"Why Bertrand Russell?"
"That's the only philosophy bloke I know. Apart from Camus. Did I pronounce that right?" Rob fidgeted, checking the mirrors. "Anyway, I've just spotted a problem."
Mike's gut flipped. He checked the rear-view. "Where?"
"No, a moral one. If Kinnery's really turned some kid into a freak, he ought to serve time for it. But he'd never be charged, would he? Because then everyone would know about the kid, and then
his
life would be shit."
"But Kinnery didn't manage it."
"Does that matter? He must have tried. Sick twat."
"It was only meant to be an enhancement for consenting spec ops personnel."
"Yeah? Superpowers should stay in the comics, mate."
Mike found it impossibly painful for a moment. He thought of surplus eggs and donor sperm and fertility clinics, and it was all far too close to home again.
What do they really do with ours?
He had to put that out of his mind. It wasn't helping.
"I used to love the Fantastic Four," he said, trying to distract himself with trivia. "Did you ever wonder what it'd be like if you could really do all that? Change shape. Be invisible. Fly."
Rob shrugged, straight-faced. "The costumes put me off, to be honest. Spandex always makes your dick look tiny. Even mine. Did you like Batman?"
"No. He's too messed up."
"What, a billionaire who's obsessed with saving the world, likes fighting, and has an ex-military English butler?" Rob started giggling. It was infectious. "You know that's what Brad calls us, don't you? Bruce and Alfred."
Mike found himself laughing against his will again. "The bastard never says it to my face."
"Anyway, if Kinnery was really, properly, paid-up-mad-professor mad, he'd have tried to cross humans with tigers, or give them lasers for eyes or something. Not squirt ink or change colour. Cuttlefish Man's a bit chad, if you ask me. Now, if he'd tried to cross a human with a giant squid,
that
would be something."
"They don't make mad scientists like they used to."
Rob fiddled with the radio to change stations. "Has your dad said where he's going to stash this Ian if he turns out to be real?"
"No, which kind of confirms he doesn't believe it. It just involves more people. He'd want to talk that through with me if he thought it was a possibility."
"Not if he wants to keep you deniable."
"Well, we'll know by the end of the day, won't we?"
"Christ, listen to us. We're talking ourselves into believing it." Rob let out a long theatrical sigh and went back to checking the map. "Time to do a dog leg, Zombie. Double back."
Mike looked for an exit and turned onto a quiet road to let Rob take the wheel for the next hour. It was a much more tortuous route than they'd planned, with five or six detours to shake off people who weren't even there. Mike figured that if he'd abandoned this much of his sanity, then ditching the rest wasn't going to make things any worse. He made a note of motels along the road where they could stop over if this dragged on overnight for any reason.
Eventually the road signs started showing Athel Ridge. The landscape was hill-fringed pasture and fields purple with lavender crops. When they drove into Athel Ridge itself, it turned out to be little more than a loose collection of stores, bars, and offices strung along the road. Most of the parked vehicles were pickups. It looked even smaller than Mike had expected.
"Cameras?" He needed to know where they were, just in case. "There's one facing the liquor store."
Rob switched off the radio. "Traffic cam at the crossroads."
"Post office, left."
They left Athel Ridge and turned off the main road to head into the hills. Only one other vehicle passed them before Mike spotted the turning to Dunlop Ranch. Rob slowed as he drove past it.
"That's it," he said. "Start looking for an observation point."
Mike craned his neck to see if he could pick out the ranch, checking the position against the map. Distant smoke curled above the tree line. If Kinnery's annotated map was right, that was coming from the neighbours' place.
Rob pulled off the road and parked under the trees. "There it is. But Kinnery didn't allow for the bloody trees being in leaf. Still, at least everything's more or less where he said it was."
Mike scanned with the binoculars and picked up part of a roof. They couldn't carry out surveillance from here. The only way they were going to be able to see anything was to head back down the road and turn into the ranch. Kinnery had said the front of the house was visible from tree cover somewhere along the track.
Rob held out his hand for the binoculars and got out of the SUV. "Okay, let's move in closer and hope Doc Frankenstein didn't forget to tell us Maggie had security cameras." He leaned on the hood to steady his grip. "If anyone challenges us, we say we don't know it's private property and we've stopped for pee break."
"I could use one now."
"And if we don't see any activity, I'll go and knock on the door."
Mike stood twisting his lucky watch around his wrist. He was going to need it today. "Maybe I should do that."
"No, I'm lovable paternal Rob. You sound too posh."
"But if this kid watches a lot of movies, he probably thinks all English are bad guys."
"Yeah, you really should be over your national trauma by now. I'll just explain to him that we only wanted to keep Canada."
It was just a kid up there with a shotgun and some greyhounds, not Mossad. After taking a furtive leak in the undergrowth, Mike got back into the passenger seat and Rob retraced their route. The speed limit sign just before the turning loomed into view.
"Thirty seconds to abort this, Zombie."
Mike couldn't pull the plug now. "Go. Hang a right."
"Starboard ninety. Wheel on."
Rob turned without indicating and drove slowly up the track until a blur of brick-red and white began to show through a screen of trees. Mike tapped the dashboard. Rob steered off into the cover of some birches and came to halt. They could see the ranch now, a two-storey painted timber building with dormer windows and a full-width porch.
"Christ," Rob muttered. "We're storming the Little House on the bloody Prairie."
Mike took out his wallet and put a hundred dollar bill in one of the cup-holders on the dashboard. "A hundred says it's Kinnery's wayward son, rejecting his father's freaky science to join a tree-hugging commune."
Rob fumbled in his jacket and shoved a hundred next to Mike's. "A teen computer nerd who's hacked into some blackmail material or industrial secret and he's holding it to ransom. I mean, why else leak it himself?"
"I think I can see a pickup. Wait one while I take a look."
Mike got out and picked his way from tree to tree to get a better view. He didn't have to move far before he knew they weren't dealing with a pro. Maggie Dunlop might have been good at staying off the grid, but she'd obviously thought in terms of obscuring the ranch from view, not stopping ground assaults. Trees and bushes provided cover within fifty meters of the house, and there was plenty of dead ground. Even the exposed areas had outbuildings and other structures that would shorten the distance to short sprints between cover.
The old white pickup was parked out front in the shade of a tree. That would be useful cover too. If Mike got a chance, he'd remove the plug leads to stop any hasty exits.
Nothing was moving except birds in the branches. He held his breath and listened. There were no voices or sounds of human activity, and no sign of the dogs. He went back to sit on the fender of the SUV.
"Give it an hour," he said.
Rob slid out of the driver's seat and stood looking towards the ranch house. "Maybe he's already made a run for it."
"Well, the pickup's there."
"What if he's not alone? Or he's got another vehicle and he's pissed off in that?"
They waited in complete silence for forty minutes. In all that time, only one vehicle rumbled past on the road behind them. Rob was getting fidgety. He kept moving his hand to his holster, his rehearsal habit.
"Okay, let's go on the intel we have," he said. "Time for the Rennie charm offensive."
"So what are you going to say? 'Hi Ian, you don't know us, but we're private security contractors, we want to know who you're hiding from, and by the way, are you the hideous, unnatural fruit of a monstrous experiment that defied the laws of God and man?'"
Rob adjusted his ballistic vest, unmoved. "Just go around the back and make sure he hasn't got company. Radio check when you're in position, okay?"
Mike was beginning to wonder if he'd imagined his time in the Guard. He was pretty sure he'd breached compounds knowing they were booby-trapped, or that he'd probably be greeted by a burst of fire when the door crashed open. Today wasn't in that league. But this was his own country, and he realised this was probably as close as he'd come to knowing how a cop felt, where any of his neighbours could suddenly decide to finish him off.
Rob put in his radio earpiece and gave Mike a thumbs-up that left no room for failure.
"Let's get this done," he said. "We'll be out of here in an hour. Minus a werewolf."
DUNLOP RANCH, ATHEL RIDGE.
Oatie was restless. He followed Ian around the house, jerking his head up at every sound.
He wasn't even distracted by the contents of the pantry. He sat in the open doorway, watching Ian counting the cans and packets, occasionally standing up and turning around to gaze out into the kitchen with his ears pricked.
"She's not coming back, Oatie." Ian studied the instructions on the cans of dried milk and did a quick calculation. He'd have enough for ten weeks once he'd run out of the frozen supply. Well, that would motivate him to find the guts to take the truck out. "What's wrong?"
Maybe the dog was picking up on his own anxiety. Ian put down the milk and went to the living room window, half-expecting to see the sheriff's cruiser outside, but there was nothing there. He went back to the pantry and finished listing the supplies.
I could always phone the grocery store in town and ask if they deliver.
But that wasn't a plan. He couldn't do that forever. He stepped over Oatie and went upstairs again, lost for something productive to do without the animals to occupy his day, and increasingly conscious of the risk of being found.
What had Zoe done with his story? He didn't have an Internet connection. She might have tossed the notes in the garbage. Kinnery hadn't pestered him, anyway. Maybe it had all died down and he'd been forgotten again.
He sat on the edge of Gran's bed, just a mattress and frame now that he'd burned the bedding, and studied his reflection in the mirror on her dressing table. He was pretty sure he hadn't changed again since he'd fled from the coffee shop.
Funny. I hated mirrors before. Now I can't stop looking.
Ian was more than alone. He could never make friends or get to know neighbours because sooner or later, he'd change. Joe might have thought his eyesight or his memory were playing tricks before, but now that he'd spent time with Ian, he'd really notice the changes. He'd know he wasn't imagining it.
It also meant Ian could never go near a woman.
The realisation became the lowest point of his life. It was a death sentence. He stared in the mirror, now able to see himself behind unfamiliar eyes, and tried to recapture the state he'd been in when he morphed in the coffee shop. He knew he'd been agitated, scared, and lost, but he couldn't switch on the emotion to order.
Of course I can't. I'd have to pump out adrenaline. That's what starts this, I'll bet. Maybe it takes a threat to trigger it. But how do I come up with the faces? Did Kinnery ever work that out?
Ian didn't plan to ask him. There might come a time when he'd be forced to beg him for help, but right now that was the last thing he wanted.
It was a nightmare. He couldn't control his own body, even if the morphing reflex had gotten him out of a tight spot. He felt like he was eight years old, a grown man, and an alien all at the same time. He wasn't sure how long he could live with this. He couldn't even let his body get on with the second-by-second business of living without wondering what was happening deep in his cells.
There's got to be the real me under all this. There has to be.
Oatie sat by the bedroom door, tail coiled around his haunches. Morphing had never seemed to bother the dogs. Maybe they trusted their noses when what they smelled didn't match what they saw. Ian held out his hand, but Oatie jumped up and looked down the stairs.
Whatever had distracted him, Ian couldn't hear it. The dog wandered off and Ian went back to the mirror, willing something to change while he watched himself. If he could see it in action, he might work out how to control it. Then he heard an engine rumbling. It was a car. Oatie always heard things long before he did.
Damn. Joe's come to check on me.
It didn't sound like Joe's truck, but who else would drop in? What if it was some official from the county wanting to check paperwork or something?