Firechild (26 page)

31

Keri Grant

A
nya came back to Kennedy on a Concorde, wearing a curly red wig and more exotic makeup. In her new identity, she was returning to America after five years in Europe. Her passport had been expertly forged to support a cover story based on information Tim Clegg had gathered from the Watchdog files.

She and her twin sister had grown up on an Indiana farm, encouraged by their mother to hope for great careers in art or letters. Liberated by money from an uncle more generous than their hard-headed farmer-father, they both left the farm on the day they turned twenty-one.

Jeri entered a New York art school. Keri, with more wanderlust than any settled aim, had gone on to Paris, looking for the fabulous world of carefree bohemians their romance-minded mother had always dreamed about.

She found the old Left Bank long since faded into mythic history, along with Hemingway and Steinbeck and Gertrude Stein. Even when her own talent proved to be another mirage, she had kept on chasing romantic illusions through an Amsterdam commune and love affairs with a penniless Italian who claimed to be a count and an American drifter who said his father owned a Las Vegas casino and finally a Frenchman who promised to make her a movie star.

Now, in the aftermath of the Enfield tragedy, she had resolved to put those silly dreams behind her. The legacy nearly gone, she would soon need an honest job. First, however, she had come home to learn what had happened to her sister and her parents. In Piedmond, the nearest airport town still alive, she checked into the quaint old Norman Towers, whose red-brick battlements had been laid up the year the railroad came.

Tim Clegg, so their story went, had met her while he was stationed in Europe. She called the number he had given her for Captain Sam Holliday. Two hours later, he came up to her room and stopped a moment in the doorway to study her.

“Different.” He nodded, with a smile of frank approval. “You look the part.”

“I am—was—an actress.” She closed the door and turned to take his hand. “I’m coming to like Keri, but also to feel she’s a very risky role to play.”

“So far, so good.” He scanned her again, the smile still lingering. “The survivors have been interrogated pretty thoroughly about EnGene and everyone connected with the research staff. Jeri Grant and her parents are dead; I’m certain of that.

“Jeri had some hint of trouble coming. An Indiana neighbor says she made a phone call that frightened her folks into driving down here. They must have gotten here just in time to die. Our background for you came from what we learned in Indiana. No survivors in the Enfield area are likely to know that Jeri had no twin. If American intelligence had penetrated your cover, I’d have been informed.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“A lot will depend on you.”

Feeling a little easier, she found herself responding to his smile. The room was warm, and they sat beneath a lazy antique ceiling fan. Honeysuckle scented the air from a spray in an imitation Chinese vase on the antique mantel. She had found a kind of comfort in the Norman Towers, because it belonged so much to the past, because it seemed so secure from the faraway Center. She had begun to like Tim Clegg, but his next words disturbed her.

“I must tell you, however, that things have changed.”

“How?” His open face seemed to show both admiration and concern. She wanted to trust him. In fact she had to trust him now. Yet she could never quite forget that he belonged to the
Glavni Vrag.
“We’ve come too far to start changing plans.” She frowned in spite of herself. “I let my superiors believe you’re defecting to us. It’s a story they’re sure to suspect. Double agents are too often double-crossers. If I report some new plan—”

She shivered.

“My own risks are just as great,” he assured her soberly. “Even if the general is my father—I know him too well to think he would hesitate to have me shot if it came to that, but nothing has changed our actual goal. That’s worth any risk.” He was leaning urgently toward her. “We’re still fighting to shield civilization from genetic war—or maybe something worse. We can’t afford to fail.”

“So what’s the change?”

“Not our aim. We must kill this synthetic being before Kalenka and his team get the secret of whatever hit Enfield. The difference is that ridding the world of her looks a lot harder now.”

The big fan spun slowly overhead, its gears humming a monotonous rhythm. The honeysuckle spray was suddenly too sweet. She wanted to toss it out of the window, but she sat where she was, waiting uneasily.

“Here’s the problem.” He shifted uncomfortably.

Alphamega was killed here in the lab. Or at least mauled so severely by a sadist on the staff that Kalenka announced her death. He went out of the room to arrange for staff and equipment to study the body and came back to find her reviving.”

“A medical mistake?” Anya frowned. “Just a coma?”

“Who knows? She’s still a riddle to Kalenka. To everybody. Even her chemistry—something he calls her nucleotides. Totally different, he says, from those in any known form of life. As strange to him, he says, as lasers might be to an ape. He admits that he doesn’t understand anything about her. Doesn’t know what she can do. Or can’t. Which is why she frightens him.”

A baffled shrug.

“Her own revival is not half of it. She has friends. Two fellow prisoners. Belcraft’s brother, the man who found her in the ashes. And a Mexican alien named Torres, who seems to have looked after her while she was hiding. All three—”

He shook his sandy head.

“There’s a link between them Kalenka can’t explain. Somehow, they’re all able to keep in contact, even when kept physically apart. The creature seems to know all that happens to them. She can touch them— heal them when they’re hurt—by some means Kalenka has failed to discover.

“Torres was shot at the time of his capture. The wound was infected, and he had a bad reaction to the antibiotics. Kalenka evidently tried hard enough to save him, electric shocks and drug injections when his heart stopped. But he died, and lay dead too long for recovery without brain damage. So Kalenka says.

“But he did revive, or somehow was revived. The infection is gone, and his knee healed amazingly. Kalenka thinks the creature’s uncanny powers are behind the medical miracle of his revival, with maybe a medical assist from Belcraft. Even Belcraft himself has made what Kalenka calls a very puzzling recovery from a fairly serious concussion he suffered when he was captured.

“All of which makes our mission pretty tricky.”

He stopped to gaze at her again with an absent-seeming approval.

“We’ve got to be careful, because we don’t know Alphamega. If she does possess some crazy psychic gift, she may sense what we’re up to. So far she hasn’t used her mental powers, whatever they are, to hurt anybody, but we don’t know she won’t. Not that we can let that matter.” He shrugged. “Whatever she is or can do, this display of unknown powers has raised all the stakes.”

“Our lives do matter.” She shivered again. “But I get what you mean. If the Center gets a hint of what you’re telling me, they could want their own chance to squeeze the secrets out of her.”

“Even my father—” Frowning, he seemed to share her dread. “In one way, he’s bent as much as we are on killing the creature, because he sees her as an actual agent of an actual Satan. But she also excites his Hitler complex. He wants Kalenka to get the biological bomb, if there is a biological bomb, and whatever else she knows while she’s still alive to talk.

“So far she hasn’t talked. Our best hope is to learn how to stop her before she does. Belcraft—this Dr. Saxon Belcraft—looks like our only possible point of attack. Jeri was living the past year or so with his brother, the one at EnGene, who have been the actual creator of the being. That ought to give you an opening.”

“If he—this doctor-brother—didn’t know Jeri too well.”

“They never met—I’m almost sure of that. The brothers had been out of touch. The thing is risky. I know that, but it’s the best chance we have.”

They went downstairs to the nearly vacant and peaceful-seeming dining room for a southern-cooked dinner under languid fans. He drove back to the post. She followed next morning. On the basis of a brief interview and a strong recommendation from him, she was given a job in the secretarial pool at post security. Finding no quarters available inside the perimeter, she bought a used Toyota and rented a garage apartment in Maxon, a tiny farm town a dozen miles away.

The pool had been expanded to cope with a flood of demands from people concerned about relatives or property lost in Enfield. Armed with basic typing and filing skills she had learned for her first approach to Jules Roman, she felt fit enough for the job. Meeting Belcraft was not so easy.

The three prisoners were kept in separate buildings now, heavily guarded. The whole perimeter area was under martial law, with guards and staff under strict orders not to talk. Tim Clegg had scraps of news when he called her to his office, but never anything revealing.

“The creature’s still defiant,” he told her, “in her own passive way. She’s on a hunger strike. She still somehow knows all about how Belcraft and Torres are faring. She keeps refusing to eat until they get better food and freedom in the open air. Kalenka won’t give in. In fact, he can’t. I was present when he reported the problem to my father. Dad jumped up and banged his desk, threatening to have the two men shot at once as a lesson to the creature.

“A stalemate, with no sign of a break.”

“We’ve got to have a break.”

In her other role as a loyal arm of the KGB, she had been filing progress reports through a tiny radio built into a cosmetic container. Computer chips inside it compressed her messages into momentary squeaks too brief to be traced and transmitted them to be picked up and forwarded to Moscow from the embassy in Washington.

“My people are worried.” Feeling more and more at ease with him, she let anxiety sharpen her voice. “They demand more progress than I can report. They know just enough to terrify them, and they don’t trust anybody. Not me, for sure.”

“Who else?”

“Nobody.” He sat silent, and she went on. “I’m their only agent here inside, but I can be replaced. If such military biologicals do exist, my Moscow bosses have ordered me to get them. Or else erase the whole discovery. If they don’t get positive news—soon—they’ll recall me. Hunt me down if they have to.”

He shrugged. “We didn’t sign up for anything easy.”

She tried to carry on, searching for possible informers. A service club and bar now occupied what had been the student union building of the abandoned college. Spending her evenings there, appearing available and talking to anybody indiscreet or drunk enough to talk, she met a security man who liked gin and Coke a little too well for his own security.

His name was Frankie Bard. An EnGene security staffer before the disaster, he had just come back to work on the post, driving a patrol car and drinking in the club on his nights off. She disliked him. Foul-mouthed and dim-witted, his black-haired belly often bulging from the bottom of his shirt, he always smelled of onions and tried too hard to get his hands on her.

She tolerated him because of his gossip. His pet topic was the captive monster-critter, which held him in a frightened fascination. Sitting with him in the bar, she paid for most of the drinks and listened to his nasal monologues.

“Just nigger luck I happened to be off duty on the night she fired the town, or she’d a burnt me to that queer dust.”

Exchanging rumors with his friends in security, with drivers and lab technicians and the mess hall crew, Bard had gathered a store of terrifying tales. The critter shone in the dark. People that touched her came down with chills and fever. Could be the Enfield virus, now incubating in them. Deadlier than anything.

“Me, I wouldn’t touch her. Pray to God she don’t get loose.”

The creature was still chained in her cell in the old infirmary. Bard’s friend Mickey Harris had worked her over there. Said he thought he’d done her in, squashed the hellfire out of her like the devil’s imp she was. Somehow she’d come alive again. Upset about the injuries, the major had transferred Mickey to mess hall duty. Afraid he’d finish killing her before she confessed what sort of hell she’d brought to kill Enfield.

Her hunger strike was over—Mickey knew the cook who had to fix up the special trays she ordered. The major was scared of her, as much as anybody. Maybe afraid she’d plant the death in him. He’d begun giving her all she wanted to eat and doing favors for her friends, that killer spic and the crazy doctor that found her in the ashes. She’d got the major to order the cuffs off the spic. Even got permission for him to walk outside, exercising the knee Mickey had shot from under him.

To pay for those favors, the critter was talking. Anyhow, learning to talk. English now, instead of her smattering of spic. Learning faster than any human, the lab crew said. Nearly like she read people’s minds, though she kept asking a lot of questions. But still too stubborn to say anything about EnGene and the killer dust till Belcraft and the spic were set free.

Which would be never.

“Not a Chinaman’s chance.” Frankie belched. “The general swears he’ll be damned if he ever lets them go, or the critter either.” He belched again and lifted a wavering finger for another gin and Coke. “Time’s a-comin‘ when the little monster bitch will have to change her tune. That’ll be when they have to let Mickey Harris at her again.”

When Anya said she had to leave, Frankie wanted to drive her home. She tried to remind him that he couldn’t take his patrol car out of the perimeter. He wanted to borrow her car. Escaping, she went to the “she room,” slipped out the back way, and left him to his gin and Coke.

Driving out toward the gate, she saw Mickey Harris walking from the mess hall, late and hastening. She had met him in the bar. He was a dark stocky man with a flat, high-cheeked face and long black hair combed straight back; even at night he wore black-framed mirror sunglasses that glinted in her headlight.