Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [84]
“I told you, I went there and talked to them, remember? Your dad gave me your stage name. Your mom acted like she wanted to burn my face with a road flare.”
“That’s them.” He waved one hand carelessly, then froze it in midair. His body language and his tone changed abruptly, to something sober and tense. “You spoke to them?”
“I told you I—”
“You went to visit them? At their house?”
“Yes,” I told him, not sure where he was headed with this line of interrogation, but sensing that I wouldn’t like the destination even a little bit. “But I told you that before.”
“I wasn’t thinking. We …” He dropped the glass and it stayed upright, but sloshed. “We have to go back there. What if you led the agents right to them?”
I held up my hands in a gesture that wouldn’t have stopped an aggressive poodle, much less a frantic, tipsy drag queen. “Don’t, Adrian. Don’t go there, not like this. Your parents aren’t in hiding, are they? I was inside their house, yes,” I confessed, and then I grasped at straws. “And it looked to me like they’d been there for years. The government doesn’t want your parents. It could’ve had them at any time—”
“Okay. Okay, yes. You’re right,” he said, and it was pitifully apparent that he was leaning on my words, trying to calm himself down. Hey, I know it when I see it. “You’re right, they’ve been there since before I was born. Nobody wants anything from them. Everybody knows they don’t know anything … except, my father gave you my stage name …”
“Well, he sort of scribbled it—”
“He told you where to find me. If he told you, he could’ve told anybody!”
“Goddammit, Adrian, settle down. He didn’t tell just anybody, he told me—and I was doing a very convincing cop impression, I’ll have you know.”
He glowered at me and then he growled, “You mean, you showed up in an official-looking car, in a suit?”
Oh. I got it. “Well, it wasn’t … it wasn’t a black suit, and it wasn’t a black car. And I had a badge …” I looked back down at Peter Desarme’s clothes on Adrian’s back, and his badge on my kitchen counter, and I figured he, too, would’ve likely had an official-looking car to complete the package.
“You don’t understand. My parents, they … They aren’t very trusting of authority, but they fear it and they’ll cave to it, if it comes on hard enough. Please, for the love of God, tell me you did not lead anybody to my parents.”
“I couldn’t have,” I hoped, and I prayed. “Listen, I was not being followed. I’m smarter than that, and more careful than that. If I weren’t, I never would’ve survived this long.”
He was tapping his foot and tapping his wrist on the edge of the counter, trying to come to some kind of decision. “You would’ve noticed someone tailing you in a car.”
“That’s what I’m telling you, yes.”
“But what if you were being followed some other way? Something less obvious?”
“Like what?” I wanted to know, but a word bubbled to the surface of my attention, and I didn’t like it. “Like with some kind of … I don’t know. Surveillance system.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” he mused, poking at the wallet. “Something like a satellite.”
“A satellite?” My blood went colder than my drink. “That’s not possible.”
But Adrian didn’t say anything to help slow the ramp-up of my paranoid frenzy. “The technology wasn’t really live yet when I was still in the service, but you could see it coming. Satellites were the next thing that would save us—we’d be watching our enemies from space, in high definition.”
“But … but can they do that now?” I demanded. “That’s something that happens on TV, and in movies once in a while. But in real life? Bullshit. I call bullshit.”
“Call it what you want. The gear these guys were wearing—it was advanced stuff. Those earpieces.” He made a fiddly motion, as if he were holding one up. “Those microphones. A quarter the size of what we were using a decade ago.”
The only satellites I knew about that didn’t carry TV signals fed straight to the Internet, like Google Earth … and that was just a snapshot, right? Satellites—which is to say, powerful cameras out in orbit—only give you an image. They don