Limitless

by Robert J. Crane

  Then I opened the folder and saw his face in a photo, looking back out at me.

  MINISTRY OF DEFENSE was stamped all over the damned thing. With a C instead of an S in defense. It took me about two seconds, even given how exhausted I was, to realize that this was a personnel file. Philip Delsim had worked for Britain’s defense ministry until he’d been canned about five years ago for—according to this—stealing secrets and selling them to an unknown source. They had a little of the evidence, pictures of him with a lady who didn’t look too unlike a British nanny.

  “Son of a bitch.” Her name was Eleanor Madigan, and I knew her.

  I scrambled and pulled my phone out of my coat pocket, fumbling to dial a contact I’d put into the damned thing just this afternoon. When I heard someone pick up on the other end of the line, I started talking before they’d even said anything. “Karthik, I need you to plug the name Philip Delsim into the Omega database.”

  “All right,” he said, sounding a little stilted, like he’d just woken up. “Is there some reason I’m doing this at four o’clock in the morning?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “because he’s the son of a bitch who’s about to get his ass kicked by me for all this shit he’s started.”

  Chapter 67

  “Philip Delsim?” The words echoed from the speakerphone, bouncing off the concrete walls. The room smelled stale, like air that hadn’t been circulated in a very, very long time. The dank of the underground setting crept in off the walls, and it almost sounded like water was dripping faintly in the distance. This far beneath the Omega building, that would hardly be surprising.

  Philip Delsim stared straight ahead as Karthik spoke. He had one of Liliana’s daggers right at his throat, the blood trickling down his deep brown skin and turning the collar of the purple dress shirt he was wearing nearly black.

  Philip held a single finger to his lips, now using it as an aid for contemplation as he listened to Sienna Nealon’s voice on the other end of the line while she fed instructions to Karthik like he was some trained lap dog. He listened, watched Karthik, and waited. And then he prompted Karthik toward the keyboard inches away, setting him to motion typing.

  “Philip Delsim,” Karthik said. His voice was flat, about on point for a man who might have been woken in the small hours of the morning. Philip considered it fortunate timing, since he’d been waiting to start Liliana working on Karthik. He imagined it might have been somewhat worse had Nealon called only twenty minutes later; answering the phone while he was screaming would have been quite out of the question for this lad once he’d lost twenty or thirty percent of his skin. Karthik glanced at Philip, a silent look asking permission.

  Philip nodded once, glancing over the monitor quickly. “I’ve got a file here,” Karthik said. “Ten year veteran of the Ministry of Defense,” Karthik said. “Was working as a double agent with Omega, feeding us… feeding them… secrets, other things. Details of interest.”

  “Is there anything there about him being a Cassandra-type?” Her voice came through tinged with excitement. She thought she was a clever girl, she really did. Her breathless thrill at putting elementary pieces together was no more impressive than a full-grown adult knowing how to add one plus one, but she was foolish enough not to be aware of this.

  Once again, Karthik looked to Philip for permission, which Philip gave with a nod and an arched eyebrow. This was power.

  “Yes, he’s a Cassandra-type…” Karthik’s voice trailed off as Philip reached out to a section of the text with a single finger, and when Karthik’s eyes met his, Philip shook his head once, a simple no that was communicated perfectly. “No family.”

  “So he was Omega’s rat inside the British government,” her voice came through. “Now he’s mad at both of them for some reason.” The dull sheen of frustration clipped her words even with that dreadful American accent. “Any idea why?”

  Philip shook his head once. “The file doesn’t say,” Karthik spoke in proxy for him.

  “Any last known addresses?” Sienna asked, voice crackling through the phone.

  Karthik waited just a second while Philip nodded and pointed straight to the only address on the page. “There is one.” He gave it, slowly, repeating it back to her twice to make sure she had it. All the while, Philip listened with a sweet sense of satisfaction. Either this would end her—this bullheaded, charge-into-everything-shoulder-first bitch—or it’d put her out of the way long enough for him to do the last thing that needed to be done. He could feel the probabilities shifting, knew the trend and the direction they were heading. It might not be long now, if he was lucky. He glanced at Karthik. And if his current hostage was indeed the right one.

  “Thanks, Karthik,” she said, and her enthusiasm was amusing in its supreme idiocy. “I’ll check it out.” She hung up without a word of farewell.

  “The quintessential rude American,” Philip opined once he was certain that the line was dead. He took the phone out of Karthik’s outstretched hand and nodded to Liliana, who tugged at his neck, pulling him out of the chair upon which he sat. “That should keep her busy for a bit.” He smiled at Karthik. “And now you should be busy for a bit as well, I think.”

  “I have nothing against you,” Karthik said, the knife against his throat. Philip stared at the welling blood, the crimson seeping into his collar. “I have done nothing to you.”

  “Of course not,” Philip said, standing. “And if it was just you and me, there would no reason to do what I’m about to have done to you.” He planted a firm hand on Karthik’s shoulder. “But it’s not just you and me, you see…”

  He let his eyes drift over to Janus, where he sat bolted to a chair, secured with actual bolts, with chains, hand and foot bound the metal legs. “It’s you, Janus, and I,” Philip said. “And Janus… he just does not wish to yield.” He turned to look back at Karthik. “So I suppose it’s down to you to convince him to.” He waved faintly at Liliana. “She’ll do her best to persuade you, with blade and pain.”

  “But I did what you wanted,” Karthik said, in faint disbelief. “I did what you wanted!” Liliana pulled him, dragged him toward the center of the room.

  “Indeed you did,” Philip said mildly. “But you don’t actually have what I truly want.” He pointed at Janus. “He does. So I suppose now we’ll see if he favors you more than he values himself.” Philip did not blink, the words sounding harsh even to his ears. “Because so far I’ve yet to break him enough to guarantee that he’ll give me what I want.”

  Chapter 68

  When I hung up with Karthik, I realized I had no frigging idea where the address he’d given me was. I had no money with which to pay for a cab, or a map, and so I did the next best thing I could.

  I went into a corner store and asked.

  The guy behind the counter looked at me from beneath dark eyebrows. He looked Russian maybe, or eastern European, and when he opened his mouth he confirmed it for me. I had a hell of a time understanding what he was saying, and he gestured emphatically with his hands as he spoke, telling me to go this way two streets, that way for four blocks—

  The gist was that I wasn’t far away.

  I thanked him and headed in roughly the direction he’d faced me. I walked quickly, trying not to attract attention to myself. Not sure how well that worked, since I was missing my right sleeve all the way to the elbow. My clothes were shredded, and I had a dozen or more holes in my coat. Not the small kind, either.

  I wandered for about forty-five minutes before I got frustrated. I pictured London in my head. I couldn’t quite get it.

  So I went down a back alley, made sure it was clear, and went supersonic as I shot into the sky.

  After I did it, I realized it probably wasn’t the best idea to let off a sonic boom just before I tried to get high enough into the air to see the whole city, but whatever. I’d been playing by the rules as laid out before me for two whole years. I’d dealt with a string of assholes like Ryan Halstead, U.S. Ass-ador, except they�
�d all had titles like “The Distinguished Gentleman from California” and “the Senior Senator from New York.”

  I’d eaten enough of their shit to have a bellyful.

  It was all grating on my nerves now, the sum and total of it, set to a boil by sitting in that office across from Mary Marshwin, watching her get the edict dumped down on her from above. That was me, in my own seat. Not nearly as bad, but the vampires from Washington wanted to tell me what to do every day of my life, and I had to listen.

  For the job.

  For the last couple years, I’d been playing softball with the kids I’d been up against. I ran into a real meta once every three months, and they were almost all kids. Almost all. Kids waking up to their power and pushing the limits. Society’s limits. The limits of decency, in some cases. And I was the one who was there to push back.

  But without even realizing it, I’d hit limits of my own. Limits to my patience. Surprisingly, they were farther than I would have guessed them to be. I didn’t even care at this point that I’d originally entered government service because I’d been blackmailed into doing it; I had a job to do, and it was an important one. I’d bought in.

  When they said, “Do it this way,” I’d said yes.

  When they said, “Don’t kill anyone,” I’d said yes.

  When they said, “Go here, do this, don’t tell anyone, now go here—”

  You get the point.

  Somewhere along the way I’d become a slave to the job, to the voices up the chain who told me what to do. The person I’d been before wouldn’t have eaten a spoonful of what they fed me on a daily basis, let alone the acres of it I’d ingested since the war ended.

  But everybody has limits.

  And now I’d reached mine.

  I visualized London in my head, saw the river with the wavy line run through it like I’d seen on an internet map ages ago, and again in the tourist shop just a few minutes earlier. I pulled out my phone and looked at the cracked screen. I wondered if…

  It still said “Vodafone UK” in the upper right hand corner, even this far up. Three bars.

  I typed the address into the search bar of the web browser, and it took about a minute before it came back to me with a map. I clicked the directions button and it laid it out. Two point one miles away.

  I let myself drift downward, easing toward the dot on the map that indicated where I was supposed to go. The map compensated, then compensated again, alternating the route as I drifted in a straight line, as the crow flies, straight toward my target.

  It was time to stop letting other people put limits on me. If the UK government didn’t want me around, that was fine. I’d be on my merry way.

  But I’d be damned if I was going to leave town before I solved their problem for them.

  Because there was a limit to how much crap I’d put up with from Philip Delsim, too, and he’d gone long, long past it even before he’d put the first guy I’d been interested in for a long while into the hospital.

  Chapter 69

  The screams were exquisite, the sound and volume filling the stone room, seeping into the walls. Philip wondered, not for the first time, if a telepath came into a room where something like this torture had occurred, would they be able to feel it later? Would there be residue of the emotional horrors left behind for others to witness? Could the mind detect the echoes of screams and pain?

  He stood idly by while Liliana did her work on Karthik. It was definitely her usual standard of care, and Philip paid close attention for the first ten minutes or so.

  Then his attention shifted to Janus at his right, as he reached out with his powers and felt the probabilities shift.

  Since this endeavor had begun, he’d been reading Janus at every opportunity, watching his resolve. It was an easy thing for a Cassandra-type; you merely looked into their future. The future was a fluid thing, with multiple possibilities in many cases. As the event you were watching drew closer in the present time, the probabilities often shifted, something he could both see and feel, a sort of overlay he had never been able to explain to anyone.

  Except Clarice, of course.

  He had watched Janus as the old man endured torture of his own. He had watched Janus and the probabilities as he went through an endless cavalcade of former Omega operatives whom Janus had worked with, cared for. He never once made mention of what he was looking for from the old man, not even a whisper.

  Because he didn’t need to.

  All he had to do was focus on the old man and run the scenario in his brain.

  If we go to the Highshire Bank and attempt transfer of all of Omega’s accounts, what will he do?

  The answer had come back in pieces, fragmented, as it always did when there were so many probabilities in play. For a while, the leading contender was for Janus to inform the manager through body language or a passed message that he was a captive, and the silent alarm was pressed. No trouble for Philip, really, being able to read the cracks in the bank’s defenses and escape safely, but that wasn’t exactly the point, was it?

  But now, in this very moment, the probabilities were shifting. They were dropping lower as Philip watched the event in question. Now he was docilely going along, doing as he was asked, making the transfer.

  And Philip could not help himself from smiling as the sound of screams across the room intensified and the probabilities all hit zero.

  This was it.

  Janus had broken.

  This was the moment he had been waiting for.

  Chapter 70

  I entered the building via the back alley. I did it quietly, breaking the lock and slipping in. It was an apartment building, with shoddy carpeting that looked like someone had tracked oil in on muddy shoes and just danced a conga all around the hallway. The place smelled, too, like someone had come in and peed into every electrical socket. You know, to hide it in the walls.

  I wondered why you would even lock the back door to a place like this, and I snaked my way through the hallways in quasi-stealth mode. What did that look like? Basically, walking normally. Trying to hide and darting from corner to corner is a dead giveaway in an urban environment. Pretty suspicious.

  So instead I roamed the hall of the building looking like a homeless person, shuffling in my torn and burned clothing. I heard movement ahead, around a corner, and I knew there was nowhere to hide so I just kept walking. Two guys in hard hats with construction vests that glowed with fluorescence passed in the hallway ahead.

  I looked around, wondering if this place was slated for demolition or something. It wasn’t quite to the level of a condemned building, but it wasn’t too many degrees off, either.

  I found a staircase and ascended, the wooden steps squeaking underfoot as I rose. I thought about flying, but if there’s one thing that looks even more suspicious than a person darting about, it’s a girl levitating. The way people look at you, you’d swear they’d never seen anyone defy gravity before. Which means they should probably watch more Idina Menzel musicals.

  I climbed in a hurry, darting up the stairs and coming out on the second floor. This hallway was no better than the last, just a long, narrow corridor with piss-poor lighting. It still smelled, and the air barely stirred as the door closed behind me. It had an eerie feel to it, but nothing exactly screamed trap at me. It wasn’t like Admiral Ackbar burst out of a nearby door to shout or anything.

  Okay, maybe I was getting just a bit of a trap vibe.

  It could have just been the building, though, or the upkeep of the place. It was certainly rough around the edges, which may have explained the construction guys. I didn’t hear any pounding or sawing, though, which made me wonder what the hell was going on. Maybe one of the downstairs residents was carrying on a renovation.

  I arrived at the door in question and stood outside it, looking at it warily. It looked a little weathered but not battered, like it had aged about as well as the rest of the building. This was it. The last known address of Philip Delsim.

  And
I knew as I stared at it that there was no damned way I was going in that front door.

  The guy had a fricking bomb maker on his team. He had to know that the police could eventually get a lead on him and tumble to his last known address. What would be their next logical step?

  Kicking in his door.

  I went to the side, to the next door in hallway. I knocked politely and it opened without effort, squeaking on its hinges as it cracked a couple inches.

  I wasn’t a vampire, so I considered that an invitation to come inside.

  I swept in and closed the door behind me, making my way through a kitchen that had been stripped of all appliances, to the wall bordering Philip’s old apartment. I put my head against the wall and listened, just listened, waiting to hear anything on the other side.

  Not a damned noise.

  So I placed my hand on the wall and pushed. Plaster cracked under my fingers and palm, and I gently applied pressure until it shattered and my hand passed through. Once it had, I hooked my arm inside the drywall and pulled, ripping it open. I grabbed each side and made myself a little entrance, opening the wall like a surgeon until the studs were exposed and I could see Philip’s wall on the other side.

  Then I cracked three of the studs and removed them before smashing very delicately through Philip’s wall.

  I made just enough of an entrance to pass through without wasting my time, leaving a gaping hole big enough to drive a truck through. I found myself in a kitchen that didn’t smell nearly as bad as the one I’d just been in. The smell of piss had faded, replaced by that scent of stale, undisturbed air that builds up in places where no human has trod for some time.

  The walls were stark, with empty brown stains where things had obviously hung once upon a time. There were no curtains, and the light of the rising sun lit the whole place with an orange hue. I tried to wipe the drywall dust off my shoulders but failed. I quit bothering after a moment, resigning myself to the fact that my construction dandruff was just the icing on my homeless girl cake.