Read Online Subterrene War 03: Chimera by T.C. McCarthy - Free Book Online Page A

nodded again and turned on a lamp before sitting next to the woman. They spoke Korean. I had no ideawhat he was saying, but the volume went up and it was clear that Jihoon had started to make her edgy—even more edgy than she had been when in my custody. He turned to me.
    “Let’s start uploading all those schematics and get ready to transmit because we might not have much time once they find the bodies you left behind. And this will take some time. Was there another Korean there, a man who looked older than the rest?”
    “Yeah. There was an old guy with white hair. Why?”
    He shook his head. “You are one dumb simpleton. In Korean culture, you should assume that the oldest one is in charge; it’s not always true, but most of the time it’s a fair assumption.”
    “So?”
    “So…” Jihoon slapped the girl and she winced, a drop of blood appearing at the corner of her mouth. “You killed one of Sunshine’s lead scientists, someone who could have told us a lot. But then, all us
Chinamen
probably look the same.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Well, what about her?”
    “She’s just an aide. A goddamn secretary. Well done,
Lieutenant.
”
    Jihoon translated what he could, and after an hour the woman started crying and wouldn’t stop.
    “We’re getting nowhere,” I said.
    He nodded. “She confirmed Sunshine is something related to genetics so at least we know what they were here for—have enough technical data to keep a team of armor and weapons analysts busy for months. We alsohave the identities of some of the Korean team; maybe we can get something from their background that will tell us more about Sunshine. These armor systems are advanced, but Korea isn’t a threat to our forces, so I don’t get it.”
    “They’re going to violate the Genetic Weapons Convention,” I explained,
“less than a year after the ink dried.”
    “So?”
    I lit another cigarette and went to the window, looking down onto the plaza’s darkness and unable to shake the sensation that the entire world was about to change. “
Sunshine.
Even if this betty can’t give details, she confirmed that it’s a new genetic-engineering program geared to go into full-scale production within ten years. Who does that these days? And the question isn’t whether Unified Korea will threaten
us,
it’s who the hell scares them so much that they feel like they have to break with a brand-new treaty in secret? I mean, they know what happens if they’re caught. What zapped them like this? What have the Chinese got?”
    Jihoon sighed. “If I’d been there with you, we wouldn’t have messed this up so badly.”
    “If you’d played it straight, I wouldn’t have had to tie you up.”
    “So what’s the move?”
    He asked it like I was some kind of expert. Maybe compared to him I was, but what the hell could I say? Ji was supposed to be the genius. Less than a month ago, I’d been a sergeant and never did a single day in any of the academies, while looking at Jihoon, you just knew that a groomed bastard like that had been admitted to one at six years old, the earliest possible age, and probably to one of the tier-one institutes—not one of thoseunderfunded dust bowl academies in the reclamation districts. He hadn’t ever
seen
a civilian university. I didn’t have to ask to know that his mother had never feared being pushed into the breeding program or that his father had about a million civic award buttons pinned to his blazer lapel—to show off whenever he took a walk.
    I was about to say something when Ji pointed at the holo station. We had kept it on the news, with the volume turned down, to get a heads-up if they found the murders, and now we saw the club, La Tumba, with my victims shown in three-dimensional color.
    “You should have lit fire to the place,” he said.
    “I couldn’t.”
    “Why?” But I ignored the question. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, that the old city had put its spell on me and to set it ablaze would have