CounterProbe Read online

  Jane plucked at her jacket sleeve. “Down, you said, not like in ‘up,’ but like feathers. Did ducks die for my jacket?”

  “Jane, I don’t know how they get down—maybe they shear it like lambs’ wool. Or harvest it by the handful. Maybe Santa’s elves throw it from the sky. Or maybe people kill ducks and geese and take it.”

  “It’s not good for things to die,” she said.

  “People don’t like for things to die. But everything has to, sometime. It’s when people or animals die… too soon, too painfully, too uselessly—or even sometimes too late—that we’re sad about it.”

  A wail chainsawed through the cold throat of the night, a wail that wobbled up and down the minor scale.

  Adrenaline hammered panic into Kevin’s heartbeat, torched his mind with indecision. Reflex and second thought went one-on-one against each other.

  A police siren. His foot tensed on the gas pedal, torn between slamming down or moving hard and fast to the brake. The whining howl grew shriller. Every good-citizen urge pounded into Kevin’s skull was nudging his foot to the brake, teasing the steering wheel to the curb. Was it wiser to pull over, passive, and assume—hope—that the official vehicle would barrel on past? Wiser to bolt? Fight or flight or just belly-up give up?

  Only split-hair seconds had elapsed while the macrocomputer of Kevin’s mind ran its options. In the rearview mirror, he watched a weaving ball of crimson flash nearer. The van was still moving at normal street speed; he had done nothing at all.

  Before he could change that, the oncoming vehicle loomed larger in the mirror—large, and white, with a word stenciled across its top in big, legible letters. A-m-b-u-l-a-n- c-e. Relief streamed to Kevin’s farthest-flung nerve ends.

  “Ecnalubma!” he announced jubilantly. “It’s only an ecnalubma.”

  He twisted to watch the ambulance scream abreast while he edged the van to the curb. Rolling down the window, Kevin leaned out to read, head-on, the backwards letters meant to be seen only in rearview mirrors.

  Once, months before, Jane had interpreted that careful gibberish as a real word. That was the August night when the ambulance had brought her wasted, naked body all the way from a rural Crow Wing bluff top to the University of Minnesota Hospitals in Minneapolis.

  “Ecnalubma,” Kevin repeated, letting his eyes revert the backwards consonants and vowels to their proper meaning.

  He sighed as the shriek of the passing vehicle droned into the darkness. The person-long lump on the rear gurney had looked vague and anonymous. Heart attack victim? Bleeding ulcers? Some more abstruse malady? Dr. Blake was relieved to diagnose only one nonmedical fact: no ambulance was going to play pursuit vehicle for the CIA. He wondered how “paranoia” would read backwards, and painstakingly worked it out in his muddied mind. Aiona— para, para… aionarap.

  Belatedly, he glanced to Jane.

  “I shouldn’t have shouted ‘ecnalubma.’ It didn’t put you under, did it?” His hand gently rubbed her denimed knee.

  “Under? No. The… ecnalubma screamed too loud.”

  “Ambulance, Jane,” he corrected happily. She needed to know her world on its own terms now. “It was just an ambulance.”

  He steered the van down the dark, snow-churned street until it vanished into a stream of similar vehicles. It finally nosed onto the entry ramp to Highway 100, following the venerable north-south route until it joined Interstate 494, then peeled off onto an east-west access road.

  “The wilds of Bloomington.” Kevin surveyed the brightly lit, ruler-straight channel of freeway known as the Bloomington Strip. Bloomington claimed to be Minnesota’s third-largest city, but it was a heartless community. Few ever saw its downtown. Instead, its soul resided along Interstate 494, beside a restless rhythm of passing cars and within an endless chain of upscale restaurants and singles bars, hotels and motels.

  An hour later, Kevin, ensconced in one of the most downscale of the motels, was sitting on the edge of a double bed, watching Jane sleep in the bed across from him.

  A strange world, he reflected, where a room for two had come to mean separate beds each big enough for two. It implied more togetherness—and more apartness—than he suspected the species could stand, no matter how nomadic it became.

  The clubby motel glass he held seemed to grease his palm with the lingering oils of traveling salesmen and randy football players and giggling women desperate for what passed for a good time on the Strip.

  But Chivas Regal slicked the inside of the glass. Why not? He’d thought in the liquor store while staring at the overlit rows of bottles. Why the hell not? The McDonald’s bag lay on the bedspread beside him, bloated as a prostate patient’s bladder, only with air.

  He’d forced down the cold McDonald’s burger as soon as he’d rammed the motel room night chain home, knowing he needed it. Warm booze—he didn’t have the energy to find the ice machine—trickled through him, piping a relaxation so profound down his wrangled nerves that he could almost feel blood draining from his taut arteries in slow stages.

  Risky, he knew. Risky to allow himself this small, calculated collapse at the lip of a glass. Risky to have registered, even under a pseudonym, at a motel.

  But where was he supposed to go? What dive’s water glass would he honor with his hoarded Chivas tomorrow night? Where would Jane lay her telekinetic head next?

  “To aliens,” Kevin toasted himself in the plain-Jane mirror above the Melamine-topped dresser. “And all good alienists.”

  The juxtaposition soothed him, as the Scotch had not. Who was better qualified to receive an alien visitation, to guide a human with alien talents through a too-familiar world, than an alienist? A shrink who saw his world shrinking under the enormity of one huge, artificial object in the sky over Crow Wing?

  He looked at Jane again, and frowned.

  Nothing answered him, except the raw silk whisper of the Chivas Regal he could not afford down his throat.

  Chapter Nine

  * * *

  I told you he’d head home!” Nordstrom crowed. “Instincts of a lemming. The man wants to be caught, to be crucified. A Savior complex, and a textbook example, if I ever saw one.”

  Turner didn’t answer. Instead, he tapped his fingers on the Xerox of the university campus police report atop his desk. The Chevy van had been reported at the local McDonald’s just last night. Its license plates had been described as “obscured,” but the make and model were on target.

  “We need his cooperation,” Turner said slowly, “we don’t need your latest techniques in search and retrieval, Dr. Nordstrom. I’ve done a little backgrounding of my own… on you.”

  Nordstrom’s laugh was slightly self-deprecating.

  “You’re not even worried, are you?” Turner complained. “If a Senate investigative committee got their hands on what I dug up…”

  “It’s classified. All my work is.” Nordstrom’s smile hovered a whisker’s width away from a smirk. “I’m surprised you wasted your time, Mr. Turner. I would have told you anything you needed to know.”

  “I wanted to know what you wouldn’t tell me… or what you wouldn’t let me read between the lines. Back at Harvard, you and Blake shared a lot of the same class rosters.”

  “They were large classes.”

  “Still, you knew him.”

  Nordstrom shrugged. “You knew that. Blake was one of those ingratiating fakers even crusty Harvard professors slobber over. Liberal, to a fault. Used to egg me into medical ethics debates—Blake was always trying to impress the impressionable. He didn’t even know who I was. A most… disagreeable man. But it worked. I saw him win grades, win hearts and minds…”

  Nordstrom rose from his chair and paced away, shrugging. “Not mine.” After a long pause he turned slowly to face Turner again. “I expect you to point out that I don’t have one.”

  “One what?”

  “Heart.”

  Turner spun a manila folder on his desk so Nordstrom could read the typed title. “The PID isn�
�t noted for hiring heart. I see you were involved in that CIA scam to cool off the army’s involuntary LSD guinea pigs from the sixties.”

  “Involved? I invented it.”

  “Those flashbacks you induced sent some of those guys back to the nuthouse.”

  “It kept them out of government claims court, didn’t it?”

  “How’d you do it? Induce flashbacks so destructive, I mean? Did you drop it in their brownies at a family picnic? Spike their Sunday afternoon beers? Even the guys’ lawyers couldn’t untangle what was LSD-echo and what was just plain craziness. Drove their cases out of court through sheer psychotic overkill. Was it some drug, some LSD derivative, something even I don’t know about?”

  “ ‘There are more drugs on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.’”

  “Cut the… quotes, Nordstrom.” Turner’s shoulders shifted uneasily. “You work for me now. The job is simple: find the psychiatrist and his patient; persuade—repeat, persuade—the guy to work with her under our supervision. Failing that, you are to use your… skills, as needed… to debrief Jane Doe herself.

  “That won’t be easy. She’s part wonder-worker and part time bomb, from what slim facts we’ve pieced together. Four dead men behind her, two of ’em the Crow Wing cops who found her, two of ’em mine. Even Dr. Swanson’s paranormal experiments proved to be hard-won. We don’t know exactly what Jane Doe is, and how hard it will be to find out.”

  Nordstrom smiled, showing Dentine-red gums. “I deliver the goods. And government imperatives allow me to push the human psyche to its limits—my own as much as anybody’s. Everything that makes Homo sapiens civilized is useless when the ruling order requires a specific behavior. Useless to the victim, that is. Civilization has many uses for the hunter.”

  “Listen to me: The woman’s mind is valuable, and the man is the key to her mind. That makes him valuable, too. No need to send him home in a mental body bag unless we have to.”

  Nordstrom’s thumb and fingers rubbed together speculatively. “What if I produce a better key?”

  “Prove it. What we don’t want—what nobody wants— is to blow this woman’s abilities before we’ve had a chance to evaluate them. Blake’s right about one thing: she shouldn’t get into the wrong hands.”

  “Do some of those hands belong to our comrades across the sea?” Nordstrom sat down.

  “Ask Baker. I’m just a front-line operative. A delivery boy.”

  “Then let me congratulate you.” Nordstrom raised one eyebrow over the ground-glass rim of his spectacles. “From that report, it looks like it won’t be long before the fugitives are in custody. Then I go to work.”

  Turner skimmed the page again. “We’re looking for them in Minneapolis now; a big city makes a finer net than the boonies. You were right about him heading back here. Poor devil.”

  Nordstrom shrugged and flipped open a manila folder. The pen-and-ink sketch of Jane looked back at him. “Poor bitch,” he parroted softly.

  “Don’t underestimate her,” Turner warned. “Cracking that—from all reports—extraordinary… mind of hers will take skill, and maybe something Dr. Kevin Blake always had that you don’t.”

  Nordstrom’s face went livid. “What?” he demanded, a higher note scratching his voice’s baritone sheen.

  It was Turner’s opportunity to smile coldly. “Heart.”

  * * *

  “Jane?” Kevin shook her shoulder.

  She sat up groggily in the semidark, murmuring “Dr. Neumeier—?”

  “Were you dreaming?”

  “No… I don’t think so. But I thought I saw Dr. Neumeier—” Jane looked to the oblong of window where highway lights gleamed faintly through the drawn curtains.

  “You couldn’t have seen her. For God’s sake, don’t have nightmares that I can’t analyze, Jane. We’re not there anymore, in Neumeier’s cabin in the north woods. Besides, Dr. Neumeier’s dead, you know that. I told you myself just tonight.”

  “Then I… her.” Conviction lifted Jane’s voice to a single, repeated note. “She said that… ‘They will always win.’ ”

  Kevin was silent, recognizing the words of the canny old sociology professor, survivor of the Holocaust but not of the government’s right to know in the Land of the Free.

  He made himself confront the facts implicit in Neumeier’s death.

  They, the ones “who always win,” the forces of official inquiry, must have reached Neumeier’s wilderness cabin after Jane and he had left. Then they must have interrogated her—too harshly, triggering a fatal coronary.

  Of course, Kevin himself had precipitated that by running to Neumeier in the first place, like a truant schoolboy hiding behind a favorite teacher. The lump of lifetime guilt Kevin collected somewhere at his center coiled up a few thousand more yards of secondhand string…

  Kevin made himself remember his patient. “Jane, what you overheard, that was said… days ago, nights ago. You’re remembering conversational odds and ends—”

  “I’m remembering,” she challenged, a smile in her voice. Now that she was fully awake and the light wouldn’t shock her eyes, Kevin turned up the lamp on the bedside table between them. Even Edison’s genius couldn’t lighten the three a.m. Blues. Kevin slouched on the edge of his bed. Jane curled up against her upholstered headboard.

  “You want me to remember,” she reminded him.

  “You remember too much.”

  “And not enough.”

  “And not enough. Jane, I want—” Her eyes livened. “Not that. I want to put you under hypnosis again.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed, then stretched impatiently. “I liked the chair in your office better. When you hypnotize me on a bed, my neck hurts afterwards.”

  “Simple cure.” He tossed the pillows on his bed to Jane’s. “Get comfy; then we’ll put you under.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you didn’t mind hypnosis.”

  “No… but there’s so much in my mind now, everything that’s happened to me since I wasfound. I don’t want to lose it.”

  “Jane, I don’t want to lose any part of you, either. My God, that’s my job, to find it. And so much is still lost. You’re a miracle, you know that?”

  “They didn’t think so.”

  “ ‘They’? You mean the… guess I better find something to call them.” Only euphemisms, cloyingly coy, surfaced in Kevin’s mind. “The, uh, visitors?”

  She shook her head. “Not them. Them! The Volkers. My… parents. If they thought I was a miracle, they would have wanted to keep me. Why did they have my photograph on their wall? And why did I look so different in it—the same, but different? Why do I feel… ?”

  “Feel what?” he coached.

  “Feel that I don’t know what’s happening to me anymore.”

  “That’s not true!” He launched himself at her bed, tired springs squawling under his weight. “You know more than ever. We know more than ever. And forget the Volkers! I should never have taken you there. They’re your parents by virtue of sheer dumb luck more than intention. They don’t know the first thing about being parents except clinging to some illusion of a child. You’re too real for them, too demanding.

  “What you should want to know about is… those others, the visitors. The ones who took you from this earth in the form of a tiny cell twenty-five years ago and returned you as a grown woman. Do you know how many cells are in the human body? Sixty thousand billion. All those cells, growing, changing, encapsulating the information that makes you… you. And some of them were adulterated— had to be to give you the faculties, the powers you have. What about them? The ones who made you.”

  “They let me go! I remember that.” Jane was shrinking into the piled pillows, as if to cushion herself against a lingering nightmare.

  “Yes, yes,” Kevin soothed. “But why? Why, when retrieving you and capturing all that information coursing along your neurons was their only purpose? Why let you go again? And with what
attributes? Did they… empty your memory of what they wanted to know, or simply copy it onto their own records? Did they strip you of your telekinetic powers as painlessly as they stripped you of your clothes in the… uh, laser lift? Did they give you a message to give mankind—?”

  “Humankind,” Jane corrected.

  Kevin waved his hand. “It’s the same thing.”

  “It’s not. Chauvinistic speech conventions are designed to reduce the role of women not only in history but in contemporary life as well.”

  He sighed his frustration. “This is hardly the moment for a women’s lib speech—did you get that from the nursing students? I never should have sent you to stay with them in the dorm—it was like turning on a tape recorder in a disco.”

  “I… read that sentence. In a book. In the library.”

  “Then you do remember the information you… gleaned! That souped-up speed reading you did at the campus library stuck. So the… shit!… the aliens must’ve left your memory intact! That’s why I need to pullout those latent memories so you can see them for yourself, so I can understand—”

  “Understand!” She seemed panicked now. “You understand too much, and I not enough. Please, Kevin, I don’t want to lose myself again! Never again. To let myself go like that.”

  “I’ll bring you back, I promise.”

  “You can’t bring Dr. Neumeier back.”

  Kevin’s face froze as all persuasion drained from it, leaving bleak introspection.

  “You’re right. Neumeier’s death is my fault. If I hadn’t brought you to her, if we hadn’t been tailed by whoever Washington sent, the good professor would still be alive.” Jane leaned forward and touched his hand with her fingertip. “There are places, Kevin, that nobody can bring you back from. I don’t want to go to one of those. I’ve been there before, I think, and I can’t come back too many times. If you make me go too far inside myself again, I may not be able to leave—ever.”

  “They left you here, turned you loose, with that kind of condition on it, you think?” He sounded horrified, and he was.