The Day Before (15 page)

“That's the important thing.” Stating platitudes sounded good right now.

Emir nodded. “That is the most important thing. But, here.” He pointed at the strange black box he'd shown her on the previous visit. “You see what is wrong, obviously.”

Sam raised her eyebrows. “Oh. Golly. You're right. Look at that.” She looked over at Emir for a clue.

Strutting like a gamecock, the doctor pointed at a dial on his bulky machine. “You see this? You see? Right here?” A scowl etched itself on his face.

She inspected the little dial, green on a field of black. “Yes.”

“What color is it?” Emir demanded, as if the color weren't blindingly obvious.

“Green.”

“Yes!” he yelled.

“Is it not supposed to be green?”

“Ah.” Emir rocked back on his heels, thumbs hooked through his red suspenders. “So good to meet a halfway-­intelligent bureau agent. So very pleasing. So very rare. No. This dial is meant to be blue. I
made
it blue. My mother's favorite color. It was blue three days ago. Now, it is green.” He laid the information out with solemn dignity.

Sam shook her head. “Is the dial important? Rare? Expensive? I don't understand why the color change matters, Doctor.”

“Someone has touched my research!” he shrieked.

“Did you talk to the graduate students? Perhaps one of them knocked the dial loose and replaced it with a new one. Maybe they painted it. A practical joke, perhaps?”

Emir pursed his lips, fuming. “This is no joke. I have told the detective time and time again. I am being threatened. This is a subtle and diabolical reminder that I am being pursued. The dial should be blue!”

“Fine.” Sam stepped away from the machine before whatever leaking radiation from the box that had permeated Dr. Emir's brain cells affected her. “Change the dial. It shouldn't be that hard.”

“It's evidence!”

“Yes—­of a green dial. To be anything more, I need records, proof the original dial was blue, video from security.” She didn't really, but she hoped he'd think that to be too much and drop this ridiculousness.
Who cares about a stupid dial?

Emir stared up at the video monitor as if he'd never seen it before. “Video, of course. I had not thought of that.”

Sam nodded. “If security will release the video—­”

“No, no,” Emir said abruptly. He waved her request away. His face suddenly took on a paternal smile full of goodwill. “My mind, it's not what it was. The dreams become reality, the reality becomes dreams. I forget myself. So sorry to take your time. May I show you out? Buy you lunch? A T-­shirt from the gift shop?”

“There isn't a gift shop, Dr. Emir.”

“No? That must have been my dream then. Silly me. Perhaps we should build one, then I can buy you a T-­shirt.”

“That's too kind.” Sam danced out of his reach before he could infect her with the crazy virus. “Is your intern around? I'd like to have a word with him if he's free.”

“Henry?” Emir frowned. “Yes, he should be arriving at the lab shortly.”

“Great, I'll just wait then. Have the security guards tell Henry I'm looking for him as soon as he checks in.”

Sam waited in an empty conference room for Henry Troom to arrive. Her gut instinct said there was something wrong here. Not the color of the dial per se, but the whole feel of the lab. Something was ever so subtly wrong.

There was a knock on the door, and Henry walked in, hair mussed and tie askew. “Agent Rose? The security guard said you needed me for something urgent.”

“Not urgent, just a few questions to clarify what's happening.” She took a seat and smiled sweetly. “Dr. Emir called me in this morning because he was worried that something had been tampered with in his lab.”

“I didn't do anything,” Henry said. “I told him the balloons weren't my fault. Nate did that.”

“Dr. Emir didn't mention balloons. He was concerned because the dial on his machine was a different color. You helped construct the machine, didn't you?”

“Oh.” Henry pulled a chair out and sat down. “No, I didn't work on the original prototype. The one we have in the lab is a fourth working model that Dr. Emir has made.”

“Do you know what color the dial on the machine is?”

“Green.”

“Has it always been green?”

“Ever since I started working here. Green for go.” Henry shrugged. “Why?”

“Dr. Emir insists the dial was blue three days ago.”

Henry sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Was he talking really fast? Did he mention dreams or anything bizarre?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. He offered to buy me a T-­shirt from a nonexistent gift shop.”

“Are you taking notes on this?” Henry asked.

“Not yet, should I be?”

“It's just . . . I don't want to get Dr. Emir in trouble. Government grants are hard to get, and . . .” He frowned and looked away.

“You don't want my report to strip Dr. Emir of his grants or you of your education funding. I got it. Is Dr. Emir doing anything that would make him lose his grants?”

“No!” Henry squirmed in his seat, obviously uncomfortable with sharing his information.

Sam sighed. “I'm good at keeping secrets, Henry.”

He rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Have you ever been to Dr. Emir's house?”

“No.”

“It's covered in surreal paintings.”

“Like, Picasso? His big secret is he collects stolen art?”

“Nothing like that, he paints them. Huge canvases filled with the most otherworldly spaztastic stuff you've ever seen. Cities straight out of a bad B-­movie. Science-­fiction stuff I can't even explain. It's unreal. And it's all in the wrong colors.”

“How do you mean
wrong
?”

He shrugged. “Green skies. Blue grass. Yellow buildings with silver lights. Dr. Emir is color-­blind. He has to be.”

“Okay.” Sam tilted her head. “Why is this a deep, dark secret no one should share?”

“The color-­blind thing isn't an issue. It's the manic rages that worry me. Dr. Emir is a genius, but he is truly one of the great tortured geniuses of our age. He'll go for days, sometimes weeks without sleep. I've seen him take a catnap at the lab, then run home and lock himself in there for three days because he had a dream and couldn't rest until he'd put it on canvas.”

Sam connected the dots and relaxed. “So he called me during one of these manic phases?”

“We try to keep him calm and make sure he gets the downtime he needs, but with everything that's happened . . .” He held his hands up in a gesture of futility. “I'm sorry he bothered you.”

“Don't apologize. This is my job. I just needed to know what help Dr. Emir needed.”

“He needs some melatonin and a good night's rest without any of his weird dreams. He talks about them a lot, and they're very vivid. It's one of the signs of high intelligence, vivid, nearly lucid dreams. After everything's settled, you should come to one of our lab parties when he gets talking. It's mind-­blowing some of the stuff he comes up with.”

Sam chuckled. “I'll take your word for it.” She stood up. “Thank you for talking with me, Mr. Troom. If you do see any anomalies in the lab, please call me. And please assure Dr. Emir that the bureau is doing everything it can to keep him safe.”

Putting all the pieces in place painted a better picture of the lab. Dr. Emir was a distracted genius who couldn't tell reality from dreams. It happened. Some of the world's best inventions had come from similar minds. She walked to the car, trying to shake off the unsettled feeling. The shadows of the lab followed her home.

 

CHAPTER 16

When an iteration of reality collapses what happens? Some would imagine that the ­people populating the alternate timeline die. That theory defies the basic laws of the conservation of energy. Recall what I have said about the wave: everything must come back to the prime iteration when we hit the event horizon. During past decoherence events, everyone has experienced the dissonance of two realities colliding. A dying node briefly inherits the conscience of the dominant iteration, recalling things that are to come. The memories of our shadow selves become dreams and nothing more.

~ Student notes from the class Physics and Space-­Time I1–2071

Thursday June 13, 2069

Alabama District 3

Commonwealth of North America

M
ac chewed his nails as his chair swiveled back and forth in front of the dim computer screen. Damn her for putting him in this situation. He looked plaintively at the ceiling. “God—­if there is a God—­I could use some help here. A sign. Something to tell me that helping her isn't the worst thing I could do.”

No choir of angels or neon flashing sign manifested a divine will of any kind.

Sighing, he picked up the efile with the report on Jane Doe . . . aka, Samantha Lynn Rose the second. A clone working for the bureau was an even bigger security threat than a clone working for N-­V Nova Labs.

Sam needed to be dealt with.

A rapid clone test would work if she were an age-­advanced clone, but a good black-­market-­clone operation would have ways around that. Getting the lab in Atlanta to do a test for Verville traces meant getting a second signature. If Rose was a clone, getting her signature was the next best thing to committing suicide. If he went to Marrins, the test would never happen. The senior agent would accept the computer search and turn Sam over to bureau.

They'd would kill her.

He dropped the efile on his desk again and went back to chewing his nails. The bureau would euthanize Agent Rose after interrogating her with techniques that would make old Guantanamo look like a spa in comparison. She wasn't human, but she looked human. She sounded human.

The memory of her stripping off a wet shirt made him feel all too human. She was nice to him, but nice wasn't an excuse. He swore again.

There had to be another way.

“MacKenzie?” Harley leaned around the corner, a cloud of cheap cologne following him. “I'm going to lunch, you want anything?”

“No, thanks.” Mac shook his head and avoided eye contact with the older man.

“Okay. I'm going to the grill. Be back in an hour or so, cover for me if someone calls. You know what traffic is like on that end of town.”

“Yes, sir,” Mac said, as the senior coroner shuffled off to the Bon Temps Grill . . . and golf course. The morgue doors slammed shut with a leaden thud. With one final curse for God, the universe, and everything else that had conspired to bring him to this point, he grabbed his dissection equipment and went to find Melody Doe.

There were two interns sitting in the small break room between his office and the bodies he wanted to inspect. He shoved his efile into his lab-­coat pocket and faked a smile. “Hey, what are you guys doing?” Keeping to his normal pattern of behavior and ignoring them would have been safer, but Mac doubted they'd had enough experience with espionage to be concerned.

They still looked at him bug-­eyed, as if they couldn't believe Mac could form full sentences. One said, “Eating lunch.”

“Coroner Harley just left,” he said in a casual, hinting tone that would have worked on any military recruit. The interns just stared. “We're getting another busload of bodies from the coast tonight. Since we're going to work after hours, why don't you boys go take a long lunch?”

That did it. Their eyes lit up at the promise of sunshine. “Can we?”

“Just be back before three. Harley keeps a one o'clock tee time on Thursdays.”

“Right,” one of the interns said. “But he'll be back once he realizes the course is flooded.”

“There's a TV and alcohol. He'll be gone for at least two hours.”

The interns looked at each other and shrugged. “This is real chill of you.” The younger man patted Mac on the back as he hustled out.

Mac leaned his head against the cold walls of the morgue as the interns ran off. He was going to get court-­martialed for this. Lose his citizenship. All for a pretty pair of brown eyes.

And amazing legs. Truly stellar stems. Can't forget those.

“I'm hopeless,” he muttered, walking into the cold room. The smell of chilled antiseptic wash hid the odor of delayed decay as he rolled out the remains of Mordicai Robbins and plugged his data pad into the scanner to download. Then he went searching for Melody Doe and found her in the walk-­in freezer with a dozen bodies that had washed out of their graves during the storm.

Melody had been pretty in life, he knew that from the pictures, but looking at her now . . . He shivered and reached for a pill bottle that wasn't there. His hand clenched into a fist.

He should have just handed Marrins the evidence. Called it a day. Gone home, or gone house hunting. Anything but this. Memories of the desert, heat, and blood blurred into reality as he looked at Melody Doe's fractured skull. With shaking hands, he wheeled her gurney into the scanner box, hit the right buttons, and hurried down the hall to dry heave in the comfort of his office.

Eyes watering, throat burning, he frantically pushed aside piles of junk to find his pills. There had to be one somewhere.

The morgue door slammed. A belch echoed through the halls. Harley couldn't be back already, could he? Maybe the golf course was flooded.

Pushing unsteadily to his feet, Mac dropped the search for pills and stumbled toward the cold room. He'd have to make do with incomplete scans or call the whole thing off.

Harley's footsteps echoed behind him.

Mac sped up, barreling into the cold room with a controlled skid.

Mordicai Robbins was unhooked and halfway to his storage spot when the heavy doors swung open. Warm air from the hall swept into the room, with the scent of Harley's cheap cologne.

Mac slammed Mordicai into place and wrenched open the walk-­in freezer. Grabbing hold of the nearest gurney, he pushed it in front of him as if he were merely checking the graveyard rejects and not digging into a case that wasn't his.

Harley stood by the door, arms crossed. “Whatcha doing?”

“Ah, just making sure we send the right bodies back. I thought you, um, wanted them checked?” His tongue deserted him as memories of Afghanistan assailed him. There was blood. So. Much. Blood.

Harley eyed Mordicai's locker for a moment, then grunted. “Right. You get lunch yet?”

“Um, n-­not yet.” He slid the gurney he'd grabbed into the scanner next to Melody Doe and took the efile from its dock. Scan complete. “I, um, sent the interns to lunch just now,” he added. Mac hesitated in front of Melody's body, unsure if he should pull her out of the machine for the coroner to see.

“You okay?” Harley asked.

Mac jerked his head in a nod. “It's just, I'm waiting on my refill. All these bodies . . .” Weren't bothering him nearly as much as they had a month ago.

A heavy hand landed on his shoulder. With a painful squeeze, the coroner shook him. “Lemme handle it. You go sit in your office. I can clean this up.”

His hand slipped to the efile; he had what he needed. “Sure. Sure. Thanks.”

“Not a problem.”

Retreating to his office, Mac turned off the light and rested his head on a pile of old forms. Sunlight streamed in through the ground-­level window. He could see the parking lot, Agent Rose's office window . . . and Agent Rose, stepping out of her car, wearing a perfect navy skirt on her perfect tan body. For a moment, his ghosts fell silent. There had to be a mistake.

There was no point to planting a clone in the bureau unless they were primed to do something, to feed information to someone. But there was nothing in District 3 anyone could possibly want.

Except for the lab. And a CBI senior agent who would rather write Jane Does off as clones than open murder investigations. No wonder Sam wound up as a target. Young and eager to please, she was just the kind of person they didn't want. Whoever
they
were.

And with a cushy promotion, the clone-­Sam could do even more. Muddle more investigations. Destroy evidence when a politician was replaced. A whole conspiracy to destroy the country was blooming in front of him, and he didn't want to stop it because the little soldier had finally woken up from a five-­year nap.

“MacKenzie?” The office door opened with a squeal of protest. Harley squatted beside his chair. “You doing all right, son? I saw that girl—­she was in a powerful bad way. Not a pretty sight. Why don't you take off early?”

Mac sat up. “I'd like that.”

“I'm sure you would.” Harley picked up a pill bottle from Mac's desk. It rattled with toxic relief. “Take a ­couple of these on the way out. You'll sleep better.”

He took the bottle gratefully and dumped a pill in his hand even as Harley walked away. The bitter aftertaste made him gag. The taste was off, and he idly wondered what the expiration date was on these meds. Rolling the second pill between thumb and forefinger like a worry bead, he pulled up Agent Rose's file again, his mind wandering down the tunnel of depression. Too many ­people had died because of his mistakes already. He couldn't let Sam be a victim. But she was dead already. He spun in his chair.

Agent Rose was dead . . . maybe. The woman he knew as Sam was a clone . . . maybe. The answers were there dancing just outside his reach. If he could shake the fog. Ghosts of dead men stared at him from the darkness of his own mind. Fallen friends waiting for him to make that last, fatal mistake. And he was running out of time.

Mac shook his head. He had to buy time. Had to get sober.

Had to . . .

Had to . . .

He frowned in confusion at the pills. Had to get off the pills. Five years of living with his head in a fog so he could forget one cold morning in February of '64. Five years of twelve pills a day. Five years of barely remembering his own name, forgetting to eat, losing everything. He bit his lip, tasted blood.

He couldn't think like this. Couldn't think with his head in the fog. Couldn't remember what he was supposed to do. Trembling, he walked out of the morgue, dumping the pills onto the lawn.

Agent Rose looked across the parking lot at him.

Mac swore under his breath. Wiping a cold hand across his mouth, he flicked the pill bottle into the grass. Her eyes followed the fall of the bottle.

If looks could kill. “Agent Rose, hi.” Mac tried for cheerful and wound up sounding desperate.

“I was looking for you.” She crossed her arms and glared at him. “MacKenzie?”

Mac shook his head. “Sorry. I'm . . . I'm not feeling well.”

She glowered at the pills in the grass. “Where did you find those?”

“Harley had some extras.”

“I see.” Agent Perfect was not happy.

He was shaking. Mac rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I had one. Just the one. And I feel . . . I feel nauseous.” Exceptionally nauseous, he realized. Burning-­in-­the-­heat-­ready-­to-­pass-­out nauseated.

“You look it,” she said, sounding disgusted.
So judgmental . . . but who is she to judge? At least he was
real.

Then again, what'
s
“
real . . .”

“Why don't you let me drive?”

Mac nodded. The world was spinning around him, but he could focus. And focusing on Agent Rose was no hardship. He giggled.

“What?” She pulled him up and helped him steer his unruly feet toward her car.

“The world revolves around you.” He laughed and fell into the backseat.

“Does it now?” She tilted her sunglasses down so he could see her eyes.

He sighed. “God, you're beautiful.”

“Save your prayers for later, Mac. Where'd you get those pills?”

“From . . . from my office.” He frowned. “Harley helped me find them. I left . . . left the bottle there, because of the prescription number.”

“Just the bottle?”

Mac battled his memory. He remembered the empty bottle, he'd left it on the edge of his desk so he could call in the refill. “It was empty. But it's not.”

Agent Rose patted his knee. “Stay right here.” She walked off and came back with the bottle, a ­couple of pills, and grass clippings on her knee. “Pull your legs in.”

He groaned when the car started. Agent Rose's hand came into view with two small orange pills, just like the ones he'd been taking over the weekend. He gulped the fruit-­flavored medicine down. “Feel worse,” he groaned. “Mixed . . . shouldn't mix.”

“I know. Just don't die on me before we get to the house. I think you're in for a bad night.”

Mac heartily agreed.

S
am barely managed to get MacKenzie into his room. He was feverish to the touch and shaking, but still somewhat responsive. Time for phone calls.

“Altin here.”

“Altin, it's Rose. I have some pills of suspicious origin, and I need to get them tested.”

“Is this a bureau thing?”

“I don't know. I asked MacKenzie to do some autopsies for me. At lunchtime, he was fine, this afternoon he's—­” She heard MacKenzie throwing up in his bathroom. “It looks like the flu—­fever and vomiting—­but I don't know a virus that hits this fast. He found some pills in his office, thought they were his, and took them.”

“What sort of pills does Agent MacKenzie do?” Altin's asked with polite menace.

“
Do,
” she thought.
Not
“
take.
”
That seems about right.