Daniel Suarez - Influx

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.”

Grady stood across a granite-topped island from him. “Who else is in this building?”

“You mean what else: floors and floors of truth in advertising—cold storage. Very useful for erasing thermal signatures from questionable fusion experiments.”

Alexa glared at him. “Fusion? Cotton, you’re not supposed to have that level of technology out of BTC headquarters.”

He poured another glass. “Cognac, Mr. Grady? You look like you could use one.”

Grady nodded.

He poured. “Drawn from casks lost in a shipwreck off the coast of France in 1873.”

“Good lord, it must have cost a fortune.”

“I wouldn’t know.” Cotton slid a snifter along the stone counter to him. Grady just barely caught it before it went over the edge.

Alexa persisted. “What else do you have in this hideaway of yours?”

“Nothing dangerous, if that’s what you’re thinking. No, this is strictly a stealth operation. We are safe from all known tracking technologies here.”

“Not a q-link transmitter.”

Cotton finished off another finger of cognac. “No. But then, we took care of that, didn’t we?” He offered her a drink with his eyes.

She just made a disgusted sound and headed down the corridor, clearly irritated.

Grady watched her go.

“She could probably use some alone time.” Cotton started moving pots and pans around, turning on gas burners on his massive stove.

Grady actually felt bad for her. “Alexa just walked away from her whole world for us. I remember having mine taken from me, and that was hard enough.” He took a sip of the cognac and savored it on his tongue. “My God, this is like a mist going down.”

“Yeah, pretty smooth…” Cotton was getting ingredients out of what turned out to be some sort of walk-in fridge.

“You’re cooking?”

“Sure, why not? I always try to have a nice meal after near-death experiences. The food never tastes better. Thought I’d make a bouillabaisse. You hungry?”

“Okay.”

Cotton stabbed a finger at the ceiling. “This calls for Bizet…” He shouted at the ceiling in respectable French. “ Les pêcheurs de perles —‘Au fond du temple saint’!”

Suddenly the opera began to fill the loft. Beautiful music. Grady could see the colors in waves. He felt the depth of the day’s events and took another sip of cognac.

“I am sorry that you wound up in Hibernity, Mr. Grady. Please know that I was given no choice.” Cotton was gathering fresh seafood onto the counter.

Grady nodded absently. “How on earth is there fresh seafood here?”

He gestured to the walk-in fridge. “Inert storage. Uses noble gases—argon. Like cryogenics but without freezing. Food takes ages to go bad.”

“Another world-changing innovation hidden in a vault.”

Cotton seemed unfazed as he shelled large prawns. “This whole building is a ten-story freezer two blocks long. We’d probably find Prohibition-era gangsters in here if they ever thawed the place out.”

“So how is it you’re here, Cotton? Why were you playing the BTC’s mad bomber all these years?”

Cotton grimaced. “Bad luck, really.”

Grady gave him a look.

“Oh, right. I guess you were unluckier than I was. What I mean is, I was caught trying to break into BTC headquarters about… oh, I guess a dozen years ago.”

“You were trying to break into the BTC?”

“Well, I never claimed I was smart.”

“How did you even know they existed?”

“I didn’t. It was a job. I made it my business to obtain difficult-to-obtain information for interested parties. The BTC building had come to the attention of certain people—certain low-profile people—who let me know just how ultrasecure this very run-of-the-mill building smack-dab in downtown Detroit was. It was anomalous to say the least.”