Blood Will Tell (34 page)

Still, Thorn was offering far more than she had expected. He would not be mentioning Gaia to her if he didn’t visualize some long-term future with her and Jerem. Wasn’t that what she had always dreamed of and thought she would never have—a chance for them to be a real family? Miala realized suddenly she would go to the wildest frontier planet if it meant that Eryk Thorn would stay in hers and Jerem’s lives, and whatever its current shortcomings, Gaia was hardly the frontier. Besides, she’d grown up on Iradia and certainly knew how to fend for herself in a rough environment. She might have spent the last eight years living soft on Nova Angeles, but once a person has been toughened in a crucible such as her home world, the lessons learned there were indelibly etched in the psyche.

“What sort of a place is New Zealand?” Miala asked, hoping her tone was neutral enough, even though she thought,
Please, God, not more desert...

When he replied, Eryk Thorn sounded almost amused, as if he had known exactly what was preying on her mind. “It’s a temperate country—it has forests and open land. And it’s an island. Lots of water. No desert. It escaped a lot of the damage Gaia suffered during the environmental breakdowns of the twenty-first century.”

“And that’s where your mother is from?”

He nodded. “Both my parents, actually. I think that’s why she kept me. There are far too few of us left in this day and age. Guess she wanted the bloodline to continue.”

There was so much Miala wanted to ask, but she also knew that Thorn had already revealed far more to her than he probably had to any other living being. She pushed most of the other questions aside, but felt compelled to inquire, “Have you ever been to New Zealand?”

“Once.” At first it seemed as if he would offer no more than that, but after a brief pause he added, “It can be a harsh place, but I think you will find parts of it beautiful.”

Then let’s hope that we end up in one of the beautiful parts
, she thought. But she only said, “I’m looking forward to it.”

Thorn’s lifted eyebrow handed her the lie, but he said nothing, instead reaching over and laying his hand on top of hers where it rested on the handle of the bag she carried. He didn’t bother to offer her any soothing words. She somehow doubted he had any, but the fact that he was already planning for their future together reassured her far more than any facile words about how he was sure Jerem was fine and that this would all go off without a hitch. Whatever else he might be or do, Eryk Thorn looked at the galaxy through a set of keen, unsentimental eyes. If he thought they would come out on the other side of this relatively unscathed, well, then, that was good enough for her.

Still, she couldn’t help wishing the rough parts were well past them. Too bad that life didn’t come with a selective remote control, one that would allow you to skip over the frightening or dangerous sections. If only that were the case, then she’d push the button that would put her, Jerem, and Thorn safely on the
Fury
and flying off to Gaia, with the kidnappers vanquished and all the loose ends on Nova Angeles neatly tied up. But life didn’t work that way, unfortunately, and she knew they would all have to live through whatever lay ahead to get to that particular happy ending.

Miala glanced over at Eryk Thorn’s imperturbable features and wondered if he ever experienced such moments of doubt. It would be nice, she thought, to be that sure of one’s self, to never seem to experience a moment of indecision or fear.

She tightened her fingers around his, hoping to feel some of his strength bolstering her own sagging will.
Let me be strong enough
, she prayed silently.

Let me be strong enough to save my son.

“Well, dip me in shit,” breathed Creel, who had to read the terse automated message several times to make sure he’d gotten it right.

Jessa Kodd paused at the edge of his desk, green eyes widening slightly. “Excuse me?”

He looked up. “Sorry. But I think I’ve got something here.”

She set down the case file she was holding and walked around the corner of the desk, then leaned over his shoulder so she could get a closer look at his computer screen. A spicy scent wafted from her loose hair as she bent toward him, and Creel had to swallow and attempt to recall what had grabbed his attention in the first place.

“I tagged Mia Felaris’ bank accounts so I’d be notified in case of any unusual activity,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t notice his increased respiration. “Two standard hours ago she withdrew ten million in cash from a holding account she had on New Chicago.”

“Ten million?” Jessa’s tone was carefully neutral, but he thought he could hear the incredulity behind it.

“Just about emptied the account. There’s a couple hundred thousand left, but that’s it.”

“Think she’s getting ready to blow the system?”

He shook his head. Although Mia Felaris’ actions seemed to be those of someone preparing to pull up stakes and move on, somehow Creel didn’t think that was the case here. There seemed to be something else going on, some other motivating factor.

He just wished he could figure out what it was.

“I’m pulling in the security feed from New Chicago Central Trust now,” he said, watching as the flat video images scrolled past. They showed a normal weekday morning of patrons moving in and out, some tapping away on their tablets as they stood in the queue, higher-level customers getting one-on-one service from the bank’s various functionaries.

Creel let the feed continue on its loop, his eyes only half-focused on the flood of data. He’d done this enough times that he knew he’d catch the anomaly when it popped up.

And there it was.

Mia Felaris strolled in, accompanied by a nondescript-looking man in a plain dark suit. He stood off to one side while she went to speak with an older woman who obviously was a mid-level bank officer. After a few seconds, they disappeared into a private office. But the strange man continued to wait in the main lobby, his stance relaxed, his gaze appearing to continually move over the other patrons as they went about their business.

“Who’s that?” Jessa asked.

Creel shook his head but didn’t lift his gaze from the monitor. “Don’t know. Let me do a capture and see what the databanks have on him.” He paused the image, typed in the commands to have the image-matching software take a snap of the stranger’s face, and then waited as the computer began the process of trying to line up the pixels with the billions of records on file in the Consortium’s databases. The process could take a while, Creel knew, but it was an invaluable tool in a galaxy-spanning civilization that all too often had galaxy-spanning criminals as well. Of course, anyone who’d had a photo identification taken at some point in their lives was also stored in the database, but usually it was the shady types who tended to have more official “portraits” on file.

He turned away from the computer to see Jessa Kodd watching him with speculation in her cool green eyes.

“Think he’s coercing her?”

That had been Creel’s first thought, but somehow he didn’t believe it was the case. “I don’t think so,” he replied with a frown. Leaning forward, he tapped in the command to have the image back up a few frames, then watched carefully as the pair entered the bank. “You’d think she’d look more nervous around him. Look at the way he touched her elbow there—” He paused the image. It was the briefest of gestures, but somehow it looked as if the stranger were trying to give a reassuring pat to Mia’s arm before she went off with the bank officer. “If he’d been threatening her, she would have reacted negatively, even if she were trying to look cool. But instead she got that little smile on her face. I don’t think he’s forcing her to withdraw that money.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Maybe. All my research so far has shown she leads a pretty solitary life, though. Just her and the kid.” The kid, whom no one had seen since the house fire. The boy hadn’t been injured, as far as Creel could tell. He’d checked with all the local hospitals and clinics, and no one answering to Jerem Felaris’ description had been admitted to any of them. Maybe Mia Felaris had just stashed her son at a friend’s house. He wasn’t at the suite she’d booked in the Rilsport Plaza, either. Creel had already searched the rooms after she’d left and found nothing. For someone leading a quiet civilian life, Ms. Felaris seemed to know an awful lot about not leaving any clues behind.

The computer beeped, indicating that it had completed its search, and Creel swiveled back around to check out the results.

“Captain Galen Marr,” he read. “Shows he’s got a light cargo ship registered on Monteverde…looks as if he landed here on Nova Angeles two days ago. The vessel is right here at the Rilsport spaceport. Landing pad eighteen-twenty. Paid for a week of docking privileges in advance.”

“So they didn’t take his ship to New Chicago?”

“Doesn’t look like it. Must have traveled by regular shuttle.”

Jessa frowned. “Why would they do that if they had a private ship at their disposal?”

“Maybe it needed repairs or something.”

At that comment she shot him an unbelieving look, and Creel lifted his shoulders.

“All right, that doesn’t seem likely.”

“To put it mildly.” She glanced at the computer screen, as if trying to commit Captain Marr’s hard features to memory. Then she gave Creel a slow smile, a smile most men in the department would have lined up to be on the receiving end of. “Guess we’d better get going, then.”

“Going?”

In answer she reached forward and typed in the command that put his computer into locked-down sleep mode. “Landing pad eighteen-twenty. I figure this Captain Marr’s got to come back to his ship
some
time...”

After hours of careful scrutiny—well, what felt like it, anyway—Jerem was convinced that the cameras watching his quarters were simple video units, no infrared or anything fancy like that. Of course he couldn’t just walk up to the cameras and inspect them without the kidnappers guessing he was up to something, but he’d gone back to the hand-walking, cartwheels, and anything else he could think of that would look as if he were simply an active kid who was going out of his mind with boredom. Who would ever notice that the cartwheels and somersaults usually brought him close to one of the cameras, or that the time he spent lying on his back, staring blankly at the ceiling, he was actually trying to focus on the compact pieces of photographic equipment, attempting to remember what his mother had told him about cameras and video surveillance.

Jerem knew that his grandfather—who had died before Jerem was even born—taught his mother everything he’d known about hacking into computers and writing security programs. When she’d started her own company on Nova Angeles, she’d taken that one step further, enhancing the practically hacker-proof programs she wrote with sophisticated surveillance equipment for those customers who needed it. She always had catalogues for the latest stuff lying around, and since Jerem had seemed interested in it (because although he would never have admitted it to her, he thought what she did was actually kind of cool), she’d explained some of the basics to him.

So he knew to look for the telltale film on the lens of a camera that had infrared capabilities, and how to tell if it could see into other spectrums—ultraviolet, for instance. Not that they’d need something that sophisticated to keep watch on a regular human boy. It wasn’t as if he could just turn invisible like one of those Specter creatures he’d seen featured on a particularly exciting episode of
Moon of Syrinara
. Too bad, because right now invisibility would have come in pretty handy.

But the second best thing to turning invisible was just disappearing, and now that he was almost certain the cameras wouldn’t be able to register his body heat, Jerem figured he could probably sneak out without anyone noticing. Or at least he hoped. He just had to wait for night to fall.

The same pointy-faced kidnapper came in around dinnertime—not that Jerem knew the hour, of course, but the hollow feeling in his stomach told him it had been at least four or five hours since lunch—and brought him a tray of some gluey-looking noodles with a heavy sauce. It looked pretty gross, but Jerem knew if he was going to make a break for it, he’d need to have eaten something. So he picked up the fork and plowed in, trying to ignore the nasty aftertaste the food left in his mouth and making a mental note to ask his mother for a big, juicy burger the second he got out of this hellhole.

The kidnapper apparently was ready to find fault in anything Jerem did. After a few minutes of watching him eat in silence, he demanded, “What’s up with you, kid? You seem awfully quiet.”

Jerem forced another glutinous mass of food down his throat and replied, “That’s because this food is so rank that I have to concentrate on not throwing up.”

“You’re lucky you’re getting anything,” the skinny man said, but he looked satisfied. Obviously Jerem’s rudeness had convinced him it was business as usual in the prison quarters.

“Yeah, tell my stomach that,” Jerem muttered, but he finished the food in grim silence, drank the glass of water that had come with it, and then pushed the tray away...but not before slipping the fork up the sleeve of his sleep shirt just as the man watching him glanced down at the chrono on his wrist.

The kidnapper picked up the tray, gave Jerem one last squinty-eyed glare, and then paused at the doorway. “Just behave yourself. Stay out of trouble, and if everything goes according to plan, you just might see your mama tomorrow.”

Even though he knew the kidnapper was probably just messing with him, Jerem couldn’t help feeling a stab of hope at those words. At least it sounded as if his mother had been in contact with them—probably to pay off the ransom. He wondered how much they were asking for, and whether his mother would be able to come up with it. Sure, they lived well, and there always seemed to be enough money for trips over the summer holidays and the latest toys and electronic gizmos for the house, but he got the feeling these guys probably were asking for a lot more than a couple thousand units. Otherwise, what would be the point of hiding him off someplace like this and feeding him and all the other stuff they’d probably spent money on?