I moved in closer, pretending to be inspecting the cover of the latest issue of The Atlantic, and tried.
– to fire her she’s going to bring up that whole fucking business about the affair God knows how she’ll react she’s a fucking loose cannon would she call Gloria and tell her ah Jesus what am I going to do I don’t have any choice so goddamned stupid to fuck your secretary-
I stole a furtive glance at the banker, and his dour face had not moved.
By this time I had formulated a number of what I guess you could call understandings, or perhaps theories, about what had happened, and what I should do.
One: The powerful magnetic resonance imager had affected my brain in such a way that I was now able to “hear” the thoughts of others. Not all people; perhaps not most, but at least some.
Two: I was able to “hear” not all thoughts but only those that were “expressed” with a fair degree of emphasis. In other words, I only “heard” things that were thought with great vehemence, fear, anger. Also, I could “hear” things only at close physical proximity-two or three feet away from a person, maximum.
Three: Charles Rossi and his lab assistant were not only not surprised at this manifestation, but were actually expecting it. That meant they had been using the MRI for this express purpose, even before I came on the scene.
Four: The uncertainty they felt indicated that either it had not worked in the proper way before, or it had rarely done so.
Five: Rossi did not know for certain that this experiment had succeeded on me. Therefore, I was safe only as long as I did not let on that I had this ability.
Six: Therefore, it was only a matter of time before they caught up with me, for whatever purposes they intended.
Seven: In all probability, my life would never be the same. I was no longer safe.
I glanced at my watch, realized I had strolled far too long, and turned back toward the office.
Ten minutes later I was back at the offices of Putnam & Stearns, with a few minutes to spare before my next appointment. For some reason I suddenly found myself recalling the face of the senator I had seen on the CNN newscast. Senator Mark Sutton (D.-Col.), shot to death. I remembered now: Senator Sutton was the chairman of the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence. And-was it fifteen years ago?-he had been Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, before he’d been appointed to fill a Senate vacancy, and then was elected in his own right two years later.
And…
And he was one of Hal Sinclair’s oldest friends. His roommate at Princeton. They had joined the CIA together.
That made three CIA types now dead. Hal Sinclair and two trusted confidants.
Coincidences, I believe, occur everywhere except in the intelligence business.
I buzzed Darlene and asked her to send in my four o’clock.
FOURTEEN
Mel Kornstein entered, in an Armani suit that looked untailored and did little to conceal his girth. His silver tie was stained with a bright yellow half-moon of what appeared to be egg.
“Where’s the asshole?” he asked, giving me a soft, damp handshake and looking around my office.
“Frank O’Leary will be here in about fifteen minutes. I wanted to give us a little time to go over some things.”
Frank O’Leary was the “inventor” of SpaceTime, the computer game that is an exact rip-off of Mel Kornstein’s amazing SpaceTron. He and his attorney, Bruce Kantor, had agreed to a conference to initiate the exploratory stages of some sort of agreement. Ordinarily that would mean they realized they’d better settle, that they’d lose big if it ever went to trial. A lawsuit, as lawyers like to say, is a machine you enter as a pig and come out a sausage. Then again, they could be showing up simply as a courtesy, but lawyers aren’t much into courtesy. It was also entirely possible that the two just wanted to display their gladiatorial confidence, try to rattle us a bit.
I was not at my best that afternoon. In fact-though my headache had by this time mostly disappeared-I could barely think straight, and Mel Kornstein picked up on this. “You with me here, Counselor?” he asked querulously at one point when I lost the thread of argument.
“I’m with you, Mel,” I said, and tried to concentrate. I’d found that if I didn’t want to pick up a person’s thoughts, I generally didn’t. What I mean is that I discovered, sitting there with Kornstein, that I wasn’t bombarded with thoughts on top of conversation, which might have been unbearable. I could listen to him normally, but if I wanted to “read” him, I could do so simply by focusing in a way, homing in.
Obviously I can’t describe this adequately, but it’s like the way a mother can single out the voice of her child playing on the beach from the voices of dozens of other children. It’s a bit like listening to the jumble of voices on a party line, some of them more audible than others. Or maybe it’s more like the way, when you’re speaking on a cordless phone, you can hear the ghosts of other people’s conversations overlapping your own. If you listen with some effort, you can hear everything clearly.
So I found myself listening to Kornstein’s voice, rising in aggrievement and falling in despair, and realizing that I could hear only his spoken voice if I so desired.
Fortunately, I regained some footing by the time O’Leary and Kantor showed up, effusing cordiality. O’Leary-tall, red-haired, bespectacled, thirtyish-and Kantor-small, compact, balding, late forties-made themselves right at home in my office and sank into their chairs as if we were all old chums.
“Ben,” Kantor said by way of greeting.
“Good to see you, Bruce.” Good old casual chummy banter.
Only the attorneys are supposed to talk at these conferences. The clients, if they appear at all, are there only for their attorneys’ ready reference; they’re supposed to keep silent. But Mel Kornstein sat there, fuming, refusing to shake hands with anyone, and couldn’t restrain himself from blurting out, “Six months from now you’re going to be washing dishes at McDonald’s, O’Leary. Hope you like the smell of french-fry grease.”
O’Leary smiled calmly and gave Kantor a look that said, Will you handle this lunatic? Kantor bounced the look over to me, and I said, “Mel, let Bruce and me handle this right now.”
Mel folded his arms and smoldered.
The real point of this meeting was to determine one simple thing: had Frank O’Leary seen a prototype of SpaceTron while he was “developing” SpaceTime? The similarity of the games wasn’t even in question. But if we could prove beyond any doubt that O’Leary had seen SpaceTron at any point before it went on the market, we won. It was as simple as that.
O’Leary maintained, naturally, that the first time he saw SpaceTron was in a software store. Kornstein was convinced that O’Leary had somehow gotten an early prototype of the game from one of his software engineers, but of course he couldn’t prove his suspicion. And here I was, trying to fence with Bruce Kantor, Esq., the feisty little bantam.
After half an hour Kantor was still making noises about restraint of trade and unfair practices. I was finding it hard to concentrate on his line of argument, in that half-dazed state I’d been in since the morning, but I knew enough to realize he was just blustering. Neither he nor his client was going to give an inch.
I asked, for the third time, “Can you say for absolutely certain that neither your client nor any of his employees had any access to any of the research or development work that was going on at Mr. Kornstein’s firm?”
Frank O’Leary continued to sit impassively with folded arms, looking bored, and let his attorney do the heavy lifting. Kantor leaned forward, gave his saucy little smile, and said, “I think you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, Ben. If you’ve got nothing else-”