Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (8 page)

“No, I don’t.” This time she charged at him. She caught him just as he crested a hillock. He found himself propelled down a steep slope, lost his footing, and fell headlong. But that was it. She didn’t knock him out with a rock or anything.

She searched in the grass for whatever it was she had dropped, and then her footsteps receded into the darkness.

He scrambled to his feet. He ran up the slope after her and crested the hill again. The trail dropped steeply at first, a fun drop for anyone mountain biking, then bottomed out in a swale before rising again in a series of bumps.

Well, at least he was faster than she was. He could see her blocky shape struggling up the opposite slope, not too far ahead of him. He didn’t see Hesketh, but the thing was too low to be spotted easily. From Charis’s intentness, it must have been just ahead of her.

By the time he caught up to her again, the air was tearing in his lungs.

“Jesus, can’t you just give it up?” She turned to face him. “I need to check the thing out. Relax.”

“I . . . won’t . .. relax.”

“I’m sorry. Here’s a bit of mandatory vacation.” She raised the beer can.

Bernal heard a loud 
thwang
, like a giant rubber band. Something grabbed his legs and threw him backward. He fell on his back and tried to get up, but something held his legs in a firm grip. He felt at them. Rubbery cords had wrapped around them, pinioning them. When he struggled, the cords grew tighter.

He forced himself to relax and really analyze what held him. The cords were elastic, but not sticky. At least, they didn’t stick to his pants, though they did seem to stick to each other. He swung his legs around so that he had some chance to see what the arrangement was.

They were mutually sticky through something like Velcro. He could feel how the ends of the cords penetrated each other. He was held by a dense network.

He managed to slip his hand into his pocket and pull out his multitool. If he had to cut every cord, he would be here all night. But networks often had points of maximum vulnerability. He plucked the cords to get a sense of the tension, cut one, then another. Already the net was looser, but he had to be careful not to try to escape too quickly, which could cause it to twist and tighten up again. He thought carefully and cut a third.

Ah. He wriggled out of it and was finally able to stand with his legs free. Then, moving deliberately, he set off after Charis and Hesketh.

The right-of-way crossed a road. Bernal saw Cha-ris’s Hummer parked a few yards away, but it was dark.

Scratches on the asphalt ran across the road and back into the grass. The damaged Hesketh was still going strong.

Bernal moved more quickly. Beyond the road, the right-of-way swept wide to the left, where it met a high chain-link fence. Tracking Hesketh was easier than it might have been, because the right-of-way was hemmed by back fences and other barriers on both sides, and because Hesketh made an astonishing amount of noise pulling its body along on its remaining functioning legs.

He almost went past it, but some noise beyond the fence redirected his attention.

Something had ripped a hole in the fence, partially screened by dried weeds. Some of the weeds were freshly broken.

He pushed his way through.

Charis carried another
 of her blocky, cheesy-looking weapons. She should hire a decent props department, Bernal thought. She’d climbed partway up the slope and was now looking downward, almost at Bernal.

Below her, Hesketh climbed tenaciously up the slope of tires, its legs spread wide. Two of the legs on the left side were dead and dragged uselessly, while one on the right jerked spastically. It was a wonder it was going anywhere.

Charis bent over, heaved, and toppled tires down on top of Hesketh, yelling something Bernal couldn’t hear. It slid a few feet back, then spread its legs out farther and climbed more deliberately. Charis chucked a couple more tires, but they bounced harmlessly off its carapace and off a projection on its back.

It was an antenna. The thing had a high-frequency antenna on its back.

Why was it still heading toward her, instead of fleeing?

“Charis!” he yelled up.

He thought back to their fight. She probably could have taken him out at any time, much more effectively than the guy with the cast-iron doggie doorstop had. But, at every point, she’d only used as much force as she needed to.

“Give me a minute.” Her voice was surprisingly calm. “Then we can have a talk.”

She shouldered her weapon and fired. It seemed to be some kind of crowd-control hoser and fired padded pellets. They were meant to stun unarmed rioters. And it had the desired effect, knocking Hesketh completely off its legs and rolling it down the hill. She charged down after it.

He was finally close enough to get a look at Hesketh.

It looked really slapped together, with bubblegum welds that would have shamed a first-year shop student. Nothing about this operation was as high class as he would have liked.

She knelt over Hesketh and looked up at him. “You okay? I mean, I had to—”

“Charis,” he said urgently. “That thing is radio-controlled. I’ll bet it has no more processing in it than a remote-controlled airplane. It’s nothing but a decoy.”

“Then why the hell would it be—” She glanced down at it, then ran.

She’d almost gotten out of range when the thing exploded.

_______

He felt the
 compression wave of the explosion. He stumbled backward, hands in front of his face.

But he was still there. He hadn’t been knocked into blackness. But, for a moment, he remembered what had happened to him, and huddled, curled up, hoping to protect himself.

“Where are you injured?” Charis’s big hand on his shoulder, her wide face shoved into his.

“I’m ...” He took a breath. “I’m fine. Just... I had something happen once. Still cracks, here and there. Give me a minute, I’ll be okay.”

Blue flames licked up from where Hesketh, or whatever, had been. Its pieces lay all around the crater it had blown in the pile of tires. Bernal choked on the smell of burning rubber.

He looked up at Charis. “How are you?”

“Alive. Thanks to you. But not much better than that.” He now saw that half her face was black, and there was a bloody tear in her leg.

“Bandages?” he said.

“In the car. But don’t worry about that now. Get the extinguisher. Under the steering column.”

“Let me help you down—”

“Now.
 Tire fires are nightmares. 
Move”

Bernal found the red extinguisher easily enough. The climb seemed much harder this time. Every third step, his foot sank into a tire. Loose lengths of radial belt tore at his pants.

The stench was incredible.

By the time he got back up the hill, Charis had torn a length of cloth from her shirt and tied off her bleeding calf. Her fingers moved with quick expertise: she knew field first aid.

Bernal sprayed foam on the stinking rubber.

“So, what the hell was this thing?” Charis held a length of the device’s leg. “Packed with half a pound of Semtex, I’d estimate. Not a crowd shredder, but nothing to pick your nose with either.”

“Some kind of decoy, not Hesketh at all.” Once burning, the rubber decided it liked it that way. The fire retreated only reluctantly. The extinguisher was meant to suppress an engine fire. Its capacity was limited. “Just a little remote-control crawler. No processing in it at all.” 

Charis shook her head, then winced. “I’ve been skunked. All the way through. There’s no Hesketh. There’s nothing. Muriel asked me—”

“What?”

“Muriel Inglis. You remember her. Your boss. She asked us to look into what Ungaro was up to. Said she’d lost control, that things were going bad and she needed our help...”

“Whose help?”

“Social Protection. We provide . . . technical security services, you might say.”

“Who might say? Not me.”

“Argue with me, but keep working that fire. You’ve almost got it under control. Look. Muriel’s taken off and I don’t know what the hell she’s up to. I do know that she’s taken off with a spare herf gun of mine that I would like to have back. I should have just called it all off this morning when I saw no Hesketh in that lab and got roughed up by Muriel’s attack dog employee.”

It took Bernal an instant to realize that she was talking about him. “What do you say Muriel asked you to do?” 

“She asked me to grab Hesketh when I could, so that she could examine it. She didn’t think Missy Madeline Ungaro was reporting adequately. Muriel had funded the thing, so I guess I was some kind of high-tech repo man. Muriel’s got a talent for getting people to do what she wants. Right? So, tell me, why are you here? I had information from before, from my surveillance, on where Hesketh was going to be. What brought you out?”

Muriel, Bernal didn’t say. A message from Muriel. He didn’t have any interest in sharing that information with Charis. He’d have to find Muriel and talk with her first. He kicked a big truck tire onto some fugitive blue flames and got a last dribble out of the extinguisher.

“Just a hunch,” he said.

If Charis hadn’t shown up, he would have waited for Hesketh and then met the detonation himself. He was  sure there was a good explanation, but one thing he’d have to ask Muriel was why she had sent him a message that had almost gotten him killed.

Something glowed above the trees. As Bernal drove, it grew and turned into the toe of a cowboy boot, brightly spotlit.

The boot was at the end of the kicked-up leg of a cowgirl straddling a rocket. She was thirty feet high, a masterpiece of fiberglass craftsmanship. She wore two sheriff’s badges, one on each thrusting breast, and nebulae decorated her short denim skirt. The rocket she rode was a nondescript thing of creased metal. Beneath her feet lay a diner, like the box her high-heeled ostrich-hide boots had come in.

Near Earth Orbit. Bernal was burnt, stinging from cuts, and his ears still rang from the detonation. What he wanted more than anything was to get back to Ungaro’s lab and get to bed. But something about the cowboy motif snagged his thoughts. He slowed and pulled into the gravel parking lot. Vast fields spread out around the diner and barren hills. Whether toxic waste, ancient Indian curses, or lack of easy highway access, something had prevented any kind of development nearby.

The cowboy boot. Muriel had sent him his message about Madeline Ungaro’s lab in a cowboy boot. But that seemed overly subtle, even for her.

Wait. A Near Earth Orbit menu had been propped up against the wall in Norbert Spillvagen’s garage office. And with that as an additional piece of information, the orange pickup he’d seen in Spillvagen’s driveway suddenly emerged out of the murky parking lot into Bernal’s consciousness. Once he saw it, it seemed obvious, like he should have spotted it from the road. It had extra chrome detailing on it, which made Bernal think Spillvagen must have bought it used. That didn’t seem like Spillvagen’s style at all.

Bernal felt an unexpected surge of anger. Spillvagen. What the hell was he up to? Bernal was searching for something really important. Spillvagen had deliberately lied to him, for reasons of his own, and sent him on a ridiculous detour to talk to Yolanda.

Bernal didn’t usually let anger guide his actions, but being tossed around by Charis and then almost blown up had put him in a bad mood. Plus, he realized he was hungry. Might as well take care of all his current needs in one place. He pulled into the parking lot. The cowgirl above now faced away, staring off into the depths of space.

He went in to confront Spillvagen.

_______

“May I join
 you?” Without waiting for an answer, Bernal slid into the booth opposite Spillvagen.

Spillvagen still wore his short-sleeved dress shirt and tie, but he’d eaten a donut with powdered sugar some 
^:
 time during the day, and the gondoliers now poled through a snow-covered Venice. He looked around, as if hoping for some escape. Then he shook his head. “Sure. Why not?”

“You sent me to harass Yolanda,” Bernal said. “You didn’t actually think she had anything at all to do with what I was interested in. You just wanted her to think that you had a lot of agents doing your bidding. Put the pressure on.”

“Well .. .” Spillvagen said. “That’s not strictly true. I was wondering . . . oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. But if you knew how deep her loony campaign has put me in the shit. .. .” 

“Your goal should be to not get in any deeper.” Bernal picked up a menu. “There are a few things I want to know.”

“You want to know something? Stay away from the paella.” The waiter was tall and mournful, BOB was embroidered on his bowling shirt in elaborate script that matched the menu. “I think it has squid in it. Those things evolved too long ago to be edible.”

“Just a burger, Bob.”

“How’s the salmon?” Bernal asked.

“You ever smell one of those fish farms? Makes a beef lot seem like a resort spa. And enough PCBs and mercury to yellow your eyeballs.”

“Maybe a burger.” Bernal closed up his menu. 

“Excellent choice.” What Bob scribbled on his pad, however, seemed much more complex than their actual order. “The real question is, of course, was 9/11 Pearl Harbor, or was it the Reichstag fire? Or to put it another way, did we simply 
allow
 a real enemy to attack us, or did we have to 
create
 one? Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Roosevelt did what he absolutely had to do to preserve Western civilization, however he set it up. He had to get an isolationist, xenophobic, racist, mob-ruled, Hollywood-addled nation to do its duty. Think of the challenge he had! They thought they could pull the Atlantic and Pacific oceans over their heads and go to sleep. Greatest Generation, my ass. The last generation for whom lynching was considered an evening’s light entertainment. And the whining! An overdue stock correction and they all fell on their backs and lay there for a decade with their legs in the air like stunned beetles. So FDR really had to let that bunch of losers get kicked in the ass to wake them up.