Dark Angel: Skin Game (9 page)

In his run-down rattrap of an apartment on the eighth floor of a condemned building, Bobby was glued to his tiny used television—which he'd liberated from a sector checkpoint— carrying coverage of the hostage situation at Terminal City. This shabby studio apartment with its tiny stove, dwarf

refrigerator, a coffee table that Bobby also ate on, and worn-out sofa was not going to be his home for much longer. Once he reached his goal, and finished his project, and could truly pass as human, things would change for the better.

And Bobby Kawasaki would finally have everything he wanted.

Rising, Bobby wandered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. He stared at himself—the white face, the features sort of pinched, the bone structure vaguely reptilian—in a manner reserved only for the vain and the self-loathing.

He knew very well he'd been an experiment—something involving splicing chameleon DNA into his human genetics—though the Manticore scientists (his abusive "parents") had reminded him over and over that he'd been a disappointment to them. Their goal, their project, had been for him to blend in with his surroundings on command; but as it turned out, this ability only manifested itself when his adrenaline spiked—something over which he had no control.

Fear, anger, anxiousness, any extreme emotion set him off; but any other time—zippo.

Oh, he sort of blended in anyway, in a more subtle manner; just not to the extremes his Manticore creators had intended for their projected military uses.

The scientists had tested him extensively. In a crowd of Asians, Bobby appeared somewhat Asian, while in a crowd of Caucasians, he took on the poly-Euro cast thought of as all-American; if he'd been sitting with African-Americans, they'd remember him as a light-skinned brother, albeit a quiet, unremarkable, definitely undistinctive one.

Of course, that had been too distinctive for Manticore— the point had been for him to blend in so well, he would virtually slip away, and if anyone remembered Bobby at all, that was seen as a failure.

Manticore was looking for an invisible man.

And sometimes Bobby was just that—that was the worst part. On occasion the blending effect happened at the most inopportune times, as well. He'd lost a couple of job interviews and more than a few first dates when he'd simply blended out of sight in his nervousness to please.

And once the blending began, once he had faded into the woodwork, he could not speak, did not dare call attention to himself, lest he expose himself as the freak he was.

That had been the case until the drug, anyway.

The drug—Tryptophan, to be exact—worked differently on his X3 metabolism than it did on his later X5 brothers and sisters. He knew that in them it controlled their seizures, made them more human. In Bobby the results were much more extreme.

Sure, it kept him from blending in, but it also kept him from living.

The pills made him feel like a hundred pound weight had settled on his chest. He felt drowsy, slow, and unable to connect with the world. They did allow him to hold down a job, though they had made him a different kind of invisible man: no one, not even at the hectic Jam Pony, seemed to notice either Bobby or his lethargy. His boss, Normal, dismissed Bobby's listlessness as typical behavior, commonplace conduct among his regular layabout employees.

"Bip bip bip, Bobby."

The words still echoed proudly in Bobby's head. When Normal yelled at him, he was just like everybody else-human.

The recent hostage crisis had exacerbated his already high anxiety level, however, and he'd had to double his Tryptophan dosage to keep from blending during the crisis. If he'd blended then, there was no telling how much damage it would have done. The ordinaries would have seen him as a transgenic—he would have been exposed, as Alec and Max had been—and any chance to keep up his human life would have been gone.

Even the transgenics might have reacted badly, would finally realize he was one of their own, and perhaps see his blending as a betrayal. Either way, both sides would have hated him.

And hatred was one kind of attention Bobby Kawasaki did not crave.

Now, though, Bobby struggled to fight off the dulling throb of the drug. Tomorrow he'd have to be at work, and Normal wouldn't expect any less from him. That meant by tomorrow he'd need to get back on his damn meds, so he'd have to pursue his project tonight, or else it would need to wait clear till next weekend. Though Thursday's shopping hadn't been discovered until yesterday, the effort of a midweek foray had weakened him considerably, and the double dose of Tryptophan on Friday had practically turned him into a zombie.

He needed to go shopping—he was so close! One, maybe two more trips, then the big one ...

... and Kelpy—the name he'd been called by the other transgenics at Manticore—

would be gone forever, and so would Bobby Kawasaki... gone, history, a ghost... as he evolved into the person he'd always wanted to be, the one person that would gain him access to the affections of the only woman who had ever meant anything to him... ...

Max Guevera.

Looking into the mirror again, Bobby—for now he was still Bobby, stuck with Bobby—realized that he was starting to blend into the bathroom wall behind him. The drug was almost gone now. He would soon be at full strength and then he'd go shopping for material.

After all, he had a human suit—a suit of flesh—to complete.

Even though he bore a German name, Otto Gottlieb strongly resembled the Hispanic portion of his lineage.

Otto's Jewish great-grandfather had smuggled his wife and two boys out of Nazi Germany just before the onset of the Second World War. The family had ended up in South America, where the two brothers, Otto and Fritz, had grown up safe from Hitler's clutches. Though many Nazis came to Argentina after the war, the Gottliebs were already firmly entrenched and the family furniture business had flourished.

Otto's grandfather had eventually married an Argentinian woman and they had a son, Samuel, who went to school in the United States, where he married an American woman and put down roots. Samuel and his wife, Eliza, lived the American dream.

Selling furniture to families in Bloomfield Heights, Michigan, the Gottlieb family included Samuel, his wife, and two children—a girl, Elizabeth, and Otto, named after his father's uncle.

Brought up with a deep love of justice and an even more deeply ingrained sense of patriotism, Otto joined the Army straight out of high school. Then, following his service stint, where he had nearly made a career of it, he went to the University of Michigan for his bachelor's degree, followed by earning a master's degree in Criminology. Not long after that, Otto had been recruited into the NSA and—after four years of dedicated service—found himself partnered with the enigma known as Ames White.

Not quite six feet tall, Otto liked to play basketball to stay in shape, but mostly he jogged, or really, ran—like he was right now. Sweat dripped onto the front of his gray T-shirt and his feet thudded on the concrete of the street as he ran alone in the cool evening silence. The shirt and his matching gray shorts were both emblazoned with the logo of the FBI; but being with NSA, Otto had many clothes and many IDs with the names of various agencies on them.

Working on mile seven of a ten-mile run, Otto huffed a little, but otherwise ran easily, arms and legs pumping in a natural rhythm. He loved this time of night. Darkness settled on

the city, a gentle blue softening the edges of what Seattle had become, post-Pulse; no one to bother him, the job wasn't pressing on him, the day's work behind him, and, most important, time to himself, to sort out whatever problems occupied him at the moment.

Tonight's problem had to do with his boss and partner— that lovely specimen of humanity known as Ames White.

Something was going on behind Otto's back—or anyway, White was up to something behind Otto's back—and the NSA agent hated that. He'd suspected White was pursuing a secret agenda, well before the crisis situation at Jam Pony; but, before, Otto had always been able to write off his suspicions about White to the man just being a little ... odd.

Otto knew plenty of government agents, and they were all—including himself, he realized—wired up wrong, in some way—even twisted in one fashion or another.

Scratch a cop, and find a guy who's looking for a little piece of personal power; scratch a government agent, and find the same sickness, writ larger.

For the most part, though, these quirks were harmless, outweighed by the sense of civic responsibility that attracted a man to government service. White, however, was a weird, self-absorbed, negative son of a bitch ... no question. The man seemed to have two saving graces: competence and patriotism. Only, Otto had started to doubt the latter attribute, wondering if White served some secret master....

Running like this, getting the poison out, usually made Otto dismiss such thoughts as absurd, even silly. But now— after the weird climax of the Jam Pony hostage crisis—

whatever suspicions Otto had about White were only magnified, and given weight.

His feet pounding the pavement, Otto let the movie of that night run in his head....

The Seattle detective in charge of the situation, Clemente, seemed to have things in hand until he tried to trade a truck

for hostages. Sometime during the exchange, shooting had erupted from somewhere.

Otto had seen Clemente order his snipers to pull back, and the snipers did visibly withdraw.

Though he couldn't prove it, Otto had a suspicion that one of the endless phone calls White made that day was to bring in the group of shooters that queered the exchange.

Otto didn't know why he felt that—it was just his gut— but over the years, he'd learned to trust his instincts. Then later, after dark, after White had used the botched exchange to gain control of the hostage crisis, Otto approached White just as his partner was slipping on a Kevlar vest handed to him by the female leader of some kind of tactical insertion team—a team unlike any Otto knew of in the NS A lexicon. The group—bizarrely bulked-up types—kept moving, and Otto fell into step with them.

"Sir, what is this?" Otto had asked. "Who are these people?"

White glared at him with typical impatience. "They're assigned from another agency."

"What agency? I don't understand..."

Stopping and turning to face Otto, his sneering features only inches away, White growled, "And let's keep it that way. You're not cleared for this op—so pull the men back and secure the perimeter."

Otto froze, his mind bubbling with protests that couldn't seem to find their way out through his mouth.

White's expression tightened further—a handsome man, Ames White became ugly when lines of anger grooved his face ... which was frequently. His voice rose: "Walk away. Do it now."

Not understanding, but unwilling to question a senior officer, Otto had done as he was told.

And it had been less than a half hour later—after the unknown agency's super-SWAT

team emerged from Jam Pony with the perps, loading them into a van and a commandeered

ambulance—that one of Clemente's uniformed cops came up to Otto near the perimeter. The man seemed on the verge of laughter, and Otto couldn't imagine what there was to laugh about in a hostage crisis.

"They need you inside," the uniform had said, the words burbling out, mixed in with chuckles.

How weird, how inappropriate, that seemed....

Otto started to call to the other agents, but the uniformed cop put a hand on his shoulder.

"You better go in alone, sir," the officer said, his amusement lessened, but still there.

Confused, Otto made his way inside the building. He walked slowly through the first floor, where some other uniformed cops were leading three of the hostages toward the door.

"Can you direct me to Agent White?" Otto asked.

One of the uniforms pointed toward the ceiling and walked out, laughing.

What the hell was this?

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Otto thought he heard what sounded like muffled voices—angry muffled voices. The building was supposed to be secure, but Otto slipped his pistol out of the holster anyway and pulled a pen-light from his jacket pocket. Checking carefully, he went through the door of the second floor—it appeared to have been a dressmaker's loft, long since abandoned, a few naked female mannequins holding court surrealistically among various detritus—and moved closer to the voices.

Coming around a corner, he found the TAC insertion team, in their skivvies, and a fully dressed Agent White—all secured to pillars with Jam Pony packaging tape... all screaming what seemed to be obscenities through the tape gags that covered their mouths, in particular Ames White.

Suddenly Otto knew what the cops were all laughing about, though he himself found the situation humorless.

He holstered his pistol, pocketed the flash, and rummaged in his pants pocket for his knife. "Sir, what happened?" he asked.

White's answer was thankfully muffled—and for a split second Otto considered turning around and walking out; but he knew it would mean his career. Biting his tongue, he cut them loose, White first, then the others.

The muscular, half-naked commando team left without so much as a thank you—their displeasure (with themselves?) palpable.

Standing there in his ripped suit, peeling pieces of tape off his jacket, his scowling face bloodied, White said, "Go home, Otto. I'll write up the report and let you see it in the morning."

"But... what happened here, sir?"

White closed his eyes, obviously fighting for control. One fist balled at bis side while the other grabbed a hank of his own hair. He stayed like that for a long moment. Otto realized his boss considered himself a cool customer; but Otto knew that White was in reality a hothead. Anger, frustration, desperation, and finally a kind of unearthly calm all crossed White's face before he opened his eyes again.

"Now is not the time, Otto," he said. "Go home and wait for me to call.... It might be tomorrow, it might be the next day. Maybe it'll be Christmas. But just go home—relax.