Mindbenders (22 page)

“People like
us
?” Tauber said. “Honey, we’re people like
you
.”

“I am a graduate student in Museum Planning,” Kate insisted, talking right over him. “I have a life and a boyfriend. As soon as I finish my thesis, I’ve got six good institutions that want me.”

 “You are the possessor of very powerful forces and senses, more powerful than 99% of the population. If you don’t—” Max paused, looking at his lapel. A funny smell filled the car.

“I spent my whole childhood getting disciplined,” Kate rattled on, “for things I didn’t mean to do. My parents got in the way of every good date I had, because they thought I gave boys crushes on me. I didn’t even know—”

“Stop,” Max said.

“What good is it anyway? The things you find out, no one even wants to know. It’s like—”

“STOP!!”

Kate flinched. “Stop what?” We all seemed to notice the smoke at the same time.

“You’re burning a hole in my shirt,” Max said. A little plume of blue steam was rising from the corner of his breast pocket.

“I’m not,” Kate whispered, pulling her head back into her shoulders.

“You may not be aware of it,” Max said, “but…you are,” and he tamped the smoke out with his finger.

Kate gulped hard and jerked her head sideways into the window. “Dammit! I’m not…Shit!” She clamped her arms across her chest. “I’m—
beyond
all this!” She dissolved into tears, drawing herself into the corner of the chair. Max offered a hand on her shoulder, but of course he didn’t have the touch for it and she wasn’t interested anyway.

We headed north through Harrisburg. The highway whittled down a few lanes due to construction and we crawled for a while. Max probably could have made everybody pull out of the way if he wanted, but it seemed like everyone needed to breathe, to regain a sense of the world around.

“Are we going somewhere?” Tauber asked finally.

“I’m not sure yet, just keep moving,” Max said. “They don’t know where we’re going.”

“Well, neither do
we
,” Tauber answered, “so they’re on the money.” Max shot him a look.

“Where’s the rest of your team?” Kate asked, ending a long silence. “Who else is working with you?”

Long pause.

“It’s—it’s just us,” I said.

Recognition broke over her face in waves. Disbelief came first. She searched our faces, to confirm we were serious. Then she started to laugh, almost against her will. “Are you kidding?”

“No,” Max sighed. That was when reality swept over me all at once. I’d been so caught up in what we were doing, in the energy and activity of it, I’d lost track of just how crazy the whole idea was. The ring in her question was reality and it wasn’t pretty.

“Do you know who these guys are?” she demanded. “I mean, anything these companies say in public record is meant to mislead and L Corp
admits
to thirty billion annual revenue. They opened the doors six years ago, supposedly for political consulting but last year wasn’t even an election year, at least not in this country. So it’s either Defense or they’re selling drugs—who else makes that kind of money that fast? They had a couple guys camped around my house the last few days—I figured, if they were trying to get inside my head, I’d get inside theirs first. They’re serious, they’ve got big resources and big backers and some big deal happening really soon.”

“Tomorrow,” Tauber said.

Kate’s eyebrows went up like exclamation points.

“You know that? For a fact?”

She kept looking back and forth from one to the next of us. You could feel the air leaking out of the car. She stared out the window, tapping her knuckles against it like a drummer.  

“I have an apartment,” she said finally, “in Philadelphia. Dad never visited me, so they couldn’t have gotten the address from him. You should be safe there overnight.” She made a disgruntled count of the company. “Someone’s going to have to sleep in the bathtub,” she announced.

~~~~

Her apartment was in what looked like a very dignified old garage. “It’s a mews,” her voice echoed as she opened the huge door—someone had built it some time ago to fit the ornate archway on the street. “We’re tracing back the documents—I know it’s at least two centuries old but that’s as far as we’ve gotten.” The neighborhood was one of those arty places where everything looks a little rundown but one neighbor stacks huge paintings in his window while the sound of a jazz band drifts out of the next.

The TV was on when she opened the front door. The two spooks, Tauber and Max, immediately went stiff and cautious, moving through the place door to door, throwing open and checking each room thoroughly before relaxing. Kate walked calmly past them into the kitchen to make coffee.

“Steve leaves the TV on all the time—when he’s here, when he’s gone. It’s his imaginary friend.”

“Steve?” I asked.

“My boyfriend.”

“You live together?” Max demanded. The tone of voice said he wasn’t convinced there was no threat. “He stays here even when you’re gone?”

“Well—he and Morgan were here. They’re away this weekend.” She hesitated for a moment. “She’s my roommate—Steve’s with her too,” she said with a little hesitation.

“So he’s the
apartment
boyfriend,” I remarked and Tauber shot me a look. Kate just nodded and went back to her coffee. “Do you have tea?” Max asked and she nodded and ran water into a kettle.

“They won’t barge in on us?” Max asked. “The roommate and…your boyfriend?”

“They’re gone till Monday,” Kate answered wistfully, kindling a questioning look on Max’s face.

There was an artist’s easel propped against a corner, holding a book of drawing paper. Max tore off a page.

“We’re going to spread out on the table,” he announced, setting Kate scrambling to move a pile of academic journals onto the floor before he could upend them. Max spread the paper across the surface. Kate pulled out a speckled journal out of the side pocket of her suitcase and opened it to a page marked by a yellow stickie.

“These are my father’s notes from his talks with Dave, my notes from our conversations and my research. I can’t promise they’re word for word but the gist should be right.”

The pot started to whistle. Kate turned but Tauber held up his hand. “You stay, sweetie,” he said. “I can make tea—and coffee.”

“My hero,” she answered. She opened her book and started reading out loud. Each major point she made, Max jotted on the sheet, lines drawn between known connections and dotted lines between suspected or hypothetical ones. It was a familiar list—L Corp, using mindbenders to bolster candidates and business clients, an army of low-level mindbenders to send out mental suggestions and the Big Scheme coming soon.

“There’s not much new here,” Tauber said when she’d finished. The table was a nice mess of papers and coffee mugs, doodles on art paper and lots of names with arrows pointing at other names pointing at question marks, mostly because we didn’t really know a whole lot more than we did before.

“What did you do to the shooters at the cemetery?” Max asked again. When she didn’t answer immediately, he explained, “You made their guns fly away. They got naked without a peep.”

“Can’t you do that?”

“I want to know how
you
did it. Their goggles were supposed to hold down outside influences like us.”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“You usually make guns fly around without knowing what you’re doing?”

“I don’t usually deal with people with guns!” she answered, again as though fighting to get the words out. Or fighting to control herself.

“So you took their guns—and cell phones,” Max said. “And goggles. And clothes. And you broke the killer’s bones.” Having seen her temper, I wouldn’t have kept pushing this point but that didn’t stop him.

“I—I didn’t,” Kate protested again. A long moment passed, the two staring each other down across the table. Then she added, “Not on purpose. He really did kill my father! It was in his head. He drove the car himself, so no one would botch the job. He ran over him twice to make sure he couldn’t survive and then just drove off.” The tears were brimming but she fought them off stubbornly, heroically. A long moment passed in silence.

 “But
not on purpose
isn’t the same as
I didn’t do it
, is it?” Max said finally. “What did you know when you marched down that hill into the face of six people with serious guns and bad intent?”

“I knew I was sick of guns,” she answered fiercely. “I knew you were coming from Dave.”

“How did you know that?”

“He told my father that, if anything happened to him, you’d be coming.” This was a shock to me but Max just smiled, as though it confirmed something he’d already been thinking.

“And what
else
did you know?” he said,  voice softening.

“Why is it so important?”

“If you’re really fooling yourself that you didn’t make those things happen, I need to know it.”

“You don’t need to know anything about me.”

“And if you broke his bones at ten feet without meaning to, I would think
you’d
better know it. People like us can’t afford illusions about ourselves.”

“Why? The psychiatrists are all booked up?” She was building up a slow boil again; I started looking for a soft place to land.

Max eyes flared. They seemed to draw up into his skull. I felt his voice coming at me through the floorboards.

“Our illusions have consequences. They have a way of becoming real.”

Kate’s face went paler, if such a thing were possible. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Where is this boyfriend of yours? Where’s your roommate?”

“I—I told you. They—they went camping. They made plans... a long time ago.”

“You just buried your father.”

“You can’t expect them to feel the way I do.”

“I could expect them to go to the funeral for your sake.” Kate’s jaw was set but her eyes were nowhere near as confident. “Does Morgan share Steve with you when she’s around? Or are you the only one sharing?”

Max was inches from her now. His voice was so soft, I couldn’t believe I really heard it. I saw his lips moving but the words seemed to come from inside my head.

“Your feelings run very deep; they frighten you. Millions of people with the depth of a coat of varnish are frightened by their feelings. And you carry oceans—so I understand your caution.” He stared into Kate’s eyes like he was pulling her inside-out through them. “But instead of learning to deal with the power of them, you’ve gone into hiding. You’ve taken partners who don’t touch anything in you and given them free reign. It’s safe—you know they’re only using you for sex and company—you’re in no danger of feeling anything that could get out of hand. Your career keeps you at an academic distance from all of human history. You’ve got the illusion of a life but no nourishment. The longer you bottle those feelings up, the more powerfully they’ll spill out in the end.”

His eyes were hard on her and for a moment she looked stung, almost shamed. But then her face turned defiant. She took him on and stared him down.

“Funny-from what I’m reading, you’ve spent the last twenty years hiding—from
everything
.”

Max didn’t bend. “I said I understood—I didn’t say I was different.”

The place was quiet for a long moment before Kate gave out a long sigh.

“Okay,” she admitted, “when I came down the hill, I knew I wasn’t going to let them kill anyone else. And I knew I could
do
something about it.”

She was confiding now instead of confronting. But her voice gained strength as she went.

Tauber came out of the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and refilled the cups.

“Well now, that’s the thing, ain’t it? Knowin’ you can
do
somethin’ ‘bout it. There’s somethin’ big comin’ down in the next day or two and we seem to be the only ones in the world who can
do
somethin’ ‘bout it.” He clicked his cup into hers. “Yer daddy’d be with us if he was around.”

She was wavering, still conflicted. “They’re defense contractors. Let the government squeeze the purse strings—they can stop them.”

“They don’t need the government’s money.”

“They’ve got Jim Avery!” I burst.

“
Your World
? On TV?”

“He’s the bankroll,” Tauber said.

 “Hmph!” Kate puffed. “That’s some bankroll.”

“They’ve got all the connections in the world,” Max said, looking intently at her again. “No one will ever investigate your father’s death—or Dave’s. They’ll be papered over. No justice for them if we don’t make it ourselves.”

You could see this pound its way into her. She’d been holding herself in ever since the funeral and now every feeling in her simmered just an inch beneath the surface. Max sat up and his voice was straightforward, unemotional.

“I’ve spent twenty years,” he said, “hiding from what I am. Sounds like you’ve done the same. And we see the results: I’ve lost my best friend; you’ve lost your father.”

Kate was struggling now. “There’s got to be an answer,” she whispered. “There’s got to be hope.”

“Ya want Hope? Avery’ll sell it to ya, sixty bucks a barrel,” Tauber said with satire in his voice. “He’s the OPEC o’ Hope.”

Kate wheeled around so fast, we all jumped in place. “I’ve
heard
that!” she hissed. “Where did I—? From the man in the car! When I got home from… identifying Dad’s…body, I went into the kitchen to make coffee and I got this weird headache, like the back of my skull was hot. A probe. Dad used to probe me in high school, to make sure I hadn’t gone over some boy’s house.” Her voice wavered again and now she kept talking despite tears rolling down her cheeks. “It was the guy in the van parked across the street.”

“You can handle probes?” Max asked.

“I was a good girl,” Kate answered, lifting her chin. “When my parents made me promise never ever to do something, I only tried it a couple times.” She flashed a sly smile, almost despite herself. “Besides, I had to learn so I
could
go over the boy’s house, didn’t I?” Her smile faded fast. “So I followed the probe back to the guy across the street and started riding his thoughts, letting them carry me, for hours at a time.”