“Doesn’t matter anyway. They’ll all be replaced by robots and kiosks in another year or two.” She took a moment to polish off her burger, sip, and then continued. “Point is, he didn’t want anyone getting the wrong ideas, coming after the wrong person, especially after that San Francisco debacle. He wanted me to know who did it.”
I casually reached across and took one of her fries. My other hand was rummaging about under the table for my new handgun.
“And then he told me that he was solely responsible.”
What?
“Told me he pulled some fucking James Bourne shit, murdered his way free. Got home, found you hiding in the closet, chewed you out, made you lick his wounds for a while and then cut you loose. Then he asked me if I believed his story.”
“And do you?”
“Not a word.”
Here we go. Lean back, calm, nice and easy …
“But I don’t care. So what he told me is what I told them. So it’s good as true and no one is going to come after you, at least for now. You can put the gun away.”
I debated for a moment as she finished the last of her fries, neatly licking the final traces of salt off her fingers. She seemed very confident. Were there snipers somewhere? Maybe I could …
“You could,” she said, reading my thoughts, sizing up the distance between us. “But it would be pointless, and unlike the last time, the cameras in this place are in working order. Besides, I have no intention of hurting you. Quite the contrary. I have something for you.”
Intrigued, I returned the LCP to its intimate resting place and sat back.
“What is it?” I asked.
She shook her head as she finished off the last of her drink with a slurp and rattle.
“I’ll tell you outside,” she said. “I need a cigarette.”
She cleaned up our table as I packed up the laptop, and then we wandered outside to the parking lot so she could partake. She offered me one, but I declined.
“I would never have guessed you smoked,” I said.
“Only when I eat this shit. Gets rid of the taste.”
An awkward silence reigned for a few minutes. I’d never smoked with someone before. Were you supposed to interrupt their smoking? Was the smoking the point?
“Okay, here’s the deal,” she said. “If he taught you half of what he knew, I can use you.”
“Use me for what?”
“Tom was exceptionally good at making messes. As far as I can tell, you’re pretty good at cleaning them up. I can use someone like that. There are a lot of messes to deal with right now.”
“Like what?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. Puff of smoke. “You work, you get paid.”
“You’re telling me I should work for you without knowing why I’m doing it?”
“He would have.”
“And as you just pointed out, I am not him.”
She thought about that for a second as she took a drag.
“There are three reasons to take a job,” she said. “Any job. First reason is you’re good at it. You’re good at farming, you farm. Second is if you get something out of it. Money. Enjoyment. Fulfillment. Whatever.”
She paused, then, seemed to struggle to find words to wrap her third category around. “Bird flu. Comes and goes. It came back big, a couple years ago. The vaccine killed a few thousand people, worldwide, but it maybe saved millions. Was it worth distributing, knowing people would die because of it?”
I shrugged. Edison had said much this same thing before, numerous times, and in not so many words. I wondered if there was an employee handbook.
“Nothing changes until there’s reason for it to,” she went on. “There are small losses, but a catastrophe might be averted. Vaccine hits before the epidemic, immune response prevents catastrophe. If not, you get a New York. London. Madrid. Moscow.”
She turned her cell on to check the time. Frowned.
“Anyway, that’s the third reason. Sometimes there are things that need doing, things no one else is going to do. Garbage men. Taxi drivers.”
“And who decides that? The Abes of the world?”
“What exactly do you know about him?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Only what he told me.” This time it was my turn to end a line of questioning.
“They decide,” she said, returning to her point. She gestured upwards to indicate people higher up the food chain. “They find reasons to act. We act. Other people react.”
“Yeah, I get that. But they are … who? There has to be someone in charge, right?”
There was a short silence as she either prepared a lie or tried to sort out some complicated truth. My mind skimmed Edison’s chronicles to determine if I already knew. Edison’s father, the government. False flags. Northwoods. Centralia, Oklahoma, Waco. MKUltra. New regimes and broken cells. Apart from the pieces I was part of, any of it could have been fiction. I needed truth.
“You remember that shit with the ninety-nine percent a few years ago?” she asked. “How one percent of the population holds most of the wealth and power?”
I nodded.
“Their aim was off, by a few factors of ten. Try more like point zero zero zero zero zero zero one percent.” She counted on her fingers, maybe missed a zero, maybe added one extra. “Maybe a thousand out of seven billion. But despite what the nuts say, there’s no New World Order. There’s nothing new about it, and certainly nothing orderly. It’s too fucking big to manage.”
“So the all-seeing eye doesn’t exist.”
“Oh it exists. Anyone who can is recording everything they can get their hands on, and anyone who can afford it is buying it all up and poring through it. There’s more than one reason Congress keeps doing away with Internet privacy laws. But there’s no conspiracy. It’s been going on forever. Only difference now is efficiency. There’s so much more you can do when you can see everything. There are patterns in that data, if you look hard enough. Eddies in the water that for all I know might be predicting who’s going to be at war a century from now. And there are people who have a vested interest in that war. That theoretical war.”
“Then whoever that is, they’re the ones in control.”
“No. What I’m saying is that who is in control, whether anyone is in control at all, is irrelevant. There are people with money and people with power and people with information, and when you put those together you can make things happen. But to try and define that as some sort of control is idiocy. There are people making decisions, yes. There are people who decide to make decisions based on those decisions. And so on, eventually it gets to us. To me. Then I call someone I can trust to get the job done. Or, god help me, someone like Tom. But to call that control? To figure out who’s in charge? It’s pointless.”
“Shit happens.”
“Exactly,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette on the curb and pocketing the butt. “And you’re either the one it’s happening to, or the one making it happen. Which would you rather be?”
She offered to walk me to my car, and I accepted. I didn’t plan on driving this one for very much longer anyway, so it didn’t matter if she could ID it.
“So, you don’t know where he is?” I tried, hating myself for bringing him up again. I knew she wouldn’t answer, but I wanted to keep her talking, feeding on crumbs, anything she was willing to give.
“No,” she said. “It was two weeks ago. He’s vanished. And even if he wanted to be found, with everything he’s done, there’s no coming back.”
“There’s nothing you could do for him?”
“There’s nothing I would do. I won’t miss him a bit. He was just a co-worker and a bad one at that. He was useful because he was willing to do anything, but that made him dangerous. Bad for everyone around him, present company included. He ruined everyone he came across.”
With one exception, I thought. I had made it this far mostly in spite of Edison. But at least some of what I was, was because of him. And I didn�
�t feel ruined. I felt … whole. Entire.
“So that’s it,” said Marc. “You’re on your own now, Christian or Nichole or Edith or whatever. You want in, you call. I’ll arrange it from there.”
With that, she reached into a pocket and handed me a crisp twenty, already folded in half, and held it so that her fingernail emphasized the serial number. Counterfeit or real? Who else was involved? The Treasury Department? The IRS? I tucked it in my pocket, next to the balled-up scrap Edison had left me. These were my two choices now, each with some appeal, neither one ideal. Maybe I could flip a coin to decide, after Marc had gone. It was hard to believe she was part of a plot to manipulate world events. She smelled of nicotine and soap, smiled, laughed, ate french fries. She seemed nice. Normal.
Long, awkward pause. Say goodbye, Christian.
“I wonder,” I said instead, “how things would have gone if it had been you in the restaurant that day, instead of him.”
“That’s easy,” she said. “You would have been the first one I shot.”
And then she smiled and walked back towards “the office.” Stopped after ten steps, just at the door, and turned like a duelist.
“One last thing,” she said, barely audible over the traffic, the wind.
“What?”
“He left a message for you, if you ever showed up here. A bit odd, but … he said when you pull out of here, watch that right hand turn. Carefully.”
After that she was just gone, as if she never was. Nevertheless, the cryptic instruction rolled around in my head as I pulled out of the lot and onto the side street. And as I waited at the intersection just like we had ten years ago, I remembered him doing the same thing I was doing: watching, carefully looking both ways. Left and right.
Left, no traffic, street light, telephone pole.
Right, fire hydrant, mailbox, street sign …
• • •
After we’ve gotten ice cream at the mall, he puts the car in gear and swings out towards the street, cutting across empty spaces, the shush of water as we pass through puddles. When we reach the street, he stops to wait for traffic to clear, and peeks in the mirror to watch me watching him. Waiting for him. He lowers his eyes, closes them, as if searching for an answer.
And he suddenly remembers the street sign beside the restaurant, the one he’s seen dozens of times, the one we’d driven past as we escaped: N. EDISON.
“Edison North,” he says, feeling it out as he says it. “My name is Edison North.”
And he is, for a while.
For me.
Acknowledgments
It’s easy to pinpoint when I started writing Blackbird: July 6, 1999. It’s less easy to say when it was done; it was a long journey with many starts and stops, and it involved a lot of people who contributed to Blackbird’s evolution in some small way, whether they are aware of it or not.
Thanks of course to my agent Chris and the people at Victoria Sanders & Associates, my editor Chelsey and the folks at Skyhorse Publishing, and my original copy editor Jennifer. People like them do a lot, but their most important job is letting you know when something is done growing, and when it needs to hang out in the nest a bit longer. Until it’s ready to fly.
Thanks as well to all the superfans who’ve followed Blackbird on its long journey and suffered through early drafts, including Aaron, Ana, Brian, Colin, Dan, Danielle, Dustin, Erin, Felix, Frack, Jason, Jerry, Jessica, Joshua, Kimberly, Leon, Melissa, Mercedes, Mike, Milly, Rachelynn, Renee, Ryan, Sean, Su-Anna, both Nicks, both Wills, and the rest.
Special and/or oddly specific thanks go to: Calisa, for the box cutters; Ean, for documenting the moment Blackbird was born; Gosu, for giving Xtian a voice; Jestyr, who helped get this entire journey started; Juge, for the stars on the ceiling; Kenshiro, for the MANPADs and his advice on keeping it real; Melinika, for the bird clock; and Rois, for the map font. You all deserve thanks for a lot more than that, but those things in particular helped shape this novel.
I would also like to thank: Drew Curtis of Fark.com for helping publicize Blackbird in its fledgling online serial days; the people of the #fark IRC channel, Iconoclast MUD, and Writer’s Block Discord server; my parents, for always being my biggest supporters; and especially my wife, for putting up with me throughout most of this process.
To all of them, and all of you: the next one won’t take nearly as long.
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