I looked it up on my phone. “Great is truth,” I read, “and strongest of all.”
Dion shrugged. “I suppose I can agree with that. Even if Mom won’t accept what the truth really is . . .”
I tapped my finger on the table. I felt as if I was close to something. An answer? Or maybe just the right questions to be asking? “Your brother had a data key,” I said, “which would unlock the information stored in his body. Would he have given it to your mother, do you think?”
Ivy watched Dion carefully to see if he reacted to mention of the key. He didn’t have any reaction I could see, and Ivy shook her head. If he was surprised we knew about the key, he was hiding it very well.
“A data key?” Dion asked. “Like what?”
“A thumb drive or something similar.”
“I doubt he’d give anything like that to Mom,” Dion said as our food arrived. “She hates technology and everything to do with it, particularly if she thinks it came from I3. If he’d handed her something like that, she’d have just destroyed it.”
“She gave me quite the cold reception.”
“Well, what did you expect? You’re employed by the company that turned her son away from God.” Dion shook his head. “Mom’s a good person—solid, salt-of-the-earth, Old World stock. But she doesn’t trust technology. To her, work is something you do with your hands. Not this idle staring at computer screens.” He looked away. “I think Panos did what he did to prove something to her, you know?”
“Turning people into mass storage devices?” I asked.
Dion blushed. “That’s just the setup, the work he had to do in order to do the work he wanted.”
“Which was?”
“I . . .”
“Yeah,” Ivy said. “He knows something here. Man, this kid is not good at lying. Take a dominant position, Steve. Push him.”
“Might as well tell me,” I said. “Someone needs to know, Dion. You don’t know that you can trust me, but you have to tell someone. What was your brother trying to do?”
“Disease,” Dion said, looking at his burrito. “He wanted to cure it.”
“Which one?”
“All of it.”
“Lofty goal.”
“Yeah, Panos admitted as much to me. The actual curing wasn’t his job; he saw the delivery method as his part.”
“Delivery method?” I asked, frowning. “Of the disease.”
“No. Of the cure.”
“Ahhh . . .” Tobias said, nodding as he sipped his coffee.
“Think about it,” Dion said, gesturing to the sides, animated. “Infectious disease is pretty awesome. Imagine if we could design a fast-spreading virus which, in turn, immunized people from another disease? You catch the common cold, and suddenly you can never get smallpox, AIDS, polio . . . Why spend billions immunizing, trying to reach people? Nature itself could do all the work for us, if we cracked the method.”
“That sounds . . . incredible,” I said.
“Incredibly terrifying,” J.C. said, pointing at the kid with his knife. “Sounds a little like using a smarkwat to fight a viqxuixs.”
“A what?” Ivy asked, sighing.
“Classified,” J.C. said. “Smet, this steak is good.” He dug back into the food.
“Yeah, well,” Dion said. “I was going to help him, you know? Go to school, eventually start a new biotech company with him. I guess that dream is dead too.” He stabbed at his food. “But you know, each day he’d come home and Mom would ask, ‘Did you do any good today?’ And he’d smile. He knew he was doing something important, even if she couldn’t see it.”
“I suspect,” I said, “that your mother was prouder of him than she let on.”
“Yeah, probably. She’s not as bad as she seems sometimes. When we were younger, she worked long hours in menial jobs, supporting us after Dad died. I shouldn’t complain. It’s just . . . you know, she thinks she knows everything.”
“Unlike your average teenager,” Audrey said, smiling toward Dion.
I nodded, toying with my food, watching Dion. “Did he give you the key, Dion?” I asked him directly.
The kid shook his head.
“He doesn’t have it,” Ivy said. “He’s too bad a liar to hide this from us, in my professional estimation.”
“What you should be doing,” Dion said, digging back into his burrito, “is looking for some crazy device or something.”
“Device?”
“Sure,” Dion said. “He’d have built something to hide it, you know? All that maker stuff, you know? He was always gluing LED lights to things and making his own name badges and things. I’ll bet he hid it like that. You pick up a potato, and it knocks over a penny, and a hundred geese fly into the air, and the key drops on your head. Something like that.”
I looked at my aspects. They seemed skeptical, but maybe there was something to this. Not a device like Dion described, but a process. What if Panos had set up some sort of failsafe that would reveal the truth if he died—but it hadn’t been tripped for some reason.
I forced myself to eat a bit of omelet, just to be able to tell Wilson I’d done so when he inevitably asked. Unfortunately, my phone still hadn’t beeped by the time we finished. I stalled as best I could, but eventually felt it would look suspicious to Zen if we stayed any longer.
I led the way back out to the SUV, and held open the side door for my aspects before rounding to the driver’s seat. I’d just settled in, planning my next move, when I felt the cold metal of a gun barrel press against the back of my neck.
18
Dion climbed into the passenger seat, oblivious. He looked at me, then froze, going all white. I glanced at the rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of Zen squatting behind my seat, gun pressed against my head.
Damn. So she hadn’t been as willing to wait as I’d hoped. My phone hung in my pocket like a dead weight. What was taking Wilson so long?
“Join me in the back, if you would please, Mister Leeds,” Zen said softly. “Young Maheras, remain in place. I assume that I needn’t warn you how willing I am to resort to violence?”
Sweating, I noticed J.C. in the rear-view mirror, his face red. He’d been sitting in the seat that Zen now squatted before, but hadn’t seen her until now. Twice she’d gotten the drop on us, and J.C. hadn’t been able to do a thing. Her skill at this was far better than my own.