Bad Monkeys (23 page)

“Right…” I stared at the casino floor, focusing on the individual fibers that made up the carpet. Out of the thousands of random impressions left by passing gamblers, a fresh set of footprints appeared, as visible to me as tracks in grass. “Got her.”

I sprinted away at superhuman speed. The bad Jane’s trail led out under the pyramid atrium, where another pair of security guards tried to get in my way. I’d just finished taking them down when I heard a horn blast off in the distance. I ran towards it, and the bad Jane came darting right in front of me, her hair more than just mussed, now—she looked like she’d been through a tumble dryer. She saw me and tried to snap off a shot, but the barrel of her NC gun had cracked, rendering it as harmless as the toy it appeared to be. A look of real fear came into her eyes then, and she took off in a blur.

I stayed right on her heels. I could sense that she was almost out of power, in need of another dose, but between the Mandrill bomb explosions and the horn blast, any X-drug vials she was carrying would have shattered by now. All I had to do was keep pressing her until she was completely tapped out.

I chased her into a corner of the atrium, where she broke through another stairwell door. The stairs went up, the flights staggered to follow the incline of the pyramid. The geometry of it made me dizzy, so I forced myself not to look up the central well and just concentrated on running. By the time I passed the fifth landing, it was more like flying.

We flew up and up, all the way to the top—I nearly caught her at the three-quarter mark, but she put on a final burst of speed and pulled away again. Then I was at the top landing, in front of a door that radiated heat. The door was unmarked, but if you were going to make a sign for it, the symbol off the organization coin would have been a good choice.

I nudged the door open and stepped into the eye of the pyramid. It was like stepping into the sun: the Luxor’s searchlight was the size of a swimming pool, and though it pumped most of its energy into the sky, enough reflected back off the inside of the glass cap to turn the room into a bake oven.

My pupils shrank to pinpoints as I climbed onto the catwalk that encircled the searchlight. The air above the light was one big heat-shimmer, but I thought I glimpsed a human outline on the far side of the catwalk.

“You might as well show yourself,” I said. “I know you’re here, and you don’t have enough juice left to get past me.”

She solidified. “Careful with the gun.” She gestured at the glass walls. “If you miss…”

“I’m not going to shoot you. I need you awake so I can beat the truth out of you.”

“The truth.” She smiled. “You sure you want the truth, Jane? Because the truth is, even if you get me to tell you where Phil’s hiding, you won’t save him. He belongs to the Troop now. You might catch him, but you won’t turn him. He’ll curse you for even trying.”

“Why don’t you let me worry about that?”

“I know you
are
worried about it. That’s why there’s a part of you that really would like to shoot me, to shut me up before I can talk. Go on, check it out.”

I glanced down at the gun in my hand.

The dial was turned to the MI setting.

“Yeah,” the bad Jane said. “If you kill me, Phil gets away, and then you can go on pretending there’s hope. But there is no more hope, Jane. You had your chance to protect Phil twenty-three years ago. Now he’s got power, and position, and a purpose—more than
you
ever had—and he’s never going to give that up willingly. He might have shared a little of it with you, but that chance is gone too. So all that’s left is death. You can hunt him down and execute him, like the bad monkey he is. Is that the truth you’re looking for, Jane? You want to be responsible for finishing Phil off?”

As she talked, she moved along the catwalk towards me. She started to get a little too close for comfort; I took a step back and my heel caught, throwing me off-balance. It was all the opening she needed. She came forward in a blur, chopping her hand against my wrist to make me drop the gun. Then her hands were around my neck.

“Don’t fight it,” she said. I tried to melt away, but she held on to me firmly, using the last of her power. “Don’t fight it, Jane…You know this is the best way.” She bent me backwards over the catwalk railing. I felt the heat of the light scorching me. “Just let go. Just let go. No more guilt for you, no more screwups, and Phil gets to go on…”

With the last of
my
strength, I reached up, placed a palm flat against her chest. I pushed,
merged,
my hand passing through her jacket, her skin, her breastbone. I grabbed her by the heart, and squeezed.

She gasped and let go of me. She tried to step away, but I lifted her off the ground.

“Now,” I said. “You’re going to tell me where my brother is…”

Her arms and legs started flailing like mad, but her slaps and kicks were nothing to me. I pivoted around, lifting her over the railing to dangle her above the searchlight. I concentrated; the light blazed up, not just
like
the sun now, until I could see all the way through her, all the way to her soul. Steam, then smoke, curled off of her.

“Tell me where he is,” I said. I gave her heart one more squeeze.

She threw her head back, screamed it out; the words echoed off the glass tent as the light continued to blaze.

“Thank you,” I said. “And good-bye, Jane.”

I opened my hand. Her body, limp now, slipped free. Descending, she flashed into fire, the light consuming her more thoroughly than a Mandrill bomb. Not even ashes were left.

Tapped out, dripping with sweat, I slumped against the catwalk railing.

A dark shape moved at the edge of my vision. There was a flash of pebble glasses.

“Well,” Dixon said. “That was rather medieval.”

“I didn’t like her,” I told him. “I don’t like you much, either. But that doesn’t matter now…I know where Phil is.”

“Yes, I heard. I hope she wasn’t lying.”

“She wasn’t. But we’re going to have to move fast. By now Phil will know that this operation has gone wrong. When the bad Jane doesn’t report in, he’ll run.”

“Not to worry.” Dixon flipped open his cell phone. “I have a Bad Monkeys strike team standing by.”

“I don’t want any help. Just get me to him, I’ll go in alone.”

“You aren’t going in at all. Even if I trusted you, you can barely stand.”

“Even if you
trusted
me? What…Wait. What do you mean, ‘strike team’?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“No. We’re supposed to bring Phil in alive. Love promised me he’d honor True’s deal.”

“Love is on his way to the hospital,” Dixon said. “He had a heart attack—a real one. That puts me in operational command.”

“It doesn’t change the deal! You can’t—”

“You know that bomb you left on the baccarat table? The technician we sent in to defuse it said that the ‘damper switch’ was just a dummy. If it had gone off, it would have killed everyone in the casino.”

“It wasn’t Phil who put me up to that. It was
her
.”

“It was his plan. This is the sort of thing your brother does for the Troop. This is what he
is,
now…And I am not going to go in soft and risk letting him escape, just to assuage your guilt about being a bad sister.”

“You prick,” I said. “You’re just doing this to spite me!”

“I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.” He raised the cell phone to his ear.

I scooped my NC gun off the catwalk.

“Don’t be a fool,” Dixon said.

“Don’t think I won’t…” The dial was still on the MI setting. I tried to switch it back to narcolepsy, but it must have been damaged in the fall. It wouldn’t budge.

A cold smirk formed on Dixon’s lips as he watched me struggle with the dial. “How very convenient,” he said. “To stop me, you’ll have to kill me…And as there are no witnesses, you’ll be free to blame the bad Jane…”

“Shut up!” I banged the dial against the catwalk railing. It still wouldn’t turn. “Put down that goddamned cell phone!”

“No.”

“I’m not going to let you kill my brother, Dixon.”

“And what about all the other people
he’ll
kill, if he gets away? I suppose you’ll blame their deaths on the bad Jane, too.”

“Dixon—”

“Go ahead,” he said, staring me down. “Pull the trigger. Prove me right.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No…” Relaxing my grip, I let the gun drop. It bounced off the catwalk and vanished into the light.

Behind the pebble glasses, I caught the tiniest flicker of relief. “That’s better,” Dixon said. “Now—”

Before he could finish his sentence, I dipped my hand in my pocket and came out holding the bad Jane’s knife.

“I’m not going to let you kill my brother,” I repeated. “But you’re wrong about the rest of it. I take full responsibility. For everything. For Phil.”

Then I flicked open the blade and stepped towards him.

“SO YOU KILLED DIXON TO PROTECT
your brother.”

“No, I killed Dixon because I
didn’t
protect my brother…and because I finally realized I couldn’t save him.”

The doctor shakes his head. “I don’t understand. If you thought Phil couldn’t be saved—”

“I didn’t say that. I said
I
couldn’t save him. The bad Jane was right about that much: I’d missed my one chance, and all I could do now was get him killed…But Phil could still save himself.” She looks the doctor in the eye. “I don’t care what the Troop did to him, what they made him do, I have to believe there’s some part of him that’s not irredeemable. He was a good kid, you know? He deserved better than me for a sister…But I was what he got, and if I wasn’t strong enough to bring him home, I could at least buy him some more time to find his own way back.

“So that’s my story.” She shrugs and sinks back in the chair. “What do you think?”

“I’m not sure what you want me to say, Jane.”

“That bad, huh?”

“I could point out some more holes in the narrative, if you like,” the doctor says. “I could tell you that there
have been no reports of bodies found at the Venetian: no butchered guests up in the penthouse, no mimes with their throats slit beside the Grand Canal. I could tell you that the security guards at the Luxor are quite certain there was only one Jane, not two, running amok in the casino that night, and none of them witnessed any laws of physics being broken—just a lot of punching and kicking. I could tell you that, but then you’ll tell me that Catering covered up what really happened, and if that explanation still leaves a few loose ends, well, it’s a Nod problem.”

“Good to see you finally catching on,” she says. “So what about Dixon? What did they make him out to be? Another security guard? A hotel employee who got in my way?”

“He was a social worker,” the doctor tells her.

“Dixon, a social worker?” She laughs. “That’s rich! Let me guess: he worked with street people, right?
Deranged
street people?”

“Homeless addicts.”

“Sure, of course. And that night—don’t tell me—that night, he just happened to be passing through the Luxor and heard one of his new clients had gone berserk. So he decided to help track me down and ended up getting stabbed for his troubles.”

“The police don’t know how Dixon came to be in that room with you. But that scenario sounds plausible.”

“Yeah, except for one thing: I’m not deranged. I mean, my
story’s
crazy, I know that, but I’m lucid.”

“You’re lucid now,” the doctor says. “But that night?”

“Yeah, well…Those X-drugs really were something. Too bad I won’t be getting any more.”

“Jane—”

“I talked to Phil again, you know,” she says. “I mean, not
really
…But after I killed Dixon, when I was sitting at the top of the stairs waiting to see if the cops or the
Clowns would come for me first, I pretended Phil was there with me. I told him I was sorry. I’d never done that, you know, in all the conversations we’d had, but this was like the last time, so I apologized for being such a lousy sister, for leaving him that day…I told him that no matter what bad things he’d done for the Troop, it wasn’t his fault, it was all on me. I said I hoped he’d find a way to get free of them—that he could, I
knew
he could, if he really wanted to.”

“And what did Phil say?”

“He didn’t say anything. He just listened.” She looks the doctor in the eye again. “I hope he listened.”

Before the doctor can respond, his pager goes off.

“Time to go?” She sounds disappointed.

“I have to step out for a moment,” the doctor says. “But I would like to talk some more. If you don’t mind waiting…?”

“No, I don’t mind.” She shows him her bracelets again. “It’s not like I’ve got anywhere to be.”

He stands up and reaches for the tape recorder, then hesitates. “Did she say anything else?”

“Who?”

“The bad Jane. Before you dropped her—did she say anything else about Phil, or the Troop?”

“No. I mean, it’s not like she was super-articulate with my fist in her chest. It was all she could do to scream out a few words…Why?”

“Just curious,” the doctor says. He presses the
STOP
button on the recorder. “I’ll be back shortly…”

He goes to the door and tries to open it, but it’s been locked from the outside. “Guard?” he calls. “I’m ready to come out now…Guard?” He raises a fist, knocks. “Guard!”

Behind him, there is a thunk of handcuffs hitting the table. He looks over his shoulder. She is leaning forward, aiming a bright orange pistol at him. “What on earth…?” he says. “Where did you…?” Then he sees
it: the black tile in the floor has been flipped up to reveal a compartment underneath.

“Phil,” she says.

He blinks. “Is this some kind of joke? Did…Did Dr. Chiang put you up to this?”

“It’s no joke, Phil. I wish it was.”

He stares at her for a moment, glances at the tape recorder, and then he is hammering on the door. “Guard!…GUARD!”

“There’s no one out there to help you, Phil. This isn’t the county jail. You’re in an ant farm in the desert.”

He stops pounding. He turns around slowly, a new expression on his face.

“Yeah,” she says. “Sorry. I lied to you about Dixon: I probably
would
have killed him, but he was smart enough not to give me a reason. By the time he showed himself on the catwalk, the strike team was already on its way, and he sent them in with strict orders to take you alive—not because he’s a nice guy, you understand, but because even he didn’t dare break the deal Love made with me…Love said the Clowns had a way to trick your memory, make you think you’d come to me on your own, to pump me for intel, which would give
me
a chance to try to reach you. Dixon said it would never work, that you had no conscience left for me to reach, but I told Love I was sure I could pull it off…” She sighs. “But I was wrong about that, wasn’t I, Phil?”

She picks up the tape recorder and slams it down hard. The case splinters, revealing the flat disc of the Mandrill bomb inside. There’s a nervous pause as they both wait for the timer to finish counting down, but when it reaches zero, there’s no explosion, just a short buzz. A word appears in the digital readout:

SHIBBOLETH

Then the lead h flickers and goes out:

SHIBBOLETH

“Jane,” he says. “I can explain…”

“Yeah, I’ll bet you can,” she says. “But there’s not much to explain, is there? It was a simple test. You didn’t have to confess, or break down crying, or anything dramatic like that. All you had to do was walk out of this room without trying to kill me.”

“Jane…Jane, please.”

“I’m sorry, little brother. I tried. I gave you every chance I could. But this is my half of the deal…”

“Jane!”

“Bad monkey,” she says.

She pulls the trigger.

The NC gun makes no sound.

He convulses. One hand grabs the knob of the door behind him; the other flies up to his chest. A strangling noise issues from his throat; his face reddens and his eyes bulge.
Her
eyes widen, as she leans farther forward, taking it all in. His knees start to buckle.

And then, right at the point where he should fall dead of a heart attack, he catches himself. He stops gasping for breath. His legs straighten and his arms return to his sides.

She pulls the trigger again. Once again the NC gun is silent, but it’s a different kind of silence—the kind that signifies impotence. This time he doesn’t react to the shot. He stands tall, his face returning to its normal color. She switches the gun’s dial from MI to CI, aims straight at his head, and tries once more.

Nothing. He doesn’t even blink.

She is not pleased with this outcome.

“Phil,” she says.

“Jane,” he replies.

“You’re not the ant in this ant farm, are you?”

“No.”

“I am.”

“Yes.”

“Well, fuck,” she says, and tosses the useless gun on the table.

There’s a knock at the door. Phil steps aside, and Dixon enters the room. She greets him with a sour look.

“How long have you known?” she asks.

“That you are a deep-cover agent, working for the Troop? From the beginning,” Dixon says. He gestures to Phil. “We were warned about you.”

“Then why recruit me?”

“As an experiment. We’d been aware for some time that the Troop was attempting to infiltrate the organization. We’d enacted countermeasures, but were uncertain how effective they were. Recruiting you offered us an opportunity to test them.”

“So the idea was to see how long it would take to catch me if you didn’t already know?”

“Yes.”

“It was a lot harder than you thought, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Dixon says. “Of course I expected you to be a good actress, well practiced in passing yourself off as a charming misfit rather than the monster that you really are, but your ability to fool shibboleth devices came as a shock. Your emotional control was remarkable, especially in someone who
seemed
so impulsive. For a while I almost despaired of catching you out.”

“So what finally tipped it?” She glances at Phil. “Him?”

Dixon nods. “Even the most self-controlled person is subject to temptation. You were able to conceal your enthusiasm for more mundane acts of evil, but I thought your composure might crack if you were presented with a chance to commit a truly extraordinary sin.”

“So you sent me to hunt down my own brother.”

“To kill him, on the pretense of saving him.”

“How’d you know I’d go for it, though? I mean, if he’s really Troop, then we’re technically on the same side.”

“Technically,” Dixon says. “But it is true, isn’t it, that your brother’s abduction by the Troop was no coincidence?”

“Of course it wasn’t a coincidence,” she says. “He was my ticket in. They wanted a sacrifice to prove that I was serious. But they didn’t tell me they were going to
adopt
him.”

“I assumed as much. I thought the discovery that your brother was not only alive, but occupying a position of importance in an organization to which you were little more than a peon, would undermine whatever loyalty you had.”

“So this whole thing…” She waves a hand at the room. “This…
play
…It was all so you could read my heart the moment I pulled the trigger?”

“Yes,” Dixon says. “And the results, I’m happy to report, are conclusive. You’re evil.”

“Yes I am,” she says, unable to resist a smile. “But you know, you didn’t have to go to so much trouble. You could have just asked my mother.”

“Perhaps I would have, if she were still alive.”

“Yeah, it’s a shame about that. You know they never found the truck that hit her?” She sees Phil bristle and her smile broadens. “So what happens now? You turn me? Make me a double agent?”

Dixon shakes his head. “You’re a bad monkey. Now that that’s out in the open, the organization has no further use for you.”

“Right.” She nods, then shrugs, accepting the inevitable. “Oh well, I had a nice run. Did some good damage along the way.”

“Some,” Dixon agrees. “But less than you believe…The beginning was real,” he explains. “But after the Arlo Dexter mission, Cost-Benefits became concerned that it was too dangerous to leave you running around loose, even under close surveillance. True began pressuring me to kill you and be done with it. Ultimately I
convinced him to accept an alternative. We gave you to the Scary Clowns. Everything that has happened to you since you met Robert Wise has been simulated.”

“Simulated,” she says. “You mean the Ozymandias facility…The diner…
Vegas
…?”

“Dreamscapes and ant farms, all of it.”

“No way! That…They can’t
do
that!”

“Love will be pleased his illusions were so effective. It turns out I owe him an apology. When I first saw the script his people had prepared, there were a number of plot twists that I was sure would give the game away. But the Clowns’ understanding of human gullibility is greater than mine.”

She thinks about it. “X-drugs don’t exist?”

“Drugs that allow you to stop time and fly around like a martial-arts superhero? No, they don’t exist.”

“Well, that’s embarrassing…So if the scene at the diner never happened, that means—”

“True and Wise are both still alive,” he says. “Oh, and Love didn’t have a heart attack.”

“What about John Doyle?”

“Bad Monkeys killed him twenty years ago.”

“And the bad Jane?”

“Roberta, actually. Roberta Grace. My protégée. She’s already back at Malfeasance, preparing to use what we’ve learned from you to weed out the Troop’s other moles.”

“And what about
him
?” she asks. “Is he really my brother?”

“Yes. And he really does work for the Troop. But really, he works for the organization.”

“How? He was ten when they took him. Don’t tell me you recruited him before that.”

“No, and we didn’t recruit him afterwards, either. He came to us. The Troop’s indoctrination specialists had done their best, but your brother proved to be something they never planned on. Incorruptible.”

“Incorruptible!” She snorts. “The little shit just didn’t have what it takes to be a bad monkey, that’s all!”

“You asked on the day we met, what it is that I want,” Dixon says, ignoring her outburst. “The answer is: to demonstrate the futility of evil. You and your brother, each in your own way, have helped me do that. But your part of the demonstration is over now.”

He opens his coat to reveal another NC gun. This one does not resemble a toy. It’s black, and its dial has only two active settings. Dixon draws it from its holster, then turns to Phil and asks with uncharacteristic deference: “May I?”

“No,” Phil says. “She’s mine.”

“Of course.” Dixon hands off the pistol, and brushes his palms together as if wiping away dust. “Good-bye, Jane Charlotte,” he says. “We won’t meet again in this life—or in the next, I hope.” He leaves the room.

“Prick,” she says, as the door shuts behind him. Then she looks at Phil and her demeanor softens. “So, little brother. I guess congratulations are in order.”