Mariposa

by Greg Bear

  "No. Who's the Quiet Man? What's his real name?"

  "I don't know. He worked for Price, too. But he stayed in California—in La Jolla, I believe—and sent his workers overseas. I was scheduled months ago to give a presentation at the COPES conference in Los Angeles—but bowed out the day before the bombing. I was still on the schedule."

  "The bomb was meant for you?" Rebecca asked.

  "For anyone Price no longer trusts. Or perhaps just as a warning, or a disruption. I don't know."

  "You're still pointing the gun at me."

  "I am," Plover said, and looked down with wide eyes, flexing its grayish shine in the single light.

  "What did Quinn say, when he was vulnerable?"

  Plover shook his head. "This room could be bugged."

  "It isn't," Rebecca said, but sensed Plover wasn't going to say anymore on that topic.

  "What's your connection with the courier, Nathaniel Trace?"

  "One of the seven programmers. They've also experienced side effects. Your group received an even smaller dose."

  "Are we all going to turn into homicidal maniacs?"

  "I want to doubt it, I need to doubt it," Plover said. "It would take years to know. Epigenetic testing . . . learning which genes are clamped in which individuals, and how that effects their behavior . . . still at an early stage. I'm tired. I've told you all I know."

  "Has anyone in the third group experienced problems?" Rebecca asked.

  Plover became even more agitated. Rebecca considered a feint and an attempt to take away the gun.

  "I don't know. I don't know! It's like an ocean of sewage, spreading out in a huge wave. And for Price, Mariposa is an atomic bomb smack in the middle of that ocean. Pwoosh."

  Plover threw out his free hand and flicked his fingers, spattering metaphoric shit.

  Startled, she missed her chance to go for the gun. "Someone called to say you'd be coming. The Quiet Man?"

  "I don't know who else it could be. He protected me, found me a place to hide and offered me advice I thought was sound. I trusted him. Because of him, I am still alive."

  "He didn't protect your wife."

  "That was before I trusted him. But I don't trust anyone now. I even regret giving you those files . . ."

  He pointed the Luger squarely at her chest. "If you die, now . . . Price . . ."

  "You did it to avenge Madeline's murder."

  Plover tried to pull himself together. "I wanted to inform you, as one of my patients . . . It's all so tangled. When this is over, if I can continue my research—if the good guys win," and he afforded Rebecca a small, shy smile, "Mariposa will be the greatest boon to humanity since fire. Think of it. Sanity for all. But first . . . we have to climb over this wall and get to the other side. I'm glad I did it. I had to. The Quiet Man was right, bomb or no bomb. You're the one with the connections to stop Axel Price. Please do it. For Madeline."

  Plover got to his feet, then backed across the room and opened the door.

  He closed the door behind him.

  She heard his footsteps going down the hall. After that, silence. She opened the door and looked out. Baumann was still away from his post.

  Nobody had replaced him.

  She closed the door and sat in the half dark, blinking, bringing her breath under control. She could end up like the broken man she had interviewed this morning. She could end up like the programmers, wherever they were, whatever their symptoms might be—and the odd Mr. Trace, who at least had shown some sort of courage and even, possibly, compassion.

  It all sounded incredibly nasty and unpredictable.

  How would she feel when . . . if, it began to happen?

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  36 HOURS

  Lion City, Texas

  A light breeze blew grit and silt from Mexico, leaving brown streaks across the Texas sky—the ragged hem of famine's cloak.

  William Griffin parked the old Chevette at the dry grassy margin in front of a small bungalow and kicked down the emergency brake, then sat for a moment, head bowed, steadying his nerves.

  His next action would be the first bead on a bone rosary of sacred violations. He—a special agent—was going to assault a sworn peace officer. After this, he could never again hold himself above the criminal; he was part of that world, one of them . . .

  Undercover and way outside his known universe.

  He peered through the rivulets of dust on the windshield, sweeping up the shadowy details of the sleeping neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Lion City: a loose scatter of dusty yards and screen porch houses, oaks and dogwood, boarded-up auto shops, a shuttered feed store, a recycled tire store—hard times.

  On a dirt lot across from the house, idle truck trailers and big rigs stretched out silver gray in the promise of dawn, surprisingly pretty, though covered with dew and a film of mud.

  A rooster strutted across the dusty patched asphalt of Farm to Market Road.

  Nothing but the rooster and William.

  William had met his new partners two days ago and explained the switch-out. The agent formerly in charge of the Little Jamey operation, codenamed Vanilla Extract, had been unexpectedly reassigned to Alameda.

  William had been in on the secret planning of this whole operation and was in cahoots with agents in D.C.

  He was immediately accepted. Some of the agents had heard vague rumors about Mecca and admired that kind of rogue reputation.

  He seemed to fit right in.

  A heavy-duty Econoline van, gray and green, windows thick-meshed and interior customized for prisoner transport, had been parked under a dying oak tree far down the driveway. Block letters on its rear doors read "PerpTrans."

  He touched the temple piece of his MacArthur-style spex and murmured, "Let's wake him up."

  William rolled down his window. He heard a phone jangle. After four rings, someone picked up. William caught a bit of the dialog through his earpiece.

  The man in the house was half asleep.

  Wrong number.

  William heard the heavy clack-ka-ching from inside the house even before the grid passed along the angry words: "Well, goddammit, it's five a.m.!"

  A message tickered in the corner of William's lightly tinted spex:

  Time. Bring leash.

  William gritted his teeth and got out. A bit of sand had lodged under one eyelid but there was nothing he could do; seconds counted. He walked up to the porch and sliced through the screen with his pocket knife, flicked up the hook, then swung open the screen door with a ghostly creak.

  The brass monkey knocker was mounted on the inside door. Red glass eyes glowed in the leering face. The banner over the knocker read, "Welcome to the Monkey House."

  He lifted the monkey's paw and rapped.

  "Who's there?" a grating voice asked.

  "Travis Coolidge, Lion County jail. I'm to ride in with you. I have the itinerary for this morning's transfer."

  "Well, hell. Something's changed?"

  The door opened and William faced Eddie Mallom. Mallom blearily eyed William, recognized a cop when he saw one, and swung the front door wide. "Anything different from what we got faxed last night?"

  "Just me."

  The brass paw rattled. "Jesus. We're not due for another hour and a half. You coulda let me sleep in."

  Mallom was in his mid-thirties, a bachelor, about William's height but skinnier, slope-shouldered but not a weakling judging by the rope-knot muscles that poked from the sleeves of his T-shirt. His face was lean and grizzled with a thick morning beard.

  William and his new partners had closely watched their respective clients all last evening. There had been an employee toot at the local BBQ. The PerpTrans boys had left around two in the morning, barely three hours ago.

  Mallom turned his back. "Hell with it, come on in. I'll get coffee."

  William reached into his windbreaker and removed a small cylinder of Spray-Cuff.

  Mallom was not completely oblivious. He looked over his
shoulder just as the quick-setting gray cord crazy-tangled his upper body. The strands instantly tightened and bound his arms to his torso. William pointed the nozzle down and webbed the man's legs as he hopped around, then muffled his last few grunts with another discharge around the face and eyes.

  Trussed like a fly, Mallom toppled. William caught him and eased his fall, then made sure the man could breathe by spreading two air holes in the nylon-tough strands around the man's nose and mouth. Mallom couldn't see much and could do little more than squirm and make strangled complaints, not very loud, since he couldn't draw a really deep breath.

  "Relax," William said. "Just go limp."

  Mallom's single visible eye was puffy and glaring, but he stopped struggling.

  "Ooo hhuck aw ya? Cri own kimee."

  William dragged him into the short middle hall and then into a bachelor-filthy bathroom: pee stains around the toilet, greasy hair tangles in the corners, underwear poking from the ratty laundry hamper.

  He made sure the narrow window over the shower stall was latched shut. A quick search in the kitchen turned up a plastic drink jug from the local Cactus Stop. He filled it with water. The wide green flex-straw went into Mallom's mouth.

  "Don't let yourself dry out. Pee if you have to. It might be a day or two before someone comes to look for you. Sorry about that."

  Mallom now suspected he wasn't going to be murdered, so he grunted an expletive.

  William found the man's employee uniform, cap, and equipment hanging on a valet and the bedroom dresser, put them on—not a great fit, but good enough—and stuffed his own clothes into a plastic bag. The house was a mess but not Mallom's uniform; shirt and pants had been neatly pressed, the shoes polished to a high sheen.

  William made sure to lock the front door behind him, and returned to the car to get the black case.

  The dawn was brighter now and the rooster was starting to prance before belting out a cockcrow. Across the street, a portly truck driver in a red jacket walked around his rig with a step a little like the rooster's. He cleared his nose into a kerchief and waved at William.

  At this distance, he was reacting to the uniform. The gray early light obscured features.

  "Going to haul Little Jamey's ass down to Huntsville?" the trucker asked.

  William nodded under his cap.

  "Screw Washington," the trucker said, and spat. "Screw the FBI. Screw Larsen and all the tax-hiking sons of bitches. Screw the New York press. Serves the bastards right."

  Lion City and the Texas Department of Corrections, headquartered in Huntsville, in recent years had become a law unto themselves and so, as the trucker said, screw the FBI and screw New York.

  William shrugged, lifted one hand, and climbed into Mallom's transport van. He slipped the black case between the van's seat and the engine cover.

  The van recognized the recently implanted chip in his arm, a duplicate of the one issued to Mallom—good beginning. Everyone in Lion City was chipped. One big, happy family, almost all of them eager to execute Little Jamey. He started the motor, let it idle for a minute, backed it out of the driveway, and drove along Farm to Market Road, then swung east, toward the Lion County Correction Center.

  Right on schedule.

  The clandestine grid had been silent for a while.

  No doubt Kapp and Curteze had been as busy as William.

  Then, in his ear, a calm voice from Washington, D.C.—Jane Rowland, as he had suspected all along. She had taken over this part of the operation and was running it for Alicia Kunsler.

  "Old Pap is frantic for news. What'll I tell him?"

  "Tell him Jim's got his raft," William said. "We're heading for the river."

  Shortly, he would have to ditch his spex. Talos tracked nearly all communications around Lion City and the campus—and if they couldn't ID any particular signal, they sent out employees or sheriff's deputies to locate the source—just to make sure.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Pendleton Reserve, California

  The morning trip south from Los Angeles was swift, peaceful, without incident. Nathaniel Trace was glad he could drive like a normal human being and not draw attention.

  The Quiet Man had left a message—a series of numbers. The Mind Design circuit was still working. The original Turing Seven still had their EPR phone accounts, and the Quiet Man had one as well, but the display showed only three phones logged on.

  The phones would not work for anyone but their assigned owners. While it was conceivable that their codes could be cracked—Nathaniel had a number of ideas how that might be done—the circuits would tell them if someone unauthorized was listening in.

  So far, nobody was.

  The Quiet Man was very fond of EPR technology.

  Nathaniel drove down Camino Del Mar, then stopped at a coffee shop to pick up Humphrey Camp. He was alone. The right side of his face was paler than the left, and his left hand showed an intermittent tremor. iHis Hi

  Driving south in light fog, Camp opened the window and waved his fingers in the cool, moist slipstream. "I can't think straight for more than five minutes," he complained. "My stomach is ruined. I still don't know what to eat—I'm starving to death and I don't even care." He touched the pale side of his face, then pinched it hard. "Feeling comes and goes. It's like someone's put a voodoo doll up to a mirror. Bork's gone into hiding—won't say where. Jerry Lee seems happy. He's stalking women in Santa Monica. I don't feel guilty knowing that, either. But look at you—you're driving a Hyundai, Mr. Sober and Responsible, for Christ's sake."

  Nathaniel had bought a nice, safe car, unlikely to encourage him to explore the wild limits of his new abilities—and had paid cash. That evening he had filled the tank, stopped over for a few hours at a beach motel, then driven in the dark to downtown Laguna Beach, where he had received his last call from the Quiet Man, telling him where to pick up Camp.

  Camp rambled on. "You think Talos blew up the LA Convention Center to kill Plover, right?"

  "I don't know," Nathaniel said. "Seems a bit extreme, if you ask me."

  "But you stuck around. You did what Plover asked. Why?"

  "He seemed sincere."

  Camp pulled in his hand and scratched his nose. "Okay. You hung around for no good reason. Why?"

  "Checking out the weather. A hunch, call it."

  "Hunches seem different. You know why Jerry Lee is stalking women?"

  "No idea," Nathaniel said.

  "Maybe it's a hunch. After the blast, the Quiet Man told me you went right back inside, to check up on a woman you just met."

  "Seemed the thing to do," Nathaniel said.

  "Maybe you were stalking her," Camp said.

  The Quiet Man's numbers needed to be broken down into groups of seven. In his head, Nathaniel stacked them and ran them through the most likely coding algorithm—one with seven steps—and recovered what appeared to be a set of coordinates. There was one last step, known only to the Turing Seven—what the Quiet Man called an "acciditional" twist or renormalizing of the results.

  Without looking at a map or engaging the nav system, Nathaniel visualized where the first set of numbers would take them: out to Mind Design, near the beach in La Jolla.

  That was too obvious, too dangerous—why even bother with encoding? If the Turing Seven were a threat to Price, wasn't Mind Design one of the first places they would look?

  Seven numbers. Seven programmers.

  Seven stations of the crossed.

  Then he renormalized, using the "acciditional" twist.

  "If you ask me," Camp said, "you might go all psycho on my ass any minute."

  "I'm okay with women," Nathaniel said, and grinned at Camp, showing his teeth.

  "How about male colleagues?"

  Nathaniel pirate-squinched his face, then let it relax. "Sorry. Nothing."

  "Fuck you," Camp said.

  The new coordinates would take them out of La Jolla entirely, up into the hills overlooking Camp Pendleton.

  Ca
mp chuffed. "The Doc thought Lee was the most stable—but then, he's always looked cool and collected. In Arabia, Lee was cooler than the Talos goon squad—even with his arm in shreds. But right now, it's you, isn't it?"

  "I go day to day. I want to know what's happening. Don't you?"

  "Curiosity worth dying for?"

  "Life is discovery. The Quiet Man wants us to follow a trail. Maybe he wants us to put a stop to what we've started."

  "Never met him," Camp said. "Just took orders from the rest of you and did my work. But it takes a strange man to work a thirty million dollar contract for three years and then get all moral and weepy."

  "Then maybe he just wants revenge."

  "That I can get behind," Camp said.

  The drive was going to take longer than Nathaniel expected. He turned east on 76 and headed toward Vista. Camp's hand had stopped its periodic tremor and his face was regaining its color, but his head nodded to some internal, irregular beat.

  "It changes all the time," he said. "If we're coming unglued, if our genes are getting shut off in weird sequences . . . Who knows what that could do, medically? Maybe it'll end up killing us."

  "They tested it on animals," Nathaniel said.

  "That's so reassuring," Camp said. "Maybe it's like a way to make assassins better killers, easier to brainwash. Wouldn't Price want something like that?"

  Nathaniel thought that over as he turned off 76 and headed north. The country here was gray and dry, the trees by the side of the blacktop roads mostly dead. This area used to be covered with groves and farms. Now it looked blasted. This wasn't drought caused by global warming, however; this was the way California always looked when the money and the water went away.

  It looked like much of Mexico.

  "I don't feel easy to indoctrinate, and I don't like taking orders any more than I did before, maybe less," Nathaniel finally said. "How about you?"

  "No," Camp admitted. "I'm like a cranky baby. But I am more coordinated, in a weird way—better at physical stuff. And quicker at learning some things. You?"

  Nathaniel nodded. "Up to a point." His shoulder and wrists were still sore.