Puppets (21 page)

She looked troubled. "In some ways. It's hard to say. We need more information."

Outside the weather lowered further, and the belly of the sky seemed to swell and then open. Rain began to fall, silver and thick as a school offish, and some leaky drainpipe near the windows spewed a fountain that splashed heavily on the window ledge. The room got dim, and it seemed forlorn in there, Rebecca's cheerful interior washed in such a sullen light. Mo got up, turned on some lights,

began pacing around the room. Rebecca looked lost in her own thoughts, too. With the lights on, the window light grew much dimmer, and the rain on the glass blurred the world into an indistinct abstract, full of vague and dark shapes.

Mo looked back at Rebecca, sitting with her elbows on her knees, chin on two fists, staring at nothing. Very beautiful, very troubled. It was good that they had a team, he thought, but even so it seemed a little lonesome, just the two of them against who knew what.

28

M
R. SMITH WAS WORKING the golden retriever. He'd named the dog Johnny, counterpoint to the German shepherd's Frankie. This stage was often therapeutic, he'd found, a chance to get outside, get some exercise. Just a man and his dog in the great outdoors. Even if what they were doing wasn't exactly
Dog World
material, was it.

The old dump was a good place to work dogs in this phase. The whole area was well out of view of roads or houses, although at the southeast end, where the land tilted toward a little stream, one of Westchester County's innumerable upper-middle-income developments had sprung up in the last ten years. The terrain was a wide, gently sloped basin of several hundred acres, covered by forest and littered with relics from its landfill days: here an ancient Studebaker, there a badly rusted piece of farm machinery or an icebox or fifty-gallon barrel of who-knew-what, humping out of the leaf-covered soil or draped in vines.

The junk was an asset in several ways. It kept people away, especially these upper-income neighbors: parents who wouldn't stoop to strolling in a landfill, spoiled kids who didn't wander around after school but were hustled off to dance lessons and soccer practice. Almost as important, the rusting relics aided the conditioning process by creating all kinds of nooks and crannies, good denning for rabbits, raccoons, mice, grouse. Something to arouse the dogs' killing urges.

The dogs you could take out here fairly early on, because in the unlikely event someone saw you, you and your mutt looked from a distance like a Hallmark card or something out of
Field & Stream.

Thursday evening of a pleasant if too hot late-May day. The puppeteer held Johnny's leash in one hand. Over one shoulder he carried a small backpack full of supplies: an army-surplus folding spade, a child's garden rake with a sawed-off handle, meat tidbits for rewards, a heavy steel-cable tether designed for large livestock. And the radio sending unit. He had rigged the retriever with two sets of implants that delivered an electrical current to parts of the dog's brain. One set simply caused pain; the other hyperstimulated the hippocampus, site of the rage and fear reflexes so essential to conditioning. One of Mr. Smith's concerns had been that the wires and receiving unit on Johnny's bald skull would be rather visible, and they could get snagged on branches. So he'd bought a sweater that matched the dog's fur color and had cut off and customized one of its sleeves. It ended up as a pullover cap that covered Johnny's neck and head, with holes for eyes and ears, camouflaging the shaved dome and snugging the electronic components against the skull. In the dimming light, from any kind of distance, no one would see anything but a man and man's best friend, out for a woodland romp. The dog was on a leash now, but for the workout he planned, the direct neural stimulus would be his means of control. If it worked as expected, the technology would constitute an exciting advancement in animal conditioning. The control unit was a little box adapted from a radio-controlled toy car. Thank you, Radio Shack.

Right now, he was putting off the exercises and just savoring the evening. A moment of comparative serenity, time to ponder. Later tonight, with his human subject, he planned a lecture on control, on resistance, on protest, on the necessity and urgency of what they were doing together. It was important to tailor the speech to each individual, according to what he knew of the subject's past, beliefs, values, habits, et cetera. That made it much more effective. So the variant of the lecture he was developing now made use of the current subject's liberal political values. The subject was a defender of free speech and agreed with the Supreme Court that burning the American flag was a legitimate, protected form of expression—protest speech. Mr. Smith didn't agree, but he was certainly willing to use the analogy if it allied the subject's values with the project at hand. And, in fact, it was a very close analogy.

"You and I are conducting an act of protest," he rehearsed out loud. Johnny's eyes rolled up to look at him nervously. "We are protesting the actions of our government, the most nightmarish, despotic acts ever committed by any government or society. Yes, it seems ironic—some would even say hypocritical—that to protest killing and degradation and oppression, our protest takes the form of killing and degrading and controlling innocent people. Yes, these are heinous acts that should be reviled. But you must think of it as you do desecrating the American flag. It's an extreme form of protest, an outrage against common sensibilities, that is
justified by the extremity of
the wrongs it protests. That
is what we are engaged in.
That
is the mission you are helping to carry out. Yes, you are being asked to make a great sacrifice—
as am I!
But it is a sacrifice we
must
make if we are going to change the course of events—which it is our lot, our
duty,
our
destiny
to do!"

His voice rose as he continued, and Johnny looked up at him with eyes bright yet somehow flat, something a little dead" about them. The tremor in the dog's right rear leg picked up. Smart dog, knew his master's moods already. Mr. Smith found himself breathing hard, not from the walk but from the anger that flared as he thought about the topic. The vein in his neck bulged against his shirt collar, the skin between his shoulder blades began to perspire. There was so much to tell, so much to protest. If he didn't watch himself, he could go on and on. Not good. You had to boil it down to something short and simple that the subject would easily remember. A neurolinguistic program easily activated by the appropriate stimuli.

So he brought his breathing under control and tried again: "We
must
make this ultimate sacrifice because nothing less will capture the attention of our violence-saturated, apathetic nation."

Better, but it still sounded a little overblown, eighteenth-century.
Fuck it,
he thought.
There's time, focus on the task at hand.
But just thinking about it had spoiled his mood.

They were deep in the center of the old junkyard now, where some of the older trees still stood, swarmed with kudzu that made leafy tents around their bases. A row of rusted-out fifty-gallon drums formed a low wall, their contents long leached into the soil but still giving the area a stale stink, caustic soda maybe. Johnny shied at the dark leaf shadows or maybe the chemical smell. That was good: Put him on edge, get those old fight-or-flight chemicals perking.

Mr. Smith paused to scan the evening woods. Stop, look, and listen. In Vietnam, you learned to scout the landscape, and you did it right or you died. But nothing moved nearby except the gently swaying treetops. A couple of lawn mowers droned somewhere in the downhill development, and a distant car horn honked amid the universal faint hiss and roar of the highway, but that was it. Time to get to work.

"Okay, fella," he told the dog. "Okay, Johnny boy. Come on." Obviously the retriever had learned the nuance of this tone of voice, the bogus friendliness that signaled the beginning of a session, because his hindquarters began to quiver. Sometimes test subjects would snap at this stage, you had to be especially careful during the first session outdoors. So Mr. Smith kept a wary eye on Johnny as he put down the pack and took out the cable tether. He clipped one end to the dog's harness and looped the other through a flange of iron on a half-buried hay rake. Only when Johnny was secure did he unclip the leather leash.

He stood back and rummaged in the pack until he found the plastic bag of steak chunks. He took out one, offered it. Led by his nose, Johnny came forward, and Mr. Smith backed away until the cable drew up taut. Johnny tugged hard at the line but couldn't go any farther. You didn't want to make mistakes about the range; no, sir, you did not. Mr. Smith tossed Johnny the meat and the dog snapped it out of the air.

Standing just beyond the arc of the cable, Mr. Smith took out the radio control unit and thumbed the switch. A bead of red light came on. Mr. Smith showed Johnny the fierce little crimson eye, and sure enough the dog began to growl and shake all over. Less than a week of lab work with the setup and this boy had the routine down pat! Johnny was obviously rarin' to go.

"Good boy," Mr. Smith said sourly.

The left-right toggle was rigged to activate one set of implanted wires that would give the dog an adjustable dose of pain. The forward-back toggle fed a variable current into the hippocampus, directly activating the fight-flight reflex. Used independently, the two could act as a kind of experirnental control, allowing you to differentially test the conditioning value of each. Or you could use them together and really drive the poor sumbitch wild.

Mr. Smith had looked forward to a little more serenity this evening, at least a longer pretense of the man-and-his-dog thing, but working on his lecture and recalling all the outrages and indignities and horrors had put him out of sorts. Johnny was, after all, a pain in the ass, rambunctious and disobedient, especially compared to the German shepherd. Maybe he'd start with the pain.

He thumbed the left-right toggle, just a little off dead center, and Johnny's eyes seemed to bulge. The dog made a noise like a hinge that needed oiling and rotated his head robotically, as if working a kink out of his neck.

"You look stupid in that getup, Johnny," Mr. Smith said. "What're you gonna do about it, you little fuck?" And he thumbed the toggle over another few degrees.

Half an hour later it was getting too dark to see well. Time to head back to the house. The dirt around the rusted hay rake was clawed up in a semicircle, dug deep from Johnny's lunges, his straining at the tether. Johnny had shit himself a couple of times during the double-stimulus periods and would need to get hosed down, but otherwise this had gone great. During the short-range tests, the dog had practically broken his neck a dozen times, trying to get at Mr. Smith when the direct hippocampal stimulus had been activated, and he'd lapsed easily into quiescence when the stimulus was removed. He had shown an amazing ability to learn commands in minimal time when subjected to electronically reinforced pain-reward conditioning. Then, when Mr. Smith had let him off the tether to sniff around and roam, the controls had worked just fine at a distance. He could drop Johnny into the dirt or turn him into a man-eater from a hundred yards away. Mr. Smith would have been delighted if he wasn't so preoccupied with emerging complications.

Before leaving the circle of vine-tented trees, he took out the spade and the rake. He shoveled and raked the soil and leaves until there was no trace of Johnny's exertions. When he was done, he scanned the landscape carefully. Only one far-off lawn mower running now. A faint whiff of barbecue, family life going on all around, unknowing.

That thought made Mr. Smith angry again. All the things he was excluded from. The easy companionship of loved ones, the pleasant routines of normal life. Dinner on the deck, TV, carousing with the kids, bedtime stories, making love, the sweet sleep of the innocent. Forbidden. Denied. Forget about it.

"Let's go, Johnny," he said. The whites of Johnny's eyes flashed briefly as he heard the tone of voice. Mr. Smith gave the leash a yank and they started home. Back to reality.

Calm down,
Mr. Smith commanded himself.
The direct-neural-stimulus
experiment is goingflamingly well, couldn't be better.
The thought gave him a moment's pleasure, but then it occurred to him that, yes, indeed, it was good work, the kind of thing that if you didn't have to live in the twilight world, if you'd had a real laboratory, if you'd been able to publish and speak at conferences, you'd have made terrific progress in all these years and you would have gotten all kinds of recognition, research contracts, honors, university chairs, a fucking Nobel Prize.

All denied him. All impossible.

Besides which, there were the other problems. Number Three was turning out to be a huge problem. Three was like a snowball rolling out of control, gathering size and speed, bearing down on Mr. Smith's operations. He should have
known
Three would be a fuckup. A mistake in so many ways. Because of Three, he'd have to attend to some serious damage control, some countermeasures, and that always meant increased risks. Dr. Rebecca Ingalls was at the center of it again. And her hotshot cowboy-cop new boyfriend, Detective Morgan Ford.

For a moment his mood brightened. Thank God he'd had the foresight to put the listening devices in her apartment and could more or less keep up with where they were going, what they were thinking. And what an incredible stroke of luck that she had dared to pair up, even after her first relationship disaster, with another principal investigator on the case! What were the odds? It was a sign, a gesture of favor from fate, that his work would and should continue.

But they were both too smart. They were getting too close, prematurely. Each in his or her own inimitable little way, they had managed to grab threads that could unravel the whole show. And there was still a lot to be done, the protest hadn't attained the magnitude that it needed. It was time to give serious thought to doing something about Number Three and about putting major obstacles in the way of the two lovebirds. Dampen their enthusiasm in a big way.

The problem with damage control was that it was risky. It meant conducting missions away from your preferred turf. It meant showing too much of your hand, too much about your level of knowledge or organization. It meant
losing
control, surrendering control to others or risking it to the whims of fate. The first such mission had almost upset his apple cart big time.
Son. Of A. Bitch.