Mindbenders (29 page)

“What are our odds?” I asked and saw from Tauber’s scowl that this wasn’t a proper question.

“If they’re good, we won’t have time to go anywhere,” Max answered. “But Mark’s is a good plan if they’re incompetent.”

“Which is a 50/50 shot,” Tauber added. “That’s the worst of it. Otherwise, ya got neighbors at a distance, no breaks in the fence. Better’n most.”

“Okay,” Max said, “this is base of operations.”

There was a stock of really high-priced food in the fridge. Five minutes later, the place was stuffed with burbling pots and pans, every new discovery from  the pantry (anchovies, peppers for roasting, really expensive veal slices and Saturday’s fresh mozzarella) added to the mix, dishes being carried out to the closest dining room as fast as they were done.

“Do we have time for this?” Tauber asked, not that he seemed to care. For a skinny dude, nothing got past him without damage being done.

“Gotta eat,” I insisted and Kate nodded, pressing garlic into slices of veal and eggplant. I threw her contents over penne in garlic, oil and lemon juice. A speck of the mix dropped onto the counter in front of me and I tossed it at her. She tossed back and, three seconds later, the whole bunch of us were chucking around everything loose. Still alive, as well as hungry.

“It really stuck in my craw when I saw that bastard at the airport and figgered we were too late,” Tauber said across the forty-foot darkwood table in Dining Room #1. “And we coulda been.” The man was a coiled spring but he brought us down to earth pretty quick.

“That was a fake-out,” Max said, carrying in a chopped salad, chopped a little too thoroughly if you weren’t planning to eat with a spoon. “If that was it, they wouldn’t have been flying people in today. This was giving a false sense of security. They’ll let everyone relax before they move again.”

“But why send a bomber out to get caught?” Kate asked. “Won’t that just
tighten
security?”

“Damn straight,” Tauber said.

Full as a python in mid-cow, I dropped into the informal living room, the one with the TV. I’m comfortable anywhere with a working television. Two seconds later, I had Kate’s answer.

“
Here’s
why,” I said, loud enough to gather them all in. On the TV, pixeling away in front of me, stood Pietr Volkov and two other L Corp types I recognized from the airport. The police chief of Rome and the G8 security head were reading a joint statement, subtitled onscreen.

“Wanna guess whose people took out the bomber?” I asked.

“The people who programmed him to stand on a street corner like a sitting duck,” Max answered.

“You win.”

A man identified as an L Corp VP rambled on about “proprietary multi-point body-language analysis software that screens crowd scenes and identifies anti-social behavior before it actually occurs.”

“You’re saying,” came a reporter’s voice, “that you can predict crimes before they happen?”

“We’re saying we can identify individuals with bad intent,” the VP answered. “The software is still experimental and by no means foolproof. It requires a good deal of support and fine tuning. But—”

“Let me guess…” Max said drily.

“—we have agreed to a trial here, to provide additional security for this conference. Anyone who wants to crash this party will have us to reckon with.”

“…unless they’re already wearin’ an L Corp badge,” Tauber said. “Fan-tastic.”

“Why set up the bomber to fail? To get yourself
access
,” Max answered, smiling hideously. “It’s actually very clever in a perverted sort of way.”

“They’ll be with her every step,” Tauber said. “No need fer a sniper if ye’re a foot away.”

“Worse yet,” Max added, “they’ve set her up as a martyr. Someone’s tried to kill her. Everyone’s focus now will be her safety—so when she dies, hope will feel even more futile.”

“
If
,” Kate said. “
If
she dies.” Max nodded stiffly.

We ruined the last couple of dishes, overcooking perfectly good food because, all at once, nobody was paying attention. We’d kept away from the half-wrecked cellar, feeling funny about drinking in front of Tauber until he came back upstairs with some really expensive booze.

“It ain’t Prohibition,” he said. “I’ll see somebody drinking soon—might as well be y’all.”

We ended up sprawled across forty-year-old overstuffed couches on one of the balconies. Kate and I both dove for the same couch—we’d had a gang of wine and she ended up nuzzling up against me, having her usual effect on my anatomy. Things got real warm there, notwithstanding the breeze. We were all giggly and exhausted and dopey.

“Where did them ghosts come from?” Tauber drawled lazily. “Chariots and peacocks and Hercules with a golden hammer? What the hell was
that
?”

“Hercules didn’t have a golden hammer. That was Thor.”

“What’s Thor doing in Rome?”

“Not what I meant. I meant—”

“And where’d Jesus get a wand? What was
that
about?”

“It’s Kate’s power, how she’s developed her skills.” Max nodded to her. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” He seemed to be trying to make amends for the way he’d pushed her in Philadelphia. Which made sense, once you knew what she could do if you pissed her off.

“No, it’s okay,” she said, rousing herself. “We’re a team. You need to know what you can expect of me—which is that I don’t know what to expect of myself.

“My dolls had their own lives, that’s how it started. At first, I just talked to them the way little girls do. But eventually, they talked back, stole each other’s clothes and the horses from my brother’s cavalry set to ride around the house.”

“You have a brother?”

“He died ten years ago. He decided he could levitate off a tenth-story balcony. We don’t last long, the Crowell’s. As I got older, the dolls told me things  I couldn’t have known—”

“You did,” Max said flatly. “You knew things you weren’t supposed to know, maybe, so you projected them on the dolls.”

“They…knew my mother was dying,” Kate stammered, “before the doctors. When the doctors were still saying she’d be fine.

“In college, I…got lonely. I guess everyone creates their own world, but mine was more…elaborate than most. I replayed my bad dates, saying all the lines I wished I had, y’know? Except I started hearing answers from the boys I didn’t expect. What they really thought, what they really wanted.”

“Things you read in them,” Max said conclusively. “You just didn’t want to admit what you knew.” He kept trying to reel her in, to persuade her she’d maintained some kind of control but clearly Kate wasn’t buying.

“We went to Morocco once. We strolled through the marketplace, ate dates overlooking the ocean, I got sunburnt, we made love in a rocky cove. We never left Philadelphia. It was all in my head. Those memories are more real to me still than anything that really happened.”

“Everyone does that,” I tried to console her—you could see her getting more frantic as she went along. “We all get carried by imagination.”

She shook her head. “This wasn’t just me. My boyfriend insisted on showing everyone our pictures from the trip. We took cameras wherever we went. Of course, no pictures. We never left the apartment.”

“Wow,” Tauber said.

“So understand—I learned to do this by fooling myself. And that’s scary.”

“You need practice,” Max said, “enough practice to catch yourself before you go off the rails.”

“We don’t have time for practice,” she said, wandering to the edge of the balcony.

The sun was going down. Sunset in Rome—like any other time in Rome—is spiritual overload. The clouds billowed like they were being conducted. The warm light burnished church domes and swaying trees, the god’s head fountain across the street and the Fiat 500 that kept circling the block, buzzing like a bee on steroids. In this light, the whole world seemed precious and Kate, blocking the sun, hair aflame, seemed miraculous. The sadness in her eyes would have pierced a dead man’s heart. I wandered to the rail and had my hands on her shoulders before I realized I’d stood up.

“You don’t have to know everything,” I said. It wasn’t good but it was what came out.

“But I have to know
enough
, don’t I? This is
it
. Whatever we came to do, it’s soon. I want to do good. But this is opening things inside that scare me to death.”

She was in my arms and I was swooning a bit just from proximity. Balancing against that was the fact that she could read my mind; that threw a monkey wrench into every way I knew to be with women. There was no point offering false comfort—like Max, she would know it instantly for what it was.  I struggled to find something both true and encouraging to say and found I didn’t have much experience with that combination.

“What’s good about you,” I said finally, “is that you’re so twisted up trying to do what’s right. When the time comes, you’ll know the right answer.”

She flickered a smile—like she was trying to encourage
me
—settled against my arm and, as long as no one disturbed us, I wouldn’t have needed anything else for the rest of the day.

But those moments don’t last. Max seemed to have wandered away but Tauber was stalking the rooms like an alien energy force was chewing on him, singing some classic rock song in a terrible off-key voice. Probably Neil Young—off-key seemed to suit the song. We were all drowning in jet lag while he was getting wired.

“So?” he demanded on his next pass through. “How do we protect Singh if L Corps’ got access?”

“What’s
our
problem?” Kate asked lazily, lolling on the railing. “Why does everyone have access but us?” and it was like streamers going off in my skull.

I leapt to the bureau to check our video camera really held the images we’d taken in the bomber’s apartment, that I hadn’t imagined or erased them. Then I grabbed the phone, pulling the business card from the airport out of my pocket.

“Billy Symczck, please. Billy? Greg! Listen, my crew and I need credentials—yeah, for the G8. Same to you, buddy. I’ll
tell
you why. You have any friends in G8 security? Good—call and tell them their bomb is wired wrong. No chance of  it going off. See what they have to say and call me back.”

I slouched into a chair, crossing my legs over another ornate table.

“We gon’ get
access
!”

~~~~

“It’s called Tiber Island,” Kate said. Not that you could miss the place—a stone wall and concrete deck breaching the water like the prow of a ship, a collection of Renaissance buildings rising through thickets of palm and locust trees, awash in spotlights, the island curved into the elbow bend of the Tiber, Vatican domes in distant silhouette and two ancient bridges like a belt propping it up.

Getting there, though, was like trying to push a ham through a sieve. Soldiers clustered behind concrete roadblocks at every corner starting a half-mile away, in visible body armor, over-the-ear helmets and automatic weapons at the ready. Each stop required ID, a body check and interrogation (
Purpose of your visit? Press Credentials? So Late? We’re disorganized.
No one in Italy seems shocked by this answer).

“The bridge dates to 62 BC,” Kate narrated, reading the museum tour off her cell. “One story says the Romans killed a dictator,  threw his body in the river and the silt collected around it to create the island. It looked like a ship so they added the prow and stern.” She was chattering, nerves on edge—I could feel it as well as hear it. Or maybe it was my own nerves I was feeling.

The air had that stuffy, close feeling like when Max blocked us—I wondered if he was keeping tabs now. He’d run through several techniques with me as we prepared, step by step. When I said, ‘You think I can handle this?’ he answered, ‘Think how far you’ve come in a few days. You’re not the same man’ and I knew it was true.

So now I worked the system, like a new driver obsessively checking the mirrors before pulling out of the driveway.
Ruby. Emerald. Sapphire. Turquoise. Don’t look for anything in particular; don’t anticipate. Listen for words or rhythms of speaking in your head that aren’t your own. Just follow  those and see where they take you
.

It didn’t take long. I started feeling paranoid and defensive and realized it was coming in waves; it only took a beat after that to realize it wasn’t my own paranoia but theirs, whoever they were. I relaxed into the vibration and suddenly it was coming from everywhere. Lingering in doorways and street cafes, watchful eyes from cars on strategic corners, waiters and newspaper sellers, students and telephone lineworkers, everywhere we went, the vibrations and those tiny green-tipped lapel pins. If I wasn’t successfully blocking myself, we’d find out pretty quick.

Billy said he’d meet me at the bridge but two blocks early, a car pulled up alongside us and he jumped out the open door. “In!” he demanded, grabbing me and throwing me into the seat. He slammed the door in Kate’s face, crying, “One ride per customer.”

And then we were off, weaving through a maze of alleyways onto a wide avenue past the Coliseum and Circus Maximus.

“Your friends think they’re spies,” he said, rechecking the rear-view mirror. “Are they?”

In the vanity mirror I made out an Alfa Romeo following at a respectable distance but I didn’t know the driver. I never would’ve noticed on my own.

“Not mine,” I shook my head.

Billy shrugged, “No matter.” A sharp right bounced us across a sidewalk and into an archaeological site marked ‘No Admittance’ in three languages. We detoured past a 2200-year-old arch and between 40-foot-high marble slabs fallen from a temple, then sped the wrong way down a one-way street onto a service road under a viaduct and into a warehouse district. There was nobody in sight. “If they
are
spies,” Billy remarked, “they’re overpaid.”

He screeched to a stop in front of a shuttered plant, all graffiti’d walls and glass skylight roof panels. The whole district was shut tight, not a car or moving body in sight on a Sunday in the capitol of Roman Catholicism. Billy jumped out, punched a couple of keys on a touchpad and the front gate rattled upward. It closed automatically when he pulled inside.