by Matt Forbeck
"How do I know the video from your server farm wasn't faked?"
"You don't," Patil said, his eyes widening. "But I do. That scene came directly from my own surveillance camera. It is unadulterated."
I looked down at my hands. They were not the ones that had pulled the triggers on the guns that had killed all those people. I knew that, but how could I convince Patil of the truth?
"That wasn't me. I swear."
Patil sneered at this. "You've already confessed that lies mean nothing to a man on a mission like yours."
I grimaced. It seemed that my moment of bluntness with Patil might cost me.
"Do you really believe that we could get our hands on every bit of footage from that night in the White House? That no one would say anything about the fact that I didn't show up to my own rebirthday party?"
Patil stared at me as if I weren't really there.
"Sharma." I used the man's first name to grab his attention. "Why would we do something like this? If the Service wanted all your people dead, why wouldn't they just send someone else?"
"Maybe they did." Patil's eyes focused so sharply on me that it seemed like his gaze might slash open my throat. "Maybe that wasn't you. But if not, who was it? And why go to the trouble to impersonate your gait?"
I growled at the thoughts racing through my head. "Someone's trying to frame me. They want you and me at each other's throats."
I remembered the man who'd tried to get change from me back in Georgetown.
"Someone gave me some bills yesterday that had once been mine," I said, "but one of them had passed through one of your businesses shortly before I was murdered."
Patil furrowed his brow. "The implication would be that you were in our custody before you were killed, no? That we Kalis were, in fact, your killers."
"Exactly! Whoever's doing this is trying to set us against each other, probably to draw the heat off them."
"So they can get away with your murder?"
I shrugged. "I have to think the two things are connected."
Patil shook his head. "But why should I believe any of this? Are these yet more lies?"
I reached into my pocket to fish out the bills, and one of the men behind me whipped me across the skull with the barrel of his pistol. I half-spun about to attack him, but the other two men shoved their guns in my face. I put up my hands instead.
"The bills I mentioned are in my pocket."
Patil considered this for a moment, then nodded at the woman. She snaked between two of the men and slipped a hand into my pocket. A moment later, she pulled out the soaking wet bills and held them up into the light. She stared at them, her eyes scanning every detail, until a scowl fell across her face.
"He's telling the truth," she said.
The fact that she had access to the bill-tracking database should have disturbed me, but I was too relieved to worry about it at that moment. I let loose a deep breath I didn't know I'd been holding.
Patil screwed up his face and stared at me, taking my measure. "Anyone who could fake an entire White House party could certainly forge the records for such bills."
"Check them against your own," I said. I didn't know for sure that the Kalis would bother to keep such records. Most merchants just passed on the data to the Treasury department and then cleared their cash cache at the end of every day. The Kalis laundered such a huge volume of money, though, that I could hope that they might be a bit more particular about keeping their own records for far longer than that.
The fact that Patil didn't scoff at me immediately told me I was right. His eyes unfocused for a moment as he looked up the data. He was biting his lower lip when those eyes snapped back onto me.
"Your data matches ours," he said. "Perhaps you are correct. Perhaps someone is trying to set us at each other's throats."
I nodded hard. "Exactly!"
Patil shrugged. "Be that as it may, I do not see why I should not simply kill you and be done with it. Perhaps if I give this mysterious person what he wants he will then leave me alone."
"At least until tomorrow, when I'm revived again."
Patil winced to acknowledge this.
"Let me go," I said. "Let me track down whoever this is and make him pay. That's what you want, isn't it?"
Patil arched a bushy eyebrow at that. "Why, whatever would make you think that?"
I glanced around at the people holding me prisoner. I looked straight at the woman as I spoke.
"If you wanted me dead, I'd already be gone."
Patil laughed at this, the kind of laugh you get from telling an old friend a joke you both already know. "Too true."
He looked me in the eye.
"All right, Mr Dooley. We have an understanding. You will keep out of Kali matters, and I will refrain from trying to kill you."
I shook my head. "What if that's what this killer wants?"
Patil leaned forward as his voice rose in disbelief. "For me to not kill you?"
"No, for me to stay out of your business. Perhaps he's using you as a shield to hide behind."
Patil rubbed his five o' clock shadow with a thin-fingered hand. "Perhaps it is as you say. However, I cannot just give you the keys to my home. That would be unacceptable."
"How about I just contact you when I need something you might be able to supply?"
Patil smacked his knee with an open palm. "Done."
Then he gave me a pitying smile. "If I were you, Mr Dooley, I'd do everything I could to find this killer of yours as fast as you can. If he's foolish enough to put himself between the Secret Service and the Kalis, he's mad enough to try anything."
"I'll find him."
"Please do so fast. You amortals tend to think of time in terms of decades and centuries. Those of us blessed with only a single life never forget that the world can change in an instant."
"I thought Hindus believed in reincarnation," I said.
He smiled at that. "Very good, Mr Dooley, but when we are reincarnated, we come back as something different every time. In this way, we can take a fresh stab at life. The same cannot be said for you, I'm afraid. You carry the same baggage with you every time."
He gestured to the woman, and someone behind me pulled a bag of black cloth over my head. I did not resist.
I waited for several long minutes as the submarine made its way through the Potomac to wherever the Kalis wished to take me. They spoke not a single word, probably communicating through messages sent to each other by nanoserver instead. The silence made for a long, eerie trip.
Eventually, I felt the thrumming of the submarine's engines stop. They had been so soft that I'd not even noticed them until they were gone. Two men then grabbed me by the elbows again and guided me out through a hatchway, one of them pressing down on the back of my head, presumably to keep me from knocking my forehead on the top of the hatch.
The men walked through another hatch and up a ramp. The change in temperature told me that I'd left the sub. They led me up in a winding path that went up two long flights of stairs and along a number of tight hallways. Then I felt something sharp press into my neck, and I fell unconscious.
When I came to, I was sitting alone on a landing in the middle of a long set of stairs. It took me a moment to recognize the place, but I had been there so recently it was hard for me to forget it: the stairwell from The Exorcist.
Maybe, I thought again, the people of Georgetown had better reasons than just superstition for staying away from the place. Whatever they were, those reasons had kept the locals from robbing or killing me while I sat there out cold.
I checked the time and saw that it was already past 6am the next day. I'd been out for several hours but still felt like I hadn't slept at all.
I reached up, felt the foil cap still on my head, and tore it off with one swift jerk. Once I did, a slew of messages queued up for my attention. I ignored them all and contacted Patrón by voice. Sometimes he let my calls get caught in his secretarial filter, but I suspected this time I w
ould get right through. While I waited for him to respond, I called for a Secret Service pool hovercar to come pick me up.
"Ronan!" Patrón's voice thundered in my ears. "Where the hell are you?"
"Georgetown." My voice was hoarse with whatever Patil's people had used to knock me out. "I just spent the night in the company of the Kalis. How's Querer?"
"She's– Christ, Ronan, you scared us to death. I thought you were dead for sure. Disappear without a trace twice in the same week. Not even an SOS signal from your eyes."
"I'm fine." I growled to clear my throat, and I headed up the stairs to Prospect.
"You sound half-dead."
"Just tell me about Querer."
"She's going to be fine. I think she's already out of surgery. The bullet didn't hit anything vital."
I closed my eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. "Where is she?"
"GWU Hospital. She should be in recovery right now."
That made sense. The George Washington University Hospital was the closest one to the Jefferson Memorial. Once the EMTs stabilized her, they would have taken her straight there.
"Thanks," I said. "I'm on my way."
"Ronan!" Patrón said. "I want a full report about where you've been all night."
"I'll get right on that," I said, "just as soon as I check on Querer."
We both knew I would never get around to it, but Patrón let it slide. He could give me a hard time about it later, after all this was over. I disconnected from him and stood at the top of the stairs, from which I could see the storefront in which I'd last been killed.
I flipped on my ID layer and scanned the street. The man who'd given me those bills that went through the Kalis wasn't anywhere to be seen. I hadn't thought he would be, but I had needed to try.
At the moment, it seemed like I could cross the Kalis off my list of likely suspects in my murder, although I wasn't entirely sold on that. Patil could have been lying about it, of course, although it seemed like an awfully long way to go to avoid telling the truth to someone you could have just had killed. That didn't mean that someone else in his organization hadn't had me murdered – or hadn't set us against each other.
I'd seen lots of agents make the mistake of thinking of a criminal organization as a monolithic structure, the parts of which always moved in synchronicity with each other and with a unified purpose. It was a convenient way of understanding such a group, but it ignored the true complexity of any human organization. Everyone in any organization is an individual with his or her own wants and needs and plans for satisfying those things. As long as the individual's desires matched up with those of the organization – or, at least, the organization's leaders – then everything worked well. But when those desires diverged, the unity of the organization fractured.
Patil had a number of lieutenants and other flunkies who carried out his orders, people to whom he delegated both power and responsibility. If one or some of them had decided it was time to remove Patil and take over, setting him against me would be the perfect diversion to keep attention off of themselves.
My gut told me, though, that Patil had just as firm a grasp on the Kalis as he ever had. He'd been running the group for a decade now, having taken over from his predecessor via a bloodless coup. Displaying authority without resorting to having to use its power was one of Patil's trademarks. The fact that he'd been desperate enough to send a squad of killers after me indicated that he was shaken more than he would ever care to admit, but that didn't mean that he'd lost his grip on the Kalis as well.
I'd made a lot of enemies over the years, and any one of them might be behind all this trouble. It seemed like I'd slid all the way back to square one.
The hovercar landed next to me, and I gestured for it to open a door before it even touched down. I leaped into the seat, closed the door behind me, and ordered it to bring me to Querer. Visiting her, at least, was something I could manage.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Querer did not look good. She lay in a blue gown in a whitesheeted hospital bed that had the top half propped up to help ensure any loose fluid wouldn't collect in her lungs and stop her breathing. Her right shoulder, between her neck and the actual shoulder joint, was swathed in gauzy bandages and tape. A nasal cannula supplied her with a steady flow of extra oxygen, and a bank of monitors standing near the far side of the bed kept a steady beat of tiny beeps and blinking lights to indicate that she'd not died quite yet.
Alone in the room with her, I gazed down at her sleeping form. The artificial sunlight radiating from the nearby wallscreen made her look older than she was. Getting shot can do that to you too. Nothing ages a person like pain.
Despite that, she had a certain undeniable beauty about her. Here, with her defenses down in every way, she seemed innocent and exposed, vulnerable. She needed someone to protect her, and I had failed at that. I silently promised myself that I would not allow that to happen again.
I reached out to pull a stray curl of hair from where it had fallen across her face, and I tucked it behind her ear. The sensation roused her, and a moment later her wide brown eyes opened. "Oh," she said with a pained smile. "It's you."
She reached out for my hand, taking care to only move her lower arm, from her elbow down. I put my fingers in hers, and she gave them a soft squeeze.
"You look like hell," she said.
I gave her a wry smile. "Given how you look at the moment, that's a terrible insult," I said.
She copied my smile, then gave my hand another squeeze and let go.
"The bullet went right through my shoulder," she said. "Missed anything vital. Didn't even nick my collarbone. The docs say it's a miracle."
"I don't think they were trying to kill you," I said.
She made a face at that, then winced in pain. "They did a good job of faking it."
I peered at her wounded shoulder. "If they wanted you dead, they would have used a higher-caliber bullet, or one with a soft nose or explosive tip. You would have never known what killed you."
"You say the sweetest things."
I stood there quiet until she waved me toward a chair. "If you're going to stay, then sit," she said. "It hurts to look up at you."
I obliged by moving the chair over to the right side of the foot of her bed, directly in her line of sight, before I sat down.
"So if they weren't trying to kill me, why did they shoot me?" she said. "To get to you?"
I nodded. "Patil wanted to have a conversation with me. They dragged me into a submarine in the Tidal Pool."
"Very persuasive." She considered me for a moment. "Partnering up with the legendary Ronan Dooley has proven hazardous to my health."
"I didn't want a partner. I think I made that clear."
"The fact that you asked Patrón to make me your partner should you get killed – and then that you got killed – makes me wonder how sincere you were about that."
I looked down at my hands, palm up in my lap. "I haven't had a lot of luck with partners. I tend to draw fire, and that's not healthy for anyone who spends a lot of time near me."
Querer arched an eyebrow at me. "That sounds awfully convenient for a man who prefers to be alone."
"I don't mind being around people," I said. "I just don't like to watch them die."
"I'm a big girl, Dooley." Querer groaned as she sat up a bit farther in her bed. "Today's incident aside, I can normally take care of myself."
"I'm sure, but there's little that's normal about my life."
"Don't flatter yourself. You're about as regular an amortal as I've ever met. Most of them are insufferable bastards. There's a certain arrogance that comes with the certainty that no matter how badly you might mess something up you can always start over with a fresh slate."
"And I don't have that? I've been reborn as often as anyone."
Querer smirked. "You ever read The Lord of the Rings? Or see the movies?"
"Every chance I get."
"You know the elves in the books, how they are? Th
ey take such a long view of the world that they become like aliens to the humans in the story. Amortals are like that. Endlessly patient. Hatching plots that take decades to come together. Playing every side they can find against the middle." She sized me up with her eyes and nodded her approval. "You're not that patient. You're still among the living, not one of those ghosts that haunt their own lives."
I looked at the wallscreen. It showed the capital waking up to a bright sunrise beaming right down K Street at us.
"I never think of myself as having that much time," I said. "I might. Perhaps the people I work under do, but the people I work for, they don't have decades to waste. Or to wait."