Xenofreak Nation (21 page)

Scott tensed up and put an arm out to stop Bryn from entering the dark room. In an undertone, he said to Phaco, “Take her somewhere.”

“Can’t. She invited.” Bryn didn’t know what was going on. She looked into the room and realized it wasn’t empty. There was a man standing in the shadows; a tall man with a beard. Sitting at the desk was a woman—Padme.

Scott stepped inside and Bryn stayed close, one hand holding onto his hoodie like an anchor. The door shut with an ominous click. Somehow she doubted Padme would be overjoyed at the reunion. The Pakistani girl jumped up and came around the desk, displaying no surprise at seeing Bryn with Scott. She flipped on the overhead light.

“Let me see it.”

Bryn didn’t have to ask what ‘it’ was. The wig was much easier to remove than it was to put on. She waited for the verdict as Padme studied her quills.

“How does it feel?” Padme asked.

“I’m getting used to it.”

Padme laughed, a short, barking sound. “An admirable attitude.”

“Do I have a choice?”

Padme cocked her head to the side, considering. “No, you do not.”

“Enough,” the bearded man growled. Bryn looked at him in the light and her eyes grew wide. That was no beard she’d seen. A sickening bolt of fear shot through her as he moved across the room and stood in front of Scott.

“You and Dundee really screwed the pooch,” the wolf-faced man said. “Disappointed a very powerful client. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

“Because I know where the Panda is,” Scott replied. “And I can get it back for you.”

This was news to Bryn.

“Where is it?” Lupus asked in a deceptively soft voice.

“At a farm upstate. The ARA took it. We were outgunned.”

Lupus’ seemed to relax somewhat, but Bryn was convinced he could burst into violence at any moment. “The Animal Rights Army,” he said. “And you know this, how?”

“I told him,” Bryn said.

Scott took a sharp breath as Lupus’ big shaggy head swung her way.

“Please elaborate…Porky,” Lupus said. His words were phrased as a polite invitation, but Bryn felt like she was wearing a red hood and he was considering whether to devour her. And ‘Porky’ was the name she’d given Dundee, which meant the Australian was still alive and had spoken to Lupus.

“I know Kareem, their leader,” she said.

Lupus smiled, or at least she thought it was a smile. He leaned down almost to her level and showed his teeth, which looked disconcertingly human against the thin black of his canine lips. “And how did this Kareem know about the shipment?”

Scott rescued her. “I’ll be sure to ask him when I take it back.”

Lupus straightened up slowly. After a moment, he said, “Mouse told me how the two of you managed to hook up. Very Romeo and Juliet, complete with tragic ending. Cougar, you will accompany me to recover the panda. Porky, you have a date with your father, and Padme will escort you.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

Before Scott could even shoot Bryn a warning look, she exclaimed, “What? No!”

Padme merely gestured to the door.

Bryn stood her ground and glared at her. “You’re wanted for kidnapping and escape. I’d like to see you try to collect that ten-thousand dollar reward.”

Padme shook her head slightly, rolling her eyes. “I’m not interested in the reward. Who do think offered it in the first place?”

“Who? You?” Bryn scoffed.

“Enough!” Lupus said again. “Get her out of here.”

Bryn finally glanced at Scott. He expected to see fear and anger in her eyes, but why did he have the feeling it was directed at him? Perhaps because he led her here, and was passively allowing Lupus to deliver her to her father? Yet he couldn’t help but feel that despite the gravity of Bryn’s situation at home, she was safer there. Her father may be a humongous jerk, but he wouldn’t kill her, something that was more and more likely to happen while she pretended to belong among the outcasts of the Xenofreak Nation.

Padme took Bryn’s arm, but Bryn shrugged the smaller girl’s hand off. Scott suppressed a pang of something, concern maybe, as she walked out the door, but was too relieved that she’d quit protesting to give it much thought. Padme tossed him a look over her shoulder that wasn’t hard to read; satisfaction.

Lupus got right down to business, as if he’d already forgotten the two young women. “Where’s the farm?”

Scott had memorized the coordinates Shasta sent him, and Lupus entered them into his holophone. “Two hour drive if we don’t hit traffic. How many ARA soldiers?”

“I don’t know.”

It was always hard to tell what Lupus was thinking by looking at his face, but he made up for it in the timbre of his voice and choice use of words. “You’re not worth a god-damn, you know that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t sir me. We’re not in the military anymore, boy. Get on the phone and find me a truck and some god-damned backup. And you better come up with a decent plan, with minimal carnage because we don’t need the press on this one, or I’ll hang you out by your furry thumbs.”

Scott accepted a whack on the side of the head as he walked past Lupus on his way to Phaco’s desk. Lupus muttered something about getting some lunch. Scott pretended not to notice that he used his sleeve to open the doorknob. It was a frustrating fact that Lupus never left prints on anything, or left any cups lying around with his DNA on it. Scott did catch what he’d said, “We’re not in the military anymore,” but it could have simply been his way of saying “you’re,” since Lupus knew Scott had been a Marine for a day.

‘Minimal carnage’ was not the XBestia way, but it made sense as far as this job was concerned. Under normal circumstances, the ARA would boast publicly about the panda rescue, but they hadn’t because they knew the authorities would confiscate the animal and quite possibly put it in a zoo. The ARA vegan animal extremists would hate zoos almost as much as they hated human consumption of meat. Their goal would be to somehow get the panda back to its native habitat in China, a lofty objective that would take time and resources. This silence on their part worked in the XBestia’s favor. As long as Lupus and company didn’t leave a bunch of corpses for the cops to investigate, they should be able to retrieve the cargo with no one but the hapless ARA soldiers the wiser.

It took four hours to get to the outskirts of the rundown, thirteen-acre farm just outside of Poughkeepsie. They drove in a ten-foot long decommissioned U-Haul rental truck with Arizona plates. The truck looked unassuming, but it was armored, had honeycomb bullet-proof tires, and the cab had been opened up to connect to the back. The driver was an ex-NASCAR mechanic, a Native American xeno who called himself Chief Joe. He had a bulbous red nose that suggested alcoholism and wore a Mohawk, but instead of a strip of hair down his head, it was a rather raggedy band of feathers. In the passenger seat was his partner, a female xeno named Liz. She, too, had a partially shaved head, similar to the cut Scott was growing out. Her graft, some kind of reptile skin in the shape of an arrow pointing down, was situated at the base of her brain. The first time he looked at it, it appeared to be green, but the second time it looked brown. He wondered if it was chameleon skin.

Lupus sat with Scott in the back, slumped and dozing almost the entire way, while Scott familiarized himself with the arsenal on board: four long-range CO2 dart-gun rifles with thermal night vision scope capability, and a box of darts pre-filled with tranquillizer sufficient to knock out a 200-pound man, pressurized and ready for use. Two separate darts with a different anesthetic were designated for the panda in case they needed them.

Once they reached the farm’s coordinates, Chief Joe slowed down as Scott leaned into the cab to look out the window and study the perimeter visible from the main road. A stand of old sugar maples completely concealed the farm. The main gate appeared to be reinforced, but the fencing on either side looked like standard agricultural barbed wire, and the land was level. Scott pointed to a section of fence to the right of the gate, an area thinly populated with saplings. Chief Joe nodded.

They drove a quarter mile further before Chief Joe pulled over at a place where the shoulder of the road widened into a lookout point. It was almost dark and there was no other traffic. The terrain was woodsy with green meadows, and the air coming in through the windows felt humid and warm, laden with the chirping of crickets and frogs.

Lupus sat up and stretched. “We here?”

Scott said, “Yep.”

Lupus grunted and pulled out his holophone, switching it to conference. After one ring, Padme’s face appeared. She began to talk without waiting for a prompt from Lupus. “These guys are dedicated, but small potatoes. Kareem’s mother LaShonda Williams won a lottery jackpot in 2013 and managed to hang onto most of it until she died last year of lung cancer. Kareem, who graduated from NYU with a Bachelors in Liberal Studies, inherited several million and has been essentially building his army ever since.”

“That’s fascinating,” Lupus said, sounding profoundly bored, “but would you mind please getting to the part about how many of these stooges we are up against?”

“I hacked into the ARA’s email through their website. They have over one hundred active members, only a handful of whom reside in the area and are overtly involved in the day-to-day operations. Two hours ago, Kareem sent an email to a Miss Karen Lee inviting her over and telling her, in essence, that they would have the place to themselves tonight.”

Scott tucked away the information that Padme had the ability to hack into someone’s email. She’d never revealed that she was anything more than tech-savvy.

“So we brought all this firepower to take down a guy on a booty-call?” Liz asked.

“Not necessarily,” Padme replied. “I sent a map of the farm—main house, barn, chicken coop and two outbuildings. It was originally an organic dairy and egg farm, but the livestock was sold off and the grazing fields are fallow. The structures were built a century ago. Barn is constructed of local stone a third of the way up and finished with timber. Fencing is not electrified. There is, however, a video surveillance alarm system with infrared capability.”

“Can you shut it down?” Lupus asked.

“Not from here. The alarm company has an adequate firewall, though I was able to extract information from correspondence between Kareem and the company. An email dated two years ago had an attachment with the original schematic proposal for installation of the cameras. I sent it to you. The cameras use software analysis that will alert Kareem via holocall if it detects intruders, or if one or more of the cameras go offline. If he does not contact the company to give the all-clear within ten minutes, the system will alert police. As to how many people you may encounter, I can tell you that the previous owner converted one of the outbuildings to a housing unit in 1987. As we speak, the occupants are streaming a holo entitled, ‘Mask of the Undertaker.’

“That’s a good movie,” Chief Joe said, earning a sidelong look from Lupus.

Padme continued, “In addition, there are three people using the postal address assigned to that unit. All male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. None of them have military service records, but their arrest records suggest they are familiar with firearms.”

Scott was dumbstruck that Padme had obtained all that information in the four hours they’d been driving. Although in point of fact, she would have had significantly less time to do so, since she’d had to take Bryn home. He hoped Lupus would ask her how that went.

But Lupus only said, “That it?”

“The local police provide live scanner audio feed on the Internet. I will monitor it and call you if they are notified and responding to a security breach in your area. That’s all.”

Lupus flipped his holophone closed over her image without so much as a goodbye.

He looked at Scott. “What we got?”

Scott handed each of them an earbug and waited while they were inserted. “Frequency confirm.”

Lupus, Chief Joe and Liz all said, “Check” in turn, and Scott heard each of their voices in his right ear.

He held up one of the dart cases. “This holds your ammo. It’s like a straw dispenser. Push this lever and a dart will drop into the tray. In the syringe is the fastest-acting tranquilizer on the market, but it will still take about 30 seconds for full effect. We got one shot at a time, so make ‘em count. I can’t emphasize enough: if you have a shot, say so. We want verbal confirmation on each target so we don’t dart anyone twice, else we’ll have to take ‘em with us to monitor their heart rate and respiration.”

He distributed body armor vests, saying, “From what I saw yesterday at the beach, these guys like rifles, but there were a lot of bullets flying with only one hit, and it was non-lethal. Doesn’t mean they got no aim—could be they were trying not to kill anyone. Tonight we can assume they will do their best to stop us, and they won’t be using darts. Try not to get shot in the head.”

Liz snorted and nudged Chief Joe. “That means you, featherhead.”

Scott held up one of the rifles and demonstrated how to load a dart. “This switch on the scope turns night vision on and off. Accuracy depends on distance. Distance depends on CO2 pressure, so before you take your shot, adjust this dial accordingly, one notch per five meters. Don’t even bother to shoot if you’re further than 100 meters from the target. The guns are quiet, but not silent. Be sure to police your darts. And for God’s sake, don’t poke yourself.”