Mindbenders (23 page)

She saw Max’s eyes on her and she reddened.

“I had a hard time making friends, okay? I was the eerie girl in middle school who talked to herself and commented on
what people were thinking
instead of what they’d said out loud. Eventually, you make use of your advantages. I started getting into boy’s heads. It got me a better class of dates.” She laughed and placed her cup in the sink. “Anyway, when I got inside the guy across the street, I found out about the big operation—he’s doing security for the flight.”

“There’s a flight?” Tauber asked.

“Definitely,” Kate answered. “More than one—he’s in charge of his and two others. And there’s more besides.”

“Then they’re not goin’ to Langley,” Tauber concluded.

“Langley? That’s CIA, right?” Kate said. “It’s always in the movies.”

Max nodded. “This whole thing’s tied up with the CIA somehow. But nobody’s flying from Herndon to Langley—it’s ten miles.”

“What was weird was, he was doing security and they didn’t give him the details. All he knew was, it’s soon—”

“Tomorrow—”

“—they told him to bring his passport and warm weather clothes for a week. And they told him,
This is the big shot. We won’t get another chance like this for years
.”

“A chance for what? Did they tell him that?”

“To kill hope. That’s what they said, to kill hope everywhere.”

“That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Tauber said. “If they kill hope, what’s Avery got to offer ‘em?”

The room went silent for awhile. Then I heard myself speaking. “What he’s offering is a
fix
,” I said. They all turned to look at me and damned if I had any idea what I wanted to say but that didn’t stop the words from coming.

“My outfit had a local guy, a translator, in Najaf. He was real useful when we first got there and everybody was friendly. Six months later, everybody—Sunnis, Shiites—started targeting his family because he was helping the Americans. We had to smuggle them all to Jordan. He applied for a visa to the States and our CO promised to help him get it.

“And then word filtered down that they—whoever ‘they’ were—weren’t processing visas, not fast, and then not ever. Which didn’t stop him from showing up in my quarters every couple days, bugging
me
about it. ‘Are they helping me? We getting a visa?’ What was I supposed to say? ‘It’s America,’ I told him. ‘They’ll do the right thing.’ After the fourth or fifth time, no way either of us believed it.  

“But it ate at me. Why didn’t he go to the CO? Why me? The answer is, because I’m not tough—never been. He came to me because I’d tell him what he wanted to hear. I gave him his fix, his hope for the week. I felt like a pusher, too. Who made
me
a spokesman for America?”

I could feel the memory burning inside, like it had just happened, like it was happening right
now
. My fists and teeth were clenched tight. “That’s what Avery’s doing—offering everybody their fix.”

We filtered around for a while, aimless, each of us wandering around the room, uncertain of the next step.

“It makes sense,” Max finally said. “It’s what Avery told us—supply
and
demand. If they kill hope, he’s got this huge organization designed to offer it—for a price.”

“And it’s so much safer sellin’ measured portions to them that can afford it,” Tauber said. “Real hope’s messy. Unruly. Bad business.”

“But what does the CIA have to do with it?” Kate asked.

“Five minutes talkin’ to them’ll kill any hope ya got left,” Tauber cracked and we all smiled. But the joke didn’t get us any closer to an answer.

The TV was in front of me; I wasn’t thinking of escape or boredom. I wasn’t interested in what was on. If there’s a TV in front of me, I pick up the remote and turn up the sound. Thirty seconds later, I change the channel. It’s what I do. It’s the way I survived Iraq and a year in the middle of a swamp and probably my childhood. So now I did it again, just out of habit.

“Preparations continued for tomorrow’s G8 Summit in Rome,” the announcer droned, trying to sound important if not exciting. “Demonstrations were held on four continents today in support of Indian Premier Aryana Singh’s proposal for worldwide nuclear disarmament. Rome police are out in force, covering the major squares and thoroughfares to keep the demonstrations from spiraling into unruliness.”

“There, ya see?” Tauber cracked. “Unruliness! Them bastards have
hope
!”

“Tomorrow’s arrivals of foreign dignitaries have been moved to Rome’s Ciampino Airport, a rigidly-secured military facility. Authorities have assured foreign governments that…”

My eyes must have gone huge. Kate saw it from across the room. “What?” she demanded.

“We’ve got it all wrong,” I said and Max slapped his forehead across the room, reading me.

“Got
what
wrong?”

“Everything. CIA!”

“They’re behind it?” Tauber barked. “Against it?”

“Neither. It’s not
the
CIA. It’s just CIA—the
airport
is CIA!” I ran to Kate’s computer and punched up Google. “I flew into Ciampino once on leave. The airport code—the three letter ID on your luggage?” I waited a second for the information to display. “Ciampino is CIA.”

“And IAD?”

I scanned down the list. “Dulles.”

“They’re flying to Rome tomorrow,” Tauber said. “From Dulles to the G8.”

“To
kill hope
,” Kate murmured, staring at the TV, where Singh was addressing a raucous crowd from a balcony in New Delhi.

“We seek a new world,” her voice echoed across the square. “In our lifetime, we have seen walls dissolve between East and West. Now it is time to continue that work, to push down the walls of fear between us, to keep pushing until no more walls are left. This is a long road but, as the philosopher says, every journey must begin with a first step.”

The crowd cheered.

“Them bastards have
hope
,” Max repeated quietly. “We’re going to need passports.”

~~~~

Twelve

We left for New York around two in the morning. Kate had locked herself in her room for a couple of hours, the sound of her crying surfacing every once in a while, whenever she lifted her face out of the pillow. Max went out in the afternoon, saying he was ‘going hunting,’ whatever that meant—he returned twenty minutes later, talked to Tauber a minute and went right out again. When Kate finally emerged, eyes bloodshot and suspended between collapse and explosion, Tauber quietly said, “If we’re boardin’ an international flight with no suitcases, they’ll have us in the interrogation room in about half a second.” When Kate looked up, he waved a stack of fifties in her face—apparently Max had done another bank run.

She dragged us out shopping and spent the evening expertly packing suitcases in the living room, refusing to let any of us help. But when Max finally returned at 11 with Chinese and said we’d soon be ready to go, she boiled over.

“I’m totally unreliable. I’ll be a danger to you all. I don’t know what I’m doing till I’ve done it. And I won’t be any good in a fight. There are things I’m not willing to do, even to my enemies.”

“Breaking every bone in their bodies should get us through most situations,” Max answered drily and Kate surprised herself by breaking into laughter.

“That’s very reassuring,” she said.

Tauber returned from down the block with a very lived-in hearse.

“This won’t attract attention?”

“They’ll notice ya but nobody’s gonna stop ya,” he smirked.

“Here’s your passports,” Max announced, handing each of us a packet of several. “Use the American ones for now.”

“Keep no more’n one on ya at a time,” Tauber cautioned. “The rest go in yer suitcase. Invent a good backstory for yourself, a history. Nothin’ fancy, just simple so we can all remember.”

The little blue books looked very realistic—mine had several pages of dog-eared destination stamps.

“Are these for real?” Kate asked.

“The guy who made them is the CIA’s guy in Philadelphia,” Max explained. “He has the real machines.”

“So they’re real.”

“No. The serial numbers come from dead people whose passports haven’t expired and a couple of variations in the holograms make them forgeries. So they’re just wrong enough that the government can deny us.” He smiled. “Does that make me a patriot?”

“Will he remember making them once the suggestion runs out?”

“No suggestion,” Max said. “It would have worn off before the G8 ends, so not a good idea.” He held up the chain with the ID card and BMW key fob. “I told him it was L Corp business. They’re the fair-haired boys these days, so he’ll make sure he forgets.”

Halfway up the Jersey Turnpike, everybody had settled in. Tauber and Max were lights-out in the back seat, Tauber with his arms crossed over his chest like a mummy, Max rousing with tremors every few minutes, taking a drowsy look around and settling back to sleep.

Kate rocked slightly in the passenger seat, humming to herself but staring at me every once in a while. “What does he want?”

“Who?”

“Renn.” She was rolling around in the seat, giving me the girly eye. I’d taken a few peeks at her too, though the memory of her breaking the guy’s bones at the graveyard (and knowing she could read my thoughts) kept me respectful. She was pretty in a distracted tomboy sort of way, the girl who didn’t pay attention to her own looks. Which, in the real world, meant she was pretty enough not to have to—and knew it.

“I don’t know. It’s a big question,” I asked.

She ran her finger up the side window of the car—it had started to rain again; we’d been moving through showers the whole way. “Well, that’s the hard part, isn’t it? To know what you want.”

She reminded me of Tess all of a sudden, which didn’t make sense; they didn’t look at all alike. Maybe it was just the way we were talking, softly, the rain patting on the roof, like lovers after bed.

 “I’ve seen how you pay attention—to everything,” she observed. “You’re a watcher. You have to know
something
about him.”

I was a little annoyed she wasn’t more interested in
me
. “I know who he is,” I said firmly and she sat up. “He’s a superhero who wants to be a person, but he’s not really cut out for either one.” She didn’t seem impressed, though I thought I was reasonably brilliant.

The overhead lights rolled across the windshield like the drum lights on a copy machine. The rain came in bursts and other cars hovered in ragged clusters every couple miles.

“What do you remember?” she asked after ten minutes of silence.

“What?”

“That’s your problem, isn’t it? Remembering?”

“It’s one of my problems.”

“So what do you remember?”

I wanted her to be interested in me but then I went all suspicious when she was. That’s what I got for the kind of company I was keeping. But the look on her face drew me in. She had power and she was the first one in this whole crew to ask me the slightest thing about myself. She cared—I could see it, just looking at her. Max kept telling me not to worry about how I knew things anyway, right? Just
know what you know
—I could hear him voice pounding that line into my head. I felt like I knew Kate—and I trusted her. She could probably find out more about me in three seconds than I knew myself—if she wanted to.

“What do I remember?
Lots
and nothing. I remember being a kid—riding a bike, stacking hay in a field and binding it. I remember the porch and the steps and the dark green screens over the window but I can’t remember where we lived, not even what state. I remember sitting in the kitchen with my mother, singing Doobie Brothers songs along with the radio. I remember she’d cut her hair short and I remember her dress—some bright orange thing with a big swirly pattern on it—but I can’t see her face. How can I not remember my mother’s face?” The images were there always, fragments, bits and pieces that didn’t add up to anything bigger, any sort of whole. They were always there behind my eyes, behind every conscious thought. “I remember women—dates, my arm around some girl at a movie, parked in the high weeds in my car. I remember the dashboard light and the feel of some girl’s blouse, her perfume and the taste of her neck. And the crickets,
so
loud. But it’s flashes and feelings, nothing…complete. What do you remember?”

“Of my life?” she asked, confused.

“Of
my
life,” I said. “You’re the mindreader, right? You see any more than I do?”

“I’m not much of a mindreader,” she answered, “But—can I touch your forehead?”

I pulled away. “I don’t like anybody touching me,” I insisted though it wasn’t true. I was just instinctively afraid of her opening me up like Pandora’s Box. Of course, as soon as I thought it, she read it.

“I’m nothing to be scared of,” she said. “I backed into this thing.”

She smiled and it was a blushing, half-shy, real smile, not that gargoyle smile of Max’s. “I’ll look inside if you want—it’ll be as much of an adventure for me as for you.” Then she stopped and I could see her play back what she’d just said; she cackled a moment later. “I guess that
does
sound a bit scary,” she admitted but I was already over it.

In the highway light, she was unbearably lovely. Her green eyes just seemed to soak me up. She’d been waiting, waiting for someone—why couldn’t it be me?

“I want to help you,” she breathed in an impossibly soft voice, “but you have to let me touch you.”

If she’d told me to shoot myself in that tone of voice, I couldn’t have said no.  

She put her fingers to my temples and I got an instant erection. A long blast screeched from a truck horn right alongside  and I swerved back into our lane. “Sorry,” she said, reddening. “I—I didn’t…I never know when I’m going to do that to a guy.”

“You mean …that happens a lot?”

“Not always…but…with some guys, yeah, every time.”

“You must be very popular,” I said and she giggled.  She reached for my temples again; ohh did I not want to resist but I had to pull away.