“For my heart was hot and restless,” said Lulu. “And my life was full of care,/And the burden laid upon me/Seemed greater than I could bear.” She sat there and stared out the window.
“What was that?”
“From The Bridge—the poem the Longfellow Bridge was named after. MIT boys used to quote it to me as we crossed here. Thought it made them seem more romantic. You know. Thought they’d get lucky.”
“Did they?” asked Decker.
Lulu stood up and made her way toward the door. “Not often,” she said. “Not my type.” Then, she smiled. “I like bad boys, Special Agent Decker. The ones on the lam. The ones wanted by the police, not the cops chasing them.” At that moment, a young couple sidled in right behind her, getting ready. They were approaching the Charles Street-MGH Station and Lulu grew suddenly serious. “This is us,” she said.
They got out at the Circle, at the intersection of Cambridge and Charles, and headed downstairs with the rest of the crowd. But, just as they approached the turnstiles near the door, Lulu turned back. Cops were everywhere, at every entrance and exit.
They hovered there by a newsstand for a moment and were about to head back upstairs when the policeman nearest to them was distracted by some tourist with a map and a question. They ran past him and jumped into the nearest cab.
“Hey, hold on a minute,” the driver began. “You have to wait in line.” But, by then, Lulu had already stuffed a twenty into the slot.
“We’re late for a meeting. Take us down Charles to the Common,” she said, bringing her face close to the plastic partition. “And the twenty’s for you.”
They made their way down the street, past another contingent of police on the other side of the circle. “What gives?” Lulu asked. “Why all the cops?”
“Don’t know,” said the driver. He leaned on his horn as a young girl wearing a fake fur flew by on a bicycle right in front of his cab. “Fucking bikes.” He cursed a blue streak and then added, “There’s some kind of demonstration in the park. Some Occupy Wall Street thing. It’s Friday. Seems to happen every week nowadays. Might as well be driving in Cairo.”
Sure enough, they had only gone a few blocks when the traffic crawled to a stop. Young kids — college students, apparently, from a dozen or more local schools — seemed to be converging on the Common. They carried signs complaining about the Education Industrial Complex, as they termed it, decrying how many university presidents earned hundreds of thousands or millions while other university workers struggled to make ends meet.
“Last week it was the Massachusetts Nurses’ Association. Now, that was worth slowing down for,” said the driver.
They told him to pull over. The sidewalk was jammed here with protestors. Everyone seemed to be heading south, into the park. Decker and Lulu got out and immediately found themselves being carried along by the crowd. “Follow me,” she said, holding onto his arm.
“What’s the matter?” asked Decker.
“See that guy in the raincoat? Past Teke’s Nails, one block back? Near the lamppost!”
“What about him?”
“He’s a cop.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” she replied, and in that moment, the man noticed them staring at him. A second later, he spoke into his sleeve.
They took off down the sidewalk, moving as fast as they could through the throng. Meantime, the man in the coat began waving at somebody else on the opposite side of the street. When Decker looked over, he noticed another young man with the same type of raincoat also running southbound by Seven’s Ale House. Without warning, the other man dashed into the street and began weaving through traffic, trying to make his way over to them.
Decker and Lulu ran faster. They pushed and manhandled their way through the crowd, jostling and bumping, and finally coming to an abrupt halt as they slammed into the back of a very large man carrying a green and white golf umbrella. The man turned on them slowly.
Lulu took a step backward.
Decker felt his fingers curl into fists at his sides automatically.
The man was huge, at least six feet six. Maybe more. Some kind of Eastern European, thought Decker, with a small coconut-shaped head and beady gray eyes. He looked down at them disapprovingly. “Sorry,” he said, donning a mask.
It was one of those Guy Fawkes affairs, an Anonymous mask. The man next to him put one on too. Then another man, until everyone in the crowd seemed to be wearing them.
“What is this, a flash mob?” said Lulu.
Someone came up directly beside them and handed her a couple of masks. He appeared to be giving them away to whomever was interested.
Decker and Lulu put on masks and ducked into the heart of the mob. Moments later, they found themselves outside a drug store just south of Vernon on Charles. “Want a soda?”
“What?” It was so loud, Decker wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly. “A what?”
Lulu pointed inside. “Ice cream soda,” she shouted, grabbing Decker by the hand.
They entered the drugstore. It was disquietingly quiet after the strident shrieks of the street. Somewhere, in the background, Decker could just make out Perry Como singing Do You Hear What I Hear? Only a few people milled about the narrow, cramped aisles, picking out objects like sleepwalkers. The store looked like something out of the 1950s. The shelves were decked out with garlands and Christmas stockings.
They took off their masks.
Lulu headed straight for the hair supplies while Decker made his way toward a newspaper stand by the checkout counter. Amid the alien abduction rags, he found his own face on display. In fact, it was plastered about. His and Lulu’s. WANTED, the headlines roared out at him. Have you seen this man… this couple… alleged terrorist attacks. And so on and so forth. He scanned each one in turn until — that face!
Decker picked up the newspaper. The front page featured the woman from Mr. X’s VR world! Her name was Mary-Lou Fleming, and now he understood why she had looked so familiar. She was the woman he’d seen on TV, the one who’d died with her two kids when a train hit her Camaro at that railroad crossing in Mississippi. But what, Decker wondered, had she been doing in Mr. X’s VR world?
Decker brought the newspaper over to Lulu. She was busy reading the labels on a couple of boxes.
“Recognize this woman?” he asked her.
“That’s Mary-Lou Fleming,” she said, barely looking up from the boxes.
“Exactly.” Decker shook the paper in his hand. “I just saw her in Mr. X’s VR world.”
“What?”
“She was in this Southwestern-looking suburb, like something near Phoenix or Albuquerque. I don’t get it. Why was she there? What’s she got to do with Zimmerman and Braun?
Lulu shrugged. “I don’t know. But I have my suspicions. Who else was in there?”
Decker filled her in on what he had seen at the Media Lab. He told her about the blond man in tennis whites and the feeling of dread that had wafted about him. He told her about Emily, about her standing alone in those trees and how she had tried to seduce him. He told her about seeing Lulu naked in that circle of prairie grass, about Becca and the blond man’s threat on her life.
“Naked, huh?” was all Lulu could say. “How did I look? Did I look sexy? Did I look fat? Don’t tell me — I looked fat, didn’t I?”