The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  The first thing she did was call DeGarmo, the lawyer. Of course he wasn’t at the office on Sunday, but he’d done her the service of putting her on his comm’s short list of calls that could be forwarded.

  His home comm barely buzzed once. “Miss Lopez, Angel—are you all right?”

  Angel laughed because there was no other socially acceptable way to react to the question. “I’m alive.”

  “The police—”

  “—are looking for me, right?”

  DeGarmo nodded. “A Detective White, in particular.”

  “Well, hold off telling them where I am for a while—”

  “I’ll respect that, but I have to advise you—”

  “Skip the advice, I need you to do a few things for me.”

  “Like?”

  Angel felt a strange sense of finality. She hesitated a few seconds before she spoke. “Byron’s ashes—” She sucked in a breath.

  “Yes? I have them, I’ve been waiting for—”

  “You handle the arrangements. Dump them, bury them. I don’t care. Just invite all those other heirs of his.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Angel closed her eyes and nodded. “I don’t want any part of it.”

  “Is that it?”

  “No, my roommate—her name’s Lei Nuygen—is in St. Luke’s Veterinary Hospital. I want you to take care of her medical expenses. Surgery, medicine, rehabilitation, all of it.”

  He nodded again.

  “Last, I need you to transfer my money—” Angel brought out the black ramcard Tetsami had given her. “It’s a bank in Zurich . . .”

  After she had talked to DeGarmo, she called Frisco International and reserved a seat on the midnight ballistic to Toronto. Toronto was a nice place since it was out of the country and she could swing it without a passport. In Toronto she figured she had enough grease to pull out some sort of ID arrangement, legal or not, that could get her a lot farther.

  She had committed herself. She was getting the hell out.

  She pulled out her tickets and looked at them. The game with Denver was in three hours. She had box seats near the fifty yard line. She wondered if it was a good idea to go. She could try and lay low until the flight. But she knew that if she didn’t ditch Byron’s data, she’d be looking over her shoulder all the time. If she was lucky, everyone would still think she had the only copy—after Mr. K’s organization collapsed she just might—and once she handed it off, no one would have a reason to hound her.

  Or at least no reason to hound her to another continent.

  If she didn’t give up the data, she’d be crazy or dead long before the election.

  • • •

  At three, another autocab dropped her off at Hunter’s Point Boulevard. It wasn’t because she wanted to walk a few kilometers to the stadium, but because of the godawful traffic that was clogging the whole Bayview area.

  She walked along the side of the road and looked at the cars. Kilometers worth of road were lined with moreaus packed into vans, pickups, and old Latin American land-yachts. One babyshit brown pickup with particleboard walls on the bed must have been carrying at least a dozen rodents. The smell of alcohol was as thick as the smell of excitement. The Earthquakes’ white and blue thunderbolt logo was flying on flags, plastered on cars, on windows—she even saw one jaguar who’d dyed the fur on his chest.

  There was the normal whooping, calling, and carrying on. Like every big game.

  But it wasn’t like every big game.

  As she walked along the side of the traffic jam, making better time than the cars, she could see signs of the tension that was hanging just below the revelry. It wasn’t just the fact that the fans were louder and more raucous than usual. More than once she heard something break in the distance. Quite a few things were getting tossed on the sidewalk—empty drink bulbs, toilet paper, food, clothing, and, in one case she saw, even a passenger.

  It wasn’t just that there were twice as many cops directing traffic as there’d be for a regular game, or that, while the cops on the street were normally attired, the ones in the idling patrol cars wore full riot gear. It wasn’t just the two SWAT vans she saw.

  It wasn’t the dozen or so newsvid aircars that hovered over Hunter’s Point like locusts over a field of grain.

  The clearest sign that something different and very wrong was going on was with the pink fans. Nonhuman football had as many human fans as moreys, and it was human money that really supported it. Maybe half the take at the Hunterdome gate was normally from the human spectators.

  In the mile of traffic she walked by on her way to the Hunterdome, she saw three human-occupied cars. In each case, there was no reveling fan inside. Each human driver had locked the doors and sealed up his vehicle like a tank going into a war zone.

  On each driver’s face was an expression that said, “This is not a good idea.”

  If anything, the proportion of human fans decreased as she approached the Hunterdome. The dome itself looked like the upper third of a gloss-black bowling ball. Angel approached it as just another one of the thousands of fur-bearing people who were clogging the parking lot.

  A half-hour before game time, just as she was nearing the gate, the surface of the dome activated. Predictably, it was for a beer commercial. Outside, the dome was a giant display ad, inside it was the single biggest holo screen on the West Coast.

  She entered the gate as, above her, a twenty-meter-tall tiger was kicking back some brew bigger than she was.

  For a half second she almost panicked when her card was passed through the meter. After all the fiddling that had been done to it, would it read properly? Would the reader fuck with the data that everyone was knocking themselves out to get?

  It was only a moment, though, and then the young canine who read the ticket directed her up and to the left.

  She passed a refreshment stand—the lines were long enough so the people near the end would probably miss the whole first quarter. She decided not to get something to eat. The air was ripe with hot dog, and cooking meat made her queasy.

  Despite the crowd, when she broke out into the stands, she could tell that it wasn’t going to be a sellout. She could see it in the stands as she made her way down to the fifty yard line. Way too many empty seats for this important a game. She had a feeling that each empty seat represented a human season ticket holder.

  So, she was in shock when she got down to her seat and found a human sitting in it. A human she knew.

  For a second time that week she asked Detective Kobe Anaka, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Chapter 27

  For an instant, Angel wanted to run. Just start running blindly and never stop. But her feet remained rooted to the aisle well past the point when her panic faded and she could think.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked again. She was sick of surprises, sick of being caught off guard.

  Anaka moved over a seat and gestured for her to sit down next to him. “You seem to forget, I’m the one who returned those tickets to you.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Briefly, she felt really silly. She was getting as paranoid as everyone accused Anaka of being. “How’d you know I’d be at the game?”

  “I didn’t.” Anaka shrugged. “Seemed likely, considering the emphasis the letter put on it.”

  “You read—” She clamped down on the self-righteous question. Of course he’d read it, how else would he have known who to return it to? “Why’d you come here?”

  “I don’t know . . .” Angel bent over and got a good look at him. He was in sad shape. His eyes were bloodshot. The suit he wore was different, but just as rumpled as the last one she saw him in. Even over the pungent odors of hot dogs, beer, and ten thousand moreaus, she could tell he hadn’t been anywhere near a shower in days. His face seemed thinner, his chin shadowed, and his move
ments had the deliberate quality of someone who knew he was on the verge of collapse. He stared up at her and there was a pleading look in his eyes. “Come in, Angel, to the station with me.”

  Angel looked at him coldly. “Fuck you, Anaka. I’ve already tried to do that once.”

  Anaka turned and rested his forehead against the seat in front of him. It was so long before he responded that she thought he had fallen asleep. Meanwhile the PA system blared, “Welcome to the Hunterdome and Earthquakes’ football.”

  During the applause, Anaka said, “I don’t know what else to do.”

  Angel barely heard him. The motto of the Earthquakes was that they’d “make the ground shake,” and the bass speakers of the dome’s sound system did a good job of making everything vibrate.

  A minor 2 to 4 quake could hit right now and no one would notice. Those who did would probably put it down to a special effect.

  “You have to help me—”

  “Help you what?”

  “Stop them!” Anaka was shaking, and it wasn’t just the noise level in the dome.

  Above them, over the field, the massive holo was firing up. Ten-meter-tall armored moreys went through their ritualized violence up there on virtual turf. It then began feeding in the net simulcast.

  “You’re the only one,” Anaka said, “who knows. Who isn’t a part of this.”

  Angel put a hand on his shoulder. How the hell could she tell him that she’d given up fighting, that the best thing she was hoping for was a clean exit. “You need some rest—”

  He shook free of her grasp. “How the hell can you say that?”

  “Anaka—”

  “After all this, I’d think you’d understand.”

  Angel got a prickly feeling at the back of her neck. The feeling that something had gone terribly wrong. Anaka was on the verge of hysteria. Something bad had happened.

  She put a hand back on his shoulder as the teams began to take the field. While the announcer went through the roster and the holo threw up stats in all their three-dimensional graphic glory. “Tell me what happened.”

  He looked at her sideways through half-closed eyes. “Oh, you know. You probably always knew. It was your lover that started all this.”

  “Cut the crap and tell me what happened after that goddamned shootout!” Her own voice now held a note of panic and desperation, and perhaps that cut through to Anaka.

  “Okay.” Anaka even chuckled a little, a sound that frightened Angel almost as much as the look in his eyes. “What happened.”

  He looked out into space, as if he were studying the graph of Al Shaheid’s past performance quarterbacking for the Denver Mavericks.

  When the Mavericks won the coin toss, Anaka repeated, “What happened?” as if he was asking himself the same question.

  “After you left me,” Angel prompted.

  He nodded. “Had to redo everything. Surveil VanDyne from a distance. Oh, God, I wish they’d found my tap—”

  “They didn’t?”

  “A passive, noninvasive, optical sensor next to one of their trunk lines. I think it was too simple for them to find.” He shook his head. “Kept monitoring police air traffic. That’s how I found out how Pat Ellis died—”

  “Doctor Ellis?” The name felt like a hand clutching her chest. That poor dumpy pink woman, the woman who was so afraid.

  “—car was found in a ravine up in the San Bruno Mountains. Been there since Sunday. An ‘accident.’ They ran her off the road.”

  Chalk another one up for the feline hit squad. It sounded like their style. Even though she was pretty sure that was the case, she asked Anaka “Who?”

  “The same people who told her to burn Byron Dorset’s body, who put the wrong person in charge of the autopsy.” He looked at her as if all this was obvious. “That was two—no, three days ago.” He looked at his watch.

  The Mavericks got the first down. It looked like the beginning of a drive, and the crowd didn’t like it.

  Anaka was still looking at his watch.

  Angel shook his arm. “Then what?”

  “Seems much longer . . .” He looked up from the watch, seeming very weary. It was then that Angel noticed Anaka’s pants for the first time. They were stained, still wet in some places. Angel leaned over, and finally, through the hundreds of overlapping odors, she could make out the smell of blood.

  “What—” she started, but Anaka was back into his story.

  “Kept hearing White over the radio. Knights this, Knights that. He had two dozen skinheads in jail when you were kidnapped. He rounded up the rest afterward.” There was a sad expression on his face. “He really was a good cop, before they got to him.”

  Angel looked up at Anaka. Her hackles felt like spikes on the back of her neck. Something very, very bad was happening—had happened.

  “Who got to White?”

  “The aliens, of course.”

  A chill traced icy talons down her back and stabbed itself into her gut.

  Below, the Earthquakes had halted the drive short of a touchdown and progress was going in the other direction. The crowd was on the verge of a standing ovation every time the Earthquakes’ canine quarterback, Sergei Nazarbaev made a first down.

  “What happened to White?” she asked after three plays, afraid of the answer.

  Anaka jerked like he had forgotten they were having this conversation. “He’s dead,” he said, sounding a little surprised, like it was a newly discovered fact. “Damn shame, he was a good cop. Before they got to him.”

  “How—” she stared, but Anaka went on as if there hadn’t been a pause in their conversation.

  “I was so stupid,” Anaka slammed his fist on the top of the chair ahead of him. Fortunately, it wasn’t occupied. Angel saw the blow draw blood, but Anaka seemed oblivious. “I saw all the communications to Alcatraz. But I didn’t really see anything until that damned computer called you.”

  “Yesterday,” she said. It was already ages ago.

  “The signal burst through and overloaded the tap. Even though it wasn’t encrypted, I only got a few bits of what it said.”

  Anaka lapsed into another silence. Angel didn’t prompt him. She was afraid of what he might say. She kept telling herself that it wasn’t what she was thinking, there was a better explanation.

  But she kept looking at Anaka, at the blood on his pants, his shaking hands, the dead glassy eyes—No, she said to herself, not that.

  The Earthquakes’ drive was stopped, and the score was tied with a field goal apiece.

  “What did you get?”

  “Huh?” Anaka looked at her.

  “The tap, what did you get when you tapped—”

  “Oh.” He wiped his forehead with the hand he’d struck the seat with. It left a trail of blood on his face, and he looked at it with an expression of surprise. “Sorry, I’ve been a little distracted.”

  A little?

  “I saw enough of what that machine said. And suddenly, it all made sense to me—”

  Makes one of us, Angel thought.

  “All this time I thought it was human corruption. Graft, bribery, organized crime, big money . . .” Anaka smiled at her. The smile scared Angel more than if he’d leveled a gun at her. “It was a revelation. The aliens. They were behind everything!”

  Angel nodded slowly.

  “I was on the cusp of this when White called me and said that one of the Knights had finally broken. I knew that I had been vindicated. VanDyne would come tumbling down, and the evil things controlling the government would be unmasked. Alcatraz isn’t a prison—it’s a control center.”

  He’s gone nuts. Fully around the bend. Angel sat back and could barely say what she was thinking. “You said White was dead.”

  Her voice was a whisper, and she had no idea whether Anaka had heard her. He went on. “
I was wrong about White. They had gotten to him before I did. When I got to him, I could see how those things could manipulate the minds of their victims. He kept on about how one of the Knights had rolled over on Alexander Gregg’s campaign manager. He didn’t see the big picture at all—and his eyes—oh, God, it was his eyes. It wasn’t White in there anymore.”

  “You said White was dead,” Angel repeated, loud enough for Anaka to hear.

  “All of them. The whole department was gone. They tried to keep me from leaving, but I had to get out. I couldn’t let them do to me what they did to White.” He looked down at his pants and rubbed one of the nearly invisible spots of blood. It was still damp, and Angel saw his finger come away wet. Angel focused on a hair that adhered to the blood. It was short, gray, and tipped with a tiny glob of what could have been flesh or clotted blood. “He looked so surprised. It was the hardest thing I ever did.”

  “Oh, God.” The shudder in her voice reached all the way into her diaphragm. This had pushed Anaka over the edge, all the way over. This had all come too close to his own paranoid nightmares, and it had burst his little reality dam. She could see one thing, anything, setting him off, making him decide that she was one of them.

  She stood up and began sliding away from him. She needed to find a cop. The police had to be busting their asses to find Anaka. He was oblivious, studying the hair that was glued to his finger.

  Keep staring, she thought. Stare until we get a hold of a white jacket in your size—and maybe some Thorazine.

  She was so intent on Anaka that she backed into somebody.

  As Angel turned, she got an intense feeling of déjà vu.

  She’d bumped into a pale pink who looked like a Fed, down to the barely concealed throat-mike. A pink with a nearly transparent white crew cut and red irises. She was looking at the same pink she had bumped into in Frisco General, the same pink who’d been pointing a vid unit at her house, the same pink she’d avoided to visit Lei at St. Luke’s. The same two meters of suit punctuated by the bulge of artillery under his arm.