Jezebel's Ladder (4 page)

“Who would give a monster like that
heightened strength?”

“It’s not so black-and-white.
Maverick’s a charming guy who started as a military rescue diver. He was one of
the best, a hero. He used his abilities to ignore frigid water and being
smashed against rocks while he was saving someone’s ass. Can you imagine how
cool it would be if all police and firefighters could to do the same thing?”
the teenager asked, grinning. Then his face dropped as he remembered. “After Maverick
massacred the terrorist cell, Dirt Bag’s TV station reported that they had
accidentally blown themselves up. Now, I work for him to pay for my revenge.”

She watched Daniel lift up his
shirt, take tiny alligator clips, and attach them to stainless steel
piercing-posts through his nipples and belly button. “Didn’t those hurt?”

“Not as much as ripping the sticky
pads off every night did.”

After attaching a clothes-pin-like
pulse-monitor to his fingertip, Daniel slid into the first contact, a radio DJ.
Jezebel had twenty minutes of unadulterated boredom until he surfaced,
scribbled a license number, and began furiously sketching a face.

Jez asked, “Someone with a page?”

“No, someone from a record label
bribing the DJ to play a new song. Usually, I let this stuff slide, but the
target works for Dirt Bag. If I give him juicy information, it keeps him off my
back for a week.”

Jez admired the pencil drawing. “You’re
an artist.”

Daniel shrugged. “It’s the one
subject Dirt Bag still sends me a tutor for. I passed the GED a couple months
ago.”

Then the boy started his next dive.
Meanwhile, she opened up a document on the laptop and started a report. Where
possible, she scanned the documents into the file directly. They had no
excitement for the rest of the night: a self-help guru, a successful chief
financial officer, an old yoga instructor, a navy diver, a computer-chip
designer, a sniper on leave, and a bow hunter. Daniel caught the CFO in bed
with one of the board members, explaining his rapid rise. Jez played a lot of
computer solitaire while she waited.

On the last dive of the night,
Daniel came back early. “The professor we’re looking for isn’t there.”

She did a quick, online search. “Dr.
Reuter was buried a month ago.”

“Maybe someone in the
investigations office can check his house,” he said.

She hit print, and tucked a copy of
the report into that month’s folder. By the time Daniel had the electrodes and
alligator clips off, she had the e-mail program up and passed him the laptop. “Ready
to send.”

Daniel grinned as he typed the
encryption password and the e-mail address. “This is great. No paperwork! I
haven’t been to bed this early since the hospital. What am I going to do with
all my spare time?”

Jez considered this for a moment.
Left to his own devices, the boy would waste away on movies and games. He was
in serious need of parental guidance. More importantly, he needed a chance to
find out who he was beyond work. Her own mother had been a fanatic about
self-discovery through college. “Exercise each afternoon with me, and you can
pick out some on-line college classes. Dirt Bag gets your nights, but I’m going
to make sure the rest of your life doesn’t atrophy.”

Daniel made a spinach face.

Jez echoed something her own
therapist had said, “Working out half an hour a day will help tone you up, burn
calories, and prevent depression. If you don’t feel better about yourself after
a month, I won’t force you to continue. See you at one o’clock tomorrow.”

During the next day, Daniel complained about his aching
abdominal muscles after the workout. To reciprocate, Jez let him beat her
soundly at a video game. Afterward, Jez took her first training class on
voluntarily entering theta state via meditation. Before dinner, both of them packed
travel bags.

Her second night was about the same
as the first—pointless and boring. The surfer was away on a Hawaiian vacation,
so Daniel only visited seven people: a prison minister, an encyclopedia
salesman, a dentist, a gambler, a cancer surgeon, a commodity trader, and a
funeral-home director. The funeral home had definite links to the Fossils, and
appeared to be disposing of extra bodies. Everything went into the report. To
pass the time, Jez listened to a Nora Roberts book on CD while she plotted target
points on a map.

Just before quitting time, she had
almost eight hundred red dots on the paper, and several, hundred-mile-radius
circles etched to group them. Daniel eventually asked, “What is that?”

She showed him the map. “It’s just
a cluster analysis of the targets remaining. Using this grouping, I can raise
your average to just over fourteen dives a night.” Below the map were some
calculations.

Daniel was awed. “This is some
advanced math. Dirt Bag said you didn’t get past high school.”

“I didn’t
finish
my degree,
but I was four years into a math major at the University of Nevada. I made the Dean’s List,” she snorted. “Let me finish this hand plot and send a memo to
Dirt Bag.”

“This is great!” he laughed. “But
you’re wasting your time.”

Jez frowned. “You don’t think he’ll
change the search strategy? I thought we wanted to work smarter, not harder.”

Daniel raised a finger. “I’m not
telling you to stop. On the contrary, I’m telling you that your brain is too
valuable to waste with grunt work like this. Plotting this will take you weeks.
We pay other people to do this for us. Scan what you already have to Buddy, and
write a one-paragraph explanation. Let him sneak it through channels; he’s good
at that sort of thing. Wow, you’re smart!”

Jez pretended to be offended. “Don’t
sound so surprised. Even people from trailer parks can have brains. My mom
earned a degree in engineering before she married Dad, got pregnant, and became
a widow.”

“I’m no Olive, Jez,” he said,
referring to her ex-fiancé’s evil sister. “I knew you were special, but
this
.
What were you doing in show business?”

Jez explained, “I danced to pay for
school, and Chance told me a hit magic show could make more in the first year
than I could earn in five as an actuary. It was simple math; I dropped out and
never looked back.”

He finished packing his gear as
they talked. “See what other improvements you can think of, but delegate the
legwork. I’ll meet you on the bus at bedtime. By tonight we’ll be in Santa Fe.”

****

Sounding pleased, Benny called
Daniel’s cell during the five o’clock meal. “How’s it going?”

Daniel complained, “She’s killing
me with this exercise stuff. Now, she says I can eat whatever I want, but the
meal has to have a vegetable that’s not fried. Who made her Mom?”

“She wanted to substitute V8 for
your Mountain Dew. The vegetables were a compromise.” Benny replied.

“Cruel and unusual. It’s not right,”
the teenager groaned.

“Take it like a man,” Jez jeered.
Around the table, the guards and driver snickered.

“I ran this clustering idea of
yours past a few people at the insurance company DB owns, and they claim it’ll
work like a charm. It’s tremendous. I’m going to see to it you get a raise.”

Daniel said, “Give Jez the raise;
it was all her idea. Besides, I inherited more money from my parents than I’ll
ever use.”

There was silence for a long time. “Give
the phone to Miss Johnson.”

Daniel did so, and the others tuned
out a long discussion about the benefits of different analysis models and
distribution assumptions. Then Jez dropped the bombshell. “However, I decided
none of that really matters. We’re so understaffed compared to the Fossils that
we don’t stand a chance. They’re growing every year while we’re barely breaking
even. At three attempts a year, it’s only a matter of time till they kill our
leader, and we’re finished.” She proceeded to rattle off another model for his
analysis team to consider.

Carefully, the former actor changed
the subject. “Have you noticed it’s easier for you to plan when there are
others around?”

Jez shrugged. “Sure, isn’t it for
everyone?”

“Not really. I want you to consider
that you might be benefiting from the Collective effect.”

Jez was hurt. “You don’t think I’m
smart enough?”

Benny stayed calm and gentle. “I
never said that. I thought this was Oobie’s idea because he’s actually a
low-grade genius, unfocused but capable. He speaks three languages and has
almost photographic recall. This leap was big even for Oobie. You surprised a
room full of geeks; but three days ago, your IQ tested at 138. Not shabby, but
you see where I’m heading. Be aware that you may be borrowing from others close
to you. This isn’t good or bad. I just need you to be aware of the effect.”

Just when she thought it couldn’t
get any stranger, it did.

Benny added, “You may want to experiment.
See how far the effect reaches. My guess is that it will have the same range as
your ability to detect actives. I’ve been able to amplify the emotions of a
crowd, but we’ve never encountered a manifestation exactly like this before.
You are one of a kind, Miss Johnson. Now that we have established that we all
bow before you in these matters, did you have a suggestion?”

She left the restaurant to talk in
privacy on the bus. “Forget about pages for now. We need to find people we can
trust and make them work for us.”

“I’m listening,” Benny said.

Jez made her pitch. “A police
profiler, Calvin Robins, showed up on both your lists. Even if he turns up
negative, he’ll be an invaluable asset. He’s in Phoenix. We can reach him by
tomorrow.”

Benny sighed. “I don’t know why we
didn’t catch that before now. I’ll clear the operation with the big guy.
Scouting is authorized, but no contact till I arrive.”

“Thank you,” Jez said.

The whole group celebrated their
new venture that night with baklava for dessert and a Guitar Hero tournament.

By noon the next day, they were in a Phoenix hotel. Daniel
was excited as he did push-ups in the exercise room. “This place has a hot tub.
After we finish our workout, I am so there. With your help, I have much more
free time.”

Jez was in workout pants, bent in a
Downward Facing Dog. “About that: last night I started to load some apps for report
writing onto your phone, but there was no room left.”

Daniel froze in place. “I can
explain.”

“I’ve never seen that many porn
video files before. Dirt Bag hasn’t been a good role model. I guess it’s good
news that all your plumbing still works.”

“I do still have one testicle.”

More softly, Jez said, “I’m no
moral paragon, but you need to clean this stuff off for security reasons.
Downloading from untrustworthy sites can endanger the whole Project.”

Daniel nodded, resigned.

“Besides, you really should be
finding girls your own age to talk to.”

“That doesn’t happen a lot to boys
in wheelchairs,” he replied glumly.

“You could be purple with three
eyes, and someone out there would think you’re the cat’s meow,” Jez insisted. “When’s
the last time you went on a vacation?”

“Never.”

Jez raised her eyebrows. “Then
you’re due. We should go to Hawaii to follow that surfer. You could check out
the bikinis on the beach.”

“You know, talking to you is like
talking to a guy.”

Jez laughed. “Thanks, I think.”

Benny walked in, getting a good
view of Jezebel’s posterior. He was momentarily speechless.

Daniel sat up. “The boss is here,
we’ve got to quit.”

Jez barked, “Ten more minutes, soda
boy or I cut you down to three cans a night. Give me lip and you’ll do more ab
crunches.”

Daniel resumed his exercises.

Clearly uncomfortable, Benny said, “Calvin
Robins looks better the more we investigate. The search teams want to know what
flagged him. Your… criteria might help refine future searches.”

As she stretched slowly through her
cool-down routine, Jez said, “He used to be a police officer who ran regularly,
longer when he was thinking about a case, and studied martial arts—pretty
normal. Then he talked some jumper down from a ledge, and everything changed.
The quotes from his incident report sounded like someone from Ward Seven. After
that, Robins got motivated, earned a degree in psych, and took the detective
exam. It was a classic awakening. The jumper had to be a Ticket holder, the
vector for activation.”

When Benny seemed confused, Daniel
explained, “She calls the pages Wonka’s Golden Tickets.”

The former actor laughed. “I’ll
have to use that one. We know Robins can pick a serial killer out of lineup with
an amazing batting average, but that wasn’t in the report I sent Oobie. What
made you sure?”

Jez toweled her neck off and
slugged down water. “He’s paranoid, even around other cops. He has headaches,
outbursts of rage, and bouts with alcoholism. The case he got sanctioned for
was a killer he met on the street. Robins had no search warrant, but found five
bodies in the guy’s basement.”

Daniel finished his repetitions. “He’s
probably an active, but you were an alcoholic before you had a Ticket.”

Jez changed the subject. “I’m so
sure he’s got a page that we’re going to pick his code name.”

“Batman!” Daniel burst out. “You
know, bats mean crazy, and his last name is Robins.”

Jez blew a raspberry. “I don’t do
comics.”

Benny shook his head. “It’s too
trademarked and noticeable. How about Crusader?”

Daniel grunted as he climbed back
into his chair. “That’ll do. I sniffed around his house last night. He has four
locks on the door and keeps a spare gun in every room. His basement looks like
a bomb shelter. I don’t think that guy ever goes out.”

“I approached Detective Robins in
his office this morning, and he wouldn’t talk to me,” Benny said. “He’s very
antisocial. I’ve brought the complete and updated file with me. Let’s head to Daniel’s
room. It’s more secure there. We need to find a way to approach this man to
recruit him.”

As Jez passed by him, the former
actor tightened his voice. “You can shower first, though.”

Jez smiled as she took note of the
actor’s tightened trousers. His plumbing appeared to work, too.

****

After cleaning up and putting on
business clothes, Jez arrived in Daniel’s room. They all read the file, passing
around sections of it, and posting key facts on the whiteboard.

“Every week, he goes out on one
date, always selected from the same on-line service,” Jez announced. “Oobie,
could you and your friends insert and backdate a dating profile for me?”

Immediately, Benny stepped in. “That’s
too dangerous. You aren’t field trained. You haven’t even completed your theta
training.”

“We could do the hack,” Daniel
bragged. “But we can’t force him to pick you.”

Jez gave a chuckle. “I know his
type. Crusader is twenty-eight; make my cover twenty-five. Guys always want
younger women. Make her a diamond in the rough. I won’t wash my hair for a few
days. Get a photo of me with thick glasses, and my hair up, but with killer coy
eyes and a smile. Say I’m an actuary who does her own taxes. I’ll bone up on
boring, insurance-research, data models. Add some common interests: bridge,
pool, and track. Give me a track scholarship for a math degree. Admit I have a
swimmer’s butt. Hint that I need someone to help me train for a triathlon. Gush
over him in the mail.”

She paced as she plotted. “He’ll
need an opportunity for debate and conversion. He is a collector of foreign
beers. Have me be a wine connoisseur. Now we add the aroma of repressed
sexuality. Make my name Layla. Say I have insomnia. Under religion, put
reformed Catholic.”

Daniel warmed to the game. “What we
have to watch out for is making it too obvious. Why would Layla want
him
?
Say she’s an only child. Her father was a psychologist who was never home. Give
her interesting, unresolved, daddy issues.”

In her best, throaty, Mae West
voice, Jez said, “I always wanted to meet a man who’s an expert in liquor and
poker. Pick pool as the first date so he can ogle me while I pump him for
information. My outfit should be dull, conservative, long-lasting and
concealing, showing just enough leg to keep him on the line. Maybe I’ll wear a
London Fog coat to hide the goods until we introduce ourselves. The shoes will
be the most important lure—peek-a-boos. Then pull out the big guns.”

Benny gasped, “My God, he doesn’t
stand a chance.”

Jez patted him on the leg. “None of
you do, sweetie.”

They debated for a while. Benny
finally yielded under the provision that she finish her mental conditioning and
wear a wire so the strike team could listen in. It would take at least three
days to gather everything.

In the end, Daniel had one more
condition. “To get him on board, we need to give him something as a gesture of
good faith.”

Benny sighed. “What did you have in
mind?”

“A page for a page,” Daniel
suggested. “We let him read one that would help him, and that also starts him
at a higher rank in the project.”

Benny locked eyes with him. “You’re
talking about Pattern Simplification.”

“It would be perfect to smooth out
a lot of the contradictions with whatever worldview he has now,” Daniel argued.
“Plus, when he passes out, we bag him and drag him to headquarters.”

Benny nodded. “We’ll have to bring
Dirt Bag in on this mission. Daniel, you have work to do. I’ll take charge of
Miss Johnson’s training for the next few days.”

****

When Jez walked into the bar to
meet the target, she could immediately tell two things: Robins was definitely
active and seriously desperate. She stopped on her way to meet him to drop a
few coins in the jukebox. The woman sitting nearby said that new requests were
taking about thirty minutes to play. Over the wire, Jez said, “Be ready to move
to his place when you hear Clapton. That will be the exit cue.”

Everything about the operation went
flawlessly. Crusader was hooked. After pool, the screaming guitar of the song “Layla”
came up. She danced alone to her namesake, garnering several stares. Leaning
close to Robins, she purred, “That was sweet of you to play for me, but I like
the slow version much better.”

Robins paid the check and they were
out of the bar in less than three minutes, heading for his place.

As the profiler drove them in his
brown sedan, Jez slipped up. In a conversation, she glibly said, “Observing
changes the experiment’s outcome. The critical flaw in the Schrödinger’s cat
metaphor is that the cat observes itself.”

Robins’s detective instincts kicked
in. He pulled over and stopped the car. “Who the hell are you, really, Layla?”

Jez tried to blonde her way out of
this particular traffic ticket, but he wasn’t buying. Finally, she shifted her
perky exterior into a serious face, and went with honesty. “Sorry, I can’t help
it. You’re really smart, and that makes me smarter. It’s kind of intoxicating.”

Robins narrowed his eyes, but said
nothing.

“I’m going to tell you a story.
Stop me when I get something wrong.” She then proceeded to give him the team’s
version of his own recent history. Jez finished with, “We can help. We’d like
you to join us.”

Robins snorted. “And you’d be the
incentive?”

Jez shook her head. “We don’t work
that way. We just needed to find a voice you would listen to. Even if you decide
not to join, we can trade your page for access to one that reduces your
side-effects. It’s called Pattern Simplification. Our boss used it to get rich
in the stock market. Now he wants to use it to help people.”

“My gift is anomaly spotting,”
Robins admitted. “Borges, that guy whose rights I violated, pulled the wings
off flies in fourth grade. In fifth grade, several dogs disappeared in his
neighborhood. In eighth grade, Borges went hunting with an uncle and
accidentally
killed him. In tenth grade, one of his classmates was stabbed and stuffed in a
gym locker. It’s all circumstantial, I know. After Borges dropped out of
school, he worked as a janitor so he could have his nights free to learn his
new trade.”

When she didn’t react, the profiler
bit his lip and continued. “I can see what others are like in their dreams just
by looking. Most dreams are feeble and boring, tight loops repeating the same
things. These people are worse than ghosts, stuck in a drab pursuit: fear or
desire. When someone is following another set of rules, they stand out like a
monarch in a fast-food line. Correction, they become a hungry lion in a
kindergarten classroom.”

He put his head on the steering
wheel. “I don’t want to see these things; you wouldn’t either.”

She tried to sound sympathetic. “Calvin,
you have to admit that drinking is
not
a good idea in these
circumstances. You can still see them, but drunk you might accidentally tell
them what you see. These are not people you want noticing your talent.”

“Being alone is the best way to
cope,” Robins said.

“But that can drive a man insane,” Jez
countered. “Wouldn’t you like to talk to people who see the things that you
see?”

Softly, he admitted, “Yes, I would.”
He resumed the drive to his house.

When they arrived, she could see the
backup van on the street corner and knew Benny would be listening to every
word. That gave her the confidence to say, “So I show you mine, and you show me
yours?”

Robins led her inside, and bolted
the door. Using a single, dim, hall lamp, he opened a floor safe that Oobie
hadn’t noticed on recon. While he took out an envelope, Jez put on a pair of
white, lady’s dress gloves. She pulled a piece of golden paper out of her
purse, exactly the same dimensions as the other page.

The profiler pulled a gun out of
the safe as well and directed her to the next room. She let the listeners know
where she was by saying, “You want to do the trade at the kitchen counter?”

When they were both seated on
stools next to each other, he gripped her hand. “I think this setup is way too
convenient. We should do this at the same time.” The safety clicked off.

Benny ordered the troops in.

Her mouth went dry.

“Unless this is a trap meant to
kill me,” Robins said.

“It’s safe,” she asserted, trying
to steady her voice.

“Then recite Simplification with
me.”

Pattern Simplification:

The human mind is an advanced
predictive processor. Imagine driving or catching a ball. This
four-dimensional, predator-prey, motion algorithm in the brain can be
generalized to filter noise from any abstract data.

By the time the assault squad had
battered down the door, both people in the kitchen had fallen to the floor. Jez
made it to theta, mitigating the tsunami of data. She was breathing heavily. It
sounded almost erotic.

The former actor was first through
the door. He grabbed the pages off the floor before anyone else could see them,
and stuffed them into a metal lunchbox. Robins was convulsing and babbling
incoherently. The troops tranquilized him, splinted his tongue, and hauled him
out to the induction center.

Then, Benny held Jez close in his
lap and smelled her perfume. As he stroked the back of her neck, he whispered, “Good
show, Jez.”