Thy Brother's Keeper

  The scanner squawked—Lowery was tuned into the local cop frequency. Something about a fender bender on Maple Street.

  “So far she’s been a good little girl. Made her hospital rounds this morning, then went grocery shopping.”

  “Buy a lot?” Luca asked.

  “Come to think of it, yeah. Watched her load six bags in the back of her wagon—a blue Volvo, by the way.”

  Luca straightened in his seat. Interesting. “Six bags for one woman living alone?”

  “Like I said, it’s Christmas. Maybe she’s planning a big family dinner.”

  “Read your own notes—she’s got no family.”

  The more Luca thought about Dr. Elizabeth Cannon, the more he liked her as a real possibility. A loner with tons of experience delivering sims, she’d probably jump at the chance to shut down a place she thought of as a “slave factory.” Now here she was, stocking up on groceries—enough to feed a sim and the missing Cadman and Sullivan perhaps? Plus she had a home office, the perfect place to deliver a sim. Was that why she’d canceled her office hours? Wouldn’t do to have one of her patients spot a pregnant sim, would it.

  He felt some of his fatigue lifting.

  “All right,” Lowery said, “let’s just say this sim is in there. How—?”

  “Sheis in there,” Luca said. “I feel it in my gut.”

  “Okay. I’ll go with that, because my gut’s giving me the same message, but does your gut have any idea how we get her the fuck out of there? Look at this neighborhood, will you? It’sLeave It To Beaver -ville. There’s no room to operate.”

  Luca had already noticed that. Neat, middle-size houses, most sporting Christmas decorations, nestled side by side and back to back on quarter-acre lots, with wide streets that nobody parked on. Sitting here like this, their car looked as alien as a flying saucer. Only a matter of time before—

  Another squawk on the scanner, this one about a suspicious car parked on Cavendish Drive.

  “Shit!” Lowery said. “That’s us.”

  Luca slapped the dashboard. “Move. I don’t want any local heat seeing our faces.”

  “So what do we do?” Lowery said as he put the car in gear.

  “A raid. Oh-four-hundred tomorrow morning.”

  “Are you kidding? On Christmas?”

  “Can you think of a time it’ll be less expected? Six of us hit the place front and back wearing FBI jackets and full assault gear. If we find the sim we secure her, terminate everyone else, and take off. If we don’t find her, we apologize for raiding the wrong address, and disappear.”

  “FBI?”

  “Hey, it’s not like they never raid private homes and it’s not like they’ve never fucked up before either. Everybody still remembers Waco. It’ll take days, maybe weeks, before the feds convince the public they weren’t involved.”

  Lowery grinned. “And by then we’ll be long gone. I like it.”

  “It’s win-win,” Luca said. “If I’m right, we’ll have the sim. If I’m wrong, no more wasting time watching Cannon.”

  But I’m not wrong, he told himself. That sim’s in there. I can smell her.

  18

  SUFFOLK COUNTY, NY

  “Even though it’s only Christmas Eve, we’ll call this our Christmas dinner,” Zero said as he opened the lids of the pizza boxes on his dining room table. “Because who knows where we’ll be tomorrow? No turkey for our sim Christmas, I’m afraid. Just two large pies—a plain and a sausage.” He glanced at his two guests. “Do either of you know what Christmas means, by the way?”

  Kek didn’t even look up; he’d been lured away from one of the computers where he’d been engrossed in Mortal Kombat XX , and now he grabbed a slice of the sausage pie and started wolfing it down.

  But Tome smiled and said, “Lights and trees and presents.”

  “Yes, that’s a big part of it. A time of peace on earth and good will toward men, I’m told. But what about sims? Does that include good will toward sims?”

  Zero had made the mistake of allowing himself a glass of holiday cheer: one Scotch and water. Terrible tasting stuff, didn’t know how Ellis Sinclair had drunk so much of it all those years, but he’d forced it down—the season to be jolly and all that. Now he wished he hadn’t. Not used to alcohol, and though he wasn’t feeling much in the way of physical effects, it seemed to have untethered his thoughts, leaving them to wander. Now they were wandering into terra incognita.

  “Tome not know, Mist Zero.”

  Not know what? Oh, yes…about good will toward sims.

  “Of course you don’t, Tome. Christmas has become a secular holiday for the most part, but it’s still a religious occasion for those who celebrate the arrival of their god to save mankind. But what of us sims? Are we included in that salvation? Or are we damned?” He toasted with a piece of plain pie. “Joy to the world.”

  But he felt no trace of joy, felt instead as if he were standing on the brink of a precipice, gazing into the unknown. The world as he’d always known it was about to change. Radically. And with it his relationship to that world and all the people he knew in it. Nothing would ever be the same.

  He tried to imagine what it would be like to come out of hiding, to wander about with his face exposed to the world, to be a person . He could not.

  He surprised himself by starting to sing: “We three sims of chimpanzee blood, wondering how we’ll ride out the flood…” He noticed Tome and Kek staring at him. “Come on, sing! You know the words!”

  But then he couldn’t go on, not with his throat constricting around a sob.

  What have I done? My race, my brother sims—what will happen to them when Meerm’s baby is shoved in the face of the world? By saving them will I doom them to extinction?

  19

  SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ

  DECEMBER 25

  “We leave at oh-three-hundred,” Luca told Lowery. The two of them had the SimGen security offices virtually to themselves. He checked his watch. “That gives you ten minutes to get the other four assembled by the cars and ready to go.”

  “Got it,” Lowery said and trotted off.

  Luca turned back to the printouts on his desk. This genetics stuff was so complicated. He’d done search after search before tracking down intergenomic and intragenomic competition, and then more searching before finding articles he could understand. Weren’t many of those, but he’d managed to glean some idea of what it all meant. He still didn’t see what was so frightening about it.

  Intergenomic competition…a theory that arose back in the nineties about the maternal and paternal halves of the fetal genome competing for dominance during development. Luca understood it best when he translated it into combat terms. In a male embryo, the Y chromosome from the father directs the struggle against the maternal half of the genome. But in a female, with no Y to marshal the forces of the paternal genome, the maternal X has an easier time against the paternal X; it can then push more characteristics from its own underlying genome toward the front, thus showing more of its maternal DNA to the world.

  Intragenomic competition was a newer and more controversial theory. While intergenomic competition applied to all species, intra genomic competition applied only to recombinant transgenic species of higher mammals, and it was a double war. While the usual intergenomic competition was being waged, there was also a civil war going on within the recombinant genome. As Luca understood it, the recombinant half would try to express the genes from its original underlying genome at the expense of the foreign genes that had been spliced into it.

  Yeah? So what?

  If all this held true, a human father meant the pregnant sim’s baby would look more like a human if it was a boy and more like a chimp if it was a girl.

  Again: So what?

  I must be missing something, Luca thought, because the only scary thing here is how boring this is.

  He checked his watch again. Time to go. An 0300 departure would get them to Mineola in plenty of time to gear up for the raid. r />
  And they had plenty of gear. Like the others, Luca was wearing a black cotton BDU; but before they went in they’d add body armor and Kevlar helmets with visors; each would carry tactical forearm 15,000 candlepower flashlights and an HK submachine gun equipped with double 30-round translucent magazines.

  He hoped to use that weapon. He wanted that sim, yes, but wanted Cadman and Sullivan there too. Especially Romy Cadman. He wanted one last look at that pretty face before he put a bullet into it.

  20

  MINEOLA, NY

  The racket—footsteps in the upstairs hallway, a fist pounding on a door, Betsy’s voice shouting—startled Romy awake. She found herself up and moving without knowing how or why.

  “Wake up! Patrick! Romy! It’s time! We’ve got to go!”

  Go? Where? She pulled open her door and caught Betsy as she hurried by. “What’s wrong?”

  “Meerm’s in hard labor. We can’t hold off any longer. Got to get her to the hospital right now!”

  Romy saw Patrick stick his head out of his room and called to him. “Did you hear?”

  He nodded blearily. “What time is it?”

  “Three-twenty!” Betsy cried, moving away. “Get dressed. We’ve got to move!”

  Romy jumped into her clothes and was down the stairs in seconds, Patrick right behind her. They dashed to Betsy’s bedroom where they found a very confused and frightened Meerm lying on a cot and wrapped in blankets.

  “Patrick, you carry her,” Betsy said as she yanked the spread and blankets off her own bed. “We’ll fix up the car.”

  Romy followed her to the garage where they flattened the rear seats in the Volvo and spread out the bedclothes. Patrick appeared a moment later carrying the moaning Meerm. They nestled her in the rear section.

  “Patrick, you drive,” Betsy said. “Do you know the way to the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll direct you, then. Romy, you stay here in the back with me.”

  And then they were on their way, Betsy and Romy kneeling on either side of Meerm in the back as Patrick pulled out of the driveway. Romy opened her PCA and left a beeper message for Zero: “It’s happening. We’re on our way to the hospital.”

  As she hung up she heard Betsy on her own PCA.

  “…know it’s Christmas, Joanna, but this is more than just an emergency section, it’s an historical event…I wish I could say more than that, but I can’t. Have I ever lied to you? Well then, believe me, Joanna, you want to be part of this. Okay, good. I’ll see you there.”

  As Betsy hung up and punched in another speed-dial code, she glanced at Romy and smiled. “My surgical team. A dedicated bunch, but itis Christmas Day. My nurse anesthetist is Hindu, so she’ll be no problem; but both my scrub nurses have small children.” She shrugged. “One’s coming. I hope I can persuade the other. If not…do you faint at the sight of blood, Romy?”

  “Me?” Romy said, caught off guard. “No, I’m okay with blood. But if you’re talking about assisting on a surgery…I don’t think…”

  “Let’s hope you won’t have to, but be prepared. I may need you.”

  Slice open Meerm’s belly? Romy didn’t know if she could help with that.

  21

  “Second floor—clear!”

  “Office—clear!”

  “Garage—empty!”

  Luca stood in the center of Dr. Cannon’s living room listening to the reports through his headset, and felt ridiculous.

  The op had started out perfectly. With the six team members divided between two Jeeps and a rented van, they’d arrived in town with time to spare. They’d left the Jeeps in the lot of an autobody shop and headed for Cannon’s house in the van. The plan was to ditch the van at the shop lot after the op and make it back to SimGen in the Jeeps. But now…

  Shit, the house was empty.

  Luca had had his first premonition the moment they’d pulled up in front: the lights were on. Upstairs and down. At four in the morning?

  They’d crept up to the windows—no one moving about inside. They’d slammed through the rear door—no alarm.

  Footsteps pounded down the stairs behind him. Luca turned and saw a helmeted figure approaching, recognized him as Lowery when he lifted his visor.

  “Three bedrooms upstairs. The reports on her say she lives alone, but all three have slept-in beds. They’re not warm, but I’d guess they haven’t been cold too long. Looks like they left in a big hurry.”

  Luca felt as if he were turning to ice. “You’re saying they might have been tipped?”

  Lowery shrugged. “Who’d tip them? You and me were the only ones who knew where we were going. Maybe they got spooked. Maybe they spotted us watching the place and decided to take off.”

  Luca turned away and ground his teeth. He should have kept someone here until the raid, but without Snyder and Grimes he was short-handed. What did he do now?

  “All right,” he said into his helmet mike. “Everybody back to the van. We’re outta here.”

  They’d return to the other cars, but not to SimGen. Not yet. He was staying in this area. Maybe he’d split up the team and send them looking for Cannon’s Volvo. Slim chance there, but better than doing nothing.

  Needed time to think. No question now that Cannon and the sim were together. Find the doc and he’d have the sim, and Cadman and Sullivan too, no doubt.

  But where?

  22

  Zero watched the surreal scene below with a by-now-familiar mix of anticipation and dread. The faint aftereffects of the Scotch had evaporated when he received Romy’s message. He’d arrived at the hospital shortly after Betsy and the others, and left Tome and Kek parked in the van while Patrick admitted him through the doctor’s entrance. Like every other department in the hospital, security was a skeleton crew because of the holiday; so Zero, wearing a hat pulled low, dark glasses, and a scarf around his lower face, made it to the OR suite without being stopped.

  Betsy had commandeered the amphitheater OR, and now Zero gazed down at a brightly lit operating table fifteen feet below, where a nurse was scrubbing and shaving Meerm’s distended belly. The sim lay tense and trembling with IVs running into both arms. The hovering dark-skinned anesthetist, who Betsy referred to as Madhuri, was ready to put her under.

  The scrub nurse looked up and said, “Hey! Who’s the guy in the mask?”

  Zero leaned back out of sight. He’d replaced the hat and scarf with his usual ski mask.

  “A trusted friend,” Betsy said. “Don’t worry about him, Joanna. Just get our patient prepped.”

  Betsy had told him she’d chosen the amphitheater for its audio-visual system, and Zero thought that an inspired idea. They could still lose this war; maybe an A-V record would provide some insurance. The problem was how to get the system up and running.

  “There,” Patrick said, close at his side as he sighted along the top of the mounted camera. “That’s pointing in the general direction.”

  Zero turned and seated himself at the computer console. “Good. Now let’s see if we can get a picture.”

  “You know how to work this sort of rig?” Patrick said, leaning over his shoulder.

  “Not really, but it seems to be a dedicated system, and if the menu’s at all intuitive…”

  The menu formed on the screen and Zero groaned. It looked like a crossword puzzle with numbered feeds and rows of input from and output to and acronyms he didn’t understand. Suddenly the air in the balcony seemed too thin. He ripped off the mask and took a deep breath. He looked down at his trembling fingers poised over the keyboard. It wasn’t just the computer program, it was everything…the huge responsibility that he’d taken on over the past couple of years…he felt as if it were all crashing down on him at once. Everything he’d been living for hinged on what he and these good humans did here tonight.

  He took another breath and focused on the screen. He could handle this.

  A little trial and error, a lot of intuition…he could do it. He had to do
it.

  Meerm so ver fraid. Not fraid needle. Fraid this place. And fraid hurt. Hurt so bad.

  “Okay now, Meerm,” say mask lady. Nice lady. “I’m going to make the hurt go away.”

  Meerm feel warm, feel hurt go. This ver nice lady.

  “I’m going to put you to sleep now, Meerm,” lady say. “And when you wake up, you’ll have a baby. Won’t that be nice?”

  Yes. Baby. Meerm baby. So nice. Meerm want hold, want kiss. Make baby safe. Hold-hold-hold and nev let go.

  Sleepy now, but not stop think baby…Meerm baby…Meerm ver own baby…happy Meerm…

  23

  “Stop!” Luca shouted. “Pull over right now!”

  Lowery slammed on the brakes. As the Jeep screeched to an unexpected halt, the two following vehicles skidded past and swerved to stops ahead.

  “Where’s the blower?” Luca shouted. “Give me the fucking blower!”

  “Here,” Lowery said, slapping the PCA into his palm. “What’s the matter?”

  “I am so stupid,” Luca said, punching in 4-1-1. “So fucking stupid!”

  “Are you going to tell me—?”

  “Cannon’s answering service! They’ll know where she is!”

  He got the number from information, punched it in, and asked for Dr. Cannon.

  “Dr. Cannon’s not available,” a woman’s voice told him. “Dr. Moss is covering.”

  Shit! “I really need to speak to Elizabeth personally. This is her brother and we’ve got a family emergency that needs her immediate attention.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. I’ll try her house and—”

  “I’ve already called and she doesn’t answer.”

  “Maybe she’s at the hospital. I can page her if you wish.”

  “Would you? That would be wonderful.”

  Luca waited on hold, feeling the time drag by, and then the operator was back on.