All the Lives He Led-A Novel (34 page)

Well, I was doing that already, but I paused in slipping into my shirt to tell him so.

He just said, “Do it faster. We’ve got a job to do.”

He didn’t look evil, the professor never did that, but I was taking no chances. I stopped with my head just ready to slip into the shirt collar. “What job?” I demanded.

He opened his mouth to give me an answer but Piranha Woman got there first. She spoke to him, not even looking at me, “I say once more, Colonel, you are making a serious mistake.”

That was when the old man stopped looking jolly. “I say once more, Major, shut up,” he said. She cringed a little, bit her lip a little, but did as she was ordered as, back to good-natured, the colonel turned again to me. “Why, Brad,” he said, “what we’re going to do, we’re going to pay a call on that farmhouse outside of Caserta. I think Gerda may be holed up there.”

I took a chance. “Because of what I told Shao-pin?”

“Yes, partly,” he said. “We knew she had a place somewhere around here and the other possibilities got eliminated quickly. Your lead may eliminate, too, but at the moment it’s the only one we’ve got.” He sat down on the edge of my cot, watching me pull on a pair of socks. “Bradley, I’m not wrong about this, am I?” he asked. “You do want to be there when we take her, even if—even if she resists.”

“You’re not wrong,” I said, pulling on my sandals. “Even if anything.”

He said, “Yes. In fact I think she’s more likely to be peaceful if you’re there.” He rose. “Though we can’t be sure of how she will react,” he added. “Now we’re out of time. The column will be waiting.”

He was right about that, too. I could hear the engines as soon as we left the room, more than a dozen vehicles, and as soon as we got into the command car that was waiting at the curbside, doors open, our driver slipped us into what looked like a space right after what seemed to be the fourth or fifth vehicle in line. I noticed that all the vehicles ahead of ours had machine-gun emplacements on the roofs.

As our driver slipped us into place the whole column began to move, bright lights began blinking on every car, and we accelerated into the stream of traffic, Piranha Woman in the front seat next to the driver, me sharing the rear with Colonel Mazzini, who was already looking out the window with one eye and keeping data flow from his opticle for the other, and we were barreling down the autostrada at something over a hundred kilometers an hour. From the backseat I couldn’t tell how much over, but I could hear the faint
eepeepeepeep
that informed the driver he was in violation of the posted speed limits.

We weren’t alone, of course. It was well past rush hour but the autostrada carried the usual autostrada’s 24-7 worth of traffic, buses and tandem trucks and farm pickups and about a million private cars, all unwillingly shoehorning themselves over to the slow lane when the strobes and ultrasounds of our lead high-speeds warned them that a chunk of Security was on the move. I couldn’t see exactly how many Security vehicles were in the posse that the professor had summoned out of nothing. More than a dozen, counting the personnel carriers behind us that I couldn’t see most of the time, and the ambulance and the two fire trucks that were only visible when the road was making one of its gentle curves. With all the pulsing strobes and the shuddering of the ultrasounds and the
heehaw
of the clear-the-way signals it looked and sounded like many more.

And there I was in the middle of it, racing like a bat out of hell to join Security in the hunt—the ultimately fatal hunt, no doubt how it would turn out, for my dearest, dearest love.

Once we were well on the way Colonel Mazzini pushed his opticle to one side and turned to look at me. “We’ve got a few minutes,” he told me. “No doubt you have questions.”

I surely did. I didn’t have to ask any of them, though. The professor knew what they were, and economized on time by answering them all without waiting for me. It was that silly trip to Caserta, the one when Gerda got lost, that did it. Only she hadn’t been lost at all. After I got out of the three-wheeler? Gerda had waited just long enough for me to be out of sight. Then she drove off on an errand of her own.

So the professor said. And how did he know this? Simple. It was satellite surveillance that gave him his answer.

There was very little that happened on the surface of the Earth, or at least the inhabited part of it, that one spy satellite or another was not watching.

So it was no trouble for the computers to locate Gerda’s car in the palace parking lot, just where, and when, I’d got out of it. When it pulled back out of the lot they did briefly lose it in the overpasses and underpasses that went to the autostrada. That wasn’t much of a problem, though. By then the same search programs that had picked me out of the Cairo subway mob knew what the three-wheeler looked like from overhead. They widened the search a little, and there she was, tootling up the farm road to the place where she had scored the grappa.

Where we were heading, me and Piranha Woman and the professor and all those heavily armed Security grunts.

Before anything began to look too familiar the professor ordered all the bells and whistles off. “We don’t want to tell them we’re coming,” he told me. I hadn’t asked for an explanation. I didn’t ask for one when I observed that all the other autostrada traffic had been stopped on the shoulders, so that nothing moved on the highway but our Security cavalcade, nor even when I felt our car slow from its 120 kph or so to maybe 70. I didn’t need to be told that the reason we were slowing was that we were getting close, and the reason for halting the other traffic was that the professor suspected there was going to be shooting, and didn’t want any of it to kill civilians. Then, tardily, I recognized the dingy old warehouse on a hill, and the dirt road to the farmhouse where Gerda had scored her half-liter of grappa.

We were there.

Our car slowed and pulled as far as possible to the right, fifty or sixty meters short of the farm road, so the personnel carriers could slide past. A three-wheeler with a machine gun mounted on the right was already chugging up the hill. It stopped halfway there. The machine gunner sighted in on every visible door and window—most of them shuttered—while the driver scanned the house with field glasses.

What their next step would have been I never found out. They didn’t get to take it. On one of the windows the shutters flew back.

I had no doubt of what it was that flew out of it, incandescent red and fiery yellow, drawing through the air a shallow arc that ended in the face of the machine guuner. He didn’t stand bemused, waiting to be turned into bloody, crispy shrapnel. He responded as he was trained to, fingers seeking the machine gun’s trigger, the barrel swinging toward the opened window. He was fast, yes, but not as fast as the rocket from the handheld launcher inside.

The missile did not only pulverize the upper body of the machine gunner, it caught the driver and flung his racked and burning body onto the nearest row of rotting vegetation. But by then the next Security vehicle had opened fire on that window, and then two more behind it; violent explosions flared inside, and then a dozen square meters of outer wall peeled away and toppled to the ground. The missile shooter had to be inside, along with his weapon, but all I could see was flame. What I didn’t know was whether the shooter had sensibly got out of there right after firing that one shot, or stayed around in the hope of another. If he had he was no longer alive.

Or she was.

By then every vehicle in the Security line was bouncing up that road. From the front seat Piranha Woman turned to the professor, her face a mixture of eagerness and joy. The professor was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “Let the grunts do their work. They’ll fetch whoever’s in there out for us.”

Well, that was sensible enough for someone commanding an assault force. It didn’t appeal to me, but then Gerda was involved and about her I had never been sensible. “Can’t we at least get a little closer?” I asked. Or begged, or maybe even whined.

I don’t know what the professor thought of me at that point. He glanced at me without any recognizable expression at all. Then he raised his voice. “Move us up to the turnoff,” he ordered the driver.

As we began to move the file of Security vehicles was just beginning to bounce off the road to get around what was left of the destroyed three-wheeler. The room the missile had come out of was blazing merrily. There was no sign of life from anywhere else in the farmhouse … .

And then, as we entered the farm road, there was.

It didn’t come from any of the doors or windows we could see. There was at least one door on the far side of the farmhouse, though, because something came roaring out of it, heading across the planted fields.

What it was (we found out later) was a four-wheel-drive farm jitney, meant for cruising plowed fields. It did its job. It bounced across the rows of rotting flax, headed for the Caserta-bound highway. Piranha Woman had the glasses on it. “I think it’s her!” she screeched. “I can’t see the face, but it’s a woman! Don’t let her get away!”

If anyone was going to catch her it had to be us; all the rest of our posse was tangled along the side of the road, bypassing the ruin of the three-wheeler. “Do it!” shouted the professor, but even before he spoke the driver was backing us bumpily onto the empty autostrada. Our car was at least twice as fast as the escaping Gerda’s could ever be, but backing onto the highway slowed us down. As we began accelerating down the highway Gerda’s crop-jumper was a hundred meters away and already climbing the autostrada’s embankment. And Piranha Woman had opened her window, with a rapid-fire gun poking out and ready.

She wasn’t firing, yet. She was looking back over her shoulder at the professor, waiting for his order. But if Gerda showed any sign of getting away from us I had no doubt that that order would come.

There was not going to be a happy ending for my love. Dead or captured: there were no other apparent possible outcomes.

What that estimate didn’t figure on, of course, was Gerda’s—or maybe I should say Brian Bossert’s—track record. He (that is, she) had been in plenty of tight places before, and survived, by doing what was not expected.

She didn’t try to run away from us along the empty autostrada lanes heading toward Caserta. She cut right across the paved lanes and kept going, bumping across the parkway strip and right into the lanes that led to Naples.

The professor had stopped the eastbound traffic. Westbound it was sailing right along, 100-plus kph, maybe a little slower than usual as the Naples-bound drivers tried to figure out why the Caserta lanes had become suddenly empty, but still chugging along.

I saw what Gerda was up to. If she could just get through that cross traffic there was a chance—maybe not a good chance, but a lot better than no chance at all—that we couldn’t follow.

Oh, it wasn’t a wonderful plan. What it was was just the only one open to her and, hey, it might have worked.

It didn’t, though.

It was an intercity hydrobus that hit Gerda’s farm jitney, but of course the smashing and crashing didn’t stop there. I don’t know the final total of fender benders that were lined up on the shoulder, the drivers yelling accusations at the other drivers and at the carabinieri. The carabinieri didn’t yell back, just went on with the job of getting all the warm bodies at least a dozen meters away from the hydrobus, all that is but my busted-up beloved, stuck irretrievably behind the little engine, which had taken up residence in her lap.

It hadn’t been an equal match. The intercity bus outmassed Gerda’s little cart at least a dozen to one. It was efficiently crumpled, and the released hydrogen in the bus’s fuel chamber could not be prevented from flaring up. Fortunately the system was designed as a release-as-needed fuel provider. If it had all gone up at once there wouldn’t have been any survivors at all. As it was even Gerda survived for a little while. Long enough to talk to me. As soon as the flare died down I pushed the carbinieri away and ran to her. I took her in my arms, calling her name. She said, “Brad? Is that you?” I don’t think she could see, but she was pressing something into my hand and whispering, “Take it. Hide it! Don’t let them get it.” Then the others were getting there, trying to make me release her.

At first I wouldn’t let them, because she was still talking. “Brad,” she said, “was I wrong?” But then she did stop, and I let them take her, because I had felt her die.

27

MY CAREER AS AN EVIDENCE THIEF

“Hide it,” Gerda had said. So I did exactly as I had been commanded by the dying wish of the woman I loved with all my heart. That is, I hid it. I wrapped my fist around it, which was not hard to do because it wasn’t much bigger than an American quarter, and I didn’t unwrap it until I was slipping it into my hip pocket.

You see, I had a very high opinion of Security’s spy cameras. The chance was slim that they had such things bearing on this patch of superhighway between Naples and Caserta, but slim is not the same as none, and Gerda had wanted it hidden.

It stayed hidden all the way back to the Security complex in Naples, where they drove me into a built-in garage. I was well inside the building before I stepped out into one of those bare Security rooms, where they got me to make a statement for their records before they let me say good-bye to Gerda.

Well, actually they were fairly nice about that part. They had cleaned her corpse up a little and covered most of her with a white cloth. She lay on a gurney with her eyes and mouth closed, and they left me alone in the room with her for a bit.

I didn’t protract it. She was gone. I just kissed her cold lips, and whispered into her unhearing ear, never mind what, and I went out and closed the door behind me, and never again saw that body that I had once so thoroughly enjoyed.

The professor came by while I was eating something Nola had brought for me. He asked if I needed anything. I said no. He asked if I had any questions. I said no to that, too, although that wasn’t true. I had great big and seriously worrisome questions about that object in my right hip pocket.