Deadly Genesis (Boomers Book 2) (20 page)

“One, you listen to this entire meeting and join the discussion. Two, you don’t take off the minute someone’s back is turned because your mind works so much faster than the rest of ours. You include us in the decision making…”

“Or what?” Rory’s eyes blazed. “You’ll knock me out again?”

“Don’t tempt us.” Garrett replied drolly, but Simon hushed him with a look.

“We’ve got a huge problem, Rory. But you don’t play like this is a team, you just decide you know the answer and maybe you’re right. Maybe you do. But if you don’t include everyone else, you’re nothing but a loose cannon and a threat. It’s why Michael made the choice he did, and I’m not saying he was right, but neither are you. So, are you gonna be a team player or sit this one out on a bench?”

He voted for the former, because they would need all their skills. She glared down at the table, her mind whirling—the tornado of thoughts so swift it made him dizzy. He actually averted a mental eye to avoid the sickening sensation of collision. He truly couldn’t fathom how she processed data at that speed.

“Fine. I’ll listen. To everything, and I won’t take off without informing you.” Her concession earned her freedom, and he leaned back in the chair with a sigh. The strain of holding Amanda together, reconstructing her memories and searching for the missing Boomers had taken its toll on him. She didn’t leap out of the chair, but her hands fisted and she sat forward. “Where do we start?”

Amanda walked over to his chair and slid onto his lap as if she belonged there, and he rested a hand on her thigh. Drake picked up a digital tablet and placed it on the table in front of Rory. To her credit, she didn’t turn it on, she waited.

It was a start.

“We have a lot of data, a lot of pieces. All of us do. It took a while to knock that sedative out of your system, so we had time to compare notes. But there are holes—motivations we can’t explain. Garrett, Simon and Drake compiled all of it with input from Ilsa and me.” Swallowing back her very real grief for the betrayal of friends, Amanda tapped the table. “We need you to look at the pieces. I know you can figure this out. We can find them if we all work together.”

“If they’re smart, they put a bullet in Michael’s head or he’ll kill them himself.” Garrett’s observation sent another wave of tension across Rory’s expression. She glanced over at him and stared.

“Let’s hope they’re really stupid.” She picked up the tablet and flicked it on. Simon half-expected her to stand up and walk out, but she didn’t. She kept her word and stayed right where she was.

“You need to eat.” Amanda ran her fingers over the back of his head. “You look exhausted.”

“I am exhausted, but we don’t have time for rest and we bounce back quickly.” He rubbed her leg. The others puttered in the kitchen, and Ilsa left to check on her patients with Garrett in attendance. Drake walked over and took a chair and waited along with him and Amanda. They all waited for Rory to put the puzzle pieces together.

Rory capped the emotional well spewing inside of her gut. Acid burned her throat and her heart actually hurt. She wasn’t sure what she was more upset about—that Michael had drugged her or that he got himself caught. No way had he gone easily. The first report detailed Fizz’ involvement and doubts about Josh. She wanted to reject both possibilities immediately, but the proof in Amanda’s memory about Fizz seemed incontrovertible.
But… Josh?

That offered a fresh wave of pain to choke on. She finger-swiped through the pages of data. The experiments, the torture, the locations where Amanda went during her captivity, the information on the data farms she destroyed, and more. They’d taken their research further, and they’d included full dossiers on Josh, Curtis, and Fizz.

Fizz.

She couldn’t imagine him turning traitor and betraying them all. Of course, she couldn’t imagine Fizz shutting down a tunnel, killing all the electronics inside of it, and damn near blowing up a bus full of people before he did that either. The action precipitated his exodus from the team all together.

R.E.X. labs and their experimental roster, the assignment of the scientists, the new warehouse location.

The black-dressed soldiers. She enlarged one of the images and studied the emblem on their collar. She didn’t recognize it, but it resembled the Egyptian glyph for eternity.

Amanda’s disappearance had involved a coordinated, deliberate assault. “He asked about me.” She glanced up and focused on the blue-haired woman across the table. Being her best friend, she would guess she knew Amanda better than anyone else in the room—even Ilsa her roommate.

“Yeah, but I thought it was just Josh being Josh. He’s always had a thing for you.” She looked like she belonged in Simon’s lap, right and comfortable. Rory was happy for them. The casual intimacy they shared seemed so natural. She and Michael—they didn’t. She put a pin in that thought and rubbed her face.

Josh being Josh.

He always had a thing for you.

Josh became Fizz. Fizz had a plan.

He made the implants work. It’s why the chips Ilsa designed could be repurposed for human implantation. Fizz was a technopath.

They had a plan.

They wanted a world free of war.

Data farms.

What was in the data farms?

She tabbed back through the screens.
Corporations. Software companies. Social media cloud servers.
The list of clients was huge. She ran her finger down the list, reading every name.

Twice she passed it and twice she had to force her mind back to it.

Infinity Corporation.

Her parents company also maintained information stores in the destroyed data farms—along with a hundred other companies. The randomness of the attacks and the types of data didn’t even make the news, so what was up with that?

Reprogramming Amanda to work for them.

Changing the world.

Taking Ronan.

Josh, friend or foe?

Fizz, former friend and current foe.

Why take the Boomers?

Josh.

Michael.

He’s always had a thing for you.

“You’re not being reasonable, Rory. They took you. They held you. And now you’re just in bed with the guy and kissing his ass?” Josh gaped at her as though she’d grown three heads.

“You don’t have to like it, Josh. But I care about him.”

“He thinks he’s from the future. They all do. They’re nut jobs.” He banged his fist against the table. Curtis winced, but didn’t get involved in the argument. In fact, he avoided her gaze altogether.

“I believe him. You don’t have to, but I’m not going to abandon them either.” It wasn’t the first time they had this argument since the day on the pier when Josh tried to rescue her and she’d betrayed him to Simon.

She betrayed him.

Rory’s eyes closed. He might not have been on board with what happened to Amanda—she didn’t see that as a possibility—but her betrayal? Turning against him when they were already two members down and siding with those crazy strangers from the future? Rory embedded into their lives, running missions and dividing her time between the Boomers and Infinity. The constant tug of war between duty and desire.

Yeah, that could have pushed him to make a bad choice.

The turning of an individual was always a possibility. No one predictor could say whether a child would grow up sane and sound or bat crap crazy and criminal. Even the best person could go off the rails for the right reason. Josh didn’t believe the Boomers. He’d distanced himself more and more from the situation.

Around her, the others talked quietly. Food was served. Drake slid a cup of coffee in front of her and she picked it up, flipping back through Amanda’s report about what had happened to her. They sent her out specifically to destroy the data farms.

Something in the data farms—

“Simon?”

The telepath looked over at her. “Yes?”

“Why were all of you so certain that Hans Geiger was my father?” Activity in the room stilled at the question.

After a long pause, Simon pushed his bowl aside and stared at her steadily. “The name Aurora Graystone was linked to Hans Geiger according to the history modules in the chips. We weren’t certain of a birthdate or place, but we knew his activity increased during the late twentieth and early part of the twenty-first century. We believed it to be tied to the fact that he had a child.”

That was a leap, even for her. She shook her head slowly. “But that’s not all of it.” She glanced from Simon to Drake to Garrett and back. “What part aren’t you telling me?”

Ilsa slid her phone across the table and Rory glanced down at a grainy black and white photo on the screen. It showed several officers in Nazi uniforms. They posed, stiff-faced and solemn for the camera.

“The man on the right in the back row is Hans Geiger.” The scientist said softly. The three men at the table seemed frozen in a cracked tableau. She studied the man in the photo, blowing it up only pixelated it further. He looked familiar, especially around the eyes.

“I don’t know this man.” She didn’t recognize any of them. Only their uniform—a dull ache throbbed behind her right eye. Her gut said he was the key. He was the key to all of it.

“Okay.” She put the phone down and stood. Pacing from one side of the kitchen to the other, she rubbed her hands against her face. “Start at the top. Tell me everything you know, each of you. Every detail you can remember.”

“It’s all there,” Garrett argued.

“No. Something’s missing. Something that links Geiger to Fizz to Josh, to this situation, to you. You’ve all kept low profiles, but—” Her mind clicked. They kept low profiles, but they lived in a time of modern surveillance, smartphone photographs, social media. “Simon you searched for Amanda that way. What other photos did you find?”

The telepath frowned. “Different locations. The Wall Street sit in, the server farm explosions, a couple of parades—”

“Who else was in the photos? Do you have those?”

He grimaced. “I destroyed the file I made.”

Garrett swung a look at him and even Amanda looked startled. “Why?”

The blood drained from Simon’s face. “Because in one you were following Michael and it looked damaging…” The rest of his words faded. Amanda followed Michael.
Data farms. Information. Nazis.

“Bait and switch. Your chips didn’t work, you rely on public information stores, you don’t have working images of Geiger, but you know what he looks like. While you’re hunting him, you tripped something. He retaliates; he looks for you. Plans are implemented. If you think someone’s hunting you, you make contingency plans. You build a force. You take out the hunter before they can take you out.” She played out scenario after scenario.

Public information.

“We need a computer.”

No one moved or responded. Rory blinked slowly, bringing them all back into focus.

“Explain, just sum it up.” Simon leaned forward. “You figured something out.”

“I don’t know if I figured it out or not, but two similarities make a coincidence. Six or more and that’s a conspiracy. You’ve been in the past, what? Forty years? You’ve been active, working on your agenda, but you’re looking for a man who was a Nazi. Arguably someone extremely paranoid and very controlled if he’s managed to be elusive for–what? Seventy some odd years since that war ended? Michael said he was an Immortal, which means he has time and patience.” She paused a beat. “So wouldn’t it make sense, in a high tech era, that he has sniffer programs keeping watch on keyword searches? The U.S. government does, it’s called Echelon. Assume Geiger has something similar, and he likely knows someone is after him. If you’re paranoid and smart…”

“You get proactive. You take out your hunters. Son of a bitch.” Garrett pushed away from the table. “They bagged your people to lure us out the same way we planned to bag you to lure him out.”

“Maybe.” But Rory was already way ahead of them. Whatever Geiger hunted, it was larger than five men hunting him. If they could figure out what he was searching for, they might have answers. “But none of this tells us where Michael and Rex are.”

Because she was aiming her brain at the problem directly—
fuck.
“Russia.”

“What about it?”

“Josh and Curtis supposedly went to Russia to find Ronan, but they said he was gone before they got there. We have no reason to believe that’s true.” Rory’s gaze snapped to Simon’s face. He nodded slowly.

“We start with Russia. Get me some quiet spot, I’m going to do a long distance scan. Drake get some equipment together. Doctor Blaine, I need you to get a medbay ready. Amanda, let Ilsa check you out before we take you in the field. Rory, Garrett—pull whatever computer searches you need together. We find Ronan…”

“We loosen one card in the stack and we find another clue.” Rory’s heart hammered.
You better be okay, Michael. You have to be.

Twenty-four hours after their dinner meeting on Rock Isle, the Boomers, along with Amanda and Rory, were ready to breach a vodka factory in a small, provincial town called Kashin. Located two hundred and twelve kilometers north of Moscow, everything about the area harkened back to a more decadent age in Russia’s history. If the communists remade anything in the town, it had been undone in the years since communism fell. The frosty temperatures left their breath puffing in the air. Like the other Boomers, Rory and Amanda were dressed in unrelieved black.

Silent for nearly the entire journey, Rory stared at the factory expressionlessly. If they found Ronan inside, they would be reunited with their teammate and reveal treachery on the part of two others. A bittersweet trade to be certain. The plan called for the Boomers to take the most direct attack—they would deal with the guards and the security, Rory and Amanda would use the distraction to penetrate the perimeter and sweep the building for Ronan.

Simon didn’t believe Michael or Rex were present. “We do this by the numbers,” he glanced at Amanda. She wasn’t the one he was concerned about. Rory seemed to be following the plan so far, but that could change in the thick of battle.