by Pike, JJ
“Let’s talk about Fran.” He tore the page out of the manual.
“Give it to me.” She waved at the piece of paper.
“This?”
“Just give it.” It wasn’t much, but she had a sample of his handwriting. God knows what she was going to do with it; she didn’t. He handed it over and she stuffed it where everyone who’s worked without pockets for years stuffs important things: in her bra.
“What’s she said about me? Did I seduce her? Beguile her? Lead her astray?”
“Yup.”
“I’m such a putz.” He laughed. It seemed to be his trademark sound, this laugh. This time he was laughing at himself. “I fell for it. Me!? At my age! She seduced me.” He waited.
This was going to be good. A classic “he said, she said” story, but with international intrigue and the fate of humanity’s future in the balance.
“I thought it was a relatively innocent office romance. She’s a bit young, but she’s hot and smart and I was flattered.” Again with the laugh. “I don’t know how I didn’t spot it. It’s classic. Middle aged man. Starting to bald…” He touched his hair. He wasn’t doing too bad in that department, but perhaps he had hair plugs or surgery or whatever men did these days to stay looking young. “Middle aged spread…” He patted his belly. Again, not much to complain about there. He was fit. Not just “fit for his age,” but actively fit. “I’ve never been married, never had a relationship that’s lasted longer than six months, never had kids. Not that I thought of kids with her, you understand, you just think these thoughts once you get to a certain age.”
Jo knew all about those thoughts. When her husband died she’d lost her best friend, the father of her unborn children, her one and only chance at any romantic attachment that was worth a damn.
“Okay.” Rayton uncrossed his legs. “The question we have to ask ourselves is why. Why is Francesca Loomaye lying to us?”
Nice try, Rayton. There is no “us.”
“She’s smart. She’s calculating. What’s her agenda?”
“You asked her to spy on Alice Everlee?”
“I did.”
“You thought Alice might be selling K&P’s secrets?”
“I thought Alice might be on to me. She’s a smart, smart cookie. If anyone at Klean & Pure was going to blow my cover, it was her.”
Jo didn’t disagree. She’d always known Alice had that extra thing: the alert watchfulness of survivors that made them keenly aware of everything and everyone around them. She could see why Michael would peg her for a spy catcher.
“I had to know if my cover had been blown.”
“How did you convince Fran to hack her computer?”
“I asked.”
“And she did it. No questions?”
“She did.”
“Did you tell her not to look at the files she was downloading.”
“That would be stupid. Nothing like someone saying “HEY! DON’T LOOK AT THIS! to make you look at a document.”
“How do you explain the fact that she never read them?”
“I assumed she did.”
“That didn’t worry you?”
“Jeez, Jo. You talk like you just walked out of the Academy. If Alice Everlee was smart enough to uncover an international operation, do you think she’d write about in a way a random civilian might understand?”
“Fran says you told her Alice was selling Klean & Pure’s proprietary secrets.”
“She’s a complicated young woman.”
“Am I hearing you right? You told Fran that Alice was an industrial thief in hopes she wouldn’t review the files she was downloading?” Sounded mighty fishy to Jo.
“No, of course not. Why would I do that? Man, she’s got you twisting and swinging.”
“You did NOT tell her that Alice was stealing company secrets?”
“I did not.”
“What did you tell her? You had to have told her something.”
“I told her I was working for K&P; that Jake had authorized me to conduct an internal investigation; that no one was above suspicion; and that I needed her help.”
He was exhausting. Effectively he had told Fran her boss was engaged in industrial espionage. “There’s no point playing lawyerly games with me, Michael. I’m too old and too tired to mess around. Tell me what I need to know or you might as well plan to spend the next thirty years in lockup.”
“I’m telling you the truth. I worked for our government. I’ll tell you the rest of that when I get my indemnification. I had cause to believe Alice Everlee suspected I was involved in something that was outside the parameters of our work brief. The end.”
It didn’t sit right, smell right, fit right. There were missing pieces of this story on both sides. Michael and Fran were both liars. He had just admitted he was a liar which made him marginally easier to believe.
Jo flashed her brake lights again. What she really wanted was a good night’s sleep, but there was no way that was happening any time soon.
The general swapped Rayton out for himself and settled into the passenger’s side. “Professor Baxter is losing her composure.”
“She was ever composed?” said Jo.
“Outbreaks of MELT have been confirmed in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.”
“Shoot. Has she expressed an opinion one way or the other as to Michael’s claim that we should starve MELT rather than feed it to keep it in one place?”
“She has not.”
“Do you need me to come and talk to her?”
“I need someone to do something,” he said. “The President has left the White House. The Cabinet has been taken to a safe place. Our airspace is closed. Ditto the ports. Half the country is on the move and the other half is preparing to repel all boarders. This has gone way beyond anything we can control.”
“Give me two minutes. I just need to pull myself together.”
“Sorry, Jo. There’s something I need you to listen to.”
“Great. More good news, I’m sure.”
The general handed her a small tape recorder.
“There are hours and hours of this stuff, but I’ve had one of my men boil it down to the important bits I need you to hear.”
Jo held the recorder in her hand. “Tell me it’s one or the other of our suspects confessing.”
“Kind of…”
Jo was awash with chemicals: part happiness, but mostly nervous anticipation. It was like being in bed on Christmas Eve, hoping your parents had bought you a bike, but fearing they’d bought you a Chatty Kathy doll instead.
“Give me the quick and dirty version.”
“There’s a radio station. Low rent. Must have been one of those internet deals before everything went offline. Now they’re broadcasting to ham radios and such. They’ve been taking calls from people inside the zone. They’re harrowing tales, but not what interests us.”
He knew how to get her blood pressure up.
“There’s a caller who goes by the name of Ella.”
“Ella?” Why did that ring all her bells? Right. The annoying anagram: Eloise Farmanday. Might they be one and the same? Ella and Eloise? Seemed too close to be a coincidence. Note to self: ask the guys where we are on tracking her down.
“She, or he…” The general raised his eyebrows. “You heard me right. They claim she’s using voice-altering software so we can’t be sure if the caller is a man or a woman. She knows a lot about MELT.”
Great. Now they had a man who sounded like a woman or a woman who sounded like a woman. What good was that? She rubbed her aching shoulders, though it did no good. There wasn’t going to be a massive, lucky breakthrough. They were going to have to go at this the old-fashioned way: one foot in front of the other with good, solid investigative practice. Look on the bright side, she told herself: at least someone was talking to an internet radio host.
The general was waiting on her next instruction. What did she want to do about Ella? She certainly didn’t want to sp
end an hour or more listening to a radio show. “Highest-level notes?”
“You’re going to have to listen to it. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is an insider. You’re looking for someone who knows the industry. She got on the air with the CEO of BlastoPlasto—one of Klean & Pure’s major competitors—who, according to Professor Baxter, is the devil incarnate.”
Jo could just see Christine saying that about the competition.
“Ella claims that MELT was engineered…”
“We know it was. It was scheduled for release this month. That’s not insider information.”
“Excuse me,” said the general, “I misspoke. She says the weaponized version of MELT was both engineered and released deliberately. If she’s to be believed, this wasn’t an accident.”
Jo’s knees began to shake. “Not an accident?”
Hoyt shook his head.
“Who releases something like this deliberately?”
“Over to you, Mizz Morgan.” General Hoyt saluted her, in spite of the fact that she was not military and left her to her homework assignment.
Jo picked up the camera that had been lying on its side on the dash. “Did you hear all of that?”
“We did,” said Alex. “But I’ve got no damn clue what to do about it.”
“We haven’t heard this broadcast?”
“Nope.”
“You’d best get someone on it. They might not be able to reverse engineer the masked voice, but we can.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the camera feed.
“Right?”
“Maybe,” said Alex. “There are some smart hackers out there…and we’re operating out of what you might generously refer to a ‘can on wheels.’ We have virtually no equipment. It’s all people power here, Jo.”
Jo turned the tape recorder over in her hand. “Hoyt will have this digitally. I’ll ask him to send it to you. Get someone good to listen to it. I don’t want some pimply youth still in short shorts to get this assignment.”
“Understood and agreed,” said Alex. He’d find a way to run it through some software. She had faith in Alex Acron.
“And don’t hand it off to Sam. He’ll goof off and get lost in the weeds. There’s so much riding on this I can’t have egos involved. He’s been itching to prove he’s not Mr. Come At Me, Bro’ ever since that went down and it’s clouding his judgment.”
“Heard and understood.”
Oh, rats. That was Sam. He was right there, listening in. How appalling. Nothing to do but suck it up and move on.
“I’m not wrong, Sam. You’re a great agent, you’re just trapped in that story. Shake it off and we will all be better for it.”
He didn’t answer.
Not her problem. She needed to get back to her suspects while the team listened to this Ella person and worked out whether they were for real.
The general rapped on her window. “More news, I’m afraid.”
“Hit me.”
“Indian Point is already leaking radioactive material and that warm front hovering over Baltimore is causing our people some agita. It does not bode well. The weather, as you know, may not be our friend in this regard. We’re all hoping and praying the wind doesn’t change, but we need to plan and execute that plan as if it’s a given.” The general was very matter of fact. The consummate professional, in fact; not an ounce of drama about him. Jo liked him very much. “It doesn’t help that there are plenty more reactors, plants, and power stations in close proximity to New York. We need to be heading further west. We’re waiting on our orders.”
“So we wait?”
He nodded.
It was one of Jo’s least favorite things: waiting. She opened her laptop and re-read all the files her team had sent her, even though her eyes were swimming and her brain spinning. The same question kept bobbing to the surface: How do you stop a plastic-eating compound when it has gone nuclear?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Betsy didn’t hold back when she saw Jim, she couldn’t. The words came out of her in a rush. “What did they do to you? Oh, my darling. Come here. Let me help you.”
He’d only been gone a few days but had aged a decade. His face was gaunt, his eyes sunken, the stubble on his chin patchy and white. That wasn’t the worst of it. He was broken in a way she’d never seen before. Not even during their worst times in Vietnam. It was going to take a powerful amount of love and care to get him back to his fighting-fit best. But that was for later. Now she had to tend to his body. He was filthy in the same way Paul had been—smeared in blood and dirt—but she couldn’t be sure it had been applied to him as a form of camouflage. The blood might be his. He might be terribly hurt. Had he been shot? Stabbed? Whipped? She couldn’t wait to get her hands on him and check him for damage.
He and Hedwig had wedged a tiny, little scrap of a girl between them on the motorbike so it took some wrangling to get them all off. Betsy and Hedwig lay the girl on the ground. Jim was in no state to help with anything that required fine motor skills. He was stiff, staggering, clunky, awkward, barely able to get off the bike.
He leaned himself against a nearby tree. She looked him up and down as fast as she could. There didn’t seem to be a single concentration of blood, new or old. Good. She clung to the idea that the smears that ran up his arms and legs were just like Paul’s: there to make them less conspicuous.
His hip had to be killing him. He’d left the house without his meds. How on Earth had he managed?
“We put her out,” said Hedwig. “Gave her a sedative. Seemed the right thing to do. She was very brave and did a heroic thing that saved us all, but in the end she was in a lot of pain. Some pig broke her arm. Deliberately. I set the break as best I could. I knew she’d be in agony if she woke up in the well of my vehicle with us bouncing around in the woods, so I gave her some knock-out drops.”
“Drops?” said Betsy.
“Figure of speech,” said Hedwig. “I’ll bring them back when I return.” She mounted the motorbike and revved the engine.
“Where are you going?”
“I left our supplies in the van on the side of the road. All it takes is one pig to come along and decide they’re going to take what’s ours and we’ll be relieved of several weeks’ worth of food and medicine.” She didn’t wait for Betsy’s reply. She was off down the driveway in a cloud of dust and gas fumes.
“She’s a good girl,” said Jim. “Bit angry, but then aren’t we all?”
“Get yourself inside,” she said. “I’ll be right behind you. We’re going to check you out before we leave.”
“Leave? Where are we going?”
“The salt mines.”
Jim groaned.
“Is it a bad idea? Do you know something? Have you heard new news? We’re so behind. The power’s out and we only have Alice’s old hand-crank radio. We’ve been listening to Aggie’s man, Widget, off and on.”
“Honey. I barely know my own name. It’s the thought of leaving home. Traveling. That’s all. I wanted to see your face and this house. Nothing else. It’s what kept me going.”
He was bowed and stooped as he shuffled towards the house. Her heart broke. Her darling man had been reduced to a shadow of his former self. She’d never not seen the young man still living inside her beloved before, but in that moment she struggled to remember her dashing Captain.
“That’s Bryony,” he said over his shoulder. “She was in the camp with us. The kids—I mean Paul and Hedwig—did a fine job stabilizing the break, but I’d like you to take a look at it, my dear.”
Not a word about himself.
So like him.
Seventy-seven and still doing the right thing. They’d broken the mold when they created Jim Asher and she’d been lucky enough to get the last man of that particular production line: strong of heart, staunch of purpose, the moral code of an ancient Babylonian. They’d joked about it. Many times. He was an absolute gem, unlike any other.
Thank goodness they had Sean’
s opioids. Jim never needed to feel the smallest twinge of pain ever again. She could ply him with the good stuff and get him back to feeling like himself.
“Resist the urge…” Evelyn’s voice again. “…to medicate others to meet your own needs. Don’t project, Betsy. Just because you’d go for your medicinal crutch in your hour of need, doesn’t mean he would. Let him ask for what he needs. Make no assumptions. And especially don’t make assumptions around addictive substances. This is your blind spot. Anyone in pain creates this panic response in you. Remember that you’re not responsible for healing the whole world or taking away their pain. Keep your eyes on your own page. Leave Jim to his own work.”
