6 Forever Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  “Technoceuticals can be classified as designer drugs in that they take existing elements and combine them in new ways.” Roland rolled his hands one over the other, as if mixing said drugs. Either that or he was about to have a fit. “But it goes way beyond that. The name technoceutical isn’t by chance. These are pharmacological drugs for the most part, but they can contain additional, artificial elements too. Sometimes those elements are technology based.”

  “Like nanites,” Nigel put in, also playing dumb. We were a good team.

  Not that I’d ever admit it to him.

  “Sometimes.” Roland dragged out the word. “The ingestion of these amalgams of drugs and microscopic tech, or drugs and…other materials, also condensed down to microscopic levels, are the newest craze in designer drugs.”

  Roland was somewhat off base, but still too close to the truth for comfort. Technoceuticals had been around long enough not to be considered a craze anymore, but a fourth-generation internationally booming business. They had a highly specific purpose, however, and that had kept them under the radar. Apparently, until now.

  “And these are—what, coming out of China? And Soo was based in China, so that’s why you wanted to talk to her?” If they were willing to go open kimono, I was more than happy to take a look. As long as I wasn’t the one betraying the family jewels.

  “Roland is simplifying the situation for the sake of brevity, but yes,” Marguerite said quellingly. “We’ve found victims of a type of drug poisoning that doesn’t align with any of our standards.

  “That happens all the time,” Roland interrupted, warming to the subject.

  Marguerite silenced her junior partner with an icy glare. “True, there’s always a new drug on the market that we can’t quite identify at first. But the effects of these technoceuticals, which is a name that we didn’t assign but appears to be common vernacular in certain pockets of the drug community, these effects go well beyond typical drug reactions.”

  “Like what?” I asked, frowning. How much did these people know?

  “Hallucinations of events taking place in real life halfway across the world.” Roland gave a sheepish grin. “Oracular visions. Telekinesis and telepathy. Astral travel. Levitation.”

  “Levitation!” I widened my eyes. “Seriously?”

  Marguerite narrowed hers at my oh-gee response. Time to dial it back a little.

  “Yes, Ms. Wilde. We’re quite serious,” she said. “Of course, most of the drugged victims we examined died quickly from the side effects of whatever drugs they ingested, so we couldn’t get very far with our analysis. Still, I think you’ll agree, this isn’t a minor matter.”

  “No—no,” I said, chastised despite myself. Though I truly hadn’t heard of technoceuticals going all magic carpet on people. That was new. And that was dangerous, if that kind of arcane black market contraband had broken into the public domain. “How much of these, uh, pills have you found?”

  “Not a lot,” Roland said. “Which almost makes it worse. We’re convinced there’s an entire supply chain of these technoceuticals, that they’re blanketing Europe, the southern continents, even the US—but where are they going? Someone is using them, and demand is likely going up if it follows the trend line of any other type of drug on the market. But all we have is the middle link. We don’t know who the intended audience is—or who’s making the supply.”

  I frowned. “Don’t you actually have the end link? You’ve got the users, you said.”

  “Not the intended users,” Roland said heavily. “These are more…from what we can tell…test cases gone awry.”

  Something in his tone pinged a response deep inside me. Connected children, I suspected, at least in part. They’d always been the first line of violation, whether as donors or test subjects. I didn’t know what was worse.

  “Children,” I said curtly. “The users you’ve found are children.”

  “Mostly,” Marguerite stressed the word. “Children or the very old, and they all fit into a rather unusual psychographic.” Marguerite waved her hand to ward off the question, though I knew what the term meant. I’d worked with cops before. “A way to identify people beyond typical characteristics like gender and birthplace. Psychographics take into consideration socioeconomic background, level of education, personality trait pools, religion, all those things.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what are the characteristics of these children?” I braced for the list I knew was coming. I’d met many of the kids Father Jerome had saved…known too much about the ones we’d failed. Interpol wouldn’t have any surprises for me, but I still had to ask.

  “Typically? Starting with the demographics, they’re young,” Roland said. “European mostly, particularly Eastern European, but we’re finding more incidences in Western Europe as well. When it comes to psychographics, they’re typically lower educated if they attend regular schools at all, more rural—well, and they have a history of psychic ability, whether real or untested. They’re believed to have the Sight.”

  “Were believed,” Marguerite said crisply. “By the time they reached us, most of them were dead.”

  Her tone chafed, but as my temper spiked, Nigel brushed me with his arm. He was trying to tell me to be cool, I knew. Regrettably, my chill was rapidly disintegrating.

  “If they were dead, then how do you know…” I didn’t have to finish the sentence. “Not all of them were dead, were they?” I thought I might get sick.

  “No,” Marguerite confirmed, with just enough excitement to make me want to throat-punch her. “Some were in advanced stages of shock, some were in a frenzy of activity, the equivalent of an epileptic seizure. Two we’ve studied for some time are in a state of catatonia.”

  “Two you’ve…studied?” My voice was remarkably calm, masking another surge of anger. “That you’re still studying?”

  The agent didn’t seem to notice my question. “Some were talkative; some were rendered mute. And some…” Marguerite had the grace to hesitate, to dampen her professional curiosity somewhat. “Some had suffered other trauma, trauma that should have been enough on its own to kill them, but they weren’t dead yet when they reached us. Missing organs, limbs, severely battered—”

  “Enough,” I said, lifting my hand. “You think Annika Soo—someone who was working with you, helping you—you think she was involved with this kind of sick trafficking, yet you maintained a relationship with her?”

  My surprise may have been disingenuous, but my outrage was no less fierce for it.

  “Involved or knew something about it, more than what she was telling us, certainly,” Marguerite said coolly. “If that kind of information is in the databases of the business you just inherited, we would appreciate knowing about it. In exchange, we can offer you immunity from prosecution, since you had nothing to do with any of Soo’s activities prior to your recent connection to her.” Her eyes flicked up to meet my gaze. “Assuming, of course, that’s actually accurate.”

  “On what grounds can you promise that? You don’t have that authority,” Nigel said suddenly. He pointed to the police officers, who’d now ended with the chat portion of their get-together and were now collectively watching a device—whether for a news feed, scanner alert, or sports score, I had no idea. “You shouldn’t even be here, in public, talking to us in any sort of official capacity. Again, Interpol provides information. It doesn’t conduct its own interviews.”

  “We do when the need is sufficient and the preponderance of law enforcement agencies are not sufficiently equipped to handle a newly identified threat,” Marguerite said, clearly speaking from prepared talking points. “Crime labs have no standards for these drugs because they technically don’t exist. We don’t even know the underlying elements that have been combined to make them. Furthermore, we don’t have the technology to extract nanites from the bloodstream of these kids and reverse engineer the drugs that cause them to die in the first place.”

  “And they all die, right?” I asked, my voice g
ravelly.

  She hesitated. “Eventually.”

  Eventually meant no. Eventually definitely meant that those two “catatonic” Connected kids were still being held in some government lab somewhere right now, kids who maybe weren’t even under the influence of technoceuticals after all, but merely exhibiting psychic abilities that Scully and Mulder here thought were questionable. Abilities the mainstream world never had been able to understand. Not during the biblical rash of demonic possessions, not during the Middle Ages’ witch hunts and Inquisitions, not now—where surely, they believed, such abilities were the result of lab-produced drugs. These Connected children may have escaped the dark practitioners and Gamon, but they’d merely traded one barbaric set of captors for another. They were being held, and they were being held by these two idiots who didn’t know the first thing about the extraordinary young souls they were sticking into cages.

  Not anymore, though.

  I turned to Marguerite and gave her my most winning smile. She’d thought to lure me with an illusion that they had something on me, something that would force me to work with them. That was bullshit, but two could play the illusionist’s game. And right now, I was willing to play it all the way up to the part where she spilled every last detail on what two Connecteds they were studying…and where precisely they were.

  “How can I help?” I asked, beaming.

  Chapter Four

  The conversation took another half hour, with Marguerite and Roland detailing how we could reach them, what information they needed, where we could send the files, and when we should expect them to follow up. Essentially, they wanted me to spill all my candy on Soo’s most sensitive operations, but I tried not to overplay my gullibility. The truth was, the more we talked, the more concerned I became. By the time Nigel and I pulled away in the limo, stress was strumming my nerves like a backwoods banjo player hopped up on moonshine and crack.

  I was used to legitimate threats to the Connected community coming from bad guys who looked and smelled like bad guys: Gamon and her legion of crazies, the worst of the dark practitioners; the religious nut jobs of SANCTUS; and then the regular run-of-the-mill dark practitioners who didn’t want the end of the world so much as they wanted their own personal power banks recharged and upgraded on the backs of the most vulnerable of Connecteds.

  Those guys, I could handle. I might not like them, but I understood how they worked.

  But Interpol? A government agency whose main concern was keeping the streets safe from drug trafficking—no matter what those drugs were made of? By all rights, I should be on their side. I should be helping them rid the arcane community of the drugs that had proved irresistible to both dealers and buyers alike. Technoceuticals did involve nanites in some cases—tiny components that could augment a Connected’s psychic abilities by attaching to specific sections of the cerebral cortex and stimulating them. But more often, they were comprised of more organic components—components unwillingly donated by Connected children.

  I shuddered, and Nigel looked over at me. We’d given up the driver-VIP conceit by mutual unspoken agreement, and I sat next to him as we darted through the streets of Paris, escaping the city via the most roundabout way possible.

  “No tail for the last ten minutes,” he said. “It’s likely we’ve lost them.”

  “Electronics?”

  “Swept. The nanodot Marguerite left on your sleeve after shaking your hand looks to be her only contribution to your wardrobe. We didn’t have our tech out, and we were too public for them to get up close and personal.”

  I nodded. We’d left the nanodot on a baby carriage as we’d exited the museum, and I believed Nigel when he said we were clean. But I was in no hurry to rush to Father Jerome’s newest safe house yet. I didn’t know what I’d tell the priest—that he was on the verge of discovery, everything he’d worked for at risk? We’d both lived with that threat for so long, it’d lost its punch. That now, on top of everything else he worried about, he needed to look over his shoulder at his own friendly neighborhood police officials? They’d coexisted peacefully for too many years for that to go easily on the old man.

  “Why now?” I asked, earning me another glance from Nigel. “Father Jerome and I have been at this five years—him even longer. Why is Interpol interested in technoceuticals and Connected children now?”

  “Soo,” Nigel offered. “She was playing a long game, and she got them involved—maybe to stymie one of the other Houses, maybe to keep tabs on Gamon. She couldn’t have known she wouldn’t be around to see the game to its end.”

  “I guess I can see that,” I said. “Gamon’s got to be bad news outside of Connected circles, maybe even on some sort of Interpol’s international Wanted list. If Soo was trying to track her down via official channels without it looking like that’s what she was doing…”

  Nigel finished the thought for me. “What better way to do that than to build a working relationship with Marguerite and Roland. I suspect they’re both good, solid agents. I don’t know Roland, but Marguerite was a police investigator in Paris before taking this position. I’ve heard nothing negative about her.”

  “So why are they picking on me?”

  “They’re not,” Nigel said flatly. “These people don’t know you, Sara. They certainly don’t know what you are. You’re important to them solely because of your affiliation with Soo, and the fact that you seem like the newest weak link, the liability in her operation. They slip in through this breach, they get the foothold they need.”

  “Yeah, but they knew an awful lot about my recent promotion to head of household,” I said, dubious. “If they have some sort of mole…”

  Nigel rejected that idea as well. “If they were sophisticated enough to have a mole inside Soo’s operation, this conversation wouldn’t have taken place, at least not in this manner. I would have been followed before—my identity within the organization would not have been that difficult to identify, for someone willing to look.”

  “I didn’t know about it.”

  “You never looked.” He shook his head. “More likely, Soo’s lower-level House members are talking, your reputation is growing within the House, and that’s what bubbled up to Marguerite’s team. As the newest member of the House and in such a high position, you’re the easiest target. If they could get to you before you have a chance to drape yourself in the secrecy and tradition of the House, it’s a coup.”

  “I guess.” I frowned, staring out the window. “When you say team, you think it’s only the two of them? Or are there more to worry about?”

  “Probably more, but admins and techs for the most part. Number crunchers and researchers. Lab assistants, perhaps, medical types, if what they’re saying about playing host to afflicted Connecteds is true.”

  I winced. “Agreed. Headquartered in Lyon?”

  “There’s a bureau here in Paris, but their orders would be coming from Lyon, certainly. None of their team would be located outside of France, though. Too many laws to work around.” Nigel tapped the steering wheel. “Luc will know. It’s likely Mercault has a property near Lyon. If so, they’d be keeping tabs on the surrounding environs.”

  Eventually, we both were satisfied that no one was following us, and headed out into the countryside. We changed cars twice more and drove southeast, and I fell asleep in the car. When I woke, blearily, I saw a sign for Saint-Étienne. I squinted at Nigel. “Where are we?”

  “When Father Jerome realized you were coming and why, he directed me to bring you here.” Nigel shrugged as my look sharpened. “I don’t know why. He was adamant, though.”

  My stomach tightened the farther we drove, despite the beauty of the countryside. This far away from Paris, everything was picture-book perfect, all the atrocities I’d been imagining involving children and trafficking and drugs drifting away under the leafy bower of trees. I couldn’t quell my anxiety over Father Jerome, however. I didn’t like Interpol even thinking in his direction. When we finally turned onto a wide lan
e that snaked back through the forest, I was practically on the edge of my seat, expecting to see a bombed-out building where once had sat a gracious, idyllic mansion.

  Fortunately, my fears were unfounded. The priest’s country safe house proved to be a mini château, and the familiar figure of Father Jerome stood in front of it as we arrived. He immediately bustled down the stairs, not waiting for the car to stop. He was beside the vehicle as I emerged, and enveloped me in a warm, solid hug.

  “Sara!” he announced happily before turning to Nigel to shake his hand vigorously. “I’m so glad you are here. When Nigel told me you were coming, and that you’d attracted the attention of Interpol—I knew it was time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Come, come.” He seemed far too chipper for a priest who was on Interpol’s radar screen, no matter how tangentially.

  “How many children are here?” I looked up at the impressive house. “I didn’t even know we had something this far out.”

  “Not many,” Father Jerome said. “But these children, they are the most special of all, eh? We are blessed to see God’s beauty in such a way while we walk among the living.”

  I pulled my attention away from the house and refocused on Father Jerome with a frown. The priest was beyond enthusiastic, he was positively giddy. He’d seen worse happen to the children than I had, and he’d survived multiple bombing attempts, but whatever was inside this building took him beyond all that. Why?

  “Who’s here, Father?” I asked again, as we headed up the stairs. When I’d visited him in the past, the old priest would sometimes have the children rush out to greet us, wanting me to be surrounded with the end result of all our work. But this felt different—different and unsettling, no matter how cheerful the priest was.

  “Children, as always.” Father Jerome smiled and led us into the house. Unlike so many of his other safe houses, however, the halls weren’t running wild with kids.