Little Deadly Things (40 page)

Jim and Dana rushed over to catch her. Dana pointed with his head and said, “The sofa. Put Mom on the sofa.”

The vid feed of the holo cut off. Eva’s features replaced Rafael’s. Her voice was strained, agitated, her speech reduced to simple thoughts. “Marta, you owe me. You owe me lot. I keep Jim out of jail. I make you rich. I help your poor. I get your father out of prison. Now he is here. You must do what I say. I mean it.”

They watched in sickened horror. Eva had been friend, mentor, and colleague for years. She’d been a difficult friend, to be certain, but she maintained a unique brand of loyalty. Now she was changed. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Her hair was unkempt, unwashed. Her recent tics, jitters, and odd mannerisms had progressed to jerky movements, nearly uncontrolled, as if she were a marionette in the hands of a palsied puppeteer. She alternated between brushing non-existent bits of lint from her clothing and scratching hard on her left arm.

Eva’s voice rose. Normally flat and uninflected, it was shrill and unsteady. “Forget police. I stop them anytime. You blame me for Rockford? Soon NMech gets Rockford. We get everything. I reorganize NMech. I get rid of waste. Stay away or I hurt your father. Stay out of my way.”

The link ended abruptly.

“What the hell?” said Jim.

“My father,” said Marta.

“He looked scared, but healthy,” said Jim.

Marta’s eyes welled with tears. “I’ve lived with the fact that I might not see him again, at least not for another decade. But that was him. If Eva got him out of prison now, why didn’t she do it sooner? When she was still, well, sane?”

Jim wrapped his wife in his arms. She buried her face in his chest and sobbed.

Dana stood quietly. When his mother’s cries subsided, he walked to the tall windows and stared out. Without turning back, he asked, “I wonder where Eva has him. Did either of you recognize where the vid was shot? Did anything look familiar?”

“No, nothing,” said Marta. “But did you notice Eva’s speech patterns? The syntax? Even her accent is returning. I don’t like this one bit.”

“There’s something about the vid I can’t quite put my finger on,” said Dana. He turned away from the sad view of dirty snowdrifts and mud—and touched the window to darken it. He said, “Let’s see the vid again.” He subvocalized and Rafael Cruz appeared once more. They could see off-white walls in the background, the corner of a bed and the edge of a window. Once more, Eva delivered her tormented edict.

“She looks terrible,” said Marta. “Her left arm is bleeding. She’s scratching herself raw.” Marta subvocalized and accessed information in her medical database.

“Why is she doing that?” asked Dana.

“Some of the medications for personality disorders can cause itching. I’m guessing that she’s self-medicating in some way. Maybe it’s induced some kind of mood disorder, like BPD.”

“What’s that?” asked Dana.

“Borderline personality disorder. It’s a prolonged disturbance of the personality. A person with BPD can experience mood instability—”

“That’s our Eva,” said Jim, “But she goes a wee bit beyond instability.”

“And it goes way beyond moods, Jim. Listen, we’re dealing with Eva at her worst. We’re in for a rough ride. Eva can’t handle the emotions she’s feeling. They’re too complicated and too threatening. So she splits her feelings. It’s easier to see things as all bad or all good. She idealizes herself, exaggerates her positive qualities, then devalues others. They become the ‘all bad’ to match her ‘all good.’”

“Why now?” asked Jim.

“I can’t even guess, but I can tell you that if we push Eva too hard, she could tip. She would demonize us. If she sees us as all bad, it will be easy to devalue us, to make us non-persons. Then she would have no compunction about killing us.”

“Mom, do you think she killed Aunt Colleen?” asked Dana.

“I’m sorry, but yes, she might have.”

“But if she killed Aunt Colleen...” said Dana, his voice trailing off.

“Remember, we’re not dealing with a sane person anymore,” said Marta.

“She was always nice to me,” countered Dana. Jim said, “She’s never been normal.”

“She was
always
nice to me. She was okay in her own way until you and Mom teamed up against her.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Jim spoke, “Dana, the Eva you knew when she was your teacher is not the Eva we’re seeing today,” Jim said.

“Why would she turn on us? Would she hate me now, too?”

“Dana,” Marta said gently, “something happened to her, something changed her.”

“Mom, I’ve been trying to tell you and Dad for a long time. But you kept on saying, ‘Oh, that’s just Eva,’ or ‘She can be moody.’ But it all came down to public health. Without her all that would have been impossible.” Dana choked back a sob. “And then you made sure that I couldn’t spend any time with her. One of my best friends—and I needed a chaperone to be around Eva. Maybe I could have helped her.
You
could have helped her. You have all these herbs and plants from
Yocahu
”—he spat the word—“and you could have helped her.”

Marta started to cry. Dana’s accusation rang true. “Hijo mia, come here.”

Dana held his mother at arms’ length. He held her tenderly and respectfully, but at a distance. There was a mixture of pleading and command in his voice, “Mom, you have to figure out what happened to her so you can fix her. I like plain old weird Eva.” Then he embraced his mother and they absorbed strength from each other.

But Dana wasn’t finished. He turned to his father. “And you? She was your best friend. Then you didn’t want anything to do with her. I don’t know what she did to you, but can’t you forgive her? Look where we are now. Why did you shut her out, anyway?”

“It’s a long story, Dana,” said Jim.

“Baloney! ‘Long story’ is what you say when you really mean, ‘I screwed up.’ Okay, you don’t want to tell me why you stopped being her friend after all these years? Fine. But you took her away from me. And you had no right to mess with
my
friends.

The three stood silently. As one, they reached for each other, huddling together, each mourning in his or her own way. Jim shed silent tears. Marta sobbed gently. Dana stared straight ahead, angry one moment, crushed the next.

At long last, Jim spoke, his voice tactical. “Right now, we have three related problems. First, where is Rafael? Second, how do we get him away from Eva? Finally, there’s the small matter of what she’s going to do next.”

“Play the vid again, Dana,” Marta instructed.

They watched it again and then Marta pondered out loud, “This is troubling. My dad is one thing, but I’m terrified about what she’s going to do. She said, I
‘reorganize NMech. I get rid of the waste.’
I wonder if she’s going to do something with our public health projects. That was how she described them—a waste. She said over and over that she only did it to get me to join NMech. My god, if she terminates the public programs, there are people who will die. I mean thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.”

“What kinds of projects, Mom?”

“Ah, a lot. Let me make a list.”

Marta touched her sleeve and subvocalized. She frowned, and tried again.

“Guys. We’ve got trouble. I can’t access any of the public projects, the subsidized patients, the donated nanomeds—none of it. I can’t tell if she’s terminated those programs or just locked me out. She could wash out every charitable activity we’ve built.”

“How do we stop her?” asked Jim.

“I don’t know. I don’t even know what she’s doing. I don’t know how she terminated the accounts that Denise Warren told us about. I don’t know how to stop her.”

“Can the public health projects be restarted?” asked Jim.

“I don’t know that either. I don’t even know if NMech still exists. Oh God, I feel helpless.”

“Dana, link to the newsfeeds. See if there’s anything,” said Jim.

Dana subvocalized and a series of images projected before them.

“Look. There. And there,” Dana pointed.

One feed showed a panorama of hospital entrances, flooded with ambulances. There were desperate fathers and screaming mothers carrying their children. Old men and women with labored breathing, their faces pale or jaundiced. Another series of feeds showed the chaos and violence of street riots or worse—running battles between military or police agencies on one side and pirate armies on another.

Dana stood, speechless. Marta sat down heavily, her legs unable to support her. Jim watched the feeds. Dana moved to comfort his mother.

“How is she doing this?” Marta cried.

Dana asked, “Can she be controlling this from her office?”

“I don’t think so. Eva would have hidden everything. I had the technical staff search for anything that looked suspicious right after the explosion. Eva’s pillar had been dormant. She must have another one somewhere.”

“I bet that’s where she’s got my grandfather,” said Dana. “I think I saw a clue in the vid. I’m going to play it again to be sure.”

Morning broke on March 4. The usual chitters, howls, and grunts of Waza National Park’s wildlife were joined by a new sound. Cries of dismay and alarm echoed among Sergeant Mike Imfeld’s squad. Their uniforms were dead. It was as if a master switch turned every uniform to dumb cloth. The medical sensors were muted; the protective liquid armor puddled uselessly; shirtsleeve bandages for cuts or scrapes morphed from medical marvels to blood-mottled fabric. Even the command, control, and communications applications were dead. In the event of an attack, they would be reduced to blind firing.

Imfeld’s problems were compounded by his foe’s skill. Aluwa’s scouts had come of age in the forest. A small company followed Imfeld’s squad’s every move. Seventy-five child-soldiers circled north above Waza and then south to reach the park’s eastern border and set up an enfilade with a company on the western border with Imfeld’s squad in the middle. Aluwa knew he would have the element of surprise. What the teenaged general did not know was that the EcoForce’s defenses had been disabled by instructions from Cerberus.

When Aluwa’s attack began at 0700 hours, local time, the Eco-Force squad’s defense was unfocused. The battle for Waza National Park was over in less than thirty minutes. Aluwa suffered nine casualties. None of Imfeld’s troops survived. The Great Washout claimed its first military casualties.

Dana Ecco subvocalized and the dumb pillar projected Eva Rozen’s vid feed. There was Rafael Cruz. Behind him were the plain walls, the small bed and the edge of a window.

“There,” said Dana. “The window.”

Jim said, “So what? We can’t see what’s outside of the window.”

Dana said, “Look at the window itself. That’s not smart glass. It’s an old-fashioned window. Look at the glass. See the little ripples in the window?” He subvocalized and magnified the image which showed a moiré pattern in the glass.

“You’re right,” said Marta. She stared at the vid. “Nobody uses plain glass anymore. Building codes require smart glass.”

Dana said, “So where does Eva go that would have this kind of a window?”

“I bet it’s her home,” said Marta. “I remember, back at Harvard. One of the few times she ever talked about her childhood, she described the apartment where she grew up. She swore that if she ever was successful—no, make that
when
she became successful, she never had any doubts—she wanted to recreate her childhood apartment in Sofia.”