The Last Iota

by Robert Kroese

  It was going to be a long ride back to the office, so I settled in for a nap. We didn’t have the money to hire an aircar, which meant we were stuck taking surface streets around the DZ. The freeways had been gotten so hopelessly snarled with traffic during the Collapse that nobody’d ever been able to unsnarl them. In fact, nobody had even really tried. There seemed to be sort of a general agreement that the Los Angeles freeway system was an experiment that hadn’t really worked out, like nuclear power or rap-metal. These days, if you wanted to get somewhere in L.A. you had to take the surface streets, pay to drive on one of the privately funded, ultrafast expressways known as Uberbahns that had been constructed on top of the old highway system, or—if you had the means—take an aircar. Our aircar was currently in a million pieces, as I’ve mentioned, and we couldn’t afford to hire one. Using the Uberbahns was a bit cheaper, but the exits were at least five miles apart, so it wasn’t efficient for a trip across town (which was the point, I suppose).

  The office was a run-down, three-story building bordering the Disincorporated Zone. Nearly an hour after we’d left Selah, the car pulled up to our building. Keane got out and began to walk to the door. Realizing I wasn’t following, he stopped and turned. “Coming, Fowler?”

  “Meeting April for dinner,” I said.

  Keane nodded, still watching his comm screen. He turned, walked to the door, and disappeared inside. I closed the car door. “Secondary destination,” I said to my comm, which would send the instruction to the car. “Thai Kitchen on Mission.”

  The car pulled away from the curb.

  Technically, I’d been telling Keane the truth: I did have dinner plans with my friend April Rooks. But it was only six fifteen, so I had time for another stop before meeting April at seven. It meant walking a few blocks from the restaurant and back, but I couldn’t risk Keane checking the trip record and finding the discrepancy.

  I got out of the car at Thai Kitchen, then walked south three blocks to the Aloha Motel. I went to the door of room 212, knocked three times, paused, and then knocked twice more. After a moment, I heard a woman’s voice from within.

  “Fowler?”

  “It’s me,” I said. “Let me in.”

  The door opened, and I stepped inside. I was met by a tall, thin blond woman wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, Lycra shorts, and gym shoes. I smiled as I saw her.

  “Hey, Blake,” she said, smiling back at me.

  “Hey, Gwen.”

  THREE

  Gwen’s hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her pale skin glistened with sweat. The furniture in the motel room had all been pushed to the edges of the room, with the two chairs on top of the small table in the corner, and a small square mat was in the center of the room. Gwen had never been a huge fitness devotee, but her three years in hiding had changed her. She wasn’t going to let something like being imprisoned in a motel room keep her from staying in shape. Imprisoned was maybe the wrong word; she did leave on occasion, but only at night and in disguise. I don’t know what sorts of exercises she’d been doing, but she was thinner and more muscular than she was when we’d been dating. She looked good.

  “Good to see you, Blake. It’s been a few days.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Been really busy.” This was a lie, of course. I’d had very little to do over the past several days, which ironically made it harder to make excuses to get out and see Gwen.

  “Any news?” she asked.

  Gwen had shown up unannounced at our office three weeks ago, ending her mysterious absence of three years. She had been anxious and paranoid, as you might expect from someone who had good reason to believe her life was in danger. I’d only been able to get her to tell me the rough outline of what had happened—most of which I already knew, thanks to Keane and Selah Fiore. Gwen had insisted on keeping her reappearance secret from Keane, and I’d done my best to abide by this request—against my better judgment. I didn’t entirely trust Keane, either, but I didn’t think he had any reason to want harm to come to Gwen. In any case, Keane tended to figure things out no matter how secretive I was, and at some point we were likely to need his help. But Gwen insisted on keeping him out of the loop until we had a better idea of the threat she still faced.

  That threat evidently had something to do with a task force Gwen had been part of, some ten years earlier. As I mentioned, Gwen had worked for the Los Angeles Department of Planning. She, along with several other city, state, and county employees, had been recruited to work for a group called the Los Angeles Future Foundation, which was nominally a nonprofit organization devoted to advancing sustainable urban growth. Gwen and the others were put on a Civil Unrest Preparedness Task Force, which was tasked with devising a plan for “long-term prioritization of city services in the event of a large-scale civil unrest and a complete breakdown of the government at the federal and state levels.” What Gwen didn’t realize at the time was that this wasn’t a hypothetical exercise: LAFF had somehow known the Collapse was coming. But by the time Gwen realized LAFF wasn’t who she thought they were, it was too late to get out.

  So Gwen and the others—mostly mid-level city and county employees—had done their job, developing a plan to deal with a case of widespread civil unrest in Southern California. It became evident during the development of this plan, however, that the government simply didn’t have the resources to deal with the sort of large-scale riots, demonstrations, and general chaos that LAFF was expecting, no matter how much advance warning they had. The solution was to cede a large section of the city to the chaos. The primary architect of this “Disincorporated Zone,” I had recently discovered, was the man I knew as Erasmus Keane. He and Gwen had worked on LAFF’s task force together—although he hadn’t gone by the name Erasmus Keane then.

  When the Collapse happened, the LAPD and National Guard were instructed to protect and fortify “vital areas” of the city, while leaving a conglomeration of poorer areas completely undefended, as the task force’s plan recommended. A vast swath of the city, including South Los Angeles, Compton, and Huntington Park, became essentially a free-range prison. Temporary police barriers became concrete walls topped with razor wire, and any pretense of equality under the law evaporated. If you had the misfortune to live in the DZ post-Collapse, you were automatically suspect. The breakdown of the freeway system made it easy to control movements in and out of the DZ; checkpoints were set up with the ostensible purpose of identifying terrorists and other criminals and to stem the flow of illegal drugs and weapons. The drugs were usually coming out of the DZ; the weapons were going in.

  It took almost a decade for the legal formalities to catch up to the harsh reality of the situation: the majority of the residents of the DZ at the time of the Collapse were undocumented immigrants, and the legal status of tens of thousands of others was thrown into question by the loss of records during the Collapse and subsequent years of near-anarchy while the state and federal governments were re-constituted. In many areas of the country the legacy of the Collapse was little more than a temporary lapse in government services, with local governments and ad hoc civilian organizations picking up the slack. But in the DZ, the Collapse was near-total. Income taxes went unpaid, vehicles went unregistered, children were born without birth certificates. Criminal enterprises burgeoned. By some estimates, over 90 percent of economic activity in the DZ was off the books. By the time anyone started to get a handle on the scope of the problem, there was neither the will nor the means to re-incorporate the DZ into American society. Los Angeles had given birth to a third-world country within its borders, and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. There was a lot of blame to go around, and plenty of people in the city government lost their jobs, but the task force—and LAFF’s involvement in the Collapse—remained secret, and eventually things went more or less back to normal. It was around that time that Gwen disappeared.

  I learned later that everyone on the task force had either been murdered or had vanished under suspicious circumstances. There had been
such a surge in violent crime in the years immediately after the Collapse that no one had even noticed the pattern. Nobody, that is, except for Gwen Thorson. After a few of her former colleagues disappeared, Gwen had gone into hiding in the DZ. She’d been there until just over three weeks ago, when instability in the DZ began to cause her to fear for her safety. She wasn’t safe in L.A. proper, either, but hiding in the DZ was apparently no longer an option, for reasons I didn’t quite understand.

  I knew more about LAFF and the Collapse than just about anybody, but I still had a lot of nagging questions—the most pressing of these being: who had targeted the members of the Civil Unrest Preparedness Task Force for assassination? If LAFF had wanted them dead, they would have killed them as soon as the task force disbanded, not waited six years. I also hadn’t figured out how Gwen had managed to disappear so quickly, and so thoroughly that even Erasmus Keane couldn’t find her. She must have had help, but so far I hadn’t been able to get her to admit to anything.

  “Keane and I met a client this morning,” I said. “Selah Fiore.”

  “You’re working for Selah Fiore?” asked Gwen, unable to hide her surprise.

  “Looks that way,” I said. “Not my choice. She tricked me into agreeing to meet her.”

  “Tricked you how?”

  “She said she had information about you.”

  “And did she?” Gwen asked.

  I let the question hang in the air for a moment. “You sound worried.”

  Gwen shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant. “Just curious.”

  “Come on, Gwen. It’s been three weeks. Either you trust me or you don’t. I don’t like the idea that Selah Fiore might know more than I do about what you’ve been doing for the past three years. That was a very uncomfortable meeting.”

  “Gosh, Blake, was it?” Gwen said. “I’ve been hiding in the DZ, looking over my shoulder for the past three years, but clearly you’re the real victim here.”

  “Damn it, Gwen,” I said. “I’m trying to help you here. I’m already running around behind Keane’s back trying to keep him from finding out about you—”

  “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I promised I wouldn’t. Although I don’t know how you expect to figure out who was behind the murders of the task force members when you spend all day cooped up in a motel room, and I’m spending half my time covering my tracks from the most brilliant detective in Los Angeles.”

  “I never asked you to help me look into the task-force murders.”

  “Then what are you doing here? Why did you come to me?”

  “Going to you was a mistake. I appreciate your attempts to help, Blake, but you’re never going to figure out who killed those people. I’ve been trying for three years.”

  “How much investigating could you do from your hideout in the DZ? Keane and I have resources—”

  “Forget it, Blake. You’re just putting yourself in danger. Get on with your life. I’ll be fine.”

  “Here in the Aloha Motel.”

  “I don’t plan to stay here forever. Once the DZ cools down—”

  “Have you been watching the news, Gwen? The DZ is worse than ever. Almost as bad as right after the Collapse. Gerard Canaan was just on TV yesterday, talking about how they were going to have to send the National Guard in.”

  “Gerard Canaan the oil guy?”

  “He’s out of the oil business,” I said. “He seems to have adopted the DZ as his personal cause. Wants to try to turn it around, reintegrate it into Los Angeles.”

  “That’s just what the DZ needs,” said Gwen. “Another martyr yearning for redemption.”

  I shrugged. “The point is, Canaan’s a smart guy. If he thinks the DZ is going to implode, I’d take him seriously.”

  Gerard Canaan was an oilman from Bakersfield who had gradually built his company, Elysium Oil, into one of the largest energy firms in the world. Then the Wahhabi coup in Saudi Arabia caught him off guard and he lost almost everything. Over the past few years, though, he’d made something of a name for himself as an investor in Southern California real estate. Lately he’d been spearheading a push to get the city, county, state, and federal governments to rebuild the DZ, but government officials were wary of taking on big projects in the wake of the Collapse. There was also suspicion that certain powerful individuals—Selah Fiore among them—had a vested interest in keeping the DZ lawless. Meanwhile the DZ continued to deteriorate.

  “The National Guard isn’t going to take over the DZ,” said Gwen. “The government doesn’t want to take responsibility for that shithole.”

  “Well, if they do, you’ll have no place to hide anymore. And if they don’t, the DZ’s going to remain a war zone for the foreseeable future. Either way, you can’t go back there.”

  “I’ll figure something out.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Gwen. If you tell me what’s going on, maybe I can help you. Does Selah know something? I know she was involved with LAFF. Did you work out some kind of deal with her?”

  Gwen let out a long sigh. “If I tell you, it doesn’t leave this room.”

  “Of course not. Come on.”

  Gwen nodded slowly, staring out the gauzy curtain of the motel window. “Yes,” she said at last. “I had an arrangement with Selah.”

  “What sort of arrangement?”

  “I told you how I was recruited by LAFF, right?”

  “Yeah, they wanted you to be part of some Civil Preparedness Task Force. To develop a plan for the city to deal with the Collapse.”

  “Yes, although of course we didn’t know about the Collapse at the time. We just thought we were working on a sort of worst-case-scenario handbook. I know it seems sinister in retrospect, but at the time it was just another project. And to be honest, it was a lot of fun. These were people who spent forty hours a week banging their heads against government bureaucracy, and they were finally given free rein to create something.”

  “You never told me any of this when we were dating,” I said.

  “I was under a strict nondisclosure agreement, as I said. I wasn’t even allowed to discuss who was in these meetings with other people in my department.”

  “And that didn’t strike you as strange?” I asked.

  “It did, actually,” she said. “But it was also exciting. I think they were counting on that. Counting on us to be so enthralled by the idea of being on this elite team that we wouldn’t ask too many questions. Two members of the task force were dismissed early on for talking about task force business outside our meetings. Not long after that, they both lost their jobs as well. It was hinted to the remaining task force members that those two had said too much. We took the hint.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Go on.”

  “The intelligence we were given gradually got more specific,” she said. “Occasionally documents marked ‘classified’ found their way into our meetings. Documents from various federal agencies. Housing and Urban Development. The Department of Energy. The Justice Department. Even the CIA and NSA. There was no way we were authorized to look at this stuff. Eventually, I think we all realized it was a trap, but it was too late. We had knowingly consumed and passed on to each other top secret information. We could all have been thrown in federal prison for life.”

  “So you did what they asked.”

  “We had no choice,” Gwen replied. “We developed a plan, like they asked. I did look into LAFF a bit on my own, but I came up with nothing. It was a privately funded organization that didn’t disclose its donors. It had almost no legal footprint, just a few vaguely worded consulting contracts with various government agencies. The people we thought were LAFF employees were just lawyers on retainer. We never talked to anyone who had ever met an actual LAFF employee. The whole organization was just a shadow.”

  “You could have gone to the police. The FBI.”

  “Sure,” said Gwen. “I could have walked into the local FBI office with a stack of classified documents, but I
had no guarantee anyone else on the task force would back me up. LAFF would set me up as the fall guy and disband the task force. And even if the feds believed me, then what? I’d never met anyone who worked for LAFF. Just a few lawyers whose real names I didn’t know. Those lawyers would scatter like cockroaches as soon as the FBI got involved.”

  “But you could have stopped it. Stopped Maelstrom.”

  “Maybe,” said Gwen. “But at that point I wasn’t sure stopping it was desirable.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Thousands of people died, Gwen.”

  “In the Collapse,” Gwen said. “The Collapse was going to happen either way. All we did is cauterize the wound. The result was … unpleasant, but it would have been worse without Maelstrom.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand. If LAFF is so insidious and powerful, why did they need you in the first place? Evidently they had access to all sorts of sensitive information. Why couldn’t they just design this post-Collapse survival plan themselves?”

  “You’re not listening, Blake,” said Gwen. “There is no ‘themselves.’ There are no LAFF employees. They don’t do anything. They’re a virtual organization that exists only on paper. They hire consulting firms to hire lawyers to put together semi-official groups like our task force. They found the people capable of doing the job they needed done and manipulated them into doing it, completely in secret. And at the same time, they hide in plain sight. Hell, LAFF has a public Web site. You can read all about the wonderful work they’re doing to help plan a sustainable future for Los Angeles.”

  “All right,” I said. “So you come up with this emergency response plan. The Collapse happens right on schedule. The plan gets implemented, and the DZ is created just as you envisioned. Then what?”

  Gwen shrugged. “Then we went back to work. Most of us did, anyway. A few got laid off; one woman quit because she got sick of getting IOUs from the city instead of a paycheck. But the rest of us went back to our normal lives—as much as we could during the Collapse, anyway.”