The Silent Army (26 page)

I can’t easily verify the information you sent, Fawkes. Even if it’s true, this isn’t the grind, it’s the UAC. Robin Raphael is one of the richest men in the world, with a private security detail. Charles Osterhagen is a retired general who heads Stillwell Corps. He runs a privately contracted army. I couldn’t get close to either one of them if I had to.

You are a trusted FBI agent, and, more importantly, you are trusted by them.

You’re overestimating how far that trust goes. Your plan isn’t going to work.

They’ve seen you kill me in their dreams, Agent, and they believe it. They believe that you will be the one to stop me. They don’t think it’s possible for you to betray them. Their arrogance could easily be their undoing.

I’d seen enough to make up my mind; Ai and her people were dangerous. They were a threat to the UAC and the world. There might even be some truth to what Fawkes implied, that the window to stop them might be closing. Still, I couldn’t let the assault happen. The other threat was a possibility; Fawkes’s attack was real.

Call off the attack altogether
, I said.

No. Without the ground assault, someone else will eventually fill the empty seats and take control again. With their leaders dead, though, I’ll hand over the nukes.

I only have your word on that.

It’s all I can offer.

It’s not enough.

Then I have my answer.

They’ve seen this. It doesn’t play out the way you think, Fawkes. It will get out of your control.

They are manipulating you. They’ve seen their own destruction; that’s why they’re so scared.

They’ve seen the destruction of the whole city.

It’s a lie. No matter what she’s told you, she’s far more ruthless than I am. She has no intention of being stopped by me or you or anyone—but they have to be stopped.

You both do.

There was a pause before he answered.

That would be acceptable to me.

The connection closed.

I looked at the time remaining for the scrub. They could be finished any day, but Fawkes didn’t seem concerned by that fact. They were going to miss him, and he wasn’t worried because he already knew that.

It didn’t matter. He was right about one thing: I was out of time. The rat’s nest Sean had stirred up went deeper than anyone thought, and Calliope was in trouble. I called Alice Hsieh.

Alice, I know you’re not Sean, but I need a favor.

Go ahead.

Buckster’s on the run. I need a team covering his apartment.

Buckster’s our only link to the nukes. Where the hell are you?

Following up on a lead.

Everything is secondary to finding that case, Wachalowski. Everything.

I know.

I’ll get Vesco over there.

Thanks, but do it quick. We’re running out of time.

Calliope Flax—Bullrich Heights

The route the old man gave me took us deep into Bullrich, and he was right; it had gotten worse since I left. No one lived down there. Even the dealers peeled off after a while. The streets were full of trash; the shops were shut up and spray painted one end to the other. It was fucking no-man’s-land.

You sure this is right?

Yes.

There’s nothing out here.

That’s the point.

I cruised under an old rusted bridge where chunks of metal had flaked off into the street. Water ran through holes up there, coming down in streams. A tight path led through an alley. Piled near an old brick wall was a burned-out metal drum and some old shopping carts. There wasn’t a streetlight for a mile, and it was getting dark.

The map marker showed the end point right nearby. I slowed down and cut the engine.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “We’re almost there.”

“Almost where, Chief? We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

“The area’s clear, trust me.”

“Yeah, right.”

I looked around. I didn’t see anyone else down there. I couldn’t hear shit over the sound of the water streaming down onto the blacktop.

“Down there,” he said, pointing over my shoulder to the dark alley. I could see trash piled up back there that had been there for years. No sane cop would go near that place.

“What’s the matter, you scared?” he asked. I held out my hand.

“Give me the gun.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You want me on point, give me the gun.”

He grumbled, but he dropped the piece in my hand. I checked it; it was fully loaded.

I fired the bike back up and took us in. When I got to the corner, I saw a path between two concrete walls. It was too tight for a car, but not for the bike. At the end was an alley in part of a used-up project.

“There,” he said. There was an old metal door in the back of one of the buildings. I cut the engine and walked over. The metal squealed when I pulled it open, and rank air blew out.

“After you,” I said. He went in. I kept the gun in my hand and went in after him. When I looked through the back of his jacket, I saw he had a knife tucked in his belt.

“This is the place.” It looked like the guts of a bus terminal, rotted from the inside out. I kept the old man where I could see him.

“What’d you say her name was?” he asked. “The one who questioned me at the Feds?”

“Ott.”

He reached in his coat, but not for the blade. He pulled out a pint of whiskey and took a swig.

“Tell me what you remember about her,” he said, handing me the bottle.

“Not much.”

“But some?”

I took a swallow.

“I got caught up in that shit two years back.”

“How?”

“Some kid I met in jail. He got himself killed.”

It was a long time since I thought about Luis. He’d gone down hard, that one.

“Who was he?”

“Some rich kid. They killed his whole family, then got him too.”

“How?”

“I found him facedown in a public toilet. He almost took me with him.”

I shrugged, and took another pull off the bottle before I gave it back.

“He was okay, though.”

“That’s when you met your friend the Fed?”

“He’s okay too.”

“He’s working for them, Cal. Don’t let him fool you.”

“You’re wrong.”

Light moved past the open door, and a second later I saw a car pull up on the other side of the narrow concrete path. The headlights went out, and from across the way, I heard two doors slam.

“That woman Zoe Ott, she was part of an experiment back then,” Buckster said.

“You don’t say.”

All I knew was I had to go down there. In the firefight, I took off and lost Wachalowski. Goons were torching the place, and I just ran, deeper and deeper in. I never met that crazy bitch before in my life. I didn’t know who she was, and I still didn’t know. I just knew I had to find her.

“He’s been trying to stop them,” Buckster said.

“Who’s ‘he’?”

“My contact.”

“And how’s he going to do that?”

“By finding out how it is they do what they do, and how to stop it.”

“Yeah, I saw the little outfit he had going down there.”

“Hey, you know as well as I do—sometimes the things that need doing aren’t pretty. Someone has to do them.”

“Uh huh . . . and who put your ‘contact’ in charge?”

Buckster took a swig from the bottle and shook his head.

“People want freedom,” he said, “but no one wants to get their hands dirty.”

“Fuck you, asshole. My hands are plenty dirty.”

“Your friend helped destroy that operation. He used you.”

“You got it wrong. I dragged his ass down there, not the other way around. She did something to me.”

Footsteps came up to the metal door. Outside I saw a couple of guys coming up in the dark.

“I’m giving you a chance to be on the right side,” he said. “You want a chance to stop what happened to you from happening again? You want to stop them?”

“Them?”

“This goes way beyond that girl at the bureau,” Buckster said. “They can make you do anything. They can make you think anything, they can make you forget anything, they can make you believe anything, and they’re all around us. They do it all the time.”

He got me there. I didn’t want to believe it went that far, but if one person could do it, why not more?

“Just tell me this,” I said. “When you met me coming off that train, did you do it so you could take me?”

“What?”

“I know about the jacks you had wired up at the clinic. I know that bum was one of them. Was I supposed to be next to him?”

He looked at the floor for a second.

“Yeah. Originally.”

“You knew I was first tier.”

“I got news for you, Cal. It doesn’t matter what tier you are. A nobody is still a nobody. No ties, no job, no friends that we knew about. . . no one to miss you.”

“Then what changed your mind?”

“Your connection to the Fed . . . at least at first. I don’t know. I guess I remembered where I came from. I guess I realized you weren’t a nobody. I thought I’d give you a chance.”

“To do what?”

“Be somebody.”

A couple revivor sigs blinked on in the corner of my eye; then two big guys came in through the door. I could see their eyes glowing as they moved through the dark.

The reminder went off then. The text file popped up and displayed two messages:

There is no door behind the flag.

Leon Buckster is going to take you to the ship. You can trust him.

Right away, I knew it was wrong. I changed the name on the file when I saved it, and it was the same as last time. Whoever was fucking with my head found out about the text file. Someone else had written that note.

Leon Buckster is going to take you to the ship. You can trust him.

I didn’t know anything about any ship. Whoever made me write it wanted me to go there. They wanted me to trust him. That was all the reason I needed not to.

I pointed the gun at the old man and cocked the hammer. Off to my right I saw the two jacks pull guns from their coats and level them at me.

“Cal, take it easy!” he said. “Don’t!”

“Fuck you.”

I kept the gun on him. The two thugs had their guns pointed at my chest.

“Cal, you can trust me. Lower your gun and they won’t hurt you.”

“I think you’re the hub, Doc. I think if I take you out, they won’t do shit.”

I saw orange light behind the old man’s eyes, and I the two jacks relaxed. They put the guns away.

“That girl, the redhead, she’s not the only one, Cal. There are—”

“Shut up! You’re full of shit!”

“I’m not, I’m telling you. . . . For me it started as far back as the service, and that was a long time ago. Please give me the gun and I’ll show you.”

I scanned the jacks. Besides the guns, they each had a bayonet tucked in their arms, and each one had a brick of explosive strapped to its belly.

“You’d never get all three of us, if it came to that,” the old man said. “It doesn’t have to come to that.”

I aimed for his shoulder and pulled the trigger, but he was faster than he looked; his palm connected with my wrist and the bullet blew a chunk of brick from the wall. Before I could bring the gun around, something stung me in the side of the neck.

I turned and saw something whip back into the closest revivor’s arm as it snapped shut. Before I could do anything else, my head got heavy and my legs went soft.

“Sorry,” Buckster said.

I wanted to throw a punch, but my arms were like lead, hanging by my sides. I made it one step before I went down.

“Get her in the car,” I heard him say. The revivor standing over me nodded, and things started going blurry.

“Don’t hurt her,” he said. His voice sounded far off. “She’ll come around. We can use someone like her....”

It was the last thing I heard before the lights went out.

Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo

I’d been staring at the computer for hours, but I hadn’t entered anything. In fact, I hadn’t even unboxed my notebooks yet. I was too busy reading what was already in there. I stared at the screen with all the lights off, not totally believing what I saw.

I thought no one knew much about what happened two years ago. No one talked about it and Nico said it got covered up, but these people knew about it. They knew everything about it. People from their group were seeing the needle heads long before I ever was. More than thirty people saw it a year in advance. They reported in from all over the city, the state, and beyond. They knew about me and Nico. They knew about everything.

Ott, Zoe. Potential E1.

I stared at the icon that represented me, until the heart shape blurred. There were a lot of connections that led there, along with the two who came before me. Penny, and . . .

Hyde, Noelle. Potential E1 (Deceased).

Potential E1. Whatever E1 was, it was important to them. They’d been looking for it a long time. They thought it might be me, but I wasn’t the first one they’d thought it about. At least one of them ended up dead.

I touched the heart with Noelle’s name over it, and a red message box popped up.

Classified.

None of the references to her said how it happened, how she died. There were a few pictures of her; she reminded me a little of Penny, except her eyes were green like mine. In one picture she was dressed up in a suit, with her hair in a tight bun. She had the same tattoo as Penny, the snake around her neck, swallowing its tail.

In the next picture she looked like a bag lady. Her hair was a rat’s nest, her teeth were yellow and brown, and her clothes were filthy. The last picture might have been taken with a cell phone. She lay on the sidewalk, covered in blood. I closed her file.

When I picked up the glass to take a drink, I realized it was empty. I grabbed the big bottle and tipped it until the neck clinked against the rim. I watched the clear liquid trickle in and the level rise until it got a half inch away from the top. I put the bottle down and the cap on.