Joe Ledger (17 page)

A woman stood ten feet behind me.

She was dressed in black. Shoes, trousers, jersey, gun belt, pistol. All black. Dark hair, dark eyes.

Those eyes.

Her
eyes.

My mouth fell open. Someone drove a blade of pure ice through my heart. I could see my pistol begin to tremble in my hand.

I stared at her.

I spoke her name.

“Grace….”

Chap. 6

I don’t know what time does in moments of madness. It stops or it warps. It becomes something else. Every heartbeat felt like a slow, deliberate punch to my breastbone, and yet I could feel my pulse fluttering.

She held a pistol in her hand, the barrel raised to point at my chest, and I had an insane, detached thought.

You don’t need a bullet to kill me. Be
her
and I’ll die.

Not be her, and I think I’ll die, too.

She licked her lips and spoke.

“Who are you?”

The accent was British. Like Grace’s.

But….

But the tone was wrong.

It didn’t sound like her.

Not anymore. It had a moment ago when she’d spoken my name. But not now. Not anymore.

“Grace,” I said again, but now I could hear the doubt in my own voice. “I….”

She peered at me over the barrel of the gun, her eyes dark with complex emotions, fierce with intelligence.

Slowly, carefully, she raised her gun until the barrel pointed to the ceiling and held her other hand palm-out in a clear no-threat gesture.

“You’re Captain Ledger, aren’t you?” 

I kept my gun on her.

“Who are you?” I asked, but my voice broke in the middle, so I had to ask again.

“Felicity Hope,” she said. “Barrier.”

I stood there and held my gun on her for another five seconds.

Then….

I lowered the pistol.

“God almighty,” I breathed.

She frowned at me, half a quizzical smile. “Who did you think I was?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Felicity Hope holstered her piece and came toward me. “You called me Grace.”

I said nothing.

“You thought I was Grace Courtland, didn’t you?”

“Grace is dead.” 

“I know.” She stood there staring at me.

Up close, I could tell that it wasn’t her. This woman’s hair was paler, her eyes darker, her skin had fewer scars. But the height was the same, and the body. The same mix of dangerous athleticism and luscious curves. The movement was the same, a dancer’s grace. And the keen intelligence in the eyes.

Yeah, that was exactly the same.

Damn it.

When the universe wants to fuck with you it has no problem bending you over a barrel and giving it to you hard and ugly.

I cleared my throat. “Did you know her?”

She nodded.

“Was she…a friend?” I asked.

Felicity shrugged. “Actually, we weren’t. Most of the time I knew her I thought she was a stuck-up bitch.” She watched my face as she spoke, probably wondering what buttons she was pushing. Then she added, “But I don’t think I really knew her. Not really. Not until right before she died.”

“How?”

“What?”

“How could you know what she was like right before she died?”

“Oh…we spoke on the phone quite a lot. She was officially still with Barrier and had to make regular reports. I was the person she reported to.”

“You were her superior officer?”

She looked far too young. Grace had been young, too, but Grace was an exception to most rules. She’d been the first woman to officially train with the SAS. She’d been a senior field team operative in some of the most grueling cases on both sides of the Atlantic. There was nobody quite like Grace and everyone knew it.

Felicity shook her head. “Hardly. I was a desk jockey taking field reports. I know I’m not in Major Courtland’s league.”

“No,” I said ungraciously. “You’re not. Tell me why you’re here.”

She said, “Changeling.”

“Which means what exactly? The name keeps popping up in searches but no one seems to know exactly what it is.”

“What do you know about transformational genetics and self-directed theriomorphy?”

“Some,” I said, dodging it. “What do you know about it?”

“Too much.” 

“Give me more than that.”

“They’re making monsters,” she said.

I shook my head. “Not in the mood for banter, honey, and I’m never in the mood for cryptic comments, especially not from total strangers I meet in dark places. This is American soil and a legally closed site. Spill everything right now or enjoy the flight home.”

She took a breath. “Okay, but I’ll have to condense it because there’s a lot.”

“So,” I said, “condense.”

“Can you take that flashlight out of my eyes?”

“No,” I said, and I didn’t. The light made her eyes look large and moist. If it was uncomfortable, then so what? I was deeply uncomfortable, so it was a running theme for the day.

She said, “Ever since the dawn of gene therapy and transgenic science it’s become clear that DNA is not locked. Evolution itself proves that DNA advances. Look at any DNA strand and you’ll see the genes for nonhuman elements like viruses hardwired into our genetic code.”

“Part of junk DNA,” I said. “What about it?”

“Transformational genetics is a relatively new branch of science that is searching for methods of changing specific DNA and essentially rebuilding it so that a new tailor-made code can be developed.”

“That’s not new,” I pointed out. “The Nazis tried that, and the whole Eugenics movement before that.”

“That’s selective breeding. That’s cumbersome and time-consuming because it requires eggs and host bodies and so forth. This is remodeling, and recent advances have opened developmental doors no one imagined would be possible in this century.”

I didn’t say anything. During the firefight at the Dragon Factory we’d encountered mercenaries who had undergone gene therapy with ape DNA. And there were other even more hideous monsters there.

“The word
theriomorphy
keeps showing up. What’s that?”

“Shapeshifting.”

“Shape…?”

“The ability to change at will from one form to another.” She smiled through the blinding flashlight glow. “From human form into something else.”

“At…will?”

“Oh yes.”

“Like from what to what? You’re making this sound like we’re hunting werewolves or something.”

Her smile flickered. “Who knows? Maybe we are.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I know.”

“Wait…hold on…are we really standing here having a conversation about werewolves? I mean…fucking
werewolves
?”

After a three count she said, “No.”

“Jesus jumped-up Christ in a sidecar, then why—”

“Werewolves would be easy,” she said, cutting right through my words. “Werewolves would be a silver bullet and we’d take the rest of the afternoon off for a drink. I wish it was only werewolves.”

I gaped at her.

Seriously…what do you say to that?

Chap. 7

“Okay,” I said, “before I pee my pants here, how do you know about this and what can we do about it? This facility is sealed.”

She flashed her first real smile, and it looked so much like the battlefield grin Grace used to give me that I almost turned away.

“When your task force shut down this place,” she said, “they made a thorough video inventory of everything. High-res footage from where every piece of paper was all the way down to the way pencils sat in a pot on each desk. Everything, with a second camera filming what the first camera was doing in order to firmly establish the integrity of the scene and contribute the first real link in the sacred chain of evidence. Am I right?”

Church had told me about that, but I hadn’t seen it. I nodded anyway.

“So we can take or touch anything recorded on that video.”

“That’s the size of it,” I agreed.

“The federal order sealing this place contains an authorized copy of that video.”

“Yup.”

“And the teams who were here agreed that absolutely everything has been documented—at least in terms of its existence and placement.”

“Sure.”

Her smile brightened. “Therefore, anything that
isn’t
on the video technically doesn’t exist in terms of that federal order.”

“Sure,” I said again, “but how does that put us back in a discussion about werewolves? ’Cause, quite frankly I’m having a hard timing shaking loose of that conversation.”

The smile dimmed but did not go out. “Not werewolves,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“They’re not werewolves. That’s not what they were doing here.”

Felicity turned and walked a few paces away, going along the hall in the direction I’d come. She stopped, looked through the shadows. “You were in the storage room?”

“Maybe.”

“You were in the storage room,” she repeated, not making it a question this time. “Did you look inside the bathroom?”

“Sure. Nothing there.”

She sighed audibly.

“I wish I could say you were right about that, Captain.”

Without another word she began walking down the hallway toward the storeroom. She didn’t have a flashlight, and my beam was currently pointed at the floor in front of me; however, she seemed quite at home in the dark.

I felt like I’d walked into the middle of a play for which I had no script and no stage direction.

She paused once in the very outside edge of the light and looked back at me. I had seen Grace turn that way, stand that way.

Look that way.

Then Felicity Hope turned and vanished into the black.

My eye tingled at the corners, and I knew that given half a chance I was going to break down and cry.

“Oh, Grace…,” I said very, very quietly.

Chap. 8

I caught up with her at the entrance to the storage room and followed her over to the small bathroom. As she approached the door she drew a small gun from a shoulder rig.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Getting ready,” she replied crisply, “and I suggest you do the same. I don’t know exactly what’s down in there, but things could get very bad very quickly.”

I almost smiled. “In a toilet?”

“I trust you have enough faith in Barrier agents to know that we don’t typically feel the need to arm ourselves to take a piss.” She opened the door and we looked inside. Toilet, sink, white-tiled wall, plastic trash can. And the partial handprint on the back wall.

I said, “Secret door?”

“Secret door,” she agreed. “And your federal task force missed it.”

“Balls.”

With her pistol in her right hand, she placed her left on the back wall, over the partial print. She moved her hand to one corner and pressed. The tile tilted inward with an audible
click.

The whole rear wall swung inward on silent hinges, revealing a set of metal stairs that went down into blackness. A smell wafted up at us.

Rotting meat.

Human waste.

And… something else.

A fish stink. Not actually unpleasant, like the way an aquarium supply store smells, or the kitchens at a low-end fish-and-chips restaurant.

There were sounds, too.

Machines. Whirring motors. Rhythmic pumps. Other mechanical sounds, all soft, all muted.

“How do you know about this?” I asked quietly.

Felicity shrugged. “This information was hard won, believe me. Literally blood, sweat, and tears.”

She moved to the top of the steel steps.

I drew my Beretta. “What’s down there? I mean really, no bullshit about werewolves or boogeymen. What the fuck are we going to find down there?”

Felicity turned toward me. In the crowded confines of the bathroom she was very close to me. I could smell her perfume. It was the same brand Grace used. What the hell was it, standard issue by Barrier? Or maybe it was the top-selling scent in England, and I was out of the stylistic loop.

Her body was achingly familiar and devastatingly female. It was the kind of body that no matter how well-balanced and normally nonsexist a man is, he can’t help but be profoundly aware of it. Of hips and breasts, of long legs and a slender, graceful throat, of animal heat that was purely, inarguably, powerfully female.

And yet….

Standing this close to her there was something wrong about her.

Maybe it was because she was so like Grace that knowing she wasn’t Grace made her feel fundamentally wrong. It was meeting a deliberate fake, a double or stand-in for someone I loved. Everything similar suddenly felt like a cheat, like a fraud perpetrated on my broken heart by a cruel and vindictive universe.

And beyond that, there was one other quality. One other thing that was not anything my senses or my personal pain perceived. This woman, this Special Agent Felicity Hope, seemed strange. Sure, I was still rattled by her sudden appearance in the dark, and by her similarity to Grace, but there was something else. She had a quality that made her not….

Not what?

I really had no idea how to finish that thought.

And no time.

Felicity moved away from me and began descending the steps. She moved well in the darkness, and if her feet made any sound at all on the metal stairs it was beyond my senses. With great reluctance and confusion, I followed.

The stairs zigzagged down two levels, and I realized that we had to now be at least twenty feet below sea level. Cape May is pancake flat and houses in the center of town had basements. Certainly nothing built this close to the bay would normally have a cellar. But the stairs went down and down.

With each step the smell of rotting meat increased.

I almost said, “There’s something dead down there.” But it would have been inanely obvious. Something was not only dead, it had been dead for some time.

Felicity slowed her pace and took her gun in a two-handed grip.

Sweat was beginning to run down the sides of my face and pool inside my shirt at the base of my spine. It would be nice to lie and say it was because the stairway was oppressively humid, but that would have been bullshit. I was scared. Really damn scared.