3rd World Products, Book 16

by Ed Howdershelt

  I quietly asked Tea to continue blocking cell phone signals. Switching the probe view back to Marie, I studied her face for a time and said, “You can almost see the little buggers working. A while ago we could see gristle through her skin. And although the dent spots are still pale, the bone isn’t showing through now. Can’t see many blood vessels anymore, either.”

  Tanya gave me an odd glance, then watched her mother’s face heal for a while in silence.

  I said, “Sometimes you see odd things during surveillance, ma’am. People scratch, fart, pick noses, wipe the stuff on other people, plan devious and dangerous things, and wander around half naked or starkers. You see everything, good or bad, because it’s all part of the show. Now and then what you see is lovely, like Elgin’s legs, but sometimes it’s pretty ugly, like someone putting ground glass in somebody else’s food. You just never know what the hell you’ll get, y’know?”

  With a sidelong glance at me, Tanya said, “I know what you’re saying, but it just felt so dirty to spy on her like that.”

  I shrugged. “Necessity. Now we know where she stands and she has a number to call tomorrow.” Turning to look at her, I said, “We’re doing the same thing now. Watching your mom sleep through a probe. Dirty? Not dirty?”

  Giving me a wry look, Tanya said, “Not dirty. We care about her. We need to know she’d doing all right.”

  “Uh, huh. Watching Elgin talk to Fullbright and discover her own agency is bugging her. Necessary? Not?”

  She sighed. “Yeah, okay. Necessary.” She then pointed a finger at me and grinningly said, “But you enjoyed it!”

  I laughed, “You can stuff that back in the bull, ma’am. You eyeballed her right along with me. I saw your lips go all soft and swollen. Your eyes lit right up when that shirt jacked up around her waist. You almost drooled. You’d lick her silly in a heartbeat.”

  There was momentary outrage on Tanya’s face, but it faded fast and she snorted, “Yeah, you bet I would. She’s hot.”

  “They make ‘em stay fit. It really shows, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it definitely does.”

  “Are we ready to ‘surveil‘ somebody else, or is it time to make a couple of drinks and sit back for a while?”

  “Who are you talking about surveilling now?”

  Pretending pain, I said, “Ow. That should be…”

  She backhanded my leg. “Skip the English lesson. Who?”

  “The clinic staff. They’re inside a secure facility. Bet they gossip like schoolgirls.”

  Tanya grinned. “Why not do both? Drink and watch?”

  She got up to go to the suitcase and opened it, then seemed to have a moment of thought. With a glance at me, she came to stand over me and asked, “Now what?”

  Trying to look innocent, I asked, “Why, whatever do you mean, milady?”

  “Why would we be monitoring the clinic staff?”

  “Oh. Damn. I thought you’d ask why we’d be drinking.”

  Rolling her eyes, she said, “Uh, huh. Why the clinic staff?”

  “Because some are security people, not medics. They’ll expect certain things to happen. Got any idea what?”

  She shook her head. “No. Not really.”

  “Beyond the obvious, neither do I. They might.”

  “The obvious?”

  “Tests. Measurements. Estimates of healing and how long it will be until she says ‘let me the hell out of here‘. And those in on the game — if any — will probably speculate on the next moves and the likely outcome.”

  Tanya seemed to let all that gel for a time, then she nodded and went back to the suitcase. In short order we had a couple of drinks and I’d split a screen to watch four probes at once.

  Sipping, Tanya made a face and said, “We forgot the ice.”

  I sent green tendrils to our glasses and formed ice in our drinks, then sipped mine and said, “It’s good. Thanks.”

  Poking the ice blob in her drink, she replied, “No. Thank you. This stuff is only barely drinkable when it’s warm.”

  Someone on screen was joined by someone else. I turned up the sound a bit, but it was only some yap about football. On panel three, a woman answered the phone and told someone she could cover an extra hour or so, but that’s all.

  That’s how it went well into our next drinks, then a guy in a suit opened a door and beckoned someone in. Another suit walked past the probe and I had it follow him through the door.

  The first suit said, “I just got off the phone with Latimer. They’ve issued arrest warrants on federal charges. Diller pulled blood, but the nanobots died as soon as they left her body.” He shrugged. “They always do. I don’t know why they bothered. We already knew they were in there. Anyway, this’ll only go on another couple of hours, then it’s business as usual at both ends of the stick.”

  Both ends of what stick? I hate euphemisms. Metaphors. Whatthehellever that was.

  The second suit nodded and asked, “Why the big deal about it? She’s sedated and capped.”

  “He didn’t say.” Shrugging again, Suit1 said, “All I know is, this place will get back to normal tonight. I’m really fucking sick of all this. It never had anything to do with us and we shouldn’t have been dragged into it.”

  Suit2 said, “Our friends at Homeland were trying to be slick, but Carlin said the NSA found her almost immediately. There’s a big hash going on about who’s going to get her.”

  That puzzled me. Of course the NSA could find Marie. Her daughter visited her every day or so and lived… unless they were no longer talking about Marie?

  I said, “Something’s fishy. I don’t think they’re talking about Marie now.”

  Her drink forgotten and her eyes locked on the screen, Tanya nodded. “Neither do I. Mom hasn’t been a secret at all.”

  Suit1 said, “I don’t give a flying fuck who gets her, I just want her out of here. What happened in Cosgrove was so bad the Canadians haven’t given us any shit about taking her.”

  Cosgrove. In Canada. Bad happenings. I ran core searches and came up with damned near nothing for a moment, then found CSIS and media records of a 2009 grain silo explosion in Cosgrove. Half the town destroyed. Disaster assistance, etc…

  Putting up a screen for a map showed a spot sixty miles north of Ottawa. Population before, 603. After, 447. More research, same results. Different media, same words. In many cases, entire paragraphs or even the entire column had been copied. All the same pictures of devastation. The only survivor comments were from the day of the explosion. Nothing since.

  That stunk; it meant only one official source of info was available, which didn’t make any sense. With a hundred and fifty dead, there should have been media vultures swarming like starving locusts. An aerial view showed a shallow crater where the silo had been, but something about the blast diameter didn’t look right to me.

  I overlaid an earlier satellite view of the town and lined up the roads. The center of the blast zone was a good fifty feet west of where the silo had been.

  Probes sent to Cosgrove didn’t find any indications of any explosives other than what occurs naturally within a grain silo; wheat dust. Yet the explosion had been at least three times the size of any similar explosion ever recorded. I suddenly and completely didn’t buy any of it. The area had been roped off for a week. Surely there were a few other pix of the place.

  On a government computer in Ontario I found what appeared to be the only official documentation about Cosgrove that wasn’t a recap of the media blather. Several pictures showed the silo blast had been of normal intensity, but one of the pictures showed a deep pit within the blast radius. It was fifty feet west of center. I tried to see into the pit by various means, but the photo just wasn’t good enough.

  A secret weapon location or a lab? I voted the lab because an underground weapon explosion didn’t seem likely to poke a tunnel to the surface. It would blast into the open, create a mound that would collapse into a crater, or it wouldn’t have power enough to do
more than create a new cave.

  Research turned up info from the early fifties that said the area had been set aside for military use, but that it had been decommissioned for use as farmland. Government and corporate funds had established a silo in the early sixties, a road had been paved leading to the main north-south highway, and a tiny town had formed by the early seventies.

  Sitting back, I sipped and thought, ‘Did the military leave them some underground surprises?’

  I was about to send probes when Tanya touched my shoulder and asked, “What did you just do? I saw tons of text and some pictures and maps flash by, then you stopped here.”

  Oops. The screen had reflected my activities through the core, which had synced up and sent me everything at my brain’s current operating speed. Swirling my drink, I realized that speed likely wasn’t my absolute best at the moment.

  Sipping my drink again, I said, “Just scanning for pertinent stuff. There might have been a military gadget under that silo.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “Yup. I’ll send probes. Stand by, ma’am.”

  The probes descended fifty feet before they encountered shattered concrete and twisted steel rebar. No radiation. No residue of explosives. No sign of a major fire or flood. Examining the walls, their damage reminded me of when I’d pushed exterior house walls off a foundation to collapse a ratty structure.

  Pressure cracks radiated outward through the concrete. Some of the rebar was warped outward and broken, not cut. The ceiling had sagged in places and collapsed completely in others. And then I found a perfectly round hole a yard wide in the ceiling of the west-most section of the facility.

  Except for the hole, it was an undamaged rectangular room, now filled with sand. I sent probes up through the hole and the strata a few feet around it. The outer probes showed generally similar strata and data. What had once been a small cave had been converted into a bunker. The inner probe in the tunnel showed sand leading upward thirty feet or so, then regular soil to the surface.

  “Okay,” I said, “A concrete bunker down there was destroyed, all but one room of it. I think something made it to the surface through that hole. Somebody then filled the hole with sand and capped it in a hurry with local dirt. The indentation around the center was made to look like a blast crater.” Looking at Tanya, I said, “I hope that doesn’t mean the silo explosion was deliberately caused to cover something else.”

  Tanya gave me just about the biggest, most skeptical fisheye I’d ever seen as she asked, “You really think someone deliberately blew up that silo?!”

  “I don’t want to think that, but the silo appears to have exploded after whatever happened to the bunker. Tanya, most governments and militaries cover up their screwups when they think they can get away with it.”

  Her fisheye continued for a time, then she returned her attention to the screen and sipped as she studied things. I scrapped my interest in the Cosgrove crater and sent a probe to check records at the nursing home. Forty adults and two children in twenty-one rooms. None listed as Canadian. Well, that would figure. All with varying brain or neurological damage. That figured, too. It’s what the place was all about.

  Having gone that far, it was only one little step farther to send probes to and through the patients themselves, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Treatments other than those normal for such injuries. Medications not normally used. I didn’t know what all they might be, but my core assembled a list of typical meds, procedures, and hardware and looked for oddities.

  And, boy, did it find something. One of the children, a girl of eleven named Marjory Wright, had a bandaged head and wore a neck brace. At the back of it were a line of small bolts, not snaps, and two strips of what looked like det cord had been embedded in the plastic along the lines of bolts. I checked the composition and found Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate. Yup. Detonation cord.

  Each embedded cord had its own blasting cap as well as a separate, fiber optic laser-initiated igniter. Several wires led from the brace to a box hanging on the side of the bed. The wires were bound together like a clumsily-made rope and there was plenty of slack in them. There were also a couple of large loops fastened to the gurney with a Velcro strap, likely to make the kid a little more portable if necessary. Unfasten the loops and there’d be another six or eight feet of cable.

  I finished my drink and sent my findings to Angie and Linda, then called Stephanie.

  She appeared behind the screen and said, “I’ve reviewed your data. I can find no records concerning the birth of this child.”

  “Under that name, you probably won’t. The towns Marjory and Wright are north and south of the silo crater, respectively.”

  “I see. I should have realized that when I reviewed the data.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “Not necessarily. I just realized it when you said you couldn’t find any record of her. Got any idea why they’re so scared of her? Wanna bet her actions are what made people react so poorly to Aria Wilson?”

  “You could be correct.”

  Tanya asked, “Aria Wilson? Yet another woman in your life?”

  “Her mother’s an old roomie of mine, in fact. Aria’s only about ten, Tanya. She did something that freaked people out last year and they shipped her down from the asteroid station.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “She uses fields without hardware. BIG fields. Scared the hell out of some brass hats. We think this kid may be like her.”

  Pointing at the screen, Tanya asked, “So that’s why she’s wearing that collar? It’ll stop her somehow?”

  “Yup. See that black cord in the plastic? It’s det cord. We used it to cut down trees in Vietnam. Nowadays it’s used in mining and building demolition. That little bit’s a shaped charge that’s probably enough to make her head completely disappear.”

  Shrinking back from the screen, Tanya muttered, “Oh, my God… that poor little girl!” Looking at each of us, she asked, “What can we do?!”

  “Nothing yet. We need more info.”

  “What?! We can’t just leave her like that!”

  “Yes, we can, and don’t get fuzzed up, lady. We can’t just take the collar off. Break the circuit and the laser will fire. Break the laser and that’ll set it off, too. And beyond all that, we don’t know that removing it would be a good thing.”

  Tanya looked at me as if I was insane, of course. She opened her mouth and yelled, “Are-you-fucking-crazy?! We…”

  I lightly stunned her larynx and said, “Cool down or I’ll stun you cold. Just sit there and watch.”

  Wiping the screen, I showed her clips of Aria’s evaluation run at Carrington. Seeing a full-sized car slowly floating downward in a column of bright light made her mouth fall open. When I sent a tendril to unfreeze her throat, Tanya swallowed a few times, then sighed deeply before she spoke.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize… Well, just never mind, okay? I can see how something like that would scare people.”

  “It sure did. I figure Aria would have wound up like this kid if the government had gotten its hands on her first.”

  “So… what now?”

  “Now we try to find out all we can about what happened in Cosgrove and what she might have had to do with it. I have a feeling we won’t like the results.”

  Steph said, “The damage in the bunker was caused by directed field energy, as you suspected. Miss Wright in 2009 was apparently many times more powerful than Aria Wilson. It would be impossible to calculate her current abilities.”

  I studied the neck brace for a moment, then asked, “How would they have caught her, Steph? She’d have had to sleep sometime, but they’d have had to find her.”

  Putting a picture of the kid’s skull on the screen, Steph said, “Note the deep crease on her left temple.”

  “A bullet, you think? A sniper barely missed?”

  “It seems probable. A more direct impact by some other object could have created such a crease, but that would have precip
itated other damages.” She canted her head slightly and added, “This wound appears slightly less than two years old.”

  Tanya asked, “Can she be fixed? Like my mother?”

  Steph said, “Of course, but as with your mother, the repairs would only be physical. In your mother’s case, she’ll have an opportunity to regain the use of previous segments that were missing. In Miss Wright’s case, that might not be true.”

  I asked, “Because her healing is complete and locked and restoring that spot would just give her some empty space?”

  “That would also be my speculation.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Tanya yelped, “I can’t believe you two! Won’t you even try?!”

  Steph replied, “Not without knowing much more about Miss Wright’s mental state, which would require relocating her to a place of safety and awakening her.”

  Standing up, Tanya started to say something more and I held up a hand. She closed her mouth and gave me a dim glower.

  I said, “Tanya, if she’s what happened to that bunker, she could be completely, murderously insane. There are forty other people plus staff in your mom’s nursing home and more below it. We need more info and that’s all there is to it.”

  Steph said, “I’ve found a report by a Dr. Robert Treager concerning events at the bunker.”

  She put it on a screen and Tanya and I began reading. When I glanced at her and asked, “Next page?” she replied, “Not yet,” so I sent a copy of the stuff to my previous screen and read alone.

  Pages one through seven were preliminary info. Marjory was an orphan, presumed about nine at the time of the report. Field talents discovered in 2005 when she’d levitated herself out of her crib. A crib at age five?

  Tests and surveillance had more or less determined what else she could do. In Treager’s opinion, her 2009 mental capabilities were still only those of a typical five-year-old at best.

  On page eight, Treager finally got to the bunker bust. Marjory killed her doctors and several guards by simply punching six-inch holes through them, then went looking for someone named Arnie. There was nobody at the facility named Arnie. He seemed to be someone from Marjory’s past, but Treager speculated that Arnie might simply be an old imaginary friend. Marjory had gone on a rampage looking for him.