Red Shadows (25 page)

Then, she was falling into darkness.

She hit the ground hard, the flashlight was knocked from her hand by the impact, the circle of its beam turning crazy cartwheels as it jumped and skipped away across the floor. Winded, Anderson stumbled to her feet and tried to go after it. Her senses warned her of danger. Feeling the presence of an assailant leaping towards her in the darkness, she raised her Lawgiver. The gun's barrel met her attacker's blow and deflected it with a metallic clang. The impact forced the gun from her hand, sending it spinning away into the darkness. The perp attacked again, slashing at her with a wide sweep of his blade that skittered across one of the plasteen plates of her body armour. She felt blood at her side and realised that the knife had penetrated her armour. Acting on reflex she directed a low kick into the darkness in front of her, hearing a satisfying gasp of pain as the ball of her foot connected with bone.

The perp moved away. The silence returned. Blood seeped slowly down her side. Ears straining, Anderson heard the quiet sounds of the perp's breathing as he edged in a circle around her. It was as if he could see her in the darkness. Seeing the beam of the flashlight shining dimly in the distance, her first instinct was to run towards it. Realising it would present her back to the perp, she began to move sideaways instead, trying to second-guess the perp and traverse a circle within his circle. She saw a leg silhouetted by the beam of the flashlight behind it. She lashed out with a kick again, raising her foot higher and making contact with a softer target. She heard the air explode from the perp's mouth.

Pressing home her momentary advantage, she charged towards where she thought he was, only to suddenly feel his hand grab hold of her hair as he pulled her head back. The perp was going to try to cut her throat! But he had made a mistake. Anderson remembered Noland telling her that the perp was right-handed, so she twisted to her left and raised her right shoulder, the blade deflecting harmlessly off the armoured shoulder pad of her uniform. She reached back with her left hand grabbed the wrist of the hand holding her hair and twisted it. The perp shrieked. His hand released her hair. Using the movement of her body to increase the leverage, she twisted the wrist further, at the same time stepping backwards to overextend his arm.

The movement unbalanced the perp, causing him to fall to his knees. Wary of the knife in his other hand, she twisted his wrist further, dislocating it. The perp shrieked again. She twisted further, harder. As he shrieked once more, she kicked him in the stomach, and then used her leverage on his wrist to push him face down on the floor. With her knee in the small of his back, she used her free hand to grab his other arm and pull it behind him. Fumbling in the dark, she pulled a pair of handcuffs from her belt and put them on his wrists as he struggled.

"In case you're wondering," she said as she snapped the cuffs shut, "this is what it feels like when you're no longer in control."

Lifting him by the arms, Anderson frog-marched the perp towards the fallen flashlight, but, even as she bent forward to pick it up, she felt a change come over her prisoner. With a strangled gasp, the perp fell to the ground as his body began to shake. At first cautious in case it was a trick, Anderson shone the flashlight in his face. The perp's eyes had rolled back in his head, while white froth gathered at his lips. He was having convulsions. Then, as she turned the spastically flailing perp on his side to keep his airways clear, Anderson saw an image from inside his mind...

Daytime. The apartment in Ciudad Baranquilla, sunlight streaming in through the windows, his father sitting in his chair. William is two years old the first time the spiders come for him.

The image is gone, quickly replaced by other images as she is suddenly subjected to a disturbing kaleidoscopic cascade of the killer's memories. She sees the same boy a year later, huddling under the covers of his bed as a black tide of spiders flows across the floor around him. She sees him older, discovering the colours of the human aura for the first time as he realises his father is a Red. She sees the boy older again as he pulls a jagged piece of glass across his father's throat. She sees the institution. She sees the Grey Man. She sees their bargain. She sees the list of twenty names. She sees the deaths of Margaret Penrith and all the others. She sees the killer's name - William Ganz. Above all else she sees herself through William's eyes as he spots her for the first time outside Sissy Spacek Block. To him, she is an angel surrounded by a bright fiery halo: a halo so brilliant that it hurts him to look at it. She sees it all, granted access to every one of William's memories for half a second. She sees it, and even as the images pass before her she comes to a realisation.

Something is wrong.

The memories in William Ganz's mind are dying. As each image flashes through his mind, it is shredded and disappears. Piece by piece, drop by drop, memory by memory, everything that exists of William's personality is being destroyed, fading away before her eyes. Where once there was a man's mind, there is now only a void: a black hole, a blank slate, an empty canyon, and then...

It was over. Drawing a sudden gasp as the contact was broken, Anderson looked down at William Ganz in horror. The convulsions had stopped. His eyes had rolled back around, but now, all that was left of him was a dribbling, drooling husk.

He's been mind-wiped, Anderson thought. It's like someone set his memories to self-destruct if he was captured. And, if I hadn't been the one to capture him - if I hadn't been holding onto him at that vital second - I never would have known it had happened. Whoever did it, they must be the people behind him, the people who gave him the list of twenty names and set him on the road to killing. It's as if they're trying to cover their traces. But they made one mistake.

Casting her mind back to the memories she had just experienced, Anderson concentrated on the image of a man she had seen in William's mind: a man in a grey suit, with blond hair and a sardonic, arrogant manner. Even as his memories were dying, William had realised what was going on. Seeing his own memories flash and fade before him, he had realised exactly who was responsible. In his final moments of lucidity, William had reached a new understanding. He had realised who it was that had betrayed him. Now, thanks to his insight, Anderson understood it, too. She realised who had betrayed William Ganz. She realised who had mind-wiped him. It was the man she could see in the image in her mind. The man William had called the Grey Man. He was the man who had all the answers to all the questions raised by this case: the murders, the list of names, HelixCorp's involvement.

Now, all she had to do was find him.

EIGHTEEN

EXECUTIVE DECISIONS

"We found him about half a klick away," Loudon said to her after the various resources of the Justice Department had arrived to attend to the clean-up following the arrest of William Ganz. Tek-Judges were there to sweep Robert Bloch con-apts for forensic evidence that might lead her to the Grey Man. A Med-Judge was present to see to the bloody but shallow cut that Ganz's knife had left in her side. And there was an ambulance to take Ganz himself away to Psi-Lab for observation while they tried to work out whether his condition was permanent. Loudon had also arrived, at first ostensibly to assist the other Judges, but now to mourn another fallen comrade.

"It looks like suicide," Loudon continued. She was talking about Dietz. "He shot himself with his own Lawgiver."

"No, it wasn't suicide," Anderson told her. "The perp used his powers to make him do it. I saw it in Ganz's mind before he was mind-wiped, but by then it was too late to do anything about it." She paused. Despite the fact that she wore the tough veneer of the typical Street Judge, Loudon was clearly upset. "If it's any consolation, Ganz has already paid the ultimate penalty for his crimes. Having your mind wiped is about as harsh a punishment as you can get. Chances are, he'll spend the rest of his days as a dribbling imbecile. It's like a living death."

"Yeah? Well that's no more than the drokker deserves then," Loudon said, the minuscule crack in her veneer abruptly disappearing. As Anderson watched the Street Judge stalk away, she found herself pitying the next perp who tried to mess with Loudon.

"Control to Anderson." The dispatcher's voice came over her radio.

"Anderson receiving, Control," she sighed. It had been a long night. "I hope you've got some good news for me. I could use it."

"You might want to prepare yourself for disappointment then, Anderson," Control answered her gruffly. "You remember you requested that Douglas Mortimer be brought in for interrogation? Well, it looks like we may have something of a problem."

It was the colours, or lack of them, that surprised him most. Having never been in a Sector House interrogation suite before, Douglas Mortimer had assumed that the colours there would naturally follow the usual Justice Department colour scheme of blue and gold. Instead, it turned out that every feature of the room he sat in was the same uniform shade of grey. The walls, the door, the chairs, the table he sat at, all of them were grey. And not just any grey, but a particular shade of washed-out grey that he was sure no one other than a Judge would ever consider using. It was as though he had been transported without his knowledge to some dull monochrome world where colour had been abandoned, while he sat to wait in fear of judgement.

Finally, the door to the interrogation suite opened and a Judge stepped into the room. Recognising her as the same Psi-Judge who had come to his office yesterday, Mortimer felt a brief and familiar tang of fear. Then, remembering that attack was the best form of defence, he took the offensive.

"I demand to see your superior," he told her, using the same voice he had often used to terrify under-performing middle managers. "This is an outrage. First, a Judge comes to my apartment in the middle of the night. Then, I am forced to wait in this limbo for hours. I want to speak to Chief Lochner at Med-Division immediately."

"I'm afraid the Med-Chief isn't available," Anderson said. If she was even remotely terrified of his voice, she gave no sign of it. "You'll have to speak to me."

"I want to know what charge I've been arrested on. I have my rights."

"No," Anderson shook her head. She almost seemed saddened. "No, you don't. Not here. Not anymore. You can see that can't you? They don't do rights here, only confessions. And believe me when I tell you if you don't talk now, you won't get another chance. Now, why don't you start by telling me about HelixHealth and the medical tests for this so-called cancer vaccine?"

Unsettled by her strangely melancholy manner, for a moment Mortimer found he was at a loss for words. Then, almost despite himself, he began talking.

"Project Changeling," he said. "That's what they called it." Even as he began to speak, he wondered why he was doing it. Why, having kept the secret for so long, did he suddenly feel the need to just blurt it out? Briefly, he wondered if the Judges had done something to him. He had heard that they sometimes used low-frequency sound waves and truth drugs to get a suspect to crack. It could even be that the Psi-Judge was surreptitiously using her powers on him. Whatever the cause, he found himself compelled to take a course of action that was the antithesis of everything he had learned in twenty years in the world of business. He wanted to play his cards cleanly and honestly. He wanted to tell the truth.

"The whole cancer vaccine business was just a cover story," he told her. "The project's real purpose was to research the possibility of creating a method to allow the large-scale breeding of psychics. Suitable candidates were chosen based on their genetic profile and approached by HelixCorp with an offer of employment-"

"Suitable candidates? You mean pregnant women?"

"No, not pregnant," Mortimer said. "Not at first, anyway. As I say, they were chosen on the basis of genetic profiling as women who had a higher than normal chance of producing psychic offspring. At some point during the program they were given an anaesthetic and artificially inseminated without their knowledge. The semen samples used for the insemination had been genetically modified, again to increase the likelihood of psychic offspring from the union. Then, further drugs and treatments were given to them during their pregnancies, which the researchers hoped would yet further increase the chance of a successful result."

"And what about the women? With all these immaculate conceptions going on, didn't anybody get wise?"

"The researchers had already accounted for that. As well as fitting the genetic profile, the subjects had to fit other criteria. They had to be sexually active, ideally even promiscuous, with a tendency to believe what they were told by authority figures so that they wouldn't ask too many difficult questions. They also had to have moral qualms about abortion, and they were kept separate from each other so they couldn't compare experiences. In each case, the woman believed the father of her baby was her husband or a boyfriend. Apparently, it all went pretty smoothly."

"All right, so what happened next?"

"In due course, thirty of the project subjects carried their children to term. But when the children were tested to see if they had psychic potential, all the tests came back negative. By then a lot of money had been sunk into the project, so the company decided to cut its losses. Project Changeling was quietly disbanded, the researchers were bought off, and the happy mothers were sent on their way. The whole thing was forgotten, until a few months ago when a report landed on my desk and I found out about Changeling for the first time. That's when the shit really hit the fan."

"Go on," Anderson encouraged him. There seemed a sudden urgency to her mood, as though she thought they were pressed for time.

"At the time the project was disbanded, the company arranged to continue quietly monitoring the children just in case anything unforeseen should happen. That's where HelixHealth came in. The children were all offered free medical checks every three months, to allow their psychic potential to be covertly and continually assessed. For forty years it looked like they were just ordinary citizens. Then, a few months ago, some of them started to manifest the first signs of emerging psychic powers: uncontrolled random telepathy, minor telekinetic abilities, lucky guesses that turned out to be incredibly accurate, and so on. In each case, they were persuaded they were suffering from stress-induced mental illness and given a course of psi-blockers disguised as antidepressants. It quickly became clear that the children we thought had no psychic potential had all grown up to be latent psychics, and that meant that the company had a serious problem."