Reborn, page 16
Joie took a deep breath. Gulped audibly at the enormity of what she was about to say.
Carter spoke instead.
“I might know someone,” he said simply.
CHAPTER 40
A day later, Joie wasn’t surprised that Carter had dragged her to a dive diner up in Everett. Those seemed to be his sort of place. Ernesta and Mitch had gone in earlier as a cover, looking like a couple doing a late breakfast. The others had returned to the two alien ships, with Kehoe monitoring things while Yormevs apparently fidgeted next to the man.
Joie had been given a small earring that could put sound directly into her eardrums via some magic, as well as pick up everything said within about two meters of her.
Carter swore by the food in this place, telling her before that they deserved a Michelin star, if they could only convince someone to buy better coffee. It was Seattle, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without finding better coffee, so the owners must have liked it black and tarry.
She’d had one sip after they sat down and agreed with Carter that it needed a lot of stuff added.
“Remember, you only need about a quarter of what you used to,” she said to him.
He was on the inside of the booth next to her, giving her access to move quickly. Neither of them was armed at the moment, but Yormevs or Tanerhald could grab them in a flash of light if necessary.
Hopefully, Earth wasn’t being put out of its misery today.
“I’m working on that,” Carter muttered back. “Helps that they shrank my stomach. I get full so fast it’s like I didn’t eat anything.”
“You’re eating like a normal person, dork,” she laughed. “Granted, that’s been how long ago for you?”
“Too long,” Carter muttered darkly. “I’m almost as old as Ernesta, at the end of the day. However, I did give up living for a stupendously long time to do this.”
“And you have a lot of bad habits to unlearn,” Joie turned to look at him.
He was growing in a beard that was a darker shade of blond than the hair on his head. Chestnut, maybe. Made him look almost distinguished, for all they looked like kids. And he hadn’t cut his hair in a while.
“Going for the hippy look?” she asked with a grin.
“Ernesta suggested a lumberjack look to try to blend in better,” he rumbled. “Still a lot of folks out there that might recognize the face, in spite of being fifteen centimeters shorter. I’d hate to be nabbed for something the old guy did. Even if I got away, they might run my prints and then you’d have one hell of a time explaining things.”
Joie nodded at that. He did look better. Not remotely her type, but he was consciously trying to act less like a juvenile delinquent than he had been. To listen to the folks around him. Her job was to help with that.
Help him understand what it meant to have friends.
Her own wakeup call had been a little brutal.
The waitress returned and got their orders. Joie did a meat and cheese omelet, with some broccoli and spinach thrown in, simply because they’d made the mistake of offering her a ‘build your own’ option.
Carter did the SOS. Shit on a Shingle like you got in the army when the cooks were running behind or had had a shitty morning. Biscuits, split and buttered. Meat tossed randomly on. Hash browns on one side. Gravy over everything. Cheese over that.
Joie knew she’d be burping all day if she ate that many carbs and that much grease.
Carter seemed to thrive on it, even shrunk down.
They waited. Small talk just to make small talk. Anything she said was going to be recorded by both alien sides, so she skipped several topics when he asked, including how she’d managed to get to Guadalajara.
No reason to drop the feds or the aliens on the Pedros if they hadn’t figured it out already, after all.
She would miss Sarah as much as she missed Celeste, but the Army had been exceedingly good at teaching her to value duty over self.
Pounded that into both of them, though it hadn’t stuck as well with Carter.
Or maybe it had gotten buried under all the other things, until Yormevs had dug the original Carter Faulkener out and shown him to the light.
Yeah, that was more likely it. They’d all three been born again, metaphorically, if not literally. There was no roadmap for how to handle being young and exuberant after you’d hit middle age and settled. Shit you’d learned and knees that didn’t hurt.
Carter and Ernesta were both winging it. Joie was just recovering from the depression of the last two-plus years.
Joie picked her up as soon as the woman entered. Carter called his old contact Irene, because that had apparently been the name the woman had been using when he’d met her more than a decade ago.
Thai bones in her face and that golden coloring to her skin. Short and broad in the shoulders and hips. Busty. Wide, flat face that was attractive, but not beautiful. Sharp eyes.
They made eye contact and Joie felt the woman’s appraisal. Then Irene scanned the rest of the room, but didn’t seem to notice the others.
Mitch had his back to her and Ernesta was a better undercover agent than just about anybody Joie had ever met.
Irene approached, waving down the waitress as she did.
“Coffee, please,” Irene told her. “No food for me. And I’ll need extra cream and probably extra sugar, because he’ll have used it all up.”
“Saved you two,” Carter grumbled under his breath.
Joie grinned.
They were almost like an old, married couple in that way. He’d said that when setting up this meeting, but Joie hadn’t grasped just how closely the two of them had to have worked for those sorts of casual assumptions to come up in public.
Irene sat. Studied Carter and blinked so hard she almost fell out of her seat. Moved to Joie’s face again and stared, mouth open.
“It’s complicated,” Joie said. “Yes, that really is Carter. No, you don’t want to know because the price of that knowledge will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“You paid for it,” Irene noted.
“Rest of my life, as well, Irene,” Joie nodded. “The costs are that high because the price of failure is even worse.”
“Failure?” Irene asked. “Your friend here asked me to meet with you two because you needed information. Previously, he’d been on the run from specifically you and everyone else for things he’d done for some folks elsewhere.”
“Hanoi,” Joie said simply, watching the impact of her words on Irene. “That was where I caught him. Brought him in. Things have gotten…squirrelly since then.”
“Oh?”
“We made a deal with some people you don’t ever want to meet, Irene,” Joie said. “They did this to us. When we’re done, they’ll remove us entirely from the playing field and you will never see any of us again.”
Irene blinked. Euphemistically, they would all have to die for what they knew. At least that was the little, white lie Joie was implying.
Because technically true was the best kind of true.
“He said you were looking for someone,” Irene nodded to Carter now, not saying his name out loud.
Possibly folks around here knew the name. Or maybe she was that superstitious. Either way worked.
“US Army General Valmy Bouchard,” Joie said in a quieter voice. Limited to this table. “He is playing with fire, Irene. Playing with Armageddon. We have to stop him, and do it right now, before things happen and you get to watch Human civilization melt down.”
Irene mouthed the words, eyes huge as the implications sank in. Joie nodded.
This woman was a smuggler, primarily. A fixer. You had a need, usually for something illegal or at least hard to find. She found it for you. For a price.
Like getting Carter to Vietnam, looking for Romana. She hadn’t been there, but he’d been asked for a price, a favor for one of the major crime lords in Hanoi, and had paid it.
Granted, it had been the Russians. Carter probably would have done it for free, maybe paid them, but he had a deep and ancient hatred of those folks going back a generation.
Joie had never had the security clearance or mission need to be told what had happened back then. Still, everyone who knew Carter knew his opinion on the Russians.
“Melt down,” Joie repeated. “Possibly end. As in Armageddon itself. We’d like to stop that. To save the world. I need help finding Bouchard.”
She leaned back and watched.
Irene turned to Carter and Joie felt him nod, bristling that he was the one Irene would trust.
Seriously? The world has to trust Carter Faulkener to do the right thing?
That was when you knew shit was bad.
But that was Old Carter. Mercenary. Warlord. Terrorist. Punk.
New Carter had friends, even if he was still too tough to admit the need.
They hadn’t given him any choice in the matter.
And he had Irene, who might have been his best friend in the world, in the before time. An old, married couple sort of thing.
“What am I allowed to know?” Irene asked finally, not much more than a whisper.
“My people think he has gone to ground in the Western US,” Joie said. “Flight from Santiago, Chile that went off the radar in Mexico, but there have been no indications that it crashed. And there would be, with the systems we can access. He’s air-gapped himself.”
Irene nodded at that. An air-gapped computer was one where you only touched a network that didn’t have any connection to the outside world. If it wasn’t physically on the internet somewhere, nobody could touch it.
Bouchard had gone somewhere that didn’t register his presence. Ergo, air-gapped.
To Joie, a mark of panic. Which just meant that he understood what had happened in orbit, even if he didn’t know who had done it.
The walls had started closing in on him.
“I get the feeling that suddenly I’m on the side of the good guys,” Irene said bleakly. She turned to Carter. “How the fuck did you let that happen?”
Carter shrugged. Then he grinned.
“She can be mighty persuasive,” he said, nodding at Joie. “And the shit I’ve seen…”
He smartly let that trail off.
Irene could live the rest of a normal life if Earth survived.
Joie and Carter would be boarding somebody’s spaceship, probably Tanerhald’s, and leaving forever, hopefully with nobody the wiser at what had almost happened.
Cost of doing business.
“Damn it, why do I have to be a hero?” she asked in a quiet, angry voice.
“Because the folks I’m working for intend to destroy the world if we don’t find Bouchard, Irene,” Joie said bluntly. “Right, fucking, now.”
That got through.
Like Carter, Irene was mostly bluster. He’d said that, too, but Joie hadn’t believed. Hadn’t understood the psychology of their pairing.
The unspoken trust that bound them. Not quite wedding vows, but maybe as close to friends as either of them had been allowed to retain in this business.
Joie held out her hand to the woman. Nodded for Irene to take it.
“Hot,” Irene said, confused.
Joie elbowed Carter, he did the same, until they were all holding hands.
“We’re not Human anymore, Irene,” Joie said. “I can’t say more, or you’d have to come with us forever when this is all done. There are angry people out there, who see us as a threat that must be neutralized. They’ve given me one opportunity to do it, before they step in with a big, fucking hammer.”
Irene went white. She blinked. Let go of their hands.
Food arrived, and they ate in silence, Irene watching and processing while Joie and Carter pretended that it was all perfectly normal.
In the background, Ernesta nodded as she and Mitch rose, paid, and departed.
The waitress cleared the empty plates and refilled their coffee with crappy sludge, bringing more cream and sugar without having to be asked, as they’d already emptied everything.
Irene drew a heavy breath. Settled. Studied Carter for a long moment.
“So this is goodbye?” she asked.
“Most likely,” he said, holding out a hand that she took. “It’s been fun.”
Irene nodded and turned to Joie.
“Contact you on his emergency number?” she asked.
“Yes,” Joie replied simply, trusting that the computers routing such a call would forget about it before the CIA or any other agency managed to figure themselves out.
“I’ll do what I can,” Irene promised.
“Thank you,” Joie said. “Carter has told me that you were one of the only people on this planet he could trust. I’m glad I got to meet you.”
“And I, you, Joie Daring,” Irene breathed. “Wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
Joie slid out of the booth and left a couple of counterfeit bills on the table that the Department of the Treasury itself couldn’t have detected. But a nice week’s bonus for the waitress.
A way to put a smile on the woman’s face.
If only for one last week.
CHAPTER 41
Valmy was in a space that had been mission control for the silo, back when it had been armed with world-ending missiles. Old-fashioned consoles originally designed for monitors with tubes, then updated later. Still the thick, angled metal. Still had that 1970s feel so endemic to many US bases.
Set the design once and then just keep building it forever?
He looked at Chelsea and Garrison and wondered if that sort of thinking had caused a lot of the problems he was facing today.
They were alone in here. Without weapons, the space had no purpose, so folks used the other levels for training and social space. He’d made it clear that anybody even acknowledging their existence would be facing a stint in Leavenworth measured in lifetimes, so other than nods in the chow line, he was left alone.
So far, nobody else had found them.
Partly, that was the device Bandi Algom had given him to install atop the old launch silo. It supposedly blocked other folks from scanning him, or getting to him. Valmy didn’t understand how the tech worked, but it had kept them safe so far.
“I have a problem,” he said to the two.
“Can we call in more help?” Konicek asked.
Most of his people were headed home from Central Asia now that the Russians, Chinese, and everyone else had finally backed off and started moving troops home. Standing down, as it were, from the sorts of heightened efforts that would need them to take a few weeks off to recover from. Sleeping two to three hours at a time with a pistol under your pillow, while staying ready to be sent on a mission on ninety-seconds warning, that wore on a person.
And it had been necessary.
“No,” Valmy decided after a few moments of thought. “Issuing those orders would tell our enemies where to look for us. How to find us. I’ve got teams headed to DC and Seattle, plus instructions to send a force of regular troops to Chile as fast as we can negotiate a joint mission with the locals. Daring is coming for us.”
“Do we assume all the ones who disappeared are with her?” Vanlaere asked. “Kehoe, Graydon, and Stone?”
“Would they have defected?” he asked her. “You were the closest to them?”
“She can be charismatic, sir,” Vanlaere replied. “With Mithras and Hernandez dead, I could see her easily tipping Graydon. Kehoe would be harder. Stone will follow orders.”
“So let us assume that we’re facing those four, plus whatever resources whoever has them can supply,” Valmy said.
“Who has them?” Konicek asked.
“Aliens,” Valmy said simply. “I’m not sure which ones, but my group in Argentina have all vanished, as has the ship we were trying to recover. Assume infiltrators, but I also assume that they will look Human. Human-enough.”
The two of them had heard enough to nod instead of recoil in abject horror. It was like dogs. Some folks had an utter terror, while many were blasé.
“We’re defensive,” Vanlaere noted. “Holed up and safe presently, but that limits us. How do we break out?”
“I’ve needed the resources of TRC around me while I considered my options,” Valmy said. “We’ve managed to steal or reverse engineer a few things from our pet aliens over the decades. Nothing sufficient to turn the tide right now, but I feel like we’ve come down to endgame, and need to draw some things out of the cupboard.”
“Such as?” she asked.
“I’ve been holding off on offering treatments such as you two underwent to outsiders,” Valmy said soberly. “In a way, dangling the possibility in front of people in order to keep our funding levels high while we did research. Project Herakles was a reasonable success, but it created monsters like Faulkener. Big and burly. Project Carpenter has refined that to the point that we all look normal.”
“Who are you thinking of bringing in from the cold, sir?” Konicek asked.
In from the cold. An old espionage term, for an agent that was on the outside, guessing, and needed to be rescued. Informed.
Made dangerous.
Valmy nodded to himself.
“This is a secret you need to carry deep,” he informed the two, waiting for them to nod. “Your upgrades supposedly double your lifespans, meaning that you will not really feel the advance of age until you are twelve or thirteen decades old.”
They nodded as he spoke. Old briefings, often repeated.
“That is a lie,” Valmy said. “Only a handful of folks are aware of the truth at present. I expect to live at least four hundred more years, and there are suggestions in the latest research that aging is a disease that can be defeated entirely, instead of held at bay for a time.”
“Defeated, sir?” Vanlaere asked.
“Defeated,” he nodded. “None of us are fertile. I’m not sure that can be fixed, but if we could make people live forever, we need to control population ruthlessly, anyway.”
They both stirred uneasily, but Valmy had spent more than a decade considering the shape of Human culture that he intended to create.
Republican government as currently constructed worldwide would eventually have to give way, if only because it had been founded and secured on the notion that politicians would eventually age and die, opening space for younger generations to step into their space.
