“I don’t believe Keaton killed her,” Gilgamesh said. He hugged Gail closer. “I would know.” When he had been in the flow he sensed the Progenitors were unhappy with what had happened to Tiamat. He didn’t tell Gail, Gail not being happy with the interference of the Progenitors. “We can’t do anything about it, anyway. Which, as always, makes me nervous.” And with Gail sitting essentially in his lap, if he wasn’t careful he would make a pass at her. “Distract me, please?”
Gail shrugged and closed her eyes. “Daisy and Van finally finished collating the boxes of information we got from Mr. Collins.”
“The information I got,” Gilgamesh said, amused. Gail snorted, but she did nod to acknowledge his contribution. “Anything on what Chrysanthemum is?”
“Mr. Collins had information on three Chrysanthemum contacts: Ajax, Cassandra and Mask. Mask of course is Wandering Shade, and he used a Kansas City PO box, and he was only active in 1967, 1968 and 1969. Ajax verified Mask as a legit Chrysanthemum contact, but we don’t know if this was real or bogus.”
“Interesting. All this went through the Kansas City lab run by United Toxicol?”
“Nope. Only Mask dealt directly with the KC lab. The Ajax and Cassandra contacts came second hand, through Toxicol’s Denver and Newark offices.”
“So Mr. Collins never possessed contact information on Ajax and Cass…?”
“Nope, we got lucky,” Gail said. Her interruption startled him again, but instead of noticing or otherwise reacting, she rested her head on the angle of his chest, below his shoulder, and snuggled closer. “The results of the lab work they ordered didn’t all get sent to the same places, and some of the ‘send to’ information got inadvertently copied into Mr. Collins personal records. We found locations for four: Kansas City, Salem Oregon, Charleston West Virginia and the CDC’s Virginia Transform Detention Center. We don’t know which ones got sent to which alias, save for the Kansas City address.”
“Anything else?”
“Mr. Collins referred to Bass as ‘Patient 172’. Patient 172 came to them after she killed a Dr. Littleside in Denver, and Mr. Collins wrote in his notes that he suspected Chrysanthemum got to Patient 172 and set her up to assassinate Dr. Littleside because of Dr. Littleside’s investigation of an assassination attempt on some other Doctor in Boston. This implies he knew Chrysanthemum was a Major Transform operation.”
Gilgamesh bit his upper lip. “The Boston doctor’s Hank. The FBI tried to assassinate him in December of ’66, using Monster-generated élan,” he said. “How can the assassination attempt be connected to this? Who are Ajax and Casssandra, anyway?”
Gail shook her head, worried. She let the quiet build for a minute while she traced patterns in the underside of the desk above their heads. “Did I ever tell you how I met Sylvie?” she said, breaking the silent spell.
Gilgamesh said “No,” and they went on to speak of safer topics.
Carol Hancock: October 19, 1972 – October 20, 1972
I didn’t go back to Detroit, not immediately. I had paid a high price to keep Hank as mine, and I needed to finish the job. Out of the fiasco at Keaton’s home, I had sacrificed my status, my ability to suppress my beast, and my ability to work on making the world better instead of making the world worse. I had worked for years as a young Arm to become one of the good guys instead of one of the bad guys. In a day, I lost everything except Hank and Littleside and my rights to Chicago. The Arms remained a functional group, and we would be taking down the first Focuses, which might not be the smart thing to do, but did have appeal.
I stopped first in Chicago, got my mission RV, Gomorrah, out of storage, reactivated my dormant Chicago crew and started some of my Detroit people moving their operations back here. I leaned on an associate, who didn’t know me as an Arm, to cough up a tiny abandoned light industrial factory and parked Gomorrah inside. I welcomed myself to my new home. The place stank of grease and paint thinner, and had a large basement.
I hired a cleanup crew to clear the place out and make it livable. Then I went to Littleside and set up camp in an unused section. Hank hoped to study Transform geriatrics here someday, the process of aging in Transforms, which was different from normals, but that would require some time when external emergencies didn’t monopolize my time and my money.
The section still smelled of fresh paint and construction. I lifted a desk and office chair from the office of a doctor I hadn’t yet found time to recruit, and a cot from a containment cell. A desk and a bed, all the necessities of life. I would live here until my crew fixed up my new place. Mine. Chicago was mine again.
My mind drowned in my beast. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw my most recent torture victims, and I became aroused again. I decided, with Chicago mine again, to end this nonsense. I sat on my cot, meditated, focused my will and my juice, and ditched Bass’s tag.
The tag didn’t go.
I sat upright, eyes wide and nervous, my body shaking in fear. An Arm could always drop a tag. This was unprecedented. I metasensed around and, no, nobody played with me. I burned juice into my metasense to make sure. I carefully did a metasense scan of myself for juice-active implants, a theoretical fear Gilgamesh and I had come up with as one of our worst-case scenarios for bad enemy weaponry. Nothing. I had peed out Bass’s chemical concoctions over a day ago, my body working just as it should.
I found nothing out of order, suspicious, or fucking anything.
After quieting my Crow-worthy panic, I sat down on my cot again and went deeper into my meditations, deep enough to pick up the harsh electronic buzz of Hank’s lab equipment almost a hundred feet away. I attempted again to ditch the Bass tag, and again I failed. I burned five points of juice into the process, trying every trick I knew and some Gilgamesh and I had dreamt up to try as experiments someday, including a self-tag variant in an attempt to overlay Bass’s tag.
Nothing. The tag would not budge.
Worse, the more I prodded the fucking thing, the more my beast awoke.
Still meditating, I did a complete memory review of my Keaton visit. I ran a time check, and, yes, I was missing about 40 minutes of time, all while under Bass’s chemical assault. The bitch had done something to me. Again. More tricks along the lines of what she did to me when I invaded her lair and shut down her industrial torture project.
I got so angry I found a defenseless wall and beat my fist bloody.
---
“I joined up with Keaton’s Arms, I ditched the Cause and I’ve reclaimed Chicago,” I said, harsh. “Live with the changes, or do I need to reestablish who’s boss around here?”
I didn’t face my tagged Arms, I faced Hank Zielinski, my treasure I had sacrificed so much to keep. He was a far tougher audience than my Arms, and I needed to get to him first. He stood with his back against the wall of Lab Three, his private Littleside work area. He was as white as Denise Pitre had been, but he still kept arguing. Hell, I hadn’t been this stubborn with Keaton. Computer printouts and punch cards littered the floor from the winter winds of my anger.
He should know better than to attempt to defy me, but, well, Hank. He remained mine, but being mine didn’t mean he didn’t need discipline. I started toward him in a stalk. In my mind, I saw the screaming young man I held in my power yesterday, as Bass loomed behind me in Keaton’s basement and called forth my beast.
The young man hadn’t lasted two hours.
“Commander!” Zielinski’s voice was low and intent, and he focused his eyes on my bloody knuckles, still smarting from my assault a half hour ago on the defenseless wall. He yanked on my tag like the pro he was. “You’re the Commander! Find us a way through this disaster.” I held his neck in my hand and heard his heart race. I picked up on the faint odor of the tag I had marked him with years ago. I didn’t respond. He might have superhuman will, but his resistance to torture and violence was, truthfully, below the human norm. I grabbed his left thumb and twisted, just right.
“Carol,” he said, terrified and in pain, but he st
ill tried to affect me with his words. Fool. Dead inside, I hungered for pain. I was my own enemy now, working against my long term plans.
“Keaton won’t get everything right,” Zielinski said, his voice barely choked out of his throat. Implacable, indomitable. “Figure out contingencies. What do we do if her plans go wrong? What if she succeeds? Where are her plans likely to go wrong, and what do we do about it then? You’re the Commander. We’re counting on you.”
The Commander was gone in a bunny suit. What a joke. I remained Keaton’s lowest rank flunky. I wore Bass’s tag.
Zielinski, though? I might not be anyone else’s Commander, but I remained his.
I dropped him and turned away. Several long moments passed before I spoke. Zielinski waited with his imperturbable patience.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said, my voice a distant Crow whisper. “I’ve been torturing people for the last two days. Under orders. You know what giving in to the torture urges does to me.”
Zielinski nodded and massaged his neck. “You don’t believe Keaton’s going to succeed at taking the first Focuses,” he said, not a question.
I shook my head, appalled again at the idea of going after the Focuses one at a time, in the process giving the later targets plenty of warning and time to prepare. “Keaton’s tactics may be good, but the strategy’s bad. She’ll succeed for a while, and then her plan will blow up in her face. In all our faces.”
“How?”
I shrugged. “How the hell should I know? There are a million different ways this piece of drek could go bad.”
“Can you come up with contingencies? Plans for what to do after this falls apart?” I remained silent, contemplating the cascade of punch cards on the floor. I hoped he hadn’t kept any valuable information in the stack, or if he did he possessed some way to sort them again. In a while, I nodded.
“Out of a million, a few are more likely than others.” What had set Keaton off? The two boxes of Crow research Sinclair dropped off? That drivel? Nothing made sense.
Zielinski sat back down on his stool, his legs unsteady from my unwise abuse.
“What about Gail?” he said, focusing on business instead of the angry Arm. “Did Keaton flat out forbid you to help Gail and work on the juice moving project, or do you have some wiggle room?”
“The constraint is on my time. I’m under new orders, and my responsibilities don’t leave me more than a few hours a week with Gail.” I would be spending far too much of my time following Bass’s orders, feeding my beast.
I couldn’t tell Hank I carried Bass’s tag and didn’t know how to ditch it. I wanted to, but something in my head blocked me. I responded to my discovery with a low growl.
“All right, that’s bad, but it isn’t the end of the world.” I could hear the schemes in his head through his voice. “We can keep working. Ever since Lori came through in August we’re making excellent progress.”
Lori. He wanted me to hear the name ‘Lori’ from his lips. Why? Oh. Of course. Smart man.
“Too late. Even if we make our breakthrough and I get juice from Gail, Keaton won’t change direction.”
“Success will give us more options to work with.”
I nodded. “True.” I would flip dominance on Haggerty as soon as I got juice from a Focus. Success in the ‘juice from a Focus’ project mirrored nicely the Eskimo Spear quest success, in that we had both ordered our underlings to attempt the impossible, and the status from completing the impossible was too large to ignore. My new combat methodology would be ready for that day; I was already way past the point where Webberly could clobber me while I tested out various pieces of my new method. I counted on Haggerty not noticing how Webberly edged toward the paper-thin-skin look common to all the senior Arms, because of their mutual dislike. The rest of the world would need to watch out for Webberly when I finished with her.
I didn’t hate Haggerty the way I hated Bass. With Haggerty my conflict was professional, an argument Arm style about who got to drive the car and who got to read maps and navigate. In the end, we would both be in the same car. In some screwy fashion Amy and I were family. Bass? If I got her, she would die, but before she died, I would go overboard. I fantasized about this constantly. Could I torture her and make her scream forever? I wanted to try.
“One other thing,” I said. “I know where your loyalties are, and I can see you thinking about the possibility of passing a quiet warning on to the Focuses. Such contact would not be wise.”
“Carol?” he said, startled and innocent. His comment would have fooled anyone besides me.
I shook my head. If I didn’t stop him, he would be on the phone with Tonya and Polly as soon as I left the building. “Keaton threatened to take you and Littleside. You will not stick your neck out. The risk of exposure is high from both ends, and I don’t think either of us wants me to receive an order to kill you. Neither do I want to stand there and follow orders while Keaton does you herself or drags you back to Los Angeles as a slave.” Bass would make sure you died accidentally within a few days, I didn’t say.
“Of course,” he said, and I didn’t believe him.
“Hank,” I said, “this isn’t your call. I’m the Commander, not you, and this decision is mine to make. Let me make the call about the Cause Focuses. This is my strength.”
He sighed, and nodded. This time, I believed him.
---
I sat in what passed as a pew in the storefront that served as the mother church of the Church of the New Humanity. I wore my Angela Sebesta disguise. Angela was a woman Transform and a bit of a religious flake. Through her I had planted the seeds for the Church, but I wasn’t here as the manipulative Angela, but as a penitent and to sniff around for the FBI.
Larger questions than the Church’s problems bothered me. What was I doing by following orders? Why was I starting a war I didn’t want to start? Why was I torturing people who didn’t need to be tortured?
I prayed for something, anything. Willpower. Guidance. Bolts from the blue. A way out of this mess.
At least I found no trace of the FBI in this church.
I opened a Bible and leafed through it, searching for inspiration. Someone had left a donation envelope, um, not to this church, inserted between two pages. Where did the Church of the New Humanity get its Bibles from, anyway? Someday, we would need our own scripture, but that day was not today.
Someone had underlined a passage in pencil on the page marked by the donation envelope. “Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord, saying, ‘I will entice him.’ And the Lord said to him, ‘By what means?’ And he said, ‘I will go out, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And he said, ‘You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do so.’ Now therefore behold, the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of these your prophets. The Lord has declared disaster concerning you.”
Yah. Right. Life sucked.
---
“Are you completely confident your phone isn’t bugged?”
“Yes. What’s this about, Carol?” Lori said.
“Listen closely,” I said. “First, I’m cutting off contact with you and the other witches. I have other business and my other business takes priority.” She was the other side now, and I didn’t dare keep up contact. Not the least because I suspected Keaton would find a way to use my connection to her against both of us if I didn’t cut it off.
“Carol?”
“I said listen. Second, I’m moving back to Chicago and taking Gail with me. She’ll contact you when she finds a new home.”
Lori didn’t interrupt this time.
“Third, the project with Gail has been moved to the back burner. I have other priorities, and won’t be able to spend more than a few hours a week with her. If you want to continue working with her, feel free, but I won’t be involved.”
“Carol, did something bad happen?”
“Fourth, remind Tonya about her safe.” This last statement wasn’t in my
script, and I wasn’t sure what prompted me, but something about Tonya’s safe was important.
“What?”
“That’s it, Lori. Good luck. I hope the baby’s wonderful.”
“Carol!”
I hung up.
Hell. I hoped I didn’t just fuck up. I was one of the bad guys now, and given the dried blood under my fingernails, a truly evil bad guy. I shouldn’t have given anything to a leader of the other side, but I gave little enough.
Now I would find out how smart Lori was.
I counted on her to be the good guy and defeat me. The good guys always won, right?
---
“Carol?” Gail asked. “What did you want to see us about?” She had been calling me Carol instead of Teacher ever since the household tagging ceremony. I didn’t think she realized.
Gilgamesh, Gail and I met in Gail’s office, with the door securely locked. I had enjoyed myself a lot last night before my drive to Detroit. Victims screamed in my head, bringing a smile to my heart. I sat on the desk, and the two faced me in a couple of high wingback chairs that looked like they belonged in a living room rather than an office. They remained casual with each other, not yet intimate.
Fuck! Gilgamesh pulled the same crap that lost him Lori, him and his unbending emotional distance and his firm independence. What did he think he was, an Arm? And Gail? She didn’t rate Gilgamesh any higher than anyone on her leadership team. Idiots. Their silliness would screw up the entire household redefinition project if they couldn’t figure out how to get inside each other’s heads. I wanted to lock them both in a room with a couple of knives until one came out on top, but they weren’t Arms and the Arm approach wouldn’t work. Shit. They made me appreciate the brutal simplicity of Arm dominance hierarchies.
Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) Page 23