Interesting Times (Interesting Times #1) (8 page)

“Okay.”

“Psychics and cyborgs.”

“The cyborgs are gone,” Tyler said. “And
I don’t know much about psychics, honestly. I’ve never met one, as far as I
know. Artemis could explain it, but it’s never really come up.”

“Artemis. The little girl who isn’t a
little girl.” Tyler nodded. “What is she, then?”

“A very old little girl,” Tyler said.

“How old?” Oliver asked.

“I have no idea, honestly. I asked her
once but she just looked at me like…well, I never asked again.”

“Why does she look like a child?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “She never
hit puberty?” he guessed.

“I see,” Oliver said, although he didn’t
see at all. “And you work for her. How did you get involved in this?”

“I used to be a cop,” Tyler said.
“Honolulu. I got mixed up in…well, that’s not really important right now. When
the smoke cleared, Artemis recruited me.”

“And you just went along with her?”

“After what I’d seen?” Tyler asked. His
eyes took on a faraway look for a moment. “She made an offer and I didn’t have
to think about it for long. I was never going to be the same person again.”  He
used his chopsticks to toy with a piece of chicken. “I guess I could have
buried my head in the sand and pretended none of it was real, but that’s not
me. I don’t regret it, not really. My world is a lot bigger now. The things
I’ve seen since then…” he trailed off.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t
believe,” Oliver quoted from an old sci-fi movie.

“You’ve got it,” Tyler nodded. “That’s
it exactly.”

“So there’s you, and that psycho Sally…”
A dark look crossed Tyler’s face and Oliver knew immediately he’d gone too far.

“You want to cut her some slack,” Tyler
said, a little roughly. “She’s had a bad time lately. The way she is right now,
she’s not always like that.”

“What happened?” Oliver asked.

Tyler looked down, considering.
“Something terrible,” he said finally. “It’s not my place to say. But the
person you met today isn’t the person I met two years ago.”

It didn’t seem worth pushing the issue.
Oliver decided to change the subject.  “So are you guys government agents? Some
secret agency you could tell me about, but then you’d have to kill me?”

Tyler reached into his back pocket and
found his wallet. He flipped it open and showed Oliver a badge that identified
him as John Connor, a special agent with the FBI.

“Really?” Oliver asked. “Wait…
John
Connor
?”

Tyler chuckled as he flipped the wallet
shut. “No, of course not. Well, check that, the badge itself is real. If you
run that through any government computer it’ll verify my name and that I’m an
agent, but it’s not really true. I’ve never even been to Quantico. It’s just
part of the bag of tricks.”

“How did you get the badge, then?”

“Artemis has contacts everywhere. I mean
everywhere
. And anything she can’t get, Seven could probably make.”

“You said that name before. ‘Seven.’
He’s your tech support guy?”

“Well, he’s not just the guy who fixes
the printer when it breaks, but yes. You may meet him, eventually, but he
doesn’t leave the office much. Has trouble with crowds.”

Oliver nodded as if everything he was
hearing did not sound completely nuts. “So it’s just the four of you? That’s
just enough that you could all fit inside a van.  You could drive around
together, solving mysteries.”

“I made that joke once,” Tyler said.
“Nobody else got it.”

“Oh.”

“And it’s not just us. We actually have
branch offices all over the world, but they’re mostly just support staff with
the odd specialist here and there. I doubt most of them have any idea what we
actually do. Sally and I are the only field agents, at the moment. There are
never more than a handful of us. Well, in my time, anyway. I can’t say
historically. Artemis has been doing this for a long time.”

“How long?”

Tyler shook his head and shrugged. “Last
chance for a pot sticker,” he said, motioning at the soon-to-be-empty plate.

“That’s okay,” said Oliver.

“Your loss,” Tyler said, popping it into
his mouth.

The door to the restaurant swung open
and a bedraggled homeless man wandered in. Oliver recognized him; he’d seen the
man panhandling in the financial district dozens of times. He’d given the man
change once or twice, if he remembered correctly. This place seemed pretty far
out of his regular territory.

The man spotted Tyler and began
shambling over to their table. “No, no!” the waitress tried to intercept him.
“You leave!  Bad smell!”

“It’s okay, Li-Jen,” Tyler called,
waving her off. “He’s with us. Hey, Oscar,” he greeted the man.  “You want to
sit?”

Oscar stopped at their table but didn’t
sit. “This the guy?” he asked, looking Oliver up and down.

“Yeah.”

“I know you,” Oscar said.

“I work downtown,” Oliver explained, a
bit embarrassed. “Sometimes I give you…”

“You wear that awful tie sometimes,” the
man interrupted.

“What?”

“That green tie with the stripes,” Oscar
said, running his hand horizontally across his chest where a tie would have
lain.

Oliver knew the one he meant. “That was
my father’s tie!” he objected.

“Let’s leave it,” Tyler said. “What do
you have for us?”

Oscar looked back to Tyler. “Word on the
street is it was a mistake,” he said. “Wrong guy.”

Oliver sighed. “I knew it.” Of course it
had been a mistake.

“How do you mean?” Tyler pressed.  “Who
had the contract out?”

“The lizards.”

Tyler’s eyes widened.  “Holy shit,
really?”

“Who are the lizards?” Oliver asked.  It
sounded like a gang name from the 1950’s, or the worst high school mascot ever.

“Never mind,” Tyler told him. “What
happened?” he asked Oscar.

“They had a prophecy,” Oscar explained.
“You know how the lizards get with that shit. I guess they figured out it
wasn’t
this
guy they wanted, because they just snatched some other dude
off the street at Noriega and 35
^th
. Cut his heart out and dumped
him.”

Oliver knew that intersection. It was
only a few blocks away from his house. And someone had been
killed
there?

“So it’s all off?” Tyler asked.

“They aren’t out looking for him,” Oscar
said. “If they had people on the street we’d know about it.”

“What about Mr. Teasdale?” Oliver asked.

“No word on him,” Oscar said. He looked
at Tyler questioningly. “Rocky’s shop? He dead?”

“Yeah. We figure Teasdale went after him
when the contract went bad.”

“And the fire?”

“That was Sally.”

“Oh. Figures. Well, that’s all I’ve got
for you. Your boy here’s in the clear.”

“Okay, thanks,” Tyler said. “Hey,
Oliver, give me a twenty?”

Oliver knew the drill this time. He went
into this wallet and handed Tyler a twenty-dollar bill. Tyler handed it to
Oscar.

“You could have just given it to me
yourself,” Oscar said to Oliver.

“Yeah. I guess I could have,” Oliver
said.

“You want some
kung pao
to take
with you?” Tyler asked.

“No, I ate already.” He looked back to
Oliver. “Don’t wear that tie anymore. You want to wear solid colors.”

“Oh,” Oliver said.  “Okay.”

Oscar shambled to the door and was gone
a moment later. Oliver looked back to Tyler. “So what now?” he asked.

“Now? I guess I take you home,” Tyler
said. “Looks like we’re done.”

“Who are the lizards?” Oliver wanted to
know.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Tyler said.
“The less you know about any of this the better, really.” He leaned forward and
waved his hands in an elaborate dance in front of Oliver’s face. “This has all
been a dream!” he intoned.

Oliver stared at him blankly. “I don’t
dream.”

“Ah, it was worth a try,” Tyler said.
“Eat something. I’m going to report to Artemis and then I’ll drive you back to
your place.”

Oliver looked at the empty plates that
covered the table. Now he
was
feeling hungry, but the food was gone.
“You ate everything already.”

“Oh, well, that’s easy to fix.” He
raised a hand to get the attention of the waitress. “Can we get some menus?” he
called.

Oliver raised his eyebrows.  “Menus?
You’re going to eat more?” The man had already put away enough food to feed a
small family.

“I’d hate for you to eat alone,” Tyler
grinned. “See, you get a half day at work and a free dinner. This is turning
out to be a good day for you after all!”

Chapter 10

They were
a few blocks away from his house when Oliver said, “Maybe this
is
a
dream. If it’s my first one, how would I even know the difference?”

Tyler
nodded thoughtfully. “I never thought about it like that. Well, if you’re dreaming,
maybe I am, too. Hey, did you ever see
Inception
?”

“Yeah,”
Oliver said. “I didn’t get it at all.”

“Me
neither. But if you’ve never had a dream, I guess you wouldn’t even know where
to start. Huh.  That
is
weird, never dreaming. I don’t think I’ve ever
heard of that before, and I’ve heard of a lot of things.”

“It’s
just the way I am,” Oliver shrugged.  He didn’t know how else to explain it.

Tyler
had called Artemis as soon as they were back in his car and had briefly
explained their situation. He listened to her for a moment, and then handed the
phone to Oliver. “She wants to talk to you.”

“I can’t
find any evidence that this was anything other than an error,” the girl had
said. Oliver still thought it was strange to hear a child talk so formally.
“Nor can I come up with any reason you would be a target for assassination by
anyone at all, let alone the Kalatari.”

“The
who?”

“Never
mind that.” He heard the girl sigh into the phone. “If you like, I am willing
to place you in one of our safe houses for a few days, just to confirm that
there is no further danger.”

“But
they got the guy they were looking for,” Oliver said. “The lizards, or the
Kalatari
,
whatever you call them. They killed someone out near my house.”

“A man
is dead. We have been able to confirm that.”

“Then
what’s the problem?” Oliver found himself ashamed of the question the moment he
asked it. A man was dead, after all, and here he was acting as if his own was
the only life that was important. Could he be any more callous?

There
was silence on the girl’s end, and Oliver wondered if she had felt the same way
and hung up on him. “This feels wrong,” Artemis said finally. “While I have no
evidence, I am certain that there is something unusual about you. The way you
walk in the world is…” she trailed off. “I do not know. I feel as if I am
witnessing the birth of something unique.”

Oliver
was quite certain he wasn’t unique, but he did feel just a little bit
flattered. Nevertheless, it was time to get back to his life. If he was back at
his office tomorrow, he might be able to explain away the events of the day,
although it would be a longshot. He was certain that any more time away would
mean crossing the line permanently.

“I think
I’d like to go home,” Oliver said. 

“Very
well. Tyler will drive you.”

“I don’t
mind getting a cab,” Oliver offered.

“Tyler
will drive you,” the girl repeated, hanging up. And that was that.

Now he
was nearly home and then this would all be over. Tomorrow he would go to the
office and say…something. He didn’t know what yet. He doubted he would be able
to sleep tonight, so he’d have plenty of time to think about it.

Oliver
sighed softly. As relieved as he was that he was no longer in danger, he
couldn’t help but feel the tiniest bit disappointed. This had been a wild,
dangerous day, but he had to admit it had been an interesting break from his
normal routine. He would probably not have another day like this in his
lifetime. He wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good or a bad thing.

Tyler
drove the block around Oliver’s house twice, looking carefully at each of the
parked cars they passed. Nothing seemed amiss to Oliver. The neighborhood
looked the way it always did. Did Tyler expect an assassin to be hiding in the
bushes outside his house?

Finally,
Tyler stopped the car. “Give me your keys,” he said.

“What?
Why?”

“I’m
going to go inside and check it out. Just to make sure.”

“I’m
sure that’s not necessary,” Oliver said. “This is all over now.”

Tyler
shook his head. “Just trust me, all right? I’ll be in and out in two minutes.
Then you never have to see any of us again.”