Too late. A high-pressure column of blue flame erupted from the unit between Blake’s shoulders; from the back it must have seemed that his head was a volcano. The plastic upholstery burst into flame, releasing acrid black fumes. A hole opened in the thin sheet metal roof of the car.
Reeling from the awful heat, dying before their eyes, Blake stumbled back toward the smoking vehicle and collapsed into the driver’s seat. With a last agonized spasm, an unconscious reflex of escape, he threw the pots into reverse high. The burning car jerked away and spun around, throwing flaming bits across the wet roadway, careening crazily off into the forest.
But somehow the car stayed on the road. Blake hadn’t watched all those action-adventure holoviddies, with stuntmen lunging around cloaked in flame, without getting the technique down pat.
Blake tugged the knot of his silk tie and smoothed it to lie flat against his white cotton shirt. He snugged his suit jacket neatly around his shoulders and, a moment later, rose as the magneplane slowed for the Brooklyn Bridge station. Someone looking closely might have noticed the red welt across the back of his neck, but a quick glance around reassured him that no one was watching.
He stepped off the plane, briefcase in hand, and briskly marched to the escalator. Minutes later he was on his way back uptown on a restored antique subway train. A century ago it would have been rush hour, but the bright, clean subways were never crowded these days. He got off at a midtown station. As he emerged from underground, the rising sun was touching the tops of the glittering towers around him with pale yellow light.
The physical exhilaration of the attack and narrow escape had drained away, and he experienced a moment’s dejection. He wasn’t even sure who or what he’d been fighting—or why, now that Ellen had rejected him, except for some vague sense of his own injured pride. Simple fatigue is a great discourager of pride. With self-hypnotic effort, he regained at least a temporary feeling of confidence. He was on the way to another job interview, and this was for a job he wanted.
The offices of the Vox Populi Institute occupied a three-story brick building in the east 40s, within walking distance of the Council of Worlds complex on the East River. Plain as it was, the building was worth a fortune.
Inside, the decor was even plainer—steel desks, steel chairs, steel filing cabinets, crumbling bulletin boards, crumbling paint (institutional green to shoulder height, institutional cream above), and aggressively plain and surly office help, one of whom finally agreed to show Blake the general direction of Arista Plowman’s office. Dexter was not in today.
Arista, it was said, was less tolerant of human foibles than Dexter—theirs was a prickly partnership— she being as far out on one end of the political spectrum as he was on the other. Arista championed humanity at large, Dexter championed the individual human with an actionable grudge. Their differences hardly made a difference to anyone but them, since Dexter’s favored weapon in defense of the individual was the class-action suit, and Arista’s tactic in defense of the People was to take up the cause of a single, symbolic Wronged Innocent.
She glanced up when Blake appeared at her door and knew instantly she was not dealing with a Wronged Innocent. She growled something like “siddown” and made a pretense of studying his resume. Arista was a bony woman with heavy black brows and grayish black hair that was contracted into tight waves against her long skull. Her severe dress, black with white polka-dots, hung askew from her wide shoulders, and the way she leaned her elbows on her desk top and perched her skinny bottom on the edge of her chair conveyed her desire to be somewhere else. She shoved the resume to one side of her desk as if it had offended her. “You worked for Sotheby’s, Redfield? An auction house?”
Her mouth twisted sourly at the sound of his Brittainted accent. Her own accent was good American, pure Bronx—even though she’d been born and raised in Westchester County. “But you were an
art
dealer.” The emphasis alone neatly conveyed her opinion of those who sold things, especially expensive, decorative, useless things.
“Yes, it’s crazy. These people believe in an alien deity. I managed to join an arm of that cult. I can recognize several of its members and at least one of its leaders. Because of what I know, several attempts have been made on my life, the most recent only last week.”
“They call themselves the
prophetae
of the Free Spirit, but they have other names and cover organizations. I penetrated a branch working out of Paris and helped put it out of business”—after all, no reason for modesty—“They worship a being they call the Pancreator, an alien creature of some kind who is supposed to return to Earth to grant the enlightened—meaning themselves—eternal life, and carry them off to some sort of Paradise. Or perhaps establish Paradise right here on Earth.”
“The
prophetae
are crazy, but they are numerous and extremely influential. Less than ten years ago, members of the Free Spirit started the Multiple Intelligence program inside North America’s Security Agency. That program ceased operations—and its leaders disappeared—when the subject of one of their illegal experiments escaped their control. But not before they had murdered a couple of dozen people. Burned them to death in a sanatorium fire.”
“Less than a month ago, the Space Board discovered an interplanetary freighter, the
Doradus
, which had been converted to a kind of pirate ship. The chief of one of the largest corporations on Mars was implicated. Jack Noble. He’s disappeared.”
“I was there. I’ll give you whatever details you want.” Blake leaned back in his chair and looked up at her as she thoughtfully returned to her desk. “Doctor Plowman, you’re supposed to be in the business of getting government back into the hands of the governed—after people like my father, if I may speak off the record, helped take it away from them. This is exactly the kind of group I should think you’d want to put out of business.”
Outside, Blake realized that the interview—not to mention the night’s events—had left him exhausted. Exhaustion is hard on the reflexes. When a tall, emaciated young man crossed the street in front of him and darted into the nearest infobox, throwing a hurried glance over his shoulder, Blake thought nothing of it. Indeed, he hardly noticed, until he’d come within a few meters and the man suddenly wheeled and raised his arm.
The bullet blew a crater in a marble slab on the side of the building, just about where Blake’s head had been. More bullets—real metal bullets, fired with zeal and accuracy that, if less than perfect, was too great for even a split second’s complacency on the part of the target—following Blake’s breathless roll and scramble along the gutter until he reached the shelter of a parked robotaxi. People were screaming and running—this sort of thing
never
happened in Manhattan—and in seconds the block was deserted.
Blake swore at himself for not spotting his assailant sooner, for he knew him quite well.
Leo
—former wimp—one of his buddies from the Athanasian Society. Blake wished he had a gun. He didn’t carry one, not just because they were strictly illegal in England, where he’d resided for the last two years, and not because he had any qualms about defending himself, but because he’d looked at the statistics and calculated the odds and figured he had a better chance of staying alive without one.
Blake stuck his head under the dash and spent a few seconds fiddling with the circuitry. Still crouched on the floor, he said, “Is there a skinny long-haired guy in the infobooth on the next corner, to your left?”
The taxi hadn’t touched Leo, but it had him trapped in the recessed doorway with only millimeters to spare. Leo was frantically trying to lift his big feet past the mangled bumper when Blake flew over the roof, into his face, knocking the big nickel-plated .45 revolver sideways and out of his hand. Leo’s head crashed backward into the building’s art deco stainless steel door, and when he tried to jerk away from Blake’s hand around his throat he found that Blake’s other hand held a black knife, poised rigidly upright under the angle of his jaw.