Very Hard Choices

by Spider Robinson

  He could see the newspaper vending-boxes the attendant had mentioned. Up at the head of the line; forget it. Fortunately she was engrossed in a newspaper of her own.

  Time now to consider whether he should board this ferry with her. Or develop engine trouble at some point before he reached the head of the line.

  An island meant fewer witnesses. It also probably meant they all knew each other, and would be likely to notice and remember him. On the other hand, all islands are tourist destinations; solvent-looking strangers his age and apparent status would probably be so familiar as to go unseen.

  And this might be it. This might be the location of the ultimate target, the end of the quest. It would make sense in many ways. He had to at least get a GPS fix on wherever she was going, even if he didn't dare go for a visual.

  Yes. It was worth the risk.

  He leaned forward, crossed his forearms on the steering wheel, rested his forehead on them, closed his eyes, and was asleep nearly at once. He woke when he heard engines starting.

  The ferry ride was forty minutes of total boredom. But he soon saw that only regulars, islanders, were bored. First-timers such as him found the scenery orgasmic. So he had to. Irritating. There was a whole lot of calm water, a big sissified sea. Rock stuck up out of it randomly in various directions, at varying distances, in assorted shapes. Some were green, some just grey. The sky was as big as a sky, and fully as skylike as every one he'd ever seen. The sun was on today. So what? Why did the view give so much pleasure? And why only to those who'd never seen it before?

  It amused him to reflect that he might actually be on the verge of understanding those questions, and countless others like them, after so many years. An unimportant consequence, surely . . . but amusing.

  Of course there was a place to park within a hundred meters of the end of the ferry ramp in (God help us all) Bug Cove, if you didn't mind paying an arm and a leg per hour or portion thereof. Unfortunately it was on the left, and the ferry debarked two at a time, with him in the right lane. To avoid drawing attention he took the first right he possibly could instead, and found himself in the parking lot of what looked like an old-timey train station whose tracks had been stolen, but was in fact the Heron Island Public Library. He paused before choosing a space, and a voice came in his open window. "Library parking only, mate. They're serious about it, eh?"

  He turned to see Colorful Coot standing beside him. "I can see how they'd have to be," he agreed in his best imitation of Canadian manners. "I'm just waiting until I can get through the traffic to the pay lot across the street." He must have got it right because Coot bought it, nodded and walked away and never looked back.

  He turned around, waited a couple of minutes while the ferry finished emptying. But his access to the lot was still blocked by cars waiting to board the ferry for the trip back to the mainland—and although the two immediately in the way saw his problem and tried to maneuver to make him a hole, they were unable to. Everything had to wait while the foot-passengers walked aboard first . . . or limped, or shuffled, or lurched on their walkers. Only then did the cars board, and they did so for nearly five full minutes.

  Finally the way was clear; he zipped across the street and into the lot, where he found the only empty spaces were as long a walk as possible from the automatic kiosk where you had to buy your parking permits. The kiosk took only Canadian coins; he had just enough. He made himself consider the bright side. Most of the lot serviced a small but fully occupied and surprisingly unseedy marina operation. He was almost invisible way down at the end, and facing out at all the water just as yokels were expected to. He checked his GPS snitch's readout the moment he was back in the car, and saw that his target had gone to ground. The unit had automatically recorded the coordinates. He checked all his mirrors without seeming to, rolled all his windows up, and activated the GPS snitch's audio circuit in time to hear:

  "—worry, though, your secret's safe: I didn't have time to tell him you used to drive the Jailer-Trailer . . . excuse me, the Police Community Services Mobile Unit."

  "If I applaud, will you give me a straight answer?"

  "Sure. I told him I was getting you high."'

  Ah, he thought. Now we're getting somewhere. Leverage . . .

  Unfortunately, the cop dropped out of the conversation nearly at once. The strong silent type. Okay, that was information, too.

  Now, who were these other two assholes she was listening to?

  He accessed the net with his phone and was only slightly surprised to learn GPS alone could not get him an address for that location. He could wait until business hours in the morning and inquire at the municipality's office. Or he could go there tonight and look at the street sign and the number on the door.

  5.

  Saturday, June 23, 2007

  Heron Island, British Columbia, Canada

  "What does this guy look like?" Jesse interrupted Nika.

  "The Michelin Tire Man with Baby Huey's face," I said.

  "I don't know who they are."

  "Neither do I," said Nika. "Think of a totally bald Tony Soprano—who's never been angry in his life."

  "Got it," Jesse agreed.

  Nika resumed her account. "So I agreed to meet your father—"

  "Could we call me Russell? Or just Gramps?"

  "—to meet Russell down at Spanish Banks Beach in the middle of the night. That's by—"

  "I know where it is,' Jesse said. "Dad sent me a photo of Vancouver once that said on the back it was taken from there."

  "Well, Zandor was just offshore, in a small boat. I couldn't reach him, and he could regulate his distance from me. He came within range. Then he spoke to me on a cell phone, and he . . . " She glanced away for a moment. "He told me things, that . . . well, he proved to me that he could read my mind. Deep."

  "Okay," Jesse said.

  She shook her head. "No. Not like you're thinking, like a carnie act, where he asked leading questions and I told him how to hook me."

  "Okay," Jesse said.

  She shook her head again. "You have to really get this. He told me when, where and how I'd lost my virginity, which only the other party knew, and he told me how I'd felt about it, which nobody knew." Her cheeks darkened.

  "Okay," Jesse said again, blushing slightly himself. "I buy the premise. My father knows a telepath. Please believe I'm not being flippant when I say I'm not terribly surprised. He would if anyone ever did. We can move on. This Sandor—"

  "Zandor. Zandor Zudenigo. It's Serbian."

  "This guy proved to you he was a telepath. But you say it hurts him to do it."

  "Horribly. And there's no off switch. He's a hermit by choice. Your fa—Russell is one of the few people he can stand to be near."

  Jesse nodded. "Because he doesn't judge people. I get that. Except for me."

  "Beg pardon?"

  "Skip it. Zandor proved all this to you. Told an armed police officer he knew all her secrets. Why?"

  "He had unwillingly read the mind of . . . a monster."

  "A Bundy?"

  She shook her head. "Much worse."

  He blinked. "A Dahmer?"

  "Much worse."

  "We're not talking about Picton? The pig farmer slash prostitute killer they're trying right now, supposed to have taken out a couple of dozen women?"

  "Much worse."

  He paled slightly. "Not just . . . worse."

  Again she shook her head. "Much worse. I've never heard or read of anybody as bad. In history. At the time that Zudie . . . I'm sorry, I should call him Zandor, but he looks so much like a cartoon character or a bald Tony Soprano, it's hard not to think of him as Zudie. At the time Zudie read him, Allen was planning to kidnap and rape and degrade and torture to death as perfectly blameless a family of four as he'd been able to find in Vancouver. Over a period of days. With great ingenuity and with true scientific brilliance and without a morsel of mercy. As a work of art. He created and enhanced agony as others make music or dance or paint." Sh
e broke off.

  "And he was an Armstrong," I said. "A Baryshnikov. A Salvador Dali. In his spare time he became a cybermillionaire, a respected code warrior."

  Jesse was finally beginning to boggle a bit, and I could see it irritated him. He wanted to believe anything Nika said to him, even if I agreed with it, but this was getting thick. He soldiered on. "So Zudie gave you evidence that would—"

  I took it. He was used to being skeptical of me. "All Zudie had to give us was what happened to be passing through Allen's head during maybe fifteen to thirty seconds—during which time he believed he was just about to crash his plane into Howe Sound and die. He spent most of that time regretting the ghoulish masterpiece he wasn't going to get to complete, savoring the ones he had, and gleefully telling God to go fuck Himself. Then his engine caught again, and he flew out of Zudie's range. We had just enough clues to start hunting him. And no choice in the world."

  "And absolutely nothing on him in any legal sense," Nika clarified. "I couldn't have gotten a warrant to tap his phone, even if I'd known his last name. I didn't have reasonable grounds to stop him on the sidewalk and ask him his name."

  "All we had was his first name, and that his private playground, his outdoor art studio, was somewhere along the Sea To Sky Highway," I went on.

  "Jesus Christ," Jesse said. "That's like saying, somewhere along the New England Thruway, isn't it?"

  I nodded. "Except it's ninety-eight percent empty forest. Handy for a man who doesn't want them gagged."

  Jesse closed his eyes for a moment. "So what did you do?"

  "We started driving the Sea To Sky, pointing a camcorder out the window as we went."

  He opened them again. "Hoping what, exactly?"

  "That when we got home, Zudie might spot, somewhere in several hours of video, the unmarked turnoff he'd seen beside the highway in Allen's mind's eye. The trail that led to Painland."

  He started to look interested. "I see. How'd it work out?"

  "Badly," Nika said, "He was much smarter than we were."

  "With much better video gear," I said. "It filmed license plates of anything that so much as slowed down near his special turnoff. A live feed, back to his home near the city. He damn near beat us here."

  "Which turned out to be good," Nika said. "He was taken by surprise, busy torturing us, when Zandor showed up."

  We both fell silent. Jesse waited a reasonable time, then a little more, and finally burst out, "And did what?"

  I looked at Nika. Nika looked at me. She shrugged you try it.

  Okay. I turned back to my son. "Zandor ate his mind and his body died. Right about where you're sitting."

  I heard Nika draw breath, but if she had any correction or amplification to offer, she thought better of it.

  I watched Jesse decide to believe us, and start thinking it through, and waited for him to ask what we'd done with the body. He did not, then or ever. If you want to say that's appalling, I won't argue. If I say it made me proud, you'd better not either.

  Nika and I let him sit with it until he was ready to proceed. "So," he said, "you now figure a partner, or apprentice, or acolyte or admirer or art-lover or whatever, has connected you with this rich man's disappearance, and put an ultra-high-tech GPS snitch on your car? Why the hell did you come out here in the first place? Have you got Zudie out there in the woods, somewhere, getting ready to eat this guy's mind too?"

  "We can't reach Zudie," I said. "He stopped talking to us."

  "To you," Nika said.

  "To either of us. To anybody. He jumped in a hole and pulled it in after him."

  "Why?" Jesse asked patiently.

  I gestured vaguely with my hands. "He ate a guy's mind."

  "He had to."

  I nodded. "Apparently that doesn't help enough."

  He closed his eyes and began massaging one eyebrow. It is a mannerism I have myself, one that my wife used to gently mock me for. "I think I'm actually relieved to know that," he decided.

  Neither of us responded. I know part of me felt the same way, strongly. But the question was complicated. What Zandor had done that night had saved my life, and Nika's, just for openers. It unquestionably also saved the four other innocent lives we knew Allen already planned to take, at the very least. Arguably it also saved all the countless other lives Allen would have gone on to take in the course of pursuing his Muse. And "lives" is only part of it, and not even the worst. Allen didn't just take lives, he took souls, He cultivated agony like orchids, cut despair like diamond. Many of his victims never bled at all, but each one hemorrhaged every single drop of hope they had in them before he let them go.

  And still, what Zudie had done—had been forced to do—creeped me out a little. I guess because it creeped him out a lot.

  Jesse shook his head and rebooted. "Okay, this is all history. Let's get back to: how did you realize there was a new problem to come talk over with Russell, before you knew there was a bug on your car?"

  Nika took a deep breath. "My cousin Vasco . . . " She started over. "My cousin Vasco does computer stuff for CSIS in Toronto. That's our—" She saw that he knew what CSIS is. "Deep stuff. They caught him hacking into their system when he was a kid, and recruited him. We were best friends growing up, so I think he talked about what he does there to me more than to anyone else—and he told me hardly anything. Just hints, and not many of those. Once, he said if I ever needed to know everything there was to know about some person badly enough, I could have it all within an hour. Everything. Every penny he ever spent, every e-mail he ever sent, every webpage he ever looked at. Anybody. The chief of police. The premier. Anybody not in the intelligence community, was how he put it."

  "So you asked him to very quietly and very anonymously find out who Allen might have swapped jpg's and videos with?" Jesse guessed.

  She winced. "I didn't have the courage. Allen was so smart, I was terrified of anybody he'd trust that much. And . . . look, I was not going to give my cousin, a fellow officer, the name of a man I helped murder and ask him to run it. Okay?"

  He nodded. "So then—?"

  "I asked as a hypothetical what could he do with somebody who'd been dead thirty-five years, since before computers? How much information could he turn up now? He said that was much tougher, could take as long as a couple of days to run, unless there was something special about him, and I said he was considered a math genius in his day, and—"

  My ears started to ring. I sat bolt upright. "Oh my God, no!"

  "Russell, I never so much as hinted or implied that he hasn't been dead for thirty-five years. I just—"

  "Nika, he told me the fucking CIA almost got him, once! That's why he's supposed to be dead."

  "He never told me that, and neither did you!" she said angrily.

  I had no reply. I never had, now that I thought of it. I had simply assumed that Zudie would.

  "And even so, I warned Vasco to be careful, that there might have been a time when three-letter-agencies were interested in Zudie, back in the day. I didn't tell him why I wanted to know about this dead guy—but I did stress that it was not important enough to be worth any risk at all, that he should back away if he sniffed anything bad. He laughed at me."

  "How did you—" I started to ask, and she guessed where I was going.

  "We used to exchange holiday e-mails and phone calls like everybody, but for real communication we always used a goofy system he came up with when we were kids together, that was totally secure."

  Jesse looked politely dubious. "I've been told there's no such thing," he said.

  She shrugged. "You tell me how to beat it. He got one of those free e-mail accounts, under a name that was just a string of meaningless letters, and gave me the password to it verbally. Any time one of us wanted to write the other privately, we'd open that account, type our message, without addressing it to anyone . . . then put it in the Drafts folder, and quit."

  "My god, that's beautiful," Jesse said at once.

  It took me a little l
onger to grasp it, but once I did I had to agree: it was breathtaking. God himself couldn't intercept the transmission . . . if no transmission ever took place. As far as the system was concerned, the message never went anywhere: it merely got contemplated by two different computers. Nika's cousin was smart.

  Because she was frowning Jesse felt he could, so now we were all frowning. Time to find out why. "What happened, Nika?"

  "I get a call from my sergeant passing on a phone message. My cousin in Toronto had called to say goodbye, he was being transferred overseas."

  "Jesus Christ," I said involuntarily.

  "What did you do?" Jesse asked gently.

  "Sat still and thought hard for a long time. Then I got hold of a laptop that couldn't be traced to me, pirated wireless from a café, and checked our Drafts folder. No message. Three days in a row I tried. I was trying to make myself believe that a little thing like being paralyzed would be enough to keep my cousin Vasco offline . . . when he called. On the telephone."

  She stopped talking. We gave her time.

  She attempted a smile unsuccessfully. "He said he'd been promoted to a better position in CSIS's Albanian office, as if that made sense. It was hard to say how long he'd be there. He had a plausible-sounding story about why they were sending him there, and what he would do there, and I think he convinced whoever was monitoring the call that he had convinced me. I did my best to help. But we both knew he was reading a script. He made no mention of my data-search, and cut me off at the first syllable when I started to. I forgot to ask him for his phone number, had to get it from Call Identify after he hung up. It took me ten minutes to think of it."

  "Jesus." It was Jesse who said it this time.

  "Look, we should get back outside," she said. "Even if whoever owns that bug isn't paying close attention, they're bound to notice eventually that I hardly ever say anything."

  "Damn it, we're not even close to done here," I said.

  "For now we are," she said, and got up.

  "She's right," my son said inevitably, and headed for the door with her. "Look how late it's getting: it's nearly dark."