by Liana Brooks
“We took ’em. I sent half to the district tech lab, one to the local PD techgeeks, and the rest to the bureau tech lab in Atlanta.”
“Too bad,” she said. “Stolen security bots would make life interesting.”
Sam studied the scene, trying to glean some sense from what she was seeing. Every door down the hall hung off its hinges. Black security glass littered the floor on both sides of the windows. “Does this look like an explosion to you, or is that just me?”
“No residue from a blast although the impact fractures on the wall support the theory. Dr. Vergeet assured me there is nothing in these labs that could cause an explosion. They don’t even have a flammables locker.”
Sam shook her head. “What about residue from your missing security guards? Did you get anything there?”
“Not a single hair. There are no signs of physical violence, and both cars are gone. We have an APB out for them, but anyone with half an ounce of sense stripped those cars down and left them in Atlanta, with the keys in the ignition. They’re gone and sold for parts by now.”
She moved down her checklist. Security, fried electronics, and the actual target . . . “You said this part of the lab belonged to Dr. Emir? Where is he?” Maybe the intended victim would have some insight into the whys and wherefores of the crime.
“Right this way although you may regret asking,” Altin warned. “He’s the one who demanded the bureau be called in. If Dr. Vergeet had her way, the cleaning crew would already be fixing this up.” Altin led her into a small workspace in front of a bank of broken windows. The windows looked over a curved black lecture hall with stadium-style seating focused around a teaching space at the bottom of the dell. A spotlight illuminated a single heavy table and a small box perched on top.
A thin man with a white beard and thick glasses fussed around the box, looking like Santa Claus after he discovered dieting and exercise. He blinked at Detective Altin with a scowl. “Yes, Detective? Have you found another way to ask the same question? What are we on, the third or fourth round?”
Altin went poker-faced. “Dr. Emir, this is Agent Samantha Rose of CBI. She’s here to take your complaint.”
Santa gave her a dismayed look. “You are the best the bureau has to offer?”
“Yes, sir.” Sam squared her shoulders and tried to look smart.
“Are you familiar with the work of Echeverria, Klinkhammer, and Thorne?” Emir asked, lifting his chin so he could glare down his nose at her.
“No.”
“Ah.” Emir pushed his spectacles up. “I see. I suppose it is too much to hope you read up on the work of our namesakes before traipsing out here to do your dancing-bear act?”
Altin covered his mouth to hide a smile. Sam grimaced and turned to the doctor. “The bureau’s understanding was that you wanted a trained agent on-site as soon as possible, not that you wanted to hire a new intern. Rather than insulting my intelligence, why don’t you fill me in on what I need to know?”
Emir’s eyes went wide. He turned, shouting in a language Sam didn’t understand, and went off to yell at the younger men still hovering around the box.
One of the younger men broke from the group and walked toward her and Altin, arms spread wide. “I’m so sorry about that, Agent Rose. I’m Henry Troom, one of the doctor’s assistants. You have to understand, Dr. Emir is very upset. Please don’t judge him by this . . . outburst.” The young man shook his head and smiled. “Would you let me help you?”
Sam held out her hand. “Dr. Troom—”
“Henry—I’m still working on my doctorate.” He shook her hand, smiling with obvious pride in his approaching title despite his attempt at modesty.
She gave him a curt smile. “Of course. Mr. Troom: why was I called out here?”
“Dr. Emir is worried the lab was broken into so that the perpetrator could steal a copy of his work. Only the doors on our side of the facility were damaged, and the doctor’s research is easily transportable although not easily replicable. Still, if someone made a copy, the consequences could be devastating.”
Right, earth-shattering. He’d probably lose a grant or something. “What is Dr. Emir studying?” Sam asked as she pulled out her notebook again.
“Uh.” The man ran his hand through his shaggy dark hair. “How familiar are you with theta waves and Minkowski metrics?”
“Never heard of them.”
The intern winced. “Right. Well, in that case . . . what Dr. Emir is designing is a communication form that would exploit hypothetical systems of computation involving Novikov’s self-consistency principle.” He frowned in concentration; Sam frowned in confusion. “It’s all fundamental work to test Dr. Emir’s theories at this point. If we can build an operable machine, it will be the first step to ultimately improving the entire cloning industry. In theory.” He dropped his gaze to avoid direct eye contact.
It sounded dodgy. Sam looked at Altin for help. The detective shook his head. “You lost me,” she said to Troom. “Back up—Dr. Emir is creating an improved mode of communication? With a long-term benefit to the cloning industry?” She kept the distaste out of her voice with effort.
“Yes, in the particulate sense. Consistency theory and antimatter proofs show that one thing cannot exist in two places. If you—”
“Stop!” Dr. Emir bellowed, marching toward them. Yes, she thought, stop. If Troom was hoping to become a teacher, he wasn’t doing a very good job at it. Apparently, though, that wasn’t Dr. Emir’s problem. “This man is not cleared for this information!” he shouted, stabbing a finger at Altin. “This is why I required someone from the bureau. Someone with clearance must be the one to look into this matter.” He put a hand on Sam’s shoulder and steered her away from Altin. “You must understand, Agent Rose, this is government research. I cannot trust a country cop”—he spat the words out like a profanity—“to understand the delicate nature of what I do. Nor do I trust them to keep their mouths shut.”
With a snap, Sam shut her notebook. The last thing she needed in her life was another bigoted old man. “Dr. Emir, the detective is here to help. Two security guards are missing, and you believe your research is threatened. I need to understand what is going on before I can move forward with this case. Who would want your notes badly enough to break into the lab?”
The doctor glared at her, looked over his shoulder at the machine, and turned back. “Everyone. My research could rewrite human history.”
“I’m sure it could.”
“No,” Emir said, ignoring her sarcasm. “You aren’t. You think I’m a raving madman. I’m paranoid, but not without reason.”
She gave him a cold, flat stare she’d learned at her first duty station.
Emir blinked. “In the past, I had research that was equally controversial. Adaptations of cloning techniques. Gene-therapy work that worried people with an overdeveloped sense of ethics. I have survived assassination attempts. I am no stranger to duplicitous individuals using badges and titles to steal my work before betraying me.”
Sam nodded. It wasn’t bigotry keeping Emir from trusting Altin, it was fear. Not uncommon in citizens from the old United States. “I understand, and I will do everything in my power to protect you. But I trust Detective Altin. He is going to serve as the main investigator for this case. I’ll be there for backup in case sensitive research is threatened.”
The doctor looked grim, but nodded. “You will be the one interviewing me?”
“Yes.” She nodded to Altin. “Can I speak to you a moment?”
They stepped outside and away from the oppressive atmosphere of the lab. It wasn’t until they were out of sight of the lab that Sam felt comfortable talking. “I really want to find the missing security guards. Can the PD make it a priority?”
“Sure, I’ll list them as persons of interest and hunt ’em down. No problem. What are you go
ing to do with Emir?”
“Interview him. He says he’s received threats in the past. Who knows, I might get lucky, and this will be something unrelated to the work here at the lab. But I’m thinking if someone came to the lab looking for information, that means the person knew it existed to start with. In a tight-lipped academic community, that’s a pretty small suspect pool.”
Altin’s eyebrows crept up. “Inside job?”
“A textbook case.”
CHAPTER 3
It is not the nature of man to kill. Men are born in fear. They strive for popularity and power to stave off the inevitable day when death will woo them to her silent domain. To kill, a man must shed his innate humanity and embrace the worship of the only true deity—Death.
~ Excerpt from The Heart of Fear by Liedjie Slaan I1–2071
Wednesday May 22, 2069
Alabama District 3
Commonwealth of North America
Bright light stabbed through the high window, burning Mac’s eyes as the world swam into bleary focus. Softer light from the computer screen illuminated drifts of paper. He picked one up for closer inspection: a diagram of the bones of the hand printed on flimsy, recycled paper. Why had he printed bone diagrams? The reason escaped him.
Foggy memories begged for his attention. Something about . . . about . . . He rubbed his face with his hands and tried to figure out why his ears were ringing. Where was his coffee? He vaguely recalled asking one of the interns to bring him coffee.
Pushing aside papers, he groped for his cup of sanity. Papers crashed to the floor, knocking his phone as it rang. He grabbed the red coffee mug like a drowning man before picking up the phone. “H-hello?” He tipped the coffee into his mouth. Nothing.
“Agent MacKenzie?” The woman’s voice on the other end of the line had an angry edge to it.
Another memory pushed its way through the fog, the memory of long, tan legs, a black-lace bra, and deep red lips. Her. Heaven bless the erratic sprinkler system that had caught the agent off guard.
“Agent MacKenzie?”
“Uh, yeah, Agent . . .” Lips? Red? Something about red . . . “Rose?” He shook his coffee mug upside down. The wispy remains of a dead beetle floated to the ground.
“How’s Jane?” Agent Rose asked.
“Who?” Tipping the mug toward the sunlight, he peered into the depths at sludge and something fuzzy. Penicillin was a mold. That made fuzzy healthy. Mac looked around for a spoon.
“Jane Doe.” Agent Rose sighed in exasperation. “The Jane you’ve had rotting in your morgue since last Friday. The one I’ve patiently waited for a report on. That Jane. Do you have the autopsy and test results yet?”
“Um . . .” He frowned at the computer screen. That could be Jane Doe’s autopsy file, maybe. “Sure?”
“Great. We’re shifting Jane’s files to Birmingham this afternoon. See you in twenty.” The phone clicked off.
Twenty? He blinked in confusion. Did she mean she was coming down in twenty minutes? He swore and pulled open the desk drawer. There had to be a packet of instant coffee in there. His fingers slipped around the familiar shape of the pill bottle. The pills tempted him, offering a way out of the coming pain and humiliation. Escape in an orange bottle.
He shoved them in his lab-coat pocket and fumbled for the last packet of instant coffee.
The Deep South never fit in. Maybe it was the checkered penal-colony past, or the lingering hostilities from the Civil War that fractured the United States in the 1860s, or maybe it was simply that every country needs a place for the malcontents to gather. Pushed from the cities, beaten back by the glowing lights of progress, they turned to the overgrown cotton fields for solace.
Bureau agents in California called it the war zone. This was the last battlefield of national unity, the place where no one had voted in favor of the new Commonwealth but instead had it thrust upon them. This is where agents came to die.
Somehow, Senior Agent Robert Marrins had managed to survive. A former Texas Ranger with no family, he’d not only managed to fill a vacancy in Alabama District 3 but hold the place and keep the peace. But instead of being the living legend Sam imagined when she had first heard about him, she found an avuncular old man with a red nose and sagging belly who didn’t so much keep the peace as hide in his office and avoid anything that looked like work. He just happened to be in a district in which nothing seemed to happen. Lucky for him; sucks for me. He got to sit in his creaking, oversized office chair, and his junior agents did whatever happened to come across his desk.
So it was a little bit frightening when Marrins showed up for work on time that morning to harangue her about what he called, “That damn clone case.”
“This is going too slow,” Marrins said, the smell of antiseptics and coffee wafting around them as he continued his rant. “The regional director wants murders wrapped neat and tight with a seventy-two-hour turnaround. The government’s made promises. No more three to six months waiting for trials. No more twenty-year-old cold cases. People need closure.”
“I know, sir, but Agent Anan was very specific. It needs to hold up in court. I need more than a weekend to get everything done.” The handle of the heavy morgue door burned Sam’s hand as she held it open for Marrins.
“You take orders from me, not Anan. It isn’t hard, Rose. Three pages of paperwork and two signatures. You’ve got to know how to handle people like MacKenzie. Lean a little. He doesn’t have the balls or the backbone to stand up to you, even if you are a girl.” Rubicund jowls vibrated with anger. Marrins shoved the next door toward her as they walked into the cold autopsy room.
Sam caught it with a grimace. “Leaning on Agent MacKenzie won’t guarantee accurate results, sir. There’s still a chance that Jane Doe isn’t a clone.”
“Bull pucky!” Marrins growled with his thick Texas drawl that came out when he was angry. “You’ve seen the statistics for this kind of crime. How often has a case like this not turned into a clone in our district? Come on, Rose, how many?”
She pulled a lab jacket off the coat tree and shoved her arms in. “None, sir,” she admitted.
“You’re chasing shadows,” Marrins said. “Do you know when the last violent crime was in District 3?”
“The Horror House case six years ago.” It was the only bit of interesting crime history in recent memory, and the lurid details of the case had been accompanied by graphic images that still made her ill when she thought about them.
“And that was a set of clones, too,” Marrins said.
“Statistics prove that people who abuse clones or animals move on to human victims in 80 percent of cases. It’s not a huge jump between a clone and a human, sir. One genetic marker’s worth of difference, and you have a psycho moving from legal disposal of a clone to the illegal torture and murder of a human being. It’s happened before, and we’re going to see more cases like it when the Caye Law gets passed.”
Marrins buttoned up an extralarge lab coat with a heavy sigh. “You’re as dense as you look sometimes. If you want that promotion, let this go. I’m getting pressure from my superiors, and the buck stops with you. Get Jane Doe off my desk and out of my district by Friday, or kiss your promotion and transfer good-bye.”
Sam bit back an angry response.
“If MacKenzie gives you trouble, threaten to turn that gez in for abuse.”
Sam frowned at the profanity.
Marrins ignored her. “Everyone knows he’s here because of drug problems. Another report of behavior unbecoming, and we’ll put him in medical-therapy retirement. Best thing for him. Then we can get a decent corpse-flicker.”
There was the inevitable clearing of a throat behind them.
Sam snapped her jacket shut and turned with a tight smile to MacKenzie. “Where’s Jane?”
The ME closed his red-rimmed eyes. “Over
. . . over here.”
“See what I mean?” Marrins hissed in her ear.
She watched the medical examiner freeze half a second before opening his eyes and stiffly walking away. Ignoring the senior agent, she turned to MacKenzie. “Well?”
With a jerky nod, the ME led them over to a viewing console.
“No body?” Marrins sniffed. “Back in the day, they showed you an actual body, not a mock-up.”
“This is a body,” MacKenzie snarled.
Sam cleared her throat. One thing she’d learned to do very fast in the academy was get between all the bloated male egos. “Sir, the body stays in cold storage unless there is a question with the scans. Even then, we would need your signature to cut into a body. The only exceptions are clones when the owner has requested organ harvesting.”
Which a senior agent should know. . .
Marrins grunted. He glared at the scans as he hooked his thumbs in his pockets.
The ME gave her a grateful look as images of the corpse appeared on the screen in 3D. “The victim was between thirty and thirty-five, Latino descent. Her pelvic saddle has no marking from childbirth.” Images of bone structure flashed past. The screen zoomed in on the skull, then muscle layered over the bones. Finally, skin appeared. “That’s the computer’s best guess at what Jane Doe might have looked like.”
A basic Hispanic face, nothing out of the ordinary, but disconcerting in its similarity to what Sam saw in the mirror every morning. She grimaced as the computer added wavy black hair and a dark skin tint. Sam surreptitiously glanced at the ME to see if he was smirking. Both the men stared at her face on the screen without recognition.
“Wetback?” Marrins harrumphed. “Looks like a friend of yours, Rose. You know her?”
“I was born in Toronto, sir, and not all people who look Hispanic actually know each other.”
“She looks familiar,” Marrins said. “Think I saw a whore with that face back in Texas once.”
