As expected, he walked out of the county lockup as the sun rose over the courthouse. What he felt most in the moment was ashes, grinding away in his chest. They were supposed to build an empire that took the gringos’ gold by selling them poison. It wasn’t supposed to be about killing soldiers or women. It absolutely wasn’t supposed to be about some ridiculous power struggle that would make the streets of La Paz run ankle-deep in blood. They were Quechua. The mere thought that his people would spill their own blood over some idiotic feud was just so wrong.
When his nephew rang his phone, Adelmo quickly answered; appearances must be maintained. “Don Quispe, I’m sorry to say your plan may not have survived its encounter with the enemy.”
Adelmo ignored the bellicose laughter, but noted how it finished with hacking cough. Maybe Manuel’s heart finally would be the death of him. If only Adelmo could be so lucky.
“You don’t even know the best part, Uncle. Your spy? The one who froze my only son? She sent me a message. Got it all the way past our screens. She must be pleading for her and Colque’s life. And just after her newly hired assassin murdered you. This Rage is a truly clever woman. You go with God, Adelmo Quispe. Rage will be joining you soon.”
The line snapped closed. His nephew wasn’t smart, but he was cunning. The mental arithmetic was simple and straightforward.
Sniper.
He scanned frantically and motioned to his attorney. “Where is the car?”
The lawyer didn’t have time to respond before Adelmo saw the glint of a rifle sight in the early sunrise. He pushed the man down as the wall behind them both shattered. A piece of concrete slashed across Adelmo’s cheek, and the report of the rifle crack echoed through the courthouse’s campus. They ran through the hysterical crowd with rifle rounds nipping at their heels to nearby dumpsters.
Manuel was, as always, using an anvil where a needle would do the job. It would’ve been simpler and vastly more effective to follow Adelmo discreetly and end it with a car accident or a fatal case of food poisoning. But that would take too long and wouldn’t be nearly good enough to stroke his nephew’s titanic ego.
The sniper fired three, maybe six rounds at most, and then the shooting just stopped. The screams had died down as sirens wailed to life nearby. Everyone looked around in terror, but the shooter had vanished.
It took a bit of coaxing to get his lawyer to come out from behind the dumpster, but after that, Adelmo simply climbed into the car his men had acquired and drove away. Adelmo was free and alive. This was not how Manuel did business. In one respect, he was obviously grateful. But in another, he was deeply worried.
Chapter 57: Aaron
“Wow, Agent Cohen,” Donny Deng, head of The Firing Range, said. “We heard about what happened. Please, come in!”
Trayne had contacted him with a realmspace address. Since he was the only member of the team not in the hospital, he was the only agent who could meet her. And if they were lucky, arrest her. That was where The Firing Range came in.
The room still held its old title even though it’d been a decade since it was last used for target practice. The long, low space was now the agency’s main research lab for realm investigations. The Realmspace Division had a modest budget, but they seemed to be making the most of it. Experimental computers and scanners were stacked all over the place, most of them in pieces, but all of them turned on. It reminded Aaron of the time he and his nephew took apart all the old computers in his dad’s basement, except these were new and still worked.
Bundles of computer cables of every length, thickness, and color imaginable lined the walls and hung from the ceiling. It was less like a lab and more like the aftermath of a pasta factory explosion. The smell of stale coffee and cooking electronics overlaid everything.
The décor wasn’t as colorful the crew. Three of the scruffiest people Aaron had ever seen this deep in the Hoover building were all he had in this latest attempt to apprehend Trayne.
Donny pointed to the other two members of the team. “That’s JoBeth Litton and Emilio Sanchez. JoBeth, how’s it coming?”
The sole female of the group was nothing but a pair of shoes to Aaron, lying on the floor underneath a giant cabinet. She needed to replace her black sneakers pretty badly.
“Hang on,” JoBeth said, “there we go.”
A bank of old-fashioned LCD displays on his right lit up to show neat columns of numbers reeling up and down incomprehensibly. Another set of LCDs lit up on the opposite wall with colorful graphs and metrics. JoBeth crawled out from under the cabinet and dusted her hands off.
“The isobar metrics are officially online.”
“What time did you need to meet with your contact?” Emilio asked.
“Nine fifteen,” Aaron replied. “But I’d like to get there—”
“As soon as possible, big surprise. You’ve only got, like, an hour.” Emilio sneered as he poked and whirled controls only he could see.
The files said this kid was thirty, but Aaron could not shake the impression of a sullen teenager.
“Sanchez,” Donny scolded.
Emilio shrugged. “Fine, sorry, whatever. We have to get the rig calibrated for you, Agent Levine. So if you don’t mind?” He gestured at the center of the room.
Aaron sat down, and then leaned back into what looked and felt like a dentist’s chair. They connected a single wire to his phone. It fanned out into dozens, and then dozens more, forming a heavy bib sitting his chest. “So what do you need from me?”
Donny stared at his displays as the synch process booted up. “We need you to keep her still, and in one place, one realm, for as long as you can. If she really does meet you in Bards, and you can keep her there, that would be great. It’s the best-mapped place in all of realmspace, which makes tracing just a little easier.”
“So we’ve finally figured out how to trace people from realmspace to real?” It was the holy grail of law enforcement. A breakthrough like that would change everything.
“Not really, no, nothing like they could do in the old days. But if you can hold her still long enough, we can usually luck out and catch signature bits of whatever provider she’s using. With a little more luck, that’ll get us the search warrant we need to find her phone.”
The disappointment was bitter but not surprising. The tech guys always promised more than they could deliver.
“There’s an awful lot of luck involved in that sentence, Mr. Deng. And why are you optimistic about Bards?” It was the most secure realm in the EI.
“It’s so big and heavily traveled they can’t help leaking at least a little information.”
“So,” Aaron said, “we’re trying to figure out the license plate of a truck based on the noise it makes on the highway?”
Deng grimaced and shook his head. “It’s not quite that bad.”
“But it doesn’t seem much better.”
“We never claimed it would be easy, just that it might be possible.”
“I still say you’re chasing a ghost,” Emilio said. “Angel Rage is a construct foisted on the public by corporate America. They needed someone to hide behind while they managed the biggest mergers in history. She never existed. Ever. Nobody can do those things.”
So Aaron had been blown up by an illusion. Right.
“I’ve got seven stitches and a black eye that says otherwise.”
They were still picking up the pieces at the marina. None of it made any sense. The early evidence pointed to Adelmo, but his warning was what helped Lefla rescue the team. Adelmo’s lawyer pulled the case against him apart so thoroughly Aaron wasn’t sure if he actually set foot in a jail cell.
Then some maniac took a few pot shots at Adelmo in front of the Fairfax County Courthouse. The preliminary investigation had come up with the Angel Rage name, which was ridiculous. She’d never once been associated with violence of any sort. The whole thing sniffed of a frame-up, but nobody had time to figure out who was behind it all. Half the state was turning itself inside
out trying to find Trayne and keep tabs on Adelmo. Blowing up an FBI team, and then getting shot at in front of a county courthouse tended to lend a bit of notoriety to a case.
Aaron’s stitches chose that moment to shift, and he winced. “The government thinks she’s real enough to want her arrested.”
Emilio wasn’t just unconvinced, he was downright angry about it. “I’m telling you we’re gonna go to all this trouble, and if we manage to catch her, she’ll walk, and then sue us for false imprisonment or worse. Angel Rage is a myth, man. A total fake. She doesn’t exist. The real enemy is megacorporations. They’re the ones who created the legend and put this name on it. They hid behind Angel Rage and stole trillions, and they’ll be the ones who’ll create whatever they need next to enslave us.”
Maybe it was the exhaustion, or the pain, or the loss, or just the class-A level effed-upness of it all that made Aaron cut loose. “So all those people she manipulated, put out of business, sent to shelters, they were just grist for the mill, yeah? Just a conspiracy. Some of the people she ruined killed themselves, you know that, right? A few took their families with them. Most of them were billionaires, but that didn’t matter to their kids. Daddy or Mommy would rather kill everyone than go to jail.
“That’s all on her head. She did that. Those men and women raided pension funds trying to keep their companies above water, and when it collapsed, even the widows lost everything. Thousands of them. That’s on her head too. Or do you think the time she spent helping drug dealers put more sunrise on the streets is what makes her a fake? Oh, I get it. She wasn’t trying to tear down your megacorps then, right? Tell the truth, Sanchez. You only started hating her when she went after the wrong people.”
“Hey, man, fuck you.”
“Emilio!” Donny stood up. “That’s enough! Either you can do the job or you can go home. Do you understand me?”
Aaron fell back into the chair, spent. A scene out of an old black-and-white movie rushed unbidden to him. “I’m not even supposed to be here today.” He took a deep breath. “So I meet with her and keep her still?”
“If at all possible,” Donny said. “You’ll need to be as aware of us as you are of the realm, though. No deep diving.”
She’d designated the center of Wunderland as their meeting point. Finding it was easy enough. Staying there as the clock ticked down was another matter entirely.
The melodious voice of the ridiculous caterpillar purred once more around its hookah. “By the way, I have a few more helpful hints. One side will make you grow taller.”
Aaron tried to stare down the creature. “I told you, I’m not eating anything. Don’t you go on break soon?”
The avatar laughed. “Well you must have eaten it at some point, sir, otherwise you would not be this fine height, indeed. And this caterpillar is on duty for another…” There was a pause while whoever wore it checked the time. “Three hours.”
Wunderland was definitely not his place. He much preferred Stooge’s. More pie, less smoke. Unfortunately, the caterpillar’s mushroom was at the center of it all, so his avatar was three inches high. The scenery literally towered over him.
The ground was bare dirt, and the forest undergrowth was thick enough to make chance encounters the norm rather than the exception. Since it was Bards, he’d already had to dodge out of the way of two spice navigators in their giant trundling metal carriages. It turned out that the Red Queen was hosting an actual Bene Gesserit convention on the grounds nearby. At least the wind blew the patchouli-and-skunk stench of the spice away from him.
“How doth the little crocodile…”
“God!” JoBeth exclaimed in the lab as she monitored the session remotely. “That’s, what, the fourth time he’s recited that stinking poem?”
“Fifth,” Emilio said.
A woman with dark hair walked out of the brush, dressed in a variant of Alice’s dress. Vertigo swirled in his head as all the conventional monitors they had running shut off with a snap. It could only mean one thing.
“She’s here.”
Chapter 58: Kim
“I’m telling you, Kim,” Mike said, “I don’t like this.”
They didn’t need to like it. They needed to trust her. The only way to win now was to turn inside Watchtell, make a decision he didn’t see coming. He was too far ahead to do anything else. “It’s not up to you; it’s something I have to do.”
Tonya paced back and forth in the hotel room. “This is crazy. There’s bound to be a better way to stop him.”
Kim had insisted Tonya stay in realspace. She couldn’t keep Mike out of the realms, but she would be damned if Tonya got caught if something went wrong.
She manifested on the edge of Wunderland wearing a more mature, but no less recognizable, version of the iconic blue-and-white dress.
“We have the evidence we need; now we just have to get it to the right people.” She pulled up the hood of her cloak, then set out in the direction of the pedestal mushroom. “Can you tell if he’s there yet?”
“No,” Mike said, “but I wasn’t expecting to. We need to get out of here, Kim.”
She wasn’t sure what was more irritating, Mike’s protectiveness, or the way she wanted to nestle inside it. Comfort and desire were distractions she couldn’t afford right now.
Kim crept through the bushes toward the center of the realm. Peering through the leaves, she said, “Right there.”
“Are you sure?” Mike asked.
“Look at him. It takes training to be that stiff.”
It was fortunate he was that obvious. She expected Park, who’d been chasing her for most of a decade. The guy she walked up to was half his age with curly red hair. He was arguing with a caterpillar who was paid to be a pain in the ass.
When he finally saw her, the first words out of his mouth dispelled any question in her mind.
“Kimberly Trayne, you’re under arrest.”
It was the standard spiel. She motioned him to the end, desperately trying not to smile. It was the first time anyone had gotten close enough to Mirandize her, and he knew it. The kid could barely hold his voice steady.
“Do you understand these rights?” he asked as they sat down on a bench next to a seldom-traveled side path near the mushroom.
“Agent?”
“Levine.”
“Agent Levine, I’m not here to turn myself in.”
He couldn’t be more than a few months out of the academy. Well, at least she still rated an agent.
“Yes, I understand my rights. Okay? Listen, I’m not important here. There’s a threat to the Evolved Internet that the FBI needs to know about.”
“Have you reconnected with your associates?”
“No.” Her eyes misted over. She hadn’t had time to properly mourn them, to absorb the loss, to get her head around the complex emotions it was all dredging up.
“We won’t be getting back together again. I have a friend who’s noticed something strange going on with the EI in the past few months.”
A weird invisible wave that seemed more like fabric than wind swirled around them, and her heart skipped two beats. A desert sun blasted onto her face as sand threatened to creep over the tops of her open shoes.
Levine blinked. “What’s going on?”
Mike said in her ear, “He’s working with Deng’s team. He’s bound to be in the basement of the Hoover building.”
“Deng’s team?” Tonya asked.
“Realm detectives. They’re good. I’m better. Time for me to ruin someone’s day.”
They didn’t have realm detectives when Kim was active. “What are they trying to do?”
“They’re trying to lock on to the noise your avatar makes.” His voice was distracted, as if he was juggling.
“Can you stop it?” Kim asked.
“No, but we’re fine for now. It’s like a dance. We’re waltzing.”
Aaron raised an eyebrow at Kim’s quiet smile. “Whatever it is you’re doing, you need to stop. You’re j
ust adding obstruction to the list of charges.”
Kim breathed out heavily and closed her eyes. Jesus, this guy was green. “Agent Levine, do you really think adding to that list will change anything?”
The wave swirled again, and they found themselves in a courtyard at night. An elaborate fountain flowed into a reflecting pool in front of them.
“I need you to listen to me.”
He paused briefly with his eyes unfocused, undoubtedly talking to his own team. “Okay, let’s hear it.”
She tried to summarize what they’d found. Watchtell had built a conspiracy with world leaders to take over the Evolved Internet, or crush it if they couldn’t. Explaining it was tricky because every few minutes or so they’d jump to a new realm.
A much stronger one of those weird waves took her breath away as it snapped through her mind.
“Well done, Deng, well done.” Mike chuckled in Kim’s ear as she and Levine found themselves in a deep wood with laser blasts and strange, heavy clanking in the far distance.
“Achievement unlocked. Let’s move to the next level.”
Now there was another force, some other kind of power. It lifted them away and transitioned them through a rapid kaleidoscope of realms. Hard vacuum and the bottom of an ocean slammed against them so fast it left a few rivulets of water freezing as they ran down her skirt.
They landed in a ski lodge with a crackling fire. Levine shook his sleeves free of half-frozen water. “It would be easier for me to believe you if we weren’t jumping all over the place. I’m going to have to ask you to stop interfering again.”
“Oh,” Kim said with a smile. “I’m not doing anything but talking to you.”
The way Aaron’s eyes flared made her cringe inside. She’d said too much, and a static snap of force a few seconds later just proved the point.
“Ow!” Mike said. “That’s not fair. They know I’m here now. Okay. This just got real.”
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