"I didn't bring her," Gregg said. "I ... I needed to make sure Brandon was going to keep his word first," he lied. "Let me out and I'll get her."
Rudo shrugged. "It doesn't matter," he said. "She isn't that large a problem. Not any more. It was you I wanted, Gregg. You're the dangerous one."
"You were never going to give me a new body. Did Brandon know that?"
Rudo smiled. "Brandon is an idealist, not a pragmatist. You were supposed to give him leverage over me. He doesn't like the project we're working on. Brandon wanted to negotiate with you and Hannah as collateraclass="underline" everyone would compromise and everyone would get something they want. Brandon would get my work placed on a back burner, I'd get your little anti-Shark group scuttled, with your help. Even you would get something, Gregg. Too bad Brandon doesn't realize that his phone isn't secure. Too bad, too, that I never could give you a body, even if I'd wanted to do so. You see, all the jumpers really are dead now. Didn't you know that? A shame, really. But I still have some uses for you, Gregg. I probably should just kill you now, but I'd rather demonstrate to you just what we've been doing. What Brandon didn't want us to pursue."
Rudo gestured to his companions, and they lifted him, net and all, as Rudo brushed lint from his suit.
"I think you'll be impressed," Rudo told him. "I daresay it will take your breath away."
A Dose of Reality
by Laura J. Mixon
& Melinda M. Snodgrass
Clara van Renssaeler, Journal Entry, 31 Mar 94
A viable killer virus continues to elude me. I'm afraid I'll to have to abandon this random-insertion approach. As ever, none of the latest batch are showing any preference for attacking Takis A-infected cells over noninfected cells. The shotgun method for targeting the wild card initiation site is simply not working.
If only Battle hadn't bobbled the break-in.
Uncle Pan is outraged at Papa for not supporting the Black Trump effort. Papa just made some sort of conciliatory gesture in the last few days, I gather, so the tension has eased a little between them. A little. Still, Papa's resistance to the plan has made Pan impatient with my delays. As if I had any control over my father!
But I can understand Uncle Pan's concern. Hartmann's allegations have raised everyone's suspicions. The Feds are probably already digging; eventually they'll turn up a lead that will uncover our work here. We are running out of time, and I am out of ideas.
Uncle Pan is trying to pull the organization back together and stave off panic, and has insisted I make a presentation at one of his political meetings tomorrow. ("Uncle Pan." It seems odd to call him that. He's now a good eight or ten years younger than I am. I miss the old Uncle Pan, the elderly gentleman from my childhood who let me crawl up into his lap and told me stories, who helped me train my first horse and helped me with my French lessons, and called me PC, his petite cavaliere.)
He's invited big wheels from all over the world. He says the organization is in serious trouble and my virus is perhaps our last chance to forestall wholesale defections - by forcing them all to focus on a single, common goaclass="underline" eradication of the wild card, once and for all.
I'm to give an overview of my research, to make it clear why the Black Trump is necessary, and to "play down the obstacles remaining, if you please, PC." To leave the attendees with the impression only a few details have to be ironed out.
I loathe this deceit.
Uncle Pan argues that desperate times call for desperate measures. That if we don't act as a unified entity now, our cause is lost. What is a simple lie, he says, when a world is at stake? He laughs indulgently at my protests and tells me to trust him.
I suppose it's hypocritical of me to balk. Many things have been done in our cause that I find personally abhorrent.
If I could just get hold of Tachyon's files, I could transmute the lie into truthl We know his Trump virus, Takis B, is in essence a deletion virus that attaches at the Takis A initiation site. Even if Tachyon hadn't known from his work on Takis A - and the Takisians have clearly finished mapping the human/Takisian genome - to engineer Takis B, Tachyon had to know where that site is on the human genome from the restriction map.
I've combed all the lab notes he donated to the World Health Organization in the seventies. Notes on his Trump virus work weren't included among them. They have to be somewhere, though - and he developed Takis B in his Jokertown lab. The information has to be there; QED.
I need that initiation site.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Clara entered the darkened conference room and waited for her eyes to adjust. The meeting was not yet underway, though most of the participants seemed present. No one seemed to notice her, other than the guard who'd opened the door. She chose a seat near the front end of the U at the U-shaped table, opened her satchel and pulled out her speaker's notes.
Muscular men with semiautomatics peeking out from inside their suit jackets stood at all the entrances. General MacArthur Johnson, Uncle Pan's security chief, stood near the shuttered windows, arms clasped behind his back and feet planted apart. If it weren't for his eyes, he might have been made of obsidian. Pan Rudo, graceful and catlike in his new, ectomorphic Aryan body, paced around the room behind the chairs, listening, exchanging a word here and there. He came over as she sat down, and squeezed her shoulder.
"Ready?"
"As I'll ever be."
"Good. We'll begin in a few moments."
In a counterpoint to the soft babble of interpreters' voices, the chandelier overhead tinkled in the air-conditioned breeze, glowing a dull amber. Glasses, coffee cups, and ash trays littered the polished mahogany table. The smells of smoke, of foreign perfumes and body odors, clogged Clara's nostrils and throat.
Perhaps thirty people or so, mostly men, sat at the table. Clara knew only a few of them. General Peter Horvath, an important British Shark for whom her father occasionally provided legal services, was there of course, and Eric Fleming, a multi-millionaire rancher from Australia who had been a close acquaintance of her father's since she was a girl. Most of the rest she knew only by name, if at all. They made up a hodgepodge of races - Caucasian, black, Oriental, Hispanic, Mediterranean - arrayed in a riot of costumes: business suits in a variety of styles, dress uniforms, fatigues, kitenges, robes, boots, loafers, sandals.
The fat Sikh to Clara's left wore an expensive gray business suit and white turban, for instance, and had a black beard rolled tightly up into the folds of fat at his chin. He chain-smoked, smiled at her in a way that made her uncomfortable, and completely ignored his interpreter, a strikingly beautiful woman in a ruby-red sari, who whispered in his other ear. Clara gave him her most intimidating owl-eyed stare, and eventually he coughed, stabbed out his cigarette butt, and looked away. On her right a tiny, stiff-faced man who might have been Central or South American wore a military uniform with lots of brass and ribbons on the chest. Two Orientals sat with O.K. Casaday - probably North Vietnamese representatives. And three members of the Meta-Greens - an extremist group from Germany, an odd marriage of the skinheads and the Greens - sat near Rudo's chair, looking young and insolent. One had his army boots up on the table.