by Eliot Peper
“Thank you,” said Helen, imbuing her gaze with a gratitude Diana wanted desperately to believe. “Thank you, Maria. I really appreciate you sharing that perspective with me. Rest assured, I’ve spent months wrestling with those exact possibilities.” Helen smiled sadly. “And I wish it were that easy. Truly I do. If it were another place, another time, maybe that would be enough. There would be so much less risk, so much less danger. But the world is moving too fast for nuance. Everything is accelerating, and when things start spinning out of control, a strong hand is required. One of the difficult lessons I’ve had to learn in my own journey is not only to assess risk but to gauge when risks are worth taking. You’re right, this puts all our chips on the table. But it’s a bet we simply have to make and have to win. There’s no other choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” said Diana, despair bleeding through. “You chose to kill Freeman. You chose to involve me. That wasn’t inevitable. It was a bid for power. This is exactly the same, only bigger. But you don’t have to make the same choice. You can do what’s right, protect the only thing worth protecting.”
“I was afraid of this,” said Helen, her voice crystalizing into something sharp and brittle. “Your career was so promising until you shied away from doing what needed to be done. Temperance isn’t a luxury people in our position can enjoy. Our duty is too sacred. You speak so highly of the international community, but what do you think Taipei, Moscow, or Addis Ababa would do in our place?” She reached out and slapped Diana across the face. “Pull yourself together, Maria. Take off those rose-tinted glasses and wake the fuck up. We either seize this opportunity or surrender to the black hole of history. I won’t let that happen. And you won’t either. You’re going to help, whether you like it or not.”
Diana’s cheek stung. She remembered working in the greenhouse, knees aching, and discovering that something had been eating the leaves of her milkweed. Leaning in close to inspect the damage, she’d seen a chrysalis hanging from the tattered remains of a leaf, a caterpillar secreted within, midway through metamorphosis. She checked it frequently, hoping to catch the moment when the butterfly finally emerged. But one morning she returned to check, and all that was left was the withered chrysalis hanging from the ruined plant. Betrayed by Dag, trapped by Helen, unable to escape the sins of her past, Diana was as empty as that fragile husk.
“Not going to happen,” said Diana, shaking her head. “I’ve lied, tortured, and killed for you. But this I won’t do. We can’t go down this road.”
Helen sat back in her chair and stared at Diana, who struggled to meet her gaze. The older woman’s expression was strangely flat, a forced neutrality that inspired more fear in Diana than outright rage could have. For a moment the only sound was the torrential rain, falling in dark curtains across the lake. Diana focused on the whiff of Michelia champaca, as if a scent could transport her away from this place, from this woman.
At long last, Helen sighed. “I didn’t want to have to do this,” she said. “Really I didn’t. But you know the rules. This isn’t a game you can bow out of. The fact is, we need you. And that need is greater than the tenderness I hold for you.”
Diana’s skin tightened as if it had shrunk a size.
Helen dropped a video stream into their shared feed. Diana jerked as audio feedback screeched at earsplitting volume. Instead of settling into any semblance of sense or harmony, the noise skipped and jumped and warped and shrieked in a chaotic melee that defied synthesis, an auditory scalpel that sliced straight through to her brain stem. There were hornets trapped inside her skull. Her heart couldn’t find its rhythm. Satan danced on her eardrums. She had to flee, fight, scream. Her hands flew up to cover her ears, but they did little to muffle the cacophony.
That was the first reason it took her a moment to parse the video. The second was that the images were as deranged as the audio, lights flashing and dimming and strobing in a random walk that assaulted her retinas. Like a monster rising from the deep, the scene before her slowly emerged as she pieced together shattered glimpses into something interpretable.
It was Dag.
He was sitting in an armchair. The wall behind him was paneled in dark wood and covered in shelves stacked with books. The room was luxurious but oddly cramped. For a moment Diana thought a visual filter might be imposing pandemonium on an otherwise peaceful tableau. But then she noticed that the angled lights threw shadows a filter couldn’t impose. And Dag’s eyeballs roved behind his closed eyelids in time with the dazzling bursts, his face and fingers twitching with every crack and howl in the monstrous soundtrack. Tears coursed down his hollowed cheeks, and his body shuddered like a marionette, the inescapable turmoil besieging whatever reserve of control kept him from ripping his hair out and beating bloody fists against the locked door.
As quickly as it had appeared, the nightmare vanished.
Now there was nothing but the murmur of raindrops and distant thunder. Now there was nothing but the soft, warm glow of tasteful dining room illumination. Now there was nobody but Diana, convulsions passing through her in invisible waves, breath coming in ragged gasps, every sense raw and aching. No, not nobody but Diana. Helen was there too, calm and erect, looking at her one-time protégé with pity and disdain.
“This is exactly why we should have done this the easy way,” said Helen, as if describing a mislaid restaurant order. “Coercion is so crass. I have faith that you’ll come around eventually. If we had more time, I could persuade you on first principles. But time isn’t something we can afford to waste at the moment, so we’re hosting your boyfriend as an insurance policy. I know it’s a little cliché, but classics are classic for a reason, right?” She sighed. “Look, Maria, I’m sorry. But you’re forcing my hand here. Your country needs you. I need you. And nothing is going to get in the way of the mission. One day we’ll look back on this and laugh. Dag might not, but lovers come and go.” She plucked a Michelia champaca from the vase. “I will say this though, he still hasn’t given up anything on you.” With careful deliberation, she pulled off the golden petals one by one, letting them flutter to the floor beside a slim antique briefcase resting against the leg of her chair. “Claims he doesn’t know anything about what you’re working on, which is obviously horseshit. An ex-Apex operator working under Sean who is blissfully clueless of his significant other’s espionage activities? Please. Everyone breaks eventually, but he’s holding on longer than most.”
Helen held out the naked flower, its bare stamen oddly obscene.
Diana’s hand shook as she accepted it.
“Do this for me,” said Helen. “Be the woman you were meant to be. Take your place in history. You’ll have Dag back in no time at all. I promise we won’t physically damage your boy toy. You can return to weeding and fucking and whatever else you fill your time with. You’ll be a hero, and you’ll have me to thank for it.”
Diana crushed the stem in her trembling fingers.
“What would you have me do?” she asked, painfully aware that capitulation deserved nothing but contempt.
CHAPTER 20
Diana couldn’t see more than a couple of meters into the darkness surrounding the boat, yet it surged forward from the dock, piloting itself away from the Ranch, Lowell’s sparkling fortress receding behind her like a star falling into a black hole. The rocking motion polluted her thoughts with unwanted memories of the smuggler’s hold. Fear and curiosity had made the midnight voyage an adventure, until seasickness smothered any other impression. Unwilling to show weakness before the other refugees, Diana had clenched her stomach and swallowed the bile in the back of her throat. Now waves slapped against the hull, rain muddled the windshield, and, reaching for composure honed by years of training, Diana tried to make sense of what had just happened.
Dag hadn’t betrayed her. Their relationship wasn’t a house of cards constructed to pry Diana’s secrets away from her. The pancakes, drawings, and affection were genuine. So were their fights, frustrations, and guilt. He had
n’t seduced her, doted on her, shared himself with her only to sell off whatever intel he could glean. In the end, he was exactly what Diana had secretly feared he might be. The real deal. A man driven not to satisfy some ulterior motive but to win her trust.
Dag wasn’t Helen’s instrument. He was her hostage.
Sitting in that chair, twitching in time to the audiovisual hellscape Helen had woven around him, the sheer fragility of Dag’s mental state had been all too obvious. He was doing everything he could to resist, to remove himself from the madness with a continuous act of will. He had that same look when he was working on a sketch, an aura of supreme concentration that drowned out the world around him. But Diana had directed enough interrogations to know that nobody could hold out indefinitely. Everyone broke. The only question was how much they were willing to lose before giving in.
Diana’s fingers laced and unlaced atop the briefcase in her lap.
Laced. Unlaced. Laced. Unlaced. Laced. Unlaced.
Dag could not give in. They were pressing him for details of what she’d been up to, tidbits that might prove valuable in the effort to coerce her. But the sad fact that she had never trusted him enough to divulge anything meant that he didn’t have anything to offer them. His torturers would mistake ignorance for intransigence and wouldn’t stop until he was broken beyond repair.
The boat bumped up against the dock. How much simpler the world had been when she had arrived at the lake that afternoon. Opening her umbrella and snatching up the briefcase, Diana disembarked, careful not to slip on the slick wood.
Dag hadn’t betrayed her, she had betrayed him. She loved him, but she hadn’t shared anything about herself with him, dooming first their relationship and now his sanity. Instead of protecting him, her reticence had disarmed him in a fight against an enemy she hadn’t anticipated. And as soon as things went sideways, she had assumed the worst of him, let her paranoia paint him as a collaborator until it turned out he was a victim.
Her first instinct had been revenge, not rescue. Imagining Dag to be an agent of Helen, Diana had lost no time forsaking him.
The rain had turned the path to mud, and Diana lost her footing as she trudged from the dock to the parking lot. Her knee hit the muck, and as she flailed to catch her fall, a gust of wind caught the umbrella, and rain pelted against her, ice-cold rivulets running down her back.
As she knelt there in the mud, a sob tore through her. She had done terrible things. Ripped families apart. Destroyed lives. Ordered interrogations just like the one Dag was suffering through now. Layered deception upon deception until truth itself was suspect. Through it all she had justified her sins as necessary to protect the innocent, to defend this nation she had devoted her life to. And for what? Helen had transformed that nation into a vehicle for the oppression Diana was supposed to be fighting against. If America was to be the next global empire, then Diana’s actions were not redeemed by abstract principles enshrined on a piece of parchment fading under glass at the National Archives.
Diana clenched her fist around the slick handle of the briefcase. This country had no special claim on justice. It was as guilty as the rest, and she was its deputy, its assassin, its weapon of choice in the perpetual mission to pursue the only thing its leaders truly cared about. The extension of their own power. Diana was one of the soldiers who had shattered Bulgaria, sanctioned persecution as necessary for the greater good, chased her family into hiding. She was the shadow that haunted her own nightmares, the savvy apologist, the right hand of tyrants. The minute the veil of patriotism fell away, espionage lost its luster. Diana had taken the gift of freedom bestowed by her grandmother’s sacrifices, and this was what she had become. An agent like herself was nothing but a murderer, a liar, and a thief. And unlike those common criminals, she’d had the audacity to believe herself superior, to celebrate her atrocities.
Rain rinsing away the tears, she pushed herself to her feet and stalked the rest of the way to the car that had delivered her here from the airport. Helen wanted to domineer Diana, goad her with a stick if a carrot would not suffice. When Diana had helped kill President Freeman, she could at least claim ignorance. This operation offered no such false pretense. She was to be the tip of the spear that would subdue the world.
Wrenching open the door, Diana threw herself into the car and out of the rain. The door clicked shut behind her, muffling the sound of the storm and making the vehicle feel like a hermetically sealed chamber, cut off from the horror of her realizations. For a moment she floated in welcome numbness.
But something lay on the seat beside her, something she hadn’t left in the car on arrival. Wiping the water from her eyes in disbelief, she stared.
Helen had left her a final gift.
The ruins of La Jolla came to life before her eyes, Dag’s master draftsmanship now complemented by shades of charcoal that gave the drawing a sense of weight and texture that made it feel realer than real life could ever hope to be. The piece hit Diana like a punch to the gut. It impressed a raw power that her glimpse at the semifinal sketch had only hinted at, conveying awe, intimate contamination, and a desperate sense of loss. You know what I think about when I’m working on a piece? I think about all the ways you might die out there, all the horrible things that could be happening to you, what I would do if you just never came home. It’s like some sick fascination. Diana had never even thought to worry about Dag. She had been too interested in her own problems, a narcissism that now disgusted her. Like a warped reflection in a funhouse mirror, the scenario that had obsessed his thoughts had come to pass, but in reverse. Horrible things were happening to Dag, and she had to figure out what to do.
The wheels finally found traction, and acceleration pressed her back against the seat. Helen had laid the perfect trap. She had collected all the ammunition, reeled Diana in, pitched her on principle, and, when that failed, deployed her leverage with pitiless efficiency and keen attention to detail. Helen’s labyrinth had no exits.
There was only one stray thread.
Diana knew exactly where Dag was.
CHAPTER 21
As she sipped her virgin Caesar and adjusted to the abrupt mindfulness brought on by Analog’s feedlessness, Diana was all too aware that every passing second was a singularity of torment for Dag. While the dogs snored in front of the fire and patrons murmured to each other over fancy cocktails, he was slowly but inevitably losing his mind. But Diana’s only hope of freeing him lay in theater, and theater required production.
The lack of gin robbed the Caesar of its edge, but the presence of her favorite cocktail would help assure her series of guests that this was just another day, that she was in control.
Control was exactly what Helen wanted to exercise over Diana, reattaching a leash to her favorite dog. Diana could feel the weight of the briefcase leaning against her calf under the table. It was a venom no less lethal than the one that had killed President Freeman. This particular concoction was just made of words on paper instead of an array of biochemical compounds.
Budgets, contracts, notes, receipts, accounts, and all the other informational debris that constituted the lifeblood of any corporation, any agreement, any relationship, all doctored by Helen’s analytical wizards to be the genuine article, hard evidence that Rachel was using Commonwealth’s privileged position to sell state secrets to foreign powers, with the board’s knowledge and consent. The software architecture powering America’s nuclear arsenal, diplomatic correspondence regarding a secret trade negotiation, target lists for NSA and CIA surveillance—the contents of the briefcase at Diana’s feet revealed all these and more to be on the market for the right bidder, Rachel playing matchmaker between first-tier power brokers who had the required discretion and resources.
All that information was connected to the feed in one way or another, after all. Who had more to gain by taking advantage of the situation? Gatekeepers abused their power all the time, and this would be just one more distressing example. Monumental amounts of currenc
y shuttled between a menagerie of offshore accounts, compensating Rachel and the board for their trouble.
But someone as smart as Rachel would never allow clues hinting at her darkest secret to be scattered across the feed itself, so all records of the ploy were kept on old-fashioned paper, as antique and invisible to the digital panopticon as Analog itself.
Diana was to retrace her steps and pay a visit to Commonwealth’s next board meeting, ensuring that this briefcase was left behind, its handle covered in the most delicate of oil paintings, expert recreations of Rachel’s fingerprints. Diana would then have Sofia discover it and cash in the favor of a lifetime by turning her friend into an unwilling whistleblower. Sofia, ready with a fabricated tale of being the conflicted Good Samaritan, would deliver the evidence to an investigative journalist in Helen’s thrall. Supplied with corroborating documentation cooked up within various federal agencies that confirmed the veracity and extent of the corruption, the reporter would author the mother of all exposés. Complemented by the actual testimony Diana had collected at the last board meeting, Helen would have the excuse she needed to launch her coup d’état, sending in the FBI to seize Commonwealth and, with it, the world.
If Diana had not agreed to carry out the plan, she would never have left the Ranch alive. So she had put on a show, her submission made believable by the weakness of the only edge she retained. If she was to make use of that edge, the fiction must be maintained, Helen’s inevitable suspicions held in check. Helen must believe that Diana was executing the plan against her will but with the excellence and professionalism necessary to save her lover.