“Did you ever go down that trail again?”
“No.”
“Then it’s déjà vu.”
“But how do I know that I never will? What if I went back and checked to make sure my déjà vu was accurate? Then I’ve turned it into premonition.”
“You just know,” Bobbie said. “Some things you just know.”
Vi felt a little edgy and was hoping that Bobbie would shut up for a while, so she could clear her head for the ropelines in the square. She tucked the blouse and longjohn top into her skirt, popped a clip into her Uzi, racked it once, and buckled it into the holster.
“I’ve been having premonitions,” Bobbie said. “I’m in a crowd. I scan the hands, I see the muzzle coming up, I throw myself at the shooter and I take it in the face.”
Bobbie clipped the comm set to the back of Vi’s skirt, pressing a pair of thin black wires flat against Vi’s spine.
Vi shivered a bit. She said, “It’s just the stress, Bobbie. That’s the job.”
“Oh sure and I’m a hero and I go down in history, all the way down to a footnote probably, but what the fuck? I took the bullet like a good girl, and that’s the fucking job — we plot against the plotters, right? Plan and counterplan. Only we didn’t stop this plot, Vi, because the real target of the shooter was me. They planned that I would throw myself in front of the bullet.”
The wires on Vi’s body comm ran to a plastic brace on the back of her blouse collar. Bobbie fed the mike line over Vi’s shoulder, under her arm, to a clip on Vi’s right cuff. The comm, like the armor, was fitted to each agent by the Equipment Section, Beltsville. Vi plugged the receiver line into the earbud.
“Well?” said Bobbie.
“Well what?”
“Well what do you think it means?”
Vi could see that Bobbie was scared. Bobbie was always scared in the morning before a big outdoor event, a big crowd behind ropelines. Crowds were easier once you were inside them, scanning, vacant, ready. The hard part was getting ready to be ready, because you had to think about it. Vi considered Bobbie’s premonition. It had a familiar ring, and Vi wondered if Bobbie had told her about this particular premonition at some point in the past. Bobbie averaged two or three premonitions per deployment and usually had four or more recurrent dreams recurring in a cycle at any given time. She also had hot flashes, sudden intuitions, many different déjà vus, and what she called the Creepy-Crawlies. Most of these involved her death, except her déjà vus, which usually involved ex-husbands. Vi brought her suit jacket from the closet, brushed the lint from the arms, and put it on.
“Wasn’t that a movie?” she asked Bobbie. “’Cause, you know, it’s sounds familiar. I really think it was a movie.”
“What movie?” Bobbie said. “What’s the title of this alleged movie that no one has ever seen but you?”
“I never said I saw it, Bobbie. But I think I might’ve seen the coming attractions.”
“For my premonition? What are you, on crack?”
Vi was dressing Bobbie, the armor and the harness and the comm. Bobbie’s comm was always snarled. Vi got it straightened out and draped the wires through the brace and down Bobbie’s arm.
“See, there’s this female agent, right?”
“In the movie?”
“Right. She’s tied to a chair by this evil torture expert guy in the old abandoned oil refinery on the outskirts of town, and she has to shoot her way to freedom. She kills like fifty judo guys in turtlenecks. She can’t get her hands free, so she has to shoot the gun with her mouth. She ulled the igga ike ith.”
“That’s preposterous,” said Bobbie. “Was she pretty?”
“Really pretty.”
“Did she die?”
“Nope,” said Vi. “She survived and so will you.”
Vi plugged Bobbie’s earbud in. They were armored, armed, and all comm’d up. They left the room and started down the corridor.
“Maybe it wasn’t a movie after all,” said Vi. “Maybe they just did the coming attractions and never got around to making the rest. I’ll bet that happens.”
Bobbie said, “My second husband was like that.”
“See?” said Vi. “It’s nothing to freak out about.”
Outside the VP’s suite, the detail was assembling, the SWAT guys and the comm techs, Tashmo and Elias. O’Teen leaned against the wall, his florid face inside a book.
Bobbie said, “What’s happening, O’T?”
“Waiting on Miz Gretchen,” said O’Teen.
O’Teen was handicapping one of the major book awards, reading all the nominees. The book he was reading had a picture on the cover, a woman in the sunlight with two happy-looking pandas.
“Any good?” asked Vi.
O’Teen said, “It’s going out at six to one on the Vegas line.” He turned a page and sighed. “I’m not sure I’ll make it until baseball.”
Gretchen emerged from the VP’s room. She saw Vi in the hallway and said, “Just the body I’ve been looking for. Come on, Violet, let’s go prep the square.”
Vi and Gretchen took the freight lift to the loading dock behind the inn and started up the sidewalk toward the square. Vi waited for Gretchen to say something about Vi’s trip to C.E. the night before. Vi assumed that Gretchen knew about the trip — little happened on the detail without Gretchen knowing it, especially the petty derelictions which made the agents human and not robots, but which always put you on the wrong end of a blasting, Gretchen’s famous rages, and sometimes got the people near you blasted too, Gretchen’s rages being somewhat indiscriminate. Vi had heard Gretchen curse Tashmo over two stupid roadblocks, which Tashmo hadn’t even been in charge of, and Vi’s offense, flouting orders, going AWOL, was a lot more serious.
It was two blocks from the hotel to the square. They cut across a parking lot. Mounted cops cantered past. It had been raining off and on since the downpour of the morning. Now the rain had stopped, though it felt more like a pause than a stop.
“Go somewhere last night?” asked Gretchen.
The tone was chatty, but Vi was not deceived. Gretchen often started chatty, got her facts established, toyed with you a bit, before exploding.
Vi said, “Yes I did. I went to see my brother. I told you all this yesterday.”
“You asked me. I said no. Or did I hallucinate?”
“No, I asked you.”
“And what did I say?”
Vi said, “Just get it over with. Rip me ten vacation days. Fuck it, take ’em all. Dock my pay, hose me on my bonus, stick me on the ropelines until Christmas, I don’t care. I’m sick of the cat-and-mouse. Every morning I get up, dress myself, dress Bobbie, then convince her that she’s not going to die today, and only then can we leave the goddamn room. I caught O’Teen in the hallway reading about pandas. It’s crazy, Gretchen. We’re all going crazy.”
Gretchen nodded and they walked along. She said, “What’s your brother’s name?”
Vi said, “What do you care?”
“Is it Jojo? It is Freddy? Is it Nick?”
Vi said, “It’s Jojo. Jojo Asplund. Don’t fuck around with me.”
“Well okay,” said Gretchen, “here’s to good old Jojo. I rip you two vacation days. Next time I give an order, Vi, obey it for me, huh?”
They passed through a choke point onto the secured area behind the prefab stage. The stage was ten yards wide, plywood and tube steel, covered and enclosed on three sides by a canvas canopy, stripes of green and white, like a wedding tent. Hanging pieces of the tent were flapping in the breeze, the big sides filling like a sail, then going slack and sucking in, with each shift in wind. There were folding metal chairs against the back wall, half-filled with local dignitaries running through their speeches, some mouthing words in practice (eyes closed, it looked like prayer), others having sudden thoughts and scribbling on index cards. A podium stood out alone at the stage’s edge, like a diving board — beyond it was a drop-off, space, and then the crowd.