Fire With Fire-eARC

by Charles E Gannon

  But like a monarch dying intestate, Nolan had left behind no definitive instructions as to how, and by whom, succession was to be effected. It was possible, even likely, that Tarasenko had the complete blueprint for how to proceed—but if so, that put him in position to take control of IRIS himself, to falsify or withhold postmortem directives—

  Downing started: he wasn’t sure whether it was at the slightly off-center landing of the tilt-rotor, or at his own cynicism. Good grief, man, you’ve worked with Arvid Tarasenko for over twenty years: he’s a good man. But losing Nolan so suddenly had Downing running from pillar to post, trying to pick up the pieces, even wondering who could be trusted and who couldn’t. So I wind up suspecting everybody.

  And having Caine go missing a day ago had not helped matters. No word from Opal either. Some covert bodyguard she’s turned out to be.

  But that was unfair and he knew it: there had never been enough time to do more than assign her and clean up after the ambush in Greece. And less than twenty-four hours later, Nolan was dead and Downing was scrambling to fill his shoes and figure out what to do next. Not easy, particularly since the outcome of the Dialogs was to have determined their future operational agenda.

  Downing grimaced as he unfolded from the narrow seat of the cramped commuter craft. As it turned out, advance planning would have been a waste of time, because none of the scenarios would have begun with the operational presumption that Nolan was dead. There had been plans for how best to handle his death before Parthenon. But this—losing your leading man not at the close or rise of a curtain, but between the acts—this was terra incognita.

  Downing exited the aircraft into the bright sun and cool air of DC in April and experienced a surge of anxiety that he imagined was indeed akin to those felt by ancient mariners whose journeys had carried them past the edges of their maps, compelled them to sail into deep, unknown waters.

  As I do now, Richard thought, glancing at the Capitol dome as he walked to the black sedan waiting discreetly beyond the edge of the tarmac.

  * * *

  The traffic was moderate but progress was fitful, sudden rushes of speed alternating with a bumper-to-bumper crawl. Unpredictable and unsettling—just like the immediate future. If Arvid can help me forge, or better yet, inherit, the same political and industry links and relationships that Nolan enjoyed, then IRIS should be able to continue along on much the same footing. But if not…

  Downing willed that thought to die, but another—just as troubling—rose to take its place: Trevor, arriving at Dulles, would be joining him at Tarasenko’s office within the hour. There, Nolan’s son would stolidly endure condolences, stolidly sit through lunch with Uncle Richard, and then stolidly shake hands, depart, and carry on a fighting withdrawal from his own feelings until he reached the safe refuge of his one-bedroom townhouse in Georgetown. By that time, Downing would be on his way out to visit newly widowed Patrice in Silver Spring, who would smile gratefully through bright, wet eyes that would not brim over until the intrusion of consolers had ended.

  But the eldest child, Elena, was the wild card. Her father’s daughter in almost every way, Downing was certain of only one thing: she would be devastated, no matter what she showed the world, or Miles, her teenage son. On the other hand, although being a single mother had been hard on her, maybe it would be a strange blessing now: from his own experience, Richard knew that parents could often be strong for their children even when they felt themselves too weary and weak to carry on.

  “Mr. Downing, we’re here.”

  Downing sighed, looked up at the Capitol Building. An hour from now, he’d know the fate in store for IRIS—and himself. A part of him wanted to stay in the car, and just keep driving.

  Right: none of that, now. Downing forced himself to exit the vehicle briskly, waved the driver on, went up the steps two risers at a time. He kept up that pace as a matter of principle, stopping only where the security checks—the chemical sniffers, metal detectors, Geiger counters, badge and retina checkers—slowed him down. Tarasenko’s assistant looked up as he swept around the door jamb. “Mr. Downing, Senator Tarasenko is expecting you.”

  “Has he been waiting long?”

  “Not quite a minute.”

  “Thank you, Daniel.”

  “My pleasure. Go right in.”

  Downing did, willing himself through the doorway that would put him on his future path as well as bring him face to face with Arvid Tarasenko—

  —who was staring at him as he entered. The senator was sporting a small smile, half-reclined behind his desk, hands folded over a midriff that had, in the last two years, started to expand. “Richard: join us.”

  “Thank you, I—” Wait: ‘us’? Richard looked, saw that the chair in the room’s right-hand corner was occupied.

  Caine. Smiling. Or, more accurately, with teeth bared. “Hello, Richard,” he said.

  “Hello, and—and I’m damned glad to see you. But why didn’t you tell me where you were going? I had no idea—”

  “I think that was the idea, Richard.” Tarasenko smiled, a bit ruefully: “Unless I’m quite wrong, you were not supposed to have any idea where Mr. Riordan was or where he was heading.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Caine’s voice was flat. “I’m out, Richard. No more IRIS.”

  Downing was too surprised to feel surprise, but clearly, Caine had come to the wrong place to make such a pronouncement: Tarasenko would never let it stand. “Come now, Caine, there’s simply no reason—”

  Tarasenko did something he rarely did: he interrupted: “He’s right, Richard.”

  Downing felt his palms grow suddenly cold. “Right about what?”

  Caine smiled. “I’m busted.”

  Tarasenko nodded. “He’s contaminated goods.”

  It was moving too fast. “He’s—”

  “Compromised by having direct contact with me, particularly so soon after Nolan’s death. To any half-witted newsperson, his coming here will look like he was running back to the home office. Leaves folks wondering if he came here on his own—or if someone sent him. Someone like you, Richard, since I’d lay odds that he made sure the press saw him leaving the villa he shared with you and Nolan. And I’m guessing, in the past two days’ chaos, you haven’t had the time—and he never gave you the reason—to think to have him watched, or have his mobility restricted.” He turned to Riordan. “Damned shrewd. You’d have been pretty good at this line of work, Caine.”

  “Thanks—but no thanks.”

  Downing discovered he had wandered over to the chair next to Caine’s. He sat heavily. “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand what? Why I’d leave? Or how I got in here without an appointment?”

  Downing looked at Arvid. “How did he get in to see you without an appointment?”

  “Same way he’s probably going to get in just about any place he wants to for the next two or three years—twenty, if he stays in the spotlight: he just gave his name.”

  “And you let him in?”

  “Jesu Kristos, Richard, why the hell wouldn’t I? He shows up, unannounced, no appointment, Nolan’s recently dead, IRIS is mute: what am I supposed to think? He could be a courier with something you can’t trust to any of your remaining commlinks; he could be coming to tell me that now you had been eliminated, too, and he was the only survivor. He’s not just anyone, Richard—and these days aren’t just any days. He knew that, and therefore knew I’d open my door because I had to presume that his appearance here was necessitated by some kind of emergency. He played us both like a pair of violins, Richard.”

  “And now—”

  Caine shrugged. “And now, because I’ve been observed to have immediate, on-demand access to Senator Tarasenko, the press will assume that I report to him. And that connects back to you, again, since you’re also known to have a long association with the senator—and collectively, that all points to IRIS.”

  “Which means that it still points to not
hing: IRIS is still thoroughly secret despite its data leaks.”

  “Listen, Richard, my running straight home to Senator Tarasenko like his pet dog will start at least a few of the smarter investigative reporters down the same path I followed in my own researches. They’re going to start unearthing the same ‘coincidental associations’ that I found, start making some of the same conjectures, and then start asking some of the same questions—but in public.

  “However, I’ve only come here once. So if I drop off the radar—and you leave me alone—then the news media just might overlook this, or deem the evidence too thin to warrant a follow-up.”

  “How kind—and condescending—of you to walk me through all the implications, Caine, but I quite understand what you’ve done. I just wonder if you understand—really understand—the consequences of your actions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Nolan and IRIS have been a force for good. Roll your eyes if you like, but you’ve said it yourself on occasion: if there are exosapients, then IRIS was a necessity. You don’t like our methods? Fine: neither do I. You don’t like what I do for a living? Fair enough: most days, I don’t like it much either. But does that mean it shouldn’t be done? Can we afford to hope things will just turn out all right? You’re the military researcher, writer, historian: you, above all people, should know that those who decline to take a hand in controlling events surrender the ability to influence them. And now you may have broken our one useful control mechanism.”

  “Firstly, it’s not broken—not yet. And it won’t be, unless you force me back into it. But more importantly, if you had only had the common courtesy of asking me to join you—directly, without half-truths and coercion—then I would probably have volunteered to help. But you can’t force someone to become a willing volunteer for a cause. That’s not how loyalty works—and you and Nolan should have realized that.”

  “Caine, Nolan and I tried to protect you—”

  “Oh, you mean like at Sounion, at the overlook?”

  “Nolan admitted that was a mistake and that he and I—”

  “Are liars. The ambush at Sounion was a not mistake. That was a sting operation—your sting operation—to snare enemy agents, with me and Opal staked out as a pair of Judas goats.”

  Downing felt his face grow very hot very quickly. Bloody hell: Caine caught us—well and good.

  And he did not appear to be in a forgiving mood.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  MENTOR

  Downing opened his mouth, hoping that a glib, convincing lie would cooperatively spring forth from it—but he remained mute. Tarasenko stared politely out his window toward the throngs of sightseers headed toward the National Mall.

  Downing let his lips close, looked down at his folded hands. Bugger all: nothing left but the truth, I suppose. “So you figured that out. About the overlook.”

  “Oh yes, I figured it out.” Caine’s voice was as hard and level as a steel ruler. “Too much coincidence. And too happy an outcome. You sent us out there as bait—because the best way to draw the opposition into the open was to give them a target they couldn’t resist.”

  “And that’s how you figured it out? Because you retroactively conjectured how their attack might have been to our advantage?”

  “No, what tipped me off was what happened to that thug you shot—or rather, the thug you didn’t shoot.” Caine shook his head. “So much went on that day, and then the next, that I didn’t realize it at first: when you saved me by shooting that assassin who had come around the front of the car, there was no sound of a gunshot. And when I thought back, I distinctly remembered seeing your pistol: no silencer. So who shot him?”

  Downing tried to swallow, found his mouth too dry.

  Caine’s smile was cold. “I guess I’m just about the luckiest man alive, considering that there was a sniper—my own personal guardian angel—someplace higher up the mountain, waiting to put a hole the size of a tailpipe though that assassin’s head. I should have realized it sooner: the angle of the impact and the way his head went over so sharply couldn’t have resulted from any shot that would have come from you. And the projectile was too destructive to have come from your handgun: it had to be a bigger, high-velocity weapon.”

  Tarasenko glanced back at Downing once, then out the window again.

  “And once I realized that, then everything else started falling into place. It wasn’t my landslide of PVC pipes which sent that second car over the embankment; it was another well-placed shot from another guardian angel. And why did that vehicle burn so handily? Because while Opal and I were fighting for our lives, the sniper put an incendiary round into the engine and transmission—or maybe a few, at least until the oil in both systems caught fire.

  “I think what really kept me from suspecting a setup right away was that clever lie you told—so quickly, too—about the road worker at the detour being part of the assassins’ team. But no, she was your agent, because it was her directions which sent us to that deserted overlook, where your snipers were already in overwatch positions. Pity it got a little messy, but you still got what you wanted.”

  Tarasenko’s head turned back from his sustained gaze out the window. “Which was?”

  “Mr. Tarasenko, you’re no stranger to special operations, so that question is pure theater. Richard needed to get the opposite side to risk their assets so that he could pull their fangs in one fell swoop. Because after assassinating their assassins, IRIS was in control again.

  “From the moment you took out their operatives, the opposition was running out of time and options. They wait to hear from their assassins, don’t, try to contact them, can’t. So it takes them hours to learn that their assassination attempt has failed, takes even more time to learn how their first crew of thugs was liquidated, and still more to start moving new forces into the area. By then, it was the next day and I had sung my song at Sounion—and was no longer a crucial target.”

  Richard leaned back in his chair. “So, if you understand all that, how can you fail to see that we did it for your own good?”

  “Why was anyone looking to kill me in the first place? Who was responsible for putting me on a hit list to begin with—Richard?”

  Downing tried to look Caine square in the eyes. “That ambush was the only option we had to secure your safety. Once you stepped off the VTOL in Greece, we knew the clock was ticking and that if we waited for the opposition’s inevitable attack, we couldn’t be sure of the outcome. For all we knew, they might have had the time and resources to conduct multiple attacks: first on the villa, then, the next day, a bomb at the Dialogs. And what would have been left when the dust cleared? International discord, finger pointing, mutual suspicion—”

  “Well, congratulations. And feel free to risk my life—and Opal’s—again whenever it’s convenient for you.”

  Downing kept his voice calm. “Like it or not, we were right. There were counter-operatives at Sounion, we did eliminate them, and Parthenon did come to a successful conclusion.”

  “Sure, you were right, but that just reinforces your assumptions that you can always outthink everyone else—which you can’t—and that your ends justify your means. But your means—your lies—are always part of your ends, too. How you achieve something always leaves its imprint upon what you achieve.”

  Tarasenko looked out the window of his office and scratched his ear. “Mr. Riordan, you speak as eloquently as anyone I’ve ever heard. But I wonder: do you really—really—believe that our preferred method of operation is misdirection and deception?”

  Caine snorted a laugh. “How could I not suspect that? You covered up my disappearance on Luna. The Pavirus was a hoax. You staked me out as a Judas goat at Sounion. One hundred hours of my most important memories have been erased. Every time I’m told I’m free, I get pulled back into cloak-and-dagger land again. So you tell me: where does the duplicity end?”

  Tarasenko continued to smile; they waited.

  Aft
er five seconds, Downing noticed that Tarasenko hadn’t looked away from the point in space at which he had been staring. Nor had he blinked. As Caine rose from his chair, Downing’s breath caught and jammed in his throat: “Arvid?”

  The next thirty seconds were utter, hushed chaos. Once they had Tarasenko on the floor, CPR produced no results, and Downing noted the encroachment of the same rapid pallor that had swept so quickly up and over Nolan’s face two days earlier at Sounion.

  After thirty seconds, Caine jumped up, abandoning the chest compressions, grabbed for the phone.

  “No,” said Downing.

  Receiver in his hand, Caine froze. “What do you mean, ‘no?’ He needs—”

  “No,” repeated Downing, leaning back from Tarasenko’s body. “We need to control this.”

  “Control this? How?”

  “We have to think how this will look, how the media will begin to probe us if we call this in right now, without any prior—”

  But Caine had dropped the phone just a sharply as the stunned expression had dropped off his face: he was moving toward the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To tell Tarasenko’s assistant that his boss needs medical help—now.”

  “Caine, I can’t let you do that. Don’t make me order you—”

  “Richard, now it’s your memory that’s faulty: I’ve stopped taking your orders. Remember?” He opened the door.

  Downing was surprised by a sudden, dizzying panic so intense that his vision blurred. “But you can’t leave—”

  “Oh no? Why?”

  Downing reached for an answer, had none. “I’m in this alone, now.”

  “Richard, you always have been. Nolan, Tarasenko, you—each trapped in your own private bubble of secrets and uncertainties. Maybe that’s the nature of organizations—and relationships—built on lies.” And he was out the door before Downing could find a suitable reply—because, Richard realized, there was no such reply to be found.

  CIRCE