“Rudle was probably ordered to back off on this,” Diane said to me, the hate intensifying on her face. “You see the problem we have here? The government is no help—everything is under their control.”
“Under whose control?” Verg asked.
“Nystrom…or one of the other syndicates,” Diane said. “Do you really claim to be this clueless? You never noticed anything suspicious about your partner?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve worked with Agent Dawson for only a couple of months, but I’m not sure what is considered odd for a human.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
“No…We have a lot of work to do, and she’s been handling security measures for the conference independently today. Are you saying she was part of that shootout at the zoo?”
Now seemed the time to firm up my story. “I had just met with her. When she saw the skills I displayed in handling the terrorists, she apparently wanted to recruit me on behalf of the Nystrom syndicate. When I expressed that I wasn’t interested, she sent people after me.”
“She’s part of Nystrom?” Verg asked incredulously. “But they’re the ones trying to kill Gredler…Are you saying she’s the assassin?”
“I don’t know the details, but she’s obviously trying to ensure he does get killed,” Diane said. “She fingered me as the killer as a distraction, and then she…” Diane looked about ready to break down, but she regained her composure. “…had my friend and her family killed to draw me out. I was part of Nystrom many years ago—that’s true—and they want revenge on me for the way I left.”
“This is…confusing,” Verg said. “I have to say, some things really didn’t add up about your being a sleeper assassin working on Nar Valdum for ten years, but it’s hard to believe an agent as high in the government as Dawson would be compromised.”
Diane finally lowered her gun from Verg’s head. “The whole government is compromised, you naïve dimwit! Chief Rudle is obviously a part of this, too, and he’s helping to cover up Nystrom’s actions. There’s basically no one to turn to on this except a rival syndicate.” She sighed and looked out the window. “This is so pointless. Just take us down here.”
Verg brought the car down into a pretty empty part of town that held mainly warehouses. “Are you going to let me live?”
We got out of the car. “Yes, Verg,” Diane said. “We’re not the bad guys.” That was even true of me—for the moment, at least.
“I don’t know what you plan to do, but I’ll look into some of your claims.”
“Don’t bother,” Diane said. “Something huge is about to go down here, and you obviously haven’t the slightest idea about it. If you start making noise, they’re just going to kill you. If you really aren’t a part of any of this, just make an excuse to leave the planet.” She shut the car door, and Verg took off.
While Diane was worried that Verg might get himself killed, it was apparently my job to be practical. “He’s going to call this in, and the police and others will descend on us any second.”
“We’ll be long gone.” Diane led me to a secluded alleyway and started taking off her zoo uniform. “I’d like to say I have some plan beyond immediate survival, but that would be a lie.”
“Well, Nystrom probably doesn’t have much of a plan either, beyond crushing us with their immense power.”
Under her uniform, she wore a white tank top and extremely short black shorts. Also, the rest of her skin was much darker than her face. “That plan will probably work,” she said. She took out a small purse concealed inside the uniform and applied some sort of cream to her face, which caused her face to match the rest of her body. She then did something to her hair—I wasn’t sure what, but it suddenly went from brown to completely black. It was a neat trick.
“You make me feel pretty unprepared. I don’t even have fake facial hair with me.”
She didn’t react to the joke…except to pull something out of her purse that she pressed against my face—I assumed this to be the aforementioned facial hair. She also put sunglasses on me and took off my coat and tossed it in the alleyway, along with her uniform. “Let’s get moving; we’ll talk when we get there.”
I placed my recently acquired guns in my waistband and concealed them under my shirt and followed her. Of course, I had no idea where “there” was, but by all indications of Diane’s preparation so far, it would have whatever we needed. As we walked through a sparsely populated area, I tried to catch a glance at myself in a window, as I was curious what I looked like with a goatee. I never really did disguises—people should want to hide from me, not vice versa.
We walked for a while and soon reached a more populated area. We didn’t look at all conspicuous out on the street. There were a few stores around, but there were mainly apartments and homes here, most of which looked pretty neglected. The places may have been nice enough once upon a time, but apparently at some point this had become the bad part of town. There were a few threatening types around—threatening in that they were street thugs, not in that they were trained killers…you know, actual threats to me—but I just ignored them, as usually people figure well enough not to mess with me. I realized Diane could have appeared vulnerable to some of them, so I made sure to stay close to her.
Eventually we came to a stairwell that led to the basement of one of the buildings. Diane unlocked the door and let me inside and then followed me in and locked the door behind her. It wasn’t much: barren walls with a few cabinets on them, a cot, and what looked like a bathroom. “This is just a little place I held onto in case something happen—”
She then lost it, crying so hard I thought she was going to fall over. “I’m sorry…I need…” She tried to fight it, but the breakdown was there, and nothing was stopping it. And there I stood, feeling completely impotent. I had no idea what to do in this situation. I had seen plenty of women cry—and had many times been the cause—I had just never cared before. I wanted to help her through it, but this was such an unnatural situation for me. I had seen how others had responded before, though—maybe in movies—so I held her tight and tried to think of some comforting words.
“We’re going to get through this,” I said as she cried into my shoulder. And that was true—one way or another we would reach an end. A lot of those paths to the end involved torture and other indignities if one of the syndicates caught us. The better paths meant quick deaths in a gunfight. If there were other possible outcomes, I hadn’t figured them out yet.
Her sobbing died down a little bit. “I just bring pain and misery to everyone around me. It’s all I’ve done all my life.”
I held her firmly. “No, that’s not true.” I certainly didn’t feel pain and misery from being around her, just things much more confounding.
Her crying stopped, but she still looked on the edge of a breakdown. “But why are you doing this? Why are you here?”
“Because this is where I want to be.” I could feel emotion creeping into my voice as I looked into her tear-filled eyes. “I want to be with you.”
We kissed, and as far as I was concerned, there was no stopping there.
CHAPTER 32
She lay naked beside me, not sleeping but also not speaking. Her wig had come off, exposing her matted, dirty-blond hair, and whatever she had used to change her skin color had begun to fade, leaving her skin mottled. I guess she was an ugly sight, but that wasn’t my opinion at the time. I just watched her as she stared at nothing. Never before had I been so interested to know what was going on in someone else’s mind. A lot had happened to her recently—it was quite possible that she wasn’t even thinking about me. It didn’t seem likely, though. Maybe she was thinking how lucky she was to have the love and support of such a hero as Rico Vargas from Rikar. Or maybe, as astute as she was, she’d seen through the illusion to what I really was: a man who’d taken advantage of her emotional fragility to get what he wanted.
The sex drive is a strong primitive impulse that cons
tantly tries to control your actions. It’s not something I should have been indulging under dire circumstances where I’d need to think clearly. Not to mention the emotional toll. Not for me, of course, but I’ve seen it in others. That had never mattered before, but I was planning to depend on Diane for whatever new course my life was to take, and now I’d possibly ruined things. So I looked at her as she silently spaced, waiting for her to speak, since I had no idea what to say myself.
“I think I’m losing myself,” she finally said.
“What do you mean?”
“I built up this new person—someone I thought was so much stronger than the old me—and I feel her chipping away. I don’t know what else to do under these circumstances, though.”
“These aren’t circumstances normal people deal with.”
“No…but I’m still just dealing with bad choices I made over a decade ago. Things I thought I left behind…but…you are what you are, I guess.” She finally turned to look at me. “When you talked to Hana, did she mentioned that transport with the jump malfunction that killed 340 people?”
“Yes.”
“I made that happen.”
She let that hang there a moment. That was pretty extreme. I’ve killed more than that many people myself—but not all at once like that. Of course, I do things one-on-one, and that usually comes with less collateral damage than faking a transport malfunction. “Are you trying to shock me?”
“I’m just telling you who I am. I’m not just a murderer—I’m a mass murderer. That’s who you’re in bed with. That’s the side you’ve chosen.”
She was trying to shock me. “You don’t seem like a mass murderer.”
“Well, I am, and that’s a pretty low nadir to climb your way out of.” She went back to staring at nothing. “I used to just blame my circumstances. Easy enough. I was fourteen when I came home to find my mother and father murdered. I couldn’t cope with that.”
“So you joined a rival syndicate?” I’d known stories of lots of sociopathic killers. I’d never found their stories that interesting; they’d taken long journeys to become what I was born as. But Diane had gone there and tried to come out of it; that was interesting, because it was different.
“It’s not quite that simple.” She was quiet for a moment, and then a smile finally appeared on her face. “My parents were good people. My dad worked in the mines—just basic, honest work. He and my mom were convinced I was a genius and destined to do great things. They encouraged me to study and saved up to put me in a fancy school. They also tried to teach me religion, but eventually I thought I was too smart for that.
“When I was fourteen, the Randatti syndicate started making inroads on the planet. They started some protection rackets in the city we lived in. They were just dumb thugs, hurting people and acting untouchable. And then my dad did a crazy thing: He treated them like the dumb thugs they were. When they attacked some people in the neighborhood—people he didn’t even really know—he grabbed a bat and fought back. Chased those worthless idiots off.
“The next day, I came home from school to find him and my mother shot dead. No mystery who did it, but everyone just acted like it didn’t happen. They were too afraid to lift a finger. Randatti was powerful—a bunch of powerful, evil thugs—and no one felt like they could do anything about it.
“I lived with my aunt after that and kept going to the school my parents had saved for, but I couldn’t concentrate on my studies anymore. How was any of that important when murderers could just walk free, untouched?”
I touched her cheek. “You wanted justice; that’s natural.” Someone harms you, you want to harm them back to discourage them from doing it again. Quite natural. Even logical.
“Yes, I wanted justice. But not just justice. The more I obsessed over it, the more the hate grew. I wanted revenge.”
People tend to put an almost spiritual meaning behind the notion of justice, but I never felt it was actually distinguishable from revenge. It’s just revenge codified by law. “Would any person not want revenge in those circumstances?” Me, of course—I don’t kill to satisfy my emotional needs.
“Maybe no one is that levelheaded, but when you embrace such a strong desire for violence, it corrupts you. And I was obsessed. I knew not to talk about my plans—everyone considered it suicide to try anything against Randatti—but I secretly researched them and their operations on the planet. I found their hideouts and spied on them on my own time, trying to plot what I could do to them. I even got a gun. People were afraid to take them on publicly, so I was going to take them down, piece by piece, in secret.
“I was sixteen when I finally decided to start. I knew of a back room at a bar a number of the thugs congregated in. I dressed up to look older, hid the gun on myself, and walked into the bar as calmly as I could, trying to hide exactly how fast my heart was beating. These were human males, so my plan was to smile and flatter them to get them to drop their guard and then kill them all and get out of there. I reminded myself of the sadness and anger I’d felt when I’d found my parents dead, and I knew in my heart I could kill them. So, without hesitation, I stepped into that back room.
“And they were all already dead. Some woman was standing over them. She didn’t react much to my appearance—just pointed her gun at me. I looked at her handiwork and back at her and said, ‘I want to do this, too. I want to kill Randatti.’She smiled, and we strolled out of the bar together. And that was the last day I ever saw my home.”
“She was a Nystrom assassin?” I asked.
“Yes. I should have seen that it was just murderers killing murderers, but that wasn’t what I wanted to see. After watching for so long while the Randatti thugs just went about their business with no fear of reprisal, I couldn’t help but see the people who finally made them pay as the good guys. I was tired of being impotent against such evil, and Nystrom was a way to strike back.
“And they were happy to have me and my enthusiasm. They are quite a sophisticated operation—they have a whole training program for assassins. And I was eager to learn—eager to be able to do something. I was one of their best, they said, and for my final test to become one of their trained assassins, they brought in a Randatti syndicate member, pleading for his life. I was to shoot him in the head to show I was ready. I shot him in the knees, then I shot him in the head.
“After that, I was off doing Nystrom’s business. I killed many Randatti members—Nystrom was in a large conflict with them. It became less cathartic over time—started to feel like I was just doing necessary dirty work—like pest control. I liked to think I was making a difference, but there were always more targets. I constantly subjected myself to the worst of humanity on my missions, and I soon began to lose any feeling of respect for sentient life. I knew all the darkness people had in them—how horrible they could be—and death just seemed like such a good thing for so many people. Eventually, Nystrom gave me targets that had nothing to do with Randatti, but I no longer cared who I killed. It was hard to believe any of them didn’t deserve it. The universe was full of nothing but violent, selfish people, and I could kill day and night for years and barely make a dent in the evil. Eventually, I didn’t even care about justifications for my murders; it was just my job. It was just something to do in the empty, cold universe.
“I did this for years, and Nystrom paid me well. I never really enjoyed the money, though. I was just so empty—so joyless. And then I got a new mission: A group of us would sabotage a transport going between Andalu and Nar Valdum—to kill one target and make it look like an accident. Hundreds of innocent people were going to die—people who had nothing to do with the syndicates—so that’s why they assigned it to those they knew wouldn’t have a problem with that. And they were right, because I didn’t care anymore. In fact, I despised the ‘innocent’ people. There were huge conflicts between the syndicates—things affecting countless worlds—and they just went about their daily lives like nothing was happening. They were worthless—willing vict
ims of the syndicates. They were inconsequential, so anything that happened to them was inconsequential.
“Nystrom knew of a problem with the transport that no one else knew of. With just a little prodding to the jump drive, the transport would have a massive failure on its jump, and the ensuing investigation would reveal the actual error in the system as the culprit. No one could know it wasn’t really an accident. I almost wonder if Nystrom itself had built the error into the system to one day exploit it like this.
“Technically, the job was simple. Nystrom had contacts that would get us easy access to the starport as a maintenance crew, and from there we could make the ‘accident’ happen. Then we’d change back into civilian clothes and wait in the terminal to make sure our target got on the transport. I don’t even remember who he was—some official associated with another syndicate. So I sat there, pretending to read a book as I watched him out of the corner of my eye—ignoring all the other people. The…” She teared up. “…children running around. I didn’t care. I was just a soulless monster, concentrating on the job.
“And then someone asked me, ‘Are you alright?’ It was a young woman about my age, and I was a bit surprised, because usually I was very good at blending into the background when I needed to, and I thought my face no longer portrayed any emotion except when I willed it to. ‘I’m fine,’ I told her. And she said, ‘Sorry, it just kind of looked like something was wrong. I didn’t mean to impose or anything.’ And then—on a whim, I guess…maybe because I thought it would shut her up—I said, ‘Actually, my parents just died.’ She looked so concerned—and I think I was a bit amused to play with her emotions like that, but then she smiled and said, ‘Tell me about them.’
“I wanted to brush her off, but I didn’t want to make her suspicious, so I thought I’d just give her a few quick details using my actual parents. So I tried to remember some meaningless stories. I told her how my mom and I used to have a special ritual for making brownies, which we did every movie night. And I told her how my dad would take me with him on his fishing trips as a little girl and let me reel in every fish he hooked. They were supposed to be pointless anecdotes I had no emotional attachment to, but I hadn’t thought about my parents in so long, and I couldn’t help but see their faces. They used to look at me with such love, and I wondered if they could see the soulless monster who was ready to sit idly by while hundreds went to their deaths. Their little girl they had so much hope for—that they worked so hard for—was even worse than the thugs my dad had tried to chase off with a bat. Worse than the ones who killed him and my mother.
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