BETA - Project Avatar, page 10
She asked a well-dressed, middle-aged woman in the crowd beside her, “What happened?”
Immediately, four or five people turned to her from different directions, all eager to bring the newcomer up to speed on the exciting events. “Gas leak!” they said excitedly. “A gas leak has exploded! And now there is this fire.”
Dee edged sideways a couple of steps, turned, and began hastening away along the rear edge of the sidewalk, where the crowd was thinnest.
Taking a moment to indulge her growing sense of panic, she let her eyes do a slow, careful sweep around the street, fearfully checking the surroundings.
Directly across the street’s five columns of halted cars, not twenty yards away, she saw a very tall Westerner towering above the crowd. He had short-cropped hair in the military style, and an ill-fitting suit emphasized his gangly appearance.
Her eyes locked onto his face, and she froze. He was staring straight at her and speaking into his fist, his immense Adam’s apple moving as he spoke.
She knew the face. She had seen it staring at her from inches away, less than two days ago, when she peeped into the window of her suite at Hotel Uncle Sam. On that occasion, he had been wearing a midnight-red beret.
Chapter 11
Dee’s eye contact with the tall man might have lasted two seconds, during which the world stood still around her. Then he leapt onto the roof of an auto-rickshaw and bounded toward her over the roofs of cars, like stepping-stones across a stream.
She shrieked, dropped her three shopping bags, and bolted down the sidewalk.
As she made the turn at the end of the sidewalk, she slowed just enough to pull her shoulder bag’s strap over her head so it would lie flat against her back as she ran. Then she tore off into the dense grid of the old downtown district, dodging among cars and pedestrians, turning randomly at each corner.
At the second corner, she allowed herself one glance over her shoulder. The tall man was still behind her and less than a block away. He was very fast.
Even in the panic of full flight, the voice of reason was speaking clearly somewhere in her head: He’s not alone. Don’t try to outrun them. Get off the street.
She was running alongside an ornate and ancient building, four stories tall and topped with onion domes. She recognized it as the Tipu Palace, a museum that had once been the summer home of an eighteenth-century sultan. The main entrance was on the far corner of the block, but there were several street-level doors on this side, and one of them had been propped open with a trash basket.
Dee darted through the door, nearly taking a spill when she ran into a mop and bucket just inside. She dashed up the short hallway to a T-intersection and turned left. The doors along the hall had panes of frosted glass with unreadable words or names written on them in Tamil. This wing of the building appeared to be used for administrative offices and was not open to the public.
She quickly came to the end of the second hallway—a dead end. This wing of the building wasn’t nearly as labyrinthine as she had hoped, and she spun around, searching for a route of escape.
In desperation, she opened the door closest to her. It was a tiny office, not much bigger than a closet. An Indian man with a big black mustache looked up at her, startled, from behind a desk heaped with papers. She ignored his gasp of surprise and pulled the door shut again.
The second door opened onto a narrow stairwell with banisters carved in ornate teak. As she began dashing up the stairs two at a time, she heard a clatter somewhere back down the hall. Pursuit was not far behind.
On the second floor, she left the stairwell and ran as far down the main hallway as she dared, expecting her pursuers to burst through the stairwell door behind her at any moment. She tried a doorknob. This time, she was lucky.
The room was a small, unoccupied office, piled high with carvings, artifacts in hammered brass, and other memorabilia of the royal past.
Dee closed the door quietly behind her, then darted around to the back of the generic-looking gray metal desk and ducked down to squeeze herself inside its kneehole.
She crouched there in the dark, catching her breath in big, silent gasps of terror. Her hands, as if on their own initiative, rummaged in her bag to find her smartphone. It was the instinct to call someone for help. She flipped it open and stuck the Bluetooth insert into her ear.
“Beta,” she whispered.
“Yes, Dee. What can I help you with?”
“Place a call.”
“Who would you like me to call?”
Then the door opened.
She stopped breathing. Her heart seemed to freeze in her chest.
The universe was completely still for three seconds. Then the door closed again. She heard a murmur of voices in the hall, followed by stealthy footfalls moving away, and then another door opening. There were at least two men out there.
It was quiet now, but they would be back.
“Call Abe,” she whispered urgently, though she knew that he was almost certainly in the air, en route to Amsterdam.
“Which of Abe’s numbers should I call?”
“His direct line,” she answered, nearly weeping with impatience. “Go on, do it now!”
Abe’s “direct line” was actually routed through an elaborate circuit of patched phone lines and digital scramblers, but it was the number for the cell phone he kept in his pocket. No one who had this number was allowed to use it, except in dire emergencies. And it was the caller’s responsibility to make the conversation sound innocuous.
A moment later, a recording of Abe’s voice spoke in her ear. “If you’re getting this message, I must be out of service range or my phone is turned off. Leave a message.” Beep.
“Hey,” she whispered through gritted teeth, forcing her voice to sound as casual as circumstances would allow. “Guess who this is? I’d love to chat. Why don’t you give me a call? Bye-bye.”
Beta apparently recognized the last word, because a few moments after Dee stopped speaking, she heard her phone hang itself up.
So here she was, cowering alone in the darkness and fast running out of options. Probably no more than a minute or two from falling into the custody of shady and possibly murderous soldiers. She closed her sweaty palm into a fist and pummeled herself on the forehead, trying to force her brain to cough up a workable plan of action.
“What am I supposed to do now?” she said aloud in a tremulous whisper. “Where can I go?”
Beta spoke into her ear: “What is your objective in this situation?”
This was so unexpected that, despite a full panic, she was caught up short. “What . . . what did you say?”
“I am now in advisory mode. Please clarify your objective.”
“Objective!” Dee hissed bitterly. “I don’t have any objective! I just want to make it out of here. Alive.”
“Position confirmed by GPS,” Beta told her. “Tipu Palace, Bangalore. Relative altitude: second floor. Downloading floor plans. Establishing routes of egress. Establishing line-of-sight vulnerability patterns. I am entering calculation mode. Please wait.”
A quiet piece of half-familiar elevator music began playing softly in her ear. She made a small, outraged sputtering sound between her lips but was unable to form words. After a few seconds, Beta repeated, “Please wait,” and the music continued.
“Beta,” she managed to whisper. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, Dee. I don’t understand the question. Would you like to hear a menu?”
“No!” she hissed.
“Calculation mode is now complete. From the available data, I have calculated 3.2 times ten to the fifth power short-term scenarios for discreet and rapid exit from your current position. I will now enter guidance mode, according to the parameters of the top-scoring exit scenario. Probability of successful evasion is twenty-one to eighty-seven percent, depending on the status of unknown variables.”
“Beta, what . . . what . . .”
“Yes, Dee?”
“You’re going to tell me how to get out of here?”
“If you are instructing me to enter guidance mode, I am already in guidance mode,” Beta told her. It sounded a little bit like the thing was scolding her. It said, “Exit through the door. Turn left and advance down the hall rapidly but with caution.”
“Oh, this is completely ridiculous,” she muttered. But she was going to have to get out of this room sometime soon, before someone came through the door again. So she crawled out from under the desk, adjusted her shoulder bag across her back, and tiptoed over to the door. She cracked it open and peeked out.
The hallway was clear, as far she could tell. She was immediately struck by how sumptuous the place was. The walls were painted with faded but gorgeous frescoes depicting a royal hunt on elephant back, and the floor was carpeted with a long succession of elaborate Afghan rugs. This must have been a wing of guest rooms, back in the sultan’s day.
Dee tiptoed down the hall, double-time, trying to control her hyperventilation. She wiped her sweating hands on her brand-new pants.
“Attempt to open the next door on the right,” Beta told her.
“That’s not the stairwell,” she whispered nervously.
“Correct,” Beta confirmed, and offered nothing further.
The doors on this hall were much more ornate than those on the ground floor. They were paneled in teak and inset with Mughal patterns of bone or ivory. She tried the knob and the door opened easily.
“Close the door behind you,” Beta instructed her. “Rapidly but with caution. Now exit through the window.”
“But I’m on the second floor!” she whispered.
“Correct.”
She crossed the room and peeped out the window, down into a small courtyard. There appeared to be no one standing below, so she pulled up the heavy sash. The old counterweights rattled a bit inside their housings, making her wince. She leaned out for a better look below.
She was above a walled garden, full of flowers, beautifully maintained. It was dominated by an alabaster fountain and several jacaranda trees. Just below her window was a blue-tiled roof covering an entranceway. She stepped cautiously out onto the roof. Then she shuffled over to the edge and peeked down.
A cast-iron trellis covered with flowering vines walled the little patio below her feet. She sat down on the edge of the tiles, felt around with her foot until she had a purchase on the ironwork, then clambered down to the ground.
“Advance immediately to the west wall of the garden and scale it,” Beta told her.
“Which way is west?” she whispered, bouncing nervously on her toes. There were at least six windows looking down onto the garden, not to mention a large door right beside her.
“Hold your smartphone directly in front of you and rotate to your left,” Beta said. “A little further. A little further. You are now facing west.”
She sprinted across the mossy cobblestones and clambered up the woody vines clinging to the garden wall. She placed her hands with care at the top, afraid there might be broken glass mortared onto the bricks to deter burglars. Finding it clear, she threw her feet over the top of the wall and dropped about eight feet down onto the packed dirt of a small alleyway behind the palace.
“Turn right and advance with maximum haste,” Beta recommended.
She took off running, probably faster than she had ever run in her life.
“You are approaching a road,” Beta told her. “Acquire motorized transportation as rapidly as possible.”
Sure enough, the little alley opened onto a small, paved road running along the wall at the back of the palace, and right there at the corner was an auto-rickshaw. The driver was snoozing with his sandaled feet dangling out the window.
She jumped into the backseat uninvited and slammed the door behind her. The driver awoke with a start and banged his knobby knees on the tinny roof.
“Utavi!” he exclaimed.
“I’m in an auto-rickshaw,” she said breathlessly.
The driver blinked his wide eyes at her. “I am sorry, madam, what did you say?”
“Tell the driver to take you to the train station,” the voice in her ear insert advised her.
“I definitely do not want to go to the train station,” Dee objected. “They’ll be watching the train station.”
The driver moved his jaw up and down once without saying anything. He was staring wide-eyed at her, as if at a madwoman. After a moment, he said, “That is very well, then.”
Beta was silent. Dee clenched her jaw with frustration, then did as she was told.
“Take me to the train station,” she told the driver.
“Oh, dear . . . but, madam . . .” The driver moved his mouth a couple more times without producing any actual words.
Dee fished out a hundred-rupee note as fast as she could and handed it to him with shaking fingers. “Take me to the train station,” she insisted.
“Yes, madam,” he said, and started his vehicle.
Unfortunately, she had boarded perhaps the worst-maintained auto-rickshaw in all South Asia. It started on the third try and began clattering down the street at roughly walking speed, blowing out huge billows of smoke as it went.
“Faster!” she yelled.
“Yes, of course, madam!” the driver shouted back. “We will be going faster very shortly, I assure you.”
With a few explosive backfires, the little vehicle began gradually gaining speed. Dee turned around in her seat, staring back at the little alleyway and the wall of the garden receding slowly into the distance in the rear window.
“Please, oh, please, can’t we go a little bit faster?”
“Yes, very soon, madam.”
They eventually reached the end of the long, straight stretch of road and came to the first intersection. The driver stuck out a hand to signal left.
As they were puttering through the turn, Dee saw two men in dark suits come sprinting around the distant corner of the palace wall, far behind them. The men stopped, and one of them pointed up the road, directly at her rickshaw. Finally, the little vehicle made it around the corner and was chugging up a major street.
“They saw me,” Dee said. The driver couldn’t hear her anymore over the rattle of the engine.
“Please confirm,” Beta requested. “Are you currently under pursuit?”
“Yes,” she said miserably. “Yes, I am.” Despite the cold terror in her belly, she found a moment to wonder why would Ed’s research group at Endyne have programmed a personal assistant app to ask, “Are you currently under pursuit?”?
“Proceed one hundred twenty meters,” Beta told her. “Then exit the vehicle. One hundred meters. Eighty meters.”
A faint roar had been swelling behind them, and it suddenly grew much louder as two black motorcycles screeched around the corner onto the street behind them. The tall, stork-like man was riding one, and a man in a matching suit, with a red crew cut, was on the other. They leaned hard into the turn, then opened up the throttles on their machines and came howling up the street at high speed. They would be level with the little rickshaw in seconds.
“Ten meters.”
“Stop here!” Dee screamed.
The startled driver hit the brakes. Before the vehicle had come to a halt, she was out the door.
It was a residential neighborhood. She found herself at the head of a small pedestrian alley squeezed into the darkness between a pair of two-story apartment buildings. She dived straight in, dodging around some children playing a ball game. Behind her, she heard the shriek of the motorcycles’ brakes as they arrived at the mouth of the alley.
The alley turned out to be a real obstacle course, impossible to run through. She made her way along at a skipping, hopping jog, frequently using her hands as well as her feet to maneuver. She ducked under laundry lines, jumped over unexpected steps and ditches hidden in the shadows, and slipped sideways through knots of chattering women who stared at her or gave hoots of surprise as she shouldered rudely past. The smell of curry leaves, cloves, and cumin were pervasive.
Behind her, she heard the motorcycles roar again and then fade into the background noises of the city. They must be circling around to cut her off.
“Are you being pursued on foot?” Beta asked her.
She glanced over her shoulder, making sure. “No.”
“Your position has multiple routes of exit,” Beta informed her. “I am entering calculation mode. Please wait.” The insipid elevator music came on, making a surreal mix with Bangalore’s street noise.
She came to the end of the alleyway and found herself facing a cream-colored plaster wall with passages leading off to the right and left. People were staring at her from all three directions, and also from the windows above. A young man in a doorway just beside her began speaking to her in Tamil, and his voice sounded gravely concerned.
“Which way, Beta?” she asked. “Come on, which way?”
“Please wait.” There were three more agonizing seconds of background music, and then Beta said, “I have calculated 2.7 times ten to the fourth power possible exit scenarios. Turn right.”
She slipped past the concerned young man and began wending her way as fast as she could down the alley to the right. A few moments later, Beta said, “Turn left,” sending her into a passage so narrow it was little more than a crack between two buildings.
“You are approaching Mysore Road,” Beta said. “The probability of being observed when you enter Mysore Road will be thirty-two percent or greater, depending on the number of pursuers.”
“There are at least two of them,” she said, shuffling sideways between the two walls in an effort to avoid scuffing soot all over her new clothes.
“The probability of being observed will be fifty-four percent or greater,” Beta amended. “Stop and observe the street before proceeding.”
She made it to the mouth of the passageway, which indeed opened onto a bustling sidewalk beside a busy street. She stood puffing for a moment, gathering her nerve and her breath, then poked her head out and looked around. No motorcycles in sight.
