Puppets (42 page)

And Mo thought,
Jesus. Better not make any mistakes, Biedermann.
Not one. Or you'll have to deal with that.

52

"
N
OW," BIEDERMANN SAID, "we've got a lot of ground to cover. So don't go away. I'll be right back." He leapt up, came quickly over, checked Mo's handcuffs again, snugged the bands hard. When he was satisfied, he jogged off in the direction of the front door, up the four steps, and into the lobby area.

Mo bent to inspect the underside of the ball return. Too dark to see much. The cuffs were nylon bands, three eighths of an inch wide, about a sixteenth of an inch thick. Easy to cut with the right tool, but with a tensile strength of 375 pounds, breaking them would require more force than even the biggest prison-muscled con could exert. Each of Mo's hands had about eight inches of movement. He gave a couple of powerful jerks to test the steel flange. Nothing budged.

Rachel was moaning, her head hanging toward the table.

"Rache, it's going to be okay," Rebecca whispered. "Just hang on. Hang on.", Mo said, "How're your hands, Rebecca? Any movement at all?"

From where he sat on the floor, Mo could see that her wrists were tied hard against the foot-thick steel pedestal. She worked at them for a moment, gave up.

"No," she said. "But listen—"

But Biedermann was coming back, springing down the steps, carrying a big duffel bag. He dropped it halfway between the occupied booths, went to check the people at lane three, came back.

"Doors locked," Biedermann said, "sign says
Closed,
nothing happening in the parking lot. Answering machine at the desk turned on. I think we're ready to go."

"Erik, we know who you are," Rebecca said. "We know about the psych projects, we know you manufactured killers during the Vietnam War. That you programmed Ronald Parker and Dennis Radcliff to do the puppet murders. We don't know exactly why, or what you want. I know you've got a statement to make, but—"

"But you don't know what it is. Well, it's simple. It's that no one should do these things to other human beings. It's that governments shouldn't make people into monsters." He turned toward lane three and raised his voice. "I worked with a special branch of Army Intelligence from 1964 to 1973. My job was to destroy the part of people that made them human. To turn men into killing machines. I had primary responsibility for making fourteen of them. And I was only one of half a dozen doing that job."

Biedermann's voice had risen, affronted, appalled. Now he stared over toward lane three as if expecting more of a response. "Do you give a shit? Does it matter to you?, Well, you're gonna give a shit tonight! You're gonna know exactly what it means."

When nobody said anything, he charged down there, leaned into the half-circle of frightened faces. A moment later, a wrenching scream echoed in the room. It was a man's voice that peaked high and ended in a guttural, choking noise. Mo could see one of the heads at the far booth bobbing and bucking. Another scream rose and subsided, and then there was just the sound of weeping.

Mo tried sawing the handcuffs against the flange, but it was too smooth, no abrasion. He glanced over at Rebecca. Beneath the table, he could see that her hand had found Rachel's hand and was caressing it with her fingers. She was also doing something funny with her hips, lifting slightly and arching them forward and back against the seat.

Biedermann came back to the center of the alley and stooped to unzip the big duffel. He started taking out equipment and ordering it on the floor.

"When the program shut down, it left all kinds of lingering problems. All these guys with their circuits screwed up. We'd operated on their brains, we'd severed the little wires that gave them the nice feelings most people take for granted. We'd conditioned them to take orders absolutely and to fear and hate things. What that really means is, I'll tell you, there are parts of your brain and mind that go way back. That still have the instincts of reptiles, the program to kill prey and rivals. You just have to let those monsters out of their little soft boxes in the brain. We've all got 'em, they're always right there, I fucking guarantee it." Biedermann's voice was smug yet grieving, choked with sorrow. "But our experimental subjects, our robots, they didn't work very well. They went fritzy five ways come Sunday. Oh, well—psychology is an inexact science. Right, Bee?"

She responded immediately. "And you're recapitulating these atrocities, even though you abhor them, because, what, you wanted the public to know?"

"Ah—dawn breaks over Marblehead! Yeah. To know and
to
experience revulsion.
Hey—anybody experiencing revulsion yet? If not, believe me, I'm gonna fix that." Still digging in the duffel.

Rebecca continued to move her lower body, that odd sideways sidle and forward slide. "And you wanted revenge. Because you felt controlled—they turned you into something you never wanted to become. Somebody deserved to pay, and you deserved some catharsis. But you also experienced something in your own childhood, didn't you? What they did to you fit right into the lifelong pattern. That's part of why you submitted to it in the first place, why it was easy for them to convince you to go along. Was it your father?"

Biedermann stopped, looked over to Mo. "God, she's good. So good. A good lay, too, huh, Mo? Sometimes when they've had a kid, they're not as tight, but this gal . . . Nice attitude about it, too. But that's right, Bee. You know, for moments there I almost thought we had a chance —you and me, maybe there was another way, a sweet,
normal
way out of it. But when you got me up close, you didn't like me so much, did you."

"Erik . . . " she began. Real sadness in her voice. But still the movement of her lower body.

"Oh, Bee. What chance was there I could be 'normal'?" A voice of misery. "I don't even know what that means. You gotta understand, they'd killed my fiancee, back in '71. They did surgery on my
life,
trying to cut out the parts of me that would rebel. But I always felt the strings on me, Thirty years, it always hurt, I always resisted."

"Which is why you chose the puppet motif," Mo said. "You wanted to re-create the injustice you experienced. To demonstrate how horrible it was."

Biedermann stopped his unpacking again to look across at him with shadowed eyes. "You guys are great together, you know that? Sharp as tacks. Bee, what Mo just said, remember to explain it to the press tomorrow. But, see, it didn't end there, when the program shut down. I felt bad about what I'd done. They'd ignored my protests, but they gave me a chance to help remedy it, to some small degree. I was given the
delightful
job of cleaning up the domestic messes back here. Because so many of them came home and started doing awful things. And I took that job. I even had to clean up some of the guys I'd made. You know, really, it wasn't a lot of fun. The only good thing about this was that by doing it I stayed above suspicion myself, I wouldn't get cleaned up myself. And by staying on the inside I was still on the grapevine, I could still hear things."

Biedermann had taken out a roll of plastic line and was pulling off lengths, clipping sections with a wire cutter, setting them aside.

"One of the items in this duffel is a manila envelope. It's got photos, it's got tapes, it's got lists of names and dates. It isn't all that much, but it details what I know of the program. It tells how I personally made a puppet to kill Senator George McGovern and gives information on four other domestic political hits. Sirhan Sirhan will be the easiest to prove was one of ours. I mean, Jesus, do you know what the
weight
of this does to you? The weight of knowing this?"

"You want us to take the materials to someone?" Mo asked.

"We're going to have a lot of media coverage here in"—

Biedermann checked his watch —"about twelve hours. The proverbial eyes of the world will be on this building, and the person who walks out of here will present this file to the newspeople. It won't be me, because I'll still be in here with whoever's still alive. I'll be in here with the TV and radio on, making sure the information gets circulated properly. If it doesn't, the body count goes up."

Rebecca sneezed explosively, and Biedermann glanced over at her. Mo did, too. From his position on the floor, he saw that a dark lump had appeared near her feet. Hard to see, the light was no good. It looked shapeless, a bag. A purse. It had been on the seat, and she'd been working it toward the edge with the movement of her hips.

Thirty feet away, Biedermann went back to unspooling line, clipping it, laying it out.

"Bee, you're not going to like this much, but you're gonna have to be the messenger. You've got the credibility, God knows Ford doesn't. Plus you're photogenic."

"Send Rachel out. Please."

"Um, no. No, unfortunately Rachel is central to this pageant. So is your boyfriend. They'll be used to help light a fire under your fanny, I need you to go out of here in high gear. The maternal-grief thing—that'll play persuasively on TV, right? It's awful, I know. But they're not walking out, and you're going to have to watch the—"

"Erik. Don't. You. Dare."
Rebecca's voice curdled Mo's blood.

"Don't tell me what to do, Bed
You
know
better than that! You're gonna go out of here as hurting as I am. You're gonna be
motivated.

To make sure the information gets play." Biedermann's voice was a snarl. He took out a small black case, opened it, sorted inside. From what Mo could see, it looked like a medical tool-kit. "Plus, you know, I fucking
hate
Ford. The fucking attitude, the bulldog thing, always weaseling in closer. You know, you can blame him for your situation right now. If he'd ever let go. If he'd ever take an order. He's the one who forced my hand. And I have a lot of resentment around control issues, don't I." Biedermann was starting to lose it, the feeling taking over. He took out a rechargeable electric drill, looked it over in the dim light, revved the motor.

"You're thinking I'm some kind of freak, huh, Mo? You think you're so different? Well, take a look at yourself. How you hate the strings on you. If you'd seen what I did, how far would you go to do something about it? How well would you do with that demon riding you? Think about it!"

That echoed uncomfortably in Mo's thoughts. He was glad that Rebecca didn't seem to be listening. She had her eyes shut and was taking deep, slow breaths. Beneath the table, her feet were moving, sliding the bag to the end of the booth. Yes—her purse. When Mo looked up again, he found her staring at him. Eye to eye in the dim light, no movement, just the message in the eyes.

This would need some covering noise, some distraction. Mo began talking: "So you were the cleanup man for over twenty years. Why did you start. . . this? Why didn't you just finish, get the last of them, close the book? After so many years?"

Biedermann reared up, eyes shut in mock ecstasy.
"Yes!
I knew you guys would do it! I knew you'd zero in on the fundamental question. Tell you why, fuckhead. Tell you about how your tax dollars are spent."

He stood up and went down to lane three, leaned on the table with both hands, his face lowered to the circle of heads.

"Why did I start making puppets myself, going freelance, in 1995? Twenty-two years after the original puppet-masters had seen the error of their ways? Any guesses? No? Well, you couldn't know. Because that's when I had to kill a guy, another cruise missile gone out of control. This was a serious screwball, not only hurting other people but doing this autosurgery routine, too? And after I kill him I see that he's only in his late twenties. Six months later,
whoops,
had to do another one, same age. So I made some discreet inquiries. And found out that the program
hadn't ended
in 1973. It had never closed down, just got put on the back burner until things cooled off!
It's
going on right now!"

Biedermann stopped and shined his flashlight into the faces of the people at the far booth and then across the room into Mo's eyes and Rebecca's. "Time for some normative conversational input," he said in a flat voice. "Time for some expression of outrage, people. Or are you too far gone? Too used to this shit?"

A paralyzed silence from the other booth.

"It's horrible, Erik!" Rebecca called. "But why did they—"

"Thank you. Why did they do such a terrible thing? Because with the Vietnam War over, we still had the Shining Path to kill, we had Commander Marcos and his Mayans, we needed agents in communal movements all over. And we had to have contingency plans for troublemakers here at home—radical environmentalists, socially conscious rock stars, that type. Manufactured assassins and provocateurs are so politically convenient, see. No overt action needed. And they'll do
anything,
they don't make moral judgments about assignments, they'll take on suicide missions, they'll kill our own people so the powers that be can pin the blame on someone else. If they're caught alive, they're impenetrable under questioning. For a decade or so it was still the commies, anything faintly Red, had to nip it in the bud. But then the truck bomb went off in the World Trade Center, and good morning America! Suddenly everybody's worried about the Middle East. Islamic fundamentalists, America-haters, Arab terrorists. Don't think it's a real concern? Fact is, our guys who know about this shit, all the Defense Department spooks, they all know it's only a matter of time before we see some major terror damage here in the U.S. But how do we fight these guys, how do we manage what they call an 'asymmetrical conflict'? The Arab fanatics, they're more than happy to die for their cause, plus they're decentralized, they're in enclaves and cells scattered all over the world. Can't hit them with our big weapons, we need a more precise, delicate tool. But our normal soldiers don't seem to have sufficient commitment or desperation just now, do they? So how do we get at all those nasty guys?"