"Let's say this repeater gadget was only turned on during the last fourteen hours," Hodges says. "We know it can't have been earlier than when I tried out Dinah's game, or I would have seen the number-fish and the blue flashes. So here's a question: can those demo screens be amped up even if the gadgets are off?"
"No way," Jerome says. "They have to be turned on. But once they are . . ."
"It's active!" Holly shouts. "That fracking zeetheend site is active!"
Jerome rushes to her desk in the outer office. Hodges follows more slowly.
Holly turns up the volume on her computer, and music fills the offices of Finders Keepers. Not "By the Beautiful Sea" this time, but "Don't Fear the Reaper." As it spools out--forty thousand men and women every day, another forty thousand coming every day--Hodges sees a candlelit funeral parlor and a coffin buried in flowers. Above it, smiling young men and women come and go, moving side to side, crisscrossing, fading, reappearing. Some of them wave; some flash the peace sign. Below the coffin is a series of messages in letters that swell and contract like a slowly beating heart.
AN END TO PAIN
AN END TO FEAR
NO MORE ANGER
NO MORE DOUBT
NO MORE STRUGGLE
PEACE
PEACE
PEACE
Then a stuttering series of blue flashes. Embedded in them are words. Or call them what they really are, Hodges thinks. Drops of poison.
"Turn it off, Holly." Hodges doesn't like the way she's looking at the screen--that wide-eyed stare, so much like Jerome's a few minutes ago.
She moves too slowly to suit Jerome. He reaches over her shoulder and crashes her computer.
"You shouldn't have done that," she says reproachfully. "I could lose data."
"That's exactly what the fucking website is for," Jerome says. "To make you lose data. To make you lose your shit. I could read the last one, Bill. In the blue flash. It said do it now."
Holly nods. "There was another one that said tell your friends."
"Does the Zappit direct them to that . . . that thing?" Hodges asks.
"It doesn't have to," Jerome says. "Because the ones who find it--and plenty will, including kids who never got a free Zappit--will spread the word on Facebook and all the rest."
"He wanted a suicide epidemic," Holly says. "He set it in motion somehow, then killed himself."
"Probably to get there ahead of them," Jerome says. "So he can meet them at the door."
Hodges says, "Am I supposed to believe a rock song and a picture of a funeral is going to get kids to kill themselves? The Zappits, I can accept that. I've seen how they work. But this?"
Holly and Jerome exchange a glance, one that Hodges can read easily: How do we explain this to him? How do you explain a robin to someone who's never seen a bird? The glance alone is almost enough to convince him.
"Teenagers are vulnerable to stuff like this," Holly says. "Not all of them, no, but plenty. I would have been when I was seventeen."
"And it's catching," Jerome says. "Once it starts . . . if it starts . . ." He finishes with a shrug.
"We need to find that repeater gadget and turn it off," Hodges says. "Limit the damage."
"Maybe it's at Babineau's house," Holly says. "Call Pete. Find out if there's any computer stuff there. If there is, make him pull all the plugs."
"If he's with Izzy, he'll let it go to voicemail," Hodges says, but he makes the call and Pete picks up on the first ring. He tells Hodges that Izzy has gone back to the station with the SKIDs to await the first forensics reports. Library Al Brooks is already gone, taken into custody by the first responding cops, who will get partial credit for the bust.
Pete sounds tired.
"We had a blow-up. Me and Izzy. Big one. I tried to tell her what you told me when we started working together--how the case is the boss, and you go where it leads you. No ducking, no handing it off, just pick it up and follow the red thread all the way home. She stood there listening with her arms folded, nodding her head every now and then. I actually thought I was getting through to her. Then you know what she asked me? If I knew the last time there was a woman in the top echelon of the city police. I said I didn't, and she said that was because the answer was never. She said the first one was going to be her. Man, I thought I knew her." Pete utters what may be the most humorless laugh Hodges has ever heard. "I thought she was police."
Hodges will commiserate later, if he gets a chance. Right now there's no time. He asks about the computer gear.
"We found nothing except an iPad with a dead battery," Pete says. "Everly, the housekeeper, says he had a laptop in his study, almost brand new, but it's gone."
"Like Babineau," Hodges says. "Maybe it's with him."
"Maybe. Remember, if I can help, Kermit--"
"I'll call, believe me."
Right now he'll take all the help he can get.
21
The result with the girl named Ellen is infuriating--like the Robinson bitch all over again--but at last Brady calms down. It worked, that's what he needs to focus on. The shortness of the drop combined with the snowbank was just bad luck. There will be plenty of others. He has a lot of work ahead of him, a lot of matches to light, but once the fire is burning, he can sit back and watch.
It will burn until it burns itself out.
He starts Z-Boy's car and pulls out of the rest area. As he merges with the scant traffic headed north on I-47, the first flakes spin out of the white sky and hit the Malibu's windshield. Brady drives faster. Z-Boy's piece of crap isn't equipped for a snowstorm, and once he leaves the turnpike, the roads will grow progressively worse. He needs to beat the weather.
Oh, I'll beat it, all right, Brady thinks, and grins as a wonderful idea hits him. Maybe Ellen is paralyzed from the neck down, a head on a stick, like the Stover bitch. It's not likely, but it's possible, a pleasant daydream with which to while away the miles.
He turns on the radio, finds some Judas Priest, and lets it blast. Like Hodges, he enjoys the hard stuff.
THE SUICIDE PRINCE
Brady won many victories in Room 217, but necessarily had to keep them to himself. Coming back from the living death of coma; discovering that he could--because of the drug Babineau had administered, or because of some fundamental alteration in his brainwaves, or perhaps due to a combination of the two--move small objects simply by thinking about them; inhabiting Library Al's brain and creating inside him a secondary personality, Z-Boy. And mustn't forget getting back at the fat cop who hit him in the balls when he couldn't defend himself. Yet the best, the absolute best, was nudging Sadie MacDonald into committing suicide. That was power.
He wanted to do it again.
The question that desire raised was a simple one: who next? It would be easy to make Al Brooks jump from a bridge overpass or swallow drain cleaner, but Z-Boy would go with him, and without Z-Boy, Brady would be stuck in Room 217, which was really nothing more than a prison cell with a parking garage view. No, he needed Brooks just where he was. And as he was.
More important was the question of what to do about the bastard responsible for putting him here. Ursula Haber, the Nazi who ran the PT department, said rehab patients needed GTG: goals to grow. Well, he was growing, all right, and revenge against Hodges was a worthy goal, but how to get it? Inducing Hodges to commit suicide wasn't the answer, even if there was a way to try it. He'd played the suicide game already with Hodges. And lost.
When Freddi Linklatter appeared with the picture of him and his mother, Brady was still over a year and a half from realizing how he could finish his business with Hodges, but seeing Freddi gave him a badly needed jump-start. He would need to be careful, though. Very careful.
A step at a time, he told himself as he lay awake in the small hours of the night. Just one step at a time. I have great obstacles, but I also have extraordinary weapons.
Step one was having Al Brooks remove the remaining Zappits from the hospital library. He took them to his broth
er's house, where he lived in an apartment over the garage. That was easy, because no one wanted them, anyway. Brady thought of them as ammo. Eventually he would find a gun that could use it.
Brooks took the Zappits on his own, although operating under commands--thoughtfish--that Brady implanted in the shallow but useful Z-Boy persona. He had become wary of entering Brooks completely and taking him over, because it burned through the old fellow's brains too fast. He had to ration those times of total immersion, and use them wisely. It was a shame, he enjoyed his vacations outside the hospital, but people were starting to notice that Library Al had become a trifle foggy upstairs. If he became too foggy, he would be forced out of his volunteer job. Worse, Hodges might notice. That would not be good. Let the old Det.-Ret. vacuum up all the rumors about telekinesis he wanted, Brady was fine with that, but he didn't want Hodges to catch even a whiff of what was really going on.
Despite the risk of mental depletion, Brady took complete command of Brooks in the spring of 2013, because he needed the library computer. Looking at it could be done without total immersion, but using it was another thing. And it was a short visit. All he wanted to do was set up a Google alert, using the keywords Zappit and Fishin' Hole.
Every two or three days he sent Z-Boy to check the alert and report back. His instructions were to switch to the ESPN site if someone wandered over to see what he was surfing (they rarely did; the library was really not much more than a closet, and the few visitors were usually looking for the chapel next door).
The alerts were interesting and informative. It seemed a great many people had experienced either semi-hypnosis or actual seizure activity after looking at the Fishin' Hole demo screen for too long. That effect was more powerful than Brady would have believed. There was even an article about it in the New York Times business section, and the company was in trouble because of it.
Trouble it didn't need, because it was already tottering. You didn't have to be a genius (which Brady believed he was) to know that Zappit, Inc. would soon either go bankrupt or be swallowed up by a larger company. Brady was betting on bankruptcy. What company would be stupid enough to pick up an outfit making game consoles that were hopelessly out of date and ridiculously expensive, especially when one of the games was dangerously defective?
Meanwhile, there was the problem of how to jigger the ones he had (they were stored in the closet of Z-Boy's apartment, but Brady considered them his property) so that people would look at them longer. He was stuck on that when Freddi made her visit. When she was gone, her Christian duty done (not that Frederica Bimmel Linklatter was or ever had been a Christian), Brady thought long and hard.
Then, in late August of 2013, after a particularly aggravating visit from the Det.-Ret., he sent Z-Boy to her apartment.
*
Freddi counted the money, then studied the old fellow in the green Dickies standing slump-shouldered in the middle of what passed for her living room. The money had come from Al Brooks's account at Midwest Federal. The first withdrawal from his meager savings, but far from the last.
"Two hundred bucks for a few questions? Yeah, I can do that. But if what you really came for is a blowjob, you need to go somewhere else, old-timer. I'm a dyke."
"Just questions," Z-Boy said. He handed her a Zappit and told her to look at the Fishin' Hole demo screen. "But you shouldn't look longer than thirty seconds or so. It's, um, weird."
"Weird, huh?" She gave him an indulgent smile and turned her attention to the swimming fish. Thirty seconds became forty. That was allowable according to the directives Brady had given him before sending him on this mission (he always called them missions, having discovered that Brooks associated the word with heroism). But after forty-five, he grabbed it back.
Freddi looked up, blinking. "Whoo. It messes with your brain, doesn't it?"
"Yeah. It kinda does."
"I read in Gamer Programming that the Star Smash arcade game does something like that, but you have to play it for like, half an hour before the effect kicks in. This is a lot faster. Do people know about it?"
Z-Boy ignored the question. "My boss wants to know how you would fix this so people would look at the demo screen longer, and not go right to the game. Which doesn't have the same effect."
Freddi adopted her fake Russian accent for the first time. "Who is fearless leader, Z-Boy? You be good fellow and tell Comrade X, da?"
Z-Boy's brow wrinkled. "Huh?"
Freddi sighed. "Who's your boss, handsome?"
"Dr. Z." Brady had anticipated the question--he knew Freddi of old--and this was another directive. Brady had plans for Felix Babineau, but as yet they were vague. He was still feeling his way. Flying on instruments.
"Dr. Z and his sidekick Z-Boy," she said, lighting a cigarette. "On the path to world domination. My, my. Does that make me Z-Girl?"
This wasn't part of his directives, so he stayed silent.
"Never mind, I get it," she said, chuffing out smoke. "Your boss wants an eye-trap. The way to do it is to turn the demo screen itself into a game. Gotta be simple, though. Can't get bogged down in a lot of complex programming." She held up the Zappit, now turned off. "This thing is pretty brainless."
"What kind of game?"
"Don't ask me, bro. That's the creative side. Never was my forte. Tell your boss to figure it out. Anyway, once this thing is powered up and getting a good WiFi signal, you need to install a root kit. Want me to write this down?"
"No." Brady had allocated a bit of Al Brooks's rapidly diminishing memory storage space for this very task. Besides, when the job needed to be done, Freddi would be the one doing it.
"Once the kit's in, source code can be downloaded from another computer." She adopted the Russian accent again. "From secret Base Zero under polar ice-kep."
"Should I tell him that part?"
"No. Just tell him root kit plus source code. Got it?"
"Yes."
"Anything else?"
"Brady Hartsfield wants you to come visit him again."
Freddi's eyebrows shot up almost to her crewcut. "He talks to you?"
"Yes. It's hard to understand him at first, but after awhile you can."
Freddi looked around her living room--dim, cluttered, smelling of last night's take-out Chinese--as if it interested her. She was finding this conversation increasingly creepy.
"I don't know, man. I did my good deed, and I was never even a Girl Scout."
"He'll pay you," Z-Boy said. "Not very much, but . . ."
"How much?"
"Fifty dollars a visit?"
"Why?"
Z-Boy didn't know, but in 2013, there was still a fair amount of Al Brooks behind his forehead, and that was the part that understood. "I think . . . because you were a part of his life. You know, when you and him used to go out to fix people's computers. In the old days."
*
Brady didn't hate Dr. Babineau with the same intensity that he hated K. William Hodges, but that didn't mean Dr. B. wasn't on his shit list. Babineau had used him as a guinea pig, which was bad. He had lost interest in Brady when his experimental drug didn't seem to be working, which was worse. Worst of all, the shots had resumed once Brady had regained consciousness, and who knew what they were doing? They could kill him, but as a man who had assiduously courted his own death, that wasn't what kept him awake nights. What did was the possibility that the shots might interfere with his new abilities. Babineau pooh-poohed Brady's supposed mind-over-matter powers in public, but he actually believed they might exist, even though Brady had been careful never to exhibit his talent to the doctor, despite Babineau's repeated urgings. He believed any psychokinetic abilities were also a result of what he called Cerebellin.
The CAT scans and MRIs had also resumed. "You're the Eighth Wonder of the World," Babineau told him after one of these--in the fall of 2013, this was. He was walking beside Brady as an orderly wheeled him back to Room 217. Babineau was wearing what Brady thought of as his gloaty face. "The current protocols have
done more than halt the destruction of your brain cells; they have stimulated the growth of new ones. More robust ones. Do you have any idea how remarkable that is?"
You bet, asshole, Brady thought. So keep those scans to yourself. If the DA's office found out, I'd be in trouble.
Babineau was patting Brady's shoulder in a proprietary way Brady hated. Like he was patting his pet dog. "The human brain is made up of approximately one hundred billion nerve cells. Those in the Broca's Area of yours were gravely injured, but they have recovered. In fact, they are creating neurons unlike any I've ever seen. One of these days you're going to be famous not as a person who took lives, but as one responsible for saving them."
If so, Brady thought, it's a day you won't be around to see.
Count on it, dickweed.
*
The creative side never was my forte, Freddi told Z-Boy. True enough, but it was always Brady's, and as 2013 became 2014, he had plenty of time to think of ways the Fishin' Hole demo screen might be juiced up and turned into what Freddi had called an eye-trap. Yet none of them seemed quite right.
They did not talk about the Zappit effect during her visits; mostly they reminisced (with Freddi necessarily doing most of the talking) about the old days on the Cyber Patrol. All the crazy people they'd met on their outcalls. And Anthony "Tones" Frobisher, their asshole boss. Freddi went on about him constantly, turning things she should have said into things she had, and right to his face! Freddi's visits were monotonous but comforting. They balanced his desperate nights, when he felt he might spend the rest of his life in Room 217, at the mercy of Dr. Babineau and his "vitamin shots."
I have to stop him, Brady thought. I have to control him.
To do that, the amped-up version of the demo screen had to be just right. If he flubbed his first chance to get into Babineau's mind, there might not be another.
*
The TV now played at least four hours a day in Room 217. This was per an edict from Babineau, who told Head Nurse Helmington that he was "exposing Mr. Hartsfield to external stimuli."
Mr. Hartsfield didn't mind the News at Noon (there was always an exciting explosion or a mass tragedy somewhere in the world), but the rest of the stuff--cooking shows, talk shows, soap operas, bogus medicine men--was drivel. Yet one day, while sitting in his chair by the window and watching Prize Surprise (staring in that direction, at least), he had a revelation. The contestant who had survived to the Bonus Round was given a chance to win a trip to Aruba on a private jet. She was shown an oversized computer screen where big colored dots were shuffling around. Her job was to touch five red ones, which would turn into numbers. If the numbers she touched added up to a total within a five-digit range of 100, she'd win.