Influx

  Cotton raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, he’s about fifteen minutes early. Tough son of a bitch, isn’t he?”

  Morrison felt around himself for his armor and weapons, but his equipment was in a pile some yards away.

  Alexa quickly aimed the psychotronic gun at him. “Ah-ah, don’t.”

  Morrison assessed the situation, looking at the equipment missing from her harness and the nearby pile. He grinned nastily. “You won’t be Hedrick’s little sweetheart after this, Alexa. You’ll be one of the little people.”

  Cotton reached down and punched Morrison in the jaw, barely fazing the man.

  “Goddamnit!” Cotton hopped away, nursing his paw.

  Morrison gave him a disgusted look. “You’re a pussy, Cotton.”

  Alexa aimed the psychotronic beam. “Night-night.”

  Morrison gave her the finger even as he lay back down, and he was soon snoring soundly.

  Alexa tossed the weapon onto the pile, and then motioned for Grady and Cotton to come closer to her. Grady could feel the gravity around them change—and down suddenly became up.

  As they rose through the treetops, Grady turned to her. “Agent Davis is dead, the deputy secretary of Homeland Security—anyone who believed my story is dead, and the police will be out looking for Cotton in force soon, too. Where do we go?”

  Cotton looked at them. “I know a place . . .”

  CHAPTER 24

  Safe House

  It was well past midnight by the time Alexa—with Jon Grady and Richard Cotton floating beneath her gravity mirror—descended toward a flat, silvered roof of a massive, windowless ten-story brick building in the meatpacking district of Chicago. Half a mile ahead of them was a panoramic view of the downtown skyline.

  As they came down from the night sky, Grady could see large, faded signs painted directly onto the brick facade of their destination: “Fulton Market Cold Storage Company” and on a brick tower the faded words “Greater Fulton Market.”

  As they alighted onto the flat rooftop, Grady stood unsteadily. It was the first normal gravity he’d felt in several hours. They had flown a circuitous route from the plains, coming into Chicago low and slow from the northwest due to Alexa’s concerns about scanning, search teams, and satellite surveillance AIs teasing out their flight path from an all-seeing gaze in orbit. She was convinced Morrison and Hedrick would find them quickly—and appeared to be getting more concerned each minute.

  Despite the circumstances, Jon Grady had to admit that the flight (or, more appropriately, the “fall”) here was pretty spectacular. Grady and Cotton had floated alongside Alexa in the sphere of the mirror’s influence. The summer air rushing over them all as they soared silently above the midnight landscape—at first above broad cornfields bordered by dark clusters of trees and thick underbrush. Crickets thrummed below them, and the lights of lone farmhouses and outbuildings had passed by in the night. Eventually these gave way to exurb subdivisions and big-box retail centers, and finally a contiguous grid of suburban yards and streets. Grady had found the experience the closest thing he could imagine to being a bird—flying quietly over the land.

  Now that they’d landed, Alexa was scanning the skies nervously, her eyes illuminated by some device built into the crystal of her helmet’s visor.

  Cotton seemed unconcerned. He was already ripping Velcro straps to remove his orange bulletproof helmet and perp-protection vest. Both had the words “Federal Prisoner” stenciled on the front and back. “Well, that was a memorable evening.” He cast a look at Grady and tossed the helmet to him. “Very interesting little invention, this gravity mirror of yours, Professor.”

  Grady caught the helmet. “I’m not a professor.”

  “I think you’ve earned an honorary degree somewhere.” Cotton started walking toward a steel roof-access door in a towering brick bastion behind them. Here, too, was another faded painted sign reading “Fulton Market Cold Storage” in letters three stories high—it was like a building on top of the building.

  Alexa called after him. “What is this place, Cotton? And what makes you think they won’t find us here?”

  He glanced back. “It’s one of my safe houses. And they won’t find us because they’re already on our trail elsewhere.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, there are people within the BTC who will make it difficult for them to realize they’re not finding us.”

  Alexa narrowed her eyes. “Traitors, you mean? But the scanning—”

  “You wanna stand out here all night, or you wanna come inside?”

  She took another glance skyward, and then Grady and Alexa followed him. Cotton opened a small electrical panel to the side of the door and let a flash of light scan his eyes. The surprisingly thick stairwell door clicked open, and they followed him down a metal stairwell.

  Grady watched the door boom shut behind them and a green light appear. “One of your safe houses? How many do you have?”

  “If I told you that, they wouldn’t be ‘safe’ would they?”

  Alexa frowned. “If you think Morrison doesn’t know about these, you’re crazy. You can’t hide anything from the BTC. They’ll be sending harvester teams here any minute.”

  “Yeah, well, see, that’s the funny thing. Turns out the trick to keeping secrets from the BTC is to temporarily forget what you don’t want them to know. And thanks to modern science, that’s possible.”

  Grady frowned. “I experienced something like that in Hibernity—a protein that makes you forget specific memories as you recall them. But I never got my memories back. I lost a lot. Pieces of my childhood. My parents. Can you teach me how to recover them?”

  “Ah. You have to record them if you want to rewrite them again. Nasty, nasty place, Hibernity. My apologies for having been the instrument of your delivery to it—unwilling though I was.”

  Grady thought back to the night of the bombing. He remembered Cotton’s odd, almost apologetic shrug just before he departed. That memory had survived Hibernity.

  They arrived at the first stairwell landing, and here was a sturdier-looking black door. Cotton rapped on it with his knuckles. It sounded as solid as Mount Aetna. “Diamond-aggregate nanorods—hyperdiamonds. Got a millimeter of it coating the walls as well. Beats the hell out of carbon nanotubes—that stuff is worse than asbestos. And so 1990s.” He placed his hand over some sort of scanner—one that looked more complex than a simple palm print.

  Alexa scowled. “What tech level is this? And more importantly, how did you get it?”

  The stairwell security door clicked and then opened. “Who cares what tech level it is? And as for how I got it, that’s easy: Morrison was right—I’m a thief. A master thief.” He walked inside, kicking on the lights with a massive knife switch that echoed in the cavernous space beyond.

  After exchanging glances, Alexa and Grady followed.

  Within was a huge, refurbished loft space, with exposed brick walls, interior partitions, tasteful art and furniture, a living area, a restaurant-quality kitchen, and shelves lined with books. Beyond, Grady could see a long corridor with polished wood floors, half a dozen doors closed to either side, opening at the end of the hall into what appeared to be a large technical workshop. Thin-film screens and multiplexed surveillance camera holograms glowed to life all around the loft.

  “Home sweet home . . .”

  As Grady and Alexa surveyed the place, Cotton walked into the kitchen and grabbed stemmed glasses from an overhead rack. “You know, Alexa, if you thought they were pulling out all the stops to get Grady, just wait. AWOL, you’re ten times more dangerous to Hedrick than Grady is. With what you know about them . . . wow-wee! He’ll leave no stone unscanned.”

  Cotton pulled the stopper out of a decanter and poured a finger of brandy into the three glasses. “And then there’s always the fact that he’s madly in love with you. Love and h
ate are opposite sides of the same coin, you know—both passions. You can flip from one to the other—but not to indifference.” He held up a glass with a nod, and then quickly drank each, one after the other. “Ahh! That’s the stuff.”

  Grady stood across a granite-topped island from him. “Who else is in this building?”

  “You mean what else: floors and floors of truth in advertising—cold storage. Very useful for erasing thermal signatures from questionable fusion experiments.”

  Alexa glared at him. “Fusion? Cotton, you’re not supposed to have that level of technology out of BTC headquarters.”

  He poured another glass. “Cognac, Mr. Grady? You look like you could use one.”

  Grady nodded.

  He poured. “Drawn from casks lost in a shipwreck off the coast of France in 1873.”

  “Good lord, it must have cost a fortune.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Cotton slid a snifter along the stone counter to him. Grady just barely caught it before it went over the edge.

  Alexa persisted. “What else do you have in this hideaway of yours?”

  “Nothing dangerous, if that’s what you’re thinking. No, this is strictly a stealth operation. We are safe from all known tracking technologies here.”

  “Not a q-link transmitter.”

  Cotton finished off another finger of cognac. “No. But then, we took care of that, didn’t we?” He offered her a drink with his eyes.

  She just made a disgusted sound and headed down the corridor, clearly irritated.

  Grady watched her go.

  “She could probably use some alone time.” Cotton started moving pots and pans around, turning on gas burners on his massive stove.

  Grady actually felt bad for her. “Alexa just walked away from her whole world for us. I remember having mine taken from me, and that was hard enough.” He took a sip of the cognac and savored it on his tongue. “My God, this is like a mist going down.”

  “Yeah, pretty smooth . . .” Cotton was getting ingredients out of what turned out to be some sort of walk-in fridge.

  “You’re cooking?”

  “Sure, why not? I always try to have a nice meal after near-death experiences. The food never tastes better. Thought I’d make a bouillabaisse. You hungry?”

  “Okay.”

  Cotton stabbed a finger at the ceiling. “This calls for Bizet . . .” He shouted at the ceiling in respectable French. “Les pêcheurs de perles—‘Au fond du temple saint’!”

  Suddenly the opera began to fill the loft. Beautiful music. Grady could see the colors in waves. He felt the depth of the day’s events and took another sip of cognac.

  “I am sorry that you wound up in Hibernity, Mr. Grady. Please know that I was given no choice.” Cotton was gathering fresh seafood onto the counter.

  Grady nodded absently. “How on earth is there fresh seafood here?”

  He gestured to the walk-in fridge. “Inert storage. Uses noble gases—argon. Like cryogenics but without freezing. Food takes ages to go bad.”

  “Another world-changing innovation hidden in a vault.”

  Cotton seemed unfazed as he shelled large prawns. “This whole building is a ten-story freezer two blocks long. We’d probably find Prohibition-era gangsters in here if they ever thawed the place out.”

  “So how is it you’re here, Cotton? Why were you playing the BTC’s mad bomber all these years?”

  Cotton grimaced. “Bad luck, really.”

  Grady gave him a look.

  “Oh, right. I guess you were unluckier than I was. What I mean is, I was caught trying to break into BTC headquarters about . . . oh, I guess a dozen years ago.”

  “You were trying to break into the BTC?”

  “Well, I never claimed I was smart.”

  “How did you even know they existed?”

  “I didn’t. It was a job. I made it my business to obtain difficult-to-obtain information for interested parties. The BTC building had come to the attention of certain people—certain low-profile people—who let me know just how ultrasecure this very run-of-the-mill building smack-dab in downtown Detroit was. It was anomalous to say the least.”

  Cotton stopped peeling seafood for a moment to stare wistfully into the distance. “I thought I had it all figured out back then.” He laughed. “But we don’t know what we don’t know until we know.”

  “Someone hired you to break into the BTC?”

  “It’s not like I tossed a brick through the window. I had a sophisticated operation. I am a master thief. It’s just that there is no breaking into the BTC.” He opened a glass-faced wine cabinet and held up a bottle of red. “Châteauneuf-du-Pape?”

  Grady nodded toward his half-full cognac. “No, I’m good, thanks.”

  Cotton started opening the wine as he continued. “And that low-profile client, I later found out, was the CIA. Wish I’d known that back then. They have a rather dismal history when it comes to break-ins.

  “I thought I was clever, but I got caught before I even got into the premises. Turns out the exterior of their building is a facade in more than the traditional sense. There are no windows. No surface-level doors—or at least none that go anywhere. Behind the concrete-and-glass perimeter are thirty millimeters of diamond-aggregate nanorods, black as Sauron’s tower—that’s where I got the idea for this place, by the way. The BTC HQ goes a few hundred feet underground—that I know of. They project holograms on the walls inside to make it appear like you’re looking out a window at the real world. The human eye can’t detect the difference with the tech they’re using. So they’re constantly switching the view to live shots taken by their video dust cameras scattered around the world—extradimensional transmitters link all their comms.” He looked up. “You probably figured that out by now. It’s why no one can eavesdrop on them.”

  Grady considered this as he took another sip of the precious cognac. After savoring it for a few moments, he said, “And they caught you?”

  Cotton nodded as he started cleaning seafood again. “Yeah, and you can imagine I had my eyes opened fast. A barbarian hauled before Caesar. The director at the time, a little waif of a man named Hollinger, was impressed I’d gotten as far as I did. He offered me a deal: I could either work for them as the public face of the Winnowers—become the infamous Richard Louis Cotton—or I could get pushed through an exothermic decomposition beam.” He turned back. “And you saw what one of those did to our friend Agent Davis.” Cotton paused for a moment. “Poor woman.”

  “So you became the Antitech Bomber.”

  “No one in the BTC wanted to be Cotton, and they needed a new antitech boogeyman. They kept me on a short leash for quite some time. The plan was that after a decade they’d retire Cotton, too. I was supposed to relax in idyllic splendor among the other godlings.” He chuckled as he took a sip of wine from the crystal bulb he’d half filled. “But then, I never really believed that. And also I’d never forgotten the job I’d been hired to do. After all, how often does a thief get a chance to steal back the future?”

  “Then you already had a plan? Which we disrupted . . .”

  “You might say we have something in common, Mr. Grady.”

  Grady finished off his cognac, then pulled the video projector from beneath his shirt on its chain. “Maybe you can help me then. I need to decode the data on this device—it’s DNA-formatted.”

  Cotton shrugged. “That’s the only real format there is.” He looked at the thin piece of bone. “What is it?”

  Grady thumbed the button, and Chattopadhyay’s image appeared on the wall. “My name is Archibald Chattopadhyay, nuclear physicist and amateur poet. I have a lovely wife, Amala, who has given me five wonderful children. I led the team that first perfected a sustained fusion reaction . . .” Grady paused it.

  “Clever bastards at Hibernity, aren’t they? I’d heard rumors tha
t they’d taken over half the prison.”

  “But they still can’t escape. That’s what I’m hoping to help them do.”

  Cotton gestured to the device. “Leave it with me. I’ll decode all the data that’s on it.”

  Grady hesitated. “We’ll do it tomorrow—after some rest. I don’t want to let this thing out of my sight.” He then put it away beneath his shirt again.

  “Suit yourself. Just let me know when you’re ready.”

  Grady looked down the corridor. Alexa was nowhere in sight. “You have beds in this place?”

  “Sure. Rooms on both sides of the hall. Take any empty one.”

  Grady gazed into the dark at the hall’s end. “I should go thank Alexa before I get some sleep. She did save me.”

  Cotton looked up from his work. “You really think your thanks is what she wants right now?”

  Grady considered this. He finally nodded. “I guess not.”

  With that he went to find a bed.

  CHAPTER 25

  Domestic Dispute

  In the predawn stillness the street of downtown Detroit were nearly deserted. The office towers were still mostly dark. Graham Hedrick sat in the command chair of the BTC’s mission control center overlooking the big screens and the specialist workstations in the room below. He could see a large image of North America centered on Detroit and the Great Lakes on the central screen above; several incoming objects were being tracked across the plains and also coming in from central Canada over the Great Lakes.

  Alarms were blinking on several screens.

  Hedrick nodded to himself. “X-51 WaveRider cruise missiles. I’m impressed by their initiative.” Someone had made a command decision somewhere on the other side. He knew these hypersonic missiles could do thirty-six hundred miles an hour—which meant, at six hundred miles, they were only ten minutes away. Launched from a B-52 bomber, they wouldn’t be mistaken by other global powers for an ICBM launch, but they could do a great deal of damage if they reached their destination—which, according to telemetry reports, was BTC headquarters in downtown Detroit. At that speed, they carried very few explosives. Instead, they were packed with scored tungsten rods. Just before impact, their modest warhead would detonate, showering the target area with thousands of fragments—obliterating anything in a three-thousand-square-foot area in a rain of hypersonic metal.