by Nina D'Aleo
About The White List
Chapter 11 is watching you.
Silver is an intelligence operative working for an agency that doesn’t officially exist—beyond any government and above the law. Chapter 11 is the kind of place a person can join but never leave. And it keeps a third of the world’s population under constant surveillance. At work. On the street. In their homes.
Why? Because of Shaman syndrome.
One in three people are born with Shaman syndrome, which endows them with abilities they cannot control and do not even know they have. It is Chapter 11’s responsibility to cap and surveil these walts—as they are known—to ensure their talents don’t turn ugly for the ordinary people around them.
After Silver’s partner, Dark, is seriously injured by a walt, Silver is driven to investigate. What starts as a routine investigation isn’t as clear-cut as it seems, especially when she discovers there’s a price on her head.
Chapter 11 might be watching the world, but it can’t see the division in its own ranks. Someone wants the white list—the list of every known walt that Chapter 11 has capped—but for what purpose? Silver needs to find out the secret behind Shaman syndrome, before it’s too late.
Contents
About The White List
Part 1
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Part 2
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
Part 3
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
Acknowledgments
About Nina D’Aleo
Also by Nina D’Aleo
Copyright
For my brother
Part 1
1
My brother had always insisted that humans were nothing more than shaved apes and now, sitting sixth row at my first commercial wrestling match, I couldn’t help but see his logic. Not that there was anything wrong with wrestling, or with apes for that matter; there was just something simian about a big man wearing shiny underpants and a superhero cloak body-slamming another muscled-up guy in a unitard. There was a lot of grunting and chest beating. There was a lot of tight Lycra riding up into sweaty cracks and crevices better left unseen.
In actual fact humans were a ninety-six to ninety-nine point four percent genetic match for chimpanzees. Zero point six percent and shrinking, I thought, as the hefty guy on my right leaped to his feet and screamed, “Take him, take him!” showering everyone in the rows below us with spittle and half-chewed popcorn. I sighed and gave the I’m-not-with-him headshake as disgruntled victims wiped their necks and shot poison looks in my direction.
I glanced at my partner, sitting to my left. Fists clenched in his lap, body tensed and pressed forward, Dark’s eyes darted left to right, following every move of the match. What had he called wrestling? “Ballet for the real man”? At the moment he looked like a real man who needed a serious boost of fiber in his diet.
“Bos.” I nudged him.
He twitched, grunted, but remained in his happy place of contact sports, thousand-horsepower supercharged V8 engines and hot girls who never ask, “But do you love me?”
“You do realize this is all staged, don’t you?” I said and got an angry mass shushing from everyone around me. I covered my laugh with a cough and checked the time. Two whole minutes had elapsed since the last check, two hours since our arrival, and still no sign of our guy. I faced the fact that, given there were only fifteen minutes left of the event, it was highly likely he was a no-show. That meant one of two things—his condition had spontaneously resolved itself or he had ‘gone green’ sooner than expected and other agents had picked him up and not yet called it in. It also meant I’d cancelled girls’ night for the fifth time in a row because of work, essentially for nothing. A rare chance to wear heels, talk boys and potentially find the one traded in for steel caps, man BO and being stood up by a walt.
I blew through the next quarter-hour lost in my own thoughts, which these days mainly rolled around someone with dark eyes and dark allure, and a far more attractive, interesting, and successful version of me, meeting in all kinds of ways and going wherever the mood took us.
I blinked back to reality with Dark’s elbow digging into my ribs. The show was over and the crowds were massing toward the exits. I rubbed my forehead and yawned. Dark nudged me again and I pushed his arm away with a bit too much force.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I muttered, standing up and grabbing my coat off the back of the chair.
“Nothing,” my partner repeated, following me along the line of seats. “Nothing as in actually nothing, or as in the lame, girly nothing that means something I’m supposed to magically know?”
“I had plans tonight.” I glanced back at him.
“To do what?” He smirked as if it was laughable that I’d have plans.
Boston Bonacci-DeScuro (Codename: Dark). My partner. My best friend. Most of the time I felt like kicking him in the head. “I was going out with the girls.”
“So what? Go out tomorrow night,” he said.
We joined the jostling crowd filing up the stairs. I did a halfhearted scan of the people around us. There was the usual smattering of odd, awkward and intoxicated individuals. No one matched the surveillance photos we’d memorized before coming out after tonight’s walt.
“That’s not the point,” I told my partner.
“So what is?” he asked.
A trio of skimpily dressed petite blondes crossed our path and Dark shoved me to one side to let them cut in front of us. They giggled and gave him the cutie-pie-baby-wave popular with girls fond of wearing belts as skirts. Dark ogled. He grinned. I noticed he was clenching his fists to pump up his muscles. Pepé Le Pew, tattooed on his left bicep, took on a strained expression.
“Pathetic,” I told him.
He watched the girls until they vanished, then turned back to me. “So—what is the point?” he repeated.
I pushed ahead of him and climbed the stairs.
“What?” He followed me.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I told him, knowing he hated when I said that—almost as much as he hated being told he had short man’s syndrome.
He grabbed my arm and pulled me to a stop. “Cough it.”
“It’s really nothing.” I faked indifference. “It’s just—everything is always tomorrow night and tomorrow night never happens … and no one’s getting any younger here.”
Dark quirked up one side of his mouth—his ah-ha expression. “I knew it,” he said. “It’s about a guy. Who is he?”
“He’s no one,” I said. “And that’s the point.”
“Okay …” Dark processed for a moment. “So you want a boyfriend.” He looked around. “Well what about him, right there?”
“Who?” I followed his line of sight.
“The guy in the flannelette and the AC/DC shirt. Crew cut. He’s checking you out.”
“That’s a girl—obviously,” I snapped, annoyed I was still falling for his jokes after all these years.
“Really?” He squinted with mock confusion.
I turned my back on him in disgust. As I did, the random blur of the crowd snapped into sharp focus on the face of our walt. He and a bunch of other guys were exitin
g the glassed-off VIP section of the entertainment center. Based on their behavior—their sloshed, giddy, dog-on-the-loose frolicking around one central guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt open almost to the waist and a pair of Christmas reindeer antlers usually reserved for babies, dogs and retail assistants, I guessed it was a bucks’ night. To the untrained observer our walt would have just looked like that guy in the group who always takes things too far—he’s drunker, rowdier, more obnoxious. My eyes, however, picked up all the signs, now that I’d seen the face I’d been looking for. The walt was lurching left to right, stumbling, shouldering into people, blinking his eyes, shaking his head, biting his lips. His hands slid along the walls, along every surface. I saw a tremor run through him. I yawned and looked away, but all my senses had jolted into work mode.
“Bos. Walt in sight.”
His dark green eyes sharpened. He picked out our guy and confirmed, “In sight.”
The walt and his friends headed toward the closest exit. We mirrored their movements, palming the crowd aside. A few people gave us dirty looks and one guy stubbornly refused to move. Dark flashed his badge and said, “Cops. Move your ass.”
The guy moved, double time, which may have had more to do with the gun he’d glimpsed inside Dark’s jacket than with the prospect of us being the law. We reached the top of the stairs just as the bachelor party vanished through the exit. We stepped up the pace to keep them in sight, trailing the group through the lobby of the complex and out to the driveway, where a limousine sat idling. The chauffeur opened the door as the men approached. They tumbled in. A blue light flashed from the depth of the vehicle to the sound of a techno bass and a chorus of giggling girls.
“Strippermobile,” Dark told me.
“Combining high-performance engines and naked women—how could you ever go wrong?” I muttered dryly.
We passed the back of the limo as it pulled away from the curb. Once the vehicle was in motion, we sprinted to Dark’s car, parked nearby. A drunken night on the town with the boys gave us the perfect cover to take our walt—but if we lost him at this stage of break-thru, it was not just a failed assignment, it was life or death.
2
We tailed the limousine through a stretch of backwater highway before reaching the city limits. I watched out the window as we buzzed by streets I knew so well I could walk them blind. High-rise lights sparkled across the windscreen—hotels, luxury apartments, and office buildings where corporate slaves still sat hunched over their desks at past eleven on a Friday night. But then again, who was I to judge? I hadn’t seen leisure time in so long we were virtual strangers. The car’s heater warmed my legs while an unforgiving cold buffeted my face from Dark’s open window. No matter how freezing, boiling or in between, my partner was incapable of driving with his window up. He said he needed fresh air. I questioned his mental health.
The usual massing of clubbers and pubbers crowded the popular nightspots. People mingled, lingered, flirted and flaunted. The meat market in motion. A group of black-shirt bouncers tried to break up a curbside fight. Alcohol fueled a fire lit by the frustration of life stuck in a rut. Change the setting and the scene remained. Wherever people went, there were loving, fighting, desperation, exhilaration—life in polar extremes. This city was one of many, but also one in a million. Our City. Codename: Toran-Rabbin-Es.
I felt Dark’s vehicle slowing and concentrated my attention ahead on the limousine. It had turned into the parking lot of one of the city’s largest strip joints, or as certain patrons liked to call it—casa della performance erotica. Next thing Dark would be trying to convince me that stripping was art too. The limo double-parked across a row of cars. We eased into a spot behind them and watched as the bachelor’s buddies exited the car and stood around it, talking and smoking, tapping on the windows. More girls came out from the club and sidled into the limousine. Our walt was at the front of the car, leaning against the hood. His sides were heaving. We needed to grab him and quick, but we couldn’t do it yet. Not with so many witnesses. We had to wait until the bachelor was done.
“Compromised visual,” Dark muttered. “Switching to halo.”
He killed the headlights and switched on the halos. Imperceptible to normal sight, they gave us, via a screen embedded in the center console of Dark’s car, an X-ray view of everything, including the X-rated goings-on inside the vehicle.
“Great,” I complained. “If it takes one guy with one woman an average of two point four minutes, how long does it take one guy with six women?”
“Two point four seconds,” Dark suggested. “Lucky bastard.” He tilted his head, staring at the halo screen. “Hey, do you think X-ray porn could take off as a new fetish?”
“Maybe for frustrated radiographers,” I said. “It’s doing jack all for me.”
Dark snorted. He dragged gum out of his pocket and offered me a stick.
I shook my head.
“Take some,” he insisted.
“Why—do I stink?” I asked.
“You never chew gum,” he said.
“I prefer mints.”
“Who prefers mints?”
“Obviously some people do,” I snapped. “They’re not putting them on the market just for me.”
“Name one other person who prefers mints,” he demanded.
I searched my mind for a name and came back with nothing. “Too many to name,” I said. “Besides, this isn’t about mints, this is about your inability to see anything from anyone else’s point of view.”
My father had taught me that the best defense is a good offense. Unfortunately he ran his marriage under the same principle.
Dark clicked his tongue and gave me an Italian ‘get lost’ gesture.
We watched the monitor in silence for several minutes.
“You know you’ve been friends with someone for too long when you start arguing about breath fresheners,” I muttered.
“You know what this is right here?” Dark tapped the steering wheel. “This is marriage. Two people forced together arguing about every pointless anything that comes up. And you still want to get married.”
I knew I wanted to get married, the being married part—well, I was choosing to be ignorantly optimistic about that.
“Maybe you should just face facts,” he continued. “Some women never get married and you could be one of them. I mean, you don’t even know how to cook.”
“Really, Boston? That’s the bar I’m aiming for—knowing how to cook?” I said. “I have a PhD. I speak eleven languages. I have a ninety-nine-percent shot accuracy rate and I’m fabulous with kids, but because I can’t cook, I’m unlovable?”
I didn’t mean to bash him over the head with my CV or come across conceited—self-praise was not my usual style, but his words had hit a raw nerve and I felt like I needed to defend myself.
“You’re lovable, you’re just not wife material,” he replied. “Who the hell wants a wife who physically and mentally kicks his ass and then serves him instant noodles every night?”
“Why would she need to serve him anything?” I pointed out. “Is he somehow incapacitated? What century do you think we’re living in?”
“Century irrelevant,” Dark said. “This is a man’s world, baby—like it or lump it.”
I turned in my seat to focus the full force of my glare on my partner. “I find your statement offensive on so many different levels, I don’t know where to start.”
“So don’t,” Dark cut in. “Just accept it as fact.”
“I will accept nothing as fact,” I hissed.
“Silver—seriously.” Dark met my stare. “Look at us. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life living with someone you have to lie to every single day until you die?”
My insides knotted. Dark knew all my buttons and weak spots. Lying to my family all this time had been almost unbearable. If their safety hadn’t been in jeopardy, I would have broken a long time ago. My greatest fear on this earth was something happening to the people I loved.
<
br /> “I could marry an agent,” I said.
It was Dark’s turn to stare incredulously. “Are you forgetting Dale?”
I sighed.
“Three years together and he breaks up with you with a text message.”
I rubbed at a building pressure behind my eyes.
“What did he say again—that you were an emotional cripple—?”
“I remember,” I cut in.
“—that you made him feel like he was going crazy and—”
“Bos!” I said. “I remember.”
“Then why the hell are you talking about marrying an agent?”
“Because not all agents are like him.”
“Who? Who isn’t like him?” Dark demanded.
I sighed. Why did he always have to have a name? “There’s you,” I said.
My partner laughed. “Me? I don’t hold doors open. I don’t bring flowers. I don’t call girls back—ever. And it’s not because they’re not nice girls—some of them are very nice—trust me. It’s because I know who I am. A relationship is just not an option for me. Any agent who is compos mentis knows that.” He tapped the side of his head.
“There are actually plenty of agents who are happily married,” I reminded him, and it had nothing to do with them opening doors or bringing flowers, or whatever other stereotypes Dark was imagining constituted a healthy relationship.
“If they’re married to a civilian then they’re living a lie,” Dark said. “No matter how nicely you dress up the relationship—it’s a lie. Correct? And if they’re married to an agent, it won’t last. You know our divorce rate.”
I felt my dreams hit the wall and splat. I must have looked especially pathetic because Dark’s expression softened so that he looked uncharacteristically boyish and bashful.
“Don’t worry.” He thumped my arm. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. We’re stuck together forever.”
“Awesome,” I said. “But I have needs too. Unmet needs …”