Brennan nodded and holstered his gun. "Yes he is, in a way," Brennan said. He hunkered over the body and tore off its shirt, pointing to the bulky bandage high on the left shoulder blade. "I hit the only survivor of the attack on my country place right about there. This was his second try." He stood, reached into his back pocket, and took out an ace of spades. He scaled it at the body, and it stuck, face up, to the blood running from the dead man's forehead. "Something for your friends from the law to think about when they finally get here from the doughnut shop," he said, and turned away.
"Wait a minute," Tachyon said. "Where are you going?"
Brennan glanced overhead. "To check on things." Tachyon nodded. "I understand. Be careful."
Brennan nodded. Avoiding the lumbering elevator, he took the stairs up to the clinic's top floor. The corridor was dark and quiet. He went down it like a skulking cat, and when he flung open the door to Jennifer's room, a startled Father Squid whirled to stare at him.
"What was all that commotion down below?" the priest asked.
"Another hit," Brennan said briefly, holstering his Browning. "Everyone all right?"
Brennan shook his head. "I think they need you down there, Father."
The priest crossed himself and dashed out of the room. Trace was sitting in a chair by Jennifer's bed, looking like a statue of the wounded woman. Jennifer herself had faded to the point of translucence. She looked like a serene, beautiful corpse.
Brennan winced. This couldn't be doing her any good. He started to say something, but Trace looked up and rubbed tiredly at her eyes with the heels of her hands.
She looked at Brennan. "I found her," she said wearily. "She's lost, afraid and wandering. She wouldn't come back with me."
"You have to bring her back," Brennan said.
Trace shrugged. "I can't. She doesn't trust me." She looked at Brennan speculatively. "But maybe you can. If you have the guts."
Brennan started to answer her, but she held up her hand. "Don't be so quick to commit yourself," she said. "I know you're tough and brave and all that, but physical bravery has little to do with this." She pursed her lips and looked at Brennan seriously. "Your Jennifer was in a deep dream state when you were attacked. Instead of snapping back into her body, her mind somehow shunted itself off into another plane-another dimension. I suspect that this has something to do with the nature of her ace powers, that when she turns immaterial, she somehow shifts through adjacent dimensions."
"And this time," Brennan said, "only her mind shifted. Her body stayed behind, and she can't find her way back to it."
"Correct," said Trace.
"What's this other dimension like?" Brennan asked. "Now it's just a gray void, but that's because Jennifer's conscious mind is dormant. Once a waking mind enters it, it'll become the living manifestation of the archetypes that govern that mind."
Brennan frowned. "I see. I think. But what's so dangerous about that?"
"If you enter this dimension, it'll become populated by the driving images, by the symbolic figures that stalk your subconscious. Do you dare face them?"
Brennan hesitated. He had no great desire to examine closely the hidden secrets of his mind. But it seemed he had no choice. He nodded.
Trace smiled, but there was little humor in it. "All right," she said. "I guess we'll get to see how brave you really are."
Kien got up, walked to his office door, and closed it, shutting out the annoying beep-boop-bap coming from the antechamber where Rick and Mick were playing Donkey Kong on the Atari.
It baled Kien why anybody would waste his time like that, but he allowed lesser men their divertimenti. He had his own plans to occupy his mind. He should be hearing from Lao about the hit on the clinic at any time now. If Brennan and that arrogant little space bastard were dead, fine. But Kien had the feeling that it wouldn't be that easy, that he would need a more subtle web to ensare them. Then, spiderlike, he could suck out their juices and cast aside their desiccated corpses like yesterday's garbage.
Yes, he told himself as he sat back in his chair, feet on his desk and fingers interlaced behind his head, nice image. I like it. I am a spider, a great, powerful emperor spider who sits in the center of his web, patient and cunning, reading the vibrations made by lesser men as they scurry like trembling flies from strand to strand. I pick those to reward and those to use and discard. I've come a long way since Vietnam and the store that was my father's.
His father, Kien realized, had frequently been on his mind lately. It wasn't like him to be obsessive about the past. Thinking about the past did no good. It couldn't change things. It did no good to brood about the old man's death, the way Kien had found him lying slaughtered on the dirt floor of their store. Kien had never had much as a child. He endured poor food and patched clothing, and was jeered at by the other children in the village as much for his pauperish appearance as for being Chinese. But the French bastards who murdered his father took what little money the old man had accumulated, dug the strongbox right out of the secret place where Old Dad had kept it hidden. They left nothing for Kien. That was why he had to change his name and go to the city. He didn't desert his family. He did what he could for them-
There was a sound, a knock on his door, and Kien started. "Come in," he said.
It was Rick and Mick. "Just got word from your informant on the police force," Rick said.
"He kept an eye out like you told him," Mick added, "and went to the scene when the call came that something was going down at the Jokertown Clinic."
"And?" Kien prompted.
Rick and Mick looked at each other, and Kien realized that neither wanted to be the bearer of bad tidings. They nudged each other a couple of times, and Rick finally came out with it. "Lao's dead. Shot once through the forehead. There was an ace of spades on his body."
Kien clenched his teeth. "And Brennan and Tachyon?" Rick and Mick shook their heads. "Don't think they were hurt. Lao got some joker -kids, a joker geezer. He also wounded one of the doctors. Tachyon's still at the clinic, but from what the witnesses said, this Brennan guy just disappeared. He kneecapped the guys Lao hired to help him and left them behind for the cops."
"But they don't know nothin'," Mick was quick to add. "They're not Fists. They're not connected to you."
They seemed to expect some kind of explosion, but Kien just nodded. "I'd planned for this possibility" he said. "If you want something done right," he mused aloud, "you have to do it yourself."
He stood, clasped his hands behind his back, and started to pace around the room. "Tachyon's no problem," he muttered. "I can deal with the little fool anytime I want to. It's Brennan I have to track down as soon as possible." He fixed Rick and Mick with a stare. "Where would he go after the attack?" Rick and Mick looked at each other, looked back at Kien, and shrugged.
"He would be worried about his bitch. Yes. His sentimentality would get the best of him, and he'd head right for her side to make sure that she was all right." He stopped, stared at a three-tiered glass stand that held part of his fabulous collection of ancient and rare Chinese ceramics. "He said that she _ was at the clinic, but they wouldn't just put her in an open ward. She'd be somewhere that they thought was safe." He paced back to his desk. "Where, precisely, would that be?"
Someone behind him sneezed. "Bless you," Kien said reflexively. "I didn't sneeze, boss," Rick said. "Neither did I," Mick added.
Kien whirled around. "Then who did?"
"I think it came from there," Rick said, pointing at the vase on the middle tier of the glass stand.
It was a green-glazed vase with a black background dating from the Yung Cheng period. Very old and extremely rare in color and form, it was one of the cornerstones of Kien's art collection. He frowned, stood, and went back to the glass stand. He peered into the vase.