CounterProbe Read online

  “Not they,” Jane said gently. “You.”

  Her eyes radiated an awful honesty. Kevin searched himself, wondering who was the amnesiac, who the probe, who the tool of others’ wishes.

  “Maybe you should hypnotize me,” he joked, gift-wrapping anxiety in humor. Such defense mechanisms were alien to Jane.

  Silent, she watched him, the lamplight carving delicate arcs under her eyes, shadowing the skin beneath her lower lip, changing her—again—into something Kevin did not quite know.

  His hand lighted on her hair. “I don’t know how much time we’ll have left to… work. There are things I need to know—for your sake as well as my own stubborn, self- serving curiosity. I won’t… lose you. Not this time, not ever. Trust me.”

  She nodded soberly. He segued quickly into the hypnotic ritual before she could change her mysterious mind. He told her that she was relaxed, that she was safe, that she would be all right. And then he whispered the word. Ecnalubma.

  Jane went under like a perfect pupil, into perfect peace. Kevin envied her that induced serenity for an instant before he kicked his professional mindset into gear and began asking his questions. Then he began listening. And watching.

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  At three o’clock in the morning, Nordstrom was staring at a Milky Way of stars—headlights streaming on the freeway beyond his Registry Hotel suite window along the Bloomington Strip.

  He savored his position of height, of aloofness, a habit of his New York City upbringing. He liked the night and its anonymity—that, too, a residue of urban jungle infighting.

  This flat, open suburban wasteland, with its hints of cold vastness lurking just beyond the last snake of illuminated freeway, repelled him.

  Of course, the January cold—the primitive January cold—justified his fur-lined storm coat more than any piddling snowfall that could swirl into the glass canyons of Manhattan.

  Nordstrom had tossed the coat on an overstuffed chair, open lining fur-side out. He paused, vodka glass in hand, to admire the mink’s rusty black sheen in the incandescent lamplight.

  That’s how Nordstrom liked to wear his status symbols —close to the vest. Concealed. A teasing presence that tantalized the less blessed.

  He eyed the manila folders sprawled across the king-size bed, adding a random pattern to the bedspread’s neat geometric print.

  Nordstrom liked addling order with a random element, too, especially someone else’s mental order. Now the subject of his disorder was Kevin Blake.

  Where was he? Nordstrom mused deliciously at the window. Someplace warm and comfortable, like this? At peace with the thought of new work about to begin?

  No, Blake would be out of his element—in the dark and the cold, in whatever corner of it he could buy, beg or steal. He would be desperate to belong again to the common herd of the law-abiding. He was a herd animal who didn’t know it, Nordstrom thought, cut loose by circumstances from the security of the mindless masses. Blake would bolt, would run himself into the ground and would give up, sniveling, ultimately.

  Then Nordstrom would go to work. He anticipated matching wits with a fellow psychiatrist, he admitted to himself. Particularly this one. His knuckles whitened on the glass with its bloodless white liquid. Odd that it should come down to this, he and Blake, after all the gulfs between them.

  Nordstrom had manipulated his own life from birth. With his first breath, wealth and its expectations were his. Unfortunately, he never grew beyond that first gangling adolescent spurt that promises much more. He never outgrew his infant unattractiveness—too much head and eyes. Eventually, there came the teeth, also too much, despite the costly machinations of a Park Avenue orthodontist.

  So despite the money, Eric Nordstrom grew into the kind of ill-assembled man on whom trousers always sagged and custom-tailored shirts invariably wrinkled, and whose high-priced 57th Street haircuts immediately turned into something Walter Mondale would sport.

  Such details had not bothered his obsessively intelligent mind, though he recognized them with a kind of icy dislike. He had been a solitary, driven child—more adult than most of the grown-ups around him.

  He hadn’t minded until Harvard. And Julie Symons. Nordstrom sipped his vodka and changed hands on the glass to warm one and cool the other. Julie Symons’s father was a top cosmetic surgeon, her mother begotten in money and married to someone who could beget more of it. First they begot Julie, a tall, fragile girl with the darting shyness of a hummingbird.

  Tall. Nordstrom even hated the look of the word. But Julie had spoken to him, as if Eric Nordstrom weren’t a worm who’d oozed up onto the sidewalk into her path. Julie Symons—a born dancer with the kind of brownette coloring that looked exquisite in pink, and Nordstrom hated pink.

  She was dead now.

  Nordstrom went to the bed, flipping open the strewn folders, one by one, until the photograph of Kevin Blake jumped into his vision.

  Julie had spoken to Eric Nordstrom.

  But she had screwed Kevin Blake. Filthy.

  The phone rang—not an abrupt, old-fashioned buzz, but an up-to-date electronic two-note wail. Nordstrom, expecting it, took his time answering. He checked the crocodile- banded Piaget under his French cuff before lifting the receiver. Eight-fifteen exactly, as arranged.

  “You required a consultation?” the voice demanded without preamble. It quavered in the artificial tone that indicated it was deliberately garbled, that the call itself was scrambled.

  In nine years, Nordstrom had saluted five different voices with the receiver and had never known the name of one of them, other than a terse code word. He used the latest silly monicker now.

  “Overseer?”

  “Affirmative. You requested contact. What is your situation? You are not to contact Overseer unless it’s an emergency.”

  “It is. The local authorities aren’t helping catch the fugitives—”

  “That’s usual. We don’t want them to get too curious. Our agents will find the subjects.”

  “That’s just it. Your agents—agent—may have a stake in not finding them.”

  “You mean Turner?”

  “Turner, and maybe others. But Turner’s the—key. I think his… heart… isn’t in this. He’s gone soft. He found out about assignment Angel Dust.”

  “It’s possible he has clearance for that. We can check.”

  “It’s his attitude. He doesn’t want to catch this pair. He’s… protective of them.”

  “So are we. In our way.”

  “He’s got it all wrong. He wants the psychiatrist and the woman handled with kid gloves. That treatment will never break down the doctor-patient relationship. He wants me to waste time trying to convert Blake to our side.

  “I say, forget him! Get to her; she’s the vulnerable one. Blake’ll never help. He’s a fringe type—liberal big mouth. He’ll scream civil liberties so loud it’ll raise the dead. I went to school with him. I know. The guy’s practically a fucking Commie. Turner’s… insane to think we can work with him.”

  “You can do wonders with anyone.”

  “Not if your men won’t let me.”

  “Anyone else besides Turner oppose you?”

  “Not… directly. You know my specialty. I work best alone, with a blank check. Everybody in this iceberg town could screw up this operation. They’re unsophisticated hicks when it comes to a sensitive operation. I need complete authority—”

  “You’ve always worked through channels.”

  “Channels will bury us this time! I need control. Otherwise, I won’t be responsible. You think this is your usual drip-dry brainwash job? Hell, no. These things have to be handled delicately. Turner, whatever his problem, wants to wade right in and hack around.

  “Trust me. I know my man—and I will know my woman. Give me carte blanche and then watch the telekinetic toasters fly. I’ll give you some stuff that’ll really curl your oak leaves—”

  Silence on the phone, not even the sound
of breathing. For one panicked, gasping moment, Nordstrom wondered if he’d been cut off—if he’d never been speaking to anyone at all—or if it was all a plot, a figment, a paranoid delusion…

  “We’ll consider your request.”

  A dial tone hummed into Nordstrom’s ear, faintly dismissive. He hung up as slowly as he had answered and returned to the bed. Kevin Blake’s face still lay grinning up at him with that too-too Freudian beard and that public relations smile.

  Nordstrom remembered watching with sour, envious satisfaction as Blake had watched Julie inexorably succumb to anorexia nervosa. That’s when Blake’s post-med school specialty had firmed, surprising all but Nordstrom, who had watched. Psychiatry.

  That’s when Nordstrom had declared his own specialty. Also psychiatry.

  Oh, nobody knew about his secret fixation. He hadn’t even gone to the funeral. Fiancée, that’s what Julie was to Blake, officially, but everybody knew that old man Symons had no patience for Julie’s infatuation with a penniless nobody. Fiancée. That was frozen in time now, that travesty, with Julie.

  Nordstrom’s eyes narrowed.

  A closed coffin. That’s what the fine-print obituary in the New York Times had promised; that’s what the visitation delivered to all comers, including the great Dr. Blake.

  Even then, Nordstrom had his ways. He was a medical student, after all, and he was obsessed. He got into the mortuary, his palms sweating as he anticipated his pretext crumbling under the first question. But no one cared; no one asked. Maybe he looked like a funeral director.

  He saw her, as Kevin Blake never had, dressed in something pink and soft that sank into the exposed cradle of her bones like rotting flesh already. They’d done her up completely, probably for old lady Symons—the hollow, painted face, elegant as an ivory skull polished here and there with fever; the buffed fingernails and sculpted hands; the carefully done hair wearing a permanence of form it never aspired to in life.

  At first it enraged him, the notion of anonymous fingers handling Julie’s paper-thin form so intimately. The final indignity, the cliché went, and everyone touching her but him, even at the end. Then it fevered him. He began to imagine himself with the sharp-pointed shears and the hair spray, himself arranging and manipulating the clothes, the limbs.

  In that roomful of closed coffins, he stared at Julie Symons laid like a princess on a cream-colored satin bed and then kissed her thin, painted lips. They were quite, quite cold.

  Nordstrom stared down at the tasteful hotel bedspread, his heart hammering. Kevin Blake smiled up at him, the bastard! Nordstrom’s trembling hand flipped the photo into the dark of the folder.

  He opened the last blank manila file, the one with the pathetically few papers and the sketch of another dark-haired woman. Jane Doe. His lips curled as his mind pronounced the lumpish non-name.

  Another nobody, just like Kevin Blake, he decided. But unlike Julie, alive. And Kevin Blake cared about this one, too, or he wouldn’t be playing fugitive from one godforsaken end of Minnesota to the other. Nordstrom smiled into his vodka.

  Blake, unlike Julie, had hardly noticed that Nordstrom was alive. Yet somehow in school, Blake and Nordstrom always ended up on opposite sides.

  They had again, only this time Nordstrom ran the class and established the rules. This time, Nordstrom would win.

  Chapter Eleven

  * * *

  Jane felt herself lifted off the earth—her body hovering as high and light as thin air.

  No… Her mind refined the impression. She was actually sinking—so deep it made her feel she occupied another altitude. Whether high or low, she always felt light when Kevin hypnotized her. She wasn’t one to imagine things—her alien upbringing had stunted that facility— but at times like this, Jane fancied she felt like a dolphin cruising far below sun-dappled waves, making intelligent blips in the depths.

  Kevin’s voice came to her, a lifeline of bubble-garbled rumble she somehow understood; she followed its wavering filaments through the fathoms of her weightlessness.

  “I might as well get the lurid stuff over with first. Tell me about the visitors, Jane.” Kevin’s voice came now, not so much demanding as inquiring, not so much to be obeyed as to be pleased. “Tell me what happened when their light beam lifted you into their ship. I saw you assumed into their presence, like some undressed saint. You must have seen them. Inside the ship. What were they—are they— like?”

  Jane swiveled ponderously amid the aquamarine murk of her awareness, the psychic shift tattooing sensation across her memory like fanning seaweed.

  “Snow angels,” she finally said.

  “Snow angels.” A long silence swirled around her. In another state, Jane had learned to anticipate, to read, to react to the tone of that voice. She would explain. Or defend. Or deny.

  Here, nothing was required but the slow, sure drag of memory along the foggy bottom of her internal sea.

  “Snow angels,” Jane repeated dreamily. “I like the look of snow, but it’s cold. They—those beings, my keepers— were like snow—so many, so massed. Cold but light. They sparkled as their mind turned. It would be easy to sink into them—down, down upon the table, under the bright beam above, floating on them, drifting through the stars with them, seed and sowing bound together, mindless, memoryless.

  “They made not-being seem better. Normal. Others drifted in their care, as I must have, too, orphans of other worlds. Unplugged, that is what we were in that state. Disconnected. Prongs no longer probing to the center but drawn away. Untouching.

  “What were they like? They were like mist in the mind. I felt them moving upon my memory—cold, white steps that sank into nothingness. Lifting here, sinking there. Leaving no traces. Footless footprints. They melt away. They leave me melted. That is what they’re like. Like melted snow angels.”

  “Okay.” The word’s bluntness somehow didn’t shatter Jane’s reverie. “‘Snow angels’ it is. That’ll look great in Project Blue Book along with the other wacko entries… Did you get a chance to… communicate with them?”

  “Oh, yes. They spoke English. They had plugged the words into me to begin with. I spoke to one and all. I… argued for maintaining my me-ness. Some… one listened. So I was returned, the ground cold on my feet, but me not caring. No one caring but Kevin, who bought me Zyunsinth and brought me Zyunsinth again, and then buried Zyunsinth—!”

  “Jane, hush. It had to be. That coat isn’t Zyunsinth, only the memory of Zyunsinth. Zyunsinth are the people… creatures… of another world like ours. Did your—they —say why they released you? Once they removed the information you had gained by living among us, once you were empty again, surely they planned to take you away and leave you to gather data from another, similar place?”

  “I don’t know what they planned. They were… intrigued by my me-ness. They seemed like doctors.”

  “Doctors?”

  “All gathered around in white, looking and asking but not seeing or telling. I was returned. They didn’t say why. I didn’t ask. I was not aware until I stood on the bluff and knew that I was outside the homeplace, that I was no longer on the scanning table—”

  “They… operated on you?”

  “What is ‘operated’? They asked me to put myself in their control again.”

  “Did you?” The voice grated with concern.

  “I… don’t remember. I stood before them and asked for myself back. Then I stood in the dark and the cold— and they were only faceless metal hovering over me and a pitiless eye of light. Snow angels. Light and cold, fleeting but eternal. Unforgiving.”

  “Did they have hands, feet? When the Volkers had their close encounter, they mentioned slitted eyes.”

  Jane felt her head nod as slowly as a manatee’s bumping noses with an underwater rock. “All that. They had all that. They were like us, but different. Different among themselves. But the same. As we are. I… I did not belong with them.”

  “Of course not! You belong here. You were human concei
ved, if not reared. And now you’ve lived among your own kind for several months.”

  Kevin’s voice was swelling into a distant roar, as it often did when it feared the undertow would take her. Jane remained serene, drifting beneath a latticework of light and shadow, skimming along the fibers of her own nervous system, hearing herself humming.

  “Jane. Jane!”

  “Yes?”

  “Not so… deep. Remember, you’re here with me in the motel room, that’s all.”

  “There’s more here than that.”

  “What?” Again, the burr of panic thickened the voice. Jane made her own words calm, calming. “Memory. Memory we have with us always.”

  Quiet filtered through the opaque current of memory. A long quiet. Then, words again.

  “All right. Let’s go back before the bluff top. Before the aliens came to retrieve you. Let’s go back to the woods between Dr. Neumeier’s cabin and Duluth. Let’s remember when the cars had the van sandwiched between them on Highway 61, and I turned onto the side road. Then I drove the van into the drifts until it stopped and got out, leaving you in the front seat—”

  Jane felt seaweed coil her limbs, sensed a sudden smothering immensity to the water around her. Tendrils of her breath wreathed the coral, coiling into a shape like DNA. She climbed the double helix like a diver scaling an umbilical cord of air to the surface. Shadowy shapes buffeted her. She no longer breathed. Her senses darkened, even as she felt herself being lifted, lifted…

  The DNA spirals—half coral and half medical textbook drawing, both impressions superimposed on each other by her retentive, image-scavenging mind—grew faces and elongated into flames. She felt no heat, only herself dwindling into the depths far below her and the click of her altered cells reorganizing her body until she seemed to be one raging, singing autonomous cell that gathered and gave back—

  “Jane!”

  The word came swinging down toward her like a vine, offering an alternative safety.