Cold Warriors

by Rebecca Levene

  "Not so fast, Agent Orange," she said. "How about you show me some ID? And how about I get my constitutionally mandated phone call and use to it call my dad? Who, by the way, is a senior 9th circuit judge, in case no one mentioned that to you."

  He raised an eyebrow, unperturbed. "Have it your way, kid. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law -" He pitched his voice loud enough to carry across the entire car park. Jenna's head jerked up at the sound, expression registering shock when she caught sight of Alex.

  "Shut up!" Alex hissed. "I'm coming, OK - just shut the fuck up."

  The rest of the walk passed in silence, but he didn't release her wrist and she felt eyes on her, boring into the back of her head. Kids at West Village High didn't get arrested. It just wasn't that sort of school.

  Alex waited until she was inside his black Impala before she turned to him again. She'd had the walk over to decide on a new tactic, and it required her to look friendly. Her smile was so stiff it made her jaw ache.

  "Look, this has got to be some mistake," she said. "Why don't you drive me home, have a quiet word with my father - I'm sure we can clear this all up." She was sure her father would be furious, but dealing with his anger seemed like the least bad option right now.

  "Here's the thing," he said. "Most people, when they're told they're arrested, ask what the hell for."

  "I..." she trailed into silence.

  "You need to work on your poker face, kid," he said. "Far too many tells."

  He was right and he knew it and there was nothing she could do about it. After a second he clicked on the radio to some college station, tapping his finger against the wheel just out of time with the music. She looked at her reflection in the car's tinted window, long blonde hair bleached to ash and pale skin ghost-like. She didn't look like an innocent person taken against her will. She looked like a guilty person who'd been caught.

  "I have a problem," she said eventually. "I'll get help. I'll go into rehab. I'm not hurting anybody except myself."

  He nodded almost imperceptibly, eyes fixed on the road and finger still tapping.

  "What do the FBI care about a little recreational drug use, anyway?"

  "They don't," he said. "But thanks for the heads-up. I'll make sure to have local law enforcement search your home and locker."

  After that she sat in silence, fists clenched tight and jaw working soundlessly. She'd walked right into it and she only had herself to blame, but that didn't stop her fury. And beneath that, quivering in her belly, her fear. Because she really hadn't done anything other than attend a few pharma parties and maybe score X a few times when they hit the East Village clubs. There was no reason, none at all, why a federal agent should have dragged her out of school and into his unmarked car. And she'd asked for ID, but he'd never shown it.

  She thought about screaming, but there was no one to hear except him, and she had the horrible feeling that it would just make him laugh.

  She stared out of the window instead, trying to memorise their route, imagining repeating it to a cop, a real one, when she made her escape. The West Village passed by, leafy and quiet, dull Chelsea, the sprawling campus of Colombia and then the shabby-hipness of Harlem. They were on 105th, somewhere between 4th and 5th, when the car finally slowed.

  Alex hoped they'd stop on the street where she'd have a chance to call for help, but her captor pressed a button on the dash and the doorway to an underground garage opened onto darkness. She banged against the glass of the window as the car slid down but all it did was bruise her palm, and no one looked round.

  "I'm not going to hurt you," the man said mildly as he reversed the car between two others, both identical black Impalas.

  Alex took a shaky breath, desperately wishing she could believe him. "You haven't even told me your name."

  He shrugged. "You can call me PD. People tend to."

  The underground garage was empty, dank and dripping. Her heels caught in the cracked concrete as she walked beside him, but he didn't take her wrist again and she let herself believe that was a good sign.

  "PD," she said, "are you really with the FBI?"

  "I never said that I was." He turned to stare at her, head cocked to one side, considering. "Listen, kid - you're in trouble, but not the kind you think. You'll be walking out of here alive, I promise you that. Whether you're walking out a free woman or in cuffs is up to you."

  He led her to a rusted metal door, punching a number into a keypad lock before swinging it open. The corridor beyond was white painted and strip-lit, clinical and unwelcoming. Her footsteps echoed on the tiled floor but there was no one around to hear them.

  The room he brought her to contained nothing but a table and three chairs. PD gestured at one of them and settled himself beside her so that she had to twist her head to see him. She was sure it was deliberate, an interrogation technique. But what the hell did he want to interrogate her about?

  She tried to keep calm, not to let the waiting get to her the way it was clearly intended to. She tried to convince herself this was all a trick of her father's, something he'd cooked up with his contacts in the NYPD in an attempt to scare her straight, and it was almost plausible enough that she could buy it.

  When the door opened behind her with a whoosh of air she couldn't help her start of surprise. She forced herself not to look around as the newcomer paused behind her. PD's head lifted and she knew the two were exchanging glances.

  A few more seconds passed before she heard a soft sound which could have been a laugh, or maybe just a sigh, and the newcomer moved to sit opposite her. He was thin, old and white with a friendly, almost avuncular face and eyes such an odd, pale blue they appeared blind. But the most striking thing about him were his hands. He held them steepled in front of him, slender, desiccated fingers tapering into hooked nails. They were a skeleton's hands covered in only the thinnest parchment layer of skin.

  "Miss Keve," he said, "My name is Hammond. You must be wondering why you've been brought here."

  She nodded, not trusting her voice.

  "The Patriot Act's a marvellous thing, Alexandra. It gives us a freedom we never had before. It allows us to listen in on a populace that once valued its privacy above its safety. And, as the conspiracy theorists have correctly surmised, Al Qaeda operatives aren't the only people we're searching for."

  Alex's heart raced as she tried to recall the hundreds of phone conversations she'd held in the last few weeks alone. Had she said anything incriminating? But they already knew about the drugs, and they didn't seem to care about those.

  Hammond read her expression and smiled. "No need to rack your brain, young lady. I can tell you exactly what you said that was of such interest to us."

  He nodded to PD, and a moment later the sound of her own voice filled the room. It was a little slurred in places, over-enunciated in others. Whatever she was about to say, it was clear she'd been wasted when she said it.

  "Hey," her voice said. "Is that the - what's the word? Is that the NBC complaints division?" There was a brief pause, but no reply came. She'd probably reached an answering machine and failed to realise it.

  "Well, anyway," her voice continued, "I've got a complaint to make. I'm - it's late, I'm a little - I'm watching the news right now, and it's some piece about a high-school football team, and that's supposed to be cheerful, right? I mean boring, but cheerful. But there's blood everywhere."

  Another brief pause, and in this one you could hear her gasping breath, a whimper buried somewhere in each exhalation. "He killed them all - he shot the whole fucking lot of them. Jesus, I don't know, maybe that's news or whatever, but did you have to show us the bodies? That... that girl with her head blown off, and the guy in the George Bush mask, that's just sick." A shuddering breath, and then her voice was a little steadier. "So yeah, that's what I wanted to say. Just stop showing it, all right. Please stop showing it."

  There was the hiss of static, and then a long
stretch of silence. Alex had no memory at all of making that call. But she knew when it must have been, 10 days ago exactly after that night at Jenna's place where they'd all tried ketamine and god knows what else and none of them had had a very good time on it, but she'd had the worst. "Down the K-hole," Jenna had said, and after that it was all just a blank till Alex woke up the next morning with a pounding head and a feeling of sick, unfocused dread.

  Alex didn't generally follow the news - she didn't give all that much of a shit - but she'd seen the piece about the school shooting in Iowa, where an unknown boy in a George Bush mask had walked into his school and shot down twenty-seven of his classmates before walking calmly back out again. They still hadn't identified the killer, but then it was only three days since the shooting.

  "I didn't know it was going to happen!" she said. "It was - I don't know, a crazy coincidence or something. You can't possibly think I was involved. I've never even been to Iowa!"

  "It was no coincidence," Hammond said blandly.

  PD's chair squeaked against the floor as he shifted. When she turned to look at him she saw that he was watching her through narrowed eyes.

  "You weren't bullshitting me," she said. "You really work for the government."

  Hammond shrugged. "For the... let's say for the CIA."

  She'd moved beyond fear into a kind of frozen calm so brittle it might shatter at the slightest pressure. "Look," she said. "I was high. I'd taken... all kinds of stuff and I had no idea what I was saying. I don't even remember saying it."

  Hammond nodded, thin lips pressed together. "But you did. You did, Alexandra, and I find that very interesting indeed."

  She wondered dully what they would do with her. Were they going to ask her to identify her accomplice, the boy in the George Bush mask? Would they offer her a deal if she did? She considered lying, giving them the first name she could think of. If she made it common enough there'd probably be a boy at the school in Iowa who had it. But that would be like an admission of guilt and she wasn't ready for that. She was innocent, and some part of her that still believed in the pledge of allegiance and America the Brave and all that shit, thought that ought to count for something.

  "You want to know what I think happened?" Hammond said. "Those drugs - whatever it was you took - opened a doorway in your mind, and for a brief moment you were in the spirit world, where time has no meaning."

  Alex stared at him, dumbstruck. "You think what?"

  "There really was a broadcast about that school on NBC the night you called. And when you saw it in that state, you saw... well, to say the future would oversimplify things. You saw the psychic scar on the spirit world that the events to come had left."

  It would be easier to think that he was crazy, but there was no hint of madness in his pale eyes and when she looked across at PD he nodded encouragement and agreement.

  "OK," she said. "Right. So you're saying I didn't have anything to do with that shooting. So why the hell have you brought me here?"

  Hammond reached across the table, resting his dry, skeletal hand against hers. "You're a spirit traveller, Alexandra, the first of your generation. That makes you very rare and very valuable indeed. In the right hands and with the right training you could be an enormous asset."

  PD leaned forward, resting his large, blunt-fingered hand against her other wrist, so that she was caught between the two men. She was suddenly uncomfortably aware of how much larger than her they both were. She felt the quiet strength of their hands and for the first time noticed the bulge of the jacket at PD's hip, the tell-tale shape of a handgun beneath it.

  PD followed the direction of her gaze. "I told you I won't hurt you, kid," he said.

  "That's the last thing we want," Hammond said. "Our aim today is to recruit you."

  She jerked back, pulling her hands from beneath theirs. "Recruit me? I'm sixteen!"

  "Oh, we'd want you to finish your schooling, of course," Hammond said. "You wouldn't enter active service for a few years yet - though we'd train you in the interim, and perhaps make occasional use of your unusual abilities. What do you say, Miss Keve?"

  Her chair scraped shrilly against the tiles as she stood. "No! More no than you can possibly imagine! You're crazy, this is crazy and even if it wasn't there's no way I'm working for the federal fucking government. I've got thirty million dollars in trust - I'm not planning on working at all!"

  Hammond leaned back in his chair and she couldn't pinpoint what shifted in his face, but suddenly it didn't look friendly or avuncular at all. "I'm not sure you fully understand the situation here. We have evidence - quite solid evidence, I imagine, since the search warrant on your house was executed a few minutes ago - that you've been engaging in illegal activities. We also have testimony from several of your friends that you have, on more than one occasion, supplied them with controlled substances. I don't have to tell you that's a felony. How do you think you'd enjoy prison, Alexandra - with or without your thirty million dollar trust fund?"

  Alex took in a deep, shuddering breath. "You're telling me I don't have a choice."

  "There's always a choice," PD said. "You just have to decide if it's worth paying the price for making the tough one."

  But Alex couldn't go to prison. She tried to picture it, the shame and the boredom and the fear - every woman in there knowing her father was a judge. Her life would be over, maybe literally, definitely metaphorically. She tried to imagine Jenna standing by her, or Ryan or any of her friends, but she knew that they wouldn't. Their very complicity in her crime would drive them away from her. And her dad would be so stern and cold and disapproving, and her mom would say all the right things to the press and nothing at all to her.

  Her knees felt suddenly weak and she let herself sink back into her chair. "You win," she said bitterly. "If you want me, you've got me."

  Hammond smiled wide. "I'm pleased to hear it. Welcome to the Bureau of Counter-Rational Warfare, Alexandra."