Mappa Mundi (24 page)

Natalie didn't understand her father going along with something as brutally unethical. Could he be agreeing just because doing the right thing meant being expelled from Mikhail Guskov's inner circle? He'd never shown signs of that shallowness before. Was there more to it?

She racked her brain to remember anything from the files that Jude had shown her that might explain things, but nothing did. Meanwhile Bobby slept and they sat, and time passed and Natalie's whole being demanded she do something; stand up, dare McAlister to shoot her, grab the scanner now sitting so damn' close on the station top, and save Bobby from whatever her wretched system was doing to him.

Outside there were other agents from the Ministry, armed ones. If she tried it, would they be quick enough to come to her aid? If they did, who would they shoot first?

The clock ticked the world around to two-oh-five and she remained frozen with worry and indecision.

A minute or so later, still trying to work up the courage to dare McAlister's gun, Natalie found herself thinking,
Gosh, that's bright in there, who turned the lights up?

“I'm going to switch the lights down …” she said, moving towards the control. But before she could she heard McAlister whisper, “Jesus wept! Are the cameras on?”

She glanced back over her shoulder at the same moment her fingers located the lights command and found them already switched into twilight mode. McAlister had leaped forward and now hesitated, his fingertips just touching the glass wall of Bobby's room, his mouth hanging half open.

Bathing his sweaty face in a pale lustre, the sheets around Bobby were glowing as though lit from within or as if they'd been passed under a violet light in a nightclub. Their super-whiteness stood out vividly, suffusing the room and giving McAlister a yellowish shadow that stretched up and over the control panel.

Natalie didn't understand what she was seeing. Turning around, she scrubbed at her sore, tired eyes with her hand, but when she looked up the brightness remained, slowly, steadily intensifying. She moved to the window, pressing her face to the safety glass, and saw the head, face, and shoulders of Bobby X shining like a low-budget movie special effect showing the waking of a saint or a demon.

The emergency alarm went off at the same moment, maybe triggered by her father's conscience or the sensitive nanodetectors in the room, Natalie didn't know. McAlister jumped at the shrill sound and started mouthing off some protest, dabbing at the sweat rolling off his forehead. In contrast Natalie felt cold as ice. In that instant her courage finally took form. She reached behind her for the scanner and shouldered through the doors.

As she fumbled with the control settings she saw the light on her hands and lab coat. Its quality began to change from the stark white of the shining, making her waste precious seconds looking up at the bed where she saw Bobby's whole figure begin to emit a violet gleam. She felt heat brush her hands and face and her eyes watered and hurt. She loaded the shutdown commands and tightened her finger on the trigger but the scanner kept returning a “Failed Send” message. Frantically she checked power and systems—they were all OK.

The heat became stronger and she had to step back, almost
blinded. She kept on trying with the machine, but it occurred to her then that whatever was coming off Bobby was probably distorting the scanner's signal and she might as well have been trying to make contact using a tin can and a piece of string. It was only then that she realized she was afraid.

She looked up and narrowed her eyelids to tiny slits as she backed off and saw Bobby's face on the pillow, his smile deepening as the glow increased. He looked deliriously happy.

Natalie felt sick. She had no idea what to do. In the distance she could hear McAlister making calls, urging her to come out, to get away, his voice as high and hysterical as a child's. She began to turn away, shielding her exposed skin from the glare. She heard the alarm change its note to the tones for a contamination alert. There was a soft pop and the light dimmed back to its twilight night-state, gleaming red in the alarm's added suffusion.

Natalie's eyes struggled to adjust, watering profusely. She turned back, thinking Bobby must be burned or dead, and saw the sheet on his bed drift lightly downwards. It settled into a series of fold mountains and valleys. It lay on the surface of the dimpled foam mattress that rose out of its human-made hollows to meet it. Bobby was nowhere to be seen.

A few uneven, racking breaths came to her aid and she let go of the scanner, hearing it clatter down onto the tiled floor although that didn't matter now. She stared at the bed and her mouth worked silently around some meaningless syllables of disbelief. She wanted to laugh, reminded instantly of Jude's file and the manner of its appearance; things seemed to be popping in and out of reality, like there was nothing to it, like it was easy, obvious. The gut-trembling that she'd never felt on seeing the papers and memos appeared now, weakening her knees. She groped around for something to hold on to. The bed was the nearest thing and the relief as her hand felt its solid presence was indescribable.

From the door she heard McAlister squeak, “Where the hell did he go?”

Someone called her name from far away. It was almost inaudible.

Natalie leaned on the bed, feeling its heat and the smell of Bobby's sweat seeping up around her. Of their own accord her hands spread out, confirming that he was gone. Now she did laugh, a kind of coughing gasp that wasn't a sign of amusement. It must be a prank—but nobody involved in this had enough sense of humour to pull a practical joke.

“Natalie? Doctor Armstrong?” The voice from far away zoomed in as it spoke, hesitant and frightened.

Baffled, she looked under the bed, and found what she expected: nothing.

She spun around, thinking how ridiculous this was, and halted dead in her tracks.

Bobby X was standing right in front of her.

“Doctor?” he whispered. He held out his hand towards her shakily, peering.

“Bo—” she began, relieved, hand on her heart, ready to say what a scare he'd just given her, when he faded.

It was like watching a ghost. Suddenly she could see the open door through him and McAlister's dumb, stupid shape standing there like a stuck pig, mouth catching flies.

“Natalie?!” Bobby's tremulous voice was fading, too. It sounded like a badly tuned radio station. He pawed at something in front of him as if he was being attacked, blinking and squinting.

She realized that he couldn't see her any more.

“It's all right, I'm here Bobby.” Natalie reached towards him quickly, moving to grab his hands. Her fingers passed through his and closed on nothing.

“Natalie!” he cried. His beatific happiness of a moment before was gone. The shadows of his face were racked with terror, their uneven flicker making him look as though he was winking.

She snatched over and over again at where she could still see traces of his outline. Her fingers slapped into her palms, her fists clenching emptily right inside his arms. She could feel nothing but a faint tingling like pins and needles where they closed on a void.

In fear and despair Bobby threw himself at her, trying to catch hold, but just as her hands had, his hands swiped right through her. In that instant her whole body was engulfed with prickling tremors and, as sure as she was of her own name, Natalie knew that she and Bobby were crossing over.

Then he was gone.

In his place came a numb blackness. Natalie fell into it as though into a vast, open mouth. With her last moment of awareness she felt its hungry breath engulf her.

On the surface of another world McAlister was calling, “Help! Help!”

Jude met Mary at Goodenough's bar and restaurant, a place close to his home where they occasionally went for a quiet conversation out of work hours. He took care to arrive before her, walking in out of the stale afternoon and hoping that the smell of fried onions and a mesquite grill would be enough to put him in a better frame of mind. Closer to and the bar's scent of spilt beer and margarita mix sent an acid line up his nose.

Neither odour hit the spot and he didn't stop as Cole, the barman, gave him the nod and said quietly, “Hey, Jude,” front runner in the longest, oldest running-quip contest. Cole's grin was soft with self-mockery as he vigorously polished a glass pitcher with his white cloth. His rheumy, lugubrious eyes, specially modelled, Jude thought, on bloodhounds, tracked Jude's movements to the end of the bar. Cole waited until Jude sat down and then flicked a thick finger towards the Red Hook pump, questioning.

Jude nodded. The music was softer at this end where one of the speakers was broken. It sounded furry. Cole put the beer glass down on a mat, noted Jude's expression and ambled off again to unpack a few more pitchers from the washer. Jude looked along the ranks of cold beers, bottled fruit drinks, spirits above them in line upon line of bottles of endlessly different shapes, sizes, colours, and promises. It looked
like treasure. From far behind him he heard the click of pool balls and the thump of a cue landing on its butt on the floor. The men playing spoke in soft voices he couldn't hear.

He checked what his datapilot had to offer on Fort Detrick. He'd not got far when Mary swept up.

“Hey, Cole!” she called.

“Mary, Mary,” Cole said, “how's that garden going?”

Jude stood and gave her a hug of greeting. They kissed each other on the cheek and she settled down, cool and graceful, her blue eyes sparkling with the promise of complicity he'd been counting on to lift his spirits.

“I'm sorry about Florida,” was the first thing she said. “I guess I screwed it up some without you. It happened so quick in the end. I wasn't expecting them to bail on us that fast. They must have had insider knowledge.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Apology accepted. I read your account. Tough break.”

“Lost your man again,” she said, carefully checking him for reaction.

Cole took her order with another hand-signal. They both watched him pour and shake the cocktail.

“Seems like fate,” Jude said. “I think we're not meant to get him. My guess is that the government find him too useful. Someone watches over him. I'm going to ask Perez for some casework that doesn't involve his areas next. Something simpler, like fraud.”

“How about voluntary body-chemistry control?”

“That's a science already?”

Mary flashed her whitened teeth and laughed. “It will be now that they've finished perfecting NervePath systems. Glandular balancing using Micromedica for common disorders will lead to doping yourself with your own hormones in the time it takes to say Olympics, don'tcha think?”

“Puts self-help in a whole new light.”

“And the drugs empires will have to pack up and get with the pace.” She took a sip of her martini as soon as it arrived and fished out the olive to eat it. “So what do you think of this invitation to Utah?”

Jude hadn't given it any thought since she'd mentioned it. Fort Detrick, not Dugway, was on his mind. “Another army technoporn show,” he said. “Probably something to do with the biothreat.” They'd been invited to views before, where a new advance in defense or offense was wheeled out for inspection. They were allowed in because their work was supposed to uncover similar systems being produced on the black market. Jude had never seen any of the biogear outside a BSL-
_4 
zone so far, and he never wanted to. “When is it?”

“In a few days. Perez is going to send you the details.” Mary shook her hair back behind her shoulders. “Anyway, enough about all that. Did you hear about this rumor of experiments at Deer Ridge? I thought you said you had family there?”

Jude was startled, but he knew not to show it. He'd seen a few reports on the smaller or more outrageous newsnets and it was in one of their itemized postings from their own FBI datapilots. “Yeah. My sister. Half sister. She didn't know anything.”

Mary looked disappointed. “I was hoping maybe there'd be a lead there, into something.”

“If there is,” he said, “it's going to be some kind of government thing. Just like these Ivanov cases. We've never successfully prosecuted any other agency for use or development. They always pull that national security number.” He reached over to her hand where it rested on the edge of the table and squeezed it briefly to console her.

“Sorry. I'm being a horse's ass, I know.”

“Maybe, like you say, it's got nothing to it.” She shrugged.

He watched her closely as they took a drink each. She didn't seem concerned. He wished that he could stop being so picky-paranoid. He needed help badly and she was cool in a crisis. He trusted her. So why couldn't he talk?

“She's gone AWOL somewhere, though,” he said, trying out the idea.

“She? You mean your sister?”

“Yeah. I let her have the apartment while I was away, and when I got back,
nada.
Not even a note. But she's always been pretty flighty. Could have just gone off and planned to come back in a few days. She often does that.”

“You don't sound convinced,” Mary finished her martini and wiped her fingers on the napkin carefully, taking a moment over each one.

“Yeah, I'm not entirely. This business could get the media real edgy. I know she'd like to use it any way she can to push AIM forward. I'm worried she might go and get a few of the active ones and stage some kind of protest about it.” And if that didn't sound like lying lame shit he didn't know what did.

Mary nodded. “She never had to stay on the Reservation, though, did she? I heard you say often you'd send her money and she'd send it back.”

“Uncle Sam's filthy dollar,” Jude agreed, snorting at the memories of White Horse's terse notes. “Thinks it comes with a debt attached.”

“Who's the parent in common?”

“Father. Magpie Jordan. Used to be called Joe sometimes but he never liked Christianized names.”

“You've got it as your second name.”

“Yeah. But I don't use it. Not unless White Horse is around. She doesn't like my English name much. Mom chose that, and she hasn't got a lot of time for her either.”

“Does it mean anything? You never told me.”

Jude grinned at her. “Magpie's a name for someone who likes to tell tales and lies. Dad was good at all that. Very funny. My mom thought he should have written it down but he never did.”

“Sorry.” Mary put her hand on his shoulder for a moment.

“That's okay. Long time ago. Another drink?”

“Why not? You get them.” She got up to go to the powder room.

While she was away Jude thought he probably would tell her. The
weight of not doing so was almost painful and he felt deeply tired. He worried that White Horse was in so much trouble he couldn't even touch it. He didn't know what he could do to help her.

He ordered the drinks and was waiting, looking at the high screen where that day's baseball highlights were being cycled, when his Pad bleeped a triple tone.

He flicked it on to read the incoming information—a coded line, a private word.

It was from a contact of his at the Centers for Disease Control labs in Atlanta. A guy who'd helped him out a time or two before.

New Russian connection. Meet me.

It was flagged urgent and included the times of flights and a series of instructions.

Jude put it back in his jacket as Mary returned.

“New mail. Anyone I should know about?” she asked lightly, winking.

For a second something about the wink bothered him. It was like a flirt, but Mary didn't do that routinely. It was like a signal, but he didn't know what it meant. The news from Atlanta was still sinking in. He shrugged it off.

“Nobody nice,” he said and picked up the menu, almost as an afterthought, so he didn't have to meet her eyes and get the third degree. He paused. “How high up are our investigations supposed to go?”

She sat back in mock surprise at the question. “How high? As high as it takes. We're here to enforce the law for everyone.”

“Right.” He flipped the menu. “Want to eat here?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet. Jude, come on. What's bothering you?”

He stared at the list. “I think I got into something up to my neck and I can't get out,” he said finally.

She nodded. “Go on.”

“I don't know if I should.” He stuffed the menu back into its holder and flicked it away from him across the bar before turning back
to her. “We've been friends a long time and it's probably better you don't know.”

“Jude, for Chrissake.” She smiled and nudged his shin with the toe of her soft shoe. “Let me help. Is it to do with White Horse?”

“Not entirely.” He linked his fingers together and turned his hands inside out, stretching, listening to his two loose knuckles crack. He felt he was at a critical point, an intersection in events, where his next move, one way or another, would precipitate an instant and inevitable plunge into the future, from which there would be no means of escape. He sighed, breathless at this insight, helpless before it. Like a person listening to an old recording of themselves they've forgotten ever making he heard himself speak.

“I need a couple of days to think about it, okay? I'm going to stay away from work and just try to get it done on my own, yeah?”

“But then, if it isn't done, you'll let me help you?” She sat forward and stared intently into his face. “If it's dangerous …”

“I don't know,” he said. “I'll tell you later.”

During the next hour, they drank three more rounds, talked about nothing in particular, caught up on some more details of her Florida experience. None of this could drag his mind from the file contents and Natalie Armstrong. He was barely able to keep up his end of the conversation. When she was leaving Mary said, “If you want to talk …”

“Sure. Thanks.” Jude watched her go. He realized he liked Natalie because she was sparky, like Mary. He asked himself, as he worked his way through a fourth beer, why he'd never gone to bed with Mary. He wondered, feeling suddenly lonely, if she'd like to and why he was thinking about this now when he'd never thought about it much before, whether it was his fear trying to grab on to something—anything—like a drowning man reaching for a shadow in the waves that might be either driftwood or emptiness. And then he thought about Fort Detrick and his mind went blank.

By eleven that night he still hadn't come up with a plan that wasn't a hundred percent impossible to carry out, and none of the guys he'd once known in the army had had any clue what he was talking about when he'd called to poke around. So, for want of any other action, he booked his flight to Atlanta.

Jude was entering the details into his diary when a curious possibility about the files back at his apartment occurred to him. It was so obvious that he wondered why he hadn't thought of it before. Suppose that those papers were all in one file because they all related to one man? The combination of the idea and the drink made him dizzy.

He paid Cole and left, hurrying home with his head down against a light rain that had just started to fall.

Dan got to the Clinic and found chaos. Police and military vehicles clogged the gateway like a log jam in a sluice. When he was allowed in he found the corridors were full of people who were all but running, weaving around each other in both directions, talking to microphones and one another in blurts of request and instruction that bounced off the walls and roof to mingle into a senseless din. The alarms were switched off, but the resulting background of silence was more disorientating than their normal screaming. The lack of motivating noise was unsettling. He gathered from fragments he overheard that there'd been some kind of Micromedica breakout—a contamination—and that something had gone bad with Bobby X.

Dan's first thought was to find Natalie. But when he asked where she was the security officer scanning his Clinic card gave him a flat glance. “Report to your station. Someone there will inform you of your duties.”

Dan had to bite his lip to prevent himself from saying “Fuck you” right into the little shit's face. Two minutes in charge and it was
Zeig Heil
all the way. He took his card and brushed through the knot of people at the doors to the Therapy wing, treading on more than one foot.

A temporary hub had been set up in the waiting area. He saw
familiar faces there. They all looked pale and strained. Nobody smiled. Standing among them were two officers in biosuits with air-groomers in their hands. Their headgear was hanging off and trailing down their backs, so obviously if there had been any danger of live NervePath in the air it was gone now.