“Fifteen,” he repeated with a look that said 450 Euro.
“We don’t have fifteen minutes,” Max said as we went up the stairs. “Marat got into a cab just ahead of us-”
“You saw him?!” Tauber nearly lifted out of his shoes. “And you let the son-of-a-bitch get away?”
“It was more important to get here first,” Max answered. “Besides, I got this address when he gave it to his cab driver.”
“How’d we beat him here?”
“That unfortunate cab driver is temporarily seeing left as right and right as left. So Marat is now on the wrong side of town and getting into a new cab. He’s not stupid-he’ll call in reinforcements. We have approximately seven to ten minutes.”
“Give me the camera,” I told Max and he handed it over gratefully. “Nobody’s going to let us carry evidence out of here. We’ve got to document as much as we can.”
The room was a classic student clutter, a hovel, clothes piled on the ripped second-hand couch, Godard and Che on the wall, books and pamphlets in piles on the floor and bomb-making equipment spread across the table.
Tauber pulled a pair of latex gloves from a box and handed each of us a pair. “Put them on now. Nobody touches anything nekkid.” Then he set to work examining wires and diagrams.
Max wandered to the desk by the side window, and picked up a battered leatherette slipcase that was lying open. “The bomb maker was doing his bills,” he said.
“What?”
“He was writing checks-my Italian’s not perfect but it looks like the gas company, electric, telephone…” I jumped to the desk and got pictures of the ledger.
“Putting his affairs in order?” Kate offered.
“He’s a nihilist-he’s going out in a few minutes with a bomb strapped to his chest. He’s paying the phone bill?”
“This is even better,” Tauber said and we grouped around him. A pad of longwise European paper displayed bomb-making preparations, a diagram of the bomb, a scrawled map of the airport and scribbled notes around the edges. “He marked down his destination,” Tauber said. “Look where,” holding up the pad and angling it so I could get video. “He wasn’t even trying to reach the gate; his goal was the corner. Across the street. Several lanes of traffic between him and the target.”
“Too far away-you said so yourself,” Kate said.
“Only,” Tauber twinkled, “if ya actually intend to blow somebody up.”
“Look! The rubies!” Scribbles of the gems were all over the edges of the page, obsessively drawn and colored in with marker or something. I shot close-ups.
“Yeah,” Tauber nodded like this was no surprise. “Gems are a good control. Almost everybody sees rubies as the same shade-even if you’re color-blind, it’s a consistent, vivid shade o’gray.”
“And color,” Max cut in, “is a frequency, just like sound. So if you want to maintain control over somebody at a distance, you program them to replay the image in their heads over and over. It keeps them around the right frequency, so they keep receiving your suggestions.” He kept picking through the wire and clutter on the table, examining each bit and holding it out to the camera, moving rapidly. “This was a fall guy. They monitored him-”
“Who did?”
“That, we’ll see-I think we all know the prime candidate-they controlled and moved him around like a dog on a leash. Kate heard his panic-he had to reach the right spot on time but, when he did, he had no idea what to do, no further goal. It was all fed to him and now the feed dropped off.”
“So I was wrong.” I wasn’t surprised but a little disappointed. It sure felt like I’d been tapped into somebody.
“No-you were right too,” Max said and I was totally confused. “You, I’m certain, tuned into the suggestion — the signal from his minder, his runner. The guy whose job was to lead him to the wrong spot and abandon him there.”
This, strangely, was confounding. I had a much harder time accepting I’d succeeded than a few moments earlier accepting that I’d failed. “So I did it? I’m a mindreader?” I’d hardly spoken more than a few words a day the week before.
“Don’t get cocky,” Max said, rummaging through cabinets and drawers, pulling out papers and holding them under my camera for recording. “You picked up a specific mind intentionally beaming out a message. You’ve been around Tauber and me, you had to fight off Volkov and Marat and now we’ve got Kate and a bunch of drones trying to probe us. That’s a lot of activity all at once, so you’re getting stimulated. You probably live on the minder’s frequency anyway.” He looked me square in the eye. “But you paid attention,” he said. “Give yourself credit for that. And fix those rubies in the back of your mind-you may find them handy later on.”
“But what was the point?” Kate asked. “Why send out a bomber intentionally to get captured?”
“Good question,” Max said.
“Think of the damage he could’ve done if nobody’d stopped him,” she mused.
“He wouldn’t’a done shit,” Tauber said, holding up the bomb blueprints for us. I focused the camera on the drawings in the center, where he was pointing. “See?” he challenged Max, who stared at it blankly. “Didn’t they teach you anything in that program?”
“I told you, I resisted.”
“Shee-it!” The blueprints quivered in his hands but not as bad as they had the day before. “It was no bomb to begin with! Damn thing couldn’t go off the way they had it wired. No way, no how. Wiring’s all wrong.”
“Jesus,” Kate moaned. “What a sitting duck.”
“Time’s up!” Max yelled suddenly, throwing another few documents under my lens for preservation. “We’ve got company.”
A moment later, we heard shouts and a crackle of electricity in the street below. Tauber started badly at the electrical sound; he had the door open before Max yelled “Go!”
“Head for the staircase at the end of the hall!” Renn ordered but there was a stairwell just in front of us. Tauber and I both made for it, Tauber arriving just in time for a bolt of electricity to rip past his ear and blow a hole in the ceiling above. Leonardo light poured gloriously down through the billowing plaster. Tauber turned two shades paler than he already was and we scrambled backward.
Shouts and footsteps echoed up the stairwell, but Max came tearing around the corner, his arms swinging over his head and down the stairwell. He looked crazy at first but, then you could see the energy ball arcing through the smoky lightshaft and plunging down the metal staircase. The banisters buckled and bent, the steel latticework groaned and screeched and several steps collapsed, crushed like someone had dropped a steam roller. We heard the cries of shooters scrambling away as the ball bounced down into the lobby below, taking the rest of the staircase behind it.
Tauber gaped but Max simply pointed at the far end of the hall like this happened to him all the time. “ That staircase, dammit!” Kate was already ahead of us, hitting the landing and disappearing down the shaft.
We bounded down two flights before the crunch hit. Kate went first, slipping-jumping as many steps as she could without falling, the rest of us a few rungs behind. We had just about made the lobby when a lightning bolt hit the staircase just above us, slicing it away from the wall. I looked up just long enough to catch Marat’s white hair and the arm of his dark robe flapping over the railing. The staircase groaned and began to list at a nasty angle. We stumbled on, the lobby just ahead.
That’s when I saw something that wasn’t there. Just like at the airport, that distant radio station began drifting in and out of my head again. This time, I knew what was happening, so I focused- rubies, rubies. I held that color, that frequency, vivid in my head and locked into the signal right away. And I found myself staring at the staircase-the staircase we were descending, except I was seeing it from the lobby just below.
The lobby where Marat and five L Corp guys with stun guns and anti-noise headsets waited to take us the moment we appeared. Marat and five others, including the guy whose head I’d just gotten inside of again.
Kate was inches from the last step. I threw myself into the air and grabbed her just above the last step, our momentum carrying us hard into the far wall. We flew through the doorway in two seconds-the third second, the place opened up, bullets and lightning bolts everywhere. We lay flattened on the floor, scrunched tight together as
