Empire Games Series, Book 1(6)
“Sure, Clive! Anytime!” Oh shit, she thought. It was the end of the show: the perfect time for layoffs, especially if he was planning on screwing people over. Her heart sinking, she followed him off the stage. Behind their show area there was a small, airless space backing onto a couple of other stands. There were no chairs, but a man and a woman were waiting there. At first she almost thought they were sales leads, but the black suits, cheap haircuts, and government-issue surveillance eyewear was all wrong. They smelled of—
“Rita Douglas?” asked the woman. She held up a badge, unsmiling: “DHS, Officer Gomez. Come with us, please.”
Rita froze. “A-am I under arrest?” she asked.
“No.” Gomez glanced at her companion. “Your turn.”
He made eye contact with Clive. “You can go now,” he said. “You never saw us and this never happened.”
Clive turned and left without a backward glance. Bastard, Rita thought tiredly. Fair-weather boss. Snitch. Informer. “What is this?” she asked, trying to put on a calm expression. Her stomach lurched.
“We want to ask you some questions,” Gomez said bluntly. Her posture was tense. “Please look at this card and tell me what you see.” She held out a badge wallet toward Rita, then flipped it open.
Rita stared. The cops watched her expectantly: “It’s some kind of knot. Celtic knotwork?” Her brow furrowed. “Why? What’s it meant to be?”
The two DHS agents shared a look. “Told you so,” murmured the man. They both relaxed infinitesimally. He looked at Rita: “As Sonia said, we’d like to ask you some questions. It’s about something you might have witnessed without realizing what was going on.” He smiled, but Rita could tell a fake when she saw one. “You are not under arrest. You are not a suspect in any investigation, although I should warn you that anything you say will be recorded.” He shrugged. “But we’d prefer you to come with us voluntarily. That way we can eliminate you as a material witness from an ongoing investigation and let you go.” Rita, filling in the blanks, caught the implied or else.
“Uh, my rental car’s—” Rita’s head was spinning. “We’re checking out tomorrow morning. Due to fly home.” Flying with HaptoTech implants still embedded was a nightmare at every security checkpoint, and it would take outpatient surgery to get them removed. HaptoTech would pay for it, but in the meantime she’d be stuck with the itching, not to mention Clive’s whining because the damned things were expensive. “I was supposed to give Julie and Deborah a ride—what about them?”
“We’re the government: we can take care of everything.” The male agent grinned at her humorlessly. “You’re in suite 119 at the Motel Six on I-5, right?” Rita nodded. “Give me your rental’s key fob. We’ll sort everything out for you.”
“How long is this going to take?” she asked dubiously, handing over the keys.
“Not long; we’ll probably be through with you by Sunday.”
Rita forced herself to conceal her dismay. Gomez added: “If you cooperate fully, we’ll book you a replacement flight home.”
What was that ancient Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times, and may you come to the attention of people in authority. “Okay,” said Rita, trying hard to sound calm. “Whatever you want.” I am a cooperative citizen, sir. Nothing to see here. She paused. “But can I grab something to eat, and some makeup remover pads?”
The female agent nodded. “We can do that,” she said, and Rita felt the words with the force of imaginary handcuffs closing around her wrists. “I promise you won’t regret this, Ms. Douglas.”
She was lying, of course.
BALTIMORE, NOVEMBER 2019
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004910023 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT
COL. SMITH: Okay, so today we’re evaluating the prototype candidate identified by our data trawl. Name’s Douglas, Rita Douglas. Age 25. Which is to say, at least 5 years too old to be part of the DRAGON’S TEETH world-walker breeding program we uncovered back in the day.
DR. SCRANTON: (throat-clearing noise) Messy.
AGENT O’NEILL: If she isn’t one of the DRAGON’S TEETH children, where did she come from?
COL. SMITH: Douglas may not be part of the world-walkers’ project but she’s listed in the database we captured back in ’03. So we ran her DNA profile with forensics against the, the FBI’s Alternate World Terror Suspects Index. And it turns out there’s a three-sigma maternity match with a world-walking terror suspect. We ID’d her mother back in the day but she’s been missing for years, presumably returned to the hostiles’ time line.
AGENT O’NEILL: How did Douglas slip beneath our radar? The kid, I mean, not the mother—
DR. SCRANTON: She didn’t.
COL. SMITH: Correct. She was adopted by a childless couple in Massachusetts, eleven days after birth. Very fast. Very well-organized—her maternal grandmother took care of it. We dug the original hospital records up and it turns out her birth mother and father were medical students. She was an, uh, accident.
AGENT O’NEILL: Medical students? World-walking medical students? What is this, I don’t—
DR. SCRANTON: Listen to him.
AGENT O’NEILL: Okay.
COL. SMITH: Douglas carries the recessive trait for moving between time lines—like all of the DRAGON’S TEETH children. The world-walkers used a fertility clinic in Boston to run a rigged artificial insemination program, to breed more children who were also recessives. We figure they were going to approach some of them, as adults, to become host mothers or sperm donors … The point is, the first-generation carriers aren’t able to world-walk themselves. And that goes for Douglas. When the terrorists set up the DRAGON’S TEETH program they already knew about her, hence her name appearing on the database. But she was born years before they set that wagon rolling. Anyway, her birth mother is most definitely one of Them—Miriam Beckstein. In fact, she was one of their ringleaders. There’s an outstanding warrant for her arrest. Charges include mass murder, terrorism, crimes against humanity, violations of the Espionage Act, theft, possession of weapons of mass destruction, and treason. Oh, and narcotics trafficking.