Mindbenders (26 page)

Next, in a progression I could barely understand,  everything amplified and deepened. I jumped, all at once,
inside
the young man—feeling what
he
was feeling; rapid heartbeat and shallow rabbit’s breath, desperation and fear, fear of failure and fear of success. I could feel him now, somewhere just across the traffic island, moving through the crush, arms folded in front of his chest, sheltering the package there, the wires and plastic leading off the detonator on his chest. Suddenly I was pushing hard at the crowd, clearing them away rudely, sharply, yelling louder and moving faster. Kate and Tauber branched out behind me, apparently reacting to the same vision.

Max was ahead of us, moving fast—of course, people just got out of his way. He plunged into traffic, tipping his hand at a black-suited officer, who waved him on. The same cop jumped to stop us when we arrived three seconds later. “Max!” I shouted. I saw him turn, just a glance over his shoulder;  the officer straightened like a ramrod and got the hell out of the way.

“Over there!” Max yelled, pointing toward the terminal exits. “Spread out!” The bomber was moving across the grain of the crowd and I kept riding his feelings. It was like a late-night drive, trying to hold onto a staticky distant radio broadcast that kept fading in and out—you held onto the fragments that made sense and tried to assemble the rest from context and guesswork. He wasn’t aware of us, the bomber wasn’t. He kept repeating the same frantic thoughts in succession.
Get there. Not too soon. Get there. Not too soon.
I kept waiting for something about the mission—the bomb, Singh,
something
—the kind of compulsion that could drive a person to suicide. But the connection ebbed instantly when I did, so I cleared my mind and returned to simply receiving what he was sending and following it. Necklaces and rings in the air rotated through his head in rotation with
Get there. Not too soon
.

A second later, I glimpsed a close-cropped haircut jerking through the crowd ahead and knew immediately this was him, this was the bomber, in plain sight, moving across the edges of the crowd where it was thinner and he could move faster. Tauber crossed over, moving to an angle where he could cut him off. I changed my angle to catch up behind them and threw myself through the crush. I could feel the boy’s desperation mounting, the sweat pouring down his face and chest, his hands twitching.
Too soon, too soon. She’ll be here soon.
His desperation matched my own. We’d come all this way and barely made it in time—
if
we were in time. Minutes to go—seconds? He still wasn’t aware of us—he wasn’t aware of anything now but her, the imminence of her. The plane had surely taxied in by now–she’d be at the gate anytime.

Tauber burst out of the crowd right behind the bomber, lifted his arms to grab him and—crack!— he was on the ground, writhing and quivering.  I was there a second later—I  reached for him but somehow managed to pull my hands back at the last second. The electricity made a crackling noise as it pulsed through his body. His skin was bluish and shimmering; the smell and sizzling noise were the same as in the back of Dave’s store in Florida.

Max rushed up, touched Tauber’s shoulder and the blue light drained off. “He’ll be okay,” he said. “Get after
him
!” The bomber had reached the edge of the traffic island—I could feel his satisfaction, a sense of finality, of relief. He’d made it. I anticipated his next step, jumping across traffic and making that last dash—a good run, but the last one—to the exit gate. To his target. But somehow, he stopped instead, lolling like he was right where he meant to be.

There was no one between us now. I ran, sprinting headlong, abandoning any concern about frightening or upsetting the crowd. But, with a couple yards to go, Max grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me to the curb to watch. We had a front-row seat for the scuffle that made the news—the camera crew, in fact, stood right in front of us.

Five or six guys came from nowhere, swarming the bomber, wrestling and throwing him to the ground, pinning his arms behind him to eliminate any chance of tripping wires or throwing triggers. His shirt came open and the squares of plastic explosive on his chest, the wires and battery taped there, were suddenly visible to all. The crowd started to shriek and scatter in every direction. The panic spread like an infection through the crowd, starting close-by and gushing out in all directions, becoming more desperate with distance, blindness always worse than the most terrible sight.

Max pulled me the short distance back to Tauber—Kate was helping him regain his footing. His hair was sticking out in all directions and he was hissing like a dry cleaner.

“Are you alright?” Max asked.

“Fuck no, I’m not alright! What the hell happened?”

“You took a lightning bolt. I guess Marat can temper them enough to knock you over without killing you.”

“Ain’t that
genteel
of ‘im!” Tauber growled. He kept trying to lean against the lamppost but sparks kept flickering from his fingers when they got close together.

“I think the air shield would have protected you, if we’d known” Max offered, not that he sounded real confident.

“
Frying
him first would protect me!” Tauber yelled. “Torching him down to his shoes would protect me!” They were arguing in the midst of a riot, understand—people rushing by, screaming, others rooted, paralyzed, watching the guards struggling with the bomber. He was still flailing and kicking, the whole group staggering back and forth until they finally tied his hands and clamped their own arms solidly around his neck and waist. Then the team lifted the bomber entirely off the ground, a van pulled up with perfect timing and they dragged him inside, shouting and protesting.

As the van made its way out of the square, the crowd seemed to get the message. Applause rippled through the courtyard and followed the van, lights flashing and siren whooping, as it pulled out of sight. We stood, deflated, in the midst of the cheering crowd, staring at each other blankly.

“So?” Kate said. “Are we done? Is that what we came for?”

People were filtering back into the square now that the drama had ended. We wandered to the corner where the guards had overpowered the bomber. Bits of wire and one brand-new Nike sneaker remained at the curb.

“Expensive shoe,” I said, “for an anarchist.”

“Too far away,” Tauber growled, gauging the distance to the gate. “Couldn’a done much damage from here if he wanted to.”

“He wanted to,” Kate said. “He
had
to. He was panicked, running late, frantic to make up time, I could feel it. Though, once he got here, he was totally confused, like he didn’t know the next step.”

“That’s not what
I
got,” I said and suddenly they were all staring at me.

“What did
you
get?” Max asked.

“What you sent! Wait—you mean you
weren’t
sending out his thoughts? For us to pick up?”  Max shook his head immediately. “Then what
was
I getting?”

“What did you read?” he repeated and the sound of his voice reverberated inside my head.

“
Get there. Too soon
. He was panicked about being
early
—and, once he got here, to this corner, he was satisfied. He’d done it—reached his goal. He knew it—it was very clear to me.” Kate shook her head, listening and all I could do was shrug. “I’m probably wrong, I don’t have the power like you guys. In my head, he kept thinking about
jewelry
.” Every eyebrow went up. “Big red stones.”

“I didn’t get anything about jewelry,” Kate offered.

 “Ruby Red,” Tauber said but it was a question and I nodded. He turned to Max immediately. “It’s a control—rubies. Like the lapel pins.”

Max stared, mulling for another moment—then he wheeled on Kate. “Could you see his face?”

“What do you mean?”

“The image you got from him. Was the camera on him—or was he the camera?”

“Oh, he was the camera, for sure. I saw what
he
was seeing, the street in front of him.”

“And you?” he turned on me next, fierce and rushed. “What did you see?”

“I saw his face, sometimes,” I answered. “Sometimes closer , sometimes further. Sometimes from the side, sometimes from behind.” I panicked a little, replaying it all in my head. “I must have got it wrong. How could he see the back of his own—?”

I didn’t get the chance to finish the sentence.

“Come on!” Max cried,  jumping against the flow of the crowd, leading us at a tear away from the terminal.

We rushed headlong toward the outer edge of the square. As we went, Ciampino’s exit gate opened and the first motorcycle came through, siren wobbling. A solid row of caribineri took up positions alongside the gate and another motorcycle followed. That was when the chant started, voices rising from every part of the courtyard. “Pace” and “Friede,” “Paix,” “Paz” “Peace” and other variations, one chanted after the next, call and response like gospel church.

This was not the roaring crowd demagogues (and most politicians) hope for—this was a strong, individual voicing, quiet, respectful, gaining strength with every repetition, with the power of the same idea in fifty languages in close proximity. Scanning the faces as we ran past, I couldn’t say that these were really hopeful faces. Mournful seemed more accurate. Maybe they just hoped to be hopeful, hoped for the chance someday to feel hopeful again.

And then the gate opened and the motorcade came through, four Mercedes limos followed by two more rows of motorcycles. One flipped its siren, a momentary honk and the crowd hushed for a second but the chant continued immediately, almost a whisper. And, a moment later, a hand extended from the rear window and waved a thumbs up.

“This way!” Max said. He led us across a blinding marble courtyard and through the echoing lobby of an office building onto the street beyond. He hailed a cab and gave the driver an address and some directions. We hurtled off as soon as the doors closed behind us.

“Where are we going?”

“To the bomber’s apartment,” Max whispered.

“How do you know where he lives?” I asked. He just shot me a look like
Have you been paying attention the last week?
and I moved on. “Why are we going  there?”

“Because of what you saw.”

“I probably saw it wrong.”

 “Maybe,” he said. “Let’s find out.”

It took us fifteen minutes in traffic to get where we were going. Rome is a beehive—the traffic moves slowly but comes from everywhere, cars feeding in from sidestreets, alleys, driveways and thoroughfares built on twenty separate levels, buses and cars crowding through insanely small openings and motor scooters like mosquitoes buzzing around everything else at random. Traffic lights were obeyed as much by coincidence as duty. Blocks of buff-colored sixteenth-century apartments nestled between sleek glass office towers curving around an arch built in the year 2 (II) to honor the Roman Conquest of the Week.

At one point, the wide shopping thoroughfare we were on, lined with cypress trees in neat rows, sidewalk cafes and leather and haute couture boutiques, changed without warning or transition to a one-lane brick shelf descending three stories across the face of an ancient stone wall, dropping to a narrow cobblestoned roadway twisting through the middle of a pruned, manicured park—all in the space of a quarter mile—before dumping us in the midst of a working-class neighborhood filled with grimy apartment houses,
trattorias
and a spectacular domed temple built before Christ to a God I’d never heard of and restored later by a Pope I’d never heard of in commemoration of an apostle I’d never heard of.

All this to reach a pretty ordinary-looking block of apartments built above a Laundromat, an electronics store and a local flea market offering sheets, plumbing supplies and live ducks and pigs for on-the-spot slaughter.

“We’ve got a problem,” Max said as the cab stopped. A pair of carabinieri stood all puffed-up outside the front door. We loitered, stymied, wandering into the stores to keep from being too obvious.

“We’ve got to find a way in,” Max said as we lingered among the IPods and laptop computers, electric pasta makers (in Italy?) and the latest digital cameras. “The caretaker’s in the basement. He’s already trying to figure out how to turn this unfortunate boarder into cash.” He pulled a couple of hundred-Euro notes out of his pocket. “But we need an excuse to get in there without alarming the cops. You know, normal everyday graft.”

“You couldn’t just suggest they leave us alone?”

“Suggestions are short-term; when they remember, they get very pissed. Not good pissing off cops, especially if you need them later.”

I’d been admiring a really nice digital video camera behind the counter, sizing up  the detachable microphone and the very nice zoom lens. That’s when I had one of those cartoon moments, the thought balloon with the exclamation point going off right over my head. “It’s a
story
!”

“What is?”

“The apartment—the bomber. Billy asked me if I was covering the summit. I’m a reporter, remember? At least I was. We got this guy’s address from a source and we’re checking it out.”

“If you’re the reporter,” Kate demanded, “who are
we
?”

It took a two-second glance at this group to answer the question. “
You’re
the reporter,” I told her. “I’m your producer, Max is cameraman and Mark is audio.” I pulled Max’s bogus credit card out of my back pocket, gesturing at the counterwoman and the video camera.

Five minutes later, we tramped around the back of the apartment house, skirting the edges of a deep pit covered by heavy planks and rubber sheeting. The pit filled the space between the rear walls of several adjoining houses. Kate threw a curious look at the spades and brushes stacked against the outer wall as we went by.

“Keep the lens on wide-angle,” I told Max. “It’ll keep the picture from shaking too much. Get as close as you can to your subject. If you want a wider shot, back up but remember, it’s TV—closeups still read better across the room.” I knocked on the door several times before a slightly feral face appeared, bearing that universal hungry look. That hunger was a great reassurance.