Death Wave (16 page)

“There's more here than meets the eye,” Walt agreed.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think you should do about it?”

Nick started to answer, but found that he had nothing to say. “I don't know,” he admitted, feeling weak, helpless, and hating himself for it.

But Walt smiled, sphinxlike. “I think perhaps I can help you, Nick, my friend.”

“Yeah?”

“Remember what I said when we first met. Rise and strike.”

 

WALTER JAMES EDGERTON

So much of his life was based on fiction and deception that Walt sometimes had difficulty separating the true from the not-so-true.

He had indeed been arrested and jailed when he was fourteen. Not for hacking into the school system's examinations, but for attempting to blackmail his middle school principal, threatening to reveal that they had had sex together (which was false) unless she altered his grades (which were less than admirable).

His trial was so brief that he didn't realize it was over until the judge declared him guilty and sentenced him to five years in a corrective school.

It was there that his talents blossomed. Walt obtained contraband narcotics for his fellow teenaged jailbirds, he sold forbidden phones and notebooks to them, he learned how to smuggle prostitutes—male as well as female—into their cells.

He himself remained a virgin. He was never raped. He never hunted down his nonexistent violator. He never killed anyone.

But one fine day (actually it was raining hard all morning) he was taken from his cell and brought to a conference room. Waiting for him there was a tall, broad-shouldered blond woman with a generous figure and a face that would have been beautiful if she would only smile.

But she was deadly serious. She offered Walt freedom and even a decent income if he would cooperate with the World Council security agency, of which she was a high-ranking member. A recruiter, she called herself, working to find and stop criminals before they could harm society.

So Walt became an
agent provocateur
. At first he had been thrilled about it. His job was to mix with the young and disaffected, the unemployed, unemployable youthful men and women who lived on government subsidies. Find the ones who were willing to commit crimes and see to it that the police apprehended these potential criminals before they could do much harm to society.

It meant living like a smelly unshaven bum much of the time. But Walt didn't mind that too much. It was part of the deception, part of the role he was playing. He found that there were plenty of young women who were willing to trade sex for adventure, for advancement, for staving off the loneliness of their threadbare existences.

Over the years, Walt became a guru, wandering across the country, meeting youngsters who were desperately seeking guidance and friendship, searching for some goal in their cheerless lives. He began to believe he was honestly doing good among the kids growing up in the public housing projects and dark streets of their overcrowded cities.

He kept a neat little apartment for himself in Oakland, California, and repaired to it in between assignments. He worked off and on at writing his autobiography, partly accurate, mostly fiction.

Then he got an urgent call from Barcelona, from the woman who had originally recruited him.

“People are frightened of this star traveler,” she had told him. “They're afraid we're going to be taken over by aliens.”

Walt had never considered that possibility. Neither had anyone he'd met or worked with.

“There must be terrorist groups scheming to assassinate him,” Gilda Nordquist went on. “We've got to identify them and find out what they're up to.”

Walt understood what she was saying. She expected him to produce a terrorist cell that would try to assassinate the star traveler. And if they succeeded, so much the better.

 

CHICAGO

The flight from London to Chicago was by rocketplane, of course. Forty-five minutes from liftoff to touchdown. Yet as he sat in the softly yielding recliner chair and watched the atmosphere's thin layer of blue hugging the curved horizon, Jordan wondered why no one had invented a better system for long-distance transportation.

They're still using rockets, he mused. Probably not chemical rockets, they must have come up with something more efficient than that, but basically this vehicle isn't that much different from the clipperships we used before I left for New Earth.

Well, maybe Mitch can adapt the energy screen technology for propulsion. Use dark energy instead of brute force rockets. He said he was looking into that.

The display screen on the bulkhead of his private compartment lit up with the image of a smiling young woman in the airline's sky-blue uniform who said, “We are beginning our descent into Chicago's Banks Aerospaceport…”

She looked faintly Asian, although her eyes were sky blue. A mixture of different stock, he concluded; the whole human race was slowly blending. That's good. Then he remembered that almost everyone on Earth carried a percentage of Neanderthal genes. We've been blending for a long time, he realized.

Jordan tuned her out of his attention. All she was really saying was that he should buckle his safety harness. As he did so, he recalled that he didn't know Thornberry's address: neither his home nor his place of business. I'll have to look him up in a local directory.

To Jordan's surprise, however, Mitchell Thornberry was standing at the gate when he entered the terminal building. The Irish roboticist was wearing a neatly buttoned vest over a long-sleeved silver shirt and darker slacks. The vest's colors shifted as Thornberry moved through the arriving crowd toward him; the colors melded and swirled like an art display.

A knowing grin split Thornberry's jowly face as he stuck out his hand. “Welcome back to Chicago, Jordan.”

“Mitch,” said Jordan, clasping his friend's hand gratefully. “How did you know—”

“Professor Rudaki called me. Said you were heading here, out of London. There's only two flights a day from London, and the next one's not due until evening, so I figured you'd be on this one.”

“You should be a detective,” Jordan bantered.

As they started to head for the exit, Thornberry said, “Rudaki told me you've run into trouble with the head of the World Council.”

“I'm afraid I'm something of a fugitive, Mitch. And they've separated me from Aditi.”

Thornberry's face darkened. “They can't do that.”

“They've done it. I don't know where she is or how she is.”

“Well, we'll see about
that,
” Thornberry said as he shooed Jordan with one hand toward the crowded corridor that led out of the terminal.

*   *   *

Janos Rudaki sat in his study, his eyes focused on the astronomical journal displayed on his wall screen, his ears listening to the heavy footfalls of the louts who were searching his home. His wife had fled to her room, unwilling to watch these strangers poking everywhere. The serving robots had been herded into the kitchen, where a trio of stern-looking security agents were going through their memory chips.

Rudaki sat and waited for the security agents to finish. He knew how to deal with such intrusions. There was nothing for them to find, so let them look until they got tired.

At last the head of the security team—a muscular-looking man with short-cropped sandy hair and a trim, slightly darker beard—appeared at his doorway.

“May I come in?” he asked in a deep, flat voice.

Rudaki looked up from his reading. “You're asking permission?”

“I am being polite, Councilman.”

“Come in, then. Sit. Make yourself comfortable.”

The security agent stepped into the room but remained standing.

“You found nothing,” said Rudaki.

“Nothing.”

With a shrug, Rudaki said, “I told you so. He was here last night. He slept in the guest suite. He left this morning, quite early.”

“And went where?”

“I don't know,” Rudaki lied.

“He hasn't used his credit account.”

“So you have no idea of where he is.”

“He can't get far without money.”

Rudaki hunched his shoulders again. Then he asked, “Tell me, just why are you searching for him? Is he under arrest or something?”

“Something,” said the agent.

“What?”

“You should discuss that with Chairwoman Halleck, sir.”

“I already have, while your people were thumping through my home. She says Kell is supposed to be under protective custody.”

“That's my understanding.”

“And his wife?”

“She's safe.”

“Under protective custody?”

“Yes.”

Rudaki took in a deep breath and pushed himself to his feet. He fretted about his phone call to Mitchell Thornberry, in Chicago. Sooner or later the security forces would listen to it. With a mental shrug he told himself, So be it. They can't arrest a Council member for phoning someone. I hope.

“Well,” he said to the security man, “if you're finished here then I suppose you should leave. I have a meeting with Halleck scheduled for later this afternoon. I'll be sure to tell her how thorough your team has been.”

If the security man caught the irony in the professor's voice, he gave no evidence of it.

 

COMMUNICATIONS COMPLEX

With some misgivings, Aditi walked with Castiglione and Dr. Frankenheimer down a long corridor. She saw that the doors on either side were unmarked, and the corridor ended in a double door, also unmarked.

Castiglione was wearing a fitted military-style tunic, complete with epaulettes. Frankenheimer was in ordinary street clothes: a collarless tan checkered jacket that somehow complemented his thinning light brown hair and round, youthful face. Aditi had found a sunny yellow blouse and midnight blue skirt among the clothes that had been delivered to her apartment in the communications complex.

Castiglione was chatting cheerfully as though he had forgotten about the slap in the face Aditi had given him the night before, or at least put it out of his mind for the time being.

“Don't be worried, lovely one. The procedure is totally painless. Isn't that correct, Doctor?”

Frankenheimer nodded. But while Castiglione was smiling toothily, the neurophysiologist's boyish face looked quite serious, concerned.

“It's a completely noninvasive procedure, Mrs. Kell,” he assured her. “You won't feel a thing. And it won't affect your brain at all. It's just … well, taking a picture of what's inside your skull.”

“With neutrinos?” Aditi asked. “I thought they didn't interact with matter.”

His brows knitting slightly, Frankenheimer said, “They don't, hardly at all. But if you produce enough of them you can get useful information from the relatively few interactions they do have.”

Before Aditi could respond, he added, “You should talk to a physicist about it, I suppose. I merely use what they've built.”

Mitchell Thornberry, Aditi thought. Mitch would understand it.

Castiglione laughed. “You should go through the procedure with me first.” To Aditi he said, “That will show you there's nothing to fear.”

“I'm not afraid,” Aditi said. It was almost true.

“Good.” Castiglione cocked his head slightly, then added, “I suppose a picture of what's inside my head would show that it's empty.”

No, Aditi retorted silently. An image of your brain would show filth.

The inside of the imaging laboratory reminded Aditi a little of her own educational center back on New Earth. It was a small room, slightly colder than the corridor outside. A set of consoles lined one wall, a desk and several plastic chairs stood along the wall opposite. In the center was a recliner and behind the chair rose a metal arch studded with lights and display screens. She saw tracks set into the floor on either side of the recliner.

Castiglione fell silent; he stood by the door and crossed his arms over his chest. Frankenheimer led Aditi to the recliner chair.

“This arch contains the neutrino scanner,” he explained. “It will slide along these tracks and take a three-dimensional image of your brain.”

“I understand,” said Aditi.

“If you'll just sit in the chair and relax, this should be over within a few minutes.”

Aditi sat, wondering what Frankenheimer's reaction would be if she shut down the scanner's electrical circuitry. No, she decided. Let them go ahead with this procedure. I want to get this over with. I don't want to frustrate them. Or frighten them.

She cranked the chair down to its reclined position and closed her eyes. Just as she did so, she heard a phone chime. Opening her eyes, she saw Castiglione putting his phone to his ear, his smile suddenly gone.

*   *   *

Janos Rudaki sat before Anita Halleck's imposing desk.

“It was good of you to come on such short notice,” she said, with a forced smile.

Rudaki grimaced slightly. “I thought it would be better to answer your summons than to have you send another squad of hooligans to my home.”

Halleck's brows rose. “The search team disturbed you?”

“My wife. She's very sensitive. But to tell the truth, your search team was very polite, very careful. Outside of one little ornamental dish given to me by the late king of Sweden, they didn't break a thing.”

“I'm sorry for that.”

“I appreciate your concern.” His fleshy face contracting into a frown, Rudaki asked, “But tell me, what is so important about this man Kell? Why do you want to put him in protective custody?”

Halleck's eyes shifted from Rudaki to the dark holographic viewer set in the wall across her office, then back to the professor again.

“A man who can insert himself into every electronic broadcast across the solar system? He could be dangerous.”