by Sims (lit)
“Alice?” he said. “What is all this?”
“What? Oh, you mean the foil. That’s for protection.”
“From…?”
“From having my mind read. The aliens working for Mercer Sinclair can read thoughts, you know. This protects me from them. At least…” Her voice faltered as her face twisted into a mask of grief. She sobbed. “At least I thought it did!”
Romy stepped closer and slipped an arm around the woman’s quaking shoulders. “What’s the matter, Alice? What happened?”
“The check!” Alice wailed. “They stole it!”
Knew it! Patrick thought. Complete waste of time.
“You mean,” Romy said, “someone broke in here and took it?”
“Yes! They knew my secret hiding place and they switched it with another check, a worthless one!”
Romy glanced up at Patrick and shrugged.
“Let’s go,” Patrick said. He wanted to be angry at this flaky lady for wasting his time, but she was too genuinely distressed. Her bizarro apartment, though, was giving him a grand case of the creeps.
“We can’t leave her like this. She’s terrified.” Romy turned back to Alice. “When did you last see the check?”
“Oh, I haven’t taken it out for years. But after talking to you last night, I pulled it out of my secret hiding place, to have it ready for Mr. Sullivan, and it had changed!” Another sob, louder this time. “The date’s the same and the money’s the same, but it’s not a SimGen check anymore and someone else’s signature is there instead of Mercer Sinclair’s!” She fumbled in her housecoat pocket. “Here. I’ll show you.”
“Romy…,” Patrick began but her quick sharp look cut him off.
“Let me calm her down a little,” she said, “then we can be on our way.”
Alice produced a slip of paper and shoved it into Romy’s hand. “There. See for yourself!”
Patrick saw Romy glance at the check, then take a closer look.
“What?” Patrick said.
Romy angled the paper back and forth in the dim light. “Well, it’s for five thousand dollars and it’s made out to Alice Fredericks. And she’s right about the signature: I don’t know whose it is, but it’s not Mercer Sinclair’s.”
“I’ll bet she’s also right about it not being from SimGen too.”
Romy nodded, still staring at the check. “Uh-huh. It was drawn on the First Federal Bank of Arlington, Virginia.” She looked up at him, her eyes so bright they fairly glowed. “From the account of something called Manassas Ventures.”
2
“I don’t get it,” Patrick said. His stomach lurched as one of the Federal Plaza elevators lifted them toward OPRR’s offices.
They’d held off talking about Alice during the ride over from Alphabet City. The odds that one of New York’s current crop of cabbies would know enough English to follow their discussion were astronomical, but still they hadn’t wanted to risk it. Now they had an elevator car to themselves.
“I think I do,” Romy said. “I think she did perform some service for SimGen in its early years, maybe even before it started calling itself SimGen. And it may well have had something to do with a baby.”
“What about the space alien angle? You’re not buying into—”
“Of course not. I’m no psychologist, but I can see how she may have felt very guilty about what she did. Combine that with not being too tightly wrapped in the first place, and you can understand someone unraveling. She structured a fantastic scenario that blended fact and fiction.”
“But Mercer Sinclair?”
“More mixing of fact and fiction,” Romy said. “Alice must have had some direct contact with him because he keeps reappearing in her story—taking the sim baby, signing her check.”
“Right. The check. Why did she think it had changed?”
“You heard her. She hadn’t looked at it for years, and during that time it did change—in her mind. Maybe Mercer Sinclair had given it to her himself. She remembered that and so over the years her loosely hinged mind substituted his signature for whoever really signed it. And since Mercer Sinclair is synonymous with SimGen, she began to remember it as a SimGen check.”
“Poor lady. I’d give anything to know the truth about her.”
“I don’t think even she knows anymore.”
He slipped an arm over Romy’s shoulders and pulled her closer. “You were good with her.”
“I felt sorry for the poor thing.”
It had taken Romy a while, but finally she’d managed to calm Alice Fredericks, telling her she was safe now: The aliens had what they wanted and so they wouldn’t be bothering her again. She could take down the foil, let some fresh air into the room, and stop worrying. Alice seemed to buy it. She hadn’t seemed quite ready yet to peel the foil from the walls, but she’d been in better spirits, and even gave them the check to take with them. After all, it wasn’t the real thing, so it was no use to her.
“How old do you think she is?” Patrick said.
“She said she was forty-seven.”
“Yeah, but is that reliable? She looks sixty.”
“Poverty and madness can age you pretty fast.”
“Yeah, well…” He sighed. “I guess there’s no way to find out what really went on between her and SimGen—or rather, the proto-SimGen being directly financed by Manassas. Which leaves us no closer finding out who’s behind Manassas.”
“But we’ve got a Manassas Ventures check, and it’s signed. That’ssomebody’s signature.”
“Right.” With his free hand Patrick pulled the old check from his pocket and held it up. “A C-like letter connected to a squiggle, and then an L-like thing connected to another squiggle, on a check drawn on a Virginia bank that was no doubt gobbled up by another bank that merged with yet another bank which was taken over by still another bank.”
“But the check’s dated back when all that appropriation money was being funneled into SIRG. If we can connect SIRG to that Arlington Federal account…”
“Fat chance.”
“Don’t be so sure. I’ve got Uncle Miltie working on SIRG.”
Patrick had to laugh. “How do you get your superior to do your scut work?”
She lifted her chin defiantly. “I’ll have you know I’m superior to Milton Ware in every way.”
“Except in seniority, position, and salary, right?”
“Mere details. Besides, he’s crazy about me.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“And he’s an expert at tracking down funding. Nobody better. Knows a ton of passwords and can sniff out an unclaimed research dollar at a thousand paces. That’s how I sicced him on SIRG. I told him this group got zillions in funding without ever revealing what it was doing. Maybe if OPRR learned its secret…”
“And he bought it?”
“Why not? It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Did you tell him it hasn’t received a dime in years?”
“Of course. But I suggested that if he could find where all that funding came from, maybe some of it might still be around for OPRR to tap into.”
“And he bit?”
“Like a dog on a bone. And Milton Ware is the kind of dog who’ll work a bone until there’s nothing left.”
They reached the OPRR offices, a nondescript suite on the eighteenth floor. Romy led Patrick to a windowed office where a peppy, white-haired little man sat hunched before a computer. The plaque on his desk readMILTON WARE .
“Any luck?” she said.
The man looked up and regarded them with bright blue eyes. “Yes and no.”
After Romy made introductions, Ware took off his glasses and pointed to the inch-high stack of printouts on his desk.
“The good news is that I know where Social Impact Research Group’s money came from. The bad news is that OPRR won’t be able to get any of it.”
“Why not?” Romy said.
“Because its ultimate source was the Department of Defense.”
�
�Knew it!” Romy said, clapping her hands once. “Just like SOG—military bucks laundered through an innocent-sounding subagency. Any indication where the money went after it was cleared through SIRG?”
“Hell,” Patrick said, “we know damn well—” But a quick look from Romy shut him up.
Right. They both suspected that the money had marched through a parade of holding companies until it reached Manassas Ventures, which used it to fund the nascent SimGen. But Milton Ware knew nothing of this.
“We know it wasn’t anything legit,” Romy said, jumping in to cover for him. “Otherwise they would have been more open about the funding.”
“I don’t see why it matters,” Ware said. “It doesn’t exist anymore. No trace of it in anyone’s budget anymore.”
Patrick leaned back and thought a moment. They knew SIRG was still active—Daniel Palmer had said the name before his speech center blew a fuse. But where was it getting its funding now? The path to the answer might not lie with government agencies but with people. He’d seen it happen time and again during his labor relations practice: certain shady characters, on both the labor and management sides, would be found out and sent packing, only to pop up in another company or union local the following year.
“SIRG might be operating under a different name,” he said, “but I bet the personnel are the same. Any idea who headed SIRG?”
Ware leaned forward and put on his glasses. “Yes. I remember coming across that somewhere…” He began shuffling through his printouts. “Here it is: the director was a Lieutenant Colonel Conrad Landon.”
“And where is he now?”
“Easy enough to find out.” Ware turned to his computer. After a number of flamenco bursts on his keyboard, he leaned closer to the screen and said, “Conrad Landon retired as a full bird colonel.”
“Damn. When?”
Ware stared at the monitor. “The same year the funding died.”
“What a surprise,” Romy murmured.
Patrick leaned across the desk for a peek at Ware’s screen. “Any hint at where he might—?”
The picture of Landon startled him. Something familiar about the man in the grainy, black-and-white personnel-file photo.
“What’s up?” Romy said.
“Nothing. I just—” And then he knew. Add a few decades, enough to whiten the hair and deeply line the face, and Patrick recognized him. “Nothing.” Repressing a shout of triumph, he rose and extended his hand across the desk. Had to get out of here, had to talk to Romy alone before he exploded. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Ware. I’ve got to run. Romy, could you show me out?”
He fairly pulled her out of her seat and propelled her ahead of him down the hall.
“What is it?” she said.
“Where can we talk?”
“My office is—”
“Might be bugged.” He saw the elevators ahead. “Back to our mobile conversation pit.”
He pressed both theUP andDOWN buttons. The upward bound car arrived first, carrying four people. He let it go. The downward was empty. Perfect. He dragged Romy inside, jabbed the button for the lobby. As soon as the doors closed…
“Remember when we had our little face-to-face in my office with the Manassas Ventures lawyers?” he said, his tongue all but tripping over the words in his rush to get them out before someone else entered the car. “And remember how I followed them downstairs to their limo, hoping to find someone like Mercer Sinclair sitting in the back?”
She frowned. “Vaguely.”
“But it turned out to be someone I’d never seen before. Well, I’ve just seen him again. The man in the back seat was Conrad Landon, former Army colonel, and former director of SIRG. Maybe not so former. I’ll bet SIRG never went away and he’s still calling the shots. Find this Conrad Landon and we’ll find SIRG.”
3
NEWARK, NJ
Something’s not right, Zero thought with a pang of unease. We’re missing something.
He sat next to Tome in the rear seat of the van as it bounced over the rough pavement of Newark’s dark back streets toward the sim quarters Portero had led him to last night. Not quite 6:00P .M. yet but the sun was long gone and icy night had taken command.
Tome was dressed like the worker sims, but he’d been equipped with a PCA. The plan was to drop him off where he could sneak into the building and mix with the other sims. Zero was confident that Tome’s gentle nature and above-average intelligence would gain him the respect and confidence of the other sims, enough so that one of them would trust him with Meerm’s whereabouts. When he found out, he’d press the preset speed-dial number and they’d pick him up.
Zero sighed. Not a perfect plan. It hinged entirely on the assumption that the sim laborers knew where Meerm was hiding.
His face itched under the ski mask; he’d traded tinted glasses for the ultra darks he usually wore, but they still impaired his vision. He wished he could pull everything off and ride along like a normal human being. But then, he wasn’t a normal human being.
Just ahead of him, Patrick and Romy were a pair of silhouettes in the front seat.
“You two have done wonderful work,” Zero said. “You make a great team.”
“We do, don’t we,” Patrick said from behind the wheel.
Zero watched them glance at each other and smile. He could sense the growing bond between him. And as much as it made him ache to see Romy with Patrick, he knew it was for the best. Despite their surface differences, Zero sensed that they complemented each other on the deeper levels where it really counted.
He steered his thoughts away from Romy and toward what she and Patrick had uncovered today.
“We now have an ironclad chain of evidence. It doesn’t take a handwriting expert to decipher the signature on Alice Fredericks’s Manassas Ventures check as ‘Conrad Landon.’ That draws a direct line from the Department of Defense to SimGen.”
“It’s not something that will hold up in a court of law,” Patrick said. “Off the top of my head I can think of half a dozen grounds for preventing it from being admitted as evidence. But in the court of public opinion, it’s a hydrogen bomb.”
“Assuming the public gives a damn,” Romy said.
Patrick nodded. “Oh, they’ll care all right. We lay it out clear and simple for them. We show how SimGen’s early financing was public money: from Manassas Ventures which got it from SIRG which got it from the Department of Defense. The obvious question then is: Why? What did the D-o-D get in return? So we’ll explain how Manassas leases trucks in Idaho that show up on the SimGen campus, transporting cargo back and forth, cargo that no one’s allowed to see. But we’ve seen it, and that’s when we show them Kek. When we reveal that Kek was found in Idaho, they’ll be able to connect the last dots themselves: SimGen is producing hybrid simian soldiers for the Department of Defense to use in black ops or guerrilla operations. When the public learns that SimGen has been turning normally harmless creatures into man-killers, they’ll care. They’ll care like crazy. SimGen’s dirty little secret will finally be out in the open for all to see, and that will be the beginning of the end of SimGen.”
Zero had been listening to Patrick, but someone else’s words had been echoing through his brain at the same time.
You have no idea what you’re getting into, the forces you’ll be setting in motion…they’ll crush you.
“No comment back there?” Patrick said.
“As I told you: wonderful work.”
But still that uneasy feeling plagued Zero. Was this the danger Ellis had warned him about? He could see now why the people behind SimGen were so ruthless when it came to protecting the company.
So he added, “Now we know why SIRG’s funding was cut off: it didn’t need any more. With all the SimGen stock it holds in Manassas Ventures, SIRG is a financially independent organization. Which means we’ve got to be more careful than ever.”
“Right,” Patrick said. “More than careers and reputations hang in the balance should their little
operation be exposed. Billions of bucks are at stake.”
Romy half turned in her seat. “Which raises a scary question: If SIRG has its own billions to finance its operations, who does it answer to?”
“No one with a conscience, that’s for sure. Maybe someone high up in the Pentagon, maybe only Conrad Landon himself.”
“I think we can count on SIRG to do whatever it deems necessary to protect its investment,” Zero told them. “That’s why, if we’re going to bring SimGen down, I’d prefer to find a way that keeps you two out of the spotlight.”
“Which is why we’re heading to Newark, I assume.”
“Exactly. I think it will be safer for all concerned if we let Meerm and her baby bring down SimGen.”
“But that puts the child in jeopardy,” Romy said.
“No more so than now. Meerm’s baby is just as much a threat to SimGen dead as it is alive. Its half-human, half-sim DNA will tell the whole story, a story that, unlike the money trail you’ve discovered, can’t be denied or stonewalled or spun into something with no resemblance to the truth. That baby is a slam dunk.”
“Then it’s all on our buddy Tome.”
“Yes, Mist Sulliman,” Tome said from his seat beside Zero. “Tome ready help.”
“I know you are,” Zero said softly.
Now Romy looked back at him from the front seat. “Zero, I’ve been around you long enough to know when you’re holding something back. What aren’t you telling us?”
So many things…but right now Ellis Sinclair’s words continued to haunt him, especially his warning about the fallout from what they might uncover.
Things that will hurt me personally, and devastate other, more innocent, parties. Things that no one will want to hear. And don’t think you’ll come through unscathed, either.
That last part had been particularly unsettling, but not as jarring as his final warning about what they might find.
