The Cure (35 page)

“Don’t misunderstand,” she interrupted. “I know why you did it. The details you left out weren’t absolutely necessary to give me the gist of what you
thought
was going on. That had nothing to do with my decision to join Fuller.” She paused. “I understand why you’re so hurt,” she said. “And I don’t blame you.”

She gazed into his eyes with a warmth and affection that sickened him. Was she still playing a game? Trying to draw him in, using his obvious attraction to her?

“You’re the last person I’d ever want to hurt,” said Erin, and she could not have looked more sincere. She paused, and then after a heavy sigh, added softly, “Because I can see myself falling in love with you someday as well.”

Hansen wasn’t sure how to react to this. Thirty minutes earlier he would have been on cloud nine. But now?

“Then why are you doing this?” he said.

“Because there’s a lot you don’t know.”

“Okay. Like what?”

“Remember when you were shot with a dart at the Saguaro Inn?”

Hansen nodded. It wasn’t something he was likely to ever forget.

“Well, the dose of tranquilizer in those darts only lasts for about an hour. Not ten or twelve.”

Hansen struggled to comprehend. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that a lot happened after you lost consciousness. A lot more than I told you.”

“Was
anything
you told me after I woke up true?”

Erin winced. “Ah … not so much,” she admitted. “I did try to escape from the motel. But while I think I’m pretty good, no one is
that
good.”

Hansen stared at her with wide eyes, speechless.

“The good news,” she continued, “is that it looks like we have some time.” She gestured toward her cuffed hand. “And neither of us is going anywhere. So are you ready to learn what
really
happened between the time you were shot, and the time you woke up in a dry riverbed?”

Hansen was still reeling, but he managed to nod.

“Great,” she said. “I think you’ll find this extremely interesting.” She raised her eyebrows. “And then some.”

42

ERIN COULDN’T BELIEVE
Kyle Hansen had just driven his newly acquired car into the middle of the fray outside of her motel room and was trying to use it as a weapon. The meek physicist who claimed he’d lose in hand-to-hand to a ninety-year-old woman in a wheelchair?

What courage. And what insanity, both.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Hansen taking out one of their attackers with the car, and then screeching to a halt and rolling from the car before it stopped. The car blocking her view of where Hansen had landed, but being able to make out a man on the other side of the car, crouching down and pointing a gun toward the ground.

He must be aiming at Kyle!

Erin shot frantically at the crouching man behind the car, but had little chance of hitting him. Her angle was bad, the car was blocking her out, and she had to make sure she aimed high or risk hitting Hansen herself. It was hopeless.

The man standing over Hansen pulled the trigger.

“
Noooo!
”

The long, hysterical scream filled the air, and Erin realized only after the fact that the scream had come from her own mouth.

She kept squeezing the trigger long after the magazine was empty. A part of her realized she was now out of ammunition, but she didn’t care. What did it matter? She hadn’t let herself truly care about anyone since she was eleven. But lately she had relented. She had begun to let people in. Lisa Renner. And now Kyle Hansen.

And now he was gone
.

She was a
curse
. Whoever she cared for was taken away.

Reinforcements were suddenly coming from out of thin air and all of them were converging on her motel room. In seconds they realized she was out of ammo and broke down the door.

She decided not to even attempt to fight. What was the point?

Finally, one man, the man she had shot, entered the room, blood streaming from his arm, and Erin absently realized he was the same man they had Tasered at the student union. He looked relieved when she just stood there, showing no intent to demonstrate her impressive martial-arts skills.

“Hello again, Erin,” he said. “My name is Ryan. Ryan Brock.” He pointed a gun at her awkwardly with his left arm. “I need you to sit on the bed.”

Of all the things she imagined he might have said, this was not among them.

“Why?” she said simply, moving to the bed and sitting on its edge.

“I don’t want to take the chance that a fall might injure you,” he said. And, inexplicably, he sounded almost … friendly.

This was the last thought she had when, almost apologetically, Ryan Brock pulled the trigger and everything went black.

*   *   *

ERIN OPENED HER
eyes with a start. How was she still alive?

Two men sat across from her at a magnificent mahogany conference table. Two men she had never seen before. Her hands were loosely cuffed together by long strips of plastic, giving her considerable freedom of movement.

“Sorry about the restraints, Miss Palmer,” said the taller of the two men. “But from what I understand, you could kick both of our asses without working up a sweat. And this is something we’d rather avoid.”

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“My name is Steve Fuller. I’m the man who called you on the phone and invited you to meet with me in Palm Springs.”

“I know who you are!” she hissed. Her eyes blazed with a fury, with a visceral hatred, that was stunning in its power. “I know all about you.”

Fuller leaned back in his chair, as if desperate to put additional distance between himself and her withering glare. He looked truly taken aback. “What could you know about me that would bring out this kind of hatred?”

“I know you’re an international arms dealer. I know you attacked Drake’s compound in Yuma, killing everyone there.” She lowered her eyes, which had suddenly become moist. “And I know you killed Kyle Hansen,” she whispered.

Fuller studied her for several seconds and threw a worried glance at his colleague. There was something about this other man that made Erin think he was more dangerous even than Steve Fuller, although she couldn’t put her finger on what that was. Another gut instinct.

“First of all,” said Fuller with a sigh. “We didn’t kill anyone in Yuma. We used nonlethal gas. And second of all, Kyle Hansen is alive and well. Just like you. He’s sleeping peacefully in the next room.”

“Bullshit. You know I’ve studied psychopaths like you for years. You know I’ve spent every day in the company of the world’s smoothest liars. I’m not impressed with your apparent sincerity. You’ll have to do better than that.”

Fuller sighed and rose from the chair. “Follow me and I’ll show you.”

Fuller led her from the room and down a hallway. Guards were stationed outside the door, but he gave them a stand-down signal with his eyes. He opened the door to another room, also with two guards outside.

Erin entered and then gasped. Sure enough, Kyle Hansen was sprawled out on a portable cot, his chest rising and falling steadily.

She rushed forward and examined him, bringing her cuffed hands to his face and stroking his cheek. He felt warm and looked to be uninjured.

“Believe me when I tell you,” came Fuller’s voice from behind her, “that you and Kyle are the last two people I would want harmed.”

Erin turned to face him. “Where are we?” she said.

“We’re in Palm Springs. At a very secure facility under the desert. The one I had hoped to meet you in when I called you.” He shook his head. “If only I hadn’t so grossly underestimated you, we could have all spared ourselves a lot of trouble. But I still say it was impossible to predict you’d be this gutsy and elusive.”

He stared at her grimly. “But much, or maybe even all, of what you think you know is wrong. And it’s more critical than you know that you learn the truth.” He motioned toward the door. “So if we could return to where we were, we have a lot of ground to cover. And the faster we can finish, the faster we can return Kyle Hansen to consciousness.”

43

THEY HAD RETURNED
to the room Erin had been in when she had first come to, across from Steve Fuller and the strange man who had yet to be introduced. Fuller had freed her of her restraints, making sure she understood they were being watched through video monitors and she had no chance of escaping.

Erin’s head was spinning. Was there really even more to this story than she knew? Somehow, she felt there must be, or she and Hansen wouldn’t be alive. But what could it possibly be?

“So can I assume it was Kyle who told you I was an arms dealer?” said Fuller.

Erin nodded. She had considered remaining silent, not answering his questions, but decided to cooperate—to a point. As long as she was only telling him things that were fairly obvious.

Fuller leaned in and stared at her intently. “Did Kyle happen to mention anything wild? You know, maybe something having to do visitors from another planet?”

“Funny you should mention that. In fact, he did. Pretty crazy, huh?”

The man beside Fuller began to unbutton his shirt, although his fingers seemed clumsy. “Not as crazy as you might think,” said the man, as twelve whiplike tentacles shot out from his stomach area and undid the last few buttons on the shirt with inhuman speed and elegance.

Erin’s mouth dropped open and she didn’t speak for several seconds. No wonder she had felt so uneasy around this man. Hansen had warned her this would be the case. Finally, with her eyes wider than she guessed they could open, she croaked, “Drake?”

The man—or clearly, the alien—shook his head. “No. My name is Fermi.”

“I don’t understand. I thought there was only one of you. Did the Wraps mount another Mount Everest expedition to send you after Drake?”

Steve Fuller turned to Fermi and raised his eyebrows. “She knows to call you a Wrap,” he said. “And that it took a heroic effort by your people to get you here. Kyle seems to have told her quite a lot.”

The alien frowned. “Erin, did Kyle just fail to mention any Wraps other than Drake, and you just assumed there was only one here? Or did he explicitly say that Drake was the only one?”

“Explicitly,” said Erin, and even this word was hard to spit out. Why hadn’t Kyle Hansen told her there were other aliens? Was there
no one
she could trust?

But suddenly she realized she was jumping to conclusions. “Drake must not have told Kyle about these others,” she said. “That would explain it.”

Fermi shook his head. “Erin, Steve and I met Kyle in a room very much like this one years ago. There are four Wraps on your planet. And Kyle knew that for certain.”

Erin shrank back as though she had been slapped, the color draining from her face.

“Look, Miss Palmer,” said Fuller. “Erin. I know you’ve been through a lot and don’t know who to trust. But I think you would agree, clinging to a blind trust of events as told by Kyle Hansen would be a mistake. He told you only one Wrap was here. And clearly this isn’t true. So if you could tell us what he told you, exactly, this would help us set the record straight.”

Erin nodded, like a zombie. Why not? What harm could it do at this point?

She launched into everything Hansen had told her. A galactic community he called the Seventeen. Sixteen interstellar arks parked in each of seventeen different solar systems. Hansen’s work with Drake, and the alien’s insistence that ridding the species of psychopathy was the only way to prevent humanity’s self-destruction. And Hansen’s claim that Steve Fuller was an arms dealer, and his rationale for why such a man would want to eliminate Drake.

Fuller and his alien associate listened intently, raising eyebrows, shaking their heads, and glancing at each other knowingly on occasion, but saying very little.

When she had finished they informed her that everything Hansen had told her about the Wraps, the Seventeen, and how transit to Earth had been accomplished was accurate, as far as Hansen knew it, but his narrative veered off course when it came to the Wraps’ expedition to Earth. There had been four Wraps, not one. And they had not gone it largely alone after arrival, as Hansen had described, but had immediately made contact with the government of the United States, since it was the strongest nation militarily.

Fuller and Fermi repeated almost all of what they had told Kyle Hansen those many years earlier about how the organization was set up, with Steve Fuller in charge, and the purpose and extent of their activities. They explained how and why they had abducted Hansen from his apartment near Carnegie Mellon, and the promise the Wraps had seen in him with respect to extending the frontiers of quantum mechanics and computing on Earth.

When they were finished, they waited silently while Erin pondered all that they had said. So many conflicting thoughts and emotions were wrestling for prominence she thought her head might explode.

“So why would Kyle mislead me?” she asked Fuller. “And why would he say you were an arms dealer? And Drake
is
real. Unless you’re telling me he really wasn’t the man—the being—I was working with to cure psychopathy. Which I’m not sure I’m willing to believe at this point. Kyle has said that only a Wrap—with a quantum computer—could have found the cure, and I believe it. So were you part of this also? Of curing psychopathy?”

Fuller took a deep breath. “I’ll answer all of these questions, and more. But let me come about it in a more roundabout way. Let us first tell you some things we never shared with Kyle. This will put all of the rest into context. It’s the only way you’ll understand.”

Erin waved her right hand toward the two men across from her in a classic,
you’ve-got-the-stage
gesture.

“The Seventeen, as you call them,” began Fermi, “have been stagnant, ossified, for tens of thousands of years. Our societies, our science, is little different than it was thirty thousand years ago, when you and the Neanderthals were vying for supremacy on Earth. The early members of the Seventeen recognized an essential paradox hundreds of thousands of years ago. Imagine a species with the required drive, passion, and indomitable will to take the next step toward transcendence. A species refusing to take
no
from the laws of physics. A species who
demand
s that the galaxy and the universe yield before them. Any such a species would be ultracompetitive and aggressive. Insatiably driven. Reckless. And would self-destruct. With absolute inevitability. The computer simulations show this in every case. Such a species would develop weapons of mass destruction, experience dramatic overpopulation, and its immaturity, aggression, and recklessness would lead to Armageddon. Every time.