Winston Chase and the Theta Factor Read online

  Bledsoe lowered his hand and gave her another jolt of energy. Her body stiffened again, legs kicking out, heels squeaking as they skittered across the floor. After a couple of seconds, he relaxed his grip, and she sagged on her seat. Only the agent’s rubber-gloved hands held her in place.

  Bledsoe leaned back and looked to the nurse, still fixedly busy in her corner attending to various medications.

  “Ms. Hendrix,” he called. Slowly, she looked up. “If you would be so kind, let’s resume.”

  The set of the nurse’s jaw and drag of her feet told Bledsoe all about her feelings, but he didn’t care. She was being well paid, and he had been assured that other motivations pertaining to her family were sufficient to guarantee her silence.

  Arriving at Claude’s bedside, the nurse checked his vital signs and IV levels once more. She leaned in close to his head and carefully examined where his brain met exposed bone near the incision around his skull.

  “He has some swelling,” she said.

  For an instant, Bledsoe thought she was going to poke her fingertip into the moist gray folds, but her surgical glove paused an inch from the surface. “You can see it here and here.” She indicated an area on the left side of Claude’s head. “This procedure isn’t normal. We should close up and give him time to recuperate, at least for a few days.”

  “And if we don’t?” Bledsoe asked.

  The nurse shook her head slightly. “I don’t know. I would expect hemorrhaging. Perhaps seizures.”

  “How long do we have?”

  Her lips pursed together even tighter, and she gave a small shrug.

  Bledsoe inhaled deeply and gave them all a warm smile. “Then I suppose we have no time to waste!”

  Resigned to the situation, Nurse Hendrix turned to the monitoring system and worked at its controls.

  Bledsoe studied Amanda’s face. Her attention was locked on to her husband, studying his eyes, every crease in his features, the bony set of his shoulders, and always the ghastly bareness of his exposed brain. Claude returned her gaze. She was obviously trying to tell him with her eyes that she wanted him to fight, that she still loved him and would endure anything on his behalf. Bledsoe could see that Claude did not have the same resolution. He would break.

  Good, he thought. That’s what I’m counting on.

  “Ready,” said the nurse.

  Without waiting for another word, Bledsoe fired more energy into Amanda’s leg.

  Amanda’s mouth and eyes went wide, and her and body went rigid. A scream began in her throat and just as quickly died as the muscles in her neck seized up. Her legs spasmed, and the rubber of her shoe soles squeaked in short, staccato bursts across the tile floor. The agent’s gloved hands kept her pinned to the chair. Amanda’s eyes rolled back in her head, and a gurgling sound bubbled in her throat.

  “Devlin!” cried Claude. “You’re going to kill her!”

  Without easing up the on the pressure, Bledsoe held his old friend’s gaze. His lips peeled back into a tight grimace. “If she dies, I’ll bring her back. We have the equipment. I can keep doing this all day.”

  He lifted his hand away from her leg, and Amanda’s body slumped even as it continued to sporadically jerk. She moaned, and a trail of spittle flowed from the corner of her mouth.

  “Are we ready, Nurse Hendrix?” Bledsoe asked.

  She only nodded.

  As before, the monitor screen at the end of the mess of wires trailing from Claude’s brain swirled with great chaos and static. After a moment, the randomness congealed into several distinctive areas of light and dark. The earliest signs of scenes and people flitted by, but Claude’s mind was buzzing far too fast for any one image to solidify.

  “Now, Claude, old buddy,” Bledsoe said soothingly. “I need you to take a deep breath. Just relax and let your mind empty.”

  Claude stared back at him, his features twisted with wrath and helplessness. His bloodshot eyes wept and continually flitted from Bledsoe’s face back to Amanda’s.

  “I don’t understand how you can be so cruel,” he said. “So evil.”

  Bledsoe patted Amanda on her thigh. The gesture might have seemed friendly under any other circumstance.

  “All for a good cause. Now, where were we?” asked Bledsoe. “Ah, the bank. I want you to recall putting those items in that bank vault for your son.”

  Claude closed his eyes, as if trying to fight his own mind. His brow furrowed, and another red trickle spilled out over the lip where skin peeled back from his skull.

  Nurse Hendrix typed at her console and tapped on the screen to fine-tune several settings. In a moment, she located a recognizable image. Bledsoe saw a matrix of rectangles that soon became the wall of safe deposit boxes his agents had investigated hours after Winston had been there.

  “I want you to remember putting the objects in that lockbox,” Bledsoe said.

  Claude shook his head slightly, but the scene shifted, and Bledsoe made out a pair of hands, Claude’s own hands, setting papers and bundles into the narrow box. With a little more adjustment, the nurse resolved enough detail into the scene that Bledsoe could make out the gleaming of overhead lights off of metallic artifacts.

  “Good,” he said. “That’s very good, Claude. Let’s go for round number two. Show me where you hid the next piece in the tunnel under downtown Portland.”

  Beside him, Amanda stirred. “No, Claude,” she rasped. “Don’t. Don’t help.”

  “Show me the tunnel hiding place,” repeated Bledsoe.

  “No,” whispered Amanda.

  “Show me,” began Bledsoe as he jolted Amanda’s leg again, causing her to cry out and her body to nearly jump out of its seat. “The tunnel.” He struck the leg another time. “Hiding place.”

  Energy poured into her as he inwardly counted to five. The strain of holding her in place was beginning to show on the agent’s face, and his arms trembled as her shoulders shook and bucked beneath him.

  On the monitor, swirling darkness suddenly gave way to a tall, curved rectangle. A symbol of some sort stood at its center. Bledsoe couldn’t make out the details. However, he saw sparks flying from the edges of the shape. Welding? Yes, that would make sense. The sparks fell in a cascade of white and orange.

  “Show me the device behind the plate,” said Bledsoe. And just like that, the plate disappeared. In its place, Bledsoe saw a small metal object, a shiny torus shape that he recognized from so long ago.

  “Excellent!” He clapped his hands with mock joy. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  Claude shook his head, and the image vanished from the screen to be replaced again by swirling random static.

  Amanda had bitten through her bottom lip. A small, pink rivulet ran down her chin and dripped on the floor between her and Bledsoe. “No…more,” she said hoarsely.

  “But darlin’,” said Bledsoe. “We’re only now getting to the good stuff. Let’s see what comes next. The anticipation is killing me.”

  Bledsoe sensed that Claude was on the point of surrender. Soon, the secrets buried inside his mind would be Bledsoe’s for the taking, and he would at last have the Alpha Machine.

  “Clear your mind, Claude,” he said. “First, there was the bank. Then, the tunnel. What came next? Imagine where you hid the next piece.”

  He stared at the monitor, waiting for his future to take shape.

  “Now, Claude. Concentrate really hard. Where did you hide the next piece after the tunnel?”

  Bledsoe realized he was holding his breath. From the corner of his eye, he noticed that even the nurse and Amanda were watching Claude intently, neither moving.

  “I don’t know,” whispered Claude.

  Claude’s mouth said one thing, but his mind offered up another. The monitor’s display writhed like a ball of serpents. Shapes flitted in and out of recognizability.

  “That’s it,” said Bledsoe. “After the tunnel. Where did you put the next piece?”

  Claude’s eyes darted around the ceiling.
No doubt, he was trying to distract himself with some new image, any association that might link to his past and prevent his brain from betraying himself.

  “I won’t,” he growled.

  “You will,” Bledsoe hissed. “You’re doing it right now.”

  “He’s lying,” Amanda whispered.

  Bledsoe reached over, seized her leg, and blasted another wave of energy into her thigh. Her head whipped back, and more gurgling escaped from her throat. Bledsoe only held Amanda there for an instant before releasing her. She sagged against her chair, panting, eyes closed against the pain.

  “Show me, Claude! The next piece. See it. Show me where you put it.”

  “No,” he said against bared teeth, even as tears streamed down his cheeks. Bledsoe couldn’t tell if he was refusing the order or bemoaning Amanda’s pain.

  Bledsoe shifted his hand from Amanda’s leg up to her face. He gripped her jaw between his thumb and fingers, nails digging into her skin. She tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go, and she was too weak to struggle.

  “I’ll cook her brain like a poached egg, Claude,” Bledsoe said. “You know I will. Show me what I want.”

  Claude opened his mouth. “I—” he began, then his gaze went wide and vacant. From the edge of his vision, Bledsoe saw forms flit across the monitor, then swirl away into static. Claude’s breath began to come in ragged hitches. He looked at Amanda, back to Bledsoe, and again at Amanda.

  The nurse tried to interject. “Perhaps we should—”

  “Show me now!” Bledsoe raged.

  He nearly came up out of his seat. Even though he restrained himself, he still sent a wave of energy through his arm and into Amanda’s face. He could feel her bones vibrating in his hand. She tried to scratch at his arm but couldn’t control her body well enough make contact with him. One of her hands banged into the side of her husband’s bed.

  On the monitor, images flew by. Bledsoe recognized a few of them. The lab from Area X. Amanda’s face, both before and now. The dance where they had all had that fateful argument. A baby. Pieces of the Alpha Machine. Bernie. Everything that Claude could seemingly dredge up from his past, flitting by so fast they were nearly a blur. So many images…except the one thing Bledsoe needed to see.

  His fury boiling over, Bledsoe’s self-control nearly failed him. “Where is it?” he yelled as he slammed the surgical table beside Claude with his fist. “Where is it, Claude?” Only several seconds later, he realized the old man’s eyes had rolled back in his head.

  The display twitched once, twice, and then settled on a single scene. Bledsoe saw a plane against clouds, tiny and distant. Was that a biplane? The image wasn’t quite distinct enough to make out. The clouds grew blurry and became a spinning propeller. Behind this stretched a vast geometric web of intersecting lines arrayed in a seemingly infinite arch spanning into the distance. He’d seen that pattern before.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Bledsoe whispered. He had it all on the recorder to study later. It would come to him when he could concentrate and—

  One of the table monitors blared an alarm. Claude’s breathing, which Bledsoe had taken to be convulsing with fear and dismay, now turned to jagged bursts.

  “He’s having a stroke!” said Nurse Hendrix. “We have to stop now!”

  Bledsoe forced himself to take two steps away from the table. His own heart raced, and taking a deep breath to steady himself proved difficult.

  He could figure out his next destination, but there was still more information to be gained.

  “Stabilize him, nurse,” Bledsoe said flatly. “You really don’t want to let him die yet.”

  11

  Sweet and Sour Alien Power

  Theo fetched Chinese takeout, and Winston, burger and shake long forgotten, sailed through sweet-and sour-shrimp with a side of barbecued pork. They sat behind the lobby desk, the smell of steaming egg drop soup vying with the long lobby counter’s recent coat of furniture polish. Theo kept the blinds down, and sporadic traffic noise only occasionally broke through the Sunday afternoon quiet.

  “I hate to say this,” the curator and former physicist said around a mouthful of chow mein, “but I’ve always been envious of your folks. I injected the QVs, same as they did, but for some reason they didn’t do much to me. When the time came, they had to leave me behind.” Theo scowled at his food.

  “Don’t feel too bad,” said Winston. “Look what happened to my dad. Worn out after who knows how many years of time hopping, just trying to get rid of this thing. Never able to see his family. Always wondering if and when the Project people would find him and lock him away.”

  “Well…I do understand that part.” Theo leaned back and gazed at the ceiling, his expression distant and haggard. “There were a couple times when I might have married, if I’d had the nerve, but I always wondered. As long as I had that thing inside the bomb, it all might come to an end at any moment. I never believed it was ever really over.”

  Winston pointed his chopsticks down the hall toward the Japanese relic. “How’d the piece get in there?”

  Theo chuckled. “Your dad found me in Canada in 1951. He helped me start a new identity and persuaded me to move down here for this ridiculous scheme. He said he’d actually gone back to 1942 to watch the bombing firsthand and still had to spend a month or two tromping around the forests near Brookings to find the thing. Claude removed the explosive, just in case, and put the Alpha Machine piece in its place. Ever since, I’ve been sitting on the bomb like a mother hen, waiting.”

  “For me.”

  Theo peered over the top of his glasses at Winston. “Claude said it was a maybe, that no one might ever come for it. I’d hoped it would stay here forever.”

  “Guess not.”

  Theo smiled ruefully and rested his chopsticks in his chow mein. “We’re stuck until tomorrow, though. Claude and I sealed that thing up tighter than a drum fifteen years ago. We’ll need to take it into a machine shop tomorrow to cut into it.”

  Remembering the tunnel under Voodoo Doughnut, Winston undid the buckles on his pack. “I may have a quicker way.”

  He opened the top flap, removed his jacket, and drew out Little e. When Theo saw it, his eyes grew large again behind his spectacles.

  “That’s right,” he whispered. “I remember now.”

  Winston seized the device’s crosspiece and squeezed. Blue electrical arcs danced between the tube tips, which narrowed almost to a single point.

  “Amazing,” whispered Theo.

  Winston squinted against the brightness of the concentrated energy and felt the heat of it grow against his face. “The rest of lunch can wait. Let’s get to work. Do you have any sunglasses?”

  Theo fetched a pair from his office as Winston settled in beside the bomb.

  “I have to be fast since I don’t have many energy marbles,” said Winston. “Where is it?”

  Theo pointed. “Behind the red circle.”

  Winston nodded and set to work. Sparks erupted from the contact, and Winston’s eyes ached, even though he could barely see through his squinted eyelashes. As soon as the first blob of molten metal struck the floor, though, the hardwood started to smoke. Soon, a small flame blossomed. Winston and Theo stamped it out. Theo cursed his own stupidity and soaked several towels from the janitorial closet, which he then spread around the bomb.

  “Looks like I’ll be investing in a new area rug,” he said.

  Winston kept trying to blink the blue splotches out of his vision.

  “Why put so much work into stashing the piece in this particular bomb?” he asked. “You guys could have hidden it anywhere.”

  Theo cocked his head thoughtfully. “Your dad said the future was filled with magnificence, but that the pace of change was like living on a roller coaster. He said that many, maybe most, of the future’s problems stemmed from people losing their roots and feeling adrift. The war…” Theo ran a hand across the glass of a display containing several Japanese uniform m
edals, as if slowly wiping away the debris of his memories. “The war was terrible. But it was also the finest achievement the world has ever seen, history’s biggest and best example of nations bonding together in the do-or-die fight for good and liberty. Claude thought it was important to surround the Alpha Machine with reminders of that.” He smiled fondly. “I suppose a good parent never passes up a chance to teach a lesson.”

  Winston found it unsettling to consider how close his father and Bledsoe were in their obsession over World War II.

  With a nod and a deep breath, Winston set back to work. Lightning danced between Little e and the bomb’s surface. Sparks sizzled where they fell on the wet towels. The acidic stench of burning steel scraped Winston’s throat and nose, making it difficult to breathe. After a few minutes and the addition of one energy marble, though, the red circle fell to the floor with a dull thud.

  Winston peered inside the hole, which crackled and glowed as its edges cooled. The bomb’s innards bristled with wires, many of them disconnected. Winston couldn’t see more than a few inches into the dark interior, but it was enough to make out the end of a metal cylinder roughly three inches in diameter, secured in place by a bracket.

  When Winston finally looked up, he found Theo standing over him, holding out a Phillips screwdriver. “You’ll want this.”

  Winston relaxed his grip on Little e, and its arms returned to their overlapping, tapered positions.

  “I always did find that thing a bit odd,” said Theo.

  “Maybe creepy? You’re not alone,” said Winston as he traded Little e for the far simpler tool.

  As soon as the hole’s rim cooled enough to touch, Winston carefully set to work on the two screws securing the bracket’s bottom. After a moment, the screws fell and clattered about the bomb’s tail section. Winston grasped the end of the tube, jiggled it loose from the bracket, and slowly brought the cylinder into the light. It looked almost exactly like an unlabeled, oversized soda pop can, only the top had no tab to pull. Winston’s face, ridiculously stretched, stared back at him from the silvered surface.