Ground Zero

  “I believe he’s waiting for your okay,” Patrick said.

  “Oh, sorry,” Zero replied. He saluted Kek and said, “Excellent job, my friend. Please reassemble it.”

  Patrick had no way to gauge this creature’s emotions, but he sensed a burst of pride and pleasure in response to Zero’s approval. Oh, yes, Kek might be hell on wheels when it came to confronting an enemy, but he was Zero’s kitty cat.

  “Who made him?” Patrick said as Kek’s flying fingers clicked the pieces back into place. “SimGen?”

  “The most likely suspect,” Zero said.

  “But if so, how did he get from New Jersey to Idaho?”

  “Our guess is he was put aboard a truck from the SimGen basic research facility; the truck was driven aboard a plane at the SimGen airstrip and flown to Idaho.”

  “Why Idaho?”

  “Because it’s largely empty. Because you can buy big parcels of land that allow you to operate in near absolute privacy.”

  “But who?” Patrick said. “Who wants to operate in secrecy? Who wants to stockpile a bunch of Keks?”

  “Kek might be just one of many new species quartered in the hinterlands.”

  The possibilities made Patrick more than a little queasy. “There’s a thought to take to bed with you.”

  Just then Ponytail stirred, groaned, and lifted his head.

  Zero glanced his way and said, “A font of information on these very subjects is about to become available to us. I hope.”

  “I don’t think you have to hope,” Patrick said. “I’d swear he recognized Kek when he jumped him. He even tried to say something. It sounded like, ‘Kree—’ but he never got to finish it.”

  Ponytail’s eyes were glazed and it was obvious to Patrick he had no idea where he was or why he was tied up or what was going on. Tell him he’s at an S & M beerfest in Sydney and he’d buy it. After ten seconds or so his chin dropped back onto his chest.

  “We’ll have to ask him about that,” Zero said. “He should be ready to talk soon.” He turned to Kek. “Take your position upstairs at the window now.”

  Kek turned and scrambled up a metal ladder affixed to the rear wall.

  “The garage comes with a loft,” Zero said. “The window up there affords an excellent view of the street. It also serves as Kek’s home.”

  “So it was him I saw peeking down on us that day,” Patrick said.

  Zero nodded. “Kek has a curious nature.” He turned to Romy. “Where did we put that inoculator kit?”

  “Right here,” Romy said, and handed it to him.

  “The moment of truth, as it were,” Zero said, opening the kit as he approached the captive. “Now we find out if Luca Portero is as involved as we think he is.”

  “How safe is that stuff?” said Patrick, eyeing the amber fluid in the inoculator’s chamber.

  “I’ve never used it,” Zero said. “But they were willing to dose you up with it. Any objections to returning the favor?”

  “None at all,” Patrick said.

  “I didn’t think so.” He handed the inoculator to Romy. “Would you do the honors?”

  “My pleasure,” she said.

  She tilted Ponytail’s head to the side, exposing his neck.

  “You know what you’re doing?” Patrick said.

  She nodded. “Used to work research. Injected a lot of animals before I decided I’d rather work the other side of the street.”

  She placed the business end of the inoculator gun against the side of Ponytail’s neck. She look as if she were about to execute him.

  “What about the dose?” Patrick said. “How do you know how much to give?”

  “Haven’t the faintest. But this is the dose he was planning to put into us, so that’s what goes into him.”

  “And if it’s too much?”

  She shrugged. “That’ll be his problem, won’t it.”

  Patrick realized he was seeing another side of Romy, a new persona, cold, efficient, almost ruthless in simmering fury. Was this the “someone else” she’d mentioned before? Not that he could blame her: This man had invaded her home, bound her, watched as his partner had mistreated her, and had been about to invade the very core of her privacy—her mind. Add to all that the possibility that he might have had a hand in the deaths of dozens of sims and the guy was lucky she wasn’t jabbing the inoculator into his eye.

  Patrick felt his shoulders bunch as the Romy pressed the trigger and injected the liquid through the skin of Ponytail’s neck with a soft pop .

  The man flinched, his eyes fluttered open. He raised his head and looked around, dazed. Patrick saw the purpling welts on his throat, mementos of Kek’s fingers. He blinked. Patrick watched a look of utter horror flow through his features when he saw the inoculator in Romy’s hand.

  “No!” he rasped, his voice barely audible through his bruised larynx. “You didn’t! Please tell me you didn’t!”

  Romy bounced the inoculator in her hand. “Shoot you up with your own junk? You bet we did.”

  “Not Totuus!”

  “If that’s what’s in your vial, then, yes, Totuus.”

  And then Ponytail did something that took Patrick completely by surprise: His face screwed up and he began to sob. Romy took a step back and regarded him with mute shock.

  “You didn’t have to do that!” he squeaked in his laryngitis voice. “I would have told you! I would have told you anything you wanted to know!”

  “Sure, you would have,” Romy said. “And we would have been able to take every word to the bank, right?”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Patrick said, turning to Zero. The man’s genuine terror was getting to him. “What don’t we know about this drug?”

  Zero’s expression was unreadable behind his ski mask, but his tone was puzzled. “I researched it after hearing that it had been found in the globulin farmers’ bodies. Its main side effect is a headache for about a day afterwards.”

  Romy seemed unfazed by the man’s abject terror. She pressed the red RECORD button on his own recorder and held it before his face.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  Ponytail squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth, fighting the drug and the question.

  “Come on,” Romy cooed. “This is a simple one. Your name…what is your name?”

  The man’s face reddened with effort, then the words broke free in a hoarse rush: “David Daniel Palmer!”

  “Excellent. Now, Mr. David Daniel Palmer, who sent you?”

  He began to blubber again. “Please don’t ask me that! Please!”

  “And if I’d begged you not to shoot me up with this stuff an hour ago, you would have spared me, right?”

  “Please!”

  Romy’s voice hardened. “Stop stalling! Tell me now: Who do you work for?”

  Parker screwed up his face, chewed on his lips, then blurted through a sob, “SIRG—”

  But as soon as the word escaped him, his eyes rolled back in his head. He stiffened, bared his teeth, and began to shake, violently enough to start his chair walking across the floor.

  “Ohmigod!” Romy cried. “What’s happening?”

  Zero leaped forward. “He’s having some sort of seizure! If he swallows his tongue he’ll choke to death!”

  Patrick watched in horror as Zero’s gloved hands worked past Palmer’s foam-flecked lips, trying to pry open his jaws.

  And then as suddenly as the attack had started, it stopped. Palmer drooped in his chair, breathing raggedly, his eyes glazed.

  “Daniel Palmer,” Zero said, leaning close, all but shouting. “Are you all right?”

  Palmer mumbled something.

  Zero shook his shoulder. “I said, are you all right?”

  Palmer stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign language, then said, “Crash want rag lay hedge knock two.”

  “What?” Zero said.

  “Numb bag five sense peel drawer another stop see.”

  “He’s lost his mind!”
Romy said, her hand over her mouth. The cold bitch goddess with the inoculator and the tape recorder was gone, and she was back to the Romy Patrick knew…or thought he did. “Did I do this? Is this my fault?”

  “I don’t know,” Zero said. “I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it.” He glanced at Romy and Patrick. “There’s also the possibility he’s faking.”

  “He gets an Oscar if he is,” Patrick said.

  Zero leaned close again: “What’s your name?”

  “Realize game attached.”

  “Oh, God!” Romy whispered.

  Zero pulled out a phone. “I think we need help.”

  “Who are you calling?” Patrick asked.

  “A doctor.”

  6

  SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ

  DECEMBER 16

  “Duke Jackson is dead,” said Lister’s voice through the receiver.

  Luca Portero tightened his grip on the encrypted phone and kept kicking at the leaves. He’d been out in the woods surrounding his cabin, taking some fresh morning air, taking precautions…the way things were going, precautions might come in handy. The news didn’t surprise him.

  “How?”

  “Broken neck. His body was found around 5:00A .M. A red flag went up at our end when NYPD tried to run his prints this morning. They’ve got him listed as a John Doe and he’ll remain that way.”

  “What about Palmer?”

  “Not a peep. And that worries me more. I’d almost prefer to have his corpse surface.”

  Luca knew what Lister meant. An experienced operative caught in the act while carrying a supply of Totuus was a recipe for disaster. But Luca had taken precautions for just this eventuality.

  “We’re protected,” Luca said. “I had him and Jackson down a dose of MTW before they went out.”

  “Thank God for that. How did you ever convince them to take it?”

  “I told them they had no choice, that it was a direct order from the Old Man himself.”

  “Lucky they believed you. Still…MTW is still pretty new. Not much field experience with it. Better pray it worked. Because if it didn’t…”

  Lister didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t have to. If the MTW had failed, Palmer would have spilled everything by now.

  The MTW did work, Luca thought. It had to.

  “But even if it works perfectly,” Lister went on, “you’re not off the hook for muffing another operation. And neither am I.”

  “We didn’t muff a thing !” Luca said as a cold lump formed in his belly. “The Idaho hotshots blew it.”

  “The people upstairs don’t see it that way. They’re out four skilled operatives in two months with nothing to show for it. And they keep asking me, ‘Where’s the pregnant sim? All our resources at your disposal, a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to her, and what have you come up with?’ Do you hear what they’re saying, Luca? It used to be, ‘When’s Portero coming up with something?’ Now it’s, ‘When are you coming up with something?’ Me. Like we’re Siamese twins.”

  Luca thought he heard a tremor in Lister’s voice. He’d never known Darryl Lister to be scared. When they’d been pinned down by Taliban mortars outside Gardez, he’d been the picture of cool. But now…

  “Shit. I’m sorry, man.”

  “Hey, we’re not dead yet. We’ve gotten out of tighter places. But they want results by the end of the year.”

  The end of the year—two weeks!

  Luca said, “What about the plate number Snyder spotted on that van last night?”

  “Nothing. He must have got it wrong. The number’s not in use. Tell Snyder he needs glasses.”

  Luca didn’t think so. More likely the plates were phony, and Palmer and Jackson had been in that van along with Cadman, Sullivan, and who knew who else.

  “All right then,” Luca said. “What’s the status of Cadman and Sullivan now? Do we keep after them?”

  “The decision’s been made to back off for the time being. They’ll be on guard now and—”

  “Obviously they were already on guard.”

  “Yes, well, be that as it may, they’ll be on full alert now, and we can’t risk losing any more men. The legal people can put the stall on any discovery motions Sullivan files; we’ll find out who’s behind them later. Right now concentrate on finding that sim.”

  “It’s possible she’s dead,” Luca said, hoping it was true. “That cold snap after she escaped was pretty mean. She could have crawled into a pipe somewhere and froze to death.”

  “Then find her body. Since that fool Eckert started blathering about her being pregnant and the baby’s father being human, SimGen stock price has slid six points. Most people think he’s crazy, but he’s making a lot of investors nervous. And that makes everyone upstairs nervous. You know what SimGen stock means.”

  Luca nodded. It meant independence for SIRG. No strings, no brakes.

  “We’ve got to find her, Luca. I don’t have to tell you what will happen if Eckert or Cadman and Sullivan get to her first.”

  Luca closed his eyes. That would finish SimGen, finish SIRG, and leave him running for his life.

  “They won’t.”

  And to make sure they wouldn’t, he had to nail Ellis Sinclair as their informant and serve up his head on a silver platter.

  7

  MANHATTAN

  Patrick checked the cars on Henry Street outside his office building before stepping out. All looked empty, no plumes of idling exhaust. After the other night, he was spooked, and not ashamed to admit it. You weren’t paranoid when they really were out to get you.

  He stepped out onto the sidewalk and cried out as he collided with someone. He jumped back, ready to run back inside, when he noticed it was an older woman. He grabbed her arm to keep her from falling.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t looking.”

  “Did I frighten you, Mr. Sullivan?” she said.

  He looked at her face. Uh-oh. Alice Fredericks. The Mother of All Sims.

  “Hello, Miss Fredericks. Nice to see you again. No, you didn’t frighten me. I just didn’t expect anyone there.” He made a show of glancing at his watch. “I’m just heading off to a meeting and—”

  “You didn’t call me, Mr. Sullivan.” Her look was reproachful. “You said you would and I’ve been waiting every day but you haven’t called.”

  “I told you,” he said, backing away, “I’ll call when my schedule lightens up. It’s just that there’s been so much going on.”

  No lie there.

  “You’re not afraid, are you?”

  Maybe he should tell her he was very afraid, that he was terrified. Then she’d look for someone else. But he couldn’t make himself say it.

  “Not of space aliens.” True enough. Too many other truly frightening things going on in his life right now to worry about space aliens. “Not a bit.”

  “Very well,” she said. “I’ll be waiting.”

  He turned and hurried toward Catherine Street to find a taxi.

  After a ride during which Patrick spent more time looking out the rear window than the front, the cabby dropped him off at Penn Station. He wandered around Seventh Avenue, going in and out of stores to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then headed further west.

  Finally he arrived at Zero’s garage just behind a middle-aged woman. Despite the parka-like hood cinched tight around her head against the cold, he recognized her.

  “Dr. Cannon,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Patrick Sullivan. I don’t know if you remember me, but I was—”

  “You were helping at the Beacon Ridge atrocity,” she said with a smile as she pushed back her hood. He noticed that her long graying mane had been shorn to an almost boyish length. “Yes, of course I remember. And call me Betsy, please.”

  The door opened and Romy was there, smiling. “A two-fer! Come in, Betsy. So good of you to come.”

  “No problem. It’s easier for me to come to Zero than him to come to me.”

&nb
sp; “And you cut your hair. I love it!”

  Patrick stepped inside and closed the door behind him, remembering Zero’s hurried phone conversation with Dr. Cannon last night. She was on staff at Nassau County Community Hospital and, following her instructions to Zero, Patrick and Romy had driven David Palmer out to the hospital and left him in the parking lot for her to “find.”

  Now, as the three of them trooped toward the rear of the garage, Kek suddenly came bounding down the ladder from his domain in the loft and charged them. Patrick tensed, waiting for Zero or Romy to call him off, but they said nothing. Then Betsy Cannon opened her arms and embraced the beast.

  “How is my friend Kek doing?” she said.

  Kek signed something to her and Betsy laughed. They had a brief conversation—Betsy speaking, Kek signing, then Kek scrambled back up the ladder to his observation post.

  “You nursed him back to health, I’m told,” Patrick said as Kek vanished into the ceiling.

  “Not really. Zero did most of the nursing. I tried to save his frostbitten fingers but was only eighty-percent successful. As an OB-GYN I have surgical training, but—”

  “OB?” Patrick glanced past her at Zero who nodded. “Then if we find this pregnant sim—?”

  “You’ll bring her to me, of course. I’ve lots of experience delivering sims.”

  “You have?”

  “Certainly. I spent six years as medical director of SimGen’s natal center. When it finally seeped through to me that I was delivering a race of slaves into the world, I quit. And not long after that I received a call from Zero.”

  The idea of birthing sims thrust Alice Fredericks’s crazy, tortured face into Patrick’s mind. “Let me pop you a question out of far left field: Do you know if SimGen ever used human women to bear sims?”

  “What?” Romy said. “That’s not out of left field, that’s from the bleachers!”

  “Not while I was there, I assure you,” Betsy said. “Why do you ask?”

  Patrick told them about Alice Fredericks and her story.

  “She certainly sounds delusional,” Betsy said.

  “I’m ready to believe that SimGen’s connected to almost anything bad,” Zero said, “but I draw the line at space aliens. Let’s get back to reality, shall we?” He turned to Betsy Cannon. “Any idea yet as to what’s wrong with the patient we sent you last night?”