by Therin Knite
It’s Brennian’s body.
Jin situates himself on a passenger seat as the copter’s loading door begins to close. “Adem, they told me about echoes. Some guy named Lance filled me in a few minutes ago.”
Clarity strikes me. Jin is dressed in a bullet-proof SWAT suit, sans helmet, and sweat coats his face like a last-place marathon runner’s on a hot day. “Jin,” I say, “what the hell are you doing here?”
“Hey, don’t yell at me.” He pouts, brows furrowing. “You told me to help. I panicked, thinking you were being murdered, and called Briggs. He called EDPA, who’d already been told you were in trouble and were dispatching a team to your location. Briggs demanded he be allowed to send a team, too, for a joint mission. So don’t get mad at me. It was your idea to call me for assistance.”
“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at myself. You could’ve gotten hurt.”
He bangs his head against the side of the copter, rattling an overhanging rack of medical supplies. One of the medics tells him to calm down or get out, and he growls in response. “Are you serious? You’re having a heart attack, and you’re worried I’ll get hurt? By the old gods, Adem. I’m willing to take on a little injury now and then if it’ll stop you from suffering near-death experiences every other day.”
“We’re putting him under now, sir,” the curly-haired woman says to Jin. “They’re prepping med-four at the hospital. He needs to be anesthetized on arrival.” A colleague off to the side hands her a plastic mask that she settles over my nose and mouth. “Deep breaths, Agent Adamend. Count backward from ten.”
“Jin.” The scent of lavender overwhelms me.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
I’m out at seven.
* * *
“How many more times do I have to sign this thing?”
“It’s thirty-seven total. Had you not hacked our files, you would have gotten the short version, but you had to be a nosy little ass. Consider this your penance.”
“Damn. Thirty-seven? I lost count after page two hundred.”
“Not my fault.”
My eyelids are heavy, but I manage to lift them long enough to get a peek at the argument taking place on either side of me. To my right is Dynara, reading the same book she started in Pentagon Park. The contender on the left is Jin, who’s leaning on my bed railing as he scrolls through a document labeled EDPA Nondisclosure Agreement V6.5 on his Ocom. The hospital room appears identical to the one I became acquainted with after my dragon mishap, and it occurs to me that Dynara is the kind of person who would orchestrate a scheme to land me in the same room twice just to mess with my already screwed-up head.
“Are you implying I have a short attention span?”
“Do you know what ‘imply’ means?”
Jin points his finger at her in the most threatening way he can: the equivalent of a terrified puppy barking at an intruder. “I am plenty capable of paying attention.”
“If that were true, you would have noticed Adem’s been awake for almost two full minutes.”
“Huh?” His gaze settles on me, and a bright smile stretches across his face. “Firecracker! There you are. I was starting to think they’d dosed you one too many times.”
My tongue is made of cotton. My head is stuffed with fur. The world is hazy and filled with colors that shouldn’t even exist on Earth. And something tastes suspiciously like mushrooms. “They did, I’m pretty sure.” The words emerge garbled and slurred, and Jin breaks out into a fit of laughter.
“Man, you sound like me on a really bad night!”
“The fact that you can drink enough to make yourself sound in any way similar to that is disturbing in and of itself. The fact that you can drink that much and remember sounding like that is even scarier.” Dynara sticks her Ocom on top of the folded lilac coat on my bedside table and maneuvers closer to me.
Jin’s face sours. “You don’t know anything about me, so you can shove it.”
“Honey, I know everything about you.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s my favorite color?”
“Periwinkle,” she answers without hesitation.
Jin scoots his chair a few inches away from the bed, eyes transfixed on Dynara with a look of sheer horror. “How did you know that?”
“Because someone like you could only have periwinkle as his favorite color.”
“Wh-what’s that even supposed to mean?”
A well-timed cough breaks through my teeth, cutting off their debate. “Hey, guys, this is a fun conversation to watch and all, but can someone fill me in on what’s been happening since they knocked me out?”
Conceding defeat, Jin sinks deeper into his chair cushion and motions for Dynara to explain. Facts roll off her tongue so fast my med-washed brain begins to fall behind during the second sentence. “All but two components of the Manson murder have been solved at this point. IBI Director Whitford Brennian was confirmed to be the echo maker responsible for constructing the dream that killed Manson. His motivation was, theoretically, to keep his involvement with Regina Williams as it related to the death of her partner a secret; the revelation that his affair with Williams in any way contributed to the drug-influenced fight that ended with Rampart’s death would have ruined him. And her, too, I suppose.”
“What are the two things?” Jin asks.
Dynara shoots him an annoyed scowl. “Part of an ongoing investigation, I’m afraid. I can’t tell you more until you have clearance, which you won’t get until you finish signing the nondisclosure agreement.”
“What? Really? Come on.”
“Are you five years old or something?” Her arms cross, hands tucked under her elbows to prevent herself from reaching for a weapon. “Adem, how do you deal with him?”
“I don’t.” I wet my lips as best I can with a dry tongue. “I slog through embarrassing temper tantrums until he calms down enough for me to ply him with the promise of food and drink.”
“Hey, I’m your best friend, Adem! You should be pleading my case.”
“Honey,” Dynara says, “you don’t have a case. Your evidence bag is empty.”
“No, really, Dynara.” I intervene to let the steam between them dissipate. “What are the two components we’re missing? One is the guy, right? The guy behind Brennian?”
She points to Jin’s forgotten Ocom and makes a signing gesture in the air before answering. “Yes. We’ve broken into Brennian’s profile and attempted to track his communications with the man he told you about, but there don’t appear to be any. Either this guy has gone to great lengths to hide his digital contact with Brennian, or there never was any. He may have relied on off-net tactics—paper messages, meetings with informants in random locations, etc.—so now we’re analyzing Brennian’s movements over the past several weeks. We’ve got about fifty agents wading through six thousand street and security cameras to search for mysterious meetings or his presence in places he had no reason to be. As of now, though, we have nothing on this man. Or organization. Or whatever it is that’s been hiding outside EDPA’s radar. If it’s there, though, we’ll find it eventually. I’ll find it eventually, at least.”
“Can I have some water?” My arm attempts to reach for the cup on my bedside table, but I can’t lift it higher than the railing. “Damn, what did they do to me?”
“You suffered massive heart damage.” Dynara grabs the cup and lowers it to my mouth, allowing me to take three sips at a time. “They lost you as the copter was landing on the roof. Had to revive you in the elevator on the way to the operating room. Med-four is a powerful tool and all, but it’s not magic. A nurse came by earlier and said you’d be feeling weak for another five hours or so.”
After finishing the elixir of life, I watch Jin seek out the last few signature lines. Then I ask Dynara, “The other thing, what is it? The other detail we’re missing.”
“How Brennian became an echo maker.”
“He wasn’t always one, I’m guessing?”
“No, he wasn’t. He beca
me one recently by receiving a large, concentrated dose of Somnexolene. We found it during his autopsy. You never see that much in a person anymore because we haven’t given it to anyone since the Impala incident. Most of it is in trace amounts that are filtered from the environment into mothers into developing fetuses. If he’d been one of the unlucky few with an adverse reaction, that much of the chemical could have killed him.”
“So, where’s the mystery? The man he was working with gave it to him.”
She shakes her head. “No, see, each batch of the chemical contains a special marker to differentiate it from the batches that were produced before it. If our big bad was producing his own Somnexolene, then it either wouldn’t contain a marker or it would have a different marker than any of the batches we have on record. Yet it did match. It matched the only batch we have left. The batch locked up inside a vault in the lowest level of the EDPA office that no one is allowed to touch under any circumstances.”
“So you have a mole?” Jin’s head snaps up, excitement written into his grin. “This is playing out like a spy flick. Please, continue.”
Dynara prepares a retort, but I cut her off. “How many people have access to the vault?”
“Sixteen, including myself and Murrough, who is not the mole.”
Jin rolls his eyes. “How can you be sure?”
“She’s sure, Jin. Trust me. It’s not him.” Too many years of built-in-stone loyalty stand between the brooding Murrough and even a miniscule illusion of betrayal. “Who are the other fourteen?”
“Well, it’s not like you know many of them, but whatever.” She recites the list from memory. “Dr. Stapleton Creedy, Dr. Sasha Dupree, Senior Agent Morris Thompson, Dr. Lana Carter, Dr. Regis Foreman—”
“Wait.”
“What?” Jin and Dynara say together.
“Dynara, does Somnexolene have a medical abbreviation?” Various images from the past three days align themselves in my mind, and two of them bear a striking resemblance. An overworked clubber with orange face paint. An overworked doctor with an orange coat. Good gods. How did I miss that?
“Abbreviation?”
“Like one you would label a syringe with?”
“Well, yes.”
“What is it?”
Some unidentifiable emotion flashes across her face, born and smothered in the same instant. “S-plus.”
* * *
Surgery rooms are often accompanied by an atmosphere of dread and the feeling that, at some moment in the past (distant or near), some poor doctor slipped up in the middle of a vital operation and some poor soul lost his life to natural imperfection hidden beneath a pair of blue, airy scrubs. Lana’s outpatient surgery room, which doubles as her lab, has been spruced up with bright orange knickknacks to give it the illusion of safety and welcome. But when Dynara and Murrough burst through the double doors to find Lana standing calmly in the middle of the room—waiting—a heaviness settles in the air. The sorrow of detected deception.
“I was watching the security feeds,” says the dark-haired doctor. “I saw you come in and figured my time was up.” She twists her messy ponytail, gaze falling to the polished floor. A hazy reflection of herself stares back. “Was it you, Adem, that found me out?”
I hover in the entryway, one door balanced against my shoulder, chest beginning to calm from the exertion of walking briskly through the EDPA building. Five hours was too long; I left at three and a half, refusing to let Dynara make my kill for me. “Yes. I saw you at Club Valkyrie the other night. You were watching Regina Williams, presumably under orders from your real employer. Then you spotted me. You knew who I was, so you ran off quickly, hoping I wouldn’t get a good look at your face.” I pause and release a long sigh. “It worked. Momentarily. I didn’t recognize you when you performed surgery on me. I was preoccupied with other things. Always be alert. My first rule, and I broke it because I didn’t think the too-friendly doctor was worth my attention. Not a mistake I’ll make again.”
A rattle jars us out of the conversation, and we both turn to watch Dynara wrench open the cabinet and withdraw the entire rack of syringes. The Somnexolene is sitting in the back row, an innocent addition to the eyes of someone who doesn’t know any better. Dynara’s careful hand plucks it out and replaces the rack. She backtracks to her position beside Murrough and waves the syringe toward Lana.
“Hiding it in plain sight. Clever. Fifteen different doctors and nurses must come through here in a day, and not a single one saw this. It would have looked more suspicious, wouldn’t it, had you torn off or replaced the label? The evidence of tampering would have set at least one person’s overly organized radar off. So you just stuck it in with all your other medicines and nano-machines. How long ago did you take it?”
“About six months,” Lana says. “I took two doses, of course, and replaced them with empty syringes. One dose went to—”
“Brennian,” I finish.
“Yes, and I kept the other here as per my orders. At some point, I suppose, I would have been told to give it to someone else.”
Murrough raps on his holstered gun with a calloused finger, a frown distorting his perpetual stubble. “You’re being very forthcoming.”
The friendly doctor nods and smiles the smile of a lover left behind on a sidewalk in the rain. “As much as I can be. I like you all. You’re great people, and you do great things. I almost wish I’d been employed here of my own accord, but, alas, my path took me this direction a bit too late.”
Dynara tosses the syringe in the air, and Murrough catches it, stuffing it into one of his uniform pouches while his boss approaches the newfound enemy. “This guy you work for. Give me his name.”
“I don’t know his name.” She stuffs her hands in her lab coat pockets, and Murrough tenses, prepared to exhibit his quick-draw skill if the occasion calls for it. “I know a name but not his real one. Only his inner circle is blessed with that much. All I know is that during my tenure at med school, I was offered a spectacular deal by one of his many liaisons. Infiltrate EDPA, perform tasks as commanded, and get paid a hell of a lot more than any normal doctor could ever hope to make. What can I say? I was young and stupid, and by the time I realized that, it was far, far too late to get out.”
“Lana, honey, this doesn’t need to be difficult.” Dynara’s voice is high and rich—the negotiator mask has slipped into place. “Tell us everything you know over a nice cup of coffee in a questioning room, and we’ll set you up a deal. Fair, right? I’m always fair.”
“I know, Dynara, but life isn’t. And he most certainly isn’t.”
She moves, yanking both hands out of her pockets. Murrough’s gun appears in an instant and blows her left hand off. She screams in agony, crumpling to the floor, but she doesn’t even give her mangled hand a second thought before pressing the backup syringe to her neck and injecting suicide.
Her eyes glaze over. Her muscles relax. Her head cracks against the tile as she goes limp. The empty syringe slips from her hand and rolls away, coming to rest against the leg of a nearby stool. She dies in the mere seconds it takes Dynara to cross the space between them.
Dynara stops, half-stooped over Lana’s body, hands reaching out and aching to rewind time, to get a second chance at preventing this catastrophe. A hushed moment passes, and she reverts to the Dynara we all know and loathe. She nudges the remains of the syringe swimming in the blood and flesh of Lana’s left hand while eying the second, intact one. “Well, this sucks. Whoever is pulling the strings behind these people is a fanatical figurehead. Training his soldiers to die rather than surrender. To destroy themselves rather than reveal him. Using fear to make his puppets move about. He’s the most important thing in this whole operation. Him, or whatever radical notion he stands for.”
Something clicks behind me, and I crane my stiff neck to find a flock of EDPA Security agents aiming their guns at my rear end. “Whoa, fellas! Not the bad guy.” The door is lifted off my shoulder, and when I turn to face the suicide cha
mber again, my vision is blocked by close to seven feet of Murrough, who’s looking out into the hallway with a seething glare.
“The hell are you fools doing? Get a medical team in here.” The army devolves into a mass of bumbling idiots all trying to call in the same commands to the same people at the same time on their ear-coms, and Murrough growls through his teeth. “Never mind! I’ll do it. Get back to your stations.”
A chorus of Yes, sir is followed by their panicked flight off to wherever they rushed here from without a plan of action to deal with what could have been a deadly shooter. “Did they receive training,” I say, “or do you people just give everyone a gun?”
Murrough takes the question personally, his grip tightening on the door. “They receive plenty training.” A vague murmur wafts through my memory: Dynara’s chipper voice proclaiming, Murrough is head of Security, after her, Jin, and I called a truce to scarf down some delicious delivery pizza during my abridged hospital stay.
“I didn’t mean that as an affront to you. I swear.”
He towers over me, and I picture any attempt at flight being swiftly cut off by his free hand wrapping around my throat and squeezing with enough force to make my brain leak out through my ears. But he only grunts in response before clearing the way for me to reenter the room, where Dynara is examining the lucky syringe.
“Potent poison,” she says. “That was, what, a ten-second kill, Murrough?’
“There about.”
“I know sixteen nano-chemical combos off the top of my head that have similar kill times. All of them rare. All of them illegal. All of them far more expensive than any average-Joe terrorist or criminal mastermind can afford.”
“So,” I say, “we’re dealing with a super-rich, super-smart, super-persuasive criminal with no known motives or goals. And we have zero leads on how to find him?”
“Looks that way.” Dynara sets the syringe on the counter and steps closer to Lana’s body, turning the friendly doctor’s head until her blank eyes hit the ceiling. The poison from the broken syringe and the blood from her injured hand have mingled to create a volatile orange mixture that clings to her cheek. The image takes me back in time. A tired woman with orange face paint stares longingly at the dance floor. She wants to get away from her strenuous life. She wants someone to help her get away. She is not distressed, only fatigued, but she wants someone to rescue her nonetheless.