Underground

CHAPTER 15

I tend to wake up grumpy. I am not a morning person in spite of years of rolling out of bed early to hit the gym or practice hall or to pound out a few miles of calorie-burn on the street before breakfast. Tuesday, I woke up downright effervescent—even if I did have to ice my knee and take pills to relieve the swelling. I’d never “done” bubbly before that I could remember—not since being a little kid bouncing out of bed in anticipation of holidays and Christmas packages—not even with Will. Warm, mellow, glowing, yes, but not, as my uncle put it, “bright eyed and bushy tailed”—which I always thought sounded a lot like a squirrel, and considering my uncle’s.22-caliber reaction to squirrels, I found the phrase horrifyingly ironic.

I let Quinton get up at his own speed while I started coffee and took a shower.

Chaos had been irascible, dancing around in fury and then throwing herself on the floor like a bratty child pitching a fit. She was bouncing around, trying to get a bite of my bare toes, when Quinton emerged from the bathroom, pulling his shirt on over his shower-wet hair.

“Hey there—” I started, but he put a finger to his lips and then leaned in to whisper in my ear. “Ignore me.”

Puzzled, I bent down to pick up the ferret before she could get too badly underfoot. Chaos bit my thumb. “Ow!” I yelped. “What was that for?”

Chaos made a high-pitched barking sound and fought to escape my hand. Quinton stopped rummaging in his backpack and turned an expression of mixed concern and curiosity on us. I loosened my hold on the ferret a little but didn’t let her go, and she settled down a bit, but still wanted out of my hand. I put her down again and she darted for her cage.

I followed and bent down beside the cage to look in at her while Quinton began to walk around the room with some kind of electronic device in his hand.

“Hey, ferret-butt,” I cajoled my pet. “What’s up with you?”

She poked her head back out of her nest of old sweatshirts and heaved a ferret sigh. I reached out a finger and stroked her ears and she rubbed against my hand, but as soon as I tried to pick her up, she squirmed away.

“What a contrarian you’re being today. Are you sick or something? You don’t look sick…”

Quinton put his things down and joined me on the floor, peering into the ferret’s cage. “How old is she?” “Six.”

“Huh. That’s getting kind of old for a ferret. Maybe she needs a checkup.”

“She’s due for shots in a couple of weeks. If she keeps acting up, I may take her in early,” I said. Then I looked him over and asked, “You done with whatever you were up to?”

“Yup. No bugs in here,” he answered, keeping his voice low. “There’s always a possibility of passive bugging through the phones, tapping at the central station, or using parabolic devices at a distance, but they’re a pain, so it looks like Fern’s either not too interested in your home life or she’s on very short rations. We should check your office, too. Has your alarm called the cell phone since she turned up?”

“Oh, damn it—my cell phone!”

I got up and found my purse and dug for the phone, tossing other things out as I hunted: keys, feather, spare pistol clip, wallet…

Quinton knelt down in front of me and picked up the feather, and then offered it from his kneeling position with teasing reverence. “Your spear, m’lady zombieslayer.”

I laughed and he grinned, encircled instantly in little pink and gold sparks with the feel of champagne bubbles as they crackled through the air. Wow, pink sparks… My face felt hot and my fingertips were trembling from the sudden flush of giddiness.

I turned away, putting the feather back in the bag, and tried to resume my hunt for the phone, but Quinton wasn’t having it. He stood up behind me and touched my shoulders very lightly.

“Harper. I don’t want to make you nervous. Last night was wonderful—well, after the sheer terror—but it doesn’t have to mean—”

“Shut up,” I suggested. “Don’t say it doesn’t have to mean anything.” I turned around and faced him, standing very close, and the small difference in our height in bare feet let me look hard into his eyes without having to tilt my head down much. “I didn’t drag you into my bed just because I was scared or excited about being alive or… rebounding or whatever. I like you. I trust you—with my life. And I don’t have to lie to you. I love being with someone who knows. I think it’s better than the sex—which was damned fine.”

He started to smile, but it kept on spreading wider until he grinned and laughed and gave me a fast kiss on the lips. I thought my blush would set us both on fire and had to look back down at my purse and make busy to keep from babbling like a fool.

I got the phone out—still sealed in its crushed can. Quinton put his hands over mine, stopping me from unpackaging the phone.

“Hang on. As soon as the battery is back in, the phone can be tracked and used as a bug. Right now, you’re the only lead to me and the cell phone is the best lead to you. Fern’s friends will definitely be monitoring it for her. For now, let’s assume the office is bugged until we can check the phone from someplace other than here.”

I bit my lip and looked at him, taking a long, bracing breath before I said, “I think I need to know a little more about Fern Laguire’s motives. You’ve said several things that make me think this is personal between you two.”

“Oh, it’s personal,” he replied, nodding, the colors around him fading down to a constrained amber glow, “in an impersonal sort of way.” His tone verged on amused. “We only met a handful of times, but I know her pretty well by observation—better than she does me—and she hates me. I am the huge black blot on Fern’s otherwise stellar career. I was on loan from another agency to do some work for Fern’s group at the NSA—my previous supervisor wanted to hide the embarrassing evidence of the project I’d been working on once it blew up. I had the right mix of odd skills, so they seconded me to Laguire’s group. The NSA’s nickname around Fort Meade is ‘Never Say Anything.’ It’s a great place to hide someone with tech skills from prying investigators.” Quinton paused and looked around. “This is going to take a while. Let’s sit down.”

We parked ourselves on the sofa, leaning into opposite corners so we could see each other without one of us having to resort to sitting on my coffee table.

“All right,” Quinton resumed. “I ended up at Fort Meade because the guys I had been working for were an embarrassment—it was their project that first got me started looking at the cracks in reality—and the agency wanted to keep it quiet, but I was already starting to think I was in the wrong working world. I’m just not of the mind they are—well, you know that. But working for Fern Laguire was not the best place to nurture a sense of the rightness of big central government and its actions.

“You know about the NSA…?”

I nodded. “Crypto specialists, intelligence gathering by electronic eavesdropping. Supposedly, they don’t work on domestic systems or run covert ops.”

Quinton snorted. “Yeah, and if you believe that there’s a pointy leftover from the World’s Fair up in Queen Anne I’d like to sell you. Mathematicians and their algorithms don’t care about political boundaries. The crypto-geeks at the server farms of Fort Meade do it because they love the game—the intellectual challenge of breaking the system—and very few of them know the source or final disposition of the intelligence they decode. But I did and so does Fern.

“I had an attack of conscience over it and I wanted out. But there was no way Fern would let me go, because her idea of freedom and mine were not even in the same philosophical universe.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You’re not going to say they retire people to six-foot dirt apartments, are you? Because I have a hard time buying that.”

Quinton shook his head. “No. Fern’s not homicidal as far as I know, but retiring from intelligence or any classified service comes with monitors and strings.

They don’t just let you walk out and go your way and that’s what I craved. Fern didn’t want to let me go at all and she’s very good at finding ways to make people stay. It’s a big key to her success within the agency—people work for Fern until they drop. But I left. I didn’t say I was going, because I knew how she worked. I just made myself disappear, in spite of their security measures, and they didn’t know how. I think they still don’t. That alone must just boil Fern’s brain, but that I slipped the chain completely is even worse. I proved her fallible. She’s never going to forgive me. If she can get me back, then she saves face—which is all-important to Fern at this stage in the game. She’s nearing retirement and she has to be totally nonstick armored on her way out the door or she’ll get the same treatment she’s given plenty of others.”

“Ugh,” I said with a shudder. “Sounds like she wouldn’t mind if you did get killed.”

Quinton shrugged. “So long as she could show I’d never compromised her, she’d be good with it.”

“I wonder if she could be persuaded that she’s hunting for a dead man…”

“It’s a remote possibility I could switch records with one of the missing undergrounders—I know most of them well enough to get at the right records—but she’d never buy it without a body.”

“And you don’t really match up to any of the bodies that have turned up, so far.”

“True. Nice thought though—never had a woman offer to kill me off before.”

“Well… they say friends help you move and good friends help you move bodies. Just a different kind of body.”

That got a laugh out of him, which pulled a smile from me, in spite of the subject matter. He sobered and looked at me with a tinge of blue in his energy corona.

“Harper, you don’t have to be in the crush between me and Fern Laguire. You can roll over on me. I’d only ask that you tell me ahead of time, so I have a head start on her. I can disappear again and she’d leave you alone.”

I gave my head an adamant shake. “No way. I’m sick of being left. I’m not throwing you to the dogs like a bone to save my own skin. I wouldn’t even if—And I need your help, because I’m not going to abandon the dead, either,” I added, letting my eyes turn aside as I felt a hot blush on my cheeks.

“Umm… yeah,” Quinton said, looking pleased before his expression sobered with the subject. “There’s still our three-faced friend in the sewer,” he added with a shudder.

“Not to mention Detective Solis—so long as we’re on the topic of people of interest.”

“Maybe Sistu will eat Fern and we can blame it on a secret government project,” Quinton speculated, half-seriously. “The Feds would step in and Solis wouldn’t be allowed to pursue the case any further no matter how he felt about it.”

“We should be so lucky,” I scoffed. “Its not as if we have any control—” I stopped, cut off by an intersecting thought.

“Control of what?” Quinton asked.

I frowned, concentrating, trying to get a hold of the slippery idea that had run through my head. I put up one finger to hold back his questions as I thought.

“We postulated a pattern. What if the pattern is determined by a person—not a god masquerading, but an ordinary person and their ordinary drives? Ella Graham said that if the gods were pleased they might send Sistu to help a petitioner hunt. Maybe… Qamaits can lend out her pet herself. She’s got power over the monster, so why not hand him over to someone who did her a favor? Like… getting her out of the construction pit?”

“Then the person who helped her out is still alive.”

“And using their monster-on-loan to settle scores. But Sistu needs to eat more frequently than his hunting buddy wants to whack someone, so… he grabs a snack and takes it to his lair for later.”

“So Felix was a snack, but Jenny or Go-cart were revenge?”

I nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. Separate the zombies from the disappeared, and the ones who were found dead are the key to finding out who’s responsible. We’re not looking for anything supernatural on that score—just a human with a grudge.”

I shuddered and thought about the necessities of the normal world. “This isn’t going to fly with Solis. He might buy the idea that someone killed some of the undergrounders, but the chances are good whoever it was has an alibi for at least one of the deaths—he doesn’t have to be nearby if Tall Grass was right about Jenny’s death. I’m not sure how I’d point the finger, either. Solis is not my biggest fan since the poltergeist business.”

“It’s more important to get rid of the monster than to lock someone up for it.”

I nodded. “We’ll have to catch up to whoever it is first since the monster must be hanging around him… or her. It won’t be easy, since the monster might decide we look like lunch and whoever’s directing it might not even know what’s going on if they don’t speak Lushootseed or whatever the thing speaks. I wish I knew what it was saying last night…”

“What who was saying?”

“Sistu. Didn’t you hear it yelling at us?”

“I couldn’t make anything out of it. It sounded like screaming or speaking in tongues.”

“Many tongues. I think I caught a few words, but the rest was mush. It talks. And it flickers through a whole closetful of shapes as it does. Ella Graham said it was clever and sneaky. Maybe we can slow it down if we can just figure out how to talk to it…”