Perfect Killer

by Lewis Perdue

  "That's what you say, Officer;" Vince said.

  "What the hell's that supposed to mean, sergeant?"

  "It's their story and your word against theirs." He fell silent. Then: "Look, Doc. I know you did some classified work before. And if this is connected, you'll need to sort it out."

  "This has nothing to do with my past life and everything to do with Vanessa Thompson's killing."

  "Uh-huh. They have a different story. And firepower to make their version stick." He turned right on Olympic. "Not that I believe a word of it, which is why I am telling you what they told me not to. It's not a lot, mostly what Chris pulled together before the chopper arrived—that the people you killed were from an elite unit attached to the Army Technical Escort Unit, which is a one-of-a-kind, battalion-level organization headquartered at the Edgewood facility at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. They were reorganized a while back into something called the Guardian Brigade, and when that happened, some of their command structure went covert and untraceable. They're all good soldiers is my understanding, but the covert part of things offers some opportunities for abuse, especially those who're supposed to be secretly supporting Homeland Security operations.

  "In the words of the tight-assed colonel who did all the speaking, most of their missions are 'no notice, hazardous, and classified.' which means no damn thing to me. Does it to you?"

  It did. Dread gathered in my gut. "What else?"

  "Nothing, unless Chris has something."

  We drove the rest of the way in silence, up Westwood Boulevard, past the medical school and right toward my lab's entrance, where Vince stopped at the curb.

  "Watch your back. These guys may be assholes, but they're powerful, dangerous assholes and they're holding enough cards to make you play whatever game they want."

  "They think." I got out.

  "No hero stuff," Vince said. "What you're doing in there means a lot more to the world than you getting killed." He paused. "Call me if you need help."

  "Thanks, Vince," I said. "I will."

  CHAPTER 25

  Former general and president-to-be Clark Braxton held the telephone handset to his ear and struggled with the hot and ready rage seething in his guts. He glared at the night-mirrored windows in his private study, watching the anger play across his face, But when he spoke, his voice carried the cool, even authority of command.

  "Colonel, I comprehend the situation report, but I hope you realize what a bind the events of this evening puts you in." Braxton emphasized the you and allowed himself a thin smile in the ensuing silence. The colonel was one of an elite corps of devoted loyalists on active duty who owed their lives or careers—or both—to him. Obedience to Braxton outranked other loyalties and commitments because they believed only Clark Braxton's presidency could save the United States.

  "Of course, sir. I fully recognize the gravity, which is why we've moved as quickly to neutralize the consequences and collateral damage. With all the military and Special Forces exercises we perform out here in the West, law enforcement cooperates with us pretty well."

  "Law enforcement's not the concern," Braxton said. "Stone's a natural twopercenter."

  "Yes, sir. I've reviewed his record, active-duty and his covert service. He's unusually capable."

  "Better than six of your elite so far."

  Braxton let the awkward silence work on the colonel.

  "Sir—uh, we ... well, I have an operational situation."

  Braxton said nothing.

  "Sir?"

  "Go on."

  "Sir, I've committed as many of my resources as I have for this operation. I, uh .. I've got quite a mess to clean up. Mounting another operation now would produce issues I would not be able to successfully contain."

  Braxton watched the second hand of his Rolex sweep smoothly through another ten seconds of silence.

  "I understand your predicament and appreciate the effort and risk you have undertaken," Braxton said finally, his voice calibrated with firm, sympathetic authority. "You contain things there. I may be able to help."

  Braxton smiled broadly as the colonel exhaled a faint shudder of relief.

  "I will contact a combat-tested operative I already have on the ground," Braxton continued. "I want you to go back to the sheriff and to the LAPD. Just you. Find some politically ambitious blabbermouth way up in the chain of command. Meet them at a coffee shop or some other neutral territory. Before you go, shape Stone's record to fit what I am about to tell you. Make sure you give them a hard copy with all the right classified stamps on it so it'll have maximum credibility when they leak it to the press. You with me so far?"

  "Yes, sir. It might take a little time to create the document, set up the meeting."

  "Make it fast. Now listen carefully, this is what you're going to tell them."

  CHAPTER 26

  As I made my way out of the stairwell on the fourth floor and down the polished linoleum-tiled corridor, Sonia Braverman, all of four foot eleven, and maybe a hundred pounds on a heavy day, stepped out of the break room in front of me. She wore one of those dark faux-silk dresses with the tiny, light print and the matching belt that women of a certain era like so much. Sonia served as my office manager, as she had for many previous directors of Neurosurgery. She was way past retirement age, but I didn't mind the annual bureaucratic torture trial to keep her there. Sonia looked at me for several moments before the recognition dawned in her eyes.

  "Dr. Stone! Just look at you!" She scanned me up and down more thoroughly than an MRI. "Oy!" For her, that syllable had about a hundred shades of meaning. I understood about seventy-seven of those meanings and was all too familiar with this particular one. I was busted.

  "For a brilliant man you have no sense at all, not a bit." Sonia's voice carried a high-pitched timbre, something like that of a songbird raised in Queens. "Look at you! Getting shot at and having your boat sink out from under you? Oy! You know what that does to the people who care

  about you? My hiatial hernia flared up with the television news this

  morning, and you know what that does to me. This dangling from heli

  copters, you have got to stop! And walking around with a loaded gun

  and boating around at all hours of the night and dragging in here for

  work looking like a derelict and smelling twice as bad." She finally

  paused.

  "Just look at you!" She shook her head. "What I am going to do with you I do not know. You will never live to be an alter kocker if you keep on like this!"

  Sonia herded me toward my office.

  "Your face is all sleepy. And that ear!" Then Sonia shifted her voice from surrogate Jewish mother to efficient scheduler and office boss.

  "You have a busy day already. In addition to your appointments this morning, you promised to lecture to that visiting group of postdocs from Toronto, and your friend at Pacific Hills has a conflict with your usual weekly appointment and needs to do this afternoon instead. I've cleared your schedule already for that."

  The mention of Camilla's extended-care facility northwest of Malibu took my breath away as I realized that I had thought of her so seldom in the past twelve hours, mostly not at all. I had once believed that our souls had touched and that we represented something eternal.

  In the six years since the accident, I had danced around the naïveté of that belief, uncomfortable with its significance and unwilling to let it go. And while the orbits of my life had become eccentric over the years since—drawing me nearer to her at some times and farther at others—she maintained her gravitational hold on my heart and kept my emotions circling around her.

  "Let's get you some sleep," Sonia said. "I'll reschedule your morning appointments and cancel the lecture."

  I shook my head as I walked through the reception area. "Only the morning. I'll be okay after a couple hours sleep."

  She tsked her partial approval as I shuffled through my office toward the door to a small room I called home when I worke
d late at the lab. I stopped with one hand on the doorknob.

  "Can you make sure I am up by eleven?"

  "We'll see."

  "Yes, ma'am." I turned around and went through the door, closing it softly behind me.

  I sagged onto the folding cot and fell asleep with my clothes on.

  In the gray half-world we transit before sleep takes us, I thought about Camilla and who she was, who I was, and how Jasmine threatened that.

  It struck me then that we can never be who we are because the actual moment of being in the present is an infinitely small moment sandwiched between the constantly shifting memories of who we have been and the thoughts and fantasies of who we will be. My research, and that of many others, indicated that consciousness perceives events in the world about one-fifth of a second after they have actually happened. That means any time we think of the present, we are already looking at the past. The reality we perceive never coincides with the reality that exists.

  Who we are is never the same from instant to instant because the present we perceive is continually reshaped by the past. Thus our hopes and dreams for the future propel us through an illusory present to a fourth state of time: our state of being that is simultaneously neither past nor present nor future and yet all of those combined. It had something to do with space-time, which made me wonder if that had anything to do with the soul and where Camilla's mind lived.

  Camilla had no future in this world; no one had ever recovered from her level of profound brain injuries. While she occupied a physical presence in the present that I perceived, her brain showed no indication of consciousness or directed neurological activity above the brain stem, which indicated she lacked a present of her own.

  I often worried if an internal life played in her head beyond our scientific ability to detect it. Physicians not so long ago lacked the instruments to detect brain waves, which made me realize that merely because we failed to detect something did not prove its absence. I fell deeply asleep then, wondering what this meant. And whether it meant any damn thing at all.

  CHAPTER 27

  My fine, dreamless sleep ended with Robert Johnson's raspy voice and gifted guitar.

  I tried to ignore it, but "Crossroads Blues" persisted. Finally I woke up enough to recognize it as my iPhone. I grabbed it as the song stopped, read the display, saw it was shortly before 11:00 A.M., and watched the voice-mail indicator blink at the bottom.

  The canvas-and-wood folding cot creaked as I sat up, rubbed at the fatigue on my face. As I stood, my muscles and joints painfully reminded me that, even though I was in damn good shape for a guy on the upside of fifty, the unaccustomed gymnastics of staying alive had carved a load of new aches into my body. I stretched everything to the pain limit and found nothing indicating serious injury.

  Only then did I shuffle over to the coffeemaker near the shower. Bless Sonia, I thought as I flipped on the switch. She had filled it up ready to go. While the coffee brewed, I shaved, then stumbled into the shower to see if the stinging-hot water could jump-start my brain. By the time I got out and toweled off, my cell phone went off again. I picked it up, recognized the same number, and answered it.

  "Stone."

  "Brad! Sorry to be so persistent, but I thought you would want to know you received a wire transfer a few minutes ago for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars." The voice belonged to Juan Hernandez, president of Simi First Bank, a small, solid, and profitable institution run by top-quality executives who treated customers as people rather than cattle.

  "Jeez." I reached over to pour coffee into a John Deere mug.

  "You weren't expecting it?"

  I sipped at the coffee for a moment. Vince's comments about the officious colonel came to mind, the part about no report, better off without the insurance. The Jambalaya had cost me only about $100,000. I'd bought it in bad shape out of a bankruptcy, put in another $50,000, and saved a bundle by doing most of the refurbishing myself. It might have been worth $200,000 the day I finished the work, but given the depreciation since then, I doubted she would have fetched more than about $130,000 yesterday morning.

  "Uh-huh, it's the… insurance on my boat. I wasn't expecting it so quickly."

  "I caught the news. It said you were okay," Martinez said. "Did they get that right?"

  "Just bruises."

  "Good. Well, I wanted you to know the payment arrived." He paused. "Take care of yourself."

  "Doing my best." I started to say good-bye, then a thought came to me.

  "Juan, can you print out a copy of the transaction record and fax it to me? It'll remind me to deal with it when I get time."

  "Done."

  "Thanks."

  After I hung up, I turned on my laptop and worried about where the funds had actually come from. I slipped into a softly worn pair of khaki cargo pants and pulled the laundry plastic off a blue, oxford-cloth, button-down shirt. I refilled my coffee mug as I slipped on socks and my spare pair of walking shoes before settling down in front of my laptop. I felt a memory rising from unremembered dreams. These came from time to time; some might call it inspiration and others a message from the divine.

  As the ideas coalesced, I double-clicked OpenOffice and slipped a Mozart piano concerto into the laptop's CD drive. Finally I slipped on headphones and sat still, eyes closed. The music cleared my head and I began to write. Soon, everything else vanished.

  Eventually the music ended and left me looking at new words for the first time. I often felt like a conduit rather than a creator. This would make for a provocative presentation to the postdocs from Toronto.

  Sonia walked in with a grilled-cheese sandwich and a large mug of chicken soup.

  "Not to disturb you, but your postdocs will want you in about half an hour." She set lunch on the table.

  The writing spell faded and the rest of my life raced toward me: the J2 icon on my laptop screen told me Juan's fax had arrived with my e-mail; my iPhone whined its lowbattery plea; the time startled me. I looked my watch.

  "Wow!" The writing had consumed my morning and the beginning of the afternoon. An urgent rush rippled through me.

  Sonia waited until I had sampled the chicken soup before retreating from the room. I printed a hard copy of what I had written, then pulled up the fax image on-screen and tried to decipher the banking gibberish as I wolfed down lunch.

  The money came from an insurance company in the Isle of Man, asset playground for spooks, terrorists, tax evaders, and others with enough money and motivation to play international three-card monte with their cash. I had received wire transfers in my other life that had originated from places like this. I did not want that part of my past creeping up on me again.

  With time running out, I grabbed the pages from the printer and retrieved my stilldamp wallet from my shorts along with a Space pen, a small blue Leatherman tool attached to one of my old military service dog tags, and a tiny, thin LED light that shone bright blue when you squeezed the sides. I grabbed my phone and headed out with Sonia's good wishes echoing behind.

  As I rushed along the corridor, I pulled up Chris Nellis on my speed-dial list and got his answering machine.

  "Chris, I had an interesting conversation about what you found in and around the Jambalaya. Call me on my cell when you can." I left the number, hung up, and set the phone's ringer to vibrate. When I reached the enclosed bridge to the next building, I began a jog toward the conference room inside, the half dozen postdoctoral students from Toronto were sitting around a long, elliptical plastic-laminate table, drinking coffee from a variety of disposable cups. The rest of the seats around the table along with the standing room around the windowless walls were jammed with a collection of my current students I vaguely recognized but whose names I could not recall.

  The conversation lulled when I entered the room and made my way to the big white board at the front.

  "Good afternoon," I greeted them. "Before we get started, I want you to know that if today's lecture is interesting and you want m
ore, you can find my notes and other data at my Web site: ConsciousnessStudies.org." I turned and wrote the address on the white board.

  "Okay." I turned to face them. "Let's begin with a question: Did you really decide to attend this seminar today, or are you here because of some unremembered incident last year or maybe during your infancy?"

  The attendees unanimously gave me the confused stares I wanted.

  "Or maybe you're here because of some artifact lurking in your DNA?" Their befuddlement deepened.

  "Some among us today believe everything you do is predestined. These reductionists and determinists whose dogma dominate brain science today think free will is an illusion and consciousness an accidental by-product of synaptic electricity."

  A couple of the faculty members present, acolytes of the orthodox, frowned deeply at this.

  I tapped an index finger against my temple."'One hundred percent in the meatware,' they say. ‘Inspiration, meditation, right and wrong, eloquence, philosophy, do not exist; transcendence is a fantasy and everything's just the meat talking.'"

  Most heads shook their disagreement.

  "This issue transcends science because free will underpins our relationships with others and forms the philosophical foundations of law and society. Genuine accidents carry a different reaction than intentional injury or insult. Courts treat two people convicted of identical crimes very differently if one's insane or visibly, provably braindamaged.

  "Sadly, the scientific mainstream has mishandled free will. They have a vested intellectual interest in promoting politically correct science over reality, just as the Renaissance Vatican favored the religiously correct over provably factual heresy.

  "They conveniently forget Albert Einstein when he said that ‘science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.'"

  I ignored an assassinating frown from a slight man sitting toward the back of the room. The man, Jean-Claude Bouvet, had a lot to lose if I was right. A widely published author and leader of the "consciousness as meatware" movement, Bouvet was a pompous, brilliant man who received lavish research funding from large pharmaceutical companies.