Remo grabbed the next flight to Chicago and dozed in first class. Before they landed he did his breathing and felt the good leveling force of all power move through him, calming him. He realized then he had done what he should never do, let his mind take over, the mind where doubts lived and thrived on selected pieces of negative information culled from the universe of information. He knew he had done his job right. The witness had somehow truly forgotten. He decided not to use fear this time.
* * *
Gladys Smith had finished her fourteenth romance novel of the week and was wondering if she would ever get to have a man's arms around her again, when the finest romantic experience of her life walked through the door she thought had been locked.
He was thin, with thick wrists and a sharp handsome face with dark eyes that told her he knew her. Not from an earlier meeting, but in some other, deeper way.
He moved silently with a grace she had never seen in a man.
“Gladys?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Gladys Smith?”
“Yes.”
“I'm here for you.”
“I know,” she heard herself saying. He did not grab her like one of the boyfriends that haunted her past. He did not even caress her. His touch was gentler than that, as though his fingerpads were an extension of her own flesh.
She never knew her arms could feel so good. She sat down on the bed. She never knew she could feel so good about her body. It was becoming alive in ways she had never known. It was welcoming him, it was wanting him, and finally it was demanding him.
Her mind was like a passenger on a trip her body was taking. And just when she hovered at the edge of a climax that would satisfy every longing she had had as a woman, he asked for something so minor and trivial all she could do was sob, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” And that sob became a scream of satisfaction and joy.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, darling, anything. Of course I'll remember. What should I remember?”
“Your testimony,” he said.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Of course. What do you want me to remember?”
“Whatever your testimony was,” he said. She put his hand back on her neck. She never wanted his hands away from her again.
“Sure. But I don't remember it. I don't remember anything that happened at the company. It's like almost everything after my twenty-first birthday never happened.”
“Of course it happened.”
“I know it happened. But I don't remember it, darling. I don't. When I look at the pages of testimony I gave, it's as though some stranger had said it. I don't even remember giving the testimony. I don't remember anything past four weeks ago.”
“What happened four weeks ago?”
“Put your hand back where it was. Okay. There. Right where you had it before. People were looking at me. And they were asking me things, strange things about grain transfers. And I didn't know what they were talking about. They told me I had worked for a grain-trading company. They got very angry. I don't know why they got angry. They asked me who bought me off. I would never lie for money. I'm not that sort of person.”
“You really didn't lie,” said the man with the dark eyes that knew her.
“Of course not, darling. I never lie.”
“I was afraid of that. Good-bye.”
“Wait. Where are you going? Take your clothes back off. Get back here. Wait. Wait!”
Gladys ran after him to the door.
“I'll lie. If you want me to lie, I'll lie. I'll memorize everything in the transcript. I'll remember it. I'll say it word for word. Just don't leave me. You can't leave me.”
“Sorry. I've got work.”
“When will I ever find someone else like you?”
“Not in this century,” said Remo.
* * *
This time he did not phone in his failure. He insisted on a meeting with Smith.
“That won't be necessary, Remo. I know you didn't fail. As a test, one of our government agencies damned worried about this thing ran lie-detector tests on two witnesses who claimed to have forgotten their own stories. Both of them passed. They weren't lying. They really did forget their own testimony.”
“Wonderful,” said Remo.
“Wonderful? This is a disaster,” said Smith. “Someone out there knows how to dismantle our entire justice system. This country is going to fall apart pretty soon.”
“Pretty soon? When was the last time you made a phone call, Smitty? You want to watch falling apart in action, call a repairman.”
“I mean there will be no way we can enforce any law if someone knows how to make witnesses forget. No law. Think about it. If you can make people forget, there will never be another witness. Never.”
Remo thought about it. He thought about forgetting things, forgetting his early life in the orphanage. If he could only forget selectively, he thought, it might be the best thing that ever happened.
“Remo, are you there?”
“I'm thinking about it, Smitty,” he said.
Chapter 4
Beatrice Pimser Dolomo was happy. Rubin Dolomo, the guiding genius of Poweressence, the spiritual force, was feeling almost good enough to get out of bed. Cutting his minimum daily requirement of Valium down to a single triple dose helped, but it was always easier getting out of bed when Beatrice was happy. Everything was easier when Beatrice was happy.
But the Dolomos' lawyer was not happy.
“I don't know what you two are giggling about, but the feds have got us nailed.”
“If you would only renounce your failure mechanism you would reap success and power. The only thing between you and your new dynamic life is yourself,” said Rubin.
“You want a Poweressence convert or you want to try to stay out of jail?” asked Barry Glidden, one of the foremost criminal lawyers in California. The Dolomos had hired him because he was known as a no-nonsense, no-holds-barred defender of clients, provided those clients had a no-holds-barred attitude toward payment.
Barry rested his arms on the table of the beautifully lit Dolomo day room, overlooking the magnificent Dolomo estate. He already had plans to buy it from them when they went to jail and turn it into a condominium development. There was enough prime land here to build an airport if he wanted.
“Let me tell you two happy people what they got on you, in case you think this hocus-pocus you make so much money on can work miracles. One, they got the alligators you put in that columnist's pool. That's Exhibit A. They got a wonderful witness, one of your former devotees, who says that Exhibit A was what you, Beatrice, told her to put into the pool. Because you aren't going to pass that off as stocking of wildlife, and because no one is going to believe an alligator walked from Florida homing in on a columnists' negative forces, that leaves any reasonable jury only one option: attempted murder.”
“That was Rubin's idea,” said Beatrice, displaying her charms in a halter and slacks. She knew Glidden wanted the property. One of Rubin's Poweressence converts was a movie star who had already been approached to invest in the consortium Glidden was organizing to make the purchase. She did not tell him she knew this, however.
She had told him simply that if he lost this case his children would be boiled in oil, alive.
He had offered to resign the case. She had told him she was only joking. Mostly. She had laughed coquettishly when she had said that. Barry Glidden had not thought it a thing of mirth.
“In Dance of the Alarkin Planet, a creature very much like a crocodile kills people with negative vibrations,” said Rubin. “Animals sense these things. Their instincts are a lot purer than the twisted products of the human brain.”