Luca followed him outside to the cars. He waved to Maria and jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the open front door. She jumped out of the Jeep and ran back into the house.
Again, Lister’s eyes followed her. “Remember what I said about putting down roots.”
“Roger that,” Luca said.
But not till he saw how all this settled out. Until then he wanted that Bermuda account as fat as possible.
“And ditch the kid. Put her back where you found her.”
“Will do.”
Lister smiled. “Or marry her.”
“I don’t think so.”
He’d miss Maria, miss her a lot. She loved sex, cooked up a storm, and was crazy about him, would do anything for him. Maybe he’d keep her around till he found a replacement. Someone who could—
Luca’s PCA chirped. He flipped it open and turned away from Lister as he spoke. “Yes.”
“This is Grimes. We found her. She’s been hiding out in a sim crib.”
Relief flooded through him. “You have her?”
“Not yet. But we’ve got an address and we’re on our way.”
“Where’s the crib?” Luca listened as Grimes read off a Newark address. “I’ll meet you there.”
He ended the call and turned back to Lister. “One of my men. We’ve located the missing sim. We’re on our way to pick her up.” He grinned at Lister. “One problem down, one more to go.”
“Let’s hope so,” Lister said.
Luca jumped into the Jeep. Newark. Not a long drive. And the timing could not be better. Tying this up would free him up to devote all his energies to Romy Cadman, and settling with her once and for all.
20
NEWARK, NJ
Meerm lonely. Not hungry. Nibble food save from last night. Watch out window. See peoples walk sidewalk. Not far down. One floor. Meerm listen. Sometime hear what passing peoples say. Sometime happy. Sometime mad. Meerm like happy better.
Meerm watch street. Many car but no sim bus. Wait sim bus. Hope come soon. Then friend Beece come. Belly pain hurt less when Beece near. Beece talk Meerm, help Meerm.
Meerm see car come fast. Stop outside. Four sunglass mans come. Look round, look sim building. Meerm quick step back. Who mans? Why here? Why look at sim building?
Meerm fraid mans come in. Peek so mans not see. No mans come in. All stand by car. One talk little phone. Why here?
Then Meerm see new car. Also fast. Stop next first car. One man come. New man talk loud. Point this way and that way. Other mans go. New man voice…Meerm hear before. But where?
Now Meerm see new man and other man come sim building. Meerm fraid. Mans come take Meerm away? Back to new needle place?
Meerm hide. Go closet. Push self into dark corner. Make ver small.
Hear yell downstair. Benny mad. Shout loud. New man yell back.
Meerm shake. Know new man voice! Same voice in old home night loud noise and fire. Hear on roof too. New man come get Meerm!
Hear loud feets on stairs. Must not find! Must not find! Meerm climb up in closet. Get on shelf. Curl up. Make small-small. Tiny-tiny-tiny. Push back into high corner and—
Corner move. Meerm turn, feel loose board. Meerm push board, move more. Black space open. Cold in hole. Meerm not care. Too fraid be cold.
Hear new man voice yell, “Damn it, where is she?” Voice close now. In sim sleep room.
Meerm squeeze into black hole. Ooh-ooh-ooh. Too tight. Meerm so fat now. Meerm fraid get stuck, but more fraid new man. Push-push-push, get fat self into hole.
“I tell you,” Benny say, “we ain’t got no sims here inna day!” Benny sound fraid. “Not till tonight when they all bussed back from the city.”
“She’s here!” new man say. “And we’re going to find her! Look under every bunk! Check every closet!”
Meerm in cold place inside wall. Ver tight. Ver dark. Meerm push on board, push back where belong. More dark now. All dark.
Meerm hear closet door squeak. Some man open. Meerm can’t see man but hear thing move. Meerm stay ver, ver still. Not breathe.
“Nothing in here.” New man voice ver close. Meerm so fraid. Want go pee. Bite lip stop cry. “Where the fuckis she?”
“Maybe she goes out,” say other man voice. “You know, walks around.”
“Since when did you become a sim expert?”
Other man say, “Hey, I’m just thinking out loud, okay? That sim at the sweatshop described her to a T: she’s lost, she’s sick, she’s blown up. So we know she’s staying here. She’s just not here now. Probably going stir crazy here alone all day.”
“All right. Here’s what we’ll do. Bring in the others and we’ll do a sweep of the building. If we don’t find her we’ll back off and put the place under twenty-four-hour watch. When she returns, we nab her.”
Meerm hear mans go way but still not move. Still fraid. Meerm must stay in sim building. Mans will get Meerm. Hurt Meerm if try leave. Meerm so sad she cry.
21
SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ
Luca wanted to skip this—he had far more pressing things to do than listen to Sinclair-1 yammer. But the man had said he was calling this late meeting specifically to address a security issue. In addition to everything else going on, SimGen security was still his responsibility.
But he didn’t have to arrive on time. He was punctual by nature, and his years in Special Forces had reinforced that, so it took considerable effort to force himself to walk slowly down the hall, pacing himself to arrive at least three minutes late.
Luca balled his fists. Coming up empty in the sim crib this afternoon still rankled him. Fury and disappointment had mixed into a combustible compound in his bloodstream. His head felt like a ticking bomb. He’d left four men to watch the building—all sides, all day, all night—but he had a gnawing premonition that the missing sim wouldn’t be back.
Then, just fifteen minutes ago, Lister calls, supposedly concerned about the well-being of the sim because he hadn’t heard any word on her. Luca had had to eat some bitter crow.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Lister then proceeded to twist the knife: “Someone handed you the address where she was staying and she ducked you? If a monkey can outwit you, how can we expect you to find out who’s behind the woman and her lawyer?”
Don’t worry, Luca thought as he approached the door to Sinclair-1’s office. She’s next on my list. And I know just how I’m going to handle her. As soon as I finish with these assholes…
When he stepped into the office he found only two of the usual crew in attendance: Both Sinclairs were present, but Abel Voss was missing.
“Mr. Portero,” Sinclair-1 said as soon as the door closed. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“The wait is over,” Luca replied. He wanted out of here as quickly as possible, so he pushed right to the subject, “You mentioned a security matter?”
“Yes, Mr. Portero. Were you aware that we had an attempted break-in this afternoon?”
“Of course.” A group of sim huggers had tried to run the front gate. His men had detained them until the State Police arrived. “They’re in jail.”
“How gratifying that you know. But my question is, Where were you?”
“Busy with other matters.”
“Matters more important than the security of this campus? Security here is your number-one priority. There are murderous bioterrorists running around out there, slaughtering humans and sims, and yet when this group tried to attack us, you were nowhere to be found.”
“Harmless nobodies,” Luca said, allowing a sneer to work its way onto his face. What an old woman he was.
“Lucky for us. But with you hiding out somewhere, there’s no telling what damage we might have suffered if they’d been the SLA.”
A flash of anger added heat to the pressure pushing against his eardrums. Hiding? Had this empty suit just accused him of hiding?
“Easy, Mercer,” said Sinclair-2, turning his head to look at Luca. This was the first sign
of life he’d shown.
With difficulty Luca kept his voice level. “But they weren’t the SLA.”
“But they could have been!” Sinclair-1 said. He pointed over his shoulder at the darkening hills visible through the oversized picture window behind him. “The SLA could be out there now, in the trees, readying an assault.”
“They’re not, and they never will be.” Luca had had just about enough of playing games with these two. “I guarantee it.”
Sinclair-1’s eyebrows rose halfway to his forehead. “You guarantee it? How interesting. You’re clairvoyant?”
“No,” he gritted. “I’m the SLA.”
Immediately he wished he hadn’t said it.
“This is no time for sick humor,” Sinclair-1 said.
Luca knew from the dubious expression on the CEO’s face that he still had a chance to take it back, but decided against it. Fuck ’em. He stepped up to Sinclair-1’s desk, rested his hands on its cool onyx surface, and leaned forward, literally getting in the other man’s face.
“That was not any kind of humor.”
“What?” The voice from his right, Sinclair-2, on his feet, his face pale. “You?”
“Ellis, he’s joking.”
Luca fixed Sinclair-1 with his gaze. “Have you ever known me to joke?”
The CEO wavered, then took a step back, his eyes wide.
Movement to Luca’s right. “Monster!” Sinclair-2 charging, face distorted with fury. Luca pivoted, drove a fist into his gut, and that was all it took. The man doubled over, then dropped to his knees, gasping.
“Dear, God! Ellis! Are you all right?”
The kneeling man, still clutching his belly with one hand while the other clutched the arm of the sofa for support, shook his head. His voice was a half-strangled whisper. “I’ll never be all right.”
Sinclair-1 stared at Luca. “Why? In God’s name, why ?”
“To find your million-dollar sim.”
“For what?” Sinclair-2 said as he hauled himself back into the couch. He sat hunched over, rubbing his belly. “To harvest her organs along with the rest?”
“No. To give her to you two.”
“Why would we be interested?”
“Because she’s pregnant.”
A pause as the two brothers glanced at each other, then stared at Luca.
Sinclair-1 snorted. “Impossible!”
“So I’ve been told.” Luca shrugged. “And maybe that’s true in theory. But I deal in facts, and everything I’ve discovered about this particular sim confirms that she is pregnant.”
“How on earth did you find out about her?”
Might as well tell them the whole story, Luca thought. Well, most of it.
“It started with a phone call last month. A woman said she had to speak to Mercer Sinclair right away, said she had information that would affect the entire future of SimGen. That sounded like a security matter to me so I took the call and—”
“And pretended to be me?”
“Of course. The woman, whose name I later learned was Eleanor Bryce, a Ph.D. in microbiology, told me she was in possession of a pregnant sim.”
“You accepted that?” Sinclair-2 said. His color was returning along with his voice, but pure hatred gleamed in his eyes. “Just like that?”
Portero returned his stare. You want another try for a piece of me, fancy man? Next time I spread your nose across your face.
“Of course not. In an involved back-and-forth that took almost two weeks she sent enough information to convince our people that she could be telling the truth.”
“Your people!” Sinclair-1 now. “The ones in our Basic Research facility, I suppose. Why not ours?”
“We were going to bring in your people later, but first we had to secure this sim. The Bryce woman made enough slips during our communications to allow me to pinpoint her location. When she presented her ultimatum I decided it was time to move.”
“Ultimatum?” Sinclair-1 said.
That’s not what you should be asking me, Luca thought. Why aren’t either of you asking the right question?
Because he was dying to lay the answer on them…and watch both the Sinclair brothers’ hair turn white before his eyes.
Luca said, “She wanted to sell us the sim.”
“Sellus? Sell us something that already belonged to us? What did you tell her?”
“Since I was pretending to be you, I said exactly that, then I asked her how much she wanted. She told me to bid. And she warned me not to be ‘chintzy’—her word—because there’d be another bidder: the Arata-jinruien Corporation.”
Sinclair-1 pounded a fist on his desktop. “Those bandits? Outrageous!”
“Wait just a minute,” Sinclair-2 said, holding up a hand. “Let’s take a step back here.”
Here it comes, Luca thought. His gut tingled with anticipation.
“Let’s just say,” Sinclair-2 continued, but he spoke to his brother, as if Luca weren’t there, “that this Bryce woman, through hormone treatments or a recombinant patch, did somehow manage to induce a female sim to produce a fertilizable ovum. That will cause SimGen problems because it means people will be able to breed their own sims—and no one on this planet wants that less than I do—but it doesn’t invalidate our patent on the sim genome. So—”
Not the question!
“She didn’t do anything to the sim,” Luca snapped. “She’s a microbiologist. Knows nothing about reproductive medicine.”
“How can you be sure?” Sinclair-1 said.
“She told me.”
Sinclair-1 barked a laugh.
Luca glared at him. “At the time I questioned her she was loaded up with a drug that made her incapable of lying.”
“The compound mentioned in the autopsy report,” Sinclair-2 said, his tone dripping contempt. “Did you torture them before or after you had your information?”
“That was just window dressing, to muddy the waters while I eliminated everyone with firsthand knowledge about the pregnancy. I didn’t know what the sims knew, but I didn’t want any loose ends, so they were removed too.”
“Dear God, why?” Sinclair-2 said. “A pregnant sim, even if it were possible, opens up a can of worms, but it’s not worth the lives of three people and a dozen sims!”
Here’s the moment, Luca thought. Time to rock your world.
“It does if the father of the sim’s baby is human.”
Silence, a moment of glorious, absolute silence in the office as the Sinclair brothers froze. Luca could have been looking at a photograph, or an elaborate sculpture. Then the thump of Sinclair-1 dropping heavily into his chair as if the bones in his legs had suddenly dissolved.
Luca inhaled the mixture of shock and terror filling the air. Moments like this made life worth living.
He’s wrong! Mercer Sinclair thought, fighting a vertiginous sense of unreality. Portero’s wrong! He has to be!
…the father of the sim’s baby is human…
Those words hung in the air before him, almost visible. He sensed that if he reached out his hand he might touch them.
He looked at his security chief’s smug expression and knew that Portero believed it, but that didn’t mean it was true. Being a tough guy didn’t mean you couldn’t be scammed.
Mercer worked his lips, forcing out the words. “A hoax!” he cried, but it sounded more like a bleat.
Portero shook his head. “I have it from all three farmers: They all believed they were in possession of a pregnant sim that was going to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.”
“Then they believed wrong!”
“Wait a second,” Ellis said. “They believed. That’s important. They may have been morally bankrupt, but they weren’t ignorant. A globulin farm requires a fair amount of scientific sophistication. And if they were convinced that one of their sims was pregnant…”
Mercer stared at his brother. Ellis seemed to have shaken off the pain and humiliation of Portero’s gut punch. But instead
of feeling, as Mercer did, that his lips were encased in lead, Ellis seemed almost…energized.
And he was thinking the unthinkable.
“Ellis…it can’t be. Read my lips: Sims. Are. Sterile. Want me to write it out on a piece of paper for you?”
“But a sim gene can mutate,” Ellis said. “Sims can’t evolve, but they’re as prone to mutations as any other organism. Murphy’s Law, Merce: Shit happens, especially when it comes to reproduction. Nature abhors a dead-end species nearly as much as a vacuum.”
“Don’t talk to me of ‘Nature’ and what it abhors,” Mercer said. “I abhor teleological concepts. Life is chemicals, pure and simple.”
Ellis went on as if Mercer hadn’t spoken. “I remember reading years ago about a woman who’d lost her left ovary due to a ruptured cyst and her right fallopian tube due to a tubal pregnancy. She was told she’d never have to worry about birth control, but years later she showed up in her doctor’s office with a positive pregnancy test. An ultrasound showed that her left fallopian tube had migrated across her uterus to link up with her right ovary.”
“Apocryphal garbage.”
Ellis looked at Portero. “This Bryce woman who called, this microbiologist, did she tell you how she found out the sim—what was her name again?”
“Meerm,” Portero gritted. The name burned like acid on his tongue.
“Did she tell you how she discovered Meerm was pregnant?”
Portero made a face. “What difference does it make?”
“Humor me.”
A sigh, then, “When she first called she told me she’d been working up a sick sim—vomiting, pain. Couldn’t find out what was wrong so she sent blood out to a commercial lab and ordered a preset battery of tests for abdominal pain. The battery was designed for humans, and one of those tests was for pregnancy. It came back positive. She repeated it at three different labs, and all came back positive. She rented an ultrasound rig and that removed all doubt. She overnighted me copies of the blood work and the ultrasound. I had our people go over them. They said it could easily be a hoax, but there was enough there to be worried about.”