The Dinosaur Chronicles (5 page)

“I tried to meet you in Paris, you know.”

“I suspected as much. I stayed out of your way.”

“The Algerians lost ten thousand killed and a third of their land.”

“So? They fought the Lybians three years later and got most of it back.”

The balcony floor began to undulate, and Zetternick shifted his cane. He said, “All, of course, just a gambit to advance your career.”

“I follow tradition! My family has a long history in politics!”

“The Unspoken Advisor to Napoleon,” Zetternick recounted. “The Mysterious Ambassador at Fort Sumter. The several-greats uncle of yours at the court of old Franz Joseph—”

Zetternick expected a reaction, sooner or later. When it came, it still caught him off guard.

Gauchard moved left, then feinted right. Zetternick struggled to match the maneuver, but he felt himself spun around, with Gauchard’s left hand over his mouth and the Frenchman’s right hand clamped firmly on his right forearm.

“Well, old man,” Gauchard gloated in a low but satisfied voice, “even pseudrenalin can’t quite make up for the inertia of hundred-year-old bones. Yes, I saw you take several pills downstairs, and the side-effects of pseudrenalin abuse are quite apparent, if one knows what to look for.”

Zetternick felt himself being dragged to the edge of the balcony.

“An old man tries for one last triumph and laces his nerves with drennies,” Gauchard went on. “He sets up a tete-a-tete with Minister Ben-Aban. He shows him the wonderful view from the second-floor balcony. But the old man, teetering under the influence of stimulants, falls over the railing. Quite understandable. And the autopsy will, of course, show evidence of the drug.”

Zetternick’s vision swam freely now; the dark sky and the stone railing of the balcony smeared like coffee swallowing cream. He fought to lift his cane with his one free hand. The stick came up jerkily; his wrist throbbed with pain, and when he finally managed to bring the cane erect, the rubber-tipped end bobbed against his forehead.

Zetternick felt the cold of the railing against his thigh. Gauchard spat, “Trying to hit me with your cane? You can hardly lift the thing. I’ll say this for you, Zetternick; you don’t give up.”

Zetternick let the cane slide off his face and rest on his right shoulder. The struggle against Gauchard—if his miserable efforts could even be called a struggle—had stiffened his muscles and he hardly had any control over his extremities. But now he twitched each finger of his left hand, which still gripped the crook of the cane.

Gauchard pressed him over the railing, and Zetternick twitched frantically. Then, with the calm efficiency of an unintelligent mechanism, a relay clicked and a soft hiss passed by Zetternick’s right ear.

Gauchard screamed. Or, he tried to scream, because the scream was severed even as his throat expelled the call.

Gauchard fell back, releasing Zetternick. Zetternick struck the railing, doubled over and leaned far out into space. Arms numb from the struggle, Zetternick hung there, like a hinge over a fulcrum, ready to fall to his death. A primitive part of his mind, a part assigned to the self-preservation of the organism, somehow told his knees to buckle, and gravity slowly dragged him back from the precipice.

Zetternick gasped for breath. He turned his head and tried to focus on Gauchard. The large man had fallen against the building wall. Clutching his throat, he glared at Zetternick with mixed hatred and surprise.

“Shaking your hand, M. Gauchard,” Zetternick rasped, “was never my ‘Plan A.’ This,” he said, pointing to the cane now fallen to the balcony floor, “was always my intention. Neurotoxin. From a tropical fish that hasn’t been seen in decades. The cane with its deadly aerosol is a weapon I retained from an adventure of many years ago.”

Gauchard’s eyes widened.

“It will look like heart failure, Gauchard. No autopsy will find the toxin. The crest of your career has met a sea wall.”

Gauchard lurched forward. Zetternick tried to dodge the attack. Gauchard, staggering on both knees, grabbed Zetternick on his second try and slammed his right hand into the hand of his nemesis.

Zetternick cried. It wasn’t a loud cry—more the mewing of a century-old larynx. But as his hand met Gauchard’s, the fire of pure evil found every nerve of his fingers and burned its way up his arm and into his mind. The darkness of the night sky was swallowed by a blackness that defied color; the soft music from the first floor of the old Victorian mansion was replaced by screams of madness.

Soon, the blackness crumbled into fragments of light and dark, fragments that twisted and rippled until they merged into images stark with the hatred of the ages. He saw men with spears raiding an unnamed, forgotten village. He saw men with rifles dying in the Belleau Wood. He saw the sacking of Troy, the bombing of Dresden. He saw mothers and their children hacked to death by adherents of the One True Religion.

The visions changed again, and he saw men tortured for what they knew, or for what their captors suspected they knew.

He saw the ovens in Poland, the radiation wards after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the bloodied corpses irrigating the fields of the Khmer Rouge.

Zetternick knew he would die, and would gladly have died a thousand times to keep Gauchard from throwing the world into flames. Yet the images faded, and when Zetternick looked again, he found himself scraping his right hand against the stone railing, leaving a long black streak with every stroke. He felt sick and he felt violated, and he scraped until his fingers tingled.

Zetternick found the strength to pick up his cane and rise to his feet. Ben-Aban was still staring into the night, and Gauchard lay dead on the balcony floor.

In the chandeliered hall, Zetternick had noted Ben-Aban’s distanced attention—his introspection. Such men were often candidates for hypnosis, and Ben-Aban had been no different.

Zetternick had turned the Kazakh minister into bait.

Zetternick spoke to him now, changing the way Ben-Aban would remember the evening: Yes, Ben-Aban had come to the balcony with Zetternick. But Zetternick had soon left, and Gauchard had arrived later looking for the minister. The two had talked, and Ben-Aban had fallen asleep.

Zetternick paused. The hypnosis, combined with his innate talents, should hold—at least for several days. If Ben-Aban did ever remember what really happened, he would be trapped by the content of his initial statements.

And when Ben-Aban awakened, he would find Gauchard dead. The inevitable autopsy would show heart failure—death from natural causes.

Zetternick put his hand on Ben-Aban’s shoulder. “M. Minister, you will count back slowly from two thousand. When you reach zero, you will awaken and resume your life. You will forget that I have ever made any suggestions to you, but you will remember the suggestions as if they had happened. Do you understand?”

Ben-Aban nodded.

“Commence counting.”

“Two thousand ... one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine ...”

Unless Nojon became worried enough to chase after Gauchard, the scheme would work. It should take Ben-Aban at least half an hour to reach zero. And that, Zetternick hoped, would be enough.

Zetternick swallowed his final pill. He descended to the first floor and, despite the pain in his right hand, completed a round of good-byes. Ten minutes later he sat in the back seat of the car that had brought him.

The chauffeuse turned and asked, “Did it go well, Excellency?”

Zetternick smiled. “There is a chance, Estelle.”

The gray-haired woman had been his employee for three decades. He had few secrets from her. She said, “And now to the hospital?”

Zetternick shook his head. “No. Let’s go home.”

“Home?”

Zetternick knew the efforts of the evening would kill him, just as soon as the pseudrenalin started crashing. He said, “An old man dying in a hospital is demeaning. A retired diplomat dying in his sleep, in his own bed, after a last appearance such as tonight’s—well, that’s a much better story, and it will help to counterbalance the coverage of Gauchard’s death.”

The chauffeuse turned her head and pulled the car into the street. She had not quite been able to hide the tears from old Zetternick.

Afterword

“The Men with the Power” first appeared in the Spring 1999 issue of
Maelstrom Speculative Fiction
(issue #4), as “Touch,” as by T. Rex.
MSF
was a U.S. semiprozine that ran for eight issues from Summer 1998 to October 2001. Editor David L. Felts had a good ear for entertaining prose, and his selections for
MSF
were among the best the small press of that era had to offer.

Felts and I even discussed the possibility of a sequel to “The Men with the Power.” It would not be hard to imagine, for example, that Zetternick’s encounter with Gauchard had recharged the old man, and that he would, after all, wake up that following morning. What was lacking was a challenge worthy of Zetternick’s abilities. This, of course, is the problem for all sequels, be they written or motion picture. If your hero or heroine saves the world in their debut, you can’t have them come back to rescue a lost puppy.

But if I ever do come up with another acceptable crisis for ol’ Z, you can trust that I’ll drag the old gargoyle into it. And tell the world about it.

Gillespie pulled the yellow folder from the pocket on the outside of the door. There, beside the
Mnemonic Alternatives
logo on the flap, the patient’s name glowered up at him.

Harbaugh, John T., Master Sergeant, USIF.

Gillespie winced. He knew what Harbaugh wanted, and it was something neither Gillespie nor anyone else on the planet could give the man.

Still, Gillespie told himself, maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe he just had a cold. A nice fat upper respiratory infection. Chicken soup and Rx-level antihistamines.

He could work with that. One thing he
couldn’t
do was let Harbaugh stew in an examining room all day.

Gillespie pulled back his shoulders, put on a cheerful mask and opened the door.

The room, like others in the gleaming new hospital, was furnished like a den or a living room. While it did have the obligatory examining table, the emphasis lay on the plush patient’s chair and the faux mahogany doctor’s desk and the overly cheerful plants that hadn’t yet been overwatered.

Outlined against the light of a long, sealed window, a cushioned high-back chair shaded a tall, muscular man.

Gillespie blinked against the brightness and approached. “Sergeant,” he said. “Nice seeing you again.” Gillespie tapped a shrinking reservoir of false sincerity and added, “You’re looking well.”

He extended a white-coated arm.

The man in the chair unfolded a lanky frame. As he rose, his features sharpened in the morning light. With dark hair and firm, set lips, the warrior in the man was unmistakable. But his eyes, now framed by encroaching worry lines, stared at Gillespie with an intensity the doctor found disturbing.

With just a hint of hesitation, the soldier shook the offered hand.

Gillespie kept his composure and motioned Harbaugh back into the chair. Gillespie himself sat on the edge of the desk. He forced out the question. “What brings you back to us?”

Harbaugh looked past Gillespie, to the coat rack in the corner, to the wastebasket under the examining bench, to the floral prints that decorated the room’s aseptic walls.

Gillespie folded his hands and waited.

At length Harbaugh said, “I’m still having a hard time. Things were good at first, after the operation. Good for weeks. But now I’m tense, nervous. Can’t concentrate ...” His voice wavered in the telling, making his disclosure somehow an apology, or the mutterings of a whiner, a weakling. He said, “My hands shake. I bump into things. Drop things. My muscles ache. And sometimes, the world doesn’t seem real anymore. Everything I look at, I look at and wonder, ‘Is that really there, or am I making it all up?’ And at night—at night,” Harbaugh croaked, “I wake up. From dreams that aren’t exactly nightmares, but dreams that keep me from falling asleep again.” Harbaugh leaned back the in chair and closed his eyes. “God, I’m tired.”

Gillespie had heard it before, but he asked it again. “Describe the dreams. If you can.”

Harbaugh leaned forward. “I dream about the village—about going in, about coming back out, and even though I can’t recall what went on in the village, each night I get ...
closer
.”

Gillespie sighed. “That’s not possible. Those memories are no longer there.”

“Then why—”

“‘Concatenation.’ It’s a term our psychologists have come up with to describe this. Your mind’s trying to span a gap in your history. In some patients with trauma-induced partial amnesia, we find similar gap-filling.”

The sergeant’s voice dried. “That gap, Doctor, is ruining my nights, destroying my days.” Harbaugh trembled then, something the dark of the chair could not conceal, and he squeezed the armrests, draining the color from his hands. “I can’t sleep,” he said. “I can’t work. I keep thinking about it,
all day long.
Things were fine right after the treatment, but now my mind’s so focused on what’s lost ...” Harbaugh bit his lip. “As bad as the memories must have been,” he said, looking Gillespie in the eyes,
“I want them back.”
 

Gillespie removed his glasses and nervously polished the lenses with his tie. “Do you remember how it was, Sergeant? Before the treatment? Do you remember the depression, the drugs, the alcohol? Your wife nearly divorced you. How is she, by the way?” Gillespie kicked himself mentally for bringing Harbaugh’s wife into the argument. It was underhanded and unfair, but necessary.

Harbaugh choked out a laugh. “She’s fine. She’s happy. I don’t drink or take pills or beat on her any more. But
I’m
not fine. And I don’t know long it’ll be before I go
back
to the drink, the drugs, and beating on her.”

“Ghosting, Sergeant,” Gillespie said. “Your brain’s littered with signposts, little things that point to the memory of what your troop found in that village—and what they had to do about it—but the memory’s no longer there. These are signposts without destinations.”