Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (24 page)

“Is he in there?” Garibaldi asked Thompson.

“Somebody is,” Thompson replied.

“I don’t feel Bester, but I don’t have line of sight, either, and he would be blocking anyway.”

“I’m going in.”

He sidled up to the door, and with a quick, explosive motion, kicked it open. In the murky room beyond, someone moved, and he drew the PPG around.

“Hold it!” he shouted.

“Whoever you are, hold it!”

“I’m not him,” said the figure, hunched in the darkness.

He spoke in heavily accented English. A man. Garibaldi kept the man covered while he fumbled for the light switch. The light revealed a small cafe. A middle-aged man in a policeman’s uniform knelt beside a woman slumped across a table.

“He did something to her,” the policeman explained.

“He lied. He said he hadn’t hurt her. But I can’t get her to wake up.”

Garibaldi didn’t let his aim waver. Who was to say this wasn’t another of Bester’s tricks, another of his hollowed-out robots? The moment he turned his back, this guy might gun him down.

“Drop your gun and kick it over here,” he commanded.

Around him, Thompson, Girard, and Bjarnesson covered the stairs and the various other exits. The policeman complied, putting his pistol on the floor and then giving it a good nudge with his foot.

“Is he here?” Garibaldi demanded, retrieving the weapon.

“No.”

The cop looked back at the woman.

“I’ve called an ambulance, but…”

Bjarnesson holstered his weapon and strode over to the two. He knelt by the woman, took her pulse, then concentrated for a moment.

“I think she’ll be okay,” he said.

“She’s been wiped-a very professional job, probably Bester’s work.”

“No? Really?”

Garibaldi asked, voice sopping with sarcasm.

Then a bit more thoughtfully, “She must have known something. Can you get anything from her?”

“Not right now. She’s in a delicate state.”

“Try.”

“No!”

The policeman was suddenly on his feet, eyes blazing.

“She’s been through enough. Leave her alone. Leave her alone, or so help me…”

“Don’t worry, sir,” Bjarnesson soothed, with a glance toward Garibaldi.

“I won’t touch her. Like I said, she’s in a delicate state.”

Garibaldi absorbed that silently. Was Bjarnesson telling the truth, or was this just another delaying tactic? Maybe he was one of Bester’s, too - just more subtle about it than Sheehan.

“I’m checking the rest of the place out,” he said.

He moved from room to room, switching on lights, knocking down doors when no one answered them. Thompson and Girard trailed behind him, calming and questioning the hotel guests as he eliminated hiding places.

The whole time, he felt Bester slipping away. But maybe that’s what Bester wanted him to think, as he hid gloating in some little corner of the building. He had to search it.

Behind one door he found the remains of an Al, stinking of ozone, probably from a deliberate overcharge. He searched the room quickly, found a weird dressing-robe sort of thing and a rack of mostly black clothes. And tacked to the wall, next to the mirror in the bathroom, a charcoal drawing. Bester’s eyes stared from the sketch, mocking him.

“Damn it!” he snarled.

He tore the picture from the wall, then went to flip over the bed, rifle through the dresser drawers. Nothing, of course. The AI might still have some information of use in it, though he doubted it. More frustrated than ever, he continued his search. When he reached the topmost floor, he smelled smoke, and went more carefully.

The door to the loft apartment was cracked; he eased it open and peered cautiously in. After he assured himself no one was inside, he went to look at the smoldering pile on the floor, near an easel. The resiny scent of turpentine tingled along the back of his throat. He stared, puzzled, at the burned painting.

Something about that scene convinced him, though he couldn’t say exactly what. Bester wasn’t hiding in the hotel-he really was gone. Garibaldi hurried back down the narrow stairs. The rest were already gathered in the lobby.

“Four of the guests recognized his picture,” Thompson informed him, “though none of them have seen him lately. But the cop…”

He quickly related d’Alambert’s story. Bjarnesson was talking over a link. He glanced up at Garibaldi.

“Trang and Sloan think they’ve picked up his trail,” the agent reported.

“They’ve gone ahead.”

Garibaldi remembered the canvas, still smoking.

“He can’t have too much of a lead,” he said.

“We’ve wasted enough time here.”

Outside, the ambulance had arrived, and they were loading the unconscious woman into it. D’Alambert, the cop, looked on, wringing his hands.

“You had him, didn’t you?” Garibaldi said.

“And you let him go.”

“I couldn’t stop him,” the man said, miserably.

“I tried.”

Garibaldi would have felt sympathy if he’d had time for it. He didn’t. The colder the trail got, the harder it would be to follow. Bester might be only a few steps ahead of them, but he had the advantage of knowing where he was going.

“No. I won’t get this close and fail,” he said, under his breath.

“Let’s go,” he told the telepaths.

“My men have almost all of the streets closed off,” Girard informed him, “and we have choppers and hovercraft up, too. We’ll get him.”

“I’ll believe it when it happens,” Garibaldi replied.

Bester leaned against a building and drew a deep, calming breath. Panic wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Panic triggered reflexes that were too ancient, reflexes that knew nothing of the helicopters he heard buzzing about, of infrared cameras, of telepathic hunters. Panic might have been an asset in the days when it helped a naked monkey-thing scramble up a tree, three steps ahead of a pack of hyenas, but it was no help to a teep in his present position.

He couldn’t count on his insiders, anymore. By now they had unmasked themselves, outlasted their usefulness. He was on his own.

He clutched his new identity to his chest. It wasn’t that bad. All he had to do was get out of Paris. A small area could be searched intensively, but expand that area to France, to Europe, and beyond, and he would be safe again, for a while.

And he wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes again. No, he just needed a little distance, and more importantly, a little time. He was too weak, now. A few hours before he would have been able to penetrate a police barricade, like the one he saw a few streets ahead, simply by willing it so. Now he would be lucky to fool a single normal.

He still had one advantage. He still had the Shadow chip. He couldn’t cloud a man’s mind, but he could cloud a machine’s.

There was a department store on the next corner, wasn’t there? He slipped toward it.

He used the Shadow chip to make the security system stupid, but locks were another matter. Like those of the pharmacy, they were independent mechanisms. He took off his jacket and placed it against a window, which fortunately turned out to be glass. He couldn’t hold the jacket up with his crippled hand, so he leaned against it and punched with the other. The window shattered inward without much fuss, and he stepped in. Was there a live guard here? Probably, but he didn’t remember. He waited, crouching for a few seconds, straining his worn-out abilities to the maximum.

Yes, there was a guard.

When he had him in line of sight, he jolted the fellow, which was the best he could do, and followed that with a vicious uppercut. He was physically weakened, too, but achieved the desired result. The man - no, woman - fell sprawling, her shock stick bouncing on the floor. He picked it up and hit her with it, twice. Then searched her. No gun. What kind of guard didn’t carry a gun? The kind that didn’t think she needed one, obviously.

He shocked her again, then knelt, pinched her nose, and covered her mouth.

“Sorry” he said, “but if I just cuff and gag you, they’ll feel you when they come by. Can’t have that.”

So much for his promise not to kill anyone else. Of course, they would notice the broken window anyway-maybe a little sooner if they felt the guard. But how much time would her death actually buy him?

Swearing, he let her breathe again, took her phone, cuffed her hands behind her and around a column. He was in the women’s lingerie section, so he balled up some panty hose and shoved them in her mouth. Then, still cursing at himself, he made his way toward sporting goods. He had come shopping here with Louise. It was where he had gotten her the dress. What would she think, when she looked in her closet? She wouldn’t remember getting it, but she would know, by then, who had given it to her. Would she throw it away? Or would she keep it, sensing that there must have been something true between them, something real?

It doesn’t matter Concentrate.

He wove through the darkened racks, trying to think of something else. He remembered playing cops and blips with the other kids in his cadre, when he was only six or so. He had always wanted to be the cop, the hunter, the good guy, but more often than not they had made him play the Blip, the rogue on the run. He remembered an argument he had had with one of the boys in the cadre-Brett-when they had played Blips together. Brett had insisted that Blips always acted stupid, always made obvious mistakes. Bester had wanted to play as smart as he could, because he hated being beaten, even if he was supposed to be. He had sacrificed Brett to the others that day, made Brett lose, so he could win.

He had been punished for that, for turning against one of his own brothers in the Corps, even in a game. Now he was the Blip, for real. But no, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t a Blip-he was the last Psi Cop. It was the world that had gone rogue.

For an instant, he was that six-year-old all over again. It was so real, and so vivid, that the intervening years seemed dreamlike, unreal. As if the thing that connected him to the child wasn’t a linkage of years, or the passage of time, or personal evolution, but that single, unchanged desire to win.

In sporting goods he picked up a target pistol, a small - caliber weapon that fired flechettes. Anything heavier would be locked up someplace, and he didn’t have time for that. He also picked up a Bowie knife, night vision goggles, and several motion detectors of the sort that campers used for perimeter alarms.

He placed one by the broken window and another near the front door. Then he slipped out the back door and into an alley. They didn’t know how weak he was. They would waste time searching the store for him, assuming he was creating a psychic shadow for himself. He hurried down the darkened street, feeling a little better with a weapon in his hands. He was also regaining his strength - the background babble of Paris grew clearer with each passing moment. Soon he would be able to face his hunters on a more even footing.

Or so he was thinking when he turned a corner and ran square into one of them. It was a young fellow, scarcely out of training. He was as surprised as Bester-Bester could feel his shock like a grenade going off. The hunter’s weapon was already out, and up. He fired.

He missed.

Something whined by Bester’s shoulder as he sidestepped left and fired the flechette gun once, twice. The boy got off another shot, too, but Bester felt a diffraction of pain. It wasn’t from being hit himself, but from the darts punching holes in the hunter. The second one hit bone in the shoulder, and the young man gagged on his own tongue. Bester finished putting him down with the guard’s shock stick.

He searched the still body, quickly. Oddly enough, the boy was using some sort of flechette gun, too, and not much better than his own. He traded shock sticks-his own was nearly out of charge-took the gun, and then quickly scanned the boy. He had a partner, working around the other side of the building. Bester flattened against the wall and waited.

A moment later the second man came around, warily. Bester hit him in the neck with the flechette gun he had taken from the first hunter. The response surprised him. The man roared in pain, but was not otherwise deterred, pulling his gun up to fire. Bester had only one choice-he leapt forward inside the extended arm, swinging the shock stick. The hunter reacted too quickly, however, and they were suddenly grappling.

The hunter struck-not physically, but with all of the power of a young P12.

Long ago, Bester had studied shaman battles.

The human brain had evolved to process data derived from sensory input. The recent mutation that had produced telepathy hadn’t changed any of the other hardwiring. Telepathic input was complicated, it circumvented the sensory nerves, went straight to the brain. Still, the brain, being as it was, interpreted psionic attacks as sensory input. The result seemed eerily optical.

In short, a battle of minds was, on the perceptual level, a battle of illusions-like those described in ancient myths and legends. For Bester, there was nothing mystical about the process, but “shaman battle” was as good a name as any. His enemy launched a multilevel attack, aimed at pain centers, voluntary muscle control, and at the cerebral cortex more generally, triggering some random and some specific neural firings in Bester’s brain.

Mechanically, that was what happened.

How Bester perceived it, however, was somewhat less clinical. A cloud of wasps surrounded him, condensing from the air like dew, tickling his naked flesh from head to foot. Their stings dug into him everywhere simultaneously, and he suppressed a shriek. They crawled into his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his ears, and with them brought agony that curled him like a withering leaf.

Bester gathered what strength he had left and wreathed his tortured flesh in flame, searing the insects away. Their charred bodies fell from him by the thousands, and he tasted the stink of them on his tongue. Even before the last of them were gone, biting hard rain and hail drove into him, quenched his fire. Grimly, he clothed himself in heavy combat armor, but he knew that it would last only an instant.

If he kept playing this defensive game he was going to lose.

His enemy’s mind was a spinning disk, a buzz saw, then a jagged globe turning several directions at once. Bester engulfed it in viscous fluid, clogged it. The hunter responded almost instantly, crystallizing the fluid and shearing through it, sending sharp fragments flying back at his opponent. But Bester’s move hadn’t really been an attack-it had been a feint.