The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1)

by Randall Farmer

  Fuck! I carefully showed no hint of my reaction on my face.

  “Do they know which Arm they’re after?” The FBI was playing a devious public relations game, so far going after me without revealing my true name. Fighting a range war against the hero of the Battle in Detroit wouldn’t play well with the FBI’s pro-Transform agents.

  “What does it matter?” the judge’s wife, a blue-haired matron with a truly impressive bust, answered. “They’re all monsters. I don’t understand why the FBI hasn’t killed them all years ago.”

  “I think the FBI’s going after all the Arms now, after the Phoenix church massacre,” one of the others in the cluster said. I repressed a wince. Neither Amy nor I had managed to pin the massacre on any of the Arms. We either had a rogue Arm working in secret, a feral Arm we had somehow missed, or the Hunters or some other powerful predatory Major Transform had found a way to masquerade as an Arm. None of our possibilities would bring us chocolates and roses.

  “I wish them all the luck in the world,” another said. “It isn’t as if the FBI hasn’t been trying.”

  “It’s all those Transforms.” The judge’s wife said the word as if she mouthed an obscenity. “We never should have allowed all those Transforms to live out with normal people. If there weren’t any Transforms, there wouldn’t be any Arms.”

  “So what else do they know about Cazort? How is some woman able to masquerade as a successful businessman?” I said. I drew them out, carefully extracting everything they knew about the situation. They happily gave me what I wanted, not in the least suspicious. I carefully watched the mood I projected, pitching my voice to ease their natural wariness.

  Concealing the fact you’re a Major Transform isn’t difficult. The thing bothering me the most about the Phoenix church massacre was the fact the perp hadn’t bothered. The perp intentionally made sure people knew an Arm conducted the massacre, and because of that, all of us Arms were neck deep in shit. As one of the more public Arms, I had suffered the worst, with my lair burned down and two of my own, Sammy and Consuela, dying in the attack.

  Now this. With one knife thrust in the back, the FBI had just taken away three quarters of my financial support. This would also put a major dent in my research activities, and with my dreams at night going bad, and Amy breathing down my back on the subject, this I didn’t need.

  Fucking goddamned FBI. Fucking goddamned perp. In my disguise I continued to smile and prattle, but any Major Transform able to read my emotions wouldn’t be fooled. I was, alas, a tad angry.

  ---

  The waiting room in the shoddy office on the south side of Houston was filled with little brochures that said things like ‘Injured? Know Your Rights’, ‘Why You Need a Will’, and ‘Know Your Rights as a Tenant’. John Cascarelli, Attorney at Law, had a good lock on his cheap office, but not quite good enough. I slipped through the waiting room past the receptionist’s desk and into the back. My eyes adapted easily to the darkness.

  I found the file room through the second door on the left and searched under P for Greg Petroski. John Cascarelli kept his files in order, and after a moment I found the file.

  Charges: Conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, conspiracy to defraud, tax evasion, aiding and abetting all sorts of things. Quite a collection Greg had accumulated, but the Feds were mad at anything to do with an Arm, and they were hitting everyone who had ever dealt with my Phil Cazort identity with everything they could come up with.

  On the last page, the lawyer had written in big letters ‘Guilty as sin’.

  I shut the file. There was no copy machine in the office, and so I would have to take the file to copy it and come back a second time tonight. Doable. I slipped out.

  ---

  “How much trouble is Greg in?” I asked, still fatigued from the stress of the flight from Houston to Chicago. I didn’t mind flying, just the lack of control.

  Frank Russo shook his head and spoke in a voice gone hoarse from years of cigars and alcohol. We sat in the study of Frank’s house in Chicago, a dark place filled with dusty books and Frank’s collection of cigar cutters. “He’s dead. There are too many orders for gym equipment. He can’t explain where any of the equipment went. Also, he can’t explain where the funds for his gym came from, and why he can stay in business when his gym is losing money the same way a crooked cop loses evidence. They know they’ve got a live one, and they’re going to keep after him until they get something.”

  “Have they gone after you, yet?”

  Frank shook his head and took a sip of his Jack Daniels on ice. He didn’t look much the worse for wear. He was a man used to dealing with stress.

  “I was just a man fooled by an Arm. Half the city of Chicago can claim that right now. Even if I knew you were an Arm, I didn’t do anything. This guy, he’s supplying you with equipment. Actively aiding and abetting. The way the courts have been about Arms recently, he’ll be lucky if they don’t hang him.”

  I leaned back in my chair and nodded. “I’ll get him out.”

  ---

  “I’m going to have to leave Chicago,” I said to Haggerty, eying the stack of reports on the coffee table in front of me with disgust and concealing the ache in my heart. After visiting Russo, I swung by my Church of the New Humanity storefront and caught an FBI investigator poking around and gently questioning the day staff. I didn’t know if they had found a link or just snooped into everything associated with the word ‘Transform’, but enough was enough. I certainly didn’t want to risk the Church, as my secret project was months or years away from going public. “Either that or go to war with the FBI.” I hadn’t killed any of them, yet. Haggerty’s orders.

  Amy slapped closed my latest report on my research progress and shook her head. “We would lose.” At least she said ‘we’. “Some damned Crow gave everything they knew about all the senior Arms to the FBI back on May 23rd.” Well before the Phoenix Church Massacre. Damn. There went half of my theories out the window.

  “You’ve confirmed the timing?” I said. Amy nodded. This was what we expected, but the date chilled me. We had a goddamned Crow conspiracy after us, almost definitely prompted by the Eskimo Spear revelation.

  I couldn’t afford the Hilton’s presidential suite, but I lived here today. I wouldn’t be paying, either. I appreciated the finery, the nicely polished dark wood furniture. The wet bar. The crystal. The silk sheets. I stood and stretched, covering my anxiety. Not enough, so I did a short tumbling run, ending up against a window. I admired the view of The Loop. “Did they pick up anything on Keaton?”

  Amy snorted. A couple of months ago, her opinion of Keaton had taken a drastic turn for the worse, and it hadn’t been good to begin with. Something had obviously happened between them, but I hadn’t managed to extract the details from either of them.

  She abandoned the sofa to follow me, carefully keeping herself between me and the room exit. I had no idea why, save that she often did screwy things of this nature as training exercises. “The Boss lucked out. Everything the Crows leaked covered her now defunct Detroit operation. You know about my problems.” The FBI had raided Haggerty’s midtown Manhattan lair the same night they burned down my Chicago home. They took seven of her people in custody, including Mark Castlemont, her artist, lover, and main confidant. Rescuing them was high on our agenda. “I’ve also learned the FBI raided Sylvia’s Dallas business office on June 2nd. They were unhappy they didn’t find as much as they wanted, but my guess is they did manage to shut down all of Bass’s businesses.” Haggerty snorted. “She wasn’t much into diversification.” Amy and Sylvia didn’t get along, not even slightly.

  “June 2nd. Before the massacre,” I said, palm flat against the window acreage. “The timing puts Bass back on the top of our suspect list.”

  “She never moved off the top of mine,” Haggerty said. She went into a martial arts attack stance. I caught her movement out of the corner of my eye and flinched into a defensive stance, but by the time I had done so Haggerty had
moved on to doing shadow boxing with, annoyingly, my shadow. I moved out of the sunlight. “This isn’t proof, though, and we can’t do anything without proof. I’m going to be giving the FBI some rough prods, so it’s a good idea you’ve decided to move.”

  Haggerty was our FBI expert, and even from her, ‘rough prods’ meant blood spilled. If my presence in Chicago wasn’t already untenable, her rampage would make it so.

  “Now, about the juice from a Focus project,” Haggerty said. Her voice came from behind me, even though to my eyes she remained in front of me. She never tired of these games. I suspected she was invisible and to my left. “I don’t understand why you gave up on Cooley.” I sat down in the overstuffed leather brass-buttoned hotel chair by the coffee table where I had my documentation spread out.

  “Cooley wasn’t going to work.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just a gut feeling, I guess.”

  Haggerty appeared in front of me, shook her head and got in my face. “I would prefer some logic and data.” A boss Arm style demand if I ever heard one. “You tagged her?”

  She stayed in my face. “Yes.”

  “And the tag felt wrong?”

  “No, the tag was okay.” Shit. I didn’t know what she wanted. I really wanted to be mourning my lost city, not dealing with a boss Arm in a mood. “After I tagged her, I did all the standard tests, and nothing.”

  “So, when did this gut feel of yours occur?”

  “When she started following me around like a puppy dog after the juice cycling test,” I said. Haggerty frowned; she hadn’t expected my comment. “She wanted more time juice cycling. After I left to work on some other business, she showed up at my house, with just one wild-eyed unhinged bodyguard, and attempted to bargain for more. I slapped her with several tag-based punishments and she ignored them. Hell, boss, she wouldn’t stop begging even when I overloaded her with pain. I even used some of Keaton’s disgusting pain-torture tricks and I couldn’t get her to stop.”

  Haggerty got out of my face, sat down in the hotel chair across from me, leaned back and studied the ceiling. “Give me some metrics on this,” Haggerty said.

  Metrics? I didn’t have ‘pain meters’. “On my one to ten personal pain scale, which I use when I get Stacy to torture me to help me think, I hit Linda multiple times with ‘over 10s’. What would have knocked me unconscious.”

  “Did you give her enough pain to knock Cooley out?”

  I nodded. “It didn’t help.”

  “That’s not what I’m looking for.” She wouldn’t stop digging until she dug up what she wanted. Following my Haggerty protocols, vastly different from my Keaton protocols, I kept a pleasant expression on my face, my eyes open with rapt attention, and projected an aura of action. “I want to know how far up the pain scale it took to knock her out. Even a guess would help.”

  “Sixteen. My guess.”

  “Finally.” Haggerty pulled on my tag to make sure she had my attention. “Dammit, Carol, you have the data to give, if you just bothered to organize your thoughts.” She paused to let her point sink in.

  Never fail an Arm boss. Worse, each Arm boss will have different needs in this style of situation. Haggerty wasn’t going to get angry with me, beat me up or cause me pain. Instead, she would belittle my methods and my intellect for every little failure. Worse, each little failure invited Amy to dig deeper into my business, and if I failed too many times, she would dig deep enough into my personal life to really piss me off, never a good thing in front of any Arm boss.

  “Tell me about your training results.” Use ‘metrics’, she didn’t need to say.

  “I’ve been training Linda and her people for over two years,” I said. “Linda’s not athletic.” I gave numbers. “She heals quickly and can function while gravely wounded.” I gave more numbers. “Juice movement is rock solid, she supports 10 triads, and…”

  I didn’t know where Haggerty was going with this, but I suspected I would find out eventually, likely after many hours of her digging. In the end, she would make me prove, with logic and data and far too much wasted time, exactly what I knew from my gut feel of the situation: Linda wouldn’t work.

  Then Amy would order me to find a better Focus to work with. She would be right, and I suspected she would order me to put this at the top of my project queue. Getting a better Focus to work with wouldn’t be easy, as Linda was considered in the top 5% of all Focuses.

  I only knew of one possible better candidate in the Midwest Region, a Focus best known for her temper and her inability to live up to her potential.

  ---

  “Carol.”

  “Rise and shine,” I said over the phone. Tonya’s people took nearly ten minutes to rouse their Focus, appallingly inefficient. “Time for all good Focuses to be awake.” I mean, it was five in the morning already. I had already done my morning workout. I knew Focuses needed more sleep than Arms did, but even so, a Focus should be up by five in the morning. You would have thought she was a normal.

  “You sound like Keaton. What do you need?” Tonya asked, her voice still rough with sleep. Wary, as well. With good reason. I never trusted her, and she never trusted me, and so on and so forth. Our mutual distrust might even have had something to do with her part in breaking me when I had been a captive in the CDC back in ’68. She had switched sides since, and paid her debt to me, but still, no matter how hard I tried, she always seemed to me to be ‘the other side’. Lori kept insisting that Tonya held to her word, and represented the Cause in a wonderful fashion on the Council, but I knew the bitch didn’t have her heart in the Cause, no matter what anyone else said.

  “I need a Focus,” I said.

  “That’s interesting. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for three days, ever since the FBI took out your Chicago businesses,” Tonya said. Shit. Probably half of Zielinski’s urgent ‘call me’ notes were due to Tonya’s insistence on phone contact after every little bump in the road. Why couldn’t that bitch go do some real work, like Lori, instead of spending all her time with a telephone stuck to her ear?

  Well, I didn’t want to hear her expected warning to stay away from the FBI, so I waited her out. Eventually, Tonya gave in. “A Focus? What do you need a Focus for?”

  “Experimentation. All you fine fat Focuses flush with juice still haven’t figured out a way to give juice to an Arm, and it’s time to do something about the problem. I want a nice young Focus, about five years or so, old enough to know what she’s doing, and I’m going to train her. We’ll see how far your Focus abilities can be trained, and I’ll bet when we do, we’ll find in there somewhere the ability to move juice to an Arm.”

  Tonya groaned. “Lots of Focuses train their abilities, and some of us have been training them for years. No one can move juice to an Arm.”

  “Focus training isn’t worth spit in a hurricane,” I said, no sympathy for her annoyance. “You have no conception of discipline and real training, and the pathetic noodling you call training is a joke. When I say training, I mean real training.”

  “Oh, no. I’m not going to turn some Focus into your hands for Arm training.”

  I laughed. She should be begging me to train Focuses, dammit, if she had brains for anything besides politics. You would think what Keaton and I did for Lori when we trained her, what Keaton did for Wendy Mann and what I did for Linda and Gloria would have brought Tonya and her East Region Focuses begging to our door, but Tonya and reality were at best on speaking terms, and the two of them didn’t get along very well. “You don’t think Focuses are tough enough for that? It would be interesting to see what a Focus did with real Arm training, but I wasn’t thinking of something quite that serious. Pressure and sweat, but no egregious torture and no personality breakdowns. The point is to train her abilities, not to tame a killing machine.”

  “You think this has a chance to work?” Finally. A little bit of thought from Tonya.

  “Perhaps,” I said. “We’ve
got one case of a Focus giving juice to an Arm. If we apply some training and some stress to the right Focus, we might be able to reproduce the event, perhaps even reliably.”

  Tonya paused in thought, and I heard her greedy Focus mental gears turning.

  “You going to be using Zielinski on this?” Then again, maybe not that much thought.

  “Of course I’ll be using Zielinski on this.”

  “I think something might be arranged,” Tonya said. “What are you offering?”

  At times I wondered if Tonya made her household Transforms bargain for their juice.

  “Not a thing,” I said. “You want this as much as I do. You’ll give it to me for free because you want this happening under your control rather than somewhere else.” I paused, and just before she spoke again, I continued. “Besides, we’re on the same side, remember? Getting Focuses to work with Arms and vice versa is one of the core goals of the Cause.” As I said, her allegiance to the Cause was just a little too superficial for my tastes.

  Besides, if she gave me too much grief, I would go to Teas or even Claunch. I had been doing a complex dance with both first Focuses for the past three years. Teas, the idiot, thought she was hot shit enough to manipulate me, and I took merciless advantage of her to ferret out information about the first Focuses. As did Lori. Claunch, on the other hand, really was hot shit and, annoyingly, occasionally useful, though she was clearly the sort of person whose right hand didn’t know what her left hand did. She had approached me from her position as the official head of the Focus Network, but I played coy. No, I wouldn’t approach Claunch unless forced, but Tonya knew full well about Claunch’s dance with me, and how much it would hurt her politically if Claunch and I really started to tango.

  I had gone after the entire Council a couple of years ago and won, not as a nasty blood dripping Arm, but as a devious politician. They hadn’t known what to make of me. My weapon was the Lucy Peoples Memorial Fund, which I set up and sponsored. The fund, named after the first Focus who had been accidentally killed by the first American Arm way back in the late ‘50s, was run and administered by the Council specifically to provide monetary aid to new Focuses in need. I still got a good snicker whenever I thought about how well the fund worked, as I not only bought the good will of the Council but also got them to buy into the sub rosa world of Arm finances. The fund also got around the ‘Arm pet’ problem of subsidizing individual Focuses. The nicest thing about the Lucy Peoples Memorial Fund was the fact it also attracted donations from a great many external sources. There was even talk on the Council of taking things a step further in coming years, following in the footsteps of the United Negro College Fund.