World War 97 Part 2 (World War 97 Serial)

by David J Normoyle

  It took me a moment to work through Burnett’s logic. “Of course. But it can’t be best to let the lies and treachery of Celeste to continue unreported. What if Darius had given secret instructions to loyal Americans who don’t know his true agenda? Throughout Under Nyork, there are bound to be people who know something that can help the mibs find Darius’s accomplices, but they’ll only come forward once they know the secret.” I knew I should mention Arianne, but I hesitated. Then the moment was gone.

  “You’ll have to trust me, Jordi. You don’t mind if I call you Jordi, do you? It’s possible that Darius’s plan was for him to be revealed to the world as a member of Celeste and undermine our country that way.”

  “Wouldn’t he have stayed alive if that was his plan? His reveal would then be even more shocking.”

  “Perhaps.” Burnett shrugged. “Don’t mistake me—I don’t underestimate Celeste, and our mibs are working harder than ever. We will foil whatever they’re planning. It’s just more important right now that President Darius Roberts remain a martyr and a source of strength to the people right now.”

  “You can’t hide something this big. What if I go directly to the news network?”

  Burnett smiled. “Remember earlier, when I told you that I’d have to refuse what you asked of me? This is what I thought you’d want—to reveal the truth of your brother to the world. I think you are an idealist at heart. Surely you have to realize that’s a selfish request. You feel that some part of yourself has been sullied by your brother’s actions and that you would gain redemption for exposing him.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not it.”

  “Very well. Who on the news network do you trust?”

  “Levitt. Alan Levitt.” It was the first name that had popped into my head, but after some thought, I liked the choice. He was one of the main anchors at the network, but he often took positions that were critical of the establishment.

  “Very well.” Burnett pressed a button on his desk. “Get me Alan Levitt.” A moment later, one of the screens came to life, and Alan Levitt’s face popped into view. Burnett went to stand in front of the screen.

  “Who is it?” Levitt asked grumpily. Then he sat up straighter in the chair. “Oh it’s you, Sam.” A girl was dusting the side of his face with makeup, and he shooed her away. “What can I do for you?”

  “Sorry to bother you, Alan. There’s been a disturbing discovery in the last few days, and a friend of mine wants to let you know about it. Are you alone now?”

  Alan turned around. “Shut the door behind you,” he said to someone behind him, then he faced Burnett again. “I can get it out in this evening’s news if you want.”

  “No, Alan, this is unofficial news.”

  “Unofficial? So why are you even telling me?”

  “My friend thinks you’ll want to know.” Burnett nodded at me, and I stepped beside him so I would appear on Alan Levitt’s screen.

  “My name is Jordi Roberts, and the late President Darius Roberts was my brother. He was a member of the terrorist organization Celeste.”

  Levitt looked across at Burnett, who nodded.

  “Shit. This news becoming official anytime soon?”

  Burnett shook his head.

  “Dammit, that’s going to ruin my digestion for the day. Hard to forget a thing like that.” He turned to me. “Listen, next time you have something like that to get off your chest, tell it to your pillow or whisper it to a newborn baby or shout it to someone who’s so drunk they won’t remember the next day. Don’t make me miss dinner due to my ulcers acting up.” He pressed a button and disappeared from the screen.

  I turned to Burnett. “What did he mean ‘official news’?”

  Burnett sat down behind his desk. “All news that gets reported gets checked out at this office first. If we deem it unofficial, it doesn’t get reported. Go to any journalist or anchor—heck, you can go to the head of the news network if you want. Unless we decide we want a story released to the public, it stays buried.” Burnett picked up a tablet and started to scan through it. “Now, leave me. We’re finished here. I have a war to win.”

  What about the free press? I wanted to shout and scream or throw books across the room. But what was the point? Freedom of the press had always been touted as one of the principles of the American Conference, what made us better than societies like Russia and China. Screaming would have been like fighting for something still living or maybe for mourning something just dead. But I had just seen that the free press was neither of those.

  It had never existed. The free press was a lie.

  Chapter 5

  I left the Capitol building through the same door I’d entered. I barely noticed the mibs guarding the door and nearly walked straight into the protective barrier around the Shroud. I was in a daze.

  I’d spent countless hours watching the news without realizing how much of it was fake. I’d seen Alan Levitt expose corruption within the government, and he’d launched scathing attacks on military policy. I’d hated him for his attacks but, at the same time, admired his bravery in standing up against the system. I was comforted by the idea that a watchdog was in place to make sure those in power didn’t get away with too much.

  And to find out it was all a sham… everything that the news anchors told the world had been sanctioned.

  Back inside the conveyor pod, I hesitated deciding where to go. I’d just planned to let Burnett know about Darius, then get a well-earned drink. But now? I couldn’t just ignore what I’d found out. I had to do something. Who could I trust? Only two people came to mind: my squadron leader, Will Saunders, and my wife. I didn’t know where I could find Will, but I could start at home with Christina and figure it out from there.

  I keyed in the location of the conveyor station closest to our house then waited while the pod whizzed into action. Being in motion felt better, even if I didn’t have any kind of firm plan. Christina had surprised me by springing into action when we found Darius’s message. Perhaps she would know what to do.

  I exited the pod when it came to a stop and traveled the passageways to our door. I scanned it open. Christina sprang to her feet and hugged me even before I was fully inside. I gripped her back just as fiercely, and we stayed in each other’s arms for a long moment. Tension leeched from my shoulders, and I realized just how much I needed support right then. I couldn’t keep going on my own; I needed to share the burden.

  We entered the living room, swiped the door behind us, and sat down together on the sofa.

  Christina touched the side of my face. “Are you okay?”

  “No, not really.”

  “What did they do to you in there?”

  “In the Bureau—that wasn’t too bad.” It had been at the time, but that seemed so long ago. “I went to see Burnett. It’s all a lie.”

  “What’s a lie? Calm down. Start from the beginning.”

  “What about you? Last I saw, one of the mibs was manhandling you.”

  “I was treated well enough, considering,” Christina said. “They confiscated the holographic message, of course, and asked me the same questions over and over again. I didn’t know much, so they let me go after a few hours. They kept asking me if you were a member of Celeste. No matter how many times I told them you weren’t, they didn’t seem to want to believe me.”

  “Did Mari Larsen interrogate you?”

  “No, I don’t think I was that important. And you?”

  “Yes. I have so much to tell you.” I decided not to go into details about what had happened with Larsen, and I didn’t mention the meeting with Arianne or my sleepless night in the hotel room. I told her everything that had happened in Burnett’s office, though. She listened open-mouthed.

  “Alan Levitt,” she said. “Of all people.”

  “Burnett asked me to choose who to contact. It was almost random that I chose Levitt. I’m sure I could have picked Johnley, Amendenson, Bryce—any of the anchors—and it would have been the same.” I stood up
and paced to the small kitchenette and back. “What do we do?”

  “What can we do, darling?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no way to let the world know because it will be unofficial news.” I snorted. “Can you believe they call it that? Unofficial news.” I went to the monitor on the wall. “I want to check something.” Will had said he would send me his address when he returned to the undercity. Given everything going on, he might not have had the chance yet, but it was worth checking. I logged on to my mail.

  “Did you think of anything else, Jordi? Now that you know the truth about your brother, did anything else he did give you a clue?”

  “Not that I’ve been able to think of. We were close until I was fifteen. Back then, I knew everything about him. He was getting straight As in all his subjects—without trying, the bastard—and charisma was dripping from him even then. He became Zirconia’s golden child, and she pushed, pulled, and prodded him toward political life. We gradually drifted apart then, and I’ve seen very little of him in the last few years.” I shrugged. “Whenever he turned away from his country and into the arms of the terrorists, it was after the time when we were close.”

  A message from Will blinked into view in my mail window. I clicked it.

  “And you said Larsen and the Bureau have been watching you for months. Any clue as to why?” Christina asked.

  “No, still no idea.” Will’s message contained his address and an invitation to visit him. I wondered if Will knew what I’d done in the Battle of Rockall when he’d written that. I memorized the address then reconsidered Christina’s question. “I never told you that the Bureau was tracking me.” I had skipped over relating the weird interview, unsure how to explain what had happened. Had Larsen caressed my nipple while telling me about carnivorous female spiders, or had I imagined it?

  “Oh. Mari must have mentioned it during my interrogation.”

  I blinked several times, staring at the monitor, then I deleted Will’s message and logged out. I turned around. “You told me that Mari Larsen didn’t question you.”

  Christina just stared at me for a moment. “Bugger!” She shrugged. “I guess this was due to come to an end soon anyway. Might as well be now.” Without taking her eyes off me, she reached across the sofa, stuck her hand into her bag, and pulled out a gun. The weapon was very similar to the one the mibs had held on me when we’d emerged from the tunnels. She pointed it at me.

  “Okay.” I felt as though I should have been unshockable after all that had happened recently, but I had to remind myself to breathe as I stared down the barrel of a gun my wife held. “You are in Celeste?” It seemed everyone else was. Why not Christina, too?

  She laughed at that. Laughter can be infectious, but not then. I had never felt more serious in my life. “No, not that. You do seem to have a gift for getting things arseways.”

  “What then?” The gun was steady in her hand even as her head rocked in amusement.

  “Bureau agent. What you’d call a mib.”

  “I see.” I didn’t see.

  “Let me explain. A little over a year ago, certain evidence led Mari to suspect that not all was as it seemed with our then president, Darius Roberts. But it wasn’t in her power to launch an investigation into a sitting president. When you had your accident, she saw an opportunity to attack the problem sideways. She sent me undercover.”

  “You’re not a nurse.” I blurted out the words before I realized how stupid they were. Of course she wasn’t an actual nurse if she was an undercover mib.

  “I was taught how to give an injection and wrap a wound. I think that’s most of what a nurse needs in terms of technical skill. In terms of mental fortitude, she needs the patience of the deep ocean to put up with the fucking needy patients. You don’t know how many times I wanted to scream at you, ‘Just stop whining about it already.’ Hell.”

  Christina already looked different—the set of her mouth, a narrowing of her eyes. Even the timbre of her voice had changed, deepened. It had all been an act.

  “Did you ever care for me?” I asked.

  “Care for you? You’ve got to be kidding me. I hated your guts. You were my punishment. I had to smile and make appropriate grunts while your pathetic prick slithered inside me.”

  Her words should have hurt me, and they probably would in time, but right then, I just felt empty. I knew my marriage hadn’t been great, but I couldn't have imagined it was just an elaborate investigation into my brother. “I never suspected.”

  “You were so vulnerable, I had to play this healing-angel role.” She snorted. “Remember that? You called me your angel. I laid the ‘oh, my darling, Jordi’ shit on thick. You’ve probably guessed by now, that’s not the real me. Quite the opposite.”

  “You acted different when we went investigating the old train in the tunnels.”

  Christina nodded. “Yes, more like the real me. I was afraid you might get suspicious. But after a year of fruitlessness, to finally have the possibility to find something got my juices flowing. Plus, I suspected I wouldn’t have to uphold the pretense for much longer.”

  I remembered when we met the mibs on the way to the tunnel. Christina had pulled a crazy stunt that could have gotten her killed—or so it had seemed. “Those mibs. You knew them?”

  She shook her head. “No. But I have a secret ID. I got a bit of distance from you, put the secret ID in my hand, and raised my arms so the agent could see and scan the ID. Luckily, he was smart. He let us go through but watched where we went. When I came back through the vent, I told them to pretend to take me and to arrest you.”

  “You told him to shoot me?” And I had been protecting her.

  She shrugged. “I left that up to him.”

  “And you struggled enough to provoke me into action.”

  A lopsided smile crept up one cheek. “I hope it hurt.” She stood and moved toward the door as I took a step back. “I’ve been looking forward to this moment for a long time now. Every time you collapsed into our bed in the middle of night, stinking of drink. Every time you told me some obvious lie and I had to play dumb and swallow it. Every time you had me suck you off. I bore it all, knowing that one day it would come to an end, and I’d make you suffer then.”

  “Wait.” I took a farther step back, away from the maniacal gleam in her eye. My shoulders touched a wall behind me. “I’m not an innocent, but you can’t blame me for all that. I had no idea you weren’t willing. Whoever gave you the task to go undercover is the one you should be mad at. I wasn’t the best husband, I admit, but I had no idea what was going on in your head. Why don’t you put the gun down?”

  Christina nodded. “Okay.” She placed her gun on the counter. She stepped toward me. “Do you feel less threatened now?” Her leg snapped up, the side of my head exploded in pain, and I staggered to the side. “Kickboxing black belt,” she said. “You can add that to the things you didn’t know about your wife until today.”

  Her fist snaked out and caught me in the nose. My eyes watered. I raised my hands to block her, and she moved to the side, her hands jabbing out to hit me on the jaw, the temple, and the cheek. My vision was blurred with my own tears, and each new strike added to the crushing pain behind my eyes. I lowered my head and charged at her, my hands spread wide in front of me, trying to get close to her, get her into a bear hug, anything to stop the hitting.

  She didn’t try to dodge, and I managed to get both arms around the back of her shoulders. Before I could get a good grip, my hip made contact with hers. I felt a sudden zero-G sensation, then I was slammed down on the ground. My head cracked against the floor, and breath was torn from my lungs.

  Christina stood over me. “I was also Bureau judo champion.” She leaned down until her face was close to mine. “I imagine most of your hand-to-hand combat experience came from bar fighting.”

  I sucked in a breath. My side hurt like a motherfucker—maybe a broken rib—but it was nothing compared to the blinding agony in my head. Christina’s face
wavered in and out of view.

  “You were pathetically easy to fool, you know.” Her voice seemed to be coming from far away. “So desperate for comfort and affection after the injury that you didn’t suspect a thing when your nurse fawned all over you for no reason. Then quickly agreeing to a marriage when I said I was pregnant—as if I would let anything spawned by you grow inside me.”

  I had briefly wondered, after Christina told me of the miscarriage, whether there’d ever been a baby then chided myself for such horrible thoughts. “I don’t… I don’t deserve this.” My words came out staggered by grimaces at the stabs of pain in my side at each breath.

  “Resisting arrest—that’s what it’ll be documented as,” Christina said. “But don’t pretend you don’t deserve this and more. I know what you did at the Battle of Rockall. I always knew you were scum, but even I didn’t think you were capable of that. She didn’t let me hear the end of that. Stealing a plane and running away in the middle of battle.” Christina stood up and gave me a kick in the ribs.

  I gasped, wrapping my arms around myself, grateful for small mercies. If she’d kicked me on the right side of my body, where I suspected a broken rib, I would have passed out.

  “Who’s she? Who wouldn’t let you hear the end of it?” I didn’t really care; I just wanted her talking to distract her from kicking me. I coughed—a rasping painful cough.

  “Mari, of course.” Christina crouched beside me. “We are soulmates. We’ve been together for five years. Together, we are perfection, and men are only a necessary evil in our world.”

  “Why would she make you marry me?”

  “We have an unusual relationship, Mistress Mari and I. She invents creative disciplines for me. Being your wife—it was an assignment for the Bureau, as well, of course—was her most diabolical punishment. When she got me alone, she’d make me recount all the vile things you did to me and made me do to you. She’d string me up naked and punish me. But the retelling was the worst part, reliving each moment again. After that, the beating was a relief, something I’d deserved. The worse whipping she ever gave me was after your disgrace at the Battle of Rockall. And even though it was really nothing to do with me, I felt like I had earned it simply by association with you. Even though our marriage was a sham, I was your wife. I still can’t believe that you weren’t shot after the court martial.”