He pushed his bulk into the booth and wiggled a finger at a waitress, ordering coffee for himself. He'd just gotten off the air runner that took him from the shuttle station in Florida to this Denver location, and he was feeling space-lagged, groggy. He'd had to arrange special home leave for the trip, and he hoped it was worth it.
Outside the window of the diner, people walked up and down the street, their mouths moving in speech that was probably significant to them, though neither the Looker nor Terence was interested. They had weightier issues at hand.
"Can we have her removed?" the Looker asked.
Terence chose to ignore the possible euphemism of the word removed, but he felt his heart skip into a higher drive. He knew an attempt had been made on Clare's life before she was brought to the Planetoids. It failed, intercepted by her guards. Unfortunately, the hit man had been killed, along with two police officers, in a traffic accident on the way in for questioning. There were no clues as to who had hired him, just as there was no clue as to who hired Clare to kill the Governor.
"Who ... Clare?" he asked. "If you want an escape—"
"No. Not Clare," the Looker said impatiently. "This Addams woman."
"You mean—from this case?"
"I mean," the Looker said, "from her interaction with Clare, at any cost."
Terence felt acid rising from his stomach to his throat. He'd never done more than pass numbers, names, files. He wanted to keep it that way.
"Many have tried," he said, keeping his voice jovial, joking. "In fact, I could think of a few people who'd volunteer for the job, just for fun. But I didn't sign on to remove anyone. I don't do that."
"You do what you're paid for, and you don't ask questions about it. But I wasn't thinking of you, at any rate." He sucked in air through his teeth, made a thoughtful series of clicking sounds with his tongue. "She's difficult," he commented. "An empath. My group doesn't want an em-path working with Clare."
His group. The Looker never used the acronym DIE, which he found distasteful. He never used the full name, either. It was always "my group" or "the Division," or "our people." It was the same attachment to secrecy that he had about his name, which Terence never knew. He was the Looker. That was all. Terence thought it was childish, like little boys playing with codes, but he knew the games they played weren't for children. The Division said little, and didn't miss a trick.
They knew Jaguar was an empath. They would know all about every possibility for Clare's Teacher assignment. Although, given Jaguar's reputation, they probably had a pretty thick file on her even before this. And he understood the Looker's concerns about having an empath work the case. They could get in where the testers couldn't. On the Planetoids there was a grudging acceptance of the empathic arts, or at least a willingness not to interfere with their use. On the home planet, the arts still generated suspicion, or aroused terror, or were seen as something practiced only by freaks, misfits, potential ritual killers.
The Looker's research involved technologically generated psi capacities, so Terence knew he didn't have any of those prejudices, but he recognized the potential power of the empath, if left uncontrolled and unmonitored. Monitoring and control were his strong points.
Terence bit back a smile at the thought of the Looker trying to monitor Jaguar. That would be pretty amusing.
"I understand the problem," Terence said, "but it's gonna be tough. Her supervisor's particular about her... very protective. And—well, I don't think she's all that removable, once she's got her teeth in something."
"Can we get Clare off the Planetoid?"
"Depends on if you mind a lot of notice. There's lots of eyes watching this one, and she's in a classified location. Security's pretty tight."
"All right. Perhaps the furor will subside and we can consider ways. We'll have to get Addams off the case, though."
"How?" Terence said.
The Looker removed his glasses and held them up to the light, brought them to his mouth and breathed steam on them, then rubbed at them meticulously with the corner of his napkin.
"How many organizations are currently monitoring the Rilasco case?" he asked.
Terence chuckled. "All of them," he said. "NICA's got a woman there, and so do the regular feds. There's a couple of Colorado state people, and management for the Leadville group. We got a regular Rilasco conference going. Everyone's got something to say about it, calling and asking what'll happen next to the Patricks casino project, to her. It's just a good thing we got a rule against reporters, or they'd be crawling up our butts like fire ants in Alabama."
"And has she spoken at all—about her employers?"
"Not a wicked word."
"I thought not," the Looker said. He picked up his cards, shuffled, and pulled one. King of spades.
"I'll come to the Planetoids, briefly, and my presence won't be remarked upon as anything unusual. You find someone who can work an e-wave amplifier on her."
Terence frowned. "A Supertoy?"
From what he understood, there were still some serious problems in using what was commonly called the Supertoy line.
"With two live subjects?" he continued. "I thought—"
The Looker interrupted. "It's in the experimental phases. This will be a good opportunity to gather data and perhaps solve our problem at the same time. Can you find someone to use it? Preferably another empath, and someone she knows. I'd rather not bring any of our people up there."
He cast a suspicious glance out the window and up toward the invisible Planetoid. Terence knew they didn't want to go there if they didn't have to. No matter how cool they all seemed, they didn't like to leave their own turf.
Terence chewed on his lower lip thoughtfully. "There's Nick. I'll bet he'd be glad to have a shot at her. He's got a list of complaints against her already, and Dzarny's covering for her with the Board. But what if it doesn't work?"
"Then we'll determine alternate removal methods. Just go ahead with this for now. And get a recording implant in her."
Terence shook his head. "Not possible. She won't do it for the Board, or for Dzarny, and I can't get close enough to slip one without her knowing it."
The man snorted. "Never mind. I didn't imagine that the Planetoid was so filled with nervous old men, but since it is—"
"Look," Terence said, "I'm working with her other assignment. Graff. I can get something in him, and then we'll have partial recording anyway."
"All right. Do what you can. Take care of it. Nervous old men," the man said sadly. "You might as well be home dusting furniture and worrying about whether your toilet is composting properly. Be thinking of ways to get Clare back here. Always think ahead."
"I'll work on it."
The Looker leaned across the table and jabbed a manicured finger at him. "Work very hard," he said. "It might be difficult to take care of her where she is, and we would prefer a debriefing with her prior to final disposal of the matter."
He shuffled his cards and laid out a neat row of seven, signaling the end of the interview. "But first, take care of the Addams woman."
"Yeah," Terence said. "Me and about fifty other men who'd like to."
The sun cast long shadows of trees and shrubbery, narrowing and stretching them across the path that wound through the Wildlife Sanctuary where Jaguar walked. She paused briefly in front of the two golden eagles, one missing a leg and the other a wing. They were perched on the tree that grew in the center of their cage, their eyes piercing the netting that surrounded them as they focused on her. When they realized she wasn't dinner, they turned their attention elsewhere.
She saluted them and continued along the path to the gate that separated the public portion of the Sanctuary from the breeding complex. Here she passed her ID in front of the sensor, waited for the green light, then spoke her password.
Panthera Onca.
A simple password, but the entry locks responded to voice wave as well as words, and would open only for those whose patterns matched their index. Besides
this security, Jaguar knew that Maria, who directed the breeding program, kept an old but effective shotgun at her side. She didn't want anyone bothering her animals.
Inside the breeding complex, a series of houses had been set up for prisoner programs. Some held regular apartments and provided a base for Teachers whose prisoners needed a normalcy of routine and isolation from the rest of the replica city. There were specialty houses, too, such as the bar and hotel, and the VR site that would be ready for use within the year. Here, also, was the House of Mirrors.
All program facilities were behind another set of gates at the far end of the grounds, away from the animals. This gave Jaguar the opportunity to walk through the complex and visit with Hecate and Chaos, the two jaguars in residence here, while she waited for Rachel to bring her Clare's complete file.
Chaos and Hecate were the only two jaguars in residence on the Planetoid, and perhaps the only hope left of ever reintroducing the species to the wild. No home-planet zoo had had any success with such a program. The most they could get was an in vitro process, utilizing an artificial womb for gestation. The breeding procedures they'd developed in these programs included genetic tinkering meant to increase fertility, resistance to pollution-related diseases, and the capacity of the fertilized egg to withstand in vitro gestation. But in the process of the splicing and reformulating genetic codes, the wildness had been bred out of the animals, making them more like large domestic cats, and certainly unfit for reintroduction into the wild.
At this Sanctuary, the director had stopped the genetic tinkering and was letting the cats find out who they were by themselves.
She took the side path that led to their habitat and stopped in front of them, wrapping her hands around the steel bars that enclosed them. Maria had insisted on bars rather than the wireless laser fencing. She said that if they were caged, they should be able to see what caged them, rather than become confused by the visual illusion of freedom.
"Hecate," Jaguar whispered, and the golden-spotted female rolled, stretched herself, claws showing and retracting. They knew each other well.
"Chaos," she said, and the sleek black male lifted his massive head, his tail snaking in gracious curves as he waited to see if she would talk with him. For an empath, gathering the knowledge of other animals was no more difficult than gathering the thoughts of humans.
There was a beast, and it had a belly. The empathic moment would drop you off there, if you let it.
Jaguar knew this, because she'd met with that beast and slept quiet and sweet in his belly, danced inside the entrails, swam in that honeyed stream of warm blood, wanting to know.
Every night at midnight, the Jaguars were allowed to run free, hunting down mice and other small rodents for food. They were just tame enough that a preset signal from Maria brought them back, willingly, to pace the inside of a cage.
One night Jaguar had been given permission to sit in the cool, thick scent of their cage while they ran. She watched their shapes, elusive in the moonlight, skimming the earth, low to the ground but with the grace of flight. They had come up to the cage and stared at her, sniffed her as she sat safe behind their bars.
There was a beast, and it had a belly filled with sweetness and honeyed dreams of blood and grace in motion. You could gather the wisdom pooled there, if you were willing to get quiet and do without words.
Jaguar pressed herself against the cool steel of the bars and curled her gaze toward the black male, who lay on his belly in the pose associated with ancient Egyptian statues of cats, paws forward and head held straight.
She would wait here for Rachel to bring her the complete file on the Rilasco case, and her team member's report for Adrian's case, which she was helping out on. She'd have no time to read through the Rilasco material before she met with Clare, but today was just an introductory day. The information would mean more to her after she'd met the prisoner.
Working two at once, and one of them Clare Rilasco. What was Alex up to this time?
His capacities as an empath made him an interesting Supervisor. Although she knew he didn't often sit in the adept space or call on the waves of knowledge that grew from this art, he would just as frequently be picking up signals in a subliminal way, acting on them instinctively. She assumed that's what he was doing in putting her on the Rilasco assignment, but she wondered if he had a hidden agenda as well.
No. Not if there was a hidden agenda. She wondered what the agenda would turn out to be.
That was something Nick taught her. There were always hidden agendas. The task was to identify them, and it was always best to assume the worst in doing so.
"When I meet someone," he told her, "the first question I ask myself is what's the worst thing I can imagine that person doing? What I imagine, they'll probably do."
Damn Nick. Now she had to try to determine what his hidden agenda was as well. She couldn't ignore what he'd done for her on the home planet or here. She couldn't ignore whatever it was fate or bad luck or poor judgment that kept them crashing into each other.
She'd slept with him once, pulled by that something into intense lovemaking, wrestling for power with their bodies, continuing as they'd begun, laughing at each other's attempts to win out. Only once, and afterward, she felt bruised and darkened by the interaction, wanted only to break the connection between them. But she couldn't.
He started nagging at her about the arts after that. He wanted her to teach him what she knew, some of the more complex ways of power that she'd been taught in her Mertec tradition, from her grandparents, and later, from Jake and One Bird. But what gifts she had she wouldn't share unless she felt specifically called to do so. With Nick, she felt specifically enjoined not to teach him a damn thing, though she couldn't articulate her reasons for that intuition.
Maybe he just seemed too anxious. Too hungry. But apparently he'd already been dabbling in the arts for years—without ritual, without guidance, without any way to contain or ground the kind of energy that got kicked around when you touched a wounded psyche.
On their last case, he attempted contact with the prisoner, denying he'd done so, and denying he'd botched it. Jaguar had gone in afterward to try to repair the emotional breach Nick had torn open with his clumsy approach, but it was too late. She'd shielded him, because she felt culpable for not helping him when he asked. But that was too late, also.
He'd not only done irreparable damage to the prisoner, Jaguar suspected he'd come out of the interaction shadowed.
Shadowed empath. Eating the psyches of his prisoners without knowing how to rid himself of the debris afterward. Becoming what he ate, his ability to see clouded with the rage and fear and hate that invaded him from the empathic contact.
Or maybe he'd been moving toward it all along, the old pain from the Serials creating a chronic darkness that drew darkness to it. He'd seen his wife and two children killed during the Serials, and he bore a scar across his chest, a bullet wound he'd gotten in trying to save them. When he made love to Jaguar, he'd taken her hand and pressed it into the jagged white line of skin as he pressed himself into her.
She could hear him laughing at her, laughing about what the Board would do to her. Nick, laughing and pulling her close. Another male body asking for hers, and she feeling something like longing for that warmth, something like a centrifugal force that pulled her in deeper and deeper. Why did she consent to share his bed, however briefly? For the warmth, the memory of what he'd done for her when she was lost and alone?
Or was it some shadow in her that pulled her to him?
Shadow of the past. She didn't need to attend any of the memorial day events to remember the Serials. Right now, her memory was sucking her back in time at a time when she needed to focus on the present. Jaguar reached into the pocket of her leather vest and felt the crumbled leaves of dried mint, brought them to her face, and breathed in. She emptied her thoughts to a still center, letting the air that entered her lungs carve out a clear space where vision might appear.
> She wasn't an adept and had no precognitive capacities, as Alex did, but here, in the presence of the animals whose name she bore, within the watchful gaze of their eyes, she could listen to whatever whispered in her, through her, voices in the wind telling her what she needed to know. In the belly of the beast she couldn't see ahead, but sometimes she could see through.
Hecate turned her yellow eyes to the human presence and growled. Jaguar breathed and opened to those eyes, to the dance of the night, to herself.
"I myself, Spirit in Flesh, speak," she said, intoning the ancient Nauhatl that cleared the way to vision, to the clear space.
She felt the hiss of molecular shift and the skin-stretching sense of boundaries splitting. The eyes opened, welcomed her, calling her in. Then, the free fall through nowhere to infinity, internal, but unbounded since it took part in an energy that most people didn't even believe existed. She gasped in the joy of opening herself, being shattered and rewoven within this vast space.
This, without words. Just a touch of fur. Then, the whispers calling to her in voices so old they had no name.
Where is your darkness?
Her darkness. Where? What shadow in her?
Your darkness.
She felt herself moving through the thickness of night, slowly and carefully. Reluctantly. Here. Somewhere inside the slowrise of terror. Inside the past. Inside the Serials.
Here. Where the dead walk.
Manhattan. Here, where she was walking with her grandfather.
She was a ten-year-old, out buying ice cream with her grandfather. They'd just listened to a news pundit saying that serial and ritual killing had risen in North America by 225 percent in the last year. He wanted to rededicate the year, call it the Year of the Serials. Maybe the decade of the killer, too.
That's what I say, people. The Year of the Serials. Maybe we should sell T-shirts, right? Call in and tell me what you say.
But that was just the beginning of the storm.
She stood at an ice-cream vendor's stand, holding her grandfather's hand, listening to his conversation with a child's capacity for absorption in the absence of understanding.
THE FEAR PRINCIPLE Page 5