Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) (51 page)

“I can do those things on my own,” George said. “I’m not worried about what anyone else does. I’m not the best painter in the world, but I’m pretty good. And even if I weren’t, I could still do it. I could still
enjoy
it. I don’t know what the logical argument is, but I’m not messing with any fifth-grade kid. I wouldn’t mess with him even if his dad were a monster. Anyway, I bet he’s not.”

And with that, George turned and simply walked away. He stepped over the concrete barricade he had moved there earlier this morning with a forklift, and then he began the long climb up the ramp leading to the garage exit.

“Wait, George.
George!
”

Jacob looked one last time toward Anselm. Jacob had no gun. He hadn’t expected to need one. Not that he could have taken control of this situation now even if he’d been armed to the teeth. He needed his brother. “George,” he called again, and he turned the scooter around as quickly as its little electric motor would allow. “George, I don’t know if this thing is strong enough to get up the hill! I’ll have to take the elevator. Wait! George!”

Anselm jumped down from the van, and he ran to Kevin’s side. He paused in his singing. “Are you still alive?”

“Keep singing.”

Anselm did. His voice did not waver. It was “Mon Petit Oiseau,” a French children’s nursery rhyme. A lullaby. Kevin hadn’t heard it before, but he could understand it easily enough. Not surprisingly, Anselm’s accent was impeccable.

“They’re coming,” Kevin whispered. “Don’t worry.”

Anselm put a hand on his shoulder. He kept singing. A minute later they both heard another sound. It was the high, whining noise of a small electric motor being asked to do too much.

Jacob Savian was coming back.

He would never be able to catch up with his brother. George was moving too fast, and he was probably already back up at street level. So now Jacob was returning on his little blue scooter. Returning to the scene of his undoing. He was wearing a hangdog expression, like a child whose long-awaited birthday party has not gone as expected. “That was very disappointing,” he said, bringing his scooter to a stop just before he reached Kevin and Anselm.

Anselm looked up, still singing, and he gave Jacob a curious stare. He seemed only now to be noticing how immensely fat this man was. The scooter Jacob was sitting on had an extra-broad wheelbase, a thick platform, and a wide seat to accommodate Jacob’s bulk; he was gripping the little handlebars as if he were wishing the scooter had come with rocket launchers. Or at least an auto-defibrillator attachment. Anselm turned away from him. He sang to Kevin with focus and care, giving his teacher his strength.

“
Very
disappointing,” Jacob said again. He looked down at the man lying on the ground, at all the blood spreading out around him, and then he looked at the 10-year-old child who had become, in the last five minutes, the most – and only – available link to Pascal Billaud. The only link to a man he had spent the last year and a half planning to destroy.

He couldn’t get to the father, but the boy was still here. Right here in front of him.

With a quickness that even George would have found surprising, Jacob Savian heaved himself off the scooter and lunged for Anselm Billaud. The boy saw movement out of the corner of one eye, and he jumped out of the way. He was fast, but not fast enough; Jacob’s lunge was completely unexpected.

Jacob had him.

They were both on the ground now, and Jacob had the boy’s body pinned under one impossibly fleshy arm. With his other arm he reached for Anselm’s neck, reached for his face and for his head. Jacob’s eyes were blazing. It didn’t matter that this was only the son and not the father; they were connected somehow. They were the
same
. And maybe the death of the son would be enough, maybe the trauma to the father, the knowledge that his work had led a man to kill his only son, would be so devastating that he would simply give up his work, or else he would become so distracted, so wracked with guilt, that he would make a mistake, would mix up lines of code, something.

Jacob reached farther, reached and finally found Anselm’s soft neck.

“Hey.”

Jacob looked behind him. The man on the ground had whispered at him; he was not dead. In fact, he was not even unconscious. He was staring straight at them, and somehow he had managed to get his arm all the way around. To point the gun one last time.

“Stop distracting the kid,” Kevin whispered
.
He
shot Jacob through the mouth
,
and
the
.45 exited the top of
Jacob’s
head in a puff of hair and skin and blood and brains. Jacob’s hand relaxed and slumped down from Anselm’s neck, and Anselm managed to wriggle himself out from under the man’s suddenly twice-as-heavy body.

Kevin whispered something else, but Anselm couldn’t make it out.

“What?”

“Can you keep singing?”

Anselm didn’t move for a few seconds. He was breathing quickly, and looking around the now quiet garage like a frightened field mouse. This had been a very scary morning. He had been tossed into a van, tied up and gagged, and then there had been a lot a lot a
lot
of shooting. Mr. Brooks had saved him somehow, but Mr. Brooks also looked as if he might be in serious trouble. And just now a big, blob-like man had tried to strangle him. And then
more
shooting, so close and so loud that Anselm’s ears were still ringing painfully.

“Anselm?”

Mr. Brooks was still trying to whisper to him, and it was at this moment that Anselm showed his true mettle. He made a conscious decision to wait, to be shocked and terrified and traumatized
later
, because his teacher had asked him a favor. There was work to be done here. He looked at Jacob’s lifeless corpse one more time, as if checking to be sure there would be no last minute, horror-movie reanimation scene forthcoming. Satisfied, he turned back to Kevin. “I’m here,” he said, with a calm primness that would have made his mother proud.

Big bad guy is dead. That’s all that matters. Time to get back to singing.

He continued with the lullaby.

Time moved on, and Kevin closed his eyes with relief.

A minute later, they heard the sound of sirens.

Patch Job

Kevin was aware and he was not aware. He was conscious, but only because his system still didn’t know how to operate in any other way. Didn’t know
how
to shut down. They reached him just minutes later, drawn by the tracking system in his cell phone. He had lost a lot of blood.

“He’s lost a lot of blood.”

They wanted to take him away from Anselm, but the boy held firm. “I’m supposed to be here.” Anselm said. “I’m supposed to sing.”

The agents and medics looked at him for a beat, and then while they were applying pressure to Kevin’s wounds and readying the fold-up gurney they began telling Anselm that this was not allowed, that it simply
could not
be allowed for a half-dozen reasons. But Anselm ignored them; he had already returned his attention to his teacher. He began singing again, his head moving gently to the rhythm of the song his mother had sung to him so many times when he was an even younger, even smaller boy. The EMT’s shook their heads in resignation and let the boy come. He climbed into the ambulance, and it sped out of the garage and then up First Avenue, followed closely by several marked and unmarked cars. At the hospital there was no waiting, there were no triage steps or questions about next-of-kin; they rolled him straight into a private area and began working quickly.

Kevin was still aware. Still awake. He had a moment of white-hot fear in which he wondered how they were going to do any real work on him.
You can’t put me to sleep
, he wanted to shout.
It won’t do anything.

But they seemed somehow to realize this, and in any case putting him to sleep didn’t appear to be part of the plan. They used local anesthetics through injections in his spine, and the numbness that went washing through him was both wonderful and terrible. Would the feeling return? Was it the anesthetic working, or was his body taking its first steps toward permanent paralysis? He had no way to know. Finally they had to take Anselm away because there was going to be blood now, scalpels and surgery and
blood
, but not before the boy extracted a promise from the doctors. They had to keep making noise, Anselm told them. “He needs you to talk to him.”

They assured him they would, and then an agent came to tell Anselm that his mother had arrived at the hospital.

“She’d very much like to see you.”

Anselm streaked away, and Kevin could hear the boy’s joyful cries echoing down the hall. If he had not been feeling so nauseated, he would have smiled.

The doctors did what Anselm had asked. They talked. They talked
all the time
, narrating their every move. Kevin could feel them pushing and pulling at him as they explained what was happening; he could hear, above and below the talking, the cutting and the sucking noises. There was the debate over what to do about the kidney; then the on-the-spot decision to remove it and patch him up; then the harsh, metal-on-bone sound of debridement on the hip wound, followed by the sound of metal pieces being inserted and affixed to what was left of that shattered bone. All of this was over the course of hours. Hours and days and weeks, and yet Kevin did not move, he was there in the same room with the same doctors, none of them leaving or taking a break.

So it hasn’t been weeks or even days,
he thought.
Today is still Tuesday.

They worked and worked, narrating all the while. At one point he heard a voice that sounded like Dr. Petak’s. Kevin tried to turn and see, but he still couldn’t move.

“Petak?” he called out.

No one answered him. They were willing to narrate, not to discuss.

Finally they left him alone, and after a while Anselm was allowed to come back in to keep him company. His mother came in for a moment as well, to thank him. Kevin shook his head and managed to croak out, “not at all,” and then Anselm let himself be led away. Kevin shook his head and pointed at the television, to show the boy that it was all right, that he had plenty to distract him now.

Something soothing
, Kevin decided.
Not the religion channel.

He was glad when the anesthetic began to wear off, though it meant brand new kinds of pain. The feeling of paralysis had been unnerving. After an hour they gave him pills to ease it back again,
and
this at least was a more normal sensation. The pain was still there; it was only dulled.

Kevin watched three half-hour newscasts. He was about to push the nurse-call button when Danny Fisher came striding through the door. His arm and shoulder were tightly bandaged, but otherwise he seemed fine. He gave Kevin an affectionate pat on the shoulder, much more gently than in times past. “Nice job,” Danny said. “That guy was a real nutcase. If it hadn’t been for you, there’s no telling where he’d have Anselm by now.”