Vortex

Chapter Twenty-three Sandra and Bose

Bose took her past the place where Orrin had once rented a room. It was a five-story walk-up in a part of town you drove through with your doors locked: windows like eyes shut against the sullen indifference of the heat-stricken street, a doorway littered with broken syringes. Up in one of those rooms, Sandra thought, in the long afternoons before the night shift began, Orrin must have patiently filled his notebooks, page by page, day after day. “You think he came back here?”

“No,” Bose said. “But I don’t know how well Orrin knows the rest of the city. He has forty dollars in his pocket and I doubt he ever hailed a cab in his life. He’s taking transit and he might have decided to stick to the route he knows.”

“Route to where?”

“To the Findley warehouse,” Bose said.

So they followed the bus routes Orrin once would have taken to work, hot streets clotted with traffic under a sky dark with thunderheads. The afternoon light was fading by the time Bose turned off into a neighborhood of single-story industrial buildings set back in lifeless yellow lawns. The buildings housed small manufacturers and regional distributors, none of which seemed especially prosperous.

Bose parked in the lot of a corner gas station with a coffee-and-doughnut shop attached to it. Sandra said, “Are we close to the warehouse?”

“Close enough.”

Bose suggested coffee. The restaurant, if she could dignify it with that name, held a dozen small tables, all vacant. The windowsills were dusty and the green linoleum was peeling where the floor met the walls, but at least the place was air-conditioned. “Better get something to eat,” Bose said. “We might be here a while.” She ended up carrying a muffin and coffee to a corner table. From this angle she could see the street, the long row of anonymous buildings on the far side, the threatening sky. Was one of these buildings the Findley warehouse?

Bose shook his head: “The Findley warehouse is around the corner and a couple of long blocks down, but the nearest bus stop is just across the street—see it?”

A rusty transit sign bolted to a light standard, a concrete bench tagged with ancient graffiti. “Yes.”

“If Orrin comes by bus, that’s where he’ll get off.”

“So we’re just going to sit here and wait for him?”

“You’re going to sit here. I’m going to scout around the neighborhood in case he got here ahead of us, though I doubt that. I don’t really expect him until after dark.”

“You’re basing this on what, intuition?”

“Did you finish reading Orrin’s document?”

“Not all of it. Not yet.”

“You have it with you?”

“A printout. In my bag.”

“Why don’t you read the rest of it, and we’ll talk about it when I get back.”

She read it while Bose did his drive-around, and she was within a few pages of the end when he pulled back into the lot. He parked behind the restaurant’s Dumpster where the car would be hard to see from the street—an act of prudence or paranoia, she thought. “Find anything?” she asked when he came through the door.

“Nope.” He ordered another coffee and a sandwich and she heard him ask the woman behind the counter, “You mind if we sit here a while more?”

“Sit as long as you like,” she said. “We do most of our business at lunch. It’s mainly drive-through after three. Make yourselves comfortable. Long as you buy a little something now and then.”

“There’s a tip in it for you if you keep a fresh pot brewing.”

“We’re not allowed to accept tips for counter service.”

“I’ll never tell,” Bose said.

The woman smiled. “Looks like the rain’s starting. Good time to be indoors.”

Sandra saw the first fat drops strike the restaurant window. Moments later, water was washing down the glass in quavery sheets. Rain bounced from the steaming asphalt of the parking lot, and the scent of moist, tepid air seeped under the door.

Bose peeled a layer of plastic wrap off his sandwich. “You finished Orrin’s story?”

“Just about.”

“You understand why I think he’s headed here?”

She nodded tentatively. “Orrin—or whoever wrote this—obviously knows a few things about the Findley family. Whether they’re true or not is a different question.”

“I’m more concerned with what’s going on in Orrin’s head than what’s true. Remember what he told Ariel? ‘Tonight’s the night.’”

“He has unfinished business. Or at least he thinks he does.”

“Right. What he doesn’t know is that Findley and his people are on high alert. There are private security cars parked all around the perimeter of the warehouse.”

“Private security? What, like Brinks?”

“No, not like Brinks. These guys aren’t bonded and they don’t advertise.”

Sandra shivered and told herself it was because of the sudden damp in the air.

Outside, in the flooding rain, a city bus pulled up. A puddle had formed around a blocked storm drain and the bus’s wheels splashed the three indifferent blue-collar guys who were waiting for it. They got on. Nobody got off. The bus pulled away.

“Orrin could get hurt,” she said.

“We see him, we take him back to Ariel and make sure they both get out of town. That’s the plan. If he gets past us there’s really nothing we can do.”

The wind picked up. There was one tree on the entire street—a spindly sapling on the lawn that hedged the sidewalk—and it bent before the storm like an arthritic pensioner. The restaurant’s plate-glass windows rattled.

Sandra found her thoughts returning to the scar on Bose’s body and the story of his father’s death in India. “Those thieves who broke into your father’s place in Madras,” she said.

He gave her a startled look. “What about them?”

“What were they after?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m curious.” I’m entitled to be, Sandra thought.

Silence. Then: “Maybe you guessed. They were after the drugs.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“The kind of drugs you seem to think they were after. Martian drugs.”

“Because your father wasn’t just an engineer, he was involved with Fourths.”

“He despised the people who were only interested in longevity. He hated the word. He used to say it wasn’t longevity that mattered, it was maturity.”

“Your mother knew about this?”

“My mother was the one who recruited him.”

“I see. So the scar…”

“What about it?”

“I didn’t get out of med school without a course in anatomy. Unless the knife that cut you had a blade under an inch long, it would have damaged major organs. Not usually a survivable wound, especially if you had to wait for help.”

She was so accustomed to Bose’s perpetual calm that she was startled when he wouldn’t meet her eyes. After a time he said, “It was my mother’s decision.”

Sandra had come to this surmise last night, but it was still slightly shocking to hear him admit it. “To give you the Martian treatment, you mean.”

“As a last resort. For the purpose of saving my life. It was a hugely controversial decision, among the people who knew about it. But I didn’t have a choice—I was comatose when it happened.”

Cellular technology engineered by the Martians from samples of Hypothetical debris, grown in bioreactors and injected into his damaged body, repairing it, working in him even now… She recalled something he’d said just a couple of mornings ago: Once the biotech infiltrates your cells, it’s there for good. Some people find that idea abhorrent.

This body she had touched: not wholly human.

“That’s why you care so much about Findley’s import business.”

“Findley and the people he works for are corrupting and debasing something that might be vital to the future of all of us. They’re more than ordinary criminals. They’re the kind of people who’ll commit murder—not for the sake of a few extra years of life, which might be understandable, but for the privilege of retailing it.”

“Like the people who killed your father.”

“Exactly like.”

A fresh pulse of rain rattled the window. The streetlights had come on, serial halos of yellow light. Bose reached over the table to touch her hand, but she drew it away without thinking.