Going Grey

by Karen Traviss

  "This guy, you mean? That's Tom Rennie. It says so on the caption. He's the son of Mike Brayne's friend. He was over from England for the holidays." Dru held her phone next to print-out of the snatched shot from Westerham so Weaver could compare the two. "I'm sure Tom wouldn't mind providing some DNA so you can look for werewolf genes to your heart's content, though."

  Weaver's expression was now locked. Either he knew he'd been manoeuvred into a corner and that she was lying, or he was now having serious doubts way too late. Leo sat swiping through his phone with no real appearance of urgency.

  "Here," Leo said. "That's Rob, Tom's father, with Mike, my boy." He held up his phone. It was some photo taken in Africa, with Mike looking suitably military in a dusty landscape, sitting on the tailgate of a vehicle with Rob. "Not that you'd need DNA to see that Rob is Tom's father. Extraordinarily alike, aren't they?" Leo smiled at the picture, which might have been pure theatre or genuine paternal pride, then put the phone back in his pocket. "I think we're done now, Shaun. Just remember that I won't tolerate you or your minions even being in the same time zone as my son or his family."

  "Is that a threat, Leo?"

  "Let me explain. A threat is when I say that if you do X, then I'll do Y. I'm going to do Y anyway, regardless of whether you do X, so technically, it's advance notice. Y, in this case, is an ongoing police investigation, plus the scrutiny of whichever agency my colleagues might feel is appropriate in the national interest, given the nature of your industry. But I've got people to explain all that to you. I really must be going now." Leo stood up and held his hand out to Dru. "I believe you had some unfinished business, Mrs Lloyd? Letter?"

  Leo was skilfully minimizing Weaver. Anger was what you showed to people who frustrated you and got under your skin; disdain was what you showed a minor player. Knowing Weaver, that was probably a more painful way to find out he was going to be turned over by every organization and committee that Leo could throw at him. Leo's revenge had probably only just begun. He seemed to be a remarkably long-term kind of man for a politician.

  Dru placed her resignation on Weaver's desk. "I actually came here to hand in my notice. I completed the investigation. There's no mule and no shape-shifter. And the benefits package just isn't enough to make me forget being staked out like a goat."

  Weaver didn't answer. Dru caught Julianne's eye as she left, but there was only surprise there. As she stood in the elevator lobby with Leo, heads popped up over cubicles in nearby offices to gawp. It was far easier to walk away than to walk in. They could keep the remaining candy bars and spare pens in her desk. She left nothing here of any consequence.

  "How about Kinnery?" Dru asked on the ride home. This didn't feel real yet. She dreaded the moment when it all sank in. "Isn't he a liability now? A weak link?"

  "Not really," Leo said. "Who holds all the actual proof of wrong-doing? We do, we being you, me, and Charles. What's Shaun got? Two key personnel – well, one ex-employee and one consultant – who'll throw him under the first available bus, and no proof of the existence of engineered genes at all. Even if he cites Charles's story about Maggie being a volunteer test subject, it can't be proven now, and it's a far less contentious ethical issue anyway. And he really doesn't want the biker linked to him, believe me, so that story dies a death too. Give it six months, and KW-Halbauer will have airbrushed Shaun Weaver out of the picture and concreted over everything that might come back to embarrass them."

  There would be aftershocks from this, Dru knew, but she'd have to handle it. The car drew up outside her house and Leo turned to face her. She was expecting a politician's thank-you-and-goodbye, but she got something else.

  "Was that really Tom?" he asked.

  It was an odd question. Dru thought he'd understood from the start that it was Ian. She hadn't felt the need to explain it to him. There were things you just didn't spell out in situations like this, where you didn't always know who might be eavesdropping.

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Because I didn't know."

  "Oh." Dru knew thin ice when she felt it underfoot. Had Mike forgotten to brief his father, or had he withheld something? He hadn't given any indication when she'd mailed him earlier. She didn't want to drop Mike in it. "I saw Tom out walking the dog."

  It wasn't an answer to any question, and it wasn't a lie, even if it sounded like one. But she was dealing with a politician. She knew she was hopelessly outgunned in the smart answers war.

  "You didn't ask what I didn't know, or when," Leo said. "Or answer the question."

  "Does it matter now?"

  "Not the way you might think it does."

  "Well, Weaver still doesn't know Ian exists, and he must know that we'd love to demonstrate that Tom Rennie has no non-human DNA in him. I think Weaver's cornered."

  "Well answered," Leo said. "I meant that I hadn't realised just how effectively Ian could morph until I saw that picture today."

  Dru felt she'd let Mike down somehow. If he hadn't told his father every detail, that was his business. She did her best to recover the situation.

  "I can't see the ability having much military use," she said. "He couldn't pass himself off as me, for example. And he'd still need to work on accents and mannerisms like anyone else."

  Was that true? Dru couldn't swear to it, but she knew what she'd seen.

  "I don't care what use Ian might be, but he would," Leo said. "He'd want to help the DoD. The medical issues aren't even on the table, and never will be."

  "I understand."

  Leo gave her a proper smile, no show of teeth, but genuinely warm nonetheless. "Dru, I like people who keep their counsel and don't drop my son in the mire. Loyalty's a rare and precious commodity. When I see it, I take good care of it." He took her hand and shook it again. "Take some time off. Don't rush into anything we offer now that you don't have to. Think about what you really want to do."

  Dru waved him goodbye, wondering if that was appropriate with senators, and went indoors to kick off her shoes and flop on the sofa. Damn, she was shaking again. It wasn't until she'd made a pot of coffee and was on her second cup that she realised she'd been set a make-or-break test in a few minutes in that limo.

  Somehow she'd passed. Leo wanted to be sure she'd back up Mike, and she had. Why wouldn't she? He was her lifeline, and he happened to be doing the moral, decent thing in a world that generally didn't.

  She wondered what would have happened if she'd failed that test. If she was careful, she'd never have to find out.

  EPILOGUE

  WASHINGTON, DC: SEVEN MONTHS LATER

  JUNE.

  The jeweller unrolled a small black velvet mat on the glass countertop and laid the watch on it with due ceremony. After a brief inspection without touching it, he looked up at Mike.

  "This must be of great sentimental value to you, Mr Brayne."

  It was a diplomatic way of saying he was stunned that a member of the Brayne family would possess anything so tacky, let alone want it repaired. The last time Mike had visited the store, his impulse purchase had been in the five-figure bracket, a pair of emerald earrings for Livvie. The jeweller knew him as well as he knew Dad. If the man felt his store was being sullied by cheap plastic, he'd never dare say so to his well-heeled customers.

  "It's my lucky watch." Mike indicated the small tear in the strap with his forefinger. "You could say it saved my life. Is it possible to fix it?"

  The jeweller picked up the watch and looked at it with his loupe. "I'm told the movements in these are surprisingly robust, but I'd have to make enquiries about the strap. You could always have a new one fitted. The case is a separate piece of plastic. But of course, the issue is sourcing it. China, you know."

  Mike found himself wondering how much of the watch would have to be replacement parts before it was no longer the same object and its significance had been diluted. He wasn't superstitious enough to think his luck would run out if he didn't wear it, but it was like his wedding band or dog tag, a physical symbol o
f a state of mind that he wanted to revisit and that required a certain ritual when taken off or put back on again.

  "Okay, let me know about a repair," Mike said. He should have left it with the jeweller, but he didn't want to be parted from it for an indefinite period. "I want to keep it as original as possible, no matter what it looks like."

  Mike fastened the watch on his wrist again and left to meet Livvie and Ian at the cafe. It was a carefully scheduled trip that required a timetable grid of museum visits, shopping, picking up Rob from the airport, and a charity dinner with Mom and Dad. There were also appointments that they had to keep. One of those was with Charles Kinnery.

  Mike had decided to risk meeting him for coffee in a hotel restaurant, somewhere touristy where neither of them would be expected to hang out and where they were unknown faces. Livvie didn't plan to come. Ian was still steeling himself for the event. He hadn't seen Kinnery face to face for some years, and he hadn't even spoken to him on the phone since Maggie's death. It was going to be an awkward reunion.

  Livvie sat at a window table with an espresso and her master list in front of her, checking things off. Ian sat opposite her, reading it upside down.

  "Is Rob's tux sorted out?" Mike asked, pulling out a chair.

  "Yes, they're delivering it to the apartment." Livvie caught the waiter in passing, flashing her best smile to get a coffee for Mike. "But you've got to force him into it this time. I'm not cornering him again. It's like trying to get a cat to swallow tablets."

  "Have you tried yours on, Ian?"

  "It'll take some getting used to." Ian rattled the ice in his glass of juice. "I don't look like me."

  There was a time when that would have meant something very different to Ian, but today he was just passing a comment on how alien formal clothes could seem. Mike took the fact that Ian could even say it without noticing as proof of one task completed.

  "So do you want to see Kinnery or not?" Mike asked.

  "I thought I'd be okay, but I need some time."

  "No pressure. I know it'll be hard, especially in a public place."

  "It's not that I don't want to see him. There's just other people I need to talk to first."

  Ian went on sipping his drink. The big event for him on this trip wasn't the dinner or the meeting with Kinnery. It was visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He'd finally tracked down a vet who'd served with David Dunlop, and after a lot of planning and correspondence, he'd arranged to meet him there. It was preoccupying him.

  These things could be painfully intense for anyone. Mike knew that it wasn't just meeting the short-lived human bridge between yourself and a lost loved one, which was a gamble in itself. It was the risk of discovering things you didn't expect and weren't prepared for in the reminiscences – things they'd done, people they'd known, and even the small detail of how they'd died, although Ian knew David hadn't been killed in action. The man had come home and rejoined the civilian world, a past that Ian was still hesitant to piece together. He just wanted to flesh out David's Vietnam service for the time being and to try to connect with that. Kinnery was almost a sideshow.

  Detail. That's the hard stuff.

  Mike knew all the small detail of how an Iraq vet called Ivan Howe had died. He'd avoided looking into the man's service record. Did that make things worse? In a way, he wanted to find that the guy wasn't worthy of respect, but he knew things wouldn't be that tidy. Mike had made a decision that he would have made again today. Now he had to live with it the way his father had taught him.

  "Well, if you change your mind, Kinnery's down here every couple of months," Mike said. "We could come back another time. I can ask him the questions for you."

  "Thanks. I'm getting a little worked up about this afternoon."

  "All set up?" Livvie asked.

  "I might need moral support. I've never seen a memorial that big. I can handle the scale of gravestones. But tens of thousands of names, thousands of people, is kind of overwhelming."

  Ian had quite an ability to imagine how he might feel in a situation simply from examining images. Mike wondered if it was the legacy of the years he'd spent trying to interpret the outside world through a TV screen, but there was also a high level of emotional intelligence at work. Ian was a meticulous observer of the unseen as well as the seen. He'd obviously thought himself into the situation already and knew how painful it might feel.

  "I visited the war graves in Normandy, and I wasn't prepared at all," Livvie said. She put her hand on Ian's and squeezed it. "You're right, it's upsetting when it hits you. You'll be glad you talked to this guy, though. You have to seize the chance while people are still around, or else all the personal detail that doesn't reach the history books dies with them."

  Mike raised an eyebrow at Livvie. "You're a ray of sunshine today, honey."

  "You're the historian. You should know better than anybody."

  "I better head out and find Kinnery. I've got to get to the hotel by eleven. Lunch at one-thirty, Dad's favourite Italian. That leaves us plenty of time to get across town to the memorial."

  "Done," Livvie said. "Synchronize watches."

  "If you want to show up, Ian, please do. You've got the map."

  As Mike walked away to find a cab, he reflected on how much Ian had progressed in a year. Nobody would guess that he'd made his first bus trip on his own last July. Now he took a capital city in his stride. The only downside was that Mike couldn't boast about Ian's achievements to any outsider except Kinnery, and even then in a limited way. The fewer people who knew how far Ian had come from that baseline, the better.

  It was enjoyable to be alone and anonymous in a city again, observing the world from the back of a taxi. Mike watched how people reacted to him. Today, many of them didn't even seem to see he was there. As he stepped out of the taxi and paused on the sidewalk to put his wallet back in his hip pocket, a woman almost walked into him and looked up as if he'd materialized out of thin air. She didn't know who he was, and she'd forget him in seconds. That was exactly what he wanted.

  Kinnery was already in the busy coffee shop jealously guarding a table, almost lost in a sea of tourists.

  Mike shook his hand. "How are you doing?"

  "I'm good." Kinnery pulled out a chair for him. "No Ian?"

  He said it casually, but Mike knew that was his main reason for showing up. "He might stop by later," Mike said. "He's shopping with Livvie. We've got a charity event on Thursday with Rob and my parents. Ian's first black tie dinner."

  They sounded as if they were making small talk, but it was an exchange of critical information for two people who couldn't talk on the phone or e-mail each other except in emergencies and via an indirect and tortuous route.

  "My God, hobnobbing with the smart set." Kinnery smiled. "He's come a long way. Maggie would be amazed."

  "Yes, he's passed his driving test, and he's learning Arabic and Spanish now. He's ready for serious security work."

  "Good grief. Really?"

  "It's like he was born for it. Just tell me you didn't design that."

  "No." Kinnery shook his head. "I think I went quite far enough into the realms of ill-advised fantasy, Mike."

  Mike stopped short of telling Kinnery too much about Ian's exceptional physical skills. It was another admission too far. "He's good at it. I trust him to work alongside us now."

  "Just remember that people could well start looking again one day. They might even be guys like you."

  They were, buddy. "What better place to hide him than among contractors, then?"

  "Well, he's happy. I'm glad. I really am." Kinnery didn't sound it, though. "Any more problems?"

  It was code for uncontrolled morphing. Mike braced to lie unashamedly. "I think you can treat it as shut down now. Well, you'd have guessed that when I asked you for the affidavit for his passport application."

  Kinnery nodded, staring across the room as if he'd seen something. Maybe he was trying to spot Ian, thinking this might be some sort of demons
tration of his skill. "My offer stands if you need any medical support."

  "I don't think he's ready for that yet."

  "I've updated the list of tests and procedures I think might be safe to have without causing problems." Kinnery took a folded sheet of paper from his wallet and handed it to Mike. "Do I take it he no longer wants the, ah, problem switched off? Not that I can do that yet."

  "No, he's perfectly happy controlling it. He likes the way he looks, and he wants to stay exactly as he is."

  "Well, damn. I'd say that's a result." Kinnery steepled his fingers and put them against his lips. "To be honest, I've no idea how much he'd revert to an original phenotype or what it would do to other aspects of his health. When I started this, we didn't even realise that junk DNA wasn't junk."

  The conversation faded quietly. Kinnery kept scanning the diners. Mike looked around for Ian, but he couldn't see him at all. Was he the guy reading a map at the far table, or the one over there struggling to take the lid off his coffee? If he'd come in, he'd morphed radically and changed his clothes. Mike had an odd moment of disorientation. Ian could still walk past him unnoticed unless Mike was looking for giveaways like gait and body language, and Ian was getting more adept at disguising those simply by acting.

  They fell silent for a while. There wasn't much else to talk about safely.

  "How's Livvie?" Kinnery asked.

  "Fantastic."

  "And Rob?"

  "Due back from Kenya tomorrow. We do hostage and kidnap awareness training now. It's always a good sales pitch when you explain how it happened to you." Or how we did it to others. Mike scanned the coffee shop for Ian again. "Dare I ask how things are at your end?"

  "Well, I'm okay, but Shaun's had seven months of hell. The board's forcing him out. Your father really can bury someone, can't he?"

  "So I gathered."

  "Shaun never forgets, though, and he never quits. Just be aware of that. He'll be a bitter man with a lot of money. Well, not by your standards, but enough to bankroll some trouble."