by Heskett, Jim
“You’re not wrong about that. But he told me to kill her yesterday. I actually tried, but she got the best of me. She could have easily taken me out, but she didn’t. She spared me. She told me to keep digging.”
“Digging? For what?”
Isabel’s thoughts ran a million miles per minute. “I thought this was about me, but it’s not, is it? It’s about her. Marcus wants revenge on her for breaking up his marriage. Or, he's still in love with her and he wants her back, or he wants to punish her, or something like that.”
"Or, it's a combination of all those things. I wouldn't put it past Marcus to be so petty." Jacob leaned closer on his stool. "I know DC is where the big boys play and that's incredibly attractive, but maybe it's time to request a transfer. There's no shame in taking an assignment at a field office in Seattle or Chicago or Oklahoma City if it means getting out from underneath Marcus Lonsdale. He'll kill your career, Isabel. I've seen him do it to others."
She nodded, still tasting the bitter coffee on her lips. “You’re not wrong about that.”
"He's one of the reasons I retired. Not him, specifically, but people like him. People who value their personal ambition over what the Bureau is supposed to stand for. It didn't use to be like that. Or, maybe it always was, and I was too starry-eyed and naive to see it. Either way, the young always eat the old, then the young become the old and get eaten by the next generation. That never changes, for sure."
Isabel rubbed her knuckles into her temples. “I have a lot to think about.”
“I expect you do. I know you’ll make the smart choice. That’s why I always liked you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Because, even though you’re just a kid, you have an old soul. You’re the kind to do the right thing, unlike Marcus and his ilk.”
Isabel stood and offered a hand to shake. “Thank you, Jacob. I have to get back to DC as soon as possible. I can’t let him use me for his personal vendetta, so I have to do something about this.”
Jacob gripped her hand and gave it a good squeeze. “Watch your back, kiddo. There are good people in the FBI. But, there are bad ones, too. I don’t have to tell you which kind Marcus is.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
EMBER
Ember had wallowed in a morning and an afternoon of frustration. President David Wellner had sent out a Club-wide memo declaring there would be a sweeping investigation into corruption across all the Branches. While such a thing could theoretically have a good result, it could also cause a lot of chaos in the interim and increase the already tense situation between the Branches. It wasn’t too long ago that Five Points had tried to start a war. And, it seemed, if Fagan was right about their Branch intentionally manipulating the contract that had started Ember’s trial by combat, they might be trying to launch another war.
Meanwhile, Fagan had been busy with some other project for the Branch. Gabe had been unable to work his algorithm magic on the last call from Quinn. And Zach had been acting weird, not responding to texts, or responding with curt replies.
Such a strange day. At least she’d had a long session at the gym, her first in many days. The step count on her watch was past 10k already. And, she was also having a great hair day today. So, she had to take the good with the bad.
Ember herself had been out shaking trees, asking around, trying to find Quinn. But it seemed hopeless, as no one in the Highlands Branch would give him up or even engage with Ember. It didn’t matter to them that Quinn had civilian hostages. Her protestations were met with skepticism or silence.
Highlands Branch could be like that; aloof, foreign, uncooperative. Ember didn’t count any of them among her friends.
So, since she had one more day until she could meet Quinn at the park in Broomfield, she decided to drive out to Parker and explore the historical archives there. Ember had questions about the last black spot trial by combat in 1971 since no one could seem to answer those. She also had questions about why this trial by combat had happened in the first place due to two assassins "accidentally" being assigned to the same contract.
Ember didn’t know if she would find answers to either of those questions in the Club archives, but it was her best bet. Something had to break her way, after weeks of frustration and no answers.
She parked outside the Parker Post Office, an office building by a set of train tracks amid the perfectly-manicured neighborhoods in the Denver suburb of Parker. The building was allegedly a mixed-use office building with lots of available space, but with rents so sky-high that no business would dare waste the money. Most of the Branches had Post Offices set up like this. Only the Golden Branch of the DAC had a fake front with a full-time receptionist and other tools to make theirs look real. The rest paid their property taxes and kept activity in and around the buildings quiet. A few close calls aside, this system had worked for decades.
Ember walked up to the building and knocked on the separate side entrance leading into the basement. She faced the surveillance camera and gave it a wave.
“Can I help you?” said a scratchy voice from a speaker under the camera.
“Uhh, Ember Clarke, Boulder Branch.”
“I know who you are, Ember. You killed one of our members last week.”
“Yes, right, I did that. She was trying to kill me first, though. Killing her back seemed like a fair response.”
“Please state your business.”
Ember cleared her throat. “I’d like to take a look at the archives. Records from 1971, specifically. My mentor said she would call ahead and clear it with you guys? Yeah? Ringing any bells?”
After a few seconds of silence, the door buzzed, clicked, and then drifted open an inch. Warm air from the inside leaked out. Ember pulled the door back and slipped inside to a dark stairwell leading down, with only small orange running lights at her feet to guide the way. If they were trying to project a creepy vibe, then they had succeeded.
Ember hopped down the stairs to a lighted basement. An older black man sat at a desk on one side of the wide hall, a computer screen lighting up his face. He was wearing a uniform like a security guard, complete with a hat and implements hanging from his belt.
“Afternoon,” he said, dipping his head at her.
“Hello. I’m Ember.”
“Hello, Ember.”
“And… your name?”
“You can call me Historian.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Okay, how very swords-and-sorcery of you.”
“We do like our little traditions,” he said, chuckling. His laughter immediately endeared the man to her. It was thick, like the gravelly bass tones of a jazz singer. “You want to see records from the 70s? That would be behind me, fourth door on the right. But be ready to do some digging. It gets much better in the 90s and after, but before that, it’s like the wild west in those rooms.”
“Right. What if I can’t find what I’m looking for in there? I mean, is there someone who knows everything?”
The Historian shrugged. “Well, you could always ask the Oracle, but you know doing that ain’t cut and dried. A lot of people want to see the Oracle. Not many get in.”
Ember nodded. Of course. The Oracle. She hadn’t considered the Oracle since this whole thing had started. Going to see her was an option, but not a good one, since there were so many complication involved with meeting the vague and shadowy ‘arbiter of Club knowledge.’
Ember had learned about the Oracle from Fagan. Apparently, she was a neutral third-party collector and curator of Club history with a specific focus on arbitrating disputes and answering complex questions. The Oracle had been established long ago when it had become clear that having such a position was necessary for inter-Branch cooperation.
Fagan had also told her some interesting stories about the Oracle. Sometimes people went to see the Oracle and didn’t come back. It was a strange legend, to be sure, but in Ember’s experience, the Club was full of such arcane, muddled legends.
“I wasn�
��t a hundred percent sure the Oracle wasn’t a bedtime story the Club elders invented to scare us.”
"Oh, yes. The Oracle is a thing. We just don't broadcast it."
“Well, I’ll take my chances here. I’ve got all afternoon.”
The Historian handed her a clipboard with a pencil dangling from a string. “Sign in here, please, and sign in the room for everything you check out.”
Ember snatched the pencil and wrote the name Nunya Bisness on the sign-in sheet, then handed it back to the seated man. “Hopefully, this won’t take me long.”
"I'll be here until five. Then, I'm kicking you out because my wife is making lasagna. I will not be late for lasagna.”
“Understood.”
She strolled past him to the fourth door and opened it to a long room lined with metal shelves. Boxes and boxes of documents lined those shelves. The Club forbade keeping records in the cloud, but keeping them all in a paper form seemed so antiquated and basic. A single flick of a butane lighter could wipe out fifty-plus years of collected history. But it wasn't up to her.
Ember strolled along the aisles as fluorescent bulbs ahead winked and hummed. She stopped on the aisle marked 1970-1971 and squinted at each individual shelf.
After a couple of minutes of looking, she found the Review Board record for 1971, spread across three boxes. She carried each box to a table near the front of the room, then began sifting through the paper documents inside. The first box contained files dating from January through March. Expecting the second box to contain the second-quarter files, she was surprised to find that it instead held files from April to December, and the year listed on them was 1968. This box was in the entirely wrong room.
The third box she looked through was full of files dated October to December 1971 — the fourth quarter of that year.
After a few minutes of combing through the early and late 1971 files, she could see that there was nothing mentioned anywhere about a black spot or trial by combat. On top of that, there were also no files here from April through June — quarter 2 — or July through August — quarter three — of 1971. Those two missing quarters were exactly the files she needed. This 1968 box full of the middle two quarters must have been switched at some point.
Ember left the room and crossed the hall to the room with a plaque reading “1960 - 1969,” then she hunted around in that identical room until she found a set of boxes for 1968. But, those boxes appeared to contain the right files for the timeframe. It had not been a matter of someone accidentally—or intentionally—switching the contents of two boxes.
“Shit,” She said as she hoisted the 1968 boxes back up onto their shelves. “Where did you go, 1971?”
Ember returned to the 1970s room and stood at the front. She let her eyes wander over the aisles, thinking of where to go next. There were hundreds of boxes in this room. Those files could be anywhere, if they were even here. She doubted, with Lasagna Historian Guy watching over the place, if anyone had stolen them. So, they had to be here, somewhere.
Ember made a slow march up and down each aisle, noting the year placards taped up at the end of each, and dipping through to check the years and months listed on the fronts of boxes.
Near the back of the room, on the aisle marked 1979 Part 1, there were two rows of boxes on the top left shelf that weren’t marked. Upon closer examination, Ember found a spot on the shelf immediately below, and it was clear that something had once been taped to the shelf’s frame, probably a placard like on the other shelves. The tape was now frayed and black with the grime of dust.
She turned around, looking for another clue. Her eyes went top to bottom, searching the nearby area.
She saw it sticking out from below the shelf behind her. On the floor, a tiny corner of a piece of laminated paper. She picked it up and turned it over to find the word unfiled written on the paper slip. This must have been taped on the shelf frame and fallen off.
Ember got to work, digging through the unfiled boxes. Many of them contained documents that had no official date, like random memos and handwritten meeting minutes. One folder contained a set of letters back and forth between a Highlands member and a Boulder member having a love affair. Why this was in the official Club archives, Ember had no idea. She didn’t have time to go down that rabbit hole now.
Then, halfway down the shelf, she found a brown box. The first document in it was a typed Club-wide memo, dated April 2nd, 1971.
“Bingo.”
She walked the box back over to the table with the others. As she set it down, she mumbled, “I should have known all this mystery and confusion was due to a stupid filing error.”
Her fingers scanned through the aging and brittle papers. A quarter of the way through the contents of that box, she found a set of yellowing pages, including this gem:
Meeting Minutes Summary from April 19th, 1971.
Disciplinary review for Theodore Banks (TB), accused of killing four Club members from the Golden, Boulder, and Highlands Branches.
Club President brings meeting to order. Vice President reads charges against TB. TB is accused of orchestrating a plot to overthrow the Club by teaming up with multiple Branches to start a civil war. TB refuses to name his co-conspirators. Representative from Highlands Branch demands execution. Representative from Five Points Branch demands leniency due to lack of direct evidence.
Fifteen-minute recess.
After recess, Club President proposes a solution: trial by combat, but adding in the “black spot” twist used in 1965 and 1968. Each Branch will send one assassin after TB for six consecutive weeks. The Board discusses this back and forth for ten minutes. Ultimately, the measure is voted upon and approved.
Ember read over the summary several times, a frown on her face. There didn't seem to be a smoking gun here—nothing scandalous to indicate why the black spot had been effectively scrubbed from other archives.
She flipped through the stapled pages. There were ten in all, and she noted some of the pages appeared to have been ripped out of the staples. The original collated document appeared to have had twice as many pages.
Ember dug back into the box of records. She scanned through, looking for pages with staple holes that could have come from this original. While she didn't find any, she did note a folded piece of paper trapped underneath everything else in the box. She grabbed all the nearby documents and pulled them up so she could wriggle her fingers underneath the others to extract this piece of folded paper.
Once she unfolded the paper, she noted there were holes where staples had been at the top left, and at the bottom, the typed phrase: page 18 of 20. But, unlike the other printed pages, this page had pencil scribbled all over it. Much of the graphite had been smeared or faded, but Ember held it up to the light to read the notes:
Post-notes record by Historian (unreadable)-
Two months (unreadable) the black spot decision, another emergency (unreadable) Board was held. They acknowledged that (unreadable) this decision to sentence TB to black spot was a terrible mistake. A civil war nearly broke out (unreadable) result of this decision. The current death toll (unreadable) Branches is at 25.
Ember leaned against the table, reading over the words. So, the last black spot trial by combat had caused something like a civil war. They should have known, with all these Branches involved, they wouldn’t be able to control the outcome of assassins contracted to kill each other in the black spot frenzy.
So why did they scrub it from the records, and why did they decide it was okay to give a black spot to Ember now?
Chapter Thirty
EMBER
She nodded to the archives security guard on her way back out, and he looked up from his laptop as she passed. He was wearing a curious look on his face, brow furrowed. Maybe he had expected her to walk out with a stack of photocopies.
“You find what you were looking for?”
“Kinda,” she said, then gave him a goodbye wave as she ascended the dark stairs and opened the door to a sin
king sun. A blast of cold air swirled around her face, sending hair into her eyes.
Once she had flicked the hair out of her way, she noted a familiar face standing in the parking lot with a lead pipe in his hand. Thirty feet away, hovering between two cars in the gravel lot. He was wearing a beanie cap pulled low, down over his eyebrows. He had on a leather jacket, black jeans, and steel-toed boots.
“Wait a second,” she said. “I know you. Where do I know you from?”
The realization settled in on her. Two weeks ago, while fending off the sniper on her tail, Ember had battled a trio of guys on two separate occasions. Once in the parking lot across the street from the Westminster branch as she had been stalking her target. The second time, in Boulder, as she had been trying to lure that same target into a trap.
All three of them had been from the Five Points Branch, all of them friends with the assassin Ember had killed in self-defense to start this whole black spot mess. All three of them angry enough to make a lethal run at her. Twice.
And these were the same assholes who had murdered Charlie. In a skirmish inside a parking garage, these goons had tried to take her out. Instead, they’d killed one of the longest tenured member of her Branch, a friend to everyone and a man of character.
A good man's life, wasted because these idiots held a grudge.
“You know where you know me from,” he said, his voice strained and brimming with rage.
"You're the one I kicked in the nuts so hard you puked yourself. Where's the other two? I'd guess the one with the broken collarbone couldn't make it."
The guy’s upper lip curled back. “You think you’re so funny, and so damn cute.”