Free Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief by Alexander Jablokov Page B

minute, I’ll be okay.”
    Blue flames licked up from where Hesketh, or whatever, had been. Its pieces lay all around the crater it had blown in the pile of tires. Bernal choked on the smell of burning rubber.
    He looked up at Charis. “How are you?”
    “Alive. Thanks to you. But not much better than that.” He now saw that half her face was black, and there was a bloody tear in her leg.
    “Bandages?” he said.
    “In the car. But don’t worry about that now. Get the extinguisher. Under the steering column.”
    “Let me help you down—”
    “Now.  Tire fires are nightmares.  Move”
    Bernal found the red extinguisher easily enough. The climb seemed much harder this time. Every third step, his foot sank into a tire. Loose lengths of radial belt tore at his pants.
    The stench was incredible.
    By the time he got back up the hill, Charis had torn a length of cloth from her shirt and tied off her bleeding calf. Her fingers moved with quick expertise: she knew field first aid.
    Bernal sprayed foam on the stinking rubber.
    “So, what the hell was this thing?” Charis held a length of the device’s leg. “Packed with half a pound of Semtex, I’d estimate. Not a crowd shredder, but nothing to pick your nose with either.”
    “Some kind of decoy, not Hesketh at all.” Once burning, the rubber decided it liked it that way. The fire retreated only reluctantly. The extinguisher was meant to suppress an engine fire. Its capacity was limited. “Just a little remote-control crawler. No processing in it at all.” 
    Charis shook her head, then winced. “I’ve been skunked. All the way through. There’s no Hesketh. There’s nothing. Muriel asked me—”
    “What?”
    “Muriel Inglis. You remember her. Your boss. She asked us to look into what Ungaro was up to. Said she’d lost control, that things were going bad and she needed our help...”
    “Whose help?”
    “Social Protection. We provide . . . technical security services, you might say.”
    “Who might say? Not me.”
    “Argue with me, but keep working that fire. You’ve almost got it under control. Look. Muriel’s taken off and I don’t know what the hell she’s up to. I do know that she’s taken off with a spare herf gun of mine that I would like to have back. I should have just called it all off this morning when I saw no Hesketh in that lab and got roughed up by Muriel’s attack dog employee.”
    It took Bernal an instant to realize that she was talking about him. “What do you say Muriel asked you to do?” 
    “She asked me to grab Hesketh when I could, so that she could examine it. She didn’t think Missy Madeline Ungaro was reporting adequately. Muriel had funded the thing, so I guess I was some kind of high-tech repo man. Muriel’s got a talent for getting people to do what she wants. Right? So, tell me, why are you here? I had information from before, from my surveillance, on where Hesketh was going to be. What brought you out?”
    Muriel, Bernal didn’t say. A message from Muriel. He didn’t have any interest in sharing that information with Charis. He’d have to find Muriel and talk with her first. He kicked a big truck tire onto some fugitive blue flames and got a last dribble out of the extinguisher.
    “Just a hunch,” he said.
    If Charis hadn’t shown up, he would have waited for Hesketh and then met the detonation himself. He was  sure there was a good explanation, but one thing he’d have to ask Muriel was why she had sent him a message that had almost gotten him killed.

13

    Something glowed above the trees. As Bernal drove, it grew and turned into the toe of a cowboy boot, brightly spotlit.
    The boot was at the end of the kicked-up leg of a cowgirl straddling a rocket. She was thirty feet high, a masterpiece of fiberglass craftsmanship. She wore two sheriff’s badges, one on each thrusting breast, and nebulae decorated her short denim skirt. The rocket she rode was a nondescript thing of creased metal. Beneath her feet