by Heskett, Jim
“David,” Jules said, her sharp tone cutting through the whirlpool of his thoughts.
Wellner ignored her completely, and his gaze landed on Historian Kunjal Anand, brow knitted, holding a pen above a yellow legal pad. He wanted to tell Kunjal not to take notes for this meeting, not to commit his failures to the permanent record, but he couldn’t think of a good enough reason to break protocol.
“How you doing, Kunjal?”
The young man raised an eyebrow and said, “Uhh, good, sir. How are you?”
“Oh, you know. It’s a lot right now.”
Kunjal looked around, seemingly confused about whether he was supposed to have a direct one-on-one conversation with the President in the middle of this meeting. Wellner wasn't even sure why he was doing it.
“You still like your apartment?” Wellner asked. “And that big American refrigerator?”
“David,” Jules said again, interrupting.
“What?”
“Would you sit? You’re making us all nervous.”
“I think I’d like to stand. I’m hoping this doesn’t take too long. I still have a lot of paperwork waiting for me in my office.”
She frowned. “Very well. There are two important topics of information I need to pass along, to be entered into the record and to introduce for discussion with the Board.”
Wellner watched Kunjal scribbling, the young man’s ear pointed at Jules.
“First,” Jules said, “I was paid a visit yesterday by a woman from Boulder Branch. Fagan.”
Wellner stopped pacing. And now he did look at Jules. It had simply been a reaction to her words, not a deliberate attempt to make eye contact with her.
There was no malice on her face. But she had to have reason to be suspicious, didn’t she? Would she assume Wellner was behind the attempt on her life? It seemed utterly bizarre that she had told no one about the assassination attempt yesterday. As far as Wellner knew, at least. She had said nothing to him, nothing to anyone else on the Board. He would have to imagine it would be the number one topic of conversation if she had brought it to everyone’s attention.
Maybe the rumors about her dealing cocaine were true, and she had assumed it was an attempted hit related to that. Maybe. Or, she had something more sinister under wraps than her desire to establish a cartel.
“Fagan came to you?” Wellner said. “You, specifically?”
“Yesterday at around four. She said she had wanted to speak with you, David, but you weren’t available.”
She’d looked at him when she’d said it. Of course, Wellner had been planning the hit on Jules during that time. Had there been some recognition in her glance? Did she know? Did she assume? If she was anything, he knew she was a good politician — able to play things from multiple sides while keeping her poker face tilted slightly upward in a vicious, mischievous grin.
Wellner thought he might puke. He could feel the anxiety rumbling around in his stomach, poised to eject from his mouth. His legs were weak, and he could feel dots of perspiration forming on his forehead. He wished he had a bottle of antacids, even though he knew it wouldn’t sedate the discomfort.
Still, Kunjal scribbled, intently focused on his yellow legal pad.
“Fagan has reason to believe that Five Points is planning an attack on another Branch. At least one, maybe more. She and Ember Clarke have recovered journals from a deceased Five Points member that detail non-specific plans. They have been studying them for days, trying to find concrete evidence.”
“If the plans are not specific, then that doesn’t sound like anything actionable. I’ll ask the Security team to start monitoring the Branches daily, including message board traffic and on-site inspections. Good? Who’s next with a report?”
Jules cleared her throat. “I’m not finished.”
Wellner stopped pacing and turned to her, but he looked at her hands on the table, not in her eyes. There had to be a way to end this meeting quickly. The longer he stood here, the more likely he would barf all over this table.
“I went to Lyons and spoke with the Oracle.”
“You did what?” Wellner asked.
“This is part of an investigation I had been undertaking for several weeks now. I thought it was time we had outside counsel. And while I was there, I learned something terribly interesting. The Oracle told me that after the last black spot variety of trial by combat was issued in 1971, the disciplinary measure was later outlawed by the Review Board. That was part of what was in the missing documents in the archives.”
Wellner felt unease grip his spine. He knew the last black spot had caused problems after, but outlawed completely? He had no idea. He’d assumed the punishment was simply uncommon, reserved for the worst offenders.
Wellner opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
Could this even be true?
“Also,” Jules said, “Ember Clarke went to visit the Oracle on Halloween, and she was told the same thing.”
So, Ember knew. And Jules knew. This “investigation” that had persisted for weeks? Could this have been what Jules and Kunjal had been talking about in the stairwell? Could all of that “scheming” actually have been about the black spot and had nothing to do with Jules coming to unseat him from power?
Wellner looked at her now, right in the eyes. He couldn’t read her. How could he have been so wrong about all this?
Maybe this was all a part of Jules’ plan, but he couldn’t see it from end to end.
“I need time to consider this information,” he said.
Jules frowned. “We’re concerned about you, David. I heard that you interrogated and executed three Club members in the basement of this building last week. Adding that to your unprecedented execution of the Boulder member during an actual Review Board session, I must say I’m deeply concerned about your behavior. What is going with you?”
He wanted to lash out, to smack her across her smug face, to delete the condescending attitude dribbling from her mouth, and yet he simultaneously felt chastised, as if he were being cross-examined by his own mother.
Wellner stood, tapping his foot on the floor. Too much. Too much to process. Every eye in the room was on him, watching, studying, judging. It was too much. He had to go. He had to think. He had to be somewhere else to reconcile this new development. He would never get anywhere mentally, standing here amid all this judgment.
Wellner picked up his token from the table and fled the room.
Chapter Twenty-Four
EMBER
She studied the interior courtyard at Bam’s apartment building. A black tarp stretched over the pool, winterized and shut down for several months to come, most likely. All the individual apartments were in a rectangle, pointed into the interior. There were a few lights on, but no one was hanging out on the walkways on the second floor or the porches on the first. The evening seemed relatively quiet and peaceful.
She had her sights on the apartment next door to Bam’s. Ideally, she would break in, then drill a tiny hole into the wall, insert her hidden camera, and get the hell out before anyone had a chance to see her. The problem was, she couldn’t see from here whether anyone was home or not in that adjacent apartment. There were no lights on, as far as she could tell. It didn’t seem late enough at night for people to be sleeping, but no lights and no activity didn’t mean for sure no one was home.
The apartment two doors down from Bam’s did open, though. A woman wearing a stained t-shirt and sweatpants shooed a cat out, then closed the door behind her. The cat sat back on its haunches and proceeded to unleash a volley of meows at the door.
Not a complication she needed, but Ember might not get a chance like this again. She had to take it.
After some internal debate, she decided to leave the drill in her car to travel light and inconspicuously so she could get a closer look. Better not to have a drill in her hand if she did happen to run into someone on this fact-finding mission. A knock on the door would end speculation very quickly.
So, she zipped up her jacket, pulled up her hood, and left the car, then opened the gate into the courtyard and trudged up the stairs to the second floor. She approached carefully, eyes on Bam’s door the whole time. His lights were off, too. Since her previous GPS tracker had failed, no way to know his current location. But it didn’t look like he was here at the moment. He was a young man, probably out at the bar, drinking Jello shots out of a stripper’s belly button, or whatever the kids did these days.
Ember first walked by his door, slowing to spy in through the window blinds. She moved her head up and down to check. Lights off, nothing going on inside. Next, she did the same with the neighbors, and it seemed like they were gone, as well. This was about as good as it would get. The cat continued to meow, stalking her as she scurried around the apartments.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Let’s go back for the drill and get to work.”
She turned around and kept her head low as she descended the stairs. The assassin stayed on full alert, searching for curtains drawn back, for eyes peering in the darkness. The hood of her jacket cut into her peripheral vision, so she tried to stay focused and keep her head moving.
As she neared the pool, she turned her gaze when she heard the creaky gate at the end closest to the parking lot open and shut. She found herself standing thirty feet away from a familiar-looking guy in a black beanie, with a ceramic weed pipe in his hand. He looked like he’d been headed toward the stairs leading to Bam’s apartment. A friend coming by to get stoned?
“He’s not here,” she said.
The guy looked up, his face twisted as he stared at her. “Wait a second. Don’t I…”
Now Ember recognized him. Last time, he hadn’t been wearing a beanie, and he now had the beginnings of a beard, so his face seemed different. But this was one of them. He was from Five Points, one of the three guys who had first attacked Ember in a parking lot over a month ago, as revenge for killing Niles Thisdell, the event that had started this entire shit-show.
One of the three who had murdered her friend, Charlie.
“Oh, damn,” Ember said. “Not one of you guys.”
She wasn’t even sure which of the three it was. One of them, she had stabbed in the chest and broken his collarbone. Another had come at her again, two weeks ago, outside of the Parker Post Office. This was the third guy, maybe, or the same one from outside the Post Office? She couldn’t tell for sure.
“You,” he said, seething. He opened his palm and let the pipe fall to the ground. Without hesitation, he whipped a hand back toward his belt and drew a jagged hunting knife bigger than his head. Almost like a machete.
Ember braced her body for impact, one foot behind the other. He came at her, opening the blade as he ran, both of them standing within a foot of the edge of the covered pool. She wished she could take a few steps to her right, but it was too late for that now.
Ember raised her fists. She waited to see if he would go high or low with the blade. He chose high.
Ember lowered herself into a crouch and pushed forward at the last second when he was within one step from her. As she felt the air whiff above her from the blade swishing downward, she pushed out, planting the palms of her hands on his stomach. He folded, falling backward.
His hands thrust forward. Ember made a fist and punched up at the hand holding the blade. It fell from his grasp as he was still falling, and it tumbled to the concrete as he landed on his butt.
Ember snatched the heavy knife, then she tried to raise it up high to swipe at him when she felt a hand close around her ankle. Next thing she knew, she was slipping, collapsing into the tarp over the pool. Splash.
Then blackness materialized around her as the tarp encircled her like a mummy’s wrappings. Icy water flooded into her ears, her nose, her mouth. Panic gripped her for an instant, the intensity of the sensory deprivation overwhelming her.
All the while, the Five Points thug had his hands on her from behind, grappling, trying to reach the knife in her hand to steal it back. But he was also wrestling with the billowing tarp, and he couldn’t snake through it to establish a solid hold on her.
Ember couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t figure out which was way up. But one thing she knew for sure: the guy was behind her. She drove the knife backward, stabbing at the hunk of flesh clinging to her like a backpack. With the resistance of the water, she had to push with all her might to drive it home.
The blade entered flesh. The hands on her spasmed and then relented. The hands drifted away, and she no longer felt pressure against her backside.
Ember took a second to calm herself and get her bearings. Her head pounded from lack of oxygen. As near as she could tell, she was still right-side up, underwater. She wriggled her hands up toward her face and then pushed them outward, clearing the bunched-up tarp away from her body. Chlorine in the pool burned her eyes, and her lungs screamed for air.
Then she swam up, kicking her legs to reach the surface. The tarp fell away from her as she pushed against the water to move higher. As she breached the surface into the darkness of night, she gasped and sucked in a lungful of painfully frigid air. She coughed out water, lungs feeling on fire, eyes burning, with icy water dribbling down from her hair and into her face.
And there was Bam, standing by the edge of the pool, eyebrows raised at her.
Chapter Twenty-Five
EMBER
“What the hell are you doing in my pool?” Bam said, frowning down at her. “It’s closed, dumbass. Obviously.”
Ember first looked around at the apartment doors in the courtyard. The squabble with the Five Points guy had seemed loud, but no one had apparently been drawn out to come look. Maybe fist fights by the pool were such a regular occurrence here, no one cared. Either way, she didn’t want to linger.
“Just taking a dip,” she said as she swam over to grasp onto the edge. The shivers took over with freezing water underneath and freezing air on top. She pulled herself out of the pool and whipped off her soaking wet jacket, leaving only a t-shirt and dripping jeans below.
Bam leered, his eyes undressing her in the most uncomfortable and obvious way she’d ever experienced. “You look cold. Like you’re smuggling some .22 rounds.”
“Why haven’t you killed me? You’ve had your chances. You could put a bullet in my head right now and be done with it. You could have your revenge. But you’re content to let this all play out and give me chances to beat you.”
“I told you. I’m not done with you. Also, I’m not going to shoot someone in my apartment building’s courtyard. Think about it. That would be insane.”
“You want me to go on an educational scavenger hunt for Niles. I get it. What’s the point of that, though? I never gave a shit about Niles. He wasn’t my friend or my enemy, so why go to all this trouble?”
He shrugged. “You get to decide what the point is. But I’m ready to tell you the next clue. Do you want to hear it?”
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “Sure.”
“Niles’ car. Find that, and you’ll find useful information.”
“You put a bomb in his car?”
“I didn’t say that. But that’s the next place to look, if you want to keep seeing this thing through to the end. And you better hurry, too. Tick tock, Ember Clarke.”
“What if I say no?”
Bam turned up his palms. “Then more civilians will probably die. I know that’s important to you, because I figured out your kryptonite.”
She flexed her jaw, trying to keep the shivers from taking over her body. “Did you kill my recruit Gabe?”
Bam gave a simple shake of the head, with no emotion on his face. “Wasn’t me. I had nothing against Gabe. Shit, Ember, if you hadn’t killed my mentor, I wouldn’t have anythi
ng against you, either. But you did, and now this is where we’re at.”
She didn’t get the feeling he was terribly broken up about Niles being dead, actually. He had such a flat expression on his face so much of the time. He was always on an even keel, actually, except when he was angry. Maybe that was the key to getting him to reveal something; poke him. Or, it could shut him up for good. Ember didn’t know the right way to play him yet. He was too hard to read.
“You lost a recruit, and I lost a mentor,” Bam said. “It feels like justice, but it’s not quite the same thing. I can see why you suspect that I did it. I don’t blame you for that. But if you’re hoping to figure out who did you wrong, you’re going to have to keep looking.”
Bam paused with his mouth open, halting himself from saying something. He tilted his head and frowned. They both turned to look as the body surfaced in the pool, surrounded in a cloud of blood only a little darker than the water. His arms were out, head down, as if frozen while treading water. He bobbed up and down, moving with the current.
“Oh, shit, is that Tanner? Did you kill him?”
“If Tanner is the guy who attacked me and dragged me into the pool, then, yeah, I killed him.”
Bam gritted his teeth. “Shit, Ember. He was a friend of mine. And now you’ve left a body in my damn pool.”
“Where are the bombs?”
Bam clenched his fists. “Don’t change the subject.”
“I told those assholes if they came at me again, I would kill them. I didn’t want to. I don’t like killing Club members unless I absolutely have to, but I didn’t see how I had any other choice. All three of them have had plenty of warning. One of them has a broken collarbone, so he’s not probably out for me. The second one is in your pool. And if the third guy comes for me again, I’ll kill him too.”