Drakon Page 7

  Carmaggio felt a little off himself. Nothing I could take to court, but it's the same MO, he thought. The skin along the nape of his neck roughened. Angel dust? he mused.

  Something unnatural was behind this combination of speed and strength and utter savagery.

  "Right, let's see if this is who I think it is," he said. He slid a hand inside the dead man's jacket and began checking pockets. "Green cards, blank. Social Security, ditto. Oho, Jojo was getting upscale—passport. Couple of computer disks. Official stationery . . ."

  "Jojo?" Jesus said.

  "Do-it-while-you-wait Jojo Jackson himself," Carmaggio confirmed. "Aha."

  A piece. A .32 revolver in a waist holster, no sights, trigger guard cut away—Jojo had always liked to think of himself as seriously bad; in fact, he'd just been bad. Not a very good documents man, either. Sooner or later something like this was going to happen to him—the means might have been more conventional, but the result was much the same.

  There was something a little farther down the alley, too. A scrap of paper flecked with blood and plastered to the wet side of a dumpster. A C-note.

  "Somebody might want to bag this," he said mildly. More of the warehouse money.

  "Now, why do you come to Jojo?" Jesus said, imitating Carmaggio's voice.

  ID. Lots of things you could do with cash, but you needed some ID for most of them. Like moving around, buying airplane tickets, renting a car. Not necessarily very good ID—people just didn't look most of the time—but some sort or paper.

  "Travel plans," he answered. Wherever the mystery killer was going, it was probably bad news for the recipients . . . but New York could use the breathing space.

  ***

  Gwen unfastened her seatbelt and stood. Air flowed in through the door of the airliner, mildly warm. Welcome to Cali, Colombia. Welcome to a country that had never even existed in her history; there had been a Republic of Grand Colombia from the 1820s, but that had stretched over all the Andean lands. The smell of burnt kerosene was overwhelming, and she breathed through her mouth to compensate. Outside only the distant mountains were familiar. Friends of hers had estates here, growing coffee and stock and heaven-berries and ganja—in the Domination's timeline. There was a minor liftport and a settlement nearby, mostly servus. This millions-strong monstrosity was almost completely alien, save for a few ancient Spanish churches and public buildings preserved for aesthetics in both histories.

  She hefted her bags and followed the crowd to the Customs checkthroughs. Green-uniformed guards with submachine guns slung across their chests waited among the milling crowd. Some of them had guard dogs on leashes. The animals' heads came up as they scented her, tracking back and forth with cocked ears to find where the unfamiliar trace came from. One of them began barking and tugging at his lead, until the policeman quelled him with a sharp order. Passengers surged away from the growling and bared teeth.

  Noisy lot, humans, she thought.

  Their smell lay heavy in the concourse. It had none of the sharp clean scent of her own species, or the comforting sweetness of servus; the harsh feral smell put her teeth on edge. She showed them in a snarl of her own for an instant. It was a good thing that humans couldn't use their noses for anything but keeping their eyes and upper lips apart; if they had a decent sense of smell she'd never have been able to hide. And what they did scent, they only noticed subliminally, most of the time. She had been working on her pheromones during the flight. It took a while to adjust them upward, although toward the end the cabin staff and several passengers had been hovering around her seat—without knowing exactly why, of course. She smiled as she handed her forged passport to the clerk.

  He was only a pace away across the desk. His brown skin flushed as he looked up at her. She took off her sunglasses and tucked them into a pocket, smiling as she met his eyes. The Colombian swallowed and put a hand to the collar of his shirt.

  "Welcome to Colombia," he said mechanically.

  "Why, thank you," she said, smiling more widely. The forged passport rested between the fingers of her right hand. "It looks like a lovely country."

  "Ah . . . your Spanish is excellent," he stammered. Several of the other clerks were looking at him oddly; he straightened and cleared his throat.

  "Thank you," Gwen said.

  It wasn't difficult to learn, when you had an eidetic memory; just read a grammar and spend a few days listening to Spanish-language television, of which New York had plenty, and practice a little. She probably had a Puerto Rican accent.

  "Ah, purpose of visit?"

  "Business," she said. To be precise, laundering $970,100 in American currency, but no need to go into details. Some contacts with the local criminal classes might also be useful.

  "How long do you expect to remain in Colombia?"

  "About a month."

  Drops of sweat were rolling down the clerk's face. The men at the other desks were glancing over again and again. Hmmm. Perhaps a little too much on the pheromones.

  "Your papers, please, and put the luggage here."

  She put the suitcase on the flat surface and handed him the passport. He dropped it to the desk and opened it, reaching for his stamp.

  That he hesitated only an instant when he saw the ten hundred-dollar bills folded inside the passport said a good deal for his nerves and self-control, especially when you remembered the effects of the pheromones. The standing desk had a wooden rim around it; the bills vanished into a drawer.

  Thump. The stamp went down on her passport, and the clerk opened the suitcase and gave the clothes inside a cursory inspection. The money was underneath the folded garments, in neat bundles wrapped in plain paper and sealed with tape.

  "Enjoy your stay, Señora Smith," the clerk said. He hesitated, then went on: "If you need assistance . . ." and slipped a piece of paper across the desk. With his name and address on it.

  She palmed it. "I'll certainly remember your kind offer, Señor Gaitán," she said.

  The man looked after her as she walked away, until a supervisor came by and cleared his throat. She continued slowly, thinking. A hotel, of course. Then . . .

  "Gwen!"

  "Why, hello, Dolores," Gwen said.

  One of the flight attendants; Dolores Ospina Pastrana. They'd chatted on the plane, although of course she hadn't understood exactly why this particular yanqui was so interesting, so charismatic. The stewardess was pulling her luggage along on a wheeled carryall, looking trim and efficient in her blue uniform. She fidgeted with the handle,

  "Do you have a ride?"

  Gwen smiled, white teeth flashing. "Why, no, I don't. Thank you for the offer; I hope it isn't an inconvenience."

  "No, no, I'm off duty for the next three days."

  "That's wonderful," Gwen said, smiling more broadly. Her nostrils flared slightly. "Perhaps you could show me some of the sights."

  She didn't intend to stay in Colombia long, and a native guide would certainly help her get started more quickly. The evidence could always be disposed of, one way or another.

  "It's a lovely city," Dolores said. "But it can be dangerous for an outsider."

  Gwen chuckled. "Let's go. I'm sure you can shield me from the perils of ignorance."

  ***

  "Who did you say you were with?" Mary Chen asked, stepping in front of the personable young man before he could pass through.

  "We're with the Federal government, Dr. Chen," he said, with a frank, open smile.

  He was wearing a nondescript dark suit and raincoat; so was his friend. They were both six-footers, one young and dark, the other fortysomething, heavy, and graying blond; the older man looked like an athlete gone very slightly to seed, or a lawyer who spent a couple of nights a week at the gym. He carried something like an attache case, only considerably larger. Unlike his younger companion, he didn't smile.

  "Well, that's you and a couple of hundred thousand others, even under this administration," Chen said. "What does the Federal government want with medical evi
dence being held in an ongoing investigation?"

  Nobody waltzes into my office like this! It might not be much of an office; cluttered, with a couple of spider plants on top of the filing cabinets, and smelling faintly of disinfectant from downstairs, but it was her turf.

  The young man laughed easily, eyes crinkling. "We're with an executive agency," he said. "And it's not an ongoing investigation anymore. Since it's a closed file, I'm sure you won't object . . ."

  "Great, an executive agency. FBI, CIA, NSA, Bureau of Indian Affairs, NASA, what?"

  He reached into his jacket. "The City wants full cooperation," he said gently, and extended a handful of documents.

  She read raising her brows. "Impressive." It was; including two heavy hitters in the NYPD. "Unfortunately, you don't seem to have noticed that I'm a medical examiner—and we're appointed by the courts. We're not part of the police department."

  She handed the sheaf of paper back. Mary Chen had spent a good deal of the last twenty years around police officers; long enough to recognize the very slight bulge below the young man's left armpit. Icy certainty paralyzed her mind for an instant. These were Feds of some sort; it would be deeply stupid to make a claim she could refute with a simple phone call. And they were serious. Some sort of Federal cop, or more likely spooks; FBI would have been more open about who they were.

  The older one stepped by her and put his carrying case on the desk. He pressed the buttons on a digital lock and snapped the catches open with his thumbs, the metallic click loud in the little room. Much of the space inside was insulation, leaving just enough for an arm. A very large arm.

  "Look," she began. "If you think I'm going to sit still for this, you're very much mistaken."

  The young man's smile didn't waver. He reached a black-gloved hand inside his jacket and produced another folded paper.

  "Dr. Chen, this is a national security matter," he said. She snorted.

  "If you'll take a moment to think about it, you'll realize that that's not just a phrase to shut you up. We're nearly into the twenty-first century, and pretty soon genetics are going to be as important to our security as electronics have been for the past few decades. You must realize something of how sensitive this matter is, or you wouldn't have kept it as quiet as you have—nothing to the press, no publicity, just a few friends of yours at the university, nothing on paper. That's fine, but this needs to be studied by top people. We can provide the facilities. You can't; with all due respect, you're a forensic pathologist, not a research geneticist. No offense."

  "None taken," she said between clenched teeth.

  Before she could continue, the man handed over the letter.

  "The United States needs to keep its technological edge," he said earnestly. "Otherwise, our influence goes; and it's an influence for good, well beyond our borders."

  The paper was an official document, but not from the American government. The language was Vietnamese; in the upper right-hand corner was an identity photograph of her aunt Edelle. Who was still in Hue . . . in a Vietnam growing even more hostile to its ethnic-Chinese minority since the naval clashes over those damned islands. Not that it had ever been very friendly.

  "I didn't even know she was still alive," Chen whispered.

  Gloved fingers plucked the document out of her hand. A promise, she realized. Hanoi was extremely anxious to stay on Washington's good side these days. Possibly a threat. More probably just a promise.

  She turned her head aside. "In the cold storage," she said.

  ***

  Claire Finch had been with the FBI for three years now. She'd never seen her superior as angry as he was now; a cold, grim rage that crackled through the office despite the expressionless set of his face.

  "The investigation's being canceled," he said.

  "Twenty-odd murders, and it's canceled?"

  "Not our jurisdiction." John Dowding rose and walked over to the window, looking down at the Washington street.

  "The Fischer was a kidnapping-murder."

  "Nope. He went back to his apartment voluntarily."

  "She used his panix.com account illegally—that is our turf."

  "Not according to the memo," he said over his shoulder.

  "What about the DNA sample from the skin and hair?"

  "The sample's been removed from Quantico. The records have been removed. Just between you and me, that . . . arm . . . thing, whatever, has been quietly spirited away too. And the people who were working on it have been told it's a matter of national security. Not that anyone would listen to them with the evidence."

  Finch shook her head. "This stinks, sir."

  "Stinks of Langley, possibly the NSA," he said. "They took a look at the genetics and they panicked. If someone is that far ahead of us, it is a crisis."

  "Not as much of a crisis as it was to Stephen Fischer," she said tartly.

  "Granted." Dowding's long, bony face nodded. "And this doesn't look like an espionage situation to me—and it'd be our affair if it was."

  Not theirs personally—they were with the Behavioral Sciences section—but counterespionage within the borders of the U.S. was a Bureau function. A distinction more often observed in the breach than the observance, true, but the Bureau was about as likely to relinquish its jurisdiction as a pit bull was to give up a marrow bone.

  Finch bit at her lower lip. "Sir, generally if the Other People tried to take something like this away from us, the Director would tell them to go pee up a rope."

  Dowding leaned back in his swivel chair and tapped the knuckles of one hand with a pen. "Exactly. So the truth about this evidence must be so terrifying that the Director or someone just below his level wants to hand it over to somebody else."

  "I have a bad feeling about this, sir," she said.

  Dowding nodded. "Finch, I trust you."

  She looked up, startled. He was holding a disk in his hand, one of the new read-write opticals. "This is that DNA report on the skin samples that Quantico did," he said.

  They shared a glance. The powers-that-be hadn't really grasped how difficult it was to get rid of every copy of inconvenient data, yet.

  "Here's what we're going to do," he said. "Strictly off the record, of course. I think our highly-unusual mystery suspect will be back . . ."

  ***

  The Parque de Calzado wasn't much, Gwen decided. A few tall palm trees, a rectangle of grass cut by a St. Georges cross of tessellated brick pavement, and a central fountain. Around it were apartment buildings in the hideous style the humans seemed to like, boxy things of steel-reinforced concrete; nobody in the Domination's timeline had ever built anything like them, except as factories or warehouses. Here they were residences, including Dolores's, where she'd holed up for the past three days.

  It was also quite dark, now.

  "Gwen, this park is . . . this is not a safe place," Dolores pleaded.

  "Even less so, now that I'm in it," she chuckled.

  The air bore a confusion of scents; mostly bad, but not as much so as New York. The temperature was quite pleasant as night fell; a fair number of people were out strolling. Fewer and fewer as she led the ex-stewardess away into the back streets.

  "Gwen—"

  She stopped, impatient, and gripped the Colombian by her upper arm, jerking her close. "Dolores," she said quietly, staring into her eyes. "Lets get one thing settled about this relationship, right from the start. I'm in charge. Understand?"

  "I—" She could hear the others heart accelerate, smell the acrid tinge of fear in her sweat. Pupils dilated.

  "I understand."

  "Good. Shall I send you back to the apartment?"

  No, the Columbian subvocalized. Not alone, not now. She shook her head.

  "Good." I don't want you on your own for long, not for a couple of weeks yet. It would take that long to get her settled in and accepting the situation. The alternative was to snap her neck, but that would be wasteful; besides that, she was likable.

  "Now, let's keep going. Do
you know the Rule of Seven?"

  "No. Seven?" Dolores was trying to keep the quaver out of her voice, Gwen noted with approval.

  "Nobody is more than seven acquaintances away from anyone else. For instance, you know this Señor Mondragón—"

  "Just his name, from the papers. I don't know such people."

  That seemed to be a general attitude here in Cali. People who did know such people or said they did had a tendency to vanish.

  "—and someone we meet will know someone who knows someone, and we'll be led to Señor Mondragón, soon enough."

  Why does she want to meet a criminal?

  "Because I have some business to conduct, mi amiga. Now shut up."

  Gwen patted her gently on the back to take the sting out of the words. She had been very useful, and it was a great relief to finally have her biological needs taken care of on a civilized basis. If something of a strain for Dolores at first.

  They had wandered into an alleyway; dark enough that it was a little dim even to Gwen's eyes, and Dolores was blundering along in a literally blind panic. It stank as well, of cat-piss and less savory odors, starting with spoiled garbage. Gwen smiled, her ears cocked forward a little. Two sets of heartbeats, they were accelerating as she and the Colombian walked down the cracked and slimy pavement. Two shapes spreading out, black silhouettes outlined against the slightly brighter street beyond. A light flared under a heavy brown acne-scarred face as one lit a cigarette. Dolores whimpered slightly, but kept to her position in Gwen's wake.

  The short man's face looked a little puzzled as the women kept coming toward him. His companion was four inches taller and much heavier; a blank bovine expression over shoulders and belly that stretched the grubby white cotton of his T-shirt.

  "One for each of us," the short man whispered aside to his friend. Aloud:

  "Good evening, ladies! You shouldn't be wandering alone around here. Perhaps we can help you."

  "I think you can," Gwen said, smiling. "We're looking for a Señor Mondragón."