A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (39 page)

Tonya went over to the conference table and sat down again.  Twenty
-nine hours.  Hearing the number almost made her weep.

Arms were tougher than she realized, though.  Hancock still lived.  For a moment, she flashed back to a spotty memory of Wini and Shirley forcing her to cut her own heart out of her body.  For years, she had believed her memory an illusion, because of the impossibility: she had lived through cutting her own heart out of her body.  Today, for the first time, she believed.  The event wasn’t an illusion.

The men followed Tonya to the conference table.  The secretary resumed taking notes.

Leeson kept talking.
“We’ve tried everything we can think of, but even after getting juice she doesn’t respond to anything.  She’s dying.”

“Withdrawal does permanent damage,” Tonya said.  “
Once a Transform goes under for more than about ten or twenty minutes, you’ve lost them.”

“Keaton went into withdrawal,” Dr. Jeffers said.  “She was in withdrawal for two hours about four years ago.  She recovered.”

Tonya raised an eyebrow; she knew the story and what the withdrawal had cost Keaton, but didn’t want them to know.  “You know more than I do,” she said, a bald face lie.  Right now, she didn’t give a rat’s ass.  “Twenty minutes of withdrawal leaves a Transform severely retarded, if she is lucky enough to survive.  Might leave her paralyzed for life.  I’ve seen this.  I can’t predict what twenty-nine hours might do, even to an Arm.”  You might need to teach her to speak again, and potty train her, you utter dolts.  Are you up for that?

Dr. Jeffers leaned back in his chair.  “Can you at least try?  Look at our records and see if you can come up with anything?”

Tonya remained angry, and her nagging guilt wouldn’t let go. “$100 an hour.”

Dr. Jeffers nodded.  “$100 an hour.”

The Arm
remained silent in her cell, flat on her back, still in heavy restraints. Tonya watched, via closed-circuit television, unable to summon up the fight to visit in person.  Hancock never moved.

Tonya looked through the medical records.  The damage from 29 hours of withdrawal was unbelievable.  Internal bleeding, fever, high blood pressure, and a high white blood cell count.  The results on Hancock’s CBC test resembled nothing human.  The results on her urine test were similar.  X-Rays showed her joints and her organs decaying.  Blood filled her urine, her bruises didn’t heal, and cerebrospinal fluid leaked into her blood.  The doctors thought she was dying.  Tonya knew Hancock was healing, albeit slowly, perhaps too slowly.  Her mind was gone, though, and showed no sign of ever coming back.

“There are no certainties,” Tonya said.  Leeson and Dr. Jeffers paid close attention.  “However, both Arm and Focus healing is aided by juice.  And time.  Given the damage the Arm suffered, I would estimate you will need at least five volunteer Transforms to bring back her mind.”

“I can do that,” Dr. Jeffers said.  “I can’t do it quickly.  I
t would take four to six weeks before we can make arrangements for five volunteers.”

“
If you want to interrogate her, you’ll need to do this in four to six
days
.”  Tonya shook her head.  “There’s no telling how much of her memory is left after your abuse, but I can guarantee you she won’t have any left if you dilly-dally for weeks.”

“There’s a problem, Dr. Jeffers,” Leeson said.  “Special Order Five.”

Dr. Jeffers paled.  “Right.”

“What
’s Special Order Five,” Tonya said, adding in a charismatic demand.

“We lose our jurisdiction over the Arm on April 14
th
, Focus Biggioni,” Dr. Jeffers said.  He paled some more.  The information wasn’t supposed to go to her.  “The Arm will be remanded over to Federal Courts and the Federal Penitentiary system at that point in time.”

Left unsaid was
: ‘unless the Arm had become an FBI consultant or provisional Deputy Federal Marshal.’

“
You have your work cut out for you, don’t you,” Tonya said.

Leeson and Dr. Jeffers left
, hurriedly.  Tonya stayed in the conference room, brooding.  The tapes of Hancock screaming her way into withdrawal would not leave her mind.

Tonya went to the hotel after she left the CDC.  Keaton still refused to respond to Tonya’s messages, which she had left with both Keaton’s new and old answering services.  Tonya couldn’t do anything more, today.  She needed to stake herself out like a goat, a sacrifice for the angry dragon.

If Keaton didn
’t come by tonight, Tonya predicted nothing would be left alive tomorrow.  When Patrelle learned of Tonya’s visit, he would arrange a little behind the scenes euthanasia.  He would pull the rest of his people and save money for the coming massive manhunt to find Keaton.  Dr. Jeffers and Security Director Leeson were fools to trust Patrelle.  He and his people wouldn’t play fair.

Sky: March 27, 1968

Sky maneuvered the gasoline tanker truck
over to the narrow asphalt driveway leading to the CDC complex.  By his side, Eileen chewed her knuckles, ready to climb out of her skin in fear.  Sky was not being very comforting.  He barely fought off his own panic.

Earlier, before they left their staging point, Eileen had gone down on her knees before Lori.  Kali had taken off on a stolen motorcycle only a minute beforehand.

“Ma’am,” Eileen had said. “Hear me.”  Yet another unfamiliar Inferno formalism.  Inferno had so many different formalisms, all heavy with juice, that Sky wanted to tear his hair.  Intellectually, he knew why they needed these formalisms.  Living inside each others’ skin was difficult enough in a normal Focus household; in Inferno, the pressure of the household Cause and their many missions greatly elevated the stress levels, increasing the need for formalisms.  Emotionally, the formalisms weighed him down, each another delicate cut at his understanding of Transform societies.  The myth of the independent individual.

“I listen,” Lori had said.  Lori’s opposite of the myth of the independent individual
she and Ann termed the household superorganism: the household, greater than the sum of its members.  Damned crazy, but Lori and the rest of Inferno had found a way to make the insanity work.  With the formalisms.

“The plan is too complex, Focus.  Our teams have done many dangerous missions; one thing we’ve learned is the more complex the plan, the easier for a trivial problem to snowball into an unstoppable problem.”  Eileen bowed her head at Lori’s feet.  “Please reconsider.  Contact the Arm.  Abort this plan.”

Lori’s face remained blank.  Sky repressed his panic and worried.  Too much panic repression was bad for a Crow.  Crows lived by their fear, by their panic and by their terror.  If a Crow used up his panic, he would blithely and idiotically perish.  Sky had used up his panic, once.  After looking back on the situation later, he realized that without people to look after him, he wouldn’t have lived through the danger.

“I hear you,” Lori had said.  “Sky?”

Lori wanted Sky to explain.  Sky had explained this to Lori, during his critical analysis of the inspection of Focus Abernathy’s mutie mill, when he showed her how the mission would have worked better if she had been present.  Sky had explained the brutal lesson to Eileen, albeit reluctantly.  “Your worries would be appropriate if you didn’t have so many Major Transforms involved.  Experience has proven to me, Eileen, that Major Transforms can handle ornate and overly complex plans, plans that others would see fall apart.  I don’t know why, but we can.  From the point of view of a Major Transform, this isn’t even a very elaborate plan.”  You want a complex plan?  Let Focus and Arm organize things.  Jesus wept!

“I accept,” Eileen had said.  Sky hadn
’t been sure exactly what the juice did to Eileen, but Eileen’s mental state did improve after the formalism.

What Sky
didn’t like were the dark looks from Tim and Tina, afterwards.  The people of Inferno believed Major Transforms weren’t significantly better in all ways than non-Major Transforms.

They were wrong.

Sky had a lot to say on the subject, and he planned to incorporate it in his lessons later on.  The goal of Zen Buddhism was to experience and understand the real world, not the world of illusions, propaganda and self-lies.  Doubt was the necessary tool, at least as Sky interpreted Zen, when relating the practice to Transforms.  The illusion of Major Transforms not being particularly different was seductive, but quite incorrect.

He did suspect
his lesson would provide the Inferno Transforms incentive for even more training and improvement.  The beauty of Inferno and their Cause was their dedication.  They were good for him; he had never before in his life worked so hard at improving himself as he had during his time with Inferno.  He could work even harder, he knew.

Eileen fidgeted in her seat next to Sky, as the outer fence guard station came into view.  The guard station was deserted.  Lori, Tim and Tina, in the VW bus, had already been through and taken care of the guards.  In the distance, Sky hear
d the prearranged firefight start.

The extremely important t
iming was all in Sky’s hands.  Supposedly, Lori did her witchery so the messages from the “Crow” supposedly aiding them in their fight went to Sam, the Transform Sky portrayed.  All so Sky could tell himself what he metasensed.  He warned Lori that living a lie like this would give the juice too large an opening.  She hadn’t understood his concern, but reworded his warning and passed the risk along to Kali.

The gasoline tanker truck
would be impossible to miss, and the guard outpost had a telephone connection to the CDC Detention Center.  They needed to remove the guards from their guard post before the tanker truck appeared, or the plan would collapse.  Sky needed to time the approach of the tanker truck to the guard station to match the inception of the firefight, as well.  Between the outer guard post and the inner guard post many state police, CDC guards, and FBI agents stood guard.  Inside the inner guard post, even more waited.  They needed to decoy a significant number of the guards toward the firefight, if the rescuers were to have any chance at getting the tanker truck and the VW bus through the inner gate.

An hour beforehand, Kali
had selected the guard groups she would manipulate, and made hand signals in the air, plain enough for Sky to metasense seven kilometers away.  Sky had informed Lori, who plotted Kali’s position on their map, allowing them to figure the timing for their approach to the gates.  For the past hour, Kali had been spooking guards, the same trick she used to get by them on their earlier attempts.  This time, Kali set them up, making the state police believe enemy action was immanent to their north.  Trigger happy.

North, though, was where the FBI had their command post set up tonight, between the inner and outer fences, down in a wooded ravine.  According to Kali’s signals, the FBI
remained on a state of high alert from the aborted rescue attempt on the night of the 25th.  Sky tried not to think about the fate of the policeman they had kidnapped on the way out after that failed attempt.  Kali said she made his death look like a suicide.  No, he didn’t want to think about it.

The firefight trigger, signaled by Kali, was simple.  She got in behind the FBI,
putting the FBI between her and the state troopers.  Then she shot and killed the CDC liaison officer standing at the edge of the FBI outpost.  This liaison officer had radios from all three forces and was responsible for keeping them in communication.  With the liaison officer down, Kali counted on a chaotic response when she sprayed the state police position with several machine gun bursts.  Her ruse worked.  The state police returned fire at Kali’s position, which meant they fired through the FBI to her.  The FBI returned fire at the state police.  The firefight was on.

“The firefight’s started,” Eileen said, trepidation in her voice.  She was sweating
, and Sky realized her fear dwarfed even his.  He nodded.  Kali had been right in her observation about Eileen.  She coped with action far more poorly than she let on.  So sad, so pathetic.  He wished her well and hoped she found a happy home with her MBA.  She didn’t belong in a place where greatness was called for.

Sky sensed CDC guards and state troopers running toward the firefight.  They didn’t all have to run to the fight for the plan to succeed.  As long as
the firefight reduced their numbers to a manageable amount, the rescue crew could cope.  Sky metasensed the guards stream toward the firefight, some running, some at a wary walk.  He kept the tanker truck moving, slow but steady, attempting not to attract attention by grinding the gears or racing the truck engine.  Soon enough they would be in sight range.

As he motored along
, he edged closer to the stragglers.  About a minute past the outer guard station two of the stragglers, CDC guards, spotted the tanker truck.  They turned back toward the road.

“Trouble,” Sky said to Eileen.  “Two guards are going to try and flag us down.  You’ll see them when we round the bend up ahead.”

Eileen nodded.  She took her semi-automatic rifle in one hand, cracked open the passenger side door of the tanker truck, and ducked down.