The Dragon Factory

“I suppose. Anyway, he said that Dad wants the new generation gene sequencer, the Swedish one that was on the cover of Biotech Times.”

“So? Let him have it,” said Hecate.

“He wants two of them, and I think he wants them just because they were on the cover.”

“Who cares? Buy him a roomful.”

“He already has a roomful of Four Fifty-four Life Sciences sequencers,” complained Paris. “He says they’re garbage and his attendants had to restrain him from having a go at them with a fire axe.”

Hecate shrugged. “Why are you making an issue of this? If Alpha wants twenty new computers then let him have them. We can debit his allowance for it. God knows he’s been enough of a cash cow lately to allow him some toys. What’s it to you?”

Paris sneered at his sister’s use of “Alpha.” Dad had started calling himself that a month ago and insisted that his children only address him by that name. Their father’s staff had to address him as Lord Alpha the Most High. For two years before that he’d only answered when addressed as the Orange, which was a vague reference to some alien race whose origins and nature seem to be in some dispute among UFOlogists. Paris was grudgingly indulgent; he had a vein in his forehead that started pulsing every time he had to shape his lips around one of those names. The only one of his father’s names Paris had ever liked was Merlin, which Cyrus had used for most of their teenage years.

Hecate raised one delicate eyebrow.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Paris snapped. “I’m not being cheap or, god help us, ‘thrifty’… it’s just that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between necessary requests and his go-nowhere whims. Like the swimming pool filled with mercury.”

Hecate finished her martini and stood up. She was exactly as tall as Paris-six feet on the dot-and had legs that been commented upon everywhere from Vogue to Maxim. The most common phrase in the magazines was “legs like alabaster.” Crap like that, which Hecate had found flattering when she was in her teens but now found trite. Her silver-white pubic hair was shaved to a tiny vee, and when she raised her leg to step into her panties the cabin lights sparkled on the golden rings in her labia. Her nipple rings were platinum. For her twenty-seventh birthday she was considering having her eyebrows pierced, though she was absolutely certain it would give Dad a coronary. As far as he knew, the Twins were completely without marks except for the starburst scars. He told them over and over again that purity was important, though none of his explanations as to why it was important made any rational sense. Something about keeping the channel open for the celestial god force that was supposed to flow through them.

She pulled on a short pale green skirt and a white satin blouse that caught stray flickers of light when she moved. She sat down, snugged back into the deep cushions in one corner of the Lear, legs crossed, dangling a sandal from her big toe.

The reference to the mercury pool was fair enough; it had been absurdly expensive-$5.35 per hundred grams- and yet startlingly beautiful. Ten thousand gallons of swirling liquid metal. The purchase of it through various companies they owned had caused a brief stock market run on the metal, and there was still speculation in some of the science trade journals that someone somewhere was developing something new that would wow the world.

Hecate said, “By the time he’d gotten tired of the metal consciousness experiment the market price had gone up twenty-six cents an ounce. We made a killing.”

“That’s hardly the point,” Paris said irritably. “It’s part of a pattern of deterioration and excess that’s making it harder and harder to separate his crazy bullshit from actual research.”

“Which is why we pay Chang, Bannerjee, and Hopewell to validate his work.”

“The Three Stooges? They’re idiots.”

Hecate gave her brother a tolerant smile and a mild shake of the head. “They’re not and you know it. They’re the best of the best.”

Paris made a rude noise and threw back the last of his drink. “With Otto always at Dad’s side our three idiots can never get close. I think we need to invite him down to the Dragon Factory for a few days.”

“Are you nuts? He’s been trying to find out where it is for years now. No way we can bring him there!”

“It’s not like we’d send him a plane ticket, Paris. We’d go get him and control what he sees and knows. We could block out the windows on the jet, maybe slip him something so he’d sleep through the trip-something so that he wouldn’t know where the Dragon Factory was. But I really think some tropical air would do him good, and we’d have a chance to get some actual quality time with him. And maybe see if we can figure out if he’s totally bonkers or just half-crazy. We could show him the Berserkers and the stuff we have in development for the work camps. He’d-”

There was a soft bing! sound, indicating that their plane was beginning its descent. A moment later Paris’s cell phone rang. He paced the length of the cabin, mostly listening, grunting now and then. He said, “Shit!” and disconnected. His face was flushed red.

“What’s wrong?” asked Hecate. “Who was that?”

“Sunderland,” Paris said. “They’re having problems getting the computer system. Apparently they’re meeting more resistance than anticipated.”

“He has the entire NSA!”

“I know; I know.”

Hecate bit her lip and looked out of the window for a long moment. “We need that system. Pangaea’s not good enough for the next phase. We need MindReader.”

As brilliant as the Twins were, they could not take full responsibility for much of their transgenic work. Most of it was stolen. Pangaea, a computer system given to them by Alpha, was an advanced intruder model, and with it they had been able to infiltrate the mainframes of many of the world’s top genetics research labs and clone the databases. This gave them a bank of knowledge broader than anyone else’s, and broader by a couple orders of magnitude. However, Pangaea was not a new system and some of the modern firewalls were starting to give them trouble. The only computer system capable of slipping through those firewalls was MindReader, and it could more easily decrypt the data.

They’d already tried putting a mole in the DMS to try to steal a Mind-Reader unit or obtain specs on it. They acted on a tip that there were some security holes in the organization, but they hit only brick walls and wasted over a million dollars that they would never see again. Using the Vice President had been Sunderland’s grand scheme, and he’d already banked a lot of Jakoby cash just to set it in motion. If the plan failed, there was no chance in hell of getting a refund from the fat blow-hard. That, they both agreed, was one of the downsides of being criminals. Unless you could pull a trigger on someone there was just no accountability, and Sunderland was not someone they could dispose of.

“Well, there’s still the Denver thing,” Paris said after a long silence. “The way Dad reacted when we told him about it… there must be something amazing down there. Maybe even the schematics for Mind-Reader.”

“More likely it’s early genetics research,” cautioned Hecate. “Could be a complete waste of time for us.”

“Maybe,” Paris said diffidently. One of the many goals of Sunderland’s gambit with the Vice President was to keep the DMS too busy to notice anything happening in Denver. The discovery of a trove of old records belonging to one of Alpha’s oldest colleagues was huge. The Twins had long suspected that Alpha had ties to groups who had pioneered genetic research, and the existence of a legendary trove of data based on covert mass human testing had long been the Holy Grail of black market genetics. No one knew exactly what was in it, but since the 1970s more than a dozen people had been murdered during the search for it. Alpha had mentioned it several times and had slyly gotten the Twins to look for it, but when they said that they thought they had a solid lead on it in a records storage facility near Denver, Alpha had tried to play it down as a whim that had passed. The Twins hadn’t believed him. There had been a moment of naked hunger in Alpha’s eyes that had electrified them.

The Twins were using this trip to visit Alpha as a way of distracting him and the Sunderland gambit as a way of distracting the DMS. If everything went according to plan, then Paris and Hecate would have the contents of those records by the time they returned to the Dragon Factory.

“You’re right. When it comes right down to it,” Hecate said with a smile, “it’s not like we don’t have a Plan B. Or a Plan C.”

“Or Plan D,” he said brightly.