State
or
County
PD/State
PD/Virginia/Fugitive/Multiple Murder/Spree/Guns/Sam Wilkins McLeod.
The video showed a group of people against a brightly lit and highly coloured background.
For a moment it meant nothing to Teresa, but she made Grove lean forward and look closely at the image, and used the mouse to click on it; at once it expanded to occupy the lower half of the screen.
She was in AI's Happy Burgabar with her husband Rick, in a small town called Oak Springs along Highway 64 between Richmond and Charlottesville. The video frame had frozen on them as the family passed the main course selfselection counter, the vivid colours of AI's unmistakable 1090 dominating the room.
The shock of recognizing this, which was buried under layers of extreme experience deep down, long ago, away somewhere in her virtual life story, produced another automatic response from Grove. The computer images on the monitor began to flicker brightly as he moved swiftly through the lists. Teresa watched the computer display again, feeling helpless.
Her own virtual past was fastforwarding, fastrewinding, while she stared through the eyes of a man she knew was on his way to a massacre.
He paused again, and the computer image steadied.
Participatory/Interactive/United Kingdom/
England/National
or
County/County
Police/Sussex
Police/Multiple
Murder/Spree/Guns/Handgun/
Semiautomatic Rifle/Gerald Dean Grove/Part I.
Immediately underneath it said:
Participatory/Interactive/United Kingdom/
England/National
or
County/County
Police/Sussex
Police/Multiple
Murder/Spree/Guns/Handgun/
Semiautomatic Rifle/Gerald Dean Grove/Part II.
Grove stared at the screen, with the mouse pointer resting on the frozen video image of Part I, ready to start it running. The image was of Grove himself, sitting in a car on the seafront at Bulverton, leaning forward to tighten the hotwired connections beneath the dash.
Deep in the recesses of Grove's mind Teresa thought, He's playing with me. Or I'm playing with him.
She knew she should abort the scenario. She had been completely unprepared for this.
The thought was sufficient to move him. Fatalistically, Teresa watched the screen to see what he would do.
Grove's next choice frame showed a western saloon, where a young woman was waiting to start performing in a
pornographic movie. The video frame had caught Shandy in her offguard moment before the filming began, when she was reaching behind her back, pinching at the material of her shirt, to try to ease the tightness of her halfcup bra.
Grove, of his own accord, enlarged the frame, and with a concupiscence Teresa was forced to share, ogled the tantalizing glimpse of the voluptuous young woman.
Grove's mind, his brain, whatever corrupt organ it was that Teresa occupied, was full of predatory lust and physical greed. He moved energetically, against Teresa's resistance, and slid the pointer to the ExEx box, glinting invitingly at the top of the image.
He stood up, and waited while the nanochips were processed by the equipment.
'No!' Teresa said, to herself, to Grove, out loud, or directly across, or however it was done. 'Not Shandy!'
'Shut the fuck up.' Grove had the phial of nanochips now, delivered at the dispensing peripheral built into the top of the desk, and swung himself out of the seat, out of the booth.
'Whoever the fuck you are, shut the fuck up.'
Teresa had grown up in a world of swearwords, but she had always loathed that expression and the kind of man who used it. lt was invariably a man; women were capable of a lot of swearing, but they rarely used that phrase. She had been trained by the Bureau not to react to abuse from suspects and perpetrators, but that illtempered phrase had always got under her skin, once or twice to her jeopardy.
'Tough shit, lady!' Grove replied to the thought. 'Shut the fuck up.'
'Not Shandy, you bastard!'
'I told you to shut the
Teresa backed off, back as far as she could go, mortified by what was happening, and now unable to control events, except inadvertently.
She glimpsed an understanding at last of how a man like Grove operated. Everything she had experienced of him until now had been, for him, an unconscious blind, a shutting off of his true self The muttered hatreds, the confusion, the vindictiveness, the banality; none of these represented the real Grove. They were instinctive moves, inadequate responses of an immature mind, to a complex and subtle world. Now though, without warning, his true nature had moved in and taken command.
Grove was an obsessive, a monomaniac, capable of focusing on one thing only at any time.
With the inviting view of Shandy getting ready for action, his psychopathic mind had become dominated by the frozen image of her. She had her shoulders turned away as she tried to deal with her momentary discomfort, twisting her body so that her backside and breasts were exaggerated, posed in almost a parody of the traditional cheesecake stance. The video snapshot had obviously been selected for that reason, a visual shorthand of the contents of the scenario. Grove could not know that, but could and did react on a gut level to what he thought he would find.
In his singlermindedness, Grove could no longer be influenced or diverted away. Teresa, a passenger in his mind, could only reside in a well of apprehension, disgust and concern as Grove took over.
This was what it must have been like in Bulverton Old Town on the day of the massacre. She had heard many accounts from different people: Grove seemed invulnerable as he strode through the streets with his guns. His victims were paralysed by their terror of him, or by disbelief at what they saw. No one challenged him until it was too late; only a few people were able to run away or hide. Grove had been impelled not by hatred, or by passion, or even by madness, but by singleminded deterrmination.
Only at the end, when his obsession began to fade, did he become less fixated; then he was quickly encircled by the police, and his murderous spree was ended.
Now, though, in a terrible prelude to what would be happening later, he was in full thrall to his psychopathy.
She realized that she was also in his thrall. Grove was using her. He had already learned from her how a handgun should be held, aimed and fired; he had already found his way to Elsa Durdle, to one of the old FBI training scenarios, then to the scenario about himself, and now he had arrived at the innocent obscenities of Shandy and Willem.
He made her feel as if he was penetrating her cover, crashing in on her life, but the reality was that she was exposing it to him. Her unconscious mind was guiding him, educating him.
Yet she was helpless. While all this coursed through her mind, Grove had walked through to the simulator area of the building and handed over the phial of nanochips to one of the technicians. As the injection apparatus was quickly set up, and connected to the valve on his neck, Teresa braced herself for the shift into the scenario, knowing that aborting herself out of it was the last option she had.
Grove/Teresa became aware of heat, bright lights and clothes that were too tight. He blinked, and tried to see what was going on around him, but his eyes had not yet adjusted.