Jade Sky (21 page)

Jeff looked around the dark room with wide eyes. Matt had taken out the phone, and the nondescript bed and end-table would give him no clues. "Where am I?"

Matt snorted. "Really?"

Jeff took a few deep breaths, then met Matt's bland stare. "Look, it wasn't personal. I was just following orders—"

Matt held up a hand, squeezing his eyes shut against the urge to tear Jeff's head from his shoulders. This wasn't the whispers, just good honest rage. He opened them, now on eye level. "ICAP agents tried to kill
my wife
. You're going to tell me why, or bless your heart, they’re going to take you out of this room in real small pieces."

Jeff winced against his bonds. "Do you have any painkillers?"

"I force-fed you four Advil to help the swelling, and you won't cut yourself if you don't struggle. You'll be fine, if you talk."

He spoke through gritted teeth. "Look, it wasn't me, alright? LaLonde sold you upstairs, Frahm ordered the hit, I rode along to make sure nothing happened to Monica."

Bonking him would have ensured Monica's death, but he let the obvious lie go for a moment. "Brian ordered me killed because I asked about a file?"

Jeff shrugged and winced against the pain. "I'm middle management. They don't tell me anything I don't need to know." The hint of a smirk twisted his lips.

Matt sighed. "Look, there's no reason to stall. Your clothes weren't bugged. We're hundreds of miles from your car and phone, and while you were unconscious the GPS transponder in your thigh developed a bad case of very high voltage."

Jeff's eyes widened at this last piece of information. He tried to look down, to see the burn mark.

"There ain't no cavalry coming."

For the first time, desperation crept into Jeff's eyes. He licked his lips, cleared his throat, looked around the room. He swallowed, then met Matt's gaze, smirk in full-force. "Let's get real here, Matt. What are you going to do, torture me? I know your psych profile. You're capable of violence, incredible violence, but not torture. You're in deep shit here, and I might be your only friend at ICAP. So what's this going to be?"

Matt met his gaze. Matt's psych profile literally sat in a folder in Jeff's office, and they both knew that Matt didn't have it in him to torture someone for information. Matt stood. "You got me pegged on that score, Jeff." He walked to the bedroom door. "I don't have it in me to torture a person." He knocked.

Garrett Johnson walked in, his massive frame followed by Akash and Blossom. Akash set a silver briefcase on the bed and popped the clasps.

Jeff frowned as his gaze darted from face to face. "Aw, guys, you don't want to get messed up with this. This is between Matt and—"

Matt grabbed his jaw and turned him so that they looked eye to eye. "Hey, you asked what this was going to be, so shut up and listen to the answer." Akash pulled an autoinjector out of the case and loaded in a phial of clear blue fluid. Matt took it from him and pointed it at Jeff. "This is infrared retinal enhancements. I picked it because of all the Gerstner Augmentations available to ICAP agents, it's one of the least likely to bonk you. Unless Dawkins was telling the truth, of course. That'd mean that you'd be looking at 'when,' not 'if.'" He looked at Akash. "Rastogi, would you mind? The non-broken fingers, please."

Akash untwisted the bailing wire on Jeff's right wrist, grabbed his fingers and twisted, presenting the inside of Jeff's elbow to Matt. Dark purple bruises marked where Matt had squeezed to get him to drop the gun. Matt tapped the vein with his fingers, then placed the needle against Jeff's skin.

"Wait!" Jeff's desperate eyes skittered across the needle, then locked on Matt's.

Matt hesitated. "The ICAP agents that showed up at my house were trying to bonk me on purpose, so they could put me down after I killed Mon and the Walkers and God knows who else. I showed these guys the weapons."

"I didn't order the hit! I didn't! But Frahm sent me in on the cleanup when they realized you weren't neutralized. They briefed me en route, too late to stop anything."

"Why?"

"They think Dawkins compromised you."

Blossom knelt next to him. "Who's 'they'?"

"Upper management. I got my orders through standard chain of command, through Director Frahm's office. I had nothing to do with trying to kill you."

Blossom rolled her eyes up to Matt. "First part is true. Last is a lie."

Matt raised an eyebrow. "How do you know?"

"Flash of worry on his face, too fast to see without computers. Unless you're trained. Or pumped up with Gerstner Augs."

Matt looked back at Jeff. "Okay, so why is ICAP trying to kill me?"

Jeff's smirk disappeared in a snarl. "Because Dawkins is trying to destroy us, and you're buying his lies. You've been compromised, and a rogue agent is way too dangerous to let live."

Jeff flinched as Akash's lips brushed his ear. "Which parts are lies?"

"All of them."

Blossom shook her head.

"Dammit, Tsuji," Jeff said. "I'm telling the truth!"

Matt jammed the needle into his arm, and Jeff writhed.

"Jesus, no, please don't do this." He looked at Matt with tear-filled eyes. "Please."

"Three," Matt said.

"Look, we can make a deal—"

"Two." He put his thumb on the green button on the back of the injector.

"Okay! Okay! Just take it out!"

Jeff gasped in relief as Matt pulled it out. A bead of blood formed on his skin—Jeff's eyes didn't leave it.

"Last chance, Jeff. Start talking. And if Blossom thinks you're lying, even once, you're going to be able to see heat all of a sudden."

Jeff shuddered, and then words flowed out of him in a rush. "He's right. Dawkins is right. ICAP controls the world supply of Gerstner carbon. Jade, too. They've got her chained up in a lab in D.C."

Matt exchanged confused looks with his team.

"Who's 'her'?"

Jeff's eyes flicked to Blossom, then Matt. "The source. Gerstner. She's some crazy scientist or something from Germany."

Garrett snorted. "They chained up a scientist, and she still works for them?"

Jeff’s eyes widened at the needle. "I don't know. It's something like that."

Blossom stepped behind Jeff, next to Akash, and signed,
He's holding back something
.
But ask him about the insanity first.

Matt shook his head. "Don't add up, Jeff. Jade's been a problem pushing ten years, and she's the only one who can make it?" Blossom's nostrils flared and she signed,
Insanity?
Matt ignored her for the moment. "What is this, Breaking Bad? It’s chemistry. Like following a recipe. They could figure that out in a decade just by watching her work."

"Not a decade. A lot longer. Hitler's goons used her for their
Ű
bermensch
program in the forties."

Garrett snorted again. "She'd have to be a hundred years old. Older."

Jeff nodded. "They found her in that bunker in Dresden, strapped to a gurney with metal banding. She was . . . old then, too."

"Bullshit," Matt said, snatching up the autoinjector.

"It's true!" Jeff's stared in horror at the needle. "I swear on my life it's true!"

Matt glanced at Blossom, who signed, "true." He knelt so that he was at eye level with Jeff, resting the injector on his knee. "And what about the rest of it?"

"Rest of what?"

Akash rolled his eyes, still bending Jeff's hand behind his back, exposing his vein.

Matt patted the autoinjector. "Why you're so afraid of this. It's just IR vision." He stroked the needle down Jeff's arm, eliciting a horrified shudder. "There is no safe dosage, is there?" He ignored Blossom's satisfied, sarcastic grin.

Jeff squeezed his eyes shut and nodded.

"You son of a bitch," Garrett said, his hands balling into fists. Matt stopped him with an upraised hand.

"So you expect us to believe that ICAP created and distributed GS technology, continues to supply the whole world with it, and spends hundreds of billions of dollars on super-soldiers to combat their own supply who they know are going to go insane?"

Jeff nodded again, his eyes still shut. "They didn’t mean for it to get out, but they’re not willing to stop just because it did. So you're there to curb the problem as much as possible. That's everything, I swear." He continued in the barest of whispers. "You're going to kill me, aren't you?"

The whispers danced through Matt, urging him to do it. He opened his mouth to ask "why?" when Akash cut him off. "How do we cure it?"

Jeff licked his lips. "You don't. There's no cure."

Blossom scowled. "Lying."

Jeff shrieked as the needle entered his arm, struggling against the wire that bound him to the chair. "NononononoNO—" Matt hit the plunger. The injector emptied with a hiss, and Jeff's protest changed to a mindless wail.

Garrett stepped forward and slapped him hard enough to wrench his head to the side. "Shut the fuck up." He backhanded him the other way, and Jeff stopped screaming, his face glowing red from the force of the strikes.

Matt put his fingertips on Garrett's chest and backed him up a couple of feet, glaring daggers, then turned and looked at Jeff, who hung his head. Matt lifted his chin with a finger, and he didn't protest. "You want to go nuts, Jeff? Kill your family, innocent people, until monsters like us put you down?" He gestured at the case, and Akash loaded up a dose labeled Late-Second Precognitive Therapy. Only one in ten thousand applicants cleared for augmentation, and less than five percent of them cleared for precog.

Jeff swallowed, tears springing to his eyes. "No. You can't. It's not fair."

He took the autoinjector from Akash and held it in front of Jeff’s face. "You were going to bonk me on purpose, let me kill my wife, kill my neighbors, until you put me down like a rabid dog. If it's anything, it's fair." He smiled a smile he didn't feel. "But I'm not a rabid dog. I'm a man, and a better man than you. So tell us what you know, and this goes back in the case."

Jeff squeezed his eyes shut. "You're going to think I'm lying."

Matt ran his tongue over his teeth. "Try me."

"Gerstner isn't human."

Garrett interrupted him. "So she's an alien?"

Matt glared him into quiet. "Go on."

"We're not sure what she is, but she was an old woman when the bombs buried her under the rubble of Dresden. American operatives uncovered the bunker in the late fifties, and she was still there, the only thing still alive, buried under rock for almost fifteen years, with nothing to eat, nothing to drink. They found her half-loaded into the incinerator, laughing." Matt exchanged glances with Blossom. "She claims she's a Nephilim."

Blossom raised an eyebrow. "What is nay-flim?"

Jeff closed his eyes, then opened them. "A fallen angel."

Matt glared at Jeff. "That's ridiculous."

Jeff shrugged against his bonds. "I didn't say it was true. I said it's what she claims. What we know is that she's very old, that Hitler's
Deutsche Physik
program victimized her until a bomb sealed them all in to die, that everyone in that bunker killed each other or themselves, that she was rescued by the group that eventually became ICAP, and that Gerstner Augmentations stop working when you unplug her from the machine."

Akash let go of Jeff's arm and stepped around where they could see each other. "I don't get it. Why not just unplug her?"

Garrett frowned. "Better question: How do you know all this?"

Jeff looked at each of them in turn but answered Garrett first. "Because my grandfather told me."

Blossom frowned. "And your grandfather is who?"

"One of the historians who went with Brian Frahm into the bunker."

Matt grunted at the impossibility. "Excuse me?"

Jeff sighed. "I think you know Frahm’s family history. How he and I got involved with ICAP."

"Sure," Matt said.

"I don't," Blossom said.

He sighed again. "Our grandfathers served in the Special Activities Division of the CIA, just grunts. His group, under Lieutenant-Colonel Petrie, uncovered the bunker under Dresden. Before he passed, Gramps told me the truth of it." He looked past Matt, through him, quoting. "'The floors were slick with long-rotted bodies in SS uniforms. Until they breached the doors there wasn't enough oxygen for full decomposition, and almost all of them were suicides. The smell was unbelievable. They found her, this emaciated, skeletal body strapped to a gurney with spring steel, half-loaded into an incinerator, the walls everywhere stained with old blood. They helped carry her out, to winch her up the stairs to the dark sky waiting above, and the whole time she laughed a wheezing, inhuman laugh, too dry to come from living lungs.'"

His eyes focused on Matt. "Only that's not true. It was my grandfather, but wasn't Frahm’s. It was Frahm."

"Bullshit," Garrett said.

Jeff's eyes flickered to Blossom and then back to Matt. "I lied, but not about that. Brian's real name is Kurt. Kurt Frahm was born on August seventeenth, nineteen-hundred-and-fourteen in Omaha, Nebraska, and uses Gerstner's power, whatever it is, to keep himself young."

Matt pulled the picture from his wallet, smoothed it out, and passed it to Garrett. "Gottschalk sent this to me a few days ago."

Garrett snatched it out of his hand, looked at it, showed it to Akash, and passed it to Blossom without comment.

"What about your grandfather?" Akash asked.

Jeff shook his head. "He didn’t want in. Said it wasn’t natural, that it went against God's plan. He wasn’t happy when I took the job. He told me the truth to keep me away, only it didn't work. I want to be like Frahm, young forever." He raised his head in a defiant sneer. "And so does everyone else."

I don't care about this story,
Blossom signed from behind him.
How do we stop it?

Matt wanted to hear the rest, but saw her point. "Alright, say that's true. How do we stop it?"

Jeff shrugged. "Like I said, she's in the machine. Take her out and it all stops."

"And Frahm dies," Akash said. "Instantly?"

Jeff sighed. "I don’t know. But it’s not just Frahm. The rest of upper management, and some bankers, and CEOs, and politicians. A lot of people with a lot of money don't want to die." His eyes dropped to the floor and he muttered, "I don't want to die."