Gone Dark (The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Book 2)

by P. R. Adams

  What she wanted. At twelve, she knew. “You just liked the possibilities.”

  “No. I loved the possibilities. It was so different here. I could choose to pursue a sport, if I wanted. I could be an artist. There was so much freedom. And then I found out my aunt was a spy. Do you know how thrilling and mysterious that sounds to a twelve-year-old? And after a few years, she arranged for me to meet someone.”

  “Dong?”

  “Yes. And he offered to make me a spy, too. He said I was special, and MSS would help me be the best. I was a teenager. They were saying everything I could want to hear. I loved your country, but they were giving me an opportunity to live in mine without the dead-end life I had been facing.”

  “And now you’re all they offered. It sounds like a good ending, Huiyin.”

  Pain flashed across her face. “But it’s a lie.” She undid the buckle on her coat and opened it. She wore nothing beneath.

  “No. We’re not doing—”

  She stood, free of the coat, flesh a soft butterscotch. “Ichi says that you lost your girlfriend. I’ve seen your dossier. I watched the data feeds. I’m sorry.” She crossed to me, grabbed my left hand, ran small fingers along the arm to the shoulder. “This is cybernetic?”

  “You’ve seen my dossier. Your people tore me apart, didn’t they?”

  “Dong did. Not the MSS.” She guided my hand toward her chest, glaring when I resisted. “Let me show you.” When I wouldn’t let her, she pressed against me and placed my hand on her shoulder. “Do you feel it? Hidden beneath the flesh, but still there?”

  It was like bunched-up muscle, rough enough to the touch that my fingers could register it as well as I could smell the flowery perfume she wore. “Scar tissue?”

  She guided my hand along the softer flesh inside of her arm, to the elbow, then down to the wrist. “And implants. Twitch response accelerators, reinforced bone, hormone management systems, blood filtration, many other things. The best I could be. That meant the best they could cut me up and make me into. Dong didn’t just take away your limbs. He tried to take away your humanity.” The tears she’d been holding back trickled down soft cheeks. “Like he did mine.”

  “No. You still have your humanity. You don’t have to let them take that away.”

  She guided my hand to her breasts—small, firm. Warm to the touch. Human.

  I tried to pull away, but there was a part of me that protested. What would I gain? What would I lose? Even if she was playing me for sympathy, she was a victim, just like me.

  I whispered, “Huiyin, don’t let your training do—”

  “This is not my training. This is me. My need.” She unbuckled my belt and drew my underwear down. “Prove to me I’m human.”

  I carried her to the bed, hating what I was doing so soon after losing Margo, hating the ridiculous and dehumanizing game Huiyin and I played, but hating people like Dong and Stovall even more. I brushed Huiyin’s tears away, then explored the body that hid its scars as well as my own. She ran fingers over my cybernetic limbs, watching me for reactions, then turned her focus to the human parts of me. I did the same for her, and before long, I couldn’t remember Margo, or Cytek, or Abhishek’s warnings. Huiyin’s arms and legs twisted and tangled around mine, and her moans became the center of my universe.

  When we were done, she lay quietly with her back to me, softly breathing with a jag that could have been crying or the last moments of ecstasy. Once again, it seemed authentic, as if her suffering went deeper than the scars.

  I pulled her close, stroking flesh that butchers had cut apart in the name of service. “Did Dong ever exploit you? Sexually?”

  She tensed, then relaxed. “Only as part of my training. He had…unapproved of appetites.”

  “Did you ever suspect he might be a traitor?”

  She turned around and kissed me. “They did. A few years ago. They were watching him.”

  Not close enough, apparently. “Did you ask for this operation?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes drifted away and she yawned. She pulled away and sat on the edge of the bed. “We can talk more tomorrow. When we plan the Cytek raid.”

  I lay back. “Yeah.”

  She pulled her boots back on, then her coat, then she let herself out with only a quick, guilty glance back at me. I locked the door and turned the lights out again, feeling strangely vulnerable myself. There was something troubling yet relieving about what we’d done. It wasn’t just knowing I had been with someone as damaged as me, although that was a part of it.

  Not just physically damaged, I realized. We had both been betrayed by people we had trusted. The scars ran into our psyches.

  Sex between broken people. Is that all I’ll ever know again?

  Wendy Politkovskaya lived about forty minutes outside Charlotte. The surrounding woods were already alive, vibrant, filtering the morning sun and keeping the temperature pleasant. Leaves and twigs crunched beneath my step. There was a pleasant earthiness to the air that was refreshing after our time in the Canyon.

  From behind me, Chan said, “Sure it’s safe to leave the car back there?”

  The naïveté brought a smile to me. “Robot systems don’t do so well without markers to guide them. You can’t count on technology for everything.”

  Chan shrugged and looked away when I turned around. “For most things.”

  The woods thinned, and a lawn sloped up to a small cabin with a rustic facade—logs with a sloppy mud mortar. Smoke rose from a stone chimney. It was certainly convincing from a distance. We made our way between stumps, trying to stick to mostly buried stones to avoid the young grass but stopped when the door opened and a tall, silver-haired woman stepped out, shotgun held halfway between ready and aiming. She wore a forest green sweater and brown pants that seemed intended to play down her hourglass figure.

  They failed.

  I raised my hands. “Abhishek said you could help me.”

  The tall woman looked past me. “You were to be alone. Is your girlfriend dangerous?” An accent, barely, but there. Russian.

  “This is Chan. Just Chan. You can call me Stefan.”

  “Chan and Stefan. Well, better you come inside. Wendy is my preference. Time isn’t stopping for us, and there is much to talk about.”

  The cabin interior also played on the rustic motif. It was all one big room broken up by nothing but log support beams and faux Colonial furniture. Wendy waved us to a dark-stained oak table—professionally crafted—and set the shotgun down next to the door.

  She pulled a cast-iron kettle from a potbellied stove. “Either of you would like herbal tea?” Wide-set gray eyes flitted between us. “Good for the kidneys.”

  “Sure.” I wasn’t much for tea, but our hostess seemed intent on sharing it.

  Chan nodded and stared down at nails covered in black-metallic polish, maybe embarrassed and certainly noticing how different they were from the at-home-with-nature surroundings.

  I took a sip of the steaming drink as soon as a cup was slid in front of me. It had no real color, like water against the brown of the stoneware cup. It tasted as if someone had squeezed rose petals and dunked dirt-covered roots into the pot. “Really tasty.”

  Wendy smiled as she lowered herself into a chair with a cup of her own. She blew steam at me, then took a sip before setting her cup down and caressing it with wrinkled fingers. “With your reaction, I would scold you that life is about more than good taste, but the way you dress and the company you keep, this is something I can see you already know.”

  Chan stared into the cup, silent and unmoving.

  “She means Abhishek,” I said. “How do you know him?”

  Wendy’s index fingers rubbed the stoneware cup. “Mutual interests. The two of us came from countries where things were bad and getting worse. Who knew that we would watch the same play out here? Where I grew up, if you had money, you might kill to keep it. And the more civilized folk? They simply put enforcers into power to do the work for them. Thugs. Cretins. And
to maintain the facade of democracy took so little as to play to the simple-minded nationalist interests. Tell the workers this will make their country—make them—great in the eyes of the world again. People are so desperate, so willing to believe even obvious lies.”

  “Americans are too sophisticated for that,” I said, aiming for something between sincerity and irony. I caught the smile that flashed across Wendy’s face. She was still a good-looking woman, even without makeup. “You’re a journalist?”

  “Now. A model in my youth. It paid the bills. It gave me access. How quick men are to assume they can talk about everything around a pretty, young woman. It would surprise you.” Wendy glanced at Chan, brow wrinkled in apparent confusion. “This Chan does very little talking.”

  Chan raised the steaming tea up and sipped at it. “Thinking. Mostly.” Those magenta eyes stayed locked on the teacup.

  “We know someone who says this company—Cytek—was an old Chinese Ministry of State Security shell company. Chan’s found some data to back that up. We spent most of the ride down here digging through old financial reports and some of the declassified investigations around the company. Apparently, the company’s front was mostly throwing money behind fake cybernetics research efforts while reselling cheap Vietnamese knockoff components. Lots of shell games with money, imports and exports, all to embed spies around the world.”

  Wendy nodded. “All very wasteful, isn’t it? The old world. Governments spying on governments, quibbling over the rationale behind what is ultimately the same story: The rich get richer off the labor of the poor. My homeland, China, Europe, your country—the same across the world. It is always the same. And now the people with all the money have grown tired of the interference of governments. Were it different, it could actually be a good thing.”

  “A good thing?”

  “Eliminating our current systems. Stepping away from hard-line ideologies.” She closed her eyes and breathed in her tea.

  I tried to relax and not sound defensive. “And replace them with what? Anarchy?”

  Wendy’s gray eyes flicked open, locked on mine. “There are only the two options—the current systems and anarchy? I had forgotten that.”

  “Then what would be better?”

  “Certainly not what happens now. This Metacorporate Initiative.”

  I took another sip of my tea. It still tasted like dirt. “I get the idea behind it.”

  “Do you?” Wendy pulled her hands from her cup and pushed back with a groan of wood on wood. She strode to the kitchen area, pulled a data device from a drawer below and to the right of a pewter sink, then set the powered-on device in front of me. “For years, I watched corporate behavior—toxic chemical dumps into rivers; deadly product designs that could have been averted with minor testing and adjustments; reckless and illegal business decisions that wipe out the retirements of millions. This particular story I’ve been following for the last few years. In my darkest moments, I could not have imagined it could actually come to pass.”

  Chan stretched closer when I set the data device between us. Once again, I was pleasantly surprised by the change—soap, shampoo, a hint of perfume.

  “The dates,” Chan said. “Is this…?”

  A weariness settled on Wendy’s face. “Decades. It has been in the planning for decades. Billionaires spend their money to educate and refine their loyalists, to put their chosen ones in power. All the way back to Citizens United—corporations being granted personhood status with none of the expectations or obligations of a true person. A connection could easily be made to that. What I have detailed there? It has a cynicism about it that goes beyond folly of that sort. What comes next, the way that a select group of winners will walk away with unprecedented levels of wealth while the rest of the world will lose everything? Can anyone even conceive of what this is going to do?”

  I swished my tea around in its cup. There was a worse taste in my mouth. “It sounds terrible, and I don’t mean to come across heartless, but isn’t this something people are bringing on themselves?”

  Wendy pointed to the data device. “Data at this level is beyond the capacity of most people. Leaders, data feeds…people put their trust in those sources. Politicians selling out constituents who selected them for representation, journalists worrying more about creating controversy and drama for ratings instead of facts—the failure points are there.”

  I wanted to say the failure was in allowing it all to come about in the first place but couldn’t. I was just as guilty as anyone else of only caring about my own needs. “One person can’t prevent this. What I can prevent is them killing me.”

  “You think so?” Wendy seemed to smirk behind her cup. “Of the whole world, only you know what is at stake.” She waved for me to hand the data device to her, then opened a new document. “That look—Abhishek tell you?” She pushed the data device back.

  “What is this?” I scrolled through the document. Names, some I recognized. Numbers, with way too many zeros and commas.

  “Losers, winners.” Wendy finished her tea. “The new world.”

  Chan swatted my hand away and scrolled back to the top of the document, then opened a window. A string of numbers and letters I’d seen before. A device ID. “From the computing device. The one you gave me.”

  Wendy’s eyes said that was true. “It is just some of the data he took off of it, but it is the piece that stood out. And that is why you have to die.”

  “They think I know who they bought off and…” I tapped the document.

  “Trillions of dollars will be at stake. It will be a complete reshaping of the global economy. One life, do you think it matters against all of that? A few hundred? Thousands? Millions? For that information, they would wipe out most of us without hesitation.” Wendy looked at the bottom of her cup. “What choice do they have?”

  “And this Cytek thing? It’s just a front they use? A cleaner?”

  “It is possible. Looking through some old research, I saw something. You have someone from MSS helping you?”

  Did we? I was growing less sure of Huiyin by the second. “Maybe.”

  “An old facility exists still, part of the MSS operation. A major data center. Still running today. Anything you want to know about what Cytek is doing, that center is probably the key. So much of this plan revolves around secure data.”

  Another data center. Great. “Where?”

  “The city of Baltimore—not too far from there.” Wendy flashed a toothy smile. “You have been to this place?”

  Baltimore? Why would the other traffic go out through the data center in Biloxi if they had something in Baltimore? “Not willingly. What makes this facility so special?”

  “It is near one of the desalination facilities, you know? When they built it, there was much work all along the coastline—tunnels, pipes, digging. You think your Agency did not take advantage of that during their spying on MSS?”

  “And this new Cytek organization doesn’t know about it?”

  “Maybe they do. Maybe the MSS would tell you?”

  We were back to relying on Huiyin. “I guess we’ll have to ask her.”

  Wendy gathered the teacups. “It is a dangerous game you play.”

  “I wasn’t given a choice.” I pushed back from the table. “But I think it’s about time we changed the rules.”

  Chapter 18

  Clouds of steam slithered like gray snakes through the dark of night, veiling what little starlight slipped through cotton ball clouds to speckle the black water. We were parked on a concrete slab that looked down on an abandoned beach that might one day be revitalized. One day. For now, it was overrun with bloated fish corpses, which were sickly gray strips in the dark sludge that had replaced brown sand. The construction craze of some years back had taken its toll, leaving behind rotting wood and half-buried rusting metal structures. Once-blue water had turned toxic, become choked with hostile algae and other growth.

  I shivered, more from nerves than the cool air c
oming in through the car’s windows. The stench from the beach had been nauseating at first, but it was now bearable. Water lapped gently against the shore, calming.

  But the shakes were coming, regardless.

  Only Huiyin seemed calm, staring down at the Cytek facility from the front seat of the other car, as if the data center were a puzzle she could solve by exerting her will.

  Chan turned from the computing device that dominated the dash of the car we shared and considered the MSS agent. “Trust her?” Chan certainly didn’t seem to.

  I didn’t know how honest to be, so I said, “I trust my team.”

  “But you slept with her.” Chan never looked away from Huiyin.

  “You leave a camera in my room?”

  Chan glanced down at the computing device display. “Security, right?”

  “And there’s privacy, too, Chan. That’s not acceptable. Have you been recording everyone?”

  “Just at that place. It was scary. Spread out. Felt…alone.”

  Heat flashed along my neck, warring with the chill of the shakes. “Hope you enjoyed the show.”

  “You’re not like Jacinto.” Chan leaned in closer to the display, but not close enough to hide the glistening of tears. “Gentle. Kissing.”

  The heat along my neck spread. “Jacinto was an animal.”

  Chan nodded and wiped away tears. “Sorry.”

  “Forget about it. Just don’t do it again, please.”

  More nodding. And sniffling. “Ichi’s jealous.”

  Who hadn’t seen us? “She’ll just have to deal with it. Huiyin’s free to sleep with who she wants.”

  Chan looked up, eyes damp, brow wrinkled beneath magenta bangs. There was a moment where something more might have been said, then it was gone. All attention returned to the display.