Mindbenders (27 page)

“GNN,” I told him in English, assuming like an arrogant American that he could speak it. “We want pictures. Video. TV.”  I held out my bogus passport without actually giving him time to read it. That’s all the look he’d have gotten if I’d had real ID. We tried to dance past him through the door but he stepped over to block it. He wasn’t big but he was built like an oak tree.

“Polizia is coming,” he said in accented but reasonable English.

“We want pictures,” I said. “
Before
the polizia come.”

“Polizia
statale
,” he clarified. “Especiale. They want everything very clean. Nobody sees nothing.”

His words said good citizen, his eyes read
hungry
. I pulled out 200 Euro and kept adding 50 Euro increments (slower and slower each time) until we reached 450 and he grabbed for the money. I pulled it back. “Fifteen minutes,” I told him.

“Fifteen,” he repeated with a look that said
450 Euro
.

“We don’t have fifteen minutes,” Max said as we went up the stairs. “Marat got into a cab just ahead of us—”

“You saw him?!” Tauber nearly lifted out of his shoes. “And you let the son-of-a-bitch get away?”

“It was more important to get here first,” Max answered. “Besides, I got this address when he gave it to his cab driver.”

“How’d we beat him here?”

“That unfortunate cab driver is temporarily seeing left as right and right as left. So Marat is now on the wrong side of town and getting into a new cab. He’s not stupid—he’ll call in reinforcements. We have approximately seven to ten minutes.”

“Give me the camera,” I told Max and he handed it over gratefully. “Nobody’s going to let us carry evidence out of here. We’ve got to document as much as we can.”

The room was a classic student clutter, a hovel, clothes piled on the ripped second-hand couch, Godard and Che on the wall, books and pamphlets in piles on the floor and bomb-making equipment spread across the table.

Tauber pulled a pair of latex gloves from a box and handed each of us a pair. “Put them on
now
. Nobody touches anything nekkid.” Then he set to work examining wires and diagrams.

Max wandered to the desk by the side window, and picked up a battered leatherette slipcase that was lying open. “The bomb maker was doing his bills,” he said.

“What?”

“He was writing checks—my Italian’s not perfect but it looks like the gas company, electric, telephone…” I jumped to the desk and got pictures of the ledger.

“Putting his affairs in order?” Kate offered.

“He’s a nihilist—he’s going out in a few minutes with a bomb strapped to his chest. He’s paying the phone bill?”

“This is even better,” Tauber said and we grouped around him. A pad of longwise European paper displayed bomb-making preparations, a diagram of the bomb, a scrawled map of the airport and scribbled notes around the edges. “He marked down his destination,” Tauber said. “Look
where
,” holding up the pad and angling it so I could get video. “He wasn’t even
trying
to reach the gate; his goal was the corner. Across the street. Several lanes of traffic between him and the target.”

“Too far away—you said so yourself,” Kate said.

“Only,” Tauber twinkled, “if ya actually intend to blow somebody up.”

“Look! The rubies!” Scribbles of the gems were all over the edges of the page, obsessively drawn and colored in with marker or something. I shot close-ups.

“Yeah,” Tauber nodded like this was no surprise. “Gems are a good control. Almost everybody sees rubies as the same shade—even if you’re color-blind, it’s a consistent, vivid shade o’gray.”

“And color,” Max cut in, “is a frequency, just like sound. So if you want to maintain control over somebody at a distance, you program them to replay the image in their heads over and over. It keeps them around the right frequency, so they keep receiving your suggestions.” He kept picking through the wire and clutter on the table, examining each bit and holding it out to the camera, moving rapidly. “This was a fall guy. They monitored him—”

“Who did?”

“That, we’ll see—I think we all know the prime candidate—they controlled and moved him around like a dog on a leash. Kate heard his panic—he had to reach the right spot on time but, when he did, he had no idea what to do, no further goal. It was all fed to him and now the feed dropped off.”

“So I
was
wrong.” I wasn’t surprised but a little disappointed. It sure felt like I’d been tapped into somebody.

“No—you were right too,” Max said and I was totally confused. “You, I’m certain, tuned into the
suggestion
—the signal from his minder, his runner. The guy whose job was to lead him to the wrong spot and abandon him there.”

This, strangely, was confounding. I had a much harder time accepting I’d succeeded than a few moments earlier accepting that I’d failed. “So I did it? I’m a mindreader?” I’d hardly
spoken
more than a few words a day the week before.

“Don’t get cocky,” Max said, rummaging through cabinets and drawers, pulling out papers and holding them under my camera for recording. “You picked up a specific mind intentionally beaming out a message. You’ve been around Tauber and me, you had to fight off Volkov and Marat and now we’ve got Kate and a bunch of drones trying to probe us. That’s a lot of activity all at once, so you’re getting stimulated. You probably live on the minder’s frequency anyway.” He looked me square in the eye. “But you paid attention,” he said. “Give yourself credit for that. And fix those rubies in the back of your mind—you may find them handy later on.”

“But what was the point?” Kate asked. “Why send out a bomber intentionally to get captured?”

“Good question,” Max said.

“Think of the damage he could’ve done if nobody’d stopped him,” she mused.

“He wouldn’t’a done shit,” Tauber said, holding up the bomb blueprints for us. I focused the camera on the drawings in the center, where he was pointing. “See?” he challenged Max, who stared at it blankly. “Didn’t they teach you
anything
in that program?”

“I told you, I resisted.”

“Shee—it!” The blueprints quivered in his hands but not as bad as they had the day before. “It was no bomb to begin with! Damn thing
couldn’t
go off the way they had it wired. No way, no how. Wiring’s all wrong.”

“Jesus,” Kate moaned. “What a sitting duck.”

 “Time’s up!” Max yelled suddenly, throwing another few documents under my lens for preservation. “We’ve got company.”

A moment later, we heard shouts and a crackle of electricity in the street below. Tauber started badly at the electrical sound; he had the door open before Max yelled “Go!”

 “Head for the staircase at the end of the hall!” Renn ordered but there was a stairwell just in front of us. Tauber and I both made for it, Tauber arriving just in time for a bolt of electricity to rip past his ear and blow a hole in the ceiling above. Leonardo light poured gloriously down through the billowing plaster. Tauber turned two shades paler than he already was and we scrambled backward.

Shouts and footsteps echoed up the stairwell, but Max came tearing around the corner, his arms swinging over his head and down the stairwell. He looked crazy at first but, then you could see the energy ball arcing through the smoky lightshaft and plunging down the metal staircase. The banisters buckled and bent, the steel latticework groaned and screeched and several steps collapsed, crushed like someone had dropped a steam roller. We heard the cries of shooters scrambling away as the ball bounced down into the lobby below, taking the rest of the staircase behind it.

Tauber gaped but Max simply pointed at the far end of the hall like this happened to him all the time. “
That
staircase, dammit!” Kate was already ahead of us, hitting the landing and disappearing down the shaft.

We bounded down two flights before the crunch hit. Kate went first, slipping-jumping as many steps as she could without falling, the rest of us a few rungs behind. We had just about made the lobby when a lightning bolt hit the staircase just above us, slicing it away from the wall. I looked up just long enough to catch Marat’s white hair and the arm of his dark robe flapping over the railing. The staircase groaned and began to list at a nasty angle. We stumbled on, the lobby just ahead.

That’s when I saw something that wasn’t there. Just like at the airport, that distant radio station began drifting in and out of my head again. This time, I knew what was happening, so I focused—
rubies, rubies
. I held that color, that frequency, vivid in my head and locked into the signal right away. And I found myself staring at the staircase—the staircase we were descending, except I was seeing it from the lobby just below.

The lobby where Marat and five L Corp guys with stun guns and anti-noise headsets waited to take us the moment we appeared. Marat and five others, including the guy whose head I’d just gotten inside of again.

Kate was inches from the last step. I threw myself into the air and grabbed her just above the last step, our momentum carrying us hard into the far wall. We flew through the doorway in two seconds—the third second, the place opened up, bullets and lightning bolts everywhere. We lay flattened on the floor, scrunched tight together as the place erupted.

In the fifth second, dead silence, except for the tinkling of glass hitting the floor. We were cramped into the corner behind the doorframe, staring across at Max and Tauber still clinging to the precarious staircase.

At the same time, I still saw the other angle as well, the same doorway but now from down the hall, through the eyes of my L Corp contact, as his crowd waited for us to show, for a clear shot at us.

“You wrecked the other staircase,” said a dry voice from down the hall. Through the L Corp side of my head, I could see the head blueshirt—a bullethead with a full red beard—talking and Marat slinking up behind him. How’d
he
get back downstairs if there was no other staircase? “So there’s no place else for you to go.”

“Like hell,” Max muttered. He and Tauber were hanging onto the monkey-bar staircase, their weight threatening to pull it down altogether at any moment.

“That’s all you got?” Max answered loudly, moving hand-over-hand very deliberately toward the landing. “Volkov offered three-quarters mill and a country house.”

“Offer?” Redbeard answered, sounding almost amused. “You’re taking
offers
?”

“We need an escape route before I run out of bullshit,” Max whispered. “Anyone has suggestions, now’s the time.”

The staircase shrieked and sagged sickeningly toward the outside wall of the building. If I’d ever heard that sound onboard a ship, I’d be looking for life rafts. The whole apparatus now hung entirely over the wide-open stairwell, Max and Tauber literally clinging to the handrails.

“The Italian police just want accomplices; you’re better off with us,” came Redbeard’s voice again.

I don’t know if Kate had risen to her feet or if I’d just lost track of her, but suddenly she was at the back of the stairwell, sheltered behind the doorframe, out of the line of fire, peering down into the dim landing.

“I think I can get a better offer,” Max yelled. In seconds, he and Tauber were either going to have to swing over onto the landing—in full view of our attackers—or plummet two stories down into the stairwell.

“I think you’re misinformed,” Redbeard answered drily, clearly close to the end of his patience.

 “It’s a plumb-bob!” Kate mumbled, talking to herself, gazing into the stairwell with an idiotic level of excitement.
It’s a cannon
, I’d have understood. A
plumb-bob
?

“Are we outside the walls of Rome?” she demanded.

“
What
walls?” Tauber rasped. His fingers were slipping; he was in no mood.

“The ancient city had walls!” she burst, like this was absurdly obvious. And, looking over the railing, I saw the plum-bob, conical, pointed, ridiculous, string looped over the doorknob two flights down. “We
have
to be outside the ancient city,” she muttered to herself.

“Time’s up, Renn! Come out or we come in!”

“What’s the
point
, Kate?”

 She was smiling now, which was insane. “We go,” she said softly.

“Go? Where?”

“
Down
,” she answered. She was already working her hands back and forth, in and out. A moment later, she leaned into the doorway and threw an air ball down the corridor. I had to grab the doorframe to keep from being sucked out after it. Marat’s team scattered in twenty directions as it flew between them, ripping pictures off the walls and pulling potted trees, newspapers, doormats, pairs of shoes and every bit of dirt and lint and paper in the hall into a crazy, swirling, rolling tide.

“Go!” Kate yelled, jumping brazenly across the landing into the stairwell. Max and Tauber swung and landed hard on the steps. We scrambled down two flights, breakneck, to the basement door. Max threw it open and then melted the lock, sitzing and sparking, behind us.

A rickety wood staircase plunged two
more
stories in seconds through a rough-cut chamber that looked carved out of the earth instead of built. An ancient narrow stone archway blocked the view below. I heard the others gasp as they reached it—when my turn came, I couldn’t help but do the same.

Stretched out below, under floodlights, lay the open-air courtyard of the Emperor Nero’s summer house. Two huge fountains framed an archway like the Lincoln Memorial but fancier; behind that stretched an open-roofed courtyard with a wading pool and a mosaic floor hand-painted by a cast of thousands.

“What’s the point of a museum education?” Kate whooped. “I know excavating equipment when I see it,
that’s
what.” Behind us, I could hear fists pounding at the melted doorway.

We ran a central corridor, between rooms painted with flat pre-perspective murals—mountain and garden landscapes, well-dressed Roman citizens dancing, drinking, bathing and some other stuff. Some of it looked pretty dirty, actually. I wouldn’t have minded spending a little more time there, under better circumstances. The lights cast dramatic shadows behind the pillars and the timber skeleton bracing the cavern ceiling.