Root of Unity

by SL Huang

  “Of course you are.” The sentence was heavy with irony. “You’ve been meeting with her for months. Were you working to find a buyer for her work? Did the buy go wrong?”

  I was jarred for a minute. Months? Holy crap, they must have found the trail Checker had set for the Lancer.

  Should I set her straight? Was there any way to turn this to my advantage?

  “I’m not trying to help her sell the proof,” I said, dragging out the words. Stalling.

  “Then what? People like you don’t visit with math professors for no reason. What were you discussing?”

  Checker had—hopefully—made the Lancer think we were in fact discussing mathematics, but if the government didn’t know that part I wasn’t about to tell them. They’d lock me away forever, if they knew. Black doors, silver needles, red tile, white coats—

  “She wanted protection,” I blurted. “A bodyguard. I kept telling her she didn’t need one. I was wrong—obviously. Finding her is a matter of professional pride.” I bit my lip to stop the stream of words. I talk too much when I’m lying.

  The agent studied me.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked finally.

  “Maybe. That depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  She appeared to be considering her next statement carefully. “You are aware we are under a serious national security threat if the proof is not contained before we can adapt our systems.”

  “I’m aware,” I said.

  “To that end, we’re not opposed to utilizing whatever assets might come our way. And you have proven to be remarkably efficient at tracking this group.”

  I tried to tease through her meaning. My head was still muzzy, but she couldn’t be saying what I thought she was saying. “What?”

  “Assuming you’ll cooperate fully, and that your identity and your story check out, we’d like to use you.”

  “You want to hire me?”

  Her lips thinned. “I didn’t say hire. I said use.”

  The skin on the back of my neck crawled. “You’re not the Secret Service, are you.”

  Some very unofficial branch of the Department of Homeland Security, one empowered to make whatever decisions necessary to protect the country…one to whom the petty crimes of a mercenary retrieval expert were insignificant as long as they could harness her as a bloodhound, unbound by the niceties of due process and lawyers…it all seemed so at odds with the bright white room and the woman’s crisp civilian clothes and short stylish haircut.

  “You’re not just going to let me walk out of here,” I said.

  “No.”

  A trickle of panic joined the skin-crawling. “Fuck you,” I said. “You want me to be some demented version of a CI, put your cards on the table right the fuck now.”

  Her expression didn’t change, but I had the distinct impression my response was precisely what she’d manipulated me into saying, and I didn’t like it. “We’ll be tracking you,” she answered me calmly.

  “You’ll what?”

  “The tracker has already been implanted. Deliver us Professor Halliday and her proof, along with some assurance you’ve contained the information, and we’ll tell you how to disable it. Or how to have a surgeon remove it, if you prefer.”

  I lunged and wrenched my hand; my thumb cracked audibly as it went—my hand scraped out of the cuff with a burst of pain and I dove to the side, off the bed. An IV stand stood next to me; in one fluid motion I wrapped my other hand around it and spun, slinging it at the agent.

  She fended it off, faster than I expected, and reached for her holster at the same time, but I used the precious split second to vault past the foot of the bed and slam into her, jamming up her gun hand. I twisted as I hit and took us both to the floor. My hand followed in the same motion to grab her sidearm out of her holster myself.

  I rolled away and came up gun first. The agent snapped to a standstill in the midst of lunging after me.

  “Better,” I said.

  “You don’t want to do this.” She wasn’t even breathing hard.

  The wound in my side spasmed. “Give me the tracker info. Now.”

  “I’m not in possession of that information,” she said. “And if you try to take me hostage, the result will be your arrest or your death. Work with us instead.”

  “Work with you? Under threat? I don’t think so.”

  “You think this is a threat?” She laughed. The sound was ugly. “It’s a gift. The only reason five agents aren’t bursting through the door right now is my supervisors’ decision to have me keep this unofficial. Do I need to spell this out for you?”

  Secret police, people in white coats—

  Except this wasn’t a secret base or a laboratory. It was a hospital room, with an unbarred window and a TV bolted to the wall above us.

  “You’re short on time,” I said.

  Her expression flickered.

  “You airlifted me to the nearest hospital, and you didn’t even take me somewhere secure afterward, because why risk exposing a base of operations to someone who’s just going to walk out anyway?” I squinted. “Do you even care if I escape, instead of just being fooled into thinking I’m getting the best of your little deal?”

  “It’s not a trick,” she said. “I’ve been straightforward with you.”

  “So that I knew I couldn’t run off and sell the proof after finding Halliday. So I would know you had a leash on me.”

  She didn’t blink.

  “Get out of my way,” I said. “Or so help me, I will shoot you.”

  She straightened and moved aside.

  My clothes were on a chair next to the door. I scooped them up with the hand that wasn’t holding the gun—my broken thumb twinged. Then, with a sick feeling I was doing exactly what they wanted me to, I edged out of the room, keeping the agent’s own gun on her the whole time.

  She didn’t try to stop me. After all, she had won.

  Chapter 15

  I staggered out of the building—a regular hospital—into the bright sunlight. There’d been no other security; I’d changed in a stairwell and walked out the door. The DHS had been kind enough to leave the contents of my pockets untouched, though my shirt was missing. Probably a surgeon had cut it off. I’d zipped up my jacket instead—it would look funny in the Southern California warmth, but that was the least of my concerns right now.

  My side throbbed like the tracker was releasing a toxic poison into my bloodstream, taking me over, making me theirs.

  Where to go?

  Did it matter?

  Away. I had to get away. That was the first priority. Get some distance.

  I stole the first car I came to, wondering if the DHS would bust me for it. Like that would make a difference now. I drove fast, faster than I should have, tearing out into the desert, out past the outskirts of LA to where civilization drained down to gas stations and dust. Then I pulled the car off the road, into the empty nothing, and stopped.

  The sun beat down through the windshield, baking me. The wound in my side ached horribly. I’d popped my broken thumb back into place on my way out of the hospital, but it still sent spasms up my right arm, and the burn on my left hand had started to prickle again under the bandage they’d dressed it with.

  I ignored the pain and dug into my pockets. I’d dropped my main knife in the diner when they’d taken me, but I’d had a pocket multitool on me that had a blade on it. I pulled it out and opened it.

  I leaned back and squeezed my eyes shut. I had to be able to do this.

  The hyperawareness of my body that let me put whip-fast mathematical calculation into practice also told me when I was injured, where, and how badly. The layers of muscle and skin and flesh sang to me in numerical exactness. How small was a microchip? I had to be able to feel it, right?

  Had to…

  For a few long, long moments, all I could sense at the wound site was an aching, burning pain. I pushed it aside impatiently, probing for anything out of place. Stitches. The ja
gged ends of a tear that hadn’t closed yet.

  And there. A small dot of foreign matter. Something that didn’t belong.

  That was it. That must be it. I gripped the pen knife in my left hand, clenched my teeth, and pulled up my jacket.

  By the time I’d dug out the microchip, a bit of a thing the size of a grain of rice that slid slickly from my bloody fingers to the hard-packed dirt, the driver’s side of the car was wet with blood and my wound had reopened to ooze down my side. It wasn’t dangerous—not yet; not until infection set in—I knew enough mathematics of anatomy to have made sure of that.

  And the microchip was out. That was the important part.

  I took a breath, feeling suddenly much cleaner.

  Would the DHS—or the NSA, or whoever—be able to tell I’d removed it? Would they be after me?

  More importantly, what if they had put another chip somewhere? Slid it in with a needle between my toes, or folded it into the stitches where I wouldn’t be able to tell one bit of foreign matter from the next? Could I search my whole body this way? Tear myself apart?

  The feeling of cleanness dissolved away.

  I tried to extend my senses, to feel through the rest of my body, but I wasn’t sure. They could still be tracking me.

  Or maybe I had beaten them. If I had, they might be able to tell I’d sliced their spying eyes out of myself. I had to leave the chip behind and get out of here. Fast. I gunned the engine and drove until I found a gas station, then switched cars and repeated that seven times.

  There was nothing more I could do.

  I’d ditched my cell phone in the middle of nowhere along with the microchip, so I angled back toward LA and sped through the desert until I found a grungy strip mall with an electronics store. I bought a prepaid cell phone and dialed Arthur.

  No answer.

  Shit.

  I dialed Checker.

  “Hello?” said Pilar’s voice.

  I was too confused to answer for a second. “This is Checker’s phone,” I said stupidly.

  “Cas!” Pilar effused. “How did it go? Did you get away? Where are you? Did you find the professor?”

  “No,” I said. “Where’s Checker?”

  “I fed him an Ambien and forced him to get some sleep. I told him I’d wake him up if there were any developments. Are there? Developments?”

  “I thought you were with the NSA,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Well, I was, but there wasn’t all that much for me to do once Arthur turned himself in.”

  “Turned himself in? Is Arthur under arrest?”

  “What? No! Uh, I don’t think so. Why would he be?”

  I supposed it was possible for Arthur to spin things as if he hadn’t broken any laws.

  Especially once he’d split from me. I was mad at him all over again.

  Pilar kept chattering. “But anyway, Checker called me for help, I think he was having some sort of PTSD trouble what with the building falling on Arthur, so—”

  “What?”

  “Well, I don’t know if that’s what it is, really, but one of my cousins was in the Marines and—”

  “Pilar!”

  “Apparently it’s not the first time Checker and Arthur have tangled with someone who likes to blow up buildings,” she said. “Checker’s been on it, trying to see if it’s the same person. They say it’s not a very common MO.”

  It wasn’t. “Did he find anything?”

  “Um, I don’t think so. Not yet.”

  Which meant they were at a dead end, and I was at a dead end, too—I could tell Checker to leak another meet, but with the Feds watching they’d be sure to pick up on it and come fuck everything up just like they had the first time.

  Had the DHS found my trap at the diner because they were already tracking me, or had they followed a bead on the men working with the Lancer? My skin crawled like it felt the presence of a thousand unseen pursuers. Why the hell had we brought in the government in the first place? Goddamn Arthur.

  “Anyway, Cas, what do you need? Should I wake up Checker?”

  I closed my eyes. I needed to know he’d been keeping me scrubbed. That there was nothing for the NSA to find other than the clues Checker had planted to set our trap, that he’d been keeping me too well-hidden for the DHS to have found out everything about me with a few clicks of a button…that there was no way the Feds could track me down and collar me again.

  I had no metric for how powerful they were, not really. How could I? Come to that, Checker might not have any better idea than I did. He could give me all the assurances in the world, but I wouldn’t know the truth until they either tracked me down or didn’t.

  I was so tired.

  “Cas?”

  My side ached. My jacket was starting to stain in an expanding wet red spot that glistened against the dirt and dried blood already on it. I needed to take care of that.

  “Cas? Are you there?”

  “Just tell him to call me,” I said, and hung up.

  I was still parked in the strip mall where I’d bought the phone. I surveyed the other stores—half of them were shut up. That’s right, it was the weekend, wasn’t it? Sunday, probably, depending on how long I’d been under at the hospital. I scanned the signs, hoping for a laundromat or a dry cleaner’s.

  No such luck. Restaurant, pizza place, restaurant, bank, video store, empty storefront, karate dojo, nail salon, the electronics store I’d bought the phone at, and three more food places. If I wanted a sub, smoothie, or frozen yogurt, I was set, but a vague nausea floated through me at the thought of eating. Probably I had been pumped full of some sort of anesthetic at the hospital.

  The karate dojo had several branded shirts and uniforms on display in its darkened window. I drove around to the back of the strip and broke in, but I didn’t even have to risk going up front—the back room had boxes of school-affiliated clothes, some with fanciful calligraphic characters added and some without, and a bin labeled “lost and found” that was overflowing with clothes and shoes. A cabinet also had a rudimentary medical kit. Perfect.

  I spread out on a stack of mats in the back room and pasted my side back together as well as I could, liberally squeezing a handful of the single-serving packets of antibacterial ointment onto the jagged site before mashing a compress dressing on top of it. I also taped the broken right thumb against the rest of my hand. It had started to swell in a tender, puffy bulge around the joint, and was turning a lovely purplish shade, but there wasn’t anything else I could do for it. I rolled up my bloody jacket to take with me and throw in a dumpster and eased on a large T-shirt emblazoned with “Five Spirit Valley Karate” in both English and presumably Japanese, then dug in the lost and found for another jacket. Not that it wasn’t warm enough to go without one, but I liked being able to hide my guns.

  By the time I found a baggy sweatshirt I was short of breath. I sat back down on the mats and leaned back, pressing a hand against my side on top of the bandage. The pain was tolerable, but all of my energy seemed to have bled out on the floor of the abandoned diner. Fuck.

  I hated being weak.

  It didn’t really matter right now, though, did it? I was out of it all. I could leave finding Halliday and saving the global economy to the NSA and Homeland Security. They’d find her and fix things, or they wouldn’t, but either way, someone else was on this case. It didn’t have to be me.

  I could dig myself in somewhere and try to sleep and take spectacular amounts of narcotics until I healed.

  I felt Arthur’s hand on my elbow in the bar again, heard the tension in his voice as he asked for help.

  That was before he went to the authorities. He doesn’t want you in on this anymore.

  What if I stepped off the case and Halliday died?

  What if I stepped off the case and the DHS found Halliday and then buried her and Arthur and Checker and Pilar so deep no one ever saw them again?

  I wiped off the sweat dampening my forehead with another Five Spirit Va
lley Karate T-shirt.

  But what could I do anyway? Unless Checker came up with another approach, I’d run out of leads to chase down.

  Everything had been taken out of my hands. I had no responsibility here. Face it, you’re only clinging to this job because you want something to cling to.

  It was probably true.

  That was it, then. I was done.

  Fuck that noise, said something deep in the back of my brain. You’re not done. Arthur asked for your help—stop whining and help.

  I winced.

  I’d go back to Checker’s. Whatever he was working on to track the explosives expert or the Lancer, I could probably be valuable. I could even grit my teeth and tolerate it if Pilar took the intel to the NSA afterward—the important part was that someone would find Halliday. Or maybe we’d discover enough for me to go out after her again myself, once I’d regained a little energy. That would be a far more preferable course of events.

  It was better for me to have something to focus on, anyway.

  I pushed myself up off the pile of mats, using a set of metal shelves for support. After a clumsy and crude cleanup job, I limped to the back door and shouldered it open.

  A handgun appeared in my face.

  “Well, well,” said a man’s voice. “We’ve been looking for you.”

  Chapter 16

  My reflexes were a hair slower than normal, fortunately, because it took that split second for me to stop myself from twisting the gun out of the guy’s hand and flipping it back on him. I turned my aborted reaction into a slight stumble. It was frighteningly easy to play weak.

  “A mistake, going anywhere the big eyes can see you,” said the man who had me at gunpoint. He was a large, swarthy fellow, who seemed to take far too much delight in gesturing upward with a gleeful smile.

  Right. Shit. The strip mall had security cameras. And from the sound of it, the Lancer was almost as good as Checker. He’d been searching for my face since we’d planted the false trail. Come to that, I was lucky the NSA wasn’t doing the same. Unless they were on their way, too…