Reflex (33 page)

There. Someone is staying here.

She had collected several scallop, a few mussel, and two turban shells when the security guard approached her on the beach. As far as she could tell, she was still a half-mile away from the houses at the end of Great Pond lane.

"Are you staying in this neighborhood, ma'am?"

She jerked her head up as if she'd been taken unawares. She'd actually noticed him some time back but had kept her head down, studying the sand and the shells with apparently unswerving attention.

She took a step back and put her hand to her chest. "Oh, my goodness! Where'd you come from? What's that you said?"

He was in a brown uniform that looked vaguely police-like and his belt supported all the usual law-enforcement equipment, ranging from nine millimeter automatic to nightstick to radio. "Are you staying in this neighborhood? This is a private beach and unless you're a resident or a guest..." He let that trail off.

"I'm at the Winnetu," she explained.

"Could I see some ID, please?"

She spread her arms wide. She was wearing a one-piece swimming suit, a sweatshirt tied around her waist, and capri pants. She was barefoot and the only bag she had was the plastic Ziploc holding her shells.

"You can't. I left my purse in my room—it's not the sort of thing I take beachcombing." She fished in the waistband of her pants. "I have my room key, see?" She showed him the Winnetu tag without displaying the room number stamped into the key. "And I can
tell
you my name—Jones, Millicent R. The R is for Regina." She looked at his uniform shirt with the name of the company, Island Security, plainly labeled on one of the shirt flaps. "And as a security guard, I didn't think you could ask for someone's ID." She pointed at his name on the other shirt flap. "Isn't that right, Bob?"

"One can always
ask.
You passed the Private Beach sign back there, ma'am." Bob pointed.

Millie made a show of looking but she'd already seen the sign. She'd just ignored it. She looked back at the guard and held up her bag of shells. "Sorry. Was looking down. Didn't see it."

"Yes, ma'am. You'll have to go back."

"I see. Do I have to leave the shells I picked up beyond the sign? I think I got one of the turban shells in this last stretch."

Bob shook his head. "I don't think that'll be necessary."

"I must confess I'm surprised they keep a security guard just to watch the beach."

He smiled slightly. "No, ma'am. I'm making my rounds. We watch this neighborhood." He gestured vaguely behind him, in the direction Millie had been walking. "Some of these houses sit empty through the winter so we keep an eye on them."

And some don't?
"Must get pretty cold here in the winter. I sure wouldn't want to stay here then."

"Windy and cold."

"Do many people in this neighborhood stay through the winter?"

He ignored her question. "You can't miss the hotel, ma'am, if you just walk back the way you came."

She blinked.
Put me in
my
place, didn't you?
"All right." She smiled politely but not warmly and headed back down the beach the way she'd come, at the waterline, still looking for shells. At the border between the private and public beach she looked back.

He was still watching her from the same place. She waved and he raised his hand briefly, then turned away, walking back through the dunes. She went back to the hotel and rinsed her shells off in the kitchenette sink, then arranged them on the coffee table in the living room.

Someone might come see if I kept them or not.

Davy came down to breakfast reluctantly, timidly. It had been three in the morning on the East Coast when they'd returned from Nigeria, and after Hyacinth had left his room, he'd felt limp with exhaustion.
Though not in the way I'd thought I would be.

When sleep had finally come, it brought nightmares of small plane crashes and burning villages, towering natural gas flares bending from on high and torching house after house. At one point in the horrid stew of images, he'd seen Reverend Ilori bent over the coals of his burning church, cooking a large lizard on a stick. He turned to Davy and said, "Good eating!"

When he stuck his head into the breakfast room there was no sign of Hyacinth, but the room wasn't empty.

Conley was sitting at the table, alone.

"Well, the math is bizarre and nobody believes my data and I can't tell them the circumstances."

Davy blinked, relieved.

Bad enough that I've turned a monster loose,
he thought, thinking of Roule.
I'm glad I don't have to eat breakfast with one.
He'd gone along with the recovery because the kidnappers really were bandits. He'd seen the newspaper reports about the attack—seven guards and a secretary killed during the abduction—and he'd thought he was actually doing a good deed.

Davy looked suspiciously at Conley. His recent encounter with Hyacinth made him reexamine the man's words. "What do you mean, 'can't tell them?' "

Conley looked up blinking, clearly engrossed in his physics puzzles. "Am not allowed to."

Davy jumped to the other side of the table, standing right behind Conley. With his right hand he grabbed the neck of Conley's shirt from behind and shoved down as Conley tried to scramble to his feet. With his left hand he ripped Conley's shirt open, exposing the man's left shoulder, collarbone, and upper chest.

The scars were there, both of them. He prodded with his finger and felt the hard lump under the skin.

Conley, realizing what he was doing, stopped struggling.

Davy released him and walked slowly back around the table.

Conley glared at him. "I really liked this shirt!" Pointedly, he popped a dangling button off its last strand of thread and dropped it in his shirt pocket.

Davy pursed his lips. "Your scars are older than mine, but not as old as Hyacinth's. How long ago did they put it in?"

Conley poured himself some more coffee from the thermos carafe. "You saw Hyacinth's scars? Wow."

Davy felt himself blush scarlet. "Is it everybody here? Everybody who comes in contact with Simons?"

Conley shuddered slightly like a horse twitching off a biting fly. He stared at the opposite wall and said, "Not only did I track your mass moving from station to station, but every time you jumped, the gravitational signature actually overlapped for one hundred and thirty to two hundred milliseconds. It was as if you were in two places at once, which is impossible, of course."

Davy sat down and shook his napkin out before placing it in his lap. "Must be anybody who knows Simons. Inner circle stuff."

Conley shook a packet of artificial sweetener into his cup. "So it confirms my previous hypothesis. You aren't really disappearing and reappearing. You're opening a gateway, a hole between the two space-time locations. Because the hole persists, I'm getting my doubled mass reading—through the door."

Davy poured himself coffee. "I think I know what you mean."

Conley looked up from stirring his coffee, the spoon dangling in his hand. "Really?"

"Yeah. For instance it seems like we're in the same room right now but from the conversation, we're actually a million miles apart."

"Think about it! Don't you know what this means? If you could open such a hole and leave it open? At the least, it means unlimited energy. You could end droughts by diverting flood waters from one part of the planet to parched riverbeds elsewhere. Add a hydroelectric generator and you'd get energy as well. Hell, open a gate between a low altitude reservoir and an upper one and you have perpetual energy."

"Perpetual motion?" said Davy, a skeptical look on his face. "Where does the energy come from?"

It was Conley's turn to blush. "Well, where does the energy come from for
your
jumps?"

Davy shrugged, "Ah, that. Well, each time I jump every hot beverage on earth loses a millicalorie of heat."

Conley stared at his coffee for a second before smiling. "Well, that's a thought. We should measure the net energy in your departure and destination environments."

"Yeah—imagine what global warming would be like without my efforts!"

Conley sighed. "I take it you don't really know where the energy comes from?"

"I take it you don't know which of the staff here have implants in their chest?"

Conley stopped talking and ate his breakfast. Davy glared at him for a moment before fetching his own from the sideboard. When he was done, Davy said, "I'm going to the beach if it's okay with you."

"Conley looked vaguely up at the ceiling and said, "Turn on the beach keys, please."

A wall-mounted intercom said, "All clear."

Davy shivered. He thought he was watched always, but it was nasty to have it confirmed.

Conley nodded at Davy. "Listen for the whistle—he wants to talk to you later."

"He? Your master? Simons?"

Conley looked away. "He's flying in. They'll want you locked down when he lands."

"Yes, Renfield."

Conley looked puzzled and raised his eyebrows.

"You guys need to read more. Go Google it. R, E, N, F, I, E, L, D. To narrow it down add the search term 'Stoker.' " He jumped directly to the beach.

It's an odd duck that doesn't know who Renfield is.

The wind was strong out of the east, parallel to the beach, tearing the long ocean swells to rags as they broke. Davy sat in sun-warmed sand in the lee of a rock, sheltered from the stinging wind-borne sand.

The tide was out. He stared at the smooth expanse of wet sand and thought about tramping out a message for passing spy satellites, DAVY HERE, in letters twenty feet on a side. It would be visible but, even if his jailers let him do it, what were the odds of the right SatIntel analyst reporting it to someone who was sufficiently in the know?

He thought about what Conley had told him, about keeping the gate open. He pictured putting his hand in a full bathtub in Stillwater and simultaneously putting the same hand in the cistern in the cliff house—holding the gate open—having the water flow through from bath to tank.
Would beat hauling buckets.

The whistle blew and, reflexively, he jumped back to his room, in the square. Conley was already there, the padlock in his hand. "Time to put on the manacle, I'm afraid. They're on final approach."

Davy put the manacle on around his ankle. He let Conley examine it for snugness, snap the padlock shut, and check that the lock was definitely engaged.

Conley didn't stop there—he followed the chain to its floor anchor and verified every link. "Secure," he said to the mirror.

It was another half-hour before Hyacinth came in the door and double-checked the chain and lock. Only then did she hold the door for Lawrence Simons to enter, a file folder in his hand. After Simons was seated, just outside the radius of Davy's chain, she took up a station against the wall. She didn't speak and she didn't look at Davy.

"Good morning, Mr. Rice. Good morning, Dr. Conley."

Davy watched Simons's face. The man smiled as he spoke but it struck Davy that the politeness was a shell, spoken like some barely understood foreign language.
He knows when to use the phrases but he doesn't really understand why.

Simons continued. "I don't think we'll be needing you at this time, Dr. Conley."

Conley blinked, then said, "Of course. I'll be in my office." He left quickly and, Davy thought, gratefully.

After he was gone Simons turned to Hyacinth and said, "If you'd see about that other matter, my dear."

Hyacinth nodded and left.

Simons put on the polite smile again and said, "Nice work there in Nigeria."

Davy nodded slightly. "Have you known Mr. Roule long?"

Simons tilted his head as if considering. "I've known
of
him for several years. But I don't think I've ever been in the same room with him. He's not a direct report."

"Ah, so he
is
one of yours?"

"He is unaware of the connection."

"What happened to the kidnappers?"

Simons shook his head. "Bit of a botch, really. The army leveled the island and pumped thousands of rounds into the surrounding mangroves but they didn't come up with a single body. Closer coordination was called for."

"To keep them from leveling the mission?"

Simons looked at Davy like he was from another planet. "To insure the destruction of the kidnappers."

Hyacinth came back in and nodded to Simons. "All off, sir."

"You're sure?"

"I unplugged the AV board. All video and audio feeds are dead until I plug it back in and I locked that room. I have the only key on site."

Davy remembered the day the welder had blown the circuit breaker—how Hyacinth had talked to the mirror without response. He filed it away.

"Very good, Hyacinth." Simons shifted in his seat, turning his attention fully upon Davy.

"As I understand it, you can teleport to any place you've been previously."

Davy shrugged. "Within reason. I have to have sufficient recall of the place. If I haven't been there in a while, I need my memory jogged."

"Jogged? How jogged?"

"By going there again, by some more traditional means." He paused for a second then added, "Or images—photos or video."

Simons took a folded page from his file folder. "I see. How fresh is your memory of Caracas?" He handed the sheet to Davy.

Davy unfolded the sheet and studied it in silence. It was a color printout of the central areas of Caracas, major avenues only, with several points of interest highlighted and an overlay of the subway system.

Simons shook his head. "You were there last July for the NSA. You delivered several cardboard boxes."

Indeed?
Davy looked up surprised. Simons knew that much. "All right. I have a site at the Metro station at Plaza Venezuela. Also at the
Parque Central."

"Not Bolivar Plaza?"

"I wouldn't go there in an armored car."

"Surely in daylight?"

"Well, perhaps in a large group, in daylight."