would spread like wildfire and would never go away.”
“So, you think Fawkes was insane?”
“Fawkes is clearly very intelligent, and he’s clearly very determined, but how would you frame it? From the information I have, I can deduce only that Fawkes coordinated the attacks as a means of fighting this shadow he obviously believes exists.”
“Is there any chance he’s right?” I asked. MacReady watched me evenly.
“His data appears very conclusive,” he said, “but there are other possible explanations. Fawkes didn’t pursue them. He followed his paranoia down the rabbit hole.”
“Could he still have been right?”
MacReady sighed. “You can always make a case for these things,” he said. “Not long after the events of two years ago, a new law was passed. It ensured that revivor consciousness would revert to pre-generation seven levels—basically removing some of the higher functions to make them more obedient but less self-sufficient. Now all revivor models of Fawkes’s generation or lower are being scrapped and replaced. One could look at those things and see how it might fit into Fawkes’s thinking.”
I couldn’t tell if he believed it or not. In the light of the monitor, his face was hard to read, and maybe he wasn’t even sure what he believed himself.
“Do you have concrete proof of Fawkes’s communication?” I asked.
“No. You’ll have to trust me on that, but it worries me, and that’s part of why I’m here. It was one thing to have Fawkes infiltrate Heinlein’s systems and access our data without anyone’s knowledge …it’s another for someone inside Heinlein to be willingly communicating with him. Before, he controlled revivors that he’d smuggled into the country to do what he needed done, but if he’s making allies inside the city who are human …”
He didn’t have to finish. That would mean Fawkes had managed to get people, regular flesh-and-blood legal citizens, to buy into his conspiracy theory and help him. That would give him a much, much wider reach. Maybe even wide enough to try to acquire weapons like the ones uncovered at Royal Plaza.
“Does Heinlein know you’re here?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “and they can’t. I don’t know who on the inside might be compromised. I won’t communicate with you over the wire for the time being, until I know, but I’ll try to help you if I learn more.”
“Thanks, MacReady. Looks like I owe you again. Be careful.”
“And you, Agent.”
He got up and headed for the door, stopping to turn back before he left. Silhouetted in the light from the hallway outside, he looked like a shadow himself.
“Even if he was right about Zhang’s Syndrome,” he said, “I would be very cautious of Samuel Fawkes.”
He left, and when he closed the door, the only light left was the soft glow from the vitals monitor. I began to fall back into sleep.
I could almost have dreamed him.
2
Whispers
Nico Wachalowski—Mercy Greaves Medical Center
The words lit up in the dark behind my eyelids. I brought the time up next to them and saw it was morning.
Opening my eyes, I found myself looking at a foam-tiled ceiling. A fluorescent light flickered off to my left.
The vitals monitor wasn’t beeping anymore, and my strength had returned, for the most part. I stretched. My muscles felt stiff, but I could move.
The message had come in on the channel we used to use back in the service, during silent operations. He’d never used it since. None of us had.
The message was sent at a little past three in the morning. It was flagged as an emergency transmission. I opened it.
31 03 76 11 52 57 81 1
That was it—just a list of numbers, with no accompanying text or voice.
It could have been a glitch, but it didn’t look like it. Whatever the numbers were, he meant to send them to me. I put in a call to him on the JZI, but he was offline.
I closed my eyes again and brought up the footage from the night before. The data I pulled during the raid had been removed, but I still had the visual recording up to the point I’d entered the basement. I skipped through, marking off key sections.
In a window, I watched as I tailed Takanawa down the stairwell. The view moved slowly in the darkness, letting him stay well ahead. His thermal signature trailed across the floor, and I followed it. Smaller signatures scurried here and there as a group of rats were startled. The marks intermingled for a second, and something flickered.
I stopped the recording. I remembered the distortion, but at the time I thought it was a trick of the light; I didn’t expect to see it show up on the recording. Going back, I slowed it down for a better look. The patterns from his footsteps were steady; then the rats scattered. I saw the flicker again. The glow from the footsteps disappeared for a second, then came back.
I checked again to be sure. Something blocked them out temporarily, moving right to left. Something crossed in front of them. Something I couldn’t see had been sticking to the right wall. It startled the rats, and when it did, it crossed over to the left, causing a skip in the patterns.
I cut back to when SWAT first broke in on him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, still dressed. Unlike the others who’d been caught, he was alone. There was no revivor with him.
He shrugged.
Bringing up the SWAT report from the raid, I cycled down the inventory of revivors that had been impounded. There were twelve total: the eleven active ones, plus the defunct one I’d found under the bed.
The revivor specified “she,” but it seemed unlikely Holst had done it, and no other women were found in the hotel. The only females at the site were revivors.
It hit me then. I hadn’t seen a revivor in the room with Takanawa, but maybe there had been one there. The revivor under the LW cloak could have been female; I never actually saw it. Sean told me Holst and Takanawa were there to intercept the weapons, but the original buyer might have already had an operative inside. A revivor from the outside could have deactivated the pleasure model and taken its place, stowing it under the bed of another room.
That could have put the operative in the room with Takanawa. It had an LW suit and used it to disappear when the raid began. When we let him go, it followed him, hoping he would lead it to the case before it left the hotel.
