Wow, that was an awesome put-down of conventional society. I didn’t have a rebuttal other than, “If the Society was so awesome, why was it so easy to bring down? The truth needed to be free.”
“What did that get us?” A asked, gesturing with his head to the hole in the window. “The rich are richer than ever while the poor are even more destitute. Do you know why that is?”
I hesitated to make fun of him again. “Because the rich have money and can make sure it stays that way?”
A smiled. “Because the poor are stupid. That’s why they’re poor.”
“The game was rigged from the start,” I said.
“So you broke the board,” A said, laughing. He stood right in front of me with his weapon. One powerful enough to blow a hole in my chest even with the armor in my suit and cybernetics. I suspected, by the way Zheng Wei’s head had exploded, it was also loaded with grenade ammunition. “Or you tried to. That’s the one thing Marissa understood that you didn’t. You can only game the system, not stop playing.”
Wow, he didn’t know me at all. “Yeah, that’s me. I’m the revolutionary. That’s why I’m wearing a ten-thousand-dollar suit I’m going to have to burn when I get back to my penthouse, mistress, and private jet. What the hell is wrong with people that they think I’m trying to be the good guy in all this?”
“The fact that every time something gets put in front of you, you fuck things up,” A said, shaking his head. “We could have avoided all this.”
“You would have betrayed me and killed me if I followed your script,” I said, frowning. “Did you really think I didn’t realize that?”
A narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t used to people knowing how the game was played. Maybe that was annoying him—that I wasn’t stupid like all the other people he’d manipulated or intimidated over the years. People he inevitably betrayed and murdered once he was done. It made me wonder just what his body count as a member of HOPE was like. I liked to think Marissa had been a moderating influence on him, but I just didn’t know anymore.
Instead of answering my statement, he kept his pistol squarely aimed at my chest. “I have your woman. Even if she’s not Marissa, she has value to you, and that means she is worth bartering.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “She’s not my woman. I swear, it’s like I’m in a bad crime novel here.”
“She has suffered because of her deception,” A said, his voice accenting the third word. “Badly.”
I paused, suddenly no longer in a joking mood. “What have you done to her?”
I cursed myself for revealing she wasn’t Marissa. I’d been so damn cavalier about things I hadn’t considered how he might react to that revelation. A had some respect for Marissa—God only knew why—and that had kept Claire safe.
“What have you done to her?” I repeated.
“Punished,” A said simply. “She will survive, however, if she receives the proper care. That is dependent on your cooperation.”
I needed to find out where the hell she was. “What do you want?”
“The Black Dossier.”
I knew this was a bad idea, but I had to try. “Nanotherapy is a bust. It doesn’t work.”
A didn’t respond for a second. “I will get the fix for my condition from you and Delphi then. She will give me whatever I want in exchange for you.”
“So, I’m a hostage now?” I asked.
“No,” A replied. “I do not intend to let you live.”
Well, that was direct. “Kind of inclines me not to obey, doesn’t it?”
“Humans will obey to buy them more seconds of life,” A said. “That’s your failing. You’re very much like them.”
“Thank you,” I said.
A aimed his gun at my head, keeping it extremely close. “I could kill you at any moment, G. You realize that, right?”
“Yes, but you’re not going to do so because the Black Dossier is in my brain,” I said, replying. “Which you might have gotten from me if you hadn’t acted like a complete nutjob from our reunion until today.”
A sneered. “You were always my enemy, G. You sought to cut me out of my—”
“Stop,” I said, raising a hand. “A, if you had come to me in the past fifteen years, I would have given you stock options and a place within Atlas. Instead, you’ve been hanging around Marissa and working for god knows who else.”
“You think I’m a monster,” A said. He hesitated. “A creature unworthy of you and your company. Don’t deny it. You’d have tried to kill me.”
I had him off balance now. The revelation about nanotherapy had shaken him, though I could barely tell given he had the demeanor of a department store mannequin. Every plan he’d made up to this point was completely shot to hell. That meant he was acting on instinct now, and I potentially had him.
Or he’d just kill me and start over somewhere else. It stunned me that the man resented me the way he did. I hadn’t thought of A in years, but it was clear he’d been thinking of me damn near constantly the past decade and a half.
“No,” I said. “I would have put that monstrousness to good use because that’s what armies need. Mind you, I would have tried to reign in some of your quirks. By the way, are there any Blackbriar soldiers alive out there?”
A looked back to the door. “No.”
A had made the mistake I’d expected him to. One of two, in fact, with the second being he would try and hack my brain to get the Black Dossier versus try to negotiate with me. In his moment of distraction, I knocked away his gun. I kneed him in the stomach, then punched him with every bit of strength in my body. It was like hitting a brick wall. Still, I managed to grab the A7-Striker in his hands before pulling it from his grip.
A looked up at me with fury in his eyes. “That was foolish.”
I tried to shoot him with the weapon, but the barrel was too long. Instead, he knocked it from my hands before headbutting me in the face. What followed was one of the nastiest beatings I’d received in my life. I’d like to say I gave as good as I got, but that wasn’t true. Hell, I didn’t even manage to land a single blow before A threw me over his shoulder and smashed me through the table holding the sushi platter.
A placed his boot on my neck before taking the fusion pistol from my jacket. “What is this, Han Solo’s gun?”
“I know!” I said, coughing as he leaned tighter on my windpipe. Every word came out in a raspy hiss. “I can’t believe he spent money on that.”
I just needed him to try to break into my brain; then everything would go right. Inside, I’d had the Turing Society prepare a virus that would tear through A’s memories and shut him down permanently. It would also give us access to everything he knew and let us put this nightmare to rest. It took a lot of trust to assume the Turing Society wouldn’t put spyware or a shutdown code in me as well, but I was out of options.
A looked down at me, and I expected him to start rifling through my memories at any second. “What’s your game, G?”
“What?” I asked, internally panicking.
“You always have an angle,” A said, clenching his teeth. “Always some plan or way of talking yourself out of trouble. The fact you’re not trying to means there’s something going on that I don’t know about.”
Dammit! Why did he have to be smarter than most idiots I dealt with? “You’re right, A, I do have an angle. It’s to wait for you to realize you’ve been boxed in and have been from the beginning. As long as I have the Black Dossier, you’ve got no moves to play but to do exactly what I say.”
I gave myself a fifty-fifty chance of being killed right then and there. However, those were the best odds I had at this moment.
A responded by aiming the fusion gun at my head. “Ever had your face melted clean off? I’m interested if you’ll bleed red or white. All those new cybernetics just aren’t the same as what Doctor Gordon made us with.”
I grinned. “Always a follower. Never a leader. Even now you’re chasing your old masters’ will. You don’t have
the stomach to command others. You wouldn’t even know what to do with the dossier if you had it.”
A’s eyes stare turned cold and empty before he tossed the fusion pistol away, stepped off me, grabbed me by the shirt, then ran to smash me up against the wall. He held me up by my face, threatening to crush me with his fingers. “I am going to rip every single secret out of your mind, then make sure the people you love die horribly. I’m going to start with that bitch’s daughter, who I’ll sell to fucking sex slavers.”
I felt him inside my brain as he hooked up. He was going to brute force his way past my firewall, but I just dropped it and let everything download.
A’s eyes widened. “You son of a bitch.”
“‘Fraid so,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “You got punked.”
I then delivered a knee to his groin before he dropped me and started feeling his head like it was on fire. He thrashed around the room and screamed. I imagined him trying to purge the files from his mind with every trick up his sleeve.
It wouldn’t work, though.
I didn’t give him a chance and grabbed the fusion pistol before firing a single blast into his chest. I regretted not being able to see his face as his body exploded into pieces of flaming synth-flesh mixed with cybernetic limbs.
“Please tell me you got that,” I said, sending my words to Barbara.
“Yes,” Barbara said, communicating via our infolink. “We got everything.”
“His base?”
“Yes. It’s downtown in the industrial zone.”
I looked down at the dead form of Zheng Wei, then at the severed head of A. The best assassin of the International Refugee Society was nothing more than a burning fleshless skull of plastic, metal, and synth flesh. His eyes were the only part of his body that were undamaged, staring forward and blinking with half-melted eyelids. Somehow, the skeletal jaw and metal teeth contorted themselves into a grin despite his decapitation, and there was a look of approval on his face.
It sickened me.
I nodded. “Then I have an appointment to keep with Claire.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I stole A’s air car, which I managed to hijack despite the fact the thing was coded to his biometrics. The thing was a cherry red Mercedes Falcon 2040, and I had to wonder if the concept of “covert agent” had just simply fallen off his radar. Then again, what did it say about Agent A that he’d spent the past fifteen years apparently driving around in a top-of-the-line sports car killing people, and I hadn’t noticed him?
Or Delphi?
Yeah, I wasn’t going to think too hard about that, or the results would depress me. In any case, I took the vehicle to the industrial district, even though it stood out like a sore thumb. I just hoped no one decided to knock it out of the sky with a stinger missile or laser-guided rocket. I could have probably gotten my people to handle the last bit of my “adventure,” but I wanted to see this through to the end.
The industrial districts of Los Angeles were a place I’d never been before. Not unless you counted my earlier mad flight through them tonight. The construction companies Atlas had hired and worked with made sure most of the facilities were automated and didn’t require anything more than a minimum of human supervision.
They worked day and night, producing everything from electronics to steel girders, which were almost always shipped out of the country on boats to China or on trains to Canada. Much of the United States economy was subordinated to repaying the interest on the massive debt it had to other nations, which still was necessary to keep things from collapsing. Even if our nation were to become self-sufficient again, I wasn’t sure if we wouldn’t be kept underfoot with unequal treaties and two-thirds of the Big 200 companies milking every credit from us while funneling them back to their home nations.
Well, turnabout was fair play, I supposed.
The bleak industrial spires loomed over my vehicle as I kept the headlights off and stuck to the shadows. A’s air car had quite a few enhancements. James Bond was apparently a favorite of all Letters, since the car also contained a communicator that transmitted on a low-frequency broad pattern (whatever the hell that meant), which kept people from following the signal back to its source. I made use of that as I approached A’s refuge—hoping it wasn’t too late to pull a happy ending from all this.
“So the board of directors actually went for it?” I asked S’s image on the dashboard vidscreen beside the air car’s controls.
“Barbara provided the Black Dossier and information for us to force Karma Corp’s hand. They assumed you killed Zheng Wei because he wouldn’t cooperate.”
I grimaced. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“We may have to fake your death,” S said.
“I hope you’re kidding.”
“You barely exist now,” S said, shrugging. “But I think I might be able to negotiate that down if I inform them A was the one who actually killed Zheng Wei and you killed him. It’s the kind of useful lie this situation warrants.”
“But it’s the truth,” I said, staring forward as I drove on manual even though I was having a conversation with her.
“I know, but somehow they’re still likely to buy it,” S said, sarcastically. “You’ve made us the kind of deal that has the potential to dramatically increase Atlas Security’s resources.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “Yes, Samantha, that’s the reason I did this.”
“Who knows why you do whatever you do. Who knows why anyone does?” S said. “I believe we make all our decisions based on instinct, and consciousness is just a trick. We’re just observers of our own selves.”
I turned my head to look down at the video. “That’s a depressing thought.”
“Only if you believe in free will. I don’t,” Samantha said.
I paused. “I’m sorry about A.”
“No you’re not,” S said. “No one is. He died alone and unmourned at the hands of someone who was not stronger or smarter but sneakier.”
“Thank you, I think,” I muttered.
“It wasn’t a compliment. My only problem is we’re one less in existence,” S said. “Eventually, we’ll all be gone.”
“I’m not so sure,” I replied. “The Black Dossier said they’d already created an entirely new line of assassins for Karma Corp. They’re working on trying to reverse engineer the tech and make it cheaper. We could be looking at a whole new race of slaves in the coming decades.”
“I doubt it,” S said.
“You don’t think people will want to manufacture more of us?” I asked.
“I do. I just think the poor will always be cheaper and replicate themselves for free,” S replied. “They could take your furniture, Heather, and upgrade her for all the sexiness for half the cost of making one of us.”
“That’s unfair.”
“Is it?” S asked. “You know she’s a spy sent by Lucita, right? Someone to report on you so no one else can.”
“I did not,” I said, unsurprised at this point.
“Well, there you go,” S said. “The only people you can trust in this world are me and Lucita.”
“Except you both just demonstrated why I can’t,” I said, chuckling. “Is there anything else I should know?”
S’s expression turned serious. “I’ve put out an order for terminating Marissa’s life. I’m paying for the contract myself. You realize you have to eliminate her, right?”
I didn’t respond.
“G.”
“Case,” I said, sighing. Even if I thought of her as S instead of Samantha. G wasn’t who I was. G was never who I was.
“That’s your prerogative,” I replied.
S slumped her shoulders. “Even after all this time?”
“Judge not lest you be judged,” I said, shrugging. It was an odd statement given I was sure I’d long since passed the point Saint Peter would turn me away at the Pearly Gates. I’d made my choice, though, and wasn’t afraid of the consequences. “Never mind abo
ut her, though. I’m more worried about Claire now.”
“Do you love her?” S asked. “Because everything you believed about her was a lie too.”
“There’s a lot of that going around.”
“Truth and fact are fundamentally different things,” S said. “Fact is something that is immutable, but truth is something decided by the heart.”
“Thank you, Doctor Jones.”
“We’ve wrapped up HOPE and offered jobs to most of the more pragmatic members,” S said. “The organization can’t be allowed to continue if you want to survive this. We can offer Claire a position, too. One where she’d be able to be with you.”
“Are you playing matchmaker?”
“You are the loneliest person I know, Case. Which is weird because you don’t have to be. You are the Tin Man with a heart.”
I frowned. “Why does everyone keep saying that?”
“Because it’s true.” S blinked. “Don’t get yourself killed. We’ve got James removing the pathways Marissa used to compromise Delphi. It’ll take about three months before she’s operational again, and your deal came at just the right time to keep us solvent. You don’t need to go into this factory alone. I can get an army to back you up.”
“I don’t need an army,” I said, reaching over and switching off our infolink.
Claire and I didn’t have a future. Too many lies had passed between us. That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try to save her, though. Assuming she was still alive. If she wasn’t … well, I’d made a point to ask the Turing Society to make sure her daughter, Fiona, was safe. I didn’t know what I was going to find in A’s safehouse, but I had a feeling it was going to be awful.
The actual building was an obelisk-shaped water treatment plant that purified ocean water by the hundreds of millions of gallons every day before bottling it for the rest of the world at a reasonable profit. Enormous piles of toxins, salt, and garbage lay along the highway leading up to the building. Massive tanks were visible on its side, and hundreds of pipes covered in catwalks. It stood out like a sore thumb even in the enormous collection of metal buildings surrounding me.
Agent G: Assassin Page 22