This was the place to which the desk clerk had provided directions to his targets. That’s what had brought him here, but the rest of the night, his first exposure to the reach and power of Langston Marsh stuck in his mind more.
“Something amiss,” in Marsh’s words, referred to a “ping” his quantum computer had come up with. The unseen machine was like a technological insomniac, forever scanning police frequencies, wire services, cellular telephone calls, e-mails, and a host of other sources for incidents that stood out for reasons that rendered them inexplicable. Crimes, mostly, perhaps indicative of Marsh’s Zarim targets behaving in desperate fashion. Emerging from their anonymity because pursuit was closing in, choice bled out of their lives.
Rathman couldn’t say if he entirely believed the man’s spiel about the aliens he was committed to exterminating, because he didn’t care. The man was giving him free license to do what he did best: inflict pain and kill, not necessarily in that order.
According to Marsh, his supercomputer had pinged a crime in a suburb of San Francisco, something the police were calling a home invasion. But the computer had also found that the dead couple’s son was missing from a hospital and a doctor there was dead as well.
Connections, Marsh had explained. His computer was an expert at making them.
The computer was expert at something else as well, that being the capability to process incoming information from over ten million security cameras scattered across the country. One of those ten million had provided the picture of Alex Chin climbing into a canary-yellow Volkswagen Beetle not far from the hospital he’d fled. The driver’s face was grainy, mostly obscured, and barely clear enough for Rathman to be certain it was a girl, likely the same girl the motel clerk had told him was with Alex Chin now.
By the time Rathman had reached San Francisco, the computer had found six more instances of the Volkswagen being recorded by security cameras. The last one came at that diner just off the PCH, where the waitress had directed him to the motel. Now that motel’s smelly, comic book–reading clerk now lay dead behind the counter. Police would think he’d slipped on the floor and broken his neck because that’s the way Rathman had made it look after the clerk had provided this address. His death was of no consequence at all, though hopefully the investigation wouldn’t make too much about the damage done to the back of his hand and the broken KNOCK WOOD statue Marsh had dumped in the trash before leaving.
There was no canary-yellow Beetle in the FedEx Office’s parking lot, but his target and the car’s owner could easily have stashed it out of sight somewhere nearby.
“All right,” he told the driver, as the big SUV started back down the street again, “pull into the lot and park in the far corner, facing the FedEx Office.”
52
CONFESSION
ALEX WAITED FOR SAM to join him before clicking on the first icon contained in the pictures file. The screen seemed to darken briefly before a grainy photograph took shape.
It was a baby picture, an infant wrapped in a blanket atop a taupe-colored couch. Alex recognized the couch from other pictures he’d seen of his parents’ first apartment after they came to America to pursue their dream.
This must have been his first baby picture, snapped as soon as An got him home to the apartment. The other icons offered more of the same, charting his early growth. Stereotypical shots, the kind every family stockpiles.
Only Alex had never seen them before. His parents had always told him all his baby pictures had been lost in the move from the apartment to the Millbrae home where he had grown up.
And just hours before had watched his parents die.
Alex felt himself choking up again, his insides tightening, his throat clogging. He felt Sam stroking his back, trying to comfort him, realized he was sobbing. Then cleared his throat, made himself refocus.
“This is why,” he said out loud.
“Why what?” Sam posed tentatively.
“No baby pictures, nothing of me until I was, like, four or five.” He turned from the screen to look at her, words forming with his thoughts. “Because they were evidence of what my mother had done.”
“What’d she do?”
“She saved my life. Rescued me from a fire,” he said, leaving things there.
“So what’s the problem?”
“Let’s find out,” Alex said, and clicked on his mother’s frozen image to pick up the story An Chin had left for him inside Meng Po.
*
There is little more I can tell you about Laboratory Z.
The media, of course, was filled with news of the strange explosion at the lab. As is customary, people talked of nothing but it for days and weeks and then it, like all else, became old news. There were all kinds of stories and rumors, investigative reports about it being some secret installation probing travel between dimensions, wormholes, teleportation, and all kinds of things nobody really believed were real. Stuff for crackpots and conspiracy theorists.