April’s eyes went wide. Keane shrugged. Walthers nodded. Canaan continued to stare into space.
“Makes sense to me,” said Walthers. “I’ve known April a long time. I’d sure feel better if she had the code rather than Keane.”
Keane thought for a moment. “I suppose I’m okay with that,” he said at last. “Once Walthers gets approval on the deal, I’ll give April the code and she can reset it again, to something I don’t know. She can set up whatever fail-safe she likes.”
“Good,” said Walthers. “I think I can make this work. Give me some time to make a few calls.”
Canaan was shaking his head and mumbling incomprehensibly to himself.
Keane glanced at his comm. “You have thirty-eight minutes,” he said. “You know how to reach me. April, Fowler, let’s get some breakfast.”
THIRTY-TWO
Agent Walthers called just as we were finishing up breakfast at a diner around the corner from the courthouse. He’d gotten through to the director of the FBI, who got approval of Keane’s deal from the president himself. I couldn’t begin to imagine the deal-making and scapegoating this whole episode was going to set off at the highest levels of government, but it was pretty clear that the feds understood Keane held all the cards. Gerard Canaan had been taken into custody.
April told us she’d lost her job, but she didn’t seem terribly broken up about it. I think she’d gotten bored with her work as an intellectual property lawyer, which was one of the reasons she was always so eager to help me and Keane. I suggested that she could go to work for Keane, but she reminded me that she didn’t exactly need the money: once Keane gave her the code, she could literally make money out of nothing. I doubted very much she would use the code at all, though. April had helped us because she believed it was the right thing to do, not because she expected to be compensated for it. And if she took a hundred iotas, why not a million or a billion? No, April would play by the rules, even if it put her at a disadvantage. This trait of hers was, of course, why I had trusted her with the code in the first place.
I was exhausted, but Walthers told me Green River would be dropping Gwen off at the courthouse at ten, so I felt obligated to pick her up. April and I embraced outside the diner; I thanked her profusely for her help and for helping me and putting up with Keane. She said not to worry about it and that she was glad Gwen’s ordeal was over—and she meant it. I told Keane I’d see him back at the office; April’s house was on the way back to our building, so they shared a car.
I set out on foot, both because I needed to get some fresh air to clear my head and because I was sick of riding around in someone else’s car. I’ve never been a very good passenger; I like to feel the steering wheel in my hands.
Half an hour later, I walked into the BMW dealership on Fourth Street, noting the IOTAS ACCEPTED sticker on the window. “That one,” I said, pointing to the dark blue 2040 BMW 1200a parked on the display floor. They were asking 199,900 iotas. I told the salesman I’d give him two hundred thousand, including taxes and registration, if he didn’t try to up-sell me and I could drive off the lot by nine o’clock. He opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it and gave me an actual salute. He ran to the back of the store, returning a minute later with a stack of papers. I was on the road by eight fifty-seven.
After locating a straightaway where I could legally take off, I shifted to flight mode. The wings popped out and the jets fired. With a massive surge of acceleration, I was airborne. I’d been a free man for over an hour at this point, but you don’t really feel free in Los Angeles until you’re soaring over the goddamned city in your very own flying car. I’d paid my dues, and I was going to enjoy this. I circled downtown a few times and then cut across Beverly Hills toward Malibu. I banked just before the Santa Monica Mountains and then followed the coast down to Long Beach. Los Angeles was a beautiful city, at least from a distance.
It was now quarter to ten, so I regretfully cut my joyride short, banking back toward downtown. I landed about two miles from the courthouse and took the surface streets the rest of the way. I pulled up to the building at two minutes after ten. Gwen was waiting outside.
I parked the car at the curb, got out, and ran to Gwen. I gave her a long hug. She looked exhausted but relieved. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The swelling on her face was mostly gone. “Nice car,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Turns out they give you a brand-new BMW when you save the world. Pretty sweet deal.”
She smiled, pulling back to look at me. If she was appalled by my burned face and missing eyebrows, she didn’t let it show.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“I’m okay,” she replied. “Mag-Lev handed me over to Green River not long after you left. They treated me well.”
“Good,” I said. “Sorry it took so long.”
“Not your fault,” said Gwen. “I should have trusted you in the first place.”
I shrugged, not knowing what to say to that.
“So you actually did it,” she said. “You got the coin and beat Gerard Canaan at his own game.”
I shrugged. “That was mostly Keane,” I said. “I just did a lot of running around.”
“No,” she said, as we walked to the car. “You’re not just Keane’s muscle. You’re his conscience, too. Without you, there’s no telling what kind of mischief he’d be up to.”
I opened the door for Gwen and then went around to my side and got in. I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “I don’t know, Gwen,” I said. “I have a feeling the only reason he hired me in the first place was because he thought I might be in contact with you. He was trying to put the pieces of the Maelstrom puzzle together.”
“That may be,” Gwen replied, “but he kept you on well after it was clear that you didn’t know where I was. He needs you, and he knows it.”
I nodded, still not entirely convinced. It was somewhat reassuring to learn, I suppose, that Keane really had been trying to locate Gwen. She’d just been so well hidden that neither of us could find her until she revealed herself. He was still a liar, but he hadn’t been lying about that.
I wondered how much hope I really had of moderating Keane’s behavior. Was I helping him be his better self, or was I merely enabling his psychotic tendencies? It was difficult not to think of Rachel Stuil—or whatever her name really was—as Keane’s moral and intellectual double. He’d saved the world from her diabolical plan, but I suspected he’d done it more to solve the puzzle than out of any concern for those who would be affected by the collapse of the iota. It was all too easy to imagine the roles of Erasmus Keane and Rachel Stuil being reversed.
Keane had agreed to cede power over the iota flaw to April, but that seemed more like a concession to necessity than a voluntary abdication of power. I’d suggested it in part because I wasn’t sure the government would take the deal if Keane insisted on holding on to the key. Agent Walthers could vouch for April, but nobody trusted Keane—for good reason. Keane understood that, and did what he had to do to make the deal work.
And that brought us to Gwen. Why had Keane insisted on putting Gwen in charge of the DZ? It certainly made some sense: she’d worked for the city for many years, had good political instincts, and was intimately familiar with the DZ. For some reason, though, I suspected there was more to it than that. Did Keane know something about Gwen that I didn’t? I trusted her to do right by the people of the DZ, as far as that went, but I wasn’t entirely sure there wasn’t some dynamic between Keane and Gwen that I was missing.
“Did Agent Walthers tell you about your new job?” I asked.
Gwen laughed. “Yeah, I guess Keane had some crazy idea to put me in charge of Canaan’s DZ fund.”
“Not so crazy,” I said. “I don’t know of anyone more qualified. You should do it.” The words had escaped my mouth before I knew what I was saying.
“I’m still legally dead, you know,” Gwen replied.
“Even dead, you’re more
qualified than anyone I know.”
She smiled. “I’ll think about it. Where are we going, Blake?”
“I figured you could stay at our place until you get your legal status figured out. In the spare room, I mean.”
The latter sentence hung in the air awkwardly for a few seconds before Gwen replied. “That would be much appreciated,” she said. “Thank you, Blake.”
I smiled back at her.
So this was where we were at. Gwen had changed while she was gone, and I still hadn’t gotten a handle on how exactly. Maybe I had never really known her in the first place. But there was time to figure all that out. The important thing was that she was safe.
I didn’t ask her why Keane had picked her to run the DZ Future Fund; if there was something to tell, she’d tell me on her own time. Nor did I tell her about Keane’s alleged sister, Rachel Stuil. I’m not sure why; I fully intended to tell everything to April once we had a chance to talk alone. There were more things I wanted to tell April as well, but at this point I wasn’t completely sure what they were. The adrenaline had worn off, and currently most of my brain was consumed with longing for my mattress. Whatever feelings I had for other human beings were going to have to wait until baser needs had been satisfied.
I parked the car on the roof and took the elevator down to the first floor. If Keane was around, I didn’t see him. I pointed Gwen to her room and then escaped to my own quarters, where I peeled off my clothes and fell into bed. I slept like the dead.
THIRTY-THREE
The next week was mercifully uneventful. Keane handed the iota code over to April, who had spent most of her time since our meeting with Walthers hammering out the details of Keane’s agreement. She followed the terms he had set out as best as she could, but at this point the feds didn’t have much choice but to go along with whatever April dictated. She set up something similar to Keane’s fail-safe; if anything happened to her, supposedly the code would be released to the general public. In reality, she had arranged for the code to be sent only to me. In the event that something happened to April, it would then be up to me to determine whether foul play had occurred and do with the code as I saw fit. I guess April didn’t like the idea of accidentally getting hit by a bus and destroying the global economy in the process. That was April, always thinking about other people.
Gerard Canaan pled guilty to Selah Fiore’s murder. From what April told me, it sounded like the LAPD had known he had her killed all along. Now that he’d lost his leverage with the government, they were free to pursue the case against him, rather than pursuing Canaan’s vendetta against me and Keane. He was unlikely to face any charges for defrauding Elysium’s investors or orchestrating the invasion of the DZ, because it wasn’t in the government’s interest to bring those crimes to light. But he’d most likely spend the rest of his life in prison anyway.
Canaan’s mercenaries finished their takeover of the DZ three days after my recovery of the last iota. Green River command evidently had their orders; they continued pacifying the DZ despite having lost contact with Gerard Canaan, who was in federal custody. I wanted to try to get them to stop executing prisoners, but April and Agent Walthers both thought it was a bad idea to interfere until the DZ was secure. If Green River’s management realized their client had been arrested, there was no telling how they would react. We couldn’t afford them leaving the job halfway done and letting the DZ devolve into chaos. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t insist. If a few gangbangers had to be summarily executed to bring stability to the DZ, well, I guess I could live with that.
Gwen and April met frequently over the next several days regarding the status of the DZ Future Fund and the selection of board members, and they also had to meet with the heads of various state and local government agencies. Most of these agencies had already been bought off by Canaan, so getting them to go along with the DZFF was just a matter of advising them of a change in the political landscape and realigning their allegiances slightly. There was some pushback from the governor’s office, but they changed their tune when Gwen put the governor’s sister on the board. Fucking politics. I could only hope all this maneuvering would actually result in some small improvement to the lives of the people living in the DZ. At this point, I put the odds at fifty-fifty. A coin toss, ha-ha.
Keane and I had no cases lined up at present, so I decided to take it easy for a while. When I wasn’t testing the limits of the BMW, I was working on plans for some major remodeling to Keane’s run-down building. If the DZ was going to get an injection of fifty billion iotas, I figured I could do my part by giving our building a facelift. Maybe someday I’d even be able to take the boards off the windows, but for now I’d settle for having a door that closed.
The atmosphere in the office was so upbeat and pleasant, in fact, that I decided not to break the spell by asking Keane about Rachel Stuil. Obviously he knew a lot more about her than he’d let on, and he had decided for some reason not to tell me. He’d led me to believe she was a he, for one thing—a misdirection that was completely pointless unless he’d never expected me to actually meet her. At some point, we were going to have to have that conversation, but I’d been through hell last week and I deserved a little peace.
Some five days after our meeting with Walthers, I was spackling the walls in the lobby when my comm chirped. I assumed it was April; we had been talking about getting lunch so she could tell me about her plans for the future now that she was no longer working for the law firm. I picked up my comm from the top of the ladder where I’d left it. My chest tightened as I saw the display. It read: “Lila.” That was impossible, though. Rachel Stuil was dead, killed by Green River mercenaries. Wasn’t she?
I tapped the display and the message popped up. It read:
ready for round two? :)
ALSO BY ROBERT KROESE
THE BIG SHEEP
STARSHIP GRIFTERS
AYE, ROBOT
MERCURY FALLS
MERCURY RISES
MERCURY RESTS
MERCURY REVOLTS
MERCURY SHRUGS
SCHRÖDINGER’S GAT
CITY OF SAND
DISTOPIA
DISENCHANTED
DISILLUSIONED
THE OUTCAST
THE FORCE IS MIDDLING IN THIS ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROBERT KROESE is the author of Starship Grifters, which Hugh Howey called “my favorite read this year [2014]. A hilarious space adventure.” Rob is also the author of Mercury Falls, which Booklist called a “whimsical, riotous debut,” along with Mercury Rests and Mercury Revolts. The Last Iota is probably something like Robert Kroese’s twelfth book, but there’s no way to know for certain. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thi
rty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Also by Robert Kroese
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE LAST IOTA. Copyright © 2017 by Robert Kroese. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by David Curtis and David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photographs: urban landscape © Rustic/Shutterstock.com; coin © Alexroz/ Shutterstock.com; mayfly vector © Vectorworks_Enterprise/ Shutterstock.com; circle maze © Ray49/Shutterstock.com; flying car © Valentyna Chukhlyebova/Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-08846-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-08847-5 (e-book)
e-book ISBN 9781250088475
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First Edition: May 2017
The Last Iota Page 27