The PuppetMaster by Andrew L. MacNair Read Free Book Online Page B

numbers. The earlier attacks required more plastique, more charges, and a larger team. This required a small team and in all likelihood, only six charges. But the numbers, the deaths it could produce . . . that was the deciding factor.
    With the basic idea still twisting around in his mind, Sutradharak got out of bed and made a pot of coffee. Details always needed research, and research needed to be done in the capital. He began preparations to travel to New Delhi.

     
     
    Nine
    I screamed and strained every muscle against the walls of the cell, but like an animal being slowly choked into submission, no sound came out. The sphere that surrounded me, trapped me, was transparent and nauseatingly tight. I clawed and scratched at the slickness, pushed out in four directions like DaVinci’s naked man. But the surface only flexed like thick, unyielding cellophane. Impenetrable. I screamed again. Silence. Colors pulsed from blue to scarlet and back again, the colors of blood. I sobbed. Beaten, I slid to my knees. With shoulders slumped, I began twisting in slow spirals. It was always slow spirals. My nightmare had returned.
    I woke up drenched in sweat. The air was still cool by summer standards of Uttar Pradesh. The sun had not yet risen above bank of the river, but atop my linen, I was soaked in pools of my own perspiration.
    The fan above me spun in a slow thwumping tempo, and I exhaled in panicked breaths into the draft. Three years I had suffered through my nightmare. Like a soap opera it came with variety, but always with the same theme. Over the last ten months it had receded enough that I believed it had left for good, but like a silent thief it had crept back. And the bubble, that fucking corpuscle of blood, still trapped me.
    That bubble had changed my life, every facet of it. It was the tiny unforeseen event that had altered my course of life forever.
    I stared at the blades of the fan. For a year now I’d been able to push her memory down, or back, or wherever we push such things--managed to keep her fragrance and eyes locked inside a vault of unwanted recollections.
    The fan drew me in, and there at the center lay Lilia--where I always saw her--curled and shaking upon the carpet. She looked strangely peaceful, like a child twitching in an afternoon nap. Our pizza sat half eaten on the table, our mugs of beer half full. The air was dry and hot with the Santa Anas that had been whistling in from the Mojave.
    Moments earlier we had been laughing--an exchange of childish stories that lovers do so well. She was telling me about her mother’s house in Oaxaca, of eating mole poblano with her cousins on the porch. Then mid-sentence she stopped, and with a puzzled look, stared at me, and then looked at the lights as if they were too bright for the softness of her eyes. Like a priest beseeching the heavens, her eyes rolled upward. Her hand reached out to touch my face, then she leaned forward and slid most naturally from her seat, looking as if she were simply retrieving a napkin from the floor. But Lilia Garza Morales, the woman I had loved for a year and a thousand lifetimes, slid to the carpet and never got up. She died with my hands wrapped pleadingly about her head.
    The doctors explained everything. They clipped images and scans onto white lights and showed me the post-aneurysm section of her brain. Pointed with sad, intelligent fingers at the bubble, and explained in practiced phrases all the reasons for how Lilia had slipped from my life.
    But none of them, not a single one, could explain why.
    It was September, and we were to be married in November in a ceremony of elegant simplicity on a knoll above the ocean. It was something we looked forward to more for our family and friends than for us, because Lilia and I were already joined. We knew it the moment we met--a union of a thousand lifetimes, the botanist and the linguist our friends called us, naturals together.
    We had met during a dreary wait in the admissions