Kangaroo Too Read online

  One of the displays mentions radiation hazards, and I think of Breyella. Maybe I can bring back a brochure for her to share with—

  The front door buzzes and clicks, then swings open. Yodey pokes his head out.

  “In here.” He waves me inside.

  I follow him into the clinic, noticing that the front windows appear transparent from this side. Probably some kind of tunable plexi, so the clinic workers inside can see trouble coming and the clients inside have some privacy from gawkers. “Nice place.”

  Yodey turns and gestures us into the back of the clinic. “I got connections.”

  “How is your mother, by the way?” Mrs. Hughes is on the board of directors for Lunar Planned Parenthood.

  Yodey stops in the middle of opening up one of the exam rooms and turning on the lights. “So you did some checking up on me. Respect. I looked you up too, Edwin. You pretty young to be a big-shot crime lawyer.”

  “Who says I’m a big shot?” I’m flattered, but also nervous that I’ll actually have to live up to this reputation.

  “Double docs don’t pony up retainer fees for less than the best,” Yodey says. “So you must be pretty slick, seeing what mi madre says good about your amazing client, Jessica Chu.”

  Hope you’re ready to make me look good, I text to Oliver. “I don’t like to brag.” I also don’t like talking about something I haven’t made up yet. “So. What do you have for me?”

  “Let’s talk pricing first,” Yodey says. “Guessing you’ll pay cash?”

  “Yeah. I don’t need a receipt.”

  Yodey chuckles. “I won’t tell. So, two thousand for the data—”

  “Two thousand?” Oliver shouts in my ear. I wince, and Yodey notices.

  “Wasn’t easy to get,” Yodey says. “Plus I made it a rush order, since your doc’s in jail.”

  “No, no, that’s fine,” I say, turning down the volume for my comms. “What about for the transportation?”

  Yodey shrugs. “Say five hundred for the pickup. Beyond that, I’m not the boss of Zoo. You want shuttle service, negotiate with him.”

  “Fine.” I should probably be haggling more. “I might not have access to quite that much cash right now. How about twenty-one hundred for everything?”

  “Twenty-four,” Yodey says without blinking.

  “Twenty-two.”

  His expression is unreadable. In my ear, Oliver says, “Don’t say anything more until he does.” I twitch my fingers and text back: I’m not an idiot.

  After a few seconds, Yodey says, “Twenty-three-five, low as I can go. Expenses and such.”

  I pretend to think about it for a moment. I’ve actually got several thousand in cash stowed in the pocket for emergencies, but I don’t want this kid to think I’ll roll over so easily all the time. Especially if I need to buy something else from him later.

  “I can live with that,” I say. “May I use the restroom?”

  Yodey points me toward the hallway. I go inside, open the pocket to retrieve the cash—plus a few more hundred-dollar-bills for Zoo—and then return to where Yodey is sitting in front of a desktop computer.

  “Here.” I hand him a folded stack of bills.

  He flips through the cash. “This only half.”

  “I want to see the data first.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Yodey turns to the computer, wakes it up, and inserts a small memory card. The screen lights up with a file listing, reminding me of the data I bought from Gladys. I hope our analysts can make sense of that soon, and find something actionable in there.

  Some of these file listings resolve into thumbnail images, and some of those look like different “street” levels in the Terraces. “You were able to recover the security footage?” I ask.

  “Official cams not the only eyes on the street,” Yodey says. “I asked around. Found some phone vids and stray selfies with your mystery woman in the bee-gee. Might be some noise in there—my supplier didn’t check for anything beyond location coordinates. Might be some cams pointed the wrong way, showing irrelevant scenes. Trust you to keep all this on the down-low, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Seeing as how I’d probably get disbarred for even accepting this information. Thanks.”

  “Why you do this, anyway?” Yodey asks. “You trying to get Doc Chu off the hook, this no way to do it.”

  “My client isn’t cooperating,” I say. “But I’m legally required to do whatever I can to mount a compelling defense.”

  “You the man,” Yodey says, shrugging. He leans back and holds out one hand, palm up. “We good?”

  I pull the rest of the cash from my jacket and hand it to him. “Yeah, we’re good.”

  He pockets the cash without counting it—I suppose that’s a sign of respect—and stands. “I give you a few minutes to scan, then we gotta bounce. You can check deets later. Just make sure you got all you need.”

  “Thanks.”

  I wait until Yodey walks out to the waiting room and starts talking on his phone, then lean forward so Oliver can get a better look at the computer files through my eye.

  EQ, what am I seeing here? I text to him.

  Oliver gives me instructions for unpacking and sorting through the vid files. The first few are not useful—some kids recording vid journals of themselves, talking into the camera from inside closed rooms. No views of the street outside, even if they’re facing the right way. Another vid appears to be one side of a phone call between a man and his girlfriend. He’s trying to talk her into sending him some naked pictures of herself. I wonder how Yodey got access to a private phone call and whether he and his associates do this all the time. I’m really glad all my comms are end-to-end encrypted with the agency’s strongest algorithms.

  The next vid shows me what I’m looking for. But it’s not what I want to see.

  “Son of a bitch,” I say out loud. “What the fuck! Are you fucking kidding me!”

  Oliver says in my ear, “That looks like—”

  “It sure as fuck does!” I stand up, toppling the chair. “Motherfucker!”

  I yank the memory card out of the computer and leave the clinic before Yodey can stop me. I don’t actually care about anything right now except calling Paul and having a one-on-one with him.

  * * *

  Zoo takes me back to the Hotel Tranquility and agrees to wait for another five hundred dollars. I go up to my room, slam the door closed, and pace around for I don’t know how long in a vain effort to calm down. Then I pull one of Oliver’s pesticide disks out of the pocket and stick it on a wall. I’ve already turned off my comms feed back to him. Now I open a new channel, direct to Paul’s office.

  He answers in a few seconds, full vid and audio. “Kangaroo.”

  “Alisa Garro is on the Moon,” I say. “Did you know about this?”

  He hesitates, and it’s not because of the transmission delay or because he doesn’t remember who she is. Paul was the one who wanted her convicted on five counts of treason. I see his upper lip twitch before he answers. “No. I did not know about this.”

  I smack my palm against the wall. It hurts, but that means I’m not dreaming. Goddammit. “Don’t lie to me. Why is she on the Moon?”

  “I promise you, I do not know,” Paul says. “How is this relevant to your current assignment?”

  “What the fuck is my current assignment, Lasher?” I say. “You send me to the Moon, but apparently Surgical has other orders, because she wanders off without me, meets with Alisa fucking Garro and some other guy, and this morning the other guy winds up dead, and I find out all surveillance vids from the meeting were erased, and I need to go to the fucking black market to get a picture of—”

  “Slow down,” Paul says, frowning and leaning forward. “Who gave Surgical other orders?”

  I gape at him. “You didn’t give her a secondary objective?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Paul says. “And what is this about erasing data?”

  “Don’t you bullshit me,�
�� I say. “This is a secure channel. You tell me the goddamn truth here.”

  “I promise you, Kangaroo, I am currently as confused as you are.”

  This is worse than I thought. “EQ looked into the hack. There was an agency authorization order. Jessica requested it, but somebody at C-level or above had to sign off.”

  “Tell me the details,” Paul says.

  I give him the relevant names, dates, and times. “EQ saw the data through my comms link. He can verify it. But if this was faked, then someone knows way too much about us. And if it wasn’t—”

  “I’ll get to the bottom of it,” Paul says. I’m sure he will. But I want more than just information.

  “I want to talk to Alisa Garro,” I say.

  Paul hesitates for the briefest of moments, barely long enough for me to notice. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Kangaroo. Let me handle this.”

  “I have transport that can get me to Copernicus Base,” I say. “I have an operational responsibility to investigate and resolve anything that may interfere with successful completion of my mission objectives. And given the fact that there’s just been a multi-site, highly coordinated terrorist attack, I’m pretty sure the Lunar authorities will agree, once I identify myself as an OSS officer, that I have a blank check to call out some goddamn spacemen and start digging!”

  I give Paul a moment to think about it. Neither of us blinks.

  “I’ll get you a contact,” he says finally. “Give me thirty minutes.”

  “You have fifteen.”

  “Thirty minutes,” Paul repeats.

  He disconnects the call before I can say anything even dumber. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t a great move to give my boss an ultimatum. Especially since I do not have the slightest idea of what’s going on anymore. Why did Jessica meet with Alisa Garro? And how is Alisa Garro on the Moon and not rotting away in prison?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Earth—United States—Washington, D.C.

  Here’s what happened 9 years ago

  The last time I saw Alisa Garro, she almost killed me. On purpose.

  When I first joined the agency, my medical care was an immediate priority. Science Division wanted to establish a baseline for studying me, and Paul wanted to make sure my ability wasn’t just a temporary aberration, or some weird phenomenon caused by a brain tumor or something else that was going to kill me. He wanted the best physician he could find to take care of me and tell him how long he could expect to use me. He’s all heart.

  That physician was not Jessica Chu. No, she was a replacement for my original Surgical officer: Alisa Garro. Because she turned out to be an evil witch.

  Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration. But only a slight one.

  Alisa Garro was—and still is, judging by the vids Yodey found—a very attractive woman. Natural blond hair, sparkling green eyes, daily-workout body. I’ll admit, when I met her for the first time, my teenage body got a little excited. Her voice made it even worse—distinctly feminine, with the barest edge of huskiness that she could turn up when she wanted to work you over. She knew what she had going on, and she knew how to use it. Brains and beauty are a powerful combination in this business.

  She was good at her job. She presented a friendly, caring, almost maternally nurturing front. She asked all the right questions. With those brilliant emerald eyes, it felt like she was staring into my soul. At first, I found it comforting—she knew exactly how I was feeling, she knew how to fix whatever the problem was, I could trust her when she touched me.

  Later, though, once I realized it was all an act, it became deeply disturbing. Because then it felt like I couldn’t hide anything from her. I felt naked whenever I was in a room with her, and not in a good way.

  Paul Tarkington may be a shameless manipulator, but he doesn’t pretend to be nice about it. Alisa Garro, on the other hand, wheedled and cajoled and seduced to get what she wanted. She could convince you that you wanted to give her what she wanted. It was insidious. And once I saw through her act and became impervious to her charms, it turned my stomach to see how she continued to use it on other people, especially men, and how they kept falling for it.

  It’s sad but true: you can lead a male pretty much anywhere by his penis.

  The day she betrayed me and shattered my trust irrevocably, I call “Surprise Day.” First, Science Division surprised me by doing unexpected things in all their tests that morning—they figured that they’d never get the opportunity to do it again, so they packed all their pranks into a single session.

  This was before the war with Mars, before the agency officially put me in the field, but they were talking about it. I think they were stringing Paul along, but I wasn’t privy to the conversations they were having at that level. What I do know is that the agency insisted that Science Division run battery after battery of tests on me, making me push the pocket to its limits, to see exactly how useful it could be—how big I could make the portal, how long I could hold it open, what happened if I were knocked unconscious while the portal was open, all kinds of fun stuff like that.

  Anyway, after the third unexpected projectile flying at my head while I tried to open a portal, I called bullshit on their shenanigans and left the lab ahead of schedule. Then I got an even bigger surprise when I returned to the office.

  Alisa wasn’t in the exam room when I returned, sporting some nasty bruises and wanting something to help relieve the pain. She must have been gone for only a minute. Her workstation was unlocked, and I couldn’t resist peeking at my file. After all, don’t I have a right to my own medical records?

  I learned that she was dosing me before sending me off to each of my sessions at Science Division. According to her notes, she wanted to see how various brain-altering chemicals might affect my ability to use the pocket, and she’d been slipping me progressively stronger neurotoxins the whole time.

  After overcoming my initial shock, I copied all the files and sent them to Paul. When Alisa returned, I confronted her. She denied it, of course, and tried to talk me down. When that didn’t work, she tried to seduce me. That was insulting. Yeah, sure, I was a horny teenager and she was a stone cold fox, but did she really think I’d fall for that after an entire day of increasingly unpleasant surprises?

  Also, I was starting to feel kind of sick.

  I stormed out of the office before she could try anything else. Then I collapsed in a Metrorail station on my way home and wound up unconscious in a civilian hospital. It was hours before Paul retrieved me, and nobody was happy at that point.

  I know Alisa Garro didn’t actually want to kill me. But I don’t think she would have cared much if she had. I was just another curiosity to her. Dead Kangaroo? Oops, my bad, let’s find another unsuspecting subject to experiment on.

  I couldn’t believe it when she wasn’t court-martialed, or even officially reprimanded. I mean, I know we do a lot of bad stuff in secret here at the agency, but we still have some measure of government supervision. The secretary of state still jumps down Paul’s throat every time I introduce some “variation” into one of my missions. Alisa Garro must have had powerful friends—or influential people she could blackmail—in very high places to get away as clean as she did.

  They wouldn’t tell me where she had been reassigned. I suspected that Paul knew, but he wasn’t at liberty to say. He always deflected whenever I asked about her. He told me that she had been exiled from the United States, and that he would make sure she never bothered me again.

  I trusted him. I still trust him to keep her the hell away from me. But now I want to see her. I want to know why Jessica wanted to see her. I want to know what the fuck she’s doing on the Moon.

  * * *

  Paul calls back forty seconds before the half-hour deadline. No free pizza for me. But I do have plenty of time while waiting to review all the vid that Yodey’s sources recovered from Jessica’s meeting with Alisa Garro.

  I can’t hear their conversation on any of the vids, and
the resolution is low enough that there’s no chance of reading anyone’s lips. What I do see, after reconstructing all the footage, is Alisa arriving at the café first and sitting by herself for a while. Then Jeremiah Burgess shows up and greets her. While they’re talking, Jessica walks up to the table.

  Alisa stands up as soon as she sees Jessica. They argue for a while, and Burgess works pretty hard to get them to calm down and sit. The conversation remains relatively calm until Jessica pulls out a necklace—the one now sitting in the U.S. marshals’ evidence room—and pushes it across the table to Alisa, who picks it up and immediately throws it on the ground.

  Then it’s more standing, gesturing angrily at each other, and finally walking away from the table in opposite directions. Jeremiah Burgess doesn’t seem overly concerned at this point. He doesn’t try to follow either Jessica or Alisa; he just picks up the necklace and sits and finishes his drink. Maybe he thought he could pawn the necklace later.

  Based on the timestamps in these vids and when Jessica’s transponder came back into range at the hotel, she had to come straight back by tube after leaving the café. Jeremiah Burgess stayed in the Terraces for a while, got drunk, and left about half an hour before he was killed by a robot. Whoever paid him for his power plant insider information must have wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be around to talk about that transaction.

  I can’t tell where Alisa Garro went after she left the café. But Paul’s going to help me with that.

  “I hope you appreciate this, Kangaroo,” he says. “I just cashed in a big favor at the White House.”

  “And?”

  “I was able to confirm that Alisa Garro is on the Moon. Special assignment for State.”

  “What’s the assignment?”

  “I wasn’t able to find out.”

  “You’re director of operations for Outback.” There can’t be more than a dozen people in the whole State Department who rank higher than Paul. “What do you mean, you couldn’t find out?”