SINdrome

by J. T. Nicholas

  “Why the mystery, Hernandez?” I asked. I could tell from the set of her shoulders and the slight frown on her face that she was uneasy. It wasn’t worry about the location—if so, she’d be looking around more, instead of meeting my eyes.

  “Better if you hear it from him. You trust me, right, Campbell?”

  There was actual worry in her eyes, but, for some reason, I felt some tension ease. It wasn’t the look of impending betrayal that I saw there. At least, not the kind that would end with me in bracelets. “With my life. Let’s do this.”

  We stepped through the door into a large, mostly empty room. There were a few scattered stacks of pallets. A couple of plastic fifty-gallon drums. Piles of what looked like broken-down cardboard boxes. And a giant of a man standing near the pallets. I recognized him at once. And felt a surge of guilt.

  “Shit,” I muttered. “Thompson.” Hernandez didn’t say anything, which I thought was strange. But she led me over to the big rookie. Well, maybe not a rookie, anymore. Given the current situation, he’d probably seen more action in his couple of months on the force than I’d seen in my first couple of years. He looked much the same as I remembered—big, chiseled features, recruiting poster haircut. Okay, so maybe his nose was a little off-center—that was probably my fault.

  “Campbell,” he said, his voice a smooth baritone. “I’d say it was good to see you but…”

  “But last time I put a few bullets into you?” I asked.

  He rubbed at his chest. “That really hurt, you know.”

  “Look, kid, I knew you were wearing Kevlar, all right? I wasn’t trying to kill you, but you were in my way. If Hernandez brought you here, then you know why.”

  He surprised me with a grin. “Shit, Campbell. I don’t care that you shot me, not really. I care that you cheated. I still owe you for our sparring session. I was winning, dammit.”

  “No such thing as cheating when it’s life and death,” I replied. “Thought you would have figured that out by now.”

  That sobered him a bit. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.” Then he grinned again, a grin that had an almost vindictive edge to it. “But it’s cool. Because I get to see your face for the next part.”

  Hernandez had been suspiciously quiet during all of this. And I realized that despite Thompson having been sent against me and Al’awwal as part of a special response team at the Walton Biogenics lab, there was no way Hernandez would have looked as worried as she did over bringing the rookie into the fold. Which meant there was another shoe to drop.

  It dropped. Hard.

  “Campbell.”

  I recognized that voice. That smarmy, greasy voice. Francois Fortier, NLPD Detective, head of the fucking team looking for yours truly, and someone who loved to share the details of the depravities he visited on his own personal Toys. The one cop in all New Lyons I’d happily put a bullet into. He stepped out from behind the stack of pallets, all oily hair and sloppy, seam-straining suit, and I damn near pulled my gun. I could sense Hernandez at my shoulder, ready to tackle me if I did, and I could see the slight shift in the set of Thompson’s shoulders, also ready to throw himself into the fray.

  * * * *

  “What the fuck is going on here, Hernandez?” I growled. Fortier opened his mouth to answer, and I shot him a glare that said all the things I wasn’t saying out loud. Damn, but that bastard made my fists itch.

  “He wanted to help,” she began.

  “To help, or some help?” I snapped before she could say more. “I didn’t think you’d be the one to help him find me.” She winced at that, and I felt shitty. Deep down, I really didn’t believe that Hernandez had betrayed me, but Fortier brought out something ugly in me.

  “Just listen to him, hermano,” she said.

  Fortier hadn’t said anything. Five minutes ago, I wouldn’t think you could put him in a room with me and have him shut up for that long. Even being wrong about that irritated me. “Fine. Talk.”

  He shrugged, and I swear to God, somehow managed to look…bashful. “Look,” he began. “The thing is… Shit.” He trailed off. Looked down at his shoes. Back at me. I was vaguely aware of Hernandez giving him a supportive nod—which sent another little stab of betrayal into my guts. “Look, I can admit when I’m wrong. When this shit started, I wanted nothing more than to put you away. God above,” he said with a gritted-teeth smile, “I fucking hate the sight of you, Campbell. Always have. Probably always will. Your holier-than-thou, too-good-for-this-fucking-world attitude. Do you have any idea how fantastic it was to watch you fall from your own little mountaintop and have to live in the shit with the rest of us?”

  Thompson and Hernandez both looked a little worried now that Fortier was unloading. But this, at least, was a Fortier I could understand. And to think that he hated me every bit as much as I hated him, even if I thought the reasons were bullshit, made me feel a little better.

  “And yeah,” he continued. “I liked Toys. Liked having beautiful women at my beck and call.” He snorted. “Look at me. I wasn’t getting them any other way.” Some of the anger drained from his voice. “But I hand-to-God thought they were things.” He winced as he said it. “Jesus, even saying it now…” He shook his head, and a look of nausea swept across his face. In that moment, I hated him just a little bit less. A little bit.

  “So yeah, call me stupid. Call me naïve. Call me whatever the fuck you want. I don’t care. I bought into the line I was sold. I tried to ignore the evidence. Wrote off the pregnancy as a fluke. You ever hear of a liger? And having dirt on politicians. Who the fuck doesn’t, and who the fuck cares? Politics is an older and dirtier game than prostitution. Everyone knows it. But then you had to turn yourself in, and you had to do it with a shitload of scientific mumbo jumbo tucked in your back pocket.” He shook his head, spat on the ground. Drew an angry breath. “At first I was just happy to put your ass behind bars. But then I got to wondering why you did it. We weren’t any closer to finding you. So why do it?”

  “To make people listen,” I said quietly. “And to make sure Walton couldn’t suppress the evidence we’d found.”

  “Make people listen,” he snorted. “Well, it fucking worked, damn you. I wanted to ignore it, Campbell. I really fucking did. But I’m a cop. I’ve never seen a guilty man turn himself in unless he was bucking for a lesser sentence. I waited to hear about you cutting a deal.”

  “No deals,” I said.

  “No deals,” he agreed. “Just you, in a cell. In general fucking population. And I got to thinking about that, too. About how fucked up that was. I don’t like you, Campbell, but cops don’t belong in general pop. And I figured, if you’re half as smart as you get credit for, you had to know there was a chance you’d end up right where you did. A good chance some scumbag convict would try to shank you.”

  I unconsciously rubbed at the knife wound on my arm. “So, you reviewed the evidence. The ‘scientific mumbo jumbo.’”

  “Yeah. Most of it might as well have been written in Sanskrit. But Kaphiri’s journal entries, his explanations. Maybe most of all, him documenting the efforts Walton took to keep him quiet. You don’t go to that kind of effort to silence someone if you’re not doing anything wrong. So yeah, I started believing.” He shifted his weight, dropped his gaze once more. “I… I couldn’t just turn my Toys…my… Shit. Whatever. I couldn’t turn them out. Just, kick them to the street. They’re still at my place, Campbell. I haven’t touched them. But they’re there. Looking at me. Waiting for me to tell them what to do. Watching and waiting.”

  “That’s pretty much all they’re allowed to do,” I agreed. “That, and suffer.”

  The words landed harder than I’d expected, and Fortier winced. The color fled his face, and for a moment, I thought he was going to vomit. He got himself under control with a visible effort. “Yeah. So, they’re there, at my house. And it got to the point where I was almost afraid to go home.
I had to do something. I’ve been… Well, sabotaging some of the efforts to find you. A little bit. But it’s…it’s not enough.”

  His admission of trying to undermine the search efforts shocked the hell out of me. In a thousand years, I never would have expected it. I could buy the guilt, the realization, the understanding. I’d seen it in other faces. I’d seen it in Hernandez. But aiding and abetting was a far cry from assuaging your guilt, and if you’d asked me yesterday if Fortier had the courage to act, I would have laughed in your face. “And then Hernandez showed up,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Fortier agreed. “You may think I’m an asshole, Campbell, but I’m not half as stupid as you think. I’ve been watching her. And while she was smart enough”—this with an acknowledging nod toward Hernandez—“to avoid anything that I could actively pursue, there was an awful lot of sick days and family emergencies accruing over the past couple of months. Not enough to go to the brass, even if I’d wanted to. But enough to make me suspicious. So, when she started pulling people aside and asking questions…” He trailed off.

  “He sought me out, hermano,” Hernandez said. “Cornered me, really. I didn’t want to let him in, but he told me the same thing he just told you. And I believe him. Besides”—she shrugged—“other than Thompson here, no one else was taking the bait. Figured another shooter can only help.” She threw Fortier a smile that was half-hate and half-tease. “Maybe he’ll catch a bullet for us.”

  “You’re all heart, Detective,” Fortier replied, the snide tone creeping back into his voice just a bit. “But I’m not just a target. Me and Thompson, we brought gifts.” With that, he reached behind the stack of pallets and began pulling out gear bags. My heart skipped a beat at the thought of having an honest-to-God holster once more.

  “Fine, Fortier. You and Thompson are in. Has Hernandez briefed you?”

  “Just that it’s incredibly dangerous, we’ll all probably die, and if we don’t do it, the world is doomed,” Thompson said. Then he grinned. “Who could say no to that?”

  “She didn’t even mention Idaho?” I asked. “That’s the best part.”

  Chapter 17

  We spent Valentine’s Day on the road.

  The RV that Al’awwal and Tia managed to secure was an older, used model that had seen a lot of road. But it had the benefits of being big enough to hold us—complete with a makeshift isolation chamber for Silas—and being within the price range that we could pull together on short notice. I still had no idea how Silas funded things, but even his resources weren’t without their limits. And you couldn’t exactly walk into an RV lot and hand over a briefcase full of cash without raising an eyebrow or two.

  It did have all the required autonomous driving and navigation features. Which was a damn good thing, since without them, we wouldn’t have been able to get on the interstates. As it was, we were staring down about sixteen hours of driving to get from New Lyons to the Potato Farm, which was located somewhere within a hundred miles of Boise. That same drive would have taken twice as long back before autonomous driving, when speed limits were set statically at levels thought to be best for the mechanical limitations of the vehicles and the physical limitations of the humans behind the wheels.

  Now, speed limits simply didn’t exist, not on the interstates. The whole thing was computer controlled, relying on a network of global positioning satellites, a bank of super computers, and the continuous data feed from every car on the road. The system adjusted speed based not only on the flow of traffic, but on the system monitoring of the vehicles themselves. Even our clunky, outdated RV averaged a solid one-hundred-forty to one-hundred-fifty miles per hour, while more modern vehicles sped along the interstates at something closer to two hundred. Not even law enforcement could engage manual drive on the interstates…but then again, there was no need. All they had to do was identify the vehicle they wanted stopped, and if it was on the interstate, the system would take care of it. Slow it down, move it to the side of the road, and then lock the vehicle in place.

  It made our journey all the more dangerous, and, to be honest, it made my palms itch. Hernandez looked a little twitchy, too, staring out a window, but with one hand near the sidearm she still wore. Our egress from New Lyons had been easier than anticipated. Silas was still tied in to the NLPD’s computers, and we had Fortier and Thompson with all the latest intel that hadn’t made it into those systems. We’d slipped past roadblocks and monitors like they didn’t exist, using surface roads until we were well out of New Lyons, and then accessing the highway. Hell, with Fortier on board, we probably could have driven directly through any one of the checkpoints, so long as I stayed out of sight. But we hadn’t gotten as far as we had by taking risks.

  The others had taken the two cops in stride, since none of them had the history with Fortier than I did. Silas had even gone so far as to reach out to his network and ensure that Fortier’s former Toys would be either brought into the fold or, at the very least, taken to a place of relative safety. I couldn’t tell if the relief of Fortier’s face was from thinking that they’d be taken care of, or that he wouldn’t have to deal with them himself when all this was over.

  We had gathered in what passed for the living area of the RV, with the door to the vehicle’s single “bedroom” open but sealed off with plastic drop cloths and duct tape. I knew that the plastic also wrapped around the walls, floor, and ceiling, in an effort to isolate Silas, the room’s sole occupant, as much as possible. One of the small windows in the back of the RV had been left unwrapped, and had even been cracked open, the proverbial airhole. I’d questioned that at first, but Tia had explained that the point was to protect those of us trapped in the small metal box from whatever plague Walton Biogenics had released, and not to stop any airborne particles from being sucked out the window and sprinkled over the highway. Her words, not mine. The risk, as she’d pointed out, of the virus actually finding a host that way was pretty slim.

  The table, such as it was, was only big enough for four people. LaSorte claimed one of the seats of honor, as he had a half-dozen screens spread out before him. Al’awwal had the other, rounding out one side. Fortier and Thompson had squeezed into the other side, their respective—and very different—bulk making for a tight fit. Some bench seating ran along the wall on the opposite side of the table, and Hernandez, Tia, and I shoehorned onto it. I was, maybe, pressed up closer against Tia than was strictly speaking necessary, but I told myself that it was to give Hernandez a little more room. Besides, Tia didn’t seem to mind. Silas had pulled a metal folding chair right up to the edge of the plastic. If it wasn’t for the barrier, he could have reached out and touched the people at the table.

  Fortier and Thompson were taking turns staring back and forth between Al’awwal and Silas. Al, in typical fashion, wasn’t fucking about on the preparedness front. While most of us chose to leave the heavy gear in the bags, he’d strapped his Israeli bullpup to a tac-strap and had it close at hand. Fortier was looking at him with an expression that was half-incredulity and half-fear. “You sure he’s a synthetic?” Fortier asked, directing the question my way.

  “I can speak for myself,” Al said. “And yeah, you’re damn right I am.” He patted the bullpup affectionately. “And yes, I can use this.”

  “Pretty effectively,” I agreed. “And he kicked my ass when we were sparring.”

  Thompson stopped staring at Silas and his quarantine room, “And worked his way through a squad of the Special Response Team.”

  “Jesus,” Fortier muttered. “And a fucking plague to boot. You didn’t mention that, Hernandez.”

  Silas cleared his throat. Or tried to. It turned into more of a half-cough, half-strangle. No one spoke until the fit had passed. Silas twisted the cap off a bottle of water with one hand and took a long sip. “While I am sure,” he said at last, “that we all have many things of which to speak, perhaps we should concentrate our efforts on the matter at hand. We will
need some kind of plan when we approach the…” He paused, grimaced. “Potato Farm.” A wan smile twisted his lips. “And I fear time is something of the essence.”

  That was an understatement, but it reminded everyone around the table of just how dire our circumstances were. “What have you been able to find?” I asked.

  LaSorte took the cue, and started working his magic. “We’re too cramped in here. Take a look at your screens.”

  I pulled out my personal screen, and, sure enough, found information already blossoming onto it. Most of it was basic—images from corporate marketing materials embedded within what looked like county-filed blueprints, satellite shots used for traffic apps, some heat mapping showing the highest periods of activity. I wasn’t sure how LaSorte got that, but it conformed with a fairly standard workday, so maybe it was conjecture. Names and addresses of employees. And, the piece de resistance, the basic layout of the physical and electronic surveillance.

  “Damn,” Thompson said with a low whistle. “You guys are better than Cyber. You pulled this together in…what? Two days?”

  LaSorte flashed his charming grin at the big rookie. “Something like that. But this,”—he waved one hand that encompassed all our screens,—“is the easy stuff. Some of it was behind pretty impressive firewalls, but, really, nothing to the degree that one might expect at a super-secret facility.”

  “Are we sure we have the right spot?” Tia asked. Her presence had earned surprised exclamations from both Thompson and Fortier, but she’d just grinned and shrugged and somehow had the pair laughing along with her in under a minute. I had no idea how she did it, and I could admit the tiniest itch of jealousy to see her laughing with Fortier, though I think I’d managed to keep it off my face. “We’re kind of going on pure conjecture, here. And I’m not sure we should trust that Larkin woman.”

  “We did find one thing, Ms. Morita,” Silas said from behind his plastic wall. “There are unusual power levels at that facility. With Ms. Larkin’s help, we identified several ‘standard’ Farms and ran some cross analytics. We have a good estimation of how much energy a Walton synthetic facility would use, based on size. The Potato Farm…” He couldn’t finish the sentence as another bout of coughing racked his body. He waved one hand toward LaSorte, who jumped into the gap.