by John Scalzi
“Maybe distraction?” Lowen said. “If you blow up a Brazilian consulate on American soil, you focus two governments’ attention on one thing: the consulate exploding. We’re going to be dealing with that for a few months. Meanwhile, whatever else these people are doing—like what the plan was behind Carvalho’s killing Liu Cong—gets put on the back burner.”
“We’re still getting the information about Carvalho,” Prescott said.
“Yes, but what are we going to do about it?” Lowen said. “You’re the U.S. government. You have the choice between focusing on a case of a foreign national killing another foreign national on a Colonial Union ship, on which you have no jurisdiction whatsoever and only a tangential concern with, or you can focus your time and energy on whoever just killed thirty-two people on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Which do you choose?”
“They might be the same people,” Prescott said.
“They might be,” Lowen said. “But my guess is that if they are, they’ve kept themselves far enough away from events that there’s someone else the direct line points to. And you know how that is. If we have an obvious suspect with an obvious motive, that’s where we go.”
“Like Amazonian separatists,” Prescott said, archly.
“Exactly,” Lowen said.
“The timing is still a little bit too perfect,” Prescott said. “You stepping out and the consulate going up.”
“I think that was coincidence,” Lowen said. “If they were timing it, they would have waited until Nascimento was back in the office.”
“Which would have meant you would have died, too,” Prescott said.
“Which would have suited their purposes of distraction even more,” Lowen said. “Blowing up the daughter of the secretary of state would definitely have drawn the focus of the United States. Another reason to assume the bomb was set in motion a long time ago.”
“When I present your theory to the secretary, I’m going to leave that last part out,” Prescott said. He pulled out his PDA to take notes. “I’m sure you’ll understand why.”
“That’s perfectly fine,” Lowen said.
“Huh,” Prescott said, looking at his PDA.
“What?” Lowen asked.
“I’m sending you a news link that was just forwarded to me,” Prescott said.
Lowen pulled out her PDA and opened the link; it was a news story on her tending to the injured on Sixth Avenue after the explosion. There was video of her kneeling over a prone woman.
“Oh, come on,” Lowen said. “She wasn’t even hurt. She just freaked out and collapsed when the bomb went off.”
“Check your message queue,” Prescott said.
Lowen did. There were several dozen media requests for interviews. “Gaaah,” she said, throwing her PDA onto the table, away from her. “I’ve become part of the distraction.”
“I take it this means the State Department should say you’re unavailable for interviews at this time,” Prescott said.
“Or ever,” Lowen said. She went to get some coffee to self-medicate for her quickly approaching headache.
* * *
Lowen ended up doing six interviews: one for The New York Times, one for The Washington Post, two morning news shows and two audio programs. In each she smiled and explained that she was just doing her job, which was not strictly true, as she had given up the daily practice of medicine to work for the U.S. State Department, and anyway her specialty had been hematology. But no one called her on it, because the story of the daughter of the secretary of state arriving like a healing angel at the scene of a terrorist act was too feel-good to mess with.
Lowen cringed as her picture was splashed across screens all over the planet for two whole news cycles, the second news cycle prompted when she received a call from the president, who thanked her for her service to the nation. Lowen thanked the president for the call and made a note to yell at her father, who had undoubtedly set up the media op for his boss, who had to contend with midterm elections and could use a spot of positive public relations.
Lowen didn’t want to deal with any more interviews or congratulatory calls or messages or even the offer by the Brazilian Ministry of Tourism to come for a visit. What she really wanted was to get her hands on the file concerning Luiza Carvalho. She pestered both Prescott and her father until it showed up, along with a State Department functionary whose job it was to not let the file out of her sight. Lowen gave her a soda and let her sit down with her at the kitchen table while she read.
After a few minutes, she looked over to the State Department courier. “Seriously, this is it?” she said.
“I didn’t read the file, ma’am,” the courier said.
The file had nothing of note about Luiza Carvalho. She was born in Belo Horizonte; her parents were both physicians; no brothers or sisters. She attended Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, earning degrees in economics and law before joining the Brazilian diplomatic corps. Postings in Vietnam, the Siberian States, Ecuador and Mexico before being called up to be part of Brazil’s United Nations mission, which was where she had been serving for six years before she took on the Clarke mission, where she murdered Liu Cong.
Like all Brazilian foreign service workers, Carvalho was questioned annually by her superiors about her associations and activities and also consented to be randomly “examined” (that is, followed and bugged) by the Brazilian intelligence services to make sure she wasn’t doing anything untoward. Aside from some questionable sexual liaisons—“questionable” in terms of taste in partners, not in terms of national security—there was nothing out of the usual.
Carvalho had no associations or friends outside of the foreign service community. The only trips she took were Christmastime visits to Belo Horizonte to spend the holidays with her parents. She took almost no time off except for two years prior to her death, when she was hospitalized for a case of viral meningitis; she spent four days in the hospital and then another two weeks at home recovering. And then it was back to work for her.
No pets.
“This woman is boring,” Lowen said, out loud but to herself. The courier coughed noncommittally.
An hour later the courier had left, file in hand, and Lowen was left with nothing but a feeling of unsatisfied irritation. She thought perhaps a drink might fix that, but a check of her fridge informed her that the only thing in that appliance was the dregs of some iced tea that she couldn’t recall making. Lowen grimaced at the fact that she was coming up with a blank concerning when she had made the tea, then grabbed the pitcher and poured it out into the sink. Then she left her Alexandria condo and walked the two blocks to the nearest well-lit suburban chain theme restaurant, sat at its central bar and ordered something large and fruity for no other reason than to counteract the taste of boring that Luiza Carvalho had left in her mouth.
“That’s a big drink,” someone said to her a few minutes later. She looked up from her drink to see a generically handsome-looking man standing a few feet from her at the bar.
“The irony is that this is the small size,” Lowen said. “The large margarita here comes in a glass the size of a hot tub. It’s for when you’ve decided that alcohol poisoning is a way of life.”
The blandly handsome man smiled at this and then cocked his head. “You look familiar,” he said.
“Tell me you have better pickup lines than that,” Lowen said.
“I do,” the man said, “but I wasn’t trying to pick you up. You just look familiar.” He looked at her more closely and then snapped his fingers. “That’s it,” he said. “You look like that doctor at the Brazilian consulate bombing.”
“I get that a lot,” Lowen said.
“I’m sure you do,” the man said. “But it couldn’t be you, could it. You’re here in D.C. and the consulate was in New York.”
“Sound logic,” Lowen said.
“Do you have an identical twin?” the man asked, and then gestured at the bar stool next to Lowen. “Do you mind?”
L
owen shrugged and made a whatever hand movement. The man sat. “I don’t have an identical twin, no,” she said. “No fraternal twin, either. I have one brother. I pray to God we don’t look the same.”
“Then you could be that woman’s professional double,” the man said. “You could hire out for parties.”
“I don’t think she’s that famous,” Lowen said.
“Hey, she got a call from the president,” the man said. “When was the last time that happened to you?”
“You’d be surprised,” Lowen said.
“Cuba libre,” the man said to the bartender as she came up. He looked over to Lowen. “I’d offer to buy you a drink, but…”
“Oh, Lord, no,” Lowen said. “I’ll have to hire a taxi to get home after this thing, and I only live a couple of blocks away.”
“Cuba libre,” the man repeated, and then turned his attention to Lowen again. He extended his hand. “John Berger,” he said.
Lowen took it. “Danielle Lowen,” she said.
Berger looked momentarily confused and then smiled. “You are that doctor from the Brazilian consulate,” he said. “And you work for the State Department. Which is how you could be here and have been in New York yesterday. I’m sorry, let me introduce myself again.” Berger held out his hand once more. “Hello, I’m a moron.”
Lowen laughed and took his hand a second time. “Hello,” she said. “Don’t feel bad. I wasn’t exactly being forthcoming.”
“Well, after all the attention you got the last couple of days, I can see why you might want to lay low,” Berger said. He motioned to Lowen’s drink. “Is that what the tub of margarita is about?”
“What? No,” Lowen said, and made a grimace. “Well, maybe. Not exactly.”
“The drink is working,” Berger said.
“It’s not about the attention, although that certainly could have driven me to drink,” Lowen said. “It’s about something else, related to my job.”
“And what is that, if you don’t mind me asking?” Berger said.
“What do you do, Mr. Berger?” Lowen asked.
“John,” Berger said. His Cuba libre arrived. He smiled his thanks to the bartender and took a drink. Then it was his turn to grimace. “This is not the best Cuba libre I’ve had,” he said.
Lowen flicked the edge of her margarita glass with her finger. “Next time, go with one of these tubs,” she said.
“Maybe I will,” Berger said, took another drink of his Cuba libre and then set it down. “I’m a salesman,” he said. “Pharmaceuticals.”
“I remember you guys,” Lowen said.
“I bet you do,” Berger said.
“Now it makes sense,” Lowen said. “Easy conversationalist, blandly attractive, not too quirky, looking for the sale.”
“You have me pegged,” Berger said.
“You’re not going to make the sale,” Lowen said. “I mean, no offense. But I plan on walking out of here alone tonight.”
“Fair enough,” Berger said. “Good conversation was my only goal, anyway.”
“Was it,” Lowen said, and drank some more of her margarita. “All right, John, a question for you. How do you make a boring person a killer?”
Berger was quiet for a moment. “Now I’m suddenly very glad I won’t be making that sale,” he said.
“I’m serious,” Lowen said. “Hypothetically, you have this person. She’s a normal person, right? She has normal parents, has a normal childhood, goes to a normal school, gets normal degrees and then goes and has a normal job. And then one day, for no particularly good reason that anyone could see, she goes and murders some guy. And not in a normal way—I mean, not with a gun or a knife or a bat. No, she does it in a complicated way. How does that happen?”
“Is the guy an ex-lover?” Berger asked. “Hypothetically, I mean.”
“Hypothetically, no,” Lowen said. “Hypothetically, the best way to describe their relationship would be work colleagues, and not particularly close ones at that.”
“And she’s not a spy, or a secret agent, or leading a double life as a crafty assassin,” Berger said.
“She’s completely normal, and completely boring,” Lowen said. “Doesn’t even have pets. Hypothetically.”
Berger took a sip from his Cuba libre. “Then I’m going to go with what I know,” he said. “Mental derangement caused by addiction to pharmaceuticals.”
“There are drugs that can turn you from a boring person into a methodical murderer, as opposed to turning them into someone who kills everything in the house in a rage, including the fish?” Lowen asked. “I don’t remember those being touted to me when I was working as a doctor.”
“Well, no, there’s nothing that will do something that specific,” Berger said. “But you know as well as I do that, one, sometimes drug interactions will do funny things—”
“Turn someone into a methodical murderer?” Lowen asked again, incredulously.
“—and two, there are lots of our products out there that will eat your brain if you overuse them, and if they eat your brain, then you’ll start doing uncharacteristic things. Like becoming a methodical murderer, maybe.”
“A reasonable hypothesis,” Lowen said. “But hypothetically this person was not regularly taking either legal or illegal pharmaceuticals. Next.”
“All right,” Berger said, and gave the appearance of thinking quickly. “A tumor.”
“A tumor,” Lowen said.
“Sure, a tumor,” Berger said. “A brain tumor starts growing, hypothetically, and starts pressing on a part of the brain that processes things like knowing what is socially appropriate behavior. As the thing grows, our boring person starts putting her mind to murder.”
“Interesting,” Lowen said. She sipped her drink again.
“I’ve read stories about such things, and not only because my company sells a pharmaceutical treatment for cutting off the blood supply to tumorous masses in the body,” Berger said.
“It’s good to read for recreation,” Lowen said.
“I think so, too,” Berger said.
“And as superficially appealing as that suggestion is, this hypothetical person received a clean bill of health before her last assignment,” Lowen said. “It was hypothetically a job that required extensive amounts of travel, so a thorough physical examination was part of the job protocol.”
“This hypothetical person is getting very specific,” Berger said.
“I don’t make up the rules,” Lowen said.
“Yes, you do,” Berger said. “That’s why it’s a hypothetical.”
“One more chance, Mr. Berger, comma, John,” Lowen said. “So make it good.”
“Wow, on the spot,” Berger said. “Okay. Remote control.”
“What?” Lowen said. “Seriously, now.”
“Hear me out,” Berger said. “If you wanted to do someone in, and have no one know, and completely cover your tracks, how would you do it? You would have someone that no one would ever expect do it. But how do you get them to do it? Skilled assassins may be good at looking like normal people, but the best assassins would be people who are normal people. So you find a normal person. And you put a remote control in their brain.”
“You’ve been reading a few too many science fiction thrillers,” Lowen said.
“Not a remote control that gives you gross control over a body, with everything herky jerky,” Berger said. “No, what you want is something that will lay across the frontal lobes and then subtly and slowly, over the course of time, bend someone towards doing the unspeakable. Do it so the person doesn’t even notice their own personality changing, or questions the necessity to kill someone. They just go ahead and plan it and do it, like they’re filing taxes or making a report.”
“I think people would notice a remote control in someone’s head, though,” Lowen said. “Not to mention the hypothetical person would remember someone opening up their skull to get inside of it.”
“Well, if you were the sort of people w
ho would make this sort of remote control, you wouldn’t make it easy to find,” Berger said. “And you wouldn’t make it obvious when it was inserted. You’d find some way to slip it into their body when they weren’t expecting it.” He pointed at Lowen’s drink. “Nanobots in your drink, maybe. You’d only need a few and then you could program those few to replicate inside the body until you had enough. The only problem you might have is if the body starts trying to fight off the ’bots and then the person gets sick. That would present as, say, a meningitis of some sort.”
Lowen stopped sipping her drink and looked at Berger. “What did you just say?” she said.
“Meningitis,” Berger said. “It’s when there’s a swelling of the brain—”
“I know what meningitis is,” Lowen said.
“So it looks like meningitis,” Berger said. “At least until the people who have inserted the ’bots tweak the ’bots so that they don’t cause an immune response. And then after that, they stay in the brain, mostly passive and mostly undetectable, until they’re turned on and they perform their slow counterprogramming.”
Berger took another sip from his drink. “After that, it’s just a matter of timing,” he said. “You get the person with the remote control in the right places, let them use their own brains to take advantage of situations, and slip them just enough instruction and motivation that they do what you want them to, more or less when you want them to do it, and they think it’s their own idea. Their own quiet, secret idea that they feel no need to tell anyone else about. If they succeed, then the remote control shuts down and gets excreted out of the body over a few days and no one is the wiser, least of all the person who’s been remote controlled.”
“And if they fail?” Lowen asked, almost whispering.
“Then the person who’s being remote controlled finds a way to get rid of themself, so no one can find out about the remote control in their brain. Not that they know that’s why they’re doing it, of course. That’s the point of the remote control. Either way, you’ll never know that the remote control existed. You have no way of knowing. In fact, the only way you would ever know is if, say, someone who knows about these things tells you about them, perhaps because he’s sick of this sort of shit and doesn’t care about the consequences anymore.”