Rogue Oracle

by Unknown

  Harry swallowed. “I know that our subject was there. We’re pulling passports to figure out who he might be.”

  “Figure this out. Soon.” Aquila gave him a look that could shatter steel before he walked away.

  Through the glass wall of the conference room, Veriss waved at him. Harry groaned. But there was no use pretending not to see. Veriss stuck his head through the door and called out: “Agent Li, I have some interesting findings for you.”

  “What’ve you got? Any new disappearances?” Harry snapped. Veriss had taken over the conference room as his private office: whiteboards were covered with equations and diagrams, and photos of the victims were neatly tacked up on the walls with clear tape. Veriss had probably seen too many cop shows, and Harry considered it all to be for show until proven otherwise.

  Veriss bounced up and down on the balls of his feet. “No. But I’ve combed through all the files of the remaining living Rogue Angel personnel.” Veriss showed him a flip chart covered with names in a tree-like structure. About a fifth of the names were crossed off. “If I had my projector, I could show you—”

  “Bottom line, Veriss,” Harry interrupted.

  Veriss pointed to a cluster of about forty names at the lower end of the chart. “This graph contains the names of all the known victims, plus a few dozen more. It’s like a large game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Gerald Frost’s secretary was Carrie Kirkman.” Veriss drew an arrow connecting the two with a Magic Marker. “Carrie Kirkman also worked for Carl Starkweather from 1991 to 1992.” He sketched another arrow. “And Carl’s interpreter was Lena Ivanova. For a social network, these are pretty strong ties.”

  “We know this already.”

  “I was running assignments through the model, searching for patterns of overlap.” Veriss stabbed a key on his laptop. “I was searching for discrete assignments that included Frost, Kirkman, Starkweather, and Ivanova. All of them, at one time, worked on tracking down fuel debris at Chernobyl.”

  Harry leaned forward in interest. “Let me see that list.”

  Veriss punched a key. “There are forty names on the list.”

  Harry scanned the list, noted that Norman Lockley was on it. What the hell did the disguise master have to do with reactor rods? He didn’t entirely trust Veriss’s data. “Why’s Lockley here?”

  “He helped a couple of scientists who claimed that fuel had been improperly disposed of to defect.”

  “I thought all the fuel rods were destroyed in the explosion.”

  “Apparently not. The buildings were scavenged for anything of use, and the other three intact reactors were active for some time afterward. Eventually, they were shut down, and there were some fuel rods that weren’t accounted for.”

  “Did Rogue Angel track down the missing fuel?”

  “No, they didn’t. They tried, but access was so limited that they were unable to make much headway.”

  “Give me a hardcopy of this list. We need to re-interview those people.”

  “Someone stole my printer.” Veriss sulked. “I’ll have to get someone to print it for me. What are we looking for?”

  Harry shook his head. “Veriss, you’re not going to be interviewing anyone. Get these people rounded up to bring in here for questioning. If there are any who aren’t under protective custody by the Marshals, get them under it.”

  Veriss opened his mouth to protest. It was clear he thought this administrative work was beneath him.

  “Just do it, Veriss,” Harry said. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with Veriss’s fragile ego. He banged out of the conference room before Veriss could argue.

  Jesus Christ. Harry rubbed the back of his neck. He never thought he’d be at the point in life where he was blowing off NCTC intelligence and more interested in the predictions of a deck of cards. No matter what happened, it seemed that he—and science—were one step behind Tara.

  He reached for the door handle at the forensics unit, noticed a yellow sticky note stuck to the door with a hand-drawn radiation symbol. The note said: Radiation Danger: Knock First.

  Harry rapped his knuckles against the glass, and Anderson popped out from beneath a counter. She was swathed in a white Tyvek suit, but no face mask. She unlocked the door for him and waved Harry in.

  “Do I need one of those?” He gestured at her suit.

  “Nah.” Anderson waved him off. “You’re not gonna spend all day with this stuff. And our samples are breaking down, anyway. They’ll be in the lead-lined garbage can soon.”

  Harry’s brows drew together. “What do you mean, they’re breaking down?”

  “Check this out.” Anderson punched a keyboard protected with a clear plastic sleeve. On closer inspection, Harry realized that it was a plastic zipper bag from the grocery store. Harry hoped that was to protect it from coffee spills, but he was skeptical. A monitor flickered to life, and Anderson pointed at a purple-tinted series of lines and dashes.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “This is an image of the DNA of the unknown subject we got from Carrie Kirkman’s clothes, the day we took it.” She clicked a mouse sealed in a plastic baggie, and the image was replaced by a similar one that resembled broken bits of string. “This is the same slide today. The DNA has degraded to the point that it’s useless.”

  “That’s not supposed to happen. Did the radiation do that?”

  “We don’t know if it’s the cause or a side effect. Same story with the DNA from the scenes of the other disappearances.” Anderson clicked through a series of slides. Even a layperson like Harry could see the strings broken and bleeding together. “The DNA of your unknown subject is … dissolving.”

  Harry leaned forward on the counter to stare at the monitor. He thought better of it, brushed imaginary radiation from his sleeve. “What does this mean?”

  Anderson pursed her lips. “I think … I think it means that your unknown subject is dying.”

  GALEN HAD ALWAYS KNOWN THAT HE WAS DYING.

  They’d told him this since he was a child, but the fact seemed insignificant to him. Remote. Irrelevant.

  He remembered sitting on the edge of a cold steel examination table at the Minsk Children’s Hospital. Try as they might, the doctors were unable to find anything wrong with him. Unlike the other residents of Minsk Children’s Home Number One, Galen was physically perfect. His growth was normal. No tumors erupted from his skin. His thyroid levels were textbook.

  A doctor finished feeling the lymph nodes in his neck with cold hands. The doctor scribbled down something in his charts. “Good, good,” he muttered. He glanced at the nurse standing beside the drafty window. “Are you sure he’s one of the Chernobyl children?”

  “He is,” the nurse said. “His mother was a nurse who treated the firefighters who put the reactor fire out. She died right after the accident.”

  The doctor peered through his square-framed glasses. “And the father?”

  “Unknown. But he’s a very good boy.” The nurse smiled at him. Galen gave a small smile back. He liked the nurses. They always seemed hurried, and tired, but they actually spoke to him as if he existed. The one in the room with him now, Anna, always sneaked him an extra piece of fruit when he was brought in to see the doctor. It was a different doctor every time, but they always said the same thing.

  The doctor scribbled something in his chart. “Doesn’t matter. He’s dead anyway, like the rest of them.”

  But Galen knew he was different from the others. The nurse got him dressed and walked him back through the hallways of the hospital that smelled like piss and bleach and winter. Children were kept here until they were old enough to go to the asylum. The worst of the worst went there: the ones who had no idea where they were, who weren’t able to interact with the world at all. Many simply screamed, their cries echoing from the ward. Yes, these would be going to the asylum, if they survived long enough. Many times, they didn’t. Galen stared unash
amedly at a child being led by the hand down the hall. He wore a hospital gown, barefoot, with his head shaved. The boy had no eyes, just scarred sockets, but at least he was quiet.

  “Don’t listen to the doctor,” the nurse said, kneeling down to straighten Galen’s shabby collar. She kissed his cheek, and she reminded him very much of his mother. His mother always told him that he was special.

  “You are different from the others,” the nurse said, pressing an apple into his palm. “You are one of the lucky ones.”

  Galen didn’t feel particularly lucky, but the nurse’s hope was often contagious. He hurried to eat his apple before they made it back to his bunk at the Children’s Home. He didn’t want the others to see the apple and take it away from him.

  Galen had lived in Minsk Children’s Home Number One since his mother died. His mother had been a nurse, too. He thought later that perhaps this was what merited him some of the extra treatment. When the firefighters had been burned trying to put out the fires at Chernobyl, his mother had left in the middle of the night to give first aid. She’d kissed him on the head and gone to help, leaving Galen in the predawn darkness, listening to the Pripyat sirens. She’d come back the next day, exhausted and smelling like metal. She’d lain down on their bed and Galen had curled up beside her, listening to her breathing. She did this every day for a few days, went out to help the men, ignoring the evacuation. They called the men trying to clean up the mess “liquidators.” The first time he’d heard the term had been from his mother. He remembered her eyes, wide and haunted, her face pink with the kiss of what he thought was sunburn. She would hold him close to her heart and cry. On the seventh day, she just stopped breathing. Galen had been sleeping with his ear to her chest, and he thought he heard it happen, that soft sigh that simply disappeared.

  But he was “lucky.” Luckier than the children in the asylum, who would never leave. Like his mother, they would simply disappear. And many of the children in Minsk Children’s Home Number One would disappear, too. Galen had known some of the children when he had lived in Pripyat. These children had gone out with him to play in the black rain. Then, they had laughed and splashed and smeared the black mud on each other’s shirts. Piotr and Nicholas, who had lived next door with their sister, Sophie, had run their trucks through the mud that smelled like metal, pretending to be soldiers.

  No more. Sophie was dead. Piotr’s limbs twisted as he grew to grotesque proportions. His right foot was as long as his forearm, the rest of his limbs spindly as matchsticks. The right hand he’d used to dig his toy truck out of the puddles was swollen and pink, fingers twisted like a tree root. Piotr knew that he would lose that hand any day, hid it under the blankets so that the nurses would perhaps forget about it, and no one would come after him to cut it off.

  Nicholas, bald and pale, sat on the edge of his bed, without the energy to swing his feet. Dark circles smudged under his eyes, and Galen could see blue veins in his scalp. Nicholas had cancer. Galen didn’t know what kind. When he asked Nicholas what kind, the boy would just point to his head. Nicholas never spoke anymore.

  But Nicholas and Piotr were like Galen. Orphans of Chernobyl. They were different from the children in the asylum. Nicholas and Piotr and Galen knew they were dying. With Nicholas and Piotr, the degradation could be seen.

  But Galen was lucky. He had a bit of hope. He had a bit of hope that he would grow up, that he would have the opportunity to get out of this place. One of the nurses who’d lost her own child was even teaching him how to read on her cigarette breaks, a sure sign someone believed in his future. As he grew older, that benign fate of his made him furious. He watched as Nicholas and Piotr and the other boys and a few of the nurses at the Children’s Home vanished. Just like his mother. And the world still moved on. And so did he.

  But the doctor’s words still rang in Galen’s head. He didn’t know how he could escape the death sentence handed down to all of them. Like the weight of rain in the sky, he knew he couldn’t run from it forever.

  But he was determined to make the most of the time he had left. And he wouldn’t be alone.

  In the shadow of Norman Lockley’s house he limped, peering through the blinds at the bored Marshals doing a crossword puzzle on the curb. Once or twice, they’d knocked on the door, and Galen had answered them in Norman’s voice. The cells of his body, still working hard to overcome Norman’s atrophied muscles, had allowed him to walk, at last. But he still kept the timbre of Norman’s voice and part of his lumpy profile. Galen felt his mouth full of sharp teeth, spat one out in the kitchen sink. He picked it up, marveling at it. It was a canine tooth that had belonged to the dog, but laced with the base metal of one of Lockley’s fillings. He could feel the dog’s primal concerns in his head, a bass note to the wealth of Lockley’s information that flooded his brain. Galen opened the refrigerator and stuffed some lunch meat in his mouth to keep the voice of the dog quiet, so he could listen to Lockley.

  Lockley had what he wanted. Lockley suspected the location of the remainder of the Chernobyl fuel rods. If he could just keep everything together until …

  The doorbell rang. Galen limped to the door to peer through the peephole.

  It wasn’t one of the Marshals. It was more prey.

  Galen licked his lips.

  Chapter Twelve

  CASSIE HAD eventually fallen asleep, her arms wound tightly around Maggie. Tara lay beside her with Oscar jammed into her armpit, purring like a chainsaw. She hadn’t bothered to call the Pythia; Tara decided the Oracle could figure out what had happened on her own. Or not. Tara felt it would be a long time before she would feel like having a civil conversation with the Pythia again. Maybe not ever. She felt her hands balling into fists whenever she thought of the Pythia. Damn, but it had felt good to slug the witch.

  She dozed, slipped into a dream.

  In her dream, the desert was giving way to scrub forest. The sandy soil underfoot had melted into glass. Tara’s lion padded beside her, sniffed at a stand of black grass. The sky overhead was a threatening red, and a warm breeze tangled in Tara’s skirts. Grains of sand rattled on the cracked, shiny ground.

  Tara looked up. The silhouette of a black tower blocked out part of the sky, the Tower from the Tarot. There was no light inside, but Tara could smell fire and ash. Pine trees grew warped around the foundations of the building, reaching at odd angles with needles fanned like brooms.

  A figure was walking toward the building, one she recognized: the figure from the World. Instead of being swathed in the white robes depicted in the card, the Sacred Androgyne was wrapped in a black sheet. The figure walked barefoot across the ground, and he left bloody footprints where the glass cut his feet. Now, he looked decidedly masculine, though the laurel leaves around his temples were wilted and dried out.

  Thunder and lightning crackled overhead. Tara called out to the figure. The World turned, cast a cold, gray gaze at her, before continuing into the shadow of the Tower.

  Rain plinked down from the sky. Tara held out her hands, felt an oily blackness spattering over her skin. It was the black rain from Chernobyl. It buzzed when it touched her skin, as if it had been electrified.

  Tara picked up her skirts to run, to chase the retreating World into the shadow of the building. The dark sheet melted seamlessly into the carbon-black of the Tower, which she discovered was hewn of bits of sheet metal riveted with lead. Tara’s fingers scrabbled around the seams, searching for a way in. But she could find no door.

  The lion growled beside her, staring up with his glowing amber eyes. Tara followed his gaze, saw the blackened figure of the World silhouetted at the top of the Tower against the red sky. Lightning crackled around him. Tara could feel the buzz of it under her feet, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

  He was going to jump.

  Tara screamed at him to stop. Her voice was obliterated by the crash of lightning as it raced along the ground and struck an antenna on the top of the building. She saw the World falling into t
hat rain-spangled blackness like a falling star.

  Her breath snagged in her throat, and she ran to the burning form on the ground. But it did not burn as a body should—the World burned with a heat so intense that it sizzled the rain from her face, drove her back. The form on the ground burned like molten steel, red and white, with raindrops sparking on it. It burned so hot it sank into the ground like an ember.

  She knew that there was nothing she could do to save it. Tara could do nothing but watch as the World burned.

  TARA WOKE UP, HEART STUCK LIKE A COLD STONE IN HER throat.

  Oscar was spread on her chest, trying to keep her from shivering. Tara sat up and extricated herself from the blankets, wrapping her frozen fingers in the cat’s fur. Trying not to awaken Cassie, she padded out of the bedroom and closed the door. The cat clock on the kitchen wall showed her that she’d slept through the day and most of the night. Dawn was beginning to redden the horizon. She rubbed her cold arms, plucking at a note on the kitchen table:

  Came by to check on you. Didn’t want to wake you. Went back to work. Call me if you need me.—H

  She glanced over at the couch. Harry must have gotten some sleep here; a wadded-up blanket was kicked over one arm. The manila files that had been spread over the floor were missing.

  Without Harry to keep her warm, she settled for the next best thing: a hot shower. She stood under the scalding water, trying to chase the frost from her skin. Her fingernails and toenails had turned black and blue under the chill of the dream. This dream had been more intense than the others; she could still taste the metallic rain in her mouth. She ran the hot water tank cold before she got out. She put her clothes for an extra spin in Harry’s dryer before she got dressed and put some coffee on to brew.

  She found Harry’s television remote buried under a cushion, clicked the TV on. The early news announced that Dulles airport was closed. Tara squinted at the footage of pissed-off travelers, thought she saw some Department of Homeland Security jackets in the background. The newscaster, standing in front of the flight drop-off area, was telling the audience, “… low levels of radiation have been detected in the international arrivals terminal. DHS tells us that the radiation levels are benign, but that cleanup will take a few hours. The airport will be reopened then.”