"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing. I'm on it. Relax."
Dru realised she was letting uncertainty get to her. Everyone was looking over their shoulder these days, but mostly at her.
"Sorry. Rough start to the day. Talk to you later."
So Dean wasn't worried, even though it was an oddly specific reference to a man who hadn't worked here for years. Dru relegated it to a watching brief and forgot about shape-shifting agents to concentrate on how many duplicated IT jobs there'd be if KWA and Halbauer merged. It was looking so depressing that she was relieved when Julianne, Shaun Weaver's secretary, called her to a meeting.
Julianne had mastered the art of corporate mime. When Dru reached Weaver's office, the secretary did her usual elaborate hand signals like a bookie at a race track.
On the phone,
she gestured, left hand miming a handset against her ear before extending and lowering.
Wait.
Dru took a seat. Weaver was a god, and Dru was a minion. She had to wait for an audience. Eventually the door handle clicked and Weaver stood in the doorway with a bloom of light around him that only added to the sense of being allowed some face time with God.
"How are you, Dru?" He remembered her name. That was something. "Sorry to dump this on you, but Sheelagh's out today. I've had an odd phone call."
She almost called him Shaun in return, but familiarity only worked one way. "How odd?"
"Come in and I'll tell you."
The vertical blinds were drawn even though the office wasn't overlooked. Dru decided this already had the signs of turning into something above her pay grade. She sat down in one of the oversized green leather chairs and almost held her breath. Weaver was a hard man to rattle. A volcano could erupt in his backyard and he'd simply raise his eyebrows. But as he read through the notepad on his desk, he kept rubbing his top lip.
"A paranormal news site's running a line on my old colleague, Charles Kinnery," he said. "Dynamic mimicry for the DoD."
"
The Slide
." Dru nodded.
Time to look indispensable. Especially with Sheelagh away.
"I saw it on the digest. Crazy stuff."
Weaver frowned as if he'd expected her to do something about it sooner. "One of their people rang me for a comment. Zoe Murray."
Dru waited for him to go on, but he didn't. "She bypassed Dean?"
"Yes. But I don't want this discussed outside this office." Routine jitters about the merger wouldn't normally have ruffled Weaver's calm, let alone an obviously crackpot story. "Not even with Dean."
"It's on the Internet, Mr Weaver," Dru said. "Even a take-down order can't erase it completely. It's not true, surely."
"Well, we did do some transgenic research funded by the DoD. But this Murray woman has the actual name. Project Ringer. That means there's been some kind of leak, because it was classified. The name was never made public."
"But no actual shape-shifter."
"Dru, if we'd pulled
that
off, we'd have asked the DoD for a lot more money."
"But they thought it might be feasible."
"You know how these agencies are – win big or fail big, but at least give it a shot. We introduced engineered animal genes into human embryos. It wasn't illegal back then – nobody had done it yet, officially. But they were all destroyed by fourteen days anyway." Weaver sounded as if he was making a defence case to her. She noticed his blink rate for the first time. "The value to us was the techniques we developed during the project, the spin-offs for therapeutic applications. Which paid off."
"My subject's psychology," Dru said. "I just need to know enough to understand the risk."
"You've seen squid and octopus change colour and texture. They do it with structures in their skin. Chameleons use cell signalling. Lots of animals have evolved different methods for fast disguise. Now imagine if a human could change colour and even the shape of his features when he needed to, and then change back again. Life would be a lot easier for covert operators."
"And bank robbers. And hijackers."
"I didn't say it was without a downside."
"Okay, I can see how making some red-haired spy look Middle Eastern would be useful, but what about the other giveaways, like gait? Size? Gender? Voice?"
Weaver nodded as if he was relieved that she'd grasped it without his needing to draw pictures. "We only got funding for the initial stages before they decided it was too crazy even for them. But that was all we needed."
Dru could have told DARPA that it was crazy for five bucks. But she still wasn't sure what the immediate problem was – that KWA had a leaky employee somewhere, or that Weaver didn't want KWA tarred with the goat-staring wacko research brush, let alone conducting illegal experiments. But sloppy commercial confidentiality was a killer. Nobody would want to team with a technology company that couldn't keep sensitive information secure.
"So what do you want me to focus on?" she asked.
Weaver clasped his hands on the desk top, stroking one thumb across the other. "Did you ever meet Charles?"
Dru bristled.
How old do you think I am?
How old do I
look,
for goodness' sake?
"No, I was still looking for my first job when he was around."
"I'm wondering if this journalist's misunderstood something that might have actually happened."
"I can't guess," Dru said. "You need to spell it out."
"Okay, perhaps Charles walked out of here with material or data, and he's been working on it elsewhere. Maybe he parked some engineered genes in a human volunteer, even
himself
. There's a lot we need to find out."
Dru was instantly out her technical depth. "Why would he need to use a host?"
"He wouldn't. DNA's easy to move around. You can even put a drop of fluid on paper and mail it. Using a live carrier's a good way to hide and transport it, though. It's invisible unless you know it's there and what to look for. Who's going to screen people?"
It was fascinating, but the more Weaver explained, the more bizarre and incomprehensible Dru found it.
Motive.
She was still a psychologist at heart. When people leaked information, there was a reason for the when and the how. It might simply have been a case of very old, inadequately shredded documents that had suddenly been unearthed on a dump, but Weaver seemed to be taking it seriously, and Dru never assumed she was being told the full story.
"If this project started twenty-odd years ago, why raise it now?" she asked.
Weaver shrugged. "Sabotaging the merger?"
"Wouldn't somebody float a smear story that was more credible?"
"I would have thought so."
"And who would do it? Kinnery?"
"Only if he was working for a rival. But he's been in academia for years."
"You said he might have walked off with KWA's property. I thought he was the friend you built the company with."
"Charles had his moments. He just quit out of the blue and sold his stake to me. It was some personal crisis. Maybe drink or gambling, because God knows he had his weaknesses, but he refused to tell me the details. So I'm not ruling anything out."
That was an awfully long time to harbour a suspicion. Dru began to see Weaver in a subtly different light. He'd always seemed unflappable, the man in control of everything, but now that relaxed manner looked like something else – an exceptional patience, the kind that could wait quietly for as long as it took to get what it wanted. It was a sniper's mind-set. It might even have been a vengeful one. This was technology with hugely lucrative patents. Yes, it was probably worth the wait.
"I think this something for the FBI. They handle industrial espionage." Dru didn't want to talk herself out of a job, but this looked way beyond her remit. "Or the FDA, if you think he's breached research regulations."
"Imagine how Halbauer would react if we had government agencies crawling all over us. Think about our share price."
"Understood." Dru nodded, shifting back to sabotage as a motive. Maybe Weaver and Kinnery had parted acrimoniously and Kinnery had picked his moment to cause trouble. But that meant she'd be dealing with not one but two men who could ferment a grudge for decades. It wasn't comforting. "So you want to keep the investigation in house."
"Exactly."
"I still think you should touch base with the DoD. For all we know, this leak might have come from them. It's not exactly unknown."
"I've covered the DoD."
"Do you mind my asking how?"
"I've spoken to a senator who was on the committee when Ringer got its funding. We kind of know one another. Leo Brayne."
"Oh." Dru didn't keep up with politics. The name rang only a faint bell. "And?"
"He said he'd handle the DoD. In the meantime, we start our own investigation. We can't compromise him by telling him what we're doing. You know how they like deniability."
Dru would have been fine with investigating an employee. She knew the process inside out. But Kinnery had severed his links years ago. She didn't even know if they'd kept his HR file.
"How about hiring a private investigator?" she asked.
"It's one more person to tell," Weaver said. "And then it gets harder to sit on. By all means use one for compartmentalized information, but I want this run internally. HR won't blip anyone's radar."
Any half-decent PI would do a search for Kinnery on the Internet anyway, so Dru wasn't sure how she'd keep the shape
-shifter story from an agency. But it was insane. Maybe it didn't matter. She could simply laugh it off and hint at secret but legitimate reasons easily enough.
"Are you sure about this, Mr Weaver? I'm not head of HR. I'm not even Sheelagh's deputy."
Weaver shrugged, but it wasn't convincing. "She's not here. You are." He started tapping his touchscreen. "Anyway, you're the Olympic champion on detail. Very thorough. I took a look at some of the disciplinary cases and dismissals you've handled. You really leave no stone unturned when you're building a case, do you? You could always dig up some dirt to get rid of hard-to-remove staff."
Dru wasn't sure if that was a compliment or an indictment. "I watched too many re-runs of The Untouchables as a kid," she said, embarrassed.
"Sorry?"
"Al Capone. Tax evasion. People who break rules tend to do it across a wide spectrum of activity. You can always find something."
Weaver actually laughed. Dru realised she sounded confident. It was entirely accidental.
"Okay, time's not on our side," he said. "Charles already knows I'll want answers. I need this knocked on the head and buried as soon as possible. We're going to be in negotiations with Halbauer through August, and I don't want any last-minute surprises."
"Do we have any leads at all? The text of the document?"
Weaver shook his head. "If I leaned on this journalist, it'd look like confirmation. I've give you what notes I've got. Kinnery's living in Vancouver, so spend what you have to and pass the receipts through me personally, not Finance. No written reports – verbal only. Discretion, remember. PIs don't need to see the bigger picture to function."
"And what are you going to tell Sheelagh? Because this is going to be time consuming."
Weaver got up and opened the blinds, standing at the window with the sun on his face. He'd come clean and seemed to want to wash himself in the light. It was interesting to watch his body language. She hoped he wasn't fully aware of that and just doing a clever act.
"This is strictly between you and me," he said. "I'll deal with Sheelagh tomorrow. I'll tell her I need you to collate some background for Halbauer."
Weaver definitely wasn't a spur of the moment man. Dru decided to check the timeline. "Just so I know how much ground I've got to make up, when did
The Slide
call?"
"Yesterday," Weaver said, not even blinking. So he'd waited a day. He could have taken it up with Sheelagh after all. "Just as well you were around today, wasn't it?"
So Sheelagh was never meant to know this was happening. Maybe she was out of favour. Tough luck; this was survival, about keeping a wage coming in, about not ending up like other respectable, responsible, middle class people who suddenly found themselves without a job, then without a house, and finally fell so far that they could never get back up again. Dru wasn't proud of it, but she now saw Sheelagh as collateral damage.
She once wondered how kapos had slept at night. She realised that they were too focused on surviving another day to afford a luxury like pity.
WASHINGTON, DC
JULY.
Kinnery realised he wasn't as good as he thought at staying off officialdom's radar as soon as he walked down the steps of the hotel.
He wasn't too worried about his logged, photographed, ticketed, scanned flight from Vancouver. There were a hundred reasons for a man in his position to fly to Washington. But there was a security camera in the hotel lift, another in the lobby, and two looking up and down the street outside. Those were just the privately-operated ones that he could easily see. As soon as he looked up at the office block across the road, he spotted another unblinking glassy eye mounted on a metal rail, which could have been another private camera or a police installation. It didn't matter. Any agency could get access to any footage they wanted, legally or otherwise. He was observed somehow, somewhere, from the moment he closed his front door.