Thirst No. 5 Read online

  “Seymour . . .”

  “Okay, maybe she was a spy! But maybe she was forced into the role. Did you stop and think of that before you murdered her?”

  “You have to trust me, it wasn’t that way.”

  “Oh really, what way was it?”

  I hesitate. “She was possessed.”

  He looks at me as if I’m crazy. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Turning, I stare out at the desert, seeing the air tremble as it superheats and rises in waves over the bleak landscape. The ground is half dirt, half sand, hot enough to fry an egg. I shake my head.

  “When I was at IIC’s headquarters, while I was trying to take control of their Cradle, I had all kinds of strange psychic experiences. I shared some of them with you, but the worst ones, the ones where I came face to face with this demon, I didn’t talk about. I couldn’t. It was so awful, it almost drove me mad.”

  “You always seemed in control.”

  “It was an act. At the end, I was losing it.”

  “How do you know you didn’t lose it last night?” he asks.

  I reach out and put my hand on his shoulder, half expecting him to shake it off. But he is listening, my old friend, he continues to listen. Yet he wants hard answers, logical reasons, and I doubt if I can give him those.

  “I caught her in a lie,” I say. “A big lie. Then it was only a question of getting her to admit what she was, which she did.”

  “What she was? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I told you, she was possessed.”

  “Get off it, Sita. This isn’t The Exorcist. Shanti was one of the sweetest girls I ever met.”

  “Yeah, sweet as apple pie. I thought the same thing. So damn sweet.” I pause. “Look how we found her, with half her face melted away from acid a jealous boyfriend had thrown at her. How could we help but feel sorry for her?”

  Seymour is suddenly confused. “That was true. She didn’t lie about that.”

  “Nothing she said was true! She lied to us from the start. Those facial wounds—they were self-inflicted. She poured the acid on herself.”

  Seymour shakes his head. “No one could do that to themselves.”

  “No normal human being could do that. But she did.”

  “You keep saying these things as if they were facts. You don’t know.”

  “I do, I saw her for what she was. At the end she didn’t even try to hide it. She was happy that I knew. Please, Seymour, I swear to you on Krishna’s name that she was gloating.”

  Seymour stands silent for a minute, then takes the bottle of water from my hand and pours it over his head. He stares up at the burning blue sky. I have never sworn to him before. I’ve never had to. Certainly I have never invoked Krishna’s name before.

  “I thought when we escaped IIC’s headquarters, we were safe,” he says miserably.

  “So did I.”

  “I thought you said the Telar were all destroyed.”

  “I think they are.”

  Seymour sighs and throws the empty bottle aside. “What a way to wake up,” he mutters.

  “I’m sorry. Honestly, Seymour, the instant I killed her I thought of you. How much it would hurt you. It was all I could think about.”

  Now he looks to me for comfort, and I’m amazed at his ability to forgive me, to trust me. “Did she suffer?” he asks quietly.

  I think of the fires that await those who fail the test of the Scale, and how poorly Shanti will do when she reaches that judgment. But Seymour’s expression is so desperate, I believe a lie is better than the truth. Besides, I couldn’t have given Shanti a faster death than ripping off her head.

  “It was quick,” I say.

  We walk back to town. Seymour stops once to cry, but he is all right. I know eventually he will be fine.

  THREE

  Finally, the gang is gathered in Matt’s room. His air conditioner actually works. Cynthia Brutran sits at the head of his bed, an open laptop resting on her crossed legs, a pillow at her back. She has changed clothes since the start of our flight. Gone are her jewelry and expensive suits. Her pants look as if they were bought at the local drugstore—I suspect they were—and her top is a deceptive T-shirt with a sketch of Baker looking not only exotic but actually inviting beneath the rays of the setting sun.

  Even though we are on the run, the woman—an old foe of mine—looks more relaxed than I have ever seen her. I wonder if the destruction of her company’s headquarters has given her a sense of freedom. I would not be surprised. Rather than your normal platoon of crooked tax accountants and boxes of records of phony stock options, the firm had demons in its basements.

  Yet I am slow to trust Brutran.

  She did try to kill me, a few times.

  Her five-year-old daughter, Jolie, sits in a chair in the corner beside the TV, flipping channels between cartoons and the film Rosemary’s Baby. How appropriate, I think, since Jolie was the product of a breeding program designed to manufacture psychic mutants. The child also looks relaxed, happy even.

  Seymour and I sit at the desk. Matt stays on his feet. He likes to pace when we have meetings, but not out of nervousness. I may have been the boss while we were trying to bring down the IIC and Telar, but Matt is our natural leader. The change in roles doesn’t make me feel threatened. I’m hoping I’ll find it a relief.

  “Are we still on the list of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted?” Matt asks Brutran.

  She nods. “We didn’t fall off during the night. The only difference now is that treason has been added to our list of crimes.”

  “Terrorism and murder were not enough?” Seymour asks.

  “Apparently not to whoever is after us,” Brutran replies.

  “Do we know who that is yet?” Matt asks.

  “Our capture is a priority for every law-enforcement branch of the government,” Brutran says. “That hasn’t happened since Bin Laden and his minions hit the World Trade Center.”

  “Won’t someone high up the chain of command realize, soon, that these charges have been fabricated?” Seymour asks.

  “They haven’t been fabricated, not entirely, and that’s the key to our dilemma,” Brutran says. “We did blow up IIC’s headquarters, and because the Pacific Coast Highway is loaded with remote cameras, chances are we were seen leaving the area immediately after the explosion. That building was full of children. Those children were incinerated in the blast. The police and fire departments are still trying to dig what is left of their bodies out of the rubble. That footage is running almost continuously on CNN and a dozen other news stations, and it’s creating a national anger, a raging wave. The American people want the perpetrators caught. They want them tried and punished. Imagine the pressure that rage puts on the politicians, on the police, the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, the NSA.”

  “But why have they latched onto us as the guilty parties?” Seymour asks. “So we were in a van leaving the area. Lots of vehicles were leaving the area.”

  “Good question. It leads me to my second point,” Brutran says. “In the midst of this mass hysteria, pictures of us in the van are suddenly sent to every law enforcement agency in the government. A fake history of us is created. I just read an in-house email that is being circulated at the FBI that states that Sita—whom they are calling Alisa Perne—spent five years in Syria in a terrorist camp, where she learned the art of bomb making. All of us are being assigned similar pasts, and this information is being widely circulated by the program the Cradle created and placed on the Internet.”

  “But this is insane,” Seymour protests. “Can’t these agencies tell fake information from the real thing?”

  “Yes and no,” Brutran says. “To understand the no part, you have to understand the fierce competition that exists between the various agencies. The disputes between the police and the FBI are legendary. There have been hundreds if not thousands of TV shows and movies that have talked about that. The local police are working on a case and an FBI agent shows u
p and all hell breaks loose. That’s old news. But when Homeland Security was created, the discord was taken to a new level. Homeland feels they are the boss, that all the other agencies should bow to them. While the CIA has been around for ages, and they feel they are the final authority. My point is that these agencies don’t cooperate with each other, not easily. They are loath to share information, and when they do, they seldom trust that the information they’re getting from another agency is accurate.”

  “We have nothing to do with their internal disputes,” Seymour says.

  “That’s true,” Brutran says. “But the Cradle’s program is clever. It knows how to take advantage of this blind spot. By flooding the various agencies with false information about us, it has created a hysterical wave of paranoia that no single agency—and no single person—can stand up and dispute. Remember Hitler’s famous line, ‘The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.’ It’s only been twenty-four hours since the explosion and already this lie has tremendous momentum.”

  “What you’re describing is all smoke and mirrors,” Seymour says.

  “Yes. But it’s rooted in the hard cold fact that hundreds of kids have been murdered. You keep forgetting that. Someone has to pay for that evil deed, and, once again, the authorities are under tremendous pressure to produce suspects. Imagine how pleased they must be that, seemingly out of nowhere, they are receiving all kinds of intel on us.”

  “Receiving it from whom?” Seymour demands. “It makes no sense they should believe a torrent of information being fed to them by some wild program.”

  “You haven’t been listening,” Brutran says. “The FBI doesn’t think this information is coming from a computer program. To them, it appears to be coming from local police. In the same way, Homeland doesn’t think it’s getting this intel from a foreign source. They probably believe it’s coming from the CIA or the NSA. That’s why I stressed the problem with these agencies not talking to each other.”

  “You’re saying the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” Matt interjects.

  “Exactly,” Brutran says.

  “But eventually the truth has to come out,” Seymour insists.

  “Probably,” Brutran says. “But that will take time. The Cradle’s program has its tentacles wrapped around every computer in practically every government agency. From what I can tell, even the White House is being fed a stream of false updates. If we’re lucky, and the president eventually realizes that his people have been duped, then he will still be left with the fact that these children died and we were seen leaving the area of the crime.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Seymour says. “What are we supposed to do? Sit here and rot and wait until the storm blows over?”

  “Funny you should say that,” Brutran says. “That was going to be my final piece of advice—”

  “We cannot sit here and do nothing,” I interrupt.

  “Why not?” Brutran asks.

  Matt holds up his hand. “We’ll get to that in a minute. For now I want to finish discussing this program. Cindy, exactly when did it become active?”

  I have never heard Matt call Brutran by her first name before. The woman appears to respond well to his questions, to his command. With me, she has always been a little snide.

  “Yesterday morning. The instant we blew up IIC’s headquarters and wiped out the Cradle,” Brutran says. “That act immediately triggered the program’s attack on us.”

  “So there must be someone left alive who is controlling the program,” Matt says.

  Brutran shakes her head. “It may be on automatic.”

  “That’s a freaky thought,” Seymour says.

  Brutran disagrees. “In a way it doesn’t matter if there’s still a living hand at the helm. The program is awake and it’s intelligent. The instant we leave this motel, we’ll be exposed and it will begin searching for us again. Think of the resources at its command. It just has to give the word and hundreds of thousands of police and government agents will try to converge on us. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if the program goes so far as to use the military’s satellites to hunt us down. With power like that, it won’t be long before we’re caught.”

  “What if we continue to live off the grid?” Seymour asks.

  “It will help,” Brutran says. “But it won’t save us.”

  “I disagree,” I say.

  “With which part?” Brutran asks.

  “The last part. I’m not as fatalistic as you.” I say.

  “I’m being pragmatic,” Brutran relies.

  “You’re giving up. I believe if we’re smart and careful we can avoid being caught. Plus I think it’s vital that we discover if there’s a living hand behind this program. If there is, we kill it. And then, and only then, do we try to erase the program.”

  “Why wait?” Seymour asks.

  I shrug. “If we manage to erase it, but haven’t taken down whoever’s behind it, they’ll just reload it on the Internet and we’ll be back to square one.”

  Brutran stares at me. “Long before you moved into IIC’s headquarters, I assigned our best minds to study this program. They got nowhere and we’re talking about some of the keenest computer people of our time. They told me they couldn’t get within a light year of figuring out how to disable it.”

  “Why?” Seymour asks.

  Brutran leans toward us as she answers. “Because the intelligence that created the program had an IQ of at least a thousand.”

  “You’re suggesting it’s being controlled by subtle beings,” Matt says. “Nonphysical beings.”

  “There’s a strong possibility that’s true, I can’t be sure. However, I do believe it was created by something nonhuman.”

  “We can’t kill it if it ain’t alive,” Seymour mutters, expressing my lingering fear. “What are our choices?”

  “Wait it out,” Brutran says. “Wait until the government realizes it’s chasing a ghost. Eventually they’ll see that the bulk of the data they’re being fed is false. Plus they can’t keep their agents running all over the country looking for us. There are a thousand other threats they have to worry about every day. If we’re patient, they’ll get weary of the chase. At the same time they’ll probably discover the program on their own. Then it will be their problem to figure out how to pull its plug.”

  Matt glances at me and I nod. “I wish waiting and doing nothing were an option,” he says.

  Brutran notices our exchange. “Is there somewhere else we have to be?” she asks.

  “Yes,” Matt says, and proceeds to describe the photograph I found hidden in Shanti’s suitcase. Brutran and Seymour listen closely. Indeed, Jolie lowers the volume on the TV and cocks her head in our direction, and I remind myself to keep an eye on her. Even though she looks innocent, she was part of the Cradle, which specialized in remote assassinations.

  When Matt is finished, Seymour turns to me. “Why would the people behind Shanti be interested in a religious artifact?” he asks, and I can’t help but notice his use of the word “people.” Seymour refuses to accept that Shanti was possessed.

  “She may have just been interested in those who are taking care of it,” I reply. But I have chosen the wrong person to lie to. Seymour looks as if he wants to snicker.

  “Gimme a break. They want the veil,” he says.

  I shrug. “You might be right.”

  “You really fought the Nazis during the war?” he asks.

  “Didn’t you say so in one of those books you wrote about me?”

  “I’d have to go back and check. But why bother? I have the real deal sitting beside me. How did you get involved in the war?”

  “I was living in France when it was overrun in 1940. I could have gotten out but I loved Paris. I decided to stay and see which way the wind blew. But after a while I got tired of watching the Gestapo’s brutality and decided to help out the French Resistance.” I shrug. “My involvement blossomed from there.”

  “We had a record of your
work with the Resistance in our files,” Brutran says. “But you seem to have vanished after the Allies invaded on D-day.”

  Matt has brought up the fact that Harrah and Ralph Levine were friends of mine during the war, and that they possessed the Veil of Veronica, but he has not revealed how rough a time I had in Auschwitz, for which I’m grateful. I’m not in the mood to talk about those days. I wonder if I ever will be.

  “It’s a long story,” I say, repeating what I told Matt.

  Seymour reaches out and touches my hand. “We have the time to listen,” he says.

  Matt notices my discomfort and interrupts. “Not now, Seymour. We have more pressing matters to take care of this morning.”

  Seymour continues to study me, as do Brutran and Jolie. I feel like I’m sitting under a hard white light. The Nazis used to grill me under such lights, for days at a time.

  “Like what?” Seymour says to Matt. “You know as well as I do that Sita’s already decided we have to go after these people—or I should say their grandchildren—and see if they still have the veil.” He stops and turns back to me. “True?”

  “I’ll go after them on my own,” I say.

  “Like we’d let you,” Seymour says.

  “Do you have Shanti’s cell phone with you?” Brutran asks me.

  I hand it over. “I’ve already checked for stored numbers. She had none. Not even a copy of her last call.”

  Brutran accepts the phone and reaches into her bag and pulls out a small electronic device I don’t recognize. “The phone might show no obvious record,” she says. “But I should be able to read her SIM card.”

  Brutran opens the back of the cell as she speaks and removes the battery. She clearly knows her business. Beneath the battery is a small transparent plastic card coated with lines of copper and silicon. Without a pause, Brutran slips the card into her mysterious device and plugs the latter into her laptop. She scans the screen, appearing to flip through numerous files. She frowns.

  “Shanti was cautious,” she says. “This card has been wiped clean. Even my recovery programs can’t find anything, and they’re capable of reconstructing files that have been ground with sandpaper.”