Organic Future - Sparrowhawk Part 19

"Jasmine." Bernie's voice was barely above a whisper, hoa.r.s.e and tortured.

In a moment, he looked down at his hand. His knuckles had whitened where he gripped the gun. He looked past his hand, past his gun, to the shadows beneath Gelarean's chair. Gelarean had folded his feet beneath him there, as if to hide them. But Bernie could see them clearly, see how small they were, just the size of a certain b.l.o.o.d.y footprint that he still bore imprinted on his mind.

"Eee kai vai." He felt like vomiting. Deliberately, he relaxed his grip.

He forced himself to put the gun back in its shoulder holster. He took a deep breath. He turned to look at the plants that filled the room and glowed in the sunlight. "Nettles," he said. "Cocaine nettles. You are a son of a b.i.t.c.h. I'll bet you even put that chip in the Sparrow yourself." He paused. "Care to tell us how you did it?"

The first time Bernie had met Gelarean had been when the man had so cheerfully announced that Emily had won her patent. He had struck him then as a man whose joviality was a false front, a man who concealed his true self.

Now that true self shone through in a smirk of triumph, and Bernie was not happy to be proven right.

"I am," said Gelarean, "a Palestinian. And my fellows are everywhere."

Bernie vaguely remembered the Palestinian diaspora from his childhood. The refugee camps had finally emptied, and their occupants had settled throughout the world. They had not, however, surrendered their hatred of Israel, or of its allies. "It was not hard to gain access to the Sparrow," he added, and his smirk became once more a glare. "I thought I left no traces. But then you appeared, pretending to be sniffing after Dr. Gilman." He shrugged. "I delegated the next attempts."

"To Chowdhury. Why him?"

"He was in debt to my wife's cousin. And he was already making..." A gesture indicated the nettles and drew Bernie's attention to a single fish tank on the far side of the room. It held three snakes, larger ones than those in Chowdhury's lab.

"He was..." He hesitated as if he were searching for the right word.

"Vulnerable. Biddable. He would do what I told him to do."

Emily made a disgusted noise. "And you had already told him to make those drug..."

He shook his head. "I was not involved with the nettles. The genimals,yes."

He glanced toward the fish tank and the snakes and began to sidle out from behind the desk. Bernie stopped him with one upraised hand. "But why? And how did the girl come in?"

Gelarean's open hands moved up and out. "It was good business for the family. But..." Gelarean's tone remained as reasonable as ever, but now his forehead wrinkled and his eyes widened in the intent stare of the fanatic.

"The country deserved it. It's always been the Great Satan, the stronghold of Zionism. If it had virtue, if it knew and followed Allah, there would be no problem. It would not be the enemy of all Palestinians, and there would be no market for the drugs."

"But we're not Moslems," said Emily. "We don't know Allah. We have no virtue. And that makes us fair game."

He nodded earnestly, as if pleased that she understood him so well.

"You're raving."

"Let's go," said Bernie.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

THE CASE WAS not quite closed. Bernie had the villains, one in a hospital bed, the other in a cell, and he had many of the answers. But he did not have them all, and he knew that Gelarean's lawyers would be trying to pry him loose as quickly as possible. The weekend therefore gave him little rest. He had to interrogate his catches more thoroughly, turn his ferrets loose in Gelarean's computers, survey Chowdhury's disks, question Victoria Gelarean, and try to find Greg Florin. Unfortunately, though the disks held clear evidence of his involvement, Florin had dropped out of sight. He was not at his casino, nor at his new project, the "farm," and his employees and a.s.sociates all claimed that they knew nothing.

Bernie had no time for anything but the investigation until well into the next week. It was then that Lieutenant Napoleon Alexander, the Count, called him into his office, pursed his bright red lips, and said, "Well?" Bernie's preliminary report, its cover sheet only slightly curled, was on the desk in front of him. He looked at it and added, "I've skimmed it, but let's have the gist of it."

Bernie gave his boss his usual sloppy salute. "I remember thinking," he said. "When the call went out about the Sparrow. That it was terrorists." He shrugged. "Gelarean's Palestinian, and his records show that he's been giving them money since before he came to this country."

"You can't hang him for that," the Count said. "Randecker gives to the Irish Republican Army, but he's no terrorist."

"No, sir. But Gelarean may have done a little more. When I confronted him Friday, he bragged about his contacts. And the records say he's had guests from abroad. They may have been more active terrorists." "So he's aided and abetted."

Bernie nodded. "That changed when Chowdhury piled up his gambling debt with Florin. As it happens, Gelarean's wife is a Campana. So he had a line into the Mob."

"If we had known that..."

"We might have suspected his involvement earlier, but that's all. If we could be d.a.m.ned for our relatives, none of us would have any hope of heaven."

He paused while Lieutenant Alexander rummaged in a drawer, found an old pipe, tucked its bit between his teeth and muttered, "There's a little flavor left."

"Anyway, Florin pushed," Bernie continued. "He wanted something to revive the drug trade, and Chowdhury suggested the cocaine nettle. When he produced it, and it worked, that was when the word reached Gelarean. He thought of asking Chowdhury to come up with drug-producing genimals, and when he realized what a grip he had on the man, he had him install the chips, program the a.s.sa.s.sin, and so on."

The Count shook his head. "You've done a good job, Bernie. But what's his motive? Greed for the drug money, I can understand." He patted the report on the desk before him with one hand. "Even that business about attacking the 'Great Satan.' But why did he want to kill Dr. Gilman?"

"He has a nasty habit of stealing credit whenever he can. Once her patent was through, there wasn't much point in continuing to try to kill her, but by then I was on the scene. They both thought I was after them."

"And Chowdhury panicked."

"It only has to happen once."

"And the girl? Jasmine Willison?"

Bernie made a face. He had been telling Connie everything, repeating his report to the Count, and she had asked precisely the question their boss had asked toward the end. He wished there were a better answer than the one he had: He had to shrug and say, "For a while, I thought that would turn out to be Chowdhury. But it was Gelarean, though he won't talk about that. He's guilty, he admits it, and the photos in his desk are quite enough proof of his guilt. But why? He's nuts. All fanatics are nuts, and too many of them are nuts about blood." Now all he could do was repeat the words.

They were in Connie's small living room, side by side on a couch that was little more than a pad of foam rubber covered with soft, loosely woven fabric.

An internal frame let it be bent to hold various configurations. Its back was a line of colorful pillows leaned against the wall. A bolster covered in purple s.h.a.g served them as a ha.s.sock. To one side, a low table of zebra wood and slate held their empty coffee cups.

The rest of the room was no more elaborate. A ceiling fixture threw spots of light onto one end of the couch, three metallic photos upon the wall, a veedo unit with slots for tapes and disks. A goldfish bush sat by the window, where light could hit the leaves; two colorful fruit, nearly ripe, wriggled on their stems above a bowl of water. A third had already fallen into the bowl, where it swam about as if it had always been a fish. On the floor near the plant's pot lay the feather Connie had retrieved from the dead Hawk. "Or damage, anyway," she said. She flipped a pillow flat on the end of the couch and stretched out. Her bare foot poked at his knee. He captured it in a large hand and kneaded the toes. "Wasn't that why he wanted the drug genimals?

And why he didn't simply take an axe to Emily?"

"Yeah." Bernie sighed. "He liked gore, didn't he? Emily didn't."

Her toes curled around his thumb. "You do too."

"Even if it makes me throw up?"

"In a way. And so do I. That's why we're cops."

"Two of a kind," he said.

"Predators. Hawks."

"But not wild. Not wolves." He meant, he thought, that they did not prey upon society. They were domesticated, and they served society, as dogs did the sheep and shepherd. Perhaps, for all that he liked to compare himself to a Hawk, he was not a hawk. Yes, hawks were as domesticated as dogs. but they were hunters, fighters, not protectors, guardians. If he were truly a hawk, he would have to join the army. But that did not appeal to him at all. He was a cop.

He sighed. He wished it really mattered to anyone but the girl's family and friends why Gelarean had done to her what he had done. But whatever the reason, the man would spend many years in prison. The Sparrow alone was enough to guarantee that. And when he got out, he would surely be deported. He would be no problem ever again for this society. Sadly, there was no shortage of people like him. There never had been. There never would be.

Some things never changed.

With a wiggle of her toes and a shift in position of her foot, Connie changed the subject. "And now she's done with you?"

He nodded. "You were right. At least, we had our fling. And now she's gone back to her husband."

"I thought that might..."

He let his hand slide up her calf. "You going to leave me too?"

"No husband to go back to."

He hesitated, letting his eyes search her face. "We could change that."

Now it was her turn to hesitate, and he thought that she must be as used as he to the single life, perhaps as reluctant to let it change. But..."Was that a proposal?" she asked. Her voice had a small crack in it.

He looked away. "I suppose it was."

Later, they mounted the dead Hawk's feather on the wall above the couch.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

WHERE BERNIE HAD spent the weekend in a frenzy of investigation, Emily had spent it feeling frustrated and bored. The threat that had been hanging over her was gone, but so were the suspense and excitement that had accompanied that threat. She felt let down, disappointed. There would be no more Sparrows landing on the freeway to gobble her up, no more a.s.sa.s.sins in the trees, no more Mack trucks lunging out of traffic to run her down, no more runaway Tortoises. Nor would there be handsome policemen to sweep her off her feet.

The romance was gone from her life.

Truly, she knew it, Nick was the man she wanted. Gentle, supportive, reliable, the father of her child, the cradle of her heart. But, for all that, she had told Bernie to keep his distance...

He had been efficient, smooth, and capable. She had told him he was cruel, and he had agreed. If she had thought to wonder, she would have expected him to show a grand ferocity when he confronted Chowdhury, and then Gelarean. But there had been none of that. He had only been strong and direct and to the point. He was a defender, not an attacker, not a despoiler. He was less gentle than Nick, but he too was supportive, in his way, and reliable.

Halfway through Sat.u.r.day afternoon, she found herself wondering how much damage her marriage had sustained. Nick was forgiving, yes, but she had briefly forsworn her loyalty to him, if not her love, and he knew it. It had to make a difference, and a difference that she would have to struggle to overcome. Not that Nick would keep reminding her, or that his feelings would be lessened by the memory. He was too forgiving for that. But she, she carried the guilt, and she would have to exorcise that burden.

She was pacing back and forth in the living room, her voice echoing within her skull, when Andy tugged at her jeans and cried, "Mommy!"

She bent to him, suddenly aware that she had been ignoring persistent demands for attention, and said, "Yes, dear?"

"My Warbird went under the couch. Get it for me?"

She obeyed, but when Andy followed up that demand with a request for a story, she said, "I think it's about time I baked us some bread. Want to watch?"

"I wanta help!"

"Just watch, until you're bigger." Nick was a.s.sembling the ingredients for a cake, but she chased her husband from the counter of "his" kitchen to the table and dove into her occasional specialty. It was also her therapy, for she had long since learned that pounding bread dough into submission could quiet her mind even when her thoughts churned so vigorously that she could concentrate on nothing else.

But her thoughts refused this time to quiet. Instead, they jumped their track. How much had she contributed to the final roundup? She had identified Chowdhury's "boss," but surely only seconds before Bernie would have seen it himself. She had made a phone call. She had...What else? She had given Bernie someone to talk to, and that was all. She hoped she gave Nick something more.

On Sunday, she and Nick took Andy to the zoo to see the unmodified ancestral stock of the genimals he knew so well from the veedo and the airport and the highway. In the reptile house, a python was basking in the sun; on the wall beside its cage, a board displayed the skin it had recently shed. "Lookat that," said Emily. "See the scales that covered the eyes?"

"They're like windows!" cried Andy.

"They make me wonder if we could make a house, or a car, or a train, from a snake. The windows would be built in, grown in, and..."

"Your next project?" asked Nick.

She shrugged and grinned. "Maybe, come to think of it. It would be easy enough to enlarge those scales and make them repeat along the body. It would be trickier to transplant the genes into a pumpkin, or Roachster." Or an Armadon, she thought, and she wondered what would come of that project now that Chowdhury was out of circulation.

She did not get an answer to her question right away. Neoform had lost not only one of its chief researchers and product developers, but also its research director, and on Monday, no one knew what would happen next. She and Alan Bryant were in their domed fabric "barn" that afternoon, checking on the growth of the Bioblimps, when Alan said, "Do you think they'll make you the new chief?"

She shook her head. "I'm not political enough. And I wouldn't want the job if I were." She gestured past the net that closed off most of the dome's interior s.p.a.ce, forming a huge cage in which young moving vans rose and fell above a long food trough. Their bells swelled and contracted, propelling them about their s.p.a.ce, in and out of the zones of blue and gold illumination defined by the dome's panels, in a way that would not be allowed once they reached full size, when strapped-on control pods would cover their mouths, all except a narrow opening for their breathing. Their tentacles writhed as they plucked chunks of unidentifiable meat from the trough and inserted them into the stomachs within the bells. The sphincters that controlled the openings to their cargo holds alternately gaped and puckered. Each van bore a stylized sailing ship on the side of its gasbag. "They'll be too big for this place soon. We'll have to take them outside and tether them."

"You would if you were political," said her aide. Then he shook his head.

"We won't need to tether them. Their nervous systems are so rudimentary that we've had some problems designing the control circuitry, but it's almost ready now."

"Tether them anyway. If the controls have been that tricky, something's bound to go wrong. And we don't want them wandering off and eating pedestrians."

Alan began to laugh, looked sidelong at her, and let it die. The image had been a funny one, straight out of ancient monster movies, but it did, he quickly realized, come a little close to home for his boss. "Have you heard anything about Chowdhury's lab?"

"Not a thing. I think they're pretending he's taking a little sabbatical.

Business as usual for now."

The pretense lasted until Wednesday. That morning, when Emily reached her lab, Alan was holding a piece of paper. As she entered the room, he handed it to her. She stopped, leaned against a bench, and read: TO: All Employees FROM: T. Gruene, Personnel RE: Supervisory changes We have recently lost one of this company's three founders, Director of Research Dr. Sean Gelarean, and a valued employee, Dr. Ralph Chowdhury, Senior Researcher in Product Development.

We will shortly advertise for a new Director of Research. Until the results of our search for a replacement are in, Dr. Gelarean's post will remain vacant. All reports and requests for travel funds, supplies, and project approvals should be routed to Dr. Atkinson.

Dr. Chowdhury's position will be filled by Dr. Adam Chand. Until now, Dr.

Chand has been a research a.s.sistant in Dr. Chowdhury's lab.

"It doesn't say a word about why we lost those 'two valued employees,'"

said Emily. "But that's good. In fact, Wilma might make a good replacement for Sean. And Adam..."

"He'll do fine," said Alan.