The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1 by S. Andrew Swann
He went through a line of hedges and started to roll down a steep hill. He caught himself before he rolled all the way down.
Hassan hunched low, tongue lolling. He leapt over the hedge and started bounding over the monuments that dotted the hillside. Nohar knew he couldn’t move that fast, even with a good leg. He braced himself defensively to receive the canine’s charge. Hassan didn’t seem to have a gun. Hand to hand, he had a chance to take the assassin.
Nohar felt his heartbeat accelerating. The adrenaline was kicking in.
Hassan passed him and Nohar tried to pivot to follow him. Nohar wasn’t quick enough. He felt a kick slam into his lower back, above the base of his tail. He tried to roll with it, but the blow still sent him to his knees.
The Beast was roaring—
“Time for death, cat.” A shaggy canine arm hooked around his neck, and there was a fiery tingle under his left armpit. He smelled his own fur burning.
He could feel the rush as The Beast was triggered. But he couldn’t move. Hassan was using a stun rod—Nohar was paralyzed. When Hassan pivoted Nohar’s body around on his bad knee, pain fogged his sight again. When he could see again, he was propped in front of an open grave. The canine arm began to choke him.
“Your final reward. Make your peace, cat.”
Why didn’t the sick bastard just shoot him and get it over with?
Manny said they were exhuming Johnson’s grave. Apparently, they had. The open grave he was looking into was Daryl Johnson’s less-than-final resting place. Lack of oxygen was making him begin to black out. The effects of the stunner were beginning to wear off, but his muscles felt like mush. He didn’t want to have to smell Hassan’s musk when he died.
Suddenly, there was a bright light. Nohar saw something—a bullet?—ricochet off Johnson’s marker. They were both bathed in white light, their shadows extending forward into infinity. Hassan was quick, and the arm around Nohar’s neck disappeared. Hassan’s shadow jumped out of the light to the sound of another bullet.
Nohar’s muscles weren’t under his control. He tumbled forward, into the grave.
He splashed facedown in an inch-deep layer of black mud. His whole body cramped up on him. The stunner had been military-style, not a street or a cop version. His muscles had been through a blender and felt predigested.
It took an interminable time for him to recover. As he fought to get his body under control, he could hear sirens in the distance. It certainly took them long enough. By the time he could get up on his hands and knees and look up, the grave was surrounded by Manny and three nervous pink medics. All backlit by red and blue flashers. They were about to climb down into the rectangular hole. Nohar waved them away and stood up. His right knee nearly buckled, and from the loose way it felt, the support bandage had torn off.
Standing, he could reach the lip. It wasn’t a good idea in his condition, but be damned if he was going to a hospital. He grabbed the edge, buried his left boot in the side of the grave, and hoisted himself up. His bad shoulder protested and he nearly slid back into the hole—but he clawed his way out.
There was some fear from the medic, but the strongest smell was coming from Manny. He was worried. Nohar tried to allay Manny’s worries by walking—without any help—back up the hill, to where all the cops were. Manny followed. “Are you all right? What did he hit you with?”
Nohar answered through gritted teeth. The walk up the hill was sending daggers of pain through his knee and his hip. “I’m fine. Hassan was using a stun rod—” Nohar noticed a bandage around Manny’s right hand. “What happened to you?”
Manny handed Nohar the Vind. “This thing has one hell of a kick.”
Nohar stopped. “Oh, hell, Manny, your hand. You broke your fucking hand to shoot—”
“Calm down, it isn’t like anyone’s going to die from it.”
Manny, Nohar thought, your hands are your life. “How’s Smith?”
“Smith’s dead.”
They passed the broken hedge Nohar had fallen through and were on level ground again. “Dead? He only got hit with a stunner, I saw it.”
Manny shrugged. “Then that’s what killed him—”
There were a half-dozen black-and-whites parked around Eliza Wilkins’ grave. There was also Manny’s van, an ambulance, the predictable unmarked Havier, and, of all things, a black Porsche. The frank was still there, looking like an inert lump of flesh only vaguely molded into a humanoid form. Cops were all over, planting evidence tags and yellow warning strips. Harsk was yelling into a radio, alternately cussing someone out for losing Hassan, and trying to hurry the forensics guys. The only nonhumans were Nohar, Manny, the frank—and Agent Isham, FBI, who left the Porsche and walked toward him and Manny.
She still wore the shades. “Doctor Gujerat, I’ve cleared it with your office. We want you to make a field ID of the deceased.”
Manny nodded. “No promises with just the equipment in the van—”
“Do it.”
Manny gave an undulating shrug and walked toward the van. Nohar started to follow, but Isham grabbed his arm. “We talk, Mr. Rajasthan. Sit down, your knee will appreciate it.”
Nohar found himself sitting on one of the cold granite monuments. She was right—taking the weight off his leg was a relief. It had been in constant pain. Isham pointed to the dead form of Smith. “So, who has Hassan killed this time?”
He didn’t have any reason left to be recalcitrant. “He called himself John Smith. He’s an accountant for a company called Midwest Lapidary Imports. Apparently the board of directors consisted of franks like him. Claim to be from South Africa, but they aren’t.”
Isham nodded. “Not South Africa. The frank’s much too xenomorphic. Doubt his type is anywhere in the catalogs. Why did Hassan hit him?”
Client confidentiality was irrelevant now. “Until the killings started, MLI was a quiet little covert operation buying influence in Washington. The company has over eight thousand false identities they funnel the money through to avoid the limits on individual campaign contributions. The amount runs into the billions. Smith hired me to find out if someone in MLI was behind the Johnson killing.”
“Was there?”
Nohar waved at the dead form of Smith. “The papers in the briefcase are evidence with which he wanted to go public. The MLI organization seems to have slipped out of the control of whatever government was backing them. They’re in direct control of the Zips.”
Isham lowered her sunglasses. “What government?”
“Hassan showed up before Smith told me. He implied that information isn’t in those paper—”
Nohar turned to face the corpse. She was already watching. Manny had come out of the van with a large hypodermic needle. He was trying to take a fluid sample and do a field genetic analysis. He was kneeling over the body, removing the needle from the frank’s doughy chest. As Manny withdrew the needle, odors erupted from the corpse—evil bile and ammonia smells. A few cops covered their mouths and retreated into the darkness. From somewhere behind him, Nohar heard the sound of retching. While the cops backed away, he, Manny, and Isham watched in horrified fascination as fluid began leaking from the hole Manny’s needle had made.
Manny had ripped the frank’s shirt open to get at the chest, and now, cloudy liquid was seeping from a tear in the otherwise featureless skin. The tear was widening with the pressure of the escaping liquid—Manny seemed to realize what was happening. He ran back to the van. Fluid was now pouring from the frank. The smell had driven back all the pinks, and Nohar’s nose was numbing. The frank’s clothes were soaked with the cloudy liquid, and there was a growing dark spot on the yellow lawn. Nohar thought he could see steam rising from the corpse.
The rip was no longer tearing open. The edges seemed to be dissolving. Manny was racing back with an armload of evidence jars. He was barely in time. The frank had already spilled half it
The body was gone. It left only a pile of clothes, a pair of pink dentures, and a pair of fake plastic eyes.
“Holy Christ.” One of the cops was crossing himself.
Manny looked at the puddle surrounding the clothes where John Smith had been, and said, in a tone of epic understatement, “This wasn’t normal frank.”
Isham walked over to Harsk. She seemed to be listening to her earplug. “The Fed’s taking this over, Harsk. National security.”
Chapter 23
The trip to Metro General, down the Midtown Corridor and I-90, was a convoy. Nohar didn’t want to go to the hospital. In fact, just the idea of it made him nauseous. But Isham was clamping down and the Fed was going to keep all the principals in one place. Manny’s van was led by Isham’s Porsche. The black-and-whites followed, and downtown they were joined by a group of five dark-blue Haviers.
The convoy converged on Metro General. The cops were shunted into quarantine, Isham shouting down Harsk’s objections with talk about waiting for a delegation from the Center for Disease Control. Isham had most of the cops believing the frank was some bio-weapon delivery system.
Isham knew it was a crock, Nohar could tell, but it gave her a convenient excuse to lock up the local law enforcement. It was her show now. Nohar decided she could have it.
She didn’t quarantine him. She wanted the cops isolated, and she didn’t want him telling them about international conspiracies to control the U.S. government. She took him and Manny to the brand-new genetics lab on the fifth floor of the new Metro wing. The floor was dotted with her agents, and Manny was given lab assistants who were not on the normal hospital payroll. The Fed had dived in with both feet.
Isham spent a half hour in someone’s day office, poring over the documents in the briefcase. She had Nohar sit across from her, getting graveyard mud all over some poor doctor’s leather couch.
Occasionally Isham would shoot a question at Nohar. The questions were instructive in themselves. A hundred and fifty members of Congress had received MLI’s money. Over seventy had been supported enough to have a massive conflict of interest. Thirty-seven congressmen had received enough money to owe their careers to MLI. Half of these people MLI bought had made it into the various House committees. Three of them held chairs—including the chair of Ethics committee. There were records of outright bribes to dozens of people in the executive.
And all of this had been done indirectly.
MLI’s money did come from wholesale dealing in gemstones—massive dealings. They moved so many rocks that the whole lapidary industry was suffering a depression. The devaluation of diamonds and lesser stones didn’t seem to bother MLI’s balance sheet. They simply moved more rocks to compensate. There was no sign of where their inventory came from, but its volume justified the eighty billion in assets MLI claimed.
In with the accounting information was a collection of letters.
Isham asked about a few of them. None came from MLI itself. They were all forgeries from the hands of MLI’s nonexistent employees.
A Jack Brodie from South Euclid, Ohio, wrote to ask a California legislator to consider helping to eliminate federal morey housing in that state. Just a simple request from someone who contributed twenty-five grand to his campaign.
Diane Colson, allegedly living in Parma, Ohio, “informed” a committee member on House Appropriations of all the waste in the federal budget. In the military and NASA in particular.
There was that August 10th letter—Wilson Scott from Cleveland was urging support for Binder’s moreau control package, “in view of the recent violence.” The smoking gun as far as the Zips were concerned. The proof the violence was engineered to get certain people elected Senate.
Isham dispensed with most of this with a few questions. She seemed to be in a hurry to assimilate the information. She only slowed once, over a letter from the familiar name Kathy Tsoravitch, written to Joseph Binder back in the Fall of 2043.
Isham looked up at Nohar. Her sunglasses were off and her retinas cast an orange reflection back at him. “What’s NuFood?”
Nohar shrugged. “A little R&D enterprise MLI bought out. My friend with the computer thinks it’s only there to smooth out the loss column of their taxes. Some sort of diet food.”
“Why a food company?”
Nohar really didn’t care. It wasn’t his problem any more. “Diversification?”
To his surprise, Isham actually laughed a little. Her laugh was as silent as her breathing. “They went to a bit of trouble to get this particular company—”
Isham slid the letter across the desk and Nohar glanced it over. Kathy was positively adamant Binder prevent NuFood’s enterprise from being approved by the FDA. If he remembered correctly, MLI bought out NuFood only a few months after this letter.
Isham riffled through the papers. “NuFood’s ten million in assets is barely a ripple in MLI’s finances. The patents are nearly worthless. It doesn’t seem to have an income at all.”
“I told you it was a tax dodge. A money pit the IRS would buy.”
Isham looked at length of computer printout. She seemed to be talking to herself. “Then why would they be piping money into it before it failed?”
The comm rang. Even though it wasn’t her office, Isham didn’t hesitate. “Got it.”
When the comm lit up, only showing black, she said, “Bald Eagle here. This isn’t a secure line.”
An electronically modified voice came back. “We have the go.”
The caller hung up.
Isham smiled and gathered up the papers. “Well, I’ll ask these franks about NuFood when we have them in custody.”
She locked the case and gestured to the door as she put on her mirrored sunglasses. When Nohar stood up, his knee began throbbing again. He had to grab the door frame to help himself move outside. Isham walked by him and started down the hall. She paused to turn and say to him, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to keep a close eye on you until this clears. You’re probably going to be stuck here for a while.”
“I don’t have anything better to do at the moment.”
Nohar hobbled down the corridor and collapsed in a chair in a waiting room across from the lab where Manny was working. Isham passed him, going toward the stairs. She looked at the red-haired FBI agent who was sitting across from Nohar. She pointed at Nohar and the agent nodded.
It seemed Nohar now had his own personal pet FBI agent. The agent didn’t wear shades, a normal human—
Even with the pet FBI guy, for once, Nohar was thankful for the Fed. With all this, MLI was blown open. There’d be nothing left for them to cover up. The violence should be over. He was sorry for Smith, but Nohar was glad his part had ended.
The agent looked vaguely uncomfortable. Nohar wondered whether it was because he was guarding a morey, because the morey he was guarding was still covered with graveyard mud, or because FBI agents were trained to look constipated as a matter of course. Nohar yawned and struggled his wounded leg up on a table.
Manny came out of the lab across from the lounge, trailing another agent. He carried a black bag in his good left hand. “Seems to be my eternal duty to patch you up. Let me see that knee while the lab techs troubleshoot the chemical analyzer.”
Nohar’s agent walked up so the two FBI guys framed Manny like human bookends. Manny was ignoring the agents as he felt along Nohar’s right leg. Nohar tried not to winc
“And make the Fed divide their forces?”
“Very funny.” Manny slit the pants around the knee, which was swollen a good fifty percent. Even under the mud and the fun, Nohar could see the discoloration. “You need an orthopedic surgeon. You may have done yourself some permanent damage.”
Manny reached into the bag and got out an air-hypo and slipped in a capsule. “This is a local—” Manny shot the hypo into the leg and the pain left Nohar’s knee, leaving no feeling at all. Then Manny pulled out a hypodermic needle, a large one. Manny found the needle impossible to maneuver with his bandaged right hand and shifted it to his left. When he did, the color leeched from the face of Nohar’s agent. “I’m going to drain this and put another support bandage around it. And if you don’t see a specialist about this, I swear I will hunt you down, trank you, and drag you there myself.”
Manny slid the needle home. Nohar only felt a slight pressure under his kneecap. Nohar’s agent, however, began to look ill. The guy got worse when Manny started withdrawing blood-colored fluid from Nohar’s knee. Manny filled the hypo, put it in a plastic bag, and repeated the process with another hypo. The agent turned away, looking out the window at the hospital’s parking garage.
Manny sponged off Nohar’s knee with alcohol and a strong-smelling disinfectant that made Nohar want to retch. As Manny scrubbed, Nohar tried to get his mind off the smell. “What’s with the analyzer?”
“Every new piece of equipment has some bugs—” Manny sounded like he didn’t quite believe it. He looked up at the agent who’d accompanied him. The guy stayed expressionless. “Your client was one weird frank. If frank is even the right term—nothing to indicate the gene structure even has a remote basis on the human model. It looks like it was engineered from scratch. I don’t know what we got here. There was no cellular differentiation in the samples I salvaged. Through and through this guy was made of the same stuff.”