Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (26 page)

“What’s this?” Girard asked.

“I’m Police Inspector Girard. He has your family as hostages?”

“Yes. He sent me out to get some things. He said if I wasn’t back in an hour, he would start to hurt them. It’s been almost an hour.”

“What did he send you for?”

“Train tickets. Some food. Please, I have to take them to him.”

“I’ll help with that,” Garibaldi offered.

“No!”

“Look, we’ve already got your place surrounded.”

“Don’t you hear me? He’ll kill them.”

Garibaldi looked at Girard.

“Gas? What? There’s gotta be some way to get him out of there.”

“Without endangering the family?” Girard replied.

“I much doubt that. Why not wait until he leaves, in the morning? We know what train he’s taking, now.”

“Just one problem with that. He’ll scan Paul here when he gets upstairs and get an instant replay of this whole conversation. Who knows what he’ll do then?”

“You did it on purpose,” Paul said heatedly.

“Spoke to me on purpose. To trap me.”

Garibaldi shrugged.

“It aren’t pretty. But look, this guy just mindfragged his girlfriend for Chrissakes. You think he’s gonna even blink with you guys? Man, every second he’s with your family they’re in danger. You think he’s just gonna walk away from the three of you, especially after he sent you to get train tickets for him? No way. All three of you are dead or as good as dead without us. We’re the only thing between you and Bester, and you’d better believe it.”

“That’s the problem,” Paul said.

“You aren’t between us. There is nothing between him and my little boy. Nothing.”

“Well, then. Let’s put our heads together and see what we can come up with, then. And, considering your deadline is almost here, I think it ought to be pretty fast, don’t you?”

Bester felt a sudden flash of heat that had nothing to do with the kung pao sitting uneasily in his stomach. It felt more like a hot wind in his skull, followed by a contrasting cold that lingered. He’d felt it before, just before walking into Lyta’s trap. He’d felt it on Mars, seconds before a terrorist bomb had de-pressurized his office.

There was an old exercise for picturing how gravity worked. You imagine space as a sheet of rubber, extending in all directions. You put a ball bearing on the sheet, and it creates a small dimple. You place a cannonball on the sheet, and it makes a large one. Place the ball bearing near enough to the cannonball, and it rolls down the large dimple to join the cannonball. The lesson is that mass warps space, and that the “attraction” of gravity is merely a by-product of that warping.

Bester had long ago used that same visualization to think about telepathy, with the ball bearings and cannonballs and what-have-you representing minds. A normal made a tiny dimple, a P12 a deep one. But it was more complicated than that. The older a telepath got, the more experience he acquired, and the more he learned from his instincts, the stronger his telepathic gravity became and the more the plane of thought curved around him. The deeper his imprint became, so to speak.

At the same time, he became more and more sensitive to other perturbations on the imaginary rubber sheet. Yes, real telepathy, the transfer of coherent ideas from one mind to another, depended upon proximity and, ideally, line of sight. But there were older senses that telepathy could engage, senses that worked below the level of rational thought. He had felt Lyta, that day. Her Vorlon-enhanced abilities had made a huge dent in the fabric of psi-space, and his back-brain had fairly shrieked Get out! What he felt now was no less compelling-a bunch of little ball bearings were rolling toward his cannonball, and the deep-warning-system of his brain was yammering for attention. This was an instinct he had learned to trust.

Yes, something was wrong.

“You can keep us covered all the way up?”

“Yes,” Bjarnesson said, matter-of-factly.

“Telepathy works on line of sight, and he won’t have that until we open the door. It’s easy to disguise the faint impressions he might feel until then.”

“So I’ve heard,” Garibaldi answered.

Girard had begun to wonder just what the hell he was supposed to be doing here. His investigation had spiraled completely out of his control. Just like his life. First Garibaldi had horned in, then the EABI, now Garibaldi again.

Looking back on it, it had almost been a relief. When he, Girard, was in charge of things they tended to go wrong, especially lately. When he learned that one of the century’s worst war criminals was the object of his pursuit, he had talked himself out of the case. He had been a coward, in that way, ready to let outsiders take the risks, even if it meant they would also get the prize.

Now things had gotten damn muddy, though. Who was in charge? Garibaldi, clearly, mostly by the force of his bullying, but also because he had been right. And because Sheehan’s betrayal had mired the EABI forces in uncertainty.

Parisian citizens were paying for all of this, though. His citizens. The people Girard was sworn to protect-the people Garibaldi and the rest didn’t give a damn about. He took Garibaldi aside.

“I’m going through the door,” he said, mildly.

“It’s okay, Girard, I’ve got that covered. “

“No, it’s not okay,” Girard said.

“There’s a woman and a little boy up there in danger. I will not let you burst in, guns blazing.”

“Look…”

“No, you look. You aren’t an officer of the law, Monsieur Garibaldi. You are just a man with an unhealthy obsession and far too much money, who thinks he’s a cowboy from the American West. We’ll do this my way. Period.”

“What’s your way?”

“I go in with Paul, alone and unarmed. I explain to Bester that he’s surrounded…”

“Oh, give me a break,” Garibaldi said, rolling his eyes.

“He’ll just take one of them hostage. Or maybe you.”

“He already has them hostage. He won’t get far if he tries to leave with them.”

“But with the element of surprise…”

“Now you give me a break. We haven’t surprised this man yet, and despite assurances all around, I’m not confident he can be surprised. My way. If he isn’t amenable to reason, then you can do what you wish.”

“This is a bad idea.”

“Right now, my men outnumber yours ten to one, even if we include the telepaths, who don’t seem to know who they’re working for anymore. I can have you arrested again, and I won’t make the same mistake they did. I’ll have you hauled down to the station and held until this is all over. Understand?”

Garibaldi was a man who was used to getting his way, but that had been a relatively recent development. Deeper than that, beneath the veneer of the rich tycoon, there was a man who had spent most of his life following orders. He nodded reluctantly.

“I still think it’s a mistake.”

“So noted. But that’s how we’re doing it.”

“Your funeral, buddy. And it probably will be.”

Girard smiled ruefully.

“I just have this image of you and Bester-one man made of matter, the other of antimatter. If I let you rush into that room…”

He shook his head.

“I won’t let that happen.”

Girard checked to make sure everyone was in place. Snipers in the apartments across the streets, men below the windows, several on the roof. All were told to stay out of line of sight and let their surveillance equipment do the watching for them. Once he felt secure, he waved Paul over.

“I’m going in unarmed, to talk to him. I’ll do my best for your family, I swear.”

Paul just shook his head.

“We should hurry” he said.

“I told him I’d be back.”

He positioned two teeps and two normals at the base of the stairs, then let Paul lead him to the lift. There were eight of them in all: Paul, Garibaldi, Thompson, Bjarnesson, another teep named Davis, and three special - ops policemen armed for bear. He tried not to pause when they reached the door and the others took their positions. Then, screwing up his courage, he knocked.

“Who is it?” A woman’s voice.

“Police Inspector Girard,” he answered, in a loud voice.

“I’m unarmed. I’d like to talk to Alfred Bester, please.”

A pause of several heartbeats followed before she answered.

“Come in.”

Chapter 13

“The door is locked, madame,” Girard said.

“I can’t come to the door,” the woman replied.

“It’s a trap,” Garibaldi hissed.

“Break it down.”

“I would rather use Monsieur Guillory’s key.”

“Oh. Yeah. Well, if you want to be lazy.”

“Don’t follow me in,” Girard warned.

He took the key and opened the door. Guillory’s wife and child sat on the couch, watching them.

“Monsieur Bester, I wish to speak to you,” Girard called.

He didn’t see Bester anywhere.

“I am unarmed, but there are armed men in the hall and surrounding the building. I want to come to some accord that will settle this without any more violence.”

“He’s gone,” the woman on the couch said.

“What? Impossible. And if so, why didn’t you answer the door?”

“He told us not to.”

“But if he isn’t here…”

Girard walked slowly around the living room. Nowhere to hide there. He looked in the kitchen next, checking the cabinets even though he didn’t really imagine a grown man could fit into them. He looked in the bedroom, the boy’s room, the bathroom. No one there, not even behind the shower curtain. When he came back into the living room, the two were still sitting there. Garibaldi peeked around from behind the door.

“He doesn’t seem to be here,” Girard admitted.

“He went down the garbage chute,” the boy said.

“What?”

“In the bathroom,” the woman said.

Paul had called her Marie, yes? It wasn’t a name he could hear without experiencing some troubling thoughts just now.

“No way.” Garibaldi grunted.

“I’m coming in.”

“Watch it,” Thompson called from out in the hall, “he might still be in there. He might just be telling you he’s not.”

“Can he do that?” Girard asked, incredulous.

“Yes, against normals, certainly.”

“Okay. Let’s all search, then.”

He noticed that Marie and the boy were both sitting exactly as they had been, and little spider legs tickled up his back.

“You can get up now,” he said.

“No, we can’t,” Marie said, tears starting in her eyes.

“He told us not to.”

“He compelled them,” Bjarnesson said.

“Should be easy enough to fix. He couldn’t have had much time.”

That was too much for Garibaldi. He entered the room, and he wasn’t unarmed.

“Where’s the garbage chute?”

The boy pointed the way with his eyes. Garibaldi gazed in dismay at the dark shaft.

“Damn it. Where does this go?”

“We don’t know,” Paul called, from where he knelt with his family, soothing them, telling them that everything would be all right.

“The basement, I guess.”

“Perimeter reports no one went out the window or exited from the building by the doors,” Bjarnesson relayed.

He paused.

“I think he is gone. I don’t think he could fool all three of us working together.”

Garibaldi looked back down the shaft, speculatively. The inside was filmed with dust, and what looked like fresh scratch marks.

“I’m going in,” he muttered.

“I’ve sent a detail to try and find the basement, so that end is covered,” Girard said.

“If you want to follow the cobra into its den, more luck to you.”

“Just call me Ricky-Ticky,” Garibaldi replied.

Bester was smaller than Garibaldi was, that was clear from the start. He’d known that, of course, only it was hard to think of Bester as small, at least until he was confronted with the fact that he, Garibaldi, fit into the shaft like a cork just a micron shy of a perfect fit. There was little he could do other-than wriggle and let gravity do the work. As it was, he had to stretch his arms out above him.

It wasn’t until he’d managed, catching and bumping, to descend about ten feet that he considered what might happen if Bester was still at the base of this thing. He would be a perfect target, coming out legs first. A sitting duck.

What the hell did that mean, anyway, a “sitting duck”? He slid down what he estimated to be another ten or fifteen feet. Then the chute angled sharply. Until that point, he hadn’t been able to see how far down it went, but he figured the building was two stories, with a generous basement. So he ought to be about two-thirds of the way down. Good, because he was getting itchy. The chute was too damned small, and he couldn’t move…

But he had dropped only another five or six feet before his feet came to rest on something solid. He kicked around, and found that the chute simply came to an end. Which was stupid, but… come to think of it, he’d never known anyone who lived in a building with a garbage chute. It had never occurred to him it might not be functional. On Mars, you didn’t build something unless you were going to use it, and if you decided you weren’t going to use it you took it out, to free the space for something else.

Of course, on Mars you weren’t dealing with three-hundred- year-old buildings that had been tinkered with incrementally over the years.

“Nice insight, Garibaldi,” he muttered to himself.

“Now how are you going to get out of here?”

A couple of minutes of frantic wiggling proved to him he wouldn’t be able to reverse the process that had brought him down. He couldn’t get any leverage with his arms up over his head, and his elbows didn’t have room to flex out. He felt panic rising and batted it down. He didn’t like tight places. He hated not being able to move his arms and legs, scratch his nose.

“Hey! Get something you can use to pull me out of here,” Garibaldi called up.

“Hey! Somebody!”

No answer. And he was hit by the sudden, terrible image of Bester, standing among the corpses of Thompson, Girard, and whoever else had remained in the apartment. Bester, grinning as he heard Garibaldi’s voice, trying to decide whether to toy with him or cut right to the chase. He looked up, but all he could see was the smallest sliver of light. Enough of a window for someone to pump a few bullets or PPG blasts down? Sure. The light flickered as a shadow crossed it.