Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he told me. Just one more lie like so many, maybe my entire life is one, and it’s time I know what was really done to beta test Carme’s and my eventual implanted networks. Because now that I’m face to face with Mom, I’m reminded that there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for us including taking on the first SIN herself before allowing any version of it to be passed on to her daughters.
“You started wearing contact lenses a few years ago,” I say to her as I finish eating everything in front of me, telling myself no more. “And now Carme and I are wearing them. Only they’re not intended to correct our vision, and maybe yours aren’t either.”
“Would you like something more to eat?” she collects my dishes before I have the chance.
“Yes, but I’m going to say no,” I reply as a phone starts ringing in the direction of the den. “You don’t even wear reading glasses. But you have contacts, and I should have wondered about it before now. Who tried out the SIN prototype, Mom? Because I know what you’re like.”
“I wouldn’t allow anything done to you and Carme that I don’t know about.”
“Is that what made you sick?”
“We learned the hard way that if you don’t coat the devices with proteins from your own body, chances are the implants are going to be rejected,” she loads the dishwasher. “My immune system went on the attack, and removing the SIN had unexpected side effects,” she explains dispassionately as if what she’s depicting is reasonable, and I remember what Dick said about it.
Dissolving the injectable devices is possible in an emergency. But it’s uncertain what the consequences might be, and in Mom’s case it may as well have been cancer. For all practical purposes her body responded with similar symptoms, and she tells me again how guilty she felt when I quit the Air Force because of her.
She knows I didn’t want to return to Hampton to live in the barn again, working for NASA as Dick directed. But plain and simple, he wanted me home with her, not that I needed him or anyone to make me take care of my mother. There wasn’t a question what I would do, and he seized the situation as an opportunity he could use to further his scheme.
Mom’s bad outcome was an unexpected gift, really. Dick facilitated my leaving the military, an unusual thing for a 4-star general to encourage. It would be fortuitous if I went to work for NASA Langley, and he claimed it was in the cards for me anyway. But just not quite so soon, and he’s yet to tell me what cards he meant.
“There’s been no better place for your training,” Mom places a soap pod in the dishwasher, starting it up.
00:00:00:00:0
“TRAINING for what? To be a cyber nerd, a test pilot, a human factor pessimist?” I ask, monitoring the live security video images in my smart lenses, looking for whatever just triggered a motion sensor light near the barn where my Chase Car is parked.
“Best to learn things from the ground up,” Mom the educator says. “No better person to pilot the plane than the one who created it . . .”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I exclaim as I see Lex in my SPIES at the same time rapid footsteps sound in the dining room.
Dad looks terrified and dazed, padding into the kitchen with no shoes on, the overhead light shining on his hair sticking up everywhere like Einstein. His eyes are wild behind his thick glasses, in gray sweatpants, his corduroy shirt buttoned crooked.
“We’ve got real trouble,” he says in a quiet fast voice.
“What’s Easton doing?” Mom dries her hands on a paper towel.
“He’s asleep.”
“What’s happened, Dad?” I ask.
“Nonna just called in a panic because Lex isn’t there,” and no matter the crisis he’s always low key and soft spoken. “She doesn’t know when he ran off or where he might have gone, and he’s not answering his phone.”
“He’s here,” I reply.
Picked up by our security cameras, he’s small and frantic, breathing hard as if he’s been running. Hesitating in front of the barn, he stares at my Tahoe, looking around, wearing his same green jacket, his backpack on. I remember the transit bus when I was leaving the mobile home park, and he must have been on it instead of asleep in his room as Nonna assumed.
“I’ll get him,” I hurry back through the dining room, and Dad’s right behind me, ready to fly out the front door in his socks. “No!” I tell him.
“Let me help, Calli. This is my fault.”
“Right now, I need you and Mom to stay inside with Easton. And it’s not about fault, never has been, never will be,” as I go out the door into the cold, not bothering with my down vest.
Hurrying down the walkway, I detect a droning noise coming from the water, something small and quiet like a two-stroke engine. And then I see the shadowy shape of the boat coming close, no lights on, two people in it, nearing our dock at the same moment Lex steps out from behind the pecan tree, bathed in blue among Dad’s shiny squirrel traps.
“Run!” I yell at him, and he freezes as tripped motion sensors illuminate the dock.
I see the gas cans in the back of the boat as I recognize the man from the Hop-In, and the woman has short black hair, a dark jacket and white fingernails you could see from space. Both of them are armed with machine guns, and Lex has turned into a statue.
“RUN!” I scream at the top of my lungs, and he doesn’t budge, staring at the monstrous duo as they dock their boat.
I take off as fast as I can, down the sidewalk, across the driveway, cutting through snow and slush. Grabbing his arm when I reach him, I take cover as best I can behind the pecan tree, which isn’t nearly thick enough. We’re sitting ducks, the distance between us and the dock about the length of a tennis court.
I pull out my Bullpup as the woman with short black hair and white nails trains the barrel of her full-auto weapon at us, the man lifting gas cans out of the boat.
“Drop your gun. Step away from him, and he doesn’t get hurt,” she calls out in a flat shrill tone at the same moment I hear a car on the driveway.
Fran is returning home, it occurs to me, all of us about to die. I order Lex to get down on the ground behind me and not move. Raising my pistol, I wait to be ripped apart by a barrage of bullets as I feel him pressing against my legs while headlights shine through trees, getting close. Then the unearthly hooting starts.
. . . WHO-WHO-WHO . . . !
Louder as a shadow swoops close to the dock, straight toward the killer couple. Mr. Owl dive-bombs them feet first, his talons going for their heads as they duck and shriek, and I start shooting.
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!
Both the man and woman are down, not moving, and just as quickly the great horned owl is gone. He gives a final hoot somewhere in the darkness over blue-spangled trees along the river.
“What were you doing?” it’s all I can do not to explode at Lex. “I told you not to leave the house. I trusted you when I could have locked up your butt. You’ve got to stop almost getting me killed!”
“I shouldn’t have frozen like that!” is what he has to say about it, angrily.
Mom and Dad are headed toward us. She’s carrying my down vest, and it’s a good thing because I’m freezing.
“What the owl did was awesome!” Lex exclaims, his attention riveted to the illuminated dock with the bodies on it. “Are they dead?”
“I’m pretty sure they are,” I reply, and as if on cue the motion sensor lights go out.
“Good, because they’re bad! But I froze! I was stupid,” he’s about to cry.
“It’s okay, son, you were very brave,” Dad assures him while I look at the Tahoe on the driveway.
Engine running, headlights burning, and I’m puzzled why Fran doesn’t climb out. I know she couldn’t have been shot, the thugs Nev
a dispatched not firing a round. They didn’t have a chance, thanks to Mr. Owl.
“Is everybody okay?” Mom hands me the vest, and I put it on.
“Not everybody,” I reply, alluding to our uninvited guests as she moves close to Lex, looking him in the eye.
“What happened?” gently, kindly, she puts her arm around a boy she’s never liked or given the time of day. “What frightened you enough that you would take the bus here in the middle of the night?”
“She wants to hurt Nonna and me. And I got scared,” Lex digs out his phone.
He goes to recordings, selecting one, and Neva Rong appears in the display. Her voice sounds in the blue-glowing darkness as if there’s nowhere we can go to get away from her.
“. . . This is Dr. Rong. Neva Rong,” and she must have used a videophone app, the same thing she did to me earlier in the week. “I know it’s late for a 10-year-old to be up but I thought it very important we get acquainted. Vera would want us to be friends.”
“Why are you calling me?” Lex in the recording, his face surprised and wary, and I recognize the mathematically inspired art printed off the internet, his bedroom in the background.
“I realize we don’t know each other yet, but I wanted you and your grandmother to be reassured that most of all I admire your talents, Lex. Or should I call you Lexell? I understand your astronomer parents named you for a lost comet. I’m very sorry about what happened to them. I believe there’s a place for you at Pandora someday . . . ,” she says, and the implication is obvious.
33
BOLDLY, outrageously, Neva’s intention was to harass and intimidate as only she can, and to curry Lex Anderson’s favor for the future. She has to headhunt the best talent on the planet like everybody else, and a 10-year-old prodigy she could control and manipulate has to be extremely appealing.
There’s no better way to keep him under her thumb than to cause him real trouble, and then rescue him from it. She probably got his phone number from Vera, and when Neva called, he was smart enough to record the conversation.
“. . . Vera thought the world of you,” Neva goes on in her seductive tone. “But I’m afraid there’s the untidy matter of the burner phone in your backpack at the failed rocket launch. After you hacked into NASA. Or that’s the accusation.”
“I didn’t do it! Someone else did! Maybe it was you!” and Lex is a firecracker, I’ll give him that.
“Well, even if you did it . . .”
“I didn’t!”
“Either way, all can be forgiven. But you’re going to need a lawyer, and I’m happy to help because they can be awfully pricy. As can college.”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to be talking to you . . . !” Lex says in the recording, and I pause it, emailing the file to myself so I can listen to it more carefully later.
He and my parents return to the house as I walk toward the Tahoe parked on the driveway. There’s no sign of Fran because it isn’t her SUV, and it’s as if my Chase Car drove itself from the barn. But what I’m seeing is its twin, the windows down, Carme climbing out with her Bullpup pistol now that the coast is clear.
“It’s a good thing I decided to drop by,” she heads toward me, dressed similarly in a warmup suit, a down vest, shearling-lined boots.
“What are you doing here?” I couldn’t be happier to see her.
“I had a feeling you could use some company,” she says as I begin looking around for my ejected cartridge cases.
Finding them where they melted divots in the snow, I collect them as if I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever known.
“Four rounds,” I let her know, tucking the spent cartridge cases in a pocket.
“Ditto. Two per a-hole,” Carme replies, and we begin walking to the river, our matching pistols with their long-barreled silencers pointed down.
We cross the sloping snowy grass to the dock, and the bodies are completely still, eerily visible in the soft glow of Mom’s miniblues.
“Just so you know, I’m pretty sure I took out both of them,” Carme can’t resist needling me like she always does.
“Nope. I don’t think so.”
We trudge past the stump wrapped in lights, all that’s left of our favorite tree. Images flash in my mind of sunny days and better times when we’d swing out over the river, landing like cannonballs before a lightning strike put an end to it.
“I saw what was happening before you did,” Carme adds.
“Nope. Not possible since we have the same equipment and see the same things,” and I’d better not find out ART gave her a heads-up that he didn’t give me.
“What I mean is, I visually saw the boat as I was zooming up the driveway.”
“Did you expect this might happen?”
“I’m not surprised,” my sister says cryptically. “But as you know from your own cyber sleuthing, they were smart enough to go dark, no signals transmitted, and I’m betting they don’t even have phones with them.”
Nearing the dock, we’re detected by motion sensors, and the lights blink back on, illuminating the would-be assassins. Crumpled in a spreading puddle of blood, they have 4 holes each, head shots but not snake eyes or even close.
The deadly pair was a moving target as they frantically tried to ward off their winged attacker. Their faces are shredded as if a pterodactyl got them or someone with a pitchfork.
“Told you it was me who nailed them,” Carme starts going through the dead man’s pockets.
“I know I did,” and I’m reminded of my plaque from the Protective Services Academy for shooting a perfect score repeatedly.
But I’ve never been one to brag the way my sister does, and there’s no point in nagging her about not wearing protective anything including gloves. She just doesn’t care, and it occurs to me that I’m not hearing sirens. Looking back at the house, I see Mom watching through the dining room window, and she hasn’t called anyone, not the police, at any rate. And neither has Dad.
“How are you going to explain this when Fran rolls up any minute,” and I’m not talking about her discovering dead people on the dock.
I’m worried about her showing up and seeing Carme. She’s supposed to be overseas somewhere, not here with me, both of us armed with matching clothing, Chase Cars and guns.
“Fran hasn’t left the scene at the mobile home park,” my sister says, her quick fingers darting in and out of the dead man’s pockets, producing a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills.
“Why? Because that doesn’t sound like her,” I take a look at the bass boat tied to a cleat.
There’s nothing in it except a folded nautical chart. A range bag filled with loaded magazines. Two large-caliber pistols. A handheld spotlight.
“Fran called Mom a while ago and said it’s like herding cats getting everybody working as a team,” Carme starts counting the dead man’s money. “And she’ll probably be at the scene all night, making sure everything’s done exactly right.”
“That’s industrious of her when just a few hours ago she was freaking out all over the place because of a snake tank and an empty owl cage,” and as I say it, I realize that Fran got considerably settled and more centered after I told her what I’d found in the shooting log from Christmas Eve three years ago.
Knowing that Neva had sent a hitman to terrorize her, that the flat tires were deliberate, seemed to hit a reset button. I felt a resolve in Fran, a slow-burning defiance that’s been missing since then.
“Ten grand,” Carme says with a low whistle. “That’s a lot of cash to be carrying on a boat ride.”
She zips the roll of hundred-dollar bills inside her jacket pocket.
“Finders, keepers,” she says, no more bothered by breaking the law now than she was at the Point Comfort
Inn.
The heck with gloves or my crime scene case, the heck with everything except accomplishing the mission and staying alive.
“But I sure hope that wasn’t their entire fee for service,” she adds. “Otherwise, I guess we’re a cheap date.”
“Be careful digging around with bare hands,” I go on to remind Carme that she may know how to tamper with crime scenes but she’s not trained to work them. “You don’t want to touch something you wish you hadn’t, including blood.”
00:00:00:00:0
THE DEAD WOMAN stares up blindly, gorily, one of her eyes partially avulsed from the socket, her hair a helmet of sticky red from deep wounds to her scalp.
I avoid blood as I search the pockets of her jacket, remembering the slender arm reaching out the Cherokee’s window in the drive-through, the black leather sleeve, the flashy rings and gaudy nail polish.
Finding what might be house or apartment keys, I ask Carme if she’s seeing one that might belong to a Jeep Cherokee.
“Nope, and I’m not seeing a phone, are you?”
“Not so far.”
“As I expected, they knew what they were doing,” she turns the dead man on his side, and blood spills out of the small holes in his head.
One went through his left temple, another through the bridge of his nose, two more through his cheek and jaw.
“Bingo!” Carme slides a wallet out of a back pocket.
“I have a feeling the rented Jeep they were driving is out of sight in a garage at the Dog Beach Marina,” I surmise. “They might have a short-term rental or someone does,” and I’m thinking of the assassin in the Denali again.
Spin (Captain Chase) Page 27
