“You’d be surprised,” Bobbi replied. “So Tom was a good guy, we both know that. What’s it got to do with me?” But for all her bluster, Bobbi’s nerves stood straight on edge – she felt the bristling of something enormous on the horizon, and inside she swirled with the storm of anticipation.
Freida stared at her for a moment, and perhaps forgetting the gun leaned forward all the way to look Bobbi straight in the eye. “Look,” she said. “Tom was a good cop. He was a good agent, too – and he pretty much got fucked over by everybody he worked under. As far as I’m concerned, the Bureau killed him as surely as if one of our men had shot him in the face, and that’s not right by half. I want to find out what the hell really happened to him.”
Bobbi’s guts clenched as she tried to contain the rising tide of mingled dread and excitement that rose within her. “We can agree on that,” she replied, feeling her hand going slick on the checkered wood of the crusher’s grip. “So, you called me here. I guess you figure I’ll help you?”
“I know you will.” Freida’s eyes glittered with what Bobbi clearly saw was the light of victory. “You want to know as bad as I do, I think. And we both know things. I know what’s happened on the Bureau’s side, and believe that you were with Tom ‘til he left you.”
Bobbi stared at her now. “Go on,” she said, and she heard the sternness in her voice being stripped away by the flood she so dearly tried to keep back.
It was a cue that Freida seemed to take to mean she could be comfortable, because the stiffness in her shoulders faded; she propped herself up on an elbow as she settled into a more comfortable position. She took a smokeless cigarette from a silver case produced from the inside of her jacket, crushed its tip, and was instantly surrounded by the faint odor of herbs as she began her tale.
“I guess you know,” Freida began, gesturing with the cigarette like a magic wand, “that this all started with Tom flagging down this plane that had the Dolls in it – you know about the Dolls, right?”
“Yeah,” Bobbi said with a nod. “First one got killed by Koreans,” she said, “and then the second one got shot when his gun fucked up.”
Freida’s lips flattened a bit, and she nodded. “And the third, well, we never recovered her. By that time it didn’t matter, because the Bureau had already decided that he was the one to put the blame on. There was just too much pressure on the Bureau, and too much that didn’t shake out. Easier to turn him into a scapegoat than to admit they just didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
Bobbi shifted in her seat a bit. “I don’t understand that,” she told her. “You’d think they’d … I don’t know, just hang him up for being ineffective and say he botched the investigation. Why label him as a criminal?”
“Well,” said Freida, “because the evidence seemed to suggest that he very well might have had something to do with it. Take that gun you mentioned.” She paused to take a draw from her cigarette. “There wasn’t any evidence of hacking at all.”
Bobbi’s brows arched; she wasn’t expecting that. “That doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen,” she replied. Her thoughts in that instant were filled with Stadil, his plans for Tom and the truth. “Tom would never have just up and killed that girl.”
A shrug rolled through Freida’s shoulders. “Well, I agree with you there,” she said. “But there was no evidence that it had been tampered with. The record shows that he selected nonlethal rounds, and then just before he squeezed the trigger dialed back to explosives. I mean that’s possible, isn’t it? She was attacking him, he said – I’ve always thought it was a reflex reaction.”
Bobbi shook her head. “He swore up and down to me that he never touched the dial,” she said, harshness rising in her voice, “and I believe him. You people took everything he had without entertaining the possibility of a mistake or malfunction.”
“By ‘you people’ you’re referring to the rest of the Bureau, I’m sure.” Freida’s eyes narrowed. “All I did was the analysis. I don’t think he killed that girl on his own, either. But what could we have done? At the time it seemed a definite possibility, and then when he just took off—“
Bobbi shifted in her seat again; the momentary flash of anger that had shot up her spine was swiftly replaced with discomfort. “That was my fault,” she said. “I was hired to meet up with him.”
One slender red brow arched. “Hired by whom?” Kelley asked.
It took a long, tormented moment before the words left Bobbi’s lips. “Anton Stadil.”
There was silence between them for a long moment. “I’m glad they closed this case already,” said Freida, looking soberly down at her hands. “Else we’d probably be continuing this conversation in an interrogation room.”
Silence hung between the two of them. Finally Bobbi decided to bite the bullet, as curiosity and that maddening desire to solve things finally got the best of her. “You’re for real, aren’t you?”
Freida’s eyes were grim when they lifted to behold her. “Yeah,” she said. “I am.”
“Look, I’m going to put this thing away. And then let’s just talk plainly, all right?”
“All right.”
“And when I do, we’re going to lay things out, both of us, on the table.” Bobbi’s fingers tightened on the weapon’s grip for a long moment, feeling its texture biting into her palm. “No shit.”
“No shit.”
“Well all right then.” Bobbi pressed the crusher back into place, felt its weight again nestling against her thigh. She smiled, which looked strange beneath her banshee makeup. “Let’s have ourselves some girl talk.”
Sitting there in the restaurant’s bar, the two women spoke about things that neither of them had dared talk about since Tom had disappeared. Bobbi didn’t speak first; she had let the transgendered Kelley do most the initial talking, and she certainly seemed to have a lot to say.
First and foremost was Freida’s assertion that the Bureau had never intended to throw Tom to the wolves. Not at first, anyway. But when he shot the Doll and then disappeared, the scenario that the Bureau had prepared in case he had decided to run. The Romeo was solved, and they had their criminal. And so that was it. Everything she and Tom did after that played directly into the paranoid construct the Bureau had whipped up to absolve itself. He was doomed the moment he left, the moment he met her at the Market that night. Her fault. Stadil’s fault. That fucker.
Bobbi ordered a double scotch and was quiet for a while, feeling a blazing core of anger pour into her gut and seethe there. Silence hung between the two of them for a while, with Freida determinedly watching a pair of chatting businessmen and Bobbi trying to fight down the emotional steam pressure generated when sadness crashed down over that cinder of rage. She closed her eyes and took the scotch down in a chain of steady swallows. The heat of her anger was drowned by that of the single malt; she’d have time to mourn again later.
“So,” Bobby finally said, and her voice was raspy from the drink. “You said you weren’t ever able to crack the archive.”
“I wasn’t,” Freida replied with a nod. “Still haven’t, either – it’s the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. We’d always gotten it down to a certain level, and then…”
Bobbi nodded. “Some kind of fractal encryption,” she replied. “Gets more and more complex as you go along – we ran into it, as well.” That damnable archive. Bobbi paused, and her tone dipped coyly. “Cracked it, though.”
Freida was quiet for a long moment. She looked at Bobbi with renewed appreciation, and no small amount of suspicion. “Did you?”
“Uh-huh.” Bobbi leaned forward. “Tried to share it with you Bureau folks after Tom disappeared. You know, try and get his name cleared at least. But nobody wanted to hear it. I did it through anonymous submission, through hack informants I knew you people had … all the same thing. Nobody wanted to even look at what I had on hand. Certainly put things into perspective.”
Silence for a moment, then Freida spoke. Her voice was flat. �
��I didn’t hear about that,” she replied. “And I should have. I’m the technical specialist over there, so I see everything that comes in via the Bureau net.” Her pretty face turned hard and cold, and she looked down at her nails. “When was this?”
“Two years ago. Right after Orleans Hospital burned down.”
“Orleans … ” Freida looked back up. “Why is that important?”
Bobbi’s brows arched. “Because that’s where he was last,” she replied, and she found herself getting very angry, very fast. “You people really just threw your hands into the air and left him to get hung, didn’t you? I mean, I know he’d disappeared with me, but you didn’t even bother to track him after that, did you?”
Freida spread her long-fingered hands in supplication, and her blue eyes were wide. “Look,” she said, “I didn’t have anything to do with this. I came here to try and figure out what happened to him.”
“He blew up and died,” Bobbi said, and she was shocked at how hollow her voice sounded as she voiced these words. “Burned with the hospital.”
“Can you be so sure?”
Bobbi pursed her lips. “Look,” she says, “You’re a nice … a nice girl, and I can see you give a shit. But I don’t want anything to do with the Bureau. Your people hung him out to dry, and I have no interest in getting hung up with him. I’ll find my answers on my own, I think.”
Freida paused. “Wait, wait.” She shifted in her seat a bit, a prim frown lining her lips. “You’re misunderstanding me. I said the Bureau doesn’t know I’m here, but I didn’t go into a lot of detail.”
“Uh-huh.” Beneath the table, Bobbi’s hand slid slowly back to the grip of her nerve crusher. “You wanna illuminate me?”
There was a moment of silence as Freida’s eyes tracked Bobbi’s shifting shoulder, reading her mood. “I left the Bureau four months ago, Bobbi,” she finally said. “I burned any ties I had with it.” She looked down at her glass, at the delicate nails that tipped her slightly mannish hands. Waited for a reply.
Bobbi squinted at her. “Say what?”
“I said I’ve quit the Bureau.” Freida looked back up at Bobbi now, seeking her gaze. “Wolsey’s out – they put Gerald Exley in charge of the whole thing, and that man’s turned as cold as a mech since Tom went underground. He started making some seriously dodgy decisions.”
“Like drilling his partner?”
Freida gave Bobbi a puzzled look. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“His partner, Brighton.” Bobbi arched her brows. “You know who I’m talking about.”
“Agent Brighton was transferred to another office,” Freida said, her nose wrinkling.
Bobbi leaned forward again, both hands coming up to rest on the table. “Agent Brighton got transferred straight to Hell,” she said darkly. “And it was Exley who pulled the trigger. Tom was there, man. He played cat and mouse with him before letting him go.”
The expression on Freida’s face was stormy as she listened; Bobbi couldn’t tell if it was disbelief or if the woman had some suspicion that had just been confirmed. “I don’t know,” Freida said, frowning down at her drink. “I have to check on some things. Look, I’ll get in touch with you in the next day or so – we’ll meet on the network again. You don’t have to worry about putting up barriers while you’re in there now, it’s not like we aren’t on the same side.”
“That a fact?” Bobbi’s brows arched. “I’ll take your word for it, honey, at least for now. You go make your confirmations or whatever, and let me know when you want to meet.” She rose, then canted her head as she gave Freida one last surveying gaze.
“… what is it?” Freida looked down at herself.
“Nothing.” Bobbi pursed her lips. “Just it’s a good look on you. You make an okay lady, honey. Maybe you shouldn’t sell yourself too short.”
Then Bobbi left, and the woman that had once been Arnold Kelley felt her cheeks burn as she sat alone in the sudden silence at her table.
Bobbi felt a knot of fire tie itself in her chest as she stalked down the street from the Via Bella. By the time she made it to the end of the block, hot tears ran down her cheeks, making rivers of blood from her artfully sprayed makeup. She didn’t know how to feel about what Freida had said; she had always thought that the Bureau had set their sights on Tom out of a lack of other targets, but this was just … this was a setup too, engineered by that damned Exley and probably under orders of that bitch Merducci as well. How she wished she could have been standing there right now, so that Bobbi could unload the full battery of her nerve crusher into that smiling, perfect face and roast it right on its sculpted scaffold! God, how she’d like it right now. To see that bitch, or Exley –
She realized what she was thinking, and she had to collect herself. Bobbi stopped at the corner, standing just under the awning of a Vectrex Media, where the smiling faces of Annie Taiga and Lorna Chan and a legion of other entertainment figures smiled down upon her like saints, and she willed the cauldron of her heart to settle down from its sudden boil. She knew that there would be no profit from letting this drive her crazy. She knew that this might have been the kind of thing that she would learn if she kept digging. She’d done everything that she possibly could short of hacking a major network to send the story out, and even then that wouldn’t be any guarantee – she had done all of this, and nothing had happened. Genefex had prospered, Wonderland was even bigger, and now that fucker Exley was running the local Bureau office. So what the hell could she do?
Bobbi leaned against the video store’s gleaming facade, retreating from the river of people that flowed in neat, traffic-controlled spurts throughout the New City. She had lived in this city for twenty-eight years; she had fought hard to live in the city’s glittering herd, fought hard for her money and her prestige. Bobbi stared out at the crowd which collected on the corner. A trio of lean girls in Melanie Harrick boots tottered precariously on their towering heels, giggling to one another. A few years ago, she’d had simply thought, ‘Damn, nice boots,’ and then promptly gone on about her business. But now they seemed empty, vapid. A man in a black Vianni suit complained loudly about stock prices into his earbud phone underneath the streetlight.
Was this was how Tom had seen things? She had never understood his point of view, not entirely. Certainly she had seen her share of horrible things, but it had always seemed part of how things were, a natural process. Nature was a cruel and vicious thing at times, after all. Tonight, though, the increasing weight of revelation had shifted her perceptions. It all seemed so very synthetic to her, in a way she had never before realized. Maybe the facade wasn’t just plastic; maybe it was action-figure time all the way down. Tom had believed that, and standing in the glow of the media store’s glowing holographic signs she wondered very strongly if he might not have been right on the goddamned money.
It certainly gave her a lot to think about on the train ride home.
When Bobbi got back to the Temple, the club was much quieter than it had been. Last call had been sounded, and the cowboys who remained were draining their glasses in preparation to flee. She didn’t bother to look at their faces; she knew she looked more than a little mad in her banshee getup and the tracks of bloody red that had dried on her cheeks. She just hoped that she could make it upstairs before –
“Bobbi?” Too late; Scalli had sighted her, and called to her from his place behind the bar. With the lack of a crowd she knew it was likely that he would spot her before she could make her escape; the big man’s face was etched with concern as he came to the end of the bar. “Everything all right, girl?”
She mumbled something like ‘Yeah, no problem’ as Bobbi marched past him through the back door. Numbness spread through her body as she took the elevator to the top floor, and by the time she had arrived in Stadil’s office, she found her upset transmuted into an incandescent fury. This was bullshit. This was bullshit! There was no way in hell that she was going to be turned into some weepy little sor
ority girl over this. She had been used by a dead man to kill another man, this she believed. A man that she had come – perhaps more quickly than she was comfortable with – to care about. Stadil had used her like a pawn, and he was an arm of that bitch and her company. So what was she going to do?
As far as she was concerned, Bobbi had two choices. She could sit around sniffling over the whole fucking thing, being paranoid about invisible hands guiding the world for the next fifty years until she overdosed on pints of ice cream, or she could just get that much angrier than she already was and do something about it. It wasn’t like her to get sniffly over this kind of bullshit; she had the tools and the resources to go find out what the fuck happened, didn’t she? As she stormed past the desk and headed into her room, bathed in the light of the screens that sprang up in her wake, she tried hard to push back the tide of emotion that threatened to crush her. She knew what she wanted to do; it was more a matter of how the fuck to do it.
Bobbi stepped through the doorway, and stopped as she saw Tom’s coat in its shadow-box to the right. She turned toward it, and looking at the stained microfiber remembered a chain of faces, all of them his. His face when she’d met him, guarded and serious; how white and drawn he’d been when they’d managed to survive the ferals; how he seemed so hollow and thin when he’d pulled the Doll out from underneath the trash pile. Had it all been Stadil’s fault? No, she thought, not entirely. The job would have killed him on its own. But better that, she believed, than to be fast-forwarded into oblivion by some asshole and his corporate masters.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 3
