Shadow Unit 15 (11 page)

SOMEONE HAS CUT THE VIDEO FEED FROM THE FARADAY CAGE, Leon types.

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT WORK, Hafs types back, and opens the heavy fire door.

The hall is silent. The lights burn grimly overhead. The guard who should be on duty at the end of the hall is missing, the desk empty. Hafidha wonders who was on shift today, and hopes whoever they were, they just ran.

She sidles down the hall, moving fast because she doesn't have a weapon. She can't clear rooms; she just has to cover the ground and get out of the line of fire as fast as possible. She has to assume that Partridge has a Taser, a gun. The Taser won't do much more that slow Hafidha down. Startle her. Sting her a little.

Bullets are no fun, even for a gamma.

The airlock door to the Burrow isn't locked. Somebody used an override key. Hafs glides it open and steps inside. She pauses behind the second door, also partially open, and listens.

"I'm not going to shoot you," Partridge says. "Because that would make a hole in the mesh. But I'm going to open the door and come inside, and I want you to know before I do that that I am armed."

Suze's voice answers, wary. "What happens then, Emily?"

"You need to be evacuated," says Partridge, sounding oh so reasonable. "Everyone has to leave the building."

Hafidha checks the seal on her gas mask.

"Okay," Suze says. "You're my guard."

"Right," says Partridge. "Just step back into the corner. Away from the door—"

Hafidha hears the pistol cocking. She doesn't wait another second. Suze is safe inside the burrow, safe for seconds more. Safe as long as the door stays closed.

She reaches out, wireless girl, and triggers the in-room pepper spray remotely, dosing everything outside of Suze's cage. She hears a scream, coughing. She kicks the door aside and charges in—

Right into the sights of Partridge's gun. Partridge stands, coughing, tears streaming down her face. Feet planted in a modified Weaver stance, hands braced on her gun. Barrel locked on Hafidha.

"You're the monster," Partridge says. "Doesn't the FBI do pepper spray training with its agents anymore?"

"Budget cuts," Hafidha says, voice muffled through the gas mask. "Stuff costs a mint. Look at what we've hit up the taxpayers for today alone."

"Get in the cage," Partridge says. She gestures with her head, not her pistol. More's the pity. And the room's big enough that Hafidha is at least twenty feet away. Advantage to the gun.

"Get in the cage?"

"You never should have gotten out of it. Monsters don't get better."

"I know about Ashley," Hafidha says. "I know somebody took her away from you."

"Don't—you!—dare."

"All right," Hafidha says. She takes a step closer to the door of the burrow. "See? I'm going. But the thing is, I think we're on the same side."

"Walk. Shut up."

"Somebody killed somebody I loved, too."

The gun levels. Partridge squints over the sights, her face glossy with tears and snot. "We are not the same."

"A car," Hafidha said. "A freak accident. Nobody to blame. It broke me, Emily." She waves around. "You know how long I spent in this room."

On the other side of the glass, Suze is watching. Waiting? Gauging. But what can she do from back there? And Partridge is still being very careful with that pistol. She backs away as Hafidha advances, keeping her space buffer. Keeping control.

Hafidha is halfway to the Burrow's double door. She has her shoulder to Partridge now. She stops and turns to her. "I saw conspiracies everywhere. I couldn't accept that sometimes awful things just happen. I had to have a reason, and then I had to find the person behind it. The person who made me suffer, and make them pay."

The hair on Haf's neck prickles. The hair on her arms rises, as of its own accord. She doesn't dare look at Suze, look away from Partridge.
Suze wouldn't hurt me
.

But she could. She might. She's a monster, too. Or the habitat of a monster, anyway.

But even if she would, how could it happen here? How could Suze call lightning inside a building, when she herself is contained inside a Faraday cage?

"Do you want to know what the funny thing was, Emily?"

"No," Emily says, but the muzzle of the gun droops slightly. She relaxes her grip to wipe her nose on the back of one hand.

"I think you do," says Hafidha. "The funny thing is that I was right. Somebody did kill my friend. The same somebody who—"

"NO!" Emily yells, and in the moment Hafidha sees she's overplayed her hand, or maybe this was one of those games that no hand could have won for her. Maybe Brady could have done better. Reyes.

Maybe not.

Emily raises the pistol. Levels it. Hafidha takes a breath and braces herself to run forward into the bullet, to keep going, To trust her superhuman body to take the shot and carry her onto Partridge anyway.

She hopes it won't be a head shot.

"I'm not like you!" Emily screams. "Ashley takes care of me!" And the bullet is coming, Hafidha knows it's coming, she can already feel her skin trying to crawl out of its way—

The room fills with smoke. With the scent of seared flesh. Hafidha blinks; she's on her ass against the glass wall of the burrow, and the gas mask has been knocked askew. Her eyes burn from leftover pepper spray. She has a memory of brilliant light, of booming sound.

She can't find Emily. No, there she is, sprawled on the—

Oh.

Outlets across the room are smoking, scorched black. Spitting tiny tongues of flame. A sprinkler kicks on.

Hafidha looks away from what was Emily Partridge. She heaves herself to her feet. Her ears ring. The room spins. She should go try CPR.

She turns over her shoulder and looks at Suze.

Suze stands near the inside of the glass, one hand pressed against it. The fine lines of the Faraday cage wires gleam golden against her palm.

"You could do that all along?" Hafidha asks stupidly. Her voice sounds tiny and distant.

"It's just an ionized pathway," Suze says. "It never had to run through me."

"Oh," says Hafidha. "You could have said something."

Suze smiles. It's not a happy one. "You were all very proud of your Faraday cage."

Ashton, VA, May 21, 2014

Tyler picks up on the first ring, jovial. "You're late for bike polo, man, we already started. Where are you?"

"Tyler," Dyson says, and jams the Nokia against his ear a little harder. "Tyler, I—"

"Wait," Tyler says. "No, not you, Dice, them. You sound...are you okay?"

The laughter and conversation on Tyler's end fades, gets farther away. Dice can hear the sea in his other ear, a roaring. "I'm sorry I'm late," Dyson says, and the sob breaks out of his throat. Sharp edges of gravel stab into his knees as he lands on them. The ambulance blanket falls away; the wind crawls up his back.

"Dice, it's okay," Tyler says. "I'm walking away from everyone. Signal's good. I can wait. Something happened. Are you still in Virginia?"

Dice lives in Arlington, but to Tyler and him, Virginia means Idlewood.

"Eddie..."

"Oh, fuck," Tyler says. "Dice, I am so sorry."

Dice, it's okay.

It's okay, big brother.

But Dice can't stop crying now that it's all come out.

"He'll come around. You said he was changing. I believe that."

Oh. "No. Tyler. He's dead."

"Holy shit."

If only Eddie was just mad at him. "He's— He died. I just told him, and then—" And then Hell rose up. "He died, to save my life. I'm alive and he's dead."

Tyler doesn't need to hear about what Natalie did. How brave she was. Not today. Not yet.

"What the hell happened out there. No, later. Are you okay? Are they taking you to the hospital?"

"Maybe. I...kinda feel weird."

"It's shock. You should tell someone there. There's an ambulance, right?"

There were four. And something that looked like a SWAT team. "Yeah. I—"

"Tell someone."

"Tyler..."

"I'm here."

"I don't wanna be alone," Dice says, and the wind wraps around his throat.

"I'm coming," Tyler says. "I'll be there."

*

Brady sits down next to Hafidha on the bench beside the rose garden. It creaks under his weight. They lean together in companionable silence for a few moments, watching as Falkner and Tan direct the rescue and recovery teams. Lau was last seen bringing Susanna a cup of tea and a phone so she could call her mother.

Brady tilts his head after a while and says, "If I were knitting gloves for Henry Clark, I'd close off the fingertips. Just saying."

Hafidha shrugs. "He likes to feel the warmth of the coffee cup. He's got mittens that go over them when he's cold. You complaining?"

Brady made a noise that might have been a laugh before it died. "Not today."

The silence resumes. Hafidha looks around, and doesn't see Chaz. She had given him three big hugs and sent him off to talk to Suze. She doesn't have the energy just now to deal with him.

Todd, though. Todd sounds restful. He wanders past, and Hafidha raises a hand to wave him over.

"Want a Creme Egg? Only slightly past the expiration date."

"They expire?" Todd accepts the candy. He holds the brightly wrapped oval in his hand as if it were an offering.

Brady settles and resettles himself, like he can't get comfortable. "Did anybody find Beale?"

Todd licks his lips. "Leon said he signed out a few minutes before the lights went out. Like he knew it was coming."

"Wait," Brady says. "What the hell?"

"It's him," Sol says. "That son of a bitch. It's him. Rupert Motherfucking Beale."

Hafidha feels a little dizzy. She stuffs a Creme Egg in her own mouth and bites it in half. Emily Partridge's last act of charity. "That's going to require some evidence, Duke."

Todd raises his hand, ticks off on fingers, some of which are partially missing. "He's close to the team, he's connected. He wrote a letter of recommendation for Jeff Simmons when Simmons applied to the FBI, thereby setting the stage for the Quantico outbreak. He once paid Guy Nadon as an informant—off the books, but I managed to trace a postal money order. He had a book signing in Portland around the time Viv Paliotto was killed. No credit card trace for plane tickets because his publisher footed the bill, but I got Homeland Security to pull the passenger records. Hope Mitchell met him at a book signing. I can place him in Leesburg for at least three hours before Ashley Campbell's accident."

"Circumstantial," Brady says, but not like he believes that means anything.

Todd nods. "And the kicker? He made a six-dollar purchase at a Starbucks less than two hundred meters from the intersection where Erik Holt was killed, not five minutes before."

"Fucking Starbucks," Hafidha says, feeling as if the earth under her feet has just dropped a meter and then caught her hard when she followed. "You know how many calories are in one of those things? And he's always drinking them. Always."

"Might keep even a gamma stocky, if he was crafty," Brady said.

"He's crafty," says Sol. "You know how he left the Chicago P.D.?"

"Medical," Brady says. "Line of duty, right? Other than that—" He shakes his head. Hafidha is already looking it up.

"Car accident," she says. "During a car chase. His partner was killed."

"Freak accident," Sol says. "So there's your gremlin. What if he can just... nudge probability? Get the result he wants when he wants it? Or get a better chance of it, anyway? He pushed you, and he pushed Emily Partridge. He made it happen, Hafidha. But that's not all."

Hafidha looks at the remaining half of the Creme Egg. It tastes, suddenly, like chalk and stale sugar. "Life is too short to eat crap chocolate," she says, and tosses it over her shoulder into the rosebushes. "Hit me."

Todd rubs his forehead with the palm of his hand. "Correlation is not causation. But I can put him on a bunch of plane flights that coincide with some of our ligature deaths. And I can put him in New Richmond, Wisconsin, of all the godforsaken places. Or at least, driving through it, because he had a signing tour eight years ago where he drove himself from Madison to St. Paul."

"Autumn," Brady says. "You're saying he taught that creep—"

"I'm saying it's possible."

"Holy balls," Brady says, and falls silent, staring. Hafidha realizes she's not worried, and that reminds her to reset the bugzapper. Which reminds her of Jason Saito's surprise and delight.

You're dead now,
she thinks.
Shut up.
But when did Saito ever listen to anybody?

"I think he was hunting gammas all over the country. He's the thing that eats
T. rexes
. Rupert Beale."

Todd turns around and sits on the bench on the other side of Hafidha. He rests his elbows on his knees and tilts his head back to stare up at the flawless sky. All around them, the sultry scent of roses hangs on the late spring air.

"I do not have enough ammunition for this," Hafidha says, and looks at the blood on a dead woman's green shoes.

Washington, D.C., May 21, 2014

Stephen Reyes lowered the phone from his ear and tapped the red "disconnect" icon on the screen. That, so clearly, was how the action played in his head. So he was surprised to find he'd missed the icon and hit the margin of the screen instead.

His hand was shaking.

Autumn's school was on speed dial, or he couldn't have put the call through. "This is Stephen Reyes," he said to the front-office secretary. "I'm calling about my daughter." His own voice was a stranger's in his ears—too high, quavering, an old man's voice.

"I'll check, Mr. Reyes," said the secretary—what was his name? Tom. It was Tom. "Do you need to speak to her?"

"Yes. Yes, please."

Reyes listened to hold music and tried to breathe slowly. He should have counted verses of the tune, because that would reassure him he hadn't waited as long as it felt. Every beat was a step in the march to something horrible—

"Hello,
Papi
." She had a child's voice, made with a child's throat and tongue and lips. But the intonations and cadences were adult. He would know those four syllables anywhere.

"Hello,
mi ardilla
. Have you had a good day at school?"

He could hear her shrug. "Today in art class we learned about the color wheel. Science is still best, though. The tadpoles have legs now."

"Good for them.
Mija
, I'm going to pick you up after school today."

"I can take the bus. The driver knows me." An offense against her dignity, to take away this big-girl privilege.

"I know. And I know nothing frightens you, but I'm not as brave. Something happened today that scared me, and I'd feel better if I brought you home myself."

Over the phone, a considering silence. "Ooo-kay," she sighed at last.

"Wait for me in the office if I'm not there right away."

"Are you all right,
Papi
?"

He didn't lie to her. So he made sure it was true before he said, "Yes, I am."

When he disconnected, the phone was skittery in his sweating hands.

Rupert Beale.
And, an inward scream,
You were my friend!

No, he'd never been that. He'd been a tapeworm. He'd fed on the team's work, then on their lives. How long ago had the parasite attached himself? How much had he damaged or turned to his benefit?

Or arranged from the beginning to suit himself.

His team—now Falkner's team. Had Beale taken a furtive hand in their recruitment, tipped probability to select his opponents?

Not Chaz, because Reyes had found (and immediately failed) him before Beale could have first manifested the anomaly. Todd, likewise, had been on a collision course with the WTF long before Beale had heard of anomalous crimes. Falkner, Lau, Worth all filtered in from Down the Hall, from the Behavioral Analysis Unit, and the fixed determination required to get them there would have made Beale's intervention unlikely. Brady'd had his contact with Andre, but by Reyes's rough estimate, that would also have been too long ago for Beale to have manipulated the situation.

Hafidha.

Beale had got to her eventually, and through her, the team. Losing Hafidha had destabilized them. But could Beale have wanted her with them all along, a switch he could flip?

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C., December 2003

"Doctor Stephen Reyes?" said a female voice from the receiver of the phone on his desk. It wasn't so much a question as a verification of a result.

"Speaking."

"My name is Doctor Madeleine Frost. I am an oncologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore."

She spoke with precision, as if to a child or a non-native speaker. Reyes prevented his virtual hackles from rising with a practiced effort. "What can I do for you?"

"I've read your white paper for law enforcement, first responders, and medical professionals."

The adrenaline rush made him glad he was sitting down. An oncologist. Not a bizarre crime, then—might she have seen some clinical sign of the anomaly, some causal link? But doctors weren't immune from believing their next-door neighbors were aliens. "I see," he replied cautiously.

"I doubt that." As if it were a statement of fact, and to be insulted by it would be unreasonable. "I am consulting on the case of a thirty-year-old woman of African-American descent with stage III Hodgkin's lymphoma." After a stately pause, Doctor Frost added, "Or perhaps I should say she
had
."

"She died, then."

"No, Doctor Reyes. She's cured."

"In remission."

"'Remission' is usually more accurate. In this case, I don't believe it is. The patient's tumors did not merely shrink but disappear. I examined the tissue from the second biopsy myself. It contained no viable Reed-Sternberg cells, and no inflammatory cells. I then viewed the results of her initial biopsy, and finally examined that biopsy sample myself. I was able to verify that the first tissue sample clearly displayed mixed-cellularity Hodgkin's lymphoma. The two biopsies might as well have been taken from two different patients."

Reyes waded as quickly as he could through Doctor Frost's medical terminology. "You're saying...her treatment was effective."

"She was one month into an ABVD chemotherapy regimen which was to have been eight months in length. I believe the cancer may have been destroyed by her own immune system."

Reyes was fairly sure that didn't happen. Not normally.

"Doctor Reyes, I understand from your white paper that your task force seeks out unusual individuals who have committed criminal acts. If so, this is outside your area of interest. But if I have read your paper correctly,
you
would be very interested indeed in locating such an individual under any circumstance."

"You're correct," he said at last. "Yes. Yes, I would."

"I'll start the process for clearing the release of her contact information to you."

Baltimore, MD, December 2003

The woman who walked in the door of the coffee shop was dressed for a colder winter than Maryland could offer. Her shoulders hunched high under a red wool bomber jacket with the collar turned up, and knitted legwarmers covered her legs above her knee-high lace-up boots. She'd tugged a bulky black watch cap down over her ears and almost to her eyebrows.

Reyes rose from his seat to catch her eye. "Ms. Gates?" he said as she approached.

"Yep. Doctor Reyes, I presume?"

He pulled out her chair. "The very same."

She grinned. "You learn that at Quantico?"

"At my mama's knee."

"Now there's a woman who thinks of the future. So. I've been up close and personal with a lot of people named Doctor in the last few months, but none of them from the FBI. Have I turned into a security risk?"

He heard the faint hard edge behind the flip words. "I don't know. Have you?"

It surprised her enough to make her think. She shrugged out of her jacket and pulled off her hat; a furious mass of black hair sprang up in its wake. It looked dry and harsh-textured.
From the chemo,
he guessed. With her outerwear off, he could see the line of her clavicle through her sweater, the sharp jut of her wrist bones, the tendons of her neck unpadded by fat.

"You know I was with the Secret Service?" she said. When he nodded, she went on. "One of the things my job was based on was the idea that the easier it is for someone to do something, the harder it is for them to keep from doing it."

Reyes turned it over in his head. "Do you believe that?"

"No. I don't think I do. People resist doing bad shit every day, when it would be just as easy—easier, even—to go ahead and do it. I think what we were really supposed to be doing was watching out for the people who would do bad shit no matter how hard it was." She ducked her head suddenly, which put her face out of view.

"You liked your job," Reyes said after a moment.

"You could say that."

The waiter stopped beside their table, and Gates lifted her chin again with a dazzling smile for him. "Hey, it's my new favorite person! I'd like a large cafe miel, a hot chocolate, and the lemon poppyseed cake."

"Don't hold back on my account," Reyes said mildly.

For an instant, Gates's eyes cut toward him, fully open. But she merely turned the smile on him. Reyes ordered Darjeeling.

"If I haven't made the Most Wanted list, what am I here for?" she asked when the waiter left.

"Originally, I wanted you to tell me about...well, about your experience of the last few months. But I think I'd like to tell you, instead. And if I get anything wrong, you can say so."

Her lower jaw slid forward, and Reyes saw her thoughts in her eyes:
Con artist. Charlatan. Nutjob.
"And if you get it right, you'll tell me all about how to nourish my inner thetan?"

"If I get it right, I'll give you what little information I have about your condition, and you can do anything you please with it."

"My condition is, I had cancer."

"And now you don't. And if that were all, it would be hard enough to explain. But that's
not
all, is it?" He saw from the angle of her body, the shuttering of her face, that she was about to stand up and walk out. So he hurried. "You've lost a lot of weight in a very short time. It's one of the symptoms of Hodgkin's, so you didn't wonder about it at first. But you're always hungry. Unless you take in what you would once have considered an unreasonable number of calories, you get weak and light-headed. And you can do things you couldn't do before. You have the grip strength to open any jar easily. You have the endurance to walk, climb, or run further than you ever could. Your reaction times are quicker."

He had to pause for breath, and thinking. At that inopportune moment the waiter arrived with their order.
I'm going to lose her. She's scared—confused—and I've made it worse. She'll walk away.

Food landed in front of her—sweetened coffee, sweet cocoa, cake—and she stared at it, hands in her lap, as if she were reading a page of text.

"Anything else?" the waiter asked.

Gates lifted her eyes from her order to Reyes's face. And grinned, a little crookedly. "Not yet," she said to the waiter without looking away from Reyes.

He had underestimated Hafidha Gates.

So as soon as the waiter was out of hearing range, Reyes said, "There may be another manifestation of what's happened to you. Some small ability, some unusual skill you didn't have six months ago, or one you had before that you're now much better at with no apparent cause."

Gates wasn't grinning anymore. She swallowed half her hot chocolate, though it must have burned her mouth. "You could say that."

"I don't need to know about it if you don't—"

"Oh, no. We're reality-checking here, and I want to get maximum bang for my buck. I can...get the most out of a computer. I can sort the Internet like a centrifuge. It's...hard to describe. It's as if I know where all the electrons are buried."

"And that's new?"

She nodded. "It's not just food. I crave
information
. It's as if, because I got blindsided by life, I want to prevent it sneaking up on me ever again."

Reyes's breath hitched. He hid it by fiddling with his tea. "We call that your mythology."

Gates stopped in the middle of cutting a chunk out of her slice of cake. "'We.'"

"I lead the Anomalous Crimes Task Force, working out of the Behavioral Analysis Unit. We investigate criminal activity involving individuals affected by what we're calling the anomaly, for want of a better term. It produces the kind of metabolic changes you've experienced. And...a variety of other effects as well."

"You think that's what I've got."

"I do."

She popped her fork into her mouth and chewed cake. She seemed undisturbed, but Reyes didn't believe it. She swallowed and said, "So, not just superhackers?"

He thought of Lawrence Hakes, and felt a psychosomatic twinge in his knee. "If the anomaly were sentient, which I don't believe, I'd say it has a great imagination."

Gates finished her cocoa and swallowed another lump of cake. "You're here to tell me I'm now a supervillain, and you've got your eye on me."

With great power comes great responsibility,
Reyes thought. Did Gates read comics? In the Secret Service, she'd been ready to take a bullet for a stranger. She'd understand Peter Parker's mythology.

"No, Ms. Gates. I'm here to offer you a job."

He was astonished by his own words.
No, you're not. That's exactly why you came. You just hadn't seen it yet.

Gates set her fork down, folded her hands on the table edge, and studied him. "From now on, you get to call me Hafidha."

In spite of the wording, it was an order.

Washington, D.C., May 21, 2014

There was no place for Beale in that history. Frost, secure in her basement and her work, was practically untouchable. And the person who'd affected Hafidha's trajectory, for good or ill, was Stephen Reyes.

He could breathe again. He could pick up his daughter from school. And he could do whatever it took to help bring down Rupert Beale.

Not a friend. But maybe The Kingpin.