Kaleidocide (34 page)

When they finally were cleared to return to the base, the protection team gathered again in the aero bay, to debrief yet another close call. Despite all the damage that had been caused by this latest assassination attempt, Michael Ares and the double were still both alive, as was Lynn Ares, who had asked the big cyborg bodyguard to take her back to the house above. For this reason, Stephenson unfortunately misjudged the mood, and sidled up next to Terrey as the team was gathering, telling him excitedly about how his dream of the fire came true and how his Dreamscape rig could revolutionize the personal protection business. As he was talking to Terrey, he half-perceived the double comforting the twins next to the parked aero not far away, with the little girls hugging him in a way that showed they couldn't tell the difference between him and the real Michael Ares. He also half-noticed that Jon stood up and looked in his direction at some point, saying, “No, I've never hit anyone” and then looking at his fist and adding, “The knuckles at the base, right.”

Stephenson didn't think anything of this because he was concentrating on his animated one-way conversation with Terrey, but as he was looking at the Aussie protection expert he suddenly realized the double had moved to his side and taken a swing at him before he could do anything about it. The hammer blow from the bigger man connected with the top side of his cheek and his temple, where it hurt like hell but wouldn't cause damage like a broken jaw, and Stephenson fell sideways and sprawled onto the floor. He shook his head in pain as Jon was shaking his hand for the same reason, and started to push himself up to let the man have it twice as hard. But Terrey put his hand out and down near him, as if to say “Don't” without using the word. So the little man just wrapped his arms around his knees and fumed.

“Michael,” Terrey said to the double. “We having a blue?”

The double looked down for a minute, listening to his internal audio and rubbing his hand. Then he said, “This man should have more respect for the dead, and for the girls.” He gestured over to the twins, who were clinging to both sides of Tyra's chair and watching the scene. Then he listened some more, and said, “He shouldn't be flapping his bloody trap when he just failed to save their mother. He should be … more sorry, especially when they're around.”

“I hear you, Michael,” Terrey said. “But what do you expect him to do, shed tears? If he doesn't have a cry, you'll have a blue?” The handsome man smirked a bit at his play on words. Maybe he was trying to remove some of the tension, but Stephenson guessed that it wouldn't go over well with the man who was speaking through the double. And he was right, because Jon looked down and frowned noticeably.

“I
really
don't want to hit
him,
” Jon said, seemingly to himself. He looked up at Terrey, obviously fearful that the voice inside was going to tell him to do just that.

I would have taken him out pretty hard if I'd been allowed to,
Stephenson thought.
I shudder to think of what Terrey would do to him.

 

31

CONFRONTATIONS

My sense of helplessness and resentment for being stuck in my room at the cottage was never higher than during the fire. I actually thought of getting in the car and driving to the hill, or telling someone to come pick me up in an aero, but then of course I realized that it was pointless and would accomplish nothing. So I had to sit in my plush chair while telling someone else what to do, and watching Liria Rabin fall to her death and leave her children motherless. Her husband Paul and her father-in-law Saul had died a year earlier in events surrounding my ascension to the throne of BASS, and now she herself was a casualty by simply being an acquaintance of mine.

Ironically, I had been trying to
help
Liria and her kids by moving her into the second house that BASS had built on Stags Leap, because she no longer wanted to stay in the one she had shared with a murderous husband. Lynn and I both thought that it would help her make a new start in her life, which had been shrouded in sadness for as long as we'd known her, though we didn't know why until her husband's evil machinations were revealed. But the first thing that went wrong with our well-intentioned but misguided plan was that her teenage son John refused to move into the house, because he was resentful of BASS and me. So since the move she had been without her son, who was staying in an apartment near the old house in Marin County, and now her other two children were without a father or mother.

That's why I was so upset after talking to the sobbing twins through the double, and why I told him to hit Stephenson. The only mitigation of my anger was that Hilly and Jessa didn't seem to notice that the double was not me, which bode well for our trip to the city the next day, and my chances of surviving the kaleidocide—though not Jon's, because they would surely still be trying to kill him, instead of looking for me. But the effectiveness of the double was a cold comfort compared to the fate that had befallen the twins, and so I was only half-kidding when I said that Jon should hit Terrey, too, when my old friend was being flippant about it.

“I guess I just want him to be sorry,” I said to Jon, in answer to Terrey's last question, then gave the double a reminder. “Speak like you're me, because the girls are still there. If they sense something's different, they may talk to someone and blow our cover.” That was why I couldn't project my voice through the hangar speakers like before, but had to speak through the man who was pretending to be me.

“I guess I just want him to be sorry,” Jon said to Terrey.

“I'm sorry, okay?” Stephenson said, pulling himself up to his feet and rubbing the side of his face. “I'm really sorry.”

“I don't want you to
say
you're sorry,” I said, and the double repeated it. “I want you to
be
sorry.”

“All right, mate,” Terrey said, now showing his firm hand to the double. “He said he was sorry, let's drop it.”

“What about you,
mate
?” I said to Terrey with a tone, and Jon did a pretty good job of reproducing it. “Are you sorry? I'm seeing reports of five houses and a winery that burned down in that fire, with three more casualties. Is this what you call
Protection Guaranteed
?” We both used the tone again on the last two words.

“Yeah, I'm sorry,” Terrey said, and then pointed at Jon's face. “I'm sorry, you pommy bastard. I'm sorry that you can't see that you're still alive, even after all that, and so is everyone else I'm paid to protect. Now stop slagging us and go do something to help, if you're worried about how things are turning out. Figure out what to do with the two little girls over there—we certainly can't do that. Find out what you can about Sun's problem with you, so we can maybe head off these attacks before they start.” He waited to see if I would react, and when I didn't he continued in a more conciliatory manner. “And while you're looking at the bright side, like being alive, think about the good things we learned. Sun and his people didn't know about the fire systems in the hill here, if they even know about the base at all. They assumed you would have a sprinkler system that would make the fire worse, or at least nothing that could stop their little chemical masterpiece. But we beat their best shots, and now we know what three of the colors were.” He counted them on his fingers. “Blue/green, assault team. Yellow, sniper. Red, explosives. We could be over halfway there, my man.”

“I hope their best shots aren't yet to come, because someone won't make it through.” Jon repeated the words, and must have felt weird doing it, because he was the first “someone” who probably wouldn't make it. “But you're right, I'll take care of the girls and see what I can find out.”

I told Jon to take the girls up to Lynn at the house, with minimal conversation on his part, and turned off my link to him so I could discuss this with Lynn before he got there. When Terrey saw what the double was doing, he told Tyra and Korcz to go with him, the former for the kids' sake and the latter to relieve Min, who still needed maintenance. Then Terrey had the triplets take the Cyber Hole tech with them to the medlab, so that he could work on Min there but also help them with their sister's burns.

I dialed the house and found Lynn sitting in the living room with Min standing nearby, but not too close. She had her head in her hands, and had obviously been waiting for my call.

“Michael, this is horrible!” she said after I said hello. “What should we do about Hilly and Jessa? John will flip out when he hears about this, and the fire caused all that damage, and the media will be all over this. And I'm concerned about this Tyra person, you've put her in such danger, and I heard she's from the mob, and her family won't sit still for this, they kill people for a lot less, and—”

“That's why I called you, Lynn” I interrupted her. “I wanted to talk to you about Hilly and Jessa, because they're on their way up to you.”

“What?” she gasped, but then thought a moment. “Oh yes, of course, they should come up here. They need some place to stay for now, can't go back to their house now, or be by themselves.”

“Right, my thoughts exactly. Can you take care of them until we figure out what to do?”

“Yeah, okay. Could I see your face, please? I don't like talking to the air.”

I switched the screen to two-way and told the net room at the house to display me—after I locked my door, which was behind me, to make sure Angelee or Chris didn't come walking in while I was talking to Lynn.

“There you are,” she said with a half-grin that forced its way onto her tearful face. “Wherever you are.”

“So they're okay to stay here for now,” I said. “But not for long. This is hardly a stable environment right now. Which is why I can't do much about them, with everything I need to do to help the double and Terrey. Would you be able to make some calls and check into family members, and maybe the Presidio?” It was occurring to me as I spoke that this kind of project would probably be very good for Lynn at this point—it would give her something to do and get her mind off everything else.

“I don't know about the orphanage, Michael. I thought about that, but I don't know much about what's been going on there lately.”

“Well, maybe this is a reason for you to get more involved, like we talked about.”

She was about to answer when the twins and their three adult escorts came through the door from the garage. I wondered why they didn't knock or ring at the door, but then remembered that Lynn had told the team that they didn't have to do that when they entered the living area, since she had provided a couple meals for them and they had a meeting there. So all five arrivals were soon standing in the living room, and neither Lynn nor I thought about the fact that my image was displayed on one side of the room.

“Thorn said I should take your place,” Korcz said to Min. “You can go to medlab.”

As Min left, Hilly and Jessa were looking at my face on the screen, then at the double standing next to them, then at each other.

“Why is Uncle Michael on there?” one of them said to Lynn. Only then did I realize what was happening, and I switched off the screen abruptly, feeling like an idiot. I went back inside the double, so I could help him deal with this, but Lynn was already on it.

“Oh, that was just some home video of Uncle Michael,” she said unconvincingly. “But now he's here, the real him … in the flesh.” She was even more unconvincing as she gestured at the double, but fortunately Hilly and Jessa seemed satisfied with her answer and didn't pursue the issue any further. Of course, they had much bigger worries at the time.

A relieved Lynn now leapt off the couch and did her best to comfort and love on the girls—thankfully she was much better with children than she was with lying. As she talked to them, I told Jon that he should excuse himself and leave Tyra to help with them, because I wanted to keep him away from Lynn even more now, after the events of the day. A deep paranoia was growing in me as I wondered what insidious plot would unfold next in this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction scenario.

After she finished with the girls, Lynn told Tyra to put a show on for them, and the double excused himself as I had said. Before he left, though, Lynn looked at him meaningfully and said she was going up to her room, then repeated, “I'm going up to my room.” I got the point, and I soon switched my screen from inside Jon to the netview in our bedroom. And I made sure to put my face on the display so Lynn didn't have to talk to the air.

“I'm soaked with sweat,” she said, and grunted disapprovingly as she felt her back and underarms. Then she retreated into the big walk-in closet to change, as she always did, but she left the door open. So by switching my camera view to a corner of the room, I could see her in there. She stood facing the other way as she undressed, and I noticed again that she didn't even look pregnant from the back. I enjoyed watching her and wondered why I was ever tempted by other women like Tara and Angelee. Lynn had it all—I liked the way she looked and more importantly, I liked the way she was. But against all sense, I guess one woman just wasn't enough sometimes, even a really good one.

“How did you even know about the property damage from the fire?” I asked when she emerged from the closet.

“Min and I watched it from the aero, and the news, too.” She sat down on the bed and massaged her swelled belly. “Michael, I'm afraid about what John Rabin will do when he hears about his mother. He already hates us, and he made those threats and all.”

“First of all,” I said, “he might hate me or BASS, but he doesn't hate you. I don't know why you always say ‘us,' like you're taking this stuff on yourself, when you don't have to. Second, I'll put him under BASS surveillance, and have some peacers take him into custody if there's anything suspicious. If the leader of the biggest country on the planet hasn't managed to kill me yet, I don't think one teenager is much of a danger.