by Therin Knite
“So you hope I can tell you what Brennian won’t.”
“Will you?” The silence in his soundproofed 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 I’m the boss 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 tempered 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
An enormous violet bonfire is the centerpiece of Club Valkyrie’s theme of the week. It licks a domed ceiling painted with quasi-religious murals and gold gilt. It ebbs and spikes in time with the bass beats of the latest cyber-hop song by DJ Miyazaki Prime. Smack dab in the middle of the dance floor, it plays the role of an old pagan shrine, clubbers performing half-nude fertility rituals as they whirl around its boundary. The club’s latest head patron, seated on the stage like a bygone queen, is a hyper-modded woman in her mid-thirties. Her artificial heterochromia 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, searching for a one-night lover to put the spice back into her overworked life. A has-been dancer is passed out in a corner booth, top discarded hours ago. 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 specialty 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.
For the first time in six months and fourteen days, I blush. Umbrella girl washed me good and hung me up to dry without breaking a sweat. She must have sought me out, must have known what I do and how to circumvent me—how to scramble all the signals I use to read people. And worst of all, she could. 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 straight, you know?”
“That’s funny. I was sure you went to the bathroom six minutes ago.”
He shoves a chip in his mouth, frowning. “Okay, you were paying attention to my movements. But I bet 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 an adequate napkin. “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 subtly 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 from the corner. “He hates what he perceives to be my immaturity and lack of professionalism, so he berates me whenever he gets the chance, hoping to beat it out of me. My skills, on the other hand, he has no problem with. He is well aware they exceed the abilities of ninety-nine percent of his available resources. He is also well aware that my so-called lack of professionalism is what makes me perfect for a task like the Manson case. Other agents, those more loyal to the system, may have declined, may have even ratted him out. I want to solve the Manson case, with or without his permission. And he wants to solve the Manson case, so why not ask me to?”
Half of Jin’s remaining drink disappears, and my it’s one of those days sense starts tingling. “So he picks the guy he trusts the least to do something that requires a tremendous amount of secrecy? Seems counterintuitive to me. Why not get Weiss to do it?”
“Weiss is too high profile. He gets caught? The Bureau is in hot water. I get caught? Brennian bails me out. It’s not like the world cares much for a first-year agent who gets in over his head. I’m not news. I can slip under the radar.”
He 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 concoction 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 said 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 reading them. I kept telling them what they ate for breakfast, where they’d been in the last six hours, like I was some psychotic, seven-year-old stalker. Of course, I didn’t know any better back then.” I stuff both chips in my mouth. “The tenth and eleventh refused to see me again after the introductory meeting. I liked the twelfth one though. Ms. Swanson. Useless but a very nice lady. Loves kids. She still sends me Christmas cards.” I steal a third chip. “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, as they put it, 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. Too-severe mod cheeks give her dyed turquoise lips a dollish smile, and the proportions of her body have 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 those unmatched eyes, but she hides it well. She made the offer to us both to make her seem the generous sort of rich woma
n that exists in late-night television drama, a vain attempt at “connecting with the lower classes.” 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 for a brief moment to double check that heterochromia lady’s numerous bodyguards (stationed in all doorways) aren’t watchdog types before leaving them to whatever devices they favor.
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. 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 half-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 suit 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 powders. Clean. “And your friend is?”
His answer is a small head shake, an adjustment of his suit, 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. Is it an incriminating piece of evidence that’ll be used to frame me for a crime? Is it a threatening note or object? Is it an overtly sexual gift from a heterochromia lady who’s more than meets the eye?
Nope.
It’s a pair of expensive designer sunglasses.
The same brand umbrella girl wears.
* * *
“Welcome home, Adem. Welcome, Jin,” says my greeter as we stumble toward the door. The machine takes twice as long as normal to scan us thanks to our plastered-together position. 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 think it might’ve been the pink concoction.
“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 always 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 ten-year-old couch. He staggers forward a few paces before his knees hit the armrest, and then he takes a tumble, landing face first on the worn cushion. For a second, he doesn’t move, and I start to think the impact knocked the last of the stubbornness out of him, 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 (and locked) 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 reassemble, 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 project 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 little suburban mini-mansion (now ruined by a dragon), 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 umbrella girl is. And when I find out who umbrella girl is, I can then read her and discover her intentions. A simple three-step process.
Three steps that will involve a tremendous amount of work, if the Manson Client List is any testament. The late lawyer had seven hundred fifty-eight different clients over the past five years alone. No wonder he was sitting on his patio at three in the morning. 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.
There are sixty-seven clients whose surnames start with A. Alma, Remy, a retired army doctor who was accused of fraud last year. Case resolved in his favor thanks to Manson and Burke. Alaric, Betty, an upper-class professor at Washington University, who got into an inheritance dispute with her sister. Case resolved in her favor thanks to Manson and Burke. Allison, Casey, an upscale restaurant chain owner accused of multiple health code violations this past May. Case resolved in his favor thanks to Manson and Burke.
There’s a pattern here, methinks.
Every A case was resolved in the client’s favor. I wonder at first if this is a coincidence, but
when I begin to dig into the B’s, the victory streak continues. The firm never loses. 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 (ridiculous) fees, you are guaranteed to get whatever prize you desire. Well, you were guaranteed. Now, one half of Manson and Burke is dead—the certainty of winning with the time-tested duo was vaporized last night, along with most of Manson’s bodily fluids.
The Manson killer could be a loser, then, 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 last night has access to a weapon inconceivable by most, meaning he is 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 five forty-five this morning—I’ve got an assignment for you, so get your ass over here—and Jin kept me out until eleven-oh-two. I consider a few cups of extra-caffeinated 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.
My room is in the stale apocalyptic state I left it in during my morning rush, and I kick a few stray articles of clothing out of my path. My shirt and pants and socks go in the hamper, my project board is returned to its inconspicuous home behind a suit I haven’t worn since my last PhD graduation ceremony, and my body flops down on my unmade bed, staring up at the ceiling. I mumble, “Lights off,” and the entire room goes dark save for something to my right.