by Jim Butcher
They met for meals and talked their way through food they barely ate and tea they consumed by the gallon.
He had no intention of taking her to bed. They went to bed anyway.
It was a sultry night, and he had brought her to the small ground-floor apartment on the grounds of the Catamaran Resort Hotel where he lived. She was delighted as he showed her around. The resort was gorgeous, with sculptured gardens in which stands of green bamboo framed ponds of brightly colored koi. Parrots in lovely ornate cages chattered to one another, and ducks waddled in and out of a series of lazy streams that were also home to turtles and bullfrogs. Totem poles hand-carved in Bali seemed to encourage meditation in the gardens. And guests could wander beneath the cool canopy of leaves formed by over a hundred species of palm trees, with a thousand species of flowers and plants filling the air with a subtle olio of fragrances.
Toys’s apartment was the least ostentatious of the rooms, with the least enchanting view. That had always been fine with him. It was remote and it was quiet. The fact that he owned the hotel was something no one at the Catamaran knew, nor did he tell Aayun. The staff knew that he was a permanent resident—the only such person at the place—and they mutually assumed that he was a relative of the owners.
But Toys was related to no one. The staff at FreeTech knew he lived there, but Junie Flynn was the only one of them who knew he owned it. And that he owned large chunks of San Diego real estate. Not his own money, really, but close enough.
The money had come to him along with a challenge to do some good with it. However, it was blood money, and Toys felt stained by it.
The British pharmaceutical magnate Sebastian Gault had been Toys’s employer as well as his best friend. It had been Gault who had pulled Toys out of the squalor of his younger life, seen the potential beneath the veneer of poverty and bad habits, provided him with the best education, and given him a chance to prove himself. Toys had risen to the challenge, becoming a fixer in his own right. When problems arose, Toys sorted them out. Sometimes that meant arranging a bribe, sometimes it meant cutting a throat. Toys had never been squeamish about it, and soon had a reputation in certain circles as a ruthless, efficient, fiercely loyal enabler of Gault’s excesses. Even when that meant supporting Gault’s big-ticket play to manipulate the political and religious extremes of El Mujahid and his terrorist network.
The plan was built around a weaponized disease pathogen called Seif al Din that had been designed by the brilliant scientist Amirah—who was also El Mujahid’s wife. Seif al Din had been engineered to be virtually 100 percent contagious, and it turned any infected person into a mindless engine of destructive rage. Zombies, or at least the real-world approximation. The plan had not been global destruction. No, Gault wanted to scare the superpowers, notably America, into shifting the bulk of their defense budgets away from mechanized warfare and into research and development for prophylactic drugs that would protect the population from the disease. Gault was well positioned within the pharmaceutical community, and although everyone in the industry would benefit, it was his own profits that were of primary concern.
The problem was that El Mujahid and Amirah were never really under Gault’s thumb. They saw the pathogen as a weapon of God, something that would do what decades of terrorist attacks and suicide bombers had failed to do: tear down America.
Toys had bullied Gault into trying to stop it. Together they had destroyed Amirah’s lab but nearly died in the process.
Ultimately it was all too much for Toys. He was a murderer, but he did not want to become one of the Four Horsemen of the bloody apocalypse. His Catholic upbringing, so long abandoned, reemerged, and he realized that he was an irredeemable sinner with hell as his only destination.
He had hoped to fade into obscurity and live out his years as a nothing, doing no more harm. But Mr. Church, head of the black-ops group that destroyed the Seif al Din program, found him and made him an astounding offer. He gave Toys access to the vast fortune Church had recovered from numbered accounts connected to various terrorist groups, and Church challenged Toys to use some of that money to do good in the world.
Why Church had selected him, of all people, for that role was beyond Toys. He was evil. He was a mass murderer, an enabler of horrors, a lost soul. He was damned and doomed.
But he took the challenge, even though it meant often interacting with Joe Ledger and feeling the acid burn of the man’s contempt. Ledger was Junie Flynn’s lover, so there were complications at every turn. Toys found no forgiveness there, and he understood that he deserved none. Not a drop. A sinner with so many black marks against his soul was not allowed the right to despise the devils who tormented him in hell.
And yet . . .
Every day, he felt that he was failing. Every day he could feel the darkness inside calling to him, pulling at him, silencing the voices of his better angels. And over and over again that malicious bitch Fate shoved him in the direction of new violence, new killings, new crimes. New sins.
All of this bubbled like a witches’ brew in Toys’s mind as he strolled with Aayun through the gardens. It was still there when they returned to his rooms and sat on lawn chairs with cold beers and watched the hummingbirds. His scruffy cat, Job, came and stared at Aayun for a long time. She tried to pet him, but the cat walked away.
“He’s not a very social animal,” said Toys.
“Are you?” she asked. Her eyes were large and beautiful and they awakened something in him that Toys had long since thought dead. Not just passion, but a desire to feel passion. To allow it.
“I . . . I need to say something,” he found himself saying.
She set her bottle down and swung her legs over so she sat sideways on the chair, facing him. “What?” she asked, her voice smoky and soft.
“I’m damaged goods.”
Aayun smiled. “Who isn’t?”
He saw it in her eyes. Pain, old and worn like calluses into the soft flesh of her life. He had no idea what species of pain it was, or why it had come to her. He assumed it had something to do with the wars that followed 9/11. He didn’t ask, though. The pain was there and it was hers, and he could understand it without having to know a single detail. As she, clearly, understood him.
There was no more conversation for a long time. He stood up, and she rose with him. They kissed beneath the fires of a dying sun. The kiss was tentative at first. Careful, as if each was afraid of breaking the other. That moment held in sweetness, and then everything became incredibly intense.
They tore buttons and fabric on the way inside to his narrow bed. When she was naked, he could see that she was beautifully made but far too thin. It did not matter. She was so alive. They kissed with volcanic heat. There was a kind of tenderness between them, if layered beneath need and urgency and fumbling of a kind that happens when things are so new, or so newly intense; the hands tremble and the body shudders and the blood roars.
He came too quickly because it had been so long. It didn’t matter. She came a heartbeat later. And then after half an hour they both climbed the long hill together, sweating, crying out, gasping, and as one they plunged over the edge.
When there was no more for either of them to give, when they were spent and languid, and exhausted, he held her in his arms and buried his face in her hair and tried not to weep.
But when he heard her first small sobs, he lost all control. They clung together like drowning people.
5.
Dawn was still hours away when she leaned close and kissed his cheek, then whispered softly into his ear.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He swam upward through lingering dreams toward the surface and wakefulness. He wanted to tell her that it was all okay, that there was never going to be any reason for either of them to say that they were sorry. For anything.
Then he felt the sting on the side of his neck. A little bee sting.
He tried to say something, anything, but even “ouch” was beyond him. Once more he seemed
to fall off a cliff, but now he fell down, down, down into a bottomless black hole.
6.
Nowhere
He woke naked, bound to a wooden chair by duct tape, sick and terrified.
“You’re awake,” she said.
Toys forced his eyelids up. It took effort. The darkness wanted to pull him back down, to keep him. He almost let it take him.
Almost.
Instead he looked at her.
Aayun sat on the edge of a metal equipment case. The last time he had seen her she was naked. Now she wore a white lab coat over jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. No makeup. No smile.
“What the bloody hell are you playing at?” he mumbled, his voice thick, his lips rubbery. “And what the hell did you do to me?”
“It’s a synthetic compound developed by the Iranian military. A ketamine base with some other elements. Very fast-acting. They use it for abductions when they want no noise, no fuss.”
He nodded, accepting and absorbing that. He licked his dry lips and sucked enough spit from his cheeks to allow himself to swallow. It helped, but only a little.
“Why?”
Aayun shrugged. “You don’t know? Haven’t you figured it out yet?”
“Sorry, but no. Why would I understand anything about something like this? You drugged me and brought me . . . where?” The room was a concrete box, big and dark, with bare walls but crowded with packing crates of all sizes. The stencils on the closest crates indicated that they were machine parts from Canada. “Am I still in America?”
“Maybe you’re in the last place you’ll ever be, Toys,” she said.
Toys.
There it was. She knew who he was, and suddenly the fragile construction of their chance meeting cracked and fell to the ground, leaving behind a lot of possibilities. All of them were ugly.
He straightened and reappraised her, and as he did so, the chair to which he was bound creaked. The tape held him fast to it, with his hands behind the back slat and his ankles tight to the front legs.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Who do you think I am?”
“A wicked bitch who needs her throat cut. But that’s just my wishful thinking.”
She got up and walked over to him, smiled, and then slapped him across the face. She did it forehand and backhand. Hard blows that tore his lips and rattled his head. She knew how to hit and how to hurt.
Then, still smiling, she went back to her seat. “Try again.”
He spat blood onto the floor between them. “Is Aayun even your real name?”
Her dark eyes glittered with strange light. “Yes. Does it ring any bells? It should.”
Toys thought about it. Over the years he’d met a lot of people, and a fair number were from the Middle East. Sebastian Gault and Hugo Vox both had extensive dealings throughout that part of the world. How many women named Aayun had he known? One? But she was an old woman and probably dead. How many had he known of? That took more thought, and he could come up with only two. One was the young wife of an antiquities broker in Cairo. He’d seen her only briefly once, and this woman was the wrong physical type. Who was the other? He had to fish for it. A niece of someone? No . . . a younger sister. Seen only once in a family photo but spoken of often. The sister of . . .
He froze and felt the blood drain from his face. Aayun was watching him, and she nodded when she saw that he remembered.
“You’re her sister?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
And then all of the memories that had tugged at him whenever he’d looked at Aayun clicked into place. If he had seen her somewhere other than a Catholic church, if they’d met under any circumstance that might have tied her more firmly to her family, then he might have understood sooner. Now he felt like a fool, and very possibly a suicidally stupid one.
“You’re Amirah’s sister,” he breathed.
“Yes,” she said again.
“Dear God . . .”
“I’ve looked for you for such a long time, Toys,” she said. “First I chased rumors, and twice I thought you were dead. People have been saying that you went soft. That you found God. That you lost your nerve.”
“Is that what people say?”
“They do. People have been looking closely at you. You used to be a careful person, but now you’ve become predictable, even clumsy. You live at that resort, you eat in the same diner every day. You go for long walks on the beach. You go to church nearly every day. You make no ripples. So . . . yes, the people who file reports on you say that you’ve lost your nerve, that you’ve become weak. That you’re no one.”
She paused, but Toys said nothing.
“So I had to come and see for myself. I had to know for sure.”
“Know what?” asked Toys.
Aayun smiled. “I had to see for myself if you were broken.”
“Oh?”
“I had to see if you’ve really become some kind of altar boy. And if so, why?”
His heart was pounding now. “What have you learned, Aayun?”
Aayun said, “I don’t really know, and that’s my dilemma. You could be broken, but you could also be licking your wounds and lying low until you figure out your next move. After all, you’ve had bad luck in picking patrons. Gault failed you. Twice, by my count. And Hugo Vox outlived his relevance.”
“Doesn’t say much for my effing judgment, though, does it?” muttered Toys.
“Oh, if we’re to talk about judgment, let’s start with why you killed my sister.”
He spat more blood. “Your sister was insane.”
“She was brilliant.”
“She was a classic example of the mad scientist, sweetie, let’s face it. She created an actual doomsday weapon.”
“It was because she believed in—”
“Stop,” he said. “Just stop. You can effing kill me if you like, but please don’t subject me to a lecture on the virtues of Dr. Amirah Malaki. She and Sebastian made quite the pair. He was a self-absorbed narcissist with delusions of economic grandeur, and she was a brilliant back-stabbing soulless witch. And let’s add El Mujahid to that mix. He let his wife whore herself to Sebastian in order to fool him into thinking they were a team.”
“Sex is a very useful weapon,” Aayun said flatly. “It makes men unbelievably stupid.”
“Okay, touché, love, but it doesn’t whitewash anyone involved. We’re all whores of one kind or another. Amirah fucked Sebastian stupid, and he believed that she was his ally. The Seif al Din pathogen was only ever supposed to be used as a scare tactic, as part of the biggest extortion gambit the world has ever seen. But your sister and her husband actually tried to release it and start a global pandemic. They would have killed everyone. You do grasp that, don’t you? Seif al Din could not be stopped once it was out. And don’t give me that claptrap about them wanting to use it to preserve their twisted version of Islam. They would have killed billions of Muslims with it.”
“They wanted to save the faithful and—”
“Bullshit. They turned themselves into fucking zombies! Sure, they were smarter and could speak, unlike the rest of the infected, but they were still effing zombies. Think about that, Aayun. They perverted their own bodies and were willing to destroy the whole world. Do you think Allah would have approved? ’Cause I bloody well don’t.”
Aayun shook her head. “I don’t care about that. I’m not a Muslim. Not anymore. I don’t believe in that any more than I believe in your idiot who got nailed to a tree with a promise of salvation on his lips, which, I should point out, was a failed promise. Has anyone ever been saved by Christianity? Or Islam? Or anything? No.”
“So this is what? Revenge?”
The smile on Aayun’s face changed. Twisted. Became darker and stranger.
“Of a sort,” she said softly.
Aayun got up and walked a few yards away, stopping in front of a packing case that was about the size and shape of an old-fashioned phone booth. A crow
bar stood against it and she picked it up, weighed it thoughtfully in her hands, and then fitted the crow’s foot into the gap between the front of the box and the closest side.
“What are you doing?” Toys asked quickly.
“Oh, you’ll see,” she said between grunts of effort. The green wood squealed as she pried the box open.
“Aayun,” he called, and he hated the sound of fear in his own voice. “Aayun, whatever you’re doing . . . don’t. Come back. Let’s talk this through.”
She paused in her work and looked at him over her shoulder. Her face was flushed with effort. “You are a murderer, Toys. My sister killed a lot of people, but you’re right . . . she was actually insane. She was always insane. I think God drove her mad, or at least the twisted vision of God that she always clung to. Her and El Mujahid. That was no loving God. They worshipped a monster. They believed in fatwa and jihad and all of that bullshit. They thought they were still fighting the Crusaders to protect the Holy Land. No matter what any of us tried to tell her, she would never listen. It was ‘Allah wills this’ and ‘Allah wills that.’ And I’ve seen people like her all over the world. I’ve traveled, Toys. I didn’t lie about that. I actually went looking for God, for hope, for something to believe in, but no matter where I looked all I found was lies, propaganda, false hopes, and more insanity.”
She gave another pull, and the wood cracked a little but didn’t give way. She repositioned her crowbar.
“Maybe you weren’t looking in the right places,” said Toys. His heart was still hammering, but it hurt. Not physically, but for her.
Aayun shook her head. “Oh, please. Spare me the proselytizing. I was never the audience for that kind of thing. Not even at home. Not even when I pretended to be a good and dutiful little Muslim and went to the mosque and pretended to pray. I wanted to be, but God kept disappointing me. I was hoping that you were haunting the church as some kind of dodge, some kind of protective coloration, but you’re not. You actually believe. You actually think you’re going to be saved.”