I shook my head. “I think she did that for her own amusement.”
* * *
gavrila huddled in a cabinet under a laundry sink, waiting, the M-31 cradled, ready to fire, and the guard’s assault rifle digging into her ribs. She had come in through a service door that was open to the night air, and locked it behind her.
While she watched through a crack, her patience and foresight were rewarded. A soldierboy slipped silently up to the door, checked the lock, and moved on.
After one minute, she got out and stretched. She had to either find out where the woman was staying or find some way to destroy the whole building. But fast. She was ridiculously outnumbered, and in gaining the advantage of terror she had sacrificed the possibility of surprise.
There was a beat-up keyboard and console, gray plastic turning white with some kind of soap film, built into the wall. She went over to it and pushed a random letter, and it turned itself on. She typed in “directory” and was rewarded with a list of personnel. Blaze Harding wasn’t there, but Julian Class was, at 8-1841. That looked like a phone number, rather than a room number.
Guessing, she rolled a pointer over to his name and clicked on it. That gave her 241, more useful. It was a two-story building.
A sudden loud rattling startled her. She spun around, pointing both weapons, but it was just an unattended washing machine that had been dormant while she was hidden.
She ignored the freight elevator and shouldered though a heavy FIRE EXIT door that opened on a dusty staircase. There didn’t seem to be any security cameras. She climbed quickly and quietly up to the second floor.
She thought for a moment and left one of the weapons by the door on the landing. She only needed one for the kill. Besides, she’d be retreating fast, and might want an element of surprise. They would know she had the guard’s assault rifle, but probably didn’t know about the M-31 yet.
Opening the door a crack, she could see that the odd-numbered rooms were across from her, numbers increasing to the right. She closed her eyes for a deep breath and a silent prayer, and then burst through the door in a dead run, assuming there were cameras and soldierboys in her near future.
There were neither. She stopped at 241, took a fraction of a second to note the CLASS nameplate, leveled the assault rifle, and fired a silenced burst at the lock.
The door didn’t open. She aimed six inches higher and this time blew out the dead bolt. The door opened a couple of inches and she kicked it the rest of the way.
Julian was standing there, in the shadow, holding the pistol straight out with both hands. She spun away instinctively as he fired, and the burst of razors that would have beheaded her instead just tore out a piece of her left shoulder. She fired two random blasts into the darkness—trusting God to guide them not to him, but to the white scientist she was there to punish—and leaped back out of the way of his second shot. Then she sprinted back to the stairwell and just got through the door as his third shot redecorated the hall.
There was a soldierboy waiting there, hulking huge at the top of the stairs. She knew from picking Jefferson’s mind that the mechanic controlling it probably had been brainwashed so it couldn’t kill her. She emptied the rest of the magazine into the thing’s eyes.
The black man was shouting for her to throw out her weapon and come out with her hands up. All right. He was probably the only thing between her and the scientist.
She toed the door open, ignoring the soldierboy groping blindly behind her, and threw out the useless assault rifle. “Now come out slowly,” the man said.
She took one moment to visualize her move while she eased back the arming lever of the M-31. Shoulder-roll across the corridor and then a continuous sweeping burst in his direction. She leaped.
It was all wrong. He got her before she hit the ground, an ungodly pain in her belly. She saw her own death happening, a thick spray of blood and entrails as her shoulder hit the floor and she tried to complete the roll but just slid. She managed to get up on her knees and elbows, and something slimy fell out of her body. She fell over facing him, and through a darkening haze raised the weapon toward him. He said something and the world ended.
* * *
i shouted “drop it!” but she ignored me, and the second shot disintegrated her head and shoulders. I fired again, reflexively, blowing apart the M-31 and the hand that was aiming it, and turning her chest into a bright red cavity. Behind me, Amelia made a choking sound and ran to the bathroom to vomit.
I had to stare. She didn’t even look human, from the waist up; just a messy montage of butchered meat and rags. The rest of her was unaffected. For some reason I held up my hand to block out the gore and was a little horrified to see that her lower body was in a relaxed, casually seductive pose.
A soldierboy slowly pushed the door open. The sensory apparatuses were a chewed-up mess. “Julian?” it said in Candi’s voice. “I can’t see. Are you all right?”
“I’m okay, Candi. I think it’s over. Backup coming?”
“Claude. He’s downstairs.”
“I’ll be in the room.” I walked back through the door on automatic pilot. I’d almost meant it when I said I was okay. I just turned a human being into a pile of steaming meat, hey, all in a day’s work.
Amelia had left the water running after washing her face. She hadn’t quite made it to the toilet, and was trying to clean up the mess with a towel. I set down the pistol and helped her to her feet. “You lie down, honey. I’ll take care of this.”
She was weeping. She nodded into my shoulder and let me guide her to the bed.
After I cleaned it up and threw the towels into the recycler, I sat on the end of the bed and tried to think. But I couldn’t get past the horrible sight of the woman bursting open three times, each time I pulled the trigger.
When she silently threw the rifle out, for some reason I knew she would come through the door shooting. I had a sight picture and the trigger halfway pulled when she leaped out into the corridor.
I’d heard a pattering sound, which must have been her silenced weapon blinding Candi. And then when she threw it out without hesitation, I guess I assumed it was empty and she had another weapon.
But the way I felt as I eased down on the trigger and waited for her to show herself . . . I had never felt that way in the soldierboy. Ready.
I really wanted her to come out and die. I really wanted to kill her.
Had I changed that much in a few weeks? Or was it actually change? The boy was a different case, an “industrial accident” that I didn’t completely cause, and if I could bring him back, I would.
I wouldn’t bring Gavrila back except to kill her again.
For some reason I remembered my mother, and her rage when President Brenner was assassinated. I was four. She hadn’t liked Brenner at all, I learned later, and that made it worse, as if she had some complicity in the crime. As if the murder were some kind of wish fulfillment.
But that wasn’t close to the personal hate I felt for Gavrila—besides, she was almost not human. It was like disposing of a vampire. A vampire who was singlemindedly stalking the woman you loved.
Amelia was quiet now. “I’m sorry you saw that. It was pretty awful.”
She nodded, face still buried in the pillow. “At least it’s over. That part’s over.”
I rubbed her back and murmured agreement. We didn’t know how Gavrila—like the vampire—was going to return from her grave to kill again.
* * *
in the guadalajara airport, Gavrila had written a short note to General Blaisdell and put it in an envelope with his home address. She put that in another envelope, addressed to her brother, with instructions to send it on unread if Gavrila didn’t call by tomorrow morning.
This is what it said: If you haven’t heard from me by now, I’m dead. The man in charge of the group that killed me is MG Stanton Roser, the most dangerous man in America. An eye for an eye?
Gavrila.
After she had sent that
one, she realized it wasn’t enough, and on the plane she scribbled another two pages, trying to set down everything she could remember from the minutes when she’d been able to see into Jefferson’s mind. Luck was on the other side for that one, though. She dropped it in a mailbox in the Canal Zone and it was automatically routed through Army Intelligence, where a bored tech sergeant read part of it and recycled it as crank mail.
But she hadn’t been the only one on the wrong side who had been exposed to the Plan. Lieutenant Thurman heard of Gavrila’s death a few minutes after it happened, and put two and two together, and changed into his dress uniform and slipped out into the night. He got by the sentry box with no problem. The shoe who had been pressed into service to replace the one Gavrila had murdered was just this side of catatonic. He passed Thurman through with a rigid salute.
He didn’t have any money for a commercial flight, so he had to gamble on using the military. If the wrong person asked for his travel orders, or if he had to go through a retinal scan for security, that would be it—not just AWOL, but fleeing from administrative detention.
A combination of luck and bluff and planning worked, though. He got off the base just by getting aboard a supply chopper that was returning to the Canal Zone. He knew that the CZ had been in bureaucratic chaos for months, ever since it had seceded from Panama and become a U.S. Territory. The Air Force base there was not exactly overseas and not exactly stateside, either. He wait-listed himself on a flight to Washington, misspelling his name, and a half hour later flashed his picture ID and rushed aboard.
He arrived at Andrews Air Force Base at dawn, had a big free breakfast at the Transient Officers’ Mess, and then loitered around until nine-thirty. Then he called General Blaisdell.
Lieutenant’s bars don’t move you through the Pentagon’s switchboards very fast. He told two civilians, two sergeants, and a fellow lieutenant that he had a personal message for General Blaisdell. Finally, he wound up with a bird colonel who was his administrative assistant.
She was an attractive woman a few years older than Thurman. She eyed him suspiciously. “You’re calling from Andrews,” she said, “but my board says you’re stationed in Portobello.”
“That’s right. I’m on compassionate leave.”
“Hold your orders up to the lens.”
“They aren’t here.” He shrugged. “My luggage went missing.”
“You packed your orders?”
“By mistake.”
“That could be an expensive mistake, lieutenant. What is this message for the general?”
“With all due respect, colonel, it’s very personal.”
“If it’s that personal, you’d better put it in a letter and mail it to his home. I pass on everything that goes through this office.”
“Please. Just tell him it’s from his sister—”
“The general doesn’t have a sister.”
“His sister Gavrila,” he pressed on. “She’s in trouble.”
Her head jerked up suddenly and she spoke beyond the screen. “Yes, sir. Immediately.” She pushed a button and her face was replaced by the green DARPA sigil. A shimmering encryptation bar appeared over it, and then it dissolved to the general’s face. He looked kind, grandfatherly.
“Do you have security on your end?”
“No, sir. It’s a public phone. But there’s no one around.”
He nodded. “You spoke with Gavrila?”
“Indirectly, sir.” He looked around. “She was captured and had a jack installed. I jacked briefly with her captors. She’s dead, sir.”
He didn’t change expression. “Did she complete her assignment?”
“If that was to get rid of the scientist, no, sir. She was killed in the attempt.”
While they were talking, the general made two unobtrusive hand gestures, recognition signals for Enders and for Hammer of God. Of course Thurman didn’t respond to either one. “Sir, there’s a huge conspiracy—”
“I know, son. Let’s continue this conversation face-to-face. I’ll send my car down for you. You’ll be paged when it arrives.”
“Yes, sir,” he said to a blank screen.
Thurman drank coffee for most of an hour, looking at the paper without actually reading it. Then he was paged and told that the general’s limousine was waiting for him in the arrivals area.
He went there and was surprised to see that the limo had a human driver, a small young female tech sergeant in dress greens. She opened the back door for him. The windows were opaque mirrors.
The seats were deep and soft but covered with uncomfortable plastic. The driver didn’t say a word to him, but did turn on some music, soft-drift jazz. She didn’t drive, either, other than pushing a button. She read from an old-fashioned paper Bible and ignored the numbing monotony of the huge gray Grossman modules that housed a tenth of a million people each. Thurman was kind of fascinated by them. Who would live that way voluntarily? Of course most of them were probably government draftees, just marking time until their term of service was up.
They traveled alongside a river, in a greenbelt, for several miles, and then went spiraling up an entrance ramp to a broad highway that led to the Pentagon, which was actually two pentagons—the smaller historical building nested inside the one where most of the work was actually done. He could only see the whole structure for a few seconds, and then the car banked down a long arc of concrete toward its home.
The limousine came to a stop outside a loading bay, identified only by the flaking yellow letters BLKRDE21. The driver put her Bible down and got out and opened Thurman’s door. “Please follow me, sir.”
They went through an automatic door straight into an elevator, whose walls were an infinite regression of mirrors. The driver put her hand on a touchplate and said “General Blaisdell.”
The elevator crawled for about a minute, while Thurman studied a million Thurmans going off in four directions, and tried not to stare at the various attractive angles of his escort. A Bible-thumper, not his type. Nice butt, though.
The doors opened to a silent and spare reception room. The sergeant went behind the desk and turned on a console. “Tell the general that Lieutenant Thurman is here.” There was a whisper and she nodded. “Come with me, sir.”
The next room was more like a major general’s office. Wood paneling, actual paintings on the walls, a pic window that displayed Mount Kilimanjaro. One wall of awards and citations and holos of the general with four presidents.
The old gentleman rose gracefully from behind his acre of uncluttered desk. He was obviously athletic and had a twinkle in his eye.
“Lieutenant, please sit over here.” He indicated one of a pair of leather-upholstered easy chairs. He looked at the sergeant. “And bring in Mr. Carew.”
Thurman sat uneasily, “Sir, I’m not sure how many people ought to—”
“Oh, Mr. Carew’s a civilian, but we can trust him. He’s an information specialist. He’ll jack with you and save us all kinds of time.”
Thurman had a premonitory migraine glow. “Sir, is that absolutely necessary? Jacking—”
“Oh yes, yes. The man’s a jack witness in the federal court system. He’s a marvel, a real marvel.”
The marvel came in without speaking. He looked like a wax replica of himself. Formal tunic and string tie.
“Him,” he said, and the general nodded. He sat down in the other chair and pulled two jack cables from a box on the table between him and Thurman.
Thurman opened his mouth to explain, but then just plugged in. Carew followed suit.
Thurman stiffened and his eyes rolled back. Carew stared at him with interest and started breathing hard, sweat dotting his forehead.
After a few minutes he unplugged, and Thurman sagged into relieved unconsciousness. “That was hard on him,” Carew said, “but I have a great deal of interesting information.”
“Have it all?” the general said.
“All we need and more.”
Thurman started to
cough and slowly levered himself into a normal sitting position. He clamped his forehead with one hand and massaged a temple with the other. “Sir . . . could I ask for a Pain-go?”
“Certainly . . . sergeant?” She went out and returned with a glass of water and a pill.
He gulped it down gratefully. “Now . . . sir. What do we do next?”
“The next thing you do, son, is get some rest. The sergeant will take you to a hotel.”
“Sir, I don’t have a ration book, or any money. It’s all back in Portobello; I was under detention.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll take care of everything.”
“Thank you, sir.” The headache was retreating, but he had to close his eyes at the mirrored elevator car, or face the prospect of watching himself puke a thousand times at once.
The limousine hadn’t moved. He slid gratefully onto the soft slick plastic.
The driver closed his door and got in the front. “This hotel,” he asked her, “are we going all the way downtown?”
“No,” she said, and started the engine. “Arlington.” She turned and raised a silenced .22 automatic and shot him once in the left eye. He clawed for the door handle and she leaned over and shot him again, point-blank in the temple. She made a face at the mess and pushed the button that directed the car to the cemetery.
* * *
marty dropped his bombshell by bringing a friend to breakfast. We were eating out of the machines, as usual for the morning meal, when Marty walked in with someone whom I didn’t at first recognize. He smiled, though, and I remembered the diamond set into his front tooth.
“Private Benyo?” He was one of the mechanic guards replaced by my old platoon.
“In the flesh, sarge.” He shook hands with Amelia and introduced himself, then sat down and poured a cup of coffee.
“So what’s the story?” I asked. “It didn’t take?”
“Nope.” He grinned again. “What it didn’t take was two weeks.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t take two weeks,” Marty said. “Benyo is humanized, and so are all the others.”
“I don’t get it.”