Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  Boys, she seemed to be saying.

  “I plugged it in using an adapter I found in the junk room.” Erica said. “Once it was powered up, as long as I held the device Sheila couldn’t see what I was going to do. She couldn’t dodge bullets, basically.”

  If anyone in the room didn’t believe Sheila Corrigan was capable of dodging bullets, it was because they refused to accept the evidence, which included extensive footage from the security cameras in the jail. Patel—sitting next to Maggie and thus far unable to bring himself to make eye contact with Erica since the start of the meeting—had presented all of that already. Erica thought he probably felt guilty for having left Erica alone, even though if he’d been there he would likely be among the dead.

  “Why did that work, and how did you know it would?” someone from Justin’s end of the long conference room table asked. He’d been introduced, but she couldn’t recall his name. He was the only one there in police blue, though, so the commissioner, perhaps.

  “That’s where it becomes difficult to explain without going through the deck,” Erica said, looking at Justin, “but I can try. Can you bring up the apparatus?”

  After a few tries, the agent running the projector found the right picture. It was of the exoskeleton, taken after Bernard Jenks had been arrested, but before Erica had begun taking it apart.

  “I was brought here to figure out how someone wearing this could…um…do what Corrigan Bain does naturally.”

  “See the future,” Maggie said. “It’s okay, Erica, I think we’re all past that now.”

  “Okay. What I told Maggie was that it should have been impossible, without a lot of complicated optical equipment, and what’s in this picture isn’t that. I was both right and wrong. It’s not the same thing, but the device on the table is actually extremely complicated.

  “Here’s how it was done. There are actually two exoskeletons. There’s this one, and there’s the one Sheila must have been wearing. They’re paired, so if she needs to get Bernard to move, she can move her own arm wherever she is, and get him to move his arm. So far so good, right? But none of that would work if she couldn’t see the future through the device. Switch to…should be the next picture.”

  The next image was a close-up of the rectangular device in the middle of the table, from when it was still installed in the suit.

  “This part of the apparatus enabled her to do that, but I couldn’t figure out how, at first. Um. Okay, let’s talk about it like this. I was part of a project, a few years back, where we built something to see into the near future, and it only worked because the near future had a probabilistically high likelihood. Changing the future collapses the probability, which means the future can’t be seen, which means I can’t change it because I can’t see what I’m changing. A paradox.

  “That’s how I’ve always explained it, but it’s not entirely accurate. I can only see what’s happening on the other end of the…I’m sorry, I can’t do this without using certain words. We called it a chronoton. It’s a single particle of time, in the same way a photon is a single particle of light. It’s not really a particle, but it worked as an explanation because, well, because the same thing is true for energy quanta. Single, indivisible units…”

  Justin was holding up his hand.

  “Sorry,” Erica said.

  “It’s okay. Just a little slower.”

  “Right. The paradox is only a paradox for us. Corrigan Bain can change the future, and so can Sheila Corrigan, which means…”

  “Can I interrupt, for a second?” a woman named Cindy asked. Erica recalled her name, but not what she did. “Can anyone explain why her last name is his first name?”

  “We think they’re probably related,” Maggie said. When Cindy’s expression indicated this failed to explain things adequately, Maggie added, “Corrigan is the last name of the man who fathered him. He was a soldier, and that was the name on his uniform.”

  “You’re thinking this gift,” Cindy said, “or whatever it is, you’re thinking it’s something inheritable.”

  “Yeah, until we come up with a better explanation. Go ahead, Erica.”

  “What I was saying was, we’re stuck at one end of the chronoton. We’re part of the future, or, or we’re stuck inside of it.”

  There had been math running through Erica’s head ever since she worked this out, and she still hadn’t had a chance to write it down, which was unfortunate because it was going to end up being important.

  “Basically,” she continued, “if Sheila was going to have a chance to see the future through Bernard’s eyes, she first had to unmoor him from his end of the chronoton.”

  This was met with several seconds of silence. She was pretty positive she lost everyone.

  “But how did that help you?” Justin asked. “When you powered it up?”

  “I understand,” Patel said. “If Bernard was a part of the future, he couldn’t change it.”

  “Yes,” Erica said. “Although he couldn’t see that future. The apparatus didn’t work that way. Only she could see it.”

  “You worked all of that out while locked in the closet?” Justin asked.

  “Not really. I’d been trying to figure it out all day; I’m just better under a deadline.”

  Patel appeared to be warming up to the entire concept, even though he still wasn’t ready to make eye contact. He leaned forward, excitedly.

  “It took Jenks out of the, um, the timeline,” he said.

  “The chronoton,” Erica said.

  “Sure. It took him out of that to enable this woman to manipulate the future remotely. When you turned it on, it did the same, and that masked your future from her. That’s brilliant.”

  “Thanks, I’m…thanks.”

  I’m actually very smart, Erica nearly said.

  “That seems pretty useful,” Justin said. “Maybe we can expand the technology and cover the whole city.”

  It was a joke, but Erica took it seriously.

  “Well, hang on. We know what it does, but I couldn’t begin to tell you how it does it. I can’t even tell you who built it for her.”

  This was a not-inconsequential point that had already been made at the meeting. One of the things the FBI did, once they understood that there was advanced tech in Bernard’s apparatus, was try and determine if any official branch of the United States government had had a hand in building it.

  The answer to that inquiry appeared to be no, although Erica didn’t entirely trust this conclusion. It seemed to her, there were enough top secret military/CIA/”deep state” whatevers out there for it to be part of a US program that the FBI simply didn’t have clearance for. This belief was largely informed by spy thrillers, however.

  Erica herself had made a concerted effort to locate any serial numbers or production stamps on the components. She’d also been given permission to share the photos she took with Saito, her engineer at Takani-Ko. He didn’t recognize it, and neither did anyone he shared it with. Saito was extremely interested in getting his hands on it, though, which was likely not going to be happening.

  The fact that they couldn’t properly source the device was a problem all by itself. Bernard’s apparatus was only useful as long as Sheila Corrigan was on the other end of the thing, and since Sheila happened to have committed multiple acts of terrorism on U.S. soil, there was a real possibility that the country was under attack from a foreign actor supported by a sovereign nation.

  Although a private company could have done it, almost as easily. That didn’t make the answer a whole lot easier to take; it just muddied the possible motives somewhat.

  The only thing Erica thought was pretty definitively true, was that the rectangular device on the table wasn’t something that had been cobbled together in a back room somewhere. It represented a great deal of funding, and a lot of high-end science It wasn’t the kind of thing your average terrorist could build from scratch, basically.

  All of that meant it made perfect sense for Sheila to want
it back.

  “What was its function?” the guy who was probably the commissioner asked. “I mean, why was it even necessary? We’re missing two people at this table today, my people, because this woman can apparently walk into and out of any building in this city, with impunity, and kill anyone she feels like killing. It’s self-evident that she doesn’t need advanced technology to accomplish this. I have no idea how that’s so, without invoking magic as a part of the explanation, but leaving that aside, why did she need it?”

  “We think this was a way to weaponize her abilities without putting her in direct danger,” Maggie said. “Bernard Jenks was disposable. She proved that herself when she marched into the jail and executed him. Sheila isn’t.”

  “Dr. Smalls, thank you, you can have a seat,” Justin said, recognizing that they’d drifted beyond questions she could directly answer. “Maggie, how far have we gotten in terms of motive?”

  “We don’t have one,” she said, “outside of whatever platitudes to anarchy Nick and his people came up with. As far as we’ve been able to tell, Sheila attached herself to a group she could manipulate, to give her cover for her actions.”

  “She picked the targets?” Justin asked.

  “Yes. But she never explained her reasoning. Understand that the first thing any of us did here, when we realized these bombs were part of the same case, was to try to establish a connection between the targets. We were never able to. I now think that was the point. It’s also why we’re still facing the same problem. Because we don’t know why she did any of this, we don’t know what she’s going to do next.”

  “We’re back where we started,” George said. George was one of the three FBI agents Erica had been handed off to on the day of the attack. He’d barely stuck around for long enough to leave an impression with her. “We’re under attack and we don’t know why.”

  “Yes and no,” Maggie said. “The string of bombings across the country, perpetrated by the EJF, served one specific purpose: it put all of us in a room for a big, televised event. We interpreted the State House bomb as retribution for having taken down the cell, and that was reinforced when we got the free them message, but I think that was just a smokescreen. That bomb was supposed to be the endgame, and Bernard would have been the dead suicide bomber who took the blame for the whole thing.”

  “What does that say about the Prudential bomb?” Justin asked.

  “I think that was specifically to take out Corrigan,” Maggie said. “He was the one to foil the State House attack.”

  “Vengeance, then?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m sorry, this isn’t making sense to me,” Cindy said. Erica decided Cindy definitely didn’t work for either the BPD or the FBI, so that had to mean she was a politician or something, since those were the only kinds of people in the room aside from Erica. “Are you suggesting this woman conducted a campaign over three years, that was orchestrated specifically to get high-ranking members of law enforcement into the same room as the deputy mayor of the city? And then to blow them all up? How could she possibly know who was going to be there?”

  “We don’t know that,” Maggie said, “and yes, it’s a stretch. It fits the available evidence.”

  “That isn’t good enough,” Cindy said. “The entire state government is on house arrest right now because you’ve got an assassin who can walk through walls. Do you even know if she’s still alive?”

  “She can’t walk through walls,” Maggie said. “She didn’t turn up in any hospitals, and she’s on every watch list there is. It’s always possible she fainted from the blood loss and fell in the Charles or something, but right now we can’t assume that.”

  “When can we start assuming that?”

  “Cindy,” Justin said, “I think we all feel the same way. That’s why we’re having this meeting, to see if we can come to an understanding. I would love to tell everyone the threat is over, but while she can’t walk through walls—like Maggie said—she can do things we’re unprepared to deal with. She could be standing on the other side of the conference room door right now, and we wouldn’t know it until we opened the door, and that’s the real problem. There’s only one person we know of who may be capable of facing her on her terms, and he’s recovering from a gunshot wound.”

  Erica wondered if everyone in the room knew all along that Corrigan had survived the gunshot, or if this had been news to one or two of them going in.

  “I need something, Justin,” Cindy said. “I need something I can bring back to the mayor, or this is going to get complicated. You have no leads at all?”

  “We don’t know where she is and we don’t know what she plans to do next, no,” Maggie said. “If we did, we’d have led with that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Erica said. “That isn’t entirely true.”

  She picked the rectangular device up from the middle of the table.

  “We know she wants this.”

  “Given what happens when you turn that on,” Justin said, “I would think she’d want to be as far away from it as possible.”

  “Yes, except she came for it knowing that already. If this was disposable, she wouldn’t have risked storming the FBI to get it back.”

  “Are you suggesting we use it as bait?” Justin asked.

  “That’s actually a complicated suggestion,” Patel said. “She tracked it here, but we don’t know how she did it. We can’t use it as bait if we don’t know how to disable the tracker inside of it, because according to every piece of equipment we have, there is no tracker. It isn’t giving off a signal.”

  Erica was looking at Cindy when Patel said this; her expression was sort of amusing.

  “She really could be standing outside the door, then,” Cindy said. “She could know where that is right now.”

  “Probably not,” Erica said.

  She put the box she’d found in the hallway onto the table. The thing had been fingerprinted—it matched the ones Sheila left at the jail, which didn’t help since there was no match for them elsewhere—and tested in every way imaginable. Now it was just something Erica carried around with her.

  “She used this to track that,” Erica said.

  “Even though that isn’t giving off a signal?” Justin asked. “Just so we’re clear.”

  “That’s right,” Patel said. “One of these things give off a signal that doesn’t exist, and the other detects the nonexistent signal. We can’t get the one to detect the other, which at the moment doesn’t mean it isn’t giving off a signal. Only that we don’t understand how it is, and how it’s getting picked up.”

  “But, she needs this to track that, and she doesn’t have this,” Erica said.

  “We don’t know that at all,” Cindy said. “She could have another one of those. I get that she’s probably not on the other side of the door right now, but if you don’t mind, I’d rather I was in a different place than that thing until we’ve eliminated the threat.”

  “The point being,” the police chief at the other end of the table began, “we know nothing of this woman’s agenda, other than that she wants this box, so we should anticipate that need accordingly.”

  “That isn’t all we know,” Erica said. It was something at the forefront of an idea that had just occurred to her. She looked at Maggie.

  “Corrigan,” Erica said. “She also wants Corrigan. You realized this the day of the attacks, when you sent a team to the hospital.”

  Maggie…blushed. This was an unexpected reaction.

  “I don’t know about this,” Cindy said.

  “I had a face-to-face with Sheila,” Maggie said. “At the jail. That’s in the report. In that conversation, I inadvertently revealed that Corrigan was still alive. When I realized who she was, I sent members of the task force to the hospital, thinking I’d just made him a target. It was…a heat-of-the-moment thing. She came here instead.”

  “But you had it right,” Erica said. “She told me she was taking care of all the loose ends. Bernard was t
he first, and she said the box was another. Not the other. There was more on her list.”

  “You’re jumping to the same conclusion Maggie did,” Justin said. “Right or wrong.”

  “I don’t think I am. I think killing Corrigan was supposed to be the next thing. Look at the order of events. Maggie says the plan all along was to blow up everyone at the awards ceremony, on live television. Maybe it was. But the plan changed as soon as Corrigan foiled it. What did she do next?”

  “She tried to kill Corrigan,” Maggie said. “At the the Pru. Put Corrigan in a position where he has no choice but to take a bullet.”

  “Exactly. Guys, I think she’s marketing a service.”

  There was a moment of silence, because Erica had just skipped too far ahead.

  “Well that’s an interesting theory…” Justin began.

  “I’ll explain.”

  “I think we can table that for now.”

  “Let her explain,” Maggie said. “Catch us up, Erica.”

  “It’s proof-of-principle,” Erica said. “Or, an audition. Imagine you’re Sheila, and you’re working with this company, and the company is claiming they can provide, I don’t know, political assassination on demand. Something like that; it doesn’t matter exactly what. But it has to be one-of-a-kind. If we think about this as a service instead of a politically motivated attack…Justin, what do you think it would be worth to the military or, or, the CIA, I guess. I guess this would be them, right? What would it be worth to know they could kill anyone in a way that was completely impossible to trace back?”

  “That’s really…Dr. Smalls, that’s well outside the scope of this conversation.”

  “But we agree that it would be worth a lot, right? What happens to the value of that service if it can be proven to not be one-of-a-kind?”

  Everyone was quiet again. Erica couldn’t tell if that was a good sign or a bad sign.

  “After Corrigan foiled the bombing the first time,” she said, “Sheila arranged to put him and Bernard in the same place. If that bomb had gone off, it would have eliminated Corrigan, the evidence trail still would have ended with Bernard, and the proprietary technology on the table would have been destroyed along with it. But then Corrigan foiled that bombing too, so she started cleaning house. Bernard had to die, she had to recover this box, and…”