Convergence

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  “What would you have me say? It’s a job. I work for them. I do work for her. It all pays.”

  I thought about the nature of yin and yang and what the battle for balance can do to a man’s soul. Perfect harmony never comes without an exacting toll and a heavy penance. He had the smell of a cop, but he stank of defeat. I felt sorry for him.

  I felt sorry for myself, too. I shouldn’t have left Staples. I should have stayed and at least tried to get amnesty for myself and Mesa. Instead, I’d gotten petty and angry, refusing to even try, and acted like a petulant child.

  By the time my noodles came, he was finished with his, so I ate quickly. He regarded me quietly, not saying a word. Obviously, he wasn’t in the business of opening up to complete strangers, let alone bagmen for the crime lord he’d somehow gotten entangled with. When my bowl was empty, he passed me a folded napkin. I picked it up and dabbed at my lips, feeling the bodies of the memory chips through the thin cloth. I tucked my hands under the table and extracted the chips, then put the napkin back on the table.

  “I’m guessing you viewed the data?”

  He pursed his lips and tilted his head to one side. “I am lead investigator of these murders,” he said, finally. I took that as a yes.

  “Then you know this wasn’t just some random killings.”

  “Do I? In some respects, depending on certain angles and one’s point of view, you simply strode out of an apartment building and shot one of the men point-blank.”

  “And if you dig deeper, you know that these men were responsible for the freeway attack a few days ago. If you run the mems with the empath filters on, you know they were there to kill Alice. That’s a whole helluva lot of cognition you’re sweeping under the rug.”

  “It’s unimportant what I do or do not know. It is important, however, that my superiors trust in my competencies as an investigator and that they do not learn the truth. For all of our sakes, I should say.”

  “In other words, you’re sitting on all of this until Alice tells you otherwise.”

  He inclined his head slightly, with barely any movement at all. He looked small inside of his suit, pathetic even. Our business finished, he pushed himself away from the table and stood. He put on a hat and sport coat, cutting the profile of a dapper detective from a bygone century.

  I gave him a few minutes’ head start and drank a glass of water before leaving. I ran through another security check, looping around the neighborhood on an indirect path back to my car. With every step I took, I could feel the chips burning a hole in my pocket. With every second that passed, I could feel a growing uncertainty and the painful tug of time slipping away, wasted.

  I feared that the information on the chips was already past its expiration date. If Jaime’s location was buried in there somewhere, it was completely possible he would have moved on already. Once he’d learned of the deaths, he could have rabbited and disappeared to a new spider-hole that neither of the dead men’s memories was privy to. He could have limited knowledge of the secret location to a party of one, and then he would be gone forever. And Mesa with him.

  I had to find him. The memory chips had to have the answers I needed. They had to.

  In the car, I took a deep calming breath, trying to center myself. I took the DRMR unit out of the glove compartment, organized the chips on the dashboard, and plugged in.

  The chips passed the DRMR security program. No virals. No thought-bombs. No mem-wipes or Trojans. I did a quick download, uninterested in the experience of their memories. I was strictly data-hounding it, fast and easy. I dumped the mems and scrubbed them through custom filters and a facial recognition suite, hunting for Jaime-specific contexts. I didn’t need to know anything about their personal lives or what they had felt at their moment of death. I cared only about Jaime and where he might be.

  I let the info wash over me. Finished, I unplugged, needing time to think. Jaime had options, and in some ways, I was chasing a ghost. He was an information hound, a compartmentalization whore. He told people what he wanted them to know or needed them to believe. The chips were so rife with data, though—an odd disparity for someone who so tightly controlled the flow of information. That in itself was the trap. Addresses, phone numbers, safe houses, drop boxes, and multiple meeting points. Parking garages and malls, university centers, restaurants, coffee houses, construction sites, warehouses, and run-down vacant movie theaters. These men were part of a cell that Jaime ran directly. His elite squad. His private army. His killers.

  A list of safe houses were embedded in the memories of both men, but I ruled those out because I figured Jaime would eliminate them as an option. He had to assume that his men had been bagged up by the PRC and that they would vet every memory and chase every lead. It seemed unlikely that he would know Alice had sicced her inside man, her pathetic detective, on the case and wormed her way into the investigation. All of his safe houses were exposed. His entire network was not simply compromised, but burned entirely. He would have to go to the one place only he knew about.

  But where the fuck was that? Where had he taken my daughter?

  I stared out the grimy, pockmarked windshield. The city’s dust had left a fine film of grit in half-circles and triangles on the glass where the wipers couldn’t reach. A tightness blossomed in my chest, heavy over my heart. The pressure of time manifested into physical pain made worse by the loss of precious minutes and hard-fought seconds. I had to find Mesa, and I had no idea where to even begin looking.

  I couldn’t face losing her. Selene’s death had ruined me. If anything happened to Mesa…

  Then, just like that, a small thought that had been tugging at the back of my mind lurched forward and flourished. I studied this sudden realization carefully. I remembered my time on Alcatraz, where I had first met Jaime. We’d taken long walks around the compound and had equally long discussions. I remembered his story of loss, his dead wife, and the underground shelter that had come under attack. It was impossible for me to forget.

  Neither of the men had known that parcel of information about Jaime. He had not entrusted them with that detail of his life. But he had told me. He had recognized a kindred spirit. Our pain and loss made us close. In hindsight, it was easy to see that he was merely using the tools he had needed in order to recruit me, to draw me into his cause and his plans. But that little information whore had shared a piece of himself with me.

  If it were true.

  The Metro rail consisted of five lines and nearly a hundred stations. The red and purple lines were nearly thirty miles of subway with more than twenty stops between them. Union Station had been used as a shelter, but so had Civic Center. Jaime had said the PRC had tossed grenades down on them, so the odds favored Civic.

  The subways were dead tunnels, home to the rats and the displaced who had made the underground their homes. The PRC was in no rush to get them operational and did not currently view the system as an essential part of the infrastructure. They were occupied with rebuilding the highways, establishing regular bus routes, and getting the surface and above-ground rails operational. In time, they promised, the subways would run again, when they were safe. Subways were one more avenue for the terrorists to gain a foothold in their attacks and campaigns of violence. The PRC had enough problems above ground without creating the potential for even more catastrophe below. “When it is safe” became a mantra during the infrequent press briefings they gave for the state news, but the city and its infrastructure wasn’t going to be safe anytime soon. Fifteen, maybe twenty years down the line, Los Angeles could have its subways back, but only if any outlying resistance groups were completely crushed.

  Jaime could be hidden anywhere in the thirty miles of tunnel, plus all the off-shoot corridors that were used for maintenance and storage. Add to that all of the other tunnels that ran above and below the subways that could have been drilled into for access, and finding him would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Hundreds of miles of drainage networks and sewers provided Ja
ime with a million potential hiding spots deep off the grid. I didn’t know if he was a tunnel rat, but I had to consider it. In that case, finding him would be even more difficult.

  I wondered if I was looking at this the wrong way. Maybe I should be thinking of ways to make him come to me instead of trying to find him. I realized suddenly that I knew very little about him. I knew nothing of his weak spots or his pressure points. What could I do that would lure him out? What would make him peek his head up?

  After several minutes of hard thought, I still came up with nothing. The fucking information whore. He would never tell anybody more than they needed to know. Never give them an inch. He was smart to do that. Don’t let them have anything that could be used against you. Limit their control over you. He was a player, an operator. And I was a fucking idiot.

  Mesa, you poor thing…

  I called Alice. She answered almost instantly.

  “Call Kaften for me,” I said. “Tell him I have a business proposition and to meet me at our spot.”

  She started to ask why, but I cut her off and disconnected the call, not in the mood for explaining things. I needed time to make peace with this decision.

  As I drove, thoughts of dead wives, murdered parents, and random bombings swirled in my head. Dead shooters. Highway attacks. Little girls with bombs stuffed in their backpacks.

  Night fell, and my headlights fell upon an outdated placard. COMING SOON ALCYONE TOWERS. Large raised letters stood out against a mock holographic display of the finished complex. Back when the towers were proposed, space had been at a premium, and overpopulation had been a growing concern. Growing outward had been impossible, so growing upward was the sole alternative. The mock-up showed three thick, massive multi-legged structures that rose and twisted into a square antiprism. Only half of one tower had been finished before the attacks shut down construction.

  I parked near it, shut down the car, and debated what exactly I was doing there. I wondered if I would be able to find my spilt blood, if that dark patch still stained the soil where I’d fallen. I wondered if Kaften still had spotters there. The unfinished tower was a good sniper’s cove.

  After a few minutes of waiting, I got out of the car and sat on the hood. The air was musty and had a peculiar dusty tang to it. It tasted coppery.

  I waited for a bullet to punch through me, to obliterate my head, but nothing happened. Eventually, I relaxed. I listened for the sound of voices or movement. Nothing. Maybe this was a waste of time. Still, I waited, wondering if Kaften would show, and if he would let me live long enough to explain why I was there.

  I sat for forty minutes before I spotted the yellow glow on the horizon, which resolved into headlights then a small convoy of vehicles. My eyes lingered over the numerous, half-finished tower floors, but I saw nothing.

  Kaften was the first man out of the car. A loose regiment spread out behind him, surrounding me. His black skin took on a sheen in the headlights, and he puffed on a thick cigar. He looked me over, but I was sitting casually, not much of a threat.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  “I told you I’d put a bullet in you.”

  I shrugged. Water under the bridge. However, a tinge of phantom pain echoed in my shortened finger. “You’re a man of your word,” I said, trying to stay cool.

  It earned a smile from him, a short stubby smile around a short, stubby cigar.

  “So, what? You come for another one?” He looked around at the men flanking us and at the guns they held in a relaxed but ready combat posture. “Maybe a lot of them?”

  I shook my head. “I came for your help. And to give you something, if you want it. If you’re willing to help.”

  His smile grew larger. He was on the verge of laughter, but my words stole away his shit-eating grin, and his eyes grew serious.

  “Jaime Kristoff. Samuel Hodgson. I know where he is. He’s yours if you help me find him.”

  He chewed on the end of his cigar for a moment then spat it out. Slowly, he ground it out, his eyes never leaving my face. I met his gaze, staring into dark, deep pools, and I knew his answer.

  Chapter 15

  When the Nazis launched their blitzkrieg attacks against England, bombing the country into so much rubble, Londoners sought shelter in the subways. After a night of air raids and ground-shaking explosions, they climbed up out of the rubble and started their day. They went to work and bought supplies to get themselves through another day, possibly their last. They embodied that stiff-upper-lip mentality everyone talked about. The bombings were an inconvenience, a minor disruption in their daily lives, but they carried on undeterred and unbowed.

  I would’ve liked to say my fellow Americans had shown backbone and convictions similar to that of their 1940s-era British counterparts. But I couldn’t.

  As a culture, we were breastfed a sense of entitlement well past any bounds of propriety. The old American dream about working hard and people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to become a success was vilified. Anyone who was smart, worked hard, and made lots of money was the enemy. The American dream was replaced with the American Mentality, which said everyone should be able to have whatever they want, and it should just be given to them. And if it wasn’t given to them, they were encouraged to take it. No accountability. No work ethic. No sense of responsibility.

  We were weaned on instant access to information. Nothing was worth waiting for, because waiting for anything was too inconvenient. Attention spans were nil, yet, perversely, we were raised by celebrity-whore wannabes who demanded constant attention, as if they were starved for it.

  When the war came, we wanted instant results. When our insatiable demands were not met immediately, we cowered underground to escape the bombs, cried, and whined. Nobody got up and went to work the next day. All the PRC had to do was turn out the lights, and we were ready to call it quits. There were no stiff upper lips down there, deep below the city in the underground tunnels. Only bent backs and broken spirits.

  Jaime may have been the one man on his crowded platform to stand with squared shoulders. I could almost see it—him standing still with pride among nearly three thousand people, as if he were a breaker wall standing against the tide. He was fueled by hate and scorn, and he would have called it American pride, even though the America he believed in was nearing its expiration date—if it hadn’t already passed.

  The underground shelters hadn’t been perfect. Although the subway lines had been constructed to withstand earthquakes up to 7.5 magnitudes, bombs sometimes made it through. Occasionally, intense bombing caused streets to collapse into the tunnels, killing those inside. They penetrated the roads and the tunnels, taking out the water and sewer lines, which flooded the tunnels. While many died from the explosives and concussive shockwaves, a surprisingly high number of people drowned. Being trampled was a fairly common way to die then, too. In one instance, a pack mentality had taken over following a close call at the Hollywood and Vine stop. A group of people seeking shelter rushed down the stairs so quickly that a few missed the steps and toppled down. The crowd pushed on, tripping over one another. Almost two hundred people were crushed to death.

  Nearly ten thousand bunk beds filled the stops along the Red and Purple lines. The National Guard and Red Cross worked to keep the air raid shelters supplied with first aid kits and portable toilets. Several Guardsmen were appointed as shelter marshals in an effort to keep order among the ever-growing crowds, to assist with evacuations, and give first aid.

  For a lot of people, any hope they still had after the first hard day was usually gone by the second. The shelters simply became a refuge for those who were prepared to die but were unwilling to sit outside, waiting for the big one to get dropped on them.

  Hope was hard to maintain. We hacked into pirated newsfeeds over the commNet for updated death tallies and watched analysts talk about how the subways were nothing more than death tubes because the infrastructure wasn’t designed to support the shelters and withstand the a
ttacks. The broadcasts were an unrelenting loop of horrifying images and despair run in depressing repetition. The journalists promised us that their hearts went out to us. But really, they were waiting for us to die. They were hoping for the body counts to increase so they could start the news off with a fresh tally and a tired examination of death.

  If it bled, it led, twenty-four hours a day and with a ticker running over the commercial breaks. I promise, we bled. We fucking bled.

  Those newsfeeds probably saved our lives. Mesa and I had avoided the shelters, seeking escape in the countryside, away from the densely populated urban areas. Bombing trees and scrub didn’t make much tactical sense or provide any advantages when, a few klicks over, a lovely shopping mall filled with people was waiting to be obliterated. Or at least we had thought so at the time…

  I slowly descended the steps at Civic Center, down into the darkness, with Kaften and a few of his men to either side of me. A fence had been dropped to prevent admission years ago, but it had become rusty with age, and hooligans had since made the stairwell easily accessible. My footsteps against the concrete echoed softly. The motionless escalators on either side of me were nothing more than an inky black mark. The subway held no semblance of life, but it had the sour stench of the unwashed, of sweat and urine, and rotting excrement. It stank of death.

  At the platform, I spotted in the ceiling above a fiberglass man in flight—the remnants of an art installation called I Dreamed I Could Fly. Six fiberglass people had been suspended there before the war. They flyers were broken and strewn across the ground, their once-colorful bodies ashen among the ruins of broken beds, busted toilets, and moth-eaten mattresses.

  The liquid displays were shattered, the support columns dashed but still standing. The blast had obliterated some of the letters on the overhead directions, so that it read: TO N RT OLLYW D. The tracks on either side of the platform were empty, save for chunks of rubble. In the center of the station, between two concrete columns, was a grouping of bunk beds with bare frames. With the subway’s circulation system dead, the air was stale and warm.