Smokescreen

by Meredith Fletcher; Vicki Hinze Doranna Durgin

  At six feet four inches, Wallace Chace was a big man who had just turned sixty. He’d been a Washington, D.C. policeman for thirty-seven of those years, twenty-four of them spent in a patrol car, nine as a shift commander and the last four in Internal Affairs. After retiring two years ago, he continued working part-time in a civilian capacity with Internal Affairs, but his wife often suspected that it was just Wallace’s excuse for riding around in a patrol car from time to time.

  “You gonna cut that onion or memorize it?” her father asked. His voice was gruff, but there was a twinkle in his hazel eyes.

  Christie looked down at the onion on the cutting board in front of her. She even had a knife in her hand.

  “I got the bratwurst coming off the grill in ten minutes.” Wallace took a serving tray of deviled eggs and a large bowl of Caesar salad from the refrigerator. “It ain’t gonna be the same without onions.”

  “Oh,” Christie teased. “You wouldn’t want to miss the chance at heartburn.”

  “Nah. I got new medication from the doc. I’ll get through this just fine.”

  Christie tuned into her Enhanced speed, looked at the onion for a moment, then chopped. The knife blade was a blur, moving with superhuman precision, and the onion turned into a heap of perfectly diced pieces.

  “Done,” Christie announced.

  Wallace shook his head. “I’m never gonna get used to that Enhanced stuff.”

  Christie used the knife to scrape the diced onions into a serving dish and added tongs. Her father had been wary when she’d volunteered for the Enhanced pilot program, but he’d been wary when she’d applied for the Bureau as well. In both cases, once he’d seen she was committed, he’d stood solidly behind her. When she’d been recovering after the Enhanced surgeries, learning to walk all over again, he’d regularly dropped in for visits to check on her and bring homemade soups and stews her mother had prepared.

  “The tech is all coming, Dad.” Christie reached into the open refrigerator for the salad dressing her mother had made fresh that morning. “You had your vision corrected when your eyes started to change. Mom had a little work done on her cheekbones and eyes when she went in to have her vision and hearing enhanced.”

  Wallace put a finger to his lips. When he spoke, his voice was low. “We don’t talk about your mother’s work.”

  “Everybody’s doing cosmetic surgery,” Christie protested. “That’s one of the first enhancements people choose. As well as a phone implant. It’s no big deal.”

  “Yeah, well everybody isn’t your mother. Around here, we just talk about her vision and hearing enhancements. If we talk about that at all. And maybe I’ve had my vision enhanced, but I can’t see bacteria at a hundred yards.”

  “Neither can I.” Christie paused. “Ugh. And why would you want to?”

  “I was just saying…”

  “I know.”

  Wallace looked at her.

  Christie knew that look. He was concerned. She was his youngest daughter, and the only one that had chosen to follow his career in law enforcement.

  “So what’s occupying your mind so much?”

  Christie leaned a hip against the kitchen sink. Wallace took up position against the island. The kitchen had long been a place where business had been conducted in the Chace family. Milestones had been celebrated, plans had been firmed up, weddings had been arranged and bad news had been shared in that little room decorated with her mother’s collection of frontier cooking and baking utensils.

  “You know about my team?” Christie asked.

  “Of course I know. I just don’t ask.”

  That was one of the unwritten rules they had between them. When Wallace had been a policeman, no one was allowed to question him about homicides or robberies or anything else that he worked on or around unless he brought it up first.

  “It’s been tough,” Christie said.

  “Losing people is always hard. God forbid it should ever get easy.”

  “I know. This thing has gotten complicated.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  Christie considered the offer. “I don’t want to wreck the family day.”

  Wallace waved the worry away. “Your mom knows how we are. If you think I can help, I’d be glad to.”

  Over the years, Christie had discovered her father was a great sounding board. He could listen for hours, then help her distill the main problems she faced each time, and helped her support her reasoning for the course of action she’d already chosen to pursue.

  She started in, laying out the foundation for the story by telling her father about Arturo Gennady and how the scientist was getting blackmailed.

  Christie was just getting into the details of the stakeout when the back door opened and her oldest sister, Pam, entered. Pam was dark-haired like their mother, and tended toward a full figure, which was made even more full by her current pregnancy.

  “Ah, you two,” Pam said, shaking her head. She stuck her head out the door. “They’re doing cop talk, Mom. You were right.”

  “The bratwurst?” Wallace asked.

  “Burnt to a crisp,” Pam said. “Mom’s phoning for pizza now.”

  “Don’t even joke about that,” Wallace cautioned.

  “They’re fine, Dad. Russell pulled them off the grill.” Pam took the eggs, salad and diced onions and headed back outside.

  “And that would be our cue,” Wallace said. “We can talk while we eat.”

  And they did, managing to hold down one end of the long family table amid the flower gardens that Christie’s mom worked on year-round. They conversed in shorthand, the way they’d learned to do around the rest of the family, and tuned out the other conversations taking place around them.

  As economical and concise as she could be, knowing her father could read reams between the lines, Christie finished up with her confrontation with Bao and the murder of the Katsumi Shan woman.

  “No one knows who killed this woman?” Wallace asked when she finished.

  “If they do, no one’s saying.”

  Wallace pushed his empty plate away. “Bao figures this woman means something to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he mentioned her to you. Have you ever used her as a snitch?”

  “No.”

  “But she has a history of dealing information,” Wallace said.

  Christie nodded. She’d talked to Washington, D.C. police detectives who had worked with Shan.

  “Maybe Bao thinks she gave you information.”

  “Why would he think that?”

  “Because the Shan woman had dug into Bronze Tiger business and got noticed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because someone asked her to.”

  “Who?”

  “Your wild card. The mysterious commando with the sea-green eyes.”

  “You think there’s a connection?”

  “You think there isn’t?”

  Christie picked at her salad and thought about it. Her dad was right. The connection was there. She just hadn’t seen it.

  “Any further thoughts about your mysterious guy?” Wallace asked.

  Aside from the little fantasy issues I’ve been having? Christie thought. The way he’d moved and the way he’d looked, even with no face and only those incredible eyes, her mind had insisted on pushing the button on her libido. She flushed a little and hoped her dad didn’t notice.

  “I told Fielding I thought he was protecting someone,” Christie said.

  “Did Fielding buy into it?”

  “Fielding’s not a theory-based guy. He likes dealing in facts. If I’m going to mention that, I have to prove it.”

  “We know the guy wasn’t there to protect Gennady.”

  “Because he gave me the Bronze Tigers.”

  “Yeah. But why did he do that?”

  Christie followed the chain of logic, realizing that she’d had it all along. “Because he’s trying to protect someone else.”

  “Who?”
Wallace waited patiently.

  “Someone else the Bronze Tigers would go after.”

  “What project was Gennady working on?”

  “A radical redesign of an automatic targeting system that’s going to be layered into the spinal cord,” Christie said. “When it’s finished, special ops warriors are supposed to be able to leave the targeting to their onboard computers. It will ping an IFF—Identify Friend or Foe—signature off enemy troops faster than the human mind can recognize and shoot.”

  Wallace sighed and crossed his arms. “What about civilians that happen to be in the area? They’re not going to ping the IFF signature either.”

  “Civilians aren’t supposed to be in the battle zones.”

  Wallace shook his head. “I know you can do amazing things with the Enhanced hardware you’ve received, Christie, but you can’t remove the human factor. We make value judgments. Machines—computer programs—don’t.”

  “I don’t think the government is trying to turn out flesh-and-blood robots, Dad.”

  “It’s starting to sound like it to me.” Wallace waved. “That’s a discussion for another time. Let’s look at your problem. The Bronze Tigers chose to kill Arturo Gennady and your team.”

  “To send a message.”

  “But they’d still want to do business, right?”

  “They were sending a message to the FBI.”

  “At the cost of losing their cyberwidget? C’mon, Christie, you can think straighter than that. They wouldn’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

  “Meaning they wouldn’t kill Gennady without another way to get the programming.”

  Wallace nodded. “So what other way did they have?”

  “Gennady’s team.”

  Shaking his head, Wallace said, “Too easy,” at the same time that Christie realized the same thing.

  “The Tigers would know DARPA would be all over Gennady’s team,” Christie said.

  “Are they?”

  “Yes.” Christie thought about what her father was pushing her toward. “Gennady’s design was going to be handed off to another scientist. Dr. Grace Reynolds.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Gennady handled the hardware side of things. The design issues and programming. Dr. Reynolds is working on the biological end of things—making sure the invasive surgery and hardware links to the human central nervous system without causing paralysis and other problems.”

  “So everything Gennady knew or worked out—”

  “Is going to be in Dr. Reynolds’s hands.” Christie felt elated. The answer had been there, but it was all conjecture, something that Fielding would demand proof of.

  “If the Bronze Tigers killed Gennady to send a message,” Wallace said, “it wasn’t a message to the FBI. It was to someone else.”

  “Grace Reynolds,” Christie said, smiling as the pieces fell together in her head. “They knew Gennady wouldn’t roll over, and they knew Gennady’s designs would be turned over to Dr. Reynolds. The message was for her.”

  “How vulnerable is she?”

  Christie had seen Grace Reynolds’s file when she’d been working with Arturo Gennady to set up the sting. Gennady had also talked about Dr. Reynolds, saying she was one of the brightest minds he’d ever encountered.

  “She has a son,” Christie answered. “Ten years old. Dr. Gennady mentioned having met him. There’s a baseball field at the lab that the boy built with someone’s help.”

  “Is there a father?”

  “You figure him for No-Face?”

  “That would be my first guess. A man alone in the warehouse, my immediate impression is that he was a guy working to protect his family. With the way you moved, I’ll bet he’s military.”

  Christie closed her eyes, accessed the computer in the back of her skull and opened the files she had on Gennady. She found the information on Dr. Reynolds in a subdirectory, then opened it as well. Digital and video images took shape in her mind. Dr. Reynolds’s personal data expanded automatically.

  “Mackenzie Reynolds,” Christie said. “Captain. United States Army Rangers.”

  Wallace smiled. “Well, there you go. Mystery solved.”

  A pang twisted through Christie’s stomach. The man who owns those eyes can’t be married. There can’t be a Mrs. Sea-Green Eyes. Then she noticed another notation.

  “Not Captain Reynolds,” Christie said. “He’s dead. Killed in action almost three years ago.”

  Wallace thought for a moment. “Then it has to be someone close to him. Someone who has an interest in Dr. Reynolds and her son.”

  “Let me run a correlation check.” Still with her eyes closed, she ran a search through Captain Reynolds’s past and Dr. Reynolds’s present. One name appeared on both lists: Master Sergeant Dalton Anthony Geller.

  Using her FBI credentials, she pulled up a military ID image, front and profile. She didn’t recognize the face, but the eyes were a dead giveaway.

  Opening her eyes and shutting down video access to her onboard computer, she grinned at her father.

  “Well?” Wallace asked.

  “I got him.”

  Chapter 9

  “No, Special Agent Chace, I did not know Dalton was going to that warehouse that night. Furthermore, I am not convinced that you know he was there.”

  Sitting in Grace’s office in the main lab, Dalton was impressed with the way Grace lied. Of course, technically she wasn’t lying because she was carefully phrasing her responses and avoiding some questions altogether. And every chance she got, she put the pressure back on Christie.

  The FBI agent was just as cool and tactful. She wasn’t intimidated by Grace’s office, which was staged for the occasional video conferences she did with the DARPA section heads that she was accountable to, nor did Grace’s authority intimidate her.

  “I’m satisfied that Sergeant Geller was there,” Christie said.

  “Young lady,” Grace said, “there is a world of difference between satisfaction and proof. I work with theory every day, and I’m going to tell you now that the people who employ me don’t reward me for creative thinking. They reward me for results.”

  Dalton sat quietly in a chair beside Christie. The young woman address stung Christie. Although Grace wasn’t quite old enough to be Christie’s parent, the superior tone obviously struck home.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Christie responded, and Dalton knew that the ma’am was a politely concealed rebuttal about Grace’s position as an elder. “But Sergeant Geller was also at a club where a woman connected to this investigation was found murdered,” Christie said. She reached forward and tapped the holographic projector control with her forefinger. “May I?”

  Grace folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. “If you feel you must.”

  At Christie’s touch, the holograph sprang to life. 3-D images hung in the air a few inches above the desktop, evidently fed through some Enhanced function layered into Christie’s data pack.

  Dalton stayed still with effort. A scene from the Adonis Club took shape in front of him. How the hell did she make that connection?

  “The murdered woman, Katsumi Shan, worked with your husband and Sergeant Geller in their overseas postings,” Christie said. A picture of Katsumi Shan took the place of the bar scene. “I checked back through the security vids of the night the woman was killed.” Katsumi melted away and was replaced by a scene of Dalton walking through the club. “As you can see, Sergeant Geller was there the night the woman was found hanging in her office/apartment.”

  Grace waved a hand over the control pad. The image disappeared. “You’re suggesting Sergeant Geller killed that woman?”

  “No. The time-date stamp on the vid and the medical examiner’s report make it impossible for Sergeant Geller to be the killer.” Christie glanced at Dalton. “Unless he killed her earlier, managed to spoof the security vid recorders—which was done—then went back.”

  “Whatever for?” Grace demanded.

  “I don’t kno
w.”

  “Surely not to expose himself to that club’s security system again,” Grace pointed out.

  “No.” Christie didn’t appear to admit defeat, but she settled back into the chair.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Grace asked.

  “I thought you should know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I believe the people who killed Arturo Gennady will come for you next.” Christie paused. “If they haven’t already.”

  Grace’s facade cracked a little then, but Dalton doubted that anyone who didn’t know her extremely well would have noticed.

  “If they do,” Grace said, “I’d be happy to notify your office.”

  “That’s not how it’s going to work,” Christie said. “My team and I are going to stay here for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “Additional security.”

  “Nonsense,” Grace said belligerently. She tossed an accusatory glance at Dalton.

  “Dr. Reynolds,” Christie said, “you don’t have a choice in the matter.”

  “Young lady, I assure you that as project leader for this—”

  “That you deserve the additional security,” Christie interrupted. “Section Chief Alonzo Graves, of DARPA and the man you report to, agrees with that assessment in light of what has happened to Dr. Gennady. Apparently your project is highly thought of. Since I’m connected with the Bronze Tigers and am familiar with their activities in the Washington area, Chief Graves agreed that my team and I would be an ideal short-term addition to Sergeant Geller’s on-site rotation. I’ve got a few weeks to render a threat assessment in the matter.” She cut her gaze to Dalton. “We won’t be operating under Sergeant Geller as your present security teams do. We’ll be independent.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Grace snapped. “The last thing I need at this juncture of the project is someone new to my routines that gets underfoot.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I appreciate that. But your safety, and that of your son, is paramount at this point. As well as the integrity of Project Seek-n-Fire.” Christie leaned forward and touched the holograph control again. “Here’s the document from Chief Graves. He said he will be in touch with you by end of day Monday to discuss the matter with you.”