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Our Paranormal Chernobyl It had been a half hour since Maggie had talked to Detective Hammersmith, and she was tired of waiting. She’d spent the first twenty minutes making hardcopies of the chemical data she’d gathered. She found the duffel bag in one of the lab lockers and packed her armor into it, along with the data printouts and the hard drive and e-mail sheets Stokes had brought. Then, unwilling to stay in the low-ceilinged lab any longer, she’d come outside to wait, pace, and drink coffee. Unfortunately, her thermos of Starbucks Christmas Roast had run dry. As she complete another lap up and down the sidewalk, a yellow cab pulled to a stop in front of her, and out stepped none other than the red-clad archer, Crossfire. Maggie quit her pacing abruptly and made a beeline straight for Crossfire. "Hey there. Hope you’ve had more luck than I did." Jonathan snapped out of his reverie and looked up at Maggie. At first he didn’t register the face, then his eyes opened wide with realization. "Oh hey! Magnitude! Sorry, lost in thought there for a minute. The most luck I’ve had to today was a close encounter with a Vienna red-hot." For emphasis, he wiped his chin with a napkin. "I’ll be honest, it hasn’t been good." Blake related the events of the day to her, ending with his dismissal by PRIMUS. "Those guys have a major bug up their asses. I decided the next best course of action was back here at the station. A guy named Stokes was helping me track an address packet back across some transmitters. I’m hoping it will lead us back to the bad guys." "Stokes was here earlier. He tracked down that packet radio you dismantled. Turns out it was sending out encrypted messages to an account on an anonymous remailer in Sweden." "Sweden? Damn." Jonathan looked thoughtful for a moment before nailing two points on a basket with the crumpled napkin. "We’ve got to find a way to make that work. Maybe I can send a message to the packet that will pass along the whole length, then send back a reply listing all of its transfers along the way." Crossfire considered the feasibility of that, then looked over at Maggie. "How are you with computers?" "Good enough to know that mail doesn’t work that way", Maggie said sadly. "SMTP isn’t called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol for nothing. Normal e-mail can’t execute code, and I don’t think these people will be dumb enough to execute an attachment.""You’re right there." Crossfire looked to his right and frowned. "Sorry, I’m a little distracted today." There was no need to mention he was also more of a hardware expert than a software one, but he still knew enough to believe that there was a solution. The answer seemed tantalizingly close. "The other pellet’s a time-released chemical mechanism. It uses fat cells as a coating that’s slowly eaten away by the body’s enzymes. No idea what the chemicals are yet." Maggie nodded thoughtfully. "It will be difficult, but… If the culprits are in Chicago, and they seem to be, then the packets have to get through to them somehow. I figure there’s a lot of routers in the area, but it may be possible to monitor them for this specific message. That’s assuming, of course, that the message stays in SMTP format from one end of the process to the other—a long shot at best." "There’s a way. There has to be a way." Crossfire wanted to sit and think about it, but decided he would just be forcing the subject. Better to relax and just try to be Zen about it, as Darius would say. "Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have a cell phone on you by chance?" Jonathan wondered if the old man might be back at the hotel by now. Concern started to worm its way into his thoughts; if his uncle had encountered Woodbridge by chance, would his thinking be any clearer than Jonathan’s had? "Sure. Here." Maggie unholstered her small cell phone and handed it to Crossfire. "Hammersmith’s going to be here in a few minutes. We’re going to go search Sontag’s labs." "As for the messages," she said, "I’ve noticed that the body of the message never changes. So either the pellet monitors something that hasn’t changed in a while, or it’s a tracking device." She lifted the printout for emphasis. "Of course, the vagaries of the Internet mean you can’t possibly track something in a timely manner this way, and the message really gives you no idea of the target’s position, since it never changes. But what if the message was a decoy and our suspects were tracking the actual radio signal rather than reading the e-mails?" Crossfire shook his head. "It still may be a tracking signal. All The messages were identical? I’ll bet they were—the pellet hadn’t moved from the lab in a while, so that could be an explanation." He nodded thanks to Maggie as he flipped open the phone and started to punch in numbers. "A decoy? Not sure on that one either… hang on a sec." Crossfire turned away from Maggie, taking a few casual steps away as a chipper voice answered on behalf of the Palmer House Hotel. "Darius Blake, please." Jonathan listened as the phone rang once, twice… After four rings, voice-mail kicked in. The female computer voice told him in her cut-and-paste sentences that the resident wasn’t available, but that he could leave a message at the tone or press zero to talk to an operator. "Darius, it’s me. Hope everything’s alright and you’re playing it safe." Jonathan paused as he looked over to Maggie, "I’m on a roller coaster here, watch the news, you’ll see what I mean. Um…" Jonathan paused and asked Maggie for the cell phone number, then recited it to the recording. "Call me okay? I need to know you’re all right. Later." Crossfire flipped the phone closed and handed it back to Maggie, "Hope you don’t mind my taking a call on it. Thanks." "It’s fine," Maggie said, pocketing the phone. She looked up the street impatiently and was rewarded by the sight of Hammersmith pulling up to the curb. He opened the door, stepped out, and smiled when he realized that the long-haired girl in the uniform was Maggie. "You’d make a good beat cop, Ms. Thorin." "Nah, I don’t have the patience. Are we ready?" "Ready. " Hammersmith nodded to Crossfire. "We’re going to Sontag’s labs. You’re welcome to come if you like. I’d like to hear what you learned about the pellets." "There’s a lot to tell. Maggie here was pretty busy from the sounds of it and we made some headway with a pellet that’s sending out a signal. Guy named Stokes was a lot of help. Nice guy." Better than some cops, Jonathan thought to himself. "Ed and I got distracted along with Waters at a supermarket. Another living meta. Three things on that. PRIMUS is now in on the dance, Waters doesn’t like me much, and Ed freaked out." Hammersmith laughed. "Sounds like a busy couple of hours. Give me the details on the way over." At the first stoplight, Hammersmith handed a white paper sack to Maggie and held up another one. "You eat yet, Crossfire? Best gyros in Chicago." He pronounced it "year-oze." Maggie took the bulky sandwich out of the sack and unwrapped it. It was a big, puffy round of pita bread, stuffed with rectangles of thin brown meat, onions, and tomatoes, all slathered in some kind of white cucumber sauce. Eating this thing in a moving car would be no mean trick. "Looks like a shawarma without the lettuce," said Maggie. "I’m okay thanks, but if we drive by a falafel place, let’s stop in." The sausage was good, but not enough. Not even with the fries. "So," Hammersmith said, catching Crossfire’s eyes in the rear view mirror. "Tell me about the meta and what happened. Waters hasn’t reported in yet." Jonathan took a glance out the window and launched into the re-telling of it all. "There’s only one thing that bothers me out of all this," Crossfire added, concluding the account, "is where Jack’s rights are in all of this? Waters was ready to gas him out or worse. No one seemed to care that he’s just a guy in the wrong place, wrong time. I know I had to start beating up on him too, but that was just to prevent him going nuts on Ed." He shook his head back towards the window. "Maybe I just should have let him," he muttered. "Nobody has the right to destroy a store and endanger people," Hammersmith said. "And what if he didn’t stop with that store, or more people got in his way? Sounds like Jack wasn’t in control of his hunger or his powers. You got out of his mouth alive, but other people may not have been so lucky. From what you’ve told me, PRIMUS, Waters, and you all made the same decision, at different times—you even gassed him yourself, right?" "Maybe I painted the situation a little too black and white. There were still, people unaccounted for inside the supermarket. Waters was all for me going in and trying to bring him out—the area around the supermarket was considered secure. Ed was stationed outside if we couldn’t handle Jack." Crossfire sat forward his head between the front seats. "That idea seemed fine until your 2IC suddenly flip-flopped his mind and started in with the idea of tear-gassing. Sorry, but that’s not my idea of a solution. We didn’t know at the time Jack didn’t have things fully under control. Would you want an enraged meta wandering inside a supermarket with other innocents trapped inside? I did get Jack outside, then Ed seemed to attack Jack anyway, not according to the plan. That’s when the shit hit the fan. There was no reason for it, so go bust his balls for it." "I’m not going to argue with you about Waters. I know him, and you don’t. He thinks costumed vigilantes are showboaters who don’t follow orders and don’t work well with others. Even if Waters said that he wanted to tear-gas Jack out of there, which I don’t doubt for a minute, he wouldn’t have done it without a plan, and without working out the details with SWAT and PRIMUS. He’s a methodical, smart cop. I’m surprised that he asked you along at all—probably my bad influence. I know he must be regretting it." Hammersmith changed lanes and took a quick left onto Ohio street. "The point is, sometimes you have to take people down in order to help them." "That’s the problem with dealing with metahuman problems," Maggie put in. "Because of the scale of the destruction that can be caused inadvertently, sometimes you have to take radical action right off the bat for public safety. You need to be careful and not go overboard either way. It’s a fine balancing act." "I guess everyone fell off the high-wire today then," added Jonathan. "If we’re going to find out who did this to Jack and Iggy and the other people in this town," Hammersmith said, "we can’t fight amongst ourselves, and we’ve got to communicate. Maggie and I found that out a little while ago when we tried to subdue a new meta named Stranger. Did she tell you about that? A little more information before the confrontation would have made a world of difference." Hammersmith brought the car to the curb outside a glass-walled skyscraper. The Detective turned in his seat to look at Crossfire, his face serious. "Now. Do you have anything you want to tell us about Stranger?" "Not much. The guy appears to be Theo August. The fact that he’s not playing with a full deck is obvious, but you’d have one less cop walking the streets if it wasn’t for him. Is he misunderstood? Is he easy to misunderstand? You bet on both, but I’d trust him sooner than I’d trust Ed." "You may not want us fighting amongst ourselves," the archer continued. "But someone should let Ed know that. The guy has a serious hard-on against anybody in a costume, and he’s pretty judgmental. Once he’s made up his mind on face-value, there’s no talking to him otherwise." Jonathan leaned back with a creak on the vinyl, "Hey, I know I’m biased against the kid. But the fact remains, he’s not stable, and that’s a big part of why I don’t want him near me." Hammersmith shook his head. "I’m not asking about your personal problems with Ed. I’m asking why you didn’t tell me about Stranger being Theo August when we talked at the Tavern. By the time we found out who he was, the situation had escalated, August didn’t trust us, and we had no backup except for another new meta that I didn’t trust. Stranger knocked out Maggie, and he could have easily killed her. So my question is, are you withholding anything else that I should know about?" "I wasn’t sure that Stranger was August. I actually had meant to tell you, but all the excitement with the pellets kind of threw me off that track." Crossfire glanced over Maggie appraisingly. Stranger was strong enough to handle having Iggy drop on top of him. If Maggie had been knocked out by Stranger, she was sure taking it well. "No, I’m not holding anything else back. That’s it. But let me ask you a question? The way things have been going today, do you really believe knowing it was Theo August would have helped at all?" "Maybe you’re right, considering how the rest of the day has gone," Hammersmith said. "But it would have made a big difference in how I handled the situation. If I had a description of August, Maggie and I wouldn’t have wasted time trying to figure out if Q-Ball—that’s the new meta who showed up—or Stranger was lying to us. Our objective would have been clear. Unlike what we’re about to do now." The detective nodded toward the building. "I’ve got a search warrant to take anything in Dr. Vrlick’s lab that could be used to create or kill metas. But I don’t know what exactly that would be. Our usual approach is to grab everything and let the experts go over it with a fine-tooth comb. But I asked Maggie along so she could point out the important gadgets and files and save us a lot of time. Considering your federal status," he said, referring to Crossfire’s membership on the federal meta team, "I think I can get away with you coming up with us. But I’ll ask you the same thing I asked of Maggie: don’t touch anything. Just point out anything you think is important." "No problem. I’m glad your imagination provides a lot of latitude on the search warrant. It’s pretty vague." Jonathan wondered what help he could give in a lab, then hopefully acknowledged to himself that this search just might shed some light on the tracking signal. "Okay then." Hammersmith got on his radio and said that he was ready. From various parked cars—and one truck—along the busy street, a dozen men and women in blue CPD jackets began to converge on the front door. Hammersmith looked to Maggie, then back to Crossfire. "Ready?" "Let’s get to it already," Maggie snapped, opening her car door. "All this is leaving a bad taste in my mouth." Blake spared her a skewed glance as he backed up the party in front. "What’s the problem with this?" "There’s a very sick kid in there and I don’t want her harmed. That, and Ms. Sontag fired me a few hours ago." "Fired you? But I thought she only just hired you?" Crossfire’s brow furrowed. "Uh-uh, something’s not right in that. Anyone else know of any big-time genetics labs running around Chicago? I’d say we may be close to hitting paydirt here." "There’s none that I know of," Maggie replied. "Even Sontag isn’t really in that business." Maggie and Crossfire followed the team of cops, led by Hammersmith, as they crossed the gleaming, marbled expanse of the atrium to the bank of elevators. Most of the nine men and three women in the blue CPD jackets carried bulky equipment cases. Maggie with her heavy duffel and Crossfire with his own array of equipment fit right in. The security guard that had tried to stop Hammersmith and Maggie less than two hours ago didn’t even move from his station by the wall. "Twenty-ninth floor," Hammersmith told them, and went up with the first group of five cops. Maggie and Jonathan made it into the next available elevator with another group of four officers. The woman next to Crossfire glanced up at him as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves. She had short dark hair and a classic roman nose. "Hell of a day, ain’t it?" "If it gets any worse, I’m packing up my toys and going home." Jonathan grinned down at the woman. She was cute, but the pantsuit and nylon jacket spoiled the look. He’d already seen way too many cops today for his liking. The doors opened to find Hammersmith waiting silently as a gray-haired man in a fourteen-hundred dollar suit looked over the detective’s papers. Laurie, the teenaged-looking receptionist Maggie had met this morning, stood nervously behind her desk. She saw Maggie and lifted her hand in a wave, then dropped it. "Sorry, Laurie. This has been one of those days for everyone and it’s not over yet. You better call Freya." "Too late," Laurie stage whispered. The gray-haired man glanced up at her, frowning, then went back to the papers. The archer watched the girl shift nervously behind the desk. Her over-glossed lips and equally shiny clothes made Jonathan realize why he didn’t miss the corporate world with its glazed phoniness. Even the suit was making indignant but still polite noises to Hammersmith, the pitch of his voice reminding him of a nervous Chihuahua. The gray-haired man handed the papers back to Hammersmith. "That warrant is criminally vague, Detective," the man said. "But we won’t stand in your way. Ms. Sontag asked me to inform you that every one of her employees will cooperate fully in the investigation, but if you seize any property that is not absolutely required as evidence to prosecute the thief, she will hold the city—and you—liable in court. Do we have an understanding?" Jonathan had to fight the urge to make faces mimicking the suit as he spoke. The contradiction bothered him: take what you want because we’re happy to help, but take something by mistake and we’ll sue. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Every lawyer joke he’d ever heard sprang to mind. "Absolutely, Counselor," Hammersmith said. He glanced behind him as the third and final elevator full of officers arrived. "All right, ladies and gentlemen. The lab is behind that door. Seal it up and do it by the book. Ms.," he said, addressing Laurie. "Could you open that door please?" The secretary reached under her desk and pressed some button. The door to the lab began to buzz. "Maggie and Crossfire, you’re with me." And he led the group into the room beyond. The lab was as Maggie remembered it. The southern wall opposite them was all glass above the waist-high wainscoting. The view faced south, along Michigan Avenue, with the blue-green expanse of Lake Michigan visible to the left. The main area of the big room was the general lab, with seven tables loaded with computers and chemical equipment. On the west wall, set between bookshelves and equipment cabinets, were two doors. One was to the animal lab that Goran had shown her, where Argo the "talking" dog was kept. The other door, made of stainless steel, was the entrance to the walk-in fridge where most of the samples were kept. Along the east wall were the "offices," two open-ended cubicles with desks, PCs, and filing cabinets used by Anna and Torvald, Goran’s two assistants. The door to Goran’s private office was at the southern end of the east wall—Maggie hadn’t gone in there during her brief visit—but it was open now. The wild-haired, pale man that Maggie had met earlier stepped out of Goran’s office. Torvald. He looked over the group with a sneer on his face. "For Christ’s sake, what now?" he said. Definitely Torvald. Jonathan was ready to dislike the man on principle. To keep the sneer from mirroring on his own face, he instead turned to Hammersmith. "Um, detective? Are you planning to take all the hard drives?" He asked the question like a boy wondering when the family could open Christmas presents. "In good time," Hammersmith said. "I want Maggie to point out what we should look for first." "It might be appropriate to make copies of the data," Maggie said. "That way we can properly identify the substances and Ms. Sontag is not deprived of her property. But the first thing we should look at is the sample box. I’d prefer we kept those for as short a time as possible—they’ll need it to continue their work, and with the child’s life in the balance, time is of the essence." "Sample box—got it." Hammersmith walked toward the sneering man in the lab coat and held out his hand. "You must be Torvald Lorentzen, Dr. Vrlick’s assistant." Torvald looked at his hand, but didn’t take it. "Brilliant deduction, Sherlock," the man said. "I’m sure not Anna." Hammersmith smiled. "Do I make you nervous, or are you this obnoxious with everyone?" Torvald rolled his eyes. "What samples. We have samples of everything." He glared at Maggie. "You don’t even know what you’re looking for, do you?" "I mean the samples of Roya’s cells. The ones like those that were stolen." The conversation was lost on Crossfire. The first wrong turn was Torvald’s tone of voice. The guy reminded Jonathan of some of the computer geeks he’d encountered during his brief tenure in California. Some folks needed to look down on others as a way to bolster their own self-worth, and it always seemed that those with a greater intelligence seemed to do it in the most obnoxious of ways. "The R-1 samples weren’t all that were stolen," Torvald said. "We’re also missing samples of the suppression candidates. I’ve been testing the racks—about thirty vials so far are full of empty water." "Suppression candidates?" Hammersmith asked. "What are those?" Torvald sighed elaborately. "Hasn’t Ms. Thorin there told you what we were working on?" Hammersmith glanced at Maggie, a small smile on his lips that he quickly put away. "She has, Mr. Lorentzen—but why don’t you tell me in your own words. Before I decide that you need to tell me downtown." Torvald muttered something under his breath. He took a chair from a nearby lab table, sat down, and crossed his legs like a bored Eastern European professor. "All right. Let me make this clear enough for even a moron to understand. The R-1 protein—the active agent we distill from Roya’s cells—rewrites DNA. It’s like a runaway cancer that causes humans and higher animals to express radical traits—metahuman traits. Goran, Anna, and I are trying to find substances to suppress R-1. We’ve designed several candidates using tricks from other protein suppressors in nature, and by using computer models, but none of suppressors have been tested." Jonathan busied himself by watching what the officers were doing around the area. Regardless of Maggie’s wishes, the police were taping drive doors shut and removing entire computers—everything but the monitors. Copying the files would be nice, but the police weren’t generally armed with ZIP drives and a hundred or so disks. There was simply too much information to look at—you could spend all day just deciding what to copy. And pulling the whole PC was a lot faster than unscrewing the thing to get at the hard drive. "Detective Hammersmith?" Crossfire leaned in to speak to the officer quietly. Hammersmith held up a finger to Torvald and glanced back at the archer. "I’m pretty clear on the ground rules you laid out. With the DEA and the feds I’ve already been in on a few search and seizures. I might be of better use looking around at the computer hardware. It relates back to the pellets. If I need an escort just assign one to me." The detective pointed at the dark-haired female officer Jonathan had talked to in the elevator. "Calamino, you’re with Crossfire. Show him what he wants to look at, but you do all the touching." "Got it," the woman said. She’d just finished duct-taping one of the computers shut and noting it on a clipboard. "What would you like to see, Crossfire?" "Two things, but one is way more important. I’ve got a hunch. Let’s walk." Jonathan steered Calamino politely with one hand at her elbow, even then barely touching, down the hallway towards the back offices. He glanced back at Torvald to make sure they were out of range for being overheard. "What a knob," Jonathan said to the officer. "I’ve got a hunch here. I say, we find his two assistants, just to check them out at least. I keep hearing about ‘two doctors’ from the still-living metas I’ve encountered today. Herr Doktor over there has two assistants. Coincidence?" Crossfire flashed a grin, "I think not." Officer Calamino looked confused, and glanced back at Torvald. "Isn’t that guy the assistant to Dr. Vrlick?" "It is?" Now it was Crossfire’s turn to look confused. "Damn, I need a scorecard. It’s the mask, cuts off the oxygen to the brain. Scratch that, then." "No prob," she said. "Well, the second thing we could do is look for communications equipment. I’ll point, you nab, okay? The other thing I’d suggest we look at later, off-site, is purchasing and requisition records. If there’s a secret lab off-site, it’d make sense if the equipment came via here." "I’ll wrap and tag anything you point at, but you’ll have to talk to Hammersmith about the records thing. Out of my area. So what do you want to nab first?" Maggie paced back and forth, apparently ignoring everyone else in the room while she considered Torvald's words. Why would the canditates be stolen as well? They would really have only two purposes—one would be to stop the progress of Roya's infection, and the other... "Saint-Cāline. None of those suppressors actually reverse the effects of the R-1 protein, do they?" "You’re not listening," Torvald said. "We don’t know what they do." Torvald sighed elaborately. "They’re just candidates. But no—I don’t see how any of them could even theoretically reverse the effects of R-1. I mean, how would the suppressor know what to convert the cells back to?" "I figured as much. Detective Hammersmith, I’d like to talk to you in private for a minute." Hammersmith nodded and followed her to the other side of the room. "What are you thinking, Maggie?" "Those suppressors are at least as important as the original protein—the R-1—itself. The R-1 resequences the subject’s DNA to metahuman levels. You just wait, then apply the suppressor to lock it in place and stabilize the subject’s condition. Poof, instant metahuman. Remember the golden pellet? I’d bet all you want that that’s what it did; two time-released mechanisms, one for the R-1, one for the suppressor." Hammersmith thought this over. "All right—I can follow that. But who would want to make metahumans? And for goodness sakes, why?" "Super-soldiers, super-criminals—I can think of a good number of reasons. I think the random injections is meant to be an experiment, since this is not something people will volunteer for, for obvious reason." Maggie’s tone made her disgust of this method of research clear. "As for who, your guess is as good as mine." "I don’t like guessing." The detective glanced over at Torvald, who was studiously ignoring them. "But we’ll have to deal with the ‘who’ later. Okay, what do you need from this lab to back up your theory with the pellets?" "Either samples to draw comparisons, or analysis data on the R-1 and on the suppressors. Preferably both. No need to take all the samples", Maggie said, still feeling somewhat guilty over bringing a search warrant to Freya’s door. "A few for comparison will suffice." She grinned and kidded, "Of course, I’d love to have the testing equipment too, but that’s not in your warrant." "If you need it to solve this case, then it can be arranged," Hammersmith said. His tone was light, but Maggie understood that he was quite serious. The detective crossed back to Torvald. "Give Miss Thorin everything she needs. First, the analysis data of this R-1 substance. Then samples. Then whatever the heck she wants. Am I clear?" Torvald rolled his eyes. "If she’s such a genius, why not let her—" "Am I clear?" Hammersmith repeated. Maggie couldn’t see the detective’s face, but there must have been something in it that convinced Torvald to shut up and comply. The thin-lipped young man didn’t say anything for a few moments, but then he slowly got up and walked over to a computer. "The data’s right here, Ms. Thorin," he said, voice shaky. He kept his eyes on the screen. "What would you like to see first?" "Bring up the spectrograms for the R-1 and your suppressors." Maggie wasn’t too keen on showing Torvald the results of her own analysis, but there was nothing to keep her from figuring out whether either or both the substances in the gold pellet were in the Sontag database. "While you’re at it, I’d like to take a quick look at your analysis of how R-1 operates and hypothesis on what the suppressors will do." Maybe she might even bring her original mission to fruition—figure out a way to cure Roya. That’d require a reverser, though—but that might not be a bad thing to research for the other new metahumans, either. Torvald brought up the specifications for R-1, and Maggie saw immediately that the numbers matched one of the substances she’d scraped from one of the halves of the gold pellet. It was the half that had been sealed with more fatty proteins—the half that would have been released well after the other side. No surprise here, Maggie thought. The lab assistant started opening the files for the suppressors. "We had three suppressor candidates, each designed to work in a different way," Torvald said. His voice became calmer as he got down to business. "S-1 tries to interrupt the replication of R-1 by disturbing the natural cycle of already-infected cells. S-2 tries to fill the target sites on healthy cell walls, so that R-1 can’t infect the cell. And S-3 is like a vaccine—it ‘programs’ the T-cells to recognize infected cells, and the T-cells start destroying every infected cell it can find." As they appeared on screen, Maggie mentally compared them to the specs she’d recorded for the substance in the other half of the pellet. The first two sets of numbers had some similarity to the substance, but the third spec sheet was a near-perfect match. S-3 had been the first substance released into the person’s bloodstream. "Sounds like it’d kill the host if it was injected after the patient had started to mutate to any significant degree", Maggie pointed out. "But it would work for prevention." They’re testing the vaccine! Maggie thought immediately. Maybe the other victims were tests of the other suppressors. Well, I think that clinches the issue on whether the chemicals were stolen from here or not—I don’t think it could be a coincidence that we have perfect matches for two obscure compounds. Now for motive. The S-3 wouldn’t ‘seal’ the recipient’s power, stabilizing him, as I originally thought the objective to be. No, it’s clearly a test of the suppressors—but why? Was Goran so desperate? She stood up. "Thanks, Torvald. I’m going to talk to Hammersmith a bit. I’m afraid our officer friends are going to want this data." Meanwhile, Calamino had been following Crossfire around as he inspected the equipment. There were plenty of PCs, most of them hooked to machines that looked awfully like the boxes that had been in the Police Evidence Lab. He read the labels on a few and saw that they were gas chromatographs, and mass spectronomy machines: the black boxes that chemists used to find out what stuff our dreams were made of. The PCs were networked, and there was blue cable running to either end of the room, where there were two Ethernet hub boxes. From the hubs, the cables ran into the walls—and probably out to a proxy server and mail server to provide internet connectivity. He opened the equipment cabinets along the wall, but there was nothing in there that looked like remotely like communications equipment. After ten minutes of looking around, Crossfire had nothing that tied the lab to the silver tracking pellet he’d analyzed. Hammersmith saw Maggie stand up, and met her in the center of the room. "What have you got?" "First, I’ve got 99% confidence that one of the compounds we found in that gold ball was the R-1 they’re studying here. Second, I’ve got 99% confidence that the other compound is one of the suppressors they’ve developed, only it’s the vaccine one, the one which wouldn’t seal the metahuman abilities like I thought earlier." She frowned. "So the point would be testing the suppressors, not trying to create metahumans. Goran suddenly looks like a more plausible suspect—he was pretty desperate to get the suppressors working. But it could be anyone who is working here; they might be working at the behest of Ms. Sontag in hopes of curing Roya." She shrugged. "At least the odds of this being orchestrated from the outside are pretty much nil. It’s become more imperative to locate Goran, and this search just went up a few notches in importance." Hammersmith nodded. "I’ll send people to watch Vrlick’s house, and I’ll try to put a few more men on tracking him down. Frankly, though, we’re spread pretty thin. As for insiders, we’ll interrogate Torvald, and move up to Sontag. As for the other assistant—is that her?" Crossfire was helping Officer Calamino detach monitors from the PCs when the lab door opened behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a blond woman standing in the doorway, looking surprised at the commotion in the room. She was in her mid-twenties, dressed in gray slacks and a white blouse, a gray blazer over her arm. "What’s going on?" she said. Then she seemed to realize that Crossfire was in costume. "And who are you?" "I’d direct your questions to Detective Hammersmith over there. He’s the man in charge." Maggie saw that it was indeed Anna, the lab assistant she met this morning. The young woman exchanged a serious look with Torvald, then walked toward Hammersmith and Maggie. "Hi again, Ms. Thorin," she said extending a hand. "I wish we were weren’t getting to know each other in such awful circumstances." She sounded nervous, but her grip was firm. She turned to the detective. "The man in the costume over there says you’re in charge, Detective. I’m Anna Graumann." She shook hands with the Detective, then looked around. "Is it really necessary to dismantle everything? I can’t believe this is anything but a great mistake. Goran was too dedicated to his work to ever steal from it." "The police aren’t accusing Goran of anything," Hammersmith said. "But we would like to talk to him. Have you seen him since this morning? Talked to him?" The red-haired woman shook her head. "No. Nothing. Do you think he’s all right?" "Why wouldn’t he be all right?" "If he’s missing… well, the work meant everything to Goran. If he was blamed for this, it would destroy him. His career, his reputation as a scientist—it would all be over. I don’t think he could take it." "Dammit," Maggie swore. "I hope he’s smarter than that. He wouldn’t have a cell phone with him, would he?" "He doesn't own one," Anna said. "At least, none that I've ever seen." "And we've tried his home phone," Hammersmith added. "Do you have any ideas about where he might go?" The detective asked her if she knew the names of any of Goran's friends, or of any of his favorite restaurants, parks, or coffee shops. Anna didn't have much to offer. The scientist had colleagues at the University of Chicago, and lots of other casual acquainances in town, but seemed to have few close friends. "Was he seeing anyone?" Hammersmith asked. Anna glanced at Torvald, twenty feet away. He'd turned his back to the group and was typing into the PC. "We... had dinner a few times. But we broke it off—it just wasn't… well, the age thing. And of course, Goran's married to his work." "Any place he liked to hang out?" Maggie asked. "To drink or relax?" "Not really. He would get coffee every morning at the Starbucks down the street. And on the weekends I know he went to Grant Park to read. But besides that… he wasn't a relaxer." "Might still be worth looking at the park," Maggie pointed out to Hammersmith. "He might want to be alone right now." "We can't have that, can we?" Hammersmith said, jotting down something in his notepad. "I'll send somebody over there, and we'll start talking to his friends at the college." "Could you call me if you find him?" Anna asked. "I'd like to know if he's all right." "Will do," Hammersmith said. "I'm sure that—" He was interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. "Speaking of transitions…" he said, and flipped open the phone. "Hammersmith." A long pause. "You don't say." Another long pause. "You don't say!" A few seconds later the detective sighed and said, "You don't say." And hung up. "So, what is it that he's not saying?" queried Maggie. Hammersmith laughed and shook his head. "Oh, Maggie, someday you're going to catch on to this comedy thing, and I want to be there when you do." Maggie chuckled. "I know, I know. 'Who was that?' 'He didn't say'. Sue me for trying to be original." "My apologies, then," Hammersmith said, smiling. He put away his phone, folded up his notepad, and took out a business card. He shook hands with Anna and gave her the card. "Miss Graumann, we'll be in touch. Please call if you hear from Goran before I do. I'm afraid you won't have much to do here in the lab today, because we're taking everything." Anna started to say something, then simply nodded. "Maggie, can I talk to you and Crossfire?" The detective crossed the room to where the archer was working with the dark-haired cop, Officer Calamino. "I have to go meet with the Mayor," Hammersmith told Calamino. "So you're in charge until another Homicide detective shows up—they're supposed to send somebody over. Clear the whole lab—equipment, computers, materials, everything. Use hazmat protocols for all the biologicals, and keep them on ice. Call me when you're finished." "Got it, sir," Calamino said, and moved off to tell the others. "That was Waters on the phone," Hammersmith said to Maggie and Crossfire. "He's finished with the supermarket problem, and the meta has been sedated—PRIMUS has him in a cell in their headquarters. And our friend Ed also went with them." The detective shrugged. "Go figure. But I've got to update the mayor. They've found two more dead metahumans—one of them the 'stone man' statue that Ed told us about at Mike's." Hammersmith looked at both of them, his eyes tired. "I'd like to ask you both to stay on the investigation—you've been an enormous help with the pellets. Crossfire, Maggie's identified the substances that came from one of the pellets, and they both came out of this lab. She can fill you in on the details, but basically she's thinking this whole meltdown is an experiment to test meta-gene suppression. We've got to find Doctor Vrlick—Maggie can tell you about him, too. We've got to find the other people with these pellets in them—Iggy and Stranger, to name two, but there are undoubtably others that we haven't found yet. And we have to find those two robot characters who injected everyone." He exhaled loudly. "Any ideas before I go?" "The radio pellets," Maggie suggested. "We can try to intercept the frequency and use triangulation to locate the other subjects. That might even be Crossfire nodded in agreement. "I've seen enough Wild Kingdom episodes to know tagging and tracking is all part of the experiment. I still want to find a way to track that signal back to the source if possible, because that's where we'll find our mannequins. Maybe this Dr. Vrlick as well." He shrugged his shoulders. "I'll let Maggie fill me in after you're gone. But I have overheard enough already to draw one possibility." "Everyone keeps going on about the unlikelihood of this Vrlick guy being involved. So, maybe he isn't. Sounds like a frame-up to me, one where the subject may be getting hung out so far he won't be able to tell everyone how he's innocent. Ever." "Either way," Hammersmith said grimly, "we have to find Dr. Vrlick. I'll set up the expanded manhunt on my way over to the Mayor's." He glanced at his watch. "Before I go, tell me what you need to work on this tracking thing." "We're going to need directional radio scanners—at least two," Maggie said. "And the more the merrier. We'll set them to the packet radio's frequency, wait for a transmission, then triangulate the source. Simple solutions are often best. We won't be able to locate our culprits, but we may find more of their victims. Like Stranger, say." "Alrighty, then," Hammersmith said. "The person you need is Stokes—Detective Stokel. He's unorthodox, as I'm sure you two already noticed, but he knows surveillance and tracking equipment, and he can get you what you need. Call headquarters and ask for him, and tell him I sent you. I'll make—" He was interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. "Darn it, I'm never getting out of here." He took a step away from the duo, flipped open his phone, and said, "Hammersmith." After a pause, he said, "I think the whole city is." Another pause, and then he chuckled. "I’ve come across it, through it, and at the moment, I’m carting it away. I take it you’ve been talking to Ed." The detective glanced up at Crossfire as he said this. "Yes I am, along with Crossfire and Maggie Thorin. We're seizing the entire lab and sending it down to the evidence lab. But I’m about to leave for the Mayor’s office for a coordination meeting on the entire meta situation. You should be there as well—I’ve been trying to reach Raj, but Teddy Amidon wouldn’t put me through. Since you’re still acting SA, I take it he hasn’t shown up?" While Hammersmith talked, the police continued to pack up the lab. Maggie and Crossfire heard a cop exclaim, "What the hell?" An officer had opened the door to the animal lab, and a German shepherd trotted out. "Hey," the dog said. He trotted over to Maggie and sniffed her black, police-issue shoes. "Hey hey!" Startled, Crossfire took a step back, the realized the dog was looking back at him. The same vacant, dumb look all dogs gave humans. A simple request to be petted. He held his hand down to be sniffed then went down on his haunches to scratch at its ears. "You can talk?" he asked. The whole idea made him think of the night Darius had gone on about witches and warlocks and their familiars as they’d called them. The next day Jonathan swore to never keep Glenfidditch in the loft. "Hey," agreed the dog. "He can’t," Maggie explained. "He’s just got some metagenes that affect the way he barks. At least, that’s what I figured. Anna or Torvald can give you all the gory details." She grew pensive as a thought came to her. Argo was constantly in the lab, therefore he might have seen who’d stolen the samples. Obviously he was a silent witness who couldn’t communicate what he’d seen, but was Ed able to rummage through animal minds, such as they were? Hammersmith picked his phone off the floor. "Well whaddya know," he said, "a talking dog. You still there, Agent Pender?" "Still here, but not for long," she answered. "I have a few things to clear up with my staff, and then we'll meet you at the mayor's office." "Fine. Let me get you the data on the tracking devices. Maggie, Crossfire: do you know the frequency that PRIMUS should be scanning for?" Crossfire looked up from petting the dog. "Seventy-two megahertz," he said. Hammersmith repeated the frequency to Pender. "See you at the Mayor's," he said, and hung up. "PRIMUS is shorthanded," Hammersmith told the two heroes, "so I'm not sure if they'll be able to free up personel to scan for the pellets. But if you do come in contact with metahumans, you should call them." He gave Maggie the number, then wrote down Maggie's cell phone number in his own notepad and started for the door. "I'll call you as soon as I'm able. Oh! You'll need a driver." Hammersmith pointed to a tall, gangly cop who looked like Reggie Miller's younger brother. "Hutchins! Take care of these people." Hutchins nodded, and Hammersmith waved goodbye to the group and left. |