The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (120 page)

“How old are you?” the man asked suddenly.

Cody paused and wiped his mouth. Considering how long they’d run his blood, he must have known, and a lot more besides. “Thirty-seven. Why?”

“Don’t you think that’s a little old to be a decoy?”

“I’m a courier.” He went back to the drink.

“You’re a decoy. A zero. A nothing. Less than nothing.”

Cody had no response for that; he kept drinking

“The one that sold you out, she was probably the
real
courier. Wasn’t she?”

“Who?” But even as he asked, he knew. Her name was on the tip of his tongue but he managed not to say it aloud.

“I’m right, aren’t I? You’re just – what? A day labourer who doesn’t mind needles and won’t faint at the sight of blood?
She’s
carrying. LaVerne or LaRue, whatever her name is.”

Cody pressed his lips together briefly. Whether the guy was telling the truth or fishing for a keyword, it wouldn’t hurt not to give it to him. “Roughly ten percent of the population faints at the sight of blood,” he said chattily. “It’s a physical reaction, they can’t help it. Nothing to do with their character or anything.”

“Thank you for that piece of enlightenment.” Despite his obvious irritation, his face was more impassive than ever, not to mention pastier. Now there were small flakes of what looked like dry skin around the man’s hairline. The disguise was starting to break down, the wig parting company with the silicone mask. Everything probably should have been removed hours ago but the guy had kept nursing it along with touch-ups. Because he’d expected it would all by over by now, data extracted and delivered, payment collected and he’d be on his way to his next case, already forgetting what Cody looked like.

Instead he was sitting in a small, cold room with nothing to show for his effort but a spray-on about to peel off his face and nothing to look forward to except the displeasure of whoever he was working for, the loss of his fee, and a crew he had to pay anyway.

Cody finished the drink and set the empty can down beside him on the gurney.
Well
, that
wasn’t fun. Whaddaya wanna do next?

It was the last thought he had for a while.

*     *     *

Sounds nudged him gradually toward awareness, until he understood the voices and various other noises were real, not lingering fragments of dreams, or dream-like flashes from lost hours, possibly days. Eyes still closed, he rolled over, turning his face away from the bright light overhead and smelled clean sheets, along with alcohol, powder, and cleanser. Hospital emergency room, he thought with cautious relief; there were worse places to wake up.

His memory was patchy but he knew the basics of what had happened. As soon as his captors had been sure they wouldn’t find anything in his blood, they no longer had to worry about contamination and dosed Cody’s so-called lunch. Pretty heavily, if the lead-balloon sensation in his head was any indication. Just by way of kicking his ass for having nothing of value.

Once the lunch had taken effect, they had dressed him up and dumped him someplace where he could sleepwalk indefinitely without attracting attention. Like, say, a large mall. Or a shopping village; one with a multiscreen cineplex. Cody wondered how long he had been aimlessly roaming before anyone noticed something odd about him. There were all kinds of stories. Everybody in the union knew one about a courier who had woken up to find she’d wandered into a house and spent five days with people who’d thought she was a long-lost relative. Cody suspected that one was apocryphal.

Two days later, he was in a DC-area suburb, although he wasn’t sure exactly which state. State-line ambiguity was getting to be a habit with him.

“How’d you like Oklahoma City?” asked the medic from where she sat at the lighting panel. She was a slightly plump woman with one brown eye and one blue eye; the difference was made more noticeable by the port-wine stain covering that side of her face from hairline to the corner of her mouth.

“I only saw a parking garage, a clinic, and part of a hospital.” Cody finished undressing and stood with his back to the plain white wall. “Ready when you are.”

“Ah, you’ve done this before. I don’t even have to tell you to close your eyes and hold perfectly still.”

He took a breath and held it. Sometimes he imagined he could sense the UV light change as the scanning line traveled over his body. Years ago, when he had first become a courier, they’d showed him a video of himself being scanned. He’d thought he’d looked like a fantasy creature – one of Lewis Carroll’s fabulous monsters that had wandered out of the looking glass into a high-tech lab.

Blaschko’s Lines, a doctor had told him, years ago. Only visible under certain kinds of UV light.

He’d done research on his own, wondered about lesions or the possibility of waking up one morning to find himself permanently piebald. He would dream that the lines running up and down his arms and legs, traveling in waves on his torso, looping on his back, swirling all over his head would appear spontaneously and without warning in normal light; sometimes they were permanent. Other times, they’d flash on and off like a warning light.

He hadn’t had that kind of anxiety dream in a long time. They’d faded away with the hotspots. Maybe now they were both coming back.

“Done,” the medic called.

Relieved, Cody took a deep breath and stepped away from the wall to get dressed again. The medic asked his permission before she swabbed the inside of his cheek, and again before scraping a few skin cells from his lower back, his hip, and his knee. He was immensely grateful for the courtesy. It was always nice when someone treated a courier like a human being in a demanding profession rather than merely a meat-bag for data.

The guy who escorted him to his room for the night was wearing the standard gopher attire – a multi-pocketed vest over plain T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes – but had a military bearing that he didn’t even try to hide. Cody wasn’t surprised to find someone waiting for him when he got there. It had been a while since the last sales pitch.

“We’re all very glad to have you back safe.” The woman in the swivel chair by the desk was dark-haired and dark-skinned and her voice had the faint but unmistakable lilt that Hindi speakers never lost completely. He had seen her before a few times, dressed as she was now in a black jacket and trousers, but only in passing. She was one of those people who gave the impression of being taller because of the way she carried herself. Not military-style like his friend now standing at obvious parade rest between himself and the door, just with authority. In Charge. The touches of grey in her hair suggested she was older than he was, though he couldn’t have said how much – more than ten, less than thirty.

“I’m glad to be back,” he said, feeling a little awkward as he stood in front of her. She gestured for him to sit down on the bed, the only other furniture in the room, unless you counted the forty-inch screen in the wall.

“You automatically get a week of recuperation but we’ll sign off on two or even three.” She shrugged. “Or four.”

“Thank you.”

“This wasn’t the first time for you, was it.”

As if she didn’t know, he thought, careful to keep a straight face. Then he realized she was actually waiting for an answer. “No,” he said quickly. “It wasn’t.”

“I hope that it wasn’t especially bad for you.”

He shook his head. His memory was still quite spotty – his clearest recollection was of an older man with a ponytail and having to lie very still in a cold room while his blood was pumped out of his body and back in again. He also had the idea that there had been someone in the hotel room with him before he’d been kidnapped but that didn’t seem likely. Considering how heavily he’d been drugged, he was probably lucky he still remembered his childhood.

Unless I rented it out for a database
. Another of those left-field thoughts that had been popping into his head for the last few days. They’d probably meant something once.

“. . . sure you will be happy to know that your kidnappers came away with nothing,” the woman was saying, “thanks to your unique . . . ah, condition.”

He smiled a little. “I never thought of being a chimera as a condition like, oh, excessive perspiration. Or psoriasis.”

“It does make you uniquely suited for deep encryption. Even if your kidnappers had thought to use your DNA to activate your blood, they wouldn’t know you have more than one kind of DNA, much less that they needed to scan you under UV for the entire key.”

His kidnappers;
the way she said it made it sound almost as if they belonged to him in some way. Or like they were his personal problem – his
condition
.

“Eventually, that’ll occur to someone. If someone else doesn’t sell it to them first,” he added. The memory of a woman’s name, LaRue or LaDene, and an old movie flickered in his brain and was gone.

“Such optimism.” She gave a short laugh. “The average mere can’t afford to rent a full sequencer, let alone personnel to run it who would be smart enough to figure out you had two kinds of DNA, or that they’d need both for decryption.” She gave another, slightly heartier laugh. “Contrary to what you may have heard, the evil genius is mostly mythical. Nobody turns to crime because of their towering intellect.

“But that’s neither here nor there. We still want you to work solely for us. I know that someone has made you this offer before – a few times, yes? As an employee, you would be paid substantially more, along with bonuses for crisis situations—”

“ ‘Crisis situations?’ Is that anything like ‘hazardous duty’?”

She barely hesitated as she acknowledged his interruption. “Occupational benefits are also quite generous. Health coverage, vacation time, paternity leave—”

“Dental?”

Now she paused to give him a look. “And optical. Even a clothing allowance.”

He was tempted to comment on how she had used hers but decided not to get personal.

“We can also be very flexible in terms of your cover,” she went on. “Some sort of independent, low-key profession, like an accountant or a transcriber or—” She floundered suddenly and he could tell it wasn’t something that happened to her very often.

“Software engineer,” he suggested, then smiled sheepishly. “Kidding.”

“That could work, as long as it’s something nice and ordinary. Wedding albums, family albums, baby pictures, that sort of thing—”

“I really was kidding,” he said. “Software mystifies me.”

“You could even be semi-retired—”

“No.” He shook his head, apologetic but firm. “If I go to work for you, I’m no longer a courier. I’m a government employee in a highly sensitive area under military jurisdiction. Once I lose my union membership, all bets are off. All I have is you.”

“That’s quite a lot,” the woman said reprovingly. “You have no idea how much.”

Actually, I do
, he thought at her,
but if I’m flayed and hung up in a parking garage, I won’t care about the cover story
. He shook his head again.

“If we take you into the fold, we can tell you more about what you’re doing. Don’t you want to know—”

“No.”
It came out louder and more emphatic than he’d intended but he wasn’t sorry. “I don’t. You’ve got me this much. I agreed to cooperate because I don’t need to be
in the fold
to be an encryption key. I’ll keep the secret but I don’t want to
be
the secret.”

The woman shook her head. “Please. You went over that line a long time ago.”

“Not quite,” he insisted. “My body, yes. But not
me.”

She stood up, stretching a little. “We’ll talk again. This government doesn’t give up that easily.”

“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows. “Which government is that, anyway?”

The question caught her off guard and for a moment she stared at him, open-mouthed. Then she threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, very good,” she said, as the man opened the door for her. “Very,
very
good.” She started to leave, then hesitated. “And that’s really your name: Cody.”

“Yeah. My name’s really Cody.” Something flickered in his memory again but it was gone before he could think about it. He lay down on the bed and found the remote under one of the pillows.

“Well,
that
was fun,” he said, to no one and to whatever bugs might be listening, and turned on the TV. “Now whaddaya wanna do?”

FOR I HAVE LAIN ME DOWN ON THE STONE OF LONELINESS AND I’LL NOT BE BACK AGAIN