Chameleon Uncovered

by BR Kingsolver

  “We’re being tracked,” Mike said.

  “So it seems.” I still maintained my Jasmine persona, and she should have been virtually unknown in Chicago. “Do you have any enemies here?” I slipped my hand into my purse and curled my fingers around my pistol grip.

  “I haven’t been in Chicago in ten years,” he said. “Let’s try to get to the car.”

  We picked up our pace, but before we reached the street where we left the car, a group of people seemed to coalesce around us. I recognized one person, Carly, the young woman with whom I’d shared the hospitality of the Chicago Police. She’d only seen me in my own form, though. Jasmine should be a complete stranger.

  “Hi, Libby,” she said.

  “The name’s Jasmine.”

  “Whatever name you want to use, I know you.”

  That was unnerving. No one had ever seen through any of my personas.

  “We need you to come with us,” Carly said. “We need to talk.”

  A quick scan showed me there were about twenty people surrounding us, including a couple of vamps and half a dozen lycans, most shifted into their wolfman form. I could take a vamp one-on-one, and likewise a lycan. They might have been stronger than I was, but few people had the training I’d received. That said, fighting my way through a group that large was out of the question.

  I wasn’t alone, though. I glanced at Mike, and he spoke up.

  “I don’t think so. Call in the morning, and we’ll set up an appointment,” he said.

  “You don’t understand,” a man said, stepping forward. “You’re coming with us now.” He was thin and of average height. Nothing especially intimidating, but he had the swagger and air of a bully about him. The way he held himself. The smirk on his face.

  “Eel,” several people in the crowd said, and I didn’t like the grins on their faces when they said it.

  He moved forward, his hand extended to grab me.

  I took him off guard by stepping toward him. My left hand shot out and took him by the throat. A bolt of electrical energy surged from him to me. He had a mutation for bioelectrogenesis, similar to that of an electric eel. The shock was enough to knock most people down, but it didn’t affect me at all. My hand closed on his throat and I shook him like a dog would shake a rat, then tossed him away from me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a lycan move toward me. Mike spun and delivered a snap kick to the lycan’s chin. The mutant fell to the ground, his head at an unnatural angle, and his open eyes staring at the sky.

  We both pulled our pistols, and Mike moved behind me, facing the other way.

  “As my friend said, you should call and make an appointment.”

  Carly nodded. “I’m afraid I don’t have your number.”

  “Come here,” I said, crooking my finger toward me.

  She came toward me, stopping a couple of feet away. I leaned close to her and said, “Come to the Art Institute in the morning. Ten o’clock. Tell the guards to call the director’s office and tell them you have an appointment with Libby Nelson. You can bring one other person with you. Understood?”

  Carly nodded her head. Then she turned and said, “Let them go. We don’t need a fight.”

  We followed Carly, and the crowd reluctantly parted to let us through. When we were in the clear, she stepped aside to let us walk past her.

  “What’s this about?” I asked her.

  “Mutie business. You need to know what we’re fighting for.”

  “I think I have a pretty good idea,” I said, “but you’re going about it the wrong way.”

  Mike and I hurried to the car, got in, and he drove away. We abandoned the car a few blocks from the hotel, left the keys in it, and walked the rest of the way. It was convenient, but now that we were associated with it, it was a liability.

  “Is my illusion slipping?” I asked Mike.

  He shook his head. “All I see is Jasmine.”

  “That woman had never seen Jasmine, but she walked up to me and called me Libby.”

  “She’s a mutant,” he said.

  “Obviously. She’s a chimera, but that’s not necessarily a mutation. You’re saying that she has an ability to see through my illusions?”

  “That’s the obvious explanation. We’ll see tomorrow morning.”

  Jess stuck her head into my office the next morning.

  “A woman says she has an appointment with you.”

  “Yes. Thanks, Jess. Where is she?”

  “At the front desk.”

  I walked out to the entrance and found Carly and a very tall man in his fifties. They both looked very nervous. I signed them in with security and led them back to the conference room I’d converted into my office.

  When I said the man was very tall, I meant he was a head taller than I was and didn’t outweigh me by much. Skeletal would be an apt description. His hair was receding and graying, and his face was lined and weathered.

  I ushered them into the office and found that Mike had made tea for us using the electric teapot Dad bought when he was working with me.

  We all sat down at the table and I said, “Okay. What’s so urgent that you tried to kidnap me last night?”

  “We weren’t trying to kidnap you,” Carly said with a pouting set to her mouth.

  “Turning an electrogenic loose on me wasn’t very friendly.”

  She looked down at the table and hunched her shoulders. “That wasn’t my idea.”

  “Okay.” I waited while the silence grew uncomfortable.

  “I saw you,” Carly said, “and I didn’t know how to find you, so I had to talk to you before you got away and I lost you again.”

  “Well, here’s your chance.”

  “You’re a mutant,” she blurted out, “but you’re inside the corporations.”

  Mike chuckled.

  “Well, you’re half right,” I said. “But suppose that’s true. So what? There are a lot of muties working for the corps.”

  “But you don’t work for them.”

  I shook my head. “You’re confusing me.”

  “We need you.” The tone in her voice reminded me of Glenda whining that something wasn’t fair.

  I turned to her companion. Neither he nor Carly had introduced him. “Do you need me?”

  “She says we do.” He had a German accent, and his voice sounded like he was gargling gravel.

  “And she’s that important?”

  He looked at her, and I saw his face relax into what I read as love and compassion. The way my dad looked at me sometimes in his tender moments. Then he turned back to me.

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” Mike said. “Who are you, and who do you represent?”

  The man turned his head, scanning the room.

  “There aren’t any cameras or listening devices,” I said, pointing at piles of schematics on a side table. “Believe me, I would know.”

  “I’m Carlotta Cardoza,” Carly said. “I represent a group called Democracy Now.”

  “A terrorist organization that came close to killing me twice,” I said. “I’ll tell you, I’m not a fan of your methods. And you, sir?”

  “Gustav Alscher.”

  I saw Mike give him a sharp glance.

  “I read your infonet site,” I said. “I didn’t see anything about you being a mutie organization.” Indeed, the whole thing had been a convoluted manifesto about democracy and socialism, and ranting about the corporations. I could have found the same ideas posted by dozens of people on the infonet.

  “Mutants are worse than second-class citizens,” Carly said. “We need equality, and to get that, we need the corporations to pay attention to us.”

  “Oh, they’ll pay attention,” I said. “You’re going to ignite a war and a genocide. Don’t you understand? They don’t care about you. You can’t make them care about you. Your only chance is to build your own society like I saw in that neighborhood last night. The corps will ignore you, and that’s fine. Take car
e of your own, educate your own.”

  I stood. “I can’t help you. If you continue on the road you’re on, no one can help you.”

  Mike escorted them out of the museum, then came back.

  “Was I wrong, Mike?”

  He shook his head. “No, you were entirely correct. Eighty percent of the world’s population depend on the corps for tomorrow’s meals. Alscher was a radical in Europe twenty years ago, until things got too hot for him and he dropped out of sight. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s involved in this. You don’t want to be anywhere near those people. Sooner or later, they’ll go too far. They don’t understand how the corps think. The corps wouldn’t blink at scrubbing an entire city down to bedrock if they decided it was necessary.”

  Chapter 16

  My relationship with Deborah remained frosty, but Jess was a lot friendlier. I saw Wil once when he came to meet with Myron Chung, and he refused to meet my eyes. I just put in my time at the museum and went back to the hotel. Mike and I avoided the mutie areas of the city.

  A couple of days after Mike came to Chicago, I received an email from Dad.

  Libby,

  About the list you sent. The Modigliani is easy. Frank Gomez, Chairman of Valient Corp. in Kansas City, has a standing order for any Modigliani paintings. One of my sources tells me he’s twice tried to buy that piece from AIC.

  The most probable buyer for the Renoirs is Florence Alberts in Atlanta. Her father was Chairman of Southern Foods, and she’s the widow of a Chairman of Royal Beverages.

  As for the Monet and the Degas, who knows? I’ve attached a list of about twenty private collectors with the funds to buy such paintings. I have no idea why anyone would steal the necklace. It has zero resale value.

  My guess is the four major paintings will bring fifty million each, and the minor Renoir about two to five million. On the other hand, Gomez offered AIC one hundred million for the Modigliani, so I could be wrong.

  As for who could have organized things, I would bet on Margarita Martinez. She’s local in Chicago, a well-known ‘patron of the arts’ and a contributor to the museum. She’s brokered some fairly large acquisitions.

  There are two strategies to consider. The paintings are still in Chicago, and the thieves are lying low waiting for things to cool off, or the art lovers took them out of the city before anyone knew the robbery occurred. In either case, the people who actually took the paintings are going to want to get paid. Follow the money.

  Dad

  I wandered down to Myron Chung’s office and gave him the list.

  “My source tells me that Gomez tried to buy the Modigliani piece from the museum,” I said.

  “Really?” Chung’s eyebrows shot up. “I wonder why Director Zhukoff didn’t mention that.”

  “Maybe it slipped her mind.”

  “Maybe.” He pursed his mouth as he perused the list. “Alberts for the Renoirs would make sense. For the Monet, I would guess either DeGruen or Rostikov, or Hollande, and the Degas could be Hollande, Partridge, or Itagaki.” He glanced up at me. “Your source knows his collectors.”

  “Any idea who would want the necklace, other than me?” I asked. “My source says it has no resale, which was my own take.”

  “I agree with you and your source. I think a lot of people would want it if they could acquire it legitimately, but no one can wear it if it’s stolen.”

  “Exactly. I love that necklace. To think I’ll never see it again makes me sick.”

  Chung studied me. “It was on a different floor from any of the other pieces taken.”

  “Yes, I know. It was targeted, but why? Someone might be able to wear it in China or Africa, but I don’t know if someone from those cultures would find it attractive.” I acted as though a thought had just struck me. “Unless they wanted it to throw suspicion on me.”

  He nodded. “My thoughts exactly. Miss Nelson, who knew that you admired that necklace?”

  I shrugged. “Anyone who saw me around it. Director Zhukoff, her assistant, Jessica Prior, and my dad all saw me admire it.” I shook my head as I tried to think. “I can’t think of anyone else, really. A young schoolgirl who was here with her class one day. We stood and drooled over it together.”

  That evening, I started researching Margarita Martinez. She was thirty-eight years old, daughter of a corporate executive vice president, married once and divorced, no children. Her mansion was in Glencoe, north of the city, near someplace attractively named the Skokie Lagoon, and the Chicago Botanic Garden, sandwiched between two golf courses. The neighborhood definitely had thief appeal.

  Known primarily as a socialite and arts patron, Margarita had two years of university education, and had never worked. Her money came from inheritance and a favorable prenup. Lots of gossip about her love affairs, mostly with much younger men. A hint of scandal concerning the fourteen-year-old boy-and-girl twins of another wealthy corporate family, and the thirteen-year-old daughter of a country club ex-employee.

  Her carnal tastes didn’t seem to harm her social standing. As far as I could tell, her parties and the other soirees she organized were a must-go for Chicago’s upper crust. She’d thrown a fundraising event that raised millions at the museum just a few months before the robbery. Deborah and Malcolm would have known her well.

  Checks on the whereabouts and schedules of the potential buyers on Dad’s list didn’t show anything unusual. That didn’t tell me anything. People with that kind of money didn’t stick their fingers into the messy details. Either the thieves would take the paintings to the customers, or their underlings would come to Chicago. That set off another line of research. Who would a buyer trust to authenticate and complete a purchase likely to go fifty million or more?

  I fired off an email to Dad asking that question. As an afterthought, I asked if he knew of any professional thieves he might consider for such a job.

  Two nights of hacking took me through Margarita Martinez’s bank accounts. Her investment income was enough to support her and ten thousand of her closest friends, but one of her Swiss accounts showed occasional large infusions. There hadn’t been any recent large deposits, but a hundred thousand credit payment was dated the day after the museum robbery. The credit was downloaded to a payment card, so there wouldn’t be a record of who received it.

  I then did searches on Deborah and Malcolm. Deborah came up squeaky clean. Malcolm was another matter.

  Over the previous five years, Malcolm Donnelly had repeatedly paid an alcohol rehab program some big money. Further investigation showed the patient was his wife. But that paled in comparison to his gambling losses. The man definitely had a gambling problem—the problem being he didn’t win very often.

  Donnelly was raking in fifty million a year from Tarden Corp., but his lifestyle and gambling had him going further and further into debt. I thought back to the conversation I overheard between him and Deborah, and realized that Deborah didn’t know how deeply in trouble Malcolm was.

  For myself, I couldn’t even imagine how someone could blow seventy-five million credits a year and have nothing to show for it.

  In spite of leaving Joe Wilson’s car parked on the street for two nights, unlocked and with the key in it, no one had stolen it. For some reason, that made me feel uneasy about the state of the universe. Mike and I thoroughly checked it for bombs and trackers, but didn’t find anything.

  We took the car and Mike dropped me off in the woods a quarter mile down the road from Margarita Martinez’s thirty-room bungalow. The weather was lousy, raining and windy. I slogged through the underbrush until I reached her place. Martinez was scheduled to attend a gallery opening that evening. Her full-time staff of six and the six security guards should be my only obstacles.

  Before leaving the hotel, I accessed the invoice for her security system on the infonet and familiarized myself with the equipment installed. Instead of a wall, an eight-foot wrought-iron fence stabilized by brick pillars every eight feet surrounded the grounds. Sharp fleur-de-lis
spear points topped the wrought iron.

  Blurring my form, I jumped up, grabbed the top of a pillar, pulled myself over, and dropped to the ground on the other side. I didn’t expect any of the guards to be out in that weather. Keeping to the shadows, I reached the house without seeing or hearing anyone.

  A set of French doors led out to the patio. I had no idea how much of the security system was turned on, since there were people active in the house. What I did know was that Margarita was a cat lady, with at least three of the beasts. That meant any motion detectors had to be aimed well off the floor. I disabled the alarm contacts on the door, picked the lock, and crawled inside.

  I found myself in a large dark parlor, the sort of place she might use for entertaining two or three dozen guests. Creeping through the room, I cracked the door and looked out into a short hallway. Beyond that, the cross hallway was lit.

  For the next three hours, I went from room to room, dodging the occasional servant. Four of the six stayed in their rooms on the top floor the entire time I was there. The butler roamed around, and the cook stayed in the kitchen until she climbed the back stairs to her room. All of the security guards stayed outside.

  I established that the paintings weren’t in any of the rooms on the top three floors, unless Margarita was stashing them under the servants’ beds. Going through the basement took another hour as most of the rooms had locks I had to pick.

  After all that effort, the only thing I accomplished was planting two bugs in her office. A microphone would pick up any sounds and transmit them to my server in Toronto. Any activity on the computer from that point forward would also be copied to my server.

  I crawled out of the house and over the fence, then called Mike, and walked to our pre-arranged rendezvous point.

  “Any luck?” he asked as I dragged my soggy butt into Joe Wilson’s car.

  “None, but I really didn’t expect to find anything.”