The War of Immensities (48 page)

“Everyone being
my former medical team?”

“Yes ma’am.
Them, and the hostages,” Jackovitch added.

For a moment,
Felicity searched her memory to assure herself that no one had said
anything about hostages before. They had not. There was an
inexplicable cold chill running about in her bloodstream as she sat
staring at him. “What hostages?”

“The
hostages... I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t realise you hadn’t time to
see the official report on the incident. The crew took hostages on
the ship with them. Civilian hostages. In fact, the control
group.”

Felicity
pressed down an invisible force between them with the palms of her
hands. “Go slower. You’re confusing me.”

“The former
Project Earthshaker control group were in the same hospital as the
crew of the Barton in Pearl, although on a different floor. They
were, of course, properly quarantined. The crew took the control
group as hostages, on to the ship with them. That’s the worst
offence—not just hijacking the ship but worse, taking civilian
hostages along for the voyage.”

“But they were
all going the same way anyway.”

“The Navy
doesn’t like unauthorised civilians on their warships.”

“But don’t you
understand. The control group weren’t hostages. They just all went
together, because they were all pilgrims.”

“That’s what we
need you to explain...” Jackovitch was saying.

But he stopped
when he saw the way she rocked back in the seat, as if she had been
shot. A bullet was impossible since they were surrounded by
bulletproof glass but nevertheless her brain seemed to explode
internally but the projectile that struck her was purely one of
enlightenment.

Suddenly, she
was thumping on the glass at the point directly behind the driver’s
head. “Stop the car! Here! Now!”

Her agitation
caused Jackovitch to respond immediately on the intercom and then
as the car slowed, he asked if she was ill. But she waved him off.
“Stay here. I just need a moment alone,” she gasped and was out of
the car before it fully stopped moving.

As she stumbled
on the rough edge of the road, she barely took in the surroundings.
They were certainly not worth stopping for. Rubble and possibly
garbage littered the scene with flocks of screeching seagulls, and
the place smelled to high heaven with rotting weed and dumped fuel.
Beyond the cyclone wire fence, a huge aircraft carrier was moored
out across the stretch of water along with several other
warships—one of them perhaps the delinquent USS Barton.

Felicity walked
a little way from the car, rubbing her eyes and cheeks, her head
bowed. Behind, Jackovitch remained, watching from the car, willing
to allow her some dignity for he assumed she was discomforted by
her rushed journey. But she wasn’t. It was all because her brain
was screaming at her. Stop. Think this through. Work it out.

She was smiling
when she finally returned. Jackovitch climbed out of the car to
meet her. “Are you okay, ma’am,” he asked with genuine concern.
Perhaps he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t offended her in some way.

“I’m sorry. It
just came to me and I wanted to get it clear in my head before we
said or did anything else.”

“Get what
clear?”

“Something I
didn’t understand,” she said and pressed her fingers on his lapels.
“Now listen. I want to make sure we get this straight. The
so-called hostages weren’t hostages at all. The control group took
the sailors to the ship.”

“Pardon,
ma’am,” Jackovitch gasped, sticking to his more formal mode until
he got a better grasp of this mad woman.

“You’ve got it
the wrong way around. The control group kidnapped the sailors.”

Jackovitch
blanched at the thought of how this was going to go over in the
court room. “You can’t be serious. How could..?”

“Shut up and
listen,” Felicity snapped. Anything to stop him calling her ma’am
again, but she knew she must concentrate and get it right. “When
the linkage occurs for the first time, after the sleepers wake,
they go into an ambulatory catatonic state. They just head off
blindly in the direction of the focal point. You remember the human
lemmings in the Canary Islands.”

“Yes, ma’am. We
thought that was an exception case...”

“Yes I know. So
did I. We white supremacists will never be entirely free of our
racism. We all assumed it was a bunch of dumb native fishermen,
sucked in by their voodoo or some such primitive nonsense. But it
wasn’t. Lorna Simmons did exactly the same thing. She walked
straight off a pier and fell in Auckland harbour.”

“She doesn’t
admit that on television,” Jackovitch grinned.

“The truth is,
on the occasion of their first linkage, each of them wandered off
blindly, zombie-fied or whatever you want to call it. If they don’t
get run over by a bus or fall off a cliff, it’s just plain
lucky.”

“And you think
the crew of the Barton did too?”

“I know they
did. But, you see, at the second post sleeper linkage, there’s no
zombie effect. The pilgrim now knows where they are going and why,
and they lead the first timers.”

“Are you sure
of this?”

“That’s why the
Italian pilgrims all followed Christine Rice. All of them. Even the
ones that weren’t Catholics. They all went with her. But the second
time they all went without her.”

“Some of them
still died—in the snow.”

“I know. But
that was because they were caught in the blizzard. So there’s your
defence, Lieutenant. The sailors didn’t hijack the Barton. The
control group did.”

“Well, I’ll be
god-damned… Oh, excuse me, Ma’am.”

“You call me
Ma’am one more time, I’ll belt you one.”

Jackovitch
needed a moment or two to recover, at all levels. He went to his
most commonly used line, just to be sure he was on safe ground.
“But can you prove it?”

“I think so. If
there had been just one experienced pilgrim present, the Canary
Island fishermen wouldn’t have gone off the cliffs. They would have
followed him or her down the path to their boats instead.”

“I just don’t
see how we are gonna convince the Court Martial of this.”

“That isn’t the
problem. The proof will come eventually. Right now the worry is how
to get enough pilgrims into Japan to stop 16,000 sleepers from
walking into the sea.”

Jackovitch was
leaning on the car, shaking his head in disbelief. “Well, ma’...
um, I mean, Doctor Campbell. I don’t know whether this is gonna
help our defence or not, but it sure as hell proves one thing. You
do know a damned lot more about this than everyone else.”

The
interrogations had been polite and respectful at all times, much to
his surprise. Joe Solomon must have been one of the few people who
could be edified by a hands-on tour of several of the world’s major
correctional facilities. The worst had been in East Perth lock-up,
where he had been taken initially to await the arrival of FBI
agents from America. That had been a barbaric place, brutal and
full of drunks and thugs but because he was in a wheelchair, no one
bothered him. He made a court appearance in which the FBI asked for
extradition to assist them with their inquiries and this was
immediately granted because Joe instructed his QC to say that he
agreed and was willing to assist in any way possible.

Within a week,
they flew him to Washington. There they kept him in sparse rooms
within the FBI building and rolled him out most days to one of
several conference rooms where government officials questioned him,
usually in an informal manner. At first he denied everything and
then took the 5th Amendment and they argued for two weeks whether
that was valid. It wasn’t, since Australia has no Bill of Rights
attached to it’s constitution.

But the FBI was
hamstrung from the start—once they went through those records he
had allowed to continue to exist, they discovered he had accounted
for every cent of the funding that the project had received
officially, and there was no trace of the covert funds, nor of the
slush funds that had evolved from money the project made
itself.

“You keep very
fine books, Mr. Solomon,” the judicator said at one point. “It’s a
pleasure to investigate you.”

Throughout it
all, bureaucrats mulled over what to admit to and possibilities and
consequences and it was probably a great relief to them when Harley
sent a lawyer to organise his release. There were no charges at
all, in the end. To prove something stolen, first you needed to
prove its existence.

As Lorna
wheeled him out into a rare day of winter sun, Joe knew that his
commitment to the project was complete.

“Harley said to
send you wherever you want to go. So, where do you want to go,
Joe?” Lorna asked him lightly.

“Italy. To the
convent.”

“You planning
to become Chrissie’s first real convert?”

“No. Despite
the fact that I think it’s a miracle that I didn’t end up doing
decades in Sing-sing, it’s Wagner who interests me now.”

“You think
you’ll need his protection.”

“No. That isn’t
at all what I have in mind.”

He got out of
the cab in the Bronx, huddled against the wind and pouring rain. It
was four in the morning and there was no one about.

“You better
watch yourself in this neighbourhood, buddy,” the taxi driver
warned and he searched out the change.

“Keep it. Any
mugger who comes out in this weather deserves what he gets.”

“If you say so,
buddy.”

Thyssen watched
the cab until it disappeared from sight. He was wrapped in a yellow
raincoat with the hood pulled right over his head. The driver might
remember him but would never be able to make a positive
identification. He turned then and surveyed the street—the ruined
tenements towered all about and the gutters spread to lakes as the
garbage blocked up the drains. With his hands in his pockets and
his head down, he started to walk along a carefully planned route
through streets and alleys until eventually he came to a wide
square that he crossed. He did not know the area and had no idea
where he was—he was tracing his course on a map secluded in the
folds of the raincoat. At every possible corner, he halted and
looked back to ensure no one was following. But he knew that a
professional tail would never be caught by that method.

At the next
corner, a man sat in a car, lighting a cigarette as Thyssen passed
on the other side of the road. Neither acknowledged the existence
of the other. Thyssen walked on and the man in the car, who was Val
Dennis, waited ten minutes without moving, watching for signs of
life, contented himself there was none, and then drove off. Thyssen
meanwhile was two blocks away, and stepped into a doorway and made
a call on his cell phone.

“All clear,”
Jami responded. “You go in the steel door in the alley across from
you and up to the top floor in the goods lift.”

When he got to
the lift, Val Dennis was standing there, grinning and smoking. “Yo,
Prof. Remember me?”

“I seem to
remember kicking you out of one of my tutorials about ten years
ago, Val.”

“Hey man, big
favour. I was so pissed, I assholed Geology and took Astrophysics
in a rage of vengeance. It’s much more fun looking up than looking
down.”

“Pleased to
oblige.”

“So, are we at
the end of the exercise in paranoia?” Val asked with a grin.

“Yeah. I was
sure I lost them at the airport. They’ll still be watching my
luggage waiting for me to collect it. But I didn’t want to take any
chances.”

“Cool, Daddio.
I surely don’t wanna get tumbled at this stage.”

“Unless, of
course, they didn’t need to follow me because they’ve tumbled your
little set-up already.”

“No way, bro.
They been tryin’ to bust me for years. I got so many
anti-counter-measures installed that Deep Thought will need another
Earthlife to find me.”

“Well, we’ll
soon know if that’s true. Is there somewhere warm around here?”

They rattled
their way up in the elevator to where Jami awaited them on the top
floor.

“Welcome to
Hole-In-The-Wall, Butch,” she grinned.

“Gawd,” Thyssen
grinned back. “You could hide the Titanic in here.”

“It’s in the
room out the back,” Jami laughed.

There they shed
rain coats and she handed them towels to dry the peripherals as
they made their way into Val’s amazing clutter of equipment.

“What is all
this stuff?” Thyssen asked in amazement.

“What falls, I
catch,” Val said with a shrug.

Thyssen saw a
bathysphere, and a jet engine, and what seemed to be a
communications satellite.

“Got outmoded
before it got launched,” Dennis explained when he saw Thyssen
staring.

“You wouldn’t
have a nice, standard Pentium around someplace, would you?”

“Thisaway.”

It was in fact
the sort of place where Thyssen was at home, the machines reduced
to their components and reconnected by exposed wiring. Jami sat at
the screen. “We tried to duplicate Glen’s set up as near as
possible. How is the blue-eyed boy, anyway?”

“Gone over to
the other side, I fear.”

“Bastard.”

“Taken you far
too long to realise that, honoured student. But Glen’s a practical
lad. Either he works for them or he doesn’t work. Eventually, he’ll
see reason and return to the fold and when he does we’ll know
everything they know.”

“But doesn’t
that mean that right now they know everything we know?”

“They know
everything he knows. But I managed to pump a few vital bits into
the net.”

Jami opened the
page. “User name?”

“Drongo.”

“Oh boy. Isn’t
it some sort of bird?”

Thyssen leaned
over her shoulder and typed in the password with one emphatic
finger. “Yes. It’s also a word I picked up from Brian Carrick.
Australian for someone who knows less than they ought to.”