Wild Meat

by Newton, Nero

  I have at last begun to instill in these men an understanding of the danger they face if they continue to inflame their own subjects. The common people are not blind to the source of the creatures that all too often injure or kill them in the night, and it is evident that this feeds their hostility toward their lords, who are stubbornly forgetful of the rebellion and bloodshed this land endured less than a decade ago. They defend their activities with endless bluster about their forefathers and ancient traditions, as though all of that would save them from the angry rabble. They insist their stubbornness has nothing to do with the profit they reap from the beasts’ foul yield, but probably realize that the lie is unconvincing.

  Stephen had little doubt what was meant by “foul yield.”

  The letter went on to say that local nobles’ efforts to keep the animals’ existence secret from the common people were hopeless and probably always had been. The peasants were aware that their masters raised strange and dangerous beasts. Gossip about the creatures had become fanciful over the years, and for untold generations, people had been telling stories about witchcraft and devil-worship among the nobility. The author granted that such stories were certainly nonsense, but pointed out that truth was less important than perception when it came to making sure that scythes and hoes would not suddenly become weapons of rebellion.

  The inclusion of the Hungarian writing in the indexed bundle meant that the mountainous region could have been somewhere in the old Kingdom of Hungary, but that kingdom had been many times larger than the modern nation of Hungary, so the precise location was far from clear.

  It was three in the morning when Stephen finished with the letter, and he had a wicked headache from concentrating. Before going to bed, he composed another email to Amy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Getting a residential rental approved in less than an hour was easy if you could pay the owner several months’ rent in cash. Amy accomplished this by mid-morning on the day after the invasion of her home. She found a place about ten miles west of where she had been, still in the foothills.

  By herself, she could have disappeared easily, out of town or out of the country, but she also wanted Rita to move out of harm’s way, and did not want her to spend any money. So she insisted they move in together for a while.

  In case the thugs remembered what her car looked like, had maybe even recorded the license plate, Amy traded in her Toyota for a six-year-old, mid-size Buick.

  She also insisted on getting a new car for Rita, whose beloved old sky-blue Thunderbird would have to stay locked up in her garage back on Cascabel Drive. Rita resisted the offer at first, but when her new boyfriend, deputy Phil, showed up, he pushed her to take the added precaution. Deputy Phil also escorted the women to and from their old place to pick up what they needed to make the new house livable.

  The cars seriously depleted Amy’s savings, but the money would be replenished before long because the fortune she had inherited was in something called a spendthrift trust. Andre had explained it to her shortly after they began running their “missions” together: “It means my dad set it up so that, if he died before I was thirty-five years old, which is what happened, I’d get the money in monthly increments. He didn’t trust me not to blow it all right away, but hoped that by thirty-five I might have enough common sense to handle the entire wad.”

  An additional provision was that if Andre himself died before the age of thirty-five, and if his spouse was also under that age, the monthly increments would continue until the day Andre would have reached thirty-five. At that point, the surviving spouse would get the whole jackpot.

  The monthly allowance was enough for any ordinary person to live quite comfortably on, but by the Kellet family’s standards, it was poverty. The idea had been that Andre would have had to find lucrative work – preferably with Ovation Energies or one of its subsidiaries – in order to maintain the lifestyle he was accustomed to. Extreme sports were expensive.

  Amy had been getting those monthly payments for five years, saving some, trying to live on as little as possible, and spending the majority funding various environmental projects – as Andre would have wanted.

  Now she wished that she had saved a few thousand more. If the thugs somehow discovered their new residence, she and/or Rita might have to get completely out of town, and that could get costly, depleting her savings before the next payoff.

  They had Chinese takeout and margaritas while setting up the new place. It was early evening when Amy got around to checking her email, and she found several new messages, including one from Stephen. She was eager to learn what new information he’d come up with, and to hear his take on the “ruby” forum. But glancing down the list of unread messages, she saw one whose subject line read, in French: Dear supporter of the Whelk foundation.

  Amy stared, trying to make sense of the greeting. “Whelk” was a pseudonym she had used only once – during her visit to Sanderson’s logging camp.

  She had a few different email accounts, and this particular one could easily be found by anyone who knew what her real name was. No surprise there. But the fact that someone had connected her with Francine Whelk was a lot more worrisome. She opened that message right away.

  The sender had written in French and did not identify himself by name. He claimed to be an official of the Equateurian government, but said that for anonymity he had used a free Web-based email service rather than his government’s network. He said this was for her safety as well as his own.

  Dear Whelk Foundation supporter,

  During an investigation of a public health issue, a gentleman named Marcel asked me to inform you that his former employer has discovered certain facts about Miss Francine and Miss Yi. He warns Francine that her home in California is no longer safe. If she is there now, she should leave, and should not return. According to Marcel, his former employer has developed a relationship with dangerous persons in the USA.

  Marcel believes Miss Francine’s interest in his former worksite was related to forest ecology, and not to the other matter that Miss Yi has discussed online. However, Marcel’s former employer, along with his former employer’s new associates, are of a different opinion, and they are aggressively defending their control of the other matter. He wanted me to stress that this warning is quite urgent.

  He also wants Francine to know that he wishes her well, and that his former employer’s security guards were acting against Marcel’s orders when they attacked her.

  You can see that I am not sending this message by official email. Correspondence on my government’s network is screened by departments other than my own. Passing on Marcel’s warning might be considered contrary to the interests of his former employer, who is very influential in this government. Marcel, himself, has left Equateur and is beyond fear of that influence.

  If you wish to discuss this further, you may reply to this email address or contact me at the telephone number below, which is also not part of any official network and is not being monitored.

  Amy assumed the “dangerous persons” meant someone involved in the “ruby” trade. Perhaps experienced traffickers in illegal goods? She didn’t really know how those sorts of people worked, but they were clearly a lot scarier than the guy who used to sell her college roommate a bag of smoke now and again.

  And why had the message been sent from Equateur? Was it a genuine warning? Or some attempt to draw her into communication with the very thugs who were after her?

  It seemed absurdly suspicious that the heads-up had arrived not merely late, but barely a day after the break-in at her home – like somebody’s hastily conceived Plan B. The thugs probably realized that Amy would move out of her place on Cascabel Drive, making it nearly impossible to find her anymore, so the next move would be to draw her out.

  On the other hand, what harm could there be in calling the number in the email? It would probably be evident early in the conversation whether the person on the other end had in mind her welfare or her death.<
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  Or maybe the message was a threat. Instead of a heads-up, it could have been telling her to keep her head down: Talk to anyone about this funny animal business and we’ll know about it, and we’ll track you down.

  That would actually have been a relief. Amy would have been happy never to mention the animals again to anyone if it assured her safety and Rita’s. But the tone of the email wasn’t quite right for that, either. If it was a threat, the veil was way too thick.

  So call the number, she thought, but not yet. She had a new burn phone, which would leave no paper trail to her, but she’d heard that even those could be tracked via local relay towers. She wasn’t sure how easily that could be done, but decided not to take the chance of calling the mystery e-mailer from anywhere near her new neighborhood. Someone might be able to track her the way a zoologist tracks a wild animal with an implanted transmitter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Amy sat and watched a DVD with Rita that evening, but it was hard to take her mind off the email. By the end of the movie, her new roomie was already nodding off while Amy remained wide awake, her mind spinning. She found some nighttime cold medicine in the jumble of items she’d brought from Cascabel Drive and took a hearty slug. While waiting for it to kick in, she checked out the unread email from Stephen, dated a day earlier.

  In a moment her screen was filled with a drawing that showed one of the animals standing two-legged. It wore a gold crown, a gold coronation mantle, and a rich burgundy robe that hung to the floor and obscured its hind feet. Three more of the creatures crouched four-legged in froggy postures nearby. Amy couldn’t tell whether they were wearing dark robes, or if it was just the way their shaggy black fur hung from them. She looked at the petite ears, the babyish pug noses over barely visible mouths. The eyes were huge orbs, nearly all pupil, and seemed to stare at nothing.

  Stephen had written:

  This picture shows part of a ceremony in which mountain people commemorate a king’s wonderful record of conquests in what they call a “spectacle of reenactment.” Dressing up blood rats for shows seems to have been part of the whole culture of raising them. But the “spectacles” weren’t just about putting cute clothes on pets. They would actually sick the animals on helpless peasants as part of the entertainment. I assume the victim would be all scratched up and probably zoned out from getting sprayed with “boof,” same as happened at Sanderson’s logging camp. If the animals were employed for anything half so brutal in the New World, it’s no wonder that exposure would have been embarrassing to whoever was behind it.

  Still feeling no undertow from the cold medicine, she decided to call Stephen. Rather than tell him about the break-in, which she didn’t want to dwell on any longer, she just listened, encouraging him to ramble on about his newest discoveries. He told her excitedly about how the Church had insisted that all the blood rats in Europe be destroyed, on pain of excommunication. The clergy had even confiscated any documentation it could find that made reference to them.

  “How come?” Amy asked. “Did the Church object to the ‘spectacles’ on religious grounds?”

  “It was a political decision, all about preventing bad PR for the aristocracy. This was a time of peasant revolts all across Europe – from the 1300s to the 1500s. Lots of bloodshed. Plus the Protestant Reformation was spreading like crazy. The Church couldn’t afford to lose any more allies, so they laid down some strict rules for kings and nobles that were still on its side. In the case of our mountain people, one of those rules was, ‘no more creepy animals, because they get loose and scare people who come near your castle.’”

  “Why not just ban the spectacles?”

  “Because the animals were slippery. Not only were they deliberately used in a form of sick entertainment, but a lot of times they got out of their kennels and became nighttime hazards. Picture one of those things mauling someone in the dark – just like in the logging camp.”

  “But it sounds like some of the animals got sent to the New World after this kill order,” Amy said. “That means somebody must have kept a few breeding pairs hidden, and started the whole thing over again later on.”

  “Must have been that way. And this time around it was clergy who were raising them. The higher-ups in the colonial clergy didn’t approve, and when they found out, they ordered another round of animal slaughter and confiscation of records. The Church’s internal correspondence on this matter was–”

  Amy realized she’d begun to doze, and had to ask him to repeat his last couple of points. The cold medicine was finally pulling her under. “Listen,” she said, “since I’m back in California, maybe we can meet in a week or so?”

  “Perfect. I’ll share everything I have, including what I haven’t analyzed yet, and we can work together on figuring it all out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In the gloom of a basement below a long-disused fruit-packing facility in Prospérité, the man that both Amy Kellet and Hugh Sanderson thought of as “Tall Guard” had two unexpected visitors.

  Tall Guard had been hosing out a row of cages, herding the urine-soaked sawdust and slender coils of excrement toward one of the many holes that he and Barrel Guard had jackhammered into the basement floor. None of the city’s handful of sewer lines ran anywhere near this old place, but smashing three feet down through concrete to the porous bedrock had created drains through which the wash water would eventually escape. They would only need this place for a few more weeks, anyhow, and after that it wouldn’t matter what condition the place was in.

  The two visitors had come on behalf of the health ministry doctor who had been at the logging camp a couple of months earlier, but Tall Guard had no way of knowing that, and the visitors had no reason to tell him. The only information they revealed was that they possessed evidence that would help to land Tall Guard in a snake pit of trouble.

  One of the visitors leveled a 9 mm pistol at him. The other approached and presented photographs of Tall Guard and two other men engaged in a lively and athletic orgy with a couple of very zoned-out backpacker girls they’d picked up at the Sanderson Free Forest Campground. Tall Guard hadn’t known it at the time, but one of the girls wasn’t really a backpacker, wasn’t really just passing through Equateur. She was the fifteen-year-old daughter of a British diplomat living in Prospérité, and had gone to the campground after hearing wondrous things about the endless party life there. She was pregnant now, and had told her father that her condition was the result of a drug-assisted abduction and rape, although she could not remember her captors’ faces very well. The British government was on the warpath about it, and even Sanderson would not be able to save the perpetrator from justice if his identity were ever proved.

  Tall Guard figured it must have been Marcel who had supplied his visitors with the photographs. The former foreman, who had just disappeared, was one of the few people who’d seen the pictures, which the boof merchants had merrily passed around over drinks more than once. Tall Guard still had no idea who had gotten the jump on him just as he was about to take Marcel out, but it seemed likely that today’s visit had some connection to that event.

  He began blustering about how no one could prove that those photographs were real, that in fact they weren’t real, that he would never give his visitors a single centime, and on and on and on, until one of them said, “We don’t want money. All we want is information about Sanderson’s organization. We know that you know about the schedule for shipping the animals, and about Sanderson’s personal movements, and you need to pass all of that information on to us. When and where the animals are going, when Sanderson’s leaving the country, who he’s meeting, and when he’s coming back. All you have to do is call the number that’s written on the back of that photograph and leave a detailed voice message that includes all of the information you’ve gathered. Follow it up with weekly reports that include everything you’ve learned since the last one. Each report should be thorough, and all the information has to be true. If you lie to us, we’
ll find out, and the British consulate will get this photo along with several others taken the same afternoon.”

  Tall Guard was wary, but the deal didn’t really seem all that hard to take. The alternative, on the other hand, sounded spectacularly awful, so he promised to cooperate.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Amy had Andre’s “latte burner” in the pocket of her baggy green shirt.

  She had seriously considered shocking Stephen Stokes, showing him the gun and saying, You know why I carry this? It’s because I’ve had my life threatened twice in less than two months, and at least one of those times was because I’ve been looking into these animals. Probably both times. I’m afraid this isn’t just an episode of Adventures in Art History anymore.

  But when Stephen sat down across from her in an Oakland diner, she realized that she could never have carried out that plan. It was just too weird a thing to spring on anyone, and she didn’t need this guy to think she was a flake – or dangerous.

  Besides, it might be easier than she’d expected to bring him out of an academic mindset and into a practical one. None of the nerdy, bookworm modesty she’d sensed on the phone showed in his dark eyes, or in the sharp features framed by his dark brown beard. It was a full, dense beard, not a goatee. He was tall and somewhat athletic-looking, a runner, maybe. He looked no older than her, maybe a year or two younger. He ordered a beer and Amy did likewise.