Brain Storm (23 page)

The broadcast coupling was damaged. He didn't know that was what it was, only that a bare piece of metal hung down from some wires over the cab. Otherwise, everything seemed fine.

He checked the back. The door had been broken off and repaired.

Hastily, it seemed. It was a sloppy welding job.

There were furrows that almost looked like finger marks all up and down the sides of the large rear door.

The back handle was bent. He rattled it experimentally. The door was solid. So solid, in fact, it wouldn't open. The fool who had repaired it had welded it to the side panels. At least it wouldn't fall off in traffic.

He shouldn't dawdle. Leaving the rear of the truck, he climbed up into the spacious cab.

He checked the door between the cab and the rear of the van.

That didn't budge, either. It wasn't fused like the other door, but only appeared to be stuck. No matter.

Let Holz worry about that in Edison.

The keys weren't in the ignition, but that didn't matter. He had driven the van several times himself.

He pulled a spare set of keys from his pocket and stuck them in the ignition.

The engine turned over on the first try.

The security guard gave him a polite wave as he drove out onto the street. It was the same little half salute the guard gave all the service trucks as they passed through the gates of Folcroft.

Holz's assistant did not wave back.

19

Sir Geoffrey Hyde-Black was out of air freshener.

To the sorts of people who used air freshener, this would seldom be viewed as more than a minor in-convenience. To Sir Geoffrey, it was a disaster far greater than using the Magna Carta for a doily and accidentally flushing the crown jewels down the loo.

Because without his little can of aerosol spray, he would have to smell "them" in all their malodorous glory.

The odors Sir Geoffrey wished to mask were those of the wogs.

This was a disparaging term invented during the British colonial period to refer to Orientals specifically. Through the years, the original meaning had dissipated to the point where it referred to any race or nation deemed primitive. In Sir Geoffrey's case, when he used the term wog he was referring to the other members of the United Nations General assem-bly. They all, quite frankly, smelled to him like a blood sausage that had gone off. Every last bloody wog.

He longed for the day that he wouldn't have to deal with any of them, but as Her Majesty's chosen ambassador to the United Nations, he hadn't much of a choice.

He only wished the wogs didn't smell so fright-fully bad.

It wasn't that Sir Geoffrey was a racist, mind you.

Oh my, no.

If he had only thought ill of Third World nations, that would have been racist. They all smelled, of course. That much was certain. And they were most assuredly wogs. If it wasn't the funk of unwashed clothing and bodies, it was the stench of a thousand native spices pouring from endlessly prattling mouths. Mostly chutney.

In the opinion of Ambassador Hyde-Black, the Second World countries didn't fare much better.

"Wogs in bad suits," he would say.

And let's face it, the only real Second World country was Russia and the whole population stank as if they'd spent half their lives marinating in the bottom of a vodka bottle.

As far as First World countries were concerned, the only ones that mattered were the United Kingdom and the Americans. And Sir Geoffrey had never quite forgiven the colonists for their 1776 decision. They were, in his humble opinion, wogs to a man. And wogs always smelled.

In the case of the Americans, the collective national odor was one of undercooked beef and over-priced perfume.

So that left Great Britain, alone in the world without an odor.

Of course, that didn't include the East End of London. He refused to go near there without nose plugs and a portable fan. These people, though protected by Her Royal Majesty and equal in the eyes of the Crown, were nonetheless, wogs. As were the British citizens of Liverpool, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

In fact, you could work in the City, bank on Fleet Street, frequent the haberdasheries on Savile Row and still, in the opinion of Sir Geoffrey Hyde-Black, be a wog.

And a wog, to Ambassador Sir Geoffrey Hyde-Black, always, always, unfailingly and without exception, smelled. It was an immutable fact.

And so when the General Assembly was meeting, Sir Geoffrey always armed himself with as many cans of air freshener as he could carry. He liked to keep an even ratio of cans to wogs. But he invariably exhausted his supply on those long special-censure sessions when one of those bloody mad Arab countries was acting up.

Lobynia was up to some new nonsense, and the world community was meeting at the UN Building to discuss possible sanctions. It should have been an easy matter to resolve, but the Americans had brought back the insufferable Helena Eckert to ne-gotiate. She had been the U.S. ambassador to the UN

until her appointment as Secretary of State more than a year ago. As acting ambassador, Eckart had seen fit to offer resistance to a compromise hammered out by the French ambassador. When Eckert had expressed her disapproval, the Arab contingent had become quite agitated, and the stage was set for an afternoon of heated debate.

Sir Geoffrey had just surreptitiously spritzed his last spurt of pine-forest mint onto the sweat-stained caftan of the angry Hamidian delegate and had returned to his briefcase for a fresh supply. He was horrified to find he had no more cans of aerosol freshener left. Sir Geoffrey was faced with the dreadful prospect of having to inhale the unsweetened smells of unshowered, impassioned wogs. As the thought registered in his upper-class mind, the ambassador swooned.

Fortunately for Sir Geoffrey, he needn't have been concerned. The Secretary-General adjourned the meeting for the afternoon.

Delighted at his stroke of luck, Sir Geoffrey hurried from the General Assembly chamber, his monogrammed handkerchief held firmly over his mouth and nose. In the British offices, he ordered up his limousine and took the elevators down nearly thirty stories to the street below.

His man, Parkinson, was waiting near the entrance.

Sir Geoffrey fell into the back of the limo, and the car sped off into Manhattan.

"Problem, sir?" his driver asked. His enunciation had the stodgy, labored cadences of an aristocrat. Sir Geoffrey liked the boy, even if he was a touch wog-gish.

"It's these people and their ghastly odors, Parkinson." When Sir Geoffrey spoke, it seemed as if his lower lip had been stapled to his uvula. "Remember this always, Parkinson," he said self-importantly, "it is one thing to talk about helping the unwashed masses of the world. It is another thing entirely to have to smell them."

He instructed the chauffeur to drive around the city for a while.

Eventually he had to find a place where he could replenish his supply of air freshener, but first he wanted to purge his mind and lungs of the foul poisons already ingested.

He felt safe in this city, as long as he was in his limousine.

It was the finest, most impregnable high-tech device on wheels this side of a tank. A bomb could go off in the glove box, and in the back seat Sir Geoffrey would still be safe as a babe in his mum's arms.

They stalled in traffic on Forty-second Street. They were parked there, amid a thousand honking wog horns, when the car suddenly hit a bump in the road.

Rather strange, that, Sir Geoffrey thought. How does one hit a pothole when one is parked?

The car rocked as if it had been hit by mortar fire.

Sir Geoffrey was thrown roughly around the back seat "Good heavens, Parkinson, what was that?"

"I'm not certain, sir."

Sir Geoffrey quickly assessed the situation and employed his great British intellect. "Well, steer around it, then."

"Very good, sir."

The car hopped again.

Parkinson looked genuinely shaken. "This is very confusing, sir. We're not moving. And I didn't seem to see any holes in the road."

Parkinson waited for a response. Sir Geoffrey said not a word.

That was odd. His master generally took a rogue pothole as an opportunity to deride the Americans for their shabby, woglike approach to civil problems.

And, Parkinson noticed, the traffic sounds were suddenly much louder than they had been. Almost as if something was open to the street.

But, of course, Sir Geoffrey would never open a window. He thought the smells of New York City were at least as bad as the rank aromas of his fellow UN delegates.

Must be his hearing. Parkinson made a note to go to a doctor to have his ears checked as soon as possible. And anyway, the traffic had thinned by this time. They were able to move on.

The limo continued driving along Forty-second, both rear doors missing.

The spacious, fragrant back interior of the vehicle was as exposed as a Buckingham Palace scandal.

The back seat where British ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Geoffrey Hyde-Black, had sat was empty.

Arkady Rokossovsky was a pirate.

He wasn't the old-fashioned kind of pirate. He had sailed on actual water precisely one time in his life.

It was a pleasure boat in the Black Sea, and Arkady had thrown up, feeding the fishes with his half-digested lunch.

No, he wasn't a pirate of the seas, but rather a pirate of technology.

Arkady taped movies illegally. It was a process that, to most Americans, was half hobby, half nui-sance. To Arkady, it was a living.

The films he taped he sold to his fellow countrymen on his return trips to Moscow. It was quite a successful venture. Movies cost nothing to rent here, so his only real investment was in his two videotape machines. Back home, the tape machines cost a fortune, but those who could afford them could afford to pay top dollar for such great American classics as Ghoulies and Porky's Revenge.

Arkady made a pretty good buck off of video pi-racy. It helped supplement his income as Russian ambassador to the United Nations.

In Russia, nothing official paid very well these days. Government service was no longer the easiest way to a posh Moscow apartment, a weekend dacha or a ZIL limousine.

Fortunately America was still the land of opportunity for enterprising Russians. Those lucky enough to be posted at the UN mission had far greater purchasing power than their countrymen back home.

And the diplomatic pouch meant that they could cart back duty-free loads of blue jeans, American cigarettes and Mars candy bars. A small payment to the customs officers, a portion to the Moscow police, a stipend to the black market, a cut to select individuals in the foreign-service office, and the rest went to the lucky entrepreneur.

Arkady Rokossovsky felt like a millionaire.

He was pleased when the General Assembly had suspended debate on the Lobynian sanctions. He would be returning to Moscow in another week and he wanted to make certain he brought along with him as many tapes as he could carry.

He left the video store with two full bags.

Arkady balanced the bags in one hand as he searched through his pockets for his car keys. In the days of the old Soviet empire, he would have had his own personal driver, but these days everything was on a much tighter budget Sometimes he missed the old days.

He was almost at the car when he began to get the feeling he was being watched. It was an odd sensation. One that he hadn't felt in some time.

He had been part of the mission in the old days, back when nearly all of the Soviet diplomatic corps was KGB. In fact, when he first saw the FBI warning at the beginning of a videotaped movie, he thought that the American federal police agency had somehow found a way to watch him through his television set. His belief in an omnipresent state was that in-grained.

But this was different than KGB surveillance.

There was a strange thrill of electricity around him.

The very air seemed charged.

He was at his car. Arkady, fumbling now, placed his key in the driver's-side door lock.

The pressure around the Russian ambassador suddenly changed. Arkady thought he saw something move out of the corner of his eye.

For an instant, he swore he saw a bony hand with long, tapered fingernails flash before his field of vision. Then he saw nothing.

Secretary of State Helena Eckert passed her doorman at the Brewster Building on Park Avenue.

Since her appointment to State, she spent very little time here. It was good to be home.

The doorman politely touched the brim of his cap as he held the door open wide. She didn't even acknowledge his presence, pretending instead that the door had mysteriously opened of its own volition.

She was a matronly sixty-year-old woman who used too much makeup and spent too little time applying it. Her lips were smeared with sorry streaks of red, her cheeks caked with blotches of orange rouge and her forehead daubed with bits of shimmery blue where an overzealous application of eyeliner had spilled over. Her hair, tinged blue, looked as though it had been styled at Bellevue.

Helena Eckert didn't care. She prided herself on her ability to apply her own makeup. She never let the servants go near her rapidly aging face. As for her hair? Curlers. It had shocked a lot of people when she first revealed the truth to the New Yorker magazine.

She felt so...so bohemian.

Not that she couldn't afford the best hair and face consultants in the world. Helena Eckert was rich.

But she didn't want anyone to hold that against her. Public perception was so important among the lower orders.

Even after she had graduated from ambassador, she had refused to change her grooming habits. Even after the President himself had weighed in on the subject.

But none of that mattered for now. The Lobynian sanctions had brought her back to her old haunts. She was "ambassador" again. If only temporarily. She insisted while she was in New York that she be addressed as such.

Today, she wore a Perry Ellis raincoat over her Christian Dior blouse and skirt. She felt this proved she had the common touch.