Mark Costello - Big If

“Ya,” said Claus. He marched back to his desk.

Peta was pulling on her raincoat, patting her hips to make sure she had her beeper.

“I think I’m getting close,” she said.

Jens said, “Close to what?”

“To closing, babe, what else? Tell you what: if I get Lauren to commit, we’ll find a sitter and go out for a steak. I’ll wear that tight dress with the zipper up the armpit, the one that makes me look like a bargirl in Hong Kong.”

“Yes,” said Jens. He knew the dress.

He followed his wife out the door and into Market Square.

From the window of her room at the inn, Vi looked down on Market Square to the south and east. Vi was showered from the jog and semidressed. She wore a plain blue skirt, a red longjohn top, and a level three kevlar vest, standard-issue body armor for the agents on the ropes. The vest hung from her shoulders like a smock, white nylon velcro straps loose at her sides. Vi scratched her cheekbone absently, watching a crowd take shape below, people streaming up the alleys and the sidewalks, converging on the square from ten directions.

Bobbie was sitting on the bed in pantyhose and camisole. She said, “Can I ask you something, Vi?”

“Sure,” said Vi. “Help me with the vest.”

Vi and Bobbie always dressed each other on the road, Vi first because she kept her gear in better order.

Bobbie stood behind Vi, cinching the vest tight. The vest was slate gray and smelled like damp putty. Vi hated the smell.

Bobbie said, “Too tight?”

If they wore the armor loose, it rubbed them raw all day. They wore it very tight.

Vi said it was good. She wiggled in the vest, getting it to sit right.

Bobbie said, “You ever have like — premonitions?”

Vi was buttoning her blouse over the vest. “Sure,” she said.

“Really?”

“Sure — like once I was hiking with my dad. We were in the Whites, coming down Jim Liberty, and through the trees I saw these dry white boulders in a streambed, and I knew that I had seen this exact thing before.”

Bobbie said, “That’s déjà vu. Premonition’s different. Déjà vu is when you see the past, premonition is the future.”

“How do you know?”

“What do you mean, how do I know? That’s the definition, look it up.”

“But how do you know which one you’re having? If I see white boulders in a streambed, does it mean that I was once there, or that I will be someday?”

“Did you ever go down that trail again?”

“No.”

“Then it’s déjà vu.”

“But how do I know that I never will? What if I went back and checked to make sure my déjà vu was accurate? Then I’ve turned it into premonition.”

“You just know,” Bobbie said. “Some things you just know.”

Vi felt a little edgy and was hoping that Bobbie would shut up for a while, so she could clear her head for the ropelines in the square. She tucked the blouse and longjohn top into her skirt, popped a clip into her Uzi, racked it once, and buckled it into the holster.

“I’ve been having premonitions,” Bobbie said. “I’m in a crowd. I scan the hands, I see the muzzle coming up, I throw myself at the shooter and I take it in the face.”

Bobbie clipped the comm set to the back of Vi’s skirt, pressing a pair of thin black wires flat against Vi’s spine.

Vi shivered a bit. She said, “It’s just the stress, Bobbie. That’s the job.”

“Oh sure and I’m a hero and I go down in history, all the way down to a footnote probably, but what the fuck? I took the bullet like a good girl, and that’s the fucking job — we plot against the plotters, right? Plan and counterplan. Only we didn’t stop this plot, Vi, because the real target of the shooter was me . They planned that I would throw myself in front of the bullet.”

The wires on Vi’s body comm ran to a plastic brace on the back of her blouse collar. Bobbie fed the mike line over Vi’s shoulder, under her arm, to a clip on Vi’s right cuff. The comm, like the armor, was fitted to each agent by the Equipment Section, Beltsville. Vi plugged the receiver line into the earbud.

“Well?” said Bobbie.

“Well what?”

“Well what do you think it means?”

Vi could see that Bobbie was scared. Bobbie was always scared in the morning before a big outdoor event, a big crowd behind ropelines. Crowds were easier once you were inside them, scanning, vacant, ready. The hard part was getting ready to be ready, because you had to think about it. Vi considered Bobbie’s premonition. It had a familiar ring, and Vi wondered if Bobbie had told her about this particular premonition at some point in the past. Bobbie averaged two or three premonitions per deployment and usually had four or more recurrent dreams recurring in a cycle at any given time. She also had hot flashes, sudden intuitions, many different déjà vus, and what she called the Creepy-Crawlies. Most of these involved her death, except her déjà vus, which usually involved ex-husbands. Vi brought her suit jacket from the closet, brushed the lint from the arms, and put it on.

“Wasn’t that a movie?” she asked Bobbie. “’Cause, you know, it’s sounds familiar. I really think it was a movie.”

“What movie?” Bobbie said. “What’s the title of this alleged movie that no one has ever seen but you?”

“I never said I saw it, Bobbie. But I think I might’ve seen the coming attractions.”

“For my premonition? What are you, on crack?”

Vi was dressing Bobbie, the armor and the harness and the comm. Bobbie’s comm was always snarled. Vi got it straightened out and draped the wires through the brace and down Bobbie’s arm.

“See, there’s this female agent, right?”

“In the movie?”

“Right. She’s tied to a chair by this evil torture expert guy in the old abandoned oil refinery on the outskirts of town, and she has to shoot her way to freedom. She kills like fifty judo guys in turtlenecks. She can’t get her hands free, so she has to shoot the gun with her mouth. She ulled the igga ike ith.”

“That’s preposterous,” said Bobbie. “Was she pretty?”

“Really pretty.”

“Did she die?”

“Nope,” said Vi. “She survived and so will you.”

Vi plugged Bobbie’s earbud in. They were armored, armed, and all comm’d up. They left the room and started down the corridor.

“Maybe it wasn’t a movie after all,” said Vi. “Maybe they just did the coming attractions and never got around to making the rest. I’ll bet that happens.”

Bobbie said, “My second husband was like that.”

“See?” said Vi. “It’s nothing to freak out about.”

Outside the VP’s suite, the detail was assembling, the SWAT guys and the comm techs, Tashmo and Elias. O’Teen leaned against the wall, his florid face inside a book.

Bobbie said, “What’s happening, O’T?”

“Waiting on Miz Gretchen,” said O’Teen.

O’Teen was handicapping one of the major book awards, reading all the nominees. The book he was reading had a picture on the cover, a woman in the sunlight with two happy-looking pandas.

“Any good?” asked Vi.

O’Teen said, “It’s going out at six to one on the Vegas line.” He turned a page and sighed. “I’m not sure I’ll make it until baseball.”

Gretchen emerged from the VP’s room. She saw Vi in the hallway and said, “Just the body I’ve been looking for. Come on, Violet, let’s go prep the square.”

Vi and Gretchen took the freight liftto the loading dock behind the inn and started up the sidewalk toward the square. Vi waited for Gretchen to say something about Vi’s trip to C.E. the night before. Vi assumed that Gretchen knew about the trip — little happened on the detail without Gretchen knowing it, especially the petty derelictions which made the agents human and not robots, but which always put you on the wrong end of a blasting, Gretchen’s famous rages, and sometimes got the people near you blasted too, Gretchen’s rages being somewhat indiscriminate. Vi had heard Gretchen curse Tashmo over two stupid roadblocks, which Tashmo hadn’t even been in charge of, and Vi’s offense, flouting orders, going AWOL, was a lot more serious.