MIND FIELDS (37 page)

  One swift kick from the tree-trunk leg of John Mason brought down the front door of Austin Studios.  The shattering wood broke the silence inside the darkened building.   There was a brief pause, then a frenetic clatter from an upstairs bedroom; a few seconds later Donny Austin appeared at the top of the stairs with a shotgun in his hand.

  “Who the hell’s there?” he barked out.  As he reached to flip on the light, Mason’s arm stretched out and ripped the shotgun from Donny’s grasp before he even saw his assailant.  Mase was amazingly quick for such a big man, and had been at the top of the steps waiting before Donny had time to get his gun and come through the door.

  Donny’s eyes bulged from their sockets as Mase dragged him back into the bedroom by his neck.

  “What say we have a little talk, photo boy.”

  Donny tried to answer, but couldn’t get a word through the tight grip around his throat.  He nodded in agreement as he held onto Mason’s forearm with both hands.

  “Good boy,” Mase said as he tossed Donny into a chair. 

  After that introduction, it was not hard to pry Paul Hingston’s new identity from the lips of the photographer.  He was also only too happy to provide the new name of the woman that Paul had with him, along with the digital photo still stored in his computer.

___

  Sandi Fletcher had been waiting at the Kensington Gate Hotel in London for two days.  She was too scared to venture out and had plenty of time to think about all of the terrible things that may have happened to Paul.  She had decided that she would give him one more day.  If he hadn’t shown by then, she would move on.  She stood by the window, grasping the drapes and staring down to the street below, desperately hoping to see Paul at the entrance of the hotel.  Her nerves were frayed and she ripped the curtain off of the first three hooks when the ring of the telephone tore into her concentration.  She ran to grab the receiver.

  “Hello?” she said, hopefully.

   “San?” It was Paul’s voice.

  “Thank God.  I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

  “I’m in the lobby.  I’ll be right up.”

  Paul knocked gently on the door of room 205 at about the same time that No-neck Mason was boarding a plane at BWI bound for Heathrow.  O’Grady had arranged for Trace McKnight to meet him there.

  Sandi hesitated on the other side of the door. 

  “It’s me, San.  Open up.”

  Sandi opened the door and threw herself into Paul’s arms.  She grasped desperately to his body, afraid to let go.  Tears streamed down her cheek as the tension of the past three days burst free.

  “It’s OK,” he said softly.  “Everything is going to be OK.”  He said it in a way that convinced her that she was safe now, though he wished that he could feel as secure.

  “God, I can’t take any more of this,” she said to him as she wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  They walked into the room and closed the door.

  “Listen, San.  I hate to have to do this,” he said, “but I don’t know how much time we have.”

  “What do you mean?  You said it was over.”  She clenched her fists and pounded them against his chest.  “I can’t do this anymore,” she cried as she backed away and fell onto the edge of the bed, dropping her head into her hands.

  “I’m sorry, Sandi,” he said, pulling back the curtains and glancing out the window. 

  “But how could they possibly find us here?  We’re half way across the world, with new identities, no credit cards to trace, and...Hell, they don’t even know I’m alive.”  She looked up at Paul.  “They don’t, do they?” she asked hopefully.

  “I don’t think so, but they will find us, I’m sure of it.  If I knew about Donny Austin, I’m sure Sean did too.  It’s not like it was a big secret.  Sooner or later they’ll go to Donny, and I doubt that they’ll have much trouble getting him to talk.  Once they know our new ID’s, it won’t take them long to figure out where we went.  In fact, I’m counting on it.”

  Sandi looked up incredulously.  “You’re counting on it?  Look, if you’ve got a death wish you can count me out.  There are still a lot of things I want to do with my life.”

  “Me too, San, and I want to do them with you.”

  Sandi was totally confused; Paul could see it in her face.  He placed his briefcase on the bed next to her and opened it.  It was padded with thick blue foam on the inside, protecting two small vials and syringes.

  “What’s this?” she asked, hesitantly.

  “A little something I’ve been working on.  All those weekends at BNI that they thought I was working on the Phase Two nanobots, I was really working on this.  Nobody was around to notice. The weekends are dead quiet around that place and I had free run of the lab.”

  Paul pulled out one of the vials and held it up to the light.  It was a lime green liquid with a faint iridescence.  “I haven’t been able to do any human testing, but I’ve tested it on a half-dozen chimps with the same result every time.”

  “What is it, Paul?” she asked again.

  “It’s our ticket out,” he said.  “It’s the Fountain of Youth.”

  Sandi was speechless as she stared at the glowing green liquid.

  “Aging is a simple matter of genetics,” he said.  “I was sure that if I could come up with the right gene sequencing, I could find a way to program nanobots to reset the cells in our body to a nascent state; we could start our lives over with all our knowledge intact, but without the ravages that time has wreaked on our bodies.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Sandi said slowly.  “You sent me off to London, lured the goons who want to kill us here, and now you want to shoot me up with an untested mutagen?”

  “Yup, that about sums it up,” Paul said.

  “OK then.  And to think, I was worried that we might be in trouble.”

  They both laughed.  It was a nervous laugh, but a cathartic one nonetheless.  Paul carefully put the vial back into the case and closed it up.  He sat next to Sandi on the bed and took her hand.  “Look, if you don’t want to do this, I’ll understand.  We can just try and outrun these guys, hide out in Africa or something.  I’ve got enough money to last a lifetime.”

  Sandi was tempted to say yes, but she knew that their chances of staying hidden from a determined NSA agent were slim.

  “So if this thing works,” she said, “we’ll be a couple of kids and they’ll be looking for a couple of adults, is that it?  I guess youth is the perfect disguise.  I mean, lot’s of people change their appearance, maybe make themselves look older, but nobody can fake youth.  Is that the deal?”

  “Well, something like that.  The bottom line is that they’ll be looking for us in London, and the trail will end here.  We can start our lives over anywhere, even back in the States.  They’ll never think to look for a younger couple.  We can have our lives back again.  Better yet, we can even have our youth back again.”

  “OK,” she said.

  “OK?”

  “OK,” she repeated.

  Paul prepared the syringes and injected Sandi first, and then himself.  They pulled down the covers and went to bed.  It was mid-day London time, but they were both tired.  They were fast asleep by the time Trace McKnight arrived at Heathrow.  No-neck Mason was there waiting when the plane pulled up to the gate.

___

  A horn sounded on the street below and awakened Sandi from a restful sleep.  She stretched her arms out over her head.

  “Ouch,” she winced, grabbing at the pain in her right shoulder.  She massaged it gently and rolled over to look at Paul.  Fear shot to the core of her soul as she saw the face of the old man lying next to her.  With a shriek, she jumped out of bed and stared at him.

  Paul was awakened by Sandi’s cry.  He peered up at her naked figure in the dimly lit room and smiled.  “It’s nice to know you’ll still look that good in thirty years.”

  “Paul?” she said, as she studied his face.  The loose wrinkled skin and sunken eyes belonged to the face of an old man, but the mustache and wavy brown hair was his, and the voice…it was a bit raspy, but unmistakably Paul’s.  “My God, what happened to you?”

  “To me?” he laughed.  “I wouldn’t talk, old girl.”

  Sandi looked down at her naked body.  “Jesus! They’re down to my knees,” she said staring in disgust at her sagging breasts.

  “You wish,” Paul said, still laughing.  In a rare moment of vanity, Sandi had once lamented that she was not more well-endowed in the bust line, but to Paul, her figure was just right.

  Sandi grabbed the blanket and pulled it off the bed, covering herself.  “This is your Fountain of Youth?”

  “Step one,” he said.  “This is why it’s so perfect.  See, the chronobots – that’s what I call these de-aging nanobots – they first age all the cells in the body to a chronological age of roughly sixty-five, then reset them.  The whole process takes about seventy-two hours.”

  “So I’m gonna look like this,” she rubbed at her sore shoulder again, “and
feel
like this for three days.”

  “Yup.”

  “Lovely.  And tell me again why this is so perfect.”

  “Why, did you forget already?  Oh, yeah.  You’re probably just getting a little senile, now aren’t you dear?”

  “Cute.  Just talk old man.  I want to get dressed.”

  “All right, all right.  Think about it.  We’re going to waltz right out of here this morning.  Even if those guys are down there in the lobby right now, they’ll never recognize us.  If they so much as suspect it may be us, one close look and they’ll see this stuff isn’t make-up.”  He tugged at the baggy skin on his neck.

“In the lobby?  How could they know we’re here?  You don’t think you were followed, do you?”

“I don’t think so, but these guys are professionals.  Besides, like I said yesterday, I’m pretty sure they’ll find their way to Austin.  Hell, if I know about his fake ID operation, you can bet your sweet ass they do too, and I doubt it’ll be very hard to get old Donny Austin to give them our new ID’s.”

“Jesus, Paul.  So they could be here right now?”  she said, pulling the curtain aside just enough to see out the window.

“I sure as hell hope so.”

“You really
want
them to find us?  I thought you were just kidding when you said that.”

“You don’t kid with these guys.  Believe me, I don’t want them to find
us
, just the trail to London that we’ve left for them.  See, when we walk out of here looking like this, they won’t recognize us even if they’re standing right next to us.  Their search will come up empty and they’ll assume we’re hiding out somewhere in Europe.”

“And won’t we be?”

“Nope.  Before we left Baltimore, I stopped by to see an old friend of mine.  He spent a couple of years working with Austin.  His work’s not quite as good as the old master, but good enough to pass through most security checkpoints, and nobody but a few close friends knows about this little hobby of his.  See, he’s too timid to sell the stuff; he just does it for fun, but I was able to talk him into showing me how to make a blank set of documents.  He set up the computer for me, and I put in the names myself.  Even he doesn’t know the names I used, so if by some long shot they figure out that I went to him for help, they still won’t know what names we’re using. All I’ve got to do is insert the photos,” he pulled a digital camera out of his briefcase, “with this, and we’re all set.  We walk out of here and fly anywhere we want.  Three days from now, we’ll be a couple of teen-agers.  We can be whomever we want and go wherever we want.  Imagine being eighteen again, with all the money you’ll ever need, and armed with the knowledge that a couple of extra decades of life has forced into us.”

“Yeah,” Sandi muttered as she looked into the mirror on the bathroom door, “it will be nice to be young again.” She ran her fingers through her hair, looking for gray roots.

  “You’re probably wondering why there’s no gray, huh?”

“Not really,” she said, “just looking to see if it’s starting.  I mean, all the hair I had on my head last night is still here.  It’s just a bunch of dead cells, so your little chronobots wouldn’t affect them, right?”

“Right.  Only the new hair that’s growing now will be gray.  That’s why I brought some of this along.”  He tossed a tube toward her.  It fell on the floor as her slowed reflexes failed to grasp it in the air.

“Ugh,” she grunted as she bent over.  She picked up the tube and tried to read the label, but it was all blurred. “My God, what’s happening?  I think your chronobots are malfunctioning.  My vision is starting to blur.”

“Look over here,” he said.  She looked at him. “Can you see me?”

“Well...yeah,” she said hesitantly, and then looked back down at the tube, “but I can barely read the label on this tube.

Paul laughed and walked over to her.  “Here, try these,” he said, handing her a pair of reading glasses.

Sandi took them and slipped them on her face.  She looked back down at the tube again and saw the label: “Actor’s Theater Gray Hair Dye”

“You’re just a little far-sighted old girl,” he said, smiling.

“So this is what the Golden Years are going to be like, huh?”

“Yeah.  Some treat,” Paul said.  “Now get in there and dye your hair gray.  I don’t know how long we’ve got, but we’d better be ready before any NSA agents show up looking for us.”  He walked over to the window and peered out toward the street below as she went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

An hour later, they were ready.  Paul had picked up some age appropriate clothing.  They had both dyed their hair and the thick mustache that Paul had sported since high school was gone. Even Sandi barely recognized him.  They stood side by side, studying themselves in the mirror.

“Pathetic,” Sandi said, shaking her head side to side.

“What?” Paul said, “I think we make a cute couple.”

“We look ridiculous,” she said.  “Where did you get these clothes?”

She was wearing a flower-print dress, slightly tattered around the hem.  He was wearing plaid pants and a red shirt.

“From a thrift shop.  I think it’s perfect. We look like tourists.”

“We look like a circus act.  Go down to the lobby and pick up a couple of sweat shirts, the ones that say London on the front.  But first,” she started to unbutton his shirt, “get that bull-fighter’s flag off your chest.  Anybody who spots you in that won’t be able to stop staring.  That’s the last thing we need.”

“Wait a sec,” he said pulling away.  “This works out better anyway.  Let’s shoot the passport photos with these clothes on, and then we’ll change.  That way we won’t have the same clothes on in the photos that we’re wearing today.  It’ll be less likely to arouse any suspicion.”  He pulled a digital camera out of his suitcase and took a mug shot of Sandi, and then had her take one of him.  Then he reached back into his bag to get a mobile printer.  It was about the size of a cell phone, and interfaced with the camera via a wireless RF port. Paul downloaded the photos from the camera into the printer, and then lined the printer up on the photo page of the passport.  He printed his picture into the square where the official photo needed to be placed, and then did the same with Sandi’s passport.