Nohar took her to the Zoo’s “guest house,” an old frat building. The bricks next to the trio of Greek letters had been knocked out to make room for an anti-aircraft battery. He led her through a recycled-plywood door and to the half of the building that didn’t serve as an ammo dump. The smell of machine oil and gunpowder hung heavy in the cold air.
She ended up in a small room with a sagging bed and cracked plaster wall. The window overlooked the rubble wall surrounding the campus, and the only warmth in the room was from a small electric heater.
She sat in the bed, and Nohar showed no sign of leaving.
“Babysitter?”
Nohar nodded.
Evi took stock of the changes six years had wrought in the tiger. The one thing that hit her was that the colors in his coat had faded, and the lines between black and yellow had lost their sharpness. Age, or maybe the effect of the California sun. His tail moved a little more nervously. There were one or two more scars on his back where the hair was growing back white. His expression had evolved. The white fur under his rounded chin was longer. The wrinkled grooves, growl-lines, above his broad nose were deeper. And he wore a round gold band in his ear.
That was the first time that Evi, moreau expert or not, realized that engineered feline hands were not well designed for jewelry.
Nohar appropriated an overstuffed recliner that wasn’t made for someone of his size. She heard protesting creaks and the twang of a spring giving way. He remained silent, staring out at the rubble wall.
“What are you doing here?”
Nohar sighed, a sound that began as an intake of breath and deepened to a deep bass rumble that sounded like a hostile purr. “Sitting on you so the Grand Dame Ursine doesn’t lose an intelligence asset.”
She leaned back on the bed, still tired. The ceiling above her was innocent of plaster, and holes had been knocked in the slats to reveal pipes and junction boxes beyond.
“When did you become political?”
“Still trying to link me to moreau terrorism?”
She turned her head to look at the tiger. He was still looking out the window. His right hand was clawing the upholstery on the chair. She was sorry for the fact that she hadn’t spent enough time with moreaus to pick up on their scent cues. She could read humans like a book, but tigers . . .
Nohar was broadcasting powerful waves of something.
“Sounds like you don’t want to be here.”
He snarled. “You think I like all this?”
She forgot her potential nap and propped herself up on her right elbow to look at him. There was a momentary twinge from her left shoulder when she moved. It quickly faded. She hoped that the much-lauded healing powers of the Hiashu-enhanced human projects were finally at work on her shoulder.
“Want to elaborate?”
He turned toward her. “Wu and company are going to screw us over again.”
Evi’s puzzlement must have shown.
“I’m a moreau, I should approve?” Nohar shook his head. “Violence breeds more of the same. This is a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Wu portrayed this operation as defensive.” She wondered how she had gotten into the position of defending what, by most of the definitions she had been using during her professional life, was a terrorist operation. She was astounded by how little loyalty she found in her heart for either the organization or the ideals she had worked for for the past sixteen years. All this time had she been just as much a mercenary as those Afghanis?
“What happens when the government gets wind of this?” Nohar asked.
“They’ll . . .” That was a bad thought. There was no question about the military trying to shut this place down. That would definitely fit Wu’s definition of a direct attack.
Nohar nodded, as if he heard the rest of her thought.
She could see a national wave of violence in the moreau community, igniting a backlash that could wipe out all the progress moreaus had made toward first-class citizenship. The anti-moreau forces could use that kind of conflagration to finally repeal the moreau amendment. She could see the pogrom that Wu feared.
“I was right,” she said. “You don’t belong here.”
Nohar chuckled. If she didn’t know moreaus, and this moreau in particular, she would have found the sound threatening. He had an unnerving tendency to show his teeth when he laughed, and his canines were the size of her thumb. “As if I had a choice. It’s your fault.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“My life may be in danger, the alien business may be rearing its ugly head—where else do you think a morey would go to ground?”
“What about your wife?”
“Safe.” From the way he said it, she knew not to ask any further about his spouse.
“How long have you known these people?”
“Four years. From the Los Angeles chapter.”
“This is national?”
Nohar chuckled again. “Look at this place.”
She slowly dropped back to stare at the ceiling and began to reassess her world view. “Why’d you vouch for me? I worked for the Feds.”
“You aren’t human.”
“Meaning?”
“When the shit hits the fan, species transcends politics.”
She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.
• • •
General Wu finally sent for them, well after nightfall. They were fetched by the same jaguar that had snatched Evi from “ROOMS.” She was no longer armed with the AK-47. Evi’s standing in this community was on an upswing.
Instead of the conservatory, the jaguar led them across an unlit campus to a blacked-out building. Inside, the place was well lit. It was the windows that had been painted black. The jaguar brought them through a set of doors flanked by lepine guards in black berets and into an auditorium out of another century. General Wu stood at a podium that barely came past her waist. Behind her was a rank of green blackboards set in dark-varnished wood frames. In the audience was a collection of five moreaus. With their arrival, seven moreaus, one frank.
“Welcome,” Wu addressed them. She gestured them down to the front with her stump. “My intelligence team has informed me that if we have any time to do what I plan, it is running out.”
Evi walked down to the front and sat next to a lean lepus who was missing an ear. Nohar stood; the human desks weren’t made for people his size. The jaguar barely fit herself into the seat next to Evi.
Wu continued, directing her comments at Evi. “The NLF team from Nyogi Enterprises must have had you under surveillance for some time. Following your personal contacts, and using you as a stalking horse to uncover the identities of your employers and coworkers. Would this conflict with any of your observations?”
“That makes sense except—”
“Why kidnap you?”
Evi nodded.
Wu tapped at a keyboard hidden by the podium. “We’re assuming there was some recent triggering event that made Nyogi desperate. They intend to gain quickly now by force the information they hoped to gain slowly by stealth.”
“The location of the aliens . . .” Evi whispered.
The room became very quiet. The only noises were moreys breathing and shifting their weight and the buzzing of the uncertain fluorescents. The pause lengthened uncomfortably until Evi said, “I don’t know that.”
That wasn’t a comfortable admission. Not only because there were eight pairs of eyes looking at her for the answer, a few with blatant hostility, but because it was something she should know.
Nohar spoke. “Nyogi assumes that you do.”
She turned to the tiger. “I should. I was the one who bottled up the aliens in the first place. They assumed I was an insider.”
“A human,” Nohar said, “would have been.”
She shook her head. “Species before politics.”
General Wu slapped the side of the podium, drawing the audience’s attention back to her. “We need to reach those four aliens before Nyogi does. The window in which we have to act as rapidly closing. Isham and the Feds have set back their operational capability, but it is doubtful that it would take longer than forty-eight hours for a corporation with the resources of Nyogi to assemble another team to go after a secondary target. Someone else who knows where the aliens are.
“Isham, if you do not have that information, you must lead us to someone who has.”
Evi looked at the moreaus surrounding her. Nohar was carefully cultivating an expressionless demeanor, though he was habitually making clawing motions with his right hand. The jaguar corporal sitting next to her was staring at her, teeth barred in an expression of silent hostility. The general stood directly in front of her, like a giant wooden totem. The one-eared rabbit to her right looked at her, nose twitching as if in curiosity. The four rats beyond showed mixtures of apprehension and hostility.
It hit her all at once, exactly how far she had removed herself from everything she had known, worked for, believed . . .
“Wait a minute.” Evi stood up. “Information is one thing—”
She could feel the weight of the moreau’s attention. Not only the ones in this room, not just the complex, but the weight of the surrounding community of three million . . .
“What, exactly, do you object to?” Wu asked.
What, exactly? It wasn’t like she hadn’t shifted allegiances before. If anything, the goals and principles Wu was offering were clearer than the ones the Agency offered.
“What I object to is a strong feeling of déjà vu.”
“Meaning?”
“I crossed the Atlantic in ’45, before a frank had any civil rights in this country. The Feds said, ‘Of course you’ll work for us.’ In a dozen years I managed to convince myself I was working on the side of right and justice, only to have the rug pulled out from under me.”
“Isham,” Nohar said. She turned to face the tiger, who was the only face in the room that held any sympathy. “You’re too used to taking orders. You can work with someone without working for them.”
General Wu spoke. “We aren’t asking you to adopt our politics or join our organization. We’re asking only that you aid us in achieving something of mutual, if not universal, benefit: Namely, capturing and publicizing these aliens.”
Evi looked up at the general. Nohar was right. The one specific thing that bothered her was the prospect of owing her allegiance to another political entity that would use her as a pawn and sacrifice her without a second thought. She had played that game all her life.
It was time she owed allegiance to herself.
“I’ll help you.” She sat down and crossed her legs. “With two conditions—”
The jaguar spoke. “You’re in no position—”
“Corporal Gurgueia,” Wu interrupted. “Miss Isham has been quite cooperative. We’d do well to hear her out.”
Evi waited for other outbursts from the crowd. Other than glowering stares from a pair of the rats, there were no overt objections.
“As I said, two conditions. First, this isn’t to be a brute force operation. No explosives, and if there’s gunfire, that means someone screwed up.” She stared directly at the jaguar as she said that.
Wu nodded and the jaguar emitted a quiet growl.
“Second, I’m in charge of the operation.”
The entire room started talking at once. Except for Nohar, who looked as though he expected her to say that, and Wu, who looked like she was above shouting down the audience.
Despite the dozen objections flying around her, Evi smiled. Yes, she did have little choice but to participate in this escapade. However, the general had little choice but to let her participate on her own terms. General Wu had said herself that the window of opportunity was rapidly closing.
It took nearly five minutes before the moreaus quieted down enough to let the general speak.
“Respectfully, General, you aren’t going to seriously consider this, are you?” asked Corporal Gurgueia, the jaguar.
“I’m doing more than that. I am doing just as Isham suggests. We need a specialist in covert activity, not urban warfare. We have too little time to debate command structure.” General Wu swept her gaze across the room. “Is there anyone who feels that they’ll be unable to operate under these conditions?”
No one spoke.
“Good. Our first order of business is to locate and make contact with someone who has the information we need. Isham?”
“If no one’s gotten to David Price . . .”
• • •
David Price was the only member of the Domestic Crisis Think Tank whose outside life Evi knew anything about. He’d been the only member of the think tank with whom she’d had more than a strictly professional relationship. He was perhaps the one friend she had in there.
He had a cover identity, David King, who lived in a modular tract house in Jackson Heights. She knew the house; David had once taken her there.
Now, as she flew a matte-black GM Kestrel toward the East River, she wondered about that. He had been a part of Frey’s conspiracy all along and had allowed her to be duped. Evi doubted that she had ever had any friends who weren’t friends of convenience.
Except, perhaps, for Diana.
The Kestrel was a big aircar, even bigger with most of the interior seats stripped out of it. Even so, they could fit only four members of the team in it. She drove, the one-eared rabbit named Huaras sat next to her, and in the back sat Nohar and Corporal Gurgueia. The extra weight made the Kestrel handle like a wet brick.
It was exactly five after midnight when she hit the shore of the Bronx. As soon as she left shore, she raised the aircar to legal heights and switched on the lights and the transponder. Instantly, it seemed, the comm came alive with frantic instructions from La Guardia Air Traffic Control. No one commented on the aircar’s sudden appearance. They wanted them to get into another air corridor, they were too close to Rikers.
She banked away from Rikers Island, and a subsonic rumble rattled the windows as a ballistic shuttle started rising on a steep ascent from the Rikers Island launch facility. The shuttle passed so close that she could see individual heat tiles on its underside.
She did a long banking right turn around La Guardia, over Flushing and Shea Stadium, and as the Manhattan skyline rotated into view in front of them, Jackson Heights slid by below. She cut the lights and began the descent.
The Kestrel put down on a shabby excuse for a back yard, raising a cloud of fresh snow. It sat in a brief blizzard of its own making. The gull-wing doors on the Kestrel flew open, shedding snow, and the moreaus stepped out. The rabbit covered the rear of the house with his machine pistol, Gurgueia tried to cover everything else with her AK-47. Nohar stood out of the way of the guns and waited for Evi.
Evi stepped out of the Kestrel, pulling on a new pair of gloves and taking the medkit and the gun Wu had provided her. The gun was a fairly straightforward Smith and Wesson ten-millimeter automatic. Her wounded shoulder was doped up on painkiller, so she could holster it without wincing.
“Gurgueia, you go cover the front. Huaras, take the rear. Me and Nohar are going in.”
Gurgueia seemed to bristle a bit at taking orders from Evi, but she did as she was told. Huaras wordlessly took cover by the Kestrel. Evi ran to the back door. She spared a glance at the driveway. Price’s car, an old Chevy Caldera that would have looked like a police car if it weren’t for the lime-green paint job, was parked in the open garage, plugged into the vehicle feed. The snow cover on the driveway was unblemished by tire tracks or footprints. Even from where Evi was, she could see the blinking green light on the Caldera’s dash that was registering a full charge on the inductors. The car’d been parked for a while.
She got up on one side of the back door, Nohar on the other. Using the doorframe for cover, she tried the lock. The magnetic keypad didn’t want to open. She briefly wished for the electronic gear that’d been trashed in her pack.
It wasn’t a security building, though. She saw no trace of an alarm system.
She glanced at Nohar to make sure he was covering her and grabbed the keypad-cardkey unit with both hands and yanked it off the side of the house. It came reluctantly, with a rasping noise. It hung on to the doorframe with twenty-centimeter-long bolts that pulled a chunk of wood the size of Evi’s hand along with them. It took all of five seconds for her to find the right wire, strip it, and short out the magnetic lock.
A blue spark, the slight smell of melting insulation, and the door drifted open.
She led the way into the darkened house, gun drawn.
The kitchen was a mess. At first she thought that someone had beaten them to Price. Dishes were everywhere, lending the taint of spoiling food to everything in the room. The refrigerator hung open a crack, causing a dagger of light to slice diagonally across the room. She shut the refrigerator with her foot, to allow her eyes to adjust fully to the dark.
After a second of scanning the room, she realized that this was all Price’s work. The pots left moldering on the stove, the coffee grounds overflowing the trash basket, the pile of slimy debris that overflowed the trash disposal—the room smelled like a compost heap, but there was no sign of a struggle, just lousy housekeeping.
When she was here before, she hadn’t thought Price had been such a slob.
Something was definitely wrong here.
She stalked through the dining room, and the picture didn’t change much. On the table sat pyramids of fast-food containers, old beer bulbs, pizza boxes that had been sitting around long enough to begin biodegrading. All the shades were drawn. The only source of light was from a streetlight streaming in the open door behind her.
In the living room sat Price’s comm, surrounded by an audience of beer bulbs and news faxes.
On a coffee table between the couch and the comm was sitting a box of ten-millimeter ammunition. The box had ripped open, and bullets had rolled out over the table and the floor. The remains of two more boxes were on the floor. Evi kicked one, for shotgun shells.
She looked at Nohar and whispered, “If a gun goes off—”
“—somebody screwed up,” Nohar finished for her.
She started up the stairs. The stairway was strewn with empty food boxes, dirty clothing, and beer bulbs. She also noticed a few bottles of harder stuff. Drunks with guns had to be one of the top items on Evi’s list of unpretty pictures.
At the head of the stairs were six doors. Only one, the bathroom, hung open. From the bathroom came the sound of water dripping and an endlessly filling toilet tank. The entire second floor was permeated with the smell of cat shit. As she edged toward the bathroom, where the smell was concentrated, she saw the culprit nestled next to one of the closed doors.
If she remembered correctly, Price had at least four cats. This one’s name was Lao-Tze.
The overstuffed black cat looked up at the two intruders. He addressed Evi with a questioning. “Mwrowr?” As soon as he saw Nohar, he arched his back and started hissing, backing toward the bathroom.
She looked into a bathroom and was greeted by the miasma of an overflowing litter box. The cats had long since abandoned the box and had moved on to towels, the rug, stray pieces of Price’s underwear.
As Lao-Tze backed away from Nohar, Evi silently thanked him for identifying the bedroom where Price was holed up.
Once Lao-Tze had vacated the doorway, Evi waved Nohar toward it with her gun. She stationed herself by the opening side and listened. There were a number of cats in there, and someone breathing.
She faced Nohar and started mouthing a countdown.
“Three . . . Two . . . One . . .”
Evi threw open the door and dived into the room, rolling and taking cover behind an overstuffed recliner. A displaced Siamese hissed at her. She braced the gun in both hands, aiming over the arm of the chair.
Price lay on the bed, fully clothed, oblivious.
It took a few seconds for her to realize he was alive. But he was breathing, and he was radiating faintly in the infrared. He was sleeping off what looked and smelled like a substantial drunk. There were more beer bulbs scattered around this room than the rest of the house. Lying at the foot of the bed was a Vind 10 Auto that had been improperly broken down. Curled up next to the barrel was a black-and-gray tabby. She had remembered Price calling that one Meow-Tse-Tung.
What worried Evi was the fact that Price had a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun clutched to his chest. His finger was resting on the trigger. It wasn’t pointing at anything, but if Price was startled out of unconsciousness, he could blow a hole in the wall by accident. Evi would like to avoid the police involvement a gunshot would bring.
She waved Nohar into the room to cover her. She holstered the gun and opened the medkit on her belt. She pulled out the airhypo and slipped in a trank cartridge.
Damn. She almost cursed out loud. She couldn’t risk the trank on someone who smelled like a brewery. The drug might put Price into a coma, the state he was in.
She put the trank away and started creeping up on the bed. Easy, she told herself, the shotgun wasn’t even pointed at her. She just had to get the weapon away from the drunk before he became aware of his surroundings. Easy.
She was only a half-step away from Price, when she found cat number four. The cat had been under the bed with only its tail sticking out. She’d been so intent on watching Price for any reaction, she hadn’t kept a good eye on her footing. Her boot came down on the cat’s tail accompanied by the loudest and most grating screech she had ever heard.
Price’s eyes shot open and Evi dived for the gun. She did the only thing she could think of: she slammed the edge of her right hand in front of the shotgun’s hammers as they cocked.
She lay on top of Price, and two nails of pain were driven into her hand as the hammers pierced her glove, and then skin.
But the shotgun remained silent.
A huge furry arm extended over Evi’s shoulder and pointed a grotesquely oversized automatic at Price’s forehead.
“Don’t,” said Nohar.
Price froze and Evi gently removed herself and the shotgun. She unhooked the shotgun’s grip on her hand, gratified to find that her hand retained its mobility. Even if clenching it into a fist now felt as though she were trying to rip the side of it open.
“Damn it!” She said in a harsh whisper. She broke open the shotgun and dumped the shells on the floor. Then she really broke it by bending the barrel much farther back than it was supposed to go. There was a quiet snap as a connector gave way, and the gun fell to the ground in two distinct pieces.
Price’s eyes kept darting from her to Nohar, then back again.
“Cover him,” she told Nohar, “I’m going to check the rest of the house.”
Nohar nodded as a yellow tabby crawled out from under the bed and began to weave between Nohar’s legs.
Of the four remaining doors, three were empty bedrooms. The last was a linen closet.
Evi was closing the door to the closet when she heard three distinct gunshots in rapid succession. She darted into Price’s room, but the tableau remained unchanged. Nohar looked as surprised as Price did.
Someone outside had screwed up.