Patrick leaned back and thought a moment. They knew SIRG was still active—Daniel Palmer had said the name before his speech center blew a fuse. But where was it getting its funding now? The path to the answer might not lie with government agencies but with people. He’d seen it happen time and again during his labor relations practice: certain shady characters, on both the labor and management sides, would be found out and sent packing, only to pop up in another company or union local the following year.
“SIRG might be operating under a different name,” he said, “but I bet the personnel are the same. Any idea who headed SIRG?”
Ware leaned forward and put on his glasses. “Yes. I remember coming across that somewhere…” He began shuffling through his printouts. “Here it is: the director was a Lieutenant Colonel Conrad Landon.”
“And where is he now?”
“Easy enough to find out.” Ware turned to his computer. After a number of flamenco bursts on his keyboard, he leaned closer to the screen and said, “Conrad Landon retired as a full bird colonel.”
“Damn. When?”
Ware stared at the monitor. “The same year the funding died.”
“What a surprise,” Romy murmured.
Patrick leaned across the desk for a peek at Ware’s screen. “Any hint at where he might—?”
The picture of Landon startled him. Something familiar about the man in the grainy, black-and-white personnel-file photo.
“What’s up?” Romy said.
“Nothing. I just—” And then he knew. Add a few decades, enough to whiten the hair and deeply line the face, and Patrick recognized him. “Nothing.” Repressing a shout of triumph, he rose and extended his hand across the desk. Had to get out of here, had to talk to Romy alone before he exploded. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Ware. I’ve got to run. Romy, could you show me out?”
He fairly pulled her out of her seat and propelled her ahead of him down the hall.
“What is it?” she said.
“Where can we talk?”
“My office is—”
“Might be bugged.” He saw the elevators ahead. “Back to our mobile conversation pit.”
He pressed both theUP andDOWN buttons. The upward bound car arrived first, carrying four people. He let it go. The downward was empty. Perfect. He dragged Romy inside, jabbed the button for the lobby. As soon as the doors closed…
“Remember when we had our little face-to-face in my office with the Manassas Ventures lawyers?” he said, his tongue all but tripping over the words in his rush to get them out before someone else entered the car. “And remember how I followed them downstairs to their limo, hoping to find someone like Mercer Sinclair sitting in the back?”
She frowned. “Vaguely.”
“But it turned out to be someone I’d never seen before. Well, I’ve just seen him again. The man in the back seat was Conrad Landon, former Army colonel, and former director of SIRG. Maybe not so former. I’ll bet SIRG never went away and he’s still calling the shots. Find this Conrad Landon and we’ll find SIRG.”
3
NEWARK, NJ
Something’s not right, Zero thought with a pang of unease. We’re missing something.
He sat next to Tome in the rear seat of the van as it bounced over the rough pavement of Newark’s dark back streets toward the sim quarters Portero had led him to last night. Not quite 6:00P .M. yet but the sun was long gone and icy night had taken command.
Tome was dressed like the worker sims, but he’d been equipped with a PCA. The plan was to drop him off where he could sneak into the building and mix with the other sims. Zero was confident that Tome’s gentle nature and above-average intelligence would gain him the respect and confidence of the other sims, enough so that one of them would trust him with Meerm’s whereabouts. When he found out, he’d press the preset speed-dial number and they’d pick him up.
Zero sighed. Not a perfect plan. It hinged entirely on the assumption that the sim laborers knew where Meerm was hiding.
His face itched under the ski mask; he’d traded tinted glasses for the ultra darks he usually wore, but they still impaired his vision. He wished he could pull everything off and ride along like a normal human being. But then, he wasn’t a normal human being.
Just ahead of him, Patrick and Romy were a pair of silhouettes in the front seat.
“You two have done wonderful work,” Zero said. “You make a great team.”
“We do, don’t we,” Patrick said from behind the wheel.
Zero watched them glance at each other and smile. He could sense the growing bond between him. And as much as it made him ache to see Romy with Patrick, he knew it was for the best. Despite their surface differences, Zero sensed that they complemented each other on the deeper levels where it really counted.
He steered his thoughts away from Romy and toward what she and Patrick had uncovered today.
“We now have an ironclad chain of evidence. It doesn’t take a handwriting expert to decipher the signature on Alice Fredericks’s Manassas Ventures check as ‘Conrad Landon.’ That draws a direct line from the Department of Defense to SimGen.”
“It’s not something that will hold up in a court of law,” Patrick said. “Off the top of my head I can think of half a dozen grounds for preventing it from being admitted as evidence. But in the court of public opinion, it’s a hydrogen bomb.”
“Assuming the public gives a damn,” Romy said.
Patrick nodded. “Oh, they’ll care all right. We lay it out clear and simple for them. We show how SimGen’s early financing was public money: from Manassas Ventures which got it from SIRG which got it from the Department of Defense. The obvious question then is: Why? What did the D-o-D get in return? So we’ll explain how Manassas leases trucks in Idaho that show up on the SimGen campus, transporting cargo back and forth, cargo that no one’s allowed to see. But we’ve seen it, and that’s when we show them Kek. When we reveal that Kek was found in Idaho, they’ll be able to connect the last dots themselves: SimGen is producing hybrid simian soldiers for the Department of Defense to use in black ops or guerrilla operations. When the public learns that SimGen has been turning normally harmless creatures into man-killers, they’ll care. They’ll care like crazy. SimGen’s dirty little secret will finally be out in the open for all to see, and that will be the beginning of the end of SimGen.”
Zero had been listening to Patrick, but someone else’s words had been echoing through his brain at the same time.
You have no idea what you’re getting into, the forces you’ll be setting in motion…they’ll crush you.
“No comment back there?” Patrick said.
“As I told you: wonderful work.”
But still that uneasy feeling plagued Zero. Was this the danger Ellis had warned him about? He could see now why the people behind SimGen were so ruthless when it came to protecting the company.
So he added, “Now we know why SIRG’s funding was cut off: it didn’t need any more. With all the SimGen stock it holds in Manassas Ventures, SIRG is a financially independent organization. Which means we’ve got to be more careful than ever.”
“Right,” Patrick said. “More than careers and reputations hang in the balance should their little operation be exposed. Billions of bucks are at stake.”
Romy half turned in her seat. “Which raises a scary question: If SIRG has its own billions to finance its operations, who does it answer to?”
“No one with a conscience, that’s for sure. Maybe someone high up in the Pentagon, maybe only Conrad Landon himself.”
“I think we can count on SIRG to do whatever it deems necessary to protect its investment,” Zero told them. “That’s why, if we’re going to bring SimGen down, I’d prefer to find a way that keeps you two out of the spotlight.”
“Which is why we’re heading to Newark, I assume.”
“Exactly. I think it will be safer for all concerned if we let Meerm and her baby bring down SimGen.”