The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  She decided not to risk it. The Mitsubishi SG found its resting place in a storm sewer running under Fifth.

  Ten minutes in the library’s public washroom helped her looks, if not how she felt. Evi stuck her head in a sink and let cold water run over the back of her head and the left side of her face. She had no idea how much her left eye had been hurting from the gas until she flushed it out. It was a relief just to rest her cheek against the cold porcelain. For a few minutes she didn’t care if anyone tried to jump her.

  No one did. The only people who passed through the bathroom were a pair of bouncing blonde teenagers who babbled around her, apparently doing their best to ignore the leather-clad woman with her head in the sink.

  When the girls left, she raised her head and looked at herself in the mirror. Her left eye was bloodshot and puffy, and a circular patch of red irritation marked where her gas mask had pressed into the flesh.

  With her eyes squeezed partway shut, she could see her Asian heritage.

  She bore a very close resemblance to Sukiota. So much so that the Semitic cast to her features seemed to be briefly overshadowed.

  It was unsettling, even if they were sisters. They were closer than any blood relatives outside identical twins. Evi knew of at least two living women of the same heritage with whom she shared a DNA signature.

  The heritage was Hiasbu Biological. Specifically, “General Purpose Human Embryo—Lot 23.” The last commercial strain prewar Japan ever produced.

  She removed the leather jacket and partially unzipped the monofil jumpsuit. Her shoulder had bled enough to make pulling the jumpsuit away painful. She grimaced as she pulled down the collar, revealing the wound behind her left shoulder. She saw in the mirror that the puncture was small and shallow. Splashing some water over it cleaned the blood and revealed a dark purple bruise that was spreading down her back. Looking at the bruise reminded her how much her leg was aching.

  She dressed the wound with an antibiotic patch from her med-kit. Good thing the damage was minor. She wouldn’t be able to fix a bullet wound in here.

  She didn’t even want to think about getting a major injury in the field.

  She zipped herself up, replaced the jacket, and put on her shades.

  Now she looked more the street kid than the art student.

  She walked out into the hall, limping, soft leather boots squeaking on the new marble. Muffled construction sounds were emerging from behind white plastic panels on the wall opposite the bathroom. It had been nearly six years since the Bronx Bensheim clinic was firebombed, and here they were, still repairing the damage from the moreau retaliation.

  ’53 had been a bad year all around.

  She smiled to herself. If it hadn’t been for her work in Cleveland, it could have been a lot worse.

  But her leg hurt, and she wanted to sit down.

  She found a comm booth in sight of the front door and slipped inside. It was much nicer than the comm at the theater. It still had the new factory smell about it. The booth was soundproofed behind its tinted glass and provided a contoured bucket seat. The lighting was low, and the plastic was a soft charcoal gray, not the more common glare-white.

  Just sitting down made her feel a lot better.

  The booth gave her a much needed sense of privacy, despite her paranoid thought that someone at the Agency might be using the Langley mainframes to leach the comm signals from Manhattan for her image. That kind of extravagance would be unlikely. The cost would be hard to explain down in Washington, even with a black budget. Besides, this comm’s primary use was to access the library database. She doubted her picture would be out on the net unless she tried to access an outside line.

  The comm began flashing a green message at her. It wanted her to insert her card and choose a function. Damn, it wouldn’t let her sit there and think. She picked out one of her false ID cards from her pack. The one she’d gotten herself, without Agency intervention. Eve Herman’s existence was shakier than the personae created by the Agency, but Eve didn’t exist in any file on any member of the intelligence community, foreign or domestic.

  Eve logged onto the library database and began an interminable search on the incredibly large subject of “Japan” while Evi leaned back and thought about why she had become such a prize target.

  The Agency had turned on her. Frightening, but not unheard of. It wasn’t spoken of in the open, but the stories did circulate. The Agency decided someone was a liability, and something happened to them. They stepped onto a transport that never landed at its destination, or they had an appointment with a superior and never returned. Somehow, their mail gets forwarded to some anonymous post office databank, their furniture gets moved to some small dead town in northern Nevada, their cover identities quit their jobs because of vaguely defined “family problems,” and their lives dry up and are forgotten.

  The past seven hours didn’t fit the Agency’s M.O. for “retirement.” That was despite the fact that her boss, Hofstadter, was the hand behind the sniper. The Agency wouldn’t bother assassinating agents in the field when they could simply be ordered to attend their own execution.

  Unless there was a time factor and they had to do it now, this instant.

  The mercs must have forced their hand. If she was right and the sniper was there to prevent the mercs from taking her alive, it would almost make sense. A sniper was much more the Agency’s style. They didn’t want her taken and would kill her to prevent it. That sounded like Agency thinking.

  That didn’t explain why she couldn’t call in.

  It also didn’t explain Frey. Frey was supposed to take her in, but Aerie didn’t acknowledge her existence anymore.

  Whoever Frey talked to, it wasn’t Aerie.

  The screen was flashing at her. The comm had stopped its search at half a million items. It wanted more qualifiers. Eve told it to drop any references prior to 2053.

  The Aerie didn’t recognize her code. That meant someone had nuked her Agency file.

  Why bother?

  There was something else going on here.

  Then there was A. Sukiota. Sukiota was definitely an Agency creature. Sukiota had been on her heels twice already—once in the theater, once during the chaos in Evi’s building, presuming that it was Sukiota’s Maduro that Evi had blown up. Sukiota was working with the NYPD, if not running the show.

  Both Sukiota and the cops were after her. Evi could understand the cops, but why Sukiota? The Agency already had one sniper after her, Gabe. Were Sukiota and Gabe the same person?

  The comm flashed at her.

  There were a hundred thousand references to Japan post-53. For the first time she really looked at the search she was running. She had thought she was just throwing the comm into a random search to let her think. Now her choice seemed less than random.

  Japan.

  The peeper was speaking Japanese to somebody, probably the man with the doberman. The Afghani mercs were armed with Mitsubishis. Evi had blown away a dog, a generic un-engineered doberman that had hardwired bio-interfaces.

  What did Japan, old Japan, have to do with her? She was only ten years old when Tokyo was nuked and the Chinese overran the island. But, if anything, the Japan that was touching her now was the prewar Japan, the techno-colossus that had been gone for more than two decades, not the modern little client state that no one ever heard about anymore.

  Her job barely touched that part of the world. At the think tank, that was more Dave Price’s area. His doctoral thesis was on the U.S. nonintervention in the Pan-Asian war. It was definitely Hofstadter’s area. His main area of study was Pacific Rim economics.

  In the dozen years she’d worked for the Agency, she’d had only one operation where Japan was even a small part . . .

  2053, Cleveland. Neutralizing Hassan Sabah.

  Her last “fire” mission.

  The last time she�
��d heard Frey manning the Aerie.

  And Hassan Sabah was an Afghani canine assassin, just like the mercs that had overrun her building.

  Could all that be a coincidence?

  “Hell, no.”

  She keyed the search to concentrate on Japanese Nationalist activity. That had been Hassan’s last known affiliation before he smuggled himself into the States. Evi had tracked Hassan to Cleveland during the steaming August of ’53 and had opened a can of worms that had led to the indictment of twenty-three congressmen and the resignation of fifty more.

  As far as she knew, that can of worms had nothing to do with Japan. In fact, it originated about as far from Japan as you could get. A few light-years at least.

  As far as she knew.

  There was a knock at the door to the booth, and it was all Evi could do to keep from drawing her gun. She looked and saw a young sandy-haired man leaning over and smiling through the tinted window. His name tag said his name was Paul. She opened the booth.

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry, miss, but because of the holiday the library is closing early.”

  She looked behind him, at a large digital clock hanging over the main doors. The clock was part of the reconstruction and looked a century out of place in the building. The time was 2:53.

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “No problem. There’s an announcement over the PA, but you can’t hear it in these things.”

  The guy still hovered there, smiling. She allowed herself to smile back.

  She had the comm download all the Japanese info onto a ramcard while Paul watched. “You know, I wrote my thesis on the Chinese occupation.”

  She stepped out of the booth and stretched. She tried not to wince at the pain it triggered in her calf and shoulder. “Very interesting, but it’s not polite to read over people’s shoulders.”

  Paul gave a lopsided shrug and broadened his grin slightly. She could smell a little lust and some well-hidden nervousness about the guy. “Ask me something.”

  “What?”

  “Ask me about whatever you’re searching for,” Paul hooked a thumb back at the comm booth.

  This was getting a little annoying. “I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.”

  “Then ask me something at random, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  Why not? “Tell me about Japanese Nationalist activity in ’53.”

  Paul rubbed his chin. “Busy year, but then you probably knew that. Five—no, six—high-level political assassinations. Started with Yang Peng, assistant political director in Yokohama. The NLF hired a professional assassin, took an antitank rocket to his limo.” That had been Hassan’s work, Evi thought. “That was in March. A ground-to-air missile shot down an Air-bus ballistic shuttle on takeoff. That killed the Chinese foreign minister and about a hundred tourists. That was in Shanghai in May. The director of the State Office of Science and Technology along with a few dozen Chinese scientists and engineers were killed by a suicide car bomb during a Tokyo excavation—”

  Scientists and engineers? “What were they doing?”

  Paul smiled. He seemed happy that he had finally piqued her interest. “The Chinese government never made an official statement, but their State Office is mostly known for rooting through whatever was left of the Japanese technological base for their discoveries. I did some research at the time, and the location of the explosion is around where the Japanese space agency warehoused some of their prototypes—”

  “Thank you.” Yes, it was much more than a coincidence. She turned to go.

  “You’re welcome.” She didn’t hear Paul follow her, and for that she was grateful.

  “Hope to see you again.”

  She reached the door, sighed, and turned around. “No, you don’t.” She slipped outside, not waiting for Paul to respond.

  She walked back out on the street, wading through the press of people. She knew the pieces fit together, but she didn’t know how. What was clear, however, was that her involvement in breaking up that cell in 2053 was the reason behind what was happening to her. She didn’t know exactly why, but there were too many parallels between now and five years ago.

  Everyone was after her because of the aliens.

  She pushed through the crowd, uncaring. She forced her way past a growling moreau jaguar. She ignored him. She was barely aware of where she was going, until a chain-link fence adorned with warning signs stopped her.

  She looked up and found herself facing the scaffolding enveloping the truncated tower of the Chrysler Building. The demolition of the tower had halted for the holiday, and she’d been stopped by the fence that crossed 42nd. The Chrysler Building was the only thing standing in a city block of plowed rubble.

  It looked like as good a place as any to go to ground.

  She scanned the crowd around her on this side of the fence. Scurrying civilians were doing their best to ignore her, the homeless moreaus huddled in the doorways and into each other. New Yorkers all, and not a cop among them. She might as well have been alone.

  She grabbed a handful of fence and hauled herself up to the top. The barbed wire was only a deterrent. It wouldn’t stop anyone who took a little care in climbing over it. Once she was over the wire, she vaulted into the construction site. None of the civilians commented or looked in her direction.

  She limped toward the surreal monument of the Chrysler Building over a small mountain of broken concrete and powdered stone. The land was cleared for half a block in every direction, as if the city had drawn back in rejection of one of its oldest skyscrapers.

  She made it to the base of the building, weaving through a dark jungle of scaffolding to reach the doorway. She didn’t go inside. She just sat down in the entranceway, giving a casual glance at the graffiti that covered the exterior for three stories.

  “Off the pink,” read one sentiment. It was a morey phrase. “Pink” was morey slang for human.

  It reminded her of Cleveland, and the aliens.

  Evi had handed the aliens to DC and Langley.

  It still frightened her. No one in the community had seemed to have had any official knowledge of the cell that had been based in Cleveland. She had stumbled on it while tailing Hassan.

  The mission had started out as a simple game of “bag the terrorist.” But the people Hassan killed in Cleveland hadn’t been killed for political reasons. They’d been killed because they’d known about the aliens. Hassan had eliminated dozens of people to cover up the existence of a conspiracy buying influence in Washington.

  She remembered sitting in her Porsche, waiting outside a darkened office building, headquarters to Midwest Lapidary Imports, fuming at the Aerie. Even then, before she realized the origin of the conspiracy, the scope of what she’d uncovered boggled . . .

  A cell controlled by some foreign agency operated behind this corporate front and bought billions of dollars’ worth of influence in Washington.

  Congress, the Judiciary, the White House, nothing had been immune.

  There were eight thousand employees working for Midwest Lapidary who only existed as bits in some databank. At that point the latest info was that the data trails led back to Langley. As if the CIA could finance something like that. It had been just another fictional artifact engineered by the people in charge of Midwest Lapidary.

  If they were people.

  Even then, she wasn’t sure if they were people. She had seen the corpse of one of the creatures that ran Midwest Lapidary. The being had been called a frank, but it was no frank she had ever heard of. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of human-engineered species, and the corpse of John Smith found no home there. The corpse she had seen had been 300 kilos of white hairless blubber that had been only roughly molded into the shape of a man.

  And the corpse had melted.

  Nothing she had ever heard of did that.

 
; Smith had been killed by a stun rod, so her team had been so equipped. However, she wanted to try and get these things alive. She had a lot of questions. For that reason, the team also had trank guns.

  But God knew what a trank would do to a design so exotic.

  And the Aerie had just told her to pack it in.

  She had a specimen jar on the dashboard. Inside swirled a milky-white liquid, somewhat more viscous than water. A smell of bile and ammonia hung about it. The rest of Smith’s “remains” had been at a lab being analyzed.

  Hassan had bombed the lab where the specimens had been stored. It was a total loss. All that was left of Smith was the few ounces of liquid sitting on Evi’s dash.

  But since Hassan was dead now, Aerie seemed unconcerned. Hassan had been the mission.

  She had found that a foreign government was in at least partial control of nearly a hundred Congressmen, and the Agency was happy to pack it in now because a local private investigator threw Hassan off the top of a parking garage.

  In fact, her new orders were to track down that damned PI. Nohar Rajasthan, a 300-kilo, two-and-a-half meter tall moreau tiger. A descendant of computer-evolved Indian special forces, all fur, teeth, claws, and muscle. If he had any formal combat training, he’d be scary.

  As far as she was concerned, that was pointless.

  Nohar just had the bad luck to be investigating Hassan as well. He had uncovered the same mess she had. She had thought he was safely under wraps at the hospital. It wasn’t the tiger’s fault Hassan bombed the place.

  Apparently, after the explosion, there was a battle royal between Nohar and Hassan, after which Nohar disappeared. The Agency was still operating under the assumption that Nohar had links to radical moreau organizations.

  She was still fuming at the Agency when the comm buzzed her. “Agent Isham here.”

  “Isham? This is Agent Conrad. We found one of the people you’ve been looking for. Alive and well.”

  “Who?”