Agent G: Assassin

by Phipps, C. T.

  “Do you really care about HOPE?” Marissa asked, predating Claire’s question in the future.

  “Claire does.” I didn’t mention Marissa’s own feelings on the subject. “It’s a way to protect her.”

  “Do you think I’d harm her?” Marissa said, deflecting an accusation I hadn’t even made.

  I raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t harmed her more than anyone else on this planet?”

  “I admit I’ve crossed some lines,” Marissa defended feebly. “But it was all for the greater good.”

  “You need to figure out where the line you won’t cross is. A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.”

  “Lawrence of Arabia,” Marissa said.

  I nodded. “I understand where your passion comes from, Marissa. It has taken me years to figure it out, but I know what motivates you to break every single law and code you hold dear: guilt. I don’t know what you feel guilty for, but it drives you every day to get results in hopes of making up for what you’ve done. There is no redemption in Hell, and Hell can be escaped only by doing something neither of us is prepared to do.”

  “Which is?”

  “Forgive ourselves.”

  Marissa and I were both silent.

  “Augustus’s Palace,” Marissa said, taking a deep breath. “Zheng Wei is under an assumed name with his bodyguards in the Nero Suite. He’s meeting with a host of investors to get an extension in funding Karma Corp Pharma for another five years.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  I turned around to walk away.

  That was when Marissa asked me a question I’d hoped she’d never ask. “Do you know what finally pushed Stephen over the edge? The reason he committed suicide?”

  I paused. “Yes. You ordered him to seduce Claire when he only loved you.”

  “Please don’t tell Claire.”

  I didn’t answer before leaving.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Las Vegas’ city fathers once made the mistake of attempting to rebrand the city as a family resort, only to have a sharp drop in tourism. Eventually, smarter men realized people came to Sin City for, well, sin, and made the super-successful “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” motto. President Trust and his associates had taken that view and applied it even more liberally with the Nevada emergency government.

  Walking among the neon-lit costumed crowds of the Las Vegas strip enjoying their Halloween, I noticed the many changes in the city since its renewal. Prostitution had moved from outside the city limits to its interior, most drugs were legalized (with the harder ones requiring a variety of expensive permits), and newer vices had been added alongside the traditional ones. There was already talk of making most of these changes legal nationwide. A populace steeped in vice was less likely to revolt against the continuing chaos afflicting the country.

  Augmented reality advertisements hijacking my cybernetics drew my attention to things my cover identity might enjoy. I received advertisements for memory-implantation and virtual experiences that would mimic reality beyond any home console. Sports had grown more brutal, with boxing replaced by cyber-fights that could end with the cyborged athletes’ Shells in complete ruin. People came from all over the world to experience adult tourism at its most extreme.

  My cyberbrain had access to things regular tourists didn’t, and some of the black-market items on display were disgusting. People willing to sell themselves into bondage to those who could afford them and shows of horrible things that only appealed to a select and sadistic clientele. Not to mention what was done to the hyper-realistic drones who were only stupider than me by a matter of degree rather than kind. Even so, I bought a trio of front-row tickets to the Heart reunion in a couple of months.

  The casinos themselves were mostly a few of the more famous combined with entire new rows of garish corporate-owned buildings. There was the Inferno, the Palace, the Pharaoh, the Kingdom, and half a dozen others I remembered staying at when I’d taken my own vacations to the Pre-Crisis city. They were surrounded by new transparent steel hologram-covered resorts that switched between catering to the lowest common denominator and the ultra-sophisticated based on the level. By the number of flying cars landing at private landing bays and garages, I guessed the high-rollers were grateful to no longer have to mingle with the common masses.

  As if they ever did.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be able to find her in all this?” Marissa spoke over our cyberlink, an icon of a mockingbird appearing in the corner of my vision.

  “Shouldn’t you be diving in the great artificial coral reefs?” I asked aloud.

  “I have a few minutes,” Marissa said. “Someone beat the shit out of my team and their backup.”

  “What an asshole,” I said, shaking my head. “And yes, I have a pretty good idea where Claire is.”

  “How? I’ve been having my people crawl over the city,” Marissa said. “It’s like trying to find a needle in a pile of needles.”

  “I’m just figuring out how I’d kill him with a sniper rifle or a vehicle. Those tend to be Claire’s trademarks.”

  “Which are you leaning toward?”

  I looked to the casino across the street from the Palace and then saw a taller building behind it, the Casino America, which was a weirdly garish patriotic fusion of various foreign ideas of what it was like to be American—in America.

  “Sniper,” I thought back. “I don’t suppose we can get the city’s CCTV footage and facial recognition software to help us.”

  “Not since Black Technology became ubiquitous,” Marissa said. “Hacking no longer works like it’s in the movies.”

  “Dammit,” I said, heading into the casino and passing a few other people seemingly talking into thin air. “I’ll just have to get the clerk at the front desk to let me look.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m going to claim to be a private detective.”

  “How will that work?”

  “I’m going to give them five hundred dollars.”

  “Better make it a thousand.”

  I looked at the clerk at the desk with red, white, and blue hair. “It’s a woman.”

  “Then you won’t need any cash.”

  I didn’t, and I found out Claire’s location very easily. She was on the eighteenth floor in room 1802. I got the key from her, which was all manner of illegal, at the mere cost of promising to call her. Frankly, that was a lot more than I’d expected, given her position.

  “Who runs this place, anyway?” I asked.

  “The Trikuza,” Marissa said.

  “The who?” I asked.

  “An alliance of three Yakuza clans,” Marissa said. “They got in on the bottom of post-disaster United States rebuilding and went from being a multi-million-dollar trio of criminal syndicates to a single multi-billion-dollar entity.”

  “Good for them,” I said. “It explains the Chippendale Uncle Sam blackjack dealers next to the sexy Lady Liberty costumes at the roulette tables. The Yakuza have a kind of unique stamp even when doing other cultures.”

  “You must know different Yakuza than I do,” Marissa said. “The ones I know are more about tattoos and beating people with chains.”

  Stepping into an elevator after its occupants left and shutting it before anyone else could get in, I said, “I need to break contact with you now, Marissa. I need to have this conversation alone.”

  “Because you may have to throw me under the bus?” Marissa asked.

  “Goodbye, Marissa,” I said, cutting our connection.

  I entered the room a few minutes later. Claire had managed to set up a sniper’s nest with her Sidewinder-7 sticking halfway through a circular hole she’d managed to cut through the glass. The fact that Casino American had cheaped out on buying transparent steel like the other new casinos was another reason it was an excellent spot to kill Zheng Wei.

  Claire was lying face down with her hands on the
rifle and her eye focused squarely down the sight. Interestingly, she wore a pair of jean shorts, a leather jacket, and a ponytail, which seemed like it was a costume. It took me a minute to make the connection.

  “Cosplaying as Daisy Duke?”

  “Sexy Motorcycle Girl,” Claire said. “How about you?”

  “I’m the world’s greatest assassin,” I said, shutting the door behind me. “Give or take a few others.”

  “How does one measure that? People killed? Value of targets? Difficulty?”

  “Internet polls,” I said cheekily. “Although if you’re famous enough to be on the list, then can you really be the best at being an assassin? One would think not being caught or identified would go with that.”

  “As pleasant as I find our conversations, Case, I think we should put a pin in this one until I’ve murdered Karma Corp’s CEO. Then we should find another hotel and have sex. That is unless you were stupid enough to identify my room to the clerk, in which case I may have to kill you.”

  “I remind you, you checked in. You weren’t exactly Moriarty in planning this.”

  Claire paused and finally looked back. “Maybe what happens to me doesn’t matter.”

  I paused, trying to phrase my next thoughts delicately. “That’s stupid. Really, really stupid.”

  “You’re wasting that sex opportunity,” Claire said.

  “You have a daughter, a cause, friends, and me.”

  “Also other men,” Claire said.

  That was designed to hurt, but I just took it as a given. I was an android, for Chrissakes, it wasn’t exactly like I was built for jealousy. “Killing Zheng Wei isn’t going to hurt Karma Corp. Not in the long run.”

  “Won’t it?” Claire said, turning around. “Or is that just what Marissa is thinking? He’s the guy who has been bailing out the water on a sinking ship since he boarded the S.S Karma Corp to plunder its treasure.”

  “What an oddly specific metaphor.”

  “A Pirates of the Caribbean marathon was on while I set things up. I like seven the best.”

  “I dunno, I don’t think Shailene Woodley was a very good casting choice,” I said, staring at her. “I do think Zheng Wei will just be replaced by someone else on the board. I also think it’s the perfect opportunity to bring the hammer down on your people.”

  “My people?” Claire said, finally getting up. “My people are dead. They were killed on a mission I’m not certain of the point of. They were killed because they briefly threatened the bottom line of Karma Corp, like the thousands of other people who have died doing so. So yeah, I want to hit them and hit them hard in a way they’ll remember. Can you begrudge me that?”

  “No,” I said, sighing. “No, I can’t.”

  Claire cocked her head to one side. “You’re really terrible at talking me out of this.”

  “Yeah, I am,” I said, walking over to the bed and sitting down. “Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to recruit someone who made his living by murdering people. Indeed, it’s pretty much my number one tool.”

  “Killing people. The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.”

  “No, that’s alcohol. At least according to Homer Simpson,” I said. “If you’re going to kill this guy, then let me help. We can poison him, let him die in a plane crash, have him die of autoerotic asphyxiation—”

  “Please tell me you never did that.”

  “No promises,” I said. “I swear to you, we can get rid of him in a way with no blowback. I’m really, really good at this.”

  “No,” Claire said. “I need to do this alone.”

  I rubbed my temple. “I never understood why people said that.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’ve never stood for anything,” Claire said, her dig sounding a lot angrier than I expected.

  “That’s probably why I fall for everyone,” I said.

  Claire glared at me.

  “You’d think with a computer brain, I’d think before I speak,” I muttered.

  Claire sighed and went back to her rifle. “I’m going to settle a lot of debts with this action. I’m tired of piecemeal strikes against the company. I hate using them when we should try to be tearing the megacorporations down. This company needs to die, for Alpha Squadron’s sake. For Stephen’s.”

  I closed my eyes. “You know Stephen wasn’t murdered, right?”

  Claire stopped while kneeling.

  “Listen—” I started to say.

  “Yes,” Claire said. “I knew.”

  I blinked, then opened my mouth, but ended up saying nothing.

  “I figured it out a year after meeting you. I blame you for making me the paranoid wreck that I am, but it certainly has helped in this business. Plus, I picked up on a number of your hints.”

  “I gave hints?” I asked.

  “You’re not as good a liar as you think when you talk to people you care about.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good thing when you’re lying constantly.”

  I closed my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “I knew,” Claire said. “No matter how hard I lied to myself, I knew. Stephen was handsome, charming, and heroic. A real Captain America type. However, I think I only saw what I wanted to see as he was breaking down throughout our relationship.”

  I thought about coming clean regarding Marissa’s order for him to seduce her. “He had a lot of problems with PTSD that he was dealing with using advanced neurological medications. The same drugs they used to give us in the Society.”

  “Which never worked on you because you’re a machine.”

  “The drugs they said they were giving us. Robots don’t suffer PTSD. The stuff is very good for keeping you functional, but it can cause a backlash over time.”

  “I think he stopped taking them toward the end,” Claire said. “I don’t know because I was never as close to him as I thought I was. I loved him way more than he loved me.”

  I knew that feeling. “I’m sorry.”

  “For lying to me? You don’t have to be. I’m used to everyone being loyal to Marissa more than me. She can twist your head up in knots. It makes me regret ever sleeping with her those times we did.”

  I pushed that thought out of my head. “I’m not more loyal to Marissa than I am to you.”

  “Then why did you keep it a secret?”

  “Because I love you.”

  Claire snorted after a second of hesitation. “That is a shitty evasive answer guys use way too often.”

  I stared at her with the rifle. “It’s also true.”

  “Zheng Wei is coming. When he’s dead, we’re going to need to run.”

  I tried to figure out a way to make this right. I didn’t care about Zheng Wei, but I’d broken her trust, and it filled me with a sense of panic to realize I was probably never going to see Claire again.

  “I was a machine created to kill combined with a middle-aged scientist’s desire to bring back her dead son. I have almost no knowledge of what it takes to make a successful relationship since the one person I tried to love, to give everything to, took it and abused it. Ironically, I still ended up working with her and being with her because I don’t have anyone else I can be open to about who I am and what I am. I also forgive her for far more than I ever should because I’ve done unimaginable things in the name of my clients. The fact I’ve only become less violent and not actually changed means I need that sort of comfort more than ever.”

  “Case, this is not the time to extol Marissa’s virtues.”

  “But you’re the person I want to be with. You’re different from her. You’re loyal, you’re good—”

  Claire actually laughed at that. “You’re projecting what you want to see.”

  “Am I? You’re here because you could form bonds with your soldiers. Your friends. That’s a lot harder for me than it is for you.”

  “Case, I don’t want to be your social worker. I love you too, stupid a
s that may be because I know you love Marissa—”

  There was an unspoken “I love her too” that explained her loyalty better than I ever could.

  “Then marry me,” I said abruptly.

  Claire turned around again. “I…I can’t.”

  “That is not quite the reaction I was looking for.”

  “You don’t distract someone from killing someone with a proposal.”

  “The offer stands either way.”

  Claire looked through the scope, then sighed. “I can’t do it anyway. He brought his kids with him.”

  I stared at her. “I’m sorry.”

  “You deserve better,” Claire said, getting up and walking out the door. “Don’t bring this up again.”

  Only as I observed the memories did I know for certain that not only was Claire dead, but she’d probably been dead for a long time.

  Marissa was impersonating her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Claire was dead. Or was she? I didn’t know with 100% certainty, but I did know the woman I’d been traveling with was not the original. The woman who accompanied me had different inflections, a different body language, and a different attitude about the world. Only by reliving the memories I had of her did this contrast become clear. There was also the rather conspicuous fact that this Claire had the memories of my meeting with Marissa in the basement of the Las Vegas server skyscraper. While not proof positive of who my companion was, it was damning evidence. Perhaps.

  In fact, with the changes in technology, there were a number of possibilities as to who the Claire overlooking my link to BlackCat1’s machine might be. The most obvious possibility was that I’d been hoodwinked by Marissa again, and she was wearing Claire’s body. The dead imposter had been killed because, of course, Marissa had known she wasn’t the real thing. It also explained why she was expressing next to nothing regarding A’s prisoner. That drew the question of where the original Claire was, though the answer was probably just “anywhere but HOPE.”

  The other options were less likely: a bioroid with Marissa and Claire’s memories uploaded to it, and Claire with Marissa’s memories having been merged with her own. The latter actually had some traction, as it wouldn’t surprise me if HOPE’s leader had made it so her knowledge wouldn’t be lost were she to die. Brain uploading was the Diet Coke of immortality, effectively cloning a person while not actually preserving their life or memory. The exception was fanatical groups like HOPE, which could benefit from sharing their experiences. The cause was what was important rather than individual lives.