The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  “Ms. Stephanie Weir, from the Binder Senate campaign—” Weir was the one executive officer of Binder’s staff that Hassan hadn’t killed.

  As far as Evi knew, Nohar was the last person to have contact with her.

  There was a muffled cursing and a female voice. “—give me that. Agent Isham?”

  “Ms. Weir?”

  “Nohar said that the MLI office building is a front, that they’re at NuFood—”

  “What?”

  “—he said they’re based on dextro amino acids. He’s gone there.”

  Sitting at the base of the Chrysler Building, Evi remembered that moment clearly. The moment when she knew. She had pulled out on to the street by the time Weir had reached the word “gone.” At the time, she thought the ideas running through her head were insane.

  But it had made sense.

  All those billions had been spent in a largely successful effort to erode the technical base of the United States. Especially in defense and space. The phony corporation of Midwest Lapidary was backing dozens of senators that would scuttle NASA’s deep-space probe project once it came to a vote that session.

  And John Smith didn’t match any gene engineering project that Evi had ever heard of.

  And Weir had just said Nohar Rajasthan believed they were based on a mirror-image biology.

  “Agent Isham? What’s that mean?” Weir had asked.

  Nearly everything alive on earth was based on levo amino acids. A creature based on a dextro amino acid biology wouldn’t be able to metabolize any food on the planet. Except the exotic dietary foodstuffs that NuFood produced. For the first time, Evi had realized that these were things that hadn’t been born on this world.

  Evi’s response had been, “You don’t want to know.”

  Six years later, she still shivered at that realization. She was more frightened of the idea of otherworldly beings manipulating the government than she could ever be of the Agency.

  And, since the library, she had realized there’d be other cells. The aliens, wherever they came from, were interested in preventing anything from Earth interfering with “their” worlds. However, the United States hadn’t been the only nation planning interstellar probes.

  Prewar Japan had been much farther along. So had prewar India.

  There had to be cells in Asia. If the Nippon Liberation Front bombed a Tokyo excavation of space-probe prototypes, it was a good bet that they were backed by the aliens.

  There were two players she was running from.

  The sniper was Agency material.

  Could it be the NLF that was behind the others? They employed Afghanis and had access to old Jap technology, and they had a possible link, though circumstantial, to the aliens.

  But why her, and why now? It wasn’t as if she were the only one who . . .

  Evi realized that Nohar was the only non-Agency person who knew about the aliens.

  Chapter 8

  The last time Evi had seen Nohar, he had been in a hospital bed. She had dug him, and the four aliens, out from under a warren under NuFood. He had been in sad shape, and the Agency more or less forgot about him. She’d never emphasized Nohar’s role in the whole mess.

  When she felt safe, and the night had wrapped around the city, she left the wreckage of the Chrysler Building and walked to a public comm. It took Eve Herman nearly ninety minutes and two hundred dollars to find Nohar Rajasthan again.

  All the time Evi was thinking of aliens.

  Her thoughts kept returning to the aliens’ lair under the NuFood complex. Organic shaped tunnels of polished concrete that had smelled of sulfur, burning methane, and aliens. The aliens emitted an evil bile-ammonia odor that she would never forget. The four creatures she’d captured made her think of white polyethylene bags of raw sewage.

  She finally found Nohar at some New Year’s Eve party in Hollywood. On the other coast it was seven o’clock. If anyone was interested in Nohar, they hadn’t done anything about it yet.

  What she hadn’t anticipated was how difficult getting to talk to the tiger would be, even when she found out where he was. It had been a long time since she had dealt with the real world.

  The blonde who answered the comm was stoned out of her mind, and it took Evi nearly fifteen minutes to explain to her that the call wasn’t for her. At which point the comm was abandoned, leaving Evi with an oblique view of somebody’s expensive chrome Living room filled with nearly equal numbers of moreaus and humans.

  She had nothing better to do, so she waited for somebody else to answer her call while she looked out at Third Avenue expecting the city to collapse in on her.

  Both snow and traffic were getting worse.

  Occasionally she shouted to get the attention of somebody moving close to the comm. Eventually, that worked. A pudgy lepine moreau noticed her yelling at the comm. Third generation, she thought. A Peruvian rabbit, probably a mixture of a half-dozen strains. But he didn’t look stoned.

  “Hello?”

  Finally. “I need to talk to Nohar Rajasthan.”

  The rabbit cocked one drooping ear toward the comm. “What?”

  Between the traffic on her end and the party on the other, she had to shout. “Nohar Rajasthan, I need to talk to Nohar Rajasthan!”

  The rabbit nodded. “Rajasthan, right.”

  The light at the end of one tunnel at least.

  She watched the rabbit melt into the party, and waited for Nohar to show up.

  She didn’t expect the black-haired woman who ended up sitting in front of the comm a few minutes later.

  “Stephanie Weir?”

  The woman grimaced and read Evi’s alias off the screen. “I know they don’t recognize it in New York,” Stephanie shouted over the party, “but the name is Rajasthan, Ms. Herman.”

  Evi should have noticed the ring on her finger. “I wanted to talk to your husband.”

  Stephanie smiled. “That was good. I didn’t even notice a wince when you said that.”

  Evi sighed. “Can you get him for me?” She decided that Stephanie was one of those women who became excessively catty when she’d had a few drinks.

  “No.”

  Abdel, what do I do when I can’t throttle her? “It happens to be an emergency.”

  Stephanie nodded. “Matter of life and death, do or die, now or never—You’d be surprised how common that is, Eve. They’re all emergencies. But it’s New Year’s. You’re going to have to wait until Thursday.”

  There was a broad smile on Stephanie’s face. She was obviously enjoying what she was putting her through.

  “It can’t wait—”

  “Then I’d say another detective is in order.”

  “Mrs. Rajasthan, there’s a good chance that someone is going to try and kill your husband if you don’t shut up and listen to me.”

  Stephanie lost the smile. “You look—”

  Evi wanted to punch in the screen. “You look! Tell Nohar his life is in danger—” Evi whipped off her sunglasses. “Get him!”

  Stephanie looked as if she was about to make another comment. Instead she just stared at the comm, color draining out of her face.

  Nohar had told her. Probably a long time ago, but Nohar had told her. Evi could read it in her face. She had never met Stephanie face-to-face, but she had made an impression on Nohar. Any description he gave would have included her eyes.

  Stephanie backed away from the comm. “Damn,” she whispered as she pushed back into the crowd.

  Now she was getting somewhere.

  It took less than a minute for Nohar to get to the comm. The tiger was an impressive figure even on the comm’s small screen. The party was blocked by a wall of yellow and black fur, all shoulders and face. Nohar had wrinkled his muzzle in a grimace and was emitting a low growl. She noted a few gray hairs around his broad nose.

/>   “You.” Nohar made it sound like an accusation. It probably was.

  She could understand how he felt, but the attitude still annoyed her. “Six years ago, I promised my goodwill if you helped me out. I’m paying you back.”

  “Point is?” Nohar was not one for a lengthy monologue.

  “Point is, the company I work for is trying to assassinate me.”

  There was a subtle transformation in Nohar’s face. If she weren’t an expert in reading moreau expressions she might not have noticed that Nohar had stopped displaying his teeth. The way his feline cheek was twisted, it would still be called a grimace. “What happened?”

  “There’s a good chance I’ve been targeted because of what happened in Cleveland. Because of the ‘franks’ who ran Midwest Lapidary.”

  “Shit.” Nohar let out a long breath. “That means—”

  “Only maybe.”

  She could hear Nohar’s claws rake the chair he was sitting on, even over the noise of the party. “What do I do?”

  “Disappear. Go on a real vacation, pay cash, don’t tell anyone where you go, leave the country for a while.”

  Nohar shook his head. “Asking a lot.”

  “I’m not asking anything. What you and your wife do is up to you.”

  “When will things be safe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not making things easy.”

  “I didn’t have to call.”

  Nohar let out a low rumbling sigh. “I owe you one.”

  “You did my job for me back in Cleveland. Consider it even.”

  “Not quite. You’re one up on me. Let me give you something.” Nohar typed on his comm’s keyboard and text began to appear on her screen. It was an address. Evi knew enough about New York to know that it was deep in the Bronx, Moreytown. Nohar also typed “G1:26.”

  Nohar gave Evi a close-lipped smile. “You might be able to use that.”

  Nohar cut the connection.

  What the hell was “G1:26” supposed to mean? Numbers separated by a colon. Greenwich mean time?

  Evi used the memo function to record the note on Eve’s card. She’d ponder it later. Nohar obviously assumed she’d know.

  She left the booth and started walking down Third, away from the Chrysler Building, away from Central Park, away, she hoped, from the more intense searches for her.

  She kept walking south, hiding herself in the eternal press of New Yorkers. It was getting close to nine, and traffic was grinding to a stop. Half the cars she passed had out-of-state plates. Aircars buzzed above, their red landing lights like embers caught in an up-draft.

  She kept walking, at random for the most part, keeping close to the buildings. She kept one eye open for the police. There, again, the holiday was working in her favor. The NYPD was understaffed to begin with. New Year’s in Manhattan overloaded them by an order of magnitude.

  Why her and not Nohar?

  She kept mulling over that question.

  She was pretty sure, despite her warnings, that if the people who were after her were after him, they’d have gotten to him long before she’d called. For some reason, she was more valuable.

  The only difference she could think of was the fact that she worked for the Agency, and Nohar was a civilian. The peeper’s team, the NLF, seemed to want her alive. And it seemed that the Agency was willing to kill her to prevent it. That extreme reaction by the Agency would make sense if it was something about the Agency itself the NLF was after.

  She shook her head. If that was so, then where did the aliens fit in? They had to be involved, there were too many links.

  And it still didn’t explain why the Aerie emergency number didn’t acknowledge her existence. If the Agency was trying to keep her out of the hands of the NLF, it was stupid to prevent her from coming in.

  And who the hell was Frey talking to when he pretended to talk to the Aerie?

  He was Agency, why didn’t he shoot her?

  She walked south down the axis of Manhattan, her mind traveling in circles over the same set of facts. She managed to avoid crossing paths with any cops.

  It was a few blocks south of Canal Street, right in front of the marble pagoda of the Chinatown Memorial, that she heard an aircar do a low flyby and realized that fatigue had made her careless.

  She backed to the memorial and leaned against a brass plaque listing the dead from the ’42 riots. She was confronted on one side by post-riot buildings. Sleek security condominiums, shades drawn against the empty street. Behind her was the monument to the riot and five square blocks of inadequately lit park that had once been a business district.

  The crowd had thinned a little, and the street here was mostly empty of traffic.

  The aircar had buzzed by, and she suddenly realized that one of her engineered survival traits could be a severe liability. Her body’s metabolism had a very low thermal profile. It was supposed to help her hide from infrared imaging. However, that unusual heat signature would single her out of a crowd of normal humans . . .

  The protection the crowd was offering her was illusory.

  She stood out like a beacon.

  She should have realized how tired she was. She must have been asleep on her feet to walk into a scene this perfect for an ambush. Abdel volunteered that she should have chosen a spot and gone to ground until she figured out what to do.

  But she was still here and hadn’t been blindsided yet. She rubbed her aching shoulder and noticed that her hand was shaking slightly.

  The snow was painting a thin cover on the ground, and she was beginning to feel the chill in the air.

  While she was still in the midst of deciding where to go from here, she heard a car coming down Center Street. She didn’t want to take any chances. She faded into the shadow of the pillar bearing the memorial plaque and put her hand on the butt of the Mishkov.

  The people walking back and forth down the streets ignored her.

  The car, a white late-model Jaguar, jerked to a stop, double-parking almost directly in front of her, pointed the wrong way. She was so tense that she nearly shot the driver before she heard the voices. The voices from inside the car were a relief. They all sounded drunk. The car held a man and two women.

  None of them sounded like a threat.

  One of the women wobbled out of the passenger side door carrying what appeared to be a magnum of champagne.

  Evi was about to holster her weapon when she realized she was hearing another engine, above her. The aircar was back in the vicinity. She looked up and didn’t see any lights. Legit air-traffic never cut the lights.

  The civilians across the street were arguing.

  “I told you we’d make it,” the man was telling the one bearing the champagne as he followed her out of the passenger door.

  “Sure, and we only have, like, a half hour to go.”

  The woman still in the car was the driver; she sounded the most sober. “You wanted to go to Desmond’s party first.”

  “We should have stayed at Desmond’s. A fucking waste spending two hours in the car on New Year—”

  “Girls, girls—” The guy was trying to calm things down. Meanwhile, Evi tried to spot the aircar. She would have been able to see if it weren’t for the streetlights. The bright mercury lamps were washing out her ability to see any infrared beyond a few meters. However, from the sound of it, the aircar was hovering.

  She was in trouble.

  A tiny, glowing infrared dot sprouted too close to her head and Evi ran. A bullet struck the pillar behind her. A chunk of marble shrapnel whizzed by her ear. The gun was silenced. She never heard it fire.

  People cursed her as she slammed through the crowd.

  Things were going too fast, and she still had no real idea where the aircar was.

  She ran at the Jaguar. The trio hadn’t notic
ed the shot or Evi running at them. The guy was leaning in the driver’s side door and trying to coax the remaining woman out. “Come on, Kris, we’ll miss Diane’s party.”

  Evi bolted across the street and felt more than heard the next shot hit the ground behind her left foot.

  “Not until Red apologizes.”

  Evi was halfway across the street and the infrared dot leapt ahead of her. She dodged as a bullet plowed out a small crater in the street.

  “Come on, Sam, let’s leave her—huh?”

  The one with the bottle had noticed Evi running full tilt across the street, gun down. She shoved her out of the way and dived into the open passenger door.

  “Get out!” Evi yelled. She was pointing the gun at the driver, but only got a blank look in response.

  “No, not my dad’s car.”

  “Lady, this is a real gun.”

  “You’re not steal—” A bullet punched through the roof of the Jaguar and split the armrest on the passenger door. That was too close. The driver let out a squeak and floored the Jaguar.

  The man barely had time to dive for the safety of the sidewalk.

  The woman, who looked barely nineteen, was looking at her. “They’re shooting!”

  Another shot ripped through the rear window, shattering it. There was a shuddering scrape as the Jaguar bucked forward and sideswiped a parked BMW, slamming shut the driver’s door.

  “Fuck, somebody’s shooting at us—”

  They were in the wrong lane.

  “Get in the right lane, lady!” Evi shouted as she struggled to sit upright in the passenger seat and get the seatbelt on. Then she began to reach out and close the passenger door.

  “Name’s Kris,” said the driver as she swerved way over the center of the road, rocking Evi too far out the open door. Evi had a brief, terrifying, view of speeding asphalt as another gunshot shattered the passenger window. Kris was still talking, eyes locked on the road now, “My dad’s going to kill me.”

  The Jaguar kept swerving to the right until it bumped up on the curb. Evi was thrown back into the car as a fire hydrant rendered the passenger door irrelevant. The door was torn away with Evi’s head barely inside the car.