Mindbenders (16 page)

I dove into the driver’s seat and reached under the dash for the wires—not that I knew any better how to hotwire a car today than yesterday but how many wires could there be? And then I heard that deep commanding foreign-accented voice echoing from the back seat. “Wouldn’t it be easier to use the key?” it said and a hand appeared, holding out the key for me. Except I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t move, not at all, not any part of me.

The man with the commanding voice—not real tall, middle-aged but muscular, piercing eyes and a goatee—opened the back door and came around to the passenger seat. He looked me over searchingly. “You murdered him, didn’t you? Renn—you cut him to pieces and threw him off the cliff.”

What was he talking about? Had someone else done it? Found him in the crawlspace and dismembered him? And now they were going to blame it on me?

And then the man in the passenger seat smiled and I saw in his eyes that I had just told him where Max was.

~~~~

Nine

“We’ll wait for Marat,” Goatee Man said. Marat, apparently, was Old Leatherskin the Lightning Bearer. I was quickly developing way too much familiarity with sinister nicknames. Marat appeared a moment later, though, once again, I didn’t see him arrive, despite watching for him in all the mirrors. All at once, he was just there, taking the back seat.

“Can’t you just levitate up to the house?” I said. I felt safe with sarcasm—if they were going to kill me, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

“You can drive now,” Goatee Man announced and—how about that!—I could. “If we all arrive together, Max—you know him as Max, don’t you?—Max will be more cooperative.”

“You know him?” I felt somehow that I already knew the answer.

“We were schoolmates,” he said, “a long time ago.”

When we reached the house, Max was standing in the driveway waiting. He was making no effort to get away and I instantly felt guilty. Goatee Man got out of the car as soon as we rolled to a stop. I could see  the jumpsuits climbing back to the top of the hill. One of them held out one of those plastic ties but Goatee Man waved him off.

“You won’t try to strangle me, will you, Maximka?”

“If I’d known it was you, Pietr—” Max began.

“You wouldn’t have resisted so?”

“I would have run first thing this morning.” They were both smiling their most horrible smiles—they must have taught bad smiling at that school of theirs. It was like a pair of grizzly bears circling a dumpster.

Max took a seat in the back of a black SUV. Goatee Man took the passenger front and someone shoved me into the back next to Max. A jumpsuit was already at the wheel.

“You didn’t wake me,” Max accused me.

“If you’d been alive at the time, I would have,” I snapped and he shut up. The van rocked off the lawn and joined a procession down the driveway onto the road.

“That was clever—the trance,” Goatee Man said. “I haven’t seen that in years.”

“You’ve been surrounded by feeble minds,” Max answered. Goatee Man turned to me and offered his hand.

“I’m Jonathan Tapir,” he said, smiling.

“You’re
who
?” Max said.

“That’s my name now,” Goatee Man said.

“If I’m Max Renn,” Max replied, “you’re Pietr Volkov.” He leaned back in his seat. “So—is this a Russian operation? Ironman Putin wants us back to work?”

“Patience,” Volkov counseled. “It’s far more interesting than that. But I can’t deny my partner the pleasure of explaining it to you.”

“Partner?” Max exclaimed but Volkov held a finger to his lips with an arch smile. We drove, following the river, listening to Bob Dylan’s radio show on satellite. The highways kept getting wider and the traffic thicker through countryside and suburbs and, all that time, nobody said a word. I concentrated on being someplace else in time. I was vividly remembering Tess in the back seat of her car when I caught Volkov’s bemused smile in reflection and that was the end of that. Surely, everybody in that car was furiously trying to read everyone else’s thoughts—if you’d had a think-o-meter, we would have been around 14 on a 10 scale.

Finally we banked onto a cloverleaf and across a thickposted bridge and there was the Lincoln Memorial glistening in front of us, the Washington Monument and Capitol like puzzle pieces behind. We paused alongside the Memorial, letting an unruly line of people cross the street and filter down the incline to the Mall—all manner of families, dragging their kids or grandchildren, banners bobbing in the bright midday light:
Downsize the Bomb-Makers
and
Who Are We Fighting?
The near end of the mall was full of people, several thousand moving out to join clusters at the other end, moving toward the Monument and the White House, up there in the distance somewhere. They were working their lungs, several competing slogans in the air at once.  Then the van turned along the Potomac and into the parking lot of the Kennedy Center.

“You’ll turn around, please?” Volkov asked politely, holding up a pair of the hand ties. “I’m afraid it’s necessary just for the moment.” Max turned around and Volkov slid them on and pulled them tight. I followed his lead and was surprised how tight they were. A moment later, he placed a pair of the funny goggles on each of us.

It was a strange device. I could see through the smoked lenses and hear despite the plug ends over my ears. All I felt was a kind of pressure at the top of my skull and a sensation as though all the little unheard voices in my head—the ones you don’t hear until they go away—had gone silent. Not that they really disappeared, mind you, they just seemed muffled. I’d need a degree in Idon’tknowwhat before I could get any more specific.

The parking lot was full at 2 in the afternoon and we drove through, under the building, to a backstage entrance. There were two guards at the doorway, dressed in business suits but it wasn’t hard to imagine them in blue nylon jumpsuits. When the doors opened, Marat the assassin was there, too, appearing out of  nowhere again like usual. I looked into his eyes for a moment and then away—you wouldn’t want to look any longer than that. They were dead blank.

One of the guards led us up a staircase and through a warren of backstage passageways and dressing rooms. He stopped before every opened door, every change of hallway, checking—for what? Who was going to care about
us
at the Kennedy Center? Somebody took the glasses off me when we reached the third floor, though they left Max’s on.

Finally, we came out of a stairwell into the huge backstage area, risers and dollies and flats of scenery piled up all around and Volkov led us unnecessarily through the clutter toward the front. I say unnecessarily because it was immediately obvious where we were going—there was only one voice now in the whole place and we were headed straight for it.

We stopped in the wings. The auditorium was packed, a well-heeled crowd rapt, the stage lights glinting off pearls, expensive watches and cellphones, all those tiny cameras reflecting back onto the stage where, prowling like seven thousand hours of television, Jim Avery smiled.

I’d been several days in the company of people who couldn’t smile to save their lives and now here was Avery, blinding bright at center stage and with the look of a man who knew—
knew
—that you couldn’t take your eyes off him. And when he turned his back to the audience for just a moment and faced us, closeup, the reason was in plain view—nervous tension that couldn’t quit, that percolated fulltime beneath that demanding smile—the constant awareness of mastery, of grabbing the audience and holding them,  not letting go for even a second, of his determination to hold off that unruly second for as long as it took. Max was alongside me—his expression said he hadn’t expected this, but that wasn’t the same as saying he looked surprised.

“So,” Avery emoted into the spotlights, dragging out the word to comic effect, “So-you know this-I have a standard talk I give. I start with notes and wing it-in Trieste and Bucharest. By the time I’ve gotten to Tokyo and Paris, I know what I mean to say and it doesn’t change much after that. ”

Avery took a pause, a theatrical moment of taking in the audience from one end of to the other.

“But every year, this one is different. Because this is not your average audience. When this audience gets mad, you call the Vice President at his undisclosed location—and he takes the call!”

(Laughter from the audience)

“Most people dream of hitting the jackpot. You people own the casino. Which is the only role worth having in a casino, by the way. So—if you’re so powerful, so accomplished: Why spend money to watch me talk? Not even
sing
.”

More laughter. This time, though, Avery’s smile was harder, tougher, his eyes piercing.

“This year, we
know
why you’re here. Because the world’s gotten shaky for
everyone
. Even you guys. Fabled businesses have got the heaves, basic systems—water, power, investing—all look questionable. The best information money can buy is full of half-truths and gossip. Nothing’s a sure thing anymore. And you guys have gotten used to the sure thing.”

The gaping hall was dead silent. No polite conversation, no jokes, no competition for attention. He had them and, as close as we were to him, it was clear he knew it. Now the ease slipped out of his voice—the tone got sharper, more challenging.

 “Which is the problem. You’ve forgotten where you come from. Chaos, turmoil—they’re
opportunities
! Those are just the conditions that
made
you. I always talk about Hope but you know Hope isn’t
Kumbaya, why can’t we be friends
? Hope is how you get knocked down ten times and get up eleven. No hope means the best idea in history doesn’t get built. Hope is what told you, years ago, that you could conquer the world.

“ Hope’s come easy for you guys for quite a while now,” Avery said, holding his laser smile with a satisfaction that had to be the dead opposite of the way his audience felt.  “Well-guess what? You’re going to have to dig a little deeper for it now.”

  “So say it with me:” Avery called. “
I have hope
” and the audience responded in unison, once and again, a second, third and fourth time, volume rising, the words ringing through the hall. “
I have hope
. And this one:
It’s MY World
. Again:
It’s MY World
.” They chanted every phrase he prompted, over and over, several thousand voices including mine.

How many times had I heard Avery give this speech on TV? When I couldn’t sleep at night—when I was afraid to try—I’d sit in the living room of Dave’s house and watch him stalk back and forth across some stage somewhere in the world talking like this. But, this close, I felt the raw power he had to lift a person’s spirit. The thought that kept turning over in my head was:
I have every reason to feel good about myself
. There I was, at the edge of the stage, in plastic handcuffs, surrounded by Pietr Volkov and ten guards, feeling buoyant somehow, thrilled, transported. I felt the power of Avery’s message filling me up.

“Funny how it works, isn’t it?” Avery said, flashing that famous smile (
The Billion Dollar Smile
-Newsweek) as the chants died away. “They’re just words and I can’t pretend they’re all that articulate either—yet just saying them lifts our spirits. What vision do you carry inside you today? What World are you creating right now? Tonight? Tomorrow? When hope fuels our visions, we start
making them real
.”

“We should move on,” Volkov said and the guard led us to the back of the stage and opened a door-in-a-door—a normal-sized door set into a huge unload-the-tractor-trailer door. On the other side, where you would have expected scenery or at least machinery—or, since Avery worked alone on a bare stage, a wide expanse of empty space—we found a room filled with people, mostly young people in the lotus position, eyes closed and breathing deeply.

As we passed a whiteboard in the front of the room, I read:

Here. Now. Your Assigned Seats

The World Crushes the Average Person  But I Am NOT Average

The Rules Don’t Apply To Me—I Can Accomplish Anything

I Have Every Reason To Feel Good About Myself

We funneled through a side door to a row of dressing rooms—the guard showed us into the second. It looked like the ones I’d seen in the movies—a small table set against a mirrored wall, a love seat, several chairs and a bathroom door. I would have taken the room for a spare except for the opened basket of fruit and two trays of organic cookies, each individually wrapped in plastic with hippyish hand-lettered labels. The guards let us sit and even removed Max’s goggles but not our hand ties. I certainly wasn’t comfortable but nobody had waved a Glock under my nose in a while and I took that as an good sign. Improvement’s where you find it.

And then, all at once, Max straightened up and looked around like a shot, startled. I looked around too in reaction, wondering what I’d missed. Max turned to Volkov and said, “It’s
quiet
.” His eyes were wide as though something miraculous had happened. “No voices. I can’t hear
anything
.”

“Yes,” Volkov breathed. “It’s peaceful, isn’t it?”

“How do you do it?”

“White noise generators,” Volkov explained. “Like the ones that suppress noise in headphones—whatever noise they detect, they send out the opposite waveform and nullify it. We’ve retuned ours to work on brainwaves. Just like the goggles we gave you on the way over. We knew you’d show up eventually, Maximka—we prepared.”

So, I thought, we’re disarmed. Then again, so are they, except for the guns.

And then the door opened and Jim Avery walked in. “Max!” he said, holding out his hand. When he saw the plastic ties, he glanced at Volkov and then upward—I thought immediately of the white noise machines. “Are those necessary?” he said sharply.

“Not here,” Volkov shrugged.

“Then let’s get them off,” Avery said pleasantly, as though they’d forced us to wear clown hats or something. He held out his hand to shake, saying ‘Jim Avery’ as though I wouldn’t know who he was. He was as tall in person as he looked on TV and shiny, like his cheeks had that wax they put on apples. But he didn’t wait for my name.