“You know babies,” Betsy said. “You must have seen many babies on television.”
The brow furrows deepened. “Baby?”
“Only this won’t be like the human babies you’ve seen. This will be asim baby.” She gave a little shrug as she glanced at Zero and Romy, signifying that she was simplifying the situation as best she could for Meerm.
“Where baby?”
Betsy tapped the sim’s abdomen. “Right in here. And the baby will come out soon.”
“Baby here?” Meerm said, a slow smile of wonder spreading across her face as she gently rubbed her hands across her belly. “Baby inside? Baby kick-kick-kick?”
“Oh, yes!” Betsy laughed. “I’ll bet that baby’s been kick-kick-kicking like crazy!”
As they all watched Meerm gaze at her belly, a question occurred to Romy.
“Will she be able to care for a baby?” she said softly.
“She won’t have to worry a bit,” Betsy said. “That baby will getgreat care. As a one-of-a-kind species, it will belong to the world.”
“No, it will belong to Meerm. It will beher baby. We’re not going to forget that, are we?”
“Ah, Romy,” Zero said through a sigh. “That’s why we need you: to ask the tough questions.”
Something in his voice struck her…did Zero…could Zero feel about her the way she…?
No. Out of the question. He couldn’t. He simply couldn’t.
13
SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ
“Let’s get this started,” said Sinclair-1, spinning his chair away from the winter-browned hills beyond his office window to face Luca and Abel Voss. “I’ve still got a lot to do today.”
Luca thought the CEO looked particularly irritable this afternoon. That was going to get worse when he heard Luca’s news. Normally he’d relish the prospect of upsetting him, but not now. All the blame rested squarely on him.
“We’re waiting for your brother.”
Voss shifted his bulk in his chair to face Luca. “I thought he wasn’t comin.”
“I called and told him this was too important to miss,” Luca replied.
Sinclair-1 gave him a questioning stare. Luca only nodded. Yes, they’d agreed that Ellis would be excluded from tactical meetings, but Luca had a reason. He was sure Sinclair-2 already knew that Meerm had been snatched from under SIRG’s nose, and damn well knew who had done it; he was going to use Sinclair-2 to bait a trap for the people he’d been supplying with information.
They included Cadman and Sullivan, Luca knew, and at least two or three others. Whoever they were, they’d all vanished. He’d hoped to nab either Cadman or Sullivan and wring the pregnant sim’s whereabouts out of them, but since he couldn’t find them, he was looking for a way to make them come to him.
Because heneeded that sim. Lister had thrown a shit fit this morning when he’d heard about losing Grimes and, of all people, Snyder. Grimes had been something of a jerk, but Snyder had been their most dependable man. Luca had stashed the bodies in the woodshed behind his cabin—he hoped the cold weather held—and Lister was keeping the news from the higher-ups for now, but couldn’t cover it up indefinitely. If Luca could produce the pregnant sim, however—say, today or tomorrow—the deaths wouldn’t matter.
The office door opened and Sinclair-2 entered. The older brother looked strange today. And then Luca realized what it was: His usual down and dour demeanor was gone and he looked almost…happy.
You son of a bitch.
He fought the urge to grab him by his scrawny neck and twist it till he spilled everything he knew. Every last thing.
But that was not an option. Even though Mercer Sinclair was considered the true untouchable—his was the public face of SimGen, so closely identified with the company that if he went down, so would the stock that made SIRG an entity unto itself—Ellis Sinclair was also considered off-limits. No move could be made against him without direct authority from the Old Man himself.
What Luca couldn’t understand about Ellis Sinclair waswhy . Why would anyone in his right mind want to kill this golden goose called SimGen? So that had to be the answer: The older Sinclair was out of his mind.
Which didn’t make Luca want to kill him any less.
He swallowed his bile and said, “I won’t waste anyone’s time here: We have it on good authority that the pregnant sim is in the hands of Patrick Sullivan and Romy Cadman.”
“Oh, Christ,” Sinclair-1 groaned, closing his eyes.
“That tears it,” said Abel Voss.
Sinclair-2 leaned back in a sofa and said nothing.
“When?” the CEO said, recovering quickly. “Where are they now?”
“This morning. And if I knew where, we wouldn’t be having this meeting.”
“Damn!” Sinclair-1 glared at Luca. “You’ve got to get her back!”
“We’re working on it.”
Sinclair-2 finally spoke. “Give it up, Merce. Can’t you see it’s gone too far? It’s past the point of no return now.”
“Not yet! Not until they produce that baby!”
“And even if they do,” said Voss, “we can call it a hoax, can’t we? Some cheap publicity stunt, a twenty-first century version of the Piltdown man or Barnum’s Cardiff Giant. We get our PR boys to crank up their bullshit machines and start poundin away at every news outlet they know: A hoax, that’s all it is. Just a hoax. Those boys are so good, before you know it, we’ll be believin it ourselfs.”
Sinclair-1 was shaking his head. “That won’t fly in this case. They have a real live sim mother. They can identify the human father—what was his name?”
“Craig Strickland,” Luca said. “The security guard at the globulin farm.”
“Who’s dead, right? But that doesn’t preclude fingerprinting his DNA. Plus they can put the sim mother and human father together for months in the same building in the Bronx. And most important, they’ll have the baby. With all that, it’s a simple everyday process to establish paternity.”
Luca could have cheered. He’d been looking for an opening to bait his trap, and this was it.
“I’ve taken care of that,” he said. “Because of his connection to a crime, Strickland’s body has been in cold storage in the New York City Morgue since it was pulled out of the ashes in the Bronx. A real crispy critter.”
“So?” Voss said.
“So yesterday it was released. Since Strickland’s got no family—at least none that’s come forward—I had one of my men present himself as Strickland’s cousin and claim his body. We’re going to have it cremated as soon as possible.”
He hadn’t done any of this yet. The idea had occurred to him less than an hour ago, and he had to clear it with Lister first. But Sinclair-2 didn’t know that.
“That still doesn’t help us,” Sinclair-1 said. “If indeed his corpse was, as you so elegantly put it, a ‘crispy critter,’ the NYPD would have had to look into his DNA in the course of identifying the body. Even after he’s reduced to ash, his RFLP profile will remain in the department’s database.”
Voss frowned. “What’s R-F—”
“Restriction fragment length polymorphisms,” Sinclair-1 said. “A way of testing for the differences in the banding pattern of DNA fragments from different individuals. DNA fingerprinting, in other words.”
“We know all about his RFLP in the database,” Luca said. “Ever hear of hacking a computer? Hardly anyone’s better at it than my people. We’ll have someone else’s RFLP—yours, if you want it—in that computer before sunrise.”
“I get it,” Voss said, nodding. “I’m not hearin a word of this talk of illegalities, of course. Matter of fact, I ain’t even in this here room right now. But if I were, even a genetics cretin like myself can see what’ll happen: They’ll hold up this Strickland boy as the father for all the world to see, but when it comes time for matchin up the DNA, there’ll come a cropper. They’ll go to the NYPD computer and—Lordy, Lordy, will you look at that—no match. And when they look to exhume the body—”