Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  That was too close. I need a new job.

  But somehow, despite the nightmare scenarios of torture and rendition into black site cells that had raced through her mind at the Sanctuary, she was back at home. Safe.

  Her aquarium burbled at her, and her gray tabby Ming-Ming rubbed against her legs in both greeting and reminder that his bowl was empty. She fed both fish and feline, that the latter might be motivated to ignore the former a little longer. Then Maria slipped into her black leather office chair, extracted the digital microrecorder from the little pouch sewn into the belt-line of her pants, and hooked it to her desktop computer with a micro-USB cable. She popped a Dos Equis out of its refrigerated six-pack and then turned on the recorder.

  The VOX function guaranteed there was no dead air, making it fairly simple to scan through the files, looking for something interesting.

  “Electrical usage … off the grid…”

  “At auction for seven thousand…”

  “A bus coming from Tallahassee … CNN is interested…”

  Most of it seemed to be standard stuff, accounting and discussions of doctrine or procedure or ordering material for the laboratory. Bill payments and bank accounts, tourism and supplies from the local town.

  Her computer executed a series of steps designed to download the audio files to her Mac. She dumped over a hundred of them into an iTunes playlist. Most were quite short, the VOX function flickering on and off for even the most casual conversation.

  She chose the largest file with a recent date. Forty minutes, two days ago. Maria highlighted the file and then clicked the play button.

  A voice she recognized: Gupta’s. Not the motherly, warm Gupta, or the gleeful urchin she had heard of. Cold and calculating as a machine. “The current situation continues to develop. The only problem is that we haven’t enough reliable projectors.”

  Maria frowned. Projectors? What in the world was a “reliable projector”?

  “And the boy?” another voice, a man she didn’t recognize.

  “The highest rating we’ve ever seen.” Gupta again. “But we are all agreed that, if necessary, the mother will have to be excised.”

  “That’s a lie, actually.” She recognized that voice as well. The bayou twang of the security man. It took a moment for her to realize that the voice wasn’t coming from her computer.

  Gupta’s security goon was behind her. In her house. A moment of shock, disconnection, in which ear and brain simply didn’t agree on what was happening.

  “But she really is a ruthless bitch, ain’t she?”

  Fingers like pliers bit into her shoulder. In spite of the pain, she twisted in her seat, and looked back and up into Tony Killinger’s narrow, smiling face.

  Maria whipped around in the swivel chair. Tony’s hand pressed flat against her chest and pushed once, sending her crashing back against the wall.

  “She don’t seem that way to the world, of course. But I know her much, much better than most. From the day she first walked into J-block up at Georgia State, I knew what that little twist was.”

  Maria felt like she was somehow simultaneously freezing and melting under his gaze. Her chest ached where Killinger’s palm had pressed. “What…?” She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around what he was saying, what was happening. “She was in prison?”

  He tapped her cheek with the flat of his hand. “No. That was me. Another story. She was there to teach meditation. At least that’s what the board thought.”

  She fought to find words. Her reporter’s mind searched for a question that might make sense of this dark and terrifying corner of the world into which she had somehow blindly stumbled. “Why was she there, then?”

  “To find someone like me,” he said, grinning. “She knew what she needed, and went shoppin’.” He squatted in front of her, teeth gleaming.

  “Ever see one of the big cats in the zoo? Lions and tigers and such? I mean up close? They look so purty, and soft. Here, kitty kitty.” He came so close he was practically resting his forehead against hers, his lips only a breath away from a kiss. “And they look at you, and all the time you know they’re working it out.”

  “Working what out?”

  “How to get from behind those bars. How to get at you. And … it’s nothing personal, you hear? They aren’t sick, or bad, or twisted. Their tiger mommies didn’t abuse them, and society is not to blame. And God didn’t make no mistake. That’s … their nature. Everything else … the bars or balancing on a ball at the circus, or smiling at you from a box of corn flakes … that’s all the illusion. We. Us. All of this we wrap around ourselves to forget that we’re tigers, too. All of that is illusion.”

  What was he saying? And why? Panic fought with logic as she strove to untangle facts from fantasies, reality from madness. If she could just understand quickly enough, surely there was a way out of … whatever she had stumbled into.

  He paused. “There’s a story called ‘The Lady, or the Tiger.’ Ever heard of it?”

  She nodded. High school lit class. A boy named Caleb had read it aloud.

  Damn, where had that memory come from?

  “That poor sonofabitch had to try to figure out which door was which, and whether the princess who said she loved him would send him to his death. What people like you don’t realize is that the story cheats. See, the trick was that the title wasn’t referring to the doors. It was referring to the princess.”

  “What?” Her head spun. “I don’t under…” and then she did.

  “I don’t like the idea of killing a single mother,” Tony said, the very soul of reason. “I was raised by a single mother, bless her heart. Sort of a holy thing. It just seems … wrong.”

  “H-how…?”

  His smile was almost kindly. “That’s the thing about the drive to Atlanta. It’s slow. Slower than the choppa. Gave me time to get here and wait.”

  The fact of his presence was so grave that it seemed to shut her mind down. “Get out…”

  His fingers clamped onto her wrists, suddenly applying pressure so great she felt her ulna and radius grinding together. She was about to scream, but he whispered, “Shh,” and she knew the agony would only increase if she made a sound.

  His next words verified this. “Please, don’t make a mistake. Because it’d tweak me to kill a mother who has done nothing but attempt to protect her little boy, don’t think I’d have the slightest hesitation to wring your nosy neck. None. Never cottoned to reporters. Especially ones like you who puts her fancy little proboscis where it don’t belong. Like the ones who write about, you know, bad cops who stick drug dealers in holes, back in the swamps. Stuff like that.”

  “What do you want?” She shuddered.

  “You just give me the recorder.”

  She did. He crushed it underfoot, and then scooped up the pieces and dropped them into her fish tank. The guppies and silvertip tetras scattered in all directions, trailing bubbles.

  He smiled again. “I suppose that there are … notes. Addenda. So forth.”

  “No,” she said. “Nothing.”

  He smiled. “Such a pretty liar,” he said, and deftly slipped his arm around her neck and twisted until she was blinded with pain, as if struck by an axe blade composed of solid light.

  She passed out.

  When she came to she couldn’t move anything but her lips and eyes. From the corner of one eye, she could see Tony in her kitchen, blowing out the pilot light on her stove, then turning the gas on. He had been rummaging around, and had found a package of novelty birthday candles left over from a nephew’s party. “Hey, you’re awake!” he said when he saw her watching him. “These are fun, ain’t they?” He planted two of them on the dining room table, and lit both with a Bic. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…” he sang merrily.

  Humming, he lifted her body and carried her outside. She was still conscious, thinking, Maybe if I don’t move he’ll think I’m dead. Maybe if I don’t move it won’t sever my spinal cord. A hospital can
set my neck …

  Then he dumped her down the stairs, so that she tumbled like a broken doll, competing the damage his hishigi neck lock had begun. He continued to hum the birthday song, passing her on the stairs. She wasn’t quite dead yet. If he had looked more closely, he would have seen her lashes tremble, and a tear drip from her left tear duct and flow down her forehead toward the roots of her hair.

  He walked past her, then paused. Bent down. “I let the cat out,” he said. “I’m not a monster.” Then, still humming, he trotted down the stairs to his car, which was parked on the street half a block away. He slipped behind the wheel, and waited.

  Maria’s lips trembled, worked several times without sound. Then a whisper:

  “Help … me…” She heard a meow, and her gray tabby Ming-Ming licked her face, his rough tongue an irritating comfort. “Help…”

  Then … the window above her exploded. Flaming debris rained down on her. Maria’s scream was barely more than a whisper but she screamed for as long as she could, and then gratefully accepted the dark.

  CHAPTER 25

  An hour later, Tony Killinger was back at the Salvation Sanctuary, walking through the lab with Madame Gupta, who radiated danger like a slow-mo nuclear blast. He could swear that he smelled it on her like musk. He had known that scent of hers, intimately, soon after joining her ranks, experiencing for a short time something he would not have believed existed in a human form. Then after a few amazing weeks, as if she had sampled him and found him wanting, she had withdrawn the intimacy and simply behaved as if she had turned the page of a book, patted him on the cheek, called him a dear boy, and warned him never to speak of what they had done in her bedroom again.

  “What happened?” Gupta asked. “You will tell me, and you will tell me now.”

  “The woman was found in your offices,” he said. “I was taking her to security.”

  “Did you search her?”

  “As much as I could,” he said mildly. “I ain’t the one who turned this place into Disneyland for bat-shit tourists. I warned you that would make things more difficult.”

  “You flirt with insubordination.”

  He laughed. “Flirt mah ass,” he said, allowing a little more bayou into his voice. “Hell, ah French lick insubordination every damn day.”

  Her smile was thin. “You are not afraid of me? After all you have seen?”

  For a moment a flicker of anxiety did touch him. He’d seen her kill, and control, and felt her reach into his mind in the throes of passion, flipping switches he’d never known existed at all.

  But something was dead inside Tony Killinger, and even Madame Gupta’s magic couldn’t bring it back to life. And dead things did not feel fear.

  “I’m just a wild and crazy guy,” he said.

  Gupta stared at him a long time, then turned to a golden-robed man with a thin face and a fringe of red hair around a sunburnt bald spot. “The boy is as he seems, Mike?”

  Mike nodded. “Absolutely. The tests are irrefutable. There was no dangerous change in Hannibal’s core patterns, but the chimp died.”

  She seemed dubious of the good news. “No change at all?”

  Mike shook his head. “Nothing substantive. And that is without training or precedent. In other words, we may have found an apex projector.”

  “How many do you think he can link and … effect … without damage?”

  “It is impossible to know,” he said. “We’ve never seen anything like him. Every other acolyte projecting a killing wave has died. Hannibal’s pulse didn’t even accelerate.”

  He fast-forwarded the video image. They watched the digital recording again. And then … a gurney entered the room, bearing the motionless body of Serge the chimp. He resembled an ape-shaped rag doll stuffed with knotted rope.

  Gupta seemed pleasantly surprised. “This is a complete result. More than satisfactory. The steganography?”

  Mike fiddled with his controls, and the soccer ball image appeared. “This is the image that produced the best effect. As you’ll notice, the true image was fractured and then hidden. Double masking. But something odd happened.”

  He slowed the spinning image down. And slower. A flicker. And then a quick glimpse. And then he froze, focused upon Serge.

  “As you can see,” Mike said, “the image of the chimpanzee was implanted far below the normal threshold of conscious awareness, at a rate of one frame per two seconds flashed at one-sixteenth of a second.”

  “What is the minimum threshold for vision?”

  “Absolute?” Mike scratched his head. “Well, that was determined in an experiment in 1942. Hecht and Shlaer, I believe. They were trying to detect the minimum number of photons detectable by the human eye.

  “They dark adapted the subjects for almost forty minutes, then a stimulus was presented twenty degrees to the left of the point of focus, where there is a high density of rod cells.”

  “What kind of stimulus?”

  “A circle of red light. Diameter of ten minutes.” He glanced at her with an unspoken question. When she didn’t speak he said: “A minute is one sixtieth of a degree.”

  Killinger sneered inside. Fucking brainiac. He rather hoped Madame Gupta would give him the assignment to break Mike the Geek’s arm one day.

  “Yes,” Gupta said smoothly. “Continue, please.”

  “Good, good. Well, this ensured that the light stimulus fell only on what is called the ‘area of spatial summation.’”

  “What?”

  “Nerve rod cells connected to the same nerve fiber.”

  “What did they determine?”

  “That the emission of only ninety photons was required in order to elicit visual experience. However, only forty-five of these actually entered the retina, due to absorption by the optic media. Furthermore, eighty percent of these did not reach the fovea. Therefore, it only takes nine photons to be detected by the human eye.”

  Now Killinger hoped it would be the guy’s neck. Would he get to the point?

  Gupta’s left eyebrow arched. “A small miracle.”

  “It may only take one photon to excite a rod receptor.”

  “And?”

  “And the boy saw it. He saw it. Consciously.”

  He shifted the video image onto the boy, then started real-time playback. “Serge,” Hannibal said.

  “See that? He’s very clearly referring to the chimpanzee he had met previously. He recognized his friend. And asked for him again, after the exercise was concluded.”

  Really? That actually was interesting. Damn.

  “Yes,” Gupta had to admit. “He did. What does this mean?”

  “We’ve never seen anything like Hannibal. He can be unresponsive unless some internal trigger finds interest in externals. But there seems to be an operating pore, some kind of wormhole between that unconscious and his conscious mind, like something that might be achieved by an extremely advanced meditator or martial artist.”

  Gupta waved her hand impatiently. “And what precisely has that to do with our project?”

  “Well, he is producing the delta wave forms of deep sleep, but in a configuration ordinarily found in states of high excitation.” His finger traced a squiggle on the screen. “The lesser levels of that wave-form conform to the usual flow-state, or the ‘dissolution of the subject-object relationship.’ That is the doorway state, of course.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice touched with impatience.

  “And there is an energetic threshold at which this seems to interact with the external world to produce this allocational kundalini effect. A macro instance of ‘spooky action at a distance.’ Quantum entanglement. But that effect occurs on a subatomic level. Somehow, this technique creates an effect on a macro-level linking. We don’t know precisely how.”

  “You’ve focused this energy on the image.”

  “That, according to testing, has been the best way. Something almost like an area code. And this boy can not only deliver that killing pulse to people on
the Dead List.” His lips twisted in a smile. “But note this…”

  Mike’s fingers spread out the touch screen, expanding Hannibal’s head.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Note again that the boy’s own brain waves suffered no disruption. That is why we accidentally allowed Serge’s destruction. Hannibal experienced no discomfort, so we never knew it was happening. There was no necessity to hurt the boy, or … kill him.”

  “You mean…”

  Mike nodded enthusiastically. “Under our guidance, he’s a perfect weapon. The mother must agree to bring him back.”

  “And if she doesn’t?” Tony said.

  “We have little time,” Gupta said. “I suggest that we remove the mother from the equation.”

  “Is that necessary?” Killinger asked, surprised that he had spoken aloud.

  “And if it is … have you a difficulty with this? I had been led to believe you suffered no such compunctions.”

  Tony Killinger smiled coldly, killing whatever tender instincts had threatened to surface in his heart. “Ah think we’ve come a little far for that,” he said. “Be no trouble at all.” She stared into his eyes a long moment. Too long. He felt that frisson of anxiety again, swiftly submerged but unmistakable. He would do it, or she would kill him and find someone who would. “And now I think I’d best get ready for tomorrow morning’s little exercise.”

  She nodded, apparently satisfied.

  “I believe his name is Kimball,” Madame Gupta said. “And I thank him in advance for his sacrifice.”

  CHAPTER 26

  DECEMBER 22

  8:30 A.M.

  In a room upon the third floor of the Salvation Sanctuary’s defining landmark a young man awakened from deep sleep, dreams of childhood and fleeing forest creatures sloughing away like thin syrup. As he had carefully arranged, the first sight to meet his eyes was a silver-framed painting upon the wall, flower and heart symbols arrayed in overlapping and concentric mandalic patterns, designed for meditation and contemplation.