Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox (16 page)

“Keep your voice down, Walter,” Bell hissed. “We don’t want to add to the already considerable panic.”

He took Walter’s arm and led him back down the steps into Mrs. Baumgartner’s apartment, and then out through the kitchen into the back yard, where things were quiet and calm and green, and the world didn’t seem quite so crazy. The cement bunnies remained serene and unaffected by the chaos.

“What the hell is going on out there?” Nina called from inside the apartment.

Walter hardly heard her. He was still trying to make his point.

“There must be some correlation,” he said. “There has to be!” Then he remembered what he’d seen when he first came out of the trip. Bell and Nina kneeling face-to-face, staring into each other’s eyes.

“Belly,” Walter said. “You linked minds with Nina, didn’t you?”

“Well,” Bell began, unable to meet Walter’s gaze.

“Embarrassment has no place in scientific method!” Walter said brusquely. “Anyway, never mind all that, tell me—did you or did you not link minds with Nina, instead of me?”

“Yes,” Bell admitted. “I have no idea how it could have happened, when she wasn’t even tripping.”

“Clearly she was the one who was foremost in your thoughts in that moment,” Walter said. “Not that I blame you, given her apparent aversion to brassieres, but that’s something for us to analyze later. What’s far more important to consider is the fact that both times we used this particular blend, a powerful psychic link was created. The first time it was you and me, then later on, with the killer as well. This time it was you and Nina. Am I correct?”

“Yes, you are correct,” Bell said. “Okay, so...?”

“So, she wasn’t tripping with us, but somehow our own heightened psychic abilities caused any latent power in her to be activated, as well.”

“What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is this—what if our special blend not only enhances our own abilities, but also causes some kind of psychic pulse that radiates outward. We become, for lack of a better word, amplifiers, like the ones in a radio set. Perhaps, in our heightened state, we pick up weak psychic energy around us, such as the angst of a teenager, for instance, or the unfocused rage of a demented old man, and amplify it a hundredfold.”

“Or maybe it was the gate itself that activated and amplified the phenomenon,” Bell countered.

“Could be,” Walter said. “But either way, this amplification of latent psychic power occurred, and all of a sudden the repressed frustration hidden inside the affected individuals explodes outward in a storm of psychic fury and... and...” Walter paled as something occurred to him. “My God, Belly. We are very fortunate that no one was killed.”

Bell gave him a cold look.

“You’re acting as if you believe this is our fault.”

“Of
course
it’s our fault!” Walter was almost shouting now. “Maybe it was a side effect of the way our minds were enhanced, or maybe it was caused by the gate that we opened by using the special blend, but ask yourself this: Would any of this have occurred if we hadn’t done our experiment?” Before Bell could reply, Walter continued. “It would not! We are directly responsible for that poor woman’s wounds, and for all that property damage on the street.”

“I told you to keep your voice down, dammit.”

“But...”

Bell grabbed his arm.

“Listen to me,” he hissed into Walter’s ear. “We can analyze what went wrong and discuss our own responsibility or lack thereof in private, but shouting that we are responsible out here, where that angry mob out front can hear us? That’s a very bad idea.”

Nina came out through the back door of Mrs. Baumgartner’s apartment.

“The paramedics have arrived,” she said. “Want to fill me in on what the hell happened out there?”

Walter looked from Bell to Nina and back again. He nodded.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s go back inside.”

As they stepped in through the back door of Nina’s house, Roscoe and Abby were coming in through the front door.

“Man,” Roscoe said. “Looks like somebody bombed the building next door!”

“I don’t think anybody was hurt,” Abby said, looking back over her shoulder. “But, oh, that poor piano!”

“Crazy, huh?” Nina said, hustling Walter and Bell up the stairs. “We’ll see you later.”

Walter heard Roscoe’s voice echo up after them.

“What’s with them anyway?”

Then Abby’s faint response.

“Are there any more Ding Dongs? Little Bobby is starving.”

Nina shut her bedroom room door and then ran over to the windows, peering out into the street below.

“This formula we’ve created is obviously extremely dangerous, and unpredictable,” Walter said. “I can’t help but wonder if we will be causing more harm than good by continuing to experiment with it.”

“But how else can we hope to send that monster back where he came from?” Bell asked. “I just don’t see any other way.”

“We could just shoot him,” Nina suggested.

“Maybe so,” Walter replied. “But putting aside the moral ambiguities of vigilantism, do we even know that he’s human? Maybe he can’t be killed, in the conventional sense of the word.”

“He definitely seemed human,” Nina said.

“I still think we need to stick to our original plan,” Bell said. “We brought him into this world, it’s up to us to send him away.”

“Walter,” Nina said. “Before all of the craziness, you said you saw the gate, didn’t you.”

“Yes,” he said. “But it was smaller than the first time, and seemed kind of... I don’t know... unstable. I’m fairly certain that, because Belly was distracted and wound up linked with you instead of me, my own chemically enhanced ability wasn’t strong enough to keep it open single-handedly. Or, should I say, single-mindedly?”

“So,” Bell said. “We need to figure out a way to link our minds together deliberately, rather than leaving it to chance.”

“What about some kind of biofeedback?” Nina said. They looked at her, and she continued. “I know a guy doing cutting-edge research on the use of biofeedback to regulate organ function. We should be able to borrow equipment from him.”

“Biofeedback?” Bell grinned. “Yes, yes, a portable biofeedback setup might work as a basis for the type of machine that we would need. We’d need to find a way to synchronize our alpha waves and link our minds together during the trip, so that we can concentrate on holding the gate open long enough to force the killer through.”

“We’ll need to make some slight modifications to the standard rig,” Walter said, grabbing a piece of paper from Nina’s desk and swiftly sketching out a schematic. “See here, if we can eliminate the need for wiring each person in individually, through the use of multi-wave broadcasters like this...”

Nina turned away and began to leaf through the newspaper as Walter and Bell brainstormed ideas. But without warning, she leapt up with a gasp of excitement.

“Guys,” she said. “You need to see this.”

With a feeling of apprehension, Walter accepted the paper Nina thrust under his nose.

“Here,” she said, pointing out a classified advertisement about a third of the way down the page. “Look at this!”

“Regarding incident at Reiden Lake,” Walter read out loud, pausing to exchange a significant glance with Bell. “Meet me at the northwest corner of Alamo Square Park at midnight 10/23. Crucial new information has come to light. A friend in the Bureau.”

“A friend in the bureau?” Nina said.

“Iverson,” Walter said.

“Who else could it be?” Bell replied. He looked down at his watch. “But it’s nearly 11:45 now!”

“Right,” Nina said. “Come on!”

They dropped everything and went thundering down the stairs.

“Hey,” Abby said as they barreled past her, holding a large wooden spoon slick with some kind of sauce. “Do you want some...”

Whatever she was offering, they were out the door before she could finish her sentence.

* * *

The small park was bordered by colorful Queen Anne houses and seemed nearly deserted at that hour, except for a single older man in a trench coat and long, bright green plaid scarf, walking a large slobbery sheepdog.

The northwest corner featured a break in the low wall that surrounded the park, marked by a pair of rounded stone posts like silent sentinels. A sloping path, bordered by whispering pine trees and willows, led up into the dark interior.

There was no sign of Iverson.

Walter nervously toed a crushed bottle cap while Bell alternated between scanning the street and looking at his watch. Since Iverson didn’t know Nina, and might be spooked by the presence of a stranger, she had decided to keep an eye on them from her Beetle, parked across the street. Walter couldn’t see her face, just the glowing tip of her cigarette.

“Where is he?” Bell asked.

“Do you think something might have happened to him?” Walter asked anxiously. “Latimer? Or maybe...”

He didn’t finish that sentence, but didn’t need to. He could see that Bell was thinking the same thing.

Had the killer gotten to Iverson somehow? Was yet another person dead because of them?

Still, they waited. A young couple passed them, holding hands, all oblivious dreamy smiles and leaving behind a trail of pheromones. An old Chinese woman passed, going the other way, bundled up against the night like an Arctic explorer on a grim race to the North Pole.

Still no Iverson.

* * *

They waited nearly two hours, but it was becoming increasingly clear that, for whatever reason, he wasn’t going to show.

“Now what?” Walter asked.

Bell shrugged.

“It’s not like we don’t have work to do,” he said. “We still have the deadline from the killer’s notebook. Even though we don’t know the exact date and time of his next murder, we
do
know that it will be sooner, rather than later.”

“Very well,” Walter said. “Right. So we continue our experiments on getting the gate open and stabilized. But in the meanwhile, we should watch the classifieds, in case Iverson tries to contact us again.”

Walter looked up and down the intersecting streets one last time.

Nothing.

No one.

He couldn’t help but speculate what it was that Iverson wanted to tell them. Some new breakthrough regarding the gamma radiation? Or maybe something to do with the true nature of the killer? Or the nature of the gateway.

Of course, this kind of speculation was a waste of mental energy, and he knew it. All they could do at that point was watch and wait.

The two of them returned to Nina’s Beetle with slumped shoulders and glum expressions.

“What the hell happened?” she asked, flicking the butt of her latest cigarette out the widow to join its slain brothers in a pile on the sidewalk. “Why didn’t he show up?”

“No idea,” Bell answered. “He just didn’t.”

“All we can do right now is go back to your place and get some rest,” Walter said.

“Yeah,” Bell agreed. “I think we’re all feeling a little punchy.”

“All right,” she responded, cranking the ignition and putting the Beetle in gear. “But I don’t like this. It seems, I don’t know. Weird.”

Walter climbed into the back seat, hoping again that Iverson was okay.

* * *

From the safety of a stolen Volvo station wagon, parked down the block, Allan lifted his binoculars and watched the two hippies and the red-headed bitch get out of her car and cross over to enter a Victorian row house that had seen better days. The bitch’s house, presumably, but he jotted down the address so he could check up on that.

He’d had a dark, angry moment when he thought they might not have fallen for the ad he’d placed in the classified section. So angry, in fact, that he’d almost driven away and headed directly to Miranda’s house to execute her parents and take her that very night, rather than waiting for the perfect moment, like he’d planned.

But lucky for pretty little Miranda, the hippies from Reiden Lake had showed up at the very last minute, all out of breath and wild-eyed and tumbling out of a brand new green Volkswagen Beetle. Allan wrote down the license plate number and then settled in to watch.

They never once even looked at the Volvo, let alone at him, but he pulled the wool cap down over his forehead and slouched low in the seat, just to be on the safe side.

He found it tremendously exciting to be so close to them without them knowing he was there. He only wished the redhead had gotten out of the car to wait with them. He felt no boredom, nor desire for time to pass more quickly as they waited, together but not together.

In fact, he felt perfectly calm and content, studying every detail of the pair while composing taunting letters in his head, which he would send to them later. It was going to be extremely difficult to make himself wait for the right moment to let them know he was watching. Almost as difficult as waiting to be with Miranda. He was dying to see the fear in their faces as they realized he’d been watching.

Eventually the pair gave up waiting in the park and led Allan back to their home base, just like he knew they would. And now he would be able to start stalking them in earnest. Getting to know them. Learning their routines. Connecting with them the way he’d connected with Iverson. Because although he could easily take them out from a distance, like hunted deer, it would be so much more fun to torment them. To terrorize them and watch them squirm.

This was the best part.

Back at the house, Nina watched Walter stagger into the living room and plop down on one of the sofas beside the purring fur throw pillow that was Cat-Mandu. But Bell lingered in the hallway, hands stuffed in his pockets and that charming little half-smile on his face. The same smile that had caught her attention when they first met back in March, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Neurochemistry in New Orleans.

They’d both been involved with other people at the time, but the neurochemistry between them had been difficult to ignore. It was a wild weekend, full of all kinds of drunken misadventures in the French Quarter, but somehow the two of them had never found a way to be alone together. On the last day, she’d given him her card and told him to stay in touch. She had figured she’d never see him again. Until he showed up on her doorstep with this wild tale of psychic gateways and atomic murder.