Rogue Oracle (12 page)

“Coming from an oracle, that’s a strange statement.”

“That’s my best guess.”

Harry gathered Tara’s cold fingers in his hands and blew on them. Her fingers brushed his lips, and his warm breath traveled down her wrists, stirring blood that had lain cold for months. She looked away, but it rose in her cheeks. She could feel them flaming in the darkness, hoped he couldn’t see.

With one hand, Harry pressed Tara’s hands to his chest. The other pushed her hair away from her face, and he tenderly pressed his lips to her forehead, to the bridge of her nose. Where he kissed her, the heat followed: from her temple, to her upper lip, the point of her chin. His hand on the back of her neck felt like sunlight on a summer’s day.

She wanted more of that light, that heat. Like him, she was drowning in her own darkness. Tara felt herself losing touch with the real world through her dream-visions, as much as Harry lost touch with his humanity through his work. She tipped her head forward and kissed him back. Harry’s mouth chased the chill from hers.

Her fingers wound in his T-shirt as his kisses drifted down her shoulder over the exposed scar on her collar. She didn’t fear Harry’s judgment; he’d seen these marks before. He brushed her hair away, fingers sketching the scars between her ribs.

Like a cloak, Harry and the bedspread enveloped her. Her cold hands traced over his spine and the hard muscles of his back. Their clothes tangled in the bedspread, kicked to the bottom of the sheets. Tara sighed, feeling the blissful heat of his bare skin down the length of her body, skimming her hands across his chest.

“God, I missed you,” he murmured into her shoulder. He reached down to part her legs, slipped his hand between them. She moaned, arching her back, as his fingers teased heat from her body. He pressed swollen and heavy against her inner thigh. Harry teased her until her nipples scraped his chest and she grabbed his buttocks to pull him inside her.

He wrapped his arms tightly around her as he thrust into her, grasping her hips. With a nearly violent crush of flesh, he drove into her over and over, thrust her up against the wall behind the bed. Tara clung to him with both arms wrapped around his neck, crying out as the orgasm overtook her. And it overtook Harry. His hands clutched her hips as he plunged into her one last time, growling as he came.

Tara slid back down the wall, her knees gone weak and gelatinous.

“Are you all right?” Harry had come back to himself, and his eyes were wide with worry that he’d lost control again.

“Yes. Are you?”

He took a deep breath, seemed to consider it. “Yeah. I am, now.”

He kissed her soundly, wrapping her in his arms and the blankets. She pressed her ear to his warm chest, feeling it rise and fall and his heartbeat settle into sleep. When she looked up at him, he was as she’d seen him in desert effigy: a knight at rest in the darkness. This was the first peacefulness she’d seen in him in months.

She laid her head back down, slipped into a dream of the desert. In her dream, Strength and the Knight of Pentacles, stripped of his armor, slept twined together on a sarcophagus while a lion kept watch over them.

Chapter Nine

A
S MUCH
as he hated to admit it, he needed her.

Harry shuffled through the papers on his desk while he was on hold with the U.S. Marshals. Though the Marshals had some irritating on-hold music that sounded like a tortured xylophone version of “Muskrat Love,” he felt calmer this morning than he had in a long time, as if he’d sworn off caffeine. He glanced over at Tara, scribbling notes at a nearby desk filched from the Library of Congress. The stolen chair squeaked relentlessly, but she didn’t complain, absorbed in her work. Harry had been mysteriously unable to procure a desk for Veriss, who was wearing a hole in the carpet in the conference room, pacing before a whiteboard. Harry liked him better over there, behind soundproof glass like a fish in a bowl.

Maybe Lockley was right. Maybe only people like them understood other people like them, could fathom what it was like to have the underlying tension of a more important mission every day. A duty that was more important than desire, love, or friendship. Lives were always at stake in their line of work, and everything else had to be sublimated to it. No one else would understand, no one but Tara.

Anderson from Forensics wound her way through the bullpen, making a beeline for Harry’s desk. She was dressed in a white Tyvek hazmat suit, clutching a clipboard stuffed full of papers. Only too relieved to be free of the Marshals’ “Muskrat Love,” Harry hung up.

“Anderson, what’s up? And is it Halloween already?”

Anderson’s eyes glowed in excitement. “We’ve found something new. Something interesting.”

Tara squeaked her chair around to face them, winced at the sound. “Did you re-run the DNA from Lena’s disappearance?”

“Yes. And the previous samples. We consulted with a genetics expert at the University of Virginia, and he’s very excited.” Anderson grinned. “We didn’t screw up the lab results, after all. The expert thinks that we have a chimera—of sorts—on our hands. There is more than one genetically distinct type of cell, but this isn’t anything that anyone’s ever seen before.”

“How is that possible?” Harry leaned forward in his chair. “The DNA is from people that we know to be distinct … separate entities.”

“We don’t know. The DNA strands are all tangled together. But the strands are degrading at different rates. Look.” Anderson perched on the edge of Tara’s desk and showed them a printout. The first page showed three staccato lines. “In the first DNA samples taken from Carrie Kirkman’s disappearance, we found three sets of DNA: Gerald Frost’s, Carrie’s, and an unknown. Gerald’s DNA had degraded.” She pulled out another page, including four lines. “In the samples taken from Carl’s disappearance, we found four sets: Gerald’s, Carrie’s, Carl’s, and the same unknown. Carrie’s and Gerald’s had degraded, though.” She pointed out broken and faint third and fourth lines and flipped to the next page. “In Lena’s disappearance, we found four sets of DNA: the unknown, Carrie’s, Carl’s, and Lena’s.” She pointed to two faint lines. “Carrie’s DNA has degraded to the point that it’s almost unrecognizable, and Carl’s is dissolving, too. We think Gerald’s degraded to the point that it no longer exists.”

“What would cause that kind of degradation?” Harry asked, his eyes tracing the multicolored lines.

“Only one thing would cause degradation in this way. Serious radiation exposure.”

Tara leaned forward. “Did you find radiation in the samples?”

“Once we looked for it, yes. Loads.” Anderson inclined her head to the lab. “We found thirty microroentgens per hour in the lab, and are decontaminating it now. That’s more than five times the normal background levels of radiation. Lena’s house is soaked in cesium-137, iodine-131, and strontium-90 particles, and so is the evidence from Carl’s car. We’ve stuck that in a lead-lined box. Nobody’s seen residual levels of that type since—”

“Since Chernobyl,” Tara finished.

“Yeah. Exactly.” Anderson seemed stunned at Tara’s intuitive leap. “We’d expect someone with this degree of residual radiation to have experienced serious physical damage: thyroid cancer, serious deformities, and invasive cancers. But whoever our unknown subject is, he’s apparently well enough to be skulking around in the shadows.”

“Are the levels enough to cause harm to you guys, or people working the case?” Harry asked, envisioning somebody somewhere suing him for something.

Anderson shook her head. “Unlikely that you’d get thyroid cancer from one-time vicarious exposure. But I’d advise anyone who worked those scenes to turn their clothes in for proper disposal. If any new crime scenes emerge, we’ve got more moon suits on order.”

Harry drummed his fingers on his desk. “Where the hell did this come from? Is our kidnapper sitting on a stockpile of dirty bombs?”

Before Anderson could answer, Tara said, “No. Our subject is from Chernobyl.”

Anderson blinked. “Damn, you’re good. We don’t know for sure, but the combination of radioactive materials is fairly specific. You could be dealing with a refugee, with someone who was bombarded with radiation for a long period of time.”

“But why would a victim of the worst nuclear disaster in history be selling secrets to cause more destruction?” Harry wondered. “Is he doing this for the money?”

Veriss had swum out of his fishbowl and wormed his way into the conversation. Harry groaned inwardly. “Economic advantage is the single most powerful motivator in my models. I don’t see why someone
wouldn’t
sell those secrets.”

Harry stared at Veriss. Hard.

Veriss backed up. “Absent any internalized societal norms to the contrary, of course. And being tried for treason might have an additional deterrent effect.”

Tara shook her head. “I don’t think our subject is in it sheerly for the money. I think it’s about revenge.”

Harry frowned. “What do you mean?”

She rolled forward, and her chair squeaked. “I think our subject has experienced hell. And he wants the rest of us to know what it’s like.”

Harry picked up the phone. “Get me Homeland Security. I need them to sweep every major airport with Geiger counters. We need to figure out where this guy got in.”

T
ARA’S HELL WAS DIFFERENT FROM HER UNKNOWN SUBJECT’S
hell.

And she felt it would serve her best if she could understand it.

The elevator up to the Library of Congress grated slowly on its cables. Tara looked at the flashing lights, notebook tucked under one arm, and a coffeemaker under the other. The Little Shop of Horrors had filched it from LOC, despite the LOC inventory sticker on the bottom. She hoped that if she brought it back, as a peace offering, she might be able to dig up some information.

Maybe.

The elevator doors opened on one of LOC’s long-term storage areas. Rows and rows of moveable bookshelves stretched back as far as the eye could see—which wasn’t far. The lighting here was on motion detectors to save energy and keep the documents from fading; a light flicked on when she stepped out of the elevator. They lit up as she wandered down the long, spotless corridors of documents that stretched into darkness that was air-conditioned and humidity-controlled.

“Hello?” Tara called into the stacks.

A light flickered on in the distance. Overhead lights winked on as someone approached; Tara could hear heels clicking on the concrete.

A young woman wearing a paper jumpsuit and pink latex gloves rounded the corner. Tara recognized her from the elevator; she’d been the one to filch Veriss’s projector. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion upon seeing Tara.

Tara held up the coffeepot. “I, uh, found something of yours. I thought I’d bring it back.”

The woman’s head cocked to the side, and her light brown hair licked her cheek. A pair of safety goggles was perched on top of her head. “You’re bringing it
back
?”

This was not how the game was played.

“Yeah.” Tara held it out to her. “It’s yours.”

“What did you do to it?” Suspicion turned the corner of her mouth.

“Nothing. I swear.”

“Does it still work?”

“Yeah.”

Fast as a cobra striking, the woman snatched the coffeepot from Tara’s hands and held it to her chest. “Um. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

The woman examined the coffeepot for tampering, then looked back at Tara over the white plastic brim. “Is this a bribe? What do you really want?”

“I could use some help,” Tara admitted. “Research help.”

The woman’s shoulders relaxed a bit. “Oh. What on?”

“Chernobyl. I’m looking for information about survivors, about radiation exposure and health effects.” Tara looked at the white suit the woman was wearing. “Looks like you’re the expert.”

She shook her head. “No. I’m just an archivist. Cleaning some fragile silver nitrate photograph plates. Can’t get dust on them. And they do have the tendency to corrode, if not stored properly.” She paused awkwardly. “But I think I can help you, anyway.”

“Thanks.” Tara gingerly extended her hand in truce. “By the way, I’m Tara.”

The woman grasped her hand with her pink glove. “Jenny. Let me get this gear stowed away, and I’ll see what I can dig up for you.”

Tara followed Jenny down the corridor to a back room with a locked keycard entry. Jenny swiped her badge to let them into a brightly lit space covered with workbenches and computer terminals. Under a flame hood and Plexiglass box, Jenny’s silver nitrate plates glistened, smelling sharply of chemicals as they dried.

Jenny set the coffeemaker down on a table. She snapped off her gloves and unzipped her protective suit, stepped out of it, and stuffed the gear into a wastebasket. Underneath her suit, she wore a simple T-shirt and jeans—items that wouldn’t require dry cleaning. They made her look very young, like a teenager playing dress up. She perched on a stool, watching Tara, probably guessing that Tara would run off to steal something when her back was turned.

“EPA has some files on Chernobyl. I know they’ve been over there several times on fact-finding missions.” Jenny hooked her feet in the bottom rungs of the stool and turned to a computer terminal. Her fingers flitted over the keyboard. “Some of them are public record. Some are not.”

Tara didn’t figure her security clearance would get her very far. “What would it take to get access to those?” She leaned on a workbench, arms crossed.

Jenny’s mouth turned upward. “You
could
file a request up your chain of command. It would probably take a few weeks.”

“What if … what if I brought you a gift?” Tara was feeling out the parameters of the new game; it was like bringing treasure to the dragon, in the hopes the dragon would spill its secrets.

Jenny gestured to the coffeemaker. “I think that’s an even trade. For now.”

Tara lifted an eyebrow, wondering what other petty thefts she might need to turn a blind eye to.

Jenny’s fingers flickered over the keys. “The EPA reports are used often enough that they’ve been digitized. You don’t need the originals, do you? That would take some doing.”

Tara shook her head. “No. Digital is fine.”

Jenny slid from the stool. “I can’t let you take any of this stuff with you, so you’ll have to read at the terminal. I’ll ignore any notes you take, though.”

“Thanks.” Tara slid into the stool and began to scan the files. In her peripheral vision, she saw Jenny fussing with the settings on the overhead vapor hood. She figured the archivist would probably hover around to make sure Tara wouldn’t steal anything. Tara could live with that. She hunched over the terminal and began to read.

Her knowledge of the accident at Chernobyl was probably comparable to most people in the West: she knew a reactor in Ukraine had exploded, causing serious health and ecological damage. No one had known the true radiation levels at the time. Safety protocols and information from radiation detectors had been disregarded, though the true levels were twenty thousand roentgens per hour, well exceeding the lethal dose of five hundred roentgens. The area around the reactor plant had been cordoned off with a thirty kilometer Exclusion Zone, where no one was permitted to enter. The Exclusion Zone included the nearby city of Pripyat and the reactor buildings, which were not evacuated until more than a day later. But contamination had reached into Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus following the accident, which had been caused by an experimental shutdown of the Chernobyl plant by engineers. Of the four reactors at the Chernobyl site, not all were closed until 1999.

More than a half-million people had been involved in immediate efforts to stop the spread of contamination. These people, known as “liquidators,” were given very little information about the effects of the radiation. They and firefighters were sent to drop sand and pour concrete on the lava-like reactor fuel still seething at the site, to haul away debris, to put out fires with water, and to seed the skies for rain that would precipitate volatile cesium from the atmosphere, resulting in black rain that poured down on an unevacuated populace. A temporary structure, known as the Sarcophagus, was built over the ruined fourth reactor to assist in containing the radioactive debris. But, in the intervening years since the disaster, the Sarcophagus was crumbling, allowing daylight and radiation to seep through.