Root of Unity

by SL Huang

  Of course, it hadn’t worked out terribly well for them.

  I waited a few minutes longer than I had to. I told myself it was just to be safe, but getting up also seemed a little bit difficult right now. Finally I pushed myself to my feet using the wall and led cautiously with the barrel of the Colt as I came around the back of the van.

  The carnage was gruesome, even by my standards. The corpses who’d been hit by the napalm had been blackened into an inhuman mess. Most of them were still burning. The stench in the air gagged me.

  Around them, the area between the van and the SUVs had become a blood slick, the crimson gleaming in the low light under the overpass. One of the men I’d shot in the leg had attempted to tourniquet himself. It hadn’t worked. One of the other men I’d shot had caught on fire after falling. I couldn’t tell if he’d been dead already when it happened.

  I gave the massacre a wide berth.

  One of the men twitched. It was hard to believe he could still be alive; his whole lower body was curdled and black, small flames still licking against him. I shot him in the head as I went past. It was the most merciful thing I’d done all day.

  The van was still half on fire, as was the closest SUV. The vehicle next to it had a .45-inch hole spider webbing the windshield, and the driver slumped against the wheel in his own spatter pattern of red—the first man I’d shot. The third SUV was behind the other two, and had escaped more or less intact.

  I thought about searching the other two vehicles, but I hadn’t done great with the van, and even as isolated as this place was, we’d made a lot of noise. The cops might be on their way. I’d dallied here too long already.

  I pushed my Colt back into my belt, got into the third SUV, and drove away.

  Chapter 8

  The bad guys—whoever they were—had put a tracker on their own van. They could probably find the SUV I was in, too. I stopped five streets over in a run-down residential area and stole a rusted junkpot from in front of a house that had grass that was far too long and cement blocks scattered in the yard. Then I hit the freeway, jumped down three exits, pulled off in a strip mall, and grabbed an inconspicuous Honda.

  I was a long way out of LA proper and far from any of my bolt holes. I stopped at a drugstore and bought gauze, antiseptic, and a few other random first-aid supplies, using the self-checkout so I didn’t get any nosy questions from a cashier. Then I went back to the Honda, sat in the driver’s seat, and patched myself up, taping a dressing over the wound on my shoulder and wrapping the burned hand. The burn was an odd sort of discomfort—half pain and half numbness, with a stinging sensation underneath. I put it out of my head.

  I’d picked up a new phone along with the medical supplies, having dropped mine somewhere in the fray and forgotten to go back for it. Idiot. I texted Arthur the new digits and then dialed Checker while I snugged the gauze over my hand; I put the cell on speakerphone and tore the tape with my teeth while I waited for him to pick up.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Cas.”

  “I’m guessing from the new phone number that something didn’t go as planned. What happened?”

  “Ambush,” I said.

  “Good God. Are you all right?”

  “Of course,” I said. My voice was scratching. “Though I left the street on fire. Have the cops found it yet?”

  “You left the street—what—”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I said. “They brought napalm. Or something napalm-like. Has someone called it in yet?”

  “Checking,” he said. “Aw, Arthur would be proud, you bringing in the authorities. This time of year LA’s a tinderbox; it’s not a bad idea.”

  That hadn’t been what I meant, but I didn’t correct him. “It’s just north of the 263, off the Puesta del Sol exit.”

  “Found it. Yeah, we’ve got fire department. And police, and…” He trailed off, a frown in the last words.

  “What?”

  “From what I can tell, the cops are being superseded by someone else. I can’t see who.”

  “NSA?”

  “I don’t know. Who attacked you? Who were these guys?”

  “The same ones who ran Arthur and me off the road, I’m assuming,” I said. I finished my rudimentary first-aid, leaned back, and flexed my hand against the bandaging. Painful, but I had my whole range of motion.

  “Did you get their pictures for me? License plate numbers?”

  Fuck. I hadn’t even thought of that stuff. Like I always told Arthur, I was a shit detective.

  “It’s okay,” Checker said, when I hadn’t answered. “I’ll be able to pull things from police records, though it’ll be a few hours before their CSU stuff hits the system. Can you believe it, you’d think in this modern era we’d have everything connected instantly, but no.” When I didn’t say anything, he prompted, “Cas? You there?”

  I’d been thinking about the bad guys’ MO. AKs and Molotov cocktails were common as a bad haircut. But Molotov cocktails rigged to explode as these had, those were something more unusual…and they’d geared us up with a pretty nifty car bomb earlier…plus the souped-up grenade…

  “Cas? You all right?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. My head felt like steel wool, sharp and stinging and a dirty tangle, and the nausea still nagged at me. Being in the midst of a street-sized bonfire for too long could apparently make you sick. Who knew. “I’m here.”

  “Why don’t you come back to the Hole? We’ve got more data to track now. Maybe we can—”

  “No.” My brain buzzed, trying its best. I hadn’t taken the van for that long of a ride before stopping and searching it…

  I tried to think back. It was hard to focus. No more than fifteen minutes of driving, no more than seven spent searching the van before the SUVs had arrived.

  Twenty-two minutes. They wouldn’t have wanted to go above the speed limit, not with the hardware they were carrying. Plus figure a couple of minutes for noticing the van was on the move and gearing up…

  There wasn’t all that much out this way. And it was unlikely they would’ve expected someone to find the van in the first place, so no reason for them to have had men babysitting it. I was betting I could find their hideout.

  “Cas, talk to me. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m going to find their base,” I said.

  “How?”

  “I need a map,” I said.

  “What?”

  “A physical paper map. Where can you buy one of those these days?”

  “Um, I don’t know. I’d stop at somewhere with Internet and print one, if I were you.”

  “You’re the guy sitting at a computer,” I said, irritation bleeding into my voice. “Find out where I can buy a fucking map. On paper.”

  “Other than Amazon?”

  “Stop being a smartass.”

  “Okay, okay.” He hesitated. “Are you sure you’re all right? You’re, uh, a little more snappish than usual.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “All right already. Um, it looks like your best bets are bookstores, travel centers, gas stations, or drugstores. I can call around to see who has some. Yes, yes, the antediluvian method of phone inquiries—I could hack their inventories, but that would actually be more work, believe it or not—”

  “I’m at a drugstore,” I said. “I’ll check here first.”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  “Why are you at a drugstore?”

  I tried to dredge up a flip answer and couldn’t. My thoughts scraped uncomfortably against each other.

  “Cas, are you injured?”

  Bailing on the conversation was easier than answering. “No,” I said, and hung up.

  The drugstore did, in fact, have a rack of local street maps. I bought one and went back out to my stolen car to unfold it.

  I didn’t know when the bad guys had started out, but…Estimate. Probabilities.

  I closed my eyes. Why did everything still insist on being so fuzzy? />
  Inner and outer search radii. Concentric circles of decreasing probability. Adjusted for the metric of road access and speed rather than straight-line distance. A jagged ring rose up in my head, clumsily centered on the location I’d been attacked.

  I examined the map more closely. The direction they’d come from—they weren’t trying to hide anything; they’d meant to kill me. If they’d been going east on the freeway, they would’ve come from the other side of the overpass.

  Half the circle faded out.

  They’d had a fleet of at least four SUVs and the windowless van. Figure about fifteen hundred square feet just for those vehicles—that was the size of a small house. And they probably had more.

  These guys had a ton of gear, but it wasn’t high-end or exotic, it was cheap and effective. This wasn’t going to be one of the more unusual enemies I’d gone up against—they weren’t Dawna Polk with her shiny military precision and ornate secret base or Vikash Agarwal with his absurd ray gun and ridiculous mountain lair. These people were more like me. All about business.

  Which meant I was looking for a building that had already existed, not an unmapped metal dome in the middle of the desert or a special underground staging area. The unpopulated bits of my search ring faded out, too.

  And I knew what I was looking for. A large building, probably an industrial warehouse of some kind.

  There weren’t all that many places left to look. Doing a drive through all the most likely ones would only take me about five hours, depending on how bad rush hour traffic got out here.

  Of course, there was a faster way.

  I made a face, feeling like a child throwing a temper tantrum, and called Checker back.

  He picked up right away. “Cas, hey.”

  I ignored the weight of all the worried questions he wasn’t asking me. “I need you to check a few places for me,” I said. “I’m looking for somewhere with a lot of space—more than a few thousand square feet—and away from prying eyes. My guess is a warehouse or industrial park in a place that’s not all that well-trafficked. I’m going to read off some intersections to you—can you scan the satellite pictures or whatever for the surrounding areas?”

  “These days a monkey could do that,” he said with cheerful sarcasm. “It doesn’t even take skill. Shoot.”

  “Off exit 55, up Hollins Road. Five and a quarter miles from the freeway. See anything?”

  He paused for a minute. “Looks like mostly ranches.”

  Ranches. Lots of land, little indoor space. No room for fleets of vehicles someone wanted to hide from curious passersby—or from satellite pictures, come to that. “All right. Move up to exit 56.”

  We worked our way through my entire search ring. In less than twenty minutes we’d narrowed it to three likely possibilities.

  “Do you want me to connect back up with Arthur or Pilar?” asked Checker. “If they sent a dozen guys after you with napalm—”

  “No,” I said. “If the NSA tries to go in at the same time, we’re just going to get each other killed. And I’m better than they are.” Not to mention that the last thing I wanted was the NSA knowing anything about me. And I didn’t want to take the time to wait for Arthur—at least, that’s what I told myself. “I’ll find her.”

  “Cas—”

  “What?” The word might have been harsher than it needed to be.

  “You’re not in this alone. There are people who will back you up. You know that, right?”

  “You sound like Arthur,” I said, without thinking.

  “Well, that should tell you something!”

  I stopped at the passion in his voice.

  It was true that Arthur had been trying, for upwards of a year, to bash it through my head that I had backup now. That I could ask people for help, if I needed or wanted it.

  When he said it, it always seemed to make sense. In the moment, I either didn’t think of it or found a good reason to go it alone. After all, I always had sound logical reasons for what I did, didn’t I?

  Didn’t I?

  Like now. Arthur was busy following his other lead, and we’d find his friend faster if we kept working in parallel. Besides, it would take him ages to get out here—I wasn’t just being petty. I wasn’t.

  And even if I weren’t hours east of the city, who else was I going to call? I knew a Mob sniper who still claimed he owed me eighty percent of a favor, but I didn’t trust him further than a nickel’s worth, not the least of which because his boss had been trying to freeze me out of the underground for a year now. I knew a forger who hadn’t sold me out when he’d had the chance, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a forger, not someone I could call into a firefight even if I’d wanted to. To be perfectly honest, the only person I truly trusted to be skilled enough to have my back was halfway around the world bashing corrupted warlords’ heads in, and that was even farther than Pasadena.

  “I could call Rio,” I said, just to get a rise out of Checker.

  “If you think you should,” said Checker after a moment, very stiffly. I almost laughed. He was going to strain something trying to avoid saying what he thought about that idea. I suspected it was a rant about selling your soul to the devil to kill a spider—albeit a poisonous one.

  “Maybe I should call him,” I continued. “After all, we’re talking potential global economic collapse; it might be good to bring in every gun.” Except that even planes could only fly so fast, and I wasn’t about to let this go on another twenty-four hours. I wasn’t inclined to call Rio away from whatever head-bashing he was engaged in only for him to arrive to find there was nothing left to do.

  Having my pride wasn’t pettiness. And I was perfectly capable of doing this job for Arthur, without Rio or the NSA or anyone else.

  “Look, these guys aren’t anything special,” I said to Checker. “They’re not psychics or robots or even creepy international black-ops people. They’re just your general run-of-the-mill criminal kidnappers with cheap automatic weapons.” And some nifty explosives, but I didn’t mention that. “I can handle them, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Checker, the word fragile and drawn out.

  “I’ll call you once I’ve got Halliday.”

  “Okay. You’d better.”

  I didn’t know why I found his concern so irritating.

  Chapter 9

  I zipped the little old Honda out to the first industrial park Checker and I had identified. It was a sprawling complex of warehouses, with a network of driveways in between wide connecting parking lots. Through the gate at the entrance I could see rows of white tractor trailers, and beer-heavy men in jeans shouted to each other as they lowered loading gates and hauled crates in and out. The place was a beehive of activity. Several prominently placed signs indicated it might be an ice packing plant—or maybe shrimp. The picture on the sign made it hard to tell.

  Checker had said he’d be looking into the people whose names were on the real estate I was checking out, but he’d warned me it might not be helpful if the bad guys were using well-laid shell corporations or simply squatting. It looked like he didn’t have to investigate this one.

  I drove to the next location.

  The second neighborhood was a lot emptier. I slowed down as the road narrowed and the traffic dropped off. The buildings looming past the dirty curbsides were all either shuttered or boarded up.

  This looked like a place I would choose to hide out in myself. I was betting the people who had Halliday felt the same way.

  At this location, we’d identified a large abandoned factory as the likeliest base point for our bad guys, as it had the space and the lack of foot traffic. I cruised closer, and my back itched uncomfortably as I came level with the factory. It’s unlikely they know what you look like, I reminded myself—after all, I’d killed everyone who’d seen me. And they weren’t going to be sniping random drivers who took a jaunt through the surrounding streets—that was far too good a way to get noticed.

  The factory was a cluster
of huge near-windowless buildings. A solid, high cement wall lined the curb in the gaps between structures, keeping hooligans on the street from wandering in, but the buildings themselves were the bulk of the barrier. Erratic graffiti dotted the wall here and there, but it was old and half-assed, as if even the graffiti artists lost whatever will they had as soon as they came out here.

  Yeah. This place was perfect.

  The main entrance had a solid metal gate that was locked up with a rusted chain and padlock. I drove on by. Two other entrances were similarly barricaded, and three corrugated metal gates looked like they’d lead straight into buildings or down into underground loading docks.

  If they had any surveillance, it was likely to be at those points—and maybe along the wall, to see if anyone was climbing over. Squatting in a huge abandoned complex like this meant they probably wouldn’t have wired the whole thing up for security.

  Probably.

  Well, there was only one way to find out.

  I drove back around the complex to the end farthest from the freeway. The buildings abutting the street here were dilapidated: all crumbling brick and filthy, cracked concrete, with even the plywood nailed over the sparse, high windows dirty and warped. Considering how huge this place was, our bad guys had almost certainly based themselves in a more solid part of it. I’d break in here.

  All the windows facing the outside were third-story or above, and stupid Arthur had told me to leave the C-4—I stubbornly ignored the fact that I hadn’t wanted to take the time to pick any up anyway—but those weren’t the only ways in. I did a noise calculation. Thick walls, the decibel levels of exploding brick and screeching metal. They’d probably hear me, wherever they were, but by the time they came to check out the noise and realized what had happened, I’d hopefully have Halliday already. Once I located the professor, skedaddling out of the complex and stealing another car—or one of the bad guys’ own SUVs, if convenient—would be the easy part.

  I pulled out a knife, pried open the steering wheel of the Honda, and cut out the airbag—airbags were too unpredictable, with too many variables attached. Then I fastened my seatbelt and adjusted my gun so it wasn’t in the small of my back, slipped into reverse and zoomed the little car backward, and spun it around in a neat, tight doughnut so I was facing the brick wall.