Mindbenders (21 page)

I could see a highway overpass ahead, the truck lights running off in both directions. Max shrugged. “Okay then,” he said, “North, Pancho.”

~~~~

Eleven

We crept up on Gettysburg like Lee’s Army, coming out of the South up what is now called Confederate Avenue. The sun rose through haze on the hill by the university, dense lines of trees setting off the old town below, the long straight streets marching into the distance, columns of upright woodframe and brick houses bearing the bulletholes of the battle that made America. We’d been driving all night—East, West, Southwest, Northeast—we were on our third car since Virginia.

“Wow!” Tauber breathed out as soon as he got out of the car.

“What?” I asked.

“I don’t feel any old-time mindbenders,” he said, “but there’s sure a whole lot o’
them
—L Corp—lotsa fuzzy, dim signals.” He moved around a bit, as though the signal might improve facing a slightly different direction. “But nobody like us. Nobody like Ruben.”

“I don’t know,” Max cautioned. “There’s an odd one. Not a mindbender signal but powerful. Very deep—like an 8 Hz tone.” Tauber seemed to be trying to reach for this without success.

“Can you read it?” he asked.

“Not in a way that makes any sense,” Max said. “But—if he wasn’t here, why would
they
be here?”

“They’re waitin’ fer us,” Tauber said. “We’ll have to be careful.”

“If you can’t be careful, you have to be
quick
,” Max said.

He drove through town, feinting in one direction and then another. We didn’t see any suspicious SUV’s or jumpsuits but the two of them kept watch out the windows all the same, tense and twitchy. “The signal’s very strong,” Max said, “but it’s not organized, if that makes any sense. It’s not focused at all.”

“Some kid? Practicing the remote viewing he learned on MySpace?” Tauber asked.

“No,” Max said. “This isn’t some lonely geek conquering the world. This is pain and confusion and… I don’t know, something else …”

“Where’s it coming from?” I asked, just as it became obvious. Max turned off the road under a huge brick archway into a cemetery, a vast cemetery stretched across a rolling hillside, intersected by stone walls and rows of gravestones like an old man’s ragged yellow teeth.

“This is it,” Tauber said in a hushed voice.

“What?”

“They fought here. Lincoln gave the speech here.” A note of awe and pain was in his voice.

“You’ve been here?”

“Not me,” he said. “My great-grandaddy. 26
^th
North Carolina. Died here, Cemetery Ridge. Pickett’s Charge.” There was pain and pride in his voice.

We drove the treed lanes. Max seemed to know where he was going without being in any hurry to get there. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

“What’s up?” Tauber asked finally.

“I’m trying to suss out what’s going on here,” Max answered, his voice really sober, almost mournful. “I’m trying to get a sense of what we’re walking into. It isn’t Ruben.”

“How do you know?”

“The signal’s female.”

“Yep, that lets Ruben out. Marjorie?”

“Maybe.” He listened a little longer. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he shrugged finally and nosed the car around some trees until we could see the little rise ahead holding ten or fifteen people communing over an open grave. I didn’t see the priest but we could hear the blunt music of one voice prompting and a group responding. Max parked at the bottom of the rise, where the road ended. We started up the hill but we didn’t get far.

The sudden rumble made us all turn. Two familiar black SUV’s were tearing down both entry roads simultaneously.  They stopped and emptied and then there were six of them to three of us, all of them wearing the LED goggles with earpieces. The leader came out last—Miriam Fine, looking even more fetching in the tight blue nylon jumpsuit than she had in her gray suit and pearls. Her eyes winked at me from inside the goggles—though I knew, when I thought about it, that I couldn’t actually see in there.

“Well, this
is
convenient,” she said cheerfully. “I come to wrap up one loose end and the other drops into my lap.” She motioned at the open van doors. “Take a seat—we’ll all go for a drive.”

“Not happening,” Tauber said before Max could get a word out. “I’ve already had yer hospitality.” His eye was still half-shut and deep blue.

“Why don’t we discuss it?” Max asked. The offer took Tauber by surprise and didn’t seem to suit Fine any better.

“Over there?” she offered, pointing to a dense copse of trees across the road.

“I like you better with witnesses,” Max answered, glancing at the burial party twenty feet up the hill. “You can’t erase that many, can you? We’ll talk here.”

“The Russians were right about you,” Fine shook her head. “You’re no spy. You’re negotiating? With what?” She whipped a Glock from the hip pocket of her jumpsuit and held it to my forehead. “We’re wearing the glasses—send any suggestion you want; we can’t hear it. But everyone knows what
I
want.” Her posse—all men around my age, gazing at her adoringly—pulled their Glocks from their side pockets and leveled them at us. I was
soooo
weary of guns. Fine’s cold steel tingled at my forehead and somehow I still couldn’t help but stare longingly at her. She felt so good to be in bed with…or she would’ve if we’d ever been there.

“What you will all do now is lie on the ground, arms out.”

“You gonna carry us outta here?” Tauber cracked.

“As long as you cooperate,” Fine said, looking around at the gravestones dotting the hill. “If not, we’ll leave you in an appropriate place.”

By the time she finished the sentence, it became clear she was struggling, though it was hard to tell with what. She was fighting her own words, face grimacing and sounds spewing out of her in a rush, forced past some unseen barrier.

One of her boys—gymrat muscles and a bright red Mohawk—stepped forward and leveled his pistol at Max. “Make it stop or I’ll shoot!” he screamed in his ear. Max’s eyes were as wide as the rest of us. He shook his head very slowly back and forth to say
Not me.

A moment later, Mohawk Boy’s arm began to quiver like a diving board, his gun swinging up and down a tiny distance but an impossible speed. At that moment, he couldn’t have pulled the trigger if he’d wanted to. He stared wide-eyed at his own body shaking itself apart.

When I thought that phrase—
shaking itself apart
—it was just an expression. A moment later, it became reality. With a crack and a shriek, I saw something bulge up under the skin around Mohawk Boy’s elbow and his lower arm went limp; a moment later, something much bigger jerked upward through his shoulder blades and his whole arm fell. He cried in pain and reached over to grab his limp, useless right arm.

Fine pushed the muzzle of her gun right into my forehead. “I said
Stop
!” she yelled at Max but he  just shrugged helplessly.

Mohawk Boy’s arm hung limp at his side, but his gun hadn’t moved—it remained suspended in mid-air, shaking itself to bits, piece after piece splitting off, spitting away as though spontaneously disassembling. A moment later, the unruly stream burst high into the sky—all eyes following—and spiraled in a disorganized stream into the open grave at the top of the rise.

There was a new expression on Fine’s face—and nothing I could have expected. If the rest of us were mystified, Fine was suddenly angry with herself, guilty even, like this was something she should have foreseen.

Following her glance, I couldn’t miss the reed of a girl marching downhill out of the crowd of mourners. Tall, long face full of freckles, strong nose and dark hair glinting chestnut in morning light. Her expression was fierce. And nervous. Maybe even frightened. But determined. Let’s say she was hard to read. At very least, she was
confusing
to read.

Mohawk Boy was suffering pretty loudly. He made a kind of bleating noise and  the girl threw a piercing glance at him; immediately there was a loud crack at his knee and he buckled to the ground. This time, the bone actually poked through the skin. The other L Corps all predictably leveled their guns at her for a moment, until they leapt out of their hands and performed a lovely ellipse, high into the air and down into the grave, following the remains of Mohawk Boy’s pistol.

 “
No more guns
,” the girl ordered, in a voice shaking, barely under control.  “
No more fighting
.” She stopped and glanced at us and her gaze wavered uncertain for about a fifth of a second. Then she turned her attention back to the L Corp crew, whose goggles, cell phones and car keys flew into the air and joined their other toys in the now-crowded grave above. A moment later, the pile of earth next to the grave began to pour with rising force into the hole.

Mohawk Boy was writhing on the ground, crying out and trying to push his bones back where they belonged. He kept staring at Fine, pleading, but Fine ignored him—her angry frustrated gaze remained locked on the chestnut-haired girl, who coolly returned it. I saw a flash of something almost like amusement on her face for just a moment. “Take your clothes off,” she ordered, in the tone of voice the librarian used to tell you
no talking
in the stacks.

“You don’t—” Fine began but her jumpsuit began unzipping on its own and her shoelaces immediately unraveled and tied themselves together until she fell helplessly over onto the grassy hill. The girl gave the others a sharp glance and they proceeded without further argument to unbutton and unzip.

“When you’re finished,” she told them, “you can walk back to your hotel.”

She turned her attention to us. “That should slow them down—I have a bag in my trunk,” she said, pointing to an old Honda parked a few yards away. “We should go before they call for reinforcements, right?” We all scrambled up the hill to her car, while she collected the L Corp clothes and threw them into our trunk.

~~~~

Tauber drove—it was his turn. I rode shotgun, Max and our passenger slid into the back seat. She seemed in a daze for several minutes, just staring at the seatback in front of her. When she started to recover herself, she drew up into some kind of parody of perfect posture. All at once, she really was the sexy librarian.

“They’re from something called the L Corporation,” she said finally, the words arriving in spurts. “It’s supposed to be some kind of consulting group but—”

“We’ve met,” Tauber said, adjusting the rear-view mirror to get a better look at her.

“The operations head is Pietr Volkov,” she added, staring at Max. “You should know him.”

Max nodded. “Again, we’ve met—just recently, in fact.”

Her eyebrow went up. “You think in English.”

“I was raised to be an American,” Max smiled his best smile, which was still not so hot. Another lull followed—the young woman seemed to drift away from us again. Then, all at once, she looked around startled and thrust her hand at me like an insurance agent on the make. “I’m Kate Crowell,” she said. “You were with Dave Monaghan?”

“Yes.” Here was another one who read your mind as deadpan as Max. By now, that was only a little shock.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “When did they kill him?”

“Three days ago.”

“First thing in the morning,” she said, although it was a question, not a statement. I nodded. “That’s when they ran my father over. Outside the supermarket. Stolen car, hit and run.” Her voice cracked in the middle but she just pushed past it.

“Did they catch the driver?”

“I just did.”

“The guy back at the cemetery?”

“Yes. He did it.” Each word seemed to come out of her as a separate effort.

“So you broke every bone in his body,” Max said, a judgment in his voice.

“I didn’t,” she answered, voice quivering. Every eye in the car must have gone wide at that, because she gathered herself up in protest. “I didn’t do anything.” She turned with a forced brightness to Tauber. “You’re Mark—you knew my father.”

“Yeah,” Tauber said, “he was a good ‘un. One of the best.”

“That’s not what you mean to say,” she said and waited for more.

“He…he was a full dose. An adult portion.” Tauber’s cheeks colored as he laughed and she followed, though everything she did seemed a little vacant. The way it would be if you’d just buried your father.

“And you—I know all about you,” she said, returning to Max.

“I doubt that.”

“My father went down to Washington when they debriefed you. The program was over but he still had a few friends—he pulled strings just to watch. He was so excited—he was going to see Renn!”

“He just wanted to see the horns on my forehead,” Max flashed his horrible smile again. “He was interested in seeing someone else like him—someone else like you.”

“You’re somethin’, sweetie,” Tauber crowed. “You’re just what we’ve been needin’.”

Kate started at that, throwing an alarmed look around the car.

“Whoa—wait a minute,” she said, hands raised in protest. ”Let’s get something straight. I don’t do this stuff. My dad’s been calling me for weeks to do research for him—I’m in school in Philadelphia and he’s useless on the Internet—
was
useless.”

Her eyes fluttered. She tucked her chin up and plunged ahead.

“He and Dave Monaghan worked themselves up about this whole L Corp business. They went into spasms about something every couple years. Except I guess they got it right this time. So I have his research and the notes I took for him. I’ll share them with you. But after that, I’m going back. To School. Where I belong.”

 “That’s what I said the other day,” Max told her. “That I wasn’t getting involved.”

 “We need ya,” Tauber drawled. “This is a big fight we’re in. With what you did back there—”

“I have no
idea
what I did back there!” Kate burst and shrunk back into her seat, defiant and guilty at once. “Look, I’ve seen what happens to…people like you. Nobody wants you running loose. Nobody trusts you.”