Analog Science Fiction and Fact 11/01/10

by ASF

  “Damn,” Denise said. “So he really did take her.”

  “You doubted it?”

  “Wouldn’t you? There’s a reason I divorced you. At the end, you weren’t exactly rational.” She looked up, met my gaze. “Was the withdrawal really that bad?”

  “Yes.” If I’d known what it would cost, maybe I would never have taken the implant. But once I had it . . .

  I remembered how it had been in Laurel’s office. The godlike power. The sense of being alive again. Had Denise not been there . . . “Jerret’s going to be pretty jittery.”

  I read the number to Laurel over the satphone.

  “–7987?” she asked.

  I double-checked. “Yes.”

  “Okay, that one went to Advanced Military Systems Consulting in . . . Tehachapi.”

  “Where the hell’s that?”

  “California. Between Bakersfield and Palm Springs. They’re one of our smaller subcontractors, working on security aps. Banks and things like that.”

  “What’s the address?”

  “Uh-uh. They’re our subcontractor. I am this close to a deal with the FBI. Those folks are going to tell me how one of their flies wound up in your daughter’s apartment, or by God, I’ll yank their contract and to hell with the banks. How soon can you get to Palm Springs?”

  I shrugged, but we were voice only, so of course she couldn’t see it. “As soon as we can.”

  “Meet me at the Hyatt. I’ll book you and your wife a room.”

  “She’s not—” but Laurel had rung off.

  Another day, another flight. Not the world’s easiest connection, actually. We had to change planes in Vegas. At midnight.

  Laurel’s trip wouldn’t have been any easier, but if she was feeling it, she wasn’t letting on. “The Ontario airport’s a little closer, but the hotels here are better,” she said. “Did you have a good night’s sleep?”

  Denise shot her a what-planet-do-you-come-from look, but I intervened. “Good enough.” The Corps had taught me that any sleep you actually wake up from was a good one. The past few years had raised doubts about that—the value-of-waking-up part, that is—but right now, I was on a mission. Even jetlagged and without a swarm I felt . . . surprisingly alive.

  “Great,” Laurel said, ignoring whatever subtleties she might have observed. She handed me a scone that might as well have come from Denise’s Starbucks. “Let’s hit the road.”

  AMSC’s offices were in a nondescript industrial park like a million others. The type of place that has a name like Swan Island, Bluegrass Meadows, or Mustang Heights, and where if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, you’ll wind up walking up and down roads not made for pedestrians, wondering why the hell you can go all the way from number 1401A to 1637D without ever seeing 1513C.

  Laurel missed it the first two times, but she’d obviously spent more time in places like this than I had, because on the third pass, she found an unmarked door to a whole slew of offices with numbers in the 1510s.

  Two minutes later, we had a bland-looking guy named Bruce Larch offering us coffee.

  If he’d ever known real, physical danger, I’d be surprised. Roundish baby face. Too-quick smile, quicker handshake. I’ve bought cars from guys like him.

  “One of our bugs?” he said. “In a missing girl’s apartment?”

  “My dau—” I started, but Laurel cut me off.

  “We’ve got the serial number. There’s no question it’s yours.”

  “I have no idea—”

  “Don’t give me that.” She stared at him, and I wondered how much money even lobotomized CI-MEMS might be worth on the open market. Laurel, I realized, was probably very good at what she did. “Kip here is one of our consultants. He’s ex-military CI-MEMS. Do you have any idea what those guys can do? Right now, he’s got a hundred bugs hiding in this room—no, you can’t see them, so there’s no point trying to look—monitoring your biometrics. He’s a damn walking lie detector . . .” She glanced my way. “Aren’t you, Kip?”

  I nodded. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Denise looking too, but there was no way to respond and stay in the role in which Laurel had cast me.

  “. . . so don’t scam me or we’ll pull your contract faster than you can get your tie caught in a paper shredder. Do you understand?”

  Larch took a half-step backward, bumping into the corner of a beat-up desk that looked like it had come from Office Liquidators. His voice squeaked. “Yes.”

  “You should also know he’s ex-CI-MEMS. Do you know what that means?”

  Larch shook his head.

  “It means he’s been through all kinds of shit you and I don’t want to think about, stuff that drives a lot of them right over the edge. PTSD. OCD. Paranoia.” She shot me a quick look, and I wondered how the hell she knew. Then I remembered the familiar voice on the phone. I wasn’t the only one. “It means he’s one scary dude, Bruce. And he really doesn’t like being played for a fool.” She turned to me. “How many people have you killed?”

  I shrugged. “That’s classified.” I picked up a ballpoint pen up from Larch’s desk and pushed the button. Click.

  She turned back. “So, Bruce, let’s abbreviate this. How the hell did your insect wind up in an apartment in Austin?”

  If it’s possible for a doughy complexion to melt, Larch’s had. “What was that serial number again?”

  Laurel recited it like she was talking to a six-year-old. “I think you know where it came from. Doesn’t he, Kip?”

  I nodded. Click. Click.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Larch said. “If I lose my job . . .”

  “That’s the least of your worries. Do you know who we’re working with at the FBI?”

  Larch shook his head. “Who?”

  “You don’t want to know. If you’re lucky, you won’t find out. Right, Kip?”

  I nodded again. Click. Click. Click.

  “So, last chance, Bruce. Your job’s toast. Want to spend twenty years in jail?”

  For a moment, I thought she’d worked him too hard. Bruce’s complexion was positively gray. A heart attack wasn’t going to do us any good. Briefly, I wished I’d taken Laurel’s offer. With a swarm, I’d know if he was in medical danger. But I’d also wind up like Jerret. Damn. Time to act like the norm I now was. Time to act, even if I didn’t fully know what I was doing.

  I set the pen back on the desk. “Relax. Tell us the truth and we can keep the FBI out of this. Lie . . .”

  Larch sucked his lip. “Okay . . . I’ve got this thing about football. I like the Saints.”

  “The New Orleans Saints?”

  “Yes. And a few other teams. But last year they didn’t like me all that much. I kind of wound up owing a bunch of money.” He licked his lips. “A big bunch of money. To this guy named Ray Perkins. At least that’s what he goes by. Who knows what he’s really called. Rumor is he’s into all kinds of things. He’d found this bodyguard he wanted to hire. Ex-CI-MEMS, like you. So we made a trade. I got him a few Musca domestica, agreed to keep him supplied. Perkins declined to, uh, collect, the debt.”

  “Where did you take the flies?” I asked. Briefly, I wondered if even someone like Larch could tell that my interest was more than professional. But I needn’t have worried.

  “Some condo-hotel thing in Chicago. I don’t know the address. We went with a long-lived species, gene-mods, actually, so I only need to bring new ones out every six to eight weeks. Musca domestica, with double normal lifespan. Sterile, of course, so they don’t escape into the environment and mess up the ecology. Even the military’s not got ’em yet. Latest thing. Still beta-testing.” The used-car salesman, sure that if he could only talk long enough, we’d forget what we’d actually asked.

  Laurel saw it too. “Glad to know we’re getting something for all that money we’re paying you,” she said. “Too bad you decided to give it to a criminal. What do they call that, Kip?”

  I had no idea. “Treason? Espionage? Misappropriation of gove
rnment secrets? Something like that.”

  “You hear that, Bruce? You didn’t just give this guy bugs, you gave him super-secret bugs. One more chance. Where did you take them?”

  “I told you, I don’t know the address.” He waved a hand at me, nearly knocking a Darth Vader bobblehead off his desk. “Ask him. He’ll tell you I’m telling the truth.”

  “Fine,” Laurel said, taking me off the hook. She spun a computer toward him. “EarthMaps. And don’t tell me you can’t find it.”

  “Remember,” I added, “misappropriation of government secrets is a felony.”

  Larch collapsed into a chair. But he turned to the computer, clicked in, worked the controller. Took a dizzyingly fast joyride through urban sprawl. “There.” He stopped at a tallish building, maybe thirty floors. “I don’t know any more than that. They met me in the lobby, blindfolded me on the elevator. Believe me, I didn’t want to know what floor the guy operated out of. I’m pretty sure he had the whole floor to himself, though, because they didn’t seem worried about anyone else being in the hallway. But they kept me blindfold the whole time, so I don’t even know what he looks like. Just that he has this nasal accent, like he’s from New York or Boston or something.”

  “Those are kind of different,” Denise said.

  Larch seemed to notice for the first time that there were three of us in his office. “Sorry. I was born in Orange County. All that East Coast stuff sounds the same.”

  “What about the bodyguard?” Laurel said.

  “Ex-mil’s all I know. Though he must have been in the room, because the moment I opened the carrier, I could hear the insects fly out, one by one, like he was taking control of them, then and there. He never spoke, but Perkins called him Jay something or other. Jail? Something weird like that. Jayelle?”

  “J.L.?” I asked.

  Larch shrugged. “Could be. I really don’t get those East Coast accents.”

  I woke screaming.

  I’d been in the ravine, my shoulder not feeling like a shoulder. I was trying to reach behind my back like the first-aid said, only my arm wouldn’t do it because something was in the way and the Ladenites were coming, were going to get me, because I couldn’t get up and move, but who cared because it was the shoulder with the tat and I was blind and Senseless and might as well die but that made no sense because the tat was still a tat and the dislocation hadn’t torn a nerve, so where was my swarm? Why didn’t I know what was happening? Would I even know when a Ladenite tossed in a grenade, concussing me, killing me, letting my swarm get away . . . ?

  Phone, I thought, as my senses gelled to the here-and-now. Only there wasn’t any phone because I wasn’t in my apartment. I was in some damn airport, with dozens of people staring at me like I was crazy. Which I guess I was.

  Two of the dozens were Denise and Laurel. “Are you okay?” I think it was Denise who said it, but I wasn’t sure.

  I nodded. I wasn’t ready for words yet. Not unless they were to a faceless voice on the phone who’d been there himself. My arm was pins and needles from how I’d somehow slumped and fallen asleep on it.

  “What happened? A nightmare?”

  “Something like that.”

  “How often do you get those?”

  “Couple of times a week.” I forced myself to keep talking. “Sometimes more, sometimes less. Especially when I’m not sleeping well.” Which I never was, but there was no point going into that.

  “You didn’t do that when we were together.”

  That wasn’t quite true. But the flashbacks had been different then, and as long as she was there, I’d been all right. At night, I never let myself roll far enough away not to be able to touch her. A fingertip on her back, shoulder, hip—the barest touch was all I needed. Heaven would have been to stay at home . . . and keep the Sense. Purgatory was having to choose. Hell was losing it all. I’m not much of a theologian, but I know a lot about hell. Hell is the never-ending land of if-only. Coulda-shoulda-woulda, that’s how the psychs put it, always with an implicit don’t go there, as if that’s possible. I coulda-shoulda said no to the Sense and served out my term as an ordinary grunt. But would I have done it?

  I wrenched out of the past, looked at Denise. Really looked at her, for the first time since . . . The familiar laugh lines, now etched with worry. The once-perfect complexion just starting to change. A decade younger than me, aging well. “There was one time when it was a lot worse,” I said.

  Her fingers touched her throat. “Why didn’t you explain?”

  I shrugged. “It was classified.” Their answer, not mine. And they’d had me in De-con within an hour. Maybe I wouldn’t have cared as much about national security if I’d had more time to think. “But you’d have still thought I was too dangerous.” Which, in fact, I had been. Then there’d been Jerret, and after that she’d been as angry as Cora had been.

  The Sense or her? If I could choose again, which would it be?

  Then I realized that I’d been given a second chance and hadn’t made the same choice. Back in Laurel’s office, I’d been handed my dream—and walked away from it. Because Denise was there.

  When you’ve only got one lead, at least there’s no uncertainty about what to do next. We needed to find out if Perkins was in that highrise. If he was, Jerret and Cora wouldn’t be far away.

  The question was how to do it. The building was a cylindrical tower of blue-tinted glass, a lot of space to search. Not to mention that banging on doors was likely to get us shot.

  It was Denise who came up with the solution.

  “Look,” she said, “we know he’s got a whole floor to himself, right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “And this is an older building. Late 1980s, maybe early 1990s. Certainly no later than 1995 or 2000.”

  “If you say so.”

  “So it’s not going to be full up. Trust me, this is what I do. That’s one of those dead eras in real estate. Everyone loves the latest/greatest, or the cool, older stuff. There’s nothing wrong with a building like this—they’re often great bargains—but for this guy to pick it . . . well, it says a lot about him.”

  “Such as?” This wasn’t a side of Denise I’d ever seen.

  “There are a couple of possibilities, but I’m guessing he’s about forty years old, grew up in a place like this when it was new, but not all that happily. He probably thinks that by redoing it he can somehow change all that.” Just like I’d tried to do with Cora, she didn’t say. But her gaze was an accusation.

  Laurel saved me. “So what’s the relevance?”

  “For Perkins, not a lot, unless I was selling to him. A lot of what I do is applied psychology. But the point is that this building isn’t full up: I’d guarantee it. Any floor with a vacancy’s not the right one. All we need is the vacancy list.”

  Unfortunately, getting it wasn’t quite that simple.

  Inside, the building seemed innocent enough. Starbucks in the lobby; overweight security guards behind a fake-marble desk. Banked elevators. Boutiques to one side, restaurant/brewpub to the other. An upscale health club in the back, with enough windows that only the most chicly fit would dare use it.

  Plastic letters on a brass signboard announced office suites on the lower floors: bland-sounding names with alphabet-soup credentials. Jones Smith Consultants, LLC. Adain Pappalardo, NACT. That type of thing. Fancy-sounding lounge/restaurant on the thirty-fourth floor.

  Denise had been online while I’d stepped into a Rite Aid for supplies. Now, barely glancing at the signboard, she pushed the elevator call button, then the button for the third floor. Two minutes later, we were in the sales/rental office, talking to a pale, dark-haired woman whose nameplate proclaimed her to be Hailey Carlton.

  Denise handed over her business card. “We’re interested in apartments with lakefront or skyline views,” she said—a nice way of saying everything. “Your building is a bit old, but the location’s attractive. Do you have a vacancy list?”

  Hailey sm
iled. “Yes, but since July, other than for the hotel floors, of course, it’s been sales only. We’re in the process of remodeling and converting.”

  “That’s fine,” Denise said. “Even if they don’t wind up living here, Ki–, Kim and . . . Laura here might be interested in investment properties.”

  Hailey grabbed a sheet of paper and plucked keys from her desk. “The market’s tight right now, but we’ve got twenty-three units available. Mostly one-bedrooms, but there’s a couple of twos, plus a three, coming up next month. How much are you looking to spend?”

  “Whatever gets the best value. Can you just print out the list, and we’ll think about it?”

  “You really ought to see them.” Hailey rose. “Pictures and floor plans just don’t do them justice.”

  Two hours later, I’d seen enough cute kitchens, cozy lofts, and charming breakfast nooks for a lifetime. And we’d only actually seen half the units on the list. But at least we now had the list. Only four floors were full-up: the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-fourth. If Larch was right, Cora had to be on one of them.

  Back in the lobby, I tried to park Denise and Laurel in the Starbucks. “This shouldn’t take any more than ten minutes,” I said. “If I’m not back in twenty . . .”

  “I’m going with you,” Denise said.

  I glanced around. I hadn’t seen any insects, and Jerret would have trouble monitoring the lobby, even if he tried. Buildings like this had a lot of transmission-blocking steel, and it was too cold to put bugs outside for an external transmission relay. Still, there was no use taking unnecessary risks.

  “You’re right. Let’s get a real lunch.”

  “That’s not—”

  But I had a hand on her elbow, ostensibly to steer her out the door, but actually giving it a little squeeze. A private signal. Shhh. I’ll explain later.

  I’d done it automatically, without conscious thought. If I’d thought first, I’d have expected her to slap my hand away. Instead, she turned without resistance. “Okay.”

  I glanced at her, stunned by the instant, familiar communication. Realized that in all those years, I’d never even thought about another woman. Realized I’d just assumed the absence of a new ring on her finger, too.