Frameshift

After a long day at the Human Genome Center, Joan Dawson was pleased to be approaching home. She was walking from the BART station; the walk was almost a mile, but she did it every night. At her age, she wasn’t up to any more-strenuous exercise, but she did spend all day at her secretarial desk, and diabetics had to be particular about their weight.

There was hardly anyone around; she lived in a quiet neighborhood.

When she and her husband had bought here in 1959, there had been lots of young families. The neighborhood had grown up with them, but although these had qualified as starter homes all those years ago, they were out of the reach of today’s young couples. Now this area was home mostly to elderly people — the lucky ones still husband and wife, but many of the others, like Joan, having lost their spouses over the years. Her Bud had passed on in 1987.

Joan came up the walk to the front of her house, opened the lid on the mailbox, scooped up the bills, smiled when she saw her copy of Ellery Queen’s had arrived, fumbled for her keys, and let herself in. She turned on the porch light, made her way up to her living room, and —$

“Joan Dawson?”

Her heart practically shot out of her chest, it was beating so hard. She turned around. A young white man with a shaven head and tattoos of skulls on his forearms was looking at her with pale blue eyes.

Joan was still holding her purse. She thrust it at him. “Take it! Take it!

You can have my money.”

The man was wearing a black Megadeath T-shirt with a denim vest over it, jeans with artful slashes in them, and gray Adidas. He shook his head.

“It’s not your money I’m after.”

Joan started backing away, still holding the purse in front of her, but now as if it were a shield. “No,” she said. “No — there’s jewelry upstairs.

Lots of jewelry. You can have it all.”

The punk started walking toward her. “I don’t want your jewelry, either.”

Joan had backed into the glass-topped coffee table. She tumbled backward over it, and the glass cracked with a sound like a rifle going off.

She scrambled to her feet. Pain stabbed at her from her ankle; she’d wrenched it badly going down. “Please,” she said, whimpering now.

“Please, not that.”

The skinhead stopped approaching for a moment, a look of revulsion on his face. “Fuck, woman, don’t be disgusting. You’re old enough to be my grandmother.”

Joan felt a surge of hope fighting to the surface against all the terror.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She’d backed against the rough brick of the fireplace now.

The man pulled his vest open. He had a long single-edged hunting knife with a black handle in a sheath under his arm. He pulled out the weapon and amused himself for a second by sending a glint of light playing down Joan’s horrified face.

Joan fumbled for the fireplace poker, found it, raised it in front of her.

“Stay back!” she said. “What do you want?”

The man grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “I want,” he said, “for you to be dead.”

Joan inhaled deeply, prelude to a scream, but before she could get it out, the man flipped the knife out of his hand, and it landed smack-dab in the middle of her chest, burying itself halfway to the hilt. She slumped to the tiled area just in front of the fireplace, her mouth still in the perfect O of the stillborn scream.

Pierre sat in front of his UNIX workstation. The monitor was on, but he wasn’t reading its display; rather, he was leafing through the Daily Californian, the UCB student newspaper. News about the campus football team; big debates about UCB’s elimination of racial quotas for students; a letter to the editor complaining about Felix Sousa.

Pierre’s mind wandered back to the last time he’d spoken to somebody about Sousa. He’d been talking to that strange bull-doglike fellow who had blustered into this very room over three months ago. Ari something. No, no — not Ari. Avi. Avi — Avi Meyer, that was it.

Pierre never had figured out what that had all been about. He closed the newspaper and turned to his computer, opening a window on the governmental telephone database CD-ROM, accessible through the LAN.

Avi Meyer had said he worked for the Department of Justice. The database didn’t contain individual agent listings, but Pierre did find a general-inquiry number in Washington. He highlighted the number, pressed the key for his telephone program, ticked the personal-call option in the dialogue box that popped up, and let his modem dial the call for him while he held his telephone handset to his ear.

“Justice,” said a female voice at the other end. All that was missing, thought Pierre, were Truth and the American Way.

“Hello,” he said. “Do you have someone there named Avi Meyer?”

Keyclicks. “Yes. He’s out of town right now, but I can put you through to his voice mail, or let you speak to a receptionist at OSI.”

“OSI?” said Pierre.

“The Office of Special Investigations,” said the voice.