“Then you’ll be the representative accompanying me on my inspection, I guess.” Keith placed his briefcase on the desk and flipped the latched up. At the sudden sound Abby jumped like he’d fired off a gun, and for a second, Keith thought she might faint. So he made a show of moving very slowly while he removed his lab coat, gloves and clipboard. “Hopefully this shouldn’t take very long. It’s just required after a complaint.”
“Yes.” Abby smoothed her skirt. “Please come this way.”
SSA’s main operations floor was surprisingly small. The facility was open plan and resembled nothing more than an average medical-center blood lab. Technically, Keith was not a certified medical lab inspector, but he’d shadowed one for a week at the beginning of his training, so he knew how to basically fake filling out the form and ask the right questions. His aim was to get a feel for the operation, keeping an eye out for anyone acting shifty.
Everything seemed to be aboveboard though. Blood was tested, cataloged, packaged and organized with remarkable efficiency. Accidental contamination due to human error seemed unlikely, which meant the adulterant was most likely deliberately introduced. But to what end? To specifically trigger transformations in people like Lupe? Or were the transformations an unintended effect? If so, what was the original goal?
“So why were there three separate donors in Ms. Balderas’s meal?” Keith asked quietly, once he’d finished his initial go through.
“We often blend the blood. Our customers say it improves the taste,” Abby replied.
“And is there anyone employed here that you have reason to suspect of deliberately fouling your product? For personal or political reasons?”
“No!” Abby practically shouted the answer, causing all work in the lab to come to a brief halt. “What are you even here for? Susan told me I was supposed to authenticate some packaging.”
“That’s part of the reason.” Keith tried to ignore her hostility, but it rankled. “But you can’t say that your company has been cooperative regarding our previous inquiries. My Mexican counterpart says he’s sent you four separate complaints over the last six months. Why didn’t you address the situation then?”
Abby’s demeanor shifted, and when she spoke her voice sounded small. “That wasn’t my decision. As I said before, our previous manager has been called back to headquarters for retraining.”
“Did he give any specific reason for his indifference to safety regulations and the well-being of our extra-human citizens?” The entire office had gone dead silent. Every single worker hung on every word of their exchange.
“He had concluded that the blood had been tampered with on its way to Mexico.”
“And he decided not to file a report about the alleged tampering with my office because... why?”
“I don’t know, all right?” Abby’s hands balled into fists.
“You can see how, to me, it would seem like no one in this company is trying too hard to comply with regulations,” Keith said. “Because your former manager can’t have been the only person to know about the complaints, yet absolutely no one thought of picking up the phone and calling my office. I find that strange and, frankly, suspicious.”
Abby paled. “He told us we would be fired if we talked about it.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“If we don’t work here, we have to have our memories adjusted to comply with the Secrecy Act,” she whispered. “You understand? Some of us have worked here for years. We’ve gotten married and had families. We can’t lose our memories. We’d lose our whole lives.”
The stark fear in her face took Keith aback.
“So he more or less could make all of you do anything he wanted?” Keith scanned the faces of the workers who looked on. Here and there he spotted furious nods of confirmation, but mostly the employees had the blank expressions of prisoners resigned to their fate.
“Yes.” Abby’s voice was barely a whisper.
“And you don’t have anything else to tell me about any other kind of negligence?” Keith said. “I’m asking now because I’m not here to punish any of you. I’m only trying to figure out the source of contamination.”
Abby shook her head.
“Okay then, here’s the package I need you to check out.” Keith handed her the blood bag.
Abby turned it over in her hands, lifting it to peer closely at the barcode and the impressions in the plastic. “All the safety seal materials are correct and authentic. Would you like me to scan this barcode? We can track its whole journey from donor to client.”
“That sounds great.”
Abby tapped an app on her phone. “According to our records this was sourced from Peterson Air Force Base and delivered to Lupe Balderas last Wednesday.”
“Do you often get donations from the base?”
“We drive the bloodmobile there the second Tuesday of every month,” she said. “The donors for this meal were three airmen. Stokes, Wyman and McCronklin.”
“Any of those three male?” The blood donor at the Fort Collins party had been reported to be a male.
“Only one male, Airman Wyman.”
Chapter Eight
By early afternoon Keith had gained access to Peterson and started inspecting the commissaries that served the nearly seven thousand enlisted in the Twenty-First Space Wing at Peterson Air Force Base. No alarm bells sounded. No special clearance was needed. No one but the chefs gave a damn that he’d stepped foot on base, and they only cared about getting him out of the kitchen again.
The great thing about having your work considered inconsequential, Keith thought, is that nobody cares where you go or what you do.
And while it was true that if he’d been in a law enforcement branch of NIAD he’d have been expected to check in with the MPs there, food inspectors were under no such obligation.
So he’d sailed right under the radar and started searching for his adulterant.
Keith realized, as he donned his white lab coat and pulled on his blue nitrile gloves, that being underestimated had officially become a source of grim satisfaction to him. Pride even. No one had any idea the kinds of connections he had or what he was capable of. Or even that he might be on the trail of a serious criminal. They just saw some jerk sticking a thermometer in a hotel pan full of cooling mashed potatoes and largely ignored him.
He smiled at the chef, who stared stonily back at him.
“Right on target,” he said.
The chef, an NCO named Sanchez, smiled a tight smile. He plainly didn’t like Keith’s incursion into his territory, but like all career military, he’d been groomed to enjoy passing an inspection. And Keith had put on a good show, eyeing his cooling times and hot-holding procedures and deeply scrutinizing every single drain.
The canteen kitchen was impeccably clean—even with more than a dozen cooks busting out meals for hungry airmen all around him.
But it wasn’t like a single kitchen could serve the number of meals required at Peterson, so Keith moved on. No luck at the second location either. No spell fragments or even unlabeled containers. No sign of expandinol.
No evidence of anything being hastily dumped down the drain either.
The hot Colorado sun bore down on Keith as he considered where to go next. He couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t some connection between the dismissal of trans-goblins from Peterson’s elite flying force and the appearance of expandinol in the blood supply coming from the base. Both happening at the same time in the same place seemed like too much of a coincidence.
Keith absently watched a group of sweating young cadets jog across a parking lot. Panting and flushed, a couple of them looked like they might drop over from heatstroke.
Then Keith remembered what Jerry had said about human pilots not being able to withstand the conditions that trans-goblins easily endured. All at once he realized how his case and Jerry’s situation might fit together. Though he still needed to locate the source of the expandinol before he could hope to prove anything.
Peterson maintained only the aeronautical portals that Jerry had mentioned, and these were located a thousand feet above the ground. So an unauthorized person couldn’t just sneak through an open portal on the sly—at least not without the assistance of a hot air balloon.
If the airmen weren’t doping themselves, it followed that someone had been administering the drug to them. NIAD itself could be running the show, but if that was the case special agents from Research and Development would’ve been all over Keith, obstructing his inquiries and, when that failed, just straight-out ordering him to fuck off back to Food/MED.
No, if Keith was right and this was a plan to deliberately feed enlisted airmen expandinol in hopes of building a super-soldier program to fill Jerry’s recently vacated cockpit, it was too localized to the Peterson Air Force Base to reach beyond an official here. And if the drug was being dispensed by military officials but wasn’t coming through the kitchens, then that left one other facility where human beings routinely ingested mysterious items that affected their bodies: the infirmary.
He wondered if it would be possible to access the infirmary to look for traces of magic; he needed evidence beyond his own suspicions if he was going to shut this down. Then Keith realized that he could go to the source of the tainted blood. He could find Airman Anthony Wyman and ask him what he’d been putting in his body and who had given it to him.
The question was how to do it. It wasn’t as though he could keep a low profile while asking for an airman to be paged. This was an air force base, not a shopping mall. Under normal circumstances he would have phoned Nash to have him put in the request to see Wyman, but the chances of Nash helping him do anything were slim.
Hell, he might actually be in on it, which would explain his lack of investigative zeal.
Truth was Keith had no friends or allies here at all.
But he knew someone who did.
He texted Gunther. “Can u ask Jerry to call me?”
“Sure. why?”
“I need to ask him a couple of questions.”
“Are you doing something dangerous?”
Keith considered this. Was this a dangerous action? Surveying his immediate surroundings of bland modern concrete buildings, a large flagpole rising from a circle of green lawn and the vast expanse of parking lots, he saw no imminent threat so answered: “No, why would u think that?”
“B/c you’re you? And you want to talk to Jerry, which... you never do”
“I love you babe,” Keith texted back.
“OMG you are doing something dangerous”
“Gotta go. Jerry’s calling.”
“Hey Jerry,” Keith said. “Thank you for getting back to me so fast. I was wondering if you could point me in the direction of somebody at Peterson Air Force Base who could have an airman paged for me?”
Even as he spoke he could hear Gunther’s voice, probably talking to Jerry at the exact same time.
“Gunther wants to know where you are,” Jerry said.
“I know. I can hear him. I’m obviously at the air force base. Please tell him I’m completely fine.”
“Have you seen Annie yet?”
The jet? He’d seen a couple dozen different planes flying overhead, but it wasn’t as if they were sporting big name tags. Keith took an indulgent moment to blink uncomprehending at his phone before saying, “I don’t know. What does she look like?”
“I’ll text you a pic,” Jerry said, and then the image of a sleek silver fighter jet appeared on Keith’s screen. To Keith’s amusement he realized that gold letters along the side of the jet did actually spell out her name.
“If you get the chance to find her, tell me if any mechanics are working on her. She’s in Hangar 13.” Jerry sounded almost agitated.
“Okay, I’ll do that, but the reason I’m calling you is that I need to find a particular airman. Do you have any friends here who could help me out?”
“Why don’t you just ask the MPs?”
“Because I want to be more low-key than that.”
“What are you doing that you want to be low-key about?” Suspicion clouded Jerry’s tone.
In the background Keith could hear Gunther saying, “Oh my God, Jerry, why are you even asking him that? He’s a special agent. Just let him be low-key. I’m sure it’s important.”
Smug pride welled up in his chest. Gunther would have his back no matter what. Still, Jerry’s fears needed to be allayed if Keith was going to get him on his side.
“I’m not doing anything illegal or... unpatriotic or whatever. I’m just trying to resolve a food safety issue quietly.”
“Most of my friends are gone,” Jerry said. “But you could try Dr. Lee. I’ll text the building and room number.”
“Thank you very much, Jerry,” Keith said. “And I’ll try to find a way to look in on Annie.”
“I’ll tell her that you might drop by. She’s always excited to meet new people.”
A brief vision flashed before Keith’s eyes of him attempting to strike up a conversation with a fighter jet. How would that even work? For that matter, how was Jerry still communicating with a piece of top-secret equipment when he was no longer in the military? He decided to ask.
“FaeBook messenger,” Jerry replied. “I made her an account so we could keep in touch while she was having repairs.”
Keith considered his order of action. If he was going to make good on Jerry’s request to see Annie, he should probably do that before he got into finding Wyman, since the whole Wyman scenario could go south fairly quickly. Also it turned out that the gleaming silver hexagon of Hangar 13 was on his way to Dr. Lee’s office on the third floor of the gray concrete hospital.
As Keith sauntered along the narrow sidewalk that led to the black tarmac and wide hangar doors, he considered his story and the sentry standing outside the hangar. Keith couldn’t claim to be inspecting food in an aircraft hangar, so what would it be?
Ultimately the only options open to him were playing dumb or playing mysterious. Dumb was less complicated but could prove hard for him to maintain if he wanted to ask any questions. And when didn’t he want to ask a question? He settled on the identity of an imperious NIAD agent involved in mysterious and probably highly classified business. The combination of his official badge and speaking in only a few short commands did the trick. The sentry waved him through immediately.
As he stepped into the cool shade of the hangar, Keith received another text.
“Hi Keith, just letting you know that I’ve located and neutralized the source of the expandinol leak here at the manufacturing facility. The stolen product was delivered to Blaze Gregson Jr. several times. I hope this helps. Sincerely, Susan”
Well, well, Keith thought. One question answered.
Emboldened, he picked up his pace.
Hangar 13 seemed like it was part aircraft hangar, part cool, futuristic dance club. Nearly every surface looked chrome-plated. A low distant pulse throbbed through the air like the beat of a dance remix. It seemed to emanate from the huge silver column that dominated the central interior. Six sleek silver jets were parked around this, noses facing inward. Thick cables connected three of the aircraft to the central column while the other three sat apparently inert. Here and there mechanics plodded quietly between the planes going about their unknown assignments in tired silence.
Keith spotted Annie easily, picking out the word “Annie” stenciled on her in curling gold lettering.
He’d made it only six steps before being challenged by a serious-faced young woman in mechanic�
��s gear who informed him the area was restricted.
“Keith Curry, NIAD.” Keith held up his badge and stuck to his tight-lipped secret agent persona. “I’ll need to interview the AI asset referred to as Annie.”
At the mention of NIAD the young mechanic’s eyes widened slightly, but she seemed to quickly recover.
“No one said anything . . . I’ll need to authenticate this.” Her expression was almost questioning.
“Of course.” Keith retained his smile, though his mind raced, and then he added, “I was contacted by the Denver office. Agent Nash. He requested that our AI division assess the legitimacy of Annie’s complaint.”
“She made a formal complaint? It’s about the new pilots, isn’t it?” The mechanic appeared pained by this but not surprised. “Is it being taken seriously? I mean, I know she’s mostly a machine, but she’s got a point about the phy-1 scores and the CS analysis—”
Keith had no idea what the mechanic was talking about and realized that he had to shut down this line of conversation before his glaring ignorance became obvious.
“I’m afraid I can’t comment on anything before I’ve interviewed Annie, airman—” Keith squinted at the mechanic’s name tag. “Shakur.”
“Sergeant Shakur,” she provided. Keith nodded as if adding the information to some secret file.
Sergeant Shakur jotted down his badge number. “Please wait here while I verify this. It shouldn’t take a minute.”
As she hurried off to verify his story and identity, Keith prayed that now wouldn’t be the time Nash would choose to break down and take a call. It was 4:55 and he was willing to bet the guy had skated out of the office twenty minutes ago, if not earlier.
Shakur returned with a hopeful expression and a security card, which she handed to Keith.
“Agent Nash wasn’t in but the secretary confirmed your identity, sir,” she said. “So you’re a cyber-psychologist?”
“Just an investigating agent making a preliminary assessment of the operations here.” Keith delivered the answer in the tone he’d heard many an internal investigation agent use before heads started to roll. Then he very deliberately met Shakur’s gaze. “Is there anything that you feel I should know at this juncture in my inquiry?”
Grilled Cheese and Goblins Page 25