Mindbenders (32 page)

As they wandered out, Jerry scrubbed the whiteboard. Spies, teachers, brokers or Mafiosi—all jobs were routine. Consistency, do the job reasonably well, reasonably the same, time after time. No wonder he was bored. He checked in with the cathedral by cell—they were closing up as well. Managers meeting 530p. Stay sharp tomorrow.

He flipped off the lights and walked out into the warm night. Was there someplace to eat? He was hungry. There was a waitress at a place near the Pantheon who’d flirted with him the night before but she couldn’t still be working at this hour. And he refused to eat based on sex that might possibly maybe happen someday if he got ridiculously lucky. Not.

He headed in that direction anyway. There were lots of restaurants and he wasn’t ready for sleep, no matter the company line. L Corp wouldn’t be monitoring
managers
. At least, not him specifically. At least, he didn’t think so.

The Coliseum shown through the dark streets like the world’s grandest jack 0’lantern. Lowery cut through a grove of trees across the street and under brick arches extending from one of several hundred local churches. From God’s power to man’s—that was the progression of the human race.

When Rome was the center of the European world, it built three churches a block to God’s glory—now the cathedral on Tiber Island was decommissioned, a conference center for businessmen and politicians to hold polite dinners and divvy up their worldly scraps—financial aid, military assistance, the strings-attached charity of the World Bank. The early Christians had received communion in church; so had his mother, probably last week. Lowery, a man with no active God, had gone to the center several times in the past few days to receive his suggestion, the mental image that he passed on to his charges in the viewing room. An image was all it took, in the Information Age, to conquer the World—an image and the power of the mind.

As he crossed the next street and worked his way around the remains of Palatine Stadium, he didn’t feel much like a conqueror. Rome was a big city; wandering dark places alone at night wasn’t particularly brilliant—but then, what mugger would be looking for a muggee at  5 in the morning?

The ruins had weathered smooth like skulls, the clay red like everything else in this furnace of a city. In June, Rome remained hot all night. The arches of Domitian’s Palace towered in deep shadow, the lights at the Forum nearby placing everything else in silhouette. Jerry wanted a beer. A couple of beers. And maybe a cognac. Tomorrow was the day.

Jerry had walked this way at least twenty times, day and night, since arriving in Rome but somehow, this time, the sightlines looked different, the landmarks springing from the ground at odd angles and odder locations. Where he expected to break out of the Emperor’s overhanging confines, instead he found himself more deeply withdrawn, walled-in. Rows of bone-white pillars stood against the red clay wreckage, pointing skyward like missiles.  When he looked up for stars, clouds were gathering, swirling, too quickly and very specifically too close to him. The wind kicked up, gusting through the cavernous gaps between pillars and arches and ruins, whipping his jacket from his hands. He ran after the stupid thing, ending up even deeper in the labyrinth of ancient passageways. Ripples of lightning pulsed through the clouds—this felt just about obligatory, with all else that was happening—next had to be ghosts of Emperors long dead, Lowery both joking with himself and admitting real fear simultaneously. The atmosphere had gone deathly way too fast for real life.

And then there was Pietr Volkov, advancing on him like a general across a battlefield, lit up like he’d swallowed a neon tube and marching right
through
the bars of the fence surrounding the ruins. What the hell did
he
want? Lowery had only met the man once, which was plenty. He’d heard the rumors—or the rumors about the rumors—that surrounded Volkov. Lowery thought back—had he missed a cue somewhere? Nobody had missed session tonight or last night. He’d checked them all in. He hadn’t checked the clarity of the transmission as often as the regs demanded, but
nobody
did, except Vlada, the toadie—every time he’d checked, everything had been to spec.

Volkov should have reached him by now but he was still marching and Lowery’s panic kept rising. What about check-out? Making sure none of the drones carried any of the suggestion out of the room after they were done? Had he checked
everyone
? Oh Jesus—the girl with the pumpkin thong! She’d seemed so disinterested, even disdainful—maybe he hadn’t…Shit! Shit! Now…?

“Is it possible,” Volkov bellowed, still a few yards away, “that our enemies
know our plans
?” The last words exploded inside Lowery’s skull like someone was pounding with a hammer.

“Not from me!” Lowery cried immediately, trying halfway through to drag his voice down and exert some kind of control. Volkov was right on top of him, the two of them alone in the center of the center of the Ancient World.

“Alright, not from you! Maybe from one you were responsible for!” Volkov drilled at Lowery. “Maybe from this girl you have the stupid infatuation with.
Is it possible
?”

“How
can
they?” Lowery blubbered, desperately trying not to think of the pumpkin-colored line between the girl’s legs, even though—especially because—Volkov clearly knew about it already.  “That’s the whole idea, isn’t it? We each had our portion. I only had Emerald. If they don’t have them all—?”

“Don’t
quibble
with me!” Volkov bellowed into Lowery’s face. He was backing him into one of Domition’s ancient walls. Behind Volkov, an ancient alcove rose skull-like five stories above them, flashing blue now in the sudden lightning. “You got your instruction at the same time as the others, yes?”

“Y—yes!” Lowery admitted, not sure what infraction he could have committed there.

“So you had Emerald. Who sat next to you?”

“Ruby.”

“How would you know that unless you paid attention to
that
portion as well?” Volkov thundered. All Lowery had seen was the identifying logo on the screen as they started feeding the images to them—that was
all
. He was
sure
. He clung to that denial, repeating it over and over like a mantra. If Volkov was going to read his mind, let him read that, please.

Maybe he did. Instead of ripping his skull off, Volkov held back now a moment, still only half a foot away but regarding him with at least a little detachment. Maybe this was how they looked at you just before they turned you to dust, Lowery thought. It wasn’t like there was any point resisting. An odd thought occurred to him as lightning struck the skull arch behind Volkov and the light seemed to gleam
through
him.

“Are you here?” Lowery asked, unable to think of a more elegant way to ask the question.

“No, I’m not here, you idiot,” Volkov swiped.”I can’t administer every lazy mid-level in person.”

So he was a projection—Lowery had heard of
that
, too. The old mindbenders were full of tricks. This Volkov didn’t blink—yes, he did. Now he did, that is, though Lowery swore he hadn’t until just then. He wondered if the projections only blinked once you noticed they weren’t blinking. “That won’t keep me from disciplining you in any method that strikes me as appropriate.
Do you understand
?”

A second later, the tree in front of them erupted with a lightning hit. Lowery felt the charge in the air and went deaf for a few seconds after the crack. A tree branch the size of a Fiat came down a foot away and Volkov was in his face again.

“Yes, yessir, I understand,” Jerry stammered, trying with difficulty to make eye contact.

“Charge me with tonight’s suggestion,” Volkov ordered.

“What?”

“PLAY IT BACK. NOW! I want to see what you gave your charges tonight, what they sent out. Or shall I just extract it from your frontal lobe?”

“No, no, that—” It was not the easiest time to put himself into a meditative state but at least the lightning seemed to pause while he closed his eyes. Maybe Volkov was just gathering a big bolt to smite him if he didn’t like what he saw. Jerry tried to concentrate. When he opened his eyes momentarily, Volkov was standing, tapping his feet in exasperation.

Finally, Lowery was able to put himself back in the tasking room in the convention center, the place where they all received the images for their shifts. He felt himself in the chair and saw the ruby logo on the screen. He could see the flash of ruby on the next screen but only for a second,
see, it’s just peripheral vision and my eyes go right back to my own screen and that’s it!
And then, in the air around him, filling the space between him and Volkov, here was his image, his message—the grainy, jagged, useless image he’d given his team to send out. Flashes of close movement, the grunting noises of a struggle and cries for help, jerky shards of picture skimming across the air between them, the desperate movement in the pictures heightened by the frenzied shrieking of the orchestra in the background. And rain—he hadn’t noticed the rain when he learned the transmission but now it was everywhere and he realized it had come off the video image. Everything was just as he’d been given it, he was sure. All the control bytes showed in proper order, the color bars were correct, the control tone was accurate. He’d remembered it objectively, without coloring it with any of his own input. It was an successful tasking, he was sure of it.

 Several seconds had passed since the image ended. He was still there. Volkov hadn’t said anything. Lowery convinced himself it was alright to open his eyes—at very least, his transmission couldn’t be held against him. When he did, Volkov had stepped a little further away. He seemed to be concentrating elsewhere. When he saw Lowery’s eyes were open, Volkov said, “Go about your business. Say nothing of this to anyone. We still have a leak. It wouldn’t do for them to know we’re looking for them, would it?” He took a few steps, then turned back just for a moment. “
You don’t know who to trust
,” Volkov warned. Then he stepped into the swirling wind embracing the arches and was gone, disappeared, vanished.

Lowery touched his coat—it wasn’t even damp. No rain. He took off toward a street, anyplace with cars and other people. Anyplace he could find several—no, many—cognacs with breakfast.

~~~~

Sixteen

“That was terrific,” Max told Kate as we watched Lowery sprint downhill away from the Palatine. “Except you dropped a plate.”

“Huh?”

“Volkov didn’t blink. He caught on it was an image. No harm done this time but, when you’re making an illusion, you’ve got to keep
all
the plates in the air.”

“You could do better?”

“Not a chance, but not the point.”

“Forget about next time, dammit!” Tauber burst. “
That
was the message?”

“I know—not much, is it? It’s what was in his head—it’s the message they were sending out. We got it without probing and he won’t tell anyone. But I’m not sure what it’s worth.” We started back toward the villa. “Let’s get home and play it back,” Max said.

“Play it back?”

They had a very nice home theatre system on the second floor. Max went in behind the digital recorder, pulled out the input cables and placed his fingers over the inputs.

“It’s a hard drive,” he said. “Magnetic impulses on a platter. The same process, actually, as skewing instrument readings in the nuclear plant two or three miles away.”

He pushed ‘Record’ and stood over the inputs, eyes closed, humming a kind of odd, unmusical tone for a couple of minutes. I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I came real close to the machine—it was humming the same tone. When he finally pushed ‘Play,’ the scene Lowery had shown us appeared on the screen, tumult and frenzied movement but fuzzy images and indecipherable.

“Is it the assassination of her father?” Kate asked.

“Sounds kinda like it.”

“This
can’t
be right. How can they influence her when ya can’t tell what the picture is?”

Max replayed the thing to the end, where the control bits showed—color bars, audio tone and a slate. Emerald, 3 of 4.

“They’re a couple steps ahead of us. They’ve split up the signal. Emerald, Sapphire, Ruby, Diamond—four teams, each sending out separate parts of an image. The recipient gets all four—”

“—we get static,” Kate said and Max nodded. “This is less than useless.”

“How come the music comes through while the rest is all broken up?” I asked and he shrugged.

The sun was coming up over the hills of Rome. Cars and trucks rumbled just outside, the beginnings of Sunday’s traffic. Church bells rang from every direction. Max was at the window, pulling a twenty-foot door open and shut, open and shut, all nervous energy.

“Today’s the day,” he said. “It’s going to happen today.” There was no excitement in his voice, only dread.

“We need another team leader,” Tauber said. “We need at least one more part o’ the puzzle.”

“That’s insane—finding the first guy took you hours.”

“It’s what we need, ‘less you got a better idea.”

Kate and I were dispatched to Tiber Island. “They’ve definitely got pictures of Mark and me,” Max said. “If anybody looks sideways at you—even once—cut your losses and get out.” It was pretty clear from the way he was talking that he didn’t expect much from the attempt.

Tauber looked even more wiped out—he really thought he’d found the missing link the night before; it tore into him to come up empty.

Getting onto the Island was insanity—five security checkpoints, passports and credentials and interrogation from scratch at each one. First day of the conference, everybody on full alert. With all that, I didn’t notice what was missing until we actually reached the conference center.

“Do you feel it?” I asked as soon as we crossed the threshold.

“What?”

“
Nothing
. The air’s clear—no probing, no blocking, no nothing.”