Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

"Of course not. With my platoon. They're standing guard here, and could use a description of the bitch."

"Of course. Sorry."

"You tell them everything you know, and then we'll go to Candi for a debriefing."

"All right.. just remember Gavrila's been jacked with me two-way – "

"What? That was smart."

"We thought she'd be in a straitjacket for the duration. It was the only way to get anything from her, and we got a lot. But you have to assume she'll retain a lot of what she got from Spencer and me."

"She didn't retain my address," Amelia said.

Jefferson shook his head. "I didn't know it, and neither did Spencer, in case. But she knows the broad outline of the Plan."

"Damn. She'll have passed it on."

"Not yet. She has a superior in Washington, but she won't have talked to him yet. She idolizes him, and combining that with her rigid fanaticism... I don't think she'll call until she can say 'Mission accomplished.' "

"So we don't just stay away from her. We catch her and make sure she doesn't talk."

"Nail her into a room."

"Or a box," I said.

He nodded and broke the circuit.

"Kill her?" Amelia said.

"Won't be necessary. Just turn her over to the medicos and she'll sleep past D day." Probably true, I thought, but pretty soon Amelia and I were going to be the only people in this building physically able to kill.

WHAT CANDI TOLD THEM told them was frightening. Not only was Gavrila vicious and well trained and motivated by love and fear of God and His avatar, General Blaisdell – but it would be easier for her to get into Building 31 than Julian would have supposed. Its main defenses were against military attack and mob assault. It didn't even have a burglar alarm.

Of course she first would have to get onto the base. They sent descriptions of her in the two modes they knew of, and copies of her fingerprints and retina scans, to the gate, with strict detention orders – "armed and dangerous."

There were no security cameras in the Guadalajara airport, but there were plenty at Portobello. No one who looked like her had gotten off any of the six flights arriving from Mexico that afternoon and evening, but that could just mean a third disguise. There were a few women her size and shape. Their descriptions also went to the gate.

In fact, as Jefferson might have predicted, in her paranoia Gavrila bought a ticket to Portobello, but didn't use it. Instead, she flew to the Canal Zone disguised as a man. She went down to the waterfront and found a drunken soldier who resembled her, and killed him for his papers and uniform. She left most of the body in a hotel room, first cutting off the hands and head, wrapping them well, and mailing them at the cheapest rate to a fictitious address in Bolivia. She took the monorail to Portobello and was inside the base an hour before they started looking for her.

She didn't have her plastic gun and knife, of course; she'd even left behind the scalpel she'd used on Ellie. There were thousands of weapons inside the base, but all were locked up and accounted for, except for a few guards and MPs with pistols. Killing an MP sounded like a bad way to get a weapon. She went down to the armory and loitered for a while, inspecting it while appearing to read the notices on the bulletin board, then waiting in line for a few minutes and rushing off as if she'd forgotten something.

She went outside the building and then re-entered through a back door. From the floor plan she'd memorized, she went straight to routine maintenance. There was a duty roster posted; she went to an adjacent room and called the specialist on maintenance duty, and told him a Major Feldman wanted to see him at the desk. He left the room unlocked, and Gavrila slipped in.

She had perhaps ninety seconds. Find something lethal that looked like it worked and wouldn't be missed immediately.

There was a jumbled pile of M-31s, mud-spattered but otherwise in good shape. Probably used in an exercise – by officers, who wouldn't be expected to clean them afterward. She picked one and wrapped it in a green towel, along with a cassette of exploding darts and a bayonet. Poison darts would have been better, quieter, but there weren't any in the open stock.

She slipped outside undetected. This didn't appear to be the kind of base where a soldier could casually carry a light assault weapon around, so she kept the M-31 wrapped up. She put the sheathed bayonet inside her belt, under her shirt.

The binding that compressed her breasts was uncomfortable, but she left it on in case it would buy her an extra second or two of surprise. The uniform was loose, and she looked like a slightly chubby man, short with a barrel chest. She walked carefully.

Building 31 looked no different from the ones that surrounded it, except for a low electrified fence and a sentry box. She walked by the box in the dusk, fighting the temptation to rush the shoe guard and shoot her way in. She could do some real damage with the forty rounds in the cassette, but she knew from Jefferson that there would be soldierboy guards on duty. The black man Julian's platoon. Julian Class.

Dr. Jefferson hadn't known anything about the building's floor plan, though, which was what she needed now. If she knew where Harding was, she could create a diversion for the soldierboys as far as possible from her quarry, and then go after her. But the building was too large to just go in cold and hope to find her while the soldierboys were occupied for a few minutes.

They would be expecting her, too, of course. She didn't look at Building 31 as she walked by. They certainly knew about the torture-murders. Was there any way she could use that knowledge against them? Make them careless through fear?

Whatever action she took, it would have to be within the building. Otherwise, outside forces would deal with it, while Harding was protected by the soldierboys.

She stopped dead and then forced herself to move on. That was it! Create a diversion outside, but be inside when they find out about it. Follow the soldierboys to her prey.

Then she would need God's help. The soldierboys would be swift, though probably pacified, if the humanizing scheme had worked. She had to kill Harding before they restrained her.

But she was all confidence. The Lord had gotten her this far; He would not fail her now. Even the woman's name, Blaze, was demonic, as well as her mission. Everything was right.

She turned the corner and said a quiet prayer. A child was playing alone on the sidewalk. A gift from the Lord.

WE WERE LYING IN bed talking when the console chimed its phone signal. It was Marty.

He was weary but smiling. "They called me out of surgery," he said. "Good news, for a change, from Washington. They did a segment on your theory on the Harold Burley Hour tonight."

"Supporting it?" Amelia said.

"Evidently. I just saw a minute of it; back to work. It should be linked to your data queue by now. Take a look." He punched off and we found the program immediately.

It started out with an optical of a galaxy exploding dramatically, sound effects and all. Then the profile of Burley, serious as usual, faded in, looking down on the cataclysm.

"Could this be us, only a month from now? Controversy rages in the highest scientific circles. And not only scientists have questions. The police do, too."

A still picture of Peter, bedraggled and forlorn, naked from the waist up, holding up a number for the police camera. "This is Peter Blankenship, who for two decades has been one of the most highly regarded cosmologists in the world.

"Today he doesn't even know the right number of planets in the Solar System. He thinks he's living in the year 2004-and is confused to be a twenty-year-old man in a sixty-four-year-old body.

"Someone jacked him and extracted all his past, back to that year. Why? What did he know? Here is Simone Mallot, head of the FBI's Forensic Neuropathology Unit." A woman in a white coat, with a jumble of gleaming equipment behind her. "Dr. Mallot, what can you tell us about the level of surgical technique used on this man?"