I’ve got a football game to play Friday night.…
He tried to distract himself with that thought, but it only made the pain worse. The throbs lasted longer this time, resonating like a dull echo banging up against the sides of his skull. He couldn’t bear to listen and look anymore at his mother for now and decided to try one of the other files, focusing on one labeled PICTURES.
Alex opened the file and clicked on the first photo, watched it sharpen on the screen before him.
“Sam,” he called, toward the front of the FedEx office, “you need to see this.”
51
PING
RATHMAN HAD THE BIG SUV’s driver cross up and down the street a few times, looking for any changes in the parking lot that fronted the FedEx Office. In his experience, variance was the indicator that set alarm bells ringing in his head more than any other. Two or three cars appearing where there had been none just moments before. So the first order of business, bred by that experience as well as instinct, was to make sure the scene was stable, with no unexpected threat that might catch his team unprepared and waylay their plan.
Plan …
Right now he didn’t have one. He needed to get a lock on the position of the targets first. Confined spaces like this could be tricky. Too easy for bystanders to get in the way and too easy for witnesses to get a good look at the proceedings. So Rathman’s team would go in shooting. Nothing sent potential witnesses dropping for cover and eliminated their seeing what they should not more than gunfire, no matter where it was aimed. His men would shoot upward initially, take out some lights, turn chunks of the cheap drop ceiling to particleboard rain to further discourage those hugging the floor with heads covered up.
This was the place to which the desk clerk had provided directions to his targets. That’s what had brought him here, but the rest of the night, his first exposure to the reach and power of Langston Marsh stuck in his mind more.
“Something amiss,” in Marsh’s words, referred to a “ping” his quantum computer had come up with. The unseen machine was like a technological insomniac, forever scanning police frequencies, wire services, cellular telephone calls, e-mails, and a host of other sources for incidents that stood out for reasons that rendered them inexplicable. Crimes, mostly, perhaps indicative of Marsh’s Zarim targets behaving in desperate fashion. Emerging from their anonymity because pursuit was closing in, choice bled out of their lives.
Rathman couldn’t say if he entirely believed the man’s spiel about the aliens he was committed to exterminating, because he didn’t care. The man was giving him free license to do what he did best: inflict pain and kill, not necessarily in that order.
According to Marsh, his supercomputer had pinged a crime in a suburb of San Francisco, something the police were calling a home invasion. But the computer had also found that the dead couple’s son was missing from a hospital and a doctor there was dead as well.
Connections, Marsh had explained. His computer was an expert at making them.
The computer was expert at something else as well, that being the capability to process incoming information from over ten million security cameras scattered across the country. One of those ten million had provided the picture of Alex Chin climbing into a canary-yellow Volkswagen Beetle not far from the hospital he’d fled. The driver’s face was grainy, mostly obscured, and barely clear enough for Rathman to be certain it was a girl, likely the same girl the motel clerk had told him was with Alex Chin now.
By the time Rathman had reached San Francisco, the computer had found six more instances of the Volkswagen being recorded by security cameras. The last one came at that diner just off the PCH, where the waitress had directed him to the motel. Now that motel’s smelly, comic book–reading clerk now lay dead behind the counter. Police would think he’d slipped on the floor and broken his neck because that’s the way Rathman had made it look after the clerk had provided this address. His death was of no consequence at all, though hopefully the investigation wouldn’t make too much about the damage done to the back of his hand and the broken KNOCK WOOD statue Marsh had dumped in the trash before leaving.
There was no canary-yellow Beetle in the FedEx Office’s parking lot, but his target and the car’s owner could easily have stashed it out of sight somewhere nearby.
“All right,” he told the driver, as the big SUV started back down the street again, “pull into the lot and park in the far corner, facing the FedEx Office.”
52
CONFESSION
ALEX WAITED FOR SAM to join him before clicking on the first icon contained in the pictures file. The screen seemed to darken briefly before a grainy photograph took shape.
It was a baby picture, an infant wrapped in a blanket atop a taupe-colored couch. Alex recognized the couch from other pictures he’d seen of his parents’ first apartment after they came to America to pursue their dream.
This must have been his first baby picture, snapped as soon as An got him home to the apartment. The other icons offered more of the same, charting his early growth. Stereotypical shots, the kind every family stockpiles.
Only Alex had never seen them before. His parents had always told him all his baby pictures had been lost in the move from the apartment to the Millbrae home where he had grown up.
And just hours before had watched his parents die.
Alex felt himself choking up again, his insides tightening, his throat clogging. He felt Sam stroking his back, trying to comfort him, realized he was sobbing. Then cleared his throat, made himself refocus.
“This is why,” he said out loud.
“Why what?” Sam posed tentatively.
“No baby pictures, nothing of me until I was, like, four or five.” He turned from the screen to look at her, words forming with his thoughts. “Because they were evidence of what my mother had done.”
“What’d she do?”
“She saved my life. Rescued me from a fire,” he said, leaving things there.
“So what’s the problem?”
“Let’s find out,” Alex said, and clicked on his mother’s frozen image to pick up the story An Chin had left for him inside Meng Po.
* * *
There is little more I can tell you about Laboratory Z.
The media, of course, was filled with news of the strange explosion at the lab. As is customary, people talked of nothing but it for days and weeks and then it, like all else, became old news. There were all kinds of stories and rumors, investigative reports about it being some secret installation probing travel between dimensions, wormholes, teleportation, and all kinds of things nobody really believed were real. Stuff for crackpots and conspiracy theorists.
But maybe not so crazy, after all.
Meanwhile, your father and I waited in fear. Waited for someone to come and take you away. Waited for a story about a missing baby. Someone’s tragedy that had become our joy. But no such thing was ever reported and no knock ever fell on our door.
Your father had a friend—an old Chinese man—who was shady in a good way. He’d spent most of his life arranging adoptions for Chinese babies by American parents. He managed to get us all the legal papers for you. As far as the world knew, we had adopted you legally. All the paperwork was in order, down to the day and time of your birth and signature of a fake birth mother relinquishing all claims to custody.
The documents made me wonder about your real mother. Why she never came back for you, what she could have possibly been doing in Laboratory Z. I considered many explanations and rejected them all. None made any sense, but I didn’t care because I had you. That was all that mattered. Sometimes fate must be accepted and not questioned.
But the passage of time brought more questions. Initial reports indicated three bodies had been recovered from Laboratory Z. Then it was reported that all personnel who worked for the company had gotten out safely. A major discrepancy until the newspaper and television corrected their original story, saying no bodies had been found inside Laborat
ory Z at all.
Your father and I were frightened by this, but also elated, since not one of the reports mentioned anything about a baby. You were ours and nobody was coming to take you away.
Still we worried, every day and night we worried. We feared every knock on the door or ring of the doorbell. We were scared every time the phone rang or when a stranger cast us too long a stare. That happened a lot and we had to remind ourselves that we were a Chinese couple with an American baby. Of course people stared. We learned to just smile at them like nothing was wrong.
Because it wasn’t.
Until we felt safe enough to take you to a doctor a few weeks later. A kindly Chinese pediatrician on the verge of retirement who’d made his life here just as we had. Even though all the paperwork pertaining to your “adoption” was in order, he seemed suspicious almost from the first moment we brought you into his office.
And that was before he had reason to be, before—
* * *
The computer timed out with a ping, the screen freezing.
“I’ll buy us some more time,” Sam said, starting to stand.
Alex restrained her with a hand to her forearm. “Maybe you shouldn’t. We’ve been here too long. Maybe we should just go.”
“Alex—”
“And we may need the cash later, right?”
“Alex—”
“We already learned what we needed to. The rest, this stuff with the doctor, can wait until we get more settled, figure stuff out.”
“You need to know, Alex,” Sam said, after he’d finished. “We need to figure out why all this is happening.” She glanced down at the screen. “Let me buy us some more time on the computer.”
He nodded, let go of her arm.
Sam slid away, reluctant to leave him, even for a moment. Leave him staring at his mother on the screen.
And that was before he had reason to be, before—
53
WILD CARD
WHAT OTHER GUY?
Raiff didn’t recognize the man from the description Lieutenant Grimes had provided.
“He was big,” Grimes had said.
“What else?”
“Bald?”
“That it?”
“All you feds look the same to me.”
Raiff didn’t need to know any more than that to know it was bad. His real enemy never announced themselves that way. That meant another Tracker team, led by Big Bald, had found their way to Dancer’s house. On his trail now for sure. Which meant he had two problems to contend with instead of one, making his task simple:
He needed to find Dancer before either of the other parties did, either Langston Marsh’s Trackers or the androids the boy must have somehow overcome before fleeing his house, before he could be pinned with the blame for the murder of his parents. Hard to say which was more dangerous at this point.
I should’ve been closer, in position to move preemptively.
But he’d come to fear that his mere presence in Dancer’s vicinity could place the boy in more danger, not less. In the absence of protocol, he’d determined that keeping his distance and waiting for word from the Watchers to be the most secure strategy to maintain. Imagine if the Trackers happened to find Dancer when they came looking for him.
All these years of quiet had erupted in this. Like the contents of a clogged drain bursting upward once plunged.
Raiff had made himself learn patience over the years, grown accustomed to a lifestyle off anything remotely resembling a grid. But this kind of frustration was an entirely new sensation and it was chewing away at him.
Where had Big Bald gone after leaving Dancer’s house?
Raiff drove around aimlessly as if Big Bald might pop up out of nowhere at any moment. He wouldn’t be alone, either; he’d be accompanied by a team likely larger and more proficient than the one Raiff had dispensed with earlier in the night. The incident report would’ve alerted them and they’d likely left Dancer’s house with a reasonably clear destination in mind.
While Raiff had nothing. All he could do was either drive or park and wait for a text message from a Watcher telling him where Dancer could be found. And even then everything would depend on him getting there ahead of Big Bald.
Everything.
Raiff pulled into a McDonald’s, the interior restaurant closed but the drive-through advertised on the sign as being open until 3:00 a.m. He found a darkened corner to pull into. The funds that supported him wouldn’t last forever, but they’d last long enough. His native world was rich in precious metals, including gold to the point where it was less valued there than here. Decades before, centuries, for all Raiff knew, stores of gold had been brought over and hidden away in anticipation of these times coming at last.
Whenever he ran low on funds, Raiff need only collect some of that gold, never more than necessary, and exchange it for cash. He bought old-model used cars always from private sellers and drove them until they didn’t drive anymore. The identity he’d procured was ironclad, but still precluded an actual residence or owning anything that left a trail. He had a single credit card in the name he’d assumed, necessary in order to fly or rent a car, and of all his documents the California state driver’s license had been the easiest to obtain.
He lived for his mission, and his mission was to protect Dancer, above and beyond anything else. If and when Raiff was needed, he had full operational authority. Anything within his discretion was permissible.
But discretion was pointless until he located Dancer.
The real problem here was Langston Marsh and his Tracker teams. They were the wild card, the factor never considered prior to Raiff’s dispatch because they hadn’t come into existence yet and thus were a presence that could not possibly be accounted for. Protecting Dancer against those hunting the boy was one thing. Protecting himself against those who were hunting their very kind, something else again.
No matter how much the Trackers had come to dictate his actions and movements, though, he had to accept their presence in full awareness that the threat they posed was miniscule compared to the threat looming over this planet. Without Dancer, Earth’s fall would be inevitable. Few things in Raiff’s estimation bore such certainty, or any certainty at all. But that was one of them.
His phone beeped with an incoming text message from a Watcher, the bright translucent letters piercing the spill of the parking lot’s darkness.
FOUND DANCER. LOCATION FOLLOWS.
54
DIAGNOSIS
“I’VE GOT THE CODE,” Sam said, retaking the seat next to Alex.
When his eyes remained rooted on the screen, she leaned across and typed in the access code another twenty dollars had bought her. Instantly, the screen jumped back to life, Alex regarding her briefly before returning his attention to his mother.
* * *
—until the results of the blood tests came back and Dr. Chu asked us to come back in so he could take another sample. I hated watching him do it, sticking that needle in your arm and filling one vial and then another. He wouldn’t tell me why he needed the tests repeated but I feared the worst.
You were sick, with some awful illness certain to take you from us. Why else would someone have abandoned you the way they did? It all made sense now. A monstrous act for a parent to abandon a child, no matter how sick, especially when your father and I wanted one so badly and never could have a child.
But we had you and that was enough. I held you while Dr. Chu siphoned off the blood he needed, swearing I’d always love you no matter what. Even if always was only another week or a month. I prepared myself for the inevitable, for learning the name of whatever disease you’d been born with.
Except it didn’t have a name; it wasn’t even a disease. The results of the second test came back and Dr. Chu wanted to do a third. I wouldn’t let him until he explained why. He showed me the first two blood tests, identical in all respects, with the results all out of whack. Numbers wildly askew to the point where they made no sense.
White counts, red counts, T cells, liver enzymes, kidney function—nothing was right.
There must be a mistake, I told him, even as I knew there couldn’t be, not two times in a row.
It’s impossible, Dr. Chu said, because if these numbers are correct, then your baby couldn’t possibly be alive.
But you were, at least for now. Miracles happen, don’t they, and the world is held together by fate. Fate dictated that I find you and fate dictated you would survive no matter what the numbers said.
But even miracles have their limits, and I resolved not to rely only on them. I scoured San Francisco for Chinese herbalists, practitioners of the most ancient medicine known to man. None of them would treat an infant. One, a mostly blind man, said yes, but he needed to examine you first, needed to know you by touch.
So I lifted you out of your stroller and placed you in his withered arms with scars from the years he’d spent in a Chinese prison. He ran his fingers over your face, your head, your chest, your arms and legs. I watched him start to quiver, then shake. I barely was able to take you from his grasp before he slammed backward against the wall, looking to be in the throes of some kind of seizure.
No! he spat out. No! Leave, you must leave!
In that moment I met his eyes and I knew he could see. Impossible, I know, but something had happened. Touching you had triggered something so deep inside him that his sight returned. But then, just as quickly, his gaze hazed over and he slumped down the wall to the floor, pale with shock. I put you back in the stroller and tried to help him but he wouldn’t let me. Just pushed me away, screaming in some Chinese dialect I didn’t recognize. To this day I don’t know what he was saying but I know he was scared, terrified.
I bundled you back in the car and drove straight to Dr. Chu. Night had fallen and he was just closing up his office. I blocked his way, wouldn’t let him pass until he told me the truth. I pressed him, left him no choice.
We went back inside, into his office. He only turned on a single light, kept glancing down at you in the stroller, his eyes not terrified like the old blind man’s, but wary and uncertain. The results of the third test mirrored the first two. Identical again, leading Dr. Chu to a conclusion that defied his Harvard education and fifty years of medical experience.