Breach

by Eliot Peper

  A few meters away, tall, imperious, and impeccably outfitted as the Norse goddess who was her namesake, stood Freja. The wind whipped at her robes but she ignored it completely, staring at Emily with the same mute disapproval she’d displayed in the fight club’s VIP room.

  “Welcome to the Ranch,” she said in her precise Danish accent. Her expression soured. “Lowell specifically requested that I tell you that this is ‘the party to end all parties.’” She shook her head. “He says it every time.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Emily followed Freja up the winding path to the mansion. Lowell’s right-hand woman was quite dismissive of her nominal master. Was the friction simply a harmless part of their dynamic, or could it be exploited? As his unofficial general manager, Freja knew the details of Lowell’s operations even better than he did. Although he had ordered the kidnapping, she was doubtless the one who had actually hired the Addis contractors. It would be a coup if Freja could be flipped, and Emily made a mental note to mention it in the debrief with Diana.

  As they climbed through tiered gardens, Emily discovered the source of the uncanny flames she’d glimpsed from the chopper. Hundreds of naked fire dancers leapt, swayed, and twirled, their skin slick with sweat and their eyes reflecting the burning poi, staffs, nunchaku, wands, hoops, fans, and batons that they wielded with eerie grace. They were scattered across the entire property, illuminating every path, clearing, and balcony with hypnotic patterns of flame that etched blurry afterimages onto the eye of the beholder.

  And beholders there were: guests dressed as pirates, geishas, princes, tigers, ninjas, priests, jesters, nomads—a bespoke menagerie of excess. They drank, laughed, gossiped, flirted, danced, and pleasured each other. Everyone and everything was dominated by the thunderous rhythm emanating from the wide balcony above the main entrance to the mansion. It was there, at the base of the laser that strained to touch the stars, that the DJ presided over the bacchanal like the exultant demigod of music that sounded like robots having nonconsensual sex.

  Emily had been to a lot of parties, but never anything quite like this.

  Freja led her straight up the stairs toward the wide entrance, and Emily thought her eardrums might burst as they passed directly beneath the DJ and through the open doors.

  “Pixie!”

  A figure stood on the threshold, arms raised. Emily froze for a moment, questioning her sanity. The figure wore nothing but a G-string, and every centimeter of its body was covered in precisely the same kind of glitter fractals that she had adorned herself with on the ride in. It was like staring through a peephole into an alternate reality where she was an aging, overweight man. But presumably her doppelgänger wouldn’t be able to reach through the multiverse to smack her ass, which is exactly what Lowell Harding did.

  “You asked for a sacrifice,” he yelled into her ear. “And I figured my dignity might be a worthy offering.”

  Emily pinched his Adam’s apple between her thumb and forefinger. When he instinctively tried to swallow she pinched harder, locking it in place. Standing on her tiptoes to reach his ear, she yelled back, “If you ever touch me without permission again, I will kill you where you stand.”

  His pupils dilated and he nodded incrementally, careful to keep his neck still.

  This transcontinental booty call had nothing to do with Emily’s prowess in the bedroom. For men like Lowell, it was never about the sex. He could, and did, hire courtesans with unmatched technical skills. No, for Lowell, it was always about power. He had dedicated his life to chasing it, to play not just games, but the greatest game of all. Hence all the pomp. This spectacle was a way to make his chosen few feel special, demonstrate his magnanimity, and create a world with him at its center. And for someone who reveled in gaining power over others, the prospect of prostrate powerlessness was tantalizing. With her domineering attitude and violent competence, Pixie was Lowell’s perfect foil. All the better because he felt sure he could crush her easily if he ever wished to. That dynamic was what created the tension that set his loins aflame, that turned him to putty in Emily’s hands. The thing that disturbed Emily the most was how obvious all this was to her. It took one to know one.

  Emily released him.

  “This is quite a production,” she said.

  “I promised you that you wouldn’t be disappointed,” he said, recovering his composure. “Now let me show you around.”

  Freja shook her head disgustedly, and Lowell gave her a two-finger salute as she strode off into the crowd.

  When Emily stepped across the threshold to join him in the entrance hall, the noise level dropped from deafening to just loud.

  “What can I get you?” Lowell asked with a flourish. “Bar on the right, pharmacy on the left. We’ve got anything you could possibly want, and if we don’t happen to carry the intoxicant you desire, I will move heaven and earth to get it for you. You did cross the Pacific to attend, after all.”

  Opposing bars lined the vast atrium, one stocked with liquor and the other with pill bottles of every size and color. Attendants poured drinks and handed out tablets like candy. An ancient oak grew in the middle of the space, strung with thousands of tiny lights that pulsed with the music, ordered sequences coruscating along the trunk and branches before their shape or meaning could be discerned. Guests poured in and out of the many hallways leading off the atrium, and backlit dancers threw giant shadows across the vaulted ceiling.

  Dag had always hated attending these parties, and Lowell had loved to tease him about it every chance he got. For someone who had once frequented the world’s corridors of power, Dag was in many ways a total homebody. It was hard for Emily to quell her jealousy for his apparent domestic contentment. She was here under orders from his wife to play double agent against his old boss. Forget alternate realities, this one was weird enough.

  “I’ll take a Casa Dragones,” she said, immediately chastising herself for what could be a tell.

  “Ahh.” Lowell grinned wolfishly. “A tequila girl. I knew you were my soulmate.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Joven blend, neat,” said the bartender as he poured the platinum liquid into slender-bowled tequila glasses. “Full body, vanilla and pear, well balanced, hazelnut in the finish. Fifteen degrees Celsius.”

  Lowell raised his glass.

  “To my dignity,” he said.

  “May it rest in peace,” said Emily.

  They toasted and sipped.

  “Fucking ambrosia,” said Lowell.

  The sweetness of roasted agave transported Emily back to the first time she had met Dag in person thirteen years ago. They sipped this very tequila on the balcony of the hotel bar, looking out over the glimmering sprawl of Mexico City. Both of them made every effort at nonchalance, though each had their own reasons for mutual fixation. She had been so full of purpose then, so sure of herself. Where had that confidence gone? When was the last time the world made sense, that events conformed to her plans? And yet, here she was seducing a different, blunter man with different, blunter methods for different, blunter reasons. Yes, she wanted Javier’s grand vision to succeed, but her own vision had narrowed, like adjusting the eyepiece of her telescope to focus on a specific cluster. More than anything she just wanted to defend Javier, Rosa, Dag, and the rest from the predations of men like the one who now led her on a grand tour of his private carnival.

  Each parlor was dedicated to a specific game. The chess gallery was packed but silent except for the thump of distant music and the sharp click of players making moves. The beer-pong tournament was raucous, and Emily noticed a few bouncers on hand to break up the inevitable fights. Two teams dressed in frilly Revolutionary War garb slid curling stones down a full rink, while onlookers slurped vodka shots off an ice luge. Competitors in the Starcraft lounge marshaled their digital minions on vintage ’90s computers and supervised apocalyptic clashes over an antique feedless local area network.

  Everywhere they went, people came up to Lowell. Some
appeared to be old friends, others petitioners hoping to impress their host. Lowell was beneficent but concise with each and every one, always finding a way to make a joke, move on quickly, and refocus on Emily, who received quite a few jealous looks from those who sought the great man’s attention. For her part, Emily surreptitiously recorded each face in her feed, noting the details of their appeals. You never knew what unassuming tidbit of information might later turn out to be the critical clue revealing a vast but latent web of associative connections.

  “I think that’s about enough of that,” said Lowell, as they exited the ax-throwing arcade.

  “I dunno,” said Emily. “I can see you as a lumberjack.”

  “One of the great tragedies of my life is that I’ve never been able to pull off a mustache.” He smirked. “Come on. Time for the real fun to begin.”

  Lowell took Emily’s hand and pulled her into a side kitchen where a lone cook was prepping caviar canapés.

  “How’s it hangin’, Chibundi?” asked Lowell, popping a canapé into his mouth as they passed.

  “Never better, Mr. Harding,” said the cook.

  They passed Chibundi and approached the walk-in freezer at the far end of the kitchen. Lowell’s fractals shimmered under the bright lights. Emily hoped against hope that he didn’t have some weird fetish for ultralow-temperature sex. It was unpleasant enough fucking him under normal circumstances.

  He pulled open the stainless-steel door with a wet sucking sound. Mist curled out around the edges, and Emily was suddenly terrified that a frosty quickie was far from the worst thing that might lie beyond. Maybe unbeknownst to her, Lowell was a hobbyist serial killer and Chibundi would assist him in carving her up with medical precision, keeping her conscious as long as possible while they incorporated her flesh into the night’s menu, turning clueless guests into cannibals, perhaps saving a token finger as a prize, mounting it on a rack of pinkies in the freezer that was really a grisly trophy room.

  No. She had to calm down. This was dangerous enough as it was. There was too much on the line to torpedo the mission by freaking out. If disaster struck, she could always simply call in Diana’s emergency backup via feed.

  Emily tamped down her burgeoning dread and stepped through after Lowell.

  The freezer was dark, but it wasn’t cold.

  The door hissed shut behind them.

  Panic blossoming, Emily reached for her feed, but it wasn’t there.

  CHAPTER 28

  Lights snapped on.

  It wasn’t a freezer, nor the torture chamber Emily had feared.

  They stood at the top of a stairway.

  “This is where the real party starts,” said Lowell. “I mean, I love a rave as much as anyone, but sometimes, it just isn’t intimate enough.” He began to descend, trailing fingers along the stone walls. “This was mind-bogglingly expensive to install. But the best things in life are priceless, right?”

  Emily leaned against the wall to steady herself. The rough travertine blocks were cool against her palm. The bass thump of the music had disappeared when the door closed, but the deeper silence of her absent feed was the disorienting part. The faces she’d captured, the notes she’d taken, even the map that had kept her oriented in the vast mansion, all were gone. So was her lifeline to the outside world, her only way to call for rescue.

  Lowell glanced back over his shoulder and wiggled his eyebrows. “I probably should have warned you we were going feedless, but I didn’t want to ruin the surprise. Just like Rizal’s, right? You’ll be right at home. I love this feeling. It’s like canceling all your appointments, dosing yourself with something fun, and stranding yourself on a deserted island. Hah. Disconnection as dissociative. Plus, everything’s just more sensual.”

  Emily could turn back, manufacture some excuse to stay in the main house, maybe drag Lowell to the middle of the dance floor. But her mission was to unlock his secrets, and this might well be where he hid them. Whatever was down here, Diana certainly didn’t know about it yet.

  “It’s like one percent of what combat feels like,” said Emily. “When I’m fighting, everything else just sort of fades away into the background. Wiping away the feed feels sort of similar.”

  “Ever fucked someone in a place like this?” he asked.

  “Ever killed someone in a place like this?” Emily responded.

  “Zing,” said Lowell. “This is why I love having you around.”

  Emily followed him down the stairs. They descended in a wide spiral and the air took on a subterranean coolness and density, the special atmosphere of caves and tombs. Their steps echoed oddly and intermingled with sounds of conversation filtering up from below.

  Then they passed through an archway and the space opened up into a small amphitheater. This had originally been a natural cavern, a little geological pocket, and the ceiling was rough, sharply angled bedrock. The steps continued past three tiers of stone benches to a circular sandy floor at the center of the room where twenty or so people were chatting and milling about. Water tumbled down from a narrow gap in the far wall and ran in a landscaped stream through the center of the floor to disappear beneath the nearest seats. Servers dressed in elaborate seventeenth-century French gowns and doublets replaced empty glasses with fresh drinks and handed out gourmet finger food. Armed guards in tuxedos and silver-filigree masquerade masks stood at attention around the edges of the circle.

  Freja’s carefully neutral gaze rose to meet them as Lowell and Emily reached the sand. In the raiment of an ancient goddess, Freja appeared strangely at home in this sacrosanct grotto, as if being cut off from the feed didn’t impede her ability to invoke her peers in Asgard.

  “The man himself!” The speaker wore a theatrical-quality Batman outfit, complete with mask and flowing cape. “For fuck’s sake, could you be any later to your own party?”

  “Uh-oh,” said Lowell. “Are we going to have to put Jason on liquor watch already? The night is young, good sir. Don’t waste it by blacking out. We have much to discuss and more to enjoy.”

  Lowell snapped his fingers, and the serving staff trouped upstairs.

  Jason. Emily did a double take. This huge, slouching Batman was the whiny hedge-fund prodigy from Rizal’s VIP room. Emily’s eyes flickered around the room. Yes. The cowboy was Singaporean sovereign wealth fund manager Lex Tan. The sleek cyborg was Dutch prince Barend Laurentien. The jaguar whose costume looked like it had been fashioned from a real pelt was heiress Midori Kawakami. The matador was Kenyan robber baron Barasa Lelei. And although Emily couldn’t identify Nisanur Demir’s feathery costume, the Turkish tycoon looked like she had slipped out of an avian nightmare. Emily’s heart hammered in her chest. It was a different VIP room, but this was a reunion of everyone who had been there the night she’d killed Niko, the night that had dragged Emily back out of her ferocious hibernation.

  A fifth of total global assets. It was surreal to think that seven costumed people in this little room buried under a mountain in Idaho controlled as much wealth as half of the world’s total population. Next in line for prodigious inheritances, Midori and Barend had done nothing whatsoever to earn their share. Barasa and Jason had been born into rich families and had managed to multiply their fortunes. Nisanur’s parents had been professors at Bilkent University and were constantly surprised at but supportive of their daughter’s entrepreneurial endeavors. Lowell was the only self-made billionaire here, but after the collapse of his fossil fuel empire, his was by far the smallest fortune in the room. This whole mess was his play to level back up into the big leagues.

  The feed had accelerated the global economy, created a single global currency, and opened borders not just for people but for capital. Governments lost their onetime monopoly on fiscal and monetary policy, and became less and less able to control tax evasion and capital flight even as Commonwealth found it easier and easier to track and tabulate every transaction. The feed offered countless benefits to all—it was a modern miracle—but it amplified winner-take
-all economics, and these people were some of the biggest winners. If Emily included Rachel, Baihan, and the others in attendance at Analog a few nights ago, the net worth of the dozen or so people on that list would dwarf the aggregate wealth of the vast majority of everyone on Earth.

  It was so unfair as to be simply ridiculous, strange and sad in a way that was somehow all too human. It wasn’t about the money. These people had left behind any limits on personal consumption long ago. At this scale, wealth was simply a proxy for power, fungible for its political, social, and other equivalents. Emily had always understood the fire in Javier’s belly when it came to this issue, the moral logic for instituting a progressive feed membership system that would be the first step in a long journey toward making civilization more equitable, ensuring wealth was something to be earned through valuable work, not granted by the lottery of birth. But standing here in the presence of these petty titans, feeling the sand shift under her feet, that intellectual understanding cemented into a visceral feeling in her gut, an aversion to the self-evident tragicomedy of the status quo. Had he been here beside her, Dag would have pointed out that this was precisely how human societies had operated throughout history, that modern humans had simply renamed what had once been termed nobility to make ourselves feel better. And Emily would have responded that such a precedent was all the more reason to fight for something better.

  “This isn’t a game,” snapped Jason. “There’s far too much on the line.”

  “Games with far too much on the line are the only ones worth playing,” said Lowell. “If this is more than you can stomach, there are tables with lower stakes upstairs.”