"I suppose it's illegal or something."
"Oh, yes, definitely." He laughed.
"Tell me where to meet you!" she demanded.
And so he had; and early the next morning she had driven out to DuPage County Airport and taken the Lear herself. It took her a little over two hours to get to North Conway, New Hampshire, from northern Illinois, since she had to detour around some bad weather over Buffalo. But when she touched down at White Mountain Airport she found bright sunshine, fresh powder, and a throng of like-minded ski nuts overflowing the resort town, all determined to await Gabriel's trump schussing their brains out. There were no rental cars to be had, but she coerced the young man at the Hertz office into giving her the keys of his own nifty little BMW sports coupe. Then she drove north to Wildcat Mountain, where she spent what was left of the day and the early evening warming up her muscles on the rather modest slopes of Upper Lynx and Lower Catapult, all the while eyeing the real challenge that loomed to the west, dazzling in its deepest snow-cover in decades.
Could they get up there without a chopper? He'd said they could, in spite of the fact that it was deadly dangerous as well as prohibited. That, of course, made it perfect.
Along about seven she was ravenous so she drove down to Jackson, to a well-known country inn on the Thorn Hill Road. There she dined alone on lobster bisque, a salad of spinach, endive, and red onions with mustard-vinaigrette dressing, veal scallops with black mushrooms and cognac sauce, potatoes rösti, and steamed baby green beans. She drank a single glass of a fine Souveraine California Cabernet and left the rest (to the scandal of the host), and finished with a pumpkin-pecan tartlet and a pony of calvados.
Then it was time to meet Victor Remillard.
Following his instructions, she drove to the deserted parking lot of the Mount Washington Carriage Road. Its gate was open and she turned off her headlights and went in, following a plowed track through very deep snow that was sometimes drifted higher than the roof of her car. The sky to the south had a warm glow from the lighted slopes at Wildcat, three kilometers away, but aside from that the only illumination was from starlight. The moon, four days past its full, had not yet risen above the eastern heights. Near a deserted ticket-taker's shack was a cleared space where a peculiar vehicle was parked. It looked like a boxy van precariously perched above four very wide tractor treads. She parked beside it and studied it with fascination.
Only a few minutes passed before he came, driving a big four-wheeler that he slewed around smartly, throwing up a plume of snow that glittered under the stars. He parked a few meters away, then got out and came crunching toward her. Pulling up her hood and slipping on her gloves, she stepped out of the BMW and went to meet him.
Shannon O'Connor I presume.
Victor Remillard ... I know.
Hey good screen!
And yours.
Lots to hide?
Haven't you?
Touché.
Pas du tout.
Ready fun?
Believe it.
Good sky.
No wind.
Headwall powder!
Super!
PK OK?
?? Yes. ??
Homing.
Not in SnoGo?
UPonlyDOWNXC.
Oo!
Treeslalom.
Ace hi!
Mogulbomber?
Yo!
Aerials too?
Only 720&Möebius!
!Hotdog!
!Hotdog hotdamn hotdog hotdamn hotdog!
Nightvision?
And deepvision
Hardhat?
Wired for stereo.
Torches X 2?
Mg fusees!!
Épatant!
Ready when you are.
Marchons!
Sure you can drive this thing?
No hands babe!
I'm valuable.
To Papa!
Not you?
We'll see.
LET'S GO!
So they were off in a roar of monster twin diesels, charging up the famous road leading to the summit of Mount Washington. But they weren't going to the top; they were going, by ingenious and unlawful routes, to the lip of the Headwall of Tuckerman Ravine, a steep glacial cirque that had been scooped into the southeastern flank of the peak during the past ice age. The ravine was a natural trap for snow blasted off the Presidential Range by the hurricane winds of the region. In this final winter of the Second Millennium, one of the coldest and stormiest in decades, the vast bowl of Tuckerman Ravine was filled with snow more than twenty-five meters deep. People normally skied Tuckerman in the spring, when most of the snow in the country surrounding it had melted and it was possible to hike up through the woods from Pinkham Notch to the Hermit Lake camping shelters on the ravine floor. The only way to get to the Headwall from Hermit was to slog with your skis on your back—up and up and up. At the rim of the declivity—if you got that far on the fifty-five-degree slope—you skied down. The great challenge was to schuss, to ski straight to the bottom. The feat had last been accomplished by Toni Matt in 1939. Once down the Headwall, it was possible to take the precipitous Sherburne Ski Trail back to the Notch and the highway. In the dead of winter, however, nobody skied Tuckerman Ravine. The powder was bottomless and the scene magnificent, but the upper reaches of the mountain were off-limits to the public. It was deadly up there, with some of the fiercest winter weather on Earth.
But not on that New Millennium's Eve.
"Did you lay on the Sno-Crawler just for me?" Shannon asked.
"Not on your life. It belongs to the contractor who services the weather observatory and the TV and microwave transmitters on the summit. During the winter the Carriage Road is closed halfway up and unplowed. Once a week this crawler goes up with supplies and the relief crew."
"And you can just hop into the thing and make free with it whenever you fancy a little jaunt?"
He laughed. "Not by a damn sight. But I have my methods."
They sat side by side in bucket seats, strapped in with sturdy web harnesses. Shannon had erected her heaviest mental screen, the dual-layer one with the false substrate that she used to defeat her father's probing. Victor had made a perfunctory stab at it during their initial encounter, then backed off; but she could still feel the searing power of him, like a searchlight held at steady focus against a window blind; and when they had faced each other in the dark parking lot she had seen his ghostly aura—vermilion laced with steely flashes of blue, the colors of potency and danger.
Inside the surging vehicle, studying the electronic displays on its console, Victor Remillard hardly seemed to be the black mental menace her father had described. His bare head was a mass of tight dark curls. He wore a one-piece Thermatron ski-suit with all the high-tech options—temperature control, spot massage, com-unit, stereo sound-surround, and locator beacon—ready for anything. (But she wore her old red North Face jacket and pants with the Ski Patrol patch from Snowbird! One up.)
She said, "My father's off in Vienna, where the Third Millennium has already come. He and his plutocratic friends are at a fancy-dress ball like the last act of some Strauss operetta. Next week he takes control of the Dione satellite-engineering consortium—the one that's to build the European section of Zap-Star."
"Nice for him."
"I'm to be its nominal CEO."
"Nice for you."
"Daddy expects me to be a figurehead." She smiled, letting just a bit of her supposed scheme to seize control of the consortium seep beneath the margin of her outermost screen. Victor jumped on it, just as she knew he would, and crashed the frangible barrier for a thorough scan of what lay behind. He was sure that he'd laid her mind wide open—just as her father was always sure. But Shannon's true self was secure behind the secondary shield, letting the intruder see only what she permitted him to; and as Victor sorted through what he believed were the plans and dreams of Kieran O'Connor's daughter, he himself lay vulnerable to her ... and she entered softl
y.
God—he was strong! By no means as intelligent and demonic as her father, and with ambitions predictably narrow in scope. But what a coercer, and what brutal unformed creativity was there, waiting only to be molded and directed! He would do. Oh, yes, he would do.
She finished her lightning penetration long before his scan was complete. He had noticed nothing, and when he finally withdrew, smiling in a patronizing way at her callow scheme to rule the consortium, she simulated dismay at the mental violation and then pretended to sulk.
"You'll have to do a lot better than that if you expect to put one over on your old man."
She let him wait, repaired outer barrier back in place, and then said, "I suppose you could think of a better plan."
"I might." His eyes were fixed on the snow-depth-and-density monitor and he throttled back. They had passed the dark bulk of the shuttered Halfway House and come into the open. There were great drifts blocking the way now, some of them six meters high. Victor studied their contour and composition and the nature of the rocky terrain buried beneath them, then geared down to clamber over. An unsecured boot-bag tumbled toward the rear of the cabin as they ascended a steep incline, zigzagged, then came back more or less to horizontal and proceeded up the invisible road.
Shannon said, "Nicely done ... So my little plots interest you, do they? I thought you wanted to form an alliance with my father. You could report my contemplated subversion to him, you know, and score."
"Perhaps I'm playing an altogether different game. Just like you."
The powerful headlights of the Sno-Crawler lit a hairpin section of the way that doubled back along a precipice skirting the Great Gulf, another big cirque on the north side of the mountain. They had passed above the tree line now, but rime-coated scrub decorated the crags and sparkled as though it were coated with sugar. Victor accelerated, conquered a small avalanche fall, and headed up the icy Five-Mile Grade, an exposed section that had been swept clear of loose snow by the nor'easter winds. Tonight the air was still. Victor punched a control button deploying the tread spikes and the crawler chewed its way upward.
Shannon said, "My father thinks he has control of my mind. My loyalties. From the very beginning, he's used this—this technique to bond his associates to him irrevocably."
"It's pretty obvious the technique didn't work on you."
"It does when I'm with him. Then I'm like all the others, under his spell... Even at other times I can belong to him. When I'm lonely and afraid of myself and everything else and want it all to end, then I'm caught in his vision of the Absolute, and I know Daddy's way is the only way that makes sense... But then he loosens his hold. Perhaps he's too caught up in other things to bother with the little satellite minds orbiting him and worshiping ... And I remember how he bound me. The fire racing up my spine and exploding my senses and burning my resistance to ashes. It should have taken—the bonding. But it didn't, not fully. I think Daddy may have been inhibited because I was his daughter, and his will didn't finalize the personality conjunction. It took me a long time to remember. To know why my own world had died along with the honest love—daughter's love—I had felt for him. Now, when I love him, he's not my father. When I'm myself, and I know who he is and what he did to me, I hate him."
The sudden explosion of approval—of kinship—that escaped him was a profound shock to her and a revelation. He said, "Hate. That's your antidote. Mine, too. But I've known it forever."
She had the ski gloves in her lap and she pulled each finger carefully, straightening it, before rolling the gloves and tucking them into her jacket. "He'll try to bond you, too. It's the only way he'll allow operants to be associated with him."
Victor let out a harsh bark of laughter. "Y a pas de danger!...Or as you micks might say—in a pig's eye! I'd like to see him break into my skull—"
"He doesn't. That's not his way at all. He makes us love him. With those who aren't—aren't naturally inclined to accept him, he uses a hypnagogic drug to weaken their psychic defenses, then seduces them. If the person recognizes what's being done, he kills them. He's killed one hundred and eighty-three natural operants and bonded forty-six. He finds most suitable ones when they commit certain crimes. Scams. Conspiracies. There's a kind of suboperant signature that he recognizes. The people themselves don't realize that they have the powers. In the seduction, he shows them what they can be, with his help. It's wonderful. That's why we'll do anything for him, commit any atrocity. The man who assassinated the Russian Premier and the Grand Mufti of Central Asia was one of his. Daddy has a lot of reasons for wanting to foment war. His Zap-Star satellite defense system needs concrete global villains as targets—not just scattered groups of Islamic hotheads."
"He's got it right," Victor conceded. His knuckles tightened on the wheel as the vehicle entered the Cutoff Track, bypassing another notch that was full of deeply drifted snow. "He's done a damn good job consolidating power. My operation is small potatoes in comparison. But it won't stay that way."
"If you oppose him directly," Shannon said, "he'll kill you. If you try to join him, you'll end as I have. Bound."
He was silent for several minutes, guiding the big machine through a chaos of compacted white ice blocks. Despite the strut suspension that dampened the worst of the lurching, the cabin bounced and tilted and flung its occupants against their seat harnesses like rag dolls until they finally exited the Cutoff and came back onto the buried Carriage Road proper.
Victor said, "They all want to bind us, Shannon. Starting with our parents, of course, at the very beginning. They say they love us and then make conditions. They try to hold us back, to keep us from climbing above their own puny level. They want to live through us—on us!—like some kind of psychic vampires. That's what love is. At least your father's version makes no bones about it."
"I never thought about it that way."
"Well, start. Your unconscious mind knew and you started to hate and you started to free yourself. I've always hated them all and I've never been bound. I take the little empty ones and use them, and crush the mind-fucking lovers. I'll crush your father someday, and my brother Denis, who's even worse."
"Daddy'll get you if you let him near you. I know what your scheme is. You think you can marry me and hold him off long enough to take what he has. But you won't be able to help yourself. I can sense it in your soul. The—the attraction. Daddy wouldn't have to drug you. You'd find him irresistible."
He was scowling, punching up snow-depth read-outs as the vehicle crept through looming blue-white corridors. "Maybe I'd bond him to mel Suppose you tell me just how he works it."
Shannon opened her mind instead and showed him.
Merde et contremerde! Loathing spilled from Victor's mind before he sealed off.
She said: The bliss of it and the welcome pain are long gone and now the Absolute is formless and dry and all that drives me is the need to bring him down to take the power away and have him know that I did and for that I need your cooperation.
Victor swore again in French. He superimposed the snow-condition analog on the true-terrain display and discovered that the blip of the crawler was off-course. Somewhere they had missed the Alpine Garden Link just above the Six-Mile Post of the road. It was only a simple hiker's track cutting in a southerly direction across the windswept upper shoulder of the mountain. The crawler reversed, growled slowly backward in its own tread-prints. The headlights withdrawing made the snow-plastered crags seem weirdly artificial, like stage sets fading out.
Shannon said: You must help me. I warned you in time. I saved you from him.
Shut up! Let me think!
He saw the way on the right, rough as hell but open, along a gentle slope below Nelson Crag. He began to smile, retracted the ice-spikes, and deployed the flanges. The Sno-Crawler roared as he gunned the engine. "Only two kilometers left to go ... Tell me: how much is your old man really worth?"
"I don't know. I doubt that he does. He controls more than a hundred big corporation
s, a TV network, two airlines, a major oil company, five big aerospace contractors—and that's only in North America. He has links to conglomerates in Europe, Japan, and Korea."
"What about this political thing? Does he really control the Republican Party?"
"Not the whole thing. That'd be impossible—even for him. He does own four Senators and nineteen Representatives from key states. The politicians aren't operants, of course. Some are bought and paid for, some know they're the tools of special interest but don't realize that their strings are pulled by Daddy, and a few believe they've managed to retain their integrity even though they've accepted Daddy's help. Like the President of the United States."
"President Piccolomini? My ass!"
"President Baumgartner. He'll win the Millennial election next fall. Daddy's troupe of media consultants and PR hotshots and political-action committee fronts have it all worked out. Baumgartner is a forceful spokesman for law and order. He's hawkish on the Arab countries that have cut off our petroleum supplies and he's wary of Russia and China. He's willing to accept Daddy's antioperant strategy in order to exploit the backlash against President Pic. You know how antsy the normals have been getting, worrying about operants turning into thought police and that kind of malarky. The Sons of Earth thing was started deliberately in this country by Daddy's agents just to work up tensions for the upcoming election."
"Your old man is antioperant? I don't get it."
"Daddy sees Pic's Brain Trust and all the public-spirited operants as a personal threat. And they are, Victor. If there is ever any organized metapyschic education program in this country and operants become numerous and powerful, Daddy is bound to be exposed as an operant himself. A maverick one. He'll be ruined. Not financially—he's beyond that. But his edge will be lost. His source of power."
They drove on and on, over a surface that was now much smoother, tumbled granite rubble almost completely buried in deep, crusted snow, and wind-scoured slabs of rock that had been planed by the ice-age glaciers. In the hollows and in the lee of the occasional crag were drifts. Glittering spicules of ice danced in the crawler's headlights. On their left, the whiteness fell away to black and they began to skirt the top of Tuckerman Ravine at last. They could see the Headwall itself, a precipitous apron of untouched silver under the waning moon, which had risen above the crest of Wildcat and Carter Dome.
INTERVENTION Page 55
