A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (5 page)

Flo met his gaze, with an ‘oh crap’ look on her face.  “Lori, that’s just plain stupid.”

“Uh huh.”  Now she turned to face them, the real person showing instead of the Focus mask.  The real Lori, the driven fanatic.  She understood what she was doing and she didn’t like it.  She had a problem she didn’t understand and didn’t know how to fix.

No, Zielinski
wouldn’t be put on the household leadership team.  Not until Lori fixed this problem of hers.  Flo shrugged, resigned to Lori’s problem.

“So what have you seen that’s so dangerous?” Flo asked Zielinski.  She smiled at him with an ‘open up and spill’ charismatic push.  He didn’t fight it.

“For instance, based on the information about Hancock’s capture passing through Inferno, I’ve decided an earlier supposition of mine was correct, and you and Lori are information trading with first Focus Teas and trying to convert her to the Cause.  For the obvious reason” Teas’s reputation as an honorless backstabbing betraying bitch “this makes me more than a little nervous.”  He had dealt with Focus Teas many times.  You wanted to deal with Teas directly, so you could see when the shiv was coming and dodge first.

The cold got to Flo for a moment and she shivered.  “
Okay,” she said, neither confirming nor denying.  “How are you going to cope with the fact there’s still a hit out on you?”

Supposedly, the first Focuses still didn’t know he was here, hiding in plain sight in the Rizzari household.  He didn’t believe
in their ignorance any more, but didn’t say so.  Counting on the fact the Focus could read her people extremely well and would intercept all attempts to put informants in her household had begun to wear on his sense of credulity.  A paid contract on his life, all just because he had talked to Eissler, the West German Arm, for about four hours one day last year!

“I’m going to fly down to Virginia,” Zielinski said.  “
I’m going to have a talk with Tommy and work something out.”  Tommy Bates was an FBI Agent, one of several FBI Agents who belonged to the Focus Network, the Focuses’ semi-clandestine self-help organization.  Tommy’s boss, Paul Gauthier, a long time veteran FBI agent and district chief, had helped found the Network about a decade ago, helping the first Focuses break out of the detention camps.  Zielinski had been involved with the Focuses at the time, as one of the few doctors they trusted.  Tommy had been the one who brought him into the Network.

Both Bates and Gauthier had Transform relatives living in Focus households, and neither shared the
common prejudice against Transforms.  Much of what the Network did dealt with public relations, trying to show the normal and non-threatening side of a proper Focus household.

“If you try and get involved with Hancock, you’ll find yourself in Focus Teas orbit,” Flo said.  “She’s grabbed control of the situation for the Focuses.”  Focus Rizzari looked distressed, unhappy
for this information to get out.

‘Gra
bbing control of the situation’ meant she had grabbed hold of the information flow, charging other Focuses to find out what was going on, a typical Teas trick.

“I understand,” he said.  “It’s a large risk, but I’m going to have to take it.”  For instance, once outside of Inferno he
would be able to find a way to contact the
other
Arm, Stacy Keaton, without passing the message to Inferno at the same time.  He and Stacy had been reduced to talking in code to each other ever since he took refuge here, and half the time Stacy’s coded phrases went over his head.

“
Your leaving will harm Inferno,” Lori said.

Spare me, Hank thought. 
“Your household superorganism isn’t so finely tuned,” he said.  Yet.  In his time here he had observed the Inferno household growing ever stronger, ever tighter.  Despite the Focus’s shenanigans.  He had a niggling fear that if he didn’t leave relatively soon, he might never be able to leave.  Alive.  Lori glared at him, half appalled at his statement.  Or so she showed.

“You know about
the superorganism?” Flo said, surprised.

He was surprised Flo knew and understood.  “Before I arrived, Ann and I talked several times on the subject.”  He licked his cold lips.
  Not being able to talk about this sort of thing was one of his current pet peeves.  “Have you been working on such things as well?”

Flo nodded.  “Yes.  Unlike many of Lori’s wild ideas, this one actually works.” 
He wasn’t surprised most of Lori’s ideas didn’t work for Flo.  Flo followed a different household model, what some Focuses termed the charismatic household.  Instead of using the juice weapon to keep her household in line, she used her Focus charisma.  Many thought the charismatic model kinder and gentler, but Zielinski knew better.  “We call ourselves Charade, now.  I’ve strengthened many of the household formalisms, and discovered a trick to keep the household juice buffer from inadvertently gathering juice.”

“What sort of trick?” he asked, leaning forward, a conspiratorial smile on his face.
  This was new.

Lori signaled “No!” to Flo, but Flo kept going, regardless.

“I tagged the damned thing,” Flo said.  “Now I can get by with moving juice only once a day – at breakfast time.”  Unlike Inferno, Flo’s household ran by the clock.  “This trick, and the superorganism stuff, allows me to support an extra triad.”  Lives.  The crazy household superorganism idea
did
work outside Inferno, in the way any Focus would lust after: by saving lives.  He had feared Inferno was too unique to be useful as a model for other households.

He did wonder, though, what other side effects tagging a household juice buffer might
generate.  And how she managed to do it in a safe fashion; such tricks had been tried before and hadn’t worked.  He suspected a charisma component to Flo’s trick, as it was her strength.  What else…

“This is why I had to
keep Henry at arm’s length,” Lori said, shaking her head and eyeing Flo, and interrupting Hank’s train of thought.  “He got you with
his
charisma this time.”

Flo leaned back, gave him ‘the look’, and sighed.  This wasn’t the first time he had found a way to prompt Flo into spilling some of her household secrets.  “I
would never pass any of this along without your permission,” he said, to both Focuses.

Lori shook her head, radiating distrust. 
“I’m sorry you have to leave, Henry,” she said.  She accepted his point about needing to depart, now; he relaxed.  “I apologize.  I deserve your mistrust.  After posturing to you about how wonderful and open my household is I ended up treating you like all the other normals in the household who don’t get to know what’s really going on.  I keep forgetting, ignoring, blinding myself to whatever it is in you that has allowed you to survive dealing with Arms.  You can’t let anything slip by you unnoticed or you’re dead.  I also keep letting myself be trapped into thinking of you as another of my academic colleagues, brilliant in their area of expertise but blind to everything else going on around them.  I do know better, but…”  She paused.  “You’ve got to have been hit by this a bunch of times, by how monstrous we have to be to be Focuses.  I’m surprised you’re still willing to work with Focuses at all, given our monstrous nature.”

“You can choose otherwise.”  The Focus frowned at this, but Zielinski continued.  “I’ve said that to many other Focuses and a couple of Arms: your instincts can serve as a fallback position, but following your instincts is not your only option.”

“You’ve got more nerve than I thought if you’ve said that to the Arms, Dr. Zielinski,” Flo said.

Flo didn’t know the half of it.

Buried deep in his mind was evidence that first Focus Schrum had compromised Lori, a likely subject of Schrum’s personality-altering directed withdrawal scarring technique.  He had no idea exactly what Schrum had done to Lori, but every day he stayed here he risked finding out the hard way.

Chapter 2

In addition to the roughly 11,400 Transformations in 1967, there were an estimated 850 Induced Transformations.  The number of Induced Transformations
worldwide would not pass the number of Listeriosis B and C Transformations until 1977, the inflection point that marks the start of the Transform Apocalypse.

“Understanding
Transform Sickness as a Disease”

Carol Hancock: March 7, 1968

I awoke from my latest nightmare shaking and sweating.  I could go for days without sleep, but my healing needed help
, and so sleep was something I sought out.  Here, though, every time I fell asleep nightmares plagued me, an endless varied array of them.  The sadistic pinball game, with me as the pinball.  Stacy Keaton and her torture sessions.  Enkidu the Chimera rapist.  Bug-boy, the Kafkaesque cockroach Chimera I fought hand-to-hand and killed.  Gilgamesh’s whispers, always from behind me.  Stacy Keaton again, with her bloody belt and barked orders.  The pinball game again, but instead of the evil clown some Disney movie-style blonde in medieval garb stared down at me, equally evil, and uncomfortably reminiscent to the aspect of Satan who had responded when I prayed.  Her cackles when the pinball hit the bumpers had startled me awake.

My one functional hand grasped the table in a white-knuckled grip
.  I tried to lurch up, before my chains and my unresponsive legs reminded me where I was.  I was safe, at least sort of.  No evil princesses here.  Everything was all right, I told myself.  Peachy keen.  I took deep breaths and tried to calm my racing heart.

Damn.  The eternal eye of the camera still watched.  Someone, somewhere,
got this all on film.

My cell
remained the same.  The light glared down from the ceiling.  The lime green walls stayed silent and cold.  The empty space where the monitor should have been reminded me of my helplessness.  The guard stood in the hall, but he had turned away.  The murmur of other voices and footsteps faintly echoed in from the far corners of the building.

My heart rate and breathing came down
, but I heard them whispering, all plotting against me.  Dr. Manigault waited in the corridor, drinking in my pain with a leering smile.  Enkidu’s heavy breathing joined the pantheon of whispers.  Gilgamesh whispered ‘good bye’.  Keaton yelled ‘shut the fuck up in there’ from somewhere distant.  All faintly amusing, save the voices scared me stiff.

My hallucinations, quiescent for so many months, had reappeared with the stress of my injuries.

I was angry and lonely and frightened, and I wanted to go home.  To eat, and heal, and lie in bed next to Bobby in my home in Chicago.

Henry Zielinski: March 8, 1968

“Have a seat,” Special Agent Paul Gauthier said to Zielinski.  “I heard about your deal with Special Agent Bates.  Ingenious.  I thought you had
the details all worked out, though.”

They
didn’t meet in the Virginia TDC.  Zielinski hadn’t been able to get in.  Zielinski sat in the Rocky Road Motel coffee shop, across from Paul.

“
This is about a different problem,” Zielinski said.  “I can’t seem to get Detention Center clearance.  I need to visit Hancock, figure out…”

“Not going to happen,” Gauthier said.  He sighed and shook his head.  “Hell, Hank, we’re so far on the outs in this one it isn’t even close to being funny.  I’m a fucking Section Chief and I can’t get into th
e place.”

Gauthier’s confession
was unexpected news.  Paul was the Network’s top FBI man, one of the founders of the Network nearly a decade ago.  He stood an imposingly athletic six foot one, was in his early fifties, and wore his fading red hair in a crew cut.  He had hard eyes, thin lips and a narrow face.  His current job wasn’t Transform related, though: wire fraud in the New York City financial district, if Hank remembered correctly.  He had a lot of pull in the Department, or had, the last time they had traded tall tales.

“How are they
keeping you out?”

“They aren’t.  Focus Teas is, th
e bitch.  She thinks I’m one of Claunch’s people.”

Hank turned away, disgusted.  “Let me speak to her,” he said.

“Not a good idea.  To get control of the CDC facility” as the FBI people referred to the Virginia Transform Detention Center “she’s had to call in a great many favors.  Being able to offer you up to Adkins would be a coup she couldn’t turn down.”

“Focus Adkins is behind my problems?” Hank asked, surprised.  “I thought Shirley” Focus Shirley Patterson, the
background leader of the first Focuses “was the one who blackballed me and took out the kill order.”

Paul laughed
and sipped his third cup of coffee.  “You’re out of the loop.  Focus Patterson’s backing Teas here, if she’s paying attention at all.  I suspect Adkins either bought off Patterson, or is representing her behind her back on the hit.  As things stand now I’d divide the Firsts this way about all things Arm, including your status: the rabid anti-Arm group is currently led by Focuses Schrum and Adkins and they’re carrying Focus Corrigan and Morris along with them for the ride.  There’s no other side, just a bunch of Firsts who aren’t particularly cooperating with each other on the subject: Fingleman, Teas, Claunch and Julius.  I needn’t tell you the factions are in flux because of the events; I know there’s tension between Schrum and Adkins and some hints of alliance between Fingleman and the anti-Arm group.”  He put down his coffee mug and filled it from one of the two coffee thermoses he always carried with him.  He was paranoid about such things, but he did have a weakness for waffles and bacon.