Blindsided (19 page)

6bDW, tucked away in the butler pantry and offline until Happy Home brought the droid online, entered from the far side of the room. John’s head swiveled around and stuck. In looks alone, 6b could have passed for human with its slender male, five-eleven build, nondescript brown hair and brown eyes, but the image was quickly ruined by the jerky gait, which barely passed for a walk across the great room. It was a wonder the scotch didn’t slosh out of the tumblers—good thing they were deep tumblers and only two fingers full.

“Holy fuck!” John exclaimed. “I have to get one of them.”

“It’s the most recent version.” Whitesman took the tumblers from the droid and handed one to John. “Rather clumsy really, and prone to hardware problems. They still have a long way to go before they’ll be useful for anything other than basic house chores.”

“Still…” John’s eyes stayed glued on the droid as it vacated the room, heading back to the pantry.

“You said you had something to report?”
 
Whitesman glanced at the archway to his recreation room longingly. Bridget was out playing Luret with the girls. He’d been looking forward to an evening of R&R…just him, his beer and some bad comedic sitcom. Instead he took a swig of scotch, relishing the smooth bite that caressed his tongue and eased down his throat as he waited for his head tech to get on with it and get out of his house.

“Yeah, um,” John rolled the cut crystal between his hands, set the un-drunk scotch down on the coffee table, then clasped his hands together. “You know, when we talked the other day, you gave the impression that there weren’t more Viadals out there.”

Whitesman’s attention sharpened, visions of resuming his interrupted evening all but forgotten. “What are you talking about? What other Viadals?”

John shrugged, trying to look calm and unconcerned, but the quick wipe of his palms on his pants said he was anything but. “You know, like a child produced outside of the program.”

Whitesman could feel the hot moisture of sweat forming on his upper lip. He sat back into the cushion, calming his fraying nerves with another sip of the scotch. This time the liquid gold felt like molten lava as it burned a path through his constricted throat.
 

Disgusted, he snapped the glass down beside John’s. “There was never any evidence to indicate the existence of any Viadals outside the military programs. I should know. I headed up the investigation on Viadal and we looked, hard, for any indication of personal experiments.”

“Huh.” John gave a half laugh, the sound echoing like a mocking clown in the high ceilinged room. “Guess you didn’t look hard enough.”

John slipped a data chip out of his pocket, presenting it up like a Catholic priest holding his offering.

With sickening dread, Whitesman reached out and took the chip. Viadal had always been an anomaly, a genius, yes, but untrustworthy in his ethics and goals. Those who had headed up the V-10 program thought it worth the risk and hired him on anyway. When he’d turned traitor, selling his secrets to the highest bidder, it was Whitesman who’d been called in to head up the investigation into the scientist’s criminal activities. Nothing had ever been found to indicate Viadal had developed genetic stock outside the programs he’d been hired for. There’d been no indication that he’d conducted the expensive experiments on his own dime. Whitesman had looked, with a fervor that bordered on the Spanish Inquisition. He and his agents scoured Viadal’s research data and bank accounts. They’d looked into every aspect of Viadal’s life, retracing his steps, questioning anyone who’d had any notable contact with him. They’d stopped at
nothing
and spared no one in their quest. By the end, they’d had their assurance that they knew all they needed to know, had all the evidence they needed to bring Viadal to full accountability for his crimes and make sure the extent of Viadal’s damage was a known entity and could be contained. And John was now suggesting he’d failed.

With a speed born of self-doubt, Whitesman marched into his study, grabbed a tablet from his desk drawer and slid in the chip. The first file embedded on the chip gave no immediate cause for alarm, a simple progress report. With less haste, he stepped back into the great room and started to scroll through the data. His eyes immediately caught on a couple words on the last page:
 
Unidentified and Viadal in the same sentence, back to back. He had to read the two words over again before they fully registered. Unidentified Viadal.

Beneath him the marble floor went to jelly. No, not the floor. It was his legs that didn’t feel like they could support a puppy right now, let alone his stocky frame.
 

He dropped back down on the couch. The world as he knew it remained off kilter, slightly out of sync. This couldn’t be right. How could this happen?

The answer was obvious, and left a pool of sickness in his stomach: He hadn’t looked hard enough, hadn’t looked deep enough. And he knew where he’d messed up, too. Viadal’s research assistant. She’d resisted questioning, eventually died from some sort of allergic reaction when they’d tried to apply the truth serum. But the small amount of uncertainty he’d harbored had not been enough to convince the committee to let him dig further.

His own doubts and recrimination morphed into something more, something sharper. “Damn them. I told them! I said Viadal couldn’t be controlled. The man thought he was a God. It was only a matter of time before he started creating his own experiments. The committee didn’t believe he’d risk our working relationship, not until they found out he was selling secrets, but they’d never been willing to consider…”
 

John was staring at him with a look that bespoke amazement, the tilt of his head suggesting an awe factor at seeing the Head Director in the throes of “losing it.”
 

Whitesman took a deep breath, regaining control. “Thank you, John. I appreciate the report.”

John blinked. “That’s it?”

“I need to look this over in depth. I’ll contact Agent Evans in the morning to discuss this further.” In control once more, his tone left no room for discussion.

John patted out a nervous tempo on his slacks, stood. “You think there could be more out there?”

An iron hammer pounded at the base of Whitesman’s skull. He rubbed his hands down his face to be clasped like a prayer against his chin. Of course it was a possibility. Where there was one, there was likely more. “God. I don’t even want to think about it.” Yet, he already was.

John took a deep breath. “I suppose you’ll have to look into that now.”

Whitesman’s hand dropped to his lap. He sighed as he stood up and motioned to the foyer. He wanted John out of here. He needed to think and couldn’t do that with one of his agents breathing down his neck. “We can’t ignore the possibility.”

John nodded, started to walk toward the door, then stopped and spun back around. “So what would you do if there’s more than the one?”

Whitesman jerked back, unaccustomed to this sort of questioning from his employees. It was because he was surprised, and only that reason, that he found himself answering. “We’ll have to find them, bring them in. Testing, analysis. At best we would probably let them go with monitoring.”

John tucked his tongue into his cheek, ran it around. “Like Garret.”

Garret. The sand in his craw. “Yes. Like him.”

“But what if they seemed perfectly adapted? Not like our killer here, but in control? Normal?”

Whitesman spun on him, his gaze pinning him down like he would a butterfly in a frame. “You think one of them could ever truly fit into society? You think there wouldn’t come a time when their uniqueness wouldn’t be a problem?”

John looked torn, unsure of what he felt. “I don’t know. I mean, they’re humans, too, aren’t they?”

Whitesman scoffed as he began pacing the room, his agitation fueling his restless energy. “It’s that human tendency that worries me. Can you imagine what would happen if Garret ever got truly angry and lost control? He could massacre innocent bystanders with his bare hands, and without his brothers nearby and handy, it would be impossible to take him down. It’s a chance having him out there and he’s been rigorously trained and conditioned to maintain control, to follow commands, to place first his orders, then the innocent above his own life. The average person is more self-serving than that. They might resist for a while. But without any sort of checks, any fear of consequences, I imagine it’s just a matter of time before they start abusing their power.”

Whitesman found himself by the picture windows, staring blankly at the spot-lighted greens. A couple of die-hard golfers were still playing, but he didn’t see them. What he was envisioning was chaos. John and Teigan couldn’t really understand. They hadn’t been old enough to remember the horror of the ’71 blackout. It could have been so much worse. One wrong move, one wrong word and a bunch of ten year olds could have blown the world away. Beyond that, none of his agents had ever seen or heard what some of the warped Viadals that had to be put down could do. He hadn’t been completely honest when he’d told them all the abnormal stock had been destroyed. There had been a whole other lab that housed and tested those anomalies, trying to determine what went wrong, how to fix them. What had been contained within those cement bunkers…Whitesman shuddered, thinking of the bear man that had so easily ripped the head off a guard who’d gotten too close.
Let it go. That’s all dead and buried.
 

“Teigan found another one.”

Whitesman blinked, taking a few moments to let the extraneous words sink in. He turned, his gaze steady as he stared at John. “What did you just say?”

John took a deep breath, as if fighting demons within himself. “Teigan found a second one.”
 
Brown eyes lifted, meeting Whitesman’s. “A Viadal child…a girl.”

Chapter Twelve

August 3
^rd
2104: 0743 EST

Aria sat at the straight-back chair, its upright spindles digging into the muscles of her lower back as she attempted to tame her renegade hair. Bought when she’d turned ten—to grow into—the dressing table and matching chair were another remnant from
before
that she’d never bothered, or wanted, to upgrade. It was familiar, though a bit small, and that familiarity trumped comfortable. Every morning since she could successfully maneuver the heavy handled silver brush, she’d sat here, performing this ritual: stroke and pull, stroke and pull, twist and anchor.
 

She ran her fingers over her hair, making sure the twist was flat before pressing her mother’s prized hair-comb into the wavy locks. The ivory had been smoothed to slippery, was missing a prong, and probably wouldn’t hold her rebellious locks past noon, but she didn’t care. It was a connection to her past. One of the last she’d ever be allowed. Nothing sentimental could be held onto after today.

“Why are you postponing this, Aria?” she asked herself.

The question remained unanswered, hanging in the air like a proverbial elephant in the room. A splash of lip balm, a last check of her buttons to make sure they were aligned properly—she’d done that more than once before and been mortified for the mistake.
 

The elephant was still there.

She sighed at her stupidity. She had to leave. The moment she’d gotten in the car to go to Garret’s had made fleeing a necessity. She’d known that. Trying to make it out there with only Frodo for companionship while living off the grid, scared her shitless, but that wasn’t what kept her here, pushing it off, making excuses. Teigan. What was it about that man that twisted her innards into knots and turned her knees into mush? Like a mummer charming his snakes, his logical reasoning and lulling words had made her complacent and yielding to his suggestions, thinking there might be an option to stay.

Unnamed source, yeah right. As if he’s going to be able to pull that one off.
 

Aria knew disappearing was the only way to protect her anonymity. It might not last forever; the hacking program she’d freely given Teigan, and thereby the Agency, narrowed her chances of hiding from slim to practically none. They would probably find her and bring her in, but she’d be damned if she made it easy for them. Each day now of freedom was a victory, each moment her own. But she wouldn’t have many if she didn’t get her butt in gear and make that first step. She had some contacts, people who’d gladly trade in an old favor or a stack of credits to help her run, and there were still places she could go that were off the grid—climatically challenged places, socially unstable places, or economically depressed places, but places none-the-less.

She should have left yesterday immediately after Agent Evans visit, but had dragged her feet, taking extra time to make sure all her affairs were in order. Willis and the others who counted on her deserved that much, she wasn’t about to leave them without a home or a means to live. But that was no excuse for why a task that should only have taken her a couple hours and a quick trip to her lawyers had lasted all day. Then there was dinner, and training with Frodo—poor dimwitted dog would never pass his seeing-eye dog test, but they continued to try—then her nightly visit with Willis where they listened to music and savored a splash of blackberry brandy while they tried to avoid anything resembling talk—closed mouth old goat, she thought with affection. All this was part of the nightly routine and couldn’t be skipped. She’d take off later, sometime while Willis was sleeping, take the system offline, call her nearby contact, grab Frodo and leave. But night had passed into morning and now it was too late.