by Kim Oh
“Resource? Wait a minute. This wouldn’t have been somebody named Morton, would it?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Another nod from Jerry. “We figured out that he’s like your agent or something. He sets you up with jobs – like this one. So there was some bio stuff in the emails. About you, your background, and all.”
“Even some photos,” said Simon.
Those had probably been why this bunch had figured they could take me on. I don’t photograph as deadly as I am in real life.
“Anyway, there was some stuff in there about your having gone up for a position as a chief financial officer one time, at some company you had been working for. But then something happened, and it didn’t come through –”
“You could say that.”
“That’s why,” continued Jerry, “we figured you’d be interested in being our CFO. For our start-up company. Once we get the financing capital from Dalby, you’ll be in on the ground floor. Complete with MFN – most favored nation status. Nobody would get better compensation terms than you would.”
“Because that’s the loophole we figured out.” Simon leaned toward me. “At least we think it is. The rules that Dalby set up for the contest – they only say that we can’t offer you money. We can’t buy the package from you. But an employment contract – a top position with the company we’ll be setting up – the rules don’t say anything about that.”
I wasn’t convinced – at least, not yet. “Seems to me you’re splitting some pretty fine hairs here.”
“Hey – if Dalby didn’t want us to do something like this, he should’ve spelled it out in the contest rules. We made a deal with him when we got into the contest, and we’re sticking to it. Not our fault that we’re being more creative than he was expecting us to be.”
“And,” added Jerry, “maybe this is what Dalby wanted us to figure out. Maybe the whole point of the contest was for us to prove that we’re smarter than Stinson, the action guy. And that there are ways of getting things done that don’t involve muscle cars and getting people killed.”
“Sure.” I had laid the .357 back in my lap. “But what if you’re wrong about that? What if Dalby just decides that you’re cheating, and this job offer is the same as money? Because let’s face the facts – it just about is. I give you the backpack . . .” I used the gun to point to it, behind me. “And I wind up as CFO of your new corporation. That’s quid pro quo, right? One thing of value exchanged for something else of value. Dalby is just as likely to say that’s the sort of thing he was ruling out when he set up the contest. It’s his finance capital we’re talking about, so he gets to decide. Who are you going to complain to if you don’t like it?”
“All right.” Jerry sighed; he knew I had him there. “Maybe so – maybe that’s what Dalby decides –”
“Not maybe. Probably.”
“So we’re not any worse off than if we don’t offer you the CFO position in exchange for the backpack. Because . . . frankly . . . we don’t have any other way of getting it from you.”
“We kinda shot our wad, already.” Simon sounded glum. “Back on the freeway. With the drone and everything.”
“That was your Plan A? And you don’t have a Plan B, I take it.”
“Not really,” said Jerry. “I mean . . . we’re pretty smart about a lot of things. This start-up – it’s going to make us all billionaires. You, too, if you finally decide to get in on it with us. But this action stuff?” He grimaced as he shook his head. “Not really our thing, if you know what I mean.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it.” I was actually starting to feel sorry for them. “You did the best you could.”
“We don’t have any other option,” said Simon. “This is our Plan B – it’s the best we could come up with. If it works, and Dalby gives us the money, then great. If he doesn’t . . .” A shrug. “That’s the way it goes. Because . . . let’s face it . . .” Simon gestured toward me. “You’re the one with the gun. And you seem pretty good with it.”
I didn’t say anything. This was all seeming pretty strange to me. Like the interior of this phony paramedics van was a little bubble, separated from the rest of the universe. Sitting here with these guys – every once in a while, I could hear some late-night traffic, a delivery truck or something like that, go rumbling by on the street where we were parked, as though to remind me that there was another world out there.
Sitting here, mulling over a job offer . . . a big money one, stock options, all that good stuff . . . yeah, that was definitely strange.
“Hey . . .” Jerry read my thoughts. “When are you going to get another offer like this?”
“We’re ready to go.” Simon held up a thin sheaf of papers, which he took from a manila envelope that had been sitting on the van floor beside him. “Contract and everything.”
“Really – you’ve got the paperwork ready?”
“I told you,” said Jerry. “This is our Plan B. We had it ready all along. The whole bit with the drone and everything, out on the freeway – frankly, we had our doubts about whether we’d be able to pull that off.”
“Worth a shot.” Simon fanned through the pages, giving them a final look-over. “But now we need to get down to business. Real business.” He held the papers out toward me. “There’s a couple of blanks you’ll still need to fill in. Social Security number, that sort of thing.”
I took the pages with my free hand, the one not resting the .357 in my lap. Setting them down in front of me, I turned them over, one by one.
“Need a pen?”
Jerry’s voice intruded on my musings.
I held my hand out, and Jerry laid a cheap ballpoint in my palm. My knees were getting creaky from sitting cross-legged for so long on the floor of the van. Holding the ballpoint pen, I went on looking at the employment contract’s last page, the one with the signature line and my name printed underneath.
“Okay . . .” I spoke at last. “You know, it’s not as easy as you’re making it out to be.”
“It isn’t?” Jerry frowned. “What’s not easy about it? You sign, you’ve got the position as CFO – soon as the start-up is fully funded by Dalby, that is – and right now, all you’ve got to do is give us the package you’re carrying.”
“Actually,” said Simon, “you can have it back when we’re done, if you want. We only need it for a minute or two. Just long enough to bring it up close to the proximity trigger –” He pointed to his stomach. “And then we’re done. That’s all we need to do, for Dalby to get the signal on his phone and know that we’ve won the contest. Then we go back down to L.A., we have a meeting in his office – his real office, not the one you met him at – and we get the ball rolling with the access to the start-up financing. That’ll be a lot more paperwork – you’ll need to be in on that.”
“Yeah, great – that’s fine. If it happens.”
“Why if?” Jerry looked puzzled. “Why wouldn’t it happen? We’ve told you what’s going on, about the contest and everything. And we’ve made you our offer, and it’s a good one – you know it is. The numbers are fantastic. You’re getting in on the ground floor of what’ll be the biggest tech start-up of the twenty-first century –”
“So you say.”
“So what if it isn’t?” He spread his hands wide. “With the kind of money Dalby is going to be pouring into it, the whole thing could go bust, and we’d still make out like bandits. Guaranteed. That’s how these venture capital operations work – at least at this level.”
“Sign the agreement,” added Simon, “and you’re an instant megamillionaire. And a CFO. Just pull the trigger. So to speak.”
“What you’ve always wanted . . .”
“No.” I shook my head. “I mean, yeah, it is what I wanted – being a chief financial officer for a big company – but wanting it was a long time ago for me. It was different then. I was different.” A little key had turned in the lock of a door somewhere inside my head, and once it had, I couldn’t stop what I said,
even though some of it – maybe all of it – surprised me. “And I’ve done a lot of other things since then, and none of it was CFO-type stuff. And . . . maybe I like doing that other stuff.” I picked up the .357 again, turning it slightly in my hand, as though it were on display. “This kind of stuff.”
There – it was all out on the table now. Where even I could see it. I bitch – a lot – about what’s happened to me, the things that should’ve happened but didn’t, and what I have to do for a living now. Some of it’s not fun – perhaps even most of it. But maybe there’s just a little bit . . .
That is.
Cole was right. A long time ago, when we were getting ready to kill our old boss McIntyre, who’d screwed over both of us. Cole had been doing his weird psychological stuff – he wouldn’t have called it that, though – about getting me ready for that. For the whole killing trip. And he had said there was something different about me, that I wasn’t like other girls. There was something wrong inside my head, the same way there was something wrong inside his, which made it just a little bit too easy for me to learn how to kill other people. I had sort of known he was right. That I was too suited for this kind of work, in a way that normal people weren’t. I had known, but I hadn’t wanted to think about what it meant –
Until now.
The job offer – the whole CFO thing, the employment contract lying before me on the floor of the van, with all the pretty numbers on the pages in the middle, and the signature line on the last page, that a ballpoint pen would fill in just as well as a fancy Montblanc – that pretty much made it real. More real than it ever had been when there hadn’t been anybody handing me an offer like that. The great thing about not having options is that you don’t have to decide about what you want to do – you just take what life hands you, and you shut up about it. Unless you enjoy the sound of your own bitching and complaining – which, like most people, I have to admit I sometimes do.
“Okay, Kim – you like the job you got. The one you do now.” In a soft voice, Jerry played the best and last card he had. “But what if something happens?”
“Like what?” I looked up at him. And asked the question, even though I already had a good idea where he was going with this.
“You’ve got a brother, don’t you? Younger brother.”
“Yeah.” I supposed this had also been in the bio material, that they had gotten out of Dalby’s emails with Morton. “Donnie.”
“That’s right,” said Jerry. “What happens to him? Where does he go, when something bad happens? To you. ’Cause it’s not a matter of if it happens. The type of job you do, it’s a matter of when it happens. Those are the odds, aren’t they?”
I didn’t have an answer. And didn’t need one – the guy had me there, and he and I both knew it. This was something that my old killing mentor Cole had warned me about, when he’d first gotten me started. You want to do this, you can’t care about anybody. Which was easy advice to follow when you’re just talking about yourself. Put another person in the equation, one you do care about – then it gets rough. That was why Cole had been a loner for most of his career. Everybody in his life had been disposable. I haven’t been that way, at least when it comes to my little brother . . .
So now I was on the hook.
“All right.” I didn’t make any more fuss. Thinking about it wasn’t going to turn it into something better. I leaned down and signed the last page of the employment contract. When the financing capital rolled in from Dalby, I could have whatever goddamn fountain pen I wanted, and my little brother wouldn’t have to worry about seeing me laid out in a box. At least, not for a long time, when I finally died of terminal boredom. As much as I’d ever wanted to be a CFO, there was no way I could see it turning out to be as interesting as the life I’d been living the last few years. “Here you go.” I shuffled the pages back together, then handed them over to Simon.
“Thanks.” He slipped the signed employment contract back into its manila envelope and held his empty hand back out toward me.
I was still mired in the remnants of what I’d been thinking about – it took a moment for me to realize what he wanted.
“Oh, yeah – right.” I reached behind me, slid the backpack straps off my shoulders, and handed it to him. “Per our agreement.”
“This won’t take long.” Simon smiled as he took the backpack with one hand and lifted the bottom of his shirt with the other. His pale, untanned abdomen was exposed, with the only slightly more colorless bandage pad to one side, just below his ribs. “Then you can have it back.”
“I’m not really into souvenirs.”
His partner Jerry and I watched as he pressed the backpack to his side. More weirdness – Simon closed his eyes and gave the backpack a little circular rub against his flesh, as though he were getting a little massage-like, sensuous kick from it. Maybe this was why high-tech guys were so into gadgets, not just smart phones, but the kind they strapped onto their bodies – wearable tech is what my brother Donnie said it was called. For guys like this, it might be what took the place of actual human contact. Get your head far enough into clever machines, and this is what happens to you, I guess.
The inside of the fake paramedics van was dead silent for a couple of seconds. Then –
Beep.
That sound was clearly audible, even though it was coming through a layer of Simon’s sutured flab, plus muffled by the bandage on top. He nodded in satisfaction as he looked over at Jerry. “We got it.”
He took the backpack away from himself and tossed it over, landing it on the van floor right in front of me.
Beep. Another one, a little louder.
The smiles faded from both their faces. “That’s not right,” said Jerry. “There was just supposed to be the one acknowledgment signal –”
Beep. That one had come even sooner than the previous one. And definitely louder, and insistently shrill.
“What’s going on?” Simon sounded panicky, as his wide-eyed glance swung across the van interior.
“Don’t ask me,” I said. “I was under the impression that you people knew what you were doing –”
Beep. And then another. Beep.
Jerry knelt in front of Simon, his nose almost touching the white bandage pad, as though he were trying to peer through it and underneath Simon’s skin.
“I don’t get it –” A note of panic sounded in Jerry’s voice as well. “Dalby told us that when we got hold of the backpack, and we got it close enough to the proximity trigger, there’d be the single beep, and we’d be done –”
Beep . . . beep . . .
Faster.
“Okay,” I said. “So one beep, or a lot of beeps – what does it matter? Maybe Dalby got it wrong. Maybe when you got it put in, the doctors threw the wrong switch. Why are you getting so freaked out?”
Beep beep beep . . .
Faster, and louder.
“Because –” Jerry’s face was bright with sweat as he looked over his shoulder at me. “It was supposed to go dead. Once it’s triggered, it sends out the signal. Then it’s supposed to switch off. Go totally inert.”
Simon clawed at the bandage pad, finally ripping it off and exposing the pinkish incision scar underneath. With increasing desperation, he jabbed his forefinger at the flat rectangular object inside himself.
The beeps sped up, with hardly a break between each note.
“Get it out . . .” Simon’s voice was a high-pitched gasp. “You gotta get it out –”
On the back of my neck, the hairs stiffened, and I felt the skin across my shoulders and arms tighten. It wasn’t fear that I was catching like a virus from the two Beta team guys, but a memory unfolding inside my head. And that was worse.
For a split second, I was back where I’d been once, a long time ago. In the grimy warehouse Cole had operated out of, and where he’d kept all his guns and lethal equipment. I was standing right behind him as he leaned forward in his wheelchair, using a watchmaker’s tiny instruments to assemble s
omething on his cluttered workbench. Something that would mean real bad trouble for a lot of people.
You can smell it, can’t you? In that movie inside my head, Cole’s psychotic grin appeared in close-up, as he stopped for a moment and looked back at me. But you’re not. You’re feeling it . . .
The movie snapped away, and I wasn’t back there in Cole’s warehouse. I was in the fake paramedics van again, parked on the side of a dark street somewhere. Suddenly, the space contained by the van’s bare white metal was way too small, like all three of us had been crammed into a box. And something in there with us wasn’t going beepity-beepity-beepity anymore – it was screaming.
“Come on!” I scrambled onto my knees, reaching for the handle of the van’s rear doors. “We gotta get out –”
