“It’s okay. We’re alone now.”
“Why do you have her scanning me?”
“She scans everyone in my office suite.”
“Even you?”
“As director, I require secrecy.” He patted a seat. “Sit. Tell me what’s got you upset.”
She remained standing. “People get depressed sometimes.”
“I want you to be happy. You know how valuable you are to us.”
Alexa stared at him, trying to read the situation. She could see his toothy smile. Eyes dilated. But she couldn’t keep wondering. “There is something I’d like.”
“What? Tell me.”
“I’ve been reviewing recent advances in the biogenetics division.”
“Oh?”
“It turns out there’s now a way to make me fertile—to reverse my genetic sterility.”
Hedrick’s face went from a smile to concern. “Really?” He paced for a moment. “What brought this on?”
Alexa sensed the need for caution.
Hedrick studied her. “Have you met someone?” He then glanced at the ceiling. Opened his mouth to speak.
“Don’t you dare.”
He stopped and then looked back down at her. His eyes narrowed. “I’ve treated you as an equal. You know I have. I wish you would realize how good you have it.”
“I know how good I have it.”
“We’ve known each other since we were children.” He gestured to the boardroom. “Do you even notice what I’ve accomplished?”
“Of course I notice.”
“And you know you’ve always been very dear to me.”
“Graham, you matter very much to me, too. But I can’t help the way I feel. Maybe it’s just the bioengineering, but I don’t have romantic feelings for people. Can you name a time when I have?”
He stared at her. “We can be mature about this. If you want to have children, we—”
“It’s nothing personal.”
He nodded. “I understand. But if you were to have a child, who would the father be?”
She considered the question. “I don’t know.”
His expression grew more serious. “But see, that’s the thing. It’s not just you who gets to decide. The Bureau has a say in this matter, Alexa.”
She frowned. “I don’t follow you.”
He studied her for a moment. “Your intelligence, your appearance, your life span, your physical prowess—the organization gave you all those things. Your genetic sequence is proprietary. You need our permission to make copies of it. Otherwise you’re stealing.”
She felt a sudden dizziness as his words came to her. The absence was coming on like an enveloping fog. “I . . .”
“Your body was designed. If you want to have children, the BTC should choose the genetic material from which your offspring are made. You must see the ethical requirement for this. Anything less is theft, Alexa.”
She could barely hear him as the mental fog closed around her.
He came close and patted her hand. “You’ve already achieved what would thrill anyone else. You hold one of the top positions in this organization—a benefit we bestowed on you. As a rational, reasonable individual, you must see that it’s the Bureau that will decide whether you have children.”
Alexa felt herself coming slowly back to her senses, her heart pounding. She barely had any recollection of what Hedrick had just said to her.
“Are we clear on this?”
Alexa nodded absently.
“Good.” He studied her. “You can go.”
• • •
Alexa approached the twin doors. They opened automatically and closed behind her just as quickly. She moved past Hedrick’s secretary and guards in apparent calm. As she rounded the corner, she saw Mr. Morrison leaning against the corridor wall.
“I see the director respects your valuable contributions.”
“Go away, Morrison.”
“Where’s our esprit de corps?” He fell in alongside her.
“What do you want?”
“You may think you’re better than me, but at least I earned my place here. I’d say I was here before you were even born—except you were never born, were you? Maybe that’s why you lack even the ambition to fuck Hedrick out of simple gratitude.”
She moved so fast even Morrison couldn’t react before she punched him hard across the face—sending all two hundred and fifty pounds of him hurtling down the hall.
Morrison rolled back onto his feet and shook his head clear. “I see that touched a nerve.”
She stared him from several yards away. “Don’t make the same mistake twice.”
He nodded, still rubbing his jaw. “I’ll make damn sure I don’t.”
CHAPTER 14
Flight
Despite every effort not to be impressed on his journey—Jon Grady was impressed. He’d been sitting in a luxurious leather seat for nearly a half hour before he discovered the hypersonic transport was already under way. It was that quiet. The pilots had the cabin window shields deployed—whether to conceal from him their route or to protect the aircraft he couldn’t tell.
When Grady heard the scramjet kick in, the shield disappeared, revealing a wide window by his elbow that he didn’t think could be made of glass. Below the sun was rising at the far edge of the world.
It was the most miraculous sight he’d ever seen. His mind caught fire as the universal laws paraded before him. He felt inebriated with joy.
Grady guessed they were at least a hundred fifty thousand feet up. Maybe higher. It didn’t feel like they were moving, though he could see the lights of metropolitan sprawl gliding by far below. They must have been doing three or four thousand miles an hour. Maybe more?
Down there was the entirety of the human race. His eyes followed the curvature of the horizon. Unlike with a photograph, the harder he looked, the more there was to see. He hadn’t expected this—that the most magical moment of his life would be given to him by his enemies. Grady couldn’t remove the grin from his face.
After a while he tried to orient himself to the globe—deduce where they were. But “up” didn’t appear to be north. He couldn’t see a recognizable polar ice cap—they weren’t that high. The modified gravity field disoriented him further. It was nearly impossible to tell what he was looking at in the darkness below.
The gravity field was a stable one Earth g. But then again, that might be his technology erasing all sensation of falling. Most people didn’t know that astronauts on the space station were experiencing almost a full g of Earth gravity; it was the fact that they were falling around the Earth that gave the sensation of weightlessness. In fact, it was gravity that was causing their orbital fall—and so the zero gravity sensation was actually being caused by gravity.
Not on this incredible machine. Everything was stable and normal here—like he was sitting in some millionaire’s home theater.
Grady turned to face the uniformed BTC officers seated across from him—young Morrisons both. “I didn’t feel any acceleration—not even when the scramjet kicked in.”
Neither of them answered.
“It’s my gravity technology, isn’t it? You’re canceling out the force of acceleration in the passenger compartment?” He beamed at them. “Amazing.”
He looked again out the window. Too bad this was an evil conspiracy. Otherwise this would really be fun.
“Are we in the mesosphere? We are, aren’t we? You could probably make use of the gravity fluctuations in the mesosphere for additional propulsion. Maybe even stabilization. Is that what you’re doing?”
The Morrison clones just stared back at him.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
The pilot’s cockpit wasn’t visible from this cabin—in fact, there wasn’t even a door leading to it from where he was. The
craft had only been traveling for an hour or so when the glass faded into an opaque surface. Materials science again? It looked like the glass itself had changed from clear to opaque. What innovator was doing time in Hibernity for that breakthrough?
He turned again to his guards, but they stared back at him like statues. No point in asking.
Frustrated that the window shield had come down again, Grady tried to get his head back in the game. It was distracting. It really was. They were rolling out all the stops. Beyond first class. This was infinity class. A private hypersonic jet with a front-row seat to the cosmos. His gravity technology had made it possible. God, he wanted to be working on this.
But there was no way. He remembered all too clearly the cruelty of his captors. The life they had stolen from him and from others. And only a vague sense of the lost memories he’d never get back.
His fellow Resistors had put their faith in him. He would not fail them.
Grady looked around at the burled walnut millwork and the fine leather all around him. This, too, was a gilded cage. He raised his flute of champagne to his guards. “To human ingenuity.”
They stared like Sphinxes.
• • •
The landing a half hour or so later was completely silent and without the sensation of acceleration or deceleration. It was as though they were in a hotel courtesy suite, not an aircraft. Before long a pleasant tone sounded, and his guards removed their seat belts. Not that anyone had needed them.
A black door slid silently upward, then aside, and the guards ushered Grady into a brightly lit hangar. He stood for a moment at the top of the metal stairs. A midnight-blue Cadillac Escalade with diplomatic license plates stood idling below. Dozens of guards patrolled the hangar perimeter, dressed in plain clothes, with long guns slung at their chests. It looked like regular twenty-first-century technology. Grady knew the BTC had outgrown firearms decades ago. These seemed oddly out of place given everything he now knew.
He stepped down the stairway and felt balmy summer air wash over him. The fragrance of mown grass brought an onslaught of memories—hazy and indistinct though they were. He felt so alive. He spotted painted numbers on the hangar door. They glowed in magenta and violet. He felt their invisible geometry. His synesthesia, he knew, but it felt good to be surprised by numbers again.
He turned to a guard. “Where are we?”
“Keep walking.”
Grady glanced back at the cobalt-blue hypersonic aircraft looming over him. Its lines were slanted in antiradar angles, giving it the look of an Aztec sacrificial knife. It was a remarkable machine. Silent. Invisible. Fast. He guessed they’d just traversed half the world in under two hours.
A strong hand grabbed his elbow, and he was soon handed off to a new set of Morrisons standing next to the open door of the Escalade. From the door’s thickness he guessed the vehicle was armored—but crudely. Again, early twenty-first-century technology. No doubt this machine was intended for the public streets. To blend in.
He gestured to the aircraft behind him. “You know, my invention made that gravity propulsion possible.”
“Good for you. Now shut up and get in.” The guard shoved Grady into the SUV.
That meant it was showtime. Grady had roughly thirty minutes to escape once they were under way.
There were a total of six guards in the vehicle, only two of them Morrisons—one on either side of Grady in the middle seat. He guessed the BTC didn’t want to have too many Morrisons in one place in public. Twins were one thing—clones something else entirely.
The two guards up front looked beefy, though. As did those in back. No doubt steroids were as crude as leeches to the BTC. They probably had something much better to pump up their soldiers. The security detail wore blue blazers and slacks—no ties. No guns visible. They looked, in fact, just like diplomatic bodyguards.
There was Scotch and wine on the console in front of him, along with what now seemed like an ancient flat-screen LCD television—no holographic units here apparently. He was sorely tempted to have a belt of booze to settle his nerves, but if he could survive Hibernity, this escape should be no big deal. They couldn’t shoot him. Hedrick needed Grady alive. That’s why they were bringing him to headquarters. He just had to make sure they didn’t nox him before he pulled this off.
Grady nodded to the men up front. “So we’re slumming it in the twenty-first century for the last leg, I see.”
The driver gave Grady a dismissive glance in the rearview mirror.
And then they were under way. With a rude jolt of acceleration that now seemed annoying, the vehicle moved through the hangar doors and out into the night. Before long they were rolling through forested countryside. Lots of deciduous trees and lush undergrowth silhouetted against a moonlit sky.
Grady leaned to the side to look for landmarks in the darkness. “Where are we?”
“Earth.”
The guards cracked up. The one to Grady’s right gestured to the television. “This thing get ESPN?”
The driver nodded. “Yeah. Remote’s next to it.”
Moments later the TV came to life.
“What channel?”
“How the hell should I know? I don’t sit back there.”
Grady watched in bewilderment as a commercial for dish soap came on-screen. It was surreal under the circumstances to watch a CGI sponge dancing across a gleaming kitchen countertop. Given everything that had transpired, it all looked so trivial.
The guard started clicking through satellite channels. “Damn, this thing is slow.”
“Welcome to tech level two.”
Grady turned away from the screen. Instead, he gazed out the window. When was he going to do this? Was it better to escape in the countryside or in the city? They were moving through suburbs now.
He guessed he’d have more places to hide in the city. More resources. And he had to get the evidence he was carrying to someone. That was a whole separate challenge.
By now the guard manning the TV remote had navigated past cooking and travel shows. “What channel’s it on?”
Another guard grabbed the remote. “It’s in the two hundreds.”
He clicked onto a cable news station where a mannish woman in a suit stood before a cluster of microphones. The chyron below her read, “Richard Cotton Trial.”
A couple of the guards roared in laughter, “Cotton!”
“My man . . .”
The woman on TV was in midsentence. “. . . effort. We’re just glad Richard Cotton will finally face justice.”
A guard yelled, “Put the game on. This shit’s been going on for months.”
Grady watched the screen in fascination.
The news cut to footage of a chained prisoner in bulky body armor and a bulletproof helmet being escorted past a phalanx of riot police. Grady recognized Cotton’s bearded face nodding to the cameras.
Grady struggled to hear the news anchor’s voice over the hoots of his BTC guards. “Captured by FBI agents late last year, Cotton was transferred Thursday under heavy guard to federal district court in Chicago, where he faces trial on thirty-three counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy, and use of weapons of mass destruction. The leader of an antitechnology domestic terror group known as the Winnowers, Cotton has claimed responsibility for a decadelong string of bombings focused on eliminating scientists whose research he claimed was ‘an affront to God.’ He has been called a martyr by thousands of admirers for whom his antimodernity message resonates.”
One guard scoffed. “Dipshits. It’s almost too easy.”
On-screen Richard Cotton raised his shackled hands as far up as he could in triumph. The Morrison on Grady’s right chuckled. “What a ham.”
Grady looked from guard to guard. “The FBI captured Cotton?”
The guards all laughed.
“You could call it that.”
>
Grady scowled at the man. “The FBI is part of this?”
“Hey, Ep, he thinks the FBI can keep a secret.”
They all laughed harder.
The screen suddenly changed to a baseball game—the Detroit Tigers against the Cleveland Indians.
“There we go.”
Grady looked from one guard to another, trying to figure out what they had meant. Apparently there was some joke he wasn’t in on—and which the FBI wasn’t in on either.
Grady leaned forward to see a downtown skyline ahead, lights glittering atop lofty towers. There were Michigan plates on the few cars they passed. Signs on businesses and billboards for local radio stations made it clear they were heading into Detroit. Numbers and letters glowed supernaturally all around him now—his synesthesia kicking in, distracting him with its visual lures.
He needed to stay focused. The time on the dashboard read “11:23 PM.” They’d been traveling for nearly fifteen minutes already.
Another glance to either side. They were driving on a nearly deserted multilane highway. It was bridged over at intervals with cross streets and signs for downtown. There were grassy embankments to either side, leading up to bushes and chain-link fences, with houses and buildings beyond. He guessed they were going seventy.
The guards were absorbed in the baseball game. Grady forced himself to ignore the glowing numbers littered across the TV screen. Focus.
When would he do this? He had to act soon, or they might actually arrive at BTC headquarters.
The Escalade signaled and changed to the slow lane. There were no cars around them at the moment.
No time like the present.
Grady casually picked at the “mole” on his neck, removing it. Then he opened his mouth and placed it on his tongue.
The Morrison to his right gave him a disgusted look.
But before the man could even speak, Grady heard a high-frequency sound as a sudden surge of pressure spread away from his own face, enveloping them both in a fog-like, translucent wave. A wave that rapidly expanded in every direction.