“You should kill Persephone,” Marissa said, surprising me. “And Nechayev.”
I blinked, surprised by this line of questioning. I’d expected something related to having sex with Lucita, which showed I’d underestimated Marissa.
“Oh?” I asked. “Why?”
“Persephone has access to all of the Society’s former resources as well as the knowledge of how to create Letters.”
“And you’re worried this will make me outlive my own usefulness?”
Marissa looked to one side. “I don’t want to see you get hurt, no matter how badly you screw up… or I do.”
Ah, this was about sleeping with Lucita. Cute. Apparently, all the prostitutes and women I’d slept with on mission didn’t count, but this did.
Which, now that I thought about it, meant we had a really fucked-up relationship.
“Thank you.” Kissing Marissa, I held her by the hands. “Keep your secrets. We’ll call it even.”
Marissa pulled away, giving a forced smile. “I hope you brushed your teeth.”
“I need you, Marissa. No matter what I’m required to do as part of missions, no matter how many things I get wrong because of my background, you’re my ace in the hole. The woman I need at my side. Together we can do the right thing, even if it’s not always the right thing for those above us.”
It was all true. I also knew it played at her insecurities. She’d come from nothing, a family life that could only be described as abusive, in an environment that lionized crime, and the government had given her purpose in life.
Marissa looked down. “G—”
“Yes?”
I could have used my pheromone control to weaken her resolve, but I wanted to establish a permanent strong relationship here. A part of me, though, wanted her to see through my manipulations and reject me. It would be better for her in the long run.
“I’m with you,” Marissa said. “I love you. No matter what you do.”
I smiled and gave her a short kiss on the lips. “I love you too.”
Marissa then contacted me on my cyberlink. “That was saccharine.”
“Was it?” I asked, surprised by her actions.
Marissa said, “How much of that was sincere?”
“I do need you,” I said, not answering the question. “So what’s on your mind?
“Hitoshi,” Marissa said. “He’s a member of the Japanese government’s intelligence arm.”
“And?”
Marissa looked at me like I was stupid. “He knows who you are, who I am, what we do, and that we’re working for the United States President.”
“Ah, so you think we have to silence him,” I said sarcastically.
Marissa stared.
I raised an eyebrow. “Really, we’re going there?”
“This is a presidential assassination squad. I was made aware of certain eventualities being necessary. Killing a foreign national to protect the secrecy of Strike Force-22 is pretty low on the things I’m capable of doing.”
“Understood.” I paused. “He murdered another agent of the Public Security Agency with Lucita’s help. Inform his government. They should burn him.”
Marissa looked down. “He might try to bargain his way back.”
“Not with the Society paying him off.” I let her infer that I was going to frame him. We could leverage him with the right pressure, real or faked.
Marissa took a deep breath. “He won’t thank you for that.”
“He will if we help him with it.”
Marissa blinked. “A friend in the PSIA would be helpful. You do realize if he turns us down, he has to die, right?”
“Yes. I’ll do it if it comes to that but only if.”
“You’re a lot softer than you appear, G.”
“I’m hard when I need to be.”
Marissa smirked. “I hope this works.”
“I haven’t mentioned Strike Force-22, only that I could get rid of Lucita’s problems with the US government and had a contract with them. The New Society is being created from Strike Force-22 to give the President a layer of plausible deniability. All Hitoshi knows is there’s a civil war going on inside the Society.”
“He suspects—”
“What he suspects is as worthwhile as Nazis on the moon.”
Marissa contemplated that. “Good luck with your mission. We have twenty-five minutes less.”
I noticed she hadn’t brought up my recruitment of Lucita. It was either because she recognized my authority to do so, intended to go over my head, or planned to deal with Lucita herself. None of that was my problem now.
I thought about what I would do when and if they asked me to kill Hitoshi. The answer was, of course, I’d kill him. He wouldn’t even be in the top fifteen people I’d killed with regret. I wondered why I’d tried to save him. To keep Lucita on my side? To simply say I’d tried? To try to appear to be the better man even though I wasn’t? I couldn’t answer that. I headed down the stairs of the building and proceeded to use the Yakuza’s channels to contact E. I texted him that Hitoshi wanted to speak with him in private. I had my suspicions E already knew who Hitoshi was and who he was working for. It was sometimes better to have a mole you knew about in your organization than try to sift them out. If not? Well, Hitoshi was a loyal soldier. Why wouldn’t he come? The only question was how much backup he’d come with.
“Oh, G?” Marissa said over our cyberlink. “I did mean it, though. I do love you.”
“I know,” I said, giving a half-smile.
“Only Harrison Ford can pull off that line,” Marissa said before cutting our cyberlink.
The building’s lobby was a large open-air chamber with a marble set of stairs, its fogged glass sides leading up to the second floor. Several couches were present in the lobby, along with a flat-screen television set and a circular secretary’s desk. A Western-style chandelier hung from the ceiling over the center of the room, hundreds of crystals inside it. The entrance was a set of glass doors centered on a revolving one, but all of them were locked.
We were a couple of blocks away from the Wilder West restaurant with a small garden in front of the building where no pedestrians were present. There was little chance of anyone hearing fighting inside, and that expanded my combat options. The lights were off in the building and I could see three figures approaching the front doors.
Hiding behind the opaque glass of the second-floor stairwell, I watched E and two Yakuza thugs, older ones in their thirties, walk with him. Both had walkie-talkies, and I knew they would call for help the moment things went south. It would also result in Persephone and Nechayev’s evacuation. They had to go down first.
I didn’t really want to kill E, but I would. None of the Letters could exactly be called friends, not even S and I, but we understood each other better than most. E believed in the Society, or at least, believed service to it was his purpose in life. It filled him with a sense of pride and joy to achieve the goals they set out for him. He was, despite being Korean, a corporate samurai and every bit as loyal to it as Marissa was to her government. It would be hard to break him of that loyalty.
I contacted Lucita on my IRD. “You still have that device that shuts down cyberlinks?”
“Yes,” Lucita said. “And it’s nice to have your number now. I was afraid you wouldn’t ever call me.”
“What’s the range on it?” I asked, ignoring her quip.
“One hundred yards.”
“Please use it now.”
A second later, our cyberlink cut and I saw E take a step back, momentarily disoriented. He and his men were under the chandelier, just as I planned. Aiming at the wire while crouched, I fired a silenced shot, then proceeded to roll out of the way. The chandelier fell from the ceiling and landed with a resounding crash.
Two bullets hit the spot I’d fired from before I was standing tall and aiming down at E. “Now, that wasn’t polite.”
“The notorious Agent G,” E said, looking up. He had a gun aimed right
at my head. “You’re like a bad penny, taking up space in your pocket and useless as currency.”
“Tsk-tsk-tsk,” I said, walking down the stairs with my gun also aimed at his head. “You think you’d be more grateful to see your brother.”
“You’re not my brother.”
“I’m the closest thing you have,” I said. “All Letters are siblings, the only members of a race of twenty-six.”
“Twelve, thanks to you and your little civil war.”
“It’s not my civil war,” I said. “I didn’t make us with false promises of getting my memories back. I wasn’t the one who stupidly tried to wipe out President Douglas’ people and brought the federal government down on our heads. I didn’t—”
“You’re still maintaining we’re all androids and not people with wiped memories? Seriously?” E asked.
I stared at him. “You don’t believe that?”
I hadn’t expected that.
“It’s a bit sci-fi, don’t you agree?” E asked.
“It’s true.”
“Black Technology can do a lot, but I don’t believe it can make people.”
“Life is full of mysteries,” I said, coming within just a few yards of him. “Like, for instance, why do I love the Splinter Cell games but hate Homeland when I’ve never played or watched either?”
“You hate Homeland?” E said, faux horrified as we encircled one another with our guns drawn. “What is wrong with you?”
“It’s racist and glamourizes torture,” I said.
“Says the professional assassin!” E said, shaking his head. “What, do you watch nothing but reality TV instead?”
“Ha-ha,” I said, shaking my head. “Our lives are products of our programming.”
“You’re not going to convince me to betray the Society,” E said, keeping the gun trained on him. “I’ve got my memories back.”
I stared at him. “Peter. I can get your Assistant released to you. You’ll be together, you’ll be pardoned by Uncle Sam, and we can get revenge on the organization that created us.”
E took a deep breath and put down his gun. “Fight me.”
I blinked, debating shooting him right there. “Excuse me?”
“You want to use my lover against me. Get me to betray the people who gave us nothing but—”
“Murder, lies, and betrayal,” I interrupted.
E paused. “So, fight me. One on one. If you win, I’ll join you.”
“And if I lose.”
“You’ll be dead.”
I had sixteen minutes left before Nechayev arrived and everything went to hell. E was a better fighter than me, always scoring top of his class in hand-to-hand fighting. I’d never managed to beat him during all our encounters, averaging square in the middle of our teams. Marcus Gordon had created the Letters to be identical in skill sets, but we’d all gradually developed our own specialties. I was the liar and the shooter. Good at hand-to-hand but not great. Much like everything else but lying and sniper work.
I was the Jack of All Stats, Master of Some.
I put down my gun. “All right.”
“You know I have another gun on me,” E said, shaking his head.
“So do I.”
E took up a fighting pose.
So did I.
Chapter Sixteen
E and I stood across from one another, taking in each other’s posture and position as we tried to anticipate the other’s moves. There was an old maxim in the fighting world that it was much easier to fight a fellow master than a rank amateur, since the latter was unpredictable. The thing was, for masters, that meant you had to be unpredictable to win. Just how unpredictable, though, and how much you were willing to risk, were the questions.
E made a half-punch forward, testing my reflexes only for me not to move at all. “You know, I didn’t expect you to agree. I always thought the only thing you believed in was your pocketbook.”
“You clearly don’t know me at all.”
“G, Class-S sniper and manipulator. A social chameleon who can assume nearly any disguise with near-perfect accuracy. The only Letter who believes in Western religion after the suicide of H. Fancies himself a ladies’ man but forms attachments to his lovers that prevent genuine playboy behavior.”
“That last bit is completely wrong,” I said. “I am a ridiculous playboy. Also kind of an asshole to my girlfriend, but it’s okay since she lies to me every other word. We’re made for one another.”
I dodged out of the way of his second strike, a punch aimed at my jaw, only to spin around and strike him in the back of the neck. He grabbed my arm and threw me over his shoulder. I landed feet first and kicked him backward.
“Fancy footwork,” E said, smiling. “Where did you pick up capoeira?”
“Past six months,” I said, stretching my neck to one side as a taunt. “I felt I needed something other than Battle Angel style if I was going to take you guys out.”
“You killed B, C, and L.”
I had. Each of them had refused to back down and fought to the bitter end. Even if I hadn’t been the one to fire a rocket straight into L’s car, I’d been the one to track him down and show the military he’d been working with terrorists.
“And recruited A, J, K, O, P, Q, W, and X. J and K are married now. One of the benefits of it being legalized.”
E growled at the statement, which made me realize he assumed I was taunting him about his sexuality rather than being genuinely happy for the pair of women. His next move was obvious, and I ducked out of the way before kicking him in the side. It was like kicking a brick wall, but one that registered pain. I realized he was angry now.
I laughed. “You didn’t actually think any other Letters had defected, did you?”
“I thought better of them,” E growled. “What did you offer them?”
“They jumped at the opportunity to get off the sinking ship of the Society. So did most people in the bureaucracy and tech bureau. Gerard, Nancy, Thompson, and even Sophia. The majority were there because they had to be. Because they were blackmailed, intimidated, extorted, or worse. Everyone else was there because of money. Did you really think there was some great loyalty to the cause? A cause to make money for corporate-backed terrorists?”
That was when E swung too far in and I started unleashing a furious torrent of punches and kicks designed to break the limbs of a normal man. He managed to block two out of every three, but I still managed to deliver a series of blows that staggered him. The fact that he managed to hit me back twice was almost inconsequential. Defeating him was a matter of shaking his conviction, and I was very good at that.
He headbutted me before grabbing my arm in an arm bar. He’d suckered me into a state of overconfidence. “Except, S, G. Except S. S believes in the cause just like I believe in the cause. We are a force for global stability.”
“S is working for me,” I said, adding gallows’ laugh. It was complete bullshit, but all I could throw at him given how insane it was that S believed in the International Refugee Society now. What, did she have a Road to Damascus moment? Except in reverse? In any case, it surprised E, and that was all I needed.
“What?” E said, loosening his grip enough for me to spin around and deliver an elbow to his gut before throwing him onto the ground, grabbing his arm, and placing my foot on his throat.
“I win,” I said, spitting blood from my mouth.
E looked at me, then looked behind me before his eyes darted back at me. I proceeded to take a step to one side, letting go of him even as a gunshot fired behind me. It would have gotten me right in the back if it had hit. Turning around, I saw one of the Yakuza under the chandelier was still conscious and had managed to get his hands on E’s pistol.
A second later, E was already grabbing hold of my pistol on the ground and firing right into the head of the Yakuza he’d come with. An ugly, bloody mess ensued. I didn’t carry low-caliber ammunition for the kind of threats I dealt with.
I looked at him. “Curio
us choice of action.”
E scrambled to his feet, wobbling as he did so, keeping my gun trained on me. “Is it?”
“I thought you said you’d surrender if I won.”
E chuckled. “I didn’t expect to lose.”
“I imagine you didn’t,” I said, sighing as I spotted Lucita coming down the staircase behind him. “But I believe you’re about to come over to my side.”
“And why is that? I don’t believe you for a second about S.”
I stared at him. “E, Persephone and Nechayev are meeting to discuss betraying Matthews.”
E lowered his gun, slumping his shoulders. “How do you know?”
“Do you really think this is about money?” I said, playing on his prejudices. “They want to surrender.”
E shrugged. “You’re the one who says this is all about money.”
I sighed. “Which is why they’re going to surrender. Matthews is the only ideologue in the group and the one who probably set them against President Douglas in the first place.”
“She’s a monster,” E said, staring at me. “America is involved in more wars than it’s been in decades.”
“America is occupying 153 countries across the globe,” I said, staring at him. “Imperialism is alive and well if you can afford it. The only difference between the United States and a lot of other nations is they can.”
E looked to one side, thankfully not in Lucita’s direction. “S is the only other Letter still serving the Society. The others went rogue or were killed.”
“You really need to drop this bushido bullshit, E. No one is subscribing to it but you.”
“I’m Korean, jackass.”
“Forrest Whitaker and Tom Cruise were samurai too. It didn’t do either of them any good.”
E stared at me, confused.
“The odd thing is I have no idea what I’m referring to,” I said, shaking my head. “Quips are a bitch when the last movie you saw was the last ten minutes of The Rules of Supervillainy.”
“I’m sorry, G, but I can’t. I have not enough principles to break the most important.”
Agent G: Saboteur Page 11