Memory Blank

by John Stith

  Leroy tugged at his collar. “I don’t understand. Why were you chasing him?”

  “You don’t understand? I’m surprised at you, Leroy. I thought it would be obvious to you.”

  “What are you talking about? If you’re going to talk crazy, I’m leaving. Maybe Tom’s death has affected you more than you realize.”

  “It certainly affected me more than I realized it would,” Cal said carefully.

  “Maybe you should see a doctor.”

  “I already have actually. He helped me in a couple of ways.”

  “You keep talking in riddles. What’s the problem?”

  “Okay. No more riddles. Just some clear, solid observations. I know what you’re up to, Leroy.” Cal had been about to threaten him with the police, but suddenly saw an alternative. “I want a cut.”

  “A cut of what? What do you mean you know what I’m up to?” Leroy was even more flustered, now finding it difficult to maintain eye contact.

  “A cut of the profits,” said Cal, guessing. “I’ve got the photograph, you see.”

  “Photograph?”

  “It’s a passable picture of me, taken outside the Vittoria office building. Do I need to say more?”

  “You sure do. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I found it in Fargo Edmund’s apartment. It was taken with your wristcomp. And I can prove it.” Cal could prove only that Leroy had taken it, not that he had found it at Edmund’s, but there was no use burdening Leroy with too much information.

  “Cal, I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Leroy’s body language disagreed with his speech. He slumped now, hand on his chin. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

  Cal didn’t argue the point immediately, because Leroy’s drink arrived in the hands of another waiter.

  Cal paid little attention to the large man until he laid a fresh napkin in front of him. “I didn’t order a—”

  “Compliments of the house,” the waiter said, pointing with his finger at the napkin. Only then did Cal realize there was a message written on the napkin. Suddenly chilled, he leaned forward to read it.

  The note said, “If your wristcomp’s on, turn it off now, or we’ll kill you now. Believe it.”

  Cal cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Good-bye, Vincent,” he said in as clear a voice as he could manage. A moment later he added, “Can you hear me, Vincent?”

  No answer. Had he obeyed the instruction, or had he stopped responding to convince Cal’s company that he had followed orders? Cal was afraid that he had taken the literal order.

  Fear surged within him as he looked back up to the man who had brought Leroy’s drink. He was a stranger, powerfully built, with broad features and a humorless way of transfixing a person with his stare.

  “Listen up,” the man said. “We’re leaving here in one minute. You’re coming with us. If you flinch just a little, and make me think you’re running, I’ll take the chance. Maybe they’ll catch us, maybe not. But you won’t be around to find out if they do or not.”

  “How did he learn so much?” asked Leroy.

  “Shut up. We’ve got more to worry about now.”

  “But if he gets loose, he’ll tell everyone what happened.”

  “I said shut up. I’ve got a plan.”

  “A plan like hiring Edmund? He was only supposed to hospitalize—”

  “Shut up,” the man said through clenched teeth. He said nothing more, but Cal could easily imagine him continuing with “Or you’re going with him.”

  Leroy’s imagination obviously worked well too. He shut up.

  Absorbed with the interaction between Leroy and his friend, Cal hadn’t noticed the small gun that the man now held.

  “Get up,” the man said.

  Cal no longer had doubts about who the boss was. He directed his next question to the large man. “What if I don’t?”

  “Then you never do. I’ll kill you right here.”

  “That’s the problem with having too much curiosity,” Cal said, trying to disguise his nervousness. He rose. “Other than that, why should I go with you? You’ll just kill me somewhere else.”

  “Maybe. But this way your pretty little wife doesn’t get her arms and legs sliced off later.”

  Cal’s stomach lurched. “Okay. I’m ready to go.”

  “I thought that would persuade you. But you sure could have saved us a lot of trouble if you’d just stayed home like we asked.”

  Cal moved slowly toward the door.

  “Wait a minute,” the man said. “You’re not quite ready yet. Lean over the table, hands in the center.”

  Cal did so, and the man searched him quickly and efficiently.

  “Well, well, well. Our computer expert carries a gun. I must not have told you yet how much I don’t like surprises.”

  Cal was straightening up when the blow hit. The man probably used Cal’s own gun to hit him.

  The impact caught him over his right ear. The explosion of pain in his head was all he was aware of for an agonizing moment. He eventually realized he had fallen onto the floor. He pulled himself to his feet, listening to the blood pound in his heart and hearing Leroy’s objections silenced by the other man. The man gave Cal’s gun to Leroy.

  “Just trying to prevent future communications problems,” the man said when Cal had made it to his feet. “I don’t want you to do anything except come with us peacefully, and make no funny moves. You do, and your wife gets it later, and you get it right away. Is all that clear?”

  “Perfectly.” Cal no longer noticed his churning stomach for the pain in his head.

  “Okay then. Stand up straight. Look happy.”

  Cal tried to smile.

  “Never mind. That’s worse.”

  They opened the door and walked into the hall. Leroy was at Cal’s side, and his partner followed, no doubt with his gun concealed but ready. Cal couldn’t afford to do anything unless it had almost guaranteed success. He couldn’t risk doubting the man’s word about what would happen to Nikki.

  Nikki. He clung to the hope that Vincent had kept transmitting, but that hope was fading. No police had arrived on the scene. The main room looked just as before, with people talking and milling around.

  Cal walked at Leroy’s side, looking for a familiar face in the crowd, but not knowing what he would do if he saw one. If it weren’t for Leroy’s partner’s threat, he could have tried to escape into the throng. Surely they wouldn’t fire on him in here.

  Too quickly they reached the exit. The sweat on Cal’s head began to cool and evaporate once they were outside.

  “You were great,” said the man. “Maybe that wife of yours will live a long life.”

  Cal said nothing.

  “This way,” the man said, indicating the direction by jamming his gun against Cal’s ribs.

  “There’s no need for that kind of talk now that we’re outside,” Leroy said, breaking his long silence.

  They walked along the terrace. Few other people were close, and Leroy kept his voice low.

  “Who are you to object?” his partner asked.

  “Damn it, Dave. This is all getting out of hand. It was never supposed to be like this.”

  “Shut up and keep walking.”

  Cal felt new shivers up his spine as he realized that Dave, if that were his real name, didn’t object to being partially identified. The shivers intensified when he recalled that Michelle’s database had said Leroy’s partner was a man named David Ledbetter.

  With a minimum of conversation, they boarded a tube car and rode to the south pole. Cal kept watch for the right opportunity, but none came. Shortly they boarded a shuttle.

  Cal wondered why they were taking him to Vittoria, but his curiosity was soon changed to a deep, gut-twisting fear.

  Dave closed the overhead entry but then touched a control panel. Cal knew without being told that the man had prevented the shuttle from being released yet.

  Dave looked out the window for a moment witho
ut talking. Then he moved his gaze from the view of Daedalus, put the gun in his belt behind his back, and turned to face Cal.

  Briefly he inspected Cal. Cal had started to wonder what would happen next when, with no warning, Dave hit him squarely in the solar plexus, hard.

  Cal’s view went black as he closed his eyes against the pain. The man’s fist felt as if a pole vaulter’s rod had rammed into Cal’s stomach. Cal gasped for breath. His body bent under the force of the blow. Just as he began to think about how lucky it was that he hadn’t eaten a large meal recently, Dave hit him again.

  Dave’s fist caught Cal solidly on the side of the jaw. Cal was fleetingly aware of Leroy’s protests, but his head felt as if someone had exploded a large firecracker in his mouth and had another one buried in the back of his skull.

  But Dave didn’t stop there. He hit several more times, past the point at which Cal quit counting.

  Cal must have lost consciousness for a brief period, because he found himself crumpled on the floor, hard metal below his chin. There was a sharp, salty taste in Cal’s mouth. Leroy and Dave were arguing. Cal kept his eyes closed.

  “…didn’t have to do that,” said Leroy.

  “Listen, Leroy. We’ve got to find out exactly how much he knows, and fast. If you’ve got a better way, get it out.”

  “There have to be drugs to do that.”

  “Well, excuse me. I didn’t have time to visit someone who’d furnish fancy drugs for a price. Besides, this way is more rewarding.”

  Cal would have stayed quiet, but his rib cage hurt so intensely, he tried to shift his weight to reduce the sharp pain. The motion was detected.

  “Help me get him onto a seat,” Dave said.

  The agony in Cal’s ribs doubled as the two men lifted him by his arms to maneuver him. His body was flopped onto a chair, and his head snapped back against the bulkhead. Again he felt on the verge of throwing up.

  “Okay, Mr. Donley,” said Dave. “We’re going to ask you some questions. You can answer them quickly and correctly, and you won’t get hurt any more. I think you can figure out the other possibility.”

  “I probably could at that,” Cal said, his voice blurred.

  “See, Leroy. There’s a little life left in him. You always worry too much.”

  Leroy said nothing. He had been unusually quiet lately.

  “Okay,” Dave said. “First question. Who else knows what you know?”

  Cal shuddered. If Vincent were still transmitting, a possibility Cal was giving up on, he could tell them the truth, and they might even quit beating him. Otherwise the truth would merely let Dave track down Nikki and Michelle and kill them. If he told them no one else knew, he lost leverage, but their safety—

  Dave hit him in the stomach again. This time Cal did throw up. Unfortunately, he threw up on Dave, so the man kicked him.

  As the pain slowly receded to the point where Cal could pay attention to his surroundings again, Dave said, “I asked you to answer quickly.”

  Cal tried to spit out the answer fast enough to avoid more pain. “No one else knows.”

  “Convince me.”

  “Convince you?” Cal’s words were slurred. “Think about it. If someone else knew I was meeting Leroy to get money out of him, you think you would have been able to get me here?”

  This time Dave slapped him hard on the cheek. Cal’s head felt like it was going to come off.

  “Let’s try that again. I know damn well you weren’t trying to get money out of Leroy. You wouldn’t go in for blackmail.”

  “I appreciate your confidence in me,” Cal said heavily. “I wanted to find out why.”

  “If you don’t know why, you don’t know much. How did you find Edmund?”

  Cal tried to find a lie that wouldn’t point back to Michelle. “I tapped into the master file of pictures of everyone alive and ran an image comparison program until I narrowed it down. Then I went calling. I’m a computer expert, remember?”

  Dave thought for a moment, then seemed to accept the answer. “How did you trace him to Leroy? Not that I’m implying that part must have been particularly hard.”

  The truth would work this time. “I found a picture of me in Edmund’s apartment—”

  “What were you doing in his apartment?”

  “I went there after he fell off the terrace. So I found this picture. And it had been taken with a wristcomp. A wristcomp with some defects in the video. I started calling anyone I could think of who might have had a reason to hurt me.”

  “So you called Leroy.”

  “Right. They matched.”

  “How’d you think you could get away with that alone?”

  “I had a gun, remember?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Why?” Cal repeated.

  “Why’d you call Leroy. What made you think it might be him?”

  “No good reason. I wondered why he’d seemed nervous during the test the other day.”

  “That’s all?” Dave glared at Cal. Then he turned to Leroy and said, “Damn, but you’re dumb.”

  “There was a little more,” said Cal. “During the test I witnessed, the picture faded for just a moment.”

  Dave rubbed his chin. The big man towered over Cal. “Maybe we did the right thing after all. You hadn’t suspected anything earlier?”

  “No,” Cal said. It was getting harder to talk, because his jaw was becoming stiff, but he tried one more time to get information out of them. “How much are you guys going to make off this deal?”

  “Enough.”

  Maybe the direct approach would work. “Damn it,” said Cal with a tongue that almost refused to obey. “What the hell did you do?”

  “You don’t even know that much?” Dave turned to Leroy, and glared at him again. “We made some economies in the communications gear. Vittoria doesn’t really need it, and Tolbor wasn’t watching too carefully, so we eliminated a few of the backups.”

  “So the image fading was just an indication that reliability was low?”

  “I think we’ve wasted enough time here,” said Dave, ignoring Cal’s question. “Leroy, get two suits out of the locker.”

  Cal’s remaining strength started to fade. He hadn’t paid much attention to the suit locker on his past trips. Another thing he hadn’t thought about much was the emergency door at the rear of the shuttle.

  Cal had always been good at math. Despite his fatigue and the throbbing pain, he could easily see that three men, two suits, and one emergency exit left almost zero hope.

  CHAPTER 16

  Hurdle

  Cal shuddered, pulling himself upright in the shuttle seat. He tried to convince himself that Dave wouldn’t throw him out the emergency exit.

  “Don’t move,” commanded Dave. “Hurry it up with those suits, Leroy.”

  Cal’s thoughts snapped back to Nikki and Michelle. If only he could use the threat of someone else’s knowledge to avoid being thrown out the emergency exit. But telling Dave would be like ordering their execution.

  But he had to do something. Cal searched the possibilities. He had no chance, in his current condition, of overpowering Dave.

  “What’s the slow-up?” Dave yelled at Leroy. Leroy still hadn’t got the suits out.

  “Just a minute,” Leroy said. “I need to think. There’s got to be some other way.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Some other way of dealing with Cal. To kill him—”

  “We have no choice, you idiot. If he’s alive, he can find us. And he can protect his wife if he has enough time. This isn’t some eighteenth-century swashbuckler. We can’t just disappear. You heard how he found Edmund. There’s no choice.”

  “Just a minute,” Leroy repeated.

  Cal saw the opportunity and tried to capitalize on it. “You’ll get caught sooner or later anyway, Leroy. You can claim that the times Edmund tried to kill me were due to his misunderstanding. If you’re here when your partner throws me out, you don’t have
a chance.”

  “Shut up,” Dave said. He said it a lot.

  “I left a disposition with the bank computer. It’s to send it to the police if I die.”

  “You’re lying,” Dave said. “You would have mentioned it before.”

  “Until now, I didn’t think you were going to kill me. And surely somebody will remember seeing us together at the bar.”

  “He’s right, Dave,” said Leroy, still not reaching for the suits.

  “Damn it, he’s lying, trying to make you think we’ll get caught.”

  “I still don’t want to kill anyone.”

  “You’re not going to. We’ll both be in suits, and our friend here will just be a little slow getting into his. I’ll open the door.”

  “You’ll be just as guilty,” Cal said.

  “Shut up,” Dave said.

  “Leroy,” Cal called. “You’ve got my gun. You can do something to correct all this. Edmund tried deliberately to murder me three times, obviously at Dave’s request. He’s the guilty one. Your only offense is—”

  “Shut up,” Dave shouted one more time. But this time he didn’t wait to see if Cal would obey. He punched Cal again, three quick, hard, vicious punches.

  Cal was sure he felt a rib crack. His breath was gone. He couldn’t talk.

  “Give me the gun, Leroy,” Dave said. Obviously Leroy’s delays were not lost on Dave.

  With blurred vision, Cal saw Dave approach Leroy slowly, gun pointing toward him.

  Cal fought to get his breath back. In the last instant before Dave reached Leroy, Cal snapped a cushion loose from its resting place and hurled it at Dave.

  Several things seemed to happen all at once.

  Dave whirled to see the cause of whatever had hit his back. It took him a fraction of a second before he assessed Cal’s action, obviously dismissed it, and turned his attention back to Leroy.

  Leroy had not been idle while Dave had looked behind. He had drawn Cal’s gun.

  For an instant the two partners faced each other, guns drawn. Then, so close together that Cal couldn’t tell the true order, a high-pitched beep sounded on the shuttle intercom, and twin burning noises indicated that each man had shot the other. Maybe the intercom sound had triggered both men to fire. Maybe they would have fired anyway.