Jezebel's Ladder Read online

  “Exactly.”

  “Then who? Aliens, angels?”

  Benny shrugged. “No idea. One theory claims that all pages are blank; they just stimulate us to come up with the ideas ourselves. This is known as the bootstrap hypothesis.”

  “Ideas?” echoed Jez.

  “Each page represents one idea that our society does not have, a rung on a ladder to a higher form of civilization. Any one page could revolutionize an industry and dominate it for decades to come. That’s why certain members of the petroleum, pharmaceutical, and fertilizer industries would kill for even one of these pages. Governments would also kill before they let theirs escape.”

  “The Fossils,” Jez said, remembering the pejorative term Daniel used for the opposition.

  “But the true power is the synergy that happens when you combine these ideas. Do you see why we can’t afford to let the others bury or destroy them? We need all the rungs to complete the ladder.”

  Jez struggled to hold the concept. “Some of this sounds more like a curse or trap than a blessing. How do we know the aliens, or whatever, are benevolent? Where does the ladder lead?”

  “You don’t have the clearance for that yet. We’ll talk further if you ever get to level two.”

  Chapter 4 – Secretary for Eye Corps

  Next, the limousine took Jezebel to her new apartment: company-owned, fully furnished, and stocked with basic bathroom and food supplies. Daniel rode over with her. “Congratulations! Work doesn’t start till about eight each night. The rest of the day, if we’re not traveling, you’re free to do as you please.”

  Daniel handed her a platinum credit card and said, “Take a guard along shopping and buy as much as you can fit into two airline-sized suitcases. While you’re at it, you should get suitcases, too. Buy whatever you need to keep from getting bored on the bus or in a hotel room. We travel a lot.”

  “Your last name’s Sorenson?” she read.

  “Well, technically it’s Fortune; Dirt Bag adopted me, but I use my real dad’s name on anything I want to keep under the radar.”

  She was still stunned by the whole alien thing. “Okay, what’s my limit?”

  He scratched his head; his hair had been washed and neatly combed for the meeting with his boss and grand-boss. Even the t-shirt was clean, though just as drab. The boy seemed to favor dark blues, greens, browns, and grays, nothing that drew attention. Was this spy-craft, or natural shyness? “I’ve never hit the max. I think my record was nine thousand plus the airfare to Indonesia.”

  Jez blinked. She had been eating macaroni and soup for a month. “Wow. No limit. Got it. But why would anybody let me use your credit card?”

  “We have some good friends in the hacking community. I authorized you yesterday as my sister. We look enough alike that it’s a good cover identity. You’ll get your own corporate card and passport in another few weeks.”

  Jez was touched by the gesture. “How did you know I’d stay?”

  The boy shrugged. “Anybody who can face the Zombie Master is good for the long haul.”

  She tried for a smile, but her face was overloaded. “Great. When do I meet the rest of the team?”

  Daniel looked both ways. “Aside from the drivers that they rotate every few days and the two bodyguards, I’m it.”

  When they arrived at the apartments, he excused himself. “Normally, I’m all over the mall, but I’ve been awake since noon yesterday. I need my rest.”

  ****

  Jez bought more than she should have: clothes, laptop, electronic book reader, and shoes. She could have filled a bag with shoes alone. The freedom was electrifying. When the car wouldn’t hold any more bags, she tried to go out for a big dinner. However, with no one to join her and no alcohol, she settled for a chicken Caesar salad to go. Then she went back to the apartment to unwrap her acquisitions and play. At 7:30 p.m., while trying on a new, silk blouse, she saw Daniel’s ghostly form phase through the bathroom wall.

  “Get out, pervert!” she shouted, bombarding him with invective. “You’d better pray you get back to your body before I do.”

  Even disembodied, Daniel raised his hands defensively. “Sorry. Dirt Bag ordered me to. He wanted to know if you could still see me. It won’t happen ever again, I swear!”

  She was getting paid to be a den mother to a professional peeping Tom. Putting on a cotton business shirt, slacks, and running shoes, she felt ready for anything.

  She knocked on his door fifteen minutes early. The guard let her into the apartment, and then waited in the hallway.

  Daniel was already in pajamas, ready to work. “We have a busy night tonight,” he said, avoiding discussion of his earlier indiscretion. “When I’m out, lower the headboard microphone to my lips. Sometimes, when I find documents, I read them out loud. Even in other languages, we can make sense of it with the right transcriber. When I come back, give me a new pad of paper. My recall is best during the first few minutes awake. I draw as much as I can to get details of the encounters. I flesh out the sketches between dives.”

  Jez found that if she just repeated a word, it kicked his instruction generator again. “Dives?”

  Daniel lectured. “Out of body excursions. I can’t see pages directly, so I’m scouting people who showed up as anomalies on somebody else’s radar. I look for high gamma-wave output, odd behavior, new technology, and reader flares. If that pans out, we send in the negotiators like Buddy.”

  “If that fails?” she asked.

  “We usually bribe someone close to the artifact to acquire it for us.”

  “Or steal it yourselves.”

  He shrugged. “This is species survival. Dirt Bag doesn’t suffer idiots for long, especially when the other groups are keeping watch on his every move. You got a problem with that?”

  “No, I just wanted to know what I should be looking for while Buddy is talking.”

  Daniel smiled. “You’re a very flexible woman.”

  “I think you mean adaptable, but yes, that too,” she said with amusement. He actually blushed. “Do they all last the same amount of time? Are they linked to a REM cycle or something?”

  “It’s not sleep. The length of each dive depends on how close the subject is. My max range is roughly a hundred miles, but that’s really deep water. I can only do a couple of those a day before I’m useless. I have to be physically close if I don’t have a clear target. That’s why I was in the bus for you. I can do about twelve dives per night. Some subjects take multiple dives to make sure.”

  “How do you find a target?” she asked.

  Daniel pointed to the stack of folders, and she handed him the top one. Inside was a color photograph of a man, a detailed list of his favorite haunts, background information, and a used napkin. “I used to drive by each person for a visual. Unfortunately, that only worked about half the time, added overhead, and I could only get in about four people a night. If I familiarize myself with their description and have something personal with their DNA on it, I can usually zero in with no problem. The trick only works about 95 percent of the time and never with cats. Don’t even ask.”

  Jez nodded. “Okay. As you finish each mission, I hand you the next target dossier, and…” She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, gross, is this a tissue?”

  Daniel pointed to a box on the floor. “Put on a set of those gloves. If you contaminate the sample, I get lost, and you could get sick.”

  She wrinkled her nose as she put on the gloves. “How do you prioritize?”

  “Each night, I do two dives against the competition for the intelligence team in London. Those are the most important, because we’ve stopped several assassinations and infiltrations this way. Those cases decide what city we travel to next. All the other dives are arranged in roughly first-come-first-served order. Nobody likes the system. Buddy wants to be more proactive and less reactive, but there’s only one of me.”

  “Who gives you the leads?”

  “They come in two categories, I alternate leads from
each group. Dirt Bag’s folks in New York find people who are too successful given their contacts and skill sets. Buddy’s group in LA finds the negative outliers, the spectacular wipeouts. They do most of the research and then toss the summaries in my slush pile.”

  She nodded. “Filtering out intelligence and duplicate dives, say we average 9 separate targets a work night. That means you must screen about 2,250 potential actives a year. How many leads on these Golden Tickets do they hand you each year?”

  “Over 5,000. I have a backlog.”

  “How many leads pan out?”

  “Only a couple. Most people I watch are nutcases, but I’ve saved Dirt Bag’s life three times. We also have a pretty good picture of where all the Fossil and governmental pages are stashed, as well as what they can do.”

  Curious, she asked, “Why only search at night? That seems limiting.”

  Daniel sighed and pointed to a large map on the wall with strange notations on the bottom. “The fewer people there are sleeping, the safer and easier it is to travel Out of Body. This is basic onierology. The more people there are dreaming at a time, the noisier the Collective Unconscious gets. It’s kind of like trying to get to the best seat in a good rock concert with stadium seating. I spend most of my time fighting the tides.”

  “But wouldn’t you dive during the day then?” asked Jez.

  “The Collective is world-wide. The numbers at the map bottom are the millions asleep from 11:00 p.m. till 7:00 a.m. in their time zones. The number on the hand-drawn curve is a calculation of how many cumulative people are asleep world-wide when darkness hits that line.”

  As she examined the graph at the bottom, she noted, “Over the Pacific it drops to almost nothing.”

  “That’s the sweet spot where we do most of our work,” he chimed in.

  She noticed a problem in the model. “When it hits this coast with India and the Orient, there are billions instantly.”

  Daniel raised a finger. “Bingo. I call that the Great Wall of China. You do not want to be OOB when that hits.”

  Jez nodded. In spite of all the weirdness, she could handle this. “This sounds pretty tame, like glorified door-to-door sales with a really strict curfew. Anything else Eye Corps is responsible for?”

  “I shut down just before the Wall, write out my reports, then I crash. Next day I start over again. The dive cycle is completely harmless, but I can get thirsty. So stand by with those cold Mountain Dews.”

  “Doesn’t that keep you awake?”

  “OOB isn’t sleep, just an altered state.” Without warning, Daniel took a hypodermic, marked with green tape, out of his dresser drawer and injected himself. There were several greens in the drawer, but only one yellow and one red.

  “Insulin?” she guessed.

  He shook his head. “A cocktail of Pentothal and neuro-boosters like potassium. It makes the dives smoother. Part of your job is to watch the monitors. If my gammas get too high, the alarm goes off. It might mean attack or interference. Hit me with the yellow syringe in the arm. That will slow me down and keep me from burning my brain out too fast.”

  “And the red?” she asked, afraid of the answer.

  “One time, I followed a guy on a private jet. He took me out of range too fast, too close to the Wall. My heart rate went too low, and I almost died. Luckily, the casino had portable shock paddles. That might have failed, too, if Benny hadn’t used the Collective Unconscious page held against my forehead to talk me back. Dr. Poldark gave us the red syringe with epinephrine to jump-start me in an emergency. It also has some theta blockers in it to help snap me out of the dive. Just think of it as preventing the bends when I go too deep.”

  “Wow, talking to someone mind to mind?” Jez asked.

  “When two people hold the page at once, it can work like a mental version of the tin-can telephone. I keep it in my bed-table drawer in case of emergencies.”

  “Could I try that?”

  Daniel shrugged and took the Collective Unconscious page out. They each grabbed one end of document, but the teenager snatched his hand back almost immediately. “Stop. Ouch.”

  “Did you hear me say hello?” she asked.

  “Shouting. Benny was direct and smooth. Contacting you was like standing in the middle of a cyclone while getting pelted by heavy, glass, pop bottles. You have fifty worries bouncing around in there. Let’s not try that again.”

  After Daniel put the page away, Jez summarized, “So while you’re away, I just stay quiet and watch for your brainwaves to color outside the lines?”

  Daniel nodded. “Henry, the normal guy outside, compares it to driving a big rig across country–a lot of boredom, but you’ve got to stay awake or someone could die.”

  “No pressure.” Something occurred to Jez as Daniel lay down in his bed. “If you’re taking Pentothal, that means I can ask you anything and you’d tell me the truth?”

  The teenager grimaced. “Not entirely, but I owe you one for the bathroom visit. I think I know what you want to know. Buddy’s page gives him this empathy skill that means he really can talk people into just about anything.”

  “Handy,” Jez admitted.

  Daniel explained, “For most people it would be, but Buddy has guilt problems. He doesn’t use the skill as often as Dirt Bag wants him to. He works part time for this hospital charity and goes to church a lot.”

  “I had something more personal in mind. How did you lose the use of your legs?”

  Daniel jerked his head back a little. “I guess if we’re going to be working together, you’ll hear it eventually. I’ll tell you, and then we’ll be square.”

  He took a deep breath. “My dad was a professor of anthropology and comparative religion. Dad took Mom and me with him on a trip to the Middle East a little over a year ago. It was nice. Normally, we didn’t get to spend much time with him. Our hotel lobby got bombed by a terrorist group. I was the only survivor.”

  Jez started to apologize, but he held up a hand. “The pain was pretty bad. I was in traction for a long time. When I found out I’d never walk again, I got suicidal. That’s when Babushka Mufsi paid me a visit. She was an old, Jewish lady who had emigrated from Romania, some kind of fortune teller. Dad had helped her to escape a particularly dark chapter in her country’s history. To help me through my dark time, she gave me the page. Even though I couldn’t walk, I could go anywhere from that hospital bed.

  “I used it to track down the bastards who bombed us. I phoned the embassy, the cops, and the media. However, no one took a drugged-up, invalid kid seriously.”

  Jez guessed the rest. “Except Fortune.”

  Daniel nodded. “Yeah. Use his code name in case someone has this place bugged. The Ladder Project staged a raid on the terrorists’ house. Maverick, the leader of the assault, has defected to the Fossils since, taking the Override page with him. That guy is scary.”

  “Who would give a monster like that heightened strength?”

  “It’s not so black-and-white. Maverick’s a charming guy who started as a military rescue diver. He was one of the best, a hero. He used his abilities to ignore frigid water and being smashed against rocks while he was saving someone’s ass. Can you imagine how cool it would be if all police and firefighters could to do the same thing?” the teenager asked, grinning. Then his face dropped as he remembered. “After Maverick massacred the terrorist cell, Dirt Bag’s TV station reported that they had accidentally blown themselves up. Now, I work for him to pay for my revenge.”

  She watched Daniel lift up his shirt, take tiny alligator clips, and attach them to stainless steel piercing-posts through his nipples and belly button. “Didn’t those hurt?”

  “Not as much as ripping the sticky pads off every night did.”

  After attaching a clothes-pin-like pulse-monitor to his fingertip, Daniel slid into the first contact, a radio DJ. Jezebel had twenty minutes of unadulterated boredom until he surfaced, scribbled a license number, and began furiously sketching a face.

  Jez
asked, “Someone with a page?”

  “No, someone from a record label bribing the DJ to play a new song. Usually, I let this stuff slide, but the target works for Dirt Bag. If I give him juicy information, it keeps him off my back for a week.”

  Jez admired the pencil drawing. “You’re an artist.”

  Daniel shrugged. “It’s the one subject Dirt Bag still sends me a tutor for. I passed the GED a couple months ago.”

  Then the boy started his next dive. Meanwhile, she opened up a document on the laptop and started a report. Where possible, she scanned the documents into the file directly. They had no excitement for the rest of the night: a self-help guru, a successful chief financial officer, an old yoga instructor, a navy diver, a computer-chip designer, a sniper on leave, and a bow hunter. Daniel caught the CFO in bed with one of the board members, explaining his rapid rise. Jez played a lot of computer solitaire while she waited.

  On the last dive of the night, Daniel came back early. “The professor we’re looking for isn’t there.”

  She did a quick, online search. “Dr. Reuter was buried a month ago.”

  “Maybe someone in the investigations office can check his house,” he said.

  She hit print, and tucked a copy of the report into that month’s folder. By the time Daniel had the electrodes and alligator clips off, she had the e-mail program up and passed him the laptop. “Ready to send.”

  Daniel grinned as he typed the encryption password and the e-mail address. “This is great. No paperwork! I haven’t been to bed this early since the hospital. What am I going to do with all my spare time?”

  Jez considered this for a moment. Left to his own devices, the boy would waste away on movies and games. He was in serious need of parental guidance. More importantly, he needed a chance to find out who he was beyond work. Her own mother had been a fanatic about self-discovery through college. “Exercise each afternoon with me, and you can pick out some on-line college classes. Dirt Bag gets your nights, but I’m going to make sure the rest of your life doesn’t atrophy.”