Agent G: Assassin

by Phipps, C. T.

  Claire stopped and stood still. “Oh, right.”

  Eight Atlas Security guards surrounded us and aimed their laser-sight-equipped M25s at us.

  Lucita glared at them as she caught up after a less-than-impressive jog. “Okay, Case, who the hell is she and what’s she doing at our crime scene?”

  Claire wasn’t wearing her usual style of a hoodie and jeans. Instead, she wore the sort of business dress common enough that someone who didn’t know her might mistake her for a secretary. Also, a pair of glasses that were purely an aesthetic choice these days. The fact that Atlas Regional Headquarters had facial recognition software and a frigging AI monitoring everyone who entered meant such disguises were pointless, though. Had she managed to hack the system to get a false identity too?

  “No,” Delphi said in my mind. “I identified her immediately. I just thought she was coming to your place of business for money, a sexual encounter, emotional support, or some combination thereof. She has, after all, done so before.”

  “I thought I told you never to record what goes on in my office,” I thought back to her.

  “I have exceptional microphones. Believe me, you’re not the only one using your office that way.”

  “Ugh. Thanks, Mom.”

  “I don’t know what she was doing up here, though,” Delphi admitted.

  I stared at Claire’s hands and noticed powder burns. I looked back at the closet she’d fled from and noticed an automatic ARC-57, the King of Uzis, sticking out.

  “I think she’s our killer,” I said, holding her by the shoulder. “Which, as the Chief of Security, means she’s in my custody, and I’ll be taking over from here. Everyone get their guns off us, or I’m going to get very upset.”

  The security personnel looked to Lucita then at each other. It made me think I’d have to do more to associate with our staff. I might know all of them by name, but they didn’t know me and clearly didn’t have any reason to be loyal to me. That was the problem when you were a millionaire recluse who hated dealing with people.

  “Go,” Lucita said.

  The security personnel broke up and put their guns away, leaving us and heading back to the bodies.

  “Thanks,” Claire said, taking a deep breath. “I have a good reason for everything I’ve done.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said, not really caring whether she did or not. She could have shot up the Oscars, and I would have done my best to protect her.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Lucita said, looking between us. “Who is she?”

  “This is Claire Morris. She’s an associate of mine and Marissa’s.”

  “Helps-you-kill-people associate or naked-and-screaming-in-ecstasy associate?” Lucita asked.

  “Both,” I replied.

  “Case!” Claire said.

  “Oh, like you’re alone in that,” Lucita muttered. “I do my best to sleep with my associates. It makes them less inclined to turn on you. Well, sometimes more, but only if you’re stupid about it.”

  Oh, Lucita, what would I do without you? Oh right, not be embarrassed and have to clean up as many bodies. “In any case, I think she’ll be able to provide us with information about the situation.”

  “You think?” Lucita said. “Either way, I am willing to let this go if she killed Marissa.”

  “I did not kill Marissa,” Claire said, her voice cold and harsh. “She’s my friend.”

  “Okay, now I’m against her again,” Lucita said, shaking her head. “I suggest you throw her off the building.”

  “Lucita!” I snapped. “Not funny.”

  “Not joking,” Lucita said, growling. “I’m your best friend, and it astounds me you’re still involved with that woman. Jesus, Marissa is like a virus.”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to wrap my head around why Claire would want to meet with Marissa in the middle of a half-constructed Atlas building. As known associates of HOPE, they would have been stopped by security, and the only people who would have let them in were Delphi and me. Hacktivists and cyber-terrorists were not the normal sorts of people security companies liked to associate with. Hell, my association with both would have gotten me “retired,” or at least forced me to fake my death if my non-Letter partners found out about it. “Do we have any idea who our fake Marissa was?”

  Claire looked down. “I don’t know. She and the others were apparently sent to kill me and retrieve the data I was bringing here.”

  The plot thickened. “Perhaps you should explain from the beginning.”

  Honestly, I wasn’t too surprised about the discovery that the body wasn’t Marissa. Death could catch any of us at any time or any place, but I somehow knew she was too clever to be caught in such an obvious way. Cybernetic enhancements didn’t make it impossible for you to be killed, but it did make sure it was much harder to kill you. Body doubles, face-sculpting, Shells, and even artificially accelerated clone growths were all possible with today’s technology. Ryan Gosling had been reported killed like three times thanks to the fact that he’d licensed out his visage to the public. It had become a popular conspiracy theory, but the second time had been real, and a Shell had replaced him in his subsequent movies.

  “All right,” Claire said, taking a deep breath. “I was born in Seattle to a mixed Odawa and Irish family that lived on the border of Canada. My brother joined the army first—”

  Lucita narrowed her eyes. “I meant with Marissa.”

  I gritted my teeth. “She’s a member of HOPE.”

  Lucita’s eyes widened, then she covered her face. “Delphi, did you know about this?”

  “Yes,” Delphi said simply, speaking over the building speakers.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Lucita asked.

  “I am fully prepared to destroy this entire company to protect Case,” Delphi said. “Everyone else is expendable.”

  Lucita looked up at the ceiling. “Well, at least we know where you stand.”

  “On a mountain of corpses, overlooking an infinite vista of information,” Delphi said. “Reality is made of information, you know.”

  “How long have you been a member of HOPE, Case?” Lucita asked. “You know, the organization that routinely bankrupts billion-dollar corporations?”

  Lucita was exaggerating, but not by much. HOPE had been formed in the wake of the refugee crisis and ended up about halfway between Anonymous and the Weatherman Underground. They engaged in actual sabotage and political activity that sometimes-included violence. They also engaged in blackmail, espionage, and the occasional bit of wetwork for hire. The organization, unbeknownst to the public, donated billions of credits in vital humanitarian aid to the most desperate parts of the country as well. None of which would keep the Emergency Government from executing them all if they could track them down.

  “I’m not a member,” I said simply. “Just an affiliate. I—”

  “How long?” Lucita asked.

  “Eight years,” I answered.

  “Jesus,” Lucita said. She then paused. “Marissa is the head of the organization, isn’t she?”

  “Founder. At least as far as I know.”

  Lucita looked about ready to explode. “Why? Just why?”

  I blinked, thinking back to the mission where Claire had recruited me. It had been after Thompson had thrown himself off the rooftop. “I was tired of being the bad guy.”

  “There are no good guys!” Lucita said, shaking her hands in the air. “There never have been. There are only bad people and worse people!”

  I didn’t want to believe that and working for HOPE made me feel different. “If you want me to resign, I will.”

  Lucita blinked. “Case, I drowned a man in my toilet once. I’m not that hypocritical. I just don’t know how you can serve both God and Mammon.”

  I was surprised by her show of support. As much time as S and I had spent together, I was sure she’d have me thrown into a hole and forgotten about me for endangering her company. “God is Mammon when it comes to t
he megacorporations. It’s why I’m trying to tweak their nose enough.”

  Lucita took a deep breath. “White guilt has ruined you, Case.”

  “My mother was black,” I said. Well, the mother of the extremely light-skinned biracial man I was cloned from.

  Lucita raised an eyebrow. “Really? You don’t look—”

  “Can we get back to the fact that people just tried to kill me and Marissa?” Claire spoke up.

  “That’s Tuesday for us, dear,” Lucita replied condescendingly. “Also, I hate Marissa and don’t know you from Eve.”

  “Is Marissa all right?” I asked, realizing for the first time since finding out her corpse had been a fake that my ex could actually be in danger.

  “I don’t know,” Claire said, frowning. “The information I mentioned earlier is all stored in my mnemonic drive. Terabytes of data about all of Karma Corp’s dirty deeds, and hopefully, enough to finally bury them if it’s all released at once.”

  “Karma Corp?” Lucita interjected again. “Your target is Karma Corp? The head of the Corporate Council? Numero uno of the Big 200? The first company-state to be on the United National Alliance Security Council? Ugh, English doesn’t have enough swear words for what I’m feeling right now. I’m going to have to switch to Italian.”

  Lucita let forth a series of choice profanities that somehow still sounded beautiful. It was her command of the Romance language’s epicness that made even variations on cazzo idiota come out sounding lovely.

  “Aim big, and you’ll never miss your target,” Claire said, reciting a line from her days in the Marines.

  “Karma Corp has been a target of mine for a long time,” I said softly. “I owe it many debts.”

  I wasn’t a crazy person and didn’t anthropomorphize Karma Corp. Companies weren’t people, no matter what the law said, and couldn’t be evil in and of themselves—only the people inside them. Most of the people involved in the Letter Project were long dead or had been replaced. Still, the company was the heart of the Invisible Hand and had never stopped its vilest experiments.

  Indeed, with how cheap human life had become after Big Smokey’s eruption, it had gotten even worse. If Marissa or Claire had discovered something that could cripple or even dismantle the megacorporation, then I was all for doing it. I’d probably be able to make a tidy profit for myself and a mega-profit for Atlas Security along the way.

  “What’s on the disc, anyway?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Claire said. “Need-to-know operational security and all that. I probably shouldn’t know it relates to bringing down Karma Corp, but Marissa occasionally lets details slip.”

  “In bed?” Lucita asked.

  I stared at her.

  “What?” Lucita asked. “Spy work should always be lurid. Otherwise, it’s just wiretaps and hacking.”

  “Marissa contacted me to meet her here with the decryption drive. Except when I arrived, it was a fake and she was an assassin. I shot them both up and hid when the security corps arrived. They didn’t do a very good job searching. They seemed more interested in Marissa’s body than in looking for the assailant.”

  “Why were you having your clandestine meeting on Atlas soil anyway?” Lucita asked, as if the Atlas Regional Headquarters were a fucking embassy. Which, legally, it was kind of was, but she was still taking this corporate sovereignty thing way too seriously.

  “We use Atlas Security property to hold most of our meetings,” Claire said. “Case said it would be okay if we stayed off the grid.”

  Lucita turned to look at me. “Case, I withdraw my earlier statement. You need to resign immediately.”

  “I don’t care. It’ll give me more time to play video games and kill people.” I was joking, sort of.

  “I overrule that with my Chairman’s veto,” Delphi said via our cyberlink. “You’re not allowed to resign, Case.”

  “Isn’t that my choice?” I asked.

  “No,” Delphi said. “You owe me too much.”

  “Fine.”

  “Why don’t you have an encryption key and why didn’t Marissa have a copy of the data?” I asked the first questions that popped into my head. I couldn’t think about the fact that someone had very likely intercepted and killed Marissa. I’d been thinking about that all the way over there, and it had left me numb. I couldn’t afford to be numb now. I needed to be sharp.

  Claire rolled her eyes at that before turning to me. “I kept the data in my cyberbrain to avoid the possibility of leaks. If Karma Corp knew HOPE had as much as we did, they’d send the Feds or their own mercenaries against us. They’d also spare no expense in crashing our system with Black Hat slicers. Marissa believed keeping the encryption would prevent me from deciding to use the data early.”

  “I see,” Lucita said. “A nice way to make sure your subordinates stay under your thumb as well.”

  “Says the woman who calls hers slaves,” I replied.

  Lucita shrugged. “That’s a fair cop. You don’t know if you can trust a relationship if they have other places to go, though.”

  “That’s horrifying,” I said.

  “Says the man who lets his employees steal from him as long as they fuck him,” Lucita said.

  “They don’t have to fuck me,” I corrected her.

  “Marissa didn’t trust herself with the data either,” Claire said, looking as disgusted with this conversation as Lucita had been earlier. “Honestly, I think it would have been better to keep it with a third party.”

  “The ‘why now’ actually matters,” I said, trying to put pieces together. “We’ve been trying to take down Karma Corp since Mississippi.”

  Claire slumped her shoulders, defeated. “We’ve run out of time. Zheng Wei is going to be making an announcement in two days. Our inside sources indicate he’s managed to get nanotherapy working.”

  Zheng Wei was the Chief Technology Officer of Karma Corp and the pioneer “visionary” of nanotechnology as a new force in human medicine. Theoretically. Truth be told, he’d done amazing work in micronizing surgery and advanced medical treatments, but nanotherapy had proven beyond his capabilities despite extensive human experimentation. The miracles at Lourdes had a better track record than nanotherapy healing. If he actually had gotten it working, it was the opposite of information that could destroy Karma Corp. It could be enough to make them bigger than the next ten in the Big 200 as well as give them a monopoly on modern medicine.

  Lucita blinked, credit signs passing across her irises. “Seriously, I thought that was a myth. We need to buy Karma Corp stock heavily and get ahead of this.”

  “They’re the worst of the Big 200,” I said.

  “And if we’re to be even half as effective, we need to be more like them,” Lucita said, unashamed. “Nanotherapy has the possibility of ending disease on Earth. Fuck, it could reverse aging, or at least retard it. The number of in-born medical conditions it could fix—”

  “Which is why Karma Corp needs to be taken down now,” I said, nodding my head. “The moment that announcement goes out, it won’t matter how many thousands of people they’ve murdered in their experiments to get these results. The ends will have justified the means.”

  “Won’t they have?” Lucita asked. “The only people who care about the means are those who haven’t succeeded.”

  She had a point.

  “Oh, come on,” Lucita said, shaking her head. “Surely, Case, you’re not going to argue good and evil with me.”

  “I leave God to judge,” I said, shrugging. “Everything I do is based on my own little pseudo-Nietzschean world. Karma Corp is a sick twisted giant who has hurt the people I love. It also made me its slave, so I don’t give a shit about how many aspirins or clone hearts it makes. I intend to take it down, and they can distribute nanotherapy knockoffs across the world after the other companies have looted its corpse.”

  “Says the guy who has a love slave,” Claire said.

  “Heather’s not a slave,” I said.

&nb
sp; “What’s wrong with slavery?” Lucita asked. “I mean if it’s not racial and applied equally.”

  I felt my face. “Stop helping, Lucita.”

  “Sure.”

  Claire smirked. “Still, a badass speech, Case. You know, despite misusing both God and Nietzsche.”

  “You’re going to end up distributing the technology to everyone, aren’t you?” Lucita asked, sighing. “Again?”

  I laughed. “I gotta be me.”

  Lucita shook her head. “At least give us a copy of the information. We’ll get a head start on it.”

  I looked at Claire, who nodded. “Sure.”

  “Have you tried to contact Marissa? The real one?”

  Claire’s expression was unreadable. “I sent calls her way immediately. Nothing. I tried calling you, but you had your cyberlink off.”

  I grimaced. “I had it restricted to Atlas frequencies. Sorry, I thought I was coming here to identify Marissa’s body.”

  “You still might be,” Lucita said, more harshly than usual. “You realize the most likely scenario is those are a pair of Karma Corp’s samurai out to scuttle HOPE’s ill-conceived plan to screw them over.”

  Claire looked ready to go for Lucita’s eyes. Instead, she responded with an icy “I’m aware.”

  I thought about the bodies nearby and proceeded over to the fake Marissa. The guards and forensics teams had taken Lucita’s order to leave literally, and thankfully, I didn’t have to explain why I was stealing evidence. Then again, I was Chief of Security, so I could just order them away. I really needed to start doing my job one of these days.

  “What’s that?” Lucita said.

  “The fake Marissa was trying to give me that when I shot her,” Claire said. “It can’t be the encryption key.”

  “Are these computers operational?” I asked, looking at the various machines covered in plastic all around us.

  “Yes, Case,” Delphi said. “Do you want me to isolate them from the rest of the network?”

  “Yes,” I said, sitting down. “I have a feeling they weren’t here to kill Claire, though they may have been here to steal your information.”

  Claire looked confused. “Then they didn’t know me very well.”