That Nietzsche Thing (2 page)

“Cut the bullshit, Fonseca. I know you
falsified this report.”

I said nothing.

“I know what DNA match Forensics got back on
the body.”

“Hey—” I started.

“You and I both know who the girl was,”
Constantine interrupted. “I’m not upset that you falsified this
report. On the contrary, this was some quick thinking. If I had my
way, we’d pin a goddamn medal on you. But, what I need to know,
Fonseca, is who else did you tell about this girl before you got it
in your head to change the names?”

“Nobody,” I answered quickly. For once, I
could tell the truth.

“As I said, cut the bullshit.”

“No, seriously.” I held up my hands in
surrender. “The God’s honest truth.”

“Somebody knew where this body was,
Detective. And who she really was.”

“If they did, they didn’t hear it from
me.”

“It would be very serious mistake to
interfere with my investigation at this critical juncture,”
Constantine said formally. Me? Cut the bullshit? He needed to cut
the bullshit. He was treating me like a perp. Hell, I’d used that
line myself a thousand times. Did he think I was an idiot? What
back-of-the-matchbook, FBI correspondence course had he just
graduated from?

“
Your
investigation?” I asked
defensively. “Last I checked, Special Agent, I was still the LI on
this girl’s case.” I tapped the sheet of paper before
Constantine.

Constantine gave me a look like I’d just
crapped on his loafers.

“The murder might be your case, Detective,”
Constantine said slowly, “but the theft of Vivian Montavez’s
body—”

“Then you do admit that the dead girl
was
Vivian Montavez?” I leapt forward, interrupting.

Constantine swallowed his words. “The theft
of the dead girl’s body...”

I relaxed in my seat.

“Is a Federal matter.”

I didn’t want to call him out on it, but I
seriously doubted there was any Federal Code against
body-snatching. Maybe something from the 19
^th
Century...but really? One stolen corpse was hardly a Federal case,
even if she had been Vivian Montavez. “I’ll find you the girl’s
body,” I answered. “There was no need for you to...” I looked
around at the bustling command center. “Invade...”

“You’ll forgive me if I lack confidence in
the local administration,” Constantine smirked. “We can’t rule out
the possibility that local officials might be among the
perpetrators. We’re well aware that most here in this city
are...sympathetic...”

“Sympathetic?” I laughed. “We’re only missing
one body here, Special Agent. This isn’t exactly Al-Qaeda.”

“Nevertheless...”

“Nevertheless, nothing. We can handle
it.”

“The Bureau has more then enough resources in
country to hand this case,” Constantine said, flatly.

In country? They were at war.

“Your assistance will not be required.”

“You are in the City of Seattle,” I said. “It
is customary to liaison with—”

“It’s not the City of Seattle, anymore,”
Constantine interrupted. “The Federal Courts have taken supervision
of the city government. As officers of the court, the FBI now
exerts executive control over this city.”

I met Constantine’s comment with silence. I
was dumbstruck. “What?” was all I could manage.

“The City of Seattle is now a ward of the
Federal Courts, Detective.”

“You can’t do that!” I exclaimed, a cigarette
almost to my lips.

“That will be for the SCOTUS to decide. Next
year, when they’re in session. Until then, there is precedent.
Title IV of the Civil Rights Act. Geneing and related drug
criminality, being a disproportional menace, borne on the backs of
minority communities. It is beholden on the Federal Government to
intervene where local, entrenched institutions are unable to
protect those most vulnerable.” Constantine sounded like he was
reading his speech from a note card. But he wasn’t. They’d made him
memorize it.

“This is an occupying army,” I said in
disbelief, looking around at the gathered throng of armed men.

“The Federal Courts will oversee the civil
administration of this city until such a time as the Geneing menace
has been combated.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, Detective, I certainly am not.”

“All to get Montavez’s body back? You’re
insane.”

“No,” Constantine shook his head. “This has
been a long time coming. President Cassidy won election on the
platform of combating the Geneing epidemic head on. Look around
you. This is what combat looks like.”

“But...you can’t...you can’t
do this
,”
I said, panic gripping my insides. “The people won’t stand for
it.”

“They will, and they’ll thank us for it,”
Constantine said, raising to his feet. “This is what the people of
Seattle voted for – what the people of America voted. Action. Not
talk.”

“You can’t invade an American city,” I said,
hoping there was some legal truth to such a statement.

“We can, Detective,” Constantine said,
without a hint of mirth. “To save it from itself.”

He was fucking insane. There was no other
explanation.

“Thank you for your assistance, Detective
Fonseca,” Constantine continued, tapping the sheet of paper on the
table. “But the murder of this Jane Doe, and the subsequent
abduction of her body is now a Federal matter.”

He was about to give me the bum’s rush. I
could feel it. I’d gotten it plenty in my day.

I was about to find myself out of a job.

But I still had one card to play.

“I suppose you know where she was living?” I
said, matter-of-fact. They might. I had no idea what they might
know from the Sen. Montavez end. It was possible he knew where the
girl had been living. But I doubted it. And all the girl’s personal
effects, everything incriminating, from the dumpster...well, they’d
sort of disappeared between the crime scene and the station. Into a
garbage can on Second and Pike, to be precise.

“Well,” Constantine hedged, “we are
investigating...”

I had him. I had something he needed. I
wasn’t out of a job just yet.

“‘Cause it’s possible that there might be a
few personal effects of the deceased that didn’t quite make it into
the chain of evidence...”

“If you’re withholding information,
Detective…” Constantine leaned forward across the table, fixing me
with an accusing finger. “…I won’t hesitate to prosecute you to the
full extent of the law.”

“You don’t have to tell me how to do my job,
Special Agent.” I smiled, looking at the tip of his angry finger.
“You’ve just got to let me do it.”

Constantine looked at me. For the first time
all day, he was speechless.

“I guess that makes us partners, then,” I
said with resignation, reaching for my smokes. If I was going to be
stuck with this hick jack-ass, he was going to be stuck with a bad
case of second-hand smoke.

Chapter 3

So, I had Constantine by the balls. At least
until I’d shown him exactly where the girl had crashed before her
death. That bought me maybe an hour or two. No more. But I was
scrambling, clawing for anything to keep me afloat, any way to hang
on to my job.

If Constantine was serious about the Feds
turning Seattle into a Federal protectorate, then there wasn’t be a
snowball’s chance in hell that the likes of me would be kept
around. I wasn’t political at all, but those on the force that
weren’t outright, card-carrying Progs, were at least soft on the
issues the NeoCons always harped on about – Seattle itself was soft
on the issues the NeoCons always harped on about. A haven for
hippies, Genies and abortion-huggers.

Sure, the Federal takeover might not hold up
in court, but that would take months to play out. As sure as I was
standing, the NeoCons would certainly take the interim period to
pack the city payroll with right-minded folks and make sure that
all the positions of power had their prayer rugs correctly oriented
toward DC. Constantine wouldn’t lift a single support of his mobile
command center until he was sure he had Seattle neatly in his
pocket.

No, once Constantine was through, Seattle
wouldn’t be fit for a guy like me.

So, it was with my best interests at heart
that I set out to string the whole Montavez case out for as long as
possible.

I couldn’t see there was any real mystery
behind the murder and subsequent abduction. The body would show up.
If the Progs had taken it, they’d sooner or later play their hand.
If it was just some sort of sick joke...well, she’d wash up in the
Sound in the morning. As I said, she was already dead. There wasn’t
really much more that could happen to her.

I’d gotten the girl’s address out of a small
notebook I’d found in a purse in the dumpster next to the body. Her
wallet was gone, along with any money or phone, or any ID, but the
battered notebook, with a bunch of torn out pages, had been tossed
aside by her attacker as nothing more than trash.

All the remaining pages in the book were
blank, but I did that old Hardy Boys trick where you shade in the
impression left by the force of the pen writing on the sheet of
paper above the top page left on the pad.

Of course, I didn’t have to do it with any
fucking piece of charcoal or lemon juice, or however they did it in
the books. I had a high dpi scanner and software custom designed
for the task. Fiddle with the chroma long enough and everything
that’d been written on the pages earlier in the book showed up as
shadowy outlines. There was always a lot of crazy overlap, as each
successive page added its own contents to the resulting image, but
usually you could make out something in the mess.

I could make out the street name, Galer, and
the number of an apartment. I vaguely knew the apartment building,
up on Queen Anne Hill. But what the girl had been writing over and
over, on page after page in her little notebook, was what really
caught my attention. It freaked me out enough that I decided to
toss all the rest of the evidence away and falsify that report. If
the chief had gotten a look at what I saw on that computer screen,
he’d have told me to do the same without blinking an eye.

On my computer screen I saw Q after
interlocking Q forming a crazy mosaic, covering every inch of the
reconstructed handwriting. Hidden amongst the Q’s I could just make
out the street address – a note she’d perhaps handed to someone –
but all the Q’s, that was freaky. Q after Q after Q.

Okay, I should back-fill here, because you
have no idea what I’m talking about. Probably because you’re not
supposed to know what I’m talking about. All of this stuff, the
Gene Genies, Q, everything that happened, has successfully been
expelled from the official records. It’s like it’s some sort of
state secret. Though I don’t know why. None of it really shows the
Progs in a bad light. But then Progs never like anything that they
can’t control. Never have, never will. And none of this was under
their control. Maybe that, to Progs, is showing them in a bad
light. I don’t know.

Anyway, you might have some memory of Geneing
and what it was. And that it’s been done away with. Sort of like
the Black Plague – but of drugs. Something horrible that happened
to other people long ago, but nothing anyone worries about
anymore.

I guess that’s not too far from the truth.
Progs might not actually say it, but they hint that their social
programs did away with it. Like the New Deal and the Depression.
But don’t believe it. I’m here to tell you what really happened.
And the Progs didn’t have a fucking thing to do with it. Social
programs or not.

Geneing first hit the streets in the early
20’s, selling itself as the ultimate designer drug. A drug you only
had to take once and then, forever, you could get high whenever you
wanted.

It wasn’t really a drug, though. Not
technically. Sure, it got you high, but not in the usual way.
Geneing was a very targeted form of gene therapy that resequenced
DNA to naturally produce opiates, or at least the neurotransmitters
involved in opiate intoxication. One hit and you were high
forever.

Okay, suppository it was tailored with verbal
and non-verbal triggers that allowed you to turn the intoxication
on or off – a smell, a sound, a safe word – but I sure as hell
never heard of any Genies really using them. Once someone took that
shit, they were perpetually stoned out of their minds. They never
ran out of dope, never had withdrawal symptoms, never woke up the
morning after.

Most didn’t live long enough to have regrets.
The constant flood of endorphins inevitably fried their cerebral
cortex. But most simply died of thirst or starvation, lost in the
bliss of their perpetual high.

But those that lived long enough to want to
clean up their act, quickly discovered that there was no sobering
up from Geneing. They’d willfully modified their most basic genetic
code. The damage with irrevocable. There was no way to turn it off,
even for the Genies who chose to willfully be sober. The trigger
was always there, ready to open the floodgates of Elysium with a
single thought. They had to live with the constant, torturing
temptation ready to reclaim them. It took them all, eventually.
Geneing wasn’t just a drug, it was a terminal condition.

And all of this, it was rumored, was the work
of one man. Some genetic scientist who’d developed the gene therapy
and unleashed it on the world. Nobody knew who he was, or why he’d
created Geneing, but many Genies spoke of him like he was the
progenitor of a new race. A Moses-like character who’d finally
freed humanity from the shackles of living.

In these circles, he came to be known as Q. I
don’t know if it was a “Star Trek” reference, or James Bond or
something, but the title Q was soon taken up by the mainstream
news. It entered the common consciousness.