Mindbenders (7 page)

“Fuel?” Tauber growled. “Iraq’s got oil.”

“They’re not producing it fast enough—at least that’s what they told us. What they produced went to paying for the government.”

“Paying off the government, more likely,” Tauber said.

“We should get going,” Max said and I stuffed my things into my bag.

We approached Durham just before 9, joining the morning rush past a skyline that waffled between glass tower and impregnable cliff dwelling. Miriam Fine lived in a suburban town on the outskirts. “I’m unsatisfied with your instructions,” Max complained. “Technically, she doesn’t even live in Durham.”

“Complain to Dave next time you see him,” I told him. “I’m just a vessel.”

“Why don’t
you
find her?” he remarked, looking at Tauber. “This should be perfect for remote viewing.”

“I need pen and paper,” Tauber said and I knew where it was in the glovebox. He closed his eyes and took several long breaths. His breathing got lighter and lighter after that, to the point that I thought he was either asleep or expiring. But, just at the point that I got concerned, his hand started moving on the page, sketching a very loose oval with a bulge on one side and a couple cross-hatch markings, first towards the top, then leaving a space and continuing the lines below. Beneath the oval, he began sketching a series of small rectangles and then abandoned them, ending with several stacked boxes. His eyes opened and he smiled at what was probably my skeptical expression. “Your subconscious,” he said, “is a whole lot more powerful than yer conscious—it’s in touch with stuff your conscious mind wouldn’t fraternize with to save yer life.”

“The conscious mind wants control,” Max interjected. “It wants everything in a neat box. If you just let the hand move however it wants to—don’t try to control, don’t second-guess—you can draw directly from the subconscious.”

“You get a bit at a time,” Tauber continued, “first a feeling, then a little more detail and a little more and if you’re lucky, wham! You get the big picture.” He pointed at the glovebox. “Let’s see that map,” he said and I handed it to him.

“Okay,” he said, pointing, “here’s the hump in the highway—see it there?” and I did. Where his oval wasn’t perfect—where it bulged out in one direction—the highway did the same on the map. He pointed out a spot on the map near the bulge where a bunch of criss-crossing streets were grouped around a long narrow empty space: “Here’s all the streets criss-crossing in that neighborhood—well, they aren’t quite as straight as I drew ‘em. The empty spot’s a hilltop.” He stared at the stacked boxes as though they were somebody else’s work. “She lives at the top of the hill—two-story brick with double-chimneys. It might not be a big hill,” he added. “You’re boosting the signal, aren’t ya?” he asked Max suspiciously. “I wouldn’t’a got it this fast on my own. It’s been a long time.”

“You’re still doing the work,” Max said.

 “But…how does it work?” I stammered. “How do you explain it?”

Tauber shrugged. “That’s a conscious mind thing,” he said, tapping his forehead. “Having to explain everything. I don’t have to know how sex works, son, long as I know how to do it…”

He turned to Max. “But how do you know what
you
know?” He had that same squinty-eyed skeptical look on his face that I’d seen the night before when we started talking about Florida. Smiling, pleasant but there was an edge to it. “I’m not the man I was, but my memory’s okay. I don’t remember you in the program.”

“I was sort of on the edges,” Max said, smiling back—two of the worst smiles I’d ever seen.

“What edges? Weren’t no edges. You were in or out. Which program? Center Lane? Grill Flame? Stargate?”

“None of them,” Max answered. Then he went red, taking both of us by surprise. “I never made it through training. I was drummed out—for insubordination.”

After a second, Tauber answered with his own laughter. “That would explain you getting along with Dave.”

Max nodded, adding, “Dave was the one who fired me,” and that triggered another round of laughter. Throughout it all, though, Tauber’s eyes stayed tight on him.

“You’re blocking me,” he said finally.

“Force of habit,” Max answered first and then shrugged. “We all have our secrets. You’re blocking me too.”

“But you know who I am—Dave sent you to me.”

“Uh-huh,” Max sighed, “and he sent me to you, didn’t he?”

Tauber didn’t seem thrilled with this answer, but it silenced him for the moment. And then we were down the offramp into the suburbs. “This is right, isn’t it?” Max asked Tauber and he nodded, gruff.

The offramp dumped us into a development, streets of neat well-kept houses on a hilly incline. Max started his driving-with-the-eyes-closed thing and I was stupidly thrilled to see Tauber was just as petrified by this as I was. But this time, we circled the neighborhood several times before Max could get a heading. “Lots of interference,” he muttered. He closed his eyes again, made a few quick turns and Tauber pointed at a brick house just where the road curved. “That’s it,” he said immediately.

Miriam Fine’s house stood at the apex, the highest completed point of the development. Streets of blocky brick houses stretched out downhill in several directions. A wide patch of woods filled the crest of the hilltop just behind her, a few construction cranes visible farther back, in a clearing between two developments. This looked like the spot the developer had reached when the construction economy got the hiccups.

We walked up the driveway to the heavy wooden door. Max stood aside and let Tauber knock. The door opened almost immediately.

“Mark?” Miriam Fine said with a sharp gaze. “What’s happened?” The look on her face suggested she either wasn’t all that pleased to see him or didn’t like the way he looked. Neither answer would’ve been a shock. Tauber definitely wasn’t her type—she was a slim, youthful fortyish, dressed in a ruffled white blouse, charcoal just-so suit and pearls. Ridiculously well-put together for 9 in the morning. Where Tauber seemed to have fallen apart without the program, Miriam Fine had obviously thrived. The instant after sizing Tauber up, she turned her attention to me and Max and her expression changed. Her mouth smiled but her eyes didn’t—this was a pattern among this whole group and not one that made me real comfortable. “Come inside,” she said in a stage whisper. “You don’t want to be seen.”

The living room was straight out of some decorating magazine, paint by numbers. Everything looked fine and went together, I guess, but the place might as well have been a movie set. There was nothing personal anywhere—no magazines on the table, no trash or cups or loose papers anywhere. Just two matched couches, a TV in an old-style armoire and a neat little computer desk with the CPU in a box attached to the leg. The desktop held her monitor screen and a neat stack of papers—bills, one purple Sticky note and her paycheck stub—a real corporate, computerized stub, not the handwritten job we got whenever Dave made us a little money at the store. The place was so orderly, I was afraid to sit down.

“What’s happened, Mark? Why are you here?” Fine asked, but she kept glancing at Max, who was hovering quietly in the background. Before Tauber could answer, she started retreating to the kitchen. “Let me get you some water—I’m sure you’re thirsty.”

“We’re fine,” Max said but she was gone for just a few seconds, returning with a pitcher and glasses on a tray. Nobody took any.

“Dave Monaghan’s dead,” Tauber answered finally. Fine lowered her eyes and took a breath, slow and deep. She daubed at her forehead a couple times.

“How?” she said.

“Shot dead in Florida yesterday.”

“How do you know?” she asked, which struck me as an odd question.

“We were there,” I said, indicating Max and me. “They shot him through the bathroom window and then they blew up the  house.”

“Who did?” she asked and I wondered why she was asking questions, with words. She was in the program, wasn’t she? Couldn’t she just read our minds? Maybe the other two were blocking her, which seemed kind of odd too. Or maybe she felt a need, for some reason, to hear their answers aloud.

“Two mindbenders,” Max answered. “Minor league, less than .5 on the Kirlian scale. We met them half an hour later trying to go through Dave’s office.” Fine’s eyes widened.

“What happened to them?” she asked. “Did they—could they tell you anything?”

“They didn’t know enough to tell,” Max said. “But they came in an expensive SUV under suggestion with after-action forms to fill out and phone numbers to report to.”

“Did you get the phone numbers?”

“They’re useless,” Max shrugged. “You get a recorded message that asks for the extension you wish to dial.” He and Fine had a kind of staring contest going. “But they were clearly cogs in a pretty organized wheel.”

“Whose?”

“Can’t tell. They blocked well—no names or titles. Their thoughts were in English, so no language cues.”

“Did you dispose of them?” Miriam Fine said and I squirmed at the directness of the question. I squirmed a little more at being the only one in the room who seemed uncomfortable with it.

“I put them out overnight. They have to be up and around by now—and raising the alarm.”

“Which is why you’re here,” Fine said.

“Dave left a list of agents he felt should be contacted—he must have felt you were in danger.”

“That’s what you think?” Fine said, settling into a chair by the fireplace, smoothing her skirt under her, her eyes never leaving Max. “What is your plan?”

“My…plan?” Max stammered. “Just to follow Dave’s blueprint. Just…just to warn you.”

“Against what? Against whom?”

“Whoever killed Dave,” he answered, like it was pretty obvious—I thought it was. Fine stood up from her seat like the perfect hostess, like all this life-and-death stuff was getting in the way of her socializing.

“Does anyone want coffee?” she asked quietly.

“Tea?” I asked and Max shot me a look like I’d asked for a handgun.

“I really think we should get going,” Max said. “They have to be looking for us.”

“Oh?” Fine said, still smiling. “Are they lurking outside, waiting to attack?” She shivered theatrically.

“How can I tell?” Max said, sinking into a chair opposite her. “There’s so much static around here—you don’t notice it?” Fine just stared at him. “I’m not comfortable when I can’t tell what’s going on around me.”

“Well, I’m not comfortable running away without a good reason,” Fine answered, speaking slowly, biting each word off as if they came
a la carte
. “We don’t know why Dave was killed, we have no  real reason—other than your unspecified fears—to feel endangered ourselves. You say he left you a list, you think you know what it means, this one here—” she waved her hand at me “—says he saw Dave die and the house blow up. Even if I grant all these things on faith, why should we go anywhere?”

“I have no facts to offer,” Max said, “but I sensed that these agents were low-level, low-status. They wanted the list but only to hand it over to someone well above their pay grade.”

“You
sensed
,” Fine repeated, the words a hiss. “In what way? Automatic writing? Ideagrams? Narrating out of a trance? Which process do you use?”

“I—I have my own approach,” Max said.

“I’m sure you do,” Fine said and turned, all at once, to me. “And you? You are?”

“I’m Greg—”

“Greg lived with Dave,” Max explained. “Dave had a group of veterans living with him, making the transition back to civilian life. Dave helped them …adjust.”

“That sounds like Dave,” Fine demeaned politely. Her eyes were on me. Her eyes glinted at me as though we shared a secret, a juicy one. She was an attractive, confident, well-organized person, someone who could help me, who could help us all get ourselves together. If she was in charge, we wouldn’t be running all over the map. “You saw him dead too, then,” she said.

“I saw him first.”

To Max: “You weren’t there?”

“I arrived late.”

Fine’s eyes were slitted, like Tauber’s had been. “How late?”

“Five, maybe seven minutes—that’s right, isn’t it?” he asked me.

“I think so,” I said, my cheeks reddening. “I…lost track of time.”

“You were under stress—that happens,” Miriam Fine said, smiling at me. She had a cup of tea for me, the way I liked it. I didn’t remember her leaving the room to get it but there it was. She was considerate that way, I could tell. She went out of her way for people. At least, she had for me—neither Max nor Tauber had anything to drink. She turned back to Max. “If you say you arrived late, does that mean you were on your way when it happened?”

Now there was something in the air—Max looked uncomfortable. “Dave warned me they were coming. When I first sensed them, I didn’t realize they were coming after him.”

Fine nodded. “You thought they were after
you
,” she cooed. “Because there’s always someone coming after you, isn’t there?” With each word, he shrank and she blossomed. His eyes seemed to shrivel into his head, the hollows under his thick eyebrows darker and deeper by the second.

“It’s not like that,” he said but we all knew it was. He’d already told us it was. Fine might be a bit of a tight-ass but she was the first together person I’d encountered since Dave got shot. She was smart and clean, she lived in a nice house in a respectable neighborhood, she had a regular life and a regular job. She had pictures on the wall and a desk with a big computer monitor and computerized paystubs from a real corporation, not a handwritten chickenscratch job that the bank teller looked at you sideways over. Miriam Fine was a corporation and I was traveling with a freak show. She had every reason to feel good about herself.

“I made a mistake,” Max conceded, shoulders slumped. “I left town and got thirty miles away before I realized they were after Dave. By the time I got back, it was too late.”

“So your method isn’t foolproof, it seems,” Fine said. “You aren’t Superman.”

“He’s pretty close,” Tauber said and that seemed to break the mood, at least shake it up. “He does things we never did.”

“Of course he does,” she said. “He can’t help himself. So you feel responsible—”