The Last Good Man

by Linda Nagata

  The ghost of a bitter smile surfaces on Fatima’s face. “Thank you for finding me,” she says. “I am ready to go.”

  Chris gets the door open. There’s an awkward moment as they say goodbye to Fatima, to Ryan Rogers, and to Dano Rodrigues. When they are gone, a pair of American intelligence officers comes aboard. Everyone signs an electronic document agreeing to submit to an interview within forty-eight hours of their return to the United States, and after that they transfer to a chartered jet. A cheer goes up as it lifts off. There are fist bumps and yells of “Right action!” Chris even gives a little speech: “We did what we came to do and we did it well. Be proud. This will be one to remember.” He sniffs at the cabin air, shakes his head. “And damn, we stink. As soon as we reach cruising altitude, I want everyone to get cleaned up.”

  They use the kitchenette and the tiny restroom to wipe down. The clothes worn on the mission, smelling of sweat and smoke and gunfire, are packed away in plastic bags. They change into civilian clothes. An extra athletic shirt and trousers are found for Miles. He still doesn’t have shoes but he’s not going to complain.

  “Who’s got a razor?” he shouts down the aisle. He remembers the coarse length of his beard. “Maybe scissors too.”

  Rohan grins. “I’ve got just the thing.” He reaches deep into his pack—and produces a straight-edge razor, of all things. Turning the blade so the cabin light flashes against it, he says, “Of course you might slash your own throat if we hit turbulence.”

  Miles shrugs and accepts the weapon. “I always wanted an ironic death.”

  He manages not to kill himself. Afterward, his face clean, he studies himself in the mirror, startled at how much he’s aged. His face is thin, bony, reminding him of the way his father looked after a bout of pneumonia almost killed him. Miles was lean before this ordeal, but looking at his ribs, his hollow belly, he guesses he’s lost thirty pounds. He pulls his borrowed shirt back on, returns to the cabin, returns the razor to Rohan. Khalid hands him a steaming microwaved meal.

  Miles wants to ask about the mission, how ReqOps located Hussam, how they got inside the building, how they pulled it all off without taking casualties. He wants to ask who hired them, and what their relationship is to the US government, and what legal basis they had to do what they did. But the smell of hot food reminds him that he’s thirty pounds underweight and starving. So he eats. Afterward he leans back in his seat, closing his eyes for just a minute—and doesn’t wake up again until the plane touches down in Dublin. A brief refueling stop. Only the pilot is allowed to disembark. Miles goes back to sleep.

  ~~~

  True gives in to post-mission fatigue, sleeping most of the way to Dublin. She’s more alert as they set out across the Atlantic. It’s 0400 on the west coast. Lincoln has gone home to sleep, but she knows someone will be staffing the command post, so she calls in. Michelle, one of Tamara’s assistants, answers.

  “Hey,” True says. “We got anything new on Jon Helm?”

  Michelle answers with a low, dejected sigh. “Not really. Any outfit with the resources to field those Arkinsons should have a bigger footprint, but there’s a weird silence around his operation. We haven’t even been able to track down the provenance of the Arkinsons.”

  It’s disquieting news. “Do you have any idea why that might be?”

  “He employs the right people. That’s my guess. Wildcat cybertechs who make sure his name stays out of the Cloud.”

  “Jon Helm,” she murmurs. “Still no idea what his real name is?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “All right. Keep me posted.”

  On the east coast, it’s just past 0700. The day’s getting started. In a couple of hours, Lincoln will be on the phone. He has a long list of contacts—trusted friends and former associates—any one of whom might have insight on Jon Helm’s identity. But True has Brooke Kanegawa—and Brooke has straight-line access to intelligence resources in the US Department of State.

  It’s a girl thing. True met Brooke when they were both pregnant—True with her third, Brooke with her first. True had been only twenty-seven—Twenty-seven? My God, was that even possible?—on temporary assignment in Washington DC, drafted onto a committee charged with producing a report on the sequence of blunders leading to the Mischief Reef incident. Brooke, a State Department employee with a master’s degree in international relations, was assigned to the same committee. They’ve stayed close ever since.

  True uses her tablet to compose a brief email:

  Mission accomplished. But I’m trying to chase down an identity on a nom de guerre, “Jon Helm.” Associated with a black-hat PMC, Variant Forces, based somewhere in Africa. Got anything you can share?

  She doesn’t expect an immediate answer. It’s too early. She waits five minutes. Nothing comes, so she gets up to get something to eat. She finds Chris awake. They talk, and then she returns to her seat. Just before 0900 EDT, a reply from Brooke drops into her tablet:

  Holy F!!!! When you guys at ReqOps go head-hunting, you don’t fool around! This place is buzzing. Some not happy, to be honest. You know how it is. Toes have gotten stepped on, so watch yourselves.

  Re: Jon Helm. You believe in ghosts, sister? People here do. And that’s all I can say about that.

  True stares at the note. Reads the second paragraph a few more times. A shiver walks her spine. That second paragraph says a lot: Jon Helm is known to State, he’s supposed to be dead, and he’s someone True knows or at least knows of… If he was a stranger, Brooke would not have made it personal: You believe in ghosts?

  So who is it?

  True thinks back over twenty-seven years of service. She’s met a lot of soldiers in that time. Some are dead, some still serve. Most have returned to civilian life. She keeps in touch with only a few.

  Another email arrives from Brooke. As True’s gaze alights on the subject line, she feels a feverish flush: Diego.

  True didn’t mention to Brooke anything about Jon Helm’s tattoo. So why is Brooke thinking of Diego?

  She opens the email to find a photo of Diego. Lincoln is on one side of him, face unscarred, Shaw Walker is on the other. All three of them drunk and Diego with a brilliant, carefree smile. He looked so much like his father: a lean face, chiseled Spanish features, dark eyes, dark eyebrows, and skin that turned a rich brown with just a hint of sunlight.

  True remembers the day that picture was taken. She remembers taking it. A Fourth of July barbecue she and Alex put on a few weeks before Diego’s first deployment with Rogue Lightning. They were bound for Kunar Province in Afghanistan. Gone three months. Near the end, Lincoln was seriously wounded. That was the first time he was seriously wounded, by gunfire. Diego took no visible wound but after he returned, he never smiled like that again.

  Five months later, he was dead.

  True blinks against welling pressure in her eyes. Scrolls past the photo to where Brooke has included a single line of text:

  You have to wonder, if he’d lived, who would he be now?

  True’s heart skips as she scrolls back up to look at the photo again. Who would he be now? She enlarges the image. If he had lived…

  She lets Lincoln drop off the screen. Then Diego, because there is no “if” about his death. True read the autopsy report. She examined the x-rays. She looked on his blackened and shrunken body.

  Only Shaw Walker’s image remains on the screen. He’s laughing with Diego, but his eyes are narrow, his mouth quirked. His is a cynical humor. He’s a good-looking man, with a high forehead and strong, balanced features. His eyes are light-colored. Easy to think the camera failed to capture their blue hue, but True knows it rendered them accurately: pale gray. His buzz-cut hair is dark blond. In the photograph, he’s clean-shaven.

  True studies his face, the set of his eyes, the details of his expression. She strives to see through to his soul. If Shaw had lived, who would he be now?

  Brooke has an answer to that: He’d be Jon Helm.

  Jon Helm

>   True needs to be sure. She spends twenty minutes in the Cloud, going through her albums and pulling out photos of soldiers who fit the description of Jon Helm that Miles provided—Caucasian, light eyes, lean face, lean build. She dumps them into a slideshow, putting Shaw Walker’s photo sixth. The picture is eight years old. Shaw would have been in his early thirties.

  They are halfway across the Atlantic when she wakes Miles. He sits up, bleary and apologetic. He looks years younger without his beard.

  “We were supposed to talk about Jon Helm,” he remembers.

  She says, “I want you to look at some pictures.”

  “Sure. Happy to.”

  “Go wash your face. Drink some water. I need to know you’re awake.”

  She waits in the aisle until he comes back with a cup of coffee. He returns to his window seat; she sits beside him.

  “I’ve collected some pictures,” she says. “Think of it as a photo lineup, okay? I’d like you to look at them. Let me know if anyone looks familiar.” She wakes the tablet, hands it to him.

  He puts his coffee in a cup holder, then studies the first photo. “Don’t know him,” he says.

  “Swipe to see the next one.”

  He does, examines it carefully, shakes his head. The third portrait catches his attention. “I think I met this guy once in a bar.” And the fourth photo: “That’s Rick Hidalgo—he was an instructor at Ranger School.”

  “You’re right,” True says. “That’s who that is.” She strives to keep her voice flat, to show none of the anxiety she’s feeling. She doesn’t want to influence him, even on a subconscious level.

  He looks at the fifth photo but makes no comment. He swipes to the sixth, Shaw’s photo. “Fuck,” he whispers.

  True’s stomach knots, but she says nothing, makes no move. She focuses on her breathing, keeping it soft and even.

  In a husky voice, Miles says, “This is an old photo. The guy’s older now. He has a scar on his lip. But it’s him. The merc with the crippled hand. Jon Helm.” He turns to her. “You know him? Who is it?”

  “He’s supposed to be dead,” she says in a voice barely audible over the white noise of the engines. She takes back the tablet, taps out of the slideshow, and turns off the screen before reciting the facts like a whispering automaton. “Shaw Walker. Captured along with Diego. Held with him at Nungsan. Shaw was there when they murdered Diego. They made him watch the execution. You can’t see him on the video but you can hear him screaming, pleading with them to stop, to stop…”

  She’s rambling. A sharp breath, a few seconds to steady herself. She doesn’t look at Miles when she says, “Thank you for helping. That’s what I needed to know.”

  She starts to get up but he catches her arm. Veins stand out on the back of his large hand as he holds her in a firm grip. “That bastard couldn’t have been Shaw Walker,” he says in a harsh whisper that escapes between clenched teeth. “Shaw Walker is a decorated combat veteran. Shaw Walker is fucking dead!”

  “Let go of me,” True says.

  Miles looks confused. He releases his grip. His voice is soft, husky with anger as he says, “Hey, I’m sorry. But how the fuck could it be him?”

  It occurs to True that the only thing she knows about the circumstances of Miles’s kidnapping is that the raid was led by the merc with the crippled hand.

  By Shaw Walker.

  “I don’t know how,” she says, a tremor in her voice betraying her. She sits down beside him again. Not looking at him. Breathe. She gathers herself and when she speaks again, her voice is steady, calm, controlled. “The army identified remains found at Nungsan as those of Shaw Walker. That’s what I was told.”

  She glances across the aisle to where Jameson is sleeping. This knowledge, it’s as if she’s stumbled onto the rusted shell of an unexploded bomb. Speak too loud and she might set it off. She leans close to Miles and whispers. “This is going to cause a lot of fallout among our veterans. A lot of bad feelings.” Sweat glistens on his cheeks; his jaw is so taut it looks like he’s holding back a scream. “I need to ask you one more favor.”

  “Don’t ask me to keep this a secret, True.”

  “Just until we’re home.” She knows that Chris is in the back of the plane with Khalid. Everyone else is in their seats. Asleep, maybe. She hopes they’re asleep. “I just think it’s best to wait until we’re on the ground.”

  He stares at her suspiciously, like it’s a trap. “I’m going to be researching this,” he warns her. “Writing about it.”

  She’s surprised by the fierceness of her own response. “Think about that, Miles. This is a man who does not want the world to know he exists. You want him coming after you?”

  “What the hell? What are you saying? You’re going to let this go?”

  “Fuck no. I’m saying you need to be careful. I understand you’re a journalist now, not a Ranger. I understand your priorities are different. But take time to assess the situation.”

  “And you?” he asks suspiciously. “What are you going to do?”

  She thinks about it. After a few seconds she says, “I buried what was left of my son eight years ago. I went to five more funerals—for Shaw, and for the other soldiers who did not survive that mission. I thought it was over—as if you can ever get over something like that. But if Walker is alive, I want to know why. I want to know how. I want to know what the hell he’s doing preying on innocent people like you. And I want to know what really happened at Nungsan.”

  “Then we’ve got the same goals,” Miles says. “Except I’ve got one more. I want to see him brought in. I want to see him stand trial. And when he’s locked away in a super-max, I’m going to write a fucking book.”

  Dangerous Ground

  By the time they land at JFK, the news about the mission is out. Emails have started to arrive. Most are congratulatory but True knows that’s only because her digital assistant, Ripley, files away the toxic missives—the insults, ill wishes, and death threats from digital terrorists, half of them generated by passionless trolls working under the direction of propaganda bureaus, the rest the irrational rants of awkward kids, or of narcissistic farts who imagine they can command the world from behind black curtains. Ripley forwards redacted copies of the toxic stuff to a nonprofit troll-hunting service with an AI that tries to engage the senders, while analyzing patterns and clues in their emails that get cross-matched to billions of forum posts until anonymity melts away. True scans the weekly reports, but otherwise she doesn’t waste time on it.

  As their plane taxis from the runway, she types a quick, smartass answer to a gruff note from her old man:

  Yes, I know what “retired” means. It means I get to choose my own missions. I’ll let Lincoln know your opinion of his “loose cannon maneuvers.”

  Love,

  True

  A new email comes in. True grimaces when she sees it’s from Tamara’s too-friendly colleague, the roboticist Li Guiying. She endures a flush of embarrassment when she reads the subject line: You are a hero among women!

  For fuck’s sake.

  Eyes narrowed in irritation, she skims the congratulatory note, confirming that it contains the sort of flattery she’s come to expect. In an uncharitable turn, she wonders if Guiying has trained a simple AI to write her correspondence, teaching it basic rules of echoing and praise. An easy project for someone with her skills, and it would let her maintain pseudo-friendships with thousands of potential colleagues.

  True decides she likes the idea. It’s a neat explanation for what she’s always regarded as the inexplicable amount of attention Guiying has paid to her ever since they met at a London seminar… five or six or seven years ago? True’s presentation at that seminar had been a brief, informal talk on the potential lethal impact of autonomous combat systems. She’d argued for the moral necessity of a human decision-maker in the kill chain.

  Li Guiying—a stranger at the time—approached True afterward, a rosy blush coloring her face as she awkwardly introduced he
rself as a robotics engineer formerly employed by the Chinese firm, Kai Yun Strategic Technologies, but working now for a French corporation.

  Guiying was in her late twenties then, a petite, finely dressed woman who seemed ill at ease despite her sterling credentials. “I very much agree with this fear you have expressed,” she told True in crisp, Chinese-accented English. “I believe you are correct that some tragedy of machine error could occur. I have nightmares of such a thing.”

  Then she went on to counter everything True had said:

  “You are an experienced soldier, a brave patriot. You are wise, and know a combat situation could demand a least-worst option. There must be contingency in the decision-making process for times when communications are disrupted. Then, the choice is to withdraw robotic weaponry and concede the battle, or to proceed, knowing there is risk, and the algorithms could be in error. But all war is risk. It is my experience that those who have the power to make such choices will choose to proceed.”

  This sounded to True like a well-rehearsed argument. She acknowledged its merit but added, “Command might back such technology, right up until the first time something goes terribly wrong and our frontline troops, along with those of our allies, have to pay the price.”

  At this, Guiying’s flush deepened, her gaze drifted. Watching her, True felt as if the conversation had changed in some critical way, so that it was no longer theoretical but had somehow become personal. She was left puzzled and deeply uncomfortable, a feeling reinforced when Guiying said in a quiet, almost guilty tone, “Most often, advancing technology demands to be used. I think Command would say to fix it… but maybe it is different in America?”

  Not so different, True thinks, taking off her reading glasses and rubbing her eyes. The plane has come to a stop, so she turns off the tablet’s screen without bothering to reply to Li Guiying’s email.

  Looking back, it’s clear to True that the roboticist regarded the rise of autonomous systems in the military as a given. She probably knew it would be only a few more years until True was out of a job but had been too polite to say so. Hell, maybe what True sensed in that long-ago conversation was the inevitable end of her own military career—but whatever the cause, she has never forgotten the odd, awkward feeling of that encounter. Ever since, she’s looked on Guiying with a wary eye.