By the time we got where we were going, I was driving. At least I was behind the wheel. The road wound around the longest string of mountains I’d ever seen. Every time I thought we were about to start descending, another hill opened up in front of us and we’d climb a little higher. Streetlights twinkled in the valley a long way down. Lightning flickered out of clouds that seemed about ten feet above our heads, hammering trees right in front of us more than once. It was only late afternoon, but the clouds made it feel like midnight.
“Safest place, in a car,” I muttered to myself as another bolt hit another tree.
“Actually, that’s not true,” Renn said, looking like he was about to explain it.
“ Don’t,” I warned him and sent the rest, the I don’t want to know part, thinking it as hard as I could, wondering if I could make the back of his head burn. Not likely, but he shut up at least.
The road never laid out in front of you, it kept moving and jumping and finding unexpected places to go. There was always that nice low solid rock wall that promised to keep us from driving over the edge of the cliff which was good since the whole damn thing was cliffs but I couldn’t help but wondering why the son-of-a-bitch had to put us on a cliff in a thunderstorm at the end of two days of running.
When we neared the driveway, he had to point it out to me three times-I would have gone right by. The roadbed was below the street and overhung on all sides with trees. It was a long driveway, winding past expansive fenced-in grass fields-I thought of horses right away, though there weren’t any in sight-and eventually to a surprisingly compact house perched right on the cliffside. The nearest houselight was a mile downvalley, the road visible for at least a mile in either direction. I had to give him credit-nobody was sneaking up on us here.
Once we pulled up in front of the house, he opened his door and I found I could open mine too. I was able to stand up, stand on my own two feet. After twenty minutes in the driver’s seat, watching my body drive without any input from me, this was a serious relief. “Thanks for giving me my limbs back,” I cracked.
“You threatened to drive off the side of a cliff,” he reminded me.
“I didn’t mean it!”
His eyebrow went up. “Just because I can read your mind doesn’t mean I know when you’re full of shit.” He tapped his finger against my forehead. “Remember that when you start doing it,” he said and went to work checking inside the planters and the mailbox in the rain.
I followed, rubbing my wrists-they felt like they’d had iron bars inserted. My ankles felt like they still did. I wondered about how long it would take me to scramble downhill to town. But with no traffic on the road, a mile drop to those glimmering lights and a raging thunderstorm overhead, the odds didn’t add up in my favor.
“For the moment, if you wish, it’s kidnapping,” he answered, though I hadn’t asked the question. “We’ll go inside and I’ll explain things to you. After that, hopefully, you won’t want to run away.”
“And if I do? What’ll you do? Paralyze me again?”
“As I said, let’s hope you won’t,” he said with the same voice he’d used to threaten Hawaiian Man with his finger. “You know me-I don’t offer lots of explanations. Just hear me out.” He walked through the trees to the kitchen door and searched all over around it for the key-under the planters, atop the lintel, beneath the windowsill. Finally he picked up a rock, smashed the window and unlocked the door from inside.
“There isn’t some sophisticated mindbender way to do this?” I asked.
“I’m tired,” he said, “and it’s raining.”
The kitchen had a nightlight burning and a radio playing in the dark-I’d never realized what a dead giveaway that combination was. The kitchen was the end of the north wing of the house. One wing held the kitchen and garage, the other, three bedrooms and two baths. The wings extended over the cliff, joined by the most incredible double-wide living room I’d ever seen. Huge slabs of local stone covered the walls above a multi-level dark wood floor, every parquet line pointing up the mountain-and-valley panorama through the wall of windows. A simple dining room table and chairs stood on a high shelf floor near the kitchen; couches, bookshelves, a monster TV and computer table filled the other end of the room.
“They’ll be gone for two more days,” Renn said, coming out of the bathroom with towels. “The people that own the place. The computer has a high-speed hookup. We can research-”
“I’m not researching shit,” I told him. “I wouldn’t have come this far if you’d told me who you were.”
“I’m not an enemy agent,” he said, sitting on the couch.
“You said you didn’t work for America.”
“I’ve never actually worked for anybody,” he answered. “The country that trained me no longer exists. I am here by choice, like millions of other illegal immigrants. Sit-I’ll explain.” I wasn’t sitting. Standing up, I figured I was three steps closer to the door than him. “You can ask questions, if you want-I’ll answer. At that point, you can run if you want.”
I sat.
“Where are you from?”
“I was born a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I was born in Leningr…uh, St. Petersburg, excuse me, and grew up in a city called Novosibirsk, in Siberia.”
“What is your real name?”
“I have no ‘real’ name, like most people do,” he said. “I have no family identity. I was a child of the state.”
“You’re an orphan?”
“I’m the product of a genetic experiment. The Soviet government began experimenting with mind control in the ‘20’s. Once Stalin pushed out Trotsky, the program began forcibly mating individuals with strong powers. The program was never really successful-there were some physical and genetic problems. Early mortality and a high rate of suicide, for example.”
He laughed here a little, his dark laughter. I didn’t remember knowing many Russians but this struck me nonetheless as a very Russian type of humor. “They continued to breed the few remaining specimens until the 70’s. I am the end result of four generations of ‘psychics’ bred like farm animals for their desirable characteristics, without love or choice.”
“That’s why Fine said you were the greatest of them all-most powerful, cream of the crop.”
“I was a misfit, a disaster. When I was a child, there were ten of us, mixed into a population of forty or fifty others who showed promise but came from normal families. Most of us died off before completing training and the Soviet became disenchanted with the program as time went on, so the numbers dwindled.”
“They got disenchanted…they didn’t get results?”
He laughed again. “Oh no, they got results- everyone got results, though ours were better than the Americans. But there were problems-political problems.”
“Political problems? With spies?”
“With bureaucrats,” he answered. “Ideological problems, I should say. Communism likes-liked-to think of itself as a scientific approach to history and the world. The problem that no one likes to face is that science is a moving target. What we know now is not all we will know someday. The idea of thoughts being part of an accessible stream that can be tapped and affected at a distance, the idea that the mind-as opposed to the brain- can be separate from the body, can travel and take action on its own, this struck the ideologues as metaphysics. It strongly suggested the possibility of a soul, separate from the physical body, some remnant that has its own life beyond a single physical identity. To them, this smacked of magic. It was not explainable and repeatable-it was not scientific. This didn’t play well at the Politburo oversight committee.
“And Renn,” he continued, “ was the biggest risk of all. I was dangerous, out of control. I responded badly to training. Our training was designed for the average person with some psychotronic ability.”
“Psychotronic? Is that like psychic?”
“I don’t like that term, psychic. It puts me in a lineup with Nostradamus and Madame Marie the fortuneteller.” He shrugged. “Although, otherwise, the words probably mean the same thing.
“Anyway, the problem for most mindbenders is that the mental signal they receive is weak. Any sort of distraction or embedded or suggested thought will disturb it or color it and your whole purpose as a spy is to bring back useful, accurate, actionable information. So they had to desensitize us, to beat down our reliance on logic, on what we thought things should mean, anything that might get in the way of our reporting what we found, as we found it. Desensitizing involved a series of beatings-”
“Excuse me?”
“They beat us. They sent good decent men with big families and charitable intentions-and strong arms. They
