Zheng Wei was mostly natural, with an implant for communicating with the internet and a body-sculpted face designed to look like Donnie Yen’s. Which, now that I thought about it, might explain the hotel’s name. He was tall for an Asian man and wore a blue suit with—I shit you not—a cape hanging from the back of it. I’d heard some executives were experimenting with new fashion styles, but that was ridiculous.
I chewed instead of replying, moving my mouth around like a cow. Then I stood up and handed him some of the sushi from the mostly eaten platter. “Fugu?”
“Get him out of here!” Zheng Wei shouted, gesturing to his guards.
“I have the files,” I said simply.
Zheng Wei looked like a balloon which someone let all the air out of. He raised his hand and said, “Stop.”
His guards looked confused. None of them looked particularly anxious to approach me, either. Maybe these were the Blackbriar soldiers who actually understood who the hell they were messing with.
Zheng Wei seemed to contemplate his next course of action before gesturing to the door. “Leave us.”
The Blackbriar troops hesitated, then shrugged before departing.
“Really? You’re letting your guards leave? That’s more generous than I expected,” I said, perhaps tempting fate.
Zheng Wei narrowed his eyes. “I know what you are. The Letters may be obsolete technology, but if you really wanted me dead, then there’s nothing I could do to stop it. If you’re not going to leave, I can’t delay you either.”
I raised an eyebrow before shrugging. I’d known the executives at Karma Corp and the few people who had access to the International Refugee Society’s records had a lot more respect for Atlas than most, but this was the first time I’d encountered the idea that we were some kind of boogeymen. Honestly, given the ease with which I’d arrived here, and that I was now dealing with Zheng Wei personally, I started to expect another shoe to drop—missions rarely went this well.
“I’m here to talk to you about the fact that nanotherapy doesn’t work,” I said, taking a drink of orange juice.
Zheng Wei nodded, then drew a futuristic-looking pistol from his coat in one smooth motion before I managed to grab it from him, trip him, and snatch his car-starter fob from his hands as he attempted to hit the panic button.
“Ah,” I said, holding both in my hand, the glass of orange juice having spilled on Wei’s expensive carpet. “So that was your plan. Lull me into a false sense of security and shoot me with your…is this Han Solo’s blaster? Tell me this works.”
I aimed the gun at a vase nearby, and the weapon shot a blast of glowing energy that I suspected was a tracer round for something else. The blast not only destroyed the vase but the table it was on, creating a large, smoldering, pile of goo.
“Don’t do that!” Zheng Wei hissed.
“This is a terrible and impractical weapon,” I said, shaking my head. “It tells people right where you came from. On the other hand, it is incredibly awesome. Did you have this custom made, or is it a perk of being richer than God?”
“My people will be here any second!” Zheng Wei snapped.
“Yes and no,” I replied, putting the gun in my jacket pocket after turning on the safety. “The yes part is that they’re going to be here, invariably. The no part is that I’ve already jammed this part of the room and you did the rest. So, yes, inevitably they’re going to check on you in a bit, but for the next few minutes I’m going to have alone time with you.”
I was actually hoping the Blackbriar troops were going to burst in and start shooting. I wasn’t happy about having to run away the last time, and I’d managed to get a couple of armor-piercing grenades from the good folks at the Turing Society. The fact that they also didn’t show up on scanners made me happy too.
Zheng Wei lowered his gaze and sat down in the leather chair across from the couch. “What do you want?”
“To do business,” I said, sitting back down on the couch. “I would have thought you’d be willing to do that.”
“Please,” Zheng Wei said, curling his lip in disgust. “You don’t think we know who you are?”
“We?” I asked.
“The Invisible Hand,” Zheng Wei said.
I snorted. “Nope.”
“What?” Zheng Wei said.
“I don’t believe you’re a member,” I replied.
Zheng Wei frowned. “And why is that? I know what you are, who you are, and what you do.”
I pointed at him. “If you did, you wouldn’t be in this position. I don’t believe in the Invisible Hand either. At least not as a literal thing. It’s sort of like my Rollo Tomasi, which is an L.A. Confidential reference if you didn’t get it. It’s a way of anthropomorphizing the forces beyond my life. Bringing it up constantly is just my way of fishing to see if anyone has read my file—which is what you’ve undoubtedly done.”
“You’re wrong,” Zheng Wei said, slumping his shoulders. “There are powerful forces ruling the United States, Europe, and other nations from behind the scenes. The Corporate Council, the United National Alliance, and the Emergency Government are its tools.”
“A conspiracy can be powerful, secret, or numerous. Usually one, maybe two, but never three,” I said. “I spent years trying to figure out my brother Daniel Gordon’s masters, and it finally occurred to me it was not a corporation but corporations in general. Legal personhood had made people act in the name of ideas, of capitalism and self-gain as ideologies, rather than just self-interest. Which means greed exists as a personified force and that individuals are just cogs in its machine. The existence of Mammon the demon proven, if you will.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Zheng Wei said, confused.
I sighed, pulled out my gun—an AR-28 rather than the fusion pistol—and shot him in the leg.
“Fuck!” Zheng Wei shouted, falling on the ground and clutching it.
“Oh hush,” I said, frowning. “I didn’t hit anything vital. It barely broke the skin. I packed a low-caliber gun simply for emphasis. What I’m saying, Zheng Wei, is that I don’t hate you. You know, despite the fact that you’re a murderer of homeless people for gross medical experimentation and are about to kill millions of poor people over the next twenty years.”
“You shot me in the leg!” Zheng Wei shouted.
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a hypodermic injector, which I tossed to him. “Take this and use it. It’s the same thing dentists and EMTs use.”
Zheng Wei grabbed the injector and stabbed his leg with it. Almost instantly, the bleeding slowed down and the pain looked like it was subsiding too. Even so, he repeated, “You shot me in the leg!”
“Yes, because I’m sick of being bullshitted,” I said, frowning. “I also wanted to emphasize that you are not in a good negotiating position.”
“What is there to negotiate?” Zheng Wei said, coughing. “You’re here to kill me. You work for HOPE. You know what I’ve done. What I’m planning.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You didn’t come up with the plan to sell nanotherapy to the public, did you? Even though you signed off on all the experiments.”
Zheng Wei got a disgusted look on his face. “No. No, I didn’t. Do you think I wanted to kill as many people as I have? I believe—believed—in nanotherapy and its potential to change the world. When the eruption happened, and the world’s economy and ecosystem was fucked, I knew Black Technology was our only hope. Except even it has its limits. We needed to push it past the bleeding edge to give us a way to survive the next century or two.”
“So that’s what these past ten years of failures have been about?” I asked, actually impressed with his devotion. “Polishing a turd?”
“The Sunken Cost Fallacy writ large,” Zheng said, his words occasionally interrupted by jolts of pain. “The technology is a bust, though. We have no idea how to program tech as small as we need to make it, nor create it with sufficient complexity. Which meant there was about a hundred billi
on dollars’ worth of wasted research.”
I stared at him. “A hundred billion dollars? Bullshit.”
Zheng Wei shrugged. “Quite a few facilities we built and promises we made added up over the years. I’ll admit, I did some creative bookkeeping and so did most of my staff. Nanotherapy was always the golden goose that kept us competitive with our investors abroad. We faked results and lied about our progress.”
“So, who is responsible?” I asked.
Zheng Wei gave a bitter smile. “You aren’t the only one who anthropomorphizes the forces that guide our corporate culture. Everyone signed off on it, though. Once they knew the truth, they gave me a choice of making up for their lost investment or dying and having my subordinates do what I wouldn’t. I figured, hey, why not get rich off of it?”
It was clear he wasn’t nearly as comfortable with what he’d done as I’d thought he’d be. That didn’t change the fact that he was a mass murderer. He wasn’t the guy who would be injecting poison into the arms of children, adults, and old ladies, but he was the guy who signed off on it. That made him worse, in my opinion. Still, I wasn’t here for justice.
At least not entirely.
“Well, in the words of Jules, I don’t want to kill you,” I said, lying. “I want to help you.”
Zheng Wei looked at me sideways, then coughed. “I’m sorry, that would be a lot more believable before you shot me.”
“Yes, well, I love making my point with a bang,” I said, making my worst pun since I’d gone through my Bond one-liner phase as an assassin. “Basically, I think we can save a bunch of lives as well as make an enormous profit.”
Zheng Wei stared at me. “You’re G, though. The terrorist who works for HOPE and kills people like me.”
I blinked. “Where the hell did I get that reputation?”
“You’ve always had that reputation,” Zheng Wei replied.
“I’m an assassin,” I snapped. “I shouldn’t have a reputation.”
I mentally filed this under things I needed to blame Marissa for, since I couldn’t think of anyone else who would spill the beans about my career. The idea of my being viewed as some sort of counter-cultural do-gooder repulsed me. It also made me worried about my ability to negotiate in the future, since it meant Atlas Security was going to be tarred (and probably had been tarred) by association.
Zheng Wei didn’t look impressed, though, and tried to shrug before a look of agony passed across his face. “Listen, I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. The only reason people tolerate you is because the cost-effectiveness of killing you was always determined to be too high. You’re like the old algorithm that determined whether to recall an unsafe car versus the danger of lawsuits—you know, back when people could sue.”
“That is the most depressing thought I’ve ever heard,” I said, staring at him. “Not only am I viewed as a do-gooder, but I’m not even a dangerous one.”
Zheng Wei chuckled. “Better to be Castro than Che.”
“I find that comparison insulting on multiple levels,” I said, shaking my head. “It also makes me less inclined to make my offer.”
“What offer is that?” Zheng Wei asked, looking at his leg. “Got another dose of that painkiller? You know, until the Blackbriar troops come in here and kill you?”
“Nope,” I said, resisting the urge to poke him in the leg wound. “In any case, I’d like to replace the pre-existing dangerous nanotherapy with a harmless placebo like the kind you plan to sell to the rich. That way you still make a fortune—albeit from selling snake oil to the masses, but it’s not poisonous snake oil. Which literally should not be that expensive since it only requires you to create something that doesn’t kill people.”
“Tell that to the cigarette companies,” Zheng Wei replied before looking chastened. “That’s possible, but the profit is significantly lessened.”
“How much?”
“Five percent,” Zheng Wei said. “If the Illuminati don’t exist, people every bit as bad do, and they’re rich enough to make us look like Tiny Tim.”
“And if the offer for this is the Black Dossier,” I replied, looking at him.
Zheng Wei blinked. “You’d give that kind of power to Karma Corp’s executives?”
“Yes,” I lied. “As long as it comes with the caveat of investing the profits in making two more arcologies. I was thinking Detroit and Atlanta, personally.”
Zheng Wei’s eyes blinked a few times. “Arcologies aren’t profitable for decades.”
“It depends on who you’re charging to build them,” I replied, weaving my spell over the man who wasn’t thinking at his best, as the injection I’d given him was full of more drugs than painkillers. The amount of Lethe was miniscule, but it was enough that everything I said to him was going to sound like a really good idea and bury itself deep in his consciousness. “Imagine, Mr. Zheng, actually building something worthwhile with your life. The money from your misguided venture used to create proven superstructures that will help at least four million people out of the refugee zones within the first five years.”
“Four million isn’t a lot,” Zheng said.
“Only by comparison to the dreams you were selling others,” I replied. “Which don’t work. The good done will multiply exponentially over the generations as the for-profit industries built will increase the material prosperity of the population. They’ll build schools named after you and erect statues—which, like Columbus, will convince people you aren’t an awful sack of crap despite it being manifestly true.”
I shouldn’t have thrown in that last insult, but I really hated this guy.
Zheng Wei paused as if seriously considering it. “The board would never go for it, even with the Black Dossier’s threat.”
“They would if I could also deliver them the head of HOPE,” I said coldly.
Zheng Wei’s eyes widened. “Then yes. We can do this. We can save millions.”
Mind you, I had no intention of turning over Marissa to these pieces of shit despite all she’d done to me. I might kill her for what she’d done, though I still couldn’t convince myself I could, but I’d never betray her to the corporate weasels who’d ruined the world. Even if I was one of them. I could, however, turn over her original body with an appropriate brain. It wasn’t like science had a way to read memories yet—just implant them—and one dead lump of gray matter was as good as another.
My plan wasn’t perfect. People were still going to be sold a useless drug treatment most couldn’t afford, but exposing it would just mean they’d crank up their corporate propaganda machine to meet the truth with lies. This way, especially if we could get the arcologies dedicated to making useful medical equipment, we could maybe continue the original good HOPE did with its blackmail material—no longer needing the blackmail itself.
I’d have to edit the Black Dossier, of course, picking and choosing what files to share while leaving enough to make it useful, but I could also keep behind some choice bits for my own protection. In time, once everything was in place, I could get my “daughter” to release the full dossier to the other megacorporations and have them go after each other like rival ant colonies.
It was a solid plan.
A solid plan ruined by A bursting through the doors and shooting Zheng Wei in the head.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The bullet that struck Zheng Wei’s head caused it to explode in a fashion that could only be called comical, spreading his brain matter and skull fragments in every direction. I ended up getting splattered with some of it and had to wipe it away as if a toddler had thrown food in my face.
Wiping away the goop, I trembled with a fury I didn’t know I had within me. “You damn…idiot! I had him eating out of the palm of my hand!”
A could have killed me at that moment, but instead approached with his weapon drawn. It was an A-7 Striker with a long, thin, silencer-like barrel that was actually designed to make the bullets travel further as well as hit harder. There was an amused
look on A’s face, as if killing Zheng Wei was a terribly funny joke he’d just made, and he expected the laughter to keep on for a few minutes.
I could probably salvage the plan I’d proposed to Zheng Wei. There were always subordinates who were willing to pick up the pieces of their master’s empires, but it would require eliminating the others, or money. I had plenty of the latter, but every bit spent was going to come out of some poor person’s mouth and not the people who could afford my plan. I wasn’t a class warrior—that was Marissa’s thing—but I hated the self-destructiveness of it all.
In Chinatown, Jake Gittes had asked richer-than-God pedophile Noah Cross, “How much better can you eat?” Why did he need more money to the point of stealing land from poor California farmers? Why did he need more money? Noah had famously responded so he could buy the future. It was a shitty world that there were more people today like Noah Cross than the rich assholes who just spent their money on banging supermodels and fancy yachts.
“That’s a good reason to do it, I think,” A said, shaking his head. “You were supposed to kill Zheng Wei.”
I stared at him. “Yeah, it’s almost like I find the idea of obeying you stupid.”
“That’s one of the reasons you were always a pain in the ass, G. You were never as obedient as you should have been,” A said, shaking his head. “You never took the pleasure you were supposed to from service.”
“You do realize how embarrassing it is for you, a black man, to talk like that, right?”
A rolled his eyes, every step like an execution. “You were the only one of us who viewed being a Letter as slavery. We lived like kings, had the authority to decide who lived or died and wielded power as part of the grandest conspiracy the world had ever known. If that was slavery, it was the kind the Janissaries possessed when they directed the fate of the Ottoman Empire. What you wanted was the freedom of the fast-food-scarfing, sugary-drink-swilling obese masses dying on their cancer sticks and opioids.”
Agent G: Assassin Page 21
