Nick studied the images captured by the EPF squad. The Energía had been chopped apart by Cohe wands, its heads, arms, legs and torso segments gruesomely divided into neat little piles. No doubt the assassin had been slain by Royal decree as the ultimate punishment for sloppiness.
The Energía had mistimed the assault in the lobby and its failure to achieve split-second accuracy had resulted in the Shonto Prong being trapped in that elevator for a short period. Not only had the murder of Director Witherstone been jeopardized but unnecessary risk had been added to the Shonto Prong’s mission. If the marine commandos had arrived at E-Tech headquarters minutes earlier, they would have had an opportunity to confront the Paratwa. On a good day, with the heavens aligned in their favor, they might even have killed it.
There was something odd about the Energía’s inclusion in the attack, however. Nick wondered why the Royals had paired such a low-end assassin with the far superior Shonto Prong. Human killings ordered by the Ash Ock were exquisitely planned. A mission of such critical importance – the assassination of an E-Tech director – should have called for a more skilled decoy.
In any case, this wasn’t the first time the Royal Caste had ordered the murder of one of their own, and in such a way that it served as a message to binaries everywhere that the Ash Ock did not take kindly to failure. And this wasn’t the first time Nick had seen the perverse body-chopping signature of the assassin who he was certain had slain the Energía. He didn’t know its name, only its breed and moniker. It was a Jeek Elemental, one of the deadliest of the breeds. It was known as the liege-killer.
Said to possess legendary combat skills, the liege-killer was the Ash Ock’s special errand boy, dispatched to terminate assassins who refused to be united under their banner or failed to carry out their orders. Had the liege-killer preyed only on its own kind, Nick might have almost supported its effort – any way you looked at it, one less Paratwa in the world was a good thing. But the liege-killer was also responsible for human casualties believed to number in the tens of thousands through a series of mass annihilations.
Nick spotted something on the Energía’s severed torso pieces and zoomed in on the images. The chests and backs of the tways revealed crisscrossing lash marks, indicating a flogging with Cohe wands, undoubtedly done premortem. The liege-killer had not considered death to be enough of a punishment for the Energía’s failure.
On several occasions, Nick had tried to learn more from Ektor Fang about this assassin who dispensed the Ash Ock’s most brutal justice. However, the CI always clammed up when he broached the subject. He sensed it was more than just another topic that the Du Pal considered off-limits. Ektor Fang didn’t spook easily but Nick had a hunch that even he was afraid of the liege-killer.
The landline beeped. It was Maria Jose. She’d ascended in the E-Tech hierarchy following yesterday’s announcement of her boss’s promotion and was now chief assistant to E-Tech’s new director. Rory Connors, who had served Director Witherstone in that role, also benefited from the changeover. He’d been transferred and bumped up into Bel’s former position. Rory was the new Associate Director of Media Relations.
“Director Bakana would like to see you at your earliest convenience,” Maria Jose informed him.
“I’ll be right up.”
There was no need to fudge a pass this time. A Security terminal in the hallway outside his floor’s cafeteria issued a B authorization, which had no time limit for his stay on the executive level. He hopped the next elevator.
Bel’s new position came with a full Security detail, beefed up since the attack. Nick counted half a dozen Security men and women patrolling the floor between the elevator and the director’s suite, all armed with thruster rifles. A battle android, which had supplemented Director Witherstone’s human bodyguards when he was in public, stood guard at the suite’s main entrance. During the attack, the BA had been summoned from its normal station in the garage, but it had arrived on the fifty-seventh floor too late to join the fight.
The precautions looked impressive. But Nick knew that in reality they were meaningless. The rifles offered no tactical advantages over handguns within the tight corridors of an office building. In fact, had such weaponry been used during the attack there would likely have been even more casualties, victims of friendly fire. As for the android, its single greatest advantage, autotargeting firepower, would be rendered ineffective against most assassins, who were outfitted with personal jamscram devices.
Still, Nick supposed that the Security presence did have one benefit. It made workers feel more secure.
The android noted Nick’s B pass as he approached and didn’t challenge him. He entered the suite’s outer office. It was more spacious than Bel’s previous area, with three times as many workstations.
Several of the staffers who had been with Bel in Media Relations and had been there during the attack stared at him as he walked by. One of them stood up and started clapping. Others joined in. He wanted to tell them that he really wasn’t their savior but settled for smiling and nodding. One of the core group was missing: the terrified young assistant, Renee. He’d heard that she’d quit E-Tech the day after the attack.
Maria Jose, who now had her own office adjacent to Director Bakana, greeted Nick with a beaming look that seemed on the verge of dissolving into tears. Before he could utter a word, she gushed out a heartfelt “thank you” and threw her arms around him. Nick wasn’t fond of sentimental displays but there wasn’t much to be done about this one.
“I know what the official line is,” Maria Jose said, unwilling to release him from a crushing bear hug. “But we all know what you did for us. You saved our lives.”
“Hey, we all did what we needed to do. It was a team effort.”
“It was God’s will.”
He broke away from her as soon as he could without giving offense.
“May God be with you always and look out for you,” she whispered.
Wiping her tears away with a hankie, she opened the inner door and ushered him into Bel’s office.
Ten
Annabel Bakana, the fourth director in the organization’s history and its first female, came out from behind an impressive oak desk. In her case, Nick wouldn’t have minded a soul-swallowing hug. But Bel limited her greeting to a formal handshake.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I hope I’m not taking you away from any important work.”
“It’s cool. Just the normal day-to-day stuff.”
He gazed out the two intersecting window walls of her spacious corner office. On a clear morning, he would have been able to look across the Delaware River into Camden, his old ’hood. Today was more typical, however, offering only a gloomy view of poisonous gray smog.
Most office buildings used smartglass that could be altered from translucency to any imaginable scenic view. But part of E-Tech’s mission was facing the world as it was, not hiding the outside environment behind visions of the Roman Colosseum or zebras dashing across an African savanna.
He drew his gaze back into her office, nodded his approval at the elegant furnishings. “Nice crib.”
She stared blankly. Nick sometimes reverted to 1980s street lingo learned as a child, forgetting how out of date it was. And although technically this wasn’t a residence, “crib” did seem the proper term. He had a fair hunch that Bel would be spending more time here than at her apartment.
“Nice office,” he corrected, gesturing to an impressionist landscape painting, green and gold foliage against cloudy skies. “That’s an original Renoir, isn’t it?”
“I’m told it is.”
The painting hung from a short partition that served as a view block for a well-stocked bar. Director Witherstone was known to have had a passion for drinking, especially straight-up WeBoys. The cinnamon-infused and obscenely expensive vodka was fermented from corntatoes, a GMO mashup of corn and potatoes. Its high price was due to a sophisticated snob-appeal marketing campaign by the owners of the WeBoys
distillery.
Passion for a rare drink was hardly unique to the murdered director. It was common for elected officials and the heads of nonprofits to have a private liquor or vaping bar in their office. Back in the era in which Nick had grown up, that would have been frowned upon, the individual likely fired or at least forced into rehab.
“I’m not much of a drinker,” Bel said, gesturing to the bar. “I’ll probably do an office makeover and have it removed. But for now, there’s quite a selection available. If you’d like, feel free to fix yourself something.”
“Thanks, I’m good. And I wouldn’t be too hasty in ditching readily available alcoholic beverages. A couple months into this job and you might find yourself needing the occasional jolt.”
She motioned him to an L-shaped sofa. It had no armrests for him to perch on. He stacked two cushions and sat atop them to equalize their height differential.
Bel sat down on the other leg of the L. The seating arrangements suggested this was an informal meeting although her manner and poise came across as stiff. He chalked it up to the newness of her job, of not yet having settled in. After all, she’d officially been director for less than twenty-four hours.
“Sometime in the next week or so,” she began, “I’m planning to present you with a formal proclamation. It will be given in conjunction with a modest celebration honoring your brave actions during the attack.”
“Don’t take this wrong, Bel. I appreciate the thought. But if you really want to do right by me, forget about all that stuff.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Care to tell me why?”
“I’m more of a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. Publicity is something I’d prefer to avoid.”
She seemed to relax a bit, settling back into the cushions. “I read that about you. In fact, I read your E-Tech bio. I was surprised to learn that you slept through most of this century.”
“Yeah, missed out on a few dozen wars, not to mention the fourth season of Breaking Bad.”
She gave him another blank stare before continuing. “Your bio is rather incomplete, particularly from the era you were born into. Frankly, I couldn’t find any useful information on you.”
“I like to fly under the radar. Always shied away from social media.”
That was only part of the reason for the scarcity of an infotrail. Prior to going into stasis, he’d hacked every Internet database he could find, everything from the hospital records where he’d been born to his tax files with the Internal Revenue Service. And what personal information he hadn’t been able to eliminate had been wiped off the net fortuitously in one of the great viral scourges of the 2050s.
Bel went on. “Your bio doesn’t even say why you volunteered for an underground stasis program, only that you did so in 2010. Those were primitive days for preservation techniques. The chances of your body surviving long enough for advancements in technology to enable your revival were considered close to zero.”
“Guess I thought it was worth the risk to awaken in a better place.” That wasn’t the truth, just the reason he gave when asked about his unusual past. He added a bitter chuckle. “Talk about a serious miscalculation.”
She smiled coolly and made an odd gesture, running her palms down across the hips of her dress, a dark blue A-line. The garment was a bit more conservative than the Oscar de la Renta repro she’d worn during their first meeting. But Nick still found both her attire and the gesture strangely alluring.
Who am I kidding? Alluring didn’t begin to describe what he felt when he looked at Annabel Bakana. The truth was, he found her incredibly sexy and desirable. It had been a long time since he’d felt such an immediate attraction to a woman. But that’s exactly what had occurred when he’d first encountered her in the hallway minutes before the attack.
Since that day he’d tried to force such thoughts out of his mind. An intimate relationship wasn’t likely to spring up between them even though he sensed that the attraction was mutual, that on some level she had or could have feelings for him. But he hadn’t allowed himself such distractions since being brought from stasis nine years ago. His earlier life, and all the pain and guilt that had swirled around it, had taught him the value of staying focused.
Stick to the plan, he told himself. He’d formulated the broad outlines of what needed to be done since that last fateful meeting with Ektor Fang. Her predecessor’s assassination had altered his focus to a new director, but the overall goal hadn’t changed. He’d known that Bel would summon him for this discussion and he knew what he needed to accomplish during the meeting. That was all that was important.
“Jumping into the future isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” he said. “You’ve heard about some of the side effects of being under for a long time?”
She gave the textbook answer. “Diluted senses of taste and smell, a mildly escalated need for sleep, desensitization of memories bearing a strong emotional component.”
He’d never found that last one particularly relevant. Some of his emotions were as powerful or even more powerful post-stasis.
“Even the stasis physiologists don’t know exactly why those things occur,” he said. “Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend the experience.”
“I could never do something like that. For better or worse, this is my time.”
Nick wondered if she’d at least considered the possibility. Many people did these days. A growing percentage actually went through with it, choosing stasis to escape a troubling world or personal demons. But something in Bel’s utterance indicated that she was serious about her beliefs, that she’d never evade life in the present by leaping into a distant and unknown future.
He admired her for that. And whether it was that admiration or his attraction to her or some combination of the two, he decided to detour from his game plan and reveal some of his inspiration for choosing stasis.
“My life back in 2010 had become too hard. I’d lost my sister and my parents within the space of a few years.” There was another reason, a more important one that had driven him into stasis. But it wasn’t something he was willing to talk about.
“I tried the standard escapes to obliterate my troubles. Moved around a lot – Europe, Asia, throughout the US – all the while existing on massive amounts of alcohol and casual sex. When those things were no longer enough to keep the pain tamped down, I switched over to heroin and abstinence.”
He hesitated, surprised by the turbulent feelings his confession was bringing up. Why am I revealing such things to a woman who’s nearly a total stranger?
“One night, I ended up in a hotel room in some Texas border town. That’s where I bottomed out. I stole a .45 caliber handgun, set my ass down in front of the TV and put the barrel in my mouth.”
Nick grimaced with the memories. Even though the events had occurred more than eighty-five years ago, in real-time they’d happened less than a decade ago. The torments remained close to the surface.
He pushed on. “Just when I’m about to eat a bullet, this preview comes on for a documentary about cryonics, about people who arrange to have themselves placed in subzero storage after they die. And suddenly I’m pulling the gun out of my mouth and thinking, why the hell not?
“I start doing some research into cryonics. I had a good chunk of money from a settlement involving my parents’ deaths – they were killed in a terrorist attack in Europe – and within a few weeks, I’d invested a bit of it with this underground group. They helped me commit suicide but in a much gentler way, with drugs. They froze my body the instant my heart stopped beating.”
Bel looked amazed and saddened by his story. “It’s truly a miracle you’re here today.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
“Must have been an incredible shock to wake up in our era.”
“Not so much shock as disappointment. After I got acclimated, I realized I’d jumped from the frying pan onto the burner.” He laughed bitterly. “The world of 2086 was even crazier and more disjointed than when I went under.
“Back in 2010, it looked like humans were at least starting to address the major problems threatening life on Earth. Global warming, chemical and organic pollution, shrinking resources, extinction of species, religious crazies lusting for nukes. A whole shitload of troubles, all exacerbated by an endlessly increasing population.
“But when I woke up, things were way worse. Self-interest seemed to have totally triumphed over the common good. The twin gods of profit and progress were rampant back in my time as well, but there’s no comparison to today’s vast inequality between the rich and poor. It’s so extreme now that we sequester the haves from the have-nots, force most of the poor to live behind walls.
“Back then the planet had nasty wars and genocides as well. But the 2090s have upped the ante in terms of the sheer numbers and the degree of brutality. And if all those things aren’t enough, science goes and creates a quirky little organism called the McQuade Unity, whose cells can remain in telepathic contact with one another even when physically separated.”
Bel finished his thought. “Which paves the way for genetic engineers to breed binaries.”
“Yeah. But do you want to know the worst thing of all about this era, even worse than the Paratwa assassins? It’s the hopelessness that people feel. The average person seems to have given up. They believe that there’s no future, that the Earth is doomed. Not everyone, of course, but billions of them, and not just those living in the unsecured areas. And that sense of despair robs people of their best qualities, their compassion, their concern for the welfare of others. They become incapable of looking beyond the narrow borders of their immediate lives.”
He sighed. “I understand part of the reason people become this way. The world can be a hard and tough place for anyone. But when you combine personal pain with a civilization that seems to be crumbling all around us, even the brightest optimist can begin to feel lost and coldhearted.”
Bel went quiet for a time, staring at him with an expression he couldn’t read. Nick hopped off the sofa and walked to the bar. If there was ever a time for a drink, this was it.
Binary Storm Page 8
