Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

by Eliot Peper

  Diana sipped her cigar, the glowing tip throwing another splash of light across the scene. She held the smoke in her mouth, and notes of cedar, moss, and pepper danced on her palate. Letting the smoke out through her nose, she tasted licorice in the finish.

  Growing up in a Texas ghost town, this man had built a commercial juggernaut from scratch. Following the wildcatter tradition of his home state, he had struck oil on a few wells drilled into mature reservoirs everyone else thought had run dry. He parlayed that early success into an incredible run of highly leveraged growth, taking on as much debt as he could get his hands on to scoop up leases for reservoirs deemed too difficult to produce. Then he’d brought on petroleum engineers who went to extreme lengths to milk fossil fuels from Mother Earth. This strategy had found its ultimate expression when Dag had helped him secure rights to drill the Lomonosov Ridge, the underwater mountains below the Arctic Ocean that held the largest reserves of oil left on the planet. Climate change had thawed the Arctic, which made accessing the oil easier, the use of which further accelerated climate change, which increased the value of Lowell’s large real estate holdings, which he carefully invested in based on their relative resilience, making him a billionaire many times over.

  You didn’t pull off a scheme like that without a lot of subterfuge. Lowell played well and played dirty. In his bid for global natural-resource domination, he had left a trail of political corruption, corporate espionage, financial shenanigans, blackmail, human-rights abuses, and even targeted assassination. That didn’t even take into account the destructive cynicism of the overall business plan.

  Even while she was an official spook, Diana had run some operations that supported or protected Lowell’s various gambits. After her exile, she had continued to aid in his efforts whenever Dag came to her for help with things he couldn’t handle. Lowell might be an asshole. But Uncle Sam wanted our asshole to win. God forbid the Taiwanese, the Russians, the Indonesians, or the Saudi royal family lock up the last of the world’s oil. So the US government turned a blind eye or even lent a hand, often in the form of Diana. It was shady. But life was shady. And it was her job to sweep up the mess so that American civilians could live in self-satisfied peace.

  Of course, the global carbon tax had dashed aside Lowell’s house of cards in one fell swoop. But he wasn’t the type of person to waste away the rest of his days in luxurious retirement. He was up to something. She was here to find out what.

  The pale woman murmured something to herself. Then she stretched, arching her back like a cat. Rolling over, she tried to get comfortable again. A frown creased her elegant forehead. She sniffed. Sniffed again. Yawning, she rubbed her eyes. Sniffed a third time.

  “Do you smell smoke?” she muttered, the words muddled by sleep. “I smell smoke.”

  Blinking slowly, she turned her head from side to side, looking around the room.

  Diana sucked on her cigar, the ember setting her face aglow.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” The woman jerked up to a sitting position and shimmied back against the headboard, pulling up a corner of the sheet to cover her naked breasts. Her exclamation was pitched high with terror and panic. “Noel! Wake up!”

  Her companion stirred. “What the fuck, Sandra? It’s the middle of the night.”

  Sandra just pointed a shaking finger at Diana.

  Diana imagined what they must see. A disembodied head smoking a cigar in the doorway, her stealth jumpsuit turning the rest of her body into a shimmering pool of shadow.

  Noel hit the light, and the bedroom was flooded with harsh illumination.

  Lowell snorted, and Sandra slapped him. “Wake up, asshole,” she said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Noel addressed Diana.

  Diana was struck by the fire in the woman’s eyes, her blunt refusal to be intimidated. These women were top-tier courtesans, a profession once reviled, now held in high esteem.

  “I’m here for him,” said Diana, flicking ash in Lowell’s direction. “You two can feel free to go and to charge him double for the trouble.”

  Noel and Sandra traded glances over Lowell, who was shaking his head blearily. Without another word, they stood and dressed in quick, efficient movements.

  “Mmmphgg, where are you going?” Lowell was shaking his head. He looked hungover.

  “You’ve got a visitor,” said Noel, and followed Sandra past Diana and out of the suite. Even their exit was imbued with an apparently effortless grace that Diana knew must be the result of years of training.

  “A visitor?” Lowell grunted and pushed himself up to a sitting position, finally looking up at Diana. She would appear even stranger when lit, her body a glistening liquid absence, her head and cigar the only things his eyes could latch on to. She blew a smoke ring, watched it tremble and dissolve as he got his bearings.

  A predatory grin spread across his face.

  “My, my, my,” he said. “Look who we have here. Welcome to my humble abode, Diana. You missed the party. But I’m sure I can find some way to entertain and delight you.” He patted the bed beside him. “I’m nothing if not a generous lover.”

  She waited him out.

  He shook his head in mock disappointment. “Ah well, playing hard to get, are we? Well, at least be a doll and ring room service to bring up some coffee. This hangover is a motherfucker.”

  Diana wasn’t above using other people’s sexism against them. It was as useful a tool as any other. But she certainly wasn’t going to play along with his blatant attempt to signal social dominance.

  She took another pull on the cigar.

  “I’ve always found vanity to be the most unfortunate aspect of megalomaniacs,” she said. “They say it’s about the world, but it’s actually just about them. All those grand dreams are rooted in nothing more than personal insecurity. Puffing out the chest, raining terror upon enemies, declaring strong opinions in loud voices. You’re so obsessed with yourself that you think I must be too. I think it’s rather pathetic. What really surprises me about this situation is that you appear to be equally obsessed with me.” She paused for a beat. “Why?”

  Lowell threw up his hands. “Really? This is the conversation you woke me up at four in the goddamn morning for? For heaven’s sake, Diana, life deserves flair. Add some pizzazz. Stick a finger up his butt. Something, anything.” He sighed. “Why you? That’s a ridiculous question. Because you’re the best. And this is important. You think I’m going to hire some fucktard like Haruki when it’s for real?”

  “Ahh, flattery. What a devious little man you are. Just praise my virtues and win me over, right? Well, if I’m just the star student you’ve been looking for, then why use so many cutouts?”

  “Would you have taken it seriously if I didn’t? Compartmentalize information, each cog knows only its own task, etcetera, etcetera. Isn’t this right out of your playbook? You secret agents just love to lecture me on operational security. Now you’re criticizing me for being careful? I just can’t win, can I?”

  “Interesting that you would choose this particular moment to brag about being so very careful.” She took a puff. “If you anticipated I’d slice through the cutouts, then forcing me to do so risks blowing the op.”

  “Look,” he said. “Honestly? I’m happy you’re here. We can cut the bullshit and do this like good, honest spooks. Plus, even if your questions are lackluster, I can’t fault your entrance.” He looked her up and down. “My security detail didn’t peep, and whatever that is you’re wearing is slick as a wet pussy. You’d be amazed at the utter dullness of some of the people in this town. Their cheap suits, their endless acronyms, their zero-sum-game thinking, their patent inability to dream big. They have no sense of adventure, no joie de vivre. It’s stage-four boring. Sometimes I worry it might be catching. So even though you chased away my lovelies, I must admit, you’re a blessing in admittedly heavy disguise.”

  Dag had always said that the one thing Lowell hated above all else was boredom. In fact, the primary factor th
at had kept Dag in Lowell’s employ even as other colleagues dropped like flies was that Dag challenged Lowell and could keep up with his antics. But as Dag became less and less comfortable furthering his client’s schemes, he’d come to regret his status as a favorite lieutenant.

  I’m sorry. That came out all wrong. All the emotions that Diana had been smothering with continuous action threatened to boil up and overwhelm her. Nothing Sean or Lowell had said so far implicated Dag in their plot, but did that mean he was innocent? Was it coincidence that Dag’s mentor and his former client were both so intent on engaging her? Helen had taught her never to believe in coincidences, and this one was too big to swallow. Even so, Diana had lashed out at Dag without evidence of wrongdoing. She very well might have fatally wounded their relationship. A relationship that, for all its many faults, was also the one constant in her changeable life. Sometimes it felt like Dag was smothering her, but there was no one else looking out for her, no one else offering her small kindnesses with no expectation of reciprocation. It was the very lack of a quid pro quo that made her feel so uncomfortable, so out of her depth. Sparring with Lowell was so much easier, familiar in its stark self-interest.

  “Seems like the guy who claims to want to cut the bullshit is the one spewing it,” she said. “For all the words you’ve said, there’s surprisingly little actual information. And if that’s not a red flag, I don’t know what is.”

  The color drained from Lowell’s face, and his eyes widened. Diana’s hand went to her holster, and she twitched her head to the side to check the room behind her. But there were no henchmen sneaking up behind her, and her feed scans were still coming up clean.

  Then Lowell leaned over and projectile vomited onto the carpet. It was a slimy yellow sludge, mostly liquid. He wiped his mouth with the corner of the sheet.

  “Whoo,” he said, as the acrid smell reached Diana’s nostrils. “I feel so much better. I’m telling you, DC people are so inane that I have to drown my frustrations in liquor. Their tediousness is hell on my liver. Next time drop in a few hours earlier, and I’ll find a boy, girl, or whatever you’re into who can loosen you up a bit, if you know what I mean.”

  “Despite appearances, I have better things to do than listen to a crackpot and not-so-well-endowed old man. If you don’t get to the fucking point, I’m either going to torture you or leave.”

  “Zing,” said Lowell delightedly. “Yes! For the love of all things fuckable, I’m glad you’re here. Okay, you wanna know why I have you looking up Rachel’s skirt?”

  He bounded off the side of the bed, strode to the window, and pulled back the curtains. The lights of Washington twinkled in the darkness beyond. Lowell pressed his palms against the glass.

  “Everyone worries about the future.” His voice lost its affected madness. He was quiet now, incisive. “They freak out about technology. They obsess over how tomorrow might be different. But it’s the things that do not change that we should pay attention to. If you want to make sense of the world, focus on finding the constants. They’re the rare truths that everyone’s too busy to bother with. This town”—he tapped a finger on the glass—“has forgotten its most basic truth. These politicians and bureaucrats are so consumed with their petty institutions that they don’t even realize they’re ceding the only thing that matters. Power. During the Revolutionary War, Americans beat the British because they didn’t engage in open battle, sapping their enemy’s strength with a thousand guerrilla raids instead. Today Commonwealth has infiltrated every corner of our lives. Our houses, our cars, our planes, our jobs, our cities, our armies, our communications, our money, everything runs on their software. We invited them in, handed ourselves over willingly. We’re all so dependent on the feed that we can’t do anything without it. It’s death by a thousand small conveniences. When Rachel announced her cute little carbon tax a few years ago, it didn’t just blow up my business, it sounded the death knell of the nation state. Countries can’t even make their own damn decisions anymore, not without Rachel’s permission anyway. And this is just the beginning. The balance of power has shifted. And this town”—he tapped the window again—“is on the losing side.”

  Diana puffed on her cigar.

  Fifteen years ago she had lost her first agent. As a case officer, her primary job was recruiting, managing, and protecting a network of agents who could feed her secrets. Sometimes they shared intel under duress. She might blackmail an official if she could find suitable documentation of scandal. More often they did it for greed, revenge, or a ticket out.

  Hamza had been none of these. He was a principled spy, so fed up with the endless corruption over water rights in drought-ravaged Morocco that he had walked straight into the American embassy and demanded to speak to an intelligence officer. From that day on, Hamza had been a font of useful intel, passing along classified documents, secret blacklists, and details of clandestine payouts in the hope that the Americans would force out the worst offenders.

  Hamza’s information was pristine, but Diana started to worry that the bosses he was reporting on might get wise to his efforts. She petitioned for help, but Helen refused on the basis that agency algorithms were turning up no such evidence of conspiracy in the feeds of the targets. Resources were needed for more pressing problems. Diana then urged Hamza to take a break, or at least slow down. But in his zeal to empower his supposed benefactors, he wouldn’t think of it.

  One dusty afternoon he missed a meeting. Diana had sat there sipping on too-sweet mint tea and wondering where she’d find his body. After he didn’t show up at the backup location, she began searching his haunts. He was in his bathtub, hair still sticky with shampoo, throat cut, resting in scarlet water thick with soap bubbles.

  Diana had lost it when she got back to Washington, shouting down Helen right there in the middle of Mauricio’s. The agency had become so reliant on the feed for intelligence gathering that it had divested its expensive and risky human networks. Why bother running agents when you could scrape a trillion data points and filter them for statistically significant intel? The problem was that data told you what people did and how they did it. But it revealed little as to why they did what they did. In the special kind of blindness brought on by apparent omniscience, they were hemorrhaging their best people.

  Lowell was an asshole, but he was also right. When everything from the grappling hook at her side to the national power grid depended on the feed, the world had slowly but surely divorced power from official politics, people not even cognizant of what their reliance on Commonwealth might foretell.

  “Sounds like you’re working on a campaign speech,” she said.

  Lowell’s head snapped around to pin Diana with a stare.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said. “We don’t have to scratch our balls and watch our country wither and die. If I learned anything as a businessman, it’s that opportunity hides in every disaster. Commonwealth is a threat to every government on earth because every government on earth depends on Commonwealth. But it’s headquartered here on American soil. It’s a prize waiting to be seized.”

  Dominos fell in Diana’s head. Collecting dirt on Commonwealth and progressively more personal intel on Rachel. Surveilling her daily routines. Mapping key physical locations. It wasn’t about shorting their stock. It wasn’t even about ousting her as CEO.

  “You want to nationalize Commonwealth?” Diana couldn’t contain her shock.

  Lowell beamed. “All we need to do is work up a good excuse and send in the FBI. Countries nationalize big companies all the time. Hell, we saw too much of it in the oil industry. Rachel can do what we tell her or go to prison while we install a more reasonable leader. Shareholders will throw a hissy fit, but we’ll promise to remunerate them at some point, and they won’t be able to do shit about it. It’s our public duty, for heaven’s sake. We can’t just abdicate the sacred mantle of American sovereignty to Silicon Valley, can we? Endangers the Constitution and baseball and apple pie and all our other bril
liant traditions and blah, blah, blah.”

  It was totally insane. But it would finally provide the oversight that techno capitalists like Rachel had evaded for so long. It would put voters back in charge of critical infrastructure. It would clarify what had long since been obvious: the digital world was just as important as the physical one and ought to be a public jurisdiction, not a walled garden.

  Lowell dropped Diana’s report into a shared feed. Images unfurled. Board members arguing, Sofia’s map of the corporate hierarchy, Kendrick’s financial highlights, Rachel working in her corner of the lobby, Diana’s rough outline of the house on Telegraph Hill.

  “As your report illustrates, Rachel is not even close to being prepared for such an eventuality. If we strike hard and fast, she won’t even know what hit her. These tech gurus still live in a fantasy universe where they’re the peaceful purveyors of a benevolent future. That’s the problem of living in a bubble. Can you imagine trying to develop an oil field in Nigeria with an attitude like that?” He roared with laughter. “You’d be eaten alive. Welcome to the real world. I mean, shit, Rachel swims laps at a public pool. Minimal security detail. Pfft. With a few guns and a lot of lawyers, Commonwealth will be the rightful property of the United States government. God bless America. Problem solved.”

  Lowell gave himself a round of applause and dismissed the shared feed. He bit his lower lip and raised his eyebrows, leaning in toward Diana with feverish intensity.

  “The thing is,” he stage-whispered, “we can’t do it without your help.”

  Diana looked beyond Lowell, through the haze of cigar smoke, and out the hotel window. She found the apex of the Washington Monument, followed the shining obelisk down to where it appeared to emerge from the roof of the White House. It was to this beacon that her family had fled the destruction of Bulgaria. It was here that they had finally discovered what it felt like to live free of constant fear. Diana had dedicated her life to protecting that feeling, to serving this symbol and the people who believed in it. Was this lunatic plan its unlikely salvation from the descent into irrelevance or the harbinger of its self-destruction?