She stepped out and looked around, her face revealing nothing, and started up the sidewalk toward town like a tourist on a morning constitutional, neither slow nor hurried. The camera had a wide-angle lens; she dwindled away pretty fast.
'So should we check the hotels and try to find out who she is?' I asked.
'Maybe not. Even if we got a name, it might not do us any good. And we don't want anyone to make a connection between St Bart's and Guadalajara.'
I gestured at the screen. 'No one can track that signal to here?'
'Not the pictures. It's an Iridium service. I decrypt them passively from anywhere in the world.' He turned off the screen. 'You going to the unveiling?' Today was the day Jefferson and Ingram were to have finished the humanization process.
'Blaze wondered whether I ought to. My feelings about Ingram are still pretty Neanderthal.'
'I can't imagine. He only tried to murder your woman and then you as well.'
'Not to mention insulting my manhood and attempting to destroy the universe. But I'm due in the Clinic this afternoon anyhow, to get my memory fucked with. Might as well see Wonder Boy in action.'
'Give me a report. I'm going to stay by the screen for the next day or two, in case "Agent Simone" tries another visit.'
Of course I wouldn't be able to give him a report, because the encounter with Ingram was related to all the stuff I was having erased, or at least so I assumed – I wouldn't be able to remember his assault on Amelia without recalling what she had done to attract his attention. 'Good luck. You might check with Marty – his general might have some way to access FBI personnel records.'
'Good idea.' He stood up. 'Cup of coffee?'
'No, thanks. Spend the rest of the morning with Blaze. We don't know who I'm going to be tomorrow.'
'Frightening prospect. But Marty swears it's totally reversible.'
'That's true.' But Marty was going ahead with the plan even though it meant the risk of a billion or more dying or losing their sanity. Maybe my losing or keeping my memories didn't rank too high on his list of priorities.
The woman who called herself Audrey Simone, whose cell name was Gavrila, would never go back to the monastery. She had learned enough there.
It took her more than a day to put together a mosaic of Iridium pictures of the two blue vehicles making their way from North Dakota to Guadalajara. By God's grace the last picture was perfect timing: the truck had disappeared and the bus was signaling for a left turn into an underground parking garage. She used a grid to find the address and was not surprised when it turned out to be a clinic for installing jacks. That Godless practice was at the heart of everything, obviously.
General Blaisdell arranged transportation to Guadalajara for her, but had to wait six hours for an express package to arrive. There was no sporting goods store in North Dakota where she could replace the ammunition she'd used up opening doors – Magnum-load dumdum bullets that wouldn't set off airport detectors. She didn't want to run out of them, if she had to fight her way to the redheaded scientist. And perhaps Ingram.
Ingram and Jefferson sat together in hospital blues. They were in straight-backed chairs of expensive teak or mahogany. I didn't notice the unusual wood first, though. I noticed that Jefferson sat with a serene, relaxed expression that reminded me of the Twenty. Ingram's expression was literally unreadable, and both of his wrists were handcuffed to the chair arms.
There was a semicircle of twenty chairs facing them in the featureless white round room. It was an operating theatre, with glowing walls for the display of X-ray or positron transparencies.
Amelia and I took the last empty chairs. 'What's with Ingram?' I said. 'It didn't take?'
'He just shut down,' Jefferson said. 'When he realized he couldn't resist the process, he went into a kind of catatonia. He didn't come out of it when we unjacked him.'
'Maybe he's bluffing,' Amelia said, probably remembering the conference room at St Bart's. 'Waiting for an opportunity to strike.'
'That's why he's handcuffed,' Marty said. 'He's a wild card now.'
'He's just not there,' Jefferson said. 'I've jacked with more people than everybody in this room put together, and nothing like this has ever happened. You can't unjack yourself mentally, but that's what it felt like. Like he decided to pull the plug.'
'Not exactly a selling point for humanization,' I said to Marty. 'It works on everyone but psychopaths?'
'That's the word they used to describe me,' Ellie said, saintly and serene. 'And it was accurate.' She had murdered her husband and children, with gasoline. 'But the process worked with me, and still works after all these years. Without it, I know I would have gone crazy; stayed crazy.'
'The term "psychopath" covers a lot of territory,' Jefferson said. 'Ingram is intensely moral, even though he's repeatedly done things that all of us would call immoral; outrageously so.'
'When I was jacked with him,' I said, 'he reacted to my outrage with a kind of imperturbable condescension. I was a hopeless case who couldn't understand the rightness of the things he had done. That was the first day.'
'We wore him down a little over the next couple of days,' Jefferson said. 'By not disapproving; by trying to understand.'
'How can you "understand" someone who can follow an order to rape a woman and then mutilate her in a specific way? He left her tied up and gagged, to bleed to death. He's not even human.'
'But he is human,' Jefferson said, 'and however bizarre his behavior is, it's still human behavior. I think that's what shut him down – we refused to see him as some sort of avenging angel. Just a profoundly sick man we were trying to help. He could take your condemnation and laugh at it. He couldn't take Ellie's Christian charity and loving kindness. Or, for that matter, my own professional detachment.'
'He should be dead by now,' Dr Orr said. 'He hasn't taken any food or water since the third day. We've kept him on IVs.'
'A waste of glucose,' I said.
'You know better.' Marty waved fingers in front of Ingram's face and he didn't blink. 'We have to find out why this happened, and how common it's going to be.'
'Not common,' Mendez said. 'I was with him before, during, and after his retreat into wherever he is now. From the first, it was like jacking with some kind of alien, or animal.'
'I'll go along with that,' I said.
'But nevertheless very analytical,' Jefferson said. 'Studying us intently from the very first.'
'Studying what we knew about jacking,' Ellie said. 'He wasn't that interested in anybody as a person. But he had only jacked before in a limited, commercial way, and he was hungry to absorb our experience.'
Jefferson nodded. 'He had this vivid fantasy that he extrapolated from the jack joints. He wanted to be jacked with someone and kill him.'
'Or her,' Amelia said, 'like me, or that poor woman he raped and cut up.'
'The fantasy was always a male,' Ellie said. 'He doesn't see women as worthy opponents. And he doesn't have much of a sex drive – when he raped that woman, his penis was just another weapon.'
'An extension of his self, like all of his weapons,' Jefferson said.
'He's more obsessive about weapons than any soldier I ever jacked with.'
'He missed his calling. I know some guys he'd get along with fine.'
'I don't doubt it,' Marty said. 'Which makes him that much more important to study. Some people in hunter/killer platoons have similar personality traits. We have to find a way to keep this from happening.'
Good riddance, I didn't say. 'So you won't be coming with me tomorrow? Stay here?'
'No, I'm still going to Portobello. Dr Jefferson's going to work on Ingram. See whether he can walk him back with a combination of drugs and therapy.'
'I don't know whether to wish you luck. I really prefer him this way.' Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought the bastard showed a glimmer of expression at that. Maybe we should send Marty down to Portobello alone, and leave me up here to taunt him out of catatonia.
 
; Julian and Marty missed by only a few minutes sharing the Guadalajara airport with the woman who had come down to kill Amelia. They got on a military flight to Portobello while she took a taxi from the airport to the hotel across the street from the Clinic. Jefferson was staying there, no coincidence, and so were two of the Twenty – Ellie and the old soldier Cameron.
Jefferson and Cameron were dawdling over breakfast in the hotel cantina when she walked in to get a cup of coffee to take back to her room.
They both looked at her automatically, as men will when a beautiful woman makes an entrance, but Cameron kept staring.
Jefferson laughed and put on the accent of a popular comedian. 'Jim … you don't stop puttin' eye tracks on her, she's gonna come over and smack you one.' The two men had become friends, having worked their way up from the same beginning, the lower-class black suburbs of Los Angeles.
He turned around with a careful expression and said quietly, 'Zam, she might more'n smack me. Kill me just for practice.'
'What?'
'Bet she's killed more people than I have. She has that sniper look: everyone's a potential target.'
'She does hold herself like a soldier.' He slid a glance over to her and back. 'Or a certain kind of patient. Obsessive-compulsive.'
'How 'bout let's not ask her over to join us?'
'Good idea.'
But when they left the cantina a few minutes later, they ran into her again. She was trying to deal with the night clerk, a frightened teenaged girl whose English was not good. Gavrila's Spanish was worse.
Jefferson walked over to the rescue. '–Can I be of some assistance?' he asked in Spanish.
'You're American,' Gavrila said. 'Will you ask her if she's seen this woman?' It was a picture of Blaze Harding.
'–You know what she's asking,' he said to the clerk.
'Sí, claro.' The woman opened both her hands. '–I have seen the woman; she has been in here for meals a few times. But she doesn't stay here.'
'She says she's not sure,' Jefferson translated. 'Most Americans look pretty much the same to her.'
'Have you seen her?' Gavrila asked.
Jefferson studied the photograph. 'Can't say as I have. Jim?' Cameron stepped over. 'You seen this woman?'
'I don't think so. A lot of Americans coming and going.'
'You're here at the Clinic?'
'Consulting.' Jefferson realized he'd hesitated a moment too long. 'Is she a patient?'
'I don't know. I just know she's here.'
'What do you want her for?' Cameron asked.
'Just a few questions. Government business.'
'Well, we'll keep an eye out. You're…?'
'Francine Gaines. Room 126. I'd surely appreciate any help you could give me.'
'Sure.' They watched her walk away. 'Is this deep shit,' Cameron whispered, 'or just meters of excrement?'
'We have to get a picture of her,' Jefferson said, 'and send it on to Marty's general. If the army's after Blaze, he can probably get rid of her.'
'But you don't think she's army.'
'Do you?'
He hesitated. 'I don't know. When she looked at you, and when she looked at me, she looked first at the middle of the chest and then between the eyes. Targeting. I wouldn't make any sudden movements around her.'
'If she's army, she's a hunter/killer.'
'We didn't have that term when I was in the service. But it takes one to know one, and I know she's killed a lot of people.'
'A female Ingram.'
'She might be even more dangerous than Ingram. Ingram rather looks like what he is. She looks like…'
'Yeah.' Jefferson looked at the elevator door that had just been graced by her presence. 'She sure does.' He shook his head. 'Let's get a picture and get it over to the Clinic for when Mendez checks in.' He was down in Mexico City, scrounging raw materials for the nanoforge. 'He had some crazy woman break into St Bart's.'
'No resemblance,' Cameron said. 'She was ugly and had frizzy red hair.'
Actually, she'd had a wig and a pressure mask.
We walked right into Building 31, no trouble. To their computer, Marty was a brigadier general who had spent most of his career in academic posts. I was sort of my old self.
Or not. The memory modification was seamless, but I think if I had jacked with anyone in my old platoon (which should have been done as a security measure; we were just lucky) they would have known immediately that there was something wrong. I was too healthy. They had all sensed my problem and, in a way you can't put into words, had always 'been there'; had always helped me get from one day to the next. It would be as obvious as an old friend showing up without the limp he'd had all his life.
Lieutenant Newton Thurman, who was given the task of finding me a place to be useful, was an oddity: he had started out as a mechanic but developed a kind of allergy to being jacked – it gave him intense headaches that were no fun for him or for anybody jacked with him. I wondered at the time why they would put him in Building 31 rather than just retiring him, and it was clear that he wondered the same thing. He'd only been there a couple of weeks. In retrospect, it's obvious that he was planted as part of the overall plan. And what a mistake!
The staff in Building 31 was top-heavy in terms of rank: eight generals and twelve colonels, twenty majors and captains, and twenty-four lieutenants. That's sixty-four officers, giving orders to fifty NCOs and privates. Ten of those were just guards, too, and not really in the chain of command, unless something happened.
My memory of those four days, before I had my actual personality restored, is vague and confused. I was slotted into a time-consuming but unchallenging make-work position, essentially verifying the computer's decisions about resource allocation – how many eggs or bullets to go where. Surprise, I never found a mistake.
Among my other unchallenging duties was the one, as it turned out, that everything else was a smoke screen for: the 'guard sitrep-log,' or situation report log. Every hour I jacked in with the guard mechanics and asked for a 'sitrep.' I had a form with boxes to check, according to what they reported each hour. All I had ever done was check the box that said 'sitrep negative': nothing's happening.
It was typical bureaucratic make-work. If anything of interest did happen, a red light would go on on my console, telling me to jack in with the guards. I could fill out a form then.
But I hadn't given any thought to the obvious: they needed someone inside the building who could check on the actual identities of the mechanics running the guard soldierboys.
I was sitting there on the fourth day, about one minute before sitrep time, and the red light suddenly started blinking. My heart gave a little stutter and I jacked in.
It wasn't the usual Sergeant Sykes. It was Karen, and four other people from my old platoon.
What the hell? She gave me a quick gestalt: Trust us, you had to undergo memory modification so we could Trojan-horse our way in here and then a broad outline of the plan and the incredible Jupiter Project development.
I acknowledged a numb kind of affirmative, unjacked, and checked the 'sitrep negative' box.
No wonder I had been so damned confused. The phone buzzed and I thumbed it.
It was Marty, in hospital greens with a neutral expression. 'I have you down for a little brain surgery at 1400. You want to come down and prep when your shift's over?'
'Best offer I've had all day.'
It was more than just a bloodless coup – it was a silent, invisible coup. The connection between a mechanic and his or her soldierboy is only an electronic signal, and there are emergency mechanisms in place to switch connections. It would only take a few minutes after something like the Portobello massacre, where every mechanic was disabled, to patch in a new platoon from a few hundred or a thousand miles away (The actual limit was about thirty-five hundred miles, far enough for the speed of light to be a slight delaying factor.)
What Marty had done was set things up so that at the push of a button all five guard mechanics in
the basement of Building 31 would be switched off from their soldierboys, and simultaneously, control of the machines would be switched over to five members of Julian's platoon, with Julian being the only person in Building 31 in a position to notice.
The most aggressive thing they did, immediately after taking over, was to pass on an 'order' from Captain Perry, the guard commander, to the five shoe guards, that they had to report immediately to room 2H for an emergency inoculation. They went in and sat down and a pretty nurse gave them each a shot. Then she stood quietly behind them and they all fell asleep.
The rooms 1H through 6H were the hospital wing, and it was going to be busy.
At first, Marty and Megan Orr could be doing all the jack installations. The only bedridden patient in H wing, a lieutenant with bronchitis, was transferred to the base hospital when the order came down from the Pentagon to isolate Building 31. The doctor who normally came around every morning couldn't have access.
Two new doctors came in, though, the afternoon after the morning coup. They were Tanya Sidgwick and Charles Dyer, the jack team from Panama who had a ninety-eight percent success rate. They were mystified over their orders to come to Portobello, but sort of looked forward to the vacation – they'd been installing jacks in POWs at the rate of ten or twelve a day, too fast for comfort or safety.
The first thing they did after settling into their quarters was to go down to the H wing and see what was happening. Marty got them comfortable on a pair of beds and said they had to jack with a patient. Then he plugged them into the Twenty, and they instantly realized just what kind of a vacation they were in for.
But after a few minutes of deep communication with the Twenty, they were converts – in fact, they were a lot more sanguine about the plan than most of the original planners were. That simplified the timing, because it wasn't necessary to humanize Sidgwick and Dyer before putting them on the team.
They had sixty-four officers to deal with, and only twenty-eight of them were already jacked; only two of the eight generals. Twenty of the fifty NCOs and privates were jacked.
The first order of business was to get the ones who were already jacked into bed and plugged in with the Twenty. They lugged fifteen beds into the H wing from the Bachelor Officer Quarters. That gave forty spaces in H; for the other nine, they could install jack interfaces in their rooms.