Alexa quickly aimed the psychotronic gun at him. “Ah-ah, don’t.”
Morrison assessed the situation, looking at the equipment missing from her harness and the nearby pile. He grinned nastily. “You won’t be Hedrick’s little sweetheart after this, Alexa. You’ll be one of the little people.”
Cotton reached down and punched Morrison in the jaw, barely fazing the man.
“Goddamnit!” Cotton hopped away, nursing his paw.
Morrison gave him a disgusted look. “You’re a pussy, Cotton.”
Alexa aimed the psychotronic beam. “Night-night.”
Morrison gave her the finger even as he lay back down, and he was soon snoring soundly.
Alexa tossed the weapon onto the pile, and then motioned for Grady and Cotton to come closer to her. Grady could feel the gravity around them change—and down suddenly became up.
As they rose through the treetops, Grady turned to her. “Agent Davis is dead, the deputy secretary of Homeland Security—anyone who believed my story is dead, and the police will be out looking for Cotton in force soon, too. Where do we go?”
Cotton looked at them. “I know a place…”
CHAPTER 24
Safe House
It was well past midnight by the time Alexa—with Jon Grady and Richard Cotton floating beneath her gravity mirror—descended toward a flat, silvered roof of a massive, windowless ten-story brick building in the meatpacking district of Chicago. Half a mile ahead of them was a panoramic view of the downtown skyline.
As they came down from the night sky, Grady could see large, faded signs painted directly onto the brick facade of their destination: “Fulton Market Cold Storage Company” and on a brick tower the faded words “Greater Fulton Market.”
As they alighted onto the flat rooftop, Grady stood unsteadily. It was the first normal gravity he’d felt in several hours. They had flown a circuitous route from the plains, coming into Chicago low and slow from the northwest due to Alexa’s concerns about scanning, search teams, and satellite surveillance AIs teasing out their flight path from an all-seeing gaze in orbit. She was convinced Morrison and Hedrick would find them quickly—and appeared to be getting more concerned each minute.
Despite the circumstances, Jon Grady had to admit that the flight (or, more appropriately, the “fall”) here was pretty spectacular. Grady and Cotton had floated alongside Alexa in the sphere of the mirror’s influence. The summer air rushing over them all as they soared silently above the midnight landscape—at first above broad cornfields bordered by dark clusters of trees and thick underbrush. Crickets thrummed below them, and the lights of lone farmhouses and outbuildings had passed by in the night. Eventually these gave way to exurb subdivisions and big-box retail centers, and finally a contiguous grid of suburban yards and streets. Grady had found the experience the closest thing he could imagine to being a bird—flying quietly over the land.
Now that they’d landed, Alexa was scanning the skies nervously, her eyes illuminated by some device built into the crystal of her helmet’s visor.
Cotton seemed unconcerned. He was already ripping Velcro straps to remove his orange bulletproof helmet and perp-protection vest. Both had the words “Federal Prisoner” stenciled on the front and back. “Well, that was a memorable evening.” He cast a look at Grady and tossed the helmet to him. “Very interesting little invention, this gravity mirror of yours, Professor.”
Grady caught the helmet. “I’m not a professor.”
“I think you’ve earned an honorary degree somewhere.” Cotton started walking toward a steel roof-access door in a towering brick bastion behind them. Here, too, was another faded painted sign reading “Fulton Market Cold Storage” in letters three stories high—it was like a building on top of the building.
Alexa called after him. “What is this place, Cotton? And what makes you think they won’t find us here?”
He glanced back. “It’s one of my safe houses. And they won’t find us because they’re already on our trail elsewhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, there are people within the BTC who will make it difficult for them to realize they’re not finding us.”
Alexa narrowed her eyes. “Traitors, you mean? But the scanning—”
“You wanna stand out here all night, or you wanna come inside?”
She took another glance skyward, and then Grady and Alexa followed him. Cotton opened a small electrical panel to the side of the door and let a flash of light scan his eyes. The surprisingly thick stairwell door clicked open, and they followed him down a metal stairwell.
Grady watched the door boom shut behind them and a green light appear. “One of your safe houses? How many do you have?”
“If I told you that, they wouldn’t be ‘safe’ would they?”
Alexa frowned. “If you think Morrison doesn’t know about these, you’re crazy. You can’t hide anything from the BTC. They’ll be sending harvester teams here any minute.”
“Yeah, well, see, that’s the funny thing. Turns out the trick to keeping secrets from the BTC is to temporarily forget what you don’t want them to know. And thanks to modern science, that’s possible.”
Grady frowned. “I experienced something like that in Hibernity—a protein that makes you forget specific memories as you recall them. But I never got my memories back. I lost a lot. Pieces of my childhood. My parents. Can you teach me how to recover them?”
“Ah. You have to record them if you want to rewrite them again. Nasty, nasty place, Hibernity. My apologies for having been the instrument of your delivery to it—unwilling though I was.”
Grady thought back to the night of the bombing. He remembered Cotton’s odd, almost apologetic shrug just before he departed. That memory had survived Hibernity.
They arrived at the first stairwell landing, and here was a sturdier-looking black door. Cotton rapped on it with his knuckles. It sounded as solid as Mount Aetna. “Diamond-aggregate nanorods—hyperdiamonds. Got a millimeter of it coating the walls as well. Beats the hell out of carbon nanotubes—that stuff is worse than asbestos. And so 1990s.” He placed his hand over some sort of scanner—one that looked more complex than a simple palm print.
Alexa scowled. “What tech level is this? And more importantly, how did you get it?”
The stairwell security door clicked and then opened. “Who cares what tech level it is? And as for how I got it, that’s easy: Morrison was right—I’m a thief. A master thief.” He walked inside, kicking on the lights with a massive knife switch that echoed in the cavernous space beyond.
After exchanging glances, Alexa and Grady followed.
Within was a huge, refurbished loft space, with exposed brick walls, interior partitions, tasteful art and furniture, a living area, a restaurant-quality kitchen, and shelves lined with books. Beyond, Grady could see a long corridor with polished wood floors, half a dozen doors closed to either side, opening at the end of the hall into what appeared to be a large technical workshop. Thin-film screens and multiplexed surveillance camera holograms glowed to life all around the loft.
“Home sweet home…”
As Grady and Alexa surveyed the place, Cotton walked into the kitchen and grabbed stemmed glasses from an overhead rack. “You know, Alexa, if you thought they were pulling out all the stops to get Grady, just wait. AWOL, you’re ten times more dangerous to Hedrick than Grady is. With what you know about them… wow-wee! He’ll leave no stone unscanned.”
Cotton pulled the stopper out of a decanter and poured a finger of brandy into the three glasses. “And then there’s always the fact that he’s madly in love with you. Love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin, you know—both passions. You can flip from one to the other—but not to indifference.” He held up a glass with a nod, and then quickly drank each, one after the other. “Ahh! That’s the stuff.”