very start—and wasn’t exactly a sweetheart to begin with—hell, everybody could tell when I converted.”
“And you are converted?” Amelia said. He got a serious look and nodded in jerks. “You don’t feel resentful about . . . losing the man you used to be?”
“It’s hard to explain. What I am now is the man I used to be. But more me than I used to be, get it?” He made a helpless gesture with both hands. “What I mean is I never in a million years could’ve found out who I really was, even though it was there all the time. I needed the others to show me.”
She smiled and shook her head. “It sounds like a religious conversion.”
“It is, sort of,” I said. “It literally was, with Ellie.” I shouldn’t have said that; she started to cloud up. I put my hand on hers.
For a moment everyone was silent. “So,” Amelia said. “What does this do to the timetable?”
“If we’d known before the thing started, it would’ve sped it up considerably—and of course it will do that in the long run, when we’re out to change the world.
“Right now the limiting factor is the surgery schedule. We plan to finish the last set of implants on the thirty-first. So by the third of August, we should have a building-full of converts, general to private.”
“What about the POWs?” I asked. “McLaughlin didn’t convert them in two days, did he?”
“Again, if we’d only known. He was never jacked with them for more than a few hours at a time. It would be good to know whether it does work with thousands of people at once.”
“How do you know it’s one or the other?” Amelia said. “Two weeks if they’re all just ‘normal’ people; two days if one of the elect is with them all the time. You don’t know anything about intermediate states.”
“That’s right.” He rubbed his eyes and grimaced. “And no time to experiment. There’s some fascinating science to be done, but as we said up at St. Bart’s, we’re not doing science quite yet.” His phone pinged. “Just a second.”
He touched his earring and listened, staring. “Okay . . . I’ll get back to you. Yes.” He shook his head.
“Trouble?” I asked.
“Could be nothing; could be disaster. We’ve lost our cook.”
That took me a moment. “Thurman’s gone AWOL?”
“Yep. He cruised right past the guard last night, right after you . . . after Gavrila died.”
“No idea where he went?”
“He could be anywhere in the world. Could be downtown living it up. You jacked with him, Benyo?”
“Huh-uh. But Monez did, and I’m with Monez all the time. So I got a little. Not much, you know, his headaches.”
“Do you have any secondhand impression of him?”
“Just a guy.” He rubbed his chin. “I guess he was a little more army than most. I mean he kind of liked the idea.”
“He didn’t much like our idea, then.”
“I don’t know. I’d guess not.”
Marty looked at his watch. “I’m due in surgery in twenty minutes. Be doing jacks until one. Julian, you want to track him down?”
“Do what I can.”
“Benyo, you jack with Monez and whoever else was with Thurman. We have to know how much he knows.”
“Sure.” He stood up. “I think he’s down by the game room.”
We watched him go. “At least he couldn’t have known who the general was.”
“Not Roser,” Marty said. “But he might have gotten the name of Gavrila’s boss, Blaisdell, through one of the people in Guadalajara. That’s what I want to find out.” He checked his watch again. “Call Benyo about it in an hour or so. And check all the flights to Washington.”
“Do what I can, Marty. Once he’s out of Porto, hell, there must be ten thousand ways to get to Washington.”
“Yeah, right. Maybe we should just wait and see whether we hear from Blaisdell.”
We were about to.
* * *
blaisdell spent a few minutes talking to Carew—the actual “download” of information from the jack session would take several hours’ patient interrogation under hypnosis, by machine, but he did learn that there were a couple of days unaccounted for, between the time Gavrila was jacked in Guadalajara and her death more than a thousand miles away. What did she learn that sent her to Portobello?
He stayed in the office until he got the coded message from his driver that matters had been disposed of, and then he drove himself home—an eccentricity that sometimes was useful.
He lived alone, with robot servants and soldierboy guards, in a mansion