All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (13 page)

He glanced around, recognized nobody he knew, and took in the ambience of the place.  Innovative was the word that crossed his mind – they had a United Parcel Service outlet here, as well as a rack of post office boxes, copying machines, a mimeograph machine, and farther back a small offset printing press behind a glass wall.  They sold fancy paper and signage, packing boxes and labels, and advertised ‘one day business cards’.  Nothing obvious, though, shouted ‘Transform establishment’.

Hank dodged stacks of cardboard shipping boxes to reach the front desk, got a key for the key-operated copying machine, and went to work.  Keaton’s well-bribed researchers had spotted what he noticed, but hadn’t understood, or even made any smarter inferences about it other than ‘amygdala abnormalities’.  He was fully convinced now he and Lori were chasing something real.  The Focus needed this information; thus his copying.  Not wanting to interfere too much, he would send the information without comment.  Lori might have to make a few visits to these…

“Dr. Zielinski, what in tarnation are you doing here?” a woman’s voice whispered into his ear.  Hank’s heart thudded, ripping him out of his reverie.  He turned, to find himself staring down at a Focus he recognized.  He forced down his panic and dug up the name.

“Focus Hargrove, you must be mistaken,” he said.  “My name is Dr. Frank Madison.  I believe the person you mentioned passed away some time ago.”  Hint.  Hint.

Focus Hargrove nodded and her mane of red curls sparkled as she moved.  “Okay,
Dr. Madison
,” she said, and twinkled.  “Now, if you’d please answer my question, I’ll let you get on your way.”  Her cheery voice couldn’t hide the stress behind it and the skin behind her freckles looked pale and tired.

Hank took a quick look around Cosgrove’s and winced.  Yes, those were Focus Hargrove’s bodyguards, and they weren’t in a happy mood.  Coming out of the back room, the one with the small offset press, was another Focus and her bodyguards, a taller Focus he didn’t recognize.  Blue jeans, scarf blouse, and honest to God beads in her long chestnut hair, she might have starred in movies as the archetypical hippie.  The infamous Gail Rickenbach, obviously.  Luckily, she remained lost in quiet conversation with a chubby young blond Transform woman.

Cosgrove’s was one of Hargrove’s businesses, Hank realized.  He hadn’t had any contact with Focus Hargrove in the past three years, but he knew her from one of Tonya’s earlier projects, to identify and use strange Focus skills.  The project had been swiftly shot down by the Focus Council and hadn’t lasted more than a few weeks, just enough to give him all sorts of ideas he had never been able to follow up on.  Focus Hargrove had the ability to diagnose simple illnesses among her Transforms with her metasense; with a little bit of juice pattern training she should be able to diagnose normals as well, and with some medical training diagnose more than simple illnesses.  The Council had shot down all of his other ideas, as well.

“I’m here to make some copies of some research notes,” he said.

“Why here?”  Hargrove backed her comment with her ample charisma. Hank’s sinuses started to pound.  Yes, there had to be trouble brewing, if the normally breezy Hargrove was acting like a paranoid Focus bitch.

“Are you familiar with a new Major Transform who recently moved to Detroit?”

“Her?” Hargrove said, her one word comment holding a mixture of disgust and fear.

He had guessed correctly; Keaton had contacted Hargrove.  He nodded, answering Focus Hargrove’s question.  “She has an account here, and since I’m only visiting Detroit she gave me her permission to use her account.”

Hargrove frowned.  “She’s patronizing my business?  Strange.  I hadn’t thought She liked me at all.”

“Let me guess: she was cold, business like, uninformative, and wanted your bodyguards to know what she looked like to avoid problems.”

“Yes.”  Pause.  “You’re implying this means she likes me?”

“Quite a bit,” he said, although ‘like’ might have been too strong a word.  ‘Respected in some strange way’ would have worked better.  “Even from a Focus’s perspective, she often comes across as distant, cold and impolite.”  Putting it mildly.  “If she was indifferent, she would have insulted you to your face.  If she was hostile, she would have either ignored you entirely or threatened you and yours until you did what she wanted.”

Focus Hargrove shook her head.  “Huh.  I wonder if She might be willing to help me with a nasty problem.  Could you take a message to Her, requesting a meeting, Dr. um Madison?”

“If it’s appropriate.  She’s inundated with a lot of tricky business right now.  What sort of problem is it?”

She gave him a frank ‘I’m not going to tell you’ look.  Behind Hargrove, he caught the hippie Focus giving him the eye.  She wanted to butt into the conversation, which given the clatter of the shop and her distance from them would take Biggioni-quality ears for her to hear and understand, but held back.  Not out of politeness, but out of fear.

Mental gears clicked in his head, and Hank made the connection to Loess’s journal.  The four of them had gone over it on the plane flight to Kansas City.  He cocked his head and gave Hargrove the look.  Yes, she might easily be ‘Sparkles’, the blackmail target Focus.

“I recently came into some information hinting that one of the Detroit Focuses might be the subject of pressure by our shared enemies,” he said.  “The person this Focus would want to talk to about a subject of this nature is her Focus Council representative, as this is a Council matter.”

Focus Hargrove’s eyes turned icy.  “You know way too much, but if you know the target then you should know I can’t take it to Focus Weiczokowski, and why.”

“Oh,” he said.  “Thank you, Focus.  The target was given only by a cryptic code word, and She suspected it meant your young friend, not the old bat herself.”  Keaton had been sure ‘Steelcase’ was Patriarch code for Focus Rickenbach.  Hargrove’s comment meant that the target was Focus Adkins.  Someone had made a serious mistake, because the chances Hargrove’s people could take down Adkins and her hardcase rug-chewing fanatics, even from surprise, were minimal.  “If this is so, then you need to talk to Focus Biggioni.”

“I can’t do that,” she said.  “I’ve already bothered her too much, and…”  Focus Hargrove let her voice tail off.

“You don’t want to owe her more than you already do,” Hank said, finishing Hargrove’s sentence for her.  Focus psychology 101.  “Because of the sensitivity of the information, I predict she’ll owe you.  If you handle it correctly.”

“Meaning?”  Good.  If he read Hargrove correctly, she bought his argument.

“Don’t just call.  Take excessive precautions, as if you’re being spied on all the time.”

“I can, because I’m afraid I might be.”  She turned.  “Gail?”

Focus Rickenbach and her crew were on the way over, Rickenbach wearing an ‘I’m going to dive in feet first no matter what’ look.  “Sorry to barge in, Beth, but this man isn’t a normal, he’s some form of screwy Transform.”  She was trying to protect Focus Hargrove.  He couldn’t help but admire her attitude.

Hargrove frowned.  “You must be mistaken, Gail.  This is Dr.” pause “Madison, a Network doctor.”

Hank reflexively stuck out his hand, which Focus Rickenbach ignored.  “He’s got juice and dross all over him, and there’s a piece of him that’s actually Transform.”  She pointed to the middle of his back, on the right.  He raised his eyebrows in surprise about her ‘diagnosis’.  Furthermore, Focuses normally didn’t even use the word ‘dross’, much less
metasense
it.

“Ma’am,” he said, mentally skipping rope.  “I was the target of an assassination attempt several years ago, an attempt involving Monster juice, and one of my adrenal glands transformed.”

Focus Rickenbach wrinkled her nose.  “What does that do to you?” she said, instantly shifting from paranoid to intrigued.

Which meant she had read him, and decided he told the truth.  Lie detection was a Focus charisma trick, but she wasn’t old enough to have come into her charisma, nor did she show any other signs.  He started to pay close attention to the hippie Focus.

For one thing, he got the feeling of serious brainpower.  He was dealing with a baby Tonya-class Focus, but with no chance to do his usual background checks.  If she had taken a dark path to get this far, she would have him dead and buried within an hour if he wasn’t careful.

“I get excited easily, and I have many of the nervy tendencies I once had as a young man.”

“You’re tagged, too, but I’ve never seen any tags like you carry before.”

“How many do you metasense?”

“Three.”

“Very good,” he said, trying to keep from bolting in sudden Crow-like panic.  “Unfortunately, I can’t say any more on the subject.  Strict confidences and…”

“One of them has to be Arm Keaton’s; it echoes her metapresence,” Focus Rickenbach said.

Hank bristled.  This was impressively excessive; Keaton and Tonya were right when they called Rickenbach a bull in a china shop.  He leaned forward, toward Focus Rickenbach.  She didn’t back off or flinch.  She did, however, involuntarily flash something that gave him an instant erection and left him falsely in love with her.  Whatever it was, it didn’t turn off after the flash ended and it made him pay attention to her as a woman.

She stood eye to eye with him, well stacked, with lush brown hair and the faint scent…

Hank filled his mind with memories of playing tennis and the smell of tennis balls.  “Focus, please.  What you sense is true, but it’s a trick my friends would like to keep secret.  You wouldn’t want them angry with you.”  The effects of Rickenbach’s damned involuntary charisma flash faded, leaving him with a pounding headache.

She shrugged, ignoring him for a moment as she leafed through his copies lying in the output bin of the copier.  She had no idea what she had done to him.  “You’re doing brain experiments?  Hey, that’s an actual cut open head, there!  What sort of monster are you?”  She was both fickle and unstoppable.

“I didn’t do this research,” he said.  “I’m just collating it and passing it along to a colleague.”

Focus Rickenbach shrugged again, and continued to flip through the copies, even after he tried to grab them from her.  “Harvard has a brain bank?  Ghouls.”

He sighed.

Flip.  Flip.  “So that’s what this thing’s called,” she said.  “Only whoever wrote this is an idiot.  This poor victim’s amygdala isn’t anomalous.  All Major Transforms I’ve metasensed are that way.”

Exactly.  “You have a very discerning metasense, Focus,” he said, scared now.  Her discernment was well outside the abilities of any Focus he had ever examined.

“Don’t you patronize me,” she said, and sneered at him.  “Typical fool, more interested in dead bodies than living Transforms and what they could tell you.”

“You perhaps have some other observations on the subject you might like to share?”  Focus Rickenbach definitely rubbed him the wrong way.  This know-nothing amateur…

“Sure, if you’re deigning to ask,” she said.  The sneer didn’t leave her voice.  “The metacampus is the most noticeable marker.  The other two Major Transform brain markers I can sense are more diffuse, one across the middle of the forehead, the other on the opposite side of the brain.  Uh, both in the cerebrum, if I’m remembering my biology classes correctly.”

The frontal cortex and the visual cortex.  Interesting.  Four areas fit with Arm Haggerty’s sixteen-variety theory as well, and the fact the other two were diffuse explained why the researchers had missed them; the physical changes associated had to be subtle.  “You remember correctly, ma’am.”

Focus Rickenbach finished her flipping and handed the stack to him.  “Gory but harmless, I guess,” she said.  “You might want to do something about your transformed adrenal gland, though.  It can’t be healthy.”

“A sentiment many share,” he said, as Focus Rickenbach airily waved her hand at him, dismissingly, and walked away.

“You know, Doc, it takes work to get on Gail’s bad side,” Focus Hargrove whispered.  “She’s about the kindest Focus I’ve ever met.”

“One of my talents, I’m afraid,” he said.  “Now, ma’am, I need to finish this and get it mailed off to Focus Rizzari.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Focus Hargrove said.

Hank didn’t figure out that Hargrove had rolled him to get him to spill the recipient of the copies until he was half way back to Keaton’s house.

Chapter 4

“Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.”

– The Buddha

Tonya Biggioni: January 9, 1969 – January 10, 1969

Arnold Rennik picked up the last four boxes, smiled at Tonya, and left her office.  Tonya made sure she didn’t let the pity inside her slip out, because pity messed up the juice flow worse than anger.  Her vigilance served as a constant lesson in humility.  Arnold was a living reminder Transform Sickness did not afflict just the intelligent, pleasant, young and good looking.  Arnie had an IQ of about 85, was in his late 50s, crotchety, and between the wens on his face and the asymmetric curls of his round ears, he won awards for ugly.  What should a Focus to do with someone like Arnold?  Play God and discard an inferior Transform? Feed him to the Arms because he wasn’t up to standards?  Properly trained, Arnold was certainly no worse than the average household member.  He pulled his own weight by dint of hard work.  Without a Focus willing to give him a chance, no one would have ever known.  Prejudice is, literally, pre-judging, Tonya repeated to herself for about the millionth time.  If the Focuses ever won the right to choose their own Transforms, they would win the right to pre-judge.  Would it corrupt them and morally destroy them?  Some Focuses thought it would.  Tonya campaigned for the right, and was secretly terrified the Focuses would abuse it and truly become evil.  As Lori would say, often just to annoy her, if the Arms are the predatory nature of humanity writ large, then Focuses are the Babushka nature of humanity writ large.  Drum roll, please!

Tonya looked around her office, moved a picture of her twin nieces’ high school graduation from the freestanding shelf unit to her credenza, next to the pictures of her children and one grandchild, then stepped back.  “Now everything looks right,” she said.

Her people had finished painting the last of the walls last week, and this week they had put in the carpeting and finally moved her office decorations in from storage.  Tonya did the actual unpacking herself.  Unfortunately, two boxes had come up missing, and hadn’t been found until last night, in a storeroom on the fourth floor.  At long last, she had
her
office again.

“Delia?” Tonya said.  No answer.  She looked around, backed into the hall, and into Delia’s office, kitty-corner from hers.  The household had completed Delia’s office last week, without anywhere near the fuss and bother shown on hers.  There were times when her people’s desires to make everything the best for
our Focus
interfered with Tonya’s pragmatic desires to get things done quickly.  If it was for her, there was no ‘ninety five percent is good enough’ or ‘ninety nine percent is good enough’.  It was always ‘a hundred percent is never good enough’.

Delia sat at her desk, a letter in her hand, staring with wide eyes and slack jaw.  Tonya felt Delia’s shock through the juice.  Instincts raged forward and Tonya turned to look for her bodyguard. Danny had drawn in-house bodyguard duty today and he stood at the end of the hall.  With the gauntlet thrown down in front of the first Focuses about the Chimera issue, Tonya had raised her household’s level of security to be tighter than it had ever been before.  Guards on Tonya, guards on the house.  The in-house bodyguard station was supposed to be a last ditch position.  Perimeter guards were supposed to handle all the normal threats.  They had four people on bodyguard duty around the clock, and it ate into Tonya’s resources, but she had relented and followed Rizzari’s lead: Tonya’s household women Transforms who had the aptitude and bodies for it were now training as bodyguards.  What with the two to one female to male Transform ratio in a household, they needed to use women for every position possible, especially anything requiring a Transform.  A few of the younger Transform women with more flexible attitudes took up other skills as well, carpenters, joiners, plasterers, electricians and plumbers.  Tonya’s household ran a large construction business, and what the hidebound patriarchal unions didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

At Tonya’s alarm, Danny came to attention, drew his weapon, and cautiously scurried down the hallway toward her.  Catching her tension, her cat, Stalker exited Tonya’s office at a run, startling Danny for an instant.  Tonya nodded at Danny, and with her eyes and with the juice indicated where she wanted him to stand, so he would be able to cover both Delia’s and Tonya’s office.  The juice signaling was another innovation she lifted from Lori, though she adapted it verrrry slowly, and with only a few of her more trusted and stable household members.  Lori’s household model was so different from hers that Tonya used extreme caution when adapting any of Lori’s tricks, even if their utility was obvious.  Mistakes could be deadly, especially when mucking with the balance of a finely tuned household.

Tonya even had a few of the more experienced Transform bodyguards experimenting with signaling back to her by control of their emotions and thought patterns.  The signaling project progressed slowly, as her people didn’t train for this level of mental control.  They learned, though.  According to Lori, Transforms could learn quite a bit more, including direct Transform to Transform signaling.  However, since those elaborations required the involvement of a Focus who lived and breathed juice patterns, which Tonya didn’t do yet, implementation was a long time off.

With Danny in place, Tonya did a little more, a tendril of emotion sent with the movement of the juice. Calm, comfort, down the pipe to Delia.  A tough trick under the best circumstances, and the newly learned trick proved to be doubly tough when Tonya was uneasy herself.  This situation was good practice, though.  There was a lot more to moving juice than just pleasure and punishment.

Delia looked up, surreptitiously swiped at her eyes with her left hand, and carefully sniveled, trying and failing to do so inaudibly.  In her role as Tonya’s official executive secretary, added to her role as chief aide after Tonya had been given the mentoring program, Delia held it a point of pride not to get too emotionally involved in her duties.  Tough to do, given the number of miserable tragedies they had found among the young Focuses.  If whatever the letter contained punched so hard through Delia’s determined outer shell, strengthened by her kidnapping ordeal, it must be horrible.

Delia caught her breath and leaned on her Focus’s support. “Ma’am. I recommend you give this letter your utmost attention,” Delia said, formal as a new Transform in a dictator’s household.

Tonya clamped down on her own panic.  Formality at this level was a bad, bad sign.

“Thank you, Delia,” Tonya said, walking into Delia’s office and taking the letter from her.

Focus Biggioni,

I hate to bother you this way, ma’am, but I have run into a problem far beyond my meager abilities to solve.  I fear I’m being closely watched, and thus had to resort to subterfuge to contact you.

On December 29
th
of last year, my household was approached by three men who wished to talk to me.  I agreed to talk to the men only after they threatened to publicly expose all the Transform members of my household as Transforms.  One of the three men, their leader, did the talking.  The other two were bodyguards and stayed extremely close to the leader.  The leader introduced himself as Bill Concord and told me he had a job for me.  The job was for me to arrange to have my bodyguards, at a specific signal, kill Focus Adkins “because we understand you have disagreements with her.”  He told me that if I failed, he would carry out the previous threat. In addition, Mr. Concord listed several other things that would happen if I failed, including exposure of building code violations, union work rule violations, tax code violations, and morality law violations.  Without getting into the details, I can assure you the exposure of these various violations would thoroughly destroy my household.  Mr. Concord also promised that if I successfully carried out the assigned job, I would come under the protection of his organization and would no longer need “the protection of the Focus Network.”  This protection would also include well-paying jobs for the men in my household, as well as monetary compensation after the completion of the job, in the amount of twenty five thousand dollars.  Mr. Concord also told me my household was being watched and they knew everything I or the people in my household did, and that I should not attempt to communicate to anyone the gist of the conversation, and if I did so I would “be killed.”  The man then left, leaving a bag containing roughly three thousand dollars in cash (in well-used ones, fives and tens) “to compensate you for your lost time.”  I regret to inform you that in the presence of this man, under the threats he uttered, I agreed to do the job.

I must also regretfully inform you that all three men were Transforms.  To me, they felt as if they were male Transforms, except for one detail I discovered only by accident.  To my utter embarrassment, when Mr. Concord stated his demand that I kill Focus Adkins, I momentarily panicked and attempted to re-tag them, bring them into my household, and strip them of their juice.  The stupidity of this activity is of course evident to me now. If I had succeeded, not only would they have very likely been able to shoot and kill me before I had laid them low, I would have essentially declared war on whoever was behind their plans.  However, my panicked attack on them did not succeed, for although I could sense they were Transforms, I could not retag them, and (what I consider extremely important) they did not notice my attempt.

After the three men departed, and after recovering from my panic, I gave the situation much thought, and I realized Mr. Concord’s information about my household was incomplete.  In specific, when Mr. Concord listed the things he would expose, he did not list a far larger blackmail threat than the threats he did mention.  At first, I couldn’t figure out why.  I first suspected Mr. Concord, a Transform, was under the protection of a Focus so powerful as to be able to protect her people from retagging, that he represented a political rival to Focus Adkins, and he had gained his knowledge in the same way Focus Adkins gained hers, via detective work and intimidation of household members.  I revised this because first, Focus Adkins knew about the household secret Mr. Concord missed, and secondly, because there was one key fact about my household secret no outsider could guess: the household secret in question is attended to only by normals, to prevent legal problems from destroying my household.  I was forced to conclude (provisionally) this Mr. Concord and his associates were not normal male Transforms backed by a Focus, but something else (my guess would be Crows and Chimeras), and they had gained their information about my household by metasensing the work of the Transforms in my household, not by detective work.

After a fortuitous consultation with an acquaintance of yours named Dr. Madison, I decided to bring this to your attention in as secretive a manner as possible.  I had this letter typed up by a trusted non-Transform member of the household in the physical presence of the household secret in question (where no Transforms are allowed).  If this letter reaches you and I am still alive, then my supposition is correct and this method of communication is indeed secret from Mr. Concord.

Help!

Sincerely, Beth Hargrove

(written by P.N.)

Tonya looked up at Delia after she finished reading the letter.  “For the moment, forget you ever read this letter.  I’m going to be in my office, spending some time alternating between panicking and thinking, and probably making a few phone calls to justify my existence.  Hold all incoming phone calls.  Slide the food under the door.  Don’t panic if the juice goes nuts.  The usual.  When Marty returns this evening from work, you and I and Marty and no one else are going to have a quiet conversation.  I suspect it may last a long while.”

---

“Okay,” Marty said, putting together the information from the letter with all the other information Tonya managed to dig up that might fit into the mess.  “Here’s what we have: Beth got visited by three unknowns she believes to be Crows and Chimeras, who missed her household’s moonshine operation, and she’s being blackmailed into attacking Focus Adkins.  Keaton moved to the Detroit area in December because of an offer you relayed to her from the first Focuses, and you posited the offer might be a trap.  Keaton has a new charge, so she, the newbie and Hancock could have also done this.  Beth has never met any Arms before, likely doesn’t realize how easily Arms can masquerade as men, and thus they could have easily fooled her.  Focus Adkins is publicly anti-Arm and deals with Keaton through you, and is likely the first Focus who originated the Keaton deal.  In addition, the Arms have evidence showing someone is training no-household Focuses, and you believe the person behind this is Focus Adkins.  In addition, there’s Chimera interest in Detroit, a young Focus in Detroit who’s attracted widespread attention because of her immense potential, and because she’s going to get married in May.  Lastly, according to Focus Rizzari, with only one exception Crows’ metasense cannot pick up on verbal conversations, cannot ‘see’ normals, nor can read handwriting or printed words at a distance, nor can any Crows take the stress of confrontations such as the one with Beth.  Anything else?”  He leaned back in one of Tonya’s two office chairs, balancing it on the rear legs.

Tonya closed her eyes, moved juice before she got too wrapped up in the discussion and forgot, then tried to remember anything else that might be relevant.  She pulled her own chair out from behind her desk, to make for better conversation.  “I was in secret contact with a senior Crow named Shadow, but when I attempted to call him today I found out his phone had been disconnected.  We know Carol visits with Keaton about once a month, normally around the first of the month.  I tried to contact both of them today and only got their answering services.  We also know Keaton likes to partner, so to speak, with a local Focus.  So far, she’s chosen to work with older, established Focuses.  We don’t know who she’s contacted in Detroit, and if she’s working with any of the Detroit Focuses.”