Allie's War Season Three (16 page)

"Get your mind out of the gutter," Dorje joked. "At least until we're off the clock."

Jon saluted him, but his eyes never left the other's body. "Sure thing, cap'n."

They made their way to the curb together, deciding by mutual consent to walk, rather than mess around trying to get a cab at that time of morning. It was only around fifteen or sixteen blocks. Since they were street blocks, not avenue blocks, that meant about as many minutes. Jon walked fast anyway, as a general rule, so he had no trouble keeping up with Dorje's jerking, seer-like gait, which always reminded Jon of an animal walking through hostile territory. He looked like he was ready to bolt at any minute, like his energy might burst out under his skin.

Even so, the fact that Jon himself could see it so easily made him nervous. It made Dorje seem dangerously and conspicuously not-human.

Dorje must have felt some portion of Jon's observations, because the seer's gait adjusted, growing more fluid, yet somehow clumsier-looking.

"Better?" he said over his shoulder. "Do I look sufficiently confused and unsure of myself to be human, now?"

Jon snorted, throwing up his hands in mock exasperation. As he did, he saw a woman who had been checking them both out flinch when she saw his mutilated hand, where Terian had cut off his thumb and forefinger in that same cell in the Caucasus Mountains.

Jon couldn't help but notice her reaction, although he did his best to ignore it.

Shoving that hand back into his jeans pocket, he quickened his pace so that he was moving alongside Dorje again. The seer grabbed his free hand, tugging on his fingers affectionately.

"You're beautiful, Jon," he said with a smile. "...And I happen to know still very talented with that hand, missing fingers or no..."

Jon snorted again, laughing at the seer's innocent expression, even as Dorje pretended Jon had misunderstood his words.

"Mulei, Jon!" he insisted with a grin. "I meant mulei! You dirty-minded human..."

"Sure you did." Jon kissed the seer's cheek anyway, still smiling.

They reached the library in under fifteen minutes, still a good twenty prior to when its doors opened, which wasn't until 10 a.m., since it was a Sunday.

It turned out that Jon and Dorje weren't the only ones waiting for the doors to open. A handful of twenty-something students and what looked like a lower-level library employee waited outside as well, reading monitors and talking via their headsets until the time-lock disengaged. From what the employee told the rest of them, the locks only opened at the start of a new shift, so no one inside could let them in even if they wanted to, not until the official opening time, when the night shift turned over to the day crew.

Jon had thought he knew the layout of the library fairly well from prior visits, but changed his mind when Dorje shared via his headset the blueprints of the lower levels during their walk. The map he'd gotten from Balidor was detailed, especially in relation to the passageways that connected the main branch to the underground storage areas under Bryant Park.

Jon had a vague recollection of those flooding once, but that was the only knowledge he'd had previously that they even existed.

"Is that where we're going?" he asked Dorje nervously.

He was already thinking to himself that there was no way in hell they'd get in there, not without Dorje using some serious mind-muscle to convince the staff they had a legitimate right to be down there. Dorje also shared their cover with him as they waited out front, standing a ways away from the other early-birds. Jon was to request access to the printing area, to check on a project in which one of his thesis advisors from Columbia University was collaborating.

The project was real, apparently...as was the social science professor's involvement.

They hadn't gone so far as to establish a firm alias for Jon, given the time constraints, but it should get them downstairs to the relevant part of the library's basement. From there, Balidor only knew roughly where the old Cypher Computational, as they used to call them, would be located. Two main storage areas lived downstairs, one right beside the printing area, and another directly across from it, around the corridors that formed a U-shape below the lower courtyard. The storage area by the main printers happened to be the one located not far from the mouth of that passage that led under Bryant Park.

Balidor said to work through each room systematically until they found a machine that was still operational, and then tell the staff they'd received permission to investigate the contents of an old key they'd found in some war relics collection or another.

In Jon's view, it was an iffy story, at best.

Really, Jon wondered just how often Balidor actually
interacted
with humans, given some of the lame cover stories he came up with. This particular strategy also required one story for the front desk and another for the basement...along with a number of pushes to make the whole thing credible...which didn't up their chances of slipping in and out unnoticed.

Still, given how quickly Balidor pulled the whole thing together once he knew what Allie brought back from her and Revik's bank heist, Jon couldn't help being impressed.

"Think quieter, cousin," Dorje cautioned him, smoking a hiri as he leaned against the base of one of the stone lions.

It was the lion called 'Patience,' Jon was fairly sure. Some part of him found that funny.

Probably the part of him that hadn't had any coffee yet.

"Does the library have its own seers?" Jon murmured, leaning against the cement base next to Dorje. Dorje glanced at him, nudging him with his shoulder.

"No," he said, smiling. "Well...the boss doesn't think so. I more meant about what happened last night." The infiltrator made a vague gesture towards the surrounding parkland and open sky beyond the staircase. "They'll have a few nets out there...Manhattan's not that big, and we're right smack dab in Midtown..."

Jon nodded, feeling his face warm as he realized what Dorje meant. Folding his arms across his chest, he leaned against the lion next to Dorje, the leather of his jacket tightening across his back and holding him further upright. Once Dorje voiced it aloud, the caution seemed pretty obvious. Jon even knew what the seer meant by 'nets'...well, more or less. They'd be scanning over the city, looking for key words...like 'bank' and 'heist' and 'explosion,' for example...also 'Allie,' 'Alyson,' 'Revik' and on and on. They'd be looking for people who had seen anyone meeting the description of Revik or Allie. They'd also be looking for anyone who might have seen something in the vicinity of the bank itself, people who...

"Jon," Dorje said warningly.

Jon flushed a little hotter. "Okay. Yeah. Gotcha."

"Don't worry," Dorje said, patting his leg. "This will be good. Easy. In and out."

"Who's worried?" Jon muttered.

He turned his head as he spoke, hearing the massive click of the timed lock as the bolt slid back into the wall where it had held the front doors in place. The employee they'd overheard talking to the students stood up from where he leaned against the cement divider near the main entrance doors, stuffing the portable monitor he'd been reading under one arm. The man blew on his hands, shivering, though it wasn't all that cold, at least not from Jon's perspective.

Still, the air was cooler than it had been the day before. Jon knew it would heat up by noon, and possibly get downright hot by the mid-afternoon, but he could feel the change in the air. Something had shifted, turning the seasons, changing the sky.

It wasn't even October, yet it was starting to feel more like winter already.

Dorje stubbed out his hiri as he took his weight off the cement. "Come on. It'll be easier the faster we do this...and I'm hungry."

But Jon had stopped to stare at the monitor under the human guard's sweatshirt-clad arm. Dark words continued to flash on the lit screen, visible from where he had clamped it against his body, just above his elbow.

"Hey!" Jon said, waving at the man.

Dorje touched his shoulder in warning, but Jon barely felt it.

"Hey...you!" Jon waited until the man turned, finding Jon with his eyes. The man appraised him in one quick look that told Jon he was probably gay. Ignoring the interest he saw there, Jon also ignored the man's appraising glance at Dorje.

"What are those headlines?" Jon said. "Did something happen in San Francisco?"

The man looked startled for a moment, then his expression cleared.

Within seconds it was replaced by a kind of excitement, but not the good, happy kind of excitement one got from hearing good news. Instead he looked like someone who wanted to talk about something he couldn't quite believe, something he hadn't absorbed yet emotionally. It reminded Jon of how people got after earthquakes, or other natural disasters.

"Yeah, man...there's something on in SF. You haven't seen this?" The guard held up the monitor, and Jon tried to read the words. "It's all over the news. People are already worried it might be here in New York, too..."

"What might be here?" Dorje said, his voice sharpening around his accent.

The guard barely seemed to notice him, still looking mainly at Jon. "They have no idea what happened..." he added. "I have friends that live in the neighborhood where it started. Right near it, anyway...I grew up in the Bay Area..."

Jon was too busy trying to make out the text on the antique-looking screen, ignoring the flashing pictures and movies until he could get the gist of what the words were saying.

"SAN FRANCISCO HOSPITAL PLAGUE...HUNDREDS KILLED..." Jon muttered, reading off the machine. "...FEARS OF SPREADING VIRUS." He looked at Dorje, feeling something in his chest go numb. "Jesus."

"They already found cases outside the hospital where it started," the guard added, his voice still holding that tense, charged note. "...I guess they put the quarantine into effect pretty fast...within 12 hours of the first case...but not fast enough. I don't know how you could keep people from walking in and out with it anyway, big hospital like that. They had a staff change before they realized what was happening..."

He walked closer to Jon, raising the monitor somewhat and turning so Jon could read it over his shoulder. Jon couldn't help noticing how old the device was, the same kind most people carried prior to headsets and now implants.

"...They found three more cases at one of the other hospitals," the guard added. "Also in the Marina District, which is way across town..."

"Do they have any idea what it is?" Jon said. "Where it came from?"

The guard shook his head, giving Jon another once over, before catching Dorje's annoyed look and averting his gaze.

"No," he said, flushing a little. "...No, they have no idea. But I guess it kills people really fast." He sounded more openly worried when he added, "...I have a lot of friends over there. I've tried calling a few of them, but I guess the networks are on blackout for local news since this hit the international feeds..." Looking up at Jon, he gave Dorje another surreptitious glance before adding, "They're afraid of a panic, of people trying to leave, probably. Some of the non-networks are even saying that SCARB is talking about closing down the city..."

"SCARB?" Jon said, his voice sharpening. "What does SCARB have to do with it?"

The man looked caught, as if he'd said more than he meant.

But Jon already understood.

"The black market feeds," Jon said. He held up a reassuring hand, shaking his head to indicate he didn't care. "It's okay, man," Jon said. "I'm from SF...I just want to know what's going on. My family's there..."

The man's expression relaxed somewhat, but he continued to look nervous. Glancing at Dorje, he finally added in a lower voice, moving closer to Jon,

"Yeah, well...those
other
feeds?" he said conspiratorially. "Those ones you mentioned? They're saying it might have been a
terrorist
attack, man. They said there's evidence that some group of renegade seers did it. They also said the disease only kills humans..."

Jon glanced at Dorje, and could see from the seer's blurred irises that he was already in either the Barrier or the virtual setting of his headset...or more likely, both. He was probably looking at the seer black market feeds and/or talking to Balidor. Jon had no doubt they were already in process of checking if the stories linked somehow to that crazy thing Chandre had done, blowing up that lab in Hayward the previous year.

Not like Jon
disagreed
with what Chandre had done.