Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  From Joe’s perspective, the time it took to get from the curb to the center of the mall was somewhere between goddamn forever and a fucking eternity. There were approximately ten million people in the way, too, because other than the gunshot, somebody pulled a fire alarm, so an entire city’s worth of people dropped everything and got the hell out.

  There was already a news van out front, which was just ridiculous. He had fifteen police cars ignoring all traffic lights to converge on the mall at the Pru, and a damn news truck beat them there.

  “Make a hole!” Joe barked on exiting his car. The uniforms who’d gotten there ahead of him were already focusing on crowd control, pushing the shoppers away from the entrance.

  Joe found Sergeant Pekoe at the door. Pekoe was supposed to be suspended, but Joe couldn’t think of any good reason to bring that up at this moment.

  “Will, establish a perimeter,” he said.

  “How far?”

  “The goddamn river, if you have to.”

  A firetruck siren sounded from a block or two off.

  “Have them help. I don’t think there’s a fire. And someone get me a bullhorn.”

  Police officers were converging on the scene. Since the Center Court could be accessed from multiple directions, each direction got at least two cops. All of them followed the lead of the first responder—the kid hiding behind the kiosk—by seeking cover. Bernard was clearly aware of the crowd they were attracting.

  “How does it work?” Corrigan asked.

  “The bomb?”

  “Yes, the bomb. I see a cell phone hooked up to it. Do you have a trigger or something?”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Sort of difficult not to. Is that as big as the last one?”

  “Bigger. We have a surplus of C4.”

  “Great.”

  “Yes, it will probably a decent amount of the mall. I toyed with putting us out there, to see if we could bring down the building.”

  The building he was talking about was the Prudential Tower. Bernard was standing in front of an exit that would put him in a small courtyard directly at the base of the Tower. Corrigan wished he had decided to stand out there, as the blast would surely be less lethal in an area with no ceiling.

  “With a little luck,” Bernard added, noting the increased law enforcement presence, “we’ll wipe out half the police force in the city.”

  “You’ll also die with them,” Corrigan said.

  “There’s that, yes. But my god is particularly vengeful. Why haven’t you tried to stop me yet?”

  “You haven’t done anything yet.”

  “That’s not an answer, Corrigan Bain. You’re the city’s guardian angel, according to Ms. Devereaux. Haven’t you been reading your own press?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Well, you are. And I’m a threat, so do something.”

  “I don’t really do this, Bernard,” Corrigan said. “I’m not even sure why I’m here, because typically I don’t deal with this sort of thing.”

  “Saving someone?”

  “No, I mean murder. I don’t get involved in murders, just accidents. To be honest, I’m surprised I was even notified of this little party. It’s not my thing.”

  Bernard didn’t respond right away. He acted as though he were listening to something, only there was nothing to listen to aside from the wailing of the fire alarm.

  “We find that very interesting,” he said after a time.

  “You keep saying we. Who is we?”

  “There is myself, and there is the voice inside my head.”

  “Tell me about this voice,” Corrigan said.

  “No, I don’t think I will. Your accidents only rule must have been very convenient over the years.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You never had to get your hands dirty. Never had to pick sides. An accident has no subjectivity. Not like murder.”

  “You have a higher opinion of murder than I do.”

  Behind them, Detective Joe White had just arrived at the scene. He made his presence known immediately, with a bullhorn.

  “CORRIGAN BAIN, PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR, TURN AROUND, AND STEP AWAY FROM THEM.” White blared.

  Corrigan thought it was telling that White decided to address Corrigan first, when he was self-evidently not the biggest threat at the scene.

  Bernard smiled.

  “Don’t do it,” he said. “If you walk away I’ll set off the bomb.”

  “Even if he decides to shoot me?”

  “Oh, especially then.”

  Not much about the scene made sense. There was a man in some kind of robot gear standing in the middle of Center Court, holding a gun. Two paces to his right was a girl wearing a bomb. Four paces in front of him was Corrigan Bain.

  It didn’t make sense because the man didn’t appear to have any kind of trigger.

  The girl could have one. Nobody seemed to be able to get a clean look at her hands, so a suicide bomber couldn’t be ruled out. It was just that this also didn’t make sense. Suicide bombers didn’t typically wait until the building was cleared before setting themselves off, and they weren’t known to bring friends along.

  Also, the girl was Monica Devereaux. Joe thought she was weird when he interviewed her, but not this kind of weird.

  He waved Newton over.

  “No demands?” he asked.

  Newton was the first on the scene. He’d already been following Bain before the gunshot caused the mass exodus.

  “He hasn’t communicated to anyone other than Bain,” Newton said.

  “Did you try?”

  “No sir. He shouted, but I didn’t engage.”

  “Good, that’s good. Nobody’s been blown up or shot since you got here, that’s the best you can do.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I’m gonna get Bain the hell out of there and then reach out. Newton, I need you to get on the comm and see if anyone here has a confident shot. Do it quietly.”

  “Yes sir. Sir? On who?”

  “Any one of them, Newton. Nobody take a shot. I just want to know what I have.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Joe lifted his megaphone.

  “CORRIGAN BAIN,” he said, “PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND TURN AROUND.”

  “How are you going to set off the bomb?” Corrigan asked.

  The girl whimpered and eyed the cell phone attached to the bomb. Corrigan wanted to say, yes, he saw that, but Bernard doesn’t have a phone in his hands. Only then did it occur to him there was someone else involved.

  Bernard didn’t have the trigger, because someone far removed from the blast site had it.

  The voice inside his head, Corrigan thought.

  Corrigan started checking the area for a camera, then realized he was being stupid about this as well. Bernard was wearing one.

  “CORRIGAN, ONE MORE TIME…”

  “He told me I can’t leave!” Corrigan answered. He snuck a peek over his shoulder in the future and placed Detective White at the far end of the room behind a column in front of the GameStop. That’s where the megaphone was sticking out. It was a long way away. The perimeter established by the police was based on cover, and there was no cover in the middle of Center Court, so they weren’t any kind of close.

  There was a pause. He could imagine Joe White cursing to himself and probably thinking up a way to blame Corrigan for all of this.

  “ALL RIGHT. YOU WITH THE GUN. YOU HAVE A BOMB AND TWO HOSTAGES. TELL US WHAT YOU WANT.”

  Bernard looked at Corrigan. His future blinked in and out of existence four times.

  “I’m not speaking to them,” he said. “Tell him we already made our demands.”

  “You want me to say that?”

  “Please.”

  “Even if it doesn’t make any sense?”

  Bernard smiled.

  “We asked that they be set free, and that hasn’t happened. We had this conversation, boy scout.”

  “Okay, I�
��m going to stand up and turn around and convey that to Detective White. Will that be okay?”

  Corrigan was about ten feet from Bernard and Monica. He could close that distance in four steps if he charged. If he could see Bernard’s future with any kind of consistency, he’d try it.

  “Yes,” Bernard said. “Go ahead. You can see the future; you already know it will be okay.”

  “But you can also alter the future.”

  “Oh, very good.”

  Corrigan sighed.

  “You know what,” he said, “this is ridiculous. None of this makes sense. According to you, that bomb can level the mall, and now you’ve got half the police force in your blast radius. You want me to tell the cops that you have no demands, because today is all about the consequences of you not getting your demands met, but that just means you’re going to detonate the bomb. As soon as I tell them that, they’re going to start to look for options to shoot you without setting it off. If this was really about punishing the city for not meeting your demands, you would have set off the bomb, and you wouldn’t even need to be here to die with it.”

  Bernard laughed.

  “You’re right; we’re being disingenuous. This was all about you, Corrigan Bain.”

  The guy with in the robot suit wasn’t answering. Joe managed to scare up a set of binoculars to get a better look at the situation, but what he was seeing made no sense at all. Suicide bombers don’t take hostages, and Monica Devereaux—who looked terrified—was clearly not there voluntarily.

  Bain appeared to be trying to resolve this situation, so the good news was that he was probably not a terrorist. That was great, except he was also not a cop, and there continued to be no plausible explanation for how he ended up being the first person on the scene.

  According to Officer Newton, Corrigan started running toward Center Plaza before the gunshot. Agent Trent would have Joe believe this was because her boyfriend could see the future.

  He still wasn’t buying.

  Joe didn’t know if Corrigan was armed. That seemed like a small thing in light of all the other variables in play, but it was something Joe also had to take into account.

  But the focus of the problem was the guy wearing that weird apparatus. It was great that all the people the city was actively looking for, in connection with the State House bombing, had decided to go shopping at the same time like this; better-or-worse, by the end of the day they’d probably be closing that case. Joe just couldn’t figure out how to do that without adding to the body count.

  They needed more time. The bomb squad was still a half an hour out, the nearest sharpshooter team was another hour, and since nobody knew exactly how big of an explosion to expect, the entire Prudential tower was currently being evacuated, which was probably going to take all afternoon. If they could establish a dialogue with the instigator, they could at least get a clue about how long they had before they had to make hard decisions, like who to shoot in the head first.

  “Joe,” Maggie Trent said. She’d come up behind him while he was busy holding his breath. “What’s the situation?”

  “No idea,” he said. “Nobody’s talking.”

  She grabbed the binoculars from his hands without asking, and looked at the scene.

  “Jesus,” she said. “The bomb. Did you look at the bomb?”

  “I’ve got nothing else to do, so yeah.”

  “It’s got a remote trigger, like the one in the State House.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “The trigger man might not even be here, is my point. Can we jam the signal?”

  “Not before the bomb squad gets here, no. We can shoot the guy in the robot suit now, cross our fingers and hope for the best, but other than that…”

  “Do you have a shot?”

  “I was joking, Agent.”

  “I wasn’t. I don’t think we have a way out of this, other than Corrigan coming up with a solution on his own. We’d be better off if you established a perimeter outside of the blast radius, either way.”

  “How far?” Joe asked.

  She looked at the device again, through the binoculars.

  “Um…Jesus. Okay. Maybe outside the mall.”

  “Can’t get a shot if we’re not in the building,” Joe said.

  “You also don’t need twenty men to take the shot. I’d get some bodies away from here, if I were you. That’s twice the size of the State House bomb. I’m surprised she can stand up straight.”

  “What do you mean, this is about me?” Corrigan asked.

  “I would have thought it was obvious, by now,” Bernard said. “This was all to draw you out and see what you could do.”

  “Super. You could have just asked. I mean, I’m flattered.”

  “You’re a wild card. We had to make sure we eliminated you first. To be honest, we had no idea someone with your capabilities was out there. It’s a shame to have to kill you, but here we are.”

  “Maybe I should have a direct conversation with the voice inside your head,” Corrigan said.

  Bernard smiled gently. His future blinked out again, and back in, and out. In the micro-second it was available, Bernard pointed the gun at Corrigan.

  “I think we’ve said enough,” Bernard said. Then he did as anticipated, and pointed the gun at Corrigan.

  “What’s going to happen next is that I’m going to shoot you. If you let me do that, I’ll surrender, and the bomb doesn’t explode.”

  Corrigan couldn’t tell if that was how the future was going to actually play out. All he saw—and felt—was the bullet hitting him in the chest; Bernard’s half of the future was missing.

  “Okay,” Corrigan said.

  “Okay? You agree?”

  “Yes. Go ahead and shoot me.”

  Without preamble, Bernard pointed the gun at Corrigan’s chest, and fired.

  Corrigan altered his future, but not in a way that resulted in him not getting shot, as he felt as if he needed to hold true to the promise to allow this to happen. Instead, rather than stand still, he charged.

  The load hit him in the chest, right around the heart, and was not fatal. The flak jacket he’d taken from the condo earlier that day absorbed the worst of it.

  It still felt like he’d been struck in the ribcage with a sledgehammer, but that was why he rushed forward in the first place. His momentum carried him forward despite the impact.

  Bernard got off a second shot. This one hit Corrigan in the stomach, under the vest, and was probably fatal.

  But not right away. He had enough life in him to connect with Bernard, knock the gun away, and come down hard on top of him on the concrete floor.

  The camera lens on Bernard’s head shattered. Corrigan got up onto his knees and slammed the man’s head on the floor with his left hand, while his right hand sought out the wound. He was unreasonably preoccupied by the notion that his guts were about to pour out of the wound. Black patches began appearing at the edge of his vision, and the pain was kicking in.

  He was pretty sure he was dying.

  Not yet, he thought.

  “Come here,” he barked at Monica.

  She was terrified to move.

  “Quickly!” he said.

  She stepped closer.

  “Kneel, quick, I can’t stand,” he said. “Hurry.”

  She crouched down next to him, tears streaming down her face.

  “We’re not,” he said, in response to the question she hadn’t asked yet. He was losing track of the present already; that was bad.

  “Are we going to die?” she asked.

  He could hear all kinds of shouting. People were running towards them. He had almost no time.

  He looked at the bomb, tried five things in the future to disable it. Four of them set off the bomb. The fifth—yanking the cell phone at the center off of the device—was the only one that didn’t.

  He ripped the phone off the bomb. The future continued to exist.

  Then he collapsed. He could hear Maggie screami
ng his name, and Joe White barking orders. He wanted to apologize to Maggie for getting himself shot again, but he couldn’t seem to move his mouth.

  Police officers wrestled Bernard to his feet. Despite the multiple blows to the head, he was conscious, and smiling at Corrigan.

  Then the world went black, and Corrigan Bain died.

  Part II

  Shiva Ascendant

  11

  Days later, there are still more questions than answers.

  * * *

  After an incident that left one man dead and another in custody, the country is looking for an explanation. Who is Bernard Jenks? How is he connected to the EJF? And what did Corrigan Bain have to do with any of it?

  * * *

  Police, the FBI, ATF, nobody’s talking. Even the local blogger, who was at the center of it all, has dropped out of sight.

  * * *

  Americans want answers. Americans deserve answers.

  —Washington Post editorial board

  Erica Smalls stole into Boston in the middle of the night, on the red-eye from JFK. By then, it had been a little over two weeks since Agent Maggie Trent turned to an associate in the FBI headquarters and suggested someone get Erica on the phone, and approximately ten days since a terrorist threat in the city of Boston ended with the death of Corrigan Bain.

  There were reasons—some of which might, in a different context, make for a funny story about irony and whichever fickle god was responsible for institutional bureaucracy—why it took so long to put Erica and Maggie on the phone together. One of those reasons was that Erica Smalls happened to be working for the speculative technologies division of a large Japanese corporation. This meant (although it didn’t have to, as they had offices all over the world) that Erica was in Japan when Maggie first thought to reach out.

  This wouldn’t have been a huge problem if Maggie knew she was trying to reach an American citizen working overseas, but she didn’t. The last thing she had on Erica was that she’d graduated from MIT, and then left the city.