Russell's Attic, Books 1 - 3

by SL Huang

  “Oh, come on, why would he?” I said. “Plus it makes sense from the beginning; Martinez knew she was working on it and—”

  Arthur glared daggers at me, and I shut up. Ah. He was trying to make her feel better.

  Halliday lowered herself to the ground and sat back against the tree. The dirt and grass were still wet from the recent rain; it soaked through her slacks, but she didn’t seem to notice. Arthur crouched down next to her. “Sonya. You okay? Take a minute.”

  “And then talk,” I said. “You hired us to get the proof back, and now we know who stole it. Where would she go?”

  “But she burned it.” Halliday didn’t sound like she was hearing me. “You said she burned it.”

  “Our version, yeah. Because she has her own version already,” I pointed out. “She clearly doesn’t want anyone else with their hands on it. Now where would she go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does she have any family? Other close friends?” I pressed her.

  “All the family she has left are still back on the reservation. In New Mexico.”

  “Huh,” said Arthur. “Indian reservation, is that outside NSA jurisdiction? Might be a good place for her to run.”

  “I’m pretty sure the NSA’s jurisdiction is wherever the NSA says their jurisdiction is,” I said. “They’re assholes that way. Same with the DHS and whatever secret black ops branch they have on this.”

  “She wouldn’t go back anyway.” Halliday spoke in a monotone, not making eye contact with us. “Her parents are gone now. There’s no one left she’s close to. But…why? Why would she do this?”

  “I’m more interested in the ‘where’ than the ‘why,’” I said.

  “But the why might tell us where,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “Sonya, was she in any financial trouble? Professional trouble? Any sort of motive?”

  “No. None. She had tenure; we both did. She’d just gotten two groundbreaking papers accepted for publication. She was still going strong.” She huffed out a breath. “I confess to some envy—the last two papers weren’t even in her field, and she’d had no collaborators. Just put them out, one after the other. She was that smart. She didn’t need my work.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. Did she still not see it? “Or she stole both of those proofs, too.”

  “What?” Halliday’s head jerked up to look at me. “No, then why wouldn’t the authors come forward? If other people wrote them, they’d notice. This isn’t a large world.”

  “Or maybe she bought them,” said Arthur.

  Halliday opened her mouth, but couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.

  “Could be plenty of reasons the authors never came forward,” Arthur added. He didn’t enumerate the others.

  “Besides,” I said. “Your proof was the big one. It was going to change the world. This was a major breakthrough—you’d go down in history for it. For some people, that’s worth stealing for.”

  Halliday sat for a minute, squinting into the distance. I wasn’t sure if she was considering what we’d said or ignoring us until she shook her head. “You’re still not making sense, either of you. If Rita was buying proofs, or, God forbid, something worse—she didn’t do that in this case.”

  “Well, she probably knew you well enough that—” I started.

  “Let me finish,” Halliday said, very firmly. “You’re right, she knew me well enough to be certain I never would have agreed. So what was her plan, then? If she released it, I would have spoken out. She had to know that.”

  “Well, then maybe she was planning something else,” said Arthur, his voice heavy.

  “What—to kill me?” Halliday pushed away from him. “That’s ridiculous. Rita’s intelligent, and she had every opportunity to do something despicable. If she’d wanted to dispose of me there are many ways she could have done it that would have left everyone unsuspicious, without ever giving other people the chance to be involved or interested. What you’re saying does not make sense.”

  Arthur and I were silent for a minute. Then he said, “Crimes don’t always make sense.”

  “Rita’s would,” insisted Halliday. “You’re asking me why she did it—I don’t know, but I’m telling you, her reason would make sense. If you want what I know of her, that’s it.” She drew her knees up in front of her and laid her hands across them, re-centering herself. “Do you think…is the government going to go after her?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “That does seem likely.”

  “Russell,” Arthur admonished me, before turning back to his friend. “Sonya, girl. Can you think of a terribly compelling reason why they shouldn’t? She stole your work.”

  “I know. But…I don’t want to let them get to her until we have the whole story. Her side of the story. She had to have a reason. She had to.”

  Halliday and her faith.

  She reached out and placed her hand on Arthur’s arm. “I feel like I have no right to ask this of you. But Xiaohu and Rita, they’re both good people. Good people who might have made some mistakes. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “We need to help them. Please. The government can’t…please, Arthur.”

  Arthur gusted out a sigh.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “You commissioned us to get your work back. Now you want to protect the people who stole it?”

  Neither of them answered me. It was as if I were invisible.

  “All right,” Arthur said finally, to Halliday. “All right. You say they’re good people, I’m gonna believe you. Okay? We’ll see what we can do for Zhang, and do our damnedest to get to Martinez first.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and I had the distinct feeling there was more passing between them than I knew.

  Arthur stood. “Russell, we got work to do.”

  I never said yes to anything. “I don’t know what you want from me,” I said. “If you’re planning on spinning a story to the Feds, the last person you want in there is me.”

  “Let’s see,” said Arthur to Halliday, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You already told them you gave the proof to Doc Zhang, right? At least, close enough they know that’s what happened?” She nodded. “So, we’ll set it up like he had it stolen from him. We don’t say who. Worst they can prove is he ain’t followed protocol, maybe we say he just wanted to sneak a looksee at it before handing it over, who could blame him? Might be able to swing it so it just gets him fired ’stead of ruining his life. Good?”

  “Thank you,” she repeated.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Arthur said grimly. “This is going to be a scramble to set up, and a gamble to make ’em buy. And even if they do, pretty sure Dr. Zhang committed a big crime just by taking it. But the best thing we can do is keep our stories straight. You—” He pointed at Halliday. “You stick exactly to the truth, except for this conversation. You gave the proof to your friend, and you ain’t know nothing else. Same with you, actually,” he said, nodding to me. “You ain’t know nothing ’cept he was supposed to be picking it up. But we’ll try to keep you out of it. Okay, next thing, I’m gonna talk to Zhang. The Feds, they seen his house by now. We can say he brought the proof home to look, just for an hour, and someone came trying to steal it, and he’s the one burned it to keep it out of their hands. Then he skipped out ’cause he felt so guilty for stealing and losing it.”

  That was…actually a pretty decent story. It even made Zhang out as some sort of hero, albeit a guilty one.

  Of course, it meant more work for us. Goddamn Arthur.

  “I’m on Zhang,” continued Arthur. “We’ll try to spin this so it points to the Lancer—that would make sense. Russell, I’m gonna need Checker for a few hours to find out what footprints the professors might’ve left, but after that, you and he get on finding Martinez. For now, we ain’t telling the Feds a lick about her involvement. Got it?”

  The last thing I wanted to do right now was work with Checker. I supposed
it couldn’t be helped, not unless I turned my back on the whole thing entirely, and as tempting as that sounded…

  Goddamn Arthur.

  “Arthur,” said Halliday. He looked down at her, and she nodded to him, a deliberate, meaningful gesture.

  He nodded back. “We’ll get to the bottom of this, Sonya. Promise.”

  Chapter 25

  Arthur went inside to give the DHS agents his story, presumably with a big song-and-dance about how he’d wanted to break it to Halliday gently first that her friend Zhang was a thief. I sat out on the deck and waited. They’d probably want to interview me, too, and I planned to say I didn’t know a damn thing.

  He took a long time telling it—or maybe they were taking a long time asking him questions, or he was taking a long time refusing to tell them where Zhang was, if he’d even revealed he knew where Zhang was. I wasn’t sure which way he was playing it, and I didn’t particularly care. Arthur could take care of himself when it came to dealing with the Feds. He was the one who’d wanted them in on this in the first place, anyway.

  After a while, my feet started to itch. Literally itch, the soles of my feet, as if I’d stepped on poison ivy. I blamed it on being in a house with the DHS. It had been easier to ignore their presence when they’d stayed on their perimeter…why I had agreed to come back here with Arthur, I couldn’t fathom.

  I tried to sit and not think about things. Now that I was at a lull, everything I’d compartmentalized was banging on the lid of its box, demanding to be let out. Especially given that I had to go and work with Checker after this—work with him to try to track down and protect the woman who had stolen the proof I’d been hired to look for. I almost laughed. The world had turned upside down.

  My feet itched.

  I’d thought this job was over. I’d thought I could safely ignore Checker until I decided to hire him again. Maybe I would’ve taken some quality time off first and made friends with some dangerously high levels of narcotics. I usually tried to stay working instead, but who said I had to? I knew enough math not to OD.

  Would flirting with the lethality line really be so bad anyway? I imagined Arthur finding me cold in a pool of my own vomit, and got a perverse sting of pleasure out of the image. I could blame Checker for driving me to it, him and his insistent, pestering, wrong questions.

  Ow, my feet. I stood up and started pacing around the deck.

  Besides, eternal oblivion would mean I’d never have to think about the fact that the math—

  I banged off the deck and walked around the house, skirting the agents in the living room still having their sit-down with Arthur and Halliday, avoiding their certain demands for a statement from me, too. They’d want to keep me under their eyes until they had Zhang back, but my feet and I weren’t about to allow that to happen.

  I stole Arthur’s car—he’d be pissed; he had to go prep Zhang once the Feds let him loose, and needing a ride from them first would make things more difficult, but I didn’t care. At the perimeter, I got very, very lucky: the agents in the house hadn’t known I was leaving, so hadn’t told the agents downhill to stop me, and they were used to my face moving in and out of the safe house. They waved me through.

  I’d claim ignorance later. No idea you wanted me to stay and give a statement about the biggest information theft since the Rosenbergs. No sir, no ma’am, no idea at all.

  The sun was setting, suffusing the city in soft twilight. Driving through the mountains dipped me into deep shadow before catapulting me back into the last rays of the day. It would have been pretty, if I’d been in a mindset to care about such things.

  I didn’t know where I was going till I’d gotten there.

  A graveyard.

  My feet had stopped itching.

  I turned off the car and sat for a moment. What the hell was going on?

  The night was dark and quiet.

  I was supposed to be on a job still. I had to wait until Arthur did his thing and then work with Checker on finding Martinez. And somewhere in there give another statement to the DHS. And probably help Halliday rewrite the proof again, unless after doing the thing twice she now had it memorized.

  What the hell was I doing at a graveyard?

  I got out of Arthur’s car and slammed the door. The gate to the cemetery was locked, but that was no problem. A couple of force vectors had me over the iron fence and landing on the wet grass inside.

  A sprinkler came on in my face. Of course. LA didn’t exactly have dew, and even though it had rained the night before, the sun would’ve burned all the residual moisture off an open lawn like this one.

  A lawn. In a graveyard.

  I tumbled away from the spray, shivering, and regained my footing on one of the asphalt paths leading through the headstones.

  Why am I here?

  I thought about going back to the car, but when I tried to turn back to the gate, my feet felt mired in cement, and something in me clenched. My throat closed. I crouched for a moment, hands on my knees, taking small sips of air through my mouth.

  Jesus Christ.

  I stood back up and took a cautious step into the graveyard, and the feeling lightened.

  I stopped again.

  What the fuck. Something was messing with me. I didn’t like being messed with, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to listen to it.

  I sat down on the path. The asphalt was damp.

  The only person who’d been able to get my mind to…do things…this way was Dawna Polk. I shivered, the feel of her invading tendrils a visceral echo in my brain, even years later. But she’d been seamless, hadn’t she? Most of the time I hadn’t even been able to tell when I was doing what she wanted. To be perfectly honest with myself, I still didn’t fully know what she’d made me do and what decisions I’d made myself. I was pretty sure I’d never know.

  What was happening now?

  I could force myself out of here if I wanted. Right? I was sure I could. But if I did, I’d never figure out why my brain—or someone else—wanted me to be here.

  Unless that was a rationalization. Unless that was the weird psychic command’s way of forcing me to keep going. Unless someone, Dawna Polk or someone like her, was counting on me thinking exactly that way…

  Shit.

  Why would Dawna Polk or anyone else want me to randomly come to a graveyard?

  I sat for a while longer.

  In the end, it wasn’t a choice. I had to figure out where this feeling was leading me, whether or not whoever had set this up was counting on that. I stood up and walked down the path. My gun was in my hand.

  The curving asphalt sloped down between the well-tended plots, a river of ink between the white bones of the gravestones. I followed it down into a wooded area and then up a hill that was topped with an ornate round building.

  I stood staring at it. I had to go inside.

  Fortunately, that was easy.

  The freshly-broken door banged behind me as I walked in. The building was filled with walls of plaques—small squares with carved names on them that stacked on top of each other, chasing each other up into the darkness. Cover stones for cremated remains, I realized, the columns of stone tablets heavy with the history of the dead.

  I stepped carefully between the walls of memory and time. Why had I come here?

  The names rose up over each other, one after another. Pierre Boswell. Leticia Cooper. Adrian Clark Lopez. None of them meant anything.

  More and more and more. Cecil James Rosen. Kate Ouyang. Nanette Marie Wyman.

  Cassandra Russell.

  I stopped.

  Stared.

  What. The. Fuck.

  There was a plaque with my name on it and presumably there was an urn full of ashes behind that plaque and why the hell was there a stone cover here with my name on it?

  Maybe it was a different Cassandra Russell.

  The dates of birth and death were years only. One almost a quarter of a century previous—that fit, at least roughly. The other only a few
years ago.

  Before I had considered it, I had grabbed one of the stanchions attached to some velvet rope barriers, dragging it forward so the rest of its fellows collapsed to the floor behind it in a cacophony, and bashed the base of it into the stone like a battering ram.

  The crack echoed through the building, off all the other quiet stone tablets. I smashed the stanchion into my name again and again, until the stone cracked and crumbled, until the fissures spread out in spider webs across neighboring cover stones. Then I threw the impromptu mallet to the floor and dug at the pieces, scrabbled at them until my fingers bled, tearing them out of the way until I could see inside.

  The urn set in the dimness was a simple metal one, unadorned. I yanked it out and swept off the top.

  It was empty.

  No. Not empty. I’d expected ashes—expected human ashes, behind a cover stone with my name on it in a graveyard some unconscious command had driven me to, morbidly expected to be holding what purported to be my own remains. But the inside of the urn was clean and ash-free, still new and shiny, with only a folded piece of paper at the bottom.

  I shook it out. Unfolded it. My hands were shaking.

  I read it. It wasn’t long.

  Eight words. Ten, if you counted my signature.

  I stumbled back out into the night. I’d barely remembered to wipe my prints from the stanchion and the urn. I left the rest of the evidence of my crime scattered across the polished stone floor under the eyes of all the ashy dead.

  The note rang through my head, echoing off the insides of my skull, over and over and over again:

  Do not try to remember under any circumstances.

  Chapter 26

  Do not try to remember under any circumstances.

  The words circled, chanting, a repeating loop until they lost all meaning and became nonsense syllables, a never-ending, mocking litany.

  Eight words. Do not try to remember under any circumstances.

  Eight ugly, meaningless, mind-fucking words.

  The slashing, slanting handwriting had been undoubtedly and mathematically my own, with my signature underneath. I didn’t remember writing the note. Didn’t remember hiding it. Didn’t remember why I would have wanted to.