Bloodshot (25 page)

“Like I didn’t figure that out.”

“I just wanted to make it clear that I didn’t mug any innocent bystander.” He grabbed his own ass and then, with a victorious flourish, produced a very slim wallet. It was not the world’s most promising wallet. It almost looked like a pair of leather credit cards bound together, which led me to guess what it actually was. An ID folder.

I sidled up to him, sneaking in close to look around his arm and over his shoulder. “What does it say?”

“It says I mugged Peter Desarme.” He brandished the badge so I could see it in all its glory. “CIA agent.”

“Wait. What?”

“That’s what it says,” he noted redundantly.

He let me swipe it out of his hand. I examined it up close and personal. It looked real. “I don’t get it.”

“What’s not to get?”

“I figured these were army guys. Or, high-ranking, suit-wearing … I don’t know. Men in Black. In my head I’d been calling them feebs. But CIA? That’s really out of left field.”

“There’s no good reason men in black can’t be CIA agents. And besides, it’s not
that
crazy,” he objected. “Project Bloodshot was closed. Maybe it was reopened as a civilian operation.”

“How do you know it’s closed? I mean how do you
really
know? We’re talking about the
military
. It’s a whole organization of left hands dedicated to not knowing what the right hands are doing.”

“You may be right, but I bet you’re not. Some asshole with money might’ve picked up where the army left off. It happens sometimes.”

“You can’t be serious.”

He said, “Think about it—all that money and research and effort, all dumped into something that winds up blacked out and shredded. It happens all the time. And every now and again, a private corporation will take an interest, and take another stab at it. They use whatever’s left of the military documentation to seed the new experiments, picking up where they left off. Sometimes they even look up the former researchers, engineers, and scientists. Anyone who took part in it.”

“Then where does the CIA come into it? Doesn’t the very presence of CIA operatives mean it’s not a civilian operation?
Or …” I reconsidered my words. “Or at least that it’s a different
kind
of official operation?”

“Nah,” he said. “CIA guys are wild cards. They’re allowed to freelance, and a lot of them do.”

“Like mercenaries?” I asked.

“More or less. People are always talking about setting guidelines for what they can and can’t do, but nobody ever does. There’s plenty of … let’s say ‘conflict of interest’ going on where they’re concerned. But …” He shrugged. “There’s no regulation. So they moonlight wherever the money’s good.”

“Huh.” I handed the ID back to him, but only after noting for the record that Adrian deJesus and Peter Desarme bore no resemblance whatsoever, and we wouldn’t have any luck repurposing the official cards. “You learn something new every day.”

He said, “Yeah. I’m learning a bunch of new things today, for example.” Then he dropped his hands and slapped the wallet onto the counter. His gaze went back and forth between the floor and the scotch glass, respectively. Quietly he asked, “So let me see if I can learn one more thing, while we’re talking. Did you know my sister? Is there any chance of that?”

“No,” I said. “But there’s a chance my client did. They were in the same program, anyway. Can you tell me a little about her? Something I can use to refresh his memory?” Or satisfy my own curiosity, as the case may be.

He sighed. “Isabelle ran away from home to go live with a boyfriend—a useless piece of shit she’d met someplace downtown. Our parents wouldn’t have it; they threw her out.”

“Can you throw somebody out who’s already moved out?”

“It was the principle of the thing,” he said. He tipped his finger at the glass and asked, “A little more? If you don’t mind.”

I didn’t mind. It was expensive scotch, but I never drank much
of it anyway. I think that the bottle was a gift from Horace, received ages previously. Adrian was welcome to it—and all the more so if it loosened his tongue.

While he sipped, I asked, “She was your younger sister, I assume? Did you try to talk her out of it? Being big brother, and all?”

“Of course I tried. But she wouldn’t hear it, and I was already overseas by then—”

“Military,” I said, remembering what the PDF had said about the thief.

“Navy SEAL,” he specified. “I was wrapping up training far enough away from here that there was nothing I could do about it. Anyway, she started to dabble in drugs, and then the boyfriend died or disappeared—I’m not sure which. She tried to come home but our mother wasn’t having it. Momma gave Bella the line about how if she wanted to go be an adult, she could stay out there and be an adult.”

“Ouch. What’d she do then?” I was going for the sympathy play, and it wasn’t entirely a ploy. I honestly wanted to know about his sister—how she’d been turned, how she’d been captured, and how she’d died.

“Lived on the streets, I guess. Bounced in and out of shelters.”

“Dropped out of school?”

He nodded.

Well, that was one more paper trail I wouldn’t bother chasing.

“By the time I had leave to come home, the household was a war zone between my mother and my father. And Isabelle was nowhere to be found.”

“Your mother wanted her to stay gone, and your father wanted her to come home, is that right?”

“Yes.” His eyes narrowed, watering with exhaustion or very old pain. “How did you know?”

“I told you, I went there and talked to them, remember? Your dad gave me your stage name. Your mom acted like she wanted to burn my face with a road flare.”

“That’s them.” He waved one hand carelessly, then froze it in midair. His body language and his tone changed abruptly, to something sober and tense. “You spoke to them?”

“I told you I—”

“You went to visit them? At their house?”

“Yes,” I told him, not sure where he was headed with this line of interrogation, but sensing that I wouldn’t like the destination even a little bit. “But I told you that
before.
”

“I wasn’t thinking. We …” He dropped the glass and it stayed upright, but sloshed. “We have to go back there. What if you led the agents right to them?”

I held up my hands in a gesture that wouldn’t have stopped an aggressive poodle, much less a frantic, tipsy drag queen. “Don’t, Adrian. Don’t go there, not like this. Your parents aren’t in hiding, are they? I was inside their house, yes,” I confessed, and then I grasped at straws. “And it looked to me like they’d been there for years. The government doesn’t want your parents. It could’ve had them at any time—”

“Okay. Okay, yes. You’re right,” he said, and it was pitifully apparent that he was leaning on my words, trying to calm himself down. Hey, I know it when I see it. “You’re right, they’ve been there since before I was born. Nobody wants anything from them. Everybody knows they don’t know anything … except, my father gave you my stage name …”

“Well, he sort of scribbled it—”

“He told you where to find me. If he told you, he could’ve told anybody!”

“Goddammit, Adrian, settle down. He didn’t tell just anybody,
he told
me
—and I was doing a very convincing cop impression, I’ll have you know.”

He glowered at me and then he growled, “You mean, you showed up in an official-looking car, in a suit?”

Oh. I got it. “Well, it wasn’t … it wasn’t a
black
suit, and it wasn’t a
black
car. And I had a badge …” I looked back down at Peter Desarme’s clothes on Adrian’s back, and his badge on my kitchen counter, and I figured he, too, would’ve likely had an official-looking car to complete the package.

“You don’t understand. My parents, they … They aren’t very trusting of authority, but they fear it and they’ll cave to it, if it comes on hard enough. Please, for the love of God, tell me you did not lead anybody to my parents.”

“I couldn’t have,” I hoped, and I prayed. “Listen, I was
not
being followed. I’m smarter than that, and more careful than that. If I weren’t, I never would’ve survived this long.”

He was tapping his foot and tapping his wrist on the edge of the counter, trying to come to some kind of decision. “You would’ve noticed someone tailing you in a car.”

“That’s what I’m telling you, yes.”

“But what if you were being followed some other way? Something less obvious?”

“Like what?” I wanted to know, but a word bubbled to the surface of my attention, and I didn’t like it. “Like with some kind of … I don’t know. Surveillance system.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” he mused, poking at the wallet. “Something like a satellite.”

“A satellite?” My blood went colder than my drink. “That’s not possible.”

But Adrian didn’t say anything to help slow the ramp-up of my paranoid frenzy. “The technology wasn’t really live yet when I
was still in the service, but you could see it coming. Satellites were the next thing that would save us—we’d be watching our enemies from space, in high definition.”

“But … but can they do that
now
?” I demanded. “That’s something that happens on TV, and in movies once in a while. But in real life?
Bullshit
. I call bullshit.”

“Call it what you want. The gear these guys were wearing—it was advanced stuff. Those earpieces.” He made a fiddly motion, as if he were holding one up. “Those microphones. A quarter the size of what we were using a decade ago.”

The only satellites I knew about that didn’t carry TV signals fed straight to the Internet, like Google Earth … and that was just a snapshot, right? Satellites—which is to say, powerful cameras out in orbit—only give you an image. They don’t give you live video feeds.

Unless I was wrong. Unless there were other kinds of satellites.

I racked my brain, trying to dredge up memories of CNN coverage or other news organizations showing footage from Iraq or Afghanistan. Some of those military satellites were more advanced, weren’t they?

Whoo
boy
. The implications made my head spin. I just might have stumbled across some whole new and exciting thing to be terrified of. I tried to catch up and calm down. I said, “Sure, fine. Tiny trackers, the size of pocket change, okay. But that’s just radio contact, old-fashioned and reliable, right?”

“Probably,” he acknowledged.

And then he started taking off his clothes.

“Not that I’m complaining, but what the hell are you doing?”

“Peter Desarme might’ve had a tracker on him. It could be anywhere, sewn into a seam or clipped into a pocket,” he said as he kicked the pants off—revealing the hilarity-inducing fact that he was still wearing the silver spangled bikini in which he’d performed
earlier. Apparently this didn’t call for any comment on his part, and if he noticed I was looking, he didn’t bring it up. “Here,” he said, chucking the pants at me. “Feel around all the seams, turn the pockets inside out. Do you have a washer or dryer here?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, we’re going to have to run all this stuff through them, on the highest heat settings.”

“Even if we don’t find anything?” I took the pants and began pinching around the bottom hem, feeling for … I didn’t know what, exactly.

“
Especially
if we don’t find anything. If we find something, we can rip it out and toss it into the microwave. If we don’t, and we want to play it safe, we’ll have to destroy the potential threat somehow or another. A good hot-water wash and an hour in the dryer ought to do it.”

“I still don’t know what I’m feeling for.”

“Anything that doesn’t belong. Something the size of a shirt button, or maybe as big as a dime. Just … keep looking.” He was down to the spangled britches, and I was dying for him to turn around. Yes, I was still wondering about the tuck. It couldn’t be very comfortable, could it?

“Do you, uh,” I broached. “Want a robe or something?”

“If you’ve got one,” he said without looking up or standing up.

I was about to tell him he could go grab one off the back of the bathroom door, thereby forcing him to get up off the floor and walk away from me … but that felt like too much calculation even for me. So instead I wandered over there and got it for him, and tossed it on his head.

He frowned at me, removed it from his skull, and slipped his arms into it. The fit was kind of tight around his shoulders, but oh well. I’m no burly man-shaped thing, and I didn’t have any stray clothing that would fit such a body. He’d have to make do.

Without a word of thanks he tossed me the shirt he’d been wearing, a white button-up. “Give this a once-over, in case I missed anything. And give me those pants back.”

We were double-checking each other. I got it.

I was happy to accommodate him because I didn’t seriously think there was any kind of signaling device inside the clothing. Usually I can sense that stuff. I can’t smell it exactly, though there is a faint metallic, ozone-y odor that goes along with such things. It’s just a sense I get when I’m around cell phones, televisions, cameras, and the like. It might have something to do with my psychic sense, like it’s tapping that same electromagnetic whatever-the-heck. I don’t know. But I definitely wasn’t getting any vibe off the duds.

Far be it from me to discourage anyone’s paranoia, though.

We ended up sitting together on the floor, going over everything with a figurative fine-tooth comb before throwing everything in the wash to rinse out the very last of our phobias.

Following this act of domesticity, we adjourned once more to the kitchen bar and resumed drinking. We also resumed our original topic, because one thing had stuck in the back of my head.

“Hey, when was the last time you even talked to your parents?” I asked. “I got the distinct impression you weren’t in touch.” Maybe we weren’t friends enough to pry about such matters, but we were well past coddling each other’s feelings. Already.

“Years ago. They were finished with me when they found the feather boa in the back of my closet while I was overseas for the last time. But I try to look in on them once in a while. I want to make sure they’re all right, or …” If he had anything left to say on the subject, he kept it to himself. “Come to think of it, I really
do
have to go check on them.”