He turned to see Manuel saying, “You seem okay, and you’ve done a lot for Mom, and Sara. So, friends, all right?”
Nohar looked at his son for a long time before he put his own hand on Manuel’s.
“Friends,” he said.
Chapter 19
Nohar drove back into LA. The suburbs passed by him like the circles of hell. He didn’t reach the edges of Compton until about three in the morning. By then he was so exhausted that he just pulled off to the side of the road and slept where he was.
While he slept in the ancient Hummer, Nohar dreamed of his mother.
• • •
He is five again, sitting in the veterinary wing of the Cleveland Clinic. He is hunched over in a too-small chair. Whenever anyone comes near him, he growls. He is here to see his mother, and they aren’t going to send him away.
Then the doctors and nurses are all gone. It is as if they have all abandoned the hospital.
He takes the chance and walks over to the big red door that leads to the feline ward. There are warnings plastered on the doors, but he doesn’t read them.
The door opens on the smell of blood, feces, disinfectant, and death. He stands there, frozen in the doorway, his eyes unable to focus. He knows, somewhere in his head, that all the felines in this ward have died from a Pakistani-engineered variant of feline leukemia, a leftover from the Pan-Asian War. Everyone caught it from an improperly diagnosed jaguar.
Now it is different, the bodies lie in their beds, torn open. The ward is now a dead battlefield, the bodies scattered in the mud after a devastating attack. His mother, near to term with her second pregnancy, is facedown in the mud, clutching a rifle.
He hears gunfire in the distance, and walks through the mud to the tree line marking the edge of the hill the bodies cover. He pushes through the brush and sees the war. A battle rages below him, on the streets of LA. Black-uniformed humans fight heavily armed moreau forces equipped as they’d been for the war. Ursines carry body harnesses linked to thirty-millimeter anti-tank rifles. Rats scurry through the urban landscape wielding small submachine guns. Tigers, like him, like his father, carry personal gatling miniguns that spray three thousand rounds a minute into the human forces.
Above it all, flames race across the hills overlooking the city.
At Nohar’s feet is a weak bark. Nohar looks down and sees one-eyed Elijah, the scarred brown dog with the electronic voicebox.
“What’s happening?” Nohar asks.
“man,” Elijah says in his electronic monotone, “is dissatisfied until he can destroy what he has created.”
• • •
The dawn sunlight woke him, the smell of smoke, blood, and death from his dream following him into wakefulness. His body ached, especially the base of his tail, from sleeping in the car.
His first business was to find a public comm and call Bobby back.
It took a moment for Bobby to recognize Nohar when he answered his comm. But then recognition did dawn, and he asked, “Nohar? Is that you?”
Nohar nodded. Dawn light was just reaching LA, but where Bobby was it was nearly ten.
“What’d you do to yourself?”
Nohar thought he could ask the same question. Now that he was over the shock of seeing Bobby on his feet, he could see how he had aged. He could see the wrinkles starting on his face. His hair was thinning and what was still there was beginning to gray. Looking at Bobby made him aware of how his joints ached from all the running around he’d done yesterday.
“What have you got on those numbers?” Nohar asked.
“Not as much as I hoped.” Bobby shook his head. “Positioning data for a satellite. But there’s nothing that officially occupies the area where your uplink was pointing—”
“There had to be something up there.”
Bobby nodded. “It gets better. There is a satellite up there. Given time and location, my boys were able to find it. It’s a Fed bird, and a black one.”
“You sure?”
“My boys are sure, and I trust my boys. They tried getting into the thing’s software, and they swear it was Fed defenses that locked them out. All we got on it is that it’s in geosynchronous orbit over the central U.S., and that it’s designed for extremely narrow-band transmissions. It’s some agency’s private communications center, private and secure.”
“Any idea what agency?”
Bobby shook his head. “Could be anyone from the FBI to the IRS. My guess, though, would be the military. This is just a communications bird, not a spy satellite.” Bobby leaned forward and asked. “What have you gotten into? I checked news reports on the coast, the cops are looking for you.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you—you’ve been dragged deep enough into this already.”
Bobby shook his head. “You can’t leave me like that, old friend. There’s got to be something more I can do for you.”
Nohar looked up and down the street. The sky was lightening, and with the dawn Nohar felt exposed. John Samson’s paranoia was rubbing off on him. He felt as if he had spent too long standing in one place.
“Two things,” Nohar said.
“Name them.”
“Can your pet hackers get a list of people who did a specific search on the net?”
“That’s not impossible.”
“I need a list of people who’ve done a search for articles by a kid calling himself The Necron Avenger.”
“That it?”
Nohar looked up and down the street again. The place was empty except for an occasional car. With the boarded-up buildings, this area of Compton looked like the aftermath of a full-spectrum war. It reminded Nohar of the pictures of African cities after the pandemic, after the gene-tech’s microbes got out of hand.
“Do some research for me. The Bensheim Foundation and their Clinics. I need to know who runs what, especially in LA. I don’t think I’ll have time to hunt all that down myself.”
“You got it.” Bobby smiled. “You know, it’s just like old times.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll call you back.”
Nohar cut the connection, feeling older than ever. To his one-time best friend he was now nostalgia.
• • •
The Hummer—which only stalled out twice—got Nohar into Pasadena early enough for him to miss most of rush hour. Pasadena was pink territory, but nothing like Beverly Hills. Nohar didn’t have to worry about cops stopping him just because he was nonhuman.
He was lucky, though, that no one stopped him because of the crate he was driving.
Nohar wasn’t really sure what he was going to do eventually, but he was going to start by watching. He found a parking space in a garage that overlooked the main LA offices of the Bensheim Foundation in LA, the address where Manuel’s ramcard was intended to go, and the place the van with the uplink was probably going home to.
The offices didn’t stand out as much as the Clinic, probably because the building was nestled in among a series of similar structures which all seemed to have been built about the same time after the ’34 quake.
Nohar chose his position before the start of business hours, so he could see the people coming here for work. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he knew that there was something here that would point to who was behind the Bad Guys.
If these people were going to such lengths to hide the information on that ramcard, that meant they were afraid of exposure. That meant that exposure was the one weapon Nohar had to end this nightmare—but he had to know what, and who, he was exposing.
His talk with Bobby confirmed for Nohar that whatever was going on went beyond the Bensheim Foundation. The Foundation didn’t have paramilitary resources—at least they probably didn’t—but Nohar was certain that they wouldn’t be using a Fed satellite if the Fed wasn’t somehow involved.
Nohar sat in the Hummer, on the to
p floor of the garage, and watched the entrance to the Foundation offices through his digital camera. It was a long and boring morning, watching the pinks move in and out of the building. He dutifully took pictures, low res so he wouldn’t exhaust the camera’s memory, just enough for identification purposes.
After about two hours, when it was nearing ten in the morning, Nohar finally got a break.
Walking out of the front of the building was a familiar face. It belonged to a tall black man with a jagged scar across his right cheek. It was the guy who had been first out of the helicopter at Pastoria Towers. The same bearing, the same arrogant hunter’s stare. Nohar put down the camera when he saw that Scar was heading toward a dark Electroline van, twin of the one that had been watching Maria’s apartment.
He pulled the Hummer out of its space and began peeling down the ramps of the garage. He only slowed to a normal speed—smelling what was left of the old brakes as he did so—when he reached the ramp out to the street.
He managed to pull out three car lengths behind the retreating van. Nohar slowed, matching the traffic flow, and wishing for a car less conspicuous than a spray-painted Hummer.
Fifteen minutes into tailing the van, the old instincts came back. He steered for blind spots in the van’s rear view, using larger cars to run interference for him, hiding the all-too-conspicuous vehicle. It helped that the guy behind the wheel—whether or not he was aware of his garish shadow—wasn’t doing anything to shake a tail. In LA traffic it would have been easy to get lost on the freeways.
Nohar stayed glued to Scar’s van, down the Harbor Freeway, south, all the way to the coast.
He followed him off the freeway, until they reached the Long Beach Naval Station. . . .
When Nohar saw that, he just slowly drove by the guard shacks flanking the entrance. “Shit,” he whispered to himself as he watched the van pass through security in the rearview mirror.
• • •
Nohar drove into Long Beach and stopped at a public library kiosk to double-check what he already knew. The Long Beach Naval Station had been home to one of the country’s top antiterrorism units during the last episode of rioting in LA. Apparently it had been a temporary assignment that had gradually become permanent.
That meant that the official news story about the attack on Pastoria Towers was probably right.
What scared Nohar was the fact that this all—everything that was happening—was a Fed operation. How could he fight against that kind of odds? The only reasonable option was to leave the country—and even that wouldn’t put him and the others out of reach of this kind of operation.
He walked back to the Hummer, trying to think of what he could do.
They had run when the media arrived. The only real chance he had was publicity, widespread international publicity. That meant more than just Manuel’s ramcard, that meant enough evidence of this Fed operation to punch it through the news filter of every comm on the planet.
There was little chance of him getting through the security at a military base, so he turned the Hummer back toward the highway and headed north, back toward Pasadena.
• • •
Nohar walked into the lobby of the Bensheim Foundation hoping that the pinks couldn’t smell the tension around him. Luckily, moreaus weren’t alien here, even in the Pasadena offices. The lobby guard didn’t give him a second look, and Nohar saw a trio of female rabbits leave an elevator and head for the exit. From the way they were dressed, conservative, dark colors, lots of material, Nohar supposed they all worked here.
Nohar slipped into the vacated elevator, and the doors shut behind him. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a security camera, so Nohar gave all his attention to the video display set into the wall of the elevator. It gave an office directory. He gave it a quick scan and highlighted the fifth floor—
The offices had their own on-site Clinic, and it was the least suspicious place for a moreau off the street to go. As the elevator rose, Nohar noted the other items on the directory. He scrolled through the items while looking as if he was fidgeting, tapping his claws on the screen.
Tenth floor, Systems and Building Maintenance. Ninth floor, Administration. Eighth floor, Accounting. Seventh and Sixth, PR and Community Relations. Fifth was the Clinic. Fourth was R&D and the Laboratories. Third was International. Second was Shipping and Receiving. First was Lobby and Building Security.
The strange thing was, this building was taller than ten stories. Nohar could remember that much from when he’d been watching it from the outside. He had this feeling confirmed as he looked at the display change floor numbers as the elevator rose.
Between the third and fourth floors there was a perceptible lag. Between every other pair of floors it took the number a little less than a second to change. Between three and four was almost three seconds.
Nohar could picture the side of the building. He had watched long enough to know that floor three was just as tall as the floors above and below it.
When the doors slid open, Nohar walked out into the hall leading to the Clinic itself. It was reminiscent of Compton, but this time the posters warning about sexually transmitted diseases seemed more ominous.
He made careful note of where the security cameras were located. Before he made it to the reception area, he slipped into the restrooms and entered a stall. He was improvising, and he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do—
What he did know was that he wanted to get a look at whatever was nestled between International and R&D. Nohar sat and thought of hiding until the building closed, but then he’d be dealing with active alarms and security that wasn’t busy doing anything else.
He needed a distraction that would last long enough for him to get a good look around. If they were hiding a whole floor, how would he get to it? The elevator probably operated on some sort of code, so he couldn’t use that. That left scaling the outside of the building, or the fire stairs.
That might be it.
Nohar left the bathroom and continued down the hall. He noted the presence of fire alarms and extinguishers. A false alarm was tempting, but there was little chance it would really empty the building before security discovered that there wasn’t a fire. Besides, no one ever believes a fire alarm the first time it goes off. There’s five to ten minutes before anyone believes it’s the real thing, unless they smell the smoke themselves.
He needed another way to empty the building.
He walked into the reception area and took a clipboard form from the bored-looking human receptionist and walked around the desk. Instead of going to the waiting area, he walked to a set of public comms lining one wall around the corner from the entrance. He looked for security cameras watching the comms, and he seemed to be in luck. No cameras here, security was more interested in watching people come and go.
They’d eventually trace the call back here, and they’d have a video record of him all over the building, but at this point he didn’t care. The only important thing was that they wouldn’t connect him to this immediately. And all he needed was a little time.
Nohar slid in front of the clunky comm and ran his claws over the textured plastic. The rarely used keyboard was recessed beneath the screen, the keys had collected a lot of debris. He fed some money into the thing and switched off both the audio and video feed. Then he started a multiple destination message, composing at the keyboard. His message went to the Bensheim Foundation Administration, the police, and several news agencies.
The note was very simple. He claimed that the Outsiders—the same people who had taken credit for Alcatraz and Royd—had placed a bomb in the building and it was set to go off in ninety minutes.
• • •
They were good. It was only five minutes from his message—he had just walked into the waiting room and had sat down—when the klaxons of the fire alarms sounded, and the PA system came on telling everyone to evac
uate the building in a calm fashion. They didn’t mention a bomb, probably to avoid a panic.
That was fine as far as Nohar was concerned. He abandoned the clipboard and started out with the mass of male moreaus from the waiting room. Most headed for the elevator, but Nohar stayed with the ones who headed for the fire stairs.
The fire stairs wrapped around the inside of a concrete tube that did its best to amplify the klaxons, hurting Nohar’s ears. The stairs were packed with people descending.
Nohar fitted himself into the crowd, hugging the wall. He continued down one floor, but at the next fire door he stopped, his back pressed to the wall, letting the people pass him. He stayed against the hinge side of the cinder-block wall, and waited.
Eventually, the fire door—which led to the anonymous floor between three and four—opened.
There wasn’t a handle on the outside of the door, so Nohar grabbed the edge of it and pulled it all the way back toward him. Someone mumbled a “thanks” from the other side of the door.
Nohar stood there holding the door, waiting for someone to notice him. No one did. The moment the stairway seemed clear of everyone, Nohar slipped through the open fire door and into the secret heart of the Bensheim Foundation.
There wasn’t anything that stood out immediately. Nothing to mark this place as something to be hidden. It was the same carpeted floor, same fluorescent lighting, same acoustical tile that Nohar had seen two floors above.
The fire door shut behind him, muffling the klaxons somewhat.
Nohar walked down the hall, passing ranks of offices, getting his bearings. At least it seemed that they had emptied this place as much as the rest of the building. Now he just had to figure out where to look. He had probably another fifteen minutes before the bomb squad brought their dogs and their chemical sniffers. . . .
Nohar turned the corner and was confronted with a much different hallway. The way was blocked by a heavy stainless-steel door that had the red biohazard trefoil etched into its surface. There was a portal in the door, and Nohar looked through it and saw a small chamber. Hanging on the walls were what looked to be human space suits.
The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1 Page 42