The Last Iota

by Robert Kroese

  I now had several options, all of them terrible. I could stop in my tracks, call Keane, and tell him to pick me up farther down the road. This would nix our rendezvous with mystery woman and probably draw the attention of the cops. I could veer off toward the car and hop in, hopefully avoiding a close look from the cops but also nixing our rendezvous. Or I could just stand helplessly by while mystery woman pointed me out to the cops—which seemed to be the winner by default.

  I slowed to a walk as mystery woman came down the steps ahead of me, just to the left of the cops. The good news was that they weren’t paying any attention to me. The bad news was that they were all staring at mystery woman. All it would take is for her to point with her finger and every law enforcement officer in the vicinity would have his eyes on me. “There he is, officers!” she would scream. “The man who killed me!”

  Except the woman coming down the stairs was, of course, not Selah Fiore. Selah Fiore was dead. This woman was, as I’d suspected, at least thirty years younger than Selah. And while her face resembled Selah’s, her hair was black, not blond. She’d had it pulled back under the hat, but now the hat was off and her hair, unleashed, flowed behind her like a plume of billowing smoke. She came down the steps slowly, deliberately, just enough of a bounce in her step to let you know she knew exactly what she was doing.

  Every heterosexual male in the area was looking in her direction. I say this not as a matter of empirical observation but rather out of a deep understanding of what makes men tick. My life was in mortal danger, and I couldn’t stop looking at her. She smiled at the cops, walking right up to them without a glance in my direction. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” she said in Selah Fiore’s voice.

  The survival part of my brain managed to wrestle the procreation part to the floor as I realized that mystery woman was stalling for time so I could get away. I tore my eyes from the scene and forced myself to put one foot in front of the other until I was at April’s car. Keane was double-parked, but so far traffic had flowed around him without much fuss. The first driver to get behind him and lay on the horn was going to break mystery woman’s spell, though, and draw the attention of the cops.

  I got in the backseat, leaving the door open.

  “What’s happening?” said Keane, who was also staring at mystery woman.

  “What’s happening is that you picked the worst place in Los Angeles for a secret rendezvous,” I said.

  Keane shrugged. “I had a lot to work out.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  Mystery woman was now pointing back up the steps, and one of the cops was nodding. A moment later, the three of them ran up the steps toward the plaza. Mystery woman walked to the car and got in, closing the door behind her.

  Keane pulled away from the curb. “What did you tell them?” he asked.

  “Timmy is trapped in a well,” she said. “What difference does it make?”

  “None, I suppose,” said Keane. “Welcome aboard, Ms. Hearst. Sorry for the cloak-and-dagger routine.”

  “You were right to be concerned,” she said. “The cops would have been waiting for you at Bolero. My name’s not Hearst, by the way. It’s Fiore. Olivia Fiore.”

  NINE

  I couldn’t stop staring at her. The resemblance to Selah was clear as soon as I’d seen her face, but now that I looked at her close up, it was uncanny. Except for the hair and somewhat lighter skin tone, she looked exactly like the simulacrum of thirty-year-old Selah I’d seen the previous day, only younger.

  “Are you Selah’s daughter?” I asked.

  “I am,” she said.

  “I didn’t realize Selah had any children.”

  “She doesn’t,” said Keane from the driver’s seat. He was taking us south down Broadway, in the general direction of our office. I hoped he wasn’t planning on taking Olivia there. You never know with Keane.

  “My mother kept my existence a secret,” Olivia said. “Wanted me to have a normal life. I grew up in Belgium.”

  I shook my head. What was it with Selah Fiore and Belgium? Her secret genetics institute had supposedly been located in Belgium, too. If Olivia’s backstory was as fake as that of the Tannhauser Institute, she’d probably never been out of Southern California.

  “Of course you did,” said Keane, who clearly shared my skepticism. “Why did you call us?”

  “Which time?”

  “Start with the first one.”

  “You know the answer to that,” said Olivia. “To frame you for my mother’s murder.”

  “Why?”

  “To get you out of the way. To keep you from looking into the iota coins.”

  “Who killed your mother?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Olivia said.

  At that moment, my comm chirped. I glanced at the display. I’d received yet another message from “Lila.” It read:

  she is lying

  I glanced at Keane, who seemed to be intent on the road. As far as I could tell, there was no one else who could hear our conversation. Did “Lila” have a bug in April’s car? I wrote back:

  We should meet.

  To Olivia, I said, “Bullshit. You were helping to cover it up.”

  “I didn’t have any choice,” Olivia replied. “I’m being blackmailed.”

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t know. After class yesterday I got a call from a lawyer. He said my mother was dead, and that there were some discrepancies with her estate. I was told not to talk to anybody, not even the police. He said to come to Los Angeles at once.”

  “You flew from Belgium to Los Angeles last night?”

  “What?” asked Olivia. “No, I grew up in Belgium. I live in San Luis Obispo now. I’m in the engineering program at Cal Poly. Anyway, I met this lawyer at a diner in Hollywood.”

  My comm chirped:

  not yet

  “This lawyer have a name?” I asked.

  “Tad Curtis,” she said. “I looked him up before meeting him. Works for some huge firm downtown. Mr. Curtis tells me all about some insane genetic engineering program my mother was running, says that the feds are sniffing around and that if they find out what she was up to, I could lose everything.”

  “Your inheritance, you mean,” I said.

  Olivia shook her head. “I didn’t stand to inherit anything. All I ever got from my mother was a trust fund. Basically a bribe to keep me quiet. She didn’t want anyone to know about me; thought it hurt her cold-bitch reputation or something. I didn’t care; I barely knew my mother. I was raised by nannies and then sent to boarding school overseas. The trust fund wasn’t much, but it gave me enough to live on and pay for school. I’m a year and a half away from graduation. If that money dries up now, I’ve got a lot of student loans and no way to pay them back.”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “You tried to frame us for murder because they threatened your goddamned trust fund?”

  “There’s more to it than that,” she said. “Mr. Curtis told me my mother had been killed because she tried to back out of a business deal with several other very rich people in Los Angeles. He called it LAFF.”

  “The Los Angeles Future Foundation,” I said.

  She nodded. “They’re pretty shady, I guess. They wouldn’t let her out of the deal, so my mother decided to go to the feds. It was her only way out. But LAFF found out she’d betrayed them and had her killed. According to Mr. Curtis, the guy who warned LAFF was named Erasmus Keane. He said Keane was some kind of criminal mastermind who knew about the Collapse in advance. I wouldn’t have believed it, but he showed me documents. They made Keane look pretty bad. He says Keane was worried that LAFF was going to kill him next, so he was going to turn state’s witness. But if he did that, all my mother’s dirty laundry would get aired and her estate would be locked up in probate forever.”

  “And all you had to do to fix things was make a phone call,” I said. “Get me and Keane to Selah’s house.”

  “That was Mr. Curtis’s idea. He
coached me so I could pretend to be my mother.”

  “You must know that framing us was not the primary purpose of that call,” said Keane, glancing in the rearview mirror. “If this Mr. Curtis had that information about Gwen, he could have just used a voice modulator and made the call himself.”

  Olivia nodded slowly. “They were setting me up,” she said. “Putting me in a compromised position. Now they can control me by threatening to release the recording of that call. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have realized it at the time, but I was so stressed, and Mr. Curtis made it sound like it was urgent, that I make the call right that moment. He was very persuasive, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, you’re in bed with the devil now,” I said. “Why did you help us? You could have told those cops at the park I was a suspect in your mother’s murder. Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I know you didn’t kill her, for one. And once I had a chance to think about Mr. Curtis’s story, I realized it was pretty far-fetched. I did some research on Mr. Keane, and well … he didn’t sound like the kind of guy who would work for LAFF. For one thing, you guys live in a shitty building on the edge of the DZ. If Keane had some pull with a group of billionaires, I’d expect you to live in a nicer neighborhood.”

  “You were going to let the cops nab us at Bolero,” I said.

  “All I did is ask to meet you,” Olivia said.

  “But you knew it was a trap.”

  “I suspected. Mr. Curtis told me to try to persuade you to back off. I was to give you assurances that the security footage from my mother’s house would be destroyed. But he had no reason to think you would believe it.”

  “Why did you call me, then? The second time, I mean?”

  “He has me over a barrel, as I said. And frankly it’s only a matter of time before the police catch you anyway, so I figured there was little harm in accelerating things.”

  “Mr. Curtis was with you when you called?”

  “He was.”

  “So he agreed to let you rendezvous with us, without the cops?”

  “He had people following me,” she said. “He told me to follow your instructions and he’d keep an eye on me. Apparently he underestimated you.”

  “If he’d really wanted to follow you, he’d have planted some kind of tracking device.”

  “There was no time,” she said. “I don’t think he really expected you to say no to the Bolero meet. Figured you’d be desperate.”

  “Any idea who this Tad Curtis really works for?” Keane asked.

  “I assumed he worked for these LAFF people,” said Olivia. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Perhaps,” said Keane. “The bigger question, though, is: What does this person or persons want leverage over you for? What are they trying to make do, other than get me and Fowler locked up? Do you know something of value to them?”

  “I doubt it,” said Olivia. “Like I said, I had almost no contact with my mother. I didn’t know anything about her finances or illegal secret projects. I’m just a college student.”

  “Well,” I said, “clearly there’s something that—” I broke off as Keane answered his comm in Korean. He spoke a few quick sentences and then ended the call.

  “That was Mr. Kim,” he said. “Says someone was just in the store with an iota coin. Serial number seven. Said he heard the price had spiked.”

  “What did Kim tell him?”

  “Said he’d give him two thousand New Dollars on the spot, and he might have a buyer willing to pay a lot more. Guy said he’d be back.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Kim let him leave?”

  Keane nodded. “My mistake. Didn’t give him clear instructions. Never imagined somebody would walk in off the street with one of the coins.”

  “Did he get the guy’s name?”

  “Eric Brassey.”

  “Comm ID?”

  “Didn’t leave one.”

  “We need to find this guy,” I said, looking him up on my comm. “There’s an Eric Brassey in Burbank. No comm ID, but there’s an address in Burbank. Keane, pull over.”

  Keane nodded and pulled to the curb. For all his genius, Keane was a lousy driver, and we needed to get to Burbank fast. If whoever was after these coins knew Eric Brassey had one, he was in serious danger.

  “You need to get out,” I said to Olivia.

  “What?” asked Olivia. “Here? You can’t leave me here!” She had a point. We were getting close to the DZ; this was a pretty sketchy neighborhood. No place for a pretty young woman alone with no gun and no comm.

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll drop you off later.”

  Keane got out and switched places. I pulled the car away from the curb and made a quick U-turn, heading back north toward Burbank. Ten years ago, we could at least have hopped on the freeway, but most of the freeways in and around Los Angeles were now automotive graveyards, thanks to post-Collapse chaos. The upside was that there were roughly twenty thousand fewer automobiles clogging up L.A.’s surface streets, so traffic wasn’t actually much worse than it had been at the peak of L.A.’s population boom.

  It took us nearly half an hour to get to the address, and I was so intent on my driving that I completely forgot about dropping off Olivia. The house was a respectable two-story gray stucco affair in an upscale neighborhood. A Cadillac aircar with Nevada plates was parked just down the street from the driveway. I pulled up behind it and threw the car into park.

  “Rental car,” said Keane, looking up the plate on his comm.

  I nodded. I had a feeling somebody had already found Eric Brassey.

  “Wait here,” I said. My instruction was actually meant for Keane, but Olivia nodded as well.

  I grabbed my SIG Sauer from the glove box and got out of the car. Putting my hand on one of the side jets of the Cadillac, I found that it was still hot. Holding the gun low, I made my way briskly up the driveway, reaching the door just in time to hear three muffled gunshots from inside. I tried the door: it was unlocked. I opened it and glanced inside. The living room was empty, and I heard no more noise from inside. I went in.

  To my right was an open dining area, and beyond that a kitchen. Other than a few couches and chairs, there was no cover to speak of and no walls to hide behind. Straight ahead of me was a sliding glass door leading to a patio area. Along the right wall were windows looking out on the front lawn.

  Bringing the gun to shoulder level, I crept along the wall through the living room, stopping to listen when I got to a doorway. Hearing nothing, I peeked around the corner: formal dining room, unoccupied. In the middle of the left-hand wall was another doorway that led to a hall. I walked across the room and peeked down the hall. I saw no activity. At the end of the hall was the foot of a staircase leading up to the second floor. I heard footsteps coming down. Raising my gun, I rounded the corner to see two men, armed with semiautomatics, coming toward me.

  “Stop right there and drop your—” I started, but it was pretty clear they had no intention of following my instructions. Unsure who these men were, I erred on the side of caution: rather than firing, I dived out of the way. They demonstrated no such compunction. Gunshots rang out and the drywall at the end of the hall exploded into pieces as bullets tore into it.

  I ran down the hall, trying to find some cover before the two men reached the bottom of the stairs. Whoever these guys were, I was now fairly certain they weren’t cops. They wore black combat gear but no insignia I could see, and even the LAPD generally weren’t this eager to fill random strangers with lead. Judging from the shots I’d heard earlier, they’d already killed at least one person, and they intended for me to be next.

  I ducked into an open doorway on the right, which turned out to be a bathroom. The door jamb splintered as more gunshots sounded. The men were using suppressors, but in a narrow hallway, gunshots are still loud. So-called “silencers” don’t make that thwipping sound you hear in movies. They just sound like quieter gunshots. Mine were going to be a lot louder.

  I shifted
my gun to my left hand, wrapped my arm around the doorway, and fired five shots blind. Then I pulled back, sank into a crouch, and leaned into the hall again. As I did so, more bullets tore into the door jamb, just over my head. One man was firing from the landing of the steps; the other was about fifteen feet away and moving toward me, hugging the wall to his right. Clever. Trying to pin me down so his partner could sneak up and take me out. I saw surprise on the face of the nearer man; he leveled his gun at me, but I was quicker. Unfortunately, my first shot was wide, and the recoil caused me to miss the next three as well. I guess I wasn’t as good with my left hand as I’d remembered. The guy in the hall got off three shots, but he was startled and aiming too high; the bullets thwacked into the drywall over my head. The guy at the stairs was holding his fire, undoubtedly worried about taking out his teammate. My last three shots hit the approaching man square in the chest. He grunted and stumbled backward, catching his balance against the wall. I was using armor-piercing rounds, but these new nanofiber vests are nearly impenetrable. I’d slowed him down, but it was going to take a headshot to stop him.

  The bad news was that I was out of bullets, and these guys knew it: the catch had slid back, indicating the chamber was empty. I had another magazine in my jacket, but it was going to take a few seconds to get it loaded. A few seconds, it turned out, that I didn’t have. Just as I smacked the magazine home, the man I’d shot came around the corner, his gun pointed directly at my right eye. I jerked my head to the left out of pure instinct. The gun went off as I whacked my head against the open door; I felt the bullet zip past my ear. Momentarily dazed, I brought my gun up and fired randomly, hitting him three times in the abdomen. It didn’t even faze him. He took aim at my head again, and this time there was nowhere for me to go. Off-balance and disoriented, I made a split-second choice: I could either grab his gun hand to redirect it, or I could aim for his head and hope I could get a shot off before he did. I picked door number two.