Chapter 31 – Crashing Waves
Half blind, Morgenstern let the autopilot park the hospital transport outside District Thirteen's medical ward. He stumbled from the cab, bleeding anew from his wounds. A steady river of blood ran from his beneath his bandaged eye and down his cheek. He took a moment to marshal his resources and then crossed the hard metal dock toward the emergency room.
Inside, he collapsed to the floor, where several nurses rushed over to him. Morgenstern instructed them to call Doctors Mallus and Bergstrom and to see to the colonel and governor in the back of the ambulance.
Back at the hospital, Abbot and Candy slept in the ICU recovery ward, connected to dozens of life support machines, monitored by committed and competent technicians. A video monitor in the background played a news story about Ashley's fights, the riots and her execution.
Two uniformed Angel City Police Officers stood at the closed door of a hospital room. Inside, Detective Cole lay in bed, his face, neck, chest and arms, painted with a mixture of the blue healing goo Ashley's Father had invented so long ago. First Sergeant King sat in a chair next to the detective while Grey leaned against a far wall. Chief Del Toro paced back and forth at the foot of the Cole's bed.
The Detective raised his head. "Chief, you gotta stop that shit, you're making me seasick." He looked at them. "You guys look as bad as I feel.”
First Sergeant King laughed, Grey smiled.
Chief Del Toro leaned forward. "Your case exploded all over my street, Detective.”
"Did we get anything?" Cole asked.
"If you mean by the way of questions, we’ve got a shit-ton of those. We had a bunch of cold bodies, and somehow we've managed to lose half of them. Answers, we don't have.”
A confused look was the only response Cole seemed able to manage.
Chief Del Toro explained, "We recovered half a dozen high profile corpses, including your Governor and her Colonel, but they walked out of the morgue. The crime scene guy's initial assessments of the gunshot wounds were consistent with a police issued weapon and your handgun remains unaccounted for. No one at the scene tested positive for ACPD residue, so at the moment we believe the shooter fled the scene.”
Del Toro leaned forward, hands on the bottom rail of the bed. "Detective. Have you ever tampered with or removed the state required transmitter in your firearm?”
Cole's face went white. "The recorder on the gun works. I know it does. But maybe the transmitter... It might be on the fritz.”
Del Toro rolled his eyes. "Can you give us a quick rundown on just what is going on?”
"She was there. It was her, Ashley Fox." Cole looked over at King and Grey. "I told you she wasn't dead.”
"You were wearing a blindfold when we found you," Del Toro stated. "Did you see her? Or did you just hear her?”
"I got shot. I passed out, but not at first. For a little while, I was just lying there. She was there; the big guy introduced her. He announced her, presented her to Dunkirk. But then they got into it about doing her and the big fucker took first dibs.
“He was taunting her and I guess she got out of her cuffs somehow, she hurt him pretty bad. That’s all I remember.”
“They said he was missing an eye,” Del Toro remarked.
“Dunkirk was there. And if someone put him down, as well as a bunch of the others; it was her. It sure as shit wasn’t me.”
"No mention of Westbury?" Del Toro asked.
"He's smart enough to steer clear of something high profile like this. I heard he was supposed to be there, but someone sold me out.”
"You think it was the mayor's office?”
Cole laughed. “It was a doomed operation. I was stupid to try it. All I did was get more kids killed, or almost killed, or tortured, or whatever.”
“We don’t have anything on Westbury?”
“You know what I know,” the wounded detective muttered.
“We don’t know anything then?” Del Toro surmised.
Morgenstern gripped the rails of the surgery table with white knuckled fury as Dr. Mallus cleaned his ruined eye socket. Using suction hoses, scalpels and clamps, the surgeon cut away the ruined tissue. Bobby Dunkirk stood by in scrubs, as the surgeon's assistant.
Mallus gleefully whistled as the restrained Morgenstern past out from the pain. With a clumsy jab, Mallus woke his patient for more suffering.
Behind them, Auntie and Keller lay on similar tables, silent and still.
Down the hall from Cole's protected room, Lt. Grey took a seat at a networked terminal. In the otherwise unoccupied office, he investigated young Miss Fox and was confronted by the video streams of her fights and execution. Going further was frustrating, as all the information on Ashley was a little less than a week old.
Before the fights last Saturday, the world at large had never heard of Ashley Fox. There was footage of her kicking out Dunkirk’s knee, when he’d attacked her a few summers ago, but her name had been withheld from the press. There were no public records of her birth, no medical records and no school transcripts, none that he could find.
Grey found the reported death of Ashley's parents in the explosion that had rocked downtown last week. The conspiracy theories surrounding Andrew Ignatius Fox III numbered in the thousands. Foremost among them was the absurd concept that he was immortal. As adults, he, his father, Alexander, and he grandfather Andrew Junior, could easily be mistaken for the original Andrew Ignatius Fox.
The first Dr. Fox had been a brilliant bio-physicist. His son, grandson and great grandson followed in his footsteps, graduating from their years of study with honors and accolades. They ruled a dynastic family of wealth and power. Naturally, the conspiracy theorists leveled accusations of cloning and genetic experimentation at the Fox family. The name held patents in hundreds of fields, not least of which, the advancement of bio-cybernetic military technology.
When questioned about the uncanny resemblance between himself and his descendants, Andrew senior had been fond of remarking that nature had peaked in his personal case and could no longer be improved upon. When pressed, he always fired off that he preferred recreational procreation to lab experiments.
In the past week, Ashley’s dramatic entry onto the world stage had generated dozens of theories. The wildest being that the recently executed Ashley had been another example of Dr. Fox's macabre military hardware, a cleverly disguised bodyguard for his newest cloned progeny, her younger brother, Geoffrey. A boy was highlighted briefly at the end of Ashley's pit fight with Mo and Lethal. Of course the wrong child was circled, but the point was made.
It also seemed clear to the conspiracy theorists that Fox's death's was a premeditated/deliberate hoax. They presumed that, like dead rock stars, Dr. Fox sightings, real and otherwise, would continue for years.
Grey logged into the department database and watched the traffic footage of the explosion that had so recently killed the doctor and his wife. Whatever this explosion was, it was not accidental The erratic vehicle's journey, combined with the electro-magnetic pulse, which preceded the impact and detonation, was what looked like an authorized atack. Someone with access to Fox’s personal schedule and a non-nuke EMP. Without the pulse, the terillium charged walls and glass of the building could never have been breeched by a run-away transport, even one rigged with a bomb.
Grey searched for the Fox family address but failed at every turn, discovering only agent’s and publicist's offices. He searched the schools and found over thirteen hundred students named Fox, but no Geoff or Ashley. It wasn't surprising that their schooling was private; the records would be stored off-grid.
Yet, Detective Cole had acquired the children after the accident, once their parents were deceased. How?
Grey exited the administrator's office and returned to the detective's guarded room. Cole was sleeping, King and Del Toro had gone home for the night. He approached Cole slowly and whispered, "Detective.”
Cole surprised the lieutenant by raising a weapon into his face. He reco
gnized Grey, lowered the gun, but said nothing.
"How did Ashley and her brother end up out at District Thirteen?”
Cole looked at the young officer.
"If I'm going to find her, I need a lead," Grey said. "How did you get to her so fast, after that explosion downtown?”
"Anytime a registered witness or a family member rings the bell, the detective in charge gets a call. Fox gave me two numbers to call if anything ever happened to him or his wife again. There was one number if it happened during the day, another at night. I called and a prerecorded message named their school.”
"And the second one, did you try it?”
"Disconnected.”
"Look. She probably went home. I've been looking, but I can't find anything on them.”
Cole closed his eyes. Grey thought he might have fallen asleep.
"They went home first, before they came to the station. Talk to Jake Whetland. I sent him to pick her up. I trust him, she did too.” He gestured to the nearby phone. "Dial this number.” Cole rattled off a number from memory and Grey dialed, handing the ringing receiver to the detective.
"Hey, it’s Jimmy. Yeah. No, I'm okay. Yeah, very hush-hush. I got a friend needs to see you. Yes, about that, listen, this is sensitive material. Keep it under wraps, no matter what it takes, except for my friend.
"Be careful, you’ll be seeing feds before sunset. And send your partner out of town. Find something upstate, or out of state, if you can. Yes, that serious. Listen, Jake. When my boy gets down there, I want you to speak the piece but give him some wrapped herring. Exactly right. Thanks." Cole hung up and handed the receiver to the lieutenant.
"He's standing a shift down on Santee Alley all morning. You can trust him. He'll tell you the coordinates and give you a written diversion.”
"Clever.”
"Get your ass down there and find her before someone else does.”
Grey moved toward the door, but turned back.
"Wait. Why would the feds be coming in on this?”
"Down on D13 there is a secret weapons lab. The senators want it but Westbury has been using it as leverage to keep them from smoking Maime and Keller.”
"A Weapons lab on an orphanage? Do I even want to know?”
"I don't think Dr. Fox ever worked there, but he knew about it. We talked once in a while, when I ran out of steam looking for Dunkirk. He told me to watch 13. We've been digging into them for years, but always got the cold shoulder from on high. We know Dunkirk has been there to visit his son, Bobby.
“Maybe Fox didn't know anything about the connection between Maime and Westbury, but once we started watching Bobby, we started seeing strange things going on there and Fox never told me how he knew. I kept digging and I ran across the name Dr. Cedric Bergstrom. He’s wanted by the feds for carrying out sadistic experiments on, guess what, children.”
"Then why did you send the kids there?” Grey asked.
"Orders came down from on high. The Dunkirk case has gotten a lot of attention. Everyone in the chain of command knows Ashley Fox was the witness. I was ordered to send her and Geoff over to Thirteen.”
"Like it was planned?”
"Oh, it was planned, but not by them. As you can see, she’s not been much of a helpless victim so far. They want to kill her, sure. But she wants to kill them just as bad. And if Dr. Fox knew what they were up to, then I suspect Ashley may very well be his equivalent of Revenge From Beyond The Grave.
"Jesus, his own daughter?”
"Yeah, well, we're all being played. I mean, how do you think you ended up here?” Cole asked the young Lieutenant.
"What are you talking about?" Grey was taken aback.
"Sergeant King and Fox go way back. They created Black Willow together; did you know that? They knew each other as kids. He didn't tell you that, did he?”
"No, he didn't.”
“Black Willow was Fox’s follow up to The 3 AM Bodyguard Project, ever hear of it?” Cole asked.
“No,” Grey replied.
“Well, no reason you should have. It was an attempt to create the perfect bodyguard. Want to guess what they discovered?”
“What?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“You are your own best bodyguard. No one can protect you as well as you can protect yourself. The conclusion to most all their tests ended in failure. Sometimes the bodyguard survived, but the client rarely did.”
“Your point?”
“Well, they did find something curious. When the client worked with the bodyguards, when he engaged the enemy and returned fire, their success rates skyrocketed.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“From what I’ve been able to learn, Black Willow was a nine-man team,” Cole said.
“Yeah, so what are you saying?”
“I’m saying there was only ever nine individuals who worked on Willow operations.”
“You mean nine people at one time, right?”
“No. I mean nine names, period.”
“Bullshit, that unit ran dozens, if not hundreds of missions. They’re on record losing thousands of soldiers. Even I ran on a couple third string Willow Ops.”
“You ever meet anyone else work a BW op?”
“We don’t kiss and tell.”
“So that’s a No, then.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Why do you think you were sent to district thirteen in the first place? Look at your all-black codec; you think that’s a coincidence? No. Someone's got an agenda for you too, pal.”
Grey laughed. "Yeah, well, they don’t know me very well then. I have a history of being unpredictable.”
"I believe that’s exactly what they’re betting on. Welcome to the other side of the looking glass. Ashley isn't done yet either.”
Grey looked down. "There are a lot of innocent kids down there.”
"Jake Whetland?" Grey asked.
"Lieutenant." Cole nodded.
Then Grey was moving down the hall, toward the fugitive teen.