“This should have been impossible,” J.C. said. “Protocol should have made it so.”
“And what protocol is that?” Audrey said. “This isn’t a high-security facility, J.C. You spend year after year without any kind of incident, and of course you’re going to grow lax. Besides, the people who pulled this off were capable. Fake ID, knowledge of the times the cleaning lady entered and left. The uniform is the same, and they even cleaned the entire set of offices so nobody would be suspicious.”
I replayed the footage of the thief, wondering if it was Zen herself. The build was right. What was it Audrey had said before? People are usually far less secure than the encryption strategies—or in this case, security devices—they employ. This could have all been stopped if the guard had glanced at the cleaning lady. But he didn’t, and why would he have? What was there really in these offices that someone would want to steal?
Just a corpse carrying a doomsday weapon.
I stifled a yawn as we eventually pulled into a residential area. Blast. I’d been hoping to find a chance to squeeze in a nap while we were driving. Even thirty minutes would do me some good. No chance for that now. Instead, I replied to Yol’s return email, telling him that yes, I did want to make Exeltec more frantic and yes, I did know what I was doing. My next set of instructions seemed to placate him.
We pulled up to a quaint white suburban house, rambler style, with a neatly mowed lawn and vines growing up the walls. A careful air of cultivation helped offset the fact that this house—with its siding, its small windows, and its lack of an enclosed garage—was probably a decade or four past its prime.
“You’re not going to hurt my family, are you?” Dion asked from the front seat.
“No,” I said, “but I might embarrass you a little.”
Dion grunted.
“Come introduce me,” I said, shoving open the door. “We’re on the same side. I promise that when I recover your brother’s body, I won’t let I3 do anything nefarious with it. In fact, I’ll let you watch the cremation—with I3 getting no chance to lay hands on the body—if you want.”
Dion sighed, but joined me in climbing from the car and walking toward the house.
FOURTEEN
“Keep watch,” I said to J.C. as we approached the house. “I haven’t forgotten that Zen is out there.”
“We might want to call in some backup,” J.C. said.
“More Rescue Rangers?” Ivy asked.
“Time Rangers,” J.C. snapped. “And no, we don’t have temporal substance here. I was talking about real bodyguards. If Skinny hired a few of those, I’d feel a whole lot safer.”
I shook my head. “No time, unfortunately.”
“Perhaps you should have explained the truth to Zen,” Tobias said, jogging up. “Was it wise to let her think we have the information she wants?”
Behind us, Wilson pulled the SUV away—I’d given him instructions to keep driving until I called him for a pickup. I didn’t want Zen deciding to apply a little interrogation to my servant. Unfortunately, if she was determined, simply driving away wouldn’t be enough to protect him. Perhaps I should have told Zen we didn’t have her information. Yet my instincts said that the less she knew about what I’d discovered, the better off I’d be. I just needed to have a plan in place to deal with her.
Dion led us up to the house, glanced over his shoulder at me, then sighed and pushed open the door. I grabbed it and held it for my aspects, then slipped in last.
The house smelled old. Of furniture that had been polished over and over, of stale potpourri, and of burned wood from an old hearth. The careful clutter offered a new oddity on each wall and surface—a line of photos in novelty frames down one hallway, a collection of ceramic cats in a shadow box near the door, a sequence of colorful candles on the mantel with a religious tone to them. The house didn’t look lived in, it looked decorated. This was a museum for a family’s life, and they’d done a lot of living.
Dion hung his coat beside the door. The only coat there; the rest were stored neatly inside an open coat closet. He walked down the hallway, calling for his mother.
I lingered, stepping into the living room, with a rug on top of its carpet and an easy chair with worn armrests. My aspects fanned out. I stepped up beside the hearth, inspecting a beautiful wall cross made from glass.
“Catholic?” I asked, noticing Ivy’s reverence.
“Close,” she said. “Greek Orthodox. There’s a depiction of Emperor Constantine.”
“Very religious,” I said, noting the candles, the paintings, the cross.
“Or just very fond of decoration,” she said. “What are we looking for?”
“The decryption code,” I said, turning. “Audrey? Any idea what it might look like.”
“It’s digital,” she said. “For a one-time pad, the key is going to be as long as the data being stored. That’s why Zen was after the flash drive.”
I looked around the room. With all of this stuff, a flash drive could be hidden practically anywhere. Tobias, Audrey, and J.C. started looking. Ivy remained beside me.
“Needle in a haystack?” I asked her softly.
“Possibly,” she said, folding her arms, tapping one finger against the opposite forearm. “Let’s go look at pictures of the family. Maybe we can determine something from them.”
I nodded, walking over to the hallway that led to the kitchen, where I’d spotted pictures of the family. Four in a row were formal photos of each member of the family. The picture of the father was old, from the seventies; he’d died when the boys were children. The mother’s picture and Dion’s picture had what appeared to be pictures of saints hanging beneath them.
No saint beneath Panos. “A symbol that he’d given up on his faith?” I asked, pointing to the empty spot.
“Nothing so dramatic,” Ivy said. “When a member of the Greek Orthodox Church is buried, a picture of Christ or their patron saint is buried with them. That picture would have been taken down in preparation for his funeral.”
I walked on a little farther, searching for pictures of the family interacting. I paused beside one that showed a smiling Panos from not too long ago. He was holding up a fish while his mother—in sunglasses—hugged him from the side.
“Open and friendly, by all accounts,” Ivy said. “An idealist who joined with friends from college to start their own company. ‘If this works,’ he wrote on a forum a few months back, ‘then any person in any country could have access to powerful computing. Their own body supplies the energy, the storage, even the processing.’ Others on the forum warned about the dangers of wetware. Panos argued with them. He saw all of this as some kind of information revolution, a step forward for humankind.”
“Is there anything about those posts of his that doesn’t add up?”
“Ask Audrey about that,” Ivy said. “I’m focused on Panos the man. Who was he? How would he act?”
“He was working on something,” I said. “Curing diseases, is that what Dion said? I’ll bet he was really annoyed when the others pulled him off his virus research because of the cancer scare.”
“Yol knows that Panos got further in his research than he let on. It’s clear to me. Yol was spying on Panos and is really, really worried about all of this. That implies he’s worried about a danger even more catastrophic than their little cancer scare. That’s why Yol brought you in, and why he’s so desperate for you to destroy the body.”
I nodded slowly. “So what about Panos? What can you guess about him and the key?”
“If he even used one,” Ivy said, “I suspect he’d give it to a family member.”
“Agreed,” I said as Dion finally headed out the back doors, calling for his mother in the back yard.
I felt a moment of concern. Had Zen been here before us? But no. Stepping into the kitchen, I was able to see the mother outside pruning a tree. Dion walked over to her.
I delayed a moment, walking up to Audrey and J.C.
“So,” Audrey was s
aying, “in the future, do we have flying cars?”
“I’m not from your future,” J.C. said. “I’m from a parallel dimension, and you’re from another one.”
“And does yours have flying cars?”
“That’s classified,” J.C. said. “So far as I can tell you, my dimension is basically like this one—only, I exist there.”
“In other words, that one is way, way worse.”
“I should shoot you, woman.”
“Try it.”
I stepped between them, but J.C. just grunted. “Don’t tempt me,” he growled at Audrey.
“No, really,” Audrey said. “Shoot me. Go ahead. Then, when it doesn’t do anything because we’re both imaginary, you’ll have to admit the truth: That you’re crazy, even for a figment of a deranged man’s psyche. That he imagined you as a repository for information. That in truth, you’re just a flash drive yourself, J.C.”
He glared at her, then stalked away, head down.
“And,” Audrey shouted after him, “you—”
I took her by the arm. “Enough.”
“It’s good for someone to bring him down a notch or two, Steve-O,” she said. “Can’t have pieces of your brain getting too uppity, can we?”
“What about you?”
“I’m different,” she said.
“Oh? And you’d be fine if I just stopped imagining you?”
“You don’t know how to do that,” she said, uncomfortably.
“I’m pretty sure that if J.C. did shoot you, my mind would follow through accordingly. You’d die, Audrey. So be careful what you ask for.”
She glanced to the side, then shuffled from one foot to the other. “So … uh … what did you want?”
“You’re the closest thing I’ve got to a data analyst right now,” I said. “The information that Yol gave us. Think about the emails, forum posts, and personal information from Panos’s computer. I need to know what he isn’t saying.”
“What he isn’t saying?”
“What’s hidden, Audrey. Inconsistencies. Clues. I need to know what he was really working on—his secret projects. There’s a good chance he hinted at this online somewhere.”
“Okay … I’ll think about it.” She’d gone from a niche expertise—handwriting analysis—to something broader. Hopefully this was the start of a trend. I was running out of space for aspects; it was getting harder and harder to contain them, manage them, imagine them all at once. I suspected that was why Audrey had insisted on coming on this mission—deep down, part of me knew that I needed my aspects to begin doubling up on skills.
She looked at me, eyes focusing. “Actually, as I consider it, I might have something for you right now. Viruses.”
“What about them?
“Panos spent a lot of time on immunology forums, talking about disease, getting into very technical discussions with people who study bacteria and viruses. None of what he said is revelatory, but when you look at the whole…”
“His history was in microbial gene splicing,” I said. “Makes sense for him to be there.”
“But Garvas said they’d abandoned viruses as a method of data delivery,” Audrey said. “However, Panos’s forum posts on these subjects increased once I3 abandoned that part of the project.” She looked at me, then grinned. “I figured that out!”
“Nice.”
“Well, I mean, I guess you figured that out.” She folded her arms. “Being an imaginary person makes it difficult to feel any real sense of accomplishment.”
“Just imagine your sense of accomplishment,” I said. “You’re imaginary, so imaginary accomplishment should work for you.”
“But if I’m imaginary, and I imagine something, it’s doubly unreal. Like using a copy machine to copy something that’s just been copied.”
“Actually,” Tobias said, strolling up, “theoretically the imaginary sense of accomplishment would have to be imagined by the primary imaginer, so it wouldn’t be an iteration as you suggest.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Audrey said. “Trust me, I’m the expert on being imaginary.”
“But … if we are all aspects…”
“Yeah, but I’m more imaginary than you,” she said. “Or, well, less. Since I know all about it.” She grinned at him, triumphant as he rubbed his chin, trying to sort through that.
“You’re crazy,” I said softly, looking at Audrey.
“Huh?”
It had just struck me. Audrey was insane.
Each of my aspects was. I barely noticed Tobias’s schizophrenia anymore, let alone Ivy’s trypophobia. But the madness was there, lurking. Each aspect had one such condition, whether it be fear of germs, technophobia, or megalomania. I’d never realized what Audrey’s was until now.
“You think you’re imaginary,” I told her.
“Duh.”
“But it’s not because you’re actually imaginary. It’s because you have a psychosis that makes you think you’re imaginary. You’d think this even if you happened to be real.”
It was hard to see. Many of the aspects accepted their lot, but few confronted it. Even Ivy did that with difficulty. But Audrey flaunted it; she reveled in it. That was because, in her brain, she was a real person who was crazy and therefore thought she wasn’t real. I’d assumed she was self-aware, but that wasn’t it at all. She was as crazy as the others. Her insanity just happened to align with reality.
She glanced at me, then shrugged, and immediately tried to deflect the conversation by asking Tobias about the weather. He, of course, referenced his delusion who lived in the satellite far above. I shook my head, then turned.
And found Dion standing in the doorway, a distinctly uncomfortable look on his face. How much had he watched? He gave me a look like one might give an unfamiliar dog that had just been barking frantically but now seemed calm. Through that whole exchange, I’d been a crazy man, stalking around and talking to himself.
No. I’m not crazy. I have it under control.
Maybe that was my only real madness. Thinking I could handle all of this.
“You found your mother?” I asked.
“In the back yard,” Dion said, thumbing over his shoulder.
“Let’s go talk to her,” I said, brushing past him.
FIFTEEN
I found Ivy and J.C. outside, sitting on the steps. She was rubbing his back as he sat with hands hanging before him, gun in one of them, staring at a beetle crossing the ground. Ivy gave me a glance and shook her head. Not a good time to talk to him.
I headed across the well-tended lawn with Audrey and Tobias in tow. Mrs. Maheras had finished pruning and was now inspecting her tomato plants, picking off bugs, pulling weeds.
She didn’t look up as I approached. “Stephen Leeds,” she said. Her voice bore a distinct Greek accent. “You’re famous, I hear.”
“Only among people who like gossip,” I said, kneeling down. “The tomatoes look nice. Growing well.”
“I started them inside,” she said, lifting one of the plump green fruits. “Tomatoes do better after the late frosts are past, but I can’t help wanting to get an early start.”
I waited for Ivy to give me a prompt on what to say, but she was still on the steps. Idiot, I thought at myself. “So … you like to garden a lot?”
Mrs. Maheras looked up and met my eyes. “I appreciate people who make decisions and act on them, Mr. Leeds. Not people who try to make small talk about things in which they obviously have no interest.”
“Several pieces of me are very interested in gardening,” I said. “I just didn’t bring them along.”
She regarded me, waiting.
I sighed. “Mrs. Maheras, what do you know of your son’s research?”
“Almost nothing,” she said. “Ghastly business.”
I frowned.
“She thinks it took him away from the church,” Dion said behind me, kicking at a clump of dirt. “All of that science and questioning. Heaven help us if a man spends his time thinking.
”
“Dion,” she said, “don’t speak stupidity.”
He folded his arms and met her gaze, defiant.
“You work for the people who employed my son,” Mrs. Maheras said, looking at me.
“I just want to find his body,” I said. “Before anything dangerous happens. What can you tell me of your priest?”
“Father Frangos?” she asked. “Why ever would you want to know about him?”
“He was the last person to see the body,” I said. “He visited the coroner on the night before your son’s corpse vanished.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mrs. Maheras said. “He did nothing of the sort—he was here. I requested a house blessing, and he visited.”
To the side, Tobias and Audrey shared a glance. So we had a witness that Father Frangos had not gone in to see the body. Proof an impostor was involved. But what good did that knowledge do us?
“Did Panos give you anything, before he passed away?” I asked her.
“No.”
“It might have been something trivial,” I said. “Are you sure? There’s nothing you can think of?”
She turned back to her plants. “No.”
“Did he spend time with anyone in particular during the last few months?”
“Just the men from that ghastly laboratory.”
I knelt beside her. “Mrs. Maheras,” I said softly. “Lives are at stake because of your son’s research. Many lives. If you are hiding something, you could well cause a national disaster. You don’t need to give it to me. The police—or better, the FBI—would work just fine. Just don’t gamble with this. Please.”
She glanced at me, lips pursed. Then her expression hardened. “I have nothing for you.”
I sighed and rose. “Thank you.” I walked away from her, back toward the steps, where J.C. had perked up a little at Ivy’s prodding.
“Well?” he asked me.
“Stonewalled,” I said. “If he did give the key to her, she wouldn’t tell me.”
“Coming here was a mistake,” J.C. said. “A distraction from what we need to do.”
I glanced at the mother, who continued to regard me, trowel in her hand.
Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds Page 15
