Mozari Arrival Read online

  “It should have been fine!” Kurtz insisted.

  “And I should be banging my wife on a tropical beach right now, but should have and is are two totally different fucking things.” Hammond grabbed a suit off the floor and hurled it at the scientist, who just about managed to catch it without it knocking him over when it hit him in the face and chest. “OK, then, Kurtz—you want a second human test, put that on.”

  “What?” Kurtz was clearly terrified, but Daniel didn’t care. Instead, he stepped in front of the path that Dr. Gibson was trying to take to the door. He and Martino also looked like they doubted they’d get out of the room alive, and Daniel wasn’t sorry for it.

  “You heard me,” Hammond growled, “put the damn thing on, right now!”

  “I… No!”

  “No?”

  “No!”

  “You absolutely fucking sure?” Hammond growled. Carver cleared her throat, approaching Hammond carefully, but didn’t dare raise her hand or try to touch him. He looked to Daniel like a glowering grizzly bear on a hair trigger.

  Professor Kurtz stared at the suit, his eyes wide. “Yeah, I’m fucking sure!”

  “OK, then,” Hammond snapped, with a curt nod. “Then take it, right now, while you can, and fuck off back to whatever secret lab in Bumfuck you crawled out from with it, and do not fucking bring it back here for any of my people to try on until you absolutely fucking would and fucking have put it on first. Got that?”

  Kurtz looked pleadingly at General Carver, whose expression was tight with anger. “General—”

  “Do as Chief Hammond fucking says,” she snarled at him.

  Sixteen

  It hadn’t taken much effort on Chief Hammond’s part to secure leave for the members of the unit. After a brief memorial service for Althaus, the German’s body had been returned home to his family for burial, and there was a natural furlough in the unit’s training since the suits were clearly not going to be ready for them immediately. Plus, Daniel gathered that Hammond had some other upgrades to the base in mind.

  As they walked back into her office after leaving the service, Daniel asked Hope, “You OK?” Althaus had been one of her group, and Daniel saw in her eyes that the loss had hurt her more than she would admit in words.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think maybe if you could get off-base for a little while, and be with friends, it would... help. Seeing a different part of the country.”

  “I don’t have many friends in this country, remember?”

  The pain in her eyes stabbed at him, and he wasn’t going to let that slide. “You have one who’d like to see that you get some time away from this place. I’m going to go home and see my family. If it doesn’t make you miss yours more, I’d be happy for you to come along.”

  Hope nodded slowly. “Anywhere that’s not here. At least for one day.”

  Greenwich, CT.

  Daniel had been worried that Greenwich would have changed so much that he would barely recognize his childhood home, but as the Amtrak pulled into the station in Greenwich, he realized that hadn’t happened. Most things were just as he remembered.

  He glanced at Hope, who was as beautiful in her simple and modest civilian clothes as in her PLAAF service dress uniform. Daniel had worn his uniform for the journey, but she’d decided that a foreign military uniform might be too confusing for people. “Ready to meet the civilian US?”

  “I think you may be more nervous about my meeting your family than I am,” she chuckled.

  Rather than deny it, he said, “You’re not nervous?”

  “Of course, I am. But less than you are.”

  “Did they teach you how to read people’s emotions at wherever you trained?”

  “The Test Flight and Flying Training Center at Cangzhou Airfield, Hebei,” she said quietly.

  “Isn’t that some sort of secret?”

  “Not really. It would probably take your CIA, what? Five minutes on Google?”

  “Come on. Mom and Dad are right there.” He pointed out of the bus window.

  They grabbed their hold-alls from the overhead racks, got a suitcase each from the cargo space under the passenger compartment, and stepped back into Daniel’s childhood.

  The four most important people in Greenwich were waiting there for them: Daniel’s mom and dad, Cody Walker in his Greenwich PD uniform, and a bouncy, beaming Chloe waving glittering, shiny balloons. Daniel wasn’t surprised when his mom started crying happy tears the moment she saw him. His own eyes stung and he felt tears on his face, surprising the living hell out of him. One glance at Hope reassured him that she wasn’t judging him for it—she was beaming widely.

  Nathan hugged his son with a proud nod. “Welcome home, Dan.” Daniel was torn between whether to hug Cody or Chloe first, but they settled the question by both grabbing him at the same time. “Group hug, bro,” Cody said. “I mean, I owe you bigtime for what you did, and I can’t imagine...”

  “I’m glad I did, Cody. Real glad.” He turned as Hope stepped forward. “Mom, Dad, Cody, Chloe, this is Hope Ying. Captain Ying when she’s on duty. Hope, this is my mom, Maria; my dad, Nathan; my best friend, Cody—who got me into all this—and his daughter Chloe.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet all of you,” Hope said.

  The family walked towards the bus station parking lot, Nathan gallantly taking Hope’s suitcase and Cody taking Daniel’s. “Are you staying long?” Cody asked.

  “We have a four-day furlough,” Daniel said. “We go back on Monday.”

  Nathan’s Mercedes GL—one of the largest SUVs on the market—was waiting for them. Even with six people and two lots of luggage, it didn’t feel packed, and Nathan drove out, into Greenwich’s streets.

  There were a few more cops on the streets than Daniel remembered, but fewer ordinary people. A couple of stores and bars had closed, but the main difference Daniel noticed was both minor and more worrying: There were a number of people in uniforms that weren’t from any service he knew of. They looked like something from some foreign TV show.

  When they got back to the West estate, Cody and Daniel carried the luggage up to Daniel’s old room while Nathan, Maria, and Chloe clustered around Hope and took her through to the kitchen for refreshments. The pairing off had been on purpose. Daniel didn’t want to waste the chance to talk to Cody about something which he doubted would help maintain the happy atmosphere downstairs. “What was with all those the guys with guns in town?” he asked once they got out of ear-shot. “Not the cops or military, but the other uniforms I don’t recognize,” Daniel admitted.

  “Private security firms,” Cody glanced out the window with a frown. “They’re the biggest growth industry in town in the past year.”

  “What does the PD think about it? Apart from in terms of competition.”

  “Truth to tell, Wild, most of the police and sheriff’s departments in the country are pretty worried about them. I mean, sure there are one or two big private cop companies who can poach real cops away with better pay, but most of them...” He puffed out a breath. “Most of them are little clubs run by nuts who want to be the star of some kind of reality show, like Dog the Bounty Hunter or something.”

  Daniel had thought that’s what they looked like when he’d first seen them, though he’d hoped he’d be wrong. “If it was the big companies, it’d be kind of OK—they’re crooks, maybe, but they have professional rules and some good cops among them who can at least keep them clean-ish—but the wannabes and douches... They’re a whole different thing. Vigilantes out to fleece scared families. Three quarters of them would probably shit themselves if they met a threat, and the other quarter are just in it for the protection money they can con or extort.” Cody sighed wearily, then added, “But what do I know? I’m biased in favor of serving and protecting, and that doesn’t bring in scare-dollars.”

  “When did all this start?”

  “It really got going a couple of months ago. I’d have thought you’d have a bette
r idea of this stuff going down than I would, with all the military stuff.”

  Daniel grimaced, putting Hope’s bag on the bed of the guest room. “We don’t get that much news at the Farm—”

  “The Farm?”

  “Our nickname for the base I’m at. There’s the TV news, and internet, but we’re usually pretty busy.”

  “Being all you can be, huh?”

  “Well, in my case, technically being all you could have been,” Daniel ribbed him, smiling to make sure his friend knew it was a joke.

  Cody nodded, but still frowned. “I see it at work all the time,” he said. “Frightened people do angry things and stupid things, and that scares all the other scared people around them. It’s making the world a lot harder to live in. Or, for a lot of people, harder to live with.”

  “I bet the Mozzarellas love that,” Daniel sighed. He and Cody went through to his old room, and he opened his hold-all on the bed.

  “Whether they do or not, it’s certainly doing them a lot less harm than anyone expected. Quite the opposite, actually. There are enough denominations of them to go around.”

  Daniel recoiled. “More of them?”

  “If the FBI’s estimates are correct, there are probably a million people total with some kind of religious fixation on the Mozari. True, some of them are probably just sci-fi fans, and others probably stoners or just faking it to get laid, or maybe acting out against their parents or whatever—but not all of them. And even if they were all true believers, that would still only make about one person in every couple hundred, nationwide, and three fourths of them are just in local little cliques of maybe a dozen.”

  “Sounds more like a knitting circle,” Daniel said as he stowed his gear on appropriate shelves in the wardrobe. Some of it was Hope’s, just in case she spent the night in here. She had been unsure about that, and, not knowing how his parents would react, he hadn’t urged her towards any specific decision.

  “Pretty much,” Cody agreed. “But our old friends, the First Church... That alone makes up a quarter of the total. A quarter million Mozzarellas, nation-wide.”

  A wave of nausea washed over Daniel. “Why do so many gravitate to that bastard Kebbell’s group?”

  “Probably for the mix of slimy snake-oil charm, and opportunities for sex and violence. Kebbell and his posse will just say ‘Hey, we’re not responsible for individual people’s actions.’ And all the while, they’re stockpiling enough weapons and ammo to start a civil war.”

  “Haven’t the BPD done anything?”

  Cody snorted. “Remember the curfew cordon that night we got Chloe back? They’ve now evacuated that whole four-block area around the church.”

  Daniel shook his head, thinking back to how much territory that covered. Four blocks was almost a town within the city. He had finished unpacking and shoved the luggage into the bottom of the wardrobe. The he went back out onto the landing, nodding Cody towards the stairs. Rather than talking about that around Hope, he said as they began their descent, “So, how are you and Chloe doing?”

  “Pretty good, Wild. Chloe’s happy, Jill’s stayed out of contact... The only cloud on the horizon is the new nationalization.”

  “The what?”

  “The police have been nationalized so they can be transferred where needed.”

  “Like the Guard in the late 60s? When the Civil Rights movement was public enemy number one?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t heard anything about being transferred to another city, but... Let’s just say I’m keeping everything crossed that it stays that way. Though, at least if I was, I’d be able to take Chloe with me, to cop accommodations. But at the same time, if they need me somewhere else, it can only be because the ‘somewhere else’ is more dangerous, and I don’t want to take Chloe anywhere there’s more danger.” He sighed and glanced down to his watch. “It’s great to see you again, and I think you’ve got yourself a great gal there, too, so don’t mess it up. I’d love to stay home and shoot the breeze, but I’m on shift in forty minutes.”

  Daniel gave him another hug. “I hear you. Go on and get to work.”

  “I’ll see you tonight, Wild.”

  In the kitchen, Hope was getting to know Daniel’s mother. She found it interesting that Maria was also a foreign visitor, and she took an immediate liking to the woman. In some way, she reminded her of her Aunt Yue, who was similarly professional about being a good host, since she enjoyed having visitors to talk to and to liven the place up.

  “Where are you from?” Chloe asked as they sat around the dining table.

  “Originally, Shenzhen,” Hope said simply. Maria gave a startled little gasp and Nathan paled, looking away, while Chloe drooped her head and backed away nervously. “It’s all right,” Hope said to her. “All my memories of it are happy ones.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maria said. She looked at Nathan, and added, “We all are.”

  Hope nodded politely. “I was in Beijing when it happened.”

  “In the military?” Nathan asked.

  “In my Air Force. Before I was assigned to come here.”

  Maria looked surprised. “And you met Daniel then?”

  “We work together, and... I wanted someone to watch The Bachelor with,” she added, grinning and hoping that the comment would break the tension.

  Chloe laughed while Maria merely looked surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought it was his kind of show.”

  “On a military base, TV is limited. Anything gains some luster.”

  “I suppose it does.” Maria nodded, and then smiled. “And perhaps the audience made a difference.”

  In the lounge, Nathan cracked open two beers and passed one to Daniel as he sat down across from him. “You’re looking good, son. I hate to admit it, because of... well, you know, but in some ways, I guess the Army life is doing you some good.”

  “I definitely get more exercise. I feel better than I have in years, Dad.”

  “Glad to hear it. But you can’t be trying to tell me a young man as smart as you is happy being a... a grunt.”

  Daniel had suspected this moment was going to be coming just from the tone of his dad’s voice when they’d spoken briefly a few weeks earlier. “I’m not a grunt.”

  “Well, I suppose, yes, the military has all these specialties nowadays, but if you’re not in something like the Judge Advocate General Corps, then, frankly, son, you’re wasting your talents.”

  To be fair, Daniel thought, this was an attitude he’d expected to share. Things hadn’t turned out that way, though, and he was glad of it. “Maybe I have a wider range of talents than either of us thought.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you had a talent for following orders to shoot people.”

  Daniel bit down on a whole number of things he wanted to say. He knew that Nathan was dancing around comparing soldiers to the man who had killed Elizabeth when she—and Daniel, too—had just been a child, because it was exactly the same thing that he would have compared it to. Until he’d found out for himself how different it was. “No. what I’m doing is... It’s a little different.”

  “Different?” Nathan scoffed. “Orders are orders.”

  “Yeah, I do... other things. I can’t say more than that, Dad. Security, you know. But think about it for a moment, Dad. I’m in the same group as Hope, and she’s not a drafted GI; she’s a fighter pilot from the Chinese Air Force.”

  Nathan opened his mouth to say something, then closed it for a moment. “Come on into the study.” He stood up and led Daniel into his wood-paneled sanctum sanctorum, lined with books behind leaded glass panes. Nathan opened a desk drawer and handed Daniel a letter from it. “Maybe this will free you up from feeling obligations to the draft notice that Cody got. I called in a favor with a New York senator who owed me one from back in the day. He agreed to cash in some favors, and... There are some notarized forms you need to sign. When you do, you’ll be free.”

  Daniel stared at him. “Free?” he echoed. “Free from what? I could ha
ve had a discharge, but I chose to stay on of my own free will. I told you that. I am free.”

  Nathan looked back at him as if he was too young a child to understand. Daniel fixed his eyes with a glower. “When you’ve signed the forms, you’ll be given an honorable discharge. You served your country, job done, and can walk away. You never have to go back.”

  “Walk away? How can I walk away? I have responsibilities. Duties...”

  “To Cody and Chloe? Of course.” Nathan nodded. “You don’t need to worry about that. Three months ago, the government decided to protect certain occupations, exempting them from the draft. Being a police officer is one of those occupations; Cody is exempt from the draft now. And, with the forms, so are you.”

  Daniel was stunned into a momentary silence. He would have wanted that, a few weeks ago, and on an intellectual level, somehow, he knew that he should want that now, but knowing and feeling were different things. “Exempt? Wait, I can see how doctors or people like that can be more needed where they are than in the Army, but lawyers?”

  “Certain levels of the legal profession...”

  “Or certain amounts of money? You can’t just bribe—”

  “Bribe!?” Nathan’s features darkened. “How dare you, Dan!”

  “Look, I won’t deny it was hard to start with, but... I am a soldier now. That’s not just what I do, it’s who I am. I’m not walking away from who I am.”

  “If it’s about that nice girl of yours, there’s no reason the two of you can’t continue—”

  “It isn’t her.”

  “That’s a first. I mean, I can’t say I blame you, but—”

  Daniel slammed the beer bottle down and stood up. “Fuck this.”

  “What did you just say?”

  Daniel glared at him, not taking it back. “How about, I respectfully decline your gracious offer.”

  The door to the kitchen opened then, Maria coming through with a look of bafflement on her face that made Daniel wince. “What’s wrong?”