Over the eighth cup of tea, the general asked, “Now, are you certain that these ‘creatures’ are in control of Nyogi Enterprises?”
“As sure as I can be without any direct evidence.”
“You present me with a dilemma.”
“How?”
“These beings, you say, bought congressmen. They wish to stagnate technological progress, correct?”
“Yes.”
“There’s an unfortunate side effect for moreaus. These men they buy get elected on anti-moreau platforms. They hire creatures like the Afghanis, for the humans to point to and say how bad the moreaus are. They’re our enemies more surely than any human.”
Evi nodded.
“You wonder why this is a dilemma?”
“Yes.”
The general snorted. “You never asked who financed my Zoo.”
It took a few seconds for that to sink in. “You’re financed by Nyogi?”
“If what you say is true, it explains a few things. I told you ‘why’ was a complex question. All my people have a different reason for working with me. Some are more—hmm—direct than myself.”
“You have people split off and go solo on you?”
“Too many, recently. And our financiers have been implying that funds might cease if some ‘results’ weren’t forthcoming.”
The general finished her last cup of tea.
“Why’re you telling me this?”
“Because I have little choice.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you have the advantage here.”
“This doesn’t just concern you. It concerns a few million moreaus who might suffer a human pogrom if our armed forces become a pawn of these creatures’ political aims. You’re going to help prevent that.”
“How?”
“You are going to do for us what Nyogi wants you to do for them. You are going to help us locate and capture the four aliens you found in Cleveland.”
Evi’s surprise must have shown.
“Oh, you never did mention the word ‘alien’ did you? Or ‘extraterrestrial.’”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Wise, I suppose. If I didn’t have corroborating information, or people vouching for you, I might have problems believing your story.”
“Corroborating information?”
The general nodded as she put away her tea service. Then she hit a button on her comm. Outside, Evi heard an electronic buzzer. “Miss Isham, we’ll have a lot to talk about later, but now I have a meeting to attend. So I am going to leave you in the hands of an old friend of yours.”
Evi turned her head as the door opened. Into the room walked a 260-centimeter tall, 300-kilo tiger named Nohar Rajasthan.
Chapter 17
Nohar took her to the Zoo’s “guest house,” an old frat building. The bricks next to the trio of Greek letters had been knocked out to make room for an anti-aircraft battery. He led her through a recycled-plywood door and to the half of the building that didn’t serve as an ammo dump. The smell of machine oil and gunpowder hung heavy in the cold air.
She ended up in a small room with a sagging bed and cracked plaster wall. The window overlooked the rubble wall surrounding the campus, and the only warmth in the room was from a small electric heater.
She sat in the bed, and Nohar showed no sign of leaving.
“Babysitter?”
Nohar nodded.
Evi took stock of the changes six years had wrought in the tiger. The one thing that hit her was that the colors in his coat had faded, and the lines between black and yellow had lost their sharpness. Age, or maybe the effect of the California sun. His tail moved a little more nervously. There were one or two more scars on his back where the hair was growing back white. His expression had evolved. The white fur under his rounded chin was longer. The wrinkled grooves, growl-lines, above his broad nose were deeper. And he wore a round gold band in his ear.
That was the first time that Evi, moreau expert or not, realized that engineered feline hands were not well designed for jewelry.
Nohar appropriated an overstuffed recliner that wasn’t made for someone of his size. She heard protesting creaks and the twang of a spring giving way. He remained silent, staring out at the rubble wall.
“What are you doing here?”
Nohar sighed, a sound that began as an intake of breath and deepened to a deep bass rumble that sounded like a hostile purr. “Sitting on you so the Grand Dame Ursine doesn’t lose an intelligence asset.”
She leaned back on the bed, still tired. The ceiling above her was innocent of plaster, and holes had been knocked in the slats to reveal pipes and junction boxes beyond.
“When did you become political?”
“Still trying to link me to moreau terrorism?”
She turned her head to look at the tiger. He was still looking out the window. His right hand was clawing the upholstery on the chair. She was sorry for the fact that she hadn’t spent enough time with moreaus to pick up on their scent cues. She could read humans like a book, but tigers . . .
Nohar was broadcasting powerful waves of something.
“Sounds like you don’t want to be here.”
He snarled. “You think I like all this?”
She forgot her potential nap and propped herself up on her right elbow to look at him. There was a momentary twinge from her left shoulder when she moved. It quickly faded. She hoped that the much-lauded healing powers of the Hiashu-enhanced human projects were finally at work on her shoulder.
“Want to elaborate?”
He turned toward her. “Wu and company are going to screw us over again.”
Evi’s puzzlement must have shown.
“I’m a moreau, I should approve?” Nohar shook his head. “Violence breeds more of the same. This is a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Wu portrayed this operation as defensive.” She wondered how she had gotten into the position of defending what, by most of the definitions she had been using during her professional life, was a terrorist operation. She was astounded by how little loyalty she found in her heart for either the organization or the ideals she had worked for for the past sixteen years. All this time had she been just as much a mercenary as those Afghanis?
“What happens when the government gets wind of this?” Nohar asked.
“They’ll . . .” That was a bad thought. There was no question about the military trying to shut this place down. That would definitely fit Wu’s definition of a direct attack.
Nohar nodded, as if he heard the rest of her thought.
She could see a national wave of violence in the moreau community, igniting a backlash that could wipe out all the progress moreaus had made toward first-class citizenship. The anti-moreau forces could use that kind of conflagration to finally repeal the moreau amendment. She could see the pogrom that Wu feared.
“I was right,” she said. “You don’t belong here.”
Nohar chuckled. If she didn’t know moreaus, and this moreau in particular, she would have found the sound threatening. He had an unnerving tendency to show his teeth when he laughed, and his canines were the size of her thumb. “As if I had a choice. It’s your fault.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“My life may be in danger, the alien business may be rearing its ugly head—where else do you think a morey would go to ground?”
“What about your wife?”
“Safe.” From the way he said it, she knew not to ask any further about his spouse.
“How long have you known these people?”
“Four years. From the Los Angeles chapter.”
“This is national?”
Nohar chuckled again. “Look at this place.”
She slowly dropped back to stare at the ceiling and began to reassess her world view. “Why’d y
ou vouch for me? I worked for the Feds.”
“You aren’t human.”
“Meaning?”
“When the shit hits the fan, species transcends politics.”
She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.
• • •
General Wu finally sent for them, well after nightfall. They were fetched by the same jaguar that had snatched Evi from “ROOMS.” She was no longer armed with the AK-47. Evi’s standing in this community was on an upswing.
Instead of the conservatory, the jaguar led them across an unlit campus to a blacked-out building. Inside, the place was well lit. It was the windows that had been painted black. The jaguar brought them through a set of doors flanked by lepine guards in black berets and into an auditorium out of another century. General Wu stood at a podium that barely came past her waist. Behind her was a rank of green blackboards set in dark-varnished wood frames. In the audience was a collection of five moreaus. With their arrival, seven moreaus, one frank.
“Welcome,” Wu addressed them. She gestured them down to the front with her stump. “My intelligence team has informed me that if we have any time to do what I plan, it is running out.”
Evi walked down to the front and sat next to a lean lepus who was missing an ear. Nohar stood; the human desks weren’t made for people his size. The jaguar barely fit herself into the seat next to Evi.
Wu continued, directing her comments at Evi. “The NLF team from Nyogi Enterprises must have had you under surveillance for some time. Following your personal contacts, and using you as a stalking horse to uncover the identities of your employers and coworkers. Would this conflict with any of your observations?”
“That makes sense except—”
“Why kidnap you?”
Evi nodded.
Wu tapped at a keyboard hidden by the podium. “We’re assuming there was some recent triggering event that made Nyogi desperate. They intend to gain quickly now by force the information they hoped to gain slowly by stealth.”
“The location of the aliens . . .” Evi whispered.
The room became very quiet. The only noises were moreys breathing and shifting their weight and the buzzing of the uncertain fluorescents. The pause lengthened uncomfortably until Evi said, “I don’t know that.”
That wasn’t a comfortable admission. Not only because there were eight pairs of eyes looking at her for the answer, a few with blatant hostility, but because it was something she should know.
Nohar spoke. “Nyogi assumes that you do.”
She turned to the tiger. “I should. I was the one who bottled up the aliens in the first place. They assumed I was an insider.”
“A human,” Nohar said, “would have been.”
She shook her head. “Species before politics.”
General Wu slapped the side of the podium, drawing the audience’s attention back to her. “We need to reach those four aliens before Nyogi does. The window in which we have to act as rapidly closing. Isham and the Feds have set back their operational capability, but it is doubtful that it would take longer than forty-eight hours for a corporation with the resources of Nyogi to assemble another team to go after a secondary target. Someone else who knows where the aliens are.
“Isham, if you do not have that information, you must lead us to someone who has.”
Evi looked at the moreaus surrounding her. Nohar was carefully cultivating an expressionless demeanor, though he was habitually making clawing motions with his right hand. The jaguar corporal sitting next to her was staring at her, teeth barred in an expression of silent hostility. The general stood directly in front of her, like a giant wooden totem. The one-eared rabbit to her right looked at her, nose twitching as if in curiosity. The four rats beyond showed mixtures of apprehension and hostility.
It hit her all at once, exactly how far she had removed herself from everything she had known, worked for, believed . . .
“Wait a minute.” Evi stood up. “Information is one thing—”
She could feel the weight of the moreau’s attention. Not only the ones in this room, not just the complex, but the weight of the surrounding community of three million . . .
“What, exactly, do you object to?” Wu asked.
What, exactly? It wasn’t like she hadn’t shifted allegiances before. If anything, the goals and principles Wu was offering were clearer than the ones the Agency offered.
“What I object to is a strong feeling of déjà vu.”
“Meaning?”
“I crossed the Atlantic in ’45, before a frank had any civil rights in this country. The Feds said, ‘Of course you’ll work for us.’ In a dozen years I managed to convince myself I was working on the side of right and justice, only to have the rug pulled out from under me.”
“Isham,” Nohar said. She turned to face the tiger, who was the only face in the room that held any sympathy. “You’re too used to taking orders. You can work with someone without working for them.”
General Wu spoke. “We aren’t asking you to adopt our politics or join our organization. We’re asking only that you aid us in achieving something of mutual, if not universal, benefit: Namely, capturing and publicizing these aliens.”
Evi looked up at the general. Nohar was right. The one specific thing that bothered her was the prospect of owing her allegiance to another political entity that would use her as a pawn and sacrifice her without a second thought. She had played that game all her life.
It was time she owed allegiance to herself.
“I’ll help you.” She sat down and crossed her legs. “With two conditions—”
The jaguar spoke. “You’re in no position—”
“Corporal Gurgueia,” Wu interrupted. “Miss Isham has been quite cooperative. We’d do well to hear her out.”
Evi waited for other outbursts from the crowd. Other than glowering stares from a pair of the rats, there were no overt objections.
“As I said, two conditions. First, this isn’t to be a brute force operation. No explosives, and if there’s gunfire, that means someone screwed up.” She stared directly at the jaguar as she said that.
Wu nodded and the jaguar emitted a quiet growl.
“Second, I’m in charge of the operation.”
The entire room started talking at once. Except for Nohar, who looked as though he expected her to say that, and Wu, who looked like she was above shouting down the audience.
Despite the dozen objections flying around her, Evi smiled. Yes, she did have little choice but to participate in this escapade. However, the general had little choice but to let her participate on her own terms. General Wu had said herself that the window of opportunity was rapidly closing.
It took nearly five minutes before the moreaus quieted down enough to let the general speak.
“Respectfully, General, you aren’t going to seriously consider this, are you?” asked Corporal Gurgueia, the jaguar.
“I’m doing more than that. I am doing just as Isham suggests. We need a specialist in covert activity, not urban warfare. We have too little time to debate command structure.” General Wu swept her gaze across the room. “Is there anyone who feels that they’ll be unable to operate under these conditions?”
No one spoke.
“Good. Our first order of business is to locate and make contact with someone who has the information we need. Isham?”
“If no one’s gotten to David Price . . .”
• • •
David Price was the only member of the Domestic Crisis Think Tank whose outside life Evi knew anything about. He’d been the only member of the think tank with whom she’d had more than a strictly professional relationship. He was perhaps the one friend she had in there.
He had a cover identity, David King, who lived in a modular tract house in Jackson Heights. She knew the house; David had once taken her
there.
Now, as she flew a matte-black GM Kestrel toward the East River, she wondered about that. He had been a part of Frey’s conspiracy all along and had allowed her to be duped. Evi doubted that she had ever had any friends who weren’t friends of convenience.
Except, perhaps, for Diana.
The Kestrel was a big aircar, even bigger with most of the interior seats stripped out of it. Even so, they could fit only four members of the team in it. She drove, the one-eared rabbit named Huaras sat next to her, and in the back sat Nohar and Corporal Gurgueia. The extra weight made the Kestrel handle like a wet brick.
It was exactly five after midnight when she hit the shore of the Bronx. As soon as she left shore, she raised the aircar to legal heights and switched on the lights and the transponder. Instantly, it seemed, the comm came alive with frantic instructions from La Guardia Air Traffic Control. No one commented on the aircar’s sudden appearance. They wanted them to get into another air corridor, they were too close to Rikers.
She banked away from Rikers Island, and a subsonic rumble rattled the windows as a ballistic shuttle started rising on a steep ascent from the Rikers Island launch facility. The shuttle passed so close that she could see individual heat tiles on its underside.
She did a long banking right turn around La Guardia, over Flushing and Shea Stadium, and as the Manhattan skyline rotated into view in front of them, Jackson Heights slid by below. She cut the lights and began the descent.
The Kestrel put down on a shabby excuse for a back yard, raising a cloud of fresh snow. It sat in a brief blizzard of its own making. The gull-wing doors on the Kestrel flew open, shedding snow, and the moreaus stepped out. The rabbit covered the rear of the house with his machine pistol, Gurgueia tried to cover everything else with her AK-47. Nohar stood out of the way of the guns and waited for Evi.
Evi stepped out of the Kestrel, pulling on a new pair of gloves and taking the medkit and the gun Wu had provided her. The gun was a fairly straightforward Smith and Wesson ten-millimeter automatic. Her wounded shoulder was doped up on painkiller, so she could holster it without wincing.
“Gurgueia, you go cover the front. Huaras, take the rear. Me and Nohar are going in.”