by Sam Sisavath
The media helicopter had continued to circle the destruction but was unable to get any lower with law-enforcement choppers already below them. Even from afar, it was easy to see that the explosion had done tremendous damage and knocked down two other structures that flanked it. The blast itself, though, was concentrated on one very specific building.
A new caption had appeared onscreen: LOCAL TECH KOBALCOM TARGETED. EMPLOYEES IN MOURNING.
“Don’t believe everything they tell you,” Xiao said as she walked over to stand next to her. “The first thing you learn to accept is that the news lies. Not because they’re doing it on purpose—or not most of the time, anyway—but because they don’t know any better. They need fodder to fill airtime and anything juicy will work. Preferably juicy.”
“If it bleeds, it leads?”
“Exactly. It’s worse for the cable networks. You can only put the same repeat programming or talking points on air so often before people click over to one of those train-wreck reality shows. The truth has nothing to do with it.”
Quinn nodded at the TV, at the ant-like first responders moving around the destruction below. “They’re not lying about that.”
“No, but even the truth has layers.”
“Why Kobalcom? They’re an Internet service provider. My apartment building uses it. Half the people in the city rely on it for broadband. What’s an ISP have to do with the people behind all this?”
“The answer’s complicated. Porter will uncomplicate it for you when he gets back.”
Complicated? Quinn thought. What was complicated about knocking down three buildings and killing hundreds in the process?
“The package he was picking up from Gary Ross that night,” Quinn said instead.
“Some nerd in an Asian lab called it KX-9. It’s C4 on steroids.” Xiao nodded at the TV. “You’re looking at where Porter put the rest of it to use.”
“Why did you use Ross to bring it into the States for you? You guys seemed to be able to sneak in and out just fine without the U.S. government even knowing about it. This isn’t the first time you’ve been in the country.”
“Far from it. If the U.S. can’t stop Miguel who works at that food truck outside your apartment from coming in, what chance do they have with us? But it’s easier to sneak a person in than a suitcase full of experimental explosives.”
The channel had added a second LIVE footage, this one from street level showing civilians looking on from behind police sawhorses. Quinn recognized the shock and horror on their faces, and for the first time felt pangs of guilt at the sight of people—men and women, some in business suits—crying and holding one another.
God, what’s wrong with me? That’s what it takes to feel something about what Porter did?
“Hundreds dead,” Quinn said quietly. “Porter did that.”
“It’s easy to make up numbers, especially at the beginning of a tragedy. It’ll take days, sometimes weeks, for the real facts to show up, and by then most people will have forgotten to care.”
“You’ve done this before. You and Porter.”
“We’ve been active for five years,” Xiao said. “What did you think we were doing out there, crossword puzzles?”
So they’re not all lies after all, Quinn thought, when Xiao turned around and fished out a cheap plastic phone.
The other woman listened to someone on the other end for a moment before putting it away and looking back at Quinn. “They’re here.”
“Who?”
“Porter and Aaron.”
“Who is he, anyway?”
“What is he is more like it. Spoiler: He’s a real pain in my ass.”
Xiao walked over to the large door across the empty spaces. She pressed a button along the side, and the thick sheet of metal slid upward on squeaky wheels. A white minivan was waiting outside and began reversing into the warehouse even before the door was all the way up, rear lights beeping as it pulled to a stop next to the bullet-riddled Dodge.
Quinn had expected to see Mary’s missing SUV, but this didn’t look like anything an aging former doctor would be driving. It was plain and beat-up and the license plate was ready to fall off.
The van’s back doors popped open and a young African-American kid jumped down, Converse high-top sneakers popping against the hard floor. He had a shaved head and was wearing a faded Captain America T-shirt.
“Still in one piece, I see,” the young man said to Xiao. “Guess you’re just too mean to die.”
Xiao smirked. “So I’ve been told. You okay?”
“Single and ready to mingle.” Aaron saw Quinn and headed over. “You must be Quinn. Nice to finally meet ya.”
Quinn shook his hand. “You must be Aaron.”
“My legend precedes me. Nice.” Then, “You still got the phone?”
Quinn dug out the cheap plastic device she’d been carrying with her since the alley and handed it over to him. “Yours?”
“I guess you could say that. A little something I cooked up a while back and we’ve been using ever since. Untraceable and unbuggable. The only thing it can’t do is get YouTube, which totally sucks.”
“Porter was using one back at the nightclub that night, wasn’t he? That’s why the FBI couldn’t trace it.”
“Uh huh.” He pocketed it. “I’ll give it back after I make sure it’s working okay.”
“Are you some kind of hacker?”
“Nah. I just like tinkering with electronics. Phones are easy breezy. If I told you how easy it was to eavesdrop on someone’s phone without them even knowing, you’d throw your fancy thousand dollar cell away and go back to using two cans and a string.”
Aaron looked past her at the TV.
“You were there last night,” she said.
He nodded. “Supposed to be Xiao’s job, but she was busy. Porter did most of the legwork; I just lent a hand or two.”
A car door slammed, and Quinn glanced over at the van just as Porter appeared. One half of his face was caked in dried blood, and he was wiping at it with a wet rag and a bottle of water.
“As you can see, it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing,” Aaron was saying.
“What happened?” Quinn asked.
“There was a little more resistance than we expected. But we got the job done.” Then, at her, “When’s your birthday?”
Quinn looked back at him. “My birthday?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not for another two weeks,” she said, thinking about Ben and his birthday present stuffed into her front waistband.
Porter exchanged a brief glance with her before disappearing to the other side of the minivan and pulled open the side hatch, then reached in and dragged a bundle outside. It was a man, his arms and legs bound with duct tape that stuck out like large plastic toy handcuffs because they had been wound so many times around his wrists and ankles. Porter pulled his victim from the vehicle and unceremoniously dropped him to the floor with a loud thwump!
“Ouch,” Aaron said. “That’s gotta hurt.”
Dried blood caked large parts of the man’s face and the white pieces of his wardrobe. He lay on the floor and didn’t seem to be offering up very much resistance.
“Who is it?” Quinn asked.
“Early birthday present,” Aaron said. “Go take a look.”
She walked over with the teenager.
“We had to go out of our way to grab him,” Aaron said, “but luckily we knew his last known location and he thought he’d gotten away. Dumb bastard. You should have seen the look on his face when we rolled up on him.”
Porter was crouched over his captive and was saying something to the man. Not that the man could respond with another strip of duct tape over his mouth. When the captive finally turned his head in her direction, it didn’t take Quinn very long to see through the blood and bruises at the face underneath.
Pete Ringo strained against his bounds, and suddenly Quinn knew why the duct tape was so thick: Because the last time she had tied him u
p, Ringo had snapped his restraints as if they were dental floss. Porter apparently already knew just how strong Ringo was and wasn’t taking any chances.
“Sonofabitch,” Quinn said, and drew her Glock.
“Don’t shoot!” Porter shouted.
Quinn already had the gun aimed at Ringo’s head, and her finger was pressing on the trigger. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t. He killed Ben and Mary!”
“I know, but we need him. You need him.”
She stared at Porter, then at Ringo, then back at Porter. “The only thing I need from him is him dead.”
“Oh, trust me, he’s going to wish he were dead when we’re done with him. But this is part of the process I told you about. This is step one. After that, he’s all yours.”
Quinn clenched her teeth. It would be so easy. All she had to do was pull the trigger and it would be over. There was no reason not to do it. He had killed Ben, then Mary. He’d shot them down like dogs.
Do it. Just do it!
But she didn’t.
She didn’t know why, but she didn’t.
Quinn lowered the gun, but she never took her eyes off Ringo’s bloodied face. “Show me, and then I’m going to kill the bastard.”
Again…
Porter dragged Ringo by his bound legs across the warehouse floor, leaving behind a trail of blood and sweat stains. Ringo struggled the entire time, making even more of a mess. Quinn didn’t feel sorry for him, not even for a heartbeat.
She watched the two of them disappear into a back room, Ben and Mary’s killer grunting something against his duct tape the entire time. Quinn didn’t know what was on the other side of the door, but Porter had told her to wait before coming in, so she did that, even if doing so took every ounce of willpower.
The sound of the van’s doors opening and slamming shut pulled her out of her thoughts. She was glad for it, because everything inside her head began and ended with Ringo’s bloody face only getting bloodier as she sought to answer the question, How do you kill a man who won’t stay dead?
“The TV’s saying hundreds dead,” Xiao was saying behind her.
“Bullshit,” Aaron said.
“Watch your mouth.”
“Okay, mom, sorry.” Aaron rolled his eyes. “Still bullshit, though. There were three security guards total on the graveyard shift watching the building, and the other two were empty.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
She looked back at them. Aaron was inside the van, sitting at the very center of a bench setup littered with electronics. Wires and devices hung from pegs along the walls and the phone she had given him—or one that looked identical—was dissembled underneath a magnifying glass that the teenager was looking through as he poked at the gutted parts with small, precise tools while a soldering iron burned nearby.
Xiao stood outside the van next to the open back doors, looking at a small TV on a table next to Aaron. “He didn’t take you inside with him, did he?”
“Of course not,” Aaron said. “I stayed in the van the entire time, waiting for the signal.”
“Good.”
“And even if he did, it’s not like I’m helpless.”
“You’re close.”
“Fuck off.”
“The truth hurts.”
“So does your breath.”
Xiao smiled. “I’ve been meaning to change toothpaste.”
“You okay?” Aaron asked.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Gee, I dunno, maybe because someone shoved a metal pole through you?”
The mention of her wound must have reminded Xiao, because she reached up and gingerly touched her left shoulder. “I took a couple of the good stuff.”
“They’re not going to last forever,” Aaron said.
“Then I’ll ask him for another one.”
“It’s not a cure, Xiao.”
“Why Aaron, it almost sounds like you’re worried about me. Say it ain’t so.”
“Pfft,” the kid said, and picked up the soldering tool and went back to work under the magnifying glass.
Quinn hadn’t interrupted the two of them as they went back and forth, and she didn’t now. Despite the insults, it was pretty obvious to her that Aaron and Xiao had a brother and sister relationship. Love/hate, almost. That made her wonder how they met, because they couldn’t be more different in every way.
She was still thinking about that, grateful for the distraction, when a voice said behind her, “You ready?”
She looked back at Porter, standing just outside the back room door.
“I’ve been ready since yesterday,” Quinn said.
Ringo was handcuffed to a pair of grimy pipes that stuck out of the far wall, pieces of a bigger machine that once ran power throughout the warehouse. The objects were large and heavy-looking enough to keep him in place; Porter would have likely made sure before he called her in.
Where there used to be duct tape over Ringo’s mouth, there was now just a bloody red blotch that looked almost like a grotesque version of a clown’s red lips. Ringo stared back at her as she entered with Porter, and he didn’t say a word or try to break free of his restraints. Instead, he sat on the dingy floor, legs splayed out in front of him, and there was a slack quality to his body that told her he had all about given up the idea of escape.
Or at least, that’s what he wanted her to believe.
Don’t trust him. Don’t trust anything he says or does.
Porter had also removed Ringo’s shirt, and it, along with a bloodied black blazer, lay in a pile next to him. Ringo’s bare chest was slick with sweat but had been spared all the blood that dripped from his face and forehead earlier.
Quinn looked through all that and saw the same thing she had seen last night:
You should be dead. Why the hell aren’t you dead?
Porter had closed the door and now walked over to stand beside her. He casually took off his own bloodied jacket but kept on his blood-smeared white dress shirt.
“Still trying to get the Old Men’s attention, huh?” Ringo said. He was speaking to Porter and ignoring her completely.
“Old Men?” Quinn thought. She’d heard that before. Where?
Right. When Ringo had first taken her to Hofheinz:
“I’m sure we’ll find him,” Hofheinz had said, talking about Porter. “Though I have to admit, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Old Men this nervous.”
“You talked to them?” Ringo had asked.
“No, but that’s the feeling through the grapevine.”
The Old Men. Who were the Old Men?
“Could have just sent them a Hallmark card like a regular ex-employee,” Ringo was saying now, still focused only on Porter. “Save yourself the trouble of skulking around.”
Porter didn’t answer; instead, he rolled up his long sleeves before wiping at some leftover blood on his face with a rag from his back pocket.
“But I have to admit, blowing up an entire building works, too,” Ringo continued. “Really brings home that whole terrorism angle, huh? The question is, now that you’ve got their attention, what are you gonna do with it?”
Quinn waited for Porter to reply, to let her in on their little secret. Wasn’t that the point of bringing her in here? The first step to revealing the truth?
“Do you see it?” Porter asked. It took her a moment to realize he was talking to her.
“I don’t see anything but a piece of shit,” Quinn said.
Ringo snorted. “Oh, nice.”
“Xiao said you shot him last night,” Porter said.
“In the shoulder,” Quinn nodded.
“Do you see it?”
“See what?”
“A wound. A bullet hole.”
A bullet hole…
She hadn’t bothered to look for it because it had never occurred to her, but she did that now.
“Come closer,” Ringo said, grinning mischievously at her.
She did exactl
y that and didn’t stop until she was three feet in front of him. If he thought she was afraid of him, he was very much mistaken. Quinn saw the somewhat surprised look on his face and felt a rush of mild triumph.
She crouched and stared back at him, daring him to do something, anything.
But he didn’t, and glanced over her shoulder at Porter instead. “What’s with you and the pretty ones? Let’s hope what happened to Serena doesn’t repeat itself. Of course, the Chinese girl’s already halfway there, isn’t she?”
Porter didn’t say anything, and Quinn didn’t bother to look back to see his reaction to Ringo’s comments. Though it didn’t stop her from thinking, Who’s Serena?
But it was one more question that could wait. Right now, she focused on Ringo.
First on his face, where despite a lot of caked blood, she couldn’t locate an actual cut or gash along his temple or forehead. So where was all the blood coming from?
Eventually she got down to his chest—or more precisely, on his exposed right shoulder.
What the hell is that?
There was no bullet hole, but there was something there. Puckered flesh, a sign that an old wound had almost healed up. Except there shouldn’t have been an old wound, because she had shot the man last night.
“It’s already healing,” Quinn said quietly, almost hesitantly. “I shot him in the shoulder last night, and the wound’s already healing.”
“Is that it?” Porter asked.
Is what it? she thought, when she suddenly understood the question, and Quinn stared at Ringo again.
I shot you. Not just last night, but the day before. I put two rounds into your chest and two more into your back, so why the hell aren’t you dead?
It didn’t matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t find them. Except for the healing wound in his shoulder, the rest of his flesh looked improbably polished and clean, as if he had just stepped out of a wax assembly line. She grabbed him and pulled him forward and stared at his back, but it was just as devoid of scars.
It didn’t make any sense. Even if Ringo had somehow (miraculously) managed to survive the four bullets she’d put into him at the abandoned building, where were the scars?
Quinn let him go and stood up. She locked eyes with him and refused to let go. “What the hell are you?”