Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (19 page)

"Better than an electron microscope,
even."

"Sure. After all, Ashton, you are big. So
you resolve infinitely and you begin searching for some positive,
unmistakable sign of intelligent activity. Then one day, lo and
behold, right there in your cross-hairs is something absolutely
astounding."

"Astounding?"

"Yes. As you are looking down, into this
tiny world, you get the very uncomfortable feeling that something
is looking back at you. Eye to eye, so to speak."

"Eye to eye, eh?"

"Yes. So you resolve the focus a final time
and what do you see?"

I said, "Dan Rather."

She punched my arm and squealed, "No, idiot!
You see an astronomical observatory. Just like Palomar!"

I said, "And I'm going to stain that
sucker."

"You bet you are. You're going to mark it
and go on looking for other signs. So maybe you only find two that
seem significant enough to mark. But, at least, you've got those
two."

I said, suddenly very sober, "Is that what
we've got here, Laura?"

She was just as sober as she replied, "How
the hell can anyone know what we've got here, Ashton?"

"Is that what you expect me to find
out?"

"No, of course not."

"What, then?"

"We're shooting in the dark."

"Really?"

"Well...in the twilight,
anyway. We do have...certain expectations. But I can't tell you
what those are. That would compromise the experiment."

"You want me to go in dumb and come out
smart."

"You could put it that way."

"What if I go in dumb and come out dumber?
An idiot, say?"

She showed me a tender smile, said, "Well,
Ashton, at least you would be a lovable idiot."

I said, "Lovable or not, I somehow get the
feeling that I'll be going in an idiot. Do you people really know
what you're doing?"

"Not exactly, no. But we
have refined our calculations to the closest possible...we
think
we know...look
here, Ashton, we believe that we have ninety-eight chances out of a
hundred to find absolutely no effect whatever."

"And the other two chances?"

"Well, one of those...we'll all get a lot
smarter."

"And the other?"

"Catastrophe," she said
quietly.

"So we're going for a hundred to one shot,
either way."

She sighed. "Those are the numbers. Cold
numbers, of course. There is no way to predict the warm
numbers."

"What are those?"

"Those are you, my dear."

I said,
"
I
am the warm
numbers?"

"Yes. The personal equation."

I said, musingly, "How good is Ashton,
eh?"

"That," she replied
quietly, "is about what it comes down to. Or so it seems. Don't let
me set you up for—I mean, if we strike out, don't try to take all
the blame onto yourself. After all, we are simply..."

I said, "Just place me in the dish, Laura.
Don't worry about it. I'll either see eye to eye with this guy or
I'll turn to salt. But does it really matter, in the long course,
which way it goes?"

"It could matter," she assured me, dark eyes
sweeping me in warm waves. "In infinite ways."

"Then I'll give the old middie try for eye
to eye," I told her, sighing. "When do we start?"

"Nightfall," she said. "We want minimum
photon interference."

"I'll answer that question for you now," I
told her.

"Which one was that?"

"Love. Yes. You can. Love is a restless
force. We don't have it. It has us. But it can't have you and me
together, Laura. Not because it's wrong but because I'm weak. Too
weak to cast off Holden."

"He said he'd spoken to you," she
murmured.

"Then tell him that I tried but you changed
your mind."

"Why should I tell him that?"

I explained, "I was in a little park last
month, close to where I play tennis. Sat down just to enjoy the
feel of the place for a minute or two. Little girl of about three
came over to me, showed me a butterfly that was resting in the palm
of her little hand. It was a very beautiful butterfly. Very
beautiful little girl. Obviously delighted with her butterfly. As I
was watching, she closed that little hand very tightly and killed
the butterfly."

"Oh dear."

"Yeah. Knocked me out. I told her, 'You've
killed it, honey. Why did you do that?' She began to cry, wanted me
to fix it. I couldn't fix it. Dead is dead, isn't it."

Laura said, "You love your allegories, don't
you."

I said to Laura, "Not nearly as much as
Holden loves you.

Why would you want to kill that? Or even
bruise it? Not with me, kid. I'm too weak for that."

She slid off her stool, patted my elbow, and
went back to work.

So. Okay. Better a lovable idiot than...

And, of course, I had to stay in condition.
For an eye to eye tussle with...who?—what? Didn't matter who or
what. Mattered only that I knew who I was and where I was.

The rest, I hoped, would take care of the
rest.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Intrusion

There was less than an
hour of daylight left and the preparations were proceeding at a
feverish pace. The domestic staff had served up sandwiches and
coffee for dinner on the run. Various items of heavy equipment,
dismantled in the lab, were coming in piece by piece and being
reassembled in the bubble.

Esau had just begun an explanation of the
alterations to the dome, now completed, and Holden was pacing about
with hands behind his back in the midst of activity when something
intruded on the beehive.

"You see," Esau was saying, "we don't need
the fine imagery required in focusing light rays. We're not
trapping visible light. What we are going for here are..."

I thought I knew what we
were "going for," there, which is a good thing because the
intrusion occurred right there. A rather large helicopter swooped
down on us and made a fast pass at about fifty feet above the
bubble. I couldn't get a good look at it directly overhead because
of the alterations to the dome but I could see it clearly on the
downrange, at a distance of maybe a hundred yards, and I could
detect no markings—which made me feel pretty good in the initial
reaction because my first thought was Souza, and he really had gone
for the marines.

But then it did one of those turns that only
a helicopter can do, one of those swinging pivots in midair, and
came right back at us. I was at the window, by now, and the view
was excellent. The chopper executed another swinging pivot and
hovered at fifty yards out, maybe a hundred yards up, giving me a
beautiful starboard profile.

Shit, it was a gunship,
without markings of any kind, and that mother was armed. We were
sitting ducks in that bubble. I yelled,
"Out! Everyone downstairs! It's an attack!"

She'd done a right-face in the air and I was
looking right up her rockets.

Everyone was just frozen in place, staring
with stunned disbelief. I gave Esau a shove and made a grab at
Holden just as something sizzling-hot flashed up into my peripheral
vision and zipped into that hovering craft.

The flash from the
explosion that followed was bright enough to contract my pupils to
pinpoints and send dancing lights along my optic nerves but there
really was not that much of a blast wave and it was not a
total-disintegration type of explosion. The chopper bucked upward
and slipped away on its side for several hundred yards, then went
down like a rock.
Then
there was a hell of a blast and shit was flying everywhere.
It was during this particular moment of observation that I first
noted the men up on the drive. One was still down on one knee, a
long slender tube balanced on his shoulder. Several others were
running toward the house...and one of these was Greg
Souza.

He'd finally found himself a working
scenario, I supposed—and, God, he looked good enough to kiss.

These guys were federal
marshals. There were six of them, plus Souza—and one looked an
awful lot like Fred, the observatory guy, in different clothing. I
had to wonder how many others might look familiar if I'd spent more
time at the observatory, but there was little time to wonder about
it because they hung around just long enough to make sure that
everyone inside was okay, then they took off down the hill toward
the crash site, all but Souza.

I overheard Souza tell "Fred" that he,
Souza, would "call in the report," so there was more going on,
here, than a private eye's response to a friend's "Code Red."

He went to the telephone
and spent a couple of minutes on each of two calls, then picked up
a dried-out sandwich and munched it as I introduced him to the
shaken scientists—all but Jennifer, who walked up and kissed him
then ran out with dripping cheeks.

There was still a lot of work to do and not
much time left to do it, which Esau apologetically pointed out, so
I walked Souza outside for a green-grass conference during which he
consumed two more stale sandwiches.

"Nobody," Souza told me, "asked who the bad
guys are. Don't they care?"

"They probably know," I replied, "but even
if they don't know, I guess there's just not time or interest to
worry about it. This is their last night in fairyland."

"Yeh, I know," Souza said.

"You seem to know a hell of a lot for a guy
on a retainer," I told him.

He grinned soberly and
said, "Don't you want to know who they are? Russkies. All hell has
broken loose. Their place over there in the Kazookas, their
observatory—"

"Caucasus."

"Yeah, whatever. It blew
up, or something—fire, I don't know. Anyway, severely damaged it,
killed a bunch of people. We're damn near ready to go to war.
They're accusing us of sabotaging their effort. These guys here
were a suicide squad. Been in the country more than month, just
waiting orders. Course, we had 'em under surveillance."

I tried to tell him, "My Code Red was a
panic error, but I guess—"

"Yeh, shit, I been down here all the time.
Took both your calls from down here."

I said, "You set me up, asshole."

"Couldn't think of a better guy," he told
me. "They wanted a psychic. They got one. Oh, and listen, don't
worry about any stiffs that may be littering the landscape around
L.A. That's all been cleaned up, very hush-hush, no need for you to
worry about—"

"I did not do it to Gavinsky, Greg."

"Course not. He was there to cover your ass.
They got to him. We had a mole. And—"

I said, "Greg, are you telling me that
you're still—?"

"I'm telling you nothing and you know
nothing."

I was getting burned, again. I said,
irritably, "Why the hell didn't you just level with me? That crap
about Gavinsky. How'd you know I wouldn't do him?"

"Just wanted to keep you away from home,
pal. We had Hank there to backstop it, just in case."

I said, "So you've known the game all the
way."

"Hell no. Still don't. Do you?"

I said, "Not yet. But it's getting
close."

"Yeh, and I'm damned glad
it is, too, let me tell you. This has been a very nervous
assignment. My orders are to keep them secure and happy and
no
interference."

I asked him, "How many people do you have on
this mountain?"

He said, "Hey, it's not all mine. I just
hold the hands. The marshals corralled those two guys you shot up
Saturday night. Don't worry, there's plenty of protection. And
Pendleton is only thirty air-miles away. I hear they got a
helicopter attack-group on alert over there, just in case. This is
a hot case you got by the ass, here, pal."

I asked, "Did Jennifer
Harrel know that you are—”

"Naw, naw, I'm just a pain in the ass
private eye she had to put up with." He dropped his eyes. "Damn
near lost her, didn't I, up there in Glendale. Shit, I had a crew
parked right outside her door. Some crew. Those guys didn't even
know there was a tussle until you came blasting out of there in
your hot rod."

I remembered, yes, a fleeting impression of
a presence in the neighborhood. I told him, "Thought I caught a
reflection of something up there, yeah."

"Well, listen..." He pulled me a few steps
farther from the house. "You need to keep an eye on Dr.
Harrel."

I felt something coming and I almost knew
what it was going to be. But for some reason, Souza's attitude
irritated me. I growled, "Yeah, I'll do that."

He said, "No, really, keep an eye open.
Could be dangerous to your health."

"In what way?"

"Either the lady has found herself a
fantastic plastic surgeon..."

"Yeah?"

"Or she's a ringer."

Now I was really irritated, despite the
fact—or maybe because of the fact—that he'd struck a chord way down
in my gut. I guess I attacked him the way I'd been attacking
myself. I growled, "That's ridiculous, Greg. She's right here in
the bosom of her own science community. Unless you're saying all of
them are ringers. And what the hell would that buy?"

"All I'm saying," he
insisted, "is that she does not check out. Something else. She's
been bucking you all the way. Didn't want you into this. Lectured
me for five minutes about what she called the pseudo sciences while
we were waiting for you the other morning."

My irritation was dying under its own
weight. I told him, "If she's ringing it, Greg, it's the dumbest
ring I've ever heard of. Also there's the matter of—damn!"