Mindbenders (10 page)

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Guernsey demanded, standing up like someone had goosed him.

“Here are the accounts she’s set up for herself and her balances in each,” Max said, pulling a piece of scratch paper from Guernsey’s desk blotter, scribbling some numbers and handing it back to him. “She’s been at it for eight months. If you check, you’ll see she’s into you for almost a quarter-million.”

“This is absurd,” Guernsey flushed. “I trust Ms. Rand with—”

“Your job?” Max asked and that shut the fat goose up for a moment. He threw Guernsey his heat-your-skull look and all the sharpness in Guernsey’s expression disappeared.  “Check the accounts.”

“Check the accounts,” Guernsey mumbled a half-second behind. We waited while he tapped away at his computer, his eyes widening and collar getting tighter by the minute.

“This started when you two got back from Atlanta,” Max said quietly while Guernsey seemed to be calculating the odds of killing himself jumping off a three-story building. “You’ll have to explain that weekend trip to your superiors,  but it’ll play a whole lot better if you catch her
before
the auditors do.”

“Before the auditors…” Guernsey mumbled on a one-second lag. He’d turned the color of the diploma on the wall. “George—get me a bank check for ‘Cash’, would you? No, no, discretionary expenses—just bring it for my signature.”

About halfway through, I realized I heard another voice echoing behind Guernsey’s; I looked over and Max was mouthing the words, again a half-second ahead of him. I would have sworn no sound was coming out of his mouth, it was just in the air somehow.

George came through in a minute, very green and obsequious, bearing the check. Guernsey filled in the figure and signed it. “Cash this for Mr. Granville here, will you?” Guernsey ordered.

George just stood there, staring. I got the feeling maybe this was a little irregular.

“ID?” George squeezed through tightly pursed lips.

“Obviously, he’s provided me with adequate ID. Get going!” Guernsey said heavily and George rushed off, returned with the money neatly folded into two envelopes and disappeared just as fast.

Guernsey sat staring at his desk blotter, the morose look deepening on his face. “I trusted her,” he said helplessly, to no one in particular.

“Remember that when you confront her,” Max answered. “Our fee is  half the interest on her bogus investments—not unreasonable.”

Guernsey mumbled ‘not unreasonable’ behind him but he was slurring now.

 “If you only tell them about her first two accounts, the money you recover should cover our finder’s fee,” Max said, touching Guernsey on the forehead again. “This way, we’ll stay anonymous.”

“Mr. Anonymous,” Guernsey mumbled, “and his brother, Mr. and Mr. Anonymous.” He checked to see if we were smiling at his little joke.

It was all I could do to keep from running to the car. Once we got inside, I collapsed in the passenger’s seat, puffing like a tugboat. He started talking to me about the route, and I thought,
he’s trying to keep my mind off
—off what? Off something. Of course, once that occurs to you, the next thought is to try to figure out what.

“We’ll want to turn West just past Richmond—once we get closer, keep your eye out for signs.”

My mind was working as fast as it was able, not that that’s saying much.

“So now we’re bank robbers?”

“We prevented major embezzlement by a bank officer.”

“And extorted money for it.”

“We got a finder’s fee—a modest one, under the circumstances.”

“Which you forced him to pay.”

“He would have lost his job and found out about the woman at the same time, and probably after she’d pulled him a whole lot deeper into it than he is now. I did him a favor.”

Which might really have been true, but it didn’t make look any less sneaky. Those old feelings were creeping back around the edges. I liked it better when I thought he was nuts.

“Why didn’t they trust you?” I asked. “Fine said you were the greatest of them all but she wanted you captured. And Tauber stayed with her. When she called you…?”

“Renn,” he smiled again. “I’ve had lots of names over the years. It’s just a label.”

“When she called you that, Mark acted like you were…I don’t know what.”

“Spies are not notoriously trusting people.”

“They trust each other—”

“They know each other a long time, since Stargate.”

“Stargate?”

“That was the last name for the program—Fine joined up near the end. There were other names before that—Center Lane, Grill Flame. But Stargate was the last.”

“Dave was part of it?”

“He was a high-ranking officer. But he quit—he caused a bit of a stir.”

“Why?”

“After Stargate, the program was getting serious—it was moving past research, the tactics were going to become more…direct, let’s say. Dave didn’t agree with it and he said so. He realized how destructive psychotronic war could be. And,” he frowned, “he knew the price we pay who practice it.”

He went quiet but he still hadn’t answered my question. At least, he hadn’t answered the one I hadn’t asked yet.

“But you were in the program, until you got kicked out,” I continued. “Is that why they didn’t trust you? Because you got kicked out?”

He didn’t reply for a while. He was driving fast, passing cars left and right and we both saw the sign for Richmond Beltway. We merged into the westbound lanes and he took a quick look at the map as the dark clouds followed us,  squeezing the sun from the sky.

“That,” he said finally, “that was a lie.”

“What was? You weren’t in the program? Or you didn’t get kicked out?”

“Neither.”

“But you’re the mindbender
extraordinaire
. She said so.” He nodded. I was baffled. “You said Stargate was the mindbender program.”

“It was the
American
mindbender program,” he said, without taking his eyes off the road. “I never said I worked for America.”

~~~~

Six

By the time we got where we were going, I was driving. At least I was behind the wheel. The road wound around the longest string of mountains I’d ever seen. Every time I thought we were about to start descending, another hill opened up in front of us and we’d climb a little higher. Streetlights twinkled in the valley a long way down. Lightning flickered out of clouds that seemed about ten feet above our heads, hammering trees right in front of us more than once. It was only late afternoon, but the clouds made it feel like midnight.

“Safest place, in a car,” I muttered to myself as another bolt hit another tree.

“Actually, that’s not true,” Renn said, looking like he was about to explain it.

“
Don’t
,” I warned him and sent the rest, the
I don’t want to know
part, thinking it as hard as I could, wondering if I could make the back of his head burn. Not likely, but he shut up at least.

The road never laid out in front of you, it kept moving and jumping and finding unexpected places to go. There was always that nice low solid rock wall that promised to keep us from driving over the edge of the cliff which was good since the whole damn thing was cliffs but I couldn’t help but wondering why the son-of-a-bitch had to put us on a cliff in a thunderstorm at the end of two days of running.

When we neared the driveway, he had to point it out to me three times—I would have gone right by. The roadbed was below the street and overhung on all sides with trees. It was a long driveway, winding past expansive fenced-in grass fields—I thought of horses right away, though there weren’t any in sight—and eventually to a surprisingly compact house perched right on the cliffside. The nearest houselight was a mile downvalley, the road visible for at least a mile in either direction. I had to give him credit—nobody was sneaking up on us here.

Once we pulled up in front of the house, he opened his door and I found I could open mine too. I was able to stand up, stand on my own two feet. After twenty minutes in the driver’s seat, watching my body drive without any input from me, this was a serious relief. “Thanks for giving me my limbs back,” I cracked.

“You threatened to drive off the side of a cliff,” he reminded me.

“I didn’t
mean
it!”

His eyebrow went up. “Just because I can read your mind doesn’t mean I know when you’re full of shit.” He tapped his finger against my forehead. “Remember that when
you
start doing it,” he said and went to work checking inside the planters and the mailbox in the rain.

I followed, rubbing my wrists—they felt like they’d had iron bars inserted. My ankles felt like they
still
did. I wondered about how long it would take me to scramble downhill to town. But with no traffic on the road, a mile drop to those glimmering lights and a raging thunderstorm overhead, the odds didn’t add up in my favor.

“For the moment, if you wish, it’s kidnapping,” he answered, though I hadn’t asked the question. “We’ll go inside and I’ll explain things to you. After that, hopefully, you won’t want to run away.”

“And if I do? What’ll you do? Paralyze me again?”

“As I said, let’s hope you won’t,” he said with the same voice he’d used to threaten Hawaiian Man with his finger. “You know me—I don’t offer lots of explanations. Just hear me out.” He walked through the trees to the kitchen door and searched all over around it for the key—under the planters, atop the lintel, beneath the windowsill. Finally he picked up a rock, smashed the window and unlocked the door from inside.

“There isn’t some sophisticated mindbender way to do this?” I asked.

“I’m tired,” he said, “and it’s raining.”

The kitchen had a nightlight burning and a radio playing in the dark—I’d never realized what a dead giveaway that combination was. The kitchen was the end of the north wing of the house. One wing held the kitchen and garage, the other, three bedrooms and two baths. The wings extended over the cliff, joined by the most incredible double-wide living room I’d ever seen. Huge slabs of local stone covered the walls above a multi-level dark wood floor, every parquet line pointing up the mountain-and-valley panorama through the wall of windows. A simple dining room table and chairs stood on a high shelf floor near the kitchen; couches, bookshelves, a monster TV and computer table filled the other end of the room.

“They’ll be gone for two more days,” Renn said, coming out of the bathroom with towels. “The people that own the place. The computer has a high-speed hookup. We can research—”

“I’m not researching shit,” I told him. “I wouldn’t have come this far if you’d told me who you were.”

“I’m not an enemy agent,” he said, sitting on the couch.

“You said you didn’t work for America.”

“I’ve never actually worked for
anybody
,” he answered. “The country that trained me no longer exists. I am here by choice, like millions of other illegal immigrants. Sit—I’ll explain.” I wasn’t sitting. Standing up, I figured I was three steps closer to the door than him. “You can ask questions, if you want—I’ll answer. At that point, you can run if you want.”

I sat.

“Where are you from?”

“I was born a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I was born in Leningr…uh, St. Petersburg, excuse me, and grew up in a city called Novosibirsk, in Siberia.”

“What is your real name?”

“I have no ‘real’ name, like most people do,” he said. “I have no family identity. I was a child of the state.”

“You’re an orphan?”

“I’m the product of a genetic experiment. The Soviet government began experimenting with mind control in the ‘20’s. Once Stalin pushed out Trotsky, the program began forcibly mating individuals with strong powers. The program was never really successful—there were some physical and genetic problems. Early mortality and a high rate of suicide, for example.”

He laughed here a little, his dark laughter. I didn’t remember knowing many Russians but this struck me nonetheless as a very Russian type of humor. “They continued to breed the few remaining specimens until the 70’s. I am the end result of four generations of ‘psychics’ bred like farm animals for their desirable characteristics, without love or choice.”

“That’s why Fine said you were the greatest of them all—most powerful, cream of the crop.”

“I was a misfit, a disaster. When I was a child, there were ten of us, mixed into a population of forty or fifty others who showed promise but came from normal families. Most of us died off before completing training and the Soviet became disenchanted with the program as time went on, so the numbers dwindled.”

“They got disenchanted…they didn’t get results?”

He laughed again. “Oh no, they got results—
everyone
got results, though ours were better than the Americans. But there were problems—political problems.”

“Political problems? With spies?”

“With bureaucrats,” he answered. “Ideological problems, I should say. Communism likes—liked—to think of itself as a scientific approach to history and the world. The problem that no one likes to face is that science is a moving target. What we know now is not all we will know someday. The idea of thoughts being part of an accessible stream that can be tapped and affected at a distance, the idea that the mind—as opposed to the brain—can be separate from the body, can travel and take action on its own, this struck the ideologues as metaphysics. It strongly suggested the possibility of a soul, separate from the physical body, some remnant that has its own life beyond a single physical identity. To them, this smacked of magic. It was not explainable and repeatable—it was not
scientific
. This didn’t play well at the Politburo oversight committee.

“And Renn,” he continued, “ was the biggest risk of all. I was dangerous, out of control. I responded badly to training. Our training was designed for the average person with some psychotronic ability.”

“Psychotronic? Is that like psychic?”

“I don’t like that term, psychic. It puts me in a lineup with Nostradamus and  Madame Marie the fortuneteller.” He shrugged. “Although, otherwise, the words probably mean the same thing.