As Flynn shuddered and twitched she leaned in close to his remaining ear. "Be respectful or I'll get more rubbish and you won't ever speak, hear or see again."
"Jesus," Matt said, his wide eyes darting from Flynn's ruined face to her stare and back.
With a nod she wiped the blade clean on Flynn's shirt. "He comes back, so we can't kill him. The lab, where they held me? It had cryo units, banks of them."
"Sure."
"The OPD had several former bonks frozen. Even without augmentation they still lived. If they can be kept indefinitely, then so can Flynn."
Matt smiled. "FADE confiscated that equipment."
"I am aware, and this is what we should do. But secret. We keep this from everyone."
"Freudenberg will have to know."
"Okay, but only him. Not Marcia, and especially not Janet."
His scowl held no weight – he must have known better than to question her resolve, even when he disagreed with it. "Okay."
"I'll call the General."
"Good. And once we take care of this, we find the OPD and kill them all."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Monica groped across the nightstand and pulled the buzzing phone to her face, read the number through sleep-blurred eyes. Matt lay too still next to her in the FADE basement apartment, wide awake at the slightest disturbance despite the trauma of the night and his arrival just a half hour prior. He'd crashed into bed and fallen immediately asleep, a level of exhaustion she hadn't seen since his post-Gerstner hospital stay.
Her mother's number flashed on the screen, so with heart in her throat she hit 'Talk' and held it to her ear.
"Momma, what's wrong?"
"You get your husband up here right now to talk some sense into these pagans!"
"Pagans?"
"Rees's flock! They's going crazy up and down the street with signs and whatnot, every day, blocking traffic and causing a nuisance."
"At four in the morning?"
"Poppa just caught one creeping round the chicken coop, had to go out confront him with a shotgun!"
Monica took a deep breath, happy there didn't seem to be any imminent danger. "Is he okay?"
"Well, yeah and no. Broken nose and he peed himself when Poppa knocked him down and pointed both barrels at him, but he'll recover, sure. Deputy Broadbent's coming around to cart him off soon as he takes care of something else."
"I meant – it don't matter." Her accent always slipped a little deeper into the trailer park whenever she spoke to her parents. "As long as Poppa's okay it doesn't matter. You want me to call Jason?"
"Oh, that boy ain't the problem. He tried to talk 'em down, but they ain't listening to him no more, 'cept maybe at that demonic pulpit. They're out of control, and we need something done. Mayor Schenk's called a town meeting for eight this morning about how we're going to take back this town, and would you believe he's got Wilkinson agreeing with him? This is gonna get out of hand and you know it. We'd like your husband here to talk some sense into everyone, maybe put a little government fire under their backsides."
Matt pulled the pillow from under his head and held it over his face, muffling his voice under layers of cloth and down. "I usually talk sense with a shotgun. What do they expect me to do here?"
Monica repeated the question into the phone. Her mothers' rambling escalated into a rant. She held the phone away from her ear. "You getting this, baby?"
He let loose an affirmative-sounding grunt.
"So you're going, yeah?"
After a moment he pulled the pillow from his face, keeping his voice too low to carry over the phone. "These people have a right to picket or protest, and if they break the law the county should handle it. We've got people working around the clock digging up the OPD, and once we find them they're not going to stay somewhere long. I can't go. Tell them to be safe and get on without me."
She patted the taut muscle across his belly, then put the phone back to her ear. "He's not going to make it, Momma."
* * *
Matt got up at six, put on sweat pants and a wife-beater that showed off his inhuman physique, and wandered down to the FADE cafeteria. In line between the only other two people up and about at this hour, he helped himself to a mounded plate of eggs, twelve strips of bacon, four sausage patties, a stack of pancakes and a half-dozen 'Maple Flavored Syrup' packets.
"Holy shit," the younger, dark-haired man said. "I heard you can eat, but seriously?"
Matt grinned with a collegiality he didn't feel – he hadn't expected company and didn't want it, but these people were his coworkers and it would smooth things for his family if they were liked. "Got in a bit of trouble last night. Regeneration makes you really hungry."
The guy chuckled as he wandered to the closest table and set down his tray. "You must have lost a limb."
Matt sat next to him. "Four of them." He stuck out his hand. "Matt Rowley."
They shook. "Emilio Cruz, Director of Advanced Imaging."
"What's that mean?"
The older man set his tray down on Matt's left. "It means he runs the labs that develop camera systems to look for ghosts and magic."
"That's possible?" Matt asked.
"Not so far," they said in unison. The older man shook Matt's hand. "Dean Flowers, Director of Acquisitions. I'm the guy who turns $800 toilets into guns and airplanes and laboratories."
"So you picked up all the OPD equipment." Matt shoveled eggs and bacon into his mouth while Dean responded.
"After your raid on the OPD facility we seized all of the assets found, yes. It's not that hard to strip assets from an organization that essentially doesn't exist on paper."
"Essentially."
"That's right. They have an office and nineteen official employees, all but two of whom have been detained – they're on the lam. The rest, well, President Williams declared them terrorists and had them renditioned to somewhere under Freud's control."
Matt spoke around a mouthful. "Does he know you call him 'Freud'?"
"All the old timers call him Freud." Emilio took a ginger bite of sausage and chewed thoroughly.
"I see," Matt said. "So what makes you think 'advanced imaging' will work?"
Emilio shrugged. "Nothing. I was hired to help the geeks go to town on it, get them what they need and try to keep frivolous spending down. I don't think those Ghost Hunter shows are real, and most of our engineers are skeptics; but they're being paid to try hard with serious ideas, in case some day it pays off."
"Do you have any reason to believe it will?"
Dean answered. "We live in the age of miracles. You yourself can predict the future, going out a split second or so, and rumor has it that Dawkins could do far more. We have fallen angels forming kingdoms all over the world, insurgencies using black magic to infiltrate and control their enemies. Why not wizards and ghosts and cameras that can capture ectoplasmic energy?" He framed the last words with air quotes.
"So FADE's working on what, everything?"
Dean smiled. "After a fashion. What it comes down to these days is that if it doesn't sound like complete and utter bullshit, we're looking into it. And if it does, we're thinking about looking into it. Our R&D teams have created miracles, and we're likely to create more as time goes on."
Matt hid a frown behind a piece of French toast, shoved whole into his mouth. ICAP, except for the top brass, had believed that Jade and Augmentations were based on science, but they were being used by Gerstner, a sacrifice of hundreds of millions of drug users to blast open the prison that held the egregoroi, ancient, angel-like creatures who considered her their last remaining daughter. He couldn't help but worry that FADE had a similar hidden patron, if not the same one.
"Well if you develop something that will calm a pissed-off wife, let me know." Matt looked down the empty plates on his tray, considered another run, an
d decided against it. He stood, tipped a nonexistent hat, and said his goodbyes to meet with Marcia Stein in the exercise room.
In a bright purple halter top and black yoga pants she cut an impressive figure for a normal, already running on an inclined treadmill by the time he'd arrived. Taut, lean muscle without a hint of fat, she moved with a graceful efficiency that defied the encroachment of age. Matt got on the treadmill next to her and set it to twenty miles an hour, more for nostalgia's sake than for the exercise he didn't need.
"Everything set?" he asked.
"Yes. The general agreed to transfer your security detail, and they've been granted clearance. I've got direct command."
"Good, thanks. What about OPD?"
She threw up her hands, then grabbed the rail to keep from falling back. "We're working on some leads. You didn't leave us any survivors last night, any that didn't get away, anyway. Hard to interrogate the dead."
"Are we getting cooperation from the Justice Department?"
"Sure, if you can call it that. They deny any knowledge of the OPD, and it's possible they really were that in the dark. We've got the NSA, FBI, and forensic accountants trying to trace the equipment buys to build those robot guys – most of it is impossible to trace, but the microchips are state-of-the-art, and somebody had to have made them. There's a trail, and we're going to find it."
"What about the White House? Can they grease the skids, here?"
She shook her head. "Williams is in full campaign mode, and he's losing. The polls have Kellett up almost twenty points – that 'Jesus wants us to exterminate the demonic pagans' thing has a lot of appeal right now. You've got millions of pissed-off people registering to vote for the first time, and it's skewing hard toward 'burn the witch'."
"Great. Well, keep me posted." He killed the machine and hopped off onto the side rails.
"That's it? You didn't even break a sweat!"
"I never do."
* * *
Dean Flowers knocked on the door to Matt's new office. He looked up from the stacks of banker's boxes, ushered Flowers in, and closed the door.
"The general spoke to you?"
"He did." Flowers kept his hands in his suit pockets. "We're installing the unit you've requested in a facility off-site. It draws power from a nearby high-use building without anything going on any books anywhere, and will be secure indefinitely. All records will be expunged."
"Excellent, thank you."
He hesitated, hands in his pockets. "May I ask what it's for?"
"No."
Flowers nodded as if that was the expected answer. "Is that all, then?"
"Yes, thank you."
* * *
Two days later, Matt waited under the shadow of Mount Mitchell, several miles outside the North Carolina state park that bore the same name. Fir and Hemlock trees stood in half-barren stands, ravaged by acid rain and some insect or another, but the area smelled of clean earth and pine needles. Except for a higher tick on the thermometer, it could have been home.
An hour after the last FADE employee had left, the white OPD van rolled into view, Sakura's grim face behind the windshield. Matt hopped on, grabbing the driver's side door handle to steady himself, and let her roll into the shaft of the ruby and sapphire mine, long-closed since it ran dry in the 1980s. They followed the chemical glow sticks left behind for the purpose, winding deep inside the earth past a thousand side passages before arriving at the cryo unit, a room-sized steel cube somehow powered via a thick cable put through the wall.
Matt hopped down and patted the thick black insulation and then the wall it went through. "What do you think's on the other side?"
"Politician hideaway for nuclear war. This far underground, with black money? Only thing that makes sense."
He grunted in agreement, circled the van, and opened the back door. Stepping back, he cringed away from the smell of vomit, shit, and old, rotting blood. "Holy shit, how can you stand to be in there?"
Instead of Sakura answering, Flynn did. "Not much of a choice, you bastard. What say you let us go and be done with this mess?"
Sakura dragged the gurney out, and Matt stifled a gasp. Under her ministrations, Flynn's flesh had grown around the bed and legs, a nightmare of twisted flesh and protruding bone that reached almost to the wheels. There was no chance that such treatment wouldn't have driven anyone utterly insane.
"Not the prettiest girl at the ball, am I, Rowley?
"You never were." He looked at Sakura. "Let's do this."
He opened the massive metal door and held it while Sakura wheeled Flynn inside. Once there they hooked him up to the pump, per instructions, two dozen needles in two dozen veins, all hooked to a small box the size of a filing cabinet. Flynn yammered the whole time, about doors and bridges and the impossibility of mortality, but if Sakura paid him any more heed than Matt did, she made no indication of it. He flicked the switch. White-blue fluid flowed into Flynn's veins, and blood flowed out.
For the first time since he'd known him, Flynn's eyes widened with worry and fear. "What is this, Matt?"
"If we didn't replace your blood, your cells would rupture and you'd never survive the freeze. Can't have you dying on us and coming back again, not for a few centuries or so."
Flynn looked around, eyes darting from featureless steel wall to featureless steel ceiling. "You can't do this. You can't leave me alone with her. Not like that. You can't."
"With her?"
Flynn closed his eyes. "Gerstner. She won't leave me alone."
"What is she, in your head?"
His face twitched, then calmed. "Soul. She's got me caught in a loop where I can't stay and I can't go back, and every life I take belongs to her. I think that's true for you, too. You serve her, same as me."
"Sure." Matt walked over to the wall and dropped the knife switch, triggering the compressor that would drop the room – and Flynn's body temperature – to forty degrees below zero. "Meantime, sleep tight."
Flynn screamed and cursed as they exited, waffling between rage and panicked pleas until Sakura closed the door, cutting off the sound. They jogged to the surface. Two minutes later the detonators went off, burying the room behind a wall of rubble a mile deep.
Matt looked from the stinking van to Sakura and back. "How do you feel about a run?"
"To Virginia?"
"Out of here. Leave the van to rot, catch a ride from the next city. No stink, and all the evidence stays here."
She took off, slowing enough to let him keep up.
* * *
"That's him." Janet tapped the fuzzy blob on the projector screen with a bright green fingernail. "Eighty-three percent."
The grainy parking lot security camera made the man's face a grotesque, pixilated jack-o-lantern. Black and white, Matt had a hard time even determining his race.
"You've got to be kidding me." Marcia looked from the screen to Freudenberg to Matt and back in naked disbelief. "That could be anyone."
"As he enters and exits the image changes enough so that even at this resolution we have an eighty-three percent confidence that this is Walter Jenkins, the jeep driver Sakura killed two weeks ago." Janet flipped to the next slide, a shot inside a crowded bar with a bombshell blonde's face circled. "Taken two days later, this is Jasmine Bero, girlfriend of Nick Burgess, who Matt shot inside. This bar is eight blocks from that Walmart."
Another slide depicted Shane Keene in high definition, three-piece suit at odds with his biker's beard, mouth open in mid-word to a similarly-dressed Asian man carrying a black briefcase. "These two gentlemen entered the uptown Berkshire Credit Union four days before the attack and transferred eighty million dollars to and from various accounts, all of which we are now monitoring."
"Who's the Asian?" Freudenberg asked.
"He's Chinese," Sakura said, arms crossed.
"We hav
e no idea." Janet zoomed in on his face. "But he went back the day after the attack, without Keene."
"So they're operating out of Cleveland," Matt said. "Cleveland."
"Looks that way, bud. Vaguely central, easy to smuggle stuff in and out of the country across the lake, lots of open space outside the city for covert air fields. And it's a shithole, so there are a lot of abandoned buildings and the rents are dirt cheap."
"Okay, let's go to Cleveland." Two steps toward the door he turned, looked at everyone still sitting at the conference room table. "What?"
"We have assets in place," Freudenberg said. "But we have to do this right. If we're going to root them out and destroy them we need to uncover everything – their funding, leadership, and bases of operation at the very least. If we don't do this right then we won't get them all, and that's going to take some time."
Matt closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again. "They tried to kill my family."
"Kidnap," Sakura said. "If they wanted us dead they'd have blown the helicopter."
"And if they took my wife and son, would they have done what they did to you?"
She nodded. "Probably."
"So close enough. They have to die."
The general put his hands up. "I'm not saying they're not going to. We just need to proceed cautiously or we're going to force them the rest of the way underground."
Janet snorted. "You bullshit us and we walk, General."
"Excuse me?"
"Oh, come on. This place has been a throbbing hard-on for two weeks just based on the tech we ganked out of the DIA parking lot. The neural enhancers alone is a multibillion-dollar coup for the military, not to mention the webbing compound and the exo-suits. You want caution because you want their toys."
"Degrading and destroying the OPD's operation is your number one priority, and I'm content to let that stand for the time being. But yes, securing technology that can help us against the supernatural has always been FADE's focus."
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