"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 hum an old 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, IVe 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—"
"Doit."
Manny gave an undulating shrug and walked toward the van. Nohar started to follow, but Isham grabbed his arm. ' 'We talk, Mr. Raj as than. Sit down, your knee wili 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?"
if Nohar waved at the dead form of Smith. "The pa-
\ pers 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
J Zips."
"*r. Isham lowered her sunglasses. "What govern-
t ment?' *
"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, No-
i har heard the sound of retching. While the cops backed
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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 its mass on to the ground, and the pace of the dissolution was accelerating. Manny began shoving jars through the hole in the frank's chest—Harsk's eyes widened and he turned around, falling to his knees. Manny got three of the specimen jars into the body before holes began spontaneously erupting in the frank's skin. The skin dissolved like an ice cube in boiling water. Manny tried to get a solid piece of the frank's skin into one of the empty jars. He scooped it up, and it melted into more of the cloudy white fluid.
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 a 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 1-90, 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. Man-ny'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
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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 the 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.