Summoned to Tourney (21 page)

A few moments later, he glanced at his watch, then rose from his chair and walked briskly down the hallway. Beyond another door, Warden Blair sat silently at a computer console, not even bothering to look up as O’Neill entered the room.

“Did she believe you?” Blair asked.

“I think so,” the colonel replied woodenly. “At least, she said she wouldn’t go back to her apartment, so I shouldn’t have any problems sending a team over there to scout for prints and fibers. Maybe we’ll find her mystery boy, maybe not.”

Blair shook his head. “The boy doesn’t matter—my people can follow him like a lighthouse beacon, anywhere in the city. What matters is that there is no interference with this project, at least for several days. And that no harm comes to your Dr. Susan Sheffield for those several days. After that, she won’t matter at all. In fact, you’ll probably need to kill her. Do you understand?”

“Of course.” Something shifted in the emptiness of his thoughts, at the idea of harming Susan.
I… I don’t want to do that
, he realized.

Blair continued, coldly, with calculation. “I can’t control her, not without damaging her ability to complete the project. We’ll need her technical expertise to complete the Breakthrough, the work that she hasn’t completed yet.” Blair seemed to be speaking more to himself than to O’Neill.

For a moment, O’Neill felt that strange emptiness lifting from his mind, the fog clearing slightly. His fingers strained, touched the flap of the holster at his belt, the .45 automatic nestled within. It was so difficult, harder than anything he’d ever done… he unsnapped the flap, wrapped his fingers around the grip, tensing…

“Don’t do that,” Blair said absently, and Colonel O’Neill screamed inside, in fury and hopelessness, as his disobedient fingers rebuttoned the holster flap, then clenched into a fist in his lap. “I still need your services, Colonel,” the thing that had been Warden Blair said in a serious tone. “I can’t let you kill yourself yet. And as far as killing me… if this body dies, I’ll simply take yours instead. Keep that thought in mind, if you think you might be able to break free.”

“I’ll ... kill you,” O’Neill said in a strained voice. “Don’t know… what you are, but I’ll kill you.”

He felt Blair’s attention focus on him, pressing down upon him like a great weight. It was more difficult to think, more difficult to focus on a single thought—he clutched desperately at the hatred, the last emotion being slowly stripped away from him.

But he couldn’t fight it; it was like fighting the tide, or the turning of the planet. When it was over, there was only a small part of him left, locked deep beneath the waves of emptiness. A tiny scrap, able only to watch and weep, without acting.

Something like a smile passed over Blair’s lips. “Much better. Now, your next assignment… I need competent laboratory personnel to replace the lost Poseidon Project team members, so we can reschedule the project. Despite the presence of the Federal officers, we should be able to resume work sometime tomorrow.”

“I’ll take care of it,” O’Neill heard his own voice say, and he rose to leave the room.

“I’m sure you will, Colonel,” Blair said, smiling.

I’ve seen that kid before, I know I have,
Susan thought, walking past the opulent displays at Macy’s and into the women’s shoes department.
That handsome face, the long dark hair… I know him, I know that I know him....

She paused in front of a display of sequined shoes, momentarily distracted by the thought of finding shoes to match her favorite black sequin dress.
Attack sequins. Guaranteed to stop traffic.
Shopping was excellent trauma therapy, a new idea for medical treatment, she thought, eying the sequined shoes and then deciding to pass on them, at least for now.

In the next department, she considered a new British trenchcoat, perfect for foggy San Francisco mornings. It looked like a good buy, especially with the matching scarf a warm and comfortable coat, as comfortable as an old friend.

Hands in the pockets of her old coat, listening to flute music, surprisingly lovely and unexpected…

And connected with that boy, somehow.

Susan shook her head, trying to remember. A concert… no, she would’ve been wearing better clothes, probably her black wool wrap over a dress, not the old worn jacket with holes in the pockets. But if it wasn’t a concert, where would she have heard him play music before… where?

She paid for the new coat, and left with the package under her arm, back toward the parking lot. The wind had picked up, swirling leaves around her feet as she crossed the street. Near the parking lot attendant’s booth, a gray-haired man with his cap on the ground was singing Gershwin to the street, mostly ignored by the pedestrians. And that was when it came to her.

A street musician! That boy is a street musician!

Elation hit her in an adrenaline rush; she laughed out loud, and began to think back of all the times she’d seen street musicians in San Francisco, the different corners and tourist areas and business districts… down near the Pier, maybe? Or Ghiradelli Square? Maybe at the cable car station, where the crowds of tourists waited in endless lines to ride the cable cars? Fog, cold, wind… where would she find those at an hour when she wouldn’t be at the lab?

“Now the quest begins,” she said under her breath. Unlocking her car, she sat down in the driver’s seat and reached for the stack of maps in the glove compartment. With a map of San Francisco spread out in front of her, she plotted out the best approach to the Pier area, then folded up the map and started her car, carefully backing out of the parking lot and into the late morning traffic.

Maybe this is crazy. Maybe I’m searching for someone who’s nothing more than a hallucination… maybe we all really were poisoned by the cafeteria meatloaf last night at the labs, and I only imagined the guy. Then again, maybe he‘s real… and if he‘s real, he‘s the answer to all of this. If I can find him, the bastard who’s responsible for what happened to Frank and Dave and all those others, then maybe I won’t be afraid to go back to the Labs anymore, afraid to go home to a silent apartment and afraid of trying to sleep tonight… afraid those things are going to come back for the one that got away.

At first, her quest seemed hopeless—on a chilly San Francisco morning, very few street musicians were at the Square or Pier 39. She asked at the Pier management office whether they might have a list of the musicians who regularly played there, and had to listen to a serious-eyed woman take ten minutes to explain that except for the performers who did shows on the small stage at the center of the Pier, they had no way of tracking the street musicians.

She stopped at Pier 45 for a quick lunch, then went back to Ghiradelli Square for another attempt. This time she hit paydirt: a quartet of musicians playing wild Celtic music for a small crowd. She waited until a lull in the music, then asked them about her mysterious musician.

“Sounds like someone I’ve seen at the Renaissance Faire, last few weekends,” the male guitar-player said. “He’s not a regular, but I’ve seen him there with some friends.”

“You were just watching the red-haired girl,” one of his female companions teased him. “He was with a woman with bright red hair,” the musician informed Susan. “And another man, a blond hunk of a guy. I’d bet they’ll be back at the Faire on Saturday.”

Saturday… too many days away, by Susan’s reckoning. “Do you have any idea where I could find him before the weekend?”

“Try the Embarcadero,” the man suggested. “I think I saw him there once, playing for the business lunch crowd.”

Susan thanked them politely, and headed back to her car. She drove back to the Embarcadero, within walking distance of where she’d started this odd trek, parked and walked to the open plaza.

Too late for the lunch crowd, she realized as she walked up the concrete steps. The plaza was mostly deserted except for businessmen apparently hurrying to meetings and such stuff, and the food stands were obviously shutting down for the afternoon.

She asked the proprietor of a hot dog stand about the street musician, and was rewarded with the man’s big smile. “Oh, yes. Beth and Eric and Kory. They’re going to play for my daughter’s wedding next month.” The man fished in his wallet, and pulled out a ragged business card with a number scribbled on the back. “This is their phone number. They live somewhere off Geary Street, maybe on the top of the hill near Broderick? Anyhow, here’s the number.”

If they take my clearance away, maybe I have a future as a detective,
she thought, smiling. “Thank you,” she said, writing down the phone number and the street information.
Anyhow, that’s enough detective work for one day, she decided. Now it’s time for combat shopping…

She made it home before the afternoon traffic began, the long slow trek of cars going across the Bay from the city, in time to see the last of O’Neill’s cleanup crew leaving her apartment.

“Find anything interesting, boys?” she asked.

The youngest of the colonel’s agents gave her a shy grin, and his superior chivvied him out of the apartment, nodding once to Susan.

She sat down on the couch and thought about the impossible, and what had happened last night. Suddenly she was consumed with the desire to know more, to find out what O’Neill and the other honchos had discovered while she was merrily spending money at Macy’s.

Five minutes later, she was on her way back to the office. The gate guard checked her I.D, more carefully than she usually did, but let her pass in without any problems. She was on her way to O’Neill’s office when two business-suited Federal agents caught her by the elbows and escorted her in another direction.

“Gentlemen, please!” she said, extracting her elbows.

“Sorry, ma’am, but it’s very urgent,” one of them said, as they escorted her down to one of the lowest levels in the building, and left her at an office door.

She shrugged, knocked, and walked inside.

And stopped short, seeing her boss and Warden Blair seated in front of her. Together.

“Ah, Dr. Sheffield,” Blair said, looking up from a stack of papers. “We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow morning. Good, we can talk now.”

“We’re making some changes in the project,” O’Neill said awkwardly. “Because we’re so shorthanded now as a result of last night’s ... incident, Dr. Blair is going to be supervising the project, as well as bringing some of his own personnel onto our team.”

She was speechless for a moment, then found her voice again. “He’s what? You can’t do that, Bossman!”

“I don’t think you understand, Dr. Sheffield.” Blair gave her a cold smile. “I’m your boss now. I will be supervising this project, with Colonel O’Neill’s assistance.”

She frowned, and decided to dig her heels in. “Like hell you are. There’s no paperwork on this, no clearance from DoD, nothing. I’m not handing anything over to you, mister, not without the correct paperwork.”

“Susan.” That was Steve, in the conciliatory tone she remembered from too many late night arguments. “The paperwork will follow in a few days. But since we’re so close to getting some genuine results on the project, I thought it best to bring Dr. Blair in immediately.”

“We
have
genuine results already, Steve! We don’t need this idiot to help us!” She leaned forward, speaking earnestly. “Steve, don’t do this to me, please. It’s been our project, ever since Day One. This—whatever else he is—he’s
not
a geologist or a geophysicist, he’s a
psychiatrist
. He not only doesn’t have the authority, he doesn’t know the Richter scale from a musical scale! Why don’t you just bring in Jane Goodall to supervise us, while you’re at it?”

“I don’t have any control over this situation,” Steve said, not meeting her eyes.

Who’s jerking your chain, Colonel?
she thought bitterly. “I won’t be a part of this, Steve. I’ll quit. And I’m not bluffing, you know I’ll do it.” She looked up into Blair’s eyes, wanting nothing more than to slap that contemptuous look on his face, and suddenly remembered…

…recoiling at the look in his eyes, knowing there was nothing human there, a corpse without emotion… stepping back, though the music still tugged her forward. Those inhuman eyes, lit with a strange hunger…

This is insane, she thought. He’s just a scientist, not a demon. There are no such things as demons, and I’m not sitting across from one.

But inside, deep down in her gut, she knew. “You’re one of them,” she whispered, more to herself than out loud.

“One of what, doctor?” Blair’s eyes followed her intently.

“Excuse me,” she said, hoping she could get out of the room without being physically ill. Now she could see it clearly, the shadow behind his eyes, the emptiness where a human being’s mind should have been. She made it to the door, but Blair’s voice stopped her.

“Think about your job security,” he said. “Think about your clearance. Think about that story the colonel taped about the floating shadow-monsters, Dr. Sheffield. I found that story of yours to be absolutely fascinating, and I’m sure the State Board of Mental Health will, too. If you quit this project, I’ll make sure they hear of it.”

“Go screw yourself,” she said with dignity, so angry that she was fighting back tears, and slammed the door behind her.

Two cups of coffee later, the problem wasn’t any easier to solve. She had considered assault and battery, intent to cause grievous bodily harm, aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, and various other physical options. She’d also considered exorcism, remembering the emptiness looking back at her from within Warden Blair’s eyes. She’d also considered just saying the hell with it and running away, so far that they couldn’t find her, and never coming back. Or just leaving, period. She dismissed the threat of siccing the Mental Health Board on her; they didn’t have time to chase after one middle-aged scientist, no matter who Blair thought he knew. They were too busy with child-abusers and serial killers. With her credentials, she could be back in work in a European lab within days. Or better yet, the Japanese;
they
had a vested interest in this, and they had lots and lots of lovely multicolored yen to spend on it. If she wanted to run away.