15. Quentin
T hough he took some convincing, Frank finally agreed to allow us to uncuff Louise hoping when she surfaced from her last round of night-night juice , she might be willing to hear some reason—especially regarding the contents of the hard-drive she had with her at the Diamond Center in conjunction with our own findings through the Saints unsanctioned ‘research’ over the last year.
When Louise regained consciousness, I was surprised by how docile she appeared after her showing at the last safehouse.
I had only barely caught her that fateful evening in the alleyway—and evidently had been too slow to catch her making the call to her ex-partner from her field agent days on that working girl’s burner phone.
She hadn’t used lethal force on Seb, but it was also clear from the ligature marks on his neck that she could have easily killed him if she had been so inclined.
Silently she stuffs down the pan bread and potato curry Seb has given her—her wrists bare and ringed raw with cuffs of skin that gently ooze blood.
The absurd urge to wrap her wounds in clean gauze and gently lay a kiss over the snowy white bandages hits me like a wave upon the rocks—crashing into me with such intensity—before receding just as quickly as it came.
“We propose an exchange,” Frank explains calmly, leaning forward to place a steaming mug of cardamom coffee and two cigarettes along with a plastic lighter before her breakfast plate—on the stretch of pressure board laid over two milk crates that acts as a coffee table.
“Oh yeah? What are we exchanging? Addresses for postcards? Are we gonna be pen pals?” Louise gasps hyperbolically, clasping her hands—a fork still clutched in one fist—beneath her chin, batting her eyes mockingly.
“Fuck, you’re annoying when you’re awake,” Frank groans under his breath, but none of us Saints miss the grin stuck to his lips.
The Francis doth protest too much.
“When we… picked you up from the Diamond Center,” Caz begins, choosing his words diplomatically—doing his best not to wither under Louise’s smoldering glare. “You had a hard drive on you.”
Louise goes rigid, all humor gone from her pale, lovely face.
“Obviously, it wasn’t difficult to get into,” Caz continues coolly, flexing a little of his skill in an obvious bid to impress her.
“Yeah, the idea wasn’t to let it get into the wrong hands, but…” She shrugs tersely, thumbing her nose at Caz. “Obviously I fucked that up, too.”
“Well, I hate to tell you this and add insult to injury—but the intel you had wasn’t anything we didn’t already know,” he laughs nervously, scrubbing a tattooed hand over his head of peroxide blond stubble–knuckles full of different color space invader sprites disappearing from view as he cups his hand over the nape of his own neck.
There’s a loud clanging rattle as Louise drops her fork against her empty plate—her terracotta eyes burning with a mix of surprise and contempt.
“So, you really fucking kidnapped me for no goddamn reason at all—is what you’re saying?” she snarls—low, dripping with the fuel of rage—just waiting to be set ablaze.
“Not quite,” I interrupt, all eyes in the room turning to me as I re-cross my legs—a cup of steaming mint tea finding a home balancing on my knee once more. “As we mentioned before, you have a use far beyond just being a conduit for information.”
Frank gives me a warning look, but we’ve already decided. The plan was to get to the bottom of the Zeitnot virus, and while the path appears to be diverging from our original course—our goal remains the same, and so we must press on.
“From your hard drives, we were able to see that you’d been looking into Covartis—the rival drug company of Bronson her perfect pink nipples hard against the thin fabric of the white camisole as she lights the cigarette—her lips pursed around the filter in a way that makes me re-cross my legs yet again—my cock threatening to get more than just half hard as I watch a thin ribbon of pale blue smoke dissipate into the air between us.
“Well, your parents weren’t actually employed by Bronson they weren’t actually murdered—they were abducted by aliens!” she crows before dissolving into semi-hysterical laughter.
Caz, a die-hard UFO enthusiast, winds up to defend the idea that intelligent life exists beyond us in this universe; but I cut in before he can aid in derailing this necessary conversation.
“They were working for the department of Reproduction,” I answer flatly.
That takes the smile off her face.
Louise’s entire body rocks forward until she’s barely seated on the edge of the couch. Her whole body turns toward me, elbows on her knees,her cigarette—pinched between her first and middle finger—forgotten as the ash grows longer.
“Bullshit.” Louise seems to barely have enough breath to make the sound—her chest rapidly expanding and contracting with panicked breaths.
I shake my head solemnly.
“Believe me, or don’t. They were working for Jim Roach when word of the nature of their research made it back to the Windmill.”
My eyes flit down to her hands as her cigarette burns closer and closer to the golden line of filter; the nearly two inches of ash falls to the floor in slow, lazy spirals like moths in a column of streetlight.
“From what we can tell, they were murdered for their findings—their work.” I reach forward and pinch the still burning butt from her fingers, placing it between my own lips before taking a drag—my lips pressing to the place hers had been a moment ago; an indirect kiss.
“Then they put Roach out to pasture and installed Martin Penny in his place—the brother of the late Doctor Landon Penny.”
I watch as Louise Penny’s iron countenance—which she has so fearlessly held up since the moment we took her captive—crumbles,her face twisting with the ugly outpour of tears.
“Why?” she wails.
“What the hell could have been worth—?” She chokes on her own gasping sobs, covering her weeping face with her shaking hands.
“You felt the suppressant melters firsthand,” Frank reminds her, muscular arms barred across his chest in a black t-shirt, his raven hair a mess.
“I’ve seen worse than that in the field.
It doesn’t merit splattering their brains across our fucking dining room table.
” Louise shoots to her feet, eyes bright and full of the flames of fury—Lucifer with her resplendent halo of righteous anger—her skin glowing as if lit from within with the beacons of purest hatred.
“It’s not just the suppressant melters,” Sébastien’s soft, musical voice cuts in.
She whirls on him—the morning star—bright and brimming with violence.
“I’ve had limited access to samples… but based on my tests and what we found from Cazzy’s digital forensics work, your parents are the point of origin for the Zeitnot virus—and not recently, either.
As far as we can tell, the virus has been around since the early 90’s—even if there haven’t been any public cases until the past two years. ”
Louise’s knees begin to buckle—her whole body gently swaying as she blinks more tears from her eyes, her lips distorting into a wobbly line—as she struggles to make her mouth move.
“That’s not possible,” she bleats hopelessly.
“It’s very possible. We can show you the proof,” Sébastien counters flatly.
“Don’t believe me—you should ask your pal Susan Lowry,” Frank growls threateningly—the last straw before Louise collapses back into the couch, all the fight gone out of her.
“And why the fuck should I believe any of you?” she spits venomously, tears streaming down her face.
“Why not fucking come find me on one of my runs in the cemetery—or on a park bench behind a fucking newspaper like the hack wannabe ‘secret agents’ you’re trying so desperately to play at being?
” she wails, beating her fists against the couch cushions on either side of her.
“Because our research also indicates that your parents didn’t mean to develop the Zeitnot virus—that it was an accident,” I finally interject, showing our hand—at least in part, for the first time.
Her eyes widen and Louise’s sobs quiet as she attempts to regain her breath.
“From what we can tell, from the limited information that we have, there was an outbreak of the virus back in the early 90s, but somehow—the virus never made it to the wider public. Cases were likely part of closed testing and secret government experimentation and thus highly controlled. However, we’re unable to tell exactly how the spread of the virus was managed from then until the first public cases earlier last year,” I conclude—Caz rushing in to add.
“We were hoping that the hard drive you had with you at the Diamond Center would provide the answers we have been looking for—but it wasn’t the only reason we needed to intercept you.”