Extraordinary Powers (14 page)

“You know, I’ve always got some Advil here,” she said, pulling open a desk drawer that revealed her stash of medications. “Take a couple. I get migraines, too, every month, and they’re like the worst.”

“The worst,” I agreed, accepting some of the pills.

“Oh, and Alien Hyde from Textronics wants to talk to you as soon as possible.” Mr. Hyde was the beleaguered inventor of Big Baby Dolls who was on the verge of making a settlement offer.

I said, “Thanks,” and scanned the messages. Darlene had turned to her IBM Selectric yes, we still use typewriters at Putnam & Steams; in certain instances the law requires typewriters, not laser printers and returned to her frenetic typing.

I could not stop myself from moving close to her desk, then leaning forward and trying.

And it came, with that same damned clarity. Looks like he’s losing it, I heard in Darlene’s voice, and then silence.

“I’m okay,” I said quietly.

Darlene spun around, her eyes wide. “Huh?”

“Don’t worry about me. I had a tough meeting this morning.”

She gave me a long, frantic look, then composed herself. “Who’s worried?” she said, turning back to the typewriter, and I heard, as if in the same conversational tone, Did I say anything! “Want me to get Truslow on the line?” “Not yet,” I said. “I’ve got forty-five minutes before Kornstein, which goes right into Lewin, and I need to get some fresh air or my head’s going to explode.” What I really wanted was to sit in a dark room with the blankets over my head, but I figured that a walk, painful as it might be, would do as much to alleviate the headache.

As I turned back to my office to get my overcoat, Darlene’s phone trilled.

“Mr. Ellison’s office,” she said. Then: “One moment, please, Mr. Truslow,” and she punched the hold button. “Are you here?”

“I’ll take it.” “Ben,” Truslow said when I picked it up in my office. “I thought you’d be returning to chat.” “Sorry,” I said. “The test ran on longer than I anticipated. I’ve got a crazy day here. If you don’t mind, let’s reschedule.”

A long pause.

“Fine,” he said. “What did you make of this Rossi? He seems a bit thuggish to me, but maybe I worry too much.”

“Didn’t have much of a chance to size him up.”

“In any case, Ben, I understand you passed the lie detector with flying colors.”

“I trust you’re not surprised.”

“Of course not. But we need to talk. I need to brief you fully. The thing is, a little wrinkle has turned up.”

There was a smile in his voice, and I knew.

“The President has asked me to go to Camp David,” he said.

“Congratulations.”

“Congratulations are premature. He wants to talk things over with me, his chief-of-staff says.”

“Sounds like you got it.” “Well … ” Truslow said. He seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then he said, “I’ll be in touch very soon,” and he hung up the phone.

I walked up Milk Street to Washington Street, the pedestrian mall sometimes called Downtown Crossing. There, along Summer Street, the gulf between the two great, rival downtown department stores, Filene’s and Jordan Marsh, I wandered aimlessly among pushcart vendors selling popcorn and pretzels, Bedouin scarves, Boston tourist Tshirts, and rough-knit South American sweaters. The headache seemed to be subsiding.

The street was, as usual, teeming with shoppers, street musicians, office workers. Now, though, the air was filled with sounds, a bedlam of shouts and mutterings, sighs and exclamations, whispers and screams.

Thoughts.

On Devonshire Street I entered an electronics shop, blankly examined a display of twenty-inch color television sets, fended off the salesman.

Several of the sets were tuned to soap operas, one to CNN, one to a Nickelodeon rerun of a black and white

TV show from the fifties that may have been The Donna Reed Show. On CNN the blond anchorwoman was saying something about a United States senator who had died. I recognized the face flashed on the screen: Senator Mark Sutton of Colorado, who had been found shot to death at his home in Washington. The police in Washington believed the slaying was probably not politically motivated, but instead committed during an armed robbery.

The salesman approached again, saying, “All the Mitsubishis are on sale this week, you know.” I smiled pleasantly, said no thanks, and went out to the street. My head throbbed. I found myself standing close to passersby at stoplights and crossings, listening. One attractive young woman with short blond hair, in a pale pink suit and running shoes, stood next to me while the Don’t Walk sign flashed at Tremont Street. In normal circumstances we all keep a certain social distance from strangers; she was standing a few feet away, immersed in her own thoughts. I bent my head toward her in an attempt to share some of those thoughts, but she scowled at me as if I were a pervert, and moved quite a distance away.

People were bustling past too quickly for my feeble, novice efforts. I would stand, craning my neck this way and that as unobtrusively as I could, but nothing.

Had the talent disappeared? Had I simply imagined the whole thing?

Nothing.

Had the power merely faded?

Back on Washington Street, I spotted a newsstand, where a clot of people were buying their Globes and Wall Street Journals and New York Times, and when the Walk sign flashed, I crossed over to it. A young guy was looking at the front page of the Boston Herald—mob hit man nabbed it said, with a picture of some minor Mafia figure who’d been arrrested in Providence. I moved in close, as if contemplating the pile of Heralds in front of him. Nothing. A woman, thirtyish and lawyerly, was scanning the piles of papers, looking for something. I moved in as close as I could without alarming her. Nothing there either.

Was it gone?

Or, I wondered, was it that none of these people was upset enough, angry enough, scared enough, to be emitting brain waves—is that how it worked?—of a frequency I could detect?

Finally, I saw a man in his early forties, dressed in the natty apparel of an investment banker, standing near the piles of Women’s Wear Daily, blankly staring at the rows of glossy magazines. Something in his eyes told me he was deeply upset about something.

I moved in closer, pretending to be inspecting the cover of the latest issue of The Atlantic, and tried.

—to fire her she’s going to bring up that whole fucking business about the affair God knows how she’ll react she’s a fucking loose cannon would she call Gloria and tell her ah Jesus what am I going to do I don’t have any choice so god damned stupid to fuck your secretaryi stole a furtive glance at the banker, and his dour face had not moved.

By this time I had formulated a number of what I guess you could call understandings, or perhaps theories, about what had happened, and what I should do.

One: The powerful magnetic resonance imager had affected my brain in such a way that I was now able to “hear” the thoughts of others. Not all people; perhaps not most, but at least some.

Two: I was able to “hear” not all thoughts but only those that were “expressed” with a fair degree of emphasis. In other words, I only “heard” things that were thought with great vehemence, fear, anger.

Also, I could “hear” things only at close physical proximity—two or three feet away from a person, maximum.

Three: Charles Rossi and his lab assistant were not only not surprised at this manifestation, but were actually expecting it. That meant they had been using the MRI for this express purpose, even before I came on the scene.

Four: The uncertainty they felt indicated that either it had not worked in the proper way before, or it had rarely done so.

Five: Rossi did not know for certain that this experiment had succeeded on me. Therefore, I was safe only as long as I did not let on that I had this ability.

Six: Therefore, it was only a matter of time before they caught up with me, for whatever purposes they intended.

Seven: In all probability, my life would never be the same. I was no longer safe.

I glanced at my watch, realized I had strolled far too long, and turned back toward the office.

Ten minutes later I was back at the offices of Putnam & Steams, with a few minutes to spare before my next appointment. For some reason I suddenly found myself recalling the face of the senator I had seen on the CNN newscast. Senator Mark Sutton (D.-Col), shot to death. I remembered now: Senator Sutton was the chairman of the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence. And—was it fifteen years ago?—he had been Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, before he’d been appointed to fill a Senate vacancy, and then was elected in his own right two years later.

And … And he was one of Hal Sinclair’s oldest friends. His roommate at Princeton. They had joined the CIA together.

That made three CIA types now dead. Hal Sinclair and two trusted confidants.

Coincidences, I believe, occur everywhere except in the intelligence business.

I buzzed Darlene and asked her to send in my four o’clock.

FOURTEEN.

Mel Kornstein entered, in an Armani suit that looked un tailored and did little to conceal his girth. His silver tie was stained with a bright yellow half-moon of what appeared to be egg.

“Where’s the asshole?” he asked, giving me a soft, damp handshake and looking around my office.

“Frank O’Leary will be here in about fifteen minutes. I wanted to give us a little time to go over some things.”

Frank O’Leary was the “inventor” of Space Time the computer game that is an exact rip-off of Mel Kornstein’s amazing Spacetron. He and his attorney, Bruce Kantor, had agreed to a conference to initiate the exploratory stages of some sort of agreement. Ordinarily that would mean they realized they’d better settle, that they’d lose big if it ever went to trial. A lawsuit, as lawyers like to say, is a machine you enter as a pig and come out a sausage. Then again, they could be showing up simply as a courtesy, but lawyers aren’t much into courtesy.

It was also entirely possible that the two just wanted to display their gladiatorial confidence, try to rattle us a bit.

I was not at my best that afternoon. In fact—though my headache had by this time mostly disappeared—I could barely think straight, and Mel Kornstein picked up on this. “You with me here, Counselor?” he asked querulously at one point when I lost the thread of argument.

“I’m with you, Mel,” I said, and tried to concentrate. I’d found that if I didn’t want to pick up a person’s thoughts, I generally didn’t.

What I mean is mat I discovered, sitting there with Kornstein, that I wasn’t bombarded with thoughts on top of conversation, which might have been unbearable. I could listen to him normally, but if I wanted to “read” him, I could do so simply by focusing in a way, homing in.

Obviously I can’t describe this adequately, but it’s like the way a mother can single out the voice of her child playing on the beach from the voices of dozens of other children. It’s a bit like listening to the jumble of voices on a party line, some of them more audible than others.

Or maybe it’s more like the way, when you’re speaking on a cordless phone, you can hear the ghosts of other people’s conversations overlapping your own. If you listen with some effort, you can hear everything clearly.

So I found myself listening to Kornstein’s voice, rising in aggrievement and falling in despair, and realizing that I could hear only his spoken voice if I so desired.

Fortunately, I regained some footing by the time O’Leary and Kantor showed up, effusing cordiality. O’Leary—tall, red haired, bespectacled, thirtyish—and Kantor—small, compact, balding, late forties—made themselves right at home in my office and sank into their chairs as if we were all old chums.

“Ben,” Kantor said by way of greeting.

“Good to see you, Brace.” Good old casual chummy banter.

Only the attorneys are supposed to talk at these conferences. The clients, if they appear at all, are there only for their attorney’s ready reference; they’re supposed to keep ‘. But Mel Kornstein sat there, fuming, refusing to shake hands with anyone, and couldn’t restrain himself from blurting out, “Six months from now you’re going to be washing dishes at Mcdonald’s, O’Leary. Hope you like the smell of french-fry grease.” O’Leary smiled calmly and gave Kantor a look that said, Will you handle this lunatic? Kantor bounced the look over to me, and I said, “Mel, let Bruce and me handle this right now.”

Mel folded his arms and smoldered.

The real point of this meeting was to determine one simple thing: had Frank O’Leary seen a prototype of Spacetron while he was “developing”

Space Time The similarity of the games wasn’t even in question. But if we could prove beyond any doubt that O’Leary had seen Spacetron at any point before it went on the market, we won. It was as simple as that.

O’Leary maintained, naturally, that the first time he saw Spacetron was in a software store. Kornstein was convinced that O’Leary had somehow gotten an early prototype of the game from one of his software engineers, but of course he couldn’t prove his suspicion. And here I was, trying to fence with Brace Kantor, Esq.” the feisty little bantam.

After half an hour Kantor was still making noises about restraint of trade and unfair practices. I was finding it hard to concentrate on his line of argument, in that half-dazed state I’d been in since the morning, but I knew enough to realize he was just blustering. Neither he nor his client was going to give an inch.

I asked, for the third time, “Can you say for absolutely certain that neither your client nor any of his employees had any access to any of the research or development work that was going on at Mr. Kornstein’s firm?”

Frank O’Leary continued to sit impassively with folded arms, looking bored, and let his attorney do the heavy lifting. Kantor leaned forward, gave his saucy little smile, and said, “I think you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, Ben. If you’ve got nothing else—”

And then I heard, in that gauzy, soft-focus tone that I’d begun to recognize, Frank O’Leary’s voice mutter something. I could barely make it out, but I tilted my head forward, pretending to be consulting my legal pad, and concentrated to separate it from Kantor’s chatter.