Viking (24 page)

Abbott’s voice took on a stubborn tone. “I say get out while the getting’s good.
Even if it does come after us, we can outrun it. We only have to make it to the
forest.”

Rafa’s face twisted in grim amusement. “How fast can you run a kilometer?”

Abbott opened his mouth but was unable to come up with a pithy retort. Instead his
jaw hung slack for a dozen heartbeats; then he swore softly and looked away.

Chen crouched down and hugged her knees miserably, her eyes still glancing back to
the chaos behind them.

Several minutes passed with no break in the monster’s attack. Showers of dirt and
pebbles rained through the leaves. Once, a bulb of soil and trunk careened like a
cannonball and smashed to a stop a few meters from their position.

Finally Rafa shifted to his feet again and gestured peremptorily.

“What now?” Abbott growled.

“I was wrong. This is no display of temper.”

“I don’t get you. Maybe it’s taking a while to give up, but...”

“It’s not pulling trees at random. It’s moving in a line, back and forth across the
thicket.”

“Why?” Chen wheezed.

“Process of elimination. It knows we’re in here somewhere, but it didn’t like what
happened when it reached in blind. So it’s weeding itself a clearing until it either
finds us or flushes us out.”

They looked at him, too horror-struck to respond.

Rafa’s lips thinned into a bleak smile. “Spilt milk, I suppose, but I should have
listened to you, Abbott. Anyway, we’ve got to make a break.”

Chen swayed wearily to her feet. “You had a point about more running.”

Rafa nodded. “I know. You guys aren’t going anywhere fast. I’m going to take off and
see if it follows me. With luck, you can go at an easy walk in the other direction once
the coast is clear. If I can stay ahead, I’ll circle around and meet you in the forest.
I don’t think it’ll follow us there.”

Chen was already shaking her head. “You’ll be history if it catches you, and even if
it doesn’t, it won’t be easy to find you. I’m not sure you’d make it back to the module
on your own. We certainly won’t.”

“I hate to repeat myself, but do you have a better plan?”

Abbott pushed his way forward. “Maybe we should give it another minute or two.”

“It’s getting closer,” Rafa responded, eyeing him calmly.

There was a long moment of silence.

“Okay.”

Rafa began creeping toward the lighter patches of shadow, where open grassland
showed through the last few strides of tree. At the edge he paused, studying the
sky.

“It’s not over us right here,” he whispered. “That’ll give me a head start.”

“Godspeed,” Chen whispered, her voice oddly strained.

Rafa turned around. He said nothing, but the carved black hollows below his brows
bored into her eyes meaningfully.

Then he sprinted out into the open.

* * *

The pufferbelly was at least as alert and nimble as he’d feared. Rafa had scarcely
covered ten meters when the sound of rending, thrashing saplings ceased. After a few
seconds he risked a look back and saw it gliding rapidly after him, tentacles shooting
in twos and threes in a quicktime rhythm to haul against the anchoring trees. Its pace
made his stomach sink.

The nocturnal air was cool and relatively calm, with only light, shifting breezes.
He’d been hoping for a real wind on the theory that it would slow the pursuit—but the
enormous creature behind him seemed possessed of an invisible means of propulsion,
independent of tentacle power. Perhaps wind was not a barrier after all.

At least it
was
chasing him. The others were out of danger for the moment.
They could streak across the gap to the dark line of forest as soon as they saw the
coast was clear.

He ran roughly north, parallel to the horizon that was beginning to brighten. In a
couple minutes he would be far enough away from the thicket to cut east himself, if the
pufferbelly didn’t lose interest. What would the forest be like? It had looked thick
and wild from the skimmer deck when they’d flown overhead days before. Would he be able
to find Abbott and Chen again?

A second backward glance and his mouth went dry. Impossibly, the bloated aerial
jellyfish was gaining on him. His flashing feet, pumping at almost a dead sprint, were
less than twenty meters from the nearest outstretched feeler. How could it move so
fast?

He zagged abruptly to the right, hurdling some low-lying brush with a grunt and
nearly tripping on rocks loosely embedded in the sandy soil. Time to head for safety,
if it wasn’t already too late. Clearly he had provided enough of a distraction to
protect his companions.

Zag again, across a shallow pond-sized depression and up the other side. Grimly he
drew more speed from his exhausted body. Already the fatigue was beginning to wear in
his thighs and shoulders. He’d never been a sprinter, never dreamed he’d have to go so
fast.

He burst through an especially thick stand of grass, ignoring the whipping blades
across his hands and cheeks, and stumbled as the heel of his driving boot thudded into
a small hole. His knee buckled, but he staggered and recovered in a heartbeat, skin
crawling as outstretched tentacles snaked blackly out of the grass.

 A dozen more steps and he felt a sinuous coil encircle his waist. There was no
warning, no crack of the whip; just a sudden band of steel that pinioned him around the
middle at elbow height and yanked him to a halt, his arms crushed tightly to heaving
ribs, his survival knife glinting uselessly in the light of rings and approaching
dawn.

He flailed with his feet, writhed wildly. So close to the tree line! Another
tentacle wrapped around one jerking ankle. He stamped at it viciously, missed, stamped,
missed again. Then the horizon spun and tilted crazily as he lifted off the ground. He
caught a dizzying flash of dark, scaly underbelly, fanning tutu, pulsing mandibles, and
whiff of animal scent that evoked wet greenery. Blood rushed to his head as he dangled
upside down, back arched in protest.

Oddly, his brain cleared, and the fear burned away like fog on a sunny morning. One
corner of his mind wondered how long he would remain conscious, regretted in a detached
sort of way that he’d be munched feet-first to prolong the pain. But such thoughts were
a minor tangent, really. The feeling that consumed him was an ache for Julie.

How bitter to die without a better farewell!

He hung there, twitching vainly, for perhaps a minute before he realized that the
pufferbelly was making no attempt to proceed with its meal. It seemed content to hold
him at what passed for arm’s length. His head was beginning to pound, his eyes to bulge
with the pressure of pooling blood. The constricting band around his midsection made it
difficult to breathe. He fought back a wave of vertigo and shouted a hoarse, ludicrous
threat to bolster his courage.

The pufferbelly suddenly began to swell and retract its tentacles. Rafa was pulled
up flush with the taut roughness of its belly, still upside down and rocking like a
pendulum. His stomach recoiled at the contact with alien flesh. Static electricity
crackled and coursed along his body, but he was too full of revulsion to wonder at its
source. The dizziness grew worse and his vision began to fog. Then the ground fell
away. Rafa’s last glimpse was the rapidly diminishing jots and tittles of brush and
rock and grassland as he rose into the blue.

He managed a final, faint “Julie” before he succumbed to blackness.

Agent Ray Gregory snapped the window of his den to the open position and breathed in
the sounds of wind and the criss-crossing mesh of half a dozen layers of traffic and a
hundred stories of bustling city nightlife. A stray gust detached some notes pasted in
a haphazard manner to a cramped desk.

He tossed his leather jacket, specked with dust across the shoulders, onto a spare
chair, and settled into his seat with a sigh. Administrative baloney and paperwork were
about as deadly dull as he could imagine, but they could only be postponed so long.
He’d kept up the “out on an investigation” routine for almost two weeks running, but he
knew if he called in again tomorrow with another supposedly urgent lead, his boss would
only roll his eyes, put the case on hold, and demand the written reports that were now
grossly overdue.

Yuck.

Reluctantly he pulled out a pocket clerk and scanned his task list. A lot of it was
trivial nonsense sent by unknown cogs in the bureaucracy.
Review new benefits
package
. Again? Well, check that one off; nobody could prove he hadn’t read it.
Return employee satisfaction survey
. They’d never even look at it. Who came up
with all this nonsense?
Prepare a written summary of depositions in the Mendelssohn
case
. That was one he couldn’t ignore, and it would take hours. He leaned back and
tried to summon the focus for a coherent dictation, but it wouldn’t come.

Gloomily his eyes flitted over to his inbox. The AI in his clerk filtered incoming
messages pretty well, killing spam, filing announcements and general information, and
forwarding urgent items. He hadn’t been buzzed in several days, but maybe it had missed
something that really
would
provide a hot clue to stave off death by
boredom.

Maybe.

Mostly it was unremarkable, but one item from a Julie Orosco caught his eye. Wasn’t
she the wife of that guy he’d nailed a few months ago? He leaned forward and played the
message, his fingers drumming the desk. At the end his eyebrows went up. How could
Orosco have been an agent? No way could they have missed that on his background. No
way.

Frowning, he hunted up the files on the case and re-read them slowly, his fingertips
pressed together, pausing to nod or knit his brows periodically. He was looking for
gaps, spots where he’d slipped up, places where the investigation had stopped short of
due diligence.

He found nothing. It was a classic open-and-shut case that could have been lifted
straight from a criminology textbook at the academy—so tidy, in fact, that it made him
a bit uncomfortable, now that he thought about it. Years of interviewing witnesses and
piecing together the most tenuous chains of reasoning had taught him that real life was
never as straightforward as the books.

If Mrs. Orosco could be believed, this case was no exception. But it simply didn’t
add up. They had looked for evidence of a double life at the time; it would have
bolstered their conception of motive at the trial. And they’d found shadowy financial
transactions, nasty phone calls—but not a whisper of a connection to the bureau. Why
not?

Gregory reactivated the digital bloodhound that had sniffed out the generic details
of Orosco’s past before. The subject template was still filled in: name, social
security number, birth date. He added “FBI” as a key word and requeried. No new hits.
How about “David Rosales” as an alias? Still nothing. He tried removing the social
security number, using a range instead of an exact birth date. That returned some new
possibilities, but he could tell at a glance they were spurious. Orosco had never been
an obese bartender in Calgary or an actor in New York City.

He took out everything but the fingerprints and was back to a single match again.
Rafael Orosco. He stared at the screen, nonplussed. “So where is this Rosales
identity?”

He re-ran the fingerprint scan with the broadest possible matching tolerance.

Still one hit. Maybe the wife was just making it all up. But she’d seemed sincere,
and he remembered pegging her as a level-headed if upset woman during their
interviews.

He cleared the screen and pulled up the FBI Academy’s intranet. After a couple
minutes of digging he was looking at graduation records. Almost immediately he found
the name, staring at him in plain type. David Rosales. Score one point for Julie,
anyway.

He switched to the personnel register, again got a hit. Rosales had graduated with
an enviable record all the way around, from scholastics to marksmanship, had been
assigned to Miami, worked for a couple years, then died in a tragic apartment fire. No
living relatives.

Could they be the same person? He was about the age of Orosco, looked somewhat
similar, though it was hard to tell from an old photo—especially if cosmetic surgery
entered into the equation. He downloaded Rosales’ fingerprints and compared them to
Orosco’s.

Different. So Julie didn’t quite have it right. But she said her husband’s archives
had video of Rosales graduating at Quantico. Could Rosales and Orosco have been
friends? Relatives?

Maybe he needed to use DNA. At the time of the original background search Gregory
only had fingerprints, and they’d provided an unambiguous identification. He’d taken a
DNA sample later, to ID cells on Oberling’s sheets, but not revisited the question of
who Rafa was.

It couldn’t hurt to check. Besides diagnosing genealogy, it would be a sure way to
prove the two men were different. Someone could conceivably substitute prints in a
file, but not DNA; it was too easy to compare known physical characteristics against a
genome and find the fake.

The Rosales file didn’t have a sample.

But that was impossible. Law enforcement had been storing profiles on all its
personnel for decades. It helped rule out spurious traces at a crime scene and provided
iron-clad positive ID when an assignment went wrong. He vividly remembered the prick of
a needle in his own arm on the day he signed up. Part of the little red vial had gone
to a drug test, and part into the database that now claimed no trace of Rosales.

Now he was genuinely puzzled.

Well, if he couldn’t rule out a Rosales/Orosco connection by DNA, maybe simpler
methods would suffice. The powerful intra-agency research cloud had archives of
trillions of financial transactions, traffic tickets, vehicle and driver registrations,
rental agreements, medical bills, loan applications, school files. With coaxing they
could perform wonders by weaving together a handful of disparate threads into a
coherent picture. It was how they’d found the meager traces of Orosco’s shadowy
alter-ego months before.