Disposable Asset

by John Altman

  Michelle returned, bearing a stubby library pencil and a copy of Our Town Downtown. Sitting in a column of sunlight by another warped window, she and Cassie circled eight possibilities. The doorbell rang; pizza was delivered. Cassie chipped in five bucks and ate two slices.

  The bong made another round. Michelle and the freckled brunette gave the hip-hop kid a shampoo with pediculicide in the kitchen sink. More strong coffee was brewed. Cassie circled five more possibilities in the real estate listings. Xavier Dark materialized, used the bathroom, and vanished. Michelle smoked a cigarette, staring at the ember. Matt and the freckled brunette went into the next room. The sound of their love-making came in fits and starts, as if they kept falling asleep.

  Cassie went to sit on the fire escape. She inhaled the fresh air, held it in her lungs. She closed her eyes, squeezed them tight, conjuring flashes of light.

  She went into the apartment again. A new player had appeared on the scene: a squat young man wearing a tank top, about five-seven, with broad shoulders and stout forearms. As Cassie entered, he was bumping fists with Michelle. ‘As-Salāmu Àlaykum.’

  ‘Wa Àleykum As-Salaam.’ Michelle turned. ‘Cass, this is Jess. Jess, Cass.’

  He regarded her critically, as if grading a piece of meat, and grunted.

  He had brought a twelve-pack of PBR. They drank and smoked. The overweight cat snored. A shadow crossed the sun outside.

  A white girl with bad dreadlocks arrived. She smoked pot, stroked the cat, told a disjointed story. ‘One time? My sister was out of weed? She knew this guy at camp who set her up? And Buddy, that’s her cat, was playing with a catnip toy? And my sister said that catnip and pot have, like, the same active ingredient? Like, she learned it at camp? So we tried smoking the catnip? And I think it worked?’

  ‘You think it worked,’ Jesse said. He had one arm around Michelle and one around the freckled brunette. Cassie could see downy underarm hair beneath his tank top, thin and wispy, like a teenager’s.

  ‘Resin, too,’ said the hip-hop kid, ‘gets a bad rap. But believe me—’ and he laughed a strange, high-pitched laugh – ‘believe me, take my word for it, you can get high from resin.’

  ‘One time?’ started the girl with dreadlocks, and then lost her train of thought.

  Michelle pushed up and went to use the bathroom. Cassie followed. When Michelle came back out, Cassie took her aside. ‘Michelle,’ she said, ‘I gotta get out of here.’

  ‘Come on, Cass. It’s temporary. We’re looking at places tomorrow.’

  Cassie hesitated.

  ‘Fuck’s sake. Chill out.’

  After a moment, Cassie reluctantly nodded and followed Michelle into the front room again.

  Sometime later she lay down on the couch, closing her eyes. Jesse and Michelle and Matt and the freckled brunette sat on the floor around her, talking. Someone lit a cigarette. The smell of burning tobacco commingled with stale beer and old pizza and skunky marijuana and body odor and kitty litter. Cassie’s stomach turned lazily. So long away, and nothing had changed. Almost as if she had never been gone at all. Shouldn’t have come back, she thought. But where else could she go? Any port in a storm.

  Eyes closed, she listened to stoned and rambling conversation, and drifted.

  She should count her blessings – part of her had been afraid that Quinn’s people would be watching the park, would arrest her again as soon as she showed her face – and not complain.

  The brunette was telling a story about the Slender Man, who she maintained was based on someone from her hometown. She was within a few years of Cassie’s own age. But the discrepancy between their life experiences was wider than the Grand Canyon, vaster than the known universe.

  How? thought Cassie. How could she have survived everything, only to end up right back where she had started? What kind of sense did that make? What kind of half-assed God was running things, anyway?

  No kind of God. That’s what kind.

  Nothing made sense. Nothing meant anything. Nothing mattered.

  I felt so depressed, Holden Caulfield had said, you can’t even imagine.

  Michelle told a story about Polybius, the video game that drove people insane. Once, in Portland, she’d met a man who claimed to have designed it. One night, not long after telling his story, he had vanished from the local scene, never to be seen again. Some people said he’d played his own game and his mind had snapped …

  Thank God Michelle had not borne a grudge. Sure, they had been friends once – best friends – but that had been eons ago. And it had not ended well. Cassie remembered fumbling the window up, with Michelle behind her, breathing hard. Hurry. Slipping into the night, dimly aware that her friend hadn’t made it out behind her. Not her fault, of course. But still.

  Where had they brought Michelle, that night? To one of Manhattan’s countless precinct station houses? To the Tombs, or Juvy? Or had she, like Cassie, been brought to a remote safe-house in the countryside? No. Cassie had been chosen. Michelle … Michelle was ordinary.

  ‘I knew this guy once?’ the brunette was saying. ‘He was, like, home alone with his dog? And he was, like, listening to the radio? And he heard this report of, like, an escaped mental patient?’

  But just suppose, thought Cassie.

  Just suppose that Michelle had been tapped by the agency. Not the way Cassie had been tapped – Cassie was more physical, more resourceful, and frankly smarter. Michelle was more of a go-with-the-flow kind of gal. But, of course, the agency would have use for girls like that too. Informers, in a word. As Benjamin Blakely had shown, the differences between Russia and twenty-first century America were not nearly so pronounced as one might have assumed. The agency would need plenty of people like Michelle. Go-with-the-flow types.

  The room was growing quiet. Final cigarettes were ground out in ashtrays. Someone belched reflectively. Someone else started snoring, from the floor beside the couch.

  Just suppose, Cassie thought again.

  Just suppose that Michelle was still working for the agency. Putting them on to other girls like Cassie, for starters – disposable assets, they might call them. And perhaps … probably, even … keeping out an eye for Cassie herself, who they knew might eventually come back to Manhattan.

  And just suppose that when Michelle had slipped out to get the newspaper, she had called someone. And then she had come back and plied Cassie with booze and weed, lowering her defenses. And when Cassie had sensed something wrong and tried to disengage, Michelle had placated her. It’s temporary. We’re looking at places tomorrow. And then more aggressively: Fuck’s sake. Chill out.

  Because sometime in the middle of night, when they all slept, the incursion team would make their move. They would attack with military precision, and Cassie would never see them coming. Then Michelle would get her pay-off, her thirty pieces of silver, and Cassie would be back in their clutches. They might murder her, as they had tried to do in Beliy Gorod, tying up loose ends. Or they might compel her to do still more violence, still more harm, on their behalf. Finishing Blakely, the hero whistle-blower, had been just the start. They would not let her rest until she had crammed their agenda down the throat of every so-called enemy of the state in the world and, in the process, murdered every innocent child who crossed her path. She could never let down her guard. She could never trust anyone. Everything she cared for slipped right through her fingers …

  Paranoid.

  Yet suddenly she was sitting up, wide awake.

  Sleeping bodies covered the floor. The cat’s tail slowly switched. And mice were rustling in the walls; that was what had woken her.

  Except, they weren’t exactly in the walls, were they? They were in the hallways on the other sides of the walls. And they were in the ceiling, and they were on the fire escape balcony. But when she shot her gaze toward the warped window she caught only a drifting shadow, quickly melting away.

  She stood, stepping over slumbering figures. Put her back against the wall to the left of the door,
sucking in a deep breath and holding it, straining to hear past the thud of her heart.

  Something hissed quietly. She triangulated. Probably Semtex 10SE, rolled on to a spool and then wired to the wall – that was how she would have done it. Three-second fuse. When it fired, sledgehammers would pound through the weakened gypsum. Then all hell would break loose.

  Michelle called them when she left to get the newspaper.

  Three …

  Waiting for me to show up again. Waiting all this time. Stabbed me in the back.

  Two …

  Fuck it. CONCENTRATE.

  One.

  The hissing turned into an angry fizz. And here came the first sledgehammer, spraying bits of drywall. In the same moment, two windows shattered. A wickedly sizzling grenade rolled into the apartment, clattering out of reach beneath a radiator.

  The front door burst off its hinges. Two mirrored gunstocks poked through like animals’ snouts. She grabbed the nearest one, pulled, and wrenched. Backing away toward the bedroom she stepped on a hand, eliciting a squawk.

  On the filthy bare mattress Jesse and the freckled brunette sat naked, clutching each other fearfully. No sign of Michelle. Cassie slung the gun around her neck, slid the window open. Wind ruffled her hair. Déjà vu. She squirmed out, dropping lightly down to the litter-and-pigeon-crap-strewn floor of the air shaft ten feet below – and losing her balance from even that short fall. Out of shape, out of practice.

  Out of luck.

  Shaking her head, she was up again. Smashing a window across the shaft with the stock of the Heckler & Koch, sweeping the frame clear, climbing into a first-floor apartment, toppling flowerpots and figurines. She found herself standing in a tiny room, near a woman cowering in a bed. A mound of laundry piled in one corner, a glass of water resting on a night table. The apartment followed an inverted blueprint from the one across the way. A few steady strides brought her through the living room, to the front door. She worked multiple locks, fumbling in the darkness.

  Before moving into the hallway, she used the mirror mounted on the H&K’s stock to scan the shadows. A dull metal banister, a winking Judas hole, a scatter of takeout menus … and two looming spherical silhouettes. For one confused moment she thought they were hanging mobiles, like the Sputnik dangling over Nikolai’s bed in Vyborg. Then she realized that they were helmets.

  Boots crunched against the floor of the air shaft; the woman cringing in her bed screamed.

  Cassie tilted the mirror again. Concentrate. At least two men, maybe more, waited in the shadowed corridor. Black body armor, chitinous black helmets, black boots. If she came out fast and dropped low, she might get them before they got her.

  Glass crinkled as a first man scrabbled into the apartment behind her. Go!

  She held her breath again.

  She went.

  Falling on to her knees, skidding on takeout menus, wheeling and firing, lighting the darkened corridor with a surreal flash. One man jerked away, grunting, as another returned fire. A white-hot poker grazed her temple. Someone fired again, and a mule kicked her squarely between the breasts, driving the breath from her lungs, knocking her flat on to her back.

  She had lost the gun. She tried to wheel around, to hook a pair of feet with a scissor-kick and tumble one man into another. But she was out of shape, out of practice, out of breath, out of luck. She kicked a shin, missed finding a grip. A gun barked again, sending fire bolting down her backbone. Yet she still lived. The ricochets lacked a biting edge. Rubber bullets.

  Even as she tried to raise her hands to protect herself, another projectile hammered excruciatingly into her ribs. More dark boots flooded the hall – from the apartment behind her, from the foyer around the corner – and surrounded her, pooling like black water as she curled, limp and mewling and gasping, into fetal position.

  EIGHTEEN

  SWIFTWATER, PENNSYLVANIA

  The siren whooped twice.

  Ravensdale pulled over, crunching gravel beneath his tires. The police cruiser swung on to the shoulder behind him. The cop – gray wool uniform, tan Stetson, black Gore-Tex jacket – took his time in coming out. Then he approached on the passenger side, slowly. After giving the Fiesta’s interior a long look, he crossed behind the rear fender and came up on the driver’s side. Beneath the brim of the Stetson his eyes were flinty brown, cheeks gaunt, chin sharp. ‘License, registration and insurance.’

  Ravensdale had them ready. ‘Was I speeding, officer?’

  ‘Going to ask you to step out of the vehicle, sir.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just leave the key and step out of the vehicle, sir.’

  Ravensdale sifted through possible responses. He had been within five miles per hour of the speed limit. His inspection sticker was up-to-date. His tail-lights were unbroken. But if this was what he feared, they would already have staked out the house. One way or another, better to deal with it here.

  He climbed out. With one hand in the small of his back – surreptitiously checking for a weapon – the trooper urged him toward the cruiser. As they walked, gravel rasped underfoot. The sun was down, but the sky was still light. An industrious woodpecker in the nearby woods worked, paused, and worked again. Nearing the car, Ravensdale was unsurprised to recognize the man waiting in the back seat.

  ‘You,’ said Howard Gibson as Ravensdale slid in beside him, ‘are a hard man to track down.’

  The trooper closed the door, popped a toothpick into his mouth, and wandered off. Overhead, a first splinter of silver moon had appeared, shining faintly against the gathering dark.

  ‘Shaved the beard.’ Gibson examined him clinically. ‘Suits you. You look ten years younger.’

  Silence.

  ‘Relax, Sean. I’m here as a friend. Got an offer, in fact, that might interest you.’

  Up the road, the trooper found a purple sticker-bush in which to pretend absorption. He leaned forward and then abruptly drew back, slapping at a forearm.

  ‘I don’t pretend charity, and I don’t ask for it. This is win-win. Deputy Director of IAS. You’ll report directly to me.’

  Ravensdale couldn’t mask his surprise. Gibson chuckled. Wrinkles around the man’s eyes made him appear to be smiling even when he was not; when he laughed, his whole face came together. ‘Don’t blame you for looking that way. Last year, to be honest, I wouldn’t have gotten within spitting distance. But … well, sir, I won’t lie. We shit the bath pretty good. Martyred the bastard, is what we did. More popular dead than he ever would have been alive. Now every able man’s got to grab a bucket and start bailing.’

  Ravensdale said nothing.

  ‘Once in a lifetime opportunity.’ Gibson’s southern roots came out in his flattened, drawling vowels. ‘You ride in on a white horse. All past indiscretions forgiven and forgotten. And you get to sock a little something away for a rainy day while you’re at it.’ A lazy shrug. ‘Like I said: win-win. The Ticonderoga house bought you some breathing room, I guess. But life is long. Kids need college. And I can’t really see you or the wife pumping gas.’

  Ravensdale said nothing.

  ‘And those guys in Lubyanka, they’ve got long memories. Eventually, they’ll turn over the right rock, the way I just did. Long run, you’ll sleep better at night this way … How is she, by the way?’

  Ravensdale said nothing.

  The setting sun painted chiaroscuros across Gibson’s face, exaggerating the laugh lines, making him look positively whimsical. ‘Fair enough,’ he said unconcernedly. ‘So. You need the security detail, and you can use the paycheck. I need someone I can march before a senate subcommittee and say, “This man does not go with the program. Fact is, he keeps trying to retire.” Symbolic.’

  ‘Gee.’

  ‘That’s my pitch. What do you say?’

  Ravensdale said nothing.

  Gibson shifted position in his seat, looking mildly pained, as if suffering from a gas bubble. ‘Also,’ he added after a moment, ‘we picked up the girl.’


  Ravensdale’s brow knit.

  ‘We invested too much to just let her go. And she’s damned good, isn’t she? Ruined for Eastern Europe, of course, but I bet we can find someplace she’ll come in handy. Problem is, she doesn’t trust us.’ Another laid-back shrug. ‘But you … you had her dead to rights. And instead of handing her over to the Kremlin, you took her across the border. She’ll trust you.’

  Ravensdale shook his head. ‘Ditched me the second she found the chance.’

  ‘She’ll settle down, once she sees the light. Lead by example, I always say.’

  ‘We finished, Howie? Because I’ve got milk in my trunk.’

  Gibson paused. He indicated Ravensdale’s breast pocket. ‘Spare one of those?’

  Ravensdale took out his cigarettes. He handed one over, took one for himself, lit both. Without a key in the ignition, his window refused to lower. He cracked open his door instead.

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Gibson deliberately, ‘you’ve earned some peace. You’re a good man – close enough for government work, anyway. Left to my own devices, I’d let it be. But …’

  Ravensdale waited.

  ‘The buzzards are circling. So. I didn’t want to go here, but if you force my hand … we’re looking at an entirely new round of Title Eighteen. The guys in legal have it all worked out. They’re raring to go.’

  ‘What’s the charge?’

  ‘Sedition, of course.’ Gibson exhaled smoke laconically. ‘You got off easy the first time, between you and me, because Andy Fletcher vouched for you. But now Fletcher’s gone. The fact remains that you fraternized with the enemy. So if we need to play hardball …’

  Coolly, Ravensdale exhaled a clockspring of smoke.

  ‘Be flattered, Sean. I want you on our side so much that I’ll get down in the mud to make it happen. So. Duty calls, soldier. Go home; put your milk in the fridge; put your kid to bed. Have a talk with the little woman. And when you’re ready, we’ll be outside. Sofiya can head down tomorrow, the next day, look at some rentals. We’ll pick up the moving expenses.’