Mariposa (12 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

Long Beach, California

Nathaniel Trace waited inside his childhood home for the next prostitute to show.

He wanted to learn what level of self-control he possessed at this point in his unfolding. That was how he thought of it now; unfolding, pushing through the pupa case and spreading his wings, pumping them until they were broad and stiff, letting them set in the dry air, ready for flight.

Plain to see, the first prostitute—a skinny brunette with a wide, pretty smile and haunted eyes—had been abused since childhood. Nathaniel found he could not engage the proper responses with someone who had such a history. The hooker's counter to his lack of enthusiasm was sadly professional. She suggested an interesting catalog of circumstances and techniques, but Nathaniel had fixated on the fact that she could not—or deliberately
would
not—share pleasure. Working in the sex trade had made her numb.

It wasn't that professionals rarely enjoyed their work. He recognized her symptoms. She had PTSD.

He tipped her a thousand dollars and she left the house without a backward glance.

Nathaniel would not allow himself to fly if he thought he didn't have the necessary control. Was he like a child, working to acquire new instincts and training—or a passionless demon waiting to explode?

As far as he was concerned, that first encounter had taught him only part of what he needed to know. It was not that he cared about those around him. He did not even much care what happened to himself. But he had set his own ground rules early on, when he realized what he was becoming:

A building without walls. A mountain without rocks. A storm without winds. A drunkboat without a compass.

So far he had not exhibited the psychopathic tendencies Jerry Lee had spoken of, but that did not mean they weren't there. The difficult thing about his present situation was he could not predict his own behavior.

And so he would try one more time.

The house stood on a quiet street in a century-old neighborhood in Long Beach, California. There had been a few changes since his boyhood, but the lineaments were the same. His parents had died in a car crash on their way to ski at Big Bear. The house had been sold and he had moved to Costa Mesa to live with his aunt in a dingy, cramped apartment.

A year ago, while recovering in Baltimore, he had purchased the house outright from its then-owner, without knowing why. The house's history carried no sentiment for him but now that he was here he could, if he wished, unroll his childhood like a spool of film, shining on each frame a precision torch that had little to do with real human needs . . . See it all in full motion and vivid color, but spotty sound.

The house was teaching him how to access his past more efficiently.

Late last night, he had replayed the convention center blast and tried to rewind his emotions. That triggered another change. Deep ennui rolled in. He cared about nothing. This was probably a delayed effect of smoke and fire and bodies—so much larger than the atrocity in Arabia Deserta, though this time he had not been badly hurt—just a few scratches.

Even so, he could almost feel Mariposa working to separate his echoing emotions into manageable chunks.

Though wide awake, he had hardly moved for several hours. Somewhere in that void was when the Quiet Man called and left a message on his EPR cell.

Coming out of fugue just before dawn, he idly keyed in his ID and retrieved the message. The Quiet Man's voice was steady. "Dr. Plover says he gave you the materials. You invited the others, and that upset the doctor—but it's probably for the best. Be careful with those aliases. They may be using parts of Jones to track us. We have nine days before MSARC kicks in. They already know where I am, of course. Jones will not tell me who was responsible for the convention center bombs, but I suspect he knows—and that means
we
know. I believe Nick is dead. This is the last time I will call. Good luck, Nathaniel."

Nathaniel shut off the phone and stared through the front window, between the gauze curtains, at the growing light on the quiet street.

Low on cash after his exorbitant tip, he had paid the second escort service in advance—three hundred dollars—using one of three credit cards registered to Robert Sangstrom.

Robert Sangstrom had recently flown from Dubai to Los Angeles—just after Nathaniel Trace skipped out of the unscheduled meeting at the Ziggurat.

Nathaniel could see everything so clearly now.

The next stage of the game was inevitable, and there was scant time to prepare.

Late in the morning, while waiting for the second prostitute to show, he used an old computer in the attic apartment, once rented to students attending Long Beach State. Routing through a skeleton server in Bangladesh, he employed a former Talos student's log-in code for the Survival Education Group—not a heavily secured site—to study online manuals on self-defense and close-in combat. The manuals were part of a mandatory Talos training program.

In the army, he had not done well in martial arts. Talos had tried again to persuade him—and the rest of the Turing group—that everyone must know how to fight hand-to-hand in several different ways. All seven had flunked, but the manuals were clearly illustrated and quite good.

His entire body began to imagine the situations described and depicted. His head hurt again, and then his arms, his legs, his back.

Muscles tensed and relaxed.

He stood and lifted his arms. He could feel the burn—and a weird sense of
anger
directed at his faltering will. Physical training was a lengthy, focused process involving coordination between brain, nerves, muscles. But Nathaniel was now aware that learning also sacrificed conservative elements—parts of his body that did not wish to learn, that actively
objected
to learning; perhaps because the learning process would lead to these habits, tissues, neural partnerships and accommodations, being
phased out.

Learning was like revolution, and the body hated change.

Aches, throbs, twinges, sharp jabs—all became a sign of success, as long as he didn't get lost in the cycle of regrowth, retraining. Like a horse spurred by its rider until it joyously ran itself to death—or leaped over a cliff.

He closed his eyes and controlled the endorphin rush; otherwise they would wash over him and leave him groggy.

Still, the prostitute did not show.

Lunch consisted of a half cup of shortening, a bowl of pasta without sauce, two candy bars, and a long slug of Gatorade. On that diet he did not piss purple, but for half an hour, he smelled terrible.

Something like ketosis, he suspected.

After thirty minutes and what passed for digestion, he tried out some basic physical moves—bracing, angling, kicking, striking. He would have to be careful not to injure himself. The body already felt too confident.

Mistakenly judging that weeks of intense training had passed, it
knew
it was ready. In reality, his body learned different things at different rates, The connection between sight-learning, text-learning, and actual physical action was unpredictable. He would not know how much he had absorbed, or how effectively, until the kick-in moment, triggered by real physical stress.

Danger to life and limb.

The prostitute was now two hours late. That was interesting, but not irritating. He could completely control his sense of passing time.

He had put on an exercise suit, black with red trim. Tight clothing bothered him. He preferred going naked, though for some reason did not like looking in mirrors. What he saw seemed inadequate compared to how he felt. His body had too much shape, its proportions were too fixed.

Intellect—the rules of the game—would have to make up for what he now lacked: social instinct, behavioral boundaries. A couple of days ago, he had been worried that everything he had ever been—all his memories, possibly even his physical form—would be erased and his life would become a blank tablet in the hands of an idiot with a big piece of chalk.

But the memories remained. He did not turn into a pile of mush. He just lacked perspective on what to do with what he had, and certainly how to feel about it.

Take Rebecca Rose, for example.

He had risked his life to find her in the collapsed convention center—and not just to make sure Plover's information reached its intended destination.

He had anonymously checked on her in the hospital.

Why?

Three hours late.

More than interesting; intriguing. The first woman had been spot on time.

He sat in on the back porch, face bathed in sunny warmth, eyes closed, muscles twitching.

When dog legs twitch, we think they're dreaming of chasing rabbits. What if they're actually dreaming of being in a big number in a Busby Berkley musical?

Who would ever know?

The doorbell rang.

Nathaniel opened his eyes, got up from the chair, returned to the kitchen, pushed through the swinging door into the dining room, and crossed the maple floor around the heavy oak table. He smiled at the shushing sound his slippered feet made on the wood, and how that was silenced by the oriental carpet in the entry, behind the old Craftsman front door with the three crackle glaze windows.

He unlatched the brass viewport. A woman in her early thirties stood outside, squinting at the afternnon glow over the surrounding houses, filtered through the trees: the famous golden hour.

She was attractive enough, with regular features—but other than that, nothing like the first.

He closed the viewport and took a deep breath.

All wrong.

Looking back at prostitutes he had been with in his youthful Army days and in France, Russia, and in Dubai—again, in full color and full motion, like playing back a video—he saw them frayed like tattered velveteen rabbits, hard-used, eyes haunted, subjected to the worst that men had to offer and too often left out, left behind. They had made themselves into closeted sweatshops of poorly manufactured lust, painted over, shaved, and discouraged. Some had decent acting skills, but the bloom was off their rose and they knew it; they knew their clocks were running out.

The woman waiting on the other side of the door dressed the part but had clear, sure eyes and a quality of skin—pellucid freshness rather than powdered pallor.

More than likely, Nathaniel guessed—though he would not call it guessing—she was ex-military, sleek and confident and fit. He compared her with the woman who had been part of the group in the Ziggurat—on the security camera, requesting entrance to his condo. Likely the same. Talos was expending huge resources to find him.

Nathaniel's next test would be to stay alive for more than a few more minutes.

The day before, he had walked around the yard visually mapping the neighboring houses, counting the windows, the doors—and now they lit up in his mind's eye. He saw the house and its environs as if in an isometric projection.

He shaped avenues of escape.

In the ten seconds since ringing the doorbell, the woman had grown restless. He could see her by listening to her movements.

With a rueful smile, he suggested to the new masters of his body that superpowers would be cool—true X-ray vision, the ears of a bat, the nose of a dog. But nothing against the laws of physics had arrived with the relaxing of his prior limitations.

No avoiding a fight. Here it was.

Nathaniel opened the door. The woman swung her head to look at him but held her body sideways like a fencer—keeping a line of fire open.

Someone was drawing a bead from across the street.

"Mr. Sangstrom?" she asked.

She had killed before. She was used to killing.

"That's me," he said, and opened the screen door.

They were roughly of a height, to his advantage. He kept his center axis aligned with hers to discourage an easy shot.

"I've never done this sort of thing," he said.

"Of course not." She smiled brightly, eyes measuring relevant distances with saccadic micro-movements. "May I come in?"

She wore a coat over a short red dress. Sensible walking shoes, no high heels or pumps. "I took a bus and then walked," she said. "Good for the legs." She lifted her bag, catching the hem of the coat and revealing fit calves. "I brought high heels. If you want, I can put them on."

"I am putty in your hands," Nathaniel said.

Her eyes turned sharp, like a cat about to leap.

Crazy confidence flooded him. At the last instant, he decided nobody would die. He would escape, they would have no idea where he had gone, and the team they had assigned to catch or kill him would survive—mostly intact. He could see it, almost experience it—run it through on a loop.

Edit the mistakes.

Just for fun. But there's something else, isn't there? You're free of every human emotion but two: pride—and curiosity.

The woman stepped around the screen door with the quick grace of a dancer—or a trained Navy Seal.

"Hold on a moment," he said. "That's my phone."

He let the screen door go and it started to swing shut.

She dropped her bag, blocking it. Her left hand flew toward the bridge of his nose. He feinted. Her right hand, edge on, came around to wedge him in the throat or fist him behind his jaw—or failing that, drop and hit him just below the sternum.

She missed.

Time slowed—nothing new. He had seen it before in in Iraq and Arabia Deserta. What astonished him was how much
slower
time seemed
now
, slower even than it had been at the LA Convention Center—and how much more it hurt at a deep level as he almost instantly burned through the ATP in his brain, the energy in his nerves.

He increased his heart rate to replenish blood flow.

The woman avoided his first rounding kick, which would easily have knocked her legs out from under her—but not the higher, faster second. His slippered foot took her under her raised arm, emptying her lungs with a whoosh and slamming her into the left doorframe.