“Retired.” The word felt heavy with irony after what he had gone through the past few days. He flexed his hands, they ached, especially at the base of his claws. It felt as if his fingers were still tearing at the concrete outside the Bensheim building.
Gilbertez appeared to ignore the irony in Nohar’s voice. “Yeah, we have records from the State and the Fed. You’ve been on one of the homestead projects. Getting the nonhumans, especially the large predatory ones, out of an urban environment.” Gilbertez looked up. “You know, for all the objections people made to that homestead project, from the hunting lobby to the Native Americans, I think it worked.”
Nohar shook his head. This guy could change subjects on a dime.
“After they started that project the crime rate in their target neighborhood went down. They say it’s just because the Fed moved the crime out, but the homestead areas haven’t had any crime problems, nothing like the inner city. So what happened to your cabin?”
Gilbertez only paused long enough to look at Nohar’s expression. Nohar didn’t know why he should be surprised. Of course, if they hadn’t known already, the first place the cops would have gone after seeing him at Royd’s would’ve been his last known residence.
“Never mind, we’ll get back to that. I take it you did a bit of hunting?”
“Have to eat,” Nohar said. The shifts in this guy’s conversation were giving him a headache. Gilbertez was wired, always moving, gesturing, talking. He had yet to sit down.
“Don’t we all. And being that they gave you land without any income—Anyway, they found the buck you got last, all dressed up. Too bad the fire torched the carcass. Shame of a waste. Only had venison a few times in my life, but seeing those pictures made me want to cry. Which I guess brings us to Charles Royd.”
Nohar didn’t see the connection, but he let Gilbertez roll on under his own momentum.
Gilbertez started pacing in front of his comm. “Royd was another waste. Did a lot of good for this town for some asshole to torture him to death. He didn’t go easy, you know—though I suppose you do, seeing the body and all. The Mayor, the DA, and the entire nonhuman population of this city want his murderer’s head on a plate. Now I’m a nice guy, but I would really like to oblige them.”
Gilbertez turned and leaned on the desk. With almost any other two people, the gesture would have him looming over his audience. As it was, he had to look up into Nohar’s face. “Now I wonder if you feel the same way? We have the records from Royd’s office, and you were up there, looking for him the same day. Weren’t you?”
Nohar remained quiet.
“Then, after all that bullshit at Royd’s residence, you turn up calling in bomb threats to the Bensheim Foundation. You’ve been very popular lately, and I suppose I should consider myself lucky that I’ve been the local boy assigned to this case.” Gilbertez pushed away from the table. “You should consider yourself lucky you got me, too. I’m going for some coffee, want any?”
Nohar shook his head and watched Gilbertez pick up his comm and leave the room. Just what that man needs, more coffee.
Nohar sat and waited for the detective to return.
During the wait, it began to sink in that Gilbertez hadn’t accused him of anything yet. Nohar couldn’t help but think it was probably some sort of trap, but he began to wonder if he had gotten hold of a cop who might listen to his story.
Gilbertez returned with a cup of stale-smelling coffee. He set down his comm, leaving it closed on the desk. He gestured with his coffee and said, “You’ve had a little time to think. Do you want to contradict anything I’ve gone over?”
“I don’t think I should say anything.”
“Has anyone read you your rights?”
Nohar shook his head.
“Well, I’m not going to. Everything we say here’s going to be inadmissible. Now—you have any problem with what I’ve said so far?”
Nohar shook his head slowly, unsure of where this all was going.
“Let me tell you about my day. Middle of the afternoon—I haven’t taken my lunch break yet—I find out we got hold of this tiger that everybody and their brother in Fedland is looking for. Case falls in my lap, and shortly after, so do a bunch of Fed agents talking about nonhuman terrorism. Now I could hand you over and have lunch, but I don’t like overbearing Fed agents, so I send them to the local judge, who’ll spend at least forty-eight hours to decide if any of the antiterrorism acts cover the crap you’re accused of. Then I bone up on all the records we have of you, and what you seem to be involved in.” Gilbertez drained the coffee.
“What Fed agency?”
“FBI. Though every black Agency claims to be the FBI when they interfere with a criminal investigation. If they were FBI, they were FBI through some special forces branch. One guy had a unit tattoo on his wrist and the other had a big scar on his face—”
Him again, “Black guy?”
“—Yeah, know him?”
Nohar shook his head.
“Suit yourself. What I got is a two-hour rundown on you, and I have a lot of questions—”
“Like?”
Gilbertez looked over at the mirror and said, “Like why someone torches their own house after going to the trouble of hunting down and dressing a buck deer. The story we have from the antiterrorist people at the FBI has you blowing the place to hide evidence of bomb-making equipment, or it blew up when one of the devices malfunctioned. Now they have the site, can’t get local boys there, but they did loan us some holos of the scene, which was enough to get my curiosity going. I mean there’s the carcass right in the middle of the ruins, and then there’s all the bullet holes.”
“Bullet holes?”
“Or some frigging huge termites in the trees around your house. I got one pic I blew up that has a pretty good view of a forty-five-cal hole in a cinder block that used to hold up your cabin.” Gilbertez finished off his coffee. “Then we got this story that you’re supposed to have killed Royd as some terrorist act. Set aside for the moment that I’ve never bought these Outsider people as moreaus—their targets, except for Alcatraz, have been humans who were working with nonhumans. Bankers who do business in Moreytown, folks who set up shop to market to moreaus, factories that have liberal hiring policies. The whole Outsider manifesto about species separation never carried much weight with me—”
“Who are they, then?”
“I suspect they’re some radical humanist organization bent on creating hostility at any point where humans and nonhumans seem to work together. They claim to be moreaus just to make it worse for the nonhumans, calling down all these antiterrorism acts on them. Anyway, that’s all beside the point. You’re supposed to be involved in Royd’s death, and then, three days after the guy’s killed, you visit his office looking for him, then return to the house with the body. Just as you’re in there, somebody calls the Beverly Hills cops to report an Outsider hit squad in Royd’s house.”
Gilbertez put down his cup and leaned toward Nohar. “So what’s going on here?”
Chapter 22
In the end Nohar decided that he had little choice but to trust Gilbertez enough to tell him. It was galling telling this all to a pink, and a pink cop at that. But, at the moment, Gilbertez was the only angle he had for getting on top of this situation. Nohar gave the cop a sanitized version of what had happened—he left out the names, and avoided telling him where Manuel and the others were supposed to be hiding out.
Gilbertez let him talk, even though silence seemed out of character for him. He flipped open his comm and typed notes as Nohar spoke. Nohar had spent an hour telling Gilbertez everything he felt he could.
Afterward, Gilbertez stared at the comm and nodded to himself. “Well, what do you know now? Your story had an advantage over the Feds’—over most of the stories I hear in here—it fits the facts. That’s good. Though you do sound like every other conspi
racy-mongering nonhuman I’ve ever heard. Really too bad that you didn’t get a chance to copy that database you sneaked into.” Gilbertez gave him a knowing look, as if he knew that was one of the few points where Nohar had lied. “I’d like to see this ramcard you say started all this bullshit.”
Nohar shook his head.
“If you don’t tell me where these people are hiding out, it sort of limits my options here. I mean I got a suspect the Fed wants, and a wild shaggy-dog story about one of the most respected charity organizations dealing with nonhumans. I got to have more than just that if I’m going to do anything with this. Now I don’t want to hand you over to these Fed guys, especially if they aren’t FBI, but I gotta have something a little solid.”
“I can’t tell you where—”
“I know, I know. I am trying to work with you. Something sour’s going on here—not that I necessarily believe your doomsday scenario—and I’d like to know what these Fed guys are up to. I need something more than your story, though.”
“What?”
“Maybe we could arrange a call with this hacker friend of yours. The one who looked up that satellite for you.”
Nohar looked at him.
Gilbertez turned the comm around to face Nohar.
• • •
“Where the fuck are you?” Bobby said as his image came into focus on the screen. He was sitting in a darkened room, and what was left of his hair was mussed and pointing out at odd angles.
From behind the comm Gilbertez shook his head. Nohar guessed that Gilbertez’s comm wasn’t quite explicit when it came to identifying itself. “I need that information.”
“Christ, you know what time it is over here?” Bobby reached off-screen for his glasses and a handheld computer. Bobby flipped open the small device, and Nohar could see a soft-green display reflected in his glasses. “Again, you got me wondering what you’re mixed up in.”
“You—”
“—don’t want to know, right.” He glanced up from the little computer and at the comm he was talking into. “You know that comm you’re on isn’t secure?”
Nohar looked at Gilbertez. “Didn’t have much of a choice. Go on, what’ve you got?”
Bobby looked down at the handheld computer again. “We have a burst of net activity surrounding The Necron Avenger about six days ago. This wasn’t some kid with his first computer either. Someone with access to a super-computer was looking for him. There’re traces of this search everywhere on the net, and it all happened within the same five-minute period.”
“Who was it?”
“We traced it as far back as a Fed node on the net, a naval gateway we can’t get past. Whoever did the search did it through the Long Beach Naval Station.”
“You mean the navy—”
Bobby shook his head. “All this means is that was the point they accessed the civilian part of the net. The search could have started anywhere in the Fed’s net. Hell, it could have even originated outside the Fed net—they could have entered through some other gateway entirely, and have it routed through Long Beach. The fact is just that we can’t backtrack it past there.”
“What about the Bensheim Foundation?”
“That takes a little more explaining—”
• • •
As Gilbertez looked on, Bobby gave Nohar a rundown on the Bensheim Foundation. All the time Dr. Bensheim was alive it had been run by an independent board based in Geneva. After the founder’s death, there was an internal struggle between the various arms of the organization and the board, ending with a multiple schism of the original Foundation. It split along international lines, so the Geneva Board still ran the Bensheim Foundation in Europe, but there were different Bensheim Foundations in the Far East, Africa, and in North America.
The Bensheim Foundation in North America struggled along by itself, near bankruptcy, for a couple of years until a corporate white knight came along to bail it out.
The white knight was named The Pacific Import Company.
“Why is that name familiar?” Nohar asked.
“Probably because of the congressional hearings back in ’62 over alleged government control of a company called VanDyne Enterprises. All of it had to do with aliens, corporate shell games, captured extraterrestrial technology, and the habitat on Alcatraz.”
“What does Pacific Import have to do with that?”
“VanDyne was a Race front. The Fed took it over through Pacific Imports. Pacific Imports is an open secret, most likely run by the CIA.”
“The CIA runs the Bensheim Foundation?”
“Didn’t say that. Pacific Imports could have funneled money from just about any covert arm of the Fed. And there was no other record of any involvement with the Bensheim Foundation. As far as I could discover, the Bensheim Foundation is still an independent entity. Their headquarters happen to be in LA, Pasadena.”
• • •
Nohar’s talk with Bobby helped convince Gilbertez that there was something to Nohar’s story. Even so, Nohar didn’t feel good about it. The last thing he wanted was a confirmation that it was the Fed that was engineering what he had seen in the Bensheim database.
Gilbertez took him back to a holding cell. As they walked through the station, emptier now that it was on the night shift, Gilbertez talked nonstop. “You might have something here. I don’t know, but I got to check some things out myself. But if this does pan out, you have to take me to these people who’re sitting on this evidence you keep talking about. In the meantime you should think about whether or not I’m your friend. From your story you have reason to be paranoid, but I think that just means you really want me on your case rather than these Feds who’re waiting for me to turn you over.”
Gilbertez opened the cell for him and removed Nohar’s cuffs. Nohar rubbed his wrists as Gilbertez said, “Think about it.”
The door shut, leaving Nohar in the same cell with only a concrete bench. As Gilbertez asked, Nohar thought about it. He couldn’t decide if he was for real, or just a clever Fed plant trying to get the only real information Nohar had, the location of Manuel and the others. The location of the ramcards.
Even if he was legit, Nohar had no illusions about any local agency standing up to the Fed on any level. Gilbertez might get everything, but that didn’t mean he’d be able to do anything. Publicity was still their only hope. When the Fed no longer had a secret to protect, they might be safe.
He had to think of something.
Nohar lay down on the concrete floor of the holding cell. It was the only place he could rest, and even there he couldn’t recline fully. He needed to get the ramcards—the ones he sent to Culver City—into the hands of a reporter. As far as he knew, even if Gilbertez was a Fed agent, no one knew that the database ramcard existed.
All he needed was to contact a reporter on the outside, get one to pick up the ramcards. The database spoke for itself, loudly enough that the pink news would pick it up. The fact that the CIA—or whoever—was using biological warfare agents domestically, for whatever reason, would set off the alarms. It would remind people too much of what had happened in Africa.
Nohar closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He dreamed of his mother again. This time she wasn’t dying from Pakistani-engineered feline leukemia—this time the Fed had injected her with Ebola Niger.
• • •
Gilbertez didn’t return until early the next morning. Nohar only knew the time from the sense of activity beyond the holding cell door. Gilbertez was accompanied by a uniformed cop, and he looked as if he hadn’t had any sleep. He tossed a pair of cuffs on the floor next to Nohar.
“Put those on. You got to take me to these people hiding out before all hell breaks loose around here.”
Nohar looked up at Gilbertez and tried to get some clue as to what he was feeling. It wasn’t hard to pick up the scent of fear. Something had really disturbe
d him. The uniformed cop was wary, but Gilbertez was really scared.
“What’s going on?”
“Somehow they got a judge. Someone’s walking downstairs with transfer orders for you. We have to be on our way before those Fed agents show up, or I’ll have to hand you over.” Gilbertez glanced at the watch on his wrist for emphasis. “We don’t have much time. If we don’t get a case put together fast, you’re going to disappear into the Federal machinery. You don’t want that to happen while you’re still an accused terrorist.”
Nohar stood up, holding the handcuffs. The uniform took a few steps back. “Are these necessary?”
“You’re still a suspect. Play along, and we can get out of here smoothly.”
Nohar put the cuffs on his wrists as loosely as their size would allow. “And him?” Nohar gestured to the uniformed cop with both hands.
“A concession to regulations. Suspects are escorted by at least two police officers. This has to be by the book, or anything that gets turned up’ll be tainted. You don’t need to worry about Ortega. I know his uncle.”
The uniform nodded, but the set of his expression did not inspire much trust in Nohar. He couldn’t help feeling as if this whole situation was some sort of setup.
Gilbertez and Ortega hustled him out of the holding cell and took him past the elevators and toward the fire stairs. They certainly gave the impression that they were sneaking out. Nohar kept an eye out for security cameras, and didn’t know whether to be reassured or dismayed by the fact that all the cameras they passed were inactive or pointing the wrong way.
They led him up the fire stairs to the rooftop parking area. In the rear, past the banks of black-and-white aircars, was an unmarked Plymouth Pegasus. Its sleek lines were at odds with the forced aerodynamics of the cop cars. The police cars were heavy-duty bubbles, where the Pegasus was a cream-colored arrowhead.
Gilbertez led them straight to the Pegasus.
Hackles rose on Nohar’s neck as they approached the car. A car like the Pegasus was out of line for someone on a detective’s salary. That meant someone had provided the car. Nohar didn’t think the LAPD was in the habit of handing out sports cars as unmarked vehicles. He could see Beverly Hills detectives tooling around in a Pegasus; a Pasadena cop, no.