Furthermore, when sent on a wet mission, he must know where his target is located before being able to invade its mind. He cannot search at will across the populations of the world but must be guided by his handlers, who first locate his prey. Once shown an image of the building or vehicle in which the target can be found — and when that place is geographically sited in his mind — he can act.
Thus far, he is also limited to the walls of that structure and cannot effectively pursue a wanted mind beyond the boundaries that are initially established. No one knows why this limitation should exist, though theories abound. Perhaps it is because the invisible psychic self, being only a wave energy of some type, responds to open spaces in much the manner of heat contained in a hot stone placed in a cold room: It radiates outward, dissipating, dispersing itself, and cannot be conserved in a coherent form. He is able to practice remote viewing of outdoor locations — but only for short periods of time. This shortcoming frustrates 89–58’s handlers, but they believe and hope that his abilities in this regard may improve with time.
If you can bear to watch, the containment vessel is opened twice each week to allow the handlers to clean their asset. He is without fail deeply sedated for this procedure — and remains connected to the doomsday button. He is given a thorough sponge bath, irritations of the skin are treated, the minimal solid waste that he produces is evacuated from the bowel, teeth are cleaned, eyes are examined for infection and then are flushed with antibiotic, and other maintenance is performed. Although 89–58 receives daily low-voltage electrical stimulation of his muscles to ensure a minimal life-sustaining mass, he resembles one of the starving children of any third-world country racked by drought and evil politics. He is as pale as any job on a mortician’s table, withered, with elfin bones grown thin from lack of use; and when unconsciously he curls his feeble fingers around the hands of ministering attendants, his grip is no stronger than that of a cradled newborn baby struggling to hold fast to its mother’s thumb.
Sometimes, in this profound sedation, he murmurs wordlessly but forlornly, mewls, and even weeps, as if adrift in a soft sad dream.
At the Shell station, only three vehicles were at the self-service pumps. Tending to their cars, the motorists squinted and ducked their heads to keep wind-blown grit out of their eyes.
The lighting was as bright as that on a movie set, and though Joe and Rose were not being sought by the type of police agency that would distribute their photographs to local television news programs, Joe preferred to stay out of the glare. He parked along the side of the building, near the rest rooms, where huddled shadows survived.
Joe was in emotional turmoil, felt slashed across the heart, because now he knew the exact cause of the catastrophic crash, knew the murderer’s identity and the twisted details. The knowledge was like a scalpel that pared off what thin scabs had formed over his pain. His grief felt fresh, the loss more recent than it really was.
He switched off the engine and sat speechless.
“I don’t understand how the hell they found out I was on that flight,” Rose said. “I’d taken such precautions…. But I knew when he remote-viewed the passenger cabin, looking for us, because there was an odd dimming of lights, a problem with my wristwatch, a vague sense of a presence—signs I’d learned to read.”
“I’ve met a National Transportation Safety Board investigator who’s heard the tape from the cockpit voice recorder, before it was destroyed in a convenient sound-lab fire. This boy was inside the captain’s head, Rose. I don’t understand…Why didn’t he take out just you?”
“He had to get us both, that was his assignment, me and the girl — and while he could’ve nailed me without any problem, it wouldn’t have been easy with her.”
Utterly baffled, Joe said, “Nina? Why would they have been interested in her then? She was just another passenger, wasn’t she? I thought they were after her later because… well, because she survived with you.”
Rose would not meet his eyes. “Get me the key to the women’s rest room, Joe. Will you, please? Let me have a minute here. I’ll tell you the rest of it on the way to Big Bear.”
He went into the sales room and got the key from the cashier. By the time he returned to the Ford, Rose had gotten out. She was leaning against a front fender, back turned and shoulders hunched to the whistling Santa Ana wind. Her left arm was curled against her breast, and her hand was still shaking. With her right hand, she pulled the lapels of her blazer together, as though the warm August wind felt cold to her.
“Would you unlock the door for me?” she asked.
He went to the women’s room. By the time he unlocked the door and switched on the light, Rose had arrived at his side.
“I’ll be quick,” she promised, and slipped past him.
He had a glimpse of her face in that brightness, just before the door fell shut. She didn’t look good.
Instead of returning to the car, Joe leaned against the wall of the building, beside the lavatory door, to wait for her.
According to nurses in asylums and psychiatric wards, a greater number of their most disturbed patients responded to the Santa Ana winds than ever reacted to the sight of a full moon beyond a barred window. It wasn’t simply the baleful sound, like the cries of an unearthly hunter and the unearthly beasts that it pursued; it was also the subliminal alkaline scent of the desert and a queer electrical charge, different from those that other — less dry — winds imparted to the air.
Joe could understand why Rose might have pulled her blazer shut and huddled into it. This night had both the moon and the Santa Ana wind to spark a voodoo current in the spine — and a parentless boy without a name, who lived in a coffin of steel and moved invisible through a world of potential victims oblivious to him.
Are we recording?
The boy had known about the cockpit voice recorder — and he’d left a cry for help on it.
One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom. One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock. They’re doing bad things to me. They’re mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me.
Whatever else he was — sociopathic, psychotic, homicidal — he was also a child. A beast, an abomination, a terror, but also a child. He had not asked to be born, and if he was evil, they had made him so by failing to teach him any human values, by treating him as mere ordnance, by rewarding him for murder. Beast he was, but a pitiable beast, lost and alone, wandering in a maze of misery.
Pitiable but formidable. And still out there. Waiting to be told where he could find Rose Tucker. And Nina.
This is fun.
The boy enjoyed the killing. Joe supposed it was even possible that his handlers had never instructed him to destroy everyone aboard Nationwide Flight 353, that he had done it as an act of rebellion and because he enjoyed it.
Make them stop or when I get the chance…when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.
Recalling those words from the transcript, Joe sensed that the boy had not been referring merely to the passengers on the doomed airliner. By then he had already made the decision to kill them all. He was speaking of some act more apocalyptic than three hundred and thirty murders.
What could he accomplish if provided with photographs and the geographical coordinates of not merely a missile-tracking facility but a complex of nuclear-missile launch silos?