"You want to tell me about that?"
"You didn't call me back. Gran left a note telling me who else to contact if I needed help."
Christ. Maggie, what were you thinking?
"Who?"
"A reporter she trusted."
It was getting worse by the second. Kinnery tried to sound calm. He probably failed. "And what did you tell the reporter?"
"I gave her some notes on Ringer. Just a summary. Gran left lots out."
"Oh, for God's sake."
"But I didn't tell her my name. Or where I lived."
Just my name, then. Great.
It fell into place. Kinnery couldn't think of a way to retrieve the situation. "The media aren't your friends, Ian. Believe me."
Christ, what a mess.
"You know what's different about you, then."
"I do now. Why did you do it? Why didn't anyone
tell
me?"
"I didn't plan it that way, Ian. I didn't even know it would have that much effect on you."
"What are they going to do when they find me?"
Ian didn't say who he thought "they" were. It didn't matter. Anybody was bad enough.
"They're not going to find you," Kinnery said. "I'll see to that. But you really need someone with you."
"Stay away from me. I'm just an experiment to you."
"No, Ian, never that."
"I'd be gone before you were halfway down the interstate, and you'd never find me."
"Okay, okay. I understand. I'll leave you alone. Just don't run away. Nobody knows where you are, so you're safer staying there. If you go on the road, the cops might pick you up, and then I can't do anything to save you."
I've got to get down there fast. Damn, has he even got a passport? How am I going to get him back across the border?
"Look, write down my cell number." Kinnery spelled it out slowly. "Got that? Don't open the door to strangers, and call me if anyone tries to get in touch with you."
"Joe can take care of that," Ian said. "Thanks for the money."
The line went dead. Kinnery put down the receiver and stared at the wall for a few seconds, his mind in chaos. He couldn't just wait for the axe to fall. He had to get Ian out somehow.
How? Doesn't matter. It can't wait.
As he switched on the burglar alarm, he considered his sins and realised that reflecting on them was all he ever did. He told himself what a bad boy he'd been, as if that was enough to atone and that the act of self-flagellation would make him virtuous. Now he had to damn well put things right. He backed the car out of the drive to head south, cell docked on the dashboard in case Ian called again.
I didn't do the right thing. I forced a life on him. An unnatural life.
There'd be no right answers or good outcomes in this. Tragedy was guaranteed. Kinnery finally understood the origin of the phrase
unable to think straight
as his thoughts went around in loops, stumbling over the same arguments that he'd had with himself minutes or seconds earlier as if they'd never occurred to him before. There was nothing linear and logical happening. His thoughts were like ricochets.
Why didn't I think about this before? Maggie. That's why. I left it all to her. Send her the money and forget about planning for the worst scenario.
But this wasn't the worst scenario yet, or even close to it. He made a conscious effort to stop the churn of thoughts before he started blaming Maggie for being dead or Ian for being born.
His cell rang a few minutes after he crossed the border via the Peace Arch. He didn't usually give out his personal number because students sometimes had a strange concept of a reasonable time to call. It had to be Ian.
"Charles," a man's voice said, no hint of query in it at all. It certainly wasn't Ian. "It's been some time."
It took Kinnery a few seconds to place it: Shaun Weaver.
That's all I need.
"Hi Shaun." Old business partners never died. They only held off calling until the most inconvenient moment. "How's business?"
Shaun didn't ask if it was a good time to talk, but then he never did. "Fine. Enjoy your trip?"
"I didn't know you had my number."
"I rang the university. They said you'd been away."
"How very security-minded of them to tell you."
"Don't chew them out. I told them it was urgent. I've had a call from a journalist about Ringer. I'm just calling to let you know you might get one too."
Kinnery found it nearly impossible to concentrate on the road for a few seconds. "Give me a clue."
"This hack knew a lot about it, considering it was classified. In fact, she seemed to know more than I did."
Deny all knowledge, or brazen it out?
"You're going to have to be specific."
"Charles, is there anything you want to tell me?"
It was all falling apart. "Do you want to tell me what she asked
you
?"
"Is there anything you've let slip that she might have picked up? I know this is ancient history, but she's making some pretty weird allegations about transgenic humans. If there's a grain of truth in this, you need to talk to me."
Kinnery measured his words carefully. He didn't know exactly what Zoe Murray had seen, and he wasn't about to volunteer information that Shaun didn't have.
"Yes,
The Slide
mailed me. I haven't responded. It's a glorified comic, for Chrissakes. You've got all the research documentation. That's about the size of it."
"Okay, Charles. I'm sorry to have to ask. Keep your mind on the road. You know what the highways are like. Safe journey."
Kinnery didn't even hear the call cut off. He was too busy looking in the rear-view mirror, breath suddenly jammed in his throat. Was he being tailed?
Come on. He knows I'm driving because he could hear it on the phone. He knows I'm more likely to be on a highway than not. Pure guesswork to shake me down.
But Shaun had never really believed Kinnery's excuses for leaving. He was still suspicious. Kinnery knew it.
He kept looking in the mirror. There were several cars maintaining a steady distance behind him. It wouldn't take a lot of effort to get a home address for him, and there were plenty of private detectives who'd happily sit and observe until Doomsday if you had the budget to pay for it. KWA probably did. He couldn't risk driving to the ranch now. It was as good as handing Ian over.
Shaun's got enough pieces of the puzzle. He could have me followed. He doesn't need to be the FBI to do it.
Kinnery switched off the satnav and his cell's GPS in case someone had managed to get access. Then he started looking for an off-ramp, thinking panicky, irrational thoughts about whether Shaun had already been keeping tabs on him the last time he'd visited Maggie. No, nobody knew, not then. This was all down to Maggie dying, all down to that stupid goddamn letter, and a phone that didn't forward a call when he most needed it to.
Sorry, Maggie. Jesus, I'm sorry. Why am I blaming you?
Kinnery pulled off and found a restaurant to have a coffee and calm down. When he went out to the parking lot, he made a discreet note of every licence plate and spent a few minutes looking around as casually as he could to make sure nobody was following him. Was he going to have to live the rest of his life like this?
Well, Ian had to, so there was no reason that he shouldn't share that sentence. He got back into the car and headed home, slow and suspicious, checking out every car that didn't pass him fast enough.
The cell rang again. The screen showed number withheld. He didn't assume it was Ian this time. Shaun was probably going to ask him if he'd remembered to switch off the oven.
"Kinnery," he said.
"This is Leo Brayne." It was another voice that Kinnery hadn't heard in a very long time, but one he could never forget. "It's time we had lunch. Next week sometime. Call my office and I'll clear my diary."
"Senator?"
Brayne didn't even wait for a reply. Kinnery had been summoned to Washington by a man he hadn't seen in nearly twenty years. He had no choice. If he didn't go, he was sure things would get worse rather than better.
He didn't need to ask what it was about. When he got back and checked
The Slide
site, it had already been updated. It talked about Ringer, how it had resulted in a live human subject who could change his appearance, and how he was now in hiding.
At least Kinnery wouldn't have to list the main points for Senator Brayne. They were now public knowledge, at least for people who took
The Slide
seriously.
Leo, there's no possible way that this is anything more than industrial espionage. If we'd succeeded in making mimicry work in a live subject, don't you think we'd have been pounding on the door for more money? It's potentially damaging for KWA, but there are no security ramifications. I think it's in the interests of everyone to keep this off the law enforcement radar. I'll investigate discreetly.
Shaun Weaver, CEO of KWA, in a call to
Leo Brayne.
LLOYD HOUSEHOLD, LANSING, MICHIGAN
JULY.
Something was burning.
Dru dropped her briefcase by the front door, wondering why the smoke alarm hadn't gone off. Clare sat at the kitchen counter, cell in hand, scribbling with her fingertip and apparently oblivious of both her empty plate and the pungent blue haze of smoke.
"For goodness' sake, can't you smell that?" Dru jerked the pan of smoking pancakes from the hotplate and turned off the heat. "Put that phone down right
now
."
Clare didn't even look away from the screen. It was like a cartoon where the character's eyeballs remained glued to an object and stretched like elastic bands as they walked away.
"Uhh... sorry, Mom. Yeah. Okay."
Enough
. Clare hadn't managed to slide fully off the stool before Dru snatched the phone. Their hands collided. It was a harder grab than Dru intended.
"Hey!"
"Don't you dare
hey
me." Dru shoved the cell in her pocket and filled the dish pan. The hot skillet hissed steam as she plunged it into the water. "All you had to do was watch the pancakes. Find your bag and get in the car. I've got to go to work. And make sure you've got your inhaler – you know what happened last time."
"Mom, I need my cell."
"Clare, the only people who
need
cells have jobs that require instant responses. Doctors. CEOs. The Secretary General of the UN. Everyone else just likes having one."
"I can't go to class without it."
"Try. I managed it at your age."
"What if I have an asthma attack in class?"
"Then your tutor can call me. That's why I want you to check you've got your inhaler. Remember how much it cost the last time you ended up in ER."
"Mom — "
"Clare,
no.
"
"Why are you taking it out on me? If your job sucks so much, why don't you just quit? It's not my fault that everyone hates you because you're the office
kapo
."
Dru tried to leave KWA at the front door, but it was getting harder these days. "I do wish you wouldn't trivialize that word. What are they teaching you?"
"Dad said it was
apt
. He says that HR's only there to protect management from the staff. Not to help employees."
Dru chose not to hear that as Larry's latest retort by proxy, a row conducted one line at a time via Clare like some game of postal chess. "Well, when
Dad
gets a job," Dru said, "
Dad
can comment on how I do mine, can't he?"
Clare was fourteen, metamorphosing into an alien species that Dru didn't
recognise or remember ever being part of.
Why do I put up with the job? Because I've got a mortgage and an asthmatic kid and a useless ex-husband who pays when he feels like it.
Larry was still pleading poverty and promising he had a new business in the pipeline.
Kapo. Maybe.
Dru had no illusions about the role of human resources at a time like this. KWA was in merger talks with Halbauer, and that meant doing what-if studies into who had to be culled to guarantee the survival of the herd. If Dru became the downsizing angel of death to look after her own family, she could live with that. Halbauer had its own HR department, a costly duplicate in a merger. She wasn't stupid. There'd be casualties close to home, too, and she didn't plan to be one of them.
"Car," Dru barked. "
Now.
"
Clare stormed out ahead of her and wrenched the passenger door open with a drama queen flourish. Dru had moments of actually hating her, then hating herself for hating her, because there'd been a time when all she'd wanted in life after a string of miscarriages was a baby. Clare hadn't come cheaply, either in terms of the cost or the toll the process had taken. Dru found it hard to cut herself any slack. She didn't want to be the mom that her own mother had been.
I'll sort this out. It's what I do.
Dropping Clare off at summer school meant a five-mile detour, plenty of sulking time in rush-hour traffic. "Mom, I'm sorry," Clare said at last. "Can I have my cell back, please?"
"Try going a day without sharing your every move and thought online. You know how dangerous that is." Sanctions didn't mean anything unless they hurt. Dru had another where-did-I-go-wrong moment. "When you're my age and the dumb things you posted are still there, you'll regret it."
"Only if I don't get murdered before then because I didn't have my cell to call for help."
"Clare, the answer's still no."
"You're so selfish."
Dru braked late and almost rammed the car in front. "You want to see selfish? Who pays your phone bills?"
"Mom – "
"I don't have the energy for this, Clare."
"I wish I'd gone to live with Dad."
"Good plan, except his girlfriend didn't want you living with them. Did she?"
"Mom, why do you hate me so much? Because you're ruining my life."
Teenagers had their script, and moms had theirs. Dru decided not to stick to hers. She pulled up outside the school and parked, silent and unyielding. If she stopped escalating this, Clare would lose interest. It was a variant on handling toddlers. She recalled those days all too well.
Clare tried again. "So do I get my cell back? I said I was sorry."
Somehow she'd picked up the idea that apologizing was a special achievement that deserved medals, not the minimum expected in polite society. Dru blamed the school again.
"No," Dru said.
No
was an excellent word. She didn't use it anywhere near enough. "I'll pick you up from Rebecca's tonight. We'll talk over dinner."
Clare opened the passenger door and sat waiting, brows raised a little in that verging-on-tears kind of way. Dru waited too. Clare's face morphed from wounded to sour in an instant.
"No wonder Dad left you," she said. "You're the kapo all day at work and you forget to stop being a bitch when you get home."
Clare scrambled out and slammed the door behind her before Dru could react. Chasing after her and demanding an apology would be handing her the power, though. Dru would deal with her tonight when the heat had gone out of this. As she drove off, she caught a glimpse of herself in the rear-view mirror and felt a pang of dismay as her brain clicked into recognition mode. Yes, that greying, fading creature with shadows under its eyes really was her. And she
recognised the description of
bitch,
too. It was true. She wore her work persona home.
KWA's automatic gate let her car in to the parking garage. This was her unthinking daily routine: park in her allocated space, then detour via the maintenance area to check the recycling bins. Someone had dumped a cardboard box without removing the originating company's address and the consignment number. On its own it was innocuous, but there was no point in broadcasting the minutiae of KWA's business, and no way of knowing what jigsaw puzzle of information it might complete. Dru hauled it out and sorted through the rest of the flattened packages, looking for offenders.
"Anything wrong, Mrs Lloyd?" Alex, one of the regular security guards, ambled towards her. "Here, let me take those."
"People aren't removing labels before they dump packaging, Alex," she said, sorting through the cartons like giant index cards. "I'll circulate a memo, but if you catch anyone doing this, let me know, okay?"
"Sure, ma'am. But you make a lot of work for yourself. Who's going to bother collecting all that little detail just in case it comes in handy?"
"People like me, I'm afraid."
Alex laughed to himself and walked to the staff entrance with her. As he reached the small glass-fronted security booth, he held up a finger as a signal to wait and reached under the counter.
"There," he said, handing her a couple of magazines. "Bet you can't do
these.
"
They were puzzle books. Alex had a lot of solitary downtime on his hands in this job, and he'd told her he wasn't planning to get dementia when he retired. The puzzles were fearsome; Dru was addicted. She slipped the magazines into her bag.
"I owe you a bottle of bourbon," she said. "Thank you."
It was a harmless little friendship between an old guy nobody noticed and a woman who didn't have many allies in this place, based on a common love of puzzles. They looked after one another.
As Dru walked out of the elevator on the third floor, heads turned in the cubicle farm. A few office staff stood chatting in a huddle behind the glass wall, but they stopped and gave her a look that made her wonder if she was decked out in a black hood and scythe. Dru didn't need Clare's history teacher to remind her what happened to kapos. You could collaborate with the camp commandant as much as you liked, and send your fellow inmates to their doom for a few extra crumbs, but you knew you'd probably end up sharing their fate sooner or later.
That, or one of the other prisoners stabs you in the back for betraying your own kind.
She'd just have to make herself indispensable. The alternative was to get out, but benefits like KWA's didn't grow on trees. What were her KWA shares worth? Maybe it was time to sell them, just in case.
Bobbie was already at her desk, fingers moving over her keyboard in a blur. The admin assistant seemed to have formed the idea that only the visibly workaholic would survive restructuring.
"Good morning, Dru."
"Hi, Bobbie. No boss yet?"
"Sheelagh's not coming in today, remember? She's taking a family day. Son. Dental appointment. I've forwarded some of her mail to you."
Dru keyed in the code to her door. "Fine."
"Halbauer sent over some encrypted files, too." Maybe Bobbie was fishing. "I think it's the IT staffing details."
"Probably. Thanks."
KWA had already offshored its payroll and accounting to its offices in India. There wasn't a lot left of HR, either. Dru couldn't blame Bobbie for getting jumpy. She logged in and found her inbox full of the usual overnight mail, pitches from training companies, and the feed of industry digests that she shared with PR and Marketing. External hearts and minds were PR's problem, but Dru needed to know if staff were saying anything ill-advised online. Keyword monitoring reports picked up every mention of Kinnery Weaver Associates and permutations of the company name on the Internet, as well as references to its areas of interest in social media and forums. Text and sentiment analytics reported back on the public perception of the company and the biotech industry. There was nothing said or thought about the company that didn't eventually find its way back to head office.
One paragraph jumped out from a sea of text in the media monitoring digest. Dru tapped the screen and isolated it.
KEYWORDS: KINNERY (CHARLES KINNERY) OCCURRENCES: 1. LOCATION: THE SLIDE
Slide?
She hadn't even heard of it. When she hit the link, it was just an online activist magazine like hundreds of others, just better designed, full of routine conspiracy theory stuff with the usual paranormal nonsense thrown in. She almost missed the reference to Charles Kinnery. All she knew was that he was one of the original partners who'd set up KWA.
DYNAMIC MIMICRY IN HUMANS: DID GENETICISTS BUILD A SHAPE-SHIFTER FOR THE DoD?
It was a bizarre story about creating a human with the ability to alter his appearance for undercover intelligence missions. It was clearly garbage. But Charles Kinnery's name was in there, along with KWA's, so there was the potential for fallout. Dru set the page to alert her on updates and called the PR manager.
"Hi, Dean. Have you picked up the mention of Charles Kinnery on the digest? It's on a site called
The Slide
."
Dean laughed. "Yeah, seen it. They're the high IQ end of
Elvis Ate My Hamster
stories. They left out Jimmy Hoffa and Shergar this time, though."
"No crisis, then."
"They could publish today's date and nobody would believe it."
"Kinnery left years ago. What sparked this?"
"No idea. Maybe they forgot their meds. This is routine dingbattery for
The Slide
, though. The shape-shifter bit should clue you in."
"Okay. But I'll keep an eye on it."
"You don't need to make extra work for yourself."