3rd World Products, Book 16 (44 page)

On our screen, Elgin tapped off and upped her speed a bit. I left the probe in her car, but she did nothing else as she took the next exit and headed back south. At US-27, she got off I-75, turned right, and parked at a motel.
 

Taking the battery out of the phone, Elgin wiped the phone with some paper napkins from a
fast food bag, then got out of the car. She threw the phone well into the pond just beyond the parking lot and the food bag and battery went into a trash bin as she entered the motel lobby.
 

Chapter Twenty-seven
 

I quietly asked Tea to continue blocking cell phone signals. Switching the probe view back to Marie, I studied her face for a time and said, “You can almost see the little buggers working. A while ago we could see gristle through her skin. And although the dent spots are still pale, the bone isn’t showing through now. Can’t see many blood vessels anymore, either.”
 

Tanya gave me an odd glance, then watched her mother’s face heal for a while in silence.
 

I said, “Sometimes you see odd things during surveillance, ma’am. People scratch, fart, pick noses, wipe the stuff on other people, plan devious and dangerous things, and wander around half naked or starkers. You see everything, good or bad, because it’s all part of the show. Now and then what you see is lovely, like Elgin’s legs, but sometimes it’s pretty ugly, like someone putting ground glass in somebody else’s food. You just never know what the hell you’ll get, y’know?”
 

With a sidelong glance at me, Tanya said, “I know what you’re saying, but it just felt so dirty to spy on her like that.”
 

I shrugged. “Necessity. Now we know where she stands and she has a number to call tomorrow.” Turning to look at her, I said, “We’re doing the same thing now. Watching your mom sleep through a probe. Dirty? Not dirty?”
 

Giving me a wry look, Tanya said, “Not dirty. We care about her. We need to know she’d doing all right.”
 

“Uh, huh. Watching Elgin talk to Fullbright and discover her own agency is bugging her. Necessary? Not?”
 

She sighed. “Yeah, okay. Necessary.” She then pointed a finger at me and grinningly said, “But
you
enjoyed it!”
 

I laughed, “You can stuff that back in the bull, ma’am. You eyeballed her right along with me. I saw your lips go all soft and swollen. Your eyes lit right up when that shirt jacked up around her waist. You almost
drooled
. You’d lick her silly in a
heartbeat
.”
 

There was momentary outrage on Tanya’s face, but it faded fast and she snorted, “Yeah, you bet I would. She’s
hot
.”
 

“They make ‘em stay fit. It really shows, doesn’t it?”
 

“Yes, it definitely does.”
 

“Are we ready to ‘
surveil
‘ somebody else, or is it time to make a couple of drinks and sit back for a while?”
 

“Who are you talking about surveilling now?”
 

Pretending pain, I said, “Ow. That
should
be…”
 

She backhanded my leg. “
Skip
the English lesson. Who?”
 

“The clinic staff. They’re inside a secure facility. Bet they gossip like schoolgirls.”
 

Tanya grinned. “Why not do both? Drink and watch?”
 

She got up to go to the suitcase and opened it, then seemed to have a moment of thought. With a glance at me, she came to stand over me and asked, “Now what?”
 

Trying to look innocent, I asked, “Why, whatever do you mean, milady?”
 

“Why would we be monitoring the clinic staff?”
 

“Oh. Damn. I thought you’d ask why we’d be drinking.”
 

Rolling her eyes, she said, “Uh, huh. Why the clinic staff?”
 

“Because some are security people, not medics. They’ll expect certain things to happen. Got any idea what?”
 

She shook her head. “No. Not really.”
 

“Beyond the obvious, neither do I. They might.”
 

“The obvious?”
 

“Tests. Measurements. Estimates of healing and how long it will be until she says ‘
let me the hell out of here
‘. And those in on the game — if any — will probably speculate on the next moves and the likely outcome.”
 

Tanya seemed to let all that gel for a time, then she nodded and went back to the suitcase. In short order we had a couple of drinks and I’d split a screen to watch four probes at once.
 

Sipping, Tanya made a face and said, “We forgot the ice.”
 

I sent green tendrils to our glasses and formed ice in our drinks, then sipped mine and said, “It’s good. Thanks.”
 

Poking the ice blob in her drink, she replied, “No. Thank
you
. This stuff is only barely drinkable when it’s warm.”
 

Someone on screen was joined by someone else. I turned up the sound a bit, but it was only some yap about football. On panel three, a woman answered the phone and told someone she could cover an extra hour or so, but that’s all.
 

That’s how it went well into our next drinks, then a guy in a suit opened a door and beckoned someone in. Another suit walked past the probe and I had it follow him through the door.
 

The first suit said, “I just got off the phone with Latimer. They’ve issued arrest warrants on federal charges. Diller pulled blood, but the nanobots died as soon as they left her body.” He shrugged. “They always do. I don’t know why they bothered. We already knew they were in there. Anyway, this’ll only go on another couple of hours, then it’s business as usual at both ends of the stick.”
 

Both ends of
what
stick? I hate euphemisms. Metaphors. Whatthehellever that was.
 

The second suit nodded and asked, “Why the big deal about it? She’s sedated and capped.”
 

“He didn’t say.” Shrugging again, Suit1 said, “All I know is, this place will get back to normal tonight. I’m really fucking sick of all this. It never had anything to do with us and we shouldn’t have been dragged into it.”
 

Suit2 said, “Our friends at Homeland were trying to be slick, but Carlin said the NSA found her almost immediately. There’s a big hash going on about who’s going to get her.”
 

That puzzled me. Of course the NSA could find Marie. Her daughter visited her every day or so and lived… unless they were no longer talking about Marie?
 

I said, “Something’s fishy. I don’t think they’re talking about Marie now.”
 

Her drink forgotten and her eyes locked on the screen, Tanya nodded. “Neither do I. Mom hasn’t been a secret at all.”
 

Suit1 said, “I don’t give a flying fuck who gets her, I just want her out of here. What happened in Cosgrove was so bad the Canadians haven’t given us any shit about taking her.”
 

Cosgrove. In Canada. Bad happenings. I ran core searches and came up with damned near nothing for a moment, then found CSIS and media records of a 2009 grain silo explosion in Cosgrove. Half the town destroyed. Disaster assistance, etc…
 

Putting up a screen for a map showed a spot sixty miles north of Ottawa. Population before, 603. After, 447. More research, same results. Different media, same words. In many cases, entire paragraphs or even the entire column had been copied. All the same pictures of devastation. The only survivor comments were from the day of the explosion. Nothing since.
 

That stunk; it meant only one official source of info was available, which didn’t make any sense. With a hundred and fifty dead, there should have been media vultures swarming like starving locusts. An aerial view showed a shallow crater where the silo had been, but something about the blast diameter didn’t look right to me.
 

I overlaid an earlier satellite view of the town and lined up the roads. The center of the blast zone was a good fifty feet west of where the silo had been.
 

Probes sent to Cosgrove didn’t find any indications of any explosives other than what occurs naturally within a grain silo; wheat dust. Yet the explosion had been at least three times the size of any similar explosion ever recorded. I suddenly and completely didn’t buy any of it. The area had been roped off for a week. Surely there were a few other pix of the place.
 

On a government computer in Ontario I found what appeared to be the only official documentation about Cosgrove that wasn’t a recap of the media blather. Several pictures showed the silo blast had been of normal intensity, but one of the pictures showed a deep pit within the blast radius. It was fifty feet west of center. I tried to see into the pit by various means, but the photo just wasn’t good enough.
 

A secret weapon location or a lab? I voted the lab because an underground weapon explosion
didn’t seem likely to poke a tunnel to the surface. It would blast into the open, create a mound that would collapse into a crater, or it wouldn’t have power enough to do more than create a new cave.
 

Research turned up info from the early fifties that said the area had been set aside for military use, but that it had been decommissioned for use as farmland. Government and corporate funds had established a silo in the early sixties, a road had been paved leading to the main north-south highway, and a tiny town had formed by the early seventies.
 

Sitting back, I sipped and thought, ‘
Did the military leave them some underground surprises?
’
 

I was about to send probes when Tanya touched my shoulder and asked, “What did you just do? I saw
tons
of text and some pictures and maps flash by, then you stopped here.”
 

Oops. The screen had reflected my activities through the core, which had synced up and sent me everything at my brain’s current operating speed. Swirling my drink, I realized that speed likely wasn’t my absolute best at the moment.
 

Sipping my drink again, I said, “Just scanning for pertinent stuff. There might have been a military gadget under that silo.”
 

“Can you find out?”
 

“Yup. I’ll send probes. Stand by, ma’am.”
 

The probes descended fifty feet before they encountered shattered concrete and twisted steel rebar. No radiation. No residue of explosives. No sign of a major fire or flood. Examining the walls, their damage reminded me of when I’d pushed exterior house walls off a foundation to collapse a ratty structure.
 

Pressure cracks radiated outward through the concrete. Some of the rebar was warped outward and broken, not cut. The ceiling had sagged in places and collapsed completely in others. And then I found a perfectly round hole a yard wide in the ceiling of the west-most section of the facility.
 

Except for the hole, it was an undamaged rectangular room, now filled with sand. I sent probes up through the hole and the strata a few feet around it. The outer probes showed generally similar strata and data. What had once been a small cave had been converted into a bunker. The inner probe in the tunnel showed sand leading upward thirty feet or so, then regular soil to the surface.
 

“Okay,” I said, “A concrete bunker down there was destroyed, all but one room of it. I think something made it to the surface through that hole. Somebody then filled the hole with sand and capped it in a hurry with local dirt. The indentation around the center was made to look like a blast crater.” Looking at Tanya, I said, “I hope that doesn’t mean the silo explosion was deliberately caused to cover something else.”
 

Tanya gave me just about the biggest, most skeptical fisheye I’d ever seen as she asked, “You really think someone
deliberately
blew up that silo?!”
 

“I don’t
want
to think that, but the silo appears to have exploded after whatever happened to the bunker. Tanya, most governments and militaries cover up their screwups when they think they can get away with it.”
 

Her fisheye continued for a time, then she returned her attention to the screen and sipped as she studied things. I scrapped my interest in the Cosgrove crater and sent a probe to check records at the nursing home. Forty adults and two children in twenty-one rooms. None listed as Canadian. Well, that would figure. All with varying brain or neurological damage. That figured, too. It’s what the place was all about.
 

Having gone that far, it was only one little step farther to send probes to and through the patients themselves, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Treatments other than those normal for such injuries. Medications not normally used. I didn’t know what all they might be, but my core assembled a list of typical meds, procedures, and hardware and looked for oddities.
 

And, boy, did it find something. One of the children, a girl of eleven named Marjory Wright, had a bandaged head and wore a neck brace. At the back of it were a line of small bolts, not snaps, and two strips of what looked like det cord had been embedded in the plastic along the lines of bolts. I checked the composition and found Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate. Yup. Detonation cord.
 

Each embedded cord had its own blasting cap as well as a separate, fiber optic laser-initiated igniter. Several wires led from the brace to a box hanging on the side of the bed. The wires were bound together like a clumsily-made rope and there was plenty of slack in them. There were also a couple of large loops fastened to the gurney with a Velcro strap, likely to make the kid a little more portable if necessary. Unfasten the loops and there’d be another six or eight feet of cable.