"But what if they've caught me morphing on the security cameras?"
Rob put a drinking straw in the bottle of beer and placed it close enough for Ian to drink. "Look, ma, no hands."
"Seriously."
"It was a second or two, you said."
"Yeah."
"Do you know what you morphed into?"
"No idea."
"Well, nobody's going to believe it," Rob said. "People get fed too many fake videos and pictures. They don't believe a bloody thing they see any more. You should start making the most of that, you know."
He flipped the cap off his beer and clinked the bottle against Ian's. He was right. It was no big deal, just a painful lesson. And if you looked at lessons the right way, they were always worth having.
"Cheers," Ian said. His hand was starting to throb, but pain, like adrenaline, was something you could habituate yourself to, and handle it better every time. He'd have to work on that. "But I think I won."
Rob winked. "You did, mate. You did."
LANSING, MICHIGAN
ONE WEEK LATER, NOVEMBER.
When was it time to quit?
It was just before 10 p.m. and Dru was burning her own time and her own data package on her own computer to do work for goddamn KW-Halbauer. If she'd thought the run-up to the merger was a pain in the ass, it had nothing on what was happening now that the two old companies were trying to rub along as one big happy step-family. HR had a new director who talked about the need to embrace culture change, which translated as you've been doing it all wrong. Dru hated her guts.
But misery was probably her just desserts for helping wield the axe. Keeping an eye on Kinnery was the only truly interesting task she had left, but she had to do it far from the company network while Weaver maintained the smokescreen to make sure she could continue to access records she might need.
Dru needed a breakthrough. Months of sifting every conceivable lead were starting to mess with her mind, mostly because it had forced her to plumb the depths of voluntary human ignorance in places she would never normally have ventured. Shape-shifters, home-grown and alien, popped up on web pages everywhere. She sipped her soda while she studied an image on her monitor, trying to work out why it seemed familiar.
It was a photo – grainy, poor contrast – of a human-alien hybrid taken in Panama, according to the caption. She really had seen this before. It took her ten minutes to find the folder, but there it was: another image that was clearly from that same sequence, and it was obviously a goddamn sloth, except the caption said it was taken in Africa. Christ, these whack-jobs couldn't even collate their own bad data. Dru closed the link and went back to her notes. What hope was there of pointing them tactfully in the direction of the simple explanations of the phenomena they thought they'd captured? None. They wanted to believe this bullshit. She wanted not to.
The Slide was a lot more professional, though, and it hadn't given up on Weaver. Zoe Murray was either pathologically obsessed or else she had good reason to believe her source.
Since the initial call in July, she'd been in touch with Weaver eight times to show him alleged evidence of morphing humans, all different cases, and ask if it was Kinnery's project. Weaver passed them to Dru for her file. Some had images attached, but they were a testament to the skill of digital artists. Dru allowed herself to be impressed by the quality and added the relevant keywords of names and places to her search field. No, she didn't believe any of it, but the whole point of sifting was to bypass her own biases.
Kinnery's done something. But what?
Dru reminded herself that she was up against a man who'd kept something hidden for nearly twenty years without cracking or letting anything leak. He wasn't careless with information. Somebody else had been, though, and she still found it hard to believe that he was prepared to confess to Weaver on the strength of it. Why bother? Why not just sit tight? And why not build a better lie?
Three theories dug in their heels and refused to go away. The Maggie Dunlop story was a decoy to mop up any information that Kinnery couldn't dismiss; there were too many verifiable details in it for it to be wholly invented; and the triangle – the relationship between the hotline number, the ranch, and whoever had answered that Seattle number – was central to the answer.
It was like watching a TV ad where an actor demonstrated an invisible product, telling the world that nobody would know you were using it. A digital artist had removed the actual product from the video and filled in the textures so that the actor's hands were empty and the effects looked like magic. In the pursuit of Project Ringer, Dru could still see the actors – Kinnery, Weaver, the guy on the phone, the guy at the ranch – but a key element had been digitized out of the scene. Something real had once been there. It was driving her crazy.
Clare called from outside the closed study door. "Mom, are you going to be up all night? I'm going to bed."
"Okay, sweetheart. Goodnight."
"There's no point being blonde if you've got bags under your eyes."
"Goodnight, sweetheart."
Dru gave it another hour before she headed for bed. She studied her reflection while she rubbed in her miracle hundred-dollar night cream, noting dark roots that needed attention again. She still wasn't used to being blonde. Most people treated her differently now and she was caught up in the feedback loop of behaving differently in return. If she'd ever doubted that humans ran mostly on instinct, she had her proof.
And the damn cream still wasn't working. She wasn't much smarter than the morons who believed in alien body snatchers. Everybody needed to cling to some fantasy, even her.
In the morning, she did her weekly check of the property register and realtor sites for Athel Ridge. Nothing had changed. Dunlop Ranch had been sold to a property company, then to another developer, and then to a buyer that appeared to be a regular family. Ian Dunlop had vanished in the chain of transactions.
Dru now had no way of tracing him. She'd checked out the companies involved, but they were exactly what they seemed to be. Ian Dunlop had taken his money and disappeared.
Dunlop. Dunlop. Sells ranch, moves to ... where? Did he even live there?
And why hasn't Weaver tried to fill the holes in Kinnery's story? Does he prefer not to know, or does he know and he just isn't telling me?
It had to be about deniability again. Weaver didn't want to know any more about her activity than he absolutely had to. Dru wondered whether that was trust in her skills or if he had another pair of eyes on this that she didn't know about.
She was back to square one, then. She spent her lunch break in the library for a change of scenery, picking a Washington town at random and going through the directory for Dunlops in the hope that she might strike lucky again. But it was desperate guesswork, and she knew it. There was no geographical connection to give her a steer on where this man might go to ground. If Ian Dunlop was the Brit she spoke to, then he could have been back in England now or anywhere on the goddamn planet. Finding the Maggie Dunlop connection the first time had been an intuitive leap from a scrap of illegally obtained information. If Dru was going to pull that off again, she needed another piece of the puzzle, or the kind of million-to-one luck that won lotteries.
Today's batch of Dunlops was as much of a cold trail as the previous ones. After lunch, she took another look through the old e-mail logs that the system administrator had provided back in July to see if she'd missed anything on her previous sift. The reporting app generated communications flow reports showing who was talking to who and what the headers were, and if she asked nicely, the sysadmin could also produce data by a variety of filters – profanities, internal spam, after-hours activity, data leakage, and even staff looking for new jobs.
But she'd already run all the name searches she could think of, Dunlop included. And Kinnery wouldn't have been dumb enough to leave a trail like that. He seemed to have been acutely aware of the security risks that most people still weren't taking seriously ten or even fifteen years lat
er.
You're a clever bastard, Kinnery. A careful one, too. But somebody outed you, and you've been forced to lie. I'll find out sooner or later.
Just before Dru left for the day, Julianne tapped on the door and placed a sealed white envelope on her desk. Dru stood there in her coat, pointedly doing up the buttons. She was going home on time tonight. Not even Weaver was going to stop her.
"Mr Weaver said someone sent him this and that you needed a copy," Julianne said. It wasn't the first envelope that she'd handed over, almost certainly hard copy of the latest approach from The Slide. "He said you'd know the sender."
"Thanks, Julianne." Dru slid it into her bag. It was Zoe Murray, then. "Glad you caught me."
Over dinner, Clare wanted to talk about arrangements for Thanksgiving and whether Larry was coming over or if they were going to eat at his place. He always left his arrangements late these days. Dru was in the mood to maintain radio silence and see if he broke first, but it wasn't fair on Clare. She should have been a non-combatant in this rumbling war.
"Why don't you call your dad and see what he's doing?" Dru said. "We'll try to fit in with whatever he wants."
Dru wondered if that sounded like sarcasm instead of the simplest way to get an answer. She loaded the dishwasher and retreated to the study to put in her daily hour or two of checking feeds and alerts. Then she remembered the envelope. At least she'd have some new data to enter tonight.
It was a printed note from Weaver, with a URL to look at: 'Another video from Murray. She wanted me to comment. Again, I didn't.'
The alleged shape-shifter footage that Dru had seen ranged from honest idiocy of the kind that mistook domestic cats for panthers to elaborate and rather clever hoaxes. Any amateur could be a special effects artist these days. It was a diversion from the real business of tracing Ian Dunlop and mapping Kinnery's contacts. Dru would give it ten minutes, no more.
The video had an interesting caption, though, misspelled but very specific: 'Guy changes into someone else in mall. Defanitely genuine, not messed with.'
It was security footage from a camera set too high above an exit to pick up more than a couple of yards outside the doors, and the quality wasn't great. There was no audio. Dru could see three guys in their late teens or early twenties, one wearing a cap. It must have been the end of an argument, because the one with the cap walked through the doors, and the other two – one blonde, one dark – jumped on him and swung punches. The cap guy turned around and knocked the dark-haired kid flat; the blonde one lost his nerve and they both ran off. A woman walked up to the cap guy and said something to him, probably checking if he was injured if his hand gesture was anything to go by. He left and the clip ended.
So there was a squabble in a mall. There were probably dozens of those across the country every day. What was Dru supposed to be looking for? She replayed the footage three or four times to check the individual faces and bodies before she spotted it.
The cap guy's features appeared to change and revert, snap snap snap, in no more than a couple of seconds. She had to replay it to make sure.
Ah. That's the shape-shifter element, then.
It looked like one of those adverts that cycled through faces of different races and ages to make the point that a product was suitable for everyone; you could see features change, but it was too fast to focus consciously on the detail. Once Dru spotted it in the video, it was noticeable, but not astonishing. It might even have been a glitch. It certainly wasn't state of the art digital effects. She checked the comments, looking for employee names out of habit, and was amazed at how many people still couldn't spell hoax.
She found herself nodding in agreement with the comments that it was a poor effort compared to some of the spoofs out there. They were right. It really did need a wolf or an orc's head to stand a chance in the micro-attention environment of video uploads.
And if anyone at KWA uploaded site security footage like this, they'd be looking for another job, pronto. I hope this mall fires the asshole.
So was this what Zoe did all day, surfing for every line of paranormal crap on the Internet?
She's just like me, then. Poor bitch.
Dru wondered why someone would post such shoddy special effects when even Clare, who wasn't particular arty, could edit almost professional-quality footage on her cell phone. The guy could have been an average idiot, of course.
Or he could have posted exactly what had been recorded, and that was why it wasn't anything exotic. It was real.
No, that was insane. But Dru had to stick to her method, however implausible the evidence, and rule it in. She checked the web page for details. The user hadn't even posted a profile she could follow. She could have tried contacting him via the comments, but that was a step too far.
The only clue she had was the camera ident and a fuzzy, indistinct date and time code. Why wasn't the image sharper? Ah, the guy must have videoed an actual screen with his phone rather than try to make a copy. The ident said PORTON MACKAY CAM 65A and the date showed it had been recorded about a week ago. Dru copied the name Porton Mackay into her notebook and added another sticky note to the hard copy chart.
She needed to know what Porton Mackay was. The name of the mall? A store? A town? This was going to take some time. She ran another search for Porton, Mackay, and Mall, and got fewer hits than she expected.
There was one with all three terms that threw up a number of related pages: Mackay Mall, Porton, Askew County, Maine. She found it on a map and checked to see if any of the place names around Porton rang a bell, but it didn't mean a thing. Nothing got ruled out, though. That was the point of this exercise. If there were obvious connections, she'd have found them by now.
It was only when she was searching with the location added to the names on her list that something clicked. She'd included the search terms LEO BRAYNE and BRAYNE. That threw up something she hadn't been expecting: Brayne and Askew County.
But it wasn't Leo Brayne. It was a Michael Brayne from Westerham Falls.
She checked the map again. Westerham Falls was maybe an hour from Porton. The search had picked up an old news release on a National Guard site about troops returning from Iraq, complete with a publicity picture of a group of guys, one of whom was identified as Michael Brayne. She searched again using MICHAEL MIKE LEO BRAYNE to see what fell out.
Dru really hadn't been expecting a result from that, either. But she got a quick match and a photo caption. The picture, taken some years ago, showed Senator Brayne with his son and daughter at a charity event. The senator had endowed some specialist treatment centre for veterans. It wasn't the scale of his generosity that got her attention, though. It was the name of his son: Michael.
She copied the two images to her desktop and compared them. They'd been taken years apart, but the son and the soldier looked like the same guy.
Oh boy.
She reminded herself that humans looked for patterns and imposed meaning on completely random things. Astronomy had its roots in that. It took a hell of an imagination to see constellations, and that was exactly what she was doing with these names and places.
But she couldn't ignore the fact that Leo Brayne had a connection to Project Ringer, however far removed, and his son appeared to live within an hour of a mall where a security camera might have picked up someone apparently able to alter his appearance on the spot. Was Mike Brayne in any phone directory? No, he was one of the elite, so he'd be unlisted. But she'd look anyway.
It took her just five minutes to find it an entry for M.S. and O. Brayne, 2763 Forest Road. There were no other Braynes with a Westerham Falls address.
Dru hadn't really thought he'd have a listed phone number, but then she didn't know anything about him beyond who his father was. He seemed both remarkably invisible and in plain sight at the same time. It took her some time to find the property on the aerial sat map, but when she did, she was struck by how much of a backwater it was.
Like Dunlop Ranch.
No, stop it. That's a connection that isn't even there.
She found herself piecing together all kinds of scenarios, most of them wild theory that made as much sense as a game of consequences. But she couldn't ignore the timeline. She thought she saw a flow there, the vapour trails of causality.
Okay, go with it. To rule it out. It can't be the way it looks.
Under normal circumstances, she'd have hired a local investigator, but asking someone to check out a senator and his family was far too risky. She couldn't even tell Weaver. He had to be kept in a holy state of plausible deniability, and she didn't want to give him any more rope to hang her with.
Her only option was to check for herself. How much time did she have? If Zoe had sent that video to Kinnery and he had any connection to that boy, he'd be making arrangements to hide him.
It was coming up to the holidays. She'd booked time off. Clare had expectations, but Dru couldn't delay now.
If I went to Maine, though, what would I see? The Braynes might be away for the holiday. These people go to ski resorts and private islands. And the mule might already be in some safe house.
The Braynes couldn't live in a small town without somebody knowing something about them, though. It didn't even have to be anything spectacular. A name would do. The Brayne connection was a piece of the puzzle that Dru couldn't ignore, even if it didn't fit her template of a gene mule and the impossibility of shape-shifting. What she needed most was some breakthrough on Ian Dunlop's identity. It was triangulation. Another data point could answer all her questions, and Weaver's.
And I absolutely have to know if this is real or not. For my own sanity.
She had a feeling that she'd find Ian Dunlop had an English accent, and that he was a lot younger than he sounded. Whether he was a living, breathing example of dynamic mimicry was a question she was almost scared to answer.
She hoped he wasn't. There were some complications the world really didn't need.
FOURTEEN
In World War II, the Germans knew the British could easily transmit bogus messages to Luftwaffe bombers, so pilots were suspicious of any orders they received. In fact, the British never bothered to do it. But the Germans thought that they did because they could, and acted accordingly. The power of suggestion and mistrust is enormous. That's another weapon in Ian's armoury.