Crosstalk

  “What is it?” she asked anxiously. “Is Trent awake?”

  “No, it’s Darrell in IT. They got a line on Verrick. They think he’s in Hong Kong to do EEDs on a high-up Chinese official and his mistress, which is great news. His location’ll be classified, and Trent’ll have a hard time reaching him. And even if he succeeds, Verrick’ll have a perfect excuse for not coming back.”

  “But why wouldn’t he want to come back?”

  “Because Trent’s going to tell him his EED has made the two of you start hearing voices. Like I told you, Verrick can’t afford to get mixed up with anything crazy-sounding and have his career go down the drain like Bridey Murphy’s hypnotherapist or Dr. Rhine.”

  “But what if he’s already mixed up with telepathy? What if he and Trent are in it together?”

  “They aren’t. I haven’t picked up anything at all that indicates Trent’s told Verrick about his phone idea. He was waiting till you two connected to broach the idea of doing scans, and he was genuinely surprised that Verrick moved your appointment up.”

  “Oh, good. I’ve been worried about that. But if Dr. Verrick had proof telepathy existed—”

  “He won’t. All Trent’s got is you, and if Verrick asks you to demonstrate your telepathic ability, you can do what you did this morning and write down different words from the ones he sends, and Verrick will decide it was just a case of over-active imagination.”

  “But what about Trent? He talked to me. He heard my voice. He’ll tell Dr. Verrick that.”

  “And you can tell Verrick you have no idea what he’s talking about. It’ll be your word against his.”

  I wish I could believe it was that simple, Briddey thought, clutching C.B.’s jacket to her against the late-night chill. “But what if Trent improves to where he can read my mind like you can, and knows that I did hear it and I’m lying?”

  “It’d still be his word against yours. Anyway, he won’t get to that point, though I’m a little disturbed that you were able to overhear him thinking about the phone—”

  “But I didn’t overhear him,” Briddey said. “I was intentionally auditing him.”

  He stopped and looked down at her. “But I didn’t teach you—”

  “I know. I taught myself.”

  “But the voices…how did you keep from being overwhelmed when you—?”

  “Opened the door? I didn’t. I was too afraid to. I figured out a way to listen to them in the courtyard. On the radio.”

  “The radio?”

  “Yes, like the one in your lab.” She told him what she’d done.

  “Wow,” he said. “Very impressive! You’re almost—” He stopped short.

  Trent must be awake, she thought, and felt a pang that they’d have to put an end to this. It was so nice being out here together. She pulled C.B.’s jacket closer around her. “Did they find Dr. Verrick?”

  “Dr. Verrick?” C.B. said. “Oh. No. I was just checking. Trent’s still asleep.”

  Good, she thought. Then we don’t have to go back yet. She looked happily around at the darkened buildings, the empty street. The air smelled of wet earth and lilacs, and in the spaces between streetlights, the black sky was spangled with stars.

  But C.B. was oblivious to their surroundings. “The IT guys are onto something regarding Verrick’s whereabouts, which means they could be calling Trent any minute now, and before they do, there are some things I need to tell you.” He took a deep breath. “The first thing is, you wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for me.”

  “What? It’s not your fault that Trent—”

  “Yeah, it is. A couple of months ago he came down and asked me to do some research into how EEDs worked, and after I did, he asked me if I thought it would be possible to map the electronic circuitry of the neural pathways the EED produced. I told him no, not without brain scans of patients who’d had the EED done.”

  He looked apologetically at her. “I only said that because I knew there was no way he could get access to them, what with doctor-patient confidentiality. I obviously didn’t want Commspan to start messing around with the idea of mind-to-mind communication, even if it was only emotions,” he said. “And the next thing I know, he’s dating you and the two of you are getting an EED. I thought you probably had the gene, given your red hair and your Irish name, and that’s why I tried to warn you. I was afraid if you had the EED, it might trigger the voices, and you’d tell Trent, and I didn’t want him finding out telepathy was real.”

  “You’re lying,” she said. “My name and my red hair isn’t why you thought I might become telepathic. You thought I might because Maeve was.”

  C.B. was staring at her in astonishment. “You know about Maeve?”

  She nodded.

  “How? And don’t tell me she told you. She’s been absolutely terrified you’d find out and tell her mother. She swore me to secrecy.” He looked consideringly at Briddey. “I suppose you heard her on this radio thing of yours.”

  “No, and no. She didn’t tell me. I figured it out.”

  “It was the Lucky Charms, wasn’t it?”

  “Partly. You used thinking about the marshmallows to distract her from the voices, too, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wondered why you were talking about a kids’ cereal,” Briddey said. “I also figured out she was who you were talking to those times I couldn’t contact you, like when I first started hearing the other voices at Commspan and when you suddenly went off in the middle of our fight.”

  He nodded. “I thought I’d taught her how to keep the voices out, but I’d never had to do it for anyone else before, so it wasn’t perfect, and I kept having to go rescue her and shore up her defenses. And always at the worst possible moment. The last time it took me forever to get her calmed down to where she could get her defenses back up, especially since I was doing it long-distance, and by the time I did, you were already in trouble at the theater. And then, when we were in the storage room, she managed to get herself in trouble again. That’s why I went back over to the door, so I could concentrate on talking her down, and why I didn’t hear the librarian till she was almost to the door. All I had time to do was switch off the light, and when I did—”

  “I fell apart,” Briddey said. “I figured that out, too. And that you didn’t text her to tell her what to say if Trent called. You just talked to her telepathically.”

  “Wow! You’re almost as good a detective as your niece. Does she know you know about her?”

  Briddey nodded. “She was eavesdropping on me when I figured it out.”

  “And she’s probably eavesdropping on us right now,” C.B. said, “although if she were, you can bet she’d be putting in her two cents’ worth.” He cocked his head to one side for a moment. “That’s what I thought. She’s sound asleep.”

  Thank heavens, Briddey thought. There was no telling what Maeve would say if she were here. “You said she panicked when the voices hit. Is she all right?” The voices were so vicious and so nasty…

  “I was able to block a lot of the bad stuff temporarily till she got her defenses up,” C.B. said. “And her voices didn’t come on nearly as fast as they did with you. For the first couple of weeks she only heard one or two at a time.”

  Which was why she was reading The Darkvoice Chronicles, Briddey thought. She was afraid she was schizophrenic, too.

  “Yeah,” C.B. said. “I heard her worrying about it. I’d seen her at Commspan a couple of times when she came to see you, so I recognized her voice, and I was afraid her concern about schizophrenia might be because she was starting to hear voices, even though she was awfully young.”

  “So you reached out to her, and the two of you cooked up the story about the science project to cover the fact that you were teaching her how to protect herself against the voices.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Thank you for doing that. I hate to think what would have happened to her if you hadn’t been there to help.”

&nbs
p; “Yeah, well, I didn’t want her to have to go through what I did, though actually she might have been okay even without me. She has a tendency to overestimate her abilities and underestimate the voices, but she’s also got a real talent for keeping intruders out.”

  “That’s because she’s had tons of practice with her own family.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, she told me all about Oona and her mother. The Stasi agent, Maeve calls her, but if you want my opinion, she’s no match for Maeve or her computer skills. Maeve’s a prodigy when it comes to writing security code, and now that she’s learned how to audit Mary Clare’s thoughts, your poor sister doesn’t stand a chance. And you don’t have to worry about Maeve’s voices now. She’s got a perimeter and a safe room and an encrypted firewall.”

  “And a castle with a moat and a tower. And zombie gates.”

  He laughed. “See? She can take care of herself.”

  “Unless Trent finds out about her.”

  “Yeah,” he said, suddenly serious. “That’s why we’ve got to make sure he doesn’t.”

  “And that he doesn’t find out about you.”

  C.B. nodded. “So far we’re okay. He hasn’t heard you mention my name or what happened last night. He still thinks you left the theater to go to your aunt’s house. Nobody from Commspan saw us on our way to pick up your car from the hotel, and there’s nothing else to connect us.”

  “Except that call you made to the hospital, telling them I’d left my room and was in the staircase.”

  “But I didn’t give my name, so unless the hospital traces the call, we’re fine. And they won’t have any reason to, because Dr. Verrick’s not going to believe Trent.”

  She prayed that was true. If they ever found out about C.B., with all he knew, they’d hound him to death. And once they discovered he was actually Irish—

  “Trent hasn’t made the Irish connection either. He hasn’t even realized you’ve got anything to do with the telepathy. He thinks this is just a lucky accident that’ll make an even better phone than an empathic connection would have. He’s totally focused on that, so much so that he hasn’t even considered how nuts this is all going to sound to Dr. Verrick.”

  “Just the same, I’d better make it clear to Maeve that she can only talk to me over the phone.”

  “Good idea,” C.B. said. “And it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to use a code name when we talk about her. We definitely don’t want Trent to realize she’s a part of this.”

  “How about Rapunzel? Or Cinderella?”

  “No, he’d spot that as code. Make it Cindy. And make sure you think Cindy, not just say it, so her real name doesn’t come through underneath.”

  “I’ll be careful.” She thought of something. “When you were talking about Dr. Verrick, why did you say you had no indication he was in on it with Trent? Don’t you know?”

  “You mean, can’t I read his mind? No, unfortunately. I’ve never heard his voice. That night I came to see you in the hospital, he’d gone home. I was planning to go talk to him at his office that night you had the midnight appointment, but he turned out not to be there, and Hong Kong’s out of range. But I can hear Trent, and if Verrick was in this with him, I’d definitely have picked it up, and I haven’t. He—” He stopped, and his chin went up in that alert attitude again.

  She watched him as he listened. He looked worn out. Of course he is, she thought. He’s had even less sleep than I have. She felt guilty that she’d fallen asleep tonight while he’d stood guard, waiting for Trent to doze off. He’d been standing guard for days on end, keeping Maeve—and her—safe.

  He came back from whatever he’d been listening to, and she asked, “Was that Trent?”

  “No, Darrell in IT again. It seems the good doctor’s not in Hong Kong after all. He’s in Arizona.”

  “Oh, no. That means he could be back here by tomorrow—I mean, by today. By this afternoon.”

  He shook his head. “They haven’t found him yet. He flew into Phoenix, but he’s not booked into any of the hotels there, and he rented a car, which probably means he was headed somewhere else—Palm Springs or the Grand Canyon or Mexico. Plus, he’s in an area with some of the worst coverage in the country. If he’s out in the middle of the desert, it could be days before they find him. Which means I’ve got time to tell you—”

  “About Sky Masterson and Sister Sarah.”

  There was a pause, and then he said, “Yeah, about Sarah and Sky,” and she had the feeling he’d intended to say something else. “Where was I?”

  You were standing here with me in the middle of the night, she thought. In the lovely lilac-scented dark. “You said they were coming back from Havana.”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking down at her. “He took her to Cuba to—”

  “Keep her boyfriend from finding out she was telepathic?”

  “No, to win a bet. And to get her into bed. He wined and dined her and got her drunk, but then—”

  He fell in love with her.

  “Yeah,” C.B. said huskily, “and took her back to New York, and told her the bit about his time of day and was about to say he had some things he needed to tell her, just like I have some things I need to tell you, when—shit.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, but she already knew. Trent was awake.

  “No,” C.B. said disgustedly, “but I just heard Darrell say—think—that he’s going to call Trent and ask him if he’s got any idea where in Arizona the doctor could be. Sorry. I didn’t think they’d call till they found him. Come on, we need to get you back home,” he said, walking her rapidly down the street. “Trent may call you, and I don’t want him picking up anything about your being awake and outside at this hour.”

  “But I thought you said he was only picking things up sporadically.”

  “He is, but I didn’t think he’d be able to connect with you either, and we can’t afford to take any risks, not with Maeve involved. You and I are one thing, but she’s just a little kid. A moat and a tower wouldn’t be any match for the kinds of things the press and the military would throw at her. Speaking of which,” he said, hurrying her along the sidewalk, “from here on out, we need to stick to ordinary lines of communication. And not ones connected to Commspan. Come down to my lab as soon as you get to work, and I’ll fix you up with a burner phone so you can call me if something develops.”

  “And what if something develops before then?”

  “It won’t,” he said. “It’s”—he glanced at his wristwatch—“nearly four A.M. already, which means we’ve only got five hours till I see you at Commspan. I doubt if Trent’ll find Verrick by then, and even if he does, the good doctor’s phone is probably in sleep mode, so he won’t get the call till morning. Or else he’ll be annoyed at being awakened, especially if Trent tells him he wants to install ESP into a smartphone.”

  “Can he?” Briddey asked, practically running to keep up with him. “Actually devise a way to translate the telepathy into a technology you could put into a phone?”

  “Not if he assigns me to do it.”

  “I’m serious. Is it possible?”

  “Not till they know how it works and what causes it, which is why it’s important for Trent to go on thinking the EED did it and that you’re the only two people it’s happened to.”

  “And that we were only able to connect because he and I are emotionally bonded.”

  “Yeah,” C.B. said. “Sorry.” They’d reached her apartment building. He cocked his head, listening for a few seconds, and then said, “Darrell’s looking for Trent’s number. You’d better go in.”

  “But you said you had something else you needed to tell me.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’ll have to wait.”

  “Are you sure there isn’t some way you could block Trent for just a few minutes? You could come up and tell me whatever it is and then finish telling me about Sky Masterson and Sister Sarah—”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. Look, you need to get
inside, and I need to get to bed. We’re both going to need to have our wits about us tomorrow. G’night,” he said, and loped down the street before she could even give him his jacket back.

  C.B.! Wait! she called, and ran after him. She handed him his jacket. “Thank you for lending it to me,” she said.

  “Anytime,” he said gravely, and for a long, still, breath-held moment she thought he was going to kiss her, but he didn’t. He shook his head regretfully, said, “I’ll see you in the morning,” and took off toward his car.

  Briddey stood and watched him go and then hurried inside and up to her apartment and her phone.

  Trent hadn’t called, and in spite of what C.B.’d said, she doubted he would. He’d be too busy calling hotels in Flagstaff and Yuma, trying to track Dr. Verrick down. And too focused on that to be listening to her.

  But in case he was, she needed to go back to sleep. She undressed, got into bed, turned off the light, and tried to turn off her mind, but she kept thinking about C.B. and wondering what the “other things” he needed to tell her were. Were there even worse things about telepathy that he hadn’t told her? Or worse ways people would try to use it? The CIA would want to locate terrorists and secret military bases with it and find out enemy plans and nuclear codes, and they wouldn’t care what they had to do to get it from C.B. or her or Maeve, wouldn’t care if they unleashed a flood or a horde of zombies or…

  Or what? she wondered. What form had C.B.’s voices taken? He’d never said. And if she asked him, she doubted if he’d tell her. She’d have to ask Maeve.

  C.B. had told her they needed to maintain radio silence, and that Darrell in IT had probably already awakened Trent, and at this hour Maeve was almost certainly still asleep, but if she waited, she might not have another chance.

  She went into the courtyard and tuned the radio to Trent’s station. Nothing. Not even static. She turned the dial slightly to each side of his frequency to make sure and then scanned quickly through the dial, looking for Darrell’s voice.