Pursuit r-7

by Andy Mangels

  8 Cheyenne, Wyoming

  "SOo they think we're terrorists now?" Kyle's voice sounded shrill even in his own ears. "What? How? Geeeeeeesh!" He yanked at the hair on top of his head in frustration and stomped away, his carefully crafted Buddhist equanimity all in tatters.

  "Possible terrorist attack is what they said," Liz responded, her tone solemn.

  Kyle stopped, forcing his emotions back under control as best he could. He turned to see how the others were taking the latest news.

  Max leaned against the now dent-free side of the Microbus. "Whether they think we're terrorists or alien invaders, we still have a big problem. It was bad enough when the Men in Black or other aliens were chasing us. But now we're at risk from the police as well. “

  Michael laughed, but it sounded mirthless. "Yeah, with our luck, we'll end up on America 's Most Wanted. “

  "Okay, let's just chill out for a minute," Isabel said, raising her hands level with her head, palms out. "That's not the only thing we need to worry about. “

  Maria sighed. "You mean the people who were in the accident Kyle caused? “

  "Hey, I did not cause that accident," Kyle said, pointing his finger angrily at Maria. He felt bad enough about what had happened without any of his friends rubbing his nose in it. "I was trying to save all our lives. “

  Michael stepped in front of Kyle's finger, his face clouded with emotion. "Step back, Valenti," he growled.

  Max put his hand on Michael's shoulder. "Hey, you step back too, Michael. Snapping at each other isn't going to get us anywhere." He sighed, then continued. "Liz, what exactly did that report say about the accident? “

  "It said the driver of one of the cars involved and a teenage passenger in another car were both in critical condition," Liz said soberly. "Apparently, the cops or government guys who were chasing us weren't badly hurt at all. “

  Michael snorted again. "Yeah, that's just our luck. “

  It occurred to Kyle that there was a way to salve his mounting guilt. "So, we should go help those people," he said. "Let Max do his alien faith-healing thing. “

  "Too risky," Liz said.

  Maria blanched and looked at her friend. "You say it's too risky? You always want to help the helpless. “

  "Of course I want to help, but we might put ourselves in even more danger," Liz said. "And if it comes down to a choice between saving all of us, or some people who got hurt because the government wouldn't leave us alone, I'm going to pick all of us. “

  No one said anything for a moment, and the only sounds nearby were the leaves on an oak tree as they rustled in the gentle afternoon breeze.

  Then Kyle decided he didn't accept Liz's us-or-them choice. There had to be a better way.

  "Who's going to expect us to sneak into a hospitall “

  Topeka, Kansas Special Agent Suzanne Duff moved through the hallway gracefully, despite the large number of dark-suited men and conservatively dressed women who clogged the area. The legislative session was breaking for the day, and the various assistants, pages, and press people milled about the foyer of the capitol.

  Touching her earpiece, Duff heard one of her fellow agents confirm that Senator McNeil was leaving the chamber. She made her way to an appropriate spot and waited. A few seconds later the murmur of the mob changed, and McNeil strode forward, flanked by a pair of Secret Service men… or reasonable bodyguard facsimiles thereof… and trailed by a pack of reporters.

  Duff watched them all closely as they walked by. The senator had been receiving death threats for the last two weeks, and although the vast majority of such threats were harmless, the FBI profilers had been alarmed by the frequency and specificity of these angry missives.

  One of the so-called news crewmen was actually an FBI agent who was recording everyone who had any contact with the senator in public. Each of the images was fed into facial recognition software and compared to the federal databases. So far, none of those scanned since her agents had come on board had come up with even a single flag of potential trouble.

  The senator was not without his enemies, which made this particular hunt even more difficult. His stance on abortion angered the right-to-lifers, while his recent negative comments about the state's gay community had gotten him into even more hot water. Can't please the right or the left, Duff thought. McNeil is perfect water-cooler discussion material. Everyone has an opinion about him.

  Personally, Duff didn't particularly like McNeil. Certainly, he had treated her with respect when she and her staff had interviewed him about the threat-letters, but she had expected that. She wondered what he would feel about her privately… and what he might say publicly… if he knew the truth about her. He could see that she was African-American and a woman easily enough, but he wouldn't have known she was a lesbian just by looking at her. The trijecta for bigots, she thought with a rueful smile. A black gay woman. She suspected that McNeil would have rather had a married white male agent heading up his case. Fortunately for Duff, one didn't always get to pick one's protectors.

  As McNeil neared the elevator, Duff felt the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Directing her voice down to her collar microphone, she said, "Watch the woman in the blue coat approaching to the senator's left. She's got something in her hand. Doesn't feel… “

  Before she had finished, the woman made her move. Her hand flashed out, crimson liquid spraying outward from it all over the senator, his aide, and a reporter from Channel 6 news.

  The woman started to yell, "This is the blood of the unborn…," but in less than a second, two FBI agents had tackled her. The Secret Service men drew their guns and stepped in front of McNeil, forming a human shield around him.

  "Step back! Everybody step back!" Duff yelled, pushing the reporters and everyone else away from the immediate vicinity. Amazingly, they obeyed her. Perhaps it was because of the already-drawn guns that backed up Duff's warning, or maybe in the shock of the moment they were merely happy to be told what to do.

  The woman was screaming as the agents held her down. One had drawn her hands up behind her back and was kneeling on her neck, while the other was efficiently frisking her. Duff knelt to retrieve the item the woman had dropped, being careful to grab it with a handkerchief so as not to disturb any fingerprints. The item was a large coffee cup, its insides coated in a viscous red liquid. Blood. Or something like it. She sniffed it. No, not blood.

  She stood and faced McNeil, whose aide was busy wiping the spatters off the senators face. "Are you all right, sir?" Duff asked.

  "Yeah, just a little red in the face," McNeil said, cracking a weak smile. Duff knew that the self-deprecating sense of humor had gone far in getting him votes, further proof that theater was as important on the Beltway as were political platforms.

  "It smells like syrup of some sort," Duff said, keeping her voice low enough that the press couldn't hear her across the foyer. "Probably watered down. “

  "Hmmm, well, it's going to stain this marvelous suit," McNeil's aide said.

  "It's all right, Delroy. Quit fussing," McNeil said. "So, you think this is my stalker? “

  Duff shook her head. "We won't really know for a while yet. She could be the one, or she could be just a random member of the unhappy public. “

  McNeil grunted and nodded. As the elevator door opened in front of him, he looked back toward Duff. "Yes, well, I'll expect a report soon." It wasn't a question.

  It took almost an hour to process the woman to the point where Duff could take a break from the thick of things. She sat down with a thump into the chair behind her temporary desk and toggled the computer on.

  A flashing icon told her she had new mail, and she clicked on it to initiate the program. Once there, she entered her federal I.D. number, her password, and a secondary password.

  She scanned the subject headings, then clicked on one that said "XMA94… Cheyenne, Wyoming." XMA- 94 was the code for unusual altercations, often related to suspected homeland terrorist cells, white supremacist sp
linter factions, or other armed groups.

  Duff read through the file quickly, noting the amount of information that wasn't included in it. Something's being covered up here, she thought. There were too many nonspecific terms, and the clearance codes for the initial strike orders were high-level ones. She had seen this kind of thing before.

  Scrolling down, Duff stopped on multiple photos taken by security cameras at the scenes of the Cheyenne confrontation. They had yet to be enhanced, but it didn't matter. Duff recognized the kids in the photos.

  Hell, they aren't exactly kids anymore. Kyle Valenti she recognized best. She had met the ex-sheriff's son in May of 2001, while working on her second case. The assignment had gotten her involved with finding a missing girl named Laurie Dupree. As the case unfolded, Dupree's abduction was linked to an archaeologist named Grant Sorenson, a group of teens in Roswell, New Mexico, and the town's half-crazed sheriff.

  At least, Jim Valenti had seemed to be half crazed when she met him. He had been caught up in an expanding web of lies that ultimately cost him his job. Yet Duff could sense that deep down, Valenti had believed he was doing the right thing.

  By the end of the case, Duff had seen things she wouldn't have thought possible. She had been forced to shoot Sorenson after he threatened her and Valenti with a gun. Afterward, he had kidnapped a Roswell teenager named Isabel Evans, taking her to Tucson, Arizona, where some kind of green jellyfish emerged from emerald crystals that were embedded in Sorenson's chest. Another Roswell teen, Michael Guerin, had somehow psychically sucked all the oxygen out of the room containing Sorenson's corpse and the jellyfish, killing the creature that had possessed him.

  Later Valenti had counseled her to doctor her official report about the incident. And although Duff didn't feel good about it, she had done so. She wasn't sure what special psychic powers Isabel Evans or Michael Guerin had, nor did she know exactly what it was that had inhabited the body of Grant Sorenson. But she knew that her FBI superiors would not have looked kindly on her reports if she had put in all the incredible details.

  Everyone knew about the other FBI agents who chased aliens and spooks; they had been relegated to the basement. Duff didn't want to end up in the basement. She told Valenti she wanted to make assistant director by the time she reached thirty-five, and though she suspected it might take a few more years than that, the AD job was still her goal.

  Duff had been extensively interviewed after the incidents in Roswell and Arizona, not just by her superiors, and not only about the justifiable shooting of Sorenson. Some other governmental agency had also been involved in debriefing her, but their questions were more about her interaction with the sheriff and the Roswell teens than about the abduction and shooting. They'd been interested essentially in hearing about anything "unusual" that may have occurred, apart from the case itself. For some reason, their probing made her dig her mental heels in deeper, increasing her determination not to tell them about the odd powers the Roswell kids had apparently manifested.

  Now, shaking her head to end her woolgathering, Duff renewed her concentration on the screen in front of her. Among the images there, she recognized Kyle Valenti and Michael Guerin, though their looks had changed considerably since she had last seen them two years earlier. Another image was a poorly taken photograph, evidently shot through an oddly darkened window. She thought she could make out the features of Isabel Evans.

  The report didn't name the teens, but did note that another male and two females were also "persons of interest." Duff suspected that the male was either Isabel's brother… Max… or Alex Whitman. The girls would likely be Liz Parker and Maria DeLuca.

  The fact that the report didn't name the kids was one warning flag for Duff; another was the absence of the original strike orders. They had already been classified, and all internal memos were to be routed through one specific office. A specially prepared press statement was boiler-plate obfuscation, and other information was blacked out.

  They're covering something up, Duff thought. Not that secrets were unusual in the domestic intelligence game, but this smelled bad. She suspected that the men who had interrogated her two years earlier were probably involved in this; the older one had been badly scarred, and the younger one struck her as extremely unpleasant, almost feral.

  I wish these kids well, Duff thought. From what the report did say, their actions sounded more defensive than offensive. She seriously doubted that they posed a danger to anyone.

  I hope they manage to get out of Dodge before the net closes around them.

  Cheyenne, Wyoming Max watched as dusk started to fall. The group had been unable to reach a consensus about whether to risk going to the hospital to heal the people who'd been injured during their escape from the mall.

  Max decided the matter would be better faced after a few of their own urgent needs had been taken care of first. Kyle agreed reluctantly, but ultimately went along with the group's decision to wait a few hours, especially since a recent news report had upgraded the status of the injured pair from "critical" to "guarded." Although the report also said that one of the patients was comatose, and that both would remain overnight in the hospital's critical care unit, Max reasoned that they could wait a few hours without necessarily condemning anyone to death.

  With the group mollified for the moment, Max concentrated on what they were going to do in the meantime. They all really needed to eat, and the alien trio was in particular need of rest, if only to recharge their powers. Max acknowledged that going back to the hotel they had been staying at prior to the raid on the mall was risky; they didn't know if it was being watched or not. So Max decided that, for now, they would stay here, in the shadows of the abandoned church. Nobody argued.

  "Kyle and I will go get some food," Max said. "I saw a chain of fast-food restaurants about ten blocks away. “

  "You need to be disguised," Liz said with a frown. "If any of us go out in public, we'll have to change our looks. At least a little. “

  "Oh great, it's alien makeover time again," Michael said with a groan. He was lying down in the back of the van, looking uncharacteristically carefree.

  "It's necessary, Michael," Maria said.

  Isabel stepped forward, her hands up. "Who's first? “

  "I'll go first," Max said. Turning to Michael, he added, "We're going to need some money, though. “

  Michael sat up and mock-saluted. "After being called a terrorist, I guess 'counterfeiter' isn't going to add too many more years onto my sentence. “

  Following their first month or so on the road, Max had stumbled onto an idea on how to get the money they needed to continue their travels. They couldn't really make the money, and if he continued to create diamonds out of coal… as he had done for Liz when he'd asked her to marry him, and then again after Stonewall… they might establish a pattern that would get them into trouble.

  But weeks ago, Max had seen a store clerk holding a twenty-dollar bill up to the light. When asked what he was doing, the clerk explained about the security thread woven into the linen of the bill, as well as the color-shifting ink. These two elements were some of the more sophisticated anticounterfeiting steps being taken lately in the printing of paper currency.

  Max immediately saw the solution to their money problems, although it had taken a great deal of research and weeks of practice before Michael had perfected his new "craft." Using his powers, he resequenced the elements of a one-dollar bill into a five- or a twenty-dollar bill. Like repainting the Microbus, all of the chemical and physical elements were already in place; they merely had to be rearranged somewhat.

  Although not everyone in the group liked Max's and Michael's financial solution, they all knew that as long as they were on the run, holding down jobs for money was out of the question. Max and Michael had both reasoned that since the money they were altering had come from the government… and that it was the government that had forced them to be on the run in the first place… then nobody was actually getting hurt, except maybe
the Treasury Department. Indeed, they had seen several times already that their "funny money"… Kyle insisted on referring to the alien-created paper as "quatloos," for some reason… passed smoothly through counterfeiting-detection devices.

  Now, as Michael got to work on turning the Cybernet Cafe's one-dollar bills into twenties, Isabel stepped up toward Max. "I think we're going to go really short," she said, sparing a glance toward Liz. Max saw her nodding.

  Isabel's hands glowed slightly, and Max's shaggy dark hair began to disintegrate. A very faint burning smell rose in the air as the hair disappeared. Within minutes, he had a spiky flattop with short sides.

  Isabel put a finger up to her mouth and squinted at her brother. "Something's missing," she said. Then, running her fingertips down from Max's oversized ears to his cheekbones, she drew in a set of sideburns. The hair follicles extruded a quarter-inch of dark hair in seconds, as if the alien energy from Isabel's hands were a grow-lamp and the emerging hairs were hungry plants.

  "Oh, very nice," Liz said, moving to stand next to Max. She ran her fingers along the side of his head, and he smirked.

  "Okay, next," Isabel said, as Kyle moved to stand in front of her.

  "I want some facial hair too," Kyle said. "I didn't know you could even do that. “

  Isabel smiled enigmatically, clearly not willing to part with all of her secrets. Max understood the impulse, a habit born of long practice.

  "What do you want?" Isabel asked Kyle.

  Kyle looked thoughtful. "I'm thinking a mustache and goatee. And maybe medium short hair, dirty blond." Kyle grinned at her, as though hoping he had just asked Isabel to re-create him as her ideal man.

  "That is so not you," Maria said.

  "Hey, the customer is always right," Kyle shot back.

  "Whatever," Isabel said with a sigh.

  Isabel closed her eyes and lowered her head, stifling a snort of laughter. Then she raised her hands and placed them on Kyle's temples.

  She looked straight into his eyes, finding his gaze trusting and hopeful, like it was when he was calm after he'd meditated. This was the Kyle that she liked, the guy who was so much like his father. He was protective and caring, kind of like a big, loyal dog.