Jezebel's Ladder (6 page)

The Eye Corps flew to Seattle for standard search
activities, while the rest of the project processed Jezebel’s recent
recommendations. Daniel got a haircut, anticipating his first meeting with a
new coworker and potential girlfriend.

The first night back from vacation,
they had no good leads. “There are a lot of rich people in this area who do
strange things,” commented Daniel.

Dirt Bag was already pushing for
them to make up the time they’d lost on their week off. Jezebel decided to
turbo-charge their effort by riding past about twenty-five other possibilities
herself during daylight hours. The guards had to take turns driving her while
she sensed for actives. She hadn’t driven a car herself since Chance’s murder.
This gave her a chance to get to know the whole team.

None of the Washington-state leads
registered as actives. Still, working day and night, and using the new cluster
techniques, they effectively tripled their previous output. On Tuesday, they
were able to eliminate every suspect in the Oregon region. Unfortunately, to
accomplish this feat, they missed a meeting that London wanted them to spy on.

Jez refused to pass the phone to
Daniel when the complaints came in. “He needs his sleep.”

The calls escalated up the chain,
culminating with Director Baker, code-named Trench Coat. He complained loudly
for thirty minutes while she used her best, customer-service listening on him.
After the “B word” was used, she promptly hung up and removed all intelligence
requests from the queue for the next two days. She didn’t tell him why. He’d
figure it out. The guards, now loyal to Jez, had orders to pass all future
harassment through her. Whenever the London chief started a phone conversation
with yelling or profanity, she hung up.

On Thursday, they hit pay dirt on a
UFO-worshipping commune in Idaho. The Right Reverend Alvin Turwilliger had been
contacted by aliens. He had proof that he would show his sworn followers.
According to the locals, the cult was harmless; they espoused a desire to have
a complete sample of the human gene pool when the aliens returned. In practice,
this meant that the leader had children with as many varieties of women as
possible.

They also had an obscure tenet
about growing all of their own food in their sealed compound. This food
included algae, hydroponic tomatoes, and tanks of shrimp. The reverend had been
a shoe salesman and carnival barker in his previous professions. There was no
way he would know enough of the science to get this right. So Jez stopped by to
investigate at the coffee house he frequented.

She spotted the reverend
immediately. He was eating pie and charming a teenage waitress. Jez tried to
sneak up so she could listen in, but the reverend snapped his head toward her
like a cat who’d just heard the can opener. He was definitely active. The
waitress spit in his pie when he ignored her to buzz around the new girl.

After twenty minutes hearing about
Turwilliger’s personal religious organization, Jez steered the topic toward
food science. The reverend replied, “That’s not really my area. Francine is the
wizard there. It’s why I married her.”

“Why self-contained?” she pressed.

The reverend leaned closer. “It has
to do with the shadows, the light and dark cycles of an Ideal Planet.” His eyes
sparkled. Here, his zealotry came to the surface. “Inhabitable planets are rare
in our galaxy. Finding them is difficult. Right now, however, we can find gas
giants easily. All we need to do is narrow our search to the giants with lots
of moons that are in their sun’s Goldilocks zone—not too hot and not too cold
to sustain human life. If we go to the expense of traveling to one of these
systems, it would provide us with a dozen Earth-sized moons. That way, there’ll
be plenty of room for centuries of expansion...and options in case we make
mistakes.”

“You’ve obviously put a lot of
thought into this. Is this theory from another wife?” she asked.

He shook his head, and whispered, “Sacred
scriptures from the Mother Ship.”

“Why Idaho?”

“The mountains here give us shadow
for about the right amount of time each day, as well as the extreme temperature
swings we can expect on the surface of a moon in an Ideal System.”

The man was deadpan serious.
Furthermore, her scalp was tingling with the same sort of feeling the pages
gave when transmitting data. The reverend was either a natural teacher or he
was carrying his Golden Ticket on him.

Jez fed him questions to keep him
talking. “So they wouldn’t have the same day and night cycle we have?”

He shook his head. “Day is the
same, but when the giant starts to occlude the sun, we call that penumbra.
During the eclipse, that’s umbra. Even when our colony is facing away from the
sun, which is roughly half the time, reflected light from the giant will light
our skies enough to read by. This time is called
reflection
. If we can
control the effects of temperature swings, the algae may grow by this light as
well. When we face empty space, we call this true night.”

He sketched diagrams of the cycles
on napkins and drew models as he spoke. Jez was captivated. After an hour of
her hanging on his every word, he made his big pitch. “I’d be willing to show
you my alien artifact if you agreed to be one of my wives.”

Jez smiled. The bell on the café
door rang as a seething Benny Hollis stepped in. “I don’t think my husband
would like that, but he might be willing to make a sizeable donation for the
chance to study your artifact.”

The thought tempted Turwilliger. “We’re
self-sufficient here. We don’t need many of the worldly trappings or artificial
social constructs. Perhaps your husband wouldn’t mind sharing you for a week in
exchange for…”

Beside their table, Benny raised a
finger. “I have no idea what is going on here; however, if you finish that
sentence, I will be compelled to do you physical harm. Excuse me. Jez, outside,
now.”

She did a mock curtsy and
apologized to the reverend, “He gets so caveman when he sees me with another
alpha male.”

Outside the shop, men in black
blocked both directions on the sidewalk. Benny was conflicted. “Fortune has
ordered me to bring you in from the field.”

Jez snorted. “That’s nice. Be
polite to the reverend. He’s a certified pervert; however, he’s also a gifted
teacher with a Golden Ticket on him. It’s about a concept called Ideal Planets.
Don’t let any women near him; he has this weird but intense seduction ability.”

“That’s amazing! Four days, and you
got a hit?” Benny said, impressed.

Jez explained, “That’s what happens
when you actually plan to do something rather than let bureaucrats bully you
into incompetence. I’ve done more in two weeks than your old scheme has done in
two years.”

“I can’t argue results, but you’ve
really kicked the hornet’s nest this time, Jez. You
hung up
on the head
of intelligence after refusing to do scouting for him. Baker is flying in
personally for the briefing on the new Fossil data. He’ll be there this
afternoon. Dirt Bag is sending Crusader back with our new recruits to do
training.” Benny shifted to a whisper. “If I can’t bring you to heel, he’s
going to send his head of security after you.”

Jez was unfazed. “So you’re
picturing me in a dog collar now? Spikes or diamonds? I’m curious.”

Her guard, Frank, was struggling to
maintain his composure. Only the potential for hostile action kept him serious.

Benny glared at her. “I’ll
sweet-talk the walking dildo in there. You, head back on the jet and make nice
with Trench Coat. The new page will smooth things over for the boss, but you
need to mend fences. We’re all giving our lives for this project, and we need
each other to survive.”

Jez blew out the angry breath she
had been holding in. “Damn it. I’m only doing this for you. Are you using your
tricks on me?”

Benny shook his head. “Never on a
friend or coworker. That would be a betrayal.”

“Good answer. I’ll get my things,”
Jez said. “What about Oobie?”

“I’ll spend tonight and tomorrow
with him. We’ll complete the loop back to LA base for the weekend. I promised
that I’d be the lector this Sunday.” We she looked confused, he explained, “The
guy who reads passages from the Bible in front of the church.”

“And you don’t break your promises.
I like that about you, Buddy,” Jez said.

****

Jez got to the airport on her jet
less than an hour before Trench Coat arrived. She decided to stick around to
greet him personally and pretend it had been her plan all along.

Once in the limousine, Director
Baker opened with, “Young lady, I am your superior.”

She replied with a very controlled,
“That remains to be seen. We do, however, have to work together.”

On the long drive to the
headquarters, they hammered out the foundation for a working relationship based
on grudging mutual respect. Nevertheless, the spy kept discovering things to
berate Jezebel about. The tirade continued until they reached the HQ lobby.
Letting him out of the limo first, she snagged a grey hair that had fallen out.
It had become second nature to sample DNA from people she might want to spy on
later.

Surprising them both, a perky,
five-foot-one blonde in pink short-shorts stood in the center of the lobby. Her
behind was emblazoned with the white logo “Juicy.” Twenty men waited on her
every whim. Even the chief spy was tongue-tied when she bounced up to them in
her Nikes and said, with a faint, Dutch accent, “Hi, I’m Nena. Are you my new
boss?”

Her black-lace bra was visible
through the tattered, white shirt. She smelled like vanilla and the promise of
decathlon sex. Old men would probably keel over at her touch. At least one of
the guards was huffing on an inhaler at the prospect. However, she didn’t seem
to have a brain in her pretty, little head.

Jez grasped her hand with a warm
smile. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Horvath. I am Daniel Fortune’s current
assistant. I’m here to show you the ropes, but the first thing we’re going to
do is take you shopping.”

Nena clapped for a moment, and then
her radiant face dimmed. “Is there something wrong with what I’m wearing?”

Jez shook her head. “Not really. I
just wanted to spend some time getting to know you. After we get you some new
shoes, you’ll want outfits to go with them. At company expense, right Trench
Coat?”

The British agent just nodded.

Jez co-opted the limousine without
complaint.

If I were evil
, thought Jez,
this girl could be a weapon
.

“Training starts at nine tomorrow,”
one agent shouted, wanting to make sure the new girl showed up.

“Just put in a wake-up call for me
at the apartments for half an hour before tomorrow’s briefing on our
competition,” Jez requested on the way out.

Jezebel honestly had a great time
with the new girl. Nena had been in an orphanage till age twelve and had never
learned the secret language of shoes. Jez took it as her sacred duty to
indoctrinate the girl, as well as to sell Daniel every chance she got. Jez
seemed to have taken on the role of de facto big sister for all of Eye Corps.
They stayed up till midnight talking and painting their toenails to match their
new acquisitions.

At 4:25 a.m., there was a knock at Jezebel’s door. Her first
thought was that Daniel had failed to report in. She raced to the door in her
baggy, gray UNLV sweats.

When she saw the top of Daniel’s
head through the peep hole, she opened the door. “You’re not dead,” she said
groggily.

“No, but you’re late!” he
explained. “I’m on my way to the conference now. For Dirt Bag, on the east
coast, it’s a 7:30 a.m. briefing. I don’t know why Trench Coat switched it at
the last second.”

Jez growled. “I do. He’s trying to
get me fired.”

“We’ve got to leave now; my driver
is waiting.”

As Jez rushed into the living room
to slip on shoes and grab her fanny pack, Nena rolled over on the sofa bed and
moaned. The sheet shifted, revealing a one-inch strip of flesh that ran
uninterrupted from her calves to her neck. Daniel stared, open-mouthed, unable
to speak.

Not wanting to wake her guest, Jez
said, “Go back to sleep, sweetie.” To Daniel, on the way out the door, she
said, “Nena didn’t have an apartment yet, so I had her sleep over. No big deal.”

When Daniel didn’t move from the
spot, the dime dropped. There hadn’t been pajamas in the girl’s bag. She
couldn’t ream the guy out for saving her job. Instead, she grabbed the handles
of his wheelchair, and pushed. “Down, boy! Stay out of my room.”

After they climbed into their ride,
while the driver placed the wheelchair in the trunk, Jez fussed with her hair
in the rearview mirror. “I look like hell.”

Daniel was still grinning. “You are
a goddess, my hero.” He handed her a highly caffeinated soda from his saddle
bag. “What’s Nena like?”

Jez frantically combed and cursed. “She’s
very friendly and would give you the shirt off her back. I’d classify her as
incredibly sweet but a
teensy
bit high-maintenance. Her only weakness so
far is her makeup cases. I’ve seen smaller tackle boxes on a professional bass
boat. Half of it is specially formulated, some of it she uses on her body. And
she won’t let anyone else touch the stuff. I think it’s residual privacy issues
from growing up in the orphanage. You both have the no-original-parents thing
in common.”

Daniel nodded. “Keep my hands off
her makeup. Anything else important I should know?”

They chatted the whole drive, Jez
struggling to stay awake.

****

The conference room was packed. The
head of the table was taken by a wide-screen TV that displayed Fortune’s face.
A diagram on the opposite wall showed the chemical company’s departmental
structure. Trench Coat glared at Jez as she entered. They were already several
minutes into the meeting, and he wasn’t going to repeat himself. She let the
Brit drone on about corporate holdings until he said, “Here’s where Smurfette’s
data was critical.”

Jez knew immediately who he was
referring to, but Daniel objected before she could. “You can’t call Nena that.”

Trench Coat raised an eyebrow. “We
don’t like to change code names once established. Can you name any other traits
of hers that another agent would recognize without hesitation?” He then
proceeded to name a few as Jez seethed.

Benny, sitting next to her, touched
her hand and gave his head a miniscule shake. This was bait, and she shouldn’t
rise to it. She had to pick her battles with the department heads.

Daniel panicked under the pressure.
“When she was in gymnastics, her picture was on the Cornflakes box for about a
week. She embodies the image of the Cornflake girl.”

Fortune cackled on his view screen.
“Flakes. Hah! It’s perfect. Trench Coat, give the boy what he wants.” Thus,
Daniel spent his political capital for the meeting.

Jez lost focus for a few minutes
until the photo of a hideous man appeared on the screen. He had a nose like
W.C. Fields, but the sneer and scar from a World War II Nazi movie. “Our
primary focus is their chief scientist, Dr. Samuel Godfrey Wannamaker. At
sixty, this genius geneticist has over twenty recorded patents. His best work
remains under the umbrella of trade secrets. He’s offered his expertise to
several government agencies, foreign and domestic.”

Benny asked, “Why the sudden shift
to private sector?”

Trench Coat said, “He was forced
into the arms of the chemical company by a radical, anti-genetic-modification,
eco-terrorist group called Whirlwind. He changes his name regularly, but they
located him again by the signature on a prototype grain. Whirlwind accuses him
of setting up a worldwide potato famine. In their press releases, their leader,
his son Seth, calls him ‘God Wannabe.’”

 “Son?” Jez burst out. “What? Did
he toss into a Petri dish?”

Crusader leafed through some notes.
“In all probability, yes. My profile shows that he prefers little boys.”

“Probably why Seth hates him so
much,” Benny guessed.

Trench Coat said, “Actually, Seth
was a failed experiment. Before these sorts of procedures were banned in the US, Wannamaker took his own DNA and improved everything he could think of. However, in
extending the cell longevity, he broke necessary death cycles. Seth’s cells
multiply too often, causing a hideous, elephant-man effect and tremendous
weight gain. Wannamaker left him to die in an institution, fully aware of the
self-crushing fate that awaited him.”

“That resentment makes him a prime
candidate for recruitment,” Fortune decided.

Trench Coat brought up a fuzzy
security photo of a morbidly obese man in the distance, labeled Seth.

Crusader warned, “He’s a psychopath
like his dad, just a little more charismatic—too unstable for the Ladder
Project.”

“Still, he could be a useful tool,”
Fortune countered.

Trench Coat said, “We’re trying to
contact him, but he’s very paranoid. It could take a while.”

Jez wanted to take a shower. “If
this bastard is tinkering with people, trying to make his own version of the
Master Race, what else has he been doing?”

Benny looked at her as he said, “That’s
one of the things we needed Oobie to flesh out, and why Trench Coat’s requests
were so urgent. We knew about his first-generation experiments with poppies
that cause fugue state and memory loss.”

“Plants with tailored genomes that
released airborne poisons when disturbed,” Fortune elaborated.

“Straight out of the
Wizard of
Oz
,” Jez said.

Trench Coat responded, “Exactly. It
was a non-lethal, defensive-perimeter project for Top Secret installations.”

“Brilliant work, but too hard to
keep confined to a limited area. Wind and insects can carry the pollen for
miles,” Fortune recalled. “What did he do for second generation? I know he got
those Russian Gulag contracts.”

Daniel replied, “I had to confirm
this on two dives, because I found it so hard to believe. This guy modified
Irish wolfhounds to the size of ponies, trained to imprint on the kennel owner.
You can spot his handiwork because they have a glow-in-the-dark birthmark at
the base of their neck. He does this luciferin marker to verify the
modifications on all his creations. Over half still fail.”

“That’s unholy,” Benny said.

Daniel paused. “It gets worse;
their bite, the saliva, has a paralytic agent.”

“So you can watch while they eat
you?” asked Jez.

Trench Coat wasn’t shocked. “No, so
they can drag you back to the Gulag for questioning. Don’t worry. This project
was cancelled because, when the kennel master died unexpectedly, the dogs went
rogue and killed the whole town, prisoners and guards alike.”

“What was he working on before the
Fossils got him?” Fortune asked.

Trench Coat changed to a picture of
a medical-research lab’s computer screen.

“Cures tailored to the genetic
makeup of the person,” Daniel answered. “He needed uninfected, umbilical-cord
blood or the marrow from a close relative.”

“Is Wannamaker trying for
immortality?” Crusader speculated.

Fortune shook his head. “No, the
clone would already have any defect he does.” They had a long discussion about
everything gathered from the passwords that Daniel had provided. “Where are
they keeping their Golden Tickets?”

Trench Coat answered, “We think he
is storing their pages at the Arkansas chemical plant.”

“Wait a minute,” Crusader
interrupted, “that’s where Cornflake Girl worked. She called an animal-cruelty
hotline because they were being mean to the doggies. That’s what got her fired.”

Trench Coat brought up a map of the
plant and turned to Daniel. The teenager sighed. “I don’t know how these were
modified, but all the guard dogs at that site have that same, tell-tale glow
patch under their collars, too.”

Fortune deduced, “They definitely
have something valuable stored there. What are we waiting for?”

“That place is tighter than Fort Knox,” Crusader complained.

Trench Coat replied, “We’re working
on an insertion plan. It would be easier with Seth’s help. His teams have infiltrated
before and sprayed graffiti.”

Fortune grunted. They moved on to
the syllabus for the new agent and guard training seminar that day. It began
with a lesson on avoiding assassination, taught by Crusader. The former police
officer would also be instructing in self-defense. Jez fell asleep to a steady
drone of petty details.

****

When Jez woke up, it was almost
nine o’clock. There were seminar students milling in the hall, and someone had
knocked. She had drooled on the conference table. Her neck was kinked, and she
was hungry. She whimpered when she saw her frumpy reflection in the glass of
the door.

When she let the crowd in, she
noticed that several had donuts from the shop down the street. She waved to
Nena. Daniel and Benny were nowhere to be seen, just newbies. The fried
confections smelled delicious. Of course, there were none left in the box in
the hallway or in the lobby. Double-checking the time, Jez went to the front
door of the HQ.

There, she saw Crusader carrying a
massive armload of books and charts to the front door. As he reached for the
handle, the heap unbalanced in his gloved hands and fell all over the ground.
She propped the door open for him and helped to pick up the fallen books. As
she leaned over, she said, “Here, let me…”

The gloves were to insulate him
against the effects of the blank page. Crusader took the rolled-up page from
his pocket and jabbed it into the base of Jezebel’s skull. The result was like
a stun gun. She dropped to the ground, with only a vague impression of her surroundings
filtering through. He whispered, “Sorry, Buddy and Oobie refused. Trench Coat
said someone had to give you your medicine.”

She had volunteered for the
experiment but not the humiliation. Crusader flung her over his shoulder and
carried her back to the classroom. He announced to the students. “This is an
example of what
not
to do. Never go out alone. Never leave the door
open. Never help a stranger.”

He proceeded to give a
thirty-minute lecture on techniques and then handed out paintball guns and goggles
in the hall. They would hunt through the building in two-person teams. “The
last person left gets a ten-thousand-dollar bonus.”

“Person?” someone asked. “I thought
we were teams.”

“It’s like a big, dodge-ball game:
at the end, there are no sides. I find this simulates the desired level of
alertness,” explained Crusader. “There is no second place.”

Soon after they left, Jez was able
to open her eyes again. An unmatched person, an older man, sat in the darkened
room with her. He looked like the swami, complete with the temple robe. Looking
for some way to cover her embarrassment, she asked, “Don’t you want the money?”

“Don’t you?”

Jez snorted, rubbing her neck
slowly. “I’d rather have my dignity back. Are you abstaining because you think
learning to kill humans is wrong?”

The old, bald, yoga master said, “It
is what you think that is important. Is a weapon wrong?”

Jez sat up, forcing herself to
think. “Nuclear weapons, maybe. They kill without discrimination. Weapons that
children can trigger by accident are bad, too. But as a general rule, weapons
can’t be wrong because
any
tool can be made into a weapon.”

“So tools are not themselves wrong?”

Jez warmed to the debate. “We shape
our environment with them. We made the first tools with our bare hands as extensions
of our will. So the question becomes whether the will of the user is wrong.”

The swami bowed to her. “I look
forward to our discussions.”

“What should I call you? Sensei,
Mahatma, Teacher?” she asked.

“Whatever you like.”

“Sensei, are you here to help
people who specialize in the mental aspects?”

“Humans are not about being the
absolute best in one area. To be properly human is to be balanced. Our tools
are to help you become a more-rounded human. As to your first question, do not
try to win any zero-sum game. This is the first step on the path of the
Destroyer.”

Jez squinted her eyes. She was
having trouble keeping him in focus as he said, “That which destroys life
creates nothing of its own. The virus only steals the creations of others and
moves on in its unending hunger. This trait is the opposite of human and cannot
be allowed to infect the Union of Souls.”

Jez was puzzled. “You’ve read that
page already?”

The swami tilted his head. “That is
the wrong question. Your first assignment is to list your fundamental beliefs.
The atoms from which all other decisions are made. This is known as the ethical
geometry of your society. If they conflict, decide what must go. Usually there
is another set of assumptions hiding behind the first set. I will return when
you wish to discuss your results.”