Lock In (23 page)

“You’re kidding,” Tony said, when he realized what I was saying.

“I wish I were,” I said.

“Shane,” Vann said.

I turned to my partner.

She pointed. “Your back is cracked.”

“It stopped a bullet,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ll get the panel replaced tomorrow.”

“Thank you.”

“You owe me.”

Vann smiled at that. “Rees,” she said.

“Dead.”

“How.”

“Grenade.”

“The
fuck,
” Vann said.

“I don’t think she was herself,” I said.

“You think she was like Sani.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do. And there’s another thing. Before she died, I think she was telling me that the night Loudoun Pharma went up she wasn’t integrated with Samuel Schwartz the whole time she was at my dad’s dinner party. She was his cover while he went off and did something else.”

“Loudoun Pharma,” Vann said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“You’re going up against a corporate lawyer on that one,” Vann said. “Good luck with that.”

“I’m on it.”

“Your housemates,” Vann said.

“What about them,” I asked.

“If Rees was integrated…”

“Then whoever was riding her saw them.”

“I’ll call in your address,” Vann said. “We’ll get agents over there.”

“Add some for yourself,” I said. “You were the one she took a shot at.”

“I was the only one
she
took a shot at,” Vann said.

It took me a second to get what she was saying. “Oh, shit,” I said, and disconnected.

*   *   *

“Whoa,” Jerry Riggs said, startled, as I sat up in the Kamen Zephyr. “Jesus, kid. You have to warn me when you do that. That threep hasn’t moved the whole time I’ve been here.”

“Jerry,” I said. “You have to go. Now.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m pretty sure someone’s coming to kill me,” I said.

Jerry laughed at this, and then stopped. “You’re actually serious,” he said.

“Jerry,” I said. “Please. Get the fuck out, already.”

Jerry gawked at me, set down the book he was reading, and walked quickly to the door.

I looked at myself in my cradle, peaceful. Then I headed out the door myself.

Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, having a private dinner with the help gone for the day. They both looked up at me as I came in.

“Chris,” Dad said.

“What happened to your 660?” Mom asked, looking at my threep.

The lights went out.

“Get out of the house,” I whispered to them. “Do it now.” The Zephyr had a night-vision option. I switched it on and looked around. I reached out and picked a knife out of the butcher block. After a moment I reached out and took a heavy iron skillet off the hook it was hanging from. Prepared either way.

I reached my room as someone was opening the sliding glass door that led to my room’s front patio. The man was stocky, short, and stepped through with his handgun pointed down and in front of him. He spotted the constellation of lights that surrounded my cradle, powered by backup batteries that would last for twelve hours. The lights would give him more than enough illumination to put a bullet into my brain. He stepped through, back mostly to me, and raised his handgun. He looked thoroughly professional.

Except that he didn’t check his six.

Or his seven, more accurately, which is where I came in at him from, swinging the skillet directly into his head.

He went down, gun firing two shots. The first bullet punched a hole in my cradle. There was a searing pain in my side as small chunks of the cradle drove themselves into my flesh. The second shot went wide, up and over the cradle to connect with the sliding door that led to my room’s back patio. It shattered.

I got the shooter with the pan but not as solidly as I could have. He kicked out a leg and jammed it into my knee. If I were in a human body, I would have gone down screaming. As it was I lost my balance and fell, dropping the skillet.

I fell and he rose, lining up another shot. I took the knife I still had in my hand and jammed it hard into the top of his boot. He screamed and leaped back, grabbing at the knife to remove it.

I jumped up to push him further off balance and he wheeled the gun up at me, firing.

I felt the bullet enter my threep on my left waist, tearing down through the leg. A maintenance alert immediately popped into my field of view, telling me that I had entirely lost control of my left leg. I knew that because I fell face-first onto the room tiles, cracking the faceplate of the Zephyr as I did so.

I rolled and looked up to see the man leaning up against the doorframe of my room, keeping his weight off his injured foot, lining up his shot. The knife was still in his foot and the skillet was behind me. There was no way I was going to stop him in time.

“Hey!” my father said, and the man turned just in time to take a shotgun blast in the side.

The shotgun blast took me by surprise, but probably less than it surprised my assassin. He flew straight out of the doorframe, spinning, landing facedown less than a foot from me. He didn’t groan or breathe.

He was dead.

“Chris!” Dad’s voice.

“I’m all right,” I called back. “Both of me. One more than the other.” I gathered my useless leg up behind me and sat up.

Mom ran up, flashlight in hand, flashing it in my eyes, blinding me. I dialed my eyes back to normal mode. “Throw me the flashlight,” I said.

She did. I ran it up and down the assassin. There was a gaping hole where a few of his ribs used to be. Dad got him at pretty close range.

“Is he dead?” Mom asked.

“He’s dead,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure,” I said.

“Jesus,” Dad said. “I just killed a man.”

“Yeah, you did,” I said. I aimed my flashlight over at Dad. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you just ended your Senate run.”

Dad didn’t have anything to say to that. I think he might have been a little bit in shock.

I took the body and rolled it over. Whoever it was, he was young, dark-haired, and dark-eyed.

“Who is he?” Dad asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why would someone want to kill you?” Mom asked.

“I’m an FBI agent,” I said.

“It’s your third day on the job!”

“Fourth,” I said. I was feeling a little punchy myself. I’d had a long day. “Mom. Dad. I need you to do something for me. When the police come, the story needs to be that this was a house robbery gone wrong. Tell Jerry that’s the story too.”

“He’s in your room,” Dad said. “Your threep has been shot.”

“I came home for dinner with you two,” I said. “We heard noises. I insisted on taking point because I’m the FBI agent.”

Dad looked dubious. “Come on, Dad,” I said. “You’re one of the most famous men on the damn planet. I think you can sell that story.”

“Why do you need us to tell this story?” Mom asked.

I looked over at the dead man in the room. “Because I need the person who did this to believe I don’t know what he’s up to.”

“Chris,” Mom said. “The man who did this is dead.”

“That’s exactly what I want him to think,” I said.

Mom looked at me like I was nuts.

My field of vision lit up with something other than a maintenance alert. It was Klah Redhouse. I told my parents to hold on and I took the phone call.

“You okay?” Klah asked. My punchiness was apparently evident by voice alone.

“Ask me that tomorrow,” I said.

“I did what you asked and looked through the Nation’s medical records,” Redhouse said. “I got clearance from President Becenti.”

“What did you find?”

“There were two people who matched what you were looking for,” Redhouse said. “One of them was a woman, Annie Brigmann. She died three years ago. The man she was driving with fell asleep with her in the car and drove off the road. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The car rolled over her.”

“The other one?”

“His name is Bruce Skow,” Redhouse said. “I tried to look him up. He went missing from his home about three months ago.”

“Hold on a second,” I said. I looked over to my assassin, took a picture of his face, and sent it off to Redhouse. “Tell me if that’s him,” I said.

“That looks like him,” Redhouse said. “You know him?”

“He’s in my parents’ house right now,” I said. “Dead.”

“That can’t be coincidence,” Redhouse said.

“No,” I said. “No, it can’t.”

“What do you want me to do with this?” Redhouse asked.

“I need you to wait for me,” I said. “It won’t be long. I just need a little time.”

“You have earned credit,” Redhouse said. “You’ve got time.”

“Thanks,” I said, and disconnected. I could hear the sirens coming up the driveway.

Chapter Nineteen

A
N HOUR WITH
the Loudoun County sheriffs, who seemed delighted to buy into the “home robbery gone wrong” story. I left just as the media, and Dad’s media people, started to arrive. That was something they could handle. At some point I would need the FBI to take possession of Skow’s body, because I needed to confirm what was in his head. I would worry about that later.

My threep in D.C. was where I had left it, and had a police guard, although whether it was a guard or a cop waiting to arrest me wasn’t clear for the first couple of minutes. A diagnostic showed that the damage to the threep from the bullet into the back was worse than I originally thought, and I had a couple of hours before it locked up entirely. I reflected on the fact that in a single day I had managed to seriously damage three separate threeps.

An hour arguing with Trinh and the Metro police about having Rees’s body released to the FBI. The point that Rees had just attempted to assassinate an FBI agent did not seem to convince Trinh all that much. Finally had to resort to having people over my head at the Bureau go over her head in the Metro police. By the time I was done Trinh no longer wanted to be my friend, ever. Suited me.

Another hour with the FBI recounting the Rees attack, making up a suitable lie about leaving the scene to check in on my parents and otherwise catching up my place of employment with the day’s events. I focused on the Rees attack, rather than the whole day. Did not volunteer to speculate on causes, and no one asked me to. For now Rees’s attack was being treated like a single event, unrelated to anything else me and Vann were doing. This also suited me.

Finished up just as my threep ground to a halt. Managed to get to my desk. I would have to schedule for the local Sebring-Warner dealership to pick it up for repair tomorrow. In the meantime I checked the inventory for visitor threeps I could use.

There were none. We had called in reinforcements for the march. Visiting agents were borrowing the five threeps we had on hand. Fine, I thought, and started looking for rentals.

There were none. The march meant that every rental threep in the District, Maryland, and Northern Virginia was rented through Monday. The closest rental threep available was in Richmond. It was a Metro Junior Courier.

“The hell with this,” I said, and finally exercised my rich-person privileges. I called up my Sebring-Warner salesman on his personal number and told him that if he could get to his store and have a threep ready for me in forty-five minutes, I would pay full price plus an extra five thousand as a tip for dragging him out of whatever Adams-Morgan singles pit he was currently casting about in.

An hour later I walked out of the D.C. Sebring-Warner dealership in a 325K—a few steps down from the 660XS but at this point it seemed likely I would have it for about a day before I completely trashed it in the line of duty—and took a cab to Georgetown Hospital, calling Vann to let her know I was on my way, and in a new threep.

I found her in the emergency room, arm in a sling, arguing with an orderly.

“We need to have you in the wheelchair until you exit the building,” he said.

“I was shot in the shoulder, not the legs,” she said.

“It’s hospital policy.”

“I can’t move this arm, but the rest of me works fine, so if you want to try to stop me, see where it gets you. The good news is, you’re already at the hospital.” She walked off, leaving the annoyed orderly behind.

“Vann,” I said.

She looked over at me, taking in the new threep. “Shane?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Prove it.”

“I royally pissed off Trinh tonight,” I said. “I think she hates me more than she hates you.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Vann said. “But if you got her even halfway there I’ll buy you a drink.”

“I don’t drink,” I said.

“Good,” Vann said. “Then
you
buy
me
a drink. Come on. I know a bar.”

“I don’t really think you should be hitting the bars tonight,” I said. “You have a hole in your shoulder.”

“It’s a scratch,” Vann said.

“A hole in your shoulder from a
bullet,
” I said.

“It was a small bullet,” Vann said.

“Fired by someone trying to kill you.”

“All the more reason I need a drink.”

“No bars,” I said.

Vann looked at me sourly.

“Let’s go back to my place,” I said.

“Why would I want to do that,” Vann said.

“Because we have to catch up,” I said. “And because there are agents there watching over the place, so you won’t be killed in the night. I have a couch you can sleep on.”

Vann continued to look unconvinced.

“And we’ll stop on the way to get a bottle of something,” I said.

“Better,” she said.

*   *   *

I entered my town house with my public ID up so that my housemates wouldn’t panic when they saw me. Tayla came over and stopped when she looked at Vann.

“They let you out,” she said.

“It’s more like I didn’t let them keep me in,” Vann said.

Even without facial expression I could sense disapproval radiating from Tayla, but then she let it go. “You two need to access the news,” she said.

“I’m not sure about that,” I said.

“They have a video message from Brenda Rees,” she said. “It went live on the net just before she shot at Agent Vann.” She pointed to the living room. “We have a monitor there for guests.”