by K. W. Jeter
Five minutes later, with a good portion of the room’s contents searched and tossed out into the corridor, they found a slim laptop computer tucked into a canvas duffel bag full of unwashed clothes. Sikes popped the lid and quickly examined the machine.
“Damn. There’s no hard disk in this thing.” He’d flipped the power switch and gotten nothing more than an initial prompt on the flat screen. “Quinn must have kept everything on floppies.” With one hand, he rooted futilely through the duffel bag. “Come on, give me a hand looking for ’em.”
His partner made no reply, but took a couple of steps over to the other side of the room. George picked up the hot plate from the top of the battered dresser. “There’s no cord on this rather primitive cooking device.” He ran his hand over the wall’s surface. “And this wallpaper would show scorch marks if it had been used over here. With his thumbnail, George pried between the hot plate’s blackened top area and the chrome surrounding it. The two parts separated like a clamshell. From the space inside, he shook out a pair of floppy disks onto his palm. “Here we go.”
“Let’s hope the good doctor didn’t have a password set up.” Sikes placed the laptop on the dresser and fed the first disk into it. “Or worse, all that encryption jazz.”
“It’s been my experience that security measures such as those are employed by people who stay in one place. People who are on the run, as Quinn was, don’t have time for such things.”
Bending close to the computer, heads almost touching, they scanned down the directory that appeared on the screen. “Jeez,” said Sikes. “He’s got his old tax returns on here.”
“Force of habit.” George ran a fingertip down the glowing lines. “None of these look very promising. Try the other disk.”
Sikes swapped the disks. He punched in the directory command.
“Great! These must be Quinn’s research files. A great big batch of ’em.” Sikes hit a few more keys. “And we’re straight in. The good doctor may have been paranoid about a lot of things—and with plenty of reason—but it was nice of him to leave this unlocked.”
A couple more keystrokes, and the first segment of the file appeared on the screen. The two men began to read.
An hour later, they were finished. The last glowing lines had scrolled to the top of the screen. For a moment longer, the two men were silent, then George reached out and tapped a key. The screen went blank.
Sikes rubbed his eyes, burning with the effort of that much high-speed scanning of information. A new fear gripped his heart, rendering him incapable of speech, nearly beyond rational thought. Time had been racing before; now it rushed toward a destination, the fate of his child, that he hadn’t a glimpse of before . . .
“Come on.” He felt his partner laying a hand on his shoulder. George’s voice was soft, trying to extend comfort in a world that had suddenly become even more terrible and relentless. That was all that Quinn’s notes had given them. “We’d better get back to the station. Maybe the others have found something. Maybe there’s still time . . .”
“You’re right.” With a sweep of his arm, Sikes sent the laptop computer crashing off the dresser and onto the floor. He gazed down at the machine with all the rage and frustration that had been unlocked from his heart. “Let’s go.” He spun on his heel and headed for the room’s door. He could hear George following him as he broke into a run in the corridor.
“I need to see Detective Sikes.”
A face turned toward him. “How’d you get in here?” The face regarded Buck with suspicion, then relaxed. “Wait a minute, you’re George Francisco’s son, aren’t you? Say, where’s your dad been the last couple of months or so?”
“What?” Buck was still partially deafened by the roar of his motorcycle’s engine and the wind noise past the helmet he now carried slung under one arm. He wasn’t sure he had heard this police detective right. Why wouldn’t the man know about his father’s resignation from the department? “Look, I don’t have time to talk about that now. I just really need to see Matt Sikes. It’s important.”
“Everything’s important. Right now more than usual.” The police detective, a human—Buck had seen him before but couldn’t recall his name—shuffled through a stack of messy file folders he had against his chest. “The heavy shit’s really come down, kid. Which means you’re outta luck if you wanna get hold of Sikes. He’s got a lot more important things on his mind than hearing whatever you got to tell him.”
Buck looked around the station’s offices, this room with his father’s old desk in it and what he could see of the spaces beyond the doors and hallways. The place was busier than he had ever seen it before, on any of the occasions he’d come down here to talk to his father. To the unfamiliar eye, it would have looked as if sheer chaos had broken out, with all the detectives and uniformed officers quick-striding or even running from office to office, or hunched over their desks and computer terminals, then shouting questions and orders to each other across the room. The station vibrated with tension, as though the inadequate air-conditioning itself had become infused with the psychic atmosphere of a Pentagon war room in full swing. Buck had seen the station in crisis mode before, though; it didn’t faze him. He knew that this was the full-court press that the department and its people would swing into for one of their own. If Matthew Sikes’s stolen baby wasn’t found alive and well, and the scumbags who’d taken it weren’t slam-dunked into the station’s holding cells so hard that their tert heads split open, it wouldn’t be for lack of every lead, suspect, or scrap of clue being followed up on.
And that was why he was here, though he seemed to be having a hard time convincing this particular bull-necked brick wall of that. Buck had decided that it was better to get the info he had straight to Sikes, rather than getting hold of his own father and telling him. He knew that Sikes would be right in the middle of the investigation on the hospital raid—it was his kid that had been taken, after all—whereas Buck’s father might be completely out of the loop. When George Francisco had resigned from the LAPD and broken up his partnership with Sikes, it had apparently not gone down on the friendliest of terms. With the kind of temper that Sikes had in the best of times, let alone a high-pressure situation like this one, if Buck’s father tried to tell him where the call from Noah Ramsey had come from, the chances were good that Sikes would blow him off before the crucial data could be passed along. Or else it would take forever for his ex-partner to get through to Sikes and tell him—and right now, time was at a premium.
The other factor that had entered into Buck’s calculations was that he knew Matthew Sikes was no dummy. He had sufficient smarts to be able to recognize what the phone call info meant, and he was wired into the center of the police and BNA web that would be able to make use of it—it’d be total gung-ho city once Sikes got the word.
If he got the word. That was starting to seem unlikely.
The cop he’d been talking to had turned away, which was just as well; Buck didn’t feel like hassling with him any more. Before anybody could stop him, he zipped down the aisle between the desks, stopping at the one he knew was Sikes’s—it faced onto the one his dad had always used. He grabbed a blank sheet of paper and a pen, leaning over to quickly write out a note.
“Hey!” The detective had turned around and caught sight of him. “What’re you doing? Authorized personnel only—you’re not even supposed to be in here.”
“Just leaving.” Buck folded the paper, scrawled SIKES—THIS IS IMPORTANT! and left it in the center of the desk where it would be seen right off. “Keep your hair on.”
He walked past the detective without saying anything else. When he hit the street outside the station, he didn’t hesitate. His mind had already been made up about what to do next.
Buck climbed onto his motorcycle and kicked it into roaring life. Wheeling it away from the curb, he headed for the nearest freeway on-ramp, that would get him onto I-5 heading north.
The police detective shook his head. He could hear, co
ming from outside the station, the roar of a motorcycle engine, loud and then fading into the distance.
In his arms, he still had the suspect files that Detective Sikes had requisitioned. He walked down and dropped the files on Matt’s desk. There were enough of the manila folders to cover the desk’s surface, hiding beneath them anything else that might have been there.
The detective started back toward the files room. He still felt annoyed at that kid barging in, especially without his father George being around. People had to realize that there was work to be done here.
C H A P T E R 1 5
IT HAD BEEN getting worse and worse, a threat gathering over the last twenty-four hours, like storm clouds massing at the horizon, heavy and dark. Something was going to happen—he could tell just from the sound of the others’ voices, without even being able to hear the words they whispered to each other. Voices, and then silence, when Noah looked over his shoulder at the other HDL team members, his gaze would be met with ones of mute resentment and simmering disdain, the dark clouds reflected in the depths of their hooded eyes. Silence, and then the voices again, whispers and mutterings as he walked away. Laughter as well, harsh and mocking, and words that were just loud enough for him to make out, as they were intended to be.
“Slag lover . . .”
Noah kept on walking, past the wooden front steps of the compound’s main building, where a knot of six or seven of the HDL members—the men who were supposedly under his command—sat in the motionless air of the high desert’s early evening. A couple of them had been knocking back cans of beer, though he had put out an order forbidding alcohol as part of the general tightening up of standards. They didn’t even bother attempting to hide their petty rebellion, and he knew better than to push them on it. The fiction of the HDL’s elite commando units, and their commitment to strict military discipline, was wearing pretty thin—dangerously so. All Noah could hope to do was keep open mutiny from breaking out, at least until Darlene Bryant’s next orders came through and the two children were moved on to some place where they would be safer.
He kept walking, boots scuffing through the loose gravel and sand, his spine and shoulders rigid as a shield. Whatever words the others shot at him, he had to let them bounce right off. Stay deaf, Noah told himself for the hundredth time. Don’t show a thing. His head, though, felt as though it were about to explode from the sheer pressure building up inside. He wondered how the hell he had gotten into this situation. When he had found the Purists—or when they had found him—and he had signed on with the HDL and taken the blood oath to protect his own species, it had been like coming home at last after a lifetime of wandering through the world alone and friendless. To be hooked up with a bunch of people—people like him—people who thought the same as he did, who could see what was happening to the world that was their birthright, and who were willing to lay down their lives to drive the parasites back where they had come from. He’d had a family at last, brothers in a common cause. That was why he’d poured every scrap of energy into the organization, given up everything else; if he had shot up through the ranks, until he was Bryant’s personal right-hand man, he had figured that it was only in recognition of his faith, his desire, his will, put in service of the one shining goal that united them all . . .
Yeah, right, Noah thought bitterly. He kicked a pebble out of his way. Something had sure deep-sixed that shining vision. He couldn’t even begin imagining what was going on inside some of these guys’ heads. By now they would have offed the baby they’d stolen, as well as the little girl Aalice, if he hadn’t been there to stop them, to keep them in line with Bryant’s orders. Noah shook his head as he gazed out through the fence topped with razor wire, and across the landscape of rock and dry scrub. He couldn’t get with the trip these sonsabitches were on. He hadn’t signed on with the HDL in order to murder kids. And these weren’t even slag children, at least not totally; Aalice and the baby were both half human. Didn’t that count for something? He would have thought that the other team members would at least be slowed down by that consideration. Instead, they were just getting more and more pissed off that he was standing between them and the two children they wanted to kill. Sonsabitches . . .
He reached the wooden front steps of the ramshackle camp building that the little girl Aalice had claimed as her own private hideaway. The realization had come to him some time ago that the other HDL members, the ones who had been up here supposedly guarding her, probably let her have the place—it wasn’t much more than an extended shack, ready to fall over in the next stiff breeze—just so they wouldn’t have to look at her. Though why the sight of the hybrid kid should irritate them so deeply, Noah still hadn’t figured out.
Pushing open the squeaky-hinged front door, Noah looked inside. Dust motes hung in the parallel slices of light that penetrated the boards nailed over the broken windows. On the blanket in the corner, Aalice lay curled up asleep, an arm protectively clasping to herself the battered doll that was one of her few playthings. Her mouth was slightly parted, cheek against an old sweater rolled up for a pillow, her breath slow and regular. In the partial light, Noah could have mistaken her for a completely human child. Or one that’s all Newcomer—he frowned, the unbidden thought puzzling him for a moment. The next thought troubled him even more: he found himself wondering if it made any difference what the little girl was.
He didn’t wake her up. Instead, he wandered back over to the camp’s main building, still feeling a crawly sense of unease across his tensed shoulders, his head crammed with things he found impossible to sort through.
Inside, Nurse Eward was tending to the stolen baby. The milky scent of the warmed formula was just discernible. From where she leaned over the baby’s cart, Eward glanced over her shoulder at him, but said nothing. He ignored the look of mute resentment in her expression, as the buzzing sound of a cellular telephone’s ring cut through the room. Nobody was sitting at the equipment-laden table that served as the camp’s link to the world beyond the fence; Noah figured that the comm tech must be hanging out somewhere with the rest of the team members.
The ring was cut short as the small fax machine switched on. A few more electronic noises, then a sheet of paper began to slowly uncurl from the slot. Noah stood beside the table, tilting his head to read the upside-down words. Before the print-out was halfway through, his heart had jumped a beat, then raced faster. When the single page was finished and the telephone connection broken, Noah reached down and picked up the curved sheet of paper. With a carefully maintained aura of calm, he folded it and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
“What was that?” Nurse Eward’s voice came from the other side of the room.
He turned away from the communications table, meeting the woman’s suspicious gaze. “Nothing special.” He shrugged, then started toward the door, making sure that his pace was not too fast. “Just routine business.” He walked past Eward, then outside, pulling the door shut behind him. Only when he was well away from the main building, and with none of the others in sight, did he pull out the fax sheet, unfold it, and quickly scan across its message once more.
The message was addressed to him. It came straight from Darlene Bryant, via one of the HDL attorneys that shuffled in and out of the private visiting area at the women’s prison. A slight tremor passed from Noah’s hands to the fax paper as he read. When he got to the end, he slowly lowered the sheet of paper and gazed sightlessly across the compound’s empty grounds to the bleaker desert beyond the fence. He felt as if a space equally as hollow had been carved out of his guts.
The fax he held was the death warrant for the little girl Aalice and the stolen baby.
Inside Noah’s head, the words of the Human Defense League’s leader marched and chanted, like an idiot army. The hollowness inside him grew larger, as though it were capable of swallowing him up, a black hole he wished he could vanish into. The bleak realization came to him, that he had made these words possible, had helped summon them into being, and th
at they were inevitable. He had known all along that Bryant’s orders for the two children’s fate would come and what they would be. There was no other possibility. He had been lying to himself when he had thought some other outcome would be arranged. Their deaths were sealed, just as if he had done nothing to prevent them from being killed back during the raid on the hospital. It was just a matter of timing and public relations. Bryant had weighed everything and in her cold judgment had decided it was better to exterminate Aalice and the baby out here, where nobody could see what happened to them, or find their bodies—find them and analyze them and reveal to all the world what the two children had really been . . .
We can’t let monsters like these live—Bryant’s words were tiny black elements on the curling fax paper. Not because they’re part parasite—but because they’re nearly all human. That was the secret that couldn’t be revealed: a mating between a Tenctonese and a human produced a child that was genetically human. The few remaining physical differences—the trace of head spots, the altered ear pinnae—mattered little, if at all. The fax spelled out, in quick, brief sentences, what Bryant and the rest of the HDL top command had already known about Dr. Quinn’s research. The doctor had proved, by his genotyping of the first Newcomer/human hybrid, the little girl Aalice, that the human strain was the dominant one, almost completely eliminating the contribution from the Tenctonese partner. There was nothing to be feared from matings between Newcomers and the human species; the only result would be children that were in essence human.
Nothing to be feared . . . and everything to be lost, for the HDL at least. Bryant had hinted about these things to him before, the real reasons for the League’s existence, but Noah had always dismissed them from his thoughts. But now—because he had vindicated her trust in him and his abilities—now she had come right out and said it. Admitted it right in the fax that he held in his trembling hands . . .