James Cameron and Charles Eglee own Dark Angel. My use is in no way meant to challenge their copyrights. This piece is not intended for any profit on the part of the writer, nor is it meant to detract from the commercial viability of the aforementioned (or any other) copyright. Any similarity to any events or persons, either real or fictional, is unintended.
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V – Kilroy Was Here"Sir," Set said evenly, saluting Logan as he walked into the small office. What had recently been a bullet-riddled, burned out husk of a room was once again a thriving workspace that was growing increasingly crammed with expensive, top of the line computer equipment.
"You don't need to salute," Logan said, just as he always did. He found it amusing that anyone, but especially Set, would choose to salute him. I'm so obviously not a soldier. "How many times do I need to tell you that?"
"It's the one order I choose to ignore, sir," Set replied.
"And don't call me 'sir,' either," Logan added.
"Yes, sir," Set answered. Logan could have sworn that he saw the shadow of a friendly, playful smile pass over the X5's face, but it was gone before his mind had even registered it was there.
"Suit yourself," Logan said with a sigh. "What do you have to say?"
"The raid was a success," Set reported simply.
"Casualties?" Logan asked immediately.
"We had two wounded, though not badly at all, sir," Set said. "They'll be ready for action again within a couple of days. We killed the two enemy guards." Logan simply nodded his head in understanding. He hated the thought that people under his command had killed their opposition, and he was kept up at night by the thought that these deaths resulted from his orders. But this is a war, he reminded himself. I may not like what I do, but I have to do it. If I don't take this responsibility, someone else will have to. And I know that someone would be Max. He chased that thought away and turned his full attention once more to the report.
"This is the attack on that island in the St. Lawrence River?" Logan asked, making certain he knew which assault was being referenced. His forces generally had at least three plans in the works at any given time, and though the St. Lawrence River strike was next up on their agenda, things had a way of changing. Logan always left those tactical decisions to his second, trusting Set to choose the proper time and place for a strike.
"Yes, sir," Set confirmed. "It was the supposed summer home of a commodities trader from Charlotte. Our suspicions were correct – it was a Familiar safe house."
"What did you find out?"
"The man who owned the home appears to have been in charge of a small cell responsible for influencing the futures market," Set informed his commander. "His files were rather extensive, and very few of them were encoded."
"You're kidding," Logan said, feeling excitement well up inside him.
"No, sir," Set answered. "A great deal of the information referred to economic markets. That information does not easily lend itself to encoding, as investment companies and commodities are already listed under abbreviations, and prices are given in constantly changing numbers that it would be unwise to change in the interest of security."
"Understood," Logan assured his second. It makes sense, actually. A simple enough code could probably have been developed if they wanted, but they would have run the risk of a faulty decryption leading to financial ruin, and the effort involved likely wasn't worth the minimal gain that would have been derived.
"The one curious thing, sir, is that there's also some fairly sensitive information that would usually have been encoded, but in this instance wasn't," Set added. "There was a large computer mainframe in the basement… I can only conclude that this site was a data entry and storage center, though there were no data entry terminals or a support staff that lends any credence to that conclusion. We captured several documents that I would classify as sensitive – names and covers of some of the Familiars is tops on the list."
"Names and covers?" Logan asked, hoping he wasn't openly drooling with his anticipation at this piece of intelligence.
"Complete with locations," Set added. "Unfortunately, there's no information on what role these people play in the overall scheme of things. For all we know, we just got our hands on a bunch of foot soldiers that aren't even good enough to be given a mate," Set grumbled. "Well, except for maybe three of them, anyway."
"What do you mean?" Logan asked, his heart pounding in his chest as he pondered the possibility of having some truly damaging information.
"Senator Hastings is one of the names," Set said with a joyfully sinister smile. "His information was set aside in a file with two other people."
"Who?" Logan asked, bracing himself to hear two more familiar names.
"A man named Bryan Roe, who's posing as an import-exporter, and a woman named Theresa Caine. She's a scientist of some sort."
"I don't recognize either of them," Logan muttered, swiveling the seat of his chair around and typing the names into his computer to begin a search. "Is that Kane – K-a-n-e?"
"No, C-a-i-n-e," Set corrected.
"This'll take awhile," Logan said once he turned back to his field lieutenant. "Let me see what you have." Set passed the papers over, and Logan perused them for several minutes before handing them back and picking up a phone. He switched on his voice modifier as the line rang, and smiled when Zack picked up at the other end.
"Who is this?" the X5 demanded.
"This is Kilroy," Logan said, knowing that the modifier would make it all but impossible for Zack to recognize his voice. With that accomplished, all he needed to do was speak uncharacteristically slowly, making certain the inflections and pronunciations in his voice were not like his usual speech pattern – he was willing to bet that even with his voice disguised, Zack would recognize him if he wasn't extremely careful. Logan knew enough about X5 capabilities to make certain he never made any stupid mistakes. "I need some information." He glanced at Set, and noticed with approval that the X5 was looking up locations on several atlas programs that were on one of the other computers in the room.
"And why should I give you any information?" Zack asked. This act is getting old real fast, Logan thought impatiently. Every time he called Zack, he went through the same routine. By now he could almost have written out the conversation before it occurred.
"We're fighting a common foe," Kilroy said, just as he always did. "As your Manticore superiors taught you, the enemy of your enemy is your friend." Logan smiled at that phrase, grateful that he'd been around that night before the attack on the Gillette facility. He was getting endless mileage from some of the clichés that Lydecker had made use of in his attempt to get Zack, and by extension, those who would doubtlessly follow him, to go along with the suicidal idea.
"How many times do I have to tell you that bringing up the colonel is not the best way to get me to give you what you want?" Zack asked. Despite his adversarial attitude, though, Logan was certain the X5 would come through with the information he needed.
"I'm on a schedule," Kilroy muttered. "Are you going to help or not?"
"What's in it for me?" Zack asked suspiciously.
"I'll give you all my recently captured data if you give me copies of what you have," Logan offered.
"No deal," Zack replied. "How about this – we trade information and you stop sending some of your people to recruit my soldiers away from me. You're really starting to piss me off with that routine, you know?"
"Fine," Kilroy grumbled, just as he always did. It was the part he played – seeming irritated by Zack's lack of total cooperation. In truth, Logan couldn't care less. He simply wanted what he wanted. Zack could complain about his people being recruited away from him until he was blue in the face, for all the good it would do him. The truth was that Logan never ordered his soldiers to partake in such activity – they did it on their own, as individuals from both groups seemed to mix from time to time. "In our last conversation you mentioned that you captured some genealogical charts. I'd like to know the family histories of a few people," Kilroy said, trying to get the conversation back on track.
"Who?"
"Bryan Roe, Theresa Caine, and Senator James Hastings," Logan told him.
"Theresa Caine?" Zack asked, surprising Logan by singling her out of the three names. He'd thought it far more likely that he would have expressed interest in Hastings.
"You know her?" Kilroy asked.
"Yes," Zack said immediately. "I'll get you a full copy of her genealogy in a few minutes, but do you want the highlights?"
"If you don't mind."
"She's White's cousin," Zack said evenly, practically bringing Logan's heart screeching to a halt. He knew his expression must have changed, because Set had stopped what he was doing and was now paying complete attention to Logan's conversation.
"Are you sure?" Kilroy asked.
"Sandeman was Caine's mother's brother," Zack explained. "That's all I have on her, though. How did you come across any information on her?"
"My people hit a safe house on an island in the St. Lawrence River. There was a ton of unencrypted data there."
"Anything you'd care to share?" Zack predictably asked.
"Maybe," Kilroy teased. "I'm looking at my mainframe, and I don't see that you've uploaded any of the information I asked for."
"Fine," Zack complained. "Give me a few minutes. We'll continue this later."
Logan disconnected the line without another word and smiled at Set. "Theresa Caine is Sandeman's niece."
"Which means she's probably as eager as White's ever been to distance herself from the heresy of some of her family members," the X5 commented. "I don't like the thought of that kind of a character trait being found in a scientist."
"For all we know she's an astronomer," Logan said, though he knew in his heart that that was fairly unlikely. The dubious look that Set directed at him let him know that his second shared his sentiments. "Then again, she's probably not," Logan admitted. "So did you find out anything else that could be of interest?"
"Well, there's no such place as Crab Island," Set answered, pointing at one of the pages and indicating that Crab Island was Caine's present location.
"There's got to be a Crab Island somewhere," Logan retorted, surprised that such a predictable name hadn't been used at some point. "Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me there were half a dozen Crab Islands around the world."
"Actually, there are seven that I found," Set responded evenly, producing a confused look from his commander. "The thing is, though, that there's no Crab Island that is away from civilization."
"Okay, you lost me," Logan admitted.
"See the addresses for Hastings and Roe?" Set inquired, pointing them out on the paper. "There are road addresses, city, state, and country. For Caine, all it says is Crab Island. The only conclusion I can come to is that Crab Island is otherwise uninhabited."
"I have a bad feeling about this," Logan muttered, combining Set's suspicions with the information that Caine was a Familiar scientist that was likely rabidly loyal and desperate to prove it.
"We already know that they've been secretly developing the snake pathogen for The Coming," Set said. "It would make sense to keep that isolated somewhere, in case it got out."
"Or in case they wanted to experiment on it, trying to change it enough to get past the vaccination Max's blood produced," Logan concluded.
"Or if they wanted to come up with something completely different, something even worse, hoping it would get past a transgenic's immune system."
"We have to tell Zack," Logan muttered, glancing toward his computer screen and seeing that the information he wanted had still not arrived. I'm not interrupting him right now, he decided, turning back to Set to kill the few more minutes he assumed he'd have to wait. "As soon as he gets me those files, I'll let him know what we suspect."
"Yes, sir," Set responded formally, as usual not questioning Logan's decision, despite the fact that Logan had purposely inflected his voice to let Set know that any input was welcome.
"What else do we have to go over?" Logan asked, deciding he and Set could dispense with the routine daily reports before turning their attention back to the more pressing concern of Theresa Caine.
"Two of our cells saw action last night," Set reported. "In Portland, two X6s from TRC-612 Delta Epsilon stopped a transgenic hate crime --"
"No," Logan interrupted, "don't refer to it as a hate crime."
"What would you prefer?" Set asked incredulously. "A small mob of humans tracked down a transgenic and started assaulting her. The only motivation seemed to be that they hated transgenics. That sounds like a hate crime to me."
"Just say they assaulted her," Logan muttered. "The last thing we want to do is start talking about anti-transgenic violence as hate crimes. Hate crimes don't exist in this country."
"Umm… yes they do," Set answered. "At least, in most states, anyway."
"People are free to hate whomever they wish," Logan replied, wondering why he was even bothering to engage in such an esoteric conversation with a young man who'd been trained to understand little more than combat. "I don't care what the statutes say, Set. This is America, and just because some old men trying to get re-elected thought hate crime legislation was a good way to seem more sensitive to their constituents doesn't mean I agree, and it doesn't mean that we're going to start pressing the issue, okay?
"If a man hits someone because he doesn't like something the guy said, it's assault. If he hits someone because he doesn't like what the guy is, it's still assault. It's a crime no matter how he felt, and punishment will result. We're pushing for equality for transgenics. How can you get that if you even consider trying to get hate crime legislation to cover your people down the road? By doing that, you'd be calling attention to the very differences you claim are so irrelevant. Your people can't have it both ways – you can't say you should have equal rights everywhere you go, and then expect special treatment if people do something to you that you don't like. You understand?"
"I think so," Set muttered, his eyes half-closed as he clearly tried to process all that Logan had said.
"Good," Logan said. "So what was the outcome of our intervention in the assault?"
"The transgenic woman escaped and was later located by our team," Set explained. "She agreed to join up. We met with similar success in St. Louis, where a pair of X7s were initially engaged by members of TRC-278 Lambda Omicron. Two of our people were injured, but in the end the X7s agreed to cease their resistance and join up."
Cease their resistance, Logan thought with amusement, wondering if he could have come up with a better euphemism for 'deciding to stop shooting.' He didn't think he could.
"Anything else?"
"The unit of X7s we have operating in Sault St. Marie has succeeded in locating another Familiar dummy corporation," Set reported. "They proceeded to hack into all of the existing sub-companies and were able to embezzle over eighty-five million dollars before uploading the Gehenna Virus, which subsequently crashed the raided computer systems."
"Good," Logan said, pleased not only with the information Set relayed, but also by the fact that Zack's upload had been completed. "Let's go through this information and get back to Zack, ASAP. We have to figure out what the Familiars are up to before it's too late."
The two men turned back to the computer screens distributed throughout the room, neither of them noticing the almost undetectable sound of a central air conditioning grate being put back in place. In the adjoining room, Syl's mind raced along as she contemplated all that she'd learned over the previous fifteen minutes. Logan is Kilroy, she thought in disbelief. I never would have guessed. And he's working with Zack, too… I never would have seen that coming. She stood and started to pace back and forth across the thick carpet, knowing that even Set would be unable to hear her carefully placed steps as she continued to toss the information around in her mind.
Max has told me how pissed she is at Zack for his little war, she remembered. She thinks it's been hindering her attempts at convincing the ordinaries that the transgenics don't pose a threat. And she's been pretty much against everything that Kilroy's done, too, for pretty much the same reasons… though she doesn't know that Logan is Kilroy. She rubbed her temples as she felt her stress level continue to rise. Should I tell Max? she wondered. Or should I just do something about this myself?
To be continued……………………………