We plunged into the thick brush, the boots pounding out the back door and tearing through Fine’s yard, trampling all the neat greenery while voices barked orders from every direction. Max was running really hard-I was puffing just trying to keep up with him. I’d spent a year in the Everglades, where even tree branches get lazy. But the undergrowth was so thick here under the trees that it was dim as dusk at nine in the morning. In such a place, a couple yards might be enough for us to get away.
The footsteps behind were so close, I didn’t even dare look back at first. But we started to pull away and I realized that, as Max-Renn-approached bushes and trees, they were actually bending out of his way, like he was projecting some invisible shell ahead of him-and whipped back with a vengeance once we passed, which really helped gain us some space. I heard angry voices cursing and shouting behind my back. And then I was startled by a whooshing sound and turned to see, just a few feet away, a twister sprung right up out of the ground. It was a little one, not one of those Hollywood ones that swallow gymnasiums, but it was enough, sucking up the forest floor and whipping the whole mess-leaves, twigs, bark, branches, pine cones, berries, vines, dust and moss-into a smoky column skittering interference between us and them.
Renn’s voice said Follow me and he peeled off to the left. I obeyed and then realized he hadn’t said anything aloud-I’d heard his voice in my head. The whirlwind continued in our original direction, and I heard what sounded like fifteen sets of footsteps following. “Fan Out!” yelled a deep voice and I peeked through the trees at the leader, a bulky guy in a dark nylon jumpsuit pointing in the wrong direction. “Get around it!” The posse fought through the bracken and uproar into the distance while we sprinted, puffing hard, uphill-I could make out a cluster of houses ahead, somewhere beyond the construction cranes.
And then the hill came to a sudden end, dropping off abruptly to a sunken roadbed cleared to bare earth and huge piles of dirt and stone held back by thick-tied cable netting. Empty bulldozers and earthmovers completed the picture.
The long-finished houses we’d glimpsed over the treetops were just across the roadbed, on the other side of the piles. We slid down the incline and right into two men in dark blue nylon, coming up the other direction between an artificial hill and a high pile of encased stone. They greeted us immediately by pulling out their Glocks. Why did everyone but us have big guns?
“Stand still!” the taller, bearded one ordered Max. “You stay right where you are. You’re not touching me.” He touched his earpiece. “We’ve got ‘em.” He tried it a few times, then turned to the younger man next to him. “Contact them. Let them know.”
The younger man touched his earpiece several times. “I’m not getting anything,” he said.
“ He’s jamming it,” Beardman said. He gestured with his gun. “Okay-cross your hands behind your backs and stand still. G here will wrap your wrists and put on your headpieces. Then we’ll go down and meet the others.”
The younger man pulled two black plastic bundles from his pocket. When he opened them, they turned out to be wrap-around goggles with prominent earpieces and blinking LCD’s at the temples. I had no idea what they were but they didn’t look friendly.
“Your bosses won’t promote you,” Renn told him coolly. “You’re too ambitious. They like employees who are grateful.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Beardman returned. “Try harder.”
As G came toward us, Max actually leaned forward and threw a punch. I was shocked-I’d never seen him react in a physical way to anything and, what with the guns and all, it didn’t even make sense. He wasn’t much good at it either-he completely missed, succeeding only at knocking the goggles out of G’s hands. Beardman kicked Max’s legs out from under him and, as soon as he hit the ground, shoved the Glock to his temple. “Okay, if that’s how you want it,” he said. “Tie him first,” he told the younger man, who put the ties around Max’s wrists and pulled them really tight. Then he lifted him up again and propped him against me while he turned to get another plastic tie for me off the ground.
I felt the vibrations coming off of Max as soon as he leaned against me. I could feel the hum sweeping from his shoulders and feet into the trunk of his body, intensifying and deepening until he somehow was a tone, a deep bass note that overwhelmed all other sound as long as he was touching me.
“Okay,” he called out as the vibration built-I could feel the effort it took for him to talk, “how about this? You’ve got a spot on your lung. Cancer. You need to have it looked at. It’s not big; if they act quickly-”
“Shut up!” Beardman shouted. “I need a diagnosis, I’ll call a doctor!” He turned to his companion. “What are you waiting for?”
“Are you going to hold his arms?” the kid asked, nervous, looking at me.
“I‘m busy pointing a gun at the dangerous one, okay? That one should be easy.” I guess it was kind of an insult at me, but I’d lost all interest by that point in anything anybody was saying.
Because I could see, all at once, what Renn was up to.
Behind Beardman and G stood the pile of stone-twelve or thirteen feet high, held in place by a web of steel cable. While they were talking, the threads of the cable were unraveling themselves. I could hear Renn humming next to me, his body radiating a tone so powerful, I couldn’t believe the Glock boys didn’t hear it. The steel threads were separating faster and faster, until all at once, as G grabbed the second plastic tie off the ground, the netting right behind him groaned and split fifty little fissures and then tore open in five or six places, sending twelve or thirteen feet of stone rushing suddenly down the incline at him-at all of us.
Because I saw it coming, I gained a few precious steps head start and that’s what saved us. At my first step, I felt Max slump, helpless, behind me-his eyes were open but he was lost in some kind of trance, pumping out his bass note. I grabbed him under the arms and dragged him up the slope in front of us. G was hit by the first couple stones that flew out of the pile-they knocked him down and he was buried in seconds. Beardman yelled after me, pointing his gun at my head but he was two seconds worth of indecisive pulling the trigger and that was one second more than he had. He was hit several times around the legs and feet and then a huge shard hit him full on the side of the head and he went down under the deluge. By the time we reached the rim, the entire trench was a dust-billowing pile of rock. I can’t account in any way for how we got out. I heard Max’s voice in my head saying Head for the house on the left and I dragged him in that direction.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Not this one-to the left,” he muttered. “I’ll be okay.” He was starting to use his own legs, still wobbly but beginning to support himself a bit while I steered.
I heard shouting down the hill-some of the stone had improvised its way down the roadbed to where it apparently met some of our other pursuers. As I headed for the house on the left, more blue jumpsuits appeared between the other houses on the block, staring down on the avalanche and calling into their earpieces for instructions. How the hell many people were after us?
We scrambled through the back yard, past a shed, several thick trees, lounge chairs and a portable bar. “Around the house,” Max ordered and I obeyed. He was limping and stumbling but at least he was talking normally now-I was ticking off milestones. I needed him full-strength-surely, we had a big fight just ahead. I could see a street just beyond the house but if they had that many guys, how far could we get before they caught us? If this was a movie, we’d hotwire a car but I had no clue how to do that and Max wasn’t in shape to do much of anything. Shouts from down below were being answered by others close by-they’d be on us in a minute. What if he needed a doctor?
“You’ll drive,” he told me. “Not fast, normal speed, don’t attract attention.”
“Drive what?” I asked. Shit, now he’s delirious. His car was sitting across the woods, in front of Miriam Fine’s house, unless it was magical and could find us on its own.
As we reached the front of the house, I felt him lean into my shoulder, pushing me toward the driveway. Where a retirement-aged man stood favoring his paunch, holding open the door of a very pretty Audi coupe. “You drive,” Max repeated and detached himself from me. He stumbled to the passenger door and collapsed onto the seat. The car’s owner handed me the keys and said apologetically “It’s just half a tank.” I took the keys and stood staring at him.
“Say ‘thank you,’” Renn muttered, pulling on his seat belt.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
“Now get in the car, dammit!”
I dropped into the driver’s seat. It was really beautiful, chrome and carbon-fiber and all that stuff they talk about in the car magazines. As I closed my door, a middle-aged woman came out of the house, locking up behind her. She had an overnight bag in hand.
“Time to go, Herb,” she called and they climbed into a Winnebago parked outside the garage.
“Don’t stare-move!” Renn gasped, smacking me on the shoulder. “That way!” He pointed to a sidestreet a few yards away. I pulled out of the driveway. As we made the turn, I saw the Winnebago head off in the opposite direction.
Max laid way back in his seat now and talked me down the long hill, panting little breaths as though he’d just carried someone up a hillside and around a house. We went nowhere and took the most complicated route to get there-right here, left there, his eyes closed the same as when we’d found Tauber and Miriam Fine’s house. This time, he was finding a way for us to get lost and stay that way. We kept turning and doubling back on ourselves as we moved progressively through the vast development. More than once I saw a black SUV turning onto a street we’d just turned off of or going down a one-way street we’d just passed.
This cat-and-mouse took more than fifteen minutes but at the end, we were all the way to the other end of the project, having never gotten near a main street. When we finally did turn onto one, we were a hundred yards from the highway entrance.
“There!” he pointed but I didn’t need prompting. We were on the ramp before I could ask a single question, before he could fail to answer even one.
“Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania,” I said after we’d driven about an hour.
He’d been sitting up properly for a while, his color-never very far from pale-returning. “Ruben who?”
“Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania. That’s the next nearest. You would have asked eventually.”
He sat taking me in for a moment. “You’re taking ownership of it,” he said, nodding. “That’s good. And the words are coming back, aren’t they?”
It was what I’d been thinking. I certainly wasn’t what I’d been-the kid who thought he was going to be Peter Jennings was long gone-but more than words were coming back. I was seeing the story-I was beginning to pull the threads together, to see a bigger picture. It was more than a little creepy, knowing he was inside my head, but at least I believed it now-that uncertainty was gone. Whatever satisfaction I got from that knowledge lasted half a second.
“How the hell many guys are after us?!!” I yelled suddenly.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? There were at least six, seven guys following us out of her house, the two with the serious guns-you sure attract a whole lot of serious guns-by the rockpile and two or three more on the ridge where the houses were. How many fucking guys are after you? How did they get there so fast? Who are these people?”
“Good questions. Those are all good questions,” he acknowledged with a nod.
“Fuck you! Good questions! You’re the mindbender extraordinaire — why am I asking the good fucking questions?”
He smiled. He seemed to actually find this amusing, which did nothing for me except get me driving 90 instead of 85 miles an hour. Now that we were out of the situation, the fear and anger were all over me. It was amazing my shaking hands could drive straight.
“I don’t have answers-not yet,” he said. “They’re not powerful minds, but the first thing they’ve been taught is a good blocking scheme. And my stamina isn’t what it used to be. Throwing several hundred tons of rock down a hill doesn’t suit me anymore.” His eyes were miles away again, that look I’d seen a couple of other times on his face.
Was that not a phrase with him? Was he actually looking miles away? He started rifling through the glovebox. “We’ll need money, a map and to fill the car up,” he said. “Then we’ll figure out the next step.”
“Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania,” I repeated.
“I’m not sure that’s it. What if Dave made the same mistake we did- I did-assuming the network was under attack? Clearly, at least one part of it-Miriam Fine-is on the other side. I’m not sure what that means. And by the way,” he stared at me, “it’s not how many fucking guys are after me. You’re the one with the list in your head.”
That stopped conversation for a while. The signs promised a rest stop thirty miles ahead.
“Throwing chunks of a hillside around-that’s mindreading?” I asked.
“No, that’s my hobby,” he laughed. “Electrons are electrons. Matter is bound together by vibration, by harmonic sympathy. So if you can manipulate the vibration, you can manipulate-rearrange-just about anything at the subatomic level. Now, it’s one thing to know about it-it’s another to do it. I’ve been playing with this for thirty years and all I’ve got are a couple of childish tricks. Nonetheless, they’re good for wreaking havoc.” He sighed-I probably looked like a fish, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “It’s exhausting too. If the rest stop has a decent cheeseburger, I want one.”
We filled up the Audi and parked it behind a couple of tractor-trailers, out of sight of the highway. On the way to the food court, we bought a map and all the newspapers they had.
“How come they can’t read our thoughts to follow us?” I asked as we sat down.
“I’m blocking us.”
“You could read the bearded guy-wasn’t he a mindbender?”
“Ha! That guy was useless. I broke right through.”
“So you can read anybody?”
“No. I couldn’t read Dave if he wanted to stop me. But these? Whoever hired these guys, they like people with minimal ability.” The waitress brought our food. I had a Caesar Salad; he dug into a cheeseburger with fries.
“That’s not good for you, you know,” I told him. “Bad for your cholesterol.”
“Cholesterol is a myth,” he answered like he’d checked it out on the subatomic level, stuffing a few extra fries in around the corners of his mouth. “After a morning of rock-arrangement, we real men want beef.”
I was wondering if his real name was Max Renn-or was the Max as phony as the Dulles? He could read minds and plant thoughts in your mind and play around with the vibrations that held the world together. The scary part was, I’d seen enough to actually have to take the idea seriously. Knowing he wasn’t making up such ridiculous stuff didn’t prove any more comforting than the alternative. Thinking about him seemed to lead inevitably to double negatives.
“What about those people? You made them give us their car? And go on vacation? Just like that?” Renn nodded, smiling his chilly smile. If he could read my mind, he knew what was coming, but he was waiting, humoring me, as I edged into my subject.
“They got away,” he answered. “So they won’t be able to give information about their car for at least a couple of days. And now, since they haven’t found us, the bad guys will have to track them, just in case we were hiding in the Winnebago.” He stared at the parking lot with a look I didn’t like. “We’ll have to ditch the car.”
“It’s a nice car,” I started. Way nicer than his, though I didn’t say so. Air conditioning, for one thing.
“Don’t get attached,” he warned. “Everything is temporary.”
I got back to my subject. “If you could make those people do what they did-are you making me go with you?”
He smiled the best he knew how, which wasn’t much. “No,” he answered and his eyes softened. “You’re here on your own. For which I’m grateful, by the way.”
“But you have a reason-for not forcing me,” I said. Like the names of the agents and the location of the box under the furnace in Dave’s store, it was just something I suddenly knew.
“Yes,” he smiled and now his eyes were burning. “That’s very good. Yes, there’s a reason why. Dave was a subtle man, unlike either of us. He left you a suggestion to tell me your password. And he left me a suggestion-I thought I wasn’t suggestible-to recognize it when you did. But I had no idea, when I first asked, what information was inside you. It might have been a person or a place or a concept or a plan or…who knows what? So the question that I ask you- what is the next nearest? — that didn’t come from Dave. It’s intentionally ambiguous because I really didn’t know what I was asking. So far, it’s gotten us some information and allowed us to meet this really interesting class of people,” he laughed. “But a better question might have got us a whole lot farther faster. So I’m hoping you’ll get stronger and take control of what he left you, of the information inside you. So, I can’t force you-to take this trip, or much else. I don’t want to get in the way of the work you’re doing…inside your own head.”
I must have shown a pretty strong reaction because he laughed again. “C’mon Gregor,” he said. “You were thinking it earlier. The words are coming back. That’s the start. You’re beginning to communicate with yourself.” He took another bite of his cheeseburger. “The sooner, the better.” Then he stopped chewing and his eyebrows shot up. “What is it?”
He’d made me nervous so I’d started shuffling the paper-when I get nervous and there’s no TV to stare at, I move things around, and all I had to play with at the moment was the newspaper. On the front page of the national section was an article about yesterday’s helicopter crash. The picture alongside it was taken at a press conference in front of L Corp Headquarters.
I was staring at the picture-I couldn’t help it, though I didn’t know why at first. And then I recognized what had grabbed me-the logo, the logo on the front of the building. I was staring at it in the newspaper but in my head, I was seeing the logo on a different background-greenish stiff paper, a rectangular strip of paper with computer cutouts stamped into the bottom edge-the green stiff paper of Miriam Fine’s paystub, on her perfect neat desk, where I’d seen it just an hour earlier.
And then my head went hot again and Renn leaned back in his seat and exhaled hard. “She works for L Corp,” he whistled. “Does that mean they all work for L Corp? The whole blue-nylon brigade?” He stared out the window now, a long way out the window, considering, gathering himself.
“Okay,” he said finally, “we’ve got to disappear for a while. Until we can figure out the next couple of steps.”
He pulled out the map and studied it for a few minutes. “C’mon,” he said and we headed out toward the parking lot.
Right outside the door, a dumpy-looking guy in a hardhat got out of his Cherokee and walked away, leaving the thing idling behind him.
“What happens when he remembers?” I asked as we pulled onto the highway.
“He won’t,” Max answered. “He’ll remember going into the men’s room and coming out to find the car gone.” He put his foot down and we pulled away from traffic, heading North. “I need what I need,” he said, “but I’m not sloppy with people. He’ll be okay. Now let’s take care of money.”
“They have ATM’s at the rest stop.”
He shook his head. “We need a bank. They can track your location from an ATM withdrawal.”
“Taking it out of a bank is different?”
“It is if you take it from someone else’s account.”
A few blocks later, we walked into an old-fashioned bank, with marble floors, dark wood booths and cathedral-type windows, a bank being just a church for money anyway. Teller windows filled the back wall but all but two of them were empty.
Max went immediately to the far side of the lobby, where the senior offices stood behind etched-glass doors. The first opened as we approached, and a slim, balding, depressed-looking man appeared, carefully neatening the creases around the shoulders of his blue suit and wearing a face that said he was expecting someone.
“Mr. Guernsey-” Max began while Guernsey’s expression wavering somewhere between polite tolerance and Do I know you? Max laid his hand on the man’s shoulder and Guernsey immediately stood four inches taller and smiled like Max was the long-lost cousin who hit Lotto.
“Can we talk privately?”
Guernsey ushered us into his office, bubbling over with good to see you and all that fizz.
The office dated to when a bank officer was a big man, having built half the town or at least paid for the building. A mahogany desk hovered on shiny brass feet in front of a brand-new untouched-by-man puffy black leather couch, four guest chairs, three large file cabinets and a safe. No cubicles for Mr. Guernsey, nossir-he was landed gentry. He settled behind the desk and affected a look that suggested he was actually interested.
“So how can I help you gentlemen?”
“Your trust in Ms. Rand is misplaced,” Max told him brusquely.
“Ms. Rand is in the back at the moment,” Guernsey replied and it was obvious that he wasn’t interested in hearing what Max had said. “I asked if I could help you?”
Max leaned forward in his chair; Guernsey did the same in response.
“Ms. Rand has been holding back several commercial deposits half a day and investing the money on her own behalf,” Max announced in a stage whisper. “She’s chosen to loot accounts with heavy activity, where it’ll take time for anyone to notice. She’s also been skimming currency transactions in several — ”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Guernsey demanded, standing up like someone had goosed him.
“Here are the accounts she’s set up for herself and her balances in each,” Max said, pulling a piece of scratch paper from Guernsey’s desk blotter, scribbling some numbers and handing it back to him. “She’s been at it for eight months. If you check, you’ll see she’s into you for almost a quarter-million.”
“This is absurd,” Guernsey flushed. “I trust Ms. Rand with-”
“Your job?” Max asked and that shut the fat goose up for a moment. He threw Guernsey his heat-your-skull look and all the sharpness in Guernsey’s expression disappeared. “Check the accounts.”
“Check the accounts,” Guernsey mumbled a half-second behind. We waited while he tapped away at his computer, his eyes widening and collar getting tighter by the minute.
“This started when you two got back from Atlanta,” Max said quietly while Guernsey seemed to be calculating the odds of killing himself jumping off a three-story building. “You’ll have to explain that weekend trip to your superiors, but it’ll play a whole lot better if you catch her before the auditors do.”
“Before the auditors…” Guernsey mumbled on a one-second lag. He’d turned the color of the diploma on the wall. “George-get me a bank check for ‘Cash’, would you? No, no, discretionary expenses-just bring it for my signature.”
About halfway through, I realized I heard another voice echoing behind Guernsey’s; I looked over and Max was mouthing the words, again a half-second ahead of him. I would have sworn no sound was coming out of his mouth, it was just in the air somehow.
George came through in a minute, very green and obsequious, bearing the check. Guernsey filled in the figure and signed it. “Cash this for Mr. Granville here, will you?” Guernsey ordered.
George just stood there, staring. I got the feeling maybe this was a little irregular.
“ID?” George squeezed through tightly pursed lips.
“Obviously, he’s provided me with adequate ID. Get going!” Guernsey said heavily and George rushed off, returned with the money neatly folded into two envelopes and disappeared just as fast.
Guernsey sat staring at his desk blotter, the morose look deepening on his face. “I trusted her,” he said helplessly, to no one in particular.
“Remember that when you confront her,” Max answered. “Our fee is half the interest on her bogus investments-not unreasonable.”
Guernsey mumbled ‘not unreasonable’ behind him but he was slurring now.
“If you only tell them about her first two accounts, the money you recover should cover our finder’s fee,” Max said, touching Guernsey on the forehead again. “This way, we’ll stay anonymous.”
“Mr. Anonymous,” Guernsey mumbled, “and his brother, Mr. and Mr. Anonymous.” He checked to see if we were smiling at his little joke.
It was all I could do to keep from running to the car. Once we got inside, I collapsed in the passenger’s seat, puffing like a tugboat. He started talking to me about the route, and I thought, he’s trying to keep my mind off — off what? Off something. Of course, once that occurs to you, the next thought is to try to figure out what.
“We’ll want to turn West just past Richmond-once we get closer, keep your eye out for signs.”
My mind was working as fast as it was able, not that that’s saying much.
“So now we’re bank robbers?”
“We prevented major embezzlement by a bank officer.”
“And extorted money for it.”
“We got a finder’s fee-a modest one, under the circumstances.”
“Which you forced him to pay.”
“He would have lost his job and found out about the woman at the same time, and probably after she’d pulled him a whole lot deeper into it than he is now. I did him a favor.”
Which might really have been true, but it didn’t make look any less sneaky. Those old feelings were creeping back around the edges. I liked it better when I thought he was nuts.
“Why didn’t they trust you?” I asked. “Fine said you were the greatest of them all but she wanted you captured. And Tauber stayed with her. When she called you…?”
“Renn,” he smiled again. “I’ve had lots of names over the years. It’s just a label.”
“When she called you that, Mark acted like you were…I don’t know what.”
“Spies are not notoriously trusting people.”
“They trust each other-”
“They know each other a long time, since Stargate.”
“Stargate?”
“That was the last name for the program-Fine joined up near the end. There were other names before that-Center Lane, Grill Flame. But Stargate was the last.”
“Dave was part of it?”
“He was a high-ranking officer. But he quit-he caused a bit of a stir.”
“Why?”
“After Stargate, the program was getting serious-it was moving past research, the tactics were going to become more…direct, let’s say. Dave didn’t agree with it and he said so. He realized how destructive psychotronic war could be. And,” he frowned, “he knew the price we pay who practice it.”
He went quiet but he still hadn’t answered my question. At least, he hadn’t answered the one I hadn’t asked yet.
“But you were in the program, until you got kicked out,” I continued. “Is that why they didn’t trust you? Because you got kicked out?”
He didn’t reply for a while. He was driving fast, passing cars left and right and we both saw the sign for Richmond Beltway. We merged into the westbound lanes and he took a quick look at the map as the dark clouds followed us, squeezing the sun from the sky.
“That,” he said finally, “that was a lie.”
“What was? You weren’t in the program? Or you didn’t get kicked out?”
“Neither.”
“But you’re the mindbender extraordinaire. She said so.” He nodded. I was baffled. “You said Stargate was the mindbender program.”
“It was the American mindbender program,” he said, without taking his eyes off the road. “I never said I worked for America.”