Xenofreak Nation, Book Three: XIA (8 page)

Bryn kept an eye out for road signs, all the while acting like she wasn’t paying attention to where they were going. Not that it mattered, really. Since Dundee hadn’t blindfolded them, he was either taking them to a meeting place other than Fournier’s new hideout, or they just might not be getting out of this alive. She’d been anxious so often lately, she was beginning to feel as if the fight or flight response was a normal state of being.

The holoclock on the dash showed half an hour had passed. Mia talked a good portion of that time, but had finally seemed to run out of steam. She was resting her forehead on the back of Dundee’s seat, and Bryn thought maybe she’d dozed off until she said, “Where are we going again?”

Something told Bryn the effects of the painkiller were wearing off and Mia wouldn’t appreciate another lie.

“Dundee is Fournier’s man,” she said. “We’re, um, going to see him, apparently.”

“What? Why?” Mia directed the questions to Dundee.

“How would I know? Do I look like his best friend? He wants to talk to you.”

Mia’s eyes slid to Bryn, who couldn’t muster a reassuring return look. She lifted her shoulders a little to indicate she had no idea why Fournier wanted to speak with them.

Their surroundings gradually transitioned from residential to rustic as the houses got farther and farther away from each other. As the yards got bigger, the houses became smaller and more derelict. Dundee took a right turn onto a rutted road that didn’t have a sign identifying it. Bryn felt sorry for Mia, who stiffened in pain each time they hit a pothole or bump. They travelled along for at least a mile past what looked like an abandoned manufacturing plant. Bryn saw two armed guards patrolling the place and fully expected Dundee to pull up to one of the corroded metal industrial buildings, but he drove on.

The road ended at a tall, gated chain link fence. Dundee pressed a button on the visor and the gate slowly pulled open. He drove onto a gravel track that went up a low, rocky hill. At the top, Bryn looked down upon a wide winter-brown field complete with a few cows and sheep, beyond which was a barn, a house and several outbuildings. She counted three men on horses riding the perimeter fence. Beyond the farm was a large body of water she assumed was the Hudson River. She glanced behind her at the abandoned plant, where the sun glinted off old-fashioned solar panels on the rooftops. The plant’s grunge contrasted sharply with the charming scene ahead of them.

Dundee took them down the hill past the red, two-story barn with white trim. He stopped the truck in front of a ranch style brick house behind a low picket fence.

Bryn took it all in and thought about the XIA’s efforts to track Fournier down after he’d narrowly escaped death in the Warehouse tunnel collapse. Scott hadn’t told her much, but he had mentioned the XIA’s focus was on a small detail Padme had let slip: that Fournier kept the larger bioengineered animals offsite. An innocent-looking farm like this would be the perfect place to hide in plain sight.

Dundee got out and opened Mia’s door. “Let’s go.”

Mia complied, moving slowly. She seemed steadier now, but her lips were compressed into a thin line of pain.

Bryn slid across the seat and got out as well. Her stomach was tied in knots. She couldn’t help but think of the one and only time she’d met the man who’d surgically removed her scalp and replaced it with a porcupine pelt. He’d been buried up to his chest in dirt from the collapsed escape tunnel and she’d forced him to tell her about the typhoid in exchange for helping him. Her efforts had been in vain, however – she’d watched in horror as he’d been buried alive – or so she thought.

The front door of the house opened and he appeared on the front step. Other than a short, neatly trimmed beard, he looked the same as when she’d last seen him, except he wasn’t covered in dirt and there was no scar across his forehead where the shattered support beam had gashed it.

There was a faint blue glow on his face, and she realized he was wearing a holopiece over his right ear. She heard him say, “Keep an eye on it,” before he blinked twice to discontinue the call. He then beckoned to them to approach, calling out, “Welcome! Please come in.”

When Bryn got closer, Fournier reached out and tipped her chin back with one finger, running his gaze over her quills. “Lovely,” he murmured. “Except…you’re missing a patch just there in the front. Have you been in an altercation?”

When Bryn didn’t respond, he looked at Dundee, who said, “Not my doing.”

“Well, then,” Fournier said, smiling like a good host and gesturing them inside. As Bryn and Mia crossed the threshold into a dark living room with overstuffed brown leather couches, he said, “I apologize for detaining you this way, but I assure you it was necessary. Please have a seat.”

He swept a hand to indicate the couches. Bryn and Mia sat with their backs to a large window that overlooked the river. Fournier strode into the kitchen and brought out a silver tray with a cobalt blue teapot and matching cups and saucers. He set it on a glass-topped coffee table fashioned from the tortuous stump of a tree, and then sat facing them on the smaller couch.

Dundee set Mia’s purse on the couch next to Fournier and went to stand by the door. He was still wearing the surgical mask, his slitted green eyes staring out over Bryn’s and Mia’s heads at the river. Bryn imagined him floating there among the reeds growing along the bank, motionless, only the top half of his face visible as he waited for his unsuspecting prey.

“I hope you like tea,” Fournier said as he poured.

“I like answers,” Mia responded.

“Don’t we all.” He held out a cup brimming with amber liquid.

Mia took it, but didn’t sip, choosing instead to balance it on one knee. Bryn curled her cold fingers around the cup he handed her almost gratefully, savoring its warmth.

“Alright,” Mia said. “Enough with the pleasantries.” She gave sarcastic emphasis to the word. “What do you want with us?”

“I’d like to know how the anti-xenofreak poster child,” he nodded in Bryn’s direction, “and an infectious disease specialist with the CDC became acquainted.”

“How do you know who I am?” Mia asked. “I used a fake name.”

He shrugged. “My staff looked through your purse. Normally, they wouldn’t have bothered, but you arrived with Bryn. So tell me how you know each other.”

Mia shook her head. “Maybe you should be asking why I took time off in the middle of a deadly outbreak to get a xenograft.”

He laughed. “I don’t need to ask why. It’s obvious you’ve figured out what my colleagues have been trying to tell the mainstream scientific community for years: xenografts protect against certain pathogens. Is the CDC planning to tell the public?”

“I’ve informed my superiors of my team’s findings.”

“Have you?” He set his cup on its saucer with a hard clink. “Because I’ve been monitoring the official press releases, and they’ve mentioned nothing.”

Mia smiled thinly. “We
are
a bureaucracy.”

“How very true. Bloated and corrupt like all government. However, that’s beside the point. I ask again: how did you meet Bryn?”

From the door, Dundee said, “Maybe we should ask Maddy Singh.”

Once Scott and Shasta left Nicola in the interview room to stew in her newly outraged mood, he asked, “Was that true? Did Fournier warn the agency?”

“Warn? No. Threaten? Yes. I assume whatever he told Nicola was meant to pacify her.”

She opened the door to interview room two, where Savvy was seated at the table.

Scott took his eye patch off and tucked it into his back pocket. “Savvy, this is Shasta Fox, my boss.”

Savvy lifted his head, but didn’t look at them. He’d kept himself occupied by hanging bits of twisted plastic wrap around his empty soda bottle.

Shasta sat and glanced down at the holofile. Scott chose to stand behind her chair this time, arms folded across his chest.

“Your real name is Felson Ostling,” she said. “Is that Swedish?”

“I’m American,” Savvy replied.

“Yes, I see you were born in Michigan. Diagnosed with savant syndrome as a child. What specifically does that mean in your case?”

“I don’t forget.”

“Prodigious memory. Okay,” Shasta said. “And how has that been useful for your employer?”

“I’m unemployed.”

“I meant your former employer, Dr. Nicolas Fournier.”

Savvy had been staring at a spot on the table, but now he looked down at his lap, where his hands were clasped. “I
can
lie, you know.”

“I don’t doubt that. The question is whether you can lie well enough to fool me.”

Savvy glanced up at Shasta’s face, but didn’t respond.

She sighed. “What is Miss Fournier’s relationship to you?”

“We’re not related.”

“How did she find you?” Scott asked abruptly. Maybe Savvy’s evasive way of answering was part of his syndrome, but it was annoying.

“She was running away and wanted to see if her old room had survived the fire. I was hiding out at the Warehouse facility because I thought it was the last place Fournier would look for me.”

It was the first time Scott had heard Savvy string more than a few phrases together, and the answer immediately struck him as coached.

“Who told you to say that?” he asked.

Savvy may have been able to lie, but he was terrible at it. He blinked several times and his upper body began rocking back and forth in small movements. “No one.”

“Because Nicola said the exact same thing.” The lie rolled easily off Scott’s tongue. “I think maybe even word for word.”

Savvy’s rocking increased; a physical barometer of his agitation. It struck Scott that all they had to do was ask the right questions and Savvy’s unconscious body movements would answer for him.

“Why were you hiding from Fournier?” Shasta asked.

“He scares me.”

“If that’s true, you should be willing to help us capture him.”

“No.” He stopped rocking.

“Why not?”

“He scares me.”

She took a breath to ask another question, but a tone sounded from the holofile, indicating that new information had been added. Shasta accessed it, and Scott read over her shoulder. The tech guys had finished going over Savvy’s stuff. The hologame system was clean, but the portable 3D printer had piqued their interest. It was state-of-the-art and very expensive, with the ability to construct complex objects out of multiple materials, including nanoscale electronics. They’d tried, but were unable to access the printer’s hard drive.

The other items among Savvy’s ‘stuff’ were a holophone without a battery and a mishmash of things apparently scrounged from the debris at the Warehouse facility. The birdcage was exactly what it appeared to be. The techs concluded that whatever had set the alarm off when Lo had driven in wasn’t among the items Nicola and Savvy had on them.

Scott stepped out from behind Shasta’s chair and leaned forward to rest his palms on the table, extending his claws to scratch its surface lightly. Savvy seemed to be trying not to look at the claws, but his eyes kept flicking back and forth from the floor to the table.

“Your 3D printer,” Scott said in a severe tone. “Can it make nanoneurons?”

Savvy recoiled against the back of his chair. “I – I can’t tell you.”

“Do you have a copy of Fournier’s nanoneuron program?” Shasta asked. Scott could sense her barely concealed excitement.

Savvy said, “No,” but he began to rock again.

“What’s the printer’s password?” Scott asked.

“I can’t tell you.”

Shasta nudged Scott’s forearm with her elbow and he backed off, stepping away from the table.

“Have you been conditioned like Lupus?” she asked. “Are you worried that Fournier will flood your nervous system with fear?”

Savvy shook his head. “I don’t have nanoneurons.”

“Why not?”

“He didn’t want to risk damaging my brain.”

Before Shasta could ask anything else, a light began flashing in the room. Scott squinted up at the overheads before locating the fire alarm unit on the wall behind him, where the white strobe light had been activated. A mechanical voice told them this was not a drill, that there was a fire in the building, and advised them that evacuation was mandatory.

Lips pressed together angrily, Shasta shoved back her chair and strode out of the room, pulling her holophone from her pocket. Scott was two steps behind her. At the end of the hallway, what little staff had been in the building were exiting the floor through the stairwell door. Shasta accessed a phone number, muttering, “I got a bad feeling about this.”

The head of building security appeared on her phone. His hair was dripping wet. Shasta asked brusquely, “Where’s the fire?”

“Parking garage. Car fire.”

“What’s the threat level?”

“Depends. Fire department didn’t even answer when we called. Sprinklers went off and my men are trying to put it out with extinguishers, but if it explodes, things could get dicey fast.”

“We have prisoners up here and severely limited staff!” Shasta sounded unusually rattled. “Can you spare anyone?”

“I got two guys on the fire and two waiting for your staff to get to the lobby. Building’s surrounded by xenos and they won’t be able to evacuate. Don’t know how you’re going to get your prisoners out.”

Scott leaned over Shasta’s shoulder and asked him, “Whose car was it?”

“Uh,” the guard looked down at something, “It’s one of yours. Assigned to Tina Lo.”

Shasta growled in her throat and disconnected abruptly, glaring at Scott. “I presume our guests left an incendiary device in the back seat?”

“The tech guys said we set off some kind of alarm when we drove in. That’s why they were checking Savvy’s stuff. None of us thought he might have left something in the car.”

She sighed and gestured to the interview rooms. “Get them. Alton and I will take care of Lupus. Meet us in the parking garage.”

Scott didn’t question her. The parking garage was the source of the fire, but they couldn’t very well walk out the front door with Lupus. They would have to pack the staff and prisoners into cars and drive out – even if they had to mow the protesting xenos down.

It occurred to him that this might be the ‘something big’ Shasta had been expecting: an attack on the XIA itself. She’d sent Lo and Boardman off to guard Unger, but what if Fournier’s plan had been to take advantage of the city’s overwhelmed law enforcement and military and break Lupus out?

As Shasta disappeared down the hallway, he opened the door to interview room two.

Savvy didn’t resist when Scott grabbed his upper arm and urged him to his feet. The savant’s face was turned away as usual, but when Scott caught sight of his profile and realized he was hiding a smile, he jerked his arm roughly.

“You think this is funny?”

“Chaos is always funny,” Savvy replied.

Scott shoved him towards the door with a little more force than necessary. In the hallway, he kept a close eye on him as he opened the door to interview room one. Nicola rushed out, saying, “It’s about time! I thought you were going to leave me in there!”

Scott almost said, “Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind,” but stopped himself. There was still a possibility she might open up to him, which wouldn’t happen if he was a jerk to her.

He walked between and a little behind them as they headed for the exit. When he opened the door at the end of the hallway, Nicola balked at entering the stairwell.

“Do you smell that? Is that smoke?”

The air in the stairwell did smell faintly of smoke. Scott said, “It’s the only way out. The elevators won’t work in an emergency.”

“Where’s Perky?” she demanded.

Scott suffered through a moment of déjà vu, remembering the girl’s stubborn refusal to abandon her bird and her ‘mother’s’ books when the Warehouse facility was under attack.

“He’ll be fine,” he said.

“
She! She’ll
be fine – but she
won’t
.”

With no warning, Nicola bolted in the opposite direction.