Fifteen

 

‘You tried to go back,’ the man said.

‘No. I tried to remember.’

‘Same thing,’ he said.

‘Where are my friends?’

‘They're there. You remember them, don't you?’

‘How do I get them back?’

The man shrugged. ‘You should go back to LA. I might be able to help, I might not. There are more of them than there are of me.’

‘But you're more powerful, right?’

‘That's the word. Doesn't always work out that way.’

Keeping her gun firmly in place, Helena turned to me. ‘Any chance of me being introduced here, Hap? Your social skills always were kind of basic.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Helena, this man is an alien.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, and turned back to face him. ‘Okay, alien motherfucker, put your hands where I can see them.’

The man raised an eyebrow, but slowly pulled his hands out of his pockets and held them up. ‘Does that make you feel safer?’

‘Patronize me and I'll blow your head off.’

‘Helena,’ I said gently, ‘I'm not sure this is the way forward.’

She stamped her foot. ‘He just appeared out of nowhere, Hap. You know how I hate that kind of thing.’

‘He didn't. He came out of my memory.’

‘Memories only exist in people's minds, Hap. They're just little flashes of electricity sparking in a mess of jello.’

I shook my head. ‘Not the way it works.’ I looked at the man. ‘Is it?’

‘Indeed not,’ he said.

‘Then why can't I remember being there? Why can't anyone remember it, when they get back?’

‘It's impossible. It's like trying to write in black marker on black paper.’

‘Yeah, very good. Very gnomic,’ snarled Helena. ‘Hap, what do you want me to do?’

‘Put the gun down,’ I said. ‘It wouldn't do any good anyway. He's not even really here.’

‘Hap, did your mother slip something weird in the lemonade?’

‘You should listen to him,’ the man said. ‘He's right, and sooner or later he's going to work out what he's talking about.’

‘Don't you patronize him either,’ Helena snapped. ‘That's my job.’

I took a step closer to her, so we were together, and she slowly lowered the gun. You'd have had to know her as well as I did to understand that she was very frightened.

‘So how come I can hear what Deck's saying,’ I asked, ‘if I can't go there?’

‘Special case,’ he said. ‘Because of what you're carrying in your head. Never happened before. It's one for the record books.’

Didn't make any sense to me, but I pressed on anyway. ‘What's the big deal over Hammond?’

‘They had plans for him. Laura Reynolds messed them up.’

‘What kind of plans?’

‘You wouldn't believe me even if I told you.’

‘Try me. I've got a high credibility threshold.’

‘Just be thankful they failed. He wasn't right.’

‘For what? You guys planning to invade?’

‘Why would we do that?’

‘Why would you abduct people? What's that achieve apart from scaring the shit out of them?’

He shrugged. ‘Nothing. It's a game. One which I don't play any more.’

‘Bully for you. And that's bullshit anyway: you abducted me.’

‘A long time ago. And did you have such a bad time?’

‘I can't remember.’

The man spoke quickly and firmly: ‘And you never will, Mr Thompson. That's the way it is, and it can't be changed. It's not my doing. So just leave it. You'll understand soon enough, but then you'll be dead and the knowledge won't be much use to you any more.’

‘Is that some kind of threat?’

‘Of course not. I don't want you to die. I have a personal interest in you: we met when you were young and had a chance to understand. I can't help you with that. The act of telling makes the truth a lie, because of all the filters it has to pass through. You see through the veils by waiting for the wind to push them aside, not by just describing them. That's what the others are trying to do, and I can't condone it. It will only make things worse.’

Helena turned to me and clapped her hands together. ‘Oh how lovely, a seminar. Are you taking notes?’

I ignored her. ‘You knew Travis' name back at Hammond's house. So you know what really happened to Hammond, and you also know I look like going down for it.’

‘My hands are tied,’ the man said. ‘I'm not exactly from around here. That's for you to sort out. And, if you'll take my advice, you might want to start round about … now.’

Suddenly I heard the sound of tyres on tarmac. I quickly glanced down the pavement towards the hire car, and saw a red Lexus heading towards it. The car stopped and two men jumped out. Even from that distance I could tell they were earthlings, and that they'd be carrying guns. The men peered in our car, saw it was empty, and then looked up and made us.

When I turned back to Helena she already had another gun out, and was standing with one in each hand. She was alone.

‘Where'd he go?’ I asked, dumbfounded. My head was still spinning from trying to parse what the man had been telling me, and also from a small and pointless relief that at least someone who appeared to be in some kind of authority knew I hadn't been the one who'd murdered Ray Hammond.

‘Just disappeared,’ she said. ‘What an asshole.’

Together we watched the two men as they approached, pulling weapons out of shoulder holsters. They were standard-issue heavies, shoulders shaped by long-ago weight-training, stomachs by too much recent beer.

‘What do you reckon?’ I asked Helena, as I got out my own gun and slapped a new cartridge in. ‘This going to be settled with a polite conversation?’

The first bullet zipped past, flying right between us.

‘I doubt it,’ she said, and started firing.

At first the men stood their ground, obviously thinking they were dealing with a couple of amateurs, instead of just one. Most people miss with a good proportion of their shots, especially at twenty yards. Helena doesn't. Helena doesn't miss if you blindfold her and lie about where you've put the thing she's aiming for.

This rapidly became clear, and the men leapt in different directions like a wave hitting a jagged rock. One clambered over the fence into the school yard. The other slid behind a car.

Helena kept firing as we ducked behind a car of our own. ‘He's a lot of fucking help, this friend of yours,’ she muttered, as we squatted down and reloaded.

I glanced round the end of the bumper: one of the heavies was trying to crawl out towards us from behind his own shield. ‘He gave me the code to Hammond's records,’ I said, squeezing a shot off. The man disappeared again very quickly.

‘Yeah, but why'd he do that? What's it to him?’ There was a splintering crump as the rear windshield of the car blew out. Helena turned and fired two shots at the fence.

‘I don't know,’ I said.

‘And who are these guys?’

‘I don't know that either,’ I said. ‘Why don't we go find out?’

She winked: ‘You take the guy behind the car.’ We waited out four more shots and then heard two dry clicks. ‘Let's go.’

We leapt to our feet and peeled off round opposite sides of the car, spraying bullets. I kept firing as we ran forward: heard a scream from beyond the fence, and saw Helena dodge off to vault over it. I stopped firing for a moment, kept the gun trained on the air about six inches over the trunk of the other car. I was expecting him to wait a second, figure I was reloading, and then pop up. I was wrong. This guy had decided that he'd had enough. He was suddenly up and running, sprinting away back down the pavement. I ran after him, but he had too much of a start and was going to make it to his car way before I did.

I aimed carefully, shot him in the thigh. The impact swung his leg round behind him, sending him into a complex and rather balletic turn that ended with him crashing into the fence.

He kept hold of his gun and tried to roll into a shooter's position, but I was already standing over him. ‘You could do that,’ I said. ‘On the other hand I could blow your head off. I don't know how much you're getting paid, but it would have to be a lot.’

‘Screw you,’ he said, and struggled to point the gun up at me. I swung a kick at his wrist: it connected and the gun went skittering across the road. If I ever have a son, I'm going to tell him to practise this whole kicking thing. It really comes in handy.

‘Let's wait and find out what happened to your buddy, shall we?’ I said. ‘Might help structure your next couple of responses.’ I stood on his hand and waited for Helena, who was wandering over towards us.

‘He's dead,’ she said, apologetically. ‘Sorry.’

‘You see?’ I said to the guy on the ground. I could tell that the pain from his leg was beginning to pitch in hard. ‘You're lucky you got me. Could easily have gone the other way.’

‘Fuck you, motherfucker.’

‘Charming,’ said Helena.

‘Who sent you?’ I asked.

‘Fuck you.’

‘He's really rude, isn't he?’ Helena said.

Keeping my foot where it was, I reached down and searched his jacket pockets. Came up with a wallet. No driver's licence, but an access card. For REMtemps Security.

Suddenly I'd had just about enough of Stratten, of gun-toting aliens and just about everything else.

‘How did you find me?’ I asked, and kicked him in the stomach. ‘How?’

Helena reached out a hand towards me. I shrugged it off, my vision melting with fury. I kicked the guy in the leg, then grabbed his jacket. I pulled him off the floor and shouted right in his face. ‘How the fuck did you find me?’

He spat at me; grinned. I kept my hold on him and punched him in the face with my other hand. ‘You're going to tell me,’ I said, right up close. ‘And if it involves my parents it's going to be the last thing you ever say.’

‘Didn't need them this time.’ The guy smiled. A trickle of blood ran out of his nose. ‘Lots of people want to turn you in. But next time … Well hey – we know where they live.’

I let him fall back to the ground, pulled the gun out. ‘Hap, no,’ Helena said urgently. ‘Don't do this.’

‘I want you to take a message to Stratten,’ I told the guy, and dropped his security pass on his chest. ‘A very simple message. I am fucking fed up with being chased, shot at and generally fucked around, and either Stratten gets out of my face or I'm going to take him down.’

Police sirens screamed in the distance, heading our way. I guess the residents of Cresota Beach don't hear that many gun battles. In LA they just turn up the TV.

‘Only thing I'm going to tell the boss is that I'm going to kill you so dead it'll be like you never lived,’ the man said, his voice low and very serious. ‘And that I'll throw in your family for free.’

‘Bad answer,’ I said, and shot him in the head.

I called my father as soon as we hit A1A. Dad took the news stoically – either Mom had filled him in, or he'd worked it out by himself and kept his own counsel as usual. Dads are strange too. They work in mysterious ways. You think they don't have a clue what's going on, and then one day you trip and they're already there in position to catch you.

Then I just floored the pedal and headed to Jacksonville, Helena quiet in the passenger seat.

I turned into Highwater on two wheels, braked the car outside the REMtemps building. I had the door open and was halfway out before Helena grabbed my arm and yanked me back. She put her face close in to mine, and spoke very clearly. ‘You can't do this,’ she said. ‘You cannot go in there and kill Stratten.’

‘I'm not going to kill him.’

‘You've sent your message. Now just leave it.’

‘I'm not going to fucking kill him. I don't kill people. That's your job, remember? ’

Her eyes shone furiously: ‘Fuck you. So what happened back there by the school?’

‘You know what happened there, and you of all people should understand it. You heard what he said, and I believed him – plus if we'd left him alive for the police to find, there'd be a helicopter firing on us as we speak. And frankly I can't bring myself to give much of a shit about someone whose job is killing people.’

‘Including me?’

‘Your choice, not my problem. Now I'm going into this building, and you can either help me or you can sit out here or you can fuck off back to your boyfriend in LA and get on with your life. It doesn't make any difference to me. Stratten knows you're not working the contract, or he wouldn't be watching the airports and he wouldn't have sent those guys after me. You're out of this. You don't have to hang around any longer and nanny me. You can let ole Hap make his mistakes by himself.’

Helena let go of me, pushed me away. I got out of the car, took one step, turned back.

‘Look, Helena,’ I said. ‘I'm sorry. But either I'm going to get whacked, or I'm going to jail. I really don't have that much to lose, except two people I care about, who've been taken away. Laura dug her own grave, but Deck's only in trouble because of me. I want them back before something happens to me, because I'm the only person who's going to give a shit. I am tired of being pushed around, and Stratten is first in line to receive that news flash.’

She sat still for a moment, breathing deeply. Then she looked up at me, and I saw something in her eyes which I hadn't even realized had been missing.

‘You've changed,’ she said.

‘Not as much as you.’

‘We'll see,’ she said, and looked at me a little longer. Then she nodded briskly. ‘Okay. Let's go mess up this guy's day.’

Sabrina was sitting behind the desk in REMtemps' reception, which cheered me up no end. Even better was the way her mouth dropped open. She knew the score, had helped tip Travis off that I'd called from Applebaum's. It was immediately evident to her that Hap Thompson hadn't dropped by to borrow some paper clips. Her eyes momentarily flicked panic, then went holding cool.

‘It would be a huge mistake to call Security,’ I advised her. ‘Really. For a start, most of them are dead.’

Frosty: ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to talk to Stratten,’ I said. ‘And I'm simply not going to take “no” for an answer.’

‘You can't,’ she replied.

‘Well there you go,’ I grinned. ‘Thought I'd made myself pretty clear, and there you go just saying “no” to me. What do you think, Helena? She being obtuse, or just stupid?’

Helena raised an eyebrow, gave Sabrina a good looking over. ‘Obtuse, I'd say. And what on earth has she done with her hair?’

I leaned on the desk, blocking Sabrina's view of Helena. ‘Let's try it again. Get Stratten out here, or I start dismantling the walls and ceiling, starting with the portion above your head.’

‘You can't talk to him,’ she said, her voice a little shaky. ‘He's not here.’

‘You realize I'm just going to run round the place, checking every room and causing trouble? Got any major clients in here for consultations? You want me to check if they know where he is?’

‘Look, Mr Thompson, he really isn't here.’ She was pale now, evidently telling the truth.

‘So where is he?’

The skin under her left eye twitched: ‘I can't tell you.’

‘Yes you can. Use words. I'll understand them.’

‘I really can't. He'd …’ She swallowed, and I realized it probably wasn't me she was most frightened of. ‘He'd hurt me.’

‘Just tell me, Sabrina, or you're going to get damaged anyway.’

She stared me down with a vestige of defiance. ‘You may be an asshole, but you'd never hurt a woman.’

‘No,’ I admitted, ‘you're probably right.’ I stood aside to reveal Helena, who was pointing a gun right at her heart. ‘But believe me: she would.’

You almost certainly haven't stared down the barrel of a gun held by Helena, but it really focuses your mind. There's something about the sight which makes it clear that the time has come to be very accommodating.

‘He's in Los Angeles,’ Sabrina said quickly. ‘I don't know where. He made the booking himself.’

I stared at her. ‘In LA?’

She nodded feverishly, eager to get it over with. ‘He went there end of last week. I've been patching his calls to make it look like he was still here.’

‘What the hell's he doing there?’

‘I don't know.’

Helena flicked the safety off. ‘Try harder, toots – or the hairstyle gets it.’

‘I don't know! He just said it was business.’

At that moment I worked it out, finally understood how he tied in. I dropped my head, wishing I was smarter, that I'd put it together several days ago. It must be great being clever. It must just make everything so much easier.

Helena watched me. ‘That means something to you?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It does. Okay Sabrina, we're leaving now, so you can go back to being rude to people on the phone. But I want you to do me a favour, okay?’

Sabrina didn't look like Sabrina any more. The hardness in her face was gone, and her lips didn't look quite so air-tight. I'm sure the change was only temporary, but it was an improvement. I only wish she hadn't had to be scared to allow herself to be more human, but I guess a lot of us are like that.

‘What?’

‘When Stratten calls in, tell him I know what his business is, and it's just about to end.’

The stewardess had our number pretty quickly. She gave both of us a fistful of miniatures and left us to it. We had a pair of seats over the wing, but could have grabbed a row each if we'd wanted it. Evidently not many people wanted to make the hop from Jacksonville to LA at that time in the evening.

‘So. You going to explain it to me, brains?’ Helena asked, chomping on free peanuts. We were an hour in the air by then, surrounded by little oval windows of darkness. I'd spent the time putting it together in my head, trying to work out how it changed the situation. We were due in LAX at nine local time; one of my two days nearly over with very little to show for it.

‘Stratten was in business with Hammond,’ I said. ‘Like he's maybe in business with people in every major city in the country. He's got the memory business locked down. Lots of well-known people use REMtemps, and some of them must use the memory services too. Though the caretakers don't know who the clients are, Stratten does, and he keeps track of every recollection that passes through one of his machines – including ones that the clients think REMtemps don't know about. He keeps an eye out for blackmail wedges, then sets a local goon on the people who dumped them – in our case, Hammond.’

Helena nodded. ‘He tails the client, gets more evidence of stuff that they don't want the public to know about, and then makes the pitch: pay us, or your career goes down the pan.’

‘I should have worked it out sooner. There was a weird entry in Schumann's file, something that happened a long time ago. I don't think Hammond heard it from any witness. I think Stratten gave the information to him.’

‘But wouldn't the clients suspect that's where the leak was?’

‘Not if he was clever enough, and made sure that the shakedown was explicitly tied to stuff which Hammond had found out subsequent to getting a key in through the memory. Maybe some of them did work it out: Jamison looked kind of shifty when I asked if he had any idea what set Hammond on to him. But by then it's too late, and Stratten's not going to care anyway. He's got them over a barrel because memory-dumping's illegal, and he can make more money out of blackmailing them than he can for charging for the service.’

‘Then Laura kills Hammond and it all goes Picasso.’

‘Stratten's got no-one else on the scene, so he high-tails it over there, clears out Hammond's apartment and lets the victims know it's business as usual. Most of them just buckle under, but Schumann decides he can't take it any more and kills himself. Meantime Stratten wants Hammond's death put to bed as quickly as possible, because the longer Travis pokes around, the greater the chance of him discovering what Hammond was involved in. When Quat lets him know what I've got in my head, it's the perfect opportunity. I go down for the murder and the case is closed.’

‘You've got to tell Travis about this.’

‘I will,’ I said, peering out of the window. We were evidently passing over a city: I could see a few lights below, advertisements for civilization. ‘I'll call him in a minute, and Jamison too – let him know he might want to watch out. But I don't think Travis can help. Stratten is too powerful to be taken down unless you can pin something very specific on him – and he's way too clever to have laid himself open to that. Probably it's Quat or some other bastard who's doing the actual leaning on clients now, and Stratten's got himself alibied by the Pope.’

‘How do the guys in the suits tie in?’

‘I still have no idea. You heard the weirdo: they had plans for Hammond. God knows what that means.’

Helena yawned. ‘Was that guy really an alien?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They all are.’ I hesitated, still trying to come to terms with what I'd learnt today. ‘The obelisk finally arrived. I've spent my life laughing at people who claim they'd been abducted. Turns out I'm one of them.’

‘Hap Thompson, Space Boy,’ Helena murmured sleepily. ‘I don't know why, but I don't find that too hard to believe. Even the whole alien deal. It's just not as hard to credit as I'd have thought.’

‘Maybe it's time,’ I said. ‘And somehow we just know that.’

‘But how come they look like us? Why don't they have those big black eyes and little grey bodies and fingers that light up in the dark?’

I shook my head. ‘Nobody can remember anything about what happens when they're taken. There's just no memory there. Even I can't find it, and I've got a hell of a lot more practice than most. So when people get back, they try to fill it in as best they can. They're scared, so they go for the big fears. They substitute hazy memories of operations they had as a kid – or projections of ones they're afraid might have to happen. They fill in the pictures from magazines, movies, books. They make something up to fill the gap, pin their fears on something concrete, because that's better than not knowing what to be afraid of.’

Helena shifted in her seat, then rested her head on my shoulder. ‘So, what now?’

‘The guy said to go back to LA. So we go there.’

‘How do we know what he says is true?’

‘Helena,’ I said. ‘He's all we've got.’ It came out a bit husky. The weight of her head, the feeling of her neck close to mine, was making me feel a little strange. I could smell her scalp, could understand the amount of space she was taking up. Somehow, with the girls I'd been with since, they always seemed a fraction too big or too small. One of her hairs was tickling my nose, which usually drives me insane. I didn't move, though, in much the same way as you don't move the very first time you're sitting holding someone and your arm gets pins and needles so badly it feels like it's on fire. Some things are worth the price: not for ever, maybe, but at the beginning.

The plane hit a small patch of turbulence, provoking a few squawks from further back in the cabin. The main lights had been turned off by then, leaving only the little glows above the windows. Sooner or later a stewardess would come along and tell people to pull the shutters down, and I'd refuse, as usual. I love being up in the sky, carried along in my taut metal tube and protected by its physics from that other physics, the physics that says all things must fall. I like looking out of the window at the blackness, studded below by the occasional sparks of light which proclaim ‘Yes, there's somebody here. There's things living on this ball of rock, and this is where we are. We have motels and cable TV and reasonably priced cheeseburgers. Come and visit us.’

‘What's this?’ Helena mumbled. Her hand was resting against my chest, the fingers tracing a ragged patch in my skin though my shirt. A small circle just below the clavicle.

‘A scar,’ I said.

‘I don't remember it,’ she said, and then went very quiet. She turned her head to look up at me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It's from then.’

‘Hap, I'm so sorry.’

It was right that she was sorry, but I had never seen a look of such compact misery, and I didn't want to see it now. ‘It's okay,’ I said. We held each other's eyes for a long moment, her trying to see if I meant it, me just looking at what was in her face. I'd always believed that loving someone was a road you could only travel down once, that after you'd taken a wrong turning you just had to turn your back and keep on walking.

Now I no longer knew.

The moment stretched, and stretched. Helena blinked, very slowly. There was something strange about the movement, but I couldn't work out what. My thoughts seemed muddy and confused, as if they were groping for the usual phenomena and not finding them, helpless and stalled in the face of some data they couldn't use.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the flight attendant standing a few rows further up the aisle. She was leaning over, talking to someone, but her lips were moving too slowly, and I couldn't hear what she was saying.

Then the plane bucked again, but this time no-one yelped. Out of the window I saw that the lights I'd noticed earlier were a lot closer now. Too close. Either the plane was crashing, which seemed unlikely, or something was coming up to greet us.

I tried to call out – to whom or what I'm not sure. The sound made it out of my throat but died before it had travelled an inch. The light was changing in the cabin, reminding me of the way it had been in Hammond's study: but this sure as hell wasn't caused by something you could buy in Radio Shack.

I heard the faintest whisper of a scream. It was Helena. Nobody else in the cabin seemed to have noticed what was going on. She had, and she was afraid.

I looped my arms around her and held on, pushing against the weight of the air, my lips against her ear and telling her everything would be all right. My vision started to come apart, as if someone had turned the brightness all the way up and everything but shadows was bleached away.

Then I couldn't even see the shadows any more, and everything was gone.