Dark Angel: Skin Game (30 page)

... and hurry."

Fifteen minutes later Clemente arrived. They gave him a quick overview of the situation, and Max led him into the bathroom.

Kelpy had taken a turn for the worse.

His clothes stripped from him, the sores covered his whole body; he still bore a strong resemblance to Logan—something in the virus seemed to have locked him into the form he'd blended with last. His temperature remained on the rise, though the icy water had slowed its ascent.

Logan sat on the edge of the tub, tending (but careful not to touch) Kelpy. Clemente stood, hovering over the tub, Max framed in the doorway.

Looking down at the pitiful creature, Clemente read him his rights, then asked simply,

"Why?"

"To be with Max," Kelpy said with a little cough. "She loved an ordinary—a human...

Logan. I needed to be Logan."

The detective turned to Max. She kept her face stony, though emotion welled within her, unbidden.

"He worked with us at Jam Pony," Max said. "No one ever paid him much attention.

But I guess he was like everybody else—he wanted to be noticed."

Behind her, just outside the bathroom, Joshua said, "Noticed by you, Max. You saved him when Manticore burned. Max ... he loved you. Not like Joshua loves Max, but like

... like I loved Annie."

Max felt tears forming—goddamnit!

Clemente was shaking his head. "This is not going to win the people of Seattle over to the side of the Terminal City residents. I mean... a transgenic killing people so he can make a human suit... to woo another transgenic."

Max nodded glumly, glancing at the feverish Kelpy, naked in the tub. He didn't appear to hear any of this, much less understand the trouble he'd caused. The promised Army invasion was less than three hours away, and there was nothing she could do to stop it—they would have to do what Manticore had trained them for, only fighting the country that created them had never been in the plans.

"This couldn't be worse," Clemente was saying, "if Ames White himself designed the scenario."

"Maybe he did!" someone yelled.

Alec.

Popping up next to Joshua just behind Max in the doorway, the handsome X5 said,

"Suppose somebody pushed our ChameleomBoy over the edge?"

They all turned, and Joshua stepped back to allow alec to

take center stage in the bathroom doorway.

"Dix just ran a chemical analysis of the pills Kelpy's been popping. They contained Tryptophan, all right... but mostly they were a drug Dix had never seen before."

"Shit," Max said. "We have to identify it!"

"Oh, but we have. Dix hacked into one of Uncle Sam's computers and found a reference to the same chemical compound. Seems it's a drug called Cullinasec."

Gottlieb's voice chimed in from the living room: "That's classified information!"

Max and Clemente followed the voice into the living room, where Gottlieb and Original Cindy were back. Cindy was seated at the kitchen table, looking shellshocked.

Clemente said, "Where's the, uh ... ?"

"The 'skin suit' is in a big plastic garment bag in my trunk," Gottlieb said, raising an eyebrow. "I don't think I compromised the evidence by moving it from my backseat to my trunk. Better to secure it, considering some of the ... unusual circumstances surrounding this case."

Clemente was nodding. "I'd have to agree, Agent Gottlieb."

"I hope you don't mind my interrupting this love fest," Max said, stepping between them, directing her attention to the NSA agent. "But what did you mean by calling that drug 'classified information'?"

Gottlieb spoke softly, as if reluctant to even hear the words he spoke himself.

"Cullinasec is a psychotropic drug being developed by the NSA for espionage purposes."

Clemente asked, "And no one outside the NSA is supposed to be able to get their hands on this junk?"

Max said, "Maybe no one outside the NSA did."

"... White?"

Moments later, Max was seated on the edge of the tub. She said to Kelpy, "Where did you get the drugs?"

"A ... nurse named Betty ... at Harbor Lights Hospital."

"But then one day she disappeared," Max said.

"How ... how did you know?"

"It's a long story," Max said.

"And... and you don't have time to tell me?"

"No." Max turned to Logan, standing just behind her. "Can you get me a picture of Ames White?"

"Right on it," he said, and was gone.

To Kelpy, Max said, "After the nurse disappeared, where did you get the drugs? Who was your connection?"

"Just... some guy. Some guy taking over... taking over Betty's clients."

Logan came in with the photo, fresh off the printer, and handed it to Max. She showed it to Kelpy.

"Would this happen to be your dealer?"

"Yes," Kelpy said. "That's ... that's him."

In the doorway, Clemente said, "Wait, wait. What's going on here?"

Max showed him the picture. "I think you recognize this face."

"Special Agent Ames White. Are you saying ... ?"

"I'm not saying anything—Kelpy is. Your dying confessed murderer has just identified NSA Agent Ames White as the man who provided him with the drugs that turned him psychotic."

"And why would he ... ?" And then Clemente answered his own question: "The media war—providing the public with a transgenic boogie man."

"That'd be a big bingo," Max said.

From the hallway, where he'd been listening in, former NSA Agent Otto Gottlieb squeezed into the little room, joining the confab to offer his own informed analysis.

"This whole crisis," Gottlieb said, "has been stage-managed by Agent White. He set Thompson and Hankins up in that warehouse with the bum imagers, providing a psychotic transgenic with two possible victims."

Clemente was frowning. "How could White know what Kelpy would do?"

"He couldn't and he didn't," Gottlieb said. "White just knew it wouldn't be good. That whole human suit routine

came from Kelpy's own tortured imagination ... where it would have remained, if Ames White hadn't turned an already unstable transgenic completely psychotic and set him loose on the city."

"All for a media war," Clemente said, still struggling with the madness of it.

"It's much more than that, Detective," Gottlieb said. "Ames White hates the transgenics—especially her." He nodded to Max. "He wants 452 dead."

"Why?" Clemente asked, eyes like marbles.

"You'd have to ask White. But I do know his desire for her death is why he brought in the snipers to start the shootout at Jam Pony."

Frowning now, Clemente asked, "That pumped-up SWAT team was government agents?"

Gottlieb shook his head. "I don't know where White got them—they're sure as hell not feds. I can't find any orders, any requests on file.... I can't even find any records of phone calls on White's cell phone, other than the one to the governor."

Still frowning, Clemente asked, "How much can you prove?"

"Damn little," Gottlieb admitted.

From the doorway, the other former NSA agent, Thompson, joined in. "I know my imager didn't work, and Ames White did hand each of us our imagers, personally."

Clemente walked briskly out into the living room, Max and the others following him; Joshua took over the vigil in the bathroom with his old friend Kelpy.

The detective sat down heavily into a chair. "Do we have enough to make a case against White?"

Max realized Logan was at her side; she looked up at him, but his attention was on the detective.

Then she turned to Clemente and said, "The Army will be making their move soon, and it'll be too late."

Clemente pounded his fist into a hand. "We need to get the word out—we can't move through the system in time to stop the slaughter. Shit... where the hell is that Eyes Only guy when you need him?"

Several pairs of eyes turned to Logan.

Picking up on it, Clemente turned to him too.

"Something I should know?" the detective asked.

"Well," Logan said, almost shyly, "I sort of have a ... uh, 'in' with Eyes Only."

"Hell, man!" Clemente said. "Can you reach him? Can he help us?"

"See what I can do. Max—come with me a second, would you?"

Away from the others, they talked quickly, then Max gathered Alec and Sketchy into an impromptu camera crew.

Soon a video camera was set up on a tripod in the bedroom, to be manned by an enthusiastic Sketchy; here were sequestered Clemente, Gottlieb, Thompson, and everyone but Alec and Kelpy ... in the bathroom with Alec manning another camera on a tripod... and Max and Logan, in the latter's computer-and-monitor-arrayed office area.

As far as Clemente, Gottlieb, and Thompson were concerned, Alec was relaying all of this to a secure remote location, where Eyes Only was making broadcast magic. The trio of law enforcement veterans were unaware—or, anyway, so Logan and Max hoped—that the real broadcasting was being done a room away, by the real Eyes Only.

And thus came to pass the first broadcast of Freak Nation TV

All around the city, TV screens went to static.

The static transformed into a logo depicting a pair of light-colored eyes on a blue background, with the words STREAMING FREEDOM VIDEO rolling by above and below, white letters standing out on a red background.

Then the familiar voice said: "Do not attempt to adjust

your set. This is a Streaming Freedom Video bulletin. This cable hack could last more than sixty seconds. It still cannot be traced, it still cannot be stopped, and it remains the only free voice left in this city..."

In homes, bars, police stations, fire stations, anywhere there was a television, people's attention turned to the box; it had been months since they had heard from Seattle's renegade cyber journalist, and the excitement around the city was palpable.

"The information you 've been given about the transgenic crisis in Terminal City is tainted and false. Likewise, the news you've heard about a serial killer skinning police officers has been only part of the story. Tonight, we'll give you the facts."

In the family room of the suburban home where he lived without his family, Ames White went ballistic. It apparently hadn't done any good, shooting up that asshole Eyes Only's apartment; right now, Ames White's best efforts seemed only to have spurred the bastard on....

As the Eyes Only bulletin continued, White dialed the number of his government office.

"Norton," a voice said.

"The prick's at it again. Start a trace, now!"

"Which prick is at what again, sir?"

"Eyes Only, Eyes Only—turn on the goddamned TV!"

"Trace started, sir," Norton reported.

"Let me know when you get something."

The staticky logo image disappeared and the screen was filled with a ghostly white man with spiky hair in a bathtub, red sores pocking his body, floating in water bobbing with ice cubes. The male form was drenched in sweat and it was obvious whoever-this-was wasn't going to live out the night.

Was this grotesque crap the best Eyes Only could muster? White was about to laugh, when the spectral figure spoke.

"My name is Bobby Kawasaki," the voice said, and it was strangely similar to that of Eyes Only himself. "I'm a trans-genic. I killed three people.

It was a bad and terrible thing— / know that now. What I did was wrong. But I want you to know I did these bad things under the unknowing influence of a powerful drug."

The picture changed to a still of Ames White ...

... who sat up sharply in his chair in his family room.

Bobby was saying, "And this is a photo of the man who gave me the tainted drugs.

This is the man who turned me into a monster."

Ames White sat frozen, as if he were the one in icy water, something frigid running through his veins—and in his belly, a million snakes seemed to coil and uncoil.

The picture was now live again, but no longer on the red-splotched ghost in the bathtub. Now the screen showed a room, possibly a bedroom ... and the face on camera belonged to that fool Otto Gottlieb!

As Otto began telling his part of the sordid tale, Ames White put a hand to his temple.

He was ruined in the NSA. Right now, in front of all Seattle, and no doubt soon, all across the country, he was being outed—all that work to save his cover after the fiasco at Jam Pony, and now it was gone.

White's phone rang and he picked it up on the third ring. "White."

"Norton."

"The trace—"

"I've been instructed to tell you to report to the office immediately."

White hung up the phone.

That idiot Thompson—the guy White had been searching for every spare minute of the last three months—came on next, spewing his self-pitying garbage.

Rising, White picked up his pistol, went upstairs and

quickly filled a suitcase. The conclave would of course see this, and he doubted they would take it lightly either—this could be viewed as nothing but the failure it was.

Even he knew that....

The phone rang.

This time he let it ring.

Detective Ramon Clemente was next on screen. "I would like to personally thank the transgenics of Terminal City, especially Max..."

"Guevera," an off-camera voice prompted.

"Max Guevera," Clemente said, "who personally, and at great risk to herself broke this case wide open, and in so doing saved many lives. And when the killer was found, and was a transgenic, Ms. Guevera did not seek to cover it up... rather came to me, the police."

White, gathering some things from his family-room desk, managed not to throw a bookend through the screen.

"As the Seattle police officer assigned to the so-called siege at Terminal City, I make this public plea to the Army: I urge you to reconsider your plans to invade Terminal City. These people—some call them freaks—have done nothing except defend themselves against false accusations, and yet... even when overwhelmed by problems of their own ... still managed to help the police capture a serial killer. In addition, they have helped identify and expose the person manipulating the confessed killer, in an effort to stereotype transgenics as monsters, in a crass and heartless exploitation of the media and the public."