"I was worried. You screamed and dropped the phone." My turn to sound incredulous. "I was scared."
He sighs and spins to the wall, leaning against it. "You can control my phone?"
"Of course I can. Mulberry, I can control every piece of equipment associated with our organization. You know that."
"I guess..."
"It is vitally important for security."
"What about privacy?"
Ah, the age-old question: What do we give up in exchange for security? The social contract—every justice system—exists in an attempt to answer this question. "Have you read Hobbes?"
"The Hobbit?"
I snort. "No. But kind of actually..." There are themes about justice and the social contract in Tolkien's classic epic. I shake my head. Not now. "Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher. He came up with a theory that, in order to survive in a hostile world, we must enter into a social contract in which we give up some of our liberty in order to enjoy the security of a powerful state. Basically, the rule of law protects me, and I follow the rule of law." Not going to mention Hobbes theory that it should be a single ruler in charge of everything...
"Dan, I’ve read Hobbes.” Mulberry’s voice is tight with annoyance. “Are you watching us through our phones? Yes or no?"
"No." The lie justifies the outcome here—Machiavelli is underrated in my humble opinion.
"But you can watch and listen to us?"
"Yes." I clear my throat. "Mulberry, I can watch almost anyone in the world through their phone." I say it low, quiet. Let that sink in. "Part of my job is to make sure that no one is watching you through your phone."
"Except you?"
I can taste the bitterness in his voice on the back of my tongue. Fuck him. I saved Sydney's life. I bite my tongue hard enough to wince. Don't say anything you'll regret.
"How is Sydney?" I finally ask, already knowing the answer. I glance over to her screen. She's reading about bed rest. Wait… what the fuck is that? I expand the live code feed. I'm not the only one watching her phone. My eyes narrow. My fingers find the keyboard, and I'm on them, chasing the little fucker around her phone. They are hiding in the messages… yes. There it is. A text from… no, this doesn't make sense. How are you hiding yourself?
"Dan!"
"Haley, disconnect call." My computer complies and ends the call with Mulberry. I need to concentrate if I'm going to remove this spy… this intruder. A smile pulls at my lips. I do love a challenge. A chase.
Vibration wakes me. I jerk to attention, knocking over a half-empty cup of coffee. Fuck. It flows across the desk toward one of my keyboards. I grab up the mug and swipe at the liquid with my shirt hem, staunching its advancement.
I scan the office for a more permanent solution. A roll of paper towels lies on the coffee table in front of the black leather couch, along with a bunch of other half-finished mugs of tea and coffee. I really need to clean up. The vibrating stops, and my phone chimes that I have a message.
I grab the paper towels and soak up the rest of the spill before checking my phone. Mom called again. It's after nine at night here, so six in the morning in Jersey. My sleep schedule is totally screwed up.
I hit reply, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and checking to make sure my work eradicated the intruder on Sydney's phone. A strange bug: echoes of Homeland Security’s clunky footprints but with the shine of Fortress Global's camouflage.
"Dan." I can hear the smile in Mom's voice when she answers.
"Hey, Ma, how are you?" I yawn and lean back in my chair, stretching my back. Falling asleep at my desk is doing a number on me physically.
"Well..." I don't like the length of the pause. "Tell me about you first."
"I'm good." I sit forward and open up her email. It's been a while since I checked on Mom's messages.
"Your start-up is still doing well? You're busy."
"Yes, but I always have time for you, Mom."
"I don't want to distract you. I know what you do is important." She has no idea what I do. I lie to protect her. Story of my life.
"Mom, what's going on?" There is an edge of annoyance in my voice that I don't like. "Sorry, you're worrying me." I sit back and stare out the glass wall in front of me to the command center of Joyful Justice. Below my office, the rows of computer banks are half full. Rachel, my second-in-command, is leaning over one of the newest recruits, pointing at the screen. On the double-height wall of monitors are a few maps but no active missions. It's all recon right now.
Mom sighs, focusing my attention. "I've been diagnosed with cancer. Breast. So… well, it's stage 3. I should be fine. But I might not be." The floor drops out from under me. I'm floating above the command center with no safety net. "I'm sorry, Dan. I don't want to be a distraction." How in the hell did I miss this?
"Mom, wait." I hold up a hand as if that can keep the oblivion from swallowing me.
"I start chemo today."
"Today? Why didn't you call me earlier? I'll fly out now." I'm at least twenty-four hours away from New Jersey though. I'll never make it for her appointment.
"I did call, honey." Her voice is quiet. "You don't need to come all this way. I'll be fine."
"I'm coming, Mom."
After we hang up, I stare down at the phone in my hand. I wasn't paying enough attention. That isn’t like me.
Steps sound on the spiral staircase leading to my office, followed by a knock at the door. I don't respond. The door opens anyway, and I swivel around.
Rachel has both hands on her hips and is filling the doorway. She wears her uniform of board shorts, a button-up shirt, and a bandana keeping her short hair off her face. "You have barely left this room in two weeks, dude! I’m dragging you out of here." Rachel's brown eyes are narrowed with determination.
"My mom..."
"What happened to your shirt?" she asks, glancing around the room. "This place is insane, Dan. You know I understand getting sucked into a project, but you need fresh air—"
"I have to go now." I stand.
Rachel throws her hands in the air. "Thank you! Let's go for a walk. Have you eaten?"
I shake my head. "No, I have to go to New Jersey."
"New Jersey?" Her confusion is complete.
"My mom. She's sick." The words are a fist to my Adam's apple. She can't die. No. No. No. My hands clench into fists. No. I will not allow it.
Chapter Four
Sydney
James links his arm through mine as we stroll down the street. It's a gorgeous sunny fall day, and the trees are bursting with color. "So, what are you going to do?" he asks me.
"I don't know," I answer, my tone grumpy and petulant.
James laughs. "You don't want to go to Costa Rica or the island. So where do you want to go?"
I shrug. "I should go somewhere safe, I guess."
"Where is safe?"
"Where no one knows me. A place where no one would expect me to go."
"What about Spain?" James asks, excitement edging his voice. "You could go to Barcelona and learn to flamenco.”
I laugh. "That has got to be the antithesis of bed rest."
James laughs. "Bed rest sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me."
"Me too," I agree. We stop in front of a brownstone and look up at the glass-fronted doors. The sun glints off the polished-wood frame. James pulls me down onto the stoop. "I just don't know what to do."
James puts his arm around me. "Trust yourself, Joy. That's all you can ever do."
I shake my head. "I've made too many mistakes." My voice is small, scared. I got you killed.
"There are no such things as mistakes, just lessons you need to learn."
"I guess I'm a bad student because I can't seem to get anything right."
He shrugs and laughs. "Not with that attitude you won't."
A knocking sound distracts James, and he turns to look up the stoop to the doors. "Time to go," he says.
"Already?"
"I'll see you soon." He ki
sses the top of my head. Blue's wet nose on my knuckles pulls me fully from the dream.
"Hey, boy," I say, rubbing his snout. His tail thumps loudly on the floor.
The knocking sounds again, and Blue urges me up with a snout push.
I find Anita at the door. She’s wearing a bright blue tunic and white jeans, and she’s holding a paper bag of takeout. "I brought wonton soup."
"Sounds good. Thanks." I step aside so she can enter the hotel room.
"How is bed rest going?" Anita asks, putting the bag of food down on the desk while I put the security latch back on the door.
"I'm probably going to murder Mulberry," I say, sitting on the bed as she starts pulling out cartons of food. He brought me home from the hospital and circled me like a mother hen until I made him leave.
"Where is he now?” Anita asks.
"I told him to fuck the fuck off."
"You've always had a way with words."
I huff a laugh. "He is all for me taking naps, so I took one." I yawn, my eyes tearing a little with exhaustion.
"Well, you'll be in Costa Rica soon, and then you'll have plenty of people who are not Mulberry to wait on you." She looks over her shoulder and grins at me.
I wince. “I’m not going to Costa Rica.”
Anita raises a brow and cocks her head, turning fully to face me. “You’re going to the island?”
“No.”
“Where then?” She crosses her arms in front of her chest.
I stand up from the bed and pace to the window. Sunlight glints off a plane's wing as it climbs into the gauzy clouds. I grew up in the flight path of a military base, and I’d often see giant cargo planes making their approach. They seemed to be impossibly large and to move impossibly slowly; it was a wonder they could fly at all.
“I’m going to Spain,” I tell Anita.
Her clothing rustles as she steps up next to me. “Spain?” Her voice is neutral. “What’s in Spain?”
“I’ve never been there. I don’t want to go to Costa Rica, and I don’t want to go to the island. I want to be alone, just for a few weeks. I’m not saying I’m going to move there forever or disappear. I just need some time.”
I turn back to the room and stare at my duffle and the clothing spilling out of it. Blue sits by the door, Nila and Frank on either side of him, waiting patiently for me. Blue is still the biggest of the three dogs, with the height of a Great Dane, the long elegant snout of a Collie, and the markings of a Siberian Husky, he watches me with his one blue eye and one brown interpreting every move I make.
His daughter, Nila, inherited the pure white coat of her mother—a Mastiff from the mountains of Kurdish-controlled Syria—and the bright blue eyes of her father. Her gaze radiates a fierce intelligence. Her brother, Frank, is a dufus. He inherited Blue’s height and markings, but has not filled out yet. His giant paws make him clumsy and his sweet nature makes him a terrible guard dog. Both puppies’ snouts are shorter than Blue’s, and their bodies stockier. They were hoping for a jog, but I won’t get to run, not for a while. Frustration tightens my hands into fists.
“I don’t know if this is the best time for a vacation, Sydney,” Anita says, annoyance edging into her voice now.
“I’ll be careful, I promise. I’ll have Blue with me.”
“What about Nila and Frank?”
“I’m going to send them on ahead to Costa Rica.”
“Have you talked to Merl about that?”
I look over at her. She meets my gaze unflinching. “He’ll watch them for a few weeks; it’s not a big deal.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want my baby born into this,” I burst out.
“Into what?” Anita asks, keeping her voice calm.
I pace away from the window toward the bed and start shoving my clothing into the duffle. Frustration’s close cousin, anger, makes my movements jerky. “Into all this violence. Into all this...” I stop. I don’t know how to express what I want for my kid. My kid. Jesus.
"I don’t want to move to Costa Rica or an island in the middle of the freaking Pacific to be coddled by a bunch of people who think I’m a hero. I don’t want to be surrounded by people who look at me like I am anything more than a flawed human." I look up from the duffle, which is now fully stuffed with my clothing. Anita is watching me, sunlight spilling around her where she leans against the window. "I need a break from Joyful Justice."
"But, Sydney—"
I hold up a hand. "This isn't me running away. I just want space. I want to be by myself. Maybe just for a month. Maybe more. I don't know."
"Okay." Anita looks down at her feet. "Fine. But just a gentle reminder that people are trying to assassinate you."
"I don't think that's true."
She meets my gaze. "You don't?"
"No. I don't think Robert is dead." Anita's eyes fill with sympathy. I shake my head and zip the duffle closed with a sharp zing. "I'm not in denial because I loved him or anything crazy like that. It just doesn't make sense to me. I mean—" I shrug and let out a breath of a laugh. "—I can see why someone would want to kill Robert, but the motives we've been offered don't make sense to me.”
Robert’s son, Fernando, who he just learned about recently, runs a criminal organization with his mother, Natalia—a former FARC rebel turned international drug dealer. Fernando wanted Robert dead for personal reasons that aligned with his business goals of destroying Joyful Justice. Fernando and Natalia are part of a criminal cabal that wants to end our crusade to exact justice with a two pronged approach—kill off key members of the organization and destroy Joyful Justice’s reputation.
Fernando lured Robert, Anita, and me to the hurricane refugee center where a woman, the week earlier, had killed several people claiming Joyful Justice gave her the assault rifle she used—their first move to tarnish our reputation as a principled, organized vigilante network. Joyful Justice would never hand over a powerful weapon to a distraught person and suggest they kill indiscriminately to assuage their own pain.
While we were there, paid plants in the crowd began chanting Joyful Justice slogans before starting a riot—another attempt to make our organization look dangerous. My mother, April Madden, arrived with a bus load of Her Prophet followers—women and men, but mostly women, who believe in a burka-clad prophet who emerged from the Syrian bloodlands claiming to bring a message from God that it is time for women to rise up against the patriarchy. To release the wolf inside them and refuse to be subjugated. My mother, April Madden, has traveled the country spreading “the word”.
Several vans of incels—self-described involuntary celibates who blame women for their misery and believe they are entitled to the use of any woman’s body—arrived next. Turning it into a full on shit show.
In the melee, a sniper shot Robert, and he fell into the toxic waters of a canal, disappearing into its murky depths. So…I don’t know that he died. He’s like a cockroach, impossible to kill…at least that’s what I’ve always thought.
“It is more effective to destroy Joyful Justice's reputation than to kill us off one by one. You can't destroy an idea, Anita, not with a gun. Besides, Robert was hardly an official member of Joyful Justice. The whole thing smells funny to me. And in my experience with Robert, nothing is as it seems."
Anita nods slowly. "Nothing is ever as it seems anymore, Sydney."
"What does that mean?"
Anita sighs and pushes off from the window, headed toward the food. "Everyone is in their own reality now. With social media, we all just get the feeds that are augmented for us. We think we choose them but we don’t. Every action we make across any device is combed, analyzed, and then an algorithm gives us more of what we ‘want’…more of what advertisers want us to see. There are forces doing their best to destroy Joyful Justice's reputation."
Anita looks up at me, her eyes holding a challenge. Anita will fight that war until it's won. "These are the data wars, Sydney. It's different than anything the world has faced before
. False narratives and propaganda are easy to disseminate. Each message can be tailored to your world view. Killing Robert makes sense to me for one reason."
"What's that?" I ask. Anita opens a takeout container and tears into a pack of chopsticks.
"Because Robert had a lot of experience with propaganda. Fortress Global provided all kinds of security for its authoritarian clients, including weapons-grade communications. If you're a dictator, you want your people to keep loving you; makes it easier to stay in power."
I nod. "That makes sense." Anita hands me a carton of food and chopsticks. The scent of sweet hoisin hits my nose, and my stomach growls.
Anita smiles at the sound. "Eat," she says, waving at the box in my hand—it's full of steaming buns. "When Robert destroyed Fortress Global and started Dog Fight Investigations, he took one department with him whole."
"Which one?"
"His data team." Anita picks up another carton and opens her own set of chopsticks. She leans against the desk. "Data, Sydney, is the 21st century’s most dangerous weapon. Not only because it makes it so easy to manipulate people but also because it turns them into the product."
"What do you mean?" I sit on the bed and bite into one of the buns. It's sweet and salty and so damn good.
"Your data becomes the product. You are the product for social media companies—they sell information about their users to advertisers, to anyone who wants it. The buyers can then use that intimate knowledge to sell you anything from a,” she waves a chopstick in the air, “mystery novel, to a vision of the world where fascism is freedom. There are few industries where people are the product, and they are not auspicious—slavery and sex work, which as you know often turns into its own form of slavery."
"Yes," I agree, my appetite evaporating.
"Sorry." Anita gestures at my food. "Eat, it's important."
My eyes narrow. "Are you and Mulberry in cahoots?"
She laughs and digs into her own takeout box. We eat in silence. Frank sets himself up on Anita's foot, hoping for some scraps. Blue and Nila stay by the door, throwing disdainful glances at Frank's blatant tactics.
Blind Vigilance Page 3