Cloud Invasion (8 page)

Somewhere behind us, Nick and Maye would stop to look at souvenirs-many shops near Trinity College served the tourists crowding the area. That meant it wouldn't be unusual for tourists or foreigners to have coffee in our targeted coffee shop.

Rafe and I had to stand at the end of a substantial line to get coffee. Each of us casually scanned the crowd while we waited. The small tables inside and out were all taken-there wasn't anywhere to sit, once we placed our order.

Rafe's hands squeezed my arm when someone stepped out of line ahead of us. Either she realized we were there or she'd gotten tired of waiting.

A Mary Evans clone walked away without glancing in our direction.

Chapter 6

Corinne

I'm on her
, Maye informed me after I sent a mental communication.
Nick is right behind me
, she added.

Rafe had stepped away to call Opal, who'd relay the message to Auggie.

I'm going after her, too
, I sent to Maye.
I'll get in front of her, you take her from behind
. I did my relocation trick, landing on a sidewalk as our target moved swiftly in my direction. Rafe was screaming in my mind to come back when the Mary clone cast a swift glance over her shoulder before she came to a standstill feet away.

Yes, I no longer looked like myself. Instead, I'd chosen to employ the power I had to create a disguise. I now looked like General Baikov.

"Ah," she began speaking rapidly in Russian the moment she turned toward me. "There are people following me. We must get off the street." She stepped forward and took my arm.

I relocated both of us right back to Maye and then to Rafe, taking care to appear as myself instead of Baikov-I didn't want to be attacked while delivering the enemy into their hands.

Rafe cursed as he grabbed the Mary clone. She attempted to fight him, but that was useless-he pulled a weapon I'm sure his daughter had supplied and held it discreetly against the clone's back while Maye held her arms.

Tell Nick to meet us at the hotel
, Rafe sent a curt mental message.
Get us back there as quickly as you can
. He wasn't happy with the way I'd taken matters into my own hands.

Clone Mary didn't want to walk; Rafe and Maye pulled her along as if she weighed nothing until we reached an alcove in a nearby building. That's when I relocated the four of us to the hotel.

* * *

"She doesn't have one of those devices, and is bug free," I informed Auggie ten minutes later. "Want me to bring her to you?"

"Yeah. Matt Michaels is here, now, so I'll let him have her after you tell me everything you can see in her."

I didn't tell Auggie that she hadn't been bug free when I found her-I'd employed my talent to get rid of it, first thing. I figure somebody was cursing somewhere when she vanished from their radar.

* * *

"There's a Baikov clone," I sighed, flopping onto a chair in the meeting room back at the Program facility. "She was expecting him when I showed up looking like him."

"What the hell?" Rafe snapped. He still wasn't happy that I'd gotten as close to Mary as I had-he worried I could have been hurt or worse.

"That's why she stepped out of line at the coffee shop," I continued, ignoring Rafe's anger. "He was supposed to meet her there and he was late. Half an hour, almost. She went looking for him. That clone may still be in Dublin, but I can't say for sure."

"Where else would he be?" Auggie asked. "If he was supposed to meet her?"

"No idea," I shrugged. It was a lie, but I couldn't tell Auggie the truth.

What do you know?
Rafe sent.

Your son-in-law did the Baikov clone in
, I responded.
Want to tell Auggie that?

Good for him and hell, no
, Ilya grinned at me, his anger momentarily forgotten.

"Corinne, did you see any other Baikov clones?" Auggie interrupted my mental conversation.

"No. I'm still trying to figure out how there's a Baikov clone to begin with," I said. "If the original got the drug, he should have changed. I'm not sure what to make of that."

"Does Mary Evans take two know anything?" Leo asked.

"No. She thinks the Baikov in Dublin is the original, so it's likely that the Russians had him as a backup for the one we killed. There may be others, for all we know."

"Too bad we don't have the other one." Matt Michaels, who sat beside Opal at one end of the conference table, shook his head.

"I think we ought to start looking for more Baikov and Mary clones," Maye suggested. "I can't believe they're cranking them out this fast."

"Where did Baikov come from?" I asked Rafe. "What's his background? When was he made general?"

"You're thinking this may go back farther than we suspect, don't you?" Richard Farrell asked.

"I'm not willing to dismiss any possibility at this point," I said.

"I know what the official reports say on Baikov, but I don't recall him coming to power or into the public arena until the end of the last regime, just before the current President took power. He's been pouring lies into the Russian President's ear ever since." Rafe had already done his homework on Baikov.

"You'd know," Auggie agreed.

"I have that photograph you asked for," Auggie said, tapping the tablet in front of him. "I want you, Matt, Rafe, Richard and Leo with me while we discuss that over coffee."

Nick and I want to see you and Rafe too
, Maye sent.

I know. I'll ask Opal to join us
, I returned.

* * *

"This was taken just this morning-he had a meeting with the Joint Chiefs," Auggie said, turning his tablet around so I could see the photograph. We sat in Rafe's and my kitchen, drinking coffee.

"Score," I sighed. Whoever had taken the photograph managed to get the Joint Chiefs in the frame, too.

"What do you see?" Auggie asked.

"I see collusion," I said. "He's been in contact with Phillips all along, as have the Joint Chiefs. The trouble is, the Joint Chiefs think Hal is Phillips, now. They have no idea what Phillips currently is-or where he is. Their initial goal is to make Madam President look bad," I said. I was terrified by other things I saw, but hesitated to give out that information.

"How will they go about making the President look bad?" Matt Michaels asked.

"Well, making her look bad may be an understatement," I amended. "They intend to discredit her completely. They'd love to shove her out of the White House now, by exposing the Program. That's the first purpose in getting the fifteen survivors away-and planting Dinosaur Boy beneath Seattle. DB may surprise them with how little sentience he has remaining to do as they ask. Every day he's on his own allows the animal to take over. Askins thinks they'll tie Madam President to the creation of DB when he causes havoc in Elliott Bay, although she had little to do with it."

"This could blow the Program wide open," Auggie said. I could tell how angry he was. Not only would Madam President fall if Askins succeeded with his plan, but everybody she'd appointed, including him, would fall with her if this news went public.

I had visions of bombers scrambling to shoot DB, all while the media had a field day with a situation that should only happen in science fiction movies.

"What is the former President's goal in all this? He can't run again," Leo began.

"Remember he likely looks very different now, and with Hal Prentice posing as him, he has easy access to the White House," Rafe observed.

"He has another agenda, you can bet on that," I said. "Whether it's the White House or something more than that, I don't want him to succeed."

"So Askins and the Joint Chiefs are still blindly following Phillips," Rafe muttered. I think he was just as angry as Auggie about the entire mess. "In order to take charge again, we have to be eliminated. What do you suppose they intend to do with us and the Program as a whole?"

"Isn't that obvious?" Auggie huffed. "They want us dead. They've tried several times already. Two facilities have been destroyed, and we've lost good people already."

"Is it because he knows he can't bend us to his will, like he did with Becker?" Leo asked.

"How much time do you think we have, before DB makes his presence known?" Auggie changed the subject, directing his question to Richard.

"He'll come out when he's hungry enough. We've recorded small tremors already, so we may only have hours, at best."

"Hours before we're exposed?"

I'd never seen Auggie so angry. We were getting hit on multiple fronts, which left those in charge scrambling for a solution. "I think I can do something about this in the interim," I said.

"What?" The same question came from nearly everyone in the room. The only one who hadn't (wisely) expressed skepticism in that single-word question was Rafe.

"Move DB," I shrugged. "Sure, he's amphibious, but he needs land to make a nest. He's also a short-range swimmer, capable of bursts of speed but not for long distances. It's enough to catch large, slower-swimming prey-like the whales he's gulping down like candy."

"How are we going to move that behemoth?" Auggie threw his hands in the air. "We can't do it-Askins and his allies will be all over us in a heartbeat, with the media right behind him."

"I didn't say we," I snapped. "I said I. Me."

"Where the hell do you intend to take him," Matt asked.

"Someplace safe," I shrugged. It was my hope that the disappearance of DB would throw Merle Askins and his cronies into a tailspin-I didn't intend for DB to be found again.

By anybody.

I worried, too, about the other survivors. What plans did Phillips have for them? After all, it was natural to worry about the biggest and baddest, when the others could be just as destructive in different ways.

At least we knew where DB was. I had no clue where the others were. Likely with Phillips. "I wonder what name he's using now," I mused.

"Corinne, perhaps you'll come back to Earth for a moment and tell us what the hell you're talking about?" Auggie said.

"Phillips. He can't be using his own name. It has to be something else, now. The Mary clone didn't know it," I added.

"Perhaps that's by design," Matt said. "You see he's allowing the originals to be killed off and replaced by clones."

"So the originals may have known what he calls himself. The new ones don't." Leo shook his head. "Corinne, what do you need to take DB out of here? How quickly can you do it?"

"I need two hours alone," I said.

"Where?"

"I can't tell you."

"I don't like this," Rafe frowned.

"Fine. You can come. Everybody else stays here."

"Wait," Rafe held up a hand.

It was too late; I'd already transported us elsewhere.

* * *

"Cabbage, why are we sitting on top of Christ of the Andes?" He sounded so calm. He was anything but.

"Because it's nice and sunny here."

"The wind could blow us right off," he said, peering over the edge of the statue at the ground far below. "There are plenty of sunny spots elsewhere."

"I wanted to come here. I figure we need all the help we can get."

"There are tourists down there," he said.

"Are you afraid of heights?"

"Not unless I have nothing to hold onto," he gritted.

"I'm keeping us up here, and the tourists can't see us," I reassured him. "Remember, you didn't want me going alone."

"I'll reconsider next time. Are we here for the full two hours?"

"I can see you're going to complain about this the whole time," I sighed. "Let's go."

"Much better. Much, much better. Is that Kilauea?" We stood atop hardened volcanic flow and watched as a trail of fiery lava meandered down a hillside on the Big Island of Hawaii.

"Yes. Volcanoes fascinate me," I said.

"I've always been interested," he squinted to see the lava flow better.

"Here." I held out my hand-a pair of binoculars dropped into it. "You can see better this way."

"How do you do this?" Ilya had arrived, accent and all.

"It's what I am," I shrugged. "Like you are what you are."

"Better," he took the binoculars and held them to his eyes. "I can see the top crust breaking apart to allow the molten lava through. Thank you for bringing me here, cabbage. I like this."

"Ilya, someday I want a house in a place like this. Where you can see trees, water and maybe a volcano, without another house being ten feet away." I said.

"I want that, too. If we weren't tied to the Program at the moment, I would see that you had exactly what you want."

"I appreciate your willingness to get it for me," I said. I could see the sun shining on the water in the distance, past steep cliffs that called the lava flow toward them. Volcanic rocks stood in the water just past the cliffs, looking sharp and forbidding in sunlight.

"Have you been to Hawaii before?" Ilya lowered the binoculars and turned to give me a smile.

"Years ago. For an anniversary."

"Ah. Do you miss him?"

"At times. He was sick when we went to the Louvre-it was the last thing on his bucket list before going home to let the disease run its course. They tortured him before they killed him-in front of me."

"You have your vendetta, just as I had mine. Baikov is dead. A Baikov clone is also dead. I hope there are no others to kill," Ilya sighed before pulling me against him. "I am sorry, cabbage, that parts of our lives have been so similar."