"If you two fuckers ever come near my boy again, I'll fucking break your legs as well. Got it? Now piss off."
Rob was pure cold venom. Astonishingly, he stepped back, took out his cell, and calmly snapped a picture. For a moment Ian wondered what the hell he was doing, but then it dawned on him; he'd taken a photo of the Ford and the licence plate to identify the two guys. It was a silent threat.
The Ford pulled out and roared away. Rob got back into the car as if nothing had happened and drove on. Ian didn't dare say a word. As they approached the exit, they came up on the Ford's tail. It was hard to identify a car behind you in the dark with its lights on, but the two guys must have thought it was Rob anyway. They raced off with a screech of tyres. They probably thought he was following them.
Rob turned off for Westerham, apparently unconcerned. He reached out and patted Ian on the shoulder.
"Nice punch, mate." He smiled. Then the smile turned into a broad grin. "I think you broke the bastard's nose."
"Oh, shit."
"It's okay. They're never going to report it to the police, are they? Not if the mall CCTV picked them up attacking you. And even if it didn't, what are they going to do about it?"
"But I
morphed
."
"I think they were too busy shitting themselves to notice." Rob seemed oddly pleased with Ian, not angry at all. "So you had a nice chat with the ladies, then. Objective achieved."
Ian was at the shaky post-adrenaline stage by the time they got back to the house. The first thing he did was check his face in the hall mirror. There was a red, swollen patch on his cheekbone close to his ear.
Rob checked him over in the bathroom. "I can't see any marks on your back. You might have some bruising on your face tomorrow, though." He inspected Ian's right hand. "Your knuckles are going to hurt for a while. If you've broken something, it'll heal on its own, but let's keep an eye on it."
"Why was the punch in the face so painful, then?"
Rob tapped his own jaw to indicate the joint. "The nerves around here. If you hit it hard from the side, it fucking hurts. That's probably what made you morph."
Ian had to learn to take pain better than that. "I'm sorry, Rob. Really."
"No, it's my fault for leaving you to it." Rob took a tube of heparinoid ointment from the bathroom cabinet. "It's a fact of life, mate. You're a good-looking, well-built lad now, and that gets the old rivalry thing going with blokes. There'll always be someone who'll want to take a pop at you if they've got their mates with them. But you know you can kick the shit out them. Okay?"
"Okay."
"If you hadn't walked away, they'd probably have backed down. But I know why you did it. Just remember that it might be better to be outed than stabbed one day. Which reminds me. It's time we added knife work to your training."
It was a funny sort of reassurance. Rob seemed to think this was a normal rite of passage. He took Ian into the kitchen and sat him down with a beer and an ice compress. Ian rubbed the ointment into his knuckles and held the ice pack on top.
"But what if they've caught me morphing on the security cameras?"
Rob put a drinking straw in the bottle of beer and placed it close enough for Ian to drink. "Look, ma, no hands."
"Seriously."
"It was a second or two, you said."
"Yeah."
"Do you know what you morphed into?"
"No idea."
"Well, nobody's going to believe it," Rob said. "People get fed too many fake videos and pictures. They don't believe a bloody thing they see any more. You should start making the most of that, you know."
He flipped the cap off his beer and clinked the bottle against Ian's. He was right. It was no big deal, just a painful lesson. And if you looked at lessons the right way, they were always worth having.
"Cheers," Ian said. His hand was starting to throb, but pain, like adrenaline, was something you could habituate yourself to, and handle it better every time. He'd have to work on that. "But I think I won."
Rob winked. "You did, mate. You did."
LANSING, MICHIGAN
ONE WEEK LATER, NOVEMBER.
When was it time to quit?
It was just before 10 p.m. and Dru was burning her own time and her own data package on her own computer to do work for goddamn KW-Halbauer. If she'd thought the run-up to the merger was a pain in the ass, it had nothing on what was happening now that the two old companies were trying to rub along as one big happy step-family. HR had a new director who talked about the need to
embrace culture change
, which translated as
you've been doing it all wrong.
Dru hated her guts.
But misery was probably her just desserts for helping wield the axe. Keeping an eye on Kinnery was the only truly interesting task she had left, but she had to do it far from the company network while Weaver maintained the smokescreen to make sure she could continue to access records she might need.
Dru needed a breakthrough. Months of sifting every conceivable lead were starting to mess with her mind, mostly because it had forced her to plumb the depths of voluntary human ignorance in places she would never normally have ventured. Shape-shifters, home-grown and alien, popped up on web pages everywhere. She sipped her soda while she studied an image on her monitor, trying to work out why it seemed familiar.
It was a photo – grainy, poor contrast – of a human-alien hybrid taken in Panama, according to the caption. She really
had
seen this before. It took her ten minutes to find the folder, but there it was: another image that was clearly from that same sequence, and it was obviously a goddamn sloth, except the caption said it was taken in Africa. Christ, these whack-jobs couldn't even collate their own bad data. Dru closed the link and went back to her notes. What hope was there of pointing them tactfully in the direction of the simple explanations of the phenomena they thought they'd captured?
None.
They wanted to believe this bullshit. She wanted
not
to.
The Slide
was a lot more professional, though, and it hadn't given up on Weaver. Zoe Murray was either pathologically obsessed or else she had good reason to believe her source.
Since the initial call in July, she'd been in touch with Weaver eight times to show him alleged evidence of morphing humans, all different cases, and ask if it was Kinnery's project. Weaver passed them to Dru for her file. Some had images attached, but they were a testament to the skill of digital artists. Dru allowed herself to be impressed by the quality and added the relevant keywords of names and places to her search field. No, she didn't believe any of it, but the whole point of sifting was to bypass her own biases.
Kinnery's done something. But what?
Dru reminded herself that she was up against a man who'd kept something hidden for nearly twenty years without cracking or letting anything leak. He wasn't careless with information. Somebody else had been, though, and she still found it hard to believe that he was prepared to confess to Weaver on the strength of it. Why bother? Why not just sit tight? And why not build a better lie?
Three theories dug in their heels and refused to go away. The Maggie Dunlop story was a decoy to mop up any information that Kinnery couldn't dismiss; there were too many verifiable details in it for it to be wholly invented; and the triangle – the relationship between the hotline number, the ranch, and whoever had answered that Seattle number – was central to the answer.
It was like watching a TV ad where an actor demonstrated an invisible product, telling the world that nobody would know you were using it. A digital artist had removed the actual product from the video and filled in the textures so that the actor's hands were empty and the effects looked like magic. In the pursuit of Project Ringer, Dru could still see the actors – Kinnery, Weaver, the guy on the phone, the guy at the ranch – but a key element had been digitized out of the scene. Something real had once been there. It was driving her crazy.
Clare called from outside the closed study door. "Mom, are you going to be up all night? I'm going to bed."
"Okay, sweetheart. Goodnight."
"There's no point being blonde if you've got bags under your eyes."
"
Goodnight
, sweetheart."
Dru gave it another hour before she headed for bed. She studied her reflection while she rubbed in her miracle hundred
-dollar night cream, noting dark roots that needed attention again. She still wasn't used to being blonde. Most people treated her differently now and she was caught up in the feedback loop of behaving differently in return.
If she'd ever doubted that humans ran mostly on instinct, she had her proof.
And the damn cream still wasn't working. She wasn't much smarter than the morons who believed in alien body snatchers. Everybody needed to cling to some fantasy, even her.
In the morning, she did her weekly check of the property register and realtor sites for Athel Ridge. Nothing had changed. Dunlop Ranch had been sold to a property company, then to another developer, and then to a buyer that appeared to be a regular family. Ian Dunlop had vanished in the chain of transactions.
Dru now had no way of tracing him. She'd checked out the companies involved, but they were exactly what they seemed to be. Ian Dunlop had taken his money and disappeared.
Dunlop. Dunlop. Sells ranch, moves to ... where? Did he even live there?
And why hasn't Weaver tried to fill the holes in Kinnery's story? Does he prefer not to know, or does he know and he just isn't telling me?
It had to be about deniability again. Weaver didn't want to know any more about her activity than he absolutely had to. Dru wondered whether that was trust in her skills or if he had another pair of eyes on this that she didn't know about.
She was back to square one, then. She spent her lunch break in the library for a change of scenery, picking a Washington town at random and going through the directory for Dunlops in the hope that she might strike lucky again. But it was desperate guesswork, and she knew it. There was no geographical connection to give her a steer on where this man might go to ground. If Ian Dunlop was the Brit she spoke to, then he could have been back in England now or anywhere on the goddamn planet. Finding the Maggie Dunlop connection the first time had been an intuitive leap from a scrap of illegally obtained information. If Dru was going to pull that off again, she needed another piece of the puzzle, or the kind of million-to-one luck that won lotteries.
Today's batch of Dunlops was as much of a cold trail as the previous ones. After lunch, she took another look through the old e-mail logs that the system administrator had provided back in July to see if she'd missed anything on her previous sift. The reporting app generated communications flow reports showing who was talking to who and what the headers were, and if she asked nicely, the sysadmin could also produce data by a variety of filters – profanities, internal spam, after-hours activity, data leakage, and even staff looking for new jobs.
But she'd already run all the name searches she could think of, Dunlop included. And Kinnery wouldn't have been dumb enough to leave a trail like that. He seemed to have been acutely aware of the security risks that most people still weren't taking seriously ten or even fifteen years later.
You're a clever bastard, Kinnery. A careful one, too. But somebody outed you, and you've been forced to lie. I'll find out sooner or later.
Just before Dru left for the day, Julianne tapped on the door and placed a sealed white envelope on her desk. Dru stood there in her coat, pointedly doing up the buttons. She was going home on time tonight. Not even Weaver was going to stop her.
"Mr Weaver said someone sent him this and that you needed a copy," Julianne said. It wasn't the first envelope that she'd handed over, almost certainly hard copy of the latest approach from
The Slide
. "He said you'd know the sender."
"Thanks, Julianne." Dru slid it into her bag. It was Zoe Murray, then. "Glad you caught me."
Over dinner, Clare wanted to talk about arrangements for Thanksgiving and whether Larry was coming over or if they were going to eat at his place. He always left his arrangements late these days. Dru was in the mood to maintain radio silence and see if he broke first, but it wasn't fair on Clare. She should have been a non-combatant in this rumbling war.
"Why don't you call your dad and see what he's doing?" Dru said. "We'll try to fit in with whatever he wants."
Dru wondered if that sounded like sarcasm instead of the simplest way to get an answer. She loaded the dishwasher and retreated to the study to put in her daily hour or two of checking feeds and alerts. Then she remembered the envelope. At least she'd have some new data to enter tonight.
It was a printed note from Weaver, with a URL to look at: '
Another video from Murray. She wanted me to comment. Again, I didn't.'
The alleged shape-shifter footage that Dru had seen ranged from honest idiocy of the kind that mistook domestic cats for panthers to elaborate and rather clever hoaxes. Any amateur could be a special effects artist these days. It was a diversion from the real business of tracing Ian Dunlop and mapping Kinnery's contacts. Dru would give it ten minutes, no more.