by K. W. Jeter
“Shh!” Her forefinger pointed toward the screen. “Look!”
He looked. What he saw rocked him back against the sofa cushions.
“With me now,” said the TV news reporter, “is George Francisco, formerly of the Los Angeles Police Department. Mr. Francisco is one of the ‘Bearers of Light,’ as the adherents of the new cult call themselves—”
Buck’s eyes widened. “What the . . .” He leaned toward the television screen.
In that little world of colored dots behind glass, his and Emily’s father stood beside the reporter. Instead of the necktie he always wore in public, a knotted cord dangled a small amulet at the front of their father’s bare white shirt.
“Mr. Francisco—” The reporter had turned toward him. “You seem to have become the spokesman for this new cult—”
“It’s not a cult.” Their father’s voice was stern, unfazed by the human’s media-juiced mannerisms. “We are merely those who are fortunate enough to have received the light of truth.”
“Okay . . .” The reporter nodded in a show of amiability. “It seems, however, that the followers of the Celinite faith—which is, I’m sure that most of our viewers are aware, considered to be the orthodox faith of most Newcomers—seem to have taken some pretty strong exception to the growing popularity of your, uh, group’s beliefs. Would you agree that that seems to be the case here today?”
The shot cut to what Buck assumed was an earlier clip depicting a shouting match degenerating into a frenzy of wrestling and flying punches that filled the street. A Tenctonese woman shouted “Heretics!” and clopped one of the new cult’s members over the head with a picket sign. The clip ended, and the shot went back to the reporter and George Francisco.
Buck and Emily’s father hadn’t lost the public relations skills he had picked up while working for the police department. “These are very unfortunate incidents,” he said gravely. “We hope to cooperate fully, both with the authorities and with our brethren who have not yet shared in the light with us, to make sure that there are no further repetitions of this kind of violence. After all, this is a situation that affects everyone in our community, Tenctonese and human alike—”
“That brings up something I’d like to have you confirm, if you can.” The reporter thrust the microphone closer to the other’s face. “Is it true that there are human members of your group? That is, who have shared in this, um, ‘light’ experience, as you put it?”
A nod. “Yes, that’s true. This truth, the message that has been brought to us, is for all people, of whatever blood. The time has come. There shall be a new birth that will bring us together as one . . .”
There was more, but Buck scarcely heard it. The inside of his head was buzzing by the time the piece ended and a commercial came on. A smiling pitchman on a yacht decorated with sultry, bored-looking women in microscopic bathing suits held up a book and a couple of audiocassettes and started rattling on about them with an even more palpable religious fervor.
Emily took the remote control from her brother’s limp hand and switched off the TV. He glanced over and saw that her eyes were shining with held-back tears.
“Wow.” He continued to stare at the empty screen. “When . . . when did all this come about?”
His sister shrugged. “I guess about a month or so ago. That was when Dad stopped coming home. ’Cause he was spending all his time with those Bearers of Light people.”
“You’re kidding.” Buck stared at her in astonishment. “He’s like . . . left you and Mom and the baby? That’s impossible. He wouldn’t do that.”
“Well, he did.” Emily’s voice sounded small and fragile. “He and Mom had a big argument about it, the last night he was here. It wasn’t much of an argument, since she was the only one shouting, and like crying and stuff; I couldn’t hear what Dad was saying. And then when it was all quiet again, I came down from my bedroom and she was all alone in the kitchen. She had her head down on the table . . . and she was crying . . . and when she looked up and saw me standing there, she grabbed me and hugged me so hard and she was still crying . . .” Emily’s voice wavered, then broke at the same time her own tears started to flow. “Oh, Buck—” She grabbed his arm and leaned her face against his arm. “I don’t know what’s happening . . . I don’t want to know . . .”
“Hey, come on. Come on, Em; everything’ll be all right.” He managed to get his arm around her shoulders and held her against his side. “Don’t . . . don’t worry.” With his other hand, he brushed away the tears on her cheek. “Did Mom tell you anything? About what Dad had told her about all this?”
“Yeah . . .” Emily nodded. “I guess she knew I was scared and stuff. So she tried to tell me—but there wasn’t much she could say. ’Cause Dad had told her that this was just something he had to do. Mom said he couldn’t explain it to her, either. It’s like all a big mystery, with these Bearers of Light and everything. He’d had a vision; that was what he told her.” She rubbed her damp face with the flat of her hand. “Mom told me we didn’t have to worry about money, at least not right now, even though Dad had quit his job. He’d made arrangements so that everything would be okay; there’s like interest coming from all their savings and stuff at the bank. I mean, I was a little scared about that, when I thought about it.” She looked up at her brother. “ ’Cause you hear about other people joining these cult things, and they have to give all their money, and their house and their car and everything to ’em—I guess it’s different with this Bearers of Light thing. I was kinda glad when Mom told me that much was going to be okay, that we weren’t gonna have to go to a shelter or like starve to death or something.”
“Yeah, I bet you were.” Buck shook his head, still finding the whole bit hard to believe. “And you say all this started a month ago? I mean, Dad joining this cult—why didn’t you come tell me before now?”
“I didn’t know how . . . I didn’t know what to say. That’s why, when I saw this on the news this morning, I phoned and made you come and see it. So you could see it for yourself.” Emily’s voice turned softer. “I couldn’t tell you.”
“Oh, man . . .” He looked up at the ceiling. This was all too much. He felt a little guilty, whether for not being home when it all happened or because somehow what his father had done was because of him, he didn’t know.
A strange, illogical thought came into Buck’s head. With all this, and with the effect it must be having on his mother and his sister Emily—he found himself wondering how his father’s human partner Sikes must feel. George Francisco’s work with the police had meant nearly as much to him as his own family, and the two police detectives had been such good friends. For him to just quit and walk away from all that . . . what could it mean?
Poor Matt, thought Buck. He felt an edge of sympathy for the tert. That would be one more person trying to figure it all out.
He went through the contents of the truck, checking once again all the equipment that had been assembled over the last few weeks. Noah Ramsey knew he was being obsessive, but he had reason to be. This was the big one, the one for which he and the other HDL team members under his command had been gearing up for a long time.
“It’s looking good, Ramsey.” One of the assault technicians followed him through the truck’s interior. The older man had actually served with the legendary Marc Guerin, the hero of the human race for whom the HDL’s top commando unit was named. “This is all going to go down like a greased torpedo.” A humorless smile moved across the man’s face. “They’ll never know what hit them.”
“That’s the plan, all right.” Noah looked across the weapon racks mounted on the truck’s walls, silently ticking through the checklist he kept in his head. Everything was locked and loaded, ready to be grabbed, safety catches thrown off, and employed with deadly force. The tech’s words echoed in his thoughts: They’ll never know . . .
“Any last words from Bryant?” The tech leaned against the open rear doorway and folded his arms across his chest. He was sti
ll in lean, hard-muscled shape, despite his gray hair and sun-grizzled visage. “Something to send the boys off with?”
Noah glanced over his shoulder at the man, then swung his gaze back to the row of automatic rifles in front of himself. He had to wonder if the other was mocking him, making some kind of point about his tight relationship with the HDL’s imprisoned leader. He had been aware that there might be resentment from a few of the team members for some time; his status as Darlene Bryant’s protegé, combined with his relatively young age, could easily rankle the older veterans of the Purist campaigns. Their attitude would change, though, after this action. He had sealed a vow in his heart that the team would pull it off, or he would die leading the attempt. A certain grim pleasure came from the contemplation of being a posthumous hero, like Marc Guerin.
He shook his head in reply to the tech. “There’s no need for that.” Noah laid his hand for a moment against the black phenolic stock of one of the assault rifles. “She knows we’ve got everything under control.”
The team’s communications tech appeared in the truck’s rear doorway. “We’ve located that Sikes guy,” the comm tech shouted to Noah. “Picked up a trace on his car—looks like he’s headed to his own apartment, where he was living before the BNA stuck him in that safe house.”
“Probably just going back to pick up something he forgot before.” That was one more thing Noah could cross off his mental checklist. “Okay, keep an eye on him—he could be real trouble if he turns up at the hospital before we move in.”
“You’re right about that,” said the assault specialist. He watched the comm tech return to his bank of radio monitors, then looked back around at Noah. “I’ve had run-ins with Sikes before. He’s nobody to mess with, if you can avoid it.”
Noah shrugged. “We can deal with him. Just like we’re going to deal with all the rest of them.”
“Ah.” The tech nodded, a half-smile appearing on his face. “I suppose so. You got a launch time for this little operation?”
“That’s not up to me.” He looked at his own hand, the fingertips curving along the bright metal of the rifle’s trigger, then turned his somber gaze to the tech. “It’s all up to the woman in the delivery room.”
He turned the key in the lock, pushed the door open an inch, then stopped. Through the narrow space, Sikes could see no one inside; the apartment he had shared with Cathy appeared empty. But past the dull rhythm of his own heartbeat, he could hear another person’s breathing. Someone waiting for him.
“Please—” The unseen person’s voice came to his ear. “Come in. We don’t have much time.”
Cautiously, Sikes put his hand inside his jacket, his grip closing about the gun in the leather shoulder-holster. He hadn’t come all this way, summoned by a mysterious phone call, just to walk into a trap.
With his elbow, he shoved the door open wider. He saw then the chair that had been dragged out from the kitchen space, and the man sitting in it. His fingers loosened on the gun, as he realized that what the voice had told him over the phone was true.
“You’re alive.” Sikes had stepped into the apartment and pushed the door shut behind himself. “It’s you . . .”
Dr. Quinn gave a single nod. “My apologies . . . for having let you believe otherwise for so long.” He shifted uneasily in the chair, as though made uncomfortable by being trapped within the room’s walls. “The deception was, however . . . necessary.”
All the apartment’s curtains were drawn, a diffused afternoon sunlight was barely able to creep among the shadows. Sikes stepped further toward the center of the room, stopping a few feet away to study the apparition returned from the dead. Though over half a year had passed, he remembered the doctor well enough to make the identification, even with the apparent changes the man had undergone. Quinn’s hair was cropped short now, a virtual prisoner’s cut, and steely gray; one side of his face and neck was mottled with scar tissue. Sikes knew that was the aftermath of the clinic bombing. The doctor’s usual white coat was gone, replaced by a denim jacket and a pair of faded jeans with a tear at the left knee. Hard travelling, thought Sikes. The man looked like somebody who had been hiding out in tough places, the harder and more unlit the better for his purposes.
Noticing Sikes’s scrutiny, the doctor managed a thin smile. “I found out,” said Quinn, “that it’s not easy being dead. Or let’s just say it would’ve been easier if I actually had been that way.”
“You pulled it off as far as we were concerned.” Sikes leaned against the counter separating the kitchen from the rest of the space. “Our coroner’s office doesn’t make very many mistakes; the medical examiner thought she had a nice little box full of your bits and pieces.” A note of grudging admiration tinged his voice. “How’d you do it?”
“Does it matter?” Quinn folded his hands together in his lap. “I am, after all—or I was—in much the same business as your coroner. Bodies, whether live or dead, are a commodity to which doctors often have access, and I had been making my plans for quite some time in advance. I knew what the coroner would be looking for, and I provided it; the explosion made the resulting evidence more convincing. The corpse whose remains were mistaken for mine was one of those poor nameless and homeless individuals that usually wind up on the dissecting tables at medical schools; I implanted an artificial knee-joint identical to my own, and kept it preserved at low temperature in the clinic until I would have need of it. Perhaps if your coroner’s office had had the time to examine the evidence more thoroughly, they would have noticed that the serial numbers on the knee-joint had been altered to match mine. I had to engrave the numbers under the microscope; the factory in Sweden stamps the numbers before sealing them under a bio-inert resin.”
Sikes nodded slowly. “Yeah, I remember my partner saying something about the photos from the coroner looking fishy—just something wrong about them. I guess we should’ve looked harder.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. It’s been hard enough pulling off this little ruse even without the police knowing I had gone underground. Not that I would have been averse to you knowing; it’s just that these secrets have a way of being found out by people with considerably less interest in my personal well-being.”
“You mean the Purists? Darlene Bryant and her bunch?”
Quinn smiled ruefully, then shook his head. “I wish the HDL were all that I had to worry about. They are something of a known quantity, and you and the rest of the police manage to keep an eye on them. I discovered, however, that I had other enemies about whom you knew nothing.”
The doctor’s words triggered a memory inside Sikes’s head; Darlene Bryant had said almost the exact same thing. Bit by bit, the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle were beginning to fit together. With Quinn sitting right here in front of him, he had already been able to get over the shock of the ostensible dead coming back to life; that process had begun when he had heard Quinn’s voice over the phone at the station, telling him to come to the apartment—and not to tell anyone else.
It showed how crafty and hard the doctor had gotten while on the run, though Quinn obviously hadn’t been any slouch before the clinic bombing, when he’d still been making his plans to go underground. And it wasn’t just the knee-jobbed corpse kept on ice to throw off his eventual pursuers; he must have palmed Cathy’s key to the apartment during the exam at the clinic; then made a copy and gotten it back into her purse without her noticing. A good thing the doctor wasn’t a criminal by nature: he had all the instincts for it.
“So you’re alive, and you’re here,” said Sikes. “You wouldn’t have called me if you didn’t have something to spill. So let’s not waste time; we might as well get right to the big questions. You knew the clinic was going to get hit—who planted the bomb if it wasn’t the HDL?”
“That question would be easier to answer if you knew who was behind my clinic in the first place.” Quinn leaned forward in the chair. “What do you know about the Sleemata Romot?”
“The Tomorrow Foun
dation?” Sikes knew enough Tenctonese to translate the words.
“That’s right. They’re the ones who provided the financial backing for the clinic.”
“I know a little about it. A group of wealthy Newcomer businessmen . . .” He shrugged. “I talked to a couple of ’em after the bombing. Struck me as being the kind of solid citizens who write nice fat donations for all kinds of things. Everything seemed to check out with them, so we didn’t poke around any further along those lines.”
“Those ‘solid citizens’ are very good at appearing to be nothing more than that. It’s how they got to be so rich,” said Quinn. “The Sleemata Romot was funding me to the tune of several million dollars a year, and I still wouldn’t trust them out of my sight. The foundation members had their own agenda, which wasn’t quite the same as mine.”
“And what was that?”
“There was a time . . .” Quinn’s voice fell low and musing. “A time when I did think they were interested in exactly the same things I was. When they first contacted me about the research I had been doing into the possibilities of crossbreeding between humans and Tenctonese—this was a few years ago. My research was at the most preliminary, almost purely theoretical stages, but somehow these men had found out about it; only later did I learn of some of the less than savory methods they had for obtaining information. But at the beginning, all I could see was the research grants they offered me. With that kind of money I could become possibly the world’s leading authority on Tenctonese physiology, even if the crossbreeding research turned out to be a complete dead end—”
“Wait a minute.” Sikes held up a hand to slow the doctor down. “You already had some idea, even before Cathy showed up at your clinic pregnant, that something like that was possible?”