Mae fought back as she crossed West End Avenue at forty miles an hour and climbing. The driver of a delivery van, catching sight of the airborne wheelchair, was disconnected from his wits and the van plowed into the back of a city bus. Mae was experiencing hot spots in her brain as if several minor blood vessels had popped simultaneously. Outrage further diminished her capacity to retake control.
Who are you? You cannot do this to me!
A flock of birds scattered from the boughs of a sycamore inside the black iron fence that separated West End from Vandy's campus. The wheelchair, now at rooftop level of two turn-of-the-century brick buildings separated by a small parking lot, began to slow down. There was a quadrangle and some tall spreading oaks ahead. The campus, between graduation and the start of summer sessions, was lightly populated on this Sunday morning.
The wheelchair stopped above the center of the broad quadrangle, hovering fifty feet in the air. Mae made a last effort to communicate with the superior young mind that had overwhelmed hers.
Got to run. Bye-bye, Mae.
Wait. You cawn't leave me like this!
Oh. Well, if you insist.
The wheelchair dropped, but only a few feet. It crashed through the densely leaved crown of a venerable oak and came stunningly to rest, upright, on a bough the thickness of a sewer pipe. The wheels hung over either side of the bough, spinning uselessly. Smaller limbs and leaves embraced and enfolded Mae like a shy nymph in a Victorian children's book.
I will get you for this, lovely. Rest assured
. But Mae had the dismal feeling that she no longer was powerful enough to be heard, let alone reckoned with.
T
he Pastor had restored order if not tranquillity to his flock by coaxing them to join the choir in singing another hymn. About a third of the congregation had decided they'd had enough spiritual sustenance for one Sunday.
Few of those choosing to leave actually believed what they had seen. In spite of their professions of faith they had little capacity for acknowledging the miraculous in their lives. Some parishioners had witnessed Tom Sherard hurling his lion's-head cane in the direction of the Mind-Fuckers.
What? What was he doing? What did that mean?
Others, already distracted by the incomprehensible, namely the spinning crucifix, had witnessed the drubbing and rout of the MMFers. But when the senses are overloaded, the mind simply shuts down or fast-forwards to the next moments of comparative sanity, where the cane-beating could be explained away as some sort of irrational scuffle. Teenagers involved, a flurry of juvenile hysteria.
(Everybody was afraid that crucifix was gonna fall, hey, it was scary, man.) Because Tom Sherard was only one of many leaving the sanctuary, he didn't draw unusual attention. The exodus was quiet for the most part; stunned faces, a few embarrassed smiles. Young children whining in their parents' arms. The Mind-Fuckers were nowhere to be seen. A woman fainted in the vestibule, revealing to passersby that she didn't wear under wear even to church. Sherard heard sirens, still a mile or so away. He saw his cane lying inconspicuously on the carpet against the wall. He picked it up and took a side exit to the parking lot.
The cane felt different to him. He had a tingling sensation from the palm of his hand to the elbow. He was bemused, but he had to smile. Whatever
Eden had done, the knobbly wood seemed to have been permanently transmuted into something ... livelier. Invested (his old friend and mentor Joseph Nkambe might have said) with Eden's considerable juju. He had the feeling that should it become necessary, he could employ his cane to cleave granite with a blow.
On West End a police car had pulled up behind the accident involving the bus. Sherard heard Eden call him. He looked around. She was in the front seat of the van the Russians had rented at the airport when they arrived. Alex was driving.
A side door of the van slid open as he approached. Bertie Nkambe was inside. She smiled happily at him.
"Hey, look what we've got."
Sherard heard a series of muted sneezes. The thin woman named Heidi was hunched over in the rearmost seat. She raised her rabbity face from her sodden handkerchief and glared.
"You
wouldn't
have me except I came down with a migraine. It whiteouts my powers. On good days I'm better than you are, Toots."
"Maybe you'll get a chance to prove that," Bertie said nonchalantly. "Meantime your headache could get a lot worse, Heidi. If you really want me to work at it."
"I told you already. I don't know where the device is! Not our department. We were here for backup, in case it was needed."
"So tell us something new," Eden said as Alex drove out of the parking lot.
"If I don't get a shot of Demerol damn soon, I'll start hurling all over this van."
"Try again, Heidi honey," Alex said.
Silence. The woman groaned. "Hang a right," she said suddenly.
Alex turned on a red light and headed up West End.
"Vanderbilt has a med school and a hospital," Heidi said in a subdued tone. "I have insurance. And a plane ticket out of town. Three o'clock this afternoon."
"No chance," Sherard said, looking tensely at his wristwatch. It was ten minutes to noon.
"Maybe," Heidi said, "I do know something that'll make it worth your while to let me catch my flight. I've been thinking about it. So maybe it all fits in somehow."
The others waited for Heidi to elaborate. At Twenty-fourth Street Alex turned left, guided by a blue sign with a white H on it.
"I flew down from Dulles yesterday with Gordo and a couple of the kids. Mae travels by flying ambulance, and the others are from places around the country. Like I said, we were backup. We knew what was going down would be nuclear, but that's all."
"Didn't know shit from Shinola," Alex said, employing his favorite American expression.
"Shut up. I don't feel like talking anyway. Let me get this over with. Anyway, Gordo and me were boarded already when somebody I knew from college got on. Sandi Goldfarb. She worked for MORG too, the Russian desk. We'd run into each a few times around the company. You know, it was a casual relationship, catch up on old times."
"Where are you going with this, honey?" Alex said over his shoulder.
"Over there, where it says Emergency? They ought to be able to give me a shot. Where am I going with it? Yesterday Sandi's on the plane with me, today she's dead."
"How do you know?" Bertie asked.
"How do
you
know anything? A casual touch, that's all. Precognition, girl. I saw Sandi dead. Broken neck. Murdered, probably. Because she wasn't in a hearse. She was lying on a floor somewhere, lying naked on a blue tarp. Eyes open. Shit. No matter how many times it happens, you almost jump out of your skin."
"What does this have to do with our problem?" Sherard asked.
Heidi was holding her head, eyes shut. Tears drained down her cheeks. "I don't know! Sandi said she was meeting another girl and they were spending the night in Nashville. Company business. If she knew what it was about, she couldn't tell me, but she said she hoped she'd have a chance to do some waterskiing. Later when she got up to use the john I had a peek at the airline ticket in her tote. She was booked on a return flight out of here, eight-thirty this morning. But I know she didn't make it."
"This doesn't do any of us any good," Bertie told her.
"Think about it. Company business. Just down for the night. I got that she was down here to screw a guy, one of ours. Either he turned out to be a homicidal maniac, orâSandi came across something she wasn't supposed to know about, and drew a quick death sentence."
"You said she was on MORG's Russian desk?" Eden asked. "Did she speak Russian?"
"Sure, her major at Rutgers."
"It's a Russian device. We know that much. That's why Alex is here."
"I wouldn't tell her a fuhkeeng thing," Alex cautioned.
"Okay, that makes a little sense," Heidi said as Alex pulled up to the hospital's emergency entrance. "Listen, I'm trying to cooperate now. I mean I don't want to be stuck here in Music City when there's a major kablooey scheduled."
"We still have nothing to go on," Sherard said.
"I was trying to remember one other thing. Pre-cog is funny; sometimes there's only a vague flash, other times you get details. There was some writing on that tarp I saw, in one corner. Black paint, a stencil I guess. It said
Holly Marie, Hendersonville, TN
âfor Tennessee."
Silence in the van. Heidi clenched her forehead tightly, crying in pain.
"You still don't get it? Sandi hoped she could go waterskiing. The
Holly Marie
. That must be the name of a boat. She was killed on a boat! And it has to be registered somewhere. Doesn't it?"
PLENTY COUPS, MONTANA ⢠JUNE 7 ⢠5:15 P.M. MDT
E
den Waring's doppelganger had been wandering around the Plenty Coups facility for most of the day. During the first hour she had become lost. From the second hour she'd been footsore, and since well before noon hunger pangs had steadily worsened her mood. The scent of food from a cafeteria steam table or the sight of a vending machine was almost enough to fetch tears. But hunger didn't bother her as much as isolation. Her long stretch of invisibility. She was neither human nor ghost. Her aloneness was absolute. Now even the day-to-day routine of shadowing Eden, her left-handed homebody, seemed more appealing to her than hours of trudge through the facility, this bright technologically precise but emotionally neutral construct, climate-controlled, with one cheerless perspective after another, a deadness to each footfall. It would have depressed the soul of a rat. In her bleakness she entertained small fears that she might never leave. It had come to her, dropped into her mind like a seed from the beak of a bird that had flown for a thousand miles, that Eden was in great danger, from a totally unexpected source. What was the fate of a doppelganger without its homebody? The terror of nothingness, beyond her ability to define or endure.
She wondered what Robin Sandza had to look forward to, once she released him. But he had been eloquent in his signaled appeal to her, finger touching his forehead, then pointing to the sky.
Miles of walking, sore feet, flagging energy. But a renewed sense of urgency.
Find him. And get it done
.
While Eden was still alive, and could reward her dpg by setting her free.
The doppelganger had already selected the name she wanted for herself. It perked her up, silently repeating to herself the lovely, longed-for, all-important name as she made the rounds of forbidden places in the underground facility, numbly searching for Robin Sandza. Imagining social situations. Introducing herself. The joy, the
magic
, in those three syllables.
Hi! I'm Guinevere!
OLD HICKORY LAKE, TENNESSEE â¢JUNE 7 ⢠6:35 P.M. CDT
"W
ell, I know I have seen it in this end of the lake," the TWRA officer said, piloting his Wildlife Resources Agency's patrol boat, a thirty-two-foot Whaler with twin 250-horse Johnson outboards, as close to the shoreline as its draft would permit. "Fact is I may have stopped it for some small infraction. They do know how to party on these big-ass showboats, specially college kids on spring break. Gang of 'em will pool their money to rent one for a week. The rowdier kind make a deal of work for us. Figure how they're out on the water, the ordinary rules of human behavior do not apply. Or they get themselves drowned. Sometimes sheriff's divers can't locate the bodies; lake's fortyâfifty foot in a high-water year, and it's dark down there. Now a houseboat, it don't go nowheres fast but it does take some experience to drive one and not run it over snags or into 'nother boat. Do us a big favor they just leave 'em tied to the dock.
Holly Marie
. Tell you how that name stuck in my mem'ry. My oldest sister named one of her twins Holly and the other 'un Hallie, or maybe it was Hayley. Say you don't have no idea where the boat might be anchored at?"
Tom Sherard said, "All we had was the owner's name. Windcastle Marine, Inc., and the registration information you looked up."
"Weren't enough to ring a bell," the safety officer said. His name was Carlisle. First name. He was in his early thirties, with sun freckles and wrinkles, new pink burn on his high cheekbones and around his blue eyes. "Well, we got us some daylight yet; after that I couldn't promise nothing."
In the shade of the cabin, Heidi, the MMFer with the huge headache that a shot of Demerol hadn't much diminished, groaned and shifted the icebag she was holding to her forehead. The only word she'd uttered for the last two hours was "fuhkoff." She had refused to wear a flotation vest. Bertie Nkambe and Eden Waring had theirs on. They were in the bow of the whaler, studying the shore, the many small coves they passed. Alex had stretched out on a couple of flotation cushions and was staring at the sky, smoking.
There was a floating dock or boatshed in nearly half of the coves. Speedboats, Jet Skis, a few sailboats, homely pontoon and paddleboats. Small kids wearing bright orange floaters around their upper arms were jumping off the ends of docks. Older kids roared down the middle of the lake on Jet Skis, slowing down when they saw the patrol boat with its orange-andgreen striped bow.