False Memory (67 page)

My gun, seven shots. My little Keanuphobe. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.

Equally ghastly but more satisfying.

The security guard, twice Skeet’s size and wearing clothes that fit him, sat behind the counter at the information station. He was reading a book, and he never glanced up.

Skeet checked the directory to locate Ahriman’s office, went to the elevators, pressed the call button, and stared straight ahead at the doors. He figured that the guard, a highly trained professional, would immediately sense anyone staring worriedly at him.

One of the elevators arrived swiftly. Three birdlike elderly women and three tall handsome Sikhs in turbans exited the cab; the two groups headed in different directions.

Already stressed out and fearful, Skeet was rattled by the sight of the old ladies and the Sikhs. As he had learned from Fig during the previous thirty-six hours, the numbers three and six were somehow key to understanding why extraterrestrials were secretly on Earth, and here was three twice and six once. Not a good omen.

Two people followed Skeet onto the elevator. A United Parcel Service deliveryman wheeled in a hand truck on which were stacked three boxes. Behind him came the woman in the pink suit.

Skeet had pushed the button for the fourteenth floor. The UPS man tapped the button for the ninth floor. The lady in pink didn’t press anything.

Entering the building, Dusty at once spotted Skeet getting into an elevator at the farther end of the lobby. Martie saw him, too.

He wanted to shout at his brother, but a guard sat nearby, and the last thing they needed was to attract the attention of building security.

They hurried without running. The cab doors slid shut before they were halfway across the lobby.

None of the other three elevators was at the ground floor. Two were ascending, two descending. Of the two headed down, the nearest was at the fifth floor.

“Stairs?” Martie asked.

“Fourteen floors. No.” He pointed to the indicator board, as the elevator on the fifth floor moved down to the fourth. “This’ll be faster.”

The deliveryman got off at the ninth floor, and when the doors slid shut, the lady in pink pushed the
stop
button.

“You’re not dead,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“You were shot four times in the chest last night on the beach, but here you are.”

Skeet was amazed. “You were there?”

“As I’m sure you know.”

“No, really, I didn’t see you there.”

“Why aren’t you dead?”

“Kevlar.”

“Not likely.”

“It’s true. We were tailing a dangerous man,” he said, figuring he sounded totally lame, like he was trying to impress her, which in fact he was. She was a pretty lady, and Skeet felt a certain stirring in his loins that he had not felt in a long time.

“Or was the whole thing fake? A setup for my benefit?”

“No setup. My chest and belly are sore as hell.”

“When you die in the matrix,” she said, “you die for real.”

“Hey, did you like that movie, too?”

“You die for real…unless you’re a machine.”

She was beginning to seem a little spooky to Skeet, and his intuition was confirmed when she drew a pistol from the white handbag that hung on straps from her left shoulder. It was fitted with what in the movies they called a silencer, but which he knew was more accurately called a sound suppressor.

“What’re you carrying under your sweater?” she demanded.

“Me? This sweater? Nothing.”

“Bullshit. Lift your sweater
very
slowly.”

“Oh, man,” he said with grave disappointment, because here he was screwing up again. “You’re professional security, aren’t you?”

“Are you with Keanu or against him?”

Skeet was certain that he hadn’t taken any drugs in the past three days, but this sure had the feel of episodes that had followed some of his more memorable chemical cocktails. “Well, I’m with him when he’s doing cool sci-fi stuff, you know, but I’m against him when he’s making crap like
A Walk in the Clouds.”

“Why are they stopped so long on the ninth floor?” Dusty asked, frowning at the indicator board above the elevator that Skeet had boarded.

“Stairs?” Martie suggested again.

After lingering at the third floor, the elevator for which they were waiting suddenly moved to the second. “We might get past him this way.”

The machine pistol that she took from Skeet would not fit easily in her handbag. The butt of the extended magazine stuck out, but she didn’t seem to care.

Still covering him with her own pistol, she took the elevator off
stop
and pressed the button for the fourteenth floor. The cab started up at once.

“Aren’t sound suppressors illegal?” Skeet asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“But you can get one because you’re professional security?”

“Good God, no. I’m worth five hundred million dollars, and I can get anything I want.”

He couldn’t know if what she said was true or not. He didn’t suppose it mattered.

Although the woman was quite pretty, Skeet began to recognize something in her green eyes or in her attitude, or both, that scared him. They were passing the thirteenth floor, appropriately, when he realized why she put ice in his spine: She possessed an indefinable but undeniable quality that reminded him of his mother.

At that moment, as they arrived at the fourteenth floor, Skeet knew that he was a dead man walking.

When the elevator doors slid open, Martie immediately stepped inside and pressed
14.

Dusty followed, blocked two other men who tried to enter after them, and said, “Sorry, emergency. We’re expressing to fourteen.”

Martie had pressed
close door
immediately after pressing the floor number. She held her thumb on it.

One of the men blinked in surprise, and one of them started to object, but the doors closed before an argument could begin.

As they came out of the elevator alcove into the fourteenth-floor corridor, Skeet said, “Where are we going?”

“Don’t be so stupidly disingenuous. It’s annoying. You know perfectly well where we’re going. Now move.”

She seemed to want him to go to the left, so he did, not just because she had a gun, but because all his life he had gone where people told him to go. She followed him, jamming the muzzle of the sound suppressor into his back.

The long, carpeted corridor was quiet. The acoustic ceiling soaked up their voices. No sounds came from beyond the hallway walls. They might have been the last two people on the planet.

“What if I stop right here?” Skeet asked.

“Then I shoot you right here,” she assured him.

Skeet kept moving.

As he passed the doors to office suites on both sides of the hall, he read the names on the etched-brass wall plates beside them. Mostly, they were doctors, specialists of one kind or another—though two were attorneys. This was convenient, he decided. If he somehow survived the next few minutes, he would no doubt need a few good doctors and one attorney.

They arrived at a door where the name on the brass plate was
DR. MARK AHRIMAN
. Under the psychiatrist’s name, in smaller letters, Skeet read,
A CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
.

“Here?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.