Timothy Zahn - The Green And The Gray

Fierenzo shivered. So he'd been right. Jonah and his fellow Grays were indeed not of this world. And apparently they'd brought not only a load of high-tech gadgets with them, but also a full-fledged war.

Wincing at the muscle twinges, he slowly turned his head and began a systematic inspection of his current living quarters.

There wasn't much to see. Aside from the blanket covering him and another one folded beneath him as a pad, there were only a pair of small mechanic's toolboxes against the wall near where Jonah had been sitting. Throwing off the blanket, he got up on slightly unsteady hands and knees and headed over to investigate.

He had just reached the closer box when the flap opened and Jonah reentered the tent. "Sorry about that," he apologized as he sealed it again behind him. "Jordan spotted some commotion down in the park and I wanted to check it out."

"Melantha?" Fierenzo asked, momentarily forgetting he'd just been caught red-handed sitting where he probably wasn't supposed to be.

Jonah shook his head. "Just a couple of gangs having an argument."

"What kind of argument?" Fierenzo asked, reaching for his cell phone. To his annoyance, it was missing, too.

"Don't worry, there was a patrol car just pulling up to take a look," Jonah assured him. "And Jordan's still watching." He gestured toward the toolbox Fierenzo was kneeling over. "You hungry?"

He was, in fact, starving, Fierenzo suddenly discovered. "I could use a snack," he said. "Just back the butcher truck up to the table."

Jonah grinned. "No butcher trucks, but you're welcome to what we've got. Help yourself."

"Thanks," Fierenzo said, popping the catches and lifting the lid. Inside, instead of tools, was a selection of granola-bar-sized packets in an impressive array of wrapper colors. Aside from the colors, there were no other distinguishing features he could see. "Do I at least get a hint?"

"Sure," Jonah said. "Sorry. The blue ones are basically different shades of beef and pork; the red ones

—"

" 'Shades' of beef?"

"Varieties might be a better way to put it," Jonah said. "The light blue ones taste like roast beef, with the darker ones more toward the steak end of the scale, while the turquoise drift off toward roast pork. Red are types of poultry, yellow are fish, green are fruits or vegetable mixes."

"The ultimate salad bar," Fierenzo said, picking up one of the green bars and peering doubtfully at it.

"Amazingly enough, you're not the first person to make that joke," Jonah said. "That one's a kind of multi-vegetable sort of thing. It goes well with any of the beef bars."

Peeling back the wrapper, Fierenzo took a cautious bite. To his mild surprise, the bar was as flavorful as freshly picked vegetables would have been. "Not bad," he said as he chewed. The texture was also more interesting than he'd expected, with subtle variations that kept his teeth and tongue guessing from one bite to the next. "Goes well with beef, you say?"

"This one especially," Jonah said, picking out a robin's-egg-blue packet. "I find it works best to alternate bites."

The blue bar was equally tasty, reminding Fierenzo of a particularly good beef Wellington he and Claire had once had in SoHo. "Is this standard Gray cuisine?" he asked.

"No, at home we cook up real food just like you do," Jonah assured him. "I'm partial to Italian and Chinese myself. These are watchmeals, designed for Grays who are traveling or on sentry duty."

"Beats the hell out of army MREs," Fierenzo said, shifting around and settling his back against the wall. The cold concrete sent another chill through him, but he ignored it. "You have anything to drink?"

"I've got some water," Jonah offered, pulling open the second toolbox to reveal a neat row of plastic bottles.

"Sounds good," Fierenzo said. "So how deep is the trouble you're in?"

"Deep enough," Jonah admitted as he handed over one of the bottles. "We could wind up with everyone in this whole thing mad at us."

"Sounds like you need a friend," Fierenzo commented, twisting off the bottle cap and taking a long swallow.

"You, for instance?" Jonah shook his head. "Sorry, but like I said, you know too much already." He lifted a finger. "Oh, and just for the record, we don't fly."

"You sure did a good imitation of it back at the playground."

"I was sliding down a tension line," Jonah explained. "Nothing to it."

"Ah," Fierenzo said. "And a tension line is what?"

Jonah snorted. "You are the persistent one, aren't you? Look, I'll protect you until you're recovered—

I owe you that much for getting me off that fire escape. But after that we're going to have to call it even and go our separate ways."

"No, I don't think so," Fierenzo said, draining the rest of the water and taking another bottle out of the box. "You see, I happen to know that your rescue of me last night was just a side effect of you pulling your own bacon out of the frying pan."

Jonah's eyes took on a wary look. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the fact that you and your brother Jordan are mixed up with the Whittiers and Melantha Green," Fierenzo said calmly. "So far you've managed to keep your involvement a secret, mainly by creating the illusion that you've been here in Chinatown watching the park, while in fact you've been in the Upper West Side trying to stop bleeding. You've done that by having Jordan sit here feeding you reports, which you then pass on to your pal Halfdan and his surveillance coordinators."

He took a swallow of water. "Unfortunately for you, one of the Greens got a good look at Jordan yesterday during that stunt he pulled near Washington Square, and he conned us into making up some nice sketches. You knew that if the Greens got hold of them, they'd eventually find someone who recognized Jordan, at which point they would give you both the kind of long, hard look you can't really afford."

He gestured at Jonah's hands. "Oh, and whatever that radio or cell phone is you have built into your hand, you actually have two of them," he added. "One per hand, which I gather is not standard issue.

Private and party lines?"

Jonah's face had taken on a slightly sandbagged look. "Something like that," he managed. "Damn.

You are good at this."

"Come down to the station sometime and explain that to my boss," Fierenzo said. "I've been telling him for years that I deserve a raise. Jordan is your brother, then? All I could tell from the sketch was that he was a close relative."

"Half-brother, actually," Jonah said, sounding a little more on balance. "Same father, different mothers. His last name isn't Gray, either, if you're still keeping score." His face puckered. "I presume that politely asking you to fade back into the woodwork is out of the question?"

"Not until and unless I get the whole story," Fierenzo told him. "And I mean the whole story."

"But—"

"But nothing," Fierenzo cut him off sharply, letting him have the NYPD Stare with both barrels. "A

Green named Cyril said the blood of thousands of New Yorkers was going to flow in the streets.

That is not acceptable in my town. You'll tell me what's going on, or so help me I'll bring so many local, state, and federal agencies down on you that Manhattan will have to open a branch island."

For a half-dozen heartbeats Jonah didn't reply. Fierenzo held his gaze, hoping he hadn't pushed too hard and wondering what he would do if he had. If Jonah decided he needed to be shut up, the obvious solution lay no more than half a rooftop away. Even if no one ever figured out how a NYPD

detective had come to fall off the top of a building in the middle of Chinatown, it would certainly close his mouth in an unpleasantly permanent way.

And then, to his quiet relief, some of the starch seemed to melt from Jonah's body language. "I am going to be in trouble forever," he muttered. "Okay, you win. It all started a long time ago, on a world not all that different from this one...."