by SL Huang
Arthur squeezed his eyes shut. “I know. I know.”
“They’d probably be just as likely to recruit her as throw her in a cell, you know. Uh, sorry. I guess that doesn’t sound comforting.”
“Sonya never wanted—” Arthur sucked in a breath. “I guess now it don’t make no difference. You’re right. But you said this would take weeks, right? For them to figure out her notes? Give us twenty-four hours. If we can’t contain it, I’ll make the call myself.”
“Twenty-four hours,” Checker echoed. “Got it. Guess we’d better get cracking, then. Talk to you soon.”
Checker hung up. Arthur ran a hand over his face and leaned back against the headrest.
“Hey,” I said. “Chin up. We’re pretty damn smart.”
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “Don’t like this. Don’t like none of it. We’ve got people trying to kill us, and Checker and Pilar, I worry—”
“At least Pilar’s got a gun,” I said.
“She what?” Arthur whipped around to face me, so fast he tangled himself against the seatbelt. “Where the hell did she—”
“I gave her one,” I said. “She didn’t tell you? She begged me to teach her to shoot when you wouldn’t—thanks so much for sticking me with that, by the way.”
“I ain’t said I wouldn’t, I said—” He cut himself off with a curse. “I told her I would!”
“Yeah, well, she said you were all reluctant about it or something. Your office manager really should be armed, you know.”
He swore again. “That ain’t the world I want to live in!”
How beautifully hypocritical of the man with a carry permit. “Well, when you get around to fixing the world, you let me know.”
“At least tell me you taught her to be safe with it, taught her muzzle and trigger discipline—”
“I told her to point it at the thing she wants dead,” I said. “She’s a smart girl. She’s not going to shoot herself.”
“What the—shit, Russell! That ain’t no way to teach someone firearms. The safety of it’s gotta be second-nature!”
“Then you start taking her,” I said. Excellent. Teaching Pilar marksmanship hadn’t been as tooth-jarringly painful as I’d expected, but I still wasn’t going to pass up a chance to get out of the obligation. “Now will you let me watch the road?” The concussion was making my vision fuzzy around the edges, but I wasn’t going to admit it.
We made good time to Pasadena. Dr. Martinez’s condo was in a pleasant, modern building full of wide windows and balconies. I had my hand under my jacket on my Colt as we got out of the car, just in case.
Arthur pulled out his mobile as we climbed the steps. “Better let her know we’re here so they’re not surprised.” He dialed.
And listened, worry overtaking his features. She hadn’t picked up.
“Maybe her phone ran out of battery,” I said. “Or, I don’t know, maybe she’s taking a nap.” I inched my Colt halfway out of my belt.
“Maybe,” said Arthur, but he put his phone back in his pocket and slid one hand against his holster.
We stepped up onto the porch and I leaned on the bell.
No answer.
“Shit,” Arthur said softly.
I drew my gun, keeping it hidden from the street behind my body. “You got your lockpicks on you?”
“Cover me,” he said, pulling them out.
He slid the picks in and turned the knob. “Behind me,” I said as he pushed the door open, and I crept in crosshairs-first. Arthur dropped back so I could take point and eased the door shut behind us with a click.
The entryway led into an earth-toned living room in a jumble of disorder. The coffee table and several chairs were knocked off-kilter, with some needlepoint and photographs dangling askew and scattered across the floor. A set of shelves had fallen to lean precariously against the back of the couch, books and papers strewn across the furniture.
The disarray wasn’t too bad—just enough to tell the story of a struggle.
“Oh,” said a weak voice.
Arthur swore and slipped past me into the kitchen, holstering his Glock. I followed and saw a pair of stumpy legs sprawled over the ceramic tile, attached to a woman slumped against the refrigerator—a woman who was not Sonya Halliday. She was a very tiny older lady, with copper-toned skin and a face so creased with wrinkles she reminded me of a walnut. A cap of gray hair still shot with black gave her a few years back, though right now the hair was wet and matted, and the ice-filled washcloth she held against it was being dyed a deep red.
“Hey. Here. Let me help you,” Arthur said, crouching beside her. “Arthur Tresting. I’m a friend of Sonya’s.”
“I know,” said the woman. I couldn’t tell if it was pain or age that made her voice hoarse. “She told me to expect you. But not the other men. Five of them. They took her. I couldn’t stop it.” She lifted a pair of enormous Coke-bottle glasses from the floor beside her and perched them on her nose; they gave her the look of an enormous insect. “Humanity is Incomplete, you know. Even more than mathematics. Sometimes we strive for correctness and we find ourselves outside the axioms, independent, cut free to blow in the wind. Then we define new axioms, or we acknowledge the evil within ourselves. I can’t say which is the better path. She told me what happened between you.”
Arthur stiffened slightly but didn’t answer. He was carefully probing her scalp wound with the wet washcloth. “I ain’t think it’s too bad. Russell, clear the house and find me whatever first-aid supplies she got.”
Two minutes later, I had cleared all the rooms and double-checked they were free of Sonya Halliday and her kidnappers, and Arthur had ensconced Dr. Martinez on her couch and was dressing her shallow scalp wound. He kept gently suggesting she let him take her to the hospital, or at least call up his doctor friend to come check if she needed stitches.
“I don’t need stitches. They tell us we need so many things in hospitals, but they’re wrong.” Martinez had picked up a pen and was fiddling with it, but not the way most people fiddled; she was unscrewing the pieces and taking it completely apart, then laying the bits out on her lap in an orderly array before picking them back up and putting them together again. After which she started the whole process over. “I’m fine. Sonya’s the one who needs help. She told me you’d agreed to help her. It’s my fault, you know.”
“Course it ain’t,” Arthur tried to assure her, at the same time I said, “Why? Did you tell someone what she was working on?”
“Me? No. But she wouldn’t have been working on it if it wasn’t for me. I led her into catastrophe. To the end of things. All the way from the beginning—I recruited her, you know. She reminded me too much of myself. Oh. I talk too much.” She screwed the pen back together, clicked it open, clicked it closed, then began unscrewing it again. Every so often her gaze behind the enormous glasses would skitter across Arthur or me, but never long enough to make eye contact.
Arthur pulled his phone from his pocket and tossed it to me. “Get Checker on security cams. See if he can track whoever snatched her. Dr. Martinez, let’s get a doctor to look at you, okay? It’s safer.”
“‘Safer’ is a funny word. Not well-defined. Since the certainty is that we will all die, ‘safer’ does not, to me, seem to have very great meaning.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” I snapped, paying more attention to punching the phone buttons than to her. “You can define it as per probability of death or injury in the immediate moment or near future.” God, if there was one thing I hated it was people trying to make math fuzzy.
A smile bloomed on Dr. Martinez’s face. “You’re right, of course. She’s right,” she added to Arthur. “Though I would argue that the degree in meaning becomes less according to the probability distribution for one’s remaining time. If one is old, and near death…”
I tuned her out as Checker picked up, and I gave him as rapid a rundown of the situation as I knew how.
“Searching now,” he said immediat
ely. “How long ago? Ballpark?”
“Hey. Martinez,” I called. “How long ago did they bust in?”
She paused, as if calculating.
“Estimate, Professor,” I ordered.
“I have no bounds,” she said helplessly. “No, that’s incorrect. Not hours, surely. Yes, that’s right. And I was out here when they left. Where they left me. So more than the time I used to move from here to the kitchen afterward.”
Christ save me from literalists. “Sometime between ten minutes and two hours ago,” I translated into the phone, with a good helping of sarcasm. “But I bet I can narrow that down for you.” I strode back into the kitchen and surveyed the bloody washcloth filled with melting ice that Arthur had dumped in the sink. Enthalpy of fusion, the likely heat flow from Martinez’s body temperature to the ice cubes—if she’d come straight to the kitchen after the kidnappers left—“I’m guessing we missed them by twenty minutes to half an hour.”
“Got it,” said Checker. “Okay, I’m hitting pay dirt. Five men, and they’ve got Professor Sonya. They’re taking her to a van—God, what a cliché. I’m tracking it. Call you back.”
“Thanks.” I hung up and headed back into the living room. Arthur was trying to get a bandaged-up Martinez to sit down, but she was moving obliviously around the living room picking things up and setting them straight.
“Doc, you just got your head split open—”
“Material things shouldn’t make a difference,” she murmured as she reshelved her books. “One should be able to isolate oneself from outside stimuli. But it’s never so simple, is it? Healing surroundings for healing physicality.”
“Not when you got the injury fifteen minutes ago,” said Arthur. “Sit down, Doc. I’ll pick up a bit, if it’s that important to you—”
“You’ll just get it wrong,” she said serenely, retrieving some small stone carvings of animals and placing them carefully in front of the books. “My mother believed these would watch over me. Protect me. I think she was both right and wrong about that.”
“Russell,” said Arthur with relief as he saw me. “What’d Checker say?”
“He’s tracking the van. He’ll call.”
“Good. That’s good.” He turned between Martinez and me, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, and I could practically see him trying to weigh all the options, wondering if we should call in the authorities, wondering if they’d only slow us down.
I stepped closer to him, passing him back the burner cell. “You call this one; I’ll follow your lead. But I’m better than a tac team, and you won’t have to wait for a warrant.”
He looked down at me for a second and then nodded. “Hey, Doc.” He cleared his throat. “Can you tell us any more about who would have known about Sonya’s proof? ’S not like she was palling around with criminals. How’d this get out?”
“It’s easy to listen to us, you know,” said Martinez, still concentrating on arranging her stone animals. “Phones, email. You could write a program that scans for keywords quite easily, I think. It’s not paranoia, it’s just fact; you accept it and live in the modern world or you don’t.”
Arthur had stepped over next to her while she talked. “Doc. Are some of your books missing?” He gestured at the lower shelves. Martinez had picked up most of the books, but the bottom shelves were still bare, a light outline of dust showing where their contents had sat.
“‘Missing’ is such a poorly-defined word,” said Martinez after a slight hesitation. “Nothing is missing if I say it isn’t, or everything is missing if I say it is. I’ve been reorganizing.”
“Doc,” said Arthur inexorably. “The men who took Sonya. Did they take some of your work, too?”
“No. Except in my friend’s head.” She pressed her palms against her reshelved books, and her voice shook. “Mathematics makes me a god. I understand the secrets of the universe. But I couldn’t stop them.”
I couldn’t say I didn’t know how she felt.
Chapter 5
“Arthur,” I said. “Call it.”
His face tightened for a long moment, then he nodded and strode over to the landline. He picked up the cordless handset and turned to press it into Martinez’s hands. She looked at it bewildered, as if she didn’t know what to do with it.
“Call the cops,” said Arthur. “Tell ’em what happened. Tell ’em I was here and left. Did you touch anything?” he added to me.
I thought back. “No.”
“Leave her out of it, okay?” Arthur said to Martinez, pointing at me. “Tell them it was just me, and that I came to help you, and I’m investigating it myself now, too. If I stay, they’ll want to ask questions, keep me here, and there ain’t nothing I can tell them that you can’t.” His jaw bunched, and I heard what he wasn’t saying—that he needed, needed to be out there tracking Halliday’s kidnappers, and not tied up with the police for hours answering an interrogation. “Got it, Professor?”
“Police rarely have the best interests of the individual citizen at heart,” rambled Martinez. “Contradiction, isn’t it? But I rather think they view themselves as being in the interests of the State instead. The goals of the collective are not always the goals of any person within it. And competence is often predicated on desire.”
“Yeah, well, they’re gonna have desire in this case, ain’t they?” said Arthur impatiently. “They’ll want the proof enough to help find Sonya.”
“Her safety is the only axiom,” said Martinez. “It’s astounding, how confusing that can make things.”
“It ain’t confusing,” said Arthur. “It ain’t confusing at all. Sonya’s in danger, Professor. Make the damned call.”
She fingered the handset. “I don’t like talking to people.”
I suspected at that moment that Arthur was showing superb control in not letting loose on a little old lady with a string of profanities.
“But I shall,” said Martinez. “It’s for Sonya. For Sonya. Her safety.”
“Yes,” said Arthur, taking a deep breath. “Yes.” He waved at me to follow him and strode toward the door, already dialing his mobile.
“Martinez is about to call the cops,” he said to Checker as we headed down the steps. “Make sure she does it, please.” He listened for a moment and then glanced back at me. “He’s scrubbing you from the security footage outside here.”
God bless Checker and his many talents.
“Get in touch once Martinez calls, and we’ll plan,” said Arthur into the phone, and hung up as we got to the car.
“You think she won’t?” I said.
Arthur hesitated. “Not sure.”
“You suspect she’s involved in this?”
“Think it’s more likely she’s just a touch different from most people. A woman that age arranging to get herself bashed in the head? Don’t jibe.”
“Maybe her plan went wrong,” I said, shutting the door and putting on the stupid seatbelt to mollify Arthur.
“Maybe,” said Arthur, “but my gut says she really cares about Sonya. I remember back—she was more than an advisor; she was Sonya’s mentor. And it seems that ain’t changed. They’re as close as family, you can see it.”
I couldn’t, but human interaction wasn’t exactly my forte. “Where to now, then?”
“Well, after this morning, first let’s figure if we got a tail, and—wait.”
I froze, the key hovering next to the ignition.
“Your seat’s different,” said Arthur. “Don’t press the pedals, but tell me if I’m right.”
I stretched out my foot next to the brake. He was right. The seat had moved back by almost an inch.
“Well, crap,” I said.
Arthur reached up and jammed a key into the housing of the rearview mirror to pull it apart. He pried the whole mirror off the windshield and dropped it between his feet, pushing at it with the side of one boot so he could get a view under his own seat. “I’m clear.” Very slowly and carefully, he leaned across the console and put his
head down by my feet, where he could see under mine. “Yup. Car bomb.”
“Great,” I said. “How’s it put together?” The last thing I needed was to be stuck here until the police arrived. Or, well, blown up by remote. That would probably be worse.
Arthur fumbled out a pen light and clicked it on. “I ain’t no expert, but it looks like a tilt fuse,” he said after a moment. “Those are what’s most common right now anyways.”
“What’s a tilt fuse?” I wasn’t an expert either, though I’d defused a bomb or two in my time by following the math. The things had a logic to them, after all.
“Mercury in a tube. Car hits a bump, it goes boom.”
“So I can get out?” I said. “You know, carefully?”
“Russell,” said Arthur, poking his head back up to meet my eyes seriously. “I ain’t no expert. Could well be a pressure sensor I ain’t seeing. The cops are on their way—they can call a bomb squad.”
I tried to decide whether explosives expertise was worth risking getting mixed up with cops.
“Russell,” said Arthur, as if he knew what I was thinking.
“Take a picture of it for me,” I said.
“I ain’t gonna—”
“Take a picture, or I’m just going to get out.”
I wasn’t sure I would, but Arthur didn’t know that. He swore under his breath as he felt around for his cell phone and then ducked back down with extreme care. It was nice to have a friend who would put his face up next to a car bomb for me, I reflected.
The flash went off twice. Arthur eased back up and handed me the phone.
The tangle of wires in the darkness under my seat didn’t actually look too complicated. I let my senses relax into the logic of it. If A, then B. If not B, then not A…
