“So, when you first told me he was thinking of getting spiked, you said he wanted you to get a Wellplant, too—if he did it.”
She nodded. “Yeah, and my mom, too. So we could stay connected.” The car locked with a beep behind us. “I’ll admit, I thought about it for a minute. I mean, it would be cool to be connected all the time, to have access to all that information and resources and stuff, but I couldn’t get used to the idea of having a spike in my head, especially not one manufactured by Howard Wells, not after seeing what they’re willing to do to get what they need to make them. I tried to talk him out of it, too, you know? But…I guess I couldn’t convince him. Maybe everything’ll be great in a few days, but from what I’ve seen so far, I doubt it.”
The diner was mostly empty. We took a booth in the front and Claudia grabbed the menus from behind the napkin dispenser and tossed one to me.
“It’s good to be out of the house,” she said.
She glanced at her menu, then nodded and tossed it aside, staring at me over the table. “You said you had something you needed to talk about. What’s up?”
The menu was stupid long—like a good diner menu should be—and I’d barely had time to look at the front page. “You already know what you’re getting?”
“Psh.” She snapped her fingers. “Tuna melt. That’s actually why we’re here.”
The server arrived and Claudia said, “Tuna melt and an iced tea, please,” then looked at me expectantly with innocent eyes and a smirk that was just this side of evil.
“I…” I started to say I needed more time. Then I saw BREAKFAST ALL DAY plastered across the top of the menu. “Two eggs over, rye toast, veggie scrapple, and home fries.” I started to hand over my menu, then I added, “And orange juice, please.”
Claudia grinned. “You’ve always been good under pressure, Jimi.” As the server took our menus and disappeared, her face turned serious. “Okay. What did you want to ask?”
First, I resumed the chronology of recent events, picking up with the brawl after Wells announced his presidential campaign, then the second visit from the FBI and their questions about me and CLAD. Claudia was duly creeped out that the FBI had found a photo of me at the CLAD house they raided. I told her how Rex and I had decided I needed to find out what that connection was before the FBI did.
“So, here’s where it gets really weird,” I told her softly, looking around to make sure no one was close enough to listen in.
I quietly told her about Rex recognizing Ogden’s picture, and about us meeting with him.
She gasped. “You went there? How did that go? What did you find out?”
“Not much, actually. He didn’t know why CLAD might be interested in me, but he told us about this Wells Life Sciences facility, where he thinks something bad is going on. He wanted us to help him break in and check the place out.”
“Are you serious?” she said, her voice getting louder before she quieted it down again. “He wants you to join CLAD?” she whispered.
“No, not exactly. I think he wants to sway me to their point of view.”
“I hope you told him no with great certainty.”
“Well, yeah, I did.…At first.”
“At first!? Jimi—”
I held up a hand to stop her. “There’s more,” I told her.
She folded her arms and closed her mouth, waiting impatiently for me to finish so she could continue getting on my case.
I had already decided that if I was going to ask her to help us, I needed to tell her everything that was going on—and there was already some information that I’d kept from her. Technically, I was not a member of Chimerica, even though it was starting to feel like the family business. I hadn’t signed anything or been sworn in or had an induction ceremony or anything like that. And I hadn’t been sworn to secrecy, or even asked to keep secrets. It had been explained to me—often, if inadequately—how important secrecy was to Chimerica, but no one had asked me to keep secret what I had learned in the last few days.
“Okay,” I said, leaning forward and inducing her to do the same. “Remember a few months ago, how much it was bothering me that Rex was being cagey about where he was disappearing to and what he was doing?”
“I remember you mentioning it once or twice. Daily.”
“Yeah, well, eventually he shared a few things with me, secrets that I then had to keep, and that I did.”
“Go on.”
“Remember how I found out I had an aunt who was also named Dymphna?”
She nodded.
“Well, it turns out, she’s in charge of Chimerica.”
“What do you mean? Like, the executive director or something?”
“I don’t know about her job title, but yes. She started it. She’s the head honcho.”
She sat back and laughed. “Man, Jimi, whenever I get upset that my family is messed up, you do help me put it in perspective.”
“My family’s not messed up.”
She laughed even louder at that.
“Okay, whatever,” I went on, trying to keep my voice low and talk over her laughter at the same time. “So hold that thought about Dymphna. After we told the CLAD guy no, we left. As we’re leaving his neighborhood, who shows up to intercept us, but Sly.”
“Sly! Wow, haven’t seen him in a while. How’s he doing?”
“He’s fine. Anyway, he takes us to this, like, secret safe house or whatever, down the shore. He says it’s important but won’t tell us what’s going on. But we get there, and Dymphna’s there.”
“Your aunt?”
“Yes. The head of Chimerica.”
“Whoa. So how was that?”
“It was really, really weird. She’s amazing, but the whole situation was bizarre.”
“What did she say?”
“We talked for a while. We talked about family stuff. She told me some of what she’d been up to, back then and more recently. Get this: apparently, she used to go out with Howard Wells.”
Claudia clapped a hand over her mouth. “Are you serious?”
I nodded. “Years ago.”
“No, you’re family’s not messed up at all.”
“Shut up. Anyway, here’s the thing. She asked me to tell Ogden, the CLAD guy, that we’d help him break into the Wells facility. She’s concerned about what CLAD is up to, and she wants us to try to get closer to them, so we can find out.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Well, I told her that the FBI was already harassing me because they think I’m involved in CLAD and the last thing I wanted was to give them any evidence to support that idea or to do anything that would make it true, but…Well, she’s pretty persuasive.” I shrugged. “I said I’d do it.”
“That’s crazy.”
I steepled my fingers in front of my face, choosing my next words carefully. “So we went back and told Ogden we’d do it. But when he told me about some of the challenges involved in getting onto the property, past the security system or whatever, I realized that we could really use some technical support.”
“Technical support?”