“The director of the CIA just resigned. He’s under suspicion of downloading classified files, but that’s just a cover. There’s more going on, much more. Cracks in the Silk network in Washington. A little war. Anyway, something did the trick,” Ben said. “Some agents reported back to their bosses—maybe the two that were in Anthrax Central, assigned to help Stuart and Norton. The bosses discovered something pretty special, a little late. They discovered they had done enough kowtowing and cringing. ‘It’s a new millennium, gentlemen,’” Ben pontificated, swinging out his right arm and waving it at the night air. “ ‘Time to clear the slate and set things right. Time to get a new compass.’ Maybe Rob’s death wasn’t in vain.
“Some cops found me an hour later outside the alley. I was pretty strung out. The next day, three agents I had never seen before sprung me from Rikers and took me in from the cold. Put me in hiding, gave me a physical and detox, then debriefed me about everything since Rob first showed up at my house. I thought at first they were just going to kill me after they’d got what they wanted. But no. There were two agencies, a cover agency either tagged into treason or defending its mistakes, and a special investigation team with almost no support and no money.
“I accompanied a group of them back to San Jose and we opened up Rob’s secret office. They assigned their own lab guys to look over Banning’s papers and what Rob had put together. They inventoried all his cultures and chemistries.”
“Before Lissa took me there,” I said.
“Yeah. They modified the elixir based on Rob’s work. By the time they had their act together, and set out to find you, it was a couple of weeks after Rob’s funeral in Florida. You had gone underground. Banning got to you first, but he was acting on his own, as usual.”
“Sometimes that’s best,” Banning said.
“We’re in a small operation, so far, deliberately—they don’t know who might be tagged, and who might not, and they want it to look to Silk like we’re still rogues. The operation may not even be officially sanctioned. I think they’re still making some tough discoveries and decisions back in Washington.”
“What about the body in the freezer?” I asked.
“There was a dust-up in San Francisco. We almost got shot—and caught two runners. One was killed, the other got away.”
“A man in gray?” I thought of the man who had argued with Lissa in front of the strip motel.
“Yeah. The Agency did a quick autopsy of the dead fellow, took samples to see what Silk might be doing to control runners. Then they hauled the body in a refrigerated truck down to San Jose. Left him in Rob’s freezer in case Silk decided to come looking. It was convenient, and there was an element of payback. A little psychological warfare.”
Lissa had certainly been surprised. “They put a sentry out in the used-car lot, in case I showed up,” I said. “The skinny guy in a herringbone suit. The one Lissa shot.”
“We don’t know who that was,” Ben said. “Maybe just a good citizen, hoping to arrest a bomber.”
Fucking amateur. “I doubt that,” I said. “Something went wrong—some lack of coordination at the top. The bomb scared Lissa. Maybe she took it out on one of their own. Maybe a taggee . . . maybe an inept runner.” Or maybe—the thought came and went—we didn’t understand anything yet.
Ben shrugged. “They make mistakes. That’s something in our favor. Our team started tracking you after Mrs. Callas illegally logged on to NCIC2000.”
“What the hell is that?”
“The FBI’s on-line database of criminal activity in the United States. It’s available only to law enforcement. A real hacker’s target.”
“Callas refused to have anything to do with us,” I said.
“Smart woman,” Ben said. “We caught up with you after they spotted Lissa Cousins’s car east of LA.”
We rolled out on the road again.
“Those three names,” I said. “Let’s make sure. They were piecework, regulus, and chopper?”
“I think so,” Ben said.
“They could be important,” I warned.
“The first could have been peacekeeper or peacemaker,” Ben said.
“There are no such genes.”
“They’re names for genes?”
“Two of them are genes,” I confirmed. Chopper was coming back to me. Not a gene, but a glycoprotein often created during phage infection. It was part of a bacterial ID system.
“Make you live forever?”
I shook my head. “That wasn’t what Rob was telling us. They’re part of the complex of pathways that allow bacteria to coordinate their activities on our skin and in our gut. Pumping in antisense RNA with a shuttle vector could block the gene products. Phage-infected bacteria, without chopper, could get picked out as ‘foreigners’ and targeted by other bacteria. Rob must have worked them into his treatment early on, but not into yours. That made the difference in your tagged behavior. He came out from under faster.”
“Piecework, chopper, regulus,” Banning said. “It is nice to be among fellow crazies, to have some acknowledgment of my efforts, and to finally, after all these years, have a government job.”
“Sure,” Ben said. “Drive.”
“I hope, gentlemen, that when this is over, one of you will lend me a pistol. I would like to kill these idiot voices once and for all.”
“Gladly,” Ben said.
Banning’s lips started working. He couldn’t help it. “My first love was a beautiful young Jewess, you know,” he confessed, eyes darting.
“Just shut up,” Ben said wearily.
Banning was quiet the rest of the way.
Our rendezvous point was a small civilian airport in the desert. A group of ten or so earnest-looking men in suits waited inside a big tin hangar. They seemed surprised to see us.
“You did it,” said a pleasant-looking fellow a little older than me and wearing jeans and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He introduced himself as an FBI agent named Condon. “Good to see you. Our other outside expert didn’t get through. We’re to accompany you to New York. Do you know where we’re going?”
“Near where they shot my brother,” I said.
