Crosstalk (62 page)

The walls were still streaked with soot, and pools of water stood here and there on the flagstone pavement, but she didn't see them. She barred the door and then stood there staring blindly at its blistered paint, trying to figure out what C.B. was up to and what it was his conversation with Dr. Verrick reminded her of.

That night in the theater,
she thought,
when he was talking to me about Niagara Falls and Lucky Charms and going to Death Valley on our honeymoon, trying to distract me from the voices.
He was trying to take Trent's and Dr. Verrick's minds off the telepathy. That's what this was all about—the Sanctuary phone and the spreading of rumors and the corporate spies and the tweets, and it was no wonder it didn't make sense. It was all just chatter, designed to keep them from thinking about something else. But what?

“I'm ninety percent sure I got all the tweets deleted,” C.B. was saying, “but just in case I didn't, it might be a good idea to steer clear of reporters for a few days. You do surgeries all over the world, don't you? Oh, good, you're way ahead of me. Great minds think alike, huh?”

I was wrong,
Briddey thought, listening to him.
He isn't just distracting them—he wants Dr. Verrick out of the country and Trent busy designing phones and spreading rumors. And it isn't the theater this reminds me of
. She squinted at the barred door, trying to capture the relevant memory, as if the blistered paint could tell her the answer.
It was somewhere else
.

In the car
. After he'd rescued her from the theater, when he was driving her to the library. He'd talked to her about reciting poetry and singing the theme from
Gilligan's Island
and “Ode to Billy Joe” to keep the voices under control.

“But I can't do that forever,” she'd protested, and he'd said, “These are just interim measures till we can get your permanent defenses up.”

Interim measures
. Distracting Trent, getting Dr. Verrick out of the country, giving Commspan and Apple a shiny new phone to focus on, they were all interim measures, designed to keep them at bay just like he'd done with the voices.
Till he gets the permanent defenses up
. And there was only one thing he could need defenses for.

The telepathy isn't gone
, she thought.
He's blocking the voices. He lied to me when he said he couldn't. He's been doing it this whole time.

But if he could block the voices, he'd have done it before Dr. Verrick ran the tests and did the scans, and Dr. Verrick wouldn't have had to shred them. And he could have done it from the testing room, and they'd never have known about him at all. And if he could block the voices, then why would he need permanent defenses? It didn't make any sense. He couldn't be blocking them.

But he is,
she thought.
And the reason he's so certain the telepathy isn't coming back is because it didn't go away in the first place. And I'm not leaving here till he admits it and tells me what's going on
.

But if he hadn't admitted it to her before, he wouldn't now just because she confronted him. She had to think of some other way to get the truth out of him.

“You can count on us, Doctor,” C.B. was saying into the phone. “We want to put this whole thing behind us as much as you do. Goodbye. Have a good trip.”

He hung up. “The good doctor's going to perform EED surgery on the king of Tupanga and his favorite wife in the Lesser Sunda Islands,” he said to Briddey, “an area that I understand has very limited coverage.” He began typing something into the phone. “And it looks like Lyzandra's back at work in Sedona.” He held the phone up so Briddey could see. “Look.”

The image on the screen was an ad for a summer Seminar of the Spirit, featuring Lyzandra, “newly returned from a cleansing retreat in the Himalayas, where she studied ancient techniques of seeing into the innermost recesses of the mind.”

Cleansing retreat
, Briddey thought.
I guess that's one name for it
.

“See?” C.B. said. “I told you we don't have to worry about her.”

“So that just leaves Trent,” Briddey said, and went over to the door of the lab. “He asked me to start spreading rumors about us having had the EED, so I guess I'd better go do that.”

“Good idea,” C.B. said, walking over to his laptop. “And I'd better email Suki and tell her I found her phone.”

“Yeah.” Briddey reached the door. “Commspan's grapevine can't function without it.”

C.B. began typing the email, his eyes on the screen. Briddey opened the lab door a few inches and said,
If you want, I could take Suki's phone up to her and save you a trip
.

“No, that's okay. I kind of like going upstairs now that—” He stopped.

Their eyes met.

Briddey smiled grimly at him. “Now that what? You don't hear voices anymore?” she said.

“Things are indeed hopeless—hopeless—but they're not serious.”

—Finian's Rainbow

They stood there for a long minute, facing each other across the heater, and then C.B. said, “I was afraid you'd figure it out.” Not “I was going to tell you.” Or even “Listen, I can explain.” And definitely not “I'm glad you did. I've hated having to lie to you.” Just “I was afraid you'd figure it out.”

You lied to me,
she thought numbly.
Just like Trent
.

But it wasn't the same thing at all. Betrayal by Trent was one thing. This was so much worse. This was C.B., who she'd trusted, who she—

“I didn't figure it out,” she said, glad her hand was still on the door. It gave her something to hang onto. “Not till just this second. The deluge isn't what shut the voices down, is it? You were. You've been block—”

“Shh,” he whispered, diving past her to shut the door and lock it.
Did you tell anybody you were coming down here?

She shook her head.

Did anybody see you?

“I don't think—”

Shh, keep your voice down,
he said fiercely, and put his ear to the door. He listened for a long moment and then said,
We're okay. Nobody followed you,
but he opened the door and looked out anyway, checking in both directions. Then he grabbed a
KEEP OUT
sign from the wall and stuck it on the outside of the door.

He shut the door again, locked it, taped up a second sign saying
DANGER—NO ADMITTANCE—EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS
in its window, and walked over to the heater that wasn't a heater. He flipped the switch, strode over to the radio, turned it on full blast, and then came back and motioned her over to the middle of the room. “You cannot say a word about this to anybody,” he said, his voice lowered. “Especially Trent.”

“You think I'd tell
him
?” Briddey said incredulously. “I can't believe you'd—”

“No, of course I don't, but you don't understand. You can't even
think
about it. That's why I—”

“Why you didn't tell me,” she said angrily. “Because you thought I'd give it away if I knew. So you let me think
I
was the one who was responsible for destroying the telepathy. You let me think I'd ruined your life!”

“Look, I'm sorry,” C.B. said, “but it couldn't be helped. There was just too much at stake. I couldn't risk him finding out about Maeve or—” He stopped himself and began again. “You saw what he's like. That onslaught of bugs didn't even slow him down. He's still convinced telepathy is something he can control, and if he had even the slightest hint it still existed, he wouldn't rest till he'd stuck it in his stupid phone and inflicted it on the whole world. It was essential to convince him it had stopped, and you were our best bet. If you thought it was true, you couldn't accidentally—”

“Give away the secret.”

“Yes, and it's still critical you don't, now that you know. You're going to have to keep completely away from Trent.”

“How? Thanks to this little diversion plan of yours, he and I are supposed to be convincing everyone we're a happy, EED-connected couple. And I can't avoid him indefinitely.”

“You won't have to. Just a couple more days.”

“What happens then?”

He hesitated, looking torn.

“You've already told me this much. You might as well tell me the rest. What happens in a couple more days?”

“I finish programming the jamming equipment,” he said.

She looked automatically over at the heater. No wonder it was always so cold down here. It wasn't a heater. It was a signal jammer.

“Nope,” C.B. said. “That just prevents cellphone coverage.
This
”—he plucked a smartphone out of the clutter on the lab table—“is what jams the voices.”

“A
smartphone
?”

“No, it just looks like one. It's actually a jammer. It sends out a signal that'll block the voices. Or it will as soon as I finish writing the code.”

“So you lied when you said the jammer didn't work.”

“No. There really wasn't a way to generate enough power to block the telepathy permanently for all those people.”

“But now you've discovered one?”

“No,” he said. “You did.”

“I did—?”

“Yep. One of the many unintended consequences of your EED, only this turned out to be a good one.”

“I don't understand. How—?”

“After you had it done, you told me we had to talk out loud because the neural pathway acted as a feedback loop.”

“And you said it didn't.”

“And it still doesn't. But after the flood, when you were telling Maeve why she needed to stay in her castle, you mentioned a feedback loop again, and I realized I'd been thinking about the problem all wrong.”

I knew all those questions he asked me about the feedback loop and then his saying the deluge had caused one couldn't be just a coincidence,
Briddey thought.

“You were right, they weren't. A feedback loop was the perfect explanation for the disruptions, except for the part about it triggering inhibitors we didn't have—which you spotted. But I'm talking about blocking the voices. I realized that if I could create a feedback loop, I wouldn't
have
to come up with all that power. All I'd have to do was set it in motion, and the feedback loop would do the rest.”

And that's why he can do it with something the size of a smartphone,
Briddey thought, looking at it on the lab table. “So it works using Hedy Lamarr's frequency-hopping thing?”

“Partly. It also partly uses Maeve's zombie-gate and forest-of-brambles and moat defenses and the synaptic patterns produced by reading
Little Dorrit
and
The Mill on the Floss—
combined with a mechanism for feeding the defenses back on themselves that will work like the one I told Verrick was shutting down the telepathy. Only this one actually will.” He held up the jammer. “A
real
Sanctuary phone.”

The effects of the jamming would intensify with each listener who received it, with each circuit of the loop, till the voices were completely shut down. And the effect would be exactly the same as if C.B.'s story about the deluge creating a cascade had been true. The telepathy would be gone for good.

“You're right, it will,” C.B. said. “But if it keeps Verrick and Trent and all the other potential exploiters from getting their mitts on it and on Maeve, it'll be worth it.”

“But—”

“And if it's us you're worried about, we'll still be able to communicate. We'll just have to do it by joining Canoodle.com and swiping each other's photographs, like normal people.”

But I'll still have deprived C.B. of his gift,
Briddey thought to herself.

“Yeah, but we'll get to go to Carnival Pizza. And plays.”

But not the library.

“Well, maybe not the Carnegie Room, but we can still go to the Reading Room. And the stacks.” He grinned at her. “And there won't be any more floods. Or zombies.”

Or fires,
she thought, looking at C.B.'s hands.

“Or fires. Which will be great. And anyway, it's probably just as well that telepathy won't be around anymore. There are some things about it I didn't tell you—some of those unintended consequences. Trust me, we'll be better off without it.”

He set down the jammer and went over to his laptop. “But that means I need to get the jammer up and running, so I'd better get back to work, and you'd better go start spreading the rumor that you and Trent had the EED. I'd suggest starting with Jill Quincy,” he said, and began typing. “Tell her, ‘This is supposed to be a secret, but I
had
to tell somebody,' and swear her to secrecy.”

“But I thought you wanted everyone to find out—”

“I do, and there's no better way to guarantee it than to tell people not to tell. Especially malicious people. Make sure no one sees you on your way back upstairs. Oh, and when you leave, can you stick a
DANGER: RADIATION
sign up opposite the elevator so I won't be interrupted?” He turned back to his laptop.

It was a clear dismissal. And he was right: The sooner he completed the jammer, the safer they'd all be. But it was more than that. He seemed anxious to get rid of her, as if he was afraid
he
might give something away if she stayed.

And now that she thought about it, he hadn't explained how he was blocking the voices right now. Or what those “unintended consequences” were that made it “just as well” that they were doing away with it. Or how he was blocking everyone while he worked on this jammer.

He's still keeping something from me, and I'm not leaving here till I find out what it is
.

She went back over to where he was working on the laptop. “How are you doing it?” she asked.

C.B. glanced up from the screen. “Doing what?”

“The blocking. If you haven't finished the jammer, how—?” and Suki's phone rang.

“Sorry,” C.B. said, and answered it. “Hi, Suki. Yeah, I found your phone in the copy room. I was just going to call you. I'll bring it right up.” He hung up. “Apparently she can't survive longer than five minutes without it.”

He held it out to Briddey. “You wouldn't mind taking it up to her, would you, since you're going upstairs? You can tell her about the EED while you're at it. But you'll have to be quick. She said she needs it right away.”

“No, she didn't. That was your SOS app. You showed me how it worked before, remember? And how useful it was for getting out of conversations you don't want to have. Like this one,” she said grimly. “Besides, you turned the cellphone jammer back on. There's no coverage down here.”

She slammed Suki's phone down onto the lab table between them. “You have to sleep sometimes. So how are you blocking us then? And how are you blocking so many people? You said each person you blocked made it exponentially harder. And how can you be blocking them
and
working on the jammer at the same time?”

He isn't,
she thought, suddenly certain of it.
Someone else is, and that's what he's been avoiding telling me.
“It's Maeve, isn't it?” she asked. “I can't believe you let her do this!”

“I didn't. Are you kidding? She's nine years old! I'd never put her in jeopardy. Besides, you heard her in the lab after the fire. I knew if I let her help, she'd go off half-cocked and do something that would tip off Verrick to the Irish connection.” He shook his head. “Besides, she had school.”

“So you expect me to believe you did this all by yourself?”

He didn't answer. He just stood there looking at Briddey for a long, measuring moment.
While he decides whether I'll buy the lie he's about to tell me,
she thought.

No,
she said to him,
I won't
.
You taught me the Rules of Lying, remember?
“You had to have a partner,” she said aloud. “If it isn't Maeve, who is it?”

“I can't tell you,” he said, and she realized with a sinking heart that he didn't have to. She already knew. And no wonder C.B. had been avoiding her. And telling her she wouldn't have to put up with him anymore. He'd connected to someone else, someone who hadn't nearly exposed his secret, who didn't need to be constantly rescued and coached and calmed down—someone who was a natural telepath like he was. And there was only one person that could be.

I should have seen it,
Briddey thought.
That's how she knows everything that goes on at Commspan, because she can read everybody's mind
. He hadn't stolen her phone. She'd given it to him. “It's Suki, isn't it?” she said.