Richard Lovett - Phantom Sense

AMSC’s offices were in a nondescript industrial park like a million others. The type of place that has a name like Swan Island, Bluegrass Meadows, or Mustang Heights, and where if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, you’ll wind up walking up and down roads not made for pedestrians, wondering why the hell you can go all the way from number 1401A to 1637D without ever seeing 1513C.

Laurel missed it the first two times, but she’d obviously spent more time in places like this than I had, because on the third pass, she found an unmarked door to a whole slew of offices with numbers in the 1510s.

Two minutes later, we had a bland-looking guy named Bruce Larch offering us coffee.

If he’d ever known real, physical danger, I’d be surprised. Roundish baby face. Too-quick smile, quicker handshake. I’ve bought cars from guys like him.

“One of our bugs?” he said. “In a missing girl’s apartment?”

“My dau—” I started, but Laurel cut me off.

“We’ve got the serial number. There’s no question it’s yours.”

“I have no idea—”

“Don’t give me that.” She stared at him, and I wondered how much money even lobotomized CI-MEMS might be worth on the open market. Laurel, I realized, was probably very good at what she did. “Kip here is one of our consultants. He’s ex-military CI-MEMS. Do you have any idea what those guys can do? Right now, he’s got a hundred bugs hiding in this room—no, you can’t see them, so there’s no point trying to look—monitoring your biometrics. He’s a damn walking lie detector…” She glanced my way. “Aren’t you, Kip?”

I nodded. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Denise looking too, but there was no way to respond and stay in the role in which Laurel had cast me.

“…so don’t scam me or we’ll pull your contract faster than you can get your tie caught in a paper shredder. Do you understand?”

Larch took a half-step backward, bumping into the corner of a beat-up desk that looked like it had come from Office Liquidators. His voice squeaked. “Yes.”

“You should also know he’s ex- CI-MEMS. Do you know what that means?”

Larch shook his head.

“It means he’s been through all kinds of shit you and I don’t want to think about, stuff that drives a lot of them right over the edge. PTSD. OCD. Paranoia.” She shot me a quick look, and I wondered how the hell she knew. Then I remembered the familiar voice on the phone. I wasn’t the only one . “It means he’s one scary dude, Bruce. And he really doesn’t like being played for a fool.” She turned to me. “How many people have you killed?”

I shrugged. “That’s classified.” I picked up a ballpoint pen up from Larch’s desk and pushed the button. Click.

She turned back. “So, Bruce, let’s abbreviate this. How the hell did your insect wind up in an apartment in Austin?”

If it’s possible for a doughy complexion to melt, Larch’s had. “What was that serial number again?”

Laurel recited it like she was talking to a six-year-old. “I think you know where it came from. Doesn’t he, Kip?”

I nodded. Click . Click .

“Don’t tell anyone,” Larch said. “If I lose my job…”

“That’s the least of your worries. Do you know who we’re working with at the FBI?”

Larch shook his head. “Who?”

“You don’t want to know. If you’re lucky, you won’t find out. Right, Kip?”

I nodded again. Click. Click. Click.

“So, last chance, Bruce. Your job’s toast. Want to spend twenty years in jail?”

For a moment, I thought she’d worked him too hard. Bruce’s complexion was positively gray. A heart attack wasn’t going to do us any good. Briefly, I wished I’d taken Laurel’s offer. With a swarm, I’d know if he was in medical danger. But I’d also wind up like Jerret. Damn. Time to act like the norm I now was. Time to act , even if I didn’t fully know what I was doing.

I set the pen back on the desk. “Relax. Tell us the truth and we can keep the FBI out of this. Lie…”

Larch sucked his lip. “Okay… I’ve got this thing about football. I like the Saints.”

“The New Orleans Saints?”

“Yes. And a few other teams. But last year they didn’t like me all that much. I kind of wound up owing a bunch of money.” He licked his lips. “A big bunch of money. To this guy named Ray Perkins. At least that’s what he goes by. Who knows what he’s really called. Rumor is he’s into all kinds of things. He’d found this bodyguard he wanted to hire. Ex-CI-MEMS, like you. So we made a trade. I got him a few Musca domestica , agreed to keep him supplied. Perkins declined to, uh, collect, the debt.”

“Where did you take the flies?” I asked. Briefly, I wondered if even someone like Larch could tell that my interest was more than professional. But I needn’t have worried.

“Some condo-hotel thing in Chicago. I don’t know the address. We went with a long-lived species, gene-mods, actually, so I only need to bring new ones out every six to eight weeks. Musca domestica , with double normal lifespan. Sterile, of course, so they don’t escape into the environment and mess up the ecology. Even the military’s not got ’em yet. Latest thing. Still beta-testing.” The used-car salesman, sure that if he could only talk long enough, we’d forget what we’d actually asked.

Laurel saw it too. “Glad to know we’re getting something for all that money we’re paying you,” she said. “Too bad you decided to give it to a criminal. What do they call that, Kip?”

I had no idea. “Treason? Espionage? Misappropriation of government secrets? Something like that.”

“You hear that, Bruce? You didn’t just give this guy bugs, you gave him super-secret bugs. One more chance. Where did you take them?”

“I told you, I don’t know the address.” He waved a hand at me, nearly knocking a Darth Vader bobblehead off his desk. “Ask him. He’ll tell you I’m telling the truth.”

“Fine,” Laurel said, taking me off the hook. She spun a computer toward him. “EarthMaps. And don’t tell me you can’t find it.”

“Remember,” I added, “misappropriation of government secrets is a felony.”

Larch collapsed into a chair. But he turned to the computer, clicked in, worked the controller. Took a dizzyingly fast joyride through urban sprawl. “There.” He stopped at a tallish building, maybe thirty floors. “I don’t know any more than that. They met me in the lobby, blindfolded me on the elevator. Believe me, I didn’t want to know what floor the guy operated out of. I’m pretty sure he had the whole floor to himself, though, because they didn’t seem worried about anyone else being in the hallway. But they kept me blindfold the whole time, so I don’t even know what he looks like. Just that he has this nasal accent, like he’s from New York or Boston or something.”

“Those are kind of different,” Denise said.

Larch seemed to notice for the first time that there were three of us in his office. “Sorry. I was born in Orange County. All that East Coast stuff sounds the same.”

“What about the bodyguard?” Laurel said.

“Ex-mil’s all I know. Though he must have been in the room, because the moment I opened the carrier, I could hear the insects fly out, one by one, like he was taking control of them, then and there. He never spoke, but Perkins called him Jay something or other. Jail? Something weird like that. Jayelle?”

“J.L.?” I asked.

Larch shrugged. “Could be. I really don’t get those East Coast accents.”

I woke screaming.

I’d been in the ravine, my shoulder not feeling like a shoulder. I was trying to reach behind my back like the first-aid said, only my arm wouldn’t do it because something was in the way and the Ladenites were coming, were going to get me, because I couldn’t get up and move, but who cared because it was the shoulder with the tat and I was blind and Senseless and might as well die but that made no sense because the tat was still a tat and the dislocation hadn’t torn a nerve, so where was my swarm? Why didn’t I know what was happening? Would I even know when a Ladenite tossed in a grenade, concussing me, killing me, letting my swarm get away… ?