The Medusa Encounter Page 8

  The woods were thick with undergrowth and saplings, with an occasional dark conifer among the bare trunks of red oaks and maples and weedy sumac and the hundreds of other species preserved in the parklands of the Hendrik Hudson Preserve. Blake moved as quickly as he dared across the thick layers of dead leaves, still soaked from yesterday’s rain.

  He knew there were image enhancers and infrared sensors mounted at intervals around the electrified fence, and he knew there were motion detectors between the fence and the wall. There were chemical sniffers scattered throughout the woods, and organic sniffers—in the form of dogs—prowling the lawns. He knew that he was not going to slither undetected onto these grounds. There were no unguarded secret passages; no daring midnight climb up the cliffs would get him past the sentries.

  But he’d prepared for all this. After hiding the rented car he’d shed his clothes and pulled on a full body suit of impermeable clear polymer, which incorporated a total skin-area heat exchange system and a shielded internal heat sink, mounted between his shoulder blades.

  The heat sink would be saturated in little over an hour now, whereupon it would automatically vent a stream of superheated gas into the atmosphere behind Blake’s head, turning Blake into a walking blowtorch. This would be inconveniently conspicuous, although preferable to the alternative—for if the unit failed to vent, it would go critical and turn Blake into a walking bomb.

  Until that spectacular moment, however, Blake would stay as cool as a salamander. Externally he had the temperature of his surroundings—

  —which made him invisible, not only to the infrared sensors but, since he was sealed in odorless plastic, to the sniffers as well.

  His other preparations depended crucially upon the weather. Clear skies . . . The lightest of cool breezes flowing downriver from an approaching high pressure system . . . Right about now . . .

  Yes, there they were, way off to his right, a fleet of orangy-pink glowing globes drifting among the stars—

  —drifting down the wind, drifting toward the cluster of buildings on the center of the grounds, which were dominated by the stone mansion itself.

  Lights blazed in the big house and across the grassy lawns. Barely visible human and animal shapes spilled out of darkened doorways and spread to the sides, keeping to lanes of shadow in a well-rehearsed defensive pattern.

  No sirens sounded, however. Blake knew from experience that the folks at Granite Lodge didn’t want to wake their neighbors unless they thought they had something really serious on their hands. Which is why there’d been no sirens the night he tried to break Linda out of there.

  Blake caught the faint but frantic hum of multiple step-monitors as the nearest railguns bobbed and swung, searching the skies, but no hypersonic chunks of steel were launched at the glowing globes overhead. The globes were virtually invisible to a very confused AARGGS, the antiaircraft railgun guidance system—

  —because the targets were only twenty meters off the ground, unreflective, and so small that at radar wavelengths software written for targets no smaller or lower or slower than parasails and hang-gliders couldn’t resolve them.

  Blake was attacking Granite Lodge with a fleet of stealth balloons. It would have been overkill to shoot down toy balloons with hypersonic missiles. Still, if the radars found their targets and the railguns fired, it would ruin Blake’s scheme.

  There were a dozen of the gossamer silk dirigibles, each powered by nothing higher-tech than a bit of burning parafin—a fat candle, bright in the infrared—but steered by feathery vanes and gilllike vents that opened and closed according to instructions from sophisticated guidance chips—preprogrammed for tonight’s weather. Slowly, silently, the dirigibles tracked their targets with microscopic visual sensors, drifting in like a fleet of stinging jellyfish.

  Too late for AARGGS. Now the human defenders of the lodge opened fire on the aerial fleet—but like the radars, they misjudged the size and range of their targets.

  Blake kept still in the darkness, taking long seconds to observe; these defenders were skittish killers, if they were killers at all. Their weapons were silenced, and they weren’t using tracer bullets. And their noise suppressors played havoc with accuracy. Without tracers they had no way of knowing where their bullets were going in the night sky. They might even be so scrupulous, Blake thought, as to be using rubber bullets, as they had the night he tried to escape.

  Someone got lucky: a burst from an automatic weapon hit one of the little balloons.

  There was a blinding flash and a terrific report. Spectacular streamers of light shot out of the blazing balloon as it fell to the wet lawn, where—in an effect so weirdly counterintuitive as to seem alien—it erupted in frenzy, sending little balls of pinkish yellow fire skittering across the damp grass like tiny creatures desperately running for cover. At the uncanny sight, well trained guard dogs howled and fled.

  If Blake hadn’t been so involved in the moment, he would have laughed. Those bouncing, scurrying points of pink light were a handful of BBs of sodium metal, fizzing into tiny rockets upon contact with the wet grass.

  Now the rest of the fleet found their objectives. White, pink, and yellow fireworks erupted on the roof of Granite Lodge. A couple of balloons floated under the porch roof and flashed into incandescence, setting the big wooden beams and the knotty pine planks ablaze.

  The three little airships that had been targeted for the garage landed almost simultaneously. Less than a minute later the garage’s hydrogen reservoir went off like a real bomb, blowing the walls out of the old carriage house and reducing the vehicles inside to vigorously burning wreckage as a great ball of flaming hydrogen rose into the night sky.

  So much for waking the neighbors.

  Blake figured he’d created about as much diversion as he could. He went swiftly through the remaining strip of woods. The electrified fence yielded to clips and cutters from his pack. As he crossed the ten meters to the low stone wall he hoped the guardians of the lodge were really as benign as he supposed, for this was the right place for antipersonnel mines in the ground and fléchette booby traps in the trees.

  He reached the wall without incident. The orange flames from the porch and garage cast dancing cross-shadows on the side lawn. The area ahead of him was lit only by floodlights. He clambered over the wall, careful of the thin plastic skin that was all he had between him and the black, angular stones. He moved into the white light, walking confidently upright. May as well be confident. Nothing could hide him now, until he reached the triangular shadows beneath the walls.

  Once into the darkness near the house he ducked and ran and vaulted onto the side porch. Doors were open where the staff had run out to defend the place. A human shape passed him at the corner of the veranda, shouting back over a shoulder. Blake ducked inside the nearest door.

  He went through the darkened library, into the entrance hall. The plans he’d studied, although he knew they lied, had nevertheless revealed the location of the lodge’s nerve center. While the huge curving main staircase left an impression of massive foundations, Blake knew there was a room under the stairs, a big room, no doubt acoustically silenced and furnished with consoles and flatscreens and videoplates, perhaps comfortable couches and chairs.

  With his clock running out fast he didn’t have a lot of time. He found the lock, hidden in the carved wooden paneling, and packed it with plastic. He stepped back seconds before the door crashed inward. He tossed a gas grenade into the room, waited a few seconds, and as he ducked into the room he dropped another grenade behind him in the hall. Why not, he wasn’t breathing the stuff!

  Inside the room, a lone young woman in a white uniform was already sound asleep in her contour chair in front of the display screens, her head thrown back and her long blond hair spilling almost to the carpet. Her right arm hung over the chair and her fingers trailed on the carpet.

  As Blake pulled her chair back, away from the console, his gaze was snagged by the ring she wore on the middle finger of
that trailing hand, a gold ring set with a garnet carved in the shape of an animal. Later he was to realize that if some recent, separate thought hadn’t formed an association in his mind, he would have forgotten the ring as quickly as he noticed it.

  Blake looked at the screens and determined that the defense forces were outside diligently putting out fires. He studied the board and realized this was nothing but an I/O layout; the processors were elsewhere.

  He took a moment to absorb the room’s plan, following the electrical buses and cooling lines . . . there were the main computers, inconspicuous in an equipment rack against the short end of the room, where the ceiling descended steeply under the stairs. He didn’t have time to stay and play—he tore them out of the rack, breaking their connections, and stuffed them into his pack. He took the trays of chips he found nearby and emptied them in on top before he sealed the pack’s flap.

  He was out of the room and through the smoke-filled hall—

  —he was into the darkened library and through it, and through the doors, and onto the porch—

  —he was vaulting the porch rail, hitting the soft grass running . . . running and running across it, catching sight of other running shapes out of the corners of his eyes . . . over the wall, through the fence, into the woods. . . .

  He took care to slow his pace, to move with caution and stealth through the damp woods. Behind him, the night sky was aglow with the burning. Sirens and amplified squawks from commlinks and the guttural roar of high-powered, hydrocarbon-burning engines approaching up the main drive drifted on the night, covering the squish of wet leaves underfoot and the scraping of branches as he worked his way through the woods.

  His car was parked some twenty minutes’ walk ahead through the night woods, well off the road, but a glance at his plastic-covered watch showed he had a wider time margin than he’d planned, so he kept the plastic suit on; it was all that protected him from the bitter cold.

  He found the car without trouble—he was a confident nighttime navigator—and tossed his pack into the forward luggage compartment. He slammed the hood down upon it, then opened the door on the driver’s side. He reached in and fetched his sliver from under the seat. He inserted it in the ignition; the board showed power to the wheel motors.

  He reached to rip open the front of his plastic suit, which would disable the heat transfer system. Once he was safely away, he could dump the stored energy in the suit’s heat sink. Before he got his hand on the seam sealer, they came out of the woods—

  —three of them in white uniforms, all young, all blond, none looking very happy.

  “Hands up,” said the leader softly. He was a tall kid with a blond crewcut so short he looked bald.

  They had him on three sides, and all of them were pointing assault rifles at him. At this range it didn’t matter whether the bullets were rubber or not. They could still rupture his spleen or put out his eyes or break something else valuable.

  Baldy looked at Blake, naked inside his clear plastic suit, and sneered. “Fetching outfit.”

  “Glad you like it,” Blake said, his words muffled through the plastic film that covered his mouth. What could you do when you were wearing nothing but sandwich wrap, except try to hold on to your sense of humor?

  Baldy gestured to his two companions. They bundled into the cramped back seat of the little electric while Baldy kept his rifle pointed at Blake’s lower middle section. “You drive,” he said.

  “Four people weigh a lot,” Blake mumbled. “I don’t know if I have enough charge for all of you.”

  “We’re not going far. Get in.”

  Blake eased himself into the driver’s seat, hunched forward because of the heat-sink unit between his shoulder blades, intensely aware of the gun muzzles pointed at his neck from the back seat. Baldy slid in beside him. Blake eased off the clutch; the motors whirred and engaged and the car slithered over the muddy track. When he reached the paved country road, Blake turned in the direction of the lodge’s main drive.

  They drove slowly and silently, until Blake asked, “How did you happen to get to my car ahead of me?”

  “Not something you need to know.”

  “Okay, but are you sure you want me to drive you all the way back to the lodge in this thing?”

  “Just drive.”

  Blake glanced at the pale blue digital display on his left wrist. “I have to get out for a minute. Just for a minute.”

  Baldy smirked at him. “It will have to wait.”

  “It won’t wait.”

  A muzzle pressed Blake’s neck, and an intimate whisper sounded close to his ear. “We don’t care if you fill up your whole body-baggie,” said the boy behind him. “You’re not getting out of this vehicle until we tell you to.”

  Blake shrugged and drove on, down the tree-crowded road, his headlights illuminating bare tree trunks like ghosts in the darkness.

  The little electric car was slowing for the lodge’s double steel gate when Blake’s heat sink went critical. The unit started to whistle.

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “I need to get out of the car right now,” Blake said, groping for the door handle.

  “Watch it!” yelled the boy in the back seat. “Hands on the wheel.”

  In seconds the whistle was a shriek.

  “Let him out,” said the girl in the back. “Let me out too.”

  Too late. A high-pressure column of blue flame erupted from the unit between Blake’s shoulders; from the back it must have seemed that his head was a volcano. The plastic upholstery burst into flame, releasing acrid black fumes. A hole opened in the thin sheet metal roof of the car.

  Spouting a spectacular plume of flame, Blake stumbled and staggered out of the car, a man burning alive. His terrified captors scrambled out of the vehicle behind him, staring at him in horror.

  Reeling from the awful heat, dying before their eyes, Blake stumbled back toward the smoking vehicle and collapsed into the driver’s seat. With a last agonized spasm, an unconscious reflex of escape, he threw the pots into reverse high. The burning car jerked away and spun around, throwing flaming bits across the wet roadway, careening crazily off into the forest.

  But somehow the car stayed on the road. Blake hadn’t watched all those action-adventure holoviddies, with stuntmen lunging around cloaked in flame, without getting the technique down pat.

  IX

  Blake tugged the knot of his silk tie and smoothed it to lie flat against his white cotton shirt. He snugged his suit jacket neatly around his shoulders and, a moment later, rose as the magneplane slowed for the Brooklyn Bridge station. Someone looking closely might have noticed the red welt across the back of his neck, but a quick glance around reassured him that no one was watching.

  He stepped off the plane, briefcase in hand, and briskly marched to the escalator. Minutes later he was on his way back uptown on a restored antique subway train. A century ago it would have been rush hour, but the bright, clean subways were never crowded these days. He got off at a midtown station. As he emerged from underground, the rising sun was touching the tops of the glittering towers around him with pale yellow light.

  The physical exhilaration of the attack and narrow escape had drained away, and he experienced a moment’s dejection. He wasn’t even sure who or what he’d been fighting—or why, now that Ellen had rejected him, except for some vague sense of his own injured pride. Simple fatigue is a great discourager of pride. With self-hypnotic effort, he regained at least a temporary feeling of confidence. He was on the way to another job interview, and this was for a job he wanted.

  The offices of the Vox Populi Institute occupied a three-story brick building in the east 40s, within walking distance of the Council of Worlds complex on the East River. Plain as it was, the building was worth a fortune.

  Inside, the decor was even plainer—steel desks, steel chairs, steel filing cabinets, crumbling bulletin boards, crumbling paint (institutional green to shoulder height, institutional cream above),
and aggressively plain and surly office help, one of whom finally agreed to show Blake the general direction of Arista Plowman’s office. Dexter was not in today.

  Arista, it was said, was less tolerant of human foibles than Dexter—theirs was a prickly partnership—she being as far out on one end of the political spectrum as he was on the other. Arista championed humanity at large, Dexter championed the individual human with an actionable grudge. Their differences hardly made a difference to anyone but them, since Dexter’s favored weapon in defense of the individual was the class-action suit, and Arista’s tactic in defense of the People was to take up the cause of a single, symbolic Wronged Innocent.

  She glanced up when Blake appeared at her door and knew instantly she was not dealing with a Wronged Innocent. She growled something like “siddown” and made a pretense of studying his resume.

  Arista was a bony woman with heavy black brows and grayish black hair that was contracted into tight waves against her long skull. Her severe dress, black with white polka-dots, hung askew from her wide shoulders, and the way she leaned her elbows on her desk top and perched her skinny bottom on the edge of her chair conveyed her desire to be somewhere else. She shoved the resume to one side of her desk as if it had offended her. “You worked for Sotheby’s, Redfield? An auction house?”

  “Not on staff. They frequently retained me as a consultant.”

  Her mouth twisted sourly at the sound of his Brittainted accent. Her own accent was good American, pure Bronx—even though she’d been born and raised in Westchester County. “But you were an art dealer.” The emphasis alone neatly conveyed her opinion of those who sold things, especially expensive, decorative, useless things.

  “In a manner of speaking. Rare books and manuscripts, actually.”

  “What makes you think you have anything to offer us? We’re not here to serve the whims of the rich.”

  He indicated the scrap of fax she’d brushed aside, his resume. “Extensive research experience.”