Wish You Were Here (5 page)

The girl grinned at him, making him wonder exactly what she was. A few moments before, she'd been an otter. Before that, if his intuition was correct, she'd been an old man with a pipe. Now, with that grin on her face, she looked just like a wolf.

‘I wouldn't worry about that,' she said. ‘I don't render the sort of bill that money can pay.' She paused for effect, and then continued, ‘After all, if it was money I was after, I wouldn't need to bother. Money's easy.'

Wesley blinked. He didn't know precisely how many adjectives there are in the English language - a hundred thousand? Quarter of a million? Five million? - but there were a hell of a lot, and virtually any of them seemed more appropriate than easy when applied to money. ‘Gosh,' he said. ‘You reckon?'

‘Yes,' the girl replied; and it started to snow banknotes. Before Wesley had time to move, he was up to his shins in crisp, new thousand-dollar bills. He didn't need to hold one up to the light to see that they were genuine; somehow it went without saying. He took about a second and a half to recover from the shock; then he started grabbing with both hands.

‘If it was just a matter of money,' the girl went on, as a sudden gust of wind blew a heavy drift of thousand-dollar bills straight into Wesley's face, ‘my job would be a doddle. If giving you your heart's desire was as simple as sending you home with enough of those things to fill a large container lorry, believe me, I'd be absolutely delighted. Trouble is,' she said, with a sigh that made all the money vanish as suddenly as it had come, ‘it isn't. Money wouldn't solve a thing. You'd just be a rich fuck-up instead of a poor one.'

‘You know what they say,' Wesley muttered, his hands still tightly clenched on what was now nothing but empty air. ‘A change is as good as a rest. I'm prepared to give it a go if you are.'

‘That's terribly sweet of you,' the girl replied, vaporising a thousand-dollar bill that had somehow managed to get lodged down the back of Wesley's neck, ‘but it'd only make me lazy. No, I know what you really want, and I intend to see that you get it.'

Wesley made a little whimpering noise and sat down on the ground. He wasn't sure he understood this dream. If his heart's desire wasn't the gorgeous girl and it wasn't all that wonderful money, what in hell was it? Later, he resolved, he and his heart were going to have a serious talk about the meaning of the word
priorities
.

‘All right,' he said. ‘You've told me what it isn't. Now tell me what it is.' A disturbing thought crossed his mind. ‘Hey,' he said, ‘if this turns out to be one of those time-share presentation things and the free gift's really only a radio alarm clock, I'm not going to be happy.'

‘Be happy. It's not that.'

‘Then what is—'

‘
Look!
'

 

Linda sat back in her seat, waved away the offer of a drink, and gazed out of the window at the clouds below.

Iowa.

She frowned. Deplorable but true; she knew only two things about Iowa. One, that it was big, dull and agricultural. Two, it was reputedly the birthplace of James T. Kirk.

Briefly she considered these two nuggets of wisdom and came to the conclusion that there wasn't a story angle in either of them. A pity; because, like Pythagoras, Linda lived her life by and for angles, and accordingly straight lines bothered her, in the same way as a vacuum is reckoned to bother Nature. As far as she was concerned, if you can't crack it open and pick news out of it, there's not much point in it being there. By those criteria, they might as well dig up Iowa and use it to line window-boxes in New York.

Nevertheless; by some divine mistake the Story to end all Stories was happening in Iowa. To be precise, at a place called Lake Chicopee, a little-known beauty spot situated in the exact geometric epicentre of nowhere.

She wrinkled her exquisite nose. As far as she could make out, there were Strange Happenings at Lake Chicopee. Mostly, it was people disappearing; but there were also uncanny sights and noises, weird manifestations, things appearing, disappearing and changing shape, things going bump in the night. She switched on her laptop and waited for the lights to stop flickering.

Seven people, five males and two females, all of them from out of state, had last been seen or heard of setting out to walk to the lake. No bodies, possessions, footprints or bloodstains had come to light, though for some reason the police department adamantly refused to drag the lake. Among the manifestations there was a long, low ship that appeared and disappeared, strange whispering voices in the woods, unexplained lights and animals and birds that were supposed to have changed their shape in clear view of what passed in Iowa for reliable witnesses.

Yes. Well.

Those, then, were the raw materials:

As the great silver bird sliced its cloud-splitting way like a light-sabre through wedding cake, Linda typed the ingredients in and read the list back two or three times, occasionally changing the order and flipping across to the readership profile database. Then she took a deep breath, flexed her shapely fingers, and set to work.

When a cook cooks, he gathers the ingredients before him and makes them into something. He doesn't wait for them to march into the pot and semaphore a message to the cooker to switch itself on. He doesn't agonise over whether the carrots really belong in the sauce or whether the parsnips are true. He goes to it with a container, a source of heat and a big sharp knife.

She paused, scrolled back and noticed an omission, which she rectified by typing in:

- which was likely enough; and in any case, the casserole needed them. She had to have Native Americans or there wouldn't be an R to go with the C, the A and the P:

Put 'em together and what do they spell? News.

Weird things happening in a remote spot = secret Government scientific research. Funny lights and things mutating = nukes. People disappearing - see above. A
ship
that appeared and disappeared; on a
lake
—

She furrowed her brows, bit her lip and let her mind off the leash.

Sherlock Holmes' law, as amended to fit the requirements of journalism. Once you have eliminated the unnewsworthy, whatever remains, however improbable,
will
be the truth . . .

Yes!

Submarines. Secret Government nuclear submarines. Neo-fascist CIA warmongers were covertly stockpiling Armageddon submersibles in America's heartland, not giving a damn about the catastrophic effects on the cute furry environment and the cute furry Native Americans, cold-bloodedly jeopardising world peace with the intention of . . .

Of?

Yes, murmured her internal devil's advocate. Why would anybody go to all that trouble? Not, of course, that a motive is essential; people will believe that the Government will do anything, provided they can be made to appear to be covering it up. On the other hand, there's nothing quite like a good solid motive for building a story that'll keep going for a week. Leave it all shrouded in enigmatic overtones and by Day Three you'll find yourself sandwiched in between the film reviews and the crossword.

Motive?

Linda clicked her tongue, reproaching herself for her lack of vision.

Obviously, they were doing it secretly because they were planning to give the submarines as clandestine military aid to a sinister foreign power.

 

Right.

Database; SFP/LIST.

Crossreference; readership profile database.

 

Only a fool would choose an SFP that'd offend half the readership. Merge; and—

‘Oh,' she said aloud.

She looked at the screen. She raised an eyebrow. On the other hand, it must be right, or it wouldn't be on the screen. After all if you can't trust the database, what can you trust?

OK, clandestine military aid to the Vatican. Saint Petergate. Pausing for a moment to speculate as to why the paper had so few readers among the Irish, Italian and Hispanic communities (bad business; must do something about that), she filled in the bare facts with some mental colour.

Vatican? Well, it was beginning to make sense. Most people knew next to nothing - she knew next to nothing - about the recently elected Pope Shane III, formerly Cardinal Archbishop of Adelaide. On the other hand, very little real hard news ever seemed to come out of Australia; and it stands to reason that any country that goes out of its way to be obscure and secretive must be up to something. She tapped a few keys, and the screen read:

Which was much more like it. After all, nobody ever claimed that Australians were a minority of any sort, so she could say whatever the hell she liked about them and nobody'd be in the least offended.

She sighed contentedly and looked out over the clouds again, consolidating the progress so far in her mind. In unspoilt idyllic environmentally sensitive Lake Chicopee, renegade CIA elements are funding a massive program of clandestine nuclear submarine building, with the sinister intention of funnelling Armageddon technology through the Vatican to the warmongers of the shadowy, secretive Australian ruling junta. Psychotic antipodean death squads with corks round their hats are systematically wiping out anybody who happens to stumble across this terrible secret, including the once flourishing Native American population, who stand by helpless as their proud cultural heritage is ground into dust under the jackbooted paw of the kangaroo. Meanwhile, your tax dollars are going to help fund the greatest threat to world peace since Genghis Khan.

She smiled, saved the file and closed her eyes. As she drifted into sleep it crossed her mind that one day the world might of its own accord produce enough genuine organically grown news to satisfy the needs of the global media, in which case she wouldn't have to do this sort of thing any more. Which would be a pity; but that day, if it ever came, wouldn't be in her lifetime. They'd just have to start up more newspapers and more TV channels and more radio stations, just to redress the balance.

 

Having bounced off a couple of rocks and a tree-root or two, Calvin Dieb came to rest in a tangle of briars.

Once he'd realised he wasn't dead a number of thoughts crossed his mind, all of them to do with money.

First; he'd been crazy to offer fifty bucks to someone to get him off the hillside, because in the event he'd been able to roll down it with only superficial scratches and bruises to show for it.

Second; in the time he'd taken to roll down the slope, he could have earned, at his usual charging rate of two thousand dollars an hour, eighteen dollars and forty cents.

Third; he would willingly pay the cash equivalent of ten hours of his time to anybody who would show him where that goddamn lunatic female had gotten to, and provide him with a large, sharp knife.

He stood up. Because of his involvement with the briar patch, this entailed a certain amount of ripping of his five-thousand-dollar trousers, but he was (a) past caring and (b) so heavily insured that he was in danger of becoming a gravitational anomaly and attracting his own meteorite belt. Someone else was going to pay - heavily - for this whole episode in any case, so the hell with details.

Thoughts of money always inspire strong emotions in lawyers, and this particular train of thought aroused in Calvin Dieb a flashback of anger of the intensity usually reserved for rival law firms who filched his richer, more gullible clients. As he gained his feet and sent out search parties for his breath, his anger started to cool; or rather to temper, becoming harder and more capable of keeping an edge. Forget the sharp knife, he muttered to himself, and bring me a writ. And, more to the point, bring me someone I can sue.

After all, he told himself, as he removed a length of bramble from around his ankle, kill a guy and there's an end to it. Sue him and you can do to him in this life what the devils in Hell will do to him in the next, only rather more thoroughly. They didn't phase out trial by combat because it was too cruel; quite the reverse.

But all that could wait. In the morning, he'd have a team of investigators down here to get him the name, address and financial details of the crazy broad who'd pushed him, and in the afternoon he'd send in the cops and the process servers. Right now, he wanted to get back to his office, where iodine would heal his wounds and foreclosing on some poor bastard would salve his mind. He looked up at the gradient he had to climb, took a deep breath and reached in his pocket for his car keys.

His car keys . . .

Psychiatrists say that the fundamental subconscious anxiety that all men suffer from, and which underlies all their actions, is a morbid fear of castration.Wrong. Unzip any man's mind and you'll find, right down there in the dark, terrifying place where the soul never goes, a primeval dread of losing his car keys. Just think how many times a day you instinctively reach in your pocket or pat your hip, just to know they're still there. Upon Calvin Dieb, already thorn-ripped, humiliated and physically and mentally out of pocket some tens of thousands of dollars, there descended the horrifying realisation that he had been gelded of his keys and that his car, the external expression of everything he was, now sat useless and undrivable in the lay-by above.