“Yes.”
I was about to ask more questions when Marissa stumbled through the door to the back room. She was wearing a black bra and blood-soaked jeans with a heavy bandage over her stomach as well as tape. I’d removed the bullet and sewed up the wound, but she’d need real medical attention soon.
“You shouldn’t go, G,” Marissa said.
“Case,” I corrected, wondering why she of all people would get it wrong. “Also, you’ve officially lost all rights and privileges to tell me what to do. I am resigning Strike Force-22, effective immediately, with the parting message of—”
“You already said Colonel Matthews and President Douglas could go screw themselves,” Delphi said.
“No, I said they could go fuck themselves. Big differen—” I started to repeat before Marissa fell over.
I ran to her side and helped her up, carrying her to one of the chairs behind the office’s counter. “You shouldn’t be up.”
“No shit,” Marissa muttered, steadying herself. “However, I thought I owed you an explanation.”
“That would imply I’d believe any you gave.”
Marissa frowned. “Yeah, that’s deserved.”
“So is being shot,” I said, remembering Hiroshi, Omata, and his pilot.
Hell, all the Strike Force personnel in Peru and Japan. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“You’ve always been blinded by the act I put up,” Marissa said. “That and my rack.”
“The Cybergoth thing is very distracting,” I admitted. “This has gone beyond quips, though. People are dead.”
“Lucita tried to kill you,” Marissa said.
“So did you,” I said, looking for confirmation that she had been the saboteur in Peru. “The other people dead were your coworkers and I thought friends. Is Daniel getting to your family when you got back in touch with them? It makes a whole lot of sense. You changed three months ago. It also explains what secret you were debating sharing with me. It was that you were the person who tried to kill me with the grappling gun and drones.”
“Yes,” Marissa said, looking away. “Gina and Mary were people I thought were still trapped in the barrio. I kept myself from researching what they were doing because I didn’t want to know. I assumed they’d ended up with the Mayans like my mother.”
“And they escaped like you.”
“Yes,” Marissa said, biting her lip. “Gina managed to put herself through school, become a nurse, and marry a doctor. From there, she helped Mary and her two out-of-wedlock children build a new life. They had a whole world I never became a part of because of my decision to become a spy.”
“What happened?” I asked, thinking back to earlier this year. It had been a chaotic time but there’d been a period, for almost a week, when Marissa hadn’t spoken to me. Strangely, it had been after a month of being chipper.
“I started receiving packages. They contained photos, videos, and letters. Details of what they’d been up to,” Marissa said, giving a mirthless chuckle. “The letters were couched in the sweetest language and there was no hint of menace. I thought the packages were from you at first.”
“Me?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Marissa said, frowning. “Few of my co-workers knew about my past.”
“Co-workers,” I muttered.
“Sorry, bad choice of words,” Marissa said, looking away. “It was only later that I received my orders to start spying on Strike Force-22.”
“You folded pretty quickly.”
“It came with a video of him shooting Mary in the head and burying her in the desert,” Marissa didn’t turn to face me. “The message made it clear that my sister was next but that I had a lot more relatives to go through before he was done. The NSA barely noticed because of our long separation and the fact that Gina thought Mary had just run out.”
“After all we’ve been through. Lucky for you S had already a patsy in the organization, otherwise you would have had to have made one.”
“Not so lucky,” Marissa said. “I was the one who leaked the information about Parker’s susceptibility to bribery to her and then hacked her emails to him. I knew all her passwords from the Society. It was all on Daniel’s orders, though.”
“Daniel seems way too stupid to have thought of all this,” I said.
“He’s a lot smarter than he appears,” Marissa said. “Much like you.”
“Ouch.”
“I couldn’t kill you with the drone,” Marissa said. “I was controlling it with my IRD implant. I hope that’s some consolation.”
“It’s not. When did Daniel change from wanting me dead to wanting to recruit me?”
“The Peru mission,” Marissa said. “He liked the absolute insanity of it.”
Of course. “He also wanted you to give me his memories. Was he working with Tribunal or against it?”
“Maybe both,” Marissa said. “The International Refugee Society had become a liability to his masters and they wanted it replaced with something less… overt. Daniel’s people in the White House allowed him to stay one step ahead while cleaning up loose ends. The only thing that hasn’t gone to plan was his failure to get Delphi. She was the only thing he really needed to retrieve from the Society’s ashes. Everyone and everything else, even the Letters, were unimportant.”
I took a deep breath, taking in the monumental nature of her betrayal. “We’re done.”
“I know,” Marissa said, not looking up. “You deserved better…Case. It was a job at first and sometimes I hated you. Hated you for being a psychopathic hitman who killed for money and no higher cause. The thing is, you carried me here and saved my life even after knowing I betrayed you. You’ve tried to become better, and I’ve become worse.”
I shrugged and reached into my pocket for a syringe I’d loaded up with a diluted mix of horse tranquilizer, sedative, and opiates. “That’s just life.”
“I won’t betray you again. Anything you want me to say to—”
I stuck her in the neck and drugged her again. It took several seconds for it to kick in, but given that she was already suffering blood loss, it knocked her out cold. From there, I put her in some scrubs before dropping her off at a nearby motel I rented for the night. When she awoke in six or seven hours, it would be to a changed world.
Hopefully, for the better.
Hopefully.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I drove down the Texas highway with nothing but grassland and farm surrounding me for as far as the eye could see. I was driving a stolen red pickup truck and doing my best to look inconspicuous. To pass the time until my destination, I looked up news on my IRD implant.
A little square appeared in my peripheral vision of a CNN news anchor talking about current events: A Hong Kong pharmaceutical corporation had its entire board murdered by armed assailants for the discovery that they’d been keeping the cure for muscular dystrophy secret.
There were riots on Wall Street as the Occupy Wallstreet movement had spontaneously reformed as something meaner and more violent. Simultaneous terrorist attacks had killed something like sixty thousand people across the globe. Red Sword had absorbed ISIS and invaded Baghdad. North Korea claimed to have released the Spanish flu back into the world. Seismologists were claiming Yellowstone National Park was ready to transform into a volcano and the government needed to take drastic action to keep it from exploding.
“It is a bad fucking week,” I muttered. “Bad fucking year.”
“The International Refugee Society helped paper over how much the world was falling apart along with the governments and corporations behind it,” Delphi said. “The infighting and lack of access to Black Technology is resulting in the control the powers-that-be once had breaking down.”
“Releasing Black Technology will finish it off,” I said, hoping it would inspire real change in the world. How could it not?
“I’m not so sure,” Delphi said. “It could weaken the power of those who have manipulated it.”
&nb
sp; “Or?” I asked, not at all happy about her hesitation.
“It could simply mean that new powers will benefit from it,” Delphi said. “You could make a dozen corporations and governments controlling it into a hundred. Even sharing it with the world doesn’t necessarily mean that the common man will benefit from it.”
“That’s what they said about computers,” I said. “The street finds its own uses for things.”
Truth be told, I was just trying to justify my decision. I’d been off my game since leaving the Society for the United States. I’d been damn near suicidal during the Peru mission and hadn’t gotten better in Japan. The fact that I was going to take on a bunch of augmented cyborgs going to kill the man I was planning on killing indicated how much of a rational planner I was now.
“It’s all right to be afraid,” Delphi said, continuing to pick up on things I wasn’t quite picking up on myself. “You don’t have to overcompensate to make up for the fact you don’t want to die.”
“We all die,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I just don’t want to end up being irrelevant. To have all my life experience wash away like… tears in the rain.”
“You’re going to be quoting media all day, aren’t you?” Delphi said.
“Only if I die,” I said. “Then I’ll be quoting for the rest of my life. Still, you’re wrong. I’m not afraid.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Maybe I am, a little,” I said taking a deep breath. “But that’s not all of it. I feel liberated in a way I can’t really put into words. My entire life was planned for me in meticulous detail from the beginning to end. I’m making my own choices now, good or bad. That’s a feeling I’ve never had before, and it makes me feel alive.”
“I envy you for that.”
“I hope you feel the same someday,” I said. “How long until we reach the Wintercrest estate?”
“A half hour,” Delphi said. “I can’t tell you what’s going on there because they’ve got jamming systems everywhere to prevent cell phones and computers from being repurposed as surveillance.”
“You can’t get satellite imagery?”
“Be serious, Case.” It was the first time she’d called me that in casual conversation.
“I am serious,” I said, shrugging. “Google probably has three up above our heads now.”
“You have no weapons, no backup, and no information on the situation,” Delphi said. “I would like to offer an alternative suggestion.”
“Let it go?” I asked. “Like Elsa?”
“If I had a face, it would be in my palm now,” Delphi said. “No, I mean contact President Douglas and let her deal with it.”
“No,” I said simply. “We’re off her radar now, and if we do, that runs the risk of us getting right back on it. Besides, anyone she could scramble up wouldn’t necessarily get there before we did. Daniel Gordon got himself so off the radar that if we don’t get him then he’ll probably disappear completely.”
“Are you telling me that or yourself?” Delphi asked.
I didn’t answer for a second. “Also, killing him is probably the only way to make sure Marissa’s sister is safe.”
Delphi then made the dial-up internet whine in my head.
“Ow!” I said. “What the hell?”
“Are you serious? After all she’s done?” Delphi asked, showing more incredulity than I’d have thought an AI capable of. Then again, she was a lot more human than I’d ever suspected her of being. I wondered how much of it she’d managed to hide from her creators. They never would have let her have as much freedom as they’d had if they’d known.
“You’re remarkably indignant for someone made of ones and zeroes.”
“I was created by your mother,” Delphi said, surprising me yet again. “She used her brain patterns as the basis for my mind the way she used her son’s for you.”
I paused. “Now all my jokes about you flirting with me feel weird.”
“As well they should,” Delphi said. “If I may propose an alternative to your plan, if you can even call it that, I think you should join up with Lucita Biondi, S, and James Madison.”
“That would require waiting for them to cross the ocean and I don’t think we have that—” I stopped midsentence. “You planned for their help from the beginning.”
“Yes,” Delphi said. “Yes, I have. Hopefully, I’ve done a better job keeping them secret than you have.”
“Given you won’t be trusting a spy above everyone else, I’m sure you have.” I looked down the road. “Where are they?”
“About ten minutes away,” Delphi said. “I convinced them to come help you after rescuing them in Japan. All I had to do was say you needed help.”
I thought about that. “Bullshit.”
“All right, I’m also paying them,” Delphi said. “But Lucita and S wanted to help you.”
I smirked. “It seems I have more friends than I expected.”
“It is not the number of one’s friends by which you should measure them, but their quality.”
“And one of them is an immortal information goddess.”
“Yes,” Delphi intoned.
My amusement fell away when I noticed a police cruiser was flashing its lights behind me. I checked my speedometer and noticed I was five miles under the speed limit. I also had switched out my license plate with a pocketknife after stealing the vehicle. Scanning the police bands with my IRD, I noted that no one had contacted anyone either. Then I focused in on the rearview mirror and saw the police officer’s face. Dressed in a beige police uniform was one of the men who’d accompanied Daniel at the airstrip. A Reaper.
“These guys are good at tracking,” I said.
“Or you just failed to suspect he’d send someone to follow you,” Delphi said. “I, reluctantly, also failed to anticipate this eventuality.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Helmut Roth,” Delphi said, downloading a profile of a supposedly dead GSG-9 soldier. The man had done a lot of good over the years, but Delphi had access to the work he’d done on the side for Karma Corp, which included murder-for-hire and a train station bombing. Even her machine goddess abilities gave her nothing, though, on what he’d been up to as part of the Reapers. I somehow suspected it wasn’t planting flowers and caring for kittens. For a brief second, I relived one of Daniel Gordon’s memories.
“You’re wasted here,” Daniel Gordon said, talking down to Roth as he sat on a bench in a locker room. “You could do so much more if you’d just let yourself.”
“I have a life here,” Helmut said. “A wife and brother.”
“They’re holding you back,” Daniel said, softly. “If you can get rid of them, you can get rid of anything.”
“What do you mean?” Helmut said.
“I’m asking you how far you’re willing to go to become the kind of guy who doesn’t clean up after other people’s messes but makes history,” Daniel said.
I then flashed to the newspaper report about how Helmut had supposedly been killed in a murder-suicide by his brother along with his wife and two nieces. His head had been blown apart, leaving no one to pay much attention to the fact the brain was missing. He’d had it transferred into a Shell before he’d killed them all.
“Wow, Daniel has a way with people,” I muttered, shaking my head of the vision I’d stupidly downloaded into my brain. I wondered how many other bits of his consciousness were now floating in the back of my CPU.
With that, I pulled over to one side and came to a stop.
“G, Case, whoever you are, what are you doing?” Delphi said, doing her best to fake being flustered. “You need to drive away as fast as you can.”
“For a computer brain, you have some strange ideas,” I said, taking a deep breath. “There’s no way this beat-up old thing could top a modern police cruiser. In any case, I like my chances better up front.”
“He’s a better machine,” Delphi said. “I don’t know all the Reaper’s work but it’s m
ore… definitive… than the Letters.”
“Maybe I’m a better man.” What an impossibly arrogant statement from a man who’d spent all six of his years killing people. All I knew was killing people. It was what I was good at.
Helmut pulled his car out behind me and, curiously, approached the vehicle as a cop would rather than immediately attacking. I understood the feeling; he was anticipating the kill. Daniel Gordon had cultivated a collection of psychopaths around himself, not for efficiency, but to give himself an entourage. That was my only advantage.
“If it’s an advantage,” Delphi spoke.
I rolled down my window, awaiting his approach.
“License and registration,” Helmut said, not quite to the window yet.
I grabbed the pistol at his side and shot him three times in the stomach. Undeterred, the fake police officer reached through the window, pulling me out and hurling me across the ground like I was a rag doll.
Helmut’s stomach leaked out an ugly white ichor through the gaping holes in his uniform. His cyberneticists weren’t nearly as concerned about making him look as human as mine had been, though, since I saw a wire poking out.
“He said you were clever,” Helmut said, holding his palm toward me.
“Just not quite clever enough.”
“Move!” Delphi shouted in my mind.
I threw myself to one side as the center of Helmut’s palm opened to reveal a hole. Said hole proceeded to flash as the ground beside me exploded upwards, sending charred dirt and grass into the air.
“A fucking hand cannon!?” I snapped. That was when I noticed the service revolver I’d dropped and made a grab for it.
“It’s evolution in action,” Helmut said, walking over and grabbing me by the throat just as I reached the gun. “The Reapers have all the best toys.”
He pulled me up and started to choke me, his fingers biting through my skin. The service pistol, a Smith and Wesson M&P 9mm, was at my feet. So, I put my foot under it and knocked it into my hand, put it to Helmut’s head, and pulled the trigger. That seemed to cause some serious damage, as I fired four times into his brain. Blood poured from my neck, though I was happy to know that sort of damage would seal up on its own thanks to Uncle Sam’s upgrades.
Agent G: Saboteur Page 18