BETA - Project Avatar, page 11
“There is a large intersection to your right.”
“Yes, I see it.”
“Wait for the cross light to turn green. Then emerge from concealment and cross the street rapidly but with caution. Go left thirty meters, then enter the courtyard.”
Dee leaned against the left-hand wall and watched the light, trying to gain control of her breathing. She opened and closed her hands several times in an effort to stop shaking.
The light turned green and the cross traffic moved forward with a surging roar, led by an advance guard of dozens of whining little motorbikes. She screwed up her courage, emerged from the alley, and walked over to the intersection. She took long strides, moving as fast as she could without running.
She was halfway across the street when she heard the motorcycles coming, first one and then the other, converging on her from both directions.
“They’re coming!”
“Advance with maximum haste.”
She broke out of the group of pedestrians at a dead sprint, leaped to the curb, and began weaving among the pedestrians on the sidewalk without breaking stride. She could see one of the motorcycles coming toward her—the one driven by the red-haired man. He was dodging cars and motorbikes as he slanted across the street to intersect her path.
He was just screeching to the curb when she ducked into the courtyard.
“Exit by the rear gate and advance with maximum haste,” Beta advised.
The courtyard was spread out between two residential buildings. It contained a number of wooden tables, and four children at play. The children stopped to watch her dash past.
The little swinging gate at the back opened onto a large open space—at least a couple of city blocks—filled with a teeming bazaar. She was at the back of the city market at Chickpet.
She could hardly believe this piece of good luck. With a wordless exclamation of joy, she darted between two sandal vendors, straight into the dense throng of shoppers and hawkers and merchants.
It seemed impossible they could follow her now. But even as the crowd absorbed her, she heard the four children back in the courtyard, squealing with terror. The red-haired man was just a few steps behind her.
“Keep your head low,” Beta admonished her. “Try to stay under awnings. Avoid running in a straight path.”
She ran down a crowded aisle of vegetable merchants, where hundreds of shoppers milled among countless colorful bins of legumes and greens and mustard seed and saffron, all glowing in the day’s last orange rays. She nearly knocked a chicken out of an old woman’s hands, and the woman chattered at her in strident Tamil as she dashed away from the scene of the offense.
“Trend further to the right,” Beta advised her. “Try to assess the position of your pursuers.”
This last piece of advice was no easy trick while running hunched over at top speed through a dense crowd. She jogged right and stole a look at the crowd behind her, lifting her head for a moment.
Her pursuers were easy to spot: one because he towered above the crowd, the other because of his bright red hair. They appeared to have lost her for the moment. Both were advancing in her general direction, but neither had his eyes on her.
She ducked into a covered aisle of electronics vendors. The stands were tiny plywood-and-mesh enclosures in a dense row, with racks of video cameras, obscure electronic parts, pirated DVDs, and talking toys.
“You will need to trend fifty degrees more to your right,” Beta scolded her. “Try to avoid agitating passersby.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” Dee asked irritably. She had just stepped on the toe of an oblivious fat man as she tried to squeeze past him, and he was shouting after her.
“I don’t understand the question. Would you like to hear a menu?”
“No!” But she began taking greater care to avoid collisions with the people around her as the logic of Beta’s advice sank in. Every bit of commotion she left in her wake was a potential clue to help her pursuers home in on her. On the other hand, a tall, well-dressed American woman fleeing at top speed through an Indian bazaar was likely to arouse some reaction from the crowd even if she wasn’t stepping on people’s toes.
As she came out of the electronics aisle, she turned right. An angry yammering of several voices rose somewhere behind her. She turned in time to see the red-haired man running up the aisle toward her, bulldozing shoppers aside with his elbows. Even at a distance of thirty or forty yards, she could make out the vicious intensity of his expression. His lantern jaw was clenched, his face was almost as red as his hair, and his murderous gray eyes were locked on her like those of a predator closing for the kill.
She gave a shriek of terror and began running. The path was broad enough here to let her gain some speed, and she could see a gate opening onto the street, just up ahead.
“Exit the market through the front gate,” Beta instructed her. “Acquire motorized transportation as rapidly as possible.”
She burst out onto the sidewalk of one of the city’s main streets. She knew exactly where she was now: only a few blocks from the city center. Dozens of auto-rickshaws were queued at the curb for customers leaving the bazaar. There were also a few taxis, and the first in line was an old but serviceable-looking Mercedes. It was idling at the curb, and the driver was a slick-looking young man in mirrored sunglasses, chewing on a toothpick, with one elbow hanging jauntily out the window.
She jumped into the back seat and slammed the door, yelling, “Go, go, go!” She looked back through the rear window and saw both her pursuers running out through the main gate. The scary-looking red-haired one had already spotted her, and now both were dashing toward her cab.
“Certainly, madam,” the young driver said coolly. “Where is your destination, please?”
“Just go!” she pleaded and said the first place she thought of: “Taj Hotel!”
The driver put the car into gear and pulled out into traffic. Smaller cars honked but gave way.
The red-haired soldier ran out into the street after them. He yelled, “Stop that car!” in a penetrating, authoritative voice.
“No, don’t stop!” she said, leaning over the seat to speak close to the driver’s ear. Her voice wobbled a little, and she was close to tears. “Please don’t stop.”
But the young driver didn’t seem at all inclined to obey the red-haired foreigner running after his cab. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said casually, hitting the accelerator. “I don’t like to stop. I prefer to go.”
The tires squealed and the car jumped forward. As it did so, the red-haired man sprinted after them in a final burst of speed, and he managed to slap one of the rear quarter panels, terrifying Dee half out of her wits.
“How very rude,” the driver commented. He began weaving at a good speed through the dense traffic, using his horn and the imposing size of his vehicle with practiced ease to carve out a passage.
Dee turned to look back through the rear window and saw the red-haired man reach into his lapel and pull out what was unmistakably the butt of a handgun. Her mouth fell open.
Just then, the tall man came abreast of his partner and put a hand on his shoulder. The red-haired man seemed to think again and tucked the pistol back into its holster. A few seconds later, one of them was leaning over a rusty old red Corolla by the curb, hauling the driver out of his car. Then the traffic obscured her view.
“If I might make a recommendation,” the driver commented, bullying an auto-rickshaw almost onto the sidewalk. “The Taj Hotel is not a good choice today. Because I believe it is on fire. On the other hand, my cousin runs a very comfortable hotel in Subedar Chatram. The rates are quite affordable.”
“Forget the Taj,” Dee said, trying to concentrate on the view through the rear window. “I’m going to . . . uh . . .” She had no idea where she was going.
They stopped to wait for a light, and she saw the red Corolla two blocks behind them, weaving through gridlocked cars in an intersection, going against the light.
“Oh, God,” she said. “They’re still after us.”
“Please confirm,” Beta said. “Are you currently under pursuit?”
“Yes!” Dee shouted. “They’re less than two blocks away.” She turned to the front and saw the driver looking at her curiously in the rearview mirror.
“Turn left,” Beta said.
“Turn left!” she shouted.
The driver frowned a little but made no comment. Just then, the light turned green and he floored it, spinning the wheel hard left.
“I believe perhaps someone is chasing you, madam,” he commented. “But there is no cause for alarm. I have lived in Bangalore all my life, and I don’t believe there is anyone in this city who can drive as fast as I can.”
“Turn right,” Beta said.
“Turn right!” she shouted.
“Very good.” The car screeched to the right and skidded into a small side street in a four-wheel drift. They began accelerating hard down the narrow lane, the mirrors on each side nearly clipping parked vehicles and handcarts as they roared past.
At the end of the block, they joined a main thoroughfare and were suddenly back in heavy traffic. Dee saw the Corolla turn into the top of the little street they were leaving, bouncing roughly over the curb, still hot on their trail.
It was easy for her to believe her driver’s boast. He deftly intimidated the smaller traffic out of his way, making lanes where there were none, using his horn liberally to assert his privilege. At one point, he even reached under the dash and pushed a secret button that fired off what sounded like a foghorn, terrorizing the competition on all sides. But despite their progress, Dee kept catching glimpses of the red Corolla out the rear window.
“Oh, what is this?” the driver said with frustration as they came to a traffic jam. He leaned out his window and yelled, “Come on, then! Get a move on!” The traffic was stopped across all lanes, turning the street into a huge parking lot, and his voice was lost in the blaring of horns.
Beta warned, “The velocity differential between you and your pursuers will be unacceptably low if your vehicle does not proceed more quickly.”
“We’re going as fast as we can,” she said. Which, at the moment, was not at all.
“Exit the vehicle,” Beta instructed her. “Proceed south on foot, rapidly but with caution.”
With a little moan of frustration, she gave the driver a hundred-rupee note and a heartfelt thank-you, then stepped out into the frozen river of cars.
As soon as she was standing up, she realized that Beta was right. The two men had already abandoned the Corolla, less than a block behind her. They were approaching the Mercedes at a quick jog, and when they spotted her, they broke into a dead run.
Dee wriggled through traffic to the curb and began sprinting up the sidewalk alongside a lush wall of greenery behind an ornate wrought-iron palisade fence. A pair of tall black-and-gilt gates just ahead signaled the familiar entrance to the botanical gardens.
“Turn right,” Beta told her.
She dashed into the gardens through the stone archway beside the closed gates. A young woman in a uniform reminiscent of a 1950s movie-house usherette yelled at her as she passed, “We are closed, we are closed!”
Dee was no more than ten yards up the wide path when she heard the young woman shriek with surprise, presumably because she was being bowled out of the way by a couple of suited commandos.
At this point, Dee knew she was caught. The paths here were wide and paved, winding among the garden’s exquisite stands of tropical trees and lush, fragrant flowerbeds. At this hour, the paths were clear of pedestrians. There might have been nowhere in the entire city where it would be so easy to run someone down.
“Turn forty-five degrees right,” Beta said.
No path led off to the right, but she obeyed, mindless and obedient as a robot. She would just keep running until they caught her.
She found herself dodging through the garden’s three-acre stand of old-growth banyan trees. It was a thicket of house-size trunks, with massive branches webbed overhead and vine-like ‘beards’ falling in thick tangles all the way to the ground.
A ray of hope dawned as she realized how much cover she had among the giant trunks. She couldn’t hear the men behind her anymore. Indeed, she wasn’t even sure which direction she had come from.
“A little more to the left,” Beta recommended. “Now find a large tree, and climb with maximum haste.”
With a resurgence of hope, she scrambled up one of the knobby beards, like a monkey climbing a knotted rope, then pulled herself nimbly up onto an immense horizontal branch, twelve feet above the ground and two feet wide. She lay down full length on it.
Her heart pounded against her ribs where they pressed against the smooth bark. Lying this way, in the grooved upper surface of the massive branch, she was invisible from the ground.
“Seek concealment among the foliage,” Beta instructed her, a few seconds late. “And wait.”
Beta put on the elevator music again. She lay pressed to the top of the branch, weeping silently, not moving a muscle.
An hour later, when it was fully dark, she finally dared to whisper a command to Beta. “Turn off that damned music,” she hissed. “And never play it again.”
“Yes, Dee.”
The ensuing silence was pure bliss.
She dozed for a while. When she awoke in the darkness, she was surrounded by the sounds of night birds. Beta was speaking in her ear.
“Optimum waiting time has been achieved. Lower yourself to the ground and advance westward with maximum stealth. Probability of successful evasion is ninety-one to ninety-five percent.”
Chapter 12
Getting out of the botanical garden was a much more relaxed procedure than getting in.
With a little help from Beta, Dee found her way out from among the banyans and headed west, passing through a succession of empty, moonlit paths that meandered among draping banana flowers and the pervasive perfume of night-blooming jasmine.
The botanical gardens were beautiful at night. It was like a bit of paradise pried from some afterlife and stripped of ghostly inhabitants. As she passed quietly across the grounds under the moonlight, she saw only one person: an old man with a limp, presumably a night watchman. She stayed tucked well into the shadows until he toddled off, leaving her alone again.
Dee was in no hurry to return to the street. She dawdled as Beta guided her along the edge of a fishpond, and almost tripped over a pair of swans sleeping on the grass with their heads tucked deep under their wings. Her shadow in the moonlight made goldfish come up out of the inky depths and stare at her from just beneath the surface.
Trees of all descriptions were lined up along the wall of the garden, providing a wide range of choices for an easy exit. She found an acacia that was branched almost like a ladder, and climbed up and over the wall in a few seconds. Several people saw her drop down to the sidewalk, but they minded their business, and she went on her way.
The night streets of Bangalore were alive with activity and commerce, in stark contrast with the peaceful gardens. Most of India kept a siesta work schedule, with business hours in the mornings and evenings, and a few hours of closure in the heat of the day. Vendors were wheeling up and down the moonlit street in motorized food carts, loudly hawking fresh fruits and grilled meats and boiled eggs, all sprinkled liberally with curry. Along the sidewalks, the awnings were out and the windows lit in every shop front. Even small children were awake and out on the sidewalks despite the late hour.
Dee hailed the first auto-rickshaw she saw and instructed the driver to take her to the train station. But when they passed a clothing store, open for business and with its windows filled with tempting offerings, she couldn’t resist. She paid the driver and got out. Having lost her hard-won new wardrobe this afternoon, not to mention her luggage and travel clothes, once again she had nothing but the contents of her shoulder bag and the clothes on her back.
While she had no time for serious shopping, at the very least she could find herself a disguise. This uplifting thought prompted her to do something she had always wanted to do: she kitted herself out with a full traditional sari outfit, of the sort that a well-to-do Indian woman might wear as everyday apparel.
The store that had tempted her out of the rickshaw was big and well lit, filling two stories. The lower floor was loaded with fashion treasures of India. In another mood she could have spent hours trying on clothes from the racks and mannequins that filled the large space, but she was still recovering from the events of this afternoon. So she selected the first piece that she fell in love with: sky blue silk with a delicately watered edge, cut lavishly to flow over the left shoulder like a shiny waterfall, with a blouse in cloth-of-gold.
Dee carried the outfit off with striking effect despite her blue eyes. She bought a single broad bracelet, plated in gold, to wear on the wrist of her bare right arm. Then she talked the salesgirl into applying tikka to her forehead: a single spot of lipstick red just above the bridge of her nose.
In the mirror, she was unrecognizable. She wondered if disguise was always this much fun. The only problem with her new look was the shoulder bag. She walked out of the store carrying it briefcase-style, which still wasn’t correct but looked a lot better than draping it over her shoulder.
Walking down the street in her new outfit with no fear of being recognized, she had an idle moment to think things over. When Ed awoke from his coma, he was going to have some serious explaining to do. What kind of a “personal assistant app” had he foisted off on her, anyway? She had nothing but praise for its sophistication but what exactly was it? She decided to put it to the test.
“Beta,” she said.
“Yes Dee.”
“Actually, I’m going by the name Karen Collins now.”
“Okay, Karen,” it replied, as if alias changes were a standard part of its command vocabulary. “Would you like to see a menu?”
“No, that’s all right. I’d like you to do some research for me. Find out everything you can about a General Tyrone Grimmer with the National Security Agency. And also the UMBRA unit of the NSA.”
