P Deutermann - The Moonpool

When I got back to my room, I found a stack of books and my watch on the desk. It was all nonfiction and not very recent, but I was delighted to have books at last. The television remained dark, but I didn’t care very much. I’m not much of a vidiot under the best of circumstances. I worried about my mutts, and wondered for the umpteenth time if my guys were looking for me. I couldn’t see Tony believing anything the G-men told him, but, on the other hand, he’d had doubts from the git-go about what I was doing down there at Helios. If Quartermain happened to back up what the agents told him, he’d probably go into the watch-and-wait mode.

My secret surprise came late that night, when I was awakened by a sound I couldn’t place. The rain was still coming down outside, so the room was dark except for the light coming in under the door from the hallway. Instinctively I reached for my trusty. 45 and then remembered I was fresh out of heat.

I heard it again: The hinges on the bathroom door made a faint squeaking noise. I tensed in the bed, not knowing what to expect, and then a human figure loomed out of the darkness and sat down on my bed.

“Hi, there,” a female voice said. “I’m Mad Moira Maxwell, and I’m your neighbor. What’s your name?”

Coming from a relatively sound sleep, it took me a few seconds to gather my wits, sparse as they were.

“Cam Richter,” I said. I could just make out her face, but the rest of her was wrapped up in a lumpy bathrobe. Her eyes were wide and, I realized, just a little crazy-looking. Had she said Mad Moira?

“So what’d you do?” she asked, making herself more comfortable on the edge of my bed. She didn’t weigh much, and her hair was disheveled. Red hair, I realized. There might be something to that Mad business after all.

“Failed to heed a nose-out warning from appropriate authority. Twice, I think. And you?”

“Sedition with a computer or three,” she said brightly.

“I haven’t heard that word since high school civics. Sedition?”

“It’s come back into vogue these days,” she said. “The government is taking itself a lot more seriously than it used to, and here we are.”

“How’d you fiddle the bathroom door locks?” I asked, mindful of the major’s warnings about being good and not talking to other detainees. I sat up in the bed to give her more room. That didn’t work. She slid closer. She smelled of soap and healthy young female.

“When you can do sedition with a massively parallel computer system, door locks are a piece of cake,” she said. “I am-I was, I suppose-a professor of computer science at the U in Wilmington. How about you?”

“I was a lieutenant in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office, back in Triboro, for far too long. Now I’m a freelance investigator. Or maybe just lance, now that I think about it. Free I am not.”

“Know that feeling,” she said.

“How long have you been in here?” I asked.

“One year, one month, ten days, and a wake-up, as the Marines like to say.”

She laughed when she saw the surprise registering on my face. “Oh, yes, lieutenant, this can go on for a long, long time. Especially for sedition in time of war, even if it is an undeclared war.”

“Fuck me,” I said, without thinking.

“Right now?” she asked, and then she laughed again. It was an appealing laugh, but those eyes still had that penumbra of lunacy around the edges. I figured her for about thirty-five, maybe thirty-eight or so. It was hard to tell in the gloom, and I wasn’t about to turn on a light.

“I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “I mean-aw, shit…”

She waved a hand. “No offense taken. In fact, I kind of like the direct approach. Especially after being locked up in here. The last guy in this room was a Muslim of some stripe, and he was scared to death of women. He threatened to report me when I visited. I told him I’d throw menstrual fluids on him in his sleep if he opened his yap. That seemed to do it.”

“Ri-i-ght,” I said. Mad Moira indeed.

“Yeah, well, I tend toward direct action. They don’t call me Mad Moira for nothing. You have anyone on the outside who’s going to be wondering where you went?”

“Actually, I think so. Or maybe it’s more like hope so. And you?”

“The Arts and Sciences faculty was probably relieved all to hell when I went ‘on sabbatical,’ as I suspect they’ve been told. If anyone has inquired, they’ve probably been damned tentative about it.”

A legend in her own mind, I thought. “You one of those feminazis I keep reading about?” I asked.

“You bet,” she said proudly. “Although I’m not anti-male. I am definitely anti-government, especially this government, which I believe to be illegal, unconstitutionally elected, and guilty of all sorts of perversions of the Bill of Rights. You going to escape?”

Oh, great, I thought. Another fanatic. She ought to meet Carl Trask. They could rant together. As to escape, the thought had occurred to me, but so had the nature of the guard force. These guys weren’t your typical paunchy, chain-smoking, union-card-carrying, fifty-year-old penitentiary screws. That little group jogging around the perimeter fence in eighty pounds of full battle regalia hadn’t been out there for a picnic, and none of them, not one, had been even breathing hard. If I did try to escape, I’d better succeed on the first try. Plus, I didn’t exactly know my newest best friend all that well.

“Thought about it,” I said finally. “But it looks really hard. Besides, I don’t fancy living in a real cell. I’m hoping my friends get some really nasty lawyers to start looking.” Even as I said that, I wondered if it was likely, at least in the near term, especially if Quartermain was part of the cover. I realized that he was increasingly the unknown element here.

“I’ve thought about nothing else,” she said, shifting on the bed. In profile her face was quite pretty, and, yes, that was red hair. “If I could get my hands on the computers that run this place, we could walk out of here in five minutes.”

“Then what?” I asked. The same government agency that rounded her up in the first place would more than likely round her up again, and this time she might have to learn Spanish or some other foreign tongue. “Are you familiar with the term ‘rendition’?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. In fact, that’s what attracted their attention. I was getting a pretty good handle on the size and scope of that program. Of course, I had to break through some federal firewalls to do it.”

“Yeah, they hate that,” I said. “Frankly, I used to hate it when hackers went after our sheriff’s office computers. If they were local assholes, we’d drop by and do something physical about it.”

“Oh, so I’m an asshole now?”

“Look, Moira, I don’t know you. I do know that I have not been fucking around with the federal government’s war on terrorism. I ignored a warning from an FBI agent to stay out of a case that got one of my people killed, so here I am. If you went hacking into the feds’ computer networks, they have to assume you’re part of the problem, just like the president said.”

“So it’s okay for the government to kidnap citizens in the night and lock them up for the duration?”

I shrugged. “Personally, I favor prosecution in open court. I’d certainly be willing to take my chances in that venue. But: Did you do the crime?”

She didn’t answer.

“You know the saying. And I have to tell you, as an ex-cop, this is pretty cushy time.”

“Yet here you are,” she said. “You don’t think what you did was a crime, but you’re doing the time, just like me.”

She had me there. “I guess I think someone’s eventually gonna try to get me out,” I said. “Maybe not right away, but soon enough. My people are going to see through the smoke screen and, being all ex-cops themselves, they’ll push it. Someone ‘in authority’ will come in here one day and ask me if I’ve gotten the message, I’ll play nice, and then I’ll be out.”