by Jackson Ford
There’s a whiteboard against the opposite wall, its surface smudged and dirty. The view from the window is breathtaking: a line of plastic garbage bins against the opposite wall of Brooks Court, next to a very rarely spotted power junction box covered with graffiti. There’s a poster plastered on the wall, a mess of lurid orange and green advertising a club night from three months ago. I’ve often wondered who put it up there and why they chose that spot—if they were specifically trying to target us, or were just high and had to meet their poster quota.
I pull off the ridiculous tie, dumping it on the counter. The surface is always sticky, no matter how much we clean it. The kitchen is sparse: there’s a microwave and a coffee machine perched on top of it, a tiny bar fridge underneath. Carlos is rummaging in the cupboards, the machine already set up for grinding.
At least the couches are decent. There are two of them, big and leathery and super-comfy, positioned in a broken L-shape in the middle of the room. Annie is sitting on one, head down, bent over her phone.
There’s no sign of Reggie yet. Paul is over by the whiteboard, tapping at something on his Palm Pilot. Yes, an actual Palm Pilot. It has a black-and-white screen, a slide-down physical keyboard and a leather cover. He point-blank refuses to upgrade—even his cell is an old-school brick, which he keeps in a pouch on his belt. Ask that thing to go online, and it would probably melt in your hand. He refuses to own a smartphone, which he says is the worst possible name for something that can be hacked so easily. When I reminded him that Reggie had installed scramblers in all our phones as standard, he just told me I was being naive.
“Hey, everyone?” Paul says. “Just a reminder, after we’re done debriefing—” he looks at me “—we need to talk about a couple of jobs tomorrow.”
Behind me, Carlos mutters something ugly-sounding in Spanish. He’s still rooting around in the cupboards.
I pick up the tie again, waving it at Paul, knowing I shouldn’t piss him off more than I have already, and not caring. “I’m gonna strangle you with this. Seriously.”
“And I am going to make sure that we’re working as we’re supposed to. I don’t know why you still have a problem with it.”
Jobs. He’s not talking about covert special ops stuff. He’s talking actual work.
China Shop isn’t just a name on a tax form. If you’re doing black-bag jobs in a city, it’s pretty helpful to have a way to move around without getting noticed. And nobody notices moving vans. They’re part of the background: the traffic and people and noise that most people in a big city don’t think twice about. When we’re gathering intel for a job, Paul will slap a special removable decal on the side of the van—a big, snorting, grinning cartoon bull that looks derpy as hell—and we’ll case as much of the area as we can.
But somewhere along the line, Paul decided that the whole moving-company thing shouldn’t just be a front—that we should do actual moving jobs, so we would appear more legit. Somehow, he got Reggie on board with the idea. Plus Tanner’s approval. And now China Shop Movers has a website. And a phone number. And every couple of weeks Paul will convince some poor bastard that Annie and Carlos and I are the best solution for moving their furniture around. We will actually go and perform actual moving jobs.
Having PK makes it a little easier—as long as you don’t make it obvious that you’re not exactly lifting a dresser with purely physical strength—but I still don’t enjoy getting up at ass o’clock and hustling to the office, just so we can drive to some godforsaken house in Downey or Torrance to move furniture. Day one: assist in the capture of international drug lord and/or terrorist mastermind. Day two: assist with moving a refrigerator down a flight of stairs.
But that’s just who Paul Marino is. He’s a details guy. Along with running comms on our jobs—ironic for someone with phone tastes from around 1995—he’s the one who gets all our gear for us. Uniforms, equipment, whatever. He takes the clothes we use to be laundered; he keeps itemised lists of everything in the house and the van, and if you even borrow so much as a single screw, he’ll not only know about it, he’ll make you write him a receipt. Yes, we may be a top-secret government operation going on cool missions, but someone has to be responsible for the details, and at least Paul seems to actually enjoy it.
What still blows my mind is how well he seems get on with Annie. She’s like the anti-Paul. They should piss each other off just by being in the same room.
I don’t know a ton about her life—you’ll be stunned to hear that we don’t usually hang out away from the office—but Carlos told me she she has a record. A bad one. The kind of record where they throw you in prison if you even apply for a job that isn’t construction or fast food. She was born in LA—in Watts, to the south—and she’s got a lot of history with multiple gangs. West Coast Bloods, MS-13, 38th Street, even some of the Sureños. Most of those names weren’t familiar to me until about a year ago. Annie was a kind of freelancer-slash-fixer, doing whatever job needed to be done for whoever could pay her. Until Tanner found her.
That’s another thing I don’t understand about Annie. We might not get along, but she is crazy smart. Which kills me. She should have been running a corporation, not getting busted for felonies in South Central. I once asked Carlos about it, and he’d given me a strange look. “You don’t know a lot about growing up in Watts, do you?” he’d said, taking a pull of his beer.
Not even I could argue with that one.
“Hey, does anyone know where the coffee is?” says Carlos.
“Top shelf, left cupboard,” I reply.
“Looked there.”
“Look again. It’s… Fuck.”
I finished the coffee this afternoon. And forgot to tell Paul we needed more.
“It’s fuck?” Carlos says. “What does that even mean?”
“Never mind. It’s fine. I’m actually OK.”
“You finished it, didn’t you? Yo, I wanted coffee too.”
Paul shakes his head, reaching over and writing something down on the whiteboard. “This is why we have a requisitions list,” he says.
“Why do we even need one? I use my PK, I need caffeine. I shouldn’t have to write it down every time.”
“And I shouldn’t have to ask you to not use that abbreviation every time. What is it with you today?”
I brandish the tie at him. “You are this close, man. Death by clip-on. I’m not kidding.”
Paul doesn’t like it when I use the term PK. He spent a bunch of time in Asia when he was with the navy, and speaks passable Korean and Vietnamese. Also a little bit of Cantonese, from his shore leave in Hong Kong. In Cantonese, PK is an abbreviation of pook kai, which means literally, go die in the street. Not exactly a phrase you’ll see in the guidebooks.
“Hey,” Annie says. She’s still on the couch, elbows resting on her knees, arms dangling. Like a boxer listening to an unworthy opponent talk trash at a weigh-in. “Are we just not gonna talk about what happened back at the Edmonds?”
“Oh, we’re going to talk about it,” says Paul, folding his arms.
I close my eyes. “Annie, I didn’t know—”
“Cos that?” She points a finger at me. “That was some straight bullshit right there.”
Carlos squeezes past me, his arms raised in a placating gesture. “Let’s just take it easy.”
“No.” She says. “No, no, no, Carlos, you don’t get to say shit. You were in the truck. You didn’t see what she did.”
It’s all I can do not to start yelling. “I got us out of there.”
“Fuck that. You just did the first thing that came into your head and hoped that it would work out OK.”
“It did!”
She shakes her head. “You don’t get it. We plan these jobs for a reason. We put in hours of prep for a reason. Everybody except you. You think you can just show up, do the one or two things you’re supposed to do with your voodoo mind shit, and call it a day. Hell, maybe you can. But what that does not give you the right to do is make decisio
ns when shit goes bad.”
What is she even talking about? Prep? How the hell are we supposed to prep for a job going south like that? Isn’t that when you’re supposed to think outside the box?
“Annie, that’s not—”
“Don’t fucking interrupt me. I’m not done.” She levels a finger at me. “You put us at risk because you couldn’t stop and think for one goddamn second.”
“Agreed,” Paul says. He’s doing the finger-ticking thing again. “It was reckless, it was irresponsible, and furthermore—”
“Oh come on.” I look between them. “This is not the first time we’ve been in trouble, and it definitely isn’t the first time we’ve almost had our cover blown. What about… what about that job at the hotel?”
“What hotel?” Annie says.
Paul frowns. “You mean Bell Gardens? Wasn’t that a casino?”
“Whatever. Yes, Bell Gardens. That cop wanted to arrest Carlos, and—”
“Yo, don’t bring me into this,” Carlos says.
“—we had to make a break for it. Imagine what would have happened if he really had managed to shoot our tyres out.”
Paul removes his glasses, digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “It’s not the same thing.”
“Got that right,” Annie says. “See, what I think? I think you wanted to do it.”
Silence falls on the room. Everyone is looking at me now. A hot flush creeps up from the collar of my uniform shirt.
“What are you talking about?” I say.
“I think you wanted to use your power. Your ability. Whatever the fuck it is. I think you were looking for an excuse. Tanner got you opening doors. Unlocking safes. I think you got bored, and you’re acting out. You ever pull that shit again on a job, you ever deviate from the plan even a little bit, I will throw you out a fucking window mysel—”
“Sounds like things went smoothly, then,” says a voice from the door.
Regina McCormick glides into the room, the motor in her wheelchair making an almost inaudible whine. The chair is a clunky black bulldozer with battery packs hanging off it and tyres that could take it off-road. She sits in it like it’s a throne, her good arm resting lightly on the control stick.
Reggie is in her late forties, with very thin crow’s feet radiating out from piercing brown eyes. As always, she’s dressed in thick grey sweats. She must have been tying up loose ends from the job, or she’d have been in the room with us already.
Reggie wasn’t the first black woman to fly an Apache helicopter, but she was one of them. She’s never told us much about her past, but I do know that after the crash in Afghanistan that left her an incomplete quadriplegic, she became very close to Tanner. Spent years retraining as a programmer too. When Tanner put me to work for her, Reggie was who she got to run point.
Behind her, just visible through the door to the back room, is what she calls her Rig. It’s a giant multiscreen system that she controls with a combination of eye movement, voice commands and a pair of giant trackballs. When she’s plugged in, she looks even smaller than usual, two huge water-cooled towers on either side of her chair, the screens towering above. But she is one monster of a hacker.
All the same, I’ve never quite been able to get a handle on Reggie. She doesn’t speak a lot about her life before China Shop, which I guess is understandable. There’s plenty online about her service record: her citations, the operations she’s taken part in, a few old newspaper stories from when she was a track star at her high school in New Orleans. It all ends about ten years ago with a simple story on a local news site headed: PARALYSED PILOT RETURNS HOME. After that? Zip.
She’s never told me much about her past, although God knows I’ve asked. She just smiles, then tries to talk about something else. The one time I pushed, she stopped me with a curt “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I don’t know this for sure, but on the one occasion where everybody at China Shop actually hung out together, it came up. A job we were supposed to run got postponed, and we ended up sitting around in the backyard waiting to hear if it was happening or not. Reggie was inside, working her Rig, and the topic of how she got the job here came up.
Paul swore blind that he’d heard that it wasn’t Reggie who owed Tanner for something, but the other way round. He wouldn’t say where he got the info, so none of us knew how seriously to take him. Then again, Paul isn’t a known bullshit artist, and I’m not sure he actually has a sense of humour. Even if it wasn’t the whole truth, there was a grain of it there.
As far as I can tell, she’s the only one of us who hasn’t been manipulated or coerced into this job. The rest of us? We work for Tanner or we’re fucked.
Maybe that’s a little harsh. We’re not slaves. We’re technically government workers, which I think is hilarious—salaried employees of the nameless agency Tanner runs. We get health benefits and dental, for fuck’s sake, run through the convenient cover of China Shop Movers. We can go anywhere we want throughout the greater Los Angeles area. But if Tanner decided one day that we weren’t worth protecting, that would be it.
“Carlos,” Reggie says. She grew up in Louisiana and has an accent thick enough to spread on toast. Her voice is slightly breathy and strained, thanks to a weakened diaphragm. “Why is every single cupboard in my kitchen open? Didn’t your mother raise you right?”
“Looking for the coffee. Teagan finished it.”
Reggie glances at me. “You should drink chamomile, dear. It’s much better for you. Speaking of which, Carlos, would you kindly brew me a cup? It’s been a long night.”
Carlos nods, earning a smile from Reggie. “Annie,” she says, manoeuvring her chair around the couch. “You seem upset.”
“Got that right. Teagan nearly blew the whole thing to shit.”
“I did not. That was—”
Reggie lifts a finger, silencing her. “That’s why we have these debriefings,” she says, looking in my direction as if she can sense that I wanted to head straight home. “So we can deal with problems to make sure they don’t reoccur.”
As Carlos makes her herbal tea—which of course there’s plenty of because nobody but Reggie actually drinks the stuff—she gets the story out of first Annie, then me. By the time we’re done, the tea is steaming by her left hand, and the room feels like it’s holding its breath.
A year ago this kind of post-mortem would have scared the shit out of me. Reggie was Tanner’s woman in LA, which meant that she was, in effect, Tanner herself. I didn’t know if she was on our side or not. But over the past year or so she’s put herself between us and Tanner, backing us up on the rare occasions when a job really has gone bad, like it did in Bell Gardens.
The debriefings we have tend to be pretty loose. Reggie and Paul might have a military background, but there are no acronyms here—no infil and exfil zones, no sitreps. Just us, Paul’s whiteboard and chamomile tea.
“Teagan,” she says when we’ve finished, turning to me with a faint engine whirr. “That wasn’t very intelligent. You put both your lives in danger, and you risked revealing your abilities. We’ve talked about this.”
I nod, reluctantly.
“The construction elevator would have been bad enough. It wasn’t a half-bad idea, as ideas go, but you should have cleared it with Annie.”
“We didn’t have time. There were—”
Reggie silences me with a look. “I expect better from you in the future. More importantly, I expect you to think before you act, which is something else we’ve talked about before. And you, Annie. Part of your role is to solve problems quickly and efficiently. When you’re on a job, Teagan is under your command. If she does something you do not agree with, that constitutes a problem, and you should have taken immediate control.”
Annie’s voice is brittle. “I didn’t head for the 50th floor. Or throw us out a window.”
“True.” Reggie inclines her head. “But you did make the decision to leave the server room and go up to Chase’s fibre hub. There w
ere other options on the table for you too.”
Annie mutters something, but after a few moments gives Reggie a tight nod.
The smile that breaks on Reggie’s face makes her look twenty years younger. “That’s done then. You’re all safe, and we got what we needed, so let’s say no more about it. Mm. Carlos, I’ve told you a dozen times, you have to let the water sit for a few seconds after it boils, or you’ll scald the leaves.”
EIGHT
Teagan
I finally change out of the rent-a-cop uniform, spending a few minutes in the Boutique’s bathroom as I change into jeans and my favourite shirt, a bright purple T depicting a cartoon monster about to swallow a city, the words Eat Local below it. After the clunky security-guard boots, my Jordans feel like heaven.
I’m starting to stiffen up, and it’s all I can do to keep my eyes open. I need to get some more food inside me before I sleep. Something more than jerky. And forget delivery—I can go five minutes out of my way and pick it up myself.
The downstairs bathroom, which we use as a kind of half-assed locker room, is just off the part of the house where Reggie has her Rig. She’s there when I come out, working the trackballs, the only light coming from the six giant screens that surround her chair on all sides.
“You’ll mess up your eyes,” I say.
She scoffs. “Honey, I’ve had twenty-ten vision since I was a kid. I got better eyesight than you do.”
“Twenty-ten? Is that even a thing?”
“Ah, the ignorance of youth.”
“If you say so, Grandma.”
She waves an arm at me. “Get out of here. See you bright and early tomorrow.”
“Yeah, yeah. Night.”
I head back into the living room/office, lost in thought. Annie and Paul are still there, leaning up against the kitchen counter on the far side, their backs to me, talking in low voices. “… can’t fit it in there,” Paul is saying. “You’d have to take the whole back off the van.”