I closed the book and handed it to Mina. “Pick a name at random.”
“Okay,” she said. She opened the book and pointed. “That’s weird.” She held up the book and showed me. Her fingernail rested on Raul Diaz.
“Try again.”
She did. “That’s really weird.”
“Stacy had a gimmicked phone book. Open it, point, and nine times out of ten, you’re getting Diaz. Crease the spine just right, shade the name a little darker, you always get the same guy. A random test that just so happens to point to a Templar-controlled Manchurian Candidate.”
“Mr. Blank.”
The other one had the good graces not to act annoyed when I took her phone book. At that point, we were probably beyond quibbling over things like that.
-SEVENTEEN-
“I’m going to come up with a nickname for you,” Mina said. She was sitting low in her seat, half asleep. We were parked a block away from the Brotherhood of Sisterhood, waiting for the orgy to get out. I had no illusions that my presence would have caused much interruption. I had heard that these people had fucked through the Northridge quake.
“Uh-oh.”
“No, nothing bad. Just so I have something to call you.”
“You have something to call me. You can pretty much call me any guy’s name there is, and chances are I’ve got an ID that matches.”
“Yeah, but none of those names are yours.”
“Okay, what have you got?”
She shifted, somehow getting even lower in the seat, shading her eyes with one hand. I tried to sit up a little straighter, suck in the gut, cut a nobler profile. It didn’t happen.
“Hmm...” she murmured. I knew what she was thinking: not tall enough for a height nickname, too fat to be Slim and too thin to be Chubby. “What about Tweener?”
“Please no,” I said. “I’m not eleven. I’ve never seen the Jonas Brothers in concert. I’ve never read a single Twilight book.”
“Yeah, it does make you sound kind of bad.”
“How about Microwave? You know, because I heat up quickly?”
“That makes you sound like a slutty girl.” She shook her head. “Besides, what am I supposed to call you, Mike?”
“I have a couple IDs with that name.”
“See? Square one.” She thought about it. “Okay, a doctor’s called Bones…”
I burst out laughing.
“What?” she said.
“Just wondering what they’d call you, then.”
“Very funny. Seriously, though, it’s your job, right? What do they call people like you?”
“I call people like me suckers. Agents. PAs. Brothers. Initiates. Acolytes.”
“Why do you call people like you suckers?”
I explained the octopus. She laughed. “I’m not calling you Tentacle.”
“That would be awkward.”
“Rabbit,” she said, nodding.
“Rabbit? Not even a cool animal? Like a wolf? Or a snake with like a gun?” I tried a gunlike gesture.
“You know the old stories about Br’er Rabbit, right? That’s you. Whether or not you like it, that’s what we’re going with.”
“I can live with that,” I said to her.
The people started coming out of the mechanic’s in ones and twos, looking relaxed. Made sense. They were like deflated water balloons. My assassin’s double was in the middle of the pack, heading to his car.
“You know, there’s a surefire way for him not to know you’re following,” Mina said.
“Yeah, I know, get there first. Problem is, I don’t know where he’s going.”
“It’s that house, remember? Where, you know…” I did know.
I said, “That’s assuming this guy is a double. He might be a triple.”
“Or a grand slam.” I looked at Mina. She looked guilty. “I’m getting punchy.”
I started my car and stifled a laugh. I was getting pretty bad, too. I hadn’t slept for a couple days, unless one counted getting a Russian upside the head the other night. I couldn’t imagine Mina’s UFO abduction had been all that restful, either. When this was over, we’d get our sleep, assuming Mina didn’t remember her mission and try to kill me. She probably thought I’d forgotten about that.
I followed the grand slam though the streets. I kept expecting him to head to a freeway, but he didn’t. He crept down to Colorado and followed that. He wasn’t heading for Hollywood.
On the stereo: “We’re Ready.”
As he rolled into Pasadena, I realized exactly where he was going. I didn’t bother with the tail; I just turned down some streets and found the closest edge of Caltech. It’s easy to lose Caltech if you’ve never been. It’s hidden just south of Pasadena’s main drag and on the outskirts of a pretty sleepy suburban neighborhood. I always expected it to be heralded by chemical lasers lancing from the sky and buildings exploding with popcorn. When I finally saw the horrible late ’60s architecture, it was a bit of a letdown. The best part is underneath.
The famous steam tunnels can be reached through nearly any of the buildings. The trick is to get in, which is easy if you have a keycard and know where to look, which I did. I found the basement with the ladder down. That led to a small room lit with a bare bulb that helpfully illuminated where some Hitchhiker’s Guide fan had spray-painted “Beware of the Leopard.” From there, the corridor led off into the tunnels themselves. Pipes ran along one wall, alternately hissing and clicking.
“Where the hell is this?”
I pointed to some relevant graffiti.
Mina said, “Oh. Hell, apparently.”
The graffiti didn’t stop there. There’s a great old tradition at Caltech of writing on any available surface. Many walls are covered with little messages, and down in the steam tunnels, where things aren’t painted over nearly as often, it was possible to see the age of the college, assuming there weren’t people in the ’90s desperately in favor of impeaching Nixon. Not that they meticulously covered one wall and then moved on. It was like looking at a substrate that had been stuck in a bag of Shake ’n Bake. As other vandals moved in and wrote around the previous generation’s graffiti, it formed a tangled web, connecting the generations with ligaments of swear words and Monty Python bits.
After a few minutes of reading the walls, Mina asked, “Who are we going to see?”
“Remember when I told you about cloning technology?”
“Right. You said it had spread all over the place.”
“It has, but it started with a single source.”
“Let me guess: Nazis.”
“Sort of. The correct answer is actually Thulians.”
“That sounds like a Star Trek alien.”
“You’re thinking of Tholians.”
“No, I’m really not.”
I took a deep breath. “Thule is a lost-continent legend, sort of like Atlantis or Mu, but it has a distinctly Teutonic spin. Anyway, the legend of Thule was an inspiration to Heinrich Himmler, who was the architect of the SS and a committed occultist. According to the legends, each generation only has seventy-two ‘true men’ who are the descendants of the sons of Thule, the Nordic-looking guys who escaped the cataclysm that sank the island. Anyway, the idea was that these seventy-two could be increased a thousandfold if they could be faithfully reproduced on a genetic level, which led to the first cloning experiments. Himmler’s people never got it right during the war, but the technology left Germany with the Odessa ratlines, and was perfected in South America.”
“Right, Nazis.”
“Yeah, okay, Nazis.”
“So who are these guys?”
“As it turns out, Nazis are a fractious bunch. Without a charismatic leader, their natural bloodlust takes over and they start getting misty over der Nacht der langen Messer. There were also some in the younger generation who believed in genetic purity but thought that actually rounding people up and exterminating them was cruel.”
Her deadpan had improved, “Gee, how progressive
.”
“These are Nazis, remember. Baby steps. Anyway, the group started splintering. Meanwhile, the CIA had started getting very interested in South American affairs. They shot pretty much every president down there and installed what they called friendly dictators. Basically any sadist with anti-Commie bona fides got his own banana republic. The point is, they were down there and they already had access to incomplete technology from their dealings with the Little Green Men.”
“How do you keep all this straight in your head?”
“I saw a flowchart once. One of these Nazi splinter groups got infiltrated by the CIA and they sort of… merged. They became the Clone Wolves. We’re going to see their LA office.”
“So they’re not Nazis?”
“They don’t give a crap if you’re Jewish, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“I’m not Jewish.”
“I know, I was just saying. The Clone Wolves are about unity. Ever see Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Imagine that, minus the seedpods and psychotic behavior. If the body snatchers were rapists, the Clone Wolves are more like that guy who drives a van with wall-to-wall carpeting and way too many Dire Straits CDs. Basically, they want everyone to get along, and the best way to do that is eventually make everyone identical at a genetic level.”
“That’s really creepy.”
I paused. “So, what, you’re Catholic?”
She was quiet while her brain found the track mine had taken and boarded the appropriate train of thought. “Uh… sort of. I was, I mean. Before V.E.N.U.S.”
“The first time you meet an angel, that kind of thing goes right out the window. Talk about assholes. Oh, here we are.”
I didn’t have to look to know she had that annoyed-Mina look on her face, those big blues narrowed at me, forehead scrunched up like a pug. I loved making her make that face.
“Here” was a doorway. It looked like any of the others we’d passed: a service door. There wasn’t even a spray-painted symbol to denote that this was the headquarters of one of the more bizarre conspiracies in LA. The door had a lock, and I had the key.
The door opened up into an amphitheater-styled room. Instead of rows of seats, tiers of portable labs ringed the central pit. A metal staircase led down, strewn with landings that led to each tier. Light came from two sources: one, desk lamps that were clipped to every available surface. The other source was in the center of the room, a structure that looked like a bunch of grapes, only each grape was man-sized and glowing brightly. Within the grapes, there were silhouettes. Human.
Distinct groups roamed the room, both the tiers and the bottom floor: white-coated men and women, all of whom were stunted and moleish. Each group had exactly five members, and looking closer, each group was made up of exact duplicates that moved, even unconsciously, in unison.
They ignored us until we were halfway down the stairs.
Mina whispered, “Why did you leave the rock in the car?”
I turned. A pack of them lurked on the stairs above us now. They were Brian, my Clone Wolf contact, the socially awkward wall. I turned back. Two groups were at the bottom. All had the same unblinking stare. One group licked its lips. The other flexed its right hand.
“I thought we were clear, Mr. Hoyt. When we want you, we will let you know,” said the group on the bottom. Their name was Bess, a woman that looked like a clean-shaven Wolverine.
“Sorry about that. I had some potentially damning information that I wanted to share with you.”
The other group spoke up. Their name was Steve. They were larger, looking closer to a modern basketball player. “You could have called.”
“But then I couldn’t see your lovely faces.”
Bess said in stereo, “Why do you bring us this one?”
“She’s interested in what you had to say.”
“You don’t have the authority to…”
The group behind me spoke up. “No. Mr. Hoyt is spreading the word. It was a good thing.”
I turned around. That group, Brian, had its attention on Bess, but they looked to be focusing on the top of her head instead of her eyes. Brian, who I had seen a few days ago on my delivery, always looked awkward, but this was awkward even for him.
Steve, all of Steves, said, “What’s the information?”
“You have a clone family that’s been compromised.”
Bess and Steve exchanged looks. Between the ten of them, that took a little bit of time. “Come down here.”
I nodded to Mina. Brian was above us, all five of him swaying a bit, not knowing what to do. She followed me down, and Bess and Steve parted in perfect choreography. I felt like I was in the middle of a dance number, only I had forgotten all the stage direction and each of my legs weighed sixty pounds.
“You sold one of your people to the Brotherhood of Sisterhood, didn’t you? I’m fairly certain that individual has been compromised. Not to mention the rest of that family.”
Bess and Steve had pretty good poker faces. “What are you getting at, Mr. Hoyt?”
We were amongst the human-grapes now. I tried not to look too closely at them. “Security, mostly. If your agents are turning, you’d think you’d want to know. I guess I was wrong.”
I turned to leave. Brian was still on the landing. All five of him.
Steve said, “Mr. Hoyt, we’re sorry. It’s just… we’ve been on eggshells lately. We’ve had to sell a few of the families. But your concerns, well, they aren’t concerns.”
“Let’s be clear. The family that I’m talking about has a member named Raul Diaz that was killed the other day. For the second time.”
All ten of them nodded. My skin tried to crawl off my body and make a break for it.
“The man that killed Diaz wasn’t the buyer, was he?”
“No. The buyer was, we believe, an agent of the Anas. You are familiar with them? The fashion ascetics?”
Mina snorted.
“Yeah, we’ve heard of them here and there.” Didn’t take too much to know who that was. Again, I remembered Diaz: the girl, the girl, the girl. The skinny blonde outside the courthouse. The woman who murdered Eric. “Don’t suppose you’ll give me a name on the buyer, will you?”
“Mr. Hoyt, that information isn’t pertinent…”
“I have reason to believe that they’re turning your clones into assassins, and not the fun, pot-smoking, capital-A kind. They’re turning them into the real deal, Sirhan Sirhan, dead-eyed killers. Whoever this Ana is, she has connections, I think to more than a couple other groups, through a specific individual—someone that just hinting about has gotten me shot at and her taken by a goddamn UFO.”
Before Bess could stop him, Steve said, “Her name is Ingrid Brady.”
Brady, skinny, blond. The Ana, same. I thought back to it: the mustache could have been fake. The girl’s hair had to be a wig since the Anas started going bald pretty quickly. There wouldn’t be much of a woman’s figure to hide, and that g-man suit could have done it. Brady had pulled a d’Eon on me and I hadn’t seen it. She had practically screamed it back in the bunker. She had called the Anas the “Anorectic Praxis.” Everyone else used the pejorative. I should have caught it, but I was too busy being shocked there was a Mr. Blank at all.
Mr. Blank had a name, and he was a she.
“What is it, Mr. Hoyt?”
“I’ve met Ms. Brady. She’s lovely when she’s not kidnapping Templars and kicking me in the guts.”
All ten gave me confused looks. “Mr. Hoyt, while we have you here, have you reconsidered donating your genetic material?”
“No.”
“All we’re offering you is the chance to live forever.”
“As a mind-controlled assassin. No, I’m good.”
“And your friend?”
“She’s not interested either.”
“She can answer for herself.”
Mina said, “No, he’s right. Not interested.”
I blinked as a thought caught up with me. “He really did look
like Che Guevara.” I focused on Bess. They might as well have started rubbing their hands together. “He was one of yours, too? Guevara was killed by CIA-trained Bolivians. Let me guess, one of them sent the head back here as a paperweight?” I asked them.
“Correct in the generalities. Not in the details.”
I looked up at the faces in the shining grapes. I turned back to them. I remembered the picture in Eric’s book. “That’s where you got them, isn’t it? Los desaparecidos. Good source for bodies. Who’s looking for someone that vanished thirty years ago?”
Bess took two steps toward me. I was suddenly very aware that I was underground in a room with five sets of five clones. Even if they were lab rats, they outnumbered Mina and me twelve and a half to one. “Mr. Hoyt, that kind of information is pure speculation.”
Steve said, “Really, we wouldn’t have to do that sort of thing if some of our agents didn’t have such phobias about cloning.”
“It’s not a phobia. It’s just, I can barely stand myself. I couldn’t imagine standing four more.”
Bess said, “You know a great deal about this. More than one of our agents should.”
I felt Mina getting closer to me, watching our backs. I hoped she had that kick ready. We might need it.
“True. Blame the person that sent one of your clones to kill me armed with a Templar and alien relic.” That stunned them. I took Mina’s hand and started purposefully up the stairs. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this.” I glanced around at the underground lab. “The figurative bottom, I mean. It wasn’t you, but you should know what your little utopian seeds are being used for.”
Bess exclaimed, “Brian! Stop them.”
Brian, all five, stepped out onto the landing in front of us. Brian was a fairly big guy, and even if leaning over a microscope had given him a mighty hunch, he still had a full head on me. One Brian could probably throw me down the stairs without much effort, but all five could have a boot party. His eyes were focused on my chest. I braced myself. Maybe I’d get in a kick to the groin. Maybe I could get past the glasses and gouge an eye or something.
The backmost Brian passed something to another Brian, who passed it to another Brian, who passed it to the one in front of me. He looked sheepishly at the Brian next to him and held it out.
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