Digital Knight

by Ryk E. Spoor

  "By all means. Thank you, Jason."

  The mini-mart wasn't too busy as I walked in the door. I noted the security camera with its odd bulbous attachment. Nothing brought home the profound changes that were happening more than this prosaic addition: that attachment was, with slight changes, basically the same as the headpiece I'd worn while searching out werewolves in the hospital hallways. That reminded me . . . I had to call back that lawyer in New York.

  I grabbed the few items I was looking for and headed back out.

  * * *

  There were unaccustomed faint lines of concern on Morgan's usually impassive, English-butler face. I saw the reason immediately. "Verne!"

  Nothing essential had changed in him; he still had the dark, wide eyes that could hold you with a magnetic presence, the distant and aristocratic stance. But beneath the dusky olive color natural to his skin, his paleness had become something beyond mere vampiric pallor; he seemed washed out, diminished, as though being slowly leached of his color and his strength. The way he stood was unnaturally stiff. And in his dark hair I thought I saw a few strands of white and gray. "Jesus. Verne, you look like shit."

  A tired smile crossed his face. "As usual, your diplomacy is staggering, Jason. You are not the first to inform me of this. And your face said all that needed to be said."

  "What's wrong?"

  Verne shrugged. "I am not sure. There have been a few, a very few, cases in which I felt similarly, aside from the one time I was forced to cross desert plains with little to no shelter—that was infinitely worse. I suspect all the changes in my life, from finding Raiakafan to simply trying to become more human again have made me overwork. For if I lie down to rest, and my mind does not enter the proper state, I do not gain the proper amount of rest; those of my sort do not sleep in truth, any more than the Earth sleeps, but there is a difference between activity and rest even so."

  I couldn't keep the concern from my voice. "I hope that's all it is. Look, just take it easy. Anyone would be a little punchy after all this stuff's happened, but you're the only one who can take care of you. I mean, what would I do if you collapsed, call 911 and tell the paramedics I have a sick vampire here?"

  "Indeed." Verne straightened with a visible effort. "But let me see these invoices . . . Ah, I see. I believe those sockets were installed, but let us check."

  We went through the huge mansion, checking off the items. Personally, I'd rather have seen Verne go to bed, but his tone and manner indicated that, weak or not, he wasn't about to listen to me or any other mortal doing a mother hen imitation.

  From that, I figured he was a lot more worried than he let on. In his room, we stopped and he grabbed a bottle of AB+, draining the entire thing without even letting it warm. This made him visibly less pale, but something about it struck me as vaguely false, like the temporarily alert feeling you might get from amphetamines or a lot of coffee. Still, he moved more easily and the gray strands were no longer visible in his hair. Maybe he just hadn't been eating right. Was there such a thing as vitamin deficiency for a vampire . . . nature priest, whatever?

  "Very good, Jason," Verne said finally. "All seems to be in order. I will pay these invoices, then. Thank you for checking them."

  "No problem. Where's Kafan?"

  "Sleeping. He tends to keep to Gen's schedule, and we don't want Gen to become habitually nocturnal."

  "Well, say hi for me. I don't know how long this search is going to take me, but I've already started on it. Might as well get home and try to get my schedule back on track."

  "An excellent idea. I will see you later, then."

  I stopped and turned in the doorway. "Verne, take care of yourself, okay?"

  "Of course, Jason."

  I drove back to my house slowly. If Verne was really sick, I didn't see how anyone could do anything. Presumably he and Morgan knew more about that than anyone else. Maybe Kafan, I suppose. Would there have been anything like first aid for Verne's kind, or was that like thinking of stocking bandages for God?

  I really should have started work on those State Police photos, but my heart just wasn't in it tonight. I put in Casablanca and let it run while I ate a very late-night snack. Finally, as Rick and Louis walked off through the rain, I headed upstairs to get to bed; I wasn't that tired, but if I didn't get back on track . . . I glanced over at the search station. It had stopped comparisons finally. I reached out to shut it off, when the message on the screen hit me with delayed impact:

  Matches: 10

  Ten matches? I hadn't even expected one! Bedtime forgotten, I sat down at the keyboard and had it call up the ten matching pictures.

  As they appeared onscreen, I heard myself say "Oh, shit."

  I'd had a vague feeling that the boys' faces were familiar, but I'd put it down to having seen their father and talked over their appearance for hours. But as soon as the photos with their headlines appeared, I remembered all too well where I'd seen them:

  Senator MacLain adopts two Viet children.

  37

  Verne and Kafan stared at the reprinted articles, while Sylvie peeked over their shoulders. "H'alate," muttered Verne. "This is most inconvenient."

  "Maybe not quite as bad as it seems." I said. Verne had looked like Death warmed over when he came in, but that might have been the yellow street lights. He seemed to look a little better, here in the office, than he had yesterday. I hoped that meant he was taking it easy. "With that kind of high profile, yeah, it's certain that your enemies know where the kids are. But the good thing is that the high profile also makes it virtually impossible to just kidnap the kids. Doing a snatch-and-grab on some random runaway is one thing; kidnapping the children of a senator of the United States—especially one like Paula MacLain, who's one of the most outspoken and uncompromising people I've ever seen—is very, very different."

  "True," Verne said. "But it will be difficult to convince the lady to return her children to their father when that father is wanted across the globe. Giving him a new identity would work for ordinary situations, but you can be sure that if we ask her to hand over her children to us that she will have us investigated to the full extent of her powers, which are quite considerable. She would most certainly discover your internationally known identity, Kafan, and might find out some rather unwelcome facts about myself as well."

  Syl nodded. "And . . . didn't she have a son before? One about Tai's age? He got killed somehow. She's going to hold on to those kids like grim death."

  I winced. I'd forgotten about that—it had happened about ten years ago, a little before I really started reading anything about politics, since in high school things like that seem pretty unimportant. But now that Syl mentioned it, I remembered; a plane crash, killed her husband and son, and it had something to do with her job so she might even have blamed herself somehow. "We'll have to think about this."

  "What is there to think about?" Kafan demanded. "I am their father. They belong with me."

  "I'd tend to agree," I said, "but the rest of the world knows you as a psycho killer, wanted by an international task force. Not exactly the kind of parent people want for children, you know."

  "Then we'll tell her the truth."

  "Which truth? The one about genetic experiments? Kafan, that'd be a quick way to end up in yet another lab. The one about ancient civilizations that can't have existed by all we know today? That would be a good way to get us all locked up. No, I'm sure there's an angle here, but I'm going to have to work on it. At least relax some; we know where they are, and they're being treated very well. They're not suffering, and it's for damn sure this organization won't dare touch them as long as they're in the Senator's custody."

  Kafan's lips tightened, showing faint hints of fangs underneath, until he got his temper under control. Then he seemed to shrink back, depressed even though the news was at least partly good. "You are correct. I cannot fight this whole world if I wish to live here." He brooded for a moment, then asked, "What about Kay and Kei?"

 
; I shook my head. "Sorry. Nothing yet. If they were captured again as you said, I'm not going to turn up anything quickly, even if they did move them. Most likely they're still in the lab compound you mentioned, if they managed to keep it hidden this long. You can't tell us where it is?"

  "No." The short, blunt monosyllable carried a world of frustration. "Showing me where I was on a map was never something they had in mind. And I just ran when I escaped. I had no time to mark bearings. Oh, put me back in the general area and I'll find it, that I promise you, but I can't show you where it is."

  "Too bad. But if we're going to even think about finding some way to go back and get them, we absolutely have to find out where the compound is, and to be honest a whole lot more about it, too." This was getting more and more difficult. I wasn't James Bond, and I didn't know anyone who qualified for the part, either. Jeri Winthrope was about as close as I got, and I sure didn't like the idea of involving her in this—both because of the problems it could cause for us and the problems it'd cause for her. That was ignoring the possibly cosmic threat hanging over anyone who got too close to this mess. "Guess I'll have to work on that too."

  Verne, still pale but looking definitely better than he had yesterday, sat up. "Jason, at this point I insist on paying you. This may require a great deal of your time and resources, and perhaps more than you can easily afford."

  I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it. It grated on me to charge a friend for something so important to them, but Verne was right. If I followed this thing to its logical conclusion, I might end up having to do everything from pay out bribes to mastermind and equip a commando raid! I shook my head at that; I didn't think I knew anyone who even knew anyone who could do that. Oh well, one thing at a time. "Thanks, Verne. You're right. This is going to get expensive no matter how I slice it."

  Taking out his checkbook, Verne wrote quickly and tore out the paper. I gagged at the amount. "Verne—"

  "Don't protest, Jason. Better to be overpaid than underpaid. You have no idea how little such a sum means to me, nor how highly I value your services."

  I nodded. "Okay." I gestured at the pile of newspaper copies. "Take those if you want. I'd better get back to work. Besides this snafu, I've also got three other regular jobs on the burner."

  Sylvie remained behind after Verne, Kafan, and Gen had left. "Verne isn't well, Jason."

  "Tell me something I don't know." I said. "He looks better than he did yesterday, though."

  She frowned, a distant and unfortunately familiar look on her face. "Maybe . . . but I have a bad feeling about that."

  I sighed. "Syl, sweetheart, maybe you can do something. It's for sure that I've got enough to do here. I'm no vampire medic. He regards you very highly and talks about your being a 'Mistress of Crystal,' whatever that means. Maybe you can do something."

  Her expression lightened. "Why, thank you, Jason! For calling me 'sweetheart,' that is."

  I blushed; I could feel the heat on my cheeks. "So maybe it wasn't ever a secret. Syl, you're the only woman that makes me still feel like I'm fourteen, clumsy, and tongue-tied. Maybe that's a good thing." She started to say something—I could tell it would be another of the kinds of things that embarrassed me more—and then stopped. "Thanks. I don't need to blush more than once a day."

  She smiled, a very gentle smile. "It doesn't hurt your looks at all, you know. And that clumsy approach of yours helps me keep thinking I'm still in my teens too, so I'd say it's a good thing."

  I smiled back, still nervous. "I guess you make me nervous because you're the only woman I'm serious about."

  "Are you?"

  I swallowed. "I've been in love with you for years, Syl. Just not ready to admit it."

  You can insert your own experience of a first happy kiss here; I'm pretty sure they're all the same to the lucky people involved. Time stops, or passes, but it certainly doesn't behave the same, and the rest of the world doesn't exist. Oh, I'd kissed Syl before, quick pecks or something, and I'd certainly kissed a girl or two once I got out of my geek stage, but there just wasn't any comparison at all. I'd been waiting to do this since I met her, and from her response, she'd been waiting just as long.

  When lack of air finally signaled the end of eternity, I pulled back from her for a moment, looking into those deep blue eyes. "Whew."

  "So what was it you were so afraid of, Jason?"

  "This. I like having control over my own life, and there's no control over this."

  That smile again. "Do you want to change your mind?"

  "Don't you even think about it. After all the courage I had to work up there to mention that four-letter word 'love,' you're not getting a chance to get away." I wanted to spend the rest of the night—maybe the rest of the week—continuing what we'd started, but I couldn't ignore business, either.

  Especially when business also involved a friend. "Syl, can we make a date for tomorrow night? Right now I'd better keep working—I've already lost a couple days as it is. And do you think you can do anything for Verne?"

  She grinned. "Not jealous of him any more?"

  "What?!"

  "I can sense things, you know that. And I could see your little pout every time Verne put on the charm and I smiled back at him."

  I gave a sour look. "Well, he does have a kind of overwhelming presence, not to mention that perfect sense of style."

  "Jealous, like I said. Don't worry, Jason. I knew you were the one for me as soon as I saw you. I had a feeling about it."

  Now that really made me wince. "I don't believe in destiny."

  "Then call it a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm heading over to Verne's. Maybe I can't do anything, but then again maybe I can."

  "Thanks . . . Syl."

  Even after she left, it took a while to start concentrating on the work at hand.

  Perfume stays with you.

  38

  TO:{Jason Wood}wisdom@wis.com

  FROM:{The Jammer}

  SUBJECT:EXCUSE ME????

  Did you have ANY idea what kind of mess you were trying to get me into? No, let me revise that. Do you have ANY idea what THAT kind of mess can do to me?

  Dammit, Wood. This guy's an international fugitive and you want me to give him a bulletproof ID? What are you mixed up in THIS time?

  So there were limits to what the Jammer would take casually. Nice to know, but I wish he'd stayed in his omnipotent mode for a while longer.

  Look, I know enough about you to know that you know perfectly well who this guy is, at least on the public-international level. So, since I also know you're not into helping criminals every day of the week, I'll assume you know something I don't know, hard as that is to believe, that makes this guy worth helping. Okay. But for this little bit of work, I'm charging. Not money, naturally. You'll make available a writable CD-ROM on a dial-in line, at 2:15 Tuesday evening. When it's finished writing the data that gets sent to it, you'll take the disk—without reading it, and believe you me I'll know—and deliver it to some secure locale of your choosing. In a separate letter, you tell me the location. Once that's done, I'll deliver your IDs.

  Oh, man. What was I getting myself into? He could be downloading anything from recipes to Top Secret documents into the drive, and I had no doubt at all that if I made a single attempt to read the contents that he would find out; he was that good.

  But then again, what was I asking him to do? Make a set of ID for a known international criminal. And if my guesses were right, he might well be working for one of the organizations that was supposed to track Kafan down. No, the Jammer had the right to ask something like this; I was asking him to put his ass on the line for me, so he was asking me to stick my own neck out.

  I typed out a very short reply,

  Terms accepted

  and sent it off.

  A week into my work and I wasn't really any closer to figuring out how to approach Senator MacLain without opening about a dozen cans of worms that were better left closed. On the other hand, I was starting, I
thought, to close in on the location of this mysterious Project. The break had come a few days ago, when a search program had highlighted the Organization for Scientific Research; a check showed that not only had the OSR always been heavily involved in biological research, but it had previously had a couple branches in the far East—one in or very near Vietnam. During the '70s, those labs had been discontinued. A bit of digging on my part, however, showed that the discontinuance had actually been a transfer of ownership to interested parties, probably in the Viet government. Details on the site were vague—the OSR files from the '70s were hard to access, since it had been a UN venture to begin with, and now that it had separated from the UN and become a private corporation it was possible all the old records not directly relevant to operation had been purged. And stuff that old often wasn't online anywhere in any case.

  It might be possible, however, to take the vague info I had and combine it with a careful modeling of the layout as Kafan remembered it and see if a pattern-recognition program could come up with anything using satellite photos of the area. Probably there were records of the installation on one of the intelligence computers—NSA, CIA, whatever—but I wasn't about to try hacking one of those. This had to be an independent operation if at all possible. With Verne's backing, we at least didn't need to worry about whether we could afford it.

  That brought up the next problem. Verne. Syl had tried a number of things, but though it appeared to help some, over the next couple of days Verne went downhill again. He was visibly older.

  I closed my eyes. Genetically engineered people, ancient civilizations, vampires, priests. . . . damn, it was a wonder my head didn't explode. All that stuff combined was enough to . . .

  All that stuff combined?

  I straightened. Reaching out, I grabbed the phone. "Verne? Sorry to disturb you, but I just thought of something."

  Verne's weariness was now evident in his voice. It was still as rich, but the underlying tone lacked the measured certainty that was usually there. "And what is that, Jason?"