Total Recall (10 page)

He signaled for everyone but Helm to continue on the same level. “Go, go, go,” he bellowed, and to Helm: “You, come with me.” They dashed down the stairs after Quaid.

Quaid reached the bottom of the stairs and looked warily around. No goons. He ran forward, saw an escalator flowing up, and headed for it. Still no goons. But he didn’t trust this. At any moment they would come charging around a corner, guns blazing. Determined to take him out—because he dreamed of Mars? No, because he wasn’t who he thought he was.

None of this seemed to make much sense. He needed time to work it out, to explore every last corner of his fragmented memory and pull out anything that was there. Maybe he’d discover he was a criminal who—but no, they wouldn’t have given a criminal a nice conapt, a decent job, and a woman like Lori. Unless they were keeping him on ice until the time came to testify at a big trial. Yes, that just might make sense. They didn’t want him remembering prematurely, because he might go back to his pals instead of testifying against them.That would explain why Lori, who as it turned out hadn’t cared for him at all, had been so actively friendly. It had been her job to keep his mind occupied. Or his pecker. Same thing, they had figured. They might have been right, but for his Mars dream-girl.

He was on the escalator now, riding the stairs up. He glanced behind, seeing nothing but routine citizens. Where were the goons? They should be here by now!

He glanced forward—and there they were! Four agents arriving at the top landing, looking below. He tried to shrink down, hiding amidst the commuters, but he was too big to manage it. His only hope was that they wouldn’t see him before he got close enough to—

They were peering down, checking the whole region. THEY SAW HIM!

There was no pause, no call for surrender. They simply started shooting.

Quaid feinted to the side. An unlucky commuter caught a door-piercing bullet in the head. He fell backward into Quaid. His face was gone.

There was screaming as the others realized what was happening. All the commuters crouched on the stairs, trying to get out of the line of fire. That left Quaid exposed, the only one standing.

He couldn’t duck down like the rest; they’d riddle him in seconds, now that they had him spotted. Indeed, his other self had no intention of allowing it. He was already in motion, mounting the escalator, using the faceless body as a shield. His gun was in his hands, firing up at his enemies. One, two, three, four—and the four goons went down in order, each holed by a single bullet.

Quaid didn’t know who his other self was, but he was beginning to like him. That man was a survivor!

He was safe now, for the moment. He could get out of the subway station and—

A bullet zinged by his ear. From behind! He twisted to look back. There were Richter and Helm running up to the escalator, firing as they went. Now they were on it, climbing over the prostrate commuters, still firing. If they had paused to take proper aim, Quaid would have been dead before he knew they were there.

Quaid heaved up the corpse he had been using as a shield, turned, and hurled it down at the two agents, bowling them over. Then he charged the rest of the way up the stairs. He reached the landing and ran down the hall.

He had maybe a ten-second lead if those were the only ones on his tail. Where could he go? On up and out to the street? There might be more goons posted at the exit. If he made it, he’d still be right in the area; they’d be casting around for him in cars and maybe aircraft. He couldn’t go back to his conapt; Lori would report him immediately, if she didn’t shoot him first.

That left the subway trains. They went all over the city and to outlying points, making connections everywhere. The agents couldn’t cover every exit in the entire subway system! So if he could make it onto a train without them following, his ten-second lead should become a ten-minute lead, and he could be out of the city before they had much notion where he was.

His body already knew this. It was pounding down the passage, heading for another train. He tucked his gun into his pants; he was now inside the security area, so it wasn’t setting off any more alarms.

He came to the landing where there was a train. The last commuters were just squeezing on. He sprinted along the platform, which was mercifully clear at the moment, and for the train.

The last commuter boarded. The departure signal sounded. The door closed.

Quaid made a flying leap and squeezed onto a car at the last second, beating the closing doors by a hair. He had made it! He stumbled, trying to avoid bumping into the other passengers. He was doubled over, but managed to keep his feet.

Bullets shattered the glass of the door just above him and plowed the far side. Richter and Helm had arrived! Had he been standing upright—

“Get down!” he shouted at the other passengers, knowing what was coming.

The train started moving. A series of windows shattered. The passengers decided to take his advice. They ducked down as well as they were able.

The train picked up speed. Quaid peered out a window-hole. He saw Richter and Helm watching, disgusted, as the train left the station. He had beaten them—for now.

He turned to find the other passengers staring at him. He realized that he was covered with blood from the corpse he had used as a shield. Well, he was not about to offer them any explanation. The less they knew about him, the better for him—and them. Richter seemed to have no compunctions about his methods; if he thought any other person knew where Quaid was, he would force that person to talk at gunpoint—and then maybe shoot him anyway.

He avoided their glances and oriented instead on the commercial on the nearest screen. It was a huckster, standing in front of a spaceship. “Don’t settle for pale memories! Don’t settle for fake implants! Experience space travel the old-fashioned way on a real-life holiday you can afford.”

The travel agency’s answer to Rekall! Quaid shook his head and sighed. He wished he could take them up on it. Because one thing that hadn’t changed, in this almost-complete demolition of his life-style, was his fascination with Mars. He still wanted to go there, one way or another, and to find that brunette, if she existed.

Did
she exist? All he could do was hope that she did. His tangible life with Lori had become illusion; maybe his dream of the other woman could become real.

CHAPTER  11
Help

R
ichter and Helm strode angrily out of the station and stepped through the rain to their car. Richter was fuming. They had lost the quarry after all, and then gotten nabbed by the subway security men because their guns had set off the alarms again. They had had to show their IDs to get out of it. That would look bad on the records. Not to mention the four additional lower-echelon agents lost. That made eight total, plus a civilian or two. What a smell that would make for all concerned! The first takeout had been bungled by Harry, obviously a duffer who shouldn’t have been assigned in the first place. But this time it was Richter himself, and he would get no credit for just about succeeding. “Just about” was just about good enough for a demotion!

He hated the man who thought he was Douglas Quaid. He had never liked him. There was something about him he didn’t trust, but Cohaagen just couldn’t see it. He’d promoted the sonovabitch, for Christ’s sake! Richter snorted with disgust.

But he hadn’t started hating the bastard until Lori had been assigned to play the role of his “wife.” After all his Beauty and the Beast jokes, that had been almost too much to bear. And now that the man had eluded and humiliated him, that hate had festered into something white hot and barely controllable. He would see the man’s brains splattered across the landscape before he was done, and it still wouldn’t be enough. If he was lucky, maybe he’d get the chance to see the man sweat before he died.

They climbed into the car. Helm took the driver’s seat, Richter the passenger seat, where the equipment was. The rain on their clothing quickly steeped the interior with its pollution, contributing to his foul mood.

The dashboard was filled with elaborate tracking devices, electronic maps, and communications equipment. Richter furiously turned knobs and punched buttons, trying to get a reading on the quarry. Damn it, the tracking was supposed to be continuous; what was fuzzing it? Was the equipment glitching? Guess who’d get the blame if a bad tracker let him down! He knew Cohaagen didn’t see eye-to-eye with him on this procedure, and if the man got a pretext to take him off the case—

The radio came to life. “Six beta nine, we have a transmission from Mr. Cohaagen.”

Richter looked at Helm and groaned. Think of the devil!

But he couldn’t avoid it. “This is Richter. Patch it through.” He wiped the rain from his face and smoothed his hair, though it didn’t do much good. Modern science was wonderful, but at the moment he wished they hadn’t invented a way to set aside the limitation of lightspeed, making virtually instant communication between planets possible. Then Cohaagen would not be able to second-guess him on this mission, while a chase was in progress.

The video monitor lighted, flickering, then showing a grainy image of Cohaagen’s face. The man was neither as handsome nor as well spoken as he was on broadcast interviews, no surprise. He fixed on Richter, scowling. “What the fuck are you doing, Richter?”

Richter put on an ingratiating smile he knew fooled no one; it wasn’t meant to. “Trying to neutralize a traitor, sir.”
And that’s the correct term! Chew on that, sir!

Cohaagen’s scowl expanded into open anger. “If I wanted him dead, I wouldn’t have dumped him on Earth!”

Richter smoothed out his own features, playing the obsequious underling, again without any concern for belief. “We can’t let him run around, Mr. Cohaagen. He knows too much.”

“Lori says he can’t remember jack shit.”

“That’s now,” said Richter. “In an hour, he could have total recall.”

“Listen to me, Richter.” There was static on the line, but not enough to blot out Cohaagen’s words. “I want Quaid delivered
alive
for re-implantation. Have you got that? I want him back in place with Lori.”

Over my dead body, Richter thought. It was all he could do to keep himself from tearing the video monitor out of the dashboard and hurling it from the car.

“Did you hear me?” Cohaagen demanded. Richter reached over and twisted a dial, causing the reception to break up. It would be impossible to tell from the other end what had caused the disruption.

“What was that, sir? I couldn’t hear you.”

Cohaagen glared. “I said xtr + b . . . lsw . . . rojwf . . .”

Richter intensified the interference, deliberately preventing himself from hearing Cohaagen’s orders. Helm gazed impassively out the windshield into the rain, affecting not to be aware of anything. He didn’t like having the quarry slip the noose any better than Richter did.

“Hello?” Richter said. “We’ve got sunspots. I’m switching to a different frequency.” How glad he was that such transmissions were unreliable when anything happened on the solar scale!

A blinking red dot appeared on the console tracking device. Helm nudged Richter, and Richter nodded. They had locked in on their man.

“Mr. Cohaagen, are you there?” Richter continued. “Hello? Hello?” So polite, with a touch of perplexity: the recording would show that he had no idea that his orders had changed.

With a contemptuous twist of the dial, Richter ended the transmission. Cohaagen wouldn’t be able to prove anything; interplanetary signals were notorious for interference. A price was paid for violating light-speed. There had been just enough genuine interference to cover his tracks.

Richter allowed himself a small, grim smile. He turned to Helm. “Fuckin’ asshole. He shoulda killed Quaid when he had the chance,” he said. Now he, Richter, would do it instead, with pleasure. They had locked on to the quarry, and no sunspots, real or fake, would interfere.

Helm gunned the car into traffic, splashing water on commuters walking out of the subway station. Their protests carried faintly, music to Richter’s ears. He put a hand up over his shoulder and hoisted one finger, signaling them, though he knew they couldn’t see inside the car. The gesture gave him satisfaction anyway. Too bad he couldn’t show the same signal of respect to Cohaagen.

Quaid had decided not to go too far. They would be expecting him to flee the city, so would be racing to cut off the exit points. Therefore he remained close—but not too close. His alternate self had deserted him; it manifested only when immediate, effective action was required, such as killing several men in several seconds. He was on his own, and that satisfied him for now.

He got off the train a few stops down and went into a lavatory. He looked a mess, all right! He slopped water across his face and hands and dabbed at the worst of the stains on his shirt, though not much could be done about that. He had a bright idea, squatted, scraped his fingers along the floor near the wall, and got a good load of dirt on them. He rubbed this into the shirt, covering the remaining bloodstains. Now he looked mostly filthy, like a tramp, not like a refugee from a slaughterhouse. It would have to do. He combed his hair back and assumed an expression of dullness, as if he were just a tired laborer returning from a hard day in the sewer.