Generation of Liars (21 page)

He came on the phone a moment
later. “Are you back in Paris, Alice?”

“No, I’m still in New York. Riding
on the subway, actually, but I should be home later tonight, and I was thinking
of us sharing a late dinner date.” The train made its next stop and the doors
slid open, heralding a deluge of travelers, and when I glanced up I spotted
Shoulder Pads from Cibix among them. Damn it.

“A late dinner?” Ben asked. “
Mmm
I like that idea.”

“I’m glad you like the idea,” I
responded distractedly, as I sprang out of my seat to avoid Shoulder Pads.

“Hey! Hey you!” I heard her voice
in my ear.  She was waving me down. The train doors snapped closed in
front of my nose. There was no escaping her now. I reluctantly turned around
and did a courtesy wave at her.

Ben was still replying to my
question. “Of course I like the idea, why wouldn’t I? I have really been
looking forward to spending time with you.”

There was a packed train car full
of people between us, but Shoulder Pads was adamant about shouting conversation
at me. “How come you left so early? Did you quit on your first day? Did HR
complain about your hair?”

I jabbed the phone pressed to my
ear, indicating I was already in a conversation, but Shoulder Pads didn’t get
it, she just kept blabbing. “Ben, can you hold a second?”

“Sure, Alice,” replied Ben.

I cupped my hand over the phone so
I could shout my reply at Shoulder Pads. “I quit today. I got another job
offer. Better pay, shorter commute. And they didn’t care about my hair.” Once
the shuffling from the new passengers was done, I noticed that there was a man
in a wrinkle-worn suit who appeared to be Shoulder Pads’ traveling companion.

“Jeff,” Shoulder Pads shouted at
the man, even though she was standing right beside him, “this is the girl with
the blue hair I was telling you about.” She turned her eyes back to me. “This
is Jeff. Jeff would have been your manager if you stayed in the department a
little longer.”

One of Jeff’s eyebrows pulled up in
suspicion. “There are no new people in our department,” he said.

“She’s not really new,” replied
Shoulder Pads. “She’s from the Parisian office. She just showed up today. Then
she took off right after the mysterious fire drill.”

“Parisian office?” Jeff stammered. Jeff,
of course, in all his middle-management glory, knew there was no Parisian
office. His eyes darted from side to side inside his face. Without saying
another word, he left his spot and tapped the ticket taker on the shoulder. The
two men exchanged whispers, ending when the ticket taker pulled out his two-way
radio. He pressed it to his lips, quietly summoning a code into the speaker.

“Where’s your new job?” Shoulder
Pads asked obliviously.

I kept my eyes on the ticket taker
and didn’t answer her. A security marshal popped onto our train car and Jeff
fingered me.

“Alice?” I could hear Ben’s fuzzy
voice breaking through on the phone. “Are you still with me? Who is that
talking?”

“Oh, sorry, Ben, it’s just one of
my coworkers. She’s very chatty.” I glided around Shoulder Pads and squeezed my
way through the crowded car.

“Oh, we all have coworkers like
that,” said Ben. “They drive me nuts, personally. It’s like, I’m an M.D. not a
psychiatrist, tell your problems to someone who cares. I’m sure some shrink with
a nice long couch would love to hear all about it for a gazillion dollars an
hour. Call me if you’re bleeding from a trauma wound, then we’ll talk. Am I
right?”

“I totally agree.” My eyes were
busily scanning the train. I was unsure how long it was before the next stop,
but I needed to escape that train. I pressed my body up against the sliding
doors and slithered my hand onto the emergency button. I slammed my palm
against it and the train shook to a halt. There was a long, burning screech
over the tracks that sent all the passengers thrusting forward. The stuffy car
quickly filled with shrill cries of panic and terror amidst the turbulence. The
metal doors popped open and I jutted my neck out to assess the situation
outside. I coughed against the sooty vapor engulfing the tunnel.

“Are you still there?” Ben wanted
to know. “You’re coming through a little fuzzy.”

“It must be my reception. I think
we’re going through a tunnel,” I told Ben, as I peered into the vast blackness
of the narrow tunnel that engulfed the train car. 

“Where were we?” he asked. “Oh
yeah, chatty coworkers. I mean it’s like, take a big fat dose of
I-don’t-give-a-damn
and a cookie and call me in the morning.”

I felt the train do a kick, as
though preparing to rev to a start again. I knew my only option for escaping
was to climb up onto the roof of the train car. I gripped one hand on the side
and hefted the weight of my body upwards. I used the traction from the door
joints to step my feet up onto the car’s overhang. Once I had managed to get
all but my legs onto the roof of the car, the train marshal who had eyed me
inside the car was already leaning out the door in search of me.

“Freeze!” the train marshal
hollered at me.

I grappled with the cumbersome
surface of the car roof, slippery and scaling. The marshal grabbed one of my
ankles and attempted to yank me down. I kicked wildly until he broke off, and I
felt the jettison of the train starting to take off again. The phone slipped
from my ear and I caught it. “Ben? I asked. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here. Just checking off some
discharge slips. So anyway, Alice, I was thinking maybe we could eat Tai food
tonight on our date, what do you think?”

“I love Tai food,” I responded. The
train took a rounded swerve, and I gripped the roof as my body dangled over a
passenger window. “Especially the stuff with little spicy chili peppers. What’s
that called?” I toppled my way onto the roof, sliding my body upwards and
sideways, grappling tirelessly, until I was lying flat on top of the train car.
I looked up and saw the blurry abyss of the sides of the tunnel as the train
rocketed back to full speed.

“I think you’re thinking of orange
curry chicken,” Ben said.

I heard the thunderous clatter of
the train marshal’s boots bolting against the metal roof. How had he managed to
get up there so fast? I whipped my head around and saw him standing behind me
and he was beating a very nasty-looking metal baton over his palm. I staggered,
on all fours, to get away from him. He grabbed me by the hair at the nape of my
neck. I shoved my foot to him, causing him to fly backwards and land on his ass
with a thump.

“No, it’s not chicken,” I said into
the phone. “It’s beefy more.”

“Alice, I don’t think they eat a
lot of beef in that region of the world. Are you sure it wasn’t just pork?”

“You’re thinking of Indian food,
not Tai food. Tai menus have plenty of beef.”

Suddenly I felt the train marshal’s
heavy palm latch onto my shoulder, thrusting me backwards and throwing my body
down so hard it made my teeth rattle. I swallowed a teaspoon worth of blood. I
lifted my cheek from the cold, rough surface of the train’s roof. I hobbled to
my feet and began sprinting and crossing the length of the train cars, over the
perilous gaps between the rickety metal tethers.

“Alice?” Ben asked. “Is this a bad
time? You sound choppy. There must be poor reception on the subway.”

The train marshal tackled me with
his full weight from what seemed like out of nowhere. “You’re right, it must be
the tunnels,” I said, struggling to get my breath out, my rib cage restricted
by the heavy weight of the marshal sitting on my back. “I’ll have to call you
back.”

Now my phone was being stuffed into
my pocket and my fist was aimed straight for the marshal’s face. The punch I
delivered rattled us both. A spate of blood sprayed from his nose and hit my
cheek like hot syrup. “That was my boyfriend all the way in Paris,” I shrilled
at him. “Couldn’t you just let me have a normal life for five freaking
minutes?”

He used his weight to get on top of
me and then he pinned my arms down so he could spit into my face unhindered. I
turned my chin to avoid his slaver. He swiped the back of his palm across his
nostrils to clear away the dripping blood. “Word is you might be involved in an
act of terrorism that happened at Cibix headquarters this afternoon,” he said
in a heavy Brooklyn-soaked accent.

“What?” I gave an insidious smile.
“Did old gray tell you that back on the train? He’s just a sugar daddy I
shorted and he wanted to give me a hassle. Don’t you rent-a-cops get any
training in assessing a situation before reacting?”

We were rolling back and forth over
the top of the rickety car. I waited until I had an advantage and kicked him in
the chest so that he flew back enough to give me time to jump off at the
platform at the Bronx station. I landed on my side and rolled onto the platform
with a thud that felt bone-shattering. I got up and dusted the dirt off me,
dragging a trail of the blood all down my collar. I ran through the crowded
platform, towards the gray-washed daylight that peeked down from above ground.

Chapter Sixteen: The Olympian

R
ABBIT
WAS BUNDLED in his raincoat, shoving his phone into his pocket when I got back
to the hotel room. I thought I had heard his voice from the hallway. I wondered
who he had just been speaking with.

I didn’t trust him.

For one thing, he had tattled to
Motley about my lip lock with Pressley. Second, blondie showing up on time, all
the time, made me wonder if there was a mole in the operation. Rabbit looked an
awful lot like a mole.

“Alice, where have you been? Look
at you. You’re a wreck. You’re completely soaked, and for heaven’s sake, is
that blood on your knees?”

“The subway got a little rough.”

“Subway?” His lips knotted and his
hands cupped onto his hips. “Why were you on the subway? Where is the rental
car?”

“Parked somewhere on Broadway. It
popped a flat in the rain so I had to ditch it.”

“You are so irresponsible, Alice. I
can’t believe it.”

“Spare me the lecture.”

“What about hair dye?”

“What about it?”

“I don’t see you holding any. You
said the reason you had to go out was to buy dye to fix the blue streak in your
hair.”

“I got sidetracked. What about
you?”

“What about me?”

 “Who were you just talking to
on the phone?”

“That was Motley.”

“Let me guess, you were calling him
to report that I had gone rogue and taken the rental car.”

“I was letting him know that I have
discovered the identity of our blond would-be saboteur.”
      

“You have?”

“Yes.” He pointed to his laptop.
The screen was populated by a magnified black and white photo of the blonde.
The blurry image appeared to have been captured that morning inside Cibix. “I
used stills from the security cameras I hacked at Cibix to match her face to a
database of online images.”

“What match did you come up with?”

“A cereal box.”

“A cereal box?” I asked.

“Yeah, as in, Wheaties. In
particular, a box with a cover that was distributed and sold in French
supermarkets following the Winter Olympics four years ago.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Her name is Ophelia Le Fur. She’s
a French Olympian. She won the gold medal in Curling.”

“Why is some French Olympian after
the dynamite stick?”

“The question is why a
disgraced
French Olympian would be after the dynamite stick?”

My eyebrow shot up. “Disgraced?”

“Yeah, shortly after her win, she
was busted in a steroid sting operation. Turns out, she had been juicing when
she won the medal.”

“So, you think she knows about the
dynamite stick, and her motive for destroying it, like so many of us liars, is
that she wants her past kept erased? But she’s French, not American, so what do
Social Security numbers matter to her?”

“Actually, she has dual
citizenship, due to the fact that she married an American shortly before her
Olympic win. Some nobody named Elijah Coke. He was a physician, so that’s Dr.
Elijah Coke. He was the reason for her downfall. Turns out he was her
handler for abusing prescriptions.”

“So, maybe the shame of being
stripped of her medal caused her to go mad, and she is seeking the dynamite
stick as some psychotic retroactive attempt to control her destiny. She thinks
it will somehow make the past better.”

“Either that or she fell on some
hard financial times after being stripped of her medal, and she’s working for
someone who is paying her to find it. Just like we are.”

“Either way, we need to lose her.”

“Agreed.”

I noticed all Rabbit’s stuff was
packed and sitting by the door. “Are we taking off soon?”

“The storm has passed and the
airports are reopening, so we’re good to leave as soon as you’re ready. I guess
we will need to take a cab since you screwed the rental car.”

*   
*    *

We boarded our plane with a tense
silence cushioning the space in between us. I didn’t trust him. He didn’t trust
me. Yet each of our survival depended on working together.

The sting of lights bouncing from
the airplane’s wing was so strong that I had shut the plastic lip on my window
somewhere over the doldrums of the Atlantic. That was also when Motley called.
He sou

“Alice,” he said in that very
precise way he always says my name that send shivers, like sharp pins, rushing
down my spine. “Good job on the servers at Cibix.”

“Thanks, Motley.”

“There is
one
thing,
though.”

“Oh?”

“When you land back in Paris, I
want you to come to my house. Rabbit says you were acting a little
off
during your job in New York City. I’m not sure what’s going on with you, but I
want to watch you for a while to make sure you’re feeling okay.”