by P. R. Adams
“I’d never really considered politics all that dangerous a career choice. Not in our country.”
“You ever hear the saying ‘If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas’?”
I fought back a smirk. “Is that a comment about politicians?”
She scowled, and for a moment, I thought I’d lost her. “I’m referring to the close ties we’ve built with developing nations. We used to take pride in exporting our culture abroad, as if that could be monetized for any length of time. Now we’re importing the thuggish behavior that’s just accepted as part of doing business in those areas.”
I choked back panic, reminded myself she was young and a political science major, but the words still chafed. “I thought we had a history of assassinations of our own?”
“When we were a developing nation. We should aspire to more now, but it’s just going to get worse. Are you familiar with the Hamilton Accord? Never mind. I can see by the way you keep glancing at the hospital you don’t care.”
“That’s a bit harsh.”
“If it’s true—” She stopped when a couple of hospital workers stepped out through the door and came toward us. After they moved on, Gillian moved closer and continued in a softer voice. “It’s not harsh if it’s true.”
A woodsy, pine-like perfume floated up from her. The smooth, feminine curves of her face—so full of anger and urgency—were captivating. “I didn’t mean to offend. Why don’t you tell me about the accord over coffee? I’ll pay.”
Gillian blushed. She leaned back and tugged down loose strands of hair. “I—I should be getting up to check on Kelly.”
Kelly. Not Mom or Mother this time. “I’d go with you, but…”
“Ravi. I know.”
“If she’s awake, please pass along my well wishes.”
Gillian stared for a few seconds. “I’d like to have coffee with you sometime. To talk about the Hamilton Accord. And politics. You seem too smart to be just another lazy jerk who thinks every politician’s the same.”
Weaver had said Gillian didn’t drink coffee. I pulled out my data device and smiled innocently. “You have a number?”
She pulled a smaller, more stylish device out, activated it and tapped through a complicated interface, then handed it to me with a smirk. “Maybe you could call your number for me?”
I dialed my data device, surprised at the heft of her system. “Full-blown computing device? You prefer expensive toys.”
“One of my vices, I guess.”
My device rang a few times; I handed her device back to her. She turned away and mumbled something into the device, then stuffed it back in her jacket. I waved and headed back to my car.
Her perfume and smile accompanied me the entire drive back to the hotel.
Ichi was waiting in the suite, planted dead-center of the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table, arms crossed, eyes locked on to my face. She was in her workout shorts and sports bra, and it smelled like she might have just returned from the gym. The wall-mounted video display showed two pierced, butch women—one white, one black—covered in tattoos, wrestling atop silky white sheets. Their grunts and moans filled the living room.
I stared at the display for a moment. “Is it me, or is it hot in here?” I headed to my room, pulling my coat and sweater off as I went, surprisingly unaroused.
She vaulted off the couch and followed me. “Chan showed me the video from last night, Stefan-san.”
“Is that what you had playing? Because I can say with complete confidence these eyes did not record that. Not while I was at the wheel.”
“You met with the Gillian woman.” Ichi’s voice dripped with accusation.
“I confirmed Weaver’s in the Boulware Medical Center, sure.”
She crossed her arms and locked her legs. “Danny let me use his drone. I saw the meeting. You are letting this become personal.”
“Personal?” I folded the sweater on top of the coat sitting on the chest of drawers.
Ichi moved in close. I could smell the perspiration on her. She tilted her head seductively and closed her eyes. “Oh, Stefan-san, please kiss me. I am weak for your touch.” She stepped back, and her eyes flared wide again as she crossed her arms. “Personal.”
“Would it have been personal if we’d sent you in to seduce Weaver? No? Then why is it personal when I try to get inside her circle?”
“Weaver is not a pretty young woman.”
I snorted. “Pretty enough when you’re in my situation.”
Ichi’s lips twisted into a snarl.
I held up a placating hand. “I get what you’re saying. Message received, loud and clear. But I’m telling you, I’m on-mission. Gillian’s my way through Ravi. I could hear it in her voice. She trusts me. Now I know this is going to sound bad after admitting I’m manipulating Gillian to gain her trust, but I need your trust.”
Ichi executed a gymnast pivot. As she stomped out of the room, she said, “Chan has something you need to see.”
A few seconds later, she slammed the door to her room. I headed across to Chan and Danny’s suite.
They were waiting for me.
Danny handed me a pair of VR glasses. “Shit, you look like you just went a couple rounds with a Muay Thai champion.”
“Worse, thanks. Next time you’re going to let Ichi borrow your drone, maybe you could let me know.” I settled into the seat Nitin usually used.
Danny glanced at his bedroom door. “I didn’t let her—”
I slid the glasses on. “Don’t worry about it. What’re we looking at, Chan?”
The glasses powered on, and I found myself on the street in front of the Chinese restaurants seconds before the attack. The image was static, with Weaver and the woman who seemed to be the owner of the Ming Dynasty locked in a handshake. Gillian stood outside the gathered bodyguards and restaurateurs. The urge to drill down and study her face and curves was primal; I shook it off.
“Recognize the scene?” Chan asked.
I pivoted, spotted the assassin in mid-slide down the wall, ready to move into action. “Yeah. You got into police files for all the video feeds?”
“Plus our recordings.” Chan walked into the middle of the street. VR-Chan was an exact duplicate of reality-Chan.
“Nice avatar.”
Avatar-Chan shrugged and walked up to Weaver. “This woman?” Chan pointed to the Chinese woman, the Ming Dynasty owner. “Recognize her?”
“She’s dressed nice and came out of the Ming Dynasty. The way everyone paid deference to her, I assumed she was the owner.”
“Wrong.” Avatar-Chan turned as an avatar of the Chinese woman appeared, dressed in a dull green uniform. “Huang Yi-Fei. Cultural attaché, Chinese embassy.”
The Chinese woman bowed.
“Posing as a restaurant owner? Why?”
“Investments.” Avatar-Chan twisted around and held hands up. “This street? Chinese money. Thousands of jobs, visas.”
“And, what, Weaver was going to shut all that down?” I drilled in on the assassin, took in the details of her body, the parts of her face that were visible. I wondered if she was attractive under everything, or…like me.
Another avatar appeared off to the right: Weaver. Standing on the floor of the Senate from the looks of it. She read from a handheld device. The same awkward discomfort she’d shown around people was there, but it was being worn down by enthusiasm. She talked about unemployment and intellectual property rights, innovation and commerce. It was dull stuff until she mentioned the Greater Pacific Trade Accord. She poked at the air with an angry finger when she spoke about it, then froze.
Danny’s voice cut in from nowhere. “Oh, shit, yeah. The Greater Pacific Trade Accord pissed the Chinese off, right? Weaver was involved?”
“Early signee,” Avatar-Chan said. The avatar waved again, and more videos popped up in the VR space. They were mostly corporate-sponsored news feeds, with attractive people pretending to present sincere, researched material. “Last year
. First move from center.”
I looked back at Gillian’s worried face, frozen in time. “Last year when? Can you track back Gillian McFarland’s start with Weaver’s presidential…” The name escaped me. “Thing.”
Avatar-Chan froze. Swiping and tapping came from somewhere outside the virtual world.
Avatar-Chan came back to life. “Two months before.”
Of course. “What can you tell me about the Hamilton Accord?”
Once again, Avatar-Chan froze, then a few seconds later came back to life. “Where’s this from?”
“A little birdie. Tell me about it.”
Avatar-Chan stared off into space for a few seconds, then said, “Fifteen years ago. Alabama Governor Gus Hamilton. Supreme Court established corporations were people previously. Money was free speech. Hamilton got seven other governors together. They said corporations…” A head shake from the avatar. “I don’t understand.”
Another video appeared in VR-space, once more a corporate news feed with pretty, glassy-eyed people acting as if their world was centered on the discussion at hand. They discussed the Hamilton Accord with breathless awe. There were two blond women with surgically constructed faces and two men—one black, one white—who looked like they’d just finished a year of steroids. The women wore skintight, dark, sleeveless dresses that showed plenty of thigh and cleavage. The men barely fit into dark silk suits and cream-colored shirts with bright red and blue ties.
One of the women said, “Finally, someone has understood the true injustice being done to corporations, and they’ve stepped up to attack this problem head-on. We’ve been waiting for a hero like Gus Hamilton for years!”
The black man looked into the camera, which moved in tight on his intense, sparkling blue eyes. “You’re right, Yvonne. Our Constitution was meant to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority, and yet all this time since our own Supreme Court declared corporations were citizens just like us, they’ve been without such protection.”
The image shifted to the white man, also in close-up. Veins bulged in his neck and along the side of his face. His diamond-gray eyes glittered. It seemed like he was on the verge of spraying spittle at the camera as he launched into a similarly vapid tirade that lionized the persecuted corporations. He turned to the other blond woman, and the camera pulled back to better capture her bronzed skin as he asked, “Beth, you’ve studied the opposition. Do they have any valid points?”
The woman smiled, and her gleaming white teeth sparkled. Unsurprisingly, she offered more nonsense that echoed what had already been said.
I groaned. “Kill it. How can you hope to get anything from those vacuum-heads? If I have to watch news, at least make it informative. Pull up a premium site, something with a strong, independent voice. And get me the text of this accord. I want to read it myself.”
Three middle-aged and worn-down people who could have been plucked from a college campus appeared. Their clothes were plain—suits and a pantsuit—and their hair was gray and frizzy. A single camera captured a medium shot of them sitting around a simple, wooden table. No ridiculous graphics or booming music, no unnecessary camera work. When they spoke, it sounded spontaneous and sincere rather than scripted. Each had a position, something derived from a take rooted in data rather than overt ideology. I read the text of the accord, which was an agreement between the eight states—Hamilton’s Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee—to enact voting measures that protected the sanctity of election spending by capping total private citizen contributions to one half the cap allotted to each corporation by the states.
That was it, no need to see more. “Okay. Kill the feed. I understand now.” I understood it all now. Gillian’s plan for fundraising was a stick in the eye for the Hamilton Eight, as the governors were being called.
Danny laughed. “I’m glad someone does. You planning to share?”
“It’s not all that important.” For us, it wasn’t, but it did seem pretty despicable. It reinforced my hatred of politics. “This would have fouled the fundraising for the Weaver campaign if the Supreme Court ruled on it. Chan, what else did you find? You figure who this woman is yet?”
Avatar-Chan’s magenta eyes flashed. Apparently, that was the signal to back off. “No records. These images, what she wears. There’s not enough. Need these points.”
The assassin’s face broke down to a wireframe, and a couple dozen red pins appeared over the contours of her face. Several of the pins pointed to areas covered by her oversized glasses or hair.
“Anything I get.” Avatar-Chan’s head shook. “Seventy percent reliable. Tops.”
“I’ll take that. Use all the criteria we have available; it’s not going to be a huge list of names to begin with. She’s at least five-ten, can’t be more than one-fifty. Cybernetic limbs, something bulletproof covering the torso, Central or South American, maybe Mexican, highly trained.”
Danny’s voice was jarringly loud. “Uh, you sure on the cybernetics?”
I lifted my glasses. “She’s stronger than me or close to it. She dropped twenty feet without slowing. She’s enhanced.” That hit me. My cybernetics were a burden, a loss of me, but hers were enhancements. I needed to address that inconsistency in my thinking.
Chan’s glasses stayed on, and the stiffness of posture said all attention was still focused on Avatar-Chan. “There’s more.”
The VR glasses went back on. “Show me.”
Avatar-Chan escorted me past the security detail person and toward the Ming Dynasty. As we passed through the door, I considered the reflection in the window, the way the street seemed so much brighter and more alive than I remembered the Canyon being. Weaver or Gillian had chosen a beautiful day for their meet-and-greet.
We stepped through the door into…
Nothingness.
Even the door was gone.
“What’s going on here, Chan?”
“Nothing. That’s the point.” Avatar-Chan reached into hoodie pockets and flicked out images until the restaurant interior appeared. It was dark, and the place was stuffed full of customers. “From early evening the day before.”
“Are you saying they had interior security cameras the night before but not the day of the attack?”
“From late night to attack.” Avatar-Chan’s head shook. “Someone deleted the data.”
I wandered through the interior, watched the staff serve up sizzling food to booths lit by candle lamps. Thanks to the design and lighting, there was a sense of privacy to every group. Customers of every sort were absorbed in the atmosphere and food. Nothing looked terribly important.
I eyed the door from the route the security detail would have taken. “The deletion happened before the police seized it?”
“Can’t tell. It wasn’t in police files. Not when I checked.”
Avatar or not, the tension was visible in Chan’s posture and body language: hands clenched in front of face, head bent forward.
I didn’t want to push too hard. “See what you can find. Maybe they have backups. Maybe it can be reconstructed.”
“Yeah.” Sarcastic.
“Chan, we’re all running into things that don’t make us feel comfortable. This is a very complicated deal.”
Avatar-Chan’s hands flicked out, and the image shattered. The VR glasses powered down. I pulled mine off.
Danny rubbed his eyes. “Uh, could’ve used a warning.”
Chan leaned forward, rigid, VR glasses still on. “Scared.”
Unspoken Rule Number One: Never admit you’re scared. Chan had just broken it, and that was all right.
I slid the VR glasses into a pocket. “We’re all dealing with it.” Fear. The idea of being left behind to be cut to pieces, broken, and tortured.
Who do you work for?
“What they did to you.” Chan took the VR glasses off, looked me up and down. “Rather be dead.”
“Learn to value life more. It’s what kept me alive.”
>
Danny glanced up at me, and I could see that he didn’t believe me. We both knew that what kept me alive was my desire to kill Stovall.
Chan leaned back against the couch and pulled the cartoon cat pillows in until they covered arms and torso. “This is me. Take it away and…” Shoulders came out of the pillow cover in a shrug.
I couldn’t challenge that. We all had strict ideas of what defined us. Mine apparently came down to something as simple as the ability to think as “me.”
But I did want my limbs back. And my eyes.
Danny followed me into the hallway and leaned against the door. “There’s more to it than someone deleting data. We put together a pretty good workup on Ravi. I’ll send it over. All these conflicting signals are getting to Chan. It’s a tough first go, I guess.”
“It still seems like an overreaction.”
A cleaning robot rolled past; Danny waited until it was out of sight, then said, “You think there’s something more? For Chan?”
“Beyond the drugs, and the knowledge that Jacinto died while working with us, and being freaked out that someone might be a better Gridhound?” That seemed like an awful lot for someone Chan’s apparent age. Then again, I’d never met a Gridhound who could handle the idea there was someone undeniably better than them. Inflated egos just came with the job. “Yeah. Just another thing to watch out for.”
Danny bowed his head. “Okay. But we need someone really good for this job.”
“Chan’s good. We’ll be okay.” I let myself into my suite and headed for my room, not slowing in case Ichi came storming out. I needed some time to figure out what we really knew. At that moment, everything was unconnected data spinning around in the same sort of void we’d found inside the restaurant.
I set the VR glasses on my nightstand and laid down, then I switched my eyes to playback to review the video from my earlier meeting with Gillian.
There was something I wanted to understand about her, and it started with her eyes.
Chapter 15
Morning brought snow and fog that obliterated visibility. I dressed and went for a walk, hoping to start pulling things together before the others woke. Three miles out from the hotel, I turned back, shivering and no closer to making sense of all the threads. My hair was damp, and I had mistakenly let a few flakes get into my mouth. They were foul, greasy. Spitting didn’t clear the pungent chemical stench.