Amortals

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Amortals Page 15

by Matt Forbeck


  I looked at Querer, and she shrugged at me. "At the moment?" I said. "None. The Kalis looked promising, but they turned out to be a dead end."

  Arwen frowned. "And you're not going after them for shooting my daughter?"

  I put up my hands. "The Service will, for sure. And we'll help them out as much as we can. My murder investigation is still ongoing, though, and I doubt Patrón will take us off of that."

  "Take you off of that, you mean."

  I admit, I didn't know what she getting at.

  She saw my confusion and explained. "You're not going to take my daughter back out into the field with you in this condition. She's just been shot."

  "Mom!"

  I had to hand it to Querer. She could have handled this like an embarrassed teenager. I've seen many people who were far older than her deal with their parents like that. When you get multi-generational families of amortals, you can find a man over a hundred years old who still can't keep his cool around his parents.

  Querer, though, was too together for that. She just laid down the law, clear and simple. "My status as an agent and my assignments are not up to Dooley to decide. That falls to Director Patrón."

  Arwen began to protest, but Querer held up an index finger to cut her off.

  "The doctors here say I'm doing well and should make a full and fast recovery. They want to keep me here a while for observation, and then – if you're up for it – you can take me home. I'll contact Director Patrón at that point and work with him to determine my next step, whatever that may be."

  "But, honey, you've been shot!"

  Arwen unconsciously rubbed her hand on her leg as she spoke, right at the spot that still caused her to limp. I could see her trying to keep herself together, but it was a struggle.

  I sympathized with her. I'd watched my wife and son fall ill and die, and there's nothing to make you feel more helpless than seeing a loved one in pain – especially when you know that the same fate might never befall you, that you'll never join them in whatever peace they might have found. Someone could have saved them the way they saved me, but just like with ninety-nine percent of the population, that didn't happen, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  "Yes, Mom, and it hurts, but I'm going to survive. It won't be enough to put me on disability. With any luck, I'll get a decoration, though, just like yours."

  Arwen smiled despite herself at that. "Imagine that," she said. "Matching mother-daughter medals."

  I put a hand on Arwen's shoulder. "Don't worry about it," I said. "I'm sure Patrón won't put her back into the field until she's ready."

  "These are hard times though," Arwen said. "He might think he has to dig deep to find the help he needs." She shook her head. "And between you and me, I never trusted him much anyhow."

  "Hey," Querer said. "What about me? I'm sitting right here."

  "Oh, you." Arwen dismissed her daughter with a wave of her hand. "Like you ever listen to me anyhow."

  "I wouldn't worry about those One Resurrectionists much," I said. "Over the years, they've proved mostly harmless."

  Arwen tried to interrupt me, but I pressed right on. "Sure, there have been a few outliers over the years, rogue elements that have crossed over the line, but most of them are good people who just happen to think that our government is doing something evil. We've had those around since 1776."

  "Don't be flip with me, Ronan," Arwen said, tightening her mouth into a stern face. "These rogue elements may have been behind your murder. That's nothing to joke about."

  I put up my hands. "You're right! I can't argue with that. I'll be sure to check them out right away – mostly because I don't have any other leads at the moment."

  "And the Kalis?"

  "I'll make sure to light a fire under Patrón to find the people who shot your daughter and kidnapped me. That's a dangerous bunch that needs to be brought in."

  "Whatever's going on, this isn't like Patil," said Querer. "From all I know of him – and you'd know better than me – he likes to be the quiet mastermind, skimming his money off the top and making sure everything runs as smooth as glass."

  I nodded. "Whoever killed me sure knew how to push Patil's buttons. He never shows his face to people unless there's serious trouble. For him to shoot you in the line of duty–"

  "Don't forget how he blew up your apartment."

  "Exactly. He's desperate, and that makes him dangerous."

  A notice that I'd received a message from Six popped into my vision. I'd set my nanoserver to filter out all non-emergency messages, but I'd always made an exception for family. This was despite the fact that nobody from my family had tried to contact me for decades. I'd forgotten I'd even made that exception in the first place, but that's what let Six get through.

  I ignored it for the moment.

  "What about yourself?" asked Arwen. "Doesn't it bother you that someone's trying to kill you?"

  I weaved my head back and forth, unsure. "Of course it does, but I – I don't take it personally."

  Arwen glared at me as if I was insane. "You can't be serious."

  I shrugged. "You know how it is when you're an agent. Most of the killers aren't after you, just the person you're protecting."

  "Well, yes, but that's not the case here."

  My system pinged me again with another note from Six. This was one was flagged red and urgent. I ignored it again. Now wasn't a good time.

  "True," I said to Arwen. "But as an amortal, I know – and my attackers know – that death isn't permanent. It's just a temporary setback. The people after me can't really kill me. They can only slow me down."

  Arwen could not repress a scowl. "Ronan Dooley, that is the most absurd pile of rationalizations I've ever heard."

  "Maybe," I said, "but I was honestly angrier when they shot your daughter than any time they were gunning for me."

  A third ping from Six popped up, this time flagged as an emergency. I closed my eyes and sighed. When I opened them, I saw Arwen gazing at me, her anger softening.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "My very-great-grandson is messaging me about an emergency. I need to take this."

  She reached out and gave my arm a sympathetic squeeze. "Go." She glanced over at Querer. "When it comes to offspring and emergencies, I certainly understand."

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  "What is it?" I asked Six by subvocalization as I strode out of Querer's room. I made my way toward the elevator that would take me to the parking slips above the hospital.

  "Didn't you read any of my messages?" the boy asked, his voice cracking with stress as he spoke. He was on the edge of panic.

  "I figured it would be faster to chat. Just take a deep breath, then fill me in."

  "It's Dad," he said, ignoring the bit about breathing. "Five. He took off."

  "Is that unusual?"

  "No, not that part. But after the way he talked to you, I got curious."

  "Uh-oh. What happened?" I got into the elevator and ordered it to the proper parking level.

  "He has a private closet in his bedroom. He keeps it locked. I broke into it."

  "You defeated it yourself?" I was impressed. Getting through an electronic lockset and reinforced door wasn't something most civilians could accomplish without an axe.

  "It wasn't that hard," said Six. "Dad doesn't trust electronics. He just had a padlock on it."

  "So how'd you get it off? Was it a key or combination?"

  "It's a combination, but I didn't bother with that. It had the lock straps mounted on the outside of the door, so I just undid the screws holding those down."

  I could hear how pleased he was with himself for figuring that out. I only wondered how long that should have taken. Five had probably trusted the outer doors to keep any intruders out. He hadn't bet on his son's curiosity eventually getting the better of him.

  "So what's the problem?" I asked.

  "Dad didn't believe keeping electronic records. He still kept everything on paper. The closet was full of boxes
of it. I don't remember ever seeing that much of it in one place outside of a museum."

  "And?"

  That hauled Six up short out of his babbling, but it also derailed the circuitous train of thought he'd been riding. "What?"

  "And what did you find?"

  "Oh! Grandpa, you wouldn't believe it. The entire place was filled with all sorts of stuff from something called the One Resurrection."

  My heart skipped enough beats I thought it might never start up again. When it did, it hurt.

  "Are you sure?"

  "Oh, yeah," Six said. "I see their logo sometimes when we go to church. I recognized it right away."

  "Wait. What?" The doors of the elevator opened, and I rushed out into the parking structure to find my hovercar. "Where do you go to church?"

  Other than for funerals, I hadn't been in a church for years. At my age, I didn't get invited to weddings much anymore.

  "The National Cathedral. It's not the closest place, but Dad says it's the best."

  "You're Episcopalians?"

  I don't know why the thought bothered me so much. Perhaps it's because I knew such news would send whatever remains were left of my long-gone mother spinning in her grave. It was one thing to fall away from the Catholic Church. It was something far worse to take up with another denomination.

  "I guess so," Six said. Caution crept into his voice. "I don't really go all that often. Dad drags me there on Christmas and Easter, but I usually sleep in on Sundays."

  "So you're a Chreaster?" I smiled despite my misgivings about whatever Five was up to. "I suppose that still beats me."

  "Grandpa," Six said. "What's all this mean?"

  I hesitated. "Hopefully nothing," I finally said. "The One Resurrection is a group of papists who believe that only God should have the option of bringing somebody back to life. They're opposed to amortals on moral grounds."

  "That sure sounds like Dad."

  "They're mostly Catholic, although I suppose they wouldn't turn away Episcopalians or anyone else who cared to join. Your father may be – clearly is – mixed up with them."

  "Is – is that bad?"

  "Hard to say. It depends on what they've been doing lately, and on how much your father had to do with it."

  "How are you going to figure that out?"

  I found the hovercar waiting where I'd left it, and I gestured for its door to open.

  "That's my job, kid. I'm usually pretty good at it."

  "What – what about–? You did just get killed though."

  I sat down in the hovercar and pinched the bridge of my nose. "That, Six, is what happens when I'm too good at it. I'll let you know what I find out."

  "Thanks, Grandpa."

  "Don't mention it. Literally. Don't tell a soul what you just told me, OK? Not even your mother."

  "Got it."

  "Put all that stuff back where you found it. Replace the lock. Go to your room and stay there."

  Six laughed. "If they find me there, they'll know something's up."

  "Then get out and do what you do. Just keep your nose clean."

  "Wow. 'Keep my nose clean'? Who talks like that?"

  I smirked. "You done good, kid. With luck, I'll be able to keep your dad's nose clean too. Good night."

  "It's morning, Grandpa."

  "Sure. For you."

  Six laughed again. I hoped I'd helped him feel better, even if only a little. "Good night too," he said before breaking the connection.

  I ordered the hovercar to haul me back to Blair House. Once I got there, I took a shower, changed into some clothes that didn't smell like the bottom of the Potomac, and wolfed down a fantastic breakfast that I barely took the time to taste.

  Then I started to hunt my great-great-great-grandson down. I first tried checking Five's footprint on the net, only to find he didn't have much of one at all. I managed to turn up a few instances of youthful indiscretion: pictures of him at parties, nothing serious. Other than that, though, he kept a suspiciously low profile.

  Five did not have any implants. He apparently had a phone, although he normally kept it turned off. I tried searching for his location by that but had no luck. I even tried calling him and confronting him directly, but as many times as I pinged him he never picked up the connection.

  In my experience, only three types of people cut themselves off from the rest of the world like Five: Luddites, criminals, and the insane. I'd talked with him, and while he may have hated me, I didn't think of him as certifiably ready to be fitted for a white dinner jacket with wraparound sleeves.

  That left technological drop-out or crook. The fact that Five

  lived in Alexandria with his wife and son meant he wasn't one of those guys who drop out of civilization to live in a cabin in the woods and send bomb-laden hate mail to mid-level bureaucrats.

  That brought us down to one possibility: Five was up to no good.

  There's a broad range of criminality, of course, from speeding on the highway to plotting mass murders. Most of humanity falls somewhere between those two extremes. Few of us are so innocent that we don't bend the occasional rule, and even fewer of us stand ready to destroy the entire world.

  The question then was this: what was Five doing that he wanted to make sure no one else could find out about it?

  I decided I'd go back to basic investigation work and follow the lead I had. Six had found One Resurrection literature in his father's closet. It wasn't a crime to side with people who didn't agree with the concept of amortality, but the fact that Five felt he needed to hide his association with One Resurrection – even from his own family – told me there was more to it than that.

  The problem with One Resurrection was that it wasn't an organization so much as a movement. It had no central offices, just a homesite on the net. People joined in it to whatever degree they liked. They could chip in some comments or a few bucks, maybe design some placards or posters to promote their point of view, or they could dedicate their lives to the cause.

  A little research showed me that Father Luke Gustavo was still listed as one of the leaders of the One Resurrection movement, despite the fact he'd secretly betrayed part of that group decades ago. Although he wasn't the named head of the group, no one else was either. He was one of the hottest firebrands in their forums, preaching fire and brimstone sermons about the hubris of humanity and the folly of treading into territory properly reserved for God. Lots of people agreed with what he had to say, and those that disagreed with him on the forums received a verbal evisceration with a heaping scoop of humiliation for dessert.

  The forum comments about my murder were mostly positive. They offered up a prayer for my certainly damned soul and hoped that my new self would somehow see the light – or meet a similarly horrible and deserved end. Some of the commenters were thrilled about the killing and wished they had done the job themselves.

  A couple of the posters actually took credit for my murder, each separate from the other. Rather than receiving the congratulations and adulation they expected, though, they fell into an argument that quickly devolved from calling each other liars to questioning which lower forms of life had served as the other claimant's parents.

  Reading between the lines of their rants, I could see that neither of them had been involved in my murder in any way. The fact that they were so excited about it that they wanted to take credit angered me. I tried to not take it personally, but images from the snuff thrid kept flashing back in my head, and that made it just about impossible.

  I'd been killed many times before, but the mainstream media had always hailed me as a returning hero. I'd purposely not hunted down the crackpot opinions because I knew they'd only make me mad. Now, though, I had no choice. The investigation had brought me here, and I had to follow through. The fact that I was chasing my own progeny through this muck washed all that anger with sadness and regret.

  The worst part was that none of this had brought me any closer to finding either my murderer or my not-so-great-greatg
reat-grandson.

  I tapped into Homeland Security's Total Intelligence Engine and put in an order to find Five.

  TIE was the greatest achievement ever made in the field of law enforcement. It gathered together every bit of information generated in the nation and synthesized it into a single, searchable database. That included every bit of data on the net, over a full alphabyte of information and growing every second.

  Collecting all that data was the easy part. Sorting through it was insane. I still remember the days before the internet. The first computer I every programmed was a DECwriter II. Instead of a screen, it had a dot-matrix printer for its display. Anytime you wanted to see what the computer was doing, you had to print out a new display again.

 

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