Maelstrom (18 page)

Lequeu recoiled, clasping his nose, but Pierre had pinned Blake’s arms and roughly shoved him into the seat. “Stupid stunt, Redfield,” said Lequeu, moving to the doorway. “You can sit there and breathe it in.”

 

Blake glared back at him, red-eyed. The odor of sodium hypochlorite was strong near the sink, but Pierre braved it to stand menacingly over Blake.

Lequeu resumed his pose of casual dignity with some effort, then removed a tiny pistol-shaped drug injector from the breast pocket of his silk shirt. He held it up for Blake’s inspection. “This is a neurostimulant cocktail targeted for Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area, the speech centers of the brain,” Lequeu said evenly. “Within about five minutes of receiving a subcutaneous injection, you will begin to talk uncontrollably. If no one asks you a question, you will talk about anything I ask you to talk about, with as many details as I ask you to provide. You will be fully conscious of what you are saying, and much of it you will regret. Some of it will be embarrassingly personal. Some of it will be disloyal. Nevertheless, you will withhold nothing.”

Blake said, “It so happens I’m familiar with the technique.”

 

“Then you know I’m not bluffing.”

 

“I believe you, Lequeu.”

 

“Perhaps you would rather talk without the aid of the stimulant?”

 

“What do you want to know?”

 

“There was a girl,” Lequeu said casually. “Linda–the first subject of the program known as SPARTA. Where is she now?”

Blake listened carefully to Lequeu’s intonation. He did not sound familiar with the SPARTA project, but perhaps he was being clever. “I don’t know where she is. She looks different now. She calls herself something different.”

“In fact she calls herself Ellen Troy. She is an inspector with the Board of Space Control.”

 

“If you know, why bother to ask?”

 

“Come, Blake. . . . When did you last see her?”

 

“On Port Hesperus, as you surely know. The
Star Queen
case was exhaustively reported in all the media.”

 

“And you had no doubt she was Linda?”

 

“I had seen her once before, in Manhattan. It was quite a surprise–I thought she was dead. At any rate, she clearly did not want to be recognized. I followed her a few blocks, but she lost me.”

 

“Why did you think she was dead?”

 

“How much do you know about SPARTA, Lequeu?”

 

Lequeu’s expression was as bland as ever. “Why don’t you tell me what you think I ought to know?”

 

“Fine,” said Blake. “I’ll be giving away no secrets. You can read all about this in public records.”

 

“I’ll give you a chance to tell secrets later,” said Lequeu. “For now, continue.”

“Linda was SPARTA’s only subject when she was an infant, when it was still a private affair between her and her parents. They were psychologists, Hungarian immigrants to North America. Their initial work was successful, they attracted attention, they got enough funding to mount a fullscale educational project at the New School.”

“The New School?”

 

“The New School for Social Research, in Manhattan-Greenwich Village. It’s about a hundred-and-fifty years old. Not as old as the Pont Neuf.”

 

Lequeu granted him a wintry smile. “Continue.”

 

“After Linda, I was one of the first to join. I was eight years old; my parents saw it as a chance to give me a head start on the rest of the world.”

 

“You hardly needed it.”

“My parents have never been inclined to take chances. In their opinion, if rich is good, smart and rich is better. Anyway, I’m just a year younger than Linda, closer to her age than any of the others. For six or seven years everything was great. Then the government took over SPARTA. Linda was sent away for ‘special training.’ A year later her parents died in a helicopter crash. SPARTA broke up. None of us ever saw Linda again, as far as I know–until that day in Manhattan.”

“What happened to her?”

 

“When I saw her, I decided to find out. There were rumors that she had lost her mind, that she had died in a fire at the clinic where she was being treated.”

 

“What else did you find out, Blake?”

Blake stared at Lequeu. If there were secrets Lequeu did not know–or did not know that Blake knew–they were getting to them now. But Blake had to tell the truth. He could not risk an injection that would leave him babbling aimlessly as he went about doing what he was about to do.
“The agency that took over SPARTA had changed its name to the Multiple Intelligences project. They classified it. Frankly, Lequeu, government files in what’s left of the United States are cheesecloth. All it takes is a feel for bureaucratic turf wars. You can get a lot of ‘need to know’ information just from the overlap.”

“What did you learn about this ‘Multiple Intelligences’ project, Blake?” said Lequeu.

 

“I learned the name of the man who ran it.”

 

“Which is?”

 

“William Laird.”

 

“And where is Laird now?”

Blake heard him say it from deep in his throat, and he knew that this was what Lequeu feared most. “I don’t know,” Blake said. “Shortly after the fire that supposedly killed Linda–and certainly killed someone who looked like her–he vanished. He didn’t even bother to resign. I found his official biography–it was sketchy and vague, but one item caught my attention. As one of his memberships, Laird listed a philanthropic society.”

“Yes?”

 

“The Tappers.”

 

“Did you ever meet William Laird, Blake?”

 

“No.”

 

“I thought not. If you had . . .”

But at that moment Blake turned his shoulder into Pierre’s crotch. He twisted off his chair and shoved Pierre as hard as he could against the sink. Pierre bent over in pain, but he was quick enough to bring up his forearm to defend himself against Blake’s thrusting arms. But Blake was not going for Pierre’s face; he reached around and past him and grabbed a bottle of drain opener from the shelf over the steel sink. He brought the fragile plastic bottle down against the edge of the sink with all the strength he could muster, even as Pierre shoved him back. Blake’s eyes and mouth were pursed tight and he was holding his breath; he yanked his shirt up over his face. Pierre swung as Blake ducked and dived. Pierre suddenly screamed.

Lequeu shrieked in pain and clutched at his throat. The bleach and the caustic, reacting in the drain, had expelled a heavy cloud of chlorine gas into the room, burning their eyes, their skin, their mucous membranes, their lungs.

Blake blundered toward the door with his eyes closed. He almost made it–but Lequeu threw out an arm and the injector brushed Blake’s shoulder as he stumbled past, running blind. He left two disabled bodies gasping and writhing on the floor behind him.

The neurostimulant was real. Before he got out on the street Blake was babbling uncontrollably. He ran down the rue Jacob, tears streaming from his eyes, while he blurted an extemporaneous monologue: “. . . Pierre Pussycat, they ought to call you, all fake muscles from the exercise machine, never saw a day of real work in your life, you
type
. . .”

Blake had meant to head straight for police headquarters, but he knew it would be hours before he sounded sane. Until then, he had to go somewhere where no one would pay attention to his sudden attack of logorrhea.

He headed for the quays and riverbanks he had gotten to know well, where on sunny afternoons like this, under the chestnut trees, one or more of his former colleagues among the homeless could be found haranguing passers-by who did their best to pretend they heard nothing at all.

Meanwhile he kept talking nonsense: “. . . and as for you, Lequeu, who’s your tailor? You ought to tell him to get into some other line of work. . . .”

 

“Frankly, Mademoiselle–”

 

“I’m an inspector, Lieutenant.”

“Ah, yes,” said the police officer, hooking a forefinger in his high stiff collar. “Inspector . . . Troy. At any rate, about this ‘precious papyrus’–the director has admitted that the scroll would never have been missed had not the unfortunate incident with the guard forced the museum staff to do a thorough search and inventory of the area where this man Guy was working.”

They were sitting in the lieutenant’s cramped and crowded office at police headquarters on the île de la Cité. Through the grimy window behind the lieutenant’s head, Sparta could see leafy chestnuts and the mansard roofs of Right Bank apartments on the far side of the Seine.

“How was the guard attacked?” Sparta asked.

 

“With a minimal dose of tranquilizer, quite expertly applied via hypodermic dart to the neck.”

 

“A dangerous area.”

“Here is the dart.” He held up a plastic package that contained a tiny glittering filament of metal. “Almost microscopic. It could have punctured the carotid artery without severe damage, although in fact it struck nowhere near the artery. In my estimation, Monsieur ‘Guy’ knew precisely what he was doing. What we don’t know is why he was doing it. Can you help us, Inspector?”

“I can only tell you that ‘Guy’ is an agent engaged in research on a group known as the
prophetae
of the Free Spirit–at least, that is the name they were known by several centuries ago. We don’t know what they call themselves these days. We’ve heard nothing from Guy in over four months.”

“But here you are,” the lieutenant remarked dryly.

 

“I received a coded message requesting me to meet . . . Guy . . . at the Louvre.”

“He was engaged in research, you say?” The crisp, gray-haired Frenchman regarded her with professional suspicion and what she had learned to recognize as the endemic jaundice of the Paris
flic.
“What was the nature of this research? Who are these so-called Free Spirits?”

“I deeply regret that as a representative of the Board of Space Control, I am not at liberty to say more,” Sparta remarked cooly. “I came to you because our man obviously intended to draw attention to himself. Otherwise the guard would not have been given an opportunity to recognize him.”

“Possibly,” said the lieutenant. He did not mention that the position of the guard’s sleeping body indicated he had been shot
after
the thief had already escaped.

 

“And because I had hoped you would be able to provide some clue as to the importance of this papyrus.”

 

“As to that, I can only repeat: the papyrus has little intrinsic value.”

 

“Would you object to my visiting the Louvre personally?”

 

“Official Space Board business naturally takes precedence over our merely local concerns,” the lieutenant replied, calling her bluff.

 

“Very well, if you would be so kind as to arrange a link with Earth Central,” she said, calling his.

 

They watched each other from opposite sides of his cluttered desk. Then, with an almost imperceptible sigh, the lieutenant reached for his old-fashioned phonelink console.

 

Before his fingers reached the pad, however, the console chimed. He hesitated, then keyed the link.
“Qu’estce que c’est?”
“Pour l’Inspecteur, Monsieur. De la Terre Centrale.”

 

He looked up at Sparta. “They are saving us the trouble, it seems.” He handed her the link’s hand unit.

 

“Troy here,” said Sparta.

 

“Troy,” said a gravelly voice. “Commander,” she said, surprised. “How did . . . ?”

 

“Never mind that. I’m calling from an infobooth on the Quai d’Orsay.”

 

“Out of the office again,” she said dryly. “Anyway, I have important information concerning our friend that . . .”

 

“It will have to wait, Troy. Sorry to cut your fun and games short–whatever line you’ve been feeding that French cop–but I just got a commwhistle from Central. Something’s come up.”

 

“Yes? Where?” “On the moon.”
PART FOUR
MAELSTROM
XI

He ws not the first man, Cliff Leyland told himself bitterly, to know the exact second and the precise manner of his death. Times beyond number, condemned criminals had waited for their last dawn. Yet until the very end they could hope for a reprieve; human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

Only six hours ago he had been whistling happily while he packed his ten kilos of personal baggage for the long fall home. Blessed surprise! He’d been released early from his tour of duty on the Moon: he was needed back on the Sahara project, as quickly as possible. He reserved his place on the first available manned capsule from Farside and sincerely hoped he would never be coming back.

He could still remember (even now, after all that had happened) how he had dreamed that Myra was already in his arms, that he was taking Brian and Sue on that promised cruise down the Nile. In a few minutes, as Earth rose above the horizon, he might see the Nile again; but memory alone could bring back the faces of his wife and children.

He’d had the usual moment of nervousness as he climbed aboard, of course; he’d never really gotten used to living on the moon, or to traveling in space. He was one of those people who would have been delighted to stay on Earth his whole life. Nevertheless, in the course of his frequent business trips between Farside and L5, he’d gotten used to the automatic capsules that shuttled him back and forth from the transfer station at L-1. He still didn’t trust the heavy modular tugs that worked the traffic trajectories between the libration points and low-Earth orbit. And he’d long been inwardly terrified at the prospect of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere on one of the fiery winged shuttles.

Cliff had ridden the catapult often enough, in fact, that people like Katrina considered him something of an expert. The first time, having heard many tall tales of electromagnetic “bumpiness,” he’d expected the launch to be rough. But so rigidly was the capsule suspended by the magnetic fields surrounding its own on-board superconducting magnets that in fact he felt no lateral movement at all as he was whipped along thirty kilometers of so-called “rough acceleration” track.

Nor had he been looking forward to the ten gees of acceleration he would have to endure for twenty-four long seconds before the capsule reached the Moon’s escape velocity of some 2,400 meters per second. Yet when the acceleration had gripped the capsule, he had hardly been aware of the immense forces acting upon him. At its worst it was like lying under a pile of mattresses on the floor of a swiftly ascending elevator.