by John Barnes
“Goddam. Perfect. And I knew I could count on you, John, I knew it.” He took another big gulp of that fierce stuff.
Travis is a very sentimental guy, but he hates to admit it, so he normally doesn’t say that kind of thing. I looked at him a little closer.
I knew that having him as a friend meant he’d show up irregularly and ask strange favors. I have several friends like that. It’s part of their charm, really, even if I do get grumpy and unhappy when I can’t do them the particular favor they ask for. It’s worth the frustration, though, because often I can, and anyway, having friends like that is kind of like being unexpectedly dumped into a scavenger hunt or improv comedy sketch (or both at once) a few times a year. Anyway, I don’t want that side of my life to change.
But drinking Turkey-and-Evil that fast … and something about his expression … this was more than Travis’s usual embarrassment at needing some odd favor. More than his usual pleasure at bringing me a weird story. He looked scared.
“Trav, are you in some kind of legal trouble? Or being followed by somebody violent?”
“Maybe both, John. I’m sorry. I know you got a house and a respectable job and you’re up for tenure and everything, and your wife’s just a little bitty thing, and all. I’m pretty sure I shook off anybody following me but you know that’s never certain. I wouldn’t be here if I had much choice.”
“So you’re being followed, or you might be?”
“I was being followed. As far as Alamosa. I changed IDs and rental cars in Santa Fe, but they stayed with me, so I ditched that car in Alamosa in long-term parking at the airport, took a cab out to a truck stop, hitched to Saguache, then found a ride with another semi this way. That Alamosa airport only has flights to Denver, and the other side must know I’m going to Denver eventually, so basically I faked for Denver and zagged here. Even if they tracked me to Saguache, where I changed rides, they’d be expecting me to be headed for Denver, either the Fairplay way or the Leadville way.”
“Who are they?” I was not pleased. Everything he’d said was true—I had plenty to lose by getting involved in the kind of thing that was Travis’s bread and butter. Plus, I’m no good at it. I write about adventures. Having them is something else. I had stiff joints and a big gut, and very likely was a coward too since nothing had tested my courage in a while and it probably atrophied like a muscle that isn’t used.
Travis sometimes had enemies who were not gun-averse and didn’t seem to think bystanders were innocent. I don’t keep a gun in the house because I wake up disoriented and do strange things till I’m fully awake. I once picked up my cat Anata, held him to my ear, and said “Hello?” when I was awakened by a friend knocking on the door. I’m always finding half-finished cooking projects in the kitchen, later in the day, that I can’t remember starting.
So if Travis had brought trouble with him, I was in for a good stomping, followed by god-knew-what happening to Kara. That’s the kind of thing that can make you angry, even at an old friend that you normally forgive for everything.
And that awareness just rubbed in how jealous I was about his youth and energy, compared to the way I was wearing out. We’d gone down such different roads. In my college days I’d almost kept up with him. He’d dropped out of Wash U after sophomore year—a little matter of not having attended classes. By then he was working part-time for a detective agency in Brentwood. He went back into the Army again to be an MP.
They stationed him at Fort Leonard Wood, so he came back to St. Louis pretty often. He’d let me know he was coming, and if I didn’t have a judo tournament or a tech rehearsal on a Saturday, he’d call me late Friday night from some truck stop out on the edge of town, and I’d drive out to wherever the semi had dropped him. Then we’d spend the weekend wandering around the Delmar Loop or the Central West End, eating, drinking, and annoying women who were way out of our league.
A few times, when he could give me more notice, I managed to find a great big fat girl with long hair for Travis, and someone short and tiny for me, and the four of us drove out to some little river town down towards Cape Girardeau for what Trav called a Redneck Heaven Weekend—even though he was a fake redneck and I wasn’t one at all. We’d stay in a cheap hotel, go to someplace where the girls could sunbathe and we could drink during the day, then dance and drink at some roadhouse Saturday night, then back to the room for drunken sex.
When I divorced the first time, and moved to Pittsburgh, Travis came along on the trip to keep me more or less sane. Depending, of course, on what you call sane.
One night in Sheridan, Wyoming, my truck had been broken down for two days, with a day yet to go before it was fixed. It was the height of tourist season, so there was nowhere to stay through the whole time; we had to move on a night-to-night basis. That night all we could find to stay in was a bridal suite with two huge heart-shaped beds and a six-person lipstick-red hot tub. I kept speculating about how many guests the average couple brings for the wedding night these days, but Travis told me that this was the cynicism of the newly divorced.
For old times’ sake we went out and located two cases of Pearl beer, which is terrible stuff but Travis likes it, plus one big heavy prostitute and one tiny little blonde one. I guess that was when I started to notice who was aging faster. I had a nice time but I was all done well inside my hour; the girl just hung around because she was waiting for her next call, and besides she and I were watching, in a spirit of complete awe, what was happening on the other side of the room.
After all those years, Travis still had all the single-minded endurance of a priapic sheltie. He also still made those weird noises. The small blonde woman nestled under my arm would periodically whisper, urgently, “Are they okay over there? She’s kind of my friend …”
I suppose I should have rejoiced that something, at least, was stable in my universe, and just the way it was when I was twenty-one, but mostly it just made me feel old.
And looking at him, right now, on my sofa, clear-eyed and vigorous and looking like he was more up for a brawl than ever, apparently after being awake for many hours and having just breakfasted on bourbon—all right, Travis still looked like he could handle anything. But the contrast only made things more acute for me. I felt even older—and in danger—danger I couldn’t hope to cope with.
“Relax, John, your shoulders are up to your ears and you look like you’re going to need your blood pressure medicine. I don’t think you or Kara is in any danger. I shook my tail hard and doubled back and shook it again. If trouble does show up, I’m here and it’s me they’re after. As soon as I go, you’ll be out of this again, and don’t you dare even think about lying or not talking if someone turns up asking questions. Just tell them whatever they ask, so they leave you and Kara alone, and you let me worry about whatever happens, ’kay?”
I took a bigger swallow of the coffee than I intended, enough to make my eyes tear a little, swallowed hard, counted ten, and remembered that without Travis, and certain other friends like him, my life would be entirely vegetative, and I would be even more depressed, even fatter, and feeling even more old. “All right,” I said, “suppose you tell me what we’re at no risk of. I doubt I’m getting any more words today, anyway.”
He finished his cup in another gulp that would have melted my head. “’Spose I can get a refill? Just one Turkey this time. I want to try to fool you into thinking I’m coherent.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible at this point, Trav.” I went out to the kitchen, topped up my own cup, gave him another shot of Wild Turkey, and topped up his.
When he’d had a sip—he didn’t seem to be gulping this one—he curled one leg under the other in a peculiar way he has that looks like a teenage dance student. He rubbed the back of his neck, and began. “Now you’re John again. Now you’re my favorite old bewildered small-town Midwestern boy.”
“The man with the word ‘chump’ glowing on his forehead.”
“The man who always listens when it gets weird
. Because it has been getting weird. I need to talk it over with somebody who’s used to thinking about weird stuff, because it’s been wall-to-wall weird for the last few weeks.”
“I gather it’s been weird.”
“You never did do irony well,” Travis said. “You smirk too much.” Then he leaned way back and appeared to be reading the story to me from a screen that only he could see, on one of the thick log beams of the ceiling. After a few minutes I slipped into Kara’s office for a second and borrowed a notepad from her pile of them—we both did that all the time—and began to take notes. Travis didn’t stop, or even seem to notice.
CHAPTER THREE
When I got the call from Xegon, all they said was that it was an industrial espionage case. That was no surprise at all. I’d worked for Xegon before; they’re a high-tech company in Albuquerque, with an office in an old storefront building along Montgomery Avenue and a lab in the secure area out east of Kirtland AFB. Which ought to be enough to tell you they’re on the spooky side of defense.
Companies like that live in a permanent cloud of worry about spies, all the time; their military masters worry about foreign spies, and they worry about their rivals. What they worry about, more than anything else, is the employee with the hidden problem who needs a pile of money to deal with it, because that’s the guy who will shoot a pile of documents over to the competition.
So I’m always getting hired to find the man with the golden nose, or the geekamatoid engineer that thinks he’s in love with a teenage crack whore, whenever management has noticed that the competition is suddenly right up with them in the proprietary areas and they’re wondering who might have sold them the voodoo. It’s a nice little sideline because those places always pay promptly and at a premium, and I’m always glad to get the work.
Xegon was good for about a job every other year, all very routine stuff; the most interesting Xegon job I had had up till then was a good Christian girl particle physicist who had paid for some grad school textbooks with a porn shoot some years before. Then she’d found Jesus and married his right-hand man, who wasn’t quite as good at forgiving as his homie was. So she was being blackmailed by her old-hippie California mother. Two weeks of banging my head against the wall while nobody would tell me anything that was going on, and then I found myself in a happy little family conference that was like a successful attempt to do ten hours of the Springer show in forty minutes. But that’s another story for another time.
Apart from that one, no previous case had taken more than a week, or been difficult at all, but all of them had been way, way lucrative. So when I came back from Anaconda, where I’d been doing insurance work, photographing a guy who was supposed to be crippled up with a bad back while he taught an advanced techniques in rock-climbing class, and found that message from Xegon on my answering machine, I figured, hot puppies, I’m gonna pay my rent for a while. I called them back, they booked me the flights, and I caught the first flight out of Billings to Denver, and then a flight from Denver to Albuquerque.
It started out completely usual. The taxi dropped me off in a parking lot surrounded by little strip malls, most of them fake Southwest mission stuff; that whole part of Albuquerque, just west of the intersection of Montgomery and Tramway, is a mixture of CBS block buildings and places that look like they used to be Taco Bells. I went through the phony-stucco arches into the lower gallery, then up the stairs to the nondescript second floor. Xegon had acquired all the offices on that floor and put in connecting doors, so it was a bigger place than it looked like from the outside.
The only person I recognized from any previous trip was the receptionist, and I didn’t know her name. Every time I’ve ever gone there, the person who gave me the assignment, the person who accepted my report, and the person who had me sign all the in-strictest-confidence documents and handed me the check, had been three different people, with no overlaps between any trips.
The guy whose office they sent me in to was a Mr. Hale, who they said was head of security.
Hale was a familiar type, but not familiar for where he was, which was maybe my first hint that something strange was up. He was like one of those guys we used to see at Wash U, John, products of upper-class inbreeding: head like a rat, chinless and Roman-nosed and tiny-eyed, with curly blond hair, perfect self-assurance, and a skinny little body, lousy for digging ditches or bar fighting, but perfect for squash, looking good in a suit, or buggery. The kind of people that America exists to support.
This guy was probably a little bit of a miser, or maybe from the well-bred-but-not-rich cousins that go into academia, law, or medicine. His jacket was okay, but his shirt was high-end Penney’s or low-end Bean, and the shoes were plain old Bass loafers.
Oh, yeah, John, all that matters. See, Hale fit into his setting like a clarinet in a gun rack. I told you he was like the Wash U old-money kids we went to school with. Well, that kind of family goes CIA or State, not DoD.
These last five years I’ve been flying to New Mexico, Utah, southern Cal, central Idaho, a lot, because people that do defense work refer you around and I’d been a good boy, gotten things done quick and cheap and discreet. So after a while you get to know what type guy to expect to find where. Normally, I’d expect to find a little hyper-high-tech defense company, especially its squarest-of-the-square offices like security, crawling with DoD types—Sunbelt state university, upscale fundie church, football and golf, calls his mother Mom, a Republican whose grandparents were Democrats.
And Hale was Ivy-Plus-Fifty, Episcopalian, baseball and tennis, calls his mom Mother, and either Republican back to Lincoln or Democrat back to Jefferson.
And yeah, that made Hale weird. Management guys at superscience companies listen to Tom Clancy audiobooks, have cathedral ceilings and barbecues, sing along with oldies on the car radio, and dress like they’re trying to infiltrate Real Estate Professionals for Jesus. This old boy probably knew who Francine Prose is, had some third-world art on his walls, and could talk Monk and Bird and Trane. I couldn’t figure how the hell he could’ve gotten past the interview to get hired, unless he was a fucking stone genius, and the geniuses at those companies don’t work in security; they’re the ones kept behind closed doors, with shitty haircuts, duct tape on their horn-rims, and obese Wiccan wives. Spend enough time in the territory, you get to know everyone’s ethnic dress.
Hey, another Turkey-and-Evil? Yeah, I know I’m gulping them like milkshakes. I’m also avoiding the subject I wanted to talk about, because, being honest, John, I’m scared shitless.
All right. So, Hale was weird, maybe just his family’s odd duck, but definitely one more weirdity among all the weirdiosity. They’re words now. I used ’em and you understood ’em, they’re words. Don’t get me further off track than I already was, okay? Thanks. This better be my last Turkey and after that I’m into straight Evil.
Hale’s office was a little white room, no pictures on the walls, no windows, just a large square closet with a totally bare desk without even a phone on it, a chair behind that desk, and a chair in front of it.
Hale sat down behind the desk and gestured for me to take the other chair. “We’ve got a leak. Probably a major one. We need to plug it quickly and discreetly. We know that it’s in the Q-tip. From your past work with us, I presume you know what the Q-tip is?”
“Quantum Teleportation and Information Physics. They’re the synthesis group that all your other research reports to. They work on some physics thing called simultaneity that I don’t understand. Has to do with consequences of quantum events observed at large distances, so that you get an effect that looks something like information traveling faster than light, and something to do with this guy Wolf-something that has the idea that the universe is governed by algorithms and not equations. Is that what I need to know?”
“I’m impressed. You’ve remembered enough from your last couple of jobs so that we can skip the briefing.” He nodded a couple of times like he was deciding that I was a good antique at the
price, or maybe that he’d like to breed me to his prize Persian cat. I mean, if I’d been a Persian cat, myself. Though with some of those old money families, I’d believe anything—one time I was looking into an insurance fraud case up in Beaver Creek and—well, that’s neither here nor there. Must be some good place in Gunnison to get drunk and tell stories, John; we’ll go there sometime when I’m not working. Right, Mario’s or the Cattleman. I’ll remember.
Anyway, now that Hale had decided I was a good do-bee, he straightened his too-tightly knotted, too-loose-at-the-collar, skinny tie, like a shy high school principal who got his job too young. “We have a number of excellent reasons, which we’d rather not share with you, to think that the leaks are going mainly to Negon, who I know you’ve had run-ins with in the past—and you’ve never worked for them?”
“Never.”
“Good. This needs to be done quickly, we have to be able to trust you completely, and, frankly, we think Negon might offer anyone working for us a great deal of money to drag his feet for a few crucial weeks. Let me add by way of incentive—and I realize your personal sense of honor is my real security—that if you get an offer from Negon, whatever they offer you to shaft us, we’ll add fifty percent to it to keep you loyal, and double it if you can turn it against them. Not because we don’t trust you but because at this point—I can tell you this, anyway—our upper management will pay just about anything to get even with those bastards.
“We are in a bidding struggle with Negon, regarding two different approaches to a phenomenon which is code-named ‘Gaudeamus’ and which I suggest you try to know as little as you can possibly manage about. Their thefts from us have put them far ahead of us, since in effect they have the benefits of an understanding derived from two radically different approaches. So first of all we need to be able to go to the relevant authorities and argue that we are entitled to an extension—or to Negon’s temporary disqualification—due to the gross unfairness of the advantage they have gained by intellectual theft. Your work will provide much of the evidence for that.
