Mindbenders (9 page)

“You’ll drive,” he told me. “Not fast, normal speed, don’t attract attention.”

 “Drive
what
?” I asked.
Shit, now he’s delirious
. His car was sitting across the woods, in front of Miriam Fine’s house, unless it was magical and could find us on its own.

As we reached the front of the house, I felt him lean into my shoulder, pushing me toward the driveway. Where a retirement-aged man stood favoring his paunch, holding open the door of a very pretty Audi coupe. “You drive,” Max repeated and detached himself from me. He stumbled to the passenger door and collapsed onto the seat. The car’s owner handed me the keys and said apologetically “It’s just half a tank.” I took the keys and stood staring at him.

“Say ‘thank you,’” Renn muttered, pulling on his seat belt.

“Thank you,” I mumbled.

“Now get in the car, dammit!”

I dropped into the driver’s seat. It was really beautiful, chrome and carbon-fiber and all that stuff they talk about in the car magazines. As I closed my door, a middle-aged woman came out of the house, locking up behind her. She had an overnight bag in hand.

“Time to go, Herb,” she called and they climbed into a Winnebago parked outside the garage.

“Don’t stare—move!” Renn gasped, smacking me on the shoulder. “That way!” He pointed to a sidestreet a few yards away. I pulled out of the driveway. As we made the turn, I saw the Winnebago head off in the opposite direction.

Max laid way back in his seat now and talked me down the long hill, panting little breaths as though
he’d
just carried someone up a hillside and around a house. We went nowhere and took the most complicated route to get there—right here, left there, his eyes closed the same as when we’d found Tauber and Miriam Fine’s house. This time, he was finding a way for us to get lost and stay that way. We kept turning and doubling back on ourselves as we moved progressively through the vast development. More than once I saw a black SUV turning onto a street we’d just turned off of or going down a one-way street we’d just passed.

This cat-and-mouse took more than fifteen minutes but at the end, we were all the way to the other end of the project, having never gotten near a main street. When we finally did turn onto one, we were a hundred yards from the highway entrance.

“There!” he pointed but I didn’t need prompting. We were on the ramp before I could ask a single question, before he could fail to answer even one.

~~~~

“Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania,” I said after we’d driven about an hour.

He’d been sitting up properly  for a while, his color—never very far from pale—returning. “Ruben who?”

“Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania. That’s the next nearest. You would have asked eventually.”

He sat taking me in for a moment. “You’re taking ownership of it,” he said, nodding. “That’s good. And the words are coming back, aren’t they?”

It was what I’d been thinking. I certainly wasn’t what I’d been—the kid who thought he was going to be Peter Jennings was long gone—but more than words were coming back. I was seeing the story—I was beginning to pull the threads together, to see a bigger picture. It was more than a little creepy, knowing he was inside my head, but at least I believed it now—that uncertainty was gone. Whatever satisfaction I got from that knowledge lasted half a second.

 “How the hell many guys are after us?!!” I yelled suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? There were at least six, seven guys following us out of her house, the two with the serious guns—you sure attract a whole lot of serious guns—by the rockpile and two or three more on the ridge where the houses were. How many fucking guys are after you? How did they get there so fast? Who
are
these people?”

“Good questions. Those are all good questions,” he acknowledged with a nod.

“Fuck you! Good questions! You’re the mindbender
extraordinaire
—why am
I
asking the good fucking questions?”

He smiled. He seemed to actually find this amusing, which did nothing for me except get me driving 90 instead of 85 miles an hour. Now that we were out of the situation, the fear and anger were all over me. It was amazing my shaking hands could drive straight.

“I don’t have answers—not yet,” he said. “They’re not powerful minds, but the first thing they’ve been taught is a good blocking scheme. And my stamina isn’t what it used to be. Throwing several hundred tons of rock down a hill doesn’t suit me anymore.” His eyes were miles away again, that look I’d seen a couple of other times on his face.

Was that not a phrase with him? Was he actually
looking
miles away? He started rifling through the glovebox. “We’ll need money,  a map and to fill the car up,” he said. “Then we’ll figure out the next step.”

“Ruben Crowell, Gettysburg Pennsylvania,” I repeated.

“I’m not sure that’s it. What if Dave made the same mistake we did—
I
did—assuming the network was under attack? Clearly, at least one part of it—Miriam Fine—is on the other side. I’m not sure what that means. And by the way,” he stared at me, “it’s not how many fucking guys are after me.
You’re
the one with the list in your head.”

That
stopped conversation for a while. The signs promised a rest stop thirty miles ahead.

“Throwing chunks of a hillside around—that’s mindreading?” I asked.

“No, that’s my hobby,” he laughed. “Electrons are electrons. Matter is bound together by vibration, by harmonic sympathy. So if you can manipulate the vibration,  you can manipulate—rearrange—just about
anything
at the subatomic level. Now, it’s one thing to know  about it—it’s another to do it. I’ve been playing with this for thirty years and all I’ve got are a couple of childish tricks. Nonetheless, they’re  good for wreaking havoc.” He sighed—I probably looked like a fish, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “It’s exhausting too. If the rest stop has a decent cheeseburger, I want one.”

We filled up the Audi and parked it behind a couple of tractor-trailers, out of sight of the highway. On the way to the food court, we bought a map and all the newspapers they had.

“How come they can’t read our thoughts to follow us?” I asked as we sat down.

“I’m blocking us.”

“You could read the bearded guy—wasn’t he a mindbender?”

“Ha! That guy was useless. I broke right through.”

“So you can read anybody?”

“No. I couldn’t read Dave if he wanted to stop me. But these? Whoever hired these guys, they like people with minimal ability.” The waitress brought our food. I had a Caesar Salad; he dug into a cheeseburger with fries.

“That’s not good for you, you know,” I told him. “Bad for your cholesterol.”

“Cholesterol is a myth,” he answered like he’d checked it out on the subatomic level, stuffing a few extra fries in around the corners of his mouth. “After a morning of rock-arrangement, we real men want
beef
.”

I was wondering if his real name was Max Renn—or was the Max as phony as the Dulles? He could read minds and plant thoughts in your mind and play around with the vibrations that held the world together. The scary part was, I’d seen enough to actually have to take the idea seriously. Knowing he wasn’t making up such ridiculous stuff didn’t prove any more comforting than the alternative. Thinking about him seemed to lead inevitably to double negatives.

“What about those people? You made them give us their car? And go on vacation? Just like that?” Renn nodded, smiling his chilly smile. If he could read my mind, he knew what was coming, but he was waiting, humoring me, as I edged into my subject.

“They got away,” he answered. “So they won’t be able to give information about their car for at least a couple of days. And now, since they haven’t found us, the bad guys will have to track
them
, just in case we were hiding in the Winnebago.” He stared at the parking lot with a look I didn’t like. “We’ll have to ditch the car.”

“It’s a nice car,” I started. Way nicer than his, though I didn’t say so. Air conditioning, for one thing.

“Don’t get attached,” he warned. “Everything is temporary.”

I got back to my subject. “If you could make those people do what they did—are you making me go with you?”

He smiled the best he knew how, which wasn’t much. “No,” he answered and his eyes softened. “You’re here on your own. For which I’m grateful, by the way.”

“But you have a reason—for not forcing me,” I said. Like the names of the agents and the location of the box under the furnace in Dave’s store, it was just something I suddenly
knew
.

“Yes,” he smiled and now his eyes were burning. “That’s very good. Yes, there’s a reason why. Dave was a subtle man, unlike either of us. He left you a suggestion to tell me your password. And he left me a suggestion—I thought I wasn’t suggestible—to recognize it when you did. But I had no idea, when I first asked, what information was inside you. It might have been a person or a place or a concept or a plan or…who knows what? So the question that I ask you—
what is the next nearest
?—that didn’t come from Dave. It’s intentionally ambiguous because I really didn’t know what I was asking. So far, it’s gotten us some information  and allowed us to meet this really interesting class of people,” he laughed. “But a better question might have got us a whole lot farther faster. So I’m hoping you’ll get stronger and take control of what he left you, of the information inside you. So, I can’t force you—to take this trip, or much else. I don’t want to get in the way of the work you’re doing…inside your own head.”

I must have shown a pretty strong reaction because he laughed again. “C’mon Gregor,” he said. “You were thinking it earlier. The words are coming back. That’s the start. You’re beginning to communicate with yourself.” He took another bite of his cheeseburger. “The sooner, the better.” Then he stopped chewing and his eyebrows shot up. “What is it?”

He’d made me nervous so I’d started shuffling the paper—when I get nervous and there’s no TV to stare at, I move things around, and all I had to play with at the moment was the newspaper. On the front page of the national section was an article about yesterday’s helicopter crash. The picture alongside it was taken at a press conference in front of L Corp Headquarters.

I was staring at the picture—I couldn’t help it, though I didn’t know why at first. And then I recognized what had grabbed me—the logo, the logo on the front of the building. I was staring at it in the newspaper but in my head, I was seeing the logo on a different background—greenish stiff paper, a rectangular strip of paper with computer cutouts stamped into the bottom edge—the green stiff paper of Miriam Fine’s paystub, on her perfect neat desk, where I’d seen it just an hour earlier.

And then my head went hot again and Renn leaned back in his seat and exhaled hard. “She works for L Corp,” he whistled. “Does that mean they
all
work for L Corp? The whole blue-nylon brigade?” He stared out the window now, a long way out the window, considering, gathering himself.

“Okay,” he said finally, “we’ve got to disappear for a while. Until we can figure out the next couple of steps.”

He pulled out the map and studied it for a few minutes. “C’mon,” he said and we headed out toward the parking lot.

Right outside the door, a dumpy-looking guy in a hardhat got out of his Cherokee and walked away, leaving the thing idling behind him.

“What happens when he remembers?” I asked as we pulled onto the highway.

“He won’t,” Max answered. “He’ll remember going into the men’s room and coming out to find the car gone.” He put his foot down and we pulled away from traffic, heading North. “I need what I need,” he said, “but I’m not sloppy with people. He’ll be okay. Now let’s take care of money.”

“They have ATM’s at the rest stop.”

He shook his head. “We need a bank. They can track your location from an ATM withdrawal.”

“Taking it out of a bank is different?”

“It is if you take it from someone else’s account.”

A few blocks later, we walked into an old-fashioned bank, with marble floors, dark wood booths and cathedral-type windows, a bank being just a church for money anyway. Teller windows filled the back wall but all but two of them were empty.

Max went immediately to the far side of the lobby, where the senior offices stood behind etched-glass doors. The first opened as we approached, and a slim, balding, depressed-looking man appeared, carefully neatening the creases around the shoulders of his blue suit and wearing a face that said he was expecting someone.

“Mr. Guernsey—” Max began while Guernsey’s expression wavering somewhere between polite tolerance
and
Do I know you
? Max laid his hand on the man’s shoulder and Guernsey immediately stood four inches taller and smiled like Max was the long-lost cousin who hit Lotto.

“Can we talk privately?”

Guernsey ushered us into his office, bubbling over with
good to see you
and all that fizz.

The office dated to when a bank officer was a big man, having built half the town or at least paid for the building. A mahogany desk hovered on shiny brass feet in front of a brand-new untouched-by-man puffy black leather couch, four guest chairs, three large file cabinets and a safe. No cubicles for Mr. Guernsey, nossir—he was landed gentry. He settled behind the desk and affected a look that suggested he was actually interested.

 “So how can I help you gentlemen?”

“Your trust in Ms. Rand is misplaced,” Max told him brusquely.

“Ms. Rand is in the back at the moment,” Guernsey replied and it was obvious that he wasn’t interested in hearing what Max had said. “I asked if I could help you?”

Max leaned forward in his chair; Guernsey did the same in response.

“Ms. Rand has been holding back several commercial deposits half a day and investing the money on her own behalf,” Max announced in a stage whisper. “She’s chosen to loot accounts with heavy activity, where it’ll take time for anyone to notice. She’s also been skimming currency transactions in several —”