Читать книгу Darwin’s Children - Greg Bear - Страница 8

Mark Augustine walked with a cane down a long underground tunnel, following a muscular red-headed woman in her late thirties. Big steam pipes lined the tunnel on both sides and the air in the tunnel was warm. Conduits of fiber optic cables and wires were bundled and cradled in long steel trays slung from the concrete ceiling, and away from the pipes.

The woman wore a dark green silk suit with a red scarf and running shoes, gray with outdoor use. Augustine’s hard-soled Oxfords scuffed and tapped as he trailed several steps behind, sweating. The woman showed no consideration for his slower pace.

“Why am I here, Rachel?” he asked. “I’m tired. I’ve been traveling. There’s work to do.”

“Something’s developing, Mark. I’m sure you’ll love it,” Browning called back over her shoulder. “We’ve finally located a long-lost colleague.”

“Who?”

“Kaye Lang,” Browning replied.

Augustine grimaced. He sometimes pictured himself as a toothless old tiger in a government filled with vipers. He was perilously close to becoming a figurehead, or worse, a clown over a drop tank. His only remaining survival tactic was a passive appearance of being outpaced by young and vicious career bureaucrats attracted to Washington by the smell of incipient tyranny.

The cane helped. He had broken his leg in a fall in the shower last year. If they thought he was weak and stupid, that gave him an advantage.

The maximum depth of Washington’s soulless vacancy was the proud personal record of Rachel Browning. A specialist in law enforcement data management, married to a telecom executive in Connecticut whom she rarely saw, Browning had begun as Augustine’s assistant in EMAC—Emergency Action—seven years ago, had moved into foreign corporate interdiction at the National Security Agency and had finally jumped aisle again to head the intelligence and enforcement branch of EMAC. She had started the Special Reconnaissance Office—SRO—which specialized in tracking dissidents and subversives and infiltrating radical parent groups. SRO shared its satellites and other equipment with the National Reconnaissance Office.

Once upon a time, in a different lifetime, Browning had been very useful to him.

“Kaye Lang Rafelson is not someone you just lure and bust,” Augustine said. “Her daughter is not just another notch on the handle of our butterfly net. We have to be very careful with all of them.”

Browning rolled her eyes. “She’s not off limits according to any directive I’ve received. I certainly do not regard her as a sacred cow. It’s been seven years since she was on Oprah.”

“If you ever feel the need to learn political science, much less public relations, I know of some excellent undergraduate courses at City College,” Augustine said.

Browning smiled her patent leather smile once again, bulletproof, certainly proof against a toothless tiger.

They arrived at the elevator together. The door opened. A Marine with a holstered nine millimeter greeted them with hard gray eyes.

Two minutes later, they stood in a small private office. Four plasma displays like a Japanese screen rose on steel stands beyond the central desk. The walls were bare and beige, insulated with close-packed, sound-absorbing foam panels.

Augustine hated enclosed spaces. He had come to hate everything he had accomplished in the last eleven years. His entire life was an enclosed space.

Browning took the only seat and laid her hands over a keyboard and trackball. Her fingers danced over the keyboard, and she palmed the trackball, sucking on her teeth as she watched the monitor. “They’re living about a hundred miles south of here,” she murmured, focusing on her task.

“I know,” Augustine said. “Spotsylvania County.”

She looked up, startled, then cocked her head to one side. “How long have you known?”

“A year and a half,” Augustine said.

“Why not just take them? Soft heart, or soft brain?”

Augustine dismissed that with a blink revealing neither opinion nor passion. He felt his face tighten. Soon his cheeks would begin to hurt like hell, a residual effect from the blast in the basement of the White House, the bomb that had killed the president, nearly killed Augustine, and taken the eye of Christopher Dicken. “I don’t see anything.”

“The network is still assembling,” Browning said. “Takes a few minutes. Little Bird is talking to Deep Eye.”

“Lovely toys,” he commented.

“They were your idea.”

“I’ve just come back from Riverside, Rachel.”

“Oh. How was it?”

“Awful beyond belief.”

“No doubt.” Browning removed a Kleenex from her small black purse and delicately blew her nose, one nostril at a time. “You sound like someone who wants to be relieved of command.”

“You’ll be the first to know, I’m sure,” Augustine said.

Rachel pointed to the monitor, snapped her fingers, and like magic, a picture formed. “Deep Eye,” she said, and they looked down upon a small patch of Virginia countryside flocked with thick green trees and pierced by a winding, two-lane road. Deep Eye’s lens zoomed in to show the roof of a house, a driveway with a single small truck, a large backyard surrounded by tall oaks.

“And…here’s Little Bird,” Browning’s voice turned husky with an almost erotic approval.

The view switched to that of a drone swooping up beside the house like a dragonfly. It hovered near a small frame window, then adjusted exposure in the morning brightness to reveal the head and shoulders of a young girl, rubbing her face with a washcloth.

“Recognize her?” Browning asked.

“The last picture we have is from four years ago,” Augustine said.

“That must be from an inexcusable lack of trying.”

“You’re right,” Augustine admitted.

The girl left the bathroom and vanished from view. Little Bird rose to hover at an altitude of fifty feet and waited for instructions from the unseen pilot, probably in the back of a remoter truck a few miles from the house.

“I think that’s Stella Nova Rafelson,” Browning mused, tapping her lower lip with a long red fingernail.

“Congratulations. You’re a voyeur,” Augustine said.

“I prefer ‘paparazzo.’”

The view on the screen veered and dropped to take in a slender female figure stepping off the front porch and onto the scattered gravel walkway. She was carrying something small and square in one hand.

“Definitely our girl,” Browning said. “Tall for her age, isn’t she?”

Stella walked with rigid determination toward the gate in the wire fence. Little Eye dropped and magnified to a three-quarter view. The resolution was remarkable. The girl paused at the gate, swung it halfway open, then glanced over her shoulder with a frown and a flash of freckles.

Dark freckles, Augustine thought. She’s nervous.

“What is she up to?” Browning asked. “Looks like she’s going for a walk. And not to school, I’m thinking.”

Augustine watched the girl amble along the dirt path beside the old asphalt road, out in the country, as if taking a morning stroll.

“Things are moving kind of fast,” Browning said. “We don’t have anyone on site. I don’t want to lose the opportunity, so I’ve alerted a stringer.”

“You mean a bounty hunter. That’s not wise.”

Browning did not react.

“I do not want this, Rachel,” Augustine said. “It’s the wrong time for this kind of publicity, and certainly for these tactics.”

“It’s not your choice, Mark,” Browning said. “I’ve been told to bring her in, and her parents as well.”

“By whom?” Augustine knew that his authority had been sliding of late, perhaps drastically since Riverside. But he had never imagined that Riverside would lead to an even more severe crackdown.

“It’s a sort of test,” Browning said.

The secretary of Health and Human Services shared authority over EMAC with the president. Forces within EMAC wanted to change that and remove HHS from the loop entirely, consolidating their power. Augustine had tried the same thing himself, years ago, in a different job.

Browning took control from the remoter truck and sent Little Bird down the road, buzzing quietly a discreet distance behind Stella Nova Rafelson. “Don’t you think Kaye Lang should have kept her maiden name when she married?”

“They never married,” Augustine said.

“Well, well. The little bastard.”

“Fuck you, Rachel,” Augustine said.

Browning looked up. Her face hardened. “And fuck you, Mark, for making me do your job.”