Ell Donsaii 13: DNA (7 page)

“Relax Steve. Before he leaves, I’ll make sure he understands that we can’t have him coming here all the time.”

“Okay,” Steve said doubtfully.

Mary’d been rummaging around in the kitchen, hoping to find some home-baked cookies, but not having any luck. She realized the likelihood of a single girl like Bridget making cookies and keeping them in a jar had to be low. Eventually she found some milk in the fridge and an open bag of Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano’s in a cupboard. She headed back out to where Zage was sitting. She poured him a glass of the milk, then looked at the date on the bottom of the bag of cookies. “Oh-oh, these cookies are pretty old. I’m afraid they’re going to be stale.”
Great Mary, way to over promise and under deliver!
she thought to herself.

“That’s okay.” Zage said wistfully, “I shouldn’t be eating cookies anyway.” He looked at the glass of milk from which he’d had a few sips. “Really, I shouldn’t drink all of this either. I hope you won’t think I’m rude.”

Mary blinked, startled by the concept of a child turning down a cookie, even if it
was
stale. She’d known the kid was supposed to be on a diet, but considering that he was still pretty heavy, she’d thought it was something the adults talked about but the kid didn’t follow. In any case, she decided she certainly shouldn’t encourage him to drink more milk or try one of the stale cookies. Instead, she said, “I hope you understand that an awful lot of people try to come see Dr. Donsaii here?”

Zage nodded, a serious look on his face.

“We don’t let adults even get onto the property, ‘cause some adults… they don’t mean well.”

Zage said, “You mean, they might do… bad things?”

Mary nodded, “So I’m making an exception today ‘cause you’re a kid, and a neighbor, and Dr. Donsaii’s not home. But… well, we really can’t have you coming over or bringing your friends.”

The kid looked sad, but not belligerent. “I understand,” he said, pushing the glass of milk away. “I probably should go.”

Once she had Zage and his dog back outside, Mary found herself really wanting to do more. After all, she’d been around Zage since the night he was born. She thought of him as family, even though she’d pretty much stayed out of his sight since a little after he’d turned one. “Would you like me to take you on a little tour of the grounds here?”

“No thanks,” he said, disappointment evident in his voice. “Tanner and I’ll just head back home, I guess.”

The kid turned around and started walking back towards Jamieson. Mary watched him go, wishing she could do more for Zage and wondering what Jamieson thought of this whole incident. Hopefully he thought they were just being friendly to the neighbor kid.

Jamieson had been astonished when the guard hadn’t run the kid and his dog off.
Sure, he’s just a child, but what kind of security team would let even a child into the house of the person they’re supposed to be protecting? What if the kid was carrying a bomb or something crazy like that? It wasn’t unheard of.

He sat there unbelieving for fifteen minutes, then the front door opened. The kid, the dog, and the guard all came back out, just as friendly as they could be. The guard said something else quietly to the kid while Jamieson wished he’d brought a parabolic microphone to let him hear. The kid shook his head and he and the dog started walking back toward Jamieson.

Jamieson slitted his eyes since they were one of the most recognizable features in camouflage. Again the kid walked right by without noticing Jamieson sitting there. Once again, Jamieson thought to himself,
There’s something familiar about that kid.

The kid had been gone for several minutes before Jamieson tumbled to it.

That’s Donsaii’s kid!

He brought up the video of the kid going by and went back and forth through it.
Sure as hell! Fat, dirty blonde instead of reddish hair, he doesn’t look a lot like her, but it’s there…
Then he realized, That’s
why the guard was so nice!

Suddenly Jamieson realized that he needed to know whether the kid
actually
came from the house back behind him. If he came from somewhere else and had just walked across the property like Jamieson had, Jamieson had to know that.

He eased back through the bushes and started after the kid.

Back in the guard’s outbuilding, Mary and the others frowned as they saw Jamieson pull back and start after Zage.

“Dammit!” Steve said over the all-team connection. “Do you think he’s realized who Zage is?”

Randy said, “He came in over the Kinrais property. Hopefully he’s just decided to leave and is going out that way.”

“Immediately after Zage left that way? That’s too much of a coincidence!”

Mary’d been switching the video feed from camera to camera over on the Kinrais property following Jamieson as he moved along. She sent the feed to the rest of them along with the map tracking Jamieson. “He isn’t following right behind Zage. He might just be leaving.”

“He’s waited to leave until after dark the other times.”

As Jamieson walked in the kid’s trail, he realized that if he was correct and this
was
Donsaii’s kid, the security team would have systems in place to watch this property as well as the “official” Donsaii residence. He may not think much of Donsaii’s security team, but he was very aware of how many times missions foundered on overconfidence.
I’ve got to act like I’m not following this kid just in case they actually
are
monitoring me!

He turned off to the side, heading for the border of the lot like he’d come in. The east border was closer to the house and the path the kid was following, so that’s the one he went for. Jamieson was still able to keep an eye on the distant kid as he and his dog loudly made their way through the woods. The kid even stopped to throw sticks for the dog a few times. Jamieson carefully stopped and stood motionless every time the kid turned around. As expected, the boy never noticed him.

Jamieson fished in his bag and pulled out one of his PGR connected micro cameras. He pulled the sticky off the back and stuck it to the trunk of a tree with a view of the back of the house as he walked by, doing so without any excess motion to warn anyone of what he just done.

Sure enough, the boy and his dog went into the house without knocking, confirming that it must be where they lived. Jamieson kept stealthily moving along the border of the lot and out to the road on the other side. On the way he left two more cameras where they’d have a view of the front of the house. When he reached the road, he worked his way along it, keeping to the shade of the trees until he got to where he’d stashed his motorcycle.

Still on their open circuit, Steve said, “Okay guys, what you think?”

“Looked like he just decided to leave in the middle of the day, don’t know why.”

“Seems pretty fishy to me.”

In a depressed tone, Mary said, “He left cameras on trees behind and in front of the Kinrais house.”

“He did?!”

“Aw, shit!”

Barrett said, “Shall I go take ‘em down?”

Ell joined the conversation, “No, leave ‘em there. If we take them down, he’ll know for sure who Zage is. At present, hopefully he just suspects. If we just keep on as we’ve been, hopefully he won’t get any more evidence to support the theory.”

“And if he more than suspects?” Steve asked.

“Then we need to be ready to deal with him if he does something,” Ell said, hard edge in her voice. “He hasn’t done anything but watch so far, and there isn’t a law against that. It does us no harm.” After a pause, she continued, “Believe me, I don’t like it! However, I think he should be treated as innocent until proven guilty.
If
he proves himself guilty, I want us to be ready to deal with it in no uncertain terms.”

Mary said, “I think we need to have a three person team following Zage like we do you.”

There was a moment of silence, then Ell said, “Yeah… we do. Steve? I imagine we need to hire more people, right?”

“We can do it with the people we’ve got short-term. But if you want to do it long-term we need to hire some people.” His voice took on a warning tone, “It’ll be expensive.”

“Money’s
not
an issue. Zage… and Shan’s safety
is
. Cover them both.” There was another brief pause, “And put a small team on my mother too. Hire as many as you need. Spend what you need to get really good people. I imagine the folks you’ve got might need to work some overtime ‘til we hire new. Pay them double-time for it.”

***

That night at dinner, Zage looked up at his parents, “Did you know that Ell Donsaii’s our neighbor?”

His mom said, “Um, yeah, the real estate agent mentioned that when we were buying the house.” Zage noticed that his parents glanced at one another before she answered and decided that for some reason they would rather that he
didn’t
know. He pondered this for a few seconds but then his mother interrupted his train of thought, “How was your first day of kindergarten?”

Zage blinked at her a couple of times, then said, “Pretty boring.”

His mother looked unhappy and his dad looked irritated. Zage had a feeling that they disagreed about sending him to kindergarten, but if so they never disagreed about it where he could hear. No one said anything for a second, then his mother said, “Did you make any friends?”

“It’s just the first day. Everybody’s getting along pretty well so far.” Zage shrugged, “I haven’t figured out which ones are bullies and which ones are targets yet.”

His parents glanced at one another again, but didn’t say anything in response to what he’d said. “How about your teacher, Ms. Binder?”

“She’s really nice. Really busy though.” His parents didn’t say anything for a minute, so Zage continued, “Did you tell
her
that I’m just there to socialize, not to learn?”

Zage’s dad barked a little laugh and his mother bit her lip for a second as if she wanted to laugh too. She shook her head, then said, “No, we’re hoping you can have a chance to be just a normal kid for a little bit.”

Zage tilted his head, “Why? I’m
not
a normal kid.”

His dad said, “The rest of the kids in your school are gifted too.”

Zage shrugged, “But they’re
nothing
like me.”

“We still think it’d be good for you to have the experience of being a normal kid.”

“How can I ‘have the experience,’ when
I
know I’m not the same as the others?”

His dad sighed, “Maybe you can’t.” He pursed his lips, “But we think we should… at least
try
to give you that experience. Put you in the situation and let you have a feel for it. You should have some idea what other kid’s lives are like, don’t you think?”

“I’ve read a lot about it. Can’t I just study it instead of having to go to school and live it? It really seems like a huge waste of time.”

“I hope you don’t talk this way to other people. If you imply that their lives are a waste of time—even if in your mind that’s true—they’re going to hate you.”

Zage frowned, “I know better than to talk that way to them… wait, are you saying that I can’t talk about this kind of stuff to you? That it makes you angry?”

His mother looked stricken, she slid out of her chair and knelt beside him to give him a hug. “No! No, we love you no matter what! We know you’re… astonishingly smart and it makes us very proud. We just don’t want you to lord it over the other kids and have them despise you.” She pushed him back out to arm’s length, “And, we’d like you to know what their lives are like so that you don’t hurt their feelings by saying something offensive out of a lack of understanding.”

Zage shrugged, “Okay. I still think it’s a waste of time, but I don’t hate it.” He consciously decided not to mention how he spent most of the class time researching other topics on his HUD. However, it brought up a question he’d been wondering about, “How come Osprey is so much better than everyone else’s AI?”

His parents exchanged another glance, then his mother said, “You mean because you have a contact with an HUD in it? That’s because they developed them down at Quantum Biomed which is a subsidiary of D5R. Since I work there I was able to get one for you before they came on the general market.”

Zage said, “Well, that too. But, mostly I was wondering about why my AI is so much more capable. I’ve seen the results of other people’s queries and Osprey finds things they’ve missed, does better analysis of what he finds and his graphic displays are
way
better.”

Again, his parents looked at one another. This time his father answered, “When you started asking so many difficult questions, we decided we should invest in a high end AI for you.”

“Oh, okay.” He smiled broadly at them, “Thanks!”

***

That night, after Zage had gone to bed, Shan turned to Ell, “What if the kid thinks to ask Osprey just how ‘high end’ an AI he is?”