Prodigal (41 page)

“That still leaves Rapa Nui.”

“Yes,” Bostic drew out, getting up from his chair. He walked across his office, arms clasped behind his back, surveying a panorama of Manhattan that erased the farthest horizon. The city, its towers bathed in stratospheric light, was his for the taking—if only he made the right moves. “How determined is she to carry out this plan of hers?”

“It’s already happening,” Tiernan said. “Even Novak couldn’t talk her out of it.”

“Then perhaps we should let Major Prism have her way.”

Even with his back turned, Bostic could sense the lieutenant scowling at him.

“You’re just going to
let
her go?”

“In a manner of speaking,” the counselor replied, turning around. “How soon can you put together your own insertion team?”

“By that, I take it you mean off the books.”

Bostic said nothing.

“I know some people,” the lieutenant said. “But it won’t be cheap.”

“Mercenaries never are.”

Tiernan chafed at the implication, rising from his chair. For a moment, Bostic thought that the man was girding for a fight—a reaction that smacked of hypocrisy in the counselor’s view. Tiernan was himself a rented soldier, his uniform little more than a disguise. That he took such offense forced Bostic to reassess him.

Perhaps he means more than he’s letting on,
Bostic thought.
Is that what this is about, Lieutenant? Split loyalties?

Or is it something else?

Bostic made his living off reading people’s motives and intentions—and with Tiernan, the conflicted emotions beneath the surface left no room for doubt.

It’s Lea.

The irony was delicious.

“Money is no object,” the counselor assured him. “You’ll get whatever you need.”

Tiernan cooled off, collecting the remains of his pride.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said, then turned to leave. Bostic allowed him to get all the way to the door before calling him back, unable to resist temptation.

“How was she anyway?”

Tiernan stopped. He leered over his shoulder at Bostic.

“Spectacular, I bet,” the counselor pressed. “The passionate ones always are. I can’t say I blame you, Lieutenant. Lea has a way of getting under a man’s skin.”

Bostic waited on his reaction, hoping to force a display of weakness—or at the very least, a dose of outrage and frustration. Tiernan, however, retained an outward calm.

“Yeah, she does,” he answered, then slipped in like the point of a dagger: “Not that you’ll ever find out.”

The door clicked shut behind him, and Tiernan was gone.

Andrew Talbot looked like hell. Or, more precisely, he might have been in hell, surrounded as he was by his nanopsychologists. While they prattled on and on about the theoretical implications of Lyssa’s condition, debating science and philosophy as if they were one and the same, Talbot made no pretense of hiding his boredom, releasing a yawn loud enough to drown out the conversations around him. Scratching his head afterward, he observed the silence that descended and took in the stunned countenance of his colleagues.

“I’m sorry,” he told them, “you were saying?”

They resumed the deliberations with even greater enthusiasm. As she watched from the entrance to the lab, Lea had to laugh—not a very joyous sound, but one Talbot seized upon the moment he heard it. Seeing her there, he wrapped his hands around his throat while his eyes rolled back. Clearly, he wanted someone to put him out of his misery.

All too willing to help, Lea motioned him over.

Talbot bounded away from the crowd, which barely noticed his departure. Taking Lea’s hands into his own, he drew her into a friendly but enthusiastic kiss on the cheek. “I was beginning to wonder if there was a God,” he said with great relief, “and now here you are to rebuke my heresy. Thank you.”

“Anytime,” she said. “Still know how to work a room, I see.”

“
Those
cafflers?” Talbot waved them off dismissively. “They’ll be fine. I figure they’ll just keep talking until someone awards them a grant. You wouldn’t happen to be in a generous mood, would you?”

“More than you might expect.”

Talbot raised an eyebrow. “Sounds mysterious.”

“My middle name,” Lea said, taking her voice down a notch. “We need to talk, Drew.”

His lips peeled back into an impish grin.

“I was hoping you’d say that. Give me one minute.”

Talbot quickly broke up the group, sending them off with the promise of a full tour of the place if they behaved themselves. The squabbling continued as the guards ushered them out, with Talbot helping every step of the way. He gave the last one a shove for good measure.

“If you please,” he said.

Lea followed Talbot into his office, a cramped little cubicle stacked with obscure texts and mounds of paperwork, a quaint throwback to a predigital age when knowledge amounted to more than a collection of stray electrons. Most of the material was classified—so highly that taking it off premises was a capital offense—but that was classic Talbot, carving out a spot for them amid a pile of state secrets.

“Before we go any further,” he said, angling himself in behind his desk, “I’ll have you know that any sort of treasonous activities you might have in mind have no place here. For that, you’ll have to take me to the pub down the street.”

“Always knew I could count on you, Drew,” Lea replied, reaching into her uniform jacket and pulling out an integrator. She slid it across the desk toward him. “That’s why I picked you for this.”

Talbot glanced down at the device, hesitant to touch it.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“The keys to the kingdom.”

His brows came together in concern.

“I have one more mission,” Lea explained. “There’s a pretty good chance something might happen to me. If it comes down to that, I need someone I can trust to carry on my work here.” After a pause, she added, “You’re the man for the job, Drew.”

Talbot considered her request. Eventually, he took the integrator into his hands—treating the thing like a bomb that might go off in his face. Lea knew she was asking him to change his life, something that could easily put him on the wrong side of the law.

Of course, Talbot never had much respect for the law in the first place.

His thumb brushed against the touch pad, bringing the device to life. Light from the tiny screen illuminated his features, pinpoint reflections in his eyes. Talbot studied the text that appeared, inspired by a glimmer of recognition.

“Is this what I think it is?”

Lea nodded.

“Access codes,” she said, “protocols, the whole works—everything you need to deal with Lyssa. The routines are all buried deep enough so that nobody will ever find them.”

He turned the integrator off.

“You’ve got balls, girl. I’ll give you that.”

“Does that mean you’re in?”

He tossed the integrator into the air, then slipped it into his own pocket. “Why not? I always wanted to stir up some trouble.”

“You’ll get your chance,” Lea assured him. She stood, offering Talbot her hand—he would need it where they were going. “Right now, there’s something you should see.”

Again he seemed unsure.

“It’s what you’ve wanted,” Lea said. “What you’ve earned.”

Talbot understood.

Together, the two of them walked across the empty lab. It was a short distance, but when they arrived at the airlock it felt as if they had gone halfway around the world. Lea kept her friend close the entire way, his excitement a tangible presence between them. As she punched in the entry code, it seemed as though Talbot would jump right out of his skin—but he remained outwardly steadfast, ever the professional.

The airlock hissed, its cylindrical door rolling aside.

And Talbot entered the Tank for the first time.

Lea allowed him to go ahead of her, to assimilate the environment in his own way. Wave after wave of bionucleic energy turned the air to a virtual liquid, forcing Talbot to push his way through—but Lea kept watch on his back, ready to lead him out if he couldn’t take it. To her amazement he never faltered. Seeing her emerge from all those sessions in the Tank must have prepared him for the worst.

And it had never been this bad.

Explosions of pseudolight revealed the small chamber in stroboscopic glimpses—bits and pieces of a violent frenzy, set to a chorus of dissonant voices. A maelstrom churned behind the glass of the Tank, random shapes and colors colliding with one another in vicious combat, a duel between immortals. Lea stared into the swirling patterns in a vain attempt at recognition.

Talbot raised a hand up to shield his eyes, shouting above all the noise.

“Is this Lyssa?”

“Part of her,” Lea told him. “She’s at war.”

“With what?”

Lea walked past him, to the glass wall, her reflection diminishing to a mere silhouette. Human faces stretched to inhuman proportions leaped out at her from within. She searched for Cray among them, but he wasn’t there. The ongoing battle, however, proved otherwise.

“With another,” Lea said, turning back toward Talbot. “His name is Vortex.”

The touch panel seared Nathan Straka’s fingertips, a crop of electrodes frozen to his temples. He checked the temperature in the computer core, but the status readout came back normal—a flat 5.5 degrees Celsius, no variation since he had sealed himself inside. It only
felt
colder, as if the embedded crawler was working his subconscious.

“Come on,” he whispered, coaxing the miniscule bits of data as they coalesced on the interface. “Bring it on home.”

Nathan had plugged himself back in the moment he and Farina parted, at the tail end of an active jack he started more than a day ago. The latency of the transmission left him wasted, strung out on an open tether while he waited the eighteen light-minutes to get a response from his last query. The experience was like holding his breath, the connected parts of his mind floating in a state of limbo behind
Almacantar
’s firewall—running a gauntlet, with the crawler on one side and a lethal dose of cosmic radiation on the other. He still wasn’t sure what he expected to find, but right now it was the only thing he knew how to do.

Find me proof.

The captain’s words still echoed in Nathan’s memory. They put the whip to his efforts, driving him to push a little more even as his synapses begged relief. The possible evidence buried in the trickle of communications between Directorate Command and Special Services existed only as an article of Nathan’s faith. He believed it because his instincts told him so—and because he needed to believe that there was
another
reason behind Gregory Masir’s death. Anything less…

Would mean you’re crazy,
Nathan finished.
And if you’re crazy, then the doc was too—and all the rest of us are headed in the same direction.

He simply would not accept that.

The panel beeped at him when it completed the download. Nathan dissolved himself out of the interface, unplugging his electrodes from the unit while his body shivered. Even though he wore a thermal suit, the cold bit right down to his skin. He blew into his fingers to warm them up, then transferred all the jacked data directly to one of the core’s old crystal media slots. After his experience with the NavCon logs, this time he made sure that everything stayed clear of the local system—a precaution bordering on overkill, but Nathan was taking no chances. Not after sticking his head in the meat grinder for that long.

He reached for the media card, his stiff fingers barely registering touch. He meant to pluck it out and read the transcripts in his quarters while pouring coffee down his throat. But curiosity demanded that he take a look
now
—and he was in no condition to resist. Routing the feed to the main display, he settled back and watched the information displace the frigid air in front of him.

Most of it was text, which he searched using algorithms that took into account the special code phrases used for interagency communications. Intelligence personnel practically spoke their own language, often talking around a subject instead of addressing it directly—the better to deny involvement later if necessary. Special Services kept meticulous records for the same reason, which meant that any references to
Almacantar
and her mission would be in here somewhere.