Firechild (15 page)

“—reason for alarm.” He was shaking his head, with a smile meant to calm her. “Just hear me out.”

Numb with dread, she whispered, “Okay.”

“Okay.” He echoed the word and paused as if deciding how to begin. “I’m a soldier’s son, grew up an Army brat. Never loved the services myself, but I took three years out of college to serve my own hitch in the infantry—because I’d promised my father when I was still a kid. Last year he hired me away from Hewlett-Packard to join a special intelligence group.

“It was a private unit until he drafted us into the task force. I was on duty in Enfield the last several months before the disaster, with a cover job in security at En-Gene. One of my fellow guards was Herman Doerr.” Pausing again to watch her response, he added, “Your agent, Scorpio.”

In spite of herself, she flinched. Watching his quizzical shrug, she felt like a mouse under the paws of a playful kitten. Should she make a break for it? He had showed no weapon. Though she was unarmed, the training school had taught physical combat. With luck enough, she might disable him and get out of the room. But—

She sank back into the chair. Men in military intelligence didn’t work alone. He would surely have somebody in the lobby, maybe even waiting now in the corridor outside. Feeling chilled and almost ill, she listened again.

“—both of us trying to get close to the man who ran the EnGene computers. An odd little guy named Arny Carboni. He never got really close to anybody, though I think I got closer than anybody else. It turned out we were both part-time hackers. Both into hobby cryptography—building computer programs to write and break secret codes. We traded algorithms.”

“Carboni?” She hated to trust her voice. “Do you know where—”

She saw his face turning older.

“Amy’s dead. Dead in Enfield.”

“But I thought—”

She checked herself to hear him.

“Arny saved my life.” She saw pain on his face. “Mine and Doerr’s. Died for it. I’ll tell you how. What we both wanted was what he could tell us about the EnGene project. Arny was a sharp cookie. We knew he had to be picking up secrets from all the work he was doing for the research staff. Your man Scorpio came to me when he saw I was ahead of him—I’d borrowed a name, of course, and he had no notion I was anything except another guard.

“I played along. Doerr had his own cover story.

Claimed he was scouting for an American pharmaceutical outfit that wanted to know what sort of genetic miracles EnGene was cooking up. He had money.” He peered at her. “Which must have come from you?”

Silently, she nodded.

“I took what Doerr wanted to pay me. Never much at first, till he thought he had me in so deep I’d never get out. Thousands, later, bribing me to pump Arny harder. So much toward the end that I knew he had to be working for Russia. I told Arny what was up. He saw a chance to get his father out of some Russian prison. We played Scorpio’s game, till things got tight.

“Your man Scorpio.” A quick little grin. “Not all yours. When we confronted him, he sold you out. Told us what he knew or guessed about you and poor old Jules Roman. What your great friendship foundation really is. Told us where his money came from. That’s how I was able to drop in on you here.”

“If you’ve come to arrest me—” Her anger flashed. “Don’t play games!”

“Wait! Please!” He raised his hand. “Let me finish.”

“Whatever.” Stolidly, she shrugged. “Whatever.”

“The phone woke me that morning—that last morning. Early, just past four. Arny calling. Told me he’d been tapping phones and heard enough to frighten him. Said we had to get out of town. Get out fast. He didn’t have a car. Wanted me to pick him up. Quick. Gave me ten minutes to pack.

“I packed in five. Maybe too fast. In my own confusion, I forgot the car keys and locked myself out of the house. Had to break a window to get back in. I lived across town from Arny, and something over half an hour must have passed before I got there.

“A couple of blocks from his place—he lived in a little house close to the campus—I met a red pickup tearing down the street. When I got there, I found the front door open. Amy’s body lay just inside, sprawled in his blood. Knifed through the heart, from the look of it, though I didn’t stay to look for a weapon.

“The knifer was Scorpio. He drove a red pickup. Part of his American cover, he told me once. Arny must have called to warn him, but I can’t guess why he used the knife.”

His level eyes challenged her.

“Can you?”

“I never trusted him.” She shook her head, wincing wryly. “Any more than I had to, which I guess was too far. I saw him two nights ago. Sat for hours with him in a Chicago bar, waiting for a contact he said he’d set up with Carboni. Of course Carboni couldn’t show—not if he’s dead. I let Scorpio talk me out of another ten thousand American dollars, for one more attempt to buy— to buy something he said Carboni had to sell.”

“Which we can talk about,” he said. “After we’ve come to terms.”

“Terms?” She searched his oddly boyish face. “Do you want to tell me why you’re here?”

“Not to hurt you.” Quizzical again, he studied her. “Working in a world of double agents, sometimes we have to talk of deals.”

She waited. He glanced around the room and cocked his head as if to listen at the door.

“I know that you’re with the KGB. Now I’m sure you’ll want to reach Scorpio’s other contacts in En-Gene. I was one of them. You and I are both playing the tradecraft game. For my own part, I’m unhappy with what I’m afraid some of my countrymen are going to do. I think you and I together might have a stronger hand than either of us playing alone.”

“Why?” She met his eyes. “If you are Clegg’s son, why should I believe anything you say?”

“Because”—his voice turned savage—”because I hate—hate my father!”

19

El Mal

Tiempo

P
ancho Torres paused in the warm twilight to look around him. The fires had died. The drumming choppers were all far away. For the moment, he saw no danger.

“Nada, chiquita,
” he murmured to the tiny creature lying in his open hand. “Nothing to hurt you now.”

He carried it up to the farmhouse, holding it carefully and high, where he could keep his eyes on it. He felt it throbbing as if it had a fast-beating heart, and he caught its scent, a faint, clean sweetness like the fragrance of a red wildflower that used to bloom when the spring rains fell in the pasturelands around San Rosario.

He unlocked the door with the key he had found inside. With all the blinds and curtains drawn, he laid the little creature on the kitchen table while he risked using one shaded light to look for food. A long shopping list hung beside the silent telephone, but the buying had never been done. He found a half-dozen eggs and a paper carton nearly full of milk. A nearly empty box of cornflakes had been left in a cabinet over the range, and that was all.

The creature crept to the edge of the table and waited there, peeping hopefully while it watched him scrambling four of the eggs. It hurried hungrily to meet him when he brought them to the table in the hot skillet.

“Caliente!”
he warned it. “Better let ‘em cool.”

It waited, with a soft whimpering sound, as if it understood. The milk was still good. When he offered a little of it in a glass, the creature raised itself to grasp the rim of the glass with both tiny hands. It leaned to taste, turned its head to smile at him, and drank thirstily.

When the eggs had cooled, he offered them in a teaspoon. It took a tiny handful, tasted daintily, gave him another grateful chirp, then began ravenously scooping them up with both hands. Nearly half of them were gone before it pushed the spoon aside and rolled on its side to smile at him, purring happily. He saw then that it was really female.

“Nifiita! Querida chiquita!”

His own chest was throbbing suddenly with a happy ache he had never felt before. He didn’t even try to understand, but she was something better than the baby he had dimly wished to father on drunken nights with those dollar-hungry gringo
putas.
So small and so helpless, in a world that must be as baffling to her as she was to him. His heart hurt for her.

He left her on the table while he washed the skillet. Before he was done, he heard her whimpering fearfully, heard the air drumming again to another cruising chopper.

“Qué es, chiquita?”

She jumped off the table to a chair and then the floor, and scurried to his feet. He picked her up and found her quivering with terror. When he laid her down beside the sink to finish removing the signs of their presence, she whined again so piteously that he put her in his shirt pocket. There, warm against his heart, she piped softly into silence.

When the chopper had gone on, he carried her back to the windmill tower and went to sleep with her near his face in the old water tank. In the middle of the night, her frightened keening woke him. Thunder was rumbling, and the rising wind smelled of rain. Fine hail was pelting down before they got back inside the house.

“Okay,
chiquita?”
he told her.
“Es nada.
They won’t be flying in the storm.”

He held her in his hands, crooning the sad Spanish love songs he had learned so long ago, until the thunder and her quivering stopped. They slept the rest of the night on the carpet because he wanted to leave no sign in the bed. When morning came, he cooked the rest of the eggs and poured out the handful of cornflakes. She seemed so ravenous again that he thought she could have eaten everything, but she stopped when half was gone to leave the rest for him.

“Ah, chiquita,
” he told her, “we’ve got to find something to feed you.”

She wouldn’t let him leave her anywhere. Carrying her in his pocket, he climbed the windmill again to look for empty-seeming buildings that might hold food. Waiting till the choppers were far away, he tried a big house a mile or so toward the perimeter.

Too late. Some vandal had splintered the front door with an ax. The house was littered with clothing flung from closets and books tossed from shelves. Some mischief to the plumbing had flooded the floors. There had been food enough, but the raiders had dumped refrigerator and deep freeze into the chaos. A nauseating reek of spoiled meat drove him back to fresh air.

He hid in the empty garage until another chopper had cruised overhead. When it was gone, he followed it back toward the desolation until he found a smaller home that looked untouched since the owners fled. Farm folk, he thought, probably retired. The fields had been turned back to pasture. A wide streak of dust had come very near, but he was cheered to see a big vegetable garden, still alive and lush again since the rain.

“Buena suerte, chiquita!”
he told her. “We’re okay here.”

Happily, he patted the warm little bulge she made in his pocket and felt her squirm comfortably against him. She had brought his lost luck back, and here was the promise of all they could eat.

Perhaps in panic, their absent hosts had left the back door open. They hadn’t been rich. Brown spots were worn in the bright yellow linoleum on the kitchen floor, but it was neat and clean. The air was rich with the sweetness of a bag of apples ripening on the counter, but nothing had decayed. Pantry shelves were loaded with cans of food and full glass jars. The refrigerator and a huge deep freeze were still running, still thriftily filled.

“Comemos aquí!”
he murmured again. “
Chiquita,
here we eat!”

He thawed steak and fried potatoes and picked ripe tomatoes to make a feast. His small companion filled herself once more and then begged to get back into his shirt pocket, where she lay crooning contentedly.

There was no lookout like the old windmill, no hideout that seemed as secure as the old water tank, but the plentiful food made him decide to stay. She would soon be famished again, and her needs had suddenly come to matter more than anything—he hardly paused to wonder why.

Better, however, not to sleep in the house. Vandals might raid again. With the dust no longer deadly, the choppers might land their crews. Refugees might return.

He found an empty tool shed behind the garden. The roof seemed sound, and a wall of brush along the old fence row beyond it might cover their escape if they had to run. He brought blankets, a few cans of food, and water in a plastic bottle.

Their stay there seemed almost a dream. His mind no longer dwelt upon the gringos and all their cruel wrongs to him and his people, because her mystery absorbed him. What was she? How had she come to be swimming out of that desolate field of death? What sort of being would she become?

Her past and her future remained beyond his imagination, but she possessed him as no woman ever had. If now and then he caught himself wondering how she had captured him so totally, he shrugged off the puzzle. He felt happy with her. Happier, even, than he had been on that
cumpleaños
back in San Rosario when he became a man. Beyond all the wonders and puzzles of her being, beyond his sudden deep devotion, beyond her trembling terrors that also frightened him, nothing else could matter.

She ate and slept and grew. Ate eagerly and often. Slept in his pockets as long as she was small enough, slept purring against him. Grew amazingly. The
salamandra
tail shrank away to nothing. Her tiny limbs enlarged, growing into perfect feet and hands. She grew hair, straight and silken fine and astonishing as everything about her.

Astonishing, because of the way its color changed. All her colors did. No longer always pink, her skin turned an instant golden tan when the sun struck it, turned baby pink again in the shade. Her eyes, bright black beads at first, flashed green with vexation when some task made him leave her. They were gray when she groped to understand something he was saying, indigo blue when she was fed and happy against him.

She learned to walk, but not by experimental clinging and tottering and stumbling. One day when he had laid her on the kitchen table while he brought their meal, she glided upright and almost danced across the table and into his hand, piping a triumphant song.