Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  As Cheryl was coming out of that turn, which had a good deal of loose gravel and was poorly banked, she slowed to about twenty-five miles per hour. She saw a man in a Xegon guard’s uniform flagging her down. She pulled to a stop in the middle of the road—traffic was uncommon and would see her hazard flashers in plenty of time, and besides the shoulder was soft.

  Then the man in the guard’s uniform killed her and took the car.

  Her death was probably not entirely deliberate; probably, whoever they were, they just didn’t care very much what happened to bystanders. Cheryl was about five feet tall and more than a hundred pounds overweight, a quiet lady whose main recreations were AA and church, so she wouldn’t have put up much of a fight if they had just ordered her out of the car. I sure as hell don’t think she would have risked her life and her children’s future to save one Godzilla Size El Garbago Thick Crust, and two two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew, for a rude engineer.

  But she didn’t get a choice. The phony guard had a bear tranquilizer dart in a little handheld gadget he could conceal in his palm. When she opened her door he reached in and jammed the dart-head against her skin and fired it straight into her neck. The little pop from the dart gadget was no doubt totally lost in the third round of fireworks now detonating out on the hills.

  Cheryl Tusson took most of the tranquilizer right into the carotid. The attacker stripped off the guard uniform jacket and put Cheryl’s Atom Bomb Pizza smock on over his t-shirt. He left her in the gravel road, where she’d fallen after he’d opened the car door. Somewhere in the next few minutes she stopped breathing, or went into cardiac arrest, or choked on vomit, and died.

  They found her next to a guard uniform jacket, lying on her side, her clothing undisturbed except for the missing smock. Probably the guard jacket was the one that had been stolen from the dry cleaner’s three months before, about which they’d never been able to find a thing.

  Police were out there right now with Xegon and Kirtland security.

  “It happens,” Hale said, “that I met Cheryl a few times, and she was a very nice young woman who always had a pleasant word for everyone, getting her life back together after a really bad start—when I cleared her to be our regular delivery person out here, I read her record, and she was just one of those women who finds Mr. Wrong in high school and doesn’t get rid of him for a while. I’d talked with her a few times when I was working late, and she’d shown me pictures of her children. So although (unfortunately), Mr. Bismarck, I can’t authorize company money for you to find Cheryl’s killer, I can mention that the people you are being paid to find are the ones who killed her, and that it is my personal and unprofessional opinion that if you do find the son of a whore, and anything bad happens to his worthless ass, I will probably believe and corroborate anything you later tell the authorities.”

  I was getting to like Hale better and better.

  Wearing that pizza smock, our boy drove straight to the lab. Norman Lawton opened the door and caught a face full of Mace and the end of a softball bat, then about twenty hard ones, real systematic, like a pro who is trying not to kill you but wants to make sure you wish he had. The fake pizza guy gave Lawton some damage to his tailbone, floating ribs, forearms, shins, ankles, and soles of the feet, finishing off with a hard one in the nads probably just out of pure meanness. Old Norm wasn’t going to be getting around much, for research or anything else, for weeks or months.

  That was interesting too. They didn’t kill him; they wanted him to keep working, I would guess, but they didn’t want him to be doing it quickly or soon. And they didn’t want a guy who would make too good a witness.

  Then the guy in the pizza smock grabbed the Gaudeamus box, leaving the leads to the recording computer lying on the table (so he knew which of several pieces of apparatus on that table to take). He also took the paper copy of the research paper from the printer. He got back into that pizza wagon and drove it out a road pizza drivers usually didn’t take, one that led east, away from Albuquerque and into the boondocks.

  Meanwhile someone else hack-spoofed the security switchboard and told the guard post on the end of that road that the pizza car would be leaving by a different route because there was a major security breach on the usual road and they were sealing it off. (That much was even true—at the time of the fake call, they were just in process of figuring out that all the flashes and bangs had been a diversion, but they hadn’t found Cheryl’s body yet.)

  My boy sailed right through the guard point onto a ranch access that goes through to 1-40. Three miles up that, he left the pizza car by the roadside, and picked up whatever vehicle had been left for him.

  Ten minutes later, when the whole Xegon facility was in an uproar and Kirtland base security, and every other test facility’s security, were all getting into one big honking commotion, a helicopter spotted the pizza car’s warm engine on IR, circled in, and ID’d it with a spotlight. A team rushed out there and made a careful approach, but the guy had left a little bitty thermite pipe bomb jammed down into the gas fill pipe, probably triggered by a motion detector. As soon as the security team got close, the vibrations set that little bomb off, and the gas tank blew while everyone was still backpedaling. Casualties there were three guys shaken up badly, with minor burns; one of them, who had fallen or been knocked over backwards, maybe had a broken rib. They weren’t going to get much evidence out of what was left of the car.

  Just then, that was about as far as they knew. Everyone was pretty much assuming that the on-the-scene bad guy had escaped in another car, but he might be out there on foot, still making his rendezvous with someone, or he could even have been picked up by a light plane that flew in under radar or got very lucky with not getting detected; that access road was paved and there were no tracks. Anyway, the sonofabitch had an almost-two-hour head start on me. He could even have dashed to the Albuquerque airport, boarded a flight to Mexico City, and already be out of the country, maybe just boarding a flight to Havana.

  Now, that weird about-to-have-a-vivid-sex-hallucination feeling, which I figured was an aftereffect of the goddies, got more and more intense as I was listening to Hale, and then got more and more focused. I was getting a picture in my mind. Of a guy throwing a pizza uniform smock into an arroyo.

  Anyway, the funny thing was, I wasn’t picturing my boy doing it, I was like, being him, in my head. I felt the cold sweat and the feeling that he didn’t want to take one second extra and the nervousness about something he had heard on the police scanner. I felt that he knew he was supposed to bring the smock along to be destroyed, and not delay to do this, and he was so afraid of being seen dropping it into the arroyo, but he was real afraid of being caught with it, and he didn’t want the others to see the blood on the collar because he had been supposed to shoot her in the thigh, but hell any dumbass knew a tranquilizer in the neck would—he didn’t want them mad at him, he really wanted them to understand—fuckin’ fuckers had no business judging him at all. At all. Fuckin’ at all. He really had to get out to someplace just off Montgomery Avenue, near the Christian conservatory.

  He was visualizing Lena Logan’s place. He hadn’t been there very often and the Christian conservatory, which has a distinctive modernist bell tower, was his landmark.

  I knew where he was and how long he expected to take and I knew that if I whipped out of Xegon and got back onto 40 and floored it, and luck was with me, I could meet up with him just before he got there—I saw all the paths in my head.

  Now, I’ve had hunches before—half my business is having hunches—but this was more like the hunch having me, like it totally took over my head, John, I’m not fucking kidding it was weird.

  Well, hell with it, I’d played hunches that weren’t half that strong before, so I said to Hale that I had an idea and thought I should act on it right away, and that if he could have the guard at the gate have my bag ready—

  “Of course,” Hale said. “I’ll walk you out to the lot.” He got up, and we walked, an
d he talked on his cell and set me up with an escort guard car.

  “Hey,” I said, “thought. Maybe useful thought. Send a blank round via Lena Logan’s Gaudeamus machine, and what happens when it arrives? It arrives white-hot and blows up, right? And there was a box of those blanks beside her computer, right by her Gaudeamus platform. And for a bigger boom—put two butane torch cylinders into a paper bag with some black powder, and send the whole works—”

  “Boom,” Hale agreed. “I’ll tell them to look for bits of fused and melted metal out there, for analysis. But I would bet you’re right.”

  As we walked out the front door into the sodium-glare parking lot that held back the vast dark night around it, the escort car was just pulling up.

  Hale walked with me to my car. He hadn’t asked me a single question. Right then I decided he was the best guy at Xegon, even if he was a lipless inbred Yankee child of wealth. You can forgive a lot of a guy who doesn’t ask stupid questions when the clock’s running and you don’t have answers anyway.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Good luck,” he said. “As long as you get that box back, no one will care what you did on the way, and I can promise the money will be good.”

  I had that rental car in gear before I had my belt fastened or my hands on the wheel. The escort took off ahead of me, siren and lights on, and he put on brights plus a front spotlight, so that gravel highway was plain as day and I went along it at about ninety, leaving my lights off so as not to annoy my friend in front. We were waved through all the guard posts except the one where I’d left my bag; as I passed through that one, I hit the window button, slammed on brakes, and slowed down, and my buddy the guard—the one who was so cool about what was in the bag before—just tossed it into the passenger seat, like I was the fucking pony express.

  That guard car rode me all the way out to the base guardpost, where the road joined blacktop, and from there I floored it up onto 40 and was finally—maybe seven minutes after getting my hunch—seriously open for business. I knew where my boy was going from having been inside his head—I just didn’t know how I’d been inside his head. I could work that out later.

  So I went west on 40, back up towards town, with the pedal held down the whole way, slowed to make the turnoff, and then slammed it north on Tramway Boulevard as fast as I could. Tramway Boulevard connects the little tech start-ups in the northeast part of the city with the older, high-security stuff around Kirtland, basically a big traffic artery that they built because they figured sooner or later there’d be growth enough out at the end of it to justify its existence. Looking at the growth they got you had to say it was a dubious kind of justification.

  You can make good time on a main traffic artery in light traffic, as long as you know what you’re doing and the pigs aren’t out. I switched up my radar detector and my police scanner, kept my ears on, and duck-and-popped my way along, staying to the right when I could, keeping big trucks between me and anything that might be watching from up ahead, beating every yellow and careful of every red. It’s nerve-wracking and challenging and frankly I think it’s fun, but because of what it does to your brakes and clutch, you’d never do it with your own car, or if your renter didn’t have pretty decent brakes.

  And the whole time the hunch kept getting stronger. My boy had taken 40 practically the whole way to the downtown and then cut back up, the long way round to go, but I knew that he didn’t know Albuquerque even as well as I did (which wasn’t all that well).

  The big problem was that I knew he was meeting somebody at Lena Logan’s, and I knew he would feel safe when he got there. I had a sense that there might be a lot of them, too, and that they were all set to pick up the white box and whisk it away; I had a real sense that it was a biggish operation about to fold down, that there was going to be nothing left after tonight, and that this guy was just ticking off the seconds as he drove, slowly and carefully, towards Lena’s.

  Then he recognized the turnoff to 25 and saw the cemeteries down beyond, and checked his clock.

  It was clear as a bell. I mean—as a bell. It actually rang inside my head for a second, John, like imagine thinking of a bell, now imagine that your thought of the bell, inside your head, could be loud enough to deafen you, and you got what it felt like.

  That landmark told him that he had shaved about six minutes off his time, and he was happy as a pig in shit. I sure wasn’t.

  That was six minutes I didn’t have. Not if I was going to get into the lane next to his car, cut him off, push him into a side street, take him from there, and hold him long enough to call up Hale and get some reinforcements from Xegon security. Especially because I wanted to do that somewhere a long way from any reinforcements he might have.

  Well, no chance for that now. If I pushed it, I might get to him a few blocks short of Lena’s, but I was not gonna do any better than that, and I’d be headed the wrong way.

  I put the pedal to the metal, stopped worrying about not running reds, and just prayed for a pork-free environment for a few minutes. And to my deep surprise—hell, I’d’ve thought, based on all past experience, that Murphy is my copilot—I got clear sailing. I made the turn onto Montgomery, up where there’s miles of those new El Cheapo condos that look like the man who is trying to invent the habitable Taco Bell has some work left to do.

  I took that turn on two wheels but I was on the track. And the funny thing was that at the same time I could feel my boy on Montgomery, breathing easier and easier, looking for an address—Lena’s address, I realized—and annoyed in the dark by how hard it was to read street addresses, wanting to slow down and go way too slow in the right lane to look for a readable number, but afraid to be that conspicuous.

  I passed Lena’s. I could feel him out there, would see him in a second. I had won the race. Now if I could just maybe think of something to do, I’d be in great shape.

  Then I ran out of thinking time.

  My target was in a small brown pickup truck, a late-eighties Datsun with an old lawnmower, a paint-spattered ladder, and a messy tarp in the back, the kind of thing that wouldn’t draw ten nanoseconds of cop interest anywhere in America, especially considering it was driven by a man with a mop of gray hair surrounding a deep brown face, wearing old clothes. He was headed towards me in the far lane, half a block away. I was six lanes away from him laterally.

  Sometimes you just go with an idea and allow your idea to be a little stupid, and it still works out better than if you’d put any thought into it. Montgomery is a big, wide urban street lined with strip malls, and it’s divided with many breaks. There was a left turn lane for the other side of the road that I could get to if I floored it, so I did, shot across traffic, and went through it the wrong way. A car and a truck slammed on their brakes and gave me a tiny bit more room; my guy was still looking at addresses as I threw the wheel hard to the right, yanked my emergency brake, and put my car into a flat spin that slapped my trunk up against his front bumper.

  I was belted in, and I tucked up good too, fists to my forehead, elbows against my ribs, and head shoved back against the headrest. Momentum was pretty close to zero—I was on the side of the car that was spinning away from the direction of overall motion—so I just got thrown side-to-side for an instant, and then everything ground to a stop as the front of his little truck tried to climb up over the back of my rental car.

  But he wasn’t belted in and never had time to put on his brakes; somehow I knew he was looking to his right, trying to read the address, right until my rear lights flashed for an instant in his peripheral vision, a split second before his left front fender crunched.

  He thunked his face on the windshield and slammed his thighs against the steering wheel. The windshield cracked but didn’t break and the wheel and dash were padded, so he was hurt plenty but he would live. I could feel the agony in his head as I opened his door and let him fall onto the street; I stepped over him, reached across the bench seat, and sure enough, my hand grasped the cool enameled metal surfac
e of a Gaudeamus machine.

  You know, John, I didn’t think of it at the time, but if that old Gaudeamus machine had not been right where I knew it would be, I’d sure be a nut with a lot of explaining to do, now wouldn’t I?

  I pulled the Gaudeamus box out, grabbed my bag from my rental car, and took off at a trot. A couple people who had stopped were yelling at me in Spanish. (I don’t know Spanish but I suspect it was something like “Come back here, you son of a bitch! I saw what you did and I’m calling the cops!”)

  I ducked down a breezeway between two stores in a strip mall, jumped a fence, and went down into an arroyo. Could be a good way to get killed but I wasn’t planning to stay long, and if it flash-flooded in the next minute, well, I guess Murphy would just be claiming his own.

  I ran three blocks, popped back up at a vacant lot where neighborhood kids had broken down the fence, and doubled around to get back to my hotel. As soon as I was there, I used the pay phone in the lobby (just in case the opposition was scanning for cell phones) and let Hale know that I had the package and I needed a pickup, ASAP. I told him to send the pickup team to my hotel room, figuring that I was better off taking the chance that they might know about this place than being out on the street where they would be looking for me.

  Hale was amazed—I guess I had just become super-detective in his eyes—and promised to have an armed team out there in less than twenty minutes.

  I stopped at the Coke machine and got three cans of Mountain Dew; I was exhausted and figured I would need all the sugar and caffeine I could get. I got back to my room, hung out the DO NOT DISTURB tag, took a leak, and settled back into my chair. As I was gulping the first Mountain Dew the utter weirdness of the whole thing hit me. That I was sitting here with a machine that did at least two things that were supposed to be impossible. Which I had recaptured from bad guys. About whom I knew nothing. Using—ESP? In which I had never believed.