by Marcus Sakey
She dabbed at a bit of sauce on her lips. “I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to pull it off, if you guys had a file on me.”
“No. Nothing.”
“I bet they do now.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I’d say so. I think the target order probably goes John Smith, then me, then you.” It was a strange thing to say, and stranger because it was true. Cover didn’t get much deeper than this. He was an enemy of the state. In the last six months he’d raided, robbed, and survived three—no, four, after today—run-ins with agents coming for his life. Earlier tonight he’d stolen experimental narcotics and delivered them to an abnorm prostitute who was a friend and possible lover of the most wanted terrorist in America, and now he was having dinner with one of that terrorist’s best operatives, a shadow woman who had probably killed as many times as he had.
He heard Roger Dickinson’s voice in his head. Tell me again. How is Cooper one of the good guys?
It was an unsettling thought, and he pushed it away. “So what’s it like for people like you and Adams? How does it work?”
“My gift, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
She picked up her pizza—he dug that she wasn’t a knife-and-fork woman—and chewed while staring thoughtfully into some middle distance. “Imagine you’re on one side of a freeway and you want to run to the other side. Cars are blurring by, and big trucks that would totally squash you, and motorcycles weaving in between. So what you do is you look in the direction they’re coming from, right? You see the relative speeds and distance, and you decide when to run and when to stop based on that.”
“Or you use an overpass.”
“Or that. But imagine instead you pointed a camera at it and you recorded the next fifteen or twenty seconds. You saw where everything went. How one car switching lanes forced the truck to slow down, which backed up the lane, which made the biker step on the gas.”
“You mean twist the throttle. Motorcycles don’t have a gas pedal.”
“Whatever. The point is, you record all of that. Then imagine you could go back in time to the moment when you started recording, only now you know what’s going to happen. You know that the girl on her cell phone is going to change lanes without signaling, and the truck is going to slam on his brakes, and the motorcycle is going around. So avoiding them is easy.”
“You mean you see vectors?”
“Sort of. The cars, they’re just a metaphor. I can’t really do it with them; I can only shift around people. I need the cues from them. I don’t really know how I do it, I just—I look at a room, or a street, and I can see where each person is moving and looking.”
“Can you tell me what’s going to happen in the next fifteen seconds?”
“I don’t know what people are going to say, or if someone’s going to spill their drink. You don’t plan to spill your drink, so I can’t anticipate it. But I can see that the guy coming out of the bathroom is going to make it halfway down one row, then he and the waitress will be in each other’s way, and he’ll back around, only the guy sitting down right there is about to get up, so there will be a logjam. The waitress will stand still, because she’s going to the table beyond them, and the others will move out of her way.”
Cooper turned to watch. It played out exactly as she’d said. “That sounds exhausting.”
She cocked her head. “Most people launch straight into how cool it is, how they wish they could do it.”
“Well, it is, and I do. But you must get tired of all of it, all of the time.”
“Yours is on all the time.”
“Yeah, and I get tired of it,” he said. “It’s the dissonance. Between what they say and what they mean. Thank God I’m less of a reader and more about pattern recognition and gauging intent. I mean, I can tell when people are blatantly lying to me, when they’re bothered, that sort of thing, but I’ve met some readers who can tell you your deepest secrets after a two-minute conversation about the weather.”
“I have, too. Most of them are shut-ins.”
“Wouldn’t you be? If I were surrounded by the secrets and lies of every person I saw, I’d stay away from people, too.”
“So, your patterns. You can tell what people are about to do? Physically?”
“Yes,” he said. “And please don’t test it by tossing that fork at me.”
“Sorry.” She smiled and lifted her hand off the silverware. “No wonder John told us not to engage you.”
The offhand comment hit like a slap. “John—Smith? He knows who I am? By name?”
“Of course.” She was amused. “You thought it only worked one way? He knows all about you. I think he kind of respects you. He vetoed a hit plan on you last year, not too long before the thing at the Exchange. One of our guys wanted to plant a bomb in your car—what was it, a Charger?—to prove that even the DAR’s best wasn’t safe.”
“So what—I don’t understand. Why didn’t he?”
“John said no.”
“I mean, why didn’t John? Kill me?”
“Oh. He said that it would only piss the DAR off. That the cost was greater than the benefit.”
“He was right.”
“He also said that they couldn’t be sure your kids wouldn’t be in the car.”
Cooper opened his mouth. Closed it. Thought about how many times he’d climbed in the Charger, and how he had never once checked for explosives. How many times Kate and Todd had ridden with him. Thought about the car in pieces, flames licking through the windows, and two tiny burned shapes in the back.
Shannon said, “So you must be quite a dancer.”
“What? No. No rhythm. I’d be a hell of a partner if someone led, I guess.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” she said, “case we ever end up on the floor.” She folded her napkin atop her half-finished slice of pizza. “So what’s next?”
“We need papers that will get us into New Canaan. Driver’s licenses, passports, credit cards. I know a guy on the West Side, does great work.”
She gazed at him appraisingly. “Why didn’t you go to him instead of Zane?”
Damn it. Careful, man. “There’s a difference between papers that can get me in the gate, and the power to erase my past, let me start again.”
“This guy a friend of yours?”
“No.”
Some of the neighborhoods and suburbs west of downtown Chicago were lovely, thriving places, tree-shaded and filled with families.
This wasn’t one of those parts.
Cooper, a military brat before he became military himself, had never really put down roots—at least not geographical ones—and so looked at every place fifteen degrees askew as a perpetual outsider. He had a theory going about cities, that the dominant industry of the town filtered into every level of the place, from the architecture to the discourse. Thus in LA, a city built on entertainment and fantasy, there were houses in the clouds and dinner conversation about cosmetic labioplasty. In Manhattan, the business of finance reduced everything, at some level, to money; the skyline was a stock chart and the streets pulsed with currency.
Chicago had been born as a working town, a meatpacking town, and no matter how many chic restaurants opened, no matter the lakefront harbors and the green spaces, its most honest parts would always be covered in rust. They would crowd the banks of the sludge-brown river and huddle in the windowless warehouses of industrial districts.
The building he was looking for was three stories of grim cinderblock. A loading dock ran the length of the face; above it, someone had painted the words VALENTINO AND SONS, LAUNDRY AND DRY CLEANING in five-foot letters. Years of Chicago winters had faded and peeled the paint. Cooper parked the car under a streetlight, though there wasn’t much point—no one lived nearby. He popped the trunk and pulled out the duffel bag.
“Dirty laundry?” Shannon asked.
“About six months’ worth.”
The machinery was audible as they approached the loading dock. A faint sweet humidity radiated fro
m the place. Inside, the room was huge and hot and noisy. Beneath humming fluorescent lights, massive washing machines spun and clanked, men and women moving between them to load the drums or collect clean clothes. The air was soupy and chemical. Although the perchlorethylene used in dry cleaning was supposed to be locked in a contained system, the machines here were old, the fittings bad, and traces of the toxic cleanser were venting into the air. All of the workers had a smallness to them, the mark of people who had spent decades maneuvering through narrow aisles and bending beneath heavy loads. Cooper started down the row, pausing to make room for a withered woman pushing a basket piled with suits. It had been chilly outside, but now he could feel sweat gathering in his armpits and the small of his back.
No one paid any attention as he led Shannon to a narrow staircase at the back. The second floor was hotter than the first, and noisier; here were the massive washing machines and enormous presses used for laundry on an industrial scale, napkins and sheets and towels from a hundred hotels and restaurants. There was a brief snatched glimpse of heavy machinery moving with insectile precision, a trace of music, something Mexican and discordantly upbeat, and then they were heading upward.
Steamiest of all, the top floor was a harshly bright hive of narrow desks jammed together. Scores of people were packed in around them, each squinting into a sewing machine or cutting lengths from fabric bolts. The sound was a hundred woodpeckers at once. Most of the men had stripped off their shirts and worked bare-chested or in wifebeaters, their skin glistening. A fan the size of an airplane turbine spun sluggishly, stirring air that reeked of chemicals and cigarettes and body odor.
Cooper started down the aisle, heading for the office in the back. Shannon followed. “Weird,” she said.
“It’s a sweatshop.”
“I know. It’s just, it’s like the United Nations. I’ve seen sweatshops full of West Africans, Guatemalans, Koreans, but I’ve never seen them all in the same place.”
“Yeah,” Cooper said. “Schneider’s an innovator.”
“An equal-opportunity oppressor?”
“Not really. It’s still pretty much one subculture being exploited.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re all abnorms. All of them.”
“But…” Shannon stopped. “How? Why?”
“Schneider makes terrific IDs,” Cooper said, shifting the heavy duffel bag from one shoulder to the other. “He specializes in abnorms who want to live as normals. High risk, but big money. Those who can’t pay work it off.”
“Making cheap clothes.”
“Making cheap copies of expensive clothes.” Cooper nodded to a woman three desks down. Hair the color of cigarette smoke was pinned in a rough knot at the back of her head. She wore odd glasses, like two jeweler’s loupes mounted in granny frames. As they watched, she slid a shirt from a basket on her left side, laid it across her table, kept one hand moving to dip into a cardboard box for an embroidered logo half an inch across, which she placed precisely and then affixed with swift, measured stitches before sliding the shirt into a basket on her right side and reaching back to take another from the basket on her left. The whole process took maybe twenty seconds.
“Is that the Lucy Veronica logo?”
“Beats me.” He started moving again, and she followed.
“So how long does it take to pay for a new identity?”
“A couple of years. They need regular jobs to make a living. They’re nurses and plumbers and chefs.” He paused at the end of a row, looked both ways, moved on. “It’s only after they finish that they come here, work six or eight hours off their debt.”
“You’re saying they’re slaves.”
“More like indentured servants, but you’ve got the idea.” He glanced down the aisle and saw Schneider talking to a dark-skinned guy twice his weight. “This way.” No one paid them any attention. Part of the ethos of the place: no one here wanted to be acknowledged. After all, that’s what they’re working toward. Brilliants going blind over menial labor, stitching knockoff clothing so they can earn the right to masquerade as normal.
Max Schneider was a scarecrow, six and a half feet tall and cadaverously thin. His watch was expensive, but his teeth were a wreck. Cooper figured that for a choice, believed the forger found an advantage in the discomfort it caused other people. Or maybe he just didn’t give a damn.
The worker he was talking to was big, fat layered over muscles. His skin was Caribbean black, but Cooper read the tension in him as crackling waves of sickly yellow. “But it’s not my fault.”
“You introduced the guy,” Schneider said. “He was your friend.”
“No, I told you, just a guy I met. I told you that when I brought him here. I said I didn’t know him, you asked if I was vouching for him, I said no.”
Schneider waved his hand in front of his nose like he was clearing away a smell. “And now he gets in a bar fight, gets arrested? What if he talks about me?”
“I didn’t vouch for him.”
“I should just cut you loose. End our arrangement.”
“But I’ve only got three weeks left.”
“No,” the forger said. “You’ve got six months left.”
It took a moment to hit, then the man’s eyes widened, his nostrils flared, his pulse jumped quicker in his carotid. “We had a deal.”
Schneider shrugged. If he was cowed by the size or fury of his employee, he didn’t show it. To Cooper, he looked like a man completely in charge, a man who could take or leave the world. “Six months.” He turned and started away.
“I didn’t vouch for him,” the man repeated.
The forger spun back. “Say that again.”
“What?”
“Say that again. Say it.” Schneider smiled with stained teeth.
For a moment Cooper could see the guy was thinking about it, that he was thinking about saying it and then grabbing Schneider by the neck and squeezing, crushing his strong fingers together. He saw the weight of a thousand injustices bearing down on the abnorm, and the urge to throw them all off at once, to surrender to the momentary pleasure of pretending there was no future.
And Cooper had to admit he kind of wanted the man to do it. For his kind and his dignity.
But the moment passed. The big man opened his mouth, closed it. Then, slowly, he dragged the chair out from his workstation and settled heavily in it. His shoulders slumped. Scarred hands reached for a pair of shears and a bolt of denim, and with a practiced cut, he gave away half a year of his life.
“You,” Schneider said, as if he had only now noticed Cooper. “The poet.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t extend a hand.
“You need something?” The forger looked Shannon up and down dispassionately.
“New identities,” Cooper said.
“Already? I made you ten last time. You burn them all?” Schneider’s brow wrinkled. “That’s reckless. I don’t work with reckless people.”
“It’s not that. I need something better.”
Schneider snorted, then started walking, gesturing for them to follow. “My work is flawless. The seal, the microchip, the ink. You can look at the edge under a microscope and swear a brand-new card is ten years old. My code rats match my work to the government d-bases. There is no better.”
“But this time I’m crossing the border.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’ll work. Mexico, France, the Ukraine, wherever.”
“I’m not going to any of those places.”
Schneider stopped. Squinted. He leaned over the shoulder of an Asian girl, maybe twenty-two, watched her fingers spin beads onto delicate filigree. Schneider shook his head, sucked air through his teeth. “Too big,” he said. “Your spacing is too big. Do it right or you’re useless to me.”
The girl kept her eyes down, just nodded, began to unstring what she had done.
Schneider said, “You’re going to Wyoming.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a twist. You don
’t need an ID. You can walk right in.”
“I don’t want to be myself.”
“Which self?” Schneider smiled his hideous smile. “Thomas Eliot? Allen Ginsberg? Walter Whitman? Who are you, Poet?”
Cooper met his eyes, returned the smile.
“New Canaan Holdfast is not like other places,” Schneider said. “The security there is very strong.”
“Very strong” was an understatement of epic proportions, Cooper knew. While the NCH had an open-door policy to immigrating gifted, Erik Epstein and the rest of the Holdfast government had a justified paranoia about being infiltrated. And with the planet’s largest concentration of gifted in a single location, they had quite literally the best people in the world securing their borders. DAR agents were allowed in New Canaan—it was still American soil, after all—but only if they identified themselves openly. A few had pretended to go native after badging in; all had been apprehended and politely escorted out by men with prominently displayed sidearms.
“Can you do it?”
“You’ll need complete identities. Supporting information in every major database. Recursive consumer profile generation.”
“Can you do it?”
“They will catch you eventually. The protocols will change or the search functionality will improve or you’ll screw up. And you don’t look right. Too much water fat.”
“Can you do it?”
“Of course.”
“How much?”
The forger sucked his teeth again. “Two hundred.”
“Two hundred?” It was an outrageous price, several times what he had paid before. Paying for these would wipe out most of the cash he’d accumulated over the last six months of being a bad guy. “You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“How about one hundred?”
“The price is the price is the price.”
“Come on. You’re screwing me here.”
Schneider shrugged. It was the same movement he had given earlier, when he had added six months to an indentured servant’s term. A move that said take it or leave it, it didn’t matter to him.
Cooper dropped the duffel on an empty work bench, yanked the zipper, and began to count out bundles. Criminal etiquette would have been to do it in private, but he didn’t care. Let one of these people jack the forger. Not his problem.