Under His Skin

Chapter 1 Lennon pushed away from his desk and rubbed his eyes. Today had been a long day, but energy still pulsed under his skin. The results that the computer had splashed onto his screen made everything he’d poured into the past few months worthwhile. This discovery changed everything—everything that humanity knew about policing, about crime, about war. From this moment forward, the world was different. Better. He still had work to do, of course. Lennon had never been the kind of guy to sit back and rest on his laurels, and he wasn’t going to change now. He and the rest of the team needed to come up with a manufacturing process that would make the bullets at a reasonable cost. They had to test the bullets on a wide variety of populations, to make sure that they wouldn’t turn out to be dangerous to one ethnic group or one gender or one weight class. Lennon did have some concerns on that score; he worried about the bullets being more harmful to underweight persons or children than they would be to people with more substantial bodies. Finding volunteers willing to be shot with experimental bullets was going to be a fun one to explain to the folks over at the ethics board, too. Those were problems to work out another day, though. It was a problem for Future Lennon. For a few hours, late at night, he could let himself sit back and enjoy the feeling of triumph. Wooden heels echoed on the tile floor, and Lennon turned his head to see a familiar face. Rada Parsons had been with Lennon since their undergraduate days. Lennon had built Interior, Inc from his inventions, but he couldn’t have done it without Rada’s skill and finesse. Rada had overseen their growth from two undergraduates working out of a substandard student apartment in Somerville to these sleek Kendall Square offices, with a hundred employees. Rada made sure that the bills got paid and the product shipped on time. Hell, Rada had more input into the manufacturing processes than Lennon did. She had a better grasp of manufacturing regulations. “Kaden told me you were still here.” She shook her head at him. “It’s after nine. The boss doesn’t need to impress anyone, big guy. It’s okay for you to go home and go to bed. Go to a bar, pick someone up. Your computer will still be here in the morning.” Lennon snickered at her suggestion. She always knew the best way to get those spinning cycles in his brain to wind down, or at least she did most of the time. Today was not one of those days. “I made it work.” He turned the machine around to show her the results that had come through. “The nano-bullet works.” Rada’s pointed little jaw dropped. “I thought that was a pipe dream, something out of science fiction.” “Everything done in this entire field is something out of science fiction.” Lennon waved his hand in a circle, to indicate all of Kendall Square. This part of Cambridge was home to more tech companies than anyplace else Lennon could think of. “Literally everyone working on something around here started out reading a book by Asimov or watching Star Trek and saying to themselves, ‘Well, why the hell not?’ And then they sat down and worked hard and tried to figure out how to do it. Although, all that the bullet is doing is delivering two different types of nanobots.” “Both of which you developed.” She winked at him and bent down to get a closer look at the data. “So this new invention creates a whole new market for a product for which we still hold the patent. Good thinking, brain boy.” Lennon’s cheeks burned, but he grinned. “Well, that wasn’t actually my goal, but you know. If it works, we’ll take it, right?” Rada ruffled Lennon’s hair. “I knew we’d manage to cram a little capitalism in there somewhere. Now close and lock that thing. We’re going out to dinner, and we’re going to celebrate. We’ll come up with a schedule for testing and production tomorrow.” “Just like that.” He fought down the corners of his mouth. The way Rada’s brain worked never ceased to amaze him. “Yes, just like that. Why would we not?” She grabbed him by the shoulders. “Why would we wait any longer than that to bring this thing to market? Think of how many lives will be saved. No more civilian deaths, no more military deaths or at least not from firearms—” Now it was Lennon’s turn to laugh. “And you call me brain boy. You’re just going to have a schedule ready to roll out tomorrow, and it’s going to get done, too. Are you absolutely sure that you don’t have a brother?” He shut down his laptop and locked it into a desk drawer as he spoke. “Four sisters, darling. Sorry to disappoint.” She held out a hand. “Come on. You need food, and this is something to celebrate.” They left the lab and headed out to Bubble, their favorite local bar. It wasn’t a big place, and it wasn’t crowded on a weeknight, but the kitchen served a late-night menu until one in the morning and they claimed to have the largest selection of sparkling wine available in the Boston area. Lennon ordered a salad and a glass of something from Schramsberg, because he was so tired he didn’t think he could eat much. Rada got the same bubbly, a sandwich, and got them a cheese plate to split with a warning look at Lennon. “You know,” she said to him, “All kidding aside, I’m immensely proud of you. I know that the product is going to pass all the testing, with flying colors, because the components have already passed. The only holdup is going to be the projectile part of it, because I don’t think there is a safety inspection for those types of projectiles.” She was being deliberately vague, because one never knew who was listening, but she couldn’t hide her excitement. “Thanks.” Lennon knew he was blushing. “It’s been a lot to work on, you know? But I’m excited too. When I think about everything that this product will do, with the lives it will save…I’m downright giddy. And I’m not a giddy kind of guy.” He toyed with his champagne flute. “You don’t look giddy, you look glum.” He shrugged. “Maybe, a little bit. I’m kind of tired. You know how I get when I’m in the heat of a project. But it’s also…” “You just can’t wait to throw the whole corporate thing off and dedicate your life to saving the rain forests?” She raised her eyebrow. “Because I’ve got to tell you, man, you could probably do that by now. If not right this minute, then after this product hits market. You can live very comfortably off what you make from it.” He opened his mouth. Then he shut it again. What he wanted to say was that he wanted someone to share it all with, but he technically had that too. He was right here with the person he cared most about in the world, or at least the person who cared most in the world about him. It wasn’t the same as having someone to come home to at night, but he guessed that wasn’t in the cards for everyone. “I still miss Greg, I suppose” He took a sip of his sparkling wine. “It’s probably difficult because it was all so unfinished. I don’t know if he’s dead or in jail or in a coma or in Tahiti or what.” Rada bobbed her head from side to side. “I can see your point. It’s been a long time, though. Maybe it’s time to move forward.” “You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Lennon laughed at himself. “Anyway, I’m probably simply tired. Tomorrow morning it’ll just be a sour note at the back of my brain, I promise.” “No sour notes!” A warm hand landed on Lennon’s back. He smiled as he recognized the person to whom that hand was attached. His director of security, Kaden Townsend, had somehow sneaked into the pub without anyone being the wiser and surprised them all. He slid onto the barstool beside Rada and accepted the glass of sparkling wine the bartender pressed onto him. “Why are there sour notes?” Rada rolled her eyes in her very best melodramatic fashion and smiled at Kaden. “The boss man is spending the night after he makes the discovery that’s going to win him the Nobel Prize for sure mourning for lost love.” “A Nobel, huh?” Kaden drew back, lifting his eyebrows. “I’m impressed, boss man. It’s good to have a plan.” “There’s no plan, and no Nobel. Come on, Rada. There’s a lot to do before we find out if this is even commercially viable.” Lennon blushed and ducked his head. “Oh, you mean like when you designed nanobots that could repair a damaged heart while it was still in the human body. Or when you designed nanobots that could repair a damaged spine.” Kaden lifted his flute in an exaggerated motion. “Excuse me. My mistake.” Lennon had to laugh. “Okay, fine, but this is a little more complex and it’s not about winning a Nobel Prize, it’s about leaving the world a better place than we found it. Don’t get me wrong, the Nobel is an honor, but it’s not why we got into this job.” He grabbed a forkful of salad. “Kaden, how did you know to come looking for us? We’re happy you’re here looking for us, of course, but we didn’t tell anyone where we were going.” Rada elbowed Lennon, a playful grin taking some of the sting out of the gesture. “He’s the director of security, Lennon! It’s his job to know these things. He’s our staff ninja, in a suit and tie.” Kaden nodded. “She’s right about that, actually. I had something I wanted to talk to you about, Len, so I checked the security cameras and noticed you leaving your office. I might have had to do some super-secret spy stuff to figure out where you guys went after you left, though.” He waggled his perfectly sculpted eyebrows up and down and leered. “By which he means he called over here.” The bartender refilled their flutes and shook his head at Kaden. “Trying to inflate your own ego never works, bro.” “Hey, I’ve got to do what I can, bro. Anyway, once I figured out what was going on back at the ranch, I put on my walking shoes and headed on over here.” Rada straightened up, all business now. “What happened that might make the security chief leave the office? Or keep him there this late in the first place?” Kaden leaned forward and dropped his voice a little. “Well, there’ve been a larger number of intrusion attempts on the system than normal. None of them have gotten through, but they’ve been pissing Jim from IT off like no tomorrow. And you know how he gets when he’s angry. He asked me to take a look, so I stayed late to work with him. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” He tilted his head toward Rada. “Both of you, actually.” Lennon sighed into his bubbly. This was why he had a COO. He didn’t want to have to deal with the day to day running of the business. He only wanted to play in the lab and make important things. He guessed that it was, technically, his company though. He should probably make some effort to manage it. “What did you find?” “Well, we get a good number of intrusion attempts as a general rule. Some of them are kids messing around. Some of them are probably competitors. Some of them are almost certainly from the usual round of miscreants, looking to hold us hostage for cash or something like that.” Kaden tugged on his collar. “These attacks are all coming from one city in Russia. That city is Astrakhan.” “I don’t know anyone in Astrakhan.” Lennon looked down into his salad, as though he could find the answers among the leaves. “I don’t think I could even find Astrakhan on the map.” Rada looked up at the sky. “You have a customer in Astrakhan, Astrakhan Health Initiatives.” She turned her head to look only at Kaden. “Do you know why they would want to hack us?” “We don’t know for sure that the hackers are associated with AHI. But anyway, I came down here to let you know that we did the research and came up with that result.” Kaden picked up his flute and played with it for a second. “I’m going to be brutally honest here. I want to bring in some other resources on this.” Rada glared at him and took a large gulp from her drink. “Buzzkill.” Lennon frowned at her for a second. “What exactly do you have in mind?” “Let me reach out to these guys and I’ll see if there’s even anything that they can do. There might not be.” Kaden put his glass down and held up his hands. “I don’t want to get your hopes up or anything. I don’t want you to worry more than you have to, either. I mean, you know that I used to be military.” Rada snorted. “The haircut gives it away, even if we hadn’t seen your resume.” “Hardy har har.” Kaden took his glass up again. “While I was working for the army, the one thing that I learned that has never let me down is to always trust my instincts. Every instinct that I have right now is telling me this stinks. I want this threat eliminated before it does something worse than smell bad, you feel me?” “Are these guys you’re calling in friends of yours from the good old days?” Lennon looked into his glass. No answers presented themselves from the bubbles, either. “They are. They’re good men.” Kaden spread one hand out on the bar. “They’ve got experience with cases like this.” Lennon pursed his lips. He wasn’t a big fan of working directly with the military. He knew his latest invention would be most useful to the military, and he knew that many of his prior inventions had been used in the military more often than anyplace else. That wasn’t the issue. His issue lay more in the way the military tended to get territorial about things. If they worked with him, even to provide protection, they would want to claim ownership of his products. At the same time, he couldn’t pretend that he was comfortable with the idea of a foreign power trying to hack into his company’s systems. He didn’t want a foreign power to get their hands on his project, and who knew if this bad actor was a Russian agent or just an enemy agent who was Russian? They could be working for anyone. “They touch nothing. They see no files, and they see no employee files. And if I see any military guys harassing any of my employees, that includes you, I’m hitting them with the paralytic nanobots and making them watch The 300 five hundred times without pausing.” Both Kaden and Rada pulled their heads back. “You’re a cruel man, Lennon.” Rada cringed and sipped from her flute. “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal under the terms of the Geneva Convention, but I’ll make sure that everyone is respected.” Kaden grinned. “Think about it this way. If some foreign power is so keen to get what you’ve got, it must be pretty special.” Lennon drank to that. “I hope so.” The glow of triumph might have dimmed a little with Kaden’s news, but Lennon could still feel it if he tried. The trio finished their drinks and left. Kaden walked home, while Rada and Lennon shared a cab. They lived in the same building, so they might as well save the gas. Lennon felt bad enough about riding as it was, but it was late and Rada’s shoes weren’t made for the hike back to their building. Once Lennon made it back to his own space, he cleaned up and climbed up to bed. He had a great view of Boston from up here. The city lights looked incredible from across the river. Greg had always liked Boston. Damn it, Greg had left years ago, literally years. Or he was lost. Or he was taken. Or his body was lying in a subway access tunnel, forgotten. Or he’d been hit on the head, and had started a new life— Lennon cut the thoughts off with a snarl and punched his pillow. He knew the only reason he couldn’t move on was the lack of closure. If it had been any other breakup, he’d have been able to heal. He still had Greg’s things, for crying out loud. It was past time to get rid of them. Maybe that would help him start to get past this miserable lump in his chest. In the meantime, he had a world to change. Maybe he wasn’t ever going to have someone to come home to at night, but he would have to be content. Most people never had chances like this, and he intended to make the most of it.