Jezebel's Ladder (3 page)

Next, the limousine took Jezebel to her new apartment:
company-owned, fully furnished, and stocked with basic bathroom and food
supplies. Daniel rode over with her. “Congratulations! Work doesn’t start till
about eight each night. The rest of the day, if we’re not traveling, you’re
free to do as you please.”

Daniel handed her a platinum credit
card and said, “Take a guard along shopping and buy as much as you can fit into
two airline-sized suitcases. While you’re at it, you should get suitcases, too.
Buy whatever you need to keep from getting bored on the bus or in a hotel room.
We travel a lot.”

“Your last name’s Sorenson?” she
read.

“Well, technically it’s Fortune;
Dirt Bag adopted me, but I use my real dad’s name on anything I want to keep
under the radar.”

She was still stunned by the whole
alien thing. “Okay, what’s my limit?”

He scratched his head; his hair had
been washed and neatly combed for the meeting with his boss and grand-boss.
Even the t-shirt was clean, though just as drab. The boy seemed to favor dark
blues, greens, browns, and grays, nothing that drew attention. Was this
spy-craft, or natural shyness? “I’ve never hit the max. I think my record was
nine thousand plus the airfare to Indonesia.”

Jez blinked. She had been eating
macaroni and soup for a month. “Wow. No limit. Got it. But why would anybody
let me use your credit card?”

“We have some good friends in the
hacking community. I authorized you yesterday as my sister. We look enough
alike that it’s a good cover identity. You’ll get your own corporate card and
passport in another few weeks.”

Jez was touched by the gesture. “How
did you know I’d stay?”

The boy shrugged. “Anybody who can
face the Zombie Master is good for the long haul.”

She tried for a smile, but her face
was overloaded. “Great. When do I meet the rest of the team?”

Daniel looked both ways. “Aside
from the drivers that they rotate every few days and the two bodyguards, I’m
it.”

When they arrived at the
apartments, he excused himself. “Normally, I’m all over the mall, but I’ve been
awake since noon yesterday. I need my rest.”

****

Jez bought more than she should
have: clothes, laptop, electronic book reader, and shoes. She could have filled
a bag with shoes alone. The freedom was electrifying. When the car wouldn’t
hold any more bags, she tried to go out for a big dinner. However, with no one
to join her and no alcohol, she settled for a chicken Caesar salad to go. Then
she went back to the apartment to unwrap her acquisitions and play. At 7:30
p.m., while trying on a new, silk blouse, she saw Daniel’s ghostly form phase
through the bathroom wall.

“Get out, pervert!” she shouted,
bombarding him with invective. “You’d better pray you get back to your body
before I do.”

Even disembodied, Daniel raised his
hands defensively. “Sorry. Dirt Bag ordered me to. He wanted to know if you
could still see me. It won’t happen ever again, I swear!”

She was getting paid to be a den
mother to a professional peeping Tom. Putting on a cotton business shirt,
slacks, and running shoes, she felt ready for anything.

She knocked on his door fifteen
minutes early. The guard let her into the apartment, and then waited in the
hallway.

Daniel was already in pajamas,
ready to work. “We have a busy night tonight,” he said, avoiding discussion of
his earlier indiscretion. “When I’m out, lower the headboard microphone to my
lips. Sometimes, when I find documents, I read them out loud. Even in other
languages, we can make sense of it with the right transcriber. When I come
back, give me a new pad of paper. My recall is best during the first few minutes
awake. I draw as much as I can to get details of the encounters. I flesh out
the sketches between dives.”

Jez found that if she just repeated
a word, it kicked his instruction generator again. “Dives?”

Daniel lectured. “Out of body
excursions. I can’t see pages directly, so I’m scouting people who showed up as
anomalies on somebody else’s radar. I look for high gamma-wave output, odd
behavior, new technology, and reader flares. If that pans out, we send in the
negotiators like Buddy.”

“If that fails?” she asked.

“We usually bribe someone close to
the artifact to acquire it for us.”

“Or steal it yourselves.”

He shrugged. “This is species
survival. Dirt Bag doesn’t suffer idiots for long, especially when the other
groups are keeping watch on his every move. You got a problem with that?”

“No, I just wanted to know what I
should be looking for while Buddy is talking.”

Daniel smiled. “You’re a very
flexible woman.”

“I think you mean adaptable, but
yes, that too,” she said with amusement. He actually blushed. “Do they all last
the same amount of time? Are they linked to a REM cycle or something?”

“It’s not sleep. The length of each
dive depends on how close the subject is. My max range is roughly a hundred
miles, but that’s really deep water. I can only do a couple of those a day
before I’m useless. I have to be physically close if I don’t have a clear
target. That’s why I was in the bus for you. I can do about twelve dives per
night. Some subjects take multiple dives to make sure.”

“How do you find a target?” she
asked.

Daniel pointed to the stack of
folders, and she handed him the top one. Inside was a color photograph of a
man, a detailed list of his favorite haunts, background information, and a used
napkin. “I used to drive by each person for a visual. Unfortunately, that only
worked about half the time, added overhead, and I could only get in about four
people a night. If I familiarize myself with their description and have
something personal with their DNA on it, I can usually zero in with no problem.
The trick only works about 95 percent of the time and never with cats. Don’t
even ask.”

Jez nodded. “Okay. As you finish
each mission, I hand you the next target dossier, and…” She raised her
eyebrows. “Oh, gross, is this a tissue?”

Daniel pointed to a box on the
floor. “Put on a set of those gloves. If you contaminate the sample, I get
lost, and you could get sick.”

She wrinkled her nose as she put on
the gloves. “How do you prioritize?”

“Each night, I do two dives against
the competition for the intelligence team in London. Those are the most
important, because we’ve stopped several assassinations and infiltrations this
way. Those cases decide what city we travel to next. All the other dives are
arranged in roughly first-come-first-served order. Nobody likes the system.
Buddy wants to be more proactive and less reactive, but there’s only one of me.”

“Who gives you the leads?”

“They come in two categories, I
alternate leads from each group. Dirt Bag’s folks in New York find people who
are too successful given their contacts and skill sets. Buddy’s group in LA
finds the negative outliers, the spectacular wipeouts. They do most of the
research and then toss the summaries in my slush pile.”

She nodded. “Filtering out
intelligence and duplicate dives, say we average 9 separate targets a work
night. That means you must screen about 2,250 potential actives a year. How
many leads on these Golden Tickets do they hand you each year?”

“Over 5,000. I have a backlog.”

“How many leads pan out?”

“Only a couple. Most people I watch
are nutcases, but I’ve saved Dirt Bag’s life three times. We also have a pretty
good picture of where all the Fossil and governmental pages are stashed, as
well as what they can do.”

Curious, she asked, “Why only
search at night? That seems limiting.”

Daniel sighed and pointed to a
large map on the wall with strange notations on the bottom. “The fewer people
there are sleeping, the safer and easier it is to travel Out of Body. This is
basic onierology. The more people there are dreaming at a time, the noisier the
Collective Unconscious gets. It’s kind of like trying to get to the best seat
in a good rock concert with stadium seating. I spend most of my time fighting
the tides.”

“But wouldn’t you dive during the
day then?” asked Jez.

“The Collective is world-wide. The
numbers at the map bottom are the millions asleep from 11:00 p.m. till 7:00
a.m. in their time zones. The number on the hand-drawn curve is a calculation
of how many cumulative people are asleep world-wide when darkness hits that
line.”

As she examined the graph at the
bottom, she noted, “Over the Pacific it drops to almost nothing.”

“That’s the sweet spot where we do
most of our work,” he chimed in.

She noticed a problem in the model.
“When it hits this coast with India and the Orient, there are billions
instantly.”

Daniel raised a finger. “Bingo. I
call that the Great Wall of China. You do
not
want to be OOB when that
hits.”

Jez nodded. In spite of all the
weirdness, she could handle this. “This sounds pretty tame, like glorified
door-to-door sales with a really strict curfew. Anything else Eye Corps is
responsible for?”

“I shut down just before the Wall,
write out my reports, then I crash. Next day I start over again. The dive cycle
is completely harmless, but I can get thirsty. So stand by with those cold
Mountain Dews.”

“Doesn’t that keep you awake?”

“OOB isn’t sleep, just an altered
state.” Without warning, Daniel took a hypodermic, marked with green tape, out
of his dresser drawer and injected himself. There were several greens in the drawer,
but only one yellow and one red.

“Insulin?” she guessed.

He shook his head. “A cocktail of
Pentothal and neuro-boosters like potassium. It makes the dives smoother. Part
of your job is to watch the monitors. If my gammas get too high, the alarm goes
off. It might mean attack or interference. Hit me with the yellow syringe in
the arm. That will slow me down and keep me from burning my brain out too fast.”

“And the red?” she asked, afraid of
the answer.

“One time, I followed a guy on a
private jet. He took me out of range too fast, too close to the Wall. My heart
rate went too low, and I almost died. Luckily, the casino had portable shock
paddles. That might have failed, too, if Benny hadn’t used the Collective
Unconscious page held against my forehead to talk me back. Dr. Poldark gave us
the red syringe with epinephrine to jump-start me in an emergency. It also has
some theta blockers in it to help snap me out of the dive. Just think of it as
preventing the bends when I go too deep.”

“Wow, talking to someone mind to
mind?” Jez asked.

“When two people hold the page at
once, it can work like a mental version of the tin-can telephone. I keep it in
my bed-table drawer in case of emergencies.”

“Could I try that?”

Daniel shrugged and took the
Collective Unconscious page out. They each grabbed one end of document, but the
teenager snatched his hand back almost immediately. “Stop. Ouch.”

“Did you hear me say hello?” she
asked.

“Shouting. Benny was direct and
smooth. Contacting you was like standing in the middle of a cyclone while
getting pelted by heavy, glass, pop bottles. You have fifty worries bouncing
around in there. Let’s not try that again.”

 After Daniel put the page away, Jez
summarized, “So while you’re away, I just stay quiet and watch for your
brainwaves to color outside the lines?”

Daniel nodded. “Henry, the normal
guy outside, compares it to driving a big rig across country–a lot of boredom,
but you’ve got to stay awake or someone could die.”

“No pressure.” Something occurred
to Jez as Daniel lay down in his bed. “If you’re taking Pentothal, that means I
can ask you anything and you’d tell me the truth?”

The teenager grimaced. “Not
entirely, but I owe you one for the bathroom visit. I think I know what you
want to know. Buddy’s page gives him this empathy skill that means he really
can talk people into just about anything.”

“Handy,” Jez admitted.

Daniel explained, “For most people
it would be, but Buddy has guilt problems. He doesn’t use the skill as often as
Dirt Bag wants him to. He works part time for this hospital charity and goes to
church a lot.”

“I had something more personal in
mind. How did you lose the use of your legs?”

Daniel jerked his head back a
little. “I guess if we’re going to be working together, you’ll hear it
eventually. I’ll tell you, and then we’ll be square.”

He took a deep breath. “My dad was
a professor of anthropology and comparative religion. Dad took Mom and me with
him on a trip to the Middle East a little over a year ago. It was nice.
Normally, we didn’t get to spend much time with him. Our hotel lobby got bombed
by a terrorist group. I was the only survivor.”

Jez started to apologize, but he
held up a hand. “The pain was pretty bad. I was in traction for a long time.
When I found out I’d never walk again, I got suicidal. That’s when Babushka
Mufsi paid me a visit. She was an old, Jewish lady who had emigrated from Romania, some kind of fortune teller. Dad had helped her to escape a particularly dark
chapter in her country’s history. To help me through my dark time, she gave me
the page. Even though I couldn’t walk, I could go anywhere from that hospital
bed.

“I used it to track down the
bastards who bombed us. I phoned the embassy, the cops, and the media. However,
no one took a drugged-up, invalid kid seriously.”

Jez guessed the rest. “Except
Fortune.”

Daniel nodded. “Yeah. Use his code
name in case someone has this place bugged. The Ladder Project staged a raid on
the terrorists’ house. Maverick, the leader of the assault, has defected to the
Fossils since, taking the Override page with him. That guy is scary.”