Echoes

by Therin Knite

  “I’m by the book because I like the rules. EDPA breaks the rules. For once, I’d like to know what I’m up against, what insane criminals these people are facing, what horrible experiments gone awry they’ve been tasked to put an end to.”

  He rests his chin on his hands, staring at the desk screen without actually seeing it. “During three of these past cases, I lost agents. And I couldn’t tell their families what happened to them because I didn’t know. I sent them out to do their jobs, and they didn’t come back. I didn’t even get their bodies back. Their families didn’t get their bodies back. That’s against federal rules. That’s against IBI rules. That’s against my rules. And that pisses me off.” His voice wavers. Ever so slightly. “Brennian won’t tell me what EDPA does. Says I don’t need to know. Doesn’t take into account I want to know.”

  “So you hope I can tell you what Brennian won’t.”

  “Will you?”

  The silence in his soundproof office is heavy and thick. He likes it this way because it’s how he intimidates people. He sits his prey in a short-legged chair that can’t compete with his grander model. He blocks out the universe with darkness, cages you in like an abused animal. Then he strikes, knowing you’ll either bend to his will or crumble, disgracing yourself, proving that you don’t have what it takes, shaming you into quitting altogether. Either way, he wins. He gets what he wants: the best and the brightest willing to do what he orders them to.

  “I will if I can.” I secure my Ocom, now containing illicit files, in my back pocket, away from prying eyes. “But only because I want to, sir.”

  He cracks a grin. “I expected nothing better of an arrogant boy.”

  “My apologies, Commander. It’s hard not to be arrogant, given how smart I am.”

  Chapter Three

  The centerpiece of Club Valkyrie’s theme of the week is an enormous violet bonfire. It licks a domed ceiling painted with religious murals and gold gilt. It ebbs and spikes in time with the bass beats from the latest cyber-hop song by DJ Miyazaki Prime. Smack dab in the middle of the dance floor, it plays the role of a pagan shrine, clubbers performing rituals as they whirl around its boundary. The club’s latest head patron, seated on the stage like a bygone queen, is a hypermodded woman in her mid-thirties. Her heterochromia mod stands out even two stories up; one eye is ice blue, the other tiger gold, this month’s “hot picks” from the Bod Mod Monthly magazine.

  The club’s second floor is not quite so…electric.

  A dark-haired woman with shimmering orange face paint gazes longingly down at the dance floor, as if looking for a lover to put the spice back into her overworked life. A has-been dancer is passed out in a corner booth, covered in glitter and missing her top. A man across from Jin and me has been watching the news on his table’s Oscreen for the past half hour. He takes a sip of his bright green mixed drink between each story. Once, I glimpse the end of a report on today’s hovercopter hiccup at the Manson house, and umbrella girl’s cheeky nod starts replaying in my head.

  I blush at the memory. Umbrella girl washed me good and hung me up to dry. She must’ve sought me out, must’ve known who I was and what I do; she intentionally scrambled all her signals so I couldn’t get a read on her. Even worse, she could scramble those signals. Jin knows how I work too, but he can no more beat me at my own game than I can him at drinking beer.

  Umbrella girl is something else. She’s—

  “Adem!” A potato chip smacks me in the face. Jin is poised to throw another, but he looks reluctant to waste more of his overpriced club food. “I’ve been talking to you for ten minutes, you know?”

  “That’s funny. I was sure you went to the bathroom six minutes ago.”

  He shoves a chip into his mouth, frowning. “Okay, you were paying attention to my movements. But you haven’t heard a single word I’ve said.”

  “Something about food and your lack of dancing ability.”

  “You guessed.”

  “Well, you’re not particularly difficult to decode, Jin.” Not on the surface anyway.

  “Is that your subtle way of calling me easy?” He pulls up the menu tab on our Oscreen and selects the two beverages with the highest alcohol content he can find.

  “I don’t think ‘subtle’ means what you think it means.”

  “Screw you.” He wipes his mouth off on his sleeve despite being in range of a napkin dispenser. “I did not bring you here to belittle me all night. I brought you here to explain what the hell you were doing with Briggs this afternoon. And to get drunk.”

  “You know I don’t drink.”

  “That’s beside the point.” He pauses as a waiter comes around with his new orders, one of which he pushes my direction. “Now talk.”

  “About what? I already told you everything on the drive here.” I slide the glass full of some toxic pink concoction back to his side of the table. “Briggs asked me to complete an unauthorized mission: solve the Manson case, and in so doing, find out what EDPA does.”

  A good fourth of his pint goes down in one gulp. “But why you? He hates you.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” I reach for his plate and snatch two chips. “He hates my inexperience and relative immaturity compared to most agents with my job title, so he berates me whenever he gets the chance, hoping to beat a few more ounces of professionalism into me. My skills, on the other hand, he has no problem with.” I munch on the chips. “Ironically, this time around, that combo of qualities is exactly what Briggs needs. More ‘professional’ agents would’ve declined his request to investigate EDPA without formal authorization, and less skilled agents might fail to come up with answers.”

  Half of Jin’s remaining drink disappears down his throat, and I get the sense it’s going to be one of those days. “So he picks the guy he trusts the least to do something that requires a tremendous amount of secrecy? Sounds counterintuitive to me. Why not get Weiss to do it?”

  “Weiss is too high profile. If he gets caught, the bureau will be in hot water. If I get caught, Brennian will bail me out. It’s not like the world cares much about a first-year agent getting in over his head. I’m not news. I can slip under the radar.”

  Jin sits the now empty glass next to his plate and chews his bottom lip. “You need a hobby.”

  “Solving cases is my hobby.”

  “You need a therapist.” He grabs the pink drink and takes a sip, grimacing. It’s something sour, and he hates sour things. But he’s going to drink it nonetheless.

  “I’ve had several of those. My current one is lucky number thirteen.”

  Jin chokes. “Thirteen?”

  “Well, remember how I was mute for a year and a half after…you know? The first five couldn’t get me to talk. The next four fled in fear after a few weeks of me making creepy observations about them. I kept telling them what they ate for breakfast, where they’d been in the last six hours, like I was some psychotic child stalker. Of course, I didn’t know any better back then.” I steal a few more chips. “The tenth and eleventh refused to see me again after the intro meeting. I liked the twelfth one though. Ms. Swanson. Useless but a very nice lady. Still sends me Christmas cards.”

  I shove all the chips into my mouth and crunch them thoughtfully. “My current therapist is the one assigned by the IBI. They still make me sit with him once a month. They’re concerned that the combined stress from my childhood trauma and the ‘Jericho incident’ might trigger some belated psychotic break.”

  Jin plants his face in his hands and laughs in disbelief. “You really need to get drunk.”

  “You should stop talking about yourself in the second person.”

  “Oh, you’re hilarious. I’m going to—”

  “Excuse me for interrupting,” says a voice to my left, “but I would not mind a dance with either one of you.”

  Heterochromia lady has crept up to us like a snake in a sea of rainbow-colored grass. Severe mod cheeks give her dyed turquoise lips a dollish smile, and the proportions of her body ha
ve been stretched and thinned to make her fit the silhouette of a designer-store mannequin. Even in a room full of half-remembered dreams, she looks like a walking storybook character.

  Her fingers tug at a loose pink curl. “How about it?”

  Pupils dilate. Eyelashes flutter. For me. She’s staring at my hair, of all things.

  Red is in fashion this month.

  “I could go for a dance.” There’s a slight slur in Jin’s reply, and his eyes are glued to her chest. The dress she’s wearing is translucent, showcasing her finely augmented breasts.

  Disappointment flickers through her mismatched eyes, but she hides it well. She made the offer to us both to make her seem the generous sort of rich woman who exists in daytime television drama, a vain attempt at “connecting with the lower class.” But she takes Jin anyway, intent on making an example of him. “This is what you could’ve had,” she’ll say in lewd touches on the dance floor.

  Petty vengeance rubs me the wrong way, so I watch them to double-check that the woman’s numerous bodyguards, stationed in all doorways, aren’t watchdog types who’ll pummel Jin bloody, and then I leave the “lovers” to their dancing.

  That’s when the assassin approaches me.

  He cuts the figure of a businessman who’s stumbled into the wrong address, but he moves with too much purpose to be an accidental anything. Hands gloved in black leather. Suit sewn for mobility instead of style. Small piece, a .22, tucked into a well-concealed holster at his side. He’s the everyman’s perfect paradigm of a professional killer.

  The moment Jin and his partner are assimilated into the dancing hive, the man darts from his dark corner to my dim table, pausing to adjust his pinstripe suit and to let the woman with the orange face paint pass him by. She appears to feel the tension between us, giving me a startled glance before quickening her pace. Once she’s gone, my hand lands where my holster sits during work hours (but of course, it isn’t there), and my muscles constrict in preparation for a harrowing escape.

  The assassin removes a package from his jacket pocket and offers it to me without hesitation. “From a friend of mine,” he says.

  It’s a small, rectangular box wrapped in decorative paper. I snatch it from him and run my thumb along the wrapping’s seam to search for signs of bomb wiring or chemical residue. Clean. “And your friend is?”

  His answer is a head shake, an adjustment of his jacket, and a clipped “Have a good night, Agent Adamend.” Then he ambles off down the nearest shadowed staircase, and I can’t help but imagine him checking off a number on his to-do list. Forty-nine, deliver gift to Adem Adamend. Fifty, splatter Officer Whodunit’s brains all over his bedroom floor.

  In a single motion, my fingers strip the wrapping paper off the slim package. The box is a crisp white with gold calligraphy stenciled across the top, the letters forming the name of a high-end brand. After finagling the top off the tiny box, I unfold the soft layer of some glitter-infused packing material, revealing the treasure within.

  It’s a pair of expensive sunglasses.

  The same style umbrella girl wears.

  “Welcome home, Adem. Welcome, Jin,” says my virtual greeter as we stumble toward the door. The machine takes twice as long as normal to scan us thanks to the fact we’re practically plastered together. Jin’s face is pressed against my neck, and his hot, alcohol-rotten breath is making me sweat. By this time in a night of drinking, he’s always deadweight. He wraps his arms tight around my shoulders and expects me to drag him wherever he pleases: another bar, a strip club, the park. Generally, I ignore him and take him to my apartment instead. Generally, he isn’t angry about this. Tonight, however, he has an extra dash of whine.

  I blame the pink drink.

  “Adem, take me bowling.” His tongue flops out of his mouth on the l in bowling, and a string of saliva soaks my shirt collar.

  “No, Jin.” I lug him through the open doorway, silently thanking my landlord for updating to automatic front doors last year. Jin gives some weak resistance at my rejection, planting his feet firmly against the carpet, but I drag him onward. He’s far past the point of overpowering me. “You’re going to sleep on my couch like you normally do.”

  “Your couch is shit, you know that?”

  When we reach the living room, I release him and give him a gentle push in the direction of my sagging couch. He staggers forward a few paces before his knees hit the armrest, and then he takes a tumble, landing face first on the cushion. For a second, he doesn’t move, and I start to hope the impact knocked him out, but then he mutters, “And it smells funny too.”

  “That’s your doing, buddy. You spilled soda on it, remember?”

  “Cherry,” he says, voice muffled by the cushion.

  “Yes, cherry soda.” I yank a folded blanket off the back of the loveseat in the corner and toss it over Jin’s prone form. He groans but doesn’t speak again. Before I head to my bedroom, I use my Ocom to switch on the screen mounted above my bookshelf and select the latest episode of Battle Game from the show list. “There you go, Jin. A soft bed and good TV. Just like you like it.”

  He’s already snoring.

  Once my bedroom door is closed behind me, I shed my coat, roll up my sleeves, and pull out my project board from its dusty corner in the closet. I haven’t used the old thing since my brief stint in middle school at age eight, but it’s the only piece of equipment I have that isn’t networked. Given the secretive nature of the Manson case, I don’t want to risk unnecessary exposure, so low tech is the best way to go.

  Its stand is too rusty to assemble, so I place it atop my dresser and switch it on. It takes a few seconds to boot up, but when it does, it gives me a variety of options. Corkboard is my personal favorite.

  I spend the next ten minutes recalling everything I can about the Manson case from memory. Important bits and pieces are jotted down using the board’s digital notecards, organized, and connected with multicolored lines. Red for EDPA encounters. Blue for IBI involvement. Green for places connected to Victor Manson himself.

  The eighty-seven-year-old lawyer had three homes in the District of Columbia: his suburban mini-mansion, a penthouse apartment in the Lincoln Sector, and some fancy cabin-style home out near the Chesapeake Bay. His firm, Manson and Burke, is located in Washington’s Central Business Sector, across the street from Pentagon Park.

  After exhausting my rudimentary knowledge of the case, I take a step back and evaluate the barebones foundation that will shortly be transformed into a complex train wreck of intra-government feuding and top-secret information. It’s workable.

  My Ocom connects to a port on the side of the board, so I copy the Manson files over for easy access. Then I switch my Ocom off for the first time since I took it out of the box last year. Paranoid? Perhaps. But since umbrella girl is keen on tracking me down at random modder clubs on Friday nights, I can’t be too careful.

  Lastly, I fish the sunglasses out of my pocket and sit them next to the board. They’re a message. Everything umbrella girl does is a message. The umbrella before the rain. Our brief conversation. That very meeting on the sidewalk next to Pennimore Street. Every move she makes is planned down to the second. She’s playing with me, for sure, but the game she favors is more than a simple prank. The girl sent an assassin to deliver a pair of sunglasses. Normal people don’t do that. Crazy people don’t do that. People with intentions do that.

  Whatever shadow game she’s building though is not going to make itself apparent through her. It’s Manson I have to focus on. If I find out who killed Victor Manson and how, I will discover what umbrella girl does. And when I discover what umbrella girl does, I will find out who she is. And when I find out who she is, I can then discover her intentions. A simple, three-step process.

  Three steps that will involve a tremendous amount of work, if the Manson client file is any testament. The late lawyer had seven hundred fifty-eight clients over the past five years alone. No wonder he was sitting on his patio at three in the mor
ning. He probably left for work at four.

  Now I’ve inherited that ridiculous burden: with no key clues at my disposal, I can’t narrow down the suspect list without knowing each client’s particular situation.

  I have to sift through every single case.

  Only sixteen names into the A section, however, I notice an obvious pattern. A victory streak. The firm never seems to lose. It always beats back any attack, any underhanded scheme, any accusations of misconduct on the part of the firm or the client. Manson and Burke is, at first glance, the ultimate law firm. If you can afford their outrageous fees, you are guaranteed to get whatever prize you desire.

  Well, you were guaranteed. Now one half of Manson and Burke is dead. That certainty of winning was vaporized last night, along with most of Manson’s bodily fluids.

  The Manson killer then could be one of the countless people the firm steamrolled in court. Or it could be a competitor, a lawyer enraged by Manson’s immense success. But such simple jealousy and revenge motives don’t explain the dragon. The person who murdered Manson has access to a weapon inconceivable by most, meaning they are either someone very high up on the chain or someone very deep in the underbelly of crime. A senator. A president. A terror cell leader. Someone with knowledge. Someone with money. Someone with power.

  Two hundred cases in, I hit a wall of fatigue. Briggs called me at quarter to six this morning, and Jin kept me out until eleven PM. I consider a few cups of coffee, but I know from experience that’ll screw up my thought process, rearranging all the wires in my head until I’m a blabbering mess, spouting off facts about phytoplankton and reciting the Gettysburg Address. (That was not a good New Year’s party.) Reluctantly, I decide to turn in for the night.