Castle Danger--The Mental States

by Anthony Neil Smith

  A sip of coffee. A nervous glance around my kitchen, lingering on the gun for long enough to see that the next time she refused, I wouldn’t be asking this politely. “Okay.”

  Instead of leaving, the guy in the hall insisted on coming in. It was, of course, the khaki clown from Konzbruck’s office; the one who’d said Phil wasn’t his boss. His name was Fergus. Just Fergus. I guessed it was his last name, because I thought Nice called him ‘Jerry’ at some point. Anyway, he waited in the living room, watching BBC News on the satellite while sunk into the couch, messing with his phone. Meanwhile, Nice and I stayed at the bar, drinking coffee and eating Oreos. I told her what I knew so far, or what I suspected, including my realization that Tennyson and Thorn had been reading my email over my shoulder this whole time.

  “So they do know about me?”

  “I think they know there’s a Guardian Angel who wants to talk to me, but not who. I mean, you wanted me to tell them about the first link you sent, right?”

  “Yeah, but … how much do they know about me? Hasn’t my name come up at all?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I mean, once Dylan got, um, taken, I thought someone would’ve wanted to talk to me.”

  I just stared at her, but my curiosity was all over my face. Why would anyone get in touch with her after Dylan’s disappearance?

  “We dated. For two years.”

  I’d had no idea, and it was impossible to tell from what I’d seen of him. According to Nice, they’d been a couple, quietly, due to their party differences, for a long time. When they first met, there had been a lot of texting, a lot of hinting, but it took a year before they actually orbited close enough together to give it a real go.

  At the time, Nice was just graduating from St. Mary’s University and looking at grad school, but she wanted to work in ‘the trenches’ of politics first, so she embarked on an internship with a women’s lobbying group, then took a staff job with Konzbruck. Dylan, who was at the time trying to help Marquette get bipartisan support for a bill he was introducing, piqued her interest, and she let him know she was interested in the subtlest of ways.

  Dylan was ten years older, obviously shy, and pretty much a wonk. He had the bills memorized, the finer details worked out, and a brain for strategy. But he hadn’t been very successful in the dating department for much the same reason Nice hadn’t been: they were both terrified of the opposite sex.

  Working in politics didn’t help. The good ol’ boys club was cringe worthy, especially if it passed you by, as it did Nice. She could tell right away that Dylan didn’t play that way, though, and his inability to look her in the eyes when he talked was actually kind of sweet.

  So, forget the long, slow process they went through. I had to pinch myself a few times to stay awake during that part of the story. Two shy people, both looking for someone to spend their time with, meet and gradually fall in … something.

  “It never felt like love, you know? I mean, it was love, but it felt weird to tell each other ‘I love you’, so we didn’t much. We were very close. We laughed a lot, and … we were intimate, of course, but, I don’t know. I felt embarrassed by the whole thing, to be honest.”

  Eventually, she realized it was more of a ‘right here, right now’ relationship, nothing that was going to last once she got into grad school, most likely somewhere in New England, and that Dylan was Marquette’s man first, his own second. Neither really broke it off, but she did begin to fade away. Fewer dates. Fewer texts. Hints that she was busy with friends. Dylan caught on quickly, and he didn’t seem to mind. Soon, they were just friends. Kind of.

  “Except, near the end, he told me some things about his job. Weird things. Like, he had been approached by someone who worked for the DFL and asked if he’d consider ‘spying’ on Andrew Marquette for five thousand dollars. He’d already been making enough waves to be on everyone’s ‘rising star’ list. Apparently, Dylan dating me in secret had been discovered because everyone watches everyone in St. Paul, right? So they wondered if he might be a closet liberal, only working for the Senator because it might lead him to a position of power.”

  “Was he?”

  She shook her head. “He was a classic conservative, as in he wanted small government, lower taxes, and individual freedom. Not the Christian Right theocracy type. He just thought the government should stay out of people’s bedrooms unless someone was getting hurt. Maybe that’s how he and Andrew met, sharing similar views like that. He never really told me. A gentleman? Yes. But a liberal? No.”

  Nice went on about how Dylan played it cool, pretended to consider the offer, then told Marquette about it. They thought it was beautiful. They could feed the DFL anything they wanted, let Dylan make a little extra, and also find out what parts of Marquette’s agenda the Democrats were interested in. It was some sweet double-agent work.

  Turned out Dylan was a lot more devious than I’d realized. I had to respect that. Here I was thinking my transitioning was something a bit outside his comfort zone, when in fact he was more layered than an onion.

  He’d been playing the role for nearly a year, and yet the DFL had been none the wiser.

  Gradually, Nice told me, “They started paying him more. I think he might have been betraying the Senator more because of it. I can’t be sure, though. By then, we weren’t seeing each other so much, but I heard things.”

  “Dylan doesn’t strike me as the type to care about money. Am I wrong?”

  She shook her head. “Exactly. He’s very careful with money, sure, but he’s not cheap. Just … not interested in the latest and greatest. If it’s not broken, why replace it? He was even annoyed when the Senator made him replace his cell phone with a smart phone.”

  “Last year?”

  “That was his first time using one. An Android. When we were dating, he still had a flip phone, and texting was about the only thing he used it for.”

  Mental note: ask Tennyson if they had checked Dylan’s phone for a location. Surely they kept tabs on him the way they did mine … but why hadn’t he been found already, then?

  “Sorry to jump ahead,” I said, “but, seriously, how did he end up in a Fancy Room? How did Konzbruck? And are they both okay?”

  “As far as I know, they’re nowhere close to dying. The things we saw, what I showed you, it all looks very real. But it’s only once a day, for an hour, and the rest of the time, they’re locked away to sleep, eat, take something for the pain. Couldn’t you tell? You’d have to be doped up to let people do that to you.”

  “How do you even know?”

  “Don’t underestimate me. I can turn on the cameras remotely. They didn’t know I had access. It was a backdoor.”

  “Wait, you hacked Fancy Rooms?”

  Shrug. “It wasn’t that hard.”

  Who was this person? With someone like this on our team, how come we were in this mess? I felt even more like a pawn in a much bigger, much meaner, and much trickier game. Everyone else had the power, and I was just being shuffled around at the players’ whims.

  “Why are you even here, then? Call the police! Tell them where this thing is.”

  She shook her head. “Look, just because I see it online doesn’t mean I know where it is in the real world. I need some help with that. I thought I would find it here. Not to mention that the moment the cops get wind of this, their lives are over.”

  A maze with no exit? A puzzle with missing pieces — ones the dog ate so you’ll never know the full picture?

  “Do you know who runs these? Are they even in this country?”

  Shrug.

  “Have you … seen … other fancy rooms?”

  She could barely look at me. I even heard her pal in the living room mute the TV and stop clacking on his phone. “It’s torture. Just short of snuff, but I don’t know. Sometimes, the room just stops broadcasting. You never know what happens to those people after. But someone wanted them in there, either for a specific reason like shaming them, or to make them pe
rform a specific act to please a specific audience. Most of them are just embarrassing, forcing people to drink beer until they pee all over themselves. Some spanking rooms, bondage, some of it obviously faked, but the red rooms, the real red rooms, the people who end up in those crossed someone bad. Someone with a lot of money and power.”

  “Those comments on the side, the people watching? Making requests?”

  Nice nodded. “They pay for the privilege. It’s all very secret. That’s why I came to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She turned her head to the boy on my couch. “Fergus, come here for this, please.”

  He was by her side in a flash, his hand glued to her shoulder. The gesture was no less creepy for being accepted so willingly. I wondered if there was more going on than friendship. It could be Nice played the shy lonely heart in public, but had somehow stolen her co-worker’s boyfriend along the way.

  Her fingers slid across the top of his. “I think Dylan knew something like this might happen, maybe not to the extent it’s gone, but I think he realized there might be a move against him … I think he and Marquette might have plotted this together for a reason.”

  “Jesus. Wait.” Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. “You’re telling me my boss set up Dylan as a target for the red room because … is there a because?”

  “Because Marquette found out that some powerful Democrats were members of the Fancy Rooms site, in order to satiate their more … let’s say ‘unusual’ kinks, perhaps. Probably some Republicans too, but he wasn’t interested in those. Except the ones who wanted him to fail, of course, and there were plenty of those. The endgame here might be to reveal his opponent’s identities. But that would require some kind of bait. And what would be better than to present them with a young Republican from Marquettes campaign, an easy puppet they can use — or abuse, more like — to embarrass him?”

  “But he’s got hackers. Wouldn’t that be the easier way? And, you know, the less harmful one?”

  “And what would those hackers say if they tracked down the IP addresses of some of their fellow Republicans? No, he had to ensure that only the targets he had in mind would be watched. Maybe his hackers are already working on a members list, but it won’t be a complete one. He can be sure of their discretion, because telling anyone about what they saw there would only reveal that they have been there. And once you’re known to have been to a red room … That stain doesn’t wash off.”

  I let out a breath. I’d been holding it in for what felt like my entire adulthood. “But Dylan wasn’t just being embarrassed. He was being raped.”

  As soon as I said it, Nice’s face collapsed, the tears started rolling. Fergus put his arm around her and leaned close. Definitely sleeping together, these two. But definitely feeling helpless, same as me. We knew what was going on and yet had no way to stop it.

  “So, Marquette never intended it to be this awful, did he? He thought they’d put him in a dress or make him eat weird shit, get spanked now and then.”

  “No, no, no. I wish the Senator’s hands were clean of this, but I think he sold out Dylan. I think that in order to get the fish he wanted, he had to give them live bait and let them do some very bad things to him. Very, very bad things.”

  “And Dylan was the perfect sacrifice, because Marquette found out he had strayed from the initial game plan? He’d sold him out first?”

  She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. Sniffed. “What’s going on? Why would someone do that? This is insane.”

  “What sort of big fish are we talking about?”

  She reeled off a handful of names. Businesspeople, men and women, who donated to the Democrats, some governors, some fellow state senators, some relatively famous people who had run for office before, lost, but were planning to run again.

  All of them paying Fancy Rooms for the privilege of watching their sickest dreams come true.

  Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

  “How do you know all this?”

  A shrug. “Nobody notices me. That’s why I’m so good at catching all the gossip, and that’s why they send me out to listen, then come back and hack away at all the online secrets to get the full picture.”

  My mouth had dried up listening to her.

  Marquette had known all along. He had put this all into play and then tossed out a trail of breadcrumbs for me to find. He knew I couldn’t resist. But surely he didn’t want me to delve this deeply into his Machiavellian scheming. Only far enough to expose his enemies. He had set it all up so I could discover the Fancy Rooms — although he sure as hell hadn’t counted on Nice’s interference — and blame the Democrats for all this mess. Him and Tennyson both, they’d set me up. I would be the bearer of bad news, the expendable messenger who might just get shot, exactly as they’d planned it.

  Think about it: How did I get involved with this? We found Hannah. If we had been able to hold on to her body, then maybe I never would’ve met Andrew Marquette. There would have been no need. But once he and Raske had me marked out as someone they needed to watch, in case I got too close to their secrets … I became expendable … a pawn in their perverse power games. Now that I was seeing it from a different angle, it looked self-evident that their secrets were larger than the trannie club and Hannah’s relationship with the Chief.

  How much of Hannah’s death had I solved on my own? Or was it all like the game Clue, where ‘the crime’ had been preordained, sealed in a tiny envelope, not to be opened until I reached the correct answer.

  By ‘correct’ I mean the answer Marquette wanted me to believe.

  Which triggered another memory: this was Hans’ apartment. Somewhere, he or Tennyson or Thorn were listening to every word we were saying.

  I cut Nice off, held my finger to my lips. “This is ridiculous. That can’t be true. You’re in on it.”

  Her eyes widened and she started to protest. I quickly leaned across and whispered, “Play along.”

  “I swear, I’m telling you the truth.”

  “No, this is all bullshit. Dylan sent you. He’s working with Konzbruck. I can’t believe I fell for this shit. Count yourselves lucky that I’m too tired of all this bullshit to call the cops.”

  While I spoke, I wrote a note on my phone, like I was going to send a text, showed it to her: We need to go. Can’t talk here. I forgot.

  She nodded.

  “Get the fuck out of here. Both of you. Jesus. Wasting my night. I’m changing the locks, I’m changing my passwords. Get out.”

  They went out into the hall, and I slammed the door for effect. Then I ran back into my room and quickly dressed, brought the gun along for good measure, then slipped out into the hall alongside Nice and Fergus. One last thought flitting through my mind before I softly clicked the door shut.

  They’re going to kill me for this.

  4

  We ended up in Dinkytown. No, that’s not a metaphor, just an unfortunately named neighborhood near the University of Minnesota, where many students from several of the Twin Cities colleges found cheap apartments, cheap takeout, cheap coffee, cheap booze, and plenty of bike shops to keep their primary modes of transportation in working order. Nice shared an apartment with two other girls, one a grad student and one about to enter her senior year, so we snuck in quietly and tiptoed over the scholars scattered over the living room floor, drinkers and thinkers entwined in postprandial respite. In short, fucked.

  “Happens all the time,” she whispered.

  Unfortunately, her hipster co-worker from Konzbruck’s office was nowhere to be found. Her name was Joyce and yes, she was Fergus’s on-and-off again friend-with-benefits, even though it looked to me as though Nice was enjoying the same benefits without Joyce suspecting a thing. Ah, young lust.

  We holed up in Nice’s tiny bedroom, the three of us cramped on her single bed, while she fired up her laptop.

  “I’d suspected that Dylan wasn’t being completely honest with me for a long time. It all seemed fishy. So even before he was taken, I’
d started looking up as much as I could about his shady side business. I tried to warn him that he was getting in too deep, but he said he knew what he was doing. I kept digging anyway, though, and it turned out I was right to do so when I found that the Fancy Rooms are owned by the same company that owns several other legal porn sites, kind of similar, chatroom style things. Bottom line, they are able to hide some of the off-the-books stuff in there and no one knows what to look for.”

  “But you did.”

  “Hey, girls can game, too. And girls can hack.”

  “So it seems.”

  “From there I dug even deeper and found the dark web links, found out who was really paying the bills.”

  “Are you serious? How did you get into the dark web?”

  “I’ve been on the dark web since I was thirteen. I have all the right browsers, the right security, the right programs. You name it, I’ve got it. I made some good money off some real sick people, I’ll tell you.” She mimed a selfie. “Click, click, know what I mean?”

  “Wait, at thirteen?”

  “I told them I was younger.”

  My stomach twisted.

  She showed me PDFs of receipts for all sorts of URLs, several pages worth. “Sometimes they buy up names just in case. They can sell them later, or use them for a while and dump them, always changing. But eventually, someone has to pay, and that’s what always gets them nailed. They can spread the net wide, but it always gets pulled into the same boat.”

  “Whose boat?”

  Fergus reached over and touched her hand. “Careful.”

  She nodded at him.

  “I said, whose boat?”

  “This is not one hundred percent foolproof, you know. It’s a bunch of coincidences, maybe some misdirection. I can’t be sure.”

  I rolled my eyes. I was starting to think they would say Marquette was paying for all this himself, which would be absolutely ridiculous. He was never that sloppy.