Part 27 (1/2)

What?

Bet she's killed more people than I have. She has that sniper look: everyone's a potential target.

She does hold herself like a soldier. He slid a glance over to her and back. Or a certain kind of patient. Obsessive-compulsive.

How 'bout let's not ask her over to join us?

Good idea.

But when they left the cantina a few minutes later, they ran into her again. She was trying to deal with the night clerk, a frightened teenaged girl whose English was not good. Gavrila's Spanish was worse.

Jefferson walked over to the rescue. -Can I be of some a.s.sistance? he asked in Spanish.

You're American, Gavrila said. Will you ask her if she's seen this woman? It was a picture of Blaze Harding.

-You know what she's asking, he said to the clerk.

Si, claro. The woman opened both her hands. -I have seen the woman; she has been in here for meals a few times. But she doesn't stay here.

She says she's not sure, Jefferson translated. Most Americans look pretty much the same to her.

Have you seen her? Gavrila asked.

Jefferson studied the photograph. Can't say as I have. Jim? Cameron stepped over. You seen this woman?

I don't think so. A lot of Americans coming and going.

You're here at the Clinic?

Consulting. Jefferson realized he'd hesitated a moment too long. Is she a patient?

I don't know. I just know she's here.

What do you want her for? Cameron asked.

Just a few questions. Government business.

Well, we'll keep an eye out. You're ...?

Francine Gaines. Room 126. I'd surely appreciate any help you could give me.

Sure. They watched her walk away. Is this deep s.h.i.+t, Cameron whispered, or just meters of excrement?

We have to get a picture of her, Jefferson said, and send it on to Marty's general. If the army's after Blaze, he can probably get rid of her.

But you don't think she's army.

Do you?

He hesitated. I don't know. When she looked at you, and when she looked at me, she looked first at the middle of the chest and then between the eyes. Targeting. I wouldn't make any sudden movements around her.

If she's army, she's a hunter-killer.

We didn't have that term when I was in the service. But it takes one to know one, and I know she's killed a lot of people.

A female Ingram.

She might be even more dangerous than Ingram. Ingram rather looks like what he is. She looks like ...

Yeah. Jefferson looked at the elevator door that had just been graced by her presence. She sure does. He shook his head. Let's get a picture and get it over to the Clinic for when Mendez checks in. He was down in Mexico City, scrounging raw materials for the nano-forge. He had some crazy woman break into St. Bart's.

No resemblance, Cameron said. She was ugly and had frizzy red hair. Actually, she'd had a wig and a pressure mask.

WE WALKED RIGHT INTO Building 31, no trouble. To their computer, Marty was a brigadier general who had spent most of his career in academic posts. I was sort of my old self.

Or not. The memory modification was seamless, but I think if I had jacked with anyone in my old platoon (which should have been done as a security measure; we were just lucky) they would have known immediately that there was something wrong. I was too healthy. They had all sensed my problem and, in a way you can't put into words, had always been there ; had always helped me get from one day to the next. It would be as obvious as an old friend showing up without the limp he'd had all his life.

Lieutenant Newton Thurman, who was given the task of finding me a place to be useful, was an oddity: he had started out as a mechanic but developed a kind of allergy to being jacked-it gave him intense headaches that were no fun for him or for anybody jacked with him. I wondered at the time why they would put him in Building 31 rather than just retiring him, and it was clear that he wondered the same thing. He'd only been there a couple of weeks. In retrospect, it's obvious that he was planted as part of the overall plan. And what a mistake!

The staff in Building 31 was top-heavy in terms of rank: eight generals and twelve colonels, twenty majors and captains, and twenty-four lieutenants. That's sixty-four officers, giving orders to fifty NCOs and privates. Ten of those were just guards, too, and not really in the chain of command, unless something happened.

My memory of those four days, before I had my actual personality restored, is vague and confused. I was slotted into a time-consuming but unchallenging make-work position, essentially verifying the computer's decisions about resource allocation-how many eggs or bullets to go where. Surprise, I never found a mistake.

Among my other unchallenging duties was the one, as it turned out, that everything else was a smoke screen for: the guard sitrep-log, or situation report log. Every hour I jacked in with the guard mechanics and asked for a sitrep. I had a form with boxes to check, according to what they reported each hour. All I had ever done was check the box that said sitrep negative : nothing's happening.

It was typical bureaucratic make-work. If anything of interest did happen, a red light would go on on my console, telling me to jack in with the guards. I could fill out a form then.

But I hadn't given any thought to the obvious: they needed someone inside the building who could check on the actual ident.i.ties of the mechanics running the guard soldierboys.

I was sitting there on the fourth day, about one minute before sitrep time, and the red light suddenly started blinking. My heart gave a little stutter and I jacked in.

It wasn't the usual Sergeant Sykes. It was Karen, and four other people from my old platoon.

What the h.e.l.l? She gave me a quick gestalt: Trust us; you had to undergo memory modification so we could Trojan-horse our way in here and then a broad outline of the plan and the incredible Jupiter Project development.

I acknowledged a numb kind of affirmative, unjacked, and checked the sitrep negative box.

No wonder I had been so d.a.m.ned confused. The phone buzzed and I thumbed it.

It was Marty, in hospital greens with a neutral expression. I have you down for a little brain surgery at 1400. You want to come down and prep when your s.h.i.+ft's over?

Best offer I've had all day.

IT WAS MORE THAN just a bloodless coup-it was a silent, invisible coup. The connection between a mechanic and his or her soldierboy is only an electronic signal, and there are emergency mechanisms in place to switch connections. It would only take a few minutes after something like the Portobello ma.s.sacre, where every mechanic was disabled, to patch in a new platoon from a few hundred or a thousand miles away. (The actual limit was about thirty-five hundred miles, far enough for the speed of light to be a slight delaying factor.) What Marty had done was set things up so that at the push of a b.u.t.ton all five guard mechanics in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Building 31 would be switched off from their soldierboys, and simultaneously, control of the machines would be switched over to five members of Julian's platoon, with Julian being the only person in Building 31 in a position to notice.

The most aggressive thing they did, immediately after taking over, was to pa.s.s on an order from Captain Perry, the guard commander, to the five shoe guards, that they had to report immediately to room 2H for an emergency inoculation. They went in and sat down and a pretty nurse gave them each a shot. Then she stood quietly behind them and they all fell asleep.

The rooms 1H through 6H were the hospital wing, and it was going to be busy.

At first, Marty and Megan Orr could be doing all the jack installations. The only bedridden patient in H wing, a lieutenant with bronchitis, was transferred to the base hospital when the order came down from the Pentagon to isolate Building 31. The doctor who normally came around every morning couldn't have access.