Besides, clearance passwords for these files were based on security level, not individual agents. It shouldn’t care if the Agency thought she was dead.
She typed a ten character alphanumeric.
The screen blanked.
There was a nervous few seconds as she listened to the laser head knocking around inside the card-reader. The green indicator on the front of the case flashed a few times.
Then the knocking from the reader ceased and the screen ran up a menu. Apparently her access codes were still good.
It was a database card, similar to the library’s. Only, instead of just the raw data, this one had its own shell program. And from a brief glance at the menu, the data on this card was a lot more specific and to the point. Sukiota must have DL’d the info from Langley as soon as she’d gotten a look at the peeper’s surveillance footage.
Each file was ID’d by an NSA picture. She knew the picture for Ezra Frey, David Price, Erin Hofstadter, Dr. Scott Fitzgerald, Dr. Leo Davidson. A picture of the sniper was identified with the one word in quotes, “Gabriel.”
Last was a file on her. Her picture was a human-looking one where she was wearing her contacts. The human eyes made the picture look slightly wrong.
She spent a few hours perusing what the Agency’s computers said about the conspirators.
Ezra Frey graduated from the USMC to Defense Intel during the hottest part of the Pan-Asian war. Advocated the unpopular position that the U.S. should intervene to defend Japan and the Subcontinent. Frey was saying that in ’26, when it looked like things were going well for the Indo-Pacific affiance. A year later, New Delhi was nuked and nine bloody years followed before Tokyo suffered the same fate. In ’35 he moved to the Agency, and began making the same noises about the Islamic Axis and Israel. The U.S. remained noninterventionist, and in six years Tel Aviv was blasted into a shallow coastal lake.
Erin Hofstadter had been born in the EEC, a European army brat. Oxford was the least of the schools from which he had a doctorate. He was an Agency advisor throughout his two-decade stint in the State Department. According to the file he’d been missing, ever since a fact-finding mission to occupied Japan in late ’53. It was presumed that he had been taken hostage by nationalistic factions attached to the NLF even though no credit was ever taken or demands made.
David Price was Pol-Sci, specialist in conspiracy theories. Sent up a few memos that suggested that some unknown agency was manipulating the U.S. government into self-destructive activities. He listed a dozen specific examples, including the U.S. nonparticipation in the Pan-Asian war, the antitechnology legislation by the Congress, up to the mothballing of the NASA deep-space probes when a launch would be cheaper than maintenance.
Dr. Scott Fitzgerald was a xenobiologist. He worked for NASA on the development of sensors on the deep-probe projects, and he had been chief of NASA’s orbital ear project. That project had, Fitzgerald alleged, found evidence of intelligent signals of nonterrestrial origin. This was before Congress axed the ear and mothballed the deep-probe project in the space of four years in the early ’40s.
Leo Davidson had degrees in computer science, engineering, and physics. He ran a particle collider in the Midwest, looking for tachyons, until the funding was cut and the collider was shut down. For various West Coast companies he tried to redevelop hard-wired biointerfaces, build control systems for fusion-drive rockets, did theoretical work in nano-computers, along with a dozen other cutting-edge disciplines. Each one, close to midstream, ran into Congressional legislation that either stalled or killed the project, generally in the name of public safety.
“Gabriel” was a freelancer. He had worked for nationalists in the EEC, and the government of the EEC. He worked for a half-dozen North African countries, where he participated in three successive coups in Ethiopia alone. In South America, he worked for a number of Latin-based megacorps, removing political obstacles in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Hitman, assassin, demolition expert, sold himself to the highest bidder. The moral equivalent of the Afghani canines.
All of them were supposed to be dead.
Evi could see how a core of this conspiracy could have formed. Most of these men had been affected badly by the alien intervention. Frey and Price had seen an invisible hand at work in Asia, and Davidson and Fitzgerald were scientists whose research was being interfered with.
Hofstadter seemed to have no such personal stake, and Gabriel was simply a hired gun. A gun probably brought in by Hofstadter. Hofstadter was, born and bred, a creature of the intelligence community.
Hofstadter had taken over Frey’s operation and was trying to clean house by putting a bullet in her.
Nyogi Enterprises was after her. Nyogi’s interest was in the cadre of rogue Agency operatives. Nyogi had both her and Frey under surveillance; they’d even purchased the buildings they resided in. The veep had said it: “They want their people back.”
She was sure that Nyogi’s involvement with the NLF was only the tip of the iceberg as far as political machinations were involved. She had seen it before. The aliens insulated themselves within corporate fronts and used them as funnels to distribute massive assets to further their agenda. The agenda, broadly defined, being the technological stagnation of the planet. Nyogi Enterprises fit the profile. The creatures running Nyogi knew about Frey’s operation and wanted the four aliens that Evi had captured in Cleveland.
When she’d found that cell of aliens running Midwest Lapidary, she had initiated Frey’s conspiracy. Whatever the exact details were, a group of Agency operatives had falsified records and diverted resources to keep the aliens secret from the government. From all appearances, the conspirators still had the four aliens Evi captured, and somehow the conspiracy was exploiting them.
She sighed and turned off the comm. She was feeling the weight of events bear down on her. It seemed that every reflection brought to light a new set of players with their own agenda.
She yawned and realized how tired she was. For all the fur shed upon it, the bed looked pretty good at this point.
Chapter 16
She woke to the sound of the door breaking open. She grabbed the Uzi and rolled off the edge of the bed opposite the door, sending a shiver of agony down her left arm. Before she could orient herself and bring the Uzi to cover the door, machine gun fire swept the wall above her. Green-painted plaster flew everywhere, yellow plastic drapes shredded, and the window exploded.
“Toss the gun.” The voice had a Bronx accent, feline pronunciation. To drive the point home, whoever-it-was started pumping shots into the bed.
Evi decided that she wasn’t in a position to argue, and tossed the Uzi over the bed. The gunfire ceased.
“Get up.”
She did so, raising her hands.
In the doorway was a jaguar. Black-spotted, two meters tall, and holding a vintage AK-47. The jaguar was female and wore a black beret, khaki shorts, and a black Kevlar vest with a corporal’s insignia on the collar. Behind the cat, in the hall, was a collection of at least a half-dozen armed rodents, similarly clad.
“Your chance to say something,” said the cat. “Make it good.”
Welcome to the morey underground, Evi thought. What the fuck did they expect her to say? She stood there facing them, hands raised, trying to second-guess the cat with the gun.
It was worth a try. “And God said, Let us make man in our image.”
The jaguar nodded and didn’t shoot her.
She’d assumed that Nohar was giving her a line on these people, that the cryptic “G1:26” he typed was some sort of password, and that Diana had interpreted its meaning correctly. That was two more assumptions than she wanted to make in a situation like this.
The jaguar backed out of the room, keeping her covered with the rifle. “The General wants a word with you.”
At least she seemed to have made the right assumptions. Appropriate pass
word. Moreaus had a well-developed sense of irony.
The squad of moreaus ushered her out of the building, one rat with her backpack, one rat with the Uzi. There was one point on the stairs where she could have dived out a second-story window and made a break for it. However, she had intended to contact these people. And “the General” seemed to reciprocate the feeling.
Besides, she didn’t want to be stuck alone in the Bronx with only a switchblade.
The manager was nowhere to be seen as they hustled her through the sweltering lobby. Three rabbits in black Kevlar preceded her out the door and to a waiting vehicle.
Evi stopped and stared at what they had parked outside of “ROOMS.” She didn’t start moving again until the jaguar prodded her with the rifle.
Where the hell did they get a French APC?
It was trapezoidal, splashed with black, gray and shallow-brown urban camouflage, and squatted on three axles whose tires were Evi’s height. The armored personnel carrier had been through a number of refits, so Evi couldn’t tell which of five models it could have been. Extra plates had been welded to the exterior. The major modification was a semicircular ring of plates sitting on top of the thing, encircling a machine-gun mount bearing an M-60.
Things like this shouldn’t have been in the Bronx. It represented a big change from when she worked in the anti-terrorist wing of the Agency, and it threw a wrench into most of the scenarios she’d worked on for the Domestic Crisis Think Tank.
It did explain how they expected to get around on these rotten roads.
They squeezed her in the back with the rodents; the jaguar drove. The ride seemed to be an exercise in proving the maximum velocity of the APC. Evi swore that the jaguar aimed at every bad spot of road that they passed, and at one point the APC lurched over a huge bump that could have only been a car.
After a while, they slowed and she began to hear noise outside. She could hear gunfire, occasional animal yells, one explosion. The APC stopped, and the jaguar radioed something ahead in Portuguese, a language Evi didn’t know.
After a few more fits and starts, the APC finally stopped and began powering down. The jaguar looked down into the passenger space. “Fernando, Gonzales, you come with me. The rest of you report back to the dorms.”
Dorms?
The rear of the APC opened and the jaguar walked by, pulling Evi along by the right elbow. “We’re going to the greenhouse. Don’t bolt. We aren’t enemies—yet.”
Evi nodded, thinking of how much emphasis the cat had put on the word “yet.”
The quartet moved out. The jaguar and two rats hustled her along unceremoniously. Evi began to realize the scope of what the APC implied. They walked out of a parking garage that was full of all manner of armored vehicles designed for urban combat. There were more French APCs on the mid-level of the garage, and the armor got heavier as they descended, until, on the ground level, she saw two T-101 Russian tanks flanking a Pakistani self-propelled artillery piece. A chunk of the second level of the garage had been knocked out to fit them in.
If these folks were careful, a satellite wouldn’t have a clue.
They passed sentries that guarded the entrance to Fordham University. Unlike the Bronx she’d seen up to now, all the rubble had been cleared from the grounds. She saw bulldozers on the edge of the property, parked on a massive wall of rubble that now formed a wall around the campus. Once they walked onto the campus, she saw the rear end of two machine-gun nests embedded in the inside of the wall.
They rounded a corner and, through an opening in the wall, she could see the gray-painted walls of Fordham Hospital and makeshift landing pads that held a quartet of helicopters and dozens of aircars.
She was walking through a fully operational paramilitary base that sat only three-and-a-half miles from Manhattan. If these folks wanted to, they could simply unpark that Pakistani artillery piece and lob shells from Yonkers to Battery Park. Where the Hell were the Feds? The government should have landed on this long before it had gotten this big.
They passed a group of more sentries and a rubble-bordered freeway and walked into snow-covered parkland. As they walked, Evi realized that the snow hadn’t covered the terrain naturally. The surface of the snow was artificially smooth, and the snow itself was dirty-brown.
They had buried huge ruts in the grass under the snow, hiding the vehicle tracks from the Fed’s spy satellites. These people were good. Then again, why shouldn’t they be? The vast majority of moreaus were designed for military use, and most of the immigrant moreys in the States were veterans.
They passed a sign directing them to the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Most of the sporadic gunfire was coming from the south.
As they wove through the artificial forest of exotic trees, she kept thinking they were less than four miles from New York. It reminded her too much of Israel. One major difference: the Israeli defenders knew the Axis was there.
She wondered if these moreaus had any missiles.
The lines of the conservatory building were wrapped in overgrown vines and bushes. From the outside the place looked long-abandoned. Inside was different. The original plants and decoration had been cleaned out, walls taken down, and the floor now looked like the situation room at the Pentagon. Under diffuse white light from a snow-covered glass ceiling, there were moreaus of every stripe operating computers, radar screens, and communication consoles. The air was filled with electronic whines and beeps. Maps of New York and the United States faced each other from opposite ends of the chamber.
The rabbits stopped at the door, and the jaguar ushered her around the periphery of the situation room. They stopped at a massive oak door, and the jaguar waved her to go ahead. Evi’s escort had long ago shouldered her weapon.
She looked at the jaguar, then back at the situation room behind her, and realized that she’d better ally herself with the moreaus. If anyone even suspected that her allegiance was still anywhere near the Agency, she was dead after seeing all this.
She opened the door and walked in.
It was a small windowless office. Behind a chipped-green metal desk sat the biggest ursine that she had ever seen.
She—the bear was female—sat on the floor and still looked down at Evi from a height of two-and-a-half meters. Her fur was a dead black, with the light picking out highlights from muscles that snaked like steel belting. She wore a shoulder holster with a Chinese fourteen-millimeter automatic. The gun hung under a stump. Her right arm ended twelve centimeters from the shoulder in a mass of twisted red scar-tissue. Other than the holster, the only thing she wore was a black beret on her head with a single star as insignia.
With her one hand, she waved Evi toward the only chair in the room. “Welcome, Miss Isham.” The bear’s voice sounded like a lawnmower laced with molasses.
Evi sat. “You have the advantage.”
The bear snuffed, apparently in good humor. “General Wu Sein at your service. Welcome to the Bronx Zoo.”
“I thought we were in the Botanical Gardens.”
General Wu snuffed again. “I refer to our entire complex. My people call it the Zoo.”
“Oh.”
“You display an unexpected amount of surprise for someone who is supposed to be working for us.” General Wu opened a desk drawer and pulled out a teapot and a pair of cups. “Care for some tea?”
Evi shook her head. “You know the news stories are plants.”
“Indeed.” The general flipped the switch on the ceramic teapot, and it began to glow a little in the infrared. “But such fictions are destined to bring us together— Are you sure no tea? The humans left some very good herbs here when they abandoned the Gardens.”
“No, thank you.”
The general shrugged and began an elaborate one-handed preparation of her tea. They sat in silence for a while before the general spoke again. “You have questions that you do not ask.”
“I didn’t think I was in a position to ask anything.”
“One is always in a position to ask questions.” The general poured her tea. “It is just a matter of not forcing the answers.”
“Then tell me what’s going on here.”
The general sipped. “I think you’ve perceived that already. An army is being trained and equipped here.”
“In secret.”
“Of course. If this was known, they would try and prevent us.”
“Why?”
The general leaned back against the wall and finished her tea. “Why is a very complex question. Shall I be simplistic?”
“Justify it however you want.”
“Simplistically, then. A few years ago a group of leaders in the moreau community, including myself, decided we should have the capability of defending ourselves.”
“Defending . . .”
“Broaden your perceptions. You are too used to seeing any moreau with a gun as a terrorist.” The general poured another cup of tea. “If our goal was a political statement . . . You’ve seen what kind of ‘terror’ we could utilize.”
The general lifted the cup and blew the steam away from the top. “Since half the anti-moreau congressmen were indicted in that CIA scandal six years ago, things have been improving. So we sit, and wait, and hope we’re not necessary.”
“What would make you necessary?”
She sipped the tea. “Anything we perceive as an attack.” The general put down her cup and scratched her stump. “Now. I ask questions.”
For nearly an hour, that’s what General Wu did. She was polite, meandering, conversational, and as thorough as any Agency debriefing. Halfway through, Evi began to realize that the general had prior knowledge of quite a lot of her story. And, while Evi was intentionally vague about the nature of the aliens because she was unsure how the general would react, the general seemed to know what she was avoiding.