Suppose you could give a blind man memories of sight. Give music to the deaf. Give entrechats to a paraplegic. Orgasms to the impotent.
Suppose the desire to know everything about your lover could be satisfied.
Suppose your need to share your own life completely with your lover could be satisfied.
Suppose a historian had access to the memories of Alger Hiss, or Richard Nixon.
Suppose politicians were required to submit to periodic memory audit.
Suppose accountants were.
Suppose you were.
Suppose a doctor could determine incontrovertibly, in a matter of hours, your innocence of a crime.
Or your guilt.
Suppose all of these things became the exclusive monopoly of anyone. Like Jacques’s monopoly on wireheading…
I opened my mouth to ask Jacques a question. I don’t remember what it would have been. A board lit up on the wall across the room, over his terminal, and he gave it instant, total attention. Almost at once he relaxed slightly, but got up from the chair nonetheless and walked to the board.
“No reason to be alarmed,” he said. He punched a few buttons, studied a readout, and nodded. “Perfectly all right. For a moment I thought we had uninvited guests, but it is only an animal. No sentience-signature in the brain waves.” He frowned. “Big animal, though. I thought—” Suddenly his voice was urgent. “Fast animal!” He punched more buttons in a great hurry, and fire erupted in the night outside through the big bay window. Laser come a-hunting. He half turned toward the window and it exploded into the room in a spray of glass, letting in fire and smoke and sudden thunder. A man came headfirst through the hole it left, rolled when he hit the floor, and came up on his feet. His gun covered all three of us, settled on Jacques.
Karen and I sat very still, sudden breeze fanning our hair.
13
1999 His eyes were brown. Black pants, turtleneck, and boots. Nightsight goggles pushed up onto his forehead. An odd headgear covered everything but his eyes. He seemed to have taken five yards of heavy-duty metal foil, painted it black, crumpled it until it was all over wrinkles, and then molded it around his head like a ski mask, in multiple layers. It distorted the shape and contours of his head. All at once I understood it.
Jacques broke the silence. “My guards?”
“I got them both.”
Jacques looked very sad. I liked his sadness. “Why are you here?”
His voice from under the foil was vaguely familiar. “I’m here to kill you, LeBlanc. And steal your magic.”
“What do you know of my magic?”
“I know everything about you. For instance, you have a weapon. Give it to me very carefully. Very slowly.”
Jacques complied.
“I’ve been tracking you for five years. And you know nothing about me.”
“On the contrary, Sergeant Amesby. I know you to be one of the finest policemen in the world.”
Amesby. The cop who had handled Maddy’s case. My mind went into passing gear.
Being recognized rocked him a little; he tried not to show it. “I’ve put five years in on you, all by myself, without letting anyone else know what I was doing, because I had some kind of notion of how important you’d turn out to be. But I’ve left records where they’ll be found in the event of my untimely death, so you daren’t kill me even if you could. And you can’t brainwipe me as long as I’m wearing this helmet. And it isn’t coming off until one of us is dead. I know all about you, LeBlanc.”
“Who am I, then?”
“You are the first genuine ruler of the world. And I’m your successor.”
Jacques burst out laughing. “You will replace me?”
“Why not? As of tonight, everything you know belongs to me.”
Jacques’s laughter chopped off short.
“Why did you happen to pick tonight?” he said at last.
“Kent, here.”
I blinked. Me, he meant.
“He’s how I got into this—him and his sister—and he’s the only part of it I never understood. What the hell he does for you that was worth all the trouble you took, I can’t for the life of me figure out, and that makes me uneasy. I did a lot of sniffing around in this neighborhood, times you were off in Switzerland and Washington and places. Mapping your security perimeters, testing the helmet, asking questions of the locals. There’s an old fart west of here used to know Kent. He was the last person to see Kent before he disappeared. He called me tonight, said he saw Kent and a woman come here, and he said Kent acted like he didn’t know him anymore. That puzzled me. I remembered a phone call I got this morning, a voice that sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it. It just didn’t add up. I had Kent figured for dead. I’ve been thinking about making my move for a couple of months now. I decided if I did it tonight I might get the only answers I haven’t got yet.”
He turned to Karen and me.
The gun was a Yamaha Disrupter, with solenoid trigger and twenty-five-round capacity. A sneezing cat makes more noise. A slingshot has more recoil. The M-40 I used in the jungle has about the same stopping power. Two guards lay dead outside, presumably good guards. He had dodged a tracking laser. I feared him.
While he was looking at us, Jacques was situated at the extreme limit of his peripheral vision. Jacques shifted his stance very slightly—experimentally? hard to say—and Amesby, without moving his eyes a millimeter, produced a second Disrupter from a back-pocket holster and drew a dead bead on Jacques’s nose.
Oh, my mind scrabbled around in my skull like a trapped rat.
Jacques had been right. This hick cop was good, was seriously dangerous. And he wanted answers I did not have and he was going to kill me if he didn’t get them. Probably even if he did. I sensed that Jacques was worried, though he hid it well, and that realization nearly panicked me. If he had no ace up his sleeve, no rabbit in the hat—
Oh, God. He did have a rabbit—he was worried that the rabbit might be foolhardy enough to take on the fox. Maddy. Something about a video feed from this room…
“All right, Norman, talk to me. How do you figure in this business? Just where the hell do you fit?”
Now, there was a question—and the clock running out. I yearned for the comfort and security of a burglar’s life.
I could see Jacques looking at me, wondering how I would play it. This was the first moment that day that I had not been under threat of instant death from Jacques, and we both knew that. If I could convince Amesby of that, maybe we could deal. I might convince him, too; I was sure he had scouted our four-wheel and seen the weapons we’d abandoned.
I think what decided me was the grief that had splashed across Jacques’s features when he heard that his two guards were dead. I knew that he was one of the best actors alive—but the sadness had been too spontaneous to be faked. He cared when his employees died.
I took my face out of neutral. I gave Amesby mild, sour amusement. A very small smile, a slight shake of the head, a suggestion of a sigh. Then I turned away from him, powering the chair around thirty degrees to face Jacques. Because of Amesby’s solenoid trigger, I wanted to do it very slowly. So I mashed the button down and whipped the chair around just as fast as it could go. Both my hands remained in sight; Amesby flinched but held fire.
“Sometimes being half smart is worse than being stupid.” I smiled wickedly at Jacques. “Who’d know better than you, eh?”
Without waiting for his reaction, I whipped the chair back to face Amesby again. His flinch was not visible this time, but I knew that was twice he had decided not to kill me. A habit to encourage. He was now conditioned to permit sudden movements in front of his eyes.
I said, “I own you or I kill you, sonny, there’s no third way. Make up your mind.”
“You own—?”
I sighed. “Look at me, jerk.”
He frowned and looked closer. The timing was important. In the split second before he got it I said, very softly, “Am I Norman Kent?”
“Jesus.” He stared. “By Jesus, you’re not! But who—”
I kept my eyes on his, held out my left hand toward Karen. “Cigarette, please,” I murmured. And bless her, she was with me, she said “Yes, sir” quite smartly, struck a cigarette, and placed it between my spread fingers as smoothly as if she were accustomed to it. It is much easier to put across aristocratic superiority if you have a cigarette to work with. It is not necessary to smoke it.
As this business ended, Amesby got his first question formulated in words and drew breath to ask it. “Shut up,” I said, with absolutely no whip-of-command in my voice. He obeyed. “You don’t know what’s going on, do you? You actually thought Le Blank here was the top man. You really thought I was Kent.” I shook my head. “I don’t know that you’re bright enough to be worth keeping. How long did you say you’d been working on this? Five years?”
He was good. He was very good. His mind must have been racing at a thousand miles an hour, but his face gave away nothing at all. I glanced at the knuckles of his gun hand and saw that he was wondering, But why can’t I just pull this trigger?
There were two places my sister could be. She could be upstairs with the video switched off, crying at the thought of her crippled baby brother down in the parlor. If so, she was safe. If not, she was standing about fifteen feet away, trying frantically to think of something. Only one door led from this room into the rest of the house. It lay well within Amesby’s field of vision. I had been observant when Jacques had come through it with his coffee cart. It opened on a long hallway, not much wider than the doorway. The doorknob was on the right. From Madeleine’s perspective it would be on the left, and the door would open toward her. She was right-handed. She could pull the door open with her left hand, wait for it to get out of her way, and fire backhand. Or she could pull the door with her right hand and try a left-handed shot. Neither was very good, against a man with one gun on her lover and another on her brother. Could I sucker his gaze away from the door? No, his instincts were too good, it would be pushing him too hard.
I knew she was there. I could feel her there. I could hear her pleading with me to come up with something. I was running out of seconds.
“I’m a layer or two from the top, sonny, and Le Blank here jumps when I say frog. If he’s all you’ve come up with after five years, I don’t think the firm will be interested in your services.” I raised my voice. “Madeleine, dear, come in here, will you?”
Everyone turned to the door, and it opened, not too fast and not too slow, and Madeleine Kent walked into the room with both hands prominently empty. Her bearing was regal. Her eyes swept the room, dismissed everything but me. I did not recognize her.
“Yes, sir?”
“Radio the ship. Tell them there will be three bodies to be picked up for disposal. Oh, and tomorrow evening I want you to order a new bay window from Halifax, and arrange for something local until it arrives.” I dropped my cigarette on Jacques’s expensive rug and trod it out. “I think that’s all.”
“Very good, sir.” She turned to go.
“Hold it right there,” Amesby snapped, his voice cracking on the last word. One of his guns tracked her, trembling just perceptibly.
She came to a gradual stop, turned slowly, and stared at him as though he were something distasteful written on a wall. His gun did not even rate a glance. “Are you speaking to me?”
I had run this bluff just about as far as I could. I had him off balance, paranoid. I had kept him on the trembling verge of pressing that trigger for so long that his finger had to be tired. One disadvantage of a solenoid trigger. I had managed to introduce a fourth person into the room without provoking shots. Now he had four threats to cover with two guns. It takes an extraordinary mind to handle more than three of anything without time-sharing.
But he had an extraordinary mind. And in my scale of evaluations, the most expendable person in the room was me. I wanted insurance.
“What I’m doing, lady,” he said, his voice dismayingly strong, “is promising to shoot you in the belly if you take a step or move some way I don’t like.”
“Do you know why you’re still alive, Amesby?” I asked. “It’s a matter of probabilities. I settled it to my satisfaction in Africa, a long time ago. Even if you put a nice heavy high-velocity load right on the money, just punch a couple of vertebrae right out and bounce the skull off the ceiling, there’ll still be about a ten-to-fifteen-percent chance that the corpse’s trigger finger will clench. Spasmodic nerve action, like a headless chicken. Ten to fifteen percent. I’ll take those odds if I have to, if you even look like actually pressing a trigger. But frankly, I would rather negotiate.”
He grinned. “Who’s going to shoot me? Her?”
“Did you happen to catch Le Blank’s face when you told him ‘both’ his guards were dead? How it took him a second to get a sad face on? You clown, you missed the point man.”
He did not turn to, or even glance toward, the shattered bay window to his right. I had never expected him to. Whether he bought the bluff or not, there was no point in turning to see. But he bought it, I could see him buy it in his heart. I had softened him up enough, hit him from enough different directions in a short enough time frame to give him the feeling that he had stumbled into a threshing machine. Now he had five things to keep track of.
“So I’ve got a ten-to-fifteen-percent chance of negotiating a mutually satisfactory settlement,” he said at last. “Until we do, the first one of you that moves is catfood.”
In that moment I respected him enormously. I was glad, because I knew he was going to kill me.
“The rest of you sit still,” I ordered. “I refuse to be killed by a headless clown, if it can be avoided.” I hoped they would keep backing my play and follow orders. “All right, Amesby, what have you got to trade with?”
“I told you: I left evidence behind, in enough different places that even you can’t find them all. Kill me and you’re blown.”
I smiled politely. “I don’t think I’ll lose much sleep over the Halifax Police Department—once you’re retired from it.”
“Yeah? How about Interpol and the—” He shut up and looked properly disgusted at himself for giving away information. “Believe me, you’ll never find all the stashes I left. You’ll blow LeBlanc, and that’s got to be at least a large part of your organization.”
I frowned and tried to look like I was trying to look like I was not worried. Casually, I put my right foot up on the chair and rested an elbow on my knee. Now I had one foot under me. At last I nodded. The good executive makes decisions without wasting time.
“All right. We’ll make a place in the firm for you. You can be one of the lesser gods—but you’ll wear a belly bomb just like the rest of us and you’ll take orders.” I raised my voice two notches. “If he puts up his guns, let him live.”
He took a full ten seconds making up his mind. Then, slowly and deliberately, he pointed both guns at the ceiling and waited to see if he was going to be shot by my imaginary assassin.
Pointing at the ceiling wasn’t good enough. He was too far away. I glanced toward the window, widened my eyes, and roared, “Dammit, no!”
I had to assume that this time he would go for it. As he began to pivot, I rocked forward and launched myself. I expected him to check in midstream and kill me, but I thought I could immobilize one or both of the guns long enough for Karen or one of the others to find a weapon and use it. I was so full of adrenalin the seconds were passing by like clouds.
There is a bit of movie film I will carry around in my skull forever. It is a silent movie, no soundtrack at all. I am partway to Amesby, in midair and in ultraslow motion, arms coming up. One of the Yamahas is arcing around toward me, almost there, while the rest of him continues to spin toward the window. Suddenly a hole appears in the neck of his helmet, under his Adam’s Apple, the size of a Mason jar lid. I continue to drift toward him a few more inches, and see two vertebrae leave the back of his neck, o
ne atop the other in stately procession, attended by gobbets of meat and larynx. A moment later his body begins to travel backward and his head starts to come forward. The body wins the uneven argument, but as it drifts back out of my way I see his nose hit his chest. The coffeepot, thrown by Karen, passes through the space his head used to occupy, trailing drops of the world’s best coffee. I note with approval that his hands have reflexively opened; both guns are airborne. The sound of the shot arrives. I am still a few feet from the point at which we would have met if he had kept the appointment, beginning to think about my landing, when Madeleine slams into his shins from the side. Her intent is to knock his feet out from under him, but the slug that killed him has already made a pretty good start on that. One of his feet swings high and wide, impacts solidly on my left temple. There is a sudden jump-cut and I am on the floor on my belly, all the wind knocked out of me.
God, what a team! I thought as reality returned to real-time. We all got him! But where did Jacques have that holdout hidden? I got one elbow under me, craned my head around, and took inventory. Amesby down. Madeleine getting up. Karen bending to retrieve one of Amesby’s guns. Jacques right where I had left him, his mouth a comical O, his hands empty at his sides. His gun had fallen to the floor, then. No, it hadn’t. But there wasn’t anywhere on him to conceal a gun capable of blowing a spinal column in two.
The voice came from the window. “Corporal, that was the busiest fucking sixty seconds in the history of the world.”
I recognized the voice and I recognized the words. Subjectively, I had last heard both five years ago, in a damp trench full of fresh corpses on the Tamburure Plains.
“Bear!”
I rolled and looked and indeed it was him, face darkened with mud. He stood just outside the ruined window with weapon still extended. It was an Atcheson Assault Twelve—a twelve-gauge shotgun with a twenty-round drum and automatic or semiautomatic fire. He was ten years older than I remembered him. “Sergeant Bear, if you please.” His eyes went to Jacques. “I assume Joe passes the exam?”
Mindkiller Page 25
