“We are going to fix it,” said one of the others. The Japanese man. “We cashed in our trust funds and raised money every way we could, then came out here to work. Away from our folks. And away from corporations who would try and stop us because abundance isn’t financially useful to them. It will force the big banks and the multinational conglomerates to rebuild the global economy. That will take time, and while they’re doing that, we’ll provide the information on how to do this to everyone. Open source. Free to everyone.”
“They don’t want us to succeed,” said Jiba. “The corporations and other people. We’ve been hacked more times than I can count. All nine of us had to buy fake IDs and go off the grid. We don’t want this stolen, and we don’t want to get hurt trying to finish this project.”
“Nine?” I said. “Who’s missing?”
“Gunter,” said Mahao. “He’s our resource guy. He went to N’Djamena, to the capital, to get some bulk materials we ordered. Seeds and a special chemical we need for the fertilizer. He was supposed to be back this morning, but he’s late.”
“Does he drive a Humvee?” I asked.
“No, why?”
“Do you know anyone who drives Humvees? Anyone you’re expecting to arrive tonight?”
“Here? God, no,” said Jiba, looking alarmed. “Gunter took a pickup truck. He’d never bring anyone else out here. We have a rule. Only the nine of us even know where this place is.”
“Shit,” said Bunny.
“Why?” asked Mahao.
Before I could answer, lights flashed through the window as the first of the Humvees swung onto the property outside the Lab.
I hurried to the window, and my heart sank. Men were scrambling out of the two Humvees. A lot of them. They were dressed in black, with body armor and weapons. Two of them dragged out a man who wasn’t dressed for combat. He was a chubby blond guy wearing only boxers and a bloody undershirt. Had to be Gunter, and suddenly the whole story began falling into place for me. Gunter goes to Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, to pick up chemicals and seeds. Either he said something to the wrong person, or our bad guys had people paying attention to anything out of the ordinary because they were conducting their own science experiments out here. I’m not good enough at math to figure the odds on how the Silentium goons wound up testing their cocci bioweapon in the same part of the goddamn Sahara as these earnest kids with their Lab. Million to one? People have bought scratch-off lottery tickets and become millionaires with worse odds.
From the damage I could see on Gunter’s face, it was clear they’d worked him over. The kid was a scientist, not a soldier. He wasn’t hardened to endure torture, and though idealism is often a sword, it is not a shield. They broke him, and I can only imagine how the Silentium cultists reacted to the news that a group of young nerds was cooking up something that would make a total joke of their entire argument. With a superabundance of food, overpopulation became a completely different thing. With deserts being turned to arable farmland, eight billion people weren’t as firmly cheek by jowl. There was no substance, then, to a belief that enforced population reduction was necessary. The Silentium was about to become pointless.
And so they forced Gunter to betray his friends, and the cult sent a bunch of goons out here to kill everyone and burn it all down.
So . . . want to hear some more funky math? Work in these variables . . .
What if we’d gotten here an hour earlier or an hour later?
What if that Nat Geo journalist hadn’t taken photos of a jet spraying something and tied it to inexplicable deaths . . . and had just enough of a conspiracy theory twitch that he thought he ought to tell someone about it?
What if the person he told dismissed it?
What if the story had not been told to the right person?
What if, what if, what if?
What if Top, Bunny, and I were not here?
I glanced at Top and Bunny. They nodded at me.
Here are some more numbers. There were twelve Silentium shooters and three of us.
Those odds?
Well, I like those odds.
7.
THE LAB
TÉNÉRÉ
SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA
They swarmed the building.
Three of them kicked in the back door and entered fast, the barrels of their Kalashnikovs leading the way. They walked right past Bunny, who rose up from behind the big dining table. He opened up on them with the shotgun, firing 12-gauge buckshot from ten feet and cutting them in half.
Another group burst in through the front door. I don’t know if they ever saw the grenade that Top threw. He timed it right, though, because it arced down between the lead guy and two on his rear flanks and detonated in the air. It blew parts of them out onto the driveway.
I had four come in through the shattered side windows of the rec room. They had to know something was up because the glass was already broken, but they came anyway. The Lab crew were in a storeroom and, I hoped, barricading the door.
I’d pulled the fridge out and turned it into a shooting blind. As the four climbed into the room, Bunny’s shotgun and Top’s grenade went off at almost the same moment. The shooters turned left and right. I was in the middle. Their guns were pointing the wrong way. Mine was not.
I hosed them with armor-piercing rounds. I emptied an entire magazine into them. You burn through a mag pretty fast. The tungsten-core cartridges didn’t give a wet shit about Kevlar body armor. Not generally, and not at that range.
Then I was up and moving, hurling a flash-bang out the window because I didn’t want to kill Gunter. I went out the window, tucked, rolled, and came up with my rifle, but damn it if one of the Silentium assholes wasn’t down on the deck. The other shooter was. How the last man evaded the flash-bang is something I’ll never know. He was three feet in front of me and tried to shoot me in the face, but he wasn’t set for it. He fired a heartbeat too soon and the world seemed to explode inside my head. His own accidental version of a flash and bang. But I was already moving, bringing my gun up to try to stitch him from balls to brains. He swung at my gun with his own, which was not the brightest move in the world. He managed to knock my gun away, but the swing moved his barrel too far, so when he fired again he missed. Again.
Then we were chest to chest, our long guns too clumsy for that kind of fight.
In movies these fight scenes go on and on. Not in combat. You either end the bad guy or you get ended yourself.
I released my rifle and struck him in the throat with the open Y formed between the stiffened index finger and thumb. Before he could even react I kicked his knee and blew it apart. He dropped and I clubbed him down to the dirt with a pile-driver punch between his shoulder blades. Even through the body armor I could feel bones break. My rifle had slewed around on its strap, so I drew my sidearm and shot him in the back of his right shoulder and the back of his left thigh. Then I pivoted toward the other shooter, who was trying to get to his feet while shaking off the effects of the flash-bang. I had a clear head shot, but I needed to ask some questions. So, for the same reason I didn’t kill the guy I’d just shot, I didn’t kill this asshole, either.
He was nine feet away and I’m a good shot. I shot him in that gap between the protective thigh pads and the hard-plastic kneecap. Aim at the center of the leg and you explode the base of each femur. Which I damn well did.
Top and Bunny came running around the building and into the driveway.
But our slice of the war with the Silentium was over.
Almost.
We took the weapons away from the two screaming men.
We even put field dressings around their wounds. Didn’t want them to bleed out. This was in no way a kindness.
Bunny took Gunter into the building, and he kept the Lab crew away from the windows. Top and I dragged the surviving cultists around behind the lead Humvee
. We used our knives to cut away their body armor. I heard the TV go on. Some kind of science fiction movie with loud dinosaur roars. The volume went all the way up. Bunny understood.
The wounded men were terrified. They were in agony. They cursed at us. They spat at us.
I knelt in front of the one I’d shot first. He was a white guy. Big and tough. His face was running with greasy sweat, and his eyes were jumping with pain.
“Silentium,” I said.
I saw what that word did to his eyes. They widened. They shifted away. And I knew I was right.
“Do you speak English?” I asked mildly.
“Go . . . fuck yourself . . .” he growled. His accent was pure New Jersey. Fair enough.
“This is going to make it easy,” I said. “I’ve got a whole bunch of questions, and I bet you know a whole bunch of really useful stuff. Names. Locations. Timetables. Stuff like that.”
I think I was grinning. Not sure.
He wasn’t. Top wasn’t. And I doubted anyone inside the Lab or at the TOC was grinning. I probably was.
“We’re doing . . . this . . .” he gasped, fighting the pain, “to . . . save the world.”
I patted his cheek.
“Who gives a fuck?” I said. I drew my Wilson Tactical Combat Rapid Response knife from my pocket and with the flick of my wrist snapped the blade into place. That blade is only three and a half inches long. Length is relative, though. Scalpels are much shorter. It’s all about how something is used.
“Names,” I repeated. “Locations. And timetables.”
He shook his head.
People think they’re tough. They think they are able to endure. Gunter hadn’t been able to resist them. This guy knew that. Why, I wondered, did he think he’d be able to resist me?
But . . .
He told us everything he knew. Every last bit. Who was running Silentium. Where the next strikes were planned. How they got the bioweapons. My friend there was very willing to talk. So, as it turned out, was his friend, who told the same stuff to Top.
As I said, we are good men, but we are not nice ones.
Nice ones don’t save the world.
Nice ones can’t.
8.
PHOENIX HOUSE
OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE
We sat in the mess hall back at Phoenix House, watching the news.
The lead story on every network was the dismantling of Silentium. It was, according to Jake and Wolf and Anderson and Sean and Rachel, a joint effort on the part of governments that set aside politics and fought for the common good. Sure. That’s a good version of the story to tell. It’ll be great when someone makes a movie. A feel-good story.
What’s that old saying? When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. Sure. In the news, the only monsters were the millenarian cultists who wanted to destroy lives in order to create a version of the world they wanted. They were the monsters of the piece.
Top, Bunny, and I were not mentioned at all.
And that, I suppose, is how we all sleep at night.
NOT IN THIS LIFETIME
SHARON SHINN
Lili doesn’t believe me when I tell her we were friends many times in the past, but she likes to hear the stories anyway.
“Where did we live last time?” she asks.
“New York City. We were waitresses then, too.”
“When was it?”
“Nineteen sixty-five.”
“So were we out marching for civil rights? Did we go to consciousness-raising sessions and burn our bras?”
I laugh. “No. We got stoned and listened to the Grateful Dead.”
“Did we go to Woodstock?”
“That was 1969.”
“Right, but we could have gone anyway. Were we still friends in 1969?”
I was dead by then, but I don’t want to tell her that. “Not really.”
“Why?”
I shrug. “Why do friends ever drift apart?”
Lili stops asking me questions for a minute so she can wipe down the last two tables while I refill saltshakers. It’s Monday morning, the diner will open in less than half an hour, and there’s still a lot to get done.
“How did we meet?” she asks. “Do you remember?”
“I was walking to work one day. You were standing under an awning, smoking a cigarette. I stopped and asked if I could borrow one, and we got to talking.”
“Did you recognize me? You know, from before.”
I turn to smile at her. Even in the gingham polyester apron that all Deli-Lishes employees have to wear, with her frizzy black hair pulled back in a ponytail so it won’t get in the food, Lili is adorable. Bubbly as a cheerleader, friendly as a puppy. One of my best days, in every life, is the one in which I meet her again for the first time.
“Of course I did. That’s why I stopped to ask for the cigarette.”
“I can’t believe I smoked back then.”
“Everybody smoked.”
“Did I recognize you?”
I laugh and shake my head. “You never do.”
“Did we work at the same place that time?”
“No, I was at a bar down the street.”
“But we became friends anyway?”
“We did. We found out we lived in the same neighborhood, so at night we’d wait for each other’s shift to end so we could take the subway back home together. Felt a little safer that way.”
“But we weren’t roommates?”
“Nah. You were living with Adam.”
“Adam,” she says, trying out the sound of the name. I can see her nod of satisfaction when she decides she likes it. “Was he cute? Was he nice?”
“Really cute. Really nice. When we got to your place at midnight, we’d wake him up and then he’d walk me the rest of the way home.”
“Did you have a boyfriend, too?”
“For a while. But we broke up.”
“Why?”
“I don’t remember.” It’s the first lie I’ve told her. This time, anyway.
“Was my name Lili back then?”
“It was, but you spelled it differently. With a y instead of an i.”
“Is my name always Lili?”
“Mmm, no. Sometimes it’s Lilah. Once it was Delilah. It’s usually got a bunch of Ls in it, though.”
“Was your name Sasha?”
I shook my head. “No. I have a different name every time.”
She’s headed back to the kitchen, but pauses to poke me as she passes. “No wonder I never recognize you,” she says playfully. “If you’re always changing your name.”
Changing my name, changing my appearance, doing everything I can to disappear or alter the course of events. Trying to make sure my life is different this time around. It never works. I just smile. “I like to mix it up a little,” I say.
I follow her to the kitchen. We have to pass Armand, who’s stocking the cash register and straightening the order pads and cups of pens laid out at the front counter. He wears his usual expression of brooding intensity, as if he alone has been told the fate of the world and it’s a dire one. He casts me one long, measuring look and I know he’s been listening to our conversation with a mix of scorn and incredulity. Armand has never said out loud that he doesn’t believe any of the tales I’ve told Lili, but his expression has always made it clear that he thinks I’m either a liar or a lunatic or a little of both. But he’s too aloof to say so to my face.
Well, he makes a point of saying very little to me at all. Fine with me. I have enough other things to worry about.
Back in the kitchen, Sanjay and Juwan are chopping tomatoes and cutting open bulk boxes of hamburger buns. Lili pauses to rinse her cleaning cloths in the sink while I get out the big ketchup bottles so I can refill the smaller ones on the tables.
“Did we know Sanjay and Juwan in New York?” Lili asks.
Both men look up in interest at that. Everyone who works in the place has heard some of my stories. I think Sanjay might actually believe them, while everyone else is too polite to say outright that they think I have an overactive imagination. Even so, with the exception of Armand, they all like to hear the tales.
I shake my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember them, anyway.”
“My mother tells me I’m a very old soul,” Sanjay says. “But I was probably in India in my last incarnation.”
Juwan makes a kissy face from across the kitchen. “If you knew me before, you’d remember me now,” he says in his deep voice.
I laugh. “I’ll look for you in the next life.”
“Plenty of this life left,” he says suggestively, and we all laugh.
Armand pokes his head through the kitchen door. “Customers,” he says, and backs out again.
We all look at each other, shrugging and rolling our eyes. No one can kill a mood like Armand.
“Time to go to work,” Lili says.
* * *
—
It’s my favorite kind of day. There’s a steady stream of customers, no one is too much of an asshole, no one stiffs us on a bill, and no one I recognize comes through the door. Well, I mean, some of them I recognize—regulars who stop by Deli-Lishes two or three times a month. But no one I’ve known in a previous life.
Which isn’t surprising, right? New York is almost eight hundred miles from Chicago. How many people would have made that migration in the past fifty or so years? Maybe I’ve left a lot of demons behind this time.
Maybe.
The only moment that gets a little weird is when an older woman, probably in her late fifties, takes a seat at my table around the dinner hour. She’s big, a little flushed, as if the heat of early spring has made her remember how wretched it is to sweat. She sucks down the first glass of ice water I bring her, and thanks me fervently when I bring her a whole pitcher to keep at her table.
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