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"All students who claimed Taxpayer status have been released to their parents. Unless, of course, they face additional charges." His stubby fingers hit the keyboard with bored efficiency.
"And the Citizens?" Wyn asked. "Several of my students had Citizen status only. I have their names and IDs . . ." She laid her list, culled from student records, on the man's desk. He gestured it away.
"Lady . . ." at her indignant eyebrow-lift, "Professor Baker," he corrected himself, "don't waste your time. All these . . . Citizens have been remanded to the proper authorities."
"What are these 'proper authorities'?" she asked, her voice frosting over.
"The Bureau of Relocation," he told her. "They'll be supplied with jobs, new homes, outside the urban infrastructure. It will give them new purpose and productivity." His jargon came out pat, by rote, designed to reassure and, if not to reassure, to intimidate. She might not know more of BuReloc but she recognized a pacify-the-tourists spiel when she heard it.
"They were my students," she insisted quietly. "They had perfectly appropriate jobs and purposes in life. I wish to restore what they had. How much?"
For a sick instant, she feared the duty officer might take that as an offer of a bribe.
"They're out of my jurisdiction, Professor. Why don't you go on home?" Go back to your library, Wyn heard. She flushed with anger.
"I understand. Very well, then, officer. How do I contact the Bureau of Relocation?" she asked.
"Lady, you don't. And you don't understand what you're letting yourself in for. Now, you look like a nice person who just doesn't understand the rules. So, I'm telling you: go home. Smith, Alvarez! Lady here can't go back to campus on foot; it was a crazy thing to come out here at all. Give her a ride back, will you?"
She could just imagine turning up on Faculty Row in a patrol car and having to apply CPR to half the cowards on campus.
"I'd rather have your escort to the Bureau of Relocation," she told them.
"Lady . . ." One man laid a hand on her elbow. She jerked it away.
"Professor, you're upset; you've had a scare; you're not used to this. Why don't you let us take you to a doctor . . . ."
A nightmare vision of an outside physician, a diagnosis of nervous, overprivileged woman, a regimen of too many tranquilizers, blunting not just her anger but the kee
She spun away, backing against the wall. They came at her as if they tried to tame a spooked horse. Their outraised, weaponless hands . . . she remembered hands like that on clubs, hurling her students down, hauling them here, then tossing them to BuReloc . . .
"Stay away from me," she demanded.
They kept advancing. Her back touched the wall. Her fingers touched the poli code and, as their hands fell upon her arms, she jerked one hand free and pressed the panic button.
She had just exchanged jailers, Wyn thought as she sat in the soft leather First Class of what she considered an u
Even now, she didn't like to think of the scene that she had caused by pressing the poli code. A jurisdictional war between private security and the LAPD was only the least part of it. As the lawyers screamed, she had been hustled out of the station and back to campus. The dean's hysteria, her brother's outrage at what he called her recklessness, a veritable feeding frenzy of reporters . . . in the end, packers had been called in, and she had been whisked off-campus and onto the first available transport for Boston.
Her brother had wanted to charter a plane. For once, she had managed to overrule him on something. But a car would be waiting. She winced at the expense, at the needless, ostentatious care, as if she were some rocker or new rich who needed a vulgar display of paranoia to establish her importance. Her male and female companions seemed more captors than companions, and they muttered of her brother with the respect that a priest might use for a captious deity.
Glancing over at her escorts for what was, essentially, permission, she reached into the carryall they had allowed her to bring with her. A few books, some tapes . . . there was her financial statement. She pulled out the prospectus for the BuReloc bonds and began to read.
A very important and long-lasting anger smoldered within her. "Go back to your library." Most recently, her brother had reinforced that order, which was right out of her infancy. "Don't play with the children in the street. Stay in your own garden."
But there was blood on the roses. Even if she'd thought lifelong she wasn't good for much else, she had to wash the blood off those damn roses.
She looked down at the transaction record on her statement, found one of her guards watching, and turned the paper over.
Something about those bonds . . . a name on the prospectus . . . surely she had seen that name before. She turned to the description of a limited partnership, of which her brother had made her a silent, but voting partner. Sure enough . . . she recognized one name as a judge, another as a congressman. She remembered a di
Foolish, wasn't she? Her lips formed a silent whistle, and she recalled what one of her keepers had said. "It's a wonder they let her out without a leash."
A wonder indeed, if she wandered about with her eyes and ears sealed by ancient history. What was that sanctimonious stuff about law she had told the street kid?
The kid had known enough to run. But she wasn't a scared kid, she thought. That case . . . if she could find a conflict of interests or a bribe or some knowledge of inside information, which (she now recalled) had dealt one of the blows to the world's economy from which it had never recovered . . . . It would never occur to Putnam to think she would know that.
And for once, she would have a weapon in her own hands. She thumbed on her hand comp. It was a small unit, more used to writing than to database searches. She had always been a good researcher. By the time she landed at Logan and was hustled into a waiting car and the indignation of various family members, she had what she thought was a clue, a weapon, and an end to her naivet?.
Over iced tea and poached salmon, her brother lectured her on discretion, security, and what she owed the family. Wyn disagreed.
May sunlight shone through the familiar, beloved ugliness of Memorial Hall's stained glass windows. It stained the old floor, hollowed by footsteps, with the color of blood; and blood was in the air.
In the year since her eviction from Los Angeles, Wyn had been in enough Welfare Islands to know when someone was being stalked. The pack was gathering; the hunt was up; and she was the prey.
She shrugged one shoulder, adjusted the strap of the old-fashioned green bookbag, and entered Sanders Theatre. Briefly, the smell of the ancient, polished wood overpowered the scent of blood. For more than a century, someone had taught the introduction to ancient literature here. She wondered how long it would take Harvard and the Department to name her successor-or if they would bother. Already, she had heard rumblings that the subject material was not just irrelevant to learning how to run a business or treat a cancer, but subversive. Look what it did to Mad Wyn Baker.