The Messiah Choice (1985) (29 page)

They came for them on the fourth night, shortly after midnight. It was a low profile jet helicopter with security-type engine mufflers that really damped, although they did not eliminate, the telltale sound of the whirlybird. The pilot was good; he landed atop the platform without lights. He was also apparently part of the organization, for although Greg and Maria had re-donned their clothes, such as they were, he didn't bat an eyelash at the sight of Angelique.

Maria in particular had worried that the helicopter might not be in friendly hands, but Greg had no problems. He apparently knew the pilot and the timing was right on the dot.

The only problem they found was in getting Angelique comfortable. The seats were upholstered in fabric, and it stung her after a while. Greg finally figured out a solution by taking a fair number of papers from the cabin—some old newspapers, sheets from the pilot's clipboard, anything—

and lining the seat. It seemed to work, and then they were away as fast as possible, the pilot skimming the surface of the sea at or below the level of the oil rigs to avoid any hostile radar.

Greg took the seat next to the pilot, and as he flew they talked.

"Sorry it took so long, but it's been damned complicated, or so they tell me," the pilot told him.

"You all are hotter'n a firecracker in this part of the world. Then they had to figure out a meeting place everybody could get to that was far enough away from here that they'd find it hard to figure, and still met the little lady's special needs."

They were soon over the Venezuelan mainland but still flying, in just about pitch darkness, at close to treetop level.

"How are they going to get us out of here?" Greg asked him.

"Old private airstrip up ahead a few miles. It ain't much and it's mostly dirt. These days it's used for smuggling. Drugs, that kind of thing, you know. The local authorities can be persuaded to look the other way on it once in a while, if you know what I mean. We got an old crate in there waiting. No seven forty-seven, mind, just a hunk of junk, but it'll get you where you got to go."

Within minutes, they set down at the field, a dark and forbidding strip hacked out of the jungle and lying between nasty looking hills.

The plane waiting was what some folks would call an antique flying boat. A war surplus HU-16

seaplane, it was impossible to say during just which war it had seen active duty. Able to land on both land and sea and get in and out of places with short, tight runways, it had the large boat-like body and overhead wings with pontoons so familiar to navy war movies, and its two great prop-driven engines were almost as loud inside the plane as outside, but it was surprisingly roomy inside, if militarily spartan.

The two pilots were both middle aged and looked like retired military, but they were long enough out of it and jaded enough to look like they slept in their clothes and peeled them off anually for showers.

The older and grayer of the two shook hands with Greg. "I'm Mitch Corwin, and that's Bob Romeriz. Welcome aboard Air Nowhere."

"Glad to see anybody," MacDonald assured them. "You know the score?"

"All the way. That her? Wow. . . . O.K., no more comments now. Pile in and let's get the hell out of here. We're cleared from Caracas to Kingston, where we'll take on fuel but nothing else.

Then we go up the coast with fuel stops every six hours. There's water in the cask in back and Dixie cups next to it, and there's cold box lunches and beer in the coolers there, and if you got to go there's a porta-potty in the back. Assuming no problems, the whole thing should take forty-four hours give or take, allowing for the fuel stops. These babies don't go real fast and they're not designed for comfort but they'll get you there in one piece."

They got in, but the old fabric seats proved impossible for Angelique, and she wound up sitting on the floor of the aircraft, simply hanging on to the metal seat bases as they took off.

There was, in fact, a great deal of noise and vibration, but the ride itself was fairly smooth and stable. They munched cold chicken, drank a little beer, and mostly otherwise kept to themselves during the trip.

They landed at a general aviation strip outside Kingston while it was still dark, but aside from staying down low inside the plane there was no trouble. The plane had a manifest and flight plan that was proper and provided a stop for refueling but no other purpose in Jamaica. The lone, bored looking customs man was there only to make certain nothing unauthorized got in or out of the plane; he couldn't have cared less what it carried and did not try to look inside.

It was past dawn on a gray, overcast day when they made their second stop, this one in Cancun, on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Again, with just a refueling and a refiling of some paperwork, there was no hassle. From that point they used small, private airfields, heading northwest across Mexico. For something planned in a hurry, it was certainly well organized.

"Oh, we do this all the time," Corwin told them. "It's the way you make money with a small outfit like this. You prepay the bribes and have a lot of options to move."

"What do you usually carry?" Greg asked him.

"A little bit of everything. Dope of all types, of course, and sometimes wetbacks and other times it might be political refugees from Latin America. We had two trips getting phar-maceuticals to Cuba, if you believe that. Those are hairier than the drug stuff but they pay best of all."

"I'm surprised you haven't gotten caught and strung up by now no matter what your contacts,"

Greg noted. "You're not in a long-life type of trade here."

"Well, hell, we're equal opportunity, see? I mean, we've run stuff for the CIA, so the U.S. stays off our back or covers for us. We've run stuff for the Reds, so we don't get no flack from the Cubans or Nicaraguans or anybody like that. Almost every government's used us at one time or another, and we're a special favorite of certain Mexican politicians."

"Seems to me you could afford better airplanes," Maria noted.

"Oh, hell, honey, we got any kind of plane you want for anything, and old pilots to fly 'em. This was the best overall for this job, considering that turkey airstrip we started at and where we got to wind up."

"Just where
are
we winding up?" MacDonald asked.

"Well, sir, near as I can tell, they got to thinking. They needed a place with a big international airport so's everybody who needed could get in and out, and they wanted a kind of place folks might go anyway. Now, add to that someplace where they wouldn't give a second glance to your little tattooed lady there, beg pardon—no offense meant. If she was dressed at all, that is."

They flew the entire distance up the California coast well out from shore and low enough to be out of most of the air traffic control radar. They landed on the water for the first time over a hundred and fifty miles out in the Pacific off the California coast, but near a small chartered tanker that was there to give them more gas. From that point, they disappeared from anyone's clear trace, landing in the water again, this time about twenty miles off the coast and in daylight.

There they unstowed and assembled and inflated a large orange life raft complete with outboard motor, and all, including the pilots, transferred into it.

Away about a mile, Romeriz took out a small metal box, raised an antenna, then flipped up a cover to reveal a single contact switch. He pulled it down, and two very small muffled explosions could be heard in the distance, panicking some gulls.

"I hate to lose her, but we can't afford to keep her any more," Corwin told them. "She'll be on her way to the bottom now with any luck, if those explosive boys were right, and nobody'll ever know we were here."

They put in at a small, deserted beach of black sand, then deflated the raft and took it back out into the water, letting the motor's weight sink it to the bottom.

Air Nowhere certainly knew its business. They walked over a huge amount of driftwood piled up in back of the beach and then up an almost overgrown trail to a small turnout near a two-lane road. A small camper truck was parked there, but it didn't seem to bother the pilots, and Romeriz went up, selected a key off his key ring, and unlocked the thing. They waited for some general traffic to pass, then got Angelique and the others inside.

"
This
we will not sink or blow up," Corwin told them. "It was rented fair and square in Astoria for a week and it's going back there when we're through. Settle back—we've still got quite a drive. Either of you want to take the wheel, you're welcome to do it. After we drop you off, this gets turned over to an innocent and unsuspecting family that wants to drive north along the coast road in a camper, and they'll check it back in. It's rented in their name, so anybody who wants to trace this will have one hell of a time proving anybody was ever in it that they want." And that was how they got Angelique to San Francisco.

"Outside of theaters and espionage circles I don't think there'd be much of a call for this stuff, eh?" MacDonald commented, applying another batch of a seemingly clear liquid to his hair and beard and then showering it off. It had the effect, over a period of time, of turning dark hair gray and doing so convincingly. Applied to both hair and beard, it had the effect of adding twenty years to his apparent age.

"Rather simple stuff, old boy," replied a tall, distinguished-looking man in his sixties or early seventies. He wore an aloha shirt and brown slacks, but somehow he still looked quite the British civil servant which he used to be.

Lord Clarence Frawley, who insisted on being called "Pip" by everyone unless under formal circumstances, had quite a lot of experience in that end, being, for some eleven years, the real-life counterpart of James Bond's legendary "Q", the master of gadgetry for spies. His own Ph.D. was in chemistry, but he knew an incredible amount about almost everything in the sciences. He had not, of course, been the one man show of the cinema, but rather the administrative head of a research-and-development wing that employed only the best and the brightest and the most secure. A staunch materialist and top scientist, he'd been one of Sir Reginald's bosses at one time when the renegade computer genius had worked for the British government and he was also familiar, as a prior Fellow of the Institute, with the actual layout of Allenby Island.

For that reason, he was Queen's Rook.

The house itself was quite large and set back from the ocean, but also set apart from any other houses atop a large hill about an hour's drive north of San Francisco. The place itself was actually owned by a Hollywood writer who leased it out for the six months of the year when he had to be in Los Angeles. None of them had ever heard of the writer, who apparently wrote television spy shows for some series or other and had gotten his start as the author of a series of spectacularly successful low-budget hack and slash horror movies, and none knew how the house had been secured, except that it had been done by agents of the King.

Pip fixed himself a whiskey and soda and sank down on the couch. "We've got the tests back on her, and they're quite amazing," he said simply.

Greg MacDonald, equally relaxed but in a bath robe, joined him. "How's that?"

"Well, the fingerprints are certainly hers, and I think it's pretty certain that she is indeed Angelique Montagne."

"Well, I'm certainly glad to hear that. Otherwise this was all one hell of a waste."

"The bone structure, cellular structure, and the like though, is simply amazing. They didn't merely give her a disguise. As near as we can tell, she is
genetically
what you see. That, and our mysteriously youthful nurse, tell us a lot."

"Such as?"

"Well, they can really do it, that's what. Someone, sitting up there, using that marvelous computer, found a tremendous breakthrough. The implications are
enormous
!"

"And scary."

"Well, yes, that too." he agreed, accepting the idea almost as an afterthought. "I can't see any other way to do it but to somehow encode a human body inside a computer, every little bit of it—

and then introducing whatever physiological changes the programmer desires and then recreating the person with the changes. It's energy into matter with the most complex organism we know—

and it's
alive
!"

"Well, maybe," MacDonald responded. "But if that's the way they do it, why keep the fingerprints? And why worry about Angelique at all? They could just take one of their own, change her into Angelique so absolutely that nobody could prove any difference, and go on from there. All this makes no sense if you're right."

"Exactly so, my boy," came another, deep, melodious British voice behind them. Into the room walked Lord Alfred Whitely, retired Bishop of Burham at Yorkminster, professor emeritus of theology and philosophy at Christ's College, Oxford. "One can never trust a Cambridge man to think things through."

The Bishop was about the same age as Lord Frawley, but round-faced and hawk-nosed with thick white hair and a ruddy complexion. The Bishop was also wearing very unclerical red plaid Bermuda shorts and a tee shirt which read, "I left my cash in San Francisco."

"And I suppose you have a better idea?" Pip asked sarcastically.

"Why of course! Researchers on my end have come up with wonders. But do go on. I would like to hear what you've found—excluding the speculation, of course, on miraculous and vaporous gadgets that don't exist and don't make sense."

The look the Bishop got would have fried an egg.

"Well," Pip went on, "we also discovered a legitimate physiological cause for this aversion to most materials. It's a definite series of allergies, far too severe to be treated without long hospitalization and lots of experimentation, but we tested a number of things after wondering why she didn't come down with problems using the straw and the like. That suggested that there were things she could tolerate, and we found one that works."

"Oh, really?" Greg was very interested. "What?"

"Silk. Real silk, not the synthetic variety. We also discovered a range of non-alkaloid dyes that could be used, and even now we've got folks working on things. We've taken many fittings, and perhaps we can have something this afternoon. The real problem is that we must tailor with silk thread as well. Do you know how bloody difficult it is to get that much natural silk these days?"