No Hero (14 page)

“Not yet.”

She harrumphs but I don’t say anything else and she lets me be. Then it’s just toe-tapping time. I sit there, one hand covering my ear, hoping no one sees the earbud. It’s hard to blend in when you look like you’re some dubious government agent. Which actually, thinking about it, I am. Still, not looking to advertise the fact.

Finally the talk winds down, the room clears, the guys on stage start to wrap up. I look to Clyde. This is the bit where I just smile and look pretty. Well... where I smile, anyway.

The two guys look up as we approach. They’re about my age, well entrenched in their thirties, I’d guess. One is tall and rangy, the other just, well just sort of average-looking really. Sort of person I’d have hated to have as a suspect. Which, I suppose, is good for us.

“Can we help you?” the taller one asks.

Clyde stares at them for a moment that becomes increasingly awkward as it becomes less and less of a moment.

“We had a couple of questions,” I start.

There’s a pause. The two men look expectant.

“Jesus,” Tabitha says into the silence. Clyde twitches slightly at the abruptness of her voice. “You two never had a conversation? Make nice. Compliment them.”

“Great presentation!” Clyde lurches as if someone suddenly switched him on. “I mean, yes, I... Great. Really... great.” He pulls his head back between his shoulders.

“Thanks!” Nondescript guy looks genuinely pleased. “Obviously it’s all early stages right now, and there are some horrible holes in the literature, but—”

“Now move on to the research,” Tabitha guides him. “Start with the riboflavins or—”

“Riboflavins!” Clyde barks. He looks around as if horrified by what he’s said. It’s as if he’s been suddenly struck by a bout of scientific Tourette’s. “Transcriptase factors!” he blurts.

“Sod it,” Tabitha says. “I’m having no part in this. Bloody idiots.”

Clyde stares desperately at me.

Impulsive. Fearless.

“Yes,” I say. I say it quite loudly. Possibly too loudly. I try to think of something else to say but my impulsiveness seems to have left me. Probably did it fearlessly. The two scientists are looking at us and at each other trying to work out if we were both just bludgeoned on the back of the head by some invisible assailant. Which will probably happen to me before the week’s out, seeing how it’s going.

Clyde is still quiet. I scrabble for words.

“Idiots,” I hear Tabitha mutter again.

“Transcriptase factors,” I say. “Riboflavins.” I’m playing for time. “Two paths of research that we have combined in examining genetic cures for...” I pause, I’m running out of steam, “...modern ailments.”

“Yes.” Clyde echoes my own monosyllable and we stand mutely again. I wince. But then, out of nowhere, a stream of words blurts out of Clyde’s mouth.

“You see, we’re currently engaged in some pretty unique research, which gels quite excitingly with your own. We’re working up in a lab in Swindon, you see, and we’ve been doing some very interesting work on pigs, using gene therapy that crosses the blood–brain barrier.”

And suddenly, to my utter disbelief, Clyde is actually on a roll. The words are coming faster and faster, the buzz words thicker and thicker. And suddenly I think despite the disastrous start, we really could pull this off.

“This is horse crap,” one of the men says abruptly.

Clyde freezes. “What?” he croaks.

“What?” I echo.

“This is quack bullshit,” says the tall guy. “Look, you may be able to take advantage of frightened patients who don’t know any better but we do know—”

Clyde steps away. He’s done. Folds as his bluff is called. And we’re done. Except we can’t be done. We have to know more than which door Olsted prefers. Which is a lousy metaphor.

Impulsive. Fearless.

“Look,” I say, cutting off the guy, “all we should need for this process to work,” I have no idea if what I’m saying gels with what Clyde was saying, but it barely even matters, “is a sample—” I take a quick step forward and put my hands on their heads, like I’m carrying out a benediction or something “—of DNA.” I tug.

Both guys yell.

“I’m calling security,” says one.

“Do you even have membership rights?” asks the other.

Clyde has my arm, is pulling me away.

“Stop!” shouts the taller one, but he doesn’t make a move.

I stare at the two tiny strands of hair in my hand. I feel like a hero. It’s like I just wrested a pair of handguns away from a terrorist. For some reason I can’t quite fathom, I cannot quite resist calling out, “Philistines!” as we leave the room.

“Yeah,” comes back Tabitha’s voice. “Those guys are the morons. Totally.”

“You’re sure this is going to work?” This still feels impulsive, but some of my fearlessness has definitely abandoned me since Clyde pulled out the car battery.

“Relatively,” Clyde says. It’s the fifth time he’s told me that. It’s the fifth time he’s failed to reassure me.

At least Clyde told me we needed to remove the earbuds. It’s nice to do this without Tabitha telling me what a paranoid idiot I am.

We’ve managed to find a storage closet, and next to the battery lie the other contents of Clyde’s rucksack: copper wire, acupuncture needles, clamps of various sizes. It looks less like the paraphernalia of the supernatural and more like hardcore S&M gear.

“How does it work again?” I sound the way I did when I first got an electric razor and was perhaps overly concerned about removing my entire face with it.

“The spell calls upon a mutagenic force from another reality. Then, because I don’t know the exact words to make us look exactly like the guys we want to look like, we’re cheating a bit and just throwing a bit of the impersonatee into the circuit. Should channel the spell nicely.”

“Should. OK,” I say. Words are spoken. Knowledge imparted. I’m still far too afraid.

“Clip the needles to the wire,” Clyde says. His attitude is different here, I think. There’s authority in his voice. And, I realize, it is not out with the boffins that Clyde feels comfortable, but in here, violating the boundaries of what is real. He is, as Tabitha put it, hardcore when it comes to this stuff.

“So, what next?” I ask when I’m done.

“I’m going to take my clothes off,” Clyde says.

Not exactly what I was hoping for.

I avert my eyes while he strips to a pair of tighty-whities. He hands me a couple of the needles that he’s rigged up to the copper wires and taps four spirals of wire embedded under the skin of his chest. “You need to put the needles in these four chakras here.” He taps between his eyes. “And then one in my third eye.”

“Seriously?” I ask.

“Yes, please. The wires—” he gestures to his tattoos “—help get the power to the chakras, but using the exact spot to infuse power is even better.”

And so I stab the poor guy. The fifth and final needle spears low in his forehead, like some sort of crazy unicorn horn. He flexes his eyebrows and it bobbles madly. I look at the car battery, at the wires beneath his skin—the path of least resistance. Not how I usually spend my weekends...

Clyde picks up a piece of aluminum foil and wraps one of the stolen hairs around it, fixing it in place with some clips. He nods. “OK, we’re good. Just hit the juice when I say,
‘ashrat.’
OK?”

He gives a perfect private-schoolboy grin, wonky teeth and all. His face is bright and clean. Almost as if he is not mostly naked in a hotel cleaning closet with giant needles sticking into him.

“Sure,” I say, “whatever you say.”

Clyde hands me two large clamps, electrical tape wrapped thickly around their handles; one red, one black; positive, negative. “On ashrat.” He closes his eyes. He slows his breathing. His chest rises and falls. In and out. In and out.
“Sellum,”
he says.
“Moshtaf al partum.”

Static electricity sweeps like a wave up my arms and legs. Each hair standing on end, one by one.

“Kel saloth cthartin. Anung ash partek. Felim um ashrat
—”

I almost miss it, caught up in the madness of the moment. But then I realize and slap the two clamps down onto the battery. And, even as I do it, part of me, yet again, wants to be put on lithium and told the bad dreams will go away.

Clyde convulses. His mouth mashes down on his tongue, mangling a word. The wires under his skin are glowing, red at first, then brighter, whiter, to blue. It’s like they’re going to burn right through him. There’s the smell of ozone, of crisping flesh. Above us the bulb flickers, a strobe flash, and then it dies. The only light is the magnesium flare of the wires, making Clyde a stick man, a scribble pattern of light lifting up, up, off the floor of the room, off into the air, his mass a bubbling silhouette, blacker than the black of the room, shifting, stirring, in flux, his arms and legs spasming, coming in and out, in and out, clenching down into a fetal position then out as a star, some bizarre exercise program, and then there is a snapping sound, like a hundred bones breaking at once, and a cry, and I think I’m finally just going to go ahead and vomit, and the light bulb flares to life once more, and I’m standing in a room with a tall rangy scientist I called a Philistine just a moment before.

“Clyde?” I cannot keep the edge of tension out of my voice.

The scientist’s double shudders, grabs the edge of the table. He exhales. “All right,” he says, “that went better than I had hoped.”

“Better?” I cannot quite keep the incredulity out of my voice.

“Yeah.” Clyde nods. “The wires stop it from stinging too bad.”

“Really?”

“Oh.” Clyde looks apologetic.

“What?” I say.

“Well...” Clyde shuffles on the spot. “Now it’s your turn.”

When I was a kid I used to dream about magic. It took both my parents to physically peel me off a copy of
The Hobbit.
And I don’t mean the stage tricks of David Copperfield. Not the levitating cards of David Blaine, but real magic. Actually violating the laws of physics. Twisting reality to your will, transmuting matter. Magic! Summoning something from nothing. Calling on the powers of the heavens. There was romance to it, poetry.

But, childhood discarded, now I know.

Magic sucks.

I’m in bloody agony. These are not my limbs. This is not my shape. It’s as if my body has been crammed into a shell it doesn’t fit. I’m pressed up against the limits of new skin while my body screams to be free.

Clyde tells me it’ll get better soon.

I would love to say that I accept this news with affable good humor, but in the heat of the moment I tell him to shove his magic bloody wand where the sun doesn’t shine. Not one of my finer moments, truth be told.

Clyde, thankfully, is the bigger man. Literally now, it transpires. He smiles, tells me not to let go of the D battery he’s given me and then leads me by the elbow out of the broom closet and back into the conference. And he’s right; it does get a bit better.

I apologize, and, knowing the lay of the land this time, finding Olsted goes quicker. Spotting his two buffalo-size security guards is easy enough anyway. I mentally dub them Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Olsted’s leathery face becomes momentarily more scrotum-like as we approach, though after a moment I realize he’s actually attempting to smile.

“Mr. Olsted,” I say, taking the lead as we approach. I attempt my own smile but I’m not totally used to these new muscles so I’m not sure I’m any more successful than he was.

“Mr. Olsted is busy,” says Tweedledum, which is an obvious lie, but I’m guessing from the size of his fists that he’s the sort of man who doesn’t have to worry about such trivial things as factual accuracy.

“It’s about your daughter, Mr. Olsted,” I say with the same teeth-grinding smile.

Tweedledee balls his fists.

Olsted lays a hand on the big man’s shoulder. “Heel, Christopher.”

Tweedledee satisfies himself with an aggressive leer.

“I enjoyed your presentation, gentlemen,” Olsted says. “But, as ever, things seem very distant.”

“That’s what we want to talk to you about.”

Olsted works his jaw. Something flickers behind his eyes. Not quite hope. Something too tired for that. And is this really the bad guy? Someone just looking to save his daughter?

“I am too old for promises of better tomorrows, gentlemen. And my money is invested in other lines of research.”

“A Phase One trial,” Clyde snaps. The words lurch out of him. He repeats it, more quietly, “A Phase One trial.”

“You’re years away—” Olsted starts.

“Publically,” I say. “Yes.”

That hangs in the air a while.

“You have thirty seconds,” Olsted says, “before Christopher and Samuel here take you outside and break your fingers.”

We lose three seconds in staring. Clyde at Olsted. Me at Clyde. Go, I will him. Talk. Please. Talk. Two more seconds go by without a word.

And then Clyde talks.

It’s almost bloody poetry. If poetry was carried out mostly in acronyms.

It’s not perfect because he stares over Olsted’s shoulder the whole time, because he speaks in a monotone, and because he spends another five seconds trying to grab at the word “precursor.” But then thirty seconds are up and he’s still talking. He’s still going at a minute.

Olsted holds up a hand and stops Clyde. A card appears in it. As if by magic. Comfortable David Blaine magic. I pluck the card from between his fingers.

“Next Tuesday,” he says. “Eight p.m. My home. You can meet Ilsa then.”

“Yes. Yes.” I am almost babbling. I want to high five Clyde. Probably would be bad form. “We’ll see you there,” I manage.

Olsted and his goons depart and we stand there staring after them. A result. For a moment I’d feared Clyde didn’t have it in him, that I didn’t have it in me. But we did it. I turn and look at Clyde. There is panic on his face.

“What did I just say to him?” he says. “I have no idea what I just said to him.”

“You know what?” I smile. “It doesn’t even matter.”

“So, wait a minute, Boss,” says Swann. She sips her beer but doesn’t take her eyes off me. “You, a government employee, are telling me, a police officer, about your plans to break and enter?”