by Matt Forbeck
"According to Paul's report, no more than twelve hours. His team works fast."
"Killed on the Fourth of July."
I nodded. "Who's going to report a few stray gunshots on a day filled with firecrackers?"
I scoured the room for clues, but I knew I wouldn't find anything. There was no way I'd manage to stumble across something that Paul's CSI team had missed. A professional team like that with state-of-the-art equipment would be able to spot a fly's footprints on the wall.
Still, I had one thing they didn't. My perspective.
I sat down in the chair.
"Gah!" Querer said. "Are you–?"
"Yes," I said, cutting her silent. "I'm sure."
I leaned back and put my hands behind the chair, together as if I was bound. I jammed my ankles up against the chair's legs as if they were zip-tied down too. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what I must have felt like sitting here with the killer babbling at me.
I'd been blinded, my tongue cut from my mouth. The pain must have been horrible. By that point, even I would have been hoping for the sweet release of death, a chance for a fresh start again. That was the only way I was likely to get my missing parts back, after all. Despite the active black market in spare body parts, legitimate transplants were rare. They still depended on twentieth-century technology, as the science behind them hadn't advanced much after the advent of the Amortals Project.
When it became possible to replace your body, vast chunks of medical science had fallen to the wayside. What wealthy foundation would subsidize research that would only help the poor? Better instead to fight for funds that would make amortality available to all.
Of course, that hadn't worked out well either. Backing up your memories wasn't cheap, and neither was force-growing a clone to adulthood. Few people could afford the insurance premiums. Those that could lived like unkillable gods.
The mortals just struggled on the best they could, the world they'd been born into stalling out around them as power and money concentrated itself in the hands of people who increasingly cut themselves off from the world around them. The gap between the haves and have-nots grew to a chasm between the tiny minority who had everything and the vast bulk who had almost nothing.
I'd only found myself on the privileged side of that canyon by a combination of bravery and blind luck.
In 2032, I'd been assigned to protect President Emmanuel during his re-election campaign. When a neo-Nazi death squad tried to assassinate him in the middle of a town hall meeting, I took several of the bullets meant for him. I was a fit and trim sixty-four years old at the time and had been dreaming about retirement right up until the moment I got shot.
As a Secret Service agent, the danger of being killed is part of the job. I'd known that when I'd signed up for it, and I hadn't hesitated to step up when the situation demanded it.
While the President went on video and reassured the country that he was all right, I fought a losing battle for my life at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I fell into a coma, and the doctors kept me alive on a ventilator. Everything about me was dead but my brain.
That's when the CIA proposed using an experimental procedure on me to backup my brain and restore it to a clone. They'd suggested it before but always been shot down on moral and ethical grounds. Here they saw their chance. Who could object to taking every measure possible to save the life of the man who'd paid the ultimate price to protect the President?
It worked, of course, and I became the razor-thin edge of the wedge the government would use to argue in favor of amortality. It didn't hurt that the idea of amortality held a lot of appeal for the wealthiest and most influential people in the nation. Within a matter of a few short years, the argument had been won, and the government shoved billions of dollars into the Congressionally approved Amortals Project.
The catch, of course, is that the government was the only organization with the resources to both build and administer such an ambitious and costly program. That placed everyone who wanted into the program at the government's mercy, including me.
I couldn't afford the insurance, of course, and despite being a high-ranking agent, I wouldn't normally have qualified for coverage. As the poster boy for the entire project, though, I couldn't be allowed to die. I was given eternal coverage with one caveat. It only lasted as long as I remained a government employee.
Looking back, I'm not sure I should have agreed to it. I hadn't any choice the first time, of course. That had been up to Colleen to give them consent, but who could have blamed her for choosing to bring me back then? At the time, it must have sounded like some kind of unbelievable fantasy.
Every time I've cashed my chips since then, though, it's been at my own prior request that the Amortals Project cashed me back in. In my lower moments, I often considered giving it all up, beating Patrón to the punch and quitting before he could make good on his threat to fire me. But if I did that, I'd lose out on the one thing driving me forward today: making sure that whoever killed me each time was brought to justice. So today, at least, I was glad to be back, to be contributing to that cause, to be making a difference. Next week, who knew how I'd feel, but right now I was determined to solve my murder.
"Ronan?" Querer spoke in a worried voice like a child checking to see if her father was asleep but wanting desperately not to awaken him.
I opened my eyes. I tried to imagine the man in the black suit standing there before me, aiming that pistol at my forehead, about to pull the trigger. I shivered so hard I felt the chair shake beneath me.
"Are you all right?" Querer asked.
"No." I stood up and walked toward the door. "But I will be."
CHAPTER NINE
Sitting for so long in the chair in which I had died had made a mess out of the rebirthday suit they'd given me at the Amortals Project. I needed some new clothes and maybe a chance to think.
When Querer and I got back to the street, the squad car was already gone. The DC cops hadn't stuck around for an instant longer than they'd had to.
I walked Querer to the hovercar and told her I'd meet her back at the office later in the afternoon.
"Are you sure? You don't look well."
"Contemplating my own demise does that to me. I just need a good night's sleep in my own bed. Right now, I'll settle for a fresh suit."
As she slipped away, I summoned another hovercar from the Secret Service pool for myself.
I watched the street life while I waited. Nothing had changed. Nothing here had changed in over a hundred years. It just deteriorated.
A grimy man sidled up to me. He'd been sitting in a doorway fifty yards up the street. He was dressed in a shirt that had once been white and still said "An American Original" on the front in block letters. He wore cargo shorts and carried an overstuffed duffel bag that likely contained everything he owned. He'd tied his busted flip-flops to his feet with binder clips and rubber bands.
"Hey, buddy? Got change for a hundred?" he said. "I need a twenty for the cigarette machine."
Most people in my social strata didn't carry even a dollar on them. If I needed to pay someone, I just looked into his eyes, brought the right amount up on my ocular display, and authorized the transaction. It was quick and easy, and it kept my pockets clean.
People without a nanoserver, though, couldn't manage this. Some used their phones instead, having you look into the camera lens on the face or just setting up an instant ad-hoc network for the transfer.
Most people only used cash if they had no other choice, and that usually meant black-market merchandise or services. They thought cash was untraceable, but that's not true. It's harder to trace, sure, but most cash registers optically scan the bills that move in and out of them. I can look at a bill, and my nanoserver will tell me its entire life story in a matter of microseconds.
This man, though, didn't really want change. He could buy his cigarettes in any corner store, and they'd give him his change. He wanted to find out if I had any cash on m
e, if I was worth trying to mug. I waved him off.
He held the bill up in front of me. "Seriously, friend. I just need to turn this into something smaller."
I glanced at the bill, and out of habit, I scanned it. Its history popped up in my lens, and one line of it blinked a bright red. The bill turned out to have been mine. It had left my custody two days ago at a curry shop a few blocks from here, right in the heart of Kali Country. I grabbed the man by the wrist and plucked the bill from his hand.
"Hey!" he shouted. "That's mine!"
I stiff-armed him back. "I just need to look at it."
I flipped the bill over and scanned the other side. Nothing new there. I thought about bringing it into Paul for analysis, but I knew he wouldn't be able to find anything. The bill had been crumpled and smoothed and had probably passed through a dozen hands before finding its way into this man's greasy fingers. Or not.
"Give me my money back!" he said as he came at me.
The man took a swing at my jaw. I blocked it with my left arm and slapped him with my right hand. That set him back. He glared at me with wild blue eyes, then up at the bill I still held in my left hand, staring at it like a starving dog. It wasn't much money to me, but to this man it was worth assaulting a well-dressed stranger and risking having his teeth knocked out.
"Where did you get this?" I asked, holding it in front of me.
The man glared at me, then spit on my tie. "Forget it," he said. "Keep it."
I reached for my badge, and the man cowered as if I meant to go for my gun instead.
"I'm not going to hurt you," I said, showing him my badge just as my hovercar landed behind me. "I only want to know where you picked up that bill."
The badge didn't scare him any less than a gun. "I don't know, pal." He pointedly looked at the ground in a vain attempt to keep me from getting a positive ID on him. "I don't know anything. Swear."
My facial recognition layer picked him out as a likely match for Andre Miandre, no known address. He was only twentyeight but looked like he was in his early forties. Life in Kali Country was hard. He'd been lucky, strong, or stupid enough to survive this long, but his body had paid for it.
"Look, Andre."
He flinched at the sound of his name. "Ah, no. Don't." The last hint of a spine slipped out of him, and his shoulders slumped forward. I had him cold, and he knew it.
I held the bill in his face. "Who gave this to you?"
He grabbed the shaggy hair on the sides of his head and knotted his hands in it, then groaned and pulled as if he might yank it all out. "I don't know. Some guy in a hat and a flu mask. I didn't get a good look at him."
"How'd you come by the money then?"
Andre frowned. "The guy gave me that bill and four more just like it. He said I could keep the rest if I gave you the one."
It was my turn to frown. "Me?"
He nodded. "That's right, Mr Dooley."
I glared at him. "And how do you know who I am?"
"I remember you from the thrids I watched in school."
I sometimes wondered how Patrón could ever send me undercover any more. My face hadn't been in the news for a couple decades, I suppose, but it seemed that even guys like Andre had studied my whole life.
"Give me the rest of the money," I said.
He hesitated for a moment, then reached into his pocket and handed over the contents. I scanned the bills and stuffed them in my pocket over his protests. All of them had once belonged to me. As far as the system was concerned, they still did. That meant since they'd left me, no one else had used them in a way that could be tracked.
"You did a good job," I said. I looked into his eyes. No nanoserver there. "Got a phone?"
He fished a grimy roll-up model out of his pocket and held it up in front of me. I looked into the camera lens on the end of the tube and paid him for the bills I'd taken. The glow surrounding the lens shifted from red to green.
"Now get the hell out of here."
He turned and ran off. I had my gait layer size him up as he went. If I needed to find him later, it wouldn't be hard. The pool hovercar arrived, and I slid in and sent it home. It angled down the tunnels toward the Potomac, and as soon as it reached the Key Bridge, it slipped into the sky and followed the river toward the sea.
My place wasn't even a mile downriver, but it might as well have been part of the Mars colony for how much it differed from Madam Fate's. Despite its storied history – or perhaps because of it – the Watergate was one of the few private building complexes that stood open to the sky, without any other buildings bridging out to it. That gave it an unobstructed view of the Potomac River and Theodore Roosevelt Island across the way.
The hovercar dropped me off at the rooftop entrance of my building, the Watergate South. It's the northern of the two curved parts of the Watergate complex that form a C facing the river, at the south end of the others. I pinged MPD CSI. Paul's voice popped into my ear.
"Yes, Dooley?"
"Is my apartment cleared to enter yet?" I asked. I didn't much care what the answer might be. I was going in either way. I just wanted to know if any blue uniforms were going to hassle me about it.
"You should be good. We completed our work there late last night. Didn't find much of interest, other than the fact you're a horrible housekeeper."
"That's not news to anyone." I paused to think for a moment as I stepped into the elevator. "How long has it been since anyone's been in there?"
"Other than my team? That's hard to say. The carbon-dating on the dishes you left in the sink hasn't come back yet."
"Give it your best guess."
"From the condition of those dishes and the decay of the garbage in your kitchen, I'd say it had been at least two weeks, maybe three."
What would have kept me from sleeping in my own bed – or at least from bothering with the dishes and trash – for two or three weeks? With Colleen gone for over a hundred years, I'm a reconfirmed bachelor, but I wouldn't ever let things slip that badly on purpose.
Maybe.
Colleen would have laughed at me. The team of domestic bots that came with the condo kept the place pretty clean. They swept and mopped the floors every night. They washed and folded my laundry. They even kept the bathrooms and kitchens clean and polished. My chores were few. I just didn't always bother with them.
"Did you tidy up for me at all?"
"The Amortals Project return preparation team showed up while we were there, but we told them they'd have to come back after we were done. They should have taken care of you by now."
There were many perks that came with being an amortal, one of which was the return prep team. Despite the fact that an amortal can't recall his own death, it's still disturbing to wake up at the Amortals Project headquarters and realize that your old self must have died. The Project's policy is to send an advance team to pave the way with your friends and family and to do whatever possible to make your re-entry into the land of the living cause little more in the way of mental trauma. That included making sure you came back to a clean home.
"Anything else, Dooley?"
"Yeah," I said as the elevator doors opened at my floor. I strolled down the hall. "Do you have any idea why I didn't signal for help when I was captured?"
"Not for sure. If I had access to your logs from that period, there's a good chance I could figure it out, no matter what happened."
There was a "but" attached to that, and I supplied it. "But the killer took them along with my eyes."
"Exactly."
"You're not much help."
"There are just too many answers to a question like that. I could guess, but in my business, that's risky."
"Live dangerously then," I said. "Between you and me."
"You could have wandered into a dead zone for communications signal. They could have knocked you cold before you could initiate the call. They could have set off an EMP or been jamming radio waves. They could have slapped a tin-foil hat on your head. Maybe a HERF gu
n. It's impossible to know."
"Thanks – wait. A what?"
"Which what?"
"The HERF what."
"High-Energy Radio Frequency. A weapon that generates an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse. Fries sophisticated electronics like the kind implanted in your amortal head. A gun might use a Marx generator circuit. A bomb would probably go with an EPFCG instead."
"Too many letters, Paul."
"An Explosively-Pumped Flux Compression Generator."
"Just as long as it's not a flux capacitor."
"A what?"
"Never mind. Just trading one obscure reference for another."
"I wish I could be more help, Dooley. Just don't go in for a repeat performance of whatever happened."