT found him a few hours later, crushed between the garage wall and the front end of an ambulance. The ambulance door was open and a long length of gauze hung out onto the asphalt.

  “That end of the parking garage had a slight slope. Gregg had put the ambulance in neutral, then stood against the back wall and released the parking brake with a gauze pull that looped around the rearview mirror. The ambulance rolled forward and pinned him against the wall. He suffocated slowly, in complete silence. They figured it must have taken him a good hour to die.”

  “Jesus,” Bernal said.

  “Interesting thing about both these guys, something I hadn’t thought of as a criterion for Hesketh, but which makes sense when you think about it. They both had high native intelligence, g, they call it nowadays. But both had sustained some minor but significant brain damage in childhood. When he was three, Borden fell off a porch head first onto a concrete driveway. When he was six, Gregg got hit in the forehead with an aluminum baseball bat when an overenthusiastic Little League player flung the thing into the stands. Both of them sustained significant damage to the medial prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain responsible for aggression control and integrated forethought.”

  Bernal remembered Ignacio returning to the yard the night he died. He’d supposedly just beaten Patricia senseless. Then he’d come back with two bags of Brazilian takeout. Not like someone trying to make up to his abused partner, just routine, a regular evening event.

  Then he’d found his carts running around the yard at night, his love slave cheating on him, and his drug operation in jeopardy. He’d gone berserk.

  None of that accorded with what Bernal knew of the Bowler.

  Ignacio now seemed like someone with obvious emotions who had been manipulated and maneuvered, and never realized who was the real aggressor and who the real victim. When he’d outlived his usefulness, he’d been discarded by having a transaxle dropped on his head, and had taken the fall for every crime that had been committed.

  Bernal remembered the story Patricia Foote, trying to find something to say, had told him about her childhood.

  “Something you would get,” Bernal said, “if, say, your mother’s car rear-ended a truck carrying pipes, and one of them hit your forehead.”

  “Sure,” Spillvagen said. “That would work. Perfect, really. Why?”

  “How much farther do we have?”

  “About a quarter mile. No, less. See that old sign? Driveway’s just past it.”

  “Stop the car.”

  “Why? I—”

  “Stop!”

  The forest was silent in the night. A rough double track ran off to the right, curving through the trees toward a house with a couple of lights on.

  “We were wrong,” Bernal said. “Ignacio Kuepner wasn’t the Bowler. A drug dealer, a smuggler, even a killer. But never the Bowler. He was played, as we all were played, by someone else. And that someone else is up there, waiting for you. You’re removing one head. And it’s pretty likely that you’ll be providing a replacement for it.”

  “Who? I didn’t . . .Spillvagen swallowed. “My God. What should I do?”

  Bernal thought. Prelate and Vervain had taken off with his phone. Charis and the Enigmatic Ascent crew were all down at Cheriton Airport, working on snapping off the transportation end of Hesketh’s operations. But they had not anticipated how much Hesketh still had to do before it headed down there. He needed to get Charis here to help him. His every instinct was to move, and move quickly, but he didn’t want to go up there with only Spillvagen as an ally.

  He stared up the rough road. First he saw it as clearly as if it stood next to him, then he thought he was mistaken, that it was just a shed, or a trailer, or a tractor, and he was imagining what he saw.

  But he wasn’t.

  Charis’s Hummer stood parked up there in the darkness by the house. The forest scene on its side made it stand out, rather than camouflaging it. There was some kind of iridescence in the coating.

  He didn’t know why Charis had come up here or where she was now, but he knew it meant he couldn’t rely on her help—and she might be in incredible danger. For now, it was him and Spillvagen.

  Bernal opened his door. “Go on up there. Give me a few minutes, then get to work, just as you were planning. How long do you think it would take you to liberate all the heads?”

  “I don’t know. Not long. Five minutes, maybe a little more. What are you going to do?”

  “Distract Hesketh’s guardian, friend. Keep her from coming back there for long enough for you to make sure that Hesketh no longer exists. So work fast. Work as if your life depended on it. And mine too, for that matter.”

  Bernal swung out of the pickup and set off through the woods before he could reconsider his plan.

  46

  Sometime in the past, it had been a repair shop or a garage, but there had been no serious traffic up this way in decades. It was a large cinder-block structure shoved up the ass of a small clapboard Cape with dangling decorative shutters and a concrete front step that had settled alarmingly and hung almost a foot off the house.

  The woods had straggled their way up to the house. Bernal saw an old birdbath and what looked like the remains of a decorative well, amid the burgeoning saplings.

  Where the hell was Charis? He told himself that she’d already taken care of things and would pop up with an apology for not answering her phone. But he could see that the front tire of her Hummer was flat, and she was not trying to repair it.

  Patricia was home. Of course she was home. Waiting for Spillvagen, so that she could watch him and make sure that he did to Hesketh only what he was contracted to do. Well, maybe he could distract her. And, if he needed to, take her out.

  Hesketh had gone out and found itself an acolyte through a proactive search that would have been the envy of any corporate recruiter. It had found Patricia Foote, a girl damaged in brain and spirit, sitting glumly in a mental health facility, waiting for something to happen. When Hesketh finally contacted her, she must have felt like Cinderella. Under instruction, she had traveled to Cheriton and gotten a job with Ignacio Kuepner, parts supplier to Hess Tech, the company building Hesketh’s various bodies. And concealed there, watching Madeline Ungaro but completely invisible to her, Patricia had assisted Hesketh in every step of its plan to become independent and escape. And, meanwhile, had been beaten and abused by Ignacio on a regular basis. That might have been as cover. Or it might just have happened. He remembered what Bob, at NEO, had told him: the contingent is always present. If you try to see everything that happens as planned, you are inevitably deluded.

  He didn’t think he’d ever untangle the nest of pain and need that had been Ignacio Kuepner and Patricia Foote. But it had finally ended in Muriel’s death, Ignacio’s death, and probably Madeline Ungaro’s death as well.

  He walked across the tilting concrete squares of the front walk and knocked firmly on the door. He felt like he should have a bouquet or something. He heard a dull thump from inside, then nothing for a long few seconds.

  The door opened, and a pair of startled pale eyes regarded him.

  “Patricia!” he said, with all the heartiness of a neglectful lover. “It took me a while to find you. It’s great to see you. Can I come in?”

  _______

/>   Then he did the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. He put his arms around the woman he now believed to be a serial killer assisting a homicidal artificial intelligence, and kissed her.

  For a moment it was like grabbing a manikin, but then she relaxed, fractionally, and at least allowed the kiss.

  “How have you been?” he said. “I can’t... the way you looked, when we found you. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. What he did to you. . .”

  “They asked me a lot of questions,” she said. “They didn’t know . . . why I didn’t know.”

  “About Ignacio?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About what he did?”

  “What he did.” She pulled away from him. “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Bernal said. “They haven’t said.”

  The place was tiny and dark and hot. There was almost no furniture: just a couch and a tube TV on a chest in the living room and what looked like a kid’s bunk bed at an angle to the wall in the bedroom.

  He had to keep her distracted. Being incredibly boring was clearly not doing it. By this point, Spillvagen should have gotten into that big garage out back and been working on Hesketh. That is, unless he’d panicked and run. Bernal understood that possibility.

  He smiled. “Come on, Patricia. We’re alive. Both of us. We made it.”

  He felt no sexual desire for her whatsoever, but tried to touch her as if he found her irresistible. “Oh, honey ... it’s been so hard. So weird. I don’t know how you could have stood it...”

  She was as dully unresponsive as any girlfriend who has decided to break up with you but hasn’t told you yet.

  He tugged her toward the bedroom, first gently, then more forcefully.

  A bedside lamp lay on its side on the floor, shooting light at a pile of laundry spilling out of a wide closet with louvered doors. Black metal dumbbells, collars, and weight plates lay in various places on the floor, and a couple of gouges had been taken out of the walls by a poorly controlled bar. The place really was a mess. Another lamp lay broken in the far corner. Patricia made Muriel look like a careful housekeeper.

  “Come on,” he murmured. “Come on.”

  She shifted her weight, and they slid past the bedroom door and stumbled into the rear hall. Handmade wooden shelves had been attached on both walls, narrowing the passage to almost nothing.

  He felt every bone in Patricia’s small body as she moved against him. The acolyte. She was the acolyte, Hesketh’s assistant. And she’d done something to Charis. Some piece of information, some loose end, had brought Charis here, to Patricia’s house. Where was she? Was she still alive? As far as Bernal could tell, Patricia had no idea he’d seen Charis’s car parked behind the house. At least, the way she leaned forward onto him, relaxing her muscles just a tiny bit, just enough for him to feel, just enough to signal some kind of surrender, felt completely natural.

  And that was more than Bernal could stand. He could fake lust to conceal Spillvagen’s desperate operation in the garage, but knowing that Charis had come here and vanished overwhelmed him.

  She looked up at his face, then reached up a finger to touch the corner of his eye. “Why? What’s—”

  Back in the garage, Spillvagen dropped something. The clink of metal on concrete was as clear as if he stood right next to them.

  Patricia jerked her head, listened.

  Bernal might have been able to get the jump on her if he’d been just a little farther away, but being up against her made every shift of his muscles obvious.

  That was more than enough for her. She was used to reacting like a trapped animal. She raked nails across his face and checked him in the crotch with her hip, then turned and was gone, not having made a sound.

  He grabbed at the shelves as he stumbled, and they pulled off the wall, falling on him. The pain seared his face an instant later, and he sucked breath. He pushed himself back to follow her. He looked down the hall into the bedroom. The light from the fallen lamp illuminated the louvered closet door . . . and the thin trickle of blood that came from underneath it.

  _______

  Charis lay face down in dirty laundry soaked with blood, with shirts and towels thrown over her, and a heavy plate dumbbell on the back of her neck.

  “Charis,” he whispered. “It’s me, Bernal.” He picked the weight up off her neck.

  Charis rolled over, choking. Her face was crusted with her own blood. He pulled her up until she was sitting, leaning on him.

  “You got here just in...but...Hesketh ... where ...”

  “In the garage,” Bernal said. “But she’s in there now. Patricia.”

  Charis sat up straight, taking her weight off him. “What’s your plan?”

  Bernal thought for a moment. “I hate to ask this—”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Can you move? Can you do anything?”

  “Help me stand up.”

  “That’s not encouraging.”

  “Just do it, damn it!”

  He got her to her feet. She stood, legs spread, and looked at him.

  “I was going to go in,” he said, “and have you go around. . .”

  She managed a grin. There was blood on her teeth too. It was all he could do to keep looking at her. “Negatory on that. I’m the pro. I’ll go in. You go around. Give me five minutes. I should be able to make it to the back door by then. Then give it everything you’ve got. We’ll only get one chance.”

  _______

  Bernal went out the front door and circled the house, moving as quietly as possible. Along its base the house had dead shrubs, stacks of rusted paint cans, the rotted remains of firewood, and castoff pieces of siding, flashing, and roofing. Bernal stood up on an irregular chunk of concrete that had once anchored a clothesline pole and peered through the pollen-streaked glass of the window, trying to scope out the situation before he had to go in there.

  Two overhead fluorescents dangling from chains lit the garage. Huge amounts of gear was piled on thick metal shelves. It was as densely packed as Ignacio’s itself, and much neater than the personal living space of Patricia’s house. The open garage door spilled light onto the sparse gravel of the driveway, but that approach was too obvious.

  Five minutes. Was Charis even wearing a watch? What the hell did she think she was going to do? She’d be lucky to live for another five minutes, much less save the day.

  Patricia’s tow truck stood near the shelves on the opposite wall. Spillvagen’s own pickup was pulled up next to it.

  Spillvagen squatted in the tow truck’s bed, his back against the retracted boom. Blood dripped down his forehead. Bernal heard him gasp for breath.

  “I just got it wrong,” Spillvagen said. “I thought the head was on the other end, and I wanted to make sure....”

  “Seal them back up.” Patricia leaned forward out of the shadows. She held a garden machete in her hand. She’d clearly hit him with it once already, with the blunt side.

  “You’ll be stuck,” Spillvagen said. “You’ll still have that head in there.”

  “Let me worry about that. Get them back in, exactly the way they were.”

  He wouldn’t live more than a few seconds past the completion of his job.

  Spillvagen hunched back down. Bernal could just see the curve of his back as he worked desperately at something concealed by the tow truck’s side panel.

  Bernal knew what he wanted to go for, but he hadn’t figured out a particularly good route. He didn’t have many choices. He left the window and crept around to the open garage door. He knelt and peered around the edge.

  Patricia stood absolutely still, arms crossed in front of her, a machete resting on her shoulder. He would have expected her face to be frozen and expressionless as well, but it wasn’t. Instead she wore a look of concern, like a mother watching her child being treated in an emergency room. There were clinks as Spillvagen worked, and the sobbing of his breath.

  Behind Patricia, Bernal could
see the door to the house. For an instant, he thought it was an illusion, a result of the way his blood was pounding in his head, but no, the knob was really turning, really rotating as Charis turned it from the other side.

  Bernal was already running when the door creaked open. Patricia, ready for one last trick from within the house, was whirling toward it, her machete blade catching the light.

  Charis jerked the door back, and the machete splintered into its edge. Patricia yanked the blade free, and turned back, toward Bernal. She’d realized that Charis’s move had been a decoy.

  Charis had gained Bernal a few seconds, but not enough. Patricia’s face was expressionless as she faced him with the blade. She gave no sign of knowing who he was, or caring. She seemed to be looking past him to something else, as if she had already disposed of him.

  The headtaker hummed on the tailgate of Spillvagen’s car. It was on, waiting to receive the heads, but nothing was going into it now. Not even Muriel. Bernal caught a glimpse of Spillvagen in the back of the tow truck, where a dull metal cylinder lay strapped to the ridged bed, surrounded by cables. Hesketh. Hesketh itself.

  Bernal grabbed at the heavy welded flange as he went by it. The massive headtaker resisted for a moment, but then slid off the tailgate and onto the concrete floor.

  It bounced with an astonishingly loud thunk. Then, as Spillvagen had predicted, a weld popped, liquid nitrogen sprayed out, and frozen mist filled the air. In an instant, nothing was visible but white.

  Bernal threw himself at Patricia. She had been expecting him to dodge the machete, like a sensible person, and wasn’t ready for a straight attack. His shoulder caught her and smashed her back against the shelves. Oil cans and car parts rang on the floor. The machete’s handle jabbed his back. He thought she lost her grip on it, but couldn’t hear it hit the floor above everything else.

  He tried to push her back again, but she twisted and slipped from his grasp, and he smacked his head on the shelf. He stumbled, then dove through the flaring pain, and threw himself after her.