“It was the VA. I’m not surprised.”
“Yeah. You prior-service, McRae?”
“No. I’ve… been with the Bureau my whole life. Kind of a lifer. But some of the agents in the Bureau are ex-military. I’ve only heard stories about the VA.”
Ulysses nodded his head as though she had just commented on how nice the weather was.
“Are your prosthetics made with nanotech?” she asked.
“State-of-the-art nanotech. Yes, ma’am. They were upgraded just a few months ago.”
Scarlet thought back to what she had learned from Worm.
Not so great a leap from a leg to an entire body, Scarlet thought. If there’s someone who can tell me more about Hannah, it’s Mac Stone.
“You were EOD. What did Mac do in the Navy?”
Ulysses smiled slyly. “Ship’s captain, AFS Olympia-4. Best damned captain in the whole damned fleet. That guy was a legend among his crew. Any one of us would have gladly died for him.”
“How well did you know him?”
“Personally? I didn’t know him very well at all. Not at the time. I was just part of an EOD unit attached to his ship. We weren’t even essential to the operation of that ship. But he’d go through the decks every once in a while to ask us all how we were doing, whether we needed anything, and if we had any ideas for how the ship could be made a better place to work. I was just a lowly E-4 at the time, a Joe Snuffy Nobody, but he shook my hand personally and thanked me for my service to our country. He said…” Ulysses fell silent, appearing unsure whether or not to say more.
“What did he say?” asked Scarlet.
The helicopter’s thumping filled the silence between them.
He looked forlornly into Scarlet’s eyes for a long moment. She looked back into his and could see a blend of pain, loss, and admiration in them. For someone so young, his eyes seemed to glow with great depth of feeling and maturity, and she wondered how he had acquired that depth at such a young age. He could not have been older than thirty.
He looked her squarely in the eye. “He said that if I ever needed anything—anything at all—to let him know. He was like that for all of us.”
“You have a lot of respect for him,” Scarlet observed.
“Yeah. Totally. He saved me. He really did.”
“Saved you? What from?”
A look of discomfort flashed subtly across his face, and he looked away from her.
Neither spoke for a few minutes. As the helicopter continued its flight westward, the towers of New Washington, D.C. grew fainter and smaller in the hazy distance.
Chapter Six
From a private letter dated Sept 9, 2070:
Always control your toys. They should never be allowed to gain any real autonomy. They can quibble about details and such, and dance around the periphery of the general use to which they’re being put, but their unspoken job description—their job’s essential, general character—is to be like loyal little pieces on a chessboard, doing exactly what they’ve been programmed or instructed to do, regardless of their personal sense of right and wrong. They need not and should not be allowed a view of the whole board itself, nor be given the game’s central object.
If they balk at your orders or refuse to carry them out, no trouble at all: There are a hundred other order-followers—no, a thousand of them!—hungry as starved, beaten dogs, pulling at their leashes to take that one’s place on the board for as little as a flashier job-title, a nominal raise, or even just a pat on the back. People’s conscience is surprisingly, delightfully, and disgustingly easy to buy. I tell you from personal experience, dear nephew: Some toys will trade theirs for as little as a better parking space, which costs you absolutely nothing to provide.
So, replace the defective toy with the new toy, at the lowest cost to yourself. In this way, you can keep your toys affordably in check and keep them busy doing what you want them to do.
The foundation of top-tier bureaucracy is the subversion of the individual consciences below itself in the hierarchy. You bring their individual wills into alignment with the organization’s, completely and unreservedly. Your toys exist to serve you, you see, not themselves or the greater good, though they are often quiet adept at convincing themselves that they do just that. They feel themselves to be justified. After all, if they’re just following orders, how can they feel responsible for what they do? Yet it is precisely their doing that we require to bring our own, marvelous aims into perfect manifestation.
An iron-clad claim on their livelihood works wonders to bring them into alignment with broad goals that they not only do not understand, but do not want to understand, or even cannot understand. Let their paychecks depend upon not understanding their true purpose on the game board.
The delightfulness and usefulness of toys cannot be overstated, dear nephew. It is virtually endless. Your toys can be commanded or programmed to raze their own inner-world to the ground, foul their own rivers and air, outsource the raising of their children to a deliberately dysfunctional education system we control, trust only our version of so-called “news,” write and enforce laws that harm and plunder even their own families and communities, kidnap and detain indefinitely anyone who defies our infallible laws, invade and demolish other countries to steal their resources in the name of regime-change or democracy, chain their very lives to an unwelcome fate, and they will do all of these things—and more—willingly and gratefully.
No, more than willingly! They would beg us on hands and knees to allow them to live like that, should it somehow be forbidden, for this general lifestyle is their conception of freedom and order, and they would even riot if they should somehow not be allowed to serve us in this state of duress, self-enslavement, and moral cowardice. I laugh at them often. Full-throated, hours-long laughter! They are endlessly amusing. They are the best toys I can think of to own.
Never forget the delusion they are under, though, so that you will not inadvertently weaken or question it by word or deed.
If you can manage to keep your toys in line, you own the board. Not the game. But the board. The game is beyond your control—it was put here by whoever or whatever created this reality—God, or what have you—but the board can be wholly owned by you. (Do you still think God is good, given the games he’s created? It is up to us to create better games, which we will, given enough time and power. May we all be patient enough to see them brought into manifestation.)
This letter is getting long. I will wrap it up for your succinctly: Own the board by owning your toys.
Always.
You can thank me later.
Uncle Illias
Chapter Seven
“I said I was depressed,” Ulysses confessed after some time, “but that wasn’t all. When I was discharged from the Navy, I was out of a job and out on the streets in a wheelchair that I had to pay for myself. Those were dark, hard days, let me tell you. I was alone. Aimless. Man, I didn’t know what I was doing… what I shoulda been doing…” He shook his head. “Whatever money I got from the VA, I spent it on pills and booze to try to drown out the pain of losing my legs and my career.” His eyes shut tight. “I didn’t want to live anymore, so I wheeled myself onto a bridge and stared down into the water for a long time. A long time, ma’am.”
Scarlet maintained a respectful silence as he unfolded his story for her.
“Some of the people traveling in cars over the bridge told me to jump.” He reopened his eyes, and they resolved into a look of remembered pain. “They laughed and jeered at me, even threw a drink at me. I had sworn to protect them with my life, and now they wanted me dead.
“I remembered what Mac had told me, though. I thought for a long time whether I should dump myself into that damned river and end it all—or if I should maybe contact him. Did he really mean what he’d said all those years ago? I mean, was his word still good, even in a circumstance like this, when I wasn’t even in the military anymore? I looked into the swirling, black-green water some more th
at night, for what seemed like a long time, just thinking… Funny, isn’t it?” He chuckled bitterly. “I used to live atop the water in that ship; it kept me afloat all this time. And now I was going to die in it. It would have been a sailor’s death… Well, sort of. ‘How fitting,’ I remember thinking at the time. How fitting…”
He lifted the visor of his helmet and wiped an eye with the back of his wrist.
“I didn’t want to contact him—really, I didn’t—but something inside me made me try. I decided it’d be all right if I at least tried. What the hell, right? I figured the worst he could say would be no. But it turned out he didn’t interview me or ask me for my qualifications, my employment history, or for any references at all. I just told him who I was and how I knew him. He told me he remembered me, and we shot the shit for a while about the good old days. Then, when I asked him if I could work for him, he said—flat-out, no hesitation—that he had a job ready for me and that I could come and take it anytime I wanted.
“I told him about the IED that got me. I told him I had lost both legs below the knee, lost most of my left butt-cheek, was addicted to pain-killers, and was stuck in a barely-functional wheelchair, but he didn’t care. He said he’d be honored if I’d join his team.”
Ulysses paused, held himself silent, as though tasting the moment again in his memories.
“He said he’d help me break my addiction to the drugs. He said he’d help me get prosthetics that wouldn’t hurt my stumps. He said I could have a job working for him if I wanted it. He said he’d be honored if ‘a veteran like me’ would join his team.
“Well, Miss, what would you have done? I wheeled myself off that stupid bridge, one shove of my wheels at a time—me, with a sour-smelling old flannel shirt and a scruffy beard—and took a bus to the outskirts of the capitol, where one of his people picked me up… in a helicopter a lot like this one, actually. I got to go to Mac’s complex and live there.
“It’s real nice there, at his place. He’s got a lot of ex-Navy people working for him there on various things: intel, counter-intel, medical care, tech development, weapons systems. You name it. We live there together, at his complex, and help each other out. It’s like a small version of the military, but privatized and a whole lot better, and instead of waging war, we’re in business. A different kind of battlefield. We all share in the work, so we all share in the rewards.
“There weren’t too many explosives to disarm at his place, though, so he offered me the position of butler. I accepted it whole-heartedly. Whole-heartedly, man.” He slowly exhaled a breath of air, his puffed cheeks deflating. “I felt respectable and valued again. That sounds strange, doesn’t it? But it’s true. To Mac, you see, a butler is much more than a butler.” He grinned sheepishly, but his eyes were twinkling. “I ended up doing a lot more than buttling, I can tell you that. Actually, I did almost no buttling at all.
“That’s Mac for you. He wouldn’t dare have a butler who was just some stuffy, stuck-up, old dude who just tidied up the place with a feather duster and handed out shitty, years-old crumpets to snobby, boring guests. No, he wanted someone who could shoot a rifle, throw grenades, and take charge if need be. He told me he wanted someone who knew how to make a mess, not just someone who could clean one up.”
He looked up at the ceiling of the copter, reminiscing. The blades outside whirled steadily within the cold morning air. “I just did odd jobs around the place, but, God, how good that felt to have some pride in myself again and to be with the boys… the boys…”
“Why did he send you for me?” Scarlet asked, not wanting to break his reverie but seeing no choice, all things considered, to do otherwise.
He turned his attention back to her and looked suddenly quite serious. “I volunteered. One of our sources inside the NSB told us you were kicked off the agency’s investigation. Said you had become some kind of bad-ass lone wolf who was hunting down the girl who broke into Quincy Air Force Base. We tracked you down. Not easy to find you, ma’am, but we did it. You were the only PIR agent whose absence from the investigation wouldn’t be noticed, so we figured it wouldn’t cause a fuss if we… you know… quietly brought you in.”
“And what does your boss want with me, exactly?”
Ulysses laughed good-naturedly. “He wants your help finding the girl. What else?”
Chapter Eight
Inside the lab, chairs, desks, and computer terminals had been overturned and thrown about as though by a tornado. Wires had been ripped and left dangling from various places in the ceiling. Every incubation tank in view had been smashed, and their synthetic amniotic fluids, crimson and stringy, had spilled onto the concrete floor, pooling and coagulating in the way that blood might on the linoleum of a slaughterhouse.
“This is a privately owned robotics lab, is it not, Doctor?” Rodrigo asked to Stan Griswold, the chief scientist at the lab.
The square-jawed scientist, looking shell-shocked, blinked his puffy eyes behind a pair of circular-lensed spectacles and nodded his head, but said nothing. The destruction around him had been catastrophic.
After his shocked silence, the scientist rubbed the stubble on his face and answered, “It was. I mean, it used to be. A few years ago, we agreed to take on a government contract. We did robotics and cybernetics here, mostly for private industry, but then also a bit for the federal government.”
“Was your lab involved in any way with the Air Force?” Rodrigo asked, wondering if there might be a connection between what had happened here and what had happened at Quincy. He looked for a place to sit but could find none.
No place that was clean and obviously meant for sitting, anyway.
“Not that I know of,” the scientist replied. “But then, I had access to only my part of the lab once we contracted out the other part of it to the government. The government guys—they effectively ‘rented’ a part of our lab and used it. Told us never to go in there. Even sealed off and locked that area from us as part of our agreement. We just… let them be. They had some sort of partnership with Arasanti Nanotech, from what I gathered. We figured if the money was good—and it was—then we had no right to complain or interfere.”
Rodrigo, Beth, and Rick all turned their gaze to meet each others’, then looked toward the scientist.
“And the government’s section of the lab—was it damaged at all?” Rick asked.
“I imagine it all was,” Dr. Griswold lamented. “The whole lab—destroyed from within. All our work. All our research. Gone. Years of progress, all lost.” He swung his head down and clutched his wispy hair with his fists. He was biting his lower lip.
“This all happened overnight, right?” Beth asked.
Dr. Griswold glared at her with a pair of bleary, stressed-out eyes. “Yes,” he managed to say, barely holding himself together, “that is correct. At least, it was fine when we locked it up yesterday.”
“Was there anyone here while this happened, besides the perpetrator or perpetrators?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No. I don’t know. None of my guys were. I don’t know if any of the government’s guys were. They kept to themselves. None appear to be here now. I’m pretty sure they left for good. There was some kind of rush here yesterday afternoon, in their section of the lab. Outside, we heard them moving stuff out through the service-entrance, yelling, yelling, yelling. Sounded serious, like they were panicked and didn’t have much time. They were loading things onto some big semi-trucks that came by and carried off whatever they had kept in there.”
“Doesn’t that make you suspicious of them?” Rick asked. “It’s like they knew this was coming. They may even have done it themselves.”
The scientist’s eyeballs fluttered behind closed eyelids. “What I know is this: If you start sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, when it concerns off-the-books government operations, you’ll probably wind up dead. Or worse.” He opened his eyes, and there was loss in them, the look that a man has when he’s been stranded and has no way home.
“I’m not stupid. I knew from the beginning—at least, I strongly suspected—that their part of this lab was going to be used for these kinds of dark projects. Why else use us and not an official, pre-existing government facility? But we needed the money. Badly. So I took it on a gamble for the sake of my employees. I knew better than to ask too many questions.”
“Who was your government contact?” Rodrigo asked. “At some point, you must have met someone face-to-face. You must have had a number to call. An address to send mail to.”
“I only met him once. During our initial conversation about the contract. Little guy but with a commanding presence. I don’t know whether his name was real or fake. Like I said, I—I didn’t ask too many questions. He said he worked for you guys, the NSB. When I first heard which agency was coming this morning, it made sense to me that it’d be the NSB.” He blinked. “Anyway, like I was saying, money was regularly deposited into our bank account, just like he said it would be. It kept us afloat. There was never any trouble, so I didn’t have much reason to contact him after the deal was made. I just…” He shrugged, helpless.
“And what might the name of this NSB employee be?” Rodrigo asked, his nose having caught the scent of something foul.
The scientist gulped, then revealed, “He called himself Pedone. Mr. Frank Pedone.”
Chapter Nine
Soon after Scarlet’s conversation with Ulysses, a text from Rodrigo arrived in her inner-phone.
Sorry for acting against your orders, chica, but this isn’t exactly insubordination. I got some info on Mac Stone that you need to know. Very dangerous, powerful man. Deeply involved in this case in a way we’re still working out. Maybe he’s even at the heart of it all. Avoid him at all costs. You don’t have the backup you need to take him down. I repeat: Do NOT pursue.
The Nightfall Billionaire: Serial Installment #3 (Scarlet McRae) Page 3