by Tara Brown
I sat across from him as Jules came in acting flustered. “I can’t find my lunch kit.”
“It’s on the clothesline outside. I washed it last night.” Fitz made a face. “There was spilled yogurt.”
“You washed my lunch box?” Jules scowled, on the verge of getting upset. “That's weird, Uncle Fitz.” She walked past us both to retrieve it from the backyard.
“Yeah.” I sniggered.
“That child is Pigpen from Charlie Brown.” He rolled his eyes. “You know she doesn't plan to change her hockey socks when she’s older. Like athlete’s foot is some kind of luck.”
“I know.” I laughed as my phone rang. We both stopped and stared at it, wondering why it would ring in the house where all the people who knew the number were. I didn't move fast enough so Fitz reached over and answered it for me, “Hello?” His eyes widened as he listened for a moment before pressing the screen and putting it on speakerphone just as the voice stopped talking. I opened my mouth to speak but he lifted a finger.
“Dear Miss Scarlett, I am sorry to tell you the ship has not come in and the package you were seeking has been lost in Bribie. Mr. Butler wishes you to seek it Oxford style before the expiration of Boston.” The robotic man’s voice paused and repeated on a loop.
Fitz listened one more time and swallowed hard. “This is from Servario. There is someone named Bribie in Oxford he wants us to find.” He chuckled. “I mean he wants you to find.”
I bit my lip, not sure of the message or why we would go to Oxford. Bribie, Boston, and Oxford could all be something. “Bribie is a place, is it not?”
Fitz, obviously still deep in thought, gave me a quick nod. “Australia. An island. Quite lovely.”
“Boston, an island in Australia, and Oxford—what do they have in common?”
“You have to read the code properly. Bribie, the obvious location is a false lead. He would never say the name of the place so obviously. ‘In Bribie’ means there is a person with this name. Someone the Burrow will want. Perhaps an Australian from Bribie in Oxford. The location is Oxford. We know it’s a weapon as it could take out Boston. It could ruin a city. But Bribie is either the person making the weapon or where the person is from.”
“Great.” I sighed. “Why isn’t Servario going after this one? He brings the assets in and we kill the list and prevent anyone from finding the Burrow.”
“Something is wrong.” Fitz’s eyes narrowed.
“What?” Coop strolled in, grabbing himself a coffee.
“Servario just left us a message saying something weird. Coded.”
Fitz relayed the message. “There is someone in Oxford, possibly an Australian or someone with the last name Bribie, who is making a weapon large enough to take out a city the size of Boston.”
Coop’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Yes. Exactly the response one should have.”
My mom sauntered into the kitchen, immediately pausing when she saw our faces. “What’s happened?”
“Weapon being created in Oxford. Servario wants us to retrieve it for the Burrow tomorrow.”
She sighed, relieved that it was something as small as international efforts to retrieve a weapon. “Oh. All right then. Fitz and I will watch the children while you lot get busy.”
“No.” Coop shook his head. “We don’t follow that arms dealer off half cocked. We need more than that.” He turned and strode from the kitchen.
My mother’s eyes followed him and then darted to me. “This is precisely why we don't shit where we eat, Evie.”
“What?” My jaw dropped.
“You have him conflicted. If he was the only one for you, he would already be warming the jet or booking flights. But he worries Gustavo has ulterior motives, as in seeing you, so he is skeptical that this information is true.”
“No,” I disagreed. “He worries because no one tells us the truth on anything, and we are constantly going by guess and by golly.”
“No one can have all the information. It’s too vulnerable then. We have filled you in slowly on everything. Now you know all there really is to know. The Organization is seeking the weapons of the Burrow to launch a one world power. The Burrow is hiding everything that might possibly help out the Organization with that. And we are the middlemen, always walking the fine line between the two. It’s not rocket science, Evie. You are smarter than you act most times.” She walked from the kitchen with her coffee.
I sat there staring at my phone, a bit baffled and a lot insulted. "She's the one who said I should patch things up with him," I muttered.
Fitz wrinkled the newspaper he had picked up as a response.
I wasn't sure what to do about any of it.
11
Z-Apoc
Jack lifted his gaze as I entered the room in the basement that we’d dedicated to the computers. He grinned. “I found Bribie. It’s a middle name. Janice Bribie Saunders. She’s an Australian finishing her post grad in molecular sciences at Oxford. She’s smart.” His eyes widened. “Really smart. Her intelligence makes mine look like yours.”
It took a couple of seconds for me to realize it was an insult, but he had moved on by then.
“She isn't an activist or political in any way. Very mellow. Surfs a lot. Loves the ocean, but even then, not to the point she would wipe out humanity. She seems like a normal girl. She’s thirty-one, been in college since she was sixteen. Finished her first degree at MIT nine years ago.”
“Holy shit.”
“Right,” Jack agreed. “I almost feel bad that she’s too smart for her own good.”
“We live in a bullshit world where everyone wants to take advantage,” Luce muttered from her desk where she was typing away on her laptop.
I sat with a thud next to her. “Do you think this is something?”
“Hard to say.” Jack shrugged. “She has the brains to be dangerous, but her research doesn't suggest anything beyond the usual. Her thesis and studies are fascinating, but I can’t say world threat. It’s mostly cancer research.” He looked worried. “I can’t assume that, when it means she will be locked away at the shrine of doom.”
It made sense. We were essentially offering her a life sentence. It was too much power to be saddled with.
Luce turned toward me, lowering her voice, “What we need to consider is how often is Servario wrong?”
Her sentence gave me chills. He was never wrong. Not as far as we had seen anyway.
“Yeah, and what happens if we say she’s cool and then Boston disappears off the face of the earth?” Jack rubbed his eyes.
Coop came in holding his phone. He lifted his gaze to me, revealing a strange look. “My mom says hi.”
“Oh.” I shrank back before I realized I had done it. “Tell her hi next time.”
“I will.” He ignored my obvious discomfort and glanced at Jack. “What have you found?”
“Nothing threatening.”
Coop’s strange expression lifted and he seemed vindicated. “I suspected. The Burrow can’t just expect us to abduct every scientist who might come across as a little too smart. This is ridiculous and technically no different than the Nazis.”
Luce stared over her screen. “There might be things about her we can’t find online. Scientists are cagey people. They don't want other people to steal their work. She might do things by hand until she knows for sure she has something worthy of bringing out into the world.”
“That’s a fact.” Jack pointed. “It’s all about being the first to write about it. Once you’re published you’re golden, but until then, anyone could take your idea and make it theirs, if they can fudge or steal the experimentation or documentation. The scientific community has a research theft every couple of years.”
Crickets could have started singing right after that as all three of us stared at him, not sure what to say.
“It’s a very big deal.” He rolled his eyes.
“Anyway, let’s keep looking into her.” Coop headed for the door.
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I jumped up and followed him out, grabbing his sleeve. “Wait, we should probably send at least one of us to check her out in the real world, not just on the internet.”
“Evie, I have this. I don't need you back-seat driving.” He walked off, clearly still annoyed about the awkwardness of earlier.
“Whatever,” I mumbled and went back to the room to help organize and analyze the information we had.
After about an hour of it, I noticed my phone ringing again. I lifted it to my face but didn't speak, in case it was another recording.
There was no one on the other line. It was dead silence. I coughed and turned my head so the other two wouldn't see me holding the phone.
“Evie?” Servario muttered into the line. “Are you safe?”
“Yeah,” I whispered as I stood and left the room.
“Why are you whispering?”
“Because you aren’t supposed to be calling me.” On our last mission, he erased my memory and the one before that, he sold me down the river several times.
He sighed. “Are you going to the place I mentioned?”
“No. Coop thinks it’s you setting us up or setting a trap.”
“Are you kidding me right now?” He was no longer whispering. “Is he disobeying a direct order from the very people he works for?”
“He’s being cautious. He wants to know everything before we go in and you never tell anyone anything. It’s always strip and pretend to be a hooker, and then as I’m running and shooting, you explain why we’re there.”
“Let’s not discuss this again.” He chuckled. “I need you there—needed you there yesterday.”
“He won’t.” I felt like a traitor even talking to Servario, especially after the text I had sent. “Call him if you want to talk to him about this. I am not in charge.”
He sat silent, maybe thinking. I couldn't even guess what he did while on the other end. When we were together he would try to do sexual things while he was on the phone. I didn't want to know if he was doing that.
“I am going to call upstairs in the bathroom, the one in your bedroom. Go there now and turn this phone off,” he demanded and hung up. I hurried up the stairs, slipping into the bedroom and closing the door just as something rang in my bathroom as promised.
When I walked in, my eyes drew to the cupboard. I opened it and crouched, checking the bottom side of the bathroom sink. Taped to the basin was a phone, an obvious burner. It was a flip phone.
“Hello?”
“Clearly it’s me, Evie. Don't sound so surprised.” Servario was annoyed, that much was obvious. “Run the tap and listen to me.”
I turned on the tap as he barked into the phone, his accent thickening with his spicy mood, “You and that little shit better have your asses on the next flight to London or I’m going to come there and kill him myself. Which, by the by, would be annoying and a real hardship on me, because I’m nowhere near Canada. The girl—the Aussie—has worked out a plan to build something we don't have the technology to counter. Do you understand that?”
“No.” It was true, I didn't understand how a girl could make up a weapon from Oxford University, oblivious to the rest of the world.
“She specialized at MIT in robotics, Evie. She is working on nanotechnology. Do you understand what that is?”
I patted my lips about to say no, but I did. It was on a list I read once of the possible things that could destroy the world. Nanorobots could ruin the world. It would appear like a zombie apocalypse, according to the article. The tiny robots would use a human host and transfer from one human to the next through a bite, spreading themselves into all the humans. I had laughed, confident it was bullshit.
“Evie?”
“Yeah, I know there are tiny robots that make you move like a zombie.” It sounded worse coming out than it had in my head, which was already bad.
“Zombies? Don't be daft. They’re meant to work like a surgical drone, traveling through the body to repair organs and clean blockages, destroy cancer. It’s meant to function—how can I say this in layman’s terms?—like a remote-control car. They would enable doctors to work on those unable to be operated on.”
“Oh.” That clearly wasn't the article I’d read.
He sighed. “Anyway, the girl has done it. She has created the prototypes and, apparently, they function. Her professor is in the Organization. He’s called her in. She is being picked up the day after tomorrow, in the evening. She’s scheduled to be going on a research expedition, some trial runs on prison inmates. They believe she’ll have the research with her. It's the only reason she hasn't been picked up yet. She will disappear after that, the research will too. She’s cagey. She hides everything and trusts no one. They can’t find her work, and she has insisted on doing everything like she might already be an employee of the CIA. She trusts no one. The professor has clued in because he is a smart man, and she has assisted him on other projects.”
“Why can’t you pick her up?”
“I’m on the team of men being sent to retrieve her. I think I’m being tested so I will be there in two days and trying my hardest to get her. Do you understand me?”
“That you will kill me if need be.” I gulped, realizing exactly what he meant. He was all about the job and his cover.
“I did warn you not to make me love you, remember that. Burn the phone.” He hung up and I hated the ache in my chest.
I clutched the phone to my chest and carried it from the bathroom after turning the tap off.
When I got downstairs I put the phone in the burn box and closed it. I pressed the button and met Jack’s quizzical stare. “Hey, Jack, what if the Bribie girl’s research is nanorobots that are like a remote-control car? And doctors could use them to heal sick people without incisions?”
His eyes widened. “That would be fairly spectacular. Tell me that’s her jam.”
“No. You tell me why the Organization would want that, I don't understand.”
“Fairly obvious I would think.” He scoffed. “In practical application one would treat cancer and save lives. The nanorobot swims through the bloodstream to the sick area and leaves the body through the urethra. This is a basic example of medical treatment. But since we don't live in a world where anyone ever thinks to use medical advancements the way scientists intended them to be used, we have to consider how they would be exploited. In biological warfare one could take a perfectly healthy individual, put nanorobots filled with illness inside them, send them to the country of choice and unleash a drug-resistant form of any given disease or virus, killing an entire population. What I would do is go directly to Saudi Arabia and cripple their economy with a sickness no one there can treat fast enough, but one I have the vaccine to, and later go in and take over. What can they do? Mid pandemic a country is weak. Then all the oil is mine.”
“Shit!”
Luce lifted her brows. “Is this a thing, Evie?”
“Yeah. This Aussie has created this. She was at MIT like you said. She was a robotics engineer and now she is a neuroscientist.” I turned to Jack. “Don't even. I don't know the proper terminology. Anyway, she wants to save the sick and weak and make this a proper way to treat people. Not kill off whole countries.”
Jack swallowed hard. “So she has it?”
“She has it. Servario and the Organization are being sent in two days from now. He gave us the heads-up so we would save her before he has to kidnap her and force her to give them her work.”
“So S is kidnapping her?” Luce asked.
“Yeah. He thinks he’s being tested. He’s being sent in to take her from a test site she is running.”
“We need to tell Coop—”
“Tell me what?” Coop cut Jack off.
“That the girl checks out. She has something the Organization wants. Servario is going to retrieve her and her work in two days, for the Organization. She is the real deal.”
His steely gray eyes narrowed. “How do you know this?”
“
He called me on a burner he had taped under my sink.”
His eyes darted to me. “He planted a phone and told you this, and we are meant to run off after him and do as he has told us to and not question it or defy him in any way?”
When he put it like that it sounded bad, but I trusted Servario. And not because my vagina told me to. In fact, she wasn't on his side.
Coop lifted his hands and rubbed them through his hair. “Okay, let’s see if we can figure out what her MIT years looked like so we can at least somewhat confirm this before we go too far.”
I gave a long sigh, the kind that lets the other person know they have displeased you. He chose to ignore it, and I chose to walk out of the room and book flights.
I finished booking with the Visa debit card Canadians used for banking. It was like a Visa but not. It used cash from your bank account. Our dummy account had one.
Coop entered, knocking weirdly. “Hey.” The funny look he had in his eyes earlier was there again.
“Hey.” How did I tell him I was leaving with Luce and disobeying his orders?
“I wanted to tell you my sister is missing.”
My jaw dropped. “What? Which one?”
“Rachel,” he answered. “It’s what my mom wanted to tell me earlier. It’s why I’ve been so distant. I can’t leave here and go find her and my family is pissed.”
It was perfect. “You have to go. Go and find her. She’s your sister. This could be because someone knows who we are. We need to know why Rachel would go missing. We can cover this. It’s a typical run for us. Get an asset and take her to Japan. No biggie.”
He looked wounded. “You’re just so desperate to get back to him, aren’t you?”
“Who?” I said it before I had really thought about it.
“You know who.” He seemed about ready to burst. “You just want to go and be with him and forget about me and where we are at.”
“Are you kidding me right now? I just told you I like you. I like being with you.” I got up from my bed and stepped closer to him. “I am not thinking about that at all. He’s acted like a dick and hung me out to dry. Remember the phone he wanted so desperately that he left me with James? I won’t ever forget that. He left me. I texted him a while ago saying we were over, forever. I meant it. I have kids and things I need to worry about, and I don't need Gustavo Servario ruining my life more than he already has.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “And now I am being accosted by you because I think we should do our jobs, and I think you’re not doing yours because you hate Servario.”