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CHAPTER TWELVE


“Detective Carmaggio,” he said, spitting the stick of gum into the wastebasket. It was his direct outside line; you couldn’t have your snitches going through a switchboard, it made them nervous.

Sugar-free, he thought with disgust, looking at the crumpled wad of gum. It was like chewing rubber bands. What he really wanted was a smoke. About time to admit that gum didn’t help the craving. Jenny didn’t like the habit, either.

“It’s about the warehouse killings, Detective,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “You know what I mean.”

Carmaggio brought his feet down from the desk and tapped one shoe onto the record pedal.

“Yes, I remember that. What’s your name, sir?” The same motion activated the tracer. He kept his tone polite and calm, inviting the man on the other end to keep talking.

“That doesn’t matter right now,” the voice said.

Hell it doesn’t. The usual influx of nutballs—confessing, or offering to reveal various conspiracies, or both—had died down long ago, it was better than three years since the murders. The voice was a man’s, not old, Standard American accent, perhaps a hint of Midwestern rasp.

“The murderers name is Gwendolyn Ingolfsson,” it went on. “It—she—is responsible for several other killings. She’s currently resident in the Bahamas.”

Excitement punched him in the gut. Closed file, my ass. This one really knew something. Maybe she did have help. Maybe they’re turning on each other. He suppressed the speculation; facts first.

“How do you know this, sir?” Rodriguez came in, and Carmaggio made frantic send a car to the trace address motions at him.

“That doesn’t matter either. What does matter is that she’s coming back.”

“Yes?”

“Back to New York. If you check, you’ll find she’s bought up the property where the murders took place, through front companies. She’ll be coming to New York shortly, and dealing with an investment firm named Primary Belway Securities.”

The Fischer killing. He’d been with PBS. Hell, so’s Jenny. Hell, she’s in the Bahamas. He suppressed a stab of worry. Nobody’s going to mess with a bunch of investment bankers.

“It’s extremely important that this . . . person not be allowed access to New York,” the voice went on.

I am beginning to get seriously pissed off with this turkey, Carmaggio thought. The tone was desperately patient, the way you talked to a slightly retarded child. Plenty of people talked that way to cops; he was used to it. He got the feeling that this bird talked to everyone that way, however.

“We’re always concerned with the safety of New York and its citizens,” he said soothingly. “Why don’t you come in and tell us all about it?”

The answer was a chuckle; the first hint there was an actual human being on the other end of the line.

“Not until we have an understanding, Lieutenant. I think you’ve figured out that this is . . . not a usual case, at all. I think you may be ready to understand what’s really going on here. But it has to be in a way that doesn’t endanger either of us. No contacts that leave any recordings, no involvement of higher authorities, and no meetings in places where we might be under observation.”

Yeah, and I have to wear a rubber nose and give the secret handshake, Carmaggio thought. If he’s so paranoid, what does he think this line is?

“That might be possible, sir. Where should we get in touch?”

“I’ll contact you, in a day or two.”

“Sir—”

“And Lieutenant . . . anyone in contact with Ingolfsson is in extreme danger.”

“All right, you dickhead, I want some answers! Now! Stop bullshitting me or—”

The line went back to the dial tone, with no click of a broken connection. Henry Carmaggio sat looking at the receiver in his hand for a moment, then replaced it with exaggerated care. The alternative was beating it on his desk until the pieces were too small to hold.

“That was just the thing I fucking needed to hear,” he said. “Jesus, you get the blue-and-white dispatched?”

Jesus Rodriguez’s thin brown face came around the doorjamb. “No trace, patrón.”

“Fuck,” Carmaggio said in a weary sigh. The new process was supposed to be automatic, with the number and location of the phone showing up on a map. “Nothing?”

“A glitch. It gives us our own number.”

He tapped the pedal again, rewinding the tape. “Let’s listen and see if there was anything I missed.”

The tape hissed. Carmaggio waited, calmly at first, then with a heavy sinking feeling. There was nothing on it, nothing at all. The weird shit was starting again.


# # #


Kenneth Lafarge bought a soft pretzel with mustard and sat on the edge of the fountain in Washington Square Park. The wounds didn’t hurt anymore.

It was a cold raw day, slush and lowering skies. A homeless man shuffled by, fingerless gloves holding two bulging plastic bags. Behind him loomed an off-white mock-French triumphal arch, and behind that a wedding-cake minor skyscraper. Pigeons hunched their wings against the cold. A man in chain-studded leather did too, his pinched gray face stubble-covered and shuttered. Two girls passed, talking and laughing; one wore a nose-stud. Ken smiled at them, at all the pulsing streams of people.

There were nearly as many people in this State of New York as in the whole of Samothrace. I like it. I couldn’t live here permanently, but I like it. He’d been country-raised, and even the capital city of Jefferson was a manicured garden next to this. He remembered green-black tuftbush and Terran sage, riding down a canyon and the skin-winged majesty of a gruk arrowing by overhead, eyeing the herd of sheep but wary of his rifle.

“I’d go nuts here in twenty years. But . . .”

His scanner caught traces of conversations, checking for keywords: in Spanish, Chinese, Italian, in African tongues extinct centuries before the Last War in his history. Nobody on Samothrace had spoken anything else but English since the first generation of settlement. For that matter, every other language had been dying out on Earth by the end of the twentieth century—by compulsion in the Domination, through market forces and policy in the Alliance for Freedom . . .

I do like it here. These people were sloppy, restless, childish, self-indulgent. They had no moral seriousness. But they’re alive in a way we never were. Not even before the Last War. His ancestors’ America had been an anxious giant, mobilized for generations against a menace that made the Cold War they’d had here look like a love-feast. Compared to this America his had been grim, puritan, uniform.

He imagined the Square broken and desolate, buildings shattered hulks. A weapons platform hovering in the Manhattan sky with the bat-winged dragon of the Domination blazoned on its side; a wolf-faced ghouloon trooper crouched where he sat, cradling a particle-beam rifle and gnawing on a human arm.

“Never,” he said softly, getting to his feet and strolling with his hands thrust into his overcoat pockets. He attracted a few glances. By local standards six-foot, crop-haired blonds with his build in neat business suits were exotic.

The problem was the asymmetry of the positions. Ken looked at the glossy of the Draka’s face again; his equipment had extrapolated it to a 3-D image and matched it against the files. This had to be one of the old ones; subtle clues in the bone structure marked it as the first or second generation of drakensis. Centuries old, then. Unbelievably experienced. And not limited by fear of detection. It wanted to be detected, to call the ghoul-horde through to feast.

“I can’t let that paralyze me,” he murmured.

An anchoring beacon wasn’t all that difficult to make. The first expedition through a planetary surface-level molehole on Samothrace had managed to cobble one together from the equipment they’d brought. Then they’d broadcast until a new molehole was latched on—giving the USS a whole new Samothrace, in a solar system humans had never visited. As far as they could tell, in that continuum Earth had been scoured free of life sometime in the twenty-first century. Spaceborne instruments could scan a planet fairly closely, even across 4.2 light-years. The oxygen content of that Earth’s atmosphere had dropped far enough to make it plain even the algae in the oceans were gone.

So the Draka here could mess up the landscape as much as it needed to. The more the better, in fact—it increased the possibility of a unidirectional lock-on by the drakensis scientists working from the other side.

I’m only constrained in what I do, he thought meditatively.

“How much does this policeman have figured out?” he asked himself.

Once he’d let the locals know, there was no going back. And they’d be exposed; he’d have to push them to the front, give the minimum of backup. The less he interacted directly with the snake, the better. At all costs.

“Well, Lieutenant Carmaggio,” he said to himself, “you wanted some answers. I hope you enjoy them.”

Kenneth Lafarge smiled. The panhandler who’d been about to approach the slumming businessman turned on his heel and lurched away.

The snake is acting through locals. I can too.


# # #


There were three other people in Carmaggio’s apartment: Jesus Rodriguez, Mary Chen, and the FBI agent, Finch. It was cramped in the living room. Unlike a lot of the Department, he believed in living where he worked, which meant paying New York rents for zero space. It was an old four-story walkup, mostly new immigrants from Russia and a few old ladies in black who passed the time of day with him on the stairs in Neapolitan dialect.

“We don’t have enough for an arrest,” Carmaggio said.

“That’s an understatement,” Finch said. “Not with the evidence gone into a black hole.”

The FBI agent fiddled with the buttons of her jacket and looked out the apartment window; it had a beautiful view of the fire escape on the building next door. “When will she arrive?”

Carmaggio shrugged. “Sometime in the spring, that’s the earliest the paperwork will be ready. We don’t know if she plans to come here personally at all. I’ve got a friend in Belway, but I can’t badger her for the information. That’s the impression I got, though.”

He opened a folder. “But this company of Ingolfsson’s has bought up or leased a lot of property. Close on twenty million dollars’ worth, including the warehouse where Marley Man got wasted.”

Silence fell for a long moment. The medical examiner broke it.

“We’ve got to face up to something,” she said. “Henry, Ms. Finch . . . we’ve got to realize what we’re facing.”

“Which is?’ Henry said. You’re the one with the fancy education. You tell me.

Chen looked down at her hands, twisting the fingers together. “The genetics . . . nobody can alter mammalian heredity like that. Nobody. I did some discreet research. And nobody will be able to do it for a long time; fifty years, conservative estimate.”

Henry grunted and looked away. “Hell,” he said. “I never even watched Star Trek much.”

Finch gave a violent shake of her head. “We can’t afford to get ourselves caught up on labels,” she said. “I think that’s what the people at the Other Place—Langley,” she amplified, “Bureau slang for Langley—I think that’s what they’ve done. It isn’t ours, so it must be the Japanese or whatever. The more layers of committees they have to filter their data through, the more officially acceptable it’ll get.”

Henry nodded. That was how bureaucracies functioned; they were set up to hammer information into a few acceptable categories, and they did just that—no matter how much violence got done to the data in the process. He’d seen enough men die in Vietnam because the raw intelligence conflicted with the approved version of reality.

“Okay,” he said quietly, “we’ve got National Enquirer stuff here, only for real. Does that mean the spooks are right? We should back off and let official channels handle it? Concealing the information we’ve got is almost certainly an indictable offense.”

Jesus Rodriguez spoke. “Like the lady said, I think they’ll be looking for the wrong thing. And patrón—the stakes are high.”

Chen looked up. “The . . . whatever it was . . . came armed. They killed and killed again. That doesn’t argue for ‘we come in peace,’ Henry.”

Her face went extremely blank. “And I don’t care to be blackmailed. That sort of thing was what my parents took a very risky boat trip to avoid. So I’m not altogether convinced of the unarguable wisdom of the duly constituted authorities, right now.”

Finch winced slightly. “Since Andrews and Debrowski came back from the Bahamas,” she said, looking down at her hands, “there’s been a fair amount of traffic that way. At a much higher level. Not those two. Whole delegations.”

You didn’t send wet-work specialists to negotiate, really. Even the sort of fairly sophisticated wet-workers involved, Amcits and on the official payroll. The accountants must have taken over, and the Government’s tame scientists.

“They’ve clamped down harder than ever, and Dowding’s been warned from higher in the Bureau not to even think about complaining again. They did some sort of deal, and they’re excited about it. Very excited. And scared.”

Carmaggio sipped his coffee. “Oh, lovely. Ms. Ingolfsson has become the goose that lays the golden eggs. She’s teacher’s pet.”

“Right,” he went on. “Now, let’s see what we’ve got and where it gets us. There’s that posse warrior with his head blown off at the eyebrows. Weapons are a hobby of mine, and there’s nothing that could do it. Some sort of energy gun might. That’s what the spooks said. They also said you’d need an eighteen-wheeler load of equipment. Our suspect had something no bigger than a rifle. From the later reports, I’d say it was the size of a handgun, small enough to carry concealed.”

Chen pursed her lips. “I can think of several technologies that could produce a knife as thin and sharp and rigid as the one that inflicted the injuries in the warehouse,” she said. “And was used to dismember Stephen Fischer. None of them available today, or will be for some time.”

“When we’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true,” Finch said. Henry looked at her blankly. “Classical reference, sorry. What I mean is, I don’t think it’s aliens here. The—not exactly the MO—the stuff surrounding the incident is wrong. And the genetic material is human. Human, and animals from Earth.”

“We sure of that?”

Chen tapped her own folder. “Extremely. Henry, the odds of a separate evolution producing that type of genetic correspondence is . . .well, getting hit by lightning is a dead certainty, compared to that.”

“Time traveler,” Finch said.

The words lay heavy in the pause that followed. Henry sighed deeply and ran a hand over his scalp, acutely conscious of the thinning hairs.

“Oh, shit,” he said. He held up a hand. “Yeah, I know it’s logical, I know it’s probably true, but we’ve just bought ourselves a ticket to the funny farm if this ever leaks out to our respective superiors.”

The idea lay like lead in his mind. I’ve been chasing my own ass on this for three and a half years, he thought. There simply wasn’t any other explanation, nada, zip. Either he forgot the whole thing, or he went with this. And he just couldn’t walk away from it. Like Jesus said, the stakes were too high.

“Something else,” he said thoughtfully. “Okay, we’ve got a time traveler.” He held up his copy of the Canadian RCMP fax. “A woman. One woman, armed, calling herself Gwendolyn Ingolfsson. And we got the arm of some thing with her. What’s that suggest?”

“Something went wrong,” Jesus said, flicking at his teeth with a thumbnail. “Accident, fuckup, de nada.”

“Not a woman,” Chen corrected. “A female, yes. Related species, but not human. Probably from, ah, the future.”

Henry sighed and loosened his tie. “Whatever.”

“And she responded with a killing frenzy,” Finch said. “That tells us something about the, the time and place she came from.”

“Dropping into the middle of Marley Man’s posse could send anyone into a frenzy,” Henry said thoughtfully. “But the two apartment killings, yeah. Our Ingolfsson is seriously bad in both senses of the word.”

Silence fell again. Finch broke it. “Why buy the warehouse?” she said. “That seems to be important, somehow. Twenty million dollars’ worth of important. That’s more than sentimental souvenir money.”

“We can’t tell for sure, but it certainly looks like Ingolfsson needs the warehouse somehow.”

“I’ve got—” Henry began.

“—a bad feeling about this, sí,” Jesus completed the sentence. “Unless she just wants to go home.”

“Could we count on that?” Henry said. “No, I didn’t think so. Let’s think about the latest ingredient.”

“Mystery Man,” Finch said. “He’s contacted you several times, me once, and several people at this firm, Primary Belway Securities. He certainly doesn’t seem to be operating with Ingolfsson. Trying to screw up her plans, evidently.”

“Cop chasing perp?” Jesus said. “They sent someone back here to clean up the accident?”

“That’s my gut feeling,” Henry agreed. He looked over at Finch; the Medical Examiner wasn’t in the same business, but the FBI agent was. “Mystery Man’s got some gadgets too.”

“Cop is a possibility,” Finch said. “Or spook and counter-spook. He isn’t necessarily a good guy.”

“So far he’s made a lot less in the way of footprints,” Henry observed thoughtfully. “No trail of bodies, and no fancy gadgets apart from messing with our computers. Assuming he was sent back, you’d expect him to have more fancy stuff.”

“But perhaps is more reluctant to use it,” Chen said. The others looked at her. “If we have a time traveler, they could be—probably would be—careful about changing the past. And we would be the past, to them.”

“Ingolfsson doesn’t seem too concerned about that,” Henry said. “Left a pretty heavy blood trail, and—”

He smacked himself on the forehead. “All that fancy high-tech stuff her company’s been selling! That’s where it came from!”

The future. The theory was starting to look convincing, not just to his head but to his gut, the place where ideas came from. He didn’t know whether to be reassured or frightened. Either I’m adjusting or going nuts.

“Perhaps she is some sort of criminal under pursuit, then,” Chen said, pulling at her lower lip.

Henry made a chopping gesture. “Let’s not let the speculation get completely out of hand,” he said. “You get too many preconceptions, it can foul up your ability to see things that don’t agree with the theory you’ve built.”

The others nodded. “What should we do about it?” Finch said.

“First, Mystery Man indicated he’s willing to meet. Yes or no?”

Chen started to speak, but Finch cut her off. “Lieutenant, I don’t think we can run this as a democracy. I think you should be in charge.”

Christ, on point again, Henry thought. The others nodded.

“All right then. I will set up a meet with Mystery Man. When we’ve got more information from him, you’ll all get to know. Which leaves us with the question of what to do about Ingolfsson.”

Silence fell. “Right now, we watch,” Henry said. “Right now, we can’t pin any of the killings on Ingolfsson. Maybe she’ll just vanish in the warehouse, maybe Mystery Man will get her, maybe she’ll turn into a good citizen.”

“And maybe the horse will learn to sing,” Finch said.

Henry did recognize that one. He shook his head. “No, there’ll be more killings, all right. And then we move in. Fuck national security; we’ll blow this thing wide open and call in the artillery and nail Ms. Time Traveler to the wall. Fuck the consequences, too. Everyone with me on this?”

A circle of nods. He went on: “You all know what happens to whistle-blowers, don’t you? Still willing?”

Nobody spoke. “All right, here’s how we’ll set it up. We keep everything word-of-mouth; and no more phone calls than we have to. Nothing on computers, absolutely nothing, and that includes notes to ourselves.

“When we move, we’ll have to be able to move fast and big. Finch, you get onto your boss and bring him in on this. Chen, get me a list of those friends you’ve been doing the discreet research with, and we’ll talk to a few of them. Jesus and I will sound out a few guys we know in the NYPD. Then we’ll—”


* * *


“Hello,” Carmaggio said.

The other man ducked his head in a nod and extended his hand. “Kenneth Lafarge,” he said.

Henry gave him a once-over. Early thirties, he judged. Close-cut blond hair, blue eyes, a farmboy face—snub-nosed and tanned, square chin. Jock’s build, broad shoulders and narrow waist. The hand fit that, slightly callused and very strong. Dressed in a suit and carrying an attaché case; sort of like a Norman Rockwell painting of an up-and-coming small town lawyer. Not heeled to Henry’s experienced eye . . . but he might be carrying a mininuke in a tie clip, for all I know. Christ, I wish I wasn’t here. For that matter, he wished all this wasn’t happening, period.

Behind them the Mall was nearly empty, bleak and lifeless with winter. It smelled of wet earth, cold water, and traffic. Carmaggio had never liked Washington much: a marble veneer over a cesspit. Which was, he thought, sort of appropriate, all things considered.

“Detective Lieutenant Henry Carmaggio,” he replied. What do you say to a time traveler?

“Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Detective Carmaggio,” the younger man said. “A great deal depends on what we can do.”

He spoke ordinary general American, but there was a hint of something underneath it; a formality of phrasing, that indicated it wasn’t quite his native speech.

“Yeah,” Henry said, hunching his shoulders. They turned and walked beside the gray surface of the Reflecting Pool. “Why here?”

“I’m apprehensive about what capabilities it may have in place in New York,” Lafarge said. “A little extra caution never hurts.”

“Look, let’s be upfront.” At the other man’s lifted eyebrow: “Let’s lay our cards on the table. You’re from the future, right?”

The words hung heavy in the air. Me and the Saucer People, Carmaggio thought.

Lafarge nodded. “In a way.”

“In what fucking way?”

The other man made a soothing gesture with both hands. “Four-hundred-forty-odd years in the future, yes. But the future of a different past.”

“What?” Henry felt a dull ache begin between his shoulder blades and creep up his neck.

“I’m sorry . . . you know the concept? A battle turns out differently, a war, someone important isn’t born, and things are changed?”

Henry nodded. “Lee wins the battle of Gettysburg, something like that?” There was no end to the weird shit.

“Yes, exactly. In my case . . . the differences start about 1779. By 1900 my world was very different from yours. By the 1990s, unrecognizable.”

“What happened in 1779?”

“The Dutch Republic declared war on the British,” Lafarge said. He ran a hand over his hair. “It’s a long story. The British lost the war against us—against America—at about the same pace they did here, maybe a little slower. But they won the war against the Dutch, and that’s where everything started to go wrong. They took the Cape Colony.”

“South Africa?” Henry said. He’d done some research on Africa a few years back, when two branches of the Black Muslims had started killing each other over doctrinal points.

“Yes. After the war, they used it to settle the Loyalists—mostly the ones from the Southern colonies—and their Hessian mercenaries. The settlers they sent enslaved the locals. And they grew, and they grew. A century later the Draka—the colony was renamed after Francis Drake—were already a major power. In the Great War they took most of Asia; then in the Eurasian War, something like your World War Two, they took the rest of Asia and Europe. There was a long cold war between them and us, the Alliance for Democracy, the U.S. and South America and the British, the Australasians, some others. The Final War happened in 1999.”

“Wait a minute.” Henry squeezed his thumb and forefinger on the bridge of his nose. “Okay, these . . . Draka?” Lafarge nodded. “They were seriously bad, right? Sort of like Nazis?”

“Worse. Smarter. In our world, the Nazis were a poor-man’s copy of the Domination—the Domination of the Draka, that’s what they called themselves. Call themselves.” Lafarge shook his head. “I’m surprised your Nazis were so much like ours. We even had a Hitler, although he didn’t look much like yours. Ours was taller, blond, and had an eyepatch . . . never mind.”

“Wait a minute,” Carmaggio said again. The tension in his neck was worse. “These supernazis, Draka, whatever, they won this World War Three, is that what you’re saying?”

Lafarge nodded.

“Then who the hell are you, the French Resistance?”

“Space travel was commonplace by the time of the Final War,” Lafarge said. Henry gritted his teeth at the heavy patience in the younger man’s tone. “My ancestors escaped to Alpha Centauri in an experimental interstellar ship—slower than light, of course. There’s a habitable planet there, you’ll discover it yourselves as soon as you get some really powerful telescopes into orbit.”

“Wait a minute—wait right here,” Henry said.

He wheeled away, working his shoulders, then stopped and looked up at the spire of the Washington Monument. From the future, from another dimension, and from another fucking planet, too, he thought. Jesus wept. Wasn’t someone like Arnold S. supposed to handle this sort of thing? Or a big-titted actress with a pair of glasses on to make her look like a scientist? Some morphing from Industrial Light and Magic to wow the kids, popcorn and Diet Coke. Shit. He remembered Stephen Fischer’s head in the freezer of his refrigerator. That was all too real. So were the lab reports, so was the arm of that God-knew-what.

“Sorry,” he said as he rejoined Lafarge.

“I realize this must all be a considerable shock.”

“Do you? Do you realize how fucking consoling that is and how much better it makes me feel?” Henry jammed his hands down into his pockets and walked in silence. “By the way, how do I know you’re a good guy yourself? You realize you’ve got absolutely no proof of anything you’ve said.”

Lafarge shrugged. “If you can match what I’ll show you anywhere in 1999,” he said, “I’m the greatest liar since Judas Iscariot. As to who’s the good guy . . . I’m not the one who left a trail of bodies through your city.”

“There is that. There is that. What are we up against?”

“A drakensis. The Draka were . . . slavers, degenerates, mass murderers, but they were human. They didn’t want to be, that was the problem—and they were very, very good at molecular genetics even then, it’s how they won the Final War. A hundred years ahead of where you are now, by our 1970s. They created their own version of the Master Race, and it replaced them. Replaced true humanity entirely, here in the Solar System.”

“Nothing left but the supermen?”

“Homo drakensis and homo servus.”

Henry winced. Servus. Slave. “That mean what I think it means?” Lafarge nodded grimly. “Tell me about the . . . whatever it is we got.”

“It was an accident, if that’s any consolation to you. We—the snakes and Samothrace—are developing a . . . faster-than-light drive. But if you do it wrong—and they haven’t got the control down yet—you end up with temporal instead of spatial displacement. I can’t explain it to you, I’m a covert-action operative, not a physicist. And you’re at least three paradigm shifts, three equivalents of Newton or Einstein, away. Could you explain a computer to a tribesman from New Guinea?”

“I can’t even understand the goddamned manuals for PCs myself. Okay, what about our bad lady? What can she do?”

“It. Never forget that. It’s not human. Do?” Lafarge shrugged. “For a start: it’s fast, fast and very strong, with hyperacute senses. Very resistant to damage, reinforced bones, redundant organs, high radiation tolerance, tissue regeneration if it is hurt. Strong enough to rip a human limb from limb, hearing and sight and sense of smell like an animal. Utterly ruthless, fearless, and aggressive, with an inbuilt drive to fight and to dominate everything in its environment. A tiger with the mind of a man. Oh, and it’s immortal—doesn’t age.”

Henry nodded to himself. Something in him wanted to add what about the blue tights and the cape? but the scene in the warehouse kept getting in the way. The memory of the heavy stink of blood, and the bodies tossed about like dolls, mangled the way a dog does a rat.

“That’s for a start?” he said. “Make me even happier, Lafarge.”

“Genius-level intelligence; in your terms, IQ of about 200, 220. Perfect memory. Idiot-savant mental abilities.”

“Counting all the spilled matchsticks?” Henry remembered the movie well, although he doubted the killer was anything like Dustin Hoffman.

“Yes. They seem to be a little short on real creativity, but they’re extremely smart. And then there’s the control mechanisms. For controlling others, that is.”

“Wait . . . you mean they can read minds? Hypnotize people?”

“Not quite. It can read body language and subvocalizations well enough to make it seem like a mind-reader, though. The control comes from pheromones . . . You know what they are?”

“What makes the dogs howl when the bitch is in heat?”

Lafarge nodded. “They’re more versatile than that. In us, in humans, they’re becoming vestigial. The effects are subliminal. A drakensis has pheromones that are overpoweringly strong. Their serf race, the servus, are completely vulnerable. But on unprotected, unprepared normal humans, the effects can be devastating too. You wouldn’t even notice them consciously; you’d just be bowled over by what feels like overwhelming charisma. Pretty soon you’d want to do anything the drakensis told you to. You’d stay awake nights thinking up ways to please.”

“Shit.” Henry stopped and sank down on a bench. Would all this go away if I just hopped the plane back to New York and forgot about it? Unfortunately, he knew the answer was no. He’d never been good at hiding his head in the sand.

He looked over at Lafarge on the opposite end of the bench. “Why do I get this really shitty feeling about all this? You going to offer us advisors and military aid? Like us and Moscow back in the old days? And sure, it’s true we were telling the truth when we said some Third World schmuck was better off taking our guns. But by the time the elephants are finished their proxy war across his back garden, it’s squashed pretty fucking flat.”

“It’s worse than that. We can’t help you directly. The Domination holds the Solar System too firmly. Moleholes—it’s the physics, I can’t explain it. If the drakensis succeeds in making a beacon, they can open a gateway and flood through. You’ll have about as much chance as . . . in your terms, as much chance as Australian Aboriginies with stone-tipped spears would against helicopter gunships and tanks. The Domination . . . they’ll reduce you to domestic animals, playthings, and they’ll gene-engineer you into liking it. That’s one alternative.”

“I hope there are others.”

“If the drakensis can’t establish a lock-on beacon here, it’ll try to take over the planet by itself.”

“Hell, there’s only one of her. It, whatever.”

“It’s immortal, remember, unless it’s killed. And it’s a female.”

“With no males, and a breeding population of one.”

Lafarge shook his head. “They don’t reproduce the way we do. They implant their fertilized ova in slave wombs—humans will do as well as servus.”

Henry winced. Jesus. “Without a man—”

“Cloning. This is a cancer, an infestation, like maggots in your flesh. You have to get it all, no matter how deep you must cut.” Lafarge grinned. “That’s the bad news.”

“You’re the good news, right?” Carmaggio said.

“A big part of it. Myself, my equipment. And it has weaknesses. They tend to arrogance and overconfidence, and they’re parasites, dependent on their slaves. Not really creative at all. And it’s under-equipped, with nothing but its equivalent of street clothing.”

“Good we’ve got you to ride to the rescue.”

Lafarge let the sarcasm roll off him; Carmaggio suspected he wasn’t long on irony, anyway. Is it him, or are they all that po-faced where he comes from?

“No, all I can do is help you. I’m incongruent with this reference frame . . . Think of it this way: I stand out. Every time I do something that makes things different from the way they’d be if I weren’t here, there’s a . . . blip. An event wave. The enemy get a chance of detecting how-where-when we are.”

“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Carmaggio said.

Well, Chief Wampanoag the Pilgrim Father said, he thought, evil spirits hide in the iron tube. When you pull the trigger, they push the lead ball out . . . Great Thanksgiving turkey, have another cup of mulled cider and now about that little land deal . . . He couldn’t expect it to make any sense. In a way, that was reassuring. If it had made sense in his terms, he’d have doubted it. Four centuries—more, in terms of actual progress. Try explaining electricity to Sir Walter Raleigh.

“What can we do, then?”

“Act on my information. That’ll still leave . . . signs . . . but less so. Muffled.”

He held up a hand. “I can’t direct you. Even that would be dangerous.”


# # #


“Hey, jake,” the Guard officer said.

“El-tee,” Henry Carmaggio replied.

Actually Saunders was a National Guard major these days, but they went back a ways. Back to the delta. Carmaggio had been a plain garden-variety grunt; Saunders started out as a lieutenant and walked out a captain. To be precise, he’d been invalided out back to the World as a captain, with some exotic Vietnamese rot carried on a punji stake eating his feet. Still a trim little guy, dark—part Indian, from Oklahoma—looking more wrinkled and gray than they all had in ’70, but hell, that was a long time ago. A small, smart man with a big nose, blue cracker eyes and a lot of oil money who still wore the uniform sometimes. Probably with as much conviction as he did the inconspicuously well-tailored businessman’s suit he had on now.

“What can I do for you?”

Carmaggio looked around the office. Nice. At Saunders’s level, weekend warriors had to have major pull; which meant their civilian jobs tended to be roughly equivalent to their military rank—and a lot better-paying than regular officers of the same formal status. A secretary came in with coffee in elegant bone china cups. None of the lingering aroma of old socks and sweat you had down at NYPD headquarters, that was for sure. Pale carpet, pale pastel colors on the walls.

“El-tee—Christ, Mr. Saunders—”

“Bill, Henry.”

“Okay, Bill. The first thing you can do for me is promise not to send for the guys with white coats and butterfly nets.”

Saunders leaned back in his swivel chair behind the broad desk.

“Okay,” he said. Time and money hadn’t smoothed much of the East Texas rasp out of his voice. “I’m pretty damn sure you’re not here to sell me tickets to the policeman’s ball or tell me how you found the Lord. Shoot.”

Carmaggio ran a hand through his hair. Christ on a stick, this is embarrassing.

“Right. About three and a half years ago, there was a big killing in a disused warehouse, twenty dead.”

Saunders frowned. “Yep, remember that one.”

“Here’s what really happened—”

Twenty minutes later, he sank back in his chair, exhausted enough to let the thick leather upholstery cradle him in its Old Spice-scented comfort. Saunders looked at him silently; Carmaggio waited, sweat rolling down into the collar of his shirt and making his shoulder holster dig into his skin.

“Henry, that story leaves me one of three alternatives,” Saunders said, clipping the end off a cigar. “Smoke?”

“Gave it up.”

“Yep. Either you’ve started using the junk you confiscate, or you’re seriously bullshitting me . . . or you’re telling the truth. If you’re tellin’ the truth, you’d better have something to show me. I owe you one, but nobody’s going to convince me the Gumbys of the Gods have landed without hard evidence.”

The detective met the cold blue eyes. William Saunders might have ears like an old-fashioned milk jug and political ambitions, but he’d also brought his platoon through a year of bad bush with fewer losses and more done than anyone else in the district. He was listening for old times’ sake, nothing more.

“Yeah . . . Bill. I realize hearing all this isn’t like going through it yourself.” A bleak nod answered him. “As it happens,” he went on, taking a black rectangle out of his pocket, “I do have something fairly convincing.”

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Framed